Big hurtle

Its easy to do the work when you're a happy camper and everything's going your way. When the bills are paid and everyone under the roof is happy and sipping hot cocoa smiling and laughing it easy to take a long pull from that mug do some work on that script/page/commission. When you're bubbling with energy and everything is in working ordered and everyone is loving your work then there's always a song in your heart you can't wait to punch those keys/layout that page/ink those pencils.

But then you get swamped with work, and not the work you really want to do, the work you need to do if you want to eat and keep the lights on. Then you have to find the time to do the work you want to do. But that's fine. You may get a little less sleep, but that's why we have coffee.

Then you get and honest critique and it becomes apparent that the work that you love and are quite serious about isn't up to par. You're not sure exactly where things got off track, but they did. Fortunately someone cared enough to point this out and not spare your feelings. If you're lucky, they gave you a few tips on getting going in the right direction. So, now you either have to put the work on hold to get your act together or continue to do the work while on a learning curve that can get real steep real fast. So the work you love is now requiring more effort and perhaps testing your love for it. However you are a writer/artist/actor/creator and your shall persevere for your craft.

Then you slip up in your personal life. You said something when you shouldn't have, or you didn't when you should. You weren't there when you really needed to be. You dropped the ball. Then doing the work becomes hard because you're feeling stressed/scared/guilty/depressed/angry and despite what you've hear and read and seen about "tortured artistes" you quickly discover that sucks like a shop vac and you're left feeling like hitting something/drinking something/crying instead of doing the work. You can still do the work, but only after the Xanax kicks in.

That's not to mention the many other distractions that you can easily ignore like sports or going to the movies or playing your X-Box. Or being worried about the world at large and if you're going to maintain gainful employment or if we're all going to die horribly in the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse which will inevitably be triggered by Wendy Williams.

Sure.

Doing the work is a piece of cake.

Paranormal Activity

Halloween being here it was a good time to take in a scary flick. So it was off to the theaters to check out PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. What I really liked was how subtle it was. It seems like most of the horror flicks nowadays are over the top gore fests. This movie got the entire audience to jump in their seats from a door slamming.

I want you to roll that around in your head for a bit.

The movie does fly in the face of every other horror flick to come down the pipe recently. This isn't a super slick production. This isn't CGI every other frame. It's certainly not gory, in fact there's very little blood throughout the entire movie.

So why is it scary? PARANORMAL ACTIVITY does an excellent job of making the viewer believe that this is really happening to someone and it could happen to you. It makes you question the sounds you hear at night. There's been a lot of comparisons to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT which are fair considering the style in which the movie was shot. The great thing here and what sets this movie apart is the camera work. It doesn't bounce all over the place. You can easily follow what what is going on.

Too often with horror and action films the directors recently have been using a quick cut style. It give a sense of the chaos that is going on within that scene. That's not done at all here. With the quick cut style the audience is left having to decipher what they saw. "What the hell just happened?" Here it is clear but still makes us engage. "I totally saw that! What the hell is it?" Both make our imaginations fire up.

It does get a bit over the top in the closing scenes, but I forgive it. It was a very memorable movie. There's been a lot of reports of people not being able to sleep after watching it. Well, I slept quite well last night, thank you very much.

Although I did get a bit of a jolt when the fitted sheet on the bed came loose and thwipped against my hand.

Gang related?

Some people just shouldn't hang out together. I didn't think I'd consider the Justice League in that category. Lately it seems that separately these characters are really great and ready to go out and fight crime and save the world. However teaming up means either someone is going to die, our some member is going to get in trouble that affects the rest of the team, or something else dumb and angsty. Instead of saving the day, they spend more time saving their asses. The latest issue of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA is another example. The heroes just get together to act all emo until Despero attacks, which had me thinking "Thank God, something interestng" but unfortunately it just gave them excuses to act even lamer. I know this is supposed to be a set up for the roster to change, but I'm pretty sure these characters are capable of functioning without the Hal Jordan/Ollie Queen Bromance to lead them. I don't think I'll be reading this title much longer, which will be the first time since 1996.

Has the culture of victimhood spread to the point that we want our heroes to be victims too? Do they have to be angsty and just suffer through pointless crap for us to identify with them? I don't want to think this. I don't want to think that superheroes being pathetic targets is the paradigm when Grant morrison just got done throwing out that rubbish of Batman being a coping mechanism for wounded child and embracing it being the end result of a person taking a personal tragedy and turning it into an incredible triumph. I don't want to go from the Miracle in Crime Alley to crying twits in spandex.

Super teams need to be super again. The Super Young Team has done more world saving that the Justice League and the Teen Titans combined in the last six months. Quit boo hooing like a bunch of shmucks and save the world already!

Back on the perch

Spent the majority of yesterday roofing, which despite sucking turned out to be the highlight of my day. That's a fairly telling statement as to how the rest of my day went. Yes, swinging a hammer until my hand blisters and toting seventy pound bundles of shingles up a two story ladder for hours on end was the most enjoyable part of my day. Something's wrong here.

Still, there was a few things that made the day of hard labor worth it besides the pay.

Working at the beach so I could be a pod of dolphins making their way south.

Watching a tri-plane flying overhead like he was the Red Baron or something. It was a red plane too. It flying overhead actually brought the job to halt because honestly when do you even see those things anymore outside of an airshow?

Having a "what the hell was that?" moment when a brief roar consumed the usually sounds of the morning and then seeing that the base was shooting missiles at submarines again.

Much preferable to the rest of the day.

Marty versus the Apocalypse

When I was in eight grade I had a history teacher, Mister Humphries. He was a good teacher and an interesting guy. The interest did not come solely from his astonishing resemblance to Santa Claus, but in that this guy was a really weird dude and every so often he'd inflict the weird on the class. We ate it up. On Halloween he showed up in a robe with a staff looking somewhat like a stout Gandalf and told us all about things like witchcraft and urban legends and things that go bump in the night. Of course this would get him fired today. He also brought in his Civil War reenactment gear and watched us squirm as we sat outside the school in the yard and he, in full costume, waved an old pistol around. The kind you had to stuff the powder into to. The thing worked too. Of course that would get him fired today too.

There was another thing that stuck with me. He showed us a documentary on Nostradamos, the ancient prophet. You probably seen his name in some of the check out lines at the grocery store while glancing at the tabloids. We watched this video in 1988. I couldn't tell you when the video was made. In this video, going by the writings they figured as near as they could that something was going to come out of the sky and strike most like likely New York City in perhaps 1994. It also said a man in a blue turban would play heavily into this. Pretty freaky stuff to see when you're 13. Keep in mind that I was viewing this in the twilight of the Cold War so the assumption was Russia nuking the Big Apple. I do admit to having the contents of that video in the back of my mind during a good chunk of 1994, only to make it 1995 and felt some relief.

I don't have to remind anyone what happened in 2001.

Now fast forward to yesterday's newspaper in which it reports on the front page that 2012 theory is gaining followers. For those who don't know, the Mayan calendar runs out around the Winter Solstice in 2012, and people are thinking that means the end of the world. That's right. The people who didn't have enough sense not to dump the bodies of their human sacrifices in the same river which they got their drinking water out of were able to predict the end of the world over a thousand years later. That's right, the calendar is over a thousand years long. Most likely the folks making the calendar died or got bored or something.

I swear. This is like Y2K all over again.

There's reports of planetary alignment also going on around the same time, so obviously all the planets lining up will destroy us all. Do I need to go into how stupid that is? THEY'RE MILLIONS OF MILES AWAY! Yeah, it cool that planets line up, but eclipses are cool too, and unless you're watching HEROES they don't mean nor do anything aside from getting us to look to the sky and say "wow".

Maybe the Mayans knew about man made global warming. OMG! AL GORE IS RIGHT!

Perhaps the Earth's magnetic poles will switch. There's some solid science stating that this does happen. It would get pretty bad if this happened, but it's survivable, especially with our knowledge and know how. This is science the Mayans did not have, so the chances of a Pole swap going down when the calendar ends is pretty thin.

Ooo, what if it's the Second Coming? The Rapture and all that. Could the Mayans have divined the time table of the events of Revelations? We're still relatively close to the year 2000. People get freaked by big numbers. They thought Jesus was coming back in the year 1000 too. There is some interesting Biblical prophesies that are currently coming into play, but the odds of these two things being relayed are slimmer than my lotto chances.

Remember when I mentioned that the calendar ends on the Winter Solstice? That's the longest night of the year. That's some pretty easy to figure out even in ancient times. It also makes a pretty solid spot to start and end a calendar year. They made a calendar over a thousand years long. Isn't that long enough? Can't we cut them some slack. I'm sure they had lives to, albeit short ones with those dead bodies in the river.

You know what I do when my calendar runs out? I buy another calendar. Next year's might have Batman on it!

X marks the nostalgia

Kristie is making me watch THE X-FILES. She sent me the DVDs. From Hawaii. This is part of something interesting. She has organized a mass viewing of the television. Episodes will be discussed via the internet weekly in four episode blocks. It's like a book club for television.

You see, before the internet people would get together, pick a book and then everyone would read that book. They would meet on a regular basis in group member's houses and discuss the book often over tea, coffee and cake. I'm not even sure if this practice even goes on anymore. So what Kristie has put together is actually something fascinating on multiple levels.

First: we have the case of looking at television differently. Seasons of TV shows are now collected in nice, neat box sets. On the surface this just means you can watch the re-run of your choice anytime you want. But look at this exercise that I'm talking about. We're treating television like we would treat a novel. Is this a case of younger generations being uninterested in reading or has television gotten to the point that it demands to be treated as literature? I'd argue the latter. I spent tonight watching a television show that is at this moment seventeen years old. I remember when it first aired. For me it's nostalgia. Will my great grand children look upon THE X-FILES season one the same way I look upon Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN? Can television stand the test of time in the same manner as literature?

Second: we replace the intimate setting of a living room with looking at a computer screen. We lose much of the personal aspect of the book club. However, we now are not limited geographically in whom we may discuss things with. This mass viewing will include people from multiple time zones and countries. That's pretty cool, although it doesn't make up for lack of coffee cake.

Onto the show itself.

I'm not a huge fan of the show, but that's not the show's fault. When it originally aired, I was quite busy with school. I did make time to watch THE X-FILES but at that time my focus was elsewhere, mostly school work. After I finished school there was the "winter of discontent" in which Friday nights were spent watching that show and MILLENNIUM followed by playing RESIDENT EVIL on my Playstation in the company of the Scorer. My memories of the show are dim during this time, again not because of the show itself. The Scorer and I were drinking heavily at the time. It was not uncommon for us to go through a fifth of rum and a fifth of whiskey in two days. So you have two guys in a house in the middle of nowhere watching scary television and playing scary video games and impossibly drunk. I barely remember anything about the show.

So these episodes are new but not so new to me. I approach more of a skeptic than I was when they first aired. That the time I was used to weird stuff. There were crop circles in a field a few miles from my house. There's a lake where a compass won't work and people swear it's haunted. Strange lights were seen over the fields near where the crop circles were found and they came from an aircraft that made no sound at all. Sounds scary, but I know the real stories behind these phenomena. Fast forward to me watching the show now. This is after I've seen shows like FRINGE which THE X-FILES paved the way for. Does the show hold up?

It does to a degree. The writing was a bit shaky here and there. Mulder doesn't seem nearly as cool now. The episode leaves somethings a mystery, but reveals perhaps too much. We are shown from the start that there is indeed a conspiracy. I think that was a mistake. They skipped past having the viewers wonder whether or not there's an actual conspiracy straight to having to figure out what this conspiracy is hiding. Its a lost opportunity.

The show does feel dated, but not to the point where you can't identify with it. Its accessible still, but a good pilot should be. I do think now that it was trying a bit too hard to grab viewers and came off slightly over-the-top. The sexual tension get dropped upon us like an anvil off of a cliff hitting Wile E. Coyote, and I do remember the many discussion of when we thought the characters would finally get together romantically.

I'll probably watch a couple more episodes tomorrow, because I want to make sure I don't fall behind the group. I can't claim to be a "X-phile", but it's fun, interesting television, and in the age of things like Wendy Williams claiming precious airtime, television being fun and interesting is something to hang on to.

I want this on DVD now.

This is everything I want in a movie.

Bad ass fight scene that don't involve CGI? Check!

Stuff blowing up? Check!

Jet Li? Check!

Big guns? Check!

Funny one liners? Check!

FINALLY! A movie for me to be excited about!