Now I'm Done

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3cfxl5IONNk

No I'm Not

My film didn't upload well to YouTube. It looks all blurry and jerky. I was horrifed when I saw it and I have only told my sister about it, and you-all. Last night I made another version with QuickTime, using more "compression" and more "frames per second" and it took like 171 minutes. This may or may not be better. Someone at work told me you might have to have a lower-quality video for it to look right on YouTube.

Stay tubed.

I'm Done

I finished my film. I posted it to YouTube. I can't believe how momentous it felt to a) find out how to use Quicktime and then b) find out how to join YouTube and upload my "video" to YouTube and c) discover my computer would do it and d) do it.

Editing turned out to be really fun. You get to find non-verbal solutions to things. And iMovie has a thing called Clip View where your scenes are set out in clear boxes and you can move them around like Tonka Trucks. Other iMovie things are not easy at all and are actually perverse and hateful.

There wasn't once I made an edit that I wasn't scared I'd lost half the footage with it (I usually had) or that it would not magically appear on the Clip Board but actually disappear instead (it often had). But then I learned footage was often tucked into chunks you didn't suspect it was in and also it appeared just anywhere, not at all "on the Clip Board" as the book so sunnily predicted.

I re-imported the footage over and over because I kept losing vast chunks of it. How a technically insightful person would have laughed at me! I used up more than half of the space on the new external hard drive I bought. At this rate I'll have to buy a new hard drive for every sketch. It's worth it. That's how into making films I suddenly am. Making a good edit is unbelievably satisfying. It's like writing a whole new joke!

Yippee!!

Poem #5

I don’t know what the game is. I don’t know what your name is. But your name has been in places I want mine to be. So it’s all sly petitioning and flattery. If I could tell you how this fills me with shame. But not as much as I envy your name. Give me two toothpicks, I’ll use them as swords to fight my way to a committee board who can give me the nod, give me the card, let me be part. I dreamed I was trying so hard to be part; someone said “She’s trying so hard to fit in.” I was, ambition was all I could sit in. Incomplete acts toward people who already had what I wanted. I do it all over again in dreams and every day I’m still haunted. Do I think it will ever end? Do I think I won’t be like this again? I’m like this asleep and awake – searching some parting of waves to let me in. Do I think it will magically paper over the person I am? Who I’ve become while I try to fit in? Tie stones to my neck, I can’t stand the shame. It’s just for a name.

I'm Just Sayin

Quo Vadis?

The mice and I have reached an uneasy detente.

They do what they want, ignoring all forms of traps and repellents, and I hope they'll go away.

Is that detente?

I just saw another one. This despite D-Con, the electric repellent, the snap traps.

Did you hear about the mother bear in New Jersey who climbed the tree to die with her cubs after she got shot?

There can't be anything more touching than a dying bear climbing a tree to die with her cubs.

Nature is powerful.

Secure the Perimeter

I read an article in the Times this week where some military men were criticizing the Bush administration's sanction of torture, not just because it's inhumane, but because it doesn't work. In general, it seems humans aren't persuaded to cooperate with people who are shovling electrodes in to them, or pouring water into their upside-down nasal cavities, or the other things too numerous to mention.

The military men had an extraordinary suggestion, which was to use marketing techniques rather than torture. They said American marketing is way more up to date and sophisticated than is our brand of torture (brutish, stuck in the cattle-prod era). And it's true! As someone who works in advertising, I know well the time, money and effort devoted to what might make someone buy a particular kind of cracker, or return to a cookie that they've abandoned. In the latter case, a huge effort is expended to make consumers remember their childhood experiences with that cookie, to connect with feelings of closeness with a parental figure, and to march out of the house nearly hypnotized by remembered warmth, straight to the store to buy those cookies and return to a time when someone cared about you and nurtured you, unlike now when people are so demanding and strange!

I think most people have a general idea of how marketing works, but the level of detail may not be known. The study of consumer habits is scientific in its dense, focused probing. How well could we penetrate an enemy combatant's emotional armor if we A) knew their language and B) used some of these same techniques? What if we tenderly examined their need for emotional stability, their desire to feel in control of their lives, their affection for clean drinking water, and all the other habits that are scrutinized with scientific intensity and focus by marketers in America every day? What if we then used their memories of their childhoods to get them sobbing and confessing they do indeed plan to commit jihad, but not if they can have that can of Coke and that yummy Mr. Chips cookie, because then they wouldn't need to wage war, they would just need the cookies and Cokes to keep coming!

I know I haven't nailed this bizarre-ity yet -- perhaps the Daily Show will, tomorrow night.