Autum Leaves and Pooh Sticks

Note to regular readers: Some of you are aware I have been working on a new log entry tenatively titled “Proud to be American” (which is ironic, since I’m not). The work continues, but is not yet done...

As I write today, it is fall in Maryland. The poorly pruned cherry tree in front is naked of its usual cheery leaves. The two stately oaks on the back are likewise shorn of most of their leaf cover and thus the heavy damage from cicadas earlier this year is no longer visible. The ugly scarred and partly rotten maple on the side of the house has shed a lesser fraction of its leaf load, the last green and yellow leaves still hanging on. If all goes to plan, this will be that tree’s last fall. Its heartwood is rotting from a failed attempt by the previous owners to cut it down, and from a peculiar pruning job. The tree has survived their attentions, but one of these days, a storm is going to catch it the wrong way and it will come falling down. Probably on my house. So as much as I may miss it, it will have to go. Besides, it is a superhighway to the roof for the squirrels.

But for now, it holds on to last leaves of the summer and a stiff brisk breeze now and again knocks the leaves free to float to the ground and erase all signs that I just mowed the lawn and raked the leaves. The compost bins are full to overflowing and yet the leaves still keep coming. The neighbor’s front yard has a huge pin oak tree probably eighty years old to judge from its girth, and that will take over the shading of my home this coming summer. I remain thankful that the builders in this neighborhood, in the late 60s, did not suffer the modern compulsion to cut down every last tree before starting construction. But my pride in the stately trees does not extend to endangering my house nor tolerating the squirrels of destruction on the roof, especially since my neighbor shares a roof with me and is none to happy to have squirrels scrambling over his head in the early morning as they are wont to do.

Autumn brings it happy cycle around. The garden is now retired and the tomato plants no longer producing tomatoes in vast and endless supply as they had been doing through the late summer, burying me in an avalance of tomatoes and parsley and mint and oregano. The basil I was able to keep up with, but the rest... well, I brought a lot of tomatoes to work and my freezer is full of them to boot. I tried a couple of years ago to thin the crop and toss the green fruit in the compost bins, but the next year everywhere I put down the compost, I got volunteer tomoatoes. It looked especially strange when put in the compost as fill dirt where the old shed foundation had been, then seeded the new patch with grass... and got a rich bed of tomato plants trying to outgrow the grass. But for their habit of dying in the first serious frost, the grass might never have won.

As I bring plants into pots and inside for the winter, the squirrels are madly putting acorns in strange places, not the least of all places the pots, so I often come home to find the pepper plants transplanted to pots tipped over where the blasted creatures have dug them up seeking places for their nuts. I’ve finally learned that the shock of being brough inside with less light and more warmth right after transplanting is probably easier on the peppers than being ripped apart by squirrels. Of course in the spring, the squirrels will rip them apart all over again seeking those same nuts. I recall my first year in the house being amazed at all the volunteer oak trees that started sprouting in one of the larger pots. The squirrels killed them off in two days once the pot was moved outside.

It is a magical time for my two cats, especially for Carmel. Carmel, despite being a disgustingly cute looking cat with chocolate siamese colouration and bright blue eyes, is a bit psychotic. I think he was rescued from the street a little too late and some of that essential feralness had already established itself, but maybe the poor beast is just a bit daft. He is terrified of people and desperate for attention at the same time. The only way to pet him is for him to think you are not looking at him and he will allow you (or even demand you) to pet him as he wanders by. There are odd exceptions: I can pet him and look at him at the same time if I am seated on my bed getting dressed in the morning, sitting on the toilet seat, or perhaps sitting down having a ‘phone conversation. An open window is like catnip to him, and opening a window will make him run from some place in the house to jump in the open space, a trick he has not unlearned no matter how many times it is shortly followed by me putting him in a cat carrier and taking him to the vet.

Carmel will not play with me. His brother Zorro (a non-genetic relationship: Carmel was rescued from the alleys of D.C. and Zorro from a barn in Rhode Island) is thrilled at times with the laser pointer, and Carmel just doesn’t get it. Zorro comes up into my lap and demands love and attention now and again, usually when I working on the computer or reading a book or a paper and in no position to deal with the aggressive wet nose attempts to shove the laptop, paper, or book aside. Carmel does occasionally deign to play with one or another of the cat toys around, but won’t engage in any play with me. All games must be solitary. He is the cat that walks alone, like Rudyard Kipling’s cat.

There is one unusual exception to this and it comes this one time of year. I call it Pooh Sticks, though that game of A.A. Milne fame bears little resemblence to this. Carmel is driven quite batty by the sight of a single leaf falling. And since I have a back deck some ten feet off the ground, which gets a liberal covering of them, I can drop them one by one down onto the ground below and Carmel will chase down each and every one.

Somewhere in that little cat brain, there is something that makes particular leaves special. All leaves are at least cursory chased. Some are more actively hunted as they come down and quite actively stomped on when they land. A few get a nominal chewing. And a couple this afternoon ranked good enough to justify a good cat jump off the ground to intercept them before they hit ground. Curled, flat, big, small, brown, yellow green, maple, white oak, pin oak... I have no idea what it is that makes particular leaves special, but they are taken down and killed mercilessly.

And never mind there is a carpet of leaves so thick on the ground that both cats could completely disappear beneath it with ease. No, it must be that exactly, only that leaf, and the moment it is dispatched, Carmel is looking back up longingly for the next to be let loose from my hands. He has boundless enthusiasm for this game and is yet to give up prior to my patience being exhausted or the leaves on the deck all being gone. It is rare for it to be the latter.

The homeowner ritual of raking the lawn of its leaves is always a peculiar one to me. I have in the past raked the yard clean and of course come out the next day to find little sign that I’ve done the work as a whole new batch has recarpeted the lawn. It usually takes three or four attempts to get them all done, and the leaf piles exceed the compost bin capacity by quite a bit to boot, so the piles will tend to migrate across the lawn again until the next good soaking rain wets them down in place enough to stay. But I seem to be the luddite of the street, with many opting to blow the leaves with forced air gadgets. One neighbor actually has an odd vacuum cleaner device to pick them up out of his gravel and backyard pool decking. Those in the front he feeds to a shredded and thence onto a tarp to pull them away into the BGE property behind the houses where the power lines come through. BGE, to the best of my knowledge, has never expressed any opinion one way or the other about the annual compost donations.

Some neighbors go quite mad with their blowers. I cannot leave windows open at night for the roar of the gas and electric blowers each evening as some suburbanite decides that a one day coating of leaves on his lawn and driveway is an insult to his manhood, and for another half hour each night, the leaves get pushed around by forced air onto the street or into a pile from which they will wander at will in the wind.

Or perhaps, once it gets dark, to be reformed on their lawn to spell out “Blow me” in large leafy letters. But I, of course, would know nothing about that.

For now, though, I content myself with the small joys of Pooh Sticks and knowing that, at least just for this one day, I have been accepted by the most discriminating of cats.

Chip Flick - My contribution to the English language

There are a wide variety of terms used to group and classify movies. There’s “Sci-Fi” for science fiction, action-adventure, romance, comedies, romantic comedies, documentaries, fantasy, westerns, and the odd running series that makes a genre of their own (James Bond, Star Wars, etc.). Some are quite good (Carl Sagan’s Contact, High Noon), some bad (Glitter), and some so wretched awful they prove space, time, and good taste are all circular by turning into movies you cannot miss (Plan Nine from Outer Space). And there are the cult classics for which there is no explanation (Rocky Horror Picture Show, Buckaroo Banzai, and so on).

Each appeals to different people and different audiences, and film critics who fail to understand this, or somehow think this is irrelevant, just end up looking clueless. I particuarly loved it when a recent Washington Post reviewer slammed a James Bond movie for being vacuous. Hello? Intellectual stimulation and 007 don’t have much common ground. Check out your sense at the theatre door: no one ever pretended James Bond was cutting edge film.

Because of these audience tendancies, some films get subgrouped by the audience they appeal to rather than the film type itself. “Guy flicks” are aimed at teenaged boys and men wishing to stay in touch with their innner teenaged boy: lots of action and adventure, fast moving plot (fast enough, perhaps, for you to not notice that there is not much in the way of plot), and probably a few very hot women here and there for eye candy dressed in just enough clothing to avoid the dreaded M rating (for immature audiences only). “Chick flicks” are aimed at women wishing to send aside reality for Prince Charming fantasies in which Guy Meets Girls, some non-sensectial thing seperates them, then because the Universe has fated them to be together, Love Wins The Day, and after years of seperation (or about 90 minutes of wasted celluiod), are magically reunited (often dumping at the last minute whomever they were just about to marry). The common element to both is that they are geared to their audience rather than the film itself, so all sorts of logical contradictions and foolishness are completely tolerable. Occasionally you get a red herring crossover that tries to be both (Jerry Maguire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but they are rare. And often make more sense than prototypical guy flicks like Shanghai Noon or chick flicks like Serendipity, Fifty First Dates, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.

However, some years ago, I coined a phrase for a then-emerging new genre, which I coined the “Chip Flick”: a movie that attempts to compensate for its shortcomings in acting skill, plot logic, pacing, and so by the excessive use of computer animation in an attempt to distract the viewer with stunning visuals to the fact that, stripped of such visuals, there ain’t much there at all. In this day and age of copyright, patent law suits, and all, I just wish to be clear on the record: I am the responsible party for creating this term, and the Oxford English Dictionary should cite me me me me as the source for this term since I first used it roughly five years ago.

Keep in mind that at the time I made fun of this approach, I was actually working in a computer generated animation position (albeit not one in the commercial film industry), and this is not a blanket condemnation of CG animation at all. Some films make careful and thoughtful use of CG effects, or have such strong sustaining plots to which these elements, and my coworkers, are the sort of people who will pause Monsters Inc. to replay scenes where the monster Sully’s fur gets blown around in the wind because it is such a visually stunning piece of graphics animation which is both eye candy to animators and makes perfect sense in the plot, which is well sustained and logical and would work perfect well if they just used little cardboard cutouts instead (and I would like add a note of thanks to the makers of South Park for lowering the standards of CG animation low enough that anyone can play in the field). It’s not the animation per sey that I am objecting to, it is that it is being used to compensate for the absence of all the critical elements of good story telling through film.

Where I get in really hot water, alas, is that my prototype for this is a movie with terrible acting, a series of gaping idiotic and obvious holes in its fundamental premise that are laughable... and some of the most stunning and compelling computer generated special effects seen to date. In fact several new techniques and innovatative approaches to animation were created in the making of this film that they have spread far and wide into advertising, or in frequent homage references in films since.

I speak, of course, of The Matrix. I was stunned. I thought it a remarkably smooth and well polished film, but fundamentally pretty stupid. While my colleagues were raving about the effects, or talking about the deep philosophical questions of how we know the reality we see is real, or whether there was a second or third layer to the matrix, and so on, I’m sitting there going “Humans as batteries? Just how stupid are you?” Why do the digital avatars have the capabilities and limitations they have: there is no reason for them at all. It makes no sense. But, as I said, I seem to be in the minority indeed on this. Perhaps there is something to this: the effects in this case were so stunning that the forebrain activity is totally surpressed, like horny men staring at a Playboy centerfold.

So I have a new prototype that won’t get me lynched. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Stunning all digital computer generated animation with an almost realistic visual feel... and no plot. At least no one is going to harange me for making fun of a film based on a video game.