Wilhelmina and the Wall

The other day I was riding my bicycle around Bremerton and listening to Willie Nelson. He had a song about a guy who was saying, "Hello wall,", etc. It gave me a thought about a person from ancient times saying that to a wall and the wall speaking back to them. And they got nailed as a witch. As I rode my bike I further thought out how that might work itself out and came up with a story.

I decided I needed to give Willie credit in some way, to give him an homage to his having led me to the idea for a new story. So I'm calling her Wilhelmina Nelson (Willie Nelson, okay?) and call it, "Wilhelmina and the Wall". Which, sounds stupid, considering the ensuing storyline. However, I figured if she's talking to a wall, how is that?

So I came up with a storyline making it science fiction. So the wall is real, and is a kind of AI talking back. But just to her. But how? Well, I have used this a few times. A scientist in the future has contacted someone in the past and the connection, in this story, is the wall.

The wall. An AI. And from there I built on that.

It's an exercise in creativity. How do we come up with these things? What is the source? How does it develop?

I was very absorbed by that at university and so I took a self-designed class to study creativity. I shot a video for my professor and kept a journal. it was my first produced video really. I spent three months shooting it, thinking about it and then turned in my journal and tape to my professor. I called the short film, "Tensions".

I felt it was a private thing. Something for myself and between him and me. And then I found out he was showing it to all his classes. It was a film built phenomenologically as that was my area of study with him, my department advisor in the psychology department.

I had perhaps made the mistake of putting myself in the video for a few seconds as I'd needed an actor and no one was around. I just wanted to get the scene done. So I did it myself. And then people on campus started coming up to me to discuss it. To offer their opinion.

It felt like standing in the middle of Red Square in the center of the campus by the fountain at WWU, I was stripped naked, exposed and vulnerable.

I did not like the "fame". That was my origin of preferring fortune over fame. If ever I were to have the choice.

But that's not what Wilhelmina is about. Or that film as that was about, "what is creativity?"

What I came away with was creativity is creation. The more you apply thought, history, technique, allegory, the more personal, the more universal it becomes.

Create? Start something. Build upon it. Logically, or perhaps illogically. But some common thread should exist, for most projects. Put effort into it. The more the better usually.

But getting back to "Wilhelmina and the Wall"? Time will tell...

Kathy Griffin's Ridiculous Trump Prop Head Shot Outrage

Comedian Kathy Griffin, always known for being outrageous, is being lambasted in the media because of a photo shoot where she holds up the several prop head of notoriously thin skinned, Pres. Donald Trump. Nonsense! Utter nonsense.

It's obviously a statement made to be over the top, to garner attention, to speak out as outrageously against a man who is as outrageous as Kathy and celebrity photographer and director Tyler Shields were in making this statement. She has apologized now, seeming to be very serious about it. But should she be? I'm not so sure.

This is art, it's a prop head, it's a statement. It's being over reacted to. Stop it! For those like Trump (THIS Trump) whining about this, how OLD ARE YOU? This is what you get when you kill education and art in schools. Ignorance. Intolerance. Fear.

What't the big deal?

Is the above true? Because face it, we have to judge Kathy's photo shoot by the actual quality of the man she was denigrating.

I really don't know about this one because although I do think it was going too far, it was ONLY going to far because of Terrorism lately and its obvious connection that is drawn with that.

Still, I've always liked Kathy. And I still do. This only strengthens my feelings for her as a professional. Again, I'm just sad she felt compelled to apologize and give Trump a chance to dwell on what, what a good guy he is and how he didn't deserve this, when he certainly did.

Free speech, right? Remember that? Comics speaking out clearly and politically incorrectly, against the monsters among us. Right?

When you consider how right wing nuts have pushed things since Trump came on the presidential stage, how they HATE being politically correct (unless you disagree with them and how is this not like that?), how it's okay to grab a woman anywhere because of Trump, in the mind of many of his neanderthal supporters, or to simply say whatever you like, whenever you like.

Seriously, get over it Melania (I feel it's abusive to call you Mrs. Trump, perhaps, First Lady Trump?). This is what it's like being married to POTUS. What do you think Michelle Obama went through? And Barack Obama never deserved what Donald has earned in all this. Good to hear now that Kathy is fighting back against what has become Trump bullying.

How some degenerates merely from Trump's lead, have become more blatantly racist, even to the point of actually stabbing people, even killing people, I'm not so sure if this isn't utterly and completely acceptable and appropriate as a statement of protest against a president who truly doesn't deserve his position and has proven already to have damaged this country, its reputation and the stability of an entire planet in forcing the readjustment of alliances away from us.

We SHOULD be outraged. But not at Kathy, surely. It is after all only a statement, not a call to actually kill the president. It's Art. If one can even understand art at even a child's level, that is.

If one drops the consideration of terrorism with this photo shoot, and then simply consider Trump and his own disagreeableness, lying, despicable personality, narcissistic ways, unending grandiose self aggrandizement, and so on and on and on during his campaign and after, in his chumming up to the Russians, to Putin, to the right wing nuts, to crazy evangelist types, and to outright racists and white supremacists.

EXACTLY how is this wrong and not simply an appropriate statement against a miserable human being who somehow pushed the concept of the Peter Principle to its breaking point in becoming President?

Kathy's a comic. This is her job. I wish she didn't feel compelled to apologize frankly. It's no less than Trump deserves because he's a man who can dish it out, but is unable to take it. So not really a "man", in the manly sense.

If I were him, well, I wouldn't have been him, but I also would have simply found a way to be positive about something like this. Instead, he does what he does best. Whine.

Get a couple of brass balls sir, you're the President of the United States of America. If it weren't for humor I seriously don't know how any of us would survive this Trump administration for the next four years.

We're ALL waiting for you to start acting like a rational and well adjusted President. But then, what with the FBI and Congressional investigations, you actually may never get a chance to mature into that role. I look forward to you off the world stage. Perhaps one day living in Moscow?

As for Kathy, all the best, you rock. Keep on keeping on!

Remember, if comics are our national canaries in a coal mine, do go gently in how you handle our canaries. And pay attention. It may be the last thing you do.

Film or digital?

Technology changes. It advances. But not all change, not all advances are good; are they?

When electronic drums came to be years ago, many purists, especially old time drummers (which isn't to say, old people who drummed, but professional drummers who were "old school") as well as audiophiles said that to make the drum sound electronic was to literally take the heartbeat out of the production of music. When you run an electronic drum in a song, you code for it, you adjust settings, it's rhythmic, it's "perfect" in a way. But when a drummer drums on a drum kit, you have a human drumming, you have a, heartbeat. That random element that is produced from the organic being, the emotion, the musician; something you cannot code for.

Because of that human musician, that organic element manipulating the sounds, the music produced is based upon the strikes of the drumsticks on drum head, cymbals, and yes, any "cow bell" or whatever else may be in the mix, like chimes, etc. Behind that drum stick is a hand, a wrist, an arm, muscles, tendons, and a heartbeat, a brain, whereupon sits the musician's mind with its history and emotions. All these things add up to that performed drum beat. It's something that you can feel it when you listen to it. The musician is communicating a real "feeling", an emotion, they are conveying a message from that performer's life to the listening (and feeling) ear of the audience. The musician emotes a very primal, base communication to the listener.

When you take that human element out of the mix, you lose something. There is a complexity that is missing. An electronic drum set built of electronics and coding is not as sophisticated, as complex. For that you would need to have Artificial Intelligence and even then, you would be missing something; you would be mimicking a human element in the sound production and you wouldn't actually have a human being behind it.

We have a similar situation now with film and HD video. It's not quite as direct as the music paradigm, but there is a loss of complexity, of traditional filmic history, of an obverse concept that further breaks down the fourth wall between the audience and the filmmaker. There is, and you can easily see it in viewing the difference between celluloid film and digital HD video, a feeling of watching something "real". Many people are noticing that it is almost, "too real", too immediate and at least for now in the beginning of this format it is breaking the element of "suspended belief" for the audience that is so necessary to filmic storytelling. It is like you are sitting on the set of the production watching the story play out. Which, is kind of cool in its own way. But you are also losing something. The "texture"of the film is now gone.

As with the digital drum kit, you can add artificiality to it, to the video experience. You can give it that "texture" with a digital "grain", you can "slow" down the image within the frame, to make it have that "Hollywood" look and feel. But it's not real. It's still a simulation. Anyone younger may come to believe it is real, but it's not.

There is a great difference between the digital drum kit and the real drum kit played by a human; and there is a between real and simulated film; though it's not even simulated, it's just outright HD digital video. I'm not trying here to draw a direct connection between the situation of drumming and HD video, I'm just trying to point out the kind of loss involved. It's a qualitative kind of loss. Almost to some anyway, like real milk or powered milk. It may seem real to some but it's not, there is a lack of quality involved. And at least some of of know it.

There is a certain loss of "materiality" as Keanu Reeves recently put it in saying that we are losing many things in life now a days, losing a certain "haptic" quality of contact. Keanu has produced a new video called, "Side by Side". From the web site: "Movies were shot, edited and projected using photochemical film. But over the last two decades a digital process has emerged to challenge photochemical filmmaking. SIDE BY SIDE, a new documentary produced by Keanu Reeves, takes an in-depth look at this revolution."

I've had a 42" Sceptre HDTV for some years now, but recently my TV went out. So I bought a newer technology LG HDTV and it's lighter, has a smaller footprint, and a far better image. I am now seeing for the first time, real HDTV. Painfully clear images with colors that will "make your eyes bleed". Okay, not really, but it has an immediacy, a clarity that is almost too much. I hated it at first. I watched some of my old shows like "Firefly" and they were clear in a way I had never seen them before. It was, disconcerting.

I even bought a new set of Firefly disks and it was so very different to watch. It lacked that certain quality that it used to have. It put the actors right there in your face, or, it was more like you were right there on the set watching them act. Where was that distance between the set and audience? That Hollywood feel? I wanted to feel like I was watching a dream, not actors on a set, a fantasy that too me out of my reality and into that fun, produced world. I did fine that by turning down the power levels on  my new TV screen, that I could return to how it used to look, though it was still clearer than before, which is cool. I thought it was interesting that the "power level" was somehow what was giving me that super clarity that was taking me out of the fantasy and too much, perhaps, into the reality of the production.

I started to realize that this is a new technology (for me) and that I would have to adjust. I realized that younger people would come to see it as normal; maybe even not liking that old "Hollywood feel" that I love so much. I remember years ago when you would see a TV show shot in video, it was obviously different, harsh looking. It had a cheaper look and feel to it. Sometimes, depending on the show it was cool, and sometimes it detracted from quality of the show. Sometimes it pointed out how little money they had to produce the show.

But this is something new. Yes, it is cheaper than film, but in some cases they are shooting in digital HD video and transferring it onto film anyway. Which is a huge money saver since you don't waste miles of footage of expensive film media and the ensuing film processing and only use in the end what you really need to.

So are we losing something special? I don't know. Perhaps as in many things we are seeing now a days, we are merely gaining a technology and not losing one. But in the way that corporations and studios are always trying to save a buck, we could be losing something here, and never realize it. Corporations love to do that, to make the cereal box the same size with less weight within it, the candy bar smaller but the price remaining the same. Is this just another example of the consumer being fooled? Maybe. Maybe not. The audiences still do set the pace and if audiences find it displeasing, sales will drop off and we may go back to using film. But at this point, I just don't see that happening. I fear they will fall complacent and accept the digital tricks to make it look like film and eventually, no one will really be the wiser.

It also makes me think of the current book revolution. Do you read books on a Kindle, Nook or some other eReader device, or do you read a book in paper form? Should we continue to kill trees for paper? There is something very pleasing about holding a book in hand, turning real paper pages, with that special paper and printing smell I have such a history with and which many younger people will not. Now that I own my own Kindle (I felt that if people are buying my works in digital format I had best learn it myself), I find that I enjoy both now, the ease and volume of content that I can carry with me in my Kindle, and the weight and feel and smell of a real paper based book. Though I mostly only read books now at home and my Kindle is my go to device for carry and read, out and about in the world.

Either way, society and life march on whether we wish to keep up or not.

When asked what Keanu shot his documentary on, he had to smile off to the side and answer honestly saying, "Digital," and then made it clear that he really wasn't against digital, he just saw that there were two different things to consider here (as I have been trying to point out here) and that he hoped as I do, that digital will be an adjunct in "film"(?) production that will enhance our movies and not simply kill film, completely.

But then again, didn't video kill the Radio Star?