Not your parents’ Camelot
The cable channel Encore did a bright thing: they followed the season ender of their blockbuster Spartacus (all sex and violence all the time, with very little plot to clutter our heads!) with the first episode of Camelot, the latest reworking of Arthurian legend.
We decided to give it a chance, especially when Eva Green showed up right from the get-go.
She plays Morgan, Arthur’s half-sister, and in that riveting opening sequence she is the prodigal daughter come home to castle to show daddy (Uther Pendragon) that she has learned a thing or two at the nunnery. Soon daddy is dead at her hand, she’s installed in the castle and shagging daddy’s top nemesis, King Lot (James Purefoy, last seen — by me, anyway — as Rome’s Marc Antony). It’s a good shagging.
Then Arthur shows up looking like, I don’t know, the newest teen heartthrob grabbed at random from Teen Heartthrob Camp, redeemed only by his association with a blonde with an awesome body, but she soon disappears and we’re left with the simpering Arthur. Who we’re supposed to believe is born to be king, has king written all over him, is already dreaming of the Lady in the Lake, yatta yatta yatta, and we’re already wishing for John Cleese et al. to deliver us, but it’s not to be. Thankfully, Eva Green keeps showing up at regular intervals.
Joseph Fiennes (Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love) plays a credible Merlin, who somehow uses his Merlinosity to convince Arthur to follow his lead back to an ivy-infested Camelot. And that’s when things really go to hell, because an agent of Merlin’s has announced Arthur’s heirdom to Morgan and King Lot, who promptly arrive in force at Camelot (as invited) and proceed to not kill Arthur and Merlin and their paltry forces.
That’s when Karen and I start yelling at the TV, because it really really sucks when the only watchable character in the show proves NOT to be as smart as you had hoped she would be. And now everyone is dumb, everyone who isn’t Merlin, and Merlin mostly just thinks he’s brilliant, when really he’s reduxing Wes Studi’s character The Sphinx from Mystery Men.
And I must say, Wes Studi does a much better job of it.
Will we watch more of this shlock? I’m guessing yes.
D.
What a voice.
Carly Simon at her best:
Not sure I ever told this story . . . but at my old girlfriend’s sister’s wedding reception, she (the bride) had the DJ play this song. I asked her afterward, what was she thinking?
“I LIKE this song!” she said, and that was that. I guess she had never listened to the lyrics? Or perhaps she felt she had learned to be herself first, by herself.
But it always amazed me, the guts (or the cluelessness) it took to play this song at a wedding reception. And, yes, she’s still with the same guy, some 20 years later.
D.
Character models
As there are no models on the web for a bird holding a rifle, I looked instead for a person holding a rifle, and found this:
which is cool and all, but does not quite suit my purposes.
New discovery for me: Cortney Tidwell, who is, well . . . just listen.
Great stuff. I got her album “Don’t Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up.” Not a single dog on that album.
D.
First efforts, tough audience
Hours of grinding, and here’s what I have to show:
What I like about it: it does not look completely unprofessional. The composition isn’t terrible.
What I dislike: just about everything else. I don’t feel that I am producing a “convincing” devolved bird (one whose wings have become arms and hands, rather similar to their hands and feet). The proportions are wrong, unnatural. Isen (the bird) is too dark, you can barely see his eyes.
My resident Web Comic expert, Jake, wouldn’t look at my efforts until I had a completed panel. I showed him the source photos and how I had doctored them and put them all together.
“What did you draw?” he said.
“The desk under the book.”
“So you’re making a cut-and-paste web comic.”
“Well –”
“I’d be impressed if you had drawn it.” And that was that.
Next, I’m going to try using this as a faint layer, over which I can sketch a different draft. This will allow me to punch up the detail on Isen and hopefully fix his upper body proportions. I’m hoping that the many-hours-if-not-days-per-panel is a consequence of the learning curve and not intrinsic to the medium.
Meanwhile, I’m having fun learning Gimp.
D.
Bad attitude
You don’t have to tell me I have a bad attitude. I know I have a bad attitude. I’m the one at the seminar pointing out that Dr. Expert really isn’t curing that many people (that, deviously, he has defined cure so as to make it look like he’s curing lots of people). Or telling the admin-trainer that the diagram on the slide she just put up might resemble a mathematical function, but has as much in common with a function as plastic grapes do with a nice Bordeaux. Or suggesting, however unsubtly, that this same admin-trainer’s Theory of Everything makes no sense in the real world.
The blather in question: John C. Maxwell’s Five Levels of Leadership. If you follow the link, you can find out for yourself what these five levels are, but it should suffice that each level starts with the letter P. That shit doesn’t happen by accident. That happens because someone wants to write a book, teach a seminar, get quoted by other self-help gurus, who knows what else.
Our admin-trainer was trying to make the point that you can’t get from level 1 to level 3 without going through level 2. I argued that the fact that you can, in fact, get to level 3 without going through level 2 is proof positive that there are serious flaws in the construct.
For sake of furthering this discussion, level 1 — the lowest level — is where people follow you because of your title. “People follow you because they have to.” At level 2, people follow you because they want to (AKA, they follow you because they like you), and at level 3, people follow you because they respect the results you’ve achieved — you’re a proven leader.
In my residency, I had six attending physicians. I had to follow all of them because I had to, so they were all at least level 1. But one of them I truly respected — when he was running the show in the OR, I always felt safe because I knew he had my patient’s best interests at heart. My patient was number one for me, as he was for this particular doc. But I didn’t like this doc. He was too weird to like. He had an off-putting mixture of arrogance and vulnerability that made him difficult to like. But I’d have followed him anywhere.
Three of my attending physicians were likable. They had good senses of humor, they were fun to hang out with when we were outside of our usual roles. Did I want to please them because I liked them? Sure, to some degree. But I didn’t respect them. They would refuse to come in to help on difficult cases, or they’d leave me in the middle of a difficult case because they had concerns more pressing than the patient on the table (heavy sarcasm intended).
Doc #1 skipped over level 2 entirely, see? And he wasn’t the only one. I can think of other chief residents and attendings whom I respected but didn’t like. Liking someone, wanting to follow their lead, really has little to do with the process. I would argue that position, too (the lowest rung) is irrelevant — to give one example, I can think of a foreign medical graduate who, while lacking position, was clearly the most qualified surgeon in the room. Others knew it too and deferred to his knowledge.
This self-help thing is just so much religion. If you don’t believe me, go to that link and watch the adoring fanboys and fangirls fall over one another singing the praises of Maxwell.
Christy Moosa says:
October 4, 2010 at 2:22 amYou mean the best idea God has ever given you, and you are honored to be his vessel. To Him be all glory, honor and power forever, Amen!
Michael Lotfy says:
October 4, 2010 at 2:46 amTo Christy Moosa: Oh you religious people, be quite and learn. It’s John’s potential that he was born to the world with it. No doubt that God is the one who planted it to him, and he does not deny it. He does not require you to remind him of it. He always mention this all over his life. Show us Christy what are you going to do in your life. John’s life speaks for him.
John, your integrity speaks for you.
Be blessed more.
Don’t mean to digress but I’m fascinated by this construction, “Be blessed more.” Is it some variant of the Wiccan “blessed be”? Theological one-upsmanship? Or a back-handed insult (“you clearly aren’t blessed enough — be blessed more“)?
Will the rest of these leadership meetings be similarly proselytic? Will we be obliged to adopt the seven traits of effective whatevers, the twelve steps of fill-in-the-blank? Must my life be purpose-driven?
Because if they are, and if we will be, and if it must, then first I suspect I’ll have to follow the 10 Steps to a Better Attitude.
D.
Rerun
I don’t feel like blogging today, but I’ve been enjoying my tiramisu photoblog, so you might, also.
Yesterday — Valentine’s Day — I discovered an amazingly decadent dessert: creme brulee cheesecake. Vanilla-intense cheesecake topped with the classic brulee. Jake ate 98% of it, but I was able to touch the smidgen that had smeared onto the sides of the styrofoam container. Fabulous.
Eat any good sweets lately?
D.
Not that you asked, but . . .
My master plan to turn myself into a web comic mogul (AKA Midlife Crisis v2.0) proceeds apace. First thing I did was find a way to pick up Manga Studios Debut 4.0 for free. This is a relatively inexpensive (especially if you get it FREE) program optimized for black and white comics, but also color compatible. But the Debut package is pretty limited graphics-wise; gradients, for example, are severely restricted. So I downloaded GIMP 2.6, a powerful (and FREE) graphics manipulation/creation program which works on my Vista computer, unlike my old friend Paint Shop Pro, which crashed me big time.
Thus far total expenditure about forty dollars to Cafe Press for a birthday present to Karen (that’s how I got Manga Studios Debut for free). To establish a basic vocabulary, I went back to Scott McCloud‘s excellent Understanding Comics, a book I’ve owned for years but have never read cover to cover. Oh, it’s good. I also popped for an Idiot’s Guide to Manga Studios for Dummies, or some such, and DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics. These have not yet arrived.
But it’s not a true midlife crisis until you’ve spent a bit of money, and I must interrupt myself by saying that my midlife crises are far cheaper than the average male’s midlife crises, which typically involve Harley Davidsons and Porsche Targas and seven-figure divorce settlements. Nope, none of that for me. Not even the Porsche. So I didn’t feel too bad dropping a couple hundred on the Wacom Intuos 4 graphics tablet. And I am proud to report that all of my programs are talking to one another, I haven’t crashed my computer, and I’m dutifully working through all the online manuals, and soon I will be producing ART! Or at least comics.
Okay, I’m off to buy a few tarantulas for Karen’s birthday! (Online, that is.)
D.
What am I getting myself into . . .
So I volunteered for this “Hippocrates Circle” thing . . . it’s an activity for junior high school kids who are interested in medical careers. They’re going to tour our facility, and there will be demos or stations. In pulmonary, the kids will get to check their peak flows (how fast can you exhale?) In ortho, someone will have to break an arm or something, because they’ll be demonstrating casting. And I’ll be scoping my throat for the greater good.
It’s not the first time I’ve scoped myself for educational purposes, but today I learned something new. Something disturbing. These thirty kids? They’re coming through my station in six groups of five.
“Oh, well,” I said, trying to put the best face on things. “Once I’m numb, I’m numb, so six scopes can’t be that much worse than one.”
One of the other docs at the meeting suggested I volunteer for a Foley catheter demo. “Once you’re numb, you’re numb.” And from there, it wasn’t too far a leap for another doc to suggest that the general surgeons warm up their sigmoidoscopes.
The things I’ll do for kids.
D.