How to Keep Losing

I lost six games of chess in a row yesterday. I normally limit myself to three games of chess at a time, but I lost the first three so quickly I couldn't help wanting to play more--and the more I lost, the more frustrated I got, and the more I wanted to play. It was made worse when the guy I lost the first three games to started trying to tell me about how I needed to learn the basic "rules" and how to "develop," plan, and calculate. I told him I knew about all that, that I simply repeatedly made the wrong plans and calculations. I know winning all those games must have made him feel grand, and was probably why it couldn't possibly have occurred to him that he was wrong, or that what I was saying was borne of being anything but a sore loser. That's the worst part of being angry or on otherwise lower ground--the time when you most need your opinion or feelings respected is the time you're least likely to get that respect. The last thing I needed was a guy to slowly go over how I should've seen how his knight was going to fork certain pieces while I was busy worrying about what his bishop was doing. There comes a point where, regardless of knowledge, one person's simply not playing as well as the other. That's life, isn't it?



Last night I watched Saikaku Inchidai Onna, or The Life of Oharu, Kenji Mizoguchi's 1952 film about an extremely unlucky woman, whose unlucky life is used to illustrate social mechanisms that repressed women in Japan, which the film has in common with most of Mizoguchi's films, like Sisters of the Gion or Street of Shame. The Life of Oharu is distinguished by being focused entirely on one woman, though, at the same time, I never felt her character was particularly well established. She seems haughty when initially rejecting the advances of Toshiro Mifune, who has a brief role as the one love of her life at the beginning of the movie.



But most of the film she seems to be trying to politely remove herself from the presence of men clutching at her kimono as they attempt have sex with her, marry her, carry her off to a life of prostitution, or, finally, to hold her up as an example of a life ruined by living sinfully. Oharu has one or two moments of assertiveness, my favourite being when she teaches a cat to steal a wig from a sleeping woman, but each of these brief incidents are following by the world slapping her down even harder.



The movie stars Kinuyo Tanaka, who appeared in fifteen of Kenji Mizoguchi's films. Typically she spends most of her time in Mizoguchi's films being humiliated, which has caused me to wonder if there was something fetishistic about it for Mizoguchi, like Hitchcock with blondes, which might make sense of the fact that Mizoguchi opposed Tanaka's career as a director.

Like all of Mizoguchi's films, Life of Oharu is extraordinarily nice looking.

Implanted Dream of the Daleks

I watched Total Recall last night. I used to watch that movie over and over when I was a kid, but I hadn't watched it all the way through in at least fifteen years before last night. It's not a bad film, though one can see how it might've been better in the hands of David Cronenberg, who was attached to direct early on before it finally ended up in the hands of Paul Verhoeven. It doesn't feel so much like a science fiction film about the delicate nature of perceived reality as it feels like a bunch of guys putting together some really nice action sequences with decent science fiction window dressing. This is in spite of some truly amazing make-up, special effects, and Jerry Goldsmith's robust score--it's all sunk by some strikingly cheap looking sets.



Everything looks like a sitcom set made to look like a shopping mall. The casting also really works against the premise--though, damn, I do love Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie. I mean, the fact that we're supposed to take him as just a mild mannered average joe at the beginning is hilarious in itself.



But I think I took the truly great action editing for granted when I was a kid. Quick cuts from waist-level pans over a punch of a guy on the left to a low angle shot of a fist going into a gut--the instincts at work with this editing was diamond sharp about action, and big motherfucking Schwarzenegger creates a satisfyingly credible reality of a one-man wrecking crew with those ridiculous arms of his.



I love how at the end of the movie, when he and Malina are strapped into the Recall chairs to get their brains wiped, the one thing the bad guys didn't count on was Arnold's incredible strength! as he rips the manacle right off the chair.

But for the actual plot of the film, he's a little absurd. It's like a porno--a cable repair man who doesn't look like a cable repair man running across a nymphomaniac housewife who doesn't look like your average housewife. But we all know that's not the point. However, the basic idea of Total Recall, based on a Philip K. Dick story, is intriguing enough that it's a bit disappointing to have it just used as a garnish. The plot's shaped by cheap action movie logic, too, like the ridiculous scene when Benny the cab driver reappears to kill Quaid with some kind of big mining rig, apparently to satisfy a personal vendetta that came from nowhere in particular.

Also, I think the film would've been helped a lot by simply swapping Sharon Stone and Rachel Ticotin. I mean, which of these looks like she might be a fantasy woman and which looks just like some average guy's wife?



For some reason last night I was getting a real kick out of wandering Second Life with a Dalek avatar.


"A-TTACK! A-TTACK!"


"THE HU-MANS WEAR LIN-GER-IE TO AUG-MENT DIS-GUST-ING ORG-AN-IC RIT-U-ALS! THE DAL-EKS DO NOT NEED LIN-GER-IE!"


"NO! I WILL NOT BE O-VER-COME BY A SENSE OF DREAM-Y TRAN-QUILL-IT-Y! THE DAL-EKS DO NOT NEED DROW-SY AU-TEMN AF-TER-NOONS!"

Forceps Giveth But Mostly Taketh Away

I was looking forward to having my wisdom teeth pulled and I wasn't disappointed. Though I have swallowed a lot of blood to-day.

The surgeon and nurse kept telling me what a good patient I was being, but I'm usually told that during these things. I wonder if a dentist has have ever said to his patient, "We're almost done here, but I gotta tell ya, your conduct has just been lousy. I mean really, I don't usually say this, but what an obnoxious jerk of a patient you've been."

I had my last hard food I'm going to have for a while before the appointment while watching the last episode of "The Brain of Morbius" Doctor Who serial. The Wikipedia entry says the serial was partly influenced by Frankenstein.



I'd have never guessed.

This serial featured a lot of "what the fuck" moments, unfortunately less to do with the fantastic patchwork monster with the translucent head casing, and more to do with the Doctor and Sarah continually trusting people who were trying to kill them moments earlier. Ultimately, this is made up for by the great animated corpse story and what I saw as an interesting comment for the nature of sexual politics.



I'm not sure it was intentional or not, and maybe any story that features an entirely female cult is inevitably going to be about the relationships between men and women on a broad, cultural level. But it seemed interesting that the Doctor, Solon, Morbius, and the Igor knock-off were part of a male, scientific and visceral group in opposition to the ritualistic, mystic and ornamental female group. The need for the Doctor's knowledge and matchstick to ignite the flame in a womb like orifice used to create the Sisters' Elixir of Life hardly seems like it could've been written without knowing what it sounded like. Though don't ask me what it means that Sarah was temporarily blinded by the high priestess' ring.

The story of Morbius, the former genius reduced to an almost mindless monster consumed with the idea of destroying the sisterhood seemed like the writer's statement on how otherwise intelligent men act when having trouble with women. This seems to be a new stage in Doctor Who's curiously self-conscious address of women's rights issues in the 70s. Liz Shaw and Sarah Jane Smith directly refer to women's equality during the third Doctor's run yet at times it almost seemed like the writers wanted to punish them for it, having them espouse these views while making stupid damsel-looking-for-distress decisions. Yet I suspect the writers regarded themselves as feminists, judging from the female president of Earth in "Frontier In Space" or the female ruler in "Monster of Peladon," though that latter one seemed strikingly ineffectual, an impression heightening a bit by her overbite and Elmer Fudd speech impediment.

Twitter Sonnet #204

Books of too long minutes line a clock's shelf.
To-day's hour seems like Saavik's whole day.
Distant spinach planet obscures your self.
Iron rich leaves show you the liquid way.
Stoned Bob Dylan sings of old Basilisk.
Tree trunk eyes watch a dumb dinning drunkard.
Soaked gingerbread men give a mindless kiss.
Ruined cake becomes a dessert blackguard.
Swamps blur beside rocket propelled bay horse.
Smug leotards know all about your flesh.
Angel children throw jacks on the car course.
Spaghetti carpet's a gross sticky mesh.
Cherry flavoured spider web drapes marshmallow.
Roasted white bits garnish bloody hollow.

The Horrible Legend

Is it weird I'm really looking forward to having my wisdom teeth pulled to-morrow? There's just something so honest about being in the middle of surgery. There's little room for bullshit--it's not like the surgeon can say he took out the teeth without actually doing it. It's not like my nervous system is going to fake the sensation of having them gone. This is just pure, unvarnished, tooth pulling. And if there's one thing I can definitely say about my teeth, it's that they're unvarnished.



Waiting at the dentists' gives me a lot of time to read, too. It's so nice to be reading a book now I feel almost helpless to read--I've gotten as far into The Idiot in a few days as it took me months to get into The Satanic Verses. Yesterday I read Prince Myshkin telling the story to the Yepanchin women about the children he knew in the village he'd lived in in Switzerland and about Marie, the sad village outcast. Obviously Dostoevsky had a very high regard for children, and reading the story I was reminded of something I've often observed, that children in fiction are often very different than children in real life--children in fiction are often idealised as guileless, always wanting to be helpful, or charmingly curious. Whereas in real life, they tend to be noisy, obnoxious, and desperate for attention. But Dostoevsky's normally so insightful, it struck me that children may simply be very different now, especially since the parents and caretakers I observe often tend to be equally obnoxious, and begrudge any attention they give to their kids.

I was disgusted by P.J. O'Rourke's expressed opinion on Bill Maher several weeks ago that, since there was no possible way of reversing the tide of inevitable environmental destruction on Earth, people might as well not worry about it and just look out for their immediate needs. Which seems to me an honest expression of modern, supremely cynical, conservative philosophy. Maybe destruction is inevitable, but there's just something so repulsive to me about giving up like that. I think the sense of an inevitable doomsday may be more responsible for lazy, selfish behaviour than it might seem at first glance.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love Gilbert Gottfried?

Enlisting More Knives, Plastic, and Metal

This, day three of a fabulous week of dental appointments, has already seen me visiting a new surgeon located on a lonely hill by a freeway overpass. I watched a twenty minute video about getting my wisdom teeth pulled and had more x-rays taken. I've gotten used to asking, "How much is this going to cost?" before letting anyone do anything despite facing the typical, brusque, "Let's just do everything we can without question because your health is of paramount importance to us," demeanour.

When I asked how much the x-ray would cost, the nurse looked at me in some confusion before telling me, "One hundred twenty."

"One hundred twenty dollars?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Say, that's not bad!" Even now, I can still scarcely believe I got an x-ray for under a thousand dollars. I also managed to talk them out of putting me to sleep when they actually extract the teeth on Friday, which'll save some money. Physical pain and some swelling for a couple weeks are nothing compared to knowing I'm not going to have to start begging family members for more money. This corpse of mine's such a fucking nuisance.

My new hard drive came in the mail yesterday, after days of my old pair of hard drives not having any trouble. Tim and I, between the two of us, couldn't even figure out which of the two was going bad. So we swapped out the oldest for the new one, which means I'm going to have to replace a lot of Doctor Who episodes, but I'm used to it being much worse when something happens with my computer.

The Pink Arms of Digestion

A tiny new daddy long legs in my bathroom a few nights ago.

I felt a bit sick last night. Pains in my chest have gradually gone away, though my left arm still feels distinctly weaker than my right arm, but I kind of wonder if this is just how it's always been, since I'm right handed, and I've just never been conscious of it before.

Last night's sickness felt like something very temporary, and definitely in my stomach. It peaked at exactly the same moment I heard a bunch of coyotes howling outside. There were about a million things that could've gotten me sick yesterday--the breakfast I had at Denny's, the pizza I had from a Nepalese restaurant for lunch, the quiche I had at my parents' house, or flecks of the material the dentist used to make moulds of my mouth for my new fake tooth.

It might have been from when I sat amongst the ducks or from some of the stranger things I saw when I walked along the river yesterday.








We've just come out of a period of rainy days, and the green resulting from it is just starting to get itself under control. But here, clouds of algae are thriving in a puddle;









An egg sack at the end of a broken branch.








I looked up at one point to see a big hawk on a branch, looking down at me. I was too slow on the draw to get a good picture--it flew to another branch, facing away from me, and this is the best I got;






Now I'm not sure what the pink stuff is. It looked like shag carpeting or the river of mood slime from Ghostbusters 2--I guess it must be algae or a plant of some kind. It was pretty, though.












Twitter Sonnet #203

Broke cash machines lengthen a night's round walk.
In the sewer river ducks plot at dark.
Foolish drunken youths fall to Peter Falk.
Great kissing scenes are censored in this park.
Weird white cheese stands hummus in weakly stead.
Party coloured pistols compete with blanks.
Loves arms appear in form of warm flat bread.
Fashion needs assortments of empty tanks.
Bowls of bisque line battlements that smell.
Silent puppet chefs form ranks in the night.
Lousy seafood ideas fill books in Hell.
Flounder fondue's vomited with great might.
Sickness inspires the distant coyote.
Humpty Dumpty looks dumb with a goatee.

One Sector at a Time

My hard drive still seems to be surviving. It hasn't given me any trouble since yesterday morning, either. It hasn't even made the grinding noises. But a new hard drive is on its way anyway--I managed to get a good deal on a highly rated, 650 gig drive from New Egg. Considering my two current drives are only around 120 gigs each, I'll be swimming in space. I was tempted to get one of the new terabyte sized drive, but I kind of share Tim's trepidation about the potential stability of these drives.

I've also got dental stuff to take care of this week. I went in for an early appointment to-day to see about getting a new false tooth--One of my front teeth is missing, and I've had the same ridiculously fake looking and uncomfortable tooth on a retainer for something like fifteen years. To-day the dentist held up a whole series of fake teeth next to my remaining front tooth, muttering, "No, that's not right, that's not right . . . too yellow . . . too light . . . too grey . . ." He had around fifty different colours of model teeth, and none of them seemed right. Finally he directed me to drive to the lab down the block where the teeth are crafted.

It took me a few minutes to find the tiny, cluttered office inhabited by only a small, stout old woman with a thick Russian accent. She seemed both like a character from the Dostoevsky book I was reading this morning and somewhat like Chew, the old Chinese man in Blade Runner who alone in his lab just made eyes. This woman just makes teeth.

She held up a few model teeth of her own to mine while I stood in the doorway leading outside, finally saying, "It'll be lighter than other tooth. Your teeth all different colours anyway."

"Anything's an improvement, as far as I'm concerned," I said.

I played a lot of World of Warcraft at Tim's house yesterday, and I've been playing a lot more of it lately since it's the only activity I have now to do while listening to The Howard Stern Show. I still haven't gotten the Burning Crusade expansion, so once I got my Rogue, Galatea, to level 60 a couple weeks ago, I made a paladin, Dormouse, whom I've already gotten to level 32. I seem to get two level ups every time I play--the recent updates to WoW have made the paladins even more overpowered than they already were. I found I needed to go after enemies whose levels appeared in red to me just to get a decent challenge. I even managed to kill a raptor whose level was so much higher than mine that only a little skull showed up where his level normally would. I only had to use one potion. The key is the paladin spell Word of Glory, which, as WoWWiki says, "in tandem with Crusader's Strike, can be used to sustain a Retribution Paladin's health indefinitely, to the point where the paladin can solo a normally 5 person elite mob [monster]."

Aside from Word of Glory, the Retribution Paladin also as a number of other ways to heal, and I've been learning Herbalism, Cooking, and First Aid, so I tend to find myself with an overabundance of means for healing myself. I've been weirdly enjoying Cooking--I hardly ever use any of the food I make, but I like seeing what new recipes I can get. I liked making blood sausage from bear meat, boar intestine, and spider ichor, and I can't wait to see what I can use the "Mystery Meat" for.

Of course, I'd really like to play Fallout: New Vegas, though I think I'm going to wait for it to come down in price a bit. But apart from the bugs people are complaining about--and which are likely to be fixed with patches, if they haven't been already--I've really been liking what I'm hearing about the Role Playing element. It sounds like the way factions work in it is much more intricate than in Fallout 3, the dialogue is modified more by your characters stats and, best of all, in my eyes, is that there's a "hardcore" RP mode that makes it so your character has to eat, drink, and sleep regularly. I thought I was the only person in the world who wanted a game with something like that.

The Shape of Machinery

I think my hard drive's dying--It made a brief grinding sound last night, but I didn't pay it any mind until I woke up this morning to find a black screen and a message with something like "Master hard disk fail." I restarted and copied all the important, irreplaceable things to my iPod. That was two hours ago, and the computer's been fine so far, but I suspect I'm not out of the woods yet. Fortunately, I happen to have enough money right now for a new hard drive, thanks in no small part to donations from Venia's Travels readers. And it's nice knowing I don't have a comic to worry about getting out on time while I've got computer problems right now.

Yesterday was, I think, the first really laid back day I've had since I finished the comic. It's taking some time for the ever present feeling of urgency to go away, but yesterday I went to Starbucks and sat reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot for a while. Then I went to the restaurant where my sister is working as a bartender now and had some scotch and cognac while reading some more--Glenlivet and Courvoisier, both of which I ordered before finding out my sister was giving me free drinks. It sure is nice to be a bartender's brother.

I started reading The Idiot even though I'm still only about a fourth of the way through The Satanic Verses. I just couldn't stand any more Post Modern bullshit. I wanted something I could sink my teeth into, and The Idiot's already supplying that in spades. Character, people, is what I'm talkin' about, and what I need.

With breakfast to-day, I watched the new Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, the first part of which was a Transformers parody that nearly killed me. I almost died laughing when the parody of Optimus Prime introduced himself as, "Masculimus Surprise."

Siegfried Means Success!

I've just spent some time looking at Arthur Rackham's illustrations for Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen, wondering if he'd drawn Brunhilde bare breasted for the scene at the end of Siegfried. Of course he did.

I'd seen Rackham's illustrations of Wagner's operas before, I'd read the opera librettos translated into English, but somehow none of that comes close to the same impact as actually watching productions of the operas. But after watching them, Rackham's illustrations take on a new life. With breakfast to-day, I watched the third act of Siegfried--I've been watching one act at a time with breakfasts this week. The particular production I was watching of course didn't feature a bare breasted Brunhilde, but instead the sleeping Valkyrie is revealed to be wearing a chemise when Siegfried pulls off her breastplate. It works well enough to demonstrate that the sleeper is not a man as he first suspected though I, like Rackham, personally prefer art that errs on the side of nudity.

The scene of the conquering hero rescuing the maiden and expecting romantic or sexual rewards, either blatantly or subtextually, has been pretty thoroughly discussed.



But I found the scene in Siegfried incredibly fascinating, and it worked for me as symbolising a much longer relationship between two people, or as translated subtext of the psychological reactions of two people falling in love for the first time. Siegfried's never met a woman at this point, and he's established as a youth peculiarly unable to feel fear. Until he meets Brunhilde--and he's afraid of her before she even wakes up. He removed the breastplate and helmet expecting a man, something familiar to him, but when he finds something both strange yet attractive to him on a deep, instinctual level, he can only be afraid at the disorienting psychological experience. The dark woods hadn't frightened him, neither had the dragon Fafner, because these were all external things. But his desire to conquer fear doesn't provoke him to violence, but rather to kiss her.

When she wakes, one of the first things he does is to ask if she's his mother, and she replies, "I'm you." Some pieces of dialogue can only exist in opera, I think.

Siegfried's experience with women is limited totally to stories his adoptive father, the dwarf Mime, told him of his mother Sieglinde. In Die Walkure, the opera previous to Siegfried, Sieglinde and Sigmund's relationship was explicitly incestuous, and the two lovers madly indulged in a relationship of reflection, a relationship where each found his or herself manifested in the other.

So when Brunhilde, responding to Siegfried's frightening ardour, tells him to love himself and, "Let me be," we're not only reminded of Siegfried's parents, but also, as Brunhilde describes previously being worshipped in her virginity, of chaste, chivalric romance. This isn't enough for Siegfried--instead of contenting himself with the beauty of his reflection in a pool without marring it by touching the water, he wishes to "dive into a flood."

I love that Brunhilde got a whole opera defining her character, so it means something when she sings about fearing the loss of her identity with her armour. The fear and delight both she and Siegfried feel at pursuing a strange and new experience is wonderfully conveyed by their song.

Twitter Sonnet #202

Mystery pranks enliven every CostCo.
Sagging bottoms mar the paper cup rep.
Ents have arms bigger than Kevin Sorbo.
Let a baby brain grow in your bicep.
Talking frogs are ominous when giant.
Even powerful fishing rods can suck.
Steam trout are not EPA compliant.
The small tailored business suit makes the duck.
Important ghosts take spectral bullet trains.
Slamming doors play in angry office sync.
Eating with closed jaws yields limited gains.
Communal meals preclude the need to think.
Glass walled racket ball courts reflect white shell.
Runny cream guts wobble out the old bell.