En Garde!

It is spring and apparently it is rutting season among the Zebra doves.



And I do mean rutting. They do not seem to behave exactly like your common or garden pigeon. That is the females seem to be about just as oblivious as pigeons, that is one often seems what I can only assume are the males (its much harder to tell than with pigeons, the males do not have any iridescence like the pigeon) bobbing and bowing to the females cooing charmingly and the females wandering off in the usual manner leaving a rather deflated male behind. I have NEVER witnessed any intercourse between Zebra doves. I can only assume it occurs privately given the Hitchcockian quantities despite the vast population of feral cats in Honolulu and the two or three squabs I've seen huddling in the undergrowth which also leads me to assume they are ground nesting birds.

Recently however the males have begun rutting. Two birds begin bobbing and bowing to each other, cooing of course, in a matter indistinguishable from the more common amorous advances except in its mirrored reciprocation in the party of the second part, I assume another male. The two birds advance and retreat, bobbing and cooing the whole time, crabwise towards each other sometimes jumping into the air and scrabbling and eventually one flies away or they both seem to loose interest.

I could of course have the whole thing backwards. Perhaps the former behavior is aggressive and the latter amorous. I could look it up but I much prefer observation of the Zebra dove to fact. They're odd little birds and I am astonished they haven't been all eaten or run over by now.

"Mother Night!"

Customers... Some people will never be satisfied. You can shake Tinkerbell over that latte till her ass turns blue and the cup starts floating, you can drone on about "mother night" till your hearts content and send you little goblin minions out to butcher heard of unicorns, someone's gonna complain that they wanted that fairy dust latte iced or a free range organic unicorn burger.

We keep having people come in an complain that we carry meat. "You're a health food store! How can you call yourself a health food store if you carry MEAT!?"

It is free range organic meat, but apparently good little hippies don't think the rest of us should have healthy meat. Its veggies or processed crap, you're with us or against us!

Also carob is the devil.

Detail

I find it intriguing the way my brain seems to operate. While in lucid dream state my brain repeats dream sequences with increasing detail, like watching a film clip over and over noticing the details. This is also the way I A) learn my lines and B) writes sequences for my comic.

At least I'm consistant.

Scale

There is a wonderful and infinitely thrilling sense of vertigo that goes along with science. The mind boggling numbers, the impossible to comprehend tracks of space not only in the macro universe but also the micro is amazing. It scares the shit out of a lot of people who's reaction is to feel insignificant or immaterial. They seem to feel the vastness of space only serves to make them smaller. In the words of Richard Dawkins, "some people find this thought disturbing, I find the reality thrilling."

There was a wonderful exhibit at the natural history museum in Boston. Though it might have been the science museum, in fact it probably was. The exhibit consisted of a big room. In the center of the room was a giant globe, at least two stories high, ringed by a walk way. Set on displays along the walk way were plagues and objects, from the size of a grain of sand up through a beach ball. Each plaque read with a note on the comparative size of the object to the giant sphere if the object where A and the sphere B. For instance a pingpong ball might be labeled "if the sphere is jupiter this is the earth." From the macro to the micro, comparing the ball to a microbe and the sphere to a drop of water and such. I remember this being the most delightful exhibit in the museum as it allowed the mind to venture into that terrifying and thrilling realm of imaginary SCALE!

More thrilling even than the vastness of space or the constant interchange of atoms, I think, is the capacity for the human mind to comprehend and hold even a fraction of the information, or to infer, from almost nothing, things we can not even see! The capacity for the human mind to expostulate and imagine and THINK.

Anyway but...

Just watched UP, thank you Chris and Lindsey. I was genuinely surprised and pleased. It is nice to see Pixar going through it's growing stages.

Toy Story 3 though... why people!? Why!?

Potter Picture

In the appendices of his autobiography, Something Like an Autobiography Kurosawa Akira wrote concerning film lighting, "I think for example that the current method of lighting for color film is wrong. In order to bring out the colors, the entire frame is flooded with light. I always say the lighting should be treated as it is for black-and-white film, whether the colors are strong or not, so that the shadows come out right." I agree with him.

Cinematography goes through trends like any other artistic medium. We went through a terrible "blue phase" and a "slow motion action phase" (To be fair I do not believe that Picasso ever had a SMA phase in his work, oh well, art history's loss I suppose) And we are now only just struggling to free ourselves of the horrible "well they did it in LOTR so can we phase".

We seem to be finally coming to terms with SFx and CGI. And it seems that the most successful application of CGI is not by making the Fx more lifelike but making the film more picturelike.

I just finished watching the latest Harry Potter film. Now, say what you like about Harry Potter and the Harry Potter films (I myself only like the franchise passingly, sleep with a man who finds the concept of the films offensive and live with a woman who refuses even to read the fifth book) but one must admit that, while the scripts become briefer and briefer, and the characters less and less developed the cinematography for the last few films has been expetional.

Mr. Yates and his crew seem to take the black and white approach to lighting. Unlike many films that attempt to film a reality this film seemed to ackowledge that the difference between film and real life is that in film you can see the world however you like. You can change the colour and the mood with lighting, it is a medium to create a picture and a mood, not a documentary. And one of the things you can do is, by framing, lighting and choice of colour or lack there of create a piece of art that is beautiful in itself.

The SFx phase we're going through means that more and more film is being shot with half sets or on green screen. This craft has never really been perfected but it seems now that instead of attempting to hid it filmmakers are ackowledging it's presence in their picture by effecting the film just a little to make it seem more contiguous. This was ushered in by LOTR I believe.

This is not a negative thing, so long as the filmmaker is aware of it and makes sure the effect is consistant throughout the film even when the Fx shots are not there.

The result of proper application and an artistic eye is almost davinciesque (not a bunch of effeminate men with disturbingly curly hair) in its use of chiaroscuro. It's artisticly refreshing.

Unrolling

Evolution, from the Latin for the unrolling of a book.

How wonderfully elegant!

As you grow up there are fewer and fewer instances of that wonderful little expansive feeling when you realized the etymology of a word.

The more you know the bigger the world is!

It nice to know that feeling doesn't go away.