The Largest Loony Bin

As the world greets Batman: Arkham City, I've just started playing its predecessor, Arkham Asylum, mainly because it was $9.99 on Steam this past week. With every new game costing between forty and sixty dollars on any platform, there's no way I can hope to stay current on video games, though it is nice that there seems to be so many people doing commentated play-throughs of games on YouTube. I recently watched one of Tim's favourites', The Yogscast's, coverage of Dead Island, because I had to write an essay on the game's commercial for my English class. My thesis was kind of on how the graphic and sort of depressing vignette of the little girl getting killed, turned into a zombie, and getting killed again was validation for the potential player and that's why the game sold so well despite bearing little tonal resemblance to that trailer. It was nice I didn't have to play it.



Anyway, I quite like Arkham Asylum so far. It's a different experience after playing sandbox games like Oblivion and the new Fallout games--I haven't played such a linear game in a long time. In the sandbox games, there's a million ways to kill a boss. In Arkham Asylum, you're always going to kill Bane by throwing batarangs at his face while he charges at you, dodging him, then tearing out his venom tubes once he's been dazed by a sufficient number of batarangs. Which is not to say it's not a challenge or that it's not fun. It's both of those things. There's something liberating about swinging up to the ceiling and waiting to slowly and stealthily pick off five guys with machine guns without having to worry about one or some of them deciding to leave the room or spotting you because, after all, you're just above their heads and the bat-grapple does make a great deal of noise. There are times when I miss the freedom of creative playing, as when I'm clearly meant to sneak past three armed guards and I said, "Fuck it, I'm Batman, I'm taking them down." I must have died fifty times trying before I sullenly slunk back to script.



But the gameplay is really fun. I don't feel so hemmed in--I get genuine delight out of Batman's melee combos and gliding down from the rafters to silently take an enemy from behind. The gorgeous graphics and atmosphere contribute a great deal to this and writer Paul Dini created dialogue that's not unintentionally funny and doesn't annoy me, high marks for video game dialogue. Though I hope he's not the guy who decided Arkham Asylum was built by some guy named "Amadeus Arkham", I hope it was already part of Batman lore.

Oh, I see Grant Morrison's to blame. I don't know, maybe it shouldn't bug me. But how many people were really named Amadeus in the past couple hundred years? It sounds too much like an old fashioned name someone reached for because they don't know many old fashioned names. And Arkham, a name which comes from a fictional city created by H.P. Lovecraft--it still sounds like a place name to me, like it was short for Ark Hamlet at some point. Though I guess there are lots of last names that end in "ham". Something about Amadeus Arkham just doesn't scan for me, I don't know why.

I do like the lines Dini gives Joker, as when he threatens to drop an elevator while Batman's in it like "a sack of puppies."



This comes right before the encounter with Scarecrow, which got very American McGee's Alice. It was cool, though I kind of wonder, since I beat a massive hallucination of Scarecrow, how Batman actually beat Scarecrow. Was he drooling and flailing his arms around until he got lucky?

Really, though, the only thing I genuinely dislike about Arkham Asylum is it force feeds me proto-cloud gaming. This is the future, or anyway it's the future game publishers want. Games that exist more or entirely on servers they own that we just tap into. I guess the eventual result would not be unlike Second Life, though presumably with less load time. The main point is to combat piracy, of course. I'm old fashioned, I still like having my hardcopies and being able to play single player games even without an Internet connexion. But Fallout: New Vegas actually required me to install Steam, the most prominent proto-cloud gaming service, even though I bought it in a store. And Steam has to be running whenever I play New Vegas, which isn't so bad since Steam at least has an offline mode. But Arkham Asylum, which I got through Steam since that seemed to be the only way I could get the $9.99 deal (was this what Herman Cain was talking about?), also required me to have a Windows Live account in order to save my game. I can play the game, but somehow I'm to believe this function games have had since the original Nintendo system can't be had in Arkham Asylum unless I'm plugged into some social network I don't give a shit about. Who knows what "achievements" and bullshit it's publishing to my arbitrarily assigned profile. I'm planning on getting Skyrim when it comes out next month, half of me expects I'll have to sign up for some other thing foisted on me. What happens when the parent companies of these things go out of business? Am I going to be able to play these games anymore? I suppose they'd consider it a good thing if I couldn't lest old games make me hesitate before buying new ones. At this rate, people are going to feel they have to pirate games. I foresee cloud server emulators at some point for certain. Yeah, you don't see that kind of thing much for Second Life or MMORPGs because those things are by nature communal, but they're nuts if they think people are going to stand for this when it comes to single player games. We can live without anonymously broadcasting the same scripted achievements everyone gets who plays the game, thank you.

Bee Week Draws to a Close

Not my best week of amateur photography. These are the best four I got.





I haven't had time to watch much over the past few days. I've almost finished the first season of Arrested Development, which hit its stride at the eighth episode, "In God We Trust", written by Abraham Higgenbotham. He seems to have brought an effective template of dovetailed running gags the show seems to have kept thereafter.

I also watched the newest Boardwalk Empire, "What Does the Bee Do?" earlier in the week. Not bad--I really loved the scene where the Commodore has a stroke when Gillian, pretending to be a naked Diana, shoots him with a toy bow. Otherwise the episode was mostly just plot. Richard taking off his mask to pose for Angela's painting didn't make sense, and it seemed like they were just finding an excuse to have him take off his mask.



Twitter Sonnet #315

Timid skyscrapers brush lightly the smog.
Grey dollars dribble down gaseous chin.
Pirate souls vomit for want of ghost grog.
Muffin top covers the recycling bin.
Gravely told anecdotes have authorised
Atomic deployment of spiked citrus.
So youth's excitement has been cauterised
By a mint moustache alphabet circus.
Tinsel shivers around the carousel.
Silent horse shadows drift up a gold pike.
Nocturnal sunbathers choose Duracell.
Censored velvet paintings crippled the bike.
Muted phones glaze an anonymous back.
Terraformed red yarn balls will soon go slack.

Art Under the Nervous Dust

I just spent almost all day preparing to vacuum and then vacuuming my room. I don't know how long it's been since the last time I vacuumed, but I uncovered a Comic-Con badge from 2008. I really don't think it's been that long. There were also a bunch of cards and sample comics I picked up, including kind of a funny one for a webcomic called Dar that I see now published its final strip in 2009. It can't really have been that long since I vacuumed.

Actually, reading that strip now, Dar seems kind of dull. It seems to be by the sort of writer who thinks that all it takes for an important event in their life to be interesting to the public is that it's made available for the public to read. It reminds me of what I saw last night.

Every now and then, I try to take steps towards not being a reclusive misanthrope. I look for Things with People that I Might Participate In. My English teacher told the class about something called "The Lester Bangs Memorial Reading" which was happening after class last night. Lester Bangs was an important music critic in the 1970s--he was portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Cameron Crowe movie Almost Famous. Otherwise, I didn't know much about him. It turns out he went to Grossmont Community college, the same school I'm currently going to, and the faculty seem to be proud of him. Or something.

I wasn't sure I really wanted to go, but the girl in the Sylvester McCoy hat I'd been talking to was going with her boyfriend, and she and I were still talking and walking after class and my car happened to be in the same direction. At some point during the walking, the Happen to Be Walking in the Same Direction turned into Why the Hell Not See the Reading, pretty much for the instinct to drift away from misanthropy I mentioned. I figured at worst I'd be exposed to the work of one of the more influential music critics of the past fifty years, which didn't seem so bad. After all, I think I kind of liked Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous, though I kept saying the picture of Bangs in the flyer looked more like Terry Jones.



Now I think about it, he kind of looks like a cross between Terry Jones and Graham Chapman.

So by now you can probably tell I was under the foolish impression that "The Lester Bangs Memorial Reading" would consist at least in part of readings from the works of Lester Bangs. Oh . . . no. It did not. We saw a brief clip of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous before the real event began, which was a student reading. As in, two students read short stories they'd written. Okay, I'm an asshole. I'm so sorry. I am. I can't help it. But after four years as an editor on the college literary magazine, I'm well past the point where I recognised even the best of student short fiction is soul crushing to read or hear read. Not necessarily because it's bad, but because you can hear so many of the practices they've been encouraged to pursue by networks of teachers and fellow students. Hell, I could hear it in the laughter in the crowd when one of the students came to a part of his story where he described a night of drinking and partying during the South by Southwest Music Festival as "the real stimulus plan."

The only really decent part of the guy's story was a bit where he was driving with his indie record label producer friend and he talked about the frightening, uncertain future. There was some real feeling there, but it was buried under faux Hunter S. Thompson, mannered rhetoric. Most signifying was when he described a bit of partying as "beyond Hunter S. Thompson." Of course it is. Because why would it be worth talking about if it's not the greatest thing ever. The first story was even more narcissistic--it was about how the guy had discovered The Grateful Dead was not a metal band and then discovered that he liked early Santana albums. It amounted to, at best, an amusing anecdote. It's not something you write down and read in front of a room full of people, even if they are laughing and seem to be listening with rapt attention.

How do people eat up this tripe? I suppose it's all part of the mutually self-sustaining aspiration machine. You know who wouldn't have been eating it up? Lester Bangs.

I've been reading his work to-day. A lot of it's kind of great. Sure, a lot of it is the cheap cynicism of entertaining criticism. But he also knew how to write--I love this piece he wrote about a band called The Shaggs. He describes their guitar style as, "sorta like 14 pocket combs being run through a moose's dorsal, but very gently."



I don't know if I'd say they're better than The Beatles, but I can see why Bangs liked them. Somehow they survived the world that takes the outstretched hand of expression and twists it around to make people poke themselves in the eyes. They're sincere, they're not shadows of themselves.

Cells of Youth

You don't need a lot of words to discuss silence. There's very little dialogue in Victor Erice's 1973 film The Spirit of the Bee Hive. The film seems mainly to exist in the quiet of its many still, lingering and beautiful shots through which six year old Ana wanders.



A lot of these beautiful shots are of open, seemingly endless Castilian fields, yet the impression we get of Ana's world is that it's small and stifling. Her family's not terribly communicative--her father takes Ana and her sister at one point to the woods to pick mushrooms, but mostly he seems busy at his occupation as a beekeeper and writing about bees. The film's title, and much of its aesthetic, suggest the world the people in habit mirror the life of the bees somehow.



Perhaps it's in how automatically and emotionlessly the characters seem to be moving through life. Ana's mother is having an affair and rarely talks, either--mostly Ana's only companion is her sister Isobel who uses her sister's absolute trust in her to pull pranks and torment the younger girl. At the beginning of the movie, the two attend a screening of the 1931 Frankenstein--the film is set in 1940, just after Franco's dictatorship has taken control of Spain. This, along with the fact that film focuses on a little girl, reminded me of Pan's Labyrinth. The use of mythological elements and how they manifest from the perspective of a young girl also contributed to the similarity, but while Guillermo del Toro's film, though keeping it ostensibly subjective, seems to lean towards the idea that the mystical elements the child experiences are in fact real, The Spirit of the Beehive seems to lean in the opposite direction.



When Ana wants to know why the monster killed the little girl and also why the monster was killed in Frankenstein, she begs her sister to explain. Isobel, who perhaps doesn't herself understand, tells her sister that movies lie and that really neither the girl nor the monster was killed. The monster, Isobel explains, is really a spirit who takes corporeal form only for people who know him, and one such person, she tells Ana, is Isobel herself.



This sets up an interesting visual tale of a girl seeking an elusive spirit whose monstrousness she seems to identify with. The spirit temporarily takes form for her--in reality a fugitive Republican soldier. But their interactions are brief and wordless.

The Wikipedia entry talks about how this film is subtly critical of the Franco regime and how all this is a metaphor for the state of affairs in Spain with Ana representing the people--everything told metaphorically in order to slip past the censors. The Wikipedia entry mentions how Viridiana did the same thing. They're lucky I wasn't on the board of censors who viewed Viridiana because that one was such an astonishingly obvious political allegory I'm really amazed to hear it got past any censors, but The Spirit of the Beehive, I had no idea there was anything remotely political in it until I read about it later. I did think it was strange a film set in 1940 Spain didn't show many signs of the Civil War, but I didn't even realise the Republican soldier was a Republican soldier until I read about it later.



And as for Ana and her family representing different aspects of Spanish society, that may well be, but I think it's much to the film's credit that their story seems to embody something so much more, something so fundamental.

The Games They are A'Changing

I guess "A Study in Pink", the first episode of Sherlock, which I finally got around to watching last night, may be the closest A Study in Scarlet has gotten to being filmed. But rather than a long detour in the second act describing the diabolic practices of those barbaric Mormons off in America, Sherlock ends with a rather disappointing game of Guess the Poisoned Wine similar to the one Wallace Shawn and Cary Elwes play in The Princess Bride. Still, I did enjoy the show. Written by current Doctor Who show runner Steven Moffat, it does actually feel a bit more like Doctor Who than Sherlock Holmes, despite attempts to include Holmes' deductive process updated for modern technology.

Holmes' deductions about a pocket watch--which was also recently used in the Guy Ritchie film--are here updated to be about a smart phone entertainingly. But it's probably unfair to expect anyone, even Steven Moffat, to be able to construct stories of Holmes' deduction process as brilliant as Arthur Conan Doyle's--Holmes is only able to figure out how to locate the killer in "A Study in Pink" before anyone else simply because he happened to have seen an e-mail address on a suitcase before anyone else. But it seems like the show is focused more on the adventure elements of Sherlock Holmes stories along with some psychological exploration of the characters.

It's remarkable how well Watson's status as an Afghanistan war veteran easily translates to the modern era and the decision to discuss more how those experiences made the man he is when he meets Holmes, I thought, was a good decision and Martin Freeman does a good job. I think the idea of a soldier experiencing a lingering passion for violence rather than going to the usual post traumatic stress disorder could use exploring in fiction. I talked to an Iraq war veteran at school earlier this year who loved talking about the war and adjusting to life at home--he talked about how often he got road rage now, how since coming back his reflexes have been more keyed up and how everything seems duller. He told me nothing can now match the feeling of busting into a house and not knowing if there's someone inside who's going to shoot at you.



Similarly, Holmes' lust for his work and coinciding insensitivity is explored and Holmes intriguingly refers to himself as a high functioning sociopath. Benedict Cumberbatch has a great voice--very deep, sort of Tom Baker-ish, the sort of voice I've been hoping the twelfth Doctor shall have. I'm not sure if Cumberbatch would be at the top of my list of preferred actors for that role, though. Maybe it's just that I'm comparing him to Jeremy Brett, but Cumberbatch, while being decent enough most of the time, doesn't quite have the visible layers of performance Brett had. He's closer to Robert Stephens in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes--he delivers well enough material that's an interesting take on the character, but doesn't display much else.

I was glad to see that, like the Jeremy Brett series, Sherlock is using the actual 221b Baker Street for exteriors. Even the floor plan of Holmes' and Watson's flat looks the same as the one seen in the Brett series.



Twitter Sonnet #314

Ties without stars start to funnel inward.
Absent beans meanwhile expand to dots.
Splitting blades of grass then grasping skyward,
Stash sycamores in department store pots.
Square tusks soon dissolve in the circle bath.
Metal apples crunch fake police to paste.
Grey eyes slice across atmospheric wrath.
Whole alternate Iowas are lain waste.
Lightsaber stripper poles benefit none.
Graffiti fountains ennoble blank brick.
White walls remind us the runners have won.
Hot air gum balloons make explorers sick.
Unrealistic health envelopes the gin.
Albatross screams hold the handwriting in.

Following Felons

I followed this raccoon around a parking lot on Saturday and he was in my dream last night. So I guess that's how that works. In my dream, it was sunset and I was trying to help him over a fence. In reality, the guy was out remarkably early and his reaction to me was just to stop now and then and stare at me curiously. He didn't seem very afraid, maybe because he could probably tear my face off if he wanted, but he didn't seem very hostile either.

On Friday night, I watched The Late Show with David Letterman because Artie Lange was on. It's really weird how everyone on The Howard Stern Show went from dealing with the shock of Lange's attempted suicide, to dealing with his absence and then, somewhat abruptly, going to a mode where they avoided mentioning him except to make it clear that Stern didn't want him back on the show for his own good. Well, Lange is on the radio, and he has been for weeks though I didn't know it until I saw him on Letterman--Lange has a sports radio show with Nick Di Paolo which streams completely for free at nickandartie.com.

I don't have the remotest interest in sports, and Di Paolo is rather a hostile conservative, but he's funny when he's not talking about politics. And Lange somehow makes sports stories interesting even to me, though I don't understand half of what he says. It's my lack of interest in sports that keeps me from listening to entire shows, I think, but Lange has that natural gift for telling stories that makes me keep going back. Mostly, though, it's made me feel less inclined to listen to radio altogether. The Stern Show has less lustre knowing Stern can't bring himself to let Lange back on. I think he should honestly ask himself if having Artie on drugs is worse than having no Artie at all.

Which is not to say I think Artie is using--just that I think it's useless to speculate or to try to control what he does in his personal life. The only thing shutting someone out accomplishes is shutting them out.

I do think Lange's got a self destruct programme still running in him. Something about the way he awkwardly worked in a suicide joke at the end of his interview with Letterman. But he also clearly seemed like a guy who needs friends.

"I Entered Nothing and Nothing Entered Me"

What a bunch of assholes. I kept thinking this during the first twenty or so minutes of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1961 film Accattone. Accattone's a pimp, and we see him at the beginning of the movie hanging out with his small time gang, every man of them apparently totally amoral as they laugh and discuss robbery and beating women.

I wondered how much of that is posturing as the film progressed, though we do see a group of the guys taking Accattone's prostitute to a deserted lot and beating her savagely. He's not present for this, and apparently it was done as a slight to him, but we don't like Accattone much better at this point, having forced the prostitute, Maddalena, to work that night despite an injured leg. He badgers her into it, whining that he needs the money and that it's all her fault he doesn't have a respectable job. He's a pretty impressive young slimeball, yeah.



Contrary to the popular idea that stories need a sympathetic central protagonist, Accattone never stops being fascinating to watch. But maybe the reason for that is none of us find such ruthless behaviour as Accattone's as alien as some of us might like to pretend. And among other things, Accattone might serve as a reminder as to why we don't give in to such base pragmatism as Accattone displays.



We never get any scene of Accattone breaking down and renouncing his wicked ways. One could even argue that the life Accattone leads is ultimately no less fulfilling than the lives most people lead. After Maddalena is imprisoned for accusing the men who attacked her without being able to prove it (there were some really fucked up laws in Italy at the time, apparently), Accattone starts trying to recruit a new girl, Stella, only to fall in love with her, trying instead to support the two of them first by taking an honest job transporting scrap metal, then enlisting as an assistant to a local thief. Accattone tries to kill himself twice during the movie by jumping off bridges, failing both times, so there is a sense that on some level, despite his completely shameless rap with his friends, he reproaches himself for his way of life. When he first meets Stella, he remarks on how extraordinarily innocent she seems.



A grim and, for Accattone, frustratingly obtuse dream sequence at the end of him witnessing his own death and a vision of other gang members buried naked in the rubble of a shelled building again suggest an undercurrent of hatred for his own way of life beneath his utterly cavalier exterior. The impression I had was of surface personality composed of networks of callous reactions to reality created as self defence mechanisms that work to kill the person underneath. It's no wonder he looks to death as a relief.



I wanted to watch the movie because it's referenced in Morrissey's song "You Have Killed Me"--

Pasolini is me
Accattone you'll be

The Wikipedia entry for the song says;

There is much speculation as to the meaning of this quote. Some fans believe that it is merely an example on Rome's influence on Morrissey whereas some believe that it is a reference to the loss of virginity, since Accattone is Pasolini's first film.

Which seems a bit of a reach to me. My theory is that it has more to do with the fact that Pasolini was murdered by a young hustler in 1975. One could imagine the young hustler someone not dissimilar to the character Accattone, and certainly one could imagine Accattone murdering someone like Pasolini. Which works with Morrissey's apparent love for his killer in his song--Pasolini obviously loved the sort of people who were incapable of respecting love.

Body Issue Slapstick

I've rarely seen an anime series so obsessed with breasts as Mahoromatic, a GAINAX series from 2001 directed by the Hiroyuki Yamaga, whose other works couldn't prepare me for such a strenuous pace of fan service. I guess even a guy who directed a bittersweet film about space exploration and the elusiveness of world peace (Wings of Honneamise) and a gently nostalgic fantasy series (Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi) needs his kicks, too.

The premise is that Mahoro, a combat android, has come to the end of her military service and can choose either to be deactivated or switch to another function, in which case her remaining lifespan is just over a year. So she decides to serve as a maid for her beloved deceased commander's young son, Suguru Misato.

I'm guessing we'll be getting more into the relationship between those two, but so far (I'm four episodes in) it's been about a rivalry between Mahoro and Suguru's busty high school teacher, who appears to for some reason have a raging lust for the generally unremarkable teenage boy.



The signifying screenshots I could post are endless, as is demonstrated by the blog from whence I downloaded this anime. Lest you think the fan service is entirely devoted to the breast wars, the fourth episode has a giant robot crab who's bent on destroying every bikini on the beach. The action sequence in which Mahoro dispatches of the beast is incredibly well animated, so this show is full service id candy.

Mahoro I guess is another example of the idealised virginal character. She remonstrates Suguru for his porn collection, so there's a slight hint of hypocrisy here, but fortunately I'm too much of a pig to not enjoy the show.



Twitter Sonnet #313

Love can change your girders into rainbows.
More fumes in rubble than buildings express.
So the wood moth broadcast draws to a close.
Fizz blocks the flattened horse tides of success.
Lice expand over the blank snowman brain.
Hard boiled points make strange the red captain.
Bloody buckets stab wells swollen by rain.
Blue edge dyes wait for centres to happen.
Psycho crustaceans briefly steal swimwear.
Fires forge rose hater jalapeno.
Stinging smiles reward the beverage bear.
Roosevelt swallowed a Filipino.
Nude grapes shyly cover themselves with mould.
Level planes awkwardly fit in the fold.

Chilled Combs

Here are some pictures I've taken this week. A lot of these, I'm just taking pictures of shadows, trying to learn how to find interesting configurations of them, rather than looking for physical subjects;














A few nights ago, I dreamt I saw an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, discussing how he'd turned into a small Asian man. Schwarzenegger explained that a lot of strange things can happen to you when you grow old. He mentioned, for example, that Sylvester Stallone had a really stupid haircut now. I saw Stallone, then, with the sides of his head shaved and a tuft of black hair was left at the top. Then I dreamt I had the haircut, but I discovered there was enough hair in the top tuft that I could comb it down into a sort of emo look.

The Eternal Purity

What the hell is wrong with pancreases these days? I just found out (or was just reminded, I'm not sure which) Satoshi Kon died from pancreatic cancer suddenly last year. Is it crass to compare the valuable contributions of people who've died of pancreatic cancer? Well, in any case, I'd say Kon is my favourite recent victim of pancreatic cancer.

Though I've only seen three of his films and the one I watched last night, Millennium Actress, is my least favourite so far, though it has its virtues.

I became interested in watching Millennium Actress when I read its story is centred on a fictional actress based on Setsuko Hara. The movie is rather a touching valentine to classic Japanese cinema and the legend of Setsuko Hara in particular. It is somewhat startling to know that she has now outlived the director of this tribute to her.



Setsuko Hara's Wikipedia entry currently describes her position in Japanese popular culture rather evocatively in the bad English of a not exactly encyclopaedia appropriate description from an apparently devoted fan;

Her star image was closely bound to the national imaginary,in which the ideology of the virgin harbored an ideal of cultural purity. Hara Setsuko's screen persona is one of tight control,under which a current of strong emotion can often be detected. Part of her popular appeal was due to a certain honesty and integrity of character,enhanced by the home drama genre that kept her in extremely plain costumes.However,she also excelled in expressing highly contradictory and conflicted emotions.She can be at once hopeful and doubtful at marriage proposals;she laughs when she is most sad and cries when she is most happy.The contradictions and tensions within Hara's star image are very much bound up with a nativist sensibility, a longing for the past combined with a recognition of the impossibility of such a return. Among her secrets is her reputed quarter-German heritage that may account for her slightly Caucasian look.After seeing a "Hara Setsuko movie" the novelist Endo shusaku writes,in a typically reverential response,"we would sigh or let out a great breath from the depths of our hearts, for what we felt was precisely this:Can it be possible that there is such a woman in this world?" Endo is one of several men whom dream of meeting Hara just once before they die.Hara was so refined,so moral,so beautiful,so representative of all that Japanese men valued in woman that she remained excitingly out of reach for the hordes of males who adored her.

This entry is pretty light on cited sources, but if one is wondering how well this reflects Hara's actual reputation, one needn't google far to find articles like this one. I wonder if this "virginal" image is one of the reasons Kurosawa's adaptation of The Idiot wasn't very successful, a movie in which Hara played the very sexually experienced character based on Nastashya Filipovna. I wonder if she chafed at the image and whether it played any part in her dramatic and abrupt retirement in 1962, when she announced at a press conference that she'd never enjoyed acting and had only pursued her career to support her family.

Kon, though, decided to go all in on the virginal mystique, showing Chiyoko, the character apparently based on Hara, as meeting her one and only true love as a child and then, when he vanishes shortly after their meeting, the movie shows her pursuing a movie career with the sole intent of making her face famous so that he can find her.

Though the movie does have Chiyoko, unlike Hara, marrying at some point, it's to her frequent director, a man named Otaki, which brings to mind the fact that people made something of Hara's retirement coinciding with the death of Ozu, who directed her in some of her most famous films. In any case, Chiyoko never seems to give her heart entirely to Otaki.

One of the things I liked about the movie was the fairy tale quality given to Chiyoko's "eternal virginity", showing her being cursed by a witch to an "eternal love" that can never be consummated.




The witch bears a striking resemblance to the one seen in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and the movie's filled with visual references to classic Japanese cinema, though no real film is explicitly referenced, instead we get a series of type facsimiles. I found this diluted the effect somewhat. Throne of Blood, based on Macbeth, is a much better story than the somewhat more mundane tale shown in Millennium Actress of a woman avenging her dead lord. One sees bits of Godzilla and Lady Snowblood without the actual impact of those films.

Like Perfect Blue and Paprika, Millennium Actress centres on a woman constantly shifting between reality and a dream world, in this case between real life and Chiyoko's filmography, which she relives as she's being interviewed by a former movie studio employee and a cameraman. It's this cameraman who creates another of the fatal flaws in this film. Unlike Perfect Blue and Paprika, where the shifting between realities has an immediate psychological kick to the characters, the impact of the shifting is constantly diffused by the interview camera man whose casual manner is always there to remind us that we're not actually seeing the characters shift between realities but instead its a visual metaphor for their reminiscences.



There are some great visuals in the film, but not nearly as many as there are in Perfect Blue or Paprika. It seems to me Paprika was the perfection of a type of storytelling Satoshi Kon had been working on all his life. Now it's become his last completed film, though studio Madhouse, from his notes and storyboards, is putting together a film called The Dream Machine, which I certainly hope shall be completed.



With breakfast to-day, I read the newest Sirenia Digest, which was good, particularly the second story about a circus bat girl.

A Glass Sphinx

I actually learned a lot more about Roger Ebert from his review of Madonna's 2008 directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, than I learned about his opinion on the movie. "Oh, there was that time we were in Bangkok and saw the show with the Ping-Pong balls. Who could think of sex during such a skillful display?" Having also seen a girl shooting ping-pong balls from her vagina, albeit only on video, I have to agree. The vagina kind of stops being a vagina somewhere in the process.

I watched Filth and Wisdom last night. It's a movie with several charming aspects, mainly in the male lead, Eugene Hutz, but on the whole a movie that falls flat from its unfulfilled, ambitious thesis and a curious lack of daring. Madonna may have been the last person I would have expected to be squeamish about sexual content. Well, maybe Madonna of twenty or so years ago. I'm reminded of a Tori Amos lyric; ". . . is it true that devils end up like you? . . . something safe for the picture frame." One can argue that this is what happened to Tori Amos, too. Certainly I think only someone who's been financially comfortable for decades can see being poor as free and fun as the three principal characters have it in Filth and Wisdom.

The reason this is a problem is that Eugene Hutz's character, the Gypsy lead singer of a rock band very similar to the man in real life, lays out at the beginning a philosophy the film is then evidently supposed to show--that filth and wisdom are two sides of the same coin, that we can't have one without the other. The trouble mainly comes in the film's definition of filth. As Ebert says, the choice of one character, a ballerina named Holly, to become a stripper isn't particularly shocking, and more to the point, it doesn't seem especially filthy. Particularly in the way it's portrayed in this movie.



Ebert says stripping is for men who like to see women being humiliated. I think that's only true if a woman is ashamed of her body and a guy responds positively to that shame, two things I don't think are necessarily always true. But maybe Madonna agrees because despite professional stripping being a crucial aspect of the story, there's actually no nudity in this movie. Which suggests the filmmaker and/or actresses see something wrong with appearing naked on film. Which marks a change in Madonna, certainly, who's appeared naked on film more than once in her youth. Holly's stripper mentor in the movie says that what men really want is mystery, which is rather an intriguing thought for a professional stripper to express and really warranted elaboration, which it doesn't get. Personally, I like mystery in a Sherlock Holmes story. I can tolerate it and respect it if a woman feels it's necessary, but it's not something that turns me on. I've always preferred all the cards to be on the table. It saves a lot of headache in the long run.

In any case, the film eventually seems to portray stripping, or almost stripping, stopping just before the jump cut, as empowering to women. A bit of a tangled message there. Likewise, the actress playing Holly (Holly Weston) delivers a very bland performance and has no chemistry with Eugene Hutz, her supposed love interest. We're supposed to be seeing people giving into impulses they personally feel are wrong and how this leads to wisdom but we never get the impression the characters are particularly disturbed by what they do and neither do we see how this leads to wisdom.

I thought a subplot about Richard E. Grant as a blind author, though tritely resolved, was more effective than a lot of critics say. Him crushing books to his face to smell them and reconnect in some way to something he can never experience again really hit me. But overall this is a movie that plays things much too safe.

Twitter Sonnet #312

Cold tofu squashes beneath the gymnast.
Flattering fluorescent greys the g-string.
Shocked maple trees decry every cellist.
Only groggy guys with cold arms use Bing.
Suspicious blank walls manifest at home.
Bedtime brings prim Mercedes seats inside.
Harding upset milk in his tea pot dome.
Very dry bread came along for the ride.
Prosperous glands happ'ly neglect the balds.
Raucous freedom bares Maury's scalp by cord.
The perfect micro-miniskirts are faulds.
Wintergreen nose hairs snap across the board.
Blushing warning signs contract an exit.
Why talk to dinner when you can text it?

Fucking Elves

Now I might just have to watch Thor and Captain America--I'm liking the looks of this Avengers movie. Good choice using Nine Inch Nails' "We're In This Together". I think someone remembered that when people think of the movie version of 300, they still think of "Just Like You Imagined", another track from The Fragile, used in the 300 trailer.

Typing my periods and commas outside quotation marks just now, I was reminded of my current English teacher recently telling the class that periods are always supposed to go inside the quotation marks unless there's a citation. Wondering how true this is (particularly since this is a rule I don't follow), I googled it just now and came across this site where I learned the commas and periods in certain instances appearing outside the quotations is British English. I don't even remember anymore how I picked these things up.

The teacher who wrote the article says in it she allows her international students to continue putting periods and commas outside quotations but concludes by saying;

My American students, though, don't get to choose. They have to do it the American way, just as they have to drive on the right side of the street, even though the British drive on the left side.

I could be wrong, but I think using British punctuation rules is decidedly less likely to cause head on collisions. She says this even after having just explained why the British rule makes more sense. She says it's more important to be conventional.

Fuck that. Fuck that. I think I'll choose not to be controlled by the prevailing dogma, just as Steve Jobs recommended. By the way, I had to watch that Stanford commencement speech again at the beginning of my Interpersonal Communication class last night when the teacher decided to show it to the class. I'm posting it here again in case any of you need to refresh your memory;



I hope I got the embed code right.



I found myself watching Citizen Kane again last night. I really do feel there's something to what Jobs says about following your heart. But isn't that what Kane did, or at least thought he was doing? He didn't have the psychological tools to know how to get to the honest place he hadn't been to since he was a little kid with a sled he loved. Kane believed the message created reality and that was all that mattered. Love on his own terms, "Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own," Kane said.

The problem that Kane never solved is how and when to let other people in. I think that's a question everyone probably ought to struggle with all their lives. In any case, I think Citizen Kane demonstrates brilliantly the capitalist fallacy of every man for himself.

Assimilation Burlesque

I didn't think Carmen Comes Home could possibly be a good movie. I watched it, I think, out of a completist compulsion, since, made in 1951, it's Japan's first colour film. And as a film, it's not really great. It has a lot of things I had big problems with, but I found it fascinating nonetheless.

It's directed by Keisuke Kinoshita, who made immensely popular films in his day, but I've always avoided his work because it sounded like it was popular because it was sentimental and insubstantial. And Carmen Comes Home is certainly both of those things. But I've long been fascinated by how post World War II Japanese films deal with the changes occurring throughout the country and the impact those changes had on the people. In this case, we see a young woman, Aoyama Kin, "Lily Carmen", played by Hideko Takamine, returning to the small country village of her youth after she'd spent years in Tokyo working as a burlesque artist. She brings with her one of her fellow performers, and the two clearly represent the manifestations of western culture in Japan, broadly contrasted with the innocent, old fashioned villagers.



Carmen and her friend wear western style clothing, but like the characters themselves, the clothing is a broad, parody version of real styles. You rarely see either of the characters without seeing a great deal of their legs--there's a pretty cheap scene where a pianist, blinded during the war, has his performance for the entire village interrupted by broad comedic business of Carmen's friend's skirt falling off and the entire village laughing at her in her massive pink drawers, which the blind man misinterprets as laughter at himself and his performance.

There's a lot of that kind of cheap emotional manipulation going on. Yet, there are a lot of nice compositions and there are some good performances by Koji Mitsui, the gambler from The Lower Depths, and Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favourite actor, as the schoolmaster. And Hideko Takamine rises above the broad comedy of her role with some genuinely decent, and strange, musical moments.



Partly I think it's that, from outside the intended audience of the parody, the language of that parody becomes intriguingly weird. So Carmen Comes Home works out to be a bad movie, but a captivating one.