Sunday, March 07, 2004
Creavity Run Horribly Amok
As a teen I was drawn to the comic book culture like a moth to the flame. That's not to say that I was drawn to the people in that culture, but most everything I could burn hours and money on I could find in a comic book shop: role playing games, miniatures, cool and unusual board games, etc.
As an adult, I've gone a reasonable way to keep that a secret. It's not that I'm truly ashamed of any of that--I mean, here I am, making an open admission of my dorkiness, so it's not that at all. It's also not that I am now the ridiculously cool guy I never was as a teen. I'd still consider myself pretty nerdy. Rather, I think I have a pretty good grasp on what society considers as normal, and what just falls too deep into subculture to be grasped by most people. I also perceive that the amount of energy it would take to explain it is just unreasonable. So it remains a part of my past, and, admittedly, a part of my present, when I can find a few friends with whom to share my closet nerdiness. They tend to be closet nerds, too.
My lovely girlfriend accepts my nerdiness, though she unabashedly teases me about it, which is fair enough. There's plenty about it to be teased, that's for sure. But my background in nerdhood sent tingles down my spine when she said that she was going to a meeting put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism here in Omaha. I'll use a nerdy allusion to make the notion clear--my spider-sense went off, full blast.
I had a brief run-in with the SCA when I was still in high school. As a nerd, the torch carried by the SCA for fun, medieval style, had an immense draw. Like a nerd to their lambent flame, I so badly wanted to attend a meeting that some of my friends were going to. My parents put their foot down, and I didn't go. But when my friends returned from the meeting I got the story, anyhow. They got to dress up in cool clothes, and there were fighting demonstrations, and all these people offered them homemade beer and wine, and--
--and that was it for me and the SCA. Now, I will be the first to admit to my rather conservative upbringing, but even given that, I am absolutely not keen on providing alcohol to minors. It's just not okay, and I don't care who you are. So it seemed umpteen times creepier that these older men and women would get my 15-year old friends dressed up in bosom-pushing outfits (which I heard all about), talk to them in some perverted hybrid of Middle English and Monty Python, and then encourage them to drink their own homemade liquor. I just got a fishy feeling about the whole thing.
Now whether or not that reflects on the broader organization, I cannot say, but it certainly has colored my perspective on the organization. So, though I didn't say as much to my girlfriend as I wanted to at the time, I even so had a few comments to dispense about what was likely to happen.
I should at this juncture mention the reason for my girlfriend's attendance at the meeting. She was not going because she had, after all the taunting about my nerdiness, developed a sudden urge to express her own inner dork. Rather, she has been working on some ideas for her Medieval Literature class, and has decided she wanted to do a photography project. One of her classmates, who apparently is into the SCA, told her about it as an opportunity to perhaps get some pictures that would fit into her period-style photographic reflections.
But after hours of strange goings-on, some weird painting, horrible play acting, and some other mischief, she returned from the meeting. Another friend took a lot of digital pictures, but she had spent money on her film, and wanted to use it on something worth the money to develop.
Now, I'm not certain I mean to formulate a categorical rejection of the SCA and the people who are involved in it. Chances are, however, that had I come across their webpage by just browsing, or by somone else's blog, or whatever, I would have likely commented on it anyway, past history or not.
There are ample reasons why. For example, I found out by using one of their maps that Nebraska is a part of the Calontir Kingdom, and further more, that Omaha is actually the Barony of the Lonely Tower (I wonder if that's a veiled reference to the First National Bank tower, the building that goes the longest way to defining Omaha's skyline). And the Calontir kingdom hosts something called the Lilies war. And that "The Lilies war is Calontir's way to show the Known World that wars can be fun."
No moth draws to this flame. But maybe if I change my mind I can talk to someone on their Curia Regis, like Chatelaine Lady Cerridwyn Eurgledde ferch Owain ap Bychan ap Gruffudd ap Llywellyn ap Siesyllt ap Meredudd, or Deborah Russell.
Friday, March 05, 2004
Indian Days
This has been my "discover India" year, it seems. It started when my lovely girlfriend handed me a copy of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things , which is a marvelous and beautiful novel. Then, a close friend of mine, Emily Ostendorf, sent me a book called Junglee Girl by Ginu Kamani, which was published by the small house where she works, Aunt Lute Books.
I'm still digging into Junglee Girl, but my time with The God of Small Things was incredible. This is not my first cultural introduction to Indian art, since I spent quality time with Satyajit Ray's brilliant Apu trilogy. Since my first introduction to Indian art was through film, the part of me that appreciates flow and connectivity relished learning, then, that Arundhati Roy's husband is Pradeep Krishen, a filmmaker himself.
Today I have run into India twice again. Before work I watched Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding. And tonight I encountered a much shorter film, the flash animation for the Singhsons, which I found off the rankings at Blogdex. The second, funny though it be, illustrates a thought the first made beautifully clear: Indian culture is relentlessly modernizing itself, and its capability to synthesize Western influences rivals that of Japanese culture. But, at least to my eyes (and these are, admittedly, quite ignorant eyes), the Indians do it without the wackiness that makes Japanese pop culture so fun, and instead with a supple grace that situates these new things fit beside the ancient ones as though they always meant to be there.
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
American Movie Dreams
Today's movie was American Movie. I don't know when, or where, or how I first discovered the movie, but I remember absolutely loving it. It came from Netflix a few days ago and this is the first time we've had to sit down and watch it.
I love that movie. And as trashy and weird as Borchardt is, you gotta love the guy for his dedication to his vision. Every time I love how the movie is about the making of his movie, Northwestern, and how it turns into the story of his short "Coven," since he discovers so early that he lacks everything it takes to finish the feature length film.
Anyway, you can check out what he's up to these days at the movie's website, which has, among other things, his personal journal. He's a rare--if not unique--sort who doesn't get famous from overcoming his failures with his drive and determination, but rather because he maintains his drive and determination though in the past it has been so consistently thwarted by his failures.
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Wading Pool
It's very cool that Opportunity found signs of flowing water on Mars. It doesn't matter, I suppose, whether or not the little area the rover is in had a 1,000 feet of it or if it was ankle-deep. It's still pretty cool. And hats off to those engineers who can drive around this little machine on Mars, and give it all these spectrometers and cameras, and have it look at some rocks with these spectrometers and cameras to determine that yes, this is the evidence for water.
I'm often amazed at some of the stuff people come up with. I mean, how amazing is it that people have invented all the technologies to do these things? There are truly so many different technologies that had to be implemented to even get the rovers there, too many even to list, from those it took to develop and conceptualize the programs, to those it took to manufacture the machines, to those we needed to blast the little jobbers into the sky, and to land them, etc. It has taken a long time to get these things to where they are. I know it's all a gradual process, but this is, really, the culmination of so many different scientific and ballistic and communication and computer technologies.
When you look at it that way, it seems almost silly that we don't really hope for the things to work for longer than 90 days. It's very good, then, that they're fulfilling their objectives so early in the missions.
The New Face of Internet Gaming
The other day as I was getting my muffler replaced a guy told me about a site where he plays games online as he works. It's called addictinggames.com and it does, indeed, have a load of games that you wonder why, when you've finished with them, how you could have possibly spent as much time playing them as you did.
One of the games--the one in particular that he tipped me off to--involves flinging a space penguin into his ship with a sort of slingshot-catapult thing, taking into account the gravitational pull of the heavenly bodies, of course. It's really a fantastic little game, and the number of points you can rack up on a single good shot is truly gratifying.
I thought I did pretty good, nailing 250,000+ points on my first game--until I saw the winner board, and noticed that there were four people who had tied for first place on the high score list at a whopping 2,147,483,647 points. Guess I have some room for improvement.
I've noticed this every time I've played an online game. I'm an accomplished gamer, but since games have been going online, and I've been playing against other people, I realize that in most of the games I play--even the ones where normally I beat my friends on a consistent basis--I'm a mewling schoolboy compared to the maniacal magistrates who hold court over the proceedings. Who are these people, anyway? I know how long I would have to play to get 2 billion points on Spaced Penguin--is that how long these folks played to get their scores?
It's even worse on Xbox Live, where I regularly compete against players who have hundreds and hundreds of hours of game time. And as much as I enjoy a good, rousing game on Xbox Live, it'd be pretty tough to convince me that it's worth that much of my time. Though, not unlike Spaced Penguin, a game of Rainbow Six does eat up time at a magnificent pace.
So you'd think, if I'm going to go online to play a game where I'd get my butt kicked, it'd be a lot more efficient to just swing on by and play a game where I shoot a penguin out of a slingshot, rather than bullets out of a G3A3. At the end of the day, we can sit around and muse about the true differences between the two--no slingshot is really that big, while the guns are pretty lifelike; there's no blood if you miss the ship with your penguin; and there are fifteen other players who are also trying to shoot bullets out of their G3A3s, M-16s, TAR-21s, or whatevers.
But the biggest difference of all? About $50 bucks, I'd say. And for some reason it hurts a lot less to get my butt kicked by some other guy shooting a penguin.
Monday, March 01, 2004
Reacting to Film, and other things of Passion
We went to see The Passion of the Christ today. There was plenty of hype and anticipation around the movie, and I had ignored most of it. I did not buy too much into the hype that the movie was charged with anti-Semitism. It doesn't make a difference to me whether or not the pope loved the thing. Academically I was interested that the film was scripted in Latin and Aramaic, but it was a good sign that the movie respected its subject material--more something to approve of than get excited about. And from what little I let myself read about the movie beforehand, I knew I had to silence the critics' buzz about the overwhelmingly graphic nature of the film and approach film's violence on my own terms, as well.
It is actually a hard discipline for me not to look at the critics' reportcards to see how a movie I want to see has done. It forces me to think about the movie and form my opinion beforehand, rather than go in loaded with opinions about a movie I haven't experienced. I learned the trick from one of my good friends, who is very intimate with film.
I also learned about Rotten Tomatoes from him as well, and now that I've seen the movie, I can feel free to dig into its first criticisms. I'm learning more and more about what I think about movies. About The Passion of the Christ, I think really the only thing I wanted from the movie was that it was not an artistic joke, that it could stand on its own as a film of careful and deft craft. And I think that worked out just fine.
This seems, mostly, what we should want out of any film. From what little I've read from the critics about The Passion of the Christ, craft is about the last thing on anyone's mind. This is one of those rare films that provokes a more personal response. More than most films, then, it should make reading the critics fun--I think reviews of it will have a way of revealing more about the critic than about the movie itself. And that's one thing, I've found, that it's certainly important to remember when you're looking at critics for anything--it always pays off to know a person's biases.
