You Know What That's Worth?
Given a moment with nothing else to do (well, nothing else that has to be done at this exact minute,) I'm working on something I've wanted to do for a while, and haven't seen at another blog (not that I visit so many that I would know if someone's done it first - hey, Mena met Howard Dean. Go Mena. And go Howard.)
Basically, I'm brainstorming my life's album. Boiling my twenty-three years of existence down to one greatest hits album, the ultimate mix tape for my time on Earth. This paragraph is annoying me so I plan to end it NOW.
Anyway, I'm setting a few rules for the list. A.) Twelve songs. No more, no less. No bonus hidden tracks. 2.) No TV theme songs, because for me that would make things far too easy. Or complicated. (No, Avril will not be on the album.) I'm making one exception, but it was played on commercial radio, so I feel it's worth the violation (no, it's not the theme from Friends.) C.) Even if an artist was huge in my life, if no single song of his or hers was super important, that artist isn't making the list. Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder are two of my very favorites, but right now it appears neither will make the cut; I'm not going to choose one song to represent an artist. Meanwhile, if an artist has two songs that were big enough, that artist can be represented twice. D.) Less a rule than a guideline, I'm choosing songs that don't necessarily relate to me, but more songs that at one point were the centre of my musical taste, either when they were hot or at some other point when something clicked and I just couldn't go more than five minutes without hearing it (thank goodness I own an iPod.)
I'm previewing this to A.) get you PUMPED! for my Chaturbate list (what is it with the lists today, Peter? And cut out the Paul Buchman crap where you mix letters and numbers to be cute) and 2.) (*sigh*) to get people to make their own in advance, mostly to see how many people actually follow up on it either by posting the list on their own site or in my comments link below.
And once I post my list next week, I won't accept flames on it. Yes, Jimmy, that means you.
I Like It (The Wit System is DOWN)
iTunes is simply fabulous. It's not enough that the interface is spectacular, sorting all my songs by artist, title, album, or whatever feature I want instantly. No, it has to have the best search engine ever, with instant results as you type each letter. And it just HAD to level all my music so that the volume doesn't fluctuate as I go from song to song.
It even sorted the files for me on my hard drive. Instead of a long list of mp3s in my My Music folder, now everything is sorted by artist and album. My first reaction was horror, since I liked everything in one folder, but then again that was because with Winamp I kept that XP folder open and clicked on the song I wanted to play. In iTunes, I just use the app. So who cares how they're folded? I can still find anything I need to outside the program. Yay.
Only a couple of demerits: when you click on a new song, it simply starts; I can't find a crossfade option like Winamp had (I refused to upgrade from Winamp 2.x to Winamp 3.0 because it lacked the crossfade; that's how much I love it.) There's no system tray option, either, so it takes up valuable taskbar space (Winamp did as well, but you could reduce it to a small bar and keep it on top of all windows at the top of the screen, very convienent for changing Jasminelive songs. iTunes lacks this as well.) I know this isn't Apple's fault, but the iTunes music store (number of songs purchased so far: six) lacks a few favorites. I got Robert Palmer's "Didn't Mean To Turn You On," but the remix of "Every Kinda People" is absent, as is "Mercy Me." And Power Station? Robert's group is absent, meaning iTunes is not one of those Some that Like It Hot. A few other 80s singles are gone, too, but a wide selection of Bangles and Go-Gos makes a happy Peter (hmm, that could be taken the wrong way.) I can understand this; if the artist doesn't want to agree to Apple's terms, then there's nothing they can do about it, and no other legal downloading services are that much more complete. But it's still a negative.
On the other hand, I can buy old episodes of This American Life for $3.95/show and put them on my iPod without turning my entire paycheck over to Audible.com. Hmm.
Too Many
Okay, now I think I have an awesome idea for my NaNoWriMo story, so much so that I wish it was already November already [sic] so that I could get started. It's kind of silly: the whole thing is on the honor system, so I could write 25,000 words before November first, then write another 25,000 over he thirty days of the event and technically win. Only myself and my computer, Lorelai, would know the difference (well, and Rory if I use the laptop, which I certainly will. People laughing at the names of my computers will be dealt a severe blow to the right temple.) Still, I feel bad about starting early --- even though I did last year, writing about 2,000 words before November first. This year will be different.
I do plan to start character detail sheets and a brief outline, which I sort of did last year. "Sort of" means a few character names, ages and professions, along with an idea of what I wanted to happen for, oh, about a fifth of the novel. I only lacked, oh, a story arc and conclusion. Nothing major.
This year I even have a title. No, I'm not one of those people that puts the cart before the donkey [sic] --- as I talked about before, the original idea came from a screenplay I was kicking around in my head, and I adopted the title from that; it actually helped me create this new, somewhat offbeat idea that will work far better from a non-autobiographical standpoint. Or something interesting-sounding like that.
All I need is a little voice recorder to carry around in case I have ideas, but it might seem weird if I whip it out at school or work. In the middle of class, my suddenly saying out loud "maybe I should kill everyone off in a giant explosion" could cause some alarm. I'll just go with the standard NaNoWriMo drop-in of ninjas instead.
How to Deal
(Because there's no better way to kick off Oscar season with a review of...a Mandy Moore film. Minor spoilers, by the way, not that there's much to spoil.)
I have this idea about hell. There's a significant lack of fire and brimstone. In fact, it looks a lot like everyday reality. It just happens to suck. Big time. You go about your life, unaware that you've passed away and entered Satan's dominion, simply depressed at the fact that everything in your life is crumbing around you. It looks like nothing's changed, but everything that happens is an absolute disaster. Sex cams friends? Or just pregnant at seventeen. Mom's thinking of selling the house you grew up in. She won't ground you after you snuck out on New Year's Eve, though, seeing as how you broke your arm in that car accident.
If you're not quite following, ask Halley Martin. She can probably explain better than I can.
Or just watch "How to Deal," where Miss Martin (Mandy Moore) experiences all that and more: two weddings, a funeral, broken relationships, water breaking and a whole bunch of parties and late nights and a lot of junk that is supposed to add up to a trip through one year of a young lady's life, but instead leaves us with an incomplete picture of a girl that you can't be quite sure you even care about.
Halley's in her junior of high school, watching her parents divorce and her "hip" disc jockey father (Peter Gallagher's eyebrows) remarry. This proceeds the wedding of her sister to a man she doesn't approve of, and the impregnation of her seventeen-year-old best friend (Alexandra Holden,) who watches the 's father die of a heart failure before he even knew he was going to have a . Life at home seems hectic, with mother (Allison Janney) depressed over her broken marriage and sister (Mary Catherine Garrison) frantically planning the wedding. Given that we see Halley, an apparently intelligent, attractive and outgoing young lady with just one friend and few other acquaintances of note, perhaps something else is wrong as well. Perhaps it's poor screenwriting.
Along the way Macon (Trent Ford) shows up, a friend of the dead father-to-be. Macon pursues Halley, who gives in pretty easily, much more easily than you'd expect from someone preaching against the evils of love. They have amazing chemistry, or so we're led to believe by a montage of around-the-town tomfoolery that stands in place of actual character development. All we really see is Macon occasionally be moody or slightly witty or reference Star Wars (since if your film sucks the best way to point this out is to remind us of a film that doesn't) as he brushes the hair out of his eyes. What she sees in him we don't know, which would have made a good point: here we have the skeptical observer pointing out all the negative aspects of love and wondering why it exists in the first place, yet she quite easily falls victim to its spell. Too bad the film isn't smart enough to figure out how to follow that angle.
I'm reminded of the film "Where the Heart Is," the last time I've seen someone assaulted with so much drama in the space of an hour-and-a-half. There the victim was Natalie Portman, in much more danger as a young small-town southern single mother than she ever was as the wife of Darth Vader. Between her deadbeat boyfriend running off, giving birth in a Wal-Mart, watching her house be destroyed by a tornado, and finally her best friend's being raped, Portman raised the bar for being crapped on in a motion picture.
Moore comes close to matching Natalie here, or does she really? Unlike her predecessor she's overly conscious of her suffering, and in fact is to a certain extent creating it. As a result she's amazingly unlikable. No one is going to claim that watching her parents split up and her father remarry should be a joyous experience, but Halley wallows in the pain, wrapping it around her like a comfortable sweater. It's hard to imagine what her life was like before this period, but, expounding that love is horrible and why, oh why, would anyone ever want to get married?!, she sounds like an experienced spoil sport, not wanting to let anyone else have fun while she stands to the side jealous of their progress. Is her older sister's engagement really that awful? Should she deny her father the new love of his life, portrayed to us less as a young gold digger than someone who legitimately cares about her husband and her two new stepdaughters? By the end, Halley's angst has become annoying, as this character flies through the year not worried about college or the future, content to only experience life day-to-day and then wonder why she's not happy.
She probably is happy, though, just blind to the fact. We spend more than ninety minutes with Moore's character, who is in pretty much every scene in the movie, yet we really don't get to know her very well. We merely watch a series of events unfold, some realistic, some contrived (like meeting the family of her sister's fiancé,) and some simply stupid (Grandma loves pot? Okay, whatever.) To sum up Halley's life based only on those events would be to create an incomplete picture, one that looks pretty bad considering that nothing that happens is really based around her. She slinks through this movie looking for happiness, yet she judges her emotions based on what's happening that weekend during a period when, by coincidence, everyone but her has a major, life-changing event. The screenwriters denying us the big picture just as Halley denies herself a broad look at her life is the best thing "How to Deal" does, and considering that's probably an accident, we're left to deal with a film that can't tell us how to deal with much of anything.
Epilogue: If nothing else, this film is a perfect example of a trailer masking how poor a film is. The two-and-a-half minute preview portrays the film as a story of a strong young woman experience legitimate hardships during a tough portion of her life and triumphing over them. Too bad it's a complete lie.
Indy Would Have Thrown Me off the Zeppelin
So, the former governor of Vermont was in town last week.
This wouldn't usually be newsworthy for the St. Louis area, except, of course, the most recent former governor of the Green Mountain state is Dr. Howard Dean, also known as "the Screamer," "John Kerry's bitch" and sometimes even "candidate seeking the Democratic nomination for President of the United States." Sometimes.
It took him long enough. Leaving New Hampshire Tuesday night, John Kerry high-tailed it to the Show-Me State, eager to lap up the remnants of Dick Gephardt's campaign after St. Louis's representative in the House decided after a horrible loss in Iowa that maybe this wasn't going to be any different than the last time he ran for Commander in Chief and lost to Michael Dukakis. John Edwards, with as much of a chance of facing George W. Bush this November 2nd as Janet Jackson convincing twelve people that, yes, it was an accident, appeared in hip, happening, gottadrinkalatte University City Wednesday night, addressing supporters in the basement of Blueberry Hill, his southern drawl occupying the same rarified air usually reserved for Chuck Berry. Even the Reverend Al Sharpton (whose campaign has so much significance that even I, someone who pays WAY too much attention to this whole ordeal, took almost a minute...literally, close to sixty seconds...to remember his name) made an appearance, getting cheers such as "Go Al!" from the weary travelers wandering through Lambert International. (Perhaps Ed O'Neill was on the flight as well, shades of "The Naked Gun" and Leslie Nielsen/Weird Al Yankovic. Or not.)
But as of Thursday night, the Doctor was not yet in.
Finally, Friday morning KWMU, our local branch of the medium-redeeming operation that is National Public Radio, reported that, indeed, the former Democratic frontrunner would be making an appearance in Mound City. Two-fifteen at the History Museum in Forest Park, the newscaster reported, giving few other details.
At school, the online newspapers seemed to know little more. The Post-Dispatch barely mentioned the event, including it as the last few lines in a story about...Richard Gephardt. They billed it as a "town hall meeting on education," again giving the time as 2:15 and the location as the Missouri History Museum, currently home to a Lewis and Clark exhibit drawing an amazing amount of media attention considering there is an entire museum dedicated to the two travelers with just as much, if not more, on exhibit across the river where the two, you know, actually set sail from (unless Forest Park was under water in 1804, but I don't think that was the case. You're thinking of 1993.)
Half past noon saw cloudy skies, maybe ten degrees, and a crowd growing at the History Museum. The young, wide eyed, Dean-buttoned staffer at the front door greeted me with, "Hey! Here to see Dean or the Lewis and Clark Exhibit!" My response of, "Why not both?" was clearly a first as it took him a second to ponder that, perhaps, with just under two hours before the affair was set to begin, I might just have time to do both. No one ever accused St. Louis Democrats of coherent thought.
I didn't do both, mostly because the L&C; exhibit costs twelve dollars that I didn't feel like surrendering Friday afternoon, and I'll be back in a month or two anyway in much more of a historical mood. There was more of a political atmosphere that afternoon as I made my way from the St. Louis 1904-to-Present wing to the very crowded lobby around 1:30, waiting for admission to the room.
"Where will he be at?" "In the basement. We're letting people in at two." Those were all the instructions the greeter at the door had for me at 12:30, and if an hour later I hadn't become clearly convinced that this was the worst run affair since the Florida recount I'd believe it to be a lie. Even in this, a city that wouldn't elect a Republican if Jesus himself returned and took up the platform of the G.O.P. (and wore a #5 Cardinals jersey to boot,) the Dean staffers expected a "mild" turnout. Instead, over six hundred people showed up for an event scheduled for a room that, at best, seated four hundred. Math has never been my specialty, so you do it for me. See if you get the same result I did.
No one seemed to have any idea what was going on. Dean staffers milled about, but were camouflaged by the similarly-dressed visitors that displayed the same Dean for America buttons that marked the gentlemen and ladies running the event. No signs were posted, other than a crudely scribbled "Volunteer Sign-Up Here" that hung above a folding table along the right wall. There were lines: three or four of them, in fact, not pointing in any direction but comprised of similarly looking Dean supporters waiting around for admission, or instructions, or, as far as anyone could tell, Cardinals season tickets.
It was fifteen 'til one when a staffer finally spoke to the confused supporters clogging the small basement lobby. "The response has been greater than expected. If you have tickets, you will get in. If not, you need to be on the list in case there are empty seats." What if your name wasn't on the list? "You're not getting in. There's a closed caption room set up down the hall to the left."
I walked out of the History Museum at ten before two, passing young and old carrying their blue and white Dean signs with them out of the cold and into the realization that they were about to watch their candidate of choice on a giant screen. The Fox News truck parked outside, its cables propping open the east door of the lobby, promised me clips on a Fox Flash (or whatever their ninety seconds of news is called these days) later that evening.
I sincerely doubt at this point that Howard Dean will receive the Democratic nomination, and furthermore that he would defeat President Bush. If somehow this happens, and I wish it to, I at least hope he picks smarter people to help run the country than helped put together his visit to St. Louis. The Doctor might have some good ideas for the nation, but his campaign stop in Mound City was an affair to be forgotten.
Plotless
It's NaNoWriMo time again, meaning that even though I already have plenty to concern myself with in the month of November, we'll be adding 50,000 words to the plate.
I attempted the whole "write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days just for the hell of it" thing last year, fading at the midway point with only 10,109 words in the bag. Better than I thought. Since I have to constantly come up with other things to be depressed about, not finishing the novel for the second straight year sounds keen. So here we go.
I'm still trying to figure out a plot idea, plus characters, etc, though I'm throwing ideas out there as I watch the Cubs pull a LaRussa in Chicago tonight. I even have a title, I think, taken from a screenplay that's been floating through my head the past few months. A name will need to be changed, though, to protect the innocent and such, and I don't think I'll adopt the story of the screenplay itself. Or perhaps I will. Or not. You're too wishy washy, Charlie Brown.
They say "write about what you know" but everything I try is too personal. Last year's story (archived on my 2003 novel page) wasn't that personal, but it wasn't that interesting, either, which is why I dropped it when I did. The one idea that keeps surfacing (pretty much that of the screenplay, minus important stuff like plot progression) is basically my life, with school and work and various people and none of it really goes anywhere. I'd actually like to write something, for once, that has a con OH FUCK KERRY WOOD JUST HOMERED. Thank you. Anyway, that has a conclusion. Screw blogging, I'm watching the Cubs game.