Okay, the title's a bit of a cheat, because I'm going to talk about a few films associated with the Middle East and Israel, rather than Turkey. But seeing as I was considering using "The Sheik of Araby", you should consider yourselves lucky. (If anyone is actually still reading this apart from Giffy. :)
But first, I want to point out that I chose not to try and squeeze another movie in today, despite finishing at the early hour of 9pm. Instead, I came home, with the intention of tidying up for a while and then going to bed early. I've managed the first one pretty well; I'll keep things short so I have a shot at the second. :)
***
The films - Blind Flight, Control Room, Checkpoint, Persons of Interest and Lost Embrace.
Blind Flight was a biopic focusing on Irish teacher Brian Keenan's experiences of dealing with being a hostage for more than five years, and his relationship with the English reporter John McCarthy who was his companion for more than four of them. I thought it was good - I enjoyed it, and it humanized his captors while still showing the brutality that this sort of situation can bring out in people. I strongly doubt that I'd do anywhere near as well in the same situation; I'm too inclined to "go along to get along", for a start.
This film provides an interesting contrast to both Persons of Interest and Checkpoint. In the first, simple interviews with people of Muslim faith or Middle-Eastern ancestry about the arrests and detentions that they and their families suffered was intercut with Ashcroft declaring that they would use any excuse to arrest people they suspected, including spitting on the streets or obscure local laws. In fact, in many of the cases mentioned, people were simply arrested without charges and put into solitary confinement (without even being questioned) for months on end. One hopes that they were never shared the risk Keenan ran of summary execution, but when you've had your other rights stripped away, I doubt you're feeling sure about anything. Ashcroft... reminds me of Imelda Marcos, in a way; the same mixture of absolute moral conviction, excellent public presentation, and underlying looniness. Scary stuff - especially since there was a bit at the very end showing how these things were still going on in 2003, when the film was made.
Checkpoint, on the other hand, inevitably reminded me of the classic Stanford Prisoner/Guard experiment. The different attitudes between the conscripts and the border police, the pointless ritual humilation of the Palestinians - I want to emphasise that the humiliations often weren't malicious, but they seemed... stupid. For example, guarding a point in a road in the middle of nowhere just inconveniences people travelling legitimately - anything that can be circumvented by having a terrorist get out of the car around the bend, jog cross-country, and meet up with the car further on is something not worth doing. Persons of Interest was fear turned stupid; Checkpoint showed, in many cases, that stupidity institutionalized. And many of the Israelis seemed to know this, and dealt with it in different ways - some worried that they would look bad on camera, some tried to point out the bad things that were happening that made these measures necessary, and some openly dehumanized their subjects. You heard, "Let them wait" a number of times - the power to choose the time when things will happen is actually quite a big deal.
Lost Embrace was a lot lighter than any of these. An Argentinian whose mother is a Polish Jew wants to escape the mall that has framed his life up to this point by getting a Polish passport and going to Europe. His father divorced his mother and left to fight for Israel in the Yom Kippur war, and he resents having been deserted. I should emphasise that the film is actually quite upbeat, despite the fact that the economy is in the toilet being one of the constants throughout the film. I'd say one of the main themes of the movie was people's tendency to see what they assume is there, and avoid asking questions because they'll probably hurt - and how important it is to be able to admit you were in the wrong. So maybe there is another way these films are linked, after all.
***
Picked up my international driver's permit, had my eyes checked, chose a pair of frames - I'm getting closer and closer to actually being ready to go overseas in a month's time. Maybe I'll even see my flatmates a bit more before then.
It's somewhat disheartening to have your mother threaten to hold your laundry hostage unless you tidy up the kitchen for your flatmates. (I feel I should explain why I was washing clothes at my parents house. I won't, but I feel I should. :) I guess this is a danger of letting your parents see your place of residence before you've had a chance to totally unpack.
Speaking of parents, I've had a pretty good crop at this festival. Morgue's mother and father are people that I only ever seem to see at festivals, now that he's away. It's not that much of a surprise, I guess, but they're nice people, so it seems a shame that I only see them once a year...
... except, of course, when Morgue decides to organize a spontaneous gathering in Courtney Place from the other side of the world. :)
I also saw and chatted with Emba's mum (though I might be hard-pressed to remember which film it was that I saw her at) - she seemed in good spirits. And I've bumped into the Hurstling and her parents on a number of occasions.
There are also people that I've met by sitting next to them at the festival and chatting - in all but one case, I been glad that I met them. And there are the ushers, who seem to be starting to recognise me; I actually made friends with one last year, and she's now floor manager for the Embassy. It's through this connection, by the way, that I discovered that they've asked whether they can have a theatre cat, and been told "no".
***
As the title suggests, I'm going to quickly go over a number of films that are at the weirder end of the spectrum: The Saddest Music In The World, Aaltra, A Page of Madness, Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space, Coffee and Cigarettes and The Five Obstructions.
Tamala was annoying. There were many, many instances where it was very nearly good. There were some good lines and images, but I'm afraid you don't get a laugh from me by having something cute-looking swear. And the audience seemed to have a very low standard when it comes to weird Japanese song lyrics - when you've heard the theme-song to Azumanga Daioh talking about imagination cake and the temptations of wheat, singing about a packed lunch lacks a certain zing.
I have mixed feelings about The Saddest Music In The World and Aaltra. I can see what they're trying to do, and I think that they did it quite well - but the kind of comedy that they're trying to do isn't really the kind I enjoy. I don't think that they're bad films; in fact, I'd say they were quite good films, well shot and well-made. (Saddest Music more so than Aaltra - the subtitles in the latter were unreadable at times, with white text over a grainy, highly exposed black-and-white filmstock.) And I think that Saddest Music evoked the films of the period very well - for example, Maria de Medeiros has a beautiful, waif-like face very evocative of early filmstars. But in the end, I simply failed to click with them.
On the other hand, I quite liked A Page of Madness, though I know that I was viewing it in quite a different way to the other films. It was, after all, a silent film made in Japan in the 1920s - I think I was prepared to work with it more than I would be for other, more modern films. I thought it worked quite well, and the music, though obviously not what the director would have envisioned, was evocative and helped me engage in the movie.
I also enjoyed Coffee and Cigarettes and Five Obstructions. C&C built on it's own internal gags well, and had many amusing bits; I didn't get into it initially, but by the end I enjoyed it. I did notice that the continuity guy wasn't on the job for the sketch with the woman reading the gun magazine - the pages that were shown in long shots were definitely different from the ones that we saw when we changed angles. (Okay, look, I notice books, all right? :)
Five Obstructions was an excellent study on how constraints can actually help the creative process - although it also showed that if you're good, you can also deal with, "Okay - do it with no constraints". I think that, in some ways, the 48-hour film competition scratches some of the same itches, though I doubt any team I know will flying out to Cuba to film. :) But the transition from, "What?!" to "Here, look at this!" was very fun to watch.
***
While I'm thinking about it - something that I didn't find exactly fun to watch was the Torrence Community Dance Group getting excited planning for their MTV award ceremony presentation in Spike Jonze Rarities. (These are the people in the video for "Praise You" by Fat Boy Slim.) They were so eager, and so oblivious to their limitations... I just dreading the point that their bubble would burst, and they'd realise that they just weren't that good. But they were happy, and excited, and they argued about whether making train gestures was a step backward from running around like an aeroplane. In a way, I can see how it's presumptuous of me to feel bad for them - after all, they're happy, the people watching them are happy, where's the harm? But I feel bad for them anyway. For similar reasons, I'm not as keen on Waiting For Guffman or Best In Show as other people I know.
The other parts were okay, but didn't really give me any new insight into what Spike Jonze does or how he does it.
***
I should point out that I've actually been glad to have gone to all the films I've seen. I'm slightly worried that I've been being too negative. Next time, I promise to talk about some of the films I've really enjoyed.
***
I have three sets of glasses frames to try out, and an appointment at 9am to have my eyes tested. I hope I get the chance to ask my flatmates their opinion tomorrow morning before they rush off to work. In light of this, I guess it's time to get to bed.
I've decided that I'm going to have to break up what I'm going to say about the movies I've seen into several different sections, to keep things manageable. I feel bad that I haven't yet had a chance to catch up on other people's blogs - on the other hand, I've spent a large chunk of this evening tracking down a copy of the Microsoft Truetype fonts so that my flatmates don't have to put up with the peculiar decisions that the browser was making regarding the most appropriate substitute for Times New Roman. However, before I begin the first of these filmic interludes, a short tale of woe from this morning...
***
I've been slightly worried about the car. I'd noticed that it sometimes had trouble starting - I thought that this was particularly true when I parked it facing down the hill and had a mostly-full tank, though I wasn't sure whether this was a real observation or just superstition. Thanks to a complicated set of circumstances (that I won't go into here, as they would serve no purpose save to illustrate my poor time-management skills), I ended up parking the car overnight on a very pronounced slope instead of the garage - and sure enough, the next day the car failed to start, and ran very roughly when I eventually got it going. I managed to get it into the garage - though it stalled several times, set off the smoke detector, and I ended up having to push it into position.
So it was with some trepidation that I set out this morning to take the car into the garage for a tune-up and to get the oil changed. I could feel the engine wanting to stall several times, and as the car is an automatic, revving the engine is somewhat complicated - as I came to the lights at the head of Willis St, I had to change into neutral and put the parking break on, rev, and then when the light changed, quickly switch back to drive and take the parking break off. So when I stalled in front of the lights on the corner of Webb and Taranaki St, I was less surprised than vaguely embarassed. After waving the cars past, and getting a passer-by to help me move my car onto the pavement, I stood behind the flashing hazard lights and waited 45 minutes or so for the AA man to appear.
It's surprising - or, if you find yourself in my position, alarming - how close to each other people are willing to throw these huge chunks of metal in order to avoid the risk of waiting through a change of lights. One of the reasons I had to stand outside the car was because it was simply to harrowing to sit through the near-misses; in fact, when the tow-truck came later, he was clipped by wing-mirrors not once, but twice while attaching the car. I suppose I should be grateful that people are probably more wary about clipping a Mercedes than a tow-truck.
Anyway, the AA mechanic initially wanted to fix the car sufficiently that I could drive it to the Berhampore garage. In the course of his investigation, I saw more of the insides of an engine than ever before - previously, I've been happy for it to be a black box that took random amounts of money from my wallet at petrol stations, and pulled my groceries, books or friends from one place to another with relatively little fuss. But now, spark-plugs were hauled out for inspection, the distributor cap was pulled off and tweaks were made to the size of the gap, I held pliers to block off a hose while the engine revved... all of this is more my brother Phillip's domain rather than mine, so I felt a bit out of place. Anyway, after an hour or so of puzzled tinkering, he discovered that the air filter had a puddle of petrol in it, which was why the engine kept on flooding; and after a bit more tinkering, he found that it was coming out of the motor, and that he could get it to run fine - if I didn't mind petrol dripping down inside the engine compartment. We agreed that this might not be a wonderful idea, and the tow-truck was summoned - driven, as it turned out, by the same chap who hauled my mini away when it met its untimely demise.
(For those more au fait with things mechanical: it seems that something was letting fuel into the pistons when the car was parked on a downward angle, and it was seeping past into the sump and mixing with the oil - this is where the petrol that was filling the air filter was coming from. Or at least, that's as close as I can remember the problem being explained to me - the AA guy said that he'd never seen it before.)
So my poor not-so-wee car is being nursed back to health - thankfully, I'm still at the festival for quite a while yet, so it should have plenty of time to recuperate. Unfortunately, it's meant that I've missed Come Drink With Me, which will puch my average number of movies for the festival a smidgen under five a day; it did give my mother and sister Catherine a chance to tease me about how little I've unpacked, though, so it wasn't a complete waste. :)
***
There are four movies I've seen in the festival that you might characterize as anti-"Coporate America": Supersize Me, The Corporation, The Yes Men and Go Further. The first focuses more on the fast-food industry, but plays to very similar themes as The Corporation - advertising is increasingly aimed at catching consumers while they're young, for example. But they take very different approaches - SM went to a school and showed small children flashcards, demonstrating that they could identify Ronald McDonald but not a traditional picture of Jesus Christ (though one child had a stab at it, and guessed it might be George W.Bush); The Corp., on the other hand, interviewed the author of a paper that examined what strategies children successfully used to get their parents to buy things - a study done for advertisers, in order to have more effective campaigns. (Nagging, unsurprisingly, topped the list of successful strategies.) I felt that they were both quite effective, not just in conveying a message, but giving the viewer reasons to take the message seriously.
Go Further, on the other hand, was somewhat disappointing. It documented a tour that Woody Harrelson did in a bus burning eco-fuel down the west coast of America. They brought along a smoking, meat-eating commentator to act as the "everyman", as well as Woody's yoga-instructor and raw-food chef - the "everyman" filled his role of being initially skeptical, and then spouting the "milk is full of blood and pus" line at every opportunity. This was the movie that I found most frustrating - while there were moments of insight into America, like the kids huffing monitor cleaner while chatting to the camera, it was obviously a feel-good movie for believers, rather than a serious attempt to inform anyone about anything; we saw a skeptic be converted, but we didn't see any real reason to be converted ourselves. I suppose it's very difficult to convey in a compelling way someone feeling better from a change of diet - but seeing that the everyman could do yoga at the end of the trip did not make me feel the slightest inclination to give up baked goods. :)
There were things that I felt let the other two I've mentioned down - SM was a little too anecdotal for my taste, for example. And The Corp. lamented the ongoing loss of commons in the world, but didn't refer to the classic tragedy of the commons problem at all, let alone suggest solutions - which gave (to me, at least) the solutions they talked about a superficial air. However, I don't see these things as fatal flaws; all documentaries have biases, and theirs were obvious from the outset. And compare the bald "blood and pus" assertions of Go Further with the interviews in The Corporation with the investigative journalists that tried to break the story about the misuse of growth hormones on dairy cows who were suppressed by the Fox Network in the most bumbling manner possible - one was the opportunity to gross people out and clown around, and the other was interesting and informative.
The Yes Men is slightly more tricky... I thought it was a good film, and I was engaged, but on the other hand - the whole "let's play on people's goodwill and show how dumb and hypocritical they are" seems to be something that's a popular tactic among activists in the States, but one that makes me intensely uncomfortable. I think that my problem with it might be that it feels like a way of attacking the people, rather than trying to solve the situation - sure, it's funny to dress up in a gold jump-suit with a huge phallus, or to blare Muzak at the patent-holder's house (as I seem to recall Michael Moore doing), but apart from solidifying the Us versus Them divide, I'm not sure what purpose it serves. And I don't find it surprising that they got no reaction from a hall full of international delegates, but did get one from a classroom full of American students - the students were in a situation where a certain amount of back and forth is expected, and there would be a certain amount of kudos in challenging an outrageous statement (after all, their teacher was friends with these guys, remember - he was unlikely to have a class where pupils were expected to come, take down notes, and leave in silence). But in an international conference, where you are among people you may have met for the first time that day... well, the point isn't to discover truth so much as to make contacts, so if someone says a bunch of outrageous stuff, where is the profit in challenging it? It might embaress the host, it would almost certainly alienate the organization, and you have no direct stake in what's being talked about - so you don't give them any questions, you plan to talk over how crazy it was with your friends afterwards, and you move on.
I also found myself out of synch with the laughter in the audience a number of times. There was one point where they had convinced a number of accountants in Australia that the WTO had decided to wind itself up; people found it hillarious that they had been taken in, but I found it terribly sad - the accountants they had tricked were elated, and agreed with many of the points that the Yes Men made about the unfairness of current WTO policies. These seemed like good people who wanted to do the right thing - if they had seemed like they had changed their tune for the sake of expedience, sure, chortle away, but if they were expressing relief that good was winning... well, to me that's tragedy, not comedy.
It did have the line "Sincerity is less fun than satire", which I thought was excellent; but I suspect it should be - Sincerity is less fun than satire to do.
***
It's a little later than I intended, and I've still got to get an international driver's license at some point, so I'm going to have to abandon my plan to check out anyone else's blogs or to cover any of the lighter (or at least, less contentious) movies, and get some sleep. More tomorrow, hopefully!
I now have the lovely, lovely internet back. How I have missed you, cable connection!
Unfortunately, I still haven't finished tidying my room, and in order to clear space for the cable guy, I had to pile a whole lot of junk on my bed. (And some boxes in Margie's room, which Margie was very understanding about.) Aaaand - I've got to get up early tomorrow, to take the car into the garage. And I messed about watching Homestar Runner and catching up on some webcomics I enjoy.
Darn it, and now I've just spent another twenty minutes doing it. Okay, I promise to have more interesting an insightful (or possibly just longer) notes on the Film Festival and some of the stuff I've seen at the Festival, but for the moment, I'll just mention Zatochi, a great samurai slapstick comedy that should be seen for the traditional Japanese tapdancing number if nothing else. Actually, I was chatting to someone I've met at the festival (a secondary-school teacher, I believe), and they mentioned that they'd travelled to Hawaii several times to judge band competitions, and that the Japanese groups would almost always have a cabaret number. Those of you who've spent time teaching in Japan - did you notice an unusual preponderance of song and dance numbers?
Oh, and Coffee and Cigarettes misses out "Cellphones" as one of the essential components of many of the shorts. It's been parodied in several places - early Angel springs to mind - but cell-phones make an enormous difference to the kinds of stories that are believable, and the ways you can alter the narrative flow. Which would be an excellent segue into One Missed Call, which I really enjoyed despite being, perhaps, a bit too predictable given his other films - but as I said, I need to clear my bed and go to sleep.
More tomorrow, I promise. :)
Just a really quick note to say I ain't dead yet, and am enjoying the films. De-Lovely was really, really good; it's probably the film I've enjoyed the most so far.
I would have had a lot more time to type, but got into a conversation with my sister in England, and did holiday planning instead. Now, off to have a shower (since the water was out in our street when I left), and on to the movies!
Oh, and I should be getting a cable modem on Monday, knock on wood.
No entry on Thursday because I started at 7:30am, finished at 8:50pm, and still didn't quite get everything done. No entries post-Thursday because I'm still without an Interweb connection at home. I nearly went to an internet cafe yesterday, but I figured that I had to pop to the parents place anyway, and I didn't have anything so important to say that it couldn't wait. ;)
(The keyboard I'm using is very annoying - every now and then I get four or five spaces where I only want one. Gah.)
***
My initial impressions of the films I've seen so far:
I thought Hero was very beautiful. I can see why people might compare it to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but I think it was a lot more accessible than that film, and in some ways cleverer. Lovely, lovely colour. As far as actual content goes - it does bring up a dilemma for me; I'd like to be able to say that I thought that peace doesn't justify an unjust ruler, but on the other hand I've got a big problem with harming or bringing harm to innocents... and in my day-to-day life, I'm aware that I tend to be more interested in getting on with people than seeking justice.
Rhythm Is It! was pretty cool, and I think that any of my teacher friends would have gotten a lot out of it. The way that the teachers from the working-class schools were prepared to excuse the kids' lack of progress (compared to the dance academy that some of the kids had visited), and the kids' responses - "No, the difference is that they're quiet, they listen and the want to do it." Obviously, it's a documentary, so who knows how the dynamics actually worked; but the impression was that the teachers didn't want to push the kids, either because they didn't want the kids to be disappointed when they failed, or they didn't want to be disappointed themselves...
Best of British was okay, but nothing outstanding. The Aardman short was funny, there were a few shorts that were annoying, and there was an interesting version of a British folk song that I wouldn't mind watching again.
Supersize Me was interesting, but not particularly challenging. I didn't realise how big the portions had become in America, but I don't tend to find the 'stunt' documentary style particularly compelling - this may be a reason I don't find Michael Moore as interesting as some people do. One thing I liked was that the documentary maker acknowledged that it was a bit of a stunt - that you weren't meant to eat McD's three times a day. And I thought that it was startling how quickly and how badly he was affected. It reminded me of the weight-gain experiement that some readers may remember from the stupid-stuff mailing list - I'll find a link to it when I have slightly more time.
Huh, speaking of time, it looks like I'm running out of it. I haven't even finished commenting on the films I saw the first day, let alone about the fact that I can hear parties in the flat across the driveway as clearly as if I had the window open in my bedroom (I may have to invest in some earplugs, and possibly learn the number of noise control :), or that there's a possibility that I'll be able to get a cable modem in 3-4 working days. So... hopefully, sometime in the near future updates will become a bit more regular.
In the meantime, I'm off to my eleventh through fifteenth films in three days. On the whole, I have to say I'm enjoying myself, though I'm a little worried about how much I'm spending on food in town. Then again, I've been tending to buy my lunch anyway, so it's not that big a change - and I'm hardly thinking about how much there's still to do at work at all. :)
Hope to see some of you at the festival.
I realise, reading yesterday's rant today, that I probably had very low blood sugar at the time. I've tried to avoid the tedious details of my work, on the grounds that very few people really care about FileMaker, and would much rather read about dumplings. On the other hand, very few dumplings play as large a role in my day-to-day job as FileMaker, so I'm afraid I'll have to beg your indulgence if it occasionally makes an appearance.
Played Nobilis with the usual suspects last night. Jenni helpfully pointed out that half the cast of Working South of the Border is living in my flat - more than half, if we recruit Sok. For those who don't know, WSotB is a roleplaying game that was meant to be somewhere between Due South and The Greatest American Hero, but as an ensemble show: the players are low-tier Canadian superheroes guarding the Canadian consulate in Chicago. It is run in a deliberately TV-style format - one session is an episode, we have a pre-credit sequence which usually sets up the story, a couple of ad breaks, recurring sets ("Hey, it's the warehouse again!"), and even a theme song ("Sweet Home, Chicago"). The tone is light comedy/drama, and the players (Giffy, Margie, Jenni and Jon T.) have been excellent at running with this. I've done two series - the first was six episodes, the second was twelve (including a double episode, a "the group as a rock band" episode, and a musical). Whether or not a third season gets green-lit will depend on how much spare time I get.
The Nobilis game was fun, as usual - everyone more than willing to get themselves in a whole heap of trouble. I got home about 10pm, and went almost straight to bed; I'm a bit tired at the moment, but I think I'll be recovered enough by the time the festival rolls around. Weirdly enough, I watched a doco about sleep deprivation and car accidents with Margie just before moving into the flat, which I'm putting down to coincidence rather than foreshadowing. :)
Speaking of foreshadowing, I was chatting to one of the Production people, and they seem enthusiastic about moving me down into Production land to make it easier for them to Set My Priorities. I think that, as noisy as the Systems room is, I'd get even less work done if I was that accessible to Production. Forcing them to climb a couple of flights of stairs is probably a fairly efficient filter of "this will only take you five minutes"-type requests. But then again, I'm sure I can find plenty of upsides to being around the production people. See? Not missing lunch turns me into a much more upbeat sort of person.
Speaking of getting things done, I've managed to get through about half of my "must do before leaving" list; since I've got a whole extra day to go, I'm sure everything will be fiiine, just fiiiine.
***
I'm not sure how I'll be handling the whole update issue once I finish work, given that I won't have a cable modem for quite some time. I guess I might ring up Paradise and arrange for a month's worth of dial-up access. Time to listen to some more of that snazzy on-hold light jazz. Woo, and hoo.
(At least it's not Vivaldi, eh, Ellen? :)
Does anyone else remember when they broadcast computer programs over the radio? Basically, you were meant to tune in at the appropriate time, record the transmission onto tape, and then play it back to the computer - it was a set of demo programs to accompany some sort of talk about computers and programming. This would have been back when I was in primary school, so I'd be unsurprised if it's not ringing any bells for anyone else. :)
***
Today has been a somewhat frustrating day. I made sure to arrive to work an hour and a half earlier than I usually do, to do some work on FileMaker before the coordinators and Editorial started - only to find that the Systems team were busy bouncing the core network switches. I still had enough time to do my main task, to remove the LotR and Van Helsing related records... only to find that one of the coordinators is working on LotR stuff, and will be for a couple of weeks. So, back into the databases to try and support that...
Also, I have been trying to return my cable modem and Saturn decoder to Telstra-Clear. I had directions, and (as it turns out) managed to find the right place - but they're in an area closed off by security guards, with big signs saying, "No public access", and no signs to indicate that a telecomunications company is hiding in the vicinity, so I was fooled into thinking that I had made a mistake. (As a side-note, I really don't enjoy trying to spot buildings while I'm driving in a busy multi-lane street - I much prefer paying attention to the road.) I acknowledge that it's entirely my fault; I should have gone up to the security guards and asked for directions. But as it was, I spent my lunchtime driving around the Stadium feeling somewhat stressed and frustrated.
Speaking of Telstra-Clear, one of my flatmates asked a builder working on the new units, and the flats are definitely wired for Saturn. So... I was going to try talking to someone when I dropped their bits and bobs off, but when that failed to happen, I resigned myself to sitting listening to hold music for thirty minutes while they "valued my call" and encouraged me to fax them or look at the website. When I finally got to a person, they were very helpful - they explained that the street number was listed as being not available for service, but they agreed that it was strange that they're be wired for Saturn if Telstra-Clear was going to refuse to connect to them. They arranged for a site inspection to confirm whether or not I'm allowed to give them money, which should take 7-10 working days, at which point they'll be able to say one way or the other whether we can get a connection via them.
(They apparently won't connect to apartments, but this is a town-house, so who knows which side of the fence they'll end up coming down on. Either way, it's another thing that seems to be a whole lot more complicated than it needs to be.)
Coupled with this, and the fact that I'm still feeling very tired despite getting to bed early both nights this week, is that there is still such a huge pile of work to do before I go on holiday, which people seem to be adding to every time I go downstairs. There's a certain theme going on there, I think, since I have a similar enormous pile of stuff to deal with in the flat, in terms of unpacking and clearing my mess out of the communal rooms - but that enormous pile is slightly less metaphorical.
I don't understand why everything suddenly got busy just before I'm about to go on holiday. Roll on Friday - but not too soon, since I've still got a whole lot of stuff to get done before I go. :p
Just in case anyone hasn't seen it, Hey, Hey, 16k is kind of catchy. Weird how there was a time there when you could get magazines with big source code listings, and writing your own game that looked similar to commercial ones was within the reach of the average bedroom coder... I guess that the whole thing of writing modpacks for first-person shooters and the like is tapping into the same motivation.
Moving into a flat without a cable modem made me realise - I use my computer very differently now than I did five years ago. I mean, I connected the machine to everything, and made sure it powered up, put on some music... and then realised I couldn't look at Homestar Runner, or check my mail, or... well, any of the stuff that I'm used to doing. And I found myself thinking, "Well, what use is a computer that's not connected?"
Of course, I had partially answered my own question - I was playing music at the time. And there's a printer and scanner, and a text editor, and some games. But not being able to look at IMDB or google at whim while the computer's on is a weird feeling, like... you know how there's often someone at work who you can ask random questions, and they can either answer you, or point you in the direction of an answer? Well, it feels like when that person's on holiday. :)
(I remember some of Ellen's friends being amazed and amused by our family, since there always seemed to be someone who could make an educated guess about the meaning of any word or phrase. I suspect that the fact there are so many people in our family helps our chances a bit.)
Along those lines - the first thing I was asked at work today was what herpetology was. This was a somewhat surreal way to start the day, though it did remind me of Bruce Norris, who some readers may remember as 'beerman' from the VUW BBS - he did genetics and biochemistry with me, and did his doctorate on the genetics of the tuatara. I run into him in Kilburnie every now and then.
***
Up until 2am on Friday and Saturday moving. I was going to be in at work on Sunday, but ended up popping back to the flat to pick the last dregs from the house, vaccuming the hall, and dealing with the bond. (And popping in to visit the family with yummy french-style bread from Le Moulin bakery, and visiting my former flatmate to drop off a bunch of her stuff.)
And unpacking. Much, much unpacking.
I'm so very, very glad that I arranged for movers. Moving a single bookshelf isn't too bad; moving five big bookshelves, three small bookshelves, a glass-fronted cabinet, a washing machine, a fridge, a lounge suite, a computer desk and a queen-size bed would have been a nightmare - especially since a number of these things wouldn't have fitted up the stairs, and had to come in via the balcony. (It reminded me of manuvering the matresses out of window in Todman St flat - except there wasn't the tension of "will we hit the power cables and electrocute ourselves" or "will Alistair's crazy knots actually support the weight" to add spice to the proceedings.)
There are still boxes and boxes of stuff sitting around - I'm a bit aprehensive about Giffy's reaction when she sees what I've done to her lovely flat - but the end is in sight. There's not quite as much storage space as I'd like, either; if I had the time, I'd pop a rack of shelves in the garage. And I've got to get a box of sticky labels to distinguish my Tupperware from other people's - an overabundance of Tupperware isn't a problem that I've had to deal with before. :) But on the whole, I think that the way downstairs is set up now is actually more cozy and comfortable than it was.
Oh, and I was given a box of chocolates by the next-door neighbors! I think that's a most auspicious beginning to my occupancy. :) One of our neighbors came to the door, asking whether anyone had jumper leads. I didn't, and she went on to the next flat; but Margie remembered that her father had given her a spare set, just in case. (Yes, Margie has no car, and does not, in fact, have a license - but her father is something of a car enthusiast, so it all makes some kind of sense.) I'd never used jumper cables as the jumpstartee, but the people I was helping were even more clueless than I was, and I seem to have picked something up from those times Mum or Dad has rescued me from the roadside when I'd left the van lights on - there was a bit of sparkage, but otherwise it was remarkably straight-forward. They were able to go to the supermarket, and they were able to get back as well - hence the box of chocolates.
Hmm. Thinking back, I don't know whether I'd brushed my hair, so I probably looked a bit mad-professor-ish. Oh well.
***
Only four more days until I start my holiday!! That means I should probably stay late tonight, so if I break things, I have three days to fix them. :)
My sister has helpfully told me what times of the week she's free, and I now know when Morgue & Cal are in Edinburg; I'm starting to get an idea of the general shape of my holiday, if not the details. One idea I'm toying with is to fly to Denmark from London near the beginning, and fly from Denmark to Edinburg. I guess it'll depend on how well Helen is feeling around that time.
I seem to have agreed to go into work on Sunday. On one hand, it's good, since I'll be able to get a lot of work done, and it means that the FileMaker changes that I want to get in before I go away can be completed, and I'll be able to charge for a five-day week next week, despite taking Sunday off. Nevertheless, on a more fundamental level, it kinda sucks.
***
Packing continues apace, as do my avoidance behaviours. Have got up to Weezer in the CDs, so on target to finish "mp3 backups" tonight; except there's still all the compilations, humour, and classical CDs to go. Hmm. I may end up having to compromise. Still, I've made a large dent in the task.
The DVDs and videos have gone to the new flat, as I realised that I had packed them in the monitor box, and my monitor is very heavy. There are large gentlemen with the truck coming over tomorrow morning; I'm paying them to deal with exactly this sort of thing for me, so into the box with its packing it will go. The computers I'll just pop in the back of the car.
The nonfiction is done - about 350 books in total, including humour. More depressing is the "unread fiction" category, clocking in at 210 books. Next up - fiction that has been read. Hopefully I'll get that done before I go to bed.
Major things to do still remaining: pack the kitchen things, clean out the fridge, pack up the computer, disconnect the washing machine, dismantle the stereo, finish packing the nonfiction books.
***
As part of looking up various things on the magical interweb, I came across palmbook librettos for the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. This may well be of interest only to me; but at least now I have something other than the default "Last of the Mohicans" on my Palm if I get trapped somewhere.
***
I've heard it proposed that in order to develop the scientific method, one needs monotheism - that you might get heuristic, rule of thumb development, but not the whole "hypothesis testing" thing. The argument goes, as I recall, that you need to have the idea that the universe is lawful - that there are universal rules that can be discovered - and that under either polythesism or animism, the world as seen as essentially disjoint, with no reason to expect the same things to hold everywhere.
It's an interesting idea, and while I'm not sure I agree with it, I'd like to get a better grasp on it. I don't suppose any readers are familiar with whoever put the idea forward, and can point me in the direction of their writings?
(I must admit, I find Jarrod Diamond's emphasis on geography in Guns, Germs and Steel more compelling - I'd heartily recommend it to anyone interested in why different cultures develop differently.)
Anyway, enough dilly-dallying - back to packing!
When you look at your tasty California sushi vegetable fried dumplings inside their wee plastic packaging and hear yourself think, "Hey, is that meant to be motion blur?", and then realise that it's condensation - that is the time when you realise that you were up too late packing boxes.
(I feel I should point out that I was thinking that it was, like, a single frame of dumplings in motion or something. It's not like I thought they were vibrating rapidly, for example - that would have been weird.)
One of the nice perks about Weta is that we get things like a guy with sushi coming once a week, bearing hot meals and teriaki beef sushi. There's also the free fruit & vegetables, and free coffee and tea, and occasionally random stuff, like packets of japanese noodles. When we're in the peak of production, I know that there are plenty of artists who never eat at home. (In fact, I had that happen at the end of Return of the King - at one point, I worked out how long it had been since I had opened the fridge, and got a bit nervous...)
In the normal course of things, I seem to cook more often than most of the people I work with. Of course, I'm counting chopping up and cooking an onion, garlic, mushrooms, zucchini and capsicum with one of those packet pastas - which is pretty much the tee-shirt and jeans of cookings, I think. (Which means just the packet pasta is... what, trackpants? And a frozen meat pie is equivalent to a stained singlet? Hmm, I don't think I want to pursue this analogy.)
Anyway, cooking is fun, and I like having the opportunity to occasionally do something bigger, like a roast. Plus I like the puzzle-solving aspect of using leftovers - lamb chops become lamb couscous with sultanas, cashews, mushrooms and onions, for example. Or roast beef becomes shepherd's pie, and the extra boiled potatoes from the shepherd's pie become leek and potato soup. The only problem with cooking during the week is that if I get home at 7:30-8:00pm, I may not eat until 9:00pm; but if it's just frying fish-cakes, hash browns and mushrooms, and microwaving frozen peas & corn, some broccolli and a chopped-up carrot... well, it doesn't take that long.
But sometimes I'll just zap a frozen meal. Or pop home to the parents.
Hopefully I'll get to cook for the flat now and then - it's always more satisfying to cook for someone else.
***
One of the excellent things about my move back to the Manuka mothership is that my new room has windows. Lots of windows. The name of the room is the Garret, because it's at the tippity-top of the building; there are windows on all but one wall, and what sun there is streams through my window when I forget to adjust the blinds. Obviously, this doesn't help on a day like yesterday, which was a miserable mix of downpour and drizzle - but when there's a clear blue day like today, it's very pleasant to let your eyes rest by staring out into the rolling green hills.
I dare say that getting the extra sunlight can't be hurting my mood any - working without windows for six months was pretty grim, especially now, when it's always dark by the time you leave. (In fact, the sun is just slipping behind the hill as I write this, and it's only quarter to four - it will be light for quite a while yet, but it won't be lovely and warm any more.) But even so, I'm looking forward to next Thursday. Ah, sweet holidays...
Talking to the I/O guys, it turns out that we did film stuff for Travellers and Magicians - no effects, purely "pull the images off this, and put it on that" sort of thing. The film industry is a lot smaller than you might think.
***
It's always a bit disheartening when you get to the end of the day, and realise that you haven't gotten around to dealing with something - in this case, disconnecting power and phone. I've been considering my options with Saturn and my cable modem, but as far as I can see, TelstraClear aren't very keen on you watching TV through them if you don't want a phoneline. I guess I'll have to think about switching to Sky.
It's weird to think back to the fanfare and hoopla that accompanied the launch of the third television channel. I mean, I even have faint memories of the regional news programme that TVNZ used to have, albeit only in terms of vague images of beige. And now... well, I haven't watched very much regular television recently, since my spare time has been limited, but there always seems to be something that I could be watching. (Admittedly, I have a problem where any moving images on a screen can mesmerise me for hours - but I don't think this can be a rare problem, since I've seen plenty of people watching E!...)
On the other hand, I don't have any programmes that I go out of my way to watch at the moment. There are some series that I enjoy when I manage to catch them - Scrubs and CSI, for example - but there's nothing that has made it worth working out how to use the timer record functions on my video. I suspect that the availability of DVDs and <cough> "other avenues" means that it doesn't feel like I have to seize the chance to catch them all. (Huh, wierd Pokemon resonance there.)
***
The countdown to my move continues apace. I have nearly packed all my nonfiction (about a dozen boxes or so), and expect to move onto fiction tonight. Except, I realise as I write this, that I haven't done my "unread non-fiction" pile yet. Bother - that's another two or three boxes.
At least I have a deadline that I'm working towards - that should motivate me to finish cleaning the house, if nothing else.
Popped over to the Girl's flat, as Jenni has secretly dubbed it, and checked out the spaces I'm going to be occupying. Yes, I agreed to move in without even looking at the room - I suppose this is a testament to how good a flatmate Giffy was, or how good I think the others are likely to be. It did make me realise that there will be a certain amount of ponderous car coreography, since Giffy will almost always leave for work and arrive home before me, and the double garage isn't side-by-side. Margie mentioned that it was a pity that I'm no longer in my Mini. (For those who don't know, I am now driving a big white 20-or-so year old Mercedes-Benz - originally my grandfather's, then my great-uncle's, then my grandfather's again. Apart from having to assure my workmates that I have not joined the Russian mafia, it's been great.)
Everything is going fairly smoothly.
***
At some point, I will have enough time to work out if it's possible to have a list of the most recent comments, to make it easier to spot if someone says something. Unfortunately, that will involve reading the documentation, and I don't see time opening up for that in the near future.
***
Investigated getting an international driver's license, and found out that it's remarkably easy - just bowl up to an AA center with a passport photo and $15, plus postage. Distressingly easy, in a way; if there were stringent criteria and an exam, then I'd feel that the tourists careening around NZ (or the UK, for that matter) had some idea of what they're doing. I suppose that this may be why people at work told tales of woe about how hard it was to get car insurance without a proper British driver's license.
Having the option to rent a car makes things more interesting - it puts Hay-on-Wye within striking distance, for example. And I think it would be interesting/neat to drive about in rural England for a bit. I wonder whether I can persuade my sister to take a field trip, and act as my interpreter. (Judging from my Newcastle experience, there's a good chance that I'd have more trouble understanding people in some parts of England than I did in Norway. Possibly vice-versa, as well.)
Of course, I'm not sure having more options is actually very helpful in my quest to decide what I'm going to do...
I find it weird when I run into a situations where I can't talk about things for either security reasons, or because of non-disclosure agreements. I mean, I was going to talk about the funny computer names that we've got scattered around Weta - but you can't, really, since you don't want to make a possible intruder's life any easier than you have to. So - pretend there was an interesting discussion about the problems and pitfalls of naming computers here. A reeeally interesting discussion, honest. :)
As an aside - chatting to an American at work, he was genuinely surprised to find out that NZ had a secret service. He said something like, "But who are you gonna spy on?" I guess it's a compliment, of a sort. Of course, as I understand it, the correct answer is - mostly ourselves and our allies. (After all, if the NSA gets our GCSB to spy on Americans, then they're not technically breaking the rules about not spying on their own citizens - they're just sharing info with their allies.)
***
I'm getting into Heathrow at 6:20am on Friday the 6th of August, and I'm leaving on Thursday, the 2nd of September at 6:25pm. That is the extent of my formal planning for my European trip.
There are several things I want to try to do:
There are a number of other things I'd like to do - I'd love to get to Cornwall, and Hay-on-Wye (in Wales), and I'd like to revisit Strasbourg. But I don't want to be in the position of travelling all the time, so I'll have to think very carefully about how I manage my travels.
Paul has helpfully pointed me at http://www.thetrainline.co.uk/ and http://www.qjump.co.uk/ for booking train tickets around Britain, but I'm wondering whether I might be better off trying my luck with some of the cheaper air options for the more far-flung parts of my trip. Is it worth thinking about flying up to Edinburgh?
***
Now that I'm not moving back to the parents, I'm going to have to make a deliberate attempt to get fitter before I go overseas - marble footrot is something that I'm not looking forward to. (Marble footrot, for those unfamiliar with the term, refers to the ache you get from traipsing through the hard stone halls of museums and galleries for days on end.) I'm pretty sure they frown on you bringing a canvas stool with you to the British Museum... I wonder what their policy is on stolen golf carts?
First things first - Firefly is great, as many people have said. I think I'm glad that I hadn't watched Buffy or Angel for a long time, so the overlapping actors had little or no effect for me. I think that the show benefits from having a proper budget; I'm not sure what it would have been like on the kind of money that made early Buffy, for example. The commentaries were interesting, not only for what they revealed (like the mimed control stick), but the contradicting stories about things like the Big Red Button. (Oh, as a public health warning, I feel I should say something about the English vocal actor commentaries on Angelic Layer. The first is interesting as an insight into the world of a voice actor in that industry; the second is interesting for the sensation of brain cells slowly melting away as you listen to it.)
I hope that they pull a Star Trek and make it back on the air.
***
It's a Sunday evening, and I'm getting busy with displacement behaviours related to packing up the flat. For example, I'm carefully going through my CD collection, and backing up into mp3 format everything that I've previously missed. This made some sense when I was intending to put my belongings into storage for six weeks - less so now, when I have accepted a place in Giffy and Margie's flat.
(What follows is me convincing myself that I've made the right decision - feel free to skip this part and move on to the next section.)
***
I think that seizing the opportunity to move into the flat is a good idea, long-term - I've enjoyed flatting with Giffy before, and I think that I'll enjoy flatting with the others. I'm slightly worried about whether my things will fit into the available space; it seems likely that I'll have to put at least some things into storage. I'm also aware that this isn't the most fiscally responsible course of action, especially when I'm about to enter a 6-week period where I'll be earnings-free, four weeks of which will be in Europe. (Plus provisional income tax is due soon, bah.)
On the other hand, the rent is significantly lower than my current flat. I don't have any outstanding debts to my name (excepting an overdue fee to Amalgamated Video, which my ex-flatmate Kate has sworn she'll pay at some point), I don't have any long-term commitments, and I've just had a pay-hike. I think some financial foolishness in the short term won't do me any harm.
(I feel I should point out that it's only a pay hike if I continue to work 50-hour weeks - if I cut back to a more reasonable 40-hours a week, it's a pay cut. But I think a pay cut is a small price to pay for the possibility of leaving work when it's light, or possibly even having a day off once a week.)
***
As another example of displacement behaviour - I'm making a list of the books I own. This is a sensible thing to do, from one perspective - it makes it less likely that I'll accidentally buy another copy of a book I already own while I'm overseas, and it makes the gaps in my collection more obvious. (I seem to have misplaced the first two Astro City collections, for example, which is very annoying; I wonder if I've lent them to someone?)
However, I'm also printing out lists of the books in boxes as I pack them - useful if they were going into storage, not so useful if I'm unpacking them in a week. And I've started with the non-fiction, which I was never likely to double-up on anyway. One upside is that I've been reminded of a number of books I've not thought about in a long while, including the red-covered reproduction of The Art of Kissing by Hugh Morris. I know that it was one of the Devon St crew that gave it to me, but I can't for the life of me remember which one... if someone remembers, please tell me. :)
Back to packing, I guess. I promise to do some speculating on my European Tour on Monday.
'Watt' is a British shortening of 'Walter', and (according to this genealogy website) the Latin form of the name is "Gualcherius", though this would normally only be used in the written form. And they ask what you can learn from roleplaying... ;)
***
As my first week back at the Manuka mothership draws to a close, I have mixed feelings about the transition. On one hand, I definitely feel under more pressure, since there's no-one I feel I can say, "Here, you look after this while I try and get this other thing done." And my new room is definitely a lot more distracting and noisy; and there hasn't been a significant reduction in the number of outstanding jobs that I'm somewhat responsible for.
On the other hand, I don't think I realised how much my previous workmate wore me down. I found him savagely negative, and he was quite vocal about the fact that he, for example, didn't distinguish between being nice to people and sucking up. I tended to do a lot of self-censorship around him, which given his "I don't care what other people think" attitude, seems somehow ironic. But now, instead of being the person he complains to about everything that's bugging him at the end of the day, I only have to deal with him in meetings, where he's on his best behaviour in front of the boss. (I'm aware that this doesn't seem consistent with the "don't care" thing; I'm not sure whether he's aware of that there's a clash.) I feel I should point out that he has a couple of young kids that he appears to care about a lot, and he can sometimes be funny - but I think I'll find it a lot easier to think of him fondly at this distance.
The other aspects of my new job seem pretty good too - the problems that I'm looking at seem slightly more managable, and while the limitations of FileMaker are no less frustrating, I feel in a better position to impliment work-arounds. I'm working more closely with the users, and by being in the same building, I can simply go down to their office and ask for clarification, or get them to step through the problem in front of me. I'm in an office that has not just windows, but sunlight - and I have blinds, so I can block the sun if it gets uncomfortably warm. And while it's somewhat inconvenient to be going away at this stage of production, I'm looking forward to having a break in the not-too-distant future.
And roll on the days when I get to do 40-hour weeks! ;)
***
Hitherby Dragons continues to give my brain conceptual contusions, from the army of dancing popes, to Morpheus and a rubber ducky, to a very special Care Bear story... and there are just little bits and pieces, such as:
See also "Neon Aquinas Evangelion," wherein Thomas Aquinas explores these issues and certain others from the perspective of a troubled Medieval adolescent.
Worth trawling the back entries for the occasional illuminating surprise.
As promised, I will answer some common questions about my Festival schedule. But first, I mentioned to Jenni a personality test that was a list of questions that you were meant to answer 'true' or 'false' to. They may be familiar to people who've skimmed the unix fortune file, for which I apologise. Web research suggests that they may be from the North Dakota Null-Hypothesis Brain Inventory.
I'm not convinced that answering this series of questions from the point of view of a fictional or role-playing character will necessarily give you a better insight into that character; but imagining their likely reaction to being given such a test can be pretty funny.
Anyway... the three questions.
Won't the different films just blur together?
No, I'm pretty sure that they won't - I definitely didn't find that last year, when I went to about 75 or so. For example, I'm going to six films on the first day - but that's a Chinese martial arts/historical epic, a German ballet/class commentary documentary, a collection of British short animated films, a doco on eating McDonalds for a month, the Che Guevara biopic and a Korean mystery/thriller. It should be pretty difficult to confuse any of those.
There were one or two instances last year where I found films blended together, so that I wouldn't be able to tell you whether I got something from one film or another - but those were documentaries that covered overlapping areas, such as The Weather Underground's coverage of, say, the Black Panthers, and BaadAsssss Cinema's coverage of the same. For the most part, they're distinct and distinctive - that saved me from going to the film that described itself as similar to Blissfully Yours. :)
Going to so many films is a waste of money.
Well, first off, that's not a question. And even if it were - so? It's not a waste of your money, after all. :)
It's interesting, in a way, that I've had a number of disapproving responses - as if it is somehow less morally worthy to spend money on going to films for a couple of weeks than doing something more "normal" with it, such as spending an equivalent amount at bars over a month, or buying car improvement kits, or spending over a hundred dollars on a haircut or a piece of clothing. Then again, if you spend $160 on a pair of pants, you've got a really nice pair of pants. :) I guess there's also the valid "don't spend any money on anything" or "don't spend money, since you're going to buy a house" points of view - but not spending money I have on things I'll enjoy has never appealed to me as a strategy. (Not spending money I don't have, on the other hand, is a sensible and worthy position, and why I have nothing on hire-purchase. :)
I guess I don't see going to a whole bunch of movies at once as being very much different from reading - if I'm enjoying a book, I'll quite happily read for hours and hours, and it's often actually hard to stop reading, and not go on until three in the morning. However, I also know there are some people who don't own a single novel, and may not read a book all year, so I'm aware that it's not the way everyone sees it.
There's also the "you won't enjoy them as much all together as you would spaced out over a long period of time" school of thought. There's a certain amount of validity in this argument - when I was first watching Buffy, for example, the quantity of enjoyment I gained from it might have been bigger if I rationed myself to one episode a week, allowing expectations to build, etc. But there are two flaws to this line of attack. The first is that the Festival is only running for two weeks, and while some of the films will come back, many will not - and even those that do, I'm unlikely to be able to organize myself to see, so I'd miss out on the possible enjoyment that they'd give me entirely. The second flaw is that I have not yet run out of enjoyable things, nor I do seem likely to in the forseeable future - 'fun' is not a commodity that I feel the need to carefully ration against some future happiness-drought. With my current backlog of things likely to be pleasant that I have not yet experienced, I'm prepared to suffer a little potential-enjoyment loss.
Do you have a spare Farenheit 9/11 ticket?
No. No, I do not. I am going to a Japanese silent movie from 1926 with a modern soundtrack. I think I'll probably go to Farenheit 9/11 when it gets wider release, but A Page of Madness isn't likely to make it back any time soon. I can see that there would be a lot to be said for seeing it with a Festival crowd; but on the other hand, I don't find Mr Moore's style as compelling as other people I know, so I'm not that desperate to see it.
***
And there we have it. Next up - thoughts about what Svend might do in Europe.