Taxes and the future

This will probably be my last entry before Christmas, as I'm about to fly home for the holidays. Yesterday, P and I went to the mall to do a little Christmas shopping, and it wasn't nearly as packed as I expected. I hope that doesn't bode ill for retailers this season, but then times are still rough for a lot of people. We went to a Purdue Alumni event last week at which the speaker claimed 70% of Americans will be self-employed in 25 years if current trends continue.

If he's right, I wonder if that will be the logical conclusion to (almost) unbridled capitalism. Will we become a nation of salesmen, everyone trying to hustle everbody else? Maybe that's too harsh a word, but once we all find out what it's like to try to sell our services/products to those who want/need them, I wonder if we'll also learn how to see through everybody else's sales pitch. There's a lot of faith put in "market forces", but the fact is the best guy for the job doesn't always get the business, money corrupts, and if everybody's worried about their next sale, the culture of this country's going to change-and probably not for the better.

Michael Moore makes the point in Downsize This that if it was true that corporations' only responsibility was to their shareholders, every corporation would sell crack cocaine-huge profits, loyal customers, low overhead. But the fact is, they also have a responsibility to many other groups (the government, the community that supports them, their employees); they just don't like to admit it, maybe not even to themselves. I've never attended business school, but I've seen enough on the subject to have an idea of what those people are being taught. The inevitable result was visible to everyone over the last few years.

I don't see anything wrong with being rewarded for doing a good job, but what message is sent when executives are rewarded for doing a bad job? The example that comes to mind is when millions of dollars in bonuses are awarded despite plant closings and layoffs. I don't think it would mean the downfall of these companies if these executives would forfeit their bonuses-not their salaries, people-to keep these people employed through a downturn (and in fact, this has happened, rarely). The employees would undoubtedly be that much more loyal and appreciative, maybe even more productive. I imagine the reply is, a company that expected such a good turn would not be able to attract high quality applicants for those executive positions. I guess it depends on your definition of "high quality".

In the last couple of years, the big automakers have come around to supporting government-run health care. The reason? The benefits they pay current and retired employees (won through decades of union bargaining) are believed to be more than the raise in taxes they're likely to face under a government health system. And in the current tax climate, they're probably right. After all, if the Republicans can just continue borrowing to avoid raising taxes long enough, they won't have to worry about the consequences.

Taxation should not be a dirty word. If the country decides it is worthwhile to have national health care, or more homeland security, or a trip to Mars, we must be willing to pay more for it. If recent history is any indication, raising taxes does more for the economy than lowering them (see Clinton vs. Bush II). This may be counterintuitive, but there it is. When business grads decide priority number one is to pay as little tax as possible, they sometimes make decisions that are morally compromised from the start. I know accounting rules are complicated (I was an accountant for several years), and interpretation matters, but if you're always trying to tiptoe the line, sooner or later you're going to step over it. I wish everyone would take a little step back to find surer footing.

One time, at band practice...

For the past few days, I’ve been listening to Elliott Smith’s posthumous album, From a Basement on the Hill, since I got it for my roommate for Christmas. His voice is very soulful and ephemeral, and along with Billy Corgan’s gives me hope that my own voice isn’t too strange to someday record some decent songs of my own.

I was in fifth or sixth grade when I first discovered rock music, about the time kids first started “going together”. Up until that point, the only music I was really familiar with was the country that my dad played in the truck and the garage, church hymns, and the themes to cartoons, TV shows, and commercials that all kids know by heart. The first rock song that really caught my attention was “Shot Through the Heart” by Bon Jovi, although at the time I thought he was saying “Shock to the Heart”. I taped it off Q102, Cincinnati’s pop rock station and the only station I listened to when I had a choice for many years, and brought a tape player to school to play it for a girl I fancied at the time. As I recall, she just shrugged it off, and the lyrics aren’t exactly encouraging for young love, but I only understood about half of them at the time.

One day, when I was a teenager, I was listening to the huge, faux-wood-paneled stereo in the living room (complete with record player and 8-track!), lying on the floor reading something and singing along. I was kind of caterwauling as a goof, which I sometimes did, when my dad walked in and surprised me by saying something like, “One thing’s for sure, you’ll never be a singer!” with a smile on his face. I just smiled back and let it slide, seeing no reason at the time to try to convince him otherwise, but inside I was thinking, “I’m going to prove you wrong.” He didn’t mean anything by it, but the fact was I loved to sing but had never really shared that with anybody.

I got the chance the summer after my freshman year in college, when me and two friends from high school got together to play in the garage at one of their houses. I clearly remember the first time I sang out loud, to Tesla’s “Signs”, as they played along on their guitars to some tabs C had printed off the internet. We continued to get together on breaks from school for a couple of years, and they also taught me how to play guitar as we recorded a bunch of songs on my CD/tape player, especially K since we both went to Purdue and ended up roommates our senior year. I still have those tapes, but I missed our big moment.

On Halloween, 1997, K, one of our other roommates, and a couple of fellow students we hooked up with had a full-blown band and played a show at a house off campus. It was fantastic, but we didn’t tape it because it was our first gig, and it could have been terrible. We did make some mistakes, and even played two songs over again as an encore after our second set, but it went great. The next week, the band completely broke up and we never played another show. I still kick myself for not recording that Halloween show, since we could have erased the tape anyway, but at least I still have the pictures of me in my Australian cowboy hat, singing myself hoarse for probably a hundred people or more and having the time of my life.

Over the years, I taught myself to sing and play guitar at the same time, which was harder than I expected, and even wrote about a dozen songs of my own. In Dallas, I hooked up with a couple guys in my apartment complex who also played guitar, and we tried to form a band, going so far as renting a storage area to practice in, but sadly nothing ever came of it. With another guitarist, I scored one of my short films, and I recorded several songs on my computer with the help of a non-linear editing program.

I lost my singing voice for about a year and a half when I swallowed a mouthful of Coke wrong at work in Dallas and strained the skeletal cartilage in my throat. (How’s that for dumb bad luck?) That was one of the reasons we gave up on the storage area band. Now it’s back, and Austin being what it is, I’m tempted to try again. Hope springs eternal, and I’m not thirty yet.

P.S. I had to rewrite this entry from scratch, because I didn’t take my own advice: always write long e-mails, blog entries, etc., in Word first, so if something goes wrong you still have a copy of it. Good advice, if you can remember it.

Entertaining possibilities

I disappointed myself by spending most of the day reading Entertainment Weekly today. I've had a subscription pretty much since 1994, when I first moved up to Purdue, and they pile up pretty quickly. Inevitably, there are some I want to keep for various articles or features, such as their "Best of" lists, but as I sort through them I come across issues that I realize immediately I don't want to keep, but some articles in them deserve a second read. So I'll end up reading a dozen articles I've already read in the course of throwing the magazines they're in away, and I end up spending hours at it. Sometimes, they're even good enough I decide I want to keep that issue after all, but usually not.

I have a pretty impressive collection of useless entertainment trivia built up in my head after a decade of reading EW cover to cover every week, and I've been trying to figure out how to put it to good use. I recently signed up for the Wheel of Fortune e-mail list, so I can be notified when they're scouting in the area and try to get on the show. I think I could do well at that one. Jeopardy is a little too arcane for me, but I should probably apply for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? as well. The questions on that show were sometimes criticized for being too easy, and I think it's still on at 12:30am or something, with a different host.

Reality TV seems to break down into two subclasses: the game show writ large (Survivor, The Apprentice, Fear Factor), where the game takes over the contestants' lives for a period of time, anywhere from a day to several months; and relationship dramas (the Real World, Wife Swap), where there aren't any winners or losers, just people in a fishbowl making entertainment for everybody else. I don't watch much of it, but of the ones I have seen, the more real the better. For instance, the first season of Survivor, which I caught bits and pieces of, seems fundamentally different from the subsequent seasons just because now everybody's ready for their close-ups. They're all aspiring actors/models/TV show hosts, and they see spending weeks on the show as the means to get there, rather than an end to itself. Survivor's hardly alone in that respect, but it kind of started it all in the U.S., and all the rest of these shows now start out infected with that mentality, which is probably one reason they face diminishing returns. The whole genre has been on the wane for the last couple years, so we can look forward to more crappy sitcoms that at least employ writers, if nothing else. Maybe the competition has resulted in better scripted shows, I don't watch enough to tell, but Lost is my current favorite, and that show would've never gotten made without suits willing to take chances.

How's that saying go? "Necessity is the mother of invention." How about, "Desperation is the mother of risky programming"? I like the sound of that.

Learning curve

Today we shot at a photo studio, and the steer showed up for a little fun. Cars would occasionally honk as they drove by us, as if to say hello. We were set up in the front and side parking lots, and of course any honks or catcalls would've ruined the audio if we'd been taping any, but we weren't most of the time.

I'm really starting to realize just how great an opportunity this position has been for me. I'm working with people who know what they're doing, and learning fast all kinds of skills I didn't have before. For instance, things I know now that I didn't before starting shooting:

1) How to set up and break down C-stands, rolling stands large and small, and American stands.
2) How to quickly assemble and disassemble a spider dolly and its track.
3) How to set up butterflies and nets on their frames, and shiny boards and flags on stands.

I'm sure there are classes at UT lasting entire semesters that teach young film students this stuff, and here I am learning for free and getting hands-on experience with a wide range of good, working equipment (we even had a gib arm, but we didn't use it). I'm very fortunate to have this opportunity. I wasn't a neophyte when it came to productions-I had experience setting up lights with scrims and filters, for example-but I feel a lot more knowledgeable about what goes into making a movie set work. After all, my entire background was in video, which has its own requirements but is nothing like shooting on film. Earlier I wrote that I never wanted to work with film again (this was after two days of getting rained out). I take it back. I wouldn't mind working with film again, as long as I could 1) get paid, and 2) surround myself with competent people who know their jobs. We should all be so lucky.

More shooting, good weather

Today we shot again for the short film I'm working on, once again at the ranch using a steer and a little boy. The difference was, today we had beautiful weather and it went pretty smoothly. No major problems, except when the cow wrangler got clipped with one of its horns across the head. He didn't fall down, and said he was alright after he stopped seeing stars, but a bruise was definitely forming by the end of the day.

One of the steers at the ranch is Bevo, UT's bovine mascot, who is brought out onto the field to lay down and observe, and apparently stand when touchdowns are made. He's not the steer we're using, but he's definitely a fine specimen. Our star is older and supposedly more docile, but he does get feisty (see above).

I'm just glad we're done with the ranch, even though there's more to come with both the boy and the bull.

Bevo the bovine. 

Bands and ideas

I went and saw Cruiserweight, a local band, play at Emo's tonight. A little beforehand, I had been standing next to the lead singer in the outside area behind the bar without recognizing her. I borrowed one of their albums from my roommate for about 6 months a couple years ago, and there were times I had that in my car for a week or more, listening to it many times. They're pretty great, kind of punk pop rock. Amazingly, they and two other bands were playing for only $1 cover charge. That's one of the great things about living in the "live music capital of the world", you can almost always see a decent band live for cheap, if you know where to look. I'd like to use one of their songs in the opening of a movie, if I ever write it. In fact, a relationship movie like Singles (which was set in Seattle and showcased many Seattle bands) would fit pretty well here in Austin. I guess I better get to work on that.

Protests and the future

Today was my first day off in a week, so I ran some errands and went to the grocery. I also wanted to go driving around photographing murals around Austin, but I ran out of steam. Austin is full of them, many on the walls of businesses to promote whatever they sell, like video stores with figures from famous movies painted ten feet high. There's a frog mural on Guadalupe so famous, when Baja Fresh bought the building to remodel, so many people protested they ended up leaving the wall it's on alone.

Austin has a bit of a protest culture, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to anger in some people that can grow unhealthy (the above example excluded). When I read about people fire-bombing McDonald's in France, I think that society has a deeper problem than cheap fast food replacing local restaurants. Violence is never an option in this day and age for anyone who wants to be taken seriously on the merits of their argument.

Does anybody truly believe the Second Amendment unrestricted would prevent a dictator from taking over America? Can you see any gun owner you know who's not crazy or abusing some substance pointing a weapon at an American soldier under any circumstance? Gun owners are overwhelmingly conservative in their politics, the kind of people who celebrate the troops, not prepare to fight them. In my opinion, the most likely scenario for the United States as we know it to cease to exist (and I by no means believe this is likely) is for a President (especially one like Bush, who believes himself destined to rule the country) to simply refuse to leave office. He'd still call himself President, and still convene the Congress and everything that goes along with the way government is run today, but with his supporters in power there (Bush's campaign this time around encouraged fealty oaths to Bush himself, not the office of the Presidency, or the United States), he could ignore any court rulings he didn't like (President Andrew Jackson did this), order the army anywhere he needed to suppress dissent (e.g. Kent State), and if his policies were popular enough, basically rule with impunity. He wouldn't have to declare himself a king (this would be counter-productive), he could claim he had to stay on as President because of "the will of the people", or the need to eliminate the terrorist threat, but he would in effect be a king. Throughout history, kings have only ruled by the consent of the people or through the application of violence. But in America today, the people with the greatest capacity to violently fight for freedom are the ones ideologically aligned with those in the government who are taking it away in the name of security and moral values. Let me reiterate that I don't see this happening. I'm sure at the end of his second term, Bush will leave the office to whoever wins the next election, because I think he does believe in the America he grew up in. But what about the next guy?

The problem with investing so much power in the Presidency, as has happened since 9/11, and promoting so much secrecy, as Bush has done since he got into office, is the loss of accountability. The Republican majority are so high on their own power right now, they don't see a downside to eliminating dissent and consolidating power. But what about when the other side comes back into power? (And if America and the Constitution survive, they will eventually.) Are they comfortable leaving the precedent of having all that control in the hands of the opposition? There used to be checks and balances, but they're eroding. If conservatives ever cease to care if their arguments are taken seriously by those they disagree with, they might change their minds about how much support those troops deserve when they're taking orders from their political enemies. That's the nightmare scenario-protestors with guns instead of signs.

Think happy thoughts

Boy, time goes fast when you're transcribing 14 interviews and three show segments in four days. Especially when you're also trying to help out a student film on the side. We set up the shoot Friday in one of UT's studios, then got the call that our principal actor had strep throat and wasn't coming. So, we tear down some of it and leave the rest for if we can make up the shoot tomorrow (fingers crossed). Depending on how close I am to finishing the interviews, I may be able to join them, but it's still iffy at the moment. The director's faced a string of bad luck since shooting started, and I really feel for him.

In other news, I'll be heading home for Christmas in a few weeks, and I'm looking forward to seeing friends and family, if only for a week. Maybe I'll get to see some snow while I'm there. Not much of that in Texas.

Stranger in the night. 

Possum Kingdom

A few months ago, I woke up at about 6:00am to a sound from my cat that was like nothing I'd heard out of her. It was like the scream a cartoon cat makes when someone steps on its tail on The Simpsons or something, only louder. After making this horrible racket, Yusuke jumped away from my window and sat growling, facing me but sneaking glances back at the blinds. Once I'd gathered my wits, I got up and looked outside, but there was nothing there. I walked out into the living room and looked out other windows facing the same area, but whatever it was had beat a hasty retreat. I did notice, however, that the gate to the path leading back behind our place was open, and I thought I heard voices talking in the parking lot out front. My instincts said they had a dog, which they'd let roam through the gate and back to my window, where my cat likes to sit and look out sometimes, scaring the bejeesus out of her.

I recommended to my roommate that we start keeping the gate closed, which we hadn't been too observant about doing to that point. So we did. But within the week, it happened again: same scream, same waking up at 6:00am, same nothing there. This time, however, when I checked the gate, sure enough, it was closed. No dog could have fit through the grating of our gate or otherwise gotten to our back patio. My new theory was that we had a possum or raccoon, and I was right. Within a week, I came home to find my roommate showing me a digital picture he'd taken of a possum on our back fence.

What do you do about a possum if you live in a city? I had no idea. Luckily, this marsupial menace hasn't caused my cat alarm to go off again since, but in the last two days, two things have happened that make me uneasy. First, yesterday I watched a cat jump down into our patio area from the very same fence the possum was on. It had tags, and seemed to just be curious about this corner of the neighborhood. However, our gate being closed, I wondered how it planned to get out again. The only route I could see was a tree whose branches reached over to the neighbor's patio. The fence was a shear six-foot drop on this side. I brought Yusuke out to the glass door where the other cat was sitting outside on the sidewalk and set her down. Right on cue, once she saw it she started growling. A few minutes later I watched this cat jump straight up to the top of the fence from the ground, gain its balance, then cross over to the other side and disappear. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, since one of the cats we had when I was a child was able to jump up and catch birds off the birdfeeder we hung from our clothesline, but still, at least that cat didn't grab hold of the feeder, he just came straight back down to earth.

The second thing happened just a few minutes before I started writing this. While a plumber was working on the tub, I heard at least two of our neighbors' dogs barking and looked outside. There on the fence was the same possum from the picture P had shown me. I took some pictures while the dogs continued going nuts, and the possum just sat there staring at me with its beady black eye. It occurred to me that if the dogs could catch the possum, our problem would be solved, so I came inside and got a broom, then went out to try and knock the possum off the fence. But as I got close, the broom handle maybe six inches from it, and the thing just sat there, mouth slightly open in its clown-white face, I couldn't do it. I thought I could see the fear in its expression at the thought of being torn to pieces by dogs, not a pretty thought. Also, I found a dead parakeet in the parking lot earlier today. Anyway, the possum lives to see another day. Hopefully, it'll take the hint and move on to someone else's yard.

Daily reading

I was just reading an academic article my roommate is using for a paper, and it reminded me strongly of the best writing on Slate.com. Have I mentioned yet how much I love that site? The breadth of topics covered, even if sporadically, makes it a must-read for me on a daily basis. I know it's owned by Microsoft, but somehow they manage to convince me they've stayed editorially independent. For instance, I'm using Mozilla Firefox now instead of Internet Explorer based on an article on Slate, and I love it. Tabbed browsing is fantastic. And hiring Henry Blodget to officiate the Martha Stewart trial and explain his old job, despite his history of legal problems regarding same, was truly enlightening, if for no other reason than giving us a window on how people in his position think. Seed managed to maintain forward momentum for months, even adding some suspense in the search for "genius" sperm donors and their anonymous kids. Sure, sometimes the political commentary gets old, especially when multiple columnists publish basically the same article, but their obituaries are always informative in ways I don't expect, and their willingness to try new things keeps me reading about stuff I wouldn't otherwise, like Jurisprudence, or Heavy Petting. I'm still mourning News Quiz, the first time any of my jokes were published anywhere (along with dozens of other people's). OK, enough sucking up. Just let me know if Mickey Kaus gets tired of complaining about The New York Times, Slate. If you need another blogger, I'm your man.

Trips and traps

I don't know why, but lately as I've been sitting down to write for this blog, every idea I've had for a posting flies right out of my head. I guess I should start jotting down notes when they occur to me. I've been feeling generally restless lately, what with the trip home coming up in a few weeks. I'm starting to anticipate the 18-hour drive home, which I've never made from Austin since I just moved down in May. I've flown home once since then, but this will be the first time I have no chance of making the trip in one day, like I was sometimes able to from Dallas.

I bought a sketch pad last week, the first I've had since I was a child. My sister is very talented at drawing, but I never really considered myself good at it. Lately, I've been reconsidering that, in light of a drawing I did at my roommate's urging. It's no masterpiece, but it's actually pretty decent, and it makes me want to try harder. I'm going through another period of "What do I really want to do?" at the moment, and despite all I've learned in video over the last half a year or more, I wish I'd found some kind of job immediately after the move. I feel like I'm losing time I could be using.

I think of all the people who've won the lottery and gone from poor to rich overnight, and I realize I've been wishing that would happen to me. I remember reading a study that concluded lottery-winners who were happy before winning continued to be happy, and those who weren't continued to be unhappy. The money didn't change a thing. And I'm happy right now, watching movies, getting up when I feel like it, traveling around, meeting new people, but I'm not satisfied (and the money won't last). When I see a movie like Gosford Park, in a way I wouldn't have recognized five years ago, I feel like I understand what it would be like to be born into wealth, and I can see why so many people in that position turn to drinking or drugs or whatever: for amusement. They don't feel the need to contribute anything, because their parents (or their parents) did it for them. I, on the other hand, want to make something that other people will respond to. I'm finding that my problem is, when I have limitless time to pursue my own interests, it's infinitely harder to focus on one thing to work on.

I remember when I wrote my first screenplay. I was working 40 hours a week over the summer between school years at college, and I would get home from work, go upstairs for three or four hours, and write on an old word processor. I finished the first draft in two weeks. The more I think about it, the more it seems working in accounting wasn't the reason I did so little writing in Dallas. It was the comfort. I need to get a job.

Downtown Houston 

Modern art in Houston

Just got back from Thanksgiving with my roommate P's family at his aunt and uncle's place in Houston. It was lots of fun, with plenty of good food. I got in some quality reading time, too, which always makes me happy when I'm traveling. We stopped by the Houston MFA and contemporary art museum, although we only went in the latter. It had lots of multimedia exhibits in addition to the paintings, which makes for a somewhat more varied experience. For instance, there was an old bed springs on the floor hooked up to a guitar amp, so when you touched it, the sound of the springs came out strong and distorted. Downstairs, there was a video of a young woman wearing headphones and dancing around Times Square, New York, and various random people would walk up and join her. The point of it stemmed from the fact that the music in her headphones was different from the music the bystanders heard through speakers she placed on the sidewalk, and she wanted to show people can still connect while dancing to different tunes. A lot of the stuff in there didn't seem like anything I couldn't come up with, but then I haven't, so I guess there's a drive to these artists I need to work on cultivating.

Rejects unite, ads rage against the dying of the light!

Well, I finally got a rejection letter (e-mail, actually) from INdTV, so I guess I won't be a Digital Correspondent after all. On the unofficial message board lots of people are posting their disappointment, but also trying to organize independently to do something with all the "rejected" talent. After all, 2,000 mostly young people with some access to video equipment and interest in producing TV segments responded, and if even a fraction of that number worked together to create shows, they could have just as much chance at making an impact as the 50 people INdTV actually picked. The only difference is, they wouldn't be making a salary doing it.

But then, one part of the e-mail we received said they had decided to accept freelance pieces from members of the talent pool that got passed over. There were some complaints surfacing during the application process about the fact that everybody had to provide them with three possible stories, and explain them on the form. This was seen by some as an underhanded way of soliciting free content ideas, and it may be used this way for all I know, but I think it was a legitimate question for possible hires. If your pitches on the application were uninteresting, there's a pretty good chance your pitches to the network would be subpar as well.

Somebody speculated that TV was already in decline anyway, and ten years from now the web will have enabled everybody to program their own channels drawing content from various locations straight to their computer. It reminded me of the music dream machine, a device that could digitally play every song you ever wanted to hear whenever you wanted to hear it, and you could switch over to the traffic and weather report on the local radio station at the push of a button. We're still a ways off from that, but it's coming, and I expect custom TV programming will be too, although this progress inevitably comes in fits and starts. For instance, I hear Tivo, which made it possible to skip the ads in television shows, will soon be adding software that gives you a pop-up ad on your TV screen whenever you hit the fast forward button to skip the ad that actually aired. Advertising will not go gentle into that good night.

Library fever

Today, I visited the downtown branch of the Austin Public Library. I have a feeling I'll be going there regularly from now on. The branch nearest where I live is closed several days a week, and it has pretty slim pickings compared to the four story building I saw tonight. Several times over the last few months, I went to the local branch looking for a book only to find there was a copy at another branch, but not where I was was.

Libraries in general don't seem to get the credit they deserve. The ones in Texas that I've visited have all carried CD's and DVD's in addition to books and magazines, and it would take some time to get through all the movies alone. It would be cheaper for me to ditch Netflix and start checking DVD's out of the library, if only they carried every title I want.

I never cease to be amazed at the variety of books carried by most libraries, even when they don't have the exact title I want. At one library, I found a mid-20th-century edition of a book that billed itself as the complete history of human warfare. It was about 2,000 pages long. If I hadn't been moving shortly, I might have checked it out. Flipping through it, I saw that it started with the cavemen.

Librarians have a stuffy reputation, but one of the more amusing consequences of the passage of the Patriot Act was the reaction to Section 215 letting the Justice Department access records of what books anyone with a library card had checked out, under the rubric of a "terrorism investigation". They don't have to be suspected of any wrongdoing whatsoever. I remember reading shortly after its passage that some librarians were so enraged they began destroying the records so the government wouldn't have the opportunity to get ahold of them. Now that's serving the patron. Here, they place a sign on the door warning everybody of the possible consequences of using the library, and stating they will comply with the law. I wonder if that's had any effect on the usage American libraries have seen since September 11th.

Pool is cool. 

Stress

I haven't been sleeping well lately, just in fits and starts, because I haven't been able to stop stressing over the shoots for the short film I'm working on. I think it's taking a toll on my ability to think, and I might have to scale back my involvement. We had plenty of crew show up both days, but it wasn't very smoothly run and it's partly my fault. The weather played a pretty big role as well, with rain both days for brief periods, and the steer didn't help anything either by not cooperating with us. All in all, this is one of the most difficult short films I can imagine working on, short of animation (and there's a little of that in this, too). Shooting different film stocks and video, along with computer animation and green screen, just seems like too ambitious a project to me, especially with no pay. At least the UT students can get credit for working on it. For me, the only thing I'm getting out of it is the experience, and that's been mixed so far. "Never work with kids or animals" is the Hollywood saying, and we've got both on this film, in addition to bad weather. Not a recipe for success. This is going to be a slog for the director, and I can't help but wonder how much of a help I can really be to him. One lesson I'm taking from this for sure is, I never want to work with film again. Video is a hundred times easier all around, and looking better quality all the time.

Dealing with fleas

So our cats currently have fleas. We don't know where they came from, but they got to be a problem for my roommate's two cats, and a few days ago I found a couple on mine, so we busted out the treatments and flea powder for the carpet and couches. About a month ago, we dosed them all with the drops on the back of the neck, but apparently that didn't help by itself. The last time my cat had them - which was when I got her home from the pound - I gave her two flea baths that didn't seem to help, before dosing her, doing the carpet and furniture with flea powder, and getting her a flea collar. That did the trick, so hopefully it'll work this time as well.

New media

So have you been to Homestarrunner.com? It's pretty hilarious. I like how Flash animation has really opened the field to people interested in animation, with a fraction of the cost involved. If I recall correctly, after The Critic was canceled, they produced a series of shorts with Flash that went up on one of the short film sites, maybe ifilm.com. I've been reading quite a bit lately about "Rolling Your Own Network", and how BitTorrent has made it possible to distribute television programming over the internet with very little cost, if the programming's good enough. It seems possible, but I'm also skeptical as to how such shows would get an audience in the first place. Would there be advertising involved, or just word of mouth? Somebody suggested this concept would only work with a consistent supply of new episodes for popular shows. The first thing that came to mind for me was cable access. There you have a huge backlog of product to draw on, if you contacted the creators of the shows and cut them in on the money. But how would you pay for it? Someone suggested product placement in place of the skippable ads. I think this is becoming not only more prevalent, but also more accepted by audiences, so this could work. The biggest problem may be the legal hurdles file-sharing programs still face, one case where government regulation may still be stifling new innovation, as opposed to the absence of it encouraging consolidation.

Biking reconsidered

I've been getting exercise the last few days, which hasn't happened a whole lot lately. I rode my bike constantly when I was in college, and I was in good shape throughout that part of my life. When I moved down to Dallas, I put my bike out on the balcony/porch of my apartment and it sat there, unused, for more than five years. Since it was out of the weather, it gathered dust steadily until you couldn't even tell what color it was, and the tires went flat. A few months before I moved down to Austin, I took a broom and brushed the dirt off, but I still didn't use it. I didn't lock it up or anything either, but apparently nobody was interested in a bike that looked so rundown, so it had that going for it.

Shortly after I moved down to Austin, I took a bucket of soapy water and a rag and gave the bike a thorough going-over. It didn't look as good as new - there was rust on both wheels and the plastic plate guarding the gears had shattered - but it did look 100% better. I pumped up the tires and took it out for a spin, and I was amazed at how hard it was to ride. It wore me out in ten minutes, riding on (relatively) level ground. The next day, one of the tires looked flat again, so I didn't ride it anymore for a couple weeks, until my roommate had a flat as well. Then we pulled off the tires and checked them for holes. To my surprise, the tire had already been patched before, but there was no apparent leak. So I put it back on, pumped it up, and it seemed to ride fine. It still goes down over time, but it's not worth buying a new tire to me at this time. Plus, the rim's bent, so I want to replace that when I do replace the tire.

What I've discovered in the weeks since is that it's not so easy remembering how to ride a bike, or at least not a 12-speed. Austin has a large cycling population, and a variety of terrain. This means hills if you ride any distance, and negotiating them effectively on my bike means remembering which gear is good for what conditions. If you're going downhill, for instance, you need a higher gear or you end up pumping your legs too fast and wearing yourself out. Today, I made the trip to UT and back without hopping off to walk for the first time, so I guess I've got it figured out again, at last. I don't seem to remember doing much shifting on Purdue's campus, but then I'm not 21 anymore. Hopefully, it'll get easier all around as I get back in shape.

Roads not traveled by

The shoot scheduled for today was canceled, but on the bright side I got a hold of the rental company and cleared up some questions. It rained for about five minutes at one point, and it's no warmer today than it was yesterday. Winter has finally arrived in Texas.

I took a couple of courses in FrontPage, and am continuing to teach myself in order to maybe get some work as a web designer. It doesn't seem to be too hard, but as I have no HTML experience, I have to rely on the program more than I'd like. When I do view the code, I seem to be able to figure out the gist of it, and I've altered this blog some, but if something went wrong I doubt I could fix it.

I sometimes look back at my education and wonder what I would have done different if I knew then where I'd be today. The answer is everything and nothing. If I'd taken a computer science major instead of English, I'd probably still be stuck in a cubicle today, like I was for "five years of my mid-20's", as the Michael Bolton character in Office Space put it. Plus, my poli sci major's classes wouldn't have overlapped enough, like they did with English, for me to have gotten that degree either. Communications would have been closer, but those jobs are just as hard to come by from what I've seen, and fetching coffee at a TV station isn't really up my alley. My college experience was what it was - an experience. I learned a lot, some of which I can apply to my life and some of which I can't. I'm sure it's the same with most people. The most valuable thing higher education can teach us is how to teach ourselves, because nobody knows what curveballs life's going to throw at us. If we have the tools to learn quickly and effectively when we graduate, it was worth the investment.

Hot and cold

Well, I survived today's shoot, and in fact we didn't unload much of the equipment from the truck at all. It seems a lot of it was to combat the sun for lighting purposes, but the sun never showed itself. It's so cold here now that the underwater shoot tomorrow might be called off entirely, since getting in the water may be a health hazard. I was asked several times today if I was freezing, since I have a shaved head and was wearing no hat. My response, as usual, was that I'm from Indiana, so I'm used to much worse. I wonder if my tolerance for cold weather will gradually diminish over time, as my tolerance for hot Texas summers improves.

My first Texas summer was in Dallas, in 1999. The year before, as I recall, was called the "100 days of 100 degrees". The 1999 summer was probably just as bad, and as luck would have it, the air conditioner in the car I was driving went out. I had to take it in twice to get the problem fixed, over the course of two or three weeks. The morning drive in to work wasn't too bad, but the drive home in the afternoon took about 45 minutes, and even with the windows down, by the time I got home I was covered in sweat and felt exhausted. Most years since have been milder, and for that I'm thankful.

Equipment for Attic Ted shoot. 

Jumping in the deep end

So I'm working on a short film a student at UT is doing for his senior thesis. I'm used to shoots involving lighting rigs, multiple cameras, sometimes external sound. I've worked on a variety of projects, with enough equipment to fill up a car's backseat, trunk, and passenger's side. Today, we rented a Budget van to hold all the equipment for the weekend's three "small" shoots. On a future shoot, we'll be renting two.

Frankly, I'm not sure I'll be able to handle this. As Assistant Director, I was originally only going to be helping conduct the set on shoot days, until the other two AD's both dropped out. I stayed on anyway and told the director I would still do the film. Our first day of shooting is tomorrow, and if all goes well, it'll only be a couple of hours worth. But from my experience on sets, I know the chances of all going well. However, I only have three options at this late date: pull out entirely, ask for a reduced role, or suck it up and do my best. Since the first two would mean leaving the team in the lurch, they're not really options. I'll just take it as it comes, and do what I know how.

Blogging as communication revolution

OK, I know this isn't an original insight, but the rise of blogging really does appear to have the power to change the landscape of personal relationships, at least at the meet and greet point and possibly beyond.

I know this because I recently met several people with blogs, in addition to applying for the INdTV job. Their site also features a blog, which according to an October 3rd story in the New York Times is becoming more and more common for businesses as a window into the employee environment for potential hires. This relatively recent development means we can get more, sometimes copious amounts of, information on people we don't know socially to any real degree. This has the potential to be a good thing when it comes to dating and jobs, but also to be a limiting factor in the types of people we talk to.

You may be familiar with the phenomenon called "cocooning". It basically means you surround yourself only with opinions and values similar to your own and tune out anything else. While checking out someone's blog may give us an idea as to their mental health, or ability to think coherently, or opinion on drug policy, it's not necessarily an accurate portrait of what they're really like in person. If you make a habit of dismissing out of hand anyone whose view of abortion isn't in line with your own, or anyone of the opposite political party, it's possible you're shutting yourself off from any arguments that challenge you're own beliefs, and that's not only dangerous, but also leaves you with a lot fewer possible relationships. This is not to say that people with like interests shouldn't pursue them together, just that challenging someone else's beliefs and opinions can be a very effective way of determining and analyzing your own.

And besides, some people may only write when they're down, or when they're lonely. Reading a blog of this type wouldn't give you much of a reason to want to get to know the person, when in reality s/he could be fun and interesting around other people. This could be why so many blogs continue to be anonymous (like this one). The face we present to the world here is accessible to anyone, so we need the comfort of anonymity to be able to express ourselves without reservation. Perhaps paradoxically, we may encourage our friends and family to visit it, where we either expose them to sides of ourselves they don't typically see or self-censor anyway, defeating the purpose of being anonymous. I wonder how many people maintain multiple blogs to get around this - one to keep in touch with others, another just for themselves. Any thoughts?

Humor for dummies

I heard a joke a little while back that went like this:
A rabbi, a priest, and a nun walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, a joke?"

Humor's a bit of a hobby of mine. Like most people, I like to think I have a good sense of humor, and I laugh quite a bit. But not as much as I used to. When I was growing up, I would regularly laugh until my abdomen ached from it. There were various things I found hilarious, including The Simpsons, which even in decline is still one of the funniest shows ever. Unlike most of the people I knew, though, I could get completely cracked up by reading. James Thurber, Mark Twain, The Mad Scientists Club, even Catcher in the Rye (I read it in my early teens) could have me rolling. I also collected books of comic strips, like Fox Trot and Calvin and Hobbes that had the desired effect. Some of my fondest memories of childhood are reading these books with my cousin J, alternating who read the words out loud from page to page and periodically dissolving into fits of laughter.

It's only natural as we get older that what we find funny changes with our evolving sensibilities (and the culture's). Movies and books that we loved as kids we often find less than thrilling as adults, if we revisit them for nostalgia. But some things grow even deeper, too, when we're able to understand them better with experience. Huckleberry Finn, for instance, or the aforementioned Catcher in the Rye. They rarely grow funnier, though, because with maturity comes the sense that the world is rarely a funny place, and these works, the ones that last, tap into that feeling and are informed by it.

I've made use of humor in some of my writing, to varied effect, but a few months ago I started writing a stand-up routine. As a teenager, I picked up Jerry Seinfeld's SeinLanguage and was instantly impressed not just with his ability to write jokes, but with how he managed to sustain a laugh over an entire routine. I wasn't watching his show at the time, so I didn't realize he made use of bits and pieces to open and close the show for most of its run. As I recall, I barrelled through the entire book in one afternoon, and laughed the whole way through. His comedy is so distinctive and, not having seen the jokes on the TV show, the whole thing felt fresh to me. I started watching Comedy Central in my teens, and still catch it at friends' houses once in a while, to see how comedians delivered their lines. On shows like Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, dozens of stand-ups got the opportunity to deliver their routines in three to five minute chunks, and I absorbed all their styles and tics to the point that I recognized most of them instantly.

But I never really took that next step and tried to come up with my own routine. Like most people, I have times when I think "I've got to write that down!" or "That's hilarious, I have to say that sometime." And occasionally, I do write them down. I started doing the same thing with song lyrics, but what I realize now is that makes it a lot harder than just sitting down and completing a thought. A funny or insightful quip is not enough on its own, and if you gather a bunch of them together, you just have a bunch of fragments that each needs to be tinkered with. For me anyway, it's important to have something together as soon as possible, then edit it from there.

I don't know that I'll ever actually deliver any of this routine I started writing. I have a mixed record in front of crowds, and stand-up has a reputation for being brutal to one's self-esteem. I have seen several comedians perform in the past five years, and I can imagine the feeling up there all alone, even if you're doing well. But I may try it just to see. I've come to believe that we find a joke funny for one of two opposing reasons: a) it's true and we never hear it said out loud, or b) it's absolutely ridiculously false. The best jokes are the ones we can't immediately decide how to classify.

Celebrity doesn't always equal stupidity

I've been reading about Trey Parker and Matt Stone's new movie, Team America: World Police, for a couple of months now. If you haven't seen the commercials, it's about a US government team that fights terrorism, and it's all done with puppets like Thunderbirds, a show I'd never heard of until they remade it this year as a live action movie. I like South Park, Parker and Stone's TV series, and I think they're funny guys, but in interviews they talk about why some celebrities are portrayed in the movie as villains who assist Kim Jong-il: they had the nerve to go on TV news and talk shows to express their views.

It's interesting to me that Parker and Stone think being a celebrity should automatically disqualify one from being taken seriously on any subject not related to their celebrity. From what they've said, their thinking appears to go like this: "Such-and-such actor/singer/etc is only being interviewed on this show because they're famous and will draw ratings, not because they have anything to contribute." I haven't been watching said interviews, but it seems to me they're missing the irony in the fact that they believe themselves qualified to judge these other people's opinions as meritless, when they are "just celebrities" themselves.

I'm not saying we should give any more weight to a star's opinion on the war in Iraq than a relief worker's or a general's, but we shouldn't necessarily give it any less either. It depends on how knowledgeable and trustworthy the person is - what's being said is more important than who's saying it. "My point exactly!" they might reply. But then why complain about their famousness rather than debate their argument? Does becoming wealthy and well-known erase the ability to read and learn? If Sean Penn traveled to Iraq and met Iraqi civilians, isn't he in a better position than you are to tell us what they said or about the conditions they're living in? Not in as good a position as someone who speaks Arabic maybe, but how many politicians being interviewed on these shows speak Arabic? Or have been to Iraq? Just because someone gets the opportunity to disengage their brain doesn't mean they always do so. Ben Affleck got interviewed about the Red Sox, too. He grew up in Boston, so I gather his knowledge of the team is more extensive than, say, Dan Rather's.

Parker and Stone also said in at least one interview that people who are uninformed shouldn't vote. That's one way of putting it. Another way would be to say people who have the opportunity to vote should get informed. To the extent that anyone listened to these celebrities' opinions, they got the message implied by the first way: butt out. If they had put it the second way, maybe I'd be more willing to believe they had America's best interests at heart. But then, that would mean believing two entertainers making a puppet movie could have a valid opinion on what America's best interests are.

Pets and politics

I've been spending a lot of time around the apartment lately, and I can't resist picking up my cat Yusuke (rhymes with brewski) once in a while for a cuddle. She used to not mind this when I was living alone, but now that I've got a roommate with two cats of his own, she starts crying pretty much as soon as I pick her up. I adopted Yusuke from a shelter, and she was very skittish and shy for several months after I brought her home, but she eventually warmed up to me and started behaving like a normal cat, walking around with her tail in the air and announcing her presence with a meow every once in a while. She's never had too strong of a voice though, so she has to be pretty riled up to get out more than a strangled whisper.

I think the presence of the other cats has brought back her feelings of suspicion, but they're slowly subsiding the longer they're around. Still, whenever she sees them across a room, she hunkers down to a crawl and sneaks forward to get a better view, preferably around the corner of a piece of furniture, and every once in a while she practices her spring. The funny thing is, the other cats don't always run away, so she has to pull up short to avoid running into them, and sometimes they go for her. I'm not sure even they know if they're just playing when they go tearing back and forth from one room to another, up and down the couch, or through the kitchen with their tails all fluffed up and arching their backs. Once in a while, one of them will bat at the other, but they rarely make contact, and that usually signals the end of the run.

Thinking about them has made me realize that we humans generally treat our pets (dogs, cats, birds) on a continuum from toys to children. We want them to amuse or entertain us, but we also want to give them affection, and receive it in return. This is quite a change from the original reasons for domesticating them: food in hard times, tools the rest. It's a measure of our advanced civilization that we no longer have to contemplate eating them, but we found a reason to keep them around anyway. However, stripped of their purpose (be it hunting pests or game, pulling sleds, or guarding our interests), I think many of us have actually lost our respect for these animals over time. Or maybe it's more accurate to say we've come to value their superficial qualities at the expense of their talents. They wouldn't be the only victims of that way of thinking.

Yusuke the cat.

New Star Wars trailer

I didn't mention yesterday that the Star Wars: Episode 3 teaser trailer ran in front of The Incredibles (although I was thinking about the prequels when I wrote that line about computer animation being used in live action movies). I picked up the original Star Wars trilogy DVD box set when it came out a couple of weeks ago, and I've got news for the fans that feel let down by the new movies: the original trilogy feels a lot closer to the new trilogy than I anticipated, and I don't think it has anything to do with the latest alterations either.

Some people might take that to mean that the prequels drag down the original trilogy (hereafter referred to as SW:OT for short), due to the disappointment that's been expressed by many long-time fans with the new movies. I haven't seen or read any spoilers for Episode 3 to speak of, but if the first two and this trailer are anything to go by, when all is said and done Star Wars is going to be one tight, coherent story that covers decades, and that's not easy to pull off. Watching Star Wars: A New Hope, for example, after finding out how Darth Vader started out, really opens your eyes to the character's pathetic state at that point in the story. Lucas says it himself on the commentary track. This guy was once the most promising Jedi in the galaxy - now he's being ordered around by bureaucrats, imprisoned in a layer of technology just to stay alive. However you feel about the midichlorians being introduced as the means to using the Force, it does explain why Vader is not the emperor: he no longer possesses most of the body in which all those midichlorians once resided. (A note on that breathing apparatus: I used to be bothered by the fact that the rhythm of Vader's breathing didn't match up with his speech, until I realized he may no longer have any lungs at all, or if he does, the breathing apparatus could be pumping his oxygen directly into them, instead of air going down his throat.) Discovering Luke wakes him up, restores his ambition. He sees a future without the man who has dominated his life for most of its length, Emperor Palpatine, Darth Sidious.

Yeah, Jar Jar is annoying, and the acting in the new ones doesn't hold a candle to SW:OT, with the exception of Ewan McGregor, Ian McDiarmid, and Frank Oz as Yoda, but the character of the films is the same: Saturday matinee fun with the kids, no questions asked. C-3P0's quips in Empire are about as bad as his quips in Clones, and nobody complained that a black man was hired to voice the face of evil for the series while his body was played by a white Brit, or about Admiral Ackbar's alien-accented English in Return of the Jedi (remember the Gungans have extremely long tongues, if Jar Jar's any indication, so I prefer to think of the extra -sa's they put on the ends of words as an overly pronounced lisp). So what if Lucas is running out of new ways to make the aliens different? That's because he's packed them so tight into the series in the first place.

There's one new alteration worth commenting on, and that's Hayden Christensen's image replacing Sebastian Shaw's as Anakin Skywalker's ghost at the end of Jedi. As a writer myself, I can see how Lucas painted himself into a corner here, and there's no easy way out of it. You obviously don't want Anakin to appear in the Vader costume standing next to Yoda and Obi-Wan - even without the helmet, it would be depressing to think he was spending the afterlife in that state. So Lucas made his ghost look like Anakin would've looked if he'd never become Darth Vader, but that doesn't make any sense - he had never looked in his life like he does as an apparition, whereas Obi-Wan and Yoda look like they did when they made their decision to die (i.e., "join the Force", as Lucas puts it on the commentary track). So as far as I can tell, for the DVD he lets Anakin's apparition appear as he did at the point when "Anakin Skywalker ceased to exist", as Obi-Wan puts it to Luke in Jedi. Of course, that's if you believe he remained Vader when he died instead of reverting back to Anakin when he has that tender moment in Luke's arms on the deck of the Death Star, the single most affecting moment of the series. (sigh)

I'm not saying Lucas and his writers (don't forget he didn't write the whole thing alone) haven't made any missteps along the way, but this is one story that I still want to see from beginning to end, and at this point I don't think I'll be disappointed.

Movies, movies

This week my roommate left town, so I've been watching lots of movies. I'm a Netflix addict, so I watch a lot of movies anyway, but over the last few days I've been watching them all twice: once just to see them, then again with the commentary. I generally like to listen to commentaries, even the boring ones, both for the insight they can provide into the creative process and as a window into what professionals in the movie industry are like.

Commentaries come in several flavors: the director alone, the director with crew, the director with cast, the producer with crew, the writer(s) alone, and just the cast. Sometimes they're cobbled together from separate recording sessions and sometimes all the participants are in the same room. The latter are usually the most fun to listen to, and the least technical. Gossip and set stories are thrown around when people get to bounce off each other. On the classics, they sometimes get a film historian to comment and provide insight on the movies place in the canon. I consider most of them lessons in filmmaking, which I hope to do someday.

Today I went and saw The Incredibles, and it lives up to the name. This is one classy, exciting movie. My only quibble would be that they let the story go a bit long, when there was an earlier point to wrap it up that would have left more opportunities for a sequel, which I would very much like to see. The animation is so good you don't notice it, which is really saying something. Although, come to think of it, now that live action movies are making so much use of computer animation, there may be less difference between the two than there used to be. What really elevates this movie is the writing. It feels so true to life, you just find yourself laughing at its rightness. And the end credits are worth sitting through, even though they've dispensed with the animated outtakes of most of their previous films in favor of the stylized reprise of many scenes from the movie. It reminded me of the opening of Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, right down to the music.

Election results

I guess it's time I addressed the catalyst for the creation of this blog, which is of course the re-election of George W. Bush. There's a lot of vitriol flying about, and plenty of soul-searching on the part of Democrats as to why Americans would prefer him over anyone else. I've certainly done my share. Until yesterday, this is a man who is a quintessential example of failing upward. He failed in the oil business, he failed as owner of the Texas Rangers (the list goes on, but I'll stop here), but throughout it all he has exuded an appalling sense of entitlement. His father pulled strings for him whenever it was necessary and possible, and he got pretty much whatever he wanted, right up to his first term as President. The only thing he's been consistently successful at is politics, so chew on that all you politician-hating conservatives. This is a man who had the power to stay a woman's execution and save her life, and mocked her for begging him to do so. I don't know if she deserved to be executed or not, but to behave in such a way is the opposite of Christian.

I don't believe people who voted for Bush are stupid, or ignorant, or even necessarily uninformed. But they were lied to by him and his administration, and they voted for him anyway. Maybe they said to themselves, he's a politician and all politicians lie, but he's better than the other guy. Just because I don't agree with them doesn't make them fools, or imperialists, or anti-America. But I would ask them to look at what he and his administration have done over the last four years, and ask themselves if they really believe he's done a good job. He has the Congress on his side, the Supreme Court on his side, and holds the highest office in the country. Yet we're facing the biggest deficits in history, the most dangerous world climate in history with the fewest allies, and a deteriorating global environment.

I believe people voted for many reasons this year, but based on the evidence my feeling is people voted out of fear. They feared that they, the country, even the world would either be worse off with Kerry than it has been with Bush, or that four more years of Bush would be worse than anything Kerry could do. The difference between the two is we already know how Bush handles the office, and it isn't pretty. When someones says Kerry would do this, that, or the other, it's only speculation. I for one was voting out of hope that he could do better.

Welcome

This is my first time using a blog. I've been reading a few for several months, and it looks easy and fun, so here I am. My hope is that writing in this space every day will help me flex those muscles so I can get back to writing other things. It worked back in February 2004, when I took off on a road trip that saw me in every Western state. I'll probably post the journal I kept on that trip here in daily increments, if anyone expresses interest.

I used to think of myself as a writer, when I studied writing in college. Then I got a job in accounting for four and a half years in Dallas, and I thought of myself as an accountant. It's not easy to write when you're an accountant. Not that it can't be done, but the skill sets don't line up so much. I did very little writing in that time period, a few songs, a short screenplay, and a short story.

Now that I live in Austin, I shoot video occasionally and read a lot. I'm trying to flip those two around, and I have hopes for a position at INdTV, a new satellite TV station coming next year that will supposedly feature a brand new way of presenting the news, and cover topics the other broadcasts won't touch, or at least go into enough for us to understand. If I get a correspondent position with them, I'll be shooting lots of video. But I hope I'll be writing again by that time, and this is as good a start as any.