Archive for the 'Blather' Category
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
Halfway Mark
It’s just past the middle of the month, and I’m slightly ahead on the National Novel Writing Month project. I started out with only a vague idea, and it has thrashed around and become something else during this process. it isn’t what I wanted to have on the other end of the tunnel, but I’m not disappointed. I didn’t know what I wanted, I just put my foot on the gas, and gave ‘er.
Now, 30,000 words through the book, I’ve come to find other meaning in the events I wrote, and the places I have to go to close the loop of the story. I was talking with Axe about it the other day, and he had some great ideas that the book could evolve into on the next draft; ideas that outline my controlling idea clearer, and conceptional smarter.
So that’s the take away from this event for me so far, and I’m sure there will be more when it’s all said and done. This has been torture, but it’s also been a lot of fun, and it’s made me feel something. I can do this with consistency, I can write for a deadline.
It isn’t as high quality as I want it to be on my first passes, but that comes with time. I still have a road to follow though, and a lot of work to complete before I can raise my hands in victory. So I’ll quit writing blather in this little window, and go blather in another, far more important window.
Enjoy every sandwich.
Monday, October 20th, 2008
The Loser Generation.
It would be unfair to say that after watching “The Rocker”, I needed a long pull from an oxygen tank in order to re-start my brain.
It would be unfair, but it would also be very near the truth.
I grew up in a time when our heroes were beyond extraordinary. They were over-muscled titans, wielding automatic weapons, driving a humvee with their feet, and egregiously killing hordes of off-sale army fatigued bad guys. They were stronger than any mortal could possibly be; capable of crushing red hot briquettes of charcoal in their bare fist, gun down entire platoons of soldiers with a single box of bullets, and battle entire Armada’s in a single Star Fighter. Our heroes were empowered to the point of being Gods.
And now there seems to be a backlash. Our heroes are clad in goofy clothing, armed with an endless list of portmanteau’d phrases, derivative of an empty culture, lacquered with folkish guitar musings. And I accepted it.
I watched Napoleon dance, and smiled benignly, because I believed it to be a reaction; the ridiculous heights we pushed our heroes to in the age of Titans had fallen, and now we were pushing the other direction. It was only natural.
But we have a problem. We’ve gone too far, again.
Just as the notion of Rambo, savagely murdering half the russian army by his lonesome, the line of believability in the Loser kingdom is starting to move towards dangerously ridiculous levels.
have you seen a Will Ferrell movie lately? They’re not that good. They’ve had some moments, but the failures tend to outweigh the successes at this point. And when I watched the Rocker, I was confronted with a terrible vision: Someone was trying to be Jack Black, who was not Jack Black.
And the seas boiled, and dead rose from their graves…
We need to get back to a place where our stories are not remarkable because they lack remarkability, or because the heroes is a social outcast to such a degree that they could NOT exist in the real world. There are people who reach these heights: they’re cat people. They live in homes filled entirely with garbage.
I do not want to watch that. I’m actually a little terrified that I even KNOW about it.
Watching someone who has similarily terrifying, social neuroses is something we ALL gravitate to, in order to rationalize our seperate insanities, and come to a place where we can feel connected to the whole of humanity. It says “hey, I’m a freak too, we’re all freaks”, and then we don’t feel disconnected.
But right now, in this moment of time, the zeigeist…we aspire to be losers.
Mediocrity is the new success.
That’s terrifying.
Monday, October 6th, 2008
I Swear.
The concept of Sarah Palin coming to office has pushed every other consideration in my life, into one corner of my brain apartment.
This I swear: If McCain gets voted into the White House, I will buy some guns the next day, and move into the woods.
Because the world will be FUCKED.
I might as well get ready for the impending apocalypse, and head out of civilization on the bounce. Pickup some supplies from Canadian Tire and run.
RUN.
Go to K-country and hole up in a cave, and await the impending fall of Western society. When every other person is stumbling around, trying to find food and shelter, I’ll have my cave pimped out with well-water, and bear skins.
This is what its come to.
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Cultural Divide…
Typically, when Stephen Harper speaks, I’m anesthetizing myself in the kitchen with a generous belt of Wild Turkey. When the news of his intent to cut $45 Million dollars worth of federal funding to Canadian Arts and Cultural programs hit my ears though, the medicine was too far away. My face was stuck to my monitor, like a bad cartoon, and sweat was pouring out of me. I read the news with near hysteria, and I could feel the terminal bubble of air traveling upwards, prepared to shatter my cortex. I was immediately struck by a nerve racking spasm, as lightning shot through my brain, forcing me to curl up in a ball on the floor and weep.
The knee-jerk reaction is to curse this man as a Clown and Fool; a brutal fixer with little compassion, but that would be observing Harper skin deep, and failing to mine the true stupidity within.
The terrifying aspect of it, is that I agree with him: federal funding to the Arts isn’t being spent properly.
There. I said it. Now we can all freak out and call me a shitface. But wait… why would I say that? I’m an artist. A writer to be specific, of film, “journalism”, short story, animated shorts, I do all sorts of things, I’m Canadian, and I’d like to have some money. Why am I not burning this man’s house down right now?
Federal funding for the arts isn’t a good or bad thing, per se. Like many of the projects the government conjures up, and we allow them to invest in, it produces some positive and negative effects; life is a rich tapestry. The most obvious criminal brute who feels this effect is Air Canada; a blight on our society and on travel plans the world over. Propped up by funding from us, it continues to fall victim to the suck-tide. The services Air Canada offers gradually slide downwards, and in consequence it requires more bail-outs, more funding. I don’t think there’s a soul I know who regards Air Canada as anything more valuable than a snot covered kleenex.
And here’s the rub…Harper seems content to continue funding it, in spite of the fact that it’s a business that LOSES money annually, to a tune that I was actually AFRAID to lookup while I’m writing this. The only defense I have against violent paroxysm is ignorance.
So what about the Arts? Is it the same scenario? Do we breed mediocrity into our cultural programs by keeping them alive? If you’ve ever tried to get funding from the National Film Board, your answer will be yes.
Harper does what most of us do when we think about Canadian creative pursuits: we lump it all together in a huge shit-pile. We need to recognize the divide. And so does any Prime Minister of this country.
A big first step is to actually look past the “gala’s” Steve, and find the divide between “Cultural Entertainment” and Canadian Culture. Here’s a handy guide: Inukshuk - Canadian Culture, Due South - Piece of Shit. The gala comment clearly indicates that You, Steve, clump any creative effort together in one category. Our entertainment industry needs to be taken off the life-support of government initiative and forced to bootstrap itself to life, otherwise there will never be any of the negative feed-back required to winnow out the losers from the movers. When any idiot with a HighDef camera can get a government grant, and deny that funding to a genuine fireball genius who can demonstrate the evolution of Native survival from conception, with a beaver pelt and a pen knife, than the system has no checks in place to stop the evil pig-demons from kicking down the door, and spraying Grandpa and the kids with Uzi’s.
You get what I’m saying, right?
Sadly, Harper could have pulled it off, but he has no respect for Cultural pursuits. He didn’t have the brains OR didn’t have the inclination, to spearhead a movement for CHANGING the way the Arts get funded. Which is clear to any mortal foolish enough to read his comments regarding the cut itself. His vision of Culture within Canada is pegged on events like the Juno’s, and he fails to look any further.
We have a rich tapestry of history and racial diversity, and with it comes the opportunity to alchemize the constituents of that diversity into meaningful, cultural art. And it’s bullshit to claim that “ordinary people” aren’t interested in the Arts. Ordinary people are the progenitors of our Art and Culture Steve. You moron.
Monday, September 15th, 2008
Comics? Comics.
Axe is busy on the outline for our movie, and new Treatment, I’ve been tasked with making some new Axe and Crom comics so we can relaunch the site in the new year.
I’ve spent most of the last hour reading online comics, supplementing my weekend of Calvin & Hobbes gorging. I remember a conversation I had once with a director at the Pump House Theater (I was doing a bit part in Raggedy Ann&Andy, ya ya, fuck you) and he said that the hardest thing to do on stage was 2 minutes of something meaningful. He was trying to impart the idea of Fidelity of Thought to me. At least in regard to stage production…which may seem narrow minded, but I assure you it is not. Skits, comics, these things require you deliver a single concept quickly, and clearly. Calvin&Hobbes is a study in this ability, since Watterson usually had 3 panels to say something witty, and he did the job with disturbing consistency. I’m trying to crack open his skull and feast on the gooey insides…
Metaphorically.
I wrote a review for Chris Gheran & The Graveyard Gang over at r4nt.com which should be going up pretty quick, just need to polish it up, I’ll keep everyone posted…I dunno why though….
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
SHIT!
So the movie is still happening. In fact it’s been taking up much of my time, and I’ve changed jobs, so that’s not helping me write useless blog posts to waste your time and life.
HAH!
Axe is currently working on the Outline of the movie, while I’ve been tinkering with Treatments and scenarios. We’ve been close for a long time, but only in the sense that once you reach the trade winds, you can get to mexico eventually, whereas before, you might blow all the way to hell and die of thirst.
It isn’t even a question of close now, it’s basically done, we’re just trying to fit the pieces together in a way that we don’t hate ourselves for. This movie business is fucking harder than they let on, at least the way we do it.
Which is the way that doesn’t suck donkey balls.
Crom out.
Friday, August 1st, 2008
I should have gone to PAX…
But didn’t. And I suppose, in the scheme of things, I could still go, I would just have to jump ship and haul ass to Seattle. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the time.
But I can recall an age when those considerations were meaningless and stupid; bygone days where I quit my job after a moments pause, in order to continue the 24 hour marathon of Quake and Syndicate Wars. Or driving through a blizzard to take a friend home for christmas, and when the car slides sideways, I don’t fret…I just turn into the slide and wait for traction to return, humming along to the Nazareth playing out of the radio.
Now I have “responsibilities”. This is a watchword that our parents used with great frequency, and it’s often touted by the establishment. I don’t think anybody should be deliquent in them, but sometimes I wonder if we should blast a few of them out of the water. Days like today, days where I realize that a finite chunk of my existence where I could be enjoying intercourse with stalwart gaming peers, vinyl clad punk girls, and technical elite, has been traded with sitting in a dimly lit room, inputting numbers into a machine that is as thanksless as it is a bitch to operate. It makes me long for a stub cigar shoved into my clenched teeth, while I annihilate someone with a thrice-barreled machine gun. Looking after my mother’s plants instead feels somewhat empty by comparison.
Now I could be one of an infinite number of men who’ve reached a point in their lives where they discover that nightly binge drinking in their underwear, while screaming at a television screen showing the explosive adventures of an enviable, well-hung hero has been replaced with a 10pm bed-down, and steamed vegetables with skinless chicken. The result of which is a stronge urge to purchase a frivilous motor-vehicle containing no more then 3 wheels, and to drive said into the brush with an intention of acheiving no less than 25 feet of vertical flight for a period greater than 5 seconds; an attempt to capture the serendipity and care-free joie de vive encapsulated in every Social Distortion lyric ever sung. But I don’t think I am.
I think the image of “growing up” in our society has been concretized by the pop-culture as a picket fence, sub-urban lifestyle, with 2.5 kids and a VW Toureg in the driveway. Whenever somebody comes along and suggests that a grown man could be just as happy, playing the drums till 2am every Friday night, while consuming a six of his favorites, and eschewing the notional validity of starting a family, everybody starts questioning his sanity, or evoking the deadly “Mid-life” analogy that is so popular. You’re either a loser, or a lonely asshole: society possesses no in-between.
I’ve wandered from the path I started on; lamenting my failure to reach PAX this year, but I think my point is that next year I’m going to make it a point or driving there two days early, drinking a quart of Wild Turkey, and attending the Convention with vigor and brazen-rakish-hellfury. Perhaps the most important thing about having responsibilities, is knowing when to stop giving a fuck about them.
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
Twit for brains
Being on Twitter is bad for me. I’m the kind of guy who wants to inflict a single, witty sentence upon as many people as I can, in a bi-hourly schedule. Hence why I blog so poorly.
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Bullshit Quotient
I read a lot of webcomics.
Like…a lot. I used to work in an office where my job consisted, mainly, of filling in a number of colored blocks on an excel spreadsheet, and making sure that within a given time, I spread the needed amount of work to be done, evenly with those blocks. Simultaneously, I was supposed to make sure that I didn’t use the same blocks too often.
I know, this sounds oddly like one of the original games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It also sounds like…Scheduling. It WAS scheduling. The relevance to my point, is that filling in the colored blocks required very little of my time. In fact, in a given day I could fill in the blocks in approx. 15 minutes. Now if you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that with that kind of …alacrity, I was left with 7 some-odd hours of time each day to sit at my desk and stare into nothing like a malfunctioning robot.
So I started reading webcomics.
I had Penny Arcade on the radar for a long time, but having read it as often as I did, there wasn’t much in the archives to rely on to maintain my sanity. I started reading PvP, Dominic Deegan, Scary-Go-Round, Goats, Wigu.com, VG Cats, and an endless list that could take up the rest of this post, but whatever. There’s shitloads of webcomics out there, and I read many of them.
And a lot of them suck balls.
Like…genuinely awful work. The art in a lot of them is half-assed, but that’s something that I can get past pretty easily. What amazes me, as a writer, is how fucking shitty the story in a lot of these are. And to top it off, is something even more insidious, and I’ve even DONE it.
Referencing OTHER comics and pop culture.
Oh god. I feel dirty every time I do it, but there are more than a few comics that make it their exclusive demesne.
I’ve been an advocate for a long time of referential dialogue. I believe that referencing popular cultural moments from television, film and music, have the capacity to raise the bandwidth of our communication. Not only can I convey the circumstances of an event, but I can also place you in a specific emotional context, all through referential dialogue. That’s powerful stuff.
My issue with webcomics, and in the greater sense all creative endeavours, that rely solely on referential dialogue, is that they lose the thrust of their own message in the act of co-opting the referent. Using these symbols isn’t a bad thing, until your own intent is lost. At that point we’re simply engaging in emotional masturbation.
So I don’t want to name any names, but god damn it Kurtz, sometimes your work chafes my friggin’ nuts.
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Argue: Where two people scream at each other
And nobody changes their mind about SHIT.
I was privvy to a second-hand conversation about Anime a little while ago, in which the proponent of said claimed that nothing could ever be considered Anime that didn’t come from Japan. And that he wasn’t interested in anything other than the “bleeding edge” (a phrase I fucking HATE btw) content coming out of Japan.
That was it. He dismissed everything else, out of hand.
Fuck. There are few things in this universe that will instantly arouse my ire more than somebody who just writes something off without even considering it.
For instance: Many moons ago, I was somebody that took a massive shit on anything that Michael Bay has ever directed. But I realized, to my consternation, that I really hadn’t seen much of his work. It was a reputation that I believed in, not empirical data. I must SEE his work. SO I watched Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon…now the next movie would have been Pearl Harbor, which probably would have killed me, but since I was too busy nibbling the barrel of a shotgun, I was unable to press “play”. I had determined, for myself, that his work was the lowest quality schlock. If they didn’t hate one another, Bay and Uwe Boll could start a club.
My point was that I was doing something that I myself hated. I was dismissing him out of hand, without having seen any of the work I was shitting on. Now if you’ve ever compared JPN vs. US animated items, you can probably understand 2nd Hand Conversation’s objection to North American content. It’s shit, a lot of it. Okay pretty much ALL OF IT.
But here’s a quote from that conversation:
“Someone has to prove to me that, over a long period of time, original english stuff is better than stuff produced in Japan”
Are you fucking kidding?