Me an' my crayons

Red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, orange and purple.

Once upon a time when I was young, probably around kindergarten, I was given my first set of eight Crayola crayons. Now, that may not sound like much, but think about it a second. A rainbow only has seven colors but those colors are the visible spectrum - the colors that we see. I remember when the world seemed simple enough that eight colors were enough to express it in. If you look at a child's coloring book, there are no true guidelines for children to use to color with. It's whatever they have available to them - even one color can be expressive enough in the right hands.

I had so many coloring books and blank pieces of paper on which to draw and color - I think blank sheets are best, although to defy the hidden rules of lines and boundaries by coloring outside the lines is true art. I recall teachers and students telling each other (me included) that coloring outside the lines was bad, and doing so showed a lack of fundamental understanding. As an adult I object to that because it creates very rigid thinking, hence the overuse of the phrase "think outside the box." The better phrase to use should be "there is no box" - any object seen on a printed page happens to be lines and curves that are placed in such a manner as to convey a familiar object, nothing more.

While I was writing this and searching the Crayola site, they displayed a book I think I'll pick up that addresses the issues I brought up above, albeit in a different manner - it's called Celebrate The Scribble.

When first grade arrived, I thought I'd flex my color muscles and go for the uber-pack of crayons - yes, the humongous 128 count crayon pack WITH the sharpener! I can still remember the various color names of new colors - raw umber, Indian red, flesh (yeah, I had a REAL problem with that one!), aquamarine, indigo, lavender, maroon, and other spectacular colors. Although I had all of these, I would still revert to the basics primarily because I did a lot of outdoor-themed pictures. Picnics, farms, beaches - all of these could be accomplished with the primary eight. I even made a "mistake" and colored one color over another - aha, a revelation occurred then!

To this day, I still adhere to using the simplest "colors" to convey a complex world, because it isn't about how much, it's about how you use what you have.

Me an' my toys - Sharp VCR

Ah 1983 - what a year, and with it the portent of becoming a high school graduate! At the beginning of the year, I was working for Marvel Comics on Blip magazine (and that's about as long as it lasted!), so I was pulling in some serious dollars for a high school senior still living at home. I had a subscription to Video magazine at the time so I started to educate myself about VCRs and the wonderful technology they were introducing to consumers, albeit on a very small scale. I had just gotten cable at the apartment and wanted some means to record some of the programming I was watching.

A bit of history here - this was a period where Hollywood was very concerned about people recording broadcasts and keeping them. They had no control over the process, but the rules behind recording were very nebulous and made one wonder about the legality of video taping. Eventually this fell by the wayside and made the industry what it is today. Read more here.

Anyhow, the new mission was to get a VCR before graduation - and virtually any VCR would do. The major players at the time were Sony (with the Beta (read: superior) format), Panasonic, Sharp, JVC (the inventors of VHS), and a host of others. Back then, the real differentiator between machines was whether or not it was a top loader (Panny) or front loader (Sharp). I personally wanted a front loader simply because I had to put it on a shelf with not much clearance height-wise. I looked at the Panasonics based on brand name alone, and I almost bought one, a story unto itself.

Back in the 70s and 80s, Times Square was a squalid and generally unsavory part of NY that you didn't want to linger around for too long. There were some slight benefits to that in the sense that the streets were lined with electronics stores that competed heavily against each other. These were way before the major chains would be vast resources for consumer technology, although Crazy Eddie's and The Wiz were sources as well. I went to one of these stores that advertised a $350 Panasonic top loader in their window, but get this... they wanted to charge me $150 for coaxial cables! That's right, the cheap little cables that you get for free! That soured the deal, and I went to a competitor of their's right down the block and bought my front-loading Sharp VCR instead.

You wanna talk about basic functionality? My VCR had a wired remote that only had one function - pause/play. That's it, and if you think about it, did I really need much more than that? Well, FF and Rew would have been nice, and power on/off would have been nirvana! I still have all of the tapes I recorded with it, much of which were movies on HBO and Showtime. I had a little day planner that I used to schedule shows with - I think the recorder had single program functionality. The first tape I made was a 4-hour VHS with two movies on it - Star Trek II and Star Wars, and I can still play it to this day, but why would I want to?

Me an' my movies

Since 1998 when I bought my first DVD and DVD player, I have striven to become a student of film. In that pursuit, I have created a massive library of films, but there are a few that truly stand out as masterworks. Here are my choices from the Criterion line:

Charade - please see this film and skip the terrible remake known as The Truth About Charlie
Ace In The Hole - Billy Wilder's fine commentary on the media, and let's not forget Kirk Douglas' amazing performance
Le Trou - very suspenseful and based on a true story
Wages of Fear - you'll be on the edge of your seat, over and over again
The Bad Sleep Well - excellent film-noir-ish Kurosawa
High and Low - morality tale with a twist
Sullivan's Travels - "Veronica Lake is on the take!"

Then there's the standard Hollywood fare:

Star Wars (and yes, I call it that and not Episode IV or A New Hope)
Star Trek II (Wrath of Khan, still my favorite Star Trek movie of all time)
Outland (this film just resonates in me because of the time and place when I saw it back in 1981)
Superman The Movie (December 3rd 1978 was when I went to see this, and I still love the time travel sequence)
Die Hard (the first movie me and my friends went to where we couldn't help saying "Oh, s***!" every time something blew up!)
Tron (ah, 1982, cheesy acting, groundbreaking CGI, and a video game!)
The Road Warrior (yep, I know this is known as Mad Max 2 everywhere else in the world except the US)