Live update

I'm currently on my way to Grease. Worst case they perform it twice. Best case they perform it once. No matter what I have to sit through Grease and that's still losing.

Journeyman, why?

So tonight was the last episode of Journeyman. And like many a sci-fi show that has heard its own death rattle they packed it with heartsting tugs and awesome reveals. Dan Vasser, you shall be missed.

Currently reading:

Idlewild by Nick Sagan I took it up because Gaiman has a positive tag on the cover. For a chapter I was worried it was fantasy. Nope, I'm safe. Dark cyber-fiction. I'm drinking it up now. And the author uses semicolons. Correctly! What more could you want?

Evolution and... hacking?

It's funny.  Last night I was just thinking about hacking and then the news totally busts a nut that humans are evolving at an incredibly fast rate compared to the past.  Not only that, but many scientists had assumed evolution was slowing down.  How's that for a turn-around?  Also, suck that creationists.

Back to hacking.  I don't mean to sound like one of those aging hackers that they tritely write into crime dramas on TV but the scene has changed sooo much.  I was there when the internet went retail.  My father has always been in the computer industry so we had internet before you could find it on every block.  The whole "AOL users suck" thing? That's because AOL originally didn't carry the internet.  They just made their own network which sucked.  Back when the internet first went non-military and non-academic (and text formatting was the most impressive thing out there) it was all just looked at as coding.  I think that's why there's a generation out there who look at everything on the internet as nothing but code to an extent.  Not that I can program in every language, but when the net went multimedia it was never a photo I was looking at.  Never a song I was listening to.  It was a file.

Now people just pirate and it's the norm because the industries for film and music suck so bad at respecting rights.  And to be fair, they were violated by the net.  But then people had a choice: to side with too much freedom or to side with legality.  And while laws can change, freedom is a binary situation.  On of off.  And as much as Bush doesn't want to admit it, as much as the MPAA and RIAA hate it, America was based on the idea of leaning towards too much freedom.  Innocent until proven guilty, all that?  That's to err on the side of too much freedom.  So now piracy is seen as an act of defiance by pirates and theft by companies.

That's not how it used to be.  It used to be that once something went digital it was a file and files weren't afforded the same protection as material copies.  Digital was just code and that's like trying to copyright a 1 and a 0.

What does this have to do with our newfound evolutionary speed?  Everything.  People have been talking about how fast technology changes.  The rate of technological generations is nuts.  Antique furniture has to be 100 years old.  An antique car is 20 years old.  A computer antique can be as recent as 5 years, usually closer to 10.  So I find it incredibly heartening to find out that the human genome isn't beyond humanity (I also find it heartnening that Bruce Sterling's column on this topic reads like watching a wall of TV screens).  Things are faster now.  Humans thrive on change.  The only reason we've survived is because our main advantage is our brains.  Our brains have led to our world moving and changing faster.  And?  And it's led to our genome following suit.  It's not just our minds that that are racing now.  It's our brains as well.

That's not to romanticize the issue too much.  Evolution is a harsh mistress, to rip off a classic The Tick quote.  Evolution is not interested in developing a better human, a smarter or faster human.  It's interested in a reproducing human.  It's quite feasible to imagine a situation occurring (sooner, now, than later) where evolution comes around and kicks us in the ass.  A situation in which we evolve to a point where we aren't able to produce enough skills or people to exercise the skills necessary to sustain us.  But you know what?  If there is a god then it (not he or she) has such a delicious sense of irony that god must be a hipster.  Irony because not only is our physical development possible too damn fast to support us, but so is our social and technological evolution.

As I said, it's not just our minds that are evolving.  It's also our brains.  And I never said evolution is in our favour.

Beowulf review

So I  saw Beowulf the other night and figured I might as well do a review, seeing as how so many people out there really don't understand where the story came from and therefore what the story they are seeing is.

The movie itself was pretty good.  My friends got creeped out by the CG so I think that means it was good.  The still shots could have competed with live action.  It was in 3d I-MAX which is really the way to go on something like this.  It's a spectacle, pure and simple.  And that's when I have to break from regular review mode and start to dissect where it came from and why most people are reading into this film... wrong.

Beowulf is from an 8th century Old English poem.  It is famous because it is

• an incredible example of the archetypal story of Journey of the Hero
• the second oldest written work in English (the first being Gilgamesh)

Now, as far as reviews go that I have seen it seems that many teachers and professors are impressed with how close to the text it remained.  Many "regular folks" have been saying it's a bit flat and to the point.  They're both right.  We're talking source material from the 700s.  How much of a rounded character do you want?  Dynamic development?  Modern character development as a hero who is also a villain on some level?  Fuck off to that!  Beowulf isn't a great story because it was well written.  Beowulf is a great story because it was written at all!  The spectacle of the poem was that the people passing it down had the gift of letters.  Until then stories had been an oral tradition.  In fact, you can tell this because (outline format again)

• the movie makes constant references to the story of Beowulf that will be told
• the actual poem is pretty much formatted as "I am going to tell you a story..."  It's not actually in any sort of narrative other than a first person storyteller

That said, the new script has amazing amounts of layering worked in considering what they were working with.  What people seem to have missed completely is that while there isn't a lot of character development there's a huge dynamic between cultures.  The movie is framed as a sort of true story.  There are many differences from the poem but those are all actually addressed in the film.  What the movie sets out to do is tell you a story but let you see the schism between the old polytheist cultures and the new Roman Christ Jesus religion.  Was that a bit of a jump?  Let me explain.

Throughout the whole movie things happen that aren't in the poem.  The poem is pretty much: Beowulf kills Grendel, a monster/demon.  Beowulf kills Grendel's mother, an older monster/demon.  Beowulf sets out to kill a last monster and is killed in the act, a valiant and honorable death for a warrior.  That's it, guys.  That's the whole story.  So what does the movie give us?  It gives us the story of a man who does these things but also give the characters a reason to fight.  A land plagued by a monster.  Why this land?  The king.  Ok, it goes on from there.  And every time a complication like that occurs, something that would tarnish the reputation of the hero, it gets dumbed down into the written poem which is essentially a bragging resume for the dead.  Before the Christian afterlife (Jews don't have a hell to speak of) people only had their legacy to give them any form of immortality.  By making the story great they made sure that only the best of that person lived forever.  No one wants to hear the immortal poem of "Stan, the guy who was pretty OK but did lose a lot of money gambling and once had an affair".  That would be a shitty epic poem.

Now, back to the culture.  Any time you see something in the movie that isn't in the poem, or vice versa, then you get a little insight into one of the surviving characters or the culture.  Examples?  Sure.  How about when Beowulf tries to explain the true story of his fights to Wealthow and Wealthow refuses to listen.  That's because Wealthow knows Beowulf the hero already and that's who he wants to live on if Beowulf dies in the cave.  When Beowulf first shows up and tells the story of killing 9 sea serpents and one of his guys mutters it was 3 last time.  We see some of Beowulf's vanity as well as the origin of the monsters in the poem.  Or when King Hrothgar is asked by Unferth if he would like to pray to the new Roman god, Christ Jesus and Hrothgar declines.  In the actual poem Grendel is explained not to be a demon but rather one of the descendants of Cain and therefore of evil seed.  Scholars know that the poem was written before Christianity and that means the Christian elements were written in later by people making new copies of the epic.  Unfurth's crippled assistant is named Cain and that should be looked at from a completely non-Christian point of view.  Then Unfurth becomes a priest!  Ah, so he will learn to write (as clergy tended to be the only educated folks back then) and has a personal link with Cain the name and Cain in the bible.  So we already gt many shades of truth and cultural interpretations worked into the story of a sad, fallible man named Beowulf.

Got all that?  I'm not saying it was the greatest movie ever.  Hell, I'm not saying it's faithful to the source material (quite the opposite).  What I am getting at is that anyone saying the characters were flat and boring and a bit one sided as a complete negative really doesn't know what it is they're watching.  Sure, the movie can stand on it's own as a story.  So can the poem.  But without context both of those versions of Beowulf come across as simple and full of people that really don't change.  In context the poem is amazing just because it's an example of written English!  Wow!  And the movie is a study in cultural shifts during the early spread of Christianity that happens to have a bunch of kick-ass monsters and bad-ass fights.  So the fact that Beowulf was done in 3D to be a spectacle of technology is fitting.  Both are have a fun, simple story that takes advantage of the newest forms of storytelling.  Toss in some really dirty dialogue and one fantastically obvious ejaculation reference and you've got a fun movie.


EDIT:  Beowulf, I am now being told, is in fact the oldest English epic. Gilgamesh is in fact in Mesapotamian.  Blame English teachers for the temporary mix up.

My weekend

Off to AC where I will avoid gambling more than $20 and will see Beowulf in imax 3d. If it's not good at least it will be gigantic.

The Broadway strike is over!

After multiple overnight discussions the strike has been settled for the next 5 year contract term.  So why don't I really feel like a lot has been accomplished?

Finding out what the strike has been about hasn't been the easiest thing in the world.  Maybe it's because the TV strike has to do with writers who are better with words, but the stagehands haven't done anything to explain their side.  From what I've gathered it seems that the producers wanted to make some cuts in their current contracts and replace those cuts with new amendments and the stage hands wanted none of that.

• Producers didn't have the ability to choose how many stagehands were assigned to a production (either for the whole thing or for set-up.  that's been unclear).  This led to many producers paying for stagehands that had nothing to do.  For days at a time.
• The producers wanted to have the ability to choose the number of stagehands and in exchange for hiring less (READ: amount actually needed) they would give all of the workers a raise.

Now that the strike is over the times reports that the stagehands are dropping the number of workers for opening set ups and giving raises to the ones who do work.  So we went through over two weeks of dead Broadway for the stagehands to throw a hissy fit and then take what they were essentially offered from the start?  I know that unions are supposed to be great and champion the working man but this is bullshit.  The writers guild is striking to get pay for work they do now and don't get payed for.  The stagehands had a strike to keep getting payed for work they don't do.  Is that ok?  It doesn't seem right to me.  This seems more like a union striking just to get attention and because they're worried they're being called on their shit.

I bet they did get more of a raise after the strike than what was initially offered.  I'm not saying that they took the same exact deal that was offered in the beginning.  But I'm pretty shocked that they broke off talks and then came back and took the same TYPE of deal that was initially offered.  Breaking off talks and striking is for when you don't think you have any common  ground in a deal and need to create some leverage.

So here's what it comes down to.  I support the stagehands.  I know how much they're responsible.  Hell, they stopped Broadway for 2 and a half weeks.  But I just can't bring myself to support their strike.  They go upset because they were pretty much caught stealing free time and panicked when a solid portion of their pay was going to be cut.  But it was stolen time and the cut would come with a raise.  I just can't see the strike as anything more than immature tantrum and trying to keep the status quo, even if the status quo was getting paid regularly for not working.

More fall photos.

Here's the rest of the good ones. I'll start with my favourite.

That's it for now.

How I spent my Black Friday.

So yesterday was Black Friday. Oooh, spooky. I actually went out and (between many aggravating errands) shot some pictures. So this post is pretty much a straight photo post. Enjoy.

More photos in a day or two.

My Black Friday was very red.

So yesterday was Black Friday.  Oooh, spooky.  I actually went out and (between many aggravating errands) shot some pictures.  So this post is pretty much a straight photo post.  Enjoy.

 

posting test

Just a test to see if I can post images without a plus account.

A night at the theatre

So this past Saturday I had a lovely evening out in the city.  We went in to see a play (12 Night of the Living Dead) and got there a bit early.  So here's how the night went.


Pre Show
Al and I got in earlier than Jill and Jarod so we walked around to the corner to wait for them.  Well, a homeless guy comes over, asking to raise money for a beer.  I didn't have any cash on me but he proceeds to regaile us with the story of his expulsion from the same place we're seeing the play in a bit.  He goes on to tell us how he was put out by "the art cult" and then apologizes to Allison.  Why am I not assumed to be a part of this cult and she is?  He then drifts to new topics when I tell him a I have no cash and am not willing to use my card.  I am told I am lucky to have a red-head.  This I know.  He says that he has a black woman and "I know, I'm fucked up".  Finally, he says he has a place to stay, it's a warm spot near a bridge.  Can we help him find it.  We point behind him a the giant bridge on Delancy and he says he feels like an idiot.  Then Jill and Jarod show up.  What crappy timing!  They missed it.

Next, dinner!  We headed off in search of easy eats.  It's NYC so the pizza places tend to be good.  We see one down a side street and head towards it.  On the way, without warning, we come across a crowded little front with people milling about.  It looked odd and exclusive so we walked in.  What we beheld astounded us.  It appeared to be a sort of gallery opening.  It's called the MF Gallery, on Rivington street.  The event in question was an underground artist toy show.  Here are some pictures.

Show
Then, the play.  12th Night of the Living Dead was great.  It got a pretty bad review in the times, but it was hilarious.  Ok, maybe as an actual Shakespearean interpretation it was lacking.  Like, the main character (Viola) didn't actually have a single line other than grunting.  But what it lacked in coherent plot it made up for in bloody gore.  It wasn't advertised as such, but the first row (and part of the second where we had been sitting) was a splatter zone.  Fingers, intestines, arms, heaving bosoms and, yes of course, brains were all on the menu.

The reason I can say it's good and the Times can't is that I can see how the infection of blood-lust wasn't the only conversion.  As people changed, their target genre did as well.  The cast all starts out in a Shakespearean performance (and they are great while they're human).  As they devolve into zombies they switch over completely into a zombie movie mode.  Lurching, eating, disemboweling.  This is what their method becomes.  As for the cast that remains human?  They keep in Shakespeare mode.  So there is a bit of an aesthetic clash.  But it's all in good fun.  I works because they zombies are good zombies and the actors are good actors.  Sure, they don't really meet on the same ground anymore, but they function on their own and it's that split in the middle where all the humor lays.

Though it doesn't function on every level as a production it was still well worth seeing.  I'm still a little weirded out that it was the second zombie stage play I saw this year (the other was Evil Dead: The Musical, which is actually a near perfect show).

Post Show
On the way home, on the PATH, a girl threw up on my friend Jarod.  She only got his jacket a bit, but it was all over her hair and hands.  She kept her head down because she was embarrassed, but she looked awful young to be so trashed.  As soon as she vomited and started moaning I turned to Allison and whispered "She's one of the infected." 


So as we're talking about how it's ridiculous how bad people get we come across some more girls trashed out of their mind.  The next few shots are of a girl being carried by two guys she doesn't know (don't worry, her good gal friend is supervising).  They are literally carrying her.  Her feet were dragging.  No motor control.  Sexy, right?  They got to the turnstile and had to rotate through it sideways.  It was so funny.  Then they got to the bottom of the stairs.


After a moment of thinking really hard they just grabbed her under the arms and by the ankles and carried her up.  She made it.

You can see, on the right, her chariot awaits.

Fin.

Holy Heroes screen caps!

Since they seemed to do pretty well last time, here they are again!

Sorry for the large amounts of silence.  I've been busy and when I've been posting it's been elsewhere on the net.  I'll start crossposting so things won't slow down too much here.  Hope you liked this weeks.