Zombie Lapdance

I’ve been more or less offline for a few days. The tablet PC stopped turning on, and while I was waiting for the new motherboard to show up, the backup Dell (the one that Klaw has been advising me on how to upgrade to Linux) chewed through its own LCD cable. It’s the second time it’s done that. I guess that every Dell laptop has to have some design feature that was put in as a prank by the high school intern.

But I got the new motherboard switched in, which was about thirty minutes of work with a precision screwdriver and my beyboard. And the good news is that it looks like all of my lithium-ion batteries are working. Wouldn’t you know it, they weren’t recharging because of the motherboard.

All of which means that I’m in a stupid good mood right now, and I thought I would soften my stance on mumblecore.

Previously, I wrote an open letter to mumblecore, explaining why I thought it sucked. After my week at the Austin Film Festival, my faith in the creativity and passion of the individual filmmaker has been re-energized. So, thanks for trying, mumblecore, I think you’re doing the best job you can, and I thank you for it.

That being said, my colleague Patrick S. sent me this link to a mumblecore trailer as well as this link. One of those links is to a parody trailer, and one is a genuine and earnest promotion of mumblecore, and it took me a couple minutes of careful watching to figure out which was which.

It’s also interesting to note that both those trailers have a much higher production value than your average mumblecore feature.

But you guys are doing great, mumblecore! Pretty much!

I didn’t get to see many of the films at the Austin Film Festival because I was spending most of my time in panels at the conference, or hanging out in the bar, or drinking like a Wisconsin native at the parties. But once the conference part was over, I got to see a fair share of films.

Here’s the viewing rundown. Every entry is going to have a link to the AFF entry, where you will likely find pictures, info, and possibly video clips.

I’m also going to mark it according to whether or not there’s women characters who talk to each other about something that is not men. On her personal blog, Toasterwaffel talked about that as a metric for judging the merit of a movie. I’m not certain if it’s fair to draw a feminist meaning from that observation, but Toasterwaffel is right in that it happens very rarely.

Title: Serious Moonlight
Type: Feature indie drama
Desc: This is the last screenplay by Adrienne Shelly, an actor from many Hal Hartley films. She was murdered in 2006, which is one of the biggest tragedies to hit cinema in recent years. This movie was directed by Cheryl Hines who many will remember from her role on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Meg Ryan plays the main character, a tough and quirky career woman who looks cute in knee-high wellies. She goes to her country cottage to find that her husband is about to leave her, so she takes drastic action.
Female Dialogue: There is quite a lot of woman-to-woman dialogue, and it is exclusively about men.
Male Dialogue: There is a little man-to-man conversation, and it is exclusively about women.

The documentary shorts program was without exception amazing.

Title: A Day Late in Oakland
Type: Documentary Short
Desc: A hair-raising investigation into the murder of a journalist in Oakland. The community that was responsible for the murder was part of the American Black Muslim faith, so nearly all the villains had the last name "Bey." I can tell you it was weird sitting in the theater while looking at news reports where "Bey tortured a man for two hours" or "Bey was charged with rape of a minor."
Female Dialogue: No women.
Male Dialogue: The men talked about serious issues.

Title: The New Canvas
Type: Documentary Short
Desc: You ever wonder what’s with those little collectible toys that look totally bonkers? This is all about that. You see both sides of the subject, the people who think that it makes high art affordable for the masses, and one guy who thinks it’s a bunch of crap.
Female Dialogue: There’s one female artist and she talks into the camera about her art. I’ll say that counts.
Male Dialogue: Same as above.

Title: Little Ripper
Type: Documentary Short
Desc: In Australia there’s people who are really serious about racing pigeons. It makes you want to build a pigeon loft and get really obsessed with birds that most people would prefer run over with their car.
Female Dialogue: There’s one woman, and she’s talking to the camera about pigeons.
Male Dialogue: There’s a lot of men, and they really love pigeons too.

Title: Mr. Okra
Type: Documentary Short
Desc: Mr. Okra drives around New Orleans, singing through his loudspeaker about all the different produce he has. There is no moment when the camera is on Mr. Okra when he is not fascinating.
Female Dialogue: No women.
Male Dialogue: Mr. Okra does indeed talk about okra.

Title: Team Taliban
Type: Documentary Short
Desc: This is about a young man who uses his Arab ancestry to inform his pro-wrestling persona of a terrorist. It’s an interesting contrast, between the man inside the ring, who is the brunt of audience hatred, and the man outside who is soft-spoken and thoughtfully ruminating on the racial and cultural ramifications of what he’s doing. What the documentary doesn’t talk about is how playing a heel is the traditional way for a wrestler to advance their career.
Female Dialogue: No women.
Male Dialogue: Wrestling.

Then of course there were all the features. The context for a feature film in a festival is much different from the context in a main-stream movie house, so who knows if you will enjoy these as much as me should you ever get to see them.

Title: Tobruk
Type: Feature drama
Desc: Supposedly it’s a re-telling of The Red Badge of Courage, as told through the experiences of the 500 or so Czech soldiers who fought in North Africa during World War II. It’s all in Czech and there’s some significant male nudity for those of you who are into that sort of thing. Here’s the structure of the film: 95% male camaraderie, beautiful views of North Africa, hardscrabble living; 5% extreme violence.
Female Dialogue: There’s one woman, a prostitute, and she mainly talks about getting paid.
Male Dialogue: The war, women, Judaism, food, drink.

Title: Punching the Clown
Type: Feature comedy
Desc: This super-low budget film follows a comedic singer-songwriter and his mis-adventures in L.A. culture. It’s genuinely funny and the main character is personable and charming.
Female Dialogue: There are women, but they don’t talk to each other. Mainly they talk about the main character.
Male Dialogue: They talk about comedy, L.A., Batman, and bagels.

Title: Passenger Side
Type: Feature drama
Desc: Two brothers drive around L.A. Because this is partially funded by Canadian TV, they have to mention hockey a couple times. The directing is sloppy, the cinematography ugly, the script over-written, and the acting frequently clunky. But for all that, it’s a good film festival entry because it’s all super-low-budget, quirky, and about relationships and shit. It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t supposed to be period piece because the car which is the main set and the music they play is so old.
Female Dialogue: There is one woman who shows up in the end, and she only talks about the dudes. I guess there’s also an old lady who is there just to be spooky.
Male Dialogue: Hockey, dismemberment, drugs, and family drama.

Title: Herpes Boy
Type: Feature comedy
Desc: Herpes boy is a guy who has a birth mark on his face and does a series of webcam journal entries about how much he hates people. Before long his cousin shows up and there’s some nifty contrast between her perky, pretty, and narcissistic character and his dour, ugly, and self-hating character. There’s a lot of Napoleon Dynamite in this movie, and it’s probably not as funny as everyone thinks it is, but it’s entertaining and quirky nonetheless.
Female Dialogue: The cousin talks mainly about herself.
Male Dialogue: Herpes boy talks mainly to the internet, and it’s mainly misanthropic.

Title: Thor at the Bus Stop
Type: Feature drama
Desc: Thor is waiting at a bus stop. There’s a bunch of other weird things that happen surrounding that. This is my favorite film of the festival hands down. Just about every scene is brilliantly hilarious, especially the one about a guy who is extremely laid back who gets carjacked. There’s a cameo by Teller of Penn and Teller fame, and there’s an extremely efficient use of low-budget film making strategies. How low-budget is it, you ask? It’s so low-budget that there’s a scene where they have to destroy a pizza, and it’s a cheese pizza. That’s right, it’s so low-budget that they didn’t even spring for an extra topping on a prop pizza.
Female Dialogue: There’s two women, one who talks exclusively about her relationship to her boyfriend, and one who talks mainly about waitressing with a digression into Norse mythology.
Male Dialogue: Ragnarok, pizza, and the planetary status of Pluto.

Title: Up in the Air
Type: Feature drama
Desc: This is the George Clooney movie written and directed by the guy who did Juno. It’s about an executive who spends most of his time flying from city to city and staying at the Hilton. His job is firing people, so there is plenty of comedic and tragic possibilities which I can assure you are fully explored. This was pretty subtle, striking a balance between the dark comedy, the character development, and an in-depth contextual reading. That being said, I think it’s harder to imagine a more depressing film.
Female Dialogue: There’s a long conversation between two women where they discuss their perfect man.
Male Dialogue: Firing people.

I spent an entire evening watching animated shorts, two back-to-back shorts programs. It was interesting to note that most of the shorts were CGI, and most of them had no dialogue. It was sort of the Pixar format of shorts, where you develop a single character who acts out a drama or a slapstick routine through the established visual logic. I talked to some of the animators about this, and I got the impression that it wasn’t so much because they were interested in the international aspect of non-dialogue animations, so much as animators that’s just how they express their art, in the purest most visual terms.

Title: Garb Age
Type: Animated short
Desc: This the only animation with actual dialogue, and I kinda wish it didn’t have any. It’s about a bunch of water-dwelling organisms that are formed from garbage that is dumped into the ocean. It made very little biological or narrative sense.
Female Dialogue: No females, but then it was hard to tell.
Male Dialogue: Garbage.

Title: The Incident at Tower 37
Type: Animated short
Desc: This was a surreal exploration of a colorful future world. There’s a good deal of humanity and a few surprises. There’s a short video clip on the AFF page if you’re curious.
Female Dialogue: No dialogue. No females. Probably.
Male Dialogue: N/A

Title: The Incredible Story of My Great Grandmother Olive
Type: Animated short
Desc: An old lady in a wheelchair gets visited by an alien. Old-people slapstick ensues.
Female Dialogue: No dialogue.
Male Dialogue: N/A

Title: Lost and Found
Type: Animated short
Desc: This was extremely beautiful and touching, a story about a small boy and the penguin who won’t stop following him. The graphic style managed to be realistically textured, but with the impressionistic style of a children’s book.
Female Dialogue: No dialogue, no females.
Male Dialogue: N/A

Title: The Mouse That Soared
Type: Animated short
Desc: A funny slapstick series of events involving a mouse who is adopted by birds.
Female Dialogue: Just animals, no talking.
Male Dialogue: N/A

Title: Off the Wall
Type: Animated Short
Desc: A young boy is making shadow puppets on the wall of his room. This becomes unexpectedly dangerous. I talked to the filmmakers, and they had a lot of interesting things to say about the art of developing character.
Female Dialogue: No females. No dialogue.
Male Dialogue: "Aaaaaargh!"

Title: Ollie and the Baked Hallibut
Type: Animated Short
Desc: A broad ethnic stereoptype is trying to make his dinner, but a sea otter stops him!
Female Dialogue: All animals.
Male Dialogue: Broad ethnic stereotypical jabbering.

Title: Pigeon: Impossible
Type: Animated short
Desc: The animator said that the original concept was a man vs. a box. This was expanded a little to include a pigeon and spy paraphernalia.
Female Dialogue: No dialogue. The pigeon might have been female, they don’t go into it.
Male Dialogue: Silence.

Title: Pups of Liberty
Type: Animated Short
Desc: This is one of the few cartoons in the festival that appeared to be hand-drawn, it also had actual dialogue. This short (which was actually reasonably long) told the story of the American Revolution in Boston from the extended metaphor of Americans being dogs and the English being cats. Unlike Maus, the animal metaphor doesn’t withstand a lot of stretching. For instance, they use the slogan "No Laws Without Paws" which makes no sense. Cats have paws. They’re making laws. Sheesh.
Female Dialogue: The main character is a female puppy. She talks a lot about liberty.
Male Dialogue: Revolutionary fervor.

Title: The Way to Heaven
Type: Animated short
Desc: A giant ghost elephant leaves a caravan to heaven in order to bless China with prosperity. Or something like that. There was no dialogue so I’m pretty much guessing here. It was beautiful at any rate. It could have been producted by Disney.
Female Dialogue: No humans, no dialague.
Male Dialogue: N/A

And here’s another short I saw from a showcase of Texas filmmakers:

Title: Quarter to Noon
Type: Dramatic short
Desc: This was made by a local director who recognized me because she used to be a regular at the bakery where I work. There’s no dialogue, and the acting is stylized to match the broadly abstract narrative about a woman with an adult job who secretly yearns to come unwound and join the children in playing on the playground. When she finally joins the playground of paradise, it’s pleasing to note that the field is populated primarily with children and grackles. If heaven doesn’t have grackles, then I want nothing to do with it.
Female Dialogue: No dialogue, and only one woman, who is the main character.
Male Dialogue: There’s some broad pantomimes about being on time and working hard.

Real quick, before we return to important things, let me just say that it’s awesome that there’s a species of finch on the Galapagos Islands that drinks blood.

And not just any blood, the blood of blue-footed boobies. There’s a neat article about this on a creationist site. Apparently blood-drinking birds are the fault of Adam and Eve screwing up the eco-system with their filthy nakedness (the site makes a similar argument using vague anecdotal accounts of flesh-eating parrots).

I’m trying to fit the vampire finches into a horror story, but I’m having a little trouble. Maybe they should have sparkles?

For the past month or so, I’ve been visiting Heavens-Above.com, a website that takes your position on the globe and calculates when various low-earth orbit phenomena will be visible from your position. For instance, here in Austin, the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope will both be visible every evening this week.

A much brighter and more localized spectacle are Iridium flares. These are caused by Iridium communication satellites which have a large, reflective antenna. Under certain conditions, which are precisely predictable, they reflect sunlight onto a patch of earth a few kilometers wide. This means that if you’re in the right spot, you’ll see the satellite glow at an intensity between that of Venus and the full Moon.

Tonight, the conditions were finally perfect. There were clear skies and a flare predicted near Austin. Julia and I drove out near the airport and waited for precisely 18:17:33. What we saw couldn’t really be photograhped, so I’ve drawn a picture.

Pretty cool, huh? It lasted for a couple of seconds and it was surprisingly intense, reminding me of a magnifying glass focusing the sun on the sidewalk, as seen from across the street.

Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t wake up at 05:30 to see one of these.

Cavan Terrill at Fusion Fragment has been kind enough to publish another story in my People’s War series. Fusion Fragment has previously posted my story "Pioneers and Indians" which takes place a few months earlier in this near-future chronology.

This new story "Anasazi-35" takes place in a post-petroleum Austin and follows a community of squatters who live under the I-35 bridge in an adobe village. It’s a story about establishing an alternative community and governing through consensus in the face of adversity. Which is to say there’s plenty of violence to punctuate the group meetings.

"Anasazi-35" draws heavily from my experience with the Austin activist community. I tried to express respect for people who live out their idealism, as well as my disappointment at their failure to require good behavior from other members of the community.

This was a tough story to write, and I imagine it will be tough to read. I invoke the writer’s responsibility to address challenging moral and social issues.

So let me know what you think.

I haven’t been blogging for the last week because I’ve been at the Austin Film Festival. I wrote a screenplay last year (my first, despite being ostensibly a film major), and the script made it into the semifinals for the AFF screenplay competition. This means for the first time I got to see the conference side of the festival.

Over the weekend, as I went to panels and parties, and drank my weight in Dos Equis, I compared the conference with my experience at sci-fi cons. The differences were pretty obvious. The crowd was more mainstream culturally and socially, the celebrities were a lot richer and more famous, and the money referred to in any conversation dwarfed the costs associated with any literary endeavor.

When I wasn’t shaking hands with celebrities I mostly talked to my fellow screenwriters. They were usually pretty easy to spot. They were the ones who looked hungry, wide-eyed and waiting for the chance to make a pitch that could lead to a sale. I felt that they took very little joy in the medium of film. I can see now why the American movie industry is the way it is. The screenwriters aren’t trying to make a movie, they’re making a logline and a pitch with a ninety-page addendum.

Nevertheless there were a lot of aspects to the panels that were virtually identical to what I’ve seen at sci-fi cons. It’s probably just a result of the power dynamic between those who are on the inside and those who can’t find the way in, but while listening to a panel discussion with the authors of Indiana Jones and Lethal Weapon, I amused myself by trying to define–

The Archetypical Questions an Unsuccessful Writer Asks a Successful Writer

Process Qustions:
-How often and when do you write?
-Do you outline or do you prefer to be suprised?
-Where do you get your ideas?

Sales
-How do things sell?
-How do I get people to buy my stuff?
-Do I force myself on important people to get them to buy my stuff?
-How do I get important people to listen to my ideas?
-Should I send in query letters, or should I buttonhole important people?

And the answers, in no particular order:

-Talent sells
-Talent alone doesn’t sell
-Perseverence sells
-Luck sells
-Virtually nothing sells anyway
-Hardly anyone has talent
-Everything happens because of personal relationships
-Nobody really knows how anything happens
-If you want it to happen, you should just do it yourself
-My process is perfectly rational
-My process is perfectly bonkers
-Nobody really knows where ideas come from
-Don’t be creepy

Nevertheless, there were some revelations. For instance, I realized that everyone has an invisible producer with a pitchfork and horns inside their heads saying "that won’t sell." Or as the guy who wrote Shrek put it in a slightly paraphrased quote: "I don’t think of screenplays as a means of expressing myself. I think of them as a tool for getting a movie made."

The other revelatory moment came when a big-name producer said, "I hate to say it, but you probably should turn your screenplay into a graphic novel first."

I’ve got one more screening and one more party tonight, and then I can go back to sleeping late and going to bed early. Next entry I’ll give a summary of the movies and screenings I attended.

I was doing some research, and came across this paper written about Rastas in science ficiton. It appears to be a student paper for a Dutch university course on cultural identity. I would like to share with you one particularly cogent observation about The Phantom Menace:

… many of the alien characters seem to be based on racial stereotypes. Most of the time however, it is hard to ascribe a character to one racial stereotype in particular. Because they are not humans but alien life forms, their features leave room for different interpretations, as do their accents and overall behavior. Some of them seem to be based on combinations of several stereotypes.

I like to think that Lucas just put a bunch of cliches and stereotypes in a bag and got a trilogy out of it.

If I can, I would like to give some props to Patrice Sarath and the firestorm of controversy she started by criticizing NanoWriMO, or nananomori, or nananananananmo, or whatever. If I can summarize her point: "NanoWriMo ain’t that hot." This has caused a lot of people to write counter-comments to the effect: "Yes it is." Or alternately: "It is pretty much."

Personally I’m suspicious of anything that encourages ordinary people to create art (see my previous entry about mumblecore). Ordinary civilians should just sit around, working day-to-day jobs, and then using that money to purchase entertainment and art at inflated prices. I’m particularly suspicious of anything that encourages people to make art and employs structures and techniques that resemble in turn a self-help cult, a 12-step program, and a pyramid scheme.

My own contribution to NanoWriMO is to copy the word NanowriMO 50,000 times throughout the month of November.

Let us talk about Hawk the Slayer.

Back in the 80s, before we had bottom-budget SyFy channel movies, we had bottom-budget sword and sorcery. Hawk takes place in a primordial past where good guys and bad guys have a lot of random encounters in the woods. They’re all just out there, in some totally random spot in the forest, burning a witch or having reckless ax-throwing contests.

The titular character, Hawk the Slayer, is heir to a kingdom or something, but he spends most of his time wandering around with an elven mind-sword.

It has a hand on the handle that glows!

Meanwhile, his brother, Jack Palance, who appears to be at least thirty years older than him (and slightly older than their mutual father who I guess was a king or something), is out conquering the land with an army of less than a dozen extras. Here we see Jack Palance as he screams "My acting is this big!"

There’s some monks in this world, who are possibly Christian, but it’s not clear. They live in badly painted fantasy fan art.

The supporting characters are really what makes the movie. There’s a blindfolded witch with the ability to bend time and space, who is nevertheless nearly burned to death by a couple of rubes with whips. The other characters just call her "woman". They can do this because every other female in the movie is either a nun or dead, or both. Keep that in mind for future reference, the primary character archetypes for women are witch, nun, and dead.

The other members of the merry band are a giant who’s about six-foot-four, a dwarf who’s about five-foot-three, and an elf with relatively high cheekbones. If I was at a party I might think that the giant and the dwarf had an impressive size difference, but in a movie it just looks like the casting agent was taking the day off.

Long running readers of this blog will know that I’ve been pursuing a campaign to become Austin’s biggest freakshow on a bike. Austin sets a pretty high bar in that department, as anyone who’s seen the bicycle thong guy can attest. My latest effort is this:

As you can see I have bungee-corded my coffeecan speaker to the handles of my bike so I can listen to science fiction podcasts at full volume. The media player and its battery pack can be seen velcroed to the side of the coffeecan.

A less publicly embarrassing project is my LED flashlight.

It’s assembled from a Radioshack battery pack. The pack already had a switch built in, so all I had to do was drill some holes in the case, do some soldering and hot-gluing and viola!

It came in handy recently when a transformer blew in Hyde Park, throwing the bakery into darkness for an hour and half.

I had to whip cream by hand like some sort of animal!