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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Life

  • I love cartoons

    This one’s going to run a bit long, I’m afraid. Apparently 2008 is my Year Of The Teal Deer…

    For as long as I can remember I have loved the fantastical. The stories I seek and enjoy tend to involve things that are outside the dry, sane, normal world we inhabit. There are limits, of course. I watched “Mirrormask” a while back, and it was just a bit over the top for me. This gives you an idea about my tame boundaries. Or perhaps it’s better to say that I prefer a fantasy well-grounded in solid characterization and sense-of-place and at least a moderately sensible storyline.

    Perhaps I’m introducing my topic by way of a tangent. I’m allowed to do that, dammit.

    I’m a visually-oriented person when it comes to my entertainment. Listening to music is often just a conduit for my imagination to concoct wild stories with vivid imagery. Reading a story, of course, conjures similar pictures in the mind. So it’s no surprise that I like a good movie or television show, one with good characters and an interesting story and, of course, some element of the fantastic. Now, it’s certainly possible to make such a presentation with live actors and physical sets. They often fall apart, however, when it comes time to introduce the “out there” elements via props or computer-generated graphics or what-have-you. There’s a seam where the people and props and physical sets end and the effects and matte paintings and other glued-on-bits begins. Seeing the boundary between reality and make-believe can take a person right out of the experience.

    One way around this problem is to make the entire presentation out of squiggly lines and broad swaths of color. You turn to animation. Cartoons. Sequential-art motion pictures.

    Okay, now you’ve leveled the playing field. The people look just as made-up as the magic, or the alien technology, or whatever. There is no more seam to worry about. You can go wild with incredible feats of strength, bizarre locations, amazing powers, and all of that fun stuff without bumping up against budgetary concerns (relatively speaking, animation budgets still exist and must be adhered to but they aren’t as wild as something like James Cameron’s “Titanic“) or further crimes against the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. Let’s face it, you have to suspend pretty damned hard to get into an animated story to begin with.

    The downside? Fake people and fake places. It’s harder to connect with the characters when they’re obviously not really people. That doesn’t stop us from connecting with characters in a book, so it isn’t really much of a stretch when you think about it. There are some upsides, such as being able to exaggerate features and physical reactions for comedic effect. Also, you only have to worry about paying A-list acting talent the going rate for voice work, and there’s rarely a compelling reason to do so in the first place. You’re not paying them to look recognizable, after all, so what do you need ’em for? In fact, giving a character a too-recognizable voice can break the immersion. Irony, that.

    Let’s get down to cases, though. It’s one thing to ramble aimlessly about what’s good and what’s bad about a given storytelling medium, but I should at least try to back all this silly verbage up with some examples.

    Take “Avatar: The Last Airbender” for instance. (You thought I was going to go straight for the anime, didn’t you? Hah!) It’s a touching, imaginative, noble and occasionally hilarious adventure story about a boy who can fly, control water, make huge boulders jump, and shoot fire out of his hands and feet. (I know I’m vastly oversimplifying, fellow fans. Bear with me.) Go ahead and tell me how one could reasonably expect to tell an epic story about this kid in a live-action medium without spending billions of dollars in special effects. Yes, I’ve heard about M. Night “I See Dead People” Shyamalan and his impending film project. I also have no idea how he’s going to make it not suck. I wasn’t tossing around the word “epic” for fun, after all. We’re talking about a story that is taking 60 23-minute segments to complete over the course of three years. There’s some filler material, sure, but not as much as one would think. (Keep in mind the difference between “pausing between heavily dramatic or busy segments for the sake of story flow” and “pointless filler to drag things out as long as possible”.) To make a film, huge chunks of the plot will be excised, as will many of the memorable characters and locations. You couldn’t do it on television without an insane effects budget… which means you couldn’t do it without getting canceled partway through the story. I hate when that happens, don’t you? This is less often a problem in animation, since the budget and the broadcast network buy-in usually happens up front, before a single episode airs.

    Alchemy. It’s all fun and games until someone creates an abomination and loses a limb. Over the course of 52 televised episodes and a follow-up feature film, “Fullmetal Alchemist” tells the story of the Elric brothers who tried to bring their mother back to life, against the fundamental dictates of alchemical science (human transmutation is strictly forbidden). The first brother is missing two limbs, one spent in the effort to resurrect Mom and the other sacrificed to save his little brother’s soul. His replacement limbs are basically cybernetic, in a steampunk/magical sort of way. The other brother’s soul inhabits an otherwise-empty suit of armor. They start out with a simple goal: To regain their bodies. Along the way, as in any good epic quest story, they learn that what they seek is both more complicated and more expensive than they originally guessed. Let’s not forget the rogue’s gallery of exotic magical villains, and the constant turning of stuff into other stuff just by drawing a magic circle and pouring some energy in. A live-action rendition of such a story may, in fact, be an impossibility. That’s a damned shame, ’cause it’s one hell of a story on which I’d hate to have missed out. It’s true that FMA started out as a manga (comic book, of sorts) but I’ve discovered a weakness within myself, namely that I find action sequences in still-image form to be both hard to follow and generally unsatisfying. If I can’t see the flow of things, the interplay of motion and countermotion, the whole thing falls apart. Also, I like hearing the voices. (It’s better than having every character sound like my own internal monologue.) So I’ll always be more a fan of the anime than of the manga… even though I’ve heard that the manga goes into some different and rather interesting directions. I should look into that some day, indeed.

    I’ll give you one more example before I go. One film, more than any other, cemented in my mind the fact that animation is an entertainment field that I would remain loyal to for life. In retrospect it’s amusing that I love this movie so much since my initial experiences of it involved a horribly hacked-up version with an uneven English voice dub track. I’m talking, of course, about “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind“. You can probably also blame this movie for my years of heroine addiction, come to think on it. Take an outspoken warrior princess, have her take the side of nature against the war machines of “progress,” throw in a swarm of gigantic bugs and some aerial combat and oh yeah a massive vaguely-humanoid war robot with the death laser from hell spouting from its maw, and you have a recipe for something entirely relevant to my interests. Well, okay, I don’t like bugs. That’s another reason why Nausicaa works in animated form rather than something made with live-action and props and CGI: I don’t want to look at swarms of realistic-looking bugs! I want my bugs nice and cartoony, damn it all. (I watched “Arachnophobia” once. Once.)

    At any rate, I hope I’ve enlightened you all somewhat on what makes animated material so appealing to this little grey duck. Thank you, and good day.

  • That would explain the telepathy, then.

    Here’s an example of the way my mind works: A sign on the MAX train informed me, or so I briefly thought, that “Twins are equipped with 2-way radios.”

    Well, no, they’re not. But trains are. Until my brain does a parity check on textual input, I often receive first impressions that are wildly off kilter. The amusing instances tend to get shared with whomever is handy. And by “amusing” I usually mean “naughty.” So it’s best not to inquire as to with what else I may have thought twins are equipped.

    But anyway.

    I’m scarfing down some comfort food, a steak burrito from Chipotle, after a long day at the office. And that’s all I can say about that. So let’s talk about the commute. On the way to work I listened to most of Garbage’s “Version 2.0,” while the soundtrack for the homeward trek consisted of most of Depeche Mode’s “Playing The Angel.” (Most of, I say, because I didn’t start listening soon enough to actually finish either album before disembarking the train.) Both of these albums aren’t quite as good as I’d hoped, though Garbage comes out well ahead on stars.

    Stars, you ask? My new toy, the Insignia Pilot, comes with a handy “rating wheel” with which I can assign those ubiquitous one-to-five-stars ratings to the currently playing track. (This is all Apple’s fault. Damn you, iTunes! Now Winamp has ’em, as does Amarok, as does Foobar2000, and so on, and so on. Then again, I’m making use of them to a limited extent, so I suppose all is forgiven.) As I listen, and if I have the player in my hand, I can simply jog the wheel one way or the other as my impression of the song changes. My rating system goes something like this:

    1. Please don’t play this song ever again. I hate mopping up the blood coming out of my ears.
    2. This is not a song I would go out of my way to listen to. I might even go out of my way to avoid doing so.
    3. Not great, not bad, this song is probably best used as background music.
    4. Oooh, I like this song! I’ll probably load it into a playlist at home when I’m enjoying a “tuning out” session.
    5. This song rocks my socks, and I don’t care what anybody else thinks of it. My love is pure and knows no bounds.

    “Playing The Angel” sports a distressing number of one-star tracks. I didn’t realize it was quite that bad when I ran my original “background music” tests last year. Much of the album’s middle portion consists of what I can best describe as stoner-goth make-out music. Ugh. Apparently I need to get Dave Gahan’s “Hourglass” loaded onto the Pilot for comparison. I like the first three tracks well enough but I haven’t given the new album a full, in-depth session.

    It’s already after 8pm, which only surprises me until I remember that I didn’t get home until almost 7:30. I think now’s a good time to save and publish this rambling bit of lunacy so I can watch some nice, wholesome Japanese cartoons…

  • 2007. Not a great year, not a horrible year.

    Perhaps I ought to wait until the last day of the year to bash out some thoughts about the dozen months gone by, but knowing how well I’ve stuck to my writing plan lately I’d probably end up writing this in mid-January… or not at all, most likely. (Let’s not dwell upon how many things I meant to write about but never did, and now can’t because I’ve lost too many of the details. Ugh.)

    Two thousand seven, the year that was… after the break. (more…)

  • Blank pages rarely inspire.

    Just because I have a place to write doesn’t mean that I have anything to say.

    I wonder how much my lack of writing output is because my life isn’t terribly interesting. Not that it ever was, I suppose. Maybe I’ve just lost my enthusiasm for talking about myself. What’s to say? “More of the same, yep! Some parts of my life are good, some parts are bad, and I’m tired a lot!” I don’t want to be the broken record guy, you know?

    I want to change things up, but the pressures of my life keep squeezing me into the same routine whether I like it or not. I’m not even getting the basics done, most of the time. (Let’s not talk about how long it’s been since I last shopped for groceries.) The good parts of my life are good, make no mistake. I’m not complaining about the core parts. My health is as good as ever, there isn’t any relationship drama to speak of, my kids are their usual outstanding selves, nothing has broken or burned lately.

    And yet, I’m tired all of the time. I don’t make very good company nowadays because I tend to yawn, fade, or otherwise wind down once the clock ticks past 8pm. To get a “decent night’s sleep” I have to crawl into bed shortly after 9pm, and that’s still no guarantee. Nightmares and insomnia are regular visitors in my psyche.

    All of the projects I say that I want to accomplish require me to get home with enough energy to want to do more than curl up and veg out. I’m not sure what I can do about this. One proposed solution is to move closer to my work… which takes me away from nearly everyone I care about, which means I’ll only see them on weekends, which means my weekends will be overbooked, which means I’ll start work Monday feeling like I haven’t rested at all and still won’t have put in nearly enough quality time with my loved ones.

    Hmm, I think not.

    The other solution is just as plausible: Change jobs. And the less said about that notion the better, here.

    So. Much of my life is good, but my ability to enjoy what’s good is hampered by the parts of my life that aren’t so good. Fun, eh?

  • I’ll miss that old tree.

    The Sitka spruce along Highway 26 fell down. For some reason this saddens me more than finding out that SixApart has sold LiveJournal to a Russian outfit called SUP.

    Here. Enjoy the two pictures I have of a big old tree.

    This is not an auspicious beginning to my December, folks.

  • Second Chances, Re-evaluations

    In attempting to make a positive-minded effort toward combating the general atmosphere of malaise I’ve suffered for most of the last couple of years, I’ve been taking stock and rethinking some aspects of my life. Some parts of my life I simply can’t change, and I find myself reciting the so-called Serenity Prayer on occasion. I find this amusing because, one, I don’t pray anymore and, two, every time it comes to mind I think back on the bad old days of youth when Mom was in and out of 12-step rehab programs.

    But I digress. I enjoy digression, mind you.

    On the personal front, Kyla and I have agreed to take another shot at the “relationship thing.” Over the last couple of months we’ve had some of the most open and effective communication out of our entire time together, and I think we might be able to function as a healthy pairing once again. Time will tell, of course, but the last couple of weeks have been consistently positive in that regard.

    On another personal front, Lil’ and I continue our struggle against the vagaries of work schedules and other conflicts to maintain something resembling a healthy, ongoing relationship. Text messaging is our friend, for good or ill. Yesterday she received the welcome news that starting in mid-December she’ll be working a nice, normal Monday-to-Friday daytime shift. The gods rejoice! This won’t solve all of our scheduling problems, but it certainly won’t hurt.

    On the family side of things, my kids are awesome. Not that this is really news, but it bears mentioning when both of ’em come home with excellent report cards and are getting high praise from their teachers. Erica, particularly, has shown incredible improvement in attitude and effort this year. Neither of them are “straight A” students, but they’re pulling down better grades than I ever did at their age and they’re on track to become decent adult human beings as well (which is more important). I’m intensely proud of them both.

    One of the areas in which I’ve found myself lacking this year is in my writing, here and elsewhere. I run an anime forum and barely write there. I host this journal and barely note the highlights of my existence in it. I belong to several online communities in which I fail to participate. I have story ideas that never make it outside the confines of my skull. My schedule (and all the distractions surrounding it) precludes much in the way of extracurricular activities, but at least one of these complaints can be addressed if I simply start using my journal again more like the way I used to. Well, I might not post so many damned memes. I’ll spare you that much.

    In my search for ways to make journal writing a regular event again, I looked into offline editors like BlogJet, BlogDesk and Windows Live Writer. They’re all decent products, even the Microsoft product, but none of them support WordPress 2.3’s tags yet so that idea’s right out for the time being. Instead I’m going to go back to a simple idea that might just work: I’m going to set my browser start page back to this journal. I don’t remember when I got away from that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the day I changed that setting (first to Yahoo’s then to Google’s portal page) coincides with the major decline in posting here. We’ll find out over the next few weeks if my crazy idea pans out, won’t we?

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