The Future of Libraries, The Movie!

Early in this blog, I wrote about the future of libraries where librarians use a rectal, temperature-based search tool called The Gerbil to assist library patrons with their catalog searching. I thought, and continue to think, that it's one of my greatest contributions to the world of library research.

I begged anyone out there in any of the internets to produce some live action dramatization of my one-scene mini play. But there have been no takers.

But today I found that I can make an animated movie simply by pasting some text into little boxes at xtranormal.com.

I first made the video with characters that looked more like I imagined them, but when I found out that it would cost me as much as $5.00 to use them, I changed back to the default, free characters.

So, here is my own production of "The Future of Libraries, a pain in the..."

If you see nothing, just click somewhere down there anyway and it should play... or click here for the link to the xtranormal page...

Carole Lombard: Librarian.

So I just watched No Man of Her Own with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, before they were married in real life. Or at least I watched until Carole marries him in the movie and tries to mend his evil ways. Then I got bored. Okay, let me FF through the thing to see if I'm missing anything... yeah, just what I thought, he cleans himself up, and she can't manage to find a store that sells bras... don't you love those pre-Code movies...

Carole plays a restless librarian, bored with her small town life. She likes to go out drinking and dancing with her friends, but her parents won't let her. Yes, she lives with her parents. Each morning, on her way to work, she rolls dice against the news stand operator to win a pack of gum.

When she meets Gable, he asks her to get a book from the top shelf so he can peek up her dress to read her spine label. The nerve of some men. Who hasn't had that happen in the library, ladies? That's why the.effing.librarian always wears pants. Oh, who am I kidding? You know I wear skirts because I love the attention. Am I right, ladies? And my panties say, "If you can read this, you can buy me a drink."


When Gable corners her in the stacks, she tells him his personality would be great to sprinkle on flowers to make them grow. But then he nails her with, "What do you do with all the hearts you break?" and plants a big, wet one on her.

Check out the "library" where Lombard works, how do they find anything? And where are the Internet computers? Oh, I guess they have wi-fi. Look at her stance; you just know she can't remember where she left her whisky flask.



Here is a clip:

Why I love Rollerball.

I love the movie Rollerball. But no, it's not a great movie.



I used to just love BAD ASS JAMES CAAN skating around and punching heads. But now that I've been a librarian, I see these scenes as somewhat prescient:

[copied from script-o-rama]

LIBRARIAN- Can I help you, please?

BAD ASS JAMES CAAN- Yeah. I tried to order some books and they said I had to appear at the center personally.

LIBRARIAN- That's right, this is our circulation unit. Make your choice here or by catalog. [she READS the card] There must be a mistake. These books are classified. They have been transcribed and summarized.

BAD ASS JAMES CAAN- Who summarizes them?

LIBRARIAN- I suppose the computers do. What do you need books for?

BAD ASS JAMES CAAN- I wanna study up on some things.

LIBRARIAN- You could go to the computer center where the real librarians are. But we have all the edited versions here. Anything I think you'd want.

BAD ASS JAMES CAAN-Let's see, then. This is not a library and you're really not a librarian.

LIBRARIAN- I'm only a clerk, that's right. I'm sorry, really.

BAD ASS JAMES CAAN- The books are really in computer banks being summarized? Where is that?

LIBRARIAN- There's a computer bank in Washington. The biggest is in Geneva. That's a nice place to visit. I guess that's where the books are now.

-------- LATER SCENE ------

OLD COMPUTER DUDE- We're a little confused again here today. This is embarrassing. It's embarrassing to misplace things.

BAD ASS JAMES CAAN- You've misplaced some data?

OLD COMPUTER DUDE- Mm, the whole of the 14th century. Misplaced the computers - several conventional computers. We can't find them. We're always moving things around, getting organized, my assistants and l. But this is Zero's fault. Zero, he's the world's file cabinet. Pity. Poor old 14th century. Well, come along now. You want to get started, don't you?

BAD ASS JAMES CAAN- Yes, sir.

OLD COMPUTER DUDE- This way. Now... We've lost those computers with all of the 14th century in them. Not much in the century - just Dante and a few corrupt popes. But it's so distracting and annoying.

Gran Torino as a snapshot of America

If you haven't seen the movie, Gran Torino, I won't spoil the ending for you here, but don't read too much further because it gets spoiled in the last paragraph.

So, I don't know what you thought, but I was somewhat dissatisfied with the ending. I think it's because whenever I saw this movie in the past, like in the 1970's with Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson, it had a similar violent conclusion, but flipped 180 degrees.

Now that it's the new millennium, you can see how Gran Torino could represent America's place in the world. At one point, Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is given a reading by a Hmong holy man and he is told that no one likes him or respects him and that he's done things in the past that he regrets. If Clint didn't represent America in the year 2009 in that scene, I don't know what else he was supposed to be.

So I started to think about that lone gunman myth of the American Western, like in High Noon or Shane or even The Shootist, and how the bad guys need to be punished. But these days, we know that violence doesn't always solve the world's problems. It might again in the near future, but not today. So how would Gran Torino have ended if it were made twenty or thirty years ago?

If Gran Torino had been made in 1975, it would have ended with a gunfight, with Walt standing "mano-a-mano" and shooting from the hip to kill all the bad guys.

If Gran Torino had been made in 1985, it would have ended with a firefight, with the titular vehicle fitted with a hood mounted .50 caliber machine gun or towing a small cannon or Howitzer to blow the criminal's hide-out to splinters.

If Gran Torino had been made in 1995, Walt would have called in some help from an ex-Army chopper pilot who would have swooped in with an Apache attack helicopter, chain-gun, and Hellfire rockets to vaporize the building.

But in the post-Iraq-Bush world, America is supposed to play nice and let the proper authorities dispense justice. We can act tough, but that's it.

So this leads to the real end of Gran Torino when we hear a police officer say, "This time we have witnesses" and we watch as the young thugs get hauled off to jail.

Which leads me to speculate on a follow-up film, Gran Torino 2: Toad's Revenge. Because when the thugs get their lawyers to have them released on bail, they return to the neighborhood to terrorize the witnesses into forgetting what they saw. And Thao mans-up enough to take them on. Using tools from Walt's garage, he gets "medieval on their asses." And maybe Sue gets some hot kung fu babes to help. Sounds good, huh? Yeah, I'm smelling sequel. Someone get Michael Bay on the phone.

I'm not even going to try to explain this.

[okay, I'll try to explain. this is an automatic banana feeding machine from the movie The Road to Hong Kong. and I think it's funny. click on the picture to see it in action. (I had it set to play all the time, but it's a huge file and was taking too long to load.)]

Please don't kill the librarian.

Movie commentary for Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.

In this movie, the killer deconstructs the nature of the slasher flick. There are rules that serial killers follow and this "documentary" explains them while analyzing and even participating in the murders. I can't explain it without ruining the fun, but if you like Friday the Halloween on Elm Street type movies, then you should enjoy this.

But one of the killer rules is that the first murder should take advantage of a relationship the heroine has with a peripheral character. Like a homeless person she talks to when she volunteers at the local shelter, or in the case of Leslie Vernon, the school librarian.

[from the screenplay]

As fyi, Old Eugene is a retired serial killer brainstorming ideas with Leslie. Freddie, Jason and Michael are who you think they are, but they don't appear in the film, just in this version of the screenplay (their lines are delivered by others in the film).

EXT. OLD EUGENE'S BACKYARD DAY
As the sun sets, they grill burgers and dogs at Eugene's place. They discuss the next step Leslie needs to take in his endeavor, an event known as the "red herring."
JASON
You got it all worked out?
LESLIE
I think so. She spends a lot of time at the library. I was gonna throw it down there.
JASON
She friendly with a janitor or somebody like that?
LESLIE
I was thinking about knocking off one of her friends.
[All immediately frown on the idea.]
FREDDIE
I don't know, you don't want to burn that one too early. Turns up the heat pretty quick.
MICHAEL
I agree, I think it's too soon. There's nobody else available?
JASON
Some homeless guy she talks to on the way? Something like that?
OLD EUGENE
How about one of the librarians? If she spends a lot of time there, she probably knows a few of them.
JASON
That's a good idea right there, Les.
LESLIE
Actually, there is a lady who lets her stay late sometimes.
MICHAEL
Jackpot. That's your winner.
JASON
Plus, those old ladies ain't exactly the most nimble, know what I mean?

So this is what we learned from this scene:

Do NOT befriend the campus nerd.

Do NOT stay after hours to let her scan the arcane histories of the local area. She is not going to discover some long lost artifact. She is only going to get you killed.

But if you are in the library when the slasher attacks, DO duck when you see the nerd turn white and point to something behind you. Do NOT stand still and say, "Why honey child, you look like you have just seen a frightful sight." Especially if you are a man.

Duck, dodge left, and haul ass from the building, as fast as your pale, pudgy librarian legs will carry you. No, you don't need your shawl. Especially if you are a man.

Witnessed stupidity.

I was in the mall today as a woman approached the directory to find the location of a particular store, and before she could begin her search, her husband stopped her and said, "Don't waste your time. I have my GPS turned on."

I have my GPS turned on. So we've reached the point where we need satellites to help us find Sears.

Now I expect Keanu Reeves to land at any time to destroy all life on Earth.

Oh, other than sucking pretty badly, the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still has a cool ending where (spoiler alert - highlight white text to read..) all the machines in the world are disabled: no more Wii; no more Google; no more Toyota; no more GM (oh, never mind); no more iPhone. So I guess that leaves only books. So I'd still have a job. Cool!

Twilight, Effing Twilight

Here is my obligatory Twilight post. Which I know nothing about. Except that I thought the movie would satisfy the no Harry Potter movie this season withdrawal because there's no Supernatural for the rest of the year, and I need some kind of PG-13 scary-action-hero fix.

But now I see from reviews that the movie version of Twilight is just some beautiful brooding poets jumping through the forest who want to see their lives shine, like A Chorus Line, but with more choreography.

So I think I'll skip this. Because really, what old man wants to sit in a dark movie theater surrounded by teenage girls?

Smoking in the stacks.

I love watching people smoke. I read a story recently that says that the tobacco companies paid Hollywood to get their actors to smoke on television and in the movies.

But that's what makes those movies so awesome. How could you have James Cagney, Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart without cigarettes? Without smoke? Read Roger Ebert's blog for his thoughts on movies and smoking.

Notice: For all children and California liberals reading this: smoking is yucky and smelly and dirty, and if you smoke you won't have any friends because nobody likes people who smoke.

But boy, smoking is so cool.

I was never a smoker myself, which is how I got on the path to library school. As a junior in high school, my career counselor offered me a cigarette, as he did to all students. If you were able to smoke with him, and laugh and joke about the dorks in the school, you received an excellent recommendation to an out of state university, or, if you managed to scam the whole pack from him, you got an introduction to the local International Brotherhood of Teamsters shop steward.

I coughed at my first puff and was sent to the library to sort the back issues of Newsweek.

So I think libraries should be smoker-friendly. Paper and fire is like bread and butter or like butter and heart disease.

I want to blow smoke rings while patrons drone on about how long it's been since they've been to a library without getting to the point of why they visited today. I want to gesture with a lit butt to get people to back away from the information desk. I want to point to the information on my monitor with my cigarette until the heat melts the protective layer of the LCD screen to leave tiny bubbles in the plastic. And I want ten cigarette breaks a day.

Fire.

The only other times it's socially acceptable to hold fire is during the 4th of July or on a late night visit to Frankenstein's castle or when you want the band to play Free Bird.

Libraries would be much cooler places if we could smoke. And librarians, well, we wouldn't be just librarians any more: we'd be movie stars.

The worst $8 I ever spent

Forgive me, but I just spent money on the DVD for the movie Pathfinder.

I saw the original (1987) version at a film festival and also owned it on VHS until it was lost in some box of crap that I can't remember where I stored it. But I see there are some clips around, so I guess I'll have to settle for watching those for now.

The original movie is like Star Wars in its simplicity: it's a coming of age movie with a powerful villain and an untested hero.

But this new version is a bowl of crap-flavored crap dusted with powdered crap. I'm certain there was a recipe, but each ingredient was another variety of crap.

This movie isn't pleasant to watch; it's not fun; it's not sexy; it's not violent in any good way that only digital effects can screw up, blood just seems to splash around without any consequence of physics. If there is anything good you can say about this movie, I don't know what language you would use because I only know English, and I couldn't come up with any.

Why we need libraries.

I like movies. No, I love movies. No, wait, I [heart] movies. I'd be willing to draw a little heart to express how much I love movies.

So when I was just watching, Duck, You Sucker, it made me glad to see a little truth expressed in the plot by Rod Steiger, one of our greatest Mexican-American actors, stating his strong feelings against violent revolutions:

"The people who read the books go to the people who can't read the books, the poor people, and say, 'We have to have a change.'
So the poor people make the change, huh?
And then the people that read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables and they talk and talk and eat and eat, eh?
But what has happened to the poor people?
They're dead."

So I like to think that libraries exist to make poor people a little less dead.

John Lennon, serial arsonist

So. I saw The Dark Knight. And I thought it was great. I haven't felt as good about a story, construction, direction of a film since Unforgiven. And now that a Batman sequel is inevitable, I wish Clint Eastwood would write it as a modern The Outlaw Josie Wales.

Now that I got the geek fanboy out of me, after The Dark Knight finished, I get into my car and the CD player starts. I burn mp3s to CD and each disk contains about 12 albums or 200 songs. The player has a nasty habit of reverting to the first track each time I start the car which makes me mad if I've just been listening to something in the middle of the disk. So I hit random and up pops "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)." I'm not a big Beatles fan, but I like "She Said She Said:" "She said I know what it’s like to be dead,... And you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born," for my own reasons. Anyway, I own Revolver and Rubber Soul.

So Norwegian Wood plays:

I once had a girl
Or should I say, she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn't it good Norwegian wood?
She asked my to stay and told me sit anywhere
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair
I sat on a rug, biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two, and then she said:"It's time for bed,"
She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn't, and crawled off to sleep in the bath
And when I awoke, I was alone
This bird has flown
So I lit a fire
Isn't it good Norwegian wood?

And immediately, it struck me that the guy in the song sets fire to the girl's place.

In the past, I might have thought that he lit the fire with a small think, a piece of furniture, but I never thought that he set the whole place on fire. But it made perfect sense.

One of the themes in the new Batman movie is that normal people will turn evil when plans are destroyed; the Joker says we should never plan anything. In Norwegian Wood, the guy apparently plans to sleep with the girl, and when he doesn't (or does, but is then sent to sleep in the bathroom because she's finished with him and he's not welcome in her bed), he goes mad and starts a fire. Don't take it from me, these people feel the same way.

I wonder if simply watching something can change us. That watching that movie changed my perspective on that song. No, watching doesn't change us. Becoming involved changes us.

From Wikipedia:

This exchange took place in a press conference in Los Angeles:
Reporter: I'd like to direct this question to messrs. Lennon and McCartney. In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. And they referred to "Day Tripper" as being about a prostitute...
Paul: Oh yeah.
Reporter: ...and "Norwegian Wood" as being about a lesbian.
Paul: Oh yeah.
Reporter: I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it, and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is being written today.
Paul: We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that's all.

Ha! Now that's comedy.

I love how Paul just becomes a wall, no involvement with the reporter, no confrontation. Just gives everything back with no malice. I think he was high.

I'll try to change the facts of the situation, but I recently had a patron who made copies and when he looked at them got upset because they weren't in color:
Him: I want a refund. The copies aren't in color.
Me: This copier doesn't do color.
Him: Every copier does color. I want my money back.
Me: This copier doesn't do color.
Him: I want these in color.
Me: This copier doesn't do color. That's the color copier over there.
His: I want these in color.
Me: That's the color copier. This copier doesn't do color.

I know it doesn't look good, but in my mind, we can't get further until we resolve the issue at hand: the he needs to acknowledge that he used the wrong copier. It's not for me; it's for him. The first step in getting help is to realize that you need help. If I just give in and throw money at him, then I didn't help; I become his bitch.

He put his paper on the copier, he put his money in the machine, and he pressed print. No one forced him to do these things.

When I was in my twenties, I would have told him to wait ten years until we invent time travel, then he can come back to that point and just tell himself to use the other copier. Or to prevent a time paradox from meeting himself, put an "Out of Order" sign on the black and white copier.

So his irresistible force meets my immovable object. And eventually he takes his copies and leaves.

And like The Joker, I smile a big, red smile. Because I wear clown make-up to work. Oh, didn't I tell you that?

(If you want to get in touch with your inner Joker, try this quiz.)

The 48-hour angel.

It looks like we all better find another career by 2009 when Emilio Estevez releases his movie, The Public, about the 48-hours when "a conscientious librarian tends to the homeless and mentally ill people who use the public library as a homeless shelter" during the two coldest days of the year, in Los Angeles.

I remember when I first read Chip Ward's article about the homeless and mentally ill situation in Salt Lake City Public Library. It was one of those moments of, "Yeah! Get those crazy people out of our library." But obviously, I didn't get it. Chip doesn't want the crazy people out of the library; he wants a social service network created to make the crazy people normal by creating housing and job training programs. He believes we all need to change.

The belief that we are responsible for each other's social, economic, and
political well-being, that we will care for our weakest members compassionately,
should be the keystone in the moral architecture of a democratic culture. We
will not stand by while our fellow citizens are deprived of their fellowship and
citizenship — which is why we ended racial segregation and practices like poll
taxes that kept disenfranchised Americans powerless. We will not let children
starve. We do not consign orphans to the streets like they do in Brazil or let
children be sold into prostitution as they do in Thailand. We are proud of our
struggles to meet people's basic needs and to encourage inclusion. Why, then,
are the mentally ill still such an exception to those fundamental standards?

America is proud of its hyper-individualism, our liberation from the bonds of
tribe and the social constraints of traditional societies. We glorify the
accomplishments of inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneers, and artists.
But while some individuals thrive and the cutting edge of our technology is
wondrous, the plight of the chronically homeless tells me that our communities
are also fragmented and disintegrating. We may have gained the world and lost
each other.
(from the Atlantic Free Press)

Now Chip is retired (and interviewed in the latest LJ), Emilio is relatively rich and famous, and librarians are waiting for things to get worse. Me, I'd love to change. Make me rich and famous so I don't have to work in the library after 2009 when this movie gets released and every crazy person in America shows up at our front door looking for Emilio to give them cookies and a cup of coffee.

Otherwise, I still gotta pay the bills.

"The Zed Word"

I like horror movies and horror comics and horror fiction. Don't get me wrong, they scare the crap out of me, and I don't like being scared. But I like knowing that the scary stuff is out there to terrify me poopless.

When I was around eight or nine years old, I would wake up every night and walk through the house with a flashlight checking for Frankenstein's monster because I thought that just dreaming about him would make him come find me. And years later, I remember how creeped out I got when I read Theodore Sturgeon's "It," with that final line that read, "And Babe screams at night and has grown very thin."

So I just saw Diary of the Dead, and I liked it. I just don't get how people allow themselves to get bit so easily in zombie movies. And how it takes so long for everyone to figure out that they should shoot for the head. I prefer the slow zombie theory used in the Dead series; this allows one to fantasize about surviving the zombie holocaust. Fast zombies are just a horror wet-dream, creating a new problem just to piss-off the purists.

But then the virus or whatever created the zombies could still exist so that all future dead would still rise up. So the interesting part of either fantasy would be the group of people who survived and how they need to deal with their future dead.

That's what's fun about horror stories; not the creature, but how the humans deal with the threat. It's fun to think of crazy new monsters that kill everyone, hell, I do it every day. But zombies are cool because they are both the known and the unknown; they're people that we recognize, friends and family, but they're not the same. So we are torn by that recognition and the new threat. And that creates the emotional turmoil to drive the plot.

And we try to remember to aim for the head.

Thoughts "a"

So I was just watching the Michael Moore film, Sicko, but I had to turn it off. I can't stand his narration. His voice sounds like he's going to end each sentence with, "You gonna eat that?"

I appreciate what he's trying to do, but I don't see how linking the current health care crisis to the demonized Richard Nixon is going to get everyone to suddenly change the system.

"Sarah Jacobson needed a new heart. Her insurance company denied her claim on the grounds that since Sarah's own heart had been beating in her chest since before birth, giving her a new heart for her used heart would be an unfair trade. Um, you gonna finish that?"

But I think he's misguided. I think the real culprit is the stock market. As long as businesses make decisions based on what shareholders want, these problems won't disappear.

And shareholders are everyone, even foreigners who hate America.
"Let's make Americans pay so much for health care that they can't afford to live.
And let's make food cost so much in America that they can't afford to eat.
And let's make real estate so expensive in America that they can't afford to have homes."

People are worried that terrorists are going to blow stuff up in America, but that's not my worry. I worry that hostile nations will make everything so expensive in America that I won't be able to afford to live here, and then I'll have to learn Spanish and live somewhere else.

I didn't give a crap about foreign investments in the USA until ten years ago when South Americans started buying all the housing in South Florida and raising all the home prices. And now that the dollar is so weak and foreign investors can be buying commodities like wheat, which translates to expensive food, I'm really paranoid about it.

"And let's make energy so expensive that the gamer librarians can't play their Wiis and PS3s and XBox360s."

Ah, that got your attention, huh? Who's paranoid now?