A grand mother's day song...

So sayeth the damned.

Happy belated Mother's Day to all of your lovely, darling child-rearers out there. In the past we have held "Bring Your Mother to Crepes" extravaganzas on Mother's Day, but as we are now several hundred miles apart, the griddle-cake logistics on that one are a bit too much. That does not mean we're out for the count.

On Saturday, May 12, we hosted the second annual Butter Elbow Animation Festival. Much fun and mayhem was had, as were some amazing animations from around the world. 

We at the Chop hope to continue helping out organizations like the Southside Hub of Production and others that bring so much to the artistic community.

Special thanks to Vicky Yen and Samantha Lotti.

For those who want t just skip to th song...

Manic Pixie Dreams: A post in which I actually talk about what I've written

Also, three days in a row? Tomorrow, I'll invent a law-enforcement killing machine, only to have it turn on its maker.  

Ah, ED-209, because the previous 208 weren't sexy enough. Yeow!

But that's tomorrow. Today, I write about writing. Specifically about the Manic Pixie, inspired by this article on Nerve.com. In it, the author asks a simple question: "Where are the manic pixie dream guys?"

And I have two answers to that question: 1) you really don't want to find them, because they'll totally steal that crystal football looking thing from your parents' living room, necessitating you to create an ersatz brothel to earn the money to buy it back. 

Or you could just win the BCS trophy. I mean, you do have options. 

And 2) you'll get just as tired of the manic pixie dream guys as you are with the manic pixie dream girls. 

That being said, I think that it would be a cool thing to see more male characters of this bent in our stories. Rhiannon Admidas has a really great blog post on this topic, breaking down some of the main differences we would see, if the MPDB (manic pixie dream boy, as she calls him) was a more prevalent trope:

The biggest difference between the Manic Pixie Dream Boy and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is twofold. 

1. The MPDB is not sick, where as the MPDG often has some incurable disease or will die in a freak accident. This is because, according to movies, in order for men to actually feel a real emotion they must experience extreme trauma. Love isn't as deep or meaningful to a man as it is to a woman, so the man must have love taken away from him or tested some way in order for him to appreciate it fully.

The woman who loves the MPDB doesn't need him to be sick or dead because simply loving him is enough. Women don't need to experience trauma like men do. Being a woman is traumatic enough.

2. The MPDB is not actually manic. He's different, but all men are individuals so this is acceptable behavior and not manic. Women are not individuals. Women are a cycle of the same thing over and over again: traditional beauty, little dogs in purses, vapidness, money grubbing, etc. So when a woman actually is different, when she's intelligent, funny and interesting, it's not acceptable; it's weird and even jarring. She's manic! However, it is this craziness that endears her to men who are tired of the vapid dog-in-purse, don't-know-how-to-be-funny bimbo that almost all other women are.

As Rhiannon deftly points out, the reductiveness of the male version of the MPDG trope is just as insulting as its female counterpart. The benefit that we readers and viewers would get out of more of them appearing in our media would be the understanding that an offensive/wholly inaccurate gender "truism" is not undone by applying it to the other gender. You fix nothing. You gain nothing.

Well, except for even more characters you can't stand.

That is not to say that there is no room for MPDG (both genders) in what we read and watch. Like most stereotypes, at the root of MPDG is a shred of truth. There are people out there who seem to act erratically, who seem to be able to coast on their quirkyness and always get a pass for their irrational and dangerous behavior because they are JUST. SO. FUCKING. CUTE! 

But you have to get beyond what the MPDG stands for and try to approach life through their chain of experiences. Are there works out there that explore the myriad reasons why someone would act--or seem to us to act--so crazily? Why does no one seem to ask, and persist in asking, the reasons? Because the reasons are what make the MPDG so interesting.

Mixing It Up

MPDG is one of the tropes I tried to play around with in Green Ray of the Sun (which, at some point, will unironically see the light of day). Two of the principal characters exhibit manic pixie traits.

The first is Jonas, a traveling artist on a journey back to his home in France--and to all the responsibilities that had caused him to leave one year prior. One of the main things I wanted for every character in this book is the notion that they were on their personal journeys. I tried to make every character feel like they were in transit from one state of being to another. For Jonas, his year away from home was more or less filled with his struggles to find his place in the world without the stability and structure of his rigid home life. This can be a challenge for a guy in his early 20s, especially when girls are involved. So what does an attractive, young, bohemian artist dude do when he finds himself independent? Answer: he shags everything that moves, for that, at least, is some semblance of meaning in a meandering life. An empty one, yes. But it is an order. 

The second character who can be classified as manic pixie is the main character, Ryland. Like Jonas, she is a young person who finds herself suddenly independent. Only her issue is that events in her past have caused her to have serious trust issues with others. In short, she is on an endless quest to find the thing or people in her life that she can count on to be straight (er, honest) with her. But her standards of honesty and nobility in her relationships (romantic and not) are impossibly high. When things get too hot, she bolts to another situation (thus, why the transience of European travel provides an interesting crucible for her struggle to define herself). The book charts the course of her journey to understanding that she has to take the world as it is, not as she would like it to be. 

With both characters, I wanted to present a surface view of a MPDG, what these characters might seem like to people around them who do not get to know them. But the reader gets to have insights that bystanders do not get. My hope is that by injecting a complexity into a tired trope, I can create much more dynamic and interesting characters.

We're all on the Journey

I am fascinated not by MPDGs themselves, but by the reasons why we (the normals) so fascinated with them. Why are people still paying attention to the patron saint of manic pixie, Zooey Deschanel? I think it is for the same reason why MPDG are so intrinsically alluring to us--we want to be them. We hate them because we love them because they represent outwordly the struggles that we internalize underneath a calcified facade of normalcy. Underneath the suits and the uniforms of our everyday are people who are searching for meaning. The same with the MPDG. The only difference is that MPDG seem to us normalfolk to be actively in the struggle. They flit from situation to situation because they are obviously on life's epic journey. 

We are not. We are stagnant. This is the cause of mid-life crises and the alarming increase in quarter-life crises. MPDGs represent our desires to find greater meaning outside of us, outside the confines of our material success. MPDGs are who we all are inside, given tangible form. They are our chaotic muses, characters who allow other characters to briefly experience the world outside the humdrum. Of course, most MPDGs do not interface with their life struggles in an ultimately healthy way.

So we're all fucked. Understanding that--and dealing with it--is the stuff of great stories. 

I think what attracts so many to the written word, and increasingly, to multimedia storytelling is the same thing that drove Homer to create the Iliad and Odyssey (I say "create" because there was a good chance he was illterate, don't you know):

We're all trying to figure this shit out. Even the people (read: characters) you hate. Especially the characters you hate. Tropes like MPDGs get tiresome because we have not even started in trying to mine the possibilities inherent in them.

In other words, you can fret about your lemons, or you can make lemonade from them. Or, you can construct a lemon-spraying hellfire bazooka and destroy all them shitty motherfuckers. You already know which one I choose.

Lopez Lomong: Something's a-foot

This is a reaction to the 5000 meter world record performance by Lopez Lomong. Read NPR article here.

Recently, in the past few years, records that seemed carved in stone have been broken. And not broken by a few small inches, but desimated. For me, running comes to mind. Most people know the legacy of Usain Bolt. And now you can add one more to the dream team, Lopez Lomong. If you read/watch the video above, it seems we have not even begun to explore the limitless bounds of the human body.

For those on a time crunch, the video shows a man running an entire 5000 meter race, breaking the world record. What is odd about this performance, is that he stops before the final lap, realizes he has one left, and then finds the power to push a second kick into the real finish-line. Even though he miscalculated and even stopped, he was able to smash the world record. Does anyone else think this is incredible?

Lopez really deserves the credit. He has earned every bit of his talent. Lopez grew up in South Sudan, and was a "Lost Boy of Sudan." Escaping teranny, he fled to the US, to become a world class runner. Even carrying the US flag at the last Olympics (Carrying the American Flag). Science fiction has more believable stories than this one.

When you write characters, do they surpase expectation and thus become believable? As a writer, and I don't claim to be one, do you avoid "far-fetched" at all cost? To mean "far-fetched" is a common thing now adays.

Yesterday I heard a man who smashed another world record in running. Dean Karnazes ran for 262 consecutive miles. It took roughly 72 hours. Years ago, we read Dean Karnazes first book and were inspired to run great distances ourselves: FlagRunners. Can you stay up for three days straight and run? It takes training but more importantly perseverance and curiosity. How far can I go? How far can I push my body? Is science fiction happening now?

If these super humans teach us anything, it's that The Avengers is not a bad day dream and Michael Offutt's Kill Suit is not far from possible. They say the difference between the most successful runners and the ones who fall short has almost nothing to do with talent. Actually, the main factor is being "thick-headed." That being, a person who in working towards an unreasonable goal, fails, and instead of listening to rational thought, tries again.

Please, Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em

This post is not about Thor.

GF and I were talking the other day, and she brought up a meme of yore from when I was yet in swaddling clothes (in sixth grade...it was a medical condition that I, frankly, don't want to talk about, okay?):

source: http://memespot.net/post/5837832289/http-howyouis-tumblr-com

In other words, we were talking about this early 1990s luminary:

Since GF and I are both lit nerds, our conversation delved into the narrative implications of M.C. Hammer calling time in his own song with that crystal clear clarion call--"STOP! Hammertime."

WTF is Hammertime?

So I will skirt over the even more obvious question of what exactly Hammer didn't want me to touch and go on to ask what Hammertime is, narratively speaking. When I did a cursory search for an answer, I came upon two notable sources of information. The first is the litany of crowd-sourced ruminations on Yahoo Answers. The page's "Best Answer" came courtesy of a 2006 post by user Ricky J., who stated:

[I]t comes from MC Hammer signifying that he's about to do a dance solo but, over the years it has evolved to mean that it's time to get busy and do something like get to work or start fighting or close a deal etc.

That makes sense. Except that it's wrong. In the song, "U Can't Touch This," Hammer does his dance solo before calling Hammertime. Thus, Ricky J.'s supposition, while plausible, cannot be the case. 

I actually much rather believe the kind folks at www.uncyclopedia.wikia.com's entry detailing Hammertime:

Everyone will experience at least one Hammer Time within a lifetime with many individuals having many Hammer Time experiences. One individual was found in a forest, naked doing the Hammer Time routine to a dead weasel which had undergone rigormortis for several days. He had been experiencing hammer time for over 3 months. 

Hammer time is used extensively by militant electricians to coordinate operations across multiple non-compatible temporal manifolds, depicted most famously in the documentary film Quake. The film's novelization, Timequake, is still a de-facto manual for electricians in training. Hammer time also grants its users advantages in torture and information extraction, which has only recently been effectively countered with the development and perfection of "Can't Touch This" conditioning. . . .

Recently, MC Hawking has unified hammerspace with Stop! Hammer Time! to produce a general theory of Hammerspacetime. This result is summarized by the famous Hammer-energy equivalence equation: e = MC^Hammer

While illuminating, that information ultimately fails when trying to apply Hammertime to writing. So I'll go ahead and try.

Hammer and the Quest for Narrative Relativity

When Hammer purposely calls his song to a stop, it is immediately followed by a beat of silence. To me, that tiny sliver of nothing in the sea of noise is Hammertime. I like to think of it in a couple of different ways. Returning to MC Hawking for a bit, you can overlay a general sense of understanding of Hammertime that resembles the basics of general relativity.

Like there is no such thing as an absolute position or speed or momentum in the universe, there is no one way that the reader/writer/character ought to experience reality (real or virtual, in the case of characters). We tailor the text to fit the character, and in so doing, we bend time, Proust-style, to get across certain ideas.

Think about how many pages it takes for Virginia Woolf to make ten years pass in To the Lighthouse, and then think about how many pages Marcel Proust devotes to his freaking desk lamp. In both cases, time is fractured in multiple ways: reader vs. character, character vs. writer, character vs. other characters. All these parties orbiting the text are necessarily experiencing time at different speeds--but all simultaneously.

Stream of Hammers

So, you may ask, is Hammertime the same as Stream of Consciousness, a method of writing associated with Woolf and Proust. Well...kinda. Hammertime and Stream of Consciousness, while having similarities, also have one very significant difference. Stream of Consciousness supposes the flood of thoughts, images, urges, ruminations that occur in the mind at any given time, and creates a pseudo-narrative to emulate that chaos.

source: http://smelltheglove-softball.blogspot.com/2010/09/stop-hammertime.html

Hammertime is the opposite. Hammertime supposed the absense of such chaos--indeed, the absence of even the routines that we do without conscious thought (thus, its presence in the middle of "U Can't Touch This"). Hammertime is not meant to emulate the everyday chaos of conscious thought. Rather, it is meant to capture those times in our lives when the universe slows down, when sesory information ebbs, and our thought processes flitter away until we are left with either a singular feeling, or no feeling at all.

Hammertime is Nirvana in the ancient sense. Hammertime points toward transcendence. 

How to Hammer It Down

So, how does one deal with the lack of detail, the lack of feeling, when dealing with a medium that is always already present? 

Answer: understand that the blank page isn't empty. It's just a different color, a different style, a different wavelength of "text" than your typed letters. If you can get yourself to think about how line and section breaks, paragraphing in prose, you can capture emotions and characterization in ways not possible with any combination of words. If you use Stream of Consciousness and Hammertime together (poets have been doing it for a good long while), I daresay that really great, innovative things will result from it. Just don't get them too close together, because I think I read somewhere that they explode when you do that.  

PS--I understand that I could have just given you the link in the last paragraph right away, and this post would have been just as helpful and quite a bit shorter. Indeed, I do understand very well.

On Endings Part 1: Graceful Ends

In the final issue of Neil Gaiman's mindblowing Sandman series, Morpheus, lord of dreams, hosts William Shakespeare for a drink up in the dream castle. The great bard isn't there for his jollies. It is toward the end of his days, and he is finishing up his final play, The Tempest, a commissioned piece for the dream king who had given Shakespeare the gift (and perhaps curse) of inspiration.

At one point in the conversation, Shakespeare turns to Morpheus and asks why The Tempest. Why not a brighter tale, a better tale? And Morpheus answers:

I wanted a tale of graceful ends. I wanted a play about a king who drowns his books, and breaks his staff, and leaves his kingdom. About a magician who becomes a man. About a man who turns his back on magic. 

In this small confession, Morpheus lets us, the readers, understand what makes him tick, what he--not a man, but a being who embodies the immortal concept of imagination--truly desires. He also reveals his understanding of himself, how he knows that he can never bring himself to embrace that dream. Because of his duties, including granting dreams to all us down here on Earth, he can never bring himself to leave his kingdom and grow as an individual. No matter the magnitude of his power, he finds himself incapable of getting what he wants. He cannot change. 

Image from a great analysis of The Sandman at: http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/ChroniclesofMoeniaArcis/news/?a=50659

That is the thrust of the final episode in the series. Funnily enough, this is a flashback. Several issues before, Morpheus, via an arcane set of circumstances, allows himself to be destroyed. It is not until this final issue, though, that we understand why he allowed his own demise to happen.

That is what endings are supposed to do. They do not necessarily unfurl the creator's master plan, connect all the dots in a cut-and-dry way. I contend that good endings, in fact, do not explain or need to explain. Nor are they required to give you closure. Especially when your tale is about an ambiguous, immortal, ineffable being, your ending should fit the story and story's protagonist.

They should elicit a shred of understanding, sometimes closure, sometimes not. But always, ending must be felt in the bones. Headspace cogitation is fine, but a good ending always hits you viscerally.

Endings: A User's Manual

So how do you do it, you might ask? And I might answer: fuck all if I know. Of course, I can't actually tell a client that when he or she is looking for some modicum of guidance on how to conclude a storyline. I'm a little bit torn on this because the words that come out of my mouth on this subject sound very much like I'm quoting from some new age manual I bought from the Wicca store along with a month's supply of sage and a set of ceremonial candles. But I'll try to be as concrete as I can, using arbitrarily numbered rules. Warning--these are my opinions from reading and writing and working with writers (I'd love to get alternate views):

1. Forget bowties. Neat, pat endings tend to undo all the work you have done trying to get readers to insinuate themselves into the text. A happy, everyone-gets-married ending is frankly insulting and can easily break an invested reader out of the narrative because your artifice is showing through. That is not to say that an uber happy ending is out of the question. But it seems to me that most of these endings I read are not earned by the text that comes before it. This world is complex. You're going to have to work harder than "happily ever after" if you want your ending to be satisfactory.

2. Remember your principles. I mean this in two ways. Keep your ending centric on your principle characters. Don't stray to tell me about what some king in some other land is doing when your story was all about a shoehorse salesman who lived down by the river. Keep it focused.

I also mean to say that you should not sell yourself out for the cheap and easy ending. If you have it in you to describe a Kill-Bill style bloodbath at the epic culmination of your tale, go for it. But if it feels wrong, goes against every fiber of your being, then don't do it even if prompted to do so by your erstwhile "betters." Literature is all about communication, and most readers, whether they know it or not, are trying to get a beat on who you are as a person as well as what the words of your story are saying. 

3. Meet your threshold of coherence. This one is the easiest to implement, but often the first tossed out. It has to make sense with the rules of the world that you have described up to that point. If not, you risk the ending casting doubt on everything that came before, and not in a good way. For example, Momento has a wickedly mind-bending ending. But it never strays from the complex web of rules set up by the rest of the movie. Indeed, the ending is great because it makes perfect sense within its own universe.

4. Consider the hard way. Nothing good and lasting ever came easy. Consider all the possibilities (your hero loses, the love is lost, the world-saving McGuffin ends up NOT working). You might find a better ending in the thistle bushes.

5. Resonance is key. Stop interpreting. Stop telling yourself how brilliant you are when you're writing. Stop betting on the fact that readers--somewhere, somehow--are going to pick up on your fantastic literary callbacks, or your deft reference to that obscure set of Marquez short stories. Your ending cannot rely on nitty-gritty textuality or deft language. It must be resonant to the human condition and must be intrinsically connected in some way to the character(s) and world and their interrelationship(s). This is difficult. It is very easy to slip into excessive melodrama in order to get the cheap tear. Resist trying to control your reader's reaction and instead concentrate on a kind a resonance with the text. You've no doubt read books and felt a shiver as your eye tracked down the page. It's that can't-stop-reading feeling, that gotta-finish-this feeling, that it's-down-the-front-of-your pants feeling. Your only guide is your emotional resonance to the text. That is your natural storytelling instinct kicking in. Use it. It will ALWAYS steer you true if you're honest about it. 

I hope this at least gives you some points to ponder when you try to complete your magnum opus. Part 2 will deal with Mass Effect...as if you weren't expecting that. 

Remember that part in Harry Potter when Harry dies and his friends have to figure out what the hell to do?

Me neither. But, it would have been interesting...

This past weekend, all of Chicago's basketball fandom let out a collective groan as the Chicago Bulls' heart and soul--Derrick Rose--writhed on the ground in terrible pain. A day later, we would all find out that the team's all-star point guard, possibly the fastest player in the NBA, had gone down with a season-ending ACL tear. 

Before this moment, the Bulls were among the favorites to win this years NBA championship. Now, some are predicting that the team will have a tough time getting out of its first round series with the Philadelphia 76ers. 

This is not how stories are supposed to end. The hero is supposed to win the day. That, or the hero is supposed to learn a valuable lesson over which we observers can nod and stroke our goatees. It somehow strikes us as wrong for the momentum toward a specific goal ends in a relatively non-spectacular way. Imagine if you watched Rudy (from the movie, Rudy) work so hard as a practice player on Notre Dame's football team, earning the respect of his teammates and coaches and fans, only to have him sit out the last game on the sidelines before cutting to credits. 

Only, it happens in real life. Stuff sometimes sucks, and your last best hope for victory chokes big time. 

Commandment 11: If the house is a-rockin'...

I contend that those moments are when a good story can become a great story. Imagine, if you will, that Harry Potter died in Goblet of Fire. He drowned or saved Cedric Diggory at the last second, and in so doing lost his life. How could you have the Harry Potter series without Harry Potter?

Oh man, RPatt. Even that wand can't make some things disappear. I mean, Renesmee. Fuck.

Well, even without the eponymous character, you still had all his friends, his family, his allies. You had, at that time, four books worth of world to use to complete the story--for it had transcended Harry's personal quest. The fight against Voldemort was one that threatened the whole world. How that struggle would have played out without Harry would have been so interesting to watch.

Sometimes we get glimpses into this sort of thing. I am reminded of the Buffy episode, "The Wish," in which we get to see Sunnydale as it would have been if Buffy had never arrived.

I thought it was fascinating to see how the characters turned out, and how the fight against the vampire conquest--however difficult--was still being waged by a ragtag group because it had to be waged. That's when you know the stakes are high. 

If you're writing a story with a singular protagonist, or even a small band of protagonists who are destined to save the world, think about chucking them into a black hole about halfway in. I'm not saying that you have to do it, but play the thought experiment out and see what might happen. It could give you insight into who exactly your side characters are and what exactly is at stake if your heroes lose.

PS--I successfully resisted bringing up the ending to Mass Effect 3 here. That is because I've been swimming in all things Mass Effect as part of an ongoing project. More later.

Wow it's been a while.

Ten days. If it takes a tank of sea monkeys 24 hours to double in size, over ten days, you'd have...

*does math*

Um, a lot of sea monkeys.

Anyway, after several metric tons of work and some very important research for a top secret class that I am preparing for the fall, I am back to more or less blogging shape. 

This'll be a short one, just to bring up the point that damn, libraries are the bomb. After doing my best Andy Dufresne through these past two work weeks, I decided to get out in the sunshine and take a walk to a nearby library. 

And I'm ashamed to say that I forgot how amazing these institutions are. Free of charge, yet filled with so much awesome that I could scarcely believe it. I walked in to be greeted by the feature table. This month's feature was "Dystopians," a topic very much in vogue (thank you Hunger Games).

Among them was the new Iced Earth album. If you would have told me twenty years ago that I could march into my local library and get a kickass metal album for free, I would have accused you of lying and kick your ass (AKA, I would have thought you were making fun of me and run away before peeing in my pants).

So this post is just a note saying that your friendly local librarian probably deserves much more love than she is getting. 

More posting in the coming days, including details on super secret class.