Brian & I just watched District 9!!! VERY cool movie! :D
It sort of reminds me of the original V miniseries in that, if you re-watch it as an adult, you find it's just straight-up a dramatization of the Nazi Party taking over Germany. As a kid, I never had a clue how political V was. I was just watching this cool show about alien invaders and resistance fighters. (You know, like the Rebels in Star Wars. I had no idea those patriots who tried to undermine the Nazis were known as "the Resistance", lol. I rarely paid attention in History class.)
So watching District 9, I got this sense that there was some real-life commentary going on (largely, probably, because this seemed too realistic to have merely sprung, uninspired, from the mind of any writer). I suspected that the fact that the alien ship comes to rest over Johannesburg, South Africa was significant, and from what little I know of African politics -- namely from reading books like Last Chance To See and watching films like Hotel Rwanda -- I suspected that a forced, "legal" population relocation might be somehow historical.
I had NO IDEA, however, about the District Six relocation beginning in 1968!!!
DUDE! Humans can do AMAZINGLY SUCKY things to each other!
I know, I know... Here's this white American getting the smallest glimpse of what has happened in part of Africa and going "People don't really behave like that!" I am, in many ways, the stereotypical American, blissfully oblivious to the horrors endured by much of the rest of the world.
And I am not proud of this fact.
But, in my defense... Well, not really in defense of my ignorance, but rather, to explain it... Our "news" media appears to do everything they possibly can to prevent us from knowing what's going on in the rest of the world. I think Eddie Izzard best illustrated this (quite humorously) when he was going into a bit about events happening elsewhere in the world and stopped himself, asking "Do you know about this-- Are you aware there's other countries? I'm just saying, you've got to flip through a fair few channels before you come across something [involving the rest of the world]".
Eddie was taking a friendly jab at us, and his audience erupted in applause. (I'm guessing cats who could appreciate an intelligent, English transvestite comedian in the late '90s has, themselves, noticed the lack of media coverage about what was happening in the rest of the world.)
But I'm not a political blogger, and this isn't about world politics. There are a lot better-informed dudes & dudettes out there that can speak much more intelligently than I can about real-world stuff.
I would, however, I'd like to give it up for the Sci-Fi writers!
I mean, you can go back to Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone episodes of the 1950s & 1960s which, viewed now, were amazingly bold in the way they spoke on racial prejudices of the time. Same with Gene Roddenbery with the original Star Trek in the 1960s.
Actually, off the top of my head, I can go back to Ishiro Honda in 1954, who sort of explored and helped to exorcise the experience of the horrors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with his Sci-Fi/Horror opus Gijira. An artist digested some truly horrific experiences, then created one of Japan's most lucrative exports!
More than that, we -- Americans -- were able to get a glimpse of the horror of nuclear holocaust from the eyes of the Japanese (well... you know... in it's heavily-edited-for-American-audiences version Godzilla (1956)) , the victims of our government's actions.
And we friggin' ate it up, lol!
And sense then, there have been scores of brilliant Sci-Fi writers who have found ways to take hard truths and difficult-to-swallow social truths and turn them into highly-entertaining (and, more importantly, thought-provoking) Sci-Fi stories!
Now, the snootier among you... Actually, I can't imagine anyone snooty wasting their time on my little blog, lol! I should imagine that my writing style and choice of topics (namely, what I've been up to lately) would immediately repulse anyone looking for pretension who accidentally stumbled onto this thing. :D
So, okay... Snooty folks might argue that human being should seek out the social horrors happening all around us and complain about them often and loudly. (And if I honestly believed our governments and their corporate rulers were listening to us and cared what we think, I would agree.) But I argue that we're not wired to seek out stuff that's going to depress us and enrage us, and that's probably for our ultimate best good. I mean, we NEED activists, don't get me wrong! But I don't think my mom (for instance) would, in any way at all, benefit by being aware of all -- or even most -- of the ugly stuff happening in the world. What could she do to change it? Would her mental or physical health be improved by worry over these things? And if not, should she be forced to pay the emotional toll for actions whose debtors sleep really, really soundly in expensive, comfortable beds?
However, if we don't know our history, we are doomed to repeat it.
I believe the human race needs to learn from the mistakes of its Past (and Present).
And one way of doing that is through Story.
Now, granted, my mom's not going to watch a movie like District 9, or even V, and her demographic has other genres of film/TV/novel to point out Mankind's shortcomings.
But what if, back in the 1980s, when I was in school, my History teacher had asked, "Okay, class, this week we're going to watch V. There will be a test on it, so no sleeping during the movie."
I don't care if there were a test on it, I would have gladly and enthusiastically watched the miniseries again!!! I would have thought this was the coolest teacher in the world!!! :D
Then imagine the following Monday. We discuss the movie for a few days, take the test, maybe get our tests back that Friday and he then tells us, "Next week we begin our discussion of the Holocaust, the actual historical event that inspired the miniseries we watched last week."
I would have been SO INTO that lesson!!!
At first, granted, I would have been disappointed to learn that aliens hadn't tried to colonize the Earth back in the 1940s. But you can bet your ass I would have remembered every detail of those lessons.
As it is, I remember staggeringly large numbers of horrible events that I wanted to forget as quickly as I was told them. And if memory serves, the coach who taught me about the Holocaust was actually quite an engaging and compelling teacher! (I remember being thoroughly bewildered by this Odessa, Texas football coach who was also amazingly intelligent and articulate, and who made the material in our text books actually sort of come alive! The other coach/teachers who stand out in memory were... well... underwhelming, academically.)
My point is that fiction -- entertaining, first, and thought-provoking on top of that -- can, and does, teach lessons to people who would normally run from a political conversation, much less a political publication!
I am one of those people.
Not proud of it, but just being honest.
If you try to start a political conversation with me, I'm leaping through the nearest escape hatch. "Political conversation" is really just folks complaining about how some things are and bitching about how some (they believe) things should be. I don't care if you're talking about Politics, religion, sports, filmmaking, literature, paranormal investigation or just whatever, political conversations are either two people bellyaching together or two people arguing with each other. You're damn skippy I'm gonna flee from that nonsense!
But if you've got something intelligent to observe about a current or past political situation, you put it in an essay or a non-fiction book.
And if you want to get your message out to the largest number of people, change the "bad guys" of your piece to extraterrestrial entities and make sure it's really well writen!
Folks like to learn things. It's what we're wired to do, I believe. I think that's our primary mission in this phsyical reality. We're constantly learning new stuff... But only the stuff that interests us. And stories -- the good ones, the ones we watch/read over and over -- cause us to expand our understanding of human existance and Truth. But it lures us in by entertaining us! :) We go for the special effects, or to have a laugh, or because we're looking for something easy to do after work or on the weekend. But we take away something to think about, some exercise for the mind, something we can debate with our friends, or just within ourselves.
And I don't think that's a bad thing.
That is to say, I don't believe that the fact that human nature is to want our spoonful of medicine coated with sugar is a "fault" or short-coming.
In fact, I really don't think I want to be around someone who actually seeks-out pain and unhappiness.
Blah.
Okay, I've gone on long enough, lol.
GOOD WRITERS RULE!!! :D
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Hammer Dracula...
One of the (slightly) more productive things I did this weekend was wacth 2 more of the Hammer Dracula flicks.
Very educational.
I had avoided all things Hammer when I was a kid, because I was more about a slick, expensive-looking visual style (I'm not proud of this, mind you, but what can I say? It was the '80s), and the Hammer Horror flicks just looked silly!
But a lot of my Horror heroes (writers, directors, actors & SFX Makeup cats) hailed the Hammer Horror flicks, so I figured I need to experience these for myself some day.
Plus, the only vampire flicks I like are the old '50s/'60s/'70s tradition, back when vampires were monsters, not whiny sex symbols. (Don't get me wrong, I love the Twilight series, but only because Stephenie Meyer's stories and characters are so awesome; I detest Anne Rice's so-called "vampire novels".) I mean, yeah, sexuality has always been an element of the vampire mythos since Stoker, and I'm a HUGE fan of sexuality! But Christopher Lee managed to be scarier because his victims were sexually mesmerized by him... These were still Horror movies!
So my first step in getting to know the Hammer Horror cannon was purchasing this great 4-in-1 DVD set called 4 Film Favorites: Draculas a few months back when I actually had a bit of money after the bills were paid. (It doesn't happen often, but when it does... Bliss!) The 4-pack includes:
Horror of Dracula (1958)
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969)
Dracula AD 1972 (1972)
Hammer only made 9 Dracula films -- the first sequel doesn't have Dracula in it and the last has a different actor playing Dracula -- so this seems like a decent sample platter of the series.
I watched the first one not long after I got the series, and it was kind of cool. It's your basic adaptation of the stage play version of Stoker's tale. And I found myself strangely drawn-in by the characters. Also, you get used to the feel of the sets/locations -- the atmosphere -- of this sort of "Hammer Dracula universe", if you will, and you kind of enjoy spending time there.
So this weekend I finally got around to watching the next two.
I missed Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, but not as much as I had assumed I would! Again, I enjoyed the world, and enjoyed the new excuses the writers dreamed up as an excuse to sick Dracula on new batches of characters. (I grew up with the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street films, so I'm not particularly put-off by contrived excuses to extend a film franchise.) I thought the flicks were fun and sort of Halloween-y! Nowhere near the scholck of an Edward D. Wood, Jr. movie! I mean, I don't imagine teen-to-adult audiences in 2009 be frightened by these flicks, either, but they're not like watching something MST3K would riff on.
Well, except that last one...
I started watching Dracula AD 1972 and it's pretty "far out, man." It's one of those aggressively groovy '70s flicks. Like the Shaft movies, but not near as cool. Like, I suspect Dracula AD 1972 was cool for, like, the first week it was in theaters, but by the time it finished its theatrical run it was already no longer cool.
You know what I mean?
I didn't get to finish Dracula AD 1972 and I actually can't say that I'm not looking forward to it, either. The story was already starting to get interesting enough so that I didn't fear I was going to puke rainbow-colored sunflowers from all the Mod With-It-ness of the main characters.
One thing I find really interesting about all 4 of these flicks, though, is the way they treat Dracula almost as though he's a demon. I mean, like, "demon" in paranormal terms, like a non-corporeal in-human entity! It fascinates me strangely.
Hmm...
OH, WAIT! I'M AT WORK! Perhaps I should go do some, then!
Very educational.
I had avoided all things Hammer when I was a kid, because I was more about a slick, expensive-looking visual style (I'm not proud of this, mind you, but what can I say? It was the '80s), and the Hammer Horror flicks just looked silly!
But a lot of my Horror heroes (writers, directors, actors & SFX Makeup cats) hailed the Hammer Horror flicks, so I figured I need to experience these for myself some day.
Plus, the only vampire flicks I like are the old '50s/'60s/'70s tradition, back when vampires were monsters, not whiny sex symbols. (Don't get me wrong, I love the Twilight series, but only because Stephenie Meyer's stories and characters are so awesome; I detest Anne Rice's so-called "vampire novels".) I mean, yeah, sexuality has always been an element of the vampire mythos since Stoker, and I'm a HUGE fan of sexuality! But Christopher Lee managed to be scarier because his victims were sexually mesmerized by him... These were still Horror movies!
So my first step in getting to know the Hammer Horror cannon was purchasing this great 4-in-1 DVD set called 4 Film Favorites: Draculas a few months back when I actually had a bit of money after the bills were paid. (It doesn't happen often, but when it does... Bliss!) The 4-pack includes:
Horror of Dracula (1958)
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969)
Dracula AD 1972 (1972)
Hammer only made 9 Dracula films -- the first sequel doesn't have Dracula in it and the last has a different actor playing Dracula -- so this seems like a decent sample platter of the series.
I watched the first one not long after I got the series, and it was kind of cool. It's your basic adaptation of the stage play version of Stoker's tale. And I found myself strangely drawn-in by the characters. Also, you get used to the feel of the sets/locations -- the atmosphere -- of this sort of "Hammer Dracula universe", if you will, and you kind of enjoy spending time there.
So this weekend I finally got around to watching the next two.
I missed Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, but not as much as I had assumed I would! Again, I enjoyed the world, and enjoyed the new excuses the writers dreamed up as an excuse to sick Dracula on new batches of characters. (I grew up with the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street films, so I'm not particularly put-off by contrived excuses to extend a film franchise.) I thought the flicks were fun and sort of Halloween-y! Nowhere near the scholck of an Edward D. Wood, Jr. movie! I mean, I don't imagine teen-to-adult audiences in 2009 be frightened by these flicks, either, but they're not like watching something MST3K would riff on.
Well, except that last one...
I started watching Dracula AD 1972 and it's pretty "far out, man." It's one of those aggressively groovy '70s flicks. Like the Shaft movies, but not near as cool. Like, I suspect Dracula AD 1972 was cool for, like, the first week it was in theaters, but by the time it finished its theatrical run it was already no longer cool.
You know what I mean?
I didn't get to finish Dracula AD 1972 and I actually can't say that I'm not looking forward to it, either. The story was already starting to get interesting enough so that I didn't fear I was going to puke rainbow-colored sunflowers from all the Mod With-It-ness of the main characters.
One thing I find really interesting about all 4 of these flicks, though, is the way they treat Dracula almost as though he's a demon. I mean, like, "demon" in paranormal terms, like a non-corporeal in-human entity! It fascinates me strangely.
Hmm...
OH, WAIT! I'M AT WORK! Perhaps I should go do some, then!
Friday, August 21, 2009
Delinquent Monkey Toes
If I were starting a rock band right this instant, that is what I would call us.
Five minutes from now, better judgment might assert itself. But for this very moment in Time, that's what our name would be.
Okay, so if I'm drinking Parrot Bay Mojitos, that should be exactly like drinking Mojitos on a tropical beach, right? I plop down my $8 for the brand name, and I get the very same experience, right?
If so, it's not quite as exotic as I would have expected.
But after a couple more Mojitos it will be. I just haven't had enough to really soak the experience in. ;P
I'm watching Halloween: The Extended Cut. (This cut combines Carpenter's original theatrical release with the additional scenes he shot (during the production of Halloween II, which he produced) to be included in the for-TV version of the film, which ran a little short with the nudity and graphic violence edited out. I like it because it adds a bit more to the story and characters. Nothing that was missing, per se, but I like the sort of "fullness" of it.)
After that, I plan to watch the original 1981 Halloween II. At work, we've been promoting the hell out of Zombie's sequel to his 2007 remake. The adds for the new one make me want to rewatch the original.
I don't know quite what to make of Rob Zombie as a filmmaker... House of 1000 Corpses was just plain boring. It looked kind of cool, but it wasn't scary or compelling or anything.
I mean, you listen to Zombie's music, and it's horror-pop genius, right? And you watch his videos, and you think :This guy has no limits to his talent!!!"
Then you watch his directorial debut...
Then he follows that up with The Devil's Rejects... You watch the trailer, and it LOOKS like a REAL Horror film! But then you read a couple of reviews -- which I just-about-never do, unless I'm just really not sure whether I want to see a flick (like, for instance, the writer/director really burned me with his last picture) -- and half the reviews love the movie and half hate it.
The people who loved it seemed to be turned on by a torture-porn element of the ending. Just ultra-violent filmmaking that shocked these paid-to-watch-movies bums and woke them up. These cats get to watch every movie that comes out, and they're bored of movie-going. It's a JOB to them! So what they have to say about the film-going experience simply bears NO relation to our experience in that we have to scrimp and save to see a movie that catches our attention, and they're dying to see the movies we would never pay money for!
So even the other half of the reviewers -- the ones that said the film looked great but had no heart or soul or story -- can't be trusted. because everyone knows that you look "smarter" putting someone else's hard work down than you do venerating it. Somehow (and I still haven't found the logic in this) if you praise a thing, you're naive, but if you insult it then you're some sort of expert.
Blah.
So then Zombie takes on Halloween.
I honestly really liked the remake! Zombie clearly has his visual style under control. The film looks like it was probably shot in the '70s, but it has all the sort of visual flair of a Rob Zombie music video. (That's not a slight, it's actual praise.) AND, Zombie did an amazing job with the script.
I saw 2 different versions of the film, too. I couldn't afford to see it at the theater, so I watched an online version (apparently a work print) with the bummer ending. Then when the unrated version came out on DVD, I bought it and watched the non-bummer ending. (From the promos I've seen of the second movie, it would have, necessarily, been MUCH different had Zombie kept the bummer ending!)
I'm not one of these old farts who can't stand to see my childhood favorites remade. In fact, I usually love the remakes just as much, if not -- heresy of heresies -- more. Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead is a much scarier experience than Romero's original. (Though, sometimes, I'm just in the mood to watch the original. Couldn't tell you why, but sometimes I am.)
That being said...
Rob Zombie's Halloween, as skillfully crafted as it is, doesn't have the same feel as John Carpenter's. It's a different animal. And I think it may be that the two artists enjoy different things about the Horror genre.
Carpenter clearly grew up with H. P. Lovecraft, and enjoys the unseen horror of a universe too old and too vast for human imagination to comfortably encompass. You can clearly see the physical manifestation of this unseen horror in the on-screen horror, but the dialogue gives you glimpses of the root causes. In Carpenter's Halloween there is an eternal evil that has crept into the body of Michael Myers and consumed his soul.
There's a spirituality there.
A dark, disturbing spirituality, yeah, but a spirituality.
I get the impression that Zombie grew up enjoying the mere shock value of the Horror genre. The soulless physicality of it.
I've got a friend who is a movie makeup artist, specializing in special makeup effects. (He would remind you that he makes people pretty, too, and he does! But what people are more fascinated by -- myself included, I'm afraid -- is the gore affects he is capable of pulling off. Anyway, he can gleefully sift through a gallery of traumatic wounds, actual pictures of actual human bodies torn and ripped apart. And make jokes as he does it.
I'm not judging here, but I can't do that. To me, I don't see a mere physical apparatus distorted in interesting pa terns, but I feel wounds that must cause excruciating pain. My friend has to, like a doctor, remove himself from such sentimentality to do his job as well as he does.
But there are others who unsympathetically enjoy other people's pain for shock or amusement. They watch Whacked Out Sports and the nightly news, savoring the humiliation and brutal pain of others, making no connection between the plight of the poor souls on TV and their own past pains and humiliations.
And I can't escape this feeling that, perhaps, Zombie falls into this camp. His chronicle of Michael Myers' life seems to simply exploit the "Look how fucked-up this is!" aspect of the development of a serial killer. He took Michael Myers out of the realm of modern-day fable and placed him firmly in the realm of almost a tragic hero. "Isn't it awful that this poor kid had all these bad things happen to him that lead him to do these even more horrible things? Wow life sucks, huh?"
I mean, I guess this sounds a bit retarded coming from a guy who so enjoys the Horror genre. But I don't enjoy the mutilations and the graphic violence (even though I do appreciate the skill it takes to create the graphic violence, and the effect it can have on the story being told -- see Serenity for a masterful example of how Horror elements can add emotional impact and depth to a non-Horror story). I enjoy the Horror story because there's usually a spiritual depth hidden deep beneath the genre conventions.
Example: Saw (the first one, in particular) is an inspirational reminder for us to cherish what is right there in front of us. It's not torture-porn (and I hate it when film critics lump it in with the copycat crap that came after it), it's a warning. All the Dead movies are about LIVING, about waking up from our auto-pilot, middle-class stupor and noticing what's around us. (Plus, there's the Apocalyptic aspect to those films, and apocalyptic stories are always about rebuilding after the collapse, finding a new way of living after everyone else is dead.)
But Zombie's Halloween doesn't seem to be an exploration so much as exploitation. He read up on what serial killers are like growing up, then showed Myers doing/experiencing those same, textbook things. (I took Psychology in high school and I knew about abusive parents and torturing small animals. I didn't see anything particularly insightful, or even surprising, in Zombie's telling of Michael's youth.)
So now Zombie is making Laurie insane, too.
Yay.
Groovy.
What a visionary he is.
What an insightful glimpse into the human condition.
How much this wise, deep, sage-like man can teach us about how to live life well.
And Zombie assures us (thank God) that this movie will be very realistic and very violent.
Woo-hoo.
The real -- sorry, the original -- Laurie Strode was a sort of mythological proxy for the audience: She was (in all of Jamie Lee Curtis's turns as the character) a SURVIVOR. I mean, on a deep psychological level, that's why we watch Horror movies, right? The catharsis. We experience terror, and then we leave the theater having purged this low-level anxiety that hundreds of hours of news and commercials and infomercials and political rhetoric have created within us, free from fear and with a sense of being able to cope with whatever petty inconveniences might present themselves to us in the ordinary, everyday world.
The Boogey-man was defeated! WE walked away from the confrontation!
But from the advance press, it seems that Rob Zombie's estimation of the human spirit is that if enough bad stuff happens to us, we will snap like the fragile twigs we are and merely add to the horrors humanity sometimes faces.
If this is the case, he would be an excellent campaign manager for the Republican Party. Clearly, life is just too difficult for the everyman to manage, and we need Big Brother to tell us what to do and buy.
I'm getting a bit ridiculous, I realize.
But this speaks to my basic problem with Rob Zombie's filmmaking abilities: I don't trust him as a storyteller.
Rob Zombie recorded another album? I'M SO THERE!!!
Rob Zombie made another music video? LEMME SEE!!!
But when he makes a film -- particularly based on a franchise I already cherish -- I don't feel as confident.
It's the writing, more than anything else. Writing stories performs this kind of fundamental function in society. Yeah, yeah, a lofty sentiment from the film flunky wannabe writer. But for the reals! Stories have an invisible side that speaks to stuff deep within us, and works on subconscious levels we don't even know we have. And when jump in and start fumbling with our subconscious, uneasiness ensues.
I'm not talking anything as grandiose as civil unrest, here, or copycat murders or anything. Usually, the worst that happens is the hack film doesn't make as much money as the corporate number-crunchers anticipated. (The marketplace is kind of magical that way!)
But $8 bucks wasted is $8 bucks wasted, right?
Worse, 2 hours wasted is kind of a bummer.
And I TOTALLY realize that I'm completely geeking-out here. I laughed at the Trekkies who complained that this latest incarnation of Star Trek's Enterprise looked like a toothpaste add, and who bemoaned that J. J. Abrams was going to be the ruination of a long-lasting and noble franchise.
And most of them (not all of them; I know at least one who wasn't satisfied after having actually seen the movie) were proved utterly wrong.
And you know what? I sincerely hope I am proved wrong about Rob Zombie's sequel! It would give me the greatest pleasure to discover that Zombie has hidden depths previously unrevealed to us! AND, I will happily sing his praises and proclaim my wrong-ness, should Halloween II turn out to be a much better film than I'm anticipating!!! :D There are times when being wrong is a profound blessing! Like when you buy a bunch of stuff at Walmart, keeping a makeshift tally of what you're going to pay in your head as you go, and what you're charged is several dollars less than what you expected to pay!
I'm hoping that's how Zombie's sequel will turn out to be.
Because I adore the Halloween franchise, because I love that sort of dark alley of modern folklore it explores. If you're too hip for Grimm's Fairy Tales or formal education, it's okay to be a fan of Horror flicks, lol. But if a Horror film doesn't actually have anything useful to say, then you're really just watching people die.
And who wants to be that guy?
But don't get me wrong: I'm actually not complaining about what Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween is. My bellyaching and nay-saying is all about what I fear Halloween II might be. (Which is, I realize, a silly and fruitless enterprise, lol.) Both versions of Zombie's Halloween were really good! I mean, like, REALLY good! :D His unrated version of the remake sits... well... a few discs down from my Extended Cut of Carpenter's original on my Horror shelf, lol.
I guess I'm just "intellectualizing" about something that I really have no way -- at present -- of knowing ANYTHING about, lol.
I'm a Horror/Writer nerd and I've found me a soapbox to stand on, dammit!
Blah.
Okay, I should get back to watching Michael Myers terrorize the citizens of Haddonfield.
PEACE!!!
:D
P. S. You know what? Now that I've gone on and on about Zombie's Halloween, maybe I should rewatch it again and make sure I'm not just talking out of my ass...
Five minutes from now, better judgment might assert itself. But for this very moment in Time, that's what our name would be.
Okay, so if I'm drinking Parrot Bay Mojitos, that should be exactly like drinking Mojitos on a tropical beach, right? I plop down my $8 for the brand name, and I get the very same experience, right?
If so, it's not quite as exotic as I would have expected.
But after a couple more Mojitos it will be. I just haven't had enough to really soak the experience in. ;P
I'm watching Halloween: The Extended Cut. (This cut combines Carpenter's original theatrical release with the additional scenes he shot (during the production of Halloween II, which he produced) to be included in the for-TV version of the film, which ran a little short with the nudity and graphic violence edited out. I like it because it adds a bit more to the story and characters. Nothing that was missing, per se, but I like the sort of "fullness" of it.)
After that, I plan to watch the original 1981 Halloween II. At work, we've been promoting the hell out of Zombie's sequel to his 2007 remake. The adds for the new one make me want to rewatch the original.
I don't know quite what to make of Rob Zombie as a filmmaker... House of 1000 Corpses was just plain boring. It looked kind of cool, but it wasn't scary or compelling or anything.
I mean, you listen to Zombie's music, and it's horror-pop genius, right? And you watch his videos, and you think :This guy has no limits to his talent!!!"
Then you watch his directorial debut...
Then he follows that up with The Devil's Rejects... You watch the trailer, and it LOOKS like a REAL Horror film! But then you read a couple of reviews -- which I just-about-never do, unless I'm just really not sure whether I want to see a flick (like, for instance, the writer/director really burned me with his last picture) -- and half the reviews love the movie and half hate it.
The people who loved it seemed to be turned on by a torture-porn element of the ending. Just ultra-violent filmmaking that shocked these paid-to-watch-movies bums and woke them up. These cats get to watch every movie that comes out, and they're bored of movie-going. It's a JOB to them! So what they have to say about the film-going experience simply bears NO relation to our experience in that we have to scrimp and save to see a movie that catches our attention, and they're dying to see the movies we would never pay money for!
So even the other half of the reviewers -- the ones that said the film looked great but had no heart or soul or story -- can't be trusted. because everyone knows that you look "smarter" putting someone else's hard work down than you do venerating it. Somehow (and I still haven't found the logic in this) if you praise a thing, you're naive, but if you insult it then you're some sort of expert.
Blah.
So then Zombie takes on Halloween.
I honestly really liked the remake! Zombie clearly has his visual style under control. The film looks like it was probably shot in the '70s, but it has all the sort of visual flair of a Rob Zombie music video. (That's not a slight, it's actual praise.) AND, Zombie did an amazing job with the script.
I saw 2 different versions of the film, too. I couldn't afford to see it at the theater, so I watched an online version (apparently a work print) with the bummer ending. Then when the unrated version came out on DVD, I bought it and watched the non-bummer ending. (From the promos I've seen of the second movie, it would have, necessarily, been MUCH different had Zombie kept the bummer ending!)
I'm not one of these old farts who can't stand to see my childhood favorites remade. In fact, I usually love the remakes just as much, if not -- heresy of heresies -- more. Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead is a much scarier experience than Romero's original. (Though, sometimes, I'm just in the mood to watch the original. Couldn't tell you why, but sometimes I am.)
That being said...
Rob Zombie's Halloween, as skillfully crafted as it is, doesn't have the same feel as John Carpenter's. It's a different animal. And I think it may be that the two artists enjoy different things about the Horror genre.
Carpenter clearly grew up with H. P. Lovecraft, and enjoys the unseen horror of a universe too old and too vast for human imagination to comfortably encompass. You can clearly see the physical manifestation of this unseen horror in the on-screen horror, but the dialogue gives you glimpses of the root causes. In Carpenter's Halloween there is an eternal evil that has crept into the body of Michael Myers and consumed his soul.
There's a spirituality there.
A dark, disturbing spirituality, yeah, but a spirituality.
I get the impression that Zombie grew up enjoying the mere shock value of the Horror genre. The soulless physicality of it.
I've got a friend who is a movie makeup artist, specializing in special makeup effects. (He would remind you that he makes people pretty, too, and he does! But what people are more fascinated by -- myself included, I'm afraid -- is the gore affects he is capable of pulling off. Anyway, he can gleefully sift through a gallery of traumatic wounds, actual pictures of actual human bodies torn and ripped apart. And make jokes as he does it.
I'm not judging here, but I can't do that. To me, I don't see a mere physical apparatus distorted in interesting pa terns, but I feel wounds that must cause excruciating pain. My friend has to, like a doctor, remove himself from such sentimentality to do his job as well as he does.
But there are others who unsympathetically enjoy other people's pain for shock or amusement. They watch Whacked Out Sports and the nightly news, savoring the humiliation and brutal pain of others, making no connection between the plight of the poor souls on TV and their own past pains and humiliations.
And I can't escape this feeling that, perhaps, Zombie falls into this camp. His chronicle of Michael Myers' life seems to simply exploit the "Look how fucked-up this is!" aspect of the development of a serial killer. He took Michael Myers out of the realm of modern-day fable and placed him firmly in the realm of almost a tragic hero. "Isn't it awful that this poor kid had all these bad things happen to him that lead him to do these even more horrible things? Wow life sucks, huh?"
I mean, I guess this sounds a bit retarded coming from a guy who so enjoys the Horror genre. But I don't enjoy the mutilations and the graphic violence (even though I do appreciate the skill it takes to create the graphic violence, and the effect it can have on the story being told -- see Serenity for a masterful example of how Horror elements can add emotional impact and depth to a non-Horror story). I enjoy the Horror story because there's usually a spiritual depth hidden deep beneath the genre conventions.
Example: Saw (the first one, in particular) is an inspirational reminder for us to cherish what is right there in front of us. It's not torture-porn (and I hate it when film critics lump it in with the copycat crap that came after it), it's a warning. All the Dead movies are about LIVING, about waking up from our auto-pilot, middle-class stupor and noticing what's around us. (Plus, there's the Apocalyptic aspect to those films, and apocalyptic stories are always about rebuilding after the collapse, finding a new way of living after everyone else is dead.)
But Zombie's Halloween doesn't seem to be an exploration so much as exploitation. He read up on what serial killers are like growing up, then showed Myers doing/experiencing those same, textbook things. (I took Psychology in high school and I knew about abusive parents and torturing small animals. I didn't see anything particularly insightful, or even surprising, in Zombie's telling of Michael's youth.)
So now Zombie is making Laurie insane, too.
Yay.
Groovy.
What a visionary he is.
What an insightful glimpse into the human condition.
How much this wise, deep, sage-like man can teach us about how to live life well.
And Zombie assures us (thank God) that this movie will be very realistic and very violent.
Woo-hoo.
The real -- sorry, the original -- Laurie Strode was a sort of mythological proxy for the audience: She was (in all of Jamie Lee Curtis's turns as the character) a SURVIVOR. I mean, on a deep psychological level, that's why we watch Horror movies, right? The catharsis. We experience terror, and then we leave the theater having purged this low-level anxiety that hundreds of hours of news and commercials and infomercials and political rhetoric have created within us, free from fear and with a sense of being able to cope with whatever petty inconveniences might present themselves to us in the ordinary, everyday world.
The Boogey-man was defeated! WE walked away from the confrontation!
But from the advance press, it seems that Rob Zombie's estimation of the human spirit is that if enough bad stuff happens to us, we will snap like the fragile twigs we are and merely add to the horrors humanity sometimes faces.
If this is the case, he would be an excellent campaign manager for the Republican Party. Clearly, life is just too difficult for the everyman to manage, and we need Big Brother to tell us what to do and buy.
I'm getting a bit ridiculous, I realize.
But this speaks to my basic problem with Rob Zombie's filmmaking abilities: I don't trust him as a storyteller.
Rob Zombie recorded another album? I'M SO THERE!!!
Rob Zombie made another music video? LEMME SEE!!!
But when he makes a film -- particularly based on a franchise I already cherish -- I don't feel as confident.
It's the writing, more than anything else. Writing stories performs this kind of fundamental function in society. Yeah, yeah, a lofty sentiment from the film flunky wannabe writer. But for the reals! Stories have an invisible side that speaks to stuff deep within us, and works on subconscious levels we don't even know we have. And when jump in and start fumbling with our subconscious, uneasiness ensues.
I'm not talking anything as grandiose as civil unrest, here, or copycat murders or anything. Usually, the worst that happens is the hack film doesn't make as much money as the corporate number-crunchers anticipated. (The marketplace is kind of magical that way!)
But $8 bucks wasted is $8 bucks wasted, right?
Worse, 2 hours wasted is kind of a bummer.
And I TOTALLY realize that I'm completely geeking-out here. I laughed at the Trekkies who complained that this latest incarnation of Star Trek's Enterprise looked like a toothpaste add, and who bemoaned that J. J. Abrams was going to be the ruination of a long-lasting and noble franchise.
And most of them (not all of them; I know at least one who wasn't satisfied after having actually seen the movie) were proved utterly wrong.
And you know what? I sincerely hope I am proved wrong about Rob Zombie's sequel! It would give me the greatest pleasure to discover that Zombie has hidden depths previously unrevealed to us! AND, I will happily sing his praises and proclaim my wrong-ness, should Halloween II turn out to be a much better film than I'm anticipating!!! :D There are times when being wrong is a profound blessing! Like when you buy a bunch of stuff at Walmart, keeping a makeshift tally of what you're going to pay in your head as you go, and what you're charged is several dollars less than what you expected to pay!
I'm hoping that's how Zombie's sequel will turn out to be.
Because I adore the Halloween franchise, because I love that sort of dark alley of modern folklore it explores. If you're too hip for Grimm's Fairy Tales or formal education, it's okay to be a fan of Horror flicks, lol. But if a Horror film doesn't actually have anything useful to say, then you're really just watching people die.
And who wants to be that guy?
But don't get me wrong: I'm actually not complaining about what Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween is. My bellyaching and nay-saying is all about what I fear Halloween II might be. (Which is, I realize, a silly and fruitless enterprise, lol.) Both versions of Zombie's Halloween were really good! I mean, like, REALLY good! :D His unrated version of the remake sits... well... a few discs down from my Extended Cut of Carpenter's original on my Horror shelf, lol.
I guess I'm just "intellectualizing" about something that I really have no way -- at present -- of knowing ANYTHING about, lol.
I'm a Horror/Writer nerd and I've found me a soapbox to stand on, dammit!
Blah.
Okay, I should get back to watching Michael Myers terrorize the citizens of Haddonfield.
PEACE!!!
:D
P. S. You know what? Now that I've gone on and on about Zombie's Halloween, maybe I should rewatch it again and make sure I'm not just talking out of my ass...
Thursday, August 13, 2009
MY NEW "FRIDAY"!!!
I think I might love my new shift!!!
I recently switched days with the other overnight guy here at the station so I can have weekends off for investigating, and this is my new "Friday"! I'm off for the next three days as of 6:00am!!!
AND...
Tonight both of us overnight schlubs are working, which means that the bulk of my shift is DONE!
Previously, I would come in on Thursdays, wait around until midnight or so for my shift to really get rolling -- because there wasn't much I could do until midnight -- and then I'd work my li'l buns off till my shift was over. And that was my "Monday". Because I was working in the back.
Now I'm in the front (if you don't work here, "in the back" and "in the front" has no meaning for you, but that's okay, it doesn't have to for you to follow what I'm saying), so come midnight the hardest part of my shift is behind me and I'm, more or less, relaxing and babysitting the station!
SAH-WEET, DUDE!!!
This, my first week working this new shift, has been challenging pretty much from the time I get in until the time I leave work. (I'm slipping into a new groove here.) But I just realized that this new groove means that right now, this moment here, I get to chill for most of the rest of my shift!!! :D
Things will pick up after 4:00am until around 5:30am, then the last half hour should be absolutely boring! :) (In the good way.)
GUESS WHAT!
It's after midnight now. My Gnomey Goddess agreed to be my girlfriend 3 years ago today!!! THREE YEARS!!! :D ♥ ♥ ♥
Can you believe any woman would put up with me for 3 years?!! I mean, I'm guessing living on different continents helps her out a great deal, so she's got that going for her. But she still has to put up with the ridiculous emails and phone calls and all that crap from me, lol.
Patience of a saint, that woman has, bless her! :)
Okay, I'm going to go see if I can text her with my new phone. (Her phone never received text messages from my old phone, but maybe this new one will work.)
Hope your Friday is smooth and easy, and I hope you have a MAGNIFICENT weekend!!!
I recently switched days with the other overnight guy here at the station so I can have weekends off for investigating, and this is my new "Friday"! I'm off for the next three days as of 6:00am!!!
AND...
Tonight both of us overnight schlubs are working, which means that the bulk of my shift is DONE!
Previously, I would come in on Thursdays, wait around until midnight or so for my shift to really get rolling -- because there wasn't much I could do until midnight -- and then I'd work my li'l buns off till my shift was over. And that was my "Monday". Because I was working in the back.
Now I'm in the front (if you don't work here, "in the back" and "in the front" has no meaning for you, but that's okay, it doesn't have to for you to follow what I'm saying), so come midnight the hardest part of my shift is behind me and I'm, more or less, relaxing and babysitting the station!
SAH-WEET, DUDE!!!
This, my first week working this new shift, has been challenging pretty much from the time I get in until the time I leave work. (I'm slipping into a new groove here.) But I just realized that this new groove means that right now, this moment here, I get to chill for most of the rest of my shift!!! :D
Things will pick up after 4:00am until around 5:30am, then the last half hour should be absolutely boring! :) (In the good way.)
GUESS WHAT!
It's after midnight now. My Gnomey Goddess agreed to be my girlfriend 3 years ago today!!! THREE YEARS!!! :D ♥ ♥ ♥
Can you believe any woman would put up with me for 3 years?!! I mean, I'm guessing living on different continents helps her out a great deal, so she's got that going for her. But she still has to put up with the ridiculous emails and phone calls and all that crap from me, lol.
Patience of a saint, that woman has, bless her! :)
Okay, I'm going to go see if I can text her with my new phone. (Her phone never received text messages from my old phone, but maybe this new one will work.)
Hope your Friday is smooth and easy, and I hope you have a MAGNIFICENT weekend!!!
Saturday, August 08, 2009
CASTLE
I friggin' LOVE this show!!!
:D
I just finished watching episodes 5 and 6 of Nathan Fillion's new show Castle and the show continues to rock!
So much so, in fact, that I've added a widget on the links part of my blog -- as I'm sure you noticed, lol.
Have 45 minutes to spare? Click on an episode and ENJOY!!! :D
:D
I just finished watching episodes 5 and 6 of Nathan Fillion's new show Castle and the show continues to rock!
So much so, in fact, that I've added a widget on the links part of my blog -- as I'm sure you noticed, lol.
Have 45 minutes to spare? Click on an episode and ENJOY!!! :D
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Just An Update...
Enjoying my weekend! :)
Over the last couple of days I've...
1. Watched Shaft (1971) and Shaft's Big Score (1972),
2. Read another chapter of Picture Yourself Developing Your Psychic Abilities by Tiffany Johnson,
3. Received Rosemary Ellen Guiley's Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits and Troy Taylor's The Ghost Hunters' Guidebook in the mail,
4. Conducted an experiment with Brian's new Ghost Box, and finally
5. Watched Push and Wolverine and the X-Men: Origins.
Oh yeah, and we ate Domino's Pizza a couple of days there, too! :D
I call this a very productive weekend so far, and I've still got another whole day!
I hope you're being as "productive" as I am! ;)
Over the last couple of days I've...
1. Watched Shaft (1971) and Shaft's Big Score (1972),
2. Read another chapter of Picture Yourself Developing Your Psychic Abilities by Tiffany Johnson,
3. Received Rosemary Ellen Guiley's Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits and Troy Taylor's The Ghost Hunters' Guidebook in the mail,
4. Conducted an experiment with Brian's new Ghost Box, and finally
5. Watched Push and Wolverine and the X-Men: Origins.
Oh yeah, and we ate Domino's Pizza a couple of days there, too! :D
I call this a very productive weekend so far, and I've still got another whole day!
I hope you're being as "productive" as I am! ;)
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Jumping Back To The Past... A Little...
I just had in interesting experience and thought I'd take a couple of minutes to share it...
It's a bit convoluted though, lol...
Okay, I'm at work listening to Chris Anderson's audiobook FREE: The Future of a Radical Price here at work. (The 3 links above are (1) to Anderson's very thought-provoking blog, (2) a free copy of the audiobook from Audible.com (you can also get it, for free, at iTunes) and (3) a copy of the book you can read online, for free.)
Mr. Anderson is explaining (in the book, that is) that in this new economy, reputation is a commodity in the web-based economy of Information. I'm not going to do this justice but, over-simplistically, Anderson is explaining that if someone Googles a subject, and one of your sites comes up in one of Google Search's top positions, that's because a relatively high number of people are looking at your site, therefor creating a kind of reputation value. (Think of your local news: If there's a particular weather person whose forecasts you trust, you make an effort to watch that person's weather segment because you value his/her reputation as a weather forecaster.) (I warned you I wasn't going to do Mr. Anderson justice, lol.)
Just out of curiosity, I Googled myself. (I'm all alone at work here, so I was Googling myself in relative privacy. I generally try to not Google myself in public; as, I'm sure, we all do.)
If you're curious, my reputation doesn't seem to carry a great deal of value.
BUT...
I stumbled upon this blog entry, which I thought raised some interesting questions...
To summarize, the entry consists of 3 paragraphs that introduce the concept of SecondLife in general, introduces me as a half-hearted case study specifically, and then makes the simplistic conclusion that participation in a virtual reality can't be healthy.
Now, it's not my intention to disrespect the author or disreguard her opinion. But judging from 2 of the 4 comments left by other people (the first one is her apoligizing for a faulty link, which I don't believe was her fault since I work at the TV station that posted the link, lol), AND including a similar opinion voiced by my friend Tommy, who introduced me to SecondLife back in 2006, I think there is some interesting academic territory left unexplored here.
This got my wheels turning because it's now 2 1/2 years after the blog entry was written and I have perspective that I couldn't have had when the entry went online. I can actually consider the issues mentioned with some degree of objectivity...
The biggest theme expressed here is the concern that too much time in a virtual world must certainly be unhealthy. My friend Tommy expressed this concern after his involvement in SL waned after a few months and Brian's and my interest was only growing.
To me, this seems an odd assumption to make. Why must involvement in a virtual world necessarily lead to abnormalities in one's perception of reality? (I could simply use the term "a schizophrenic break" but most people (mistakenly) believe schizophrenia is synonymous with the condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder. So instead of wasting your time explaining the difference, I'm wasting your time explaining why I didn't simply use the clinical term for the condition, lol.)
I can't see the throughline in that logic. Model trains are a time-consuming hobby that creates a virtual world, but I've never heard concerns that the men and women who spend the majority of their free time and money constructing these aesthetic marvels might have difficulty separating the virtual world from the real one. I've never read or heard an urban legend about members of a reenactment society confusing which century they are in and chasing folks down the street with their muskets or rapiers, lol.
So why would SL be so troubling?
First, I think it's a generational thing.
In the early '80s, Dungeons & Dragons came into the popular consciousness. It was the first, or one of the first, games to be described as a "Role Playing Game". (Nowadays the term RPG is common, but in the 1980s is was exotic and strange.) And I'm no sociologist, but I would guess that the term might have something to do with the urban legends that sprang up around a specific kid who went missing, and it was presumed to be because of the game. There was a made-fo-TV movie about it in 1982 starring a then-unkown Tom Hanks, so anyone who hadn't read/seen the erroneous news reports that created the urban legends were introduced to the "dangers" of role playing games when the movie aired.
I believe this created a pop perception that somehow role playing games held some secret power that could unbalance and otherwise reasonably balanced mental/emotional state.
I can -- again, thinking of this as a generational phenomenon -- understand how that perception could arrise considering what my generation grew up believing about hypnosis.
Hypnosis is, plainly and simply, a state of deep relaxation. It's not a dream state, as 1970/1980s TV shows and movies might have us believe, and it's not even a state of semi-consciousness. I'm talking about therapuetic (one might say "legitimate") hypnosis, the type of hypnosis that performed by certified therapists in the medical field and not the performance variety wherein people do things against their will or without their knowledge. No one can be hypnotized without their own willing participation. That is to say that the hypnotherapist can only guide you into a hypnotic state (the term itself sounds, to my generation, more mystical and amazing than it actually is) and it's up to you to become hypnotized, if you will.
Example: Have you ever driven half an hour to get somewhere, lost in thought or conversation or the radio, and when you arrive at your destination you suddenly wonder where the time went and how you got there so fast? You were hypnotized. You were in a hypnotic state, and you put yourself there without even realizing it, lol.
But we grew up with the stage magicians who did these wild things with hypnosis (Right before our very eyes! *gasp*) following some sort of preamble proclaiming the amazing things that hypnosis can accomplish. We grew up, in short, associating hypnosis with "magic".
So the thought that a game that requires its players to use their imagination for hours might unbalance us seems, in this context, almost logical. (Almost.) And yet when we were young, impressionable children we played some form of Make Believe all the time without loosing our grasp on reality.
How did we ever make it out of the '80s alive?!! ;P
Secondly, I think the term "virtual reality" itself developed -- for people of a certain age and older -- it's own "magical" perception.
Look at movies like Tron, Strange Days and The Lawn Mower Man... Before people really knew what computers were and what they could do, folks (mostly writers of fiction) theorized wildly about the possibilities of a world created inside computers that was indistinguishable from our own.
In fact, that's one of the things that fascinated (and still fascinates) me about SecondLife...
I grew up with these concepts, which were largely concerned with methods of deceiving the physical senses to achieve the illusion of the virtual reality. We -- Western Civilization, at least -- think of the world from the outside in. In other words, what is external to us (what we see, hear, smell, can tough, can taste) is real. What is internal (emotions, perceptions of self/others) is not real, it's subjective, and therefor subject to suspicion.
The surprising -- and most informative -- aspect of the SL experience turned out to be (a) how far-off the sci-fi writers were when a virtual world finally presented itself (not that they won't be proven prophetic sometime in the distant future, but it won't be in my lifetime, surely) and (b) how deeply impactful the internal, subjective experiences can be to the human experience.
If you go sky diving in SL, there's no way you're going to feel the thrill/fear/exhilaration of sky diving for real. But if the avatar of someone you respect says you're a sweet guy, you might actually walk with a little bit of a spring in your step the next day, lol.
And let's be clear, I was deep into SL, lol. If it were possible to get lost in that world, I probably would have been the person to suffer a schizophrenic break and forget which one was the real world, lol. Except, you know... I wasn't strung out on hallucinogens and hearing voices and stuff at the time. ;P (Actually, the kid the movie Mazes & Monsters was based on was abusing drugs, suicidally depressed and he still didn't thing he was living in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, lol.)
But the thing is, you really can't "get lost" in that world. Just like you can't be hypnotized and convinced you're a chicken, lol. It's simply not possible. The human mind doesn't work that way. Our grip on reality isn't that fragile.
However...
...and this is what interested me when I happened upon this blog entry from 2 years ago...
...the question of what "reality" is should be further explored by all of us, I think! :D
And SecondLife actually did help open me up to this concept, but only after years of studying the Tao Te Ching, buddhism and Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do...
A person's subjective reality really is their reality.
I'm a young and dumb teenager, I'm in a car full of my friends and my girlfriend, and the car runs out of gas. We're 2 or 3 blocks away from a gas station, so we get out and walk. My friends and I are laughing and enjoying the conversation when my girlfriend starts yelling at me. She's pissed off. How could I be so stupid as to not pay attention to the gas gage?! Why don't I care about her?! Are my friends more important to me than she is?!
Wha...?!
Now, at that age I just thought she was being a bitch and wondered why she had to ruin my night.
But now I can look back and understand where she was coming from, and even see what the hell she was talking about. My friends were having a good time, she was miserable, and I was, apparently, fine as long as my friends were fine. The woman I claimed to love was miserable: If I actually cared about her, why wasn't I sympathetic to her needs? In fact, I was laughing and having fun, and I wasn't even aware that she was unhappy until she voiced it!
I'm not proud of who I was as a teen.
But more informative was the perspective I gain when I remove myself from both sides of that particular conflict: Two people having the exact same external experience, and yet opposite internal experiences!
Empirically speaking, that shouldn't even be possible! You drop a rock, it falls. That's science. That's objective. Your car runs out of gas, you have to walk 2 or 3 blocks to refuel it...
Hmph...
Actually, the specific train of thought that made me want to revisit my adventures in SL has to do with being a rock star.
My Genius Friend Dave has met and known rock stars in his day, and did you know that not all of them are living the Rock Star life? Some of them complain about how little studio work pays. Some are complaining about the taxes. Some of them enjoy arguing with their kids and running errands with their spouses when they're not up on stage having groupies scream their name and throw thongs at them.
But if you're a rock star, how can you not feel like a Rock Star?
I believe it's all in the moments.
I think life is made up of moments, and what life we live is actually made up of the moments we identify with.
Example:
I remember my childhood as being full of freedom and non-stop fun. I can sometimes be heard to bemoan the loss of summer vacation and endless play time.
But those are false memories.
I mean, there certainly were moments -- entire days/weeks -- filled with unbridled play and incessant movie-watching! But if I think about my whole childhood, I remember that those times were the minority, not the majority. In fact, I probably spend more time now -- as an adult -- writing stories, researching and investigating the paranormal, watching movies, reading novels, laughing with my friends (in other words "playing") than I did when I didn't have to pay the bills and wash the dishes.
Seriously, if I had perfect memory and compared the time I spend "playing" now to the time I spent playing as a child, I'll bet I'm having tons more fun than I realize I am, lol!
But unconsciously, I often identify with the moments of commuting or buying money orders for rent or forcing myself to go to sleep because it's "bedtime" and call those my Adult Life, while unconsciously omitting being forced to go to bed at a certain time, doing homework, not being able to buy a toy because my allowance wasn't enough (well, that hasn't changed all that much, lol) and calling the memories summer vacation my Childhood.
But it doesn't have to be like that. I have the choice.
So what the hell is this "reality" thing, anyway?
;P
It's a bit convoluted though, lol...
Okay, I'm at work listening to Chris Anderson's audiobook FREE: The Future of a Radical Price here at work. (The 3 links above are (1) to Anderson's very thought-provoking blog, (2) a free copy of the audiobook from Audible.com (you can also get it, for free, at iTunes) and (3) a copy of the book you can read online, for free.)
Mr. Anderson is explaining (in the book, that is) that in this new economy, reputation is a commodity in the web-based economy of Information. I'm not going to do this justice but, over-simplistically, Anderson is explaining that if someone Googles a subject, and one of your sites comes up in one of Google Search's top positions, that's because a relatively high number of people are looking at your site, therefor creating a kind of reputation value. (Think of your local news: If there's a particular weather person whose forecasts you trust, you make an effort to watch that person's weather segment because you value his/her reputation as a weather forecaster.) (I warned you I wasn't going to do Mr. Anderson justice, lol.)
Just out of curiosity, I Googled myself. (I'm all alone at work here, so I was Googling myself in relative privacy. I generally try to not Google myself in public; as, I'm sure, we all do.)
If you're curious, my reputation doesn't seem to carry a great deal of value.
BUT...
I stumbled upon this blog entry, which I thought raised some interesting questions...
To summarize, the entry consists of 3 paragraphs that introduce the concept of SecondLife in general, introduces me as a half-hearted case study specifically, and then makes the simplistic conclusion that participation in a virtual reality can't be healthy.
Now, it's not my intention to disrespect the author or disreguard her opinion. But judging from 2 of the 4 comments left by other people (the first one is her apoligizing for a faulty link, which I don't believe was her fault since I work at the TV station that posted the link, lol), AND including a similar opinion voiced by my friend Tommy, who introduced me to SecondLife back in 2006, I think there is some interesting academic territory left unexplored here.
This got my wheels turning because it's now 2 1/2 years after the blog entry was written and I have perspective that I couldn't have had when the entry went online. I can actually consider the issues mentioned with some degree of objectivity...
The biggest theme expressed here is the concern that too much time in a virtual world must certainly be unhealthy. My friend Tommy expressed this concern after his involvement in SL waned after a few months and Brian's and my interest was only growing.
To me, this seems an odd assumption to make. Why must involvement in a virtual world necessarily lead to abnormalities in one's perception of reality? (I could simply use the term "a schizophrenic break" but most people (mistakenly) believe schizophrenia is synonymous with the condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder. So instead of wasting your time explaining the difference, I'm wasting your time explaining why I didn't simply use the clinical term for the condition, lol.)
I can't see the throughline in that logic. Model trains are a time-consuming hobby that creates a virtual world, but I've never heard concerns that the men and women who spend the majority of their free time and money constructing these aesthetic marvels might have difficulty separating the virtual world from the real one. I've never read or heard an urban legend about members of a reenactment society confusing which century they are in and chasing folks down the street with their muskets or rapiers, lol.
So why would SL be so troubling?
First, I think it's a generational thing.
In the early '80s, Dungeons & Dragons came into the popular consciousness. It was the first, or one of the first, games to be described as a "Role Playing Game". (Nowadays the term RPG is common, but in the 1980s is was exotic and strange.) And I'm no sociologist, but I would guess that the term might have something to do with the urban legends that sprang up around a specific kid who went missing, and it was presumed to be because of the game. There was a made-fo-TV movie about it in 1982 starring a then-unkown Tom Hanks, so anyone who hadn't read/seen the erroneous news reports that created the urban legends were introduced to the "dangers" of role playing games when the movie aired.
I believe this created a pop perception that somehow role playing games held some secret power that could unbalance and otherwise reasonably balanced mental/emotional state.
I can -- again, thinking of this as a generational phenomenon -- understand how that perception could arrise considering what my generation grew up believing about hypnosis.
Hypnosis is, plainly and simply, a state of deep relaxation. It's not a dream state, as 1970/1980s TV shows and movies might have us believe, and it's not even a state of semi-consciousness. I'm talking about therapuetic (one might say "legitimate") hypnosis, the type of hypnosis that performed by certified therapists in the medical field and not the performance variety wherein people do things against their will or without their knowledge. No one can be hypnotized without their own willing participation. That is to say that the hypnotherapist can only guide you into a hypnotic state (the term itself sounds, to my generation, more mystical and amazing than it actually is) and it's up to you to become hypnotized, if you will.
Example: Have you ever driven half an hour to get somewhere, lost in thought or conversation or the radio, and when you arrive at your destination you suddenly wonder where the time went and how you got there so fast? You were hypnotized. You were in a hypnotic state, and you put yourself there without even realizing it, lol.
But we grew up with the stage magicians who did these wild things with hypnosis (Right before our very eyes! *gasp*) following some sort of preamble proclaiming the amazing things that hypnosis can accomplish. We grew up, in short, associating hypnosis with "magic".
So the thought that a game that requires its players to use their imagination for hours might unbalance us seems, in this context, almost logical. (Almost.) And yet when we were young, impressionable children we played some form of Make Believe all the time without loosing our grasp on reality.
How did we ever make it out of the '80s alive?!! ;P
Secondly, I think the term "virtual reality" itself developed -- for people of a certain age and older -- it's own "magical" perception.
Look at movies like Tron, Strange Days and The Lawn Mower Man... Before people really knew what computers were and what they could do, folks (mostly writers of fiction) theorized wildly about the possibilities of a world created inside computers that was indistinguishable from our own.
In fact, that's one of the things that fascinated (and still fascinates) me about SecondLife...
I grew up with these concepts, which were largely concerned with methods of deceiving the physical senses to achieve the illusion of the virtual reality. We -- Western Civilization, at least -- think of the world from the outside in. In other words, what is external to us (what we see, hear, smell, can tough, can taste) is real. What is internal (emotions, perceptions of self/others) is not real, it's subjective, and therefor subject to suspicion.
The surprising -- and most informative -- aspect of the SL experience turned out to be (a) how far-off the sci-fi writers were when a virtual world finally presented itself (not that they won't be proven prophetic sometime in the distant future, but it won't be in my lifetime, surely) and (b) how deeply impactful the internal, subjective experiences can be to the human experience.
If you go sky diving in SL, there's no way you're going to feel the thrill/fear/exhilaration of sky diving for real. But if the avatar of someone you respect says you're a sweet guy, you might actually walk with a little bit of a spring in your step the next day, lol.
And let's be clear, I was deep into SL, lol. If it were possible to get lost in that world, I probably would have been the person to suffer a schizophrenic break and forget which one was the real world, lol. Except, you know... I wasn't strung out on hallucinogens and hearing voices and stuff at the time. ;P (Actually, the kid the movie Mazes & Monsters was based on was abusing drugs, suicidally depressed and he still didn't thing he was living in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, lol.)
But the thing is, you really can't "get lost" in that world. Just like you can't be hypnotized and convinced you're a chicken, lol. It's simply not possible. The human mind doesn't work that way. Our grip on reality isn't that fragile.
However...
...and this is what interested me when I happened upon this blog entry from 2 years ago...
...the question of what "reality" is should be further explored by all of us, I think! :D
And SecondLife actually did help open me up to this concept, but only after years of studying the Tao Te Ching, buddhism and Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do...
A person's subjective reality really is their reality.
I'm a young and dumb teenager, I'm in a car full of my friends and my girlfriend, and the car runs out of gas. We're 2 or 3 blocks away from a gas station, so we get out and walk. My friends and I are laughing and enjoying the conversation when my girlfriend starts yelling at me. She's pissed off. How could I be so stupid as to not pay attention to the gas gage?! Why don't I care about her?! Are my friends more important to me than she is?!
Wha...?!
Now, at that age I just thought she was being a bitch and wondered why she had to ruin my night.
But now I can look back and understand where she was coming from, and even see what the hell she was talking about. My friends were having a good time, she was miserable, and I was, apparently, fine as long as my friends were fine. The woman I claimed to love was miserable: If I actually cared about her, why wasn't I sympathetic to her needs? In fact, I was laughing and having fun, and I wasn't even aware that she was unhappy until she voiced it!
I'm not proud of who I was as a teen.
But more informative was the perspective I gain when I remove myself from both sides of that particular conflict: Two people having the exact same external experience, and yet opposite internal experiences!
Empirically speaking, that shouldn't even be possible! You drop a rock, it falls. That's science. That's objective. Your car runs out of gas, you have to walk 2 or 3 blocks to refuel it...
Hmph...
Actually, the specific train of thought that made me want to revisit my adventures in SL has to do with being a rock star.
My Genius Friend Dave has met and known rock stars in his day, and did you know that not all of them are living the Rock Star life? Some of them complain about how little studio work pays. Some are complaining about the taxes. Some of them enjoy arguing with their kids and running errands with their spouses when they're not up on stage having groupies scream their name and throw thongs at them.
But if you're a rock star, how can you not feel like a Rock Star?
I believe it's all in the moments.
I think life is made up of moments, and what life we live is actually made up of the moments we identify with.
Example:
I remember my childhood as being full of freedom and non-stop fun. I can sometimes be heard to bemoan the loss of summer vacation and endless play time.
But those are false memories.
I mean, there certainly were moments -- entire days/weeks -- filled with unbridled play and incessant movie-watching! But if I think about my whole childhood, I remember that those times were the minority, not the majority. In fact, I probably spend more time now -- as an adult -- writing stories, researching and investigating the paranormal, watching movies, reading novels, laughing with my friends (in other words "playing") than I did when I didn't have to pay the bills and wash the dishes.
Seriously, if I had perfect memory and compared the time I spend "playing" now to the time I spent playing as a child, I'll bet I'm having tons more fun than I realize I am, lol!
But unconsciously, I often identify with the moments of commuting or buying money orders for rent or forcing myself to go to sleep because it's "bedtime" and call those my Adult Life, while unconsciously omitting being forced to go to bed at a certain time, doing homework, not being able to buy a toy because my allowance wasn't enough (well, that hasn't changed all that much, lol) and calling the memories summer vacation my Childhood.
But it doesn't have to be like that. I have the choice.
So what the hell is this "reality" thing, anyway?
;P
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