Smart Kitty

So that post title is misleading, in that I am not posting any video but rather am just talking about making a video.

I got a video camera and filmed a bunch of stuff I plan to edit (with help!) into a two-minute funny thing. Whether it will be funny or not remains to be seen. However, here are some thoughts I had about it.

1. You know who has enthusiasm? Young people! Everyone in this video is at least 10 years younger than me. And they had a lot of energy and life. I think I vampired some of it from them, because I had more energy and life after hanging around them. Yes, vampired is a word now.

2. When people ask you if you are doing something for college, you just say yes. Even if you aren't in college! You know why? People like when college students go around doing things and don't want to hassle them. They want to encourage learning. Learning!

3. Sound and light equipment! Why aren't there more consumer options for this? Finding a consumer video camera of decent picture quality is easy. But do you want people to be able to hear and see what you are filming? That is harder. There are almost no reasonable consumer mics to buy. I rented one that was worth over $5,000! It was really silly to see this ginormous boom mic connected to a camera the size of my hand. Lighting, well, there is more stuff out there for that but it also is a little hardcore once you get past something the size of a flashbulb.

4. Real life doesn't look very real on camera. Seeing things like normal pictures on the wall, cars driving by, people in the background ... actually makes stuff look more fake. Strategically putting up a bunch of pages from a magazine looked more like lived-in decor than actual paintings and photos. No wonder actors are confused by what a real face looks like and get crazy plastic surgery. The camera distorts reality! Some sort of philosophical point about that!

5. It is frustrating to not know how to do things!

6. Pulling around a person on rollerskates = not the same as a camera dolly.

7. Businesses are nice about letting you film them ... unless they are a non-descript parking garage. Then they warn you not to get any footage identifying where you are. It is a parking garage!!! It looks like lights and parking spaces! If you can identify a parking garage that does not have signs (which this one didn't), then you spend too much time in parking garages.

8. I laugh a lot. We filmed a lot of scenes where sound was unnecessary so you just hear whatever is going on. Nine times out of 10 what was going on was that I was laughing. You know what's funny? Everything everyone does.

These are fresh shiitake mushrooms. I grew them from a little mushroom farm. Look, I grew something! This harvest came after a week (but excludes two big ones I already ate).

Thanks to Joy and Kyle, who gave the kit to me for my birthday and have grown many many things, including mushrooms.

I guess people are talking about Wonder Woman. They never did make that Wonder Woman movie. I'm sure that is partly because Hollywood just couldn't keep its pants on long enough to keep its wiener away from Joss Whedon and let him work on the ginormous creative problem Wonder Woman presents as a character. Here it is: She is boring.

There is tension between staying true to her (let's face it, corny) roots and angsting her up for the superhero-with-a-flaw generation. As it stands, Wonder Woman is supposed to be perfect. And that sounds really annoying, even for a superhero. (I know she has several versions of her origin story, but aren't they all about how she is basically the most perfect specimen of a superior race OR how she was literally sired by the gods?)

Superman sort of has the same problem, but he has an arch nemesis AND everyone from his race is dead. That's pretty emo. But the 2006 Superman movie had him floating above Earth in a Jesus pose, benevolently looking down on us and then saving us again. Annoying! I prefer actual Jesus, thank you very much. Superman can kiss it! Learn a lesson from that bomb, future Wonder Woman filmmakers.

Excluding the campy Adam West Batman, the caped crusader has always been a moody gent with sexy mental health issues and dark thoughts. The internal conflict of the series is now at its highest with the sharp-faced Welshman who now portrays the dark knight. So the Batman franchise (like many other successful superhero stories) is a Russian nesting doll. Inside the greater battle between good and evil is an emotional battle between dark and light and another battle between Bruce and Batman and another battle between peace and violence and probably some more battles I can't think of right now. (Ditto for Wolverine, although I thought the movie sucked a nut.)

So what do I think? Why, I'm glad you asked. I do not have all the answers. But questions are pretty awesome, too, right?

1. Do not make her an actual Amazon or spawn of Greek gods or anything where you would have a schmaltzy montage of her participating in Olympic sports while wearing one of those short, white Greek-mythology dresses that looks like a gauze diaper. She is a freakin' warrior, so war her up a little instead of making it look like she comes from the island of sexy hairbrushing and discus throwing. I don't want her coming to my planet like some kind of preachy do-gooder. Maybe she was kicked out of a camp for badass warrior chicks for doing some rogue shenanigans or opposing a messed up philosophical extreme they started to favor. It could be a matriarchy where men are not equal. Social commentary!
   
   

2. Giving Steve Trevor a ride back and then helping him fight Nazis made sense for World War II. Now if you make her a spy, you just know we're going to have to watch her discover something unsavory about the government and become disillusioned. Yawn. Maybe her people caused some bad stuff in our realm and she feels obligated to fix it. Maybe it was her parents! And Steve Trevor was on their special island not because he was lost, but because he was there to thwart them. And there are operatives to defeat. Operatives!

3. Wonder Woman has to have nemeses. She doesn't have a rogues gallery to pull from, so someone has to be creative and make them up. And we know how Hollywood feels about creativity!

4. Sorry, no invisible jet. But I think the bullet-proof bracelets and truth lasso can stay. I am also fine with the American-flag corset she wears.

   
   
5. As much as people my age might feel attached to it, TV-era Wonder Woman cannot influence this movie. It would be like letting Adam West era Batman influence the current Batman movies.
   

I noticed how many patterns and colors I have in my very small apartment. For some reason, this made me want to take a picture of them and put them in a collage to see if my apartment looks like it belongs to a crazy person. I didn't think I liked floral patterns (I still think I don't!), but there are like 9,000 of them in my apartment. So I guess I do? This photo doesn't even include all my wall-hangings or the cat blankets I will put out sometimes for the cats to nap on.

I do seem to go for a lot of the same colors.

Left to right:
Throw pillows on couch
Painting in the bathroom
Framed piece of an unfinished ad from the '50s, living room
Throw pillow for the chair
Lamp, weird placemat/tablecloth on top of my bar
Bedroom rug
Kitchen floor
Shower curtain
Tissue box in bathroom
Bed
Painted prints, living room
Painting, living room
Coat hook, living room
Table runner, living room
Clock, living room