I Wan t to the t ype Normally

Gods, I miss having a proper keyboard at my disposal. Here's what it looked like when yesterday, as an experiment, I tried typing on the screen at my normal speed:

This is how I normally t th pe. So manu ybk g saga i 'd l I'll ke tree o sa y to ev we r r u o n eb hi tthis th okn ra t o mpedes the process/ I must sa th.

There we have a mixture of mistakes from my goofy, big fingers and automatic corrections made by this thing even though I managed to turn autocorrect off. It still for some reason likes to add spaces in the middle of words and then turn those pieces of words into new words like some asexual reproductive cycle of a single cell organism.

Anyway. Here's the new trailer for "Day of the Doctor", the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special and don't get me started on what a pain in the ass html is on this thing.

I wonder if the title is meant to evoke the Day of the Dead, which is also in November.

It's a shame Kate Stewart isn't half as fun as her father. I really wish Nicholas Courtney hadn't died. How amazing would it have been to have the Brigadier in the special. A character who appeared with five different Doctors--Two, Three, Four, Five, and Seven. His last regular appearance was in the Fourth Doctor story "Terror of the Zygons" which looks as though it's going to be a big part of the upcoming special.

Terror of the Zygons (1) by greendude33

The Opposite or Not the Opposite

Blogging in direct sunlight. Never tried this before but there are no seats inside the Starbucks. Hopefully I don't look like a lobster by the end of this.

Yesterday I watched on Twitter Mike Nelson and his cohort at Rifftrax, Conor Lastowka, defending their recent MST3k style riffing on the film Starship Troopers. The group has riffed on films they've liked--unlike with MST3k, where they were free to riff on the lousiest movies ever made, Rifftrax, which relies on syncing mp3 riffs with films they have no chance of obtaining the rights to sell versions of, often depends on prospective customers already owning the DVDs for the movie in question. However, the complaint in this case wasn't that they were riffing on a good film but that they were riffing on a film that was already satire, a film that critics and audiences often fail to recognise as satire.

I haven't heard the riff but judging on reactions, I'm not sure if the riffers knew all along the film was a satire or if their egos as comedians were bruised for not having gotten a joke. Both men linked to This Atlantic article.

Nelson: "This article convinced me of 2 things: 1) Starship Troopers is a work of misunderstood genius 2) I am not funny."

Lastowka: "Pausing mid-barf to link to possibly the worst 'Starship Troopers is satire' article yet"

I haven't seen the film in a long time but I remember thinking it was very obviously satire of a war propaganda film, though the trailers made it look more like a straightforward lightweight action film. I felt it was the trailers that largely led to misinterpretations of the film--and lazy critics who watched fewer of the movies they reviewed than they'd have liked known.

Much like Verhoeven's other beloved, somewhat satirical science fiction films, Total Recall and Robocop, I certainly think Starship Troopers is overrated, but possessed of a sort of purple meat charm.

Who Wants an Infection

If I were a more superstitious person (okay, I guess I'm fairly superstitious), I'd make something of the fact that I've seen the term Typhoid Mary show up three times in the past two days in completely unrelated media. In David Cronenberg's Rabid, on the new episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and in The Drowning Girl, which I'm still reading.

I had to hurriedly dump a whole drawer of DVDs in my car--a drawer containing all my David Cronenberg, David Lynch, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, and Archers movies. After I'd moved things into my sister's garage, four DVDs had accidentally remained on the seat--North by Northwest, The Searchers, Stagecoach, and Rabid. So I watched Rabid again last night. As usual, I found something unaccountably comforting about Cronenberg's style. I also love the peek inside a Canadian shopping mall in the 70s.

I guess Marilyn Chambers in that movie is not unlike the Eva in that chapter of The Drowning Girl, who is described as "a Typhoid Mary of the mind and soul". Someone who causes widespread damage to others but is oblivious, a sort of victim, at the centre of the storm.

The reference in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is less interesting, just referring to the poor Simmons character. Not a bad episode, having to do with firefighters infected with an electric alien virus after the invasion depicted in the Avengers movie. An obvious reference to first-responders on 9/11 who later, in several cases, came down with severe respiratory illnesses which were sometimes notoriously left uncared for by the United States healthcare system.

I guess there is again something of the victim who causes damage to others when one considers the glee with which Simmons analyses the alien virus before she realises she's herself infected.

I was able to watch the episode on my Kindle after downloading the ABC app. I had no idea what channel the show was on before this. I guess it makes sense, since ABC is owned by Disney.

I got the Kindle Fire for my birthday earlier in the year and I'm sure glad I did. I'm at the school Tech Mall now but most of the time I'd be completely without internet access if it weren't for this tablet. It's around a hundred dollars cheaper than an iPad or the Samsung tablet and it doesn't have has many perks--most notably I can't access Second Life from it. But it does allow me to do most things, provided I can find some Wi-Fi and I can muster patience for touch screen buttons and the sometimes fascinating stupidity of autocorrect.

Briefly

Not much time for a real entry to-day. I've been all over the county the last week apartment hunting. I think I finally found the right place to-day though it won't be ready until next week. It'd have an ocean view if it weren't for one hill but I can drive around the hill if I want.

I found the most obnoxious sandwich place in town yesterday. It's called Which Which and they make you order by filling out a sort of application on a brown paper bag--checking bubbles for lettuce or hummus or vinegar, etcetera. Plus the place has that hostile Dalek metal with plywood interior design catching on in fast food chains. The chairs were noisy to disentangle, wire stems with seats like vomit coloured wood blossoms.

Whose Wars in the Stars?

It's been going around to-day that J.J. Abrams might be taking his cues from the "Dear J.J." YouTube video regarding the upcoming Star Wars film he's directing. Though, really, the stuff the video is asking for is stuff Abrams I think has already talked about wanting to implement--mainly in returning the Star Wars universe to the more Western, mysterious, and deadly feel of the original trilogy.

I agree those are wonderful things about the original trilogy but I don't think it's the absence of those things that sabotaged the prequel trilogy. The problems with that trilogy could be described more succinctly as conflicting tones resulting from a lack of focus and passion. I guess it's all been said before--Lucas stopped making art and started making gizmos, etcetera. And in the midst of life we are in death, etcetera . . .

But honestly, I love Coruscant. Long before Episode I, I loved the Expanded Universe stories about the hundreds of levels of old city beneath the surface of the city planet. It seems to me there's plenty of room for danger and mystery in that.

I love the "secondhand" quality to the technology in the original trilogy though I don't necessarily think seeing the shiny and untarnished tech in the prequels was bad. Just a different thing. Well, the more lived in, human stuff is always going to be better. Naboo being shot in meticulously maintained vacation spots didn't help--maybe if there'd been some of the crumbling Roman side streets like in an Italian neorealist film it would've felt less like a rich person's guided tour. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that in a new trilogy's visit to Naboo.

The impression I have of the Empire is not unlike the early Soviet Union taking over after the downfall of the Tsarists. Uniform but sort of dangerously inexpensive technology, like the TIE Fighter which notoriously lacks shields.

And I think back to how Lucas was inspired by Kurosawa movies not just for the unique vision of Kurosawa but also just for the, for him, foreignness of Kurosawa's samurai films. They give you a lot without explanation and yet the viewer is generally able to run with it and enjoy it. It occurs to me that the factions in The Hidden Fortress were always in the "wild west"--there was no clean and organised Coruscant. I just hope they'll upgrade the sinister and messy on Coruscant rather than lose it completely.

Twitter Sonnet #563

Easy beans time the trip in tortilla.
Garlic popsicle trails hold off justice.
Magic slumber pulled back Galatea.
Cake claws dismantle fake snacks by Hostess.
Armoured Fontaine tanks the de Havilland.
Crushing toupee pain reminds us of heads.
Racetracks groan beneath the grimy garlands.
Velvet sloths will giggle without their meds.
Lettuce spies have stolen the cabbage babe.
Boiled flags steam over the tin archway.
Mermaid tinsel jams the new astrolabe.
Rudolph noses smear across the freeway.
Wireless sandwiches are dry and locked.
All the gingerbread asphalt roads are blocked.

Second Guessing Satan

Of the over two hundred films he's starred in, supposedly Christopher Lee's favourite is 1968's The Devil Rides Out--this is according to Wikipedia which references as a source for the information an article which makes no mention of Lee's particular feelings about the finished film. But it is certainly one of the best Hammer films I've seen.

Unlike other Hammer efforts which are often confined to cheap and often garishly lit sets, The Devil Rides Out is a story of a secret Satanic cult among British aristocracy mostly shot in beautiful English countryside and in old, subtly lit manor homes.

Lee gets to play the hero for once here, which may be why he likes the film so much. In fact, he basically plays Gandalf, the role the lifelong Tolkien fan originally sought in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films before he was finally cast as the villain Saruman. He plays the Duc de Richleau, a man possessed of a vast knowledge of black magic and the occult and yet quite Christian. He immediately sees the danger in one young friend's flirtation with the Satanic society.

Charles Gray is in the film, too, as the leader of the cult. Here he prepares to sacrifice another would-be follower of Satan, Tanith (Niké Arrighi).

What works best about this film is its insightful exploitation of magical thinking. Lee's severe and committed delivery of de Richleau's instructions and warnings add to them a fearful weight. Rules that might otherwise have seemed arbitrary--like not allowing the potential Satanic acolytes out of bed or the need to stay within a specific chalk circle--become more impressive for the ambiguity when they come from Lee.

Much like Gandalf, du Richleau tends to give dire and urgent instructions before departing on some other errand, allowing the people left behind to struggle with whether or not they ought to obey what their rational minds might tell them is a bit silly. Lee's voice resounds in the memory giving terrible dread to the moment when someone does something as simple as allow a caller inside the house.

Twitter Sonnet #562

Apricot fingernails scratch red from stone.
Duller tires pull the wrong hearse to flame.
Squeaking coffee cups flake off on bare bone.
Almond moons cut Delilah a black mane.
Acres of tan smother screaming turnips.
Green blades of hair scratch a soil man's scalp.
Sighing wads of paper look like walnuts.
Bursting beets may tremble in all the talc.
Carpets bluer than beige are so easy.
Automobiles clog the gymnasium.
Cat shaped ceiling fans make dogs look queasy.
Paper shrubbery gilds Elysium.
Formations of plastic bags herd the meat.
Glowing fingerstalks brightly write a tweet.

Before Talking

Happy birthday to Trisa who I cannot call since the phone with her number in was killed by a washing machine some months ago.

I thought of Trisa a few days ago when, staying at my sister's apartment I watched Before Midnight with my sister and her boyfriend. Released this year, the film is the latest in a series of so far three Richard Linklater films starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, a pair of lovers who we see mostly just talking in the three films.

I haven't seen the first one since Trisa showed it to me at least twelve or thirteen years ago and I haven't seen the second since I saw it in the theatre in 2004. I only very dimly remember the first two films but this may be appropriate since the the real time quality of the stories somewhat simulates actually encountering a couple of people. Though the dialogue is a bit more effortlessly thoughtful and philosophical than one tends to hear between even two exceptionally intelligent individuals.

Like the first two films, the dialogue is used as a particularly intimate form of exploring the value of love and relationships and their value with respect to the meaning of life. The questions involved take on a greater sense of urgency for the vulnerability of the characters for staking their hearts on instinctual combinations of spontaneity and consideration.

This new film sees the couple married with kids and vacationing in Greece. The performances between the two actors are just as strong. Delpy seems again always a couple steps ahead of Hawke who always seems like he's trying to find an alternate, optimistic solution to a cynical equation she's already solved and has predicted doom because of it. Which may somewhat describe heterosexual relationships in most films and television shows now, actually.

Some of their conflicts are disappointingly cliche, like when she tells him he doesn't appreciate how difficult the work is she does at home. More interesting was the tension throughout the film over whether Hawke was going to try talking Delpy into moving to the U.S. in order to be near the son from Hawke's first marriage, a possibility Delpy sees as certain death for their relationship.

It's nice seeing a modern movie with so much dialogue and long takes. The filmmakers transition between story points very naturally.

...

Last night I dreamt I was on a cold beach under a dark overcast sky. Waves came far up the shore and water was collecting between the rocks. I kept checking the little pools for sea life and at length saw some kind of white eel with a pair of white, lobster-like pinchers. It attacked the big red crab I forgot I was carrying and the two creatures each tore an arm from the other.

The Idea of Buttons

I used to know a guitar player with really tiny fingers, like needles. I bet he has a much easier time using a touch screen keyboard.

The school tech mall is closed on the weekend so I'm having to use my kindle at the coffee shop to make this entry. Gods, I miss my computer.

To-day I'll be looking at apartments. There are already a couple places that look promising. There's a place in Hillcrest--home of the Pride parade and the best movie theatre in town--that looks so good to me I might check it out to-day despite the fact that whoever's in the office there immediately hangs up the phone when called.

Last night I dreamt Caitlin and Spooky were plotting some kind of elaborate prank. Spooky was wearing a copper brocade Victorian day dress and sitting side saddle on a Harley at the bottom of a hill accompanied by five or six 1812 French infantry.

The Sugar Aftermath

Watched The To-day Show this morning a bit. Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, and Morgan Freeman were on the show, sitting in with the hosts, to promote their upcoming paycheck film Last Vegas. They all looked extremely uncomfortable except Michael Douglas who was slightly manic. They were asked to comment on whether or not a sweater being sold with the words "Don we now our fun apparel" was too politically correct for changing "gay" to "fun." Kline said it was too stupid to even comment on.

Let me comment on it for just a moment. I guess no-one uses "gay" to mean happy anymore. I'm not sure the sweater is an example of political correctness so much as a reflection of how differently words are used now than they were when the song was written. But on the other hand, what's wrong with donning homosexual apparel, if there is such a thing? It's not politically correct--it's uptight. Not necessarily homophobic, just a sort of pathetic cowardice. That's the other kind of PC--there's Personal Computer, Politically Correct, and Pathetic Cowardice. Possibly also Peanut Custard.

I handed out candy for Halloween last night for the first time in I don't know how long. I bought three big bags of candy--one with an assortment of Skittles, M&Ms, and Snickers, another with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and one with just Smarties which turned out to be by far the most popular. I had actually begun to refrain from handing them out because it occurred to me parents might not want their kids eating candy that's not totally sealed--the Smarties wrapper is closed at the ends with just a twist. But when kids saw them in the bowl they immediately requested them. One little boy indignantly demanded them and reached into the bowl after I'd already given him a Snickers and some M&Ms.

I suspect it's because Smarties are basically pure sugar. Why suffer middlemen like chocolate or caramel when you can just mainline the stuff?

Most of the little girls were dressed as fairy princesses, one was dressed as Cinderella. Most of the little boys were dressed as either Spider-Man, Iron Man, or Thor. One was dressed as Green Lantern. I saw one kid dressed as Darth Vader and I almost said, "Hey, that's what I wore on Halloween when I was your age."

One little girl was dressed like a cow and her brother was dressed like a jester. They looked about six and eight respectively. Something funny about those two. I could see them performing with the travelling minstrels in The Seventh Seal.

White Cat, Black Cat

Halloween seems like a good time to talk about cats. They cover the spectrum in Japan so I'll talk about a Japanese white cat and a Japanese black cat.

1977's House is about a white cat named Shiro, which means "white" though subtitles of the copy I watched called her "Snowy". Wikipedia refers to her as "Blanche" which is a little better but not quite the same as calling a cat by its colour in the common tongue. This is a very strange, very effective film. It's very post-modern but I like it anyway.

It's about a haunted house and maybe it'd be accurate to call it a haunted movie. Much of what it conveys is dependent upon the delusions of the viewer who seems to be the ghost. That is, a woman whose fiancé died in World War II and now her spirit inhabits the old house motivated by bitterness harboured for all pretty, marriageable women, including, or most especially, her niece.

Wikipedia translates the niece's name as "Gorgeous", the copy I viewed called her "Angel," but her name is actually Oshare (オシャレ-). Google translates the word as "Fashion"--it's not a word I'm familiar with so I'm not sure whether Gorgeous or Angel is the more appropriate substitute.

She and her friends at school all have names reflecting their very broad, cartoonish personalities--there's Mac, whose name is short for the English word "stomach" because she likes to eat, there's Sweet, who's sweet, Kung Fu, who's a martial arts expert, and Melody, who plays piano. Oshare's best friend is Fanta, short for the English word "Fantasy", who's a bit of an extreme daydreamer. The movie begins with them giggling and hugging and skipping together.

The broadness of the characters and their relationships is a little shrill and one has the impression that this is more the spirit's conception of these people. Shiro, the cat, is the spirit's familiar and shows up on Oshare's mailbox when she receives a letter from her aunt. This is in response to her own letter, asking the aunt she hasn't seen since she was a child if she and her school friends can spend their vacation at her home.

Oshare's in a snit over her father's new girlfriend, a beautiful woman who's often shown with a wind effect and a billowing scarf. Again, a distinctly stylised portrayal and we sense the spirit hates both Oshare and the potential step mother equally--they are both, after all, eligible young women.

Shiro mysteriously follows the girls to the house where each girl is killed off one at a time, each death more bizarre than the last. Wikipedia says the filmmakers got several of their ideas from a child and there is a certain child logic to the broad humour portrayed for horror, like when Sweet is killed by several futons falling off a shelf.

But there's definitely an adult sensibility at play as well, as when one of the girls tries to take a picture of the aunt and her camera seems to be thrown to the ground by an invisible hand. Among all the groans and whines of disappointment from the girls a disembodied voice ambiguously says, "Sexy." There are a lot of lingering shots of the girls' bodies and their personalities begin to suggest fetishes. One begins to wonder if the spirit's motives are quite what she thinks they are.

Nine years earlier, Kaneto Shindo made a movie about a black cat called Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko, 藪の中の黒猫, ("A Black Cat in a Bamboo Grove") or simply Kuroneko (黒猫) ("Black Cat"). This is a much more straightforward horror movie--a very nice and surprisingly political one.

Two peasant women--a beautiful young woman and her attractive mother-in-law--are raped and murdered by a group of rampaging samurai. They had a pet black cat who decides to resurrect them as instruments of revenge against all samurai. They begin to lure unsuspecting samurai to a large, ghostly home in the guise of two wealthy women. Sometimes they seem to have black fur and move as cats. The evening always ends with the younger woman taking the samurai to bed and drinking every last drop of blood in his body.

Meanwhile, the husband of the younger woman, who was conscripted forcibly early on in the war, has brought back the head of an enemy general and thereby won the title of samurai and a high status from his lord. Soon, the lord charges the young man with investigating the murders of samurai and executing whoever or whatever's responsible.

The movie ends up being an interesting platform for discussing the difference between aristocracy and the lower class and seems to condemn nobility as inevitably seeing peasants as expendable. In one fascinating speech of all too insightful hypocrisy, the lordexplains to the young samurai that they have this right because they are the ones who protect the peasants.

Twitter Sonnet #561

Witch nebula wigs twisted the scalp point.
Locust wings dry out the pink tongue bouquet.
Leather queries resound from the sore joint.
Tired bones are exploited for croquet.
Mould forests swing from deep shadows above.
The cheap highway's made from recycled tombs.
Faded lime cubes were a ghost's type of love.
Spools of twine lay on a tall spider's loom.
Parallel orange sixes spin the weather.
Foggy diamond tombstones drift on a raft.
Emerald eyes burn through the woollen tether.
Drains don't function through good guile or craft.
Green crows point at a slightly dipping sky.
Grey roots rearrange the moor on the sly.

Return of Notepad

It's nice to be using a PC like this again. Last night I stayed at an apartment belonging to my sister and her boyfriend and they have a Mac. I was rather at a loss as to how to get anywhere with it, the one button mouse in itself perplexed me. I suppose even most PC users aren't addicted to using Notepad the way I am. I couldn't find the Mac equivalent and I suspect a programme like Notepad may be too simple for Apple.

So, yes, I was thrown out yesterday. For reasons more complicated than I probably ought to explain. I'd been living with my grandmother for over ten years. Lately some large scale family drama has resulted in bizarre, behind the scenes manoeuvrings. I heard an aunt I've barely spoken to for many years telling my grandmother on speaker phone what an awful person I was and how I was psychologically manipulating her. To do what, I have no idea.

For about a month now my grandmother had been picking fights with me with no provocation until it finally came to a head yesterday. Of course several Republican family members were there to help expel the liberal cancer from my grandmother's home, the weird asshole who had the gall to live there rent free just because he couldn't afford to pay rent and he happened to be family.

Anyway. Now I'm looking for a new place to live. Another relative, living in another part of the state, has agreed to help me with rent at a new place. I'm also looking for work though, if it goes anything like the last time I looked for work, I'm not very optimistic about it. But it can't hurt to try.

I'm at the Tech Mall at school--most of my things are being stored in the garage at my sister's place, including my computer. On my way back from there to-day I stopped in a grocery store and as I was crossing the parking lot a large man wearing a U.S. Navy sweater came up to me and said, "Excuse me, sir, I'm not asking for money but could you please let me wash your windshield so I can get something to eat?"

I said, "My windows are clean, thanks, but I can give you a couple dollars anyway--not much, I'm afraid, I just got thrown out myself." I suspect I'm still a lot luckier than that guy.

I've been abruptly thrown out of the place where live. It's a long story. I'm staying with my sister to-night. But it could be a while before I can make regular entries here again.

Shifting Lairs

I think I got more than four hours sleep last night, I'm not sure. Certainly not more than five. After a day spent vacuuming and dusting and moving furniture that hadn't been moved in a decade I was forcibly reminded that I have allergies. Sleeping in that room was difficult. I have no medication for allergies of any kind. The best I could do was make myself a hot toddy and watch a horror movie, which seemed to help.

I didn't take apart my computer until I got up at 6:20am. A couple hours later it was realised that since having my modem and router unplugged meant there was no WiFi, and therefore inconvenienced people who are not me, my computer had to be put back together immediately. So now I'm in an upstairs room where I'll be staying for a week. Since I never actually believed assurances work on my room would be finished in one day I wasn't surprised when grudgingly told the truth.

So here I am, tired, sneezing, coughing, and hoping I can be lucid at school to-night.

I'm starting to get quite a backlog of horror movies I've watched. At some point last week I watched The Abominable Dr. Phibes, a decent horror/comedy from 1971. Vincent Price stars as Phibes, a famous organist who lost his face in a car accident and now wears rubber prosthetics and speaks through some kind of tube and grammar phone rig.

He's sworn revenge against, and is systematically killing, a team of surgeons who failed to save his wife's life during a critical operation. Joseph Cotten plays Dr. Vesalius, the head surgeon and the film's protagonist to Phibes' villain.

This was the newest Joseph Cotten movie I've seen and it was nice to see he was still in good form. Still, most people probably went to see the movie for the top billed Vincent Price. I've often though how strange it is that Joseph Cotten was in so many great films (Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, The Third Man, Portrait of Jennie, Niagara) but his name doesn't often seem to come up when discussing classic Hollywood actors.

Anyway, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is pretty unabashedly campy with Phibes killing his victims with rats hidden on a plane, locusts dropped onto a sleeper from a hole in the ceiling, and, course, some big, adorable bats.

The movie has a nice look--Phibe's lair is very art nouveau. For some reason he has a house band of mechanical men and a beautiful, silent female assistant whose costumes combine with the music to give the film something of the distinctly late 60s/early 70s nostalgia for the 1920s.

To the Satellite

I woke up this morning in the mood to listen to "Sunday Morning" by The Velvet Underground. I used to get that song in my head every Sunday morning but this happened to be the one when Lou Reed died.

Reed's music and lyrics hit your perceptions from a weird angle, a great thing for art to do. He brought grace to the strange but normal. Listening to his work can help you remember it's lazy to see anything as normal.

I've been up since 6:30 this morning--I only got four hours sleep. I've spent most of the day getting stuff out of my room, after having done that for most of the week. I still have a lot to do--at the end of the day I'll have to take out my computer so if I make an entry to-morrow it's likely to be late.

Here are some pictures I've taken lately of trees with tentacles and eyes.

Twitter Sonnet #561

Collarbones bolster the grey cloud cockscomb.
Receding mud revealed granite molars.
Vinyl scratches draw rain on the box home.
Lightning cackles at the cosmic bowlers.
Copper canopies are lies through amber.
Golden skies dim for a green candle flame.
Gnarls on the naked oak form a number.
Sycamores are bending to spell a name.
Decayed mucus clots the open grave's bed.
Sensual xenomorphs curl on the tree.
Boundless barrows let loose the drifting dead.
Eyes at the bottom of the glass can see.
Venus illuminates a black garter.
Mannequin shades take shadows like water.

Learning to Smile as You Kill

Vampire cliques are just the worst. At least that's the idea in 1987's The Lost Boys in which a scowling Corey Feldman and a smirking Corey Haim use their imaginations to rescue a Jim Morrison-ish Jason Patric from the bullshit of adolescence. It's a charming film that allows its characters to mostly not be stupid.

It's a very 80s film, not just for the soundtrack which includes a number of nice, distinctly 80s tunes but for the plot which is sort of like The Breakfast Club being rescued by the kids from E.T. Sam (Haim) and Michael (Patric) are brothers who've moved to a small town with their recently divorced mother. They don't know yet that the town is ruled by a gang of teenage vampires.

The vampires represent the frightening potential threats against the brothers' budding masculinity. Edward Herrmann plays Max, their mother's new boss at the video store who threatens to become the boys' new father which means he might be the head vampire.

Michael's the first one to encounter the vampires directly when he falls for a girl, Star (Jami Gertz), who is already half vampire (or, as a teenager, half adult). They meet at a concert for a band with an oddly muscular lead singer.

She agrees to take a trip with Michael on his motorcycle but then the vampire David (Keifer Sutherland), leader of the gang, shows up with his better motorcycle and Star sheepishly goes back to his seat.

Michael's then put through a series of initiation rituals to see if he's worthy of becoming one of them. Meanwhile, Sam meets Edgar and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) at a comic book store. They have an understated pissing contest over their knowledge of comic books and we learn the Frogs see themselves as the ones responsible for guarding the town against vampires. In other words, the kids are the ones who can still dream and therefore ward off the evils of growing up.

The movie has a lot of cute moments like when the kids use squirt guns filled with holy water against the vampires and Sam, discovering Michael's becoming a vampire, rebukes the older boy with, "Wait 'til Mom finds out!"

And the film has a decent aesthetic, not falling into the infamous, decadent camp of Schumacher's Batman films, finding instead a good balance between artificial lighting and realism.

The Gingerbread Closet

I came across this Rasputina poster while cleaning out my closet to-day. Melora Creager signed her ass for me. That's why we love her.

This was from a show in San Diego I think from when Rasputina was touring to promote Cabin Fever which would have been 2002. Eleven years ago, damn. I went with Trisa who had the determination to wait behind the building after the show so we could meet Creager. I remember gushing to her about her instincts as a vocalist.

That was one of the nice things about having Trisa around, she kept up with concerts, who was coming to town and when. Also in my closet to-day I found paperwork relating to my car being towed and stored in West Hollywood while Trisa and I were seeing Rasputina at the Troubadour. There's a history in my closet that can be read in layers of Rasputina concerts.

Here's something even older:

Tim would recognise this, if he's reading. Too bad I don't have a floppy disk drive or I'd be tempted to try to get Doom II working again so I could play this old mod I worked on for ages when I was a teenager. The original concept was to create a complicated labyrinth with just one Cyberdemon but it gradually became something I just made up as I went along. The old editor Tim and I used to use for Doom had a tendency to zoom out a bit without telling you each time you loaded a mod you'd previously worked on so the rooms in the Doom map gradually got larger and larger depending on how new they were. It was kind of a hodgepodge of Grecian marble and hellscape.

Yesterday I spent all day on my math homework, to-day I see will have been spent entirely on trying to prepare my room for Monday's new floor and I'm pretty sure I won't be done by evening.

A few days ago, I read "Study for The Witch House", the new story in the Sirenia Digest. It's a nice little study of a conversation and how the undercurrents of strangely effective paintings subtly colour the conversation. Another nice piece of work.

The Profane Life

One of the best horror movies I've ever seen is 1962's Carnival of Souls. It succeeds in connecting supernatural horror intimately with the human mind like a disease whose infection is so complete and goes so deep it feels like it was always there, and maybe it was. Ghosts and demons aren't metaphors in this movie, they're simply true things. It's frightening and beautiful.

The story of a young woman, Mary, who survives a car accident, crawling out of the river into which the car with her friends and her had plunged during an impromptu drag race, recalls Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Like the protagonist of that book, Esther Greenwood, Mary finds herself psychically isolated in her world. When asked if she's afraid of men, she replies that she's not, she's just not interested, she wants to be alone.

Of course, the transparent motives of the guy asking might not help. When he knocks on the door while she's in the bath, she tells him to come in thinking he's the landlady. He's thoroughly charmed by her mistake and thinks nothing of trying to peep at her, not disguising his lust. Yet he seems surprised when she doesn't respond to his advances. He presents the disturbing desire for physical intimacy labelled emotional intimacy while completely failing to empathise on a fundamental level. It's no wonder this exacerbates, or compliments, Mary's confused feelings of isolation.

Twice in the movie, Mary, in a public place, discovers she can't hear anything and no-one can see her. She runs about frantically trying to attract attention but nothing works until she stops under a tree and hears a bird. The sound of the bird brings back all the other sounds. And people are able to see her again--there's something nicely Buddhist about this and it's also one of the points where the film's influence on David Lynch is apparent.

A more distinctly Lynchian element is the ghoulish man with dark eyes who seems to appear in impossible places, visible only to Mary, throughout the film. He never speaks. Usually he's smiling. In one very effective appearance, Mary is driving at night and he appears, looking in at her through the passenger side window.

Of course the effect is simply achieved--the passing landscape outside is, as usual for films of the time, a rear projection. Mary's car isn't actually moving, so the actor (who also happens to be the film's director, Herk Harvey) is obviously just kneeling beside the car. It could be funny but it isn't, perhaps because Mary's anxiety and personality had been so effectively established by actress Candace Hilligoss. What the scene achieves instead, in an instant, is something like a puncture in reality. We accept the reality of Mary driving the car, and when that's violated we're just as startled as she is.

That's just one of the ways the movie gets across its primary statement. Mary's sense, as she tells a psychiatrist at one point, that she doesn't have a place in this world. He tells her it's in her mind. But the mystery man doesn't even have to speak to tell her the psychiatrist is wrong.

Twitter Sonnet #560

Chopsticks impale the wet asphalt golem.
Pineapple stars scratch the anxious, thin night.
Rotten candy stains the crooked column.
Mosquitoes just observe the grave delight.
Olives are stuck with pins in provolone.
Ink floods wash the scaly brick dragon shop.
Vacant stores deal in false instrument loan.
Charred and empty skateboards can never stop.
Blackened grids cut through the white tortured wax.
Minor keys scratch tiles from the old roof.
The delicate worlds are stolen in sacks.
Solemn shadow thieves trip ceilings on hoof.
Churchyard questions corrupt giggling soil.
Robust jackets start the tombs to boil.

Frustrated Anagrams and Cold Spots

The fearful tendrils of manipulation can remain woven into the collective psyche of a family long after the manipulator has died. That's the very effective idea behind 1944's The Uninvited, a haunted house tale that works more for the understated ways in which the living characters reflect the motives of the dead than for any of the special effects portraying the ghosts. As Martin Scorsese said of the film, "the tone is very delicate, and the sense of fear is woven into the setting, the gentility of the characters."

The film stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as a pair of siblings from London who discover a magnificent, empty mansion while vacationing on the coast. They quickly decide to buy it and move in.

Milland was English and Hussey was American but almost everyone in this movie, set in England, speaks with an American accent. This is an interesting contrast with The City of the Dead, a British film with a cast almost entirely composed of British actors set in the U.S. and everyone put on American accents for authenticity. Sixteen years separate the two films, but it's interesting how intolerant to any foreign flavour us yanks were deemed.

The siblings find the home is owned by Commander Beech who sells it to them despite the pleas from his granddaughter that he not. He'd originally had the home built for his daughter, Mary, but the woman had died, fallen off a cliff near the house under mysterious circumstances related to her husband, who was a painter, and her husband's model, a Spanish woman named Carmel, who also died soon after.

From the upstairs studio which inspires intense discomfort in anyone who enters it and the sound of sobbing every night downstairs one gets a sense of the anger and sadness of the two ghosts but little concrete details of their story. These details emerge slowly from the granddaughter's half remembered impressions and gossip from the nearby town. The strongest stuff comes from Mary's friend, Ms. Holloway, whose feelings about the dead woman are rather clear from how she speaks of her:

"Mary was a goddess. Her skin was radiant and that bright, bright hair. How this room brings her back to me. The nights we spent talking in front of that fireplace, planning our whole lives. It wasn't flirtations and dresses we talked about. We were no silly, giggling girls. We intended to conquer life."

Holloway's cruelty and starchiness are reflections of the lesbian stereotype of the time yet her attempts to manipulate the Commander and his granddaughter, Stella, have a fascinating subtlety. She convinces the Commander to have Stella admitted to Holloway's asylum which she prefers not to call an asylum. Her preference for not calling things by name goes further than that. When Stella wakes up there, she finds herself imprisoned in her room and the staff treating her with caution.

STELLA: "I'm being treated as though I were insane!"

HOLLOWAY: "Has anyone used that word? Oh, I've told them a thousand times . . ."

One starts to get the impression that what few facts are known about the two dead women are inaccurate and that Holloway is probably the one primarily responsible for spreading misinformation. The characters in the film are written naturally enough that one starts to feel a real frustration at not knowing the truth. The fact that this frustration correlates with the feelings of the ghosts lends a great deal of effectiveness to the pages turning in a book or a glass moving on its own in an amateur séance.

Faith in Knives and Crosses

In a quiet little unassuming Massachusetts town filled with shadow and curling mist a centuries old community of immortal witches has thrived since the days of the infamous witch trials. That's the premise of the nicely eerie 1960 film The City of the Dead.

Their leader is Elizabeth Selwyn (Patricia Jessel), who centuries before was saved from burning at the stake by the graces of Satan. But, as striking as the opening scene set in the seventeenth century is, it's when the film goes to Christopher Lee as Professor Alan Driscoll, giving a lecture on witchcraft in colonial America, that the film really takes hold.

Naturally no-one makes much of the fact that the professor seems peculiarly and passionately concerned with the plight of the witches. Except one pretty blonde called Nan (Venetia Stevenson) who seems to have a crush on him and readily takes his advice to travel alone to Whitewood to conduct research for her paper.

There's the standard gas station attendant she stops to ask for directions, then there's the mysterious man who appears at the fork in the road before calmly asking for a ride.

The town sits in a perpetual blanket of mist and beyond the rotten wood of the ancient buildings is the pure black of perfect darkness making the place seem unreal or at least completely cut off from the rest of the world.

Innocent young Nan stays at the Raven Inn where her suspicions are slowly aroused by things like a trapdoor in her room with no handle and a dead bird left in one of her dresser drawers. When the landlady, who we can plainly see is the reincarnated Elizabeth Selwyn, invites innocent young Nan to dance with the other guests one evening Nan eventually agrees and takes off her nightgown to get back into her clothes.

And we see she's inexplicably in the undergarments of a burlesque performer. Absolutely no mention is made or explanation is given for this though perhaps it's the sign of horror movie morality at play.

Though actually one is struck by the feeling, watching the film, that no-one is safe from the powers of Satan. There is a really impressive climax involving a crucifix inflicting damage on witches but that didn't stop the local priest from being assaulted by the forces of the Devil.

The impression one has watching is that the supernatural forces at play, both holy and Satanic, are savage manifestations of human spite. The fear is invoked more from the sense that a set of laws founded on false premises rule and provide excuses for bloodlust. Seeing the drama play out gives the impression that God's order is a vain illusion over a real chaos.

Moving Along

Not much sleep last night. Mostly from thinking of the week ahead. I'm going to need to move everything out of the room I've lived in for over ten years to make way for new wooden flooring I don't want. I really wish I could afford to live alone. I think back to the humiliating and hopeless effort at getting a job last year that, if I had gotten one, wouldn't have even put me halfway to that goal. On top of that I have people around talking to me like it's because I haven't made any effort that I'm not making any money. It's funny not one of them has managed to offer one single piece of constructive advice. It's amazing how many people seem to think all one still needs to do is apply and follow-up. I couldn't even get a job in fast food last year and I applied and followed-up at all of the stores in town. And of course getting a job in something I'm particularly good at seems an impossibly distant goal, a distant goal accompanied by the knowledge that most people who do reach that goal are in miserable living conditions.

Anyway. Last night I watched the last episode of Hit & Miss. It was a good series, very much about emotion. It's something you have to keep in mind as you watch, that the writer is making an emotional point requiring the viewer to let some things pass that may not make sense.

For example, in the third to last episode I think it was, the silent stalker guy who'd observed the isolated Irish farming family in secret reveals himself to the family having brought back the little girl who's gone missing. Mia, the protagonist, head of the family who is secretly an assassin for hire, watches with pleasure the two young boys of the family start to beat the shit out of the quiet man. Her boyfriend, Ben, stops the boys and accuses Mia, who is a transwoman, of being mannish for enjoying inflicting violence.

Here I thought of two things Mia could have said; "Well, you stopped the fight, does that make you a woman, Ben?" or "So you're the Irishman who never heard of Margaret Thatcher?" Instead Mia just replies that she's not a man and the two spend time apart.

First of all, I didn't really buy that Mia would just let the kids attack the guy for no reason. The man wasn't making any aggressive movements and any halfway rational person would've had to have considered the possibility that this was a nice man who found the lost little girl and led her home.

But there are emotional points to be made here about Mia's reflexive need for violence and a more fundamental idea brought out more in the last couple episodes about identity, about what one can infer about a person based on his or her actions. In another scene built on an unlikely premise, Mia goes home to her mother and brother who live and work in a carnival. The brother is violent and transphobic and somehow physically gets the better of the trained assassin and cuts her long hair while she's conscious and crying. But the point the writer, Paul Abbott, is making turns out to be about how both Mia and her brother's propensity for violence were inherited from an abusive father.

The show is beautifully shot and Cloe Sevigny is good in the role--though I still would have preferred an actual transwoman. The show is frequently awkward in the paths it takes to get to the interesting places it wants to go. There's too much reliance on characters doing embarrassing and complicated things in private, like when Mia buys a false pregnant stomach for herself. Worse was the moment where Mia, who's pre-op and unhappy with her penis, takes a bath and leaves the door unlocked. There are a lot of moments on the show where you feel like the character would be a little more guarded in the specific situation.

But the fact that I get anxious when the characters leave themselves vulnerable for reasons that seem unrealistic to me is certainly a sign that I care about the characters. It's a shame the show ended after only six episodes. I would have liked to have seen a somewhat more relaxed examination of these characters.

I think maybe the part I liked most was what eventually transpired between Riley and the landlord, especially the aftermath and the contrast between Mia and Riley's reactions.

Twitter Sonnet #559

Blurred green windows winking from black forests.
Hissing wind sews letters in a monster.
Needles type bubbles in scarecrow harvests.
Skulls crack grins in a grim hollow roster.
Orange cold chains scratch the styrofoam bloody.
Moaning green eyes slam the splintered porch stair.
Claws fast caught in vaults turn all too ruddy.
A soggy moon fixes a solemn glare.
The sternum sits incongruous on ice.
Smoky black slugs are gliding up the wall.
A green gold clock at ten fathoms breaks twice.
Cool space conjures drag for unburnt brain's fall.
Mist faces chill easels drowning in light.
Mimosa scent chokes the unquiet night.