Friday, September 29, 2006

Man vs. Nature?

Jean-Michel, who is the eldest son of sea-explorer legend Jacques Cousteau, told reporters that he thought Irwin, in his "Crocodile Hunter" shows and beyond, would "interfere with nature, jump on animals, grab them...It appeals to a lot of people, but I think it's very misleading. You don't touch nature, you just look at it. And that's why I'm still alive." (Jean-Michel also said that he found the death "unfortunate" and said he had "a lot of respect" for Irwin.)*

Well, I have a lot of respect for Cousteau (really, that's not sarcastic), but that statement of his is really a piece of work. Honestly, how do you not touch nature?

OK, obviously he did not mean that literally. I'm sure the man walks on grass just like the rest of us; he doesn't just look at it. But he does invoke an idea that I've always had a problem with: that "man" is separate from "nature". That "nature" is this pristine, holy thing that is sullied by any contact with "man".

Of course the reason Steve Irwin was so popular was that he did jump on animals and wrestle with them. I hate nature shows as a general rule; I find them unbelievably dull. Voice-over and a locked down camera, ugh. But Irwin got in there, got involved. (To be honest, I enjoy the Kratt brothers as well. They don't get in there as much as Steve, but they do get genuinely excited when they find cool animals. And genuine excitement is quite infectious). Man and animal, both part of nature, working out a way to live together and share the same space. That was Irwin's mission statement, wasn't it? It wasn't look from a distance, admire the untouched beauty, feel guilt for how you've sullied it with your need for civilization. It was working for a compromise, looking for ways to keep sharks off of beaches so that people could swim without getting bitten, but that didn't kill the sharks in the process. It was forward-looking and always positive. Which was why I liked Steve.

I think this idea of not touching nature is a really bad one. I think it's one of the reasons so many people actively hate environmentalists. They tend to treat humans as intruders when we are, after all, a part of the ecosystem too. Yes, we've been given the gift of reason, and we should use it to find ways to meet our needs that cause the least amount of damage to the world around us, but the idea that we shouldn't touch stuff.... well clearly, it rubs me the wrong way.

My vote for the worst book ever: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, in which a talking gorilla (ugh) advocates a return to hunting/gathering over agriculture. Because what would make the world a better place is high infant mortality and getting rid of those artists and scientists and all the other specialized careers that come from one man acquiring enough food to support more than just himself.

What the environmental movement needs, in my opinion, is more guys like Jared Diamond, who are looking for ways to balance the needs of the environment with the needs of industry. He has his critics, some feel he compromises too much, but I like him. He is not a zealot, and that's sadly all too rare. His books are well worth the read.

Another book I just read also touches on this man and nature debate. It's this one:



It's about what the Western Hemisphere was really like before Columbus came. History is one of those areas where I feel my public school education really let me down, so I've been digging up interesting books like this when I can find them so I can fill in the gaps. My impression from my school days was that North America was sparsely populated, no real cities, and was all wild, only lightly touched or untouched by man. (I also thought Squanto was a fictional character. I'm a bit ashamed about that one. In my defense, he is a highly fictionalized historical figure; I think I can be forgiven).

This book is well worth reading in its entirety. Suffice it to say my school days' assumptions were wrong in all respects (although I did actually know some of this before reading 1491, because I've been reading Jared Diamond's books which make a lot of the same points). The book goes into depth on what different Indian groups were doing to use nature to meet their needs. Most interesting for me were those in Amazonia, who couldn't grow fields of grain so they cultivated groves of nut and fruit trees. Once they were all wiped out by smallpox, nothing was left but the trees. Which in the middle of a rain forest don't really scream "civilization" to the casual observer, such as the first white explorers.

My point is, popular imagery aside, the Indians did not see themselves as apart from nature, and they didn't think nature was just for looking at. They touched it and used it. Because that's what people do.

* Disclaimer: From what I've read, it seems Jean Michel's problem wasn't with Irwin so much as it was with his nephew Philippe Cousteau, who worked with Irwin. Apparently the Cousteau family is quite a divisive and combative bunch. Someone should make a sitcom. Nah, it could never be as good as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Still no joy for Duckie

I already own this movie, but I was tricked into buying it again.

Let's back up a bit. Like many of my generation, I adore John Hughes movies, and Pretty in Pink is the best of the lot as far as I'm concerned. Everytime I slept over at my best friend's house, we would rent this movie. Honestly, every single time. I still know it by heart (you'd think it was The Empire Strikes Back or something). My friend was a compulsive magazine reader; she read all the entertainment magazines and was always my friend-in-the-know. She was the one who told me that originally the movie ended with Andie and Duckie together, and the book tie-in, the crappy novelization had this original Duckie gets the girl ending. This was back in the days before the Internet, of course. This sort of info is readily available on any movie with two clicks and a Google, but back then it was like she told me she knew where the Holy Grail was.

I was in my 20s before I found a copy of the crappy novelization in a used book store (and even a decade later it was still like I'd found the Holy Grail, I'm sad to say. I was embarrassingly excited).

So it's been 20 years now that I've been longing to see this ending. I know it exists, I've read the novel version but I want to see the actual celluloid! So when I was at the Best Buy last week (buying Stars Wars Lego II for the boys) and I saw a new release of Pretty in Pink called the "Everything's Duckie Edition" which promised "The Original Ending: The Last Dance". At last! At last I would see the Duckie ending!

Or not. It's not actually there. It's just the cast reminiscing about shooting that first ending and then going back for reshoots. I was robbed!

To be honest, though, Andie ending up with Duckie doesn't work. The Blane ending was definitely the way to go. I think I felt as strongly as I did about it back in the day because it wasn't the Andie character I identified with in the movie; it was Duckie. Andie was cold and aloof (and into fashion, something I've never carried much about myself). Duckie was just Duckie, himself take it or leave it. I didn't want them to end up together because it was the right choice for Andie; I just wanted Duckie to get the girl. But like I said, it doesn't work. And it's all in that little scene between Duckie and Andie's dad. Andie and Duckie together would just be her parents all over again; one person feeling all of the love and affection for two.

The ending from the theatrical release is better for Duckie anyway. He makes the choice to step back and let Andie go. I wished it could have ended there. But someone felt they had to throw him a bone, so we get the ridiculous Kristy Swanson cameo (called "Duckette" in the credits). Is this the sort of girl Duckie would be attracted to, Duckie the pathological individualist? This is his follow-up for Andie? A richie? No way. He needs a girl with flare, with a sense of self.

Of course it helps to imagine her in her other theatrical persona: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now there's a girl for Duckie.

Friday, September 15, 2006

My Summer Vacation...

...thank god it's over. OK, it wasn't that bad, considering not a single thing went off as planned. The boys, for instance, we're very well behaved on their first long trip in the car.

The drive from Minneapolis to Chicago was nice - at first. We left after rush hour and stopped at our favorite rest stop in Menomonie, WI for sandwiches (it's on the way to Chippewa Falls, which we are compelled to visit the last weekend of every July). It started spitting rain while we ate, which was OK since the picnic tables were under little pavilions. Not an hour later the rain had increased to the point where seeing the car in front of us was a challenge, particularly if it was actually a truck in front of us, spraying up a dense curtain of water. Did I mention the freeway was down to one lane for road construction? Well, it was.

Still, we got to Chicago without incident and found our hotel. I had made the reservations over the internet, and not being familiar with Chicago, I picked the hotel pretty much at random (as close to the Field Museum as we could get so we wouldn't have to drive on the freeway to get there, then the cheapest I could find). We were in a little cluster of hotels that service the Midway Airport. A nice little oasis, and our hotel was very well run, clean with very friendly and helpful staff. But to get there we had to drive through what I can only hope is the pit of Chicago. (It actually wasn't until we were leaving on Thursday morning that I actually saw parts of Chicago that were clean and well kept).

The next day was Field Museum Day. Our non-refundable, non-exchangable tickets were only good between 9:30-10 a.m. Mapquest directions said it'd take about 12 minutes to get there from our hotel. We gave ourselves an hour so we could get there early, no stress. It took almost exactly an hour to get there, and it was the very opposite of no stress, as my eldest puked all over himself in the back seat (whether from nerves or a side effect of my husband's techniques for driving stick in stop-and-go traffic, who can say?)

So now it's already 9:30, we don't know where we are or where we can get a pair of pants and be back in less than 30 minutes (because he didn't lean forward to aim for the floor: it was all over his jacket and his pants and his seat. And by the way hotel laundry service for a pair of pants and a jacket is $20, FYI). So we cleaned him up as best we could in the restroom and got in line. Because those tickets were 100 nonrefundable dollars.


Now it could just be my pathological optimism talking, but this actually worked out well for us. It was very crowded throughout the entire exhibit, but when someone in your party still smells a bit like vomit, people generally choose to give you a bit more room. So we got to see everything, and it was very, very cool. Egypt, and specifically Egypt circa the time Akhenaten was in power (Tut's predecessor) was one of the settings for novel #2, so I've done a lot of reading on this time period. Enough to where I actually recognized a lot of the artifacts. Aidan and Oliver were interested as well, which is cool since it wasn't really geared for children. Oliver did, however, get freaked out by a massive stone head, part of a long-lost statue of Akhenaten, which was set up high so it sort of loomed over you in one room. I can't hardly blame him, he was one scary guy (and his daughters are even more alien-looking; the theory is that the whole family had some bizarre inbreeding-related disease). This isn't a picture of that head, but just to give you an idea:




I can definitely see why he was freaked out. But then he was also freaked out by Sue the T. Rex in the lobby. And the stuffed gorillas. And the animatronic bugs in the Underground Adventure...

They were both very good in the clearly not-meant-for-kids Tut exhibit. And the Field Museum had other exhibits on Egypt that were kid-oriented. You could touch stuff and interact with things (like using a shaduf to pour water into an irrigation canal, or trying to pull a massive block of stone using ropes and a wood sledge). It was a nice museum, but we didn't stay long on account of the puke smell one of us was still stewing in. We did get a big Tut T-shirt that covered most of the big spots. And I, of course, bought the museum book with photos of all the artifacts (plus a CD of the audio tour narrated by Omar Sharif, a nice bonus since we hadn't paid for that option with our exhibit tickets). And the book was written by Zahi Hawass. Not "foreword by" not "introduction by", written by. (Completely off topic, but my similar book on the Viking exhibit which spawned the ideas for my WIP has a foreword by Hillary Rodham Clinton. I have no idea why. That book has some terrific contributors, especially in the Greenland section, which of course is the most-referenced part of my book. But who hears "Viking" and thinks "Hillary"? It's just bizarre).

In case some of you are saying, "Who the hell is Zahi Hawass?", I assure you if you've ever watched a doc about Egypt on the Discovery Channel, or the History Channel, or any other channel, I guarantee you've seen Zahi Hawass:


So that covers day one of our vacation. Day two was less eventful. The Shedd Aquarium was amazing (no one puked, but Oliver was freaked out by the giant sperm whales that hung from the ceiling in the food court and the giant octopus on the ceiling of the gift shop). It still rained all day, so we never got to go to the sculpture garden or any parks or even just walk along Lake Michigan. When you're travelling with a high-energy 5-year-old, this is more than a little disappointing. We resorted to letting them watch Pokeman because it was the only kid's show on the hotel TV (formerly a forbidden show, but all their friends watch it). They were both very excited and sat quietly and colored in their notebooks while they watched it (our hotel room was actually one big bed plus a fold-out couch, which was cool because that meant during the long evenings stuck in doors we could sit on a couch and had a coffee table to draw and play on rather than trying to make do with two beds). (We also had a microwave and a little fridge, so we could cook frozen dinners rather than eat out. Did I mention the hotel was great?).

It quit raining on Thursday, the day we drove back. We decided to take the highways through downtown so they could see the Sears Tower (or as Oliver calls it, the Serious Tower, which is taller than the Vampire State Building). They got a lot of looks at it; there was road construction and it took over an hour to get from one freeway to the next. But they were really geeked to see it since it had been in clouds, mist, and fog every other time we'd come downtown. They never did get a good look at Lake Michigan, though. There wasn't enough cash left to park anywhere, so we had to let it go.

The drive back through Wisconsin was beautiful. The leaves were just starting to turn (in a few more weeks they'll be spectacular; memo to self, next trip to Chicago will be in October).

But we had to make one last stop on the way home, at Best Buy. The Star Wars: Lego Game II just came out. If you've spoken to my sons recently, this is a fact you are already very well aware of.

That's why they were so well behaved on vacation and during the long car rides. Bribery.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

On pottery

I love a good DVD commentary track. Most are a waste of time, but a few are full of insights into the storytelling process. Robert Rodriguez consistently gives good audio. On one DVD (one of the Spy Kids movies, but I'm not sure which), he told this story:

On the first day of a college pottery class, the professor announced that half the class would be graded on quantity while the other half would be graded on quality. Some of the students would be required to make fifty clay pots by the end of the semester. Students who made all fifty would receive an A, those who made forty would receive a B, and so on. The other students only had to make one clay pot, but everything about it had to be perfect. The lesson lay in the fact that the highest quality pots inevitably came from the students who were to be graded on quantity. These students learned from their mistakes, and had enough practical experience that the pots they made kept getting better and better. The students who were graded on quality tended to over-think their designs, and without the practice required to gain the skill, could not produce a high quality pot.

I've thought about that story a lot since I first heard it. I suspect he's right, and yet I'm very bad with letting things go. I'm very much the type to fuss with one pot endlessly rather than make a bunch of pots. Lots of writers advise writing a short story or novel chapter a week (which frankly blows me a way; I could never be that prolific. Not with the paying job and the homescholing, anyway). These writers have various ways of saying why one should do this, but it boils down to what Rodriguez says: it's all about the practical experience and skills that are only gained from output. The bigger your output, the more you learn.

The way I figure it, the slow workers might learn in 40 pots what the fast ones learn in 50 (maybe), but the fast ones do those 50 in less than half the time the slow ones spend on 40. I know some writers who were devestated when their first novel didn't sell. It's tough, because you put so much into it, but at the same time, it's tough - how can you expect to get it right on the very first try?

I spent 5 years on my last novel, which I've never tried to sell (or the one that came before it, for that matter). It was a great learning experience, and the novel I'm working on now is going much faster because of what I learned from writing that one. I had originally intended to revisit that old one when the new one was done, but the more distant I get from it the less I want to. So I'm scrapping it for parts (the characters were cool, if I say so myself).

So yeah, I think Rodriquez is right, but I'm still a futzer. What are you gonna do?

Monday, September 04, 2006

Good-bye, Steve Irwin


You've probably already heard the news, that Steve is gone. It doesn't seem quite right, with all the dangerous animals he's handled (or wrestled), that he was brought low by a
stingray. This is not an aggressive animal; it only has that stinger to avoid being stepped on. If it had stung him anywhere else, he'd still be with us. Just an inch either way would have hit a rib (I'm sure it was the actual puncturing of his heart more than the venom that killed him).

The world of wildlife conservation has lost a great hero, but I don't think that matters as much as his kids losing their father. Anyone who's ever watched his shows can tell you: he loved animals, but nowhere near as much as he loved his family.

He will be missed. Heck, I miss him already.

Friday, September 01, 2006

Arrested Development



When I say I never watch television, this is of course not entirely true. During the (all too) few hours a week I get to spend with my husband when neither of us are working and the boys are in bed, we usually watch something together. It's a bit more social than reading in the same room (mostly because someone won't stop talking, and the constant interruptions make me.... well, let's just say anti-social).

But we never really watch shows on TV. Mostly this is because we have vastly different tastes, but my work schedule in particular is too erratic to ever be able to be there same night, same time to catch the next episode of anything.

Then God created TV on DVD. This is in fact where I discovered Buffy and Angel. Firefly I did watch live. Which brings me to the other reason I don't watch TV - the shows I like always get axed. Which brings me to the show I wanted to discuss: the also-axed ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

This show is brilliant. I'm impressed with the casting, for crying out loud. Henry Winkler as a closeted gay lawyer? Brilliant. Liza Minelli as a woman suffering from vertigo? I don't think I've ever liked her in anything, but she's brilliant in this. And Ron Howard as the narrator? Who doesn't love little Opie Cunningham?

But of course, being me, what I love most is the writing. Yeah, it's funny, but what slays me is the structure of the thing. It's clearly guided by one man's vision, plotted out with season-long and series-long arcs, complete with foreshadowing, set-up, and closure.

Most sit-coms fail to do any of those things. Stuff happens. Next week, more stuff happens, but it's like last week is already forgotten. As much as I loved FRIENDS, it always bugged me how Chandler and Ross could still be portrayed as geeks/losers when they were bedding a different woman every other episode. Any real geek can tell you, they don't get laid quite that much. In defense of FRIENDS, they did near the end use the absurdness of their collective history for humor. I loved FRIENDS, the jokes were great. But there was never any arc there, any grand plan for where it was all going.

Of course that's the point of a sit-com. You're supposed to catch this or that episode, and everything you need to know about the characters is contained in the theme song to catch the new viewers up. I'm sure part of why ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT never caught on was that you really had to see every episode in order to appreciate it (which brings us back to TV on DVD, the perfect format).

One of the longest-running arguments in writing circles is whether or not one should write an outline before starting to write a novel. Writers arguing for one point of view or another can come up with all sorts of arguments for why there way is the right way (and in the case of some egos, the only way). But I think whichever way the writer writes, with or without an outline, reflects their feelings about structure in what they take in, reading or TV or movies. I happen to like highly-structured things. Have you ever seen the outlines Joyce used to write ULYSSES? Good God, on my best day nothing I do will ever approach that level of structure. One of the argument against outlining is it's more "realistic" to write without one. When you get up in the morning, you don't know what's going to happen. A writer shouldn't know what's going to happen either.

This is half a thought, I'm afraid, as dinner must be made. Suffice it to say, I don't like the word "realistic" applied to my writing style or my reading preferences.