Ceramics for a living? Good luck with that. Part 1

When I met my lovely wife we were going to college. Me at a junior college just turned state college and she at a major university. Which is like the janitor hitting on a CEO. At the time she paid for her education with her talents. She had a scholarship through ceramics and spent many hours at a ceramic wheel with her smelly schoolmates who were also at their wheels making what would inevitably become a bong.

I remember spending time there while she finished school projects and I played guitar and failing to act cool. I played a song so horrible once she actually told me "could you take the hippie crap somewhere else?" Needless to say we have a very open and honest relationship, like once when I got emotional over something my daughter did and she told me to "suck it up, fag."

But I'm off the point.

My wife did not pursue the exciting career of clay pot making, something the modern world moved past sometime after rome fell. Instead she helped me get into the entertainment business by paying the bills when we moved to California while I was doing free jobs to gain some contacts. And please don't read too much into 'jobs', we all have to pay some dues.

After almost 8 years of marriage and two kids later, my wife got to chat with one of the 4 or 5 people she used to hang out with in the pottery room, listening to bad reggae and playing with mud, something I grew out of when I was 3. She got the info on all of them and the results of their lives. Now remember when they were all together they talked about nothing but spinning clay and making it in the hard fast living of your modern ceramisist (which is about as hardcore as a professional chess player). The results are somewhat telling.

First there is Skylar.

Skylar wasn't just a ceramicist. He was also a painter and habitual drug abuser. He had taken so much acid in his life that on paper was clinically insane, which for him was a highlight on his resume. This information was actually given to my wife after one time after dark she asked him to walk her to her car for protection. On the way he told her about his drug use and insaneyness and she then realized she asked the one person she was trying to avoid to be an escort to her car. So in her attempt to be safe on the journey to her car had epically failed. Where is he now? He's on some mountain recovering after a drug relapse. He's doing much better than we all could have expected.

Then there's Cassy also known as: The reptilian girl whom my wife got in a fist fight with.

If you thought ceramisists where just peace freak hippies, you've never been in the middle of an argument about the optimum slip consistancey for slab building. Yeah, I don't know what that means either but apparently it's enough to give out a little chin music. This very thing happened between my wife and Cassy on a workshop trip to Phoenix. Besides her reptilian looks, the only other thing that bugged me about Cassy was she looked just like a dirty penniless hippie who smelt like the stinky butter the Sea Shepard throws at Japanese whaling ships, but she drove a Lexus her dad got her and a bank account full of cash. So instead of being what she was - a rich little brat with all the cash at her fingertips - she decided to be what she thought she should be, an annoying artist with mud under her fingernails. Today Cassy an unemployed architect.. the dream dies again.

Avatar.... I finally saw you and I am left wondering, why?

I want to talk about the top grossing film of all time. If you think it's Citizen Kane, The Godfather, or Casablanca, you're wrong. Today we're talking about Avatar. James Cameron can make a movie. Great, so could Ed Wood, but Wood never received an Oscar for his films, which are the cinematic equivalent of George Takei quoting the Bible with tourettes.

When I went and saw Avatar, I went to the 3D version of the show. Did it totally enhance everything and make me think I was there in the forest looking at blue nipples? No. It did not. Good thing too, because if I thought I was on a planet full of mutated Smurfs I'd go after 'home tree' too. (either mutated Smurfs or mutated baboons, where the blue asses have spread to the body, I have yet to decide.) The 3D for the most part got in the way. Rather than enhancing the experience it just annoyed it. As though it was possible to annoy the experience more with the two dimensional characters and the stale wooden dialogue.

James Cameron can't make a great movie, but the thing he's a genius at is making a movie that appeals to the mass audience. Which doesn't take much. In fact if you wrote a book on the Cameron's style of film making it would be called "The Lowest Common Denominator: Movie Making, The James Cameron Way!" If you don't believe me, here's some "dialogue" from Avatar.

JAKE: That's right -- to embed with the Omaticaya. To find out how to screw them out of their home. By deceit or by force, he didn't care. And if it turned out to be force, then how best to do it.

GRACE: And what about now, Jake?

JAKE: I'm not that guy any more.

GRACE: I know.

RIVETING! That's almost as brilliant as Twilight, where if you tell a girl you can read people's minds, she just stares at you.. for two solid hours until you ask for your money back.

Apparently it took Cameron 12 years to develop the technology to make Avatar, which is something I can appreciate, but in that time the only thing he realized plot-wise was: Plants are sacred, corporations want nothing more than to rape all nature, the military wants to kill all foreigners, and on other planets the local natives are basically the black jungle stereotypes Carl Denham hired to help him capture King Kong. I mean seriously, am I the only person who saw that? Just because they're blue doesn't make it any less racist.

All in all, Avatar was way way WAY too long, the story was basically Ferngully with a lot more blue private parts and 3D natives weren't at all convincing as 'real' entities. But whatever, shit blew up, right?

Right?