movies

The rest is silence

I was well into my morning before I remembered to do my morning pages, having already had breakfast and decided to watch an episode of Quantum Leap. (On Netflix, where there are a lot of odd gaps in the episodes available.)

But I did them, and then a page of short story this evening, which has so far been the pattern, even if that single page does still feel awfully hard-earned at times.

In between, I’m sure I did some things. Watched an episode of The Muppet Show, helped my father change a light bulb on the stairs, went for a long walk. On which I listened to a pair of Studio 360 podcasts. I was particularly moved by Meehan Crist’s story about the fragility and unreliability of memory. (Which I’d actually listened to last night on the train home.) There’s something both wonderful and frightening about the idea of memory as this continuous game of telephone, in which we don’t remember things so much as the memory of the memory of the memory.

This evening, I watched A Dangerous Method, which is an odd (if often very good) almost non-movie. It’s about the early days of psychoanalysis and the rift between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the performances are great. Unsurprisingly, given the topic, it’s mostly just a lot of talking. The film is many things, but exciting is not close to being one of them. When it first came out, and I was still part of the behavioral sciences group at work, we joked about going to see it as a group. I’m kind of glad we didn’t, and not just for all the talk of sex and the occasional nudity. It would have been a weird movie to watch with my boss and co-workers. It was a weird enough movie to watch on my own.

Anyway, that was pretty much my day.

My back pages

This morning, I decided to try morning pages, a free-writing exercise I’ve heard talked up a few times. (I own a copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, though I’ve never read it.) I’ve been hesitant to try it before not so much because I doubt its usefulness or effectiveness but simply because it’s meant to be done first thing in the morning. And while three pages of stream of consciousness isn’t the most time-consuming thing in the world, I do cherish all those minutes of sleep in the morning.

But a time comes when you have to ask yourself, am I serious about getting better at this? How will am I to commit the time and effort to this?

That time, of course, is 11 am on a Sunday, but still. The real question will come on Tuesday, or even Wednesday, when I go back to my regular schedule, when I have to find a half an hour or more that I’d rather spend sleeping. Today, though, it went reasonably well. I don’t feel super-empowered to finish this short story I’ve been working on or anything, but I feel a little closer to it than I did before. Or at least not further away? I don’t know. It’s an exercise; it’s not supposed to be life-changing immediately. It’s not even necessarily meant to be life-changing. But it’s the sort of thing that, if you keep at it, is supposed to help the actual work of writing work better.

Like I said, I haven’t read the book, but I’m a big believer in anything that makes writers write more.

That in mind, I also wrote this, in my weekly writing group:

“Can we PLEASE stop pretending like there is any wisdom to be gained from psychopaths?” said Kendall. “Or like anything good will ever come from listening to that mad man?”

She was angry, Daniel knew, but more than that, she was tired, not thinking straight. He was tempted to skip ahead a few minutes, fast-forward through this argument, but there was no point; he was going to win it anyway. He could just wait her out, stare her down — he’d been perfecting a patented stare — and she’d break just from exhaustion. He didn’t feel good about it, and he knew it was going to come up later in their marriage counseling — he HAD skipped ahead, briefly, to that — but he also knew it was important that they listen to what Dr. Nefarious had to say.

“That’s not even his real name,” Kendall would say, had said, and often. “He stole that from some comic book in the ’70s. I can’t believe you’re going to trust him on this.”

“Just hear him out,” Daniel did say. “If he says he knows how to save the world, we have an obligation to let him talk.”

“He’s the one who DESTROYED the world, Daniel,” said Kendall. “Or have you forgotten? This is literally all just a game to him.”

Daniel waited. He stared. He knew she would break; she’d throw up her arms, maybe storm out of the room, and heaven knew he’d been sleeping on the couch tonight. But she’d let him interrogate Nefarious, find out what the mad doctor knew. Daniel was sure of it. Just a little bit of patience, and —

He skipped ahead. Just five minutes, but he was going to have a monster of a headache in the morning. The game environment wasn’t meant to be operated like this, wasn’t built for this kind of brute-force mental hacking. Kendall didn’t like it because she said it gave him an excuse to never listen, just zip past the parts he didn’t like and then —

“Did you even hear me?” Kendall said.

“What?” said Daniel, blinking back the bright stars of the headache already.

“You did it again, didn’t you?” Kendall said. She said. “Damn it, Daniel, I thought we talked about this. As long as we’re trapped in here, at the mercy of the game we need to — “

Two more minutes. The headache was worse, but in for a penny…

“Fine!” Kendall said. “Let the mad man talk. But when it all goes south, and he does whatever it is to make things worse, don’t come crying to me.”

She sighed again, but she didn’t storm out of the room, and in the end, it was Kendall who pulled the gag from Dr. Nefarious’ mouth while Daniel rubbed the pain from his eyes. “Okay, pal,” she said. “Spill it.”

Nefarious needed no encouragement — but then, that had been the man’s story from day one, hadn’t it? Back when they’d first been building the simulation, when Daniel and Kendall had just been a couple of engineers on the project, and back when that project had just been a fun, interactive game — MAYBE some military application but not the super-villainy Nefarious had apparently had in mind all along. Even back then, in monthly meetings or his daily address to the employees, Nefarious just wouldn’t shut up. He loved to hear the sound of his own voice.

In retrospect, it wasn’t so hard to believe he’d blown up the earth and trapped everyone’s consciousness inside the game. It was only hard to believe he hadn’t done it sooner.

“The system AI has become self-aware,” said Nefarious now. He was still tied to the chair, but Kendall had pulled the tape from his mouth. “But more than that, it is aging. And believe me, its emerging adulthood is the very worst thing that could happen to all of us now.”

“Tell us something we don’t know,” said Kendall.

“It also offers us an opportunity,” said Nefarious. “in its growth, it will be distracted, and the locks on the doors –”

Twenty minutes. No, thirty. Forty. An hour, then two. Something was wrong. Daniel could now see days, weeks, months zipping past. He was losing Kendall, Nefarious, the present moment. And, maybe more important, this time, Daniel wasn’t responsible for skipping himself ahead. Someone or something else was in control.

You can probably tell I’ve been replaying Portal a lot lately.

And then this evening, I watched We Bought a Zoo. Which is more likable than good, and which does feel like two movies at war with one another: serious family drama and family-friendly comedy in which monkeys slap their faces in exasperation. Which is a thing that actually happens in it. Is it wrong that I think I liked the movie more before it went to the zoo?

Anyway, not a bad day. The Sunday crossword kind of kicked my ass, but other than that it was pretty decent.

Saturday

Today was just kind of a day, you know. I was woken up, fairly early, by a barking dog in the hall outside my room. He acted like he needed to go outside, so I pulled on some pants and a coat and that’s where we went. But of course he didn’t have to go, and had just been out, not too long before, with my father. We came back inside, and I went back to sleep.

This evening, I watched (and did not much enjoy) Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I understand it has the author’s name on it for legal reasons, mostly, and it’s not the (many) differences between Stoker’s novel and Coppola’s movie that bother me. The book holds up rather well, but it’s not always exactly what I’d call cinematic. But the changes that Coppola introduces are not very good, and with the possible exception of Gary Oldman, the movie is a master class in terrible acting. Even Oldman doesn’t give a performance so much as a parade of constantly changing makeups. (It changes almost as often as Keanu Reeves’ accent.) It’s mostly the bad acting that undoes the film; without that, it would still be bad, ridiculously over the top, but in a much more enjoyable way. As it was, the film was considerably worse than I’d been led to expect.

And that was Saturday. Beyond that, some Portal 2 (when it isn’t crashing), some writing (when I’m not), and a walk, that’s about it.

Sunday

Last night, I watched Chronicle, which I generally enjoyed, even if one of its defining features — the “found footage” format — is also one of its weakest. Aesthetically, I think it works; as Scott Tobias notes, it often “seem[s] less like a movie than like the fantastical abruptly, artlessly colliding with the real world.” But on a practical level — who’s filming? why are they filming? still? — it’s a weak link in an otherwise quite entertaining, realistic take on superpowers. I’m a little tired of the shaky-cam, found-footage thing in general, which I think works better in horror anyway, but the other stuff makes Chronicle worthwhile.

Meanwhile, more fun household repair projects found me today: helping with the kitchen sink before I’d even had breakfast, then spending a couple of hours trying (and failing) to fix the garage door after dinner.

In between, I watched The Sting off and on — it’s long been a favorite, and I got the Blu-Ray for Christmas — and wrote this with my weekly group:

The Wizard was an engineering marvel. It was designed for interstellar travel before interstellar travel was cool. Even today, nobody’s quite sure how the Millenium Corporation did it, how they raised all the capital needed to build the damn thing, which even today, a decade later, would be the envy of almost any fleet out among the stars. If it hadn’t been destroyed along with the Earth, just a year after launch, I don’t doubt it would be flying still.

But you didn’t come here for a history lesson. You came here to hire our services, put us on your payroll. I have to promise you, though, what we do here, it doesn’t come cheap. And if we do it right, even you won’t remember hiring us to do it.

It’s called “temporal erasure,” or “history smudging.” You might also have heard it called “time squelching,” if you really have been doing your homework, like you say. But frankly, those folks are amateurs. It’s like using a hacksaw instead of a scalpel to cut out a cancer; the end result is the same, more or less, but there’s a whole lot more collateral damage with the hacksaw.

Chopping up the past too messily is the surest way to bring the time cops down on your ass. If you’ll pardon my French.

We use a scalpel here, with laser precision, and we get results. Results so good, nobody’s the wiser, not even the client.

For instance, you started off by asking me what I knew about the Wizard, one of the first ships launched from Old Earth. A great hulking beast of a ship — ugly too — but you don’t need to be sleek to be fast out in space, I guess; you don’t have to be aero to be dynamic. Massive, and massively expensive. And still under investigation. The circumstances of its destruction, the explosion in the core that took out the ship and the planet below it were suspicious enough that the System’s never quite closed the book.

In fact, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think they were just about to report on some kind of new evidence? An ten-year investigation, arrests possible, iminent…

Of course, they aren’t going to find any. Aren’t going to have found any…? Tenses can get complicated around here, as you might imagine. But not to worry, your Corporation is safe. I could ask you WHY you wanted to destroy your own ship — it really was an engineering marvel, nothing quite like it since — but that isn’t what you paid us for.

Tomorrow, I return my attention to this other short story.

All that and the kitchen sink

Today didn’t go exactly like I’d planned.

I tried to do some writing, although I didn’t get very far at all. I’m struggling with this short story, not least of all because it’s got a deadline attached to it. It’s not an unmissable deadline — it wouldn’t take a whole lot to rework the…oh, five and a half pages I’ve got so far — but I’d prefer not to miss it. I’d also like to have a whole story under my belt, something unpublished but of significant length that I can submit to the Online Writing Workshop. My brain just didn’t want to cooperate today.

Admittedly, it didn’t help that I downloaded Portal again and started playing it a little bit.

Or that this evening, the pipe to the dishwasher broke and we had to do a little impromptu plumbing. It’s not yet replaced completely — it was getting too late for that — but there’s always tomorrow. Oddly enough, we’d planned on doing some plumbing in the basement this morning, replacing the hoses to the washing machine. But we’d had no luck. (Seriously, it would not budge.) So I guess the universe decided, hey, let’s give them the handyman project they wanted and then some.

Now if the universe could just tell me how to finish this short story…