Yes, I Am He

I'm blogging. I spend a majority of my time in my mother's basement. And I'm currently playing Grand Theft Auto IV. My individuality has drifted out of my body and onto the floor, where it mixes amongst Dr. Pepper cans and Circuit City receipts. To where did the communist that boiled within me just a few years ago leave? Moscow, I guess. Or he's being pressured to drink by my overpopulation-driven concepts of fatalism.


In the end, I am the result that everyone expects. At the moment, this infers a convoluted mess of syllables and pretension. And the reason for all this: I have seen the world for what it is. I have read Watchmen.

He arrived at his mark, baker's sons and pastor's wives clammering below the scaffolding, when a tear ran down his spine...

Of course I exaggerate my ethos (but I feel like typing all dramatic-like, which works even better when listening on repeat to what director Joel Schumacher calls "a religious experience" - the theme song to his 1987 movie, The Lost Boys). Here, you can listen as you read the rest of this post, entitled: "Overproduction: A Prologue with Quick Cuts"

P.S. I'm definitely singing this song at my sister's wedding, so long as she marries a rich guy.
P.P.S. Look for the YouTube video of this song in which somebody created a slideshow using random pics of emo girls he found on the internet. Creepy slash awesome slash juicy.

"Overproduction: As Has Been Noted"

As some of you, whose names I've already listed in an envelope far above the stage, know: Watchmen is a graphic novel by Alan Moore. It is considered by many to be among the best comics ever - if not the best - and is listed among TIME's top 100 novels of all time. Because I am the stereotype I've claimed to be, I must concur with the heraldry. I'd contest that novels with and without illustrations are of a different ilk, but Watchmen is of the universal "can't put 'er down" variety, accompanied by the likes of Cat's Cradle and those books in Urban Outfitters with naked people.

He wrote on, his stuffy words bouyed by the run-on sentences of times long past...

I will not give away anything of the plot, thus limiting the terms of our engagement. There is a point of parlance for us all, though, and that is the arrival of a Watchmen movie next year.

I went to IMDB to measure my elation: Confused. Low.

I was first caught off guard by the thought of a director from Green Bay (Zack Snyder), having imagined that the cold weather captains filmed little more than the gridiron. I then fell apart at the realization that this man, although of a history I do not personally know (300), was likely and horribly misplaced.

Watchmen, in my mind, is intelligent in large part because it allows long scenes of dialogue to support its images - a kind of reversal of fortune in the comic world. From the moments I've seen of the Spartan lovefest, words are buried beneath stylized kicks and man-chests. Was this director hired under the notion that "all graphic novels deserve the same treatment." I hope not yet expect so, with the saving grace being that a cinematic disaster may at least spur a search for the purer source, up the river from the peeing men.

The hangman covered his head with a matching hood, condemning them both to the darkness of Hell. All the while, the man continued to etch his story into his arm, using naught but the bone jutting from what once were his fingers.

(By the way, Watchmen is hardly written in the style I've conveyed here. I'm just being experimental, cuz I've become a scientist in preparation for Coldplay's new album. I'm going back to the start.)

Overproduction is the curse of "modern" film making. Constant cuts and crazy angles for the sake of the same. Overscripted malarkey to emphasize the import of each and every of the fifty or so lines. The Lost Boys and its 80s big-budget fun has been sent to Neverland, having returned with pirates seeking the gold of the 5-second attention span.

It's happening in movies and it's happening everywhere else. Disappointment in Conan O'Brien is largely tethered to the predictability of the act, as demonstrated by impersonators. X-Play, a video game show for which I once held out hope, has transformed into 30 minutes of commercials, press releases, and broad analysis, out of which maybe 2 minutes are actually bronzen.

Silver... Strange that the last color he'd see so resembled the light of heavens fabled. Yet as he fell from his post - finishing his final sentence on a comma - the color rose from the removal of his hood, caught on the platform above.

Is the trouble that there is simply too much demand for new media, encouraging the production of trumped up stories of one-note wonder? My answer is yes, but the demand is falsified, created by the foolish idea that man must work because there is work to do. Very little legitimate work is actually done, with farmers and robots doing the bulk of it. The rest of the world's papers and ideas are shuffled about over and over again, rarely resulting in something new enough to deserve being called "new."

Where do the artists rest amongst the nothingful chaos? If I did know exactly where, then I'm too lazy to explain it here; but there certainly is a place. Watchmen is there. Grand Theft Auto IV might be, on a virtual level. Lost Boys certainly "is."

It was a woman's necklace, glinting at him in the setting sun. Silver, exhumed from some far off land for the purpose of coming here, to rest upon this bosom and wish him a fond farewell.

This entry was posted by DoktorPeace, on Tuesday, May 06, 2008. You can leave your response.