GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT GET!
Some investment bank, four or five months of administrative slavery. I’m so pleased! Bought new trousers (special offer, real nice) and shoes. Going to be one smart puppy when I walk in there tomorrow.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Monday, January 16, 2006
Appreciation
While I understand the delightful buzz of a good review or the surprised elation at hearing that someone you’ve just met is aware and appreciative of your work, I’ve never fully understood how sensitive some people can be regarding their work.
I have a love of pulp, be it fiction, art, cinema, music... Pulp is mediocre, but competent. Good enough, but not really good.
Modern media, starting with publicly affordable photographic journalism through radio, television and nowadays teh intarwebz have poisoned our ability to appreciate works on a less absolute scale. While we were in Paris last year, my boyfriend drew a delightful sketch of the back of the Louvre while I sat beside him reading and taking notes, the two of us swapping pencils occasionally because my mechanical pencil has an eraser and his has a better tip size -- since then he hasn’t done much sketching since he wasn’t pleased with the results.
We saw very different things in the same sketch. He saw flawed proportions, crooked angles and clumsy detailing. I saw straight lines and a surprising resemblance to the actual building. He saw a drawing that would be sneered at in an architectural office, I saw a drawing that showed immense promise, especially since it was his first try.
Excellence is freely available to us, or at least, the knowledge of it. You can see pictures or films of the most beautiful and artful things ever devised by the hands of man for free after a few seconds of Googling. You can buy CD recordings of the most sublime music of the last few centuries for a few bucks in the drugstore bargain bin. In school, Shakespeare and Multatuli are thrown at young folk with such force they have to try to dodge them -- a few hundred years ago, in the town where I now live, the sight of a horse meant for riding rather than ploughing was news that kept buzzing around the area for months.
I’m not trying to argue that we should lower our expectations or worse, aspirations, simply that we re-evaluate the process by which we judge works of creativity. The movie Serenity didn’t change my life or my expectations of cinema, but it was good fun, well-written and, gorrammit, it had a hover-craft chase in it. Compare a product to its goal rather than its pinnacle, and all of a sudden mediocrity switches from being ‘less than good and much less than excellent’ and becomes a genre of its own.
I have a love of pulp, be it fiction, art, cinema, music... Pulp is mediocre, but competent. Good enough, but not really good.
Modern media, starting with publicly affordable photographic journalism through radio, television and nowadays teh intarwebz have poisoned our ability to appreciate works on a less absolute scale. While we were in Paris last year, my boyfriend drew a delightful sketch of the back of the Louvre while I sat beside him reading and taking notes, the two of us swapping pencils occasionally because my mechanical pencil has an eraser and his has a better tip size -- since then he hasn’t done much sketching since he wasn’t pleased with the results.
We saw very different things in the same sketch. He saw flawed proportions, crooked angles and clumsy detailing. I saw straight lines and a surprising resemblance to the actual building. He saw a drawing that would be sneered at in an architectural office, I saw a drawing that showed immense promise, especially since it was his first try.
Excellence is freely available to us, or at least, the knowledge of it. You can see pictures or films of the most beautiful and artful things ever devised by the hands of man for free after a few seconds of Googling. You can buy CD recordings of the most sublime music of the last few centuries for a few bucks in the drugstore bargain bin. In school, Shakespeare and Multatuli are thrown at young folk with such force they have to try to dodge them -- a few hundred years ago, in the town where I now live, the sight of a horse meant for riding rather than ploughing was news that kept buzzing around the area for months.
I’m not trying to argue that we should lower our expectations or worse, aspirations, simply that we re-evaluate the process by which we judge works of creativity. The movie Serenity didn’t change my life or my expectations of cinema, but it was good fun, well-written and, gorrammit, it had a hover-craft chase in it. Compare a product to its goal rather than its pinnacle, and all of a sudden mediocrity switches from being ‘less than good and much less than excellent’ and becomes a genre of its own.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Things I have that I didn't have in 2005
- New credit card (nice colors).
- Extra yera of age (free).
- Soot on my kitchen ceiling (microwave mishap).
- Dent in my living-room ceiling (champagne cork-popping mishap - not mine).
- War of the Worlds DVD (2-disc edition, birthday present - yay boyfriend).
- A freezeburn above my left ankle (torpedo-shaped, caused by a friend spraying compresed air from a can held upside-down so the prpellant sprayed out in liquid form - healing, currently purple).
- New interest in alcoholic beverages (currently girlishly obsessed with sweet or fizzy drinks that successfully mask the taste of alcohol).
Can’t think of any more. Pick this up as a second-generation meme and see how far you get :)
- Extra yera of age (free).
- Soot on my kitchen ceiling (microwave mishap).
- Dent in my living-room ceiling (champagne cork-popping mishap - not mine).
- War of the Worlds DVD (2-disc edition, birthday present - yay boyfriend).
- A freezeburn above my left ankle (torpedo-shaped, caused by a friend spraying compresed air from a can held upside-down so the prpellant sprayed out in liquid form - healing, currently purple).
- New interest in alcoholic beverages (currently girlishly obsessed with sweet or fizzy drinks that successfully mask the taste of alcohol).
Can’t think of any more. Pick this up as a second-generation meme and see how far you get :)
Sunday, January 1, 2006
Resolutions!
1. Stay classy.
2. Enjoy my new age -- I’ve always preferred odd-numbered years, and this one’s a second power! Yay!
3. Never again make home-made cakes with cake mix and put them in the microwave/hot air oven combo for an hour -- on microwave, instead of hot air, then open all the windows in the entire house to get the smoke out. The result was a black basalt brick that continued to smoke even after liters of water were poured over it and which subsequently couldn’t be demolished even with huge amounts of fireworks.
4. Spend stupendous amounts of time with my friends. I love you all, you beautiful people.
5. Learn to drink (maybe).
6. Learn to enjoy being stoned (maybe).
7. Reign supreme in Soul Calibur (go Kilik!)
8. Write more.
9. Read more.
10. Keep flyin’.
2. Enjoy my new age -- I’ve always preferred odd-numbered years, and this one’s a second power! Yay!
3. Never again make home-made cakes with cake mix and put them in the microwave/hot air oven combo for an hour -- on microwave, instead of hot air, then open all the windows in the entire house to get the smoke out. The result was a black basalt brick that continued to smoke even after liters of water were poured over it and which subsequently couldn’t be demolished even with huge amounts of fireworks.
4. Spend stupendous amounts of time with my friends. I love you all, you beautiful people.
5. Learn to drink (maybe).
6. Learn to enjoy being stoned (maybe).
7. Reign supreme in Soul Calibur (go Kilik!)
8. Write more.
9. Read more.
10. Keep flyin’.
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Ruined.
I just recorded over half an hour of steamy ghey lovin’ twixt an American fox and a semi-Aussie wolf and fucking Garageband crashes on me and it’s all gone, irretrievable.
I still love Mac, but grrr!
I still love Mac, but grrr!
Friday, December 30, 2005
Emancipate the analogue!
So, I was recording Chapter 4 of the audiobook of kyellgold’s novel ‘Volle’ (why yes, I am a sensationally multi-talented Renaissance Wuff, how nice of you to say so) and I was shuffling some of the pages of the script I’d prepared. Kyell had sent me the text version of the novel and after a good bit of experiemntation I’d settled on the optimal reading format -- 13-points sans-serif font (Trebuchet, cute and legible, thick and spacious), left-justified, indented paragraphs, 1.1 line distance, 8-points paragraph distance, landscape format A4 for maximum line length, thus minimizing problems arising from mistaken predictions about the grammatical structure of a sentence -- when two of the pages slipped out of the pile and I had to hunt through the pile to slip the numbered pages in their proper spot.
I seem to be struck by things quite a bit lately; first music and now this. I was struck by how marvelous the idea is that mere paper suddenly becomes valuable simply by dint of what’s printed on it. Specifically, without those particular sheets of paper, I wouldn’t be able to narrate those sections of the story.
I know it seems trite and obvious, but run with it. I’ve often professed jealousy at the compactness of visual art. When I joined jotun_neko to an evening class at his art school I saw people sharing drawings from teir portfolios and I felt a pang of envy at the ease with which artists can share their work. “Here, take this piece of paper and look at it, tell me what you think.” While proper appraisal of a complicated work of art can take some time, you can form an opinion of most ordinary works of art in a single glance. You like the colours or you don’t, the style appeals to you or it doesn’t, and the obvious faults leap into view.
Not so for writers. Poets, musicians, actors, even filmmakers practice crafts whose products take very little time to consume and appraise, at least a first glance. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, in its splendid Extended Edition Glory may be a twelve-hour marathon, but there are few regular readers out there that could read the latest Harry Potter cover to cover in that time -- despite the fact that that bitch Rowling used double line spacing to make the book seem thicker! For God’s sake, ‘Volle’ is longer than that, and so’s Maranatha and it isn’t even finished yet!
, from Family Guy>
The point is, while making a film surely taes more time and more money and a lot more calories than writing a book (not counting research, such as for travel books), the product is more compact, taking less time to consume. Artists can come together for a night and show each other their work and talk about it, and everyone can show a few pieces and get a few opinions. Long-form writers can’t do that. Reading a longer story takes hours, days, weeks, depending on how you pace yourself and the material takes time to settle.
This is sad, but also fantastic. While I’m a big geek and as an itinerant New Mediast deeply enamoured with all things digitial (I want one of these, if not to own it, then at least for the thing to exist) I’m also a big promoter of the analogue. The voice versus the iPod, as in the earlier post.
Now, take books. Like this fat pile of paper in my lap, which I’m slowly chewing through, intoning into my (digital) microphone, reading Kyell’s excellent story for mass consumption. it’ll be somewhere between ten and fifteen hours of audio material and will take easily three times as long to actually record and put together, but look, I can hold it in my hand. Sure, you may say that millions of books fit on a DVD, but before you can read them you need A) a computer, B) a DVD drive, C) a screen and D) a nationwide electricity network powered by dams, windmills, nuclear and fossil fuel reactors -- whereas to read the beautiful story I now hold in my grubby little paws, you need only your eyes and your education.
Sure, you may argue, the time it took you to learn to read (and in some of your cases, to also learn English aside from your native tongue) could be translated monetarily into a fortune far greater than the cost of a computer (though not perhaps that of the electricity network) but honestly, what were you going to do with those years anyway? Besides, you’ve had use of those skills so often since then that the cost has been amortized to nearly nothing.
Suddenly it’s not such a pity that it takes so long to read a story or a book; it’s quite special. No other medium can contain such a huge amount of information or entertainment in such a small object, which takes so very little to be consumed. As mentioned, eyes and knowledge of the written form of the book’s language are sufficient. It’s almost magical. The Lord of the Rings films may be spectacular, but the books can carry you away wherever you may read them. Beach, bus stop, hospital...
I know I sound lik the Magic Of Reading dude from that Chickenf*cker episode of South Park, but go with it.
I seem to be struck by things quite a bit lately; first music and now this. I was struck by how marvelous the idea is that mere paper suddenly becomes valuable simply by dint of what’s printed on it. Specifically, without those particular sheets of paper, I wouldn’t be able to narrate those sections of the story.
I know it seems trite and obvious, but run with it. I’ve often professed jealousy at the compactness of visual art. When I joined jotun_neko to an evening class at his art school I saw people sharing drawings from teir portfolios and I felt a pang of envy at the ease with which artists can share their work. “Here, take this piece of paper and look at it, tell me what you think.” While proper appraisal of a complicated work of art can take some time, you can form an opinion of most ordinary works of art in a single glance. You like the colours or you don’t, the style appeals to you or it doesn’t, and the obvious faults leap into view.
Not so for writers. Poets, musicians, actors, even filmmakers practice crafts whose products take very little time to consume and appraise, at least a first glance. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, in its splendid Extended Edition Glory may be a twelve-hour marathon, but there are few regular readers out there that could read the latest Harry Potter cover to cover in that time -- despite the fact that that bitch Rowling used double line spacing to make the book seem thicker! For God’s sake, ‘Volle’ is longer than that, and so’s Maranatha and it isn’t even finished yet!
, from Family Guy>
The point is, while making a film surely taes more time and more money and a lot more calories than writing a book (not counting research, such as for travel books), the product is more compact, taking less time to consume. Artists can come together for a night and show each other their work and talk about it, and everyone can show a few pieces and get a few opinions. Long-form writers can’t do that. Reading a longer story takes hours, days, weeks, depending on how you pace yourself and the material takes time to settle.
This is sad, but also fantastic. While I’m a big geek and as an itinerant New Mediast deeply enamoured with all things digitial (I want one of these, if not to own it, then at least for the thing to exist) I’m also a big promoter of the analogue. The voice versus the iPod, as in the earlier post.
Now, take books. Like this fat pile of paper in my lap, which I’m slowly chewing through, intoning into my (digital) microphone, reading Kyell’s excellent story for mass consumption. it’ll be somewhere between ten and fifteen hours of audio material and will take easily three times as long to actually record and put together, but look, I can hold it in my hand. Sure, you may say that millions of books fit on a DVD, but before you can read them you need A) a computer, B) a DVD drive, C) a screen and D) a nationwide electricity network powered by dams, windmills, nuclear and fossil fuel reactors -- whereas to read the beautiful story I now hold in my grubby little paws, you need only your eyes and your education.
Sure, you may argue, the time it took you to learn to read (and in some of your cases, to also learn English aside from your native tongue) could be translated monetarily into a fortune far greater than the cost of a computer (though not perhaps that of the electricity network) but honestly, what were you going to do with those years anyway? Besides, you’ve had use of those skills so often since then that the cost has been amortized to nearly nothing.
Suddenly it’s not such a pity that it takes so long to read a story or a book; it’s quite special. No other medium can contain such a huge amount of information or entertainment in such a small object, which takes so very little to be consumed. As mentioned, eyes and knowledge of the written form of the book’s language are sufficient. It’s almost magical. The Lord of the Rings films may be spectacular, but the books can carry you away wherever you may read them. Beach, bus stop, hospital...
I know I sound lik the Magic Of Reading dude from that Chickenf*cker episode of South Park, but go with it.
Take on me...
So, at Ches & Wolfie's Annual Interfestum Gastroblast (dinner), much superrlative food and excellent company was to be had. Oh, and remember my rancid musing about singing and the public shame surrounding same? Ches broke out two mics and plugged them into the new PS2 the off-key but highly impassioned voices of our Gang howling along to A-Ha, Ricky Martin and others.
Serendipity!
Serendipity!
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