I really need to get more sleep. Only four hours again.

Class was interesting last night. The teacher seems pretty laid back. The first reading assignment, of course, is Beowulf. The Seamus Heaney translation, which I've never read. I'm looking forward to it.

Here someone has introduced Elvis Costello to Mutt and Jeff;

I couldn't get more than four hours of sleep for some reason. But it's probably just as well, since I have to get up early to-morrow and the next day. To-night, I have school to go to. The first time I've gone to school since, I think, 2004. I'm taking British Literature 1. Just one class. Hopefully I've outgrown my academic fuckupery.

Lots of nostalgic things so far this week. I watched the pilot episode of Deep Space Nine yesterday for the first time in, I think, a decade. A lot of it felt surprisingly fresh. I remember making fun of Avery Brooks' half interestingly intense, half really awkward performance, but it seems like I'd forgotten the experience of actually watching the performance. I raised my eyebrows as if seeing for the first time his weird little "aow!" in the beach scene.

Otherwise, I didn't do much else yesterday except watch more of Vertigo again. I'm guessing this is the fourth time I've watched it in the past three weeks and it just seems to be getting better each time. I've been writing an analysis that's been getting really long. I know Vertigo's a movie that's been written about extensively, and obviously not all those writings are available to me, but I'm trying not to be redundant. The movie has so many layers that play off one another so well. It all fits together like a watch, as Keyes in Double Indemnity would say.

Olfactory! Olfactory! You need it, don't you see? 'Cause you're a fella, I can tell, who could really use a sense of smell!

No fail for he who can tell who and what stands on the other side of the wind.
A shining, dogged trail of a communal secret snail, laid bare when odourlessness you forefend.
Caspar can't conquer space alone, with eyes, ears, shape; a nose is crucial.
Stupid children cannot ever atone, not when certain thoughts are inconsequential.

Can you see what you can't smell? In any case, I would not advise it.
The scent of male, the scent of female; in the hay or in the dock, you will find it.
Parsing bad from good, lucky man, or rotten from fresh and sweet
Wafting fast from fluttering fan; you'll know when your trolley's fled down street.

Water and smoke in the sky, the city things seen but not seen
No need for how and why, not when there's odour on the screen!

Apparently I'm not the only one who noticed the Cloverfield monster looked suspiciously like the rancor from Return of the Jedi.

Torrents are continuing to be an addiction for me. I downloaded the remastered Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is a vast improvement on my DVDs, not just in terms of picture and sound but also in terms of subtitles, which are much better written in the remastered edition. I also downloaded Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds, which isn't currently in print in the U.S., which is sort of extraordinary when you consider, as the imdb entry notes, it was voted "Third in the centenary poll by Kinema-Junpo magazine about all-time best Japanese films, Shichinin no samurai (1954) and Tôkyô monogatari (1953) preceded it." The Wikipedia entry consists only of one short sentence; "Floating Clouds is a 1955 film directed by Mikio Naruse."

Watching the movie and the first couple episodes of Evangelion got me thinking about Japanese attitudes regarding sexuality and the socially proscribed roles for men and women. The second episode features Misato Katsuragi, a beautiful, 29 year old woman who takes in 14 year old Shinji Ikari and thinks nothing of barraging him with sexual innuendo in a couple of scenes that resemble the sex comedy of awkwardness typical of anime, though the significance of this relationship is broadened later in the series. Even by this second episode, there's the curious juxtaposition of Shinji being forced to adapt to this newly sexually charged atmosphere at the same time that he's being asked to perform acts of extreme violence. It's understood that Misato has no true sexual designs on Shinji, and she seems to think she's flattering him with the attention. A character later in the series points out to Shinji that he ought to feel honoured because Misato lets him see her as no-one else does.

But it is a sloppy relationship with ill-defined boundaries. I never really thought about it before.

Japanese film and television is often filled with enormous catastrophe, and it's hard not to see this as a reflection of the atom bomb's lasting influence on the culture. The popular American attitude is that Japan had it coming, though a lot of people don't think that's really true. As William S. Burroughs said, "Bombs bursting in air over Hiroshima proved through the night that our flag was already there."

Floating Clouds is a movie of post-war Japan, which is really beginning to fascinate me as a subject, after seeing this movie and Kurosawa's Ikiru, Druken Angel, and Stray Dog, which are none of them directly about the impact of losing the war on Japanese society, but are nonetheless permeated by it, psychologically and, very impressively, visually. Extensive location shooting can't fail to show the overwhelming, and very real devastation of Japanese cities. A nation-wide humiliation is ever palpable, which, by the way, is one of the reasons the Neo-Con idea of Iraq reconstruction being analogous to Japanese reconstruction is complete baloney. The Japanese cared. The nation was fully invested in war against the Allies, and they thought they were on the road to a glorious victory. They didn't just lose, they lost big and bloody.

I can understand, I think, why Floating Clouds has gotten so little western attention--which is the case for all of Mikio Naruse's movies*--because it deals so fully with the characteristically Japanese gender dynamic.

The film stars the beautiful and talented Hideko Takamine, Naruse's regular star, and Masuyki Mori of Rashomon and Ugetsu. Takamine's character, Yukiko, having been raped by her brother-in-law, takes a government job in Indochina during the war where she has an affair with her superior officer, Mori's character (Tomioka), whose wife is back home in Japan. After the war, Yukiko is forced to return to Japan, where she understandably thinks nothing of stealing many of her brother-in-law's possessions in order to get by. She has a meeting with Tomioka, who's not interested in continuing their relationship.

In Indochina, Tomioka's attitude was cool towards Yukiko. He spoke casually insultingly to her, making her tell her age in front of strangers, telling her she looked older. There's an ingrained assumption of his superiority to her. In Japan, after the war, they both go through a complicated series of humiliations as their roles are broken down by circumstances in their world. While their relationship was hardly equitable by objective standards before, at least they had the comfort of knowing what was expected of them. But in post-war Japan, where Yukiko is forced to become a prostitute and eventually finds herself financially far better off than Tomioka, nothing seems to work right. The two love each other, and are irresistibly drawn back into each other's company, even as they find themselves bitter towards one another and completely at a loss as to how to interact. Yukiko's forced to realise she's smarter and better equipped to survive than Tomioka, and that she resents his endless string of superficial affairs with other women. He's in the uncomfortable position of depending on Yukiko more than he feels he has a right to, and knowing that she's a smarter, more able person that he is. It's painful and humiliating for them both, but they can't escape because they love each other.



*I wrote an analysis for Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs early last year. You can view it here.

I was a rather lousy person a couple nights ago. You know, a former friend of mine once said she preferred books as friends over people. At the time, I thought this was a sort of pathetic view on her part, that it essentially meant she didn't have the fortitude to handle friends who were capable of looking back at her with consciousnesses that could note her imperfections. But now I think she was pretty smart.

It's been a long time since I read Fahrenheit 451, but I remember a scene where the character named Faber talks about how the power books have is in the power the people have who read them to be able to put them down at any moment.

I've been thinking about that. I think it thereby makes every piece of information or imagery that comes out of a book consensual by default. It's an intimate and fully engaged relationship because the reader can only engage voluntarily, which results in some dissolution of the reader's potentially fearful and numbing reflexes.

So, since I feel like I haven't been a very good person lately, I'm going to see if I can be more of a book.

Thursday I finally saw Juno. It's a pretty good movie. The first twenty minutes felt like a flat, Bugsy Malone version of Citizen Ruth, but after that, the characters start to seem a little more interesting and complex and it becomes a nice little story that only puts you at arms length on one or two more occasions with what it apparently thinks is wit.

Oh, and I've also been re-reading Dostoevsky's White Nights. Maybe there really is something to be said for books as friends, because Dostoevsky never fails to make me feel less alone.

Short on time again to-day, only this time it's because of a ritual orgy I'm set to take part in. Yesterday it was because I was seeing Atonement, which, while it had it's moments, was mostly just a low-rent, overly melodramatic version of These Three.

I just realised Heath Ledger was born precisely seven days before me. I'm not quite sure what to make of that, except it has me thinking about whether I'd be satisfied with the life I've led if I died to-morrow. Mostly, I'd say yes. Sure, I'd like a girlfriend, but I still see that as a fringe benefit. I'm happy Boschen and Nesuko's out there. I've seen plenty of good movies. Yeah, I wouldn't mind going now very much. I don't want to, but at least I have no "oh, gods, I never ____ed!" thing.

Very short on time to-day, so this'll be a quick entry.

My sister just told me that Heath Ledger was found dead. It's really too bad--the guy was genuinely talented, at least from what I can tell from Brokeback Mountain. He was able to convey a lot without words, with very subtle body language. He was an artist.

I think this guy's quickly going to become this generation's James Dean. I mean, heart throb with only a handful of genuinely good movies who dies young. Fits the bill.

Of course, the rat I am, my first thought was, "another cursed Terry Gilliam movie."

Anyway, I'll leave you with more of the illustrated adventures of Toubanua Tairov, my female alter-ego, who's starting to look more and more like her namesake;


I've found shopping in Chinese stores in Second Life is exactly like shopping in Chinese stores in real life--thousands of beautiful little knickknacks, as far as the eye can see;



Chillin'.



This outfit was too small, but it quite unexpectedly made her look exactly like Mia Wallace;

Last night I dreamt I was in the Black Lodge--which is the red curtained area Agent Cooper first sees in his dream on Twin Peaks;



I dreamt I was going through one of the curtained halls when I came across someone who looked like Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove, except he could walk and he was much taller than me. He didn't say anything, but he was sneering at me and holding his hands out towards me. He was wearing white gloves. I knew he wanted to strangle me.

"Olfactory!" I said, and he stopped. Then I started singing, making up words as I went. I knew as long as I could keep making up words for my olfactory song, I could keep him from killing me. I sang until I woke up, but I don't remember most of the song except;

Olfactory! Olfactory! You need it, don't you see? 'Cause you're a fella, I can tell, who could really use a sense of smell!

Anyway, here's what my female avatar looked like as of last night;



Yeah, I slimmed her down. There just aren't many clothing options otherwise. Plus, whenever she put her hands on her hips, they disappeared inside her.

One of those moments where I love MSNBC;

I admit it; I was a big fan of Dragonlance in high school. Well, I first discovered the books in elementary school, and I'd been reading them for years before I read The Lord of the Rings and found out how much had unabashedly been ripped off from Tolkien's universe. But I'm not exactly bitter about that--Tolkien came up with Middle Earth, hoping to create a new mythology, which would naturally imply multiple storytellers. Since the Tolkien estate keeps an iron fist on the Middle Earth property, folks don't have much choice but to make thinly veiled alternate versions.

My loss of interest in Dragonlance, I think, had to do more with its shoddy underlying philosophies, and almost complete absence of the astounding, beautiful aesthetic sensibility of Tolkien.

But, having just recently discovered the magic of torrents, I couldn't resist downloading the new Dragonlance direct-to-DVD animated movie last night. And, watching it, I was reminded of what was so good about the series--or maybe I'm just now able to articulate it to myself. It's a group of very well realised characters, interacting with fun and credible dialogue, on a quest. It was incredibly clear to me that the story is based on a series of role playing sessions, and the movie gives you the idea of how fun Dungeons and Dragons and role playing can be when done properly.

This is aided in no small part by the very talented cast of voice actors, particularly Kiefer Sutherland as Raistlin Majere, by far the most interesting character of the entire Dragonlance saga. The novel was actually very well adapted into a screenplay--the writer was very good at knowing what to cut and how to make things flow. The musical score was excellent and sounded full.

And yet, the movie's a disaster.

The animation is absolutely abysmal (and not in a good way*). Stiff, poorly shaded 2D animation reminiscent of the old Filmation He-Man series at best is crudely meshed with the cheesiest looking cgi dragons imaginable. Apparently the animation was given over to a Thai studio called Toonz. I don't think I need to explain again why I think this was the whole reason things went south--I covered it pretty well in my post about Hellboy: Sword of Storms.

You hire a cast who're obviously passionate about the material. You get a screenwriter who knows what he's doing. You get a decent composer and a whole damn orchestra. And then you leave the animation reins to a group of people on the other side of the planet who's language you don't speak and who probably don't know thing one about Dragonlance?! THE HELL?!

So it's sad. You're probably better off watching Record of Lodoss War, an anime which ripped off plot and imagery from Dragonlance about as shamelessly as Dragonlance ripped off Lord of the Rings.

After this, I decided to create a female avatar in Second Life;


Her name's Toubanua Tairov--Toubanua being the name of Nesuko's sister, though I made no attempt to reproduce Toubanua T'Kreth. That's a picture from after I spent money on her. I was actually doing pretty well with just freebies;



That yukata came from a really nice area recreating Heian era Japan. I had a really nice conversation with the area's owner last night about Akira Kurosawa, and she recommended the freebie place to me called Freebie Planet, which did actually have a lot of nice things.

But, I couldn't resist decking my girl out, so I wired a thousand lindens from my primary avatar and she went shopping at the GION project;


I'm really proud of those puffy eyelids. I figure, everyone's trying to make pretty avatars. I keeps it real! Er, in the fake world. I built her off the "City Chic" female default, so I obviously made a lot of changes.


*Dragonlance fans know what I'm talking about

Boschen and Nesuko seems to be getting an abnormally high number of Japanese hits to-day. It seems to have just gotten listed on Japanese Yahoo, and people are finding it by searching for "Nesuko". I know Nesuko is the Japanese name for the Loch Ness Monster. I hope I'm not damaging a bunch of Japanese kids looking for a trailer for The Water Horse.

But if I've retained any Japanese readers to-day; Ohayo gozaimasu! Dozo yoroshiku. Benkyo!

Eto . . . I saw Cloverfield last night. Which I pretty much liked. I think most of the problems I had with it were my own fault. The handheld camera thing doesn't really do much for me--the conceit that it's somehow more realistic than traditional filmmaking doesn't hold water with me, as I can see a million and one ways in which what I'm seeing is artificial anyway. And there's something else about faux home movies that I've generally found to be true that I first saw Roger Ebert point out in his review for Reality Bites;

The friends are about as inane and boring as most people are while goofing off in front of a camera, but what's remarkable is how badly the footage is shot. The camera operator has no notion of how to frame a shot, how to hold the camera steady, or how to choose subject matter. The result looks like something that might have been obtained by the Monkeycam on the Letterman program.

Also, I'm finding that, with even insurance commercials now featuring ultra-realistic shock accidents, and video game trailers showing gritty street fight footage with aliens, I'm getting kind of numbed to that shock-effect. More effective in Cloverfield, I found, were all the quiet moments where the characters were waiting for what was going to happen next. The Statue of Liberty's head landing in the street didn't get me--it was everyone getting used to the idea of it sitting there. The cameraman zooms in for a moment on her eye, which struck me as kind of an interesting moment.

I felt like a lot of time was spent trying to prove to the audience that a giant, rampaging monster could be effective on a visceral level. I was already on that page, but I liked things like quick shots of hastily abandoned restaurant tables covered in dust.

The saddest part of the movie for me, though, was thinking, "All these people are going to die without ever finding out what it's like to have a personality." Marlena seemed to have something more to her, but for the most part, everyone felt rigorously empty, especially the other two girls. Something's wrong when, during a monster attack, all I can think about is how long Lily can keep those pumps on. I kept thinking of Ghostbusters, and how much it helped that movie that the heroes had personalities. When three of Cloverfields protagonists were trudging up a building's stairwell, I kept wanting one of them to say, "Tell me when we get there. I'm gonna throw up."

But I don't know. Maybe it was intentional.

I don't really mind reveals of the monster. I wish it had been given a stranger, more interesting design. But they must have done something right, because I found myself wanting to see Evangelion unit 01 fighting it.

It's the Singin' in the Rain reference that slays me in this one;

You ever write a conversation one week, then have it the next? It happened to me yesterday. Now I have to look at my comic script and decide what I want to keep and what I want to change, because I really don't want it to be about the conversation I had yesterday or the person I was having it with. I'm almost tempted to rewrite the whole thing from another angle. All kinds of problems in it seem to crop up now, too; I don't think the main character's interesting enough, I don't think the dialogue's lively enough, some of the dialogue seems irrelevant.

Life imitates art imitates life imitates art from over fifty years ago quite often for me, as I came across a similar conversation again last night in Mogambo, John Ford's 1953 film, set and filmed in Africa. I watched it on TCM. It had just about everything I loved about the 1950 King Solomon's Mines only with John Ford's beautiful photography. There's a great, persistent contrast in Ford's movies between plain, violent men (Clark Gable in this case), and gorgeous, sensitive photography.

It's not one of Ford's better movies. It features a rather milquetoast love triangle and some vaguely racist overtones, even as the movie seems oddly respectful of the people of Kenya, and showing authentic tribes without much ignorant, Hollywood doctoring. It's a beautiful, 1950s colour film and it's just a pleasure watching beautiful Ava Gardner in her starched, hourglass dress struggling to feed a baby rhinoceros despite a baby elephant's attempts to interfere, all the while trying to laugh and smile. Apparently Clark Gable didn't get along with John Ford primarily because of how Gardner was treated. The movie clearly was no picnic for her, which makes her poise and pretence of good humour sort of awe inspiring.

Grace Kelly's in the movie, too, and she's great to look at. I wish I could take screenshots.

Apparently Gene Tierney was originally up for the role, but had to drop out due to "emotional problems", which I found rather intriguing, prompting me to read a bit about Tierney's tragic and strange personal life. I'm really amazed I never managed to read or hear of any of this before;

After some 27 shock treatments, she attempted to flee, but was caught and re-institutionalized. She became an outspoken opponent of shock treatment therapy, claiming that it had destroyed significant portions of her memory.

This was when she was only thirty five--still quite young enough to a leading actress even by Hollywood standards of the time. She'd already, by this point, had two kids, followed by affairs with John F. Kennedy and Prince Aly Khan.

Tierney's autobiography was only two dollars on Amazon, so I ordered it last night.

I finished the evening by watching half of the Rifftrax version of Daredevil. I don't see a reason to watch that movie any other way.

Finally, thanks to the Enigma Kat for turning me onto Blood Red Shoes;

Lousy coffee pot. I don't know who or what molested its noodle--you know, the little nipple on the bottom of the filter case that's supposed to shut when you remove the pot, in case you want a cup of coffee before the full thing's done brewing. This one doesn't shut, meaning you either have to wait 'til its done or just deal with coffee spilling everywhere, which is how it goes most mornings.

To-day, I'm trying not to let these things get to me. In the shower I tried blanking my mind and just concentrating on a spot of light at the end of a tunnel. It helped a little, but it's an uphill battle. I found out to-day that my hotmail address, setsuled@hotmail.com, isn't receiving some e-mails, not even in its junk folder. I found this out after clicking the "I forgot my password" on two forums on which I'm a member, one of which reset my password when I did this. I have no idea what my password there is now, because the e-mail notifying me just never showed up.

So. E-mail me at setsuled@yahoo.com from now on. If you sent an e-mail to my hotmail address recently and I never replied, my apologies. It's irritating, too, thinking of what e-mails I may've missed, like comic book publishers getting back to me.

Well. I doubt that. Say, is anyone interested in seeing the project I was working on last year? I'll post it if there's interest, though not on my web site. You have to keep in mind that it's a project that won't be finished unless I do get one of those magic e-mails. I'm not even sure I want that to happen now since eight pages of it are lost forever on the computer that went kaputz.

As for projects I do see myself completing, I did finish the script for the first issue of the mini-series yesterday. I feel pleased with it. I know of only one or two things I want to edit.

Anyway. Still eating breakfast here. Oatmeal and coffee--I never get tired of plain, old fashioned oatmeal. Its tasteproof; you either accept it or you don't. I've been peculiarly tired of alcohol lately. I'm irritated that the rum I was drinking on Sunday kind of diluted the experience of watching Vertigo, so I've been watching it again with breakfast. Maybe alcohol is only good for certain movies. I don't intend on finding out any time soon. "Booze kills feelings" as Amy Sedaris pointed out. I hate killing feelings.

Oh, and, hey, Jurassic Park makes no damn sense! "But you can't think your way through this one, John, you gotta feel it." I was under the impression that's what he was doing when he tried to create a theme park based on his flea circus dream! Gotta feel not think--sheesh, yeah, thinking's the root of all evil. No wonder Michael Crichton became a Neo-Con.

Okay, Sets, calm down . . .

Eh. I don't know if I want to watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report to-night. They've just been kind of sad and hollow without the writers. I'm getting pretty sick of "sad and hollow" lately. I really miss the cats. Apparently my grandmother and aunt have some really bad blood now--my grandmother had the locks changed and I'm under orders not to let my aunt into the house. Apparently one of the cats clawed up a nine hundred dollar antique dress. Once again, I reveal myself to be a sucker because I think that's nothing to fight over. Everyone's gotta have their ridiculous little beefs, and it's making me nuts.

Various activities to-day. I found this site which compares screencaps from Vertigo's San Francisco location footage with photos of modern San Francisco. Nice to see what hasn't changed, while noting that what has has invariably changed for the worse.

Hola. Another nice day of writing yesterday. I went to a coffee shop called The Living Room and wrote five pages in a few hours that I'm even happier with than the previous day's. The only trouble is, at seventeen pages now, this thing feels like it's just getting started. So I think this'll probably end up being a mini-series. I'll have the first issue done by Valentine's Day, but I'm not sure I consider this a Valentine's Day special anymore.

This script has been good for working off a lot of aggression I don't seem to have any other outlet for.

Last night I watched Curse of the Cat People, which I'd avoided watching for a long time because I figured it wouldn't hold a candle to its predecessor, Cat People. It's indeed not as good as the first film, but it is actually quite wonderful in its own right. It's actually a completely different kind of movie, having more to do with family psychology and the function of dreams. It had great mood.

I like Amy Sedaris. I gave a copy of her book, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, to my sister for Christmas, and I have to say it was the gift I was proudest of giving. There are excerpts from the audio book in mp3 format on her web site--read by Sedaris herself. I particularly recommend "Party log; grieving" and "Grieving (continued)".

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I went to the mall to buy phone minutes after getting cut off in the middle of a conversation with Trisa. I sat down at a table at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and wrote several pages of comic script that I'm really very happy with. Then I came back here, stared at a fire in the Second Life Dune sim for a few hours while taking screencaps from Vertigo.

I did end up watching the Martin Scorsese documentary on Val Lewton, and I'm very glad I did.

It's now been one solid week of people not noticing my haircut. I've found that, when dry, it looks fairly ridiculous, poofing out on the sides like Dr. Wily, except with hair on top. I probably ought to mind. And yet I don't.

So ends this blog entry.