Hmm, I wish I could remember more often the old saying “Rome was not built in a day.” I find myself always chafing at the thought of slow, gradual progress. I always expect things to get done in a snap of the finger. Impossible things. I should remember that the people of LOTR spent four years working under crushing deadline to produce three films of beauty. And I wither under four weeks? Or worse, four days? *sighs*
Spent nearly all of last night watching the Return of the King extended edition. At the cost of precious hours of sleep again, but I think it was worth it. It’s brilliant, they had more room for short snippets of often funny character interaction, and the Saruman/Orthanc scene at the start is worth the price of admission alone. Man, the power of his –voice-. Oh, and the really frickin’ cool model of Minas Tirith is worth the collector’s edition too. I didn’t get the Gollum model for the Two Towers set, not my cuppa tea, but the Argonath for the first film and this city rules. Heavy weight well-sculpted architecture that could kill someone. :)
I think the real power in LOTR, and one of the reasons why it did so well was because it embraced natural vistas and bigatures that were enhanced by CGI, rather than just glomming it all together from CGI. And getting THE two Tolkien artists to provide the vision had to be a damn good decision. New Zealand’s natural scenery, made cooler through raising it to the fantastic technicolor of Middle-Earth really embodies what fantasy is all about. Larger than life, and heroic, and epic.
And it wouldn’t work without Howard Shore’s phenomenal power for orchestral music score. Through nearly the whole damn movie, his themes are singing over and over. And frankly, while I couldn’t write a note to save my life and my understanding of music is limited to humming melodies, music can still touch me like everyone else. It’s a very humanistic element, and he used also solo human voices in important places to lift that connection even further.
And yes, one is pretty much blubbering by the time the end credits roll and “Into the West” starts playing – especially once you realize that the song was inspired by the struggle of a terminally ill young filmmaker named Cameron Duncan.
I might be a bit morbid thinking on this now, but I think “Into the West” would make a good funeral theme, a nice eulogy to be played over my coffin when I finally go, whenever that is. :) Would be a nifty nod to my love of fantasy as well as something that would just touch heartstrings all over.
Dunno, hearing this story in the appendixes got me to thinking about my own eulogy. Apparently Cameron Duncan wanted to be remembered, that’s why he started making all this short films and everything, and now he is, his story preserved for posterity in the dvd. Do –I- want to be remembered by the whole world? Not really. I don’t lust for fame. It actually would make me feel real uncomfortable if my name was proclaimed from shore to shore. I just want to be remembered by people that I’ve touched personally, I guess. I’m a fairly bad introvert as it goes.
What sort of memorials would I want to leave? Frankly, I also don’t know. I dabble in so many hobbies, so many pasttimes, I doubt I’d ever be able to focus in on one long enough to go deep and produce something solid. In fact, I think once I leave this world, I wouldn’t care what I leave in it, since I’d be gone anyhow.
I think, and am trying to grope towards something here, that maybe for me, it’s not so much the end product that counts, but the journey. It’s not so much about what I leave for other people when I go, but what I’ve done while I’ve been here and how happy with myself, how content I am with the going-ons of my life.
The Tao of Things.
Maybe that made no sense at all, and maybe it had even deeper implications than I thought. But it’s something I need to work through at this point in time anyhow, and it’s all inspired by watching much LOTR and hearing that haunting music.
On a more prosaic note, I did absolutely NOTHING to tidy up my room despite my resolve that I would do something. Oh well. I did make a list, though, of all the stuff that’s not right with my room and needed to be handled at some point. Gradual progress, huh. Maybe another day when I can actually consider lifting the comics from the floor and retrieving the dust covers under the bed and putting them one inside the other.
It’s not the same type of depression I’m used to. Or White Wolf’s Harano of utter despair. It’s not the ‘life is not worth living, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, I’m so miserable and worthless and a failure and a lazy bum and a procrastinator to boot, why bother’ - teary-eyed, shaky emotions, lie in bed and feel depressed about not being able to sleep but unable to do anything else either – kind of depression.
It’s more a blank sort of constant procrastination until I’m not feeling anything any more. Except this untargetted urgency and anxiety at many things being left uncompleted and becoming faintly overwhelming. But thinking about it too much would make one extremely miserable, so you keep it at a distance so you don’t feel anything. And then you search for immersion in games, movies, anything. An escapist, avoidance kind. Hrmph, dunno, maybe it’s not as unfamiliar as I thought.
I’m feeling down partially because I have two very expensive Winsor and Newton Series 7 brushes that I’d like to try out for painting my minis, but I haven’t been able to overcome this miserly instinct to hoard them and not use them. It’s a ten buck brush (US$), I mean, wow. What if I spoil it…what if I’m not worthy of such a high quality brush…I’m regressing back to childhood because evidently, so my parents told me, I have no artistic ability, because my parents have no talent for art as well. A genetic thing, I suppose. So obviously I cannot splurge on myself and buy a good brush to paint well. I must stick to cheapo nylon brushes because that’s all I should paint with. This is very twisted reasoning, I know, but we’re all a little warped somewhere by our childhoods. The paint desk is overrun by too many unpainted minis, it’s like an accusing little graveyard. I suppose having a literal army of un-repainted D&D plastic minis sitting by my keyboard doesn’t quite help either. They look passable to middling ugly, and I –know- I can paint them better, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. Nor had the time or inclination to sit down and paint anything else.
I ought to be more like those insensitive brats online who are full of themselves and have no self-doubt at all. Overflowing with ego. Even after charging endlessly into packs of mobs and trying to pull with Nova. Full of action and fury and ready to lead people to death, doom and destruction. But well, I’m more the type (in real life anyhow) to see it as really really moronic and to sit somewhere not taking the risk to leap in. Maybe that’s why I play scrappers/tanks online, so I can be a hero in my imagination without real harm coming to me.
However, I did get many purple stitches done in my Winnie the Pooh cross-stitch, after finishing some pink flowers. (Did I just say that in this blog…) The frame border is taking on shape after just a few days since Thursday. I have realized that at certain points when one is sitting in front of a computer monitor, it is quite easy to pick up a small piece and start stitching away, as long as you’ve figured out how many stitches you need in a row. One point being watching stuff on dvd. When the pictures are moving too slowly or you don’t really want to see it or you’ve seen it before, but are enjoying the music anyway. And the other point being doing CoH TFs. (Yes, you knew I’d eventually get back to the supposed topic of this blog.)
Which brings me finally and in a most roundabout way back to a review of the Good Friday to Easter Sunday weekend, and see how plans made on Task Force Thursday came to fruition.
See next blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment