Grand Canyon 5 years ago

Following the news about Jean Baudrillard buying the farm, which I learned from Eripsa here I thought I would post about the death of Captain America which I learned about here.

So we have Guerilla marketing and cross marketing with websites and graphic novels and webisdoes and download the freakin’ podcast and . . . ah! I used to think that the world was going to end because stuff like Nine Inch Nails would never play as “Solid Gold Oldies”. As I get older and realize that there are only so many hours in a lifetime, I am finding that I am a fan of the oldies. By oldies I mean music organized into an album OR TV shows into programs on the tube OR films into 2 hour narratives that you can enjoy in full sans any kind of contextualization by hours of website surfing and code breaking. Perhaps all this complexity is a game for the young or the more selectively obsessed, which I used to be until it jumped this shark. I will hold out hope that I can enjoy the new Nine Inch Nails album without devoting more than the time it takes to listento the tracks. Art is supposed to have an element of interpretation, I just don’t know how well that will hold up if things are going to get this dense.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

SAMPLE OUTLINE WRITING FOR FILM SPRING 2007

Vehicle: 1 min short Title: HYPERVENTILATION

THE WORLD OF THE STORY
A fleet of starships of varying size and function are caravanning through space. They carry with them 17,000 refugees of varying social and political background who have lost their homes to an intergalactic territory grab. This fleet is occasionally attacked by space-pirates, who are fought off by a small militia/police group made up of ex-military and volunteers. The story focuses on one refugee, a musician, lying in a tiny bunk looking out an 8″ oval porthole watching a starfighter dogfight between raiding pirates and the militia.

THE CHARACTER
Julius Kaddo (27) – the man in the bunk, is scared. Being a musician he is essentially helpless in this circumstance. This is not the first time he has had to deal with a fear of raiders; he treats panic like a form of stage-freight. He rolls the brass mouthpiece of a trumpet in his hands intermittently placing it to his lips and blowing; it seems to soothe him as he watches this fight through the porthole.

ACT I
Julius sits up in his bunk writing on a musical staff with a nub of a pencil. His stomach growls and he smacks his lips acknowledging hunger pangs.
Inciting Incident:
A loud THUD occurs and the lights in the tiny room become a dim blue, a bright red flash shins through a tiny port hole in the ceiling of the room.
Progressive Complications:
Julius recoils into a fetal position in his bunk as the lights flicker and further THUDS occur.

ACT II
Explosions from the firefight occurring outside lighten Julius’ face, his eyes are frozen like a deer in headlights watching the beautiful but deadly dance of the fighters in the cold vastness of space.
Crisis:
Julius, his face sweaty from panicked convolutions begins to hyperventilate.
Crisis Continued:
His body begins to enter a more intense convulsion and his breathing becomes more labored, his vision becomes blurry.

ACT III
Climax:
About to lose consciousness he pulls himself to clarity his vision sharpens and in the dim light of his room he frantically scans for something. He sees the item shining on a small table next to his bunk. He lunges from his bunk and grabs the item falling back into his bunk.
Resolution:
He allows the item to roll around in his hand for a moment watching the space battle escalate. He places the item, the mouthpiece of a trumpet to his lips and blows through it, in so doing he controls and calms his hyperventilation. His breathing is normal as the final light from the battle ceases and the light in the room brightens.

THEME
The plot’s crisis/climax express the idea of how a civilian might be forced to deal with a military situation that is out of his control. Julius is a musician, as such he is not a fighter nor do his skills lie in tactical strategy or anything that might benefit the fleet in avoiding pirates. As such when the fleet comes under attack he is forced to face his helplessness and accept his mortality a thought which elicits panic. He has found that the best way for him to deal with this panic is to rely on that which he does know, his musical training. So like many horn players who practice blowing through mouthpieces to keep their lips and lungs in shape Julius does it to calm himself with something familiar.

So in a few hours I’ll be 26 years old and it struck me that this is the usual number of episodes of most anime shows so I thought I’d see if I could break down my life like one of those series.

episode/year

1 This is the beginning it’s kind of abstract and scattered focusing mostly on images. The main character has few lines and prefers to “play dumb”. He is not fully mobile nor are his skills or the power that he has within him full realized.

2 More of the same, except the main character begins to move about more and befriends a dog. His brother who would for a time become his greatest foe only to later become a great ally is born.

3-5 Prior to starting school our main character makes a few friends with other “children” at pre-school, he and a few of these friends break a tire swing and it is his first traumatic event, though there is no trauma, this will be a running theme through most of the “drama” of his life.

5-10 The formative years. These episodes have some good stuff as our main character begins to develop a cynical sense of humor to replace his original fresh faced innocence. Also at this time his imagination begins to flourish as he spends most of his time playing in the redwood Forrest backyard where he lives.

11-13 Cable TV comes to the area and he is introduced to culture in the form of MTV, grunge music and Batman TAS. Also he starts to develop feelings for a girl, this would not be the first time for this but his skill set is quite lacking and so nothing comes of this, another running theme.

14-18 High School years see him honing his anti-social arrogance as a tool for dealing with the vast number of rednecks and generally annoying types that saturate the school. He forms a few solid friendships with others of the “geek” crowd and begins a sincere pursuit of medicine as a career, focusing on his studies while ignoring any remaining adolescent rights of passage.

19-22 College. It is an unfamiliar environment. The culture shock is dulled by once again meeting people of like-minded apathy and interests. For our main character this is the period of the greatest ambivalence, it is good and very bad. Then our main character discovers drugs and satellite TV and it’s mostly good, in a foggy sort of way.

23-26 Losing his passion or whatever it was for medicine our main character recoils back to the redwood Forrest where he studies film in a vague attempt to sort out his own confusion about life, etc.

It should be noted that the final ep 26 has just began and might provide a serious change in the direction of the show possibly offering a cliffhanger to a sequel if audience interest demands it.

My favorite episodes so far 4,5, 7-10, 13-17 (puberty they were good eps), 20-22 (having has his own kingdom), 25.

So last night I caught the end of a Legends of Jazz episode on The ‘S (Public Broadcasting Station). Anywho these guys are just speaking gibberish into mic accompanied by a band playing Dave Brubeck’s Take 5. They were skating and it was on Legends of Jazz which makes it legit, that is to say this was the episode that features two of the world renound skat men. That skating is legit, seems ridiculous but also kind of pisses me off since this is clearly my calling. Hell I love to speak gibberish when a tune strikes me right and yes I know these guys are doing more than that but it certainly seems like fun though it is totally ridiculous. Anyway I feel sad since clearly this was what I was mean’t to be and now it’s a bit late for me (1 week away from “26 years on my way to hell”) to begin learning how to become an expert skatman. Though my fortune cookie tonight said this: “You are talented in many ways.” If only I knew which ways damn it because I’m pretty sure that skating could be one of them.

When analyzing some piece of art for merit such as a story or a movie the first inclination is to find order, to dispel entropy and in so doing to organize the data of the piece into a category. People laugh at a stage show and see how the antics of the characters are ridiculous and exaggerated, they call this a comedy. However in the growing complexity of modern days when these categories have been delineated by critics for many decades and in some cases centuries. There appear these subdivisions of categories and inevitably the line begins to blur between genres.
Take the comedy example so if these antics are slapstick that is harmless enough but what if the jokes are organized around a political event? The Three Stooges never meet Hitler but that might have been funny. Can this simply be called comedy? It now has social commentary about relevant historical material that is not funny. OR take the example of Itchy & Scratchy on the Simpsons where the humor comes from violence, a confrontation with mortality. Of course if you can’t laugh at death what’s the point? This is something that society is getting better at. This is the very root of what makes something a dark comedy; that is the subject matter deals with serious issues of life and death.
Taking the dark comedy as a spring board is it not much of a leap to then arrive at drama through the connection between comedy and tragedy? Some say comedy is tragedy plus time but in this ever accelerating world the two quite often appear as one and the same. So if we can create something that is both comedy and tragedy the fundamental elements of catharsis, the two poles on the spectrum of artistic expression then it seems reasonable to assert that genre is a moot term.
What does this do for the artist? Well, with no easy categories with which to place a product, that product can be immediately validated as “art” or it can be dismissed as “crap” and forsaken into the void of entropy. Here is where the socio-political hand waving is most critical. In the former case of justification of a product as “art” there must not only be discourse but agreement there must be a rhetoric about the piece. This might be a “pitch” to use Hollywood terms. Now this effort of justification will thrive in the hands of a critical community with accredited critics (for whatever that means) but like in modern media, which stories get told is a political and practical decision since every story simply cannot be given such consideration.
Now it is the task of the artist not only to create from the ether, to arrive at some kind of product from the chaos, but also to justify this creation to explain something in terms of overlapping categories without betraying the creation through overly convoluted exegesis. If the product is worth much this convolution will follow and become something other people will do that will make it more than it was through critical and fan (the reason to do it) discourse. This I think is what makes something art and this I think is what makes good stuff dynamic beyond its inception and creation, giving it a longevity of entertainment beyond that of the creator. Hence the immortality thing.

Last Winter I worked on a project that was a quirky puppet film called: The Adventures of Left Shoe The Bunny Slipper. The writer/director Montel VanderHorck did sound recording for my own thesis film and so it was fun to work on his project where I was even doing a bit of acting as an orderly at an insane asylum. His movie has just won two awards at the CSU Media Arts Festival which is pretty cool. You can check out the categories here: http://www.mediaartsfestival.org/