fine whine

I've been reading lately in part because I enjoy reading and also because the library's doing their summer reading club, whereby I stand the slight chance of winning things in a drawing. Entries are based on the number of books I read.

I recall the reading clubs of my youth, which netted me many a free McDonald's hamburger or Pizza Hut personal pan pizza. Back then I would sometimes play one local library against the other, checking the same book from both and getting credit twice, and other times I'd claim I'd read books I hadn't finished. Guilt aside, the only problem with the latter approach was when the librarian would quiz me on a random book, and occasionally I'd find myself fabricating a book based on the cover image and the rest of my imagination, or another book altogether. I wasn't caught once.

Now, for the adult program, I don't even need to summarize the books or give a report. All I need do to enter the drawing is to write the title, my name and numbers, and throw it in a box. What could be easier?

Now while I am tempted to enter books I'd read before the contest began, or books I have at home, I've been trying to be somewhat honest with this. Every entry records my library card number, and it is probably trivial for the librarians to check if I have, in fact, checked out a book I've claimed to read. In the spirit of total disclosure, though, I've begun checking out books after I've read them, though only one so far: Cory Doctorow's Down and out in the Magic Kingdom. Then again, I read it after the contest began.

I read it online in minutes here and there, in a tiny browser window at the bottom of my screen. It was an easy enough read, and though heavily Disney-otaku-esque (it takes place in the park, after all) it was a fairly enjoyable book/HTML page. I read it in less than a day, and still got my work done. It was a light day.

Cory also offers his other books in free digital formats, and I'd attempted to start Eastern Standard Tribe but wasn't able to focus on it that day and still get my work done.

It did not help that the latter book is not conventionally linear, but two parts of the same story that alternate chapters. In the end it all fits together, but it's difficult to begin, particularly when I'm only able to read one or two lines at at time. Not to worry, I realized, as I had just reserved both novels from the library.

Well, since then I have read EST and it too was enjoyable enough. But that's not what this is about.

In Down and out the concept of 'deadheading' is mentioned, a form of cryogenic sleep or some such preservation of living people over long periods of time. In that book people do it as a form of one-way time travel, waiting around until the timer stops or something interesting triggers them to thaw and rejoin the living and breathing.

Another book I've read, Iron sunset by Charles Stross, mentions 'deadheading' but in a sense more like its current (well, current as of Abagnale's Catch me if you can) airline meaning--namely, a pilot who is a passenger--though only in the sense that it is for travel. Stross's deadheads are passengers on interstellar liners who paid for the economy class and are deep-frozen or otherwise in stasis. The richer passengers get to experience the luxuries of the ship and so on and so forth.

I just found it odd that both authors used the same word. This is by far not the only time two writers have 'coined' the same thing, nor will it be the last. Like I said, it was just odd, particularly since I'd read the books so closely together.

Personally, I'd use the term 'hiber-nauts'. Or, if you're a burgeoning writer, you can. Without the quotes and the hyphen, if you're bold enough. Just drop me a line, okay?

One of these days I might write a story about that sort of thing, and then, well, I'll use it. Which will make me look like the copycat, if the hypothetical burgeoning writer used it first. Such is life.

In the book Coercion by Doug Rushkoff the idea is presented that spatial relationships matter in the movie-watching experience. In a nutshell (by which I mean I can't remember it correctly) the angle from which you view a movie screen affects how your brain (and you with it) experiences the movie. According to him, according to a source I've forgotten, sitting right of center of the screen forces the eyes upward and to the left, which is something of a primordial cue to the brain to start up the analytical left side. Sitting to the left, looking right, accesses the more creative right side. So Rushkoff recommends to those seeking to love a movie to sit on the left side.

Well, tonight, in order to see the movie (we were watching The Forgotten) but still give Jessica a foot rub (and for her to not move on the sectional) I ended up sitting on the right side of the couch. She had already taken my preferred center seat, and from the beginning I knew my experience would be 'off' as the surround speakers are placed for that seat, not the one I was now in. So it goes. I think that I had the analytic stuff going full tilt, as the film started to roll, off center or otherwise.

Almost immediately I began to notice things about the movie: not things about its story or plot but the actual crafting of the images and sequences. I got distracted playing amateur film geek, as it were.

Speaking of being distracted, today I happened across a puzzling vanity plate: BABE HMR. I was unable to come up with too many words other than "Hammer" or "Hummer" for those latter three letters. Neither seemed quite appropriate for the mid-fifties woman driving the minivan.

Back to the movie, though. As I mentioned, I constantly found myself distracted by what I was watching. One thing that I noticed was that significant plot points happened at very specific timecodes. An important revelation appears just at the fifteenth minute. Julianne's on the run at 00:30. Something really, really big happens at the big 01:00, and the last thirty minutes is clearly Act 3. Everything plugs into the formula.

The cinematographer had a formula, too, though I think I caught a few missteps wherein the camera was shaky when the characters were secure but I'm not positive. I was hyper-aware of the cinematography, though, and the shaking camera and skewed (almost 60s-Batman-esque) angles really took me out of the whole audience experience (apparently this was often a side effect of the long lenses with which they tightened up so many of the shots, as the commentary revealed). So did the editing, with short cuts and quick takes anytime something really distressing's happening. So-called MTV-style editing can work, if done right. This wasn't.

Moreover, the director wanted the shots set in the present (darker, colder times) to be more blue, and shots set in the past (lighter, warmer) to be more golden. That much I noticed, and that much the director explained, but my mind took it a step further. In almost every shot of the 'cold' world few seconds go by without some flash of a warm or hot color somewhere in the frame, be it a red stoplight or taillight, or a fruit stand, or a sign or something else bright. Sometimes the warm color is solely from Julianne's hair.

I may be outthinking them, however. I'm about halfway through reading Learn design with Flash MX which is presented as a story of a class about design and (surprise) Flash MX. I've only gotten about a third of the way through it, enough for the class to have discussed the color wheel and color value schemes. I was taken back to high school art class (the highlight of which was probably my 12 pack box of "Crapple -- made from the worst stuff on earth" being sent to an exhibition of sorts in the local library) but then we hadn't delved to the heart of the matter as this Flash book does: red contrasts very much to blue, in that a tiny bit of red attracts attention even on the biggest expanse of blue (or other colors, since we wouldn't probably need to spot blood smurf-colored-flesh but instead flesh-colored-flesh). I was thinking that the filmmakers were using this effect, but either they didn't reveal it in the commentary or they just happened across it as a happy accident.

It could also be due to the pervasiveness of warm colors and the limited capabilities of post-production to cool them off convincingly. Any way around it I think I was outthinking the movie. That part of it I enjoyed, I think, though I'm sure it annoyed Jessica for me to be pointing out camera angles and colors and whatnot. I'm not sure I really enjoyed the film itself nearly as much as I did the experience of watching it. Generally I rewatch movies for commentary tracks when I enjoyed the film, but in this case I just wanted to hear my ideas voiced by the people I'd thought came up with them first.

I also re-watched it to confirm my theory that Dominic West's (McNulty from The Wire, and he does a great job playing something of the same character) stubble 'grows' in reverse, actually diminishing over the three days of the second two acts, and I think I'm right, though my little DVD player's screen isn't quite up to snuff to really get that detail clear enough and I wasn't going to zoom. It didn't matter quite that much.

Back to the commentary, though, which mentioned something I found interesting: the intensity of an character who never blinks. The director mentions Christopher Plummer not blinking in Dreamscape and Gary Sinise who deliberately did not blink in this film.

It's odd that it took the director explaining that for me to notice, as I am often the first to chime in with the chant of "BLINK!" when a character, well, hasn't for a while. Some of this, I am sure, goes back to Michael Moore's skewering of the unblinking Steve Forbes in The Big One. From now on, I suppose I'll pay even more attention to this, or at least Gary.

Another thing I've noticed about this film is that Julianne's character's name is "Telly". That's a bit obvious, isn't it? She's telling people things the whole time. Telling them! Telly! Get it? Gosh.

Thinking about it now, I suppose that license plate might've been "babe humor" but that doesn't make much sense either.

As much as I like to try and distance myself from the so-called blogosphere (see? I did it just then) I find that I cannot completely abandon it. While I find myself contributing very little to it (this very site is about the extent of it) I nevertheless read an awful lot of what's out there, digital and otherwise. I tend to reserve any book that sounds vaguely interesting that gets mentioned on the internets, and I haven't been too disappointed yet (although The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists by Gideon Defoe wasn't nearly as good as I'd expected. It had great potential but less-than-great execution). I've finished another novel based on a blogger's tip-of-the-hat and I must admit that I liked it a great deal.

The book in question is John Scalzi's Old man's war. It's a SF look at the future of intergalactic competition, war, and old people, with a dash of classic SF homage-ry and sex thrown in here and there. There's enough humor to keep me smiling throughout but few things warrant a guffaw, but that's fine with me. The speculative bits about physics come off as real conversation, not a severe beating with the expository dialogue stick. This is a good thing.

Scalzi's thoughts about the alien cultures is interesting as well, delving into a little more depth than the stock unrationalized bloodlust and all-out thirst for conquest.

To say that I enjoyed Scalzi's book is to admit that Cory Doctorow told me to do so. Well, he was right. So read it, but because I said so, not him.

That said, Cory did manage to get his pullquote atop the back cover. Friends in high places, I suppose...

Thinking now, I would shelve it up with Alan Dean Foster's Codgerspace, which is also an excellent read about old people in the future. That's about the only overlap between the two books. So, read them both, I suppose.

I've got something of an entertainment buzz going. Now that Nano's over and my vacation hold at the library is off (despite only writing four or five days last month I never turned my hold off) the good stuff is just rolling in.

I've been cracking up flipping through Interior desecrations by the very funny Jim Lileks. It's possible that I'm just tired but some of that stuff is side-splitting. Check out this book if you have any sense at all of taste or humour.

Last night I watched Suddenly, a thriller from 1955 that is more known for having Frank Sinatra as a villain than for being a pretty good movie that gives far more screen time to Sterling Hayden than it does to ol' blue eyes. This is not to say that Frankie doesn't turn in a good performance. He turns out to be a pretty decent psycho killer out to make a cool half mil to off the president, but pretty much everybody is good. I haven't seen the other film on the DVD, ostensibly with Frank again as a heroin addict or something like that, but Suddenly is well worth watching. Then again, I like to watch Sterling Hayden. If you have no idea who he is, go out now and track down The killing (one of Stanley Kubrick's forgotten early films about which I have written previously). It's a darn good movie and you shouldn't regret watching it. I don't.

I'm also happy to have finally stumbled across the excellent drama The Wire that HBO's been showing for a couple seasons now. Though it treads on the same turf as Homicide: life on the streets it's a different beast altogether. It's dense, clever, well-written, dark, gritty, and even funny at times, and I'm enjoying it immensely. Altogether I've done well to have waited and had all of these hit me at once.

Harshing the buzz considerably though is the continued stupidity of HBO's DVD people who cannot seem to consistently stick a chapter stop at the end of the opening credits. Why is this so difficult? I cannot be the only person in the world who does not want to sit through the entire theme song every fifty minutes when I'm devouring these shows. I am enjoying this show so much but when I watch five episodes in one night that means I need to fast forward four times (I did want to hear it all the way through, once) and tomorrow night I'll likely need to do it eight more times too if I know the way that I watch these things.

Then again I didn't pay for this (thank you Columbus Metropolitan Library) but I was thinking that I would probably be willing to pay an extra dollar or two (not more than two though) when I do buy discs of a show if it had chapter stops after the opening credits. At least until everybody figures out what the producers of M*A*S*H seem to already know. DVD makers, just put a chapter stop after the opening credits, please, damnit. This just gets to me for some reason.

On the upside, though, now I have a challenge. 'Roundabout the end of episode three ("The buys") I heard a familiar tune, albeit in an unfamiliar fashion. The song was one that I first encountered on the highly underrated soundtrack album for Batman forever called "The hunter gets captured by the game" and as far as I had known until today the song was done first by Tracy Thorn backed up by Massive Attack.

How wrong I was. Though that album is no stranger to cover tunes (Lou Reed's "Passenger" done by INXS's Michael Hutchence comes to mind) I'd never considered this song, one of my favorites of all time, to be one. Well, the one in the show sure didn't sound like Massive Attack and I immediately (and correctly) inferred that the version I knew and loved was likely a cover, but this one could well be also.

So I went out on the web, and I'm still not sure what I heard. Unfortunately "The Wire" is too common to help out on a search, and the HBO forums don't have a good enough search either. I'm pretty sure nobody else has asked about the song on there, and I moved my search over to the good old allmusic guide instead. There I discovered that the song was written by none other than Smokey Robinson and it was probably first performed by the Marvelettes. Unfortunately it's also been done by another five or six artists, too. So now the hunt begins.

I enjoy the hunt.

To say that I was discouraged today about my so-called novel would be an understatement. To say that "I am not going to pretend that I’m not doing so well with my novel." as I did Monday is a bad double negative, and in fact an incorrect statement. I'd meant to say that I wasn't going to pretend that I wasn't doing badly with my novel, which in fact I was. Doing badly with my novel, that is.

I am, of course writing this several days from the date that is above this. I left this as a draft and returned to it only after having given up on said novel, attempting to write another (which I also abandoned) and having written two other entries about such (this and this).

This whole lack of motivation/bad novel thing did not make me happy. As such, in Monday's entry I pretty much trashed Bruce Sterling's Zenith angle, and he dropped by my site within hours to leave me words of encouragement.

Seeing his name in my email (I get a copy of every comment before you ever get to read them), I was totally deflated. Here was a guy whose book I'd said was "very, very bad" and he had seen it. In retrospect the book's not very, very bad, but it's not great. I wrote the words in question mere minutes after putting down the book, the last chapter of which I'd sped through due to annoyance and a nasty headache.

For what it is, and that is a fictionalized look at events parallel to the paradigm shift (sorry, just had to use that phrase) up to and after the 9-11 attacks from the perspective of a practicing geek, the book works. It probably feels more dated now that some of the principal political players have been re-cast as evil, and all the more so since there hasn't been any more major terrorist happenings in the intervening years. At least, not on American soil, where it matters.

So Bruce, thanks for stopping by and for the kind words. I didn't hate your book, and I will in fact pick up others from the library.

Also, in the intervening time, another author dropped by and weighed in on the issue. He's Pauly D, author of Consumer Joe (soon to be made into a feature-length blockbuster film, or perhaps just a TV show) and he's stopped by here before. Nice to see you again, Paul! Now I feel bad for aggregating his blog and never visiting it to leave comments.

Shockingly enough these two aren't even the only published authors to have visited my little corner of the web lately. Lee Goldberg stopped by and commented on my entry about his book Unsold TV pilots. At least I didn't insult him too.

Incidently, I'd deleted that comment accidently, but was able to recreate it from my emails. Sorry about that, Lee. Stop by again some time, okay?

Well, I am not going to pretend that I'm not doing so well with my novel. I need to write over 45,000 words in the next week.

On the upside, I just read Bruce Sterling's The zenith angle and it was really, really bad. Not as bad as what I am writing, but Bruce is a pro. In a way it was a little inspiring.