I was spooning out the cat food when I started thinking about an HBO feature I'd seen on Mission Impossible 3. I'm going to skip the gimmicky spelling here. Tom Cruise and JJ Abrams had shared how the city of Shanghai had really opened its doors to them. This struck me as interesting, because some bureaucrat probably had to look over the script for the flick before approval could be given and the portrayal of Chinese military intelligence in the script was probably obviously less than flattering. You'd think they'd have run into problems on that count. Perhaps they did and were just keeping the fact under wraps.
In any case, my mind turned to the question of art and what it consists of. Readers of my previous post will remember that I spoke of communities and their aesthetics. What if a human filmmaker submitted a script to an alien bureaucrat and the bureaucrat judged the script on its artistic merits? And what if the alien world's aesthetic was worlds apart from ours?
Sounded like a good premise for a story. Sci-fi, of course. A one off? Hmmm. Maybe I could fit it into a series. How about TEAL (Teaching English as an Alien Language)? Hmmm. How would I fit in an English teacher? Aha! The English teacher is recruited as consultant and translator. He or she observes and participates in the process. Now we're talking!
All this happened before I'd finished spooning out the dog food. That's where ideas come from. From spontaneous associations, not from dog food.
Hmmm. What about dog food? Alien dog food. Alien dogs. Really intelligent alien dogs. Hmmm. Attitudes toward intelligence. Measures of intelligence. Roles of intelligence. Slavery. Cultural prejudice. Hmmm. An English teacher is hired to teach an alien dog English. The dog is as intelligent as any of us. The masters refuse to learn other languages. The dogs handle interracial relations. Hmmm.
Two ideas in one day. Not a record, but not bad.
