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Karen’s art show went off beautifully. We had excellent crowds both nights and much fun. I missed the slide show of photographs from the Mongolia trip on Saturday night, unfortunately–even more unfortunately, it’s because I was in a theater watching Blackhawk Down.

Blackhawk Down

Ridley Scott knows his way around an image, but he needs a strong actor to get emotion into the frame. There are some good actors in Blackhawk Down, but it’s an ensemble film and no one ever gets to shine. The result is a technically strong work that never connected with me.

As for the events, I read Mark Bowden’s book–the source of the film–last year and it’s an amazing piece of journalism. The film makes the interesting choice of cutting the story down not so much to avoid narrative complexity, but moral complexity. Where Bowden really told the story from all sides, thanks to interviews with Somalis in Mogadishu, the film drops the Somali perspective entirely. It hunkers down and just watches the specific actions of the Rangers and Deltas involved that day, keeping blinders on the rest. There are only two Somalis who get to speak. One is a captured arms dealer who has a meaningless confrontation with the American general, swirling his cigar and making dire proclamations. The other is a soldier who briefly questions a captured Ranger. Both are narrative shorthand, stopgaps put in the screenplay to justify the excision of so much more.

There’s even an incredibly silly moment with the arms dealer, still in captivity: right after the first helicopter goes down in flames and screams, we inexplicably cut to a shot of this guy, sitting in his cell on the Army base, smoking a cigar and grinning maniacally. He doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the chopper going down–except, perhaps, having sold the rocket that did the job–and doesn’t even know it’s happened. But because he’s the only Somali character we’ve seen who isn’t dead within three seconds, the filmmakers show him to us so we have someone to blame. “Look, a chopper went down! Look, this guy is laughing! You can blame him!” It’s a cinematic trick that goes back a century to the Lumiere brothers, who discovered they could show a shot of a firing squad and a shot of a woman clutching her body and falling over, and audiences would connect the two events. But here it’s employed to no purpose whatsoever because there is no meaningful connection between the two images.

The troops on the ground did good work in a bad situation. They responded to bad orders, bad planning, bad intelligence, and bad strategy with good tactics. But even the film’s portrayal of the soldiers’ work and the challenges they faced is undercut by the insistence on only presenting a simplistic heroic perspective. The truth is far more interesting, and makes their actions that day all the more worthy of our respect–yet the film denies us that truth for the sake of easy money. If you really want to know just how smart and talented and brave and passionate our soldiers were that day, even when they made mistakes or got lost or yelled at each other, read the book.

The film is hackwork. Calling it trite suggests it tries for something better and fails, but the truth is sadder: Blackhawk Down aims so low that even a crash landing is a heroic triumph.

I have a lot of catching up to do and maybe that’ll happen later tonight, but I wanted to share a minor bit of good news. The newspaper I’m writing my film column for just won a nifty award:

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Utne Reader, the nation’s leading magazine of alternative ideas, announces the Reader’s Choice Award of Best New Title goes to Tablet Newspaper.

Nominated by the Utne Reader editors for Best New Title in October 2001, “Tablet is a great example of creative, beyond-the-mainstream thinking, and we are proud to honor it with a nomination,” said Jay Walljasper, Utne Reader Editorial Director.

Tablet is the Northwest’s only all-volunteer biweekly newspaper. Through a core staff of dedicated volunteers and contributors, Tablet has achieved an amazing amount of success in its inaugural year. The first issue of Tablet was published on October 4th, 2000. Since then the paper has grown in page size and has increased its distribution by thousands. Being nominated for a 2001 Utne Reader Alternative Press Award is a true honor.

Since 1989 these awards have showcased the best from the alternative press in categories including “General Excellence” and “Best New Title”. Utne Reader’s editors select nominee publications through their extensive reading process and careful examination, rather than a competition requiring entry forms and fees. In this way, Utne Reader honors the efforts of small, sometimes unnoticed publications that provide innovative, thought-provoking perspectives often ignored by mass media.

Utne Reader is the nation’s leading digest of the alternative media. In addition to the magazine and corresponding web site, (http://www.utne.com), the company recently launched Utne Communities (http://www.utne.com/communities), dedicated to helping educators, non-profits and companies develop successful online communities.

Tablet will support and promote emerging music, art, and political communities of the Northwest and beyond, through bold design, a feisty attitude, and affordable advertising. — Tablet mission statement

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The piece Mike and I did aired on TechTV today and seems to have gone well. I haven’t seen it, unfortunately, and they don’t have an actual clip of Mike’s appearance on their web site. But you can read the accompanying article we wrote and watch the video we made. It’s online here. The quality of their streaming video is pretty poor, from what I saw. We’ll have a good version on Mike’s site sometime soon, hopefully with his actual appearance on the show to boot.

Lots more to talk about, but as a friend of mine likes to say: “I have so much to do that I am going to bed.”

TechTV evidently loves the video, and everything is go. If anyone out there in Revland is able to watch the episode, please post notes here. TechTV isn’t carried in Seattle, so I’ll have to miss it. Dang!

Sure enough, it was another twelve-hour workday. I didn’t even leave my studio except to visit the restroom, and it’s right next door. The restroom says hello, and how is the dog?

I spent most of the day editing the Magick chapter for the new Unknown Armies rulebook. I got almost the whole thing done until I hit the revamp of Proxy Rituals, at which point I was again baffled by the mechanics and threw up my hands at Greg, who is tackling it again. After that I tried to edit the Tilts section and found I couldn’t understand sentences anymore. I goofed off for about half an hour and then got back to work, doing a clean-up pass on the first half of the Adepts chapter. (We’re breaking the old magick chapter into Magick, Adepts, and Avatars chapters. Magick now contains rituals, artifact rules and minor artifact write-ups, authentic thaumaturgy, proxy rituals, and tilts.) The new Adepts chapter by itself is more than 45,000 words. Jumping cow.

At some point I realized just how much work remains to be done on the book and I grew somewhat demoralized. Our conceptual revamp of the fall has mushroomed into a monster of a project, and the work has been going slow of late. I need to put in a solid week of work next week to move this thing forward. I keep thinking in Pagan terms: with another six months or a year, I could really get this together. But no, it needs to be done and out of my hair, lickety split.

Tomorrow is my Flying Lab day. Some exciting good news: IK is back in the engine. This was something I didn’t know existed, but when I heard that the engine didn’t have it and learned what that meant, I realized it was incredibly important. Now it’s going to be in there after all. It’s weird how I can just assume that of course, all games work in a certain way and we can do anything, and then discover that behind that assumption lies a mountain of hard work for people that fortunately aren’t me. I have my own mountain of hard work to climb.

Friday morning I’ve got a press screening of a new anime flick called Metropolis. I’ve only seen previews for it, but they look gorgeous. Hopefully it won’t suck. I’m not very satisfied with most anime outside of the Studio Ghibli stuff, but now and then something good comes along; the semi-recent Jin-Roh, Wolf Brigade was superb.

Housemate Jane is redoing the bathroom. To her chagrin, she discovered that the seemingly pleasant trim colors of beige and olive transformed the bathroom into a military depot. So she’s changing color schemes. She’s quite enjoying being laid off from Adobe. Last week she and Scott redid the living room in her swell junktique aesthetic.

I once gave Jane undeserved grief about her style, when we were moving her stuff from her apartment into our house. There was a dresser somebody was getting rid of and I asked her if she wanted to take it, but she said it didn’t fit her design scheme. “Oh come on,” I said jauntily, “just paint it orange and throw it down the stairs and it’ll look like everything else you own.” She proceeded to paint me orange and throw me down the stairs. Sometimes that witticism gear engages and overrides the good-sense and common-courtesy mechanisms, and there I go into the breach. Oh well.

My dad sent the following and I thought I’d share it. Unknown Armies fans should find this inspirational.

It’s a set of guidelines for hunting birds on the grounds of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, given out in years gone by. That’s right. Hunting with live firearms on the grounds of a prison, with the assistance of trustees–long-time prisoners trusted enough to serve as de facto prison staff.

Dad writes: “Karen and I accompanied Mom and Dad on a memorable dove shoot at Parchman when we received this memo. Karen was agog at the sight of trusties running around the fields retrieving fallen doves and bringing them to the gunners just like a good retriever should. I never hunted again. We especially love #5.”

(For those of you keeping score at home, yes: my father and I both fell in love with women named Karen. Must be hereditary.)

Naturally, my dad was also reminded of a joke:

It seems a hunter grew tired of trying to find places he could hunt quail and decided to try a shooting preserve. He paid his fee and was surprised when the fellow assigned to him headed to the fields without any hunting dogs along. The guide was good, though, and put the hunter on birds all day long with tremendous results. He even retrieved the birds without fail as well. A wonderful day of upland bird shooting was enjoyed by the hunter and he brought a couple of fellow hunters back with him a few weeks later to show the place off. He was alarmed when the guide he was assigned turned out to be a 14 year old boy. He asked the boy why the guide he had used before was not available. “Oh, that was Pa,” the lad replied. “Ma shot him.” “Why in the world?” the hunter asked. The boy said, “Well, he got to chasing rabbits.”

The new issue of Tablet is out, and the online version is up. In my film column this time I review Gormenghast, Dead or Alive, Heather Hunter, Bulletproof Diva, and New Wave Hookers 2. The latter is a porn film about the Illuminati, so don’t miss it.

You can also read my article “Wiser Children: The Films of Wes Anderson,” for those who loved The Royal Tenenbaums as much as I did. I think the article is a little sketchy, but I only had 800 words to take a stab at the subject.

Ah, another twelve-hour workday. The problem with being your own boss is that, like a workplace boss, you want everything done immediately and perfectly–but unlike a workplace boss, there are no laws or customs in place to prevent employee abuse. Or self-abuse, in this case.

I spent the first part of the day refining the video piece for TechTV and finally overnighting it to them. According to the UPS website, the package arrived at the Ontario International Airport in California about half an hour ago, for delivery to San Francisco in the morning. It’s awfully damn cool that you can actually follow your package hour to hour–not to mention that we could shoot, edit, and polish a short piece for cable TV on eight hours’ notice, and have it done in about ten hours. Technology rules.

Afterwards I went to Karen’s studio to help her get ready for the Mongolia art show Thursday night. This entailed glamorous duties such as mopping the bird crap off the floors–she has two cockatiels, Charlie and Amelia, who perch on the pipes in the ceiling of her basement studio and crap all day. Lately she’s been playing them Louis Armstrong in the mornings, and they evidently get very excited by the trumpet, flapping around and piping back and forth.

My other responsibility to Karen of late has been prepping prints of her work. After much discussion last fall she bought an Epson 2000P color printer. This is an inkjet printer built specifically for the art-print market. Instead of the dye-based inks used in normal inkjet printers, the 2000P uses archival pigment-based inks with a broader color range than usual and an estimated lifespan of about two centuries. (Inkjets normally have black, yellow, cyan, and magenta inks and their prints can fade in a matter of months if the lighting is bad. The 2000P has black and two varieties each of yellow, cyan, and magenta for a total of seven base colors. The result is much better.)

I did some experiments with archival art prints last year for some grayscale photomontage work I was doing, and found the results to be excellent. Much research and further testing ensued. We bought some terrific archival watercolor paper made for use with printers like this one–it’s a wonderful textured, nubblety paper. When we print Karen’s watercolor paintings onto this paper, most people we show them to can’t tell which is the original. It’s really amazing. The differences are evident to the trained eye, but they’re not in terms of quality so much as color accuracy–getting exactly the same shade of blue or whatever from original to scan to print is still quite difficult, despite Apple’s hype about ColorSync. Getting one image reasonably right often entails a half-dozen prints, and these inks and papers aren’t cheap. “Reasonably right” in this case means a beautiful and convincing copy that would fool most people; much further fine-tuning would be needed for a museum-quality job, but the technology is there.

For her show, we’ll be offering prints of every single piece on display. Considering that she’ll have something like fifty original artworks hanging, it’s pretty amazing. The days when art prints were selective and expensive are fast ending, and are being replaced with something akin to retail: anything you see, you can have a print of. They still aren’t dirt cheap–we’re charging around $75-$100 a print–but they’re far cheaper than originals and a good deal cheaper than most art prints. There’s actually a very strong possibility that this is one of the first art openings around in which every single original is available in print form. And when the show is over, we’re remounting the show on the web–“repurposing the content” as they say–with the obligatory secure online ordering courtesy of PayPal.

As a byproduct of all this printmaking research, I’ll get to use her gear to produce archival prints of my photographs for sale here at Revland. This might happen by spring–dunno. I bought a good scanner last year that can scan photographic negatives at excellent resolution, and that plus this printer equals big fun. It’s been a slow slog to get to this point and I’ve been working towards it in fits and starts for two years. But the pieces are finally in place and now it’s just a matter of taking the time to make it happen.

And to think I owe it all to Shadowfist. When I worked at Daedalus Entertainment on the Shadowfist CCG, I got handed the task of doing production/pre-press work on the Flashpoint expansion set. I designed the display box, laid out all the cards, and scanned all 100+ pieces of original artwork. And then I had to do it again. And again. Because one of the owners of the company managed to erase my hard drive twice in one month. (She couldn’t tell the difference between a floppy disk icon and a hard drive icon, and kept formatting the wrong thing.) So I scanned and color-corrected the same 100+ pieces of art three times, and got a crash freaking course in using Photoshop to fine-tune scanned color files. By the end of that process, my eye for color was well trained. And I got to skip art school to boot!

Which of course brings us back to that empoweringness of technology thing. One reason why I dabble in all kinds of stupid stuff–graphic design, typesetting, HTML, photography, digital video, spoken-word recording, fine-art printmaking–is because every endeavor is an excuse to learn some new technology on my Mac. I tend to get restless easily, and am happiest when I’m solving new and interesting problems. Now if only 3-D animation technology would advance in sophistication and ease-of-use to the near-consumer level, I could start working on that animated film (The Adventures of Stop and Go) I started planning three years ago . . . though I’ve been contemplating doing it in Flash . . . oh, Hell. What I need to do, of course, is write.

As promised, a minor bit of fun news. If you get the TechTV cable network, check out this Thursday’s episode of their show The ScreenSavers. My friend Mike is doing a guest bit on the show. Sunday night we retired to an all-night diner for greasy food, bad coffee, and a couple hours of scriptwriting. We got his piece written, and today we shot an accompanying short video that worked out really well. It should be very funny, and for the Macintosh aficionados among you, we packed the segment full of Mac inside jokes–as well as a huge dollop of computer geek jokes for the rest of you. If the words “Crusoe,” “802.11,” and “Wozniak” mean anything to you, you’re our target audience.

The diner, Minnie’s Cafe in downtown Seattle, is rightly famous for its tomato-basil soup, and rightly infamous for its terrible service. Sunday night added another feather to its ill-fitting cap, when we were actually panhandled while sitting at our table–by another patron. Ah, yes. The Minnie’s on Capitol Hill closed last fall, and boasted an even higher proportion of distaff clientele.

I took Mike and his wife Jean-Michele to the airport tonight for their return to Brooklyn. They spent a full month here over the holidays, and we had an excellent time. It looks like I’ll be going to New York for a working visit in March to see the opening of Mike’s Amazon.com one-man show off-Broadway and to shoot a series of very short films with him. I’ve never been to ye Large Apple before, and I’m looking forward to it.

Those of you in the Seattle area should mark your calendars for another event on Thursday. My girlfriend Karen has a new show of artwork from her summer sojourn to Mongolia. Info and directions are at her website. All are welcome. It’s Thursday 6-9pm and Saturday 6-9pm as well.

She’s calling the show Postcards From Mongolia but I thought it should have been Hold the Dog! That’s the translation of the Mongolian phrase for “Hello!”, used when you approach a campsite. “Hold the dog!” I crack up whenever I think about this. Tomorrow I’m spending the day helping her get her studio ready for the show.

And now it’s time for bed.

Gaming author Ken Hite groused that I never got around to writing up a review for Quatermass and the Pit, and helpfully supplied one of his own:

Quatermass and the Pit

(called Five Million Years to Earth in America)

This film works wonderfully on at least three genre levels. If you don’t love it, you deserve to be shaken to death by psychic Martian ant ghosts.

Thanks, Ken!

I hope to have some fun news tomorrow for those of you who get the ubergeek cable network TechTV.

Meanwhile, you can read my first Delta Green Developer’s Diary. Diaries like this are a staple of computer-game news sites, and are sort of progress reports about games in development written by the creators. This is the first one I’ve done, and it’s mostly just an introduction to what Delta Green is all about. More to come! I think we’re going to be releasing some screenshots by the end of the month.

It’s a banner day here at Revland. Which is to say that I’m testing random-banner code for my site. This isn’t for selling outside advertising, just a tool to promote books I’ve worked on and such. I’m fiddling with other Stupid Revland Tricks as well, primarily the conversion of the site to a database-driven structure. I’m not using my own server, just a domain host (Addr.com), so my options are somewhat limited without paying extra. Shortly I’ll be testing a freeware Perl database called WODA that looks promising. MySQL looks to be A) out of my league and B) unusable without the cooperation of my domain host, who charge extra for MySQL setup and usage and so are unlikely to assist me in getting it set up on the cheap. My goal is for all the content pages and photographs to be delivered via the database, to cut down on static HTML coding and file creep, and to make some nifty features–like an actual database front end for my movie reviews–possible that aren’t now. I’ve never done this stuff before, but I’m a sucker for a learning curve. Anyone with knowledge of this sort of thing is welcome to post a comment or offer help.