barack obama's "new foundation"
as our new president said this morning, "the state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act--not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth"

like franklin delano roosevelt's "new deal" or lyndon banes johnson's "great society" now is the time for new programs to lift up the people and get them working again, get the economy healthy again. "build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together" and all else that is needed to raise this nation out of the mire of the last 8 years, to improve our worldy image and make us respectable again.

let us be in a position to reflect johnson's words: "The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community."

even in selfpublishing, i don't know what i'm doing
Mood:  down
Now Playing: pandora
been trying out lulu the last few days, reformatting my selfpublished novels to go over there from cafepress cause i'd be getting ISBN numbers for them. had to alter the original page sizes and reformat the covers--couldn't manage to get a pdf from a png properly which would have made "the empress of time" cover very unfortunately impossible and to a lesser degree the "clubhouse blues" cover (though i could have gotten around that one)--had to rework the covers a second time after the png/pdf issue, and only then learned of a long list of requirements for formatting and whatnot to get an isbn (not to mention i can't place the barcode, which kinda makes it hard to plan for my lemming drops studio logo on the backcover) and distribution (though there is a free option in distribution, the good ones seem to cost money)

and, i think there might have been a sentence in there when i started, but it got lost... as did i

anyway, while the novels will still be at cafepress, for now there will be no links to them at lemmingdrops.com or anywhere else as i discovered some old formatting troubles i missed the first time (good thing i've not sold a significant number of copies) and i'll be fixing those and then all 3 books will be back, as will be a 4th

in theory

pathetic update...
Mood:  bright
and last night, $143 belt--and not some fancy woman's belt either, just a plain ol guy's leather belt--and $319 jeans

at that price, you have to do like the cowboys and wear those things every day for, well, the rest of your adult life to make it worth it

some stuff about "false consciousness" i found and $220 jeans
Mood:  mischievious
on a sheet of paper i found the following:

to interrupt the page i found, i should mention that last night i was doing an inventory at diesel at the beverly center, and mostly i was going through item tags too fast to notice much detail. two details did catch my eye, though, one interesting but pointless, the other interested and quite pointed. the first: black leather bags were listed as neon yellow. the second: they had jeans that cost $220... there were also bags in the hundreds of dollars range but that's more common these days. but, seeing those jeans--and there didn't seem to be much too great about them; they weren't even "diesel" brand or some brand i'd heard of, where the cachet would have some alleged value in our modern society. they were just expensive jeans. the local salvation army shop in glendale is closing up and having a 75% off sale, and seeing those jeans made me want to stop by and pick up some clothes, maybe even some jeans, at 75% off just to demonstrate how fucked up our system is, when i could get jeans for mere cents, maybe a dollar, and there are some jeans for $220--and i'm sure there are even more expensive jeans elsewhere. the use-value and exchange-value sure are separated, and it's like society at large doesn't care... or if many do, it's not enough, not enough people, and not enough caring or something about all this would change...

but i digress. back to the paper i found:


except, oh so many do accept some vague notion of "the Man" keeping them down, but they ignore it as best they can, hoping against hope that maybe someday, if they work hard enough and dream big enough that they can be "the Man" and keep others down--or maybe they are misguided enough to think they can lift others up by inserting themselves into the body of  "the Man"--that thay can achieve the "American dream" with its accompanying riches... and then, they can buy some expensive jeans

also on this same sheet of paper of mine were two quoted bits of graffiti from the 1968 student uprising in Paris:


these are the things i write down from time to time, the things that get stuck in my head, but we've got over 4000 dead soldiers and thousands upon thousands of dead iraqis buying us cheap gas, right? and the world is a wonderful, peaceful place, so why should i even care how much jeans cost or what our "false consciousness" tells us is so, and what reality actually is in its difference... and its indifference

hell, i just queried an agent about one of my novels for the first time in a while. maybe this time will be the time i get something sold and i can be rich and famous and wear expensive jeans and wonder what the hell i was rambling about when i wrote this blog entry. let's all keep out fingers crossed

this isn't it
Mood:  don't ask
so, i'm watching north and south, all three books, recently, and i'm getting in my head ideas for reimagining it as an adaptation into an hourlong series, maybe a season per book, lots of historic detail, and still all the fiction that makes north and south good...

or i'm in history class planning to take more history courses, imagining being a history teacher...

but in a week, i'll be looking for temp work, probably some office job; it's what i used to do for years

life has a tendency of destroying ideas. no wonder the world sucks

spoken word night, korean filmmaking and the local paper
Mood:  happy
in that last week and a half, i've been published twice in the local paper, once (as mentioned in a previous blog entry) with my own little section at the bottom of the page, and i've performed publicly some poetry and made a movie from a script i wrote.

the local paper thing was some debate (me pro, some other people con) about dual language programs in elementary school

the public performance was at the "spoken word night" at GCC (where, since i haven't been updating this blog in a while, i'll mention i've been a student since winter semester this year). my first time up, i read a poem called "bored" and a poem called "two and two is five." then, a while later, the guy in charge asked if i wanted to go up again and i read "bondage to bondage." i got the feeling the audience liked it and sarah said i did great.

and, i mentioned it in passing in a previous blog entry last week i think, but the movie was in korean, for korean 101 at GCC. I wrote the script and starred as kyungchalkwan (police officer) and did what there were of the director/producer duties (bringing props, telling the other actors and the camera guy what to do). it's a simple little thing, a single scene basically, something like 15 camera setups to cover it though I specifically wrote it so it could feasibly be shot with a single shot. it's got no plot really, an incomplete mystery, a crime scene, a somewhat ornery detective, and in the end a talking dead guy. it was called chuseokaysuh sarin (murder on chuseok, chuseok being a korean holiday). i'm suppose to be meeting with my camera guy tomorrow, as he's also the editor, about finalizing what music goes on the final cut of the thing

just some more of my more (realtive to previous ones, that is) outgoing year

in support of dual language programs...
Mood:  a-ok
the following by me will be in tomorrow's local paper in the community commentary section:

Dual-language program is good for kids

By Robert Black

boring useless details redux
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: wire in the blood
it's late saturday, everyone's asleep. chuseokaysuh sarin (rough bit of phonetic spelling there) got its production tonight. that is, our group project short film for korean class--i wrote and directed it and also played kyungchalkawan (police officer). good time filming.

right now, i've got a rerun of wire in the blood on the tv. been watching reruns of this show every week since that new stand alone episode set in texas, and hadn't actually found them familiar until this one... i suppose i hadn't seen those particular episodes before.

anyway, had the laptop out to check the episode listings for wire in the blood and somehow happened over to the lemming drops studio site, found my old blog "boring useless details" and kinda missed that sort of rambling, unlike my other blog ("against the world") of my old essays, the b.u.d. blog wasn't about trying to make a point, political or otherwise, just me rambling about tv and movies and books an whatnot.

so, anyway, other than this wire in the blood on now and the filming earlier, i watched episodes 2 and 3 of ken burns' civil war today, took saer to a birthday party, made banana bread, and made an odd lego cave racer for a contest

of course, it's worth noting that i miss the other blog as well. ranting can be as fun as rambling, and doing both at the same time is just amazing

couple more episode of civil war tomorrow maybe, my niece's baby shower tomorrow also, sarah's got school, and tomorrow night i've got work

this weekend in (short) film
saturday was my last day at my job in the language lab, and mostly i stayed out of the way for the new supervisor--oddly, i think i ended up doing more work than many of my days before, with all the questions and assistance--and stuck to a computer in the back, finding myself some short films online. see, for this year's oscars, i made an effort to see nearly all the films nominated for everything. i had even managed to watch 7 of the 10 nominated short films online before oscar weekend... and oscar weekend, my wife and i made it to a screening of all 10--and the danish poet (which won for animated short) is awesome and worth seeing if you get the chance. so, then i learned, after the oscars, that the documentary shorts would be screening this weekend, and between watching some short films in february and researching these documentary shorts--not to mention my own interest in producing a short film--my interest in short films was piqued, so there i was at work, scouring youtube for animated shorts listed on the oscars archive site and i managed to watch 12 at work, made it to the documentary short screening and watched all the oscar nominees for 2005 on dvd, plus happened upon harvie krumpet (which won the oscar for animated short for 2003) on sundance late saturday night and loved it. checked sundance ahead and recorded two more short films on the dvr, watched them late last night

anyway, a quick rundown:

• the fan and the flower - simple visual style, wonderful story--a ceiling flan and a flower in a pot fall in love but can't be together--nice narration by paul giamatti
• gopher broke - a pixar short i hadn't seen, amusing--a gopher deliberately sets up speedbumps to knock food off delivery trucks--but not nearly as clever as some of their other work
• guard dog - ok visual style and an amusing little story, delving in the paranoid fantasies of a dog out for a walk, showing how his imaginings of what might happen to his owner make him bark at even innocuous squirrels
• ryan - lacking in content (a little short and inconclusive) but a fantastic visual experience, using cgi to show emotional and other non-visual conditions as visual
• the chubbchubbs - simple and short or i probably wouldn't have enjoyed this one much. alien janitor wants to sing, but the chubbchubbs are coming and folks freak out
• katedra (the cathedral) - awesome (and i use that word properly here) visuals but the overall metaphor comes off a little like the ending of apocalypto, easily taken as an affirmation of religion by someone religious or taken as a condemnation of religion by an atheist... i'm pretty sure it was supposed to be the former, but either way, the visuals alone are worth it
• das rad (the wheel) - all human history from the perspective of a couple piles of rocks, nicely done with a great visual style
• atama yama (mt. head) - overall lacking in style but clever in its content, as a stingy old man finds a cherry tree growing on his head and people come there to picnic, and ending with an amazing visual i won't spoil here
• give up aul yer sins - a little girl's telling of the story of john the baptist put to animation, lacking only because the girl just didn't embellish as much as one might hope
• fifty percent grey - a very simple film about a guy finding the afterlife to be empty but for a tv, very funny
• father and daughter - perhaps a little long, but its meditative tone works well at going slow, so i guess it isn't too bad. some nice visual metaphors but if i hadn't known ahead what this one was about i might have gotten lost in the slow middle
• rejected - hilarious collection of supposedly rejected promos for the family learning channel and some other products, taking more and more absurdist directions as they go on
• the blood of yangzhou district - the winner for documentary short this year, this film was 1) seriously sad in its subject matter, orphans left behind after their parents are dead from aids, some of them with aids themselves, and all shunned because of the lack of education about the disease in the poor area in which they live and 2) blatantly manipulative and self congratulatory as it was made by the people who were so proud of themselves for helping these orphans, or at least trying to
• recycled life - an amazing look at the lifestyle of people living off of, and sometimes in, a massive dump in guatemala city, better in the first half when it is just presenting these people and their lives, losing some of its power as it moves on to talk about the attempts to school the children of these families
• rehearsing a dream - at least in its objectivity, the best of the four documentary shorts this year, in my opinion, easily expandable into a feature length sort of thing like spellbound or the like. details the 7 day afaa affair in miami, in which 160 high school students interested in the arts got to workshop together and with professionals in their various arts. no agenda to this one
• two hands - like the previous one, objective and lacking an agenda, but this one was too much just leon fleisher telling his story--about how a hand injury led to years unable to play piano and further hand problems once he got to play again--and not enough visual record, archival footage i'm sure would be available at least for more performances or something
• harvie krumpet - harvie likes to be naked, can't help but touch things (and people he meets) with his finger, and, after an injury and a lightning strike, has a magnetic metal plate in his head, but he grows up, grows old, marries, raises a child and all of this displayed with some great claymation work. a beautiful little film, if you ask me
• badgered - simple and plain, but amusing still, the tale of a badger trying to get some sleep, bothered by some noisy birds and some army missiles buried under his hole
• the moon and the son - subtitled "an imaginary conversation" this is a conversation between a son and his now deceased father, an abusive drunk with ties to the mob and a life story he kept mostly secret until he was old and dying. pretty good, if maybe a few minutes too long, but it kept my interest, unlike...
• the mysterious geographic explorations of jasper morello - despite some amazing visuals and designwork, this film, about a navigator desperate to prove himself sets out on a voyage that may just cure a plague, managed to be a little boring, and it's only 26 minutes long, so that's saying something
• our time is up - live action short about a psychiatrist who changes how he deals with his patients wehn he gets some bad news from his doctor. it ends abruptly, but it's funny and gets done in its short time more than some much longer films manage sometimes
• Ausrei?er (the runaway) not much to say about the plot of this one without maybe giving too much away. a guy gives a boy a ride to school and... gets stuck with him for the day. a simple film that borders on some cliches but avoids them pretty much because the two actors are quite good
• the last farm - a wonderful visual in the end, at the grave, but a little pointless otherwise--seriously, i'm not sure what the point to showing the family on their way was at all
• cashback - what could have been a nice treatise on midnight shifts and hellish jobs turns into an excuse to show naked women--which you'd think would be a good thing--but seems a little pointless in the end... apparently a feature length version was completed before this short even got nominated for anything. i'm curious what that's like, so i guess it wasn't all bad
• six shooter - four people affected by recent deaths ride on a train. one of them just might be psychotic, and at least one of them suicidal. if you're into black comedy, especially tinged irish, this one's good
• iota - sundance sceduled this one wrong and my dvr missed the ending, so i'm not even sure what happened in it--and i can't find it online--but i still liked it, something happened to a little girl, drawn out of her room under mysterious circumstances, a year later her deaf sister and her father deal with the trauma
• the mood - a man's bad mood proves contagious and eventually dangerous

  and i still managed to watch the finale of daybreak online and the latest episode of battlestar galactica--and i really hope the writers come up with a way out of this without starbuck being a cylon, or katee sackhoff sinks her all into being a cylon--on the dvr and spend time with my family--trip to the flea market yesterday yielded some nice little people toys for saer, among other things--immediate and extended
  six shooter
  
  
  
  

  Posted by ca4/muaddib at 10:20 AM PST
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a political comic by me
haven't done one of these in a while, but the last few days i've been reading my old liquid thought comic strip from a few years back and rather liked a lot of it, and this image came to me after hearing recent news: