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[12 Jul 2009|07:22pm] |
The public relations battle over labor has been fought and lost.
It's really kind of heartbreaking, but people are just too ignorant for their own good.
The camera ruined everything.
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[11 Jul 2009|01:25pm] |
We'd ask each other: Is this what our life is like? It was the first time we saw it from the outside. The very first time. It made a real impression. Like a smack to the head... There's a good joke: the nuclear half-life of a Kiev cake is thirty-six hours. So... And for me? It took me three years. Three years later I turned in my Party card. My little Red book. I became free in the Zone. Chernobyl blew my mind. It set me free.
Voices From Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich
Second time I'm reading through this book. Nowhere else in literature of any kind have I come across stories so direct, honest, and harrowing. This book is soul-crushing in its cataloging of catastrophe, ignorance, pain and misery. If you can bear it, it's also beautiful.
Every account is a first person monologue stitched together from lengthy interviews with survivors.
I want to bear witness...
It happened ten years ago, and it happens to me again every day.
We lived in the town of Pripyat. In that town.
I'm not a writer. I won't be able to describe it. My mind is not enough to understand it. And neither is my university degree. There you are: a normal person. A little person. You're just like everyone else--you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You're a normal person! And then one day you're turned into a Chernobyl person, an animal that everyone's interested in, and that no one knows anything about. You want to be like everyone else, and now you can't. People look at you differently. They ask you: Was it scary? How did the station burn? What did you see? And, you know, can you have children? Did your wife leave you? At first we were all turned into animals. The very word "Chernobyl" is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look. He's from there!
That's how it was in the beginning. We didn't just lose a town, we lost our whole lives. We left on the third day. The reactor was on fire. I remember one of my friends saying, "It smells of reactor." It was an indescribable smell. But the papers were already writing about that. They turned Chernobyl into a house of horrors, although actually they just turned it into a cartoon. I'm only going to tell about what's really mine. My own truth.
It was like this: They announced over the radio that you couldn't take your cats. So we put her in the suitcase. But she didn't want to go, she climbed out. Scratched everyone. You can't take your belongings! All right, I won't take all my belongings, I'll take just one belonging. Just one! I need to take my door off the apartment and take it with me. I can't leave the door. I'll cover the entrance with some boards. Our door--it's our talisman, it's a family relic. My father lay on this door. I don't know whose tradition this is, it's not like that everywhere, but my mother told me that the deceased must be placed on the door of his home. He lies there until they bring the coffin. I sat by my father all night, he lay on this door. The house was open. All night. And this door has little etch-marks on it. That's me growing up. It's marked there: first grade, second grade. Seventh. Before the army. And next to that: how my son grew. And my daughter. My whole life is written down on this door. How am I supposed to leave it?
I asked my neighbor, he had a car: "Help me." He gestured toward his head, like, You're not quite right, are you? But I took it with me, that door. At night. On a motorcycle. Through the woods. It was two years later, when our apartment had already been looted and emptied. The police were chasing me. "We'll shoot! We'll shoot!" They thought I was a thief. That's how I stole the door from my own home.
I took my daughter and my wife to the hospital. They had black spots all over their bodies. These spots would appear, then disappear. About the size of a five-kopek coin. But nothing hurt. They did some tests on them. I asked for the results. "It's not for you." they said, "Then who's it for?
Back then everyone was saying: "We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left." My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little." And I had thought she didn't understand anything.
Can you picture seven little girls shaved bald in one room? There were seven of them in the hospital room... But enough! That's it! When I talk about it, I have this feeling, my heart tells me--you're betraying them. Because I need to describe it like I'm a stranger. My wife came home from the hospital. She couldn't take it. "It'd be better for her to die than to suffer like this. Or for me to die, so that I don't have to watch anymore." No, enough! That's it! I'm not in any condition. No.
We put her on the door... on the door that my father lay on. Until they brought a little coffin. It was small, like the box for a large doll.
I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it.
Nikolai Kalugin, father
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[11 Jul 2009|09:56am] |
The invisible hand made whole.
Trust not in things that lie beyond the realm of our senses. In darkness, the invisible and the black are one, and the only principle that governs their action is omerta.
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[07 Jul 2009|08:00pm] |
"Don't cry, it's my situation. I got it. Hold tight, It's going to shine on the golden child. Hold tight. I love you, I'm through with my statement.
—Derrick Johnson, executed in Texas on April 30, 2009
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[05 Jul 2009|05:55pm] |
Started work on a project this weekend. To say that it's walking a fine line between honesty and misogyny may be giving myself too much credit. But I started writing it in a burst of derisive anger, not towards anyone in particular, but over the conventions of screenwriting as they govern the work of unestablished writers -- and the petty obstinacy of unestablished writers in adhering to them.
With it, in my own, tiny, inconsequential and utterly boring way, I have declared war on screenwriting.
This is the equivalent of Michael Bay's "Frame-Fucking" on the page. Incredible terse descriptors, an assault of images. One of my transitions is "BACK THAT SHIT UP:"
At the end of my six-page introduction, I make use of an old tradition to birth my character:
By the powers and principalities, I call upon the dark Goddess Hecate, the light of Apollo, the one-toothed sisters, the Muses of Olympus, the dreadlord Richelieu, the cunning Machiavelli and all others to bring forth the INFERNAL SEED.
And if in the end, it is the equivalent of one very long cock-slap, so be it.
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| Bury my heart at Yonkers. |
[05 Jul 2009|05:38pm] |
One of the amazing things about World War Z is the seriousness Brooks brings to the subject. There is such subtle complexity and sincerity to the material that at moments you forget yourself, and that you're reading about zombies. It's still a book I have to go back and finish, but I was incredibly impressed by what I read.
I just finished the revised first draft of the screenplay, dated April 30, 2007. It's pretty good -- there were a few of those rare O SHIT moments. Due to the constraints of the medium, much of the complexity had to be lost, which is a shame. But a lot of the fallible politics that went into it is touched upon, and some very real present problems (Chinese black-market organ harvesting becomes a route of infection).
The movie is slated for release in 2010. I'm shaky on Marc Forster as a director, and I'm inclined to believe that he was a poor choice. We'll see.
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[04 Jul 2009|01:36am] |
Should be sleeping. Instead, I just started writing a ridiculous comedy titled She's Just Not That Into You... But She Could Be.
I know the title is long, but I'm married to it. Deal.
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| Invisible Hands. |
[01 Jul 2009|01:57am] |
Place there is none; we go forward and backward and there is no place.
--St. Augustine
Worked a little bit on the book today. Started feeling anxious. Stopped. Worked a little bit on Life After Death. Stopped. Then started panicking and seeing if there were any skills I could acquire quickly that would lead to a comfortable job. Panicked some more. Stopped. Started looking at old files. Came back to a project I started working on with Kevin over a year ago.
I don't think I ever shared these two with you guys (maybe parts, I don't know). But it's from a web series we really wanted to shoot titled "Invisible Hands". We were aiming for ten ten minute episodes (so the first script is short by about a page, and the second by about half -- it was a formatting issue with an older version of the software I was using). I've played with the idea, but I may work on it some more. I really like the project, even though it's very stage-like -- we were intentionally writing it so that it'd rely most heavily on performance and whatever production value we could squeeze out of a meager budget.
We have no budget. Not even a meager one.
Chapter One.
Chapter Two.
The symbols explanation is really rough in episode 2. It'll need some work if/when I go back.
The only means I have to maybe get some traction with this thing would be:
1. As Kevin suggested a long time ago, write at least four, preferably five of the episodes.
2. Put together a business plan.
3. Get a finished, polished show intro together (see below).
4. Put all of the material together somewhere online, even if its a blog, and try to get traffic.
5. Profit.
I actually cut a very quick and dirty intro sequence together for the show. The quality sucks and there's a lot of terrible shit in it because I didn't actually get to finish. Some of my equipment crapped out on me and I lost all of the ref files. Anyway, it was just meant as a concept piece from which we were going to eventually work on After Effects (I put this together in Final Cut). So, uh, forgive the terrible font-type, artifacting, and JFK getting shot:
Prelimenary Intro Mock-Up from King Felix on Vimeo.
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| Woolweaver |
[30 Jun 2009|12:41am] |
Okay... So, I decided to start writing a novel. Boiled down to its simplest elements, I describe it thusly:
A musician must travel to the underworld to retrieve his murdered son.
Except that the musician is a stand in for Orpheus, and he is drawn to the underworld, here Prypiat, by the diary and personal correspondence of his dead grandfather, that alludes to a generational curse that will cull all the first born children of each successive generation in the family. All of it being traced back to a love affair he developed with a mysterious woman of the woods, whom he eventually forsook for a younger woman of the world.
The dryad proclaims a curse, and failing to restrain it to simply the family, curses the entire city -- leading to a diaspora of the people in the surrounding land, creating a landscape that will be much like traveling through the spheres of hell in Dante's Inferno, as our hero progresses towards the heart of Prypiat.
The people he meets along the way share the terrible history of that place. Upon entering the city, things start taking on a weirder edge. His guide is a "reformed scientist", who, having lost his son to the meltdown, turned his back on rational irrationalities and proclaimed himself a shaman, explaining to the character, "Magic is science through other means."
Prypiat is a land of howling winds, and feral animals, ruled over by a pack of sentient wolves to which homage must be paid in order to travel to the world that lies over this one. The gateway: The ferris wheel. The only other human being in the place is a young woman of twenty-two, the same woman with whom the protagonist’s grandfather intended to abscond, but, due to the curse, remains forever young and shade-bound in her blasted out abode.
I'm not going to give away the entire game, but I'm doing quite a bit of research for this. Reading mythological works, Dante's Inferno, an oral history of Chernobyl, etc. And in reading both Inferno and the mythological works, I keep coming across one name again and again: Boethius, and his work, Consolation of Philosophy. For a work that seems to have been so profoundly influential, I had never heard of it before.
Another volume to add to the stack.
(As for the novel, whether or not I'm up to the task remains to be seen. As for storytelling, it seems I've become mired in a hybrid terrain where fantasy gives the weird a handjob.)
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[29 Jun 2009|11:43pm] |
And now I hear the notes of agony
In sad crescendo beginning to reach my ear;
Now I am where the noise of lamentation
Comes at me in blasts of sorrow. I am where
All light is mute, with a bellowing like the ocean
Turbulent in a storm of warring winds,
The hurricane of Hell in perpetual motion
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[29 Jun 2009|08:11pm] |
THROUGH ME YOU ENTER INTO THE CITY OF WOES,
THROUGH ME YOU ENTER INTO ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME YOU ENTER THE POPULATION OF LOSS.
JUSTICE MOVED MY HIGH MAKER, IN POWER DIVINE,
WISDOM SUPREME, LOVE PRIMAL. NO THINGS WERE
BEFORE ME NOT ETERNAL; ETERNAL I REMAIN.
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.
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| Odd Geese. |
[27 Jun 2009|02:51pm] |
Last night, a girl (in a gaggle), exited Starbucks dressed entirely in black with an honest-to-gods walking staff.
Me: That girl has a walking staff.
Kevin: They both do.
Me (double-checking): No, one of them has a walking cane, the other has a motherfucking-YOU-SHALL-NOT-PASS staff.
Kevin (noticing, smirking): You know, when you do it everyday, it's no longer cosplay.
Me: No. It's just fucking crazy... You know what that costume is missing? Bracers.
Motherfucking bracers -- they'll really tie your shit together.
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