a little test

testing a blogging application for my droid eris.

reboot

So class is done and I have no more wacky apocalyptical stuff to post.  I really have no need for this blog, though now that I'm on Blogger, I just don't want to get rid of it.  I've been on livejournal forever now (forever being about six or seven years) so I'm not sure that I'll suddenly jump ship over there and start those entries here ... but still.

Whatever this blog will become, it will be different than it's been.

world's end, a beginning.

Here's the beginning of my final project.

World's End, a play in one act.

Scene:  Hotel Bar.  DSR is a window, USR of window is a closed door.  These lead “outside”.  Across the back of the playing area is a wall.  On the USR corner of this wall is another doorway, double doors, perhaps french doors, leading back into the hotel lobby.  These doors are open.  There are stairs that deposit just beyond the wall, SL of the doorway.  The USL half of the stage is the bar, classic bar look with a dark wood bar top.  The wall behind the bar has some bottles, some glasses, some brand signs perhaps.  It should look like a functioning bar.  In front of the bar are five stools.  There are tree low round tables with two chairs at each table.  These tables are located in front of the bar.

There is a man, Mike, standing in front of the window looking out as a lovely golden orange light comes through.  We never see what causes this light and it is never identified in an absolute way.  Mike is holding a drink in one hand and his other is in his pocket.  He is dressed in dark pants and a button up shirt with the sleeves rolled up.  It looks like he is watching something.  Another man, Ray, comes down the steps.  He looks around before coming into the door.  He appears confused and disturbed, but not frantic.  He is wearing dark pants, a button up shirt, and a sport jacket.  He is carrying a satchel.  His dialogue begins before he enters the door.

Ray:  Hello?  Anyone . . . what the fuck?  Hello?  (Walks through door into the bar)  Hey!  Hi.  Pretty sure you’re the first person I’ve bumped into in . . . where is everybody?

Mike:  I think it’s just us right now.  (takes drink.  moves back toward bar.)

Ray:  Right now.  Right.  Hi.

Mike:  Hi.

Ray:  You work here?

Mike:  Manner of speaking.

Ray:  Where am I?  (looks out the window)

Mike:  Hotel.  Bar of said hotel actually.  Hotel bar.

Ray:  Can I get a drink?

Mike:  We shall do as the room implies.  What would you like?

Ray:  Old fashioned please.  With a twist--if a maraschino cherry gets near the glass I don’t know if I can be held responsible for my actions.

Mike:  A man who knows what he wants.

Ray:  People forget sometimes, how things are supposed to be.

Mike:  Or they were never properly taught to begin with.  Well, friend, I was taught well.

Ray:  Right.  What hotel?

Mike:  You don’t know?

Ray:  No.  Forgoing the rest of the potential embarrassment, I doubt I’d be standing here like a dumbass if I knew.

Mike:  Blunt.

Ray:  I apologize.  (moves to the bar.  takes one of the stools.)  It’s just--it’s like I was just suddenly here, you know?  In a room.  Maybe I took too many Ambien last night, or had a dozen drinks that I don’t recall.  All I know is that I’m here, in this bar talking to you and I don’t really know where here is.

Mike:  This happened to you before?

Ray:  Nope.  Pretty sure anyway--not enough time lost at any rate that I noticed it missing.

Mike:  World’s End.

Ray:  Excuse me?

Mike:  The name of the hotel, well inn actually.  World’s End.

Ray:  Of course it is.

Mike:  Here you go.  One old fashioned, with a twist.  Cherries be damned.

Ray:  Thanks.

Mike:  Not a problem.

Ray:  You look very familiar to me.  Do we know each other?

Mike:  Perhaps.  Though it is pretty unlikely.

Ray:  I feel like I’ve met you before.  I’m Ray.  (Hold out his hand).

Mike:  Mike.  (Shakes Ray’s hand).

Ray:  Where do you suppose everyone is?  This is really good.  (the drink.)

Mike:  Can’t really say.  Not a whole lot going on right now.

Ray:  It’s just so quiet.

Mike:  From the city?

Ray:  Yes.  Got that stink on me?

Mike:  Not at all.

Ray:  I’m not originally from--but now, yes.

Mike:  Few people are from the places that they are anymore.

Ray:  That almost made sense.

Mike:  Well, it’s a lot quieter here.  A little less lively.

Ray:  Off-season?

Mike:  Sort of.

Ray:  Well, that’s not always a bad thing.  Sometimes a little quiet is necessary.

Mike:  Sometimes.

Ray:  Jesus, that light is bright!  Can’t see anything out there.

Mike:  Would you like another?

Ray:  Gone already?  What time is it?

Mike:  It’s still early.  But not too early.

Ray:  I feel like I have an appointment.  Somewhere I need to be.

Mike:  When?

Ray:  Not really sure.

Mike:  A lot of that today, huh?

Ray:  It’s funny.  Or maybe it’s not.  I normally have a really good memory--names, dates, faces, random facts that no one else retains . . . but today--it’s like my brain took the last twelve hours or so off.  Feel like I’m in that old TV show.

Mike:  Which one?

final project part two

so i've been scribbling dialogue and hashing a story out of my concept.  still early stages.  considering turning it into a comic that is a few pages long.  did some sketches.  might do a painting to see if i like where it's going.  not quite sure yet.

final project

I'm pretty sure that I will be writing a play for my final project.  Most likely, it will be a one-act.  More details will follow as I get into the damn thing, but I've got a few pages of rough dialogue that I'm liking so far.

a life in pictures

It seems that comics have always been a part of my personal history.  I have been drawing as a long as I could hold a pencil and mixture of art and story that I found in comic books always appealed to me.  Like so many other things, my comic reading was a pool of the high and the low, the good and the bad, the resonant and the silly.  I came of age in the eighties with reprinted collections of Spider-man, Batman, Superman, Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein, Dracula,etc.  I didn't have a sense of continuity at that point and all were collections that I obtained from Superior's Public Library.  I read the pages of the same issues over and over again.  At some point I became aware that new stories were being printed and I'd pick them up from the grocery store magazine rack or, if I was lucky, we'd stop at Globe News and I'd get to go into the annex dedicated to comic books (both new issues and the back issues).  I still followed the same characters and added some based on what I could afford and what looked cool (there was a series called Solo Avengers that for a long time featured Hawkeye in a story in the first half and other characters in the second).  My brother and I both read G.I.-Joe for a long time too.  The artwork for the most part was the main draw for me, watching these stories unfold (if I just wanted to read a story I could go to any of the number of books that I owned--Point thrillers were big for me during elementary school, Stephen King and such filtered into my life during Junior High).

As I got older I thought I was getting more sophisticated in my tastes, but that was only marginally the case.  I was collecting.  I had my Death of Superman (#75 in black polybag)and my X-Men #1 (all 5 covers).  I was finding some cool stuff, but by this point it was the 1990s and Rob Liefield and Todd McFarlene pretty much had a stranglehold on style.  All new teams had at least one guy who looked like Wolverine and one who looked like a weird mash-up of Gambit and the Punisher.  There was a "hyper-realistic" style going on with lots of line shading and veins detailed into arms--but of course, most artists coming up were following either McFarlene's cartoonish proportions or Liefeld's complete lack of skill in drawing period.  During this time prices kept going up too.  I kept just justifying comics to myself during this period, but I still hadn't discovered any of the titles that I would later love and which would form a cornerstone of my support and continued belief in the form (believe it or not, I had not heard of Neil Gaiman at this point).  We're now in the mid-90's and one story-arch in my go to book kicked me out of comics for a lot of years:  Maximum Clonage in the Spider-man titles.  That was it.  I kept drawing and kept painting and held on to the nostalgic love of the characters, but I wouldn't buy another comic book for about eight years.

I graduated from college in 2002 and the comic book movies were in full swing with Spider-man and X-men getting into their sequel.  I rediscovered comics via graphic novels at Barnes and Noble.  I fell in love with Daredevil, Sandman, Alan Moore's stuff, and others.  I found the storytelling that I'd been looking for and not finding years earlier (regardless of how I wanted to believe that I had).  Now I keep up the best I can with what's new.  I read as much as I can, if not after I've purchased it, then in the bookstore.  I still draw.  I still paint.  I still love the high and the low.  And I still won't touch a book that Rob Liefeld had anything to do with--I have no idea how he has a career as a comics artist, he's awful!

the enemy is us

Zombies are definitely a catch all creature.  There is really no way to make them sexy or safe (I have seen them funny, but that comedy also involves some fear and disembowelment, so still--not safe), so they can stand for whatever fear we might have.  They are the other--standing in for racism, terrorism, consumerism, fear of disease ... the list does go on.  Most importantly thought, zombies are about us.  

There are a few things that I think are imperative to stories involving zombies:

1)  The survivors, the humans, are trapped in some way and forced to band together--whether they like it or not.  Being trapped isn't limited to being stuck in a single location like a farmhouse or a mall, it might also being trapped outside where the danger is omnipresent.  The key here is the being forced to rely on others, people who may be familiar or who may be strangers, to survive.  This is where we get to the juice in most zombie pictures because this is where we see both human frailties and nobility butt up against each other--pettiness becomes obvious, small details tend to carry greater resonance, and each moment could be the last one.  We see humanity in a microcosm and we see how humanity can fail and succeed depending on what elements of society we hold onto and what elements we abandon.

2)  Zombies are not only a fear of things that are different from us, but also of us.  Zombies are us.  They are family, friends and neighbors.  There is the constant threat that insufficient diligence or a momentary lack of focus can cause you to become one of them.  With other creatures such as vampires and werewolves, there is a continued consciousness:  you can still retain parts of you, even if part of you is now also a monster.  Vampires have an insatiable hunger, but they still retain personality.  Werewolves change into a beast, but at some point they still change back.  There is a duality in these creatures.  With zombies, it's an empty afterlife:  you are condemned to wander about without consciousness or a soul and eating other people without the promise of life after death, or even a peaceful nothingness after death because you are aware of what your body will be doing after you lose control of it.  In addition of the fear of what happens to you, it is also the continued pain of the multiple deaths of the people that you know.  You are now faced with their death, their undeath where they are attacking you, and the prospect of killing the body of someone you may have once cared about.

3)  There is the threat of plague.  Zombie origins (since Romero reinvented the creature) are deliberately vague.  No one is ever certain why the undead are suddenly everywhere, shambling or in some cases running after you.  So there is the threat of this disease of zombie-ism spreading unchecked without a cure.  This element made it easy for people to consider the "28 Days Later ..." and "28 Weeks Later ..." movies as zombie movies, even though these movies are straight up plague/ disease movies.  The metaphor still hangs comfortably around the zombie's shoulders--it is something that you can catch through a bite, through blood, through saliva.  That the zombie is decaying is also a signifier of disease and plague, the body is falling apart, and as I stated in my second point, it's a body that might be recognizable.

4) Finally, there is the fear of the other.  In "Night of the Living Dead" it starts with a few zombies around.  It seems like the threat is something that can be dealt with, it's small and manageable, but then quickly the threat multiplies.  They may be slow moving and without reasoning capabilities, but they are a legion.  They can't be easily killed because the bodies are already dead, and the numbers are suffocating.  The other--be it a person of another race, religion, or government--comes into the community.  One person is not a threat, if the community doesn't like what the other is presenting, the other can be dealt with, but as more arrive, suddenly the other has the majority and you are the one who is threatened.

So yeah, zombies are a catch all for what frightens us.  It's about situations getting quickly and completely out of our control.  It is our culture mirrored in a grotesque way and it is the worst of us magnified--on both the sides of the undead and the survivors.  Notice in any zombie movie, the remaining humans are always undone by themselves--greed, pettiness, carelessness, despair.  Zombies are often just the surrounding context for these human dramas to play out.

reclamation

Somewhere beneath the languid water thin strands of transparent nylon strands hooked to rocks and fallen trees still slowly wave to the sky with the steady undertow.  Fish shuttle past these artificial flanges that to a naked eye blend in to the surroundings, but in actuality remains firmly not part of the natural world around it.  It is other.  It is bound by the forces that surround it, bound to its environment, but not one with it.

The lakes surface denies the universe beneath it, dark waters ripple with light; the sky and the shoreline reflected in its glassy mirror and shattered with every movement of the liquid.  The trees that surround it loom, each individual blurring into the one next to it and the one next to that one until they cease to be trees and become forest.  They are a whole made up of individuals, dense and protective.  Like the mirror of the lake's surface, they are a shield to the world of the forest.  Dark and mysterious, after passing only meters inside their maze there is nothing else but maze:  more forest, more mystery, more shield.

With no movement, no sound, sounds begin to multiply.  Twigs snap.  Leaves rustle.  A bird hops along a branch, another flies through the air.  A chipmunk scampers along the ground, pausing, looking up and around, scampers some more, stops and sniffs the air, its eyes dart around some more.  It picks up an acorn that has fallen from a tree.  Off it runs, under one fallen branch and up another.  It darts down the side of a tree and into a bunch of leafy brush and then it's gone.  The sound and the movement disappear, but all is not silent.  Things fall and things are picked up again.

Further still into the forest, through the trees, there is a gentle slope of a hill.  The terrain is similar but declining into a valley, hidden in the shield.  The birds flying above can see it, they can map its terrain.  The birds know the curve it takes after 300 meters, they know where it widens and narrows, and they know where it is grassy and bare and where it becomes so thick with trees that they cannot see the ground.  Following the the bend 300 meters along a crick begins.  The water doesn't actual begin flowing from there, but that is the first place in the valley where it flows above ground.  It will widen and flow into the lake on one side and emerge from aquifers underground on the other.  The lake and the aquifers are connected by some porous rock underground, so the cycle of the water continues endlessly, constantly flowing into itself.

Climbing up the hill and venturing deeper into the forest, the trees again break wide open into a field.  The field is covered in tall grass that waves gently in the breeze, drifting to and fro, rippling like the water in the lake.  The lake of grass is equally deceptive, masking wildlife under its soft surface.  Mice dart along the dirt floor, collecting food and bits of this and that for shelters.  Snakes slither along the same dirt floor seeking out the mice.  Deer leap through the tall strands of green and gold fingers, traveling from one side of the field to the other.

Following the deer path back into the forest and zigzagging through the trees.  It is narrow and periodically along its winding, well worn track are tiny dark pellets and followed further are grasses and leaves beat flat to the ground where the deer has bedded down.  In another time of the year there would be scratches and worn patches on the sides of trees where the bucks have rutted, rubbing antlers against wood.  Sometimes antlers against antlers as well.  A wolf, with other wolves, sniff along this path.  The track the deer, the deer flees and fights and eventually becomes food for the low grey beasts patrolling the forest floor.  The wolves tear the flesh away from the carcass, eating fast and then moving away from the group to vomit up the quickly obtained meat to enjoy the dinner slower this second time.

Past this dinner site, through another thicket of trees is another hill.  On the side of the hill is a cave, torn out of the dirt and rock by animals, water, and time.  In this cave is a bear and her cubs.  Past the cave is more trees, more forest shield.  Meters pass, kilometers, and then a break in the trees, a split in the shield.  Pavement runs, slicing the forest with it's blacktop surface streaked with white and yellow lines, faded by time.  The blacktop is pitted and cracked, rain slowly working at it, cutting it like it cut the forest.

All along the blacktop are metal posts.  The posts are evenly spaced with signs on them.  Following the posts, the signs eventually terminate in a destination; buildings, towns, cities.  Like the nylon strands, these are rooted in the ground.  Like the artificial flanges these are not part of nature.  Water works at them from above and below.  The ground sprouts grass and trees, working from below.  Eventually they will crumble.  Perhaps they won't disappear, but the forest will shield them too.  The grasses will cover them.  The water will hide them.

The Universe and Everything

Okay, so this is how I view the concept of Anthropic Principle:

Imagine that the universe is a pond.  That pond developed over the entire course of history, however long history actually is.  Every atom, every molecule, every little bit of matter that makes up that pond is the result of the combination and destruction of every atom and every molecule that preceded it in the entire course of history, however long history actually is.  Furthermore, that pond is determined by the results of every atom and every molecule that bounced off, dented, and chipped another molecule or atom over the course of history.  Humanity is a speck of sand that is dropped into that pond.  Humanity developed, like that pond, over the course of interactions throughout history.  However long history is.  When that speck of sand interacts with the rest of the pond, both are changed by the interaction.  Therefore, there is no way to view the universe, as a person, without taking into account that the universe is exactly the way that it is because we are here and would be different if we were not.  We are not responsible for this form, it just is because it is and we cannot view it without taking into account us.

Scientists deal with this on a less speculative form in any sort of field study, be it with other human cultures or various species of animals.  It is impossible to observe without someway altering the habitat that you are observing, because you're very presence has already altered that habitat.  The only thing scientists can do is minimize the amount that they are altering the environment as much as they can, whether by camouflage or distance, to preserve the data collected in the inquiry.

To go more esoteric and philosophical, it's like Ethan Hawke's character in Before Sunrise observes (paraphrased):  There's nowhere I can go that I won't be, nothing I can say that I haven't said, nothing that I can look at that I can't see ... the only constant in every situation that I've ever been in is me.

The universe, the planet, the restaurant at the end of the universe ... none of this stuff needs humans to exist.  But it is impossible for them to exist exactly as they exist without our involvement, whether we like it or not.

All this being said, I agree that the anthropic principle does sound a little bit like self-aggrandizing.  To accept that all of those tiny tiny building blocks bounce around for all of those eons until humans were created and then all of our chromosomes bounced around for all of that time until they matched up exactly they way they matched up to form each of us on a planet that also has so many other examples of chromosomes matching up differently to form every type of animal, etc is pretty far fetched ... it's extremely unlikely, but it happened.  To decide that must mean that we can reverse engineer our creation to figure out how everything was created, just because we know that some things had to occur because we're here ... well, that's just silly.  It would be hard enough in a small environment to backtrack through all the possible combinations of data and make assumptions on the sliver of information that we might glean.  It's pretty stupid to believe that we can do it based on what knowledge that we are able to perceive and collect from the larger universe.  It's all speculation.  Speculation based on some information, but still speculation.  

Can I explain what happens in War and Peace because I know that it contains the word "the"?  No, and further more, if I try I am operating under the assumption that the word "the" exists and that it exists in that book and ignoring the fact that the word "the" might itself be a translated form of a word that carries the same basic meaning in another language.  I don't know Russian, but I know that they use a different alphabet than ours and that the word "the" contains other connotations (such as gender terms) in some foreign languages that we don't attribute to it in English, some or all might apply to a Russian form of the word "the".  If we don't speak Russian and never seen Russian, then this is a lot to expect and is impossible to prove.

So, in it's most basic sense:  anthropic principle means that the universe and everything else can only exist in the way that it exists right now because everything is as it is right now (including our presence).  We cannot see a universe that we have not impacted because we are impacting it just by existing and taking up space in it.  However, claiming that because we know that we exist, we can use the information of our existence to explain even a small part of everything, well, that's just silly talk.

here we go a ranting, on a winter's eve ...

Douglas Connelly is indeed a blockhead.  We've got a cranky, exiled 90 year old guy who suddenly has a vision about the end of the world, given to him by his old buddy Jesus Christ.  How is he different from anybody wandering around in the street mumbling to themselves?  Oh, and of course I'm talking about John, the guy who wrote the book or at least told it to someone who wrote it down before it headed over to a selection committee where they yeah or nayed themselves into a canon (followed by another selection committee and another one as people decided that the other guys had a few of their bullet points wrong on their internal mission statements).  Fast forward over the last couple thousand years and people are still arguing over this.

The thing that really got me about this book was somewhere in the middle where he's talking about how reading one of the sections can't help but make you fill up with praise and adoration for Jesus, and how it's good practice to get going on that now so that you're ready to perpetually pat the dude on the back and say "good job for destroying mankind and bringing us all up here where we're just wandering around happy for ourselves and the only thing that we've got to do is constantly congratulate you."

I feel like a book like this, that purports itself to be a guide to understanding a complex book that no one really understands and everyone has a different idea of, should be written by more than one person.  I feel like at the very least more than one denomination should be reflected in the construction of the book and perhaps a few literature/ philosophy people who can provide counterpoints to the rampant symbolism in the text.  But no, we get one pastor out of Michigan to tell us how it is (which is something that really annoys me in general and is used so often by talk show/ talk radio personalities to lend some pseudo-credibility to their rants and ravings and opinions).  We're talking PERSPECTIVES here people, we need more because you are not the be all and say all for the universe!

I was raised Lutheran, but a pretty liberal Lutheran, not the Missouri Synod who require woman to only wear calico dresses, and we never really covered this book in any of my Bible classes.  Better bet, I figure, to focus on the good guy hippie Jesus who wanders around with plenty of parables doing good wherever he goes.  Not only that, but he's got a gang of do-gooders that travel around with him (if they had a van and a theme song it would've been an awesome '80's show).  I think that the pastors of church's brand of Lutheranism were a little embarrassed by this book ... I mean it is pretty silly.  Lamps and lampshades and if you don't do as we say we're going to take your cookie, er, lampshade and you'll die with everyone else that doesn't agree with us when seals are opened and horsemen appear ... and monsters?  Um, it sort of sounds like John was just a little pissed that he didn't get into a quality nursing home and decided to take it out on mankind (though, probably the Romans first ... after that, maybe he'd chill out a little).

And really, the most frightening thing of all about this book, is that otherwise normal looking people that are upstanding members of communities believe it is absolutely true.  (Of course nothing surprises me anymore given how many people belong to the creepiest cult in the world ... I'd name it but then I'd get stalked and sued by their lawyers).  

Crazy is as crazy does.  Rant done.  (Bet you enjoyed Lewis Black more ...)