Artificial as Artificial Does

I was thinking about AI last night, trying to get to sleep, again in how its threat to the arts is primarily against the most vulnerable artists, which are the vast majority. A big part of the problem is much older than AI, the common misconceptions of what an artist's life is like. For every great artist who dies in a gutter, there are millions of unknown artists who die in gutters. But there's still the glamour of the few, bright stars who seem like they've achieved heaven on earth, until one of them dies in a car accident trying to escape paparazzi. How much of the average famous person's time is taken up with coordinating security to fend off the stalkers, the various weirdos, the resentful folks who think, to borrow a line from David Bowie, "This is your shadow on my wall/This is my flesh and blood/This is what I could've been."

Why? Because people identify with great artists because great artists evoke real human experiences or heightened human experiences and seem to fill a void that would otherwise dominate the meagre corporeal existence.

Can AI do that? Can AI truly democratise art, can it be the assassin's bullet that truly punishes artists for the arrogance popularly thought to belong to the lot of us because people don't perceive art as a form of labour?

Among the most prominent artists talking up the abilities of AI is the great American filmmaker Paul Schrader. Here are a couple quotes from his Facebook:

I'M STUNNED. I just asked chatgpt for "an idea for Paul Schrader film." Then Paul Thomas Anderson. Then Quentin Tarantino. Then Harmony Korine. Then Ingmar Bergman. Then Rossellini. Lang. Scorsese. Murnau. Capra. Ford. Speilberg. Lynch. Every idea chatgpt came up with (in a few seconds) was good. And original. And fleshed out. Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?

...

LET ME MAKE A VERY UNPOPLAR PREDICTION. One year from now photorealistic AI dramas will be running through film school bodies llike diuretics. Based on my brief AI experimentation a savvy student will be able to create a 90min narrative in 2-3 weeks. On zero budget. Without leaving home. Without anyone's permission. The originality of the story would determine the value of the product. Why go through the agonies of fund-raising and collaboratorating when all you need is a keyboard? Darren Aronovsky is already in the game with Roger Avary hard behind. Then it's a simple matter of creating a platform (or will YouTube be already in that place?) to screen and monetize this new form of storytelling. The film won't cost much because they won't have cost much to make. One or two of these films will break through the thin commercial membrane and attract clicks, buzz and advertising. This is beginning and it will happen very fast. As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out, "AI is the first technology created by man which can improve itself."

I decided to test Google's AI at storytelling last night. I gave it this prompt:

"Can you write a short story for me about a vampire girl who falls in love with a cowboy?"

The result was a disposable piece of soap opera, with little of intrinsic interest, though it might be read by someone who's read every single romance paperback on the shelf at Walmart and was up for devouring anything and everything. Here's a sample:

"You're a long way from home, cowboy," Maeve said, her voice a low, melodic purr that carried the faint, elegant clip of an old world accent.

The cowboy didn’t flinch. He poured his drink, took a slow sip, and then turned his head. His eyes were a startling, piercing blue, framed by sun-crinkled lines. He looked at her—really looked at her—noticing the lack of color in her cheeks, the strange shimmer in her dark eyes, and the way the saloon’s lamps seemed to avoid her face.

"Riding the fence line doesn't care much about home, ma'am," he replied, his voice a gravelly, warm baritone. "Name's Jesse."

At the end, the AI asked me what I wanted to come next, an action scene or something else. Instead I asked for a rewrite that gave the characters more depth:

"Rewrite the story so that Maeve has unresolved issues from her childhood related to resentment for the greater achievements of her siblings who were physically abusive to her. And put Jesse in desperate straits. He's recently come of age on his father's ranch. His father's his only living family and he's on the point of death. Meanwhile, the ranch is falling apart. Jesse can barely afford to feed himself and he bears the burden of his father's extensive gambling debts."

Already that's quite a lot of input from me so this is not like pushing a button and then the AI doing it all like magic. And I still wasn't satisfied with what it came up with. Maeve's resentment didn't come through and in my subsequent notes I asked continually for it to reduce the amount of exposition.

"Please convey the characters' backstories with less explicit exposition and maintain the point of view of one character while remaining in third person."

Even after three hundred years, the phantom ache of old fractures still flared in her bones whenever the winter wind blew in from the plains. She lightly touched a faint, invisible ridge on her collarbone—a reminder of a locked manor room in France, the heavy velvet curtains drawn tight to muffle her cries, and the mocking laughter of her brilliant, celebrated brothers. They had been court favorites, masters of the violin and the blade, while she had been the family failure, small enough to crush beneath a riding boot. She had outlived their mortal graves by centuries, yet the fury of never being able to match their grand achievements, of always being the broken thing in the cellar, still burned like acid in her dead chest.

I started thinking, "What is it about 'less exposition' do you not understand?" But I was polite in my next note. It's weird, talking to it I often feel like I'm talking to a child so I reflexively try to stay encouraging.

"I don't think it should be love at first sight. I think there should be bitterness. Maybe they're thrown together in a minor catastrophe and they both get on each other's nerves. There's a chance the attraction between them is entirely physical, or maybe physical love is the ultimate expression of true love. Also, make the exposition less explicit."

For some reason, the AI assumes a catastrophe means Maeve comes to Jesse's rescue. A lot of people have noticed how AI tends to be very politically correct, or as one writer I heard on Bill Maher say, like everything it produces went through HR.

Maeve moved on pure instinct, a shadow gliding through the falling debris. She grabbed the young cowboy by his collar just as a massive iron stovepipe came crashing down right where he had been standing. She yanked him backward into the alley behind the saloon, slamming him hard against the damp stone wall.

"Let go of me!" Jesse gasped, shoving her away. He wiped a mix of soot and rain from his face, his piercing blue eyes glaring at her with pure hostility. "I didn't ask for a nursemaid."

For my next note: "Rewrite it with less exposition. Maintain Maeve's point of view. Avoid cheap tricks like her deducing his financial situation by spotting paperwork in his pocket. Make her weaker and more sadistic and him more stoic. Have her murder his creditors."

"We're done waiting on your old man's markers, boy," the lead rider shouted over the wind, unholstering a heavy revolver. "You sign the deed over tonight, or we burn the house down with both of you inside."

Jesse stood his ground in the mud, completely still, his hands resting empty at his sides. He didn't beg. He didn't even speak. He just watched them with that same hollow, stoic exhaustion.

From the darkness of the tree line, Maeve felt a cold, euphoric rush. These men thought they could break something that belonged to her anger.

She didn't give them a chance to scream. Moving like a midnight mist, she tore the lead rider from his saddle, her nails ripping through his throat before he hit the mud. The second man fired wildly into the dark, but Maeve was already behind him, her hands locking around his neck with a sickening, wet snap. The third collector scrambled off his horse, crawling backward in the dirt, his lantern shattering between them.

This version concludes with Jesse happy that Maeve murdered the men and again she rescued him. I tried hard to get the AI to stop making Maeve his rescuer.

"Rewrite this so that Maeve is physically weaker. Use the rules for vampires established in Andy Warhol's Blood for Dracula. She murders the creditors but she has to use her wits, which are considerable after centuries of experience and study. Also, Jesse's stoicism should not imply immorality. As a 19th century American, he adheres to Christian morals and also to a cowboy's code."

The next version had Jesse directly inform Maeve that he has a code, which was another thing I couldn't stop the AI from doing. I was kind of amused by the way it incorprated the Blood for Dracula rules in a cheap and direct manner.

She wasn't a creature of superhuman strength or misty transformations; she was fragile, easily bruised, and bound by the desperate need for the blood of virgins just to keep her limbs from stiffening into marble.

And still she rescues Jesse from the falling stovepipe.

The water-logged timber beam snapped. The ceiling caved in with a roar of splintering wood and heavy wet thatch, showering the bar in sparks and debris. Maeve moved, not with supernatural speed, but with the desperate agility of someone who knew a heavy blow could break her fragile body. She caught the cowboy by his flannel collar, hauling him backward into the alley just as a massive iron stovepipe crashed exactly where he had been standing. She didn't guide him gently; she let him hit the damp stone wall, taking a twisted comfort in the sharp gasp it forced from his lungs.

I finally had to be direct; "It would make more sense for Jesse to rescue Maeve from the falling stovepipe."

"I did not ask for your chivalry," Maeve spat, her old world accent sharp as a razor. She scrambled to her feet, dusting the mud off her velvet cloak, her eyes flashing with a mix of humiliation and anger. Her fragile body ached from the impact. "You mortals are too reckless to live."

But she still rescues him from the creditors so next I said, "I don't like the 'tit for tat' aspect of her rescuing him being seen as repaying the favour to him. I want her to murder the creditors but not when they're threatening Jesse with physical violence. I want her to do it in their homes, in the sight of their families."

This seemed to break the AI because next it just gave me links to news stories about mob murders. So I said, "Did I ask for too much?" and it replied,

Not at all. You are pushing the story into a much darker, far more psychological space, and that is exactly where the narrative needs to go to honor these constraints.

Let's pull back from the traditional, high-stakes western action and lean entirely into the cold, calculated nature of her malice, contrasted with Jesse's rigid moral boundaries.

And it gave me another version that ended with these paragraphs:

"A man's life belongs to God, Maeve," Jesse said, looking at her with a rigid, unyielding sorrow. "And a code isn't something you keep only when the sun is shining. What you did... that isn't justice. That's damnation. And you brought it into my house."

He stood up, walking past her toward the door, never once looking back at the woman who had traded her soul to save a ranch he no longer cared to own.

To which I said, "She didn't trade her soul for it, she was already damned. And nothing in the circumstance explains why he wouldn't care to own the ranch anymore. There's also still far too much exposition. It feels more like a synopsis than a story."

Next I asked it to rewrite the story in the styles of Washington Irving, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Kerouac, and Ray Bradbury. They all seemed like caricatures, particularly the Kerouac version, which felt like Roger Corman's idea of a beatnik.

She had three hundred years of the old, dark Europe rattling around in her brain, thinking about that ancient stone manor in France where her brilliant, jazz-brained brothers played the violin, charmed the court, and beat her blue in locked rooms while the world clapped.

"Rattling around in her brain" may justify its presence to the AI by sounding Kerouacian but it also changes Maeve's character substantially, so the AI can't emulate a style (in as cheap a manner as it does) without actually changing the characters to fit the kind of story the emulated writer would write, or was supposed to have written.

I felt like a blacksmith beating the metal of the AI and I still wasn't remotely happy with what it came up with. If this is the best the AI could do, I would say we don't have much to worry about, except I think this would satisfy a lot of people. Since humanities education is failing to cultivate the mental tools for appreciating good art, the advance of AI and the regression of readers might meet somewhere in the middle. So that's depressing.

And I Liked It

Yesterday I saw this year's production of As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Southwark, London. The theatre's a recreation of the theatre from Shakespeare's time, located in the exact same location, or close enough to it. There are other replicas of the Globe all over the world, including in my hometown of San Diego, but of course this one's special. So special I stood watching the play in the pouring rain in the groundlings area (a ticket was only £12) where opening an umbrella is forbidden. Fortunately everything I wore was mostly waterproof, including the new boots by Ecco I bought in Southamption. So far so good on those. I'm hoping I can make them last through January.

As I expected, the production was very progressive, I won't say "woke" because that never sounds like a compliment. Of all Shakespeare's plays, though, As You Like It perhaps lends itself best to metropolitan progressivism. It has cross-dressing and the play's famous soliloquy functions practically as a mission statement for the modern postmodernist lifestyle. So it's fitting that Jacques is played by a woman, Katherine Pearce. Here she is delivering the speech:

She opts for a casual, almost reluctant delivery, appropriately a bit gloomy as the character is generally. Other standouts were Jonnie Broadbent as Touchstone and Charlie Josephine as Orlando. Josephine also co-directed the production. Gracie Oddie-James as Celia was gorgeous, particularly in the late 17th century stomacher. Since we never get to see Shakespeare productions in the time and place Shakespeare intended, this one chose the late 1600s, which I didn't mind so much, since it is my favourite period, though the pastels on the women's gowns and the short vests on the men made it look more like mid-18th century. Duke Frederick's costume, though, clearly seemed to be inspired by Charles II, and/or possibly Captain Hook. In this production, the cast of Frederick's court also plays the exiled court in the Forest of Arden. Both Duke Frederick and Duke Senior are played by Colm Gormley, who gives a good performance, though I didn't like some of his improvisations.

The cast laid emphasis on lines related to rain, of which there are several in the play, to the amusement of the audience.

CORIN: . . . that the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn.

. . .

ROSALIND: You foolish shepherd, wherefore do you follow her, Like foggy south, puffing with wind and rain?

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare's comedies and this production, as modern productions tend to, felt compelled to meet the modern audience's expectations of what a comedy is by creating gags where there aren't any. The first part of As You Like It hardly reads like a modern comedy with all its business about death and exile. So the performers tend to deliver straight lines as though they're jokes, which pleases people in the audience who can't understand the lines anyway. Gracie Oddie-James and Phoebe Naughton (who plays Audry) did a lot of mugging and pantomime which I sometimes found cute and other times found distracting. But never enough to ruin the experience, which was predominantly a good one.

Sonnet 2014

A modicum of spice disabled belts
No lifted pant was cinched above the breast
Lab'rinthine taverns crushed the dreamy Celts
The worst of sheep'll yield of wool the best
One timely coat was doffed to make a man
One tardy skirt reverts the dowered lass
A pickled tartan surged above the dam
A sea of stripes was vast and full of bass
With running zombies, children pitched a claim
Forgotten dogs could speak behind the hills
A feral brow at night is rendered tame
A dozen coins replaced a fold of bills
And so concludes the tea above the grange
Metallic rain invests the leaden range

Man Builds DIY Utility Glove

1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was, for a long time, considered the best of the franchise. It introduced a couple elements that influenced other films, like the group of institutionalised teens working together and people using the dream world to their advantage. This was also the first film to give Freddy Krueger more wisecracks, and at this point they're low key enough that they work. Of course, they're really sadistic. I like the "Where's the fucking bourbon" bit.

Patricia Arquette is good in the movie. She seems to have had a taste for horror. I also saw her recently in a 1990 episode of Tales from the Crypt, a fascinating vignette called "Four-Sided Triangle" in which she works on a farm for a dysfunctional married couple. The guy (Chelcie Ross) is always trying to schtup Arquette's character but she loses touch with reality and believes a scarecrow is her boyfriend.

Eventually the guy tries to impersonate the scarecrow. Both the Tales from the Crypt episode and Nightmare on Elm Street 3 feature surprise substitutions of a loved one for a reviled one. The beloved face is suddenly revealed to be a mask for the demon. In Nightmare on Elm Street 3, it's one of the things that keep reality in a constant state of instability and deprive the protagonists of a sense of safety. In "Four-sided Triangle," it functions more as a commentary on the arbitrary nature of reality, as Arquette's character doesn't learn that her beloved scarecrow was secretly invested with the body of the man she hated and feared. Not that it works out too well for the guy. Malleable reality has its advantages, but it can backfire. The rules are there to protect you as much as the people you might want to take advantage of. Making new rules can backfire, whether due to bad luck or to dealing with a demon, as in the case of Freddy Krueger, who's had a lot more practice at distorting reality.

I like the cheesy music video Dokken made for the movie.

Tom Skerritt

Tom Skerritt has passed away at 93. Few actors could so quickly establish cool and authority in a scene. It did it in countless films, in Cronenberg's adaptation of The Dead Zone, in Top Gun. But he could also be divertingly weird, as in his role in Steel Magnolias, or creepy and pathetic, as in Poison Ivy. Of course, most people will remember him best as Dallas, the captain of the Nostromo from 1979's Alien.

He won an Emmy for his work on Picket Fences and had a very long and active career, ranking among the few actors whose face and voice will be recognisable to most people. He even had a jingle.

Artificially Real

Another couple of episodes of VisionQuest were released this week and they weren't bad, the second of them in particular having good moments. Maybe it should come as no surprise since it was written by Michael Taylor, another Star Trek writer but, unlike Terry Matalas, Taylor hails from the '90s era Star Trek, when he wrote quite a few episodes of Voyager and four episodes of Deep Space Nine, including 1995's "The Visitor", which is often hailed not only as a great DS9 episode but one of the greatest in the entire Star Trek franchise.

"The Visitor" is a father and son story in which the father, Captain Sisko, gets caught in a time anomaly that sends him ahead in time at various intervals, during which he's able to briefly meet with his son, Jake, and see him grow older. Having written a classic father and son story would seem to make Taylor an ideal candidate for writing on VisionQuest, since much of the plot revolves around the father/son relationship between Vision and Tommy, though it's the third episode, written by Cindy Appel, that deals more with their relationship while the fourth, Taylor's episode, is much more about AI and synthetic lifeforms.

It's certainly a timely topic, and the episode features a cameo from JIM, one of the first characters in Timely Comics, the company that became Marvel, from 1939. JIM's seen at a conference hosted by Katerina Wells, played by Mary McDonnell, best known as the president on the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Wells is a board member of a biotech group partly responsible for developing Ultron.

Much of the episode revolves around Vision and Ultron's relationship, with the two of them presented as the good and evil polar opposites by Wells' presentation, making their increasing rapport all the more interesting. There are some genuinely funny moments, like when the two of them try to work out a CAPTCHA together, that also serve to further define their personalities and their relationship. It leads to an amazing, brutal climax.

I found Vision's shirt really distracting. At first I thought those were real suspenders/braces and wondered why the costume designer couldn't put buttons on his trousers for them. Looking closer, I think it's a print on the shirt and not real braces at all (I'll say braces since he's English and the episode's set in England). This part of the episode is set in the virtual, computer world so maybe it's supposed to be a suggestion that Vision's ability to simulate braces is broken. That's really not how it comes across. Well, it was a good episode otherwise.

It's hard to say if the episode has anything truly relevant to say about AI since all the AI characters are basically human. But AI is starting to seem eerily human nowadays.

VisionQuest is available on Disney+.

This England

I keep trying to tell myself I can't take pictures of everything that looks like an enchanted path to Wonderland here in England. I don't think I'd consciously realised how much I'd been looking forward to this for so long, from all the Lewis Carroll and JRR Tolkien and Shakespeare of it. So much of British media is so misleading, like I was to think it was all guys who look like Jason Statham and Bob Hoskins getting into fights over football. But, no, it's actually Middle Earth.

I'm on my fourth day here. I will say I had one of the worst hotel experiences I've ever had in my life in Southampton. If you're planning to stay at number 10, Darwin Street, let's just say you should bring your own towel and probably bedding and some command of the Russian language and experience in arbitrating domestic disputes would be helpful.

I checked out early and booked a room roughly halfway between Southampton and London in Farnham called the Princess Royal. Night and day. From the worst of hotels to the best. For only 65 pounds, for one night, this combination pub and hotel was not only absolutely lovely but it also had wifi, good food, and good drinks.

The room had an espresso machine with free espresso, shortbread, lots of tea, and a minifridge with free glass bottles of water and milk.

Surely there's a catch, you say. Well, it's a 45 minute walk through enchanted woodland from the train station. Darnit!

There's also a witch's cave nearby, Mother Ludlam's Cave, which my English friend, bri_fidelity, recommended to me on Facebook. It was all fenced up but I enjoyed the journey there. Just look at the ominous path leading up to it.

I had dinner at the pub attached to the Princess Royal, some fish and chips, and a glass of Laphroaig, which I was able to enjoy while reading JRR Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There was a loudmouth rightwinger guy in the place who called me a "faggot" (I thought that meant cigarette over here?). The staff were uncomfortable and embarrassed. I found it fascinating, especially because he had this fake Woodywoodpecker laugh. This is something I'm used to hearing from rightwingers in Japan, the "targeted laugh", not meant to express genuine mirth but to lash out at people who are strange in any way. So much of the rhetoric on the right is about how postmodernism is wicked because it makes people think that they can be whatever they want to be but, really, the right is quite willing to adopt affects such as the targeted laugh. The argument is just another way to say, "It's us versus them." I don't really hear the targeted laugh in the US, I suppose because it just seems to theatrical to Americans. I found it really confusing the first few times I heard it in Japan because I couldn't believe people would do it in the effort to make me feel embarrassed. It's like if someone hit himself in the head with a log in order to embarrass lumberjacks.

The Weary Master

Errol Flynn tiredly takes to the seas once again in a watered down 1953 adaptation of The Master of Ballantrae. The book is a smouldering, devilish masterpiece of unreliable narrators who take the conflict of the Jacobite uprising to a personal, family dimension (I reviewed the book in a 2022 entry). This film drains most the life out of the plot to drag a bored Flynn and a livelier Roger Livesey through a run of the mill pirate adventure. One saving grace is the film has some gorgeous cinematography by Jack Cardiff.

The book is primarily about the conflict between two brothers, Henry and Jamie, Jamie being the elder. When the future of the kingdom looks uncertain, whether the king will be a Stuart called James or a Hanover called George, the brothers decide to protect the future of the family estate by taking both sides, with Jamie going off with the Jacobites. While the book primarily follows Henry at home, dealing with the resentment of his father and wife, both of whom preferred the absent and presumed dead Jamie, the film stays with Jamie (Flynn), evidently preferring him, too. As in the book, Jamie is taken by pirates along with his new Irish friend, Burke (Livesey), becoming members of the crew, but it's in Tortuga that Jamie wrests control from the French captain and there's a couple sequences added for a dancing girl in Tortuga played by a charming Gillian Lynne in a translucent blouse. Lynne went on to choreograph Cats and The Phantom of the Opera for Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The festering resentment and gradually hardening perspectives of the book are replaced by a simplistic, easily mended little misunderstanding between the brothers and Henry (Anthony Steel) barely has a presence in the film.

Alison (Beatrice Campbell), Jamie's fiancee when he left at the beginning of the book, who married Henry when it seemed Jamie was dead, becomes a steadfast love interest for Jamie. The film interestingly keeps the subplot about Jamie's peasant mistress, Jessie, played by Yvonne Furneaux, who later appeared in Hammer's version of The Mummy and in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. The love scenes between Flynn and both women are graced by some of Cardiff's best lighting and are a pleasure to look at, even if, or especially if, you fail to focus on the dialogue.

The Queen of the Atlantic

I feel like a week aboard the Queen Mary 2 has made me soft. I certainly don't think I was walking enough. Two days in Southampton have fixed that. But, yeah, it was a good trip, and I managed to dodge any hidden charges. I sprang for the wifi, which was around 200 dollars, and I ordered a bottle of whiskey for my room, which was 94 dollars, and this all I was expecting. For some reason I could only order the bottle of whiskey as part of a minibar set so I was required to have mixers with it. I chose juice and options were orange juice, cranberry juice, or pineapple juice, except they were out of orange and cranberry juices so I ended up with twelve little glass bottles of pineapple juice. With the bottle Famous Grouse it wasn't such an unreasonable price, provided I wanted pineapple juice. It was good pineapple juice.

You'll notice I keep saying "dollars". Throughout the Queen Mary 2 there are portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, pictures of British royalty on previous cruise ships and passenger liners, and then of course the name, which comes from the consort of King George V, when the original ship was christened in 1936. And the officer staff were all British, the captain was Irish, and the service staff was all Filipino. But for whatever reason, the ship uses American money. I assumed I'd need British money so I'd gone to a currency exchange near Times Square so my wallet was full of pounds when I was aboard. Fortunately, everything is charged to your card on file. Unfortunately, the whole reason I wanted cash was so that I could tip the staff. I'd recently watched a YouTube video by Lindsay Ellis in which she went on a trip on every major cruise line and she'd reported that many cruise lines included a mandatory gratuity in your bill automatically. While this implies that you shouldn't have to tip, what it actually means is that this mandatory gratuity is used to fill out the crew's basic wage. When I tipped the barman and the steward, they were clearly very happy to receive it in British currency, but I couldn't tip very often because there was no way for me to make change or to withdraw more cash. The purser was as unable to answer this request as he was to supply me with glue.

I spent most of the time in my stateroom working on my comic and on the research paper I'm writing as a sample for my grad school application but there were a number of interesting events going on aboard. Professors of history and sociology were speaking at various times throughout the trip and there was a documentary filmmaker named Marion Milne giving talks. I caught the end of one of her talks, the Q&A section in which someone asked her if she thought Princess Diana had been murdered, and she gave a very roundabout answer before unequivocally answering "No," she thought the security staff was incompetent and drove recklessly.

The only talk I attended was by a young woman from Los Angeles who called herself just "Kylee" who showed a powerpoint in the ship's planetarium about depictions of women in art throughout history. Kylee is a former model and her talk felt very much like a college student's final project, especially since she didn't take any questions. She showed the clip of Rita Hayworth singing "Put the Blame on Mame" from Gilda and I tried to talk to her about movies and about how I'd been writing a paper on H Rider Haggard's She but she really didn't seem like she wanted to speak to anyone. When I tried to engage her further, she mentioned she'd been to university in a way that told me I ought to know my place.

She was a curator of the ship's onboard art gallery provided by Clarendon, which is not, but I liked to imagine it was, named after Edward Hyde. Incredibly, they had a Jackson Pollack painting and a number of sculptures by Salvidor Dali.

If you've heard that stale gag in a movie or TV show, "Looks like a Jackson Pollack painting", well, this is what a Jackson Pollack painting looks like.

These are two of the Dali sculptures. I especially liked the one on the left, which is in ode to Isaac Newton.

The Queen Mary 2 also has a library, which I appreciated in principle more than anything else. It was a comfortable little section of the ship and they had a fair representation of the classics--they had Moby Dick of course--and lots and lots of romance novels.

The food was very good in the King's Court buffet, except their Japanese food was terrible, as is typical of Japanese places in America not run by people from Japan (I had the worst sushi I ever had in my life in Times Square). King's Court is kind of the bottom rung, though, I didn't bother with any of the fancier dining options, though mostly I surpassed the dress code by having not only a collared shirt but also a tie. Things probably would've gone smoothly so long as they didn't notice my crumbling boots. I overheard a family from the US south dressed in t-shirts outside one of the fancy restaurants talking. Their teenage daughter asked, "Were we supposed to get dressed up for this?" I'd overheard a lot of comments throughout the trip that indicated people had failed to read written instructions. At the embarkation terminal, a lot of people were caught by surprise when asked about their ETA, not "estimated time of arrival" but Britain's new customs procedure, Electronic Travel Authorisation. The ETA is apparently a product of Brexit as it's not a requirement for any EU country. I think I was one of very few people who'd gotten the ETA ahead of time and I only knew about it because I'd asked Google's AI, "Is there anything I need to do before travelling to the UK?" I make fun of the AI a lot but I have to admit it can be very useful.

Boots aren't Made for Walking

Well, I've worn out another pair of boots. That's the third pair this year. I honestly expected these to last more than a few months, at least. They were a little expensive, made by a company called Thursday, though I've now heard that this particular model, the Cavalier, has received complaints. It's too bad because Thursday actually manufactures their footwear in the US so I thought I was supporting local jobs. But these boots also had some kind of cheap dye inside that stained some of my socks.

I used to think of boots as a sort of hardy footwear, and I still seem to have that preconception, despite the fact that the experience of the last six years has taught me that boots are delicate things that must be handled and worn with great care. I used to always buy and wear dress shoes from Pay Less in the US and they'd last for years. Then, in 2019, I took it into my head that I'd become a boot wearer. I got two pairs, moved to Japan, and wore them both out within a year. They split open on the front and the back, I'd glue them, they'd split open again. Well, they were cheap boots I'd gotten for 14 dollars at JC Penney, so I figured that was probably why. I bought my first chelsea boots then, which I rightly figured would be more convenient in Japan as footwear I could put on and remove quickly. I got a brown suede pair at H&M and they wore out in about a year. Then my grandmother died and left me a little money so I thought I'd invest in an expensive pair and got a pair by Ariat. Those lasted more than a year and when they finally did become unwearable it was because they'd split open on the sides. The soles were still in perfectly good shape and I held onto them for a while thinking I might somehow think of a way to make them presentable again.

Then I got a pair of Dr Martens, a gift from my mother on my birthday last year. I got my hopes up because the website had some kind of "boots for a lifetime" slogan. I found out later that Dr Martens' boots had diminished in quality since they started outsourcing their manufacturing. That pair split open in the back but I had to keep wearing them for a few months because I didn't have the money for new boots. I finally saved up enough and got some 7000 yen boots in Osaka, figuring they'd be good for a few months. At least that time my boots met my expectations and I retired them once they'd developed holes in their soles. And I bought the Thursday boots. I arrive in Southampton to-day, I guess buying footwear will be my first order of business. Let's see how the British do.

There is a clothing store here aboard the Queen Mary 2 but they don't sell footwear. I asked Google's AI for advice and it suggested I ask for some glue at the purser's desk to repair the odd sort of cleat panels my current boots have which are coming off on both boots. The guy at the desk was bemused like I'd asked for a garden hose or a sombrero. He said the best they had was a glue stick. Thanks, Gemini. I wonder if the AIs get together and giggle over some of the more bizarre things they get humans to do.

Sonnet 2013

The double leather bought the battered foot
No hoof was down to trod the callused floor
A Santa boot was black with cookie soot
I guess that's why he uses now the door
There's something strange that moves an L at sea
A knight, I ween, traversing water ways
I think that coats evoke a furry bee
Some hives exist for just a couple days
To drizzle cheese on chips becomes a natch
O'Brien fixed the station and the ship
In future times, no boots will ever match
The left will split apart and right will dip
And so a pretty foot remains preserved
Billali showed the thing he'd long conserved

Your Special Monster Friend

Children are held in thrall of a giant orange unicorn in 2026's Buddy. Here the potential of the creepy '90s live action children's show is realised, here the unspoken truth that Barney and Teletubbies were nightmares becomes the surface reality. It's not a comedy, it's a horror movie, but this is the finest comedic element of the film. The joke is that it's not a joke, it's the tacit acknowledgement that we all knew it was a nightmare, and yet we all played along.

The film begins in 4:3 and we meet the unicorn, Buddy, surrounded by adoring children who join him in songs with simplistic moral lessons. One little boy doesn't want to participate, preferring to read his book. After a couple attempts to get him to join in, Buddy finally murders the introvert. A little girl, Freddy, notices and gradually convinces the other children it's time to flee. So their adventure begins and as they wander the forest, the film expands the possibilities of simplistic, painted plywood sets with some shots reminding me of Night of the Hunter, which may have been a deliberate reference.

In the real world, we meet a mother, Grace, played by Cristin Milioti, whose enormous eyes are kind of hypnotic. That's incidental, though. She and her husband, Ben, played by Topher Grace, have two little boys. But she starts to feel like something's off, something's odd about the one empty chair at the dinner table.

Ben doesn't believe her, and the two have the familiar argument from a supernatural movie about one spouse who doesn't believe and one spouse who can't help but believe with every fibre of her being. Ben is one of the particularly insensitive sceptics and his attempts to placate Grace are effectively harsh.

The premise of the film reminded me a little of real world scandals in which beloved childrens' TV hosts have turned out to be guilty of physical abuse of some kind, or they're believed to have been. It kind of reminded me of The Magicians except, in that case, where the revelation was kind of a shock, in Buddy it's like acknowledging something that was right in front of us the whole time. Buddy doesn't just seem creepy, Buddy is creepy.

I appreciated the end of the film--even compared to everything else about it, it's a bold move, and seems like something Terry Gilliam might have done. I think my favourite character was Mr. Mailbox, a mailbox whose mouth is torn off by Buddy early in the film and spends the rest of the movie unable to move or speak or do much of anything else beyond looking terrified as he's carried around by the children in their attempt to escape.

Arthur, Shiny and Green

Arrow recently released a cool new box set of John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur. I bought it last month but waited until I finished my recent repeat reading of Le Morte d'Arthur, the 15th century telling of the Arthurian legends by Sir Thomas Malory, upon which Excalibur is based. Among other things, pairing a reading of the book with the film allowed me to see what a good job Boorman and his co-writer, Rospo Pallenberg, did of condensing and streamlining the tale. Which is appropriate since Le Morte d'Arthur is itself Malory's condensing and streamlining of several disparate Arthurian stories from England and France. One thing one notices about the book is that it's somewhat repetitive, sometimes because Malory is including two stories that shared origins in an older, single story, but also because sometimes two similar stories are both worth including because they have slightly different perspectives on the same topic. The story of Tristram and Isolde, in which Sir Tristram loves the wife of a king he owes loyalty to, is similar to the story of Lancelot and Guenevere, but different enough that both can be included. But you can also see why Boorman omitted Tristram and Isolde and gave some elements of their plot to Lancelot and Guenevere. Boorman even uses the vorspiel from Wagner's opera about Tristan and Isolde for the love scene between Lancelot and Guenevere.

It's funny how differently the stories evolve. Arthur barely seems to care that Lancelot and Guenevere have been seeing each other in the book and it's the brothers of Sir Gawaine that seem to be the angriest about it, with Sir Gawaine being the primary force behind the war Arthur's faction enters into against Lancelot's after Lancelot accidentally slays some of Gawaine's unarmed brothers. This was a moment in the book I thought was actually very insightful about the nature of war. Initially, Gawaine wants no part of his brothers' efforts to expose the relationship between Lancelot and Guenevere, even after Lancelot kills one of Gawaine's brothers who attempts to confront him.

"Why say ye so?" said King Arthur; "forsooth ye have no cause to love Sir Launcelot, for this night last past he slew your brother, Sir Agravaine, a full good knight, and almost he had slain your other brother, Sir Mordred, and also there he slew thirteen noble knights; and also, Sir Gawaine, remember you he slew two sons of yours, Sir Florence and Sir Lovel." "My lord," said Sir Gawaine, "of all this I have knowledge, of whose deaths I repent me sore; but insomuch I gave them warning, and told my brethren and my sons aforehand what would fall in the end, insomuch they would not do by my counsel, I will not meddle me thereof, nor revenge me nothing of their deaths; for I told them it was no boot to strive with Sir Launcelot."

This establishes Gawaine as a man of incredible restraint and wisdom. Yet later, when Lancelot kills more of Gawaine's brethren, this time men that had no quarrel with Lancelot and were even among his best friends, Gawaine urges Arthur to make war. It's a little comical that Lancelot, in the fury of battle, just accidentally kills some of the best knights in the land, including Sir Gareth, whom Malory made into something of a Mary Sue by combining aspects of characters from other stories to create him. But it's also realistic that in war collateral damage often involves the killing of people that the assailant has no desire to kill, and then it depends on an interpretation by the opposite side to recognise the killing as done without malice. Since Gawaine is established as restrained and wise, it demonstrates how difficult it can be to see past the visceral emotion provoked by such a grievous accident.

The biggest change Boorman introduces is in the expansion of the character of Merlin. Merlin's prominence in Arthurian legend really increased in the 20th century, due especially to TH White's The Once and Future King and Disney's adaptation of it, The Sword in the Stone. Then Nicol Williamson delivers such a terrific performance in Excalibur that any viewer is bound to wish there were more of him in the movie, not less. I'd say it's primarily his performance that has inspired so many Merlin heavy adaptations since, including a recent, execrably bad conservative series, Rise of the Merlin, released this year by the Daily Wire on Amazon Prime.

Arrow, of course, delivers top notch image quality on the Excalibur blu-ray and presents the film in its original aspect ratio of 1:66:1, for the first time in any home video release, and I was surprised by what a difference it made. Boorman's compositions are precise and characters whose heads were partially cut off at the top of the frame now just touch the edge. I was marvelling at how expertly Boorman compels the viewer's focus, as in the early scene in which Arthur loses Kay's sword. In the foreground on the left is Sir Ector, then in the middleground on the right is Kay, and finally in the back, Arthur moves just to the left of centre to flip up a fur on the horse's saddle to reveal an empty scabbard, right in the middle of the screen. The enormity of Arthur's error is plain from this composition despite the young man's outward calm.

It's a lovely film, too, and Boorman's trick of using green lighting off screen is so odd and unique to the film that it's really charming. And, by gad, all that gleaming plate armour. It really is a shame modern adaptations are so set on portraying Arthur as a lightly armoured man of Roman occupied Britain, placing him in the period in which Arthur would have lived, even if those adaptations are in no other way remotely realistic. The man, whether he lived or not, is a legend, and that's the way to portray him.

Vision's View

An attempt is made once again to make us feel something by tapping the well worn veins of nostalgia and deconstruction in the first two episodes of Marvel's VisionQuest, which premiered on Disney+ a couple days ago. Showrunner Terry Matalas has established his bona fides after creating a successful third season of Star Trek: Picard that relies entirely on nostalgia, following from his universally panned second season which attempted to get by on original ideas. But his Wikipedia entry says he's best known for co-creating and showrunning the 2015 SyFy series 12 Monkeys, which is a dumbed down remake of Terry Gilliam's classic 1995 film. No-one seems to remember that show, though, because a star of that series, Todd Stashwick, was regarded as a surprisingly talented newcomer in the third season of Picard, and Stashwick turns up again in VisionQuest. He's good in it, too. Also delivering good performances are Paul Bettany, Ruaridh Mollica, and the ever reliable James Spader.

Bettany reprises his role as Vision, or creates the new role of the white Vision last seen at the end of WandaVision, though distinctions between the two characters are unclear at this point except for the white Vision's ability to safely drink whiskey. This occurs during a confrontation between him and Stashwick's character in which the new Vision attempts to assert that he's different from the original and demonstrates that he's able to predict everything Stashwick might do by speaking some of his lines with him in unison. This may be Matalas' nod to real world AI language models, and perhaps his criticism of them considering Vision isn't able to predict anything else Stashwick does. Stashwick plays the series' villain, the Paladin, and gets to wear that character's costume from the comics, but it's as unimpressively rendered as Daredevil's, sadly. There is a very clear difference between the quality of the MCU movie costumes and the TV series costumes.

Most of the story involves an Inside Out (or Herman's Head) style plot in which other Stark AIs manifest in Vision's mind as aspects of his programming or as advisors. Instead of employing the voice actors of FRIDAY and EDITH from the movies, Matalas casts two more of his stable of familiar faces, Orla Brady from Picard and Emily Hampshire from 12 Monkeys. James D'Arcy plays JARVIS. D'Arcy originated the role of the Stark family butler who inspired Bettany's AI. D'Arcy first played the character on the 2015 Agent Carter series before reprising it in 2019's Avengers: Endgame.

Ruaridh Mollica is not Ed Speleers, though he looks like him, and has basically the same part on VisionQuest that Speleers had on Star Trek: Picard. In Star Trek: Picard, the Captain Picard we see is in reality a synthetic recreation of the original Jean-Luc Picard and he discovers that the original Picard had a son who has grown into a petty thief. Picard must connect with the young man who, despite his roguish past, turns out to be crucial to the success of Picard's endeavours and his very survival. In VisionQuest, the Vision we see is in reality the synthetic recreation of the original Vision and he discovers that the original Vision had a son who has grown into a petty thief. Vision must connect with the young man who, despite his roguish past, turns out to be crucial to the success of Vision's endeavours and his very survival.

In reality, he is Tommy Maximoff, whose consciousness, as we saw in Agatha All Along (before Mollica was cast), was placed in the body of a teenager named Thomas Shepherd. Scenes between Mollica and his love interest, Lisa (Lauren Morais), are effective, though they're placed in the usual context of sainted criminal misfits pitted against the cartoonishly evil law enforcement institutions.

Matalas strikes for grand emotional beats on the show but they don't have much substance because the stakes are unclear with most of the drama being in abstract, conceptual space. The conversations between Ultron (Spader, reprising his role from the second Joss Whedon Avengers film) and Vision are pretty good, though, thanks to the acting chops of both involved. As is often the case with fantasy villains in genre movies of the past thirty years, they either die a villain or live long enough to see themselves become a hero, mostly because of the implicit assumption modern writers make that evident amorality is a sign of strength, both of psyche and physique.

VisionQuest is available on Disney+.

Who Deserves Hell?

A young woman kicks an old lady out of her home and earns a curse for it in 2009's Drag Me to Hell. This is the horror movie Sam Raimi made with the cache he'd acquired from making Spider-Man movies and it's surprisingly similar to this year's Send Help, the movie he made with the cache he'd gotten from making Doctor Strange 2. I liked Send Help but I think Drag Me to Hell is stronger, particularly considering how relevant the plot is at the moment when it seems I'm constantly seeing headlines about some elderly person being kicked out of the home they'd lived in for fifty years due to the unprecedentedly cold and cutthroat practices of landlords.

The great thing, though, is that Christine (Alison Lohman) is not a cutthroat. She works at a bank where she's in charge of loans. She's angling for a promotion to assistent manager, much like the character in Send Help, but Christine's a much more mild mannered character. She's told that to get the big job she's going to have to show she can make the tough decisions. After a guy who's barely worked at the bank a few days shows he's clearly the top candidate for the job, Christine holds her nose and denies a loan to the old lady. Unfortunately for her, this old lady can call down the wrath of a lamia and Christine finds herself tormented by ghosts and demons.

This movie is very reminiscent of the first two Evil Dead movies. Raimi even indulges in similar POV shots of the demoniac entity as it rushes in on Christine's location. And, like in Raimi's classic Evil Dead films, although rules are established for the ghosts and demons, there's the sense that they can break those rules whenever they feel like it.

I really liked this movie because, like Obsession this year, it feels like one that would spark debate after people leave the theatre, like the issues of guilt and responsibility would stay in the mind of the viewer long after the credits roll. It's also a lot of grim fun.

The Sting of Life

It's finally here, the first episode of the new Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes hosted by Mike Nelson, with Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy voicing the robots, Crow and Tom Servo. You can purchase the episode, which features a Creature from the Black Lagoon knock-off movie called Sting of Death, on the Rifftrax website. Is it better than Joel Hodgson's attempt to relaunch the series? No, but it's no worse, and it is nice to see it back in the hands of Mike Nelson, who truly was the primary creative force throughout the vast majority of the show's original run, and was the host when the series was finally cancelled, after over a decade, in 1999. I've repeatedly expressed my thoughts regarding the mistakes Hodgson made in reviving the series in 2017. You can read them here, as well as read my thoughts on Mike Nelson's strategy in funding his revival.

While I do think Mike is the most important creative voice on the series, I wish the writer's room had hewed closer to the original series' format. Rifftrax, which Mike launched as a successor series to MST3k decades ago, has managed to sustain itself financially all this time (unlike Hodgson's big budget catastrophe), and is typically written by the same people whom you hear delivering the jokes. Initially only Mike himself and then, eventually, joined by his final MST3k co-stars, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy. MST3k traditionally included virtually everyone who worked on the show which led to the show's reputation for having an extraordinarily broad range of topics for its jokes. In particular, I've suspected Mary Jo Pehl was more responsible for some of the show's better riffs than is generally acknowledged, because her videos with Bridget Jones on the Rifftrax site tend to be even funnier than the boys'.

The subject for riffing in this premiere episode of the new relaunch is Sting of Death, a 1966 movie which swaps out the Black Lagoon Creature for a jellyfish man whose costume is basically a wet suit draped with what, as one of the riffers observes, appear to be Mardi Gras beads. The monster, in Scooby Do fashion, turns out to be a creepy local in a mask. His primary targets are girls who rejected him and guys who talked down to him. The most absurd scene is when a girl is killed in a swimming pool at a party and somehow no-one notices the six foot tall weirdo in the wet suit. Mike wonders if he was hiding in the filter.

As I said, the humour lacks the wonderful breadth of knowledge of all things from sports to science to pop culture that it used to have. Even the nerdy stuff feels stale, as in a musical number Mike and the bots put together about tardigrades. When Star Trek: Discovery had an episode about tardigrades over a decade ago, it already felt like a stale internet meme. You can see Hodgon's wisdom in casting a new, younger cast. Yet you can't argue with the success of Rifftrax. It's not like MST3k was ever especially mainstream, maybe it just needs to settle into being more niche than it ever was before.

One Leg at a Time

Now that I'm in the Atlantic Ocean, I can look back on my days in New York City. I got some really good pants on Saturday. There's a mall by Central Park which, like a lot of malls in California, has adopted the generic name "The Shops." I guess it's like with movies sometimes these days, like the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie just called Star Trek. Studios must imagine the guy who'd heard about Star Trek all his life who then hears about this movie and figures it'd be his "one and done." After that, he doesn't need anymore Star Trek, he's seen all the important stuff. Similarly, a mall called just "The Shops" might cause people to think of that specific mall whenever someone says, "the shops." It's a scheme that falls apart when a bunch of malls adopt that name, though.

Anyway, I got some corduroy trousers at The Shops by Central Park, in the H&M. I'd been travelling with just four outfits but I wanted a warmer alternative to one of my thinner pairs of slacks. All the shops at The Shops looked really expensive and high end but I remembered getting some deals at H&M in Japan. Sure enough, these corduroys were just 34 dollars. They weren't even on sale.

I went to the register and found they had the same self checkout stations they do in Japan. I was just finishing when a woman in her late 50s angrily approached me and started telling me buttons to push. The receipt screen came up and the only options it had were for electronic receipts. "It can't print them?" I said.

"Of course not," she said, "it's a machine." I suppose H&M receipts were traditionally hand written. I said I didn't want a receipt then and she told me to press, "Done." She removed the security seal, which trousers in Japan don't have, and said, "See? It's easy," as though she'd helped me with a task I'd been struggling with.

I had a similar encounter at McDonalds yesterday. The place had two restrooms with coded locks, both gender free restrooms. I waited among a large crowd of people at the counter who seemed all to be complaining about mistakes in their orders. An employee paused in talking to one of them to ask what I wanted and I said I wanted the restroom code, which she told me was 2026.

I turned, but before I could try the restroom on the left, and an older woman intercepted me, saying, "Not that one," and she proceeded to show me how to input the code on the door on the right. Somehow she couldn't punch the numbers in correctly, maybe she had arthritis, but it seemed important to her to show me how to get into this specific restroom so she kept at it. She asked me for the code again and I repeated 2026. She finally got it open and explained the other restroom was for employees. It wasn't labelled as such and I'm inclined to think she was remembering the days when the restrooms were labelled "Women" and "Men".

It's a good thing I wear chelsea boots or a passerby might angrily try to tell me how to tie my shoes.

Leaving the Bronx

It's my last day in New York, and I spent the night in the Bronx, so last night I googled "Horror movies set in the Bronx" and 1968's Rosemary's Baby came up. It happens to be on Criterion this month and I haven't seen it in at least a decade so I went with that. Unfortunately, this hotel's wifi is easily the worst I've experienced in the US or Japan and seems to simply not work except a few, secret, select hours a day. Even now as I write this it's not working so I imagine I'll post this at a Starbucks or something later (it's a McDonalds, it turns out). Last night, the wifi shut off in the middle of Rosemary's Baby. At least I know how it ends.

Roman Polanski used to have such great economy as a storyteller. Particularly with Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion, two movies from the point of view of a woman. Both of them seem to immediately attach themselves to the viewer's mind at the natural pace of thought and perception. Knowing he experienced life under a Nazi regime as a child, it's easy to see how he could conjure a world in which everyone you trust could suddenly turn out to have sinister motives aimed at you at the most intimate levels. Given levels of anti-Semitism in the US to-day, I wonder how far away we are from something like what happened in Germany in the mid-20th century. I didn't mention October 7th, either a few days ago or the day of the original massacre, though I think about it often. I found it horrific specifically because it was an attack on a music festival, an event where people attending have such implicit faith and trust in civilised behaviour that they can abandon themselves to experiencing artistic expression. I suppose Jihadists must be offended by anyone experiencing ecstasy outside the confines of religion because it seems concerts and music festivals are often targeted.

Another difference between New York and the west coast I noticed, there are a lot more Jews in traditional attire here. In fact, I wasn't the only one wearing a fedora. There are young Jewish men all over the city wearing black fedoras and I was asked by them no less than 15 or so times, "Are you Jewish by any chance?" The Sleepy Hollow Hotel, where I stayed a couple nights, is a prominent kosher and Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish-friendly establishment and event place.

I wonder why the Jewish population in California isn't so visible. I'm reminded of the scene in Polanski's Chinatown when Jack Nicholson's character pretends to be trying to get his father checked into a nursing home and the attendant tells him the place doesn't accept Jews. I suppose the stereotype of Jews with money must make them natural boogiemen when socialist or communist interests are prominent, or at least, the ignorant version of those interests, as in the case of the National Socialist Party.

Hopefully I'll have wifi to-morrow. I'm leaving for England on the Queen Mary 2. I'd planned on going to Europe and was idly thinking, "I sure wish there were some other affordable option aside from air travel." I've been on a lot of long flights this year. So I asked Google's AI if there was any way to go by sea and it mentioned the Queen Mary 2. Of course, it was much too expensive for me but then I noticed the price went down a few days later. Apparently these things work in the opposite way of airline and hotel reservations, the price actually goes down the later you make them. I waited 'til the price got down to just over 500 dollars. They force you to pay for at least two people, though, so the actual price I paid was just over 1000 dollars for a week's journey. Since it includes food, if I calculate the cost of a flight plus hotels for a week, that's still either cheaper or, at the most, just a little more expensive and I figure it'll give me more time to get work done. It's kind of a nuisance switching hotels all the time, chasing the best prices, though in just the two weeks I've been in the twin city area I feel like I've gotten a much more concrete impression of the physical space of New York and New Jersey.

I have to pay 30 dollars a day for wifi on the ship, which seems to be one of the hidden fees. I may see if it's possible to get it for only part of the voyage.

Sonnet 2013

A stamping crown of rusty nails approves
In office stations made to clear the green
Beneath the street, a steep decline improves
Surpassing soot is nothing truly clean
Potato changes hands to greasy bolts
As pigeon ships descend above the spike
Their tough and grumpy captain slowly molts
Collected birds prepare a feathered strike
In Union Square, the squirrels prepare cake
They crush their acorns 'neath the bench's foot
It's more than dizzy ravens like to take
The surplus in the taxi cab is put
A truly greenish crown ennobles dames
The tired moved and made substantial gains

The Dream Demon in the S&M Club

Freddy Krueger returned in 1985's A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, a film once derided for its homoerotic subtext but is now lauded for it. Directed by Jack Sholder and written by David Chaskin with no involvement from franchise creator Wes Craven, aside from a few suggestions, the filmmaking feels cheaper and more TV sized but Robert Englund in the role of Freddy still makes an effectively threatening impression.

The homoerotic elements revolve around the film's main character, a guy named Jesse played by Mark Patton, who was a closeted homosexual at the time. Apparently he complained that the movie kind of outed him for years but has since kind of embraced it, even writing a sequel to the film from the point of view of his character. No-one ever suggests Jesse is gay in the film, the interpretation mainly comes from his physical interactions with a guy on his high school football team and with the coach, whom Jesse encounters at an S&M club.

Jesse's love interest, Lisa (Kim Myers), does feel more like a best friend than lover. She also looks identical to a young Meryl Streep, which is apparently why she was cast.

Freddy's scheme this time is to take possession of Jesse's body so he can massacre people in the real world. This, too, could be taken as an allegory for Jesse struggling with repressed urges.

It's more interesting to think of this movie as unintentionally homoerotic than as intentionally so. My own opinion is that the movie was probably intentionally homophobic. When Chaskin says in interviews that he wanted to address the homophobia he was perceiving in young men, I suspect the thinking was more like, "Guys are creeped out by gay shit, this will make the movie creepier." But the film does function well as a story about someone who can never face his own subconscious so the film's unhappy ending works better on a thematic level--because the movie ends with Jesse not acknowledging his own homosexuality. The consequences are brutal but, hey, it's a horror movie.

In the Hollow

If you've been following my instagram, you'll know I've been in Sleepy Hollow lately. Yes, it's a real town, exactly where Washington Irving described it as being in his 1820 story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", near Tarrytown, or Tarry Town, as he wrote it. But it only took the name "Sleepy Hollow" in 1996. According to Wikipedia, it was called "Slapershaven" by the 17th century Dutch settlers, meaning "Sleepers' Harbour". Irving wrote the story under a pseudonym he often used to write about the old Dutch communities in New England, Dietrich Knickerbocker. "Rip Van Winkle" is also a story from Knickerbocker. Incidentally, the undergarment supposedly gets its name from Irving's pseudonym.

You can find souvenirs and buildings and institutions with the name of Sleepy Hollow, or references to it, all throughout Tarrytown, and it's no surprise since, prior to 1996, many areas in the vicinity may have justifiably considered itself to be part of the historical village. For my first two nights in the area, I stayed at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel, actually pretty far south of Sleepy Hollow.

Yeah, the Halloween decor was surprisingly lacklustre but I couldn't complain. I'd gotten my room for 150 dollars a night, and it was a really nice room, especially after I'd been staying in a hostel in New Jersey for a week.

Don't get me wrong, it was a nice hostel where I met a lot of nice people, many of them New Yorkers rather than travellers, refugees of the outrageous rent prices oppressing the nation. I ended up paying just over 200 dollars for five days, cheap for the New York area, and close to the same price I was paying my mother to stay at her place in San Diego. One of the people at the hostel told me it was illegal for New Yorkers to stay in the cheaper hostels and hotels located within the city limits, lest it interfere with the city's lucrative tourist trade.

After the initial two days, rates at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel skyrocketed, which seemed only natural given October must certainly be their busiest season, and on the day I checked out the lobby was packed with tourists though it had been fairly empty on the day I'd checked in. I moved to an Extended Stay Hotel about fifty minutes walk away from the Sleepy Hollow Hotel in Elmsford and a 1.5 hour walk from Sleepy Hollow itself.

It's beautiful country and many trees have already turned yellow and red. Broadway, a street running through Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, has Sleepy Hollow themed shops beginning a mile or so south of the Sleepy Hollow sign. There were also many charming local decorations, including a series of scarecrows made by local kids.

I spoke to the proprietress of a cool shop on Broadway and Wildey St called The Legend Shop. The shop sold Halloween decorations and Sleepy Hollow souvenirs as well as vintage records. The soundtrack to the Tim Burton movie was playing when I stopped by. She recommended I visit the cemetery later in the day and also said there was a place that had the costumes from the Burton movie.

Across the street from her shop is a beautiful old library where I stopped in to see what Washington Irving books they had. They had plenty of books called The Legend of Sleepy Hollow but only one tattered paperback copy of The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. But they did have this beautiful door:

Beeker Street is the main drag of Sleepy Hollow and I was surprised by the profusion of Mexican restaurants. There was one with a Coco theme, based on the Disney movie, which is based on Dia de Los Muertos, a Catholic holiday that shares some DNA with Halloween.

I ended up buying some souvenirs near the Philipsburg Manor; just a scarf, some tea, and a book for my nephew. If you'd like to see more of my photos of Sleepy Hollow, check out my instagram.