Updates of different sorts
Long time since my last post – sorry to any regular readers (I live in hope 
). Anyhow, some stuff has happened.
Yesterday was my wife’s birthday. We had a small celebration at home with some relatives. I cooked roast chicken and veggies which went down well and steamed pudding for desert, with home made custard (Jamie Oliver style). My darling was very happy. Of course the fact that it was her birthday yesterday means that in two weeks time it will be my birthday and I will be turning *mumble* *mumble*. No need to dwell on that.
On an unrelated note, recently I have been lamenting that many people I admire are atheists and therefore consider me to be a brain-dead moron. It inspired one reader (you know who you are) to begin to regularly feed me little videos and written pieces online explaining the atheist viewpoint. At present I have over a dozen links in my inbox that have yet to be read or looked at (I will get to them). Well I had a pleasant reverse experience this morning.
Last year while in Philadelphia for a film festival (this will be discussed in broader detail in an upcoming The Story of the Project post) I watched some television and saw Bear Grylls for the first time. For those who do not know him, he is the presenter of a show called ‘Man vs. Wild’. A former SAS survival expert, he goes into inhospitable landscapes (desert, tundra, mountains) and demonstrates what it takes for a person with only a knife and their wits, to survive. It’s fascinating television, if only to see the disgusting stuff he eats in order to live. Well I discovered today that he’s a born again Christian like myself. In some ways it’s only a small thing – it’s not like I’ll ever meet the man or interact with him in any way other than TV, but it’s made my morning to find this out. Just thought I’d share.
More on the Project to come and other posts as time, events and backlogged emails allow. God Bless.
Prepare to the point your posterior drops away from your body (the story of The Project part 6)
Plan your arse off!
That’s my philosophy of project management. When you have a project, event, birthday party, friends over for dinner, whatever, the only way to be sure that you get the outcome you want is to plan to get it. Overnight success is built on years of preparation. Also, if you’re uncertain of your ability to ‘deliver the goods’, as it were, then this is the best way to find out your rookie mistakes before you make them.
So, I had a script, I had insurance, I had actors and I scheduled a date to commence production. It was Sept 07 and we would film in the first three weeks of January 08. I started meeting with my core production team, DoP, 1AD, two production assistants and me. We met fortnightly and I made a list of everything I could think of that we would need. Costumes, props, sets, catering, I farmed most of these things out to others. For myself I had to devise a shooting schedule, create storyboards and prepare rehearsals.
I decided to try to make the rehearsal process easier by recording the first read-through. For those not familiar with such a technical term as read-through, it’s a meeting of all the cast where they sit at a table together and read through the script (see how it works?). In Hollywood this is also apparently known as a table read (clever names these movie folks have for things). I rented our church building and asked if we could use their recording equipment. Like many churches these days, ours is set up with a mixing desk for the sound and recording equipment for the sermons etc. Many members of the congregation like to get recorded copies of sermons to listen to again and think/pray about.
However, when we all rocked up for the read-through the bloke from the church who came to run the sound explained to me that he didn’t have enough microphones to give the table full coverage and that the mikes weren’t anywhere near good enough to pick up the sound unless we held them no more than a foot from our mouths. So here is a clear example of why my mantra was plan, plan and plan again. I had booked sound equipment without thinking to ask if the equipment would be right to do the job I wanted. Time and again this kind of thing happened – I would plan for everything I or anyone else on the production could think of and I would still run afoul of all the things I didn’t think of. Learner filmmakers take note.
My plan had been for everyone to receive a digital recording of the read through so that they could learn their lines by hearing them spoken in context with the other actors. They would have been able to learn their lines just by listening to their ipods. It wasn’t to be. The recording was appallingly quiet. Even with the sound pushed up to eleven you could barely hear it. Great idea – lousy execution (which coincidentally was something I was terrified would be said about my film).
So there we were, planning and preparing and making sure we were ready to go ahead come January. It was looking doable, until, two weeks out when one of my actors pulled out.
Next time…
At the breakfast table this morning
I still have the ability to confound my children – it’s comforting to know.
My daughter sat at the breakfast table with a piece of vegemite toast looking decidedly under the weather. I watched for a time as she stared at her breakfast, not moving at all. At last I said, “Mouse, medical science has now conclusively determined that vegemite toast will not feed itself to you.”
“I made it and I want to eat it,” she replied. “But I’m too tired to lift it. I’m hungry, but I can’t eat.”
“Well if you leave it long enough, you’ll stop being hungry,” I assured her. She looked at me puzzled.
“It’s true,” I asserted. “If you don’t eat the hunger will eventually go away.”
“Really? Is that true?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said in my best parental tone. “If you don’t eat, you’ll eventually starve to death and the hunger will go away.”
The look on her face was priceless. A good start to the day.
Personal Best
My wife loves the game Scrabble. Not so interesting, but a surprisingly key part of our marriage.
When we first got married she would pester me for a game regularly and I would resist mostly. I didn’t feel much one way or the other for the game and Rachel was really good – compared to me. So playing a game meant getting my butt whipped while my wife pretended not to giggle with glee. Actually there was a fair amount of giggling and not much pretending.
Later, as she pleaded with me to play, she began to drop stories of how her dad used to play with her and always beat her. She had learned from him and now enjoyed schooling me. I admit I’m slow on the uptake, but by the time her dad passed away, when I saw the deep grief the loss of him left, I got it – scrabble is a connection to the joys of her childhood, now gone. Playing with her (win or lose) was a service I could give as a husband to a wife; a joyful gift. So since then, I have resolved to play with her often.
And I’ve improved – I can now beat my wife at scrabble about 50% of the time. Yay me!
Which brings me to the point of scores and records. Early on in our playing the list of Rachel’s victories to mine (it reached something like 40 to nil before I scored my first win) became so silly we soon stopped counting. In its place, Rachel recorded her personal highest scores and we recorded our highest joint score. Today we beat our joint record that has stood for over four years, scoring a joint total of 806. If anyone is curious, this makes my wife and I what scrabble players might call reasonably talented amateurs. The world record for a single player’s score is higher than our combined score. The combined score world record is almost double ours. In terms of international tournament play, Rachel and I aren’t even in the game.
I don’t care.
I still don’t like scrabble much, but the board is usually set up on our dining room table in the middle of a game we come back to when time permits. And with every game I play I get to tell my wife quietly, without words, that I love and cherish her. Every time we play I’m at my personal best.
Don’t be afraid to suck
I just saw an interview with Wil Wheaton where he was asked about writing for the internet and he gave what he called the best advice that was given to him. It was, “don’t be afraid to suck”. He then followed up by saying, “it’s ok to suck and you’re going to suck, but you can fix that. It’s easier to fix a whole page full of sucky writing than it is to fill up a blank page.”
I really liked this advice because it contains wisdom I discovered for myself when I was an honours student in history. I was talking to my dissertation supervisor about blocks in my writing and she passed on something that one of her students had said about an essay. The student told her “I’ve written 2ooo words. It’s shit, but you can edit shit, you can’t edit nothing!”
From that day that’s been my philosophy when writing. I think it’s good advice for anyone who writes or creates. It’s nice to see that I’m not the only one who follows the same path.
Can’t see what isn’t there…?
I’ve been going over some internet atheism again (I know, the wise among you will throw up your hands and say, “You know how that winds you up!”) I was brought to it through a reference someone made to the story of a famous pastor here in Perth who changed his mind about his faith, divorced his wife and embraced his homosexual lifestyle, which he had apparently long suppressed.
I’ve been scouting about and a few themes continually present themselves. First is the theme that religious people or people of faith are inherently unquestioning of their own belief system. Put another way, religious types repeatedly refuse to question their own religion. The short answer to this is: bollocks! I came to Christ at university and have never been exposed to a more inquiring and questioning group of people than the Christians I met there. Far and away it was the atheists and agnostics (the self-proclaimed “free thinkers”) who had neither the time nor the inclination to question their beliefs (in my experience – I’m not advancing a general principle).
Yes, there are a great number of believers of all stripes who accept some (or many) things without question. In fact the vast majority of humanity accepts the vast majority of their body of cultural knowledge (call it zeitgeist, discourse, culture, what-you-will) without question. This does not mean, as many atheists seem to assert, that belief without question is a necessary factor in religion. I make this statement from my own empirical observation and offer no argument to prove my point, because I do not need to.
Which brings me to the fundamental point of argument where all atheist contention against God falls down – atheism only works if God does not exist. Atheism presupposes not only God’s non-existence, but also that this condition can be demonstrated by absence of evidence. Philosophers refer to this logical fallacy as the ‘argument from ignorance’ – the fact that just because there is no (or insufficient) evidence for a proposition, does not impact on the truth of the proposition. Atheism contends that if God existed there would be unmistakable evidence for the fact; since there isn’t, he doesn’t. Everyone trained in even basic logic should see that the proposition is predicated on the assumption that the evidence would necessarily exist, a point that I have never seen questioned by any atheist, ever.
And I feel constrained to ask, why? Why would a transcendental creator deity be constrained by any sense of evidence. Even a cursory reading of the Bible should point to the idea that the God being presented there does not count himself as an equal of humans, but far superior. If he chose, for whatever reason, to obscure his existence, then what possible power would science have to pierce that obscurity? I should point out that the Bible shows a picture of exactly such a God. He is described as being as far from the human condition as the “east is from the west” – that’s poetic, but it also indicates a radical point of difference. The God of the Bible asserts that he is not a comprehensible being.
When discussing his ideas about the possibility of alien life, astrophysicist Carl Sagan posited the possibility of an alien species so different from us that we might coexist with them and never know it, because we lacked the ability to even perceive them. No scientist seems to bat an eyelid at the notion, yet the notion that a divine being might be exactly in the same relation to humanity is unthinkable to atheists. Yet so many atheists seem constrained to boast that they are “free thinkers”.
I have yet to find a single atheist assertion that conclusively answers this question – why, if God exists, would his existence be unavoidably evident to science or scientific enquiry?
And please, let me point out that “why wouldn’t he be?” is not an answer. In order to say something is the case you have to have a reason. God could have any one of a number of reasons for concealing his existence from science, not the least of which would be, because he wants to.
That’s enough for now.
Back after a break
Finally school holidays are over. My daughter’s flown off to our nation’s capital for a school excursion to the snow and my son has returned to being chased by the girls around the playground. So, I get some moments to think and write. Matt Barron, no longer AFK.
At the hospital with Mr Happy
On Friday I had a day procedure at our local hospital, a flexible cystoscopy. For the curious, that involves having a flexible camera inserted into your urethra and then pushed all the way into your body. It’s slightly less fun than having a tooth pulled and many times more humiliating. First of all you’re dressed in one of those delightful white mini-dresses that open all the way up the back and no underwear; sounds sexy, but I’m a heavy-set male so let’s not try to kid each other. Then, after sitting around for about an hour with your tackle flying free in the open air and flashing the bloke in the chair opposite every time you move, cough or breathe, they finally call you in for the procedure.
You get to lie on a gurney, which is a kind of narrow bed surface just wide enough for a person about half my body weight. There are five or so folks in the room, most of them women over the age of fifty – nothing wrong with that but when they lifted my mini-dress hem (without so much as a by-your-leave, let alone drinks or dinner) it’s disconcerting that they seem like they should be friends of my mother. So, lying there with my dress pushed up around my waist and my personal equipment lying out for all to see, they managed to preserve my dignity by covering my crotch with a little green napkin with a nice square hole cut out of it so that my equipment neatly, and unimpressively, poked through.
Then the specialist joined us at this special gathering. He began by saying “How are you doing?” and before the pleasantries were even partly finished, followed up with injecting an anaesthetic gel into my urethra. It was a genuinely unpleasant experience, to find my flaccid member suddenly full of cold gel. However, it was only beginning to get interesting – because now came the flexible camera. The end of the camera was about the width of a pen lid (six to eight millimetres) – I know this because the registrar told me this in his pre-operative briefing. So there was the camera, which looks like something Doctor Who uses to repair a crashing spaceship and the specialist inserts a flexible, articulated tube the width of a pen lid down a hole that was never, ever meant for two-way traffic.
Gentlemen of the audience, I’d like you to pause for a moment and consider an experiment, if you will. Next time you have a chance to sit alone with just you and Mr Happy, take a pen lid and compare it to the width of Mr Happy’s one good eye. In that moment imagine that the pen lid now has to be forced all the way through your best friend and into your body. Now, perhaps some of you find this prospect no big deal, easy perhaps. I tip my hat to you and your endowment; for us mere mortals, this is a genuinely uncomfortable proposition. Please allow me to assure you all that the reality is many times worse than the prospect.
Just before the device was threaded into me the specialist turns on a television that allowed he and I to watch as he lifted the camera from the sterile cloth it lay upon and zoom toward Mr Happy like the camera on the nose cone of a laser guided bomb descending from a gulf war fighter plane. And then it was inside me. I watched what might easily be mistaken for a documentary on cave diving as the specialist explained what each part of the flesh coloured tunnel was, and I could feel the motion. It was just wrong – painful, certainly, but more than that, my body just kept telling me that the feeling was just…wrong.
Then we reached the sphincter to the body – I won’t describe what it looked like, you don’t want to know. At this point the specialist turned to me and said “I just have to push through this, you’ll feel like you’re going to urinate, don’t resist.” Of course, because lying on my back and feeling like I’m peeing freely in front of a group of strangers is something I’ve always wanted to experience. Then the mature nurse who’s a close personal friend of my mother, my aunts and every female relative I have over the age of two says to me, “This is the bad part, but it will be over quickly!”
Oh, this is the bad part? Thanks for the warning. And then it was, bad, worse than I could imagine it would be. I was looking into my own bladder, which just looked like the inside of a flesh coloured balloon, so you know, it looked right to my uneducated eye. The specialist explained that my bladder looked fine, with no signs of damage and such, not much of which I heard, because my bodies messages had now reached the point of an inner voice simply screaming “Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” continually in my head. After taking a guided tour of the flesh balloon inside me the specialist then said, “Now I’ll pull out and on the way we’ll look at all the key areas.”
“No,” I thought. “I don’t want to see anymore, just get that damnable device out of my body!” Instead I was given the complete tour of my lower urinary tract. I’m sure that when my urology specialist was a child he wanted to be a tour guide and his parents told him it was all well and good to dream, but he should have a trade to fall back on, and so he went into urology, got stuck and has been working his tour guide frustrations out through his day surgery procedures ever since. We saw my prostate, the urethral sphincter (which looked even scarier on the way out, somehow) and the scar tissue from a childhood operation. There was some other stuff, but I’d lost the capacity for rational thought by this stage and then finally, thankfully, the tortuous, vile device (which I now believe was inspired by the writings of the Maquis de Sade) left my body.
I was ushered out to a waiting area where I was offered a little cup of coffee and the chance to tuck myself away in day clothes. I stole into the toilet and imagined that this must be what it feels like for some to wake up next to someone you don’t know or recognise after a night of drunken debauchery; a little sore, embarrassed and uncomfortable when you remember the things that were just done to you. I slunk out into the hospital carpark trying not to walk like a sore cowboy and thankful my ticket hadn’t run out before I got to my car.
Oh, and I should say that everything was in good order and no signs of the possible health problems that were the reason that the whole procedure had to occur. So good news there, I guess.
Competitive writing death match
Wil Wheaton – one of my favouritist performer people – and John Scalzi are running a fanfic contest for their own gratification, based around a cute idea that Scalzi had made into a painting for Wil. The painting and competition details are here.
Needless to say as a writer and fan, I felt obliged to enter. I’ve written a 2000 word short story that has stretched my creativity a long way and is about as surreal and esoteric as I ever get (wow, there’s some bigger words than Vegemite). I showed the draft of the story to my wife and she nodded and smiled pleasantly in that way I’ve become familiar with – the behaviour of a friend who doesn’t want to break my heart by saying “I don’t get it!” I’ve seen that look in response to my writing most times since I was about twelve (and yes, I did start writing that young, so nyah!). She was very kind about it and hurried to reassure me that it was probably a fan thing, and fans would no doubt get it and she loved me and supported me as a creative person and I shouldn’t dive off into a depressive funk that could ruin the rest of my year and I should remember that I was a paid author now and my book’s poor sales are no reflection on my skill and…at this point I intervened before my wife blew a neurone. My wife is a wonderful woman who knows and cares about just how hard it is to labour creatively in obscurity. She knows I crave an audience who “gets me” and she strives to be the number one fan in that audience. Stuff like what I wrote really stretches her in this and I feel great love and compassion as she does her best to love someone like me.
So, I also showed the draft story to my daughter and was pleasantly surprised when she got quite a bit more of it. Being a teenager and thus much more grounded in pop-culture, she got a lot of the references, or at least understood that the references were references. She also put one of the running gags through the story together for herself (I’d had to explain it to my wife), so that was really gratifying.
So in all, I send the story off today with an optimistic attitude and hope the fun of my story inspires and delights some people whose creative works have inspired and delighted me.
Oh, I know what everyone’s saying, “C’mon Matt, let us read the story for ourselves and see if we get the references!” I will, but don’t want to until I know what happens in the competition, since I might wreck my chances at fame, fortune etc. So I guess, watch this space!
Movies can make you want to cry…
I cried when I saw Titanic. I hate having to admit that, but it is true.
Now, before I get tagged as a tasteless, soppy moron, let me explain myself. I did not cry for the main characters or the main storyline. I spent the film alternating between wanting to shoot Billy Zane’s character and wanting Billy Zane to shoot Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslett. A more insipid love triangle I could not imagine. Like so many people around the world I sighed with relief when the damn thing finally hit an iceberg.
When I went to see Titanic at the movies I was a newly minted stepdad and very much in love with my new wife and child. For those who remember there is a scene, when the ship is sinking and the steerage passengers have been locked below decks, where a mother who cannot save her children instead tucks them into bed and waits with them as the water rises in their cabin. I saw that scene and burst into tears – I had a wife and child in my life and longed only to bless and protect them. When I saw that scene it was too much for me – no mother should have to comfort her children in the face of imminent death. It was the first time I understood that and since then news stories about children and mass suffering have much the same effect on me. I never expected this to happen to me; I never wanted a family growing up, or even as an adult; I wasn’t anti-kids, I just felt no draw towards them. It was one of the first unmistakable signs of my wife’s power to transform me into a better man and human being.
From the sublime to the ridiculous – another recent disaster movie made me want to cry for a whole different reason. The film “2012″ was fun, in terms of special effects and crazy survivals. But it too had a scene that made me want to cry. The main character, played by John Cusack, was a failed science fiction writer who was forced to make a living as a limo driver. In the film he is derided as a failure for having sold just over 400 copies of his novel. That made me want to cry, because I’m a hopeful novelist and so far I’ve sold…well let’s just say it’s a whole lot less than 400 copies. Leandra Book 1 has not yet taken the world by storm, not that I exactly imagined it would have, but I had hoped to be selling better than I have been. Book 2 is written and sitting on my hard drive, but I haven’t made enough money from one to cover the setup costs for two, and Lulu, the publisher, make it really cheap and easy. To be honest four hundred copies sold would would have me dancing for joy (in my own home – I’d still have to sell more than that to dance in the streets).
So, I guess the upshot is that when entertainment types pat themselves on the back and congratulate each other because they “touch” peoples’ hearts, make an emotional statement, make people feel something, etc etc, on and on, ad nauseum, it is kind of true, but not always for good reasons. In fact, I think the real truth is that while (great) art can cause the audience to feel something, the feelings themselves are in the audience, not in the art. “Artists” would do well to remember that – I hope I will.