The race, deconstructed.

Throughout this analysis of those components that make up a race, I will refer to a classic, Olympic-style,100 metre sprint foot race as a reference point. The 100 meter sprint involves multiple competitors each traversing a fixed distance in as short a time as possible. More accurately, each competitor is judged relative to each other competitor. The actual times recorded do not matter absolutely. 

A time trial race is no different other than that the competitors complete their run separately. After each competitor has attempted the trial their completion times are compared in much the same way as in a traditional simultaneous race. Some events will allow competitors to make repeated attempts. This is an advantage of the time trial format over traditional format, in that if one competitor has a “bad run” in a traditional simultaneous race it would be unfair on the other competitors to request the run void and have it repeated. Conversely, a time trial format allows these individual repetitions so that each competitor may achieve their best time. This, however, in a way misses the point of traditional races – after all, the logical extension of repeated individual time trials is simply to compare each competitors historical best times, resulting always in only one winner: he who holds the world record for that event. 

Relays are another interesting variation on typical athletic sprints. Although at any one time each runner is competing against each other runner, all are part of a team, and the race is actually composed of teams competing against each other. The passing of the baton and switching of pressure from one team member to the next is merely an obstacle that the team must overcome as part of their traversing the distance. In this way a relay is similar to a hurdles event in that competitors (either as teams or individuals) must negotiate a fixed number of obstacles during the course of the race. These obstacles – the individual hurdles – are actually a part of the race track. Without them the race would not be classified as a hurdles event. They are integral to the race. In this case the combination of track distance as well as the hurdles themselves forms what I will call “the Challenge”. It comprises the goal activity to be undertaken. In a 100 meter sprint the Challenge is “run 100 meters”. 

The second component of a race is what I will call “the Medium”. This is the thing that is measured. In the case of hurdles and 100 meter sprint, the medium is time. Each race must contain these two things in some form or another, however as will be shown below, they are not restricted to spatial/temporal dimensions. There is a third component which I call Restrictions. These entail any additional rules the race may have, most often specifying the type of locomotion. Competitors in a 100 meter sprint are restricted from riding bicycles or driving automobiles, they must cross the distance required – complete the challenge – on foot, and I expect there are additional restrictions on footwear and clothing, which all fall into this category. The restrictions component exists merely to differentiate existing conventional races which, at their core, share identical challenges and mediums (usually some distance and time, respectively). Ultimately, restrictions are a part of the challenge, however they have been separated here when dealing with traditional races. The category is irrelevant when discussing games and contests not usually described as races. 

Compiling these three components, a 100 meter sprint can be said to have a challenge of 100 meters, in the medium of time, with any number of restrictions regarding garment, vehicles, age, gender, gait, etc.

What I liked about Stalker

If you haven't seen Stalker, that's fine. There's no harm in reading this, but don't deprive yourself of the film. As I say, it's a polarising movie, I think you'll either really like it or really dislike it, but the benefits of liking it are greater than the detriments of disliking it. That said, it's like 3 hours long so buckle up. It's the sort of film that has an intermission. 

Stalker was loosely based on a book called Roadside Picnic, and was screenwritten by the same brothers who wrote the book. The videogame, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., is even more loosely based on both the book and the film. Each is very different from the others: where the book pretty much says "yeah, it was aliens," the film stays away from any sorts of explanations as to the origin of the Zone, and focuses more on the characters' trek through the Zone. Oh yeah, it's about an area of land called The Zone, cordoned off by the military, where treacherous invisible things can hurt you, but there's a magical thing in the center that grants innermost desires. That pretty much applies to all three versions. Now I have to confess that some of my understanding or interpretations of the film might be influenced by the book and even by the game.

Enjoy some music:

Some people really, REALLY, like this movie. Some people say that Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is the best film humans have come up with, but I think there's no doubt that it's a polarising thing. In fact I'd bet that most people would watch it, hate it, and say "I don't get it". I'll straight up admit that I don't get it, or I didn't get it when I first watched it. Or, perhaps, that I didn't think I got it.

It always concerns me when books and movies come across as highly intellectual, because I worry that I'm not smart enough to comprehend it. They make me feel dumb. But I think there's two types of thing that can have this result. On one hand, take Lynch's Mulholland Drive - At the end I didn't get it. There were layers of symbolism and metaphors that I'm sure will become clearer the more you watch it over and over. On the other hand, there's Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicles, or Stalker, where at the end you might initially be confused, but repeated readings/viewings aren't necessarily going to help. The point of these things, I think, is the journey, whereas the first category is more about gaining a holistic view of the whole thing and then stepping back and analysing and understanding it. I enjoyed the Wind-up Bird book right until the end, where I said, "well what was the point?", then I eventually decided that there isn't a point. It's not about where it ends up, it's about the stuff that happens along the way. Similarly, when I watched Stalker and thought I didn't understand it, what I really didn't understand was why people raved about it so much. My problem, I think, was that I was looking too deeply.

Sure there's probably metaphors in the book that I missed, but that's always okay. You shouldn't have to pick up every metaphor in a thing in order for it to be entertaining, and I think that's where Stalker succeeds. It looks good on the surface: it's got very pretty images, which go well with a high quality soundtrack to really put you in the scene. And another way it does this is through pacing. It is without doubt a boring film. Shots will linger on nothing very interesting for a very long time, which sounds like a bad thing. A lot of people would see that as undesirable, but films like this don't do things like that by accident. I believe it hangs on these images for so long to sort of help you tune out of your real life, and take in the beautiful scenery within the film. This is also something that I think is meant to emulate what the characters are going through, and has to do with being outside and in nature. The main guy, the Stalker, really loves the Zone. He keeps going back there despite the danger, and the first thing he does when he gets there is goes and chills out in the bushes, because he feels at home there. Now it's worth noting that the film depicts everything outside of and untouched by the Zone firstly in dull sepia tones, and secondly as highly industrialised yet decrepit and uncomfortable, and maybe the Zone is the closest thing left in the fictional world to just nature. Flora has been allowed to overgrow, a dog runs wild, and human structures are falling apart from disuse. It's a land that nature has reclaimed, despite its decidedly unnatural origins and threats. I like the idea that the Stalker has developed some emotional or even spiritual connection with the Zone because it reminds me that we can or should similarly develop and foster our own connections with the natural world. Being outside and away from civilisation and technology is really nice and cathartic, whether that be a pulling force, our natural inclination to be outdoors in our primal element, or a push to get away from modern city life. When you are outdoors, camping or hiking or whatever, I don't know about you but I can easily sit down and just appreciate the environment for quite some time, and I think that's what the long shots in the film are really about. Just chilling out and appreciating nature. I think that's the effect the film's trying to give you.

This nature thing really appeals to me. Stalker's about a whole lot more than that, it's got lots of themes and references to religion and faith, but that just doesn't interest me when I watch it and it's not what I take away from it.

Three out of three and a half stars for Stalker.

Riddick, Sexism

The new Riddick film is okay. It's like a cross between Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick, which may seem like an obvious or stupid thing to say, but those two are clearly very different films. Pitch Black is a small, self-contained horror story, and Chronicles is an epic, planet-hopping adventure. In Pitch Black some people die. In Chronicles, political regimes change. The new one is again a self contained story, set on a desolate faraway world (which is implied to be Earth, maybe), filled with predators that want to eat people. Unlike Pitch Black, the plot has nothing to do with darkness, rendering Riddick's eyeshine irrelevant. The biggest problem I had with the new Riddick film was the character himself. I felt that it was a different character to that seen in Pitch Black, in the video game, and even in the  Chronicles of Riddick. He was cruder, ruder, and more actively a dick. Before, my understanding of the character was that he would more or less keep to himself unless provoked, and then would just kill a guy and walk away. But in this one he seemed almost sadistic, allowing or causing people to suffer more or less needlessly. Maybe I fundamentally misunderstood the guy from the beginning.

There was one line in particular which really irked me, and I'm going to go ahead and tell you, don't worry about spoilers because it's not that big of a deal. So Katee 'Starbuck' Sackhoff is the only female in the film (besides another who's there for about 2 minutes, I'm pretty sure just so they can say "look, we have TWO girls!") So Starbuck's the only girl, and she's a bad-ass mercenary, so naturally she's a lesbian, (as revealed in the clumsiest way possible,) and there's this bit where Riddick's tied up and he's telling the mercenaries about exactly how he's going to kill them when he gets out of these chains, (with no throwback reference to killing guys with a teacup in the 2nd film) and then he says, "And then I'll be balls deep in...[whatever the girl's name is]". Excuse me, Riddick? You're not one to talk about women that way. "But only because she asked me," he says. And what's worse is that by the end of the film, she inexplicably switches sexual orientation and propositions him. This is all covered here in a review by Theresa Delucci. I've never linked anyone else's work in a blog post before. Do I have to inform them? I hope she doesn't mind. Anyway that basically says everything I was disappointed with in the film re: sexism, especially in contrast to Pitch Black, which basically was great in it's portrayal and inclusion of women.

But fair portrayals of women in film and literature is something I've been thinking about lately. I don't know if this film upsets me because it's actually pretty bad or because my gaze has changed. Now, I'm very much against vomiting up angry, socio-politically charged hatred and signing off with the horrendously nerdy "/rant", so I'l try to keep this fairly objective.

There's no doubt that most protagonists are male, and that's not a bad thing. There are a couple of reasons as to why this is, the most convincing of which is something I read recently, but have since, unfortunately, forgotten. Whatever it was, it wasn't misogynistic in any way, it was just a straight up logical reason. Anyway, forget that because I'll never remember, instead we'll look at some others. There's the one about marketability, and this, as I see it, has two ideas. One is that moviegoers are more likely to be male, and therefor want male characters to identify with. I think that's even more bullshit than the idea that gamers are overwhelmingly male (an idea heavily disputed by those above-mentioned rants). Two is that both male and female audiences prefer male protagonists, as this study suggests. Some people might say that most screenwriters and authors are male, but that, too, I disagree with, since even a lot of things written by women have male protagonists. One theory is that female characters often act emotionally, and therefor become unpredictable driving forces in stories, whereas male characters are often reactionary to other things happening in the plot (possibly including female characters), and so the audience naturally identifies with them. Who knows.

There's this thing called the Bechdel test, which asks whether a thing contains a conversation between at least two women, about something other than a man. So, first of all you have to have enough females in the story that at some point two will be alone and talking, and then they have to be interesting enough that they have things to talk about besides men. Apparently a lot of films fail this test. So this is something that's on my mind when doing this stoner film script (that I haven't properly started yet. I'll get started once this other book's done). I'm going to actively work into the story a conversation satisfying this test, but is that tokenism? I think only if it doesn't seem organic, which, hopefully, it will. That's something I've realised about my writing: I'll have my plan of all the things I want to happen in the story, and if one of them doesn't seem to easily and organically arise, it gets cut, too bad. There's this female character in this (idea for a) film, who initially appears sweet and innocent but turns out to be a bit of a psychopath, kind of like Soap from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, except actually violent. This would of course still be funny if it's an initially innocent seeming male character, but I think it's even funnier because she's a girl. I don't know if that's being exploitative or not. I'm also concerned about girls always appearing as love interests. I considered having one of the two main stoner characters, who are housemates, being female. But I think that would be difficult to have a man and woman live together in a story without any romantic or sexual relationship, even though it happens all the time in real life. Unfortunately readers like romance, I've been told, so rejecting the idea of romance for the sake of romance could leave you with a story which some audiences might consider boring.

As far as I'm concerned, I stick with male protagonists because, truthfully, I'm afraid of messing up a female - not being one myself - so I stick with my boring, blank slate character, reactionary males. How women appear is constantly on my mind when I do my stories. Same with other historically oppressed groups. In Wilkinson IV there was a black guy, a Russian, and two women, and I was paranoid about accidentally coming across in some way racist or sexist. I still am now, although, I guess I won't ever screw the sexism thing up as badly as Riddick did.

Entry #18, Day 27

From the new one.

Jeannette’s returned. She staggered out of the forest this afternoon, her clothes all torn. She’d suffered some lacerations from foliage, apparently, and was bleeding. After we fixed her up she told me about where she’d been. She said she went out alone into the jungle, and about a kilometer deep she found a clearing. In the middle of the clearing was a pattern of concentric circles cut into the grass, and in the center of the circles was a large stone. She said it was like a lectern, so she stood at it, and when she did the circles in the grass began to glow yellow. Then they began contracting, closing in on her and she realised that it wasn’t just the dirt beneath the grass that was glowing, it was the slugs that had emerged from the ground. They were bioluminescing this radioactive yellow, and surrounding her, coming closer. She panicked and ran, stepping over some and crushing others, running without looking back towards the treeline, to safety, only before she could leave the clearing she felt a sudden impact all over her body, and fell to the ground. When she woke up, the glowing slugs had completely covered the stone lectern, their light uniformly pulsing. She felt that they weren’t dangerous, and even approached for a better look. When she tried to leave the area, to tell the rest of us, she couldn’t. She said there was a wall, the same thing that knocked her out. Some kind of invisible wall surrounding the perimeter of the clearing. It felt smooth and cold to the touch, and give a soft vibratory ringing sound when she put her ear up close. But there was no visual evidence of it existing at all. She rammed her shoulder up against it to no effect. She threw rocks but they went straight through, disappearing into the forest behind. She was stuck. As an experiment, she used a stick to pick up one of the glowing slugs off of the stone to see if it would pass through the wall, which it did. She was there for hours, she said, and over the time she noticed the mass of slugs covering the stone gradually shrinking, as if the stone itself was shrinking. And at one point, when it was about 20% its original size, she said she saw someone walk out from within the jungle and directly up to her. A man in a green suit. Green tie. He walked straight up to her and stood on the other side of the invisible wall, facing her.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, frightened. He reached out his arm toward her forehead, right through the invisible wall as if there was nothing there. Before he could touch her she stepped back, stumbled and tripped. She was lying on her back, looking up and he stood over her, blocking the sun behind him, silhouetted. He knelt down, and gently put his hand over her face, covering her eyes.

That’s the last she remembers. She said when he touched her she must have blacked out. She’s vomiting now, but besides that seems okay.

A short review of Elysium, the nature of Sci-Fi

I just saw Elysium, the new one by Neil Blomkamp of District 9 fame. It was pretty much what you'd expect for the big budget successor to D9. The same blending of CG robotics with live action footage, awesome visual design, and a thinly veiled commentary on how unfair the world is. Where District 9 was about racism, Elysium is about both immigration and the rich 1%, who are universally depicted as evil. Seriously, William Fitchner and Jodie Foster are bad, the President turns out to not be reasonable, the civilians are prejudiced against Earthlings. Even Matt Damon's supervisor, a non-Elysium citizen, was a bad guy with no regard for human life. In fact everyone on earth seemed to be either an evil minion of the Elysium regime or a criminal, and this was arguably supposed to reflect how the poor conditions of Earth drive people to monstrous extremes. The only really good people seemed to be the love interest and her sick daughter, and of course, the hero at the end after undergoing his personal transformation. The juxtaposition between shitty Earth and fantastic Elysium was so stark it was silly. The conditions on Earth were so totally comically bad, and Elysium was so ridiculously utopic, both environments appeared more or less unsustainable. There seemed to be no sign of government on Earth except for police robots controlled by Elysium. Nothing was clean, the only jobs I saw were in some robot-disposal factory and a hospital. Everybody else seemed to live in squalor. There was apparently money on Earth, but it was unclear whether there was money on Elysium. The only jobs up there seemed to be governmental. Could this have been suggesting that a strong public sector leads to a utopia while a sort of anarcho-capitalism leads to slums and crime? Who knows.

A guy once told me that all science fiction invariably involves some metaphorical subtext about society. I think that's bull. Or, I've misunderstood the entire science-fiction genre. In fact, I don't even actually think of science-fiction as a genre, to me it's a setting. Western is also a setting but there are particular plot tropes that characterise westerns. You can have a western set in the modern day, or in Japan - remember that Tarantino described Inglorious Basterds as a western. However you cannot take away the fictional science of a sci-fi film and have it still be sci-fi. If you take away the robots and futuristic setting of Elysium, it would be an action/drama. My point is that you can still tell a story about society without using science fiction, which is only necessary to mask the social commentary in metaphors so that the superficial story is free to be an action film (or comedy, or romance, or whatever). Science fiction is a tool to change one genre into another. Similarly, I reject that guy's statement also because I don't believe that a story with science fiction elements necessarily has metaphors. Consider Transformers. Here I'll also obviously point to my own work as an example, in that I write stories to be fun tales, ripping yarns, not to make a point. Sometimes points about society arise organically, sure, but they're never the driving force of my stories. I leave that to people who care more about issues than I do.

So if the definition of science-fiction is, "using fictional science to create metaphors for real world issues" then I don't write sci-fi, I write horror or action or something else, and a lot of movies and books in the sci-fi shelf don't belong there either. If the definition is, "containing scientific elements which aren't real," then I reject that as a genre, as it does not say anything about what happens in the story. Action movies are characterised by action. Comedies have jokes. Romances have love. Horrors are scary. Sci-fis have science fiction, yes, but that's not a plot or even an event, merely an enabler for events.

Elysium was a pretty good movie. There were a couple of laughs. My main disappointment was the childhood bits near the beginning, and the drilling in how unfair life was, how everyone deserves a shot at the good life even when it's literally very out of reach.

I give it five out of seven.

0.0 Foreword

Growing up in a Catholic environment, that is, a Catholic primary and middle school education along with a church-going father, I was exposed from an early age to a multitude of hymns, prayers, parables, biblical tales, sentiments, sayings, phrases, metaphors, stories, analogies, songs, and poems to do with the Christian faith. One of these articles, the subject of this inquiry, was a particular favourite both of my school and of my paternal family, pa included, but it was not until my late teens that I actually considered the poem in any depth. Throughout my childhood it had simply been, along with many other texts in the same category, a thing which the authoritarian people around me, i.e. adults, found incredibly interesting, and yet which I did not. I attributed my disinterest to simply being too young to understand, however once I grew older, and was confident that my capacity to understand incredibly interesting texts was sufficient, I was surprised to find that I still failed to be awed by it to the extent that the elders of my youth were. Indeed, perhaps this failing caused me to resent the poem itself, or perhaps my resentment was due to disliking the poem of its own merit, but regardless, I eventually decided to compile this analysis, in order to bring to bear, or perhaps uncover, some of the issues with the text, both in composition - the construction of a comprehensive narrative - and in interpretation - how the poem might affect people’s decisions and indeed lives. In the former I feel I have succeeded, although in the latter I have failed. Over the course of writing this analysis I lost track of the second goal, and instead focused completely on a number of specific interpretations. I feel that while this analysis does admittedly contain a certain amount of unverifiable speculation, I have not sufficiently studied ethics to say whether or not the poem gives an appropriate message to those who have lost hope or may otherwise turn to religion in a time of strife. Because of this, the analysis will remain solely a literary one, without delving into such meta-issues.

Cultivated identity, the Saw franchise, a shady past

Before I came to Canada, and as my moving date approached, I and some other people jokingly threw around the idea (some with concern) of me creating a new persona - Canada Felim.
According to Beatrice, I've been prone to do this in the past. She used the example of the stageplay I worked on with UniSA in 2011, where she was surprised to find that everyone involved knew me as "Philly", and probably had totally different perceptions of me as my parents do, or she does, or you do. They treated me differently and I probably even acted differently. When I was around those people only, and not around other people, I was, more or less, a different person. However I didn't mean to be, my transformation was unintentional. It was merely because they were exposed to attitudes and behaviours in me which other groups of people do not get a chance to observe. You obviously act differently at work than when around family, or your friends, or an intimate partner, or alone. When you go for a job interview you dress nicely and speak clearly to try and convey an image which may be a slight variation on any of your others. Does this necessarily make you a different person? This is getting dangerously close to a philosophical discussion about the Ship of Theseus (that had all it's components replaced with newer ones until none of the original material remained, and asking whether it's the same ship or not.) Let's steer away from that. That way madness lies.

So you've spent your entire life cultivating a certain persona, and as you've aged your ideal may have changed, so your instantaneous persona - your thoughts, beliefs, actions - at a particular time are different from those at another time in life. Maybe you're stressed one day, or a neo-con, etc. An observer, say a friend or family member, who's known you for all that time would aggregate these historical aspects and come up with an interpretation of you that is different to someone who's only known you for, say, a week. Maybe it was the week you were really into hairstyling and doesn't really reflect who (you think) you are. As more pieces of your personality are revealed to that person over time their idea of you will adapt and, probably, approach what lifelong friends think. Obviously bar any fundamental changes to your character that happened before they meet you. In fact, the new friends perception might be a truer description of you than the old friends, as the latter will be influenced by actions you might never repeat, or beliefs you no longer adhere to. Old friends views are tainted by vestigial components of your ex-personality, and new friends lack exposure to create a complete description of you.

I met someone who's seen the latest Saw movie only and because of that, obviously hated the entire series. (I should point out I haven't seen the latest saw, the 3D one. I think I've seen up to five. I'm just extrapolating and assuming any that follow are just as bad or worse) I asked if she'd seen the first one, which she hadn't, and no matter how much I tried to I couldn't convince her that the original Saw is an amazing film. Because of the first one (and to a certain extent the backstory introduced in two and three) my opinion of the Saw series is higher than hers. If someone was lucky enough to have only seen the original one, or the first three, they would hold the series as a whole in higher esteem than I do. As a side note, Tarantino said that the Matrix sequels made the first one a worse movie, because of the backstory introduced.

In this metaphor, you're the franchise, and chapters of your life are films (in case you didn't get it). So, make sure people see the best ones and retroactively credit yourself as Alan Smithee on the bad ones. It's still you that they're seeing.

Is that bad advice? Maybe you're a Julian Assange, information transparency type and want people to see the whole lot, even bits that no longer accurately reflect who you are presently. Is that worse? Sounds almost like lying.

Project list

Here is a list of all of my current projects and their stages of development.

Footprints
This is the academic satire, critical analysis of the Footprints In The Sand poem. It's more or less complete and has been for some time now. I'm leaving it for a few months to later come back to with a fresh head and decide if it needs more work, or is ready to publish, and more importantly, where to publish. If it can get into a real publication that would be... interesting, but my hopes are low. This will probably wind up being independently sold as an eBook.

Race Theory
A multi-part essay about competitions. Currently sitting at three and a half thousand words, it might go to four thousand, or it might go to ten thousand. There is very little way of knowing, but I feel I'm running out of things to say. This is a fairly dry, serious thing, but interesting nevertheless.

Sophomore novel
This one doesn't have a name yet. A time-travel story featuring aliens and/or ghosts who torment anyone who comes into contact with a little thing. First draft is unfinished so don't hold your breath.

Fiction piece to accompany Race Theory.
It involves a train, a device which can construct anything from anything (post-scarcity), and a big global race like a modern version of Hidalgo. It's basically not even started yet.

Wilkinson IV
This one only needs marketing. I've also had the idea of, down the track, re-releasing it with some changes. These changes would be conducive to and exist within the fiction, so, where the original volume is labelled "Second Edition", this one would be "Third Edition".