Normal Clouds

Twitter Sonnet #68

Hotel squatters are pretty thoughtless hosts.
Stomachs are the first things in the picture.
There are no real ruins on western coasts.
Try finding a Sappho action figure.
Sometimes film's a necessary mirage.
Sauron kind of only knows where you're not.
Still cars are scary in a mall garage.
If bricks were books, chimneys would know a lot.
Yellow groceries are built of square lemons.
Normal clouds are buttered, floating grits.
Zeus balls spam and ramen for his cannons.
Beneath heaven's tea set, a suitor sits.
The scared speed demon's English is pidgin.
Anything can be burned in an engine.

On her twitter to-day, Amanda Palmer posted a link to this very beautiful Smiths cover she did;



I miss Comic-Con. Though I guess I may be the only one in my social circle who does.

I woke up at 4pm to-day. I needed the full eight hours of sleep, but it was hard won. Very noisy around here to-day, and I think I still haven't finished making up for all the sleep I lost last week.

Adventures in new television with breakfast to-day confirmed again for me that I like Japan's schlock better than America's. First I watched yesterday's brand new, episode 1 of the latest CLAMP series, Kobato. Supposedly it's seinen (aimed at men), according to Wikipedia, but I could have sworn it was shojo (aimed at teenage girls) from the fact that the whole story appears to be from the perspective of a supernatural, pretty, relatively sexless and comically clumsy young girl whose mission is to heal people's hearts but not fall in love with them. But male appetites, or socially recognised male appetites, seem to be pretty different in Japan. The story wasn't very exciting--alternating between adequately funny and obligingly sweet. A male lead character appeared only briefly to punch out a guy who was about to hit the female lead, but he left to appear aloof and mysterious. I realised how simply the fiction appreciating human heart is--we'll always instinctively like the guy after that. He could be trying to destroy the world, but we'll just think, "Why's he doing that? He's such a nice guy." If the show had decided to make the guy a true jerk who just happened to be decent enough to know it's not right to hit a woman, we'd wonder why the show was wasting our time.

After this, I watched half an episode of Medium, which I thought I'd give a shot since it is number one in the ratings right now. I thought I might see what's doing with mainstream American culture.

I like the Saul Bass inspired opening, and Patricia Arquette's eerily flat deliveries are still charming. But, as seems to be the inevitable fate of nearly all lead actresses, she apparently decided to get a short, dowdy haircut.

As for the show itself, it appears to be the barest skeleton of a detective show. The episode in question dealt with the murder of a stripper whom the police captain Arquette works with believed was more innocent than she actually was--it turned out to be a pretty rote tale of a girl trying to extort money from her married boyfriend. The meat of the story apparently was a possible possession tale working as a metaphor for Arquette's dealing with her teenage daughter's growing pains. I can see the brain storming session--"Normal parents are worried about their kids being bad, so let's have the psychic mom have visions of her daughter being really bad."

I got tired of it halfway through the episode, and figured I'm running late to-day anyway. But I can't help wondering what it says about me that I preferred the guilty pleasure pretty girl fantasy over the thinly veiled exploitation of normal family preoccupations. Maybe it just means I'm not married with kids.

Hung out in Second Life a bit last night again, winning another game of chess. A pretty close game this time, but I managed to win with an unobserved pawn and pair of rooks on the left side of the board. It was definitely my most elegant checkmate in a while, but it came at the 11th hour.