Perhaps a week ago I passed the 10,000 word mark. I'd really intended to find out by then how I could further customise this blog to make it less bore/snore-inducing when viewed...and so far haven't found an opportunity to really sit down and sort it out. That's not to say, of course, that I haven't been doing stuff - it just means I haven't been doing that.
But what stuff have I been doing? Well, for longer than a week I've been working on a small title banner to sit in place of the current text title up there - and that's been going well enough, in fits and starts. The problem I have is that I have many things I want to do simultaneously and sometimes it's frankly the easier thing just to procrastinate (have I written on this before?) and watch a Youtube video (or several) than engage in creativity when I feel I shouldn't be neglecting the things I'm not doing - because clearly it's better to neglect everything equally than do one thing over another. I've also been up the line to see my sister's three-week-old daughter, and since that's a trip that takes nearly three hours to complete in one direction (not unpleasantly so, though my old car invariably returns home at the end of it with a new shake or rattle to let me know I'm pushing it a wee bit) and once there much of my attention is on the people I'm with, it means I lose most of two days (if I stay overnight. Which I did, because, frankly, 5.5 hours in a car in a single day when you haven't traveled 5.5 hours away from home seems like a bit of a task!).
Not that two days means much in the long-run, of course. It's quite easy just to lose days to nothingness, to hum-drum status quo activities like housework. I notice it's been half-a-month since I last blogged - again, much because of the hum-drum status quo. I shouldn't pretend as if I've done nothing constructive - I really have engaged in different things. Currently I have a design I'm working on for a set of three posters with a typographic focus and an association with the sea; and, as I mentioned, I've been at work on a customised banner for this blog, which I believe I've either finished or almost finished, and for which I'll find out the relevant procedure to set in place.
And also: I saw the final installment of The Hobbit, which was an achievement for me as I didn't see the first in a cinema (and I'm almost glad I didn't. I have to say that as much as I'm inspired and intrigued by much of the story-telling elements shown in the movies, there are a lot of time-wasting aspects, too, as well as interpretations of events that seem somewhat odd: the weird plate-throwing game, for instance, that the dwarves set themselves to in the first movie. Certainly they, from memory, did set to washing the plates in the novel, but did they make a great show of being reckless? I don't remember that. While I understand the need for visual entertainment in a story that otherwise communicates much of its message in text in its original version, there's a certain amount of...silliness, I think, that maybe just didn't need to be in there. Of course we want to see the dwarves as merry, rough and finely skilled in what they do - not dropping a single plate - and certainly Peter Jackson may have wanted the film to appeal to children, perhaps [though oddly so, for while The Hobbit can be argued from its written voice to have been directed towards the literate child or pre-teen when it was first penned, I'm not certain one can present a movie the way these were and still aim to be inclusive of a younger audience], but I found it oddly patronising. This may have been my issue, though...) and I'd almost missed seeing this last one on a big screen as well. At first I thought I'd made a mistake by seeing it the high-frame-rate version; the second installment I recall as having that quintessential movie flatness, languor, and warm blurriness that allows supreme escapism (I've always felt): the story is presented in an other-than-realistic way, and so you can leave criticism behind and be transported elsewhere, into a realm unlike the one you're currently sitting in. Super high-definition almost, for me, makes something too accessible and too real - there seems no drama or production about the way people move or interact, and instead it brings it all back into the hum-drum. Not quite like housework, but I'm sure there'll be some of you who get what I mean.
Anyway, it turns out it merely took my eyes and mind some adjustment; soon enough it seemed just as inaccessible and just as unreal, which, oddly, is what I feel is needed in movies. A good example of this is a show in New Zealand called Shortland Street. It's bad. It's really, really bad. I don't just criticise it because it's a completely unrealistic hospital drama and I'm a healthcare professional myself; it's truly, truly awful. Part of its awfulness - not an influential part, but a part nonetheless - is how "real" the settings are: how plain, how bland, now reach-out-and-touchable they are. How parochial the characters are, and how outlandish the stories. In comparison to another soap - Home and Away, based in Australia - Shortland Street's stories are perhaps only slightly more outlandish (at least Summer Bay in Home and Away is a community, a town; Shortland Street revolves solely around the hospital and satellite venues like a very small number of people's homes, and its stories are invariably about which of the staff has murdered which of their coworkers, who's sleeping with whom, some crazed individual seeking to bomb the hospital. I work in a hospital; some of my coworkers are friends, others aren't, and that's generally as far as it all goes. We have lives outside of the hospital and away from each other. None of my coworkers (or me!) has killed another, they're not sleeping with each other willy-nilly, and in the five years I've been there nobody's pulled any stunts to place the hospital - a major tertiary centre - at risk...and yet that stuff happens on a consistent basis in Shortland Street. I suppose it has to if the show is to remain interesting to its audience?), but Home and Away has the blurry, inaccessible quality which transports the audience at least far away enough from their own presumably sharply defined lives to suspend disbelief. Movies have typically had this as well, and I've always found it makes them more appealing: the inaccessibility implied by it makes the world the story is occurring within that much more tantalising. Perhaps it's the same sort of thing that having to turn pages in a book implies, even subconsciously - you may be so very invested in a story, to the point maybe of being able to see it occurring as you read its progression...but then you have to turn the page and find out what happens next. The glass barrier between you and the various undersea creatures at the local aquarium may be a boon to your safety, but doesn't it all look so tremendously inviting all the same? Yet if you were in it, wet and cold and accompanied by the myriad other beings you might be able to see on the other side of the glass...you may not enjoy it so much. It's a perceptive issue, methinks. At any rate, that was all to say...: I enjoyed the high-frame-rate in the end. It's weird how unusual and noticeable it was to begin with, and then how normal and insignificant it was thereafter - and how quickly my perception adjusted.
And here I am, having waxed prosaic about high-frame-rate and film and what I had really meant to write about was the feeling I (and no doubt almost every person ever interested in the world created by Tolkien) was left with having been reimmersed in the realm of The Hobbit. I won't now - I'll leave that till next time - and I certainly won't be "reviewing" the movie. I don't consider myself a movie critic, nor really do I see the value in critics when opinions and perceptions are so individual and subjective that a self-professed expert may have an opinion that they will stand by till the dire end but that makes no sense to me (Lady in the Water, for instance: I loved it. It was such a beautiful, magical movie...and yet it was generally panned by people who regard their opinions as being more valid and necessary than actual movie-goers. I can't help thinking this was at least in part because it didn't have guns and war, but also because a lot of adults these days have forgotten they're grown-up children, not an entirely new species. Magic may appeal to children, but why should it not appeal to adults? That's why we read books, watch movies, play games, listen to music, is it not? To have stories told and memories and feelings conjured into existence and experience. No wonder there are so many people who play games and get into fantasy stuff. If adult life is all about a desk job that's slowly raising your blood pressure, stifling your creativity and otherwise wringing the neck of your enjoyment of life...maybe it's not really how adult life should be). What I want to do is maybe just touch on all of that stuff in more detail - the escapism, the need for stories, and the importance of allowing those stories to be created. But we'll see. First I need to do some more designing, some more writing, some more reading, and probably more procrastination. Youtube ahoy.
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