On Friday, a campus police officer at UC Davis decided that the only rational way to respond to a group of students sitting in silence on the sidewalk with arms linked was to pepper-spray them directly in their faces. You can find updates on the story here.
It’s fucking horrible to watch. But please do. Because after the officer dehumanizes himself by inflicting unnecessary pain, and by appearing to enjoy it just a leetle too much, the protesters rehumanize the event by ultimately forcing the police to leave.
The beginning of this video terrified me. The ending astonished me: the protesters giving the police permission to go. Watch it happen. Watch the consequences, and the power, of speaking your mind.
May no one harm you today, and may you do no harm.
I know it seems to be all about the movies here in my little corner of the internet right now. So mote it be. I’m writing movies, and that means paying attention to all kinds of visual storytelling.
Brave has been on my radar for a while, and now there’s a full trailer available. I’m looking forward to it for several reasons. A girl is the hero! She has adventures. She’s good at riding and shooting. And she is brave. Oh my goodness, the power of that alone to make me want to see this.
But there’s also the power behind that power: Pixar, who are some of the best visual storytellers around — and both of those components are important. Movies are visual, which may seem like a d’oh statement until you’ve seen a film where everyone tells everyone everything, unless it’s My Dinner with Andre in which case it’s good. But for the most part, storytelling through dialogue is boring; and there is so much in good movie storytelling that happens between the words, in the silences, in the perspective of the camera and the small behaviors of the actors, in the fast cuts or the long slow moves. Remember the single shot in Hitchcock’s Frenzy that tracks out of the flat as the murder begins and backs away down the hall, down the stairs, out the door onto the street where people are going on about their daily lives… We could imagine it all in that single deliberate move, the fear and the pain and the lonely death. That’s the power of movies.
But there has to be a damn good story to tell, and that’s the other place where Pixar shines. They work hard to make the story right. I admire their process and philosophy enormously.
So I have high hopes for Brave. And high expectations. It’s Pixar’s first movie about a girl: we’ll see if they know how to tell a story about a brave human being with astonishing red hair.
I am really, really looking forward to this. A teenage girl is the hero. Adults are antagonists and allies. The stakes are the highest possible. There is no escape. And then the countdown begins…
Here are 45 beautiful cities of the future from a variety of artists. I could get lost in them: so much world-building, so many stories implied, so much evocative detail. The imagination, the focus, the discipline to create such specificity…. wow. So much that I admire in people has to do with this combination of imagination and willingness to do the work necessary to realize the vision well.
If you use Chrome browser, have I got a thing for you. If you don’t use Chrome, do yourself a favor and install it even temporarily for the pure pleasure of Jailbreak the Patriarchy, a fabulous extension by Danielle Sucher.
Go, go, go. Go read the examples and see if/when your head turns inside out. Then install Jailbreak and go play. The Internet is full of words and those words are full of gender assumptions, precious, yes they are. Go see for yourself.
Danielle Sucher, my brother, if you are ever in Seattle, I would love to provide you the beverage of your choice.
Folks who have read “Dangerous Space” will understand how I feel about this performance of “Round Here” by Counting Crows. And if you haven’t read the story, well, read it in the music.
I encourage you with all my heart to take the 12 minutes to experience this song. It’s just fucking amazing.
(Here’s the link if YouTube pulls a whacky in the embed.)
Wednesday night, Nicola and I joined our friend Colleen Lindsay of BookCountry to speak to members of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association about social media for writers. A lovely and lively crowd, and a very well-organized event (which makes me so grateful every time, because it’s not the easiest thing in the world to make everything run smoothly for folks).
It’s nice to pay forward in this way, and to offer help to other writers as I can. And it’s good to get out into the world after a long stretch of immersion in editing and writing, although I do sometimes feel like a bear emerging from a cave, squinting into the unfamiliar sunshine. Hopefully I do not behave like a bear, since that would probably scare the audience, which is certainly not the point… At any rate, it was good to reconnect with my own notions of “the community of writers,” and to realize that although I sometimes find it draining to maintain an online presence, I also find that it sustains me in a particular way. And so the search for balance continues.
And because every story needs a reversal (smile), now I will show you the EVIL that the PNWA did.
They gave us a present.
Each.
A goodie bag with a book and a lovely mug.
FULL OF EVIL.
Here’s the thing: Nicola cannot resist this stuff. She is like a two-year-old with the chocolatey-sugar-enormously-bad-fat combination. And we all know what happens when kids meet candy….
There is blood sugar whackness in my house today, friends, and I blame the PNWA.
I’ve just seen a time-lapse video made by photographer Dustin Farrell so beautiful that I cannot bear to embed it here and make it small. So instead I will send you to Vimeo where you can see it in HD and full screen, which I highly recommend.
It will take Far Too Long to load in Vimeo. Please embrace the delay. Go out for coffee, or something. It’ll be worth it.
Just magnificent. All the things I love about the west, how it makes me feel so big inside… and the time-lapse gives it a sense of timelessness that I can’t articulate but really respond to. Must think about this.
