Thanks to Yewknee for sharing Small Demons with me back in October. I refrained from sharing with all of you Literators back then because, frankly, there was so little to share. Sometimes beta-testing looks like questing with your half-orc across frozen wastelands until the game glitches and dies, sometimes it looks like stress-testing Google Wave.
At other times it looks like this:
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So I’ve been waiting and waiting for Small Demons to put enough content up for me to share it with all of you. Today’s the day.
There’s a snob and a slave inside of me. I love getting to things first (like TV shows) and yet I discover new things at the mercy of my peers’ and superiors’ suggestions. I enjoy rich foods and high culture, but feel no shame in savoring the fragrant concoction of cigarette smokes that used to lace the bowling alleys of Illinois. Half of me likes to Waltz, while the other half agrees with Stephen Wright: dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire. When Doug brought Kiddo and I to Downton last year, the inner snob and inner slave grabbed hands and jumped the room around.
I was surprised to find zero Downton posts inside my archive, long as I’ve watched it. I bought the first season for Kiddo at Christmas (along with a copy of the Name of the Wind) and refrained from purchasing the second so we could all watch it pseudo-live with every other poor American. Though this season jerked around far more than the glassy tranquility of the first, I enjoyed the ride. American producers would do well to learn from the British miniseries model, a la SHERLOCK.
Now there’s Downton valentines, Downton fan art and Downton fashion. There’s paper dolls and vintage photos and even novelties that people give as gifts. That Keep Calm and Carry On meme stretched to the borders of the abbey while other popular bloggers featured Downton’s recipes. No other TV show has so garnered such wide support from the Twitter community, though many have tried. Social television has yet to work for an actual show. Twitter helps news stations and live events like the Superbowl garner interest, but Downton alone flexed its muscles with the #switchtoDowton thread this Superbowl, and fairly successfully, I might add. Continue reading →
Saturday, February 18th, I lost my Firefly virginity.
I waited right around seven years to do this – ever since I stepped onto the college scene and my newfound friends began badgering me to watch the show. I borrowed the series from a friend, sat down on my Saturday at 7:45am and watched the series straight until 9pm. Yes, I was that hooked. This show’s amazing, and I completely understand why Firefly fans beg so often, so long and so convincingly about making a second season.
It’s like all of you told me all these years that there was gold in them there hills, but I blew you off because, let’s face it, there’s always gold in them there hills. But seven years later I walk over the tops of them there hills on the first open Saturday it crosses my mind and find out what you meant was “there’s gold on them there hills.” Lying around. In hunks and nuggets and bars. What you meant was “take a walk over this hill and pick up all the friggin’ gold you want, dummy.” That was Firefly for me, walking around and finding gold everywhere. That’s why I imbibed all of it in a single day: gold rush. Three things stood out to me: a lesson, an interpretation and a longing.
“So Taborlin fell, but he did not despair. For he knew the name of the wind, and so the wind obeyed him. It bore him to the ground as gently as a puff of thistledown and set him on his feet as soft as a mother’s kiss.”
Wind’s fairly important in this book. I could argue that it’s even more important in WMF, but that detours us from our goal (Remember, the “continue reading” is to protect Kingkiller virgins from spoilers).
Why wind? Why mention the control of wind and even inversion of wind? What’s wind to do with alchemy?
During sublimation, a vapor escapes the mercury. The alchemist must capture that vapor and through solution and distillation turn it into water. If you looked at the Emerald Table, you’d see the fourth law: “The wind carried it in its womb, the Earth is the nurse thereof.” Maier thought this means that sulphur (the masculine) is carried inside Mercury (the feminine) as the raw goods of the work. In the middle of sublimation and distillation, we see Hermes flying through the air like wind. Here’s Zoroaster’s Cave:
Our stone in the beginning is called water; when the body is dissolved, Ayre or Wind; when it tends to consolidation, then it is named earth, and when it is perfect and fist it is called Fire.
They also called that mercurial mist the zephyr, and it often symbolizes the white stone of the albedo. The Alchemist by Ben Jonson refers to Sublet’s puffer, Face, as billowing the flames. “That’s his fire-drake,/ His lungs, his Zephyrus, he that puffes [sic] his coals [sic].”
At eight I asked my father if I could bench press, but he refused. “Not till you’re thirteen. Your bones gotta develop.” But I was eight and a bony eight at that. I grew slower than my peers with little to show for my weaknesses. I’ve wondered if no form of vigorous exercise existed for children…
Similar weakness might have come for Paul Comstedt had he rejected gymnastics at age four. He grew up in Airborne Gymnastics and Dance in Colorado, a gym boasting twelve-hundred athletes and twenty-five thousand square feet. (Average gyms use nine-thousand square feet). Infused with jazz, hip-hop and ballet (technique class), Paul prepared to brave the Midwest Regional Ballet later in life. They asked him to take the lead of Swan Lakethis summer.
Paul managed his first girl’s gymnastics team in high school, a gig for spotting and coaching. He yearned to work with youth and considered counseling. Gymnastics facilitated mentoring relationships distinct from other crafts, requiring deep trust and time commitment from the athlete. Many gymnastics coaches train the same athlete from age four to eighteen, and if the athletes chooses to work for that coach, their relationship crests twenty years. Add coach intentionality plus perfect full-body training to the mix, and gymnasts mature faster. There’s a reason USA Gymnastics says Begin here, go anywhere. Before he was twenty, Paul knew his path. Continue reading →
Back in the sixties, the Power Sales Company bought up cases of plastic-and-glass gadgets from The Great Wall Plastic Company in Hong Kong. At less than seventy bucks a gross, Power Sales could peddle them to US merchandisers for a cool fifty cents a pop. These retailers then hawked the toys at fairs, carnivals and anywhere else parents pay exorbitant prices for trinkets that cost pennies to make. This trinket was the Diana “toy” camera.
Before that, Russian company LOMO manufactured their two-lens Lubitel line. Built first of bakelite and then of plastic, many put it in the same class of devices as your average metal top or Hot Wheel. They called it a toy. However, the Lubitels use 120 film and, with a proper flash, can shoot at 1/250 shutter speed. These specs land the Lubitel nearer to the fifties movement of amateur TLRs rather than the toy or disposable genus.
Later in the eighties,
Lomographische AG (an Austrian firm) started production on the Diana and the Lomo LC-A. They coined the term “lomography,” dreamt up the motto Don’t think, Just Shoot and picked up the Chinese Holga, Seagull TLR and then the Russian Horizon 202. By the new millennium, the whole “toy camera” artistic movement hit puberty.
Certainly these cameras hold vintage value, like the trinkets you might find on Etsy, but their real appeal flows from the aesthetic of their pictures. Some of these cameras came with built-in vignettes – that shadow-box feel that big-city photographers crave. Other cameras were so poorly manufactured that light leaks in and spoils the edges of the pictures, creating that toasted feel. Still others use blurs and other distortions, intentionally or unintentionally, that draw a crowd weary of Photoshop and Illustrator. Continue reading →
The Cartographer’s Guild encouraged me in my map making. Since then I noticed how maps disinter our understanding of the world. Maps do not show us where things are or where things were. They reveal who we are and how we think.
Take Hecataeus:
He’s missing a couple two or three continents. His world is all he sees. Continue reading →
Last week, we grabbed ahold of the hair on Nolan’s career and dragged the whole thing through the filter of film Noir. This week we’ll hypothesize if he’s saying anything about his career through the noir genre. Two quickies:
Nolan may or may not intend these meanings and we may or may not be able to infer them. I never assume I know all or even most of the answers – only questions, potentialities, hypotheses. At best, we can always wonder.
The first question people ask now is “Why Bane? Why choose Bane of all the villains for the third Batman? Wasn’t Bane like a side-character?”
I misrepresented Inception’s symbolism. Since that post, twobloggers now hold similar views, if they didn’t altogether borrow from me. After my second taste, I think Dante’s Inferno should take a back seat in the interpretation
Nolan’s emphasis on kicks clued me in. That part of the Nolan’s Inferno post stands. In almost every scene, someone changes their mind or tries to change someone else’s mind. In koine Greek, metanoia “change mind” is often translated “repent.” That’s the film: face your inner demons to face your outer demons. Twelve levels compose Cob’s subconscious – twelve memories of regret. That makes twelve things to change, histories to rewrite, regrets to repent from in the deepest parts of his mind. Continue reading →
I want close contact with you guys and your opinions, so here’s a short poll and the 2012 shortlist. It’s all small change to look forward to. Here’s the shortlist:
10.A Fragged List
9.In-depth analysis of the nigreddo & albedo of Name of the Wind, Wise Man’s Fear and a prediction list of what’s to come in Doors of Stone (or whatever book three of Kingkiller will be called).
Three weeks ago, a good friend of mine became my pen pal. He prefers Twitter, texted more than he called before that was preferred, and used chat rooms and ICQ long before wall posts and Gchat came along. He uses e-mail only when all other paths of pithy, electronic messaging run cold. I used to write letters to him in college, letters he replied to via e-mail.
But I’ve noticed something. The lead time runs about two days on our current letter exchange. Two days – the same time I take to get to an e-mail. I receive his letter on Sunday, write my own and put it in the mail. He receives it on Tuesday, writes a response that I get Thursday. Come Saturday, we have each written two letters and received two letters. More than this, the letters run two pages long or longer, containing several hundred words about things both private and public, humorous and tragic. They bear the intimacy of our personal scrawl – his tidy lower case rounded out and hiding under half the width of a single line, my conglomeration of typefaces I’ve collected over years of handwriting. Words in this medium use tone. They don’t when you read text like this blog. Continue reading →
By “gamer” mean more than playing video games. Travis Sweeney helped build my first computer to run Half Life 2 and CS2. That was before Portal , before the zombie mods that grandfathered endless zombie mode in Modern Warfare. I attended LAN parties. For one whole semester, I was nocturnal. I tried the free version of WOW, but couldn’t afford the monthly fee (thank God). I trace my gaming heritage back to Super Mario, Sonic, Zelda and even my friend Andy’s Oddysey which ran things link pong and my dad’s Commodore. We frequented arcades for the stand-up joystick version of X-Men, Pac Man and Marvel VS. Capcom.
Twas more than Perfect Dark, Time Splitters and Earthworm Jim.
Twas an early life of digital drug sampling. Continue reading →
This year, my two big “impulsive pastimes” were German and Chess. Eventually, I’ll get around to giving a head-nod (not a heil) to the Deutschland, but for now we’ll talk about chessdom. Buckle up your boy scout belts, secure your pocket protectors in the full upright position, and add another layer of masking tape to your nose bridges ’cause it’s about to get geeky…
I knew the moves. Heck, I could even en passant and castle. What I didn’t know was basic strategy. For instance – if you open like this:
Okay, I tried to find an image to show the a2 pawn moving to a4. It’s such a stupid move that the internet refuses to give me a picture of it. “Hey internet! Give me a pic of the a2 pawn opening.”
“Lame, Lance. Lame.”
What the internet did give me was a clean pic of this:
Because that makes a heckuvalot more sense. Your queen & bishop can get out, your knights hop in. You can castle in three moves. It’s a clean, balanced strategy and the most common opening. I also learned the benefits of battering rams:
The leaves fall at regular rates to the beat of a regular wind. My BHCL (blood:hot chocolate level) runs steady at 9%. Flames gossip to one another inside my ancient, epic fireplace, cackling over jokes they never share with me, illuminating the room with their passionate discourse.
During this season, I go upstairs and open old photo albums. Nowadays that consists of clicking on a folder icon and tapping the right arrow key like a hair-trigger. Long forgotten eras come back to me, fossils from yesteryear that would have been lost forever save but by autumn’s annual excavation.
I remembered how I aspired to grow a beard five or so years ago, and how my BFF Andrew Nash poked fun at it:
The lyrics?
John Mark’s got the beard
Better’n Lance’s beard
(but we love ‘em dear)
gilp gilp gilp gilpa gilp gilp
gilp
Andy will hate me for posting that as it wasn’t produced in a studio or with Abelton Live. But hey, anything goes on impulsive pastime mondays.
I also came across a picture of my highschool friend Logan McNeil. This guy went from winning a modeling competition in like 2005 to escorting people on and offstage at the Academies:
So, of course, the best compliment I could pay him was this:
Man I look ripped.
Aaanyway, I got sentimental thinking through the games we played late into the night at places like Denny’s, trying to ride that thin line between entertaining our server and pissing her off:
I switched out my empty hot cocoa mug for a full cuppa the Earl (lemon, no milk, no sugar) and landed on a series of pictures I took with my dad’s SLR. This was before I had a working digital camera, so they’re the last film photos I ever took. They remind me of what’s psuedo-popular now. I took them down in San Diego, most of them near the beaches and piers in Del Mar or in Rancho Santa Fe. Continue reading →
