Monthly Archives: January 2013

Film #1: The Square

January 23, 2013 By in film Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

The Square (Al Midan) tracked five Egyptian revolutionaries from immediately before the fall of Hosni Mubarek until December of 2012.

Overall rating: 2 out of 4

Early in the film, we are introduced to five different people – real Egyptians, really involved in the struggle for a truly democratic government. One was a woman whose occupation and/or qualifications weren’t clear (we were only ever given her name, and only once). One was an actor whose father appeared to also be involved in Egyptian media (although not 100% certain it was his father, although there was a strong resemblance). One was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. One appeared to be a student, although again, his occupation wasn’t given. One was a soldier who did nothing but toe the party line.

The film followed these people from the day that Mubarek stepped down and many Egyptians thought their revolution was over, to the realization that, although Mubarek was gone, they had not achieved their aims of democracy and freedom. The military took over and began issuing orders to the civilian population, restricting their freedoms and occasionally clashing with them, then, when elections were finally held, many people felt that the results of those elections weren’t indicative of the actual wishes of the people.

The filmmakers literally risked their lives, as much of the footage was taken from sites where the military was attacking civilians. Several of the subjects of the film were wounded in the 2 years of filming during various encounters with the military. The action was certainly dramatic.

The film really fell down because there was no cohesive narrative to tie it all together. We began at a very high point – the deposition of Mubarek, when all the subjects celebrated their first victory and felt that the country had come together to achieve something great. Over the next two hours, though, we went from the emotionally high point of Mubarek’s defeat to the realization that the military leaders were lying to the people and curtailing their freedoms, then to the realization that the revolution had lost its coherent center, then to the point where the Muslim Brotherhood took advantage of the political chaos created by the revolution to step in and seize power. By the end of the film, the people we were following seemed confused and defeated.

I feel that, even in a documentary where you’re filming things that are actually happening and where you may need to film a great deal before you can get a sense of what the “what” really is, you have to have some kind of narrative. Humans, as my own research keep saying, love a pattern. Sadly, war is precisely a breakdown of established patterns, so filming and making sense of warlike events is a special talent. One that, I’m afraid, this director is still perfecting.

Great for understanding what’s going on in Egypt. Certainly thought-provoking for me personally as I equate a lot of what Egyptians are fighting for with a lot of what the Occupy movement is fighting for. We’ll see how it stands up to tomorrow’s offering about Occupy Wall Street.

Travel Day

January 22, 2013 By in personal, practical advice Tags: , , , , 7 Comments

I’m en route today from my mountain lair to another mountain lair – Salt Lake City, thence to Park City, Utah. The Pirate and I are heading to Sundance.

The thing I hate most about travel is that it never goes the way I think it will. I always think that I’ll be able to sit down on the plane and concentrate on getting some work done, but that never happens. I can’t concentrate with other people around me, and I always end up feeling self conscious, as though people are looking at me and thinking “Look at that woman, pretending to work.”

This is where introversion most bites me in the ass. Being an introvert means that I live inside my own head, and in my own head, I’m freaked out all the time about everything I ever do, say or think. Will I be able to make this left turn? Will my credit card be accepted? Will I be able to find a parking spot? Will I get into a grizzly accident? These are fair concerns, but I am always able to make the left turn, my credit card is always accepted, I always find parking, and I’ve never been in a grizzly accident. I have no basis for the worry, but worry I do.

So, I will get on the plane and worry that there will not be enough space to stow my stuff. Then I will worry that the person in front of me will put their seat back. It’s stupid worrying about that, because one should only worry if something is a possibility, not if that thing is a certainty. Then I’ll worry that, while I’m engaged in reading something that requires my close attention, my husband will hear or read something amusing that he’ll want to share with me. Then I’ll worry that the flight attendant will want to know what I want to drink, whether I want a mylar bag containing the battered remains of three tiny pretzels or whether I wish to give up my trash to her. Tomato juice, no, and please take it. Maybe I’ll make a sign and stick it in my ear where she’ll be able to read it.

It’s occurring to me that perhaps what I need to be a better traveler is gin. And that 9am in California is 5pm in London – a lovely time for gin.

Harder Than It Looks

January 20, 2013 By in writing Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve done it. I’ve come out to the world. I’ve said it in public and can’t take it back now.

I can fly.

I’ve been able to do it for ages. It’s hard to describe how it works, really. You just sort of jump and then keep going. Steering is all about using your core. You have to have a strong core if you want to fly gracefully. Pilates helps. Fear of falling a very long way helps even more.

When I first told everyone, we’d been hiking all day and had made it to a spot on South Mountain from which you could see the southernmost reaches of Phoenix on the opposite side from downtown. You could actually see where the line of the city ends and the reservation begins. A stark line with slightly down-at-heel suburban stucco housing developments on one side and bare earth on the other.

We were taking turns taking each other’s picture on top of a rock overlooking the view and I said “Hey, guys! I can fly!”  Of course everyone laughed, but Trudy did the stupidest thing. She pushed me.

It took me by surprise, and I fell a good 50 feet before I turned over and surged upward, describing a graceful arc back to where everyone else stood transfixed.

When I landed, everyone was stunned, but I was fuming.

“Trudy, what was that? If I had just been joking, you would have killed me. I would have gone tumbling off the cliff and died. Why did you push me?”

“Lighten up!” Dave said. “You weren’t hurt! You can fly! She didn’t do anything to you!”

“Hey, take me up! I’ll just climb on your back,” Perdy said, and came scrambling up the rock. I hopped down.

“I can’t carry anyone. You’re too heavy,” I said.

“I’m too heavy?” Perdy said, looking hurt. “Look who’s calling me too heavy! You’d think that if you can pull that carcass through the air, you could take little me.”

The rest of the hike back down was really uncomfortable. Trudy acted all hurt because I’d yelled at her, and everyone petted and coddled her as though she were the one who’d been wronged. They immediately treated me as though, by flying, I had done something mean and distasteful, like pulling a crude practical joke.

Lesson #1: People won’t be glad for you.

Flying feels wonderful. Having the wind rushing through my hair, being able to see for miles. That’s really nice. Then again, the higher I go, the colder it is. And when I’m really zipping along, the wind cuts right through my clothes. It’s also tough to find good flying clothes. If they’re too baggy, they flap uncomfortably against my skin. If they’re too tight, they restrict my movement. If they’re too heavy, flying becomes more chore than joy. I’ve settled on that high-tech long underwear that’s made out of plasticky miracle fabrics, and I only put it on when I want to fly.

I look ridiculous. I mean, there’s no disguising my big butt. And there’s especially no disguising it in something that looks like a Superman costume (minus the cape – what the hell was the cape for?). I already knew I looked like an idiot, but Trudy, Dave, Perdy and Karen were all happy to remind me.

I’d pretty much stopped hanging around them. They acted like I’d started flying just to have one up on them, and stopped inviting me out to do regular stuff. I was out flying around because I didn’t have anyone to go to the movies with when they spotted me. I was cruising close to the ground and I heard the familiar sound of their raucous laughter. I landed near where they were picnicking at El Dorado Park, and they immediately started making fun of my outfit.

“You look like 10 pounds of sausage stuffed into a 5 pound casing,” Perdy said.

“You’d think flying would be more aerobic, you know? I would think it would make you lose some weight,” Trudy said, taking a huge bite of sandwich.

I hadn’t said a word, and before the tears could spring to my eyes, I flew off as Dave was saying something I didn’t hear.

Lesson #2: Real people should not dress like superheroes.

It started with getting kittens out of trees. I did it for a while, too, until it was the same kitten for about the sixth time, and I was on my way to a hair appointment and the woman got really nasty.

“But she’s been up there for hours,” she whined.

“Then another hour and a half won’t hurt.”

“It won’t take you five minutes!”

“You’re ten minutes in the opposite direction from my hair appointment. Look, I can’t do it. And you know what? If you just leave her alone, she’ll get out of the tree all by herself.”

“Well, you’re the shittiest superhero I ever heard of,” the woman said before hanging up on me.

I stopped answering my phone after that. Who said I was a superhero? I certainly didn’t. I can’t carry anything heavy when I fly, so it’s not like I can fly up into the mountains and rescue stranded hikers or save airplanes from falling out of the sky. I’m not impervious to injury, as I find out practically every time I’m in the kitchen. And yet, because I can fly, people assume that I have a whole host of other unusual powers.

The chief of police asked me to infiltrate a drug ring. He wanted me to fly around the desert until I found where their big distribution point was, then tell the cops. I told him that I was scared of being seen as I flew around, and that the drug dealers would shoot me, if not right then, after I got home, since there’s nobody else I could be mistaken for. He told me I should turn invisible. When I asked him how I should do that, he acted like I was just being difficult.

The authorities have stopped trying to make use of my particular strength and have taken to just harassing me. I got in trouble for flying without filing a flight plan, but I beat that because I pointed out that the FAA regulates aircraft, and I don’t possess any kind of aircraft. Now they just hang around me when I’m doing normal stuff and ticket me all the time for things like parking too far away from the curb and going 36 in a 35 zone.

Lesson #3: If people can’t use you, they have no use for you.

I’m waiting for that part of my movie where the other people with superpowers show up and take me into the fold. I need someone to tell me how this works. How do I make friends with normal people again? How do I live a normal life? How can I make it through another day without feeling so lonely I just want to fly off the Earth entirely and die? Super my ass.

Neither Love Nor Money

January 13, 2013 By in money, of interest Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

I went to the drug store this evening looking for those plastic scouring-pad things you use on your face. I normally get them in boxes of six, and I use each one until it’s smashed flat and has no fight to it – about two months or so. This particular pharmacy was the most rinky-dink, low-rent, sad-ass operation I’ve ever seen. Their “skin care” aisle was, to be fair, an entire aisle. But there was only one, perhaps two, but no more than four, of each product on the shelf. And they were spaced a hand’s breadth apart. They had one single sad little teardrop-shaped facial cleansing pad in a box for $4.79. I stood there and stared at it for a minute. Because what I’m used to getting is much, much less expensive.

There was not a single instance of another brand of the same product, no similar products. But you know what I did find? Facial cleansing wipes. I won’t even link to them, mostly because if you Google that particular phrase you get over two million results. Which is about how many brands of the things that store had.

Living in northern California, I feel that I’m constantly being bombarded with the message that human beings are killing the planet with their unending appetite for more consumer goods. I’m inundated with the message that I need to consume less, recycle more, be creative about what I use. And yet, the second I step into any consumer good emporium, the message is not just that I must consume more, but that each purchase I make must be made out of the most material it can possibly use. I can’t buy an aseptic quart box of milk (one that can sit on a shelf without refrigeration before it’s opened), but I can buy four tiny aseptic boxes that are then wrapped in more plastic to keep them all together for more than it would cost to buy a regular plastic gallon jug of milk. People still buy disposable diapers, and then they buy those monstrous contraptions that wraps each plastic diaper in more plastic. Now it’s washing our face. I like just buying some face soap and either using my ancient plastic scrubber thingie or a regular wash cloth and washing my face with it, but obviously, I’m not doing it right if, at the end of every process, I don’t have something to throw away.

Some day soon, we’re going to look back on all the shit we threw away, and wonder “what the hell were we thinking?” It’ll be a day when you won’t be able to get any of this stuff for love nor money, and that day is not far off.

Do I Know You?

January 10, 2013 By in personal, practical advice Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the lovely things about the Internet is its ability to bring actual friends closer. Who among us has not gotten back in touch with a long-lost friend or relative through Facebook?

I kind of love Facebook, for all its faults. I know all of my Facebook friends in real life, so it allows me, a person who lives in the middle of the woods and doesn’t attend a lot of social functions, to keep up a conversation with people and think that I’m just as social as they are.

I also like LinkedIn, the Facebook for people with jobs. The problem is that I don’t think people quite get the difference between the two. When originally conceived, LinkedIn was a way for people to endorse friends and co-workers they knew and trusted. The idea was that you would link up with all the people you’ve worked with that you would recommend. Friends of yours who don’t know one another could find each other, with you as intermediary, and know that you endorse them both.

Except that everyone is so brainwashed by the numbers game of Facebook, where the goal is apparently to get as many friends as the application will allow, and then force them to play Farmville with you. LinkedIn doesn’t have Farmville, but because they recognize that nobody understands how to be discriminating anymore and will “connect” with absolutely anybody, they’ve now started asking people to “endorse” their friends. Basically, you click on a person’s picture and a list of random nouns and adjectives come up. If you think they apply to your friend, you click the button and your friend gets an email saying that you’ve endorsed them. It must be new, because people I haven’t worked with in half a decade are suddenly endorsing me, as though I’ve just come to their attention again, like they were all at a party and my name came up.

But back to the numbers game, I keep getting invitations to connect from people I’ve never heard of. People who live in the same county as me. People who worked for the same company as me at some time, but not at a time when I worked there. People who know people who’ve worked with me in a similar field. I always feel a little mean about not accepting their invitations to connect, but I’m more about quality than quantity. My feeling was validated the day I got an invitation to connect with someone I’ve never heard of whose skill is tech writing but whose current job is listed as “Unempolyed at home.” sigh 

I’m never going to connect with you, endorse you, etc. if I’ve never even met you. That’s true on the Internet, but I’m realizing that real-world instances of this haven’t gone away. Today’s mail brought a hand-addressed letter from a neighbor who must live just a few houses over, but in this neighborhood that can be half a mile away. This woman writes me twice a year or so to solicit money for the March of Dimes, sending me a pre-printed card with her actual signature and a handwritten note that usually says something like “please help us out!” I kind of resent that fact that this woman lives within easy walking distance of my house, but in nearly nine years, she has never once knocked on my door to introduce herself, or invited me to her house for a cup of tea.

I’m all for connections. I love being able to remind people I know that they’re important to me and that I care about them. But I’ll be damned if I’ll let someone exploit proximity, electronic or physical, to get me to like them, connect with them, or donate to them.

Where Were We?

January 7, 2013 By in Lithomobilus, reading, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Oh, that’s right. We were talking about where narrative is going. The first thing you have to understand is that “narrative” is not necessarily the same as “writing.” A narrative is just a story – a way of expressing a series of events. The Nutcracker is a narrative told in dance. Peter and the Wolf is a narrative told with music. Guernica is a narrative of the Spanish civil war told in a mural. And there’s the most familiar and accessible form of narrative  – the television.

Since narrative isn’t necessarily literature, let’s pull back and broaden our scope. Some of the most innovative uses for narrative are showing up in games. First-person shooter games like Borderlands (and its sequel Borderlands 2). The great thing about these narratives is that they’re user-driven. The game can control the narrative in some ways, such as not allowing a player access to new chapters until certain criteria have been met, but the player has ultimate control over where they go during the game. As such, the narrative has to be flexible enough to allow the player to understand what they’re doing and how it affects the story, but it also has to be cohesive enough to remain interesting. Granted, people play games in order to overcome challenges and “win,” and that alone is enough to keep a lot of games interesting, but the best games engage the player on a narrative level as well.

Which leads to the next amazing source of new narrative: augmented reality games. The one that’s currently out and available (albeit on a invitation-only basis) is Ingress. These augmented reality games take existing landscape and landmarks and, using a smartphone’s touchscreen and geo-location capabilities, it spins a narrative about things the player can see in their physical environment. Ingress specifically uses pieces of public art, but other games under development use shared experiences like live sporting events and small-town geography to create a narrative that the player can enter at any point and will not follow in any predictable sequence. The challenges of constructing such a narrative, and keeping it compelling and believable sound so exciting to me, I can barely contain myself.

Okay, I’ve caught you up with what actually exists in the way of new narrative. Just wait, though. There’s more. I know the future.

Tell Me a Story

January 5, 2013 By in grad school, reading, Uncategorized, writing Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve started the process of writing my thesis paper for school. I’ve taken as my subject “the future of narrative,” except that, as a paper title, it will be capitalized.

When one starts out to talk about where something is going, what is the first thing one does? That’s right – talk about where it’s been. And it turns out that humans communicate primarily through storytelling, and always have. Think about your typical day. You get up, and maybe you turn on the radio or television to catch the news and traffic before heading out for work. Do the news and radio presenters give you long lists of undifferentiated information? Well, if it’s traffic, yes. Or weather. And sports scores. But all that other stuff? It’s all stories. Narratives about something that happened to somebody, and sometimes what that somebody did about it. Then you go to work or school and talk to your friends or co-workers. How do you talk to them? You tell them stories about things you’ve done or seen or thought about since you saw them last. Then you get home, and if you live with someone, you tell them the story about how your day went. If you don’t, you might call up a friend or two and the whole tribe of you will exchange stories. Or you might watch television – the non-literary narrative device. And, if you’re like me, before you go to sleep, you read a book. My entire day, from beginning to end, is steeped in story.

Now that I think about it, there’s a feature in our tiny town’s local paper that both intrigues and infuriates me – you probably have something similar in your local paper. It’s the police blotter, a place where all the calls to law enforcement are catalogued without any editorial. While it’s interesting to know whether my neighbors have also gotten their mail stolen, I want to know the stories behind these calls.

Here’s a sample:

Jan. 1

1:35 a.m.: A Boulder Creek resident reported that her live-in boyfriend had covered her mouth with one hand and used the other to try to choke her during an argument. The boyfriend had fled by the time deputies arrived at the scene.

What were they arguing about? How long had they lived together? Is this the first time they’ve called the police? How old are they? What happened after the police left?

I need story so much that when I’m bored out in public, I make up stories about the people around me. People at restaurants, people attending the same meeting I’m in, nobody’s safe. And, if asked, I’ll certainly share those stories, even if they’re about you.

Narrative is certainly changing. As technology moves ahead, it enables humans to offload some of the intellectual work of remembering a given story thread, so that stories can be told over longer periods of time. First writing made it possible to save stories for later, kind of like raisins are grapes someone saved for later, which makes the written word the raisin of narrative. Just go with it. Scrolls meant that we could have stories of any length – just start a fresh scroll when you get to the end of the one you’re on now. And whoever uses up the end of a scroll had better get out a new one, because no one likes to sit down at the writing desk and find they’re without a scroll. Not cool. Then books allowed for longer narratives in less space. Then, eons later, electronic media allowed books to take up almost no room at all.

Just wait. Next time, I’ll tell you more about where narrative is going. First, I have to go talk to some of my neighbors. Someone owes me a story.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Fair Lady

January 4, 2013 By in writing Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

As a writer, I’m always examining how I react to things. Why does ZeFrank’s Chillout Song make me cry? Why do I think that Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is brilliant, even though it’s littered with footnotes, which I normally despise?

A couple of days ago, I watched My Fair Lady, the capper to an orgy of movies that included The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Blithe Spirit. The last time I’d watched My Fair Lady, I was a teenager watching it with my father, who thinks it one of the best movies ever.

As I watched it, I realized that most of the musical numbers irritated me. There are 23 musical numbers, including the overture and the finale. Of those, I like The Rain in Spain, and nothing else.

Every other number was either boring or offensive, because to me, the characters themselves were offensive. BUT WAIT! That’s the most important feeling in the world to me. When something bothers me, I feel the need to pick it apart and think about why I feel offended.

On the surface, My Fair Lady has a lot in common with one of my favorite movies ever – A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum. There are dirty old men, young men in love, a lovely young woman, relationships scorned by society. So why is one patently offensive and one a hilarious good time?

What I finally worked out is that in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, everyone is perfectly above board about who and what they are – a discontented husband, a horny teenager, a pimp, a narcissist military jerk, a self-serving trickster – in My Fair Lady, everyone is pretending to be something they’re not. Henry Higgins pretends to be a civilized social scientist. Eliza Doolittle pretends to be an independent-thinking young entrepreneur. Albert Doolittle pretends that being shiftless and lazy is what everyone secretly wants, so no one should look down on him for it. The conceit that Henry Higgins, who shows concern for no one but himself and whose only mode of interaction is bullying and badgering, is actually a swell guy, beloved by his household staff and his good pal Colonel Pickering is ridiculous. Do these people not see what an utter jerk he is? The idea that Eliza Doolittle is such a milquetoast that after six months of abuse at the hands of a domineering monster she would mourn the fact that he doesn’t love her is incredible. Sitting through the scene where Eliza Doolittle’s father Alfred comes to Professor Higgins demanding money, in essence pimping out his own daughter – an act that Higgins supports by giving him the money while Colonel Pickering offered the barest token resistance – was almost physically painful it its awfulness.

Every time I watch AFTHOTWTTF (even shortening it to an acronym is long and awkward), I glory it my favorite song – Everybody Ought to Have a Maid.

Here are four men dancing around and singing about how much fun it is to sexually take advantage of women in no economic position to fend off their advances. While that’s certainly reprehensible, the accompanying video shows no sexual exploitation or objectification of women, but instead makes the men themselves the objects of fun, making the song more about the impossible desires of dirty old men. And nobody in this film is pretending anything different.

Contrast this with the song “With a Little Bit of Luck” from My Fair Lady (I won’t link to it because I hate the song). This song is three men dancing around and a street in London and playing strange pranks on the people they encounter while singing about how “with a little bit of luck,” they’ll be able to evade responsibility, cheat on their spouses, stay intoxicated and con money out of people. And, just to underscore the point, by the end of the picture he’s been rewarded with financial success.

In Forum, everyone gets a happy ending, but at least in that movie, I could believe it. The military jerk gets the twin courtesans, the horny teenager gets the pretty virgin next door, the mother and father get a renewed lease on love, and the trickster gets his freedom. At the end of My Fair Lady Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle get each other, but it’s hard to believe either one would be happy about it. The father is made middle class but resents it, the boy who was in love with Eliza Doolittle gets absolutely nothing.

What have we learned here? I guess that I’ll happily sing and dance with my children to any song in Forum, but if I ever let my kid watch My Fair Lady, there’ll be a huge amount of editorializing going with it.

Literary Conspiracy

January 2, 2013 By in reading Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

One thing I love about the internet is its ability to help me recover memories. For instance, I had a memory of a snatch of song whose lyric went “…the crickets sing you a lullaby by the dying fire…” After a search, I discovered that the song is Garten Mother’s Lullabye.

I still don’t know who might have sung this to me or when I may have heard it. The Pirate originally thought  it might have been one of the many songs my grandmother sang to me when I was a child, but considering that my mother doesn’t know it, I find that unlikely.

But now we come to another mystery. I have a clear memory of a poem I read when I was small. I don’t remember the title of the poem, but I do remember it being about Arethusa, a dolphin. It talked about “her suit of unshrinkable gray.” I thought that the poem might have been by Edward Lear, or possibly Ogden Nash. Sadly, neither of those men ever wrote a poem called “Arethusa” or a poem about a dolphin, although Nash did write poems about an eel, a guppy, a jellyfish, an octopus, a shrimp and a turtle.

Where does this memory come from? I grew up in two households (my parents were divorced when I was very young) full of books, so I know that I read it somewhere. I was frankly surprised not to find it on Googles “copy every book in the entire world and put it in our massive database” project currently being deployed by a crack team of not-actual-Google-employees somewhere on Garcia Drive.

The search for Arethusa has begun to take on the feel of a Search for Arcane Knowledge, as I keep seeing the name in unexpected contexts (that is, any context that does not involve Percy Bysshe Shelley or large navy ships) and I feel that it keeps popping up to mock me.

I will find it, though. Before I die, I will.