Drunken Owls and Other Delights

ITEM: Roadtrip down to the mall and Trader Joe's yesterday netted the usual groceries, some needed replacement kitchen and personal items, some scary-looking candy corn (which I'm told is "that's all you" so I'll probably be eating it until next June), and a bottle of milk stout that apparently also includes sugary breakfast cereal bits.

ITEM: I'd completely forgotten there's a London football game today, Jags versus Colts. And the Colts seem to be phoning it in, sadly.

ITEM: Inktober started yesterday! I'm going to do my best and try to do something every day, even as we'll be on vacation at the end of the month. This is one month-long meme I can get behind. It's a lot of fun, and always rekindles my love of drawing, even if it's one of my many maps or Murph doodles.

ITEM: Six more weeks of this clown show masquerading as the Republican ticket. Will be so happy when it's done with and HRC wins.

ITEM: Noted last night when editing The Balance of Light that I'd gotten to the start of the next chapter and reacted with "Oh, this chapter! I really enjoyed this one..." Sometimes being a writer is a lot of fun. :)

ITEM: Bro-in-law stopped by yesterday to work on a film class exercise with A, and I found myself transported back to 1991 where I was doing my own film homework and slowly coming to the conclusion that I really wasn't the director type, nor a visual creator that I wished I could be. I'm okay with telling others what to do in a project to get it done, but I knew I'd always be let down by the end result because it wasn't exactly what I saw in my head. That's also right about the same time when I realized that writing might not be a bad idea after all.

ITEM (Related): He filmed the entire thing on his cell phone and edited it on his PC back at home. I'm insanely jealous. I had to do all that crap by hand back in my day #yellsatcloud

ITEM (Related): While they did their filming in the living room, I skipped up back and noodled around on my guitar. Figured out a chord from George Harrison's "Beware of Darkness" that had been dogging me for a few days.

ITEM (Related Sort of): I really need to make good on my plan to start recording music in Spare Oom. I even bought a new microphone for it!


And that's my weekend so far. Hope everyone's having fun!

More stuff found on YouTube: an interesting sort-of-documentary of the Dada art movement. I saw this once in a film class at Emerson. I quite like how the documentary itself is formed in sort of a dada way, with odd and unexpected edits and sounds (including a voiceover breakdown midway through Part II).

Part I:


Part II:


Part III:



In a way you can kind of see where Terry Gilliam got his ideas...and speaking of things Python, I swear one of the voiceovers sounds like a silly-yet-restrained Terry Jones. :p

[Yeah, I know...it's a bit late, but given how much his work inspired me, I felt I had to post. :) ]

I wasn't the biggest fan of those high school/college screwball comedies in the 80s, being that I was a bit too young or distracted to enjoy movies like Class, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Midnight Madness and so on. If anything, I only got to watch and enjoy them once they appeared on a friend's cable box on HBO or The Movie Channel. It wasn't until my family and I went to see Sixteen Candles that I really started paying attention to the genre, though. I didn't quite connect with the film, but it was fun to watch nonetheless.

That same year (1984) was about the time I also started seriously listening to music. I started buying more albums, started listening to and taping from the radio (not just straight ahead rock, but American Top 40 as well), and also enjoying the endless videos played on MTV. From this sudden immersion into music as well as its integration into a visual medium, I came up with the "video treatment" style of writing scenes, specifically for the Infamous War Novel, which I'd started that year.

Come 1985, my family and I went to see The Breakfast Club. By that time, though music and writing was still important, I was definitely growing into my teenage years, having brief relationships with some local girls, and also growing into who I'd eventually become. This movie was a real eye-opener for me at the time, it being such a spot-on story about growing up and trying to figure out who you are. It also grabbed me because of the music--it was in the forefront rather than in the background, used as part of the story rather than just a mood setting, as if a soundtrack for life rather than a movie. And of course, the Simple Minds theme song "Don't You (Forget About Me)" was one of my biggest personal favorites of the time. It was also about this time that some of my earliest non-IWN writing came about, partly inspired by these two Hughes movies and full of music references.

I didn't quite gel with Weird Science (also in 1985), but the year after that, he released what many consider his best Brat Pack movie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The 80s had grown out of its post-70s discomfort and become flashy and fun again, and this one was released during a great wave of pop music. Everything was right about this movie, from a great soundtrack to brilliant timing and humor to some of Hughes' best-known and remembered scenes and dialogue. That same year, he'd written and produced (but not directed) Pretty in Pink, another of my personal favorites in terms of use of story and music and dealing with nonconformity...and featuring one of my all-time favorite Hughes scenes ever:





In 1987, after finishing the IWN, I'd started writing a silly Hughes-esque screenplay called One Step Closer to You, a nerd-tries-to-win-popular-girl story heavily inspired by his movies. Many of the scenes had a song playing, either as background or as something to push the story. I came nowhere near the level of Hughes' work with it, but I really enjoyed writing it and it was a refreshing change from the moody stuff I was writing then. By that time I'd realized that though I was different, I could still fit in somehow.

Also that year, Hughes had written and produced Some Kind of Wonderful--a sort of "what if Pretty In Pink had ended differently" story, and yet another slice-of-life movie that hit home for me, this time showing that being different from everyone else was actually a good thing...and by that time, I was heavily into college radio, writing more moody and strange things, and figuring out who I was.

I'd say the last of the Hughes movies that really struck a chord with me at that point was 1988's She's Having a Baby--not so much in story, but in music. It had a great soundtrack and a well-written story which, though I wasn't there yet, made me think about what I was going to do once I got to post-college life. With its Alec Baldwin subplot, it also made me wonder just how people would change in the years to come.

I didn't watch too many of his post-80s work, though the first Home Alone, Dutch, and Maid in Manhattan were well-made and enjoyable. All told, his 80s work had the biggest impact on me, on my writing, my music tastes, and on my life. To this day I create soundtracks for my stories, and though I don't use the "video treatment" method anymore, the songs I choose complement the scenes I write. His deft use of humor, specifically used to laugh at the situation and not at the character, still impresses me. He was brilliant with his dialogue--quirky and smart, never dated, and always quotable.

He was definitely one of my biggest influences, and he will be missed. Thinking about it, most of his 80s work pretty much paralleled my life at the time, from uncomfortable adolescence to the thrill of nonconformity to the pains of growing up. All with a soundtrack.

So Sunday we decided to stick around the neighborhood, so we went for a small walk around Fisherman's Wharf (where we took random pictures), made a small stop at Barnes & Noble, and watched movies when we got back.

One of the movies we watched was a B&N purchase, U2: Rattle & Hum. I hadn't seen it since going to see it in Hadley with head58, and I have to say the movie itself holds up surprisingly well. It's no brilliant piece of concert film, but it's a lot of fun to watch, and the performances are top notch. And of course, the cinematography is pretty damn impressive.

And one of the scenes I was waiting to watch again? This one:



This at Justin Herman Plaza, which is right across the street from the Ferry Building and at the foot of Market Street. Keep in mind, this was shot when the Embarcadero Freeway was still there (it got damaged in the '89 earthquake and was torn down soon after--you see it in the lower right corner about 1:05 in), but that BUTT UGLY FOUNTAIN they performed in front of is still there. And emmalyon works literally two blocks away from that spot!

But yeah, I was surprised that the movie held up as well as it did. And I'm quite happy that I was able to pick it up for $9.99 and enjoy it again!