Milo has the coolest dragon wings that I got from a street vendor at the Pride March this summer! So I got him a red sweatsuit (6 bucks on sale at Mervyn's; the Mom's club told me where to go for the cheapest one). $5.00 worth of red and black felt, pipe cleaners, and glitter paint, plus some old spraypaint I had lying around.
This was a little tedious but once I figured out not to cut out and sew on individual spikes, and once I started sewing enormous basting stitches not caring how it looked, the work went really fast. It took me about 2 hours, with interruptions and cats. If you look too closely you will see knots, dangly threads, screwed up stitches, and pinpricks of blood.
Then I realized the wings had a stiff back piece that went right over the spikes. I figured this wouldn't matter - he would surely take the wings off most of the time, so underneath them: spikes. During a preliminary trying-on, Milo demanded spikes on the wing backs too. That took an extra 20 minutes; no big deal.
We took a trip out to the shed (spidery, dusty, overgrown with vines, thorny, ew) to find spray paint. I had to stand on a bicycle to open the back gate which was locked way beyond my reach. Then on the way around to the shed, realized the "stray" cat had no food or water, as I suspected from its insane meowing the other night. Fed it (again) and watered it. Oh well... obviously it survived our neighbors being out of town... Someone else must be feeding it too, or it's a good scavenger.
Once the black paint dries all the way I'll brush some glitter on. When I say "brush" I probably mean "dab on with my bare fingers". Hands are such useful tools. Why bother to find a paint brush and then wash it?
I feel like I've fulfilled my "crafts" quota for the entire year, people! Also, I feel a bit proud of my girliness (a rare feeling) as I own sewing supplies, had the sewing-vision to plan a reasonable fast cheap way to make this, knew where the fabric store was, and all that kind of thing; unlike when I tried to caulk the baseboards (which I still haven't finished: I resorted to duct tape.)
I'm messing with Vox to show my mom how to sign up for it & use it. We were interested in importing her blogspot entries, but couldn't figure out a way to do it, in our 2 minute "learning how to do stuff" attention span". She just went to some sort of Library 2.0 conference and had a lot of questions which I felt surprisingly well qualified to explain at insane length.
We made a bit more of a Flickr account as a good intro to "Web 2.0". We put the blog on the Flickr account; tagged things, posted a photo to the blog, got the cameraphone hooked up to the Flickr account. We made a LibraryThing account and browsed around LT for a while talking about ways to apply it to libraries and to her specific library at work. Then we messed with some wikis. Put the LT search badge on the wiki. Read a bunch of stuff on PBwiki on a private site. Put photos on Vox. Made all the tentacles of everything connect to everything else.
Considering we were doing all this at 11pm while completely exhausted, it's pretty amazing what we covered! A whirlwind tour! It made me think of 10 years ago when she first had to give classes (at a different library) on "The Internet" and the web and using email. Or was it pre-web... I remember explaining what gopher was and demonstrating it for her, super long ago.
It really would be fun to do that kind of work as a consultant or a teacher. I kept thinking how as a business, you could send someone to a conference this and spend quite a lot of money and still not necessarily get a clear picture. But getting a consultant to come into your school, or library, or business, or nonprofit, and listen to what work you do and what your process is, and then have them help you use the tools that are out there - well, it seems so useful.
All of that came inbetween driving to Monterey, me & Milo going to the beach, the aquarium, walking all over town, and then driving back! I'm exhausted but very happy especially at my nice morning in the internet cafe and then at the beach digging around in the sand.
The other awesome thing we did tonight - when my sister came over, me, my mom, and Milo were all on the floor orking like sea lions. The couch (huge and brown) `was the wharf, pillows on the floor were the ocean, and we orked and bellowed gloriously, shouldering each other with our vast bulk, arguing about space on the pilings and maybe about fish in a game without words but with a lot of cracking up. Laura joined right in of course... no questions necessary...
I saw "Jet Li's Fearless" tonight with Charlie at the Metreon and "Ong Bak 2: The Protector" last night with John, at home. Both movies were excellent but in completely different ways, and since I saw them back to back I want to talk about them together.
"Ong Bak 2", or "Tom Yum Goong", was raw and rough with a certain unsophistication of plot and production values that I find appealing. Like Ong Bak Thai Warrior, it had super-heavy nationalist politics. And rightly so considering some of the problems in Thailand right now. I would say if you like a slick movie with a plot that's very clear to follow then see something else. If you like gritty intensity, and incredible, incredible fights and stunts and explosions and things like that, you'll LOVE Ong Bak 2. Tony Jaa's character, and it tells you something about the movie that I don't remember his name or if he even had one, grows up as a young boy with his fabulous loving incredibly cute elephant, Bo, and Bo's baby elephant, Kan, who's like his brother. Corrupt officials collaborate in kidnapping the elephants & exporting them to Sydney. Tony Jaa then runs around Sydney having wild Muay Thai fights, breaking everyone's arms, doing that elbow-on-the-head thing that seems to be the signature move of Muay Thai, and running up walls. I mean he really runs up walls. And flips up in the air like the most beautiful graceful thing you've ever seen. The chase scenes and stunts and fights were often so mind-bogglingly excellent that John and I did had to rewind and watch them several times, often stepping through frame by frame while screeching in delight and disbelief. We've seen a lot of martial arts movies together and are raising Milo to understand the beauty of that one scene in "Iron Monkey" where they're fighting on the burning wooden poles.
Be warned if you have kids that the brutal violence factor of Ong Bak 2 was such that I'd consider it PG-13 though I have no idea what it's rated - I rented what I think is a bootleg copy.
There was a particularly impressive scene in the spiral staircase of the fancy hotel, that's shot all in one take. It's about a 10 to 15 minute long steadycam shot, following Tony Jaa up a million flights of stairs as he fights person after person. Watch for it and be impressed! Notice the ways it builds on the first-person-shooter game genre, the home kind not the arcade kind -- in a really good interesting literary-referentialness-way, not in a "And here is the sequence in the movie that is supposed to make you think of the video game we will shortly be releasing" the way so many scenes in recent Star Wars movies.
I loved the speedboat chase which was so unsophisticated and sort of gratifying my teenage-boy-ish love of giant scary explosions and ridiculous stunts. I also love the way of cutting the scene to show the same scene from different angles, a bit non linear in time. However, I was aware on another level of these scenes that they were horribly dangerous and I was liking their realism and that liking is probably not right. i.e. that some stunt dude in Thailand got paid like 500 bucks to be lit on fire and be thrown through the air out of a fucking speedboat for people like me to consume the movie. Well. There it is, I liked it and was overcome with respect for the dangerous shit that went on in Ong Bak.
I could talk for 5000 words effortlessly about the politics of Ong Bak 2 but will sum up with: Sincere poor country boy with heart of gold defends spirit of Thailand and is utterly dedicated, protecting women who are sexually exploited, exposing corruption in the military and police, fighting injustice, exposing evil wealthy people who kill endangered species for the worst of purposes, and busting up evil drug rings. Did I mention that rich people suck in this movie? (The sexual politics of both Ong Bak movies were somewhat of a problem for me. They are messages to men to protect the virtue of Thailand's women, and about the vulnerability of women and children. So, while I am happy to support the anti-sexual-exploitation message of the movies, I would love to see more of an empowerment message in there too. )
Oh yeah, and did I mention that Tony Jaa is really really hot...?
"Fearless" was a whole different deal. I expected something a little more Once Upon a Time in China-ish, and the opening scene seemed to confirm that expectation. Then everything changed! It was a deconstruction of what it means to be a hero and a warrior, and I think also of masculinity. Many traditional martial-arts-movie tropes were set up - the opposing schools with their Si-funs and disciples, a scene in a restaurant where you just know the restaurant is going to get trashed, that sort of thing. But all those elements were humanized and given depth so that you could see the violence, ambition, thirst for fame and vengeance, all harming people and their relationships, undermining everything good in life. Like- not just "Uh oh, this nice restaurant is surely about to get trashed. Those railings? They're toast. - but instead "Uh-oh, he's about to trash his friend's restaurant." This builds with fairly huge obviousness - it's not subtle - but it builds slower and deeper than I kept expecting the movie's development to be. It was during the scene with Huo Yuanjia and his best friend in the ring in the public square that I realized, "Oh shit. The hero is completely psychotic and is not going to be redeemed very easily, not in the usual get-defeated-in-ring and have an ephiphany way a-la-Jackie-Chan..." And I also felt that what Huo Yuanjia was saying about the allure of ambition and fame, and of fighting to the roar of the crowd, and pride, and stuff like that, I felt whatever bits of me that feel a similar feeling, and it was uncomfortable and I learned something. I think anytime you can see your own potential for evil, it's instructive and you have a chance to correct course. But then I would think that since I take the idea of self-criticism to heart, as did this movie, in a somewhat characteristically chinese communist way. (We even had the Cultural Revolution moment where learning to be in tune with peasants and planting rice ... well.. you have to see it.)
It's always particularly a pleasure to watch Chinese movies with Charlie because she lived, worked, and travelled in China and Hong Kong and is fairly well read in Chinese literature, and though I don't know any Chinese and have never been to China, I've read a lot and know a little history. So we notice some of the interesting details of things together or can point out stuff to each other. Tonight she was laughing hysterically during many scenes and hooting and clapping, which I also enjoyed because usually I'm the hooting giggler in movies and she pokes me and shushes in an evil disapproving WASP-in-church way. It's way more fun to cheer in movies.
During the fight scene in the tent with all the Westerners, so circus-like, I had a meta-moment and a sort of breakthrough where I realized very uncomfortably that it was commentary on the (international) martial-arts movie industry and that I was at that moment, sitting in that tent, in the Metreon! And that Jet Li was in part talking about his own life and career. Did you see "Unleashed"? That shit was embarrassing, I felt so bad for Jet Li in that movie. He always seems super intelligent and dignified. So watching this made me super happy that he got to say some intelligent things. Besides the fight in the tent, which was classic and often very funny, my favorite moment of this movie was probably the philosophy discussion during the tea ceremony.
Mentally I was totally writing the slash fanfic between Yuanjia and his friend, and then between Yuanjia and Hercules O'Brian, and him and Tanaka. Oh, so bad but so juicy and good!
The fights were very good, and shot extremely close-in with a lot of cuts. There was wire work but not the horribly obvious "fantasy" kind. I don't love the cgi-effects and Matrix-style stuff, but they were still great fights with subtlety, wit, and grace. They were brutal and disturbing, and I had to close my eyes sometimes or was wincing. As I thought of all the brutal fights I have watched as so much beautiful abstract choreography & metaphor, I was feeling a little bit glad that I was disturbed by the film's violence.
Ridge told me an interesting story about one of their first users, a guy who needed to build a part for some project at his company. It would have cost him a thousand bucks and 2 weeks to get the part. He made it at TechShop before they were officially open, found a design flaw, made it again, and was out in 4 hours with the project done for under $150: something that would have cost him $2000 and a month to do traditionally.
TechShop isn't quite a co-op, but I was reminded of the atmosphere of co-ops, a happy barn-raising everyone pitching in feeling, as I scouted around the workshops and classrooms. I'm very tempted to go and volunteer, and offer to start up a TechShop community, maybe here on Vox. The idea of all the people doing projects, also documenting those projects, appeals to me! And also the exercise of building community, and contributing to community trust.
I'd like to go next week and do a little barn-raising, and document TechShop's process of building their physical infrastructure as well as starting up their very cool business. My friend Strata is volunteering there next week and so I'll also get to tag along with her for a while, and learn some cool stuff.
I'll write more in a while about the cool stuff I saw at TechShop today...
This is my first time using Vox. I'm impressed! It's very slick and beautiful. The integration with Flickr alone makes me swoon with joy.
LIz! I didn't know you were on vox. Saw you on someone's neighborhood list. I remember seeing you at BlogHer.... read more
on Machine dreams