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ABe-sensei

This weekend I got to hear Yoshitoshi ABe, the creator/designer/contributor to some of my favorite anime series. While a lot of anime leans emotionally towards a tragic opera, ABe’s works are typically much more quiet and sad.

Speaking through a translator, he opened his presentation by talking about the eye. Here are my recollections of what he said (and this is all from memory):

“Does everyone here have a cell phone with a camera? Do you know how many megapixels its resolution is? On my iPhone, the resolution is 2 megapixels. The human eye has about 6 megapixels, but that’s RGB, so it’s about 2 megapixels for each color. And all the color is concentrated in the center of the eye.

“But when we see with the eye, we are not seeing reality. Our brain is taking all these bits of color and shape and combining them with our memory of what things look like. So for those of you in the back (of the auditorium), all you see is a dot, one pixels. I look like Mario. But your brain remembers what you’ve seen me look like, so you know I’m ABe.

“If you have time, do an experiment. Take three colored pencils, and hold them behind your back. Look straight ahead and slowly move one of the pencils into your peripheral vision. Your hand will look pink, because you remember it’s pink, but you will be confused as to the color of the pencil.

(ABe displays a pencil sketch on the screen of a young girl.)

“This is just lines on paper. But we see it as a face, perhaps because of some element, an eye. We remember what that looks like, and our brain creates a face. My drawings come out of memories I’ve had, and people come up to me and say that some of my drawings have drawn on memories within them, and I think that’s why.”

How to make fire

“Any one of a million things could fail and cause our complex civilization to collapse for an hour, for a day, or however long. That’s when you find out the extent to which you are reliant on technology and don’t even know it. That’s when you see that it’s so interdependent, that if you take one thing away, the whole thing falls down and leaves you with nothing.” - James Burke, Science Historian

As someone who lives in an urban, liberal area, I’m very concerned about the collapse of civilization, because if it does, this shit is going Lord of the Flies instantly. High-minded ideals are the first thing to go out the window, and in uptown Minneapolis that’s all we have. When people find out there’s not a lot of need for Photoshop CS3 skills and opinions on Fair Trade authentic hand-woven courier bags, things are going to get ugly.

The only thing we have going for us is a belief that we can all live together in peace, as rational human beings. Which, post-electricity, means “rampant cannibalism” once Lunds is looted and/or on fire.

I don’t own a gun, I don’t know how to make fire. I don’t know how to farm. If I had a gun, I’m probably capable of shooting and killing an animal, but have no idea how to clean and prepare it for eating.

The one nice thing is that since we’re talking about a financial collapse leading to an utter failure of civil law is that I don’t have to worry about losing all my investment. I have none.

Executive Koala

Hey, remember when you were going to make that movie about a six foot tall Koala who works in an office and gets involved in a murder?

Someone stole your idea.

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Executive Koala.

Never has the phrase “OMG”

Been moreĀ apropos.

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I have…

…very little time for people or books or things that try to mythologize or spiritualize the writing process. I refuse to believe the Universe “wants” the majority of what I see in the bookstore.

The secret of writing is this: you have to walk the whole way. Sometimes it’s uphill, sometimes its downhill, and most of the time it’s flat. And if you’re waiting for a fiery chariot to descend from above and carry you to the destination, you’re a fool, plain and simple.

bleh

Okay, I’ve fucked up the daily blogging thing, but I have a real good excuse!

More later.

films

Some films of note:

R-Sector: a South Korean horror flick that uses virtually no special effects in a Vietnam war tale of a unit sent to look for another unit that has vanished while investigating a haunted plain. Genuinely creepy, low budget without looking low budget. The only flaw in the film is the climax, which tries to hurriedly explain things, adding a veneer of logic to a really spooky ghost story.

The Girls Rebel Force of Competitive Swimmers: So bad it’s good, this Z-grade horror flick is like Buffy, if Buffy made no sense, featured gratuitous nudity, and was terrible.  This is truly a movie that has everything: juggling zombies, hypno-terrorism, and mouth-to-mouth soup resuscitation. Absolutely awful, and I recommend it highly.

CQ: Roman Coppola wrote and directed this film about films, something that the director’s he’s referencing (Fellini, Truffaut), waiting until their later years to do. That’s a weakness of the film: about a young man getting his start in the French film industry of the 60s, the message is that he hasn’t figured out what his message is. But the strong points, namely Coppola’s strong command of the camera and the campy fun of the film-within-a-film (a Barbarella-esque spy film) make it worth a recommendation.

Cinema Paradiso: As a comparison, it’s easy to see why this rememberance won so many awards: the breezy story of a young boy who falls in love with the world of his local movie house, and the film projectionist who begrudgingly let him in. Warm hearted, but I lost interest in the films latter last third.

Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End: I think it was Nathan Rabin of the AV Club who nailed the analysis of these films. The last two are overcomplicated, with two many plots overlapping and in some cases choking what could be a great romp, but watching them, you still get the sense that the director has a grip on what’s happening: that it may be a mess, but there is some commanding brain behind them.

Getting the hang of daily blogging

Back in the swing of things. Work, diet, and exercise helped me overcome the little d depression I had over the weekend. I’m working, getting things put together. Hell, I just put ink into my fountain pen (note: not a metaphor) and hand wrote a few ideas out.

Meanwhile, the AV Club sums up my thoughts on the more violent aspects of the RNC protests succinctly:

The anarchists were a tiny minority of the people downtown on Monday. And they were about as effective at creating genuine social change or fomenting a real revolution against capitalist oligarchy as a crowd of drunken basketball fans overturning cars in the wake of an NBA championship would be.

We have a futon now, which means that I can sit next to my wife and write comfortably, rather than cringe as 12 year old springs dig into my spinal column, for that is what the couch feasts on: it must drink deep from the juice of the spine!

Craziness

I’m going to try and blog every day this month.

So, today, thanks to the internet, I was able to direct my wife away from the rioting and macing that took place in the normally sedate St. Paul. I used the Twitter feeds of some of the organizers, who were astonishingly up to the minute about the positions of the police.

Following those feeds, and the other “indie” media, then switching to the mainsteam news channels was like watching a gazelle racing a rock. I’m not talking in terms of quality: the slant of both was obvious–I’m always acutely aware that both groups are presenting me with a version of events. That I am being sold a product, and that product is not Reality.

But going from an updated-on-the-ground Twitter feed to the NBC news reporter standing, literally, above it all, and telling me in a tut-tut voice things I knew six hours ago, it’s easy to feel patronized. And I did. But beyond that, it was just the slowness of this, the sense of having it filtered that was so crystal clear in this case.

Bill is in a funk

And not the good kind, where I’m driving a 70s Cadillac and wearing wide lapels, either. Which, if I consider that the good kind, should give you some kind of idea of how I feel.