Sunday, June 08, 2008 Covington: Anything goes but what? By Gary Covington Looking In
THURSDAY evening. Not a word down on paper. Not even a topic. I think of the people I meet who say, "Oh, I wouldn't mind having a go at writing." and I wonder how many days or weeks would pass before they too were staring at a blank pad.
By rights, the Sunday piece should be a breeze. Sundays are for relaxing, for forgetting the gloom and doom of the daily news. On Sundays, I can scribble away about anything. Problem is what?
I could write a few lines about the latest trends I've noticed in the book publishing world or comment on yet another "best of" list -- this time "The most respected novels of the past forty years" -- and groan a groan that I haven't read any of the titles and only one of the authors, J.G. Farrell, who wrote The Seige of Krishnapur. I've not read that -- I'd love to get my hands on a copy -- but I have read his Singapore Grip, a 600-page tale of the Malay Peninsula at the time of the Japanese invasion in 1941.
The Singapore Grip? Ah -- you'll just have to ask Mr. Google and I wish you well because, with all the exponentially increasing even-as-you-read-this stuff out there in cyberspace, I'm finding it more and more difficult to look up anything.
It's true that computers and I don't get on. Never have. They sit there on the cyber-cafe‚ table, shoulders hunched, a little camera duct-taped to the casing, eyeing me, daring me to ask Jeeves or Google or Yahoo and I do and up pops a list of ten million possible web pages in 0.23 seconds.
Does anyone seriously consider that I'm going to click and scroll through that lot, calling up a site and battling past the groups and home and links in the hope that the information I'm looking for might be there? It's easier to pull a book off the library's bookshelf and look up the index.
And why is it that pornography clips virtually download themselves –- a technique I discovered quite by accident and three afternoons of trying -- while I can't even run a film clip of two fish swimming in a bucket?
No, no angler I; the fish in a bucket was the very first example of computer animation I saw, on television and about twenty-five years ago. The clip lasted only a few seconds and showed two brightly colored fish diving and surfacing and swimming around in a bucket of water. For those days it was astonishing; one of those "what will they think of next" moments and a little like a moment repeated just the other day when I watched my very first DVD which happened to be the movie Beowulf.
It took me a bit to get to the film. First up the viewer is asked what language he'd prefer -- English, Bahasa Malay or Squiggle. English. Click play. Then -- would I prefer to watch scene selections, interact with Ray Winston (?) or change my mind about the language? Click movie and I've realized that DVDs cost twice as much to rent, come in a bigger box but otherwise offer exactly the same as a regular VCD, jumps, wobbles, freezes and all.
I enjoyed Beowulf but couldn't help wondering if the movie was worth the huge technical effort. Straight fantasy computer animation like Toy Story or Cars or even Shrek -- fair enough; cartoons have graduated to three dimensions with amazing visuals. But people? For some reason, I found myself watching Beowulf's characters rather than following the action; comparing the computer-generated image to the real person. Ray Winston I don't know (no offence Ray), but there was Anthony Hopkins playing Anthony Hopkins, it took me ages to sort out who was John Malkovitch (an actor always worth watching), and delicious, delicious Angelina Jolie.
I picked up on Beowulf from the annual Scream Awards show on Channel 23 a month or so ago. Thinking the show might provide article fodder I picked up pen and yellow pad and settled down to watch.
Three awards in -- at the Most Memorable Mutilation award -- realization dawned that I'd seen it all before. The show was a repeat -- what Channel 23's promo people now call an encore, as if we viewers had actually asked for a re-run and not that the station has run out of programs.
I'd cursed -- I'm doing a lot of that lately -- looked at my blank yellow pad and wondered what to write about for my Sunday piece. Anything goes but what?
