Hero

Ezra reminds us that today is the 16th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The least we can all do is take a moment to remember this photo.

"That", as my grandfather would say, "that is such a man to deserve the name of it."

Light Blogging ...

... because, well ... I can't tell you. Let's just say I've been contacted by the Japanese government, and am even now assembling a crack team to aid me in my project. I will update when I can,

"The Core, bitches!!"

(Tip of the hat to Atrios)

Hydrogen Cars Come Right After the Jetpacks and Free Oral Sex

Linked here for future reference, and a the start of a new section in the sideboard -- HybridCenter.org

Wold Wold World

Thanks to our friends at Groovy Age of Horror, we have two spiffy links while I actually go about the job of writing for a living today.

Faceless is the very interesting retro -- in both art style and writing style -- comic adventure of Terry Sharp, 60's horror director and two-fisted Satanist smasher. Jolly good fun. If it continues you can count me in on a subscription.

Win Eckert not only has his Big Book of Wold Newton coming out (pre-order now), he also has a blog. I had no idea. The blog is a wee more streamlined than the main Wold Newton site, and so I find it a bit more entertaining/useful/useful for entertaining.

And from Gizmodo, we find that the Japanese are bringing hard-core porn to the PSP. This is an extension, of course, to the *2nd Law of Marketing: Porn Drives Technology.

Photography, magazine printing, home movie equipment both camera and projectors, the evolution of video cameras, VCR's, cable, the Interweb -- all advanced in tech and exploded into the mainstream as soon as their usefulness to getting porn from over there to over here became apparent. If it allowed you to make your own porn -- well then, gold mine. So I say, march on, merchants of filth! March on, into ... the FUTURE!


* The 1st Law of Marketing: Nail any two random pieces of wood together, into any random configuration, and some idiot, somewhere ... will buy it.

My Script Deal for a Proper Pub!

And, of course, there are days when I'm nothing but a pile of raging anger that I'm not in London hanging about with Mike and the Visible Monsters gang, drinking real beer and pitching dark little Doctor Who sidestories.

Always a pleasure to see what they're up to. Mike was one of the first to find the Kung Fu Monkey, go check him out.

"Toxic Spiritual Nature" ... and Those Desks Pinch

From our ever vigilant and adorably perma-perturbed pals at Big Brass Blog we discover that the Southern Baptist Convention is calling to remove Baptist kids from public schools and their "toxic spiritual Nature."

Similar to one that failed last year, this resolution also asks churches "to lovingly warn all of their members concerning the toxic spiritual nature of the government school system."

Grady Arnold, a pastor in Texas who also directs GetTheKidsOut.org, is submitting the measure along with David Scarbrough, minister of education at a Souther Baptist church in Tennessee.

"Southern Baptists have been playing the 'ostrich with its head in the sand' routine long enough," Arnold said. "The time is way overdue that we acknowledge the devastating effects public school is having on the faith of our children."

Arnold takes issue with Baptist leaders who argue that having their children in public schools is being "salt and light," a Christian influence and witness.

But Arnold points to the denomination's own data -- the SBC Council on Family Life Report of 2002 -- which says 88 percent of those Southern Baptist children after graduating from government high school are leaving the church.

The Arnold-Scarbrough Resolution: "(a) applauds Christians working in the government schools as missionaries, (b) calls on churches to warn their members of the devastating effects of sending their children to a totally secular institution for their education, (c) calls on churches to become aggressive and pro-active in starting Christian schools and in supporting homeschooling."

Now first off -- we know what the real issue here is. It's that 88% figure. How you gonna keep 'em down on the intellectual farm, once they've gone and read that other cultures are kinda interesting, science is our pal, and fags don't eat babies?

You'll note, interestingly, that that loss doesn't mean the 88% have stopped being Christians. I've met some of those "Ah, we'll be on our way, thank you" Baptists. We're friends. Some of them still call themselves Baptists and just go to a personally looser Church, some have drifted into the whole "generic vaguely Lutheran just not Papist" churches. But all are still practicing (and might I add, excellent living examples of) Christianity. They've just stopped practicing that particular brand of the Belief Line.

But that is not cool, as far as these boss guys are concerned. Because it doesn't matter that these exiles still have a deep and fulfilling relationship with God -- because being Christian to these religious Boss Tweeds means following their intepretation of the Word and no other. It's like a mini-papacy, but without the pointy hats and rather more smearily-mimeo'd newsletters. I doubt the irony is registering with them.

It's about control. That's what we're fighting here, folks, that's what the whole first half of the 21st Century is going to be about. It's not about worshipping God, it's about an angry 10% insisting other people believe the same way they do, and arguing with a straight face that they're being actively persecuted, thereby sucking in another 20% because one of the great secrets of human nature is that the one thing people want more than love, security, sex, chocolate or big-screen TV's is to feel hard done by.

Why? Because being hard done by is the shit. Feeling hard done by is the sweetest of drugs. If you're being persecuted -- it must mean you're doing the right thing, right? You get the mellow buzz of the moral high ground, but without arrogantly claiming it as your own. You get an instant, supportive community in a big dark scary world of such scope it may well literally be beyond rational human processing. When you are hard done by, you get purpose in a life where oitherwise, you'd have to find your own. And whe you ride that high, then no amount of logic, no pointing out that in actuality you and your beliefs are at a high point of popularity and influence for the last hundred years -- is going to pry that sweet crack-pipe of moral indignation from your hands.

I'm not saying that feeling hard done by is a sole diminion of the Religionistas. It is the nuke, people, the great vile vulgar key to the heart of all humanity, and can be seen in some form or another in every movement right or left, on every scale of social interaction from kindergarten class to nation-states. What we're seeing here is that one group is wielding the Ultimate Nullifier with amazing -- really, admirable -- precision.

To get back on the subject, I'm all for these folk pulling their kids from public school. I'm all for these communities trying to recreate entire social services and governmental structures on their own, and then dealing with the ramshackle results. Stop trying to teach intelligent design in my public school, teach it to your kids at home, and then enoy as they try to get jobs in the 21st Century. Let them form their little United States of Christ, and see how it fares in the world. I am genuinely all for that. *

Because if you have so little faith in your faith, so little belief in its strength and beauty and inner radiant truth that you don't believe it can deal with, oh, say the real world ... then exactly what the hell kind of religion are you following anyway?



*(On a personal, perhaps irrational, note I am firmly convinced that the United States population and infrastructure are now so huge, the country's essentially become ungovernable/untenable as a united country in the future. I derive no joy from the idea. But I do believe the tides of history will eventually splinter the nation. There's a comparison on how the Religious Right are the United States' Quebec, but that probably requires more thought than I have time for today.)

Half Life in Real Life

Alice at Wonderland links to what somebody who knows their rendering can do with their home-computer and some Half Life 2 models. That's a 3-D model from inside a COMPUTER GAME, people. Follow her link to get to the motherlode.

You ... you ... no, not you, the girl next to you ...

Ahh, THE FUTURE! (let that roll around, booming off the blogwalls for a moment) When any man's life can become a narrative for a teeming micro-audience! And it certainly doesn't hurt if he can write like a bastich.

Clublife -- the adventures of a New York City Bouncer.

Half-steps are fine

Yes, yes, I know, if I were truly wired, I'd have a PC/media center tied directly to the flatscreen in my living room. But that's not how the decor fo the living room plays out -- and in the meantime, the $80 RITECH Chinese we-don't-need-no-stinkin'-regions DVD player plays DivX and Mpeg4 files as data files straight off the DVD. Meaning I'm enjoying Doctor Who in damn fine quality on the old 32" Panasonic hardtop. Just the sound of that theme song fills me with unbridled glee.

My point? Sometimes, the half-step tech solve is what you need.

How Small a World?

First off, all the links in the Screenwriting section, particularly John August, are worth reading today. His is mostly about getting an agent/your first script, but one thing I'd like to focus on there is his reminder that your first script will not sell.

This is heartbreaking considering how much work went into it. And there are, of course, exceptions. But that script's job is to get you an agent and get you work. Period. I'm fifteen-odd paid movie scripts in, and my spec still sits on the shelf. It got me my meetings, and my first "why-not-it's-a-good-take-and-he's-cheap" assignment. But if there's one massive bit of engram rewriting I could do in every young writer's brain -- this is the long game. It's baseball, and you want to be Yastremski, hitting every day in the cage until your knuckles bleed. Then, "suddenly" you wake up five years later and you're writing $100 million dollar movies.

If, in some insane bit of luck, your script gets some attention, I firmly believe you need to go into those meetings selling yourself as the assignment guy. Tell the agents you're talking to that looking for rewrites. Let them understand they have a person here who knows how the business works, and is prepared to make the effort they're going to put into selling you pay off.

Of course, there's an art to the rewrite pitch, and I may be able to help you there -- that one goes up next week, after I catch up on my pages lost to this filthy flu.

Some of you may have singular artistic visions you wish to pursue. Trust me, it's far easier to pursue them once you've established working relationships with other film-making humans. By, say, working.

Oh, and the title of the post comes from CHUD's review today of Season 1 & 2 of MOONLIGHTING. The show came on my first year at McGill, in Montreal. Only one guy on the floor had a TV, and we'd cram in there to watch hockey -- but one other guy and I would bribe the dude with beer and candy to be able to watch Moonlighting. We were hooked once we'd stumbled across the pilot.

Dan, the other fan, was in his last year at McGill. He was a screenwriting major -- in a college with no screenwriting major. He essentially created it out of whole cloth, and conned the English Department into letting him be the only graduate. We became friends, and he's one of the reasons I becamse a writer, because I saw how you could do it by, well, just goddam writing and not letting anyone stop you.

I had the pleasure of reading his full script he wrote for his major. The name eludes me, but the plot of it involved a small town male babysitter; the genius 11 year-old girl who seduced him so he could be blackmailed into her insane plot of killing Santa Claus; and her narcoleptic younger brother. Every time the brother passed out, he whispered a few random words -- which you realized halfway through the script formed a completely separate but parallel storyline. It remains one of the funniest and most insanely inspired things I've read in close to twenty years.

Not yet thinking I would be leaving Physics, I lost track of Dan as soon as he graduated. He came to Hollywood. Years later, when I arrived, I asked about him.

It was Dan Waters. Dan, of course, wroter HEATHERS, and most peculiarly, BATMAN RETURNS. Which introduced the Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman. Which was so popular, they commissioned a spin-off movie. Dan Waters wrote the first draft of CATWOMAN back in 1993-ish.

And ten years later, I came on to rewrite it.

He'd left ten years earlier, claiming the movie was doomed. I should've called him ...

Mad Hot Ballroom

I cannot even pretend cynicism here.

I'm not sure when this documentary about 5th graders in New York entering a city-wide ballroom dance contest hits critical mass.

It starts when you meet the kids, and they talk about their lives and how they percieve the world. It's not quite when the pudgy kid gets picked over his more confident older brother, not quite when you realize that the two kids who aren't allowed by their religions to dance -- one Jewish and one Muslium -- are best friends while acting as DJ's. Not quite when the 11 year old girls talk about being harassed by drunk men, or begging their mom to leave their dads who cheat, and the decision they've made not to join the street culture. Not quite when you understand that the angelic boy speaks no English, but he's a hero and protected by his peers because he's born to dance.

It's not quite when you realize that the dance teacher who seems a little too driven cracks, and you understand that she's lost too many of her kids back into despair. Or when the New York Public School dance teachers break out into an impromptu dance-off/celebration in a basement in Brooklyn.

But somehow, by the time the final city-wide dance finals occur, the movie is a fat adrenaline needle of joy plunged straight into your chest.

I don't care where it's playing. I don't care how far you have to drive. Go. Now.

Singularity I

Charles Stross, who writes some very spiffy stuff, has put together a fascinatiing hypertext guide to the latest SF hotbutton. You can check out his:

Singularity: A Tough Guide to the Rapture of the Nerds

and speak knowledgeably about such things at your next rockin' science fiction/jello shots party.