Five Questions from Nickykaa

Yoko is running a meme on her LiveJournal account where you can either ping her to ask her five questions that she will answer, or you can ask her to ask you five questions, and then answer them on your own journal, offering the same conditions to your readers.  LiveJournal refuses to play right now, though, and their formatting sucks ass, so I’m cross-posting here, where I’d rather post anyway.

These five questions to me came courtesy of Nickykaa:

1)  What music are you listening to these days?

KT Tunstall’s album Eye To the Telescope is currently the soundtrack to my life.  I also fell head over heels in love with Kirsty MacColl this autumn, because her songs on the albums What Do Pretty Girls Do? and Tropical Brainstorm were smart and funny and sexy and powerful and ironic and joyful and self-conscious and wistful and bombastically, tragically wounded, sometimes all at once–  only to discover to my shock and dismay that she died, years ago.  She and her sons were scuba diving off the coast of Brazil in a no-boating zone when some asshole millionaire came zipping through in a powerboat regardless.  She pushed her one son out of the way of the boat, saving his life, but at the cost of placing herself in its path, and the boat hit her and killed her.  She was 40, the same age as I am now.

In the car with Jack, the two of us spend a lot of time listening to the soundtrack of Katamari Damacy, the Playstation 2 game, which is a whirlwind tour of musical genres and styles, mixed together with a healthy J-pop/ electronica sensibility and unified with variations on the main Katamari Damacy theme.  It was hard to find, but well worth the acquisition.

In the car by myself, I play a lot of The Crystal Method, preferably while blowing the doors off much bigger cars.

I fill in the gaps with eclectica, or streaming music from Itunes:  jazz from the University of Wyoming radio station in Laramie, or any one of the ambient stations, like Drone Zone.

2)  What quality or qualities of character do you most try to nurture in your son?

Patience.  Compassion.  Reverence.  Wonder.  Grace.  Politeness.  Joy.  And I try to teach them by example.  Even if I’m not always successful.

3)  What’s a book that you read between the ages of 12 and 20 that had a significant influence on your perspective on life?

This is a difficult question to answer, because I’m not sure how to define “a significant influence on my perspective on life.”  Age 12 was 8^th grade for me, plus the very start of freshman year of high school;  age 20 was when I graduated college.  My day-to-day life during that entire period was suburban and stable and relatively sheltered, and my worldview, having little to do with consensual reality, remarkably consistent.  It was all about movies, and music and video games and roleplaying games.  I certainly read books– including a whole slew of material I was assigned for all my classes– but I don’t remember any specific one of them dramatically changing the way I thought about the world or perceived what was around me.  Those sorts of shifts happened earlier, when I was a child (The Chronicles of Narnia), or afterwards, once I was out of college (Drawing Down the Moon; Women Who Run With the Wolves, The Great Good Place, etc.).

If I had to pick one anyway, I might answer Wendy & Richard Pini’s Elfquest graphic novels, because I spent more time thinking about that world and those characters and the issues in their storylines than any other single milieu that comes to mind, which probably altered my behavior.  And because Wendy’s art style indelibly stamped my own.

(Ha ha ha ha ha! But you know what the true answer is? The Play! Because it kicked me off on a whole metamorphosis that’s had ramifications down to this very day. That comes up during an entry I haven’t finished writing yet…)

4)  If you were given complete creative control of the next big Disney animated feature, and it had to be based, like most Disney animated features, on some pre-existing legend or work of literature, and you had an ironclad contract stating that Disney had to produce and release the film no matter what creative decisions you made, what legend or work of literature would you base it on?

This is another one that’s difficult to answer, because the qualifiers make it mean something different to me than it probably does to you.  Disney has a formidable array of talent, but they also adhere to a strict style and a particular story ethic, and you’re not going to get the best results from them trying to force them out of that style or that ethic.  So the question, “What legend or work of literature would I want to bring to life working with Disney?” probably doesn’t have the same answer as, “What legend or work of literature would I want to bring to animated film, given complete creative control and infinite talent?”

In any event, you made me think longer and harder asking me this question than any of the others, and here are the answers:

1. Joan of Arc.  Nobody I know of has ever done a decent job of it, and they could make it look good.  I’d keep ’em somewhere between the Hunchback of Notre Dame bg design and the Sleeping Beauty character design, and probably use Michael Morpurgo’s exquisite retelling of it as the bible, since he emphasized her conflict and humanity, and added some conventions that would really work in an animated film.
2. The Odyssey.  Or any of the Greek myths.  Someone’s got to make them atone for that awful Hercules and the Pastoral Symphony part of Fantasia.
3. Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremaine, or even better, Bernard Cornwell’s Redcoat, which has the freshness of being told from the opposite side.  I love RevWar, and outside of a mediocre TV series, nobody’s ever even tried to do it animated, much less succeeded.
4. Elizabeth George Speare’s Calico Captive , if I could manage to structure the plot slightly and bring it to a conclusive ending that wasn’t a happy, “Oh look everything’s OK!” ending.  Fuck you, Pocahontas.
5. Zylpha Keatley Snyder’s The Velvet Room, if I can make it look like Alton Raible’s illustrations.
6. Wendy & Richard Pini’s Elfquest. (Having brought it up.)  Disney would be a perfect match for Elfquest, and it’s not like anything they’ve ever done in the past. (The Pinis actually pitched it as an animated film, to somebody;  I remember seeing character models for Cutter.  Must’ve fallen through, though.  I would’ve heard about it if they’d come out with it.)

I would also willingly take a crack at remaking Swiss Family Robinson. Or The Time Machine.  (Having brought that up, too.)  Anything with time travel.

5)  If there were a movie made of your life, what would the opening shot be?

The very first answer that popped into my head was “Me, with a rifle over my shoulder and a sword on my hip, standing with one foot on the parapet of a crumbling skyscraper, looking out over the ruins of civilization.”  But that won’t work.  If you were far enough out to see the ruins, you wouldn’t be able to see me, and if you were close enough to see me, you wouldn’t be able to see the ruins.   Unless it was an over the shoulder shot.  Or maybe a long drift out.  None of that damn Sam Raimi swoop cam, though.

The second answer was, “A fade in from black to a really, really extreme close up ¾ shot on a piece of notebook paper, angled at about 45 degrees, as if it was on a drafting table, with the point of a #2 pencil sliding through field, leaving a line.”  That’s the sort of thing they really start movies with.  You know, you could fade up somebody’s name or the title in the lower left quadrant of the screen over it.

The third answer was “Animated 2-D bunnies in the Lee Menendez/ Charles Schulz style dancing on a pink background.”   Why not?

Never mind that! Who’s gonna play me?