Friday, May 05, 2006

Varekai

Eventually, you run out of applause. "Wow" becomes meaningless. You understand kineticism as a language unto itself, even if you haven't been exposed to a single second of ballet. You start to listen in other languages, see in other cultures. Your brain races to assemble the nonsense and the chaos, since it all has some kind of meaning. And before you know it, there's this elation that results, an epiphany that all the colors and sounds and impossibly lithe humans up on stage is a screaming-yes to some optimistic vision of the future where humanity has given up junk food for art, anger for love, speaks through song and motion, and generally look like they've left behind racism, sexism, homophobia, militant faith...you know, the entire Republican Party...and got their groove in the most bootylicious, karmatasic way possible.

The second epiphany that marches its way across your brain comes when you wonder why there isn't more art like this, celebrating the wonder and the happy-lust of live instead of having your emotions blenderized from screaming talk show hosts, blood-n-sex nightly news, Jack Bauer finding new ways to cause pain in "24", that lingering feeling that everything in Washington is corrupt and no one there cares. Nearly everything about a Cirque du Soleil show is soaking in hope and wonder. From the moment you walk in, the ushers are smiling and polite, laughing, as if they want to be here, cheerfully sharing in the experience with you. You have to draw back for a second, scanning for the typical rude-shit behavior common with customer service these days. You look around. No one is shoving to go to the bathroom. Kids are playing near the entrance before the show begins. Everyone makes way for someone else, and we all swerve in polite arcs as we file to our seats, where more polite ushers direct us to our seats. There's color everywhere, as if you have been beamed straight into a Dale Chihuly glass flower. You see some of the ushers aren't ushers, but performers in disguise, revealing their clownish ways with members of the audience, who take it all in with good nature. They too are disarmed from the outside world, leaving behind their road-rage and terror alerts for the Cirque vibe.

And that's how the show is preceded. No ads. No countless movie trailers for cookie-cutter romantic comedies or cartoons with ourageous in-your-face animals who will be pimping biggie burger meals at a fast-food chain. The performers emerge in their lizard costumes, their fire costunmes, one of them looks like Bergman's chess-playing Death, another is Pan. Icarus descends from the ceiling in a crash. It's all too large, colorful, hypnotic and captivating. It's Dr. Seuss doing a Neil Gaiman-flavored acid with Hayao Miyazaki icing. There is no plot, or is there, as you watch as a wingless Icarus figures out the beauty and raw sensuality of the earth through experincing the elements of air, water, land, and fire until he means what I could only fathom as a sex goddess, whom he marries and they become rulers of the elements Icarus transcends the need to conquer the sky and just be in all places at once through his contentment and erotic awesomeness with his wife. If that's not a pro-marriage message, I don't know what is.

Or not. I don't know. That's the grand beauty of every Cirque Du Soleil show. It could mean whatever you want it to mena, or it could be nothing than seeing fit and funny humans in wild costumes bend in ways that require no magic yet make you believe in a kind of magic from start to finish. But it makes you want more. It makes you want to go on a diet, listen to opera, read the works of philosophers, contemplate silence, take up tantra sex, wash all of your petty rage away, and smile. It makes you want to strip your soul down and lose all the baggage that keeps you from leaping and soaring. You see a better world when you get in touch with something like Cirque's visual serotonin. There's very few things in live that gives you that organic high. And it makes you see what's important, what touches the soul, what should remain at the end of all things.

And if that's not art, I don't know what is.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Alien acrobats in human skins

Not much to report from Planet Seattle. My wife and I are seeing Cirque du Soleil tonight, thanks to free tickets I got from my work. Granted, I do have a soul-deadening job, but sometimes the perks make it all worth it. If I didn't have free tickets, my wife and I would have passed on the $200 entry fee for us to go in and see a group of highly talented superhumans bend in ways not even CGI can render. It's not that we don't like CdS. We've already caught one of their shows as well as attempted to get in to one of their many spectacles in Las Vegas (either the water one or the sex one, we can't recall).

It's just that about a year ago, "Cavalia" came through town. For those of you who don't know, "Cavalia" was a CdS offshoot that featured horses and humans performing the CdS-brand of "I'll never be able to bend like that in a thousand years of diet and yoga training" dexteries. After you see a couple of people get all double-helixy with each other on a moving stallion (good lord, the sexual imagery alone), the normal CdS seems kinda tepid. After all, the people can train for years in to be in that CdS limber franca. You add a horse, a thousand-pound animal that could go nuts and stampede at any moment, and the danger-voyeur level in the crowd is elevated. Of course, tonight, my wife and I will clap and be awestruck, but CdS does need to bump it up a notch. We're thinking something with monkeys and chain saws, or the Dr. Evilesque sharks with laser beams.

Now, that's entertainment.

Monday, May 01, 2006

Because it matters


Save the Internet: Click here


More information here
Radar Scope

Noticed something over the weekend. For the first time that I can remember, there's nothing that I excited to see as far as summer blockbusters go. I can pass by Tom Cruise, the X-men, and every animated film coming my way. I can wait for them to come to Netflix in 6-8 months, but there's nothing I need to see. Same for upcoming video game releases (although E3 in eight days might change that). Nothing's coming on my radar that's got me genuinely in the "I so need that" category. I know have a few titles on reserve at my local game store, but I'll be damned if I can remember more than one.

No pinpoint on the cause, but I get the feeling that for movies, I can wait for the aforementioned Netflix release. For the price of a going to a movie once a month, I can get a DVD sporting better picture and sound quality than the theaters. I can pause when I want, rewind, watch special features, or listen to commentary. When I'm done, I'll send the movie back and get another one. Lather, watch, eject, rinse, put in return mailer, repeat. I've grown into the patience of an adult to see marketing hype for what it is. I don't need to stand in line anymore for a movie. I know it'll be there tomorrow, playing five times a day, seven days a week. I also know that big budgets don't lead to greater enjoyment. Explosions and other eye-candy may have dazzled me as a youngin', but there's a law of diminishing returns with the wonder of technology. With CGI, I'm less dazzled than I was before. For as shiny and sensational the new Star Wars movies looked, they were as sound story wise as a Faberge egg. Same goes for the remake of King Kong, which lingered close to Uncanny Valley. The humans looked hollow and the effects were delicious.

Add to this, the general avoidance static I feel at movie theaters. I'm not comfortable in the chairs, waiting through 30 minutes of ads without the benefit of a mute button. Being ad-free by getting into sneak previews and watching DVDs have spoiled me. I'm not huge around crowds, and I'm getting to a point where I like being control of the media instead of it being blasted into my face as if Dick Cheney wielded a multimedia weapon. I can start and stop a video game at my choosing. I can put down a book when the phone rings. I can pause DVDs, TV, and my iPod. All of which makes me wonder if I'm an outlier or part of a growing crowd who isn't into the communal experience of cinema, popular for most of the 20th century.

As for games, I suppose I'm wading in the desert here, a drought common between the start of the calendar year and up to E3 in nine days. E3, that video game wonderland held in Los Angeles, is like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, where Santa Claus arrived at the end and it's officially the start of the holiday shopping season. E3 marks the clock for new releases between now and, well, whenever. It's an orgy of marketing, a blender of hype and lights and swag and the id run amok. It's for kids and kids who are in their late 30s and barely able to fit their pudge into their stretch-waist khakis. It's where millions are spent in a full Zerg rush to colonize the minds of boys and men to buy whatever Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft tells them they have to buy. It is to us testosterone vessels what beauty and fashion magazines are to the XX set. Without the latest sequels to First Person Shooter X or Generic Sports Title, the menfolk in this country are nothing, and without the latest consoles, you might as well hand in your penis at the Man Desk upfront.

I've been playing video games for 25 years, and I think I've reached that point in the timeline where I can see the patterns in the industry. Shooter games, sports games, Japanese fantasy RPGs, movie licenses as games, and the weird eclectic stuff that are like foreign films: You know they are interesting but are too out there for mainstream (read: American) consumption. Looking over the gaming horizon, there's little that's innovative or exciting. Like with CGI-laden movies, there's lots of eye-candy but little fun to be had. The two things that register on my radar is "Lego Star Wars II," which is a sequel to last year's title which put a cute spin on the Lucas universe using the durable plastic blocks. The second is the new Nintendo console, unfortunately still named Wii. Moniker aside, the abilities it promised, from backwards compatibility to a gyroscope, motion-sensitive controller, could make for gaming to be what it should have always been: an aside to life's activities, not the central core. Gaming has gotten far too serious and demanded far too much loyalty and cash from consumers to make them feel as if they are on the inside of the cool clubhouse.

No, sorry, it's a hobby. It's an option. It's meant to be fun, an enjoyable time-waster, not some status symbol that miraculously enforces someone's masculinity. Not so long ago, I got over the need to frag aliens, zombies and Nazis. Once you move beyond that, a lot of gaming becomes invisible. Once you decide you don't need to hunt and kill, trample or conquer, humiliate and swagger, there's little left to actually play. Times like this, I think about my wife, who has gotten more into gaming the longer we've been married. I wonder how an industry like video games can still make money when it primarily chases one gender every year. Maybe that's Massive Multiplayer Online titles do so well with women, where the emphasis is on communication and community and not fragging each other.

Maybe MMOs are the answer to the question the gaming industry is avoiding: Has the video game generation grown up? For us in our 30s, we are the first full-fledged generation born and raised with video games on the market. We grew up in the neon lights of the arcade and wasted hours in front of the blue glow of Atari, Odyssey, Intellivision and further down the line to now. We've play countless versions of shooters, rpgs, sports titles, and more. As we get older, we like the idea of a virtual watering hole to play, to talk, to flirt, and maybe adventure. Us older folks look out at the valley below, where the sounds and flash from E3 make an artificial media storm of hype, and we shrug. It's a high school now, where the cool kids determine what you have to play to be in. We grimace at what's behind us, and then we turn back to our online sudoku, our guilds, our Second Lifes or Warcrafts. We bid adieu when dinnertime or bedtime happens in our real world. We play on our terms now, because we're old enough to understand the truth. It's just a game, and important stuff happens outside of the screen.
Diversion tactics

Last night, I finished a self-imposed dare, if I could write 30,000 words for a new novel in 30 days. I don't know what triggered the mad race for words. I have suspects: my lagging on my earlier novel, a general feeling of not being able to write on command, a growing inertia of creativity. I needed something new, something I didn't have a lot invested in. I've been working on the first novel, the serious one, for almost two years on and off. At that point, it becomes a Byzantine maze, growing darker and more muddled every time you turn a cold, marble corner until you feel the walls pitilessly closing in on you.

About six weeks ago, I broke out of my low-grade novel terror with an idea that seemingly sprung out of my head, Athena-style, with my poet friend Cori. Never felt an experience like that before, everything rushing out as I messaged her. Imagine a soothing electrical shock wrapped in an orgasm tortilla and it begins to cover it. I remember writing "electric blue Jesus in my veins" to her as I typed down details, history, primary conflicts, and within an hour I had the basic concept of the character. Within 24 hours, still peaking on the creative dosage in my veins, I had the feel of the novel, as well as solid, evolving plot.

I put the serious novel, which loomed over me like a buzzard, off to the side and decided to see if I could hold my own mini-NaNoWriMo, but set the goal for 30,000 words, instead of 50,000. 30 days in April, 1,000 words a day. No outline, but a gist of the course. I found I need some kind of deadline in order to produce something, even if I don't know just what I'm doing. It's a sense that "You need to get this done by X." All in all, it was exciting in that rollercoaster-terrifying way to see what bubbled up in the primordial ooze. I reckon I could most of it, and pieces will need to be altered or swapped around for consistency. I embarrassingly forgot the name of the lead character's boyfriend several times, inventing a new one as I went. Oh, at least there'll be some fun in the rewrite.

So, I'm writing again, albeit on a different project. I'm taking the next few days to scan what I've written, acknowledging that it's time to figure out how to break all this down by chapter. I'm a bit mushy on the middle, but then that's the biggest challenge for writers (and why it's called a "mushy middle"). At the same time, the first novel is calling me again. With my juices going, I feel like I can return to the bigger maze I built and hammer that thing into shape and get it to my former writing teacher to review. I've blown off an informal deadline already, and I would like to get it to her before August at the latest. Hrm. I sense another deadline in the making.