The Bentfootes, day 1
Mr. Urbaniak relaxes during the shoot with an admirer.
The crew was ready, the cast members were in place, the atmosphere was electric. It was our first day, shooting a brand new movie! Somehow, news of our humble location had shot across the world on the internet, and scores of the teen girls I like to call “Jimmers” were already camped out outside the doors of the studio. Why don’t these fresh-faced, nubile young ladies have boyfriends? Or school? Or parents?
Everyone was riding a high that only months of preparation and keen understanding of the script can bring. The only thing missing was our star.
His call time was seven am. Seven came and went, and then seven-thirty, eight and nine, then ten. I paced the floor of the studio and worked out the camera moves for the umpteenth time. Squid, our DP, and his crew were starting to get testy with me. They were champing at the bit, ready to shoot.
At 10:30, a roar went up from outside. The cast and crew rushed to the windows to see a huge crush of humanity swarming over the hood and roof of Mr. Urbaniak’s custom-built Hummer, 32 feet long and featuring a wet bar, a sauna and a hot tub. Mr. Urbaniak had tried to get me to go “cruising” with him one night in this vehicle, but I had just seen Al Gore’s movie the night before and could not bring myself to get into this behemoth. It was a lucky thing, as that was the evening that a twelve-year-old girl almost drowned in the hot-tub (she was not the only one in hot water that night).
Studio security, using cattle-prods and machine guns (rubber bullets only! My contract insists upon no fatalities to fans!) cleared a path through the Jimmers from the Hummer to the studio doors. After that, of course, he had to make it through the studio itself and all the hangers-on and sycophants that naturally cling to a star in the middle of a meteoric rise.
He got up to our studio around 11:00am. His subdued demeanor and unwillingness to take off his dark glasses made me fear the worst: he had shown up drunk once again, if not worse.
He staggered over to the craft services table and collapsed. A melon ball, lodged in his ear, had to be extracted with a plastic spoon.
This was an inauspicious beginning indeed to our seven-day shoot.
The scene was a simple one. Mr. Urbaniak (we named hischaracter “Jim” to make it less confusing for our lead) had to simply watch a pair of dancers run through a routine. No acting required. We found a chair for Mr. U to sit in and blocked out the rehearsal. Barely able to keep his head upright, and certainly unable to discern the dancers, who were over ten feet away, a PA held a stick with bright day-glow orange tape attached to guide the star as to where to direct his attention (the PA will need to be removed digitally later).
Now we were running over six hours late and we didn’t yet have a take in the can. Mr. Urbaniak was incapable of remaining upright, even when harnessed to the chair, and insisted on holding a huge prop “martini glass” because he thought it was “funny.” (“It’s a comedy, right? Then LET’S BE FUNNY!” is his motto.)
We ran through a total of sixty takes as the sun set and Mr. Urbaniak slumped further and further down in his seat. When a large rope of drool began to make its way to the floor, I knew it was time for medical intervention. A couple of shots later and our star’s arms starting moving again without the aid of what I call “Muppet sticks”.
That’s when the trouble really began. Although the script merely calls for “Jim” to sit and watch the dance, Mr. U could not restrain himself. Pacino-like, he ignored his blocking and text (or lack of it) and launched himself into the scene. Normally I encourage ideas from my actors, but this was utterly contradictory to the intent of the scene. First he started pestering the actress playing the choreographer, then he started “giving notes” on the dancer’s performance. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but for some reason his “notes” all revolved around whether or not the dancer’s nipples were “visible” enough for his liking in the cold room.
Everyone was getting a little testy, but I kept the camera rolling, hoping that something, anything, might be salvaged from the day’s shoot.
Mr. U then grabbed the dancer and, well, let’s say he “did something inappropriate” that involved touching what I like to call “her breasts.”
The choreographer, outraged by this breach of etiquette, had had enough. Star or no star, she would not stand idly by and chuckle at the brutish antics of Mr. U. She took him aside, where an argument quickly developed. I caught the whole screaming match on film, and it’s good that I did, as that was it for Mr. Urbaniak today. He stomped off the set and headed off into the night with a Jimmer.
So, Day 1 was exciting, but of course now I’m going to have to stay up all night to revise the script. Mr. Urbaniak is the star and lead, and now the story must be changed to keep up with his destructive whims.
Of course I could fight him, but then someone else would be directing this turkey.
The Bentfootes
Here’s a real rarity for the pages of this blog: notes from an actual film shoot.
The Bentfootes is a “mockumentary” about a fictional American family who, for the past 200 years, has toiled in the margins of American dance, all to no avail.
Why to no avail? Well, because each generation of Bentfootes, for one reason or another, just hasn’t gotten the breaks. Sometimes it’s lack of talent, sometimes it’s being ahead of the times, sometimes it’s cruel twists of fate, sometimes it’s over-reaching. And sometimes it’s because you get hit by a bus.
The Bentfootes was conceived as a dance piece by Kriota Willberg (Mrs. R. Sikoryak), and is now being expanded into a feature-length film, written and directed by yours truly (
toddalcott), with a piece of animation by r_sikoryak and starring none other than James urbaniak, with a cameo appearance by Gary “gazblow” Schwartz. It’s a regular Livejournal lovefest!
Mr. Urbaniak plays Jim Raritan, the “producer” of the movie you’re watching and the boyfriend of Susan Bentfoote, the “last Bentfoote,” whose tragic death is the catalyst for Jim to make a documentary about Susan and her family. It’s a funny, bittersweet meditation on art, life, and what it takes to “make it” in American culture.
Today’s work consisted of: watching the music documentary Dig!, in order to remind ourselves just how patchy a movie can be technically and still get by on story and content, and watching a rehearsal of two of the dances to get some ideas for camera placement and how many different takes we’re going to have to do for each dance to cover all the action.
Our schedule is very tight and our budget is, well, nonexistent. We’re shooting James’s days starting on Saturday, and the big crowd scenes where we need everybody in one spot at one time next Wednesday. That is, unless James has to shoot an episode of “Kidnapped” that day, in which case I will simply blow my head off and not worry about the movie any more.
Wish us luck!
In projector news, the store I ordered the bulb from said that it would take a week for the new bulb to come in. That was over two weeks ago, and now I’m in New York for two weeks shooting this movie. So it will be quite some time before I am reunited with my beloved projector. But I shall my hands quite fulll with this no-budget film shoot.
Anything Else revisted, incredibly
Christina Ricci has seen the future. Or maybe the past. It’s a little confusing.
LJer dougo has sent this utterly flabbergasting piece of analysis.
For those of you unable or unwilling to click on the link, I’m going to repeat the gist of the information here anyway, just because I think that it will be a healthy exercise for me to do so, that I might slowly get myself used to this idea.
A while back, I typed up this little piece on Woody Allen’s Anything Else, referring to it as “Woody Allen’s low point.” Normally I find that when I don’t like a great director’s movie, it’s because there was some other level to it that I couldn’t appreciate, but Anything Else is one of those movies where you’ve really, really got to be a glutton for punishment to have to want to watch it again, because there honestly doesn’t seem to be anything going on under the lame, disorganized comedy you’re watching.
Well, it turns out that dougo has discovered that there may, in fact, be something else going on under that lame, disorganized comedy. Namely, a (work with me here) time travel comedy, wherein Woody Allen plays the older version of himself (Jason Biggs), who comes back in time to save his younger self from following his own life’s path. Now, suddenly, the ending, which doesn’t work on any level as is, starts to take on a whole new comic dimension. (In the movie, Woody tells Jason to join him on a new job in LA, then panics at the last minute and says that he can’t go because, of all things, he’s shot a police officer and is on the lam. It makes a whole lot more sense, and is funnier, if, for some reason, Woody’s time machine is failing and he ducks out on Jason in order to get back to his own time. Christ, the movie almost becomes Back to the Future.) (It would also make sense that Jason Bigg’s character is actually from the 1950s, which would explain his love of torchy jazz and his anachronistic attitudes about present-day NYC.) (Jesus, now that I think about it, maybe there was a third part of the movie, all about Jason’s life in the 1950s, which he escaped in order to get to what is now our present. Then his future self comes back to rescue him from the 2000s. Now that would have been some kick-ass movie!)
Now, ordinarily I would file this under “people with too much time on their hands” but, well, I guess I’m one of those people, because, the fact is, there is something of a precedent for Woody Allen movies starting out much more “experimental” than they finish up. Woody lore is rife with alternate endings, scrapped productions, replaced cast-members and and even completely re-done movies. Annie Hall was, they say, originally a three-hour movie about a man’s inability to experience pleasure, and contained a substantial murder mystery. And was actually shot that way, and became the Academy-Award-winning classic only in the cutting room. (And the murder-mystery part was later re-made as Manhattan Murder Mystery.)
Also, Woody has always been playful with genre devices whenever his narrative needs a goose. Just a casual perusal of his titles comes up with deft employment of ghosts, time travel, flying saucers, fairies, voodoo, spiritual displacement, The Gods and magic (especially the “Chinese Box” trick, which comes up at least four times in his work, and which he uses again in the upcoming Scoop [which looks wonderful, by the way]) (And let’s not forget, before Woody was a comedian, he was a magician.)
It makes perfect sense that Anything Goes might feature a character from the future, and it also makes perfect sense that Woody would decide it didn’t work and cut it out of the movie at the last minute, leaving behind, yes, another romantic comedy, although one a far cry from Annie Hall. And the only people who might know about it are the actors in the scenes cut out and the crew who shot them, and they could easily be sworn to secrecy. He works with the same crew members for decades sometimes, they wouldn’t say anything (not that anyone would ask), and even an actor as grouchy as Sam Shepard becomes tight-lipped and stoic when asked why they were cut out of Woody Allen movies. So who knows?
Character Design, part II: The Comics
What is it? What makes these two guys so bewitching? Is it their trenchcoats? Is it their grace and skill? Their evident cool in the face of extreme danger? Their animal-like nature?
Or is it the talent of the artists, the quality of the line, the starkness of the lighting, the mastery of the shading? Is it that both figures, although hefty with three-dimensional weight and mass, also paradoxically border upon complete abstraction, a collection of shapes and shadows?
In my daily life I have no interest in thugs or demons and my idea of a personal hero is someone like Thurston Moore, but these two big lugs consistently make me want to stop what I’m doing, take a load off and look at some comic books.
Venture Bros: Hate Floats
1. Great title, and illustrative. The characters are separated and teamed with enemies and strangers, and find unlikely alliances due to the only thing they share: a desire to destroy their enemies.
2. High level of carnage. Could be the bloodiest so far. Last week’s episode with the fourteen deaths was hysterical, but this was almost like real violence. Truly disturbing. I’ve never seen an eyeball out of its socket, animated, much less see a “point-of-view” shot of the same thing.
3. Any TV show that includes perverse references to Superman, Turk 182 and “Winged Victory” can’t be all bad.
4. Rusty buys Dean a speed-suit. It’s red. And it didn’t occur to me until they were half-way through their purchase that Dr. Venture’s suit was once red too, but he’s worn it every day of his life since he bought it as a teenager. Now it’s faded to what my old apartment building decorator called “Desert Rose.”
5. Terrific episode-long piece of sustained action. Really, everything cuts together beautifully. It’s not just funny, it’s also genuinely exciting.
6. The most important thing, the show is completely transforming itself. Last season, a good deal of the humor was the humor of disappointment, where they set up the action cliche and then deflate it by having something mundane happen. Here, they set up the action cliche and then turn it on its head, pump it up, twist it inside out, increase the tempo and turn it into something that manages to be both parody and the real thing at the same time.
7. The sustained narrative. I cannot stress how different it makes everything.
Contest!*
Favorite / Least favorite character designs.
I’ll go first.
I don’t know why, but I find this character endlessly appealing. Best-designed character on animated television today. Not even the other characters on the same show stack up, with the possilbe exception of a couple of the villains.
There were Kim Possible dolls in the stores for a while, but I thought they blew it; they gave her real hair, which seems beside the point to me. The point of her hair seems to be that it remains in its solid Jennifer-Aniston wave, not that you could imagine running a comb through it.
I often bring up character design when discussing animation and my wife starts looking at me like I’m speaking Chinese. In some recess of her psyche, there is no “character design,” there’s just what people look like. And yet, to pick only one tiny example, I would say that a good reason for the relative success of A Bug’s Life over Antz was purely character design. Theirs were friendly and fun-looking, ours were comparatively “adult,” sophisticated and even a little creepy-looking.
The bottom line for character design, for me, is “when I look at this character, do I want to know more about them, or less?”
Case in point.
My other favorite, Sally Impossible, I could not find of image of online.
Hmm — Kim Possible, Sally Impossible? More than coincidence?
Animators: no fair nominating your own creations.
*not a contest
My Superman
Because I was up for this gig. Along with ten thousand other writers, I’m sure. Jiminy, thing was in development for 19 years, they must have asked everyone on the planet at least once.
Anyway, I never got to the pitch stage (wait a minute, I wasn’t up for this gig after all — I was up for Batman vs. Superman — so this idea never would have worked anyway –)
Anyway, I had this idea. And now that the official WB/DC approved movie is out, I know that they’ll never do my idea. But I still think it’s a great idea and here I share it with you.
The executive I spoke with at WB was interested, of course, in “re-inventing” Superman. So I set my mind to that task and came up with this.
WHAT DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ABOUT HIMSELF? Superman knows that he is the Last Son of Krypton. He knows that his father, Jor-El, was a scientist who predicted that Krypton would explode, and that Jor-El stuck him in a rocket-ship and sent him to Earth where he could be safe. More than safe, actually. Jor-El did all this because he loved him so much.
HOW DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ALL THIS? Well, in the 1978 picture, young Clark finds a glowing green crystal in the barn and takes it, logically enough, to the Arctic, where he throws it in the water and it grows into a crystal palace. And Jor-El comes on in a hologram projector thing and tells young Clark about all this.
Okay. Here’s the pitch. What if — oh, how screenwriters love sentences that begin with “What if — “
WHAT IF JOR-EL IS LYING? What if everything that Jor-El puts in his message to Clark is a lie? What if Kal-El is not the last son of Krypton, what if Jor-El was not a scientist, what if Krypton did not explode, what if Jor-El isn’t even Superman’s father?
Well, why would he lie to young Clark like that? Because Jor-El killed Superman’s father. Because Superman’s father was the Wise and Good King of Krypton, and Jor-El killed him, and put his son in a rocket-ship and sent him off to God knows where, and put this message in the green crystal tucked inside the blanket on the rocket-ship so that Kal-El would never come looking for him. He put on this act of being such a kind father, such a loving father, all so that dumb little Kal-El would never think to go back home, looking for Krypton, to find that Jor-El is, in fact, an evil usurper who is running the planet into the ground.
Which, in fact, is what has occurred. Jor-El, like our own president Bush, is an evil, greedy dictator, always using up more, more, more. And he’s been gradually taking over other planets, spreading his evil all over the galaxy. He’s got an army millions of soldiers strong, always expanding his influence, Rome-like, across the universe.
And now he’s gotten to Earth.
And Superman finds out (somehow) that Jor-El is still alive. He intercepts a space-telegram or something. And he goes out to the moon or something to meet up with his beloved Daddy and there’s Jor-El with a whole army of soldiers, and THEY’RE ALL SUPER. And they fight Superman on the moon, grab him, shove him down, ram a piece of Kryptonite into his mouth and take off for Earth, to kill everyone on the planet and turn it into another Kryptonian outpost.
And Superman has to do something about that. Because he finally realizes, after a lifetime of misplaced, mopey homesickness, that he’s not a Kryptonian. He’s an Earthling.
It’s The Chalk Circle all over again.
Anyway, so that was my idea. When the Bryan Singer picture got greenlit, I knew it was dead, but I brought it up to a friend at DC once because I thought it would make a good “Elseworlds” series. His eyebrows shot up to a fair distance above his head when I got to the big twist, but he said it went “too far” in re-writing the Superman ethos and that they weren’t doing the “Elseworlds” stories any more.
So there you have it. I have another story that involves Batman, Superman and a surprise twist, but maybe I’ll save that for the next issue of Bizarro.
Glengarry Dogs
Shelley tries to persuade Williamson, while Mr. White and Mr. Pink have troubles of their own.
Time for the smackdown of the century (well, the late 20th century, anyway): 1992 Guy-movie titans Glengarry Glen Ross vs. Reservoir Dogs.
Back in 1992 I jokingly referred to Reservoir Dogs as Glengarry Glen Ross with guns, but now that I examine both films, I was closer to the mark than I suspected.
1. Both films are about “a bunch of guys” who are involved in a not-quite-legal enterprise. One group sells Florida swampland to rubes, the other robs a jewelry store.
2. Both films deal with “manly” issues of responsibility, trust, betrayal, identity and “work” as a defining trait.
3. Both films revolve around a criminal act we never see happen. One has an office robbery, the other has the jewelry-store robbery.
4. Both films deftly shift points-of-view to keep up the supense of “whodunit.” In Glengarry it’s “who robbed the office,” in Dogs it’s “who’s the cop?”
5. Both films refuse the audience the pleasure of a protagonist, a hero, or even a “central character.”
6. Both film have a central location where the climax of the narrative takes place, which makes the movie feel like a filmed play. Glengarry has the real-estate office, Dogs has the mortuary warehouse.
Now then. One would say that Dogs is not structured the same way as Glengarry, but look at what Tarantino has done.
Here is the narrative of Reservoir Dogs laid out in chronological order (spoiler alert):
1. Joe Cabot wants to rob a jewelry store.
2. He gets his gang of men together. We meet them one by one.
3. The Cops find out about the robbery and plan to stop Joe and his gang.
4. The Cops get Tim Roth to go undercover.
5. Tim Roth practices his “story” that will get him credibility with the gang.
6. He tries it out: it works!
7. Tim Roth hangs out with the gang before the job.
8. The morning of the job, the gang goes to a coffee shop. Here, they discuss Madonna and how much to tip a waitress.
9. The job happens. Something goes wrong. We don’t see what.
10. Afterthe job, everyone high-tails it back to the rendevous point
11. Everybody sooner or later makes it back to the rendevous point and hilarity ensues.
Everything after this is one full hour of the movie. The rest of it is backstory.
Tarantino could have put the movie together this way, but look what happens. You know who the mole is from the very beginning, there’s no mystery as to “what happened at the jewelry store,” and only mild suspense for about ten minutes where Tim Roth is hanging out with the gang and they don’t know he’s a cop. And then he would have gotten to the rendevous point, at which point he’s got an hour of movie left and one location to shoot it in.
Which, strangely, is exactly what happens in Glengarry Glen Ross. There is the first forty-five minutes of the movie, which chops up, expands upon, and moves around the first act of the play very nicely, and then there is the last 50 minutes of the movie, where we’re stuck in that real-estate office and might as well be watching a play. A Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, but a play nonetheless.
Just think of the movie we could have had, oh so very easily, if Mamet had Tarantino-ized his script (again, spoiler alert). What if Glengarry began with Jack Lemmon walking out ot the Nyborg’s house, having just closed his deal with them, getting in his car and heading over to the office, only to find that the place had been broken into.
Then, we could have cut to Al Pacino hustling Jonathan Pryce the evening before, stopping to wink at Ed Harris, who’s in the middle of a conversation with Alan Arkin. Then we could cut to Kevin Spacey having a conversation with Alec Baldwin while they’re waiting for the guys to show up for the sales conference. Then we could cut back to the next day, and there’s Kevin again having to deal with the police and Mitch and Murray because the place has been ripped off. Then we could cut to Jack Lemmon, the night before, trying to get his daughter on the phone at the hospital. Then we could go back to the big scene with Alec Baldwin doing his great speech, then back to Al hustling Jonathan, and so on.
It would have been a little “artier,” but jeez, the thing is already based on a play, how much artier could a movie be in 1992? It would have made it all the way to being a “real movie,” instead of half of one.
Glengarry Glen Ross is one of the great American plays of the 20th century and my second-favorite play ever written (#1 would be Endgame). But I’m afraid that in this contest, Tarantino and his time-shuffling gimmick takes the screenplay prize.
Alcott Held Hostage, day 8 — infantainment
“My children find the windows in our apartment far more fascinating than the T.V.” — urbaniak
This will change, and sooner than you think. When the change comes, you will want to move fast.
It is, of course, extremely important that your infants be able to identify and watch television programming at the earliest possible age. Hopefully you exposed them to TCM while they were still in the womb, so that they will already have dim racial memories of George Saunders and Claudette Colbert.
When they are what Chuck Montgomery refers to as the “canned ham” stage of life, just about anything will do. My son Sam was perfectly content to watch Kurosawa when he was three or four months old, and the two of us once whiled away an afternoon watching Rififi, which held the child spellbound through the 25-minute wordless heist sequence.
However, soon, say four months from now, your matched set of tykes will demand entertainment, and they won’t have the patience for Twentieth Century or the world-weariness to appreciate Citizen Kane (my five-year-old son upon reaching the end of Jurassic Park: “Ah well, another happy ending”).
(Honestly, the kid is a born comedian. Last night, as he was going to sleep, one of our cats came in and did something crazy. Sam, on the edge of sleep, sighed and said “Cats these days…”)
Anyway, before Clockwork Orange, before Venture Bros., before Kim Possible, before Scooby-Doo, before even Teletubbies, there is Baby Einstein.
I cannot recommend this series highly enough. They are utterly homemade, the early ones anyway, feature non-nauseating Honest-to-God classical music and, most importantly, do not feature a narrative.
I don’t actually know how when kids start to “get” narrative, but a good indicator is that a two-year-old can watch War of the Worlds and not be particularly frightened, but a three-year-old will cower under the sofa at an episode of Winx Club. It has to do with identification with the protagonist. If the protagonist is frightened, about anything, the child with the dawning narrative skills will be frightened as well. Before that point, it’s all just input, honestly you could let them watch Reservoir Dogs (although that’s probably too talky).
Anyway, BabyEinstein. I recommend starting with Baby Mozart and Baby Bach. Here’s what you get: Some Guy playing Popular Classics on a synthesizer, and random shots of toys, colors, faces, clocks, more toys, puppets, etc. Babies will find it fascinating. And the nice thing about a lack of narrative is, you won’t get tired of watching it either. Because there is no content. There’s nothing to get hooked on. And if you get that Mozart sonata stuck in your head for a day, well, that’s better than the theme song to Magical Do Re Mi.
There are some later Baby Einstein videos that stretch the concept a little too thin, and the Baby Newton video features a rhythm-and-blues song about shapes that is a little too catchy (and involves a clown), but these well-worn tapes have saved more than one afternoon in my house.
Anything with animals. There is one tape called something like Mozart Nature Symphony or something and it’s just about perfect. 30 minutes of Mozart and gorgeous “how’d they get that shot” animal photography. There are two Baby Doolittle animal tapes, which mix live animal footage, some quite good, with skits involving animal puppets which are reductive in the extreme. Like, Beckett’s Act Without Words II kind of reductive.
Oh. And Koyannisqatsi. One night when Sam couldn’t sleep, this movie kept my hands from around his neck for over an hour. I don’t think he made it all the way through it, but who could these days?
But this brings me to the real point. These videos claim to be “teaching” something to your infants. Maybe so, maybe not, and I don’t really care. The benefit, as far as I’m concerned, is not education, or even entertainment, but survival. It’s that they allow Mom and Dad to have a 30-minute conversation.
I just realized, I showed Sam Jurassic Park but refuse to show him Bambi. How ’bout that.
Venture Bros: Season 2, Episode 1
Maybe I’m just buzzed, but that didn’t feel like a new episode of The Venture Bros. That felt like a completely different show. The pacing, the complexity, the multiple layers of action and interaction, all with the typically dense saturation of pop-culture references from Batman to Poltergeist.
It’s like the concepts from Season One have been folded up, crushed into a forge and pounded with a pneumatic press to form just the bones of the new season, and then there’s actually another show on top of it.
Far too much information to take in in one viewing.
It feels like the gloves have come off. The subtext has become the text. It’s no longer hinting at ideas or alluding to them, it’s coming right out and saying “This show is about ideas, and then it has to be funny, and then there has to be some kind of adventure plot.”
Startling to see a half-hour comedy, especially an irreverent, scatological half-hour comedy supposedly produced for an audience of teenage stoners, suddenly go from episodic television to mega-narrative. The mega-narrative was always there, but it felt like if the Sopranos had started out like, say, Law and Order and then suddenly turned into the soap opera that it is.
The science/religion argument that goes by in an instant, a dozen multiple deaths in ten seconds, a prison break, introspection, a drug-laced pacifier, a jungle babe, zombies, the monarch’s makeshift costume, the look on Dr. Girlfriend’s face as she gazes longingly out the window, and that covers maybe a sixteenth of the moments that make this dizzying, electrifying television.
Special kudos to the voice work, specifically Mr. Urbaniak’s newly confident reading of Jonas Venture. It’s great to see a show not sit still but rather unfold in a dozen delightful, unpredictable ways.