Tin Can Space Machines

Airplanes are bunk.

Like, I don’t mean to disparage the concept of aviation as a whole, especially when my sister’s going into aerospace engineering, and I especially don’t want this to come off as a “dumb millennials don’t know what older generations had to put up with” kind of piece (at least, without acknowledging early on that that’s the kind of piece it’s going to end up being). I really do enjoy being able to go to places at speeds people less than 100 years ago would consider impossible. But that doesn’t mean that new technology doesn’t come with a host of new-technology problems.

• • • 

I just boarded a plane. It’s a small one, only forty-eight passenger seats and maybe two attendants at best. We’ve all boarded and the captain rings the intercom. Apparently, our destination has some low visibility issues, so if we could all just get off for, well, they don’t know how long but if we could leave the plane for now, that would be great…

• • • 

There’s a reason comedians have made entire routines starting with the simple phrase, “What’s the deal with airplane food?” And sure, huge strides have been made to make sure that those specific jokes are a thing of the past. But jokes about airplane food are a symptom of a larger problem about how these companies aim to make money, and just because this particular symptom has been downplayed does not mean the sickness overall has been quelled (#eattherich).

Besides, comedians will move on to other things to poke at in the airport system. John Mulaney, for example, has an entire bit where he imagines himself dealing with a fictional airline service he calls “Delta Airlines” and their perhaps excessively malicious customer service. It’s kind of their job to do things like that.

• • • 

I’m at 36,000 feet. Flight attendants are handing out little sandwiches -- turkey or veggie -- to all the passengers, but they seem to be paying more attention to each other as they bicker about who needs to get what for later (maybe someone in First Class needs more coffee? Probably, it’s always someone from up front…). When they get to me, I get the same question this woman has asked everybody: “Turkey or veggie?” she says.

“Veggie,” I say. 

I get a sandwich. I take a bite. It’s turkey.

• • • 

I write all this with the, if not the memory of, the awareness that things were probably different back when flying was a luxury or at the very least something of note to do. Again, it’s mundane now. Flying is boring, and Icarus wouldn’t have flown like he did if it was boring, so maybe there’s something to that idea. That’s why comedians get so much mileage out of it; because so many people have had similar experiences.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t want them to be better, right? Like, until we make that technological leap to teleportation (and get over the related ethical problems), this is what we’re stuck with. The least we could do would be making it the best hours of our life.

• • • 

As I make my way past customs, one bag in my hand and the other on my back, I see her face, and I remember why I came all this way in the first place. All these petty grievances, from that kid two rows up who would occasionally bawl his lungs out to how frequently they seemed to cycle the cabin lights on and off, that’s all washed away. I smile. She smiles back.

“How was the flight?” she says.

“Fine.”

-F

A Premature Countdown But A Countdown Nonetheless

It feels weird making a “Top Five” list before the year is quite over yet. Like, as I’m writing this, movies like The House That Jack Built, Roma, The Favourite (yes, with the “u”), or If Beale Street Could Talk haven’t quite come out yet, which means that some of these could easily get bumped off or shifted around if I get around to seeing them. But this list has been on my mind since somebody asked about it at work, and I’m not sure where else this would fit into the schedule, so I thought I’d give at least a go at explaining myself here as well.

So without further ado, here are my five favorite films from 2018:

5) Thunder Road / Eighth Grade
(Thunder Road trailer) (Eighth Grade trailer)

Okay, I lied, it’s six films. But I liked these two for similar enough reasons that I couldn’t bear cutting one and not the other. It’s true that neither of these films is especially well shot (though Thunder Road does start with a reprise of the short film it is based on (which you can find here) which is a particularly impressive ten-minute long one take), but the writing very much makes up for it.

It’s actually interesting how these two films complement each other. Eighth Grade is about a girl’s final days in Junior High, dealing with the classic struggles of adolescence like not relating at all to her father or wondering why she’s not popular, but with a little bit of writer/director Bo Burnham’s wit mixed in there. On the other side of the coin, Thunder Road is about a father separated from his wife, sharing custody of a daughter the father has trouble relating to. But then he realizes he didn’t really know his mom that well either, and a large portion of the movie is him reconciling all that.

Anyway, they’re both really good with especially strong lead performances, so check them out if you can.

4) Thoroughbreds
(trailer)

It’s really easy to not care about what happens in Thoroughbreds, and I say that even as I put it on this list. There are simply no likable characters in the film, with even the two closest to sympathetic being a drug dealer and a literal sociopath. But the film (written and directed by Cory Finley), understands this and is shot in such a way to always keep the audience at a distance. The experience turns into a kind of helplessness, as you watch a series of events that was doomed to happen from the start.

And again, some people won’t like that. To those people, Thoroughbreds is a bunch of Rich, White People Problems with spoiled brats for characters, and that really is an acceptable reaction to this film. But once you get past that, the film just pulls you the rest of the way in.

3) Les Garçons Sauvages (The Wild Boys)
(trailer)

Oh, you thought the characters in Thoroughbreds were unlikeable, rich brats? Well, I’m one of two minds recommending this movie then. On one, some of the things not shown, only implied, in Thoroughbreds take center stage here, which means that the first third of this movie is just showing five terrible, terrible people doing horrible, uncomfortable to watch things. Thoroughbreds would just be a boring film without its audience’s engagement. The Wild Boys would have those same people leaving in disgust.

It also doesn’t do as much to draw people in, though that’s perhaps to be expected of a literal French art-house movie. It’s going to be pretentious and if you’re not into that, this probably won’t be an enjoyable watch. What the film does offer, though, is striking imagery and a Lord of the Flies-like energy that will leave those still in the theater with a peculiar sense of awe.

2) The Other Side of the Wind
(trailer)

I actually wrote a lot about this one already in my Blue Curtains post, but to summarize here, it’s fascinating how this film was made, it’s fascinating how it finally got all put together, and there’s enough of Orson Welles’ spirit to shine through, even if all the jokes and references land forty years too late.

Shot in a documentary style (almost ten years before Cannibal Holocaust and This is Spinal Tap popularized the mockumentary genre), The Other Side of the Wind describes to us the character of Jake Hannaford, a once-big-time film director who may be desperately clawing at relevance? It’s all unclear, of course, as Jake won’t let anybody into his private life without a fight, but on his seventieth birthday, there are cameras everywhere. I think some of the pieces are out of place, sure (the opening monolog practically begs to be respected for even releasing the film at all), but as I said in that post, I still can’t get this film out of my head.

1) Madeline’s Madeline
(trailer)

It was the trailer that first attracted me to this film, its cutout montage and constant “Hey Na Na” evoking that perfect sense of weirdness that I just had to see play out. And in that regard, I got what I was expecting. But what I wasn’t expecting was, to put it bluntly, the entire rest of it? Everyone’s performance is great, especially Helena Howard’s; it looks great, with a special commendation to make the images actually more focused as the film hits its weirdness stride; and its story slowly evolves in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way that perfectly models the perspective of its main character (and, if you watch a couple of interviews, also the creation of itself).

It’s weird. I mean, I knew I was pretentious (or at least enjoyed art people tend to call pretentious), but having it listed out like this made me realize it just a bit more. Like, the most accessible films are at the lower end of this list. Not that they’re bad, mind you, just that they’re listed lower than the more experimental fare. But at the same time, I do want most people to see most of these movies (The Wild Boys being the exception, again, you really do need to know what you’re getting into with that one), if only to help them find something new to enjoy.

-F

The Long And Short Of It

One of the lesser weaknesses I have in my writing is how I put titles on things. Now, I call it a “lesser weakness” because I know it doesn’t really matter and could probably be perennially ignored or put off until the rest of the work is finished, like, I didn’t have a good title for Write What You Know until I had nearly finished the thing. But there are other times where I flounder -- without a title to attach a central theme to, I sometimes lose track of what I was writing about.

One way I’ve found to get around this is to use longer titles. Generally, they’re just more detailed versions of what I would already use, often with an “or” stuck in there somewhere. For example, this post could easily have been titled: The Long And Short Of It (Or: How To Keep Focus When Every Other Method Fails You (And Yes, I’m Aware Of The Irony)).

That’s another thing that I like doing, actually. I like how titling things can add a little bit of humor to the proceedings. I don’t do it to things I need to seriously show other people. I don’t snark when writing a college paper on it but I did at one point have a paper with the concise title: Moving The Goalposts: Clarke’s Third Law Shows Its Age.

The closest I can think of for where I got the inspiration to do this is Kurt Vonnegut, with such classic either/or titles like Slaughterhouse Five Or: The Children’s Crusade and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater Or: Pearls Before Swine. Or maybe my inspiration is closer to Philip K. Dick who graced us with such titles as Doctor Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After The Bomb and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. Obviously, I’m not trying to compare myself to these authors in any more than a superficial level, but that is where I got the idea. Probably.

I don’t know if there’s a conclusion here. Like, this post was more of a reflection on a thing I do, and I’m not going to keep doing it (or the other way, doing it more) just because I wrote 404 words about it. But I did want to write it in case longer titles do start showing up in these posts. So I guess be on the lookout for that? No promises, though.

-F

Christmas Music

This is sort of a follow-up to the last post I made about music in the workplace, so the first thing I want to say is that, while it hasn’t gotten better by any stretch of the imagination, it also hasn’t really gotten any worse. I can narrow down the songs I don’t particularly enjoy down to a select few, noticed and appreciated a few more, and the rest I can easily tune out at this point.

But of course, all that gets thrown out the window once the holiday season rolls around. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, I walked into work and was immediately greeted by what I can only describe as somebody drunkenly mumbling their way through Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

This has happened for three Christmas seasons in a row and it still catches me off guard. Like, I know our playlist is bad, but the sudden (if not unexpected) addition of holiday cheer still finds new ways to disappoint. I can’t even give a good example of the type of music they play there; just looking for it would probably make me want to one-up Van Gogh and chop off both ears.

So far, I have been able to identify two leading factors in why this is the case (that is, why not just normal-people Christmas songs?). The first is that repetition would probably breed contempt for just about anything. It hasn’t happened to the songs I do like in the playlist because they only come up so often.

The second is that, as I learned recently, the playlist is actually a Youtube Music playlist, which means it’s curated by someone, and the someone that puts together the normal music set probably also picks the Christmas songs. So really, the entire store has to suffer because of one person’s bad taste.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. There’s no Carol of the Bells on there to terrify me, for example, and some good songs do make it through. But just like the rest of the list, the ratio of good songs to bad is very lopsided.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe our music is designed this way so that the good songs stand out more. I doubt it, but that’s one of the ways I keep hope alive in this minimum-wage world, I guess. It’s certainly a better thought than the alternative.

-F

Blue Curtains

There’s a movie I can’t get out of my head. Not because I think it’s a great movie (though it very well may be (I’d have to get back to you on that)); it’s more like when you’ve got a song in your head and all you can remember is the chorus and maybe a riff or two, and if you don’t sing about it (or, in this case, talk kind of adjacent to it), it’s just going to get worse.

The movie in question is The Other Side of the Wind, the last film by Orson Welles (now available on Neflix!). It’s a frenetic piece; its conceit is that it’s footage from a bunch of cameras all trying to get a hot new scoop on a Hollywood director on the night of his seventy-fifth birthday. What I can’t get over is how prescient it is for being shot in the 1970s.

But let’s take a step back for a moment. The title of this post is based off a tired joke that goes a little something like this:

An author, in a fit of self-indulgence, decides to sit in on a class teaching his own work. The professor goes into a long, impassioned speech about the curtains in a scene. “The author made the curtains blue here,” the professor says, “because it symbolizes the purity of the scene, while also foreshadowing the tragedy to come.”

Upon hearing this, the author shouts “The curtains are blue because I like the color blue!”

This was also at the heart of The Beginner’s Guide, the subject of a Raindrops on Roses post I made a few months back. In that game, Davey, for as much as he tried to demonstrate his understanding of Coda’s games, didn’t know Coda as well as he thought he did and so ruined their friendship because of it.

But there’s something wrong with both of those conclusions, right? The term “Death of the Author” still has meaning, right? Like, I remember discussing the briefcase in Pulp Fiction with a friend. We were both talking about what we thought was in it and I said, “Well, Quentin Tarantino says…”

He interrupted me with “I really don’t care what Quentin Tarantino says.”

I feel much the same way about The Other Side of the Wind. Taking it as a 2018 movie about 1970’s Hollywood makes it very much a period piece in the same way that Barton Fink (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen) is. It certainly helps that many of the characters are played by their inspirations up to and including John Huston in the lead role.

What makes it prescient, though, is how little some things have changed in the intervening years between filming and release. For example, sex and sexuality is one of the themes that permeates throughout the movie; one of the things all the cameras are trying to figure out is the relationship the main character has with the women in his life. But as the movie goes on, it’s revealed that not only is that kind of a touchy subject, but shades of modern-day’s difficulties with sexual assault begin to crop up as well.

Another example would be the opening monolog, especially as this one was added near the end of the arduous editing process and by making mention of otherwise anachronistic items like cell phones, it only adds to this bridge between the old and the modern.

But, again, these interpretations on certain contexts were certainly not Orson Welles’ intention. Sometimes the curtains are just a nice shade of blue. But I never really liked how that joke villainized the professor. They’ve presumably developed their own context for the piece after years of study, and suddenly someone shouts back a retort with nothing but some perceived authority. And in most cases, I find it actually weakens the piece. The Other Side of the Wind goes from a period piece spanning multiple periods to its own inside joke that the audience can never be a part of.

-F

A Follow-Up

With better planning, this would have been last week’s topic, but there were ah, more pressing issues. Though, to be fair, this also gave me a bit more time to reflect on the writing experience. This is something I actually don’t get to talk about much. Normally all my fictional pieces go through the college workshop-level process, where authors are specifically not allowed to talk about their work.

So now, two weeks later, let’s talk a little bit more about Write What You Know.

One of the things I didn’t mention in my Raindrops on Roses post on creepypasta was how enamored I am with their structure. It’s a basic structure, sure, but I think that’s why it’s so easy to copy down and use. While The Hero’s Journey is used to mold longer stories, all a shorter story like a creepypasta needs is a series of spooks that slowly escalate, and an optional denouement at the end.

I knew I wanted to write a Halloween-y story for this blog, if only to prove that I could. That’s a feeling I get sometimes, often when a story has a false start and I end up dropping it. I started this blog for the same reason, to give another example of this. The next step, of course, was the subject matter.

I do have older false starts of horror stories, mostly involving weird sounds that keep showing up around me. Spotify glitching out was the one that I had actually part of an introduction written for but there was also this weird hum at work that I obsessed over for about a week before dismissing it as “worth noting, but maybe not worth writing more than a sentence or two about” (oh hey!).

But what I also have is a bunch of stories about “Nancy.” The “Finlay story” was the most memorable, and it took a little memory digging to find the other ones, but I mean, those aren’t that scary by themselves. Like, I’m fine now. I’m fine.

I’m fine.

So then all I needed was a conceit, and that one I concede I was a little less creative on. Demons and blood and pentagrams and all that are kind of cliche in creepypasta, but I mean, I have to convince people that my English teacher is a demon spawn somehow, right? The point was, these stories I had were the type.

The climax, of course, is where things diverge from reality. At some point, you just need to creep people out, real life be damned. I’m reminded of this line from Adaptation.:

“The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”

So yeah! I had a lot of fun writing it, stringing events together like I did, and I do hope that everybody enjoyed reading it. Unless being scared isn’t your thing, in which case I do apologize. But I’d also want to know what you were expecting the day before Halloween.

-F

Your Vote Matters

Oof, this is going to come off a little cynical, isn’t it? I guess I should lead with this, then: Yes, I voted today. Despite all this essay might say, I still vote regularly. But…

In an online town hall, Bernie Sanders described this midterm as “the most important Midterm of our generation,” kind of like how two years ago was “the most important election of our generation” and while I don’t really remember the rhetoric of four years ago the midterms were probably important then too (not important enough, of course, to get the average American to vote but ehhh…).

Another common piece of rhetoric is “Your vote matters. Your vote always matters.” And yes, there are a myriad of examples where this is true. Anecdotes abound of ties and near-ties and coin flips and recounts, but where I think these go wrong is not providing examples of the other side of the coin: The times when it’s almost unanimous but not quite. Sure, these examples negate the general argument the “Voting Matters” people are trying to make (you can make a difference), but perhaps consider this alternative argument: “You should let your voice be heard.” This, I think, can be demonstrated very well with these sorts of overwhelming defeats.

So here’s my story. It’s nothing so dramatic as a federal or even state election; it was a high school student-level forum. Now, my high-school was a little different in that they tried to let their students have much more of a say in the goings-on of the school. Every one of these meetings, somebody tried to move the school’s dress code away from business casual, for example.

The big-name item on this particular meeting was the school’s schedule. The high school was in many ways an extension of the big-name college in the city. Seniors and even many Juniors took a lot of college-level classes and the high-school had a lot of oddities to accommodate that. The one most specific for this essay was the trimester-style scheduling, which itself mirrored the college experience at the time.

But times change. The college was moving to semesters, with an auxiliary “May-term” to accommodate missing any credit hours that might be lost in the schedule change. The proposal for the high school was a similar semester schedule, but with a “January term” or “J-term” for… reasons I don’t really remember anymore.

I remember Freshman-age me not being a particular fan of this change. The tentative schedule proposed still didn’t sync up all that well with the colleges, and J-term seemed needlessly complex. I also wasn’t really convinced by the arguments to change. The most egregious argument came from one then-Junior who really wanted to go sailing over summer break and this schedule would… cut into that I guess? By a week or two? The point was, I felt it was in my best interest if the school kept going with its trimester-styled schedule.

Voting was something of an embarrassing experience. Instead of counting “ayes” or ballots, they had all in favor of a particular motion stand up and those running the meeting would gauge the results from there. Voting in favor of trimesters went first, so up I went.

Nobody else stood up with me.

Some people laughed. I heard somebody yell “Sit down!”

The next morning, the results of the forum were announced. The semester schedule won in a unanimous fashion. Now, a quick google search of the word “unanimous” will yield this:

u·nan·i·mous
/yo͞oˈnanəməs/
[...]
2. (of an opinion, decision, or vote) held or carried by everyone involved.

Uh huh.

I tried not to cause too much of a disruption, but I do remember saying, “It wasn’t unanimous.”

The response was, “It was basically unanimous.”

These sorts of fora at my high school died out within a few years and I think this was one of the reasons why. Even at the level people reference when attempting to convince people to go to the polls, the most micro of levels, votes can get discounted.

Again, this is going to come off as cynical. One could easily read this as a cautionary tale against democracy. But to me, I think about this as trying my damnedest to get an opinion across. Sure I failed (and, as a schadenfreude-y aside, J-term did turn out to be a needlessly complex addition to an already weird high school), but I did try. And when I filled out my ballot today, that’s what I thought about.

-F