Needing to be Madeleine for a While

I just finished watching last night's season finale of Dollhouse. Loved it. Alan Tudyk as a multiple personality psycho is the right mix of sad and threatening--Dollhouse is set in a world without people who are fundamentally good or evil, which you get the sense is something Whedon must have felt very constrained by in the Buffyverse--so the sympathetic scenes for the villain character in Dollhouse work better than any other of the kind in previous Whedon series. It kind of reminded me of the best moments with Sylar on Heroes, but really with a lot more going on. Alpha bringing up Nietzsche was excellent, though I'd have liked some mention of Nietzsche's "master/slave" dichotomy. Echo's dismissal of the ubermench idea is a little ironic as she saved the day by being something like an ubermench while Alpha unwittingly fell into the slave mentality--his actions were defined by what other people had done to him while Echo, as some sort of free floating collage of identities, was able to observe and evaluate the facts of the situation for their true value, whether they came from Alpha or Caroline.

The characters having conflict with their own personalities might be a red herring, but it's a delightful red herring. Whiskey asserting that she knows who she is without knowledge of her original personality is a great, subtle counterpoint to Alpha's and Echo's default personalities asserting themselves behind the imprints. Is it because the scars have defined Whiskey now? Is that inherently good or bad?

And finding out the Millie active's real name is "Madeleine Costly"--I told you this was Vertigo: The Series. "Costly" may have been overselling it a little, but maybe not.

There're still flaws--mainly in how both Ballard and Echo evidently capitulated easily in order to wrap up the episode. But, I have to say it . . . whether or not this is Whedon's best series, it's by far the series I've enjoyed the most. What seemed like a safe idea at first has worked out to be more ambitious than Firefly and more cohesive than anything Whedon's done before. With Hitchcock references.

My tweets from last night;

Save-on guy's afraid of 1am drunks.
CVS now--too many syllables.
Anyway, his Christ has no time for punks.
Or cussing or car speaker decibels.

For some reason, the clean cut blond kid behind the counter thought I looked like his comrade and kvetched to me about the drunks who were there and who were--steel yourselves--using foul language! Even the young lady with them, who didn't seem drunk, was using some bad words!

I was at the CVS after 1am buying pasta sauce--Ragu is all they had, and it turned out to be as disgusting as I thought it would be. I was reminded of Henry Hill at the end of Goodfellas when he said he asked for spaghetti and marinara and got "egg noodles in ketchup". The shit poured out of the bottle like blood contaminated with spoiled fruit juice.

But it was my only choice--it was after 1am, as I said, and not as many places are open twenty four hours now with the economy as it is. And the reason I got to grocery shopping so late was that I lost track of time at Tim's taking screenshots of Oblivion;



This is my own Madeleine--I named and loosely modelled her after Kim Novak in Vertigo;



Not too bad, if I do say so myself, considering I was working from memory. Oblivion, much like Mother Nature, doesn't make eyebrows like Novak's in Vertigo.


This is Madeleine in her optimal gear, which she doesn't really need to wear anymore as I used all my experience of playing the game for three years to make her the perfect character--she's an expert in everything, which is a little trickier to do in Oblivion than it was in Morrowind. But everything she's wearing is available in the game, except for the sword which is part of a really nice weapons mod Tim and I found who knows how long ago.

Here she is in something more comfortable;


Three years after its release, I still think Oblivion's the best looking game out there. This set of shots were taken in the southern swamps of The Shivering Isles;





Archery practice--the Mongolian recurve bow is part of the same weapons mod, the arrows are regular elven arrows.





In an area called "The Fringe" now, sort of the gateway area between The Shivering Isles and Cyrodiil, where most of Oblivion is set.



Madeleine's using a khukri in a lot of these images--another part of that weapons mod.



Back in Cyrodiil now.


Someone's killed a deer.




This is another character--Henrietta. I have a bunch of different characters saved--this one was only level 12. I can't quite remember what I was doing with her--I think she was going to be a fighter.


Henrietta watching a night owl farmer.


On a ship's deck, docked at the western port town Anvil.



This is Josette, named and modelled after Josette Day. A little less successful with this one, I think.



This character's name is Laura Palmer--I don't think I made any conscious attempt to model her after Sheryl Lee. She's of a demonic species called Golden Saint, which is not a race the player's normally able to use--I unlocked the race with a simple mod I made myself.


This is a dark elf named Finch, who I seem to remember making as a mage character, though it looks like I trained her in blade at some point.


Finch again, with a candid shot of a zombie in the background.


Josephine in the besieged town of Kvatch. She's wearing the mask of the Grey Fox, which you get when you complete all of the thieves' guild quests--the head of the thieves' guild is the notorious Grey Fox who passes the mask and identity on to you a la The Dread Pirate Roberts.


Josephine in another outfit--the clothes and hair are both from mods.


This is not one of my characters--I mean, it's not a character I use, but it's a character I made as part of a mod. Basically, I'd beaten the game so many times and in so many ways, I decided to create a challenge for myself with this ultra powerful character. I placed her in a chapel in the town of Bravil, and when you enter the chapel, she starts slaughtering everyone. She'll leave the chapel, too, as you can see here, and begin terrorising all of Cyrodiil. I forgot what I named her, so let's just call her The Killer.


Here The Killer fights a khajiit and one of Bravil's town guards at the bottom of the nearby river--my own character isn't pictured because I'd untethered the camera to take screenshots. This melee just spontaneously started up while I was busy getting shots of something else--I'd forgotten releasing The Killer in this saved game. The particular guard she's fighting automatically resurrects a few minutes after being killed because he's a character important to one of the quests. So she kills him over and over again.


The Killer swimming along the bottom of the river.


Jaws cam. The guard, on the right, has just awoken. He's probably wondering where he is. The Killer approaches from the left.


The spell she's casting on him is probably a disintegrate armour or weapon spell. That's why everyone's fighting her with fists now--the reason she's using fists is probably that she's been busy for a while and has worn down her weapons, even though I'm sure I gave her very durable equipment.


The two break the surface for a moment.


The Killer has found my character, in this case a low level magic user named Ellen. She falls quickly.

Questioning the Sex of the Alien Probe

I just finished reading volume 2 of Moyoco Anno's manga Happy Mania, which continued the story of the promiscuous and hyperactive Kayoko Shigeta, a twenty four year old woman who tends to have sex with guys she doesn't know very well and starts to hate them when it turns out they like her, all part of an almost mindless but passionate effort to find a boyfriend. Anno's art style remains rife with overwhelming sensory features--the massive eyes, the massive lips, the spindly fingers. These details are crammed into massive, angled closeups of Shigeta with minimal location details that fits with the perfunctory pieces of information Shigeta takes in about the people and places around her. The manga shows a relentless, physical grasping for connection that's thwarted by a mind viciously and relentlessly introspective even as it's barely able to accept and interpret new pieces of information through a wall of libido. Shigeta reminds me a bit of Brundle-Fly from David Cronenberg's The Fly--overwhelmed by her own physical existence, Shigeta tries to digest love by spitting sexuality at everything to watch all potential lovers corrode as by acid.

Volume 2 introduces religion and rape into the tale. Religion in the form of a cult Shigeta's mother has fallen prey to--one of my favourite bits was Shigeta awkwardly kneeling in the cult's temple beside her mother, spotting a pubic hair on the floor, and forgetting about it totally the next instant. She meets the handsome son of the cult leader, has sex with him, of course, and decides never to speak to him again for no real reason, though the excuse she gives herself is that his bottom eyelashes are too long. Another favourite moment--as the guy's afterwards begun stalking her and Shigeta's hiding across the street from her apartment, waiting for him to leave, she explains dumping the guy to her friend by saying, "Didn't you see his bottom eyelashes?!"

Unfortunately, the guy turns out to be more than a stalker when he kidnaps and attempts to rape Shigeta. I think there can be value in stories that show someone who's done something bad, like Shigeta's treatment of the men she goes out with, given worse treatment than they deserve as punishment--mainly because I think a lot of people, like Shigeta, tend to beat themselves up a lot more for their own misdeeds than they deserve and posing the hypothetical drastic punishment in fiction can demonstrate to people, using their own internal devices of value judgement, that they don't deserve that kind of punishment.

Whenever rape is introduced in a story, it usually bears the weight of the audience's own, usually socially prescribed, perceptions of rape along with a long tradition of "damsel in distress" stories, which, if you have any analytical ability, you know are about rape, whether you're talking about King Kong or Robin Hood, and Happy Mania demonstrates why--because the stalker guy tries to rape Shigeta after they've already had sex. Rape isn't typically about sexual fulfilment, but about physical and psychological dominance.

There's almost an irresistible urge nowadays in modern stories of rape for starkly feminist subversions and inversions--like the recent Disney film Enchanted where the transformation of Amy Adams' Disney princess character is only complete when she takes up a sword and rescues a man from physical danger. The language of fantasy stories nowadays is such that a proactive role on the part of a captive female is practically imperative, and I'm reminded of last week's Dollhouse, which, as Moira I think was pointing out, had an ongoing theme of girls being rescued from abuse and hating themselves for not rescuing themselves.

Happy Mania features a male lead, Takahashi, who one senses is meant to be the "true love" Shigeta eventually ends up with. The story makes what is kind of the standard power compromise by having Takahashi do everything he can to help Shigeta while it's Shigeta herself who ultimately achieves her own escape. In a way, it's disappointing for an otherwise ruthlessly amoral story of sex to conform to the subliminal needs of the reader, but on the other hand, it was amusingly told. And what Shigeta does to the guy is viscerally satisfying. Which a really analytical reader might want to question themselves about.

My last night's tweets;

Sure I should've gotten some fresh sake.
Or some kind of alcoholic beverage.
But, then, I didn't want any to-day.
My lack of booze yen seems like brain damage.

Yesterday I downloaded the new Rifftones album, which, in addition to Kevin Murphy's classic "When a Man Loves a Shark" also features Mike Nelson performing a nice Tom Waits parody tribute to Carnival of Souls called "Come to the Carnival". But the crowning achievement is Bill Corbett's ethereal "Sparkly Vampires", a gentle, twinkling lullaby for all those who've had Twilight forced on their awareness.

Sustenance Strategies

Twitter Sonnet #16

Ay, my room always seems to want dusting.
A painter thought he saw a red mountain.
Love strange things casually existing.
Like an Italian restaurant Russian.
Don't know what my headaches want anymore.
I try apples, tea, coffee, and spinach.
I shall try getting to sleep before four.
Switching to rum and the craft of the witch.
Water rations should consider ravens.
And employ lovely Rita, meter maid.
Wonka factories must be ant havens.
But Oprah oughta sponsor a brute raid.
How do veggies and rice rate as breakfast?
Longer than oatmeal I hope it'll last.

I was at my parents' house for dinner yesterday and it was there I heard about Oprah Winfrey buying Kentucky Fried Chicken dinners for everyone in the country for two weeks. I'm a little torn about how I feel about this--on the one hand, I know KFC's been trying to crawl out from under the "fried" stigma in a faux-health conscious country for a while now and this is a pretty ingenious way of doing it. On the other hand, I'd like to think Oprah's motive here is totally altruistic--it's free food for everyone--well, everyone with access to a computer and a printer, so pretty much only people who could easily afford the meal anyway. But, er. Free food in a bad economy . . .

But on the one tentacle, as much as the new grilled chicken is supposed to be better than the old fried chicken, surely Oprah could've spent the same money and fed people for a month with healthier choices from the supermarket? On the other tentacle, it's not like the supermarket has a full course meal for the same price.

But on the penis, what's wrong with an old fashioned can of beans, an apple, and a gallon of oatmeal? That can't be much more expensive. But on the clitoris, maybe I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

On the hecta-sex alien proboscis, shouldn't our overlords be providing this? Though on the geometrically impossible appendage, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh C'thulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

I went Mother's Day shopping to-day and had breakfast at a Japanese place--a vegetable roll and vegetable tempura. I've noticed different places have different philosophies about tempura. Despite almost always being listed as an appetiser, depending on the restaurant, the serving is either a few small pieces or a massive pile which no reasonable person would call less than a meal. The place I was at to-day was of the latter philosophy but I somehow managed to choke it down. Hopefully it means I won't be hungry for a while as I have a lot to do to-day.

"Coffee . . . ? Coffee . . . ? Coffee . . . ? Coffee . . . ?"

Last night's tweets;

Don't know what my headaches want anymore.
I try apples, tea, coffee, and spinach.
I shall try getting to sleep before four.
Switching to rum and the craft of the witch.

Anyone know where I can get low sodium canned spinach? I'm so tired of salt.

I seem to have accumulated a large number of bot followers on Twitter. A lot of them have names that end with a year that would make them between twenty-five and thirty years old and have only one tweet, something about NSFW photos they've uploaded of themselves. They don't seem to ensnare any followers--spamming is a mysterious species of obnoxious to me.

I don't have much to say about yesterday. I drew, inked, and coloured a page, finishing abnormally quickly. Then I worked on a new project which, when taken with all the other things I'm doing, won't see any real progress for months so it's probably best not to talk about it yet. I played World of Warcraft for about an hour, reaching the esteemed position of level eight. I probably would've reached it sooner except I got trapped in the ocean a couple nights ago. Truly, the great lung capacity of the undead is a mixed blessing.

I didn't get to sleep before four, but I did get to sleep before six. Which is something, as much as anything is anything. The rum was like water for all the effect it had on me--I was drinking Malibu cocoanut rum, which is only 42 proof, but it's tasty. It takes me back to playing Knights of the Old Republic and went well with World of Warcraft. I hearby confer upon Malibu rum the title of Best Video Game Companion Booze.

Difficult Nudity

Last night's tweets;

Ay, my room always seems to want dusting.
A painter thought he saw a red mountain.
Love strange things casually existing.
Like an Italian restaurant Russian.

I went to Carmel Mountain yesterday. I stopped for lunch at an Olive Garden staffed entirely by beautiful Russian women. There was something wonderful about it. I overheard a customer who spoke Czech telling a waitress what the word for "thank you" was in Czech and asking what the word was in Russian.

Also in Carmel Mountain, I picked up the first book in the newly translated Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei manga. Just about a year and a half after the anime series premiered in Japan and became very popular among internet communities following the fansubs. Here we see the paralysis of the above the board anime companies.

Anyway, I recommend the manga. Del Rey's done an excellent job, beginning with the fact that they retained "Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei" as the title (though the second "u" is superfluous) instead of translating it to "Goodbye, Mr. Despair". Apparently Del Rey also retains all the Japanese honorifics like -san, -sensei, -sempai, and so forth and a key is included at the beginning. I love art that trusts an audience to be intelligent.

Last night I watched Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Scandal (Shubun), which is in part a meditation on the eye of the beholder, starting with an interesting juxtaposition of a painter's impressionistic technique with a tabloid journalist's exploitive interpretation of a photograph.

The film opens with Toshiro Mifune as a famous painter named Aoe sitting on a hill painting Mount Kumotori. Three elderly local men have stopped to marvel at the strange painter who'd gotten there on a noisy motorcycle, an illustration of Aoe's brash and independent nature that will be reiterated throughout the film.

One of the old men, first looking at the mountain and then at Aoe's painting, remarks, "It's too red. Mount Kumotori ain't that red."

Aoe replies, "Shut up, old man. I see it as bright red. That's how it is in my mind's eye."

"Is that how artists work?" asks another of the old men.

Aoe nods.

I couldn't help thinking of my experience with the Something Awful forum--both the people I talked to there and the old man in the movie spoke from a fundamental lack of understanding of Impressionism and the necessarily subjective nature of art in general, though the Something Awful people were intent on feigning knowledge and are probably less likely of learning anything than someone like the old man. But in either case, the problem isn't that that the concept is too complicated, but that it's too simple and obvious. Of course the value in an impressionistic work is in its subjectivity, as a photograph can accomplish realism faster and better than a painting. As the Wikipedia entry on Impressionism puts it, ". . . photography actually inspired artists to pursue other means of artistic expression, and rather than competing with photography to emulate reality, artists focused 'on the one thing they could inevitably do better than the photograph – by further developing into an art form its very subjectivity in the conception of the image, the very subjectivity that photography eliminated.'"



But Scandel next shows how photography can also be impressionistic by showing a photographer take a picture of Aoe and a famous singer named Miyako Saijo (played by the beautiful Shirley Yamaguchi) on a hotel balcony. The painter and singer had only just met, but a tabloid decides to interpret the image as evidence of a scandalous affair between the two celebrities.

Of course, the relative innocence of the time and place is revealed by how allegations of an affair between two unmarried people is taken as libellous by Aoe and horrifying by Saijo. But once one gets past this conceit, I think one can appreciate what's evidently Kurosawa's opinion on criticism--from Scandal's Wikipedia entry;

"Scandal was described by Kurosawa himself as a protest film about 'the rise of the press in Japan and its habitual confusion of freedom with license.' Kurosawa was noted for being exceptionally wary of the press in general (and didn't read any criticism of his own work, whether positive or negative)"

One needn't look very far to see Kurosawa had a very good point--look at how everyone was gushing about Wolverine before it came out, like the journalist who saw the leaked version and called it better than The Dark Knight. But now that prominent critics have turned against the film, so has much of the critical community en masse. The answer, of course, is that criticism is subjective and its value is in your respect or sympathy for the critic--in other words, whether you know the critic is someone whose tastes you generally share.

I see Mifune's and Yamaguchi's performances were negatively received for this film, which I find strange as it seems to me they weren't given much material, particularly in Yamaguchi's case, as both she and Mifune are sidelined when Takashi Shimura's character, Hiruta, completely steals the film as a weak-willed attorney and apparent prototype for his character in Ikiru.

Hiruta tells his daughter that he lives in a world of bad people who work to deceive him and so he feels a need to deceive others in self-defence, though in this case his defence mechanism has led him into collaborating with the enemy as he takes bribes from the tabloid after he becomes Aoe's attorney in Aoe's suit against the publication for libel. The theme of different perceptions and their fight for dominance is somewhat continued as an internal struggle for Hiruta when he has potential to act as an agent for either side.

It's not one of Kurosawa's best films, but I love the motivations behind it, and it certainly has a number of admirable aspects. One of the problems I had with the film, in fact, is that I found Mifune and Yamaguchi so charming that I wanted to see a torrid affair between the two. Though perhaps it was one of Kurosawa's intentions to show how the shy Saijo couldn't explore her feelings for Aoe thanks to the media attention as there is one scene where she goes to one of Aoe's exhibitions in disguise hoping to buy the painting of Mount Kumotori.



Mifune, at this point, was a handsome young man always filled with an evident, barely contained energy as he alternated between the suave gentlemen of films like this and Drunken Angel and the manic characters of Rashomon and Seven Samurai. When Aoe enters the magazine publisher office and quietly leafs through the article in a low angle shot while the magazine staff stands fretfully in the background I thought, "Holy shit, he's gonna murder those guys." You can feel the violence stored in those broad shoulders.

The gorgeous Noriko Sengoku, who played a gun moll in Stray Dog and a barmaid in Drunken Angel, is also in Scandel as Aoe's model who complains that he never has her pose nude anymore, to which Aoe replies, "I'm just beginning to have doubts about nude art in Japan. We lack both the tradition and the healthy spirit to accept the naked body. People say our nudes lack proportion. What they really lack is spirit." One might see this statement as a reflection of society's inability to see simple truth--whether it be the artistic truth of Aoe's work, or the truth in a world Hiruta thinks is built on deception.

You're Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table!

I just found out Strangers with Candy's on Hulu! If you haven't seen this series, I recommend spending the day gorging yourself if you can (though episode 2 is the best episode of the entire series).

It seems like I've been seeing Alan Tudyk a lot lately, and I couldn't help thinking of his guest role as a cult leader in this second season episode of Strangers with Candy;

These are the Sprites in Your Neighbourhood

Twitter Sonnet #15

Segways are totally radical, dude.
With coffee is ravioli breakfast.
I'm in a defiantly idle mood.
A quick calm that the weekend can't quite last.
I've decided days should not be this short.
I barely had time to cross Xanadu.
I do make martinis of the best sort.
Gin and just a pinch of vermouth will do.
I'm tired of hitting bats and zombies.
Wonder what Japanese film I'll watch next.
I guess there was a problem here with bees.
For killers seem inadequately vexed.
I mean, the bees were just the normal kind.
Tweet sonnets don't mean I'm losing my mind.

Yes, I was finally bit by the stocky, Popeye forearmed World of Warcraft bug. I bought it a couple weeks ago, let it install over four motherfucking hours on Thursday, and I've been playing about an hour a night ever since--I have a zombie warrior named Lelia (on the Echo Isle server if anyone wants to start shit with me). I've only gotten her up to level five, and so far it's mostly been about hitting bats and mindless zombies. I finally ventured out of the starting area to fight some things way out of my league and I spent a lot of time running back from the graveyard last night. Again, I couldn't find it in me to play more than an hour. Tim said to me something like, "You can easily reach level 10 in just two hours!" I just can't imagine spending more than an hour at this thing.

On the other hand, I was big into Warcraft 2 six or seven years ago. I beat the game several times and even made a lot of levels of my own with that game's really nice editor programme. I'd make theme levels--I had one that was just hundreds of sheep roaming around, and I had a number of levels that had a third faction consisting of only one ogre and one farm, isolated among some forested area like a big, two headed hermit. Interestingly, World of Warcraft has maintained a feel very similar to the older game. The blood elves seem to be the only genuinely attractive thing, but there is a sort of goofy sweetness about everything else. And all the locations feel a lot like Disneyland with all the impressionistic artificial blue, yellow, and red lighting.

Not much else to say about yesterday. I worked on the next Venia's Travels script. I'm thinking I might rewrite the last two pages to-day.

Happy Star Wars Day, everyone. To-day, no-one's too short to be a stormtrooper.

Big, Poisonous Creatures

The past couple days have demonstrated to me what random, complete assholes guys can be to women. First I read Felis Demens' account of a strange guy who wouldn't get out of her face when she was trying to handle a traumatic situation. Then my sister told me about seeing a guy just outright beating a woman in a parking lot. My sister was at work at the time--she's a waitress, and she saw this out the window. A couple people, including a military guy, got up to immediately help the woman. The asshole ran into his truck when he saw people coming out and then tried to back up into the woman. He stopped when he saw someone calling 911, got out of his car, and took his license plate off his truck.

But apparently someone had already gotten the license number because the guy was caught. It turned out he didn't even know the woman--it was road rage. Apparently she cut him off or something. My sister saw her in the ambulance and said she looked like a tweaker. Maybe she was just rattled. In any case--how did we get to this point where a man starts beating on a woman in broad daylight? For road rage? I'm thinking there's got to be something to the theories about unnaturally belligerent behaviour in Americans caused by all the salt and sugar in the food. It reminds me of watching the Super Bowl and seeing the players hitting players on the opposing team--accomplishing nothing and getting penalised. People start shit at the drop of a hat they have no rational reason to expect good results from and they get punished for it.

Something's changed, right? I said to my sister yesterday I couldn't imagine a guy doing something like that in, say, 1936. Then last night I watched Kenji Mizoguchi's 1936 film Gion no shimai or Sisters of the Gion.



1953's Ugetsu is the only other Mizuguchi movie I've seen, and Sisters of the Gion is certainly a very different film. World War II changed cinema a lot in Japan, but I can't really gauge the impact it had on Mizoguchi from these two films. The differences seem more to reflect maturation as a filmmaker and a change in the kind of story the man was interested in telling. But both films have curiously definite resolutions with overt moral lessons which might take someone by surprise whose familiarity with Japanese cinema of the era doesn't extend past Kurosawa's meditations on man's moral uncertainty. But there's a richness to Ugetsu that Sisters of the Gion lacks that also serves to make its argument against greed and ambition more palatable.

But don't get me wrong, Sisters of the Gion's a good movie, a very straightforward feminist statement by way of a sort of sly subversion of the romantic myth of the geisha.

The first two thirds of the film are sort of adorable, seemingly a very light tale of men finding respite in the geisha house from their overbearing wives or demanding businesses. We see squabbles about the prices of kimonos and coy as well as genuine petitions from the geisha for patrons.

The film follows two geisha; Umekichi and Omocha, the former being the elder who's settled into the traditional lifestyle with tranquillity and the latter is a brash youth who's cutthroat behind the geisha makeup. In her opinion, the men are there only to use the women, and any underhanded manipulation on her part is fair play. The movie's constructed to seem as though it's going to be a story about how Umekichi's dedication to her patron pays off as the loyalty ends up being genuine between them in contrast to Omocha's cynicism being counterproductive. But at the end of the movie, both women are punished by the world of men it turns out Omocha was quite right about, though her mercenary instincts turn out to be insufficient. The sour note on which the movie abruptly ends casts a shadow over the charm of the rest of the film. That the older and seemingly wiser person turns out to be wrong and the younger, cynical person turns out to be right is a very sharp thing. You can easily picture Omocha maturing into a deeply damaged individual with a heart encased by a hard shell of calluses.

One compares this film to Memoirs of a Geisha, and it's easy to think we have taken a lot of steps backwards in the past seventy years.

Last night's tweets;

I've decided days should not be this short.
I barely had time to cross Xanadu.
I do make martinis of the best sort.
Gin and just a pinch of vermouth will do.

Spain . . . Seemed to be in Spain . . .

Friday night's tweets;

Segways are totally radical, dude.
With coffee is ravioli breakfast.
I'm in a defiantly idle mood.
A quick calm that the weekend can't quite last.

I ate breakfast at Olive Garden using a gift card I'd had for almost a year and then decided it would be a good day to use the zoo pass my mother had given me. It was only when I'd driven all the way to the zoo that I discovered the damn place closes at 4pm--it was already 5pm.

So, I decided to roam about nearby Balboa Park;



From an amphitheatre that inevitably reminded me of One Wonderful Sunday.



There's a triumphant fellow.


Anatomically correct horse statue. I was reminded of an Oblivion mod someone made to remove the genitalia from the horses in that game. What the fuck is happening to people? This statue was finished in 1930 by Anna Hyatt Huntington--it is "El Cid Campeador".


Yay?



"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree!" You might recognise this from the news reel at the beginning of Citizen Kane.



This is now The Museum of Man. Detail;





A bridge over the freeway leads right into Balboa Park. The speed limit's 5mph, but of course people come right through at 20mph. I was noticing Friday how everyone around here seems to drive really fast only to walk really fucking ponderous when they reach their destination.


View from the bridge.


Looking down--the freeway I took to get there.


Actual segways in the wild. I couldn't believe it. I asked permission to take the picture but the looks on their faces, I think, clearly say, "You're judging us, aren't you?" The only thing that could make this picture more perfect is if I'd gotten some Mexican day labourers in the background.


Shot of the carillon tower from one of the gardens.





A deserted, out of the way path. Dig the roots on that tree.


Can you see the rabbit?


Have you spotted him yet?


How can anyone see this and deny the existence of The Great Old Ones?







The amphitheatre again, now getting near sunset.


The sunset.

When I got to the parking lot, I heard this;

Nobody's Brain is Safe

I went from just liking Dollhouse to completely loving it last night. It still has flaws, but last night's episode so perfectly exploited the fact that there's no character on the show you can 100% trust and almost no characters you can 100% hate. Like a line of very precariously set dominos. And there was another incredibly well choreographed fight scene on top of that between the two characters the show has done the most to shore up our sympathies for; Boyd* and Agent Ballard. I've always been a sucker for sketchy morality and this show has it in spades, and now it's getting plenty cohesive. I'm thinking I have to credit Jane Espenson with that.

With breakfast this afternoon, I read the new Sirenia Digest, a Lovecraft themed issue and one of my favourites so far. I particularly liked "THE PERIL OF LIBERATED OBJECTS, OR THE VOYEUR'S SEDUCTION" which drew from Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. And not just because The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is one of my favourite Lovecraft tales--Caitlin's new story is an example of one of the things she does best; taking modern terrors of the more explicitly sexual and exploring them with the distant biological and ethereal vernacular of Lovecraft. Employing Lovecraftian terror of the strange and barely conceivable with the intimacy of stark sexuality. A reader of Caitlin's stories might have some glimpse of the immediate terror Lovecraft or Bram Stoker might have inspired in the more innocent readers of their day. The story also draws on the unicorn myth and lays bare the rape fantasy implicit in it--coupling it with the Lovecraftian bits seems appropriate as it's dealing with a reality everyone senses but fears to acknowledge.

"AT THE GATE OF DEEPER SLUMBER" was also quite good, and for many of the same reasons. It's less of a linear tale and seems a meditation on the oppression caused by a person's own fear. The issue also included "The Coast Guard", a poem by Sonya Taaffe. I'm not sure, but I think I've read it before. Maybe it's just that it strongly reminds me of a scene in Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly.

I'm short on time yet again to-day. I've got to try to get to bed earlier . . . Again, there'll probably be another post in the dead of night. I have a lot to say about yesterday.

*One of the show's flaws; a black man named "Boyd"? Why not call him "Digger" or "Jungle Benny" while you're at it?

Finding a Place When You're Nowhere

Before I let Friday get away from me completely, I wanted to mention on Thursday night I watched Akira Kurosawa's 1947 film One Wonderful Sunday, an almost Frank Capra-ish common man story tinged with the despair and poverty of post World War II Japan. It's still not one of Kurosawa's great films, but there are two fascinating scenes that make the movie well worth watching.

One Wonderful Sunday tells the story of a young, middle class couple, Yuzo and Masako, and a day off from work they spend together and try to enjoy with only thirty five yen.

The film is hampered a bit by the censors of the occupying U.S. government, but more starkly coming across in this film are some of Kurosawa's own biases which I'm familiar with--his love of children, his extreme disgust for yakuza, and his belief that women aren't as fundamentally flawed as men, which he at one point stated as a reason for the scarcity of female protagonists in his films. Indeed, Masako, one of the two characters to which the film is entirely devoted, seems absolutely pure, a person utterly devoid of the slightest character flaw. It's a little disappointing after the far more interesting Setsuko Hara character of No Regrets for Our Youth, but Masako functions well enough for the movie's best scenes.



The first scene to really get its hooks into me comes at roughly the beginning of the last third of the film. After having been unable to afford tickets to a concert performance of Schubert's unfinished symphony thanks to some yakuza scalpers who also took the time to beat Yuzo to the ground, the couple remove to Yuzo's tiny apartment. Yuzo let's loose in a monologue of complete despair, his experience with the yakuza signifying the brutality of existence in Japan at the time, where a person's capabilities and honesty had absolutely no relevance. Yuzo turns to Masako then as the only good thing in his life and violently attempts to have sex with her. Not rape--he doesn't get more aggressive than clasping her hands, but his sudden lust comes from a place of clear emptiness that frightens Masako, who leaves after Yuzo responds to her refusal to reciprocate by sullenly turning his back on her.

One could read the scene as a dated perspective on the female libido--and the scene functions that way for anyone who might have that belief, but the more interesting interpretation of Masako being too crushed by Yuzo's hopeless selfishness is also perfectly viable, especially when Masako comes back to the apartment, meekly turns her back to Yuzo and very slowly begins to remove her raincoat. And here was a rather nice method Kurosawa used to get around censorship--this is the only time in the movie Masako even moves to take off her raincoat. Yuzo, now ashamed of his earlier behaviour, stops her from removing the coat.



The second scene to really engage me is the penultimate and climactic scene where, in an empty outdoor amphitheatre, the couple, now in a playful mood, have been sharing idle fantasies. Yuzo decides to perform a pantomime of a symphony conductor as a substitute for the Schubert symphony they missed, but his cheer vanishes with the appearance of Kurosawa's familiar hollow wind sound effect at the moment Yuzo lifts his invisible baton.

Masako applauds for Yuzo in an attempt to bolster the fantasy, and for a moment it seems Yuzo's again in the mood before he seems to succumb to the meaninglessness of pretending, and we're reminded of his earlier monologue on his own meaninglessness in society. I was also struck by the idea of how personal the scene must have been for Kurosawa, a young artist at a time, and a man who suffered from depression which caused him to question the value of his work throughout his life.

In a rather bold move, Kurosawa then has Masako break the fourth wall and address the movie audience directly, asking them to applaud for Yuzo because, Masako says, there are poor young lovers like them everywhere and they need to be able to dream "beautiful dreams."

Yuzo and Masako eventually bow to the screen, as though the audience did applaud, and Yuzo begins to conduct dancing leaves as the soundtrack provides the Schubert. The movie doesn't provide a definitive happy ending for the couple, the ambiguity of the conclusion providing a nice prompt for rumination on the value of the human soul in a society that's particularly ill-equipped to validate individuals. But one might observe the idea is relevant in any society.

Attempting to Grasp Daylight

Twitter Sonnet #14

Medieval medicine works to-day.
Strange passing girl, what are you screaming at?
The mead is quite good to-night, I must say.
And now Arlen Specter's a Democrat.
It seems I too often forget to eat.
They're fucking Gulliver's Travels again;
This one stars Jack Black and Amanda Peet--
Another kid's movie; adults can't win.
Some spurned meat shocked and saddened the waitress.
Need to remember to drink my coffee.
Wonder when fact's worthier than a guess.
Always a good time is philosophy.
Warcraft is but wind on an empty stage.
But all pleasures are shadows of long age.

I'll probably make a longer post later, but I want to get out of the house while the sun's still out. Remember, new Venia's Travels online to-day.