This unusual looking bee refused to tell me where my sister's cat, Saffy, was yesterday. She also would not entertain questions as to the existence or location of a stockpile of honey.
Yesterday I finished watching "The Curse of Peladon" Doctor Who serial, which I quite enjoyed. I got excited when I saw the familiar Martian saddlebag asses of the "Ice Warriors".
Though it seems kind of weird the Doctor continues to call them Ice Warriors--even when speaking directly to them--though the only reason he calls them that is that he first encountered them frozen in a glacier on Earth.
When I got back from the mall to-day, I saw this trio of ducks wandering into the neighbourhood;
It just so happened that the only thing I'd bought at the mall, aside from lunch and coffee, was hamburger buns. It's as though they knew.
Actually I suspect they're here to avoid a bunch of assholes at the river for Labour Day.
A decisive dance lactates mildly. Piglets gleefully gobble frantic mice. Marbles clack about ashtrays wildly. Pink potions topple from a TV vice. Reality spackles roads of green brass. Tequila trickles onto topsoil. Oompa-Loompas puke up disgusting grass. Grey rain slashes across crumpled foil. Tall boars apprehend a black robbed spy hog. But they failed to spot the saurian sub. Raincoats wade in Windows' withered dark bog. Naive pirates plead for a private club. Ill island translucent stones incept growth. A second Spain succumbs to dreams of both.
I read the first story in the new Sirenia Digest, the conclusion of "THE YELLOW ALPHABET", while I was eating lunch to-day. It was good (the story, not the lunch, though the lunch wasn't bad, consisting of a baked potato and three corn tortillas). It continued in the vein of the first portion, providing vignettes for each letter of the alphabet, picking up at the letter N. N turned out being for Naga, in a nice story that reminded me of the woman in Queen's Blade who wears a live snake for panties.
I think Z was my favourite, though, having to do with dragons whose names begin with Z. It has some nice thoughts on the sexual implications of dragon myths.
I had a really nice time playing World of Warcraft last night. I actually stayed online longer than Tim, who ran Galatea, my human rogue, through a big mine in Badlands that began with a U (can't remember the rest of the name. U is for . . . ?). I found the perfect balance--listening to Howard Stern and drinking tequila seems to fill the places where WoW is void of substance perfectly. WoW has a Howard Stern and tequila shaped hole.
I saw Machete last night. I liked it, though not quite as much as Planet Terror, the genesis for Machete--Machete originated as a fake trailer shown before Planet Terror, the Robert Rodriguez film appearing in the great double feature called Grindhouse that not nearly enough people saw.
Rodriguez directed Machete as well. He first came to prominence directing the El Mariachi series of films, the second of which, Desperado, has the same weakness as Machete, in that the first four fifths of the film are great, balls out pulp, and the last fifth dumps all the paint in the pail, resulting in greyed out mess.
I'm not against the idea of an action movie starting out with one of the villains shooting and killing a pregnant woman. Some people say that one should avoid any and all things that might trigger terrible psychological reactions in the audience unless it's done "tastefully". There are two reasons I disagree with that view--first of all, what's generally considered tasteful generally makes me want to throw up, yet people keep making Lifetime movies without regard to my sensitivities. Second of all, I think there are many people who've had bad, traumatic experiences, who like seeing realistically brutal assholes getting their asses put through meat grinders, and who find stilted tip-toeing around certifiably bad shit to be profoundly grating.
But, if you begin your movie with something like a pregnant woman being murdered (as Machete does), you can't end the movie with a full out battle sequence where all the good guys live and all the bad guys die. That, to me, isn't just insulting, it's boring and eerie. It's like footage from a concentration camp that abruptly ends with a crude drawing of all the inmates smiling together in a flowery field. You wonder where the real ending is.
In fact, incredibly enough, it's tastefulness that is generally at the root of Machete's problem. 85% or so is great, extreme, holy shit--Machete driving cars through guys, Machete blowing apart heads and limbs without breaking stride, Machete pulling out internal organs and using them as tools to kill other guys, Machete coming across beautiful naked women who want to fuck him every five minutes or so. And it's especially effective because the bad guys are killing innocent women and children, and are loaded with real life racist immigration issues. I saw one review that said Robert DeNiro was over the top as Senator McLaughlin, but he actually came off for me as pretty damn close to the batshit that comes out of Glenn Beck's or Sarah Palin's mouth. Now, one might ask, is it fair to say Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck would personally shoot and kill a pregnant woman coming across the border in order to prevent a baby from becoming a citizen? Some of the incredibly rancorous words coming from people about repealing the 17th amendment kind of suggest such brutality, but one suspects these people would baulk at direct murder. A movie like this can be helpful in making the meaning of carelessly cruel words more tangible and, for the other side, act as wish fulfilment in slaughtering representations of bad ideas without suggesting murder of real people, who are more complex when you meet them.
Machete ought to have been the story of an essentially good, but somewhat morally grey man of action caught in the middle of a philosophically real culture clash while remaining also above it--like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a film Machete pays homage to in the opening credits. Instead, Rodriguez felt it necessary to burden the plot with needless ifs, buts, and alsos--perhaps spurred by this incident referred to in the film's Wikipedia entry;
A fake trailer for the film was released on May 5, 2010, through Ain't It Cool News. The trailer opened with Danny Trejo saying, "This is Machete with a special Cinco de Mayo message to Arizona," followed by scenes of gun fire, bloodshed, and highlights of the cast. The fake trailer combined elements of the Machete trailer that appeared in Grindhouse with footage from the actual film, and implied that the film would be about Machete leading a revolt against anti-immigration politicians and border vigilantes. According to Fox News, critics of illegal immigration were offended by the contents of the movie trailer.
However, Rodriguez later revealed the trailer to be a joke, explaining "it was Cinco de Mayo and I had too much tequila."
Instead, the movie's saddled with the right wing senator and border vigilantes having ties to a Mexican druglord and Machete's every action having sometimes secret, irreproachable motives that only happen to coincide with his need for vengeance. The worse is a bit of looped dialogue where Michelle Rodriguez is taking Danny Trejo into her home after he's been injured apparently trying to assassinate the senator. In an exterior shot where it's really unnatural, we hear Rodriguez say something like, "Of course I know you had no choice, why else would you give me the money?" Meaning that she'd deduced from the fact that Machete had given her the $150,000 payment for the assassination that Machete had had no way of backing out of the deal. We're required to make a bunch of leaps of logic in order to reach one big, pointless leap of logic in a movie that's supposed to be all visceral all the time.
Mostly I loved the cast, even Lindsay Lohan, who in a few short scenes reminded me that it is tragic that she's spectacularly throwing her career away. I've never been a fan of Steven Seagal, and for most of the movie I considered him a huge weak point. I know he's actually trained in martial arts, which makes it all the stranger that all of his actions completely lack visual credibility. Of course, no-one should really be able to do the kind of damage with punches you see being done in the movie, but Seagal looks like a giant infant feebly flailing his arms. His obvious hair plugs don't help, either. I was completely not into Seagal until his very last lines, which I actually thought were intriguing and well delivered.
It felt like there wasn't enough Danny Trejo in the movie. Jessica Alba's performance was characteristically flat and a sharp anachronism among the much better actors. Michelle Rodriguez would've been a more satisfying love interest for Machete. But mainly, I give the movie thumbs up.
I kept wanting to call it "Mat-chete" because of Little Lupe;
Particularly the third Doctor incarnation, for its aesthetic, but Doctor Who generally has sort of been reminding me of Galaxy Express 999. I almost wonder if Leiji Matsumoto was partly inspired by Doctor Who when he created the manga in 1977, but I doubt Doctor Who could've had much of a presence in Japan in the 70s.
But you could describe either series by saying it's about a mysterious, alien person and young human companion travelling through space in a vessel with a curious, sort of sentimental earthly appearance--a police box in the case of Doctor Who and an old steam engine train in the case of Galaxy Express 999.
The companion, Tetsuro, is the lead character in 999 while it's the mysterious alien who has the lead in Doctor Who. And the sexes are reversed--while Doctor Who seems downright patriarchal with its predominantly male movers and shakers and pint size confused female followers, 999 has a solemn, maternal woman guiding the goofy kid Tetsuro on his trip through the cosmos.
Maetel, the mysterious companion of Tetsuro, is both eerily reminiscent of his mother yet also clearly meant to be a romantic interest to Tetsuro, a certain weirdness I'd say isn't present in Doctor Who until I remember that the stream of small female companions/possible romantic interests were originally meant to be replacements for the Doctor's granddaughter.
I watched the twelfth and thirteenth episodes of Galaxy Express 999 with breakfast to-day. It's taken me years to get this far with the series, not because it's bad but because the fascinatingly extreme melancholy of the stories seems best taken slowly. This particular story dealt with a planet inhabited by a lone, sword wielding man surrounded by the fossilised remains of his lover and the rest of the planet's former population.
The animation has gotten quite a bit better, even though it's by no means as polished as to-day's anime. I love classic anime like this, though, because the passion the animators feel for the material is so evident. These guys may not know exactly how to draw a man moving with such prowess as to relieve several hostile opponents of their rifles with only a sword, but they chisel it out of their papers and pens seemingly with just enthusiasm alone.
Of course, Galaxy Express 999 is a lot more comfortable with violence than Doctor Who. I'm up to the second episode of "Day of the Daleks" and was astonished to see the Doctor kill someone with a gun for the first time in the show's to that point nine year run. Maetel meanwhile encourages twelve year-old Tetsuro to carry and use his gun, and the first episode of the series has to do with Tetsuro killing men in the name of revenge.
But I've been loving the past several serials of Doctor Who I've watched. Starting with "The Claws of Axos", I think it's been some of the best episodes of the whole series. I particularly like the Hammer horror vibe of "The Daemons" and the first episode of "Day of the Daleks".
I watched L'Avventura last night, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 film, widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, though it was booed at its Cannes premiere. It's a reaction I can understand--the movie's about amazingly shallow rich people going on about their lives after the disappearance of someone close to them. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert said of it, "It was seen as the flip side of Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita. ' Both directors were Italian, both depicted their characters in a fruitless search for sensual pleasure, both films ended at dawn with emptiness and soul-sickness. But Fellini's characters, who were middle-class and had lusty appetites, at least were hopeful on their way to despair. For Antonioni's idle and decadent rich people, pleasure is anything that momentarily distracts them from the lethal ennui of their existence."
I was reminded of La Dolce Vita while I watched L'Avventura, but I was even more strongly reminded of The Rules of the Game. All three films tell their stories of decadent societies through series of scenes containing a special kind of vapid dialogue. Love and ambition, or feigned versions of love and ambition, are discussed in collages of casual dialogue at parties, cafes, and other social settings. Over this, in The Rules of the Game, was cast the shadow of World War II. The disappearance of a girl named Anna has a similar effect in L'Avventura.
Claudia and Sandro, the film's central characters, were the best friend and lover, respectively, of Anna. The three of them, and several other friends, disembark from their yacht onto an apparently deserted Mediterranean island. Anna had already pretended to spot a shark while they were swimming earlier and laughingly confessed her seemingly pointless prank to Claudia while the two were changing clothes afterwards. Anna is a capricious and bored young woman, complaining to Sandro, from whom she's been separated for a month, that she's become used and prefers to be alone now--right before she has spontaneous sex with him. It's because of this that Sandro initially chalks up Anna's disappearance to one of her games.
But as the characters continue to search the island in a series of beautifully composed, mostly silent shots, analysing Anna's personality takes on a new weight. As the friends struggle between deciding what the flighty and selfish Anna might have done, or what terrible accident may have befallen her, the land and the sea shown in the shots dwarf everything partly because of this tortured confusion. The natural and silent beauty emphasises the small, insubstantial society and the elusiveness not just of Anna but of Anna's personality.
I thought both Claudia and Sandro were pretty crass for engaging in a love affair while Anna's fate was still unknown, but I felt more sympathy for Claudia than for Sandro. Perhaps it's simply because Monica Vitti is an actress who displays emotion a lot better than Gabriele Ferzetti, who played Sandro. The POV shifts between Claudia and Sandro, but it seems mainly to be with Claudia, and while Sandro seems to feel superficial grief for Anna and makes some attempt to investigate her departure, Claudia seems more genuinely wracked with the questions posed by the circumstances about herself and the people around her.
Sandro made me think this movie may work very well as a commentary on modern culture, which seems profoundly impotent. Watching the Zero Punctuation review of the non-existent game Duke Nukem Forever, the sequel to the popular Duke Nukem 3D that's been delayed for nine years, I suspected the reviewer was quite right in his suspicion that the fault lay in game developers slacking off for years. Sandro's an architect and he talks to Claudia about how he'd like to pursue his own designs, complains he lacks opportunity, yet this seems unlikely given his idle lifestyle. At one point he comes across a drawing a young man's made of an antique archway--he casually destroys the drawing without seeming to know why. When the young man confronts him angrily, Sandro asks for his age, which is 23. "I was twenty three once," says Sandro. "I got into many fights."
Of course, I only mean to suggest Sandro's emotionally and imaginatively impotent, as his relationship with Claudia immediately after the disappearance of Anna shows him to be not sexually impotent. He kisses her on the yacht while Anna's still being searched for, and Claudia seems to feel only perplexed alarm before reciprocating. I was sort of working on a theory that Claudia may have been attempting to express a repressed romantic longing for Anna through Sandro, which might explain her participation in the affair. Or perhaps the apparent discomfort she feels on and off may be a pretence she effects for her own sake.
Ultimately the movie seems to be about a guilt over lack of emotions and finally a fear of them.
Twitter Sonnet #178
Skin stolen by shadow shapes moves through day. Light etches up staircases to a star. Only lemon marks a landlady's way. Bourbon sneaks into the Byzantine bar. Past welcome words walk from the tongue's tunnel. Ninja whittler cheats at origami. Cardboard beast's driven into a kennel. Smeagol has stolen all the sashimi. Goblins watch the scientific sunrise. Teeth ping pong in petrified pantyhose. Raised liver spots on rocks dream they're dead flies. See where a ketchup covered florist goes. White rock ramparts see a funeral veil. Rust marches among rings of iron mail.
At Land, a fifteen minute 1944 film directed by Maya Deren--she also starred in the movie and wrote it. It doesn't feel much like the decade it was made in. It actually kind of feels like a music video from the 80s, an impression augmented a bit by the fact that Deren looks sort of like Kate Bush.
It seems a bit influenced by the Alice books to me--her washing up on land reminds me of "The Pool of Tears" from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and her identification with the white pawn in a strange chess game is strongly reminiscent of Through the Looking Glass. It shares the broader idea with the Alice books of a young, female protagonist confronting an apparently nonsensical world of adults. Though the protagonist in this case is obviously much older, it still seems to be about her fundamental nature, emerging from the sea at the beginning like an early life form, surrounded by the abstract, contrived machine of adult reality.
It's not a bad little movie, and I'll probably watch more of her movies on YouTube at some point. It suited my weird lethargic mood last night. I played some Oblivion, too, which I was in the mood for after talking to Trisa on the phone about it the other day. I ended up just wandering around the forest at night looking up at the sky. That's the mood I was in. I wasn't drinking, either, because I had a headache. It could be I'm just not getting enough sleep, forcing myself to get up at 9am every day. But I'm enjoying daylight so much--even though it compels me to leave the house at least once every day. Every day feels like a holiday, Day Day, if you will.
Someone needs to make this movie RIGHT FUCKING NOW. From howardstern.com;
HOWARD CASTS 'FOOTLESS'
Inspired by the new cast of 'Dancing with the Stars,' Howard imagined an Afghani remake of 'Footloose' called 'Footless,' in which the “godless” dancers are punished with amputations. Howard said he'd film a stoning for the opening scene, stunt-cast Kevin Bacon as General Petraeus and envisioned a scene in which a worried father turns in his children: "You did the right thing! Your daughter's out of control. We will remove her uterus."
Howard also hoped to cast Lindsay Lohan as an ill-fated drifter: "She could play an epileptic woman. She could come to town and have an epileptic fit and they'd accidentally cut her feet off." His cast included Jennifer Lopez as a dancer ("They cut off her ass!") and Mel Gibson as an Afghani-sympathetic beekeeper: "Here in Afghanistan we train our bees to hate women and Jews!"
Watching a clip from "The Crusade" to-day, a Doctor Who serial, half of the episodes of which are lost, I found myself marvelling at what a gigantic person Barbara is. And I had to remind myself that after Barbara's departure, the worlds of Doctor Who tend to feature only very tiny women.
"Colony in Space", the serial I finished watching to-day, introduced two female characters in the titular colony, a tiny one and one who got killed in the first episode. I guess I can't really complain, though, especially as Jo Grant was radiantly cute in her Disney Cheshire Cat shirt.
I really liked this particularly serial, first of all because it featured the Doctor travelling somewhere in his TARDIS. It was good, old fashioned Who. It wasn't until the second episode that the serial had me thinking to myself, "Wait . . . Humans mining for a substance essential for Earth's survival on an alien world, inhabited by 'primitives', telepathic blue/green spear wielding natives? This is Avatar!"
To be fair, "Colony in Space" is a more complex story than Avatar--which isn't saying much. Though it's not the simplicity or well tread nature of Avatar's essential story that bothers me about it. "Colony in Space" is superior for me just by having the Doctor in it. The Master helps, too--even though I generally haven't liked the Master so far, I do think Robert Delgado's performances as the character were good, and here I like that he and the Doctor have their own motives while all this other shit's going on around them.
But the main thing is, I didn't find the story as abrasive as Avatar because the natives in this case weren't portrayed as saints. I hate two dimensional characters in any case, but perfectly good people annoy me a lot faster than perfectly bad people, as one could point out are the Master and the impressively evil looking Morris Perry as the guy in charge of the mining operation.
The aliens help the protagonists sometimes, sometimes they hinder them, all depending on their own needs. Some of the decisions they make seem good from a human moral perspective, some seem wrong.
The serial also featured a character played by Bernard Kay, looking a bit like Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York. Apparently this was the last of four Doctor Who serials he'd been in, but two of those were ones I'd skipped over due to missing episodes. I remembered him very well from "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" where he easily stood out from four or five other guys, all playing human rebels. Kay was distinguished there entirely by his performance--he has that thing genuinely good actors have, where they give you the impression that they're acting inside their minds, too. The look in his eyes says he's really thinking about what he's going to say regarding the Daleks or about the rights of the colonists. He seems kind of Harrison Ford-ish to me, and I'd have liked to have seen him play Allan Quatermain or some other rugged English adventurer.
Sad spaghetti speaks of useless walking. Too much cheese barrages a Taco Bell. Curdled cherubs rocket through line kicking. Drive-through windows have taught demons too well. Sun's rubber wrap crushes a minivan. Mormon tunnel punctures a burger place. Thousand hooks stop the fall of Peter Pan. Calico cad's caught by a spray of mace. No enterprise eclipses egg shell blue. Pastel metal holds a house together. Discount a chocolate bunny's derring-do. Risk takes row boats down in liquid weather. Blank graffiti grabs for a good mind's throat. Pink lemonade dyes the luminous moat.
When did Penn Jillette get to be so damn boring? I followed a link on his twitter to this video which is over ten minutes of Jillette discussing whether or not Finland is a Scandinavian country.
My comic has some Finnish readers, from the pictures I've seen it looks like a lovely country, I like Nightwish's Wishmaster album, and I can even say the question of whether or not Finland is a Scandinavian country is mildly interesting to me. But not stretched out over ten comedy-free minutes. It's true, I only watched half of the video, so maybe it does get funny at some point, but the guy lost me.
But I remember liking Penn Jillette, so I clicked on another of his videos, called "Fuck You Seth MacFarlane! - The Tea Party is Racist?". I know Jillette's a libertarian, so I was hoping the video would at least get me angry with him--you know, that it would provoke me. Something. But, first of all, his argument that in order for an organisation to be racist it must call itself racist is so off as to be bizarre. The Nazi party was racist, but they considered themselves to be about saving Germany. Personally, I don't think the Tea Party actually has much of a philosophy, just a lot of complaints, many of those having to do with a vague umbrella about how it's the government's fault for fucking things up. A lot of racists happen to be anti-government, and anti-left, people, so naturally there would be a lot of racists in the tea party, which accounts for Rand Paul.
Then I watched the Larry King segment Jillette was talking about and I saw MacFarlane never even actually called the Tea Party racist. Rachel Harris, another panellist, did, and MacFarlane did not appear to disagree, so maybe Jillette just didn't consider her name big enough to use for the title of his video. And an argument that Jillette finds particularly offensive, an argument he attributes to MacFarlane, the argument that the tea party are an illegitimate organisation because they have backing from extremely rich politically partisan individuals, isn't even an argument MacFarlane actually made. Jillette stresses that MacFarlane called the tea partiers "puppets" when in fact MacFarlane had only called the rich political backers "puppeteers". And there is an important difference between saying someone is trying to control a group of people and saying a group of people are essentially mindless zombies. MacFarlane also at no point says that the Tea Party is "not a real movement" as Jillette quotes him as saying. Jillette goes on with a completely fabricated argument which he attributes to MacFarlane, that the Tea Party is illegitimate because it argues against it's own self-interest, universal healthcare. Jillette holds forth about how a group of people can believe in a fundamental idea that might not lead to them being comfortable, how that's actually virtuous.
So, the point of Jillette's big, rambling, impassioned video is that in some circumstances an aspect of a phenomenon MacFarlane is putting down is good.
I actually watched a clip of Jillette on Glenn Beck after this. Both of them seem like guys who haven't slept in days and have been drinking a lot so that really meaningless, superficial arguments sound extremely important and profound.
Every time I think I'm conveying an adequate level of brutality for a story set in the Middle Ages, I read about something absolutely terrible that happened that I simply wouldn't have thought of. For example, yesterday I was reading Joseph and Frances Gies' Life in a Medieval Castle and came across this;
In the First Crusade, when the Turks besieged the Crusaders in the castle of Xerigordo near Nicaea and cut off their water supply, the beleaguered Christians suffered terrific hardships, drinking their horses' blood and each other's urine, and burying themselves in damp earth in hope of absorbing the moisture. After eight days without water the Christians surrendered, and were killed or sold as slaves.
It always amazes me how people still have relatively idyllic impressions of the Middle Ages, but then, I suspect a lot of people in this country have no real grasp of how horrible things are for a lot of people in the world even now.
By the way, this is the chess game shown in the latest Venia's Travels on my cheap glass chess board;
The last move was the transparent rook to the square next to the opaque king. The tipped over pawn is a queen.
* King: as now. * Queen: one square diagonally, only. * Bishop: o In the version that went into Persia: two squares diagonally (no more or less), but could jump over a piece between o In a version sometimes found in India in former times: two squares sideways or front-and-back (no more or less), but could jump over a piece between. o In versions found in Southeast Asia: one square diagonally, or one square forwards. * Knight: as now. * Rook: as now. * Pawn: one square forwards (not two), capturing one square diagonally forward; promoted to queen only.
I went with the first of the three types of bishop, which made the piece a lot like the knight. All together, the main difference with the game was that it went a lot slower. Even after victory was sure for the transparent side, it took forever to get checkmate. One can see the newer rules simply streamlined the game.
I've been playing chess almost nightly lately, but I haven't won a game in weeks. Though about half the time I lose because of the timer running out. I simply don't understand the point of blitz games--to me, the whole point of chess is the two opponents pitting strategy against one another. If one person makes a wrong decision because of time pressure, to me that's like getting a diminished version of a game. I know, I've complained about this before, so it's probably sounding like sour grapes, which is pretty much the reason I continue to agree to playing with a timer.
A couple weeks ago, Howard Stern mentioned his infamous visit to The To-night Show that caused Jay Leno to walk off the stage. Watching the clips yesterday, it's amazing to see how tame it is by to-day's standards, and I actually felt for once that our society has progressed in the 15 years since, at least enough to where a lesbian kiss--or even play-lesbian kiss--isn't a big deal on television.
It's funny how Leno feebly defends his reticence by saying the spanking would need a premise around it--he doesn't get it, what makes the bit funny is how uncomfortable he is. The most fascinating part for me, though, is when Leno's literally waving a bible at Stern, saying of the book, "Suddenly all this is making perfect sense to me." He says it with a little twinkle, like he's making a joke, but it has enough sincerity you know it's meant to be a little coded message to his homophobic viewers, "Don't stop watching my show, I'm on your side." Not that I think he's actually sincere about either stance, he's just a pandering weasel.
I'm about halfway through "The Claws of Axos", the first Doctor Who serial to feature companion Jo Grant in a miniskirt. I actually kind of liked the pants and sweaters Jo was wearing in the previous serial--she's so androgynous, she's like a little David Bowie or Mick Jagger tagging along with the Doctor. He's not nearly as flirtatious with her, though, which is one of the things that makes Liz Shaw a bit more exciting to me, though I think the Doctor might somewhat reluctantly sleep with Jo at some point.
The sexual dynamics on the show are really striking by modern standards--Jo's one extraordinarily tiny girl among a number of curiously large men and, jeez, is she passive.
I do long for a female companion with a bit more spit and fire. So far, my dream team consists of Liz, Vicki, Jamie, and the third Doctor. Yes, in spite of the problems I have with the show so far during his tenure, I have to admit Pertwee's my favourite of the first three Doctors. He's a lot more versatile than Hartnell and a lot subtler than Troughton. I also kind of like the moments where Pertwee demonstrates the Doctor's martial arts prowess. And the bit in "Mind of Evil" where he flips over a table on the Master was as excellent an action scene as one could want from the show, especially with the Doctor's cute ruse about spilling water.
I've been less than impressed by the Master so far--for one thing, I don't buy the Doctor, Jo, and the Brigadier calling him "The Master". I think they'd invent another name for him, like "Mr. Droopy Pants" or something.
Disney's dagger draws an inky liquid. Bad water bubbles from the goblin frog. The Lampshade's shouts are always insipid. Blinding bulbs crack the criminal lost dog. Contaminated green eyes see bright grey. Strange olive oil salesmen garrotte God. Voyeur drops leap from dramatic sea spray. So salt streams send aloft a frenzied cod. Golden faerie fish find fermenting corn. Weak bourbon weeps for the want of water. Fake angles defy geometry's scorn. Biangle married the merman's daughter. Venus invites violent screens of milk shake. Icy sheets of nourishment wash cheap steak.
I watched Viridiana last night, a 1961 Luis Brunuel film, a very pessimistic and insightful film about human nature.
I kept trying to think of who Francisco Rabal, who played the character called Jorge in the movie, reminded me of;
Finally I realised it was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obviously the movie was made long before anyone heard of Ahmadinejad, but apart from some physical resemblance, Jorge has the similar style and manner of a rich, powerful, self-serving and secular gentleman, which is fitting as his character is set up as a contrast to the title character, Viridiana, his deeply religious cousin who's about to become a nun at the beginning of the movie.
I have a feeling Jorge may have been inspired by another dictator, Francisco Franco, the dictator whose rise to power had prompted Brunuel to flee Spain. But the movie doesn't quite break down into a right versus left mentality, rather it seems intent on showing how inappropriate it is to put human beings in either mould. Classes are clearly portrayed by the film--the family to which Viridiana and Jorge belong is very rich, and the patriarch, Don Jaime, Jorge's father and Viridiana's uncle, is a man shown to have been driven somewhat mad by the isolation caused by his wealth, position, and death of his wife. The pious Viridiana works somewhat as the audience avatar as Jaime's wretched behaviour seems partially responsible for her idea to open his large house to beggars after Jaime's suicide. Jorge moves in as well, and his insensitive and cool behaviour immediately makes him less sympathetic that the physically and mentally ill poor that Viridiana takes in.
However, the movie puts together a series of events, not unlikely in themselves but perhaps implausibly unlucky cumulatively, that show the lower class to be at least as vile as Jorge's class, with Jorge having the advantage of social refinement and tact. The end of the film is sexy, funny, and bleakly insightful in its implications about the mode of living required by human need. That's not a combination you find in movies very often, and it's one of the things that makes this one quite brilliant.
The new Venia's Travels is online. At four hundred sixty four pages, it's now as long as Boschen and Nesuko. And there are still at least four chapters to go. I'm particularly proud of this chapter, so please check it out.
I haven't had time for much else to-day, although I wasn't particularly behind on the chapter. I had a lunch of taquitos and a quesadilla I made with corn tortillas and jalapeños. I couldn't eat anything spicy when I had the UTI and I'm still kind of reintroducing myself to flavour--I used to be all about jalapeños. They taste sweet now.
I heard Talking Heads' "Road to Nowhere" at the grocery store last night after hearing "Stay Up Late" at the coffee shop. "Stay Up Late" is off Little Creatures and is such an unlikely song to hear on one of the mixes piped into stores--there aren't many popular songs about making your infant stay up all night. And it was just odd hearing so much Talking Heads in one day.
Then I remembered Jennifer Aniston mentioning Talking Heads in passing on The Daily Show a little while ago and I wondered if I'd gotten a little peek into how the pop programming mind works.
After a peculiarly cool summer so far, we've been visited the past few days by some proper internal organ boiling weather. You start to feel nauseous if you stand outside for three minutes around noon. I'm not used to it--I guess I've been doing the daytime schedule for about a month now and it's almost like living in another city. It's hotter and everywhere I go is more crowded now. It occurred to me I slept through most of the 00s. I think I remember hearing about the planes hitting the World Trade Centre on 9/11 at around 10am, just after I got up. Still, hard to believe I got up at 6am in high school.
I wonder if people who are anal about acknowledging the proper ends and beginnings of decades mean to include 1980 when they say, "the seventies". Because if you say, "seventies", wouldn't you be specifically talking about the years with a seven for the tens digit? So therefore if people who are anal about the exact meaning of the word "decade" say nineties, eighties, seventies, sixties, and so on, they're referring to something different than proper decades.
Although any period of ten years is a decade, a convenient and frequently referenced interval is based on the tens digit of the calendar year, as in using "1960s" to represent the decade from 1960 to 1969. Often, for brevity, only the tens part is mentioned (60s or sixties), although this may leave it uncertain which century is meant. These references are frequently used to encapsulate popular culture or other widespread phenomena that dominated such a decade, as in The Great Depression of the 1930s.
Some writers like to point out that since the common calendar starts from the year 1, its first full decade contained the years from 1 to 10, the second decade from 11 to 20, and so on. So while the "1960s" comprises the years 1960 to 1969, the "197th decade" spans 1961 to 1970.
In addition to the interpretations noted above, a decade may refer to an arbitrary span of 10 years. For example, the statement "during his last decade, Mozart explored chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time," merely refers to the last 10 years of Mozart's life without regard to which calendar years are encompassed.
Thus, an unqualified reference to, for example, "the decade" or "this decade" may have multiple interpretations depending on the context.
The animals were certainly acting nutty outside to-day. I only went out briefly to pick up something from the store, figured I didn't need my camera, and as always happens when I don't bring my camera, I saw something cool--in this case a bright orange and grey moth that seemed to be trying to attack me the moment I went outside. It flew circles around me and made as if to ram me a few times before settling on the door.
I did get some pictures of the ducks I fed yesterday, but I think I've milked those ducks for all the photos I can. Yet still they want bread!
This new thing where people are calling vaginas "va-jay-jay" kills me. I wonder if it'd put people off their sandwiches too much if I started calling my penis "panini."
At the grocery store to-day I saw the cover of Cosmopolitan had the caption, "Untamed Va-Jay-Jay; Guess What Sexy Style is Back!" They just outright lie to their readers, don't they? When I hear guys talk about vaginas--most notably Howard Stern--it's fully shaved that's clearly in favour, at least in the U.S., and whenever a celebrity's vagina is photographed as they're getting out of a car or something, it's always shaved or even has something like one of those weird "V" designs, like the girl's a superhero or something.
Personally, I can kind of dig a full bush for the same reason I hate tattoos (though I do not have a preference)--I hate when people try to express themselves through body modification of any kind. I know this is directly contrary to the point of view of practically all my friends, but I say, don't date yourself. Unless you have gender dysphoria or a missing limb, permanent modifications usually just say to me, "I'm uncomfortable being naked, my ego needs attention at all times." Which is fair, but why broadcast it?
I'm such an asshole. I like the personalities that typically get body modifications. I sort of wish I could get on board. I'm just too into nudity. Please, I assure everyone I don't feel superior because of this. Okay, maybe a little.
To-day I saw someone walking down the street dressed as Han Solo. I'm hoping my dream of year around Comic-Con may one day be realised.
Last night I watched the Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit. I don't think I've seen it since I was a kid, when it was one of those things that was frequently on The Disney Channel in the days when kids had a lot less wiggle room on what was put on the glowing screens for their entertainment. I wasn't sure if I remember liking it or just bonding to it as part of my landscape. Last night, I found it to be a frustrating mix of really good and really bad. Visually, it's often amazing, with designs influenced beautifully by Arthur Rackham.
A lot of the voice actors were good--John Huston as Gandalf was nice, though Orson Bean as Bilbo was completely dreadful. Bean maintains a monotone of emotion throughout the film, sounding like a slightly buzzed uncle you barely know at a party, all the time, which contrasts kind of hilariously with the stupid folk music going on constantly.
The main problem, though, is simply in the fact that it's so short. All the fun of Bilbo's first meeting with the dwarves is drained, and the battle at the end, trying to be a commentary on the terror of war, is utterly ridiculous. Partly because of the rush, and partly because apparently the people doing this had no idea how to draw a huge medieval battle on a low budget. What we get is a fucking dust cloud.
I'm surprised there weren't stock pots and pans noises and people shouting, "Why you!"
I was fascinated by the presence of John Huston and Otto Preminger, director of Laura. It was like a film noir directors convention. And it was kind of cool hearing Huston, director of Treasure of Sierra Madre, laying out a scheme for the dwarves and hobbit to burgle treasure.
Twitter Sonnet #175
Rusty clouds of minds resonate madness. Steaming skillets refuse old yellow fruit. Miniskirt parachutes hold each harness. Used tissue and knives are stashed in the boot. Wet Cat glares before the great garage door. Lines of liquorice shoes freeze strange limp steps. Impostor concrete covers the shade floor. A mute surgeon has here lost his forceps. Utility cigarettes thread the nurse. Destroyed bread reappears in a stomach. Hard honey's stashed in a bee's stolen purse. Alien butterflies scorch the tarmac. Red yoghurt spills on holy styrofoam. Rabid raven crushed cranberries at home.
I'd just parked at the bank to-day when I looked over and saw this bee on my purse. Apparently it had ridden with me from home.
I brought my purse out of the car and the bee started to try to fly, but only fell to the ground, turned over onto its back. It died. The bee hive I'd seen a few days ago had been quiet lately, and Tim told me that he thought the green lynx spider I'd posted video of had looked like it was effected by pesticide, which, he said, tends to fuck up spiders neurologically. I'm guessing some asshole sprayed the bee hive and the spider had been a peripheral victim. Fucking people--the bees weren't hurting anyone, I'd gotten on a step ladder to take pictures under their hive of a black widow, which also probably wouldn't have hurt anyone.
I checked on the big orange spiders last night and it looks like they're okay, including the largest one who's been moving its web to slightly different positions each week;
It's kind of nice knowing I can go out there any time at night and see it. It seems to have gotten even bigger, I think it could pretty easily hug a quarter.
A couple weeks ago, Fred Norris on The Howard Stern Show was talking about how the theme to True Blood reminded him of Chris Isaak's "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing." Norris played a bit of the song on the air, and I immediately wanted to watch Eyes Wide Shut again. I've never been really clear on why David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick loved Chris Isaak so much--I think he's got a few decent songs, but mostly he just seems like a watered down version of Morrissey to me. Anyway, I realised I'd never seen the video for "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing", so I checked it out and found it reminded me more of a Lynch movie than a Kubrick movie. Somehow it's not on YouTube, so I went to the wild west of video posting, Daily Motion;
I just watched a bit of The Father of the Bride part II with my sister--the one with Steve Martin, not the Spencer Tracy movie (which is actually called Father's Little Dividend). It was the end of the movie, a scene where Steve Martin is bidding goodbye to his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandchild and I was fascinated by the emptiness. I think Martin's daughter, talking about his new kid, said something like, "She's an aunt, but my little sister, too." Every bit of dialogue was just eerie, plainly stated facts while the soundtrack really worked the strings. There were really ordinary compositions, too--sunset in front of a standard, upscale north eastern house, and there were actually bits of slow motion on Steve Martin, limply trying to squeeze some emotion from the scene. As I said to my sister, it all felt like part of something, and weird to be taken as a whole. Like, okay, we're establishing themes of birth and parenthood or something so now there needs to be murder--my sister said maybe their pet is resurrected at the pet cemetery--something. I imagine the people digging this movie--their thought processes must just have a certain barrier. It's really creepy, actually.
I couldn't help thinking of the Artie Lange clips I was watching this morning, and Artie's "Guy Who Laughs at Everything";
I can't believe Artie's been gone since December. It's so weird how he's just utterly gone not only from the Stern Show but from the public eye entirely. There's been nothing except the restrained updates on him on the show since the New York Post wrote about him checking out of the hospital in January. I guess it's pretty selfish wishing he'd come back to work after a suicide attempt, but damn, listening to five hours at a time of a guy talking, having that voice suddenly silenced, possibly forever, it's really sad.
Last night I watched the last three episodes of the Doctor Who serial "Inferno", first with some really shitty sake, then with Wild Turkey as I decided I wouldn't stand for two bit inebriation I was getting on my Saturday night. I discovered any and all faults I might see in Doctor Who dissolve rapidly in alcohol. I loved everything I already loved, and I stopped noticing how Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart reminds me of Graham Chapman's military characters on Monty Python, and felt genuinely overjoyed when the Doctor was reunited with his good friends at the end of the serial.
Block's rolling against the THAC0 of Death. A board collapsed in green halves on a fly. Card houses confine Queen Elizabeth. Heavy bishops nibble pawns on the sly. A spinning timer lands on a hard egg. Black and grey weapons pore over white space. Mi-go investors callously renege. Yeast is writ all over a wino's face. Hesitant bugs ponder a white wine web. Questions cluster on the filmy cup cusp. Confused frigates show up late to Deneb. Space apples picked and peeled by peon lust. Robot gold pinches the small geisha's flesh. Slaves strive in the shadow of some John Tesh.
As it may have been read by character actor Ronald Allen;
I was excited to see Mr. Allen in "The Ambassadors of Death", the Doctor Who serial, after I'd been introduced to him and his demands that energy be conserved in "The Dominators". In "The Ambassadors of Death" he seems to be playing the English version of Gregory Peck in Marooned. Though Gregory Peck didn't seem to do as much acting purely with his jaw the way Ronald Allen did.
I'm up to "The Inferno" now and I'm liking Jon Pertwee more and more, even though his run so far hasn't even quite felt like Doctor Who. I was toying with the idea of skipping ahead to the end of the Doctor's exile on earth--although I'm actually liking "The Inferno" so far, it was cruel hearing the TARDIS sound effect when the Doctor was experimenting with the console, knowing that the TARDIS was still going to be sidelined by the end of the serial. But "The Inferno" is still the most Doctor Who-ish serial so far of the Pertwee era as it features the Doctor trying to overcome obstacles in a strange dimension. And I love the dizzying layering of plot going on--first we're introduced to some kind of story about a government drilling operation using nuclear power, and then we're introduced to it again in an alternate dimension.
The previous two serials, "The Ambassadors of Death" and "The Silurians" had been good, and both having a lot to do with first contact diplomatic situations. The Doctor's role now seems to be liaison on earth to all things alien, even though I can see how the basic algorithm of "societies introduced at beginning of serial in conflict with subculture/other society/impending catastrophe" has been adjusted to "government/scientific/military team introduced at beginning of serial coming into conflict with alien society/villains/catastrophe." "The Inferno" seems still to be along those lines but is a little more satisfyingly weird, even if the alternate facial hair configurations to mark the parallel dimension are taken right from Star Trek.
The oddly Vladimir Lenin looking guy in charge of the drilling operation gave me occasion to notice how much Doctor Who has to do with weird, arbitrary assholes getting in the Doctor's way.
A couple days ago, I read a post by Sara Benincasa about Ray Bradbury's political opinions and she seems to have adopted a sweeter perspective on something that had kind of depressed me. It wasn't news to me--I actually have video from Comic-Con of Bradbury talking about how Ronald Reagan was the greatest president this country ever had because he lowered taxes and "gave the money back to the people." I didn't upload that portion of the video because I didn't feel like broadcasting Ray Bradbury talking like a moron, but I guess it's not like I really had an exclusive on the material.
The only possible positive spin I can give it in my mind is speculating that Bradbury has a slightly ulterior motive in being vehemently Republican. He made the comment about Reagan after talking again about how important he thought it was to colonise Mars--he made it clear he thought it was the only way for the human race to survive. Republicans seem to be better for the space programme almost by default--because one kind of has to treat problems having to do with things like healthcare and civil rights as though they don't exist in order to spend a significant amount of the budget on NASA. I wonder if the only way we'll get real space travel is by letting a lot of things go to shit. On the other hand, the world's so fucked up, and everything seems to get gridlocked when Democrats are in charge, that it's probably impossible to actually improve things. I wonder if it's actually possible that spending the insane amount of money necessary to create human Martian real estate might actually be the only way to save mankind--Republicans would be the only ones stupid enough to do it, but it seems like most of humanity's big accomplishments these days are stupid.
I have to admit, I think it would be fucking awesome if we could colonise space. I've been watching Gunbuster again lately, and one of the things I love about that series, and about Ray Bradbury, is the beautiful, passionate perspective on the human race attaining space travel.
To-day I've been hanging out with my new friend, the green lynx spider.
I came across it when I opened the front door this morning and found it bouncing around the front porch like a tumble weed, occasionally stopping to smash its face into the ground, as you'll see in the video;
Music is by Franz Liszt and I was rather surprised to find music so fitting--I didn't think I'd have anything to go with this spider's erratic alternating between completely still and weird frenzy. I'm not sure it knows how to walk properly. The Wikipedia entry says these spiders eat honey bees, and I did find it under the bee hive, though I marvel at how it knew to show up here. I've never seen one around before.
I got video and photos throughout the day, as it remained in the same little area for at least six hours until I was finally able to move it to an area with lower human traffic.
It's definitely one of the most beautiful spiders I've seen, and, of course, I've seen lots. Just before I saw the green lynx, I was tying my shoes when I spotted a very tiny daddy-long-legs and I thought to myself, "Ooooh! A baby daddy-long-legs!" And another part of me asked, "Wouldn't that be a long-legs who lives apart from the woman raising his child?" to which the first part of me responded, "Oh, shut up."
