[ATM] interesting review of movie on John Dobson

[Guy Brandenburg <gfbrandenburg@yahoo.com>]

An interesting review of the Dobson movie:
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John Dobson is at least as old as some of Tim Burton's
cadavers, and it may be that humanity is divided
between those who would let themselves be stopped by
him in the street and those who would keep walking.
With some regret, I place myself among the latter. If
I were to pass him in Greenwich Village or on
Fisherman's Wharf, the sight of his weathered beret
and wizened face would stiffen my shoulders. And once
I'd gotten a load of his telescope and his vaguely
disreputable come-on—"Come see the moon!"—nothing on
Earth would persuade me to linger.

But then, Dobson, the 89-year- old hero of Jeffrey Fox
Jacobs' documentary "A Sidewalk Astronomer" doesn't
want to show you anything on Earth. Self-taught and
staggeringly articulate, he's a former Vedantic monk
who, way back in the '40s, caught a glimpse of the
heavens and decided, as he says, "everyone's got to
see this." From there, he created the Dobsonian
telescope mount, an ingeniously simple apparatus that
suddenly made stargazing available to the masses.

Today, whether he's lecturing at colleges and
conventions or treating passers-by to views of the sun
and moon, Dobson is still entreating everyone to look
up. He has, like all the best teachers, a gift for the
honed sentence. "We're made out of the dust of
exploded stars," he proclaims, a pretty existential
truism that pales next to this one: "All habitats are
temporary." And he has, in Jacobs, a tireless devotee,
who trails him from San Francisco to Vermont recording
each crotchety opinion.

Your affection for Jacobs' enterprise may be
determined by your feelings for Dobson. From my angle,
he seems too reflexive with the quips and too addicted
to being the smartest guy in the room. (See how he
bridles when an actual astronomer challenges his ideas
about the Big Bang and dark matter.)
And it's an unexplored irony that the man who wants us
to know everything about the cosmos tells us so little
about his own universe.

Jacobs' disinclination to probe this prickly fellow is
what keeps A Sidewalk Astronomer squarely in the realm
of educational TV But good- for-you can still be good
for you. 

With its clever use of NASA satellite footage and
animation, the movie does give us a vivid sampling of
astronomical wonders. For those of us who would
otherwise pass John Dobson on the street, we can now
at least see what he wanted to show us: "Here are the
actors... hydrogen and helium. What is the name of the
play? Folly. Where is the theater? In space. Where do
you go to get there? In time."          CP




Guy  Brandenburg
Washington, DC
My home page:
http://home.earthlink.net/~gfbranden/GFB_Home_Page.html
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