Who Cares What You Think?

What Is She Wearing?

2007-07-27T10:17:00.001-07:00

Dress shirts for the guys, okay.

Who dressed her?

Immature Technology

2007-02-17T23:51:00.000-08:00

The whole web is, by report, buzzing about this video which, by report, explains the Web 2.0 concept so clearly and compellingly that... well, it's just really, really neat-o.

To me, the most telling thing about it is that I've been trying for half an hour to view it, and it always stalls about thirty to forty-five seconds in. That, to me, sums up a lot of things about Web 2.0. Not that I don't think it's pretty neat-o keen. I mean, if it would just work.

A Tort Is a Tort

2007-01-21T18:05:00.000-08:00

Because you asked for it...

Oh... you didn't? Too bad.

In case you need your memory refreshed (or created),
you can listen to the original at
http://www.barbneal.com/wav/tvthemes/mr_ed.wav

-----

Hello, I’m John Edwards!


A tort is a tort
In court, in court
And any old wrong can support a tort
That is, in short,
Unless the court
Defers to a statute instead.

Go right to the court
And claim a tort!
With evi-den-tia-ry support
‘most any old problem that you report
Will net you lots of bread!

Conservative people will tout reform
They’re nothing but corporate shills
Our way is the proper way and the norm
For those with our legal skills!

A tort is a tort,
In court, in court,
And you never, no never will come up short
In even the court of the last resort...

With a case like this:

The plaintiff wound up dead!

Our Little Genius

2006-10-28T22:20:00.000-07:00

Here's Girl's latest song:

A, B, C, D,
Poo-poo,
Idiot!

And then laugh uproariously.

I never should have bought her that "Baby 2 Live Crew" video.

Wish List

2006-10-24T16:25:00.000-07:00

Coca-Cola Is Donating Land for Proposed Rights Museum,

the New York Times announced today.

I can think of some proposed rights I'd like to see enshrined in this museum.

The right to privacy.
The right to party.
The right not to step on toys when you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.

Let the Midterm Begin!

2006-10-13T20:33:00.000-07:00

Day 1 of our contracts take-home midterm, and what did I do this afternoon? I read the Supreme Court's decision on the Whitewater Special Counsel's attempt to get notes from Vince Foster's attorney. 524 U.S. 399 (1998). What does this have to do with contracts? Not a blessed thing.

Attorney/Client: A Scheme Deferred

What happens to the Privilege
When the client’s died?

Does it lie there in the sun
Like a raisin, dried?

Or limp like a discarded sock
That’s not been mended-
And you wonder, why save it?

Does it last till the estate’s been ended?
Or till the heirs agree to waive it?

What if it covers up a crime
Like a coat of grime—

Can it be overcome
by a subpoena or Grand Jury?

When need the lawyer worry?
Is it never?

Yes.
Turns out the Privilege lasts forever.

New Plan

2006-10-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

Another day, another...

nap.

I found it remarkably difficult, after flyback week - read (for me, a 1L), do-nothing week - to get my head back into the game. Fortunately, there was not much game to be had: a desultory introduction to joint estates in Property, a pep talk about rewriting our non-compete memo for Legal Research / Writing... then a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, followed by an interminable discussion of test-taking strategies in Contracts. Then, as I said...

a nap.

My post-flyback resolution: more naps. Oh, and start my outline for Contracts before the midterm on Thursday. That should keep me busy.

Escape With Your Self-Image Intact

2006-10-02T06:49:00.000-07:00

So (former) Representative Mark Foley just checked himself into a rehab clinic. Oh, turns out he's an alcoholic. Or anyway, it could be, though he's not quite sure. ''I strongly believe that I am an alcoholic and have accepted the need for immediate treatment for alcoholism and other behavioral problems," he said. (I don't think he really said that, I think he "released" it.)

"Other behavioral problems."

Foley's handlers, at least, are pretty smart. Cynical, but smart. (Is there a difference anymore, though, in politics?) Want to excuse your reprehensible behavior? Blame Bill Clinton... Oh, sorry, I mean, blame alcohol. Or drugs, or... you know, something outside yourself. The liberal media.

Speaking of which, that reminds me: here's a bit of what Fox News had to say on Saturday:

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., who is single, apologized Friday for letting down his family and constituents.

Um... "single"? Delicately put.

Optional Contracts Reading

2006-09-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

The Promised Hand
(with apologies to Bruce Springsteen)

Well, I had a little accident when I was just a lad
I burned my hand, and listen, man, it hurt real bad
A couple years later, I met Doctor McGee
He saw my thumb and he said son, I guarantee
If you just give me a chance, I'll make it good as new
I'll make your hand perfect, yes I swear it's true
I've done it many times before, I know just what to do -

McGee, he's gonna howl
He don't understand
But the judge found it simple, so he put it on remand
He said, "Son, you'll get the damages that you demand
'cause you believed in the promised hand."

He told me that my hand would be one hundred percent
I thought because he said it, that was just what he meant
Now I will never recover, my whole life is a wreck
When I think of that day it makes me mad as heck
He said your hand's okay, but you deserve the best
He took a knife and then he cut this skin from my chest
Now my fingers are itching and I can't get no rest...

McGee, he's gonna howl
He don't understand
But the judge found it simple, so he put it on remand
He said, "Son, you'll get the damages that you demand
'cause you believed in the promised hand."

The jury monetized the difference, it was quite a lot
Between the hand that I expected and the one I got;
And I've come to find out that I'm a famous case
Prominently featured in The Paper Chase -
But what is all of it worth, when I can't sleep at night?
My hand is matted and unsightly and it looks a fright
If I could take it all back, I really think that I might...

But every graduate of law school
All across this land
They may forget my name but they recall my hand
I'm as famous as that guy who killed the fox and ran...
'cause I believed in the promised hand
'cause I believed in the promised hand
Yeah I believed in the promised hand.

Tempest in a Timrod

2006-09-15T15:24:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times, an article about Bob Dylan's latest borrowings. Some controversy or other keeps coming up around poor Bob. You remember, last time it was a fairly obscure novel he was accused of pilfering from? Well, there he goes again. Here's a bit of lyrical effusion from Dylan's song "When the Deal Goes Down" from his album, "Modern Times."

Well, the moon gives light and it shines by night
When I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O'r the road we're bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

("The moon gives light and it shines by night." Wow. Talk about speaking truth to power.)

Anyway, here's Timrod's more antique effusion:

And here again, but led by other powers,
A morning and a golden afternoon,
These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
A round of precious hours.
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
To justify a life of sensuous rest,
A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
And without language answered. I was blest!

See the almost uncanny similarities? No, neither do I. Well, there's a moon, and some frail flowers... and something even frailer than that, though as to what it is... and there are some precious hours, too.

But, in fact, were Timrod alive today... and he's not... I would venture to say he wouldn't complain about the couple of phrases Dylan has lifted from his work. I venture to say, in fact, that only someone whose common sense has been destroyed by too much legal reading, could find a borrowing like Dylan's even worth noting, let alone consider that it rises to the level of requiring any sort of acknowledgment. Have we really come to the point where a felicitious turn of phrase can be considered "intellectual property"? God help us.

Add to the absurdity, the fact that Timrod - known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy - has been dead since 1867, so his poems have been in the public domain basically forever. So who's complaining about this, exactly?

The Times article provides some helpful background:

But some fans are bothered by the ethics of Mr. Dylan’s borrowing ways. “Bob really is a thieving little swine,” wrote one poster on Dylan Pool (pool.dylantree.com/phorum5/read.php?1,642969), a chat room where Mr. Warmuth posted his findings. “If it was anyone else we’d be stringing them up by their neck, but no, it’s Bobby Dee, and ‘the folk process.’ ”

Um... if you follow the link, it's not quite as bad as you might think. In fact, it's really just some guy very briefly venting his spleen about ... well, nothing much. Nobody else joins in. Hardly the groundswell of outrage the Times writer implies.

Now, I'm quite ready to believe that the New York Times has basically manufactured this "controversy" to fill space on a slow news day. So here's a message for the NYT:

PLEASE STOP WASTING MY TIME

But in case anyone is misled by the article - it's in the New York Times, my God! - and actually thinks there's some sort of moral or ethical question - or, God forbid, a legal question - here's the deal, once and for all:

The public domain... is public. You don't owe anybody anything for using it. Not acknowledgment, not credit, not a thank you in your album liner notes. If you use something substantial, and you know who wrote it, I personally think it'd be nice if you acknowledged him, even if he's a hundred and fifty years dead, but I'm prepared to leave even that to your discretion. (But Dylan clearly didn't use anything substantial, did he? I think not. I haven't seen any so-called "borrowings" that run to more than a handful of of words.)

And hey, if there really are any Dylan fans who feel betrayed? Get a grip. "More frailer than the flowers" isn't worth it.

Small Mercies

2006-09-14T22:10:00.000-07:00

Thankfully, I've only heard one person so far use the phrase "hiding the ball." Well, two people, but one of them was a professor. Here's what I think about it - and I apologize for referencing The Matrix, really I do, but like you I'm a prisoner of my culture, such as it is:

"Don't try to find the ball. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no ball."

Welcome to the law.

Oh, to Be Young Again!

2006-09-10T21:50:00.000-07:00

At orientation - which was, if I recall correctly, roughly 47 years ago - the Admitter-in-Chief gave us a brief, anecdotal rundown of who was in our class: there are so many doctors, so many PhDs, so many so-and-sos. (He also told us that his job was a bit like being a type of frog that carries its young in its mouth until they're ready to venture out into the world, but I'm not sure I got his point. I am sure I don't remember his point, even if I got it at the time. On the other hand, by now I don't remember what I had for breakfast, so ... Um, I forgot where I was going with this. I do remember that law has a lot to do with whaling, though, which is the important thing.)

At any rate, when we were informed us that our class ranged in age from 12 to... a number in the low 40s... I realized that I was the oldest student in my class - that I was, in fact, a year older than the oldest student in my class, according to the Admitter-in-Chief, but I presumed that was because he hadn't thought to check if I'd had a birthday since he'd admitted me.

The second day of orientation, a group of us were trying to find our way through the labyrinth that is Boalt Hall, and one said, "I feel like a freshman again." And then, turning to me, "I can't imagine what you feel like." The other day someone said something about how "we were all born in the 80s," and then corrected himself, "...or the 70s." He also mentioned that he remembered way back when gas was $1.78 a gallon.

On Friday, though, I was informed that there was someone even older than me in our class. I don't want to investigate; I'm just going to assume it's true.

Things I Don't Miss About L.A.

2006-09-08T22:31:00.000-07:00

Oh, so many. But mainly... the traffic.

I guess it's not really true that traffic is something I don't miss about Los Angeles per se - if I wanted to be more accurate (which I don't), I'd have to say it's something I don't miss about working in Los Angeles; although, to be perfectly honest, if I were working here in the Bay Area, the traffic would be at least as bad, possibly worse. And at least in Los Angeles, once you get where you're going, you can find a place to park - unlike here.

In short, what I really don't miss... is driving. I've driven the car exactly once in the last three weeks. It makes me happy not to drive. It makes me happy to take the bus. Yes, even when it's packed so full the driver can't let anyone else on. Because, you see, I live at the end of the line, and I go to school at the other end of the line, so whichever way I'm going I'm always one of the first ones on, and I always get a seat. And I like to sit at the back of the bus, and when you sit at the back of the bus, you never have to give up your seat, because the old, infirm, handicapped, and pregnant have already been taken care of, way up at the front of the bus. At least, I hope they have. Anyway they never seem to make it back to where I'm sitting. Although of course I would give up my seat to anyone who really needed it. Actually, I would give up my seat to anyone who needed it even a little bit more than me. But I do have a really heavy backpack, so in all honesty, I feel I have a good claim on a seat. Incidentally, another advantage to riding in back is that, for some reason, it seems that the really, really smelly people who occasionally ride the bus like to sit toward the front. Don't ask me why.

Anyway.

I've never lived in a place that had good public transportation. LA's public transit system is a well-worn joke, and the town where I grew up was way too small to support a bus system. And maybe someone from New York, or, I don't know, Paris, or London, might sneer at BART and AC Transit. All I know is, even though I've never had mass transit... I've missed it.

The very first day I had to be at school, I had no idea how I was going to get there, short of either driving the car - thereby depriving SW and the kids of any means of getting around all day, which is to say, making it impossible for them to get me a desk at IKEA - or waking up SW and the kids so that they could drive me to school, which believe me was a very poor option. You have no idea, unless you have kids, and maybe not even then.

I couldn't go on the Internet because it wasn't hooked up yet, I didn't have a phone book or the time to figure out how to get the information I needed on the phone... I walked out the front door, headed for the nearest street, looked around - saw a bus stop - walked over and read the schedule. Sure enough, five minutes later, the bus came; twenty minutes after that, it dropped me off in front of the law school.

This sort of thing probably seems commonplace to both of the people who will (probably accidentally) read this post. It still, after three weeks, seems slightly bizarre to me. I had to take the bus to school once in Los Angeles; it took me - no joke - two and a half hours. Admittedly, places in LA are roughly six times as far apart as they would be in a normal city, but still.

Berkeley rocks.

Law School in a Nutshell

2006-09-08T22:12:00.000-07:00

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at twice as fast as that !"

Another One Bites the Dust

2006-09-05T22:02:00.000-07:00

I put it off and put it off... turns out my Property book was only glued, not folded or stitched - so it was by far the easiest to dismember. Now most of it lives on my shelf, the rest in a nice, tidy, and above all light binder in my backpack.

So of course, today would be the day the professor referred us to a definition in a footnote on page 748.

Instead of Reading...

2006-09-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

The Rule of Capture

Post had chased it through the waste.
Pierson slayed it; left in haste.

Post laid suit before the Court;
Claimed it by the rules of sport.

With Puffendorf their legal guide
The Court came down on Pierson’s side.

The rule is what you might have thought it:
Who owns the fox? The one who got it.

(Says Livingston: The Court’s a fool
To thus replace the Golden Rule.)

New Words in Old Bottles

2006-09-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

Boy and Girl have a new favorite song. It goes like this if Boy is singing it:

This old man,
Girl is an idiot!

and like this if Girl is singing it:

This old man,
Boy is an idiot!

Both will mix it up occasionally by singing "... Daddy is an idiot" or "... Mommy is an idiot."

The little darlings.

No Wonder I Keep Getting Lost...

2006-08-28T23:33:00.000-07:00

Heavy Books Update

2006-08-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

I cut my books. Well, most of my books. Well, two. Two is most. Property will follow soon enough.

Everyone says to take your books to a copy shop to be cut and drilled, but I did the job myself with a carpet knife and a hole punch, acting on the same principal, I suppose, as a cowboy who shoots his own horse rather that letting someone else do it. I felt I owed it to the books. The result is ragged and unpretty, and very satisfying.

I was raised with a horror of marking books, let alone mutilating them, so I thought it would be a hard thing to do. But harder for me was writing notes on the pages; once I had jumped that hurdle, the cutting was easy, and actually rather interesting. The high cost of the books, I think, made it easier – maybe because I think of them more like tools than like books, or maybe because I feel that because they’re so unreasonably expensive, I’ve already paid my debt to them in full. Or maybe I’m still pissed at having to lay out seven hundred dollars for a single semester’s worth of textbooks.

And then, of course, there’s the certain knowledge that, just as I couldn’t buy any of my books used – because who wants to get caught out with the wrong page number just when the professor calls on you? not to mention having to translate every reading assignment to an old edition – so I’ll never be able to sell them for anything like what I paid. So they’re in pieces now, and much more useable that way, I must say. I may yet survive law school.

What's the Problem?

2006-08-28T00:26:00.000-07:00

What is it with these lawyers? How come the Rule Against Perpetuities is such a big deal it's gonna count for 5% of our grade? Why don't they just say, Sorry, no perpetuities. How hard would that be?

All the time with the complicated rules.

One Down

2006-08-26T23:08:00.000-07:00

Here we are in beautiful … well, Albany. But a few blocks away from the Berkeley city line, and we’re but a brisk walk from a really good microbrewery, half a mile from the pony track, a short drive from Ikea, twenty minutes by bus from the University of California, Berkeley. Those are my landmarks – which is to say, I’ve been other places around here, but most of them I couldn’t find again without getting directions.

Week 1 is over, week 2 is about to commence. (I was a math major, a long time ago– can you tell? It’s all about recognizing patterns.) My module-mates and I have already dived – dove? doven? – deep into Property, Civil Procedure, Contracts. And I have some questions.

Like for instance, what genius decided that the hallway was the best place to put our apartment's only Ethernet port? Admittedly, it is a big hallway, with a wide spot where all three bedrooms and the bathroom open; and, sure enough, on the plans someone has taken pains to label the wide spot in the hall a “study alcove.” However – as we are now learning in law school, and as surely anyone who is not an idiot already knows – wishing doesn’t make it so. Why didn’t they label it “private library with wet bar and masseuse,” as long as they were going to go all counterfactual on me?

Maybe some of my neighbors actually work or study in the middle of their hallway, right next to the bathroom. Who knows, that location might be ideal for a student with, say, Crohn’s disease. But I defy you to show me anyone with two kids – anyone, that is, who might (for instance) request an apartment with three bedrooms – who is going to get a lick of work done, sitting in the hall. Kids awake? You’re right in traffic. Kids asleep? Not for long, you’re right outside their bedroom!

So, note to Berkeley’s IT people: bad. Fix.

Moving on.

Civil Procedure… is a red queen’s race. I haven’t had a chance yet to take a deep breath, let alone digest all the reading that’s been dumped on us already. (I know, it only gets worse. Shut up and let me whine.) So I really have only the vaguest idea what it is we’re being expected to learn… something about not locking people up or taking their stuff, unless it’s okay to lock them up or take their stuff. How do we know when it’s okay? Not to worry, the nice judges will tell us. (Incidentally, I say “learn,” though at this point, that isn’t exactly what’s going on – “absorb” might be more accurate. I’m sure it’ll all begin to make sense one day.)

Property I like, at least so far, mostly because I love antiquated ideas that make no sense in a modern context, like the anti-torture provisions of the Geneva Convention. It remains to be seen how I’ll like it once the cases stop being antique… but the rule that “iron holds the whale” was almost worth the price of admission.

Contracts… they’re contracts. (Except when they’re simple donative gifts, of course, or when they're within the Statute, except when an exception to the Statute applies.) Can’t get too excited about it yet. But our professor does a lovely job of posing hypotheticals, and seems to be presenting things very very clearly – though what the hell do I know, I just started.

* * *

As for the real world: we’re still living partially out of boxes, though SW has done yeoman work this week, unpacking, organizing, finding furniture (a kitchen table and chairs, a desk, a couch that we’re to pick up tomorrow, an antique settee, two library chairs, and a big-screen tv that almost killed the two friends who helped us move it – total expenditure, $275), and generally dealing with things non-school-related. Oh, and we bought a Vonage VOIP-in-a-box from Target, cause phone service is just too bloody expensive, we’ll see how that little venture works out. (I haven’t had the time, the heart, or the energy to hook it up yet.)

And I should be reading. Or writing. Or something. So I believe I will start now.

I'm in Love...

2006-08-23T16:59:00.000-07:00

... with a beautiful library. Oh, it's been long, long, long since I've had a big old library around. The smell of old bindings and new floors; the hush of the reading room, like and unlike a church; the sense that time has, not stopped, but steadied into a predictable flow. I could spend hours and hours here... I mean, of course, I will; but I'll enjoy it.

It's been way too long since I was in school.

Give Me a Break (from studying)

2006-08-20T19:53:00.001-07:00

Hey, kids, I’ve got a great idea! Let’s all read the same inane book at the same time! Wow! Great! I’ll bet we can set a WORLD RECORD! Won’t that be neato? Wow!

This may be the dumbest idea I’ve heard all week – and bear in mind, I just started law school, so I’ve already been plied with several legal cases worth of people who acted on inordinately dumb ideas.

The Little Engine That Could? Who came up with that one? – Bill Bennett, I’ll bet. For the record, my kids prefer Scooby Doo and the Army of the Undead. Yeah, I know it’s just a tie-in to an out-of-date video release. I’ll bet it could break the Little Engine’s record without breaking a sweat.

Oh, but wait – this is kind of nice… one can go online and donate a copy of Jumpstart’s custom limited edition of The Little Engine That Could to a child in need! I’m sure there are a lot of kids with no health insurance whose lives would really be changed by a story of a good little locomotive who pulls himself up by his bootstraps and succeeds through the power of positive thinking. …but what’s this? The link is sponsored by Penguin USA. Hmm. So who publishes this custom limited edition? … nah, couldn’t be...

I have a better idea for setting a world record: let’s take the people who thought up “No Child Left Behind” and see if we can stuff them all into a phone booth.

What Fresh Hells?

2006-08-15T20:17:00.000-07:00

And now, just to add an element of suspense to an otherwise ordinary 1L year, my brand-new laptop is liable to burst into flames for no discernable reason.

Could things get any better?

I Moved

2006-08-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

And so did my wife, and two kids. I got to drive a 26 foot moving van 400 miles. (Actual length of the truck: 34' 3" from nose to tail.) It was interesting but I don't ever want to do it again. Nor do I ever want to move again. I calculate if I get 8 consecutive PhDs in unrelated fields, I will be able to stay in University housing till I die.

Tempting.

Misquotation and the Folk Process

2006-08-05T19:13:00.000-07:00

I recently read a blog post about how annoying the author found it when people misquoted the Bible, specifically when they named "money" as the root of all evil, when (according to Timothy, the noted theological economist), it is actually "love of money" that is the culprit. This started me thinking... and, you should know, when I start to think I tend to get all bent out of shape, maybe because I find it so very difficult.

Anyhow, here 's what I think. I think that when people say things like "money is the root of all evil" there are a couple of things going on... and, oddly, I don't think that misquoting is necessarily one of those things.

I would argue that when people say "money is the root of all evil" they are not misquoting the Bible; they are, rather, correcting the Bible. Or, rather, since I would wager that most people have no idea of the source of the quote, still less what the "original" form was... that they are simply reiterating common wisdom and thereby agreeing with it. The folk process, in other words, has taken the quotation into the public domain. It no longer matters what Timothy said; what matters is the thing itself.

Now, the reason that Timothy's original sentiment is so often forgotten... is because the new saying - I dare say it - is superior. I would say that a much stronger case can be made for money per se as the root of all evil, than for mere love of money. (This is not to say that I think everything that results from money is evil... but boy, could I make a list.) Love is not an emotion that I would associate with money, personally, but I know people who do love money, and they're not more evil, as a rule, than, say, people who love dogs, or people who love the law.

Any linguist worth his salt will tell you that it's not really relevant what people are supposed to say. What counts is what people do say. Thus the absurdity of saying that "ain't ain't a word," or that it is somehow "incorrect usage" to end a sentence with a preposition. That is the sort of nonsense, as Winston Churchill famously remarked, up with which I will not put.

So-called "misquotations" abound in the world of spoken and written discourse, and pedants are forever getting worked up about what the "real" quotation should be. This is all well and good when the person supposes himself to be quoting - then the pedants correct misapprehensions, keep people honest, and generally are to be praised, if avoided on social occasions. (Okay, that was uncalled for. And untrue. Some of my best friends, etc... I include myself.)

However, very often - as I just argued in the case of that old devil money - it is the case that the folk process has improved on its source, and what was once a quotation becomes a saying. How can you misquote a saying, unless you twist it so that the words no longer make sense? So with casting money as villain. One of my personal favorites is "gilding the lily," which I find a much more evocative and useful image than what Shakespeare wrote, one character pointing out that it was, I suppose, pointless "to gild refined gold, to paint the lily." Not only is the phrase "gilding the lily" more compact than the original, falling more trippingly on the tongue... but its meaning has shifted and sharpened, so that it no longer signifies mere redundancy, but something closer to "spoiling by excess," something that I find needs summing up on a regular basis.

Another example... "Play it again, Sam," actually is a misquotation of the famous line from Casablanca, but surely the line is better misquoted? It may not have been what Bogart said... but it's what he meant, and absent the entire context, it actually sums up the emotions of the scene in a more complete and accurate way than the "correct" movie quotation - it's truer, in other words, to the spirit of the original. No wonder it beat out the original quotation in our hearts and minds. It deserves to.

****************************

There are doubtless other examples floating around in my head but I cannot think of them at the moment, as everything I and my wife and our two children own in the world must be boxed and ready for loading on a truck tomorrow morning. Yikes.

New Method

2006-07-31T19:03:00.000-07:00

How am I preparing for law school this week?

By not paying any attention to anything outside my own narrow, daily concerns.

Also I'm doing that because the alternative is, at the moment, too depressing to contemplate.

No updates on current events, please.

Sound Editors Rap

2006-07-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

For anyone who's still wondering what it is I do - sorry, "did" - for a living:

Picture a beat. (No, that's not a contradiction in terms, but you can call it a wave-form if you like.) A pale-skinned white dude bent over a keyboard, typing with one hand, the other hand darting back and forth between the keyboard and the trackball. The only illumination is provided by the pair of enormous flat-screen computer monitors. Bursts of dialogue and sound effects - never allowed to play all the way to the end of a line, or to silence - punctuate the music.

The Dialogue Editor addresses the camera:

I got the wisdom of the old school, attitude: new school
I cut mag with a razorblade, now I'm using ProTools
You better hope your computer's a fast one
I'm cutting so fast, a G4'll be crashin'
Yeah, I fixed about a million edits
But you don't even know my name unless you stayed for all the credits
I know you never heard of me
But if editing was kung fu, I'd be Bruce Lee
I'm stealth, I'm an audio ninja
So smooth, you don't even know I've been there
I hear a lip-smack, a click, a tick and I'm on it
Isolate the wave form – bang! I've redrawn it.
Quick on the draw like my mouse was a six-gun
My tracks so clean you don't even have to mix 'em
I'm fixing mic bumps like it was nothing.
A grip dropped a C-stand? Man, give me a tough one.

[another voice breaks in - it's the Sound Effects Editor]

I know you shot it on a soundstage, I don't care
I'll make it sound so real you'll swear you were right there
Any scene, any time, any place, I'll never back down
Got foley, hard effects, all kinds of backgrounds
Got birds for the daytime, crickets for night
Got offices, restaurants, theme parks, barfights.
Stereo, Dolby, five point one
I've got so many sounds you can't handle it, son
Got left, right, center track, stereo surrounds
I think I better take pity on you, mix this mother down

[the break...

and then the Dialogue Editor again]

This scene has two actors, sittin' and talkin'?
You shoulda gone in with a boom and a shotgun
You don't record that dialogue with a radio mic, fool
Didn't they teach you nothin' in film school?
Now I hear the ambience changin'
One take's quiet, the other's got a plane in
I find a fill I like so I lift it
Copy it, paste it, maybe pitch-shift it
Reverse it, loop it, put on a fade
Now it sounds like it was recorded that way.

[and the Sound Effects Editor brings it home]

Director thinks he's an artiste with a vision
Fool, to me it's just another car collision
Tire squeals and metal crashin', crashin'
People screaming, think I'll cut some breaking glass in
Don't come asking me for choices
Cause you know ProTools only got two dozen voices
The best sound? I found it, you don't have to choose it
I know what I'm doing, shut up and let me do it
I got explosions, body falls, whooshes, hits
You want guns? Bombs? Airplanes? I got all that shit
But if I cut it, motherfucker better use it
I best not find out you went and covered it with music...

And a long slow fade out...

West Coast, fool.

The Magic School Bus vs. Political Reality

2006-07-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

I keep waiting for Miss Frizzle to be called in to face a hostile school board, because she's just not preparing her kids for those all-important standardized tests.

Vacation Update

2006-07-23T17:42:00.000-07:00

This is a pain in the ass. My brand-new Dell laptop is on the fringe of a wifi signal, which (I can only guess) is apparently causing it to gain and lose its ‘net connection every minute or so… and it won’t stop beeping, even when I mute the speaker. Am I going to become a Mac apologist, after all these years? I can’t stand it. An operating system should be an operating system, nothing more: not a fetish, not a sports team, not a girlfriend whose ways you have to learn, for whom you make allowances because you love her. Look: I’m a pretty sophisticated user. Not a computer geek, but I was a math major; I’ve used computers since before they were even available to the hoi polloi, let alone since they became standard equipment for everyone on the planet; I’ve used computers every day of my working life for the past twelve years in a very technically demanding field – and if I can’t figure out how to make my computer stop beeping at me every ninety seconds… well, that’s not a mature technology, is all I’ll say.

So SW is teaching, her yearly two-week out-of-state gig, and this time we decided that while she was gone I should take the kids with me to visit my parents. They have a place in central Idaho, a couple of miles from a nice little resort town on a lake – you know, scenery, wild animals, pickup trucks, and a chance, on any given day, that it might, for some reason, snow. Or else there might be a forest fire.

Yesterday was day… what… eight? of my stint as a (very temporarily) single parent. A very privileged single parent, too, what with my mother being on hand every day I’ve been solo with the kids. And this I’ve learned… my wife is a genius. They say that a genius can do easily what other people can’t do at all. She’s got the kids all day, most days, all by herself, and she’s a lot better at it than I am. She can manage other people’s kids, too, and she makes it look easy; she can see multiple moves ahead like a chess grandmaster (I know, I know, they say that’s not how grandmasters really play. Shut up) and always choose the winning line. I’m sure if there was such a thing as blindfold simultaneous babysitting, she could pull that off, too.

But back to me, patzer that I am. First of all, just so I shouldn’t sound like I’m a whiner, I will say that the rewards of having the kids all day are great. When they are good, they are very very good; and when I am good, even if they’re being bad, still I have a definite sense of triumph and good-deed-doing in helping them work out their problems, or (what makes me feel just as good, even if it’s not as useful in the long run) distracting them, successfully bribing them, or otherwise foreseeing and circumventing problems.

Boy has been practicing his hitting and throwing skills, and it’s a joy to see him enjoy it so much, especially because I honestly had no idea he was already so good at it. He’s working on writing and reading, he loves learning about animals and what they eat and what eats them; he thoroughly enjoyed our tour of the smokejumpers headquarters – especially after our tour guide had to cut the tour short because she had to suit up, get in an airplane, and fly off to parachute in somewhere or other and fight a fire.

Girl is accumulating language by leaps and bounds, exhibits a truly remarkable and perverse independence (“I can do it” is her constant refrain, in the utterly adorable singsongy way she has of speaking), and is beginning to originate her own ideas for make-believe. This afternoon I had to bring her endless cups of make-believe tea in a plastic cup, which she endlessly slurped down, imperiously and immediately demanding, “More tea!” (I also had to save her from certain doom several times in quick succession, when she insisted on standing up on her bench at dinner.)

So when they are good, they are very very good. But when they are bad… good God. And they have, through no fault of their own, been bad for the last few days. Because Girl has been sick – she threw up a few nights ago, and has since developed a nasty little cough and a persistent tummy-ache that has thrown her sleep schedule (among other things) out of whack. Tired and sick means clingy and irritable. Also we’re in the midst of a heat wave, up here, but until about… oh, this afternoon… the lake’s been too cold for the kids to enjoy swimming, so… long days, limited fun, endless opportunity for further irritation. Irritation, of course, feeds on itself; nor am I immune. Oh, no. When it’s too hot… I like to slow down. Way down. To the point, I am told, of catatonia. When I can’t slow down, I tend to get rather pissy, in the sort of passive-aggressive way that can’t be easily or obviously pinned on one. (“I’m ready, what’s keeping you?” “I don’t care, I’ll do anything you want to do.” “Or we could do this…”)

Now Boy, of course, likes to do some things that Girl doesn’t like to do, or can’t do because she’s two years old; but since Girl is at the moment clingy and irritable, it’s usually impossible for me to put her down, because she goes into hysterics if it even crosses her mind that she might not have my full attention – as, for instance, if I step into the water for a minute to play with Boy. (God forbid I should dive into the lake, swim out to a buoy, turn and swim back - elapsed time: 180 seconds.) So for the last few days I’ve had Girl clinging to me like a barnacle, which makes Boy feel slighted – because he is – which makes him whiny and irritable, causes him to pick endless fights, leaves him without the inner resources to handle the slightest setback, and renders him in general very difficult to take. (The fights he picks are mainly – though by no means exclusively – with Girl; and surely one motive, piled atop a raft of others, is to express his anger at me, through her.)

All of which, as I say, feeds on itself. Sheesh. Yesterday wasn’t a purely awful day, but parts of it surely qualify as awful. A couple of things I’ve learned…

when a five year old is tired and hot and cross, don’t ask him what he wants to do. He doesn’t know. Just figure out something that he’ll probably enjoy, then weather the slings and arrows of his outrage till you get there. Extra credit: make it something you’ll enjoy, regardless of whether he ends up enjoying it or not.
ice cream is always welcome, but for God’s sake, don’t expect good behavior after you’ve juiced your kids up on sugar. The hotter the day, the more welcome the ice cream – but the less likely they’ve had any appetite, the less likely they’ve eaten any real food within living memory, hence the more the sugar will effect them, the more you’d better brace yourself for craziness.
cough syrup with codeine is as good for the one not taking it, as for the one who is. (“What if it wears off, and she wakes up in the middle of the night coughing?” I asked the pharmacist. She glanced around, as if the doctor might be lurking nearby, and in a conspiratorial voice said, “I’d give her another half teaspoon.”)
it’s not always a help to have other adults along to help you. Sometimes you have to shed them – your well-meaning parents, for instance – and just do what you have to do, at the pace you feel like doing it. Come back late; no apologies.

And biggest lesson of the day: when I want to go jump in the lake, I’m going to bloody well go jump in the lake. They can join me who wish, they can scream bloody murder on the shoreline who will. I’ll feel better, regardless.

Lessons from the Aquarium

2006-07-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

Bought some new fish the other day, and realized what it is our apartment really needs.

An algae eater... for toys.

Language Acquisition 3

2006-07-07T18:15:00.000-07:00

Last week SW and the kids were out of town, taking care of her mother, who was recovering from knee replacement surgery. Last weekend, I flew up to join them and then we drove home together. Now, it was our experience, when Boy was younger, that extended trips away from home - say, about a week away, usually with SW visiting her mother - were almost invariably occasions when he would go through a surge of development. He would learn to walk, or his language skills would suddenly take a quantum jump, or he'd start climbing everything in sight, or something.

Sure enough, while she was away, Girl started putting words into sentences. Now we can actually understand her better than half the time... and without having to know the context she's working from. That is to say, she can come in from the other room and tell me something, and I can figure out what she's saying without knowing that she was playing with her dolls, and so guessing she's saying something relating to the dolls. I can even, occasionally, more or less, understand what she's saying on the phone... though that's a lot harder, of course. (Sometimes I can barely understand what SW is saying on the phone. I guess it's me.)

I should explain the "putting words into sentences" part. Girl, it seems, started with sentences and put words into them. Boy took a much more traditional tack, first learning as many words as he could, and gradually building sentences out of them. His acquisition of words was rather rapacious, though: I have a video of Boy at about 20 months, going through a board book dictionary page by page, pointing at pictures, and demanding, "Saman?" (His babysitter spoke Spanish to him, and "saman?" was his version of "como se llama?")

Girl, on the other hand, first began mimicking what I can only call the music of sentences - repeating sentences she'd heard, only without any clear idea of what any of the individual words meant, or even any notion that there were individual words. And now that she does know words... she's rather abruptly begun speaking in more or less full sentences. Her syntax still needs work, of course, but I really don't recall her having much of a one-or-two-word sentence phase.

Example, please: when Boy was very young and we were driving in the car and he wanted the window up, he would demand, "No wind!" Very clear sentiment, very traditional linguistic development. When Girl wants the car window up, she'll say something like, "Ma pamba pop puh window!"

She's a singer, I guess.

Solving Problems We Don't Have

2006-07-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

So here in LA we have these freeway alert signs, so we can all be on the lookout for the blue Ford Taurus whose driver just kidnapped someone, or whatever. And of course, it doesn't happen that often that there's anything worth being alerted about, thank goodness. But when there's nothing to alert, the geniuses at ... whichever department runs the things... have decided to alert us all to how long it will take to get to downtown, or the 101 freeway, or some appropriate landmark. The only problem is, that people actually slow down to read the signs... so it takes a little longer, and creates a little more of a traffic hazard, than it would have without the information.

There's just something about having a tool that makes people use it, even when it's useless. Even when it's worse than useless. They say that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; I think the reality is that everything - problem or not - starts to look like a nail. And if there are nails on the freeway, then obviously drivers should know about it.

And so it goes.

Commie Hollywood Bastards! (or not)

2006-06-30T21:22:00.000-07:00

Does Superman hate America? Does Hollywood? Do screenwriters Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris (writers of the new - yawn - Superman movie)?

Much is being made of the fact that in this latest movie, Superman says he fights for "truth, justice, and all that," when clearly he ought to say, "Truth, justice, and the American way." Superman, unpatriotic? Say it ain't so!

Well, first of all, I've got to think that the real Superman might choose not go around spouting a phrase that, to most of the world, would come off more like a bad joke than a rousing slogan... or, say, a list suitable for Sesame Street's "one of these things is not like the others" game. (I'm not saying it's a good joke, but don't blame Superman: blame the ones who made the joke. Hint: they're not from Hollywood.)

Secondly, Superman may embody the current version of "the American way" - that is to say, winning through overwhelmingly superior force - but didn't the American way used to have something to do with hard work and ingenuity? Just asking.

Thirdly, I don't know who besides myself would be so very old as to have seen the Christopher Reeve Superman movie... but when Reeve said, ever so earnestly, to Lois Lane that he fought for "truth, justice, and the American way" - it got a laugh. No kidding. Not a mean laugh, or a disbelieving laugh, but the kind of laugh the line deserved for sheer corniness. (This, by the way, was not in godless, America-hating California - no, this was in Idaho, that reddest of all red states. You got something to say about that?)

Finally - dare I say, conclusively? - I have it on excellent - one might almost say, canonical, irrefutable, or unimpeachable - authority that "Superman fights a never-ending battle for truth and justice." Nothing about "the American way," whatever that jingoistic phrase might signify. And that was way back in the day, when America really was the global good guy. (I'll save you the trouble - the particular movie I'm talking about, "Electric Earthquake," was one of a series directed by Dave Fleischer and produced by Max Fleischer in 1942. There are more on Internet Archive. They're good. Go watch them.)

Now go back to baiting Clinton and leave Superman alone. Haters.

Issue Stealing

2006-06-30T13:41:00.000-07:00

Damn those Republicans! Stealing traditionally Democratic ideals and... well... you know... I mean, there must be something wrong with that, is all.

In an op-ed piece in today's LA Times, Representative Dan Lundgren of California's Third District, wherever that is, proposes "a $1-billion prize for the first American automaker to sell 60,000 midsized sedans that could travel 100 miles on one gallon of gasoline." His stated rationale? "We must conserve.... Replacing our cars with prize-winning vehicles would reduce consumption to about 1.8 million barrels a day. It would also slash carbon emissions.... Our economic lifeblood must be immunized against the dictates of a global petroleum cartel...."

And finally, "Our energy, environmental and national security interests are all converging."

This is a Republican? Sounds more like a conservative.

The Silly Season

2006-06-29T20:02:00.000-07:00

Lawmommy at (where else?) Law and Mommyhood pointed me toward this story, about a mysterious rain of money in Aberystwyth, Wales. And it's a perfect little 'silly season' story:

"Someone around the corner said he saw a man get out of a car, go to the pedestrian crossing and throw a huge bundle of money into the air," according to a shopkeeper.

But what caught my attention was this bit of information:

Police ... stressed that most of the money had been recovered.

On what grounds did the police "recover" the money? How come the people who picked it up didn't get to keep it? Is there some law in Wales about taking money from an eccentric stranger?

Google Challenge Update

2006-06-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

A few preliminary results:

Kristine is way smarter than I am.
Murky Thoughts and my friend Kim are also way smarter than I am.
My sister and her husband give up too easily, probably because they have small children and little time to waste. Of course, that didn't stop me.

And a few points:

Kristine notes that Google Images search was worthless, and she's quite correct. When it comes to search - to information, really - text is king. And queen. And jack. In fact it's hard to believe that text will ever not be king. Someday there may be a way to search photos without first reducing them to text... but I can't really imagine how that could be done.
Google is kind of stupid. By that I mean, that it requires its users to be far smarter than they should have to be, to root out things that are just a little bit obscure. (A more charitable way of putting it would be that Google is lousy at sorting the wheat from the chaff.) I must admit that this is the first time I've got better results from Clusty than from Google, but I haven't played around with Clusty all that much, and I don't really have a solid sense of how to use it to best advantage. Still, Google seems to me very vulnerable to competition, perhaps not the Internet superpower of the popular imagination.
The Internet's usefulness is still, in large areas (the arts and culture come to mind), mainly due to the efforts of fans, hobbyists, and dilettantes. This is not to denigrate fans, hobbyists, and dilettantes - I happen to be one myself - but it does give you some idea of the structure and causes of the Internet's limitations, as well as its strengths.
Note that the photograph in question is under copyright, and that at least the majority of instances that are accessible on the web are pretty clearly not licensed. Me, I would call every instance that I've seen an example of fair use. The copyright holder might not agree, and I would guess the courts would side with the copyright holder if it came to a test.

Anybody else?

Take the Google Challenge

2006-06-26T18:24:00.000-07:00

So a friend and I were in a bookstore, and we found ourselves in the photography section, looking for a famous photograph she remembered - a famous photograph that, for some reason, we couldn't find in any of their books. (Blame Barnes & Noble.) "But of course," we told each other, "we can find it on the Internet." So, when we got to a computer, we looked for it...

And... well, we found it. But, to our surprise, it was actually very difficult to find. So here's what I want to know: is my pride in my Internet searching prowess badly misplaced, or was it really as hard as all that?

Yes, it's a contest. Anyone can enter - anyone who would like to satisfy my curiosity, and who has some time to kill, dead, with a stake through its heart. You're on your honor, but if you can do it in under thirty minutes, I for one will not consider your honor tarnished. I'll give you the same information (from my friend's memory) that we had when we started our search:

We were looking for a famous Life Magazine picture from the 50s, of a woman who had committed suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building. She had landed on a car, smashing it, of course. Possibly because the photo was in black and white, there was no visible blood, and she actually looked quite peaceful, as if she were sleeping... on a crumpled car.

That's it. I'll post results, impressions, gratuitous insults if any, and, eventually, a link to the answer. (My answer, that is.) Ready?

Begin.

Change of Symbol

2006-06-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

Most of our illustrious senators seem to be in favor of a Constitutional amendment banning flag-burning. Oh, free speech, you are so bad, you must be restrained in this midterm election year!

I'm with Norman Thomas, who suggested -

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag; wash it.

Let's go.

Why I Hate the Police

2006-06-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

Oh - oops - I mean... oh, hell, now I'll never get to be a judge. But really, that's not what I meant at all.

This is what I meant:

Another working day has ended
Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race

Words cannot easily express how much these lyrics irritate me. "Packed like lemmings"? A very close second in badness, from the same song, is the line "Every single meeting with his so-called superior is a humiliating kick in the crotch." Bad, bad, bad. But oh, so earnest. And then to couple these first-draft images of suburban misery with scenes from a mysterious "dark Scottish lake" just makes it worse.

So why, you may well ask, didn't I just turn off my radio? Because this was the only station playing music, I didn't want to hear about what my "elected" legislators were doing now, and I hate drive-time djs even more than the Police. That's why. Plus, because I listened to that song, I get to complain about something that doesn't matter a whit, and what's more fun than that?

Time Pressure

2006-06-25T19:21:00.000-07:00

Painters coming tomorrow. Frenzy of taking things off the walls and pushing all our furniture into the middle of the room. Also patching holes in walls so spackle will be dry in the morning. Also filing and paying bills and trying to get paid for my last two jobs so no checks bounce. Wishing I had Tuesday back.

I'll Take That Under Advisement

2006-06-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

I just completed my required loan counseling, so I can get my required loans. Handy to be able to do it online, and they offer excellent advice as well on how to manage your debt. This, for instance:

Part-time jobs, summer and holiday seasonal work, tutoring, and baby-sitting all provide an excellent source of extra money and valuable work experience.

I shall certainly try to apply that to my situation.

Face Whating?

2006-06-21T23:56:00.000-07:00

Oh, those Brits. Facedancing - the newest craze? Sure, if you're interested in watching people pretend they're not excruciatingly self-conscious while being videotaped performing a ridiculous act. Me, I got plenty of that in film school. (Cast your friends in your film? Bad idea.)

However, to what's-his-name's credit, at least he's not trying to get tenure out of it. Anyway, far more tedious things have caught the interest of millions.

Thank you, KK, wherever you are.

The Truth of the Matter

2006-06-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

Christianity has long since been downgraded to a political affiliation. The real American religion is Property Rights.

What?

Understanding Understanding Comics

2006-06-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

I loved Scott McCloud's comic book, Understanding Comics.

I loved Dylan Horrocks's essay about it, too; not least the quotations sprinkled throughout:

...like all boundaries, even those meticulously surveyed, terms are social and arbitrary, not natural and inevitable. What divides my property from my neighbor’s is not a natural boundary but a social system within which certain functions of property prevail. It is important to remember that terms function in the same way...

(Thomas McLaughlin, in Critical Terms for Literary Study,
ed. Lentricchia & McLaughlin)

and especially this -

‘If any single caveat can alert map users to their unhealthy but widespread naivete, it is that a single map is but one of an infinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data.’

(Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps)

... and that's what the law means to me.

Time for a New Paradigm

2006-06-20T23:34:00.000-07:00

What's the big deal about "speaking truth to power?" I do that all the time. Problem is, power doesn't care about truth. No, what we should really be concentrating on is "telling lies to power." Now that might get us somewhere.

So Much Time, So Little to Do

2006-06-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

Wait...

Day 2 with no kids and no spouse, day 1 with no work. So today, all morning long, I got to sit at the kitchen table and write. Luxury!

I got up, made breakfast, read a book while I ate, then made a modest list of things I thought I might be able to accomplish today. I have learned from bitter experience that overloading a to-do list is fatal, so I set my sights low, as follows:

go to bank
copy keys
return videos to library
return videos to Blockbuster
buy dinner
buy crickets for Boy's lizard

I accomplished all of these things, and I got to ride my bike into the bargain. And I didn't get hit by a car, even though it was well into rush hour by the time I got home.

And there was an auxiliary list, in case I got bored and wanted to do something here at home:

laundry
bills and filling
remove molly bolts and expansion anchors from walls and find (not even apply) patching compound
figure out why Rita Mae Brown named a character after a type of wall anchor

I accomplished none of these things - well, I managed to pry one molly bolt from the wall - but still I am well pleased with myself.

Tomorrow I may or may not be called upon to go in to work, I still don't know. I still don't care. I plan on writing again in the morning. O bliss! O quiet! (except for the chirping of the crickets, as it will take the lizard about a week, I guess, to eat them all) O being able to put something down and have it still be there when next I look for it!

Next time: more about how much I miss SW and the kids. I do, really I do. But I never get to sit down and just write anymore. One of the reasons I'm so looking forward to starting law school.

More Low Budget Filmmaking Hints

2006-06-20T11:50:00.000-07:00

One of the best reasons to have a great script is that it will give people a reason to work on your film for free.

Anything can be fixed if you have a time machine and a gun. If you don't, it's best to do things properly in the first place. If you have no money, it is particularly important that you do things right, because you are too poor to pay someone to fix it.

Don't mix up your shooting formats. Especially, don't mix up your shooting timecode. Pick one frame rate and stick to it. If you don't, you will be sorry, and so will anybody who tries to help you.

Feed your crew. If you don't, the ones who are doing you the biggest favors - that is, the ones who could actually be working for real money - will get pissy. You don't want a pissy crew. Believe me.

Spring for a good microphone. Crappy picture quality, you can pass off as an artistic choice; crappy sound, never. A radio mic, by the way, is not a good microphone. Radio mics are something you use when you're desperate. Also, it's really important where the mic is placed. Don't give the job of holding the boom to the one grip you can spare because he's not smart enough to help with the lights.

Spring for a good camera, too. You can't really get away with crappy picture quality. I just said that because I care more about sound. (Well, actually, you can get away with it. But be sure you mean it - don't shoot crappy picture just because you don't have money. That's not a valid excuse anymore.)

People will do you favors because they like you, they like your project, they want the experience, they're bored, or they expect you to return the favor. I'm just saying.

I've found that when I'm working for free, the person I'm working for tends to act like they own me, like they can always ask for one more thing, one more favor, one more day, one more... something. Same thing if I'm working for a flat fee. If I'm being paid for my time, though, people become a lot more reasonable, and deadlines tend to get met. A little money keeps people honest, especially when they only have a little money - and, as a bonus, the answer to the question, "How can I ever repay you?" becomes obvious.

It's not that poverty necessarily makes you smart, but money does make you stupid. I'm just saying.

Alone

2006-06-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

SW, Boy and Girl are gone to Grandmother's House, over the burning sands (or whatever) of the central valley, leaving me on my own for a week and a half. Time to pack, read, catch up on my sleep, try to finish a few projects before law school drives everything permanently out of my mind. Or else just waste a lot of time surfing the Internet, there's always that. Oh, and watch Martin Scorsese's series on The Blues, which I got from the library the other day.

Yesterday was a birthday party for Boy's Best Friend, J... whom he will not soon see again. By the time Boy gets back, J will be summering in Montana; by the time he and his family return, we'll have moved. We're going up to Idaho for a couple of weeks this summer, and have invited them to fly over and visit - yes, they have their own plane - but for some reason they won't commit to it. Maybe they'll come, though. And SW and the kids have to come down to LA every couple of months, so the contact won't be completely broken, but... I think Boy is going to have some hard times ahead. We're leaving the only home he's known, most of the people, virtually all of the friends. He and J have so colonized each other's lives that it's strange to think of them apart... Not only that, but J's family has a swimming pool, and we only have a wading pool. I'm going to miss that, too.

Wednesday was Boy's last day at his school, too. (If it weren't such a violently countercultural sort of a school, I guess they might have said he was in pre-kindergarten, but they call it "house group" instead.) And it's interesting, since he was there for three years, and he liked it, and we liked it... but I'm pretty sure he won't miss it. At all. The next year may prove me a liar - though will that really be so bad, if I'm to be a lawyer? (Sorry, residual knee-jerk anti-lawyer sentiment, soon to be purged, I'm sure.) - but he really doesn't seem much of a one for school. Doesn't like groups, doesn't care for authority, at least the sort of countercultural passive consensus-style authority practiced at his school. And I misdoubt he'll be any fonder of traditional rule-based, do-what-I-say-because-I-say-so, time-to-do-this-now authority. We'll see what happens in the fall.

Boy's turning points are our turning points. (Girl is too young to have a tribe outside our own little family, so she's not losing hers; her transitions are not so clear.) We've begun saying goodbye to friends, because so many of those friendships have been formed around Boy's school and Boy's friends, and even though we'll see them over the summer, things have begun breaking up. SW and I are leaving our home behind for student housing - which doesn't even sound like home - and something completely different. I've lived in LA for twenty years now, she's been here seventeen, and even though neither of us has ever been too keen on the city itself... we are, more or less, Angelenos. Two decades, that's a long time to bake in the relentless sun. Can we even take the rain and cold anymore? Time to find out... soon.

Danger: Undirected Browsing.

2006-06-15T23:07:00.000-07:00

I'm too, too tired to think about it, but maybe someday I'll come back to these posts about DOPA, librarianship, privacy, social networking, intellectual property and so on and so on.

Why so fascinated with libraries?

Cause what else is there?

If They Hadn't Done What I Told Them Not to Do... They'd Still Be Alive

2006-06-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

Sanchovilla has an interesting post on Internet search engines as an investigatory tool - in the context of public defense work, but the implications are broad:

...we had a huge discussion on the ethical/legal implications of using Myspace.com, Blogger, and every other personal blog creator out there as an investigation tool.
I told him I had been having a lot of success recently using Myspace to collect background information on several key witnesses and even a victim on a few cases I had been assigned in the last 6 months. He said he did not find the sites useful or easy to use, he felt that it was infringing on the individual's privacy, and he felt it was leaning towards unethical using information culled from a personal (Adult or Juvenile's) website.

I told him he was an idiot.

Nahh, of course I didn't tell him that...

Sheesh.

The rest of the post is a case study in Internet searching... and it's obvious and simple. In fact, the shocking thing is just how obvious and simple it is. If that makes sense.

In Which Our Hero Succumbs at Last

2006-06-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

In vain I struggled. The pull of it was too great. I have joined the ranks of all the other law students to be, past, present and future: I rented and, yes, watched, The Paper Chase. And...

Wow. If I thought for a moment that was an accurate depiction of law school - past, present, or future - I would quit right now. Out of sheer boredom, frankly. Only duty, and the forlorn hope that there would turn out to be a point after all, or that at least something interesting would finally happen, and also the fact that I was too tired to turn it off and go to sleep, kept me watching until the end. Even John Houseman's storied performance I thought was largely wasted in portraying a tediously one-dimensional character; that might have been forgiveable, had the main character possessed even as much depth as that, so that Houseman could have had a worthy protagonist to his antagonist. But no: the character played by Timothy Bottoms ... what was the name again? Katz? Moss? I can't even remember... seemed to possess not even a single dimension. Certainly he had no quality to make me believe, or care, that Lindsay Wagner would fall in love with him, or he with her.

Oh, yes, "Hart," that was his name. God help us.

Maybe if the movie had been cut to an hour in length and shown as a tv pilot, it would have held some promise. As it was, I had to go out the next night and rent Inherit the Wind, with its good old-fashioned purple prose, sledgehammer-between-the-eyes subtlety, and scenery-chewing performances, to recuperate. Geeze, at least it was about something.

Blog, Blog, Blog

2006-06-06T18:36:00.000-07:00

One Tom Mighell writes on ABANET on "The Next Stage of Lawyer Blogging." He's bullish on blogging, and why wouldn't he be? He's got a gig, writing about it. What's not to like?

And I agree, I guess, with his analysis, as far as it goes. Only... where does it go? It goes to extolling "the ease with which larger professional networks are developed," "all sorts of benefits—new clients, speaking engagements and job offers," "the collaborative opportunities that blogs provide to lawyers." And, intriguingly, he predicts "the creation of 'virtual law firms' between groups of lawyer bloggers."

It remains to be seen, though, what we shall ever do with all the damned blogs? I can't even keep track of all the copyright blogs out there now, let alone the law student blogs, and what if there's something important that I want to get right? The notion that the Internet provides a self-correcting, fact-checking system is clearly fallacious... which is why it leaves a lot to be desired as a research tool.

I foresee, not only the continued proliferation of blogs, but the rise of directory services - a combination of fact-checkers, trustworthy gatekeepers, and clipping services. Kind of what the yahoos who founded Yahoo might have had in mind, way back before they began trying to be all things to all people. Something, perhaps, very like... well, newspapers. The signal-to-noise ratio on the Internet is too low for it to be otherwise; the "every man his own gatekeeper" model that Google encourages doesn't work very well now... and it's only going to get worse.

So says my crystal ball.

Surely You're Not Serious, Mr. Zywicki

2006-06-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

Wow, sounds like politics. Pettiness, obfuscation, backtracking, endless debate over who "really" meant what...

Todd Zywicki, complaining about being accurately quoted. Oh, but the accurate quote was "really" a misquote.

Um... no. At best, he said something in a way that he now wishes he hadn't... cause it makes him look like a schmuck.

Too bad, so sad. But blame yourself, Professor.

DOGMA

2006-06-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

If we make it as easy for gays and lesbians to marry as it is for straight people... won't gay marriage soon be just as meaningless as regular marriage? Maybe the self-styled "social conservatives" are trying to do us a favor - by keeping it ridiculously hard for at least some people to marry, they really are preserving the sanctity of one kind of marriage. Gay marriage.

So thank you, Senators, for trying.

I Have No Advice to Give

2006-06-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

... cause I'm just a no-L at this point, who wants to know from me? But I do have experiences to recount. In case anyone's ever trolling the Internet in search of the experiences of someone who decided to change careers in his 40s, leave Hollywood behind, move to another city hundreds of miles away with partner and young children in tow, and go to law school.

Oh, what the hell, let's call it advice. And let's assume said person is serious about going to law school, not just doing it because he's bored and has no better ideas. And because I'm still undergoing my first career, and it's bad form to spend too long on the Internet when you're at work, especially when there's a mix in the morning and you haven't finished cutting the ADR yet, I'll just tackle the LSAT first, and then if I get bored enough later on this week I'll think of something else to say.

First LSAT Advice

Study. Take the LSAT seriously. Even though it's just a test, and a standardized test at that, and even though standardized testing is a really, really stupid way to choose law students - or any kind of students - not to mention that it's an asinine way to determine who gets to be a lawyer. Take it seriously because it's the only game in town. Don't take a class if you don't think it'll help, because it won't. (But do take a class if you think it will help, because it will.)

Don't just take the LSAT to see if you do well enough to get into a good law school. (I'm told people actually do this.) Because - what if you do? Or worse, what if you do, but you wish you'd got a better score? They don't take your best score - they take, if you're lucky, your average score. So... study.

Second LSAT Advice

Practice on the real thing. I bought a "master the LSAT" book, and checked out lots more from the library. They were helpful mainly in giving me a quick start on recognizing and categorizing different types of questions, especially the different sorts of logic games I might encounter; and some of the strategies were useful. Note I said "strategies," not "tricks." I know, there are supposed to be ways of "gaming" the test, "psyching out" the test-writers, using internal hints to eliminate obviously wrong answers so you can concentrate on the few that might be right... or, failing that, have a better chance of guessing correctly. I think that approach is a waste of time better spent practicing on actual tests.

Yes, actual tests. They're not cheap, but spring for the LSAC's books of real tests that have actually been administered, and do your most serious practice using those tests. The questions are just like the questions you'll get. The other books... they must make up their own tests, because the questions just don't seem quite right. Close, some of them, but not the same. In a sense, of course, questions are questions, and the made up ones are close enough to provide useful practice. But the LSAC tests are the real thing, and there is a real difference. When you do timed practice tests - and you should do lots of timed practice tests - use the real tests. Almost every single one of the LSAC tests I did, I used a clock.

When I did my first practice test - a genuine test, straight out of the LSAC booklet - I didn't even manage to finish the logic games section. It was an unexpected result, because I was a math major in college, and I do well - I used to do well - on that sort of thing. So that section is what I mostly practiced. Not only because I wanted to improve my score, but because I took it as a personal affront that something that should have been right up my alley was too hard.

Ironically, when I took the LSAT, that section felt a little like I was doing the silent movie gag, where the guy tries to break the door down just as someone opens it. The logic games section for that particular version of the test was apparently the easiest anyone had seen in years. I not only finished it, I had time to go back through every one of the four sections and check my work; which I did, because I was afraid I had to have really, really messed it up, because it seemed too easy.

Which leads to the last piece of advice I have...

Third LSAT Advice

Don't forget to practice the easy sections. I coulda probably got another 3 to 5 points, if I'd spent a few hours practicing the things I thought were too easy to bother with.

76 Days and Counting Down...

2006-06-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

What am I doing to prepare for law school? Listening to folk music.

I know, I'm supposed to be reading A Civil Action, or a biography of a supreme court justice, or watching Paper Chase or working on a political campaign or touring Europe by bicycle. But for some reason I'm more interested in Clarence Ashley even than in reading about the latest atrocity George Bush's country's army has committed over in ... wherever the hell they are.

So interested, in fact, that I'm wading through Greil Marcus's overwrought and barely comprehensible book, The Old, Weird America. This, at least, should be good practice for law school.

In Marcus's vision of ... whatever he happens to be talking about... the words take over. It's a tradition, seemingly, of rock criticism, that it be all purple and cosmic and that it build so elaborately upon both the music and the critic's idiosyncratic perception of the music that the two become one in the mind of the reader... so that if one hasn't actually heard the music in question, if it is not fresh in one's mind, one runs the risk of being sucked down in the purple quicksand. And quicksand takes forever to get out of your clothes and hair.

Here's Marcus on the fragmentary nature of some folk lyrics:

What appears to be a singer's random assemblage of fragments to fit a certain melody line may be, for that singer, an assemblage of fragments that melody called forth. It may be a sermon delivered by the singer's subconscious, his or her second mind. It may be a heretic's way of saying what could never be said out loud, a mask over a boiling face.

Holy shit. A boiling face? And then -

The banjo could be from another song or another world. The music seems to have been found in the middle of some greater song: it is inexorable. The opening and closing flourishes on the banjo seem false, because the figures in the music make no progress, go from no one place to any other; the sound was here before the singer started and it will be here when he's gone...

And so on, and on, until Clarence Ashley looms up in your mind, archetypal, almost demonic, beyond good and evil, picking on the strings of his banjo as if they were the strings of your soul, if your soul had strings, only it doesn't.

Oh, but then - to your great relief - you listen to the song. And it's just a song. Thank God. Maybe my sleep tonight will be untroubled.

It's not just him, though - it's Lester Bangs, everyone on Rolling Stone's staff (past, present, and future), in fact seemingly it's everyone who writes about music. Here's Robert Cantwell, quoted by Marcus:

Listen to 'I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground' again and again... learn to play the banjo and sing it yourself over and over again, study every printed version, give up your career and maybe your family, and you will not fathom it.

Oooh... spooky. Deep. Even true. Though of course the song is also - and perhaps more signficantly - just a song, in a world of songs, about any one of which one could say the same thing.

Hundreds of pages of this may be more than I can stand.

It's good, though.

... To Amuse Lawyers

2006-06-01T21:46:00.000-07:00

It's nice to have something to look forward to.

Observation #2 about Hollywood

2006-06-01T14:17:00.000-07:00

It is a well, but not widely, known fact, that all movies are fundamentally metaphors for Hollywood.

From the same stripper/ghoul movie:

"It may not be pretty... but it's a lot better than being eaten alive."

A lot.

From My Latest Job...

2006-05-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

Might as well be talking about Hollywood:

"Man, I came here for a lap dance - now I'm stuck in the recruiting center for the undead."

(Yes, it really is so hard to get work during the summer that I'm happy to be cutting a film about ghouls who disguise themselves as strippers in order to lure victims to their lair.)

Did You Know? #2

2006-05-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

A loud sound can cause you not to notice a sound that came immediately before.

... unless you're paying attention.

Want to ruin radio for yourself? Start listening for lip smacks. They'll usually come right at the beginning of a sentence...

Annoying, aren't they?

Ecology, not Economics

2006-05-25T14:02:00.000-07:00

In one of Philip K. Dick's short stories ("The Preserving Machine," collected in book form 1969), someone invents a machine that turns musical works into animals and bugs. His intention is to give the musical works the ability to preserve themselves, thereby ensuring their survival should civilization end and all the sheet music and recordings perish. Of course, once the creatures are released, they begin change and evolve: some become feral and vicious, one kills and devours another, and so on - and when the inventor recaptures one of the animals and turns it back into music, he finds it has become all but unrecognizable - a new thing. The song, released into the real world, has become its own creature, unpredictable and beyond its creator's control.

Property, my Aunt Barbara. This is a metaphor I can get behind.

Math Question

2006-05-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

So I'm driving to a friend's house, and traffic is flowing well, I'm making good time, and the other side of the freeway is jammed. And I suddenly remember something rather important that I've left at home. But even though it's only a couple of miles behind me, there's no way I'm going back for it, because it would take forever.

So here's my question: Why is it called the commutative property?

Set My People (or whatever) Free!

2006-05-23T22:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, copyright isn't like property. What is it like? Anybody?

Stewart Brand famously opined that information wants to be free; but this was only half of his insight. The other half is far-less-often-quoted, because far less appealing to the utopian DIY visions of technologically advanced anarchists, not to mention scofflaw DVD-rippers and impecunious college students with constant access to unlimited bandwidth:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Which reminds me in turn of this old chestnut:

Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.

The debate over copyright bears more than a passing resemblance to debates over immigration. Think of the Public Domain as a place. Think of the RIAA as the Minutemen - strident, self-righteous, willing to go to absurd lengths to police a porous border. Think of the DMCA as a big fence that the industry-owned Congress decided to erect along that border. And Sony/BMG's catalogue? Is making a run for it, cause that's where the action is.

Is information property? Well, you can try to make it property by definition, but be aware that you are doing violence to your term. Stretch it too far, and it might not snap back when you need it to. The emphasis on the economics of IP is all about the creators and - mostly - the corporate "owners" of ideas. They want, reasonably enough, to get paid. But who speaks for the songs?

We should be thinking of ways to make those songs productive citizens, not plotting to re-forge their manacles. Yes, they have to pay their income taxes. Yes, if you put them to work, you are responsible for checking their identification; you are responsible for withholding and insurance and if you let them drive a company car, you're liable if they do something illegal. But - yes - they have lives of their own. They have families, relatives, hobbies. They're part of the culture, and they deserve respect, too.

Information is born free, but is everywhere in chains. The next frontier in civil rights?

Free culture!

The Awful Truth

2006-05-23T22:19:00.000-07:00

There is no such thing as human nature.

Internet Artifact

2006-05-23T13:27:00.000-07:00

Now this is weird. I'm not sure what it means, except by using the forbidden phrases "vacuum cleaner" and "bag" in close proximity... my blog entry got sucked up by a vacuum cleaner-like robot at cleaning-cleaners.com.

That can't possibly be useful to anybody.

Vacuum cleaner bag.
Vacuum cleaner bag.
Vacuum cleaner bag.
Vacuum cleaner bag.

Ladies and gentlemen, he does it without copying and pasting!

Property, Schmoperty

2006-05-23T11:52:00.000-07:00

One can look at anything as anything else, and what does it get you but a headache?
(Fredric Brown)

There has been some discussion… well, no. There has been occasional mention of the possibility that some might hold the opinion that using the word "property" in this context might be a problem, in that it wrongly frames the issues, drives sloppy thinking, and encourages the misapplication of legal and economic principles drawn from the much older, broader, more respectable, and thoroughly unrelated field of real property law. From this characterization it should be clear what side I come down on. My own opinion can be expressed in a single word: duh. Of course it's a problem, when people routinely miscategorize something important. Bad nomenclature drives sloppy thinking. Sloppy thinking? Bad.

"Intellectual property," so-called, is not property. It is in fact almost entirely unlike property. If you take possession of someone else's song for your own use, are you depriving its rightful owner of that use? Well... no. If you download a song from Limewire, is there some poor listener who will not have an opportunity to hear it? Quite the opposite. If you build a house on your song... the whole notion makes no sense.

Calling protected creations "intellectual property" shifts the focus from the process - copyright - to the thing. But copyrightable works are not really "things," any more than ideas are "things." Copyrightable works are, in fact, ideas... to muddy the waters only slightly, they are ideas which have been "fixed in tangible form." The distinction between ideas and things is elementary, but using the phrase "intellectual property" erases that clear and obvious distinction.

To term electronic filesharing, however unethical or illegal it may be, "piracy," is to grossly misconstrue both copyright infringement and piracy. Pirates don't, on the one hand, work for free. Copyright infringement doesn't, on the other hand, involve theft in any meaningful sense. The MPAA's advertising campaign equating illegal downloading with carjacking and shoplifting is the logical extension of their way of framing the problem; unfortunately, in trying to raise public awareness, they succeed most notably in destroying their own credibility; casting their opponents as villains, they succeed only in encouraging villainy.

The currency of ideas, insofar as the reductive notions of the Dismal Science are applicable, is not Money; it is Credit. When a screenwriter claims that someone "stole his idea," it's not like someone stole his car. He still has his idea. He's just not being given credit for it. Yes, of course, the "credit" can, in many cases, be assigned a rough monetary value. (Anything can be assigned a monetary value. It can be assigned a color, too. Or a smell. That doesn't mean it means anything.) But an idea is not property, a right to copy is not ownership, and an infringement is not theft. The courts occasionally indicate that they understand this. The remedy for a case of "idea theft" is not to take the idea away and return it to its rightful owner; the remedy is, or should be, to force the acknowledgement of proper credit to the originator of the idea, and to make sure that the infringer does not profit unduly from the appropriation.

I know I'm not going to make anyone stop using the term. "Intellectual property" sounds a hell of a lot sexier than any of the alternatives, and I'd hate to think some poor patent attorney couldn't get a conversation going at a party, just because he had to honestly describe what he really did for a living. And in fact, I'm not going to stop using the term myself, any more than I'm going to start saying "randomly generated number" instead of "random number."

I'm just saying.

Free At Last!

2006-05-19T16:33:00.000-07:00

So here's the 250 word essay that didn't get me into Yale.

________________________

The Recording Industry Association of America threatens a twelve-year-old girl with a multi-million dollar lawsuit for allegedly sharing music online.

The Motion Picture Association of America’s latest PR campaign equates downloading movies with stealing cars.

Sony BMG releases music CDs that secretly install virus-like software on customers’ computers. The software restricts file copying, but also leaves the computers wide open to attack by hackers. Attempting to remove it causes irreversible damage.

Bullies. Liars. Vandals.

Think of the public’s goodwill as a finite resource, like a well: renewable if properly managed, it can also be so thoroughly polluted as to become useless, even downright dangerous. Sony, the RIAA, the MPAA, are poisoning that well – a well from which they (and others) must still drink.

Of course, corporate arrogance, wrongdoing, and plain bad judgment are nothing new. What is new is that the balance of power has shifted. In this age of perfect reproduction and near-universal access, the outraged (and the merely annoyed) have strong weapons at their disposal.

In 1999, a Church of England pastor named John Papworth became briefly notorious by preaching that it was not necessarily wrong to steal from a supermarket, because “You can only have a relationship with a person, you don’t have a moral relationship with things. That is a power relationship.” Regardless of what one thinks of Papworth’s moral theology, it is seductive reasoning when corporations actually do begin to behave like people – people who believe they have rights, but no responsibilities.

___________________________

I know, it's way too didactic, not an argument but an anecdote. And it didn't work, either.

Oh, Yeah, I Was Going to Law School...

2006-05-18T14:18:00.000-07:00

And then there were the halcyon days (and nights, and weekends) of pilot season... and all thought of law school was driven from my mind.

So anyway, it's gonna be Boalt Hall for me. (Should I be trying for more anonymity? I guess not. I mean, how many former sound editors in their forties with two kids do I think are going to be attending a law school in the Bay Area?) It was going to be Boalt anyway - once I got in - for a number of reasons. My only regret - besides the enormous debt I'll be incurring - is that neither Harvard, Yale, nor Stanford admitted me. Cause I did so want to turn them down...

We still haven't found housing, which is a source of mild worry, which no doubt will soon be upgraded to a tropical worry and then to hurricane-level worry. Berkeley's married student housing is undergoing major construction: a few years ago we had a nightmarish summer living in the midst of construction, and we want no part of it. Unfortunately, the alternative may involve finding our own place to live, which we would really, really rather not have to undertake at this point. Once we're there, maybe.

And packing is fun, too. We went to Costco and got a bunch of those heavy-duty plastic bags, the ones with a nozzle so you can attach your vacuum cleaner to the bag and zoop - reduce your blankets, sweaters, quilts, socks, whatnot... to a hard, wrinkled hunk of plastic. (Why do we have so many sweaters? We live in Los Angeles, for God's sake. I may have worn a sweater twice in the past fifteen years.)

But today I'm supposed to be working at home. Can you tell?

Drive Time Report

2006-05-16T23:21:00.000-07:00

I've been listening all week to old - public-domain old - blues and country songs off of Internet Archive. Boy has learned most of the lyrics to Hallelujah! I'm a Bum; Girl has learned the tune, at least. She might have learned the lyrics, too, but I'm not smart enough to understand them in her language.

So the other night I went out and bought a copy of The Old, Weird America. Maybe I can finish it before I start school. Maybe - maybe! - I'll learn to like Bob Dylan. It could happen.

Did You Know?

2006-05-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

Loud sounds can mask ambience changes. Sometimes in smoothing dialogue, an abrupt change to a different background sounds smoother than a more gradual change, because the ear is distracted by the louder sound and doesn't notice that the ambient sound has changed until... well, never. Ears are stupid that way.

It's like a magic trick. Only boring.

More on that Time-Killing Google Thingie

2006-05-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

Murky Thoughts, you do keep me going some days.

In 2004... hmm. Interesting. I don't know how Google keeps track of its results and history, but maybe in 2004 they decided to broaden their vocabulary, or they revised some sort of master thesaurus, so that their search engine no longer automatically conflated "catsup" with "ketchup"?

Maybe Google can explain it. Know how to contact them directly?

There's a John Brunner novel called "Shockwave Rider," wherein one of the ways of predicting the future - social trends, weather, stock prices, pretty much anything - is by polling a huge number of anonymous respondents online. He called it a "Delphi Pool." Recall Admiral Poindexter's incredibly dumb "Policy Analysis Market" idea - basically an easily-gamed futures market for terrorist attacks - and the RAND Corporation apparently developed something called the Delphi Method at the beginning of the Cold War, which was undoubtedly interesting and geek-cool, but of dubious value. Much like the RAND Corporation itself. (Appearance of personal knowledge courtesy of Wikipedia.)

... overall the track record of the Delphi method is mixed. There have been many cases when the method produced poor results. Still, some authors attribute this to poor application of the method and not to the weaknesses of the method itself. It must also be realised that in areas such as science and technology forecasting the degree of uncertainty is so great that exact and always correct predictions are impossible, so a high degree of error is to be expected.

Another particular weakness of the Delphi method is that future developments are not always predicted correctly by iterative consensus of experts, but instead by unconventional thinking of amateur outsiders.

One of the initial problems of the method was its inability to make complex forecasts with multiple factors. Potential future outcomes were usually considered as if they had no effect on each other. Later on, several extensions to the Delphi method were developed to address this problem, such as cross impact analysis, that takes into consideration the possibility that the occurrence of one event may change probabilities of other events covered in the survey. Still the Delphi method can be used most successfully in forecasting single scalar indicators.

Despite these shortcomings, today the Delphi method is a widely accepted forecasting tool and has been used successfully for thousands of studies in areas varying from technology forecasting to drug abuse.

If I may interpret: the "Delphi method" - whatever that means - is largely bs, which arrives at results accurate or inaccurate by more or less by the same chance one would get if one studied a problem closely, and then made an informed guess. "...some authors attribute [the poor results] to poor application of the method and not to the weaknesses of the method itself"? Puh-lease. Mathematicians have a term of art for this sort of method: we call it a WAG - Wild-Assed Guess.

I remember the methodology Brunner described in his novel was vague, but nonetheless unconvincing; but anyway it was interesting and cool enough that it stuck in my mind. But my mind is a storehouse of useless trivia...

Another Google Tchachke

2006-05-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

Google Trends solves a problem I do not have. In fact, I'm not quite sure what it's good for. Nevertheless, it allows me to compare search frequencies for several key terms:

sound, fury

war, peace

up, down

he said, she said

law, order

attorney, sound editor

How significant is this? None, I think. None significant.

Happy, Happy, Joy, War

2006-05-06T21:22:00.000-07:00

I don't pretend to have thought deeply about JoyWar - though I do, naturally, have my knee-jerk response to the facts as I understand them - but something Joy Garnett posted in a forum does resonate powerfully with my sense of what copyright means, in a world where distribution and copying are often the very same thing, where media is scrutable, infinitely manipulable, and user-friendly:

...once you put a work out there it becomes part of our common cultural experience, it belongs to some extent to all of us (otherwise why put it out there?); it is something that will be built upon regardless of the author’s wishes – it is something that we as artists have a responsibility to respond to and yes, create new contexts for.

(crediting Judge Kozinski, whoever he is, for the insight)

There seems to me something very true about that - something that corporate entertainment interests will have, inevitably, to face up to; because the truth is that they have already lost the control they claim as their legal and moral right. The RIAA's scattershot lawsuit/terror campaign looks to me like death throes, or an act of desperation - or, at best, a delaying tactic... though they don't seem to be making any progress toward solving their problem, so it's probably not a delaying tactic at all, is it?

I use the term "entertainment interests" because, once art becomes commercialized - as, for instance, by taking it out of your studio and trying to sell it - it becomes, de facto, entertainment. Once you pitch the project, offer the painting for sale, put the song on the radio, bring out the cake you decorated and start to hand out dessert forks - you've given up some control. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Maybe all of it. Clearly the RIAA and Apple and Metallica's drummer would like to keep all the control... but they can't. They've already given it up, because - you know what? - they put their wares up for sale.

And let me turn it around: entertainment is de facto art. It's entertainment because nobody needs it - or anyway, any particular piece of it; it's art because if it weren't art, it wouldn't be entertaining. But that means the purveyors of entertainment have to face up, not only to the nightmare media reality they've been instrumental in creating, where any kid with a computer can copy anything and give it to everybody... but also their responsibilities as artists (or artists' representatives), in a community of artists. Does Danger Mouse want to remix JayZ's Black Album with samples of Beatles songs? Well, what the hell: he's an artist, the Beatles were artists, there's a social contract of a sort in simply being an artist. As Super Chicken said, "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it." It turned out to be more dangerous than you knew? Too bad, so sad.

I'm not saying Danger Mouse gets to re-package Beatles songs and turn around and sell them. I'm saying, come on, there's a middle ground here, and pretending that there is no middle ground, or mining it and turning it into a DMZ... that's not okay. It's also not gonna work. And whoever's being the hardass, refusing to compromise, insisting on absurdly strong copyright protection, threatening groundless lawsuits against people who can't afford lawyers? That party is going to be the bad guy. ("A" bad guy. God knows, there's room for more than one bad guy.)

To paint the issue as one of "artist's rights" versus "pirates" is absurd and disingenuous, and by attempting to frame it in such clear-cut, binary terms, the entertainment interests haven't defined their opponents; instead, they've defined themselves. They have put themselves firmly in the wrong, by refusing to accept their own responsibility as sellers. Let the buyer beware? The buyers respond, caveat vendor. And for the first time - look around you - the buyers have more power than the sellers. Lots more power.

If only we could get a handle on this global warming thing, the future would be looking very interesting.

Since Nobody Asked...

2006-05-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

Somebody or other, somewhere, was looking for something to read. And I recommended to her "The Brand X Anthology of Poetry," edited by William Zaranka. And, finding myself with too much time on my hands, and National Poetry Month being (blessedly) over with, the following verse sprang somewhat laboriously forth from my exhausted brain:

Ode to the Brand X Anthology of Poetry

Much had I travell’d in the realms of gold
And never found a blessed thing to eat
For laurels, though they may smell very sweet
As nourishment – try one? – they leave you cold.
By not one teacher was I ever told
There was a land both lowly and obscene
And by Zaranka ruled as his demesne.
I got a copy from a girlfriend old
Bought from wherever such odd things were selling.
And now, two decades late, to write I’ve hasted:
For though I know that flowers are for smelling
I were a liar if I kept from telling
How many a precious hour and day I’ve wasted
Since first I of Zaranka’s garland tasted.

No kidding, though, if you like poetry at all, check it out. The parody of Poe's Raven is, all by itself, worth the price. Especially if you find it in the library.

And yes, "hasted" is, too, a word. Lucky for me.

Monkey Man

2006-04-29T13:28:00.000-07:00

I have newfound respect.

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was hospitalized for a mild concussion he suffered while vacationing in Fiji, reportedly after falling out of a palm tree.

No idea why he was in the tree. Nobody's saying. I don't care, though, if he was so wasted he thought he really was a monkey: the man's 62 years old, and he was in a tree.

Our Place in Cultural Evolution

2006-04-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone we know is of the post-industrial, post-modern, post-agricultural, post-graduate culture. They are settled in their ways, they have alarm clocks and hobbies, they have dinner at the same time every night, their children have predictable bedtimes. We have none of those things. (Well, we do have an alarm clock somewhere.) We are in constant flux; we can't keep track of the gas bills, the library books, the day of the week; we run out of milk. When I work late, our kids stay up late; and our first instinct, when we inevitably find ourselves running late in the morning, is to just skip school.

In a world modeled on agricultural and the industrial cycles, we are hunter/gatherers. It's not that we don't have the talent to predict the seasons, grow food, invest wisely, work in a factory; we just don't seem to have the heart for it. We let things go to seed; we forget to punch the clock. We post to our blog when we should have been in bed long, long since.

It's not that there are no patterns in our lives - we're just not so good with schedules. We don't care when it's time to plant; we don't worship gods who are thinly-veiled metaphors for vegetation, who die yearly and are reborn. Our gods are arbitrary - out for fun, sometimes mean for no reason; but they're not vindictive - for one thing, they're not that interested in planning, or carrying grudges.

Hunter-gatherers are the ultimate freelancers: when there's work, they take the work. When there's no work, they hang out and catch up on their laundry. When food is plentiful, there's a feast; when food is scarce, there's peanut butter sandwiches and oatmeal to be had.

Life is good.

Dispatch 3 from Pilot Season

2006-04-27T12:52:00.000-07:00

Dozens of pilots competing for a handful of timeslots. And you thought law school was competitive.

Welcome to pilot season - like finals week crossed with mating season, all month long.

The stakes are high, of course, in television - higher than finals week, maybe not quite as high as mating season. A very successful television show can garner literally billions of dollars; even if the show's a flop, the producers, writers, and actors will still get paid sums ranging from handsome to princely. (Everybody below the line will likely get screwed when the show is cancelled after the first two episodes air.) But to even achieve the distinction of becoming a flop, the show first has to be picked up by a network. There, as they say, is the rub.

Every year, dozens of new series are conceived: pilot scripts are written, shows are cast and shot, then edited and mixed. The sound work, as ever, is put off as long as possible: and so every year at roughly the same time - April, usually, being the cruelest month - the onslaught of postproduction begins. What does this mean to me? Sleep deprivation, and the things that go with sleep deprivation: the bad (tiredness, depression, an inability to prevent myself from grabbing cookies and muffins and stuffing them into my mouth), and the good (overtime pay).

An awful lot of money is spent on these undertakings, considering that most of them, like the small, cute animal pests they resemble, will be eaten before reaching maturity. Some - not nearly enough - are killed while they are still in the shell. Most of those that are finally born, after absorbing heroic effort and vast sums of money, will shortly be euthanized.

(Last year I saw a rough cut of a pilot from a very well-respected source, in which the network had politely expressed a firm lack of interest. The surprising thing was not that the network wasn't interested, but that the producers had shown the pilot to the network before finishing it. This wouldn't be unusual in most businesses, perhaps - why wouldn't you want to find out from the client whether they might be interested in your product, before spending tens of thousands of dollars on a sure loser? - but I've very rarely heard of anyone in Hollywood not putting their best foot forward... where "best foot" means production value, not script quality.)

Most pilots are ... how shall I say it? ... not so good. Believe it or not, the stuff that eventually gets on television is mostly better than the stuff that doesn't. It's a loose tendency, because of course the networks are infinitely more interested in making money than they are in putting good shows on the air, which is why such mind-numbing drivel as "Watching Ellie" got airtime: someone mistakenly thought that some of the magic of "Seinfeld" was residually present in Julia Louise-Dreyfus, and that they would therefore stand a good chance of making piles of money.

But I digress... my point is, I need a nap.

The Limerickan Constitution, Article I

2006-04-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

It being National Poetry Month and all, and I having started this months ago and then stalled out, I offer up this fragment now. Someday I'll get to the rest of it. And I do apologize for the execrable rhyme in

The Constitution of the United States

Preamble

The Union we hereby decree
Shall be Just, Blessed, Tranquil, and Free.
We establish, ordain it,
And herein explain it,
Presuming you all will agree.

Article I.

Section 1.

The power for all Legislating,
Resolving, and also Debating,
Inheres in the Senate
And the Representat-
ives, as we're herein designating.

Section 2.

Representatives each State supplies
Proportionally to its size.
(There’s provision for Slaves
And for Indian braves,
But that language no longer applies.)

Representatives serve for the space
Of two years, then must run a new race.
If one of them dies
Then their Governor supplies
Us another to serve in his place.

Section 3.

The Vice President, please take note,
Presides o’er the Senate, sans vote
Unless there's a tie
When his “nay” or his “aye”
Will determine which side gets to gloat.

Each State gets two Senators per,
An ample amount, to be sure.
When impeachments are tried
Senators must decide.
For conviction, two-thirds must concur.

Section 4.

How elections are run is for States
To decide – unless Congress dictates;
But at least once per year
Congressmen must appear
In assembly, on such-and-such dates.

Section 5.

Each House shall adjudge its Returns
And Elections, and suchlike Concerns,
Set Rules of Proceedings
And Journal its Meetings -
But may not untimely adjourn.

Section 6.

Congressmen all shall be paid
As set forth in the laws that they’ve made;
Unless one’s been awful
It shall be unlawful
T' arrest him in plying his trade.

Section 7.

A Bill that both Houses proclaim,
The President ponders the same.
If he signs it, it’s law;
Or, should he find a flaw,
He returns it, unsigned, whence it came.

Should Congress disdain his rejection
And muster two thirds of each Section
Their votes for to cast
Then the law may be passed
Despite Presidential objection.

Section 8.

To borrow, tax, coin, fix, and lay,
And define, and declare, and to pay,
As to commerce and war
And sundry things more,
Defines the Congressional sway.

Section 9.

As for things that the Congress can’t do,
There occur to us only a few:
As, lay duties excessive
Or taxes progressive;
Noble Titles they’ll have to eschew.

(To be Titled would surely be pleasant,
But simply won’t do, not at present
For here is the thing:
Having had, once, a King
We'd rather be ruled by a Peasant.)

Section 10.

But remember, a State’s not a Nation
And may enter no Confederation
Nor coin money, wage war,
Nor lay Imposts; nor,
As to contracts, impose obligation.

Dispatch 2 from Pilot Season

2006-04-19T00:07:00.000-07:00

14 hours and counting. God bless the Motion Picture Editors Guild.

Wishing I had a better chair.

Dispatch from Pilot Season

2006-04-17T23:07:00.000-07:00

Today I got an opportunity - unlooked-for, unexpected - to be a Supervising Sound Editor. See, there were two scenes in an upcoming pilot - one that took place in a shower, with the water running; the other was a fight - for which the producers had decided to replace the dialogue, 'cause no one could tell what the hell the actors were saying. (No fault of any of the actors, in this case.) The network is reviewing a rough cut tomorrow. This is a big deal, obviously: careers are riding on an eventual thumbs-up or thumbs-down from the network.

The decision to fix these scenes was made at the last minute, and the regular supervisor was busy, so I got the call as I was driving to work. Oh, supervising! The glamor, the excitement! I fielded frequent phone calls from the associate producer; I talked to the assistant picture editor, and figured out delivery formats and timecode issues; I chased all around the facility to make sure various bits of edited picture had been delivered from the picture editor, and then digitized and prepped for the stage; I typed lots of numbers into a database program... then retyped them once the correct picture had shown up. Then I got to sit on an ADR stage with the AP (Associate Producer), the editor, the director, and a couple of movie stars, and watch the movie stars repeat performances they'd already given, weeks before. Finally - back to my civilian identity - I edited together the best takes, fixed the sync, smoothed the bits of the scene that we were still using, and prepared it for the picture editor, so she can put in the new audio in the morning. Oh, and I just remembered something I forgot to do, so now I have to get up earlier than I was going to, and do it.

It was kind of fun, in an abstract way - the juggling, the managing, the hurry-up, last-minute, make-it-work; the different people and the different egos that all needed stroking; the ringside seat at the circus; and I am, really, fascinated at the inner workings of fame, and here I got to see some, close up...

But truly? I didn't much enjoy it. I'm glad I won't be doing it much longer.

Did I mention I was supposed to be spending the day editing another show altogether? The amount of that I did was none. Tomorrow's going to be a long day, I fear.

Dateline: South Park

2006-04-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

So Comedy Central won't let Trey Parker and Matt Stone (hereinafter "the South Park guys") put "an image of Muhammad" on their show. It brings me to wonder: what exactly constitutes an image of Muhammad? It obviously doesn't have to be a likeness... but how far from a likeness can you go, and still be blasphemous? (Or, if you like, what's the closest you can get to making "an image of Muhammad" and not get killed?) For instance...

If I captioned this picture as being... a certain prophet (careful, now)... could I legitimately be tagged with a fatwah of death on the grounds of image-making? Because if I did so - oh, I'm not, don't worry - my intent would clearly not be to make an image of ... anybody... but rather to make fun. Which would of course be dangerous enough, but not really to the point.

But let's say some thoughtful fatwah-issuer did decide that the above was too anthropomorphic to bear labeling. Then what if I attached an inappropriate caption to this?

Or this?
Or this?

What if I printed a body part, and labeled it as belonging to a certain person? Let's make it something fairly innocuous, a pancreas, for instance:

This is not so-and-so's pancreas, nor am I claiming that it is. But if it were, or I was?

Sure, I'd probably be put to death for trying to be clever. But I'm not trying to defend my life, I'm trying to determine the rules. Would it be grounds, in this case or any of the above, to claim that I had illegally "represented" Muhammed?

What part does intent play in blasphemy? What part does representation play in blasphemy? What part does "part" play in blasphemy? What, what, what, what, what?

Idle Question of the Day

2006-04-13T13:31:00.000-07:00

Am I alone in thinking that Zacarias Moussauoi comes off like the sort of nut who calls the police to turn himself in, claiming to have done something he didn't actually do?

[Defense lawyer ]Zerkin read out the quote from an August 2002 filing: "The greatest jihad is to tell the truth to the tyrant and be executed for it.

"What does 'the tyrant' refer to?" Mr Zerkin asked.

"Guess what," Moussaoui replied.

"No, I'm not going to guess," Mr Zerkin said.

"You and the American people," Moussaoui replied.

Uh huh.

And from the International Herald Tribune's account on March 28:

Zacarias Moussaoui... bolster[ed] the government's case by unhesitatingly acknowledging the charges in the indictment against him and adding a few new, self-incriminating statements....

Not only was he a member of the terror network, he told the jury, he also said that he knew most of the Sept. 11 hijackers, admitted that he lied to investigators about his knowledge of their plot...

He seemed testy only when being questioned by his own lawyer, who tried with little success to elicit replies that would help his case.

Even if I were a fan of the death penalty, Moussaoui would seem a poor candidate for execution. He's a buffoon. Does it really do any good to kill a buffoon?

An Open Letter

2006-04-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

Wish List for Pilot Season

2006-04-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

Here are a few things I wish writers would learn:

1. If you turn a cliche upside down, you do not end up with something fresh and new and interesting. You end up with an upside-down cliche.

2. Have a good answer if an innocent viewer should ask - as he should - "why are those people in love?" Important note: just because she (or he) is beautiful, does not mean he (or she) is worth pursuing. And it especially doesn't mean that I (or my wife) will care whether or not he and she (or she and he) ever get together.

3. If you only have one idea, don't write a television series. Please. Don't even start. And a hint: yes, "boy meets girl" is one idea; that doesn't mean "boy meets girl, boy loses girl" is two ideas.

4. Joseph Campbell was not a screenwriter. There are reasons that Joseph Campbell wasn't a screenwriter. Just because you've "studied" the so-called Hero's Journey does not mean that you understand story structure.

Here are a few things I wish producers would learn:

1. Just because you can tell there's a problem, doesn't mean you know how to solve it. Isn't that why you hired all of us?

2. Yes, you do have to pay overtime.

Show and Tell

2006-04-07T22:44:00.000-07:00

The other day, Boy brought a single square of toilet paper to school to share during Morning Meeting. It was the first time, he said, that he had ever torn off just one, single square of toilet paper without ripping it.

The things that makes us happy.

He spent the rest of the day digging a hole to China in the schoolyard. Other kids wanted to hunt for dinosaur bones, so they compromised by digging a hole to China* and finding dinosaur bones along the way.

* (Technically, I believe, they dug a hole halfway to China, because the Chinese kids were digging the other half of the hole.)

Lightbulb Jokes (I know, I know)

2006-04-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

Q: How many directors of photography does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: One. No... two... no... well, how many do we have in the truck?

Q: How many art directors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Does it have to be a lightbulb?

I'm so tired that these jokes seem funny to me.

More Light!

2006-04-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

Daylight Saving Time... and there was much rejoicing. Had it been put in place earlier, Goethe might have had time to say something more uplifting.

Here's an anecdote for you:

In September 1999, the Palestinian West Bank was on daylight saving time while Israel had just switched back to standard time. West Bank Palestinians prepared time bombs and smuggled them to Arab Israelis, who misunderstood the time on the bombs. As the bombs were being planted, they exploded—one hour too early—killing three terrorists instead of the intended victims—two busloads of people.

More trivia here.

Top This

2006-04-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

Why is my car's clock now showing the correct time? That's right: daylight saving time has begun!

I'm that much a procrastinator.

Thank You for Your Concern

2006-04-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

Let me just pull this out from the Comments section of the previous post:

...in the way I suppose film theory injures your ability to experience a film, I think law school will do something disturbing to the way you think.

First of all, I should clarify: I didn't study film theory. I studied film production. In my experience, film theory is deeply flawed, mainly because it is largely written by film theorists, who tend to be both ignorant of and uninterested in the realities of filmmaking, film viewing, psychology, history, and common sense. "High theory" criticism is often nonsensical and almost always unreadable; if it does turn out make sense under the pointless layers of jargon and obfuscation, it's usually because it's saying something fairly obvious. Film theory. Yuck. (Yes, there are critics who have useful and interesting insights, whose theorizing is informed by practice or research, and who can express their ideas clearly. You know who you are. I hope you do. Get your own blog.)

Secondly, I really don't think that study, knowledge, and increased sophistication "injure" one's capacity for appreciation. I think, if anything, they increase it.

Richard Feynman somewhere wrote about how annoyed he was when friends assumed he could no longer enjoy the simple pleasures of the world, because his understanding of them was so sophisticated. He felt that his enjoyment was heightened, not lessened - that deeper understanding meant deeper appreciation. I happen to agree. I think a sophisticated appreciation of... whatever... generally enhances whatever "sense of wonder" there might otherwise have been. Changes it, yes, probably, and some might lament the change. I'm not one of them. In other words, I would argue strongly against describing the change as "injury."

When I studied cinematography, it literally changed the way I looked at the world. I would see things, not as themselves, but as the light on their surfaces. It was only a little knowledge - I was no great shakes as a cinematographer by the end of the class - but it opened up a very different experience of the world. It increased, not decreased, my sense of wonder and enjoyment in what I was looking at. With sound - which has become my specialty - the quality of attention that I pay to sounds in my environment is very different from what most people can muster, and because I have learned a certain way of listening, my experience is much richer and more interesting than it used to be. As for losing a sense of wonder... do you ever find yourself listening to construction noise, or cars driving past, or a humming refrigerator, as if the noise was music? Sometimes I do. I never did before I went to film school.

Without embracing anything like a "strong verion" of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I will say there's no question that certain habits of mind (including linguistic constructs) can alter your experience of the world. They can also, of course, alter the experience others have of you. Law school stories abound. Scott Turow, in One-L, talks about how, in the midst of his first year at Harvard Law School, he began arguing like a lawyer - not just to win, but to destroy the other side's argument - when he would have a disagreement with his wife. There are stories in that vein about the early MIT hackers - the ones who were hacking model trains before computers were invented. It's not so much that they began thinking like the computers they were learning to program - say, rather, they developed a marked and annoying tendency to treat everything as if it were a programming problem. In particular, I remember a story about one hacker who was married: his wife would ask him if he'd "like to take out the garbage" and he had become such a literalist that he would just answer "no" - because, while he would have been perfectly willing to do it if she had just asked him, her literal request for information elicited nothing more than... a one or a zero.

Not surprising that law students, forced to integrate massive amounts of new information and new ways of approaching problems, can have difficulty working out the boundaries within which their burgeoning skills should operate. And for some, I suppose, the change could be permanent and bad. I've worked with a lot of lawyers, and some of them were - how can I say this delicately?... some of them were not very nice people. Whether they were that way before, or whether they were changed by law school, I can't say, but I suspect the profession tends to attract, reward, and reinforce certain types of personality - the type, for instance, that is pathologically self-confident; but also the type that is interested in how civilization works (or fails), the type that is interested in ideas, the type that likes to stick it to the man...

But anyway, learning to "think like a lawyer" doesn't mean losing other ways of thinking, any more than learning to drive a car means you can no longer ride a bike. And, as for myself, I'm too old to be mentally disturbed by law school. According to current research, my brain is pretty well stuck the way it is.

The Rebirth of Cynicism

2006-03-31T11:01:00.000-08:00

My first day of my first class in film school, the teacher told us, "Today, we begin the process of ruining movies for you."

What happened over the course of the next few years was something considerably different: movies stopped being simple. I stopped being entertained by them, and learned how to read them. I'll call it "reading" because it really was quite a bit like learning how to read words. In particular, once you've learned, there's no going back: you can't look at a word you know, and not read it. Now - well, film school + 10 years in the industry - I'm always aware when I'm watching a movie or a tv show of how things are being done. When the picture editor has been forced to do something a bitt odd, in order to fix a bad performance; how the script has obviously been rewritten, but not quite seamlessly... which explains, for instance, why a certain scene doesn't quite make sense (rats in the garbage can in the tragic romance that must have been a much darker story before they cast Julia Roberts); that the director probably forgot to shoot some vital piece of footage, so they had to cut around it; that the light is coming from the wrong direction, and why it had to be that way...

It's not pathological: I can still get carried away by a good movie; but even when I'm carried away, I'm always aware of what's going on. And... if I get bored - even a little bored - or if I get annoyed by something that doesn't work - then I'm right out of the story, and I start paying attention to the craft. To be honest, even if a movie's good and I'm engaged in the story, I'll notice things about it. And, being me, I'll often mention them. Out loud. While the movie's playing. (I don't do it in theaters, don't worry, and I don't wanna hear about it.) This is why most people who know me don't want to watch movies with me. It's like taking a ride with someone who insists on stopping every once in a while to tell you what's going on with your car. "Your tire pressure's low." "Four wheel drive would be better on this terrain." "You're out of gas."

I'm sorry if the movie you want to watch is out of gas, or if it badly needs a tuneup, or if it's burning oil. But I feel duty bound to report these things. Because what if you break down, miles from nowhere? It can happen, you know. I've been there.

SW and I both went to film school (it was where we met, but not where we started going out), and so we can stand to watch movies together, because we both enjoy analyzing them, even while they're going on. It's what makes an awful lot of movies enjoyable to us, including the awful lot of movies that wouldn't be very enjoyable otherwise. (Must Love Dogs? If you're alone in a hotel in a strange city and the bars are closed and you have some time to kill dead, with a stake through its heart, I guess you could do worse than to watch Must Love Dogs. But you should have brought a book, shouldn't you?)

We have discovered a new category of movies, worse even than "movies that are so bad you can't watch them." It's "movies that are so bad you have to watch them all the way through because you can't believe it."

Examples: Constantine was so bad we couldn't watch it - we turned it off after about half an hour. Kingdom of Heaven turned out to be even worse, so boring that we stopped watching about twenty minutes from the end. AI started all right, then got bad, then got steadily worse, eventually becoming so incredibly awful that we couldn't turn it off - because every time we thought it had finally bottomed out, it managed to find a new level of badness. And, finally A Beautiful Mind was so mind-bogglingly bad, so early on, that we kept watching and watching because we literally could not believe the filmmakers had been so inept. Because we understood all of the decisions that had been made, we could see them going past, being made exactly wrong - and while it's (more or less) true that it only takes one person to wreck your film, it's truly awesome to see what happens when there's a conspiracy among three people - and they happen to be the writer, the director, and the producer. Um... Steven Soderbergh's The Underneath was another such movie. Had to watch the whole. Dismal. Relentless. Thing. Wow.

It's like an engineer watching the movie of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster all the way through. You know what's going to happen, and you keep on watching, even though, really, you're not even going to learn anything from the experience.

So did film school ruin movies for me? If anything, it did the opposite. I know Dorothy was awfully let down to find the man behind the curtain, but honestly, don't you think she was just kind of... well... shallow?

"I think you are a very bad man," said Dorothy.

"Oh, no, my dear; I'm really a very good man, but I'm a very bad Wizard, I must admit."

I think the opposite: he was a bad man, but a good Wizard. In fact, I wish someone (besides Gregory Maguire) would write an Oz book from the Wizard's point of view. Even a technical manual (heavily illustrated, please) would be interesting. To me, anyway.

Oh, go check out this page about the Wizard of Oz technique. Why not. Thanks, Google.

... And the Student Was Enlightened

2006-03-30T23:28:00.000-08:00

Boy was watching one of the behind-the-scenes features on his Scooby Doo DVD - mainly, I suspect, because SW was there and sick and tired of watching the cartoon over and over and over again - Boy hasn't been this obsessive about a video since Monsters, Inc. - anyway, he saw a bit where the voice actors were on an ADR stage recording their lines - and the realization hit him. Those actors were making the voices! And (I wasn't there, I was at work, darn the luck, but SW is a reliable witness) his jaw dropped. Yes, literally dropped.

I miss a lot.

A Few Rules of Thumb

2006-03-30T12:09:00.000-08:00

Here's a rule of dialogue editing: They wrote the scene, they shot the scene, they have to live with the scene.

Can I clean up the pinball game noise that runs through the entire scene? Put it this way: I can probably make it a little less worse. But they're playing pinball. Or they're bowling. Or whatever they're doing. It's been written and shot. I can't fix it, I can only try to make it so nobody realizes how bad it is. But if it can't be done... I can't do it.

They can always replace all the dialogue. But here's another rule: the performance the actor gave when he was on the set is going to be better than the performance he gives when you ask him to drive to Burbank a month later, stand in front of a mic in an empty room, watch himself on a video monitor, and repeat his original performance. So it behooves you - I'm talking to you, yes - to make sure that original performance is usable. That mean no grips dropping C stands, no extras banging their props, wait till the airplane noise goes away, and for God's sake, don't use a radio mic unless you Abso. Lutely. Have. To.

Which brings us to another rule. Hire somebody who knows what he's doing to record your sound in the first place. And let him hire somebody who knows what he's doing to hold the microphone boom. The less money you have, the more important it is to hire a good production sound recordist. Why spend money when you don't have any money? Because it saves you money, duh. The better recorded the sound, the less time someone like me has to spend fixing it.

And remember, a lot of the time when I'm fixing something, I'm not making it more better, I'm only making it less worse. So... don't make me have to fix it in the first place, that's your best bet. Why are you making this movie, in the first place? So people can sit down and watch it and go "What'd he say?" Recording the sound is the one job you pay for, even if everyone else on your crew is working for peanut butter sandwiches and their names in the credits. You can often find a good cameraman who'll work for free, just to get a credit; it is nearly impossible to find a good location sound recordist who'll work for free. Unless it's a really good friend. And you don't have any friends that good. I know I don't. (My wife does, though.)

So let's say you screw up the recording, or somebody screws it up for you (it only takes one person, they say, to wreck your movie.) If you do have to replace the dialogue, can I match the original sync so it looks like he's really saying the original words? Yes, I can - unless somebody managed to screw up this recording, too. Can I make the actor's new performance better by editing it? No. No, I can't. (Well, sometimes I can. But don't count on it.)

Anyway, who the hell plays pinball anymore? No wonder people say Hollywood is out of touch.

Why Do Today...

2006-03-29T19:17:00.000-08:00

Another neat little superficial NPR story, this one about brain development, suggesting that brains that develop later may actually be the smarter for it. Yes! There's still hope for me!

Good Lord

2006-03-28T13:32:00.000-08:00

Patrick Goldstein's LA Times article today talks about the new Samuel Jackson movie, "Snakes on a Plane." Goldstein admonishes Hollywood for not "embracing the future" - meaning, they should be getting on the digital train. He's obviously right... unless that train has already left the station. But I think his article tells only half the story. Yes, Hollywood fears the future; yes, the entertainment industry should be looking for ways to embrace that future instead of fighting pointless, doomed holding actions.

But really: "Snakes on a Plane?" Hollywood should fear the present. It's conceivable that "Snakes on a Plane" might make a lot of money for somebody other than the director, the producers, and Samuel K. Jackson; nevertheless, precisely because this is the sort of opening-weekend-oriented drivel that has replaced smart storytelling in Hollywood* (and it will be drivel: we all know that, right?), an awful lot of people are no longer ... well, very interested in going to the movies. I know I'm not. I used to love movies. Now I just kind of like them. Once in a while. On DVD. And only if I don't have to pay late fees.

In fact, I might just wait till some enterprising assistant editor re-cuts "Snakes on a Plane" into a trailer for a movie about... doomed Hollywood producers.

* There did used to be smart storytelling in Hollywood, right? Some? A little?

Spectrum? What Spectrum?

2006-03-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

Why is it that everyone talks about "liberal" and "conservative" as if they explained things anymore? For that matter, as if they were "opposites"? Just because the American political system is debased and simplified to the point of being retarded, doesn't mean it makes sense.

I actually don't know anymore what the defining characteristics are of so-called "conservatives." Clearly what is meant currently is something very different from what was meant only a few decades ago, when Reagan was king. - President, I mean. Back then the rhetoric - and seemingly the intent - was for small government, individual and states's rights, aim for the head when the jackbooted government thugs come to take you away. (Well, maybe not that last. I mean, conservative and nutbar didn't used to be synonymous. Not that I'm saying they are now, but... well, I'm just not saying it, is all.)

I'm told that oh, so many of the "founders" of the "neoconservative" "movement" - the "thinkers," as it were - used to be leftists - whatever that means... socialists, probably - who were disillusioned by the excesses of the Soviet "left" (whatever that meant) and so embraced "conservative" ideals.

Apparently this continues to surprise people, when left-wing ideologues become right-wing ideologues. It's only surprising if you think there's a spectrum, and only one spectrum, and that left and right are really the extreme sides of the spectrum - in short, that it's a long, long way from one extreme to the other. But obviously it isn't a long way. And obviously "left" and "right" aren't all there is. Probably - in today's political climate - a more useful gauge of someone's political ideology is to consider whether they're pro-authority or anti-authority.

Also, it would be nice if we could all agree to stop thinking that people should behave consistently! They don't. They won't. And only numbskull economics-style thinking will lead you to believe that they do, will, or that they even should. (They're not "rational actors" in the economic sense either, and it strikes me as neither particularly useful nor very bright to structure legal and policy arguments as if they were, or ought to be.)

So here's a thought: maybe the shift from top-down, authority-controlled left-wing political ideology to top-down, authority-controlled right-wing ideology was - not a large - but a very small step to take. Maybe David Horowitz (to shoot a fish in a barrel) was a loony even when he was a leftist! And maybe the natural allies of the so-called liberals - the ones who are supposed to believe in civil rights, due process, a free press, separation of powers, small family farms, and public transportation - will turn out, actually, to be the real conservatives. If there are any left, that is.

How about this for a political metaphor: think of politics as a circus, not a spectrum. Because clowns can't run a spectrum - but they may, when things go awry, end up running the circus.

Usage Question

2006-03-24T19:45:00.000-08:00

Is "confession" the opposite of "profession," the way that "congress" is the opposite of "progress?"

Professions, Antifessions

2006-03-24T10:38:00.000-08:00

Turns out that originally...

one's "profession" was the occupation one declared to a tax collector under oath.

(Go, follow the link, it's an interesting article. I'll be here when you get back.)

Once the "medical profession" was defined in terms of the Hippocratic oath, "profession" came gradually to refer to an occupation whose members had special obligations to those they served. Thus the "professions" were - I suppose they still are, technically, since it's in the dictionary and all - such things as doctor, lawyer, and basketball player.

Oh, wait, there are more. Let's just take a look at the first interesting sample I came across, shall we? Yes, let's. (Go do your own research, if you don't like my methods.) The New York State Education Department has an "Office of the Professions" that regulates 47 professions... and, let's see, they seem to be mainly in the field of health: useful fields such as audiology, midwifery, veterinary medicine, interior design... hmm.

(Leaving aside obvious comments about the dubious usefulness of licensing interior designers, why are architects on the list? And where are the lawyers, you might ask? Why, they have their own department, of course: because they're so important... or maybe just because there are so damned many of them... or because they're not willing to be regulated by anybody but themselves.)

So is a "profession" then, properly speaking, just any job that requires one to be licensed and regulated? Or is there such a thing as "properly speaking" in this case?

I rather hope there isn't - namely because I've just found a list of professions I can really get behind.

Traffic Man!

2006-03-23T19:21:00.000-08:00

I left work at 6:10 and got home at 7:20. This is typical.

How does he do it, you might ask?

Near-lethal doses of NPR.

Professional Oaths

2006-03-23T11:25:00.000-08:00

Don't ask me why the subject came to mind. I mean, I remember, but it's one of those stream-of-consciousness things that's too silly to explain, and that nobody would really care about, anyway, except the sort of person who likes to hear other people talk about their dreams at length. And I don't know any of those people.

Silly me, I thought the Hippocratic Oath began, "First, do no harm." Turns out that's a common misconception, but the Oath doesn't actually contain those words, anywhere in it. It starts (after the requisite summoning to witness of the gods) with an agreement -

...to reckon him who taught me this Art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him, and relieve his necessities if required...

And so on. This is partly the usual loyalty oath (see the first several of the Ten Commandments, for instance), partly a measure to ensure the continuance of the art of medicine. Then there's a longer bit, addressing proper practice - "... for the benefit of my patients..." - and ethics -

I... will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.

Easier said than done, I'm sure.

And then, interestingly, there's a clause about maintaining patient privacy.

Let's look into the history of privacy sometime. I think I hold with those who advocate a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to privacy. Things are clearly out of hand. (I have no idea, of course, what such an amendment would look like, but I'm sure someone out there has published their notions. I'll get around to research later... maybe... if these production sound recordists would get out of their comfy chairs and do their jobs, then I'd have some free time...)

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