Multicultural Day

This is going to get swept away by Whomania, including my own inevitable post, but I wanted to chronicle it for them what might be interested.

I won't deny that it was a pang to see chickwriter talking about Malice Domestic on Facebook, but I've been pretty busy myself today:

( This morning started at the Montpelier Festival of Herbs, Tea, and the Arts, which focused on India this year. )

Then it was home for the parade. Although I live in a suburb of DC, this particular township has a very small-town feel to it. (For instance, the town elections are next week. The mayor himself stopped by a few nights ago, stumping for votes, and helped me take the trash out. It's that kind of a place.)

We have a little parade on May Day - the ROTC from local high schools, the dog training club, the local karate dojo, the young beauty queen from a local pageant and all her tiny little "princesses," the Chesapeake Caledonian pipe and drum band, our fire engine, and cop cars from four towns around. It starts at the school and marches down main street to the town hall, where there is a town craft and bake sale.

Yes, it's so Norman Rockwell you could spit. I'm sure some of my more cynical readers have already reached for a bucket.

And because it's election time - township next week, county in September, and national in November - voters on the hoof were a particularly courted commodity today. I've shaken hands with everyone from a state Senator (Paul Pinsky; the mayor was fit to bust bragging we got him for our parade) through to the woman who wants to register wills. I didn't even know we voted for that.

Then it was across town to St. George's. Before I started going to Malice, their spring festival was the official start of spring to me, but I haven't been for years. No URLs or stories to pass on - just a lot of good Greek food (loukoumades OM NOM NOM) and enough takeout that I don't have to cook tonight either.

While I drive around to all of this, I've been listening to the audio version of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It's ambitious and uncomfortable and every now and then I have to stop it and just let what I'm hearing properly sink in.

So one of the things that's sinking in? I had not known that Salk had used HeLa cells in the creation of his vaccine. I've apparently got a part of Henrietta Lacks in a vial in my bedroom.

Flesh and Stone: Respect the Thing (spoiler post)

WD: Please skip this in the reaction post.

( This is finally the kind of episode I've been looking for )

...But!

I've still got some comments about Matt's performance in comparison to other Doctors, esp. the previous two. And I'm going to put them in a separate post because there won't be any spoilers and the spoilerphobes can read it safely.

Smith & Pertwee & Shakespeare

WD (non reaction post) lj user="neadods"> a href="http://neadods.livejournal.com/968506.html">talks about Matt Smith compared to previous actors playing the Doctor and the importance of Shakespeare (feel free to edit link text)


This is the non-spoiler Doctor Who post, wherein I expand on a conversation I just had with my roommate M about Smith as compared to other actors playing the Doctor.

If there's one thing that RTD introduced into the Whoniverse, it's major continuing angst. The Doctor is suddenly the last of his kind. Not only that, he's the one who committed the genocide, and he did it to (unsuccessfully, as we all find out) end a war.

Having turned a character once described as a "cosmic hobo" into this tragic figure, RTD then went out and hired a couple of Shakespearean actors to play him. And that was, in retrospect, absolutely key to their performance. Shakespeare's plays are stuffed to the gills with scenes where a character starts out intending to do X and ends up agreeing to do Y: "Richard you killed my husband, you monster... okay, I'll marry you." "But I'm loyal to the king of Scotland!... sure, I'll whack him, honey, anything you say." "I'll revenge my father's death... but not right now where I could do it easily, because there's still 2 hours of play left to go." "I love you more than a brother and your company is all I could ask for the rest of my life... but I'm totally ready to kill you to get that hot chick you just saw." "You just totally humiliated the hell out of me and took the one thing I said I'd never give you... let's have coffee and laugh about it." (Bonus points if you can name all the plays.)

There isn't a play where Shakespearean actors don't have to sell that whiplash with complete gravitas. And with that background, it becomes quite easy to sell a character who can flick from childlike enjoyment to worldshattering fury on a dime, as Eccleton and Tennant both did.

And then Matt Smith was hired. A lot of people have focused on his age as a problem, but I've been disappointed more by his lack of experience. wendymr said she felt that watching him was like watching a teenager play Hamlet, and in retrospect, I think that's almost EXACTLY the problem: he doesn't have the specific acting experience of trying to sell characters who encompass that wide a range of emotion.

I felt a lot better about his performance tonight - that's as close to a spoiler as this post is going to get - but M didn't. She's just not picking up the vibe of someone who is centuries old.

But she's also not familiar with any Doctor before Eight. So I agree with her about not feeling the weight of centuries in Smith's performance, but y'know what? I didn't feel that for many of the previous Doctors either. Yes, I know they've all done Shakespeare as well, but before 2005 they weren't being asked to be both the man who can say "What's the fun of being grownup if you can't act childishly" *and* sell the concept of being the Lonely God of Fire and Ice and Rage. The closest any of them got to that was Sylvester McCoy, who got the personal whiplash of being hired to be the clown and ending up as the guy who could do a Xanatos Gambit better than Xanatos.

The others weren't asked to be that. So while Smith isn't necessarily in the mold of Eccleston and Tennant, but he's a pretty good fit with Pertwee, Davison, and C Baker, all of whom talked about centuries but didn't act like it. Especially Pertwee. Exiled, time- and planet-bound Three had plenty of grief and anger of his own, but it came out like Smith's - shouting and stroppiness.

So... Smith!=Eccleston or Tennant, but Smith=Pertwee. It's a bit of a pity for those of us wanting another Eccleston or Tennant, but now I've seen that in him, he's fitting more into the role of the Doctor for me.

And to end on a shallow note, Jon Pertwee's companions also all ran around in micromini skirts...