[Hat tip to the Speak Coffee to Me blog’s consistently brilliant selections in its Ad of the Week series]
The Nonexistent Kavalier & Clay Film
This is almost heartbreaking to watch — because the film it’s promoting (by director and cinematographer Jamie Caliri, of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) hasn’t (yet) been made.
(And if you haven’t read Kavalier & Clay yet, well, now you’ve got one more reason to do so.)
Ad Du Jour: When Is a Take Not a Take?
Paying Attention to Voice
I may never have to master anything more difficult than thinking, and thinking convincingly, like multiple characters. It’s not just a matter of the word choices and rhythms of their dialogue (although it includes that). And it’s not just a matter of the outward manifestations of their natures — gender, style of dress, and so on (although it includes that, too). It’s a matter of looking at the world in a way shared by no other characters in the same scene and/or book.
This makes sense, right? People born at different times, to different families, subject to different economic pressures, attending different schools — all that: they can’t possibly regard and respond to a given event in exactly the same way, from events small (a single question, even a single word like Why?) to enormous (the impending end of the universe).
All these considerations — not just the way someone talks but his/her psychological/emotional stance in relationship to events and other characters — constitute what I think of when I think of voice. And it’s damned hard for me to understand, let alone work with.
So when I set out on the work-in-progress now called Seems to Fit, well, naturally I’d give it a half-dozen main characters and a gaggle of lesser ones. (Ha. Joke’s on me, isn’t it?)
Okay, I Still Hate the Name “SyFy”…
…and probably always will. But this is a pretty damned impressive advertisement/trailer:
It sort of compresses all the memes from the SyFy cable network’s distinctive bumper spots into a big ol’ nearly coherent 2:40 whole (and avoids the corny-CGI temptations to which the network’s special-effects guys all too often succumb in the actual programs). Nice.
(Anybody know what song is on the soundtrack? Musically, it reminds me a lot of the song whose adorable video I featured in this post back in June, but the lyrics don’t seem the same.)
(Hat tip: Speak Coffee to Me)
So Your Book Just Sits There, Inert?
Art, in Service to Commerce
…but first art, damn it:
[As with the previous post, another hat tip to Janet Reid. What can I say? When the woman’s on a roll, she’s on a roll.]
Something Is Gained in the Translation
RAMH has seen a boost in its site traffic over the last week — not in the number of visits to the blog, but in the number of pages read per visitor. Just as one example, over a 25-minute period last night 60 pages were “read,” all by one visitor: pretty amazing for a blog which, until last Wednesday(ish), averaged fewer than two pages per visit.
Without getting into a lot of detail, in short, I’m getting lots of attempts to post comment spam. One attempted spam comment — let’s call it a spomment — per post. Each (with a few exceptions) lasting no more than a minute. The posts themselves aren’t being visited — the “reader” is jumping right to the comment form. All of these bulk spomments are trying (apparently) to sell name-brand shoes: walking shoes, boots, and so on.
And all of these bulk spomments originate from pretty much the same location: Beijing.
I corresponded briefly about this with the doyen of RAMH‘s overseas contingent, Froog, who lives and works in that city and is as far as I know my only connection there. (On his own blog, roughly concurrently with the onset of spam at my end, he’d written of a sudden burst in Internet service disruptions at his end. That post of his was only the most recent in a loooooong and probably ongoing series about his problems getting — and staying — online.)
Most likely, we think, his service disruptions have nothing to do with my bulk spomments. Someone over there may have found RAMH via Froogville, or vice-versa, but is probably just testing, successfully, workarounds for the little reCaptcha word-verification scheme which I use here.
At any rate, the spomments’ contents take an interesting form. If you look at a given batch, you’ll notice that the messages are identical — though different from one batch to the next. Each spomment is a literary-sounding (but clumsily Englished) passage littered with a handful of hyperlinks, and if you jump right over the hyperlinks while reading it, the passage makes a sort of sense. Sorta. Kinda. Like.
Last night’s barrage was especially amusing, especially when you consider they’re — ostensibly — trying to sell you walking shoes (emphases added, shoe brand and of course hyperlinks removed):
We should so live and labor in our cheap [brand name] shoes time that [brand name] shoes sale what came to us as seed may go to the next [brand name] walking shoes generation as blossom,and what came to us as blossom may go to them as fruit. This is what clearance we mean by progress. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
Pagan Days
[Image at the right depicts Swedes celebrating Midsummer’s Day in a maypole dance. I found this at sweden.se, “The Official Gateway to Sweden.”]
By tradition, June 24th is Midsummer’s Day. (So you know what that makes the evening of June 23rd, right?) It’s a public holiday in Quebec and a handful of countries in Europe (although many of them no longer celebrate on the 24th itself but move it to the nearest weekend); among those with the strongest Midsummer’s Day tradition is Sweden.
Why the Swedes? and come to think of it, why June 24th, specifically?
Celebrating any mid-June day in general isn’t hard to understand, not for any land lying so close to (or crossing) the Arctic Circle. Here’s what Wikipedia says, in part, about Sweden’s tradition (which includes a maypole because, it is thought, it was impossible to find — in Sweden in May — enough greenery to wrap a real maypole):
The earliest historical mention of the maypole in Sweden is from the Middle Ages. Midsummer was, however, linked to an ancient fertility festival which was adapted into St. John’s Day by the church, even though it retained many pagan traditions, as the Swedes were slow to give up the old heathen customs.
(The St. John there was John the Baptist; of course nobody really knows when his “birthday” was, but the Christian Bible says he was born six months before Jesus, so there you go. Just about everybody does know that the latter wasn’t really born in December, or even the winter — let alone December 25th — but since when has logic dictated the structure of liturgical calendars???)
YouTube has quite a few videos on the Swedish Midsummer celebration; many of these feature the maypole, of course, and also the so-called “Frog Dance” (Små grodorna, “the little frogs”) which people perform around it. E.g.:
As it happens, this video was shot in London’s Hyde Park “at the Swedish Midsummer’s celebrations” in 2007. According to Wikipedia, in the Frog Dance “participants dance around the maypole and try to imitate the behaviour of frogs.” Presumably this latter bit occurs at this point in the song:
| Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de. Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de. |
No ears, no ears no tails do they possess. No ears, no ears no tails do they possess. |
It’s arguable whether waggling fingers alongside the head or fluttering them from behind constitutes “try[ing] to imitate the behaviour of frogs,” since frogs possess neither (real) ears nor (real) tails. But, well, here’s to the clash of cultures. (Lord knows if I were Swedish, traditions like “don’t wear white before Easter” would leave me scratching my head.)
For no very good reason, while thinking about the Swedes I suddenly wondered if the original Noxzema shaving-cream commercial might be on YouTube — you know, the one which induced spontaneous puberty in an entire national population of 10- to 13-year-old boys in the 1960s. It’s there, of course:
The Swedish-born actress Gunilla Knutson was the “narrator” there, and I’ll bet she’s pretty sick of being asked about it. (Even on a day, like today, of good cheer and celebration and, well, heathen fertility celebrations.)
I See
Speak Coffee to Me‘s most recent “ad of the week” is this glittering little diamond, a brief film (directed by Azazel Jacobs) “about looking at art.” A nice little fable for those who just don’t get the point of so-called non-representational art, it’s from the Web site of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
