Loving the Electric Land

The outfit my avatar wore to Saturday's chess tournament, again by Vita's Boudoir with a mask by Illusions. The picture was taken at Retropolis.




This picture was taken at Risk City. The next two were taken at Dragonfly;




I've found myself thinking more about Steve Jobs. I was at my parents' house on Saturday, and I could tell my mother and maybe my sister both seemed to feel Jobs was a great innovator, pretty much like the rest of the world. Maybe the key there is that they both have iPhones and I don't. Maybe I'd feel differently if I wasn't too poor to afford Apple products.

It's one of those occasions where I feel sort of like the sickly weird wildebeest trailing behind the herd, so I watched the video of Jobs' Stanford graduation commencement speech Caitlin posted on her blog;



I was only able to watch half of it at first. I just can't seem to handle it when people brag about themselves, and when I saw at least part of the speech was going to be Jobs talking about how wonderful he is, I had to switch off. But I guess that might be the expected thing for commencement speeches, and displays of great self esteem is kind of an American cultural norm now, so maybe it's expecting a little too much holding these things against Jobs particularly. I also didn't really respect his casual reference to Microsoft's Windows basically stealing the format of the Mac OS when in reality Microsoft and Apple both "stole" the interface from Xerox. It's not an argument I've particularly held against Microsoft or Apple. To me, that's sort of like saying every car made now is a rip off of the Model T.

But once past all this, I did find the philosophy Jobs expressed of doing what you love, consequences be damned, is a philosophy I have tended to agree with, though it seems to be contradicting many of the people now praising Jobs, including Caitlin, who was critical of the "fuck plan B" Twitter trend. What better way to say "fuck plan B" than to drop your regular college classes to study calligraphy?

Anyway, I tried to think about how the iPods and iPads were really wonderful, life changing innovations. Inasmuch as I can see that the iPad is clearly modelled on the PADD introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, I can kind of understand it.



I think one of the reasons Doctor Who seems to be more popular now is that Doctor Who always had the police box, was always kind of blasé about "futuristic" when that was largely the appeal of Star Trek--so much of the once fascinatingly futuristic look of Star Trek has either already come true or just looks dated. But I remember thinking how neat it was the characters could access so much information on those sleek little devices.

I mean, I agree with David Lynch that it's sad people think watching movies on the little screens is just as good as watching it on a big screen. But as with my Kindle, I can't ignore the utility this might potentially introduce. Even as I certainly think reading from a real book is a superior experience, I can carry whole libraries on my Kindle and grab thousands of free masterpieces off Amazon at a moment's notice. I watched His Girl Friday on my iPod when the power went out, after all.

So, okay. What am I saying? I don't quite understand the devotion people have to Apple, particularly to their aesthetic, but I'm sorry you folks lost a person involved with something you love and I can sort of vaguely understand. Well, I'm really trying.

Damn, I still feel like the sickly wildebeest. Maybe it was all that Vietnamese food I had for lunch.

Twitter Sonnet #311

Noodle questions plague marinara blob.
Wrathful basil leaves only a small bone.
Turning hands molest a helpless doorknob.
A plaid phone emits a tartan ring tone.
Egg feet feel nothing of olive oil.
Leaf spears bend in a vegan butter sky.
Resonant beeswax comes to a boil.
Rainbow bowling pins grant another try.
Misspelled chow mein sky writing drizzles down.
Fortune favours those who predict present.
The mind sticks onto a unique grey clown.
A full moon bulges out of a crescent.
Crashing creature pushes a booth to black.
The asterisk balloon has a heart attack.

Development with Limited Assistance

I'm four episodes into Arrested Development, and it's good, though so far not quite as amazing as its reputation suggests. But it may be too early to judge. Mostly I'm marvelling at what a great list of connexions the makers of the show apparently have--the show was produced and narrated by Ron Howard, so maybe he's the well-connected nucleus. The show's certainly better than any of his movies, though I've a floating date with myself to get really drunk some night and try to enjoy Willow again.

But, yes, Arrested Development has a great cast. Can you believe Clint Howard appears at one point? That's right, Clint Howard in a Ron Howard project, who would have thought we'd see the day? Well, maybe a more impressive guest star was Liza Minnelli in the fourth episode, who sort of surprised me by exhibiting some actually keen comic timing, which is somehow all the more effective paired with the shock of how much she looks and sounds like Judy Garland. She certainly can't sing, as her recent Tony Awards appearance demonstrated, or her cringe inducing appearance in a Sex in the City movie, but I can see from the Arrested Development appearance that her acting chops are alive and kicking.

The main cast includes Jason Bateman as the lead and straight man to his screwy family, which includes his sister played by the very hot Portia de Rossi, who doesn't appear to have aged at all since her first appearance on Ally McBeal over ten years ago.



Her husband's played by David Cross, who's effective as usual, but my favourite is Jeffrey Tambor as the father of the misfit Bluth family and corrupt founder of the company apparently built on a beach frozen banana stand. Something about Tambor's face implies bananas.



But it's his ability to calculate how to deliver lines that really works about him. I always think of a rubber band representing the audience's attention to the premise of a joke or bit being stretched as the performer or performers begin to layer on absurdities. The good comic actor turns the tone before the rubber band snaps, either by getting to the punchline, or, if there's no punchline, hitting an unexpected new emotional note that casts the setup in a new light. In this sense, a good comic actor can make material funny that wasn't necessarily funny in the first place, and Jeffrey Tambor's brilliant at this. There's a scene in the fourth episode where Tambor's character, imprisoned due to corporate fraud, finds himself in a cell with his magician son Gob (pronounced like the biblical Job) who's there as part of an escape act. Gob is desperate for privacy so that he can pass the key he's swallowed to escape with, but somehow he didn't plan on the fact that the toilet would be in an exposed place in the prison cell. Tambor tells him he could go look for a restroom but, "they've been locking the doors lately, so . . ." And cuts himself off to look down. His instinct found just the right beat to end the sarcasm--it's not a particularly funny line without what Tambor brings to it.

So performances alone are enough to keep me watching the show.

Running This Town

I have to express some genuine confusion and disappointment at the attention Steve Jobs' death is receiving. I mean, I don't like it when anyone dies, and certainly I think Jobs was probably a vital contributor to innovations in personal computing in the 1970s and 1980s. But people are acting like Benjamin Franklin just died. This was a guy who sat at the head of an organisation supported mainly by propaganda dedicated to selling vastly overpriced computers and essentially frivolous gadgets. Really what Jobs represents is a money making machine. Not discovering planets or cures for diseases, but taking advantage of current cultural short attention spans and love for electronic communication to sell, indeed, efficient devices for that. This easily outweighs whatever positive contributions he made--for his role in recognising the usefulness of the mouse based operating system and proliferating it, he's also introduced bloated and intrusive software like iTunes and of course hardware mostly dependent on his inefficient software. His main contribution to society is that he found more ways to force people to be his customers and to like it. If you're looking for an American figure to compare him to, you're probably better off looking to William Randolph Hearst than Benjamin Franklin.



Or maybe Nucky Johnson. I watched the second episode of Boardwalk Empire's new season last night. The show has such an enormous main cast, I'm glad the makers of the show feel comfortable writing episodes where less than half of those characters appear. This second one had a good fight scene with Jimmy and a nice demonstration of Chalky White's power in jail. Once again, Margaret is shown to suddenly be pragmatic and cutthroat--I guess they've just decided to completely change her character. Well, I guess it's just as well, I said they couldn't go far with the innocent immigrant thing.

More Red Cape than Movie

A year after The Mark of Zorro, director Rouben Mamoulian teamed up with Tyrone Power again for Blood and Sand, a better film than their Zorro film, but not a great film. It won an academy award for cinematography, and it does feature some really beautiful Technicolor compositions. It also features some engaging supporting performances by John Carradine, Anthony Quinn, and Rita Hayworth. There are individual scenes that work extremely well, but they overwhelm the feeble main story.

Tyrone Power always seems like kind of a chump to me, even when he's supposed to be playing a smart guy. My favourite of his films, Nightmare Alley, is a noir about a guy who thinks he's scamming everyone only to find out too late he's the one being chiselled, thanks in part to his own decisions. Blood and Sand is sort of like a very lightweight version of that. It's the story of a matador named Juan Gallardo (Power) and the movie pulls so many punches with him I thought maybe he was based on a real person and the movie was financed by his family. But no, it's just a totally fictional character the writers were evidently uninterested in taking risks with.

At just over two hours long, the movie has a kind of an epic feel about it since we start off with Juan as a child running away from Seville to go to Madrid with his friends to pursue their dreams of becoming matadors. I'm by no means a fan of bullfighting--it seems like rather pointless animal cruelty. It was sort of funny, though, how the movie portrayed the defeat of the bull as a glorious triumph but a scene that followed of the bull's meat being divvied up amongst some desperate, grasping poor is shown as something horrific, the score going to severe strings as we see the stripped corpse in a shadowed chamber and John Carradine in the foreground grimly observing, "The other side of the curtain." Yeah, it's a shame the purity of killing is sullied by the fact that it's useful to anyone.



One of the reasons Juan's story lacks so much impact is that we don't actually see much of him bullfighting. And unlike in The Mark of Zorro where Tyrone Power's actual fencing prowess is on display, the bullfighting shot from a distance is clearly performed by different man whose posture and movements are totally different from Power's.



But the main reason the story doesn't work is, again, the oddly soft treatment. At first we see Juan returning home thinking he's been hailed as a promising young matador by a prominent newspaper critic, but he finds out the review is negative when he presents it proudly to his fiancée, revealing his inability to read or write at the same time. We see him bitterly disappointed for a moment and then, without any indication of how much time has passed and no scene of him bullfighting, we cut to him as an established success at bullfighting, with the same critic now singing his praises. When Juan falls for another woman, again, we don't have any idea how much time has passed since he'd gotten married.

Rita Hayworth doesn't show up until well after the halfway mark, and it's as the rival to the main love interest, played by The Mark of Zorro's Linda Darnell. Both women wear gorgeous costumes, and neither receives anything but broad, uninteresting characterisation. I love the scene where Darnell confronts Hayworth. Darnell's dressed oddly like a mourning window while Hayworth is in see-through white.




This follows two moments that are fascinating in different ways. First is Darnell praying to the Virgin Mary, and we actually hear through voiceover the conversation between her and Mary. Darnell bops her head along with her own voiceover, coming off as a ventriloquist while we look at a statue of Mary crying milky tears for her part of the dialogue as she explains how to deal with Hayworth.



Then we cut to Hayworth playing bullfighter to Power's bull. I loved the maniacal expressions on Hayworth's face.



Hayworth has two scenes that outshine Juan's whole story--first strumming a guitar and singing to Juan over a beautiful chess set which reminds one of her future role in Gilda, though I'm pretty sure she's dubbed over with another singer here.



Then later in the film she has a rather hot dance sequence with Anthony Quinn. Remember, Hayworth held her own dancing with Fred Astaire.



Moments into this, I totally forgot the nominal point was that Juan was being spurned by the woman he'd left his wife for. It was just another part that rose above the movie's whole.

Twitter Sonnet #310

Voided notes of Bond drip from a U-Boat.
A number's replaced by a changeling name.
Malt fads bypass the venerable oat.
Always dangerous is the spirit grain game.
Requisite vodka boils damned cherry.
Steam escalators convey sad Geisha.
Port spoons run away with the knife sherry.
Starboard brandy thinks of love and Russia.
Grey scale vodka easily parks your car.
Paternal farmers ask if you're concerned.
When you're a boy, the world is a big bar.
Jameson photographers often burn.
Querulous blue bulbs pin pink lemonade.
An invisible shadow drinks orange shade.

"It was a Big Time, when Big Men Drove Nothing but Huge Ford Cars"

I was pleased to see this week's Zero Punctuation is about how much Gears of War 3 sucks. Normally I could care less about the latest faceless parcel of shooter shipping to stores. But this one was using a great Mazzy Star song in its commercial.



I guess the feeling you're supposed to be left with is, "No matter how much you and your bros rock, it's futile in the face of the end!" Notice it's recorded live off a television, I guess Epic Games weren't interested in having this one online. It seems to be the latest in a new style of video game commercial, like the Dead Island commercial, that grabs for an easy sense of depth by pairing solemn music with violent id candy. The carrot of foreboding so you have an excuse for mindless shooting. Even that wouldn't particularly bother me--though it wouldn't excite my interest either--except I hate that fucking Wide Guy American aesthetic. The one whose ancestry seems to go back to pro-wrestling and has grown in influence thanks to World of Warcraft. This perplexing fondness for the squat and, like Yahtzee points out, the impression of an image stretched to fit the wrong aspect ratio.



Get your dumb, meaty mitts off my Mazzy Star. Does he look like he has manhole boobs to anyone else?

I see the game's story was written by Science Fiction novelist Karen Traviss, who'd previously written novels based on Star Wars games. She liked to write about Mandalorian culture but, according to Wikipedia;

. . . in 2009, much of Traviss' works in reference to the Mandalorians and their heritage was retconned in a series called Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The exact reason for the change in continuity remains unknown to this date, but it prompted the author to cancel a further three novels which were planned to release in late 2009, and early to mid 2010.

I thought it was a pretty well known risk of writing in the so called "Expanded Universe" of Star Wars, that George Lucas could at any time decide to contradict you. Didn't she know what she was signing up for? Maybe she was emboldened by the near inclusion of Knights of the Old Republic's Darth Revan in Clone Wars. I kind of sympathise with her in that I suspect writing on Clone Wars isn't markedly greater than hers.

Golds, Pinks, Blacks, and Duck Egg Blues

It was my favourite lighting and cloud situation when I walked to the store to-day. I also upset a few unkindnesses of ravens, taking pictures. As usual, I felt like I could've gotten better pictures of them, but I did better than I usually do.

Drive By Disturbing

I only just realised last night the new season of Boardwalk Empire had started last week. I watched the first episode with dinner last night and found I had little or no memory of what had been going on at the end of the first season. But it was a nice return to the show--still a very pretty looking show. And I was glad to see Jack Huston's scar faced sniper character has been permanently added to the cast.



They've started hinting at an incest subplot with Jimmy and his mother, which feels like kind of a cheat to me when the two actors are only nine years apart in age and look the same age. Gretchen Mol simply never comes off as his mother in any way. Yet I do like both characters individually.

The one episode of Game of Thrones I've seen also had some incest. Is this a thing now on modern American television? Both cases seem to be playing it just for shock value. These folks ought to have a look at Japanese television, where writers and artists have been doing incest a lot longer and seem better at taking it somewhere. Rather a dubious distinction, I suppose . . .



Twitter Sonnet #309

Suspiciously sculpted curved purple cloth;
Only the collar on the tight shirt's real.
Ambitious insects have arms like a sloth.
The Mongols' bows looked like Ally McBeal.
Innocent trash bags fall under the tree.
Blood engorged fall leaves are impractical.
Decent postcards are shredded by the free.
Glass tofu can't hide a red spectacle.
Green clouds squeeze moon water on a zombie.
Noxious khaki confines millions of troops.
Youthful nostrils sneeze a purple hobby.
Different dialogue hides under the loops.
Disney backdoors lead to a stolen gown.
Wood wheels turn to effect cloudy sundown.

Magical Skulls In Love

This is the Batgirl-ish outfit my avatar wore to Saturday's chess tournament. It's by Vitabela. I got it on Friday night at the very cool Halloween Fair at Vita's Boudoir. The mask is by Siyu Suen and the boots are by lassitude & ennui. The pictures were taken at Retropolis.



Although I complain about the chemistry between the Doctor and River, there is something nicely poetic about their relationship, the idea that their whole relationship is based on one of them already knowing the other. Because they meet each other in reverse, there's no point in time when a Doctor who's never met River is meeting a River who's never met the Doctor and vice versa. Their first meeting doesn't exist, so, if one wants to wax romantic, we could say these are two souls who have always known, and always will know, each other.



There's something similar about the series arc of Dantalian no Shoka, the final episode of which I watched to-day. Throughout the series, we'd been cutting back to a recollection of Huey's (the male lead's) childhood dream of meeting and falling in love with a girl in white. In the final episode, this is revealed to be, in some way, the series female lead, the "Black Biblioprincess" Dalian.

Huey is Dalian's "Keykeeper", and to combat misuse of the Phantom Books, Huey is given permission by Dalian to initiate the rather obvious sexually metaphorical action of inserting the key he received from the girl in white in his dream into the key hole in Dalian's chest, which unlocks her power. In the last episode, in an effort to release the girl in white from some mystical prison, Huey inserts his key into Dalian again, but is shocked to find another door in the dream world barring him from escaping with the girl in white. Turns out he needs to give her more than a good lay this time.



The girl in white, as a part of Huey's dream and the one who gave him his penis/key, seems as much a part of Huey as Dalian, maybe moreso as it's only Dalian's and the girl in white's word for it that we know they're the same person. And that Huey was only able to access that childhood dreamworld by having the metaphorical sex with Dalian. So again, two souls united that have always been united. I think these shows must have been written either by people in really great relationships or people who are completely dysfunctional loners.

Anyway, Dantalian no Shoka's finale wasn't bad, but not unlike the new Doctor Who, I find myself preferring the smaller, isolated stories leading up to it. This is a GAINAX series, so a moment in the dream world where Huey starts asking himself "Who am I?" immediately made me think the show was resorting to Evangelion business on reflex, though it was more or less fitting.

Trying to Avoid Spoilers

Not bad as season finales go. Not bad as season finales that have to be about the end of the universe go. I'll admit, "The Wedding of River Song" didn't convince me the bar on those isn't pretty low. But I did enjoy the mishmash of time, the pterodactyls, Winston Churchill as Caesar, though Steven Moffat seemingly comparing himself to Charles Dickens provoked a pained grin from me.

For a season story arc, having the Doctor from the last episode appear in the first episode is a good technique, I'd been thinking for some time. And the device ultimately used to get him out of his apparent death was better than I'd thought Moffat could pull off, though it inevitably didn't quite work. Unless the universe really is fooled by appearances.



I liked the carnivorous skulls, Amy Pond in an eyepatch and her play with Rory. I still don't think the Doctor and River have good chemistry--this one especially felt very teenager.

I guess the bit I liked best was when the Doctor learned of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart's death. I think viewing the series as one story, Moffat's very right in thinking that needed to be acknowledged. Though I don't see his logic on the first question in the universe.

Neighbourhood Fascists

I was pleased to see yesterday the ducks had gotten back some of their courage.

It seems like there are an awful lot of episodes of Star Trek about teenagers getting godlike powers or otherwise decent people being corrupted by the sudden gift of godlike powers. I watched the first season episode "Charlie X" last night, which was a fairly accurate if somewhat broad portrayal of teenage fascism.

See, I can watch old American Sci-Fi television, too.

I found on my English essay rough draft the teacher had marked the places where he noticed I'd used British spellings. This is actually the first time a teacher has raised the issue with me since third grade, when it was an actual spelling assignment. I remember taking my paper to the teacher and asking her why it was marked wrong and her telling me, "We don't spell it like that in this country." I hadn't actually thought there could be a reason the way words were spelled in my C.S. Lewis books wouldn't be considered legitimate. But once my natural priggish instincts were aroused, I decided to use British spelling from then on. Though, of course, only that particular teacher cared. Soon I just used British spelling because I thought it looked better. It never occurred to me another teacher would care.

I meant to bring it up with the teacher at the end of class, but I was too busy flirting with a girl who wears a hat that looks almost exactly like Sylvester McCoy's. Is there a reason I only seem to be interested in girls with hats? Maybe it's a narcissistic thing, since I wear a hat.

Anyway, "Charlie X" was decent, except for an extraordinary number of those shots where there's extra illumination on people's eyes. I bet there's a technical term for those shots. The Morticia Addams shot.



They didn't even care about continuity, we'd seen Kirk from the side fully lit and then there's a cut to this close-up. So for gods' sakes, look at his eyes, people, they insist.

I was in the mood for Star Trek because George Takei was talking about it on The Howard Stern Show last week. He revealed that Shatner improvised a lot of his lines, but that apparently wasn't as bad as what he saw John Wayne doing on the set of The Green Berets. According to Takei, Wayne basically took over the movie from Mervyn LeRoy. Which is pretty amazing--LeRoy had been a prominent director since the 1930s. But Wayne would show up to set not only with new lines for himself but lines for other actors. I see IMDb credits Wayne as one of the directors--I wonder if this was arranged after the fact.



Twitter Sonnet #308

T-shirts serve a vulnerable master.
The eyebrow curve measures every owl.
English disintegrates in Math Blaster.
A frood reclines nude on glowing towel.
Imitation grapes reform the city.
A lurking seed reveals the big bag lie.
Cube cardboard's a harbinger for kitty.
Now even canvas hats are worth a try.
The watchful shadow tumbles off the couch.
Identity spins a crazy mobile.
Pockets of rice and beans look like brain pouch.
I think mustard juice might just go global.
Plastic traps fold under clouds of sugar.
The milkless dew drenched the bone dry cougar.

Straining Against a Skull Cell

What a strange face Peter Lorre had. Sensual bug eyes, soft flesh and dark lips. But it wasn't just his face, it was that tired, plaintive, grasping manner of his. And the voice, of course. Hearing him in Fritz Lang's 1931 German film M demonstrates it's not merely the accent that accounts for the strangeness of Lorre's voice. No-one sounds like him.



He captivates in his long monologue at the end, and you compulsively try to decode it despite the fact that it's a rather simplistic take on the criminally insane mind. The movie seems to, ultimately, be an anti-death penalty argument, but it's constructed of so many fantastic elements and relies on so much fairy tale logic, it feels more like a strange dream than a coherent argument about justice.

Made in the early days of talkies, there are a few eerily silent sequences. Like a police raid on a thieves' basement pub--the revellers revel silently, police cars pull up outside in total silence.

When police lean on the common criminal harder because of the child killer played by Lorre, the organised criminals decide to catch the killer themselves. They have beggars who follow the man once he's identified, one of them surreptitiously slapping a chalk letter "M" on Lorre's coat to make him easier to spot. Then, sort of like a marathon runner who figures a flying machine would involve running somehow, the film decides the thieves would trap the killer by cornering him in a building and then breaking in, tying up the night watchmen, and getting the job done without setting off alarms, just like they were pulling a heist. It's like old Dungeons and Dragons rules and the mage has to cast Fireball on a lock to get the chest open.

It then clearly becomes a commentary on a public and system that endorse the death penalty as the thieves put together a mock trial for the killer played by Lorre. The argument is too broad and simplistic to hold water, and I say that as someone who's anti-death penalty. The movie's saved by its maybe accidental strangeness, and one can contemplate the disturbing yet oddly sympathetic portrayal of a child killer in a dream world.