March 06, 2006

There & Then, Here & Now

I like a story I can inhabit. I suppose it requires a certain amount of confidence in one's primary reality to walk into other worlds in other stories and stay for a bit and return from them. Otherwise, you're just a nerd or a Trekker or a Jedi or...something.

Just as Anne Rice—for whatever other failings you might want to ascribe to her—can carry me into the dead weight of a heavy humid New Orleans night or the strident, stentorian spray of a cold Pacific Ocean just outside the protection of our Bay with just a few well-placed words; or as Frank Herbert could create a lush and verdant Dune; or as Joss Whedon can squirt you through a lens into Sunnydale or onto Serenity; so J.K. Rowling sends me to Hogwarts and Little Whinging, Surrey, and a secret London with the wave of a wand and her incantatory prose.

In forms that depart significantly from the quotidian reality we all mundanely mostly agree upon, archetypes are employed to give us guideposts in a strange land. It's those more gifted with a sense of story that can flesh out the archetypes into believable, companionable, sympathetic characters. It's the rare few who can further weave those characters into those with whome we can feel empathy as they are driven along plot lines that keep us engaged, keep our wills suspending disbelief and skiving the fictive nature of that narrative.

At the time when Harry Potter was the “latest thing”, a cultural explosion in and of itself, I steered clear of it. I didn't buy the books, I didn't see the movies. Friends went on opening day because they wanted to be “part of it all”. I wanted no part of it—perhaps, as I see now, for the very same reason.

I saw the first Harry Potter movie on DVD in Tucson, I believe. Sam and his Lesbian had rented it. I may be wrong about the details, but suffice it to say, I sort of fell into watching it instead of having made the effort to engage in it.

Of course I bought the DVD, and the second one as well, as it was out already. And soon after, the third. Tomorrow, I'll buy the fourth.

If you look at the left column on the main page you'll see the books I've been reading. The last five are Harry Potter books. My friend Steve gave me his boxed set of the first three and made sure I had Books Four, Five and Six awaiting me before I finished Three.

I don't find myself wishing I were Dumbledore or Harry, or any of the others, but I do see facets of myself in each of the characters (that would be where the archetypes come in) I also see the same million little nuances in each of the characters that I see when I meet someone new.

When the books conclude I'll be sad (I've just finished Order of the Phoenix today, so no [more] spoilers, please!), but I won't be despondent like the Trekkers or the Comicon-types get. It will just be nice to have known these people, and sad that we have to part ways.

The best kinds of escapism are the ones that bring you right back to here and to now with a better sensitivity and fidelity to those million little nuances that make you who you are.


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March 05, 2006

Brokedown Oscar

Hollywood isn't as brave as it thinks it is.

Hollywood isn't as bold as the right thinks it is.

Hollywood isn't as blunt as some of us think it should be.

To show clips from Brokeback Mountain where it's largely each male lead with their respective wives instead of with each other is cowardice.

To paint Crash as something other than an overwrought interpretive dance about reality is crass.

Brokeback Mountain is distruptive not because it tries to make a Statement About Love, but because it doesn't make a statement.

“Show me, don't tell me” is the first rule of story. Some might say it's the only rule and the rest are corollary.

Rightwingers out there were going to criticize the Oscars one way or another. Since everyone expected Brokeback Mountain to win, they were all focused on how Hollywood supports the gay agenda and is “out of touch”. Now, I suppose, they'll find something else.

But who ever expects Hollywood to be in touch? The Chronicles of Narnia is somehow an “in touch” kinda thing?

I mostly agree with George Clooney in his acceptance speech that Hollywood has done productive work by being out of touch. Then again, it took until 1993 to come out with Philadelphia and even then they couldn't be buggered to show a real relationship between two men. AIDS had been around for too, too long even then.

And it took them until 2005 to show real passion and love between two men, something else that's been around for a long, long time.

All that said, I'd rather have a Hollywood that is out of touch and demands that we follow towards a Utopia, rather than a Hollywood that regresses to an “in touch” martinet that is nothing but an echo chamber for the status quo.

That road leads to stagnation...and to LiveJournal.

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March 03, 2006

WordPress vs. Movable Type

I've been poking my nose in and around WordPress just to get a sense of things.

Personally, I prefer “just in time” technologies, which WordPress uses (i.e., you don't have to rebuild your site when you make changes, because the site is automatically generated at each request from a browser), in particular, it uses PHP.

I like Movable Type because this site is already using it; I also like it because its templates are just that: templates. Since WP uses PHP everywhere, its templates are actually PHP files, which is kind of a weird impedance mismatch (apologies to Simon).

WordPress is free, but so is Movable Type for the uses I have for it.

Siiiigh. I wish i weren't on neurontin. My brain works at least 50% better without it.

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March 02, 2006

iDependence

Good. Lord. God. Of. Biscuits.

Two-plus days without internet connectivity at the house.

Thank the Goddess for hills (for line of sight) and open Airport networks...but it all required braving the cold and strong winds and standing at the gas grill out back while making sure the iBook didn't fall over.

Comical, except for the utter trauma of no internet!

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