06/01: Weirdly loveable
Ms. Morissette’s So Pure is hereby presented fer yer consideration…
I’m one of those weirdos who fucking outright loves the oddly meandering disk whence comes this track—Morissette’s Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which apparently confounded any number of critics who were expecting… umm…
‘Kay. Actually, I’ve no idea what they were expecting. And I don’t much care. I do, however, submit, that if you can listen to this alternately brooding and comic disk without wanting to sing along, now and then, there’s something wrong with you. Get help.
(/Also, submitted for your consideration, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie can also absolutely be appreciated while boarding in the dark in the Gatineaus. Morissette being from here, after all, I guess this is to be expected. Or something.)
I’m one of those weirdos who fucking outright loves the oddly meandering disk whence comes this track—Morissette’s Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, which apparently confounded any number of critics who were expecting… umm…
‘Kay. Actually, I’ve no idea what they were expecting. And I don’t much care. I do, however, submit, that if you can listen to this alternately brooding and comic disk without wanting to sing along, now and then, there’s something wrong with you. Get help.
(/Also, submitted for your consideration, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie can also absolutely be appreciated while boarding in the dark in the Gatineaus. Morissette being from here, after all, I guess this is to be expected. Or something.)
28/11: Four liftoffs
So we launched a few rockets today—me and the offspring.
It’d been a while coming. The firstborn’s science group had launched a few a month or so ago, and she’d brought home a model she’d built there—sans wadding or engine or launching paraphernalia. Meanwhile, the little guy had been becoming seriously obsessed by rockets in general and by the Apollo program in particular—for a while, at bedtime, he was insisting on watching videos of launches and lunar surface activities on my laptops, and his favourite books are still on rockets and Apollo (got this great thing aimed for around his age—intricate illustrations taking you right through Apollo 11 in some detail, liftoff through the lunar excursion and back to splashdown—really tries to convey a sense of it—what it might have been like spending a week in that tiny capsule and lander, what it might have been like to be so far out there… good stuff…).
So they’d asked and I’d promised we’d get ‘round to launching a few of our own, and today, after an awful lot of cloud and rain and other inconveniences kept holding us up, we finally got a nice, clear day, if one a bit cold, a bit windy, for fiddling with bare fingers with engines, igniters and alligator clips. And so I picked up a kit with most of the remaining required stuff, got some wadding, another rocket, a buncha engines…
And it went generally well. Between the two rockets, we did four launches, of which three went perfectly—tho’ one of those did fly… well… some distance downwind…
Yeah, well, quite some distance. The thing is, the wind was a bit high, if up and down. I almost passed on launching anything whatsoever, but with two excited kids along, well…
So I took to waiting out the wind, waiting for relatively still moments for launches. Which worked fine for a few tries… Nice, seamless flights—up to the top, a bit upwind, chutes opening, thing coming back down all in one piece, all good… Almost impressive. Like we knew what we were doing or somethin’…
But then I fired one up on a C engine—second such flight. Musta got, I dunno… looked like at least a few hundred feet up…
And I guess the wind up there was a lot stronger than on the ground. ‘Cos coming back on the chute, it sailed several hundred metres. Through one anxious moment over a very, very, very tall hardwood… and over a hill and out of sight, and never mind by rules of thumb we should have had loads of room for that altitude. And if it had snagged on that monster tree, recovery would have been out of the question. Hell, I don’t think the fire department has arms go that high…
But we found it, brought it back, all intact. Lucky, in retrospect—it had landed maybe 50 feet from a muddy, swampy bit next to the river… That, too, could have been messy.
The failed flight… yeah… not sure what that was about. Tried an A engine in the one my daughter brought back, thinking we weren’t quite sure what was supposed to be in there, and though it fit fine, it looks like maybe I should have put something a little punchier in there, after all. ‘Cos it got up, turned over, came back down, engine still firing, burned out just before driving its nose cone into the ground.
Not so good. But hey, on balance, not a bad day. We’d have launched more except for the whole frozen fingers problem… It is getting a bit late in the season for this stuff, I guess.
Kids loved it, anyway. Little guy was having a great time, tho’ a little too nervous about the things actually to press the launch button. Firstborn happily sent one off on her own. Expect we’ll be firing a few more in not much longer.
It’d been a while coming. The firstborn’s science group had launched a few a month or so ago, and she’d brought home a model she’d built there—sans wadding or engine or launching paraphernalia. Meanwhile, the little guy had been becoming seriously obsessed by rockets in general and by the Apollo program in particular—for a while, at bedtime, he was insisting on watching videos of launches and lunar surface activities on my laptops, and his favourite books are still on rockets and Apollo (got this great thing aimed for around his age—intricate illustrations taking you right through Apollo 11 in some detail, liftoff through the lunar excursion and back to splashdown—really tries to convey a sense of it—what it might have been like spending a week in that tiny capsule and lander, what it might have been like to be so far out there… good stuff…).
So they’d asked and I’d promised we’d get ‘round to launching a few of our own, and today, after an awful lot of cloud and rain and other inconveniences kept holding us up, we finally got a nice, clear day, if one a bit cold, a bit windy, for fiddling with bare fingers with engines, igniters and alligator clips. And so I picked up a kit with most of the remaining required stuff, got some wadding, another rocket, a buncha engines…
And it went generally well. Between the two rockets, we did four launches, of which three went perfectly—tho’ one of those did fly… well… some distance downwind…
Yeah, well, quite some distance. The thing is, the wind was a bit high, if up and down. I almost passed on launching anything whatsoever, but with two excited kids along, well…
So I took to waiting out the wind, waiting for relatively still moments for launches. Which worked fine for a few tries… Nice, seamless flights—up to the top, a bit upwind, chutes opening, thing coming back down all in one piece, all good… Almost impressive. Like we knew what we were doing or somethin’…
But then I fired one up on a C engine—second such flight. Musta got, I dunno… looked like at least a few hundred feet up…
And I guess the wind up there was a lot stronger than on the ground. ‘Cos coming back on the chute, it sailed several hundred metres. Through one anxious moment over a very, very, very tall hardwood… and over a hill and out of sight, and never mind by rules of thumb we should have had loads of room for that altitude. And if it had snagged on that monster tree, recovery would have been out of the question. Hell, I don’t think the fire department has arms go that high…
But we found it, brought it back, all intact. Lucky, in retrospect—it had landed maybe 50 feet from a muddy, swampy bit next to the river… That, too, could have been messy.
The failed flight… yeah… not sure what that was about. Tried an A engine in the one my daughter brought back, thinking we weren’t quite sure what was supposed to be in there, and though it fit fine, it looks like maybe I should have put something a little punchier in there, after all. ‘Cos it got up, turned over, came back down, engine still firing, burned out just before driving its nose cone into the ground.
Not so good. But hey, on balance, not a bad day. We’d have launched more except for the whole frozen fingers problem… It is getting a bit late in the season for this stuff, I guess.
Kids loved it, anyway. Little guy was having a great time, tho’ a little too nervous about the things actually to press the launch button. Firstborn happily sent one off on her own. Expect we’ll be firing a few more in not much longer.
01/11: No particular reason
… it was just in my head.
(Always had a certain affection for Ms. Love… I mean, sure, she’s got some issues. But hey, don’t we all.)
26/10: Keepalive packet
Still ‘round. Just a very busy few weeks at work and beyond. News I’m actually allowed to print:
a) Did a lot of niggly little GUI cleanups and smoothings (along with some heavier feature additions vastly hardening typeface and virtual keyboard support) to that PSPKVM (a Java VM for the PSP) project I’d been helping out with. Vastly expanded multilingual support, smoothed/eased text input and general UI/useability stuff, mostly. And in the process learned all sorts of weird little things. I can now read a few characters of Chinese, I kid you not. Have no idea how to pronounce any of it, oddly enough, but then ideograms are funny that way… Anyway, big release just went out, nice to see… Seems to be making a lot of people in nations I’ve never actually visited happy.
b) Sick. Missed a recent and very large ski show immediately down the street, which should give you an idea how sick. Annoying. But what are ya gonna do.
… and that’s all fer now (heads off to make hot toddy…).
a) Did a lot of niggly little GUI cleanups and smoothings (along with some heavier feature additions vastly hardening typeface and virtual keyboard support) to that PSPKVM (a Java VM for the PSP) project I’d been helping out with. Vastly expanded multilingual support, smoothed/eased text input and general UI/useability stuff, mostly. And in the process learned all sorts of weird little things. I can now read a few characters of Chinese, I kid you not. Have no idea how to pronounce any of it, oddly enough, but then ideograms are funny that way… Anyway, big release just went out, nice to see… Seems to be making a lot of people in nations I’ve never actually visited happy.
b) Sick. Missed a recent and very large ski show immediately down the street, which should give you an idea how sick. Annoying. But what are ya gonna do.
… and that’s all fer now (heads off to make hot toddy…).
06/10: Let them eat MIDI
So I’m all stoked about this being big in China thing, y’know? Exciting stuff…
So in the interests of furthering my fame in distant lands, I’ve also uploaded the following cues from the same project of yesteryear:
Cue 1: MP3, Ogg
Cue 2: MP3, Ogg
Cue 3: MP3, Ogg
(… all never before heard tracks, natch… Exciting stuff, this, I assure you… like discovering new Beatles tapes… only less… umm… Beatlesy…)
The previous tracks were this one (MP3, Ogg) and this one (MP3, Ogg).
(ETA: Oh, hey, there’s also this one: (MP3, Ogg)… More recent, tho…)
So in the interests of furthering my fame in distant lands, I’ve also uploaded the following cues from the same project of yesteryear:
Cue 1: MP3, Ogg
Cue 2: MP3, Ogg
Cue 3: MP3, Ogg
(… all never before heard tracks, natch… Exciting stuff, this, I assure you… like discovering new Beatles tapes… only less… umm… Beatlesy…)
The previous tracks were this one (MP3, Ogg) and this one (MP3, Ogg).
(ETA: Oh, hey, there’s also this one: (MP3, Ogg)… More recent, tho…)
So I got to thinking about a few things after fishing through a couple of videos for Waits’ Big in Japan back in that last post… Turns out, there was no professionally done, official one… And a few well-meaning amateurs had taken their own stabs…
Now, I should preface all of this by saying: look, I’m a shameless dilettante myself. I’ll try any medium for a giggle, on no more motivation than that I’m given to these odd—even random—obsessions, and now and then I lose my mind and think I’m a fucking genius, see? Sure… it would probably be slightly insane even to try doing this on my schedule… but then, it’s not like anyone thinking as much about my sanity is exactly going to be making a novel diagnosis, either…
So this is not to be taken, exactly, as gratuitous abuse of amateurs in over their heads. Hell, considering the subject, here, this would be especially inappropriate. Sir Tom Waits himself has had a few words on the merits of playing and scoring instruments you don’t actually play very well—as a way of breaking yourself out of creative ruts, forcing yourself to do something different. The notion is: you’re not going to lean on your favourite old tropes and motifs if, actually, since you have no idea which end of the theremin is which, you really can’t… So I’m not going to beat up a coupla guys who figure on taking a stab at doing their own videos for Waits just because I found their efforts a bit wanting.
Hell, I kinda admire that, actually. There’s a lot to be said for taking a stab at something and fucking up. I mean, at least you tried…
And hey, I do that a lot myself, after all…
Well, the fucking up part, anyway…
But do let’s talk about the sheer chutzpah of it, at least.
I mean, I got to thinking, watching that stuff: wow, I so wouldn’t even try this, of all things.
Think about it: this is Tom Waits. Man does lyrics that paint pictures all by themselves—it’s kinda what he does, something he does like no one else does. And you figure sticking a video track over it is going to be anything more than gilding the lily at best?
I mean, note even the professionally done stuff he or his label has had done for his stuff is rarely anything more bold than sticking Tom himself, in whichever larger than life character he’s inhabiting for that particular song, up on the screen, mebbe setting the scene around him a bit so his working it works a bit better, mebbe cutting in a few vignette-like bits sketching a bit of the story the lyrics are already telling. The rule the directors they’ve had along have seemed to follow has been: go light. Guy’s on the screen anyway. It’s not like we need to help him much. If we’re smart, rather, we’ll stay the fuck out of his way and let him do his thing.
The other funny thing that struck me here is: both of the pieces I scratched linking to, in their own little way, certainly did seem to try to honour something of the spirit of the song. They didn’t exactly fail for lack of getting it. The one puts up a cheesy, heavy-handed cacophony of images roughly fitting the heavy handed sonic cacophony of the track (rubber monsters and cheesecake photos, mostly), the other tries to pick up a bit of the character of the presumed narrator. Both decent ideas, or at least the germs of them…
But you need more than that, obviously. Lacking any kind of narrative structure, neither one of them can stand in the same room as the lyric, even in its shadow (as the professional stuff officially issued for Waits’ tracks usually does). Both get tedious, repetitive. Both suffer horribly from Lord Privy Seal syndrome (Oh! He said ‘dog’! Let’s have a shot of the dog, now…).
And it’s a funny thing, this being the era it is. Are we now living in the era of dilettantes? And there is no longer any medium a wistful amateur cannot try, and cannot get some measure of distribution for? And will a day maybe even come where organized, collaborating amateurs will be regularly doing stuff like this that actually does rise to the status of solid, enviable art?
Anyway, all that said, I am, remember, just as possessed of stark, raving hubris as anyone. So my other thought on this is: if Anti or Waits did ever take it into their heads that song could use a video, I do think they could borrow an idea from the rubber monster folk of the latter video, at least…
Me, I see a claymation feature telling the story of the career of a claymation sea monster. It arrives in Tokyo, stomps some buildings…
The crowd loves it. We see it on the cover of many Japanese magazines, being interviewed on Japanese television. Frequently, at the end of the interviews, it eats the hosts…
It gets sponsorship deals for endearingly odd Japanese consumer products, lives high on the adulation of the masses a while in that nation… does some fights with a claymation Tyson, also exiled to Japan, for some reason…
And then it tries to go overseas, make a career of it in America, too…
It doesn’t make it. The American audiences aren’t getting it. And then there’s a scandal, involving a claymation Paris Hilton… It becomes a subject of opening monologues on nighttime talk shows, not a guest…
On a downward spiral, he does a bad turn on ‘Dancing With the Stars’. But the old schtick just isn’t selling. When our monster eats his partner (a claymation Whoopi Goldberg), there’s outrage, not adulation. We see a claymation agent ripping up his contract. He’s kicked to the curb…
He hits skid row. We see our sea monster drinking hard from a claymation bottle…
But then a beautiful, doe-eyed fan who’d been following him on and off from his roots, and watching this whole thing sadly from the wings, steps into the centre of the stage, finally… She shakes him out of it, slaps him in the face a few times, dries him out…
We close in a smoky little club in Chinatown in New York City. It’s a small crowd, but it’s his crowd, and they love him… He eats the drummer… The crowd cheers… His doe-eyed manager smiles at him from the wings… Roll credits…
(/I’m tellin’ ya, babe… Put a claymation Waits and band in there, popping up to sing and play, now and then, mebbe have ‘em back up the monster in the final scene, and it’s gold… Have yer answering machine call my answering machine, Tom… They can do lunch.)
Now, I should preface all of this by saying: look, I’m a shameless dilettante myself. I’ll try any medium for a giggle, on no more motivation than that I’m given to these odd—even random—obsessions, and now and then I lose my mind and think I’m a fucking genius, see? Sure… it would probably be slightly insane even to try doing this on my schedule… but then, it’s not like anyone thinking as much about my sanity is exactly going to be making a novel diagnosis, either…
So this is not to be taken, exactly, as gratuitous abuse of amateurs in over their heads. Hell, considering the subject, here, this would be especially inappropriate. Sir Tom Waits himself has had a few words on the merits of playing and scoring instruments you don’t actually play very well—as a way of breaking yourself out of creative ruts, forcing yourself to do something different. The notion is: you’re not going to lean on your favourite old tropes and motifs if, actually, since you have no idea which end of the theremin is which, you really can’t… So I’m not going to beat up a coupla guys who figure on taking a stab at doing their own videos for Waits just because I found their efforts a bit wanting.
Hell, I kinda admire that, actually. There’s a lot to be said for taking a stab at something and fucking up. I mean, at least you tried…
And hey, I do that a lot myself, after all…
Well, the fucking up part, anyway…
But do let’s talk about the sheer chutzpah of it, at least.
I mean, I got to thinking, watching that stuff: wow, I so wouldn’t even try this, of all things.
Think about it: this is Tom Waits. Man does lyrics that paint pictures all by themselves—it’s kinda what he does, something he does like no one else does. And you figure sticking a video track over it is going to be anything more than gilding the lily at best?
I mean, note even the professionally done stuff he or his label has had done for his stuff is rarely anything more bold than sticking Tom himself, in whichever larger than life character he’s inhabiting for that particular song, up on the screen, mebbe setting the scene around him a bit so his working it works a bit better, mebbe cutting in a few vignette-like bits sketching a bit of the story the lyrics are already telling. The rule the directors they’ve had along have seemed to follow has been: go light. Guy’s on the screen anyway. It’s not like we need to help him much. If we’re smart, rather, we’ll stay the fuck out of his way and let him do his thing.
The other funny thing that struck me here is: both of the pieces I scratched linking to, in their own little way, certainly did seem to try to honour something of the spirit of the song. They didn’t exactly fail for lack of getting it. The one puts up a cheesy, heavy-handed cacophony of images roughly fitting the heavy handed sonic cacophony of the track (rubber monsters and cheesecake photos, mostly), the other tries to pick up a bit of the character of the presumed narrator. Both decent ideas, or at least the germs of them…
But you need more than that, obviously. Lacking any kind of narrative structure, neither one of them can stand in the same room as the lyric, even in its shadow (as the professional stuff officially issued for Waits’ tracks usually does). Both get tedious, repetitive. Both suffer horribly from Lord Privy Seal syndrome (Oh! He said ‘dog’! Let’s have a shot of the dog, now…).
And it’s a funny thing, this being the era it is. Are we now living in the era of dilettantes? And there is no longer any medium a wistful amateur cannot try, and cannot get some measure of distribution for? And will a day maybe even come where organized, collaborating amateurs will be regularly doing stuff like this that actually does rise to the status of solid, enviable art?
Anyway, all that said, I am, remember, just as possessed of stark, raving hubris as anyone. So my other thought on this is: if Anti or Waits did ever take it into their heads that song could use a video, I do think they could borrow an idea from the rubber monster folk of the latter video, at least…
Me, I see a claymation feature telling the story of the career of a claymation sea monster. It arrives in Tokyo, stomps some buildings…
The crowd loves it. We see it on the cover of many Japanese magazines, being interviewed on Japanese television. Frequently, at the end of the interviews, it eats the hosts…
It gets sponsorship deals for endearingly odd Japanese consumer products, lives high on the adulation of the masses a while in that nation… does some fights with a claymation Tyson, also exiled to Japan, for some reason…
And then it tries to go overseas, make a career of it in America, too…
It doesn’t make it. The American audiences aren’t getting it. And then there’s a scandal, involving a claymation Paris Hilton… It becomes a subject of opening monologues on nighttime talk shows, not a guest…
On a downward spiral, he does a bad turn on ‘Dancing With the Stars’. But the old schtick just isn’t selling. When our monster eats his partner (a claymation Whoopi Goldberg), there’s outrage, not adulation. We see a claymation agent ripping up his contract. He’s kicked to the curb…
He hits skid row. We see our sea monster drinking hard from a claymation bottle…
But then a beautiful, doe-eyed fan who’d been following him on and off from his roots, and watching this whole thing sadly from the wings, steps into the centre of the stage, finally… She shakes him out of it, slaps him in the face a few times, dries him out…
We close in a smoky little club in Chinatown in New York City. It’s a small crowd, but it’s his crowd, and they love him… He eats the drummer… The crowd cheers… His doe-eyed manager smiles at him from the wings… Roll credits…
(/I’m tellin’ ya, babe… Put a claymation Waits and band in there, popping up to sing and play, now and then, mebbe have ‘em back up the monster in the final scene, and it’s gold… Have yer answering machine call my answering machine, Tom… They can do lunch.)
29/09: Big in... China?
So one of the ongoing enduring oddities I notice whenever I check this site’s stats is that a particular cue I wrote for a video project somethin’ like a few years ago still gets several hundred hits a month, rain or shine…
It tends to stick out because, being an audio file, it’s large enough that a few hundred hits adds up to a bit of bandwidth. Not enough to break the bank, no. Just one of those funny things…
Looks like the listeners are coming in from points around China… I’m guessing this is maybe because a particular MP3 services lists it in a language convenient to said surfers… I think… Seein’ as I can’t really read the pages, even with translation, well enough to work out exactly what’s going on, it’s hard to say for sure…
I find it strangely… amusing to think that somewhere in China, people are listening to this fanfare (mp3… ogg version is here), who knows why…
Anyway. Take it away, Tom…
(ETA: …video now with 90 percent less cheese…)
(/Yes, I know Japan is very much not China. But y’know… closest I had handy…)
It tends to stick out because, being an audio file, it’s large enough that a few hundred hits adds up to a bit of bandwidth. Not enough to break the bank, no. Just one of those funny things…
Looks like the listeners are coming in from points around China… I’m guessing this is maybe because a particular MP3 services lists it in a language convenient to said surfers… I think… Seein’ as I can’t really read the pages, even with translation, well enough to work out exactly what’s going on, it’s hard to say for sure…
I find it strangely… amusing to think that somewhere in China, people are listening to this fanfare (mp3… ogg version is here), who knows why…
Anyway. Take it away, Tom…
(ETA: …video now with 90 percent less cheese…)
(/Yes, I know Japan is very much not China. But y’know… closest I had handy…)
… this too. I have no explanation.
(/But there was no need to look for it. The more properly haunting studio version lives on a few disks, ‘round here… Sorta as did Catcher in the Rye in Conspiracy Theory…)
Had an inexplicable craving to hear this again, the other day. Not sure why. Mebbe it was playing at just sub-audible levels somewhere as I was walking past, sunk in, suggested itself… mebbe it’s just a long lost subroutine returning from the depths of the 80s…
And mebbe it’s just that it’s still one awfully powerful composition. Anyway. Realized the tape had disappeared—who knows to where. And sought the CD. And found it. And then found this, too.
24/07: Sir... you there on fire...
… or ma’am… Point is: anyone I know in the vicinity of Kelowna who is not currently on fire, or who is only smoking slightly, if you happen to read this between fleeing the flames, please take a minute to write, let me know to assure me yer all right/update me on how bad the burns are, etc… I seem presently to be having some trouble with my address book… Migrated this disk a while back, long story…
Oh. Wait. Found it. Never mind. Guess I can send out some emails.
Me, I’m alive ‘n all. It’s quiet, is all…
Too quiet. Like the calm before the storm. Or the moment in the Western just before the gang of outlaws shows up and moons everyone (it’s a comedy… or at least that’s what the director intended, but no one’s laughing). Or like at the family dinner table after Uncle Joe tells that incredibly racist and unfunny joke everyone’s too embarrassed to tell him really needs never to be repeated again ever… Whichever…
About that cowboy film, it gets stranger: sure, some folks are laughing, but for all the wrong reasons, at all the wrong times, and in all the wrong ways… And out of the blue, critics start hailing it as a stinging, satirical masterwork of surrealism, a brilliant and knowing repudiation of all that is wrong in modern cinema, reminiscent of Fellini at his best… It wins the Palme d’Or… And the director, who had once been quite oddly proud of simply being all that is wrong with modern cinema, is unhinged by this unexpected success, and commits suicide immediately after the awards ceremony by shotgunning twelve bottles of champagne—after giving a bizarre, rambling thank you speech in which he thanks everyone on a tiny Pacific island he’s never visited for making him the man he is—and then doing a headfirst dive into an empty hot tub…
The critics love that, too, and award him a Palme d’Or for this performance as well. Posthumously, natch.
Anyway. News: little. Head down, working, developing cabin fever. Yesterday, I made a long chain of paper dolls, named them, re-enacted The Tempest with them, but it was kinda lame, because half the cast were all soggy and limp from that shipwreck it starts with, and neither Caliban nor Prospero really got into their parts… the monster kept singing these cheery Broadway showtunes, which, sure, was monstrous, but not particulary in character, and Prospero just wasn’t coming off as particularly bright. Shoulda known. You never cast the dumb paper doll as Prospero…
Yeah, I guess that’s just about it. Work feels like drudgery. Sure, everyone says that, and probably seeing as (a) I’m working, and (b) it’s not at a landfill in the third world feeding myself with scraps of linen boiled in a kettle, I shouldn’t be bitching, but what can ya do.
Head down… head down (… heads regretfully back to work muttering…)
Oh. Wait. Found it. Never mind. Guess I can send out some emails.
Me, I’m alive ‘n all. It’s quiet, is all…
Too quiet. Like the calm before the storm. Or the moment in the Western just before the gang of outlaws shows up and moons everyone (it’s a comedy… or at least that’s what the director intended, but no one’s laughing). Or like at the family dinner table after Uncle Joe tells that incredibly racist and unfunny joke everyone’s too embarrassed to tell him really needs never to be repeated again ever… Whichever…
About that cowboy film, it gets stranger: sure, some folks are laughing, but for all the wrong reasons, at all the wrong times, and in all the wrong ways… And out of the blue, critics start hailing it as a stinging, satirical masterwork of surrealism, a brilliant and knowing repudiation of all that is wrong in modern cinema, reminiscent of Fellini at his best… It wins the Palme d’Or… And the director, who had once been quite oddly proud of simply being all that is wrong with modern cinema, is unhinged by this unexpected success, and commits suicide immediately after the awards ceremony by shotgunning twelve bottles of champagne—after giving a bizarre, rambling thank you speech in which he thanks everyone on a tiny Pacific island he’s never visited for making him the man he is—and then doing a headfirst dive into an empty hot tub…
The critics love that, too, and award him a Palme d’Or for this performance as well. Posthumously, natch.
Anyway. News: little. Head down, working, developing cabin fever. Yesterday, I made a long chain of paper dolls, named them, re-enacted The Tempest with them, but it was kinda lame, because half the cast were all soggy and limp from that shipwreck it starts with, and neither Caliban nor Prospero really got into their parts… the monster kept singing these cheery Broadway showtunes, which, sure, was monstrous, but not particulary in character, and Prospero just wasn’t coming off as particularly bright. Shoulda known. You never cast the dumb paper doll as Prospero…
Yeah, I guess that’s just about it. Work feels like drudgery. Sure, everyone says that, and probably seeing as (a) I’m working, and (b) it’s not at a landfill in the third world feeding myself with scraps of linen boiled in a kettle, I shouldn’t be bitching, but what can ya do.
Head down… head down (… heads regretfully back to work muttering…)
