Life at One Hertz

Saving yourself, if not the future Pt. 1 - Prognostication

2005-09-18T12:44:00.000-06:00

For the savvy among the world it's becoming obvious that the night of our civilization is nigh. With consumer gasoline prices predicted at a high for the next 10 years things are in shaky territory. Reserves are so low that one more major hit to any of the major production centers around the world (Argentina, Gulf of Mexico, Middle East, you know, places that have never seen a day of turmoil...) will double, if not triple, the cost of consumer fuel and make it unavailable in outlying areas where the cost of driving the truck out to the station would negate the value of the gasoline. Anything that relies on trade and transport will begin to rise in cost over the next while. Divisive actions from ultra-individualist groups and foreign terrorists will, independent of each other (this isn't conspiracy theory), put a combined weight on governments and neighborhoods that will sever our social structure. As trade and transport decreases areas become more and more isolated, higher levels of government, and government in general, lose the ability to govern. This combined with an in-bred paranoia of government (thanks to terrorists) and and unwillingness to cooperate and compromise (thanks to individualists) will create a powder keg waiting to go off. When the day comes that the economy finally buckles under the weight of high fuel costs over an under-cut service/product economy (people not buying Big Macs is bad for a growth-based service economy) and the grocery stores just don't open because there's no food for them to sell then people will turn to a mob/clan rule (rioting, looting, burning) in a scarily short amount of time. When the economy died in the 30's the culture was still very much one of community and family, religion and government, so people turned to those things. Our current society is very self-centered, with family alienation, broken homes, distrust of religion, distrust of government, and lack-of-community being almost standard (Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods will handle the crisis differently, and generally better as to them blood is still thicker than water).

The day of the great destruction will actually be fairly calm. Most people will still have food in the pantry and water and electricity will still be running. A week later hell will open on earth as people panic. People will form mobs, start looting and rioting. Government and police will still try and exert their power, but this will cave quickly as communication between branches breaks down. Some areas will wind up under military rule, while others will descend into total chaos as police and soldiers join the riots. Large groups of people will begin to exodus in two directions: towards the cities and away from the cities. Some will believe that the city is where safety, civilization, people, and support is, so will head inward. Others will see the cities as a death trap of human misery and panic, a concrete prison without food or clean water so will head outward towards farms. Farmers will be a mixed bag, some willing to take in people knowing that labour will be needed to operate the farms, others paranoid and resentful of invaders. A week or two after that thousands will be infected with disease as routine cleanliness becomes impossible when water shuts off, bodies left undisposed of begin to rot, and human waste piles up. Three months after the crash millions will be dead of thirst, starvation, rioting, murder, despair, exposure, and disease. A year later 3/4 of the world population will be dead. When the population has been fractioned and people have spread out then rebuilding efforts will start as the communities that have formed, or survived, begin to branch out and gather resources and stabilize life.

So, the question on my mind, how does one prepare to survive those three months to a year? Some places, the more impoverished/less industrialized will fare better (a relative term) because they will lose less (psychological impact is what kills the most) and some places (Amish come to mind) won't notice much of anything, though if they're within seven days walk along a major cross-country artery they will have to deal with the influx of people. The more heavily advanced/densely populated areas will obviously see the greatest impact as their every-day lives rely on trade and transport for support.

Photo project in the plans

2005-08-02T01:28:00.000-06:00

I'm going to to a photo project over the next little while called "I Love Bread"

I expect you all to wait with baited anticipation for the results.

Watching the shutters crash

2005-07-31T00:41:00.000-06:00

I'm trying hard to stay abreast of myself, but between work and sleep, it's easy to sit and do nothing at all, even if you've got everything you need for art and inspiration a few feet away.

It's also too hot here.

What we want to make ourselves into

2005-07-31T00:10:00.000-06:00

I've been asked a lot, by many different people, what I want to be in life. Some of the people asking are, or were, looking for the simple, trite answers we hold in our brains as courtesy demands; one-word pill capsules to fit ourselves into. Others have had more sincere ideas in mind, looking for a bit more in the line of character, not just what but why as well. Over the past few days I've come to some sorts of conclusions about the what and why of where I want to be headed. I want to be someone that people reference. I love to write and theorize about the nature of art and how things fit together in the world, I have been, none too rarely, describes as one of the world's more opinionated people. I like to have my opinion, and I enjoy sharing it nearly as much. Conceited? Likely, but in the same breadth and breath I feel that in the midst of my frequently redundant and obsolete insights are a few ideas worth sharing.

Pictures of Clouds

2005-07-30T09:43:00.000-06:00

Everyone takes them, they appear worldwide, they're naturally photogenic, and are of the same essence which dreams are sculpted from. At the same time there's a billion and one pictures of them out there. So many so that I find myself looking at peoples pictures and thinking evil thoughts about their large number of cloud pictures as though the photographers were irritating parents thrusting small children towards your face and insisting that you love them with an incomprehensible fervor. Perhaps this is a slight exaggeration, but that's part of what the world is built of. So, regardless of the animosity between me and other peoples' pictures of clouds, I still find myself sitting around outside, turning my camera up towards the sky. Hypocrite? Probably.

As an ancillary note, I've decided that something I do will have a character who only takes pictures of the sky and clouds, and pins them all on their bedroom wall.

MY voice inside YOUR head

2005-07-19T14:50:00.000-06:00

Last night I was having some trouble sleeping, mostly due to being too tired (I hate how that's possible, to be so tired you can't sleep) and due to the heat, so I scoured the internet for some information about people I used to know, but haven't heard from or seen in a few years. As I sent off a few short, over-tired e-mails I started to wonder how they'd be received. They'll read them with my voice as they remember it in their heads, but I'm generally unclear as to what that sounds like. I'm under the impression that more casual acquaintances perceive me as somewhat whiney, and definitely a bit of a know-it-all.

I'm not cool enough for my own self

2005-07-19T11:44:00.000-06:00

Well, the forms came from the courier today, as promised by the nice lady on the phone yesterday.

Here's the breakdown:

The Television

Sony 1050 Watt A/V Receiver

Sony DVD Player

Polk Audio Tower Speakers

Polk Audio Surround Speakers

Polk Audio 12" Powered Sub

Polk Audio Center Channel

ExpressVu HD/PVR

If you're not careful it might happen to you

2005-07-19T00:49:00.000-06:00

Today I won a home entertainment system worth between 9 and 10 thousand Canadian Dollars. Over the past week and a half I've been working at the Calgary Stampede, doing grip work and acting as camera assistant for Vos Media, who were hired by Bell Canada to handle the multi-media at their pavilion this year. In the Bell Pavilion they set up a massive collection of jumps and ramps for a mountain bike stunt show, called Rodeo X. The same bikers have been coming in and doing the show for three years now, but every other year it's been strictly a demonstration sport. This year Bell decided to use this as an opportunity to push their cell phones and digital satellite more directly with a contest. The riders were divided into two teams, the Mavericks and the Outlaws, and during the course of each show audience members could send a text message to a number with a vote for either team, then at the end of the show the results would be announced. Sending in your vote also entered you into the daily draw for a Blackberry, and the Grand Prize draw of a HD home entertainment centre. From the get-go the Outlaws were drawing in more votes, in my estimation strictly because "outlaws" is easier to type into a phone. So throughout the week I and some others would put in the occasional vote for the Mavericks. then we realized that those of us working for Vos Media had no tangible connection to Bell aside from working in their tent, as such we were eligible to win the prizes. One day when votes and attendance were low I decided to try and stack the odds in my favor, since I could sell a Blackberry on e-bay and buy myself a digital camera without having to worry about messing up my tuition budget. That day I single-handedly accounted for 25% of the day's votes. The same day our stage director's fiance came to the show and put in one vote. He won the Blackberry. I put in a couple more votes each day after that, but was pretty disheartened, and fairly certain I'd gone over my limit of free text messages. I put in a couple yesterday so that the total vote difference between the winning team and the losing team wouldn't be so wide as it potentially could be. this morning I was sitting at home, chatting with the folks, passing time before going to work, when my cell phone rings. The call display puts up a 604 area code (here it's 403) so I scour my mind quickly to think who might be calling, but come up short (I don't get many calls to start with, let alone long distance.) When I answered I was greeted warmly by a voice telling me they were from Bell Canada (not too often that you can say that) and she asked if I'd put in a text message on the 17th that said "vote Mavericks," I indeed had, and started thinking "hah, I won a Backberry after all."

"I'm calling to inform you that you've been selected as the winner of our Grand Prize. Do you remember what the grand prize was?"

"uh.. yeah, a home entertainment centre."

The next few minutes, the list of specifications for what I'd won, the questions to ensure I'm eligible, the skill testing question to make the contest legitimate under Canadian law, all kind of blurred together as I tried to wrap my head around the fact that I now own a TV bigger than my house has effective space for.

dir /w *.jpg

2005-07-09T22:37:00.000-06:00

I have an account over at Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lemonfrosted/

http://www.flickr.com/people/lemonfrosted/

4 July 2005

2005-07-07T09:42:00.000-06:00

Adrianna and I got to talk on the phone for a good while last night. that was enjoyable. I wound up sleeping in until 12:30. Not exactly the greatest thing to do, but I'd suppose it was my body telling me what I need. I showed my photo portfolio to a whole bunch of people and think I may have acquired a number of potential contracts as a result. It's somewhat startling to come to a realization that I'm more than just a good photographer. I'm not sure what it is that makes someone that way, but I apparently have it. Looking at my own work I really feel as though I've grown a lot in the last year. My pictures are showing a precision and confidence that was absent before. More, I suppose, that my work has become a little less serendipitous than in the past. I suppose one of the keys to it all is to be able to have the confidence and control in shooting and presentation, while retaining the visual element and curious spirit of serendipity. As I take more and more steps into the realm of portraiture (as opposed to my work in candid) this twin element becomes more apparent to me, finding the ability to make a set-up, posed picture not look set up and posed. I think I managed to capture that perfectly (as perfectly as I feel I've ever done) in two of the shots I took for Kim and Cody. They both look candid, while were quite specifically directed (though my direction is generally open, since I still see it as my responsibility the inherent nature of the subject, even (especially) in the controlled environment of portraiture.)

Excerpt from my personal journal.

The Art of Procrastination

2005-04-16T23:18:00.000-06:00

I found something out about myself: I write best when I'm supposed to be doing something else. Setting aside time to work on an essay doesn't work, at least not for the first draft. I need to book something that I don't want to do, then work on my essay instead of doing that thing.

Alcohol Poisoning:

2005-04-15T14:26:00.000-06:00

It's not just for white-collar professionals, bar scum, and homeless people any more.

Today is the last day of classes, also referred to as "bermuda shorts day" which is code for "drink yourself blind in public day." The space underneath my seat in Linguistics (an 11am class) was littered with several Kokanee cans and a small entourage of Black Label. A girl in the back row ran out of class suddenly to puke in the garbage can outside and the police (city police, not campus security) had to come because she blacked out after a minute of puking. When class ended she was conscious again, but was still throwing up intermittently into the garbage can while the police talked to her. A girl getting off the train had a bag from the local liquor store in one hand, shoes and an extra bra in the other.

Hot damn, I'm glad my day ends at noon.

Concept

2005-04-12T12:28:00.000-06:00

So, here's my idea for this summer as was briefly mentioned a few days ago. I'd like to organize a write-in. We'll have a location set up in the city where people can show up during the day for the express purpose of writing a letter or two or twenty to the members of Parliament, the Prime Minister, and the Governor General. The subject of all these letters will be a petition to have the salary of government officials lowered to the range of 20-30k/year. The goal is that by the end of the day every MP will have received at least one letter, if not several. The reason for this has some obvious ties to money flow, but more importantly to the motivation to political office. Too many people go into politics as a career, seeing it as a mer alternative to working in the private sector as a lawyer or consultant or business professional. This is not acceptable if we are to call ourselves any kind of democracy. Politics is not a job, its a stewardship.

The Sickness

2005-04-12T11:49:00.000-06:00

So, this bug refuses to pack its bags and leave. It has more than worn out its welcome, I must say. I find it funny how I'll have trouble getting to sleep at night, but when morning comes around I have no problem sleeping in until noon. So, I'm making today the "act like you're healthy" day, doing all the things that I would normally do if I were healthy, regardless of how dizzy it makes me.

My Version of High School

2005-04-10T13:04:00.000-06:00

You will come back within yourself
You can be art when we melt
And I will know what you were for
I say we’re leaving
There ain’t nothing here at all
Another day, a week, the mall
And baby if I was in demand
You would be mind

Someday this place it going to burn
Is your whole life in there waiting?
Someday your head is going to turn and you’ll realize
I’m missing, do you realize?

You will come back
Convince yourself you can stay alive
And wait for me
And I will know what this was for
And I’ll say we’re leaving
There ain’t nothing here at all
Another month, a year that’s all
So you can tell them I’m coming
And hell’s coming with me

Someday this place is going to burn
Is your whole life in the waiting
Someday their heads are going to turn and they’ll realize
You’re missing
We are there

It's the perfect time of year
Somewhere far away from here
I feel fine enough, I guess
Considering everything's a mess
There's a restaurant down the street
Where hungry people like to eat
I could walk but I'll just drive
It's colder than it looks outside

It's like a dream you try to remember
But it's gone
Then you try to scream
But it only comes out as a yawn
When you try to see the world
Beyond your front door
Take your time, is the way I rhyme gonna make you smile
When you realize that a guy my size might take a while
Just to try to figure out what all this is for

It's the perfect time of day
To throw all your cares away
Put the sprinkler on the lawn
And run through with my gym shorts on
Take a drink right from the hose
And change into some drier clothes
Climb the stairs up to my room
Sleep away the afternoon

Like a dream you try to remember
But it's gone
Then you try to scream
But it only comes out as a yawn
When you try to see the world
Beyond your front door
Take your time is the way I rhyme gonna make you smile
When you realize that a guy my size might take a while
Just to try to figure out what all this is for

Pinch me, pinch me, cause I'm still asleep
Please God tell me that I'm still asleep

On an evening such as this
It's hard to tell if I exist
If I pack the car and leave this town
You'll notice that I'm not around
I could hide out under there
I just made you say "underwear"
I could leave but I'll just stay
All my stuff's here anyway

Like a dream you try to remember
But it's gone
Then you try to scream
But it only comes out as a yawn
When you try to see the world
Beyond your front door
Take your time is the way I rhyme gonna make you smile
When you realize that a guy my size might take a while
Just to try to figure out what all this is for

Pinch me
Try to figure out what all this is for
Pinch me
Try to see the world beyond your front door
Pinch me
Try to figure out what all this is for

Fever

2005-04-10T00:02:00.000-06:00

I'm quite thoroughly sick right now. I'm dizzy, somewhat nauseous, feverish, tired, sore, yet unable to really get some good sleep. The neat thing about the hallucinations that you have while you're feverish is that you have no real way of gauging how much is fact, fiction, or alternate reality. Earlier today I watched myself go form being a confused teenager (a redundancy, I still say) to being a drug dealer.

Course Corrections

2005-04-06T13:46:00.000-06:00

Made some minor changes. Finally got rid of the annoying bullets. Have a big idea for the summer that I'll talk about later when I have something drawn up.

Feeling the glow

2005-04-05T11:10:00.000-06:00

This morning I bought a chocolate bunny left over from Easter for 75% off. The sucker is over 400g and cost a little over a dollar, but I was still finding myself debating wether or not it was worth it. It's funny, just the sense of perspective. Even though the thing weighs more than four times as much as a normal chocolate bar and costs only cents more, because it's sitting next to bunnies that are in the range of 25-75 cents. Eventually I realized the absurdity of the situation and bought it, along with a copy of Saved that I found in the video department for just under 9$ and a comb to replace the dozen or so I've lost. Afterwards I shoved my monstrous bunny in my backpack and went to see Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. As I was walking to the theatre form the truck I found a dollar on the ground. I love the early movie because they're so slack about security. I brought my big backpack right past several signs explicitly prohibiting such actions, not to mention the contraband rabbit.

While waiting for the movie to start an ad ran for a local lending agency that lauded the fact that they'll give you a loan regardless of your credit rating and that "you don't even need a job." The initial portion of the ad featured a man bragging to his wife about getting the loan in spite of his bad credit and jobless situation. I find it ridiculous that we're coming to rapidly accept the "something for nothing" society. It's a byproduct and reflexive offspring of the "gotta have it all" mentality. Every time something swings to an extreme, the opposite end of the spectrum breeds its own version. We see it in politics, the extremity of Rumsfeld re-bred in Michael Moore, and in religion, the bizarre antics of the Born Again's duplicated in the fatalism of Secularism. Excessive, pointless industry, the grind to have everything no matter what the cost has produced a faction of laze and indolence best represented by the lottery ticket. The New Dream is waking up to no job and a Ferrari in the driveway.

Smoke and... more smoke?

2005-04-05T11:00:00.000-06:00

The worst part about going to concerts easily has to be the fact that you get home smelling like a bar. Of course, the clothes you wear to a concert are often, by definition, some of your favorites. Even though you know you're going to smell like crap afterwards, and you're going to sweat a lot, and probably get tossed around a bit, if not had some vile liquid spilled/tossed/vomited on you, you want to look cool in case you run into someone else cool who isn't with another person who looks cooler than you. Even if you have no intention of picking someone up, this is still a concern (it's all about potential futures, not about realities). As part of the cool, you also want to be declaring to the band your allegiance to their sphere of sub-culture. You don't go to Jann Arden wearing Slayer, or anyone wearing Rush, it's strange and insulting in a way. So you dress your coolest, then come home smelling like a construction worker, a smell that's fine if you're in your construction worker clothes, but isn't something you want permeating you cool clothes which you may need to attract cool people, or cool employers.

I realize that the smell is probably the least of tobacco's evils, but I forgot to do my laundry. Where'd I leave the Fabreeze, or whatever they call that stuff...

The Sound of the Colour

2005-04-04T12:55:00.000-06:00

So, made some modifications to the template on account of Tim's complaints about readability. I rarely ever see it on any monitor but my iBook, so i've been largely unawares of how bad it was to read on other peoples' monitors. So I did some tweaking and arrived at the current blueberry scheme. which I am liking.

I watched the Juno awards last night, though "watched" is misleading and "had it on the TV while I did other things in the same room" is more accurate. The fact that Billy Talent was awarded Best _________ is a sad commentary on the state of Canadian music, the running in-line advertisements were depressing ("this award is sponsored by Doritos" was honestly one of them), but most of their performances were decent, Feist caught my attention with her one-girl-and-an-electric-guitar thing, and the Tragically Hip were at their strangest. That's really why I didn't turn it off in the first place: The Hip. I really am a massive fan of this band. Well, not to the point of stalkerdom, but I certainly geek out over their music and performances. Incidentally (though really directly related) my favorite part of the (all around amazing) Wil concert I attended to Friday night was their homage to The Tragically hip and their induction into the Canadian Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a rendition of "Grace Too." The Hip's Performance last night, coincidentally, was one of their signature mash-together-medlies fusing "Fully, Completely" with "Grace Too" including several segues of Gord Downy threatening his microphone. There's something about live music that has the potential to exceed anything recorded. No album can carry the same quantity-for-quality of entertainment as watching Tegan and Sara insult each other for 10 minutes in-between songs. Wil's record bears only passing resemblance to his live act. Even the Wild Strawberries' most mediocre songs are fused with an inescapable energy on stage. You don't even need to have heard of the band before to have one of the best nights of your life of watching Wide Mouth Mason. Matt Good's alterations to old material often reach levels of brilliance that ought to be captured in the studio, but may very well escape the capacity of those machines (I'm thinking of the slow version of "Hello Time Bomb" in specific).
Then there's The Hip. Existence demands that you stand up and squeal with glee, hoot, holler, and cheer as the guitar solo in the middle of "Fully, Completely" winds down to a gentle throbbing while Gord Downy dances across the stage for a few second before piercing the room with "She says I'm tragically hip..."

Or maybe it's just me.

Between the Past and the Future

2005-03-31T16:59:00.000-07:00

I'm a strong believer in journal keeping. I have a book out form the library about altering books. This craftswoman (artist?) takes books, any kind of book, and "alters" them by adding things to the pages, painting them, cutting holes, turning them into mosaics and montages and shadowboxes. Browsing through made me think about all the paper journals I've kept over the years, the pictures scribbled in margins, the occasional page consumed entirely by one big word, photographs and ticket stubs tapped in. honestly, I collect journals. I have three or four empty books around most of the time in anticipation of filling them. Right now I'm within the last twenty pages or so of the journal I've been filling and it's hard to not just put it down and start on one of the new books. The current one is a faux-leather hard-bound brown book with a palm tree embossed on the cover. The next is a small yellow soft-bound leather. I bought it almost six months ago in anticipation. I love to have something physical to hold onto. While I very much do appreciate the capacity for storage the internet affords, it lacks something of permanency and share-ability. While I can send my URL to anyone on the globe, I cannot share this website with those who will come long after our culture has wiped itself from the face of the earth. Because I don't own the hard drive these are stored on I may not even be able to share it with people surfing the internet two years from now. I would like to leave something for my children and grandchildren to hold in their hands.

Harold Innes described technology as being a balance between space and time. Space based technology is more concerned about bringing communication to as many people at the same time across as great an area as possible, while Time based technology is more concerned with the permanency of information. Television is a purely space based technology, it rolls incessantly on without regard to wether or not you're keeping up. All it wants is as many people receiving the signal as is possible. The internet is a little more moderate in its stand, being somewhat concerned with information hanging around a while, but the sheer fickleness of the infrastructure, the propensity for hard drive wipes and corrupted data, belies the fact that it's the people using the internet who want the information to remain around and not the medium. If it were the medium, it wouldn't misplace so much stuff. DVD is certainly a more time-based technology, the pitch for its space-based marketing being that it will last. Then, of course, we come to the most time based of all, stone carvings, metal plates, books, and scrolls. We have the art, wisdom, poetry, warnings, music, lore, government, economics, and religion of ages past encoded into these mediums. While there is most certainly a place for both in any culture, it is important that every civilization find some balance between the two. As humans we need both. We hunger for change, but thirst for permanency. I have heard it said that this is why God gave us the seasons, to give us a constant rolling change, but the security of permanency in that cycle. I digress though. I feel that our culture in many ways has glutted itself on space. It has become drunk with the capacity of its technology to reach every corner of the globe. I fear that there might not be much left of our wisdom and folly for our grandchildren to dig up as they build their cities over top our bones.

Is it in my mind or on the page?

2005-03-29T18:16:00.000-07:00

I finished up a short essay earlier today for my school application. After I was done it suggested by the parent-folks that I put in a bibliography. I didn't cite or quote anything in the essay, and the entire thing was written off the top of my head (simple question about the differences between image production in motion-picture film and television/video). In my communications theory class last semester, I grilled the TA about this same concern: at what point is something coming out of my head and when is it cited? Now, quotations are obviously cited. Something that you read yesterday so you could write the essay is cited. But what about something i read four months ago on my own? It's not like I was born being able to infer the mechanics of television, so I had to read it all somewhere at some time, but when does it become my knowledge? Due to the complexity of the information I present, I'm going to create a bibliography from some of the websites I frequent, because they've apparently had a running problem with plagiarism at the school, and I'd like to play it safe because I want to get accepted.

Where?

2005-03-29T13:07:00.000-07:00

I wonder where the bigger mess is, Iraq, the White house, the house of Commons, or my bedroom floor. not intending to be flippant, but this place is a mess. However, in digging through a pile, I found my MGB "Victory Through Sheer Volume" shirt that I bought at Edgefest '99, and my Tragically Hip "Phantom Power" shirt. Oh yeah, I'm styling old school today.

Something I've meant to mention

2005-03-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

I ride the train to and from school for an hour in each direction, giving me an excessive amount of time to stare at whatever ad has been pasted up in front of me. About two weeks ago I had an hour to ponder something. A community group in the city has been running ads for an Abortion support group. The ads are not openly anti-abortion, they are aimed at helping those affected by abortion. The tagline at the top of the ad reads "Have you or someone you know been hurt by an abortion experience?" I feel this really is a worthy cause as I doubt there are many people out there who will say that abortion is a light subject that will have no emotional repercussions on those involved, mother, father, friends, and family. It is a serious subject that really deserves a lot more respect than it is given (the current state of things being that each side is boiled down to either pro-life or pro-choice, each grossly inaccurate of the median standpoints most of the populace truly has.)

Next to the tagline, someone had taken a permanent marker and written "anti-choice is anti-woman."

Next to that hateful slogan was written by a respondent "1/2 of those killed would have been women."

Something to chew on.

New Words

2005-03-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

Created a new word in Linguistics yesterday.

We were discussing word-formation processes and as we were discussing eponyms someone asked "what about words like Darwinism?" The teacher was at a bit of a loss, and it seemed like there wasn't a term to really describe those types of words specifically. So I shot out "wouldn't they be some kind of eponymous derrivation?" Half the class laughed at me because I'm that know-it-all kid, but then the teacher got all bright-eyed and wrote it down on the overhead. Eponymous derrivation is now in the lecture notes.

At the Last Possible Minute

2005-03-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

I spent this weekend past trying to write an essay for my film class. I wrote the majority of it Monday morning, the day it was due. This is not for lack of trying, really. Most of you who tried to get a hold of me can attest to the fact that I was bored witless sitting there trying to write this essay all weekend. I eventually did get some kind of quality inspiration on paper, but now I wonder, what triggers that inspiration? Does it just require a time investment, i.e. If I spend 14 hours trying to write the essay I will eventually reach that point of inspiration? Or is it based in closeness to the deadline, i.e. even if I were to have the entire thing written long before hand, I would wind up scrapping it and re-writing becaus of a last minute realization that what I'd written was uninspired crap, that the true inspiration doesn't come until just before the deadline?

Proximity in time and space

2005-03-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

Today in linguistics we discussed compound words and polysynthetic languages. I then decided that microwaves and ovens will be referred to both as a cookingbox. To specify one or the other it will be nuclearcookingbox and thermalcookingbox. I don't suspect it's anywhere in the near future, but oh yes, somewhere between the future and the cavemen that follow is my neuclearcookingbox. Mybe it seemed funny this morning because I was still recovering from the last lingering kiss of a weekend of medication.

Mine and Thine

2005-03-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

I found free food on the train. Someone on their way to work left their brown bag of lunch on the floor when they got off. There was an orange, a fruit roll up, and a granola bar. I'm thinking about how my good fortune came from someone else's bad day.

A day

2005-03-02T09:31:00.000-07:00

I had a lot I wanted to say about the revolution of film by Steve Jobs and Canon and somethign about the debate that's going to occur at school, but I'm wrecked from my recurring lung infection, so I'm going ot go to sleep. I did go to Linguistics, but came home early because it would do me no good to try to sit through an Iranian film while I can barely comprehend English. One last note: Morphophonemics is an awesome word.

The Weight of Gold

2005-02-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

So, a few days ago we weighed me. I was under the assumption that since August's drop from 135 lbs. to 125 lbs. (unclothed) I havn't lost any more weight. As of a few days ago my clothed weight was 120 lbs. approximating my unclothed weight at 118. We've tried to fatten me up as much as possible over the week, and we're going to weigh me before I leave tomorrow. It's a little scary, in all honesty.

Built into the system of things

2005-02-23T01:24:00.000-07:00

During my stay here in Utah I've noticed some rather odd things. The state just got their transit system for the Olympics a few years ago (at least the train system and much of the bus system, a small bus system was in place prior) and is still very uncomfortable using it. The busses run in odd configurations to odd points with few stops. On the busses they have 1940's pulp-cartoon style advertisements informing riders about the basic etiquette of transit, particularly in relation to the train and how a bus pass works. The LRT itself is designed like a cross between a commuter train (it stretches from Salt Lake to Sandy) and a street car (the platforms are about the same hight of a normal curb and you step up three steps when you get on the train). The other thing I've noticed is the state's grasp of the internet leaves them like troglydites crawling around in a technological murk. Pretty generally people are paying more for less, more money for inferior, slower service. It's late at night and thesee thoughts aren't really well formed.

I've taken some great pictures, will post when I get them on my computer.

It's so cool when this happens that I can't stop crying

2005-02-16T11:51:00.000-07:00

So, a few months ago I cleaned up some hard drive space by deleting some redundant movie project files. I wasn't planning on altering the projects any further and had already published them out to .mov files. So I thought. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but the files that used to work on their own now seem hungry for all the source files, and are only 30k in size (certainly not quite what you'd expect of a 6minute full screen video). So, I'm suspecting, that I inadvertantly deleted the entire project and the published file, keeping the key file only. Fun. Looks like I'll have to do a new project for the film festival in, oh, a week.

One chance

2005-02-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

I cleaned my room this morning, including a re-organizing of dresser drawers. In one that was stuffed full of old uniforms, at the bottom I found four things that made me stop and really think for a bit. I found a letter Erin, my first girlfriend, wrote to me near the end of our short relationship, I found a letter Kelsey, my second girlfriend, wrote to me near the end of our relationship, I found my missionary tags and white handbook, warped and bent from being soaked so many times by rain, and I found a pair of Adrianna's earings. the only thing missing would have been a momento of Brenda and I would have had sitting before me an almost perfect representation of the past five years of my life. Between all those things and moments exist volumes about the growth I've been through since High School. I know I still have a long way to go. I'm still rather arrogant about a lot of things, and I could stand to be less confrontational. For much of my mission my goal was to be a more mellow person, to take things in stride more, to get less worked up over things that would go wrong, to be less confrontational, to argue less, to be more open with sharing myself, to be more secure with my own feelings. It was the end of Kelsey's letter that really caught my attention. The letter was written in journal format, then mailed ot me as an afterthought because she didn't want to keep it, knowing she would lose it and never continue it. This was almost a year before I left for Virginia.

"Maybe he is afraid of getting help. I think he is afraid of having fun. I can't even tell if he is ever happy. He has hope, but it is burried under his worry. I know I have hope that I will be okay... or maybe I just know I'll be okay... eventually. He shelters himself away from everybody... dropping no more than a few breadcrumbs as to who he might actually be. I need to know. I hate not knowing, and maybe it is perfection in knowing... my perfection. My perfection is peace and love with everything attached... I think I just figured out why that phrase always stuck with me.

"I want to talk to him, but I think he's hidden himself too well. He has to discover how to be visable again... since he hasn't in so long. I want to talk to him, but I don't know what to say anymore."

It's been almost four years since that was written and I now sit here and wonder how much progress I've made from that point.

I just sounds better if you don't listen

2005-02-10T18:06:00.000-07:00

At work we have this really really irritating way of processig the clothing that comes through. First we pull the pallets off the truck, then break them down. The boxes, however, are mixed in their contents, so we'll have things for four or five different departments in one box. So we'll go through every box and remove all the accessories, then stack the boxes up. Once the boxes have all been rifled through we tehn go through them again, taking all the plastic wrapping off, and sorting them out on a conveyor belt according to department. Then, once that's done, we'll go through and tag them all with thsoe anti-theft tags. Then we hang them on their hangers. But wait, there's more. We also get stuff in that's already on hangers, so we hang these all up at the same time as taking the acessories out, strip the plastic off them, tag them, take them off their hangers, then hang them on our hangers. A normal shipment of two to three pallets will take all day to process, and a big shipment we may have started theft-tagging by the end of the day. It's a horribly slow process, mostly because of the number of times we handle the merchandise before it goes anywhere. A number of times we've suggested processing straight out of the box, with someone sorting, stripping, tagging, and hanging in an assembly line. At the very least, we could save a ton of time if we just combined all the sorting tasks into one, instead of unpacking and repacking everything first. This is fairly obvious to anyone who works in the warehouse, the incredible ammount of time wasted by tripple, quadruple handling. A new girl was back there with us today and she asked me why we do it the way we do. My only real response: company policy. I've asked and got no real answer. About 40 minutes later the store manager comes in, and she asks him. The first time he talks right over her, and just tells her it'll be faster if she moves the box she's unpacking closer to her. So she asks again. In a very low, unconvinced voice "well, this is the faster way of doing it..."

Yeah, they have your soul, admit it and we'll have pity on you.

when we're done stealing your things, we'll be sure to write you a check

2005-02-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading an essay on the Coen Brothers' first film Blood Simple in relation to neo-noir, and just can't shake the feeling that the analysist missed the point somewhere along the line, like he has some point he wanted to make, and this movie could be abducted for that purpose. I don't know why these analists bother me, but they do. I'll read their essays and find myself frequently thinking that they just said something right, but then go on to dwell on the immaterial part of the idea, like people who go at length about symbols of "patriarchal corruption" then carry on for another page about patriarchy as the problem, instead of the (oh no, that'd be too obvious, it can't be the problem) corruption. In those cases (I've read numerous papers that all use that train of thought) I find it funny because of the unspoken implication that non-patriarchy is inherently less corrupt. Perhapse it is my upbringing, but I don't find gender to be as big a deal as so many people make it out to be as I've seen just as much corruption, violence, domination, abuse, greed, selfishness, and horror from members of both sexes, and in equal measures a distribution of all the opposing virtues. Call me simple, but we're all in this together, so let's focus on the problem.

I'm perhaps a first-class jerk for this idea that I've got, but I'm thinking for this semester's term paper I'm going to find something that destroys the common mold of film analysis as much as possible. I frankly dislike my instructor's desire to eliminate all consideration of wether or not a film is "good" or "bad" as failure to incorporate that yeaids very dubious material. Blood simple may be a Coen Brothers film, but it's honestly just "okay". The acting is passable, the story is on the high side of decent, and the pacing (this one we argued about) is poor. With the pacing, later films of theirs, Fargo comes to mind quickly, also use a very slow, hollow pacing but Fargo shows a lot more deliberation and skill in using it. Also, Blood Simple is their first film, and it's become almost an axiom that first films suffer in their pacing. Every book I've read on advice for first-time directors, producers, or script writers heavily emphasizes that pacing is very very hard to get right, that what you think is a quick pace,a nd what you intend to be a quick pace, may actually be dragging unbearably. Add to this that the Coen Brothers have also showed a certain love affair with quick, sharp pacing (The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thous) and the quick-moving developments of the last 20 minutes of Blood Simple, it's quite possible that the deliberation my essayist dwells on was really just inexperianced film making. With all that, for this terms essay I'm going to try as hard as possible to use a film such as Leprichaun in the Hood, Modern Vampires, or even Starship Troopers 2. I suspect that the essay will be based in some way around genre, so finding someting inept to maul into an essay should not be hard with the mass quantities of dreck availible.

Don't wake me, I plan on sleeping in

2005-02-03T17:33:00.000-07:00

So today has been a very strange day. I woke up in sheer disbelief over the fact that you weren't here in the city, that no ammount of wishing would fabricate the ability to get together with you tonight and do something. I was late for work again (I just can't seem to make it to those 8:30 shifts on time) but they don't seem to notice and are just pleased that I come at all. As I walked to work I saw a large rock ont he side of the road and came up with an odd idea for a story, that I'll get to. Then I got to the last intersection before work and my phone rang, but it was a wrong number. When I got to work I found a scrap piece of paper and scratched down three ideas, all thought up during the walk to work. Rocks off the Overpass. Wrong Number. What you've got in your hand. All morning all I wanted to do was go home and cry/work on my persona projects. After several hours of drowning myself in monotony and pain, I got overmyself and accepted the fate of the rest of the day. I really had the motivation this morning to call up the publishers in town and talk about their submission requirements. That small dream was crushed in its pupid form by a thousand metric pounds of depression. I think I've changed my mind about my camera. I think I'm going to go for a DV camera first. I may not be able to afford the one I'd love to have, but I'll certainly be able to get much better quality video out of a small DV cam than out of a 5mp digital. Now the problem comes in to finding one that I can afford that won't leave me wishing I'd gotten the Sony A95 anyway.

Back to the ideas. Rocks off the Overpass. There's this thing in society that a lot of us refuse to admit. A lot of us are fascinated with destruction. We're a curious people and frankly a lot of us do, at times, wonder what would happen if you took that fist sized rock and threw it in the path of an oncoming semi-truck.

Wrong Number. All the calls I get are wrong numbers.

What You 've Got in your Hands. What you're holding in your hands is a collection of what?

2005-01-31T09:05:00.000-07:00

I need to know how you feel about this
about all these things we say
I need to know you're not taking it well
I need to know you're in pain
I need to know I've broken your heart
I need you to know you broke mine

I'm not trying to break your heart
I think I'm doing a damn fine job

If you can't breathe it, it's probably not air

2005-01-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

I almost feel obligated to write. That sounds so horrible though. I don't feel obligated to write out of a sense of "people are waiting on my inspiration" or somehtign like that. I feel obligated to write because it's par of me, like there's something that I should be talking aobut but I'm not talking about it. So I'm going to talk about this feeling in a vague, general set of terms that are largely arbitrary and, where not arbitrary, semantic. So much has happened recently that it's hard to put it all into any sort of forma that one can hold and comprehend. I've lived it and I barely believe it. I wish I were talking about some kind of gross success or other vaguely emancipating epiphany of opportunity, but such is not the case. teh best thing I've come up with recently is "Albacorp Dolphin-Enriched Tuna". Well, no that's not the best thing I've thought of, but it's the most sound-byte friendly. Plus it's funny. Funny = Good.

A Need for Want

2005-01-02T01:13:00.000-07:00

"...and his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying, as if impatient to be playing upon this pipe.."

I have often lamented the lack of leadership in the world, but I'm realizing that I must rescind and restructure that statement. The world is not wanting for leadership, and that is the problem. We have too much leadership, too many leaders. We are living in a world filled with Pied Pipers who are always ever-so-willing to lead. But where are they leading us and why?

Why did the pied piper take the children? was it only to punish their parents for not paying him? What was he going to do with them? The children were led off to sweatshops and live out their days making wallets for their cousins in the neighboring city. The children were led to the wilderness to be devoured by ravenous wolves. The children were led to freedom from a society of self-serving liars. The children were led across the Jordan. The children were led to Los Angeles. The children were led out the door, around the block, and back home again. The children were led off into the sunset where they were instantly incinerated. The children were led to economic prosperity and fiscal responsibility. The children were led to strip joints where they turned tricks in the name of free expression, feminism, individuality, and ironic rebellion against the old ways.

No one knows where the children were led, but we know what they were promised.

Hurt

2004-12-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

You weren't there.
You didn't call.
You haven't given reasons.
What's going on?

Opium

2004-12-27T02:20:00.000-07:00

Religion is the opiate of the masses.

We so often misquote this phrase and spin it into something it is not.

Here is the real thing.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

Marx was not calling for a casting off of religion, though he was anti-Semitic and anti-Christian. This is not a bitter phrasing. He was passing on to his followers the key to world domination. Religion, to Marx, was the key to success. A secular religion where the opressed pray to a god of government, a government of the people.

Me vs. The Liberals

2004-12-27T01:48:00.000-07:00

I do find it somewhat funny/ironic that I fancy myself as an artistic type, am studying liberal arts, and hang out with a lot of liberals, but am myself rather conservative in my scope and reasoning. As well, it's not unknown that I have a fair amount of dislike for the left-wing. Why? Because they take the easy road of attacking religion as a reason (earlier today I read an article that called faith and "infantile concept") rather than admitting their own unhappiness.

Earlier today I was pondering the gay-marriage debate and was once again struck by how proud and stubborn humanity is as a whole. I do see the legalization of gay marriage as being damaging to society, but I now see how it will damage society. Often, and I have myself iterated these ideas before, the ultimate social decay will come in the form of the eventual legalization of prostitution, child-exploitation, bestiality, necrophilia, suicide (more a stemming from the abortion issue), &c. While these may happen, the real social decay will be much more subtle, as the aim of it is to destroy religion. Years ago changes were made to the laws that would allow businesses to be open on Sundays. The idea that was presented at the time was that if your business wanted to be open on Sunday and your employees were willing to work on Sunday, then you were free to do so. No one would be forced to work on Sunday. Today Sunday availability is the difference between having a job and not having a job. Presently we are being fed the line that religious societies that oppose homosexual unions for moral reasons "won't have to perform the unions if they don't want to". In the not too distant future, if homosexual marriage is permitted, these societies will be criticized, ostracized, and punished in various forms, legal, political, and social, for not participating.

A few weeks ago in my communications class we covered Queer Theory. The idea was, roughly, that all definitions for gender and sexuality can and ought to be decoded and recoded without meanings, or that the recoded meaning would be a sort of reflecting pool of self-definition where just because two men have sex, it doesn't make them gay. In attempting to find the aims and purpose of this theory I was told that there doesn't need to be a purpose and was criticized for "the need to see progress" after asking why it would be better. When I continued to press for some indication of how a society without names is better a question was thrown back at me along the lines of "who would be ostracized in a society like this? Isn't that better?" While I had no ready response, I realized later, as I pondered on it, that the people who would be cast out, the new fringes and outsiders, would be the people who believe that humanity has its source in the divine, that God has expectations for our behavior, and that some things are actually wrong.

In the end, abortion, gay marriage, drug use, corporate cover-ups, they're all just ways we attempt to legitimize our actions in an attempt to fill the loneliness in our souls. We're too stubborn to admit we're unhappy because we're doing things wrong. If there wasn't a need to legitimize things, if the secular liberal community really is content to free themselves of shackles and chains of preconcept and names, then why would the idea of marriage even be an issue? Why not dismiss marriage as an "infantile concept" left over from the barbaric eras of religious tyrany? It is, after all, a convention of relious patriarchal heterosexual society.

We all want to be loved.

A Quick Note on Notes

2004-12-26T22:19:00.000-07:00

I went online to pull out the lyrics for The Watchmen's "On My Way" off the amazing album Silent Radar. Now, it's not exactly that the lyrics as sung on the album, and this song in particular, are difficult to make out, but I just wanted to see them written out. You know, helps you digest it, or something. I was surprised to find that three out of the four sites I went to had an ellipsis (...) instead of the line "spray my brains". I suppose I can understand peoples' aversion to blatant suicide references, escpecially particularly graphic ones like this, but who are you helping if you helping by taking it out? I find it really confusing in light of the fact that the profanity in "Any Day Now" is still intact. Whatever.

I admit I was thrown a little when I first registered this line. I was lying down listening, but not really paying attention, just enjoying the melody, when the line "I kiss the barrel, spray my brains" jumps out of nowhere. I found it particularly jarring since the song almost carries itself with a hopeful, retrospective groove that would usually be the "I made it through it all" kind of song, especially with lines like "I've grown up big and strong" and the title "on my way". It becomes something altogether more disturbing and really truthful about the mindset driving suicide. When you're in that place, in that mindset, it is escape. Suicide holds this hypnotic apeal as a way of "growing up" or "getting over it" and "moving on", for lack of a more refined vocabulary at the moment.

If you don't own the album, go get it. If you do, listen to the song again and see what I mean.

On My Way

Change yourself, not me
Vicious fighter, I�ll agree
Nervous anger, scotch part water
I�'ve recovered fine, it'�s me

I'�ve grown up big and strong, on my way back on

Wear my halo
It'�ll make you think like me
I fell hard though
But I�'ll get back up on, you'�ll see

I�'ve grown up big and strong, on my way back on

In my town, I remember
Fought to break my mind down
Paid my toll, conscience clear
My conscience is clearer

I�'ve grown up big and strong, on my way back on

Seven times the man I'�ll ever be
Like a God on Sunday
Kiss the barrel, spray my brains
All gone now

I�'ve grown up big and strong, on my way back on

My Second Rate Hell

2004-12-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

They took you away from me and you started to fade
like you'd never been there at all
never allowed to hold on to you
it all gets taken away anyway

Missed the bus, locked the keys in the truck
same old story you've heard before
couldn't make it to the station
wasn't welcome anyway

Can't feel anything
Always been too tired to admit I'm loney but things are like that
Aren't they?

The Holes in Everyone

2004-12-16T15:41:00.000-07:00

I've come to the conclusion in preparing for my final exams that the ultimate wall any secular philosophy will find itself pressed against when attempting to grasp the world is its understanding of theology. The inability to grasp, or apathy towards grasping, the essence of the divine or the divine as a source of origin and influence is what hinders these philosophers from actually being able to succeed at what they are attempting. Granted, many aren't really attempting anything, and that by their own admission. Anyway, they construct almost every argument on the foundation that the divinists are categorically wrong about the source of humanity, even if this construction is by assumption or omission and not directly stated. As I sit here reading through lecture notes I consistently see hypotheses about what it is that makes humans different from the rest of the creatures on earth. Among most, Althuser being a possible exception, there is the basic assumption that humans are different in some way. While Althuser does ask "what if we aren't different", none that have been popularized by the institutions seem to swallow their pride and ask "what if religion is right? What if the essential human element is divine and not behavioral?" See, the most common answer about what makes humans unique is that we are symbol using creatures, but as we've analyzed the nature of a symbol it really is anything with meaning. Well, animals use symbols. Peacock feathers are a symbol that other peacocks understand and use to communicate. Wolves wandering around urinating on things are using a symbol parallel to a barbed wire fence and "no trespassers" sign. We are not alone in being symbol using creatures. Something else makes us different.

Because we always go looking

2004-12-15T01:14:00.000-07:00

Near Fantastica

The pink pills are for your sanity
we are buried in the earth because we can’t beat gravity
and you are still here because you’re an important part of the computer
you are still here because you couldn’t bring yourself to pull the trigger
I am your fuzzy bear
picture everyone in their underwear
I am your fuzzy bear
picture everyone
down in the valley where no one ever sleeps
someone is having a yard sale and man those wings are cheap
you could get away
I think it’s time you took a holiday
I am the only one who cares
and I will always be right here
near fantastica

Dream the dream of your attrition
we have no name for your condition
we will be needing you for a little while longer
you are an important part of the computer
after this mission we will let you go
after this mission we will help you to forget everything you know
I am your fuzzy bear
picture everyone breathing real air
I am your fuzzy bear
picture everyone
down in the valley where the lambs grow into sheep
someone is saying something that’s sinking because it’s too deep
but you could get away
I think it’s time you took a holiday
I am the only one who cares
and I will always be right here
near fantastica

I havn't seen you because you havn't seen me

2004-12-07T17:50:00.000-07:00

I think if I were to relate the past few weeks in even the most clinical of terms it would appear overly melodramatic. You probably just wouldn't believe me. Plus this would start sounding like a random Livejournal and no one wants that for non-voyeuristic reasons. On a tangent note off of that, I still do have a growing list of random Blogs and Livejournals that I read on occasion for purely voyeuristic reasons. I'm not going to hide it, I like knowing peoples' secrets.

One of the things that I would most certainly have written about, had I been capable of really writing at the time, would have been the injury of my hand. I broke some pottery at work and cut open the webbing on my right hand when I went to pick it up. I felt like I was going to be fine, but my boss made me go and get stitches (the first in my life) which would up being more painful and irritating over the following days than just the wound would have been. I also have a stack of paperwork to fill out if I want to get paid for the days I couldn't work because the stitches made my hand all bruised and swollen. (Yes, I do intend on blaming most things on the stitches rather than the injury as I did almost the exact same thing to my left hand a year ago, only with a knife.)

One of the other reasons that I'll give you, one of the non-melodramatic reasons, would be the arrival of finals time and also the purchase of World of Warcraft. It has been absorbing large quantities of my time, but seeing as I'm not sleeping well and my lung infection is returning due to the cold (danggit, some of the melodrama still slipped in) I've got plenty of free time that would otherwise be spent wishing I were dead-ish.

That's the update. I also caught about 15 minutes of Lost and wished upon many wishes that I'd seen it from the beginning. Oh well, I'll get it on DVD right after I get around to buying Firefly.

The Intelligent Deserve to Die

2004-11-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

We really do. We're not doing much good because we're too busy trying to figure out who's smarter.

I've accepted that I'm never going to be able to fully apreciate a lot of the movies that are out there because I'll never again be able to experience a film from the perspective of the common movie-goer. I'll never be able to see film for it's pure spectacle. I understand film on a level that makes the understanding of the commoner inaccessable to me. I was thinking about hte failing of Marxism and a lot of different theories and criticism. My problem with critics is that they often take an exclusive ownership of media, that because they can criticise it on a level of ideology that is invisible to the common viewer, their understanding is greater. The problem here is simply that that's not true. Critics seek to define culture, analyse what it is, and classify it. But they simply cannot define culture, because the very act of defineing it instead creates a sub-culture that is accessable only to those who have been initiated into the vocabulary of the sub-culture. Back to Marxism: the failure of Marxism lies in it's exclusive vocabulary and sub-culture. In order for the revolts to happen, people would have to be initiated into the vocabulary and ideas, but teh very process of initiating people into the sub-culture destroys the environment required for the revolt to take place. The problem I have with critics and acadamia in general is that there is this assumption that what they are doing is in some way definative, or even truly descriptive. Acadamia is incapable of truly describing culture because the very act of beig initiated into the vocabulary of critique incapacitates their ability to truly understand the culture. Second thing is that they rarely turn around and ask themselves "are we actually contributing?" The few that do ask that either become revolutionary geniuses or naysaying pariahs, or both.

The additional problem is that there is an entire branch of art that does the same thing with essentially the same assumptions.

The Problem of Standing Aorund Too Long

2004-11-17T17:35:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been noticing a trend in critical theories, and really any sort of theoretical socio-politi-cultural field. It basciacally runs down that after a field has been arund for a length of time it develops a robust body of literature and hypothesis. Eventually this body of knowledge and thought will actually become a hinderment to the development as a field because the academic process begins to mandate wading through an ocean so deep and wide that talented, smart, intuitive people begin to get lost in the depths, thier innovative ideas crushed under the pressure of making sure that they're not saying somethign that's already been said.Film is startinf to reach a similar threshold, where it's very hard to convince someone that you've got a new and unique idea because they want to stick it in one of the billion existing boxes that stuff has been filed in. This is kinda what's at the heart of the "you can't do that" school of literary criticism. If somone great didn't do it, it can't be done. In most fields, if Marx didn't say it, or if you havn't devoted your life to figuring out if Marx said it, you can't do it.

Caveat Empor

2004-11-13T16:43:00.000-07:00

In addition to the animated documentary spoken of below, there will also be a film that uses the most documentary methods then unabashedly, and consciously, manipulates the footage into somethign that isn't only a lie, but is a fiction.

Eat What We Feed You

2004-11-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brenda @ 11/11/2004 01:08 PM PST

I always wind up reading the comments. It's like watching a car crash. I. Just. Can't. Look. Away.

Then I get angry because there are all these people who state things as fact that aren't fact. ("Documentaries are OBJECTIVE! This isn't a documentary because it has a bias!") And I get mad.

Posted by Lemon @ 11/11/2004 02:57 PM PST

Do remember though that in some critical paradigms documentaries are meant to be objective, and anything that is not is not a documentary. they just ignore the fact that every time you choose to shoot one thing and not another, you have made an editorial decision. However, it's a lot safer, and not entirely faulted, in more moderate paradigms to exclude things with such an overtly heavy bias such as propaganda. just because these people aren't measuring up to your idea of how film classification and criticism should be built doesn't make them wrong. It's not a standardized system.

Posted by Brenda @ 11/11/2004 07:12 PM PST

Defining documentary is extremely problematic, so stating any standard of classification as FACT is dumb to begin with, but saying that something's not a documentary because it has a bias does make them wrong. How does an extreme bias make something less a documentary than a slight bias?
Triumph of the Will glorifies Hitler, yes, but it IS comprised of shots of real events, not staged for the camera, so it's a documentary. (There aren't even any real lies in it. The film isn't even narrated. It's just scenes of Hitler speaking and the Nazi party on parade and the Hitler youth being youthful. In other words, it's DOCUMENTING what was happening.)

I'm not talking about some crazy-complex system of classification based on snooty academic theory and years of film study. I'm talking about a fairly basic, agreed-upon definition.

Posted by Lemon @ 11/11/2004 08:42 PM PST

Yah, but some would put propaganda, regardless of wether it was staged or found into a class of its own. Intent, my dear, remember intent. Extreme biases manipulate the information to a point that regardless of how or where you got your footage, your message disregards that. Every live action film is documenting something, even if it's documenting actors pretending to be people they're not. That is then biased and manipulated into a fictional story. If we were to pull the camera back further to a less involved point and show the lights and crew and wires and mics, we wouldn't think we're watching Tyler Durden, we'd think "I'm watching Brad Pitt pretend he's Tyler Durden while people record it." So I suppose the question then comes in: can you make an animated documentary? If you can, then the simple fact that you're just filming a parade and not having people pretend they're in a parade doesn't cut it as for saying "documentary". Intent.

Posted by Brenda @ 11/12/2004 12:52 AM PST

Technically you can say that everything is a documentary, because you're always documenting SOMEthing (and there are theorists who have), and narrative film is just a group of conventions we've come to see as fictions.

You couldn't have a totally animated documentary, unless maybe you were using the animation as historical documents to bolster whatever it was you were trying argue or explain.

There is a fairly clear difference between filming actuality and manipulating it to your own ends and having scripted, rehearsed, staged scenes in which actors pretend to be people other than themselves.

It's not intent we're talking about, my dear. It's methods.
Extreme bias distorts, but the image retains authenticity. (Also, what's extreme bias? Bias you don't agree with? Who gets to designate when something is extreme bias? It doesn't seem like something that could be applied in any standardized way.)
Something can be a documentary AND propaganda. (See: Why We Fight (Capra directed for the military in WWI, is technically a documentary as it uses newsreel footage and supplementary information like maps, even if the map of Japan is animated to look like a dragon at one point)).

The whole problem is that documentary has been somehow roped into implying some kind of objective truth, when that's not how actual documentary film works at all.

Posted by Lemon @ 11/12/2004 01:24 AM PST

realize that definitions can, have, and will continue to change over time as the dominant interpretation changes (note dominant, that means that cliquish people like us who sit around and bicker about deeper, more precise meanings, have very little say if the mass majority decide to take it one way) and currently in film it looks as though (to my delight) that intent is more important than method. People have grown up thinking of documentaries as informative movies about beavers and magpies, or what the Egyptians wore to work.

If you use any new footage (as in you go out and shoot your own) you have not only made an editorial decision, but you have contrived a situation. I don't think the line between unscripted actuality and scripted falsehoods is quite that clear. If we were to stick with Lumiere and Melies, then it would be, but we live in a world of mockumentaries, editorials, Blair Witch, Survivor, and infotainment. Technically Survivor is pretty close to documentary as it's just footage of real people going through a number of activities that have been set up for them, much like if you were following a life in the day of a sports star. It's documenting them playing a game. That's less of a lie than them flying in a dead seal so Nanook could "kill" it for their documentary. Something can be pure fiction and be propaganda (see The Wizard, pure Nintendo propaganda) or it can be almost pure "found footage" and not be a documentary, such as Blair Witch where the only scripted scene was the final few minutes.

So, we'll chalk this one up to the creation of two new schools of thought: the Crombian Methodologists and the Olsonian Intentionists. One method dictates classification, the other intent (taking into account professed intention versus real intent) overrules what something is. But, of course, I'm more concerned with making new films over classifying and deconstructing made films, so that makes me less concerned with wether or not there "can't be an animated documentary" and more concerned with proving that there can be.

Viva la revolution!

The point of this conversation is not so much for one or the other to prove themselves right and the other wrong (well, okay, it is) but is rather to diagram the opposing viewpoints about film theory. Frankly, I don't really like most literary criticism of any kind that doesn't take in due regard the creative process and the differences of approach. As a person who imagines himself as being creative, I take an offense to a group of non-artists (or failed, frustrated artists) standing back and wrestling interpretive clout and the right to define from me simply because they've spent their life "studying" the medium rather than actually building it. It's really quite a new phenomenon in all accounting, and it's not limited to just film. Essentially they help prove that the best works are those that defy classification i.e. cause the most arguments in classrooms. So, with that, someday there will be an animated documentary.

My elbows only bend one way

2004-11-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

I'm not really sure what my intent is with starting this post. I've got a gut full of feelings that I'm not quite sure what to do with. I loved having you here even if it was for only a short time. I hate having you gone. I'm terrified about "things". I wish I had better words to describe it than that, but such does not seem to be the case. Smashing Pumpkins' song Beautiful just came up on random play. I'm haphazardly typing this out before I take off for work, and it seems to be doing me some good. As I talk, as I open up and just let all this flow out for the world to see, I can feel it all slowly draining out of me. I've got pictures of you and old journals here. I just flipped open the green one and it landed on the day that my mom found the letter I was sending to Greaves and the day that you found out about the ring. I was scared at that time too. I was scared to talk to my parents. I was scared to talk to your parents. I was scared that I'd scare you off. Some things I'm always scared of. Some things the scaredness wanes. I'm waning in my scaredness. I'm feeling better. I'm finding my feet again. I'm feeling like me again.

We're going to try and make this simple

2004-11-01T18:17:00.000-07:00

So, I just got my film essay back with a nice C on the back page and about two-grams worth of explanation why. My problem with this goes largely back to the fact that there was very little guidance as far as what was expected of us, or that this was a rather open, interpretive assignment. However it appears that secretly we have been held to a rather strict marking rubric which we are not privy to. all of this hails back to my original complaints about the class that it lacks focus and purpose. As a consequence I've decided to do a little more research on exactly who our teacher is. Donna Brunsdale is part and partial responsible for bringing us the films Waydowntown and A Problem With Fear as-well as a feature of her own direction called Cheerful Tearful which is either "amazing Canadian film making" or "pretentious tripe" depending on wether or not you believe the purpose of film is to actually tell a story or just watch someone sit in a room. Professor Brunsdale apparently believes that effective storytelling is inherently evil, at least from what the bytes taken out of the above article would tell. I'm pretty sure this isn't quite true, as becomes apparent from her class and also from her other projects. She has a love for film, that is quite apparent. She's just not very good at it. As becomes apparent from the reviews of the two features that people have actually seen (Waydowntown and A Problem with Fear) projects that she is involved with are generally okay ideas that simply lack purpose or focus. I'll not comment on the reviews of Cheerful Tearful as there really is only the one and it's written by the people who typically eat up this NFB anti-Hollywood stuff. I'm now intrigued to find a copy of Cheerful Tearful aswell as to ask whatever happened to her second feature project, Shopping. It is also interesting to note that Gary Burns is her husband. In class today she claimed some writing credit for Waydowntown, which could easily be part of Mr. Burns'.

Things I want of a selfish kind

2004-10-31T20:42:00.000-07:00

New shoes
Iron Giant Special Edition
Romeo + Juliet (Baz Lurhman version)
Hellboy: Director's Cut
Lord of the Rings Extended Editions
Big Fish
A pocket watch (the metal band on my watch got bent)
Canon Powershot A95
Futurama
any Kurosawa movie
Winnie the Pooh Special Edition
Edward Scissorhands
Napoleon Dynamite
Ghost World
28 Days Later
Kontroll (never going to happen unless I can learn enough Hungarian to order it off the net)
Pitch Black
Nintendo Game Cube
Classic Disney animations
Works of Michael Gondry
and it becomes rapidly apparent that my priorities in what I want are movies.

addendum:
Buffy DVDs
Angel DVDs
Don Bluth movies

Freakish

2004-10-25T13:53:00.000-06:00

This must easily be the strangest thing I have seen in a long, long time. it helps to further confirm the hypothesis of Scott over at VG Cats

29 October 2003

2004-10-23T10:42:00.000-06:00

Here's the ending of what I wrote in my journal on the 29th of October last year. Note the day references and I'm sure you'll find it as interesting as I did.

"Last night things didn't quite sail as planned with 'The Book of Mormon Movie', plus it started snowing thick, heavy snow. Her home teachers came late and stayed long, so we didn't even hook up until 9:10 or so, but we went to Tim Horton's, had doughnuts and hot chocolate, talked, and went to see 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. It was cheesy, but fun. We had a good night, I like to think."

I looked it up out of curiosity over a comment you made last night. It has meade me very happy with coincidences.

Is it really a question of "if"?

2004-10-20T17:16:00.000-06:00

since the induction ofterm papers into my diet, as well as an introduction to the entropic state known as "poverty" I've unfortunately had neither time nor money for watching movies. This is bad for me. Very bad. Whereas in the month of July I was able to watch fourteen films, August sixteen films, and September twenty films, October has yeilded only six to date. Now, I do realize that there's still some time left in October, but we're really only looking at twelve evenings and four, maybe five afternoons. The compounding factor is that I've all but run out of movies in my personal collections to watch. I could manage to bring the number up where I would like it to be at by borrowing movies off of friends, but this would basically require the willing forfiture of marks on my communications term paper. Maybe I can just finish a first draft of the paper in the next couple days then devote teh in-between times to fleshing it out, allowing me to focus the rest of my attention on he art of cinema...

The Road Ninja Strikes Again

2004-10-17T16:43:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I spent the day shooting photos for a friend's wedding, which involved taking a trip down to Cardston. Another mutual friend picked me up early in the morning to drive down, but he started falling asleep at the wheel so I took over driving. While we were driving through Claresholm I was in the left lane of the two-lane-one-way street and there was a Subaru in the right hand lane. The Subaru puts on his left turn signal and starts slowing down. Assuming he's wanting to change lanes and is lettign me pass I put on a little gas. suddenly he slows all the way down and tries to turn into a service station parking lot, and, as a result, turns right into my lane. I slammed on the brakes, turned the wheel, and managed to slide right between him and the guard rail, into the parking lot, and out the other side without a scratch. It was awesome.

Sleeps

2004-10-17T14:00:00.000-06:00

11
14
61
69
75
80
183
205

Happy?

2004-10-14T13:22:00.000-06:00

I don't know why, but I've been really jumpy/excited for the past hour or so. Maybe it was just getting away from work on a day when everyone seems to be in a mood. Maybe it's the fact that there are only 14 sleeps left. either way, I'm in a good mood.

At work we have a "huddle" before the store opens. This is just a spin-doctored phrase meaning "meeting." The usual fare: sales are up/down, who's on what today, shipment is too big to fit in the warehouse, typical. Lately they've also been doing a littel corporate "value" message. Today's was teamwork. The manager made a specific point about how good "the team" is about not throwing around lines like "that's not my job" and will help out where needed, even if it isn't "their job." Flash forward a half hour. We have four people (out of a normal team of seven or eight) unloading the shipment while the same manger watches over us. Some people on the line make light-hearted comments about her jumping on the line and helping out instead of just standing there. "Oh, well, the way I was trained I was told I'm not supposed to help out." So she continued to watch over us like a gargoyle making sure we don't poket and merchandise or stand around wasting time.

Worth your respect

2004-10-13T18:21:00.000-06:00

I don't give much notice to major public events, but I feel that this guy does it justice.

Eight Hundred Dollar Santa

2004-10-13T13:25:00.000-06:00

Okay, so every now and then we get some really wacky crap coming into the warehouse. Today we got a giant Santa. He's about six feet and a few inches, taller then me by a bit, and costs $799.99 CDN (so if you Americans decide you want a deal on a giant Santa holding a fiddle, we're the Shawnessy Winners in Calgary Alberta). I want to go in and take a picture of him.

Let's talk it over, it's not like we're dead.

2004-10-12T13:43:00.000-06:00

As I was leaving work to come home and consume leftovers for my mid-day caloric intake, Avril Lavigne (sp?) and her new song were playing on the radio. I normally don't pay much heed to these sorts of songs, but for some reason I decided to actually pay attention to the lyrics. In doing so I have come to the conclusion that Avril is actually the most brilliant songwriter gracing the planet at the present time. While so many others spend hours and days finding the right words to rhyme together in oder to form pleasant-sounding, yet poingant lyrics, Avril cuts through the crap and just rhymes the word "dead" with "dead." Why has no one ever thought of this before?

Tech Support

2004-10-11T22:45:00.000-06:00

I know I'm not the only one who this happens to. Someone you know, however remote the connection, hears rumor that you know your way around a computer. This may or may not be true to various degrees. well, somethign goes wrong with their computer, Windows freezes up and won't properly boot back up, critical failures every time you reset, any of the 8,936,573,241 things that can go wrong with any given version of Windows. They call everyone they know who may know your number, eventually get a hold of you and ask you what they need to do. well, you ask them what's been going on, what they see, what they've tried, then find out that they're using Windows 3.1 or something so arcane that it's been years since you forgot how to fix the problem. After a few minutes of trying to tell them how to do it you remember that the main problem is not that they know how to fix their machine, have hit a brick wall, and are hoping you can jump start their memory, it's that they have no idea what to do in the first place. Because you're such a nice person, and because their kids have school projects due tomorrow that are locked in the steely cage of the hard drive, you decide to drop what you're doing and go over to do it for them. The process is just as frustrating as you remember, Windows 98 being less stable than water, but you do manage to remember how to work your way through all the myriad of emergency boot menues to find a boot that will let you reinstall the operating system from their burnt CD. The thought crosses your mind that you've never installed Windows 98 from anythign but a burnt CD. Eventually you get everything as stable as it will ever get and head home over an hour later than you thought you would knowing that as you drive their system is flooding with hundreds of trojans and viruses. But you sleep soundly knowing that at least the projects will get in on time.

Spending my time trying to spend time more wisely

2004-10-11T17:00:00.000-06:00

It's not working. I've been sitting around scrounging weird things off the internet. I've developed a habit of searching google for pictures with specific titles like dscn0001.jpg to see all those digital cameras lose their virginity. Another favorite of mine i me.jpg

That really is the extent of what I've spent my time doing lately, aside from tryign to finish school work that I'm losing desire to do.

Adrianna

2004-10-09T08:36:00.000-06:00

Coldplay
"The Scientist"

Come up to meet you, tell you I'm sorry
You don't know how lovely you are

I had to find you
Tell you I need you
Tell you I set you apart

Tell me your secrets
And ask me your questions
Oh let's go back to the start

Running in circles
Coming up tails
Heads on a silence apart

Nobody said it was easy
Oh it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard

Oh take me back to the start

I was just guessing
At numbers and figures
Pulling your puzzles apart

Questions of science
Science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart

Tell me you love me
Come back and haunt me
Oh and I rush to the start

Running in circles
Chasing our tails
Coming back as we are

Nobody said it was easy
Oh it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard

I'm going back to the start

You Don't Want A Boyfriend. You Want Mr. Spock

2004-10-07T13:22:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm trying to decide waht to do with my afternoon. I have an optional comms lab I could attend, but as always I don't really feel like traveling to the other end of the city unless needed. I could go to a matinee, but I missed the early showings of the movies I'm really interested in seeing. It's First Thursday Crawl tonight. It's not the same without you, so I don't know if I'll go. It's a pitty because you'de really love what's going down tonight. I still have a comms assignment to finish up, which would probably be a wise use of my time, but I'm almost done it as is. What I really want to do is go take pictures of all the lovely things, but I'm out of film and have no money to buy more (not if I intend on going to movies that is.) I might look at other cameras to get, redo my budget so I can get one sooner, pick a cheaper one. Maybe.

I sliced my thumb open right across the knuckle at work this morning. One of the first things that happened, shortly aftr I stepped on a nail that went right through my shoe. I don't think it punctured skin though. I really should check. Nope, I'm fine. It's not my day for injuries, or near injuries.

the title of this post is brought to you by the last song I heard on the radio as I was driving home from work. It's by Nerf Herder.

God's Gift to Man

2004-10-06T18:26:00.000-06:00

I just wanted to take a moment to highlight just how wonderful the invention of the self-flushing urinal is. I walked into on of the washrooms on campus and there was a distinct look as though thousands of guys had gone through that stall with barly an appropriately aimed jiggle at the end of their business. It coated the floor, the urinal itself, and the walls to the side and front. I can only imagine what would be growing on that handle if it existed.

I almost peed myself

2004-10-05T19:58:00.000-06:00

I was dragging my way around the vastness of the interweb when I came across this. Now, I don't normally click on advertisments, but this one was ambiguous enough that it pulled me in. the funny thing is that people like me are the ones who have seen this the most.

The Least Likely

Give Up

2004-10-05T13:28:00.000-06:00

So, I've officially entered the realm of Post-Secondary Procrastination. I have had a quiz for my communications class availible for a week and a half. It's due today. I did it last night. I'm going to try to do next week's quiz tonight after I get home from swimming. I'm also hoping I can manage to actually read the six page (thick and chunky) chapter for this week's class on the bus ride up to school. The upsdie is that I think I got all the question on the quiz right. well, I know I got them right (the answers are right in front of you) it's wether or not I got the form right. Part of the problem is that the notation style that I was using requires you to indent every line after the first. Well, Word will do just about everything but that. Fortunately my professor hates doing bibliographys herself, so she said tehy were going to be a little more forgiving with this assignment, if the form isn't absolutely dead on. It would be dead on if I could get Word to cooperate.

Other than that, The Postal Service has been finding its way into my aural universe lately.

Grrrrrrrr

2004-10-05T11:34:00.000-06:00

Blogger has been giving me a lot of problems over the past few days resulting in a large number of duplicate posts, or posts being lost entirely. Grrrrrrrr.

In other news I found a really cool hat at Value Village the other day. It's a police style cap with the sort of octagonal shape and the short bill. It ran me in the neighborhood of $1.99. A fair deal, I'd say.

Peeling off the Scabs

2004-10-01T23:34:00.000-06:00

The Entire world situation right now has me sick of life in general.

All the above words are linked to something. I jsut grabbed a rnadom hodgepodge of events that have come to mind. Some of the sites I support and are present because I feel sad that they should exist, others are simple excercises in the futility of trying to communicate responsibility to a people who couldn't care less. Frankly, I think the system should be more concerned with getitng more people to vote than tryign to awing voters. I also think that slur campaigns should stop, as they basically say "I'm not a good choice, I'm just the better choice." I'm tired of hearing about the war and the election. I'm tired of everyone on the face of the planet trying to swing my opinion out to the poles. I look at it this way right now: the Bush administration won't get out of this mess, and the Kerry administration can't. I want someone to stand up at some open debate, ask about the war, and get the answer "Do you want the oil or not?"

You Mean There Really is a Bart!

2004-09-30T16:53:00.000-06:00

I just found this website: Scamblog

Scamblog is dedicated to those e-mails you get detailing the plights of those people who send you e-mails with heart wrenching stories about how their entire family was killed in a car accident, now they have a few months to move $XX million out of the country before the government takes it.

Turns out that there actually are real people sending out those e-mails. It's a scam, but these aren't the bot spam we're used ot from our native soil: chainletters built to spread viruses. These are real, well orchestrated scams. If you write back showing interest, you will get a response. Or at least stand a good chance of getting a response.

The Can Just Looks Big

2004-09-27T13:42:00.000-06:00

I'm coming to the realization that my film teacher is either one of the more un-engaging people I've met, not very good at teching film theory, or doesn't know film theory with any real meaty depth. Or she's just like my English teachers through the years and is trying to keep everything down to a level where wet meat fresh out of High School can struggle through but still pass. In my normal villanistic attitude, this means trying to explain that American Pie does not represent any pinnacle of civilization, and is more of a gatekeeper to the place where civilizations go to die.I guess we'll see what kind of year htis is going to be in film when I get my essay back in a month.

Life at 25 kph

2004-09-26T18:59:00.000-06:00

thomas, one of my brother's buddies, got a broken down scooter a few weeks ago. Just earlier today they finally got it to the point where it'll run, but you have to pur gas directly into the engine. He brought it over and I got to ride it for about 50 feet before it cuts out. I want one.

The Bloggosphere

2004-09-25T18:54:00.000-06:00

I've been spending some (too much) time recently cruising around the bloggospher using the "next Blog" button up at the top on the tool bar. What I've discovered is exactly what you'd expect: a lot of derelict blogs with one or two posts on them, a lot amounting to "I hate my teacher. My Teacher sux. My mom sux too." and a few that have been really neat.

One Million Footnotes has been getting more and better coverage than this little post, but I found the idea to be quite refreshing, especially since the content is actual quality.

Milk Bottle is in French and some broken English, but has a little box on the side with a new song every day. Some days it's some neat Euro-synth stuff, other days it's just weird. It caught my attention.

Lisa's Blog is a personal Blog that I stumbled into. I've kept going back because there's something about the current emotional state of the author that I find very intriguing. I see something in people, I find them fascinating.

Away With the Faeries To be honest, I've been reading a lot of Scary Go Round lately, and the fact that the author of this one is from England made me want to read it. She's kinda quirky.

Disoriented Chaos I feel I should include because I go there fairly regularly to read something. The author posted a random comment on Brenda's Blog a long while back and I decided to go see who they were and what they do. Well, we all need an occasional influx of aimless teen angst to keep us remembering what High School was like.

It doesn't matter where you kick me, I'm still coming back for more

2004-09-25T18:06:00.000-06:00

This is probably the primary reason why George Lucas is able to do what he does. Some of the changes that have been made to the DVDs (and most of the changes in the Special Edition which are thusly inherited) feel like molestations of something that wasn't really broken, and in many cases seem like Lucas doesn't understand why these films are actually popular. Though it is significant that The Empire Strikes Back has remained pretty much intact across the two recent incarnations, the largest change being the insertion if Ian McDermot as the Emperor instead of the old lady they had orriginally used. This is a change that not only makes sense, but looks a lot better than the orriginal. I'm undecided though about the change in dialogue as I havn't seen it yet.

Still, Episode III...

Me / You = Error

2004-09-25T17:30:00.000-06:00

There's this song that keeps playing on the radio at work, and it's kinda irritating. The lyrics are something like "I was invisible, invisible to you" but the first time I heard it I found myself coming up with some kind of "Schoolhouse Rock" song with lyrics like "I was indivisible, indivisible by 2..." Then as I was driving home form work, this being the song that was playing as I left the building, I combined the two lyrics to some crappy mathgeek love-song "I was indivisible by you." I think it'd be a top ten hit. It sounds exactly like a song that is a top ten hit, so why wouldn't it be? In fact, the girls made us listen to Rick Dees and the Weekly Top 40 while we worked. I want to insert small blasting caps in my ears and set them off so I never have to listen to that again. Sure there sare three, four good songs on the countdown: Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, Dashboard Confessional, but Rick has this way of making them seem like they're even more trite then the self-revelant crap that they play. When he went off about how Spiderman, in SM2, gives up being a superhero because he's demonized by the press, then saves everyone from Doc. Oc and everyone sees he's a superhero "in other words he is 'vindicated' now here's Dashboard Confessional with 'Vindicated' fromt he Spiderman 2 soundtrack..." it stripped both the movie and the song of all emotional punch. After the song finished he made some comment about how feminine Chris Carrabba's voice is.

I hate top 40 radio.

Waiting for the lights to turn themselves on

2004-09-24T18:57:00.000-06:00

I'm liking this whole putting up of pictures. I enjoy photos. I enjoy visual communication. So I decided to throw up a picture that I helpped a friend of the family make for a school project. The project was really just a tutorial for home schooling to demonstrate that you're capable of sending in projects and stuff. The requirement was "Darw a happy face, scan it into the computer, and send it to the e-mail adress." Well, that's boring, so when they asked for my help with the scanner, I developed this instead of the simple drawings.

No one suspects the butterfly

2004-09-22T16:44:00.000-06:00

This is probably the saddest (as in unhappy, not pathetic) thing I have ever written. I hope that some day someone reads this and decides that it’s worth waking up tomorrow.

paycheques and songs about suicide

The cheque is in the mail. I'm writing them with my mouth, you're going to cash them and I'm going to laugh when the bounce. Everything is wonderful now. I'm dead and you're dying. Everything is funny. Sorry if I laugh when you're down, but I don't smile at other things any more. I only eat fruit. You know where you're going; I've been there before. I told you about it, but you probably tuned me out. You work for your paycheque, but you don't need to do anything. When you're paid by the hour, you only need to be there. The activity keeps you from the insanity. The insanity protects you from the world, absolutely. It's your own circle, as vicious as you want it to be. It is a different circle. It is not a perfect circle. This circle ends. You've seen the end coming from the moment you started moving away from the beginning. Somewhere along the way, you break your bones, and someone breaks your heart. You remember the old rhymes, right? All your answers were given to you when you were in the crib and bleeding on the playground. Sticks and stones my break my bones, but your words will never hurt me. This is a lie, and yet it is the truth we know. We know that words tear deeper than any knife. Sticks and stones my break my bones, but your words may kill me. I will not die by their force, but by their guidance. That is the ultimate swan song. The end is the swan song. The swan song is, at its core, a song about suicide. If you write a swan song, you know your going to die, and you're letting it happen. Resignation is suicide. You've got all those songs in your head: all the songs about suicide. You'll be sorry when I'm gone. The darker side of the biggest ride you've ever been on. Another six months I'll be unknown. Who ever thought she'd miss the ins and outs of oxygen. Music, you'll definitely miss music. They found her in her room. I laughed the loudest, who'd have known. It's always the happy child. That's one of those unspoken rules. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. When you're not squeaking, you don't get the grease. No one can see the pain beneath the facade if you don't take off the mask. That's why we disappear, and no one sees it coming. No one suspects the butterfly.

Do you like the taste of it in your mouth?

2004-09-22T11:35:00.000-06:00

Fear technology in every way.

More Tales From The East

2004-09-22T10:34:00.000-06:00

Well, I've been sitting around trying to find the remote for the DVD player so that I can watch the new Star Wars DVDs on the big TV with good sound (better then my laptop to make a gross understatement) but someone seems to have lost it. I can vouch confidently that it wasn't me, since eveery movie I've watched at home since I got back from vaction I've watched on my laptop, up in my room. So, couldn't find the remote, so I scanned in a bunch of pictures from my trip. Yes, Brenda, I do have the ones you asked for, I can MSN them to you whenever we're next online at the same time.

Me at the CN Tower. I think I'll use this for my new profile picture.

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Me in Ottawa. That's Gateneau on the other side of the river.

The map of the city of Chibougamau. Well, part of it at least. There's not much more to it.

So there we have it, some more random pictures of where I spent my summer vacation.

The Best Way to Die

2004-09-21T17:34:00.000-06:00

Well, classes are going reasonably well, by my yard stick. I recieved my term project outline from my film teacher yesterday. we have to attend a film in the international section of the Calgary Film festival, then do a thorough analysis of the film. The length is 750 words. That is the part that has me smiling with an cheeky smile. I did a quick comparison, and 750 words is either a little more than my breakdown of King Arthur or a little less than my breakdown of Farenheit 9/11. While those aren't exactly pillars of grandure, showing off my writing ability, they are not very long in the sceme of things. Not having to sit and mindlessly gabble on about whatever it is I choose to see, simply to fill space, is certainly a relief. the only fear I have is that it may be too easy to go well over the mark when doing a full breakdown. We'll see.

As for Communications, it's going to require a little more focus and discipline.

Blame it on the Tetons

2004-09-21T11:40:00.000-06:00

I should have seen this coming from a mile away. I have the day off from work, but still have school this afternoon. Im my mind I was going to be able to get all sorts of things done today, including some good progress on the website, my laundry, and some work on the book. Instead I slept unitl 11 and have to leave for class at 2. There's still time, I just won't be able to get very much done that I had planned. Whatever, I needed the sleep.

On another note, I have a lesion on the inside of my cheek, right at the very back next to my wisdom teeth (which are poking through) in the little spot that gets perpetually bitten. I've had it for about a week right now, and it really hurts. I need to stop off at the store on my way to school and buy some mouthwash.

I Didn't Take Everything, Just the Heart Shaped Piece

2004-09-20T13:25:00.000-06:00

Well, my second Film lecture was far more entertaining than the first one. We actually covered some film theory. I'm probably going to be the guy that everyone hates because they have an answer to every question. Honestly, some teachers made me very self-conscious about that in HS, but I've decided (as of about 20 seconds ago) that I'm not going to care. I have answers and contributions to make for everything the teacher says. I know this stuff. It's in my blood.

Story Time: In grade 11 my English teacher pulled me aside after a class and politely asked me to shut my damn mouth in class because I was frustrating the other students and at least five people had individually complained about me. By name. She told me that while my appreciation of higher literary theory was a good thing, it had no place in a class where the majority of students are struggling to understand what a "plot" is. Outwardly I didn't give a flying hoot about what she said, but inwardly I found it actually affecting me over the process of time. I didn't stop contributing to class, but I grew very self conscious about answering "too many" questions.

I suspect that my new goal to allow myself to be a know-it-all will probably incur some backlash from other students, but I'm four years older than these kids, their opinion of me is the last thing I'm concerned about. Plus I can probably make some money off them when cram time comes. Ah, sweet capitalism: exploiting the needy since 1327.

In the Aftermath of the Supernova

2004-09-15T17:38:00.000-06:00

I was a little disappointed at what happened after my film class: everyone got up and left as fast as they could. No sitting around, no chit-chat, no discourse on the merits of the film, just up and gone. It'd be great if a bunch of people started going out for like dinner or something afterwards and discussed the film just viewed.

You beg me to stop, but I was never that nice

2004-09-14T17:18:00.000-06:00

I'm at school right now. I got out of my lecture about an hour early, because it's the first class so we basically just covered the usual "If you plagiarize, I will kick you @$$" that first week consists of. Now I know where all my classes are physically located, so I shouldn't have any more days of wandering around aimlessly wishing I had actually looked this crap up a week ago like I intended on doing.

In other news: I have Hunger. It's a condition that generally goes into temporary remission after treatments, but never entirely leaves your system. I was officially diagnosed early in life and have lived with it almost consistantly since then. Every now and then I'll remain in remission for days at a time, but htis remission is actually a false feeling where the condition has set in particularly hard and is in the process of doing much harm to your system, like the guy at the concert with one too many beers in his gut and one hundred too many pounds on his frame.

Aswell, if I walk around with my headphones on and no music, I can pick up just about every electrical field that I walk through. Those security detectors at the entrance to the library? I know when they're just joshing you. If thins is power, then we have nothing to fear from the world at large.

The Polls are in...

2004-09-13T23:58:00.000-06:00

...Hotcakes aren't a big seller.

I went swimming this evening and had a chance to use the scale at the athletic centre. To clarify something, it's rare the I have the chance to weigh myself. We're not exactly a family that's overly concerned with our weight so when our bathroom scale broke when I was 10 (as a result of me and my brothers jumping on it to see how many times we could get the needle to go around the dial) it was never replaced. Earlier in the year I had a chance to weigh myself at the doctor's office and came in at just under 140 pounds, a reasonable weight and up from my several year average of 135. Tonight I weighed in at 124.6 pounds.

Photoliscious

2004-09-13T20:51:00.000-06:00

I decided to scan in a bunch of pictures from my recent trip.

It is my personal opinion that this is the best picture I have ever taken.

Two kids making out at the back of the bus was our entertainment from Sudbury Ontario to Sault Saint Marie.

My riding the ferry from Vancouver to victoria. Incidentally the guy in the make out picture is the guy taking this picture.

Niagara Falls. It was a long walk from the bus depot to here.

A long time friend in Montreal, Kim. everyone loves Kim.

An interesting shot of people on the bus.

Yah, there we go.

Waste of Space

2004-09-13T16:28:00.000-06:00

I was just walking away from my film studies class when I heard the guy in front of me say "Yah I'm really going to drop this class." His girlfried walking next to him says "Why, don't you wan tto see North By Northwest?" "No, not really. They're not showing any Tarentino."
I am a fan of Quentin Tarantino, make no mistake, but this is the same mentality that I rage against over his films and also films like the Matrix: they attract widespread attention, grap the public interest, and enter the mainstream lexicon where everyone promptly ignores how they fit into the bigger sceme of things. My anger is that these film do not open a wide new world of film making and film apreciation to the general public, they form toxic little bubbles of talent and cheap rip-offs. this is the reason why I'm aprehensive about Sky Captain. I want to see a movie with such a novel idea succeed (the entire film was shot against a blue sceen) for concept alone, similar to the way that I was rooting for the re-make of Psycho to be good. But I also want to see it tank like nothing else so that 2006 will not see us staring down the barrel of 20 films shot on blue screen only.

Coming in From Everywhere

2004-09-11T08:16:00.000-06:00

I use Re_Invigorate to track the visitors to this site, and I've noticed that recently I've gotten some visitors to the site who I don't personally know. One from California was referred here through a link that I can no longer find, and I've received a number of hits from somewhere in the west Pacific. Aswell, I did a quick google of "Lemonfrosted" and found that I was linked by a guy whos Blog is titled "The Disney Blog." He quoted a portion of my ponderings on "The Nightmare Before Christmas" then added a short little comment of his own. It felt good to think that there are total strangers who see my websites.

As a quick update, the job is going well. It's monotonous, and the warehouse iss backed up beyond reason (about a month worth of shipments have yet to be processed) essentially because of supply problems (they keep sending us more stuff than the store has room for) rather than processing problems. Just yesterday I cleared out seven or eight racks that were still sitting out on the sales floor by the time I went home. Even if we process everything in the warehouse, there's nowhere in the store to put it all. Aside from that, I just need to show up and get a lot of work done. I don't need to deal with customers or any of that crap.

Also, I'm currently working on a few new Blog templates and have started a test blog http://goingforaspin.blogspot.com/ to display said templates and get feedback before applying them to real Blogs. There's nothing there right now, as far as something new. I'll work on it tonight.

Salvation is at hand for the traveling man

2004-09-08T14:52:00.000-06:00

So, I went back tot he clothing store that I might have mentioned a while ago, and got hte job in the warehouse. I start tomorrow at 8:30, then have my first class at 3:00. then I think we're going to a reading tomorrow night as well. It'll be interesting. At the reading last night Mark asked me to "draw a kitty" so I did.

I'd say don't wait for it, but there's not much you can do

2004-09-08T10:26:00.003-06:00

I possibly just had the worst night ever. My parents made borscht yesterday. The whole house smelled of it pretty strongly. At a little after three I woke up because of the smell, but didn't figure out that the smell was the reason for another couple hours. Opened my window and by sometime after seven it was cleared out enough that I was able to get to sleep. Something tells me it's going to be a long, tired day.

It's not actually an orriginal idea...

2004-09-06T20:47:00.000-06:00

... I just plagiarized something you don't recognize.

I spent some time rifling through my boxes in the basement looking for an old copy of Chart Magazine with Matthew Good on the cover. I didn't find the magazine, but did manage to find a whole bunch of very odd things in the mess of my former life. One was a sheet of paper with scribbled writing all over both sides. Normally I'm averse to finding these sorts of things because I have no idea what to expect out of it. I could have been on a streak that week and managed to write something of weight that I just never was able to do anything significant with, or I dribbled schlock and garbage out of my mouth and it stained the page beyond repair. this one is a mix. From a two liner that became the title for this post, to this attempt at comprehending my mental illness:

My brain doesn't like me. I'm not my chemical imbalance, but it's one of my defining characteristics. As for my brain, the rest of me is expendable as long as it can keep doing it's thing.

There's some rambling on the page about the nature of art, something really weird about ciphers and riddles, which I actually think I'll write out:

The cipher lies in the numbers and riddles. The patterns are the riddles and the numbers are yes and no: completely down 0 - 100 and the same for the stranger. Likewise wholeness is found from [0] to [1001] because grass is greener on the other side from the fence and (the words 'left' and 'right' are written overtop of each other here) again. This requires a reconciliation and amalgamation. 0 - 100 is too limited and the old must be abandoned and expanded. Zero is still 0.

There are number of points inside that piece where there are random letters in between lines and some letters are circled. I think the letters spell out the word "right" but I'm not certain of that. Something tickles my memory and says that this was part of some more complex visual piece. It's not in my portfolio, so I don't know what happened to the rest. To try and date this I can guess that it's going to be after September 2000 because of the references to "complete strangers" a phrase I didn't start using until after the Tegan and Sara concert where I snuck backstage. Two pieces on here use that word phrase, one which occupies the entire front and another titled Stalker.

Stalker
You don't know me
I'm a complete stranger
I saw you on the train yesterday
You never saw me looking at you
You don't know me
I know you
Or like to think I do

Complete Stranger
I'm a complete stranger
Standing in the distance I see everything
I'm a silent radar
Scratching chicken on paper in the dark
I'm dragging nothing in your bag of tricks
My bag of tricks is yellow and green
I'm colours foreign to your heart
We're old souls in bodies too young to die
We're the illegible pen marks on a cocktail napkin
We're the ideas hacked out of clay in between thoughts
We're the things you never see coming
We're the confusion over where the best prawns are served
We're sushi in the afternoon
We're a bag of cookies and a can of whipped cream at 2-am
We're dancing reindeer and Santa in Florida
We're the commercials they didn't show you
We're inflatable pool chairs in shark infested waters
We're one step ahead of ourselves
We're inspired
We're pawn to our muses
What are we again?
we adore you/we want to be you/we want wholeness/everything together as one piece of scrap metal/the junkyard tied to itself/forgotten and unseen/fully completely/people you don't know/taking count of everything/you have never known

Cost Confirmed

2004-09-06T09:42:00.000-06:00

So, my dad got home from vacation and I showed him my new headphones. He said that he used to have a pair exactly like them, just green, back when he was a teenager. He paid $13 for his and earned at his job $1.75/hr. that equals out to about ten hours of work, so, in terms of purchasing power, the equivalent would be going out and buying a $70-$80 pair of headphones.

Overwhelming Loss of Consciousness

2004-09-05T15:12:00.000-06:00

I'm in a pretty bad state physically right now. My insides have been twitching all day long, like I got some kind of barbed metal ball stuck in there and I keep jolting it, resulting on the barbs pulling my entrails and other vital organs out of place. Add to that that I haven't been eating well, and somewhere in the past three months I managed to lose ten precious pounds. I should clarify there for any strangers reading this (I know there are none, I check my stats) that I don't have many pounds free to lose. At the beginning of the summer I was 135. I am now 125 lbs. and 5'11" tall. I'm already below the recommended weight for my age and height, so losing is not a good thing. So, now I think I'm going to go scrounge the cupboards to see if I can find some caloric-intake possibly definable as "tasty."

Small Pleasures

2004-09-05T01:49:00.000-06:00

I went to Value Village today and aquired a pair of old headphones for $2.00. They're the Old style headphones. they actually look alot like the pair in this picture, but are slightly different.
The old, massive sized stereo plug was a little beat up (and incompatable with most current hardware) so I bought replacement plugs (1/8" mini) from Radio Shack and spent the majority of the afternoon trying to cull my grade ten soldering skills out of the closet. I was never that good at soldering to begin with, so this was about as arduous a process as you can find for a regular saturday afternoon. However, in the end, I, with alot of help from a friend, was able to get everything pieced together and now have a working pair of orriginal retro headphones, fitted for modern devices, without paying the $90 stores are asking for the new replicas.

The Air We Breathe

2004-09-04T01:39:00.000-06:00

Outside it smells like smoke. I got to the party and the first thing I did was went and looked for you. It's funny, in a sort of way, how everywhere I go I still expect to find you there. I'm not sure if that classifies as unhealthy or if it's just a sign of how much I gave of myself to you. It's funny how that works. How it's working out. I'm supposed to be sitting here trying to figure out what's best for me, and all I can think of is the same old feeling I've always felt: I don't know anyone here, and I don't fit in here. You made me fit in. I fit with you. We fit in. As much as people like us ever fit anywhere. Rightly so I was the square peg to a round hole once. I suppose that may be my lot in life. Do square pegs need to find square holes? Are there any square holes? Or do square pegs need to learn how to fit in round holes? Was I the one worth leaving? Questions. The only people who can answer these questions are the very people who are least equipped to do so. Heartache is foreign to anyone who isn't experiencing it at that very moment. The moment heartbreak leaves the memory of it fades and the intensity of the moment vanishes. Once it's gone we forget how all-consuming it is. We forget the small details of how it feels to wake up a million times a day to the fact that a part of your soul has just been removed with less-than-sharp instruments. It may be an illusion, a result of pride, or it may very well be a fact. When Lazarus died, Jesus wept. It is fact. It is a part of the big picture. If those who see the big picture weep at loss, then how much more right have we to weep both at our loss and our ignorance? I said once that I, in some respects, enjoy crying. I said that with every time I cry a few motes and beams are washed out. I still stand by that. I've washed a lot out of my eyes lately, but there's still a lot in there. For now, I suppose I'm going to hide here until someone finds me. It's what I want. I want someone to come find me. I want someone to give me a reason. I'm not a good enough reason for myself. Maybe that's where I should start. I should start doing things because I'm a good enough reason to be a better person. Maybe I should start tonight. Go find someone and make a new friend. I'm scared. I'll admit that. I'm always scared. Well, maybe not always, but the idea of being alive, of being part of this all, is terrifying. It's only the good reasons in life that keep me going. I need to be a good enough reason. Once, many years ago, I counted out reasons to stay alive. The list was ten long (you were there), and all ten reasons were names. I wasn't a name on that list. Maybe I should be. I think that would be a good place to start. Ten good reasons to stay alive, and my name at the top. Or at least on there somewhere. I would ask you what you think. If you said put it at the top, it would be there before you finished and wouldn't come down for a very long time. I need to decide for myself where I belong on that list. Do I have the courage to put myself on that list and then stand by it? It's something in the air. The air smells like smoke, things burning. Forest fire sweeping across the sides of the mountains. We used to freak out a lot more when those would happen. We still do get really uptight about it. but only because we're not trees. We don't have the foresight or the experience of a tree. We don't know how a tree sees it's life. If like to believe that Father has given the trees a view of their existence that enables them to accept forest fires. They, in my mind, have much to teach us. They do not see the ashes of valuable trees wasted in the wake of the fire. They see precious nutrients, the remnants of their bodies, piled hight to feed their young. They see the sunlight, precious vital sunlight, and water freed up for the saplings growing gently in the ground. All that they had they have given up do that the future generations can have it and benefit from it. How much do we give up for others, and do we recognize how much others have given up for us? These questions are personal, I suppose, which would make the answers equally personal. I don't know what to do with them. Bank them away and hope they make sense some day.

Possibilities

2004-09-03T16:31:00.000-06:00

You whispered possibilities of everything falling appart.
To be honest, somewhere inside me dreamed it would happen.
Then you could come back to me.
If that's even possible.

Go downtown, catch the early movie

2004-09-03T13:13:00.000-06:00

I've always wanted to be in the situation where I was the only person in the theatre for the movie. That or just me and the people I'm with. I've come very, very close a few times in the past, where it's been my group of a few people, then one or two other small groups, or four individuals or so. When it's a couple other like-minded groups, then it's basically like being alone because they're heckling the movie as well. But there's something about being alone, you're not even overlapping heckling. Right now I'm in the theatre for King Arthur (look on LemonFrosted for my thoughts on the movie) and I'm the only one here. There's still a while before the movie starts, so there's a chance that someone else might come in, but part of the reason why I picked King Arthur is because I suspected that it would be pretty dang close to empty, especially for the noon show, which are primarily attended by families with small children and birthday parties. All this kind of junk I learned from working at a movie theatre for two years. If anyone does come in, I can bet nickels to dimes they'll be a group of three 15 year old boys trying to eek the last drops out of their summer vacation before school starts next week.
Oh, there we go, two fifteen year old boys. Off by a count of one.
I guess I should cover all bases and mention that the other, more rare, attendees at these movies is the "dirty middle-aged guy with no where to go" and the even less common are the people like me who'll go to just about any movie just because it's playing. Probably the only restriction that I'll put on that is any movie where the theatre is going to be filled with small children, or if The Prinz would fit seamlessly into the male lead.
Wow, unprecedented, a middle aged couple just came in, together. I'm going to guess that they didn't want to go to the same movie as the kids were going to, so they sent them in and then picked a movie they could see that would be ending around the same time.
Another group of four teenage boys.
A second drifting middle-aged man (one slipped in and sat at the very back earlier)
The theatre is now playing Michael Jackson's Billy Jean. Right on. It's all about pre-Dangerous MJ. I will honestly say in public that I wish I could dance like MJ. I try. Napoleon Dynamite just made me want to learn how to dance all the more.
Aw crap, things are starting to fill up. Not bad kind of full, but there's actually people here now. I don't know if I'm going to be able to get away with having my laptop open during the movie. Maybe next week, once school is back in, I'll be able to pull this off on a Wednesday, or Thursday. Still, the audience is over 50% teenage boys. The only females are the one in the middle-aged couple and a late-thirties woman sitting alone down the row from me. Oh, she's the vanguard for a group. And a senior couple just came in. One of the things that I found really, really odd was that one of the largest demographics attending The General's Daughter were senior women. I'm not sure what it was. The subject matter (rape, murder, more rape) wasn't exactly what I thought of as grandmother fare.
I wonder what will happen if I do just keep working on my laptop as the movie plays. Lights are dimming,