I was bringing the trash cans up from the curb just before leaving for class when I met a pretty, short haired white cat. She (I'm guessing it's a she since that's how she'd be cast in a Disney movie) was on the fence between houses and started to run away when the big trash cans I brought up scraped loudly against the concrete. But she stopped and watched me, and I noticed she looked slightly cross-eyed. I stood still and silent, and we watched each other for a few moments. Her eyelids finally started to droop, so I stepped closer. She immediately back away, but then walked back towards me a little, her nose twitching. She never let me pet her--it might have happened if I'd had a lot more time to just stand silently with her--but she seemed to grow accustomed to my proximity. I like friendly cats, but there's something to be said for the cautious ones, especially if my grandmother notices her hanging around and tells the gardener to kill her.

I can't overstate how much I miss my aunt's cats. Their absence makes me feel like I have a chemical imbalance. Everything feels very, very unnatural.

I didn't actually go straight to class--I had to read Shakespeare's sonnets and eat breakfast first, and I did both at the same time at Starbucks. I've read the sonnets before, but it was years ago, and I don't think they ever impacted me as much as they did to-day. It was also amusing to see how many good Christians in the class seemed upset by the idea that Shakespeare might have been in love with a man.

I feel like I oughta post one, but it's hard to decide which. Here's 23;

As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart,
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite.
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'er-charged with burden of mine own love's might.
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ;
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.


And here's another Smiths video, one directed by Derek Jarman, whom Robyn and Moira have recently told me about;

The paper I said was due on Tuesday is actually due on Thursday. So I'll be working on that for the next couple hours. I so don't feel like it, though . . .

Watching the season finale of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles on Monday (or, if you're like me, you watched it online), you might have been asking yourself, "Who's this band they're talking about? Who are these 'Smiths'? Golly, I wish someone would post a YouTube clip of them in his blog."

Well, fear not, friends. Because it so happens that's just the kind of hero I can be sometimes;



Also, I've discovered that Colin Meloy of the Decemberists recorded an entire album of Morrissey covers. And it's public domain now, and available as a free download at the Internet Archive. And it's pretty good, I think. I could only find one clip on YouTube of Colin performing one of these, though; here.

EDIT: Incidentally, Morrissey's first name is not Paul. It's Steven. His full name is Steven Patrick Morrissey. And now that's something else you know.

Augh. There's a gardener outside making arrhythmic tapping noises I can't sleep around even though I'm strornry sleepy. I'm currently blasting Prince and the Revolution in a puerile attempt to annoy the gardener right back. I don't think it's working.

Thinking right now feels like trying to puncture a granite block with a butter knife. And to-day was yet another day where I had all sorts of plans.

Oh. I think he's stopped . . . more later . . . PERHAPS.

Finally a decent episode of The Colbert Report. It's been too long.

You know, I think the dichotomy of the Democratic presidential race is well illustrated by the images that come up on the first couple pages of Google image searches for the candidates. Here's a signifying Obama;



And a Clinton;



Any moment I expect Hilary to ask Barack, "Why so serious?"

I have to say, Hilary's rhetoric's been downright obnoxious lately. I think I'm tipping more towards Obama lately, though I don't think he's quite Superman. Aquaman, maybe.

I'm still tapping away at A History of a Fake World. I made some decent progress on Tuesday. Four thousand years down, four thousand to go. I keep writing and rewriting the first script of the comic in my head. It oughta be damn near perfect by the time I'm done. Of course, I'll be really irritated if it's not . . .

You may've heard Gary Gygax has died.



Gods, I miss playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Here's Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom for Moira (and for anyone else who wants it).

1. Beyond Belief
2. Tears Before Bedtime
3. Shabby Doll
4. The Long Honeymoon
5. Man Out of Time
6. Almost Blue
7. . . . And In Every Home
8. The Loved Ones
9. Human Hands
10. Kid About It
11. Little Savage
12. Boy with a Problem
13. Pidgin English
14. You Little Fool
15. Town Cryer

As a bonus, here's a nice version of "Shabby Doll" I came across featuring Fiona Apple;



Elsewhere in the music world, I've been following in Jim Emerson's blog the ongoing saga of the Once DVD cover's crapification. The latest post on the subject features quotes from Glen Hansard (one of the film's stars) ranting about it at Pitchfork. The Emerson blog has the photo comparison, though, where you can see the hilarious, seximus maximus thunder thighs someone apparently thought Hansard needed for the DVD to sell.

Hansard takes a moment to give justified props to Criterion DVD art; "It's the opposite of what someone like Criterion would do. They create wonderful art. With a Criterion DVD, you just want to buy it for the box. They do it right."

And here's dessert;

Yes, I'm really busy to-day, but I'm eating breakfast--oatmeal, which seems to take forever to eat. Chris Walsh posted a great Star Wars, Saul Bass opening sequence parody, so I'm taking this flimsy excuse to post this actual Saul Bass opening;

I have about a million different things I want to do to-day, plus a paper I need to work on for class. So here's a video.

I really can't be a self-respecting Morrissey fan without posting this song at least once. Robyn quoted Anton Chigurh the other day; "Now is not a time." All I could think was, "How Soon is Now?"

I uploaded Elvis Costello's My Aim is True for Moira, so I figured I might as well share them with the rest of you. "Once upon a time, I had a little money . . ."

1. Welcome to the Working Week
2. Miracle Man
3. No Dancing
4. Blame It on Cain
5. Alison
6. Sneaky Feelings
7. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes
8. Less Than Zero
9. Mystery Dance
10. Pay It Back
11. I'm Not Angry
12. Waiting for the End of the World
13. Watching the Detectives

Nothing much to report about yesterday. Maids showed up early, so I ended up with only about four hours of sleep, and I went through the day awake but useless, like a running car motor on blocks.

I read part of Caitlin R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest. The first story, "Beatification", is a nice story about a strange sexual ritual. It's followed by the first chapter from Caitlin's upcoming book, Joey LaFaye. I've only read part of the chapter so far, but I've found it oddly familiar. In tone and in many of the opinions expressed, it rather closely resembles Caitlin's Live Journal. Most interestingly, perhaps, in a complaint regarding people who use their blogs or Live Journals to vent about their personal lives, or, as Caitlin puts it in her Live Journal profile's list of "Dislikes"; "people who whine on lj".

I can't say I feel a similar disgust towards such people (I'm often enough such a person myself), though I can understand the attitude because I did feel the same way for a while. I think my feelings were mainly based on remembering revealing posts I'd made that were cathartic at the time, but which made me feel somehow vulnerable later, not only for the personal information I revealed but also because of opinions expressed in the heat of anger or sadness that I no longer held. So I would look upon people who continued to make such posts as being irresponsible or immature.

But now I'm slightly ashamed of having felt that way. It seems a rather arrogant, or maybe anti-organic, point of view to have about something like a blog, where the frequency of posts makes consistency of opinion impossible if you're a normal sentient creature who changes over time. And why, really, would I want to portray myself as someone who never cries over a broken heart? Who am I helping? People who don't want to deal with sympathy they might feel for my troubles. Republicans, in other words.

There's something to be said for avoiding personal attacks against former friends. It would make a friendship difficult to mend if public documents of personal disputes remain. On the other hand, I've always had a low view of relationships whose health depended on sweeping information under the rug. In my experience, if issues aren't dealt with straight, they tend to seep up from under the rug and hurt things even worse. And I also prefer not to let strangers influence my decisions. If an uninvolved party is upset by an apparent contradiction in opinion I've expressed, it doesn't concern me unless they can provide a solid argument.

Mainly, though, I don't think the phenomenon of people treating their blogs as confessionals is so much a problem of people needing attention as it is a problem with a listener deficit. It's nice to be able to talk to someone like the mass, quiet, audience for whom you can't possibly hope to edit your statement to accommodate differing opinions regarding components of a story or argument, so you largely don't bother. It's liberating, and at a sort of atomic level, it is nice to get that attention. Why not? We all need it; I think it's silly not to admit it.

Anyway, I think I like Joey LaFaye so far, but then, I like Caitlin's Live Journal. I must, since I still read it despite the fact that she's banned me from commenting on it.

I guess I'll get back to history-writing to-day. I better go to the grocery store, though, since a lot of food seems to have disappeared rather suddenly . . .

To-day I dreamt I was being pursued by a T-1000. I remember feeling absolutely crushed by the feeling that I couldn't hope to escape or defeat the Terminator, but then there was some kind of major catastrophe, maybe a meteor, and the whole city started sinking into a sea of lava, and I felt a grim, mad pleasure at knowing the T-1000 would likely be destroyed. I'm wondering if this dream was at all inspired by Project A-ko, which I watched again yesterday;



I hadn't seen it in a while, but Project A-ko was one of the first real anime movies I saw in high school. It seems to get better as I get older.

I'm trying to stave off frustration at how long my current project is taking because I know all of the time I'm spending putting together background details is going to pay off. I finished another map yesterday, which I'm rather pleased with. These maps will be on the web site, but they're not exactly going to be a particularly exciting feature, I know. They're really more for my benefit, because I find it a lot easier to work out histories when I've got the visual to work with.

As I was map-making, I listened to rest of Stephen Prince's commentary for Red Beard. Here's another section I found particularly interesting, which focuses on the character of Otoyo, the character I focused on most in my analysis. Prince discusses her relationship with a character in Dostoevsky's The Insulted and the Injured, here referred to as Nelly. The translation I was using for reference in my analysis translated her name as Elena;

The epileptic seizures that Nelly suffers in the novel are based on Dostoevsky's own epilepsy which surfaced at this time. Kurosawa, too, suffered from congenital epilepsy and had frequent seizures as a child, and as an adult he would sometimes go into a trance-like state. He said, "I never noticed it myself, but it seems I would sometimes have brief lapses during my work when I completely forgot what I was doing and went into a kind of trance."

Kurosawa's major characters are all subjected to shocking experiences, as I have mentioned before. In Kurosawa's artistic vision, growth only comes through shock, and it may be that this vision has roots in the director's own physiology. A physiology that would have prompted him to feel a deeper level of kinship with Dostoevsky.

This next scene in the film, where Otoyo goes outside to get money, [is] so strikingly visualised by Kurosawa with all this howling wind and dust, and the extraordinary telephoto compression of his lenses. The images look virtually two dimensional. This scene has its source in The Insulted and Injured. It's an almost exact transposition of the scene where Nelly leaves Vanya's house and begs for money on a nearby bridge. Vanya follows her, watches her beg, and then sees her enter a shop where she buys a teacup to replace one of Vanya's that she had defiantly broken. Vanya calls her name, she sees him, is startled, and drops the cup, where it breaks upon the pavement.

This scene is one of the few in the film that takes place outside the clinic. And we see again Kurosawa's almost offhand evocation of a detailed historical period. Kurosawa's sets were enormously budgeted, the production design of this film was one of the most elaborate in contemporary Japanese film. And yet he's showing us these sets in an almost subliminal fashion. He is evoking this world in tremendous detail; we see a merchant's shop, fully stocked with goods, fishermen, hauling in their nets, samurai strolling across the bridge. And yet the scene itself is quite brief. It's a peepshow, really, a fast glimpse of a richly detailed historical era. For most of the film, we are in the clinic, which is a sacred space of healing, a zone that is set off protectively from the surrounding world. When Kurosawa evokes that world, as he does here, it's in a flash, a quick peep, and full of detail and texture, but not a place where the characters linger.

Let's allow this scene, of Otoyo breaking the cup, and then breaking down before Yasumoto, to play out in all the artistry that Kurosawa has given us. This is Otoyo's moment of release. She has been inhibited, protectively insulating herself from the world and from all emotion. People cannot be trusted. They have hurt and abused her. She cannot reveal herself to them, and yet she has gone out to buy this cup for Yasumoto, has opened herself up again to vulnerability and the prospect of being hurt. She's going to sink to her knees and release her emotion in a tremendously moving outburst. This wonderfully moving and cathartic moment is one that Kurosawa is filming almost literally from Dostoevsky's novel. Dostoevsky wrote, "All the feeling which she had repressed for so long broke out at once in an uncontrollable outburst and I understood the strange stubbornness of a heart that for a while shrinkingly masked its feeling. The more harshly, the more stubbornly, as the need for expression and utterance grew stronger, until the inevitable outburst came, when the whole being forgot itself and gave itself up to the craving for love, to gratitude, to affection and to tears. She sobbed until she became hysterical."

Dostoevsky, then, provided one source for the character of Otoyo. The other source on which Kurosawa based this character was an incident he witnessed during that period in his twenties when he lived with his brother, Heigo, in a little alleyway tenement in Tokyo that seemed to Kurosawa like a world from the feudal era. A floating world of colourful characters, down and out people, who had no visible means of support, but who depended on each other, and who sustained their difficult lives with humour and resilient spirits. Heigo was working as a benshi, one who narrated silent films at the neighbourhood theatre. To Kurosawa, he seemed like a larger than life storybook character, a masterless samurai, held in awe, and respected by all in the neighbourhood.

Despite the bon ami that Kurosawa found in the neighbourhood, nasty things happened there. An older man raped his young granddaughter and parents regularly beat their stepchildren. These events impressed upon Kurosawa the existence of savagery within the human heart and he remained haunted by this for the rest of his life. One incident in particular was terrifying; sobbing, a woman from next door said that a neighbour was torturing her stepchild. She had bound the girl to a bed and was burning moxa on her bare chest. In traditional Japanese medicine, small amounts of moxa were burned on the skin to treat inflammation. But in this case, large amounts were apparently being used in a sadistic fashion. The sobbing woman begged Kurosawa to go and set the child free. Peeping in the window, Kurosawa found the girl tied to the bedpost. He went into the room and began to untie her. But she glared at him and angrily said that if she were untied, it would only make her stepmother torture her worse the next time.

Kurosawa said that her reaction was so shocking, it felt like he had been slapped. Even if he freed her, he realised that she couldn't, or wouldn't, escape from that terrible environment. Pity for her would only lead to more trouble, an idea that he dramatises with Yasumoto's encounter with the Mantis. Kurosawa went away, but the scene of the beaten child lingered in his mind. He recreated that child in Otoyo and his experience made him especially receptive to Dostoevsky's account of Nelly. Kurosawa's portrait of Otoyo, however, is not as terrifyingly bleak as what he encountered in that bedroom. Otoyo does not collaborate with her torturer, and her own innate goodness does prevail.

Some David Bowie for you. Yes, I know this blog's turning into a parade of YouTube clips. Just be thankful it's not another Donald Duck cartoon.

There are lots of versions of this song; this one's probably technically the best, but somehow I find the most beautiful version to be this one;

SETSULED ANGRY! SETSULED SMASH USING NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE!! FuuuuuuAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHCCCKK!!! Bu-LUDDY FUUUCK!!

I'm upset.

I just took the mid-midtermish (I guess that makes it a quarter term? Except there's only two--fuck it) thing in my British Literature class and I fucking ran out of fucking time. we had a choice of two essay prompts, the first asking for analysis of women's roles in English culture and how a woman's standing in society or something was seen to change over time in the texts we've read because the teacher, for some reason, spends 30% of the time trying to shoehorn a feminist dissertation into the British Literature class. This annoys me, so I chose prompt 2, which asked me to describe the changes in religious culture evident in the texts and how those changes related to historical events.

I spent some time just staring at the prompt, wondering how I could make something out of it that wouldn't be parroting the introductory texts, and I decided to frame the essay around masochism, and how the more utilitarian drives depicted in Beowulf transitioned into the Christian promotion of humility and self-denial. We were required to use direct quotes from at least three of the works we've read so far. And I thought I was doing fine--I was happy with my thesis statement, moseyed through two paragraphs, and all of a sudden there was only twenty minutes left. Yes, I was supposed to write an essay discussing a country's religious changes, tying them to historical events, making sure to quote three separate texts, all in under an hour.

I sped through a paragraph on Sir Gawain's existential conflict, and was starting a new paragraph on Margery Kempe when the teacher called "time". I was in the middle of a sentence that was going something like, "Kempe's self-loathing at missing so many confessions was not abetted until she transferred her emotional support system to her personal conception of Christ, who in her mind," madly I searched for a quote, the teacher Ended Things, and I lamely finished, "was willing to have sex with her."

GGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH! Am I a fucking hamster, dancing for your amusement??! Bloody school. I suppose this somehow demonstrates my failure to understand English Literature, right? Surely it's perfectly sensible to judge my assimilation of knowledge by how quickly I can write? Ugh. I bet all he wanted was a loose assembly of quotes. It's all just bloody, fucking, forms at the end of the day. Can't they just be honest?

Will . . . not . . . break . . . things . . .

Because I live vicariously through Donald Duck lately, here's another cartoon, kids. This is Cured Duck from 1945. I don't know why all the versions of this on YouTube are subtitled. I don't recognise the language here, but I love that they apparently had no idea how to translate Donald most of the time. And I love the way the anger management machine laughs.

Another Donald Duck cartoon; Bellboy Donald from 1942. This one sympathises with my dislike for children.

The fourth episode of Zoku Saiyonara Zetsubou Sensei has finally been fan-subbed and I think it's my favourite episode of the season. I only wish people would learn how to put widescreen images on YouTube without distorting them. I still highly recommend watching this if you can't download the episode torrent;

I can't believe there are actually Donald Duck cartoons on YouTube now. I suspect it's only a matter of time before Disney carts these people off to secret prisons, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

This is Duck Pimples from 1945. I really love this one;

I don't remember getting much sleep to-day, and I suspect I got even less than I remember. I'd had a glass of absinthe (so, so wonderful), but I guess absinthe doesn't make one as drowsy as does rum or brandy, because I wasn't even interested in sleep until 6:30am, and compulsively watched one YouTube Monty Python clip after another. Maybe I ought to've been a lumberjack.

I did, at least, get a lot more done yesterday. I finished a map, then started making up names for places. By the end of the night, I was just making up words for the different languages without assigning meanings, figuring I could draw from the pool at any time. For the nation I'm currently working on, I decided all the words should sound a little like Russian crossed with Japanese.

When I finally got tired of word making, even though it's something productive I can do while drinking, I played a little Knights of the Old Republic, wherein I've just set foot on Kashyyyk. Mission (a Twi'lek girl named Mission) kept pressuring me to have the Wookiee character, Zaalbar, in the party. I finally relented, but I'm beginning to regret it--Zaalbar must be the most annoying Wookiee in Jedidom. It's like someone took just the audio of Chewbacca when he sounded the most like he was whining, and Zaalbar comes out sounding like a horse imitating whale song. And it takes him three times as long to say anything in Wookiee as it takes your average human to say anything in English.

And I watched the new Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Monday's was the first truly badly written episode. Really badly written, with a pro-Christian cherry on top. Maybe the good writers are still on vacation. Though it was nice seeing Summer Glau get her ballet on.