Yo, ho
Disregarding everything I've ever said about Pirates of the Caribbean...
...I can't believe there's a sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean.
Tederick.com: November 2005 Archives
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November 30, 2005
moviesTO Podcast #10: All I Want For Christmas
In this week's blogTO podcast, I pretty much give a blueprint for every single thing I want for Christmas... except that I've either bought 'em all already, or I'm gonna buy them between now. What can I say, I'm good to myself.
Click here to download the mp3. Honestly, this is my favourite show yet.
Actually, though, besides Frighteners and Serenity, and the extended Fellowship score, I'm done with buying stuff for myself until after the holidays. This is eased along generously by the whole not-having-any-money thing, but it also gives people the chance to peruse my DVD Profile, and purchase accordingly. For truly, I am great, and worthy of gift.
Son of Kong
Newsflash: Peter Jackson is my hero.
I didn't manage to get The Frighteners special edition DVD today, which had been my plan, but that's okay; I've waited eight years for this "holy grail" of the laserdisc era, so I can certainly wait a few more days. I made up for it by coming home from my job interview and watching the rest of the King Kong special features from the recent DVD, and now I'm in a genuine quandary about where I should file the disk on my shelves - under the K's in "miscellaneous," or right next to The Lord of the Rings. Sure, it's a 1933 film that Peter Jackson had nothing to do with, but in the middle of the 2½-hour documentary, PJ and his Weta team just drop everything on their production of the new Kong movie, and waste a whole bunch of time re-creating the fabled, lost "Spider Pit" sequence from the original movie... just for the hell of it.
I mean, you get me? Just for the sheer love of the art form, they spent countless hundreds of man-hours and goodness only knows how much of PJ's personal fortune, and recreated a deleted scene from a movie from the 1930s. I'm watching the final sequence, effortlessly integrated with the original Kong footage, and I was heard to mutter, "Yeah... there's nerdy, and then there's this."
I am in the wrong line of work. I am on the wrong continent. I am in entirely the wrong lifestyle altogether. Someone book me on a flight to Wellington - there's toe-kissing to be done.
November 29, 2005
Come what may
I don't like being one of those guys who insists that things were better in the old days, about anything really, but about filmmaking in particular. We don't live in the old days. We can no more turn back the clock than we can grow our fingernails backwards. Maybe movies really were better in the '40s, but it's irrelevant; not only can we not make movies like that now, but if we did, no one would watch them.
And obviously, I've spent most of the last ten years as a fairly hefty digital booster. I'm a filmmaker and an artist and I like playing with toys, and the multifaceted pixel paintbox that digital filmmaking offers really does give me the ability to make the kinds of movies I want to make, in ways that simply were not possible even a decade ago. Every film I've made since (and including) Bone Daddy has literally been completely unrealizeable using traditional means. They have all been fully, unapologetically, intrinsically digital. Bully for the modern age.
Nevertheless, I was watching some making-of features on the Batman Returns DVD tonight, and I got a little twinge-y. BR, having been released in the summer before Jurassic Park, was really the last stop before computer-generated special effects exploded. It has a few CG elements near the end, but it's one of the last big-budget summer extravaganzas to be made largely the old way, before everyone started doing things the new way.
Anyways, I was watching them set up a matte painting shot with a live foreground element, and then later they were describing jerry-rigging a Batmobile model to jettison its outer fairings, and it just sort of hit me as to just how gall-darned neat that sort of thing is. It's just so endlessly compelling to watch an entire craft industry built around, essentially, gadgets and tricks. And even if CGI has given us the ability to pop our eyes completely out of our skulls at the purely photorealistic wonders we are now capable of smacking onto a screen, it's the "neatness" that we've lost.
In the optical age, special effects on film were like a magic trick. It's nothing short of amazing that they worked at all, and maybe that's why we were able to see past the inherently poor image quality and the abstract, "representational" nature of those effects. You'd never believe that Christopher Reeve was actually being photographed flying, but the fact that it kinda looked like he was, could trigger something in your brain that earned your respect even if you knew that what you were looking at was far from photorealistic. King Kong strobes and pops like crazy, but when he flips the T-Rex clean over himself (with the help of some clearly-visible support rods, no less), you cheer because it's just so unlikely that such a visual has been achieved at all.
The de facto tag line for Tederick Films has long been "seeing is disbelieving," and I suppose that it's this very effect that I was trying to get at: the best film magic makes you shake your head with amazement. "I can't believe they did that." Using every single loophole of a flawed and gullible - and oh so unbelievably analog - medium to extend the illusion past the frame and into the mind.
It's inaccurate to believe (as many do) that computer-generated images can do anything with little difficulty, but in general terms, there are probably not a great quantity of image concepts that cannot be somehow realized in the modern visual effects medium. Now, it's not a question of coming up with a clever trick to fool the eye; it's just a process of throwing enough man-hours at a data stream to generate an image output that obeys the directorial vision. And as a director myself, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The Lord of the Rings could not have been possible before the 21st century. The next generation of film art will, itself, be entirely based upon what these new tools have done to the medium which, until they came along, was technologically largely unchanged over the course of its first century on Earth.
But I've been following a certain magician-turned-filmmaker for a very long time now, and tonight reminded me that as much as I go happily forward into the new playground, the bones of what built this thing are turning to dust behind me. The Willis O'Briens and Stan Winstons, the Harrison Ellenshaws and Douglas Trumbulls, may continue to jealously guard their dwindling niche in modern filmmaking, but someday their brand of trickery may be disregarded altogether. There's a shame in that, if only because filmmaking once amazed us for what it was capable of doing as film, rather than merely as data. The moon used to seem a lot farther away, and when we got there, we believed in the dancing martians, because the lantern light had already gotten inside us, and told us that it was okay to believe.
I knew the Brit was in me somewhere
Recent e-mail exchange with one Chia MacLean:
Chris: Um, what's snogging?
Me: KISSING, you colonial wanker.
James Fucking Scott
Err... Schofield.
November 28, 2005
Four hundred bat men can't be wrong
I finally got Batman today. Mark got me Batman the other day so I followed it up and got Batman. Good Batman. I watched it all the way through and let me tell you, I am Bat-satisfied now. I have all the Batmans I'm ever gonna need. Until they make another Batman. Boy howdy, that is some good, satisfying Batman.
I've just finished packing up my iPod in an attractive cardboard box; it is being sent to the mothership tomorrow for battery reconditioning. As I understand it, I won't be getting this particular iPod back (which was named Sméagol and has stood me in good stead for close to two whole years); I will be getting a replacement, equivalent iPod with a different serial number, which I will probably name Sex Machine.
And on that subject: really, words alone cannot describe my esteem for the new iPod vibrator, the iBuzz. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, this is what science was made for. The aesthetic and sexual potentialities of having a vibrator that actually beats along to the music on your iPod... well, honestly, the mind boggles even trying to fully comprehend the things that could get done with an invention this ingenious. I've got a playlist of about fifty iBuzzable tracks on my iTunes right now that run the gamut from techno-girlypop to soul-shaking oldschool funk, and every single damn one of them makes me wish I was a girl with some time to kill.
Blue and also pathetic
Oh Internet Explorer. Will you ever stop being the whiniest, most pathetic wanna-bitch of the internet browsers?
Mamo #23: Burst into song
This week on Mamo we look at the modern American musical, and after watching Rent get its tail kicked all over town, try to figure out if there's any place for this sort of thing any more. It's a fairly diverse discussion, and as usual, we are very entertaining.
Click here to download the MP3.
And if you're a Mamo listener and you haven't done so already, please visit our site and click on the red link on the right-hand side to fill out our listener survey. It only takes a few minutes and it may end up making the difference between the show's ultimate ascendance to worldwide popularity, or descent into utter inanity. How can you turn down a chance like that?
November 27, 2005
Welcome to the occupation
Well, here I am. It's a bit of a hatchet job at this point because I'm just so freakin' sick of the new site not being done, so there's still a whole buncha stuff that needs to be worked out, like colonizing various category feeds out to other parts of the site so that when I post something here under "tederick films" it actually shows up in the Tederick Films news page. And I'm sure the Bug List currently knows no end. But hey, it's a blog, it's green, and you can read it. Not bad for a Sunday.
Plus, I was dreaming code. For three straight nights. That's never good.
NEW STUFF ON THIS BLOG! Categorization is my favourite, because it means that when I post something under "sex (practical)," pretty much anyone who has a problem with that type of content can just skip over it and go on to the next one. Sure, I wound up with like 45 categories for a blog that should probably only have 2 (Star Wars/Not Star Wars), but there you go.
More importantly to you fine people, there is finally the fine art of commentation available on this blog. The reversal of my long-standing "no comments" position has been made possible thanks to the miracle of FULL MODERATION. If I don't like you, your comment is not going to appear on my blog. If you're a mean-spirited toe-rag, your comment is not going to appear on my blog. All other worthwhile contributors (whether I agree with them or not) should do fine. It might take me a clean week to get around to clearing all of your comments for publication, but it'll get there.
Oh: and because just so many people asked, I understand you can now RSS the hell out of this thing. Let me know how that goes.
I went through all of the November posts and entered them into the new framework just to populate the database a bit so that it's not a COMPLETE waste of your time to be here, and it got me a bit bummed out. Man, so much bad shit has happened lately my mind actually can't keep track of it all. And that was just November, fer cryin' out loud. But I was recently reminded that the "good old days" may have been happier but they certainly were not simpler, so let's just get through the next couple of weeks, we'll go see King Kong, I'll buy Batman at some point, and everything will be okay.
November 26, 2005
Some big hard-boiled egg gets a look at a pretty face, and bang: he cracks up and goes sappy
We watched King Kong today to prepare for watching King Kong next month, and I was pretty happy while he was fighting various dinosaurs and causing mischief, but not particularly invested in the character at all in spite of everyone saying how sorry they feel for Kong when the mean airplanes come and kill him. I mean, he's just a big freakin' monkey. But something happens when he's up on top of the Empire State Building and the bullet holes start swiss-cheesing his body. The steam kinda goes out of him and he takes forever to die, and it's pretty hefty with the pathos when a couple hundred tonnes of monkey goes toppling off the building to the cold, distant ground below. And that's when it occured to me (and given the title of the film, this should have been a given all along) that King Kong is actually, properly, the main character of King Kong. Genius that. Basically, that means that all of the human heroes are in fact the bad guys. The spike-wielding savages are bad guys; the camera-wielding white guys are bad guys. Ann Darrow is the most elementally misogynistic lust object in all of film, because she literally just exists to be a pretty dollie for the big hefty man to enjoy and covet, so that he can take off her clothes and tickle her. The T-Rex, the stego, the pterodactyl, and the weird snake thing are all obstacles on Kong's heroic quest in this regard. Then the sneaky awful white guys play dirty with ol' Kong (completely busting up the island folks' neighbourhood in the process, naturally), and when Kong wakes up he's locked in a world he has absolutely no hope of defeating. And still he tries to make off with the useless blonde dollie so that he can take her clothes off and tickle her, and the bad guys just pump him full of lead and let him fall to his death. That's a fucking tragedy. Poor Kong.
November 25, 2005
A little something about me
Wow, it's a quarter after three and I haven't even started my day yet. I've got the post-festival hangover and a general inclination to lounge about. I'm leaving in a moment, and have no particular desire to post-op the fest in blog form right now, but I thought I'd tell you a few things about the making of my movie this year, E-Watchamacallit Un-amation.
For whatever reasons that exist only in the mind of the creator, this is pretty much my favourite thing ever. Well, possibly not "ever," because it's not really fair to compare it to something that's, say, more than a minute long. Still, of the surprising glut of extremely-short-format films I've made in the past five years, including the three for the One Minute Film Festival, E-Watch has pretty much been my clear favourite from the moment I came up with it to the moment it hit the big screen last night. I fucking love this thing. Someone said to me a long time ago that a film (among other niceties of story, theme, expression, and craft) should satisfy one's whimsy and psychological eccentricities, and that's exactly what this one does for me, fairly perfectly.
I had been wanting to make an animated 1-minute movie since the 2003 festival, and last year's film, Leap, was intended to be digitally treated, Waking Life-style, as a halfway measure in this regard. The results of that process were unsatisfying, however, so Leap was left as it was shot, and when the "intersections" theme was announced for this year's festival, I began to puzzle out some animated concepts for my 2005 film. One, a moralistic ghost story titled Swept, actually had me all the way through the script and storyboard process and into the initial stages of visual research and animation before I folded it, for possible development a bit further down the road.
It's in fact true that I had been receiving cells from the Ewoks animated series at random intervals throughout 2004; during some pie-in-the-sky blogging back in April, I not only announced my intention to make an animated film out of these meaningless scraps of imagery, but to set the film to Esquivel's "Watchamacallit," a tune I had finally tracked down recently after hearing it used on a Letterman segment back in the '90s. I was largely bullshitting at the time, but when Swept fell apart, Un-amation quickly took over as my main concept, mostly because the combination of that song with an intersected vine/butterfly (the "vinerfly") appealed to me in the most ghastly, down-to-my-roots way. Putting those two "useless" scraps of Star Wars history together into a working, flying vinerfly has a little bit to say about the way serendipitous comings-together of seemingly unrelated elements helps bring out the magic in everyday life, and the way films themselves (and especially Star Wars for me) lets us see the mundane transform into the phenomenal. And suddenly, I have a movie to make that I'm already in love with.
I shot the framing sequences with Mark and I first, and then put in animatics for the scene of the vinerfly's flight. I slowly replaced those animatics with plate photography over the course of the summer. The only thing I didn't get to do with this movie was have a pair of nudists run through the corner of one of the plates; otherwise I gathered the background footage for the vinerfly's flight in and around my neighbourhood. My sister had asked to be in my one-minute movie this year, which was easily acommodated; the Taste of the Danforth gave me some boosted production value with its gigantic, street-consuming crowd. (The little girl who waved at my camera gave me an unexpected, but extremely satisfying, beat.)
Once all the elements were in place and the cut was finalized, I took my Ewoks cells, scanned them at high-res, and manipulated them in Photoshop until I had a workable, 9-frame repetitive animation cycle for the flight pattern. I then simply output this from ImageReady as an animated strip, looped it in Premiere so that I had about 30 seconds of video against a white background, and then drew the material into After Effects, where I composited it over the plates, manipulating shape, size, and brightness and contrast to seat it into the scene appropriately. For a process that I was expecting to take weeks of my time, I got most of the animation done in a single night. I finessed things a few weeks later, and called it a lock.
(I ended up doing the biggest last-minute cheat of my life this week, though, when I was forced to re-record the master tape for the show, and took it as an opportunity to also re-record my dialogue at the head of E-Watch, with which I'd been unsatisfied. I recorded ADR on the fly and ran it into the master five minutes later. The sync is a joke, but "animated" and "butterfly" hit their marks, and that's all that matters.)
And that's that. It's not the longest movie ever and certainly not the most complicated, but it's the first time I've felt like my one-minute movie was up with the best of the other one-minute movies we showed this year. Now all I have to do is figure out what to do next.
November 24, 2005
You shall not pass
Remember what I said about the stairs caving in? They did it some more.
Now I shall never be able to escape my third floor prison, and the One Minute Film & Video Festival will have to go on without me. I shall eat Zam for sustenance and burn comic books to make warmth, while continuing to blog randomly about things that happen in my room, as my room will naturally be the only world I shall know, from now until the end of time. Even the internet will offer little solace for me, as I gaze yearningly out my tiny little window and think, yes, I was a man once. I loved, I laughed, I strode heartily across vast wastes with a song in my heart and a rocket in my pocket. And now, I wait for the stars to fall from the sky and the moon to turn red over One Tree Hill.
Remember me as a healer.
November 23, 2005
Ground shakes
Tomorrow's the festy Mcfesterton, today's with the moving rapidly about town doing various things, and last night was yet again up until 1:30 hacking and bashing New Tederick.com into shape. Whereas a week ago he was still just my sweet little baby, New Tederick.com is now in puberty. I can tell he's in puberty because he's developed that aromatic boy-in-puberty fug, which wafts out of his bedroom in the two or three seconds per day he actually keeps the door open. His arrival in this cherished period of development means that a) I have to hit him a lot more, and b) he keeps gunning for a glimpse of the wife's ta-tas. I don't know what that's about. I think we sheltered him too much when he was in the anal stage.
Across town, having completed his assignment on Clerks 2, Kevin Smith has returned to the internet to bash the AICN talkbackers again. It was relatively funny the first time, but this is pretty much just sad. But then, I'm slowly turning off K-Smith, and for no sane reason at all, just the prevailing (and growing) sense that if we knew each other in real life, he'd really freakin' hate me.
I'm fairly pleased with New Tederick.com, actually, and his zany RSS-powered neobloggeratum. Not sure when I can launch it with everything that's going on in the next week or so, but hopefully it'll be up by December. And this post will be there.
November 22, 2005
We're having a little problem with our stairs
Honestly I don't know what kind of crack I've been smoking - every time I've come to blog in the past week, I've found that the time stamp on the previous entry has been wrong. Not just a little wrong; entirely wrong, flipping a.m. for p.m. and missing my actual time-of-posting by hours in either direction. And I put these things in manually. All I have to do is look at the clock and type it in. It seems like somehow, my brain has completely lost the ability to interpret time. I have time aphasia.
Is it really 2:45 p.m. on November 22nd? We'll find out soon enough.
Meanwhile - on the same day, mind you - Oprah agreed to be on Letterman, and Chris started blogging again. Own that in your mind.
The stairs to the third floor here at 3QF started to cave in the other day; now they have pretty much sailed clear past Tim Burton territory and straight to "we're gonna need some nylon rope, a couple of carabiners, and a grappling hook." Life is full of small challenges.
November 21, 2005
Superior Ballsmanship
Friday was H-Gob and all of its inclement ministrations; Saturday was being up until 4:30 in the morning trying to bash my review into shape, and then waking up again at ten to put another 2½ hours into that selfsame process before publishing it to both Tederick.com and blogTO. I only rarely write actually written reviews for blogTO any more, since the podcast takes up the larger part of my time anyway, but for Potter I called dibs early and often: I love writing a big fat review about something that really moves my cultural landscape. This review was literally one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and when I was done, I felt what can only be described as a life-changing quantity of professional satisfaction. Now I know what I want to be when I grow up.
Saturday night was the party in the Goo and not getting to make out with Macelod, but I did end up in the middle of a Macelod-Bex-Nomi sandwich during that damn song from Dirty Dancing which is the closest I've recently come to group sex. I also watched that video of the big cat tackling the little cat like a kajillion times, until my circadian rhythms had completely conformed to those of the cats... and suddenly, I knew kung fu. Then I had to rabbit on home because Sunday was the very final soccer final, in which we kicked EXTREME BALLS! largely thanks to proud-papa-in-waiting Mark's unprecedented four goals in the second half, all scored in the neo-kid's name. (He didn't even play the first half; goodness knows what would have happened if he had.) We owe the baby a yellow soccer jersey after that performance. It's rather apalling that we spent the entire season getting defeated, only to win our three last games; it seems that we Yellow are consigned to fifth place for ever and always, unless we are in fact first. Fifth or first: that's us.
Then it was hauling an ancient refrigerator up the basement stairs with my too-old-for-this father and my too-spry-for-a-spider-guy brother, during which said fridge did in fact roll back on us and pin my right thigh to a corner with enough force to shear flesh. And then Ghost World for literally no reason at all, and Family Guy, and then finally, mercifully, 9 uninterrupted hours of sleep.
Now for wrath.
November 17, 2005
Returns
Honestly, I don't know quite what to say right now.
I didn't know we needed him as much as we need him. I didn't know how much I wanted to see this happen. I didn't think it could ever be this good. Superman Returns all right, and not a frickin' moment too soon. Really, something just got stirred up inside me that is over twenty years old - it's that kid that literally wore his Superman cape until it fell apart, screaming around my parents' house in complete circles with his arms spread wide. I'd forgotten that kid was even in there. I thought he was happy with a DVD of the Christopher Reeve movie, which I visit once every five or six years, and a couple of "obligation" issues of various Superman comic books, just to say that I have a few. When I walked into the Silver Snail yesterday and one of the Snailers handed me the first issue of the new Morrison/Quitely Superman title, which I hadn't even heard of before that moment, I bought it because I liked Morrison, not because I liked Superman. When I downloaded that trailer tonight, I did it because I liked Singer, not because I liked Superman.
I love Superman. I look at that red and yellow emblem up there, I hear the Krypton theme that runs throughout that trailer, and that kid inside me picks his feet up off the ground and starts to fly.
I cracked Movable Type wide open this afternoon at around 5:00, so the blog redesign/upgrade project is finally moving forward in bold steps. Not sure if I'll do it this month, or this year, but it will have to happen eventually; I'm starting to feel like an old man with all this HTML nonsense. Meanwhile, have you noticed how Bex's blog has been like watching an ongoing chronicle of one woman slowly self-destructing... and willingly doing it in front of everyone because it makes her stronger, not weaker? Well guess what: that's exactly what it's going to be like here, too. Yup, she's pretty much my hero right now. She's taken blogging to the next level of emotional openness and self-awareness, writing about herself and her ludicrous string of problems with a candour that frankly makes my head spin. I could only hope to be doing this as well as she is. Right now, Bex is Superman.
If only it weren't my worst episode ever
Holy shit I'm in the fuckin' Globe. (I mean, moviesTO is in the Globe. Not Mamo. Where's your Globe, Mamo? Who doesn't love Mamo? For that matter, who doesn't love Riker?)
Lost in lost
For the past two episodes, the ABC affiliate that services my area has been technically unable to broadcast Lost in such a fashion where you can actually understand the story and hear the dialogue, which is an ability most network affiliates have enjoyed since 1948. Last week it was a two-frame dropout every three seconds or so; last night the show was just off the air from around 9:25 to 9:40, and then again from 9:58 to the end. So I'm not entirely sure, but I think it was the best episode ever. I'm still cheesed off about Shannon, and I still think Jack should establish his island dominance by burying Ana Lucia in the sand up to her neck (upside down), but man alive that was some gripping Tailie action. In fact, they probably should have started the season with that episode, even though it would have kept us all twisting on the "hatch" fiasco for one more show. It certainly made me far more interested in the Tailie drama than I've been since 2x02, and the new, more handsome Ethan Rom was a hoot. (And I love how the fact that the Nathan dude was from Canada was used to make us think that the Others were all using the same standard "we're Canucks" backstory for their infilitrates.) And as for This Year's Sayid, Mr. Echo damn well better turn out to be a priest. The island needs a gigantic, ultraviolent priest!
Turns out all that crybaby titty-suckin' about how busy I was should have been kept to myself, because getting to the tail end of all that work and having nothing to do is in fact far more annoying. I stayed up late trying to crack code for the new blog, but it's looking like ol' Movable Type and my web host might not actually be the best of friends. Which would suck, because Wordpress is just gay.
November 16, 2005
Lost in space
I got up at around 8, was in front of the comp by 8:30, and now it's 12:32 and I'm finally punching out. Fifteen hour days have been the watchword for about a week and a half. The festival, some deadlined client work, a whole bunch of job searching and a film reviewing career or two, and suddenly, you're making beavers look positively lethargic, with only occasional breaks to eat sandwiches, watch House, or lead a field trip to the Science Centre. I'm certainly not one to shy away from a bit of hard work - actually I've been known to enjoy it - and I certainly recognize the irony of having sweet fuck all to do for about five months and then to suddenly have every manner of thing descend upon me all at once, but still, this shit is stretching muscles I didn't know were gone. Where did my muscles go? What am I, about to turn 30 with nothing to show for it or something?
November 15, 2005
And on his brow was written that which was CHAOS
I spent yesterday trucking around Toronto with a day pass in my pocket, dropping off the press reels for the festival. This was the first year in which the DVD reel actually worked perfectly on the first try - usually I spend days or even weeks chasing bugs out of the render - which I choose to look at as proof of my changing luck. But then, in my experience there's no such thing as luck, so I 'unno. Still, between all that and dropping my TAC application off, it felt like I was getting something done. And I love strolling around town in my urban camouflage. Makes me feel significant.
Still, it's no pillow fight in Dundas Square. Stupid soccer final! I would much rather have done this. And I could have done it in my newfangled journalistic capacity and been all Important! Dang.
I've got a brand new idea in my secret project which might turn out to be The Idea. If so it'll probably happen before the end of the year. If not, then, well I'm a big ol' cock-tease.
Got about fifty e-mails to sort through, some honest-to-god paying work to chew on, and twin New York daily show appearances by Emma Watson draining into the PVR as I write. Mmm, sweet Hermione porn. (Hmm, that'll make for some mighty fine Google indexing.) Now every time I see a picture of her I slip into my talking-to-cats voice, so I must think she is VERY CUTE! Or possibly very fat.
I'm not yet excited about Potter. But everyone else is...
November 14, 2005
Too lazy to blog, he posts an indistinct picture of recent lesbian frolic on his bed
November 13, 2005
You all every body
To celebrate Chris' birthday, a whole bunch of us (Dan'l, Brenda, me-self, Steve, Bridget, Dave Tebby, BHAM!, Matty Price, and also Chris) went to the Science Centre yesterday to look at the corpsified bodies. It was a big ol' field trip. We made permission slips and everything. Occasionally we did head counts to make sure everyone was still with the group and not lost amongst the learning. I even brought my camera:
Approaching the Science Centre.
Chris with the permission slips.
Daniel with his head up the ass of a box.
Then those nazis told me I couldn't take my camera inside, lest the science be photographed, so that was the end of that. They also told me that it would be $25 to see the exhibit, which let me exclaim "They're in it for the money, not the science!" in an actual relevant context, which is #37 on the list of 100 random, pointless things I need to do before I die. So that's cool. We stood around in line for 45 minutes debating the spelling of aureolae (and consequently fantasizing about their tissuey goodness), and then we went to see a bunch of dead bodies.
The exhibit on the whole is very interesting. It's a bit dry in parts and frankly you get a bit tired of reading the science-speak at every single stop along the way, but this actually works out okay because in Body Works 2's case, there's a whole other point alongside the science, and that's the sheer godfuck craziness of staring at a bunch of people with their skin gone, doing weird shit like riding skateboards and doing yoga. There was a human head made up of nothing but blood vessels. There was an army of prosciutto people. There was "The Exploded Human," a complete human body in all of its parts, but with all of the parts expanded outwards to allow complete view of every single element. I went around behind that one, did a deep forward bend to get my head underneath it, and then cranked my head around to look straight up, and was generally pleased to see that from that angle, the exploded human looks pretty much like the entire cosmos, in prettier colours. I then sublime-ridiculated by accidentally tripping my ear on one of the exploded human's suspension wires on my way out, causing the right leg to kick. I ran like hell.
The elements that really fucked me up, though, were threefold:
The brain. Sure, I've had a bit too much schooling lately in the relative pointlessness of all human existence and the futility of life, but staring at a preserved human brain in a glass case and realizing that this small (much smaller than you'd expect), reddish lump of meat is the sum vessel for my entire awareness and everything that I am, was... well... really upsetting. I was reading something recently about how the relative interior importance of reality versus fantasy has actually shifted in the 20th century, because we're inured with so much media (fantasy) that it's more real to us than reality... and I'm sitting there staring at that brain and thinking, fuck it all: I might just as well give "reality" a clean miss and let my brain bathe itself in the happy endorphens that come from imagining that my life is a damn sight better than it is. After all, no matter what I do - from a complete and stringent effort at improving the reality of my existence, to an out-and-out nervous breakdown skullfucking - my small, reddish lump of meat is going to be long dust at some point, and much sooner than I think. Hello? Pointless much?
The lungs. We've all had that "scare 'em straight" moment at some point in our lives where they showed us a smoker's lung and how ridiculously gross it is, but there's nothing like seeing a smoker's lung right alongside a healthy one. It's about half the size, because the smoke has so utterly destroyed the tissue that it's basically not even the same thing any more. Imagine: not even being able to breathe half the amount of air you're supposed to. This part of the exhibit just made me really sad. There was a cross-section of a smoker's tumour-riddled lung nearby, and all I could think of was this older guy I know, who's probably already got the beginnings of tumours throughout his lungs on both sides, and how he's thoroughly rendered his body unable to ever function as it was supposed to, ever again. Honestly, the lungs made me want to leave, or sit down and cry.
The pregnant woman. Maybe the most beautiful (if in a very strange way) thing I've seen in a very long while. I think pregnant women are generally among the most beautiful things ever, but this was a strikingly profound variation on the theme. The Body Worlds 2 pregnant woman was in her fifth month when she died with the fetus inside her; she was posed in a standing position and her midsection was gently teased open to reveal the baby. Man, I just zoned out and stared at that thing for about ten minutes. I can't even really describe the effect or the hold that it had on me, except that it set the deepest strings of me humming in chords. There are moments here and there in my life when I am reminded why, all bi-fun-n'-gaming aside, I am completely, perfectly, resiliently heterosexual. This possibly one of the strongest ones.
November 12, 2005
Festival, v3.0
The thing that's been solidly kicking my ass timewise over the past week (and don't even ask me how one filmmaker managed to violate the laws of physics by actually discovering a way to put sound inside video, like the cough syrup centre inside those Vicks lozenges) is of course the One Minute Film & Video Festival, which is screening on November 24th at 7:00 at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto. My latest (and greatest?) film, E-Watchamacallit Un-amation, is screening as part of the programme, which is made up of 64 one-minute films, all dealing with the central theme "intersections."
And this year, we've got advance tickets on sale! Starting in about... 45 minutes actually, at Queen Video at 480 Bloor Street, for $8 each. So please, don't miss your chance to be a part of the third annual 1MFVF, which is generally a hotbed of craziness and fun. I'll even throw in a sly Tederick.com reference in my opening monologue just to make you feel special.
November 11, 2005
Rose/bloom/etc.
Shhhh. I've ordered more dollies.
I'm in the midst of a jam-packed week that looks to last until at least next Tuesday morning, which is a sensation not unlike being the ugliest girl at the dance for the last six months and then suddenly becoming the prom queen. I'll tell you all about it sometime, but for now, I just wanted to pop in a nice footnote on my Dark Hours post yesterday. The flick's being destroyed in papers all over town, except apparently for The Globe (search for the review on Google if you want to read the whole thing), which must have received some sort of editorial mandate to "support Canadian film no matter what," given the wide variance between its review and pretty much everything else. Aside from the usual z-grade Globe writing talent, the review is notable in its unwillingness to do anything but summarize the plot and then describe what other movies Dark Hours is like. Surely, it's capable of being a few things on its own? Or do you actually have to have seen A History of Violence to understand why this is anything other than a piece of shit? Honestly, the papers would be doing the Canadian film industry a bigger favour if they just stopped giving press to projects this bad altogether. Wanna be in the papers? Make a movie on par with anything else being released this weekend. If Dark Hours came out of the States, it wouldn't even be listed today.
Rushing around like a hatter for the rest of the day and most of the weekend, but I've got good, moody November weather for it at least. And I keep dreaming about the taste of blood...
November 10, 2005
Sorry Iris, I tried
I have to take the freebies where I can get them these days, on account of having no money to pay for anything. Free movies, free parties with free drinks, free food. Free food is especially fun, like three separate "free sushi" incidents in under a week, or going all the way downtown just to eat a meat that can't be directly identified or even particularly guessed at. I'm noticing a distinct creative advantage to not knowing exactly how things are going to end up all of the time, and having to take what you're given whether you want it or not. Whereas people with money are masters of their own fate and get to choose exactly what they're going to do at pretty much any given moment, I've been cast to the winds of chance and the result is stimulating, because I get a lot more unpredictability for my lack-of-buck. And having someone else pilot the space ship is more relaxing than always having to decide on every little thing.
So: Amy sends me a pass to see The Dark Hours at the Paramount at ten, and the decision is a brisk one because it's either that or do nothing. (Being broke makes you jump at any little chance of being entertained.) And not paying for a flick always has distinct advantages, because any monetary obligation to cut the film even the smallest amount of slack is completely removed. So when a "The Canadian Feature Film Project Presents" card rises up at the head of the film, and between that and the music I know exactly what I'm in for, it really just becomes a question of exactly when I'm going to go clomping down those stairs, shaking my head at the utter failure of the entire Canadian film industry and all the people in it. About six title cards later I realize that the cousin of an ex-girlfriend of mine is in the flick; about ten minutes after that, I've satisfied my urge to see what she looks like on the big screen (she looks bigger), and out we go.
Honestly, this country is in serious fucking trouble. The granting agencies are a joke. The feature films that we are meant to stand behind (this evening's show was thrown by some kind of members-only "get Canadian content on 5% of our screens" club) are literally embarassing - you would never stand up and say "this is what my country is about." The wankers at the CFC have ridden the entire concept of the Feature Film Project into the ground on nothing more than their own greed and utter inability to distinguish a good project from a bad one. It's one thing to sell out your own mission statement, but for fuck's sake, sell out effectively.
Still, I find stuff like this relatively inspiring. I'm just a broke loser with nothing better to do on a Thursday night than go to see a free piece of Canadian shit, but it's always nice to be reminded that there's no reason to give up yet. There's nowhere to go but up, and if the CFC's in this much trouble, then it's still any man's game - there's a place for me out there, if I can just angle a way to get to it.
This is way more fun than pictures of Lego people screwin'
Up past midnight hacking and slashing code, but the good news is that (at least from a technomalogical standpoint) Tederick.com version 11 will probably actually "work," in the parlance. Doesn't have a design yet, doesn't even really have any great control over that technomalogical standpoint I referenced previously, and it'll take for soddin' ever to get off the ground, but at least I can now see the naked man inside the marble. (His testicles are oh-so-biteable.)
Turns out ol' Whedon stays up late too; he spewed on Whedonesque last night with strange missives and a shocking announcement: the return of the Buffyverse! In a) post-"Chosen" comic book form, to be written by him and b) in that Spike movie that might actually become real enough to court the Blonde One in the near future. And there's more Firefly comix comin', and there's that whole Astonishing thing with the funny lactating Beast sub-plotline he's always threatened... no wait, that was my dream last night. Mmm. Blue milk.
As for Lost, frankly, I find killing Shannon just sloppy from a writing standpoint, though I do accept the possibility that she's not "dead" dead, in the Ripley sense of the word(s). Plus, uh, worst episode ever. It even answered my "where's Sayid and Charlie?" question from yesterday, and still sucked. Not worth a 3-week hiatus to get here, even if it did conjure fantasies of Ian Somerhalder and Maggie Grace sitting side by side in a beach house going, "so, we both got killed off the biggest show on TV. Wanna wriggle? In the nude???"
Post ends abruptly now.
November 9, 2005
That's the vag talking
You're right, my drunk blog posts are better than anything else I write here.
My, we certainly are gothic today
Shhh. I'm playing wif my dollies.
Michigan: the hymen-splitting state
The other day Matty P and I were talking about taking his handful of in-between-jobs days off and shotgunning a road trip down to Boston, because, y'know, MmmmBoston. During this conversation we somehow invented the notion that Boston is celebrated for its extremely low average age of first intercourse, and that they should change their license plates to read Michigan: the hymen-splitting state. And then I think we realized that Boston is in Massachussetts, not Michigan, and we felt a bit bad about that. But let's face it, those wankers have like six or seven M-name states and it's just hard for us poor Canucks to keep track of them all. And "Michigan" really sells the joke.
So today I tried to find out which state in the union actually has the lowest average age of first intercourse, but Google, she has let me down. So if anyone actually has the answer, let me know. (I'd also love to know which state has the highest average age, for its own license plate renewal, Alaska: Land of Teenage Prudery.) In my travels, though, I did manage to find a feature on Original Pussy Beer - the home brew that one entrepreneurial spirit made with her own vaginal yeast. Now that is freakin' fascinating. Do they serve it at Cheers?
The Slave Leia thing
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Nuh-uh.
This post occured to me because at the current moment I actually have Slave Leia toys in three different scales staring at me from my shelf, which is unusual, but merely a coincidence. Slave Leia does not make me hot. She has never made me hot. I've asked partners to slip into the old Catholic uniform, used fake fangs to draw real blood, and even had a fairy detailed fantasy about wrapping one shivering young woman in my Jedi cloak and playing lightsabre games till dawn... but have never, ever, ever, ever wanted anything to do with that gold bikini.
Why? Because having lusty thoughts about Leia is like having lusty thoughts about my mom. In fact, I think there's a good possibility that for at least the first five or six years of my life, Princess Leia might very well have occupied the exact same psychological space in my brain as my mom. They kinda look alike, they certainly talk alike, and what six-year-old doesn't want a gun-toting rebel senator as a mommy?
When I hit the pubes, this maternal connectivity (thankfully) did not morph over into "boy I hope one of the stage crew girls will favour me with some metal swimwear bondage action." (Mmmm... stage crew girls.) In fact, it wasn't until watching the saga last week that I was caused to notice that (when wearing her Hoth jumper, not the bikini) Leia has a cute bum. Think about that: it took me (me) 29 years to notice that Carrie Fisher's ass is respectable. Even that girl at Celebration wasn't quite enough to push me over the edge into a full-blown slave girl fetish... although I did spend about twenty minutes trying to get a good low angle on her rather superb butt.
Now, I've spent a lot of time with male Star Wars fans and yeah, they're a desperate lot and perhaps for each and every one of them, the apotheosis of sexual experience on the planet Earth really is getting a girl to dress up like Leia and wrap her chain around your neck. (Mmmm... chain play.) But I prefer to live in doubt. Doesn't a good spot of role-playing generally require more than the usual amount of confidence, inventiveness, and willingness to shoot down the item of your idolatry with a bit of in-the-muck love-ruttin'? Sure, they've all got the nude beach photos of Natalie Portman saved on their hard drive, but when was the last time you saw a Star Wars geek sully the maiden virtue of the saga's original turbo-hottie?
Exactly. Bullshit posturing....
Cozy Kitty: Hey kids, try one in your pants!
I'm very disappointed to have to acknowledge it, but it really is feeling like House jumped the shark. Oddly, he may have jumped the shark in mid-hiatus, because everything was fine when we last saw him in the spring, and when he was back on duty in the fall things had changed completely. He bears all the marks of a writing staff that's become terrifically freaked out by the success of the show, and is now trying to write the character the way they think people want him, rather than write him the way they did before and let people get from it what they may. The result? A quippy (almost chipper), over-sentamentalized "troubled hero" Dr. House. Which stands in such direct contradiction to the way the character was used in Season One (I'm watching the DVDs right now) that it's almost painful. There are ten-second non-dialogue scenes between House and tasty little Dr. Cameron in Season One that say more about that character than 40 pages of dialogue could say this year. I can only hope that this is all building to some great personal tragedy and disappointment that will turn him into even more of an asshole than he was last year, or ol' limpy might be making his last rounds.
Thank goodness we've got Lost coming back tonight to kill characters and take names, or TV might have become boring. Given that I can't even remember the last time I saw Charlie or Sayid, it is definitely time to start thinning the massive, 15-person principal cast by at least a third. Perhaps another plane crash? Right on top of a group of people? That would be good.
November 8, 2005
Short cuts
I got the e-mail about the Star Wars Fan Film awards this year, which are finally opening the gates for their 2006 submissions. (This was the intended final resting place for Far, Far Away.) Now, I always expected to have to trim out some of the material to make their entry requirements, and had already begun thinking about the softer flesh that might prove opportune as the site for the first incision. But today's newly-released rulebook states that my 21-minute masterpiece is gonna have to come down to a measly ten damn minutes. Which, as challenges go, is nothing short of delicious.
(Yes, I recognize the irony of having to spec-ed my own Star Wars movie.)
Today I put in a solid 11-hour work day in front of the computer, which stretched muscles I haven't used in a very long time and felt surprisingly satisfying when all was said and done. It's always nice to go back into a web site you built a little while ago and say "... uh, why the fuck did I build it like this? Who builds sites like this anyway - the nazis?!" and then retrofit that mo-fo for increased user-friendliness. I also slaved away at various 1MFVF requirements with the deadline looming like a greasy Frenchman with a tire iron, manipulated various pornographic images in Photoshop, lined up a bit more paid work so that I might someday actually be able to buy Batman, and even finaled my application for funding for This Is What We Do, which began its life as my Command-Zed proposal last winter, and is now looking like the first Tederick film of 2006. And to get the guvernment to pay me to make it would be even better.
I think I oughta get this for Chris:
And these, for myself.
Something evil, like burning things down or gluing things together
Thank god this stuff actually happens in the real world and not just in porn. There aren't enough lesbian cheerleaders public sex cat fight news stories... and one can never underestimate the value of having the phrase "lesbian cheerleaders public sex cat fight" as part of your searchable text.
So: as it turns out, if you don't use Flash for two years and then pick it up again, it's fairly hard to remember how the fuck this backwards little program works. I always hated Flash, but now I hate Flash like a girl I ran out on who's come back looking for a little snuggling. Down, Flash!
November 7, 2005
I've been in love too many times to count
At 8:00 Brandy knocked on my door and woke me up from the best dream I've ever had. It's not her fault, don't get angry at her, I stole her Metropass. But still: brilliant dream. One of those dreams where you could see every single element that made it in every single thing that happened to you in the past few days, only reworked and made better by subconscious resignification. One of those dreams that reminds you why dreams are so freaking cool - hefty with the double meanings, and switchings of narrative localization (she is me and me is she), and outright "god this is so freaking coolness," so much so that even as the dream was progressing, I was complimenting my inner filmmaker on his craft. One of those dreams that really ought to be a movie, if you could ever make it any way near as good as it was in your head. It was about Heather Anderson. It was about old, lingering love. It was about a chorus line that stretches back to my seventh year. And (topically indeed) it was about how much we beat ourselves up for all the things our lives have added up to, when we somehow think we've failed. And (on the surface anyway), it wasn't even about me. Brilliant.
I was up late last night fooling around with a fairly major design change for Tederick.com, but I don't know where it's going to go; I'm sort of learning as I go with this thing, but it might happen sooner or later. It's funny, I designed version 10 (this version) thinking it would remain relatively un-dated for at least 2 years, and now, 18 months later, it has 2004 written all over it. Not that version 11 will necessarily scream 2006, cuz let's face it, I'm a really bad designer, but at least it will be a different colour.
And I have to say, 8½ inches might make a guy feel mightily good about himself but I think I'd still need a couple inches more to have the gumption to invoke the Penis Size Defence in a rape trial. (But what do you want, he goes to Mac.) Also: would the size of the guy's cock really be causative at all? Mightn't the victim have a comensurately enormous vagina, rendering the point moot?
November 6, 2005
Screaming into the wind
If you have the means, I highly recommend it: the gale-force wind at soccer (seventy damn kilometres per hour!) picked up to a new and astonishing degree of viciousness, and I turned directly into it, facing the fiery sun behind its roiling slate-grey clouds, and screamed at the top of my lungs, arms spread wide and my cloak streaming straight out behind me. And now, I feel better.
Upsides to having my bike stolen: Pseudo Mommy and Daddy (Matthew and Leah) took me out for breakfast; Tama and Jess sent me a cartoon of them as the "Pussy Brigade" in which they first medievaled the bike thief and then offered me some recuperative three-way sex; co-bike-lover Mer sent her commiserations from Nova Scotia via e-mail; Bex blogged about it; Steve bought me a beer and a really good hamburger while regaling me with tales of the Sunshine State; Chris didn't rape me once; and Zam... well, Zam was a bitch. Oh, and the police actually called me back, which was nothing short of miraculous. Apparently my Kona Nunu, whom I called Threepio but everyone else referred to as Twix, was quite distinctive and might yet find her way back to me. But if there's one thing that 2005 has definitively taught me, it's that hope is for retards.
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Last night Mark and I went to James Scott's (now Schoffield) going-away party; I hadn't seen that guy in ten damn years and man howdy, he looked terrific and was genuinely enthused to see the Browns again. We all made a pretty fantastic movie together back in 1993 called Näsal Warts (under the "James Brown Productions" flag), and after Helen he's the second North Torontonian to drop out of the sky in a week. No, third: I also heard from Jody yesterday. And today I got an e-mail from Renee, all the way from Japan, where she's still teaching English to people who don't speak it. Which is something I oughta be doing. Can you imagine me in Japan? It kinda fits, doesn't it?
My ten-year high school reunion is apparently happening in December... and naturally, they've "forgotten" to invite me to it. It really is just like high school.
I think that's about it. If anything changes this week, I'll let you know. But I'm not holding my breath.
November 4, 2005
Bikeless
My bike just got stolen. Someone actually ripped the porch railing clean off to get it. Left the other bike; took mine. To that person: thank you very much for stealing my bike. Thank you for doing it when I have no job, no girlfriend, and less than $80 to my name, and my life is generally about as hateful as it's ever been. Thank you for making the waking nightmare just one degree more unbearable, as I'm sure was your clearly thought out intention. I sincerely hope you're dead right now.
November 3, 2005
Adamantium
So they went and changed everything. That's fine, and lord knows I'm not averse to a good narrative shakeup every now and then... because hey, funny. I've been in the X-books for what now, about three years since Chad first handed me Vol. 1 of New X-Men, and it's easily the central franchise of my comic read-dom... nothing quite clicks for me so well as a well-written X-book. (Or a poorly-written one, as my thoroughly unjustified devotion to all 18 issues of Emma Frost gloriously attested.) But I believe this is the first "Crisis"-level crisis that I've actually run afoul of since becoming a "comic book guy," so I'm interested to see how Decimation affects my enjoyment of the franchise. I'm particularly wired (though no one's talking about it) to see how this spins through to Astonishing's second year, if and when Joss ever gets around to starting it... in the meantime, there's a bunch of House of M fallout to deal with, and a few new, post-Decimation X-titles coming up that look... well, interesting, but in that wordy, Claremontish sort of way, so we'll just have to see.
November 2, 2005
Flaws
Today I ran into Helen Anderson, who I haven't seen in a clear decade, not since shortly after she was jumping out my window for Fate of Dietrich, and who looked almost exactly the same as she did in high school. (I have since widened.) It was faintly startling just to see her and catch up with her, and afterwards I sat in a big chair staring out a window and thought about my life. I had one of those moments where your life exists completely outside of time... like standing on the top of a hill, below which all of the people you have ever met are scattered about a wide plain as the sun sets. You have infinite vision from that hill, and you can pick and choose people and places and moments from your whole life with equal clarity and dispassion, because they're all just on that plain, and no one thing is more or less important or recent or significant than any other one thing. And I suppose what startled me the most was the unbelievable transience of everything I've ever had. There is surprisingly little permanence in my life; even the people or things that have been here the whole time have ebbed and flowed in importance over the course of my scant three decades. And my super-spec hill vision also let me notice that I've been seeking the opposite of that impermanence since I was at least seven years old. There's something to be said for something that really lasts, something whose development gets to be measured in eons rather than nanoseconds. I stand on my hill and look for glaciers.
After the coffee-shop mindwalk I went where the free food brung me, in this case the Reel Asian programme launch party with Co-Podcaster Man, where I ran into Roberto for the second time in a week and was too chicken to talk to Anita and had just about the three best pieces of sushi I've had in at least three years, all gloriously free. Later had a young lady volunteer her beautiful ass to me on the subway, yet I came home feeling surprisingly flattened and watched Revenge of the Sith commentary till I just couldn't do it no more. Maybe my two city-encircling bike rides in as many days have completely discharged my batteries, or maybe daylight savings wrote a cheque that my body can't currently cash, but right now I feel like slipping into a coma and sleeping till doomsday. Or at least Saturday morning.
Michael Piller died yesterday, and that is extremely sad.
November 1, 2005
Rise and fall on the wings of our dreams
My body is angry at me for something, but it refuses to tell me what. It can be such a bitch! These sorts of problems can be so easily handled with a bit of honest talk about our feelings, but does Little Mr. Emotionally Unavailable want to put ten seconds of its valuable time into actually trying to make this relationship work? Nooooooooo.
Last night I had a dream about a Perfect Strangers reunion episode. Cousin Larry and Balki looked like they'd been strung out on crack for every single moment of the interveneing ten years since the end of the show; Larry was a big fat whale whose small, sallid face was a riot of acne and stubble, while Balki had shrunken into a tiny, frail frame and was chain-smoking like the devil was behind him. The episode consisted of them lounging around a pool trying to psyche themselves into going in; Larry got the closest by getting on the diving board while Balki hurled racial epithets at him, but neither ever ended up getting wet.
Right now I have to ride over to Coxwell and Danforth, then down to Lakeshore and Broadview, then to Dufferin Mall, then home. It's raining - that cold November rain, yay for the joke - making this a fine opportunity to test my "prepare yourself to be wet, and then just don't care about it" theory. My theories have been dropping like flies lately, though, so who knows. The good news is that my honourary pair of old, do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want-in-'em jeans now has a hole in the crotch large enough for a testicle to fit through... so naturally, that's exactly what I'm doing with it.