Review: Up

The short, spoiler-free version: Pixar's still got it. Up is an adorable, heart-tugging, hilarious and sometimes tear-inducing story hewn from a brick of pure wonder; if you cannot find something in this movie to make you smile, you should stop trying so hard to grow up.

Now, the longer version...

[PAUSE FOR SPOILERS


It has a talking dog and a zeppelin. Sold!

The story, in a nutshell: An old man, recently widowed and having trouble navigating modern life, decides to abandon modern life and have the adventure he and his wife always wanted, with a little help from hundreds of balloons. He is accompanied by a lawyer-friendly Boy Scout, a talking dog, and a giant bird; and learns, in the end, that the greatest adventures of all take place inside.

In all sincerity, as much of a Pixar fanboy as I am generally, Up is truly an amazing film. Pixar pulls out all the stops for this one, down to the tiniest detail, and produces something truly magical.

The visuals are, of course, astounding; Pixar has outdone themselves yet again in the visual department, creating a vision of South America and of the inside of an old man's home that genuinely left me in awe. Their characters are beautifully animated, and perhaps more importantly, subtly animated; so much of the story is told through facial expressions, gestures, and interaction with the environment (I squeed a little every time Carl put his hand on the mailbox) that I might forget the film was animated if the animation wasn't so beautiful. The sequence showing Carl and Ellie's courtship and marriage is truly breathtaking in its capacity to show, without a single line of audible dialog, the entirety of a couple's lives together.

Second only to the animation, though, are the characters. Just because their animators are so talented does not mean Pixar has shirked on their writing staff; the characters and events in this film are vivid and fully realized. Watching the character of Carl progress from the start of the film to the end, I was put in mind of actually seeing a time-lapse biography of some very real person who happened to look like two boxes stacked on top of each other. And the portrayal of his romance with Ellie was simply adorable.

The story...well, the story is where this movie might fall flat if it were a different movie. The plot itself is nicely organic and ties together well, but there are a few plot holes (the science teacher I saw this with had some choice comments about the buoyancy and staying power of helium balloons) and one or two places where characters were left holding the Idiot Ball (why would you fly your house to South America and not lock all your doors?). However, nitpicking like this is nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking; because if you're worried about this stuff, you are missing the point.

Up is not a movie about the real world. Up is a movie about wonder and adventure. Things happen not because they are realistic, but because they are beautiful or dramatic or sweet; the story running on mythological logic. From the moment Carl and Ellie's home floats away using a chimney full of balloons and two bedsheets, we have left the Campbellian world of the every day and moved to something far more likely to make us grin; and the wonder of the South American adventure ends with the sweet and utterly tear-jerking touch of a shot of their house, exactly where Ellie always dreamed it would be. They are the front and back covers of a fairytale, conveniently placed so you know when to enjoy the ride through a child's eyes.

And really, that's what this movie is about. This movie is about wonder, and all the little places you can find it, and our tendency to let life pass by without wonder, or to let the wonder in your lives pass us by without remark. It's about obsessing over little details of the past and refusing to see the amazing things happening in front of you (Charles Muntz being the totemic representation thereof—watch the events during the climactic battle), and the smile that comes to your face when you realize, as Mr. Incredible said a few Pixar films back, that sometimes the people you love are your greatest adventure.

Before I give up on spoilers, I have to end by saying, I am continually astounded by how dark Pixar is willing to wax in its films. Up has an implied miscarriage and/or fertility problem, complete with utterly depressed couple, a sad stunned man sitting at a funeral, and as far as I can tell the first on-screen depiction of blood in a Pixar film (caused by the main character, no less). It's not bad, by any means—I am an advocate of people, kids included, being forced into seeing the ups and downs of life, and it certainly gives extra lift to the joy of leaving the everyday—but it is surprising to me that they get away with it. Frankly, it gives me a little hope for the future of kid's entertainment, which is sorely lacking after some of this movie's previews...


[PAUSE TO END SPOILERS]

In the end, this is more of the Pixar magic, come to startling 3-D life. It is a beautiful movie for both child and adult, and you should probably consider bringing some Kleenex. It is odd to think that this is de rigeur for Pixar...but it is, and I hope it never stops, because it's good to know that someone in this world places such a high value on wonder.

Why Music Matters

Amanda Palmer* found an essay by Karl Paulnack that is a perfect example of the essay form: something that put beautiful words to a concept I've been trying forever to explain.

Though Paulnack's examples apply only to music, his point applies to all art: to paintings, to photography, to novels and dancing, to story and form of all kinds. These are a part of our spiritual lifeblood, and anyone who would deprive us of them is a criminal.

If you have art in your soul, do it; if you have to work at 7-11 to pay the rent while you create that art, do it. Follow your dream, however banal or deranged others might think it. We need you.

Life as Mystery: The Light Side of Twitter

I used to rail against Twitter, for all the usual reasons. Now I am pretty active in the Twitter community, such as it is. I joined for reasons of networking, initially—no sense in falling behind on the social tools available to me, I figure—but I have found far more delight in it that as a simple tool for self-promotion.

I am lucky enough that my followers do not merely consist of some analog friends and a few bots—there are people on Twitter who I have never met in person, or met only cursorily, who nevertheless follow and respond to what I say. And in reading them, and trying to view my own tweets with fresh eyes, I am fascinated by the insular, uninformative nature of a typical tweet.

People on Twitter do not generally tell you who they are, where they are, what they are doing; tweets do not usually come with footnotes or backstory. They are slices of a person's life served up without context, references to "the trip" or "the girls" or a never-before-mentioned "Bob" that leave the reader just informed enough to know that they probably didn't understand that tweet at all.

Some of this, of course, is part of Twitter's infamously bad signal-to-noise ratio, the "babbling out loud about one's unexceptional life" that has so captivated critics. And certainly, things like my friend @ragaraja's Quotes of the Day or @hodgman's outbursts of surrealism are the highlights of my Twitter experience, along with the occasional innovative uses of the medium.

But those little slices of everyday life, when done right, they are some of the best parts of my Twitter experience. Those tweets feel like little mystery novelettes to me, tiny hints at some greater set of unifying facts. They show me that some lives are exceptional—that for every three office workers there is someone working with deaf college students, or doing freelance art; that there are people of talent finding opeace and success in this world. And beyond that, these tweets help to remind me that as unified as our lives are now, there are parts of us that are not laid bare, that are not served up for public consumption. They remind me of our individuality and the manifold twists and turns that make each life unique: universal truth found in vague nouns.

Even more than this, those tweets make me think; they make me research, and wonder, and shift my brain around trying to contextualize these people, trying to understand as much of the world as I can. They are little reminders of the Socratic definition of wisdom, served up to me fresh every day. And maybe it's overly optimistic of me; but I figure, if I can find little mysteries and hidden smiles in Twitter, the rest of life can't be that difficult.

Not Providence: Two Minutes Late, but with Annotation to Spare.

Good morning loyal readers; and if you're here because of BayCon, welcome! Not Providence Part Thirteen is up, and now includes 100% more depressing strippers.

We also have, as promised, a few annotations for you all—three this week, to be exact.

• David (initially miscredited, my apologies) requested something that required me going all the way back to annotate Part One: the recipe for the elusive gimlet.


• Kate dipped directly into Part One, wondering just what Randall is reading.


• And last but not least, Glen asked me to explain why Randall has a Frank Zappa ringtone.

That's all we've got for this week. Enjoy the update, and keep the requests coming; I'm off to dance for my paycheck.

BayCon '09 Wrap-Up

(A quick bit of bookkeeping first of all: for the sake of keeping it easy, I will be adding Not Providence annotations along with tomorrow's update, rather than today. My apologies for the delay; blame the events you are about to see retold.)

This is the first in what I hope is a long line of con wrap-ups, from the point of view of an attendee (though naturally I pray for posts as a panelist, guest, maybe even MC one of these years...oh, such dreams...). I have to be honest and start my con wrap-ups with this: I hated my first con.

To be clear, my first con was not BayCon '09. My first con (not counting an ill-fated adventure in gaming at a con in my freshman year of college) was BayCon '03, which we somewhat unaffectionately referred to as "DramaCon". I was physically at the con, but saw none of the actual con activities; in between being a gofer and pretending I had some idea how to work security at a party (that was already secure enough thanks to hotel staffers and the vigilance of F.L.A.R.E.), I spent my time causing, watching, dodging, or otherwise interacting with people crying, screaming, or moping. So suffice to say I did not have the best time. When I fully committed to the idea of being a writer, I told myself that I would not attend a convention again until I was there as a guest.

Then along came my friend Stephanie, and her boyfriend Glen (a much older friend of mine who does not have a Very Important Website for me to link to). Among other things, Stephanie had some skill in marketing, and insisted that attending a convention was a good thing for a Young Writer in Training like me to do; so I bit my lip, and breathed a sigh, and said, sure, I'll try it.

Everything after that point is pure awesome.

I am not an expert in conventions, so I can't say if BayCon '09 was well run, but I can say I had a great deal of fun. The panels I attended were informative and useful and friendly, the game room seemed to be quite active, the atmosphere was mellow, and drama seemed to be, if not nonexistent, at least not out in the open where everyone could find it. The Not Providence flyers I put on the free tables seemed to disappear at a decent clip (if you're here because of those, hello!), and I got to give two business cards to two people much more successful than me, and one to someone still getting started that I thought I could help (if you're here because of that, hello!). Eyes were rolled at the staid geeky jokes (how many times can "42" be funny?), hands were shaken, a few drinks were had. I do not feel cheated out of the funds spent on registration.

More than all this, though, the best part of the convention for me was seeing what it did for Stephanie. She sold all but one of the pieces she displayed in the art show, with one of them going to the Monday voice auction in a year when only about 20 pieces made it that far; and five major, successful artists all came by and gave her both glowing reviews and helpful pointers. She was beaming when we left con on Saturday, along with intermittently blushing; and frankly, I would have paid any amount of money for first row tickets to watching an artist I know and love meet with such wonderful beginning success.

If I had a complaint about con, it is that they did seem somewhat disorganized, though again, take my complaint with a grain of salt. The Artist Guest of Honor's slideshow was rescheduled both temporally and spatially, and had a very small turnout (though that was excellent for Stephanie personally), and both the writing panels I attended had the panel's composition shifted, in one case quite dramatically. The website for the convention was down for a good couple of days during the week leading up to the con, and the schedule of events was not available until near the end of the week before that. And of course, there was a bit of scrambling with the Guests of Honor having to cancel with less than a week to go, though that was beyond the convention's control. Still, this seems like a temporary issue, and it's not something I'm going to let be a real black mark on the con; as evidenced by my decision to come home and almost immediately pre-purchase a membership for BayCon '10, which I hope to attend with slightly more literary pull (fingers crossed).

In the long run, the experiment was a success, and I think I'll be attending panels and poking my head into the game room for a few years to come. BayCon '09 make me break my vow, and I'm glad I did.

Mistakes and Mishaps and Falling Down Stairs

I must apologize for the dearth of annotation work yesterday; as some of you, my loyal readers, are aware, I am attending the Sunday and Monday bouts of BayCon, and frankly the con adventure in all its dimensions has occupied my full attention. One never realizes how many people one knows until nearly all of them show up in the same place.

So, tonight, after closing ceremonies, I will be dealing with all things Not Providence. Rest assured: tomorrow's update will occur on schedule even if I have to power myself on adrenalin shots.

Review: The One-Eyed Man is King

Right, Mr. Blog. You're a writer's blog, it's time you occasionally start acting like one; and since we can't be arsed to keep better tabs on current releases in fiction we'll have to do the next best thing and talk about theater.

Thursday night, as I was settling in for a bit of pre-writing dinner, I received a text message from a friend, telling me that her housemate was in a play on Friday night, and asking: would I like to come? Being thirsty for adventure, I said "Yes, absolutely". The production in question was the Phoenix Theater's production of Carter W. Lewis's The One-Eyed Man is King; and as of now, there is no level on which I regret having taken up my friend's offer.

My experience with independent theater has been resolutely binary: either the play is superlative and I start earmarking actors for futures on Broadway or in Hollywood, or I leave knowing exactly why this play and those actors are things one's never heard of. I am elated to say that this play is the former.

The One-Eyed Man is King is, like all the best kinds of art, something that is only knowable through the experience of it; a plot summary wouldn't be so much at risk of spoiling the fun as it would be at risk of making no sense or seeming silly without the actors, the space, the experience of viewing to drive it. So I will say it briefly: The One-Eyed Man is King is a play about a blind burglar, the alcoholic rich woman whom he attempts to rob, and their small, broken families. But of course, also like all great art, the play is much more.

The script is fantastic: witty without being wacky, deeply insightful and intelligent, and poignant without delving into the ugly arty minimalism that seems to plague so many plays that want to tell a moral. Likewise, the Phoenix Theatre's use of its space is superb: the actors, the positioning, the lighting are all used to create a real, immersive three-dimensional space, in which the audience can understand all the necessary data to know what is going on and enjoy the play, but find new details depending upon where they look. It seems like such a basic thing, but this cast and crew does it in a way that begs repeated viewings to see what I missed.

If I haven't mentioned the actors in detail, it's because I saved the best for last. All plays depend on their actors, but The One-Eyed Man is King is a script that lives or dies on the strength of its cast—and this cast makes it into something superlative. Andi Trindle makes the rich woman dysfunctional and distressed in a way that is so real it makes the viewer's guts twist; her daughter-in-law (Allie Jones) is a believable portrait of the kind of emotional half-logic that powers teenagers (and really most people) in distress; and the thief's father (Michael Moerman) oozes wisdom, smarm, and raunch in equal amounts, without ever being anything short of lovable. And while I don't want to suggest the others were anything short of amazing, Dan Wilson's portrayal of the thief had to be one of the linchpins of this play. I cannot imagine the level of training it took for him to never quite look anybody in the face while he spoke; and his delivery of the thief's lines (if not the wittiest character the one most prone to spewing witticisms) brings the character to a real, unique life.

The One-Eyed Man is King could easily have been arty trash, a slice-of-life burrito without anything of substance in the middle; but instead, the Phoenix Theater and its players delivers a powerful and entertaining performance. If you're in the San Francisco area while it's running, do yourself a favor and go see it; tickets are $20, and there are shows this weekend and next, as well as a run on Thursday the 28th. Details are available at www.phoenixtheatresf.org; and if you liked it make sure to tell your social networking tools, as these guys run (somewhat admirably) on word of mouth. It's really worth all the effort.

Not Providence: It Must Be Tuesday.

Update is go. Today's theme is "job security".

Belated Annotation

My apologies for not posting this week's annotated version on Sunday; my only excuse is that it was so hot on Sunday all my energy was diverted into not discorporating into mist as a survival tactic. Luckily, we only had one request this week, so only one person will be wanting to stab me in the face: Mr. Glen, with his question about Dario Argento.

Enjoy, and keep the requests a-comin'!

Immersion and the Urge to Flinch

Today promises to be an at-home sort of Saturday, with movies and some writing and a good bit of reading to boot; one of those days you eat cold leftovers and sit by yourself and enjoy the way the sun sets. The movie store didn't have what I was looking for (inspiration to get Netflix finally, at least), but I did wind up with a classic movie, whose plotline happens to revolve rather tightly around incest. And this got me to thinking, which means it got me to posting...

Given my proclivities, conversations turn to books and films pretty quickly—compatibility in friends and lovers is, after all, one part chemistry and two parts complaining about the same things—and something I have been noticing of late in these conversations is some variation on this sentence: "I've learned to just hide through the violence in movies".

I mean no offense to the people who say this, but I do not get this attitude. Not the attitude of violence or grimness or terrible behavior affecting them—that's called "still being human". What I don't understand is the capacity to divorce oneself from the proceedings on the page or screen; to flip past something or fast-forward through it or to hide behind one's significant other until it is over.

To me, all entertainment is a ritual of change. When I open the book or hit Play or enter the gallery, it is a surrender of control; a tacit contract that I will go wherever it is the work is attempting to take me, and will not attempt to take back control until after the journey is over. It is, if you will, a low-impact legal hallucinogen, a chance to experience the world through a fresh pair of eyes.

And what an artist wants to show us is not always pleasant. The world isn't always like a handjob from a magical princess; sometimes animals get tortured and babies die in the cradle and people give their one true love AIDS. And so, too, sometimes art is about this dirtier, uglier side of the human condition; and sometimes art has to take you through that place to show you the wonders of it.

To reject this wholly is not something I would do, but it is something I would understand. Not everyone views it the way I do, and not everyone needs their entertainment to be transformative; and certainly, sometimes the darkness came to them without the courtesy of being contained by two covers or a screen. But to me, partially rejecting something, filtering one's experience of it...this is like putting on sneakers and not tying the shoelaces, or not draining pasta before you add sauce to it: something fundamental is being removed that renders what could be a deeper or more useful experience merely somewhat functional.

This is not to say I exult in the terrible; to me, the terrible is and should be just another implement in the artist's toolkit, not the entirety of brush, paint, and canvas. I hate the torture porn genre as much as the next person with a working stomach, because it has nothing to say except "Look at all this gore!"

This is not to say, either, that these moments do not affect me—they very much do. But I consider movies that make me wince and cringe and curl up to be every bit as powerful and useful to my experience as movies that make me laugh, or cry, or surge with adrenalin. They are all emotional outbursts; they are all facets of our existence in this crazy little strip of time.

So I'll keep listening to "Polly" by Nirvana, and "Samson" by Regina Spektor; and I'll keep watching the man get his limbs sawed off in Watchmen and Junior Roark get castrated in Sin City, and read vivid descriptions of torture and chewing off one's own fingernail. Because as much as I may wince and mewl, I think that these things are as valuable as love; and I don't want to end life feeling like I came at it with blinders. And when these things happen on screen I'll let people hide behind me; but I will never, ever understand it.

Beauty

Sometimes, I envy Heather McDougal.

Here is a woman who has the sense of wonder I wish I still had; a woman who manages to look at the world each day with fresh eyes, who has found the beauty and the bizarre in a thousand tiny things. She gives voice to the silent beauties of this world and these minds we've been lucky enough to inherit; and for that, I treasure her; and for that, I envy her.

When I read her blog, I find a kind of peace. It's a balance, I think; a sort of quiet optimism, finding the glass half full by just seeing everything as a weird experiment. It's an attitude I do my best to cultivate, though the world might sprout a multitude of venomous thorns, though people I'd call "stupid" might be prolific: to see the world as an endless adventure, to see the ironies and the foolishness and the exultant spark of some divine trickster in everything we do. In short: I envy Heather McDougal, because Heather McDougal always greets life with a smile. And I wish I could always keep smiling.

As if right now, in my world, it is Friday. I have edited Part Twelve. I am on my third hand-mixed vodka gimlet of the night. I watched the first 7 chapters of Brick before my DVD player decided the disc was full of invisible scratches. I have a DVD with The Man from Earth on it, which I should watch on the recommendation of not one but two lovely people. And I am partaking in the beautiful, childlike, thoroughly ridiculous stream of tweets that is Amanda Palmer's "Losers on Friday Night on their Computer" club on Twitter (for the curious, look up the #LOFNOTC hashtag).

Somewhere, people on Friday night are having adventures. Somewhere there is dancing, and the meeting of eyes, and summer heat, and lovemaking. In here, though, there is Twitter, and drinking, and the feeling, however small, of accomplishing something Literary. In here we're watching movies and considering a run to Safeway for popcorn. In here, we're having our own kind of adventure, and in here we have our own kind of beauty.

It's time for me to get that damn smile on my face.

Shortcuts

If you have been wanting to share Not Providence but have found the URL too cumbersome to remember, or if you've just been having that second problem, you will be pleased to know that any and all links to notprovidence.com will now dump you out at the Prologue page. Rejoice, for I have brought unto you easier-to-remember URLs!

My website is still hyphenated, though. I blame the generations of mothers who insisted that Tyler Hayes was a good name for someone other than me. Unfortunately, battles to the death are still not legal in the United States.

It's Providence Time

Not Providence 11 is up. Have a little violence.

It is amazing the ease and the toil that can both go into something I create. Really, what I'm trying to say is, I love doing this. Enjoy.

Annotations of a Sunday

As mentioned, annotations were late this week, due to Mother's Day, but they were not absent. We were a bit light this week, but hey, all projects take time to pick up momentum. Our contributors this week were again Glen and Kate.

• Glen requested an explanation of the wart mentioned in the latest update, and I was all too happy to oblige.


• From Kate, we had an excuse to be evasive: a request for more information about the signs decorating Randall's lawn. I did what I could, but I assure you more data really is forthcoming.

That's all we have for this week. Keep the requests coming and we will be benevolently continue to answer them.

Mercury Retrograde, or Something

Some weeks, my daemon hides in the walls and drinks beer and generally tries not to work.

The week started with some very deep thought and introspection by me, and it's inspired a sort of Zen state of affairs; and this in and of itself is not a bad thing nor a hindrance, but it was exhausting to get to it, and when coupled with having plans with friends for four of the next five days and plans with family and friends on the fifth, I am not optimistic for getting a great deal of intense creative work done; and the pressure placed on tonight as my only definitively free night this week was so great that it was an uphill canoe trip just to get editing done on Book 1, Part 11 of Not Providence.

Fortunately, that editing is done, and plans may yet destabilize on one day or another, or end early, or something of that nature; and after this week is next week, and the week after that. Though I do have to say that now I really do not understand the overscheduled lives that some people of my acquaintance lead—is this maybe how people who aren't writing or otherwise artificing most nights fill their time?

Not Providence Part Ten

It's Tuesday again, and so here it is: Part 10. Please enjoy the imagery.

And now, I chain myself to the Rock of Proofreading, like unto a modern Prometheus.

The Annotation Project, As Promised

Here we are, Sunday the 3rd, and it's time for the first round of annotations for Not Providence. Pickings were predictably slim—people are still getting used to this idea, finding the links, etc.—but it was a better start than I was perhaps expecting. Without further ado:

• From long-time commenter Glen, we have annotation requests for an explanation of the title, addressed in the Prologue (bottom of the page, the image hated me footnoting it); the origin of the term "angle man", addressed in Book 1 Part 3; and the elusive Star Trek joke in Book 1 Part 8. Glen is apparently one of those people who puts a fiver in the busker's guitar case.


• From longer-time commenter Kate, we have a question about the "Order of Eagles" mentioned in Book 1 Part 6.

For now, that's all she wrote. Send in your requests, and I'll get to them next weekend, though Mother's Day is likely to cause a late-day update.

Keep Showing Up: Elizabeth Gilbert on the Creative Life

I am not usually one for mumbo-jumbo; I have difficulty getting behind religion as something more than a fascinating outlet for human belief, and while all mythologies are equal they still all feel like a veneer over the truth of what is weird about life. And then there's creativity.

It is hard not to approach creativity from a spiritual standpoint. There is something about it that is so elevating, so strange, so genuinely immortal, that the idea it is simply chemical reactions bouncing around my head is hard to believe. It's not something I can articulate beyond the usual words "inspiration" and "writer's block", if for no other reason than that other efforts at articulation make me sound totally insane.

And then Elizabeth Gilbert did this talk at TED. And I stopped feeling quite so insane.



I could write an entire essay echoing what Gilbert has said here; but the bottom line is, I think she's right. And I am no longer going to be ashamed to say it.

(Brief) Movie Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The short, spoiler-free version: X-Men Origins: Wolverine is to the X-Men films what the character of Wolverine is to the X-Men comics: a rather absurd addition, but an endlessly entertaining one, a pure action movie with none of that nasty character development to get in the way of some truly epic special effects and fight choreography.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

I can sum up the glory of Wolverine in three words: Retractable. Adamantium. Katanas.

The character of Wolverine has always been the heavy metal element of the group, that archetypal bad boy who everyone loves so much that he is the most obvious and up-front bastion of the X-Men team's obligatory comic book absurdities. He's over a century old, he's indestructible, he's got unbreakable diamond-hard claws, he chomps cigars and he's been both a mercenary and a samurai. He is the unabashed effort to be everything that the Marvel writers think is SO TOTALLY AWESOME, and this movie, in that sense, does him justice.

There's a plot to the movie, but it doesn't matter. There are characters, they have conflicts, but it doesn't matter. What matters is watching Hugh Jackman be a stoic, occasionally-roaring badass, and Liev Schreiber chewing the scenery and acting psycho, and Ryan Reynolds quipping while deflecting bullets with swords.

While Schreiber is an excellent actor, and Jackman gives Wolverine the life he actually needs, the real star of this movie is the special effects and the cinematography. The movie's flow is hollow, filled with so many action movie cliches that you could write it by hitting Random Item on TV Tropes (who thinks they can get away with the Slow Walk Away From Exploding Vehicle shot anymore?), but the action sequences are an over-the-top, unapologetic exercise in making you go "Awesome!" People reload their guns by tossing them up in the air, people ride on the tops of out of control helicopters, people have retractable adamantium katanas embedded in their hands. It is so over the top I could not help but laugh, but I really think that's the point. Wolverine does not mince words, it does not put on an act for you. Wolverine wants you to laugh and shout and pump your fist, and god-damn-it, it is going to make you do that as best it can.

END SPOILERS.


I don't need to discuss the movie's flaws; they are part and parcel of what I just discussed. Nothing in the movie will move you, or enrich you, or make you think. The script's occasional efforts at being deep are either the ghosts of a more emotional script or brief nods to the fact that there are actually some real actors in among the CGI and explosives, and what isn't predictable in the plot is totally insane. But this is not a movie that is about that. This movie is pure rock n' roll pulp, and while it is neither the first nor the best, it is definitely worth one viewing just to see it build a whole new top to go over.

Writing Weather Again

This morning, I had a bagel with lox, as per my standard Saturday operating procedure, and set myself to work organizing my room. There was supposed to be assembly of an IKEA bookshelf, which given my collection is sorely needed; but every time I look at the box, I find myself remembering what a pain my current shelves were to put up, and making a mental note to plan for someone to come distract me while I assemble. Or possibly assemble for me, depending on the someone.

So now, I turn my thoughts to a shower, and I look out my window, and I see that it's writing weather. Gray in a cottony way, just enough damp to make the cement reflective, a refreshed but belabored look to the trees; the kind of weather that makes me think of first grade, walking around the side of the school building, the way my triceratops eraser smelled (I never did erase anything with that...). It's weather that makes me want the energy to write for eight hours, weather that calls to me to do something with my time.

Today's plan is to see Wolverine with my mother, who is in town whilst my father plays the devil's music for a mass of idolatrous fans; and while I doubt I will find any deep or resonant inspiration in Hugh Jackman's abs, I think it will be a welcome break from routine to see an action movie and spend time with my mother. And then, tonight, I will find something tasty to eat for dinner, and drink a glass of wine, and make the writing magic happen. I hope.

You see, this Not Providence thing has been excellent for my writing discipline; but Not Providence is a work of warm summer nights, of that dark heat that feels just a little bit crazy; it's a work of misspent youth and regrettable life decisions, of actions taken now you'll know you'll regret later. This means that my brain has an excuse to not try for the story tonight, to drink a second glass of wine and watch a second movie and let sleep crawl in behind my eyes. But despite that, despite the story's resistance, I know that today's weather will refresh, and that today's activities will end with me accomplished and inspired; and for that, fog, I am glad you came.