HAPHAZARD THOUGHTS #11

Today I spent several hours working on my blog.

MOVIE CLICHÉS #1

You go to enough different movies, you start to notice things.

Roger Ebert

You can read this excerpt in the introduction of a very small book called ”Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary: A Greatly Expanded and Much Improved Compendium of Movie Clichés, Stereotypes, Obligatory Scenes, Hackneyed Formulas,  Shopworn Conventions, and Outdated Archetypes”. It contains hundreds of constantly repeated movie features tightly packed in a 116 paged hardcover bundle.

I had this volume for maybe a year or so, but never really got to it. Today I came up with a silly joke about a movie in the dearblankpleaseblanksincerelyblank mould. I decided to apply the concept of silly joke to movies, and movie clichés seemed to be the easiest target. The fact that I had a book about it made it even easier. The gods of procrastination were obviously plotting against me, giving me little excuse not to make this post and some more.

This will hopefully be the first of many posts about movie clichés, unless I get kidnapped by aliens wearing the same clothing, hairstyles, and jewellery.

Fallacy of the Talking Hero

BUKOWSKI’S NUMBER ONE RULE

His 3 passions: Writing, booze and women )I assume a woman took the picture=

So you want to be a writer

by Charles Bukowski

.

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

6 WRITING TIPS FROM GEORGE ORWELL

There’s a lot you can learn from Orwell’s writing. His Animal Farm and 1984 are now considered masterpieces – ironic, given the difficulties in getting them published – and are studied in school, I hear. “Intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism” are some of his traits. Some of them are impossible to emulate or even approximate. If you did, your work would be described as Orwellian, which shows how difficult the task would be.

He set the bar high, though he would never have said so as you’ll see in point 3. But we can at least take a few hints from him. I’d counsel you to read his “Politics and the English Language” where you’ll find most of this counsel in better form. Continue at your peril:

1. Learn from the best.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

2. Ask yourself:

• What am I trying to say?
• What words will express it?
• What image or idiom will make it clearer?
• Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
• Could I put it more shortly?
• Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly.

3. Avoid metaphors. Not all, just the dead ones. A metaphor you create evokes a visual image but a metaphor you recycle from current use loses its vividness. Toe the line, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel. To use these and others is to be lazy. The result is a euphonious phrase that lulls you to sleep. Make up your own metaphors!

4. Less is more (this is in direct violation of the previous point). Choose the appropriate verb or noun instead of a phrase. Characteristic phrases like render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, save you the trouble of finding the appropriate word. Use the active as often as you can. Use simple conjunctions instead of phrases like as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that and don’t end sentences on such commonplace as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

5. Don’t be a pretentious arse. Foreign words or expressions are used to give an air of cultural elegance, even though they sometimes have a certain je ne sais quoi. Words like categorical, virtual, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, phenomena, only embellish and give an air of untrue scientific impartiality. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, triumphant, age-old, inexorable or words like realm, throne, chariot often dignify war and politics. Bad writers will also employ terms with Latin origin instead of Saxon because of their “grandeur”. They end-up with unnecessary words like ameliorate, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous. Also, to words with Latin or Greek roots are added prefixes or suffixes to avoid finding up their English counterparts. Words like deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital.  In general, Orwell says this will result in an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

6. Be meaningful. In certain kinds of writing, as art criticism and literary criticism you can easily find passages lacking in meaning. Using words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, will add in nothing to the readers’ understanding. You end-up with phrases like “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality” or “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness”. Notice that if you replace jargon words like living and dead, by black or white you’ll see that they were used in an improper way. And use words for their actual meaning. Words like democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice are often used for meanings they do not have. Democracy is often used as praise, and calling a country anything other thing other than democratic is an insult. It is a misappropriation of the word. One can easily make a harsh truth sound like a beautiful lie. You can’t say outright “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so” but you can say “While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

Orwell offers a possible translation of what he considers to be good English to a version that fails to obey these guidelines. The original is from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

This is the translation:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Let us recapitulate:

1. Learn to write from reading the best.

2. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

3. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

4. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

5. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

6. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

7. (This one is bonus) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Books vs. E-Readers

Reblogged from Bound 4 Escape:

via

GRIZZLY MAN

Timothy Treadwell with his pet fox and his bear friend

Timothy Treadwell has spent the last 13 summers living among grizzly bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Reserve. For the last 5 years he has filmed 90 hours of the wilderness, the bears and himself. In one of his last recorded statements he seemed confident that he had found a way to live among them.

It’s understandable the appeal that this story had for Werner Herzog. He has no interest in ordinary lives, at least as a subject. His work dwells on the verge of death, where life finds its deeper expressions. He filmed humans in the South Pole, indigenous people living in the heart of the Siberian Taiga, death row inmates with weeks to live, a visionary air traveller  the sole survivor of a plane crash, etc. He says: “If I had a chance to venture out with a camera to a planet in our solar system, I would go, even if it were a one-way ticket only.”

Treadwell does what no man before him had done, he proclaims and there’s truth to that. He lives in constant danger and if he didn’t love the smell of death in the morning he certainly grew accustomed to it. He has a pet fox, to the extent that foxes can be pets. In his footage he is often a few feet

FAVOURITE COMEDIANS: JACK HANDEY

It is rare to find something that makes me guffaw. Part of that is due to my love of comedy and comedians. I’ve seen most stand-up acts worth seeing, and the ones I haven’t, I probably haven’t heard of them. Once you’ve seen it all, there’s a certain cynicism that arises. Patterns emerge, structure becomes obvious and punchlines seem evident even before the set-up is completed. Sometimes even jokes repeat themselves, with different but similar phrasing.

I recalled Louie CK talking about this sense of apathy towards comedy and what is needed to break it. Here’s an excerpt from his TV show where he talks about it:

It’s refreshing to find someone who breaks all patterns and manages to be funny in a complete new way. Jack Handy’s musings are constructed in unfamiliar moulds. Its premises are often unique and much of them even lack a punch-line. If Jerry Seinfeld is the observational humorist of the common man, Handey does

PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES

Good Speech.

I don’t follow the news anymore, but apparently they are dying.

Page One collects and condenses footage taken inside and around the New York Times. Director Andrew Rossi had full access for one year to a lot of what was happening in one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world. That amount of material probably led to the muddled final product he ended up with.

We follow some of the news that are happening, the Wikileaks being the most interesting by far. We get the opinions of the traditional media on probably the biggest scoop since Watergate. Assange the God. Assange the Devil. It’s interesting to find where they stand.

LIBERAL ARTS

I work in a fast-food chain. Because I can’t find employment. Because Liberal Arts is a pathway to unemployment. Now you get it? You’r welcome.

A movie that loves books can’t be all that bad. Liberal Arts has an aura if you will; you can’t smell the book pages, but you kind of do.

Jesse (Josh Radnor)is a newly single 35 year old who describes New York City as the greatest city in the world. He then walks around with his head stuffed in a book. In a laundry room he leaves both his bag of dirty clothes and his book unattended for a few seconds and his clothes are stolen. Not the book.

The call from his mentor inviting him to his old campus in Ohio is more than welcome. He smiles upon the chance to drive down memory lane and test that old Golden Age syndrome.

He rekindles his friendship with Peter (Richard Jenkins), and we quickly understand why they formed a bond during the time shared in class. I felt a certain privilege being in the loop with Jenkins character, knowing certain things that were not shared with others, and I imagine Jesse would have felt it too.

Peter introduces him to Zibby, a 19 year old. The close-up of his reaction upon seeing her hints at what’s going to happen.

INTO THE ABYSS

 107 min  -  Documentary

Ratings: 7,3/10 from 6.355 users   Metascore: 74/100 

Reviews: 33 user | 114 critic | 30 from Metacritic.com

Director: Werner Herzog

Stars: Werner Herzog, Richard Lopez, Michael Perry |

Michael Perry and Jason Burkett are both 28 years old and currently reside on the state of Texas. Both stand guilty of murder. They killed three people in order to drive a red Camaro. Both blame each other, and innocence is claimed by both.

Michael Perry is set to be executed in 8 days. Jason Burkett will serve 40 years. We later learn that he was saved from the needle by a convincing testimony from his father, in which he blamed the outcome of his son’s actions on his upbringing.

These are no Red and Andy. They are both equally guilt. So why will one live and the other die? We infer that question, but that question is not asked.

In this movie, unlike most of his work, Herzog avoids saying much.

He doesn’t judge, criticize or condemn.

He asks.

He looks.

He shows.

In his first interaction with Michael Perry, Herzog says something to the effect of “I don’t need to like you to know that killing you is wrong.” This is the one time he states his opinion, and the documentary doesn’t go about to prove his point. He lets the facts and the people he interviews tell their story.

We see a lot of footage of the crime scene. Liters of blood partially hidden under a rug, blood spatter painting a white all, a body floating on a lake, the shape of a man in the distance, covered in blankets. There is no question of the wickedness of the crime.

His interviews help to paint the picture more than the facts could. His questions are honest questions. He means to get to know the subjects and not the facts or their opinion on the facts. Herzog talks with one friend of the killers and little is said of them. He tells his story, which adds so much more to our understanding than his recollections of the killers would. In an interview Herzog recollects this moment:

When I have this chapter, the dark side of Conroe, you know who you are watching? You are watching a man who has learned how to read and write. What a glorious achievement, very admirable, and a young man who was stabbed with a screwdriver and his friend throws him a knife, and he does not pick it up. He looks at the knife, and he does not pick it up because he wants to see his children at night. So the dark side of Conroe isn’t that dark, because there’s such a phenomenal, phenomenally wonderful young man like Jared Tolbert.

He talks with the family of the victims. With a man who lost his little brother and with a woman who lost both her brother and her mother. Their pain is unmistakable.

He talks with Delbert, the father of Jason Burkett. He talks from prison, the place where he will most likely spend the remainder of his life. His was a life of violence, but years in prison seem to have improved him. They might do the same to his son, but Michael Perry won’t get the same chance.

He talks with Captain Fred Allen, who was directly involved in the execution of more than one hundred men until he just couldn’t do it anymore.

He talks with Reverend Richard Lopez, a man who spent a great deal of time with Death Row inmates, and asks him about a squirrel.

As I met these people, something stuck out. Two things seemed to tie all of the subjects. God, and violence. All believe in both. Guilty and innocent alike seek comfort in God and find consolation in Him. Their certainty is scary. Michael Perry is at his scariest when he talks with unassailing confidence of God.

He and Jason committed violent crimes. But they were also surrounded by violence. I’ve never met a person who was in jail. They had. Family and friends. Being stabbed with a screwdriver and cutting a throat weren’t rare occurrences. Yes, they could have led honest lives free of violence, but they were in the worst place to do so. There are studies that backtrack the violence in the south to the violence culture of Irish sheep herders of the mountains, who had to kill to keep their life sustenance. It’s the only civilized place in the world where Death Penalty is still in practice. The sister/daughter of two of the victims found solace in watching Michael Perry’s heart beat its last beats.

God and violence go hand in hand. If you kill your God will send you to Hell. If you kill in Texas your senator will. Herzog tells us that this is wrong one time, but his movie repeats it relentlessly.