Bonus Entry for a Meat Head

For as long as I can remember, my private nickname for Henry Rollins has been "Mr. Meat Head". I think this blog of his will probably help you understand why. It isn't just his failure to understand that a suicidally depressed person may think they're doing their loved ones a favour by committing suicide, it's the lack of thought and consistency permeating the piece. Behold the reversal in these two paragraphs:

When someone negates their existence, they cancel themselves out in my mind. I have many records, books and films featuring people who have taken their own lives, and I regard them all with a bit of disdain. When someone commits this act, he or she is out of my analog world. I know they existed, yet they have nullified their existence because they willfully removed themselves from life. They were real but now they are not.

I no longer take this person seriously. I may be able to appreciate what he or she did artistically but it’s impossible to feel bad for them. Their life wasn’t cut short — it was purposely abandoned. It’s hard to feel bad when the person did what they wanted to. It sucks they are gone, of course, but it’s the decision they made. I have to respect it and move on.

You regard them with disdain but you respect their decision? Maybe too much "Raw Power" makes it hard to see nuances as subtle as the difference between night and day.

For all the people who walked from the grocery store back to their house, only to be met by a robber who shot them in the head for nothing — you gotta hang in there.

Why? Isn't it possible that two people may be leading completely different lives? Did Hunter S. Thompson deciding he didn't want to put up with a life of constant pain insult someone who was murdered while leading a relatively comfortable and happy life? How?

I remember I really started to hate Rollins when his critique of Morrissey was founded on the argument that English artists should leave England. It doesn't surprise me that the man who couldn't imagine some people don't have the luxury of travelling the world at a whim would also not understand suicide.

Still, none of this is as stupid as his adolescent wank poetry.

Nesuko's Unbidden Frozen Treat

Happy birthday, Ray Bradbury, the newest free chapter of my web comic, The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko, is online.

It'd be nice if the director of the above play released the isolated recording of Bradbury. The beauty of the language is at dismal odds with the minimalist set.

The next free Boschen and Nesuko chapter will be in two weeks on Werner Herzog's birthday, I'm sure I'll have something cheerful to post then.

Dismemberment Courtesy of the Inert

Piles of decomposing corpses, sliced open to reveal internal organs in variously diseased or rotting conditions, most people might consider this unpleasant or frightening. But for the first year medical students depicted in 2006's Unrest, a fiction film that supposedly makes use of actual cadavers, all this is supposed to be normal. But how can cutting dead people open and pulling them apart ever really be normal? The tension between the common sense reality and the new one the students need to adapt themselves to adds a nice dimension to this otherwise conventionally constructed film with bland performances.

Of all the students we meet struggling with this new state of affairs, Alison (Corri English) has it the worst--due to lack of funds, she's forced to take up residence in the hospital, just a few doors down from where the cadavers are stored and dissected.

The plot eventually involves an Aztec god and a strange symmetry between the lives of Alison and the haunted cadaver that starts to kill people. It doesn't really matter--the fun is in the build up. The personalities of the central group of students are cliche--the innocent girl, the superstitious guy, the asshole frat type, and The Boyfriend--but they play off each other credibly enough and their slow exposure to their new world has a nice point of view feel to it--the manifestations of weird shit feel like realisations of bad dreams someone in the situation might have.

I particularly like the pragmatic manner in which they talk about murders they discover or digging around in a big tank for pickled cadavers. Sure, there's some horror in their reactions, but I like how all this is already starting to seem like the normal landscape.

Not the Horizon but the Corridor

People living in dingy, vaguely skeletal spacecraft cabins and corridors really don't seem to appreciate them. I sure do. If I'd seen Event Horizon when it first came out, I might have found it disappointing. But having seen it only last week, I was too busy being thrilled by the Alien and Aliens influences on the look of the film, a particular manifestation of said influence you'd only see in the 90s, to be distracted by the disappointing conclusion of the film.

It begins strongly enough, with a decent cast including Laurence Fishburne as captain of the salvage craft sent to investigate the reappearance of a long lost test ship called the Event Horizon and Sam Neill as the obsessive and slightly sinister scientist who designed the mysterious ship and its wormhole drive.

I love how the drive is housed in a room with unexplained, huge spikes on the walls of the spherical chamber which, of course, threaten impalement when people are floating around without artificial gravity.

But I'm even more delighted by just regular corridors, bridges, and cockpits. You can tell so much love went into these, more than went into the script. The film's directed by Paul W.S. Anderson who later showed his limited imagination with Alien vs Predator. Here, he's like some knight besides Arthur who has managed to draw Excalibur from the stone.

In addition to Fishburne and Neill, the movie has a nice group of rough, ornery supporting cast in the Alien tradition. Though one has cause to appreciate the remarkable way in which the best Alien movies managed to portray their large casts. The were moments in Event Horizon where it felt like I lost track of characters at times I really shouldn't have. When one person is alone in the med bay I found myself wondering why I hadn't seen another character for some time. There's also a problem in a somewhat cartoonishly rendered young man played by Richard T. Jones who at one point manages to escape being shot out into space in a wholly unbelievable way.

The main problem, though, is the nature of the threat the crew faces. I like the idea of something dangerous and unimaginable coming from a place where time is folded on itself, some place that exists in some unknown crack outside the laws of physics as we know them. It's certainly Lovecraftian. But while Lovecraft (happy birthday, H.P.)--and Alien--portrayed these horrifically strange menaces as being enormous in the implication of their lack of regard for what we value, Event Horizon has a much smaller, almost Freddy Krueger level villain.

Still, loving those model space ships and the cluttered interiors. All part of a particular flavour of 90s love for the Alien films. I mean, we love the Alien movies now, but I feel like our 90s counterparts had a different perspective. Those corridors, really influenced by the padded chambers in 2001 but distressed, made black, green, and rusty even before aliens show up. It makes me want to play Quake.

Twitter Sonnet #658

Money mammoths shout at the shaggy nose.
Chocolate cases change chokers for bagged rum.
Writers know nutrients when writing prose.
In flower shop filth fish happily hum.
"Leo" implying leopards stun lions.
Traps conveying Kristofferson scratch lime.
Leather insults the stainless steel ions.
Coffee boxes make no sense over time.
Unknown bows to knotted elbows belong.
Going for green hearted hammers breaks light.
Newspapers provide a timely sarong.
Untranslated shoes have no wish to fight.
Barefoot Amazons ruin your neck tie.
Clutching saddle shoes skeleton stores die.

Things In Rooms

Here are some of my first doodles of the semester. Most of them I did during my Media Communications class which I need for my degree and I think has something do to with television and film. But all it consisted of to-day was the students introducing themselves and choosing a spirit animal. I chose a duck--because Donald Duck was my favourite cartoon character as a kid. Almost every guy in the class chose bear or wolf or pit-bull. Hearing one of those, the teacher, a young woman from north New Jersey, dryly said, "So we know not to mess with you."

She was very young, under forty, I'd say. My other class is a mythology class which is being taught by an Indian woman in her 40s named Balasubramanian--she told the class she'd been teaching for twenty eight years. One of the students asked where she got her master's degree and she replied she'd gotten her first masters when she was nineteen in India and her second when she was twenty three in Ohio. She added her twenty seven year old daughter had a PhD. She has two daughters. Two daughters and two masters degrees, I can only imagine she knows how to freeze time.

When she was asked which were her favourite gods of the many she studied, she said her favourite two were Ganesh and Mary, mother of Christ. I liked that she didn't begin the class with any warnings about how Christianity would be treated as myth. I can see how she might not consider it a big deal considering how Hindu gods are regarded in the west.

Precooked Solutions

I'm calling it now--Outlander won't last. Apparently Starz has already commissioned a second season, which seems damned premature in any case since the second episode only aired on Saturday. But maybe they figure this is as good as it's going to get in their competition with HBO. In any case, watching the second episode made me realise the show lacks something crucial that Game of Thrones exemplifies--everyone in Outlander is either perfectly good or perfectly evil. All the best, most successful dramas of the past several years have been about characters who are forced to make ethically difficult decisions and often we never know if a character did the "right" thing.

Outlander, in addition to Ronald D. Moore as showrunner, has Ronald D. Moore's fellow Star Trek Deep Space Nine writer Ira Steven Behr as producer. Deep Space Nine, which aimed for more moral ambiguity than Star Trek series up to that point, still had, compared to to-day's TV landscape, a very neatly polarised morality. Every now and then, Sisko or Kira on Deep Space Nine maybe had to choose between saving a society from destruction and preserving a peace treaty, something like that, but nothing like on Game of Thrones where people are being mutilated, people's friends and loved ones are constantly being killed, and chaos and morally uncertain violence seem like an integral part of getting from any point A to any point B.

Outlander features an older, gentler kind of wish fulfilment fantasy. Instead of a dream about a world where moral constraints go out the window, it's a dream about being morally certain. Claire, the psychologically flawless protagonist who for some reason didn't bug me in the first episode kind of bugged me in the second episode. But not nearly as much as Jamie (Sam Heughan), her love interest.

This physically perfect specimen accepts a beating in court as a champion for the cook's granddaughter, he has a backstory about how he was arrested for fighting tooth and nail to prevent his sister's rape. If this character were a cake, he wouldn't even be a cake, he'd just be a bowl of sugar and eggs with no other ingredients.

But wait, you may say, weren't you just singing the praises of Errol Flynn's Robin Hood a couple months ago? Well, he's another good point of contrast. Sure, Robin Hood rebels against unambiguous injustice. But he had style. He sauntered into Prince John's throne room, speaking treason "fluently" and smiling before even Maid Marian knew he had good reason to oppose Prince John. He gets in an honest fight with Little John and when he loses laughs and says, "I love a man who bests me!" Robin Hood is a do-gooder, but he made doing good cool instead of just safe.

I will hand this to Outlander, its locations are absolutely gorgeous.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the new Monogatari series, Hanamonogatari, premièred yesterday.

That's 花物語, "flower story," monogatari meaning story. It's a slightly confusing naming trend--the word monogatari hardly a new one to be included in any title. It was interesting in the first series, 化物語, Bakemonogatari, because it was a portmanteau combining bakemono (monster/ghost) with monogatari (story) with the kanji they had in common in the middle, 物 (mono).

The first series was also by far the best written one so far but the previous series ended in a surprisingly very satisfying way.

This new one, which focuses on Kanbaru, the athletic girl with the possessed monkey arm, has begun promisingly enough. Kanbaru, after reminiscing about her overbearing mother who constantly enforced her interpretation of the universe on others, finds herself confronting a mysterious "Demon Lord" who offers to help students in trouble "no matter what". It turns out the Demon Lord is a member of Kanbaru's former basketball team and her "no matter what" turns out to be just listening to students and letting their problems sort themselves out. The episode ends on a nicely uncertain note as we're left to wonder why Kanbaru finds this so troubling.

All Civilisation was for Candy

Did you know there's a movie where John Astin upstages Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, John Huston, Walter Matthau, Charles Aznavour, James Coburn, and a beautiful naked woman? Ringo Starr, too, but maybe that's not so surprising. The movie is 1968's Candy based on Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's novel, a satire of pornography. Maybe it's inevitable even a satire of pornography would be sexy anyway when it features the beautiful Ewa Aulin the title role but mainly this movie is a mockery of male ego and philosophy.

We meet Candy Christian at school where she's attending a class taught by her professor father, T.M. Christian, one of two roles played by John Astin. He's a conservative fellow worried about Candy's dating habits. He may have cause for worry, too, since Candy is portrayed as an absurdly guileless and accommodating young fantasy woman.

The movie then introduces the first man to take advantage of Candy, a rock star poet named MacPhisto who enters the school auditorium to adoring teenage girls and a wind machine.

Richard Burton plays MacPhisto delightfully, knowing exactly how to portray this fellow in love with his own use of language and dramatic . . . pauses. Burton is of course one of the best stage trained actors in cinema history, the kind trained to focus his performance on calculated inflection and timing. In Candy he's very much making fun of himself.

It's very appropriate that Marlon Brando turns up at the end of the film as a bookend--one of the most famous method actors of the 1950s, Brando represented an acting style almost the opposite of Burton's. Brando plays a phoney Indian guru who talks about rejecting the materialism of the world--which mainly seems to involve taking Candy's clothes off.

The movie is a series of vignettes, in each one Candy encounters a man who's introduced as having a complex and fervent philosophy about life only in the end to inevitably reveal it as a posture, a pretext to have sex with Candy.

In addition to playing Candy's father, Astin plays her lascivious uncle, Jack, and it's in this role he's most entertaining. When a biker gang of Mexican women come to take vengeance on Candy for taking Ringo Starr's virginity, Astin tries to offer them his watch which he proudly tells them, "shows the phases of the moon."

That face of Astin's is so great and he knows how to underplay it just right, saying almost every line perfectly straight. My favourite scene in the movie involves Candy and her family being rescued by a plane of paratroopers led my Walter Matthau. Matthau's posturing is patriotism and he impresses Candy with his devotion and love for his country. He orders his men to count off and they do, all twenty four of them, and Matthau remarks on how impressive his men are. To which Jack replies, "I'll say, all those men counting up to twenty four without a single mistake."

Twitter Sonnet #657

Tea compounded with coffee bore manors.
Parliament's arms waved for lopsided flight.
Two thirds of Hell's host has written banners.
Crooked trees still sing of a lanky wight.
Saws in chorus cremate the burning rope.
Animal coffee appeal woos sugar.
Tree-lined purse strings help Gulliver to cope.
Weirder rain drips like a living Frogger.
Motionless Hobbes giants watch the tadpole.
Queries clamp the minotaur's last blood vein.
Animals drag the elves to the south pole.
Taffeta clogs the prom's old water main.
Boomerang pipe elbows exasperate
Rogue plumbing trying to repatriate.

On the Tracks with Sequinned Blind Fold

The old question about Hamlet is, "Is he mad or pretending to be mad?" Which, in a way, is a funny question to ask about the theatre. You could ask the question about the two theatre professionals portrayed in 1934's Twentieth Century and although one of them might give you a straight answer it's very likely that neither one really knows. It's what makes this early Howard Hawks screwball comedy so delightful.

John Barrymore plays theatre director Oscar Jaffe with the kind of brilliance one might expect from Barrymore's familiarity with the theatre world. Jaffe seems to frame every interaction other human beings as though he's directing a performance where he's the star. The one time in the movie where he's explicitly an actor, where he disguises himself in order to sneak onto the Twentieth Century Limited, the train referred to by the film's title, he complains of being forced into being something so low as an actor. Even this is a calculation, he presence in the theatre so enormous that just as he really is an actor every second of every day there's something vulgar in confining his eminence.

When the film begins, his assistants are searching for an actress named Lily Garland who Jaffe assures them is among the cast of their upcoming production. It's only after a lot of fuss that it's revealed that even Ms. Garland has never heard of Ms. Garland--she still thinks her name is Mildred Plotka. Jaffe has chosen to rename her and has chosen to introduce the name by assuming everyone knows it.

And that's the kind of madness that propels the whole movie. Barrymore is matched perfectly by Carole Lombard as Lily/Mildred who swiftly grows from a shy young woman to a massive star who can say with a straight face that Jaffe had no part in making Lily Garland and it sounds sort of true even though we know Jaffe completely made up her name.

The contest between them is like two storm clouds of artifice colliding, each with its own pre-production, production, and post-production. Jaffe hurriedly puts his arm in a sling before confronting Lily with her lover in the neighbouring train car, Lily wields her movie career like a bludgeon to Jaffe's ego.

Into all this, the film introduces a wealthy religious nut wandering the train and Jaffe suddenly becomes obsessed with casting Lily as Mary Magdalene.

The screenplay's by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and it's great but mainly this movie is carried by Lombard's tremendous energy and time and Barrymore's commitment to a man committed rapturously to his own bullshit.

Different Ways of Breaking

I don't need scientific accuracy from my fiction. It can be fun, I enjoy it, but story comes first, in my view. So having just watched the Mythbusters special on Breaking Bad, I wasn't really bothered that both "myths" tested, two incidents from the first season, were "busted"--in case you don't know the series, Mythbusters is a show where, among other things, people test whether or not certain science related events depicted in film or television could actually occur as portrayed.

I didn't need Mythbusters, though, to tell me the scene in the first season where Walter throws down a piece of crystallised mercury fulminate in a room, killing almost everyone in it except himself, wasn't legit. It actually says something for the general quality of Breaking Bad that I kept watching after I was shown a scene of a man standing next to the centre of an explosion that blows up a whole room and emerging virtually uninjured.

But there were a lot of moments in Breaking Bad, which I finally finished watching a couple days ago, where I thought, "This is unbelievably stupid. Why am I still watching this show?" Perhaps the worst offender is the fifth to last episode, "Rabid Dog", written and directed by Sam Catlin. It was so bad that it took me weeks to pick the show back up again. But, I'm glad I did because the last four episodes were wonderful. They threw out all attempts at moralising, social commentary, and comedy and went for straight spaghetti western--larger than life characters and the feeling of a story that gives them free, decadent rein.

I've written about Breaking Bad several times here, the first time being an entry on January 19th when I was already into the second season, a few months after I'd started watching the show. My initial impression was very positive:

I'm two episodes into the second season now and so far I'm impressed. The cast deserves the gushing letter of praise Anthony Hopkins sent them--something I consider to be one of the biggest reasons Bryan Cranston won the SAG award last night. Which is not to say I don't think he's amazing. His is the best performance of a show filled with good performances, partly just because he's the central character and has to carry more but also specifically because of the kind of character he plays--a man who's gone along with what his family and society want and need against his own feelings for so long that it's built this constant emotional wall around him. Cranston conveys this while at the same time conveying specific emotional motives for each scene. It reminds me a little of Cary Grant's performance in Notorious.

But, again, the rest of the cast is great. What I especially like is how these are kinds of people one knows from life without being sitcom stereotypes. Particularly Walter's cop brother-in-law who could very easily be the dumb, authority obsessed cop stock character. But even when he's ridiculous, like when he takes Walter's son on a misguided "scared straight" field trip, he's believably human. Which is crucial as he represents one extreme end of one of the show's driving forces, the debate over recreational drug use. Though it's perhaps a tad too obvious when he unselfconsciously produces a box of Cuban cigars to share with Walter.

Walter himself is an effective point for an argument not merely about anti-drug laws but about lazy, selfish thinking that expects invisible forces of law and social decency to sort life out. I remember seeing articles with headlines asking why we sympathise with Walter even though he's clearly a villain. I haven't seen anything so far that clearly casts him as a bad man but, assuming he eventually is firmly established as one, I would say what makes people so invested in him is that he's a character who decides to break out of this artificial world that has kept him emotionally pinioned for so long. The fact that he makes ultimately unwise or flatly bad decisions only strengthens the appeal because it acknowledges the usefulness of social contracts. It's a more honest comparison that way so that we can ask ourselves, is the sort of freedom Walter chooses worthwhile even if he fails?

Well, this is a potential the show never fulfils. The kind of psychological, Cohen brother style character analysis the show started with eventually fades away. The social issues crop up now and again later on but they have a lot less weight because we're never really provided with examples of crystal meth destroying lives. When we do get a tale of drug addiction in the second and third season it's a story about addiction to heroin. Jesse runs afoul of a couple meth junkies but it's hard to say whether those two wouldn't have been assholes without the meth. The most consistent example of meth users the show provides are two of Jesse's friends who are played for comic relief right to the end and in their nerdy conversations about Star Trek and Babylon 5 they almost seem like affectionate self-parodies of the show's writers.

The show doesn't really address the issue of whether meth should be legalised as it seemed poised to do in the first season. Instead, it becomes a fantasy of moral transgression, focusing more on the liberation in no longer being confined by culturally enforced morality and embarking on a tenacious, heedless path of self-fulfilment. There are negative consequences to Walter's actions but they're almost always so stupid it's impossible to take them seriously. The first truly negative consequence and an act of real selfishness on Walter's part comes at the end of the second season about which I wrote on Februrary 14th:

Walter White just happens to meet John de Lancie at a bar, just happens to break into Jessie's apartment just was someone was choking, and just happened to be living under the path of the effects of trauma on de Lancie's character. The extraordinary sequence of coincidences is far more conspicuous than any character development for Walter, except maybe when his wife went into labour at the same moment Walter needed to be at a crucial drug deal. At least that showed how Walter was fundamentally arranging his priorities, but it ought to have stopped there.

Something else I wrote about in that entry was something the last couple series unfortunately retconned, perhaps due to the fact that the writers themselves weren't aware of what they made:

I did like the confrontation between Walter and Skyler. The show does a really good job of making Walter's family life feel like a prison. Walter and Skyler clearly shouldn't be together and I like that the show doesn't play this broadly--we feel bad for them both.

Flashbacks in the final two seasons, as well as some resolutions in the relationship, portray Walter and Skyler's marriage as having been perfectly happy before Walter turned to his life of crime. Much like Carmela, Tony Soprano's wife on The Sopranos, the writers seemed to throw the book out on Skyler on a season to season basis. One season Skyler is an angry woman in an unhappy marriage, then she's the typical saintly, all knowing sitcom wife, then she's a vicarious fantasy character about to have an affair with an old flame, then she's gradually falling into a life of crime herself, then she's an innocent victim traumatised by the fact that her husband's a criminal, and finally she's just a sort of blank moral thermometer where we're supposed to gauge whether or not something's right by if she approves of it.

One of those flashbacks I mentioned came at the end of the third season about which I wrote:

The finale begins with a flashback to Walter and his wife moving into the house familiar to us as their home from the series. The contrast between the brilliant chemist with the promising future and the increasingly ruthless meth cook is nice. Not just for the contrast but in how the rosy future young Walter saw for himself motivated his thirst for power later.

In this, as an indictment of capitalism which fosters dreams of conquest in men, I see the show at its finest. Though I think the real reason so many people root for Walter even though he's a "bad guy" is that circumstances on the show rearrange things so that Walter really isn't that bad. Everyone he's hurt so far has either been someone who's been trying to kill him or, like his wife, has been emotionally hurt by the unexamined hollowness of their relationship manifesting in unrealistic expectations and inability to empathise. The third season finale is the first time Walter's in a position to intentionally hurt someone, Gale, who really doesn't deserve it. The show seems like it might be backing away from it--it ends with a cliffhanger.

In a way, Walter White is like Batman--people say that what distinguishes Batman from other superheroes is that Batman doesn't have super powers. But that's not really true, Batman just doesn't have explicit super powers. What Batman has is the power of the writers wanting him to live so they stretch the truth far past probability.

Walter White lives in a similar fantasy world where becoming a gang lord is more of a taboo than something that genuinely requires someone to compromise their morals.

But it turns out the show doesn't back away from what I thought it might have been backing away from and it leads to the most interesting moral examination of the entire series--and at its centre is not Walter but Jesse:

the season four episode "Problem Dog" where Jesse, in order to discuss dealing with the murder of a human being he committed, tells his group that he killed a dog for no reason other than that the dog was, vaguely, a "problem". The argument that ensues between Jesse and the leader of the therapy group highlights a fundamental issue with the kind of therapy at play--the therapist's focus is entirely on people learning to accept themselves. He is himself guilty of the accidental killing of his child when he was under the influence of a drug but he needs to accept himself in order to move on with his life. Jesse points out that if one can work through any action to the point of self-acceptance, there is no exterior, objective morality, something Jesse has a great deal of trouble accepting. He seems more at peace with himself when he calls himself "the bad guy" than he does with the idea that the murderer of one day can be an acceptably normal human being of the next.

This is the one moment where we see what living without the stifling morals implicit in the society of season one really means. It's liberating, but too much liberty can be maddening.

Unfortunately, this was something the show couldn't really build on. It could have, and maybe should have, ended there. The only way the show could proceed was to go a new route and be complete fantasy. The fantasy it chose was spaghetti western, something that really crystallised in the season four finale as we watched cool crime boss Gus Fring walk into a building to meet his fate and music swells as we contemplate a wordless closeup of him. The show ceases to be one of questions about morality and society and becomes a story about demigods. The loser in that scenario is Jesse--the show has nothing to do with him then and he becomes broadly erratic and paranoid, something that culminates in the grand stupidity of "Rabid Dog".

Here comes some spoilers if you haven't seen the show. But they're stupid spoilers so maybe you won't care:

At the last minute in season four, a close up of a plant is meant to imply that in order to get Jesse on his side for killing Fring, Walter secretly poisoned the child of Jesse's girlfriend. This was astonishingly bad in itself. Why would Gus poison the kid? Why did Walter think this would convince Jesse that Gus was the culprit when all signs pointed to Walter or a pure accident? Why did it convince Jesse? Why does the kid never tell anyone that Walter made him eat the poisonous plant?

In "Rabid Dog", Jesse finally figures out it was Walter who poisoned the kid because someone picks his pocket and takes a bag of marijuana. This makes him realise Walter could have picked his pocket and taken the poisonous cigarette he'd had on him, which somehow makes Jesse conclude Walter poisoned the kid. In all my life, I've never seen a television show fall apart so spectacularly. It's a whole house of phoney cards and the real problem with it is that nothing anyone does makes any sense afterwards.

But incredibly enough the show recovers, largely by relegating Jesse to the role of human MacGuffin and the focus goes back to Walter's quest for self fulfilment. And here the show excels, in no small part due to Bryan Cranston's performance and the show's instincts for pacing. The penultimate episode ending with a reintroduction of Walter's chemistry colleagues from the first couple seasons brings all of Walter's most interesting issues back to the fore beautifully, contrasted with him being utterly defeated by bad luck and his enemies, hiding out in snowy, miserable New Hampshire wilderness. And the show becomes about a man doing what he wants instead of succumbing to the myriad forces of the world trying to make him just roll over and die. Vince Gilligan, creator of the show, has said he wanted Walter to go from being a sympathetic character to an unsympathetic one but he's never more of an admirable figure than he is at the end. Like Elsa in Frozen, Walter White is another example of modern fiction's love for the amoral hero.

Plumbing and Policy

At the Lion Coffee shop downtown which, mysteriously, always has plenty of seats and good wi-fi. It may be the only coffee shop downtown that meets that description, even during Comic Con, which is only two blocks away. As I walked up to the place to-day I heard two women sitting outside talking. "No people here again!" said one, "Don't say it out loud!" said the other.

The reason I'm here is that my apartment is facing its most spectacular plumbing problem yet. Just a couple days after I received a notice telling me water would be shut off for five hours at a time two to three times a week, every week, for "months", I found myself without use of my sinks after dinner last night. Not because the water was shut off but because water wouldn't go down the drain and, in fact, a little water was coming up along with black gunk and a variety of debris I bid farewell to over the course of the past year--little pieces of broccoli, oatmeal, etcetera. And some of it was coming up in my bathroom sink, too.

Somehow I got to sleep last night, despite being annoyed. Then to-day it started coming up so bad in the bathroom I had to start bailing it out lest it overflow--I dumped the water into the bathtub where the drain seemed to be uninvolved for some reason. I got it down to a good level and hurriedly went to my manager where I found the maintenance guy already talking about the identical problem occurring in my next door neighbour's apartment. I came to my place and pumped water out and told me people would be there in a couple hours to fix the pipe.

I was going to go talk to the manager before that but I got caught up in the news out of Missouri and wanted to see the President speak on this issue. It's nice to hear him condemn the excessive police tactics being used and encouraging, if the Guardian article is accurate, to hear the Missouri governor is taking action based on Obama's statements. Though obviously things should never have gotten to a Federal level let alone a presidential one. I just saw Arianna Huffington tweet, "For those asking where Fed presence is in #Ferguson, it's already there: that's where the military weapons came from." Considering that response seems to be at odds with the policy expressed by the President, the political divide in government infrastructure looks a little more frightening. Mind you, I'm not talking about the divide in policy making but in the departments that evidently feel comfortable exceeding their authority to enforce ideologies opposite the ones voted into power. The fact that the rogue ideology here seems to be racially oriented is particularly saddening and a striking glimpse of just how severely people in influential positions break with the better nature of the American culture.

Twitter Sonnet #656

Soundless threaded diamonds fade from the cloth.
Thin neon green sickle moons multiplied.
Shivered daylight brushes the landed moth.
Uncredited moon the tides amplified.
Unmarried millionaires are all bereft.
Lips knowing affectionate language pause.
Silky cigarette smoke stayed as she left.
Savvy eyes through shadows shift time sea laws.
Plastic beach sand fools no fox vacation.
Unannounced ant hills pre-empt the sink drain.
Established voices hold animation.
Industry olives leave salted the sane.
Breakfast stimulus follows tattooed lunch.
Broken pipes begin a short distance crunch.

Beautiful Eyes that See Through Them All

You've probably already heard Lauren Bacall died yesterday. At eighty nine years old, she had a long life and she worked all the way up to the end--imdb lists her among the cast of a movie coming out next year. This is even more remarkable when you consider she started when she was nineteen, in 1944, in To Have and to Have Not, her first of a string of collaborations with the man she married the very next year, Humphrey Bogart.

A beautiful actress finding success so young, one might assume she was cast as a kitten, a childlike mind in a sexy body for a man to dominate, but nothing could be further from the truth. The excitement in her chemistry with Bogart was all about a playful, ongoing contest between two very clever minds.

She was always sharp as a knife and she reminded us intelligence was a beautiful thing. Her along with Barbara Stanwyck or Katharine Hepburn or Joan Crawford . . . Bacall's death has made me think, where are young actresses like that to-day? One could argue for Tilda Swinton, maybe Cate Blanchett. Those two so rarely get the front and centre roles Bacall routinely got, though--or they usually play villains.

Even when Bacall was playing comedy or a character who wasn't necessarily a genius she still seemed like the smartest person in the room. Here she is telling Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe how it's done:

In addition to starring in movies with Bogart, Bacall performed with him in an adventure radio serial, many episodes of which you can download here for free.

Song of Isolation

A film about the life of a blind woman presents a difficulty in that film is a visual medium. Presenting her story primarily through the one sense she doesn't have makes the viewer more separate from the protagonist than he or she otherwise might be, the language of the medium building the story for a us in a way she can't perceive--we're forced outside to see the character as alien. Masahiro Shinoda's 1977 film known as Ballad of Orin in the west was originally called はなれ瞽女おりん in Japan--literally something like Exiled Goze Orin, "Orin" being the name of the protagonist and "Goze" her profession. It's through her exile that Shinoda brings us her perspective, allowing him to create a film of beautiful images that very much conveys the perspective of helplessness in isolation very like the vulnerability of the blind in a turbulent world.

The subtle impression of a blind person's world being alien also communicates the solitary quality of her existence. In the movie's focus on sexual repression and abuse, the story of isolation becomes about how the human organism is crushed by the human spirit.

Goze was a profession made up exclusively of blind women, singers and musicians who lived and trained together in houses not unlike geisha. Unlike geisha, though, goze took vows of celibacy.

The women often played for parties of young, drunken men so threat and temptation were always there. Young Orin finds herself excited by the attentions of the men from whom she happily accepts drink after drink. Her love of attention and their demonstrations of lust and affection being related to the fact that she was abandoned at six years old in a small seaside shack by parents who couldn't face this difficulty of raising a blind child. The film opens with the village doctor taking the young girl to the goze house on an overcast day beside frothing, dangerous tides.

We learn Orin's history from Orin herself, who tells it to a ragged young itinerant man she shares a fire with at the beginning of the film. Shima Iwashita, the director's wife, mostly plays Orin with an air of wise, placid contentment, a fascinating contrast to the desperation that defines most of her existence. When one of the men from a party sneaks into her bed, she's expelled from the goze troupe, the measure prompted by the group's hard line on sex ironically sending the helpless Orin into a life where, as she tells the itinerant, she becomes dependant on a series of men who force themselves on her.

At the same time, she finds herself drawn to physical love and describes pleading with some men to stay with her, particularly on cold nights.

The itinerant, Heitaro (Yoshio Harada), seems to revile sex--he becomes Orin's companion and calls her his sister despite her desire that they become lovers. He supports her with the money he earns repairing and selling geta, wooden shoes.

It's hard to say how much of the love Orin develops for him is due to the fact that he's the first man not to abandon her or that he never takes their relationship to a physical level or that they're both orphans and exiles. It's the tenuousness and strangeness of their relationship that helps to crystallise the impression of profound loneliness in most of Orin's life.

"No Movie's Real"

Robin Williams is dead, apparently having committed suicide. A sensitive and gifted performer, I always thought his greatest strength was a sense of his vulnerability through his sadness. It's something that was in every performance, sometimes overwhelming the film, sometimes complementing it perfectly. He was in two Terry Gilliam movies I love, The Fisher King and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but the performance of his I love most is the one he gave in Mark Romanek's 2002 film One Hour Photo. No other film, in my opinion, better showcased this innate sadness that it seemed to me Williams couldn't contain.

He's not even doing very much in this scene, it's not a big emotive scene, but so much comes through. As a performer, Williams was like a clear pane of glass to his soul.

His stand up comedy and comedic performances were often noted as being propelled by nervous energy. It always seemed like Williams was trying to outrun something. It was a race that required him to be sensitive, knowledgeable, intelligent, and coherent. We saw brilliance when we saw him succeed at this.

Twitter Sonnet #655

Hairless hat creatures dance for chequered flags.
Knowledge leaking through black fountains recursed.
Erroneous donkeys ate their name tags.
For his tail Curious was reimbursed.
A bag of weasels defaced Piggy's moon.
Sharknadoes can't end the eternal war.
Beelzebub's men besieged Brigadoon.
Innocent Hurricane beat the cell door.
Five beats ahead of the egg was air pure.
Now fashionable patterns were floors then.
A twisted cable in a gut's unsure.
A diary awaits the cocaine pen.
Tubes of salt hold some fry matter inside.
Sea-less crowns came with the black luckless tide.

Muffin Evolution

I love when an author so successfully creates a feeling of a time past through the lives of people. The new story in Sirenia Digest, "THE CATS OF RIVER STREET (1925)" accomplishes this very well--the year in the title is really not necessary. Just the mention of The Scopes Trial in the headline of a newspaper would have been enough but Caitlin quite successfully integrates aspects of the period into the lives of the people in a natural way--it doesn't feel like a writer touching a series of bases but a woman going to a corner store and getting her groceries in a box to be delivered later or a man's painful recollections of the Great War feel like real things intimately shaping the lives of the people.

The mention of The Scopes Trial, I think, is more than about helping to establish the period, too. The story is a homage to H.P. Lovecraft and takes place in his fictional town of Innsmouth. The Shadow over Innsmouth, like a lot of works by Lovecraft, is at least in part a meditation on race, on the horror of indications of man's fundamentally animal nature. Lovecraft's work evolved from an outlook of outright racist regard for foreigners to mature into an internalised horror, a realisation that the things he had feared about other races were also part of his race, that the fear he had felt all along was a fear of his own nature. "THE CATS OF RIVER STREET" takes the figures of Lovecraft's story and in a slightly dream logic way seems to draw a parallel between the bitter, entrenched worldview of the Creationists and the hordes of Deep Ones abiding below the waves. I thought of this quote from Isaac Asimov's essay "The 'Threat' of Creationism":

To those who are trained in science, creationism seems like a bad dream, a sudden reliving of a nightmare, a renewed march of an army of the night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.

I love the portrayal of cats in the story, too. Easily one of my favourite of Caitlin's stories.

To-day I also finally watched The Missing Pieces, the ninety minutes of deleted footage from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that was included on the recent Blu-Ray release of Twin Peaks. First of all, to simply call these ninety minutes "deleted footage" isn't quite accurate. This is closer to being a new David Lynch film assembled from the deleted footage to Fire Walk With Me.

I was reminded of MORE THINGS THAT HAPPENED, the bonus scenes featured on the DVD for Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE. Much as the title suggests, the footage doesn't have the usual feel of deleted scenes included on DVDs which normally have the distinct feeling of watching actors on set. Of being privy to the creative process. MORE THINGS THAT HAPPEN and The Missing Pieces feel like windows into the worlds of their respective films. Lynch edited the footage to both films himself, mixed the sound and added music. And I really love him for that. But even that doesn't cover the remarkable feelings I had watching the footage.

Fire Walk With Me was a movie I watched over and over in high school, it's one of those movies imprinted on my brain that I know for better or worse holds an influence over me. That was in, oh, 1995 to 1997 or so. And now I see these Missing Pieces for the first time in 2014. It's like finally seeing the other side of the moon you've been memorising one side of for years.

A linear comparison wouldn't be accurate, of course. There are things in The Missing Pieces that occur after the events of the movie and the series but the fascination in watching it is in how it expands on scenes throughout the film, finally explaining the meaning behind strange, off hand little comments characters made in the film proper. The whole business about Laura being a muffin, for example, takes on a lot more meaning when we see it's Donna who's originally the muffin in the Hayward household. The later scene in the underground Canadian club where Laura takes on the title now looks like Laura fetishising Donna's innocence.

At the same time, in several cases I quite agreed with Lynch's decision to delete scenes. I loved seeing all the footage of David Bowie but, within the film itself, his unexplained appearance is far more effective for its mystery. And that's not to say I'd rather not have seen the extended scene of him in Gordon's office--seeing him interact with the curt and logical Albert and the always slightly on the wrong wavelength Gordon is absolutely delightful. It's just that the scene is right where it belongs, in The Missing Pieces.

There is, of course, a far less linear thread through the film, less narrative pull, though the scenes are put together in not just chronological but an artistically sensible order. This less urgent sense of motion is actually a strength, I feel, though I doubt it's one anyone other than a hardcore Twin Peaks fan would recognise.

At the same time, this format showcases Lynch's peculiar insight into human nature. One of the most powerful scenes to me was one where Sarah Palmer is looking for a blue sweater Laura points out to her she's wearing--and Sarah cries and becomes frightened, echoing the Giant's words from season 2, "It's happening again!" and it's only this one moment that we have any indication Sarah has had problems with her memory, or has maybe had a stroke at some point in the past.

All of the extra scenes of the Palmer family work, actually, and provide a fascinating examination of their subtly strained relationship.

From the standpoint of Lynch's abilities as a pure storyteller, I love how the relaxed pace of Missing Pieces showcases his ability to find ways into scenes. The Norma and Ed subplot from the series was one of my least favourites but I love a scene in Missing Pieces which begins with the two of them in a car playing with a breathalyser.

And there's so much more to love about The Missing Pieces--the scene with Jack Nance and Joan Chen in the lumber yard, an unexpectedly really well shot fight scene with Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland's hilariously slightly incompetent Agent Stanley.

Also, it only just now occurred to me the dwarf with the ring is rather like Alberich and the ring of the Nibelung.