Phone rings. I pick up.

“Hey Alex,” it’s my brother, “quick trivia question for you. Who was married to Carole King?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ok. How about – who was the father of the lead singer from the Wallflowers?”

“Bob Dylan.”

“Bob Dylan? Ok, thanks.” He hangs up the phone.

I put the phone down and hit play on Donnie Darko. The phone rings.

“Hey,” him again “how are you by the way?”

“Good,” I say as we both start laughing.

I should be studying tonight.  I should’ve been studying yesterday.  But for this week I haven’t really studied all that much – I’ve the cheat book on crapper duty, but other than that nothing.  I’ll hit the video again this weekend and then do the practice exam on sunday, I think, and then put the video on 24/7 during the week so that the ethical goodness seeps into me.  Mmm, ethical goodness.

In other news… wait, there are no other news.  My live is dominated by the MPREs – even the elusive job hunt has taken a back burner.  In fact, it’s kind of grown very, very cold.  And I’m ok with that.  I was talking with one of the attorneys at work and he assured me that something always cropped up.  You know, having failed to acquire a federal clerkship, I’m pretty much down to just dogging law firms at street corners.

(Actually the one true hope is that next coop I get in with someone I manage to impress enough to give a brother a hand.  Which, I’m sure I can impress them.  And with my latest batch of evaluations, including a glowing – nay, radioactive – evaluation from Prof. Rossman from Civ Trial Practice, I’m hoping things are looking up.  But I digress.)

But I’m okay with it.  The work ends in three weeks – which is both good and bad.  Bad because I’m enjoying it, not entirely due to my partner in crime (er, criminal defense), and good because I need a break.  The last project we worked on was a bitch and a half, and the one we’ve got coming is going to be even worse.  At least this one’ll be about sexually dangerous people, something I’ve written about before.

Which reminds me, I should think about publishing some of my class papers.  I can’t imagine any of you would like to read them, but what the heck.  I find them fun.

As you can tell I have very little to talk about today.  But I need to write, because in so doing I get ready for NaNoWriMo.  And I’ve decided I’m writing the Hologram story, being the one I’m currently the most involved with.  But I’ll not speak of it anymore, lest I end the desire to actually tell the story.

Speaking of storytelling, I’m glad for the status of both the Mystara campaign and the Planescape one.  Running two campaigns at the same time is a bit of a hassle, but it’s good that I have something to clear my head when I’m too much into work.  Mystara itself is a bit like a job for me, ther’es so much background there that it’s less like a hobby every time I go deeper into it.  But with the new side-campaign that we’re running, I’m starting to find the little nooks and crannies that I love to work out, and there’s a lot of ideas running around in my head for once we get back to the main game in a few months.

And Planescape is just good old plain fun.  I love that bunch of guys – even though some can be annoying, I won’t mention names but you know who you are.  No, not you.  You.  Yes.  I’m pointing right at you.  It’s the type of game I’m not taking too seriously, never planning more than one adventure ahead (although I do have to get cracking on the next part now that they’re nearing the end of this one) and not really having a set plan for it.  Kind of winging it as they go along, which has led to some odd occurrences.  But, it’s Planescape, and I love the setting as I’ve said before.

Ok, love you, bye bye.

Brick (2005), starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and written/directed by Rian Johnson.  From the beginning of this movie, you start to understand what it’s truly about.  It opens on a corpse: a pretty girl is lying dead, face down, in a ditch, while her ex-boyfriend watches from a short distance away.  He’s not crying, he’s not shocked, he’s not surprised.  He’s studying her.  In that brief moment following the opening credits, we know that this isn’t going to be your average high school drama.  There’s not going to be cheerleaders and jocks, geeks and freaks, or the ugly duckling scenario wherein a perviously shunned girl suddenly becomes the belle of the ball.  Gordon-Levitt (you might remember him as the kid from Third Rock from the Sun or as the younger lead in alongside Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You) plays Brendan, who might as well be the love child of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe without any Bogart’s charm and twice his toughness.

The movie plays like a film noir.  Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a huge fan of hardboiled detective fiction, so to say that I absolutely loved this film will give you nothing new.  And, much to my delight and – in hindsight, anyhow – perfect understanding, it works exactly like a film noir because of its setting: an American High School, with everything that entails: cliques, secrets, rumors, drugs, crime, sex and – most importantly – that sense of taking oneself far too seriously.  This movie carries that same attitude and wraps it around itself like a security blanket, but is perfectly aware that perhaps it is taking itself too seriously, like an awkward teenager who doesn’t want to wake up to the realities that lie beyond in the real world.  (Watch the one scene with an adult that doesn’t live in the world of the high school drama, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.)

The girl is Emily, and she is Brendan’s ex-girlfriend.  From looking down upon her corpse we zoom back two days, where Brendan receives a call from “Em”.  She’s scared, and crying, we can hear it on the other side of the phone.  Tearfully she confesses she didn’t know “the brick was bad.”  And then a car rides by, she screams, and is gone.  We learn a lot about Brendan: he’s too smart for High School, which leads him to be the stereotypical loner.  He eats lunch alone.  He’s not connected – but now Emily’s in trouble, and he has to reconnect.  Fast.  Enter the Brain – a man after my own heart.  The Brain is Brendan’s friend, and he’s the guy who knows everything.  He knows who’s who and what’s what.  “Who has Emily been eating lunch with?” Brendan asks in a way that gives gravitas and significance to the idea of lunch-room etiquette.

The language in the film is spectacular.  The characters live inside this noir world, and they talk the talk and walk the walk.  Even the assistant vice principal – the Ass Vee Pee – is in on it, and he squeezes Brendan to help him figure out what’s going on in his school.  Brendan launches himself into the mystery behind Emily, and the brick, connecting himself back into the old cliques and surfing around the world of high school politics, separating players from played in true detective fashion.   The Characters show up – aside the side-kick (Brain) and the tough cop (the Ass. V.P.), we have the femme fatale, the hired muscle, the kingpin, and a number of characters plucked straight from the world of a Chandler novel.  Brendan navigates the waves of the politics with the grim determination of a man who has nothing to lose and only answers to gain.  He’s a tough s.o.b., too, and takes as much a physical pounding as he does a spiritual one.

If I am to say something bad about the movie – and I can, for it is not perfect – is that it’s way too serious.  The only time the mood was broken was in one scene, where I laughed entirely too hard, and I’m not sure it was an intentional moment of laughter (although it is an intentional moment of levity.)  The movie catches you from the beginning, and ratchets you to the top without a single pause.  It’s not a rollercoaster – it’s a free fall, pure and simple.  It would have been perhaps a little better if they had given Brendan some of the wit of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.  While Brendan shows an intellect and cunning to equal any hardboiled P.I. of yore, he’s grimmer than most.  And while this fits with the reality of a high school loner, it is, perhaps, too much in a film as dark as this one.

Which isn’t to say he’s not a likable character.  Everyone can appreciate him, because the big secret of high school is that everyone’s alone.  And he’s got more courage than most people ever muster, and a pair of brass testicles to make the biggest film bad asses stand up and take notice, which automatically lends him credence as a hero.  And, in the few minutes of the first act we get to see him and Emily together, we see that there’s something very much human about Brendan, and that he loved her in that way that all first loves are hard and pure and painful.   So we cheer when he pulls one over the bad guys (and there are plenty in this film, even if none can be quite called the “villain”).

He’s also smart – but not smarter than the audience.  This is an extremely well made mystery: the audiences see the clues through Brendan’s eyes and are allowed to pull the puzzle together alongside him.  Unlike a Da Vinci Code, where the audience is required to sit back staring at puzzles which mean nothing to anyone but the main character, here we get to go along for the ride.  In a way that makes the movie interactive: we realize alongside Brendan what everything means.  And this itself lends Brendan even greater weight as a hero – we are, in a very strange way, in the space of the hero of the movie.

One tiny other critique comes at the climax of the movie, which for the sake of avoiding spoilers I’ll not describe.  Except to say that it breaks a cardinal rule of cinema: If there’s a gun introduced in Act One, it’ll go off in Act Three.  It would have been more meaningful, I think, if the climax were less amorphous in its ambiguity.  Or perhaps it is just me that feels this way.

But, aside these few things, the movie is a fantastic bit of storytelling and film making, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of cinema, and film noir in particular.  Brick easily gains a silver medal from me.

I’ve got two ideas for NaNoWriMo kicking around in my head, and I’m thinking of polling to see which one I should concentrate all of my energies on.  Interest in both of these, from my end, is pretty high, with moments of waxing and waning as I get a good idea for one or the other.  So I’m going to see what you guys want to see, and then I’ll think about adding a new area to site where you guys can come and read the results as I strive to make the 50,000 word mark by November 30th.

1. Hologram: Kind of a strange idea – a legal techno-thriller set in a near future where the world is wirelessly connected.  A young, rising star litigator has to defend a man accused of cybercrimes.  Inspired by Gibson, but a wide departure in that the cyberpunk world presented is really more or less the modern world.  (And, also, most cyberpunk deals with living outside of the system, whereas this takes us knee deep into the cogwheels of the legal strata.)  The title refers to many things in the book, most importantly being the holographic technology that allows real-time communcation between people in the story.
2. Broken: A first for me, this is a pure human tragedy about a 20-something drifter who can sense when people are “broken” – not physically ill but spiriturally.  His detection often manifests as nausea or revulsion, depending on the nature and how badly the damage might be, but he cannot sense it from himself and he spends the better part of the novel staring into various mirrors attempting to determine whether or not he, too, is broken.  There’ll be a girl, and there’ll be a nemesis, and there’ll be a love triangle.  You can call it a human condition tale.

If you’ve an opinion, I’d like to hear it.  The ideas presented are mine – go find your own or at least ask permission first if you want to borrow anything.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in my head at the moment, not least of which is a minor headache (what is it with headaches and weekends anyhow), so I’m going to take some time to lay a few of the things out on the table.  First, with Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, and the recent discovery that we’re all doomed (DOOMED! I say, to borrow from Silvio Moonbeam, R.I.P.) to a living Hell a lot faster than any computer had previously imagined, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the world, and humanity as a species altogether.

The long and short of it is that humanity has to put its shit together.  The 21st century is going to be about global challenges.  The paradigm for society has shifted.  The ability of the world to communicate instantaneously means that we are no longer dealing with just local problems.  Look at everything that’s going on in the world – global warming, Myanmar, Iraq, Iran, al-Qaeda, antitrust suits in Europe, the dollar racing to catch up with the yen, privatization, globalization, and internet piracy/privacy.  Who really thinks that these are just isolated incidents?  Who really thinks that none of that affects what’s going to happen to you tomorrow?

We – and I’m talking “we” here not just as a society, not just as the small group of people who read this, but as both a generation of young people coming into our own and as a species – must face these global problems not at the local level, but at the global level.  We need a strong, unified body of bureaucratic ass kickers to free the red tape and slap some world leaders around.  If any country, any country, regardless of its developmental status, believes that the woes of the world can be solved with local enforcement of local laws they’re wrong.  There will be too much discretion.  There will be too much differentiation.  There will be too much damage by individual nations that cannot be reversed.

What’s really needed is a global solution.  A regulatory body with powers beyond the United Nations.  The U.N. exists as a place where diplomats from every country can sit down and enjoy a nice chicken luncheon and discuss treaties that they’ll take back to their countries where their executives and their legislatures can simply choose not to obey them.  That is not enough.

The internet has given the human race the ability to talk with each other, to breach distances that no man has ever breached before in the history of the Earth.  Our words and ideas can now reach audiences across the globe simultaneously.   Why not expand that, why not take advantage of that, if not the fear of the tyrant?  If not the fear that new ideas will bring chaos and destruction and social disruption?  Change?

The world needs to change.  We need to start realizing that the old system of nation-states is not equipped with the ability to regulate change on a global level.  And global warming is just the beginning.  The internet is arising as a homeless land where its visitors are subject the laws of any country.  This creates problems of jurisdiction, of forum shopping, of unlawful prosecution, by agencies that have no right or power to regulate citizens that they have no control over.  The internet has arisen as a lawless land where the law of the first-comer rules.  A unified court with jurisdiction over international telecommunications is necessary to solve these problems which are just now beginning to crop up.

And as technology and telecommunications expands, so too does the sharing of ideas.  We’re starting to see an unprecedented number of problems with intellectual property across international boundaries.  Bodies, inventors, with proper patents in their homelands cannot export their technologies to other nations because another individual already holds the patent to it in that country.  The way we communicate has far exceeded the ability of the world’s regulatory bodies to regulate.

We need a change.

As a species, we need to grow up.  We need to abandon ideals of nationality, of pater patrias, of some silly notion that being nationalistic or patriotic makes us superior to everyone else.  It was Nationalism that gave rise to Socialism.  It was Nationalism that gave rise to Fascism.  It was Nationalism that gave rise to nearly every atrocity that humanity has ever endured or caused.

The paradigm has shifted.

I may not be right about the solution but I’m sure as hell right about the problem.  We cannot go forward as a species without realizing that.  If we do, we are doomed to commit the sins of our fathers.