15 Days

My dad wrote a little short story a couple weeks ago and I thought it'd make a strong short script (and be really easy to adapt -- all I did was change the formatting!)

So I spent a couple hours re-formatting, showed it to him, and then sent it off to a couple places asking for short scripts. 15 days later and a director now wants to make it.

It took me five years! I'd call my dad a bastard, but I think that might backfire on me in some way.

5th State in 6 Years

Moving again! This will be the fifth state we've lived in over the course of six years.



As you might imagine, Jaru is ecstatic.

The Class of 1984

Fellow Glendale High School Alumni, Greg Rodriguez scored a book-pimping on the Colbert Report recently!



And does a good job! He also writes weekly op-eds that appear in the L.A. Times.

Another famous alumni of my year is Clark Peterson, one of the producers of the film Monster.

My Sister the Star

Vanessa gets coverage on the local news in L.A. -- she's the CSI dusting the door for fingerprints about halfway through the clip -- unfortunately, not Youtube so I can't embed the video.

CSI: Fullerton Strikes Again

Scanned

I went through all my old photos and digitized them over the weekend. This way I now have digital copies on hard drive and uploaded to the internet via the very convenient Picasa.

This also makes it easy for friends to go and download any copies of photos that interest them. I've got lots of photos from around 1999 --


The above and others are at my Rutgers 99 Album.


And I have a smaller collection of photos of my Los Angeles friends. Hate to say it folks, but Glendale High School was a hell of a lot more diverse than Rutgers Philosophy.

Most of the photos are made public, so if you want to look at any of the other galleries, feel free.

Evolution Out of Control

Craggy Air tagged me with a meme -- but he neglected to include the rules of the meme! Memes must have rules upon which natural selection can operate, otherwise the following might occur:


1) I have two eyes.
2) Tom Baker is Craggy Air's favorite Doctor Who.
3) Craggy Air spells favorite "favourite", but I translated so that my American friends would understand.
4)
5) Fnord.
6) If you trace all the way back to the original source of the meme you discover that you are supposed to list seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.

Rutgers Philosophy Flashbacks

Now that we're living high in Virginia we've got TV again -- including HBO.

Which means I can watch Flight of the Conchords -- a show about a pair of musicians from New Zealand who have a much harder time distinguishing e's from i's than Gary and perform music which I'm not quite sure would qualify as danmusic or not. BTW, HBO has the first epsiode available on the web via its site -- listen carefully for the Australia name check towards the last third.

Then, 90 minutes later, catch a show about surfing.

Virginia Update

We arrived in Lexington VA just under two weeks ago, and have been getting ourselves arranged. There's this 10-15 year long period of one's life where it seems you move once per year--and grow to loathe it. Eventually your hatred of moving exceeds your hatred of wherever you're currently located, and that makes it your home.

The photo was taken on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It's the most American national park since it is entirely designed around a highway. It's a gorgeous drive, but they've actually got quite a few gorgeous drives around here that don't even need national park level protection.

The theater in town has three screens. So please don't taunt me with the array of films you've seen recently. We just got Delta Farce in this week...

I've got a new advertising slogan: "In the stix? Go NetFlix!"

In addition to the moving, I've been busy for happier reasons too. I've received two screenwriting assignments. They'll both be low budget direct-to-DVD things, but, in addition to getting paid, one of them looks highly likely to go into production at the end of August or in September. Appropriately enough, my first produced film will be a family film, rated G or PG. For this I'm working off the director's outline--so that makes it a little less work and helps, since I've not worked in the genre. This director is also taking one of my others scripts around to try and get it made.

The other assignment is more in my mode, but less certain that it'll get produced.

And I've got to do some re-writes on a recent screenplay--so this'll keep me busy for the summer.

We're not getting back to nature, we're getting away from people

Jaru has received a tenure track offer from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA -- so we'll be heading there this summer.

As an object demonstration in supply and demand, the salary offered by Washington & Lee is 50% higher than the typical starting salary at colleges in California (such as the state college system), where the cost of living is probably twice as high. One of Jaru's friends was interviewed at a school and the people warned her that she might have a hard time surviving on the salary since the school was in the Silicon Valley.

We'll enjoy doing some hiking up in the woods and hills around the area for a while, but I suspect Jaru might get tired of the lack of ethnic food. One great research item is that a bunch of the houses in the area were built in 1892, so I'll get first hand experience with haunts!

San Francisco

Jaru and I got back from our San Francisco trip last night. Our formula was I watch Jaru eat indescribable food composed largely of material extruded from the earth and she watched me eat various kinds of pizza. Blondies Pizza, just south of Union square, was very tasty, with a thick crust that was crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. Don't ask me to describe Jaru's food.

Below are some photos easily uploaded with Picasa software and web albums provided by my Google overlords:

My favorite:

From San Francisco...

Jaru's Favorite:

From San Francisco...

Me, as Zombie:

From San Francisco...

Episode 2

My sister, Vanessa, had another serious case this week:

FULLERTON– A Fullerton man told police Sunday night that he killed his 4-year-old son, Fullerton police Lt. John Petropulos reported.

Gideon Walter Omondi, 35, walked into the Fullerton Police Department lobby at about 9:30 p.m. and told the desk clerk very matter-of-factly that he had killed his son. Officers questioned Omondi and sent police and fire units to his apartment at 3200 Palm Drive. -- O.C. Register

Again, her department told her that it had been over two years since the previous homicide, and now this. That's her in the photo, lower on the steps.

In the army, one of my roommates' parents were both in the police force. He said that working that job gave them a rather bleak view of humanity.

CSI: Fullerton

In more mixed news, my tiny sister, Vanessa, at the ripe age of 24, has recently started up her job working as a CSI and within the first month has to come across a case like this:

FULLERTON, Calif. - In Orange County, Fullerton police are investigating what appears to be the murder-suicide of a preteen girl and a 40-year-old man. -- KNBC-TV.

The Fullerton CSI unit is a civilian operation attached to the police department -- but Vanessa does get a badge. She says that murders aren't too common in her area, it had been two and a half years since the last one. Needless to say, the entire staff took the case very seriously -- they don't want to mess up the evidence on something like this.

Common of government work, despite being so young and having less than three weeks on the job, they threw her right in to help work the scene.

Comics, Hamster Poop, and Art

J'aime Wells offers a sharp, common sense introduction to some issues in the philosophy of art in this post. She knows something about this stuff, having worked with Professor Peter Kivy, one of the leading scholars in this field. Since people don't click on links, I'm quoting it all here:

Chapter Seven aims to define art, and anyone with a course in the philosophy of art is probably cringing just hearing that. You can see what he is thinking. One thing he wants to do in this book is to salvage the reputation of comics as an art form. So naturally, he thinks that he will define "art" and then show that comics fits within that definition. The problem being, of course, that hordes of philosophers of art have written hordes of books about their attempts to define art, and after Arthur Danto shot them all down, everyone pretty much gave up and started thinking about other questions for a while.

McCloud writes, "Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn't grow out of either of our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction." (Boldface is to approximate the look of the lettering in that panel.)

This is so clearly a hopeless definition, that I won't fill space listing counterexamples. Instead I'll take a quick break to go artistically clean out the hamster cages. Excuse me.

OK, I'm back. McCloud doesn't really mean what he just said anyway. He is haunted by the ghosts of aesthetic theories past. For example, R.G. Collingwood argued that (real) art was expression of emotion. Dwight MacDonald argued that (real) art was distinctive expression of the individual. There is a whole family of these theories, which McCloud seems to want to align himself with. Some of his Chapter Seven examples include a caveman blowing a raspberry, a bicycle messenger riding with "personal style," and an average person signing his name. These things are said to "have an element of art." That element is self-expression. McCloud also says that he does not believe in a dichotomy between Art and Not Art. So I think what he envisions is a continuum, ranging from acts with a small element of self expression (perhaps the signature) on one end, to acts that are almost all self expression on the other end, with no clear dividing line defining Art. This doesn't, of course, require the ridiculous definition of art that includes hamster cage cleaning. A theory with a continuum still allows one to say that one end of the line is definitely NOT art, even if one declines to say exactly where the cut-off is. There can be clear cases and unclear ones. There isn't THAT much self expression in cage cleaning, so it would fall on the low end of the spectrum, and he'd be free to say that my activity there was neither survival/reproduction-related NOR artistic.

McCloud's goal here is clearly to get the broadest possible definition of art, to cut off the rather boring discussions of "That's not art! Oh yes it is!" I have a lot of sympathy for that motivation. I'd just as soon include anything that wants to be art, myself. Unfortunately, the "art as expression" theories are completely barking up the wrong tree. Whatever the continuum is, it can't be about more vs. less self-expression.

For one thing, consider modernist or conceptual art. Some of it may involve emotive expression, but many pieces are purely intellectual, and not emotional at all. You could say that intellectual "self-expression" counts as art too, but then you'd need some way to separate conceptual art from the papers in academic journals. It seems highly implausible to count academic papers as art. But whatever separates them from conceptual art is the very thing that makes art art. No kind of self-expression can make that separation.

McCloud mixes this discussion up with considerations about the motives of the artist, which is another red herring. It's not the same red herring as in the above paragraph: you could make intellectual, nonemotive art for any motive. Lots of people believe that "pure" art has to be made from "pure" motives, like individual expression, and not for "dirty" motives like making money or getting famous. But this obsession with artistic purity only dates from the nineteenth century. Shakespeare wasn't concerned about it - he was aiming to please his audience, with jokes for the groundlings and flattery for the royalty. (Look at Henry V!) Velazquez made a living painting portraits of the royal family of Spain. Mozart composed on commission all the time. The notion of "selling out" would have made little sense to them. On the other hand, some of the crappiest teenage poetry is the most pure and sincere self expression. So "expression" neither defines art as opposed to non-art, nor defines good as opposed to bad art. Lots of art, good and bad, is characterized by self-expression. Some is not. That's all.

Writing Novels

A friend from grad school, Sarah, is currently going through the trials of getting her novels published, and she's discussing how that's working out in her blog.

It occurred to me that some people visiting here might be trying out fiction writing, or considering doing so in the future. If so, I think you'll find reading her blog informative since she's discussing the process as she goes along.

Sarah's near the epicenter of U.S. publishing in New York, so she blogs often about literary agents, editors, and the needs of book publishers, as well as writing seminars and genre writers' conventions -- all very informative if you're looking to take a stab at novel writing.

She recently bemoaned the rule of no simultaneous submissions to editors -- which always annoyed the bejeezus out of me. Though, given the quality of my first novel, that rule probably shielded me from receiving a mass of embarassingly vehement rejection letters.

Anyway, she also points out that, in general, the no simulataneous submissions rule does not apply to literary agents -- very useful to remember!

The Law Dude

Former flat-mate Dan Nazer has been proclaimed a:

"...surf law expert..." -- James McConvill in The Courier-Mail

This is due, in part, to his article titled The Tragicomedy of the Surfers' Commons in the Deakin Law Review. In true academic fashion, this has already sparked a debate in the comments section on Dan's blog.

You can't buy branding like that. I can already see late-night ads on local TV with THE LAW DUDE in Copperplate Gothic Bold.

Unfortunately, I don't think The Law Dude would be able to pull off the angry "I will FIGHT for YOU!" attitude that seems prevalent in local lawyers' advertising, nor the "You need to work with a lawyer who has earned your trust by being seen surrounded by faux-leather bound books on TV for many years" angle.

Byte: The Ragged Cat

One of the cats in our neighborhood, Byte (name discovered by Gary, who cleverly looked at the ID tag), has a voice usually reserved for those who've managed to puff down 40 unfiltered Camels a day for thirty years.

And, with a voice like that, I figured I should record it, digitize it, and put it on the internet as soon as possible because, quite frankly, wasn't sure how much time there'd be left. Here's a link to an MP3 of Byte chatting at us:

Byte's Melodic Meow

In addition to her charming meow, Byte drools -- she's the most drooliest cat I've ever seen -- even out-drooling many dogs. Though it's less drooly and more liquidy -- she just keeps up a constant drip of saliva, and when she shakes her head there's this little spray of water droplets.

FROM OUR SPONSERS
Normal cats and even screwed up little beasts like Byte don't just sit there and meow at your pleasure. You have to follow them around for a while with a recording device -- try out your cat-ese on them, and watch as they silently rub their cheeks against the handheld recorder's microphone.

So, to get the four minutes or so of recording down to a reasonable length (and keep the action hopping!!) I used this very nice freeware sound editing software, Audacity. It'll even export to MP3, wihch creates much smaller files than WAVs.

Cheers, Dan!

Jaru's College Cartoon!

Jaru told me earlier tonight that she did a little cartooning so I thought we'd scan it and put it on the web.

Enron and Mom

My mom and stepfather visited this weekend -- that means I drank more beer than usual. This part of Texas was heavily settled by Germans back in the 19th century so there are some nice beer houses around the area. But the best has to be Flying Saucer -- they've got 76 different kinds of beer on tap (check this pdf of their beer menu), from all around the world and from micro-breweries in the U.S. They have other locations too, but none in the northeast or west coast I'm afraid.

There's a couple theaters in town that play arty, foreign, indie, or documentary films. After seeing Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room I grew much fonder of the idea of a death penalty, or perhaps a torture-to-death penalty. For my Californian friends you ought to check this out and see how the rolling blackouts you suffered helped some CEOs receive 300 million dollar payouts.