Kinds of Desperation

The lost causes of youthful passion are replaced by cynical pursuits of wealth in 1971's Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead (Prega il Morto e Ammazza il Vivo). But the old scores are just waiting to resurface, the characters in this nice, sweaty Spaghetti Western quietly boiling in waters far deeper than the stolen crates of gold bars. But those are pretty important too.

Ominous strangers begin to turn up at a forlorn telegraph office; a gang of robbers and a mysterious man in Halloweenish black and orange who calls himself John Webb (Paolo Casella). The gang violently takes over the place and holds hostage the occupants of a stage coach that's forced to stop there; a prostitute and a wealthy man with his trophy wife, Eleanor (Victoria Zinny).

It's not clear if Webb is part of the gang or their enemy but he and the rest of the group have an uneasy, wary relationship. The group doesn't seem much more inclined to trust their leader when he finally shows up, a former Confederate soldier named Dan Hogan played by Klaus Kinski.

I was really frustrated the only copy of this movie I could get my hands on was the English dub. Normally I wouldn't mind so much when it comes to a Spaghetti Western, many of which were made to be dubbed, but the American who voices over for Kinski is completely wrong. A flat, run of the mill performance that's completely mismatched with Kinski's remarkable fire. Watching him, you can imagine the kinds of snarling shouts that must have come out of Kinski but it's all plastered over with a garden variety delivery. I hear the German dub is really good but I can't find it anywhere.

Fortunately, he spends a lot of time silently stalking about the room and the desert, his big goblinish eyes at turns sadistic and distracted when Eleanor offers herself to him or pleads with him. His mind is on bigger things and so is Webb's which makes the quiet regard they have for each other seem to make sense. Like Once Upon a Time in the West, the hero and villain seem to exist on a different plane from everything else which has the odd effect of uniting them even as they're deadly enemies.

Directed by Giuseppe Vari, Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead isn't as ambitious as Leone's best known films but presents an effective smaller story of a group of men and women struggling in the desert.

Twitter Sonnet #1153

A fading skate reminds you once you ran.
Beneath a minute time eclipsed to one.
Condensing loops of rubber held the man.
Descending stones of mountains held the sun.
The bending rails support a jelly train.
Translucent doors reveal the moving souls.
Pursuing trees at length began to gain.
Assorted plants amassed a million roles.
A box of painted lead misled the gold.
An autumn border faced a summer dust.
In further walks the stepping tells were told.
A knocking gale was treated like a gust.
Reluctant wigs become to-morrow's felt.
Beneath their dusty hats the killers melt.

The Black Dog's Second Tale

The protagonists of Cowboy Bebop are bounty hunters, a profession popular among writers of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Westerns because it represents a blurred line between law enforcement and crime. For Cowboy Bebop, it also provides another way to explore its overall preoccupation with a changing world.

Session Sixteen: Black Dog Serenade

The second and final episode to focus on Jet (Unsho Ishizuka) reveals the story behind his mechanical arm. At the beginning of the episode, Faye (Megumi Hayashibara) casually asks him why he hasn't gotten a real arm to replace it, medical science now apparently being up to the task. He tells her that the Bebop is his ship and his arm is his arm, implying he doesn't like anyone telling him what to do.

This is immediately followed by a scene where a hostage is shot by the most erratic man in a group of criminals who've taken over a prison ship. The shooter tells the others that he doesn't like people telling him what to do. He's immediately executed by the gang's de facto leader, a quiet killer named Udai Taxim (Kosei Hirota).

As a former member of a crime syndicate, it makes sense Udai wants to enforce rules but, at the same time, like Spike, the syndicate expelled him long ago. So Udai is adhering to a way of life that has already rejected him.

Jet used to be a cop, a past we've seen something of in "Ganymede Elegy". We see some flashbacks in "Black Dog Serenade" of Jet wearing a traditional American detective's outfit, a suit and fedora (something that also makes him look even more like Jigen from Lupin the Third). It was in tracking down Udai that Jet lost his arm and somehow this led to him turning his back on the police force and becoming a bounty hunter.

And we meet Fad (Masashi Hirose), Jet's partner at the time, which gives the episode an arc partially similar to Faye's in the previous episode. Whitney Hagas Matsumoto established himself as a friend in her past, Faye re-encounters him in the present to learn he'd betrayed her back then, and the end of the episode makes it seem like he might have really had some affection for her after all. Similarly, Jet harbours only pleasant memories of Fad and is still loyal to him, we learn at the end of this episode that Fad had betrayed him, but finally we see that Fad did have some genuine loyalty to Jet after all.

A jarring part of the strange present is that it seems to not just kill the past but to deny it. The friends we thought we had weren't really friends--except maybe they were. Jet had sought out a livelihood that was more independent and required him to interpret morality more than when he worked for the police and now that decision seems even more justified. But Jet remains the "black dog who never lets go"; of all the Bebop crew, loyalty matters to him the most, which makes him the perfect subject for a story of betrayal.

...

This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen
Session Fifteen

The Many Talons

There are a lot of reasons The Talons of Weng-Chiang is one of the best Doctor Who stories in the series' history. Despite some cheesy yellow-face on a white actor and the even cheesier giant rat costumes, this combination of Fu Manchu, Phantom of the Opera, and The Time Machine creates a world all its own. In a unified dark atmosphere the six part serial introduces several of the series' most memorable characters, each representing different aspects of this strange 1889 London.

The only serial where the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) never wears a giant scarf, we see him instead casually emerging from the TARDIS in a deerstalker and Inverness cape. He never directly mentions Sherlock Holmes, the gag being the sort of dry visual joke Tom Baker excelled at. His powers of affable understatement are on good display when Leela (Louise Jameson) points out she's saved his life by killing a thug who'd sneaked up behind him. "Well, in that case you'd better come along," he says.

He keeps this up when he meets the ebullient Mr. Jago (Christopher Benjamin), proprietor the music hall where the sinister Chang (John Bennett) performs a magic act. After the Doctor and Jago investigate a shadowy figure back stage, the former seems charmed by the latter's nervous bluster and offers him a good meal, further charmed by how enthusiastically the offer is accepted.

Christopher Benjamin plays a great Falstaff, by the way, I've seen him in a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. But he still finds time to record Jago and Litefoot audio plays, a spin-off series from this particular Doctor Who serial. The other half of that duo, Litefoot (Trevor Baxter), is also introduced in The Talons of Weng-Chiang but under very different circumstances.

A sensitive gentleman and a medical examiner for the police, he can scarcely believe it when he's forced to agree with the Doctor's assessment that a corpse's wounds look like they came from the teeth of a giant rat. This is part of the reason the story works so well despite the rat costumes that look like they belong at Chuck E. Cheese--the story builds their menace in dialogue.

Also helping in the menace department is Weng-Chiang himself (Michael Spice), aka Magnus Greel, whose story you can hear more of in the Fifth Doctor audio play The Butcher of Brisbane. The backstory rattled off quickly by the Doctor near the end of this serial is certainly fertile ground for expansion, having to do with the Doctor serving in a Filipino army against Greel who also has the strange and eerie Peking Homunculus or "Mr. Sin" (Deep Roy), an effectively eerie animated doll in Talons of Weng-Chiang.

But not as eerie as Greel himself whose costume reminds me of the Klimt inspired robe Gary Oldman wears in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. He also wears a nice broad brimmed Phantom of the Opera-ish black hat at the beginning and his leather mask is perfect.

It all wouldn't work half as well if the serial wasn't so wonderfully dark. Apparently director David Maloney did an extraordinary amount of actual night shooting in this serial and I'm so glad he did. The dingy, treacherous alleyways of Victorian London pack so much more punch when they're lost in 75% shadow. There's so much effective horror in this serial that it enhances the comic relief provided by Jago and Litefoot considerably, the two always seeming duly terrified even as they are adorably ridiculous, never so sabotaging the reality of the scene à la Abbott and Costello.

This isn't a very strong serial for Leela despite the fact that she has several moments I like. Her fight choreography is a bit lacklustre and she spends a lot of time haplessly following people about but I like her line when the Doctor asks her if she knows what some futuristic crystal gadget is--"Oh. You ask me so that you can tell me." I also like when she substitutes herself for a hypnotised prostitute to get the drop on Weng-Chiang. Her Eliza Doolittle schtick is adorable, too, especially when a flustered Litefoot politely joins her in eating meat off the bone.

And after all this, the serial climaxes in one of the show's best ever set pieces; a melee before a great golden dragon that shoots green lasers from its eyes. But there are almost too many things to list that make this a great serial.

The Bandit Escapes

A comedy and action blend works so very well in 1977's Smokey and the Bandit because of its breezy pace and natural charisma of its stars. Of the latter, Burt Reynolds, who passed away yesterday at the age of 82, is obviously the film's chief virtue.

Though under a surprising amount of makeup it's the natural quality of Reynolds' performance that effects his charm as the "Bandit" of the title. Director Hal Needham must have instructed him to laugh as often as possible because he does so at times when it doesn't seem especially appropriate. But there's such an inviting and unassuming warmth in his laugh there's no awkwardness of contrivance. Like many other action films of the 70s, this one works well because the convincingly shot stunts are coupled with reactions from the stars that seem oddly calm or oddly more concerned with personal drama than the police car flipping over into a river. It's not just that Bandit seems to be a great driver, it's that he weaves around cars at 110 mph or screeches into a 180 turn like it's the most natural thing in the world.

And this carries over into the film's use of exposition or lack there of. When Sally Field hops in the car in a wedding dress, we don't really need to know much more and the movie knows this. It's like when Godard just randomly cut out shots in a scene he considered too much tedious exposition in Vivre sa vie--the audience is quite capable of making the necessary inferences to allow for an exciting pace.

The plot of Smokey and the Bandit is essentially a light-hearted, more conservative version of Vanishing Point. Instead of a bet to deliver a car, Bandit accepts a bet to deliver some beer across the state line, which may have been illegal but doesn't seem like it would draw the elaborate manhunt we see. And there's a much more cartoonish villain in the sheriff played by a wonderfully puerile and condescending Jackie Mason.

There's a coyness about the humour that falls flat sometimes, like the weird evasion of foul language in lines like the one where Bandit replaces "fucking" with "forking". But Reynolds makes it work mostly by not playing it too broad but also by going big at just the right moments, like a famous shot when he smiles at the camera after successfully hiding from a police car.

It's not hard to see why Alfred Hitchcock liked this movie, though the characters are more flippant than his usually were. The film still presents an engaging tension between suspense and humour that presents an exhilaration all the more effective for the cool Burt Reynolds at its centre.

Twitter Sonnet #1152

A drawing aped a Slinky fallen down.
In lazy spirals pens have taken time.
Of curly hair or tangled cloud renown.
The knotty dreams refuse a straightened line.
Decelerating spins produce a wash.
The legacy of bad detergent stank.
Repeated days have stepped in icy slosh.
At forty years he never rose a rank.
The burning foot became the distant road.
A set of clocks descends to make a knee.
A kindly name redeems a silent mode.
A watered lawn became a grassy sea.
In leafy frames a catchy chase endured.
A frozen motion graced a written word.

Directing the Course of a Valentine

One of my favourite episodes of Cowboy Bebop finally gives a backstory to Faye that's surprising but also, in quite a few ways, very much in line with what previous episodes had given us.

Session Fifteen: My Funny Valentine

The title this time comes from the very famous, frequently covered Rogers and Hart song from the 1930s. I doubt there are many who are unfamiliar with the song but, just in case, here's one of my favourite renditions:

Obviously there's the connexion to Faye Valentine (Megumi Hayashibara), given her name, but the lyrics, which convey the affection the singer feels for a lover not only despite but because of his or her appearance or behaviour that's contrary to the ideal, have a broader resonance for the story.

The episode begins with Faye in an initially unexplained flashback strikingly similar to some flashbacks we've seen of Spike (Koichi Yamadera). In both cases, each character is naked, apparently unconscious, bathed in a blue-green light, and surrounded by masked doctors or scientists. But, unlike Spike's flashback, we get some explanation for Faye's within the same episode.

Faye is being thawed out after having been cryogenically frozen for over fifty years. Like the kid in Session Six and Chessmaster Hex in Session Fourteen, Faye is a person from before the hyperspace gate accident that changed everything, the physical changes to Earth wrought by meteors being mirrored by chaotic cultural changes. We see this in a funny moment when Faye wakes and misinterprets everything in the room, from the washing machine she thinks is a television to the thermometer she thinks is a cell phone. Not unlike the many other misleading signifiers of race, gender, and apparel seen in other episodes. Now Faye embodies the experience of the series.

But the biggest mistake is her Prince Charming, Whitney Hagas Matsumoto (Akio Otsuka), who immediately compares her to Sleeping Beauty. Faye wakes with no memory of who she is or anything about herself and in this vulnerable state she has little choice but to trust this guy. And then we see, in the present, he's a complete fraud, in fact a small time matrimonial conman who's nabbed by Jet (Unsho Ishizuka).

And now, like the subject of the song, Hagas Matsumoto is hardly the physical ideal of a Prince Charming due to some fat implants. He's also, one should note, one of the show's typical conglomerations of race and culture, his three names each originating from different cultures and his appearance not easily identifiable as any race, though he does reveal the black doctor, Baccus, is his uncle.

Baccus tells Faye his name is a reference to the god of wine and this makes sense for the con artist he ends up being. It turns out they've thawed Faye just to unload a whole lot of debt on her. So the character defining enormous debt we've known about was, at least at the beginning, not her fault. But she believes it is and even when she learns better one assumes that kind of thing, coming right at her rebirth, would have a lasting psychological effect, like a girl being taught women are responsible for original sin.

There are serious implications to that and later episodes will introduce a more sombre tone to Faye's story but for this episode there's an engagingly light tone as we sympathise with poor Fay even as the strange encounters with the future are as ridiculous as they are frightening.

...

This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen

Better Call Robert Forster

Better Call Saul was under the long shadow of Breaking Bad in Monday's new episode, much of the story having to do with protracted setup for events from that series. But there were some nice character moments to remind us that Better Call Saul has some of its own blood in its veins.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Some of the best moments on Better Call Saul have been watching Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) pull scams. Watching him compulsively hustling in his job as a cell phone salesman has some of that pleasure. When he and Kim (Rhea Seehorn) talk about Jimmy getting mugged by kids and he gets a funny look in his eye when he says they wouldn't have dared "roll" him when he was one of them, the transition to talking about getting him a shrink almost felt like getting a therapist to cure Jimmy of who he really is. Like Breaking Bad, this show isn't afraid to discuss the sense of personal liberation that might come with criminality.

I'm pretty sure one of the kids who mugged Jimmy is the one Kim managed to save from a harsh sentence in an earlier courtroom scene. I wonder if that's going to come back to haunt the two of them.

It seems Kim is starting to feel pulled between two applications of her job as she chooses to stick with the nervous young woman instead of attending to an emergency at her cushy Mesa Verde job. As Jimmy is compulsively drawn to crooked behaviour, Kim is compulsively drawn to being a heroine.

Meanwhile, in a mildly interesting couple of scenes, Mike (Jonathan Banks) vets criminal contractors for the job of making the underground facility Walter White will eventually use. Whoopee.

For the real Breaking Bad tie in, though, the episode began with a scene set during the events of that series with Saul wearing the same outfit and bearing the same wounds we see in the last season of Breaking Bad. Though Odenkirk's noticeably older in the prequel.

He was so much older then, he's younger than that now.

What was the purpose to Better Call Saul's narrative of the flash forward? He hands Francesca (Tina Parker) a card for a lawyer. Is that lawyer Kim? Or maybe Howard (Patrick Fabian)? I liked the darkly funny scene in the new episode where Jimmy runs into a dishevelled Howard in the restroom, complaining about insomnia. When Howard tells Jimmy his shrink has been working "great" you can't really blame Jimmy for then flushing the number Kim gave him for a psychiatrist down the toilet. Does Jimmy really have any good choices? That's a good noir kind of question.

The Distance from Human to Demon

One of the things I love about 80s anime is how often it seems to present a clear window into a sub-conscience. It's hard to imagine there was much if any studio or censor interference in 1987's Wicked City (妖獣都市), a noir erotic phantasmagoria that starts with vagina dentata. When a vulva with teeth is just the appetiser on the fucked up sexual buffet you know you're in for a ride. Many were quick to label it as misogynistic but the film is more accurately described as a moody, paranoid portrait of intimacy, not hatred so much as fear of the body, male and female.

Set in a dark, cyberpunk-ish city in a world where humans co-exist with demons, the story concerns an upcoming peace summit between the two. We meet the protagonist, Taki (Yusaku Yara), when he goes home with a woman (Mari Yokoo) who looks human but turns out to be a spider demon whose genitals want to make a meal out of his.

It's worth noting that there was a real human woman who was attacked and killed by the demon who took her place without Taki knowing. He survives the encounter and, like everyone else who's raped or mutilated in the movie, seems to just shrug the whole thing off. He doesn't seem to mind when he's assigned a partner who happens to be a beautiful female demon named Makie (Toshiko Fujita).

The two of them are Black Guards, special police tasked with handling infractions between the demon and human worlds. Their job in the film is to protect a human diplomat and/or spiritual leader named Mayart (Ichiro Nagai) who's seen as integral to the success of a proposed treaty.

Mayart turns out to be a weird, lecherous, child-sized old man and his broad personality dominates in his scenes. By comparison, Taki and Makie are almost like still images of perfect people. There's a sense of a weird family dynamic with Mayart giving full reign to his Id under the presumption that Taki and Makie will always care for him. It's like Taki and Makie are ideals who answer Mayart's needs for protection and acceptance on matters the dreamer expects his parents would be too disgusted to accept. By dreamer I might mean writer/director Yoshiaki Kawajiri or the creator of the manga, Hideyuki Kikuchi. But I also might not mean any real person--it's hazardous to presume too much about an artist; for the purposes of discussion, it's better here to think of a hypothetical dreamer who has this very nightmare-like vision called Wicked City.

The plot continually finds ways back to sex scenes that are partly titillating and partly disturbing; there's a continual push and pull between enticement and repulsion. Makie and Taki are attracted to each other and are frank about sexuality. Only the fact that Makie is a demon makes her more of an "other" than Taki from the audience's point of view, and that's important when we can't be sure exactly what demons think or feel. But really we can say that about any other human being--no-one can really look inside someone else's head but people still instinctively need each other. This co-exists with unreliable anatomy. We can work out, we can wear great clothes and make-up, but there's always a chance something could go wrong, whether it's pimples, baldness, sudden explosive diarrhoea, etc. For a young person, there's the anxiety involved in sex related to the inevitable strangeness of another body. In Wicked City, we have the two ideals, Taki and Makie, and then we have the amorphous and malevolent bodies of their enemies that variously threaten to penetrate, absorb, and mutilate the protagonists.

This movie puts it all out there and I love it. I also love how much blackness there is in the movie--the impenetrable shadows of dark alleyways and churches. Probably it saved a lot of money on paint but it looks great, as does that wonderful saturated look of car tail-lights and the highlight gleams on the sides of people's faces. This movie, like many other anime films of the period, looks better and better as time goes by.

Twitter Sonnet #1151

A second click selects the looking disk.
Convening late the words expressed the dark.
A pixel pulsed to monitor the risk.
Observe the open window's 'X' is marked.
A lemon wedge denied a new install.
Communication caught the router's day.
A spilling scroll collects the printed call.
The moving paper hears what printers say.
Unchosen meals conduct the train abroad.
In feeding rails the iron wheels decrease.
An ether bridged a net for file cod.
A loading screen effects a long surcease.
A diff'rent cable led the folder through.
Computer paths are fraught with glitter glue.

The Milton Sisters, Together Again

There's a new chapter of my infrequently updated webcomic, Dekpa and Deborah, online. We finally meet Mary Milton, Deborah's sister, and Dekpa's English is improved. Happy Labour Day.

Also, Happy Birthday to Kitty Carlisle and Alan Ladd.

The Cornea of Another

Adjusting to a whole different way of perceiving and interacting with the world seems like it would be hard enough without it entailing things no-one believes or understands. A woman blind since childhood has her eyesight restored in 2002's The Eye (見鬼) with the unexpected added ability to see dead people. Some overwrought stylistic choices on the part of the filmmakers, particularly in score and sound, don't detract too much from the film's effectiveness and it's a good horror film with keen attention to a sequence of sensory experience.

Mun (Angelica Lee) undergoes surgery to replace her corneas and finds this is only the beginning of the journey to being able to see the world. Light is too bright and things are too blurry and she meets with a psychotherapist (Lawrence Chou) who explains she needs to build up her "visual vocabulary". To demonstrate, he holds up a stapler and shows that, although she might instantly recognise it by touch, she has no idea how to identify it yet by sight.

I suspect there's even more physical therapy and rehabilitation involved in such a situation but the movie gives us just enough to appreciate the circumstances. It makes it much more effective when Mun starts to see things that other people can't. Naturally, she herself doesn't even realise immediately she's seeing anything she's not supposed to when an elderly woman across from her stands up, is led away by a shadowy figure, and vanishes. It's all new for Mun and this has the effect of making the audience even more afraid for her.

When Mun does first become really alarmed by the ghost of an old woman in the hospital corridor, the music goes up to a screech and the sound mix adds in a bunch of screams that don't come from anyone. Something about it seemed very dated, a cinematic auditory trick from the late 90s and early 00s, and now it had the wrong effect on me, making me think, "I suppose really one would get used to seeing dead people all the time."

And the appearances of the dead do get gradually less alarming so it's good the film comes up with new wrinkles, one arising from a very effective twist that pulls a rug out from under Mun's perspective on everything that happened in the first two thirds of the film. There are two explanations offered for Mun's abilities and a few other plot strands that seem like remnants from an earlier draft, like a woman at a cafe who casually mentions also being able to see ghosts but who's not questioned by Mun and is never seen again. In a way, though, even this adds to a nice sense of free flowing ideas in the film which remains effectively suspenseful to the end.

Five Doctors and Three Understudies

A Doctor Who story featuring five of the Doctors played by their actual actors, one of them being Tom Baker as Four (for real, not archive footage), wins by default. So although The Light at the End, the 2013 anniversary audio story, isn't especially well written, it's still well worth listening to for the Doctor Who fan. It has the added bonus of its writing not being especially bad, either.

Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and Paul McGann all appear as the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Doctor, respectively, along with a selection of companions. The First, Second, and Third Doctors are also in the story but played by different actors, their original performers long deceased at the time of the recording. One and Two are both played by actors who'd originally played companions of those two Doctors--William Russell and Fraser Hines--which is fun but neither of them do especially good impressions. Actor Tim Treloar plays Three and he's not especially evocative of Jon Pertwee, either. The first three Doctors spend the story isolated in some kind of time bubble which distorts their voices slightly, like a bad transmission, and I had a lot of difficulty discerning which was which.

The plot involves the Master (Geoffrey Beevers)--a version of his incarnation in The Deadly Assassin and Keeper of Traken--and his scheme to trap the Doctor in some kind of temporal bomb that effects his first eight incarnations, causing his companions to fade and disappear. There are scenes where Four through Eight are together but mostly they work in pairs with Four and Eight bookending the story. Six has a crucial role, which is a bit disappointing. Four is kind of passive as though writer Nicholas Briggs was afraid of doing anything with him but it was fun hearing Four and Eight talk about the former's scarf. Five has a significant segment, a nice scene featuring Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) and a disastrous meeting. It felt like Sylvester McCoy didn't have much to do but Ace (Sophie Aldred) is amusing, calling Six "Joseph" after the biblical character for his coat.

Mostly this is just a story about sorting things out, moving pieces on a big Shuffleboard. The Day of the Doctor was better for getting at issues more personal to the Doctor and creating tension for his decisions but The Three Doctors remains my favourite anniversary story. The story of Omega feels more like it could stand on its own without the spectacle of multiple Doctors. But if you have multiple Doctors in your story, I will always tune in.

Twitter Sonnet #1150

A tested green revealed a spinach land.
A wary sprite instructs the pretty star.
Electric tables bring the brain to hand.
A cable lifts the stellar bucket car.
Delivered cups contained a set of clubs.
The empty pocket sought a billiard ball.
A daily speech succumbed to magic dubs.
The echoed thought will paint the violet hall.
A party coloured scroll described a light.
Impatient wings encode the torch's smoke.
A layered ash replaced the pallid sight.
Adjustments made a moth an able bloke.
A phony choc'late clogged confection's pump.
A medley changed a song into a clump.