a short sweet list of people who are going to hell

*yawn*stretchstretch*

*breaks out the ole rusty snarkwriting muscle*

*takes a sip of water*

Ahem ... 

PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO HELL

(that you might not think of immediately – could be your neighbors, anybody. terrifying)

• Every landlord I’ve ever had
• Prison wardens
• Everybody who doesn’t read
• Dentists
• Boring people* **
• Cat slanderers
• Fruit stickerers
• Meter maids*
• Republicans
• The inventor of the car alarm
• People who say “irregardless”
• Shoe eschewers
• Birkenstock enthusiasts
• Morning people*
• Happy joggers
• AM radio talk show hosts
• Drivers who don't use their blinkers
• Anyone who owns so little music they don’t need to categorize it
• Bottle non-recyclers*
• Clowns*
• Cheaters (dictators, dopers, line cutters)
• Unannounced visitors*
• Perfume overdoers
• Basically most people who have never had a mohawk*
• Some popes, but not Pope Francis
• Leaf blower operators
• 50 item buyers in express lines, but that one’s pretty obvious
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Comic artists who don’t give women enough clothes
• Writers who don’t give women enough lines
• Producers who don’t give actresses enough money
• People who take up two parking spots on purpose
• Dog poop non-scoopers (obviously; one offense is sufficient though, which is important to note)
• Everyone (owners, investors, bus boys, mailmen, hosts) involved in the day to day function of restaurants that quit serving brunch fifteen minutes early (or ever, potentially) or serve fake maple syrup
• People over 30 who don’t own a Ramones album, unless they were raised by wolves
• Richard Spencer (made being a nazi fashionable; ruined the undercut hairdo) < duh
• People who sell their old punk t-shirts on eBay*
• Mimes (no reason)

*Some offenses can be lessened by campaigning to pass the ERA, recycling bottles, working at a soup kitchen, or writing an essay (pro or con) about the Oxford comma

**Meant in the literal use of the adjective "boring," not for ex. to indicate employees of The Boring Company

And it turns out Mitch McConnell is Satan, actually, so sorry if I just ruined your day.

Jennifer Parker's pants, revisited

I hereby eat my words from the previous post, regarding Back to the Future, in which I claim Jennifer Parker v.2 (Elizabeth Shue) wears a lame reproduction of her original pants, as today I received my copy of Back To The Future: The Ultimate Visual History, and was able to pore over photos of Elizabeth wearing pants in BTTF 2, from which one can only conclude she was wearing the same pants after all, or if not the very ones, a close enough facsimile that they did not and do not deserve my mocking.  See for yourself (pic 1: Claudia Wells; pics 2 & 3: Elizabeth Shue)

Also, I attended the last day of We're Going Back 2015 and watched BTTF in the parking lot of Puente Hills Mall, timed so the clock tower lightning strike happened at 10:04 (or within a minute or so) and with a live Delorean chase by a van full of Libyan terrorists.  So many fan-driven Deloreans were in attendance, I kept losing count – at least 15, maybe half of which were time machines.

People were handing out "Save the Clock Tower" flyers, and the mayor of City of Industry announced they would be keeping the Twin Pines Mall sign forever.

I love Los Angeles, my weird home.

The Future Is Now

Back to the Future turned 30 years old this year. And October 21, 2015 is the future date Marty, Doc, and Jennifer travel to at the beginning of BTTF 2 (although Doc probably travels to 10/26/15 first). So right now the world is exploding with BTTF celebrations.

This is one of my favorite movies – I think it had perfect pacing, perfect casting, a perfect script. And Crispin Glover. And a Delorean ... which is a time machine.  Someone deserves a prize for thinking that one up. 

This, the week of the Back to the Futureverse 1985 future, is only happening once. So I only briefly tore my hair out with indecision before rearranging my finances to find $200 for a ticket to Back to the Future Film School, the last day of the We’re Going Back event.  I wish I could be rich and unemployed this week (I'm working on a show about time traveling teens!) so I could go to the whole thing, but I’m happy with what I was able to get – Sunday should be the best day for me: a full day of panels on the car design, editing, cinematography and so on, and then a screening of the original film at Puente Hills (aka Twin Pines / Lone Pine Mall) with some “surprises” (which I can only hope is code for a Delorean accelerating to 88 mph in the mall parking lot and then vanishing in a trail of fire).

Much has been written about the cast members who for various reasons were replaced with other actors during the filming of the trilogy.  First, pretty boy Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly, and they were well into shooting the film before he was deemed a little too serious for the role and replaced with Michael J. Fox, necessitating reshoots of all of his scenes. And neither Claudia Wells (Jennifer Parker) nor Crispin Glover (George McFly) agreed to appear in BTTF 2 or 3, so George McFly was cobbled together with existing footage and an actor wearing prosthetics (for which Crispin Glover later sued), and Claudia was replaced with Elizabeth Shue. The last scene of BTTF was reprised for BTTF 2 as its sole purpose in the first place was to set the audience up for a sequel (that I’m going to propose no one had written yet at the time that scene was penned, since most of BTTF 2 has nothing to do with Jennifer & Marty’s kids and the story plays out kind of like “oh crap, we have to do something with the kids before we get into it, since we said so in the last movie”); said sequel segues from the first film with an overlap of that scene. In other words, the scene at the end of BTTF with Claudia Wells playing JP was repeated at the start of BTTF 2 with Elizabeth Shue as JP. They weren’t trying to fool anybody. But they did mimic the scene shot by shot, like Weird Al Yankovic’s “Eat It” and James Franco / Seth Rogen’s parody of that awful Kanye West video with Kim Kardashian on the motorcycle.

Ok, I’ll include it.

Anyway, the thing that fascinates me most about all this role swapping in Back the the Future is that the costumers were unable to find another pair of Jennifer Parker’s pants for the repeated scene.

At best, that's the acid wash variant. Maybe just pink pants with some plants drawn on.

Also they’ve done something terrible with Elizabeth Shue’s hair, but to be fair it was the ‘80s and there was nearly nothing un-terrible done to anybody’s hair.

‘80s hair:

This was a thing to behold. Bangs curling out and then downward and also another set of bangs going upwards. I remember girls coming to school with their bangs blowdried and hairsprayed in both directions but the rest of their (permed) hair still wet because what happened to it was irrelevant. My friend Scott used to refer to this as the "tree branch" hairdo. It was really a very exciting version of a girl mullet. No one wore hats in the winter. The hair was the main event.

Elizabeth Shue doesn't look that bad by comparison.

zombie blog

... back from the dead.

Since I have time capsuled my blog away for five years to hibernate like some cryogenic Walt Disney corpse experiment and am just now throwing cold water on it and giving it coffee, in case you are new here, allow me to introduce myself. 

First, let's get this out of the way: I'm a cat lady. (Don't be afraid. They're in style now, like beards, and knitting.)  I live in Los Angeles and work in the film industry, and am not a Scientologist.

Second, if you don't live in Los Angeles or are new here, you may have heard that we don't really have seasons.  This is untrue.  We have: fall television show season, awards season, pilot season, and hiatus.  It can get really hot during hiatus!! Be sure you have all the window air conditioning units you need by June, because by the time it gets unbearable, everyone has run out of stock and won't be ordering any more, even though you will almost certainly use your A/C in January.  If you need to buy (or sell) a coat for some reason, you must do so before Christmas, because after that no garments are for sale except macrame bikinis and flip flops (and $100 Joy Division t-shirts at Urban Outfitters). And in fact, most apartment buildings in California are actually made out of cardboard, so you will want coats to wear indoors during awards season.  And never tell anyone in the Great Lakes region or the northeast that you're cold, even if your teeth are chattering against your phone. Deny it.

I digress.

Third and lastly, this blog used to be (usually) titled "Struck With An Axe" 

.. but I realized that was a little cumbersome.

(modern update, by Paperdoll on Flickr)

__________________________________________________________

*I know it's a bit melodramatic to suggest five years would be long enough to hide a time capsule, but remember in the '80s we thought we'd have flying cars by now. So even the pros screw up.

spin around, ninjas!

Total Eclipse of the Heart ... but way better

Literal Video Version:

Hurra Torpedo:

(and here is the original for reference, if anyone can bear it)

totally motionless except for her heart

I hate this Sarah Palin chick. But I get it – her job is to woo impressionable voters with a bombastic geyser of agitprop (or woo oil executives – who knows whose vote counts anymore); she’s here to blaze McCain’s campaign trail, or something.

Really, she wants to drill for oil everywhere; she’s ok with teaching creationism in schools; she opposes sex-ed (and has, consequently, a pregnant 17-year-old daughter); she’s in favor of a constitutional amendment denying rights to same-sex couples; she supports capital punishment; she’s in the NRA; she wants to take polar bears off the endangered species list? She’s a member of Feminists (sic) for Life who … please do not mistake them for actual feminists … oppose abortion in all circumstances, including when the woman’s life is in danger. So where does this woman get off running for office? She should be home popping out babies. Right? Isn’t that what her god put her on this earth for? I really hope I never run across this woman in a dark alley.

Interestingly, her Wikipedia page has been protected from editing due to repeated violations of their biography policy, which I can only hope means that so many people (besides me) wanted to commit their venom to print that they could no longer trust anyone to say anything nice, and would like us not to say anything at all.

Anyhow, enough about her, but another thing getting my goat is that journalists are being arrested at the Republican convention, illegally searched, personal items (notebooks, etc. – whatever might make the news) confiscated, and so on; the most notable arrest: Amy Goodman. What? I’m sorry, but … what are they so afraid of?? Cause it’s really hard to imagine (pick your right-wing poison, but I'll say) Anne Coulter being arrested, for instance, while covering the Democratic convention. Go, Homeland Security. I feel very fucking secure. I’m sure of lots of things now. Thank you.

(kate covertly puts head into pillow, then screams).

ok. ok. I’ll be alright.

an exchange from shopgirl:

Lisa: You want some advice? you never call him. But if he calls you, you talk to him, but then act like you have another call. Keep him on hold for a long time. Like longer than you think is possible. And break dates. Always break dates. Right around the holidays, cause then he’s just stuck. And fellatio. The sooner the better. And a lot. Act like you love it. After he’s addicted, cut him off. That’s when you got him.

Mirabelle: yeah, I couldn’t do all that.

Lisa: How come?

Mirabelle: I’m from Vermont.

*sigh*

On a different note, I’ve noticed things that bore me (jobs, say) are a ton more intolerable on the first day than on subsequent days. What does this mean? Are we evolving to adjust to discontent? Is complacency something that takes getting used to?


Am I an abstract pile of defense mechanisms masquerading as a human being?

Does anyone remember Dwight Twilley?

I never thought I’d say this (I like Abba, too, while we’re clearing the air here) but I miss the 80’s. It was ok to hate disco and the rich. And to want our next president not to be totally geriatric. And there was Square Pegs.

Marshall (playing The Family Feud board game in study hall): Things you keep out of the reach of children ..

Johnny Slash: Jars of tarantulas.

I have a (cassette) tape somewhere of ridiculous things people left on my answering machine. I don’t know how to preserve voice mail in the digital age, other than leaving it on my phone too long. Some things were easier in analog. Good thing my friends aren’t as funny as they used to be.

Hm .. anyway, my favorite thing on the tape is “Kate, it’s Joe. I’m in jail,” whereby a guy cancels his first date with me and asks me to call his landlord in for questioning. But here’s a close runner-up (paraphrased), left by the impossibly hilarious Scott Puhl for my then-roommate Jodi, who was his girlfriend at the time:

‘Substances you scrape off of a pitchfork.’ Hm. Substances you scrape – I know! I know!! FAR marmarmarmar .. ‘ … and the survey says, “ding ding ding ding ding! FAR marmarmarmar”’ (click)


Then there was that episode of Square Pegs where Johnny Slash was in the lunch line and said with no irony, “Can I have some more of the yellow runny stuff? And some brown lumps?”

ah .. those were the days.

would you look at this?

.. some years ago ... maybe in 1993 or so, my bro and I saw a comedian do a stand up act somewhere in Cleveland (I think it was Dom Irrera, who did this hilarious new year's eve skit that went something like "every year people say 'i can't believe it's 2000!' What'd they expect? It's 1978 again? Do you think they did that in the year 4? 'I can't believe it's 4! Four years ago it was nothing!'") .. anyway, he said "would you look at this??" and held up a sign that said "THIS." My bro Aaron used to do these funny things too, like drive up one of those runaway truck escape ramps to see what would happen (you have to get towed, if you ever wondered) or get this insane Kermitty grin on his face and then point somewhere and say "Look! There's someone famous!!" (People look! Really - try it!) I'm pretty sure also I got the best prank phone calls from my youth from him.

There's the one that goes like this: you find a phone number and keep it, because you'll be calling it over & over again. (Thank god for cell phones, and the lack of a reasonable directory for them, eh? This was back in the paleozoic era, before caller ID, when drug dealers had pagers and only the secret service had cell phones - the size of bricks - and if a friend had an unlisted number it was because his mom had an ex-boyfriend who wanted to kill her.) Speaking of the Paleozoic Era, read about it, lest you've lost faith in society during the last seven years or so; it's simply amazing what can happen in a few million years!!

So anyway, you call this number, and you ask for Salvatore. (I actually saw a version of this one on Freaks & Geeks! I don't remember what name they used - but Salvatore's a good one.) Then you do it a bunch more times, in different voices, or heck - have different people call. But you do it enough over, say, a day and a half, that they want to throttle you. Then you call back suavely and say "Hi, this is Salvatore. Any messages?" Then, the other great one was this (why this worked in this, the post-Aquarius age of the liberated woman who has two jobs and kids to raise by herself and can't be sitting around cooking roasts all day I'll never know, but I swear, in the 80's, it did)- you call someone and put on your best "housewife" voice, and .. if a man or a little kid answers, you hang up .. or you ask to speak to wife / mom, but then they get suspicious .. anyway, you get the mom / wife on the phone, and you say this: "Hi!!! I haven't talked to you in so long .. how ARE you?? WAIT - I have to go take the roast out of the oven!! Wait! I'll be right back." And then you just sit there. And listen. And look at your watch.

I was reading in a book recently that a bunch of psych experiment subjects actually failed to notice a woman in a gorilla suit running across the screen when instructed to watch carefully for a certain occurrence in a basketball game, because their focus was elsewhere. So while you've been screaming at gas pumps and wondering whether your bank will go belly-up (or having conniption fits over the legality of gay marriage in - hey! - both my home states, if you're that sort of person, but probably not, since if you're reading this, you're almost definitely someone whose company I can tolerate) here's something you may have missed:

"Fox News in Bush League" (incase that video link runs away ...) 

Bush administration gives Fox news talking points. With an agenda. Obviously.

Wow! Can you believe this? I mean, of course you can believe this - we all knew this. It's like saying that a lot of actresses have nose jobs, or that all the added security at airports since 9/11 is smoke and mirrors (an aside I'll be getting to in a minute), but here it is actually being hacked about on MSNBC. What's this? A new era of truth in news and politix? Is this really happening?

So I was at the airport - LAX - recently, and one of the elevators connecting the bag claim / passenger check in / departure floors in Terminal 5 was emitting this profuse burning machinery sort of smell, and when asked, all the security people were denying it, or saying maybe it was a car outside, and all kinds of weirdness. But then, not five minutes after I got someone to actually ask someone else (who?? who? who knows) on a walkie about it, five fire trucks showed up outside, along with 2 more fire dept. vehicles and a cop car and two airport police cars and another policeman on a bicycle. And this caravan remained, cordoning off a line with police tape and preparing for disaster, until I gave up making sense of the scene and drove away. My determination: the staff at airports has increased in number, and the lines have lengthened, but the added security is dumb as rocks, and hasn't much interest in calming people when something weird actually happens. Well, anyhow .. if this is the future, I would really like a better car. Can we just make them fly? I don't care if I have to pedal the damn thing.

Thanks to Terry Lbs. for sending me the video. xo

illusion

You have perhaps been sitting in a car at an intersection, spacing out. The car rolls backward - you're driving a stick, and have accidentally let your foot off the break. Whoah! Better drink some coffee.

Then a bus next to you has rolled away, and you can see your surroundings: you're not moving at all. And very suddenly, it doesn't feel like you're moving anymore either. You thought you were moving, actually felt it, because of the visual cues telling you that you were.

I don't know about you, but a little thing like that can freak me out all day. I remember as a kid scraping up my knees in a bicycle spill, and not feeling anything until I noticed I was bleeding, then screaming out in pain. I always thought it was one of those little kid things, magical thinking or whatever. Not so, I don't think. I have a huge cavity in one of my back teeth, right this second, and it was only after I discovered it that I realized I'd been having toothaches.

In a way it is my expectation that is causing this experience.

So let's agree that very realistic motion/sensory hallucinations can happen (to sane & sober people - I was going to say "unaltered," but that makes us into pets that still need to be neutered, and ruins the eerie effect) quite easily, and that pain can actually be prompted, or at least heightened, by the right visual cues. We all know also that some other physical sensations can be provoked solely by visual cues, and the visual cues need not necessarily be realistic ones. Characters in video games will do, allegedly, for some people. I digress.

Still with me?

I have noticed when I manage to keep the same cell phone for awhile, that my ear is trained to pick out its ring amid a barrage of background noise; that I actually sometimes "hear" the phone ringing in the music I'm listening to, when it's not there. I hear something similar, and my mind fills in the gap. Maybe we can call that a sort of auditory hallucination. Whatever we'll call it, when we take all of this stuff into consideration at once we recognize that what our brains feel it necessary to do is gather bits of information from our environment and leap to conclusions about what those clues mean. What's the point of this, if we can so easily be tricked?

As I think the way to understand something is to dive further into the murk, check this out.

Although a little bit of variation occurs within each square (even unshadowed), square A and square B are the same color. Yes. But you can't see it that way, no matter how hard you try, can you? Neither can I, and I'm a painter. There is this toy at The Exploratorium in San Francisco which consists of two colored squares within two other (differently) colored squares. You have a little rollerball, like you use to move yourself around in the arcade game of Centipede (remember Centipede?) that changes the color of one of the inside squares, and your task is to roll it around until the middle squares match. It's supposed to be difficult: the color of the outer square changes your perception of the inner square. I am exceptionally good at it. I was once sent to get a quart of paint without a color chip, and matched the desired shade of lavender by memory. And I still cannot see that those squares are the same color.

This thing has driven me nuts. I spliced a bit of square A in Photoshop, and moved it to square B. Then I took a piece of square B, and moved it to square A. It appeared to change color as I moved it. Crazy. Should we be unable to do both, it is clearly much more important to recognize something as poorly lit than to recognize what it actually looks like.

This illusion was designed by (as you can see) Edward Adelson, who is (or was) a professor of vision science at MIT. (How cool is that job??)

If you want to play for awhile before moving on, here are some fantastic optical illusions:

illusions of light at lottolab

more lightness illusions by Ed Adelson

online exhibits @ the Exploratorium (including some auditory illusions)

When I was new to L.A., I ate lunch at a cafe with a raised wooden patio. Everything trembled. I thought it was a tiny earthquake and, à la L.A. Story, everyone was ignoring it. I've been there enough since to ignore the tremors myself: cars driving by cause them; people walking on the patio cause them. It's just a shaky patio. I ate there a few days ago; a girl at a nearby table was compulsively wiggling her foot, making my whole table shake. My coffee was clinking. Crossword puzzle answers leapt out of bounds. But I knew it wasn't an earthquake. How many times do we have to experience something before we're sure we know what it means? Is the first time we see or feel something the only time? After that, does whatever knowledge we acquired recede into the background, to build the framework within which we position the experience when it happens again? Or has the experience been cached? To save time - especially when threatened - do we simply recall what occurred before, without considering new information at all?

I suppose these sorts of dilemmas drive some people to philosophy.

A philosopher / cognitive scientist, on illusions and consciousness:

Dan Dennett TED talk (< click me)

In German there is a word, katzefrau. It means cat woman. Also: funktionslust. Function desire, or the joy that comes from being very good at something. In English, we have a word for throwing something out of a window.

And there we go. I retire for the night.

Maybe, like a Hemingway story, what I've said will take shape gradually, after you've put it all away.