Like, one who insists on being in your lap as you work? Plays with the keys? The (ha ha) mouse?
Remind him or her who’s boss.
Instructions from aBowman’s site, where I found this (via the wide-ranging Froog):
This lively pet hamster will keep you company throughout the day. Watch him run on his wheel, drink water, and eat the food you feed him by clicking your mouse. Click the center of the wheel to make him get back on it.
Short films — say, 40 minutes maximum, tops — remain one of the great blind spots of most American audiences. After all, shorts don’t fit into the format of movies (80- or 90-minute features and up) or television (30-minute multiples on PBS, 20-some minutes elsewhere to allow for the paid filler). You can see animation and short-film festivals in larger cities or the art cinemas in smaller ones, but you’ve got to know what you’re going to spend ten bucks on or you won’t spend it, eh?
Aside: Yes, of course Pixar does wonderful short animations, and packages many of them to be released with feature-length films in theaters and/or on DVD. I’m just saying that in general, short films — those by film-school students aside — don’t have much of a noticeable profile here.
So our understanding here of what to expect from short films is shaped by what’s delivered in cartoons, or in fill-in-the-gap documentaries like those on Turner Classic Movies — keeping the audience in their seats until the next feature rolls around at the top of the hour. It’s as though short stories had very few outlets (well, okay, that’s not much of a stretch) — and for the outlets which existed, all stories had to be exact multiples of 3,000 words in length.
Naturally, since American audiences won’t ask for something they scarcely know exists, media outlets don’t provide it, so audiences remain ignorant, and then those audiences won’t… and so on. Less a vicious cycle, than a pernicious one.
Elsewhere, short-film traditions (like other kinds) have evolved differently. Which kinda makes sense, from a story-teller’s perspective: you tell the story completely, and when it’s done you stop, hmm?
[I’m working on a seasonal offering with my co-blogger. But, as you can perhaps imagine, complications abound in working on anything with a gargoyle. Communication problems, for one — we’re still getting used to each other’s language. And no computer “hard”ware known is meant for handling by someone with fingers of stone and eyes incapable of focusing on anything but the vague middle distance. So in the meantime, there will probably be a couple of brief posts here — like the one below — just to keep the site at a low simmer.]
Among the many dramatic narratives playing across the pop-culture landscape of recent years, one of the most dramatic — from a certain perspective — has been the South Park saga. Not that there’s really a continuing story line (each episode stands more or less on its own), no; the “dramatic arc” such as it is comes from the tension between what the show is and does, and what the broader culture implicitly says it may say and do.
(The popular saying “pushing the envelope” seems a little lame to describe South Park. The envelope in question isn’t just being “pushed” from inside; it’s actually bulging, rippling, threatening at every moment to tear itself from the addressee’s hands.)
The chief source of this tension, as in many works of, umm, art and literature, is the antagonist. The villain. The… resident evil.
Eric Theodore Cartman.
Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…
A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that I’ve seldom seen an entire episode of The Simpsons.
(Once they learn my last name, even people who don’t know me take it on faith that I must be a fan. When I was living in Virginia, pre-The Missus, I had a Saturday-night ritual which in part involved placing a pizza order at the Domino’s in the center of town, and then driving in to pick it up a few minutes later. The first time the kid who took phone orders asked my name, he busted out laughing. “Bart,” he said without explanation, “is that you?” I probably went to that Domino’s at least fifty times thereafter and every time — whether taking my order or when I arrived to pick it up — he greeted me with a hearty “Bart!” When I moved away, I should have stopped by Domino’s one last time to give him a token of some kind — a used copy of Crossed Wires, at least, the pages marked here and there with greasy thumbprints and a bookmark of crust or pepperoni. But, duh, I didn’t.)
Anyway, although I haven’t seen the show that much, I have picked up plenty of the in-jokes and recurring elements which have made their way into the general culture, elements like the very last view of the family, sitting on the couch at the end of the opening credits, in an apparently infinite number of variations of the same pose(s). I’ve seen plenty of Simpsons quotes used in email and forum sigs. I know that the exclamation “D’oh!” doesn’t translate to Duh, as one might expect, but more like something on the order of Oh, CRAP.
(Naturally, I’m expecting to be descended upon by show geeks to point out the nuances — why Homer doesn’t, for instance, simply say Oh, CRAP because in Season 2, Episode 11, he was etc. etc. etc.; and/or why, for another instance, D’oh! doesn’t mean Oh, CRAP! exactly, as I certainly could have figured out on my own if I’d just done some simple research, even Wiki-freaking-pedia got that much right, dude!)
Anyway, again, at least I knew enough about the show to be surprised that no one else, using one of the online time-sink toys at hetemeel.com, had apparently thought of this:
[Working today on tomorrow’s post — my contribution to tomorrow’s Halloween Blogapalooza blog party, hosted by travel writer Angela Nickerson.
In the meantime, I thought you might find this useful. For, y’know, when They land and we have to, like, fight our way out of impending intergalactic apocalypse and stuff. Dude, these people know.]
There’s a particular category of human experience unlike any other. It’s got nothing to do with personality or intelligence; it crosses geographic and linguistic borders as if they didn’t exist (because they don’t, except in our minds and on the paper where we record the products of those faulty machines). Such an experience comes and goes so quickly that a single blink of the eye, the least distraction can cause us to miss it. It’s grounded in the senses, not in words — nor even in the heart, except in retrospect.
There’s really no way to sum up this category except via the facile phrase the perfect moment.
The work of the late, great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson came to be associated with the phrase “the decisive moment.” He adopted it as the title of his 1952 collection (all of which is online), having borrowed it from a seventeenth century Cardinal de Retz:
There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.
I’ve been considering a series of occasional posts on this subject for a couple of months now. The essence of what I hope to get at with these perfect-moment posts is embodied in a passage from Cartier-Bresson’s introduction to the great book:
…the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.
He was speaking of photography, of course, and therefore speaking of the visual sense. But we’re awash in sensory experiences of all kinds, tumbling through them as though bobbing and thrashing about in whitewater rapids. Every now and then, without conscious thought, we grab hold of a rock. For a fraction of a second, we’re completely engaged with it — the way the light darts over its wet surface, the feel of its grainy bumpy surface beneath our fingertips or against the palm of our hands, the background roar of water and its smell as it floods our nostrils and its taste in our screaming mouth, perhaps the sixth-sense fear of what will happen when we lose our hold on the rock…
Then we’re moving on, tugged away by the rush of events and voices, the sheer force of all the moments still blasting by. We never go back to that rock. But we never forget it, either.
Those are the perfect moments I’m going to be seeking out here.
I have always had a weird affinity for the cartoonist Jack Ziegler, whom I first encountered in The New Yorker. He’s not their most prolific contributor — these days, you might find his work once in every three or four issues. Time was, though, when he put in an appearance weekly. And for whatever reason, I found myself drawn (ho ho) to his eccentric view of modern civilization, to the point that I picked up a couple of his anthologies over the years.
His 1978 collection, Hamburger Madness, includes several fine depictions of writers’ dilemmas. The first, the title cartoon, isn’t really about writing per se. But the mind of its protagonist will be familiar to anyone who has been given three months, a month, a week, a few hours to finish a manuscript. Or, of course, has suddenly found himself in the throes of writing passionately, goosed by The Muse:
The second example, though, will really hit home.
