Chris Dee
- Gender: Female
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Recent
- Chris Dee on Resolutions
- Chris Dee on Cat-Tales Graphic Novel? Well, the beginning...
- Chris Dee on M&M Battles
- Chris Dee on Female Superheroes
- Chris Dee on Cat-Tales 58: Demon's in the Details
- Chris Dee on Heartbeat msg
- Chris Dee on Biased, Stupid, Opportunists or Lazy? This one we can fix.
- Chris Dee on Buds
- Chris Dee on Light Cats
- Chris Dee on Election Day
- Chris Dee on Cat-Tales 56: Armchair Detective
- Chris Dee on Why I don't hate Mondays
- Chris Dee on Joe Straczynski's "Faith Manages"
- Chris Dee on It's got a great beat but...
- Chris Dee on I don't want to jinx this, but...
- Chris Dee on Investment Strategy
- Chris Dee on We're all still a bit mad here
- Chris Dee on Blinders
- Chris Dee on The DEE...but then again
- Chris Dee on 10,000 Times
- Chris Dee on Lighting
- Chris Dee on New Chapter Day
- Chris Dee on Superman Trivia Question
- Chris Dee on The Men in Black
- Chris Dee on Holes
Latest in Chris Dees Blog
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10,000 Times
There are 4 basic learning styles. They tell you that your first day training to become a museum docent, and I imagine if you're studying to become a teacher they hit you with it on day one also. I don't really remember all the details, but essentially, some people learn best in a classroom environment or from a book. Some respond to finding out how things are made. Some are dynamic learners, they pick things up by doing, etc. It's presented as an absolute: like you're male or female, right-handed or left-handed, color blind or not. I accepted it at the time, but I've come to doubt that concept. Because I know my learning style has changed as I've grown older. I used to be the type-1 classroom sort, and type-3 how things are put together bored me to tears. I've become a very type-4 dynamic learner, with a curiosity if not an aptitude for the type-3 how things work style. Initially I thought I had changed, but I am starting to think it is the nature of what... -
The Men in Black
Today's planned topic is postponed so we can turn our attention to an article in the New York Times about a group of people I just love. STAGE TECHNICIANS.
Unseen Army Keeps the Show Going On
They get no spotlight, no applause. But balancing that, they get yelled at a lot, and the hours are hell. Yet most technicians I know care more about the show - in terms of the audience seeing a good one - than half the cast. Unsung heroes, you gotta love them. And in this case, you better love them, because techs are among that brilliantly clever subset of humanity where: if you cross them, they can get you. And you will never, ever be able to prove it was them. You gotta love that too, at least I do. So, in honor of... -
Disneyland
Here's another one that I don't think needs a lot of unpacking or explanation. John Hench, who was essentially the architect of the original Disneyland, is one of the few people who knows what it is to make something out of your head that becomes a standard and benchmark in a million other people's heads. Here he is speaking about Main Street U.S.A. The forms of these buildings are locked into old associative forms. The old forms weren't designed by some person at a desk, an architect-the designers responded to a kind of group dream, a group aspiration. In the same way, a folk song was not written by some guy at a piano. That represents a lot of experience, and no one person can put it down. In a symbolic way, architecture is the same-an old architectural form has those reassurances locked in there. You take a certain style, and take out the contrdictions that have crept in there through people that never understood it or by accident or by som ekind of ... -
Tuscan Cooking
Had a fabulous meal last week which reminded me of the genius of Tuscan cooking. It's a story that not only tastes good, but is rich in lessons and metaphors for writing, for comics, for all sorts of human endeavors. In a way it begins with the Crusades. Crusaders and pilgrims returning from the holy land had discovered the rich pleasures that spices introduce to food. They came back, principally through Venice, with this new taste for spice, and Venice grew rich on the spice trade. What Venice had, Florence would have, and the Medicis invested heavily in the spice trade, growing even richer. Near the end of the 1400s, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean to Malabar and Calicut, exulting "For Christ and Spices!" and Italy soon had to share the spice trade with Portugal, and ultimately relinquish it. It is considered the best thing that happened to Italian cooking, because cooks now had patrons with extremely developed palates... -
Writing with feathers
I think it was L. B. Mayer who responded to the glut of big budget costume epics with the phrase "let us have no more movies where they write with feathers." Which brings us to tonight's word: Period.
Writing period is a hard needle to thread. There is a misconception even among some professionals that if we're in the past, everyone speaks with great formality. Some of the early adaptations of the Brother Cadfael novels are downright painful that way:
Monk: I am Brother Petronis, cook to this house. It is from me you will come each day to collect your master's daily fare.
Servant: I know my duties. Today my mistress has a dinner prepared. She begs only a little sage and basil to season her dish.
The same mistake was made for a different reason in HBO's John Adams series. Pretty much all of John and Abigail's dialogue is taken from their letters. The letters are a very famous and illuminating look at an extraordinary... -
Where there never was a hat
Marvel folk, I know you're all excited that The Hulk opened this weekend. Even though I'm not a Marvel gal, I rejoice in a comics company and a movie studio able to say "We know we messed it up. But look, we accept that and we fixed it." Exciting as that is for me, it's not the story today. Today the story is another class act. Last night on the Tony Awards, Stephen Sondheim received the Lifetime Achievement and just as his music so often has, his acceptance speech brought a lump to my throat.
Thank you all, but this award has to be shared with Julius Epstein, Arthur Lawrence, Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart, George Furth, Jim Goldman, John Weidman, Hugh Wheeler, and James Lapine. These are the men who created the characters that sang the songs, the situations that gave rise to the songs, and the criticism that improved the songs. They were my collaborators. They are called playwrights. They invent. They make wholecloth out of nothing. They make a hat ... -
My love/hate relationship with the Comma
Deep down, I think all writers hate those little fuckers. As CT-insiders are aware, I've been working with a partner in crime to proof and reformat the early Cat-Tales into book form. PIC and I are now midway through Book 3, and that's how long it has taken me to put my finger on it. The great conflict that transforms this little squiggle that should be the thinking writer's best friend into the unslayable, six-headed, fire-spewing, razor-taloned arch-nemesis from hell all comes down to "Once upon a time." Because the comma has two functions, one from 3,000 years ago and one from today. 9 times out of 10 they agree. It's that tenth occurrence, which is just rare enough that non-writers don't have to confront it very often and when they do, they probably don't care if they get it wrong. In the beginning, there were no keyboards. There was no paper, no pens, no ink. There was just a fire and a dead boar with enough meat on its bones for all of us. Some... -
14 Trailers
Charlie Wilson's War just came out on DVD. Watching it again after all these months, I was struck by how rich the dialogue is. Something that always ticks me off seeing a movie in the theatre is the (mercifully rare) audience that has been silent for 45 minutes, suddenly laughs because they've finally heard a line from the trailers. It's like they have no ability to judge for themselves if a line is funny or not. But if it's in the trailer, that must be a funny one, here comes the dutiful "Ha ha ha" You just know you're surrounded by the people mentioned previously who absorb advertising, publisher's blurbs, and press releases without ever stopping to consider that this is not an unbiased opinion.
Anyway, back to CWW. Most movies, you can always tell a few lines that are here just for the trailer. A ferociously punchy description of some piece of the plot. In CWW, the thing I realized is they have enough of those to make about 14 different... -
Spring Cleaning
It was time for some serious computer clean up, beyond the once a month defrag and manual checking of the anti-virus and anti-spyware software.
Those of us who took a creative writing class in high school or college probably know that old chestnut of walking around with a notebook and jotting down ideas or bits of poetry as they occur to us in our daily lives, and then turning to this miniature tome of inspiration whenever we are in want of an idea. I personally find it impossible to imagine such a thing without casting one of those poodle skirt and ponytail girls from Pleasantville High School as the would-be writer. It's so "Golly Gee, Mrs. Johnson, that sure was a swell writing tip you gave us last week. I'm never without my notebook now and, gee willickers, I already filled up 3 full pages with some keen ideas for short stories."
Beyond that unsavory feeling, I always feel that keeping little logs like that is ultimately unhealthy for the... -
New Chapter Day
I've always liked community theatres that don't pretend they're anything more than that. Those are the ones that choose the Neil Simons and Bye Bye Birdies that they can do justice to. They don't torture Chekhov.
I remember one theatre in particular where the artistic director still gave a curtain speech. Every performance, not just the opening nights. He always addressed the audience informally before the show began, and everything about it, every word, every mannerism, expressed how excited he was to have this show ready for you. It wasn't empty lip service, they all had been working on this for weeks and now it was ready to present to you. They were eager to show you and dying to see what your response would be.
That's how I feel on New Chapter Day, especially if there is a development that has been all alone in my head for weeks or months and now, finally, it gets to go out and meet people
Yesterday was new chapter day on one of...
