another quick one

Here is some cool material from across the web. Enjoy, while I try and catch up on my life…

• Seems I wasn’t the only one who objected to hearing that A Beautiful Mind won the Best Adapted Screenplay award. Here’s a more articulate arguement for why it was a poor choice. Also check out this Salon Article that pretty accurately predicted who would win which Oscar and why. It’s the same type of reasoning I used when filling out my form for Jenny’s party.

• Caption Machine - I got turned onto this site by Ronincyberpunk. It’s a cool use of blogger technology. Take a gander, there are some amazing pictures up there.
• Mordo the Magician by Steve Martin - yes, that Steve Martin. It’s a funny, morbid tale of stage magic gone wrong. Available in Flash or Quicktime.

Brief Recommendations

Virtua Fighter 4 I’m not sure how I’m getting work done with this game at home. If you like fighting games, this is a must have. VF4 utilizes real martial art styles and moves (with an exception here or there) to create one of the most accurate fighting simulators out there. Shaolin, Vale Tudo, Drunken Fist, Mantis Hand… it’s all in there (watch out Aaron, I’ve got some new moves to try on you…). Currently it’s available for the PS2 (sorry Heather), but it should be coming to the X-Box as well. Check out the website which has some amazingly accurate information about the history and characteristics martial arts styles in the game!

The Sandman I’ve blogged about must read comics before and the value of comics as literature. If you’re still unconvinced, look no further than Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. This series (collected in ten volumes) is a fascinating exercise in creating a new mythology while extending existing ones from across the world. Judeo/Christian, Norse, Greek, African, Asian, it’s all here; linked and interwoven with Gaiman’s own creations. At the same time the stories also intersect historical figures: Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Marco Polo and even Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States to name a few. The books are an exploration of humanity and the supernatural. Plus they are just plain good. I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to get around to reading them, but I’m so happy that I finally got around to it. If you’re in Rochester I’d be happy to lend these out…. If you’re outside of Rochester, take the plunge and buy one or check local libraries (some progressive ones do carry the series!

Oscars

try not to rant… try note to rant….

Last night I went to Jenny’s Oscar Party. (hold it together Matt, don’t rant) The food was great! Jenny’s hamster devolved a taste for Andy’s blood. We had a great time laughing at the speeches.

speeches, speeches umm… ahhh…. Ah screw it, FLAME ON!…

There were so many things last night that were rant worthy. I don’t know where to start. I’ll keep it to four things that really stuck with me and spare you the rest of my venom. (I’ve got to be channeling Joel today!)

1. Akiva Goldsman winning the best adapted screen play Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. To quote David Ives it’s “The triumph of the utterly mediocre.” I’m not even going to comment on the man, other than to say Batman and Robin… his record for writing crap stands for itself. However, One would think that an award for “Best Adapted Screenplay” would take into consideration how well the script adapted the source material. A Beautiful Mind is a good movie, but a white washed version of the book it is based on. The script left out some of the more offensive traits of John Nash that are detailed in the book (beyond the oft talked about Anti-Semitism, the book documents Nash’s infidelity [which kinda wrecks the love story angle], and possible homosexual tendencies [which also throws a wrench in the love story]). It’s sad that Hollywood needs to “smooth” out the rough edges of people because we, as a culture, can’t seem to accept fallible heroes (more on that thought in a future blog). If you consider the task of adapting an existing work into a new medium, In The Bedroom, Ghost World, and Fellowship of the Rings were all far more deserving.

2. The tribute film for Sidney Poitier – I love Poitier’s work, To Sir With Love is a favorite movie of mine. He’s a fine actor, a class individual and deserves to be honored. But, the more that I think about the tribute film to Poitier, the more frustrated I get. It’s great to hear other actors and actresses talk about how he inspired them. But why no white actors or other minority actors? Poitier should be honored not only because of the color of his skin, but the quality of his talent and drive. And those are things that are inspiration to people of all creed and color. But this year’s ceremony seemed to be the Academy’s apology for years of minority exclusion in the awards. The issue of race dwarfed everything incluing the tribute, both obviously and subtly (did you notice that was the only film of the night where the interviews were conducted on a black background? Also, if Hollywood has gotten so progressive, why was Halle Berry the only actress interview for the film? If she wasn’t nominated I doubt she would have been included). I guess that just shows that for as far as we think we’ve come, we still have miles to go.
3. That BS tribute to the movies they started the show with – Saluting the movies as a form of escapism and the great quote that “I’d rather see a mediocre movie than a good play” are wonderful examples of the overall dumbing down of our culture. Sometimes I wonder why I’m spending all my spare time working on a play when theatre is dying a sad, pathetic death here in the states. Must control fist of death… (this isn’t to say all movies need to be deep or that they are a less artistic medium than theatre. But do we really need to celebrate Ernest goes to Jail?)
4. Last one, and it’s short: Britney Spears talking about Pretty Woman as a pinnacle of film and how her cintematic role model is a prositute says more about her than I can ever hope to. But everyone’s entitled to an opinion. Or maybe not… A favorite professor of mine in college once proclaimed that before you could have an opinion in his class you first had to prove that you were capable of forming an informed opinion. I at first I thought that was rather elitist… at first….

Ok, after all that ranting, I do have to admit that I won the “guess the Oscars” contest at Jenny’s party (this is the second year in a row for me). It only makes me feel more cynical that the way that the academy votes is so predictable. No wait, it makes me even more cynical that I can think just like they do. Sigh… next year I’m voting the way I think it should end up; that should guarantee that I’ll finish last.

As for the past weekend, I’m trying an experiment. Here are the two handwritten journal pages about it. Hopefully they’ll be legible. If not I’ll rekey ‘em. I’m just too lazy to do it now:

and without further adeu… the Friday five:

1. What is your favorite time of year?

Fall, then spring, winter and finally summer.

2. What is it about your favorite season that, well, makes it your favorite season?

The changing leaves, the smells, the knowledge that soon snow will come and I can ski and snowboard.

3. What is your least favorite time of year? Why?

The end of winter here in Rochester. Waiting for the gray to end and the weather to start to warm up. By the last days of winter we’re all really excited about the prospect of spring!

4. Do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons?

We had banana splits on the first day of spring here at work. Soon there will be pictures and video to share of inflatable monkey love that occurred in preparation for that celebration.

5. What’s your favorite thing to do outside?

Here goes (cause I can never pick one): biking, winter sports, sailing (which I haven’t done enough of in recent years), rollerblading, hiking, camping (again I haven’t done enough of this in recent years), photography

More of a post will follow soon….

broken record

so it just really occurred to me that my blogs as of late have sounded a bit like a broken record. I think anyone whose kept up with it for even a little while could write an entry:

I’m busy. The play is crazy, but moving forward. Martial arts is going well, but not too well. Obsess about Hair and Alyson Hannigan.

actually I haven’t obsessed over her in a while. Note to self: remember to write a stalker worthy blog sometime.…

This repetition is a pretty good indicator that I don’t have much of a life right now. I do have a bunch of stuff that I’m saving to share until I have time to work on the site. Hopefully that will be soon (if I ever get home before 11.30pm or so).

As the Falcon Flys

the falcon soap opera continues. Yesterday the new boy in town (whose been nicknamed “mail man” by the folks here at kodak.com) presented a dead bird (read as “food”) to Mariah (our unfaithful momma falcon). This is an important aspect of falcon mating. Basically the male is proving he can provide, as the female can’t hunt while incubating the eggs and watching the hatchlings. Deadbeat dad’s don’t get any in the falcon world. Here’s it happening…

This also officially kicked off the “carnage cam.” By the end of the nesting we’ll have watch lots of pigeons, chickadees, swallows and other small birds consumed on camera. Seriously, when you go up on the walk, you see bird bones everywhere. On the plus side we have a lot less pigeons (winged rats) around Kodak tower.

I remember when I had time to blog

oy. oy. oy.

So my life has been just a shade of nuts recently. The play is going like gang busters (we’re less than four weeks away from curtain… of course that would be if we had a curtain). Long Ago and Far Away is in good shape. Ok… better shape, everyone’s just about off book. Ancient History needs a lot more work. But I trust my actors. So I’m not uber concerned yet. I just want this to be a good show. A cut above standard area community theatre (no crack on those theatres, it’s just this is the goal we set for ourselves). Something that I feel good about putting infront of an audience. Now, if I could only just find a gun! More on that tomorrow.

The play and some other projects are just eating up my life right now and providing a lot of drama. Speaking of drama, some is going on on top of Kodak tower. A male falcon has finally arrived to mate with our female falcon. But, surprise… he ain’t the usual male. The lack of banding on his legs shows that the new boy in town is a wild falcon, not Cabot-Sirocco who has “ruled” the nest since the birds first started nesting. This would indicate that Cabot has left the area (or left the earth). It’s possible that our Mr X knocked off Cabot (as falcons are known to do) and took his mate. You can follow As The Falcon Flys here.

In other news, Martial Arts continues to go well. I had a good class last night. Basically I threw everything and the kitchen sink while sparring. I’m spinning more regularly now (which is good), but my stance work still sucks (which is bad). As Sifu put’s it, I’m chopping away at a brick wall that is hindering my forward progress. Last night I was knocking bigger peices out of it. Soon I should be able to see to the other side. And when that day comes I’ll be able to open up a whole new can of whoop ass!

bits & pieces

I don’t have much time to blog, but I thought I’d sneak a quick note. I’ve added ronincyberpunk to my list of blogs of note. Other than being named after a masterless samurai, being a fellow Eagle Scout, and working in a theme park, Ronin keeps a pretty interesting blog. Check it out.

If I have time tonight I’ll put up a new MP3, survey and some more quotes. But the way things are going that might not occur until tomorrow.

follow up on the post on God and Creativity

heather posted the following comment after my God and Creativity post:

So… would those with more creative types of minds be closer to “God”? Some people out there just aren’t creative… are they less divine?

Interesting point, but I’d have to disagree with the notion that some people are not creative. I’ve yet to find someone who isn’t creative in some aspect of their lives. Or rather who doesn’t have the potential to be creative. Creativity is a very broad experience. Last night was a great example. An old martial arts friend is leaving town and so as part of saying goodbye, we had a huge open class/sparring night. Most of the people there were not necessarily what you would consider creative. Or at least in the traditional artistic sense. However once each of them started moving and fighting there were flashes of brilliance and creativity that were inspiring. Those moments were not that much different from Artie Shaw’s moments of brilliant creativity on the clarinet (though I don’t want to suggest that we were on a common level when it came to mastery of our chosen instruments). This also relates back to the theory of Optimal Experience that Csikszentmihalyi puts forth in books like Flow: moments when you are in a state of flow/rhythm/balance internally and with your surroundings. I can’t think of a better description of a pseudo divine state than that.

Of course, if a person chooses not to embrace their creative aspects then they are potentially cutting themselves off from this type of experience. And there are people, who for reasons I can’t understand, do choose to do that.

in other news

- I finally got a flying scissors take down off yesterday. Thanks to Aaron for being such a great sparring partner! Now if I could have gotten the roll-over-the-other-person’s-back-sacrifice-throw I tried I would have been ready for my career as a low budget action star.

- Theater: Uggg… just found out that our set designer will not be able to oversee the set construction. Crap! I don’t have time to find someone else. I knew things were going too well there.

busy, busy

This isn’t going to be a proper update ’cause life is way to crazy right now. Things have blown up (in good ways) with exact theatre company. To your left is the first draft of our poster for our first production. It needs a lot of work: it’s too dark, too busy, and the titles won’t be in Courier. But it’s a start (I did most of the work on it last night). The final will be done before the end of the week. We also just received work today that the Rochester Arts Council will act as our financial sponsor. While this isn’t direct financial support, this is the best news we could get at this point. Thanks to this we are now a non-profit organization under their umbrella. So we can finally start to begin our development work. Up until this point we were holding off because we wanted to ensure that any donations people made would be tax deductible! Phew!

Other bits and peices:

- if you want to check out that Star Wars trailer I talked about yesterday you need to copy and paste the following URL:

http://starwars.apple.com/ep2/clone_war/media/gate/ep2_clone_war_p640.mov

apparently the site doesn’t like direct links to the trailer… I dunno. Thanks Di for spottin that.

- Another good martial arts class last night. Now if I could just remember to do scissors takedowns when I manage to get myself in to the right position. It’s unusually a case of two moves later I suddenly think “Hey… I couldda done something cool back there…” And as we all know martial arts are really about being able to do cool things.

- After a lot of requests, here’s a bigger picture of the new hair. I’ve also linked the picture in the post below to this one. If you still want a bigger picture… tough. You’ll have to see it in person.

- Hopefully I’ll have more time to write tomorrow (including a follow up on the creativity posting & saying hi to some cool people linking to my site [you know who you are... hi!]).

space opera

Did you catch the Star Wars trailer last night? I wasn’t planning to watch but I ended up needing to vedge for a bit and turned on the TV just in time. Ummm…. Yeah…. It was cool, I guess. I really don’t think Lucas’s strength has ever been direction. Of the first three films he only directed the first (believe it or not, David Lynch was a candidate to direct Jedi). Phantom Menace only strengthen that view. I just don’t like the way he frames shots. I was also underwhelmed by the amount of CG in the trailer (yeah I know it’s a Star Wars film… ). So I was interested but not overly excited by what I saw last night. Of course I’m going to go see it eventually (ok… I’ll be in line the first night next to my friend Aaron) but I’m not expecting very much. In the mean time I’m still trying to track down and watch the movies that inspired Lucas (like The Searchers and The Hidden Fortress).

a brief meditation on the nature of God and Creativity

some thoughts and ideas, often gleamed in the most unusual of circumstances, stick with you your entire life. I was reminded of one of those on Friday morning as I drove into work listening to NPR. Something said in an an interview with Artie Shaw, played on Morning Edition, struck a chord within me. Shaw was a revolutionary figure on the Jazz clarinetist and band leader. He left performing behind years ago because his quest for perfection was driving him mad. At the end of the interview he said the following when asked about a clarinet in his home:

“That’s the clarinet I used to use… but it’s just a piece of wood, you know, with holes in it and they put these clumsy keys on it and you’re supposed to try to take that and manipulate it with throat muscles and chops… and try to make something happen that never happened before. And when you do, you never forget it. It beats sex, it beats anything… when you hit something on the clarinet, or any instrument, and you know that’s absolutely as close to perfect as you can make it… if you were God, you’d come closer. Very rarely can you say that.”

The reference to creation and God reminded me of something that I had heard a few years ago which at the time I thought it was an interesting idea. The more and more I thought about it and Shaw’s comment, I knew that I wanted to blog and share it. Craig Yoe, co founder of Yoe! Studios threw out this idea at a conference. Craig is one for the most interesting folks I think I’ve met. Eccentric is putting it mildly when it comes to Craig. At the workshop, he explained that he’s an ordained pastor and shared the following:

“If you look at the bible, the first words of Genesis, the first action God took was to create: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Genesis: 1,1). We, you and I, are the closest God, and perhaps the closest to being divine, when we create.”

The more that I think about those words, the more that I find that I agree with them. Whether while creating something myself, or more often experiencing the creations of others I feel connected to something far greater than just us. Call it what you like (feel free to mold this to your personal spiritual views), but there is something very mystical in the act of bringing something new and unique into the world. It transcends all other activites. And perhaps it does put us just a little closer to the devine. At least I’d like to think so.