conversation
» Thursday, April 27, 2006

From the Errol Morris interview with The Power of Nightmares director Adam Curtis:

EM: I still don’t know what I think. The New York Times, today on the front page, had an article about new evidence concerning incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The incidents – which are discussed in The Fog of War – have been disputed for over forty years. There are those that believe that they were part of a conspiracy to escalate the Vietnam War. Here’s a question: Are they right? And, in an even more general sense, is history primarily a history of conspiracy? Or is it just a series of blunders, one after the other? Confusions, self-deceptions, idiocies of one kind or another?

AC: It’s the latter. Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they're supposed to. History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended. (full text)

That's the best blip of analysis I've heard in a while. The Illuminati and the Catholic Church and the Rothschilds and the Elders of Zion make their plans with the Alien Reptile Hegemony of Rigel IV, but it always dissolves into chaos. Mostly because of the machinations of the people who live inside the Hollow Earth.

Labels: film, politics

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foiled by predictability
» Wednesday, April 26, 2006

In the evening, when the sun dips in the sky and the folks relax, Schmutzie and Palinode fit their long lean toned tanned presentable bodies onto the couch and watch the CSI Miami.

Palinode: Hey, this scene here. With all that flapping plastic tacked to posts. It reminds me of that bit in Lethal Weapon.

Schmutzie: Mm-hmm.

Palinode: Lethal. Weapon. The movie.

Schmutzie: Mm-hmm.

Palinode: Mel Gibson is a renegade cop who can dislocate his shoulder. (Pause) Remember?

Schmutzie: Mm.

Palinode: And Danny Glover? The irascible sidekick who had a thing for home renovation? Handy-with-a-nailgun-Danny-Glover? You remember the nailgun.

Schmutzie: Mm.

Palinode: And bad guys. Man, were there bad guys. (Pause) Remem-

Schmutzie: I DON'T CARE! I DON'T CARE ABOUT LETHAL WEAPON! I'M TRYING TO WATCH CSI!

(Long pause. At least ten seconds.)

Palinode: You know - (stops, waits for reaction) - I think - I'd like to see Lethal Weapon again. (stops once more) And I think the only thing - the only thing standing in my way of seeing Lethal Weapon - is -

Schmutzie: Me?

Palinode: Whuh?

Schmutzie: I'm what's standing in the way you watching Lethal Weapon? That's what you were going to say?

Palinode: No, I was - I was going to say -

Schmutzie: You were going to say me but I beat you to it?

Palinode: No, I was going to say... those bastards at Netflix?

Schmutzie: Yeah. If we had Netflix here.

Palinode: Lousy Netflix bastards.

Labels: conversations

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an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who's been ending his speeches with "God bless Canada"
» Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Stop that.

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elliott
» Monday, April 24, 2006

Last Wednesday, the morning after I handed in my resignation, Schmutzie shook me by the shoulder as I lay dozing in bed. I have sad news, she said. Elliott died. She gave my shoulder another squeeze, put a kiss on my forehead and left for work.

She'd woken me from a vivid and complex dream of meeting an old friend in a park, so it took me a moment to understand.

There's not a great deal I can say about Elliott beyond Schmutzie's photo-eulogy. While beautiful, the photos do not do justice to Elliott's bizarre bumbling speed and headlong grace. For the first few years of our marriage, our chief entertainment, besides each other, was this stupid bird. Along with George, a cranky brown finch who bit the pet store employee, the veterinarian, and us (he had a knack for nipping the soft flesh between forefinger and thumb), Elliott was the first living thing that we decided to bring home. They felt - at least to me - more like guests than pets, little creatures that we had invited over for life.

The guides we consulted told us not to take the fattest or ugliest birds, but we were high on pity and espresso that day. George was uglier and older than every other finch in the cage, hunched under a little moptop cap of feathers and attempting to bite anything that came near. Schmutzie figured she could change him. Elliott had a roly-poly body and a tone-deaf squawk that sounded like Woody Woodpecker. We took them home on the bus, sitting between the bored Hong Kong university student and the puffy-cheeked kid with the Slipknot shirt.

When we let them into their cage, George thumped to the bottom and flew into the corner, no less grumpy for having been stuffed into a cardboard carrier for an hour. Elliott was a different story. He spilled out of the box onto his back, left wing askew and flinging a spatter of dark blood across the plastic base. We looked in the box and found more speckles of blood; somewhere between the store and our apartment he'd been injured. We figured that the saleswoman had grabbed him too hastily and cracked a bone in his wing.

The broken wing never quite healed. It messed up Elliott's equilibrium just enough to make him smack his head into the perches every so often, but it never seemed to phase him. To get an idea of what it was like, imaging running headfirst into a tree, falling over on your ass, jumping up immediately and running into the tree again. And then belting out a Woody Woodpecker laugh. Now imagine doing that several times daily for five years, and you'll have a pretty good idea of our bird's life.

If it was just a bit hilarious to watch him smack his head repeatedly, it was also amazing to watch his successful flights and his mad leaps at the side of the cage, where he would whip his body around in mid-flight and grab the vertical bars for a moment before springing to another quadrant. Sometimes he would continue his hold on the bars and slide down to the base of the cage. Then he'd fly headfirst into the feeder and George would fly down and try to bite him (or mount him, we were never sure).

One of the stranger aspects of marriage is the unspoken division of tasks. I knew when I got out of bed that Schmutzie had left without touching Eliott, had left his body in the cage, and that I would need to deal with it. I knew that that his little death was too much for her to reach in and handle. So, naked and cramped from sleep, I went to the spare room and saw Elliott for myself, a little bundle of feathers and beak in the corner of the cage. I wrapped him in paper towel, tied him up in a plastic bag and waited for Schmutzie to get home. We laid him down outside at the base of a tree by our front walk, where we figured an animal, probably a local cat, would take him away.

He stayed under the tree for three days. Even though he was dead, it felt strangely comforting to enter and exit our building and see our bird there, a little splash of white in the spring soil. We would stop and see how his feathers looked, remark on the healthy colour of his beak, ruminate a bit on his closed sunken eyes. It felt as if he hadn't really died, but were just waiting patiently for a train to come.

On the fourth day he vanished altogether, as if he had just gotten up and flown headfirst into a tree branch. And then flown away.

Labels: autobio, bird, death

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friday on the deck
» Sunday, April 23, 2006

Last Friday the deck at O'Hanlon's opened. This marks the start of the warm season in this city. Armed with Schmutzie's digital camera, I started taking pictures of people at the long end of the zoom.

This guy caught me just as I was taking the picture. Clearly he was pleased.

Note the strange spindle of a goatee. It's like a little fur-lined piano stool holding up his lip.


His friend didn't care about being photographed. Instead of a goatee he's sporting a bottle of Kokanee.

That must be heavy.


Youngblood (on the left) and Nick (on the right) were sitting with us. At his best moments, Nick looks a bit like Superman.


This is not one of Nick's best moments.


In Youngblood's best moments, he gets a soulful early Peter Fonda look going on.


Actually, I think Youngblood would make a great California folk-rocker circa '71.


Abigail and Dashing Rod joined us for a while. Rod reacted correctly to the news that I'd left my job by buying me a beer. Remember: screwing up your face and saying "Whaddidjadoothatfor?" is the incorrect response. Buying me a beer is always correct, or at least on the correct track.



Last but not least, I caught a couple of photos of C., the world's most dedicated Sonic Youth fan.



And that's all. After I took these photos I stepped out into the street and got hit by a dog on a skateboard. Or maybe that was an episode of Scooby-Doo? Best bet, that was an episode of Scooby-Doo that I made up when I was a kid. Or an adult. Or just now.

Labels: autobio, photos

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E for Expedience
» Saturday, April 22, 2006

Do you want the film spoiled for you? Do you? Read on then.

Sometimes I'm not sure whether my involvement over the last six years in tv and film production has destroyed my appreciation for movies or lent it a special, acidic dimension. Sometimes I feel as if I'm looking through the screen at the figures that assembled and brought the film to being. Where someone sees a crazy angle or a cutaway, I see a budget decision; where someone finds a strange line, I see a series of meetings with tired and defeated writers answering to the immutable and silent avatars of budget and deadline, of fixes and last-minute consultations, all spliced together with pleading and threats.

Halfway through V for Vendetta, that near-future sci-fi dystopian inspirational, V's origin story is sketched out in a hasty combination of flashback and montage* as an investigator reads the journals of a doctor who performed biochemical experiments on human beings that resulted the vengeful monster-hero at the centre of the film. An incarnation of blowback, V destroys the compound and escapes, seen as a grotesque silhouette whose crispy outlines suggest that he's already very much at home in the maelstrom he walks out of. The doctor's voice-over relates the terrifying moment when V turns to regard her: "He turned to look at me - not with his eyes - he had no eyes". And then, with that odd bit of expository detail, V exits from the scene, along with eyeless face and his plans to bring down the neofascist government that presumably took his eyes, but not his ability to see.

Having read the graphic novel, I knew that the line about the eyes was an insertion in a piece of text lifted pretty much whole from the original. The subject of his eyelessness is raised and dropped in that moment. It never comes up again. To understand how silly this is, here are the relevant panels from the book (click to enlarge):


Did I mention that he didn't have any eyes? Because he didn't.

How does an insipid throwaway detail work its way into a climactic moment? Maybe a bit like this:

EXEC1: The latest cut looks great -

EXEC2: We love it.

EXEC3: It's gonna be a fucking wake-up call to the other studios.

EXEC1: - but we're kind of wondering about one thing.

DIRECTOR: What's that?

EXEC1: He's got this cool mask on, and he beats the hell out of everyone -

EXEC2: Those knife effects are going to look great when we drop those in.

EXEC3: They'll totally sell it.

EXEC1: - but how does he see with that mask on?

DIR: What?

EXEC1: Out of those little slits?

DIR: Those little slits?

EXEC2: Yeah. What's the fucker got? Like, Daredevil vision going on?

EXEC3: I fucking loved that movie.

EXEC1: Shit, you know I had the director in my office the other day? What an asshole.

EXEC2: Whatsis, um, Brett Ratner?

EXEC1: I forget his name. Looks kind of like Howie Mandel, kind of like the kid from Eight Is Enough.

EXEC3: Crap.

EXEC2: Look, the fact is, I couldn't see through that mask. You couldn't see through that mask. How does this guy see anything?

DIR: Okay, well he's got finely tuned senses -

EXEC2: Like Daredevil, exactly.

DIR: - yeah, a bit like Daredevil.

EXEC3: So he's blind?

DIR: I guess he could be blind. But principal photography's wrapped.

EXEC 2: Just stick a line in the script somewhere.

EXEC1: That's all it needs. Just have him say "I'm blind" somewhere. That takes care of it.

EXEC2: Yeah, he can stick it in Natalie Portman's ass and say, "Sorry, I'm blind".

EXEC3: Or maybe in her eye.

DIR: I'd prefer we do it in voiceover.

EXEC1: Yeah, just stick it in voiceover. Whatever. Just fucking finish it.

DIR: Okay, I'll send it to the writers and they'll find a spot for it. (leaves)

EXEC2: Hey, that wasn't the guy who did Daredevil, was it?

EXEC3: That was Brett Ratner?

Okay, so that's a wildly exaggerated and crude version of the actual process. But that was way more fun to write.

*Much of V for Vendetta is a triumph of editing over filmmaking, but that's another story.

Labels: film, scorn

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the dubious glory of jim
» Friday, April 21, 2006

Today, for the price of absolutely nothing, I took home a scratched-up sleeveless piece of vinyl for the sake of its cover. And perhaps for the glory of Jim Records, the label of Jimmy Swaggart.


Praise be to Jimmy here of the cannibal grin and daffodil shirt. The title of the album is "Camp Meeting Piano". Would you walk into a camp with this guy at the piano?


Remember - this is the man who said that gay people should be called "queers, perverts or homosexuals, but not gay. Gay is a nice word". So let us only say nice things about this man.

Whatever you may think of Jimmy Swaggart, this album comes with the greatest recommendation I've ever read:


The unique style plus the anointing of the Holy Spirit? "Follow me into the bedroom suite, Mrs. Collins. I think you'll agree that the colour-coordinated valances plus the anointing of the Holy Spirit really sell the room". Awesome. But I think the blurb lets us down at the end. If I cut an album with the anointing of the Holy Spirit - hell, if cut a fart with the anointing of the Holy Spirit - I wouldn't finish off with some lame phrase like "an experience in recording". I'd go so far as to call it a good or even pleasant experience. And why is it an experience "in recording"? I think it would be wiser to play up the listening aspect, since the vast majority of people who own this record would not be the ones who recorded it.


I wonder what people raised outside the Christian tradition make of songs like track nunber five. Do they stop and say, "When I see the blood? What?" Do children tug at their mother's hands and whisper "Why is there blood, mommy?" And the mothers will have no answer, stroking the furrowed foreheads of their little children, quietly praying that the storm will pass over them without incident? Fear not, though: the chorus of the song reads "When I see the blood/I will pass over you," not "When I see the blood/I'll be just about done hitting you" or "When I see the blood/I'll stop and say Okay, I'm outta here".

Mind you, it's a little better than the third track on side two.


I think it's a bit sneaky to follow up soothing stuff like "The Healer" and "Leaning on the Everlasting Arm" with "He Was Nailed to the Cross for Me". It's like giving a dollar to a homeless guy and then telling him you're a buck short for your grandmother's operation. My brain wants to keep riffing on that title. "He was whacked with a hakapik for me". "He was run over by a zamboni for me". "He was vented into space for me". All of which would be unlikely ways for first-century guy to meet his end. Which makes me wonder if Jesus went around saying, "Did you know it's the first century now?"

That would get old pretty quick.

Labels: music, scorn

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worst songs
» Wednesday, April 19, 2006

In my ongoing effort to prove that sick days are good for something besides lying down and throwing up, I've been poking around the internet and looking at people's lists of the worst songs of all time. I confess: I love these kinds of things. It makes my heart glad to see people taking revenge on our culture. To those who believe that the haters should get up off their hatin' duffs and join the cultural production game, I say that a) the cultural production game is inherently corrupt and insipid, and b) maybe composing a long list of hated songs and movies is a bottom-up version of cultural production, a chance for basement dwellers to haul their hateful creations of spit and lint and mouse turds up the dumbwaiter.

Most of the worst song lists are heavy with late 60s and mid 70s tunes such as "(You're) Having My Baby," a song that makes you want to shoot yourself with a high-caliber weapon, if only to drown out the sound of Paul Anka sounding so sincere about the joys of impregnation. The sentimental pop flare-out at the end of psychedelia allowed a lot of horrendous and misguided music into the world, but at least the artists appeared to believe that their songs had a certain worth, even if that resulted in Richard Harris bemoaning his lost cake recipe or Starland Vocal Band thinking that noontime nooky merited a single. The musical excesses of the 70s strike me as embarrassing but oddly sweet, even if most of the singles of the time were recorded in a benzodiazepine haze.

No, it's the eighties that really shoved pop music into the tiger cage and walked away whistling. The mutation of disco into machine-tooled soul combined with the merging of corporate interests to produce hour after hour of utterly forgettable crap. It was considered a good career move for a band to fill up a movie soundtrack, producing at least one tuneless single with the movie title shoehorned in somehow. Imagine composing and performing an entire song whose only purpose is to advertise an action film. Imagine doing that and then not overdosing on the bowl of Quaaludes in your dressing room. Can't do it, huh? When Reagan declared that it was morning in America, musicians from all over woke up and decided that it was time to make some money. Pop music started to feel like a theme-parked version of itself, with nobility replacing politics, titillation overtaking raunch, and record companies gulping songs down whole, all the better to regurgitate it in pre-digested form for the rest of us.

I've been ranting some. Here's my contribution to the hate - the worst songs of the 1980s.

Howard Jones - New Song
Not many people remember this tune from 1983. I'd forgotten it altogether until an internet radio station plugged this into its playlist last week. "New Song" combines everything that ever bugged me about the music of that decade into one three-minute package: canned boppy soul, unmemorable verses followed by slightly catchy chorus, and a vague inspirational message that translates to feel-good-fuck-all. The song plays like an extended dance remix of itself.

Bruce Hornsby - The Way it Is
Soft rock made softer by soft-spoken soft-headed singer.

Any Mr. Mister tune
Certainly "Broken Wings," but absolutely "Kyrie," with its pretentious title, processed guitar chords, and the sneaking suspicion that you've been made to listen to Christian rock without signing the consent forms.

Cutting Crew - I Just Died in Your Arms
If you're going to masquerade as Mr. Mister, it is a bad idea to give your band a name that sounds like a hair salon. But since Mr. Mister sounds like a discount men's clothing store, maybe it's not such a bad choice after all.

Don Johnson - Heatbeat
Was that the name of the tune? Who cares? It doesn't matter what Don Johnson sings, what he chooses to call the things that he sings, what he's saying when he sings them. When an eighties television personality - Johnson, Philip Michael-Thomas-Hall-Whatever, Jack Wagner - cut an album, the results weren't songs. They were Integrated Media Objects designed to consolidate revenue in the pockets of the people who drew up the contracts.

Foreigner - I Want to Know What Love Is
Agh. God! What the fuck was that? A bunch of stodgy seventies rockers with permed mullets trying on the ballad form? You can take a shower when someone throws dogshit at you, but how do you scrub your memory?

Beach Boys - Kokomo
Back in July 2004 I was sent to the Florida Keys to do some shooting and interview people about historic hurricane disasters. My employers put me up at the Holiday Isle resort on Islamorada, a slightly shabby hotel complex with more bars per square foot than anywhere else. Beach bar blended into raw bar spread into tiki bar tumbled into poolside bar overlooked beach bar again. Sunburned tourists ate and drank and swam themselves into a daze, their kids slowly turning pinker and crispier as the days went by. On the sand a team of wholesome tanned women with fake boobs set up a net and played beach volleyball in the afternoons. Despite the crowds, the complex looked as if it needed general repair, or at least a bit of paint. The tourists seemed to notice it too. The peeling walls turned their relaxation to agitated boredom, causing them to snap at their kids and chew on their po' boy sandwiches with a certain ferocity. On the second day I realized that the Kokomo bar was the very place that the Beach Boys had sung about, and not some Caribbean island as I had always assumed. I showed up one evening. The place was almost empty, with a few motivated drinkers at the bar and a couple of people at the tables. At a small stage someone was singing Jimmy Buffett tunes. An unconvincing tiki apparatus had been assembled to persuade customers that this place was the Polynesian paradise they'd always dreamed of getting shitfaced in. This was the place Mike Love wanted to take his girl to?

Tina Turner - We Don't Need Another Hero
Good songs do not have the word "thunderdome" in the chorus.

Starship - We Built This City on Rock and Roll, or maybe Sara
For a child born in the seventies and adolescing in the eighties, it was hard not to wonder where the hippies went. All I ever saw around me were a bunch of dull middle-class adults. But Starship cleared up the mystery for me.

David Bowie and Mick Jagger - Dancing in the Streets
I'd love to know the details on how this cover came to be. It seems like so many facets of our culture got caught up in this two-minute whirlwind of crap - it was like alien android replacements of rock musicians trying to get hip with the youth but getting the time frame fatally wrong. David Bowie appeared to have stolen Keith Haring's pyjamas for the video and thrown on a trenchcoat on the way to the video shoot.

Most of the post-Thriller Michael Jackson stuff - maybe Earth Song
Yeah, Earth Song is probably the nadir of the Michael Jackson bombast-a-thon, but I think that tune belongs to the nineties. Did you see Jackson's performance of Earth Song on the British Music Awards, where he appeared in white robes, sort of pretended to be a Christ figure and welcomed a stageful of solemn marching children into his arms? Apparently Jarvis Cocker ran up on stage and mooned him.

Quiet Riot - Mama Weer All Crazee Now
Once upon a time there were some guys who hung out in a basement, drank beer and jammed. One day they got a recording contract and released a Slade cover called "Cum On Feel the Noiz," which turned them into beer-bellied rock gods with tight pants, hairy chests and sweat that reeked of Jim Beam. They rode that single hard until it dropped. After they crawled out of a pit of groupies and meth, the band released another album. The single, "Mama Weer All Crazee Now," was another Slade cover, but this one did not have the benefit of a good hook or catchy tune. It could also not spell its own name, which was weird.

Eddie Murphy - Party All the Time
Another Integrated Media Object whose only purpose was to complete the colonization of eighties pop culture by Eddie Murphy. Fortunately the breakaway republic of Taste caught him in the mountain passes and harried his flanks until he was forced to retreat.

Europe - The Final Countdown
Making fun of this song seems unneccessary.

Michael Bolton
I don't remember a single tune that he sung, with the exception of the Otis Redding cover. I just remember the suits that looked too small and the button-up shirts. And the most dedicated mullet in the world.

Billy Ocean - Suddenly? Get Out of My Dreams? Caribbean/European/African Queen?
Didn't Billy Ocean seem somehow too old be a pop star? That was the creepiest thing about 80s pop - much of it came from people who seemed to debut in mid-career, if the receding hairlines and pastel suit jackets had anything to say about it.

John Cougar Mellencamp - Small Town
In one simple stroke, Mellencamp conquered the world's all time most difficult rhyme 'small town' by using it to end every line.

Sheena Easton - Sugar Walls
Yuck.

John Farnham - You're the Voice
Bagpipes? I'm sorry - bagpipes?

Labels: eighties, music, scorn

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how to watch king kong
» Monday, April 17, 2006

I finally made my way round to watching King Kong on DVD. I'd meant to see it in theatres, but passed every time in favour of intimate character-driven films in small venues. And when those weren't available, in favour of getting drunk down at O'Hanlon's.

I probably should have gotten drunk. King Kong is the ultimate big-screen film, full of panoramic shots with small details that you cannot see on a TV screen. And then there's the problem of scale - when you're creating scenes with a 25' gorilla and a 5' woman, you need a huge screen to see both of them clearly. Otherwise you're watching an ape fall in love with a matchstick. A hot little matchstick with blonde curls and a vaudeville routine.

If you decide to watch the film in a movie theatre, then you're stuck in a chair for three hours. Three hours to look at a fake gorilla? Actually, you wait ninety minutes to see the fake gorilla, which is the length of a decent feature film. Considering that the title of the film refers to the big fake gorilla, it seems strange to make you wait over an hour to see it. Imagine Titanic if the first hour were just some people standing around the docks saying "When's the ship getting here?". And then a man shows up and says, "Oh, you missed it. It left yesterday and sank in the Atlantic after running into an iceberg. Highly dramatic". And then everyone goes home.

It is a reliable scientific fact that your modern theatre goer will have drunk five gallons of crappy sugarwater before the opening credits even roll. Therefore it is a certainty that you will miss at least a few minutes of King Kong somewhere between the three-quarter hour bridge and the treacherous two-and-a-half-hour gorge. Peter Jackson has crafted a solution to this by making sure that the central ninety minutes of the film contain nearly nothing worth watching, unless you think it's worth your while to watch a bunch of unmemorable sailors get chewed or crushed or tossed around.

King Kong contains fifteen non-consecutive minutes of good film. The best thing to do is to go to the theatre with the intention of seeing the film and going to V for Vendetta instead, because King Kong's been gone for months now.

Labels: film, scorn

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mellow staff blend
» Wednesday, April 12, 2006

I take back all the bad things that I've said or intimated about work. According to a company-wide email, "There is a personnel blender in the kitchen area for staff to use. If you use it please wash it out". The phrase 'personnel blender' doesn't just amuse; it flat-out makes me happy. I murmur the phrase and the endorphins roll gently over my body, as in a tropical tidal pool at twilight. It's approaching the status of a mantra - got work stress? 'Personnel blender'. Your lover turned cold? 'Personnel blender'. Landlordsaystherentislate/ mayhavetolitigate? 'Personnel blender'. And 'kill Bobby McFerrin'. Note: If you're curious about the most effective stress-relieving way to say 'personnel blender,' give me a call. Or pester me for a podcast.

The key is not to think about the phrase too long. Or at all. The implications involving blended personnel form part of a train that boards at Camp Horror Station and terminates at Saddam Grinder Junction. But for some reason, even the image of blended personnel doesn't damp my happy engine. As long as it gets washed out, I'm fine.

There was also an email to announce that the 'plumping company' would be coming by on Thursday. No doubt there's some Ball Park Franks on the loose in the basement. I say unleash the personnel blender on them.

Labels: work

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alone
» 

A snip from John Berger's essay "The Wall and the Bulldozer":

The End of History, which is the Corporate global slogan, is not a prophecy, but an order to wipe out the past and what it has bequeathed everywhere. The market requires every consumer and employee to be massively alone in the present.

Well, duh.

Labels: literature

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putting in an appearance
» Tuesday, April 11, 2006

A long time ago - or maybe a couple of weeks ago, I dunno - I was reading Mimi Smartypants and I found out one of her biggest peeves: webloggers who post an entry to inform everyone that they won't be writing in their weblog anymore: that they have nothing to say, that the pressure has squeezed the joy out of the activity, that the rest of their lives has risen up like a tsunami of busyness and stress, swamping them amidships and leaving them at sea, paddling away and scanning the horizon for shore (as a side note, I tried to type 'shore' and ended up typing 'hoser' instead - how often do you get the chance to mistype so thoroughly that you end up with an anagram? And how often do you get to exhaust a nautical metaphor as thoroughly as I have?). Are you crippled by stress? Is your life running out of control? Write about it, she says.

Which is what I'm doing here. I generally resist writing about my current troubles, based on the notion that the folks who come here for the transcribed conversations and elaborate jokes aren't interested in my daily troubles. And really, I'm still not going to write about them here, at least not in detail - most of my current stress stems from work, and if there's one thing I don't want to discuss, it's my work. I'd hate to make some offhand comment like my production schedule is total bullshit or maybe I wouldn't lift a finger to save this show if it tripped over Niagara Falls and screamed all the way down that will come back to bite me during a review.

What really gets me is how divided I feel. At work I'm divided between one task and another, and when I settle on a task I'm divided between approach A and approach B. And always I'm divided on whether what I'm doing is worth the effort I expend on it - indeed, whether it's worth any of my effort at all. Entertaining cable television subscribers is not my idea of a worthwhile goal. Hey, did I say something about comments that will eventually bite me in the ass?

Labels: metablog

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the mystical randy newman knowledge conversation
» Friday, April 07, 2006

Kitchen. A rare weekday morning with Schmutzie and the Palinode up at the same time.

Palinode: Hmmm. (Pauses, rubs his eyes) Ah luuuv LA... da na na naa na na naa na na naa, WE LOVE IT, da na na naa na na naa na na naa...

Schmutzie: What are you trying to sing?

Palinode: ...WE LOVE IT, da na na naa na na naa na naa...

Schmutzie: (Silence)

Palinode: Hey, you know what that song is?

Schmutzie: That McDonald's song? Da da da da daaa?

Palinode: No, it's I Love LA by Randy Newman.

Schmutzie: Oh.

Palinode: (singing)Look at that sumethin... Check out that stuff... it's... (brief pause for reorientation) Ah luuuuv LA, da na na naa...

Schmutzie: I don't know Randy Newman.

Palinode: Oh well. He doesn't know you either.

Schmutzie: That's not surprising.

Palinode: He's sitting at home right now singing "I don't know [Schmutzie]/ I don't know what she's doin'/ Don't know if she's a receptionist/ Or a draft pick Boston Bruin.

Schmutzie: I AM NOT A RECEPTIONIST!

Palinode: I didn't say you were a receptionist.

Schmutzie: I'm NOT a receptionist.

Palinode: I'm just singing Randy Newman's song about you where he's speculating on what you're doing. You're also not a Boston Bruin, but that doesn't stop him from wondering.

Schmutzie: Randy Newman doesn't know me.

Palinode: That's why he wrote that song about you.

Schmutzie: Randy Newman didn't write that song.

Palinode: Oh yeah? If he didn't write it, how come I know the lyrics?

Schmutzie: (Silence. The silence that comes from ignoring the conversation.)

Palinode: That's right. I just blew your mind. I messed with your head BIG TIME.

Labels: conversations

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industry jargon
» Wednesday, April 05, 2006

To my immense delight, I found out last week that every Avid editing suite comes, as a matter of security, with a programmable key called a dongle. The function of the dongle is to prevent unauthorized rogue editors from sneaking into the building and layering in an aftereffect or converting a cut to a dissolve (Sheer incompetence Rogue editors prowling the streets are a huge problem in the production industry). The other function of the dongle is to make me laugh whenever I see one of our editors walking the hallways with a dongle attached to a band on his wrist.

Sometimes a dongle goes wrong and the Avid suite refuses to do so much as turn its head and cough. What causes dongle wrongness? Cosmic rays? Viruses in the works introduced by rogue editors? The unhealthy influences of HAL, Edgar, Proteus IV or maybe Skynet? Spindling? The truth is, we don't know what sends a dongle off the rails. But when it happens, you have to send the dongle back to the manufacturers to have it reprogrammed. To reprogram a dongle is to bless it. Therefore it is permissible and even encouraged to phone up Avid corporate headquarters in Massachussetts (978 640 6789, if you're really determined to follow through) and say "Bless my Avid Dongle, sirs, for it has gone wrong". Make sure you can produce the wrong dongle when asked, though. And don't forget the 'sirs' when you phone up.

Labels: dongle, useless

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