Fun on YouTube, wandering about the online video planet. My interest has been searching out new sci-fi short films, and there have been some great discoveries. the very best is Stop, reviewed below. Most are not much more than seven or eight minutes long and so the plotting has to be very good indeed, if there is a story. In some, there’s not much story, but great visuals.  Above: from The Gift, reviewed below.

Nora —Go see it. It’s visually terrific and there’s the tiniest plot but tiny or not, it works. It works on contrasts — prim Nora the robot cleaning ‘droid and this creature on the deserted planet. The creature is male, dwarvish, bronze-colored, sensual, limber. So primness meets sexy and slightly crazy.

Seed — intriguing. So much unsaid. Again visually it is splendid.

Love like the aliens —this knocks me out. There should be a name for the visual style, or its stylishness, perhaps near-comicbook clarity, a graphic style, but very rich, drifting, dreamy. Something underwater about it. Very fast action in sharp cuts, then slow, slow, drifting. If you want to be thrown out of a flaming spaceship and rescued by an angel along with great music, this is one for you. Go.

As in pic above The Gift— is just about the top of the list for me, it is gripping. From Russia with weirdness. Straightforward shooting, no tricks, no stylishness. A robotic butler is somehow just there — the rest of the cityscape is in no way futuristic. A cold and gritty Moscow. It has a strong plot — a revenge plot. A guy who seems to be a survivor of the Gulag arrives at the wealthy apartment of somebody from the privileged nomenklatura and hands him a gift. Needs to be seen several times.

Project Shell— is okay. So much depends on the actors in the non-graphic shorts. The very worst is when some actress or voice animation actress has a stupid Valley Girl accent, it is beyond bad.  “Alpha you are now approaching Planet Bugglefutz, prepare retro rockets” or some such, said in that flattened, baby cute voice.

Anyway Shell is okay, sort of predictable, but interesting.

Closer — is good but you have to stick with it. Starts out with lots of CGI interstellar warfare, lumpy space battleships (lumpy is now very fashionable) blasting away at each other, but it deals with heroism, when one commander, a very attractive blonde woman lands on earth and dragoons a young couple making out in a park into the war, on the side of all that is right and good. The idea of being ‘A hero’ hits the young man and he likes it and so is. Loved it.

At the very top is Stop— is so strange and so good it is almost beyond description. I actually got physical chills crawling up my back watching this. It was shot with an old Bell&Howell film camera. No kidding. There is only one actor, and only one CGI effect and I am not even sure it is CGI or just some old ancient trick of superimposition of a ghost image. Just shows you what it means when something is just plain ‘well done’. Shot in an ordinary common landscape of some park in the east (US).

The one actor is somebody who films in the park and suddenly realizes he has lost 7 or 8 minutes of his life. It’s gone. He desperately tries to find out why, how. See it!!!

Some are fairly plotless but there is always, always something of a plot even in a wordless, personless short like Albiogenesis.

And sometimes the enthusiasm does indeed save the film, as in Losses, which is not sci-fi but just a short action film, I think 11 minutes. It uses a plot cliché but the action is wonderful and non-stop and the good guy wins. And you know they had an enormously good time doing it. Cost them about $500. And they are very good at angles, close-ups, lighting, tight cutting in the action scenes.

If you want to laugh for several minutes at a time, after a frustrating or gloomy day, go to the Pixar short, ‘Lifted’. It is sort of kind of more or less sci-fi.

More later as soon as I get my picture management program figured out…

We went to Big Bend again, third year, great trip, no mishaps. Seven hours on the road from utopia to the house we always rent ten miles north of Study Butte. Went up the Blue Creek trail (above) and a new trail on the Tornillo River, which was flat and sandy and fun. A cold wind.

Re-reading the Odyssey and getting a new perspective as always with the classics. Every time you re-read them it is new. Never noticed how much dialogue and personal interaction there is. Amazing that anyone could memorize the whole thing. So rich, so beautiful.

  That’s my honeysuckle in the last ice storm. In the meantime, the San Antonio symphony at the new Tobin center, more cold weather, a lot of reading, a lot of internet searching for good book blogs and singing. Riding this Wednesday, some of us going up to the Mill Creek area. Read Howey’s Sand which was good except for the prostitute mother, which I found not a believable plot device, and am also reading The Black Sheep, a history of the Marine fighter squadron in the Solomon Islands, WW2, led by Pappy Boyington.

Could any of us ever live through anything like that again, and still keep fighting? This question comes up when reading any WW2 history. They just seem like a different subspecies of homo sapiens sapiens. Their photographs look different; they were thinner and they looked back at the camera lens in a different way. They knew more. Their clothes were stronger cloth and thicker. Their hair was different.

Greg ‘Pappy’ Boyington was stopped by his flight controller one morning as he scrambled out of his tent for a dawn patrol. Boyington was running across the coral-based airstrip on one of the Solomons. His flight controller pointed out he didn’t have any shoes on. Boyington said, ‘I can fly an airplane with no shoes’. (He was hungover, badly) and the flight controller said. ‘Yes, but you’ll need them if you go down’.

I suppose everybody falls behind on their posts at this time of year. Include me. Singing with the Methodist choir, the bluegrass group, the Christmas all-choir cantata, and finally tomorrow Christmas eve services. There’s always a need for an alto. The cantata was a terrific success, and then the flash mob all over this little town from the restaurant to the bank was great fun.

Every time I re-read this book I am amazed all over again. At the contemporary feel of the Martians and their evil stuff, the detailed observations that Wells makes, things like laser rays frying everybody, the intense scenes of the evacuation of London and so on. Also at the rational and deeply observant tone of the narrative. He’s not mean; his characters aren’t haughty or cynical. That in itself is refreshing but the amazing part is the technical imagination and the fact of the great unscrewing of the cylinder while people sit and watch in carriages. Everybody is on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages, there are no telephones, no television, and only the people n the area where the Martians first start devastating everything know it’s happening! Because word doesn’t spread, because there’s no TV, no phones, and well, the newspapers didn’t get the reports because they were written by hand and delivered by post or railway. This was written in, I think, 1897. No bug-eyed monsters here, no ET, just sloppy leathery things that use immensely tall stalking thin things like radio towers, what today we would compare to radio towers. It is all completely believeable, nothing improbable in the least. So, I am in admiration. It is really an outstanding and unusual piece of writing. ‘Far ahead of his time’ ain’t in it. that’s why I love re-reading it. The details surprise me every time. So I am writing a dystopia where there is almost no technology for the common people, they’re back to kerosene lanterns, things move by rail, and only the elite have remnants of our technology, the old technology. I was thinking that the comparison of people with kerosene lanterns as opposed to the upper crust with advanced computers would be confusing but maybe not. Be confused. What the hell.

so every post has to have a picture and that is me and Rita going down the kid’s slide.

Re-reading Great Expectations with a feeling of disappointment in the limp-celery I-forgot-it-in-the-back-of-the-refrigerator main character Pip. He never does anything when all sorts of doable options lie about him. He never makes anything happen. Everything he tries elegantly fails.

What makes all of Dickens’ books for me are the secondary characters and GE has a good plenty of them but Pip drags the narrative behind him carelessly and limply like a trailing raincoat. I never noticed it before. The book is an object lesson in the awfulness of class snobbery which is awful of course but Pip seems to have an infinite capacity to endure boring people. Dickens wants us to see how flattened these people are. Okay, okay. He should have made Trabb’s boy the central character and we could have understood the Awfulness Of Class Snobbery by giving one chapter to Pip. Miss Havisham is BORING, Estella has no redeeming qualities and is equally as boring, and I wished somebody would shoot Pumblechook or send him to the Hulks.

What saves it is the atmosphere of the marshes, that of London, the details of things, the shipping in the Thames, their journey down the Thames . An alive world.

Read an article by Thomas Frank in Salon on the MacArthur Genius grants that had me laughing out loud. He points out the winners as ‘prize magnets’ and listed the buzzwords of admiration and approbation with which the awarders describe the work of the awardees; ‘contemporary’ — ‘experimental’ — ‘original’ — ‘innovative’ — ‘insight’ — alternative’ — ‘vibrant’ — ‘rooted’. The awardees ‘redefine’ and ‘reinvent’.

Different takes on the Hero’s Tale; it seems the Eastern tradition begins with the young hero’s apprenticeship to some sort of fight Master, the Sensei — the Sensei’s wisdom, skills, the young apprentice’s bumbling, discoveries of self under discipline—etc.

In the West the stories concentrate more on the Band Of Brothers theme. Both are probably tens of thousands of years old. Band of Brothers, from Ulysses to Saving Private Ryan.

There are always exceptions but in general I am talking.

The Eastern tradition is in full flower on YouTube. So many young filmmakers or would-be filmmakers doing action shorts wherein fighters fling themselves at one another in the best Shinobi tradition and many of them have to do with the apprentice/master plot. Variations are endless. The apprentice who is talented, the one who appears to be a bumbler, the young man from a humble background, the apprentice who wants to use his skills for evil ends; a harsh master, a silent one; the variations are without number. There always seems to be the required scene of reverence for the Sensei, obedience to some strange requirement or task that turns out later to make sense.

In this Eastern aspect tradition is vital; the Shinobi Sensei has of course at one time been an apprentice himself, learning from a master, who learned from a master…going back centuries, perhaps millennia. Using the Band Of Brothers construction, the band of young warriors seem always to have sprung up w/o antecedents. The Band Of Brothers theme has a lot of energy to it.

In the Eastern take, deep respect for tradition. The Brothers in the Band, on the other hand, are irreverent and out to break rules. Much of the plot of the Young Apprentice revolves around a harsh master who seems to impose arbitrary and impossible tasks; young apprentice obediently takes them on, much hilarity ensues, finally triumphs.

The Shinobi Sensei also uses surprising methods to teach the young apprentice. Much depends on the Sensei’s ability to understand his students, to pay keen attention to their skills, failings, etc. In other words in the Eastern tradition a Good Parent we have, although often disguised as a martinet.

So in the Eastern tradition these tales have a two-part plot; apprenticeship, harsh master, then out into the world to involve oneself in revenge dramas or the destruction of thuggish persons etc. The Western tradition is far more individualistic. Both are interesting.

This is my grandmother’s first cousin, Stanley Speece. He and his brother Denver and my grandfather decided, when they were about 19, to leave Missouri and go out to Oklahoma and try to find work as cowboys for a while. But before they went, in case they didn’t get hired on, Denver and Stanley had pictures taken of themselves in cowboy gear so they could say at least they looked like cowboys. Apparently the three of them never stopped laughing and were terrible for practical jokes.

My grandmother was very close to her first cousins; her mother died and her aunts’ families raised them. When my grandfather was courting her, he got to know Denver and Stanley who were by all accounts Type A personalities (described as ‘monkeys’) and they cooked up this scheme to go to Oklahoma.

Denver’s picture (which I have here somewhere) is in exactly the same clothes. Evidently Stanley had his picture taken and then went back and gave all the gear to Denver who then had his picture taken. Same chaps, same white turtleneck, same pose, same rope. At any rate, they did go out to Oklahoma and got hired on and spent a year hustling cattle around and repairing windmills etc. etc. They had a great time. My grandfather told me about it and I wrote it all down. When he came back he and my grandmother got married.   This is my grandmother and her half-brother Alonzo King. Probably taken near New Lebanon Missouri about 1910. She was always this slim, this beautiful, even in her seventies.

Irony; it’s going over the edge and on its way down the falls but how will we live without it? David Foster Wallace, from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again: “so then how have irony, irreverence and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominate mode of hip expression. It is not a rhetorical mode that wears well…entertaining as it is, it serves an almost exclusively negative function. ..persistent irony is tiresome. It is unmeaty.”

(Me; And so on and so on but what to replace it with? We have no larger cultural context to help us avoid sticky sentimentality as the only alternative.)

DFW: “Who knows? Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess this means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.”

That was 22 years ago. Still, at present, in order to keep the reader’s interest these constructions called “characters” do head-bangingly stupid things in order that they might involve themselves in desperate situations. I think there is some unknown program running on every author’s computer which if words like loyalty, courage, love or honor come up the entire manuscript is killed.

Thus, fiction continues to slide and people flock to Guardians Of The Galaxy, which is actually a fun film. Sardonic heroes but heroes, great dialogue, action. Fights. Evil crushed by rough men and raccoons standing ready in the night.

Movie quote; African Queen. German colonial official; But you can’t have come through those swamps!

Filthy ragged Katherine Hepburn; Nevertheless.