The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
Son of the Bride of the Return of Potential Cover Art!
Haven't done this in a while...some art that trips my trigger for what the cover of either of the first two Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) books should look like. Maybe.
A nifty paragraph
Reading The Count of Monte Cristo. I really liked this paragraph. #reading #books, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.
I've been reading The Count of Monte Cristo of late, and I just really liked this particular paragraph. I know I'm reading a translation, but I am greatly enjoying what I'm getting of Dumas's style. It's hard to explain, I must admit...it's like he uses a lot of words, fairly poetically, to state something bluntly.
I am now up to where Edmund Dantes has recovered the treasure and is investigating what has become of the shards of the life that was exploded years ago, when he was unjustly imprisoned. Good stuff!
Monday, September 30, 2013
Sentential Links
Linkage!
:: The Goddess wears her cloak of flowers, the earth is lush, fresh and fertile.
In my patch of the world, green and yellow dominate the landscape. Fields of golden-yellow canola sit side by side with green crops of wheat. It’s a wonderful time to slowly drive the back-roads, just taking the time to admire the vista. (One of my Instagram friends.)
:: What was the Alliance, er, network, thinking? (John Kenneth Muir is blogging his way through Firefly...as well as lots of other good stuff. Gotta remember to read him more often.)
:: A long time ago when I asked a friend, the late Leo Wilson, maitre d’ from P. J. Clarke’s and a character out of the pages of P.G. Wodehouse, what it was about Neary’s he liked so much (Neary’s is a legendary pub in midtown Manhattan), he craned his neck, jutted out his jaw, tugged and pulled at his collar like Rodney Dangerfield (all a part of his repertoire when searching for THE word), then said with a sniff and a huff, “It’s positively civilized!”
:: When I say Miller looks like Sherlock Holmes, I mean he looks like how I pictured my ideal Sherlock Holmes whose image my imagination pieced together out of Sidney Paget’s illustrations for Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, what I gleaned from the stories themselves, and my own wishful thinking about what I’d look like when I grew up: very tall, very lean, with a very high forehead, a very sharp nose, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and…young. (This turns out to be a repost from some months ago, but ignore that.)
:: The schedule prompts the Siren to go public with one of her deepest, most tenaciously held opinions:
Laver's Law applies to cinema. (I am, in all honesty, not entirely sure I understand this post.)
:: No matter how many Star Wars books I've flipped through, I'm always coming across new-to-me behind the scenes photos. They seem to come from a never-ending fountain that bubbles with memories from the galaxy far, far away. Archives are wonderful like that. I can't think of a treasure chest I'd like to explore more. I hope the making of the new sequel trilogy is documented to the very last detail so that 30 years from now we'll still be seeing images we haven't seen before.
:: And the cover copy... Sheesh! This Superman KNOWS he's 50 years old, his powers are "supernatural" in origin, and look! He's losing the drug war! Whatever happened to fact-checking?!
More next week!
:: The Goddess wears her cloak of flowers, the earth is lush, fresh and fertile.
In my patch of the world, green and yellow dominate the landscape. Fields of golden-yellow canola sit side by side with green crops of wheat. It’s a wonderful time to slowly drive the back-roads, just taking the time to admire the vista. (One of my Instagram friends.)
:: What was the Alliance, er, network, thinking? (John Kenneth Muir is blogging his way through Firefly...as well as lots of other good stuff. Gotta remember to read him more often.)
:: A long time ago when I asked a friend, the late Leo Wilson, maitre d’ from P. J. Clarke’s and a character out of the pages of P.G. Wodehouse, what it was about Neary’s he liked so much (Neary’s is a legendary pub in midtown Manhattan), he craned his neck, jutted out his jaw, tugged and pulled at his collar like Rodney Dangerfield (all a part of his repertoire when searching for THE word), then said with a sniff and a huff, “It’s positively civilized!”
:: When I say Miller looks like Sherlock Holmes, I mean he looks like how I pictured my ideal Sherlock Holmes whose image my imagination pieced together out of Sidney Paget’s illustrations for Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, what I gleaned from the stories themselves, and my own wishful thinking about what I’d look like when I grew up: very tall, very lean, with a very high forehead, a very sharp nose, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and…young. (This turns out to be a repost from some months ago, but ignore that.)
:: The schedule prompts the Siren to go public with one of her deepest, most tenaciously held opinions:
Laver's Law applies to cinema. (I am, in all honesty, not entirely sure I understand this post.)
:: No matter how many Star Wars books I've flipped through, I'm always coming across new-to-me behind the scenes photos. They seem to come from a never-ending fountain that bubbles with memories from the galaxy far, far away. Archives are wonderful like that. I can't think of a treasure chest I'd like to explore more. I hope the making of the new sequel trilogy is documented to the very last detail so that 30 years from now we'll still be seeing images we haven't seen before.
:: And the cover copy... Sheesh! This Superman KNOWS he's 50 years old, his powers are "supernatural" in origin, and look! He's losing the drug war! Whatever happened to fact-checking?!
More next week!
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Answers the Ninth!
Wow, looks like I may end up dragging this thing out into October, which is a new record for personal futility. Oh well!
Roger had a bunch, as always, so his constitute the bulk of the outstanding answers. So let's get going:
How do you feel about casting folks who aren't the category they portray? I was thinking about Johnny Depp as Tonto, but there are tons of other examples. Should only a gay man play a gay man, e.g. Related question: how do you feel about casting a character that had been traditionally white differently? I'm thinking about making Kingpin, the white villain in the Daredevil comic books as a black man, or the black Asgardian in the Thor movie that made parts of fandom apoplectic.”
I think it can vary from character to character, in a lot of ways. Generally speaking, if a character has a specific ethnicity or ethnic makeup, then surely you can find someone of that ethnicity to do the part. This is why it rankled me a bit to have Benedict Cumberbatch, a white Brit, playing Khan Noonien Singh, an Asian villain, in Star Trek Into Darkness. (And yes, it does kind of bug me after-the-fact that they had a Latino actor, Ricardo Montalban, originate the role -- but that was in 1967, when views on such things were depressingly different.) I could go on and on about that particular casting choice, because it felt like (a) the producers just had to have Khan in their movie, and (b) the producers also just had to have the Flavor of the Month actor in their movie, so there it is. No, I don't think it worked. (And I'm not being dismissive of Cumberbatch's talent in describing him as the Flavor of the Month; he's been a hardworking actor for a while who is now EXPLODING in popularity. That's all.)
Perhaps the worst example of this is, of course, Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, in which he plays the Japanese Mr. Yunioshi in a racial-stereotype performance that has to be seen to be truly appreciated in all its awfulness. Another example that leaps to mind is Louis Jourdan, a French actor, playing "exiled Afghan prince" Kamal Khan in Octopussy. And if you really want to get right down to it, you could even make a case against Patrick Stewart, a Brit who played a Frenchman in Star Trek: The Next Generation, although with that one, the ethnic differences are lessened, and the showrunners oddly completely ignored Jean-Luc Picard's French heritage most of the time after the first season.
On the flip side, I like it when ethnic actors show up in roles that make zero reference to ethnicity at all. I'm thinking of Native American actors Graham Greene and Wes Studi, in Die Hard With a Vengeance and Heat, respectively, for example. But making the Kingpin a black man in Daredevil? Well...I don't know that that's so much of a big deal. Changing the race of a fictional character for a movie doesn't really bug me all that much. Denzel Washington cuts a nice figure in Much Ado About Nothing as Don Pedro, whom I'm sure Shakespeare didn't envision as black. But then, in Shakespeare's time, a man would have played Beatrice.
Where's the line, then? Is it OK for a Japanese actor to play a Chinese character? I'm not sure. I can sure tell when the line is crossed, though.
I'm going to lump the next questions together, because they're all shared topics:
Who will be the first woman President in the US, and when?
When will the first Hispanic be elected President? Any idea on who?
When will the SECOND black person be elected President?
Spitzer and Weiner are running for office. Why shouldn't they, with former SC gov Sanford now a member of Congress?
I wouldn't want to even begin to try picking future Presidents. I know that Washington media loves to talk about who wants to be President and all, but ten years ago I had never even heard of Barack Obama, and ten years before that, the idea that we'd give the keys to another member of the Bush family would have struck me as deeply silly. And just five years before that, you had the Governor of Arkansas giving a disastrously bad speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, which I would have thought would pretty much doom him from national politics forevermore.
Right now, I'd think that Hillary Clinton would be the most likely First Female President. I think we'll have a Hispanic President within twenty years. The second black President? No idea whatsoever. Sorry, but these particular tea leaves are impossible for me to read!
As for Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner, well...that shows how long it's taken me to answer all these questions, because since Roger asked, both have been defeated! In terms of issues and views, I am actually pretty simpatico with both of those fellows, but their personal lives sure brought them down in a hurry. It does strike me as funny that marriage-based peccadilloes only seem to be politically fatal to Democrats. I do follow a couple of Republicans on Twitter who were endlessly crowing about how Democrats could POSSIBLY vote for anyone so VILE as these admitted adulterers -- but when Mark Sanford got elected to Congress, one of them praised South Carolina voters for their "common sense". So who knows.
(By the way, here's my reminder to you all that the phrase "common sense" is one that you should never, ever use.)
Generally speaking, I try to never base voting decisions on candidates' personal lives, unless they involve actual criminal activity. I didn't marry these people, and I've read enough history to know the truth behind the great line of Captain Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly: "Seems to me that every man who's ever had a statue built of him was one kind of sumbitch or another."
Relatedly, though, I am starting to believe in term limits. But that's for another time!
A few more to come, I think!
Roger had a bunch, as always, so his constitute the bulk of the outstanding answers. So let's get going:
How do you feel about casting folks who aren't the category they portray? I was thinking about Johnny Depp as Tonto, but there are tons of other examples. Should only a gay man play a gay man, e.g. Related question: how do you feel about casting a character that had been traditionally white differently? I'm thinking about making Kingpin, the white villain in the Daredevil comic books as a black man, or the black Asgardian in the Thor movie that made parts of fandom apoplectic.”
I think it can vary from character to character, in a lot of ways. Generally speaking, if a character has a specific ethnicity or ethnic makeup, then surely you can find someone of that ethnicity to do the part. This is why it rankled me a bit to have Benedict Cumberbatch, a white Brit, playing Khan Noonien Singh, an Asian villain, in Star Trek Into Darkness. (And yes, it does kind of bug me after-the-fact that they had a Latino actor, Ricardo Montalban, originate the role -- but that was in 1967, when views on such things were depressingly different.) I could go on and on about that particular casting choice, because it felt like (a) the producers just had to have Khan in their movie, and (b) the producers also just had to have the Flavor of the Month actor in their movie, so there it is. No, I don't think it worked. (And I'm not being dismissive of Cumberbatch's talent in describing him as the Flavor of the Month; he's been a hardworking actor for a while who is now EXPLODING in popularity. That's all.)
Perhaps the worst example of this is, of course, Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, in which he plays the Japanese Mr. Yunioshi in a racial-stereotype performance that has to be seen to be truly appreciated in all its awfulness. Another example that leaps to mind is Louis Jourdan, a French actor, playing "exiled Afghan prince" Kamal Khan in Octopussy. And if you really want to get right down to it, you could even make a case against Patrick Stewart, a Brit who played a Frenchman in Star Trek: The Next Generation, although with that one, the ethnic differences are lessened, and the showrunners oddly completely ignored Jean-Luc Picard's French heritage most of the time after the first season.
On the flip side, I like it when ethnic actors show up in roles that make zero reference to ethnicity at all. I'm thinking of Native American actors Graham Greene and Wes Studi, in Die Hard With a Vengeance and Heat, respectively, for example. But making the Kingpin a black man in Daredevil? Well...I don't know that that's so much of a big deal. Changing the race of a fictional character for a movie doesn't really bug me all that much. Denzel Washington cuts a nice figure in Much Ado About Nothing as Don Pedro, whom I'm sure Shakespeare didn't envision as black. But then, in Shakespeare's time, a man would have played Beatrice.
Where's the line, then? Is it OK for a Japanese actor to play a Chinese character? I'm not sure. I can sure tell when the line is crossed, though.
I'm going to lump the next questions together, because they're all shared topics:
Who will be the first woman President in the US, and when?
When will the first Hispanic be elected President? Any idea on who?
When will the SECOND black person be elected President?
Spitzer and Weiner are running for office. Why shouldn't they, with former SC gov Sanford now a member of Congress?
I wouldn't want to even begin to try picking future Presidents. I know that Washington media loves to talk about who wants to be President and all, but ten years ago I had never even heard of Barack Obama, and ten years before that, the idea that we'd give the keys to another member of the Bush family would have struck me as deeply silly. And just five years before that, you had the Governor of Arkansas giving a disastrously bad speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, which I would have thought would pretty much doom him from national politics forevermore.
Right now, I'd think that Hillary Clinton would be the most likely First Female President. I think we'll have a Hispanic President within twenty years. The second black President? No idea whatsoever. Sorry, but these particular tea leaves are impossible for me to read!
As for Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner, well...that shows how long it's taken me to answer all these questions, because since Roger asked, both have been defeated! In terms of issues and views, I am actually pretty simpatico with both of those fellows, but their personal lives sure brought them down in a hurry. It does strike me as funny that marriage-based peccadilloes only seem to be politically fatal to Democrats. I do follow a couple of Republicans on Twitter who were endlessly crowing about how Democrats could POSSIBLY vote for anyone so VILE as these admitted adulterers -- but when Mark Sanford got elected to Congress, one of them praised South Carolina voters for their "common sense". So who knows.
(By the way, here's my reminder to you all that the phrase "common sense" is one that you should never, ever use.)
Generally speaking, I try to never base voting decisions on candidates' personal lives, unless they involve actual criminal activity. I didn't marry these people, and I've read enough history to know the truth behind the great line of Captain Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly: "Seems to me that every man who's ever had a statue built of him was one kind of sumbitch or another."
Relatedly, though, I am starting to believe in term limits. But that's for another time!
A few more to come, I think!
Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: You could do a lot worse, when wasting time on YouTube, than watching old clips from Whose Line Is It Anyway. The British version is preferred, but the American version (not the current one, the one with Drew Carey hosting) had a lot of good things going on. Here's a clip I like a lot:
Whose Line's American version seemed almost designed to force the players to have to deal with things going awry, like here when the music stops and yet he's so into the moment that he keeps right on singing.
:: Seen on Tumblr today:
Heh!
:: Want to know what pen you should use? The experts tell you. I'll have to get one -- I don't think I've ever used the one they recommend! (It's an article on cheap pens. We're not talking $350 Pelikan fountain pens, here.)
More next week!
:: You could do a lot worse, when wasting time on YouTube, than watching old clips from Whose Line Is It Anyway. The British version is preferred, but the American version (not the current one, the one with Drew Carey hosting) had a lot of good things going on. Here's a clip I like a lot:
Whose Line's American version seemed almost designed to force the players to have to deal with things going awry, like here when the music stops and yet he's so into the moment that he keeps right on singing.
:: Seen on Tumblr today:
Heh!
:: Want to know what pen you should use? The experts tell you. I'll have to get one -- I don't think I've ever used the one they recommend! (It's an article on cheap pens. We're not talking $350 Pelikan fountain pens, here.)
More next week!
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Rule of Acquisition #109
On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi are established as having a culture so built around business and the pursuit of wealth that they are governed by a series of aphorisms called the "Rules of Acquisition". I always like #109:
Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.
I agree. The hell with dignity. I'll take the pie in the face every time.
Answers, the Eighth!
Good Lord, this really got away from me, didn't it? What a strange month, September was. I figured to get ahead, but instead I fell behind! Oops. Anyway, we march on, with the remaining questions posed by a constant (and patient!) anonymous reader:
Do you have "comfort books", that you read when life is tough?
I've actually had to think a bit about this, and it turns out...no, not really. There are quotes from books that I recall in times of stress, but even then, not too many. The words of Gandalf the Grey tend to be very meaningful to me, when he says, in reply to Frodo's wish that the Ring had never come to him, "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide."
I've known people who pick up the Bible or the Qu'ran or other such books when their lives are going through dark periods, but I've honestly never much been one to do that. I also don't very often use my writing as a way of processing the demons, although I have done so in the past (here is an example). I'm not really sure if my reading really reflects the mood of my life's "current events", whatever those may be. Hmmmm...maybe it should.
How does the music you listen to vary with mood or stress?
Would you believe...kinda sorta the same way? Weird, huh?
Although, there are times when I do try to use music as a mood-enhancer, something to shake me out of my inner doldrums. Songs along this line include:
"Hello Goodbye", "Octopus's Garden" -- The Beatles
"Dreams", Van Halen
"Land of Make Believe", Chuck Mangione (the 12-minute liver version, though)
"Human", the Killers (no, the lyrics do not make any sense, but what an infectious song anyway)
"Dancin' in the Street", the cover by David Bowie and Mick Jagger (Shut up, I like it.)
And so on.
When I listen to music while writing, I find that nearly anything works. I don't try to match music to the mood of the work in progress, although sometimes I do that. I might listen to Star Wars or Star Trek music while writing one of the Princesses books, or perhaps some horror music while writing GhostCop, but not always. I like to use music as a way of shutting out the world a bit while I work, but I don't always try to match the music's mood to the writing's mood.
Sometimes, if I'm writing a scary scene, the music's mood can actually create a nifty feeling of incongruity. I like when this happens. It reminds me of Johnny Mathis's "Chances Are", a song which forever creeps me out because of its brilliant use in the abduction-of-Barry scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
More answers to come, I promise!
Do you have "comfort books", that you read when life is tough?
I've actually had to think a bit about this, and it turns out...no, not really. There are quotes from books that I recall in times of stress, but even then, not too many. The words of Gandalf the Grey tend to be very meaningful to me, when he says, in reply to Frodo's wish that the Ring had never come to him, "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide."
I've known people who pick up the Bible or the Qu'ran or other such books when their lives are going through dark periods, but I've honestly never much been one to do that. I also don't very often use my writing as a way of processing the demons, although I have done so in the past (here is an example). I'm not really sure if my reading really reflects the mood of my life's "current events", whatever those may be. Hmmmm...maybe it should.
How does the music you listen to vary with mood or stress?
Would you believe...kinda sorta the same way? Weird, huh?
Although, there are times when I do try to use music as a mood-enhancer, something to shake me out of my inner doldrums. Songs along this line include:
"Hello Goodbye", "Octopus's Garden" -- The Beatles
"Dreams", Van Halen
"Land of Make Believe", Chuck Mangione (the 12-minute liver version, though)
"Human", the Killers (no, the lyrics do not make any sense, but what an infectious song anyway)
"Dancin' in the Street", the cover by David Bowie and Mick Jagger (Shut up, I like it.)
And so on.
When I listen to music while writing, I find that nearly anything works. I don't try to match music to the mood of the work in progress, although sometimes I do that. I might listen to Star Wars or Star Trek music while writing one of the Princesses books, or perhaps some horror music while writing GhostCop, but not always. I like to use music as a way of shutting out the world a bit while I work, but I don't always try to match the music's mood to the writing's mood.
Sometimes, if I'm writing a scary scene, the music's mood can actually create a nifty feeling of incongruity. I like when this happens. It reminds me of Johnny Mathis's "Chances Are", a song which forever creeps me out because of its brilliant use in the abduction-of-Barry scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
More answers to come, I promise!
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Something for Thursday
It's my birthday today, so I'm gonna listen to some Star Wars. (Not like I wouldn't listen to some Star Wars on days that are not my birthday, but anyway....)
May the Force be with you, friends!
May the Force be with you, friends!
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
How do you get out of slumps? (I'm in one, as it turns out.)
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
How to guarantee that I'll never watch Breaking Bad
This ought to do it:
I have watched two episodes of Breaking Bad: the pilot, and the one from last week that had everybody rending their teeth and gnashing their garments. All I saw was a bleak, depressing show that made me feel bad about things, but hey, that's just me. No, what really gets my goat is the undertone of nearly everything said about this show of late, that it is so good that if you don't watch it, you are literally -- and not "figuratively" literally, not the new OED literally, but really actually literally -- deficient in some key aspect of your life. I've read tweets, more than once, that said: "I feel sorry for people aren't watching Breaking Bad."
And now comes Kelly Oxford with this. And I love Kelly Oxford. There are fewer funnier people on Twitter, and I loved her recent book, too.
It seems to me that there's an awful lot of commentary that suggests, either through tone or just states it outright, a moral or other kind of failing on the part of those who might have a different view. I know I've been guilty of that, myself. But I'm going to try and stop.
And for the record, I don't watch Breaking Bad, I am not going to watch Breaking Bad, and I am not a f***ing idiot.
I have watched two episodes of Breaking Bad: the pilot, and the one from last week that had everybody rending their teeth and gnashing their garments. All I saw was a bleak, depressing show that made me feel bad about things, but hey, that's just me. No, what really gets my goat is the undertone of nearly everything said about this show of late, that it is so good that if you don't watch it, you are literally -- and not "figuratively" literally, not the new OED literally, but really actually literally -- deficient in some key aspect of your life. I've read tweets, more than once, that said: "I feel sorry for people aren't watching Breaking Bad."
And now comes Kelly Oxford with this. And I love Kelly Oxford. There are fewer funnier people on Twitter, and I loved her recent book, too.
It seems to me that there's an awful lot of commentary that suggests, either through tone or just states it outright, a moral or other kind of failing on the part of those who might have a different view. I know I've been guilty of that, myself. But I'm going to try and stop.
And for the record, I don't watch Breaking Bad, I am not going to watch Breaking Bad, and I am not a f***ing idiot.
Monday, September 23, 2013
Sentential Links
Links....
:: It is an icky story. And I can’t help wonder if 30 black and/or Hispanic kids had broken into someone’s house if there would be as much “kids will be kids” reaction among some.
:: Will bringing it all back somehow allow me to let go of the past? (This is quite a question. I do not know. This blog belongs to one of my favorite Instagrammers, by the way. Instagram is a lot of fun!)
:: The phrase "Where's my jet pack?" has become an American idiom of late. It reflects the disappointment in the mid-century Utopian promises of technology. Walt Disney was among the top perpetrators of the hype. His forays into documentaries and comic books featured glowing predictions for scientific progress which seem overly optimistic from the vantage point of 2013. (Have you ever 'ridden' the Carousel of Progress at Disneyworld? There's perhaps no better illustration of this philosophy in action than that attraction.)
That being said, a bit of blind faith in the wonders of technology is a healthy thing. As we stand and watch NASA defunded and a super-collider shut down, we lose a little hope. We lose a little enthusiasm for what tomorrow brings.
:: But you wanna talk about something that looks good on a resume? Emmy winner is right up there with “former Prince of Liechtenstein.”
:: Can I sit on a manuscript for a month before I hack at it? Well, no. But I can wait a few days, and that my friends, is pretty darn amazing. (I'm waiting three months. And it's killing me.)
:: Books- A journey disguised as a small paper filled with wonderful words. A time capsule. A portal of wonderment.
More next week!
:: It is an icky story. And I can’t help wonder if 30 black and/or Hispanic kids had broken into someone’s house if there would be as much “kids will be kids” reaction among some.
:: Will bringing it all back somehow allow me to let go of the past? (This is quite a question. I do not know. This blog belongs to one of my favorite Instagrammers, by the way. Instagram is a lot of fun!)
:: The phrase "Where's my jet pack?" has become an American idiom of late. It reflects the disappointment in the mid-century Utopian promises of technology. Walt Disney was among the top perpetrators of the hype. His forays into documentaries and comic books featured glowing predictions for scientific progress which seem overly optimistic from the vantage point of 2013. (Have you ever 'ridden' the Carousel of Progress at Disneyworld? There's perhaps no better illustration of this philosophy in action than that attraction.)
That being said, a bit of blind faith in the wonders of technology is a healthy thing. As we stand and watch NASA defunded and a super-collider shut down, we lose a little hope. We lose a little enthusiasm for what tomorrow brings.
:: But you wanna talk about something that looks good on a resume? Emmy winner is right up there with “former Prince of Liechtenstein.”
:: Can I sit on a manuscript for a month before I hack at it? Well, no. But I can wait a few days, and that my friends, is pretty darn amazing. (I'm waiting three months. And it's killing me.)
:: Books- A journey disguised as a small paper filled with wonderful words. A time capsule. A portal of wonderment.
More next week!
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Louis C.K. is full of crap.
You know how Germans always have the best words? The nice long words that they seem to make up on the spot, words specifically tailored to capture a hyper-specific feeling? I wonder if they have one yet for "That feeling I get when I encounter something that everybody thinks is brilliant but which I think is full of shit." Case in point: comedian Louis C.K.'s almost instantly-legendary rant against smartphones. This thing lit up the Internet over the weekend; everybody was linking it, and one person I know cited that in her epiphanic decision to downgrade from an iPhone to a dumbphone. But when I heard the rant, I thought, "That guy is ridiculously full of crap".
And I say that as someone who (a) has enjoyed Louis C.K.'s work in the past, and (b) who does not own a smartphone. So I don't exactly have a dog in this fight, and in some ways, I'm a bit sympathetic. I've noticed that people spend an awful lot of time staring at their phones, absolutely. But are they really? Is that an accurate snapshot? As I write this, I'm sitting in Panera Bread. The dining room is mostly full; families, couples, and single parties abound. And off all the people in this room right now, guess how many people are looking at a glowing screen? Exactly one. Me. And I'm writing.
And you know what else? It's not hurting my engagement with the world. I'm not shutting things out. A little girl at the table next to mine knocked over her drink, and I noticed enough to pass over a few extra napkins I had. I see another girl, an employee on break, using her smartphone. She's not staring at it as she texts, though. She's talking into it. Like a phone. While she does her homework, with a pencil.
When I see lots of folks looking at their phones, what are they doing? Are they really staring at it for long lengths of time? Stopping to think of it, I have to admit...not really. Most take them out, glance at them, and if they do anything at all, it's to tap out a quick text and then put the thing away. Yes, I have seen folks who take it too far. I've seen guys who go into the restroom and text away with one hand while they use their other to...well, handle administrative details pertaining to urinal usage. (Ahem.) I'll be blunt here: I ever find out that anyone texts me from the bathroom, I'm blocking their number. Or something.
Frankly, what I see people do the most with their smartphones is keep them in their back pockets, pulled up just far enough so that one corner sticks out, visible. Phone as fashion accessory. Well, why not? That's why we have expensive wristwatches, and I remember an outfit from which I bought fountain pens back in the day marketing them as "jewelry for men".
But back to Louis C.K.'s rant, which strikes me as just another version of the "Isn't it awful what the kids are doing these days" thing, albeit more poetically delivered. But much of it is deeply, deeply misguided and/or silly. And that's after it starts off with him saying something that stopped me in my tracks and made me actively hostile to whatever else was to come in his argument.
Now, let's break that down a little bit. To start with, "Kids don't look people in the eye when they talk" is not a new complaint. Not by any stretch of imagination. I heard that all the time when I was a kid, and that was in the 1970s and 1980s. "Look at me when I'm talking to you!" is an admonition that is as old as the hills, predating cell-phone use by...well, I'll bet they were saying this in Ancient Egypt.
But then there's the bit about kids "experimenting" with being mean, and his notion that when they see how much it hurts a kid's feelings when they call them fat, they'll realize they don't feel good or something.
Bullshit.
I have to wonder if LouisCK ever actually knew any other kids, or if he ever saw any bullies at work, because I remember being a kid, and I remember that even as the kid who was often on the receiving end of the bullying, if I managed to say something to someone else and saw hurt in their eyes, I wasn't thinking, "Oooh, that didn't feel good." What I actually felt was, "Ooooh, that hurt him! I've got me a weapon!" And remember, I was the fat kid getting picked on a lot. How do you think the normal kids responded? Or the actual bullies? Seeing the hurt in someone's eye when you say "You're fat" is, for a kid, not a bug. It's a feature. The actual reaction is, "Now we got ourselves a show."
LouisCK is completely full of crap on this point, totally and utterly. It's not a good start. But he keeps going:
No. No, no, no, no, no.
First of all: why do we need this ability to just sit and do nothing? What's so great about sitting and doing nothing? Where's the virtue in that? And how is it desirable? Standing in line at the DMV, waiting at a doctor's office, whatever – are we supposed to lament the fact that we've somehow lost the 'Zen' of such things? Well, I'm not sure there was ever that much 'Zen' there to begin with. Standing in line, just being there, just being "a person"...was boring. It was a waste of time. Now, I'm a bit less prone to boredom in such circumstances because I can always kick my Writing Brain into gear and start working internally on some stories. But I do that anyway, and I suspect a lot of people do, too.
More importantly, though, how is that being "a real person"? This seems to me just another example of the notion that online interactions aren't real, that only physical world interactions are worth anything at all. I've long rejected this notion. You know what? If and when I become a published author, it will be with the help of an awful lot of people I've never met. Real people.
Which is why I think the rest of LouisCK's bit here is just a bunch of goofy existential twaddle. Ultimately we're alone? Meh, not really. And we're using our phones as a way of pushing away that loneliness? Meh, not really. People aren't texting and driving because they're afraid of being alone. They're doing it because they aren't rationally and realistically appraising their abilities to do two tasks at the same time, both of which are complex tasks that only seem simple. There's no need to appeal to Sartre here. People text and drive not because they're trying to push away the intrinsic loneliness of life. They text and drive because they are idiots.
And then he tops it off with some more stupidity:
Again: No. No, no, no, no, no.
This is another sentiment that's been around forever: that people aren't allowing themselves to really feel what they feel, that they avoid high flights of emotion, et cetera. Again, we don't need to drag smartphones into this at all: many people are uncomfortable with those high flights of emotion. LouisCK is doing nothing more than taking old complaints and using them as a cudgel against something he doesn't like, all by itself.
And besides, who is posting or tweeting or texting everything? Really, who is doing this? There are people who post more than we would, but that's no the same thing as posting everything. This distinction seems lost on Louis, but even if not, so what? If someone posts that a certain song made them feel a certain intense feeling or set of feelings, you know what? I frakking love that. I do. I think it's awesome. If someone shares with me something that gives them a feeling of some kind of passionate level, that's great. It gives me an insight into them, and it helps me to find things that may create similar feelings in myself.
Sharing is not bad. I like sharing. I don't share everything. Some folks share more. Others share less. And I know people who share a lot more than I would ever feel comfortable sharing, but that is, again, not a bug but rather a feature, because that's the only way I ever get to know what is to feel certain things. When we complain about "Those people sharing everything on Facebook!", it seems to me that what we're really complaining about is "Those people who are sharing an awful lot of stuff on Facebook that I do not personally find interesting!" Which is, of course, a different thing entirely.
We are obviously more connected now than ever before. But I am not one bit convinced that this means we are more distracted now than ever before. Believe me, I have always had great ways of wasting time. In fact, I remember teachers occasionally castigating me for daydreaming. Which means I was just doing the simple act of sitting there, doing nothing, staring into space, not much paying attention to anything at all. That's was LouisCK wants back. The wheel does turn, doesn't it?
Finally, I also wonder if part of this isn't born of my general sense – and here I'm mainly talking off the top of my head, with no real well-considered evidence to support it – that, aided by technology, a world which has been long-dominated by extroverted people is starting to tilt in the direction of the introverts, and that is making an awful lot of extroverted people really uncomfortable. But that's a post for another day.
And I say that as someone who (a) has enjoyed Louis C.K.'s work in the past, and (b) who does not own a smartphone. So I don't exactly have a dog in this fight, and in some ways, I'm a bit sympathetic. I've noticed that people spend an awful lot of time staring at their phones, absolutely. But are they really? Is that an accurate snapshot? As I write this, I'm sitting in Panera Bread. The dining room is mostly full; families, couples, and single parties abound. And off all the people in this room right now, guess how many people are looking at a glowing screen? Exactly one. Me. And I'm writing.
And you know what else? It's not hurting my engagement with the world. I'm not shutting things out. A little girl at the table next to mine knocked over her drink, and I noticed enough to pass over a few extra napkins I had. I see another girl, an employee on break, using her smartphone. She's not staring at it as she texts, though. She's talking into it. Like a phone. While she does her homework, with a pencil.
When I see lots of folks looking at their phones, what are they doing? Are they really staring at it for long lengths of time? Stopping to think of it, I have to admit...not really. Most take them out, glance at them, and if they do anything at all, it's to tap out a quick text and then put the thing away. Yes, I have seen folks who take it too far. I've seen guys who go into the restroom and text away with one hand while they use their other to...well, handle administrative details pertaining to urinal usage. (Ahem.) I'll be blunt here: I ever find out that anyone texts me from the bathroom, I'm blocking their number. Or something.
Frankly, what I see people do the most with their smartphones is keep them in their back pockets, pulled up just far enough so that one corner sticks out, visible. Phone as fashion accessory. Well, why not? That's why we have expensive wristwatches, and I remember an outfit from which I bought fountain pens back in the day marketing them as "jewelry for men".
But back to Louis C.K.'s rant, which strikes me as just another version of the "Isn't it awful what the kids are doing these days" thing, albeit more poetically delivered. But much of it is deeply, deeply misguided and/or silly. And that's after it starts off with him saying something that stopped me in my tracks and made me actively hostile to whatever else was to come in his argument.
I think these things are toxic, especially for kids...they don't look at people when they talk to them and they don't build empathy. You know, kids are mean, and it's 'cause they're trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, 'you're fat,' and then they see the kid's face scrunch up and they go, 'oh, that doesn't feel good to make a person do that.' But they got to start with doing the mean thing. But when they write 'you're fat,' then they just go, 'mmm, that was fun, I like that.'
Now, let's break that down a little bit. To start with, "Kids don't look people in the eye when they talk" is not a new complaint. Not by any stretch of imagination. I heard that all the time when I was a kid, and that was in the 1970s and 1980s. "Look at me when I'm talking to you!" is an admonition that is as old as the hills, predating cell-phone use by...well, I'll bet they were saying this in Ancient Egypt.
But then there's the bit about kids "experimenting" with being mean, and his notion that when they see how much it hurts a kid's feelings when they call them fat, they'll realize they don't feel good or something.
Bullshit.
I have to wonder if LouisCK ever actually knew any other kids, or if he ever saw any bullies at work, because I remember being a kid, and I remember that even as the kid who was often on the receiving end of the bullying, if I managed to say something to someone else and saw hurt in their eyes, I wasn't thinking, "Oooh, that didn't feel good." What I actually felt was, "Ooooh, that hurt him! I've got me a weapon!" And remember, I was the fat kid getting picked on a lot. How do you think the normal kids responded? Or the actual bullies? Seeing the hurt in someone's eye when you say "You're fat" is, for a kid, not a bug. It's a feature. The actual reaction is, "Now we got ourselves a show."
LouisCK is completely full of crap on this point, totally and utterly. It's not a good start. But he keeps going:
You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone. It's down there.
And sometimes when things clear away, you're not watching anything, you're in your car, and you start going, 'oh no, here it comes. That I'm alone.' It's starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it...
That's why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they're killing, everybody's murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don't want to be alone for a second because it's so hard.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
First of all: why do we need this ability to just sit and do nothing? What's so great about sitting and doing nothing? Where's the virtue in that? And how is it desirable? Standing in line at the DMV, waiting at a doctor's office, whatever – are we supposed to lament the fact that we've somehow lost the 'Zen' of such things? Well, I'm not sure there was ever that much 'Zen' there to begin with. Standing in line, just being there, just being "a person"...was boring. It was a waste of time. Now, I'm a bit less prone to boredom in such circumstances because I can always kick my Writing Brain into gear and start working internally on some stories. But I do that anyway, and I suspect a lot of people do, too.
More importantly, though, how is that being "a real person"? This seems to me just another example of the notion that online interactions aren't real, that only physical world interactions are worth anything at all. I've long rejected this notion. You know what? If and when I become a published author, it will be with the help of an awful lot of people I've never met. Real people.
Which is why I think the rest of LouisCK's bit here is just a bunch of goofy existential twaddle. Ultimately we're alone? Meh, not really. And we're using our phones as a way of pushing away that loneliness? Meh, not really. People aren't texting and driving because they're afraid of being alone. They're doing it because they aren't rationally and realistically appraising their abilities to do two tasks at the same time, both of which are complex tasks that only seem simple. There's no need to appeal to Sartre here. People text and drive not because they're trying to push away the intrinsic loneliness of life. They text and drive because they are idiots.
And then he tops it off with some more stupidity:
And I go, 'oh, I'm getting sad, gotta get the phone and write "hi" to like 50 people'...then I said, 'you know what, don't. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck.'
And I let it come, and I just started to feel 'oh my God,'and I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much. And it was beautiful. Sadness is poetic. You're lucky to live sad moments.
And then I had happy feelings. Because when you let yourself feel sad, your body has antibodies, it has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness. So I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true, profound happiness. It was such a trip.
The thing is, because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or a jack-off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die. So that's why I don't want to get a phone for my kids.
Again: No. No, no, no, no, no.
This is another sentiment that's been around forever: that people aren't allowing themselves to really feel what they feel, that they avoid high flights of emotion, et cetera. Again, we don't need to drag smartphones into this at all: many people are uncomfortable with those high flights of emotion. LouisCK is doing nothing more than taking old complaints and using them as a cudgel against something he doesn't like, all by itself.
And besides, who is posting or tweeting or texting everything? Really, who is doing this? There are people who post more than we would, but that's no the same thing as posting everything. This distinction seems lost on Louis, but even if not, so what? If someone posts that a certain song made them feel a certain intense feeling or set of feelings, you know what? I frakking love that. I do. I think it's awesome. If someone shares with me something that gives them a feeling of some kind of passionate level, that's great. It gives me an insight into them, and it helps me to find things that may create similar feelings in myself.
Sharing is not bad. I like sharing. I don't share everything. Some folks share more. Others share less. And I know people who share a lot more than I would ever feel comfortable sharing, but that is, again, not a bug but rather a feature, because that's the only way I ever get to know what is to feel certain things. When we complain about "Those people sharing everything on Facebook!", it seems to me that what we're really complaining about is "Those people who are sharing an awful lot of stuff on Facebook that I do not personally find interesting!" Which is, of course, a different thing entirely.
We are obviously more connected now than ever before. But I am not one bit convinced that this means we are more distracted now than ever before. Believe me, I have always had great ways of wasting time. In fact, I remember teachers occasionally castigating me for daydreaming. Which means I was just doing the simple act of sitting there, doing nothing, staring into space, not much paying attention to anything at all. That's was LouisCK wants back. The wheel does turn, doesn't it?
Finally, I also wonder if part of this isn't born of my general sense – and here I'm mainly talking off the top of my head, with no real well-considered evidence to support it – that, aided by technology, a world which has been long-dominated by extroverted people is starting to tilt in the direction of the introverts, and that is making an awful lot of extroverted people really uncomfortable. But that's a post for another day.
Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: I've seen a bunch of these before, but even so, they remain ever-fascinating: 31 haunting images of abandoned places. The hotel in Colombia is particularly haunting.
:: A couple of guys decide to go into a couple of restaurants and tip their servers a couple hundred bucks. I love this.
More next week!
:: I've seen a bunch of these before, but even so, they remain ever-fascinating: 31 haunting images of abandoned places. The hotel in Colombia is particularly haunting.
:: A couple of guys decide to go into a couple of restaurants and tip their servers a couple hundred bucks. I love this.
More next week!
It's all in the details.
I have a half-arsed theory that one thing that makes stories work, be they in book form or movies or teevee shows, is in the little details they include. It's not the "details" as in the various plot points and making sure they work, or things like avoiding anachronisms.
(Say, you know what anachronism always bothers me when I see it? People in movies or teevee shows drinking Coke from glass bottles. You can still get glass bottles today, so it's easy, right? You just buy those and film away. Problem is, those are 8oz bottles. Back in the day, Coke bottles were 16oz. Those tiny bottles always stick out like a sore thumb to me.)
But anyway, I was thinking a bit about Superman (1978), after watching it a while back, and there's this tiny little thing that happens in one scene. So tiny you wouldn't even notice it, but I think it's just terrific, because it really does add a tiny bit of realism to the film's world.
It's the start of the film's third act. Lex Luthor has reprogrammed the two missiles, and he's about to use his ultra-sonic broadcaster to speak directly to Superman. Clark Kent arrives in the Daily Planet newsroom, as his fellow reporters are clustering around a teevee set to watch the nuclear missile test. Clark comes over, asks what's going on, someone tells him, and then tells him that Perry White wants to see him. Then the guy says, "You're blocking the set, Clark," and Clark says, "Oh, sorry," ducks his head, and walks to Perry White's office.
But before he gets there, he turns back to the reporter he'd just been talking to and says, "Hey, how's Judy?" The guy says "Fine", and Clark says "Great!" or "Good!" or something like that.
The whole interaction lasts all of five seconds, but that last bit -- "Hey, how's Judy?" -- is the kind of perfect detail that makes this film's world seem that much more real. Clark isn't just hanging out at the newspaper for something to do when he's not fighting crime and working for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. It's his job, these are his coworkers. Clark Kent knows this guy's wife's name and asks about her. That's great.
I think what I'm getting at here is that even the most spectacular fantasy worlds are, at some point, mundane. There are people in every single fantasy world who are just going to jobs and asking how the kids are and the like. When writing such details into worlds, you don't have to draw attention to them or underline them or make them stand out. And you certainly don't need tons of them, just a few, here and there. But they work wonders when you realize they're there. It's like the two stormtroopers in Star Wars IV: A New Hope, chatting about stormtrooper stuff while Obi Wan Kenobi turns off the tractor beam. It's the acknowledgment in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring that a party the size of Bilbo Baggins's birthday party is going to involve a lot of dirty dishes.
What examples of such little details -- the mundane little bits of the fictional worlds -- do you recall from favorite books or tales in other media?
(Say, you know what anachronism always bothers me when I see it? People in movies or teevee shows drinking Coke from glass bottles. You can still get glass bottles today, so it's easy, right? You just buy those and film away. Problem is, those are 8oz bottles. Back in the day, Coke bottles were 16oz. Those tiny bottles always stick out like a sore thumb to me.)
But anyway, I was thinking a bit about Superman (1978), after watching it a while back, and there's this tiny little thing that happens in one scene. So tiny you wouldn't even notice it, but I think it's just terrific, because it really does add a tiny bit of realism to the film's world.
It's the start of the film's third act. Lex Luthor has reprogrammed the two missiles, and he's about to use his ultra-sonic broadcaster to speak directly to Superman. Clark Kent arrives in the Daily Planet newsroom, as his fellow reporters are clustering around a teevee set to watch the nuclear missile test. Clark comes over, asks what's going on, someone tells him, and then tells him that Perry White wants to see him. Then the guy says, "You're blocking the set, Clark," and Clark says, "Oh, sorry," ducks his head, and walks to Perry White's office.
But before he gets there, he turns back to the reporter he'd just been talking to and says, "Hey, how's Judy?" The guy says "Fine", and Clark says "Great!" or "Good!" or something like that.
The whole interaction lasts all of five seconds, but that last bit -- "Hey, how's Judy?" -- is the kind of perfect detail that makes this film's world seem that much more real. Clark isn't just hanging out at the newspaper for something to do when he's not fighting crime and working for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. It's his job, these are his coworkers. Clark Kent knows this guy's wife's name and asks about her. That's great.
I think what I'm getting at here is that even the most spectacular fantasy worlds are, at some point, mundane. There are people in every single fantasy world who are just going to jobs and asking how the kids are and the like. When writing such details into worlds, you don't have to draw attention to them or underline them or make them stand out. And you certainly don't need tons of them, just a few, here and there. But they work wonders when you realize they're there. It's like the two stormtroopers in Star Wars IV: A New Hope, chatting about stormtrooper stuff while Obi Wan Kenobi turns off the tractor beam. It's the acknowledgment in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring that a party the size of Bilbo Baggins's birthday party is going to involve a lot of dirty dishes.
What examples of such little details -- the mundane little bits of the fictional worlds -- do you recall from favorite books or tales in other media?
Saturday, September 21, 2013
"One thing led to another, and I forgot to kill myself that day."
I like this a lot. Mr. Ferguson rambles a bit, as comics are wont to do, but I think I see what he's getting at, and it speaks to my general attitude regarding snark these days.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Hurgle flurp.
This is the kind of week it's been:
Not awful, and nothing serious going awry...just daily grind, bring more grinding than usual; just...frustratingly annoying, and a lot less productive than I would like. Gotta do better! And I will...once I've finished the job of strangling this work week and leaving its decaying remnants buried behind me.
Argghhhhh!
(Stay with me, folks. Better content is on the way!)
Not awful, and nothing serious going awry...just daily grind, bring more grinding than usual; just...frustratingly annoying, and a lot less productive than I would like. Gotta do better! And I will...once I've finished the job of strangling this work week and leaving its decaying remnants buried behind me.
Argghhhhh!
(Stay with me, folks. Better content is on the way!)
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Something for Thursday
I'm not a big fan of the movie, but I like Maurice Jarre's music for it, so here is "Keating's Triumph" from Dead Poets Society.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Filling my rocket quota
Antares Rocket With Cygnus Spacecraft Launches, originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video.
Here's a nifty rocket launch. Oooh, aaah!
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
What's a noted attraction or cool thing within a short drive of your home -- say, an hour or two -- that despite its proximity, you've never been to?
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
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