Aug 29
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Queued 2 videos.
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Shared 3 photos.
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Queued 6 videos.
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Queued 5 videos.
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Queued Jackie Chan’s The Myth
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Aug 23
Field of Dreams, originally uploaded by AlbinoGrimby.
Went to the Oakland A’s game today. We had some, I would say, fairly decent seats along the third base line. I’m not a huge baseball fan (anymore), but since the opportunity came up, I couldn’t say no. This panorama is created by 44 individual images that a fine piece of freeware called autostitch sewed together. If you click on the image you can see the bigger version. I call it “Field of Dreams” because when the algorithm goes to blur the individual images it leaves bits and pieces of things that are in motion between images, like ghosts.
So this is the part where you can stop reading, cause now I’m going to wax about baseball and be nostalgic and shit. There will be, perhaps no point to this, unless you consider this a form of storytelling, which is a piece of what Courne Supremacy is about, and which I’ve failed at attending to on a weekly basis (again), but I haven’t stopped writing — more about that later.
So let this be this week’s rambling story, if anything.
Back when I was a kid, I used to root for the Phillies and out of (some misguided) loyality every Sunday afternoon I’d sprawl out across our ugly flower-covered couch and watch on our old 1970′s Sony trinitron. I did enjoy it though. I think that was after Mike Schmidt’s time, and the Phillies were generally not doing very well, but I loved them, cause I figured they were like Rocky, an underdog team and oneday they’d get their due. I think sometime earlier this decade they actually won the World Series. I’d look it up, but I don’t want to misguide anyone into thinking I’m rekindling some lost love for baseball.
I did my stint as a kid playing little league, and managed only one hit in my illustrious career. It was the last time I was at bat and I think it was a fly out. I never really enjoyed playing — little league’s too organized for my taste. Give me a whiffle ball and let’s play at the street corner where all the cars can hit us, that’s a helluva lot more fun. We used to play right in the intersection of Karen Drive and Thomas Road. Homebase was a square peg hole in the asphalt, first base was a curb, second the manhole, and third the stop sign. The players were old and young. I was maybe…I dunno…nine or so, and some of the kids were much older. We also played in my backyard which was shaped more like a strip of undulating land rather than a baseball diamond. We ended up trampling our neighbor’s flowers everytime we hit a fowl ball over first base and I was busted once for tresspassing.
I watched the 1989 World Series between the Giants and A’s — I guess this loosely brings this thread full circle and gives it some resonance since I got to sit in the stadium today in 2009, twenty years after the fact, and watch a game for real. Back in ’89 one of my friends was a huge Oakland A’s fan. We traded baseball cards and bought them in packs. I collected the Phillies (of course), but the A’s had Mark McGuire and Jose Cansenco (sp?) and they were big hitters — I have no idea if ‘roids played any part of their success back then or not, but they knocked ‘em out of the park everytime and the A’s were just better than everyone. I remember this world series because during one of the games the Big One hit. You know, the one everyone in California expects will happen again in the next fifty years give or take fifty years. Yeah, the Northridge Earthquake. My mom, brother, and I were watching it together at the time and I remember the broadcast suddenly going out. I don’t remember if the resumed playing (probably not) but the news afterwards concerned itself with ruptured gas lines, major fires in the bay area, and the collapse of one of the major freeways. It was a startling sight to see large concrete slabs of road pancaked on top of one another like fallen dominoes. Cars and people were under that rubble. There’s also a video someone had captured of a bridge where a car drives over the edge of a fallen chuck of the road. It was a pretty crazy night and not something I would want to live through. Fast forward twenty years later and I live in the bay area. So I may get my shot.
After that, I drifted away from baseball. Sports no longer interested me. I sucked balls at them. I guess at that point the era of Nintendo began because around 1990-1 I got the NES. If you remember it came in three bundles. Just the NES, the NES and zapper, and the NES, zapper, and power pad, and fuck yeah, I had that one.
And I had the shittiest Nintendo game ever, but I still hold a place for it in my heart.
Aug 15
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Queued Panda! Go Panda!
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Queued 8 videos.
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Aug 11
No short story this week., but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on writing them. Lately I’ve been doing more reading than writing, because that’s the flip side of the coin. I can’t become a better writer unless I read more. So just a brief note, here’s what I’m reading currently.
Stephen King On Writing. A friend recommended this book after I told him I was reading books I writing, in the hopes of gaining new insights into the craft. I’ve finished Stein on Writing by Sol Stein and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Both are great books. Stein focuses on the craft of writing and its good reference to have hanging around. Lamott’s book gives me the permission to write shitty first drafts and to be entirely neurotic over my writing if I want to be — at least when I read her book, I had from time to time experienced everything she talked about dealing with the psychology of other people reading and critiquing your work. The first half of King’s book are autobiographical anecdotes about his life and the road he traveled to become a bestselling novelist. I’ve started on the second half of his book which are his thoughts on the craft itself. Believe it or not, I’ve actually never read a King novel. I’m not a big fan of horror so it never struck my fancy.
Starting Point 1979-1996. You wouldn’t really guess that this was a book on Hayao Miyazaki by the title alone, but it’s a 500 page book of interviews, lecture transcriptions, and articles about the man and his animated works. Since I’m a huge fan of Ghibli films, it’s a treat to see how he created all those movies and what his thinking was behind them. He shares a lot of his wisdom on our relationship to nature, animation, and the creative process. He tells stories from his days at Toei Animation up to Princess Mononoke and I feel that I’ve gained some further insight as to how I should be acting as a professional. This book would also fall under that category of “reading books about writing” or at least about the creative process. What I found most interesting about the Ghibli process was that Miyazaki doesn’t start with a fleshed out script. He has these things called continuity sketches, which I guess are storyboards, and he goes with the flow from scene to scene, and then hopefully by the end he’s got a plot of some kind.
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It’s a comic book, but I actually think comics are legitimate forms of literature, especially Japanese ones, since they don’t have the preconceptions of what comics are supposed to be. Their entire culture is saturated with comics, and sure, most of it “read it on the john” stuff, but once in a while a few gems stand out. Akira is one of them. Ghost in the Shell is another. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is my favorite. This Tolkienesque story is the brainchild of Hayao Miyazaki. He wrote the comic before his studio, Ghibli, animated the movie back in 1984. On that note, you should watch the movie. Really, any Ghibli movie. I can recommend many of them for you.
Les Miserables. I’m slogging through this one. It’s 1460 pages for Christ-sake, but I’m more than midway through. So far my only impression is that Victor Hugo is a long-winded gasbag. I get he loves Paris so much he would marry it. It’s a long meandering tale with entire 60 page sections of the novel devoted to specific points of French history or places in Paris. The actual story bits are fun to read. The history lessons, not so much.
So that’s it, that’s what I’m doing to help my writing along. I’m in that reading mood and I may spend more time this month just picking up books and absorbing them to put new ideas in my head before I start writing new stories.
