Syhd

finally

2009-11-11T15:34:15Z

This is the tale that has needed to be told for many, many years.

the story of the first Thanksgiving

2009-11-04T15:48:35Z

Once upon a time...

Benjamin Franklin was exploring prehistoric America in his steampowered hot air balloon when his kite was eaten by the ferocious dinosaur, the saber-beaked Pturkeydactyl! Benjamin and the Pturkeydactyl fought an epic battle, but Benjamin slew the great beast with Excalibur. Afterwards, he heard the cries of the Pilgrims and Indians in the distance, so he flew over to them. They didn't have a meat entree for their first potluck dinner, so he cooked the Pturkeydactyl for them all to eat.

All of the male Pilgrims and Indians stuffed themselves silly, as usual, and succumbed to a food coma the next day in the barcaloungers while watching football on TV. The women Pilgrims and Indians left the comatose men to their Blackout Friday and had Benjamin fly them to New York City so they could go shopping at Macy's and Queen Victoria's Secret.

The end.

Sky Crawlers

2009-10-26T04:47:03Z

Put this anime into my Netflix queue, based on the interest mentioned by lordameth.

Quick summation: an interesting idea about cloned teenage fighter pilots fighting a perpetual war, but I was unable to bond with any character, nor appreciate the film in any way other than distantly philosophical.

And now, for something a bit more detailed (but not as detailed as 30 Days of Night, because good god, man!)

Where to start... this one is difficult to grab onto. A genetically engineered Kildren (cloned teenager warriors who are immune to aging and the rigors of disease, and thus make the best warriors ever, always being in their prime... children who kill, thus Kildren).

The plot follows Kannami, one of the Kildren on his reassignment to a new base, and his slow, numb and erratic manner of learning what happened to the pilot he replaced, whom no one will stay much about. Over time, people let things slip, but by and large everyone is pretty uncaring or unresponsive, even those who are normal humans. Kannami's bud, Tokini, is the most outgoing, full of vice and physical pleasures, but even he's tame.

The thing that bugged me is that no one looks at each other, not even a sly sidelong glance. They talk away from each other; were it not for the fact that they're in the same scene, you'd think they were talking to invisible people. Their reactions to each other are slow and dulled. The Kildren are like china dolls, falling prey to the uncanny divide (reinforced by the animation, which is curiously flat against an otherwise rich and detailed world).

Even the battles they fight in leave them largely unaffected. The animation of the battles is top notch, very like footage from actual dogfights. But the fight animation is dramatically different in style from the rest of the movie: it's so good, it's hyperrealistic, like a video game. Thus reinforcing the view that warfare has become a video game (in the director's notes, he spoke about wanting the entire movie to be naturalistic. How, I'm not certain).

Kannami's backstory unfolds pretty damn slowly, as does any knowledge about what the Kildren are and how they came to be. Then, about 3/4s the way through, one Kildren can't take it anymore and breaks down, spilling the beans about Kannami and the Kildren in one emotional exposition. Easily the most emotional moment, beating the base commander's irrational outburst earlier hands down. Of course, Kannami is completely unresponsive, and within a few moments, the explanatory Kildren regains her composure and becomes cool and unruffled again.

The major theme about having genetically engineered immortal clones doing the dirty work of war for we normal, aging humans is evident, but other effects are less obvious. The civilian populace glamorize the Kildren like sports stars, watching the corporate-endorsed warfare on TV. The Kildren are allowed any vice they want -- smoking, drinking, wenching. After all, they are clones and superstars, putting their lives on the line daily, why shouldn't they live it up? They suffer little lasting ill-effects... not even in the way of lasting enjoyment.

The numbness surrounding Kannami is a product of using clones. The clones themselves are engineered into intellectual numbness, not to be curious about who they are and how they came to be fighter pilots. It's enough for Kannami and the other pilots to fight. Except that over time, no matter how strong the blissful ignorance has been programmed, there's an accretion of emotional experience and knowledge that cannot be forgotten. One white haired Kildren has a thing for folding the paper very precisely after he reads it. When he's killed in battle, another white haired Kildren appears, exhibiting the exact same behavior. Kannami has his WTF moment then. He realizes that it's not enough to ride through life blissed out, not if your daily experience is locked in endless repetition. The monotony of immortal warfare becomes a prison they cannot escape.

This numbness leeches out into the humans who deal with them. The woman gearhead who supervises the repair crews is indifferent to Kannami all the way through, and rarely answers direct questions. Once you realize how long she's been in the service, and how many similar Kildren she' must have seen cycle through, one after another lacking variety in who they are and what they do, must weigh on her over time. She can't become emotionally invested in them, because they're all the same and will eventually be replaced, like cogs that break.

Then there's the enigmatic Teacher, the enemy fighter pilot who is actually a normal human adult (surprise, surprise), and serves as the harbinger of death: every Kildren who goes up against him is killed. The Teacher once worked for this side's corporation, but quit and went to work for the other corporation. Is it because he felt that Kildren diminished the value of life by trivializing warfare? Does he hunt them down to prove that experience and knowledge make for a better pilot?

Interesting thoughts stirred up. A lovely film to look at and think about afterwards, but a bit unpleasing to sit through.

30 Days of Night

2009-10-25T19:07:48Z

I caught (or rather was caught by) 30 Days of Night, the vampire movie that came out a few years ago. It showed last night on IFC and it just so happened I wasn't looking to do anything productive, so I started watching it. Really, that's all it started out as. "I'll give this 10-15 minutes and then move on."

I watched the entire damn thing. I kept thinking, "just another 10-15 mins, really, and then I'll do something else". Finally, I was so far into it that I felt obligated to see it to the end. Which is good, because otherwise I would have needed closure, and had to find and watch it again.

The thing is, I don't like horror films. I really haven't enjoyed the craze of vampires movies, whether in reimagining monsters or wallowing in immortal teenage angst. When the trailer for 30 Days of Night came out, with Josh Hartnett battling weird, angular, piranha mawed vampires, I said no.

But reimagined vampires aren't the heart of what makes the movie interesting and disturbing. It's the premise of what can happen in 30 days, and how that extended time frame is shown in the movie.

It starts off a guy, not entirely dressed for the weather, stumbling purposefully away from a frozen shoreline, across an endless tract of snow and ice. It's a really good opening scene: the guy is framed off-center with the thousand yard stare. When he walks, he's either on one side of the frame or the other, showing the expanse he has yet to cover or has already traversed.

Switch to Barrow, Alaska, with the final departure of large number of residents. These people want to get the hell out of Dodge before the sun disappears below the horizon for 30 days, leaving the town in "darkness" (which is a bit of a fudge: it doesn't stay perpetually dark. You get twilight and dusk conditions as well as full night. But the sun does fail to crest the horizon, and the lack of direct sunlight does weird things to some people (I'm getting more and more like that), driving some south in search of the sun). The town is settling in for a monthlong slumber.

As the town readies to bed down, the sheriff (Josh Hartnett, who does an excellent job of not making a meal of the role) gets a succession of odd, then disquieting calls. A scorched piece of ground is discovered outside of town, with a mound of melted cellphones in the center. A man who raises and keeps sled dogs finds them all viciously slain in their kennels. The only helicopter in town has been trashed beyond repair. The operator of the satellite Internet station goes missing.

There's the usual huggermugger about love trouble between the sheriff and the fire warden, married but now separated (for unknown reasons that are never explained). You also have the characters who are the cornerstones of horror films: the grizzled loner with a grand assortment of power equipment, bear traps and other dangerous things. There's the sheriff's teenage brother: young, wide-eyed, and innocent who exists A) to show emotional depth in the sheriff (caring for family), and B) to be a yardstick for measuring the psychological effect of the ordeal.

The dude from the shore comes to town and the slide downhill begins. He causes trouble at the diner by threatening the waitress, gets locked up, and starts making ominous threats about "they're coming." Again, not over the top. There's no glee or malevolence in his threats, just unsettling statements promising danger.

Then the Internet goes down and the electricity goes out. Which is when you find out the vampires are already in town, striking out from the shadows. A guy is plucked right in the middle of a conversation. Someone is snatched out of their house and dragged into the crawlspace underneath. The sheriff finds the Internet satellite operator, his head on a pole. The trip back to town shows cars overturned and on fire. The sheriff comes back to the police station, now deserted, with blood on the walls. Everyone missing except for the stranger, who is crying because he hadn't been taken away. They promised, he says. Oh, he's their broken little puppet, a survivor from a previous attack.

At this point, the vampires get screen time and all hell breaks loose. The moneymaker/slaughterfest begins. Vampires have their pick as the residents flee every which way. There's a drawn-out, top-down shot of the slaughter from above, distancing you from it with the height, showing how widespread the attack is.

Keep in mind this is still the first night.

The survivors find a place to hole up: someone's house that's boarded up, with a secret attic space. Days go by. The survivors are waiting for another blizzard so they can make a run for the power station. The usual hiding out tropes get play:
-- Infighting. One resident challenges the sheriff making all of the decisions. A fight breaks out and is smothered, with unease about if that drew any attention.
-- Random survivor: a girl calling out for help, wandering the streets. They quickly realize the vampires are using her to draw others out of hiding (It turns out she's doing so from a poorly considered deal with the vampires). The survivors leave the girl to the kindness of displeased vampires.
-- the troublesome old guy: One of the survivors is an old man with dementia, so of course, he's going to be a source of trouble. How he does is intelligent. The old man has a lucid moment, and thinking he's being held against his will, sneaks out of the attic while the others sleep. They catch him before he leaves the house, but he asks to use the bathroom and sneaks out of the window. His son is drawn out after him, and the others are cornered to remain inside as a vampire investigates the commotion.

More days pass. The blizzard arrives, they sneak out of the house to the general store to get supplies, but there's a small girl vampire eating messily. The sheriff's kid brother beheads the girl with an axe, which proves beheading does work on vampires, and that the kid brother is resigning himself uncomfortably to reality. The blizzard ends early, stranding them in the store.

The next escape proves that ultraviolet lamps harm vampires like the sun. The sheriff distracts the vampires by running to someone's house for their grow lamp, while the others make a short run to the police station. The grow lamp works -- sears the vampire hit by the light -- but it's undone very easily by breaking the generator. The loner plays out his part by making a kamikaze run, with power equipment, bear traps and guns (pistols and rifles pretty bad, shotguns are fine, chainsaws would be awesome), his death allowing the sheriff to rejoin the others.

Then they face infection in the ranks. One of the survivors was bitten by the vampire girl, and is turning. Interestingly, he reveals it himself and asks to be killed. He reveals that his family, seen in photos he keeps but never in person, have been dead for years. He wants to join them. He doesn't want to live forever and asks not to be allowed. The deed is done and received with grim silence. They're no longer killing as a response; they're performing preventative, premediated murder.

More days pass, and more grim realizations come. They discover someone else still alive in a nearby house. Upon investigation, it's the deputy, with a leg injury. The master bed has three bodies, hidden under the sheet. The deputy confesses that he didn't want the vampires to slaughter his family, so they formed a suicide pact. He killed his wife and kids, but failed to kill himself and unable to escape. He's been trapped in the house ever since the first attack, with the bodies on the bed as a horrible reminder what he did, not the vampires.

The survivors make a break for the safety of the power station. Along the way, the party gets separated (bound to happen, offers different opportunities for danger): the fire warden goes to help a little girl, covered in blood, but appears still human (the wide dazed look of shock is all too human a response) -- I wondered where the hell she's been and why come out now. The injured deputy disappears, and the sheriff goes after him. The three remaining survivors make it to safety, followed by the deputy, and the sheriff. The veil of safety is torn away: a vampire has been waiting! The deputy and sheriff kill the vampire, which is when they realize the deputy is turning. The sheriff doesn't even wait: despite the fact that this man has been his friend for years, he chops the guy's head off (the nastiest piece of gore in the film; really did not need to see that). No sign of the fire warden and little girl.

But wait, on the walkie, we learn the warden and girl are trapped under a truck. They become even more trapped when oil begins to spill across the snow. The vampires have broken into the oil pipeline. As the oil spreads, the vampires set fire to it (should a vampire be playing with matches?), which causes the town to go up in flames. The vampires are covering their tracks, destroying all evidence of what happened. Any concerns about what happened to the town will be put down to a freak accident caused by sun-starved residents, leaving the vampires free to go after neighboring towns in coming years.

The sheriff has a moment of inspiration and damnation. Realizing they can't win, he injects himself with some of the deputy's tainted blood, turning him into a vampire (as his kid brother watches over him protectively, losing more of his innocence). The sheriff runs off, still undergoing the painful change, to do battle with the vampire brood. Unsurprisingly he wins; he is the protagonist after all. How he wins is where the surprise lies. He takes a lot of ass kicking, giving the fire warden enough time to escape. And then, in a split second, he gets a "Holy Crap That's Bad Ass" moment that happens so quickly, it takes a few moments to register.

With their leader defeated, brood runs away. But we still have a tainted sheriff. He and his estranged wife/fire warden wait on the edge of town for the sun to come up (it's been 30 days) and the sheriff blackens and burns up, like a piece of wood turning to charcoal.

If I don't like horror, what did I enjoy? How time moves slowly, shot through by moments of violence that make the silence afterwards even worse. The way that fear drives desperate acts but over time turns into grim resignation and haunted endurance. The slow degrees by which someone who does the necessary evils becomes powerful enough to win, but evil enough to warrant destruction.

I really enjoyed how things went unexplained. No one explained the cellphones, the slaying of the dogs, the destruction of the helicopter. What about the stranger: who was he and what happened to bring him to Barrow? The answers become apparent but also pointless -- there were greater things to wonder about. The same about interpersonal relations: We never learn what separated the sheriff and fire warden (only the two main characters), whereas bit characters are given much greater depth. We spend time getting to know the main characters, but whereas we need glimpses of exposition or emotional blows to flesh out the bit characters. The couple who lost all of their sled dogs were shown grieving and struggling to cope with that loss, before the madness descended. That by itself could be the stuff of Hallmark TV movie dramas. It's a pretty rich little town in detail.

I like to imagine beyond the movie's end -- what will those who left for the 30 days do when they come back? What will the survivors say and how will they be perceived? How would this slaughterfest play out in the media?

Despite my misgivings, it was a good movie. I'm sure the graphic novel is even better, but I doubt I will read it. It's one thing to catch the movie on TV in passing. It's another thing to seek out it actively. I thank those who wrote the story and made the movie for making both so well, even if there are fancypants vampires involved.

syhd @ 2009-10-23T09:10:00

2009-10-23T13:10:51Z

.... I could really use trees with autumn leaves that light up on overcast days.

words I like

2009-10-20T14:29:03Z

I'm reading Why Read The Classics? by Italian fiction/fantasy/folklorist author Italo Calvino, whose turns of phrases I just adore.

Why Read The Classics? is full of individual reviews of his favorite books of the canonical "classics" category, which despite the drubbing that modern academics have given, Calvino feels is justifiable. Classic books are worthy of being considered above all others and are worth having lots of people read. It's even better if it turns out that you find them interesting or even enjoyable, but the fact remains that they are watershed moments in the writing of their time.

I'm impressed that Calvino considers a lot of non-European authors, although he sadly has not sampled much non-Western literature beyond some classical Islamic texts. But, if you can't read the work in the original language, and adept translations are not available, what can you do?

There's one quote he makes about another Italian author that I particularly enjoy:

"Gadda is a man of contradictions. An electro-technican engineer (he used his professional skills for about ten years, mostly abroad), he sought to control his hypersensitive and nervous temperament by means of a scientific, rational mentality, but only succeeded in making it worse; and he used his writing to give vent to his irritability, phobias, and outbursts of misanthropy, which he tried to suppress in real life by donning the mask of a gentleman from a bygone age full of courtesy and good manners."

This summation is a bit telling about those of us who like to adopt such masks.

There's another bit where he talks about a poem describing the staggering realization of turning around so quickly that you discover what you've always suspected: that the world behind you, beyond your vision, differs from what you saw before you turned away from it. In the poem's case, the discovery reveals that everything out of sight dissolves into nothingness. What I am tickled by is that he mentions an American Midwest frontier legend of the "hide-behind" -- a creature that lurks behind you as you walk through forests and that no matter how fast you turn, you'll never catch sight of it. I know of the hide-behind McBroom's Zoo, where a Midwestern farmer finds legendary creatures displaced by a tornado. McBroom actually turns around quickly enough to see the hide-behind, just as the poem's main character turns around to see the Void behind him.

Simply delighted :)

visualization, drawing, memory

2009-10-16T18:33:12Z

There's a difference between what I've visualized in my mind, and what I've drawn. The more fully rendered something is in one medium, the less likely I am to visualize it as fully in the other.

Things that I visualize in my mind can be drawn, but not very well. I can translate part of what I visualize mentally into an image on paper, but certain qualities can't be expressed properly. I usually end up having to adapt what I've seen in the hopes of giving a hint of what's missing, what should be there. But generally it fails. Frustration galore. Nowadays, I do a quick sketch and add some explanatory text, and leave it at that. The sketch and words are a reminder of what I imagined. They give me a handle to pull up all of the details and qualities out of fog of memory.

I draw best when I don't allow myself to visualize something completely in my mind. I start off with a specific concept, a strong impression -- "oh it should have this and be posed like this" -- but the less specific I am in what should be there, the easier a time I have in the process of drawing. I'm drawing from scratch, not reproducing something faithfully. The end is a something of a mystery. I don't know (and don't want to know) exactly what I'll end up with.

I'll start with a line, add another line, and continue adding lines, however I like. At some point, that collection of lines suggests something to me: "that's looking like a head". That gives me a focus for what could come next. A head implies there being the rest of the body -- a person, a monster, who knows? The features on the head indicate the mood or attitude of the being. They may also indicate a position or stance. If the being has this attitude and stance, what around them might they be reacting to? That means bringing other characters into the drawing, to fill the role needed. As it goes, a general concept will arise and I'll make changes to support the concept better, make it more distinct. However,I hesitate to changing the first few lines that started everything off; without them and the particular qualities they have, the drawing loses its point of origin.

It's like starting an avalanche. Drop a line onto the page, see what that sets off. Continue adding lines to feed the avalanche, and pull it all together in the end, if possible.

I'm learning, rather late, how to compose a drawing ahead of time, rather than wait for the composition to arise from what I've drawn. Set up the dominant elements first -- there should be a strong diagonal across here, and the perspective should be top-down. Then figuring out how arrange everything around those structural elements and add fiddly bits for my amusement.

The nice thing about having drawn a thing is that I don't have to reserve that memory in my head. To see something again, I have the drawing to go back to.

There've been a few times when I've drawn something that I thought I saw, when it was actually something else entirely, to show others what I imagined. In an gallery, someone had a framed picture of a red pencil line drawing of a nude woman sitting on the floor, resting her arms and head on the cushion of a chair. It emphasized the line from her back to her arms, curled around the dark mass of the chair cushion. When I first saw it, I couldn't make sense of the lines and shapes, and my pattern recognition resolved it into a red squirrel with a huge white belly, bent over backwards in exultation, holding a hardwon acorn in its paws (I imagined it silently saying "YES!!!"). That satisfied my need to know what the image was, and for a long time, I didn't look any more closely.

Finally, something in my brain suggested that very few people would draw an exulting squirrel, let alone frame it and hang it in a gallery (no matter how amusing I thought the idea was). I looked at the drawing more closely and saw, for the first time, the nude woman reclining on the cushion. Stunned, I described the incident to friends, who looked at me, confused. "No," they said, "it's always been a nude woman reclining on the cushion." I tried to point out the red squirrel to them, which they couldn't really see, no, sorry, uh uh. So I drew it for them (or redrew it for them?). Afterwards they agreed with me that, if viewed from a distance, squinting, it could indeed be an exulting squirrel.

syhd @ 2009-10-14T09:30:00

2009-10-14T13:30:26Z

Brushing your teeth and ending up with mint-flavored mucus is not an improvement.

idle thoughts about language

2009-09-25T14:53:35Z

count (kownt)
county (kowntee)
country (kuntree)

Oh English, how you defy reason.

and stuff

2009-08-26T22:17:29Z

I should write something rather than live parasitically through the lives of others online ("AMUSE ME!")...

no, I don't really mean 'parasitically'. I just can't get the appropriate word off the tip of my tongue, so I picked something nearby that sorta kinda fit. You know what I mean. Let's go with that being understood.'

btw, it just came to me. Vicarious.

Anyway, I'm recently back from a vacation and a bit washed out, mentally. I got to see lots of friends, but the trip took place over an odd arrangement of days that didn't really work out very well for visiting, the weather was muggy and unpleasant, and a lot of the old places I went to either have the same lack of charm they always had, or have lost whatever charms I thought they did have. When I lived there, I needed to find enjoyment where I could, so I gave graces to those places that gave me something. Now that I don't live there anymore, I don't have to beguile myself with those former charms and enchantments, which makes the place a bit sadder and killed a lot of lingering nostalgia.

Moving here was a really good move, and I'm really freaking happy about that, now that I see the state of things where I once was.

To boot, I'm a little blitzed because I've been trying to make sense of budgets and invoices, of which no one can give me accurate, lasting figures. The vendor invoiced us on this date, I authorized payment on this date, the payment went out the door on this date, and the vendor was paid on this date, none of which match up neatly. Estimated costs for work may be somewhat to wildly out of step with actual costs, and the budget projection we worked out was based on numbers from the vendor that may or may not still be vaguely accurate.

So, I'm asked, can I be firm and confident in my predictions about numbers that are soft and gelatinous, with the delicate scent of overripe mango pervading it? I fear all high level accounting is like this.

And Warcraft threatens to wreak devastation on several landscapes I've grown quite fond of.

Still, I made a killer tomato soup with orzo, I have cookies to bake for friends, I'm enjoying the Garth Nix series, "Keys of the Kingdom" (currently on Book 3: Drowned Wednesday), and I have far too many TV shows to watch this season. I've been watching The Mighty Boosh, a crackpot BBC series with Noel Fielding and Julian Barrat. Now that I've bought the first season, they go and release a boxed set of the first three seasons on Amazon. Stands to reason. Should have seen it coming, really. What I get for being an early adopter. Learned my lesson, don't think I haven't.

Yeah, it's time to go.

hurray for horribleness!

2009-08-12T15:27:18Z

Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog won a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.

See here!

drip drip drip

2009-08-11T13:51:16Z

I do not enjoy being a water collection device, existing simply to have humidity to bead up on my skin.

Okay, so it's really just sweat, but it sure feels like I'm making a syhd-shaped tunnel through the damp air, collecting moisture as I go.

Gah.

GIJoke

2009-08-08T07:14:14Z

Saw GI Joe. It was a laughfest. Laughing AT it, not WITH it.

Friends who went to see Transformers 2 said this was worse. They felt like their childhood memories had been violated. Ahhhhh, good times, good times.

Be careful: every time they focus in on someone's face, there's gonna be a flashback.

Fun game: name the movie scenes that GIJoe borrows from. "Huh, that's the Battle of Yavin from SW:ANH". "That's either the fight in Cloud City in SW:TESB or the duel at the end of Serenity... or both."

It's a good thing I never liked the GIJoe cartoons as a kid. I have no reason to be disappointed.

syhd @ 2009-08-05T17:40:00

2009-08-05T21:59:35Z

Oddly tired for some reason, which is why I'm having a spate of weird posts.

Listening to Plaid's soundtrack of Tekkon Kinkreet in my head led me to think about the ideas behind Tekkon Kinkreet, one being that Japanese towns undergo urban redevelopment MUCH faster than American or West European towns. There's a lovely old area of town, full of history and character and BAM, the developer version of Emeril comes in and plows it all under for an apartment complex (or so the director Michael Arias contends).

One could argue that America has a lot more room for development than Japan, so rather than redevelop rundown urban areas, gentrifying them, we go with sprawl. Japan doesn't have the same room for sprawling, so they have to focus on the land that is available. But that's not what I'm after here.

I got to thinking what sort of things do the Japanese prize and keep from redevelopment? Natural landmarks, shrines, castles, etc. There's the idea that extraordinary locations which move those who visit it are due to the presence of an extraodinary spirit inhabiting the area. Thus that area should be venerated, kept safe, left untouched.

Americans... we preserve historic districts and landmarks as well for being interesting, but we save a lot of places from destruction based on a celebrity who existed there. This is the log cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. This is the bar where punk music was first played. This is the house where Maya Angelou did her writing. The place is not particularly important, as much as its association to the person of fame.

Just an odd thought. Not entirely certain it's valid, but there you go.

word play and confusion

2009-08-04T21:29:31Z

I'm having what I consider to be a Calvino moment.

Italo Calvino is a 20th century Italian author who wrote very odd fiction. A lot of his short stories centered on someone who starts off with a situation, pursues the conclusions of that situation logically to ridiculous extremes and becomes so enmeshed in the web of their logic that they experience an existential crisis over the strangest things.

For example, a man becomes nearsighted and has to get glasses. He realizes that glasses give him back the wonder of clear sight, but they also change who he is -- wearing glasses, he becomes a completely different person to everyone else around him. He sees everyone clearly and eagerly goes out of his way to greet them, but his appearance has changed such that no one recognizes him so they ignore him. If he doesn't wear his glasses, people recognize him and greet him happily, but he can't see them, has no idea who they are, and can't return the greeting. He's left, frustrated and distraught that he cannot have satisfaction one way or another.

In another, an accountant sits up all night worrying about the financial records of a company. He's discovered that the numbers in the ledger don't add up, and in pursuing the matter to the beginning, finds that an accountant years ago made a mistake in the bookkeeping. It was never corrected and the current financial records of the company are based, to some extent, on that error. The accountant frets every night as he works because if the company's financial records are wrong, then the national finances are also wrong, and thus the world economy, all because of this one mistake, and it's all he can do to keep the error from getting worse.

My Calvino moment came from thinking about word play in other languages. I love how the English language can screw with meaning.

R&G Are Dead:

Guildenstern: No no. You can't not be on a boat. Death is the ultimate negative. You see?
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No. What you've been is not on boats.

I have a passing familiarity with other languages. I recognize enough bits to piece together ideas, but I don't have anything approaching fluency. I worry, in my way, about how long it will take to become fluent enough in another language to enjoy their wordplay, and how many authors I'd have to sift through in order to find those that give me the same pleasure that Calvino and others do in English.

Of course, the funny bit is that Calvino is Italian. All of his stories are translated. So to some extent, the wordplay I find in his writing is as due to the careful choice of words by his translators as it is due to Calvino.

I don't want to start thinking down that rabbit hole of logic. Otherwise, I'll be teaching myself Italian just so I can appreciate Calvino in his own language, and then discover, at the end of it all, that the pleasure of reading Calvino in his native Italian is distinctly different from my original enjoyment of Calvino translated into English.

It's OVAH!

2009-08-02T23:40:45Z

Dear gods. At long last, it's complete.

The Genie of the Teapot: The Pot that Cheers.

Now to put it away somewhere safe so nothing happens to it... like me working on it any further.

in love

2009-08-01T19:33:12Z

I absolutely ADORE the TV series Leverage -- a group of thieves screwing bad guys in an Ocean's Eleven sort of way, complete with jazz group riffing as the background music. Having started watching the show from the premiere of season two, and realizing that there's not a bad actor or character in the cast -- Timothy Hutton (rock solid anchor), Gina Bellman (rawr), Christian Kane (much improved from his Angel days), Aldis Hodge (the rapid nonstop banter makes my inner VA so happy) and Beth Riesgraf (cute, perky, crazy, fantastic). I put it on my Netflix queue. To my wonder and joy, I can watch it instantly. And I did. And I'm filled with tears of joy. I haven't been this happy since Farscape was revived to do a two-hour series finale.

But I must pace myself. Yes, pacing is good. Give myself time to enjoy the last episode, savor it, bask in the memory of it, before starting on the next one. Yes, pacing... pacing... pacing...

Or maybe right now.

language trog

2009-07-30T15:00:12Z

I know language is a mutable, everchanging thing. Words that had particular meanings take on different meanings over time, grammar twists and distorts like mutant DNA. I appreciate that, but some things I cannot buy into.

Such as the following...

Writer's Block question today:

"How has technology impacted the quality time you spend with your family?"

Joints, toes, and fingers become impacted. Meteorites impact planets, moons, and stars. Technology has not IMPACTED me, striking with a physical force that causes injury and devastation. Technology AFFECTS me.

Grrr.

12 Monke... videos

2009-07-29T18:28:25Z

<a href='http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=127139040762&h=cgw34&u=ol-U6&ref=nf">Twelve videos that you may or may not have seen on vimeo already.</a>

Too clever by half

2009-07-27T05:30:59Z

Just watched Rope by Alfred Hitchcock. Haven't seen it in a long time but it's still a good suspense film. Two intellectual dandies kill a friend and then tempt fate by having a party immediately afterwards, with the body in the room. Ah! It's an excellent film. Brandon is so full of himself and his manipulation of people that you'd cheerfully strange him. Jimmy Stewart is their former headmaster who recognizes signs that something's wrong and pieces it together. Everyone raves about the super long takes (10 minutes long, no cutaways or edits) but what I enjoy are the overlapping conversations. The camera focuses on one group talking, but in the background, other conversations are running among the other guests. When the camera switches back to them, you pick up the conversation at the moment of intrusion. It's based on a play, so there's no chance of high speed car chases or shootouts... Jimmy Stewart resolves it in an indirect but effective manner.

Good stuff. See it if you can find it.

Tekkon Kinkreet

2009-07-21T04:43:58Z

On a whim, I got this because the cover image looked fun.

Wow. This is a thoroughly twisted, but yet highly enjoyable movie. Treasure Town is "crunchy". It's a dilapidated, ramshackle shanty town-cramped Japanese urban neighborhood-Hindu temple district. You can feel the gravel grind under your feet, write your name in the grime on the windows, see raindrops bead on windshields, and walk down alleyways that are packed with jumbled mess of those working there. It descends into madness (literally) and gets psychologically mystical on you, but it doesn't come across as intentionally horrorific or nor does it go all "sunshine and daisies" on you. Characters die when just you come around to liking them. I would categorize it as noir, if noir can be bright and colorful anime. The animation style of the characters is just on the edge of my tolerance -- abstracted, distorted characters but realistic looking (i.e., not cookie cutter anime people).

I might have to watch it again. And I will be getting the soundtrack.

ranty

2009-07-19T19:46:06Z

/rant on

There was a distressing mantra being taken up by the upper echelons of libraries that "we need to be more like a business". I never understood the statement. Libraries are not businesses, they don't exist to turn a profit. They exist to provide books to the public for free. If anything, libraries bleed money. Sure, they could stand to be shaken up every so often and made a little more streamlined, but the idea that they need to sell products to their clientele to encourage greater usage is bunk. Ain't it fascinating that with the economic downturn, people are turning to libraries in greater numbers. Because what's available there is for free. The basic need has not gone away, even in the age of the Internet and Google.

And yet, funding for public libraries is nosediving. Among all of the other amenities of life, this is one we just can't afford as a society anymore, apparently.

This indirectly leads me to another institution that has fallen prey to the idea that it should be run like a business: the medical insurance industry. Insurance agencies make money for their investors by denying claims. The fewer claims they pay out each year, the more money from each premium they can give to their exorbinantly paid executives, to their investors who expect greater yield on their investments (without thinking about who should be profiting from the insurance industry -- those who are insured and get medical coverage), and money for public relations spin doctoring.

In each case, the executives and investors have forgotten with these institutions exist: not to turn a tidy profit, but to provide the public with basic necessities: adequate medical care and free access to literature. Things that a 1st world nation ought to be able to provide to all of its citizens, great and small. If the institution happens to turn a profit, well, isn't that special. But face facts, these institutions are sinkholes. Money pits. Places where money is given for the benefit of others, without a monetary return to the investors. There are worse things that someone who has money can do than give something to those who don't. Noblesse oblige, the idea that those with more should feel socially obligated to do something for those that lack, without any other benefit coming to them than a sense of Doing Good, may seem dated but its still socially relevant.

/rant off

(this is what happens when I watch Bill Moyer's Journal on PBS.org. I get angry and depressed and ranty)

quote

2009-07-14T16:49:48Z

An excellent passage about how unwavering personal convictions overwhelms reason, common sense, and being decent to other human beings.

"Once self-supported by conscience, once embarked on a career of manifest usefulness, the true [insert religious fanatic here] never yields. Neither public nor private influences produce the slightest effect on us, when we have once got our mission. Taxation may be the consequence of a mission ; riots may be the consequence of a mission ; wars may be the consequence of a mission : we go on with our work, irrespective of every human consideration which moves the world outside us. We are above reason; we are above ridicule ; we see with nobody's eyes, we hear with nobody's ears, we feel with nobody's hearts, but our own. Glorious, glorious privilege ! And how is it earned ? Ah, my friends, you may spare yourselves the useless inquiry ! We are the only people who can earn it -- for we are the only people who are always right."

-- Miss Drusilla Clack, from The Moonstone.

In other news, The Moonstone is quickly becoming a favorite of mine.

uses of mulberries other than to stain sidewalks

2009-07-07T16:36:15Z

The hot chocolate made by Starbucks and other haute cafe establishments is way too sweet. The chocolate is by no means not bitter enough to offset the amount of sugar used.

However, eating a fresh mulberry and then sipping the hot chocolate immediately afterwards is a tasty tasty way to correct that.

syhd @ 2009-06-28T23:05:00

2009-06-29T03:07:26Z

I wonder if the Home Shopping Network will have a Billie Mays retrospective marathon of every informercial he's ever made. I mean, the man is the heavy weight of infomercialdom.

That would last, what, an hour? Less?