The Alien World and the Alien Women

it seems like the SyFy channel has freed itself from the reality television model it unwisely adopted years ago. It seems like they have quite a few actually, genuinely Sci-Fi series on the air, more than one, even, so it's not like they're hanging their hat on a new Battlestar Galactica. At the recommendation of my friend Ada, who's reading the books upon which the show is based, I've watched the first six episodes of The Expanse, a space opera series. It has some of the best world building I've seen in a while, helpfully established by a plot that covers a lot of ground in that world.

There are three main storylines so far--the desperately running former crew of a freighter called the Canterbury, a detective story starring Thomas Jane on a space station, and a political intrigue centred on a politician played by Shohreh Aghdashloo.

It's a couple centuries into the future and there's a human civilisation on Mars with which the government of Earth is locked in a cold war. The detective played by Thomas Jane, Miller, is investigating the disappearance of a rich girl (another plot kicked off by a possible dead beautiful woman) who is somehow tied into a plot to put Mars and Earth at war with each other. By odd coincidence, the plot bears similarities to the Doctor Who serial Frontier in Space which I've been watching again recently. But this is why David Bowie called originality an overrated virtue. The Expanse is quite engaging for its characters and the feeling it creates of this complex solar system. It's nice seeing a show bold facedly creating sub cultures and I liked that the "belters", people who grew up in the asteroid belt, are no longer able to survive in Earth's gravity.

Really sleepy to-day. Just as I was planning on adjusting my sleeping schedule for the later classes I'm taking this semester, there was problems with water again in my apartment building which means workmen have been here all day beginning at 9:30am dismantling my shower. I'm definitely moving soon--I'm paying more for this studio apartment than many two bedroom places in town. Right now it's looking like I'll be getting a place with my friend Tim, I'm going to check out places to-morrow, hopefully I can get this all sorted quickly.

This morning I read the new story in Sirenia Digest, the first new story for the Digest in a while, and "EURYDICE EDUCTION" is a welcome return to form. Caitlin R. Kiernan takes the story of Eurydice and the concept of Orpheus instructed not to look back at her and uses it as a way to discuss the contrast between the mind trying to rationally organise the universe and the beauty of things unexplained. The compulsion to have questions definitely answered is met with the beauty and frustration of things being much bigger as the imagination is allowed to endlessly probe. Something many people to-day have lost touch with as the curtain is drawn back on just about everything and many people consider it standard to read all the spoilers for a TV show or movie they haven't watched yet, trailers now tend to give away whole movies.

One of the many interviews I've seen going around now with David Bowie is one from 1999 where an incredulous interviewer scoffs as David Bowie confidently predicting almost exactly what the internet is to-day. Bowie also talks about how it's probably a good thing that the internet will take the mystery away from icons, that the model of the 60s with Hendrix or the Beatles at the centre of a following will no longer work as the audience becomes more part of the artwork. Ironically, Bowie himself proves that the old model isn't dead with the posthumous success of ★. Indeed, it's the unreachability of someone who's dead--moreso with Bowie who successfully kept a private life--that I think is fuelling much of the attention he and the album are receiving now.

I certainly can't stop listening to and thinking about ★. Lately I've been thinking about the line "Ain't that just like me," from "Lazarus", referring at first to dropping his cell phone. It reminds me of the line "Isn't it me . . . putting pain in a stranger," from "Sweet Thing" on Diamond Dogs. This desperate attempt to grab onto identity, the consummately familiar and intimate thing, the absence of which seems a sure sign of death. This is the other side of "Changes", not only the song but of course how that song is emblematic of Bowie's entire career. If someone changes all the time, then who is that person? Is that person still the same person, what happened to the person who was here before?

I love the Lovecraftian feel to the ★ video. I don't recall Bowie ever mentioning Lovecraft, I wonder how much of the video was his ideas or the director's. But the bejewelled skull found by alien women is certainly an eloquent image of the human endeavour to make beauty and spiritual meaning out of something that is likely entirely physical. The fact that it's in a space suit on an alien world also conveys the desperate fragility of human technological achievement. The album's focus on women is also served by this. The anxiety about women and his feelings about women fit with the contemplation of the beautiful, strange, familiar, intimate, and separate. The women in the video have tails and seem to live in an alien realm, reminding me of Lovecraft's Ulthar. But their shaking ceremony oddly humanises them. "On the day of execution only women kneel and smile," Bowie sings. Do they kneel in prayer for the condemned or for the headsman's axe? Unlike Bowie's "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" the women are at peace with the fate, or in some way accept it, a concept alien and seductive to Bowie.

Looking over some of my older entries on David Bowie, I see I wrote this about his song "Where Are We Know" from his penultimate studio album The Next Day:

"Where Are We Now", the title of the song, emphasises that there's a sense that sooner or later one gets to the point where one realises moving house or reinventing oneself will never satisfy the need that prompted those actions in the first place and there's an insubstantial, alien reality we're always stuck with.

Harvey and Harvey

This cat's little bone collar (a dog collar on a cat? The indignity!) says her name is Jillian, I met her just outside my apartment a few minutes ago. I was coming back from taking out some trash and my neighbour was trying to make friends with her but only caused her to trot off in my direction. After I'd been petting her a moment he walked over and she ran off. Poor guy. I guess she lives around here.

She almost wandered into my apartment when I came back out with my laundry.

This is a group photo from a chess tournament I took part in yesterday in Second Life in honour of my friend Harvey who passed away a couple weeks ago. It was hosted by my friend Rose, the blonde woman in the middle. I only knew Harvey through Second Life--he was Italian and although SL has some really cool translators I didn't always know what he was trying to say. But he was one of the nicest people I've met in SL. He was disabled in real life so Second Life and other social media platforms were kind of his main gateway to human interaction. He was one of the founders of the Caissa chess club back in 2008 or so, if I remember. Caissa released a popular 2D chess board that was instrumental in breathing life into a lukewarm chess scene in SL. To-day, the board most commonly in use, created by my friend Beware Hax, whose shop hosted yesterday's tournament, was modelled on the Caissa board's shape and design. The last time I saw Harvey he gave me a free copy of the wall mounted Caissa study board which is still used for lectures and puzzles to-day.

Harvey used a rabbit avatar and his name, Harvey, naturally prompted me to ask one day if he was a fan of the 1950 film starring James Stewart and of course he was. So I used various Harvey posters in decorating the tournament arena.

It'd been years since I watched Harvey so on Friday night I decided to revisit it ahead of the tournament. I probably wrote about it the first time I watched it but I can't find the entry now. Good grief, this blog is old. I've been keeping this thing since 2002, that's fourteen years . . . Anyway, Harvey remains a wonderful film.

You're probably familiar with the premise--Jimmy Stewart and his six foot tall rabbit friend, Harvey, whom only he can see. I like how Stewart's character, Elwood, is really the calm centre of a storm. He has no problems, really, he's an affable guy who just likes to go to the bar every night and get blind drunk with his invisible rabbit. Well, that doesn't sound so great when you think about it, but it's a surprisingly subtle, bitter-sweet aspect of the story.

It's everyone else, though, who seems to have the anxiety about it. I love how the movie doesn't start with people in a crisis about Elwood's problem but rather with his sister and niece, who live with him in his large, beautiful house, desperately trying to make sure he stays out of the house while they give a society luncheon in order to introduce the niece, Myrtle (Victoria Horne), to society.

The film is really more a comedy about how energetically people proceed with the wrong idea--Elwood's sister Veta (Josephine Hull) embarrassed by her brother out of consideration for a shallow society of strangers, the doctors and nurses at the sanatorium Veta tries to take him to accidentally assuming she's the would-be patient and he's the one committing her, the improbable strings of dialogue that prevent them from discovering the truth despite Elwood being cheerfully forthcoming. It's a screwball comedy with a gentle, melancholy undertone, a rather fine mixture.

Even in Doctor Who

You may have heard Robert Banks Stewart died yesterday. He wrote two of my favourite stories for the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who, Terror of the Zygons and Seeds of Doom, the first and last stories, respectively, of Tom Baker's second season as the Doctor. I always liked the wide ranging quality of Seeds of Doom which begins with a homage to Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World with a group of scientists menaced by aliens in an isolated Antarctica base and then the action moves to a mansion in England. Several memorable characters are introduced, including the mercenary Scorby and the ruthless Mr. Chase.

Obviously Terror of the Zygons continues to exert its influence to-day. Robert Banks Stewart was himself Scottish so perhaps this is why he established Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart as Scottish in this story, the last regular appearance of the Brigadier on the show. One of many Doctor Who stories set in Scotland it was also shot there, making use of lovely and desolate heath. Not to mention the Zygon makeup effects so nice they've changed little in to-day's series.

While the show has often gone to Scotland, occasionally to the U.S., once to France, Spain, and the Netherlands, it has notably never gone to Ireland. Last week I did listen to an audio play that not only takes the Seventh Doctor and his companions Ace and Hex to Ireland, it's during Oliver Cromwell's infamous invasion.

"The Settling", a 2006 audio play by Simon Guerrier, has the TARDIS materialise in 1649 near Drogheda. This wasn't long after the execution of Charles I and Cromwell almost immediately turned his attention to Ireland out of a feeling that England couldn't be secured while an enemy nation was so close at hand. Irish Catholics were allied with the newly exiled English Royalists and the conflict was both political and religious, if the two can even really be separated in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

The audio play isn't nearly as facile as the 1970 film Cromwell, which omits Cromwell's conquest of Ireland entirely. The ambiguity of Cromwell's position in history for many is here emphasised as the story portrays him firm in his purpose, strongly believing in the necessity of his actions for the good of England. Most of the slaughter of women and children is portrayed as occurring against Cromwell's explicit orders. It's unfortunate actor Clive Mantle chose to deliver Cromwell's lines like a broad villain.

It's certainly a morally murky story for Doctor Who which makes it particularly memorable. The Doctor finds himself not saving the world this time but compulsively helping the one or two people he can. The show could use a few more episodes like that.

Twitter Sonnet #831

Insistent strings rain down from guitar clouds.
A job of plumbing came for wigless men.
An honest pate will gleam bereft of shrouds.
No tree took root in sand could know of sin.
A card provoked the wool to smooth its coat.
Adherence blanked the warmth in thermos time.
However duck detection cleared the moat.
There's no boxer accounting tabs in brine.
Misidentified sea shells sink the bank.
Giraffes provoked by war reveal their rage.
The baited bulls rewound the tapes by rank.
With VHS there's no turning the page.
A rabbit will return invisible
The whisky purely indivisible.

Tybalt Time

Now here's a baby faced Alan Rickman in his first credited screen role as Tybalt in a 1978 production of Romeo and Juliet for the BBC. This was actually the first episode of the celebrated series of Shakespeare plays produced for the BBC in the 70s and 80s--part of the same series which includes the Richard II I talked about a few days ago. Rickman's is one of several supporting performances that greatly outshine the leads in this version which features great costumes and sets and some surprisingly well coordinated action sequences but some rather disappointing interpretations of the text.

Of all the stand out supporting performances here the best is probably Celia Johnson as Juliet's nurse. She warmly takes to motherly mannerisms and conveys a truly touching affection for the girl and yet it's the interpretation of this character that's one of the chief problems of the production. All of the nurse's lines reflecting reluctance to pass information between the two young lovers is portrayed as coy teasing rather than reflecting the truly troubled misgivings that seem more rational for a woman aiding a budding romance between the young girl she's cared for all these years and a rash young man belonging to her master's rival family.

As Juliet's mother is Jacqueline Hill, that's Barbara, one of the first companions on Doctor Who. She does a decent job here though Michael Horden as her husband is a little more interesting, infusing the Capulet patriarch with a charmingly befuddled quality, fitting for how easy going he is about hearing Romeo has turned up at his party. Rickman ably makes Tybalt burn with youthful enmity, viewing the cocky Romeo. I'd certainly rather have seen him playing Romeo than Patrick Ryecart.

Ryecart has a nice voice, a bit Patrick Stewart-ish, but with none of Stewart's talent. He's a bit over the top and flat at the same time. Rebecca Saire as Juliet isn't bad for a fourteen year old but not especially great. There was apparently some controversy about the actors' ages--Ryecart was in his twenties--though few seem to remember that Juliet is established multiple times in the play as being thirteen years old.

It'd been quite a long time since I'd read or seen a production of Romeo and Juliet. I found myself impressed mainly by the scene where first Mercutio and Tybalt fight and then Romeo and Tybalt fight, though Anthony Andrews is a bit over the top as Mercutio. In itself it's a wonderfully constructed tragedy, Romeo trying his damnedest to keep peace for the sake of his love for Juliet but alas honour pricks everyone on.

A Sheriff, a Colonel, an Angel, an Alchemist

And now Alan Rickman, cancer takes another talented man born in London 69 years ago. Like many people I first became aware of him as a man who played villains, most notably in Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. He was, to put it lightly, the best thing about that latter film where he managed to single handedly bring charm and humanity to a two dimensional character.

It was in Ang Lee's 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility that I really began to appreciate just how talented he was, though. In a role that was by no means front and centre, he plays the long suffering Colonel Brandon with understated grace. Many people comment on Rickman's extraordinarily beautiful deep voice. That voice was an instrument and Rickman knew how to play it, knowing to play with restraint, particularly with a director like Ang Lee who's talented at using very subtle moments in an actor's performance to say quite a lot.

On the other end of the spectrum, Rickman was brilliant, too, bringing the right edge to the broader and funnier angel in Kevin Smith's Dogma. Frequently playing characters much put upon, in Dogma his elegance gives you the impression he really doesn't deserve such fatiguing circumstances but he tiredly recognises it's the nature of life.

I've never read the Harry Potter books and I don't quite remember how many of the movies I've seen, certainly not the final two, though I couldn't avoid gathering that Snape, the initially villainous character Rickman plays in the series, ends up being rather tragic, an arch that sounds intriguing enough in Rickman's hands to make me want to finish watching those movies.

Despite the noted beauty of his voice, Rickman didn't think he was much of a singer and we have Tim Burton to thank for talking him into singing for Burton's best movie of the past fifteen years, Sweeney Todd.

Rest in peace, Alan Rickman.

Now, see if you can spot all the references in this sonnet:

Twitter Sonnet #830 for David Bowie

The supermen in shadow stations pass
A needle film on orange landscape to Earth.
A man who fell and sold the width of glass
Had measured valentines at crashing worth.
Cygnet committees smell the set too sweet.
Candidates write violent journals for Blue.
Grace gives us a slow burn glass spider neat.
The angel changes little wonder you.
The young and frightening Americans
Recede before the dogs of sailors fighting
Seven days we have to Space Boy's tin cans,
Five years to the tin machine's read lighting.
The next day cast the day where we could swim
In star man light no flies or guns could dim.

Sense of Doubt

One should never confuse Shakespeare's Richard II with his Richard III. The two kings are very different, where Richard III is perhaps the better play for its crystal clear rendering of such a thoroughly ruthless man, Shakespeare creates a more conflicted character in the second king of the name. In all the productions I've seen there's a sense that he is at least partially motivated to preserve the peace in breaking up the duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, though generally in everything, including securing good opinions of himself, he seems as though he's motivated by narcissism. Which of course results in that prolonged scene where he simply cannot abandon the stage quickly to give his crown over to Henry IV. A couple weeks ago I watched a nice 1978 production for the BBC with Derek Jacobi playing the role ably, his sometimes broad, very emotive style more suited to this more than to the role of Hamlet, which I saw him as in a production from the same BBC series of Shakespeare plays. But the standouts for me in this Richard II were John Gielgud as John of Gaunt, Wendy Hiller as the Duchess of York and Mary Morris as the Duchess of Gloucester.

Jon Finch is also good as Bolingbroke and I was happy to finally see the production of Richard II that shares the same actor in the role of Henry IV as the very nice production of Henry IV that was broadcast a year later as part of the same series. He's solid enough here though the role is kind of periphery at this point, as crucial as it is to the plot.

Gielgud has the lovely "this blessed plot" soliloquy. I see the only copy of the speech from this production on YouTube is a badly formatted one uploaded by the British National Party:

I'm guessing this was meant to use the speech as a call to preventing foreigners from entering the country though the emphasis of the "Hath made a shameful conquest of itself" unintentionally reminds us that the play is about a king ordained by all law and tradition that needs to be deposed by an interloper for the good of the country. The criticism of Richard's selling charters to raise funds for his foreign wars is more an indictment of (what would come to be known as) capitalism than it was anti-Marxist

Gielgud is also good in showing subtly his complex feelings of uncertainty with Richard, initially supporting his decision to break up the duel but then finding he ought to have followed his heart rather than see his son exiled.

This play largely about male characters has some great scenes for women emphasised by two excellent actresses. Mary Morris as the Duchess of Gloucester makes a speech I found tedious in another production really gripping as she pleads with John of Gaunt regarding her murdered husband.

Wendy Hiller, as the Duchess of York, is also a woman who's forced to plead with men for justice she cannot obtain herself as she seeks pardon for her son despite her husband, played by Charles Gray (the Expert from Rocky Horror Picture Show), advocating the execution of their son for treason. There's some irony that Richard's seeming leniency was part of a weakness while in Bolingbroke it is here shown as a strength. Hiller is a big part of creating this impression as the passion of her pleas come off as so real and familiar, oddly I found myself feeling like I knew this woman and believed her plight.

Janet Maw as Richard's queen is also effective in her scene where she finds out about her husband's changed state through the gardener. The production has beautiful costumes and sets.

A Long Prophecy

It must have been nearly twenty years since I watched 1983's The Hunger. I sort of meant to watch it again after director Tony Scott died a few years ago, now Bowie's dead and I finally got to it last night. As a vampire film it would inevitably be about death to some extent but I think only Werner Herzog's version of Nostferatu is the vampire film more fixated on the nature of death. There's a quote from Susan Sarandon on the Wikipedia page where she says the film's about addiction, and maybe that's true for her character. But for Bowie's character it is most certainly about ageing and death.

And yes, that's David Bowie under all that rather impressive though, we know now, not prophetic makeup. I wonder if the ageing and dying aspect drew him to the script. It occurred to me that as fitting as ★, and the track "Lazarus" in particular, is as a final album before his death, really most of Bowie's albums sound like they may have come from a man about to die who really doesn't want to, while at the same time portraying a compulsive grasping at life beyond the point of pleasure as unhealthy. The Man Who Sold the World, "The Supermen", "Quicksand" and "Oh! You Pretty Things" from Hunky Dory, "DJ" from Lodger, "Thursday's Child" from Hours--and I haven't even scratched the surface, I could go on and on. The tone isn't always the same but the conclusion is. Many of the songs are, like The Hunger, also arguably about addiction but I'd argue saying anything is about "addiction" is kind of a closed loop. Addiction just isn't a subject by itself if you're treating it properly, addiction is a method, a path. Saying "Ashes to Ashes" is about addiction would be like saying Psycho is about murder. It's true but it's inadequate in a way that does a bit of a disservice to the work.

My one memory about my first reaction to The Hunger was the feeling that it would've been a better film if it'd had more Bowie. I'd say the same now but for probably different reasons. His story is far more interesting than the one focused on Susan Surandon's character though both she and Catherine Deneuve give fine performances. Deneuve in particular is wonderfully subtle, a manipulator who is expert in that she knows how to let people lead themselves into her traps. Though her story with Bowie is more interesting for portraying the conflict in the woman who must condemn her lovers to eternal torment in order for her to be with them. In the second half, it's little more than a standard Hammer horror plot about a vampire seducing an innocent woman into thralldom. The ending of the film, which abandons so many of the crucial rules set forth early on, feels like it derails for the sake of formula.

It's certainly a beautiful film and it seems like at this stage of his career Tony Scott had more than a few stylistic mannerisms in common with his brother Ridley, particularly in his habit of layering dialogue quietly from one scene over another and then cutting back to the first scene. Though where Ridley was so into sequins, beads, and droplets, Tony seems to have been really into billowing drapes.

Bowie Continued

I had one personal interaction with David Bowie. Plenty has been said about how much Bowie foresaw about our modern world. What's not often talked about anymore--in fact I'm surprised to see it doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry--is BowieNet, the Internet service Bowie launched in the late 90s. I was already hardcore into Bowie by that time, I can't remember how exactly I came to him, it may have been the Lost Highway soundtrack as mostly I just listened to movie soundtracks in high school and Lost Highway was my gateway into rock music. I do remember the first Bowie album I owned was the compilation ChangesBowie. It must have seemed quite surprising to find such a different sound from the same man who made "I'm Deranged", the song featured in Lost Highway, but to be honest I don't remember. It might have been something like the first time I saw Tom Baker as the Doctor--something new and yet somehow perfectly familiar, like he'd somehow always been there.

Bowie was quite an active participant on BowieNet. He posted in his forums under the screenname "Sailor" and of course wasn't believed when he revealed who he was. It wasn't until he went so far as to announce it on stage that people finally believed he was legit.

I remember very little about those forums from fifteen or so years ago and a lot of people had a lot more interaction with Bowie than me--including the poor sod who made the mistake of mouthing off about how Pete Townshend was too old to be making rock music. Already sensitive about his age, Bowie launched into a series of scathing replies for which he eventually apologised. Even though of course he was right, just by being David Bowie, a rebuke from him must have been like getting struck by lightning.

Anyway, Bowie also had a rather infrequently updated blog on which he at one point started posting updates from an old diary and I wish to hell I could remember whose diary it was. It may well have been Samuel Pepys. Bowie asked the forum if people found the posts interesting and I said something like, "Yes, I like to hear what the old fellow has to say," to which Bowie replied with a laugh, repeating the "old fellow" bit and saying that he'd continue the posts. I'd been referring to the writer of the diary in saying "old fellow" and suddenly I was terrified thinking Bowie'd thought I was referring to him.

That might be the sum total of my interactions with Bowie. But he supposedly had other alts in the forums, so who knows? Someone even asked if I was Bowie once.

One of the things I really liked about BowieNet was its section for sharing art and creative writing. You were able to give up to three "Kharma points", basically likes, for a post. I submitted several drawings to the art section, two of which, after they'd gone through the hold period before being posted, immediately had twenty Kharma points. Again, no one person was able to give more than three Kharma points but I imagined at least one person could give as many as he wanted. Regardless of whether or not that person was Bowie, the two pieces were each featured on the main art page, one of them mentioned on the main BowieNet page, so in any case I figure he must certainly have seen them. I've always been sort of proud of that. Heaven help Bowie if he had any hand in encouraging me with my art. These are the two pieces:

Headache

The Flower Eater

I suppose BowieNet didn't last because you had to pay for it. One of the many impressive quotes I saw on Twitter last night from Bowie--and it seemed like everyone was talking exclusively about Bowie all night--was this one from a 2002 New York Times article:

His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started and watches the Internet's effect on careers. ''I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way,'' he said. ''The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.''

''Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,'' he added. ''So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen.''

In spite of the fact that he was absolutely right, I still bought his final album, ★ (or Blackstar) on iTunes and stayed up late listening to it and reading all the lyrics. Tony Visconti has confirmed Bowie composed the album knowing he was going to die soon, that it was intended as a sort of farewell. Compared to his previous album, though, ★ is not elegiac but uncertain, like something strange and uncontrollable bubbling up. It has the feeling of working without a net over an abyss, its intentional melodic discord connecting with several songs about women--"'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore", "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)", and "Girl Loves Me"--in that in each of them the singer seems unsure of the legitimacy or the value of his love for the woman he's singing about. The site Genius, which I've just discovered, has quite a lot of information on the lyrics and informs me that "Girl Loves Me" is composed partly of the Nadsat slang language from A Clockwork Orange and of Polari, the slang of 70s London gay clubs--also referenced by Morrissey in his song "Piccadilly Polari". Both would seem to indicate a lack of care for or interest in the girl he's singing about yet I found something oddly affectionate about the song, more than most of the others on the album.

The final track, "I Can't Give Everything Away", compels scrutiny for being the final track not only of the album but of Bowie's life. Its first verse:

I know something is very wrong
The pulse returns the prodigal sons
The blackout hearts, the flowered news
With skull designs upon my shoes

Certainly filled with a fearful foreboding. What is the everything he can't give, to whom? The impression I have is that he simply can't countenance giving everything to Death. And of course he didn't.

David Bowie

I couldn't even begin to properly address the death of David Bowie. It seems impossible. Like an integral part of reality has been taken away.

Who but David Bowie would release such a perfect single just before his death?

There's no one even slightly like David Bowie. A being isolated on a wavelength just next door to everyone else's, he was both exquisitely alien and absolutely human. He was so obviously filled with love and enthusiasm for life and art and despite this his darkest works seemed incredibly powerful, completely genuine.

To say he was beautiful soul doesn't even begin to cover it.

It's hard to imagine any heaven or afterlife more wonderful than David Bowie.

The Spaceship Knows which Way to Go

How many great movies and television series begin with the mystery around a beautiful dead woman? Laura and Twin Peaks come to mind. One could easily interpret it as a male writer treating the subject of distance between men and women, the desire for intimacy with a being who is different in obvious ways and in ways a young person can't understand. The classic 1974 anime series Space Battleship Yamato couples this psychological compulsion and anxiety with Japan's problem with patriotism in the post World War II era. The result is a fascinatingly beautiful, unfiltered transcription of human fantasy. And I'm only three episodes in.

The story begins with two young men discovering a crashed alien spacecraft on Mars and a beautiful dead woman bearing a message from the distant planet Iscandar.

It is an offer of safe haven for the human race which faces the simultaneous threats of a decaying planet Earth and obliteration by an alien military force called the Gamilas. The hope for mankind has two focal points: the planet Iscandar and the Battleship Yamato.

The same two young male protagonists also discover the decaying hulk of the famous World War II battleship. It's rebuilt in secret underground as a spacecraft bearing some structural similarities but outfitted now with the faster than light travel technology found with the dead woman on the Iscandar craft. The two men become crew members and their captain is the gruff and mysterious Juzo Okita.

You have a father figure with the captain and a mother figure in Iscandar and bringing the two together, against all odds, is the only hope for humanity. But of course the mother figure is confused with sexual attraction. The men meet a beautiful nurse who ends up joining them on the Yamato who is there to warmly congratulate them on their first successful battle. She is a sort of mother as well but we're also made aware of her as a sexual being--not by the men but by a weirdly licentious robot.

Who programmed this robot to lift women's skirts and grope their breasts? It's not explained but these things are on the show in place of any show of sexual attraction on the part of the men (so far). The desire to revere women and keep them distant seems only capable of coexisting with lust if the lust is transferred to a robot whose actions based on that lust preclude emotional intimacy.

We also have some really beautifully animated sequences depicting the historical Yamato. Those who've followed the nature of Japan's national pride in films of the previous three decades will find this stuff really fascinating. From the strong pride in the emperor depicted in propaganda films like Kurosawa's The Most Beautiful, post-War films in Japan, incidentally some of the greatest films ever made, are permeated by a sense of floundering identity and guilt as ideals of democracy imposed by American occupiers coexist with the sudden and total loss of a national spirit of devotion to a common cause, in films as diverse as Naruse's Floating Clouds and Suzuki's Gate of Flesh. So the resurrection of the Yamato and attaching hope to it has an incredible thematic resonance, it's no wonder the show was so beloved.

The series was released in the U.S. as Star Blazers in 1979 and can you guess which two aspects were edited out? All references to World War II and all the robot's sexual misconduct. In other words, two of the most significant psychological aspects of the show.

It's a shame because, like so many great, old anime series, one of the best things about Space Battleship Yamato is the feeling that this stuff didn't pass through some moral committee. Whether or not we approve of the show's attitude toward World War II or sex it's very honest. It's how good art is supposed to work. Director Leiji Matsumoto and writer Yoshinobu Nishizaki put themselves into it without prescriptively analysing themselves and that visible heart is complex and beautiful.

Twitter Sonnet #829

Economy dumplings redeem tickets.
At every branch of meal you get gingham.
Now sinking in pudding are bad wickets.
Accuse the night's nostril in old Arkham.
Amoeba shops were once but one retail.
A Sith's own bobble head beheld the mall.
Religious cards are packed for quick resale.
A pocket pen can try to take a call.
A secret cellophane profaned the pope.
Leftover snow reformed the depths of coal.
Amphibians give tips on how to cope.
A piece of cake is harder than the whole.
The oldest ship of long defeat emerged.
Strange hope and far distant planets converged.

The Damage Caused by Comedy to the Time Line

Well, here's one instance where I really don't mind the Doctor Who television series completely ignoring the audio play continuity--the 2006 Fifth Doctor audio play The Kingmaker decides for some reason to portray the Doctor as harbouring what might be described as disgust for the Bard. Shakespeare himself coming across almost as a villain, all of which is pretty much contradictory to the few mentions Shakespeare'd had on the television series before that point and was pretty thoroughly contradicted by the 2007 episode "The Shakespeare Code".

Yet "The Kingmaker" isn't altogether bad, I sort of liked the idea of the Doctor going back in time with the intention of meeting Richard III to find out just how much of his reputation was true. Though I don't understand the obviously deliberate attempt to make King Richard sounds like the Ninth Doctor--he even says the catch-phrase "Fantastic!" at one point. The actor playing him, Stephen Beckett, does a pretty decent Christopher Eccleston impression but it's never clear why he's doing it, what it's supposed to mean. Maybe if it hadn't come from the era when Big Finish audio productions weren't allowed to directly reference anything in the series from 2005 and beyond the idea would have been clearer.

Peri and Erimem are very entertaining in a subplot, though, as they get jobs in a tavern that somehow leads them to posing as the King's nephews--the princes whose murders the Doctor is trying to ascertain the true culprit for. The Doctor also has some funny lines, I particularly liked his response to Richard who asks him, after he's chained him up, what he's doing here: "I'm a performance artist from the 20th century and this is my latest installation, I was going to call it 'Two Men Chained to a Wall' but then I thought 'Freedom' would give it a bit more intellectual gravitas."

Dekpa Sees Reason in the Beast

The next chapter (really Chapter 1 since the first was the Prologue) of The Devils Dekpa and Deborah is online. I also revamped the main site a bit.

The action goes to West Africa and you finally get to meet Dekpa. Enjoy.

A Concurrent Massacre

During the English Civil War, in the 1640s, Matthew Hopkins murdered hundreds of women with official sanction from Parliament. His profession was discovering and exterminating witches by methods now infamous. The 1968 film Witchfinder General was based on the life of Hopkins, paying to some extent impressive attention to the the historical circumstances of England at the time but falling short in its conceptions of characters.

Vincent Price as Hopkins intelligently exceeds the screenplay's broad depiction of the man, the actor playing him less as the deceitful opportunist he's written as but as something scarier, a man who sincerely believes in what he's doing. This performance coupled with the screenplay which has him using his position to extort sex from women he might otherwise accuse and torturing people out of personal motivations manages to make him come across as extremely delusional in a rather credible way.

Less interesting is a romance between a Roundhead soldier, Richard (Ian Ogilvy), and the daughter of an Anglican priest, Sara (Hilary Dwyer). Not much is made of the fact that the two are essentially on separate sides of the ideological conflict but it is interesting that these roles and conflicts are portrayed and acknowledged.

Oliver Cromwell himself makes a brief appearance, portrayed by Patrick Wymark, the scene mostly derailed by an unfortunate attempt to replicate with imperfect makeup Cromwell's facial warts. It's difficult to concentrate on much else in the scene as one is struck by how fake the warts look and the idea the filmmakers thought they were a good idea.

The movie deviates quite significantly from history in the climax in order to find a somewhat cheap, satisfying conclusion. The greatness of Price's performance here makes one wish the film had been played slightly less for the cheap seats.

Twitter Sonnet #828

Re-tumbled chocolate wrappers clung to gods.
Say whoever thought of grey phones was young.
Then nothing's left to say about the odds.
The candy subtitles please any tongue.
Upside down canes bestow grace peppermint.
Good movies line the seats in secret planes.
An everlasting spider took the mint.
Begun in mismatched teeth, the pretty Dane's.
The Holy Grail was filled with mushy rice.
Janus artist has everything she needs.
If you see two heads, 'salright, don't think twice.
To us the cowrie's worth more than the beads.
A grain of candy cane recalls the pine.
The lives a Santa drinking later wine.

The Desperate Hand

Those wide eyes under those heavy, dark brows. So much of Robert Bresson's 1959 film Pickpocket depends on them. The owner of those eyes and brows was Martin LaSalle, who was not an actor, and he and the rest of the cast deliver solemn, unemotional performances, part of a beautiful exercise in subtlety.

A pickpocket has to be very subtle. We see Michel (LaSalle) take wallets from breast pockets, facing his victim as he does it.

How do those eyes not give away everything the way they communicate everything to us? Because LaSalle is actually conveying very little it's believable even as we, the audience, understand the desperate emotions and motives behind Michel's undertaking. Bresson didn't cast actors, he cast faces.

The same goes for the angelic young woman, Jeanne (Marika Green), who lives in the same building as Michel's bedridden mother. The two actors walk stiffly around and deliver lines flatly at each other but there's something so honest about it. I don't know if you could do something like this to-day where every non-actor is hyperaware of film and television. We to-day only have good actors and bad actors, there are no more non-actors like you see in some French New Wave and Italian Neorealist films.

The reserved nature of the characters whose faces signify so much magically makes a very simple story of a man turning to crime and a woman helplessly falling into his life through need and a sense of responsibility seem complex and extraordinarily innocent. Michel's life of crime requiring deception and slight of hand seems all the more precarious for his complete lack of guile, and yet that same reserve makes his effectiveness completely believable. But more than anything, the people in this film seem naked and completely at the mercy of circumstance, every intention has only a fifty percent chance of achieving results.