Athens Round-up: Day Three - Narrative to follow when I ain't so dang tired

Writing oneself into a corner can still be profitable some times

Man, I've been stuck on a Bronze Age Sky God story called "Spec-Ops Delight" for a while now. As the name suggests, it's the third in a trilogy (EVERYTHING HAS TO BE) with "Aircraft Carrier Delight" and "War Room Delight". But I think I'm going to break the rules and leave it at a duel...ogy....for now. Naming the country was perhaps a fool mistake and though sending a half dozen Clint Coltrane types into the palace of The Foreigners leader may seem like a recipe for komedy laffs, I'm finding it isn't!

But one good thing came out of the scraps. I'll just paste it in here.

"They were the top fighters of the U.S. army, men who made Clint Coltrane look like a collection of fast food condiment packets festering in the backseat of a station wagon with no air condition on a summer’s day, while you write overwrought metaphors and keep wondering why the publisher hasn’t called back...It's important to note that the U.S. special forces spoke in English, but only technically. Military shorthand, urban slang, spanglish, codenames, film quotes, redneck slang and other sub-genuses of that great beast - American English - all mixed and matched within our heroes lexicons. "

Trying to figure out how they would sound when speaking this hyper bastardized version of English was the hardest and most enjoyable part of brainstorming for this short story. Hopefully I can find some way of working it into future projects.

Meanwhile, brainstorming for the short film sub project proceeds apace, with some serious light bulbs going off while riding the train into work today. While chucking down some dialogue I remembered something my collaborator (Myspace Man) said to me when we first met to discuss what would become Momentum. He mentioned how a lot of the writers he'd turned down couldn't' seem to realize that writing a film is different from writing a play.

Now I have tried very hard to view plays as I view any medium of story telling and I'd say that by now I do in fact feel this way. But I must admit that for years I have had to fight down a bias against them, which made any play have to work twice as hard for me to enjoy it as much as a movie, television show, book or comic. It's tricky to sum up, but I guess there was just a certain smugness and winking to the audience in a lot of the first plays I was exposed to which smelled to me of a big circle-jerk between those who made plays and those who regularly patronized them.

For reasons I have yet to nail down into precise explanations, romantic comedies can be the absolute worst for coming off as poorly adapted plays. A very good, recent example of this would be a British film I saw recently that is called Scenes of a Sexual Nature.

It tells little stories of seven pairs of people all enjoying a sunny day in Hampstead Heath park. Every single one of these stories is ether contrived, old hat or both and made all the more grating by having a kind of swagger to their telling which is there to tell you that they are totally real vignettes of things that happen all the time in real life yet are fresh and ca-razy. The dialogue always sounds unnatural and is delivered in the manner of an amateur play actor who isn't quite sure about the difference between projecting your voice to the back rows and shouting. From the incredible "Man gets caught looking at attractive woman by his less attractive wife, then fails to lie his way out of it" scenario to the "Pair of gay guys discuss things that you wouldn't expect from two gay guys, like wanting kids or being monogomous, as if they're real people or someting" scenario....the whole thing just screamed "Crappy amateur play!" at me.

SO to come back to the point, when I was tossing down dialogue this morning and thinking back both to my collaborators remarks...I tried to use that crappy movie as a benchmark against which to measure my own words. Put a gun to my ahead and ask for a short itemized list (this happens all the time) of what makes a film script that reads too much like a play and I'd give you this:

1) Smug self awareness.

2) Far too little communicated by what is seen as opposed to what is said. Basically an overabundance of exposition.

3) Very specific situational happenings being put out as universal truths.

But I'm open to input on the matter!

Fwaaah

Just a little doodle - more Athens and Athens notes to come when I'm not feeling so burnt out on computers at the end of the day. But I thought I'd mention that the script I've been developing for MySpace Man has gotten to a draft which warrents going into pre-production! So hey hey, that ball is starting to seriously roll and though scripts tend to need continuous attention in the form of minor tweakings, the majority of my work on that is done and I can now focus on new things.

Since there are stunts and CGI involved, the pre-production will be lengthier than for most 20 minute shorts. Not wanting to lose inertia, my collaborator has asked me if I want to make a simple (I.E., two or three characters, mostly out side so lighting is easy) five to ten minute short in the meantime. So I'm brainstorming away and scraping my notebooks to try and have a synopsis of something fun and easy to make...

Also, I got my tax refund today and by golly it is pretty okay! I definitely feel better about what I spent on Athens now, that's for sure.

Athens: Straddling the Aegean

I guess dog mess is a pretty serious threat to the human race

Sheesh!

It feels weird....

....not being in Canada on its birthday.

Though, thanks to Mum and my Aunt Sheila, I do have a fat wedge of chocolate cake wrapped in a small Canadian flag!

HAVE FUN GETTING DRUNK IN THE STREETS EVERYBODY.

I

I'll be doing my laundry.

Hopefully nobody pees on the War Memorial on Elgin St. this year!

Addendum: Though not nearly as big a deal as a national birthday, England is having a rather special day today as well. The national smoking ban has finally come into effect. It's kind of funny to read about, having seen all the usual pro and anti arguments having played out in Canada years ago. Some of my coworkers were theorizing about how this might "ruin pubs and bars" just as I remember various pundits doing on CJOH news. I reckon it'll be just the same as it was in Canada, a lot of meaningless whinging for the first three months and then acceptance.

The best part about a smoking ban is that, touch wood, I honestly do not think it could ever end up being reversed. Can those of you in Ottawa or Toronto honestly imagine it happening?

Athens: Greece's Pieces Part Four

Oliver Brackenbury, standing in front of famous things(like he did something) since 1982.

Right then, you've probably noticed all the scaffolding and other construction paraphenalia surrounding the Parthenon. This is not a recent thing, actually, and if you see a picture of the Parthenon where it isn't having restoration work done then that picture is at least fifty odd years old. The following is a quick video of me spinning on the spot to try and connect things a bit better. I breath SO LOUD, apparently?

The one moderin-ish structure atop the Acropolis is a small museum, whose air conditioning is a godsend after climbing in the heat. Walking around it I noticed an amusing theme where you'd keep running into four out of an original set of six statues or two out of an original set of four plates. Looking to the information plaques there was a highly repetitive theme of delicately worded explanations telling of how the British had taken various artefacts "for safekeeping during Greece's more turbulent times" and....you know....still had the sodding things. The Elgin Marbles are a pretty classic case where the English didn't leave anything for the Greeks.

Anyways! There are approximately a million billion more things I could go on about with all the other ruins, but it would get monotonous! Suffice to say, I spent the rest of the day seeing more of the sights and I had a great dinner, near yet more ruins, with which I tried the greek liqour known as Ouzo. Have you tasted black licorice? Then you have tasted Ouzo, in solid form. My waiter suggested I have a slice of fried cheese as it is supposed to compliment the Ouzo - but it did not! TRUE STORY.
So I'll wrap this up with a fuzzy picture from my hotel window. I tried to capture the Parthenon as it is at night, all underlit with several powerful spotlights. I suppose I should have walked back up to it when night fell - but I was plum tired and needed to get up early the next day for the cruise!

Ah geez

Like a lot of people I knew and know in Canada, I used to be in the habit of making all sorts of cynical jokes regarding terrorism that reflected how little I took it seriously. It's a pretty abstract thing for someone living in Ottawa.

But I had to dial that back a great deal when I moved to London, where the 7/7 bombings were still a recent memory and some people could become justifiably offended or at least give you a foul look in response to such humour. Now the majority of "terrorist threats" which are "thwarted" tend to just be a case of police not liking the look of two brown guys checking their watches, but todays event in Picadilly Circus might just suceed in convincing me to take this stuff more seriously. I'll have to see how the investigation plays out...

Addendum: The story develops.

Athens: AcropOliver

Forced play on words? Doesn't really work? YOU BET.

Anyways, coming up the side of the Acropolis, I stopped (along with about the first fourty Japanese tourists I saw. Some stereotypes are there for a reason, as they say) and snapped a few shots of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus - which was refurbished about fifty-seven years ago so that it could be actually be used. This is unlike the other theatre leading up to the top of the Acropolis, the Theatre of Dionysus, which has been left to ruin.Eventually I reached the gate at the top and saw the what is arguably the centrepiece of the Acropolis...The Parthenon!

Athens: Greece's Pieces Part Three

The neighborhood of Pelaka wraps around the northern and eastern sides of the Acropolis. It's known for good cafe's and shops. I ate here a couple of times and enjoyed several walks through the neighborhood. If you don't like being harrassed by middle-aged men who want you to eat at their cafe, you might not like it as much as I did! As with taxi's, don't take any of their shit - there will be another cafe in ten to thirty seconds of walking. To my delight, there is a real dearth of fast foot in Athens (I saw one Subway and a burger chain called "Goody's", that is all!) and thus a vast multitude of cafes and restaurants. Moving on!
I shot up the wrong path while trying to find the entrance in the wrought iron fence which surrounds the Acropolis and all the while I kept noticing this mountain palace in the distance. It definitely seems to be the second highest point in the city and nobody I asked could tell me if it was a mosque, a palace or what. Ten thousand internet points for anyone who can figure it out! It's also very easy to end up wandering through people's homes on the eastern Acropolis mountainside. More than once I wound up in people's back yards, but luckily avoided causing an international incident. Eventually I figured it out though, I'm such a clever boy.
Tonight we finally ENTER the Acropolis. Until then let the cold, touching, loving, court-order defying stare of Triplex keep you company. I found him in a great print shop in Pelaka.

He's gonna touch you in places no Doctor has ever found.

A little victory

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but the Network Rail depot I work at didn't have recycling in any form whatsoever. Considering how much paper an office uses, this is just absurd. So I've been busily fighting my way through several layers of indifference, bureaucracy and incompetence to try and get a regular paper/cardboard pickup here. I started this about three months ago, maybe a bit more.

Yesterday we finally got a bin dropped off and it felt so damn good to get that reassurance that if you raise a big enough stink and make sure that enough people know about something, you will eventually get results. I then, with some help, took the mountain of paper from the top of a spare desk (which I'd been encouraging people to use as a stop-gap measure until the bin arrived) and cleared it all out. This felt pretty good too, since we no longer have a veritable Wall of Oliver dividing the office (seriously, I'd have taken a picture if I'd thought to - it rose about five feet above the desk surface and cast a remarkable shadow in the afternoon).

Meanwhile I've also had some success bringing recycling to my house. It didn't get any pick-up due to being inside a courtyard, but I found a spare blue box and have been taking the house's recycling to a nearby drop off point once a week for the past five months. It takes all of ten minutes and gets me outside while my pizza (or whatever) is cooking in the oven. This is in addition to the little things (i.e. not leaving appliances on and turning lights out which nobody is using). Doing this stuff has allowed me to finally regain a little sanity. Back in January there were some nights I'd genuinely lose a lot of sleep from worry about what's being done to the one planet we've got. At the worst moments I couldn't help feeling that my life goals were flaky and irrelevant given where, it felt like, we'd be in twenty or thirty years.

I mention these things not to solicit a pat on the back, but because I think that perhaps there are not enough personal, small-scale examples of success with THE BIG OL' ENVIRON-MINT THANG for people to see and feel encouraged by. I think that it can be not unlike when someone sets out to start a big exercise regime and radically overhaul their diet...then looks at the long list of things to do as well as how long before they'll see results, becomes discouraged and throws their hands in the air. I've watched people see all the things they can do to be more environmental and interpret it as some kind of long list of optional chores.

But as with getting fitter and eating better, I really think that living more environmentally is something better approached as a changing of, or integration of new, habits done at a pace that you can assimilate into your daily life. Once you no longer think about being mindful of electricity use, get recycling....once you no longer think about that, look into composting and so on. Well, at least that's my advice.

Meanwhile, on the Big Picture front, Australia is banning old fashioned light bulbs all-together. I think this is a great first step and hopefully more countries will follow their lead. I mean, think about just how many light bulbs there are and what a difference it would make if they were all the greener variety.

Athens: Greece's Pieces Part Two

On day one I rolled out of bed for the free hotel breakfast, then rolled right back in until 2pm. Thirteen hours of travel (including some hilarious delays in Frankfurt) plus jetlag just wiped me out. But I forced myself up out to go see the main sights and sights of Athens which it is famous for - The Acropolis and its surrounding ruins. My guidebook map was not so hot but luckily the hotel was helpful and had a guide which a) labelled every road and b) wasn't so large I'd have to lay it out on a conference table to get the best use. Though I went with a Rough Guide to Athens, I'd almost recommend not to bother with guide books. None of them offer very satisfactory maps and a little bit of web research could have told me most of what my book had to offer.The bus system isn't too shabby, though they have this system where you don't drop the ticket in a box - you stick it in a stamping machine that puts the time on it (tickets are valid for about three hours I think). If you're a cheap bastard you can usually get away with not stamping your ticket, though I wouldn't suggest it on the tram system as those aren't so crowded as to leave the inspectors flabbergasted into inactivity. Thus a total of two bus tickets got me through my entire time in the city... Point is, I took the bus up Syngrou and, getting off one stop later than I meant to, started trotting around The National Gardens. Inside which you can find the Zappeion, which I thought was their Parliament BUT NOPE. It's just used for special functions. Oddly, I didn't take any pictures of it. Odder still, the Greeks use their parliment for a parliment.The paths in the National Gardens are very sprially so I got hell of lost for a while before popping out near where I wanted to be, conveniently. Specifically, I was outside of Hadrians Arch. Thanks to my bee-yoo-ti-full angle, you can see the Acropolis through the arch.
From there it was onto the first of the big six and I expected to part with a chunk of my cash here. Luckily you can get a very good deal on seeing the six main sites of central Athens, any of them will have a ticket vendor that can sell you an all-inclusive ticket for €12 (about $17 CAN or £8). In the end I only saw four of the six sites but even that felt like a pretty good deal for what I paid. First off, right beside the Arch but behind large fences, is the Temple of Zeus.
It's huge, as you might guess - but first here is a picture with a LADY standing near it to give proper scale.
It was around this point that a similar feeling of being steeped in history to that which I've felt in certain parts of London hit me. Not too surprising since Athens has a history which dwarf's that of London just as London dwarf's that of the New World.
The fact that several areas around the temple were archeological sites in progress only augmented the sensation!From here I then crossed over to Dionysus Promenade, which leads up to tomorrow's pictures at The Acropolis!

Not Athens, sorry!

All my pictures are at home, waiting to be uploaded when I get home from work.

But I do want to share something. I'm sure Tony Blair's stepping down (finally, he announced it almost a year ago) this past weekend has had a reasonably prominent place in news outside England. What might not be coming out at a loud enough volume for all to notice is the answer to the question "So just what is Gordon Brown going to do?".

This article breaks it down into various categories, the Climate Change section being the one that prompted this post. I added the bold section but otherwise left it unedited.

"Mr Brown commissioned and accepted the results of the report on climate change by Sir Nicholas Stern in October 2006, which said that global warming could shrink the world economy by 20%. He has supported EU and British targets for carbon reductions. So he is on board for international action over climate change, which has come increasingly to dominate world economic discussions. In March 2007 he said: "The foundation of this must of course be a new international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions beyond 2012." He added: "My ambition is to build a global carbon market, founded on the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and centred in London." He has even appointed the former US Vice President Al Gore as an adviser and action on global warming is another issue on which he is likely to differ from President Bush."

I've found myself wobbling a bit in regards to wanting Gore to run for President. He certainly could do a lot if he won. But if more world leaders start appointing him as a kind of climate change court wizard...well, it's a tough thing to figure out in which role he could accomplish more.

Athens: Greece's Pieces Part One

Phew! So I'm back and today itself wasn't too bad. It turns out that my magnificent prize for being temp of the month was a free lunch at a nice restaurant in Holborn with my recruitment agent, a nice girl with a penchant for athleticism. That plus half a day off which left me in Central London...but the heck with that -OFF TO ATHENS.

Crossing the channel, just as we hit France.

So yes, I left late the previous Saturday, stopped over in Frankfurt and then hopped down to Athens. I arrived at something like 2:30am local time. I was a bit knackered but luckily had the chutzpah to not take any shit from pushy cabbies. Athens, no exaggeration, probably has about one taxi on the road for every three other automobiles. One piece of solid advice I can give is that if you go to Athens and a cabby seems pushy or suspicious? Fuck'em, wait (often literally) thirty seconds and another will come along.

The view from my room, looking down Sygerou avenue - a main strip that runs from the docks up through central Athens.

Sorry to just drop two lame-o tame-o pictures and end it here, but jet lag just coshed me over the head and I have to sleep or die. Tomorrow I should be over the time displacement and be all set for a long narrative about my first day, in which I tromped all over the classic sites of ancient wonder which lay within the city proper.

Vacation Status: Phase One Complete

Now to head off to Uffington!

Plenty of pictures etc will flow through my interloins (WHAT?) starting Monday. Until then here is a store which I greatly wish had been open when I walked by it in Glydfada.

Goddammit I'm on the internet while in Athens

While looking up the details on the tram I want to take to the beaches of Glydfada tomorrow, the first paragraph of the main page struck me as too tragic not to share. Bold has been added by the douchbag with the sunburned forehead.

"Forty years ago Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis (the first one) was photographed proudly tearing up the tracks for the original tram of Athens, which in the eyes of many people signified the switch from being a city where people relied on public transportation to one where everyone has their own car. This led to the Athens of the last three decades, choked with pollution and traffic, where getting from one side of the city to another required a lot of patience or some imaginative routes, which as more people discovered them also became choked with traffic. It might be said that when the Athenians embraced the automobile they screwed up Athens completely. "
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Addendum: A big hello to the person in England who found this website by typing "I wet myself today" into Google!

Okay NOW I'm gone for a week

I just had to share this first of three episodes in Adam Curtis' latest series The Trap. The man is just brilliant and makes Michael Moore look like a chubby teenager with his hand down his pants while swearing loudly at a poster of Ronald Reagan riding horseback.

Belated birthday sketch

Strangely, I finished doodling this before the conversation in the last post's comments truly got under way. Alas, the text on the right got smudged and had to be replaced with cee gee eye!.

Well, screw everybody, I'm off to Athens tomorrow. I'm taking a vacation from work and all things internet OR computer related until late Sunday the 24th. Email me if you wish, just know that I shan't be up on my correspondence until at least that point in the future.

Thanks to everybody who wished me a happy birthday! It was pretty swell. I greatly look forward to coming back from my vacation with a clearer gameplan for the rest of 2007 and piles of photos of Athens.

And maybe some finished blueprints for Scarlett RoboJohannson 1.0

Addendum: Superman fights the real life KKK in the 1940's

*Tootle Parp*

Wheeeeee - apparently I have the same birthday as Chris Onstad. My webcomics success is now assured by this divine omen.

I know I've mentioned this to some folk already, but I thought I'd mention here that in the UK there are "Youth" discounts as well as the usual "Student" discounts. I think that's pretty okay, since it's unfair to assume that someone going straight from High School to the job market should be expected to pay the same rates for transit etc. as someone further down the road, who isn't working the kind of jobs one can get when only in possession of a high school diploma.

The cut off for this "Youth" discount is, you guessed it, twenty-five. My gorgeous Youth Rail Card picture is now but an archaic relic of times gone by! Here's hoping a pack of archeologists don't abduct me while I'm checking out the Acropolis in three days time.

Less than twenty-four hours of being twenty-four to go...

This panel is from chapter three, page nine of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell. I recently spoiled myself with the softcover and after the mandatory re-read I feel like I may have found a format that sits at just the right point along the line from rigidity to flexibility. The above panel is the standard size used throughout the work in a 3x3 grid. Always, the page can be split along those lines and throughout Campbell cleverly chooses to merge different combinations of these panels in various manners which change the rhythm and flow of a page - as well as simply allow larger illustrations!

If I run with this then I suppose it is a theft of sort, but honestly I think that technique is one thing and style another. To me, "stealing" the former is always acceptable because otherwise nobody would ever learn how to do anything but by reinventing it entirely from scratch. The latter is much less so, with cherry-picking being widely accepted as another method of learning but flat out copying being just as wisely frowned upon. Unless, of course, it's an homage or you're being postmodern.

Meanwhile, if the Adam Curtis documentary I posted below got you interested in the man and his work, there is an rather good interview with him that has the headline "Our anger is being ironed out of us".