What is it about the bookstore that draws me to it and sucks in my time and money. I’m convinced it’s the desire to find that one genius novel that’s highly entertaining and literary (and that I could write…or think I coils). Who knows, but I sure do spend a lot of time here.
It’s always bittersweet when the days wind down. Final sunny days at the ballpark and all. If only this team were a little better
Admittedly, I don’t really ever have any idea what to write about. It used to be that I would keep a Google Reader account open while trying to blog that I would take from liberally. I would then regurgitate a lot of content back to here that I read elsewhere just to fill in posts. To that end, I haven’t really posted all that much of late (22 total this year), so I suppose I don’t really need to do that anymore. Anyways, enough self-reflection on why I do or do not post. I’m really just looking for something better to do with my evenings that play guitar hero and rock band for two or three hours. Fun…undoubtedly. Productive…rarely.
I know it’s a bit sparse but I’m incredibly tired of all the back and forth over nothing. Anyone remember how Obama mentioned actual issues in his nomination speech? Probably not, because McCain announced his horrible VP pick the next day. When is the first debate already?
I hate to admit when I get too attached to the television, but these last couple weeks of September going into the month of October has me planted rather firmly in front of the television for a variety of reasons. When November gets here I’m sure I’ll back off a little bit to work on NaNoWriMo. For now though, I can rave about the slew of television that I have been enjoying in my spare time (it’s so much cheaper than heading out every night).
Baseball Playoffs – After the one game playoff between the Colorado Rockies and the San Diego Padres (which I watched intensely while my friends enjoyed a trivia night at a U-district bar) I’m fully invested in the baseball playoffs. This gives me a solid month of baseball games almost every day, after which basketball season starts up and the cycle can continue onwards. Even the games in which no one I know is playing (nor do I care about the game) I feel compelled to keep watching.
Fall Season – All sorts of new shows have returned this year for me to get engrossed in. Heroes and The Office are particularly good this fall, while Family Guy, The Simpsons, and a half dozen other shows are good old fashioned favorites. On top of the old favorites, there are dozens of new shows that have arrived just in time for the autumn rains. Of the many new shows, a few stand out as great new offerings. I’m particularly intrigued by Chuck, Reaper, and Pushing Daisies. The summer seasons were not bad either, giving me new episodes of Psych and Eureka (two of my favorite new shows), but fall is shaping up to be one heck of a time waster.
As summer’s memory dissipates (see Hawaii pics below) it’s all too easy to lay back and watch TV all day. I’m doing my best to be picky and choosy so as to keep it to a minimum, but for now I think I may just lay back and enjoy it until November comes along…when I’ll try to juggle some extra writing along side The Office.
I was on a bit of a hiatus for a few days. I took a short vacation to Oahu and when I got back decided to take a few more days off from the computer and give myself a bit of breathing room before I dove back into all of my side projects – the blogging, the noveling, the websites. Fortunately, it’s still raining outside, so it’s about time to start writing again and share all the pent up wisdom I pretend to carry around with me. But first, some pictures of sunny Oahu, because it was so much nicer than Seattle.
Saturday mornings are interesting beasts. They often enjoy a carefully set out collection of plans and a goal somewhere in the middle of the day. They usually end up being completely slept through and then thought back on wistfully as I stumble around at noon trying to wake up just a little bit more. But, as a freelance writer, it’s important to set aside those off days in the week, because it’s very easy – when you work at home – to start working every day and not think of work as a scheduled event but as an often times endless cycle of revisions and invoices.
So, take two or three days off every week and enjoy them because if you don’t, you’ll go insane. That’s not to say you don’t have those days to work on if something comes. Feel free to finish a big project on a Saturday if your procrastinated on a Friday, just don’t do it all the time.
That’s not why I started writing this post though. Consider the lecture over. No, I started because it’s a nice day off and with the last couple of weeks being what they’ve been, I’m happy to get out of the house and enjoy these final sunny days of summer. It should be fun. I’ll post more intriguing, deep perspective for your perusal in a day or two…for now, enjoy my shameless reposting of articles I’ve written or stories I’ve read elsewhere.
As my eyes continue to water from staring much too deeply into this computer screen all day, trying to complete a deadline early so I can enjoy my Labor Day weekend, I’m going to take a short break and (while still staring at the screen) at least stop working for a few minutes.
I have a couple of new projects in the works that will likely prove to be too much work for me in the long run, but are at least keeping me entertained at the moment. The first I have mentioned before and is my freelancing website at SeattleFreelance.com. The site has been live since early July and does not quite work yet, but the cogs are still turning and it will hopefully be operational in the coming weeks (as the work load lightens). My hope is to create a situation in which I am free of the grips of sites like Elance to garner myself work. We’ll see how it works out.
Second, I’ve started a blog novel at BrutusWeaver.blogspot.com. It’s a new project that sprouted up when I was working on an Elance project (there’s that name again). I basically thought it would be interesting to try and write a novel while people watched, commenting on my new additions every day. My goal is to write 300-500 words every day and have a few people share their thoughts. It’s been done before, but I’m not really aiming to be original, just entertained. So, if you read this (what few of you there are), please stop by and read the first few pages of my newest endeavor and leave some comments to let me know what you think.
Well, that’s it for now I suppose. I have 2500 words left and a massive proofread to undergo before I’m “officially” done for tonight. The sooner, the better.
This past weekend, the 33rd annual Seattle International Film Festival kicked off in Seattle, the annual collection of a few hundred films from all the corners of the world’s many film producing countries to the Northwest for my ecstatic perusal. As far as film festival’s go, I’ve always had a sort of reversed mental image in which grand premiers and galas are held every night within a central theater in which directors and movie stars from around the world arrive.
Technically, this only occurs in three or four film festivals around the world, and it often only occurs for a small handful of films participating in the film festival. I generally have no idea what a festival like Sundance or Cannes feels like to attend as I’ve never been, but I do know that in Seattle, the festivities are much more reserved, much less apparent, and for those not participating, only mildly obnoxious.
With the highest per capita movie attending city in the nation, Seattle has managed to wrangle together the biggest film festival in the country on an annual basis, this year consisting of 405 films. However, the festival is not privy to the kind of exciting new world premiers that Cannes gets, because so few people know about it. Wong Kar Wai’s first English language film for example, the opening film in that world famous French festival, will not make its North American debut for months to come.
It doesn’t help either that SIFF starts at the tail end of Cannes, crossing over its tail end and losing whatever international recognition it might be able to muster up in the first place. But, lasting for almost a full month, SIFF is the kind of city wide event that any movie adoring public would just gobble up. And we do. It’s a long time coming each year, but when that first schedule arrives with it’s 400+ movies, I sit down and start sorting through them, looking for the next big feature that I’ll be able to say I saw way before anyone else.
What is it about the film festival atmosphere then that so captures the hearts and minds of a city and gets everyone so involved? It’s not the prospect of so many new films. To be truthful, most of the best films screening at SIFF will be screened in a few weeks at any of the dozen or so art house theaters scattered throughout the city. Once again, this is a big movie going city. No, it’s more of a dedication to the manner in which you’re seeing these films. When you walk up to the theater, wait in the ridiculously long lines, pull out your special SIFF tickets and sit down in a packed house to a film that very few if any people have seen in America yet, it’s a special feeling.
My first film this year for example was this beautiful French compilation film called Paris Je T’aime. Comprised of 18 short films by internationally renowned directors like the Coen Brothers, Alfonso Cuaron, and Gus Van Sant, each film was a speech on love and the nature of love in Paris. It was not only a great movie, but a fun movie and the place was sold out. I had bought my tickets on the day the schedule showed up, so I was set, but more than 300 people stood in the reserve line to get extra tickets, and that’s not including the pass holders who got turned away. To make a long story short, this was a popular film and with most films at SIFF getting 2 screenings, it was amazing how quickly it sold out.
Sitting in that tiny Capital Hill theater, watching a film with no previews, personally introduced by a staff member, was a great deal of fun and the kind of thing I look forward to every year, and despite that massive line, Paris Je T’aime opens in a regular run in a University District theater this Friday. It was all for the experience.
What I’m trying to get to here is that the point of a film festival is not to show off the best new films from around the world (though that is a great side effect), nor to posh up the city with a bunch of overindulgent stars and directors. It’s about the film goers, the people who make these films popular by spending their money to see them. It’s about the experience of going to a movie, the spectacle of sitting down with a few hundred people and watching a film as though you’re the only people on the planet doing so.
There’s something to be said for the blockbuster atmosphere, standing in line with millions of others to watch the next chapter in the world beloved series of pirate, superhero, or green ogre films too, but it’s just not the same. And when you pay that much money and sit with that many people to see a film that just plain fails, you might become a slight bit jaded to the movie industry. To which I say, go to a film festival if you can; it will reignite your passion for the cinema.
Politically, this country has been a tad on the divided side the last few years. Ever since a certain Supreme Court intervention and four years of national tragedy and national travesty, mentioning your political affiliation is akin to announcing to the world which side of the cease fire you belong on.
Appropriately, the world of the arts has reacted in kind, producing works of derision and political cynicism that capture the national energy of the moment. Rather than pretend that everything is okay, or that it is absolutely horrible, the world of popular entertainment has taken to declaring that everything is political and their films and television series have been critiqued in kind.
Were one to flip through a newspaper’s film review section, it’s nearly impossible not to find at least one film that has a “political message†meant to jab at the heart of the Iraq War issue or to undermine the “Stability of the American Troops†as the opposition will say it. Either side is enmeshed in a high stakes game of who is more observant of things that don’t exist.
The answer is neither side. While wishful movie critics conjure up dozens of possible scenarios in the films they are watching in which a director (who often specifically denies doing so) has instilled some political message or another, pundits and the like do the exact same thing, trying to counteract the effects. There isn’t a single year since the start of the Iraq War that at least one major Hollywood Blockbuster hasn’t undergone the scrutiny of which faction represents George W. Bush and which represents whatever subsection of people he’s destroying.
It’s a natural progression though, to project political angst and anger from the immitigable presence of the President and his administration onto the very accessible films that millions of viewers absorb every day. Star Wars Episode III, while a film that surely had many parallels to the situation in Iraq and here at home is clearly not a political allegory, if only because that storyline was set almost 10 years ago, before anyone knew who George W. Bush even was, other than a failed baseball team owner and new state governor.
And yet the critics started a buzz, mentioning that the situation was very similar to our own and that Lucas was very harsh on the “evil sideâ€. Of course he was harsh on the evil side. It’s Star Wars. I’m not by any means saying that I wish to support the administration or contradict the message that these critics took away from Revenge of the Sith (believe me I’m not). I am however, slightly annoyed that every time a major blockbuster is released, meaning a film with lots of explosions and often times a war of some sorts, the immediate conclusion of every major film critic is that it is a political allegory of some sort.
It’s a lazy way to categorize a film to automatically compare it to something so prescient in everyone’s minds that they have no choice but to agree. The ability to look at something and make broad comparisons to a real life counterpart is not movie criticism, it is basic observation. I can do it too. I recently saw Bridge on the River Kwai. Recently Seattle has been arguing over a particular stretch of highway and how to rebuild it. And voila, I’ve compared a 50 year old war film chronicling the plight of POWs in World War II to the infighting of a few council members and entirely too vocal citizens of Seattle. I’m a movie critic now.
Of course, saying that relying on the easy parallels is an easy out is not the same as saying that films are not actually tackling these subjects head on. As I mentioned early in, there is a rapidly growing political awareness in film these days. However, in films that attempt to make such statements, the allegory is slightly less subtle (and denied by its directors). Films like Syriana or Good Night, and Good Luck targeted specific political actions that have not worked well for this nation. Even children’s films, such as Happy Feet, the otherwise happy tale of a penguin who only wants to dance, is under the surface an environmental call to action.
Film is one of those mediums that can reach every human being on the planet when done properly. Films are made with specific intent, and most of the time that intent is to make money. However, those money making machines are projected with dozens of interpretations, hoping to create a public awareness for a message that isn’t necessarily there.
Other films, those that are specifically created to portray a particular message are not nearly as popular, regardless of how good they are. However, it is in these important message laden films that I find the most poignant displays of free speech and derision, not in 300, a film that relays a specific, ages old legend and absolutely does not support the failing doctrine of a president without the nation’s trust.
