Sensual Music and Neglected Monuments

Saoirse Ronan as a vampire named Eleanor Webb wanders into an expensive restaurant, sits at a piano and plays beautifully, expertly, and when she's done she calmly, quietly allows the beauty of the moment to conclude with only the subtlest expression. This scene from the film for me reflects the feelings aroused by the whole of Neil Jordan's Byzantium. Although in some aspects I was reminded of other vampire films, Byzantium is unique in its understated, gentle beauty.

When I heard about the film, I assumed Jordan, an Irishman who frequently tells stories in and about his country, took the title from one or both of William Butler Yeats' "Byzantium" poems.

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Byzantium

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

They certainly sound like they could be poems about vampires--more the modern, contemplative and tortured Anne Rice variety than the villainous bloodsucker that would have been the familiar vampire when Yeats wrote the poems. Though I have no idea if Jordan actually took his inspiration from the Yeats poems.

Jordan is certainly no stranger to the Anne Rice vampire having directed the film version of Interview with the Vampire starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. And the story does bear some similarities--in Byzantium we follow the vampire protagonists across the centuries, we see the strange initiation into undeath, the contrast of the same people living in one time period and another, and the effect extreme long life may have on a personality. The vampires portrayed are people who have found themselves gradually more disconnected from humanity even as they acquire a profoundly intimate knowledge of the species.

But Byzantium doesn't feature as many of the qualities of action or horror film as Interview with the Vampire. Byzantium's protagonists, a mother and daughter called Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), have a relationship somewhere between a family forced to move frequently for business reasons and a couple of wanted criminals.

The years can be seen more in Eleanor's peculiarly placid, confident, and self contained behaviour which allows the film to contemplate Saoirse Ronan in stillness, revealing the former child actress has grown up to look a bit like a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Clara, meanwhile, seems as capricious and simple hearted as she was in life. She was a prostitute from an early age and we see her to-day opening a brothel in an old hotel called Byzantium on the English coast.

The relationship that slowly begins to emerge between Eleanor and a boy named Noel (Daniel Mays) may remind some of Let the Right One In but while that movie was about natural affection developing in unorthodox circumstance, Byzantium is more from the vampire's perspective as she attempts to reconcile her natural needs with disbelief and fear that would prevent others from responding to her in a natural way.

Although Eleanor generally seems the more mature of the two vampire women, Clara has a better understanding of the world's hostility towards them. Eleanor, despite her centuries, seems to have the adolescent presumption that because she wants or needs something, the world can readily supply her with it. Even after so many years, she still has the urge to connect with others on an instinctual level but humanity is usually only ready to meet her intellectually.

Who Nose

It was good, the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special. Spoilery stuff ahead.

So now we know what the big change was Steven Moffat's been teasing, the thing that changes the course of the entire show. I predict some people will regard it as a cop-out. In another kind of movie or show, I'd agree. Because I'd say there's not much point in fiction telling us we can wipe a slate totally clean. Real life doesn't work that way and postulating a reality where it does feels a bit cruel and weak. But in the case of Doctor Who, I felt like this was a genuine way of honouring the bulk of the show, the fundamental nature of the first eight Doctors reasserting itself over something that largely defines who the latest three Doctors are. One could say that the special ended with the Doctor being more Doctor than he has in a while.

Moffat rather nicely used John Hurt to provide commentary on how the show has changed in the past decade--I loved his reaction to Smith and Tennant pointing their sonic screwdrivers at people ("Are you going to assemble a cabinet at them?").

Incidentally, I don't know what state the Wikipedia entries will be in at the time I post this but right now the entry for "Twelfth Doctor" has a picture of Matt Smith. Chaos! How're we supposed to catalogue all this now? And what is it going to do to all the cutesy references to "Eleventh" things in Smith's run, like "The Eleventh Hour" and Clara saying whisky is the eleventh worst thing? I guess it was all about Tennant all along.

But the special certainly does make it clear Hurt's Doctor is to be an official part of the history now.

I like how Moffat writes regeneration as a way the Doctor has of trying to escape his past, I liked the bit about how going to younger bodies is an effort to avoid being an adult and all the terrible responsibilities an adult has. This is another reason why I didn't see the climax as a cop-out.

More importantly, I liked the climax because it's becoming increasingly rare for heroes in popular fantasy to find ways of solving problems other than the use of violence (see Man of Steel. Or don't). Moffat has written commitment to non-violence as being the keystone of the personal philosophy of the Doctor that makes him the Doctor.

I'm by no means saying I don't like violent heroes. Just that I find the Doctor more interesting when he's not violent.

I loved Tom Baker's cameo. I feel like the emotion we see in him is a quite genuine reflection of his love for the show. The other Doctors all appear in the form of archive footage but I must say I still would have preferred fresh audio at least from the living Doctors. And maybe an actual appearance by Sylvester McCoy.

I strongly suspect we'll be seeing Ingrid Oliver again, or at least that Moffat intends to have her character reappear. And I'm quite happy with that--as a UNIT character Osgood is far more interesting than Kate Stewart who just lacks the Brigadier's twinkle.

I liked how obvious it was that Osgood was a massive Doctor fangirl without anyone having to say it out loud.

I enjoyed getting the story between Ten (or shall we say Eleven) and Elizabeth I. I liked seeing the Zygons again and they were used well. Part of me wishes it had felt more like an anniversary special, part of me likes that Moffat seems to have basically used the 75 minutes as a very brief whole season. I sure wish we didn't have to wait until next autumn to get a whole proper season, though.

Twitter Sonnet #568 Doctor Who Anniversary Edition

He who's not Foreman will one day come back.
Flutes can play unsquashed Beatles and say "Run."
The Master's reversed flow leaves Bessie's track.
Tin dogs and babies end scarf stripes for none.
Celery stalk bats simply aren't Cricket.
Clashing coloured coward condemns himself.
Clever porkpie keeps Ace in his pocket.
Vancouver takes him briefly off the shelf.
Newborn wolves know everywhere has a north.
Pinstripes blink messianic finales.
The youngest old man knows a bowtie's worth.
Scottish Italy emerged from hollies.
Myriad casings can the same sonic.
At the brink of apocalypse don't panic.

The Laminated Doctor

I sincerely thought last night's An Adventure in Space and Time was a complete ruse, I thought the trailers were put together to put us off from discovering David Bradley was going to play the First Doctor in the 50th anniversary special to-morrow. Looks like either I was wrong or they've taken this ruse to very great lengths because, as we saw last night, an hour and a half television movie has in fact been made, directed by Terry McDonough and written by Mark Gatiss.

Watching it, though, I saw even more things that oddly felt like the thing wasn't exactly real, mostly to do with Gatiss' characteristically orthodox writing matched by McDonough's intensely conservative direction. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, probably because I've become a hardcore Doctor Who fan. It feels very much like a movie version of a fan trailer--one of those where someone edited together a bunch of clips from the show to make it seem like a trailer for a more mainstream picture, the excitement arising from this thing we're so geekily and slightly embarrassingly obsessed with being given a treatment like what socially acceptable movies get. In other words, if you've never seen Doctor Who, you will not like An Adventure in Space and Time.

However, if you've never seen the classic series and are merely a huge fan of the new series, I think you might like An Adventure in Space and Time quite a lot, possibly more than watching the William Hartnell episodes themselves since, as I indicated, this film is so cosily contained by the most conservative modern filmmaking language. There are a million little familiar beats--the loud little "ding" in the score when we first see the title "Dr. Who" written on an envelope, the moment where Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine) looks up and smiles at the BBC building just after she's gotten the job as Doctor Who's first producer.

Lambert becomes one of the two central figures in the movie alongside William Hartnell and the film justifiably makes something of the fact that the 1963 show's producer was a woman and its director was of Indian descent and both faced discrimination and patronising treatment from the BBC old guard.

Though this creates a problem when Lambert leaves the show after we've seen her fighting for it so passionately and so much of the film has been told from her point of view. No explanation is given for her departure though she and Hartnell share a tearful farewell.

Bradley as Hartnell gets a far more effective story, concentrating on his failing health, his pride as a performer and deep affection he felt for the show. Bradley does an absolutely beautiful job.

Hartnell was (and still is, for anyone watching his episodes for the first time) notorious for forgetting his lines and since, as we're shown in An Adventure in Space and Time, BBC budget only allowed a few retakes per episode, the actor was often forced to improvise on camera to make up for his own failing memory.

In my favourite scene, Hartnell, having worked on the show now a couple years, stands at the Tardis console furiously correcting the new director and new technicians, taking them to task about continuity when they ask him to use a different lever for the Tardis door and angrily pointing out that the Time Rotor needs to be moving in the scene because the Tardis is in flight. Then the cameras roll and he can't remember his line.

As a Doctor Who fan watching, or anyone who still respects someone completely committed to their art, it's a very effectively painful scene.

It is wonderful seeing so many of the old sets recreated--I had no idea the original Tardis console was pale blue green.

The casting is generally excellent--Bradley looks remarkably like Hartnell but more importantly his performance is great. The group of original companions are good, though, particularly in William Russell's case, the physical resemblance isn't strong.

The real William Russell actually has a cameo in the film as a security guard and actually he doesn't look much like Ian anymore.

It's a shame he wasn't available for Mawdryn Undead.

The film makes one explicit reference to the new series I won't spoil for you. I found it incredibly lame even at the same time it gave me chills. It's like getting slobbered on by a dog you love. That kind of describes most of the film, actually.

Cat of the World

This is a cat called Magda. She was called Magda by my sister's friend who used to live in the building I just moved into. I see no reason not to call her Magda, too.

I took the above picture outside the laundry room on the second floor. It was the second time I ran into Magda, this time she immediately climbed onto my lap and tried to crawl into my coat. I asked a group of teenagers if she belonged to one of them--"No, that cat just wanders." said one guy.

A few minutes later, I asked a middle aged woman entering her apartment nearby if the cat was hers.

"No," she said. "Is it yours?"

"Er, no," I said.

She explained to me the cat had been owned by someone who didn't pay the extra rent for the cat so it was put out. I think the extra rent is around thirty dollars.

I guess since Magda's been around since my sister's friend was living here means Magda can handle herself well enough. She does have claws, as I found out when I went to pet her when she'd rolled onto her back. Mainly she just seems to have unconditional love for humans.

It's raining to-day, something I didn't even realise until I went to take out the trash. So I'm spending to-day doing a number of things indoors. I put together a second bookcase, this one black that stands 40 inches tall. I'm starting to think I'll actually have somewhere to put all my books and movies.

Slow Green and Black Currents

Here's one of the more casually brilliant shots from Neil Jordan's beautiful 2009 film Ondine. It's just a scene of Jordan regular Stephen Rea, here in the minor role of an unnamed priest, discovering the film's protagonist, Syracuse (Colin Farrell), asleep in a tree. It looks like a Rembrandt painting. You can see it's full daylight but Jordan and cinematographer Christopher Doyle have very naturally sculpted the shadows to complement the film's sweet, slightly melancholy tale.

Syracuse--called Circus or Clown throughout the small Irish fishing town--earns a meagre living as a fisherman. He got his nicknames from when he used to be a drunk. Now he's sober and divorced from his still drunk wife who has custody of their extremely adorable, amiably geeky little girl Annie (Alison Barry) who was born with a kidney disease.

I don't know if this is meant to be related to the alcoholism of her parents but the film certainly doesn't paint a positive picture of alcohol. Making it somewhat ironic it premiered at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. A good sport is Jameson.

Syracuse's luck changes when he hauls up in his net a mysterious woman (Alicja Bachleda) clad only in a loose knit shirt--from what I hear, she was originally naked but Jordan was forced to alter the film for producers who wanted it to find an audience ranged wider in age. This doesn't stop the lady from stepping out of the water in a completely see through dress in a later scene.

I guess like Louise Jameson's wet chemise moment in The Talons of Weng-Chiang this doesn't count for some reason. Not that I'm complaining.

She calls herself Ondine. She doesn't want anyone to see her except Syracuse so it's a lucky thing he has a picturesque, remote little cottage in a little bay where he keeps his boats. The place used to belong to his mother and now Ondine moves in and starts wearing his mother's clothes.

Syracuse's daughter Annie quickly decides Ondine is a selkie and considering the woman's seemingly able to summon lobsters and salmon to Syracuse's boat just by singing Annie certainly doesn't seem crazy. This is part of the story's central conflict of Dionysian cynicism in the form of Syracuse's and his ex-wife's alcoholism versus the Apollonian hope represented by the magic Annie associates with Ondine. Ondine's association with Syracuse's mother, by wearing her clothes and moving into her home, seems to further imply that she's part of a belief in hope and magic that exists in a more childlike part of Syracuse's personality that is in conflict with his alcoholism.

Yet one wonders why Syracuse neglects to bring up the possibility that Ondine might be hiding from some more real-world troubles when she fervently doesn't want to be seen by anyone. Mainly this doesn't seem too unnatural--the film has a fairy tale quality aided very much by its fantastic chiaroscuro imagery and improbably gorgeous lead performers.

I suppose you could say it's hard to get bad photography from the rocky coastlands of Ireland but Jordan and Doyle still pull off something really remarkable. A moving portrait in soft blacks and greens, a sweetly sad sort of visual lullaby. Some bits that stand out for me--after Syracuse and Ondine have slept together, she seems to glide off into darkness as she slips out of frame, sliding off the bed before the too slowly following camera which catches up with her putting on a strangely silvery blanket, glittering in the gloom as she walks out into the rain.

One gets a sense from Syracuse's point of view of drowsy, serene intrigue.

I also love this shot where he comes across her under the old wreck of a ship like she's incubating in a whale's corpse. I was reminded of Harriet Andersson in Through a Glass Darkly.

Twitter Sonnet #567

Sandstorms dissolve to an azure woodland.
Muddy red sparks shoot a popcorn landscape.
Splintered squares draw into a ragged band.
Dragon ears can hear oxygen escape.
Burning amber ribbons close on groceries.
Defanged ivy clutched piano legs.
Police sirens plant birds in their nurseries.
Black hole Easter charged the red magnet eggs.
Brown wool washers keep metal necks warmer.
Luminous clouds clamour for neon grace.
No potato fish startled Jack Warner.
No river crossing chart was quite an ace.
Green rocks vanish in a soaking blue night.
Moss brushed graves retire from logic's sight.

Jungle and Structure

I watched a bit from last night's Daily Show where Jon Stewart reacts with some incredulity to Obamacare being compared throughout the news media to Hurricane Katrina. It's hard to know whether the right response is to actually explain why this is absurd or if it's better to try and ignore the assertion instead of giving it any credence, which any attempt to dispute it may in some small way do.

I heard Chris Matthews say a little while ago--I'm not sure if he was quoting someone or not--that people on the two sides of the political aisle used to fight because they disagreed and now they disagree because they fight.

For over ten years, I lived with my Republican grandmother and we seemed to get along well enough until this year. From what I hear, the way she'd begun to treat me had mostly to do with my aunt and uncle wanting me out of the way so that any inheritance they received from my grandmother wouldn't meet with potential obstacles--my uncle had been fired from his job and they'd had trouble getting by for the past year or more (despite having gone on a cruise this year). So I guess this explains the phone conversation I overheard where my aunt was telling my grandmother that I was somehow manipulating her.

I shopped for my grandmother, buying groceries and other things she would have trouble lifting, I took out the trash and did other random jobs about the house. It's expensive to live in California so it seemed like we were both helping each other out. The idea of throwing me out must have even seemed illogical to her on some level which was why she had to contrive reasons for it, one of which was our political differences. One day she told me, without any apparent reason, about a priest who told her that the only things we don't choose when we're born are our race and our gender. Everything else is our choice.

And then of course there was Obamacare. She seemed to hold it against me that Fox News told her that her health insurance was going to go up. The day I was thrown out, I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant and as I was explaining the situation to my sister on my cell phone a couple Mexican women at a nearby table overheard me and one of them said wryly to the other, "White people problems."

There is a chicken and the egg quality to the culture war. Are we fighting because we disagree or are we disagreeing because we fight? Obviously in my case it was the latter.

Yesterday I read "Pickman's Madonna", a particularly nice Lovecraftian story in the latest Sirenia Digest. It involves two characters, Isaac and Isobel Snow, Caitlin developed in the MMORPG The Secret World and a lot of their strange personalities and relationship come through in the story despite it featuring little dialogue, instead concentrating on a ceremony the two participate in in Lovecraft's dream realm. Caitlin has written several stories describing strange ceremonies. It's ceremony as artform with the various stages of sacrifice, cutting, placement of naked participants, and decoration having an aesthetic effect like the arrangement of colours and shapes in a painting.

The Killing Cleavage

I couldn't put it better than Roger Ebert, who described the distinctive imagery of Russ Meyer's 1965 film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! like so:

Take away all the jokes, the elaborate camera angles, the violence, the action and the sex, and what remains is the quintessential Russ Meyer image: a towering woman with enormous breasts, who dominates all the men around her, demands sexual satisfaction and casts off men in the same way that, in mainstream sexual fantasies, men cast aside women.

Of course the camera angles are part of what makes these already hugely endowed women so much larger than life. The violent gang of three go-go dancers in this film are typically shot from low angles or shown in other ways to impose themselves physically on others.

Really, though, I doubt there's much about this movie I can say that hasn't been said. Tura Satana, a Japanese and Filipino actress who once posed for nude photos for silent film star Harold Lloyd, plays Varla, who wields her body and suped up sportscar as part of a single, big psychic wrecking ball. She kills to sate immediate appetites and she also kills premeditatively for long term ends.

The film's boring male hero, who thankfully gets little screentime, dismisses her as an "animal" and "nothing" but Varla is quick to point out he'd been happy to try and fuck her less than half an hour earlier.

After killing an innocent young girl's boyfriend with her bare hands, Varla kidnaps her and drugs her. Still, Varla sees no conflict of interest in saving the girl from a potential rape--Varla's not running on anarchy, she has a moral code. She's simply declared war on men and given the ruthless old bastard shown in the film, it's hard to blame her.

One might say this is all old hat by now, but when was the last time you saw a female heroine or villain who's allowed to dominate men like that? Yeah, obviously Kill la Kill, but it's pretty rare even now. Even if it wasn't, the exuberance with which Meyer and his crew tell this story, and the excitement surrounding the breach of taboo, is rather delightful.

The Animals in the Paint

I got a haircut last week at a place called The Hair Dock which is run by a guy named Mike who, in addition to being a barber, is a serious salt water sport fisherman. He's an older man, in his 70s, and I listened to him talking with another old guy waiting on the bench about going to this or that sea or bay and the various kinds of big fish they each caught. Mike was cutting a mentally impaired guy's hair in the seat next to me--this customer was bragging about how he had a toy race car decorated with Popeye characters for Popeye's 75th anniversary. But he liked Tom and Jerry better than Popeye.

"The only problem with Tom and Jerry," said Mike, "is they're all basically the same."

The old guy on the bench said, "Yeah, I remember when cartoons was just Disney and, uh, Elmer Fudd." Someone in the back of the shop said, "That's all, folks!"

"You know what's big now," said Mike, "is those Japanese cartoons."

"I don't know anything about that," said the other old guy.

"It's like, you remember that Johnny Quest?" said Mike.

"No, I don't know Johnny Quest."

Then the mentally impaired guy brought up Pokemon and the old guys groaned and immediately started talking about fishing again.

One of the criticisms I've seen going around about Kill la Kill, which I caught up with to-day, is that it's "too Loony Toons." I see people saying it has great animation but no plot. It's not hard to see what they mean by plot is the tedious bullshit used to inflate the cheap Slice of Life or latest Evangelion knock-off series, facile meditations on how stupidity is a virtue in women and collecting dully animated glowing items is virtue in all.

Yes, Kill la Kill is like Loony Toons and that's a big compliment. Instead of reinforcing a delusion that sanitises life into lobotomised gratification, Loony Toons, classic Disney cartoons, and Kill la Kill provide the viewer with a catharsis in exaggerated reflections of the common human experience.

Bugs Bunny's and Daffy Duck's dealings with Elmer Fudd are often used as allegories for average people put upon by authority figures with plenty of absurd gags thrown in as a nod to the subconscious knowledge that all systems created by adults for themselves are ridiculous and in the long run meaningless. Bugs' casual thwarting of the baby-like hunter strikes a chord because Bugs is the true animal in the human while Fudd is a representation of useless human destruction motivated by delusion. Fudd seems like a baby because he's subscribed to a path of learning divergent from actual maturation.

Kill la Kill isn't that different with its story of school uniforms as a metaphor for conformity. It's not coy with its fan service, forcing viewers to actually acknowledge they like the idea of sex--one can't mistake Matoi's outfit for anything but intentionally titillating. And I love Mako's family, the sloppy dad, brother, and dog and how all of them quickly adopted different personalities when they almost instantly became rich in the newest episode.

With lightning speed, the father goes from being a "back alley doctor" to someone who goes to expensive medical association dinners with high class call girls. The absurdity of the shift is in step with the funny, exaggerated dining habits of the family and the ridiculously imposing club presidents. It's all a reflection of fundamental human absurdity that can never be contained behind artificial habit or institution.

Twitter Sonnet #566

Yellow cellophane churches keep in squeak.
Pitiless richies hurry to the Ralphs.
There's balanced a coffee bean on a peak.
White gravity socks invert the cave mouths.
Figure eight locked freeway ramparts tie fish.
Fenders build the broken path to the tow.
Emergency Christmas lights block fall's wish.
Apples flatten even the strongest bow.
A black cheese wheel descends on the car lot.
Absent knights may present arms for the press.
Flat steel remains a Terminator blot.
Pinewood support beams have Yule to confess.
Half cape combat divides matador minds.
Boba Fett bargains offer kiwi rinds.

A Face to Agree On

But if my fears prove true, masks like this could destroy all human morality . . . Name, position, occupation--such labels would no longer matter. We would all be perfect strangers to one another. Constant solitude would become our normal condition. We'd no longer be ashamed of this "modern illness" of isolation.

This isn't an analysis of internet comment forums. These lines are spoken by a doctor named Hira in 1966's The Face of Another (他人の顔), a movie that discusses the advantages and disadvantages of identity and the morality behind how one manipulates one's own identity and persona. It's a beautiful, sadistically entertaining film.

The movie follows two stories of unrelated characters. Most of the movie follows the story of Okuyama, played by Tatsuya Nakadai, whose face was badly burned in an accident at his work. The other, shorter story follows a pretty young woman who has a large, disfiguring burn on the side of her face.

Both characters are treated differently due to their injuries. Okuyama is forced to wear bandages over his whole head. We never see him before the accident--as the film opens, he's settled into a life of perpetual bitterness, continually provoking his wife, played by Machiko Kyo, in an effort to get her to admit she's disturbed by his new appearance.

The young disfigured woman finds herself uncomfortably isolated--boys who begin to flirt with her are immediately repelled when they notice her disfigured side.

Okuyama meets Dr. Hira, who may be a plastic surgeon or a psychiatrist, or both, his area of expertise is left vague and his offices are expressionist constructions of minimalist sets, process shots, and giant sculptures of human body parts. The glee with which he talks to Okuyama about the mask taking over Okuyama's life makes Hira seem more like Satan.

The mask is a face grown in Dr. Hira's lab, apparently made from organic material but Okuyama is forced to remove it every evening. Despite Hira's ideas about amoral anonymity run rampant, Okuyama's attempt at leading a double life is almost immediately seen through by the mentally impaired superintendent's daughter where Okuyama rents two apartments.

Okuyama's wife shares an interesting perspective on his circumstance. She tells him how women in ancient Japan believed they ought to cover their faces with makeup out of humility. She likens it to Muslim women covering their faces. This is part of what sets up the film's two stories as opposing philosophies--Okuyama's desire to control his appearance is related to an amoral imprudence on his part while the girl's inability to shape her appearance leads to tragic outcomes.

On top of this, Okuyama's wife offers another perspective--she points out that when women wear makeup or veils, they don't try to present these things as anything other than what they are, while Okuyama's mask is meant to deceive others. One might point out there's no moral harm if the disfigured girl received corrective cosmetic surgery, but Okuyama's behaviour makes a lack of consent on the part of the people he deals with seem monstrous.

New Faces and Old Ghosts

For years, I've thought this chipped paint on the wall of the men's room at the college looked like the profile of someone with a big, floofy ponytail and a heavy brow. I finally couldn't resist drawing in the face last week.

This week, I discovered the pizza house where Tom Waits worked as a teenager in the 60s was still around, looking probably much as it did when Tom Waits worked there.

It was Sunday and apparently the place is only open Monday through Thursday. National City, the part of San Diego where it's located, isn't far from downtown. This is National City's own little downtown--the heart of National City, if it has a heart. It was dead quiet and next to Napoleone's there's a mortuary.

I was excited about finding the storied little pizza place, then my sister found in a magazine that it's ranked number 1 in "Trendiest Restaurants" in San Diego, the description mentioning the fact that Tom Waits used to work there. Oh, well. I'd still like to try some of their spaghetti. Who knows when I'll have time, though. I have so much unpacking to do and still a few things to transport.

Secret Fire

I guess by now most of you have seen this:

If you haven't, and you consider yourself a Doctor Who fan of any measure, you ought to watch it as soon as possible.

The 1996 American TV movie was generally pretty lame, possessing many of the worst qualities of American drama of the time. It was hard to get a real notion of how good McGann was as the Doctor. Here now with a Steven Moffat script I find him rather pleasingly understated. Compared to the latest Doctors, he almost seems like a typewriter in terms of his emotional range but he gives his lines a great deal of nuance.

The Sisterhood of Karn first appeared in the Fourth Doctor Frankenstein homage serial The Brain of Morbius where they had some of the best makeup and costumes from that era of the show.

That serial had an unusual amount of subtext for the series, the Sisterhood being ancient acquaintances of the Time Lords, sometimes friends, sometimes enemies. The Sisterhood seemed like they were meant to be a commentary on womanhood and faith while Solon, as the story's version of Dr. Frankenstein, inherits some of Mary Shelley's criticism of men and of science. The fact that one of the Sisterhood in the mini-sode specifically mentions Time Lord "science" is curious. In engineering a Doctor for war, the Sisters have now kind of become the Frankensteins.

The Brain of Morbius Part1 by matrixarchive

Twitter Sonnet #565

Challenges addressed in ties choke the treat.
Quickly scolds the red nosed fat suit glamour.
Dashing doormen break the Window retreat.
No ham heart aimed usefully the hammer.
Six o'clock earls dip no bread in their tea.
Calamity climbs a eucalyptus.
Scaly felines bolt for the open sea.
Yellow crowns trace a travelling countess.
Would-be lynx motorists eye the red Porsche.
But headlamps enlarged the fat siamese.
Domestic cat eyes avert from the porch.
Asphalt blood oozed from the hill giant's knees.
Bandoliers cinch on malleable men.
Gunpowder draughts pare down the heart to tin.

A Me and My Stuff Cube

I think this is nearly an eighth of all my stuff. Note the four handy Comic Con bags. Studio investment into using these bags for advertising continues to pay off as people see me lugging these things from my car to my apartment.

And I have internet, thanks to Time Warner. I don't have time to enjoy it now, though, because I still have lots of stuff to shift. Fortunately this apartment has a ridiculous amount of storage space for a studio. I daresay I can accommodate almost everything. I wouldn't say no to a few bookcases, though. I ought to get a chair, too. I'm currently using a tote filled with books and DVDs as a seat.

I'd better get back to moving stuff so I can get to school in time for my test to-night. Please enjoy this backlog of Twitter Sonnets, now that I can copy and paste with ease again;

Twitter Sonnet #564

Horseshoe patronage steeps the dry alder.
Nameless black teas darkly stain four o'clock.
Candied teeth scratch chalk from the white boulder.
Pallid parties flaunt their bloodless new stock.
Drifting concrete veins'll yet say nothing.
Soft peeling white clouds are counterfeit brow.
Hatching tires hold no curse or blessing.
Spite seeps like sod behind a fragile plough.
Toadstools turn out the pantless and frogged.
Antique windshield wipers write old figures.
Bacon tags are in the deli morgues logged.
Beyond pale doughnut holes are blank triggers.
Blue crates of fake tofu are eldritch cheese.
Umbrella brows tangle during strip tease.

Twitter Sonnet #565

Bloodsucking flamingos gulp lemon dye. Juvenile vizirs confer with tin. Helium glee answers to transfat pie. Diamonds cut the raindrop cyclone case men. Milkless melodies twist into the tea. Vegan cookies will sew heaven's assam. Orange sunset traced a wonderful black sea. Vinyl dreams march on Victorian land. Indolent lacquered sunflowers burn clouds. Cheap spaghetti's not allowed in the church. Sunday drives off the mortuary's shrouds. Queequeg left a cheap coffin in the lurch. Eight celled bathtubs fade the paper airplane. Frothing food court car men may seem insane.

Home, Rinkside

Okay, I'm basically moved into my new place, thanks to a lot of help from my parents. There's still a lot of stuff to be transported.

And I'm at the ice rink again now which, oddly enough, is the best place to go around here for wi-fi--the signal's good and there are always plenty of seats, booths even. And currently I can glance up at some guys playing hockey if I want to. Looks like the guys in white shirts have a good goalie.

Hopefully I'll have things worked out with Time Warner in the next few days so I can have internet on my computer. The woman on the phone didn't sound too on the ball, I had to give her my address three times.

Moving Digits

I pulled into a shopping centre to-day because it had a sign for a place calling itself "Checkmate". The sign had a black and white chequered pattern. Turned out to be a place for getting payday advances and cheques cashed. I miss my chess club.

I miss movies. Twice now I've driven across town just to get DVDs out of my sister's garage. Last night I watched Yojimbo which I was in the mood for because listening to the Masaru Sato soundtrack while driving lately has somehow reminded me of my current situation. More for the goofy yakuza theme that somehow perfectly reflects the political manoeuvrings of the little town. Kurosawa never portrayed gangsters as cool--except maybe Mifune in Drunken Angel. But even then you could tell Kurosawa thought gangsters were offensive clowns.

I've been reminded how much I love driving. Back when you could fill up a tank with just ten dollars I used to drive all over town just for kicks. Nowadays it's a pleasant surprise when gasoline is under $3.60 a gallon.

To-morrow I move into my new place, I may not have time to make an entry. It'll probably be a few days before I get internet, too, but at least I'll be able to take and resize my own screenshots again and take them to school on my thumb drive.

New Old Place

Spent much of yesterday and am about to spend a bit of to-day exploring my new neighbourhood. It's a part of San Diego I'd not been in much in the thirty or so years I've lived here probably because most of it seems to be miles and miles of houses. It's 1.8 miles to the nearest grocery store. I'm used to having everything in walking distance--I'm going to have to learn to stock up. Which should be easier, shopping for just one person. Now I'll be able to use the kitchen whenever I want so I won't have to eat out as much.

Also a couple miles away is a Rite Aid where I worked thirteen years ago. Tim tells me Rite Aid was about to go out of business when someone bought it recently and saved some of the stores from closing. The interior certainly bears little resemblance to the place where I worked those years ago. Bins of random, marked down merchandise and rough hewn shelves look like they came from a high school shop class. It looks like a remodel that became permanent when it was half finished four or five years ago. It kind of reminds me of the Crown Books, which have the air of those zombie ant bodies taken completely over by parasites--zombie versions of the store that went out of business a decade ago but lawyers are still trying to get rid of warehouses filled with Larry King autobiographies and G. Gordon Liddy's analysis of the political landscape in 1998.

The Rite Aid still smells vaguely the same, a distinct subtle mix of ice cream and the wood awnings exposed on the hillside location to the winds off the ocean it faces. Not a bad location to work in but I remember navigating the freeway onramp was a pain in the ass, especially during a rainstorm.