Parkour

"Once you have passed an obstacle, you feel as if this obstacle is a part of you. You dominate it, and it no longer frightens you."

I first heard about Parkour from an article in In, an elegantly designed little 'zine I picked up at Soft Skull Shortwave in Brooklyn. Parkour, as best I could determine from the article, is a sport that primarily consists of jumping and climbing on things that aren't meant to be climbed and jumped on. Nothing terribly exciting, right?

Then I was checking out Kieron Gillen's workblog and found this.

It's a long clip, but it's also cool as aces, and well worth the download time. And I'm suddenly filled with the overwhelming urge to go leaping across the rooftops of Carroll Gardens.

Instead, I'm off to bed.

Chaleur!

So I've been trying, for the last week, to rip my DVD of HEAT onto my hard drive. [And before the MPAA comes knocking on my door, let me just add that this is MY copy of HEAT, that I bought, and that I want to have permanently on my laptop for long flights and boring waits in coffeeshops and whatnot. So, off my back, Jack Valenti.] First, I tried copying the VOB files off the disc using DVD Backup. That worked okay (after ten hours of processing), but I ended up with the movie spread over a couple of gigabyte-sized files. Not very convenient. Tried combining the files with DivXRay, but I couldn't get one single file out of them, the program kept crashing, and there wasn't any usable audio. Tried again, using Forty-Two, a wonderful program that was able to rip The Bourne Identity [rented from Blockbuster--in your face, Jack!] in one step, with no fuss. Forty-Two chugged away for a while (twelve hours), then produced a single 1GB avi file. Which Quicktime couldn't recognize, even after I ran Divx Validator on it. Luckily, VLC Media Player COULD read it, and very well at that. Beautiful picture quality, and very good audio quality...

...in Spanish. It was all in Spanish. I'd ripped the wrong audio track, somehow.

Tried again with Forty-Two, this time attempting a lower quality video with mp3 audio that Quicktime would be able to read. Let 'er rip overnight, woke up this morning to check it out, aaaaannnnddd....

...it looked good. Nice video. Quicktime could process the file. Played the French dialogue beautifully.

Argh.

Somewhere, Jack Valenti is laughing at me...

Radio Free Embassy

From the radioio website:

"We now offer THREE subscriber plans:

Yes, I understand nothing's free in this world, and yes, I'm going to miss "Mike the Radioio Guy," but I'm not going to pay twenty bucks a month for something I listen to a couple hours a week, especially if I can't run it through iTunes. And the 24 kbit stream for $5 probably has the sound quality of a transistor radio.

Ooo, look, radio.wazee's playing New Order...

This Gives Me Chills

Subliminal Protest

I was on the F Train this morning, listening to my iPod and zoning out, when I realized that something was bothering me. Something was different from my usual commute, and it seemed to be affecting my entire subway car, and it took me a couple minutes to realize what it was:

At the top of each subway car door is a sticker that reads, "Do Not Hold Doors." Except today, the stickers, identical to the usual in every other way, read, "Do Not Bomb Iraq." Every subway door, creating a subtle but persistent protest that worms its way into your brain. Like most other commuters, I'd seen the "Do Not Hold Doors" stickers so many times that I'd ceased to read them, but the deviation from what I expected drew my attention. Screw Michael Moore, making an ass out of himself on national television, stamping his feet like the annoying kid in the back of the room who won't shut up and doing more harm than good. If you want people to pay attention and listen, then you have to get in their heads, whether they know it or not.

I left the train at 23rd Street, and as it passed me on its way out of the station, I looked in the windows, and saw the protest on every door.

Shock and Awe

There are times when you witness something that burns your mind and chills your soul, something that words cannot describe, because what you have seen is beyond language, beyond comprehension. In those times, all you can do is discard sense and sanity, give up all attempts to make sense of the senseless, and just watch.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the cinematic abortion that is Dreamcatcher.

Dreamcatcher is, without a doubt, the worst movie I've seen in five years, and easily one of the worst movies I've seen ever. It's not just bad: it sails effortlessly beyond bad in the first twenty minutes, when you realize with horror that you're watching a movie about psychic friends attempting to save the world from evil slug-like aliens that explode out of people's asses.

You'd be forgiven for assuming, after reading that last bit, that Dreamcatcher is a gross-out comedy whose marketing campaign went horribly awry, a sort of Men In Black meets Dumb And Dumber. It's not. You sit there and watch and wait, even pray, for some kind of subtle humorous nod, a cinematic wink to clue you in on the joke and alleviate your fear that the once-respected Lawrence Kasdan has been struck down by a degenerative brain disorder that would cruelly allow the director of The Big Chill and Body Heat to produce this Challenger-sized catatrosphe. The wink doesn't come; what comes is the terrible knowledge that THIS MOVIE IS TAKING ITSELF SERIOUSLY, and with it, the sick feeling you might get in your stomach when confronted by an escaped mental patient with a gun who tells you, calmly and reasonably, that he's going to have to kill you unless you can tell the angels to stop beaming 50's radio jingles into his brain.

Then the psychic friend, his body controlled by an evil alien inhabiting his head, hops on a snowmobile and begins having an extended conversation with said evil alien. Who's name is Mister Gray. And who speaks, inexplicably, with a British accent.

It gets worse. Much worse. And at no point does it get even the slightest bit better. Clumps of exposition are thrown wildly at the screen like monkey feces in a zoo. Morgan Freeman shows up as a crazed military commander who's been fighting E.T.'s for twenty years and inspires loyalty from his men by shooting off their fingers. Hack dialogue of the worst caliber spews and sinks. And should I, at some point, ever meet legendary screenwriter William Goldman, I will punch him in the face, take ten dollars out of his wallet, and ask him what in the hell he was thinking.

Dreamcatcher. This Spring, crap explodes through. Try not to catch it.

My Head Hurts

At the moment (the moment being this current month, not right this minute), I'm attempting to do the following, all at the same time:

• Get certified as an Apple Technician
• Complete my latest screenplay for the Nicholl Fellowship deadline
• Learn CSS
• Plan a wedding

No, I'm not an overachiever. I just never know when to quit, and I've got an annoying tendency to want to learn as much as possible, so that whenever something piques my interest (Movable Type being one recent example, Lomography another), I dive right in and add the subject to the ongoing list in my head of Shit To Learn. Makes for an interesting individual, I like to think, but it can be awfully hard at times to get stuff done. I've got notebooks full of script and story ideas, books to read, albums to hear; the number of sites-to-check-out in my bookmarks folder is pushing two hundred, at least. And time spent online is just fuel for the fire, since it seems like every third click has me spinning off in another direction.

I don't care how focused you are: six billion web pages will blow up your head, no problem. If the sheer volume of information out there doesn't threaten to overwhelm you at times, then sorry, but you're either not looking hard enough or you're one of the plotzes stuck on AOL.

Yes, I know, we live in a grand and glorious age with this world-at-your-fingertips thing we've got going, but sometimes I just want to grab a book and find myself a cabin on a mountain somewhere; thankfully, the feeling quickly passes as I remember just how painfully dull that would be. The Internet may melt your brain, but it'll never leave you bored.

I'm off to bed.

Play Games, Get Sex

Yes, the new Gameboy looks cool. But sorry, no, it won't get you laid.

Yay

I am now an Apple Product Professional. Fear me.

Thank Goodness for the BFI

I really should have been told about this book sooner.

Cash

I'm sitting in my local coffee shop, writing on my laptop and listing to radioio, and Johnny Cash's rendition of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" just came on. And it's so damn good that I have to go buy the album.

On a side note, it's 65 degrees outside, and it's finally, FINALLY, starting to feel like Spring. So I'm going to walk to Prospect Park, lie in the sun, and try to make up for four months of miserable winter.

Hmm. Dead Fish.

The website itself is mind-bogglingly ridiculous. The graphic design, however, is pretty excellent.

This Man Has a Bird on His Head.

Courtesy of my friend JC.

Brainpowered

From Warren Ellis' BRAINPOWERED:

"The phone message tells him to walk the dog. This is a man in a terminal state of confusion. He double-locks the door. The keys have a note on them saying DO NOT LOSE. He stares, baffled, obviously trying to work out what's best. And then he posts them back through the letterbox. The phone message says to be careful the dog doesn't run off. So he puts the other end of the lead over his head. The dog does nought to seventy in four seconds. This, he can just about cope with. Until they get to the park, and the dog sees the ducks in the pretty pond, families gathered around it to feed the birds.

Two minutes later, neck deep in the pond, the dog spitting duck heads out at the feet of screaming children, he yells: 'It's not my dog! It belongs to Imogen Edwards!' And it's at that point that the dog starts talking to him..."

Go read the rest.

Life During Wartime

My thoughts on war, since it's been on my mind lately:

I keep mulling over President Bush's possible motives for going to war, and the optimist in me has dispelled the most cynical (for oil) while the analyst has crossed off the most basic (self-defense). I have to believe that Bush is not so terrible and greed-driven a human being to risk thousands of American lives for something as basic as profit, and Iraq doesn't possess the resources or have the motivation to do our country real and devastating harm. Meanwhile, the most benevolent motive (to save the Iraqi people) becomes moot in the face of the government's announcement that we're going to begin our campaign by dropping an obscene amount of bombs on the people we're purportedly trying to save.

President Bush's true motive, something that comes up again and again, seems to simply be that this is a battle of Good versus Evil, of Right versus Wrong.

This, honestly, frightens me. Because simplistic generalizations of Good and Evil are the crutch of people who aren't examining the issue closely enough, and don't want to, because they might not like what they see. It's the Good-and-Evil, Black-And-White mode of thinking that compels individuals to fly planes into buildings. It's Jihad thought. It's Stone Age reasoning. And we're better than that; if we're going to be the World's Policeman, then we've got to be. Is it any wonder other nations are reluctant to stand aside and let us sprint on to war, with that kind of childlike motivation driving us on? I understand the appeal of breaking a complex decision down to its most simple elements, but that's not the kind of thinking you want to do when you're facing the prospect of committing tens of thousands to misery or death. It's a complex decision because it damn well should be.

A recent article in The New York Times spoke of President Bush's resolution over his course of action, his conviction, his "imperviousness to doubt." The article attempted to be reassuring. It wasn't. Doubt is a human emotion, and the absence of it implies a decision made without regard to human ramifications. This isn't a time for blind conviction; it's a time for hand-wringing, for sleepless nights and passionate debate. Doubt leads to questions, and questions need to be asked, because the answers aren't black and white. Good and Evil. Right and Wrong.

The United States is not inherently good; Iraq isn't inherently evil. We are all human, and that's something we can't afford to forget.

Bad Amish! Bad Amish!

I don't really care about the movie, but I find the cover for the DVD hilarious.

The Spiders

I've been reading Electric Sheep Comix's "The Spiders," a fascinating interpretation of what a war in the Middle East could have been, or could be, with the benefit of non-lethal technology and the World Wide Web. Imagine a hundred thousand cheap and tiny mobile spy cameras dropped into Afghanistan and controlled remotely by any willing man, woman or child with a computer and high-speed Internet access, and go from there. An Afghan soldier carrying a bazooka and sitting in the middle of the desert finds himself being chatted up an LA teenager sitting in her bedroom: "My name is Tracy Hampton. I live in Laguna Beach, California. Would you like to talk?"

Imagine a world where military technology is designed to end conflict by preventing violence, rather than inflicting it, and then go read about it.

City By My Sleep

When I was a boy, I built a city next to my bed. It was about thirty-six square feet in area and took up the majority of my bedroom, had a population of roughly a hundred-and-fifty, and was made entirely of Legos. I had wired it up with Christmas tree lights, both in the streets and in many of the buildings, and at nights, with my room lit only by the hundreds of tiny bulbs, I would lie on my bed and stare at the city. For hours. Sometimes, I'd go down to the city, to tow a car that had been left by the side of the road, to close the restaurant for the evening, to send a police car on its patrol. The drive-in theatre would empty out after the last show. The mayor would take the long way home, tired but satisfied after a long day's work, making his rounds, checking things out. The lights would go out, the city would sleep, and then I would sleep as well. As tired and satisfied as the mayor.

Once, I got tired of the city, tore it all down, and built a galatic colony instead, with spaceports, lunar mining camps, landing pads, astronauts and aliens, everything your fledgling interstellar outpost needs. The same Christmas lights though.

I don't know why I'm thinking of all this now. But I'm happy and warm in the memory of the thoughts and ideas that would race through my head, lying there with my head on my folded arms, staring at the world below my bed.

This is the Story of Bernard and Bernice

I woke this morning fuzzy from the remnants of a dream that I was writing (or living, I wasn't sure) a young-adults novel about two young lovers, Bernard and Bernice, who are separated after Bernard is arrested for a crime he didn't commit and sent to a militaristic disciplinary school for boys. The story started as just a simple tale, but became something quite different as Bernard and Bernice's quest to return to each other shifted from the realm of the everyday mundane to a more fantastical world of mystery and magic.

So tonight, I sat down and wrote for a bit.

This is it: the story of Bernard and Bernice.

It doesn’t matter how they met, or where it started, at least for now. What matters is that they’re together, and that they feel like they’ve always been together, and will always be together, and that’s how it should be.

But that’s not how it always is.

The story starts with the car.

--

The car sat in the parking lot with its lights on. Bernice saw it first, and pointed it out to Bernard. The parking lot of the Seven-Eleven was empty, except for the car, because it was very late, or even very early, depending how you look at it. Seven-Eleven was open, though, because Seven-Eleven always is. Bernard and Bernice were awake, because they wake at odd hours, and dislike sleeping; they want to be awake as much as possible. They were at the Seven-Eleven to buy sunflower seeds, for Bernice and her bird, a parakeet named Joe. Bernard doesn’t like sunflower seeds.

“It’s lights are on,” said Bernice, tugging on the sleeve of Bernard’s jacket. It was early fall, perfect weather for light jackets, windy, brisk.

“Mm-hmm,” said Bernard. He was looking through his pockets for money.

“I don’t think they’re supposed to be.” The car was empty. “Someone’s going to come back and find their car dead.”

“It’s probably locked,” said Bernard. It was a new-type car, and looked expensive. It looked like the kind of car that worked with a remote, so the driver could lock it and unlock with the press of a button. A car liked that, it practically locked itself, and sometimes even did. For that matter, it usually turned off its own lights.

“You could check.” Bernice was big on empathy; she could feel the frustration of the person waking up in the morning, going to get their car, and finding it dead. Being late for work, maybe even losing their job. All for the sake of a little switch. It was such an easy opportunity to make a difference.

Bernard smiled at Bernice, knowing what she was thinking. They’d always been together, after all. “I can check,” he said.

Bernard walked over to the car and tried the door, and was surprised to find it open. Strike two for modern technology. Strike one was the lights.

He bent in the car and looked inside, looking for a light switch. The dashboard was nothing BUT switches, switches and dials and knobs, all with little symbols indicating their function. But the makers of the car, in their efforts to impress the prospective buyer as new and different, had come up with new and different symbols, for a new and different type of car, and in the process, they’d made the dashboard unintelligible. It looked like the hieroglyphics on pyramid walls.

Bernard climbed further in, to better situate himself and get a clearer view of the dashboard, and in doing so, he saw that the keys were still partly in the ignition.

“Can you find the light switch?” called Bernice.

Bernard looked up from the dashboard to tell her he’d found something else, just in time to see the police cruiser that had silently pulled up behind Bernice turn on its flashing lights.

Paper Sky

I'm not quite sure what this means, but it's beautiful.

Eclectic Morning

My friend Stef, formerly of Los Angeles, got me hooked on the LA-based radio station KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic" two years ago, and I listened to it obsessively for a couple months, then forgot all about it. But when I met Stef for a beer at the Nancy Whiskey last week, I remembered. And now I've been listening to Beck and the Flaming Lips live all morning.

Speaking of the almighty Lips, there's a terrific article about them in the March issue of Esquire which contains, among other gems, this great nugget from Lips leader Wayne Coyne recounting a conversation with Beck:

" 'You're Beck. You do that funny little hipster dance. People love the hipster dance. If you don't do the hipster dance, people are going to be disappointed. So do the hipster dance.' And Beck's like, 'But I want these shows to be serious.' And I'm like, 'Beck, I go out there and pour fake blood all over myself while singing "Happy Birthday." The least you can do is dance.' "