Real Corpus

I don't tend to be frightened by horror movies, but I have a hard time believing anyone was ever frightened by Poltergeist. I mean, it's just so damned whimsical.



Bibbidi Bobbidi SATAN!

Boy, that 80s era Spielberg blue screen sure makes me feel nostalgic. Though this particular Spielberg film isn't one stamped on my subconscious the way the Indiana Jones movies are--last night was only the second time I'd ever watched Poltergeist. The first time was when I was a kid, maybe even in the 80s. I don't think it scared me then, either, but I wouldn't say it's really a bad film. It has Spielberg's typical quirky yet rather credible cast of characters. Characters who are allowed to be smart--one of my favourite bits was when Craig T. Nelson flippantly tests Tangina, the new medium, by answering her question by projecting his thought, and she surprises him by actually hearing his thought.

But my favourite part of the movie was the last twenty minutes or so, when we're abruptly treated to an almost non-stop JoBeth Williams fan service sequence. The lady had great legs--I don't know, maybe she still does. But it starts when she gets naked to take a bath in the security of a home Tangina had promised was clean. But it turns out her vangina--I mean, vagina--isn't safe when the ghost tries to lift up her shirt.



Which sort of proves the movie's about restless spirits and not Carol Anne's poltergeist. Unless that kid had some really weird issues.




The climax of the movie for me is JoBeth rolling around, practically naked, in the mud with a bunch of, from what I hear, real corpses.

Also, I was digging Dominique Dunne as the somewhat unconventionally cute daughter, especially when she was being a smartass.



And then I read she was strangled to death by an ex-boyfriend just after Poltergeist was released. What the fuck is wrong with people?

The Origin of Energy

Gas is over four dollars a gallon around here now, and I realised yesterday that, considering a day tripper trolley pass is five dollars, it'd be a lot cheaper to take the trolley across town than to drive. Unfortunately, the place I had to go to yesterday is in La Jolla, where the proletariat's public transit's not allowed to sully the streets. I had to go there for the only good vegan mayonnaise in town, found at Whole Foods.

While I was there this time, I bought some hemp ice cream, which turned out to be quite good, though initially rock hard. One must allow some softening time before attempting to scoop, particularly if one is using a plastic spoon.

There were quite a few dairy free ice creams--almond, cocoanut (which I suspect is the best), soy, and rice--the rice ice cream being produced by the "Rice Dream" brand, which, when I see, always makes me start singing in my head "rice dream" to the tune of Radiohead's "(Nice Dream)".

While I was eating my iced hemp cream, I watched the 1929 Pandora's Box.



This is a movie that's really about how fabulous Louise Brooks was. The plot is a melodrama of a chorus girl's increasingly grim adventure through life, but the fun is in seeing, however terrible things might be, Brooks instantly laughing and smiling when a friend shows up, she sees a new guy (or girl) she likes, or someone hands her a drink.

Her facial expressions and gestures are so communicative--I love the quote from Roger Ebert in the Wikipedia entry; "she regards us from the screen as if the screen were not there; she casts away the artifice of film and invites us to play with her." And yet, Wikipedia also quotes The New York Times from the year the movie was released as saying Brooks' performance wasn't particularly expressive. I suppose, actually, her performance doesn't feature the same very broad, artificial gestures I'm used to seeing in most silent films. She may have been ahead of her time in such a naturalistic performance, though I wouldn't say she was necessarily superior to the best of her contemporaries.

This was one of my favourite bits from Pandora's Box;



After pouting about her lover's fiancée showing up at her fashion revue, she's seen here having won the day. There are few images, I think, that more decisively show a woman having conquered a man.

Here are some photos I took over the past few days;

The Hunted and the Invisible

This was bad in a way that felt like a knife twisting in my gut;



Who knew Brent Spiner had such a martyr complex. It's weird we live in a world now where I can find that out. I guess this is another indicator of how things are changing in the methods people in the entertainment business use to get out there. This one's sabotaged by bad faith, though--Spiner's problem isn't that people hate him, it's that people aren't as interested in him as they used to be. He is a decent actor, though. There ought to be a place in this world for people who are willing and able to do what they love.



I watched the last episode to-day of the Doctor Who serial "Ark of Infinity", the last episode in my opinion being the best episode, despite the first three featuring the recently deceased Michael Gough in a small role. It's the final episode that concentrates on Omega, a returning villain last seen in "The Three Doctors". Unlike the Master, Omega actually has some character to him. Exiled to an antimatter universe, his desire is to return to this one, and he temporarily succeeds, taking the Doctor's form to do so, and I like the scene of him wandering Amsterdam, stopping to watch a puppet show.



Then, one can't help feeling bad for him when he starts to disintegrate. It goes from a Frankenstein's monster with the little girl moment to a Nosferatu being chased at sunrise vibe. Quite good.



Twitter Sonnet #253

Panties protect pelvises from the sword.
Bumpers repel streams of hard kinesis.
Idle yarn's long stroked across the girl's board.
A nude torpedo holds Spock's Genesis.
Gargoyle head can fetch a quick fiver.
Burning acne scars lend imps character.
Soft pink padlocks embarrass MacGyver.
Triangles mean love to a protractor.
Flower smoothies dehydrate the wettest.
Sneezes demonstrate against the lemon.
Dissembling makes a bad actor honest.
Ockham's razor's probably by Menon.
Overlooked holes spackle themselves at night.
Antimatter's helpless in matter fight.

The New Flesh

"The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television." - Brian O'Blivion

I won't be the first person to point out how prescient that statement is for our times, coming from David Cronenberg's 1983 film Videodrome. This "retina of the mind's eye" is now on our desktops and our phones and so on. It's interesting to think how this intimacy was once perceived, when it was limited to large screens in theatres, when it was invariably a communal experience. People would go to the cinema like going to church, dressing for it and looking for a transcendental experience. Now these connexions to the electric spirit world are at the fingertips of private individuals, and that world has gotten more complex and more specialised, drawn closer to individual experiences.

I've seen Videodrome more times than I can say--I first saw it at least ten years ago and have watched it many times since. One thing I don't think I appreciated as much in my earlier viewings of the film is the character arc of Max, the main character. Masha, the worldly pornography agent Max goes to learn more about Videodrome, tells him Videodrome has something Max doesn't have--"A philosophy, and that's what makes it dangerous." I usually thought of this line in terms of what it meant about Videodrome, how it appeared to be some shadowy conspiracy with goals beyond proliferating snuff films. But what the line says about Max is equally important--Max doesn't really have a philosophy. No more than most people, except he's brash and of course young. Arguing on a panel show early in the film, he talks flippantly about how the pornography he broadcasts provides people with an outlet, and goes on to draw conclusions about Nicki Brand's sexuality from the colour of her dress. One senses he says these things for shock value, but they're smart enough statements to be defensible, so that no-one can take his candy away, so to speak.

But without a bedrock of a real commitment to anything besides an instinctual need to find something more "rough" to suit his jaded palette, he easily falls prey first to Videodrome, and then to O'Blivion's counter movement, like a brainwashed soldier.

Immediately after the movie ended last night, I opened my web browser to check my e-mail. For years now, I've had my home page set to Wikipedia's random page--you can do this by going to Wikipedia's main page and copying the url for the "Random article" link in the left column without clicking on it and pasting the url in the field for homepage in the browser options. It's a fun thing to have as a homepage.

Anyway, immediately after watching Videodrome, I clicked on my web browser and saw Sonya's Wikipedia entry pop up before me. Out of over three million entries, I got that one. I know, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world . . . But, of course, no one walked into anywhere. Weirdly, the more I tried to tell myself that it meant nothing, the more it bothered me. I kept bouncing back and forth between feeling slightly, but genuinely, crazy, and feeling cheated by experiencing what seemed for a split second like a significant occurrence related to something I lost hope in a long time ago. Where Max's lack of a philosophy made him vulnerable, my more or less possession of a philosophy has made me miserable. Though I guess buying into magical thinking would probably lead me down a more miserable road eventually. At least I didn't get "Wild Mountain Thyme" stuck in my head again.

It made me realise I need to step up my work with my next comic. I'm starting to lose it in exactly the same way I did before I got to work on Venia's Travels. You see, my mind makes characters, it makes personalities that disagree with each other, attaches whole histories of psychological hangups and motivations. I need an outlet for it, or my brain starts feeding on people I care about who won't talk to me and starts trying to get insightful. I know this about myself, and this self knowledge is something I keep close to heart because it contradicts the people who tried to tell me I was crazy for liking Sonya without having met her in real life. Well, I think they thought I was crazy because they decided when I said I loved someone it meant I presumed some form of reciprocal connexion, when I see myself as perfectly capable of loving my perception of a person without any action or participation on their part.

Anyway. The whole world's finding it trickier to separate itself from the screen.

Laughing Strawmen

There were a couple things I liked about "Time Flight", the Doctor Who serial, and a whole lot of things I thought were incredibly stupid. I liked the use of the concordes and the creepy, Bermuda triangle vanishing effect, pilots and crew wandering around in hallucinations millions of years ago. I liked how parts of the TARDIS console looked exactly like motherboards, and sound and video cards from a modern computer.



But, as usual, the Master made things really stupid. It's never explained why he decided to pretend he was some kind of djinn, even when he's by himself. The cliff-hanger line of the Doctor's at the end of the third episode is one of the most cringeworthy in the series, "It means the Master has finally defeated me!" Really, that's what you're thinking about? Not about the hostages on the Master's TARDIS, or the entire race of aliens the Master has in some kind of squishy orange console to harness them for power or something?



I'd love to see what kind of hobbies the Master has. Can't they give him something to give him just a little bit of depth? Anything, so that maybe I can hate him for reasons other than the fact that he's a blank, cackling waste of space?

Speaking of lousy villains, I've been enjoying all the negative reviews of the new Atlas Shrugged movie in theatres now, particularly Massawyrm's review;

. . . when a film comes along and paints liberals as sinister cigar smoking fat cats, feasting on opulent dinners and in all ways acting like Libertarian corporatists until the revelation that their dirty backroom politics are for the good of “the people” and “the nation” and they won’t seemingly be getting much real gain out of it at all…I have to wonder: what the fuck were they thinking? Who seriously believes this shit? The only people who think that there really are a group of people out there who are altruistically evil are only going to see this if their meds don’t knock them out too early and the home their kids abandoned them in has a shuttle service.

Altruistically evil. What a perfect way to describe the perennial bogeyman of the Right Wing.

"I Wouldn't Ask Any Woman to Do Anything"

I drank a great deal of bourbon last night while watching Only Angels Have Wings. I don't normally like to drink on Thursday nights, since I get out of class so late there's only a few hours before I need to go to sleep, and I don't like to drink after dinner because booze makes me hungry. But there was so much bourbon getting put away onscreen I couldn't resist.



I wonder how many South American cargo plane operations nowadays have such busy bars.

I hadn't watched the movie in seven years, and I couldn't remember much about it aside from the absurd hat Cary Grant wears at the beginning of the movie.



I appreciated it a lot more this time (the movie, not the hat. Though I do actually kind of dig the hat now). It's the typical setup of women staying behind and worrying about their men going off and facing death all the time, though it didn't have the nastiness of such stories in the 1960s, like Madigan, which couldn't seem to give us this story without portraying the women as resentful harpies. We're given a much more sympathetic take on Jean Arthur's character in Only Angels Have Wings, who tries in an understandably stunned way to assimilate the pilots' means of coping with the recent death of a comrade by continuing to drink and party like normal. Getting over her initial reaction, she actually appreciates the lack of sentimentality until Grant tries to offer her one of the dead man's belongings.



"Say, somebody must have given you an awful beating once," she says to him before giving the bracelet to the dead man's girlfriend.

Unlike later films of the type, the movie takes the time to probe the effects on the man's psychology. His choice of lifestyle creates conflict with the natural desires of his lover, a fact that's made him deeply resentful and unable to trust women at all. As in Notorious, it's Grant's ability to give a layered performance that really sells this. This understated pain gives the movie reality even more than the actually very effective shots of planes in flight, landing, or crashing.

Twitter Sonnet #252

Parallel lines of tape halt the image.
Crude arrowheads drag forward spark crop rows.
Fall leaves hide a discarded brown cabbage.
In spring, oak pimps array their acorn hoes.
Sunsets of dead leaves highlight a dry bloom.
Grey grasshoppers freeze beneath a red spine.
Inverted silk winds round a candy loom.
Speeding cocaine fate zips a zigzag line.
Stiff hair sabotages the moving strands.
Bulky khaki vest holds buried pink lung.
Angry stones buzz through all of the tribe's bands.
Essays unread can also go unsung.
Burnt birth records linger as poison ash.
Bloodless bellies bulge with fake foil cash.

Spirits of Flesh Haunt the Machine

Strange sexual liaisons can strike anywhere, it seems. As The Night Porter posits, it could even happen between an SS officer and a concentration camp inmate.

It's not exactly a matter of a Nazi raping a prisoner, yet one can't exactly say this is the case of a man's soul being saved from Nazism by true love. Though it could be that. The question of what it is, exactly, that Max and Lucia share is the whole heart of the movie, and it's a question driven by two great and very committed performances by Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. They both seem to wholly digest this force that seems utterly separate from the characters' conscious lives, and you never doubt the reality of what they feel, even as the feeling eludes definition.

It might be easier to dismiss Lucia's feelings as Stockholm Syndrome. She seems to become an entirely different person when she indulges in her feelings for Max--at the beginning of the film we see her as a somewhat starchy wife of an orchestra conductor, her made up hair and jewellery contrasted with coldly shot flashbacks of Rampling's deathly thin naked body as she's subjected to brutal treatment by the Nazis and by Max in particular. She seems to find a strange pleasure in seeing herself as an animal--there are a number of shots later, after she's given in, that seem to create a bond between her and Max's pet cat.



Max is cruel with her, but also feels protective of her, even willing to sacrifice his own life when his fellow Nazis wish to take her as a "witness" for a strange, underground trial. He also at times seems to become the submissive as he asks her for direction and, in the film's most famous scene, Rampling struts about a small party of officers during the war, singing, seemingly drawing on Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie to create a domineering physical performance.



And above all one that exploits her own sexuality. It seems perhaps Lucia has stowed her entire sexuality in her transient identity as Max's lover/prisoner.

One could look at the film as displaying possible sad consequences of the unnatural modes of existence imposed by both the prisoner and the guard identities, or one might look at it as a loving sadomasochistic relationship created by natural lusts exploiting the forms forced on these two by their society. The latter would seem to make more sense of the scene where Max earnestly gives a sieg heil alongside his comrades before smiling and shrugging as though he's the only one who really gets it.

Here are a few pictures I took yesterday;

Subtractric

I'm so glad Adric's finally dead. I'd heard some time ago that Adric was to die at some point--though I hate spoilers, some are unavoidable. He has by far been my least favourite companion on Doctor Who. He seemed so sloppily put together, and when he started taking initiative late in his tenure, it was annoying because I felt like he hadn't earned the right. He was just too blank. He started out as just "The Boy" before at some point they decided he was a math wiz. And since I recently watched the two surviving episodes of The Wheel In Space, it seemed to me like Adric was robbing Zoe, a companion of the Second Doctor, of this distinguishing characteristic. And I won't stand for that. Zoe was the math wiz first, had that trait from the beginning, and was much cuter than Adric to boot.



Otherwise, "Earthshock" was an exceptionally good serial. The Cybermen are really menacing and I love the feeling of boundless movement as the characters move from a story in a mine to a story in a cargo spaceship haplessly threatening Earth. And even though I didn't like Adric, I appreciated the way he died not being a hero, just trying to be one. I can tell the show runners hoped to raise the stakes by having a companion die, and it worked. Though a similar mindset was probably also behind the destruction of the sonic screwdriver in "The Visitation". I read on Wikipedia it was because the producer felt it was too easy for the Doctor to unlock doors. Which, to me, is sort of like saying the TARDIS makes it too easy for the Doctor to travel through time or his legs make it too easy for him to walk. If you don't want him travelling through time, make something go wrong with the TARDIS, if you don't want him to walk, paralyse or restrain his legs, and if you don't want the sonic screwdriver unlocking a particular door, make it impossible somehow. It was done on many occasions. There's no limit to what you can do when your job is to make shit up.

Like, free your mind, man.



It's starting to bug me how similar the Cybermen are to the Borg. Even the name--it's like each one took a different part of the word "cyborg". I think originality is overrated--every good show or movie took at least one or two things from something that came before. But the Borg are so exactly like the Cybermen the term I want to use is "rip off". I feel pretty certain the Borg wouldn't have come into existence if Doctor Who had been better known at the time in America. Even the Doctor's reasoning as to why human emotions are an advantage--that they enrich life--is better than Picard's when the question was put to him--he didn't even explain why human emotions were a strength.

But Star Trek: The Next Generation is the one I grew up with. I feel sort of like I found out one of my favourite grade school teachers had a money laundering scheme on the side.

Here are a couple screenshots I forgot to post from the mermaid section of Second Life's Fantasy Faire;

A Titan's Translucent Shadow

I finally had a chance to watch the last two episodes of Sym-Bionic Titan yesterday. They were both good episodes, though it was frustrating knowing they were the last--I guess we'll never know the identity of the mysterious character introduced in the final episode. But I loved the bleak, "on the run" mood of "The Steel Foe". I was really happy that Kimmy was given a great deal of screen time, and a lot of the tension comes out of wondering if she and Octus are going to get back together.



I also liked and was somewhat fascinated by the Ilana fan service shots, which had been gradually increasing for several episodes. This sort of thing is old hat in anime, but pretty rare in feverishly chaste, modern American cartoons. It's really nice to see, and also served as an indicator of the show's target audience of teenagers and young adults. I fear that, more than anything, this was what sunk the show. It's in a niche America doesn't quite seem to have yet, despite the popularity of anime. It's not kid stuff, and it's not Adult Swim, it's somewhere in between.



I'll miss this show a lot. There's a facebook fan campaign to get the show a second season, but I fear Sym-Bionic Titan is likely to join Farscape, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, and Firefly in the ranks of genuinely interesting Sci-Fi shows that were cancelled pretty much for being genuinely interesting.



Twitter Sonnet #251

Speeding monkeys burst in banana flame.
Spinning horseshoe crabs break the wooden post.
No-one mentions the ghost luchador's name.
Gumby masks just insult the orgy's host.
Golf in underwear prevents wrinkled suits.
A broken gallery conceals John Cleese.
Intense cat feet vanish in her rain boots.
Time loops in the interest of keeping peace.
Terse pincushion hands keep eyelids open.
Liquid ham oozed around a stale cookie.
Tailors stand waiting for pants to happen.
Gummy Bears bounce away from the bookie.
White bands solidify a false asset.
Humans demand mirrors have one facet.

Will You Stay In Our Continually Repeating Lovers' Story?

I went at least two thirds of a year believing I was 32. Discovering that this is actually my thirty second birthday is actually kind of a good feeling. I feel like I get to do-over a year.

For my birthday yesterday, I went with my family to see Source Code, a perfectly decent Science Fiction film. Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but I don't feel movies always need to be. It's the second feature by Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie, and the first with a big studio budget behind it. Which is probably why Jones didn't decide to do anything too crazy--one senses the pitch to studio producers; "It's Quantum Leap meets Groundhog Day." Fortunately the film resembles the latter more than the former. Also, unlike Groundhog Day, it invokes quantum physics, as Captain Stevens, the protagonist, actually repeats the same moments in parallel universes, rather than experiencing exactly the same moments, which provokes some interesting questions about how Stevens perceives the people he meets. He may save someone in one reality, but does he at all bear the weight of all the other versions of that person he didn't save?

Howard Stern had said the movie felt like a Hitchcock film, and he's right. I think there are several deliberate references to North By Northwest, particularly in Chris P. Bacon's Bernard Herrmann-ish score and the visuals constructed with the silver passenger train. Not quite as blatant as all the Hitchcock references in 12 Monkeys, but it's there.

Who wants pollen?



The recent days of heavy rain followed by hot, sunny weather seem to have produced, among other things, a sort of daisy apocalypse in a nearby field;
















And here's a daddy-long-legs from my bathroom a few nights ago;