Puttering in the Study

The Walls of Constantinople: AD 324-1453

Just finished this outstanding book by Osprey on the land walls of Constantinople.  Coming right after finishing 1453 this was a very useful primer on the walls, with outstanding photos, and, most of all, paintings, diagrams and cutaways that showed how the walls were constructed and used.  There still isn't the overview of the crucial area where the Turks broke through in 1453 - but there are better pictures that I've seen elsewhere.

King Kong

Finally saw King Kong yesterday, and for the most part didn't like it.  It was a tremendous thing to get on film, with incredible action scenes, but it went on, and on, and on, and in the end end, the only thing I really liked was the interplay between Kong and Ann.  And while there was plenty of that, and it was terrific - there was so much else that you were just ready for somebody to shoot the damn ape and get it over with.

Where to begin?  Well, first of all, unlike Lord of the Rings, the story here was pretty simple, and everything but the ape and girl was secondary, but the film constantly gets sidetracked into side stories that, while interesting and well done, detract from the central story.  For example, in order of appearance we didn't need the subplot between Ann and the older actor, we didn't need the subplot involving the movie star actor (although it was well done, it was not strictly necessary), and so forth.  No getting deeply into the director's motives and desire to film everything - as interesting as it was, it just took too much time explored in this level of detail.  One of my favorite characters was the first mate Mr. Hayes (although he was far too well-read and well-spoken to be a credible first mate on a tramp steamer) but his main role was as part of a subplot involving a crewmember that had nothing to do with the main story.  Absolutely no excuse for that subplot making the final cut.  Frankly, I'd rather they cut a couple of the crew members and thinned the cast.  Also, the entire subscene where the men survive the fall of the log just to be attacked by some really disgusting bugs was unnecessary.  And certainly cost a fortune in terms of effects shots.  (It also bothered me a lot and I'd have been a lot happier without the creepy crawlies).

What the film did in many places was do something I thought was impossible - make the 1976 movie look good by comparison (only in spots - let's not get carried away here).  The "making of" book on that film was one of the first film books I read, and the extreme money and time pressures forced the director in that film to cut numerous action scenes just to get the film done.  I'm not saying Jackson didn't do some nice work - I'm just saying that this film just lay there for an hour before they got to the island, then each action scene dragged on and on and on.  The dinosaur stampede was so uber-Jurassic Park it just quit being believable after a while.  On the other hand, the battle between Kong and the three T-Rexes- while it went on forever - was outstanding.  I think I actually yelled twice watching it I was so caught up in it. 

But that actually raises a good point, which is that anything - and I mean anything - with Kong in it was worth seeing.  The ape is really an ape, and is unbelievably (unless you'd seen Gollum in Lord of the Rings) interesting.  You just want to see what he does, and the scenes with he and Ann darrow you just can't take your eyes off the screen.  Everything else just fades away - except that it just keeps coming back over and over and over to get in the way.  Just let the two have their doomed romance and let us watch it (am I the only one that thought that from the time they saw one another after he broke free in New York this was just Titanic redux?  I think that's a compliment, because it means that I totally bought into the relationship.  I completely got that this was a proud, intelligent honorable creature that really cared for his little blonde toy, and that she got that, and was honored by the feelings he showed for her.  That was the heart of the movie, and Jackson nailed that.  I just wonder what the film would have been like if he'd cut about 45 minutes of the rest of the film to focus on that.  I expect he'll get attacked for overemphasizing the filmmaker subplot because he is a filmmaker, and perhaps there is some truth to that, but I think he just let too many subplots breed and multiply out of sheer love for the story.  I think that perhaps in Lord of the Rings because he wasn't quite as emotionally invested in the story he could make the decisions to cut things and redo things.  Here, I'd be curious whether he really cut all that much.  And a good trimming is what this story needed.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Finally got to watch this the other night with Jamie and really liked it.  Brad Pitt was fine, but Angelina Jolie is just on a completely different level.  She doesn't even seem to be acting, she's so good.  And no, I'm not saying that because I'm blinded by her beauty - although she is undeniably hot when she wants to be, I don't consider her beautiful in the classical sense, and I actually find her a little off-putting, if it weren't for the knack she has of being likable despite being so unapproachably attractive.  The main thing I notice about her is how well she acts.  Seriously.  She can make you forget how attractive she is (Taking LIves) and how incredibly thin and shallow a movie's premise is (Tomb Raider).  She was outstanding in Alexander I thought, unless she was sabotaged by the failure to age her as needed, and the line blurred between her age and her son's.  But let's talk about Tomb Raider.  Especially the first one, she was playing a cartoon character, but she was playing it like she was James Bond, and I was buying it right down the line.  She took a video game character and made her a believable action hero, and did it effortlessly.  She's not my idea of the perfect woman - I mean her not being Helen Hunt and all - but she's a phenomenal actress.  And in this movie, she really gets a chance to do some great back and forth with Brad Pitt.  I mean no disrespect to him - he did just great in this movie - I can't fault a hair in his performance - but she just walked all over him.  Perhaps that was in part her character, being even more professional than him, and giving him a chance to play the stereotypical male with his pride hurt (which he did very, very well) but I have to believe that she just has the capacity to do things in ranges that only dogs can hear.

Anyway, great movie.  I highly recommend it.

2005

We used this link on the return address to our Christmas cards this year to encourage people to stop by the weblog and see what we've been up to - sort of the online version of a Christmas newsletter. 

First of all, the weblog.  A weblog, for those of you not familiar with them, is sort of an online diary where you can post entries on things that are of interest to you.  I keep this post on family and personal things (the title is from Jamie's term for what I like to do when she'd like me to be doing something useful), but I have another on federal court practice, one on my State Bar director activities, and a fourth on Grayson's Tiger Cub den, since I'm den leader.  The way to navigate is easy - on the left are a list of my web logs, plus the most recent posts.  On the right are tabs for the posts grouped by category - so click on "family" and you see all the entries for family activities.  Click on "books" and you can be bored silly by the arcane history books I read.  And so forth.  On the right also are online photo albums - click on them and you can see photos organized by family, Tiger Cub den, the boys' birthday parties, our Amtrak trip, the house, our family reunion, and Bullet & Martha's visit this spring.  I'll try to cover the basic activities in this post, but you can find out more by going through the actual posts.

2005

As I said, this has been a good year - our first full year in the new house.  Highlights of the spring were Grayson's sixth birthday (hard to believe he's that old) http://mcsmith.blogs.com/photos/graysons_6th_birthday_par/index.html at which his big present was a new bed/desk for his room - http://mcsmith.blogs.com/general/2005/05/graysons_bed.html .  We also had some portraits done of the boys around Easter - this one is my favorite - We also had a visit from my birth-mother Bullet and her mother Martha.  They stayed for several days and we all had a great time.  Went to soccer games, out of dinner, cooked at home, and met the crew at the office.  Just had a really good visit.  The pictures of Grayson and Bullet are really cute - waking her up (by screaming in her ear) each morning was his job, and he really enjoyed it, as you can tell.  http://mcsmith.blogs.com/photos/bullet_marthas_visit/index.html .  Grayson also graduated from kindergarten in May.  http://mcsmith.blogs.com/general/2005/05/graysons_gradua.html 

Summer was interesting - we went to the Kleypas family reunion at Fort Parker in Mexia in June - http://mcsmith.blogs.com/photos/kleypas_family_reunion_20/index.html and had a great time seeing everyone.  Father's Day we celebrated here in Marshall - Daddy came over and we spent the day together, including watching Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in the movie room.  http://mcsmith.blogs.com/general/2005/06/fathers_day_200.html  Then, because we won a family trip on Amtrak last Christmas, we decided to spend the Fourth of July in San Antonio, and rode down there from Marshall, spent a couple of days (including taking the boys to see the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey circus) before coming back.  Great, great trip.  http://mcsmith.blogs.com/photos/amtrak_trip/index.html  We actually could have taken the boys all the way to Los Angeles and back, courtesy of Amtrak, but one day each way was plenty.  Not long after we got back, we had the twins' third birthday party at the house, highlighted by train rides.  We've had our eye on having this train out for exactly this purposes since before the house was built - the layout of the drive was intended to accommodate train rides like this (seriously) with good turnaround points at each end (since I have not yet built the trestle bridge across the creek that I want to).  http://mcsmith.blogs.com/photos/twins_3rd_birthday_party/index.html .  At this point I have to mention that the beautiful cakes at the boys' birthday parties were by Jamie - she took a cake decorating class and made all three cakes.  Another July highlight was Grayson's first model - 1/144 scale B-25.  http://mcsmith.blogs.com/general/2005/07/graysons_first_.html   He also attended art camp for two weeks at the Marshall Visual Arts Center http://mcsmith.blogs.com/general/2005/08/grayson_at_art_.html and made a bunch of really neat stuff. 

Lots of new things this fall.  Grayson started first grade at Trinity Episcopal School, and started as a Tiger Cub in Cub Scouts.  I volunteered to lead the den, so we've spent a lot of time going to Scout activities this fall.  http://mcsmith.blogs.com/photos/pack_239_tiger_cub_den/index.html  But the highlight, as you can tell, was definitely his "Mom & Me" overnight camping trip with Jamie at Camp Pirtle.  Just use your imagination to tell how much fun she had spending the night in a tent with Grayson.  http://mcsmith.blogs.com/general/2005/10/grayson_jamie_a.html  Other fun things this fall included taking the twins to the library to get library cards (with their pictures on them!) and taking Grayson to homecoming at my alma mater Texas A&M - Commerce.  They had a book signing in the student center and he was a big hit with the other authors, roaming from table to table deciding which books he wanted and which he didn't.  I forgot to take my camera, so I don't have a picture of us at our table, but someone at the school took one, and I'm on the lookout for it.  October also saw Jamie's 20 year high school reunion - she did a lot of the planning, and (despite many headaches as a result of the hurricane's taking the big rental facilities off the market two weeks before the reunion) it came out great.  Hurricane Rita was a bust here - we were on generator for most of a day and got wind and some rain, but nothing bad. 

Jamie and I also got to spend four days in Napa Valley in California at a seminar (yeah, right) in October, and had a wonderful time touring wineries and eating some really good food.  http://mcsmith.blogs.com/general/2005/11/napa_valley_tri.html The highlight of the fall was Thanksgiving, when we hosted everyone for Thanksgiving dinner at our house, and my sister Emily and her family stayed with us for four days.  Four days with six small kids and two couples and an obscene amount of food is what this house was designed for, and I am happy to report that it came through with flying colors.  We just had a great time, and look forward to doing it again for Christmas.

In December, we took the boys to see Disney On Ice, which they really seemed to like, and have been busy getting ready for Christmas.

Office

Has also been a busy year on the office front.  Jamie is completing her eleventh year as Harrison County Treasurer, and filed this month for a fourth four year term.  She doesn't have an opponent yet - we'll see what happens by the filing deadline. 

I've had a busy year as well - I finished my years as president of the Harrison County Bar Association and the East Texas Trial Lawyers Association this year, and started my year as president of the Eastern District of Texas Bar Association (federal court).  I co-chaired two State Bar seminars, and in April ran for State Bar director representing the 24 counties of bar district #1.  I won, and had had a great time working on Bar things and attending Bar board meetings around the state - so far we've met in Dallas, Amarillo, the Woodlands, and several times in Austin.  One highlight of the year was a cover story on our firm in Intellectual Property Law & Business in November - Download ip_law_article.pdf  - the story subsequently ran in Texas Lawyer and the January 2006 issue of Corporate Counsel magazine. So it's been a pretty good year at the office - the types of cases we are handling are changing, but we're enjoying the work.

Anyway, that's it from the Smith clan for this year.  Hope everyone has a very merry Christmas and happy holiday season, and we look forward to hearing from everyone soon.

Michael, Jamie, Grayson, Collin & Parker.

Parenthood

Just ran across this photo Grayson took of us with the video camera a couple of years ago (at least - we're still in the old house).  I remember he wanted to take a picture of us for a change, and we let him.  The picture was probably shortly after the twins were born.  The look on our faces says it all.

Blueprint cabinet

Thursday night I got my latest toy, two five-drawer blueprint cabinets from a local engineering firm that didn't need them any longer.  They date from no later than the early 1960's - can't be any more precise than that, although I suspect late 1940's) and are nicely distressed oak (the back and one panel of one side are painted lime green, but I can get that taken care of pretty easily).  The drawer labels include one label marked "Harrison County Courthouse" since they were used by the engineering firm that worked on the current courthouse (circa 1964).  They are somewhat smaller (at 4' wide and 3 1/2' deep)than the old dining table I have been using as a "library" table, and at 38" high quite a bit higher, but they work out great as a table for studying prints (as shown) or blueprints or books.  They make a good place to store all the prints Jamie and I have accumulated but not framed which are currently in tubes as well as smaller blueprints.

Not something I had ever anticipated when I laid out the study, but I think they'll work out even better than the library table I wanted (but have never been able to find).

1453 : The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West - Roger Crowley

This book gets a bigger icon in part because I really liked the book, but also in part because I thought the cover was really cool (it has a faux distressed spined cover).  1453 is a recent account of the siege and fall of the Byzantine Empire (by then consisting almost solely of its capital city of Constantinople) by the Ottoman ruler Mehmet (soon to be known as "the Conquerer" for pretty obvious reasons).

I waited to read this until I had finished a book on the 1204-05 siege and sack of Constantinople, and as I had hoped, by comparison this was a kinder, gentler, siege.  Although I still can't consider this the ultimate guide to the final siege, primarily because there are very few photos or diagrams, so you're left to guess what the ancient complex of walls that held the key to the success or failure of the siege looked like (don't worry - the book I'm reading now is handling that issue quite nicely) the writing is quite good, and I think Crowley tells the story well.  He gives the background of the Byzantine and Ottoman states, setting the stage for the clash between the Greek ruler, Constantine XI (who was neither Greek nor, being improperly crowned, the ruler) and the Ottoman sultan Mehmet who was probably more Greek than Constantine. 

Constantine is one of history's few examples, as best we can tell, of the right man at the right time, and he was virtually the only Byzantine ruler I know of who was someone who could be admired.  Almost without except the others were, even if good in some sense (statecraft, culture, etc.) horrific in some other way, most notably their recurring tendency to blind and mutilate political opponents, to say nothing of worse behavior, or gross incompetence.  Constantine truly did the best that he could to preserve the throne and empire he had been given, and with the exception of a diplomatic faux pas or two, he gave the city its best chance of survival, repeatedly refusing offers to save himself, at the price of turning over the city.  He was personally courageous, directing the defense of the cruical part of the walls until it was overrun, and worked tirelessly to overcome the massive blows to the defenders' morale that came throughout the siege.  (I wonder if a certain young South Carolinian who followed in his footsteps at the Alamo in 1836 knew of him - their decisions are remarkably similar).  Notably, Constantine's predecessors in 1204 either simply refused to fight at all, or did so in so incomptent a fashion that the city - defended by tens of thousands of soldiers (albeit poorly trained, armed, and led) fell to a few hundred Latin crusading knights.  Under Constantine, a small cadre of trained Italians leading a military force of probably 7,000 or so at the outset, and a shrunken city populace, fought off a superbly equipped and led army of tens of thousands for over 50 days, and - and I didn't realize this - came within an ace of lifting the siege.  According to Crowley what was going to be the final assault by the sultan's final reserves was almost at its finish when the defenses broke down.  A moment's failure by the leading Italian defender (who deserves the lion's share of the credit for the successful defense until this key point)and a door left unlocked elsewhere resulted in the city's fall.  Constantine probably never knew how close he came to succeeding in allowing his crippled empire to survive.

The book also illustrates well the character of the Ottoman effort who finally - after 800 years of failure by Islamic rulers - took the city.  Mehmet's genius for organization and logistics was the key to the success of the siege.  Keeping an army in place outside the walls for over a month with the risks of Western attack, disease (the importance of proper sanitation under siege conditions was something they understood) and supply shortages - especially given that he was employing the new weapon of artillery on a grand scale - was a tremendous achievement.  Mehmet's army was constantly confounding the Byzantines with technological and engineering advances, from constructing fortresses in weeks instead of years, casting cannons of unprecedented size, to siege techniques, to floating bridges, to the carriage of warships overland into the Golden Horn to outflank the naval defenses of the city.  What amazed me was the titanic efforts necessary by Mehmet to give him a chance to take the city, against a tiny number of defenders.  I had thought that its fall was inevitable, and took more of an effort of will than of military prowess.  I was wrong.  Both sides repeatedly outdid their predecessors in besieging and defending the city, and given that the city had endured over a thousand years of attacks by this point, that was no mean achievement.  As for Mehmet himself, he was of course not the devil that Westerners portrayed him to be, and if he did impale or massacre the occasional opponent, his tendency towards bloodthirsty behavior was not nearly as bad as his Latin (or Byzantine) contemporaries.  In fact a few years later he was himself to be horrified by a Wallachian prince's impalement of tens of thousands of his soldiers - a guy named Vlad Dracula.  (yes, that's the one - not a few Turks that survived the siege of Constantinople died at Dracula's hands a few years later).  Anyway, Mehmet, for all his bad qualities, was still remarkably tolerant, as his behavior after the siege illustrated, and did restore Constantinople to its glory days as capital of a global empire.  Certainly he behaved far, far, better than his predecessors, the Latin crusaders who sacked the city in 1205.

Crowley also explains the many bizarre atmospheric apparitions that troubled the Byzantines in the spring of the siege and especially the days before the city fell, including flames and strange lights dancing on the dome of Hagia Sophia.  It turns out that as much as they looked like the Virgin taking away her protection from the city (which was how the Byzantines interpreted it), it was actually the effect of debris in the atmosphere as a result of a volcanic eruption thousands of miles away - very similar to the effects of the Krakatoa eruption in the nineteenth century.  The same things happened, for example, in New York after Krakatoa, but New Yorkers simply called the fire brigade, as Crowley wryly observes.  The Byzantines were intensely superstitious, and saw omens in everything.  But the drama of the ancient city experiencing all this while under siege is enormous.  I really, really wish someone would put this on film.  But I guess no one would like to see a tragedy like this unfold - I mean it'd be like a film about the sinking of the Titanic.  Who'd go to see that?

Finally, the book helps show the difference between the two sacks - by the crusaders in 1205, and the Turks in 1453, and the award for the brutal sack goes to the Latins hands down.  They subjected the city to, I think it was, about five days of sack, killing and raping indiscriminately, and on a massive scale, as well as destroying and stealing the city's treasures, both in terms of gold, relics, and culture on a scale never matched in recorded history, and subjecting the religious heritage of their co-religionists to incredible desecration.  By contrast, in 1453 the Turks were only permitted one day of sack (the city was so poor by that point it was pretty well cleaned out by then) and there were a relatively small number of residents killed and raped in the sack itself (although the Turks were a little more equal opportunity rapists, if you know what I mean).  For the most part the Turks were interested in plunder, and that meant systematically searching for and sequestering the few remaining valuables and - most importantly - slaves.  The city's inhabitants were fought over, but were worth something alive as slaves (at least the younger ones), so it appears that they were not overly brutalized at the scene, so to speak (although attractive young women and boys were apparently almost torn apart being fought over at times), but were rather chained up and led away into slavery throughout the Ottoman empire.  Some were ransomed later, but the prospects for most were, to put it mildly, not good.  The Ottomans also were not nearly as interested in destroying the city's religious sites as the Latins had been, either converting them almost immediately to Islamic houses of worship, or giving them to the surviving Greek inhabitants of the city along with the freedom to continue worshiping as they had done - something that, notably, the Western Christians were adamant that they not be allowed to do.  This was one reason why the inhabitants of Constantinople were not quite as reluctant to see the Turks as one might expect.  Their experience with Western Christians had been worse.  At least after that fall they got their faith back.  Their emperors had repeatedly sold their Orthodox faith as the price for Western aid against the Ottomans - aid that, incidentally, never came.  The ones that survived the sack had churches, and even a section of the city set aside for them by Mehmet.  And, as I mentioned, the city went from a poverty-stricken besieged remnant of an empire to the rich capital of a vibrant young one.

Anyway, obviously I did like the book.  As tragic as the end of the Byzantine Empire was, it was still a happier ending (if I can use that phrase for a siege at which tens of thousands died) than the last time the city fell.  The Byzantine empire died proudly, and the Ottoman empire achieved greatly.  250 years earlier both the Byzantines and Latins both disgraced themselves.

Fantastic Four

Grayson saw this with Jamie's dad when it came out, but I didn't see it until last weekend with him, when the DVD came out.  I know nothing about the comic book, but I thought the movie was actually pretty good.  I have a contractual agreement to like anything Ioan Griffud does (I can even pronounce his name correctly) since he does such a great job as my favorite literary hero Horatio Hornblower in the A&E series, and I thought he did well here, even mastering an American accent (why can't Sean Connery?  I've always wondered that).  But all four are actually pretty good, and it probably has something to do with the focus of this movie being more on the relationships between the four than on their powers.  Michael Chiklis is probably the best since he has more to emote about, and is able to do it well, even through the prostheses he has to wear (how they made it so expressive I have no idea).  But I liked the flame guy and Jessica Alba as well.  The villain (who Jamie and I like a lot in Nip/Tuck) does the best he can with a role that degenerates into a mask-wearing villan towards the end, but at some point you just have to realize that somebody has to do it.  The final fight scene was surprisingly short - I thought the bridge scene was actually a lot better - but there are always sequels I suppose, and we'll get to see what they can do in that.  Not quite as good as the series' principal homage, The Incredibles, but then, not much is.  But a good start to a new superhero series.

King Kong soundtrack - John Barry

I have had this album since the movie first came out in 1976 - I remember buying it in the Kroger shopping center in a long-gone record store.  I have been waiting for years for the CD since I never recorded it to cassette, and thus haven't heard it in at least thirteen years, and likely much longer.

On hearing it now, I was a little disappointed.  It's great to hear it in a good quality form, and it is good work, but (and I could be wrong here) it doesn't hit me as well as some other Barry work.  The love theme and the ominous themes are outstanding, but the orchestrations are so simple compared to what we hear now (admittedly I listened to this right after Batman Begins, which is sort of like comparing lettuce to mole sauce) that it just sounds awfully thin by today's standards.  Still, very glad to have it, and looking forward to adding it to the rotation in the study.

Batman Begins soundtrack - Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard

Finally got the Batman Begins soundtrack, and haven't been disappointed.  The movie features a lot of good themes and background music - I have been humming it for weeks now, and the soundtrack is very agreeable mood music.  The absence of the usual cheesy titles in favor of bat species names is a brilliant stroke, because it divorces the music from the movie.  In many cases I'm not sure exactly where the music was in the film, and many of the different cuts have several pieces within them, so each stands alone well.  Probably good mood music to sit and read, is what I'm thinking.