Delightful Inconsistent

Watched True Stories for the first time, finally. It felt very much like like where I grew up, in attitude and time as well as landscape, because it is. That's my mall. I recognized a high school teacher of mine from the back of his head in a seconds-long clip in a montage. (I checked the credits and I'm right.) Credit presumably goes to screenwriter Stephen Tobolowsky, who is from my neighborhood of origin.

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Figured out how to twerk. Given my lifestyle, this is unlikely to ever be useful. But it's been perplexing me for years - I could not work out the biomechanics. It's like knowing a magician is palming a coin but never being able to see how, even up close. What muscles do what? Now I get it. Someone on a message board said it was simple like hula hooping, and somehow that made me understand even though it's a different movement. Now I can do it. I can throw my butt around.

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I tried and failed to watch the Parks and Rec quarantine special on the night it aired but a few hours later (since I was at work until later than it aired). I didn't record it because supposedly it would be available for streaming. NBC made it so difficult to find the page that told me it wasn't up yet that I had to change the battery in the cable remote due to excessive clicking, and by the end of the process had a toothpick clenched between my teeth - and I don't know where the toothpick came from. I was finally able to watch it a day later on a different device, which was anticlimactic compared to my new ability to manifest toothpicks.

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Inspired by various feel-good news stories, people associated with the high school did a quarantine car parade around town today to celebrate the graduating seniors whose diploma ceremony is cancelled. So at around 2 p.m., and thankfully while I was off air, a whole bunch of honking cars drove by my house. Had this been the South, the cars would have had balloons and streamers, and celebratory messages written on the vehicles' exteriors with soap or shoe polish, and the people inside the cars would have worn boas and party hats. However, since it is Massachusetts, the cars were not decorated at all, nor were the people inside them, and pretty much all of it was shades of gray and stern expressions.

I had to actively turn off my interpretive filmmaker brain which gives images and sounds meaning, because that part of my brain was very clear that the semiotic content of the gray procession was terrified abandoned people blaring "I exist," the emotional message of a newborn crying when it can't sense its mother. I had to switch into my social scientist framework instead and remember that these are people who desire color and celebration but are intimidated by it, as evidenced by the number of fabulous party clothes I am forever buying for nothing at the secondhand store with tags still on, because people here want to be the person who will wear these clothes, but then chicken out. I'm proud of them for taking this step toward exuberance.

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During breaks at work, particularly during the minutes between when I do a connection test and when I start captioning, I've been gradually stabilizing the antique quilt I keep on the daybed in my office. It's an unusual quilt in ways that aren't obvious until you get close to it. From a few feet away, it looks like simple country-style butterflies faded by time. But from close up, a lot of the "fading" is deliberate use of negative space in the embroidery, and the use of sheer or semi-sheer fabrics - nylons, rayons, cheesecloth. Many of the pieces are floated over each other using a lace edge stitch instead of a seam.

That's the main thing I'm slowly replacing or reinforcing - the black thread used for the borders has disintegrated over time in a way the other fabrics and threads have mostly not. (There are a few exceptions where I'll need to replace a piece of fabric that's torn loose and been lost, entirely or partially.) So far, I've repaired about one and a half panels out of 20. Some of what slows me down is trying to invisibly reinforce the remaining black thread instead of pulling it out and replacing it. I can work faster in the places where it's clearly beyond saving and I can quickly move forward with a facsimile. Still, preservation is preservation, and it means keeping what can be kept.

[Edited to add: The quilt was made by my mother's father's mother, who we call Mamaw. She was very modern and forward-thinking. Our best guess is that it dates back to the 30s or early 40s. Some of the fabrics weren't invented much before then, and wouldn't have broken down as much if it was made much later.]

Personal Shopper

Ciro and I watched Oliver Assayas's Personal Shopper, a ghost story with a famously ambiguous scene that has led to a plethora of stupid theories (almost all variants of "everybody is dead," the least interesting intepretation of any movie that isn't Defending Your Life). However, we got hung up on a different scene later in the film, during the course of which somebody pours coffee out of a Bialetti moka pot. It occurs in a kitchen in daytime with ample sunlight, and it's obvious that the coffee is watery in a way it should not be.

Could it be an exposure problem, I said.

No, said Ciro, look at the blacks in the cast iron pans.

We have concluded that either the moka pot was majorly overfilled with water (which seems out of character), or - and hear me out - the coffee is a ghost.

SALT deductions

I have not filed my taxes yet this year, but as a consequence of the 2017 Republican tax bill (it's a Paul Ryan baby, not a Trump baby) I know I will not be able to deduct my state income tax. This is the thing the news has talked about as a way to "punish" coastal elites, which come from states that are very likely to have a higher local tax burden (but which are nevertheless more likely to be net contributers to the federal coffers rather than net recipients of federal largess, so it's an interesting situation when you start talking about "fairness," and I could talk about taxes all day but I'm trying to get to a point).

It seems to me as a futurist that this might be something that history books point to in 100 years as one of the early signs that the Senate would become an archaic/ceremonial body like the House of Lords.

The reason I say this is that, well, look at the UN or the EU. They ask for contributions from member nations, but they don't directly levy taxes on individual citizens of those nations - each country decides how to meet its financial contribution. If the UN sent a tax bill to each person in the world, I think it's safe to say people would freak out.

That's the way income taxes were in the US until 1913, basically. States could do them. The federal government didn't, except briefly during the U.S. Civil War, which was considered unusual and temporary (like the draft). There was a real debate over whether the U.S. government was pre-empting powers reserved to the states, to such an extent that there had to be a constitutional amendment (the 16th) to say a federal income tax was ok in peacetime.

The fact that people in the U.S. at large can even have discussions about what's fair taxation on the basis of individuals rather than on the basis of states - and that this would be championed by Republicans from low-population states - shows the degree to which we increasingly agree that political power at the federal level derives from individuals and not from agreements between states.

I think we're moving to a unitary system. I don't think we seriously recognize a philsophical basis for dividing power equally between "states" anymore. They're getting to be more like teams we root for in a sports league, and the debate is whether we'd rather do revenue sharing like the NFL or luxury taxes like MLB. The Senate's obsolete in its current form. We can already see restructuring going on, and a backlash to that restructuring (not to mention the electoral college) but it seems random. It will look less random in retrospect, I suspect.

Preparing, preparing for the long trip. Mostly tedious. Lots of wading through phone trees to cancel recurring subscriptions or request paper copies of records.

For luggage reasons and because it was probably past time, I've bought a dedicated camera bag. I feel slightly awkward about it because the only bag with the right configuration to accommodate the number of camera bodies and lenses I use has Canon branding all over it, and I'm a Nikon girl. I'm trying to think of it like a false flag operation, the way people who street-park nice bicycles will sometimes spraypaint them to look rusty and not worth stealing. Here I am with this scuffed up used bag with a mismatched strap, labeled with the name of an entry-level small-format DSLR.

I'm trying to think of it like that mainly because although I have a NASA patch that I think would look great in the place where the logo is, I also think securely affixing it would mess with the bag's water resistance. Anyway, it's pristine inside and should make my life easier.

Yesterday, Ciro and I went to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in 3D Imax HFR, which was kind of an ordeal because basically nobody is projecting the movie in high frame rate. Which is literally the only thing I cared about: I didn't have any desire to see a Hobbit movie, since the series has been kind of a mess. What I wanted was to see an innovative technology used by someone who had experience with it (also known as Jackson et al, since this was their third go-around).

When I say it was kind of an ordeal, I mean we travelled an hour to a movie theater and sat through a half hour of commercials and previews, and then the film started and it was not in HFR as promised, and we got our money back and spent about two hours getting to another theater to watch the film properly, while also paying live-theater amounts of money for a ticket. Which means, fairly uniquely, that I saw the first 15 minutes of the film in 24-frames-per-second 3D and then within a couple hours saw that same 15 minutes in the more correct 48-frames-per-second 3D.

It's a totally different artwork. I don't mean that in terms of "it's more spectacular." In many ways, it is less spectacular. But when you see it in HFR, it's clear that's the native format and it's what drove all the decisions of the creative team. The movie makes sense in a way it absolutely did not at 24 frames per second.

Based on my experience, I sincerely believe that if you have not seen the movie projected in HFR, you have not seen the movie Peter Jackson made. Since I'm a moviemaker and this is the kind of thing movie people always say about movies and the theatrical experience and aspect ratios and screen brightness and whatever else, this seems like the kind of claim you should take with a grain of salt. But in this case, it isn't.

I hesitate to even call Five Armies a movie: it's something else, with a different visual language and different performance needs. It was like watching some combination of an opera, Shakespeare in the park, participating in a Civil War re-enactment, and riding Peter Pan's Flight at Disneyland. It was different enough from watching a movie that it was irritating the subtitles weren't supertitles, because when you watch something on stage, translations are at the top, not the bottom, and that's where my eye kept looking for them.

In 48 fps, Five Armies absolutely works. It succeeds. There are still some script problems, like anything at all to do with Tauriel, but most of the other things that "didn't work" fall away. They only don't work if you're seeing a cover band perform them.

I use "perform" deliberately, because performance was the biggest difference - that and editing rhythm. I wasn't watching the movie going "oh, how beautiful." I was watching performances by people in a space over time. As soon as that happened, almost every actor choice seemed motivated. The 15 minutes I saw not-HFR, everything seemed very hammy. Watching in HFR? No tonal problems at all, perfectly calibrated performances and pacing.

Maybe you're reading this and you're not an actor or director. You still have experience with what I'm talking about. You use a different voice to talk to somebody who is standing right next to you and to talk to somebody across the room. You might feel the same thing, and try to communicate the same thing, but you sound different and look different when you say/feel it. If you talked to somebody who was standing right next to you as though they were across the room, it would seem odd and fake, right?

Same basic principle applies to the difference between stage and film performances. Or, in film, if you know you're in a close up, you wouldn't try to indicate that you were saying hello by waving your hand; nobody can see your hand. Moving away from acting again, you wouldn't draw somebody a picture while you were having a phone conversation and then expect them to be able to see it and act mad that they couldn't. Right?

This difference of performance distance has an extreme impact in the case of The Hobbit. The actors, who are very competent, and the director, producer, and editor, are keying performances for HFR, where there is a sense that you are watching somebody who is standing across the room from you. This is a sense that is completely, completely different from the feeling of watching a 3D film.

In a 3D film, it's very rare to have the sense that "you are there." This has to do with a combination of motion blur, physics, and separation of the image into planes. Things in normal 3D feel in many respects less real - they don't seem to have weight. They seem like skins around air at best and like stacked paper cutouts at worst. You can see what's "in front," but you don't forget there's a screen and a wall behind that screen.

(Which is kind of strange. I think of the opening of Avatar, where a corridor is stretching away into the distance, but I still knew absolutely that the corridor was an illusion because there's a theater wall there. So I'm seeing "that's far away" and simultaneously seeing "that's right there." There are battling depth cues. That is not true of Five Armies, with rare, fleeing exceptions.)

Although I unreservedly believe HFR is vastly superior to other forms of 3D, I am not making the case here that HFR 3D is better than 2D film. Instead, I am saying it is its own unique medium, and trying to critique a film which is natively HFR 3D by watching a 2D or non-HFR 3D version is like trying to evaluate the experience of being at a live concert by watching a video of it. Except it's actually worse than that, because you're probably not aware of the degree to which you are not seeing the actual artwork in its original format.

All of the decisions which I watched in non-HFR 3D and wondered "what are they thinking?" - you see it in HFR, and it's clear what they're thinking. As a whole, the Gesamtkunstwerk (a term I use because it seems like a more accurate description of the thing than "movie") has verisimilitude, or a difference of suspension of disbelief compared to a film, the result of which is that the moments feel important, like a reflection of a true history. Not that what you're seeing is real, but that what you're seeing is trying to be faithful to something that was.

You're watching a meeting and in a film you'd think, "well, why not cut this long talky bit?" But in this format, you don't think that, because of course they're showing the meeting - the meeting is what historically happened. Of course some people are making bad jokes; in a stressful situation like this, somebody would wind up making a bad joke. Of course he's waiting and waiting before he shoots that arrow; it's tremendously obvious from the lay of the terrain that he'll have a better shot if he waits.

This feeling of truthfulness is absolutely crazy in a fantasy about a secondary world. But you could have told me I was watching The Alamo.

Your eye never wonders where to go; you can just look around, but also the architecture of the shot guides your attention. Your brain doesn't hurt from trying to reconcile the wrong-physics-ness of 24-fps 3D. Animals in particular are delightful when they appear onscreen, because it's not "there is a picture of a dog." No, there is that dog. It's not physically in the room with you, but it's clearly a dog, an actual dog, that you are watching maybe through a window.

The best analogy I can think of is subractive; if you've ever watched a colorized black and white film, you know none of the exposures make sense, even if you don't know that's the term you're looking for. You just know it looks fake in a way even highly-saturated techniclor film doesn't. Same thing here. I actually think it's an extreme disservice to the filmmakers that it's possible to see Five Armies in another format, including home video, even though I know that's what makes the economics of it possible.

If you have even a passing interest in seeing this film ever, I strongly suggest going to an HFR theater even though it's very expensive, or else just decide on not seeing it. I don't think it's necessary to see the earlier two in the trilogy (I didn't), but that particular recommendation you probably could take with a grain of salt because I've read the books and already know stuff like what the arkenstone is.

Just learned the "for girls" expansion of the Expendables franchise is called the Expendabelles. Because god forbid we just put some women on the Expendables team; they'd sap the manliness of the male action stars and turn them into incompetent weaklings because of all the estrogen leaking from their pores, polluting the air. As a woman, I know I only feel empowered if I'm given my own seperate woman space, where it is clearly understood that although I can kick butt I also eat hamburgers while wearing makeup and trip a lot, because I'm relatably clumsy.

Saw Snowpiercer last night at the Somverville Theater, which I recommend. (Both the movie and seeing the movie in a good theater; it lends itself to both big-screen viewing and viewing as part of an anonymous crowd. I don't object to VOD, but this movie's an odd choice for it if you have the alternative.) It has third act problems, but that's equally true of a lot of the stories I like; it's a hazard of weird, ambitious fiction, particularly if there's an episodic element. (See also Twin Peaks, Fullmetal Alchemist...)

When I say third act problems, I'm talking about themes; I'm not bothered by the things that seem to bother other people, not just in Snowpiercer but in SF film generally. I cut films a lot of slack, by which I mean I understand what they are.

For example, film is a medium with its own grammar and limits,

which means that if it's important to understand what a character is thinking, he has to just sit down and say it, either to another character or in voiceover. Try and think of another way to do this. Usually your alternatives are either to decide you don't care whether the audience knows what that character is thinking (which reduces film to abstracted people running and shooting), or to add a lot of extra scenes to "show don't tell" which would cost you untold millions of dollars and double the runtime of the movie.

Obviously, there are more and less awkwardly written monologues, and better and worse performances. But if a film is competently made, I'm not going to ding it for having a talking scene just before the big confrontation. By the same token, when a film compresses or expands time, I'm untroubled; that's just something film does. (See also: Nitpicking Inception.)

Another thing that doesn't bother me is when speculative fiction is speculative. It's about saying "what if." If you don't like the premise, that's fine, but that doesn't make it a plot hole. If the Matrix runs on people instead of a more efficient source of power, it does. If the Empire decided a Death Star was a better weapon than a similarly-priced fleet of warships, fine. If there's a train with an engine that can run forever with energy left over for rave parties, great.

Honestly, I could say the same thing about fiction in general. If you're not willing to suspend disbelief, you're not going to get anything out of it. I can be annoyed that Woody Allen movies are constantly pairing young starlets with grizzled old men, and in fact am annoyed. But if I'm watching one I'm not going to spend the whole time saying "she'd never be attracted to him." The movie says she is. Not a plot hole. Not a plot hole when a character feels different things than I would in that situation.

( starts to get spoliery )