Jason Porath

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Category: writing (page 1 of 2)

Rejected Pitches: Kung Fu Panda 3 and Master Leprous Starfish

(this was a tweeting spree from 4 years ago)

Chatting with co-workers re: Kung Fu Panda 3 possibilities — decided to lobby for salamander w/leprosy as next villain.

Think about it. Every time Po hits him, a piece of him goes flying off, only to quickly regenerate.

They would fight until sundown on an ever-growing mountain of his discarded body parts. He would live in a castle of his own decaying flesh.

Only to find out he is but a disciple of Master Leprous Starfish, who, when hit, loses pieces that grow into copies of himself.

To defeat Master Leprous Starfish, Po would learn the Universe Punch — a technique that punches everyone in the universe simultaneously.

Shifu: “Po, first you must become one with the universe. Then you must hit the universe in its stupid face.”

CUT TO: Shifu getting punched in the back of the head and falling down steep mountainous stairs.

CUT TO: innocent toddler rabbit, skipping along a field; punched with neck-shattering force in the teeth.

CUT TO: elderly deer matron, resting in her sickbed, suddenly punched in the ovaries.

CUT TO: hideous slavering martians orbiting the moon; they double over as they are one-two punched in the throat.

CUT TO: Po punching himself in the crotch. Not even he is safe from the terrifying power of the Universe Punch.

My co-worker’s response: counsel the story department to file a restraining order on me.

Another co-worker suggested that Master Brittle Salamander also be a hemophiliac. He can see the naked brilliance of my ideas.

(I never did submit the idea, sadly)

My Japanese Name

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Cat Theater

Struggled a lot with this comic challenge — it was “cat” and “theater,” again all in 90 minutes. My execution was kind of weak and my decision to attempt color ill-advised, but here it is, warts and all. (click to embiggen)

cattheatre

Dinosaur Roller Skate

This is another Strip Search challenge, to complete a comic in 90 minutes, given a two-part topic. This week’s was “Dinosaur” and “Roller Skate.” Here’s the comic. Hit “read more” to get my opinion on it.

dinoskate

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Naughty Mystery

So I’ve been watching this show “Strip Search,” which is a reality show about people who want to become comic artists. One of the challenges is to complete a comic in 90 minutes given two random words as a topic. One episode, they got “naughty mystery” – so I paused it then and there, and did the best comic I could in 90 minutes.

Here it is, warts and all (didn’t get the last font more legible, nor get the black balance correct on the last two panels). Click “read more” to see the (ever-so-slightly) touched up version!

naughtymystery

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The DreamWorks Inter-species Breeding Program

(beware: this contains minor spoilers for pretty much every DreamWorks movie, and a couple Pixar ones)

interspecies_01
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Continuity

The last couple months have been extremely difficult, throwing new challenge after new challenge at me. The underlying difficulty of these problems has been that they’ve been inscrutable. How do you make sense of dementia? Of cancer? Of loved ones suddenly cutting off ties, without explanation? How do you make sense out of the chaos of daily life?

This has been on my mind a lot lately. And this is what I’ve got:

Making order of chaos — out of the non-understood — is the fundamental challenge of being human. Think to the evolution of human civilizations, and how we’ve established explanations for what our experiences. Sometimes it’s as ridiculous as “the sun is pulled across the sky by 4 horses and a guy in a chariot” or “winter happens because mother nature misses her daughter when she goes away for several months out of the year.” But they break down the unfamiliar into something relatable, something comfortable. Otherwise we are perpetually in fight-or-flight mode, constantly on edge.

To this end, we’ve established rule systems to pass down across generations. The most obvious ones are religion and science, but if you think of the task of rule systems as “give a series of explanations that make life as easy and survivable as possible,” you’ll find even more systems: nationality, ethnicity, even just local communities. Don’t leave the village, don’t eat pork, don’t talk to strangers. The “why” of each rule is different from system to system, but ultimately, they answer questions. The fewer questions in one’s life, the less stress, the easier life. These systems rewire your brain for comfort: you don’t just believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, you know it. Things continue, as they did before you and will after you. The rules persist. In a word, what we’ve created, to tame the chaos of an disorderly world, is a sense of continuity.

What’s interesting to me is the idea of broken continuity. After all, many, many rule systems have risen and fallen across human history. People are adaptable enough to rewire their brains from one rule system to another across their lifetimes. One can go from knowing there is no God to knowing that God exists and loves them in a matter of days. How do we deal with exceptions to the rules — how do our brains adapt to inconsistent rules, to broken continuity?

In thinking about this, I’ve found it’s helpful to think of rule systems as organisms in a process of natural selection. I’ll use Judaism as an example. Judaism was born out of a polytheistic religion, with its central god, Yahweh, declaring war on others like Ba’al Hadad and Dagon by making “I am the only God, there are no others before me” the central tenet of Judaism. By not allowing its followers to even accept the possibility of other gods — in fact, encouraging them to destroy other religions’ priests — Judaism locked its followers into its belief system. It then evolved various laws that kept its followers alive, like “don’t eat pork,” as food preparation was not advanced enough to make it safe.

And what of the cast-off gods? They were remixed, recontextualized, re-explained. Ba’al Hadad and all other gods in that pantheon were recast in Abrahamanic religions as Ba’al Zebub, or Beelzebub, lord of the flies — a demon in later Christian mythology. Dagon’s temples were subject to Jewish vandalism, with followers breaking statues’ legs into fish tail formations, as “dag” is Hebrew for “fish.” Gradually, the image of Dagon became so corrupted that he ended up being envisioned more as a Lovecraftian fish-demon than his original godlike state.

Then Christianity came along and took a different tack than old Judaism’s kill-em-all tendencies: recast them into the fold. Hadad, for example, was variously linked with the storm-god Teshub, the Egyptian god Set, and the Zeus. The nature goddess Eostre (and her associated rabbit-rich fertility holiday), was gradually folded into the larger tradition of Jesus’ resurrection, and Easter was born. Christianity’s very existence is arguably due to such inclusions — how else was it differentiated from Judaism than by its adoption of the idea of a resurrecting god? An idea that was echoed in many other religions. The ranks of saints swelled up with each new religion that Christianity would embrace, with old religions transformed into new states, and continuity was maintained.

(you can extend this idea easily to the concept of comic books as modern-day gods, and the relationship of comic book fans to continuity, but that’s a blog post for another time)

So, what does this all have to do with coping with a couple difficult months?

It’s been about establishing a path to walk. As commonplace as it is for people to live with passed-down rule systems, I find myself without such an inheritance. Although I was raised Jewish, by Jewish law I was Christian (and by Christian law, Jewish). What with the preponderance of alternative religions in my childhood, accepting any of them as a real truth didn’t make much sense. Throughout my childhood, neither parent was on great terms with their families, and so I did not grow up with great sense of genetic heritage. Ethnically, I’m an indeterminate blank slate. Nationally, I don’t identify much as Kentuckian, and only reluctantly as American.

In short, I’m in many senses a series of broken continuities. Many are born with comfortable paths to walk down, roads more traveled. I feel that in many ways I was born out in the weeds, weaving wildly across all paths traveled in my journeys. It’s not that I’m entirely without direction, or that my life is unduly difficult, it’s that I can’t quite subscribe fully to any rule system, or commit myself to an established way of living. That’s not uncommon for anyone, especially in this day and age – I just feel it particularly acutely of late.

I’m weird. And I want to know what that means.

In this case, it means I can’t fall back on a pre-compiled set of wisdom. It means I get to pick and choose, compiling my own collection of answers and parables for my daily life. That’s exciting, although difficult when times themselves, as they have been recently, are difficult.

Then I Woke Up: The Old Man and the Magician

(this is a series of posts documenting my dreams)

There was an old man who lived on a largely deserted forested island. Every day he would jog for upwards of thirty miles around the island. He’d jog over bridges as they collapsed, often while walking dogs. He was constantly doing extremely dangerous stunts, jumping over chasms and giving the local wildlife rangers heart attacks.

He’d  do all this just to get attention – he wanted to prove he knew some really crazy magic tricks, and that was how he was able to do it. He had learned the magic tricks from a famous old stage magician who was  secretly his grandpa. Everyone thought the magician had died with no heirs, but the old man knew better. You see, the magician had been a family friend and had attended a big wedding many years ago. He had gotten incredibly drunk at this wedding… along with the mans grandmother. What nobody realized until years later was that the man’s grandmother and the magician had gotten secretly married at that wedding too, because they’d gotten so drunk. Because they were married, the woman learned all his tricks and passed them on to her grandson, who is now the old jogging man.

Eventually the old man got enough attention from the local park rangers that word got out about him. Eventually his story got to the Magic Castle, and they decided they would do a special on him. They were going to send their best young up-and-coming magician to learn his story and eventually do a televised show. Because of that, the island had become a tourist trap, with tons of lazy people showing up and expecting to have the whole story spoon-fed to them without doing any work. I was there, trying to follow the old man and the young magician, as they jogged around the island, up hills and over bridges. As I did so, tourists would yell at me and ask for me to explain what was going on.

And then I woke up.

Fifty Shades of Green

A mailing list that I’m on was writing a Fifty Shades of Grey parody starring the Hulk. Here is my addition, for posterity:

In the dim light of the morning, he somehow seemed smaller. Softer. More tender. He tiptoed back into his lavender pants, which hung baggy around his skinny waist. As he gingerly fingered the doorknob, she whispered don’t go – and he broke into a full-body blush. All that was green mere hours earlier was a burning shade of pink.

Steeling himself against the doorjamb, he dared not look back, lest he fall back into bed once more. “What, are you mad at me?” she teased out in her sing-song voice.

“No. I could never.” He tilted his head across his broad shoulders and locked eyes with her from across the room. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. And we can’t have that.”

And with that, he was gone, vanished into the streets without a trace.

City within a city

The first thing you notice is the sound. It’s the air hundreds of feet up being chopped and diced to pieces, as surveillance helicopters endlessly circle the camp. It sets the tone – a soundtrack that never goes away, just gets drowned out momentarily.

That sound is the filler for in the gaps between events at Occupy LA. Even tonight, when the city is supposed to evict the camp, the happenings of note are few and far between. A chant here, a march there. A lot of waiting and wondering. There’s a lot of down time. Everywhere people are milling about, relaxing, shooting the shit. It could be a block party, except for that sound.

The police keep the pace slow. It’s not until 1am that the riot gear shows. They take 30 minutes to walk halfway down a city block. 6 hours of standing and staring later, they leave. It feels like a message.

But for those long hours in the middle of the night, traffic cut off for blocks around city hall, this tent city is a modern-day Brigadoon: an island in another world. Traffic lights continue endlessly cycling, disconnected from their raison d’etre, from the city in which they have a function. Trees become forts. Bus awnings become lookout points. Even just standing in the emptied street of this car-choked metropolis has an intense psychological effect. Everything transformed to a different purpose than its design. You question the why of things. Another world seems possible.

A human fence of black and kevlar keeps this alternate reality from spilling out to the rest of the world. It idly stands there, murmuring amongst itself, wordlessly denying passage. There is a psychological weight to its presence. While the occupiers organically form and reform into new disorganized shapes, everything about this man-fence screams order. Each link is spread out at even intervals. Outfits, posture, expressions identical. It’s a man-made thing. Built for what purpose exactly? No one knows for sure. For now, for hours, it merely watches.

The not knowing claws at your mind. Beats into it like the steady chopping sound of helicopter blades. I’ve faced down masses of police in many countries and many continents, but the situation is never so real as when it’s in your back yard; when it’s transforming your home into an alien landscape, and your neighbors into combatants. It’s easy to be brave for an hour at a time, but eventually you get tired and you need your family, your bed, your security. Holding your ground for days, weeks, months, forever? I don’t know the right word for it.

Tomorrow the papers and blogs will write the story of tonight. Catch it, box it, categorize it. All throughout the tent city, reporters roam, picking out their pictures and words with the discrimination of a trained chef choosing ingredients. To tell the story they want to tell.

This is the story I want to tell:

Once there was a city within a city. It was filled with vigor, and hope, and life, and disappointment, and despair, and the entire range of human existence. The people who lived there wanted desperately to make a better world. Though no man could know the way, though they had no power, though naysayers belittled them, they kept trying their best. Their words made them powerful enemies, who sought to end their new world. And then, one day, the walls closed in on the city, swallowing it whole.

One day. But not tonight.

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