Significant Facades and Fantastic Symbols

While at Disneyland, my sister asked me whether I thought most of the people there were happy or miserable. "Miserable," I said after only a moment's hesitation, and my sister agreed. No-one knows how to feel emotion properly anymore. The people in the parking lot, walking towards the park, looked studiously stoic under their neon coloured ball caps.

When did we stop being a country of fast walking thin people in fedoras and dresses and become a country of overweight people in ball caps and t-shirts they got for free from Monster Energy Drinks and In and Out Burger (two shirts I actually saw)? An old man at the ticket booth seemed really excited to see my fedora. "Hats are coming back into style!" he said happily in a way that made it clear what he didn't consider the ball caps real hat wearing, whether he realised it or not. He was right, though--you can wear a hat, or you can just collect the layers of neglect of a thoughtless modern culture.

I hadn't been to Disneyland since high school, but before that I'd gone almost annually with my family, often for multiple days. So this was great nostalgia for me, and just fun in its own right.

This was my sister's Christmas present to me, but it's been raining so much lately this is the first chance we had to go.




I was surprised by all the really beautiful trees.


I might turn this one into a desktop wallpaper.


The monorail track in the background.


Another great tree, this one just past the entrance.


The arch into Main Street. Second Life, at its best, often reminds me of Disneyland for the buildings, lighting, and weather effects carefully crafted to create specific impressions. Second Life has slightly fewer people walking around in bad clothes not knowing how to role play. Probably because Second Life is bigger.


The tourists miraculously cleared for a moment when I took this picture on Main Street.


A more candid view of Main Street


Esmeralda, the mechanical fortune teller in the Penny Arcade. I gave her a quarter and received this fortune;


Makes me sound like Anakin Skywalker.

There was one real antique inside the Penny Arcade--well, unless you consider this whole part of Disneyland an antique, which you probably could;





Another fortune teller. This one told me my lucky colour was green (it figures) and gave me this fortune;


Like most people, I tend to ask just what the silken cord is running through the pearl of all virtues, anyway, so it was nice to finally get a straight answer.


A fascinating glass elephant. The place had good coffee, too.


I love the buildings on Main Street a lot more than I did when I was a kid.


A particularly nice building.


The Pirates of the Caribbean, with a green blob that may be Slimer making a cameo.


The ride was still great, with its wonderful treasure grubbing skeletons and the sabres left stuck through their invisible guts, and the burning town with rum soaked pirates singing and having their way. But now characters from the movie are all over the place, and practically every character felt compelled to mention Jack Sparrow at least once. Sparrow himself appears twice, most prominently at the end, lounging amongst booty and singing.


The Columbia. Not one of my best pictures.

After The Pirates of the Caribbean, my sister and I got lunch in Critter Country by Splash Mountain, and were surprised to find ourselves surrounded by scavenging cats;

There were three, and apparently they lived under the floor boards. They seemed as comfortable as pigeons around the humans, but were very picky about the food scraps people tossed to them, and didn't seem to want to be pet. When I finally did make one comfortable enough to let me pet him, he seemed completely indifferent; "Pet me, or don't. It's your call."




The Haunted Mansion, mercifully cleared of all tie-ins to the Eddie Murphy movie.


I loved these tentacle-like plants--another shot of the Columbia incidentally in the background.


A haunted carriage.


The pet cemetery. The statues seemed sort of Cocteau-ish to me.


This was the only picture to come out from any I took inside the rides--inside The Haunted Mansion, a portrait of a woman that turns into a gorgon when lightning flashes. I happened to get the picture right when the lightning flashed, simulating the camera flash I refuse to use.


This one didn't come out, but I still thought it was sort of interesting. The stretching room, inside The Haunted Mansion.


Sleeping Beauty's castle. It was nice to see the happy young couples, like the one in the lower right, who were kissing just before I took the picture.


The side passage through the castle is for some reason usually pretty deserted. It's quite eerie with the white statues and Snow White's tinny, high pitched 1930s voice coming from The Wishing Well, singing, with each line echoing;

I'm wishing
(I'm wishing)
For the one I love
(For the one I love)
To find me
(To Find me)
To-day
(To-day)


The Wishing Well.


The bottom of The Wishing Well.


My sister going through the side passage. There used to be a bench there where I remember resting years ago when I was approached by a Belle in a bright yellow gown who said to me, "You look like you're not having very much fun!"

"I am now," I said, wanting to flirt with to her suddenly. But I guess I didn't realise how creepy that sounded, because she walked away abruptly.


Props from Sleeping Beauty. I do love the look of that movie. That's my blue reflection there.


The only picture that came out from inside the castle.


I love the look of the Fantasyland section.






Remember when to-morrow looked like that? It seems like a long time ago, doesn't it?

My sister and I went on Star Tours, but I didn't get any good pictures, which is too bad because the thing was amazing, and wonderfully unchanged since 1987. The Star Wars droids still work perfectly as animatronics, and the place holds some of the wonder and mystery of the Star Wars universe in the 1980s, or at least an echo of those qualities. One of the kids in the back row on the ride sounded like he was going out of his mind in amazement, screaming "Oh my god!" whenever we went into lightspeed like he'd never dared to hope experiencing something like this.


I took a picture of people in line to take a picture.

Outside Disneyland now, there's Downtown Disney--basically a bunch of lousy shops, of which this was by far the creepiest;

The woman working there was oddly baby-ish herself.


How scary would you imagine the person is who'd buy this?


"What have you done with his body?!"


How would you like to feel embarrassed by what you put prominently on your shelf? How'd you like to pay 200 dollars for the pleasure?


Or maybe you'd like to pay 650 dollars for an incredibly bad acrylic painting of Jack Skellington wondering where he's left his keys meant to be romantic somehow?

Next to Disneyland now is The California Experience, which I thought was going to be a pretty pointless place, but actually turned out to be cool. It's divided into sections, like Disneyland proper. This one was some kind of Old Hollywood;






At sunset we were in an old fashioned carnival section--probably the best time to be there.




And here's the filthiest thing at Disneyland;

Of course I'd find it. Still no nipples, though.


That great tree again.


My sister's kitten, Saffy, in a picture I took when we came back. It's the closest one of her I've taken to not being blurry. That cat likes to move.

Magically Exhausted

Gods, my head it hurts. I guess I got about six hours of sleep. Then it was right to Disneyland, which I loved, I really loved. For lots of reasons. I took lots of photos, I'll probably post some to-morrow.

I'm too tired for much of a post now, so I'll say I rather liked the ninth episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season. True, Adama and Roslin stargazing and Apollo and Startbuck comfortably cavorting outside at night naked puts just about the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the planet is somehow remotely inhospitable. I guess this show was just made by people who were completely incapable of imagining tough weather.

But I liked the character stuff, and ever since I first saw Starbuck's James Cagney arms, I've wanted to see her throw punches. Her and Lee's boxing match was sweat, though I'd think Lee's really too much of a wimp for her.

Boxing adds to the growing list of things the twelve colonies have in common with Earth humans. It might be exciting for them if they find out we like neckties, too.

As you probably know by now, Chapter 19 of Venia's Travels is online.

I Can't Believe I'm Up This Early

I went to bed at 12:30am, though of course I didn't fall asleep until after 2am. Still, doing better than I'd have thought.

Venia and the Thirty (or So) Leagues

The new Venia's Travels is online. Early this time because I'm getting up very early to-morrow to go with my sister to Disneyland. I'm very glad to have uploaded this chapter--I felt like I went out of my way to make this one particularly hard on myself. There's a bonus page at the beginning.

I spent to-day colouring the last two pages. I started at around 2pm and finished at around 8:30pm, to give you an idea how long these things take me. I went out for almost precise one hour to get lunch and buy apples. I mostly listened to Radiohead and live recordings of Jimi Hendrix while I worked. A strangely good combination.

Pyjamas in the Snow

I'm starting to think Minnesota's the strangest state in the country. Not just because of its professional wrestler former governor, or the fact that it produced Prince and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Not just because of a neverending election battle where the comedian has clearly won. Not just because it's the home of Congresswoman Michele Bachman, who's scraping skull now in her ongoing self-administered lobotomy.

I guess it's a combination of all these things, and probably also the movie Fargo, which, despite its title, largely takes place in Minnesota. But I probably don't think it's a strange place for its current Republican governor, who, in this interview with Rachel Maddow from a couple days ago, rather cogently laid out the path of reasoning most Republicans subscribe to in order to make themselves believe they're not being grotesquely counterproductive by blocking federal aid to states.

The idea that stimulus is okay in this case because Minnesota has paid its taxes is bizarre when you consider that government funds are generally taxpayer money in any case. That Minnesota may have gotten along okay without the stimulus because Pawlenty had understated the budget is also bizarre--it's not as though programmes are going to cost less because there's less money, it's not like there are fewer government employees to pay.

The ideological breakdown has long been that the left believes everyone deserves assistance if they need it, and the right believes people need to stand on their own. But that's only good to a point--it requires a delusional faith in the majority of individuals that has never been supported by history. A good illustration of this philosophy is seen in this blog entry by Jim Emerson about how the right wing movie review group, Movie Guide, is praising The Dark Knight and Iron Man for supporting the right wing philosophy of individual entrepreneurs creating a better country on their own initiative. What the Movie Guide folks miss in both these movies is the implicit message that both Batman and Iron Man are very unusual people. In both cases, there's no-one else doing what these men are doing, and, in fact, they seem like very strange people.

Somehow, Republicans are clinging to the idea that the very rare exceptions should still make the rule. Pride is the motivation here, of course--the possibility of wounded pride is frightening enough to make someone grasp onto any alternative belief. Unless you're some kind of dark knight.

I watched episode eight of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night, which was a real game changer, I guess, or at least it tried to be. There was a point where Lee really ought to have said to his father something like, "Er, one little ship in the Neutral Zone across the Armistice Line hardly justifies the Cylons trying to wipe out the human race."

It was nice to see the colonel actually be sort of right about something for once. I guess I like underdogs. The only other time I can remember him being right was when he knew there'd be a Raptor posted to receive messages from the New Caprican colonists, so this was a big deal for him.

I was sorry there wasn't more of Baltar in the episode, but I was amused one of the two glimpses we had of him revealed that he was now sleeping with both of the women who'd been torturing him when last we saw him. Such a cad. I wanted him at least to exclaim, "What an incredible adventure I'm having!"

Structures Pretty and Inevitable

While eating breakfast this morning, I read some of a webcomic called The Phoenix Requiem. It's the first webcomic I can remember reading that's made me feel at all jealous. Sarah Ellerton, the author, colours her pages extraordinarily well and somehow manages to update with two or three pages every few days. I honestly don't know how she manages it--if I dedicate one day to doing nothing but my comic, stopping only to eat three meals, I can maybe see myself drawing, inking, and colouring two particularly simple pages.

I bookmarked Phoenix Requiem months ago, but only to-day have managed to reach 82 of its 330 pages. I really don't know why I'm so terrible at reading webcomics. Really fantastic colouring, in any case. I could feel jealous about the linework, too, except I bet Ellerton doesn't have to draw all her pages on 9x12 pieces of paper.

After driving to several stores on Monday looking for the new Morrissey album, I discovered February 16 was only the U.K. release date. That's what I get for signing up for the U.K. newsletter. My sister called me yesterday to tell me she'd gotten the album--the 17th was apparently the U.S. release date--and that she liked it better than the previous one because it was more upbeat. Obviously, I'm not a guy who takes a positive outlook as necessarily improving work of art, but it is a good album. Not necessarily upbeat--more like making the best of a permanent, bad situation; a romantic person learning to accept life will never provide the love he needs, and being okay anyway. Mono no aware. Morrissey seems to be expanding his vocal skills with each album, too; he's hitting notes here I've never heard him hit before.

I'm tired to-day--I forced myself to wake up at 11am because I learned last night I'm going to need to get up even earlier on Friday because my sister and I are going to Disneyland. I wonder if we could possibly have as much fun as Tom Cruise's family evidently did at Disneyworld.



Is there any part of this picture that looks real? What if it is? What if these people are really this happy and perfect looking? It's kind of fundamentally terrifying. The soundtrack needs to be Ed Wynn singing "I Love to Laugh".

I watched the seventh episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. My hatred for Roslin grows each day, but at least now I'm getting the feeling she's supposed to be a bit unlikeable.

It's interesting how it feels like we haven't really had any story from her POV in a long time--it seems like we used to get a lot of stuff about her dealing with the presidency foisted on her and her cancer, but now she's just the smug, religious edifice whose feet we see too much of. But, again, it never feels like we get as close to anyone as we do to Baltar. Not that I have a problem with that--there's enough conflict in that guy alone to fill a show.

"Aren't You a Little Short for a Stormtrooper?"

I loved this Onion story about a female dictator taking power in East Timor being hailed as a step forward for women.

Discussing Dollhouse with Moira a couple nights ago, I got to thinking about the value of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as feminist fiction. Moira feels that subverting stereotypes is one of the most powerful things fiction can do. Which may be so, but I don't think it can be the focus of a work of fiction. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is a movie that comes off as perfectly ridiculous to-day, as its makers took such pains to show there's nothing wrong with being black that they created an inhumanly perfect black man and an utterly moronic white woman--the movie's redeemed somewhat by performances by Poitier, Hepburn, and Tracy, but the young woman just about sinks it. The best way to subvert stereotypes, in my opinion, is to simply proceed knowing the false ones are false and come up with ideas that aren't controlled by them. The characters can be controlled by them, but the story shouldn't be.

But the reason I thought the Onion piece was so great was because I feel like lately there are a lot of people who see physically powerful and violent women in fiction as automatically being a step forward for women. I honestly think we're well past that. Girls who kick ass can be great fun to watch, but that doesn't mean it's flattering to women. I love the Kill Bill movies, but The Bride hacking to pieces the Crazy 88 isn't the great triumph of womanhood--it's id wish fulfilment, just as much as it was when young men got excited watching Bruce Willis taking down a terrorist group and saving a bunch of hostages by himself. These things have value as fantasy, but succeeding by violence is rarely how life works. It's porn.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with porn. But I get excited by fictional women who are the smartest people in the room without necessarily being the most physically powerful. That's one of the things I loved about Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--and one of the reasons the film version was such a letdown--Mina, despite not having any of the physical power or skills of her male companions, is unquestionably best suited to lead them. Because she's able to think outside preconceived notions, she's not controlled by her emotions, and her ego doesn't cloud her judgement. That's empowering women. Hell, that empowers humanity.

It reminds me of one of the most depressing things about the Star Wars prequel trilogy (though I still maintain the third one's a good movie!)--Yoda, who had the great line about how "wars not make one great," is shown in those movies only to have value as an extremely powerful warrior. It is fun watching him hop around and kicking ass. But he lost something much more important in the process.

Return of the Jedi was hardly any better for what it did to Leia, who changed from a nuanced, sexually immature aristocrat in Empire Strikes Back into a sex toy action figure in the third movie. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker didn't seem superior to her in the second film--they all seemed young and awkward, and that was a great part of the fun and a major contributor to the tension in the movie. But in the third film, Han's barely a character, Luke's a saint, and Leia is a cool, stoic sex slave and a cool, stoic marine. Which is also fun, but in a less resonant way. She becomes porn. There's nothing wrong with porn, but there are better things in life.

I was looking at the 4chan message boards a couple weeks ago, which are generally filled with less than invigorating discussions between teenagers, but a lot of cool and funny pictures are posted there. In the cosplay section, someone had posted a girl at a convention dressed in Leia's slave clothes from Return of the Jedi photographed from an angle that made it clear she wasn't wearing underwear. The post was filled with replies from people complaining about what a skank the girl was for it. I loved how nearsighted these kids are--complaining about the lack of underwear on a girl dressed as a fetishised sex slave? Is that like arresting a cannibal for jaywalking?

I'm continually amazed at the inability of some women to grasp the fact that heterosexuals guys like seeing bare vagina. I suppose the idea is that guys can't respect women whose vaginas they see without much trouble. The way I see it, if a guy can't respect your vagina, that's his flaw, not yours.

I watched the sixth episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. I like the stuff about Baltar with the Cylons, though I have to admit I found the diseased Cylon ship a let own. First we have Gaius learning about how the Cylons seem to operate using controlled delusions and how their ship is controlled by a pool of humanoid organs with a woman's face, and then we learn he's going to investigate a diseased ship by himself. And I'm thinking, "This shit is going to be fucked up." But, sadly, it was just a bunch of people throwing up in poorly lit corridors. I guess there's not too much they can do on a cable show's budget.

I don't understand why there are civilian refugees on the Galactica. Why don't they just go back to the ships they were living on before New Caprica? Has it even been two years? And what's become of Boomer? We don't see her with Baltar--I feel like the show wants us to forget her. Chief Tyrol mentioned talking to her briefly in one of the webisodes. Was she an informant? What was their reunion like? How does she feel about Baltar?

I slept in way too late to-day--to 2pm, so I'd better go make use of what little time I have left . . .

To Be or Not to Be

I had a dream last night that I was with Indiana Jones trying to escape from an alien invasion by running and climbing through ancient temples that were alternately being flooded and drained. We were really just going in circles, but the aliens were afraid of water. Jones kept bitching about Dennis Quaid as we went.

I watched the pilot episode of Joss Whedon's new series, Dollhouse, last night instead of watching Battlestar Galactica, but that didn't stop Tahmoh Penikett, who plays Helo on Battlestar Galactica, from showing up, this time as a detective. Looks like the guy's stalking my media player.

There was also a reference to Edward James Olmos, so it looks like Whedon's another Battlestar Galactica fan. What with the bits of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles having to do with Battlestar Galactica, it seems there are a lot of ripples. Though former Buffy writer, Jane Espenson, has written episodes of Battlestar Galactica, so I guess it goes both ways.

I liked the first episode of Dollhouse. It's not as ambitious as the first episode of Firefly, though perhaps a bit more daring. I suspect it's Firefly's failure that prompted Whedon to opt for another series set in modern times with a beautiful, scantily clad female lead, but the concept of someone who gives up her body to be inhabited by a number of different personalities for paying customers seems like fertile ground for intellectual and moral dilemmas. The show seems kind of like Alias meets Quantum Leap meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I thought Whedon might have actively been trying to write something more generic, but if so, he's failed--I suspect Dollhouse may ultimately be too interesting to succeed.

I love the names on the show--Tahmoh Penikett, Enver Gjokaj, Dichen Lachman, Eliza Dushku--I'd swear Whedon used a bowl of alphabet soup to cast the show if I didn't know he'd already worked with Dushku on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I heard Dushku on The Howard Stern Show last week trying to get everyone to pronounce her name right. They were saying "Douche-ku", which was how I was pronouncing it--that is the default sound of the letter "u", but Eliza insisted the "Dush" ought to be pronounced like "Push", which I'm still trying to get my tongue around. The first time I tried, it automatically came out more like the "ush" in "usher".

It looks like my favourite person on The Stern Show, Artie Lange, might be leaving the show, which is really too bad. He's fascinating to listen to and comes off as far more genuine that most of the people on the show, but he's been a wreck for a long time. He's talked about his depression, but anyone familiar with the condition can hear it in the way he talks about how things that used to be extremely important to him now don't seem to mean anything, and in the way he seems to automatically become hostile towards people who are kind to him or try to help him. It was visible even just in the interview with Dushku--she seemed to be digging him in the beginning, and he even brought up the idea of talking to John Favreau about a role Dushku wanted in the next Iron Man movie, but then Lange started trying to get a rise out of her by calling her gay friend a "fruit" and "fag".

Lange, at his best, uses a lot of racist and homophobic terms in his humour to mock racism and homophobia. Anyone who's listened to the show for a couple years knows he's neither a racist nor a homophobe, especially if they've heard how kind he was to someone else who works on the show when he came out of the closet. But these days, Artie seems to be using the hostile language he's grown comfortable with in his comedy as tools to keep the world at arm's length from him, especially as attempts to get him off heroin seem to have been particularly destructive lately. He seems like he might actually be on an irreversible path of self-destruction now, which is really a shame. His warmth and intelligence as much as his humour were the chief reasons I started wanting to listen to the show again after about ten years.

While eating breakfast this morning, I watched the new episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was a vast improvement over the previous episode. I'm still not interested the Christian element being plugged into the Terminator universe, but I did sort of like John Henry asking God why humans weren't made with more ball and socket joints.

People are Mad about Protein

I actually got up at 10am. Saffy the cat was knocking her cone against the door. The poor thing can't do anything without making noise. When she walks, to counterbalance the swinging weight on her head, she swaggers, as my sister observed, like John Wayne.

But I think I got at least seven and a half hours of sleep. I went to bed after watching Battlestar Galactica while drinking some Speyburn scotch at around 2:30am and fell asleep pretty much immediately. I thought maybe all the things I'd consumed during the day might keep me up--switching rather abruptly from my normal diet of oatmeal, pitas, hummus, cous cous, apples, and low sodium soup, the past couple days at my parents' I ate several microwave dinners and yesterday my sister made me some scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.

For dinner last night, she and I went to Denny's, where I almost invariably have the "All-American Slam" minus bacon and sausage and with "country fried potatoes" in place of the blackened rust scrapings Denny's calls hash browns. So the meal is potato pieces, three scrambled eggs mixed with cheddar cheese, two pieces of toast, and I get a bowl of fruit with it. My sister had some fascinating plate of french fries with nacho cheese and jalapenos.

She told me about her night working at The Roadhouse--apparently they were understaffed and short of almost every side order and even clean glasses at one point, and people had come in large groups to yell at my sister. "I don't fucking want this!" one of them I think she'd said told her when the cook had made the wrong thing for him. The Denny's was packed with noisy groups of people, too. It's gotten me thinking about what this thing called Valentine's Day has become.

I used to like walking around the mall on Valentine's Day to see all the couples who were clearly angry with each other to varying degrees of visibility, usually one person would seem bitterly disappointed and the other would seem bitter for disappointing. Last night it seemed the rabble had turned en masse against the holiday and were roaming the restaurants as marauding bands in a mindless rage.

I watched the fifth episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. I liked that Tom Zarek finally got to be something of the terrorist he most naturally would have been on New Caprica, and his idea actually sounded plausible. Roslin had the right idea, of course, but you can't call Zarek a cartoon character for his.

There are so many subplots on that show, I suppose it's natural the writers simply fail to get to a lot of things. But it has the side effect sometimes of making the characters seem oddly lazy or irresponsible. Why no scene of Gaeta being debriefed? If Adama's letting him onto the bridge, shouldn't he have at least talked to him first? Maybe he did, but if he did, wouldn't he have tried calming the colonel down by telling him about the dog bowl? And where's Sharon during all this? Either of them, really? We needed at least one scene establishing Boomer's relationship with Baltar on New Caprica--surely they talked?

Well, thank the gods we spent a week watching Adama shave his moustache, or however long that scene took. It surely Meant Something.

The Ice Rings on My Skeleton Say To-day's Valentine's Day

My sister reminded me this morning that to-day's Valentine's Day. She works at a place called "The Roadhouse" which is not an actual roadhouse, but instead a restaurant chain for people who enjoy the romance of truckers without actually wanting to face the discomforts of living as one. So I don't envy her for the sorts of people she will be dealing with at work to-night.

I'm going back to my parents' to-night, so I'm still pretty short on time. I didn't have a very comfortable night's sleep--I'd forgotten to bring my pyjamas, so I slept in my clothes in a house that always seems to be kept at freezing temperatures. It occurred to me last night that if I ever live someplace other than Southern California, it could only be someplace at least as close to the equator, if not closer. The chill drives me to distraction.

I think I'll celebrate Valentine's Day with whiskey. I'm enormously excited about the new Morrissey album coming out on Monday.



Yesterday, on the YouTube posting of the video for Morrissey's "You're the One for Me, Fatty", I commented;

The key here to understanding the song isn't that the woman is fat, but that the guy is calling her fatty while saying she's the one he really loves. In a town like Battersea, where most people aren't going to have very glamorous lives, people have to settle for work and people they don't, at heart, respect. "Some hope and some despair"--the song's a portrait of common, natural delusions fostered to avoid despair.

And to-day it looks like someone named "GolfTheMagicRabbit" has accused me of lifting it from Wikipedia. I suppose I can see how it would seem unlikely that anyone would try to elevate the discourse on YouTube. Sometimes, I'm not even sure I exist.

Once again, my iPod proved to be one of my most valuable possessions as it not only allowed me to cart necessary items for working on my comic over to my parents', I also was able to bring a couple episodes of Battlestar Galactica, so I watched the second part of "Exodus". The space battle was diminished for me somewhat by how utterly predictable it was that Apollo would come in just at the last moment. The death of the colonel's wife was deprived of a lot of impact by the fact that both she and the colonel had both been written like caricatures for a long time.

I think it's funny the message of the episode with Roslin taking a seat on Colonial 1 seems to be "Democratic elections don't work."

I liked the stuff with Baltar. I think he's my favourite character, partly because he's constantly kept on the edge of moral questions, partly because the actor playing him is capable of a lot of subtle expression, and partly because the fact that we often witness his delusions from his perspective makes him sort of the root POV of the entire series, which I don't think the show creators intended.

Abdomen Galactica

This has to be one of the most disturbing images I've ever seen;



No, kids, you didn't see her in Aliens--it's the Octomom, the woman who artificially inseminated herself with six embryos but gave birth to eight babies to add to her already six baby strong brood. And, oh, by the way, she doesn't have the means to support them.

Now, I absolutely do believe, if she can't pay for the kids, the state ought to. Protecting kids who have nothing else to protect them ought to be the state's number one priority. But pumping vulnerable human lives out into the world willy nilly is fucking crazy. I mean, if you want to be Werner Herzog or Sacha Baron Cohen and live dangerous and crazy, that's fine, I'm okay with it, and in fact I love it. But playing with other people's lives like this is fucked up.

That she apparently has been moulding herself after Angelina Jolie is sad by itself, but putting that head on top of the baby mill, and what it implies by being there, just adds to the scary.

The woman is like a hybrid of one of the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a human.

I watched the first part of the Exodus two-parter from Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. I'm enjoying it so far, though Sharon seems to be way too easy to manipulate.

At my parents' house now. I'm here to keep an eye on Saffy, who, after being spayed, would otherwise be alone her with a big plastic cone on her head. I can think of someone more deserving of being spayed . . .

Quick, Pretty Pictures

Last night, Tim recommended to me a new anime series called Maria Holic. I watched the first episode this morning;




It's another beautiful series by Akiyuki Shinbo, the guy who directed Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. This one's not as well written, but I could barely pay attention to what was going on because I was so caught up in how pretty it is. It looks like Alfons Mucha the animated series.

Apparently it's about a lesbian at a girls' school discovering one of her classmates is a transvestite.

I'm very short on time now--I'm staying at my parents' house to-night and I still need to get some of my things together. More later, maybe.

Human Instrumentality

I was thinking this morning how multitasking is a defence mechanism. It seems like the past couple years have really made me aware of how frightened most people are, and it seems like fear is somewhat closer to the surface for women, which has led me to wonder if there's a correlation between that and the myth that women are intrinsically better at multitasking than men.

The way society has worked out the dynamics of gender, it makes sense that women would be more frightened than men and require a more complex and deep rooted system of defence mechanisms. For more reasons even than the fact that it's popularly considered impossible for men to be raped by women, there's the lingering stigma against "easy" women even in our supposedly sexually matured society. There are a thousand ways in which a woman needs to worry about her self-perception, which most people create based on the perceptions of others. So it makes sense women are more likely to want a lot of friends from a variety of different worlds--if the perceptions of one sector of friends lets you down, you can go to another group who will reinforce your positive self-perception. And I've seen girls who turn right around and show more love to the group who'd previously offended when another group has proved to be a letdown.

This is human frailty. I don't think people ought to be looked down on for it. People do what they need to do to survive. What bugs me are people who take pride in it, and have grown to believe that dividing one's attentions among multiple things is more rewarding than focusing on one thing at a time.

It's true, there's a greater element of risk. The more you need to rely on only your own internal voice to tell you you're not as bad as all the awful words a former trusted friend or lover throws at you in the heat of anger, the less credible such a possible self-image seems. But in my opinion, it's worse to have your self-image falsely propped up by friends whose opinions you'll always know are based on second-hand accounts and the desire to make you feel better. I think networking in this manner inevitably leads to a disconnect from one's own heart. I've seen people who feel increasingly removed from their own lives because of it.

I remember trying to watch a movie with one girl when a guy friend of hers unexpectedly came over. The guy constantly talked during the movie, and it was obvious he was the sort of person who isn't comfortable giving himself over to experiencing art. I could tell the girl wasn't comfortable with his chatter, but she wouldn't tell him to be quiet or do anything very assertive to let him know she actually wanted to watch the movie. She didn't want to have to choose between the friend she watched movies with and the friend who did whatever this guy did for her. She missed out on experiencing the movie properly and on having a proper conversation with the guy, but more importantly, she had no identity to present to the both of us. She did not have a sort of core self-image, if you will, that she was confident in presenting.

It's only natural people like that hurt a lot when they're alone for a long period of time--the trouble is, solitude is one of life's inevitabilities. For smart people especially, who invariably become aware of the tenuousness of the delusion a group promotes to support its members. And, of course, when someone betrays an especially important member of the group, or when the group has reached a consensus about a person's wrongdoing, it's almost impossible to forgive that person. Because it's far easier to get together to talk about how bad someone's been than it is to get together to talk about how you'd like to forgive that person.

In the past, I've simply despised such behaviour. The past couple years, though, as I said, I've come to realise how frightened most people are. The idea of being isolated is tremendously frightening to people, and I feel sorry for some of the things I've said to people to disparage the actions they took in fear. There are people I care about who'll never speak to me again because I had no respect for that fear, and it's very likely that hurts them, too.

I watched the second episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. I enjoyed about sixty percent of it. I liked Baltar's dilemma about signing the execution authorisation, and Starbuck being psychologically frakked with seems to be endlessly valuable territory. But there were so many things about the episode that either went a little too far or not quite far enough. Starbuck reaching for the Cylon's hand was a little too far (unless it was Starbuck trying to manipulate him again) and made Starbuck seem kind of dumb. Baltar's relationship with the Cylon woman didn't go far enough--we need to have had at least one scene so far telling us what their relationship is like. There's also not been enough about Boomer's feelings about the occupation.

There's a shot of a forest in the episode, too, which seems to call into question the planet's supposed inhospitablity, not to mention the fact that we haven't seen it rain once, and no-one seems to need to wear anything heavier than a jacket. There isn't even any wind rippling the tent canvases.

Also, it's not fair marching out Roslin to be shot when I know the whole time she's not going to be. It's cruel to get my hopes up. Something about her really brings out the Eric Cartman in me.

"A Dog has Personality. Personality Goes a Long Way."

Trouble sleeping again last night. I didn't have any alcohol yesterday, so I guess it wasn't the wine's fault. Good thing, too--I've been really into wine lately.

To-day was the first day in a couple weeks I didn't watch Revolutionary Girl Utena while eating breakfast. I'm not going to stop watching the show--I'm still enjoying it, but I felt like a change of pace this morning. Though the past couple episodes of Utena haven't been as interesting as some of the earlier episodes. It's kind of falling into the same trap Code Geass and a lot of other shows fell into--the moment the writers really started to do some interesting stuff, it seems like they panic and just "do what Evangelion did." Like the weight of ingenuity gets too heavy.

But even the uninspired episodes of Utena are good. It's still interesting to see the small ideas animators put into the characters. I think what designers and animators do for characters in animated series might be considered somewhat analogous to what actors do when creating characters from already written material. I like the boyish mannerisms given to Utena, and expressions on the stuck-up rich girl, Nanami. A couple days ago featured a recap of one of my favourite episodes, where Nanami's duped into wearing a cowbell because it's a very expensive, designer cowbell. And, of course, this happens;



Instead of watching Revolutionary Girl Utena to-day, I watched an episode of the remastered Cowboy Bebop. I read an article recently on Chud or Ain't It Cool News talking about the live action Cowboy Bebop movie Keanu Reeves wants to make and found it to be another of several articles I've read on the subject where the writer prefaced by saying he wasn't much of a fan of Cowboy Bebop. In this case, the guy talked about how he didn't see the "cool" supposedly associated with the show and how he found it sort of phoney. I actually remember sort of feeling that way myself about the series. I still kind of feel that way about the movie. In a way, it's kind of inevitable, I think, when one approaches it as a fan of actual bebop jazz, and the more freeform, organic quality that music has. Animation is by nature a much more calculated artform, and Yoko Kanno's music is inevitably going to have a more confined feeling. To appreciate Cowboy Bebop, one needs to come from the direction of animation and fantasy appreciation. The show's not trying to be jazz, it's using some of the associated jazz, western, and martial arts aesthetic to enrich a futuristic fantasy setting. A lot of it's subjective, of course. I don't think if I hadn't watched the entire series and grown to love the characters I'd actually much dig Yoko Kanno's homages to Charlie Parker and Vangelis. But now I can listen to her music and actually enjoy it.

The best thing about Cowboy Bebop to me, though, is its texture. Even fast paced action and chase scenes are filled with tiny bits of character thrown at the screen at lightning speed. Spaceships, martian colonies, and wormholes are all well-worn science fiction concepts, but Cowboy Bebop fills them out with a collage of cultural information that comes out with the messily organic tone of millions of people going about their daily lives with this technology.





I watched the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. Someone needs to tell those Cylons that they'll catch more humans with honey than they will with vinegar. What's the point of what they're doing now? Learning how to love? Make babies? Teach the humans to be more peaceful? It's all pretty muddled. Starbuck looks good with long hair, though.

Celery and Magic Men

"Run, run, as fast as you can. You probably don't want to catch me, I'm the Cancer Cell Man."

"We swear there's a point to this!" say scientists from the University of Tokyo (I'm paraphrasing).

That's not good enough. I demand an AIDS golem.

I had a busy day yesterday and to-day looks like it'll be busier. I actually got a lot more useful things done with sleep deprivation yesterday than I did with the weird dim of Sunday.

That could be kind of a cool name for a story; The Weird Dim of Sunday. Almost sounds like The Weird Djinn of Sunday. It could be about a priest who discovers he has magical powers, causing a crisis in his faith. It would be "dim" because he loses the light of God, and "djinn" because it turns out he's a genie.

I watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica's second season last night. I am getting really tired of the allegories. Looking at the Wikipedia entry for the series, I see they're not going to let up soon, either. I hope they at least get better at telling a good story at the same time.

The allegory annoys me even when it's a point of view I agree with, but turning Baltar into some kind of conglomeration of everything conservative pundits hate about Democrats is especially depressing. Not to mention the tortured loops of logic the writers were required to jump through to get there--at the start of the series, Gaius is someone who seems to regard his apparent heartlessness as a source of pride, but then he goes into an unrelenting, blind fit of rage when Roslin's letter accuses him of lacking compassion when he saved her life. Somehow this is supposed to be his motive for taking the presidency from her? No, whispers the intoxicating Cylon muse of allegory, it doesn't have to make sense, so long as we show he's, like, so into science and popularity that he'll stomp poor innocent religion and have sex in the oval office. Now aren't you glad Bush rigged the election? Heavy, man!

I watched the webisodes that take place between the second and third season this morning. First off, yes, the writer's strike was completely justified--these really are like miniature episodes of the show, and writers completely deserve to be paid for them. Bits of them were pretty good, too--I particularly liked the stuff about the New Caprica Police and the Cylon coercing people to join in to order to prevent bloodshed. I was fascinated by the fact that no matter what changes in the universe of Battlestar Galactica, Colonel Tigh remains the great source of bad ideas. In any situation, no matter what it is, if you leave decisions up to Tigh, he invariably makes the wrong one. Pancakes are good, but where's the syrup--"No!" says Tigh, "What the hell do you want syrup for?! We're not playing patty cakes." In the webisodes, the Canadian actor also seems mysteriously to be acquiring an Irish accent. Is he supposed to be Michael Collins now?

I'm not really clear on what the humans are doing on New Caprica. Chief Tyrol, who's looking scarily like Ernest Hemmingway with his new beard, is seen urging a strike in the season two finale. But a strike from what? What are these people doing? They're all living in tents after a year, they don't seem to have any crops except for some celery that turns up in a webisode. Did that come from a ship or the planet? How's food production going? Can someone please spare a moment to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of being on the planet? Doesn't anyone care about what motivates these people? And if they can't even build permanent shelters, why don't they go back to the ships? Maybe all this will be answered in the third season. Probably not before we get Frick Cheney building a nuke in Firan to save babies from molestation by Cyim Jong-Il. Frakking allegory.

Here's to Your Frak, Frank

I can't believe how much it's been raining lately. I woke up to-day from what sounded like hail on the window, too. Water's been falling from the sky about every thirty minutes for almost a week now.

I'm not sure how much sleep I got last night but it doesn't feel like much. I tried to sleep in a while to make up for it but couldn't manage it--I lay in bed before finally dragging myself out at 12:50. I guess I am getting used to sleeping at night again, at least. It really is difficult--I tense up. It's too quiet at night. I actually need the sounds of lawnmowers and kids playing outside. Some animal instinct in me needs cowbells on everything to know where they are, or at least provide distraction for any silent predator in the house. As it is, I still can't imagine sleeping without the hum of the computer and the ceiling fan.

I think maybe I can blame the wine for keeping me up a little bit. But it was great wine--I seem to be getting some particularly good Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon lately. Or maybe I can blame the Americano I had earlier in the evening with four shots of espresso. But that coffee really wasn't optional--I was having a bear of a time concentrating yesterday for some reason. I still have no idea why--I get these days where I just feel inexplicably dim for no reason. I tried to explain it to Dragoness once, and she seemed to think I was saying I was in some pit of despair. No, I wasn't sad or anything. I just felt like my brain wasn't working right. That post I made yesterday took three hours or so because I kept starting a sentence only to forget where I was going halfway through. The only reason yesterday's post had any substance was because I fought the strange swamp around my skull to pull out thoughts I'd had while watching the movie the night before.

But then I had a bunch of different things to do for my comic yesterday. I had to start over inking a page three times because I'd somehow managed to get wrong basic little things I'd had no problem with a thousand times before.

In a word, ugh.

I watched the nineteenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's second season last night. It was cool to see Dean Stockwell, but the episode was mainly disappointing. After spending so much time making Gaius seem more complex than a snivelling little villain, they've now got him saying and doing stupid things for no apparent reason. When Roslin says there's no reason the Cylons can't also find the planet the humans have just found, why doesn't Gaius point out the same is just as true of Earth? Really, the best solution is to stop nowhere until the Cylons would no longer pose a threat. Which would be an argument Roslin ought to be making.

I keep getting the feeling Adama and Roslin are supposed to be like the Bush administration if the Bush administration were magically right about things. Roslin telling Gaius to go frak himself seemed like an obvious reference to Cheney's infamous outburst in the senate. Maybe Ronald D. Moore is trying to provide alternate perspectives in the interest of peace in the culture war, but he's not going to get there if he keeps relying on cheats by making people do things that don't make sense in circumstances with flawed logical foundations. Mostly it just seems like Ronald D. Moore's a Republican. I don't know, maybe he is. I guess it shows what a partisan I am that I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's not.

I must say he comes off as slightly, er, well, like someone who doesn't have much trouble finding a happy place inside himself in this entry in his blog about Hurricane Katrina and disaster preparedness. The notion that he has a useful perspective on the subject because he works "on a show that's premised on the idea of an apocalyptic event actually happening to group of people and their struggle to survive in its aftermath," is hilarious. I learned about as much about disaster preparedness from Battlestar Galactica as I learned about the Middle Ages from The Smurfs. I do enjoy his writing, but I guess this is one guy who definitely needs to stick to writing fantasy.

The Women Here

Last night I watched Ingmar Bergman's The Silence, the third in his trilogy also comprised of Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light. In my post about Winter Light, a movie which seemed to me to conclude with the idea that faith was necessary for human beings to communicate love to one another, I wondered if The Silence would, "in some way question the necessity of love."

Certainly, one might imagine the two sisters depicted in The Silence as being far happier if they did not love each other. This analysis of the film that Moira gave me a link to suggests the relationship between the women is intensely painful because the love they feel for each other is subjugated by resentments that have accumulated over time into profound hatreds. Though a darker view might be that neither woman can achieve total freedom because they're trapped by the love binding them together.

Roger Ebert's analysis of the film suggests the women might be two halves of one person--Ester, the woman dying from an unnamed disease, is the mind and Anna, a woman who frequently communicates with her world physically in a variety of ways, is the body. I think this is a worthy interpretation. But what are we to make then of the scene where Ester masturbates? Near the end of the movie, too, Ester despairs as she proclaims that life is merely about erections and secretions. Ester's dying and her condition and perhaps her personality seems to have denied her the physical life Anna taunts her with. Yet one wonders about Anna's true feelings about sex when a couple unabashedly having intercourse in a seat next to her in a theatre seems to shock and disgust her.

But this experience gives Anna, who's married, though her husband is never seen, the notion to allow Ester to see her having sex with a waiter she'd just met; Anna recognises this exhibition can be used as a weapon because she was hurt by it, and she uses it to hurt Ester because of the resentment she feels for her.

Anna wasn't disturbed by the vulgarity of the sight, but by the idea that two people could be so carefree that they're unconcerned with how people around them perceive them. It represents a freedom from the silent game that traps the sisters--Anna believes it's about dominance. But all Anna's flaunting of physical freedom before Ester does nothing to advance Anna's cause because she's misunderstood the rift between them, as Ester tells her, which only serves to infuriate Anna further because now not only is Ester acting superior, she may well be superior for all Anna knows because Anna senses she really doesn't understand things as well as her sister does.

Ester works as a translator, which may be a metaphor for the fact that she understands the situation better than her sister. The movie's filled with affections that don't know how to find expression or satisfaction, and Ester's business is to analyse symbols for meaning. But for all Ester's skill, she's less effective at attaining the simple bliss of love she sees in the embraces exchanged between Anna and Anna's young son, Johan. Ester awkwardly invades Anna's privacy because she's intensely lonely, not because she wishes to dominate Anna. Anna's stories of physical promiscuity make Ester jealous because she can't connect with others as easily as Anna seems to.

In a way, Anna is an innocent, but it's important to contrast her with the movie's more prominent figure of innocence, her son Johan. Johan sees his naked mother, and a painting of a nymph and a centaur, and doesn't perceive sexual connotations--he watches his mother's feet "because they move her around all by themselves". He wanders about the hotel and everything seems to be there to entertain him, including a vaudevillian troupe of dwarves, who play with him and put him in a girl's dress in a scene inter-cut with one of Anna selecting a small, sexy white dress for herself. When Ester sees the dwarves in the hall later in the film dressed as heavenly figures and death, it seems as though Ester's seeing the prominent symbols of life as the small and ridiculous things they are. To Johan, it's fun and natural and he doesn't think much of it. To Ester, near death, it's a frightening understanding of the world.

Anna, meanwhile, may lack her sister's view of the world's inadequacy stripped bare, but she's accumulated some misperceptions of the world and the people around her that she clings to, even as her stronger, more sensual side puts the lie to it, creating the conflict that causes her to laugh and cry bizarrely while she has sex with the waiter.

Bergman's trilogy is about the silence of God, but God and theology are never discussed directly in The Silence. The closest the film comes is when a radio playing Johann Sebastian Bach seems to unite the sisters momentarily in appreciation of the music's beauty--one wonders if there's significance in the child's name being Johan. It seems to point to the necessity of a plainer bliss to act as a conduit for people. The hall porter, who speaks no language even Ester can understand, seems to join them, too, in the rapture created by the music.

It puts me in mind of Friedrich Nietzsche's idea that Jesus was very near to his conception of the superman--that is, someone who is neither a master nor a slave, someone who rises above both roles. In The Silence, Ester might be the closer of the two sisters to the superman, but defined by a life led in a master role. What both sisters need, and what they both get from Bach and from Johan, is something or someone who can freely give love without the strings of preconceived dynamics or the fear of imparting love without receiving reciprocation or respect.



I watched the eighteenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's second season last night, and it was another one I didn't have any real problems with. There were flaws, yes, but they don't seem worth mentioning. It's interesting how much better the show seems to have gotten near the end of the season.

Books, Biffs, and Wolves

I had a couple rather vivid dreams last night. In the first, I was going to different bookstores for some reason. I might have been looking for a specific book--it was probably influenced by the fact that I went to a Barnes and Noble yesterday I don't often go to. Anyway, in my dream, the first bookstore I went to had hardly any books, just a bunch of middle aged men sitting around and smoking like in a 1930s gentlemen's club. There was some strangely ominous music, like tense strings from a horror movie. I caught one guy's eyes he was walking past me and we both started laughing like mad scientists to go with the music, then we both laughed normally at the joke we'd both thought of at the same time.

The next bookstore I went to was the oldest Barnes and Noble I knew of in San Diego county, and I found it had had a lot of its books taken out, too, to fit an austere aesthetic with shining metal struts against the walls. Everyone there gave me nasty looks, so I soon left. I found myself in the parking lot alone at night, and I was attacked by a large, starving wolf. It looked to be about twice the size of a regular wolf, but its flesh was sunken around its bones and its fur was clumpy and oily. I hit it across the face with something hollow and metal--I've been trying to remember what it was. It might have been a lunchbox or a tea kettle. I even think it might even have been an old fashioned mailbox. After I'd hit it, it became one of the Skinned Hounds from Oblivion and continued to fight me.

I woke up and went back to sleep, this time I dreamt I was in an alternate version of Back to the Future Part 2 where I, in the place of Marty McFly, dropped out of the hovering DeLorean to really beat the shit out of young Biff Tannen before kicking him out of his own car and running over him a couple times. Finally, I let him get up and I leaned out of the car and asked him why he hated me so much. He explained he didn't, and in fact he was a big fan of one of the same rock bands I was a big fan of, though I don't now remember the name of the band. As I pondered this, he sucker punched me and ran off.

While I was watching him go, wondering if I could chase him down, a skinny, nerdy looking young black man wearing glasses with extraordinarily thick lenses appeared, pointing a gun at me. He wanted me to accompany him to a comic book convention, and I did, finding there many of the same sorts of people I normally see at Comic-Con. And I woke up feeling nice about something apparently sort of permanent in the world.

Yesterday involved a lot of reading, coffee, and listening to some of the noisiest Starbucks employees possibly in the world. This particular Starbucks is wedged in a little shopping area between two massive office buildings. The places in the shopping area include the Barnes and Noble I mentioned, a FedEx/Kinko's, a cinema, and a lot of restaurants. It was clear that almost everyone I saw there worked in one of the office buildings, and everyone seemed to have a certain familiarity with one another, and the Starbucks workers, too. It was like I was visiting a school campus.

Last night I watched the seventeenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's second season, which wasn't bad. It was nice to see Apollo wasn't the complete doofus he was in the previous episode.

It was the Best of Ghosts, It was the Worst of Ghosts

I went back to University Town Centre yesterday and to the strange Crown Books. Just as I'd thought, the place was filled mostly with things like exposes on Saddam Hussein written in 1995 and books by figures in nationally prominent legal battles long forgotten. There was a book with a grinning, dark haired Larry King on the cover that couldn't have been published more recently than 1985 called Tell It to the King.

Then I struck gold--a big, hardcover, boxed, 50th anniversary edition Lord of the Rings for twenty dollars. No more hunting around for my sundry individual copies of the trilogy--this edition's so big, I can live in it.

I decided to take yesterday off completely, mainly because I hadn't gotten enough sleep to do anything. So I went to see a movie for the first time in months. Yes, I could've seen one of the Oscar contenders. There was the crotchety Gran Torino, the enigmatic The Reader with the naked Kate Winslet . . . But, no. I didn't see anything like that. I guess 'cause I'm a fucking rebel or some shit. I saw The Uninvited.

I think I mainly saw it on the strength of Roger Ebert's review, as I've long suspected he and I have similar fixations on psychological explorations of pretty girls. I'm not sure what it is--maybe it's the spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down, maybe it helps to draw you through problems by your compulsions.

In any case, Ebert's quite right about Emily Browning. She looks like a young Tori Amos, and more importantly, she has one of those faces that have a thousand tiny things twitching, moving, and telegraphing what might be going on in her head. And The Uninvited's directors, the so-called "Guard Brothers", know it, as it felt like 70% was close-ups on Browning. I'm not complaining.

Elizabeth Banks is in the movie, too, giving kind of an interesting performance. I respect Banks, mainly for the diversity of projects she chooses and the people she seems to like to work with and I think she was another factor in drawing me to the movie. Though mainly her performance here made me wish I was watching Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion, where Cary Grant had the similar task of saying things that sounded utterly sinister while at the same time having almost irrefutably innocent interpretations. It's a precarious sort of performance that basically requires an actor to make the audience feel like they might be going crazy and thereby identify the vulnerability of the POV character (Emily Browning in this case).

But the Guard Brothers dropped the ball on this, unfortunately--where Suspicion used Grant's character to make an utterly credible nightmare for Joan Fontaine, that truly makes us fear for her as a lot of us don't know how we'd do better in her situation, The Uninvited relies on a lot of horror movie clichés requiring the character to behave in ways that don't make sense in any context except in the context of a movie trying to create tension. There was also a twist ending that I saw coming a mile away, though I didn't mind that so much as it helped me appreciate Elizabeth Banks' performance a little more.

When I got out of the theatre, I discovered it was raining pretty hard. After a very long drive home, I discovered The Uninvited is a remake of a South Korean movie called Janghwa, Hongryeon. I felt sort of stupid for not having seen it, so I immediately sought it out.

Janghwa, Hongryeon means, according to the Wikipedia entry, "Rose Flower, Red Lotus", though the English language title of the film is A Tale of Two Sisters, as I suppose Red Flower, Red Lotus just wasn't boring enough. I guess someone probably thought they were being witty--"Everyone's heard of A Tale of Two Cities, right? Well, they're gonna be thinking, 'Hey, I know this title' when they start reading it, then--whammo! What the heck? Sisters?! Not cities?! Impossible! I have to see this movie!"

No, this movie has nothing to do with the Charles Dickens novel. I expected it to be a bit better than the remake, though, and expected to feel like a schmuck for it, but I was surprised to find it isn't actually much better. Instead of the grisly, walking, burnt corpses of The Uninvited, Janghwa, Hongryeon has the old Japanese standby of skinny pale ladies with their faces hidden by hair walking around with jerky movements, something that has yet to really register an effect on me, so that part of the movie was lost.

Janghwa, Hongryeon makes a lot more sense, that's for sure. One scene that The Uninvited had directly lifted had a girl cowering under her covers when something opened her door and came into her room. It made no sense for the girl in The Uninvited to behave this way, but it was appropriate for the character in Janghwa, Hongryeon. But I kind of missed the sort of subtle, devilish humour in The Uninvited--Janghwa, Hongryeon, like a lot of Asian horror, is a movie that takes itself maybe just a bit too seriously. Also like most Asian horror movies, it's chock-full of dreamlike editing influenced by David Lynch. These filmmakers might have done well to have observed Lynch's humour, too.

I finished the day watching the sixteenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's second season, which dealt with a hostage situation taking place in what looked like an expensive Los Angeles club filled with lazy rich people. It occurred to me a big part of the show's problem may simply be the inability of the writers to imagine poverty or desperate situations.

Anyway, remember, new Venia's Travels to-day.

Venia Gets Warmer

The new, Valentine's Day chapter of Venia's Travels is online. Early, once again. I gotta quit doing that.

Dot Dot Dot

Yesterday I watched Back to the Future with my sister, who'd somehow never managed to have seen it.

Not much else for me to say about yesterday. I did that and worked on my comic. I read the nice Sirenia Digest bonus thingy--an uncoloured issue of The Dreaming Caitlin wrote. A nice, strange story about a cat, which I always like to see.

I don't even have any complaints about the episode of Battlestar Galactica I watched last night--the fifteenth episode of the second season. It was one of the best episodes of the series. If someone had asked me to make a list of the things I'd have liked to have seen in the episode, that list would've included much of what the episode actually consisted of;

1) An episode told from Starbuck's POV that developed her character.
2) Subtle psychological interplay, in this case between Starbuck and Kat.
3) Dogfights.
4) Starbuck actually being a pilot, and being a pilot actually being a very important part of her character.
5) Characters remembering and registering the effects of things that have happened in previous episodes.
6) Beautiful women.

And I love how well the special effects of the space sequences are integrated with the physical effects in the cockpits. You really get a grip on those scenes.

This was an episode utilising what the show was made for--space battles and military characters.

Not very much sleep last night. There were noisy workmen here again this morning. I'm not having the greatest success concentrating or being coherent, so . . . over and out.

Markets Goblin, Apple, and Black

Last night I dreamt I was walking at night in the middle of a road near here where the speed limit is 55 mph. I had my eyes closed and I was feeling my way along by kicking the small centre divide. I think I had headphones on, too, and was listening to Howard Stern.

Yesterday I went to La Jolla for lunch. At the mall called University Town Centre I had some Japanese food with green tea, and I took my tea in its styrofoam cup for a long walk thereabouts. I was surprised to see the old Robinsons-May is now a Crown Books, a company I thought had gone out of business a while ago. My sister had told me it had moved into the building, but I thought it was just a case of whoever owns Crown's remaining stocks of books trying to get rid of them again, as I've seen "Crown Books" open at random locations for such purposes for years. I bought a collection of Christina Rossetti poems at one, but mostly it's just piles of autobiographies of celebrities no-one remembers anymore.

But the Crown I saw yesterday had a massive, permanent looking sign on the old department store building. I was already on a bridge, halfway across the street when I saw it and didn't feel like walking back, so I didn't go in to see what sort of undead place might be inside. I had some idea of stopping in the grocery store across the street to buy some apples--last time I'd been in that particular shopping centre, there'd been an Albertsons there. In its place yesterday I found a higher end grocery store called Bristol Farms. I'd never heard of it, but it looked like Whole Foods for people who are too rich to sully themselves with Whole Foods, which is saying something. You can gauge the snootiness of a place, too, by the name of the coffee shop inside, in this case Peet's. Peet's is kind of at the zenith of Coffee Snobbishness and Market Viability Mountain. All the big coffee chains do have distinctive flavours, but I don't really perceive any objective superiority, except that Starbucks, with so many stores, has a lot more employees who really don't know what they're doing. Also, it's worth pointing out most Starbucks now have espresso machines that require less skill from the barista at the sacrifice of some quality. So, okay, some snobbishness is justified.

What surprises me is that Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is still the only place that has loose leaf tea in bags. It's a wonderful invention--tea bags that produce tea as good as that produced in a pot. Neither Starbucks or Peet's seem to have caught up, which is particularly glaring in the case of Peet's, which presents itself as more of a coffee and tea shop than Starbucks does.

Anyway, Bristol Farms also had a stunning selection of liquor, none of which was on sale, it looked like, ever. They had 12 year and 18 year aged scotch and a whole row of different brands of absinthe, including St. George's, which, at 120 proof is by far the strongest bottle of alcohol I've seen on a store shelf without locked glass in front of it.

I bought four large Braeburn apples, a kind I've never had before. Eating apples so much lately, I'm noticing what a vast variety there is, and that each grocery store seems to have one or two types that are available nowhere else. At Ralph's a little while ago, I got something called "Rome apples", which were massive, shaped like tomatoes, and had red veins running though their pulp.

Last night I watched the fourteenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's second season, an episode that finally got around to focusing on Apollo. He seemed to become Philip Marlowe for an episode as he investigated the murder of the Pegasus's commander in his stateroom by gangsters who'd gotten past security as easily as the Cylon prisoner had a couple episodes ago when she killed the ship's previous commander. Not a lucky room. Of course, Apollo didn't waste time interrogating security.

The episode introduces a black market that has somehow formed in the community of the around 50,000 surviving humans interspersed throughout what looks like a couple dozen starships. I suppose something like that could happen. But the episode kind of asks us to take on faith one thing after another until the climax says, "See?! See the dark truths of human nature we have revealed?!"

I don't know? Yes? Maybe? Can I ask about the inefficiency of the trade regulations that have apparently caused the black market? No? Can I ask why it's wrong to trade booze for fruit? No? Okay, er . . .

I feel like I want to know a lot more than the writers want me to want to know. I know the black market was a necessity of life in post World War II Tokyo, but there were a lot of factors present there that wouldn't be present among the survivors of the 12 colonies. There's no forced shift to a new system of government, the population's much smaller and traffic from one location to another ought to be much easier to monitor, at least well enough that a massive black market wouldn't be able to form. Who are the victims here? Are supply ships being robbed? How? Are there trade embargoes? On who from where? And why? How can the currency be devalued if it's the only one in existence? Are the taxes ridiculous? What do most people do for their livings? What's daily life like for people? We really don't get any glimpse of that. Very little creativity seems to be expended for even the black market which seems to spend more time trying not to look like contemporary Earth than to be original in music and clothes.

And now we've moved from baby killing to baby fucking. Were there really this many people in need of child prostitutes among the 50,000 survivors and who are currently well enough off to afford them with resources stretched as thin as they are? If getting the basic necessities of life is so difficult, why aren't people starving to death?

Could it be the writers are more interested here in creating an allegory than they are in creating a coherent story? I think I know the answer to that one.

Some Things are Worth Fighting for

This recording of Christian Bale getting really fucking angry on the set of Terminator: Salvation put a huge smile on my face. And not for the reasons Harry Knowles accuses people of enjoying it for in this rant. Harry's right, everyone has moments where they lose their cool and the lighting guy Bale was yelling at was being unprofessional. But I didn't need Knowles to tell me that. I didn't enjoy the clip because it diminished Bale in my eyes. I enjoyed it because it enhanced my affection for Bale substantially. Somehow, people have gotten so they assume the angry guy is always wrong. Not me. As far as I'm concerned, this clip confirms for me that Bale's a righteous motherfucker who can throw down some shit if need be.

It also makes clear he's got a lot more authority on set than the director as you can hear him shooting down the idea of taking a break. But that's to be expected, really, when you're talking about a production helmed by a guy previously best known for a Charlie's Angels movie. And it's no surprise the DP's a dipshit, which doesn't excuse him from a dressing down by Bale. People like that deserve to have their balls put through a meat grinder. I just hope this makes Bale more careful about whom he works with in the future.

Another candid celebrity moment, this one on video, I meant to talk about a while ago is this footage of Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright getting pepper sprayed and tazed by police for no apparent reason. It's one of those things that makes you realise just how virulent racism still is in this country. It's inconceivable to me that someone could feel threatened by Jeffrey Wright, whether you're talking about the excitable amateur detective he played in Broken Flowers or the soft spoken freed slave in Ride with the Devil, the guy just always radiates gentleness. You get the impression that not only could he not hurt a fly, he'd burst into tears at the sight of a dead fly. I bet a lot of racist cops are particularly frightened by gentleness, though.

I watched the thirteenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's second season last night, which was enjoyable, but sill filled with disappointment. I had a sinking feeling right at the beginning when Roslin flashed back to seeing Baltar with the Cylon lady on Caprica. Yes, you would just remember that now, wouldn't you? Really stupid. Then we see Roslin soaking her bare feet in a pond. First the colonel's wife, now this. Why does this show insist on showing us withered old feet?

The episode also took us back to the baby killing well*, this time it was Roslin being bloodthirsty or something. I do kind of appreciate the writers are finally letting Roslin make mistakes. And we finally got some time with the doctors talking about Cylon anatomy, though Baltar talking about how Cylons are mostly indistinguishable from humans makes us wonder how Sharon plugged the ship's computer into her arm.

And how the hell didn't Adama foresee Helo might need to be restrained? You're going to kill his baby and he's just supposed to accept it?

The whole anti-war movement on the show is just too silly. I keep trying not to think about how the writers might be trying to create an allegory for modern U.S. relations with the middle east, but here it was especially grating. No, the analogy does not work, folks. Maybe if al Qaeda had killed 99% of all Americans and occupied the country, it might be similar. This is not the same thing. Or maybe the humans are supposed to be al Qaeda? It's too stupid, I don't even want to think about it anymore. I seriously hope these writers aren't influenced by modern international politics too much in the future.


*Is that like the kite eating tree, Sets?

". . . Torture without End, Still Urges, and a Fiery Deluge, Fed With Ever-Burning Sulphur Unconsum'd"

So I guess Morrissey is coming further west than Texas, to Coachella. The Cure and Amanda Palmer are performing, too, so that's three acts I'd love to see. But I don't think there's anything in any form of heaven or Earth that could convince me to go to Coachella again. I blogged at the time (five years ago);

Coachella sucked. It was hell on grass. In a polo field. Where there were horses. The horses were pretty, yes. But the sun was bleedin' ferocious and there was hardly any shade . . . there were great big distances to cross on foot . . .

I was there with Trisa, and the experience was mostly a long day of sitting under a bright, cloudless sky in the middle of a grassy field with no cover. People weren't even allowed to bring umbrellas. We all sunburned, used disgusting portable bathrooms, watched a couple shitty bands, and then there were The Pixies and Radiohead, which was nice but comprised only about 3% of the day. I just wasn't cut out for that sort of thing. Well, not until I hit rock bottom, anyway. By then I hope to at least have some dementia to go with it.

I actually watched the entire Super Bowl yesterday. No, I'm not interested in sports at all. But I had a brandy and my mother had gotten same wonderful sandwiches and a variety of really good appetisers. I had my first bottle of Budweiser, too, and it was the first beer I didn't completely hate. As I said to my sister at the time, it tastes kind of like seltzer water with crumbled bread mixed in it.

Unfortunately, I think I made a nuisance of myself early on because I incorrectly figured the main value for everyone in watching the Super Bowl was in making fun of it--this may be a result of growing up on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Weird Al Yankovic. They taught me that many things in life can be fun so long as you make fun of them.

The beginning of the show featured a seemingly endless line-up of talentless celebrities and public figures, including Jennifer Hudson, Faith Hill, and General Petraeus. "And now, here's the cast of Celebrity Rehab," I said, imitating the announcer's voice, which elicited no laughter, merely a dry remark from my sister that I've been watching too much RiffTrax.

But as time wore on, I actually became somewhat fascinated by all of it--the commercials, the celebrities in tacky vests and boleros, and even the game itself. First of all, there's a general atmosphere of violent hostility in commercials these days. Nearly every commercial featured someone getting hit by a car, clothes-lined by an overpass, or getting the shit beat out of them. The Cheetos commercial was about the joys of siccing pigeons on people, tearing off a woman's clothing, and breaking into ATMs. The Doritos commercial was about breaking vending machines and breaking a guy's genitals. One of the Pepsi commercials was a sort of updated version of the football player tossing a kid his towel in thanks for a soda, only in this version, the player beats up a bunch of advertising guys who try to stop him from drinking a beverage he's, in the fiction of the commercial, not endorsing. The kid smiles at the sight of the melee, and the player smiles back at him. The message being, I guess, that one shouldn't sell out, one should violently protest selling out, one should drink Pepsi because we are all born naturally with the desire to do so. Naturally the player was paid substantially to appear in the commercial.

I started getting interested in the game itself, too, especially when the sportscasters started talking about how there were an unprecedented number of personal fouls in the game. I watched players just walking right up to players on the opposite team and start slapping them around, even knowing their entire team was going to be suffer penalisations that would tangibly affect the game. One guy, running across the entire length of the field for a touchdown, apparently made the longest play in Super Bowl history. His name and face quickly became an integral part of the graphics segues and everyone was treating him like a hero. But even that didn't make him think twice about starting to beat on some other guy and receive a penalty for it.

In the end, the team with the slightly fewer personal fouls won. So I guess justice was served.

I watched the twelfth episode of Battlestar Galactica's second season. I still absolutely love this new story arc about the humans' uncertain feelings about the Cylons. But even as I was enjoying it, I couldn't help but laugh when Adama asked Sharon why the Cylons hate them so much. You've had her locked up all this time, you let people visit just to chat with her, and this is the first time you've bothered to ask her why the powerful enemy who's killed most of your species is so hellbent on your destruction? Moira has a word for this sort of thing, it is FACEPALM.

"I've Heard That You'll Try Anything Twice"

This morning while eating breakfast, I read the new Sirenia Digest and then watched a bunch of Morrissey videos on YouTube. I think I spent about an hour and a half eating breakfast, which is really too long since I'm supposed to go to my parents' house to-day for some kind of Super Bowl party.

It was a good Sirenia Digest, a little more of a spirit of fun in it than usual. It featured two stories paying homage to Edgar Allen Poe, whose birthday was last week, and made me think on how underappreciated Poe's humour is. Though I think I might call Caitlin's humour leaning more towards something I might call "humour of the sadistic" while Poe's is more like "humour of the masochistic". The first of Caitlin's two stories, "THE THOUSAND-AND-THIRD TALE OF SCHEHERAZADE", strikes its humour iron when the dominant in a sort of preternatural dom/sub relationship remarks on the stupidity of the king in One Thousand and One Nights for being manipulated by Scheherazade into staying her execution simply by wanted to hear Scheherazade tell stories. Like many people who subscribe to very literal ideas of master and slave dynamics, the dom in Caitlin's story is herself as easily manipulated as she fails to grasp quieter and more fundamental strengths.

The second story, "THE BELATED BURIAL", moves from black humour to sensual horror nicely.

So then I watched Morrissey videos, and noticed all the ones with songs still owned by Warner Brothers have had their audio disabled, which seemed a strange alternative to Warners simply removing the videos. Amanda Palmer was complaining in her blog about Warners' antics lately with her own videos. Once again, the traditional mechanisms of proliferation of art run contrary to the value of art and the impulses of the artist. It's not hard to make a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money, as Bernstein said in Citizen Kane. If you want to do something else at the same time, you're generally fucked.

I can't remember ever looking forward to the release of a studio album as much as I'm looking forward to the release of Morrissey's new one next month. It kills me he's not coming further west than Texas. I could watch him daily. I love how he's turned into some kind of gloomy rat packer, too.