Lone The Idiot on 9/2/05 at 7:03 PM

Is it okay to state emotions if said emotion is easy to visualize? For example:

Tim pounds away at the keyboard, fustrated.

Would this be considered something that can't be shown?

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Mad Love on 12/28/04 at 7:57 AM

Well, I scrapped "Lemorel's Brain" in favor of a comic book idea. The plan is for me to write and draw the comic book, then turn it into an feature-length indoe movie. I can't contain my ideas into one short film.

So the new idea is called "Shadow City," based off of old-fashioned noirs and urban legends, its half part thriller, part mystery, part fantasy. I'll definitely post some of it soon.

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Dade Devlin on 12/20/04 at 10:19 AM

Steven Katz’s Shadow of the Vampire stood out among the releases of 2000 as a wildly inventive, darkly comic thriller which capitalized on loose historical facts and a fantastic conceit that silent film director F.W. Murnau recruited a real live vampire to portray Count Orlock in his masterpiece Nosferatu. The film as a whole did not impress me much, but the execution of the conceit was handled with a nice mixture of camp and sincerity. Carried by the performances of John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe, it managed to be a nice diversion, if not an earth-shattering revelation.

The idea of playing fast and loose with historical characters intrigues me, and it’s curious that it isn’t done very much anymore. Wyatt Earp has been the subject of numerous incarnations on TV and celluloid, and many of the earlier depictions contain barely a shred of historical accuracy; yet, My Darling Clementine stands out as a classic film not because it was interested in verisimilitude, but because it instead created a mythology out of a legend borne in real life.

Hollywood did this to all kinds of true legends throughout its golden age, but for the last ten years, all we really get is the humdrum biopic or the souped-up adventure film that is billed as “based on a true story,” but contains about as much truth as a fortune cookie. While films like Gods and Monsters are great, why not create a story about James Whale’s intereaction with a peculiar scientist who created miniature people? Instead of the slavish hokum of Oliver Stone’s Alexander, why not just have the Great duking it out with enemy leaders one-on-one? Why not have him pulling an X-Games stunt on those elephants a la Legolas in LOTR (not that I actually recommend that… it was rather stupid, even in Return of the King).

What ever happened to creative liberties? Not simply compressing a person’s lifespan into a twenty-year period, or combining supporting characters for dramatic effect. I’m talking about a real innovative leap from fact to fiction that isn’t remotely accurate, but is still in keeping with the person’s character?

There are so many rich legends that we have to choose from in our history books that it would be a crime against imagination not to pursue the fanciful flights we often cook up as children, but reject as we grow older. The old maxim, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” is a motto that writers can live by. After all, great legends are truth—with a little fairy dust sprinkled on.

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Dade Devlin on 12/16/04 at 7:34 AM

Again, I'd like to encourage everyone who visits this site to check out Afire_Inside's script on his journal page. Writers support each other. E-mail him with constructive criticism. Keep writing!

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Dade Devlin on 12/15/04 at 12:40 AM

Been awhile since my last post here. I've been pretty busy, if that's any excuse. Anyway, I do have some things to show for it. Here's an essay I wrote for my nature writing class. It's not polished just yet, and it's fairly lengthy, but I hope you enjoy nonetheless.

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Spotted knapweed is an alleopathic plant, producing a toxin that affects the soil and plants around it. By killing the surrounding organisms, it’s free to consolidate the new territory. Out West, it not only imperializes the good grassland upon which livestock feed, it’s also inedible—ranchers are being run off their land by purple little weeds. This Asian knapweed probably did not grow here in the Laughing Whitefish Preserve in the days when George Shiras III was skulking about trying to snap nighttime pictures of the fauna. But then, it might have. That was just after the turn of the century.
Tina Hall, our guide from the Nature Conservancy (the organization now in possession of this refugee wilderness) says, “Knapweed is classic to see along old roads,” and this particular batch is sidled against the slats of a softening bridge once used by logging trucks, now used by amateur and professional naturalists to gain entrance to the George Shiras Discovery Trail. Spotted knapweed Seeds from the plant cling to horses, trucks, and garments, dropping off when damn good and ready and nestling into the soil, whatever kind of soil that may be, then proceeding to kill, maim, and conquer whatever native growth stands rooted in its way.

So much of Laughing Whitefish has been logged and reseeded that it’s difficult to differentiate with the untrained eye between the forest growth that’s supposed to be there, and that which is not. Maybe a quarter mile from the bridge, Hall reports that the growth nearer to the water is more diverse, while farther inland the woods are more uniform. The Laughing Whitefish River is muddy, but aside from rippling with the midges glancing invisibly from point to point, the surface is glass-placid. Farther along the riverbank are fallen trees with their own ecosystems taking hold. They died when the river rose too high.

Soon, too many details which trip over themselves for my attention, and I fall behind, foraging along the trail like a nescient bear. The path winds around a small bay area within the preserve. This is the Laughing Whitefish Lake from which Shiras snapped the first-ever pictures of nighttime wildlife.

Well, “snapped” is the wrong word.

Shiras’ rig was a specially-designed powder-flash exposure camera which he mounted on the aft of his canoe. You can just picture the scene as if it’s on silent newsreel footage, with Shiras behind the contraption, his guide at the oars, drifting up to the shoreline, he framing an unsuspecting deer with his fingers and thumb, giving a thumbs up, holding up the flash, and then “poof”, the deer bounds away, but not before Shiras has his arms clasped above his head in joy. The screen telescopes down and fades to black.

Though it’s the last day of September in Michigan’s swarthy Upper Peninsula, the dead trees in the river and the live beeches and maple in the soil proper are still green. We’ve been walking for a half and hour already; the ground thuds beneath my feet, cavernous. These are dead trees, leaves, needles, wildlife beneath my feet. Back a ways there had been an entire clearing cut by beavers; here and there spikes jut from the ground, whittled by the scooping teeth of the beaver. I very nearly tip over onto one because I’m not watching my footing and join the bloody footpath permanently. The vernal springs are empty and waiting, but they’ll have to wait all winter first until the spring thaw fills them with its rutting perspiration. For a while, the breeze is clean, acidic on my cheekbones.

Yet it’s warm here. The trail winds up a slope, and for the first time there are dark grey chunks of rock; the dirt firms underneath the soles of my sneakers. They call this change between earth-systems an ecotone. But it’s still humid; the breath of the foliage heats my jacket and my backpack straps cut into my shoulders.

Without the beams of the sun, the day gradually abates until I look ahead into the dense labyrinth of reseeded maple and cannot make out the path. This is the moment when the tinge of quasi-panicked excitement rushes into my city-boy brow, the intoxicating nectar of adventure. “Hell, I’m a big guy,” I whisper to the chipping squirrel somewhere over my head, and commence bushwhacking my own trail for the first time since coming here, stomping unidentified life forms into the packed topsoil.

My eyesight isn’t great at dusk, especially in the perpetual twilight of the forest. A few yards from my original vantage point, I think I spot where I need to be, but no easy way to get there. (Mental note: next outing, definitely bring a flashlight.) Just beyond this stygian emerald still life, there is a log landing where the logging trucks would wait and have the cargo laden on. This entire part of the forest is relatively young, except for the geological deposits strewn about. Snap goes the twig under my foot and I pause, rasping the thick air in and out. Whenever hiking, I make it a point to disturb the natural landscape as little as possible. Examining the unrecognizable growth I just destroyed, I glance backwards. Any path I may have mashed is indistinguishable from the brush. Guilt throbs behind my eyes.

Stones piled into a pyramid rise up in front of me as I falter towards the landing. Illusions of “pristine wilderness” erode like a riverbank in a thunderstorm. Maybe Shiras never insensitively trampled a path through this land, but did he honestly think that he could preserve its inhabitants’ naturalism by blowing up gunpowder in their faces at night? Marquette pioneer Peter White’s great-granddaughter deeded Laughing Whitefish to the Conservancy in memoriam of Shiras (who had married into the family through White’s daughter) and his historical contributions to not only photography, but to wildlife legislation and the early conservation movement in America. “It’s like we’re preserving a living Shiras photograph,” is how one Nature Conservancy representative described the Whitefish preserve. The artifice of the Shiras’ photography gainsaid his innovation. He too was a city boy—from Pittsburgh, for God’s sake. Not a thousand words, nor a photograph, can embody the fullness of nature, even of one place; certainly not this rudimentary shrine. To inaccurately depict life, be it plants, animals, or people, seems like a larger disservice than simply appreciating it without trying to capture it at all. A human even being in this forest is a mobile Heisenberg Uncertainty Proxy.

Through the green haze, I at last emerge into the log landing, which will be as different in three months as the sea at any given moment. We all start down the causeway flattened by years and years of logging trucks. The grooves remain in the ground from the massive tires depressed with the weights of the chassis and the felled lumber. Night eagerly licks at the trees and the path. This is the longest stretch of the hike. The computer in my bag, which serves no useful purpose, urges my backpack to bite deeply into my shoulders. The water in my bottle is warm and almost gone. The veiling mist of late hours descends before my eyes, teasing me forward. Forget the flashlight—at this point, a striped cane would be more useful. I just wish the night would come and get it over with so my eyes could finally adjust properly to the dark.

At some point on the timeline, the Narnian path gives way to the bridge, which I cross on a bare, windsodden slat. The knapwood waits patiently, ready to bed down for the night, and I wonder how it got here? To travel all the way around the world and settle here, in the cradle of natural opulence, to conquer this foreign northern land, takes willpower. It dares me to photograph of it, but I didn’t bring my camera. The knapweed is smug in its being somewhere its ancestors would have never dreamed of; it is here, and so am I. We contemplate the silently shifting river, and I suppose we both have a right to be here, but we don’t have the right to stay.

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