Last week I saw a movie with my friend Adam at the fancy Arclight theater on Sunset. As we were filing out afterward, an employee apologized for the fire alarm and handed us free tickets to see another movie. We hadn’t noticed any alarm, but we shrugged and took the tickets. Yesterday we used them to see The Prestige. (I found it riveting, though it’s only for people who like their movies grim and extremely complicated.) Toward the end of the movie, Adam joked, “Excuse me while I go pull the fire alarm.”
Archives for October 2006
Halloween Reading
Last night my writing program hosted a Halloween reading at the Fischer art gallery at USC. Tracy did a really nice job getting everything set up — there was wine, cheese & crackers, and chocolate laid out on a table in the courtyard, and the seats in the gallery were draped with cobwebs. I kicked things off by reading my Harry Potter poem and a short-short about an escaped prisoner who finds himself chained to a corpse. It’s hard to create a scary atmosphere in just two pages (which was the limit for this event), so most readers elected to do funny rather than scary. The funniest was Andy’s “The Cock-Blocking Ghost,” about a young man who finds himself living in an apartment haunted by the vengeful spirit of a male virgin. This ghost stymies all the narrator’s attempts to get laid, frightening away girls by moaning things like, “Gonnnorrrheeeaaa.”
x-Point Plot Outlines
Last week in my fiction class I learned a new x-point plot outline.
The one I already knew was this 7-pointer: A character (#1) in a place (#2) has a problem (#3). The character tries (#4) to solve the problem, complications (#5) ensue, and the character succeeds or fails (#6), which leads to a resolution (#7).
This new one is a 5-pointer, and is quite similar, but different enough to be worth mentioning: A character has a problem (#1). This problem evokes a need (#2). This need causes the character to take action (#3). In the course of this action, the character comes to a realization (#4). This realization leads to a resolution (#5).
I kinda like them both, so I just decided to combine them into my 10-pointer (plus I added #7): A character (#1) in a place (#2) has a problem (#3). This problem evokes a need (#4). This need causes the character to take action (#5). Complications (#6) ensue. The character makes a choice. (#7) The character succeeds or fails (#8) and comes to a realization (#9), which leads to a resolution (#10).
Fun / Not Fun
The fun got a little out of hand at the 29 Cafe last night. The word “douchenozzle” was introduced to our collective lexicon, despite no one really being sure what it might mean. One of my classmates expressed her fervent desire to co-star with me in a porn film. And of course there was the soon-to-be-infamous, can’t-kill-it “half monkey” conversation, which had me laughing so hard I thought I was going to rupture something. (“You know what the problem was with Twelve Monkeys?” “What?” “It wasn’t Twelve and a half Monkeys.”) I can’t even explain it. One of my classmates also related an anecdote where he told his class that he didn’t have a car. His professor joked, “What, did you get drunk and crash it?” Awkward silence. Then, “Um … actually, yeah. That’s exactly what happened.” Professor: “Um … oh.”
To balance that out, I woke up this morning to discover that some dipshit in Mexico somehow charged thousands of dollars to my credit card yesterday. Argh.
James B. Harris, Producer of Lolita, Speaks at USC
Last night James B. Harris came to speak about his role as producer of the 1962 Kubrick adaptation of Lolita. At the time, all films had to get a stamp of approval from the Catholic church’s “Legion of Decency,” so Harris had to go and screen Lolita for the group. At one point, one of the decency guys said, offended, “It seems that Humbert is staring at the photo of Lolita on the dresser and using it as an aphrodisiac so he can make love to Charlotte.” Harris gave the guy a sidelong glance and was like, “Whoa, I don’t know where you’re getting that from,” with the implication like, Man, are you one sick bastard. The guy, embarrassed, let it drop. But of course, that’s exactly what was going on. Harris says, “I should’ve gotten the Oscar for Best Actor for that.”
He also talked a bit about Dr. Strangelove. He and Kubrick had worked out the story as a straight suspense/thriller. Then Harris left to direct his own projects. Kubrick called him up one night and was like, “I had an idea. I want to do it as a comedy.” Harris thought he was crazy. The financiers thought Kubrick was crazy too, and pulled out. But Kubrick was adamant, and got it made as a comedy.
Harris also talked about getting started as a producer. The most important thing, he said, is to make sure you and your friends have rich parents.
Drive-by
This weekend someone was killed in broad daylight in a drive-by shooting a few blocks from my apartment. I used to walk past that intersection twice every day on my way to and from the grocery store. Now I drive, because of shit like this.
Movie Review: Marie Antoinette; Frazetta: Painting with Fire
Saw the new Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette movie, which has fabulously lush visuals and a killer soundtrack. It’s light on plot, and will probably try the patience of most moviegoers, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It tells the story of Marie Antoinette using the vocabulary of a contemporary teen girl flick, a la Mean Girls, to make the point that Marie Antoinette was not a monster of self-indulgence and callousness, as history would have her, but basically just like your average American — focused on her own petty squabbles and personal problems, allaying her boredom and sadness through consumerism, ignorant and apathetic about politics. The political situation in France is almost totally ignored, but this is eerily effective at capturing the insular, out-of-touch nature of the French Court. I’d even see the movie again, but then I’m a sucker for historical dramas.
Another movie I just watched that I really got a kick out of was the documentary Frazetta: Painting with Fire. If you have any affection for Sword & Sorcery type stuff, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Seen around USC
The other day I went to Subway. As I parked, I noticed that the guy getting out of the car next to me was holding a bag of Subway sandwiches. It occurred to me that it was somewhat strange for someone already in possession of a bag of Subway sandwiches to be going to Subway. I followed him into the store and stood behind him in line. He said something to the employees. All I caught was the word “blood.” Finally, unable to contain my curiosity, I asked him, “What happened with your sandwiches?” He explained that his girlfriend had gone over there to buy sandwiches, and while they were being made the employee had sliced a finger, bleeding all over the food preparation area. The girlfriend didn’t know what to say, but by the time she got home she’d decided that she didn’t want to eat the sandwiches. I said, “So she sent you to go return them?” And he said, “Yeah, she was too embarrassed to come back.”
Then walking around campus the other night, I noticed that one of the security vehicles had stopped and was shining its floodlight up into one of the enormous tropical trees outside the student center. Then I saw that a student had climbed WAY up into the tree, probably twenty feet off the pavement. A female friend of his was standing nearby, being suitably impressed and/or horrified by the guy’s climbing abilities. The security guys got out of their vehicle and told the student to come down, which he did. They looked over his ID, gave him a lecture, and drove off. I was reminded of a time when I was a freshman and got caught by campus security late at night after I had scaled a fence to get into a construction site to retrieve my frisbee. Ah, fun times. I was also pleasantly reminded of Roger Zelazny’s character Fred Cassidy, the rooftop-climbing perpetual undergrad from Doorways in the Sand.
Three Bucks
So on Saturday I was doing my daily walk around campus and found myself amidst the throngs exiting the football stadium. One guy came up to me and said, “Excuse me, sir?” I stopped and eyed him. He looked sane and wasn’t particularly dirty or unkempt. (At least, no more so than your average football fan.) He said, “I’m having a really bad day. I just realized I don’t have enough to pay for the bus home. I’m short … $2.70. Do you think you could … ?” Without thinking I said, “Sure,” and gave him three bucks. Almost instantly I realized it was probably a scam, but whatever. I think I was just relieved that he wasn’t going to try to talk to me about football.
Then today I was doing my walk, and the exact same guy came up to me and used the exact same line. I said, “I just gave you money on Saturday,” and he was like, “Oh, you did?” and slunk off. I wasn’t even really bothered that he’d suckered me, but I was really insulted that he didn’t remember me. I mean, I gave him three bucks. You’d think that would buy me at least three days of recognition. The sad thing is, if he’d come up to me today and been like, “Excuse me, sir? Aren’t you that charming young man who gave me three dollars the other day? Do you think you could help me out again? I’m having a really bad day, and I just realized I don’t have enough to pay for more crack,” I probably would have been like, “Well … okay! Hey, you remembered me!”
Beauty = Conformity?
A few weeks ago I went to a screening of a documentary about cosmetic surgery. One of the people they interviewed was a plastic surgeon, Mr. Marquardt. He’s produced a mask that he believes represents the “ideal” human face, based on various permutations of the “golden ratio” (1:1.618). He claims that this mask fits anyone from any race in any time and place who is or was considered to be exceptionally beautiful. His theory is basically that human beings recognize each other visually, using a hard-wired blueprint of what a human face is “supposed” to look like. The closer someone conforms to this blueprint, the more “humaness” our brain automatically ascribes to them. (Evidence for this includes the fact that even infants respond positively to pretty faces and negatively to ugly ones.)
I find this theory fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. In subsequent group discussions of the film, most people just seemed to find it horrifying. There was much animated condemnation of Mr. Marquardt for promoting this monolithic, reductionist, conformist view of beauty, rather than recognizing that beauty comes from within, that there’s something beautiful about everyone, that beauty is truth and truth beauty, etc., etc. I found this reflexive rebuttal overly facile. What really scares me isn’t the idea that Mr. Marquardt is promoting this monolithic, reductionist, conformist view of beauty and that he’s an idiot, but that he’s promoting this monolithic, reductionist, conformist view of beauty and that maybe he’s right. (In the film, Mr. Marquardt comes across as extremely obnoxious, so it’s hard to say how much of the negative reaction was colored by people’s response to his personality.)
Speaking of beauty, I thought this video was pretty striking. It reminds me of a study I just read, which found that people are so deluged by images of artificially attractive faces that no one in this particular survey rated any of the 150 actual, existing, makeup-less faces any higher than “average.” Only computer-manipulated faces received rankings of “rather attractive” or “very attractive.”
Medieval Swordfighting
A few years ago I saw a startling demonstration of some of the techniques from a medieval sword fighting manual. The techniques were brutal and dirty, and made a sword fight look less like a fencing match and more like a back-alley knife fight. I’ve been trying to find video of this for a while, and finally stumbled across this video [dead link] on YouTube. The guys are going pretty slow, but I think you can imagine how ugly the real thing would be.
Dude, Where’s My Car?
Yesterday I went to Venice Beach and then ate at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. You’re only allowed to park there for 3 hours, and my time was almost up, so I paid for my food and told my friends (who I’d given a ride) that I was going to hurry back and make sure I didn’t get a ticket. They were supposed to get the bill, pay it, and join me. I walked back to the parking garage and … couldn’t find my car. I was sure I had parked on level 3, but I couldn’t find it. I tried level 2. Nothing. I tried level 4. Nothing. I tried 3 again. Nope. I tried 2 again. Etc. The garage is composed entirely of ramps slanting every which way and is very confusing. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, then thirty, and I still couldn’t find my car. I wondered if it’d been towed or stolen. I wondered where my friends were. (I didn’t have my cell phone with me.) Finally, I went up to level 6 and jogged around and around in a corkscrew pattern all the way down to level 1, passing every single car in the garage. Mine wasn’t among them. There was an attendant by the entrance, so I explained my situation. I was obviously not the first person to have this problem, and she explained boredly that there are two completely separate, completely identical parking garages on either side of the building, and that my car was probably in the other one. I walked through the mall and came out in the other parking garage. Almost instantly I spotted my friends, who’d been waiting by my car for twenty minutes. They were like, “Oh, we were getting worried about you.”
Global Warming
Tonight I went to a screening of An Inconvenient Truth. Before the film, a young man gave a presentation about how global warming is destroying his homeland, a small island in the Pacific. The rising sea level is contaminating the ground water and killing off the coastal trees that his people depend on for food, medicine, and building materials. Rising ocean temperatures are wiping out the coral reefs. Without the reefs, there are no fish to eat. It’s not clear how much longer the island will be inhabitable, but the people there are too poor to move. It was very sad.
My Short Story “The Black Bird” Appears in Article “Introducing Readers to the Genre” by Carol Pinchefsky
Carol Pinchefsky’s article “Introducing Readers to the Genre” is up at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. In this piece she attempts to find readers who don’t normally read fantasy or science fiction, get them to read something, and then gauge their reactions. One story she used was my “The Black Bird.”
Ted Elliot, co-writer of Pirates of the Caribbean, speaks at USC
Tonight I went to a screening of Pirates of the Caribbean that featured a Q&A afterword with co-writer Ted Elliott. He and his writing partner had pitched the idea of doing a PotC movie to Disney back in ’92 and been turned down. Ten years later, after a change of leadership at Disney, an exec called him up and, knowing nothing of his earlier pitch, said Disney was thinking about doing a PotC movie and would he be interested. He leapt at the chance. Having done Shrek, he was interested in doing more movies that drew on material that was already a part of the audience’s mental vocabulary. Everyone’s familiar with the idea of ghost pirates and cursed treasure, but there haven’t been any big movies about them in recent memory. In fact, there hadn’t been a successful pirate movie in about 50 years. (The most recent big attempt being the ill-fated Cutthroat Island. Its major flaw, according to Elliott, is that it’s an action movie with pirates rather than a pirate movie.) Disney already had a PotC script in development that had no supernatural elements. Elliott and his partner took some characters and elements from that script and added the ghost pirates. A few weeks ago in my screenwriting class, my professor was talking about PotC and said, “What makes that movie work is Jack Sparrow. Without him, there’s just no movie. If I were to pitch it, I’d say, ‘It’s a pirate movie with Bugs Bunny as the main character.'” I thought that was interesting, and thought about asking Elliott for his take on that, but he beat me to it, saying, “Jack Sparrow is a Trickster character. Trickster characters are more common in other cultures, less so in western cultures, though there are a few — like Bugs Bunny.” Someone asked how much of Jack Sparrow’s screwball persona was in the script. Elliott said that’s why you cast a great actor like Johnny Depp — he brings a whole other intepretation to the character that you could’ve never imagined. In the case of PotC, what Depp really seized on was Jack Sparrow’s line, “But you have heard of me,” and started conceiving the character as a sort of pirate rock star.
Burning Harry Potter: A Poem
A day or so ago, I was reading one of these news stories about a church group holding a Harry Potter book burning. In all the stories I’ve read about this phenomenon, I’ve never come across a statement by someone who’s against Harry Potter who’s actually read the book. I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising — anyone possessing the intellectual capacity to read a children’s book is probably smart enough to know that banning and burning books is a bad idea. Still, I find this lack of curiosity startling. For the second time this month I was inspired to write a poem. (Which is strange, since I haven’t written any other poetry since probably about third grade.) Anyway, here it is:
Burning Harry Potter
by David Kirtley
Never have the flames blazed hotter
Than when we burned Harry Potter
We dragged him out from Privet Lane
And bound him up with cuffs and chains
He flailed and wept and cried, “I’m just a kid.”
We said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Tied to the stake there he turned red
From tip of toe to bolt-scarred head
He blackened, charred, and then was dead
And we rejoiced, our children saved
From witchcraft, never would they rave
Again of Hogwarts, Dumbledore, or Quidditch
The witch was dead. Ding-dong. Good riddance.
No more talk of places where the magic dreamt-of creatures go
Or whatever Harry told of. We never asked. We didn’t want to know.
Irritated
So last night I went to a documentary and panel discussion on cosmetic surgery in America. Unfortunately, somebody went and alerted the football team to the fact that the college has lecture halls, and a sizable contingent of them showed up, sat in the back, and joked loudly and catcalled throughout the whole panel. I was sitting close to the front, and I could still barely hear the panelists, who had microphones. I felt really embarrassed for USC. Apparently the fact that these guys are all headed off for the NFL has given them the sadly mistaken impression that they’re not just a bunch of hosers. I would have gone over there are kicked their asses, except that they outweighed me by a collective 150,000 pounds. Finally one girl in the audience went off on them, which succeeded in shutting them up for about three minutes. Anyway, I was pissed enough that I’m now boycotting SC football games. Not that I would ever go anyway.
Then I had a run-in with an overzealous gate security officer. It was late, and I had popped over to Subway for a sandwich, then tried to return to the parking garage. The guy at the gate stopped me and asked, “What building are you headed to?” I wasn’t headed to any building. I was just planning to sit out by the fountain (the only safe outdoor area within 30 miles) and eat my sandwich before heading home. I said, probably foolishly, “Oh, I’m just hanging out.” He frowned and said suspiciously, “I don’t know about this ‘hanging out.'” I said, “Is that a problem? I’m a student.” “Oh no, no problem,” he said, in a tone implying that there was a problem and that I probably had a dead body in my trunk, “as long as let me take down your license plate.” I was like, “Okay, whatever.” He made a big production of taking down my license plate. Gosh, I hope he doesn’t run my plates and find out that I’m wanted for a notorious spree of hangings-out on campuses all over the country. Then he was like, “Just make sure you’re gone by 6:00 a.m., or I’m going to be pissed.” (My permit doesn’t allow me to park on campus from 6:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.) I was like, “Yeah, whatever.” What a tool. I guess from now on instead of “Hanging out” I’ll be “Going to the library.”
Jane Goodall speaks at USC
Today I went to a lecture by Jane Goodall. Of course Goodall is one of the most famous scientists alive, but in my own peculiar cosmology what really makes her a big star is that she was referenced in a Far Side cartoon. See this page (under References in Popular Culture) for the whole story. She talked about how her fascination with animals and Africa was sparked by two fictional characters, Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan. She talked about how her erudite professors at Cambridge critized her writings as unprofessional and unscientific for ascribing such traits as “feelings” and “personalities” to mere chimpanzees. She says she knew they were wrong for one simple reason — she’d grown up with a dog. In fact, recent analysis has revealed that chimps are more similar to humans than anyone thought — we share about 99% of the same DNA. We are more similar to chimps than rats are to mice. Goodall described an incident where a startled chimp toppled into the moat surrounding his enclosure and seemed certain to drown. A bystander leapt into the water and rescued the chimp, against the orders of the keepers and at enormous risk to his own life. When asked why he’d done it, he replied, “I looked into his eyes and saw there an expression I recognized utterly, this look of, ‘Please somebody help me.'”
DONE
Well, I just finished copying out every single word of James Joyce’s Ulysses by hand into a series of spiral notebooks. I forget exactly when I started, but it was within the last two years. For some of you, this may require some explanation.
Basically, when I attended the Odyssey writing workshop in 2001, the instructor, Jeanne Cavelos, suggested that a worthwhile exercise might be to retype a short story by an author we admired and pay particular attention to how it was written. One problem for writers is that if a piece of writing is any good it sweeps you away into your imagination, leaving you with little or no awareness of mundane technical details such as verb choice, sentence length, or comma placement. Retyping a story forces you to actually pay attention to all that stuff. And I thought, hey, if retyping a short story is good, then retyping an entire novel must be even better. And if retyping an entire novel is even better, doing it by hand must be better still.
I discovered that not only was this very educational, it was also very fun, nay addictive. I found it very relaxing and also found that it put me into a mental state that was conducive to thinking over many things besides just the text in front of me. I did one entire novel, and then another, and then another, and then another. I started off with writers who wrote like me only better, then moved on to writers who wrote less like me but still great, then on to writers I didn’t actually even like but who were undeniably skilled. Which brings us to Ulysses.
I’d never read Ulysses. I’d never actually read anything by Joyce except Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I mostly disliked. (I’ve since read Dubliners, which I liked better.) My reasons for deciding to copy it out are now growing hazy after two years, but I near as I can recollect: 1) There’s a reference to it in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, 2) When I lived in Ireland, I was really struck by the fact that the Irish put a writer — James Joyce — on their currency, something that would never happen in America, 3) It was listed as the greatest novel of all time by the Modern Library, 4) Mike Canfield said he liked it, 5) Some famous writer I can’t remember was quoted as saying “We are all struggling to be contemporaries of Joyce,” 6) Some other famous writer I can’t remember said that Ulysses deploys every literary technique ever invented, which seemed like something good to know, 7) I once embarrassed myself in front of another writer when I got “Molly Bloom” confused with “Judy Blume,” and I wanted to make sure that never happened again.
Anyway, it’s now 3:17 a.m. and I’m off to bed. I may post more on this later. But for now … I’m DONE.
Security
Last week I went to a lecture by Bruce Schneier, security expert and author of the new book Beyond Fear. He said that people often frame the security debate as one of safety versus liberty, but that this is a false opposition. Usually the best way to guarantee safety is liberty. He said that law enforcement has an irrational bias in favor of accreting power and data, but this doesn’t ever seem to make citizens safer. (“When you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack, adding more hay doesn’t help.”) He said that only three measures enacted since 9/11 have actually made air travel safer: 1) Reinforcing cockpit doors, 2) Putting air marshals on planes, and 3) Telling passengers to fight hijackers. He said that drawing up watch lists and requiring multiple IDs is a complete waste of time, because we don’t have a reliable list of the bad guys and we never will. He talked about debating someone from the TSA on the radio. The TSA guy said, “If someone’s sitting next to you on a plane, you want to know who they are.” Schneier’s retort is, “If someone’s sitting next to me on a plane, what I want to know is ‘Are they planning to blow up the plane?’ If they’re not planning to blow up the plane, then I don’t care who they are. And you know what? Even if they are planning to blow up the plane, I still don’t care who they are. I just want them to not blow up the plane.” He said that people in favor of increased surveillance and identification often ask him on the radio, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, what do you care what people know about you?” To this he replies, “What’s your salary?” The only response he ever gets is embarrassed stammering.