The Alien One

There's a movie in Marlon Brando's performance far greater than The Wild One. Directed by Laszlo Benedek, the movie's far more characteristic of the work of its producer, Stanley Kramer, a director obsessed with moralising about social issues he wasn't very articulate about as a filmmaker and whose movies only ever worked due to weirdness unrelated to the message. In this case, a fairly corny, out of touch portrayal of hoodlum culture in post-World War II United States and its conflict with more traditionally minded citizenry is vastly elevated by Brando's alienated aura. It's no surprise Jack Kerouac admired him--he may have been playing a hoodlum, but he's more distinctly beat.

He plays Johnny, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle club who come riding into a small town one day. Most of the club are portrayed by middle aged actors doing broad and calculated comedy affects, resembling more guys who went to The Three Stooges school than volatile youths. This comes out most in a cringe worthy scene where a couple of them deliver some improvised scat to the consternation of an elderly bartender.

But okay, it's enough to set up at least the concept of a culture clash, so we can follow the movie's logic as it takes us to the conflict where the conservative adults start to get ruthless in an effort to just get these troublemakers out of town. We end up with a simplistic argument that these self-confident adults can be even more vicious than these mixed up kids. This may be true, but it's hardly interesting when both sides lack real character development.

Johnny's supposed to be this character who went down a path of restless chaos in life because there's no sensible authority for him to have faith in. Brando's performance is so good, he ends up coming off as a character tormented because he can't find a place in the movie. In a world where everyone else is giving superficial, affected performances, his reactions ripple with emotional depth. He's like a man walking through a dream.

He reminds me of Tom Baker. He accepts the reality of what's happening, and yet seems disengaged from it at the same time. It's as though he takes as much as the limited world of fiction can give, and with a sort of melancholy affection delivers much more. So when, at the end, Kathie, who's set up to be the final voice of moral authority, proclaims that Johnny isn't thanking them because, "he doesn't know how," instead of getting this revelation about how the world doesn't understand Johnny, we get a fascinating moment when, in Brando's subdued reaction, we realise the movie doesn't understand Johnny. His manner suggests a fundamental strangeness about existence that goes beyond saying simply that the orthodoxy doesn't know as much as it thinks it does. There's the quiet embodiment of the cool indifference of the universe.

It's All About the Birds

Last night I dreamt I was walking to the mall when I saw a badger cub hovering beside a bush. It smiled at me before flying away. A moment later, a breathless young man ran up to me asking if I'd seen a badger cub anywhere--he was the owner of the mother and was upset to discover one of her brood had vanished. Since I knew baby badgers couldn't fly, I said I had seen it and that I supposed it had been carried off by a bird I'd failed to see somehow. We split up and began a search for ravens or hawks.

I woke up and when I went back to sleep I dreamt I was feeding cold meat to three wild turkeys, which may reflect the hangover I was accruing at the time, though it was from port not Wild Turkey. Wine always gives me the worst headaches, and port gives me the worst of all wines. But the stuff tastes like candy, what can I say.

Anyway, happy Armistice Day, folks.

Twitter Sonnet #445

Feminine oatmeal held the zucchini.
Warm grains glittered down the duck's feathered neck.
Monkey Face has a purse for her penny.
Fontaine trembles by the jungle gym wreck.
Inverse bondage barraged Saturday morn.
Germless lakes can't conceive a toad for shit.
Politic tea sets are pawned for old porn.
Ordinary humans have a small kit.
Gluten tendons deteriorate fast.
Dusk collapses on the mislaid milk stool.
Sailor Time takes knots from the ropey past
And softly loosens them around the bull.
Telegraphed cucumber dims to pickle.
Briny knowledge punctured the bicycle.

When She Visits the Grave . . .

I'm currently being spammed with this message from a variety of user names;

Hey This is hard for me because I have never done anything like this..but I have a huge crush on you. I have never been able to tell you for reasons which you would quickly identify as obvious if you knew who this was. I'm really attracted to you and I think you would be wanting to get with *Read FULL Card Here*

I'm breaking so many bot hearts to-day. I can't say I feel too sorry about it when this is my chess lately, mostly from playing computer opponents;

Maybe that's part of the reason I added a graveyard for them at Chess Garden;

For you see, these opponents are in fact the unrepentant souls of deceased chess players, who may now only commune with the living through games of chess.

To-day I also added a stained glass window to the club house;

Downstairs, meanwhile, chess is played under the watchful eye of Carlotta Valdes.

His Rod of Bliss

A young man and woman passionately in love, moving together through trials of fire and water. They are seen safely through by the magic flute in the man's hands. Some might call Mozart's The Magic Flute (with a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder), not naval gazing but rather penis gazing, maybe, for this. Though it's not quite so weighted as that--most of the opera shows the young man as being essentially helpless, protected and led through life by both the forces of good and evil. One is inclined to see Pamina pleased by the flute of the otherwise generally useless Tamino. Ingmar Bergman's 1975 film of the opera rearranges the plot in some ways I'm not completely on board with, but it is a beautiful film of a delightful opera.

Bergman uses the film's overture to show the faces of an audience for the opera, apparently reacting to the music as we watch. The movie features a lot of post-modern winks which in general I don't like but were sort of interesting and amusing in themselves. It's fascinating examining faces for the subtle changes wrought inside by the music. Bergman also employs a conceit wherein the singers playing the characters continue being the characters when offstage--as Tamino's goofy sidekick, Papageno, is introduced sleeping offstage, almost missing his cue for his first appearance. Sarastro is shown during intermission, rather appropriately, reading from a book on Parsifal.

Another change Bergman made was to make Sarastro the father of Pamina, who is also the daughter of the Queen of the Night, who sends Tamino to rescue her from Sarastro after the Queen's henchmen have saved Tamino from a monster. From the very beginning, Tamino is a pawn and other forces manipulate his progress throughout the story.

In this way he, Pamina, and Papageno have the quality of children going through school and training guided by parents and instructors. It's appropriate that Sarastro is made Pamina's father, then. He and the Queen represent two philosophies influencing the children. Good and evil, yes, but the Queen is also the one who gives Tamino the magic flute, to say nothing of saving his life right at the beginning. Perhaps Apollonian and Dionysian is better for describing the two--the Queen's desire for Tamino to murder Sarastro fits with her other actions not in terms of morality but it terms of severity. Sarastro would have patience and self-discipline, would have the children learn as they go through trials, while the Queen, using magic and murder, looks for instant results. Maybe more like the dark side of the Force than Dionysian.

The change I most dislike in Bergman's version is putting the trial after the duet between Papageno and Papagena. Certainly the bizarre, interpretive dance of sex is more for a filmmaker to sink his teeth into, but I love the idea of this serious digestion of the meaning of intimacy between man and woman followed by this absurd scene of Papageno and Papagena falling for each other basically just because they have similar names. There's just such a gleeful absurdity to it.

All the Young Doodles

To-day just got away from me. I spent a long time filling out a job application for Target with lots of redundant questions. It asked for my age at least five times. First it asked for my age, then it asked if I was 16 or 17, then it asked if I was 18, then it asked if I was under 40, and finally it asked for my age again.

I do hope I get some kind of job. Expenses keep cropping up. I had to get a binder for that all important loose leaf paper (sadly, there are no women in the binder), though I had filled up my old notebook anyway. Since I'm retiring it, here are some doodles from it, like my poetry they mirror the perplexity of my existence.

Twitter Sonnet #444

After toes have trundled on tricycles,
And God won't cut cantaloupe with a spoon,
There will be a chicken sale at Michael's,
And we will paint stripes on an old baboon.
When the bereft phantoms tally liquor
And the crimson wattles grow very wan.
Pink and gold shine the vote's cloudy sticker.
Various tall grocers gaze at the dawn.
After supercilious grass lingers
On the soil of minigun smugness
Horrified raincoats shrink on their hangers
And all knowledge comes to Eliot Ness.
Quantum dust condemns every self help book.
The final square is smashed by the red rook.

The House Holds for Now

Well, last night didn't turn out so bad, did it? Not only did Obama win, but by the end of the night I was seeing people who normally avoid using the word "rape" even ironically for fear of triggering anyone's sensitive psychological state were happily joking about how Todd Akin had been "legitimately raped". Though the fact that he got a percentage of the vote at all remains worrying. Once again, I'm praising the American public for actually doing the very least it ought to do. I mean, taking out even the patriarchal complex the guy's words evince. How about we avoid electing people who are comfortable discussing with an air of authority things they obviously didn't bother to expend the tiniest bit of energy researching? To say nothing of the fact that Akin's and Mourdock's intentions were obviously to downplay the seriousness of a traumatic physical assault.

And it was a close race altogether. I'm at school now--already I heard students talking about how angry the results of last night made them. One guy talking about how all he wants to do is drive around his "big ol' V8". Could he be more of a caricature?

We finished watching The House of Usher--Corman seems to have co-opted the story for one about typically disaffected teenagers dealing with the crazy adult orthodoxy of the 50s. Kind of a low-rent Rebel Without a Cause. In contrast to Poe's work, Roderick Usher and his sensitivities are set up as alien and in opposition to the POV character. Corman takes a tale of the workings and susceptibilities of the human mind and turns it into a shot at those square adults. But, as I said before, it is campy fun.

We got into groups afterwards, because we can't do anything in this class without getting into fucking groups, to discuss the differences between the movie and the story and discovered that no-one in my group had bothered to read the story, which had been assigned almost a month ago. Though one person in the group said she didn't like it and thought it was "sick".

So maybe I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Corman for using the story to talk about how loony and self-absorbed modern American society is.

What Else?

After successfully keeping it out of my mind most of the day, even hours after voting, I'm suddenly obsessively watching the election numbers. Huffington Post's main site has a diabolical handy regularly updating flash election monitoring chart. Obama had 3 electoral votes to Romney's 49 when I got up to use the bathroom and when I came back Obama had 61. My superstitious nature may compel me to get up to pee whenever it looks like Romney's ahead now.

At least Huffington Post put little smiling pictures of Obama and Romney next to their numbers.

It's easy to imagine it as a primitive Final Fantasy game, especially as the intermittent updates make it feel turn based.

Rmny casts BLIZZARD: 56 damage!!

Obma casts FLARE: 65 damage!!

It'll be hours yet before there's enough information to call it, but it's hard to ignore for even a minute when the stakes are what they are. The choice is between the less effectual than one would like incumbent and a scary mayonnaise monster who seems like he'd sell people to China in condensed cubes while exhibiting the hollow semblance of glee.

I wish Florida would stop jiggling.

Andrew Sullivan is talking about how exit polls are showing women prefer Obama. I hope that bears out, if only for how annoyed I got when I heard people talking about women being "turned off" by Obama coming on heavier in the final debate, that the sensitive pink demographic were fainting into Romney's gentler binder. Good grief.

Gagh! Florida jiggle again! Oh, great, are you going to be problem again?

La Petite Mort

The Flea by John Donne

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.

Poem 591 by Emily Dickinson

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room -

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -

With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -
Between the light - and me -
And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see -

Prince - Creep - Radiohead cover - Live... by LucrativeAndSimple

Nature is Contaminated with Sound

Blogging from the school library "tech mall". Rows of computers with students slacking off on them and creepy, middle aged fat men wandering through the aisles like shepherds. I guess that's something like their job description.

Just got out of American Literature class where we watched the first thirty minutes of Roger Corman's adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, titled simply The House of Usher. Not the ideal setting to watch a movie, I must say. Faded image on a pull down screen as not all ambient light could be eliminated. But that's nothing compared to the sounds. I certainly felt a sympathy for Vincent Price's Roderick Usher and his sensitivity to noise when I had someone behind me unselfconsciously smacking her lips and aggressively divesting a plastic bag of its contents. I'm really not going to feel sorry to see the last of plastic bags when we run out of oil. I guess paper will still make noise, but thinking of the little white paper bags the fourth Doctor always carried his jelly babies in, I know it won't be nearly as bad.

I guess this is the fourth Roger Corman movie I've seen and it's the first one that made me begin to understand why people are so fond of him. I guess he needed someone like Vincent Price to sell his shit, though the introduction of a mundane frustrated romance plot between two cardboard characters certainly doesn't reflect well on Corman and is characteristic of the films of his I've seen on MST3k. But Price works what he's got. Usher's broader and his sensitivities are established in simplistic contrast, rather than the way Poe ingeniously wraps us into the perspective with language. But it's fun camp. And Cinemascope seems to have gotten Corman out of the habit of putting about a mile above the characters' heads in every shot. Maybe I'll try to watch the movie in a more controlled environment before next class.

Twitter Sonnet #443

Wingless penguins kiss the painted missile.
Soft avocadoes bind to the thrown hand.
Azure nerves spark at early dry thistle.
Clones broke up the first generation band.
Who's got the Grimace for a milk shake drive?
Murder weapons elude cars of bishops.
What kind of pumpkin fucks with the beehive?
Old town mustard made peace with the catsups.
Band aid dew drop mistakes collate wrongly.
Aftertaste of pomeranian bee.
2D Pentacle plans go five prongly.
Pounds of mayonnaise buried Mike Huckabee.
Plastic leaves purchase poison kin at home.
Scalps penetrate the reverse soil dome.

The Sea at Night is Aswarm with Words

'Twas a timely time change last night. I thought I'd left things rather late, having dinner at 1am after too many games of chess, but luckily for me, 1am came again. I skimmed the fifth episode of Twin Peaks' second season, skipping all the scenes where they use the Road House as a courtroom as I usually do. It's just too stupid for me. I mean, we see a big town hall meeting in the pilot episode in a room that would have been a more logical location. I know that scene was probably shot in Washington and the location probably wasn't available by season two, but I have a hard time believing that there was no choice but to reuse the Road House set. You'll notice that in all the episodes directed by David Lynch, the Road House is just the Road House.

Then I spent the rest of the evening reading. "The Slaughter of Pigeons", a chapter from James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers which was assigned for my American Literature class for next week, though the teacher took students to task for not having read it two weeks ago. I don't mind dizzy people, I'm pretty dizzy myself. But I hate it when dizzy people think they're sharp as a razor.

I also read some poetry for class by Philip Freneau and then finished the evening reading from Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as part of preparation for my term paper. I certainly have quite a lot of reading to do. It's a safe bet I'll be reading some S.T. Joshi. If anyone would like to recommend to me some books on Lovecraft, since I have to cite sources for some reason despite the fact that this is supposed to be a paper composed of my opinion, please don't hesitate to do so.

On top of all this, I'm also reading Moby-Dick just because. After reading Jules Verne and reading it alongside Lovecraft and pre-1820 literature, a book with such a diversity of vivid characterisation is an incredibly nice breath of fresh air. It's the same satisfaction I get from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I'm only twenty percent into the book, but I have a handle on the charmingly open minded Ishmael, the easy going and unapologetically strange Queequeg, the amusing relationship between the two captains who are part owners of the Pequod--and I haven't even gotten to Captain Ahab yet.

I was reading somewhere, in a source I probably ought to try to find again since I'll probably want to cite it, that someone was arguing the lack of diverse characterisation in Lovecraft's work is essential for the dread of a pitiless cosmos he evokes. I'm not sure that's true. Though I have yet to see any Lovecraftian work that has the kinds of shades of personality exhibited in Melville's book. Partly I think this is simply due to focus--maybe it doesn't really seem germane to the tale of a frightening encounter with enormous supernatural terror to weave a bedrock of eccentricities into a character. On the other hand, maybe I ought to wait until I get to bits in Moby-Dick that feature the whale.

"There are Many Here Among Us who Feel that Life is But a Joke"

So, murder is probably pretty important, right? Your reaction to it, upon witnessing it, may well be something you would put right to the top of your agenda for the day. In Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up, a fashion photographer played by David Hemmings seems like he several times would like to give the murder he witnesses his undivided attention, but a lot happens in his day and nothing seems to seem insignificant to him. The movie's a commentary on mod culture, one that may not have been entirely fair, but if you divorce it from the real life culture it references, it is a beautiful and fascinating film about a society thoroughly losing itself to a dream world.

Every scene, every shot is beautiful, wonderfully composed from the exterior shots which all seem to be location shots to the interior shots made up of the assorted bric-a-brac of the protagonist's collage-like lifestyle. Hemmings' character, as a photographer, has trained himself to always be on the lookout for interesting shots, and this extends to giving him a compulsion to attractive minutia and unusual people.

It's for this reason he follows a strange couple in the park to take pictures of them, Anonioni's own shots beautiful with his characteristic creative placing of the horizon along with diffuse lighting and the spare, organic shape of the park.

It's only later, when he's blown up the photos, that Hemmings learns he's captured shots of the man's murder. He looks at the evidence with growing horror, until a couple would-be models show up and it's time for a groovy ménage-a-trois.

But after that, then--then of course he's very upset by what he sees.

He tells his possibly wife/girlfriend about it, and seems concerned but changes the subject because she needs some advice about her new boyfriend.

We see the superficial but apparently genuine sympathy Hemmings' character has for Vietnam War protestors, though of course it doesn't match the enthusiasm he feels for an old propeller he finds at a pawn shop.

The movie's book ended by the appearance of a truckload of partying mimes, whose deliberate artifice neatly reflects the pantomime lives we've witnessed in the bulk of the movie. But it's not pantomime as in without heart, rather a strange, total devotion to form, arrangement, composition and artifice. The movie's not exactly a condemnation of the photographer and his society. Just a funny and eerie rumination.

Where has the Credible Weirdness Gone?

If you've noticed a decrease in delightful weirdness at The Onion lately, I think it's probably because a lot of the writing staff has moved over to Thing X. Take a trip to the thing. So far I've most liked the "X How" segments.

That would have nice on Halloween. I missed it.

I got to the fourth episode of The Sopranos' third season last night, "Employee of the Month", in which Lorraine Bracco's character Dr. Melfi--Tony Soprano's psychiatrist--is raped in a parking garage by an unknown assailant. She identifies him--it turns out he works at a nearby fast food restaurant. He hadn't appeared on the show before and I don't know if he appears after the episode.

Rape is a tricky thing to portray. Like any form of violence, it takes skill to portray it in a way the audience will accept the reality of it. Most people don't want to imagine something unpleasant just for the sake of imagining something unpleasant so, among other things, the story around it has to engage the audience in a useful discussion. A good illustration of what to do and what not to do is Watchmen. The Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons version isn't sexy, it's oddly mundane and uglier for it, the reactions of the people involved are complicated and a little weird in the way human beings are weird. That's the way to do it.

In the Zack Snyder version, the film, the director abandons, as he often does, any notion of character POV, shooting the victim like he's directing a music video, the general composition of the scene being in line with the movie's more artificial action film quality as compared to the grittier comic. He does what so many filmmakers end up doing with rape scenes--they make it sexy. This isn't how you do it, not if you want us to consider the story from the point of view that something really ugly and terrible has happened.

The episode of The Sopranos took a safe route, basically just showing the assault happening with an understated compositional style with no music, leaning on the actors to convey the whole thing. It's brief, and most of the episode focuses on the aftermath, dealing with notions of justice when the cops are forced to release the perpetrator after a mishandling of evidence and Melfi begins to consider turning to her mobster friend in order to get revenge.

And I thought, "Okay, that'll be kind of nice, seeing Tony Soprano beating the shit out of this guy."

But this didn't happen. Melfi, at the end of the episode, is just about to mention it to Soprano, but decides not to, and the episode ends, leaving me with the suspicion that the people behind the show thought they'd made something more profound than they'd actually made. Sure enough, here's this quote from director David Chase on the Wikipedia entry;

"If you're raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and network television, you start to think, 'Obviously there's going to be some moral accounting here'. That's not the way the world works. It all comes down to why you're watching. If all you want is to see big Tony Soprano take that guy's head and bang it against the wall like a cantaloupe… The point is—Melfi, despite pain and suffering, made her moral, ethical choice and we should applaud her for it. That's the story."

That might be fine if the counterargument had been introduced at all. The closest we get is when Melfi's psychiatrist, played by Peter Bogdanovich, starts a sentence with the word, "Civilisation--" before he's cut off by Melfi mockingly saying, "I'm not going to break the social compact," and she goes on to talk about how satisfying and empowering it makes her feel just knowing she could sic Tony Soprano on her attacker.

And even without going further than the word "civilisation," we can sense how feeble any counterargument would be. Of course, you can say the episode has set up a strawman. We don't learn anything about the rapist beyond the fact that he raped her and that he's employee of the month at the fast food restaurant. We never learn the details of how evidence was mishandled so that he's set free. But if that's so, it's a strawman for an argument that's never executed. It's like if Captain Hook won at the end of Peter Pan. It's cheap emotional manipulation with no end but smug satisfaction on the part of the writer.

The Sopranos isn't some kind of realistic study of violence and how it effects people. We have one hastily introduced business owner after another just so we can join in the fun of the mobsters beating the shit out of him. The characters are complex and interesting, but only within the context of this fantasy world.

But even if the rapist weren't a strawman--let's say he's established as a three dimensional human being. We could then go to the question that's introduced at the very beginning of the first Godfather movie, when a man asks Don Corleone for justice for his assaulted daughter because he can't expect justice from the police. The question of whether or not it's proper to take the law into one's hands is always a subject ripe for exploration. I mean, I've known several women who have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, and in each case, the rapist wasn't brought to justice. Honestly, if it were in my power to take revenge on one of these guys, I would.

I'm with Melfi when she feels the urge to use Soprano as an instrument of revenge. Then Chase dismisses as shallow the very feeling he hoped to provoke in writing her.

Twitter Sonnet #442

Otter skulls cough down alleys of damp wool.
Light from olive stars reach martinis late.
Paper skin tightens on the inky ghoul.
Capital letters fear lower case fate.
Tight'ning strips of candy wheat grow so pale.
Silent priests stray through shadows of blank trees.
Star-like teeth take rest from the man's black veil.
Boneless scalps will do whatever they please.
Oppressive olives clog spigots of peace.
Bony branch bone transplants cause infections.
Tiny Vulcans squeal when they are released.
Widescreen in labour has square contractions.
Misdirected oak leaves orange the study.
Autumn valentines are sorbet putty.

Vader Wore a Skull

Happy Dia de los Muertos, everyone.

Everyone was talking about Disney acquiring Lucasfilm yesterday, everywhere I went. Students were clustered together outside class, people in costumes trick or treating at the mall where I went between classes were talking about it, people in group chats on Second Life were talking about it. So I found myself watching Episode IV last night, realising it felt different for the first time in a long time. Like the movie's finally really old now, or dead in some way. Maybe this partly comes from my suspicion that Lucas made this move because he doesn't expect to live long. Mainly I think it's this odd feeling I have that Star Wars going to Disney is going to be a process not unlike a corpse decaying in a forest--that is, all the little life forms taking it apart and finding sustenance to grow new things of varying degrees of beauty. Which linked it to Dia de los Muertos for me, so I wrote this poem;

Dia de la Guerra de las Galaxias

Chrome paint plastic, false symmetrical skull,
A pasty smell, the madeleine of droids.
Greenish tattoo windows conjure a soul.
Holograms on silly putty asteroids.
Kurosawa wipes and Wagner deluge
Grainy and crisp new thoughts--old ghosts go broke.
Animated dancers seek no refuge.
The Empire was crushed with a slow stroke.
Skeletal mice smile to each black ear.
Dog men learned to ski and dance long ago.
Sand marigolds run with a waxy tear.
Legends haunt homunculi of Lego.
Yellowed faces dance for red and blue light.
Dead pictures replay for us every night.

It's nice I don't have to be at school to-day. Yesterday was sort of miserable--I had a midterm in American literature and it felt like everything went wrong after I found out I had the wrong kind of paper--apparently we needed "loose leaf" for it and all I had was notebook paper I had to tear out. I also needed more than one, which I didn't know until after the class was told to clear our desks of everything else, and I awkwardly had to reach back in my bag and tear out more of the wrong paper. The instructions talked about how we were to be graded on spelling and quality of writing for the two, multi-page essay responses and of course the instructions were themselves riddled with misspelling and typos, which seems almost invariably the case for documents I see that make an issue out of such things. I speak as someone who complains about typos and makes them all the time.

Hopefully my prospectus, which I'd written the night before, for the term paper, came off better. I chose H.P. Lovecraft and Washington Irving for the two authors I am going to compare to discuss the nature of American literature. I figured the two authors have plenty of superficial interests and aesthetic preoccupations in common. I'm not sure how well I can use any two American authors to definitively nail down a distinctly "American" literature, though. But maybe going with two anglophiles will be a fruitful way of going against the grain.

Speaking of Lovecraft, I read the latest Sirenia Digest to-day, which contains Caitlin's latest nice Lovecraftian tale, this time taking the form of journal entries from a member of a team of palaeontologists in the latter half of the nineteenth century encountering strange and sinister things on a dig in a Wyoming prairie. For a lot of it, Caitlin captures the voice of this period character rather well, showing her versatility with language for its contrast with well told stories from the Digest in recent months set in future societies.

The Point of Disconnect

The title of 1960's Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) led me to expect a film about an ultimate voyeur, someone who could see but whose identity or expression could never be known by his or her subjects of observation. The fact that it features a screenplay by Boileau-Narcejac, who wrote the books which Vertigo and Les Diaboliques were based on, led me to expect a film of psychological depth. The movie didn't quite live up to my expectations on either count, but it's a good movie, its virtues in a more superficial aesthetic poetry and an interesting reworking of Frankenstein.

Actress Edith Scob spends most of the movie wearing this mask but she nevertheless creates a character through her timid and strange movements of eerie grace and animalistic simplicity. Her relationship with her surgeon father comes off as a relationship between pet and master, added to the fact that throughout the movie he's attempting to restore her destroyed face it makes the movie an even more blatant commentary on the inequitable and disconnected relationship between men and woman also explored in Vertigo and Les Diaboliques.

He holds himself responsible for his daughter's disfigurement, as apparently he was driving the car when the accident occurred that led to her injury. I was reminded of the Strangers with Candy episode "Hit and Run" where Stephen Colbert hits Paul Dinello with a car, Dinello's injury somehow taking the form of a perfectly extracted face, a rubbery mask-like thing caught in the grill of Colbert's car. It seems to me now the episode was likely a parody of Eyes Without a Face, though I think in the movie the story was more likely that Scob's face was severely damaged and what remained of it was surgically removed by her father in his first attempt to replace it.

For some reason, Scob's body continually rejects new faces, despite the fact that her father had previously succeeded in the same surgery with the woman who now serves as his henchman, luring young women to the doctor's home and dumping their bodies after he's extracted their faces.

The similarities to Frankenstein are unmistakable and just as in Mary Shelley's novel, our sympathies are with the "monster", though the man playing God is not an entirely unsympathetic character, motivated by his own guilt and attempt to fix problems that are persistently insoluble.

Happy Halloween, folks. Once again, I have to spend it at school. I need to take a closer look at the calendar before registering for classes.

Moving Things

If you live in the north eastern U.S., I hope you're safe and okay.

The other piece of news that has my eye to-day is the rather abrupt announcement of Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm and the attendant announcement of Star Wars: Episode VII for a 2015 release to be followed by additional Star Wars films every few years.

Mainly, I like this news. Lucas and Disney have always had a good relationship, the presence of Star Wars and Indiana Jones at Disneyland has always been great. I love the old Star Tours and I'm dying to see the new one. I'm somewhat worried about the movies being given to Gore Verbinski with a cartoon Johnny Depp jumping about, but maybe Disney would know best the lessons of Jar Jar Binks. The fact that there are plans for so many Star Wars movies is something I really like. I think being a sacred cow has harmed the franchise--I say, make lots, make mistakes, learn from them, give lots of people opportunity to be creative with the material. If you don't like one year's Star Wars film, just wait a couple years for the next one. Maybe this means the live action television series will get off the ground, too.

I don't have a lot of time to-day, I have a three page paper to write for American Literature class to-morrow, a "prospectus" for a 10 to 15 page term paper due at the end of the semester which is to analyse the nature of American literature based on two American authors. This is a great deal more than I was ever asked to do for my advanced composition class. I guess I don't mind the extra work, but it would've been nice to enjoy a nice, easy survey course. Mostly it just makes me wonder what class the teacher would like to be teaching.

Twitter Sonnet #441

Hourly leaking carotene changed brass.
Dusty throats grew until they were the hall.
Veins of dew laminated tongues of cash
All across the fragile clay shopping mall.
Satirical frontal lobes embarrass
The blushing flower material squeezed
Into the maiden skull of the practiced
Enflamed and pale giant Lego strip tease.
Frenetic scattered caresses query
Rotting diamond taffy preserved in a
Garbage gazebo balanced to marry
The spray paint pair of ghostly hyena.
Grated eyelash raindrops make a hammock
From the mists of chewy submerged stomach.

The Gaze has No Sex

In the right circumstances, you can learn a lot from a psychopath. Takashi Miike's 1999 film Audition (オーディション)* is great for a lot of reasons, one of them is in how it uses a psychopathic character as an embodiment of intellectual replies and emotional reactions to aspects of culture. It's an effectively told horror movie, a commentary on gender relations, and a fascinating experiment with narrative, each of these elements functioning in service to the others.

Aoyama, a middle aged man with a teenage son from a wife who died seven years earlier, decides he wants to get married again. His friend, a film producer, comes up with the idea of setting up a false audition for a movie with the intention of giving Aoyama a forum to choose a potential wife. Here we set up the guilty protagonist aspect of the story that creates tension throughout the film as Aoyama initially resists the idea, wondering if they're doing something criminally fraudulent.

He expresses this feeling to his friend as they hurry through an office, shot from a distance emphasising the environment and people around them who might overhear the conversation, a more or less typical way of conveying a sense of a character's self-consciousness. But the POV of this movie turns out to be anything but typical. Although Aoyama is in almost every scene in the movie, the camera does things that suggest perhaps it's not his point of view from which we're seeing this story at all.

Going through résumés of actresses before the audition, Aoyama finds himself drawn to an applicant named Asami Yamazaki from a story she relates of how she trained throughout her youth to be a ballerina but had to give up this dream because of a broken hip, something she likened to death. Aoyama sympathises with this as it seems to remind him of the change his own life underwent after the death of his spouse.

So he has an earnest desire for a connexion with the woman he might meet through this phoney audition. At this point, I was beginning to wonder if I'd been misinformed and I was in fact watching a romantic comedy rather than a horror film. But I was divested of doubt when I saw how Asami's audition was shot.

The common wisdom on how this sort of scene should be shot would be to either exclusively show Asami sitting in centre frame replying to questions from off camera or to occasionally cut back to a close up of Aoyama to show his confirmed attraction to the woman he'd previously known only through her résumé. Instead, we start behind Asami and slowly the camera pulls into Aoyama and stays on him for most of the audition. The camera eventually briefly cuts to Asami a couple times, but mainly the feeling we're left with is that Aoyama's the one auditioning for her.

Aoyama's friend, the producer who'd come up with this scheme, immediately feels uncomfortable with Asami, perhaps sensing the eerie way she's turned the tables on them. We learn later that nearly all the information she's given them isn't true, all of it designed to manipulate them. In fact, Asami's entire personality is composed of how she's reflected by the reactions of men. We see her in her apartment, sitting still with her head drooping like deactivated robot in front of the telephone, as though she has no meaningful existence until Aoyama calls her.

There's discussion between Aoyama and another man early in the film of the extraordinary loneliness of Japanese men. When Asami's introduced, we see how Japanese culture attempts to alleviate this loneliness with the beautiful artifice Asami embodies.

We get a more or less typical back story for Asami of childhood sexual abuse told in a rather atypical way. We see moments of her childhood abuse suddenly in scenes where Aoyama is talking to her former ballet instructor and perpetrator of abuse--information Aoyama, our ostensive POV character, is unaware of, again subverting our presumption of the POV.

We see eventually that Asami cannot live on pleasing men alone, but she has been an object of men's sexual urges all her life and has had little opportunity to find ways to express her own desires. In addition to impairing her ability to empathise with others, it leads to her humanity expressing itself through sadistic torture, the urge to destroy being more primal than the urge to create.

The torture in this movie is wonderfully disturbing, I must say. I've seen few films that so satisfyingly go over the line as this one does.

She mentions to Aoyama how she knows that men hold auditions for young actresses and all the while their real primary motive is sex. In this case, she doesn't know how right she is. And yet, Aoyama isn't really a bad guy and he wasn't really seeking an imbalanced relationship with a woman. This movie shows how such inequitable, voyeuristic "auditions" are a bad thing for both men and women.

*Those familiar with katakana know that this is pronounced "Odishon", which is of course a rendering of the English word "Audition". Why someone at Wikipedia feels the need to phonetically write English titles expressed through Katakana is beyond me.

A Kettle of Weird Flies

Joss Whedon to-day pointed out several aspects of a prospective Romney presidency I hadn't considered.

Speaking of Joss Whedon, it was based on his recommendation, quoted in this article at io9 that I watched last night's horror film, a 1985 Dario Argento movie called Phenomena. Whedon said;

That movie is so ridiculously chock-full of horror: There are terrible murders, Jennifer Connelly just happens to have control over insects, there's a crazy person living nearby. By the time you get to the monkey with a razor blade [who saves Connelly's life], you're just like, Oh my God! If you look at Cabin in the Woods, you can see the influence of "Oh, you mean we can just never stop coming up with stuff?"

It's actually a chimpanzee with a razor blade, but I'm with Whedon in admiring the awesomely off the rails quality of this movie. He didn't even mention the Bee Gees girl.

Any description of any aspect of this movie is going to feature multiple points of "what the fuck". Here goes; Jennifer Connelly plays the daughter of an Italian movie star and as the movie opens, she's arriving in Switzerland to attend a girl's boarding school named after Richard Wagner (yes, Der Ring des Nibelungen Richard Wagner). She has an instinctive sympathy for insects, as we observe early on when she befriends a bee. She later describes her connexion to insects as part of her schizophrenia, which also causes sleep walking.

"But what about the chimpanzee?!" you ask. I'm getting to that.

Connelly's sleep walking has her walking dangerously along the roof of the Richard Wagner school to an abandoned part of the campus where she witnesses a girl being murdered with a steel spear. Oh, yes, there's a serial killer on the loose unrelated to anything else.

To track the killer, for no apparent reason local detectives have called on the expertise of a world renowned entomologist played from a wheelchair by Donald Pleasence with a Scottish accent. The chimpanzee is his nurse.

So--a girl who talks to insects and an entomologist? Well, it all makes sense now, doesn't it?

The insects worship her, she doesn't just talk to them. When she's in distress, swarms of flies appear and tear apart those who threaten her.

Pleasence decides to send her alone with a Sarcophagus fly to track down the killer.

The freedom with which this movie goes from one moment to the next is sort of breathtaking. I'm just giving you the broad strokes--there are so many little moments of weird. There's the brain scan the headmistress forces Connelly to undergo after her first sleep walk, there's the score which uses metal bands like Iron Maiden and Motorhead almost at random, including during a scene where Connelly's trying to lift a telephone with a metal pole through the window at the top of a door.

There's the fact that when she shows up at the girl's school, Connelly's only option for a meal is some baby food left accidentally by her roommate's family. Does it symbolise her character's innocence? Maybe. It could be seen as a story of a misfit girl's difficulty assimilating to a hostile and unimaginative world, which is something reflected in the killer's identity. The chimpanzee, too, is a figure of innocence, as are the insects. I don't know. I only know this movie really made me smile.