Vent!

I'm about a month into the new position. It's been a lot of fun, but I gotta admit it's really pushing me in some areas. I talked a bit before about the payroll and common titles(1): junior @rtist and assistant technic@l director, respectively. It's odd how the bureaucratese/payroll title sounds so much more organic. The common title is more in line with what was advertised and what I was expecting. Damned technocratic, though.

But I guess things never work out quite as expected, and I'm working a lot more these days in the 'junior @rtist' sense of my position, which is to say I'm working on shots. That's awesome, but the pressures remain for the technical stuff, and I feel like I'm dropping the ball on that end because the shot production stuff has been taking precedence, and frankly is a lot more fun.

I'm finding the tech stuff is remarkably like working at a supermarket. I generally know how stuff works, but I don't know where some obscure library or software update or patch is. They've got a nice system for all this, but in the end you still have to know what it's called, what version to get, who can answer questions on it, etc.. Software/command/library names perfectly sensible in some contexts can be impossible to intuit in slightly different ones. We've got a terrific alias for fellow @TDs, but I feel if I send more than about 10 messages to it per day I've begun to overstay my welcome, friendly and helpful as the other teammates continue to be.

An unexpected source of stress lately, though, has been people. Everyone else has been incredibly cool, but I feel like I might have been a little short with folks lately. Part of it is how people calling me or dropping by my desk totally interrupt my already clumsy juggling of different roles and duties. In my old position where stuff had gotten a little too easy, I'd welcome the interruption, but it's been a little aggravating in my current state where I'm still trying to get my bearings. I also think there's some inevitable arrogance that seeps in after any kind of promotion that I really, really should know better than to indulge. A rare luxury about the place I work is that I really do work with some sharp people, but I wonder if some of the things I've said these last weeks might give people the impression that I think otherwise.

Titanic on a boat!

Terrific combination:

1. Read the title essay in David Foster Wallace's anthology "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". (Settle in -- it's at least 60 dense, footnoted pages, if I recall correctly.)


2. Watch "Poseidon".

At the risk of spoiling it for Grumpy, I'm going to have to disclose that Fun Thing details Wallace's experiences as 'your correspondent' for Harper's on a subsidized 7 Night Luxury Cruise. Poseidon details the experiences of a group of off-the-shelf characters trying to escape the same, except in their case the boat's been capsized by a rogue wave and lies belly up on the ocean taking on water from what was its top.

One of the things I've been enjoying about Wallace's correspondent pieces is how they mix vivid description, insightful observation, and multi-layered analysis in such a way that I almost feel like I don't actually have to experience the subject event myself anymore -- it really feels like I've been there.

So when Poseidon cuts to shots of the service staff working in the galley after the terrific long, sweeping shot of Josh Lucas jogging around on the decks of an entirely CG cruise ship, I remained fully engaged. For one, I wondered if they toiled under the same service-industry oppression that turned Wallace's insistence on carrying his own duffel bag to his cabin into something of a federal case, prompting a personal visit and apology for the deck's baggage handler's incompetency from the manager. I pondered the feasibility of sneaking one's girlfriend onto a cruise like one of the galley staff's characters had done when, as Wallace found, every nook of one's cabin is mysteriously cleaned to perfection anytime one leaves it for longer than 30 minutes. When the curtain went up on the saucy Latin songstress during the ship's formal New Year's party, I wondered if her act was preceded by a passenger talent show and hypnotist/comedian much like the main act at the final night's formal on Wallace's cruise.

Taking stock...

As we meet the characters, I wonder about the statistical aberration of having an ex-NYC mayor, an ex-Navy professional gambler, and so many young, attractive, pre-retirement people on the same cruise boat. I wonder how many of the bridge officers are Greek, which would have been consistent with Wallace's findings that most cruise lines were operated out of Greece, tending to skew the composition of the officers towards the same.

Basically, whenever large volumes of rushing, flooding, pouring, bubbling, drowning water weren't on screen, I had plenty of things to keep me occupied. So that I found the 'character-driven' moments not entirely unbearable will have to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Accomplishing that, the story was able to maintain at least some minimal alignment between what it wanted me to care about and what I actually did care about as I watched the passengers get abused by those spectacular torrents of water.

It's coming!

And they truly are spectacular, orgasmic in much the way Wallace describes in another piece of his, "F/X porn". I had wondered what else was to be done for CG water after Perfect Storm besides maybe tweaking a few things on the simulators and maybe doing a better job on the color. I saw that there were indeed many more interesting things to be done, particularly the colors we see as the ship's festive lighting gets smothered by cascades of whitewater and various systems short and blow out during the impact sequence. Also worth mentioning are the rather graphic scenes of humans getting incinerated in flash fires, dropping onto ballroom ceilings, or getting themselves crushed or impaled on various shipboard implements made hazardous simply by being flipped upside down.

You'll endure this all together with the characters, and by extension, Wallace. And as the characters finally poke their heads out above water in the end, you'll find an amazing synergy between them, your proverbial correspondent, and yourself as together you sigh and are just happy to have survived the experience.

I am not a Cylon!

Ever wonder why I say I grew up in this town but it seems nobody I 'knew' is around? Or that the few people who do are strangely connected either to Wushu (El 'Sickness') or military equipment (Jerry at the surplus?) Or how it seems most of my friends from college come from the same high school in, of ALL places, San Diego? Or my aesthetic affinity for machines and technology?

Stop wondering.



I had a childhood, dammit! See? I got pictures to prove it. I wasn't artificially created by machines in a plot to destroy humanity!

Just picked up a scanner, partly motivated by irrational exuberance,
partly by this mess of negatives I found while cleaning out the house a few weeks back. I don't know what happened, but most of the actual photos from my childhood have been missing pretty much since I started college. I figure it's a mix of bad organizational skills and moving two or three dozen times. Not everything is there, and some are my brother's forays into photography (not half bad, actually), but I guess at this point I'll take what I can get.

I picked up the Canon Canoscan LiDE 500F(1), mainly 'cause it could fit in one of my drawers, looked cool, and happened to get some nice reviews. Its film and negative scanning definitely is definitely intended for casual use, though -- scanning several slides takes a lot more mucking about than I'd like. I'll have to exercise much editorial license in what gets preserved and what will be lost to the ages.

That photo is unflattering, but so appropriate.

(1) I admit I mention this so precisely because I'm curious what ads would get put up for it.

Art School Space

It doesn't take very much exposure to the arts for one to develop all kinds of wild notions of just what the hell it is that goes on in art school. Surely, most of us have had our sense of aesthetics and taste violated and molested by some piece of tripe flung limply at us from straight out of left, failing to go the distance and instead of landing solidly in our grasp, drops short, splatters, makes a huge mess, takes a bad hop, and beans us squarely on the temple.

Coming to and nursing our wounds, we can only wonder. Why? WHY???

And then... HOW?

Art School Confidential (the film) doesn't answer this, and in many ways, I don't think any of us expect it to. I was hoping simply for therapy of the sort 'Office Space' offered to white collar cube-dwellers everywhere. Office Space didn't just expose the evils of corporate platitudes and politeness, it gave us *coping* strategies. All other countermeasures exhausted, we could retreat into safety by putting the vapid, blithely ignorant boss into the Lumberg slot, the infuriatingly chipper co-worker either into the 'case-of-the-Mondays' woman or that tool with all the flare from Chotchkie's(1). We'd then chuckle a bit with the co-workers that understood and found it in ourselves to slog through the rest of the day.(2)

Confidential offers no such retreat. When(3) you again find yourself stuck in an overlong, plodding 'art' film or mediocre gallery exhibition, you won't have acquired any comic archetypes to cling to while you sip on your smuggled-in flask or overpriced glass of Merlot.

From an environment rich with eccentrics and inflated egos and what I'm told is brilliant source material, Confidential takes on the style of the conventional college coming-of-age comedy complete with dopey romance, slacker cohort/guru-figure, sublimely-perfect aryan villain figure, and occasional interjections by the world-weary faculty by equal parts accomplished and mediocre.

Much like Office Space, Confidential seems to split into two films. You'll really find the parallels striking. The First half sets up the satire. The second half switches gears and becomes something of a caper flick, methodically tying up all the loose ends and adding a lot of uncharacteristic action.

Given the spectacular disconnect that can occur between artist and audience in some projects, the satire is incredibly unsatisfying. There are freaks spouting pretentious, half-baked bullshit, of course, but not enough and not to the degree that we can believe that these are the same people that have inflicted such suffering upon us in theaters and galleries across the country.

Oddly enough, I'm left admiring somewhat the abrupt switch to the caper mode in the second half. While parts seem out of character for this kind of film, there's a cynicism underlying it that rings true and deserved deeper exploration for the kind of darkly comic take that the overall movie would've benefited from.

The cast does fine, but it really would've worked better as an ensemble presentation than focusing on a few central characters. Malkovich stands out, as well he should. The rest of the cast doesn't really offend either, and overall the film seems competently made. I'm just left stumped at how a movie could make art school students boring in comparison to office workers.

(1) Even writing this down now, I'm compelled to reach out and strangle a small rodent or something when I think of the guy.
(2) Comforting, but not necessarily a healthy thing. As many have observed, the irony of the sort that office humor sources like Dilbert and, alas, Office Space mine may indeed be the kind raw resource that the proverbial /Man/ needs to help keep us all placated enough not to affect actual change. Basically, if taping up a Dilbert strip about some grave corporate injustice that mirrors your own or quoting Office Space behind your manager's back satisfies your sense of insurgency, who's really benefiting? It's not entirely a rhetorical question.
(3) Not 'if'.