Tag: imagination

My Problem

I’m naming names today: Jenn Moss and Alan Sorrentino.

Alan Sorrentino is in the news about his letter to the editor decrying women wearing yoga pants in public. I know what Alan is talking about. His yoga pants were my muffin tops.

A muffin top is the fleshy overspill above a waist band, developing and exposed when one is wearing a tight lower garment – pants, shorts, skirt – and a cropped top. They were most prevalent among girls and young women. Probably still are. I haven’t seen one for a while.

Muffin tops caused me problems. How could someone wear something so tight and not be appalled by the flesh spilling out? Do they know how they appear? That developed my second problem. I’ve always been irritated by America’s ideals of beauty and perfection, and how humans should look. And here I was, sucked right into it. Damn America.

So I wanted to praise these people for being indifferent about my problem and showing their body as it is, and without embarrassment. But, sigh, I was also disturbed, because these people looked obese and overweight. Shouldn’t they be taking better care of themselves? That led directly to self-confrontation: is that what you think about NFL players with their big bellies? 

No, Michael, it usually isn’t. I was all about the player and what they brought to the table.

Alan, of course, was writing about his problem in what the yoga pants revealed to him about his opinion of female curves. Just like me and my muffin tops, the yoga pants were not about the people wearing them: the problem is him and his perceptions.

Now let’s move on to Jenn Moss. She’s a writer who posts on roughandreadyfiction.com. On Meta Monday, she posted about seeing Richard III at STNJ. Dwelling on Derek Wilson and his awesome guns, she wrote about how this buff actor compared to people’s usual perception of Richard III. In her final paragraphs, she wrote:

Meanwhile, this whole muscle thing got me thinking: what kind of assumptions do we bring to a play or book that we know well? Have you ever rejected a portrayal of a beloved character because it just didn’t match the vision you had in your head? Did a remake or reboot ever leave you cold? I love the Star Trek reboot, for example. But the 2005 film version of Pride & Prejudice just doesn’t do it for me.

I’m going to keep asking myself this question whenever I see a revival or any other remake: How open am I to a different look or fresh interpretation of a favorite character?

Why yes, Jenn, I have thought about these questions. I mutter and rant quite often about what so many – like you, Guy Ritchie – do to Sherlock Holmes. I grimaced at the treatment endured when the television show, ‘Wild, Wild West’ was made into a movie. And then someone did it – gasp – to the ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.’. Look what’s going on in the Marvels Universe movies. And ‘Star Trek’…grrr…. “What is the world coming to?” I bitterly huffed in best BitterBen fashion.

Of course, I was always talking about my problem. I didn’t realize it until I grasped that I do the same thing to the fiction I write. I take original ideas and torture them into something else. In my science fiction, I discard the intelligent scientific foundations from the likes of Asimov and Clarke. The science and technology just are, a big leap from here and now. Sure, internal logic to the novels is solid, but I make no effort to explain how we made advances in space travel, FTL, teleporters, compilers, terraforming, and colonizing other planets: they just are as part of the setting, much like televisions, cars, cell phones, malls and aircraft travel just are as part of a modern setting.

Reluctantly I concluded, it’s a good thing when a television show, movie, novel, song or idea is re-interpreted and presented in a new light. It is how art, science technology, and government in all their forms have worked since just about the first time a story was done, a ruler proclaimed, a tool was created, or a drawing was made on a wall. Someone saw it and thought, “Wouldn’t it be better this way?” Then they offered their interpretation – thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

We’re always doing this, imagining, re-imagining and re-interpreting all the art, technology, history and events of time.

Now leave me alone. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time. After all, that’s what all this is really about.

And that’s my problem.

 

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Twelfth Night

A friend gave us tickets to Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s ‘Twelfth Night’ as a thank you gift.

We attended the play last Sunday night. It was updated to take place in 1930s Hollywood. That premise seemed a little thin at times, as characters were still called the count and the jester, and the studio was referred to as a land. Overall, it was well acted and enjoyable…for as much as I paid attention. For as the lights dimmed and the play began, I thought, “What does Handley’s imagination look like?”

Almost everyone (future studies estimate over ninety percent of people) in the future have an augmented memory. The augmented memory has a variety of options available. One of them includes creating an avatar of your external memory. This presents you with the opportunity to talk to your memory about your memories and life. Your memory can also be a memorable companion, so you’re never alone. You always have your memory, which is useful in space.

Madison Handley, however, went a little further than the norm. Although she embodied her memory as an avatar, she also embodied her imagination as an avatar. Thus, she and her memory played with her imagination as well as her friends when she was young. But, as her mother warned, “Someday your imagination is going to get you into trouble,” her imagination caused trouble and Handley took the fall. (It is her imagination.) After that day arrived, Handley banished it. Now her memory is requesting an audience for her imagination on its behalf because her imagination has some suggestions to help Handley out of her current situation.

All of this led to the standard use questions about the character. As I developed the background to this while at the play, I thought of other imaginary characters and the troubles they caused. A movie was semi-recalled. It seemed like it was in the 80s or 90s. The imaginary character was green and male. They had disappeared, but now they were back.

That’s all I could remember. I thought I would google it sometime but didn’t get around to it. Then, today, while thinking about the imagination and shaving, I remembered, ‘Drop Dead, Fred’, Phoebe Cates, Tim Matheson, Marsha Mason, 1991. Then, remembering those sudden details, I searched for confirmation on the net. Yea, verily, I was correct. The movie only received 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I wondered, why do I remember it so well?

All of this cogitation, delays and results – the process – amused me. Took a while of circling but the memory finally landed.

Now back to my novel. I still don’t know her imagination’s appearance but I believe that will come. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

 

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Hear That Sound?

Do you hear that sound? I think of it as a thousand thousand metallic and plastic insects clicking their way around the world. It’s really millions of fingers typing on keyboards. It must be happening after reading this headline:

Cosmic radiation may leave astronauts with long-term cases of ‘space brain,’ study says

I mean, come on. Look at all the graphic novels, horror tales and science fiction stories that headline can inspire. The actual story behind it is not as rosy, citing the chance for many long-term ill effects, including chronic dementia.  But the story also says, “But it’s not clear exactly what effect space radiation has on the brain because there are different types of radiation and they’re delivered in different doses.” Maybe space brain will develop mutant space zombies (which may be redundant, as I think zombies are mutants). Or space brain unlocks telekinetic and telepathic powers of which we’ve fantasized.Maybe space brain triggers weird time travel or teleportation skills, or the ability to see or experience other dimensions.

Of course, space brain may just cause space rage or space laze or space gaze. Who knows?

Let your imagination guide you.

 

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Homage to the Stellar Queen

Two miles and 43 minutes, the coffee shop walk allows a surfeit of thinking. Today, with summer starting in the northern hemisphere, I thought of the Stellar Queen.

She’s old. I haven’t thought of her in a while. She’s so ancient in my relative life, that her original Word Perfect, PowerPoint and Paint files reside on five and a quarter floppy disks. They were transferred to three and a half inch disks, and then to a hard drive when I bought a tower Dell, in 1999.

The Stellar Queen was my first foray into science fiction. Orson Scott Card told how he liked drawing maps to stimulate his creativity. I designed cars as a child and planned to be an architect (or a rock star) so I took up designing the Stellar Queen on computer.

She was originally built by a patron of the arts who traveled the galaxies. The Lady (never named, and very mysterious) lives in an estate along the edge between the Central Plain and the Northern Mountains. A bio-dome hybrid class ship, the Queen’s bio portion is sixty-seven miles long by fourteen miles wide. Thinking in threes, she had three cities, three towns and three villages, three major climate zones (with many micro climes), and three rivers that flowed down into the Starry Sea, on the ship’s ‘northwestern’ side. One small town, Half Moon Bay, came to be on the Starry Sea, was based upon Half Moon Bay, California, where I resided for a while. The Queen featured a sun that rose in the ship’s east and set in the west, over the sea. It wasn’t a big sea, just large enough for waves, pleasure craft and some fishing. Just big enough for romance.

Three centers, for government & ship operations, markets, and education, were established, along with three wineries, three breweries, three ranches…et cetera. I began many stories about her. Murder on the Stellar Queen, Death Boards the Stellar Queen, Treason on the Stellar Queen, and so on. None were finished nor submitted. I still have them, though, in notebooks, in boxes, in the garage.

I still smile, thinking about the Stellar Queen, and I easily board her. Half Moon Bay on the Queen is a pleasant place to be, to sip wine or beer and contemplate the ocean and sunshine, marvel about traveling the galaxies, and think about the first day of summer in another year.

Time to go write like crazy.

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The Reading Problem

I’m suffering from The Reading Problem again and anew, the evil spell and joyful tonic of reading others and then struggling with the many fires they ignite in my mind. It’s like, gasoline has been poured on dry grass, matches tossed on it. A warehouse of explosives has…exploded. But the explosions are thoughts, insights, themes, concepts, ideas, visions, memories, epiphanies, realities, all brought up by others’ words.

My wife and I spoke about this sometime earlier this week, after watching Carpool Karaoke, Broadway edition. We ‘found’ James Corden early on in Gavin and Stacey. He lives up to my hopes that he was the talented individual that he seemed to be (thus vindicating my taste, intelligence, and insights, you see). But, as usual, I’m jealous of the little blue eyed bastard for doing neat things like singing with Lin-Manuel Miranda ‘and more’ – (like Audra McDonald, a pretty damn good ‘and more’, along with Jane Krakowski and Jesse Tyler Ferguson – yeah, ‘and more’). Which prompted the expected, “Gee, wouldn’t it be great to be so talented and to know such talented people and have them as friends and get together to do fun, talented things?” Like the artists and writers in Paris did. Dorothy Parker and friends. Or the Hollywood Vampires, or The Traveling Wilburys. “Let’s get together and do an album, Tom Petty.” “Sure, and let’s call Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and George Harrison and see if they want to play along.” “Okay, Jeff Lynne.”

But I’m a writer, cocooned in my own self and its creations of doubts, suspicions and insecurities about who I am, hoping that I’ll grow out of it all some day (I’ll be 60 this year, and I hear that 60 is the new forty, but I’m hoping it’s the new 20) so I don’t socialize well, not like Stephen King and the Remainders. I’m more like J.D. Salinger with less talent and intelligence. So I don’t belong to any round tables and don’t do pop ins.

Reading is my outlet, along with conversations with my wife, a highly remarkable, intelligent, and well read person (you should play Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit with her). She tells me things, and that fires up my mind, like quoting American Dervish writer Ayad Ahktar about writing and his amazing accomplishments as she prepares for her book club.

My mind had already been inflamed by reading other posts. Sweet lord, the amazing writers out there, with insights and inventive, beautiful language. The subjects they choose, the rawness displayed as they strip naked and flash their pain. While I often debase the Internet of Things as the web of greed and misinformation, gems can be found without much effort. People are exploring themselves and telling us what they found, or what can’t be found, or what they’re hoping to find, and the trouble they’re having with their efforts.

If you want a similar mind explosion to what I endured, discover WordPress. Just follow along, and read.

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