They're More Than Shire Reeves Now

In a weird way, I actually gained a little respect for Megyn Kelly of Fox News after watching this interview she conducted yesterday with Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the man in charge of local law enforcement in the handling of Saturday's shooting in Tucson.



I intensely dislike her, and her point of view, but I respect her because watching this I can see she's really invested in her point of view, for whatever reason, and there is a basic, real logic in what she's saying. It really isn't a sheriff's place, in a situation like this, to insert politics. Even if Loughner really was incited by right wing rhetoric (and I suspect he was to at least some extent) to commit murder, it's not the sheriff's place to assert this without hard evidence. You're on treacherous ground when you allow law enforcement to be partisan. The sheriff looks even shakier as he's evidently not a great speaker and failed to bring up concrete examples like the now quite infamous Sarah Palin website which put crosshairs over a picture of Giffords, among other politicians, with the caption "Don't Retreat; Reload."

But if prominent politicians and commentators, like this one;



are using unambiguously threatening speech, they ought to at least be on the radar of law enforcement. If a sheriff isn't going to say this sort of rhetoric is irresponsible, who will? Keith Olbermann? Certainly, and he put it wonderfully, but very few people on the right are going to be swayed by him.

Howard Stern made an interesting point this morning about how Sarah Palin's insistence that any apparent fault in her rhetoric is absolved by her intentions is funny when considering she was quite eager to cause a scandal about a pretty harmless joke told by David Letterman.

The Everything in the Computer

I see Jar Jar Binks is still leading against Jared Lee Loughner and Gabrielle Giffords as a trending topic on Twitter. Jar Jar's been ahead of both topics consistently. And I have no idea why Jar Jar Binks is trending at all--all the tweets I see under it are variations of "Why is Jar Jar Binks trending?" The only amusing tweet on the subject I've seen came from Russell Brand; "Jar Jar Binks is almost an anagram for Justin Bieber."

What does it all mean? All I can say is;

Twitter Sonnet #221

Trebek takes a wrong question at knife point.
Red knots make a jagged chain between hands.
Noodle fingers cling to reptilian joint.
Smoke on broadcast became rows of grey bands.
Putty people stretch over the wide screen.
A skeleton drinking wine wants armour.
Mutant shells hide bulls who are much too lean.
Tumble dumpster's loud with just a hammer.
Tinsel cages collapse against fake pine.
Parrots convey tales of a shrinking pig.
Gallons of milk bury a drop of wine.
Floating quietly as Maury's lost wig.
A dumb iron lion jumped in a bath.
Rust fires spread with immutable math.

Yesterday I placed ninth out of fifteen in a Second Life chess tournament. I lost two games out of five, winning three (no draws for me this time). Here's a picture the organiser took of the winners and participants afterward;



My avatar, Toubanua Tairov, is the masked ballerina on the lower right. Someone asked me if I was Russian, based on the avatar name and the ballet getup. "I do have kind of a theme going to-day, don't I?" This inspired me to go take pictures in SL's versions of Moscow and Saint Petersburg;




Then, Tou continued her world tour in Vienna;



And Paris, circa 1900;



Hardly showing off the particular Paris qualities of Paris, I know, but this empty building had some of the best lighting I'd seen on my journeys yesterday. A lot of these historical cities sims are really impressively built, but so many fail to take lighting into consideration, using building parts that remain at the same luminance regardless of the time of day, meaning they seem to glow at night and fail to capture the loveliness of sunrise or sunset.

I also played some World of Warcraft at Tim's last night. I'd misread the requirements of the companion pets achievement--turns out I need 50, not ten, pets to get the skunk. Ugh. And yet I'm really keen on working on this achievement. I don't know why.

I dreamt I was playing Warcraft IV last night--a non-existent game. I never played Warcraft III, but Warcraft II I played constantly back in the day. In my dream, I was disappointed to find the fourth game had eliminated peasants and peons.

The False Premise of Murder

I've just been reading the messages left on YouTube by Jared Lee Loughner, the man who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to-day. Early reports said she was killed but she seems to have survived somehow, despite a bullet passing through her brain. Six people were killed, though, among them a nine year old girl.

I admit my first thought, given that Giffords is a Democrat, was that Loughner was a tea partier. I'm not sure I'm wrong yet, either, based on the YouTube messages, which conclude with a demand for a gold based system of currency. This is a policy advocated by many tea partiers and Ron Paul supporters, as well as by, it should be noted, Democrat Barney Frank. Though Loughner's argument seems to be a bit metaphysically based, as his messages seem generally to be. They seem based on the modern idea of reality created by one's own consciousness. Which mainly reminded me of Brad McCullum in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, and I can sort of see Loughner as a Werner Herzog character. By which I certainly don't mean to glorify Loughner, merely that Herzog's film--and I'm also reminded of Cronenberg's Videodrome--speaks to the fact that Loughner's mental illness is not uncommon.

I also thought of the tea party in Loughner's bizarre insistence on proper grammar while failing to use it himself;

Secondly, my hope - is for you to be literate! If you're literate in English grammar, then you comprehend English grammar. The majority of people, who reside in District 8, are illiterate - hilarious. I don't control your English grammar structure but you control your English grammar structure.

He talks about government brainwashing;

Government Officials, and the People. Nearly all the people, who don't know this accurate information of a new currency, aren't aware of mind control and brainwash methods. If I have my civil rights, then this message wouldn't have happen.

I can't help thinking, who are you to criticise anyone's grammar? Yet, I don't think it's so much blind hypocrisy I'm seeing as a thoroughly delusional philosophy. "I don't control your English grammar structure, you control your English grammar structure."

I thought about Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment believing in creating reality by defying the rules of morality like Napoleon. He was also assured of the supremacy of his intelligence over others, and it's not hard to see how he'd feel that way when he considers the rules of reality being only those conceived by himself.

Yesterday's Pie

I've been taking another crack at watching the latter portion of Twin Peaks' second season. These episodes I haven't watched since high school--after "Lonely Souls", the last one Lynch directed before leaving to work on Wild at Heart, I only sometimes watch the next two episodes concluding the whole Who Killed Laura Palmer arc before skipping to that legendarily fucked up final episode directed by Lynch. The trick when watching Twin Peaks, I've discovered, is to allow at least two weeks to pass after you've watched a Lynch directed episode. Otherwise I feel kind of gross--like following up a gourmet meal with a microwave dinner. You have to give it some time before the microwave dinner seems okay. The other directors just lack Lynch's singular instincts.

I'm glad the pilot episode is available at last on the gold box set. The first DVD release of the first season in the U.S. skips the pilot and begins with an episode not directed by Lynch. I hate thinking of all the people whose first impressions of the show are from that episode. It's not their fault--there are plenty of shows that don't really start until their second episode. But the two hour pilot is like a fully formed David Lynch movie.

Anyway, I don't know how many more second season episodes I can take before skipping to the end. Then again, my whole experience might be different now after more than a decade. But I can't say I'm looking forward to Billy Zane in his cowboy costume or the solid brick of wet sugar that is the Dale/Annie romance.

I hated how the other writers would take some of Lynch's weirder ideas and make them normal. Nowhere is this epitomised better than in the character of Agent Cooper. Cooper's a good guy from the start, but he's weirdly callous and perverse. It's hard to imagine late season two Cooper grinning as he cracks open a copy of Flesh World or a dead girl's diary. Part of me just wants to watch because of the chess game subplot.

I'm still reading Inside the Victorian Home. Its good qualities far outnumber its bad, which kind of makes the bad bits more jarring when I hit them.

I was reading the chapter on the bedroom the other day and it was going into detail about the kinds of mattresses used for beds and the various cleaning routines--just the sort of thing I'm interested in. I was reading a bit on how a bottom mattress cover sheet was washed once every fortnight before a top cover sheet, which then became the bottom cover sheet. Then I read this footnote;

This system, known as "top to bottom, bottom off," was still being used in British boarding schools in the 1980s--and possibly still is?

Er, you're asking me? It seems like something she wouldn't have too much trouble finding the answer to (we're talking about boarding schools, not al-Qaeda training camps), but if she couldn't or didn't want to, why mention it at all? I suppose this sort of idle, conversational segment doesn't seem too strange isolated here as it is in my blog, but when you're happily reading a steady stream of impersonal facts, these things feel a little weird when they crop up. I guess it could be the influence of Internet literature is changing literature as a whole on a fundamental level.

The Wrong Moves

I dreamt I knew Rachael Harris and that we shared some kind of dark spot in our pasts, possibly a crime we committed, that took place on a red bullet train. But the dream was taking place in some kind of subterranean world where the fourth Doctor and I were fleeing from an entire civilisation of cosplayers who wanted us dead. The Doctor and I were in some kind of dim, grey concrete subway station where there was a single mine cart on the track, covered with red Christmas lights.

Among the slowly approaching cosplayer horde, I spotted Rachael dressed as Raggedy Ann. When she recognised me, she seemed surprised and immediately changed sides to join with myself and the Doctor.

"We need to get out of here," I said to her.

"I know," she said, eyeing her former comrades.

"No--not them." I nodded at the tracks. "A train's coming."

The three of us made our way to a torch lit dungeon, where we realised the cosplayers had stopped following us.

"I wonder why," I said.

"They're afraid of something in here," said the Doctor.

Eventually, a tall, muscular man with a shaved head and leather armour joined us.

"Hello." The Doctor grinned as he asked, "And who might you be?"

"I'm the former lord of this place," he said. "They've sent me in here to die with you."

"Oh?" said the Doctor. "By some doom of your own making?"

"Why, yes," said the man in a far off, troubled tone.

It turned out he had created a centaur through genetic engineering. We were able to watch the centaur through a rectangular observation window. It was quite different from the classical concept of a centaur--it consisted of an entire, starved looking horse with a man's torso attached to its rear, sort of flailing around half conscious and urinating on the horse's neck.

The dream ended when we found an escape route via a roller coaster car on a track that led out into a green, sunlit world. I remember the Doctor sitting at the front, telling us all some pleasant story as we rode.



The dream may have been partially influenced by the fact that I watched the last episode of the "Sunmakers" serial yesterday. It was a good serial, though as lampoons of bureaucratic dystopia go I've certainly seen better and I'm getting a little tired of the Doctor saving entire civilisations. But mostly I was disappointed by the chess game the Doctor plays with K-9, which bookends the serial. I took a number of screenshots to analyse the game, and was sorry to find it wasn't a real game. It sort of works, if one goes by medieval rules and assumes the Queen can only move one square diagonally. But then the Doctor moves his King halfway across the board. Oh, well. It's still not as bad as the chess games in Code Geass' second season. Though considering Lelouch's philosophy was that one should always attack with the King, maybe it was exactly as bad as the games in the second season of Code Geass.

I miss CC and her endless Pizza Hut deliveries.

Twitter Sonnet #220

Half a lemon peel drags in the other.
Cinnamon spears a shot of burnt whiskey.
Slime obscures moons in a nasal gutter.
Damp clove planets in the sky that's rusty.
Over lolling tongues of turtle lava.
Honey burns the obsidian surface.
Giant's coffee translates into Java.
Books of face code slam into a trellis.
Happy stems hold Chutes and Ladders to heart.
Green arms spiral around an old white boot.
Patterned sinus scraping is a new art.
Smoker owls make Q rings with each hoot.
Grey Poupon seas besiege Andromeda.
Hard Hitchcock slides into a pink pita.

I was working with a sort of leap frog of metaphors there, so I guess that's how a sonnet that started out being about my hot toddies ended up being about sex. The inevitable destination of poetry, maybe.

With breakfast to-day I read most of the new Sirenia Digest. "--30--", a story inspired by a comment on Caitlin's blog by Robyn Massachusetts, is a fun piece of dark humour about the lengths a writer goes to find an ending to a story. I rather have to sympathise with the fairy store owner of the Endings Shop--this economy's bad enough without customers having to trade memories and sex just to find your shop's location.

The digest also contained a very brief flash fiction by Sonya Taaffe, where she adopts the point of view of the Minotaur to paint a rather flattering portrait of Ariadne. In its short span it manages to heap quite a majesty onto Ariadne, while making the Minotaur seem kind of pathetically caught in a one-sided lust for his sister. It's kind of an interesting take on the story. One gets the impression Sonya isn't exactly a big fan of the Minotaur.

Following this story, Caitlin included a number of anonymously made comments to her blog in response to a prompt that asked readers to describe what they'd do to Caitlin if they had her alone, in a room, tied up for twenty four hours. Caitlin asked them not to hold back, saying that they couldn't hope to get close to disturbing her.

I only managed to read the first few before I got too bored. I imagine they're a lot more interesting when they're directed at you, but I'm not usually very excited by someone else's fan mail. Caitlin refers to her fan mail a lot, which I suppose is smart for someone trying to grow their own brand. Maybe I should mention it here every time I get fan mail, but as much as I can see the practical use of building one's own legend or whatever as an artist, I just can't psychologically handle broadcasting such flattering things about myself. I do like the way Howard Stern does it. I love when he complained about how people in the media were calling Michael Jackson the King of Pop only because Jackson called himself that, and then Stern decided to call himself the King of All Media to see if it was picked up by that same PR world. And it worked. I'm certain there are a number of people out there who assume there's something to Howard Stern solely because they've heard him referred to as the King of All Media. Maybe I just like it because it also contains a self-deprecating element wrapped up in a media satire.

Tumbling Ingredients

I don't quite remember last night's dream, only two women, twin sisters with long dark hair in white dresses. They both seemed to be feeling smug about something, I'm not sure what. Either a pile of garbage or a corpse--something sinister and messy in the corner of a room. The thing that struck me is that the two felt like fully formed characters in my mind, like I could now very comfortably write stories about them.

It's amazing I dreamt anything, with this cold keeping me up. I finally had to drag myself outside to-day to replenish soup, bread, and honey supplies. I willed myself not to have a sneezing fit. I was listening to Dark Side of the Moon and I kept telling myself, "As long as there's Pink Floyd, I won't sneeze." I managed to avoid sneezing right up until I was parking the car when I got home.

I haven't had much time for anything else to-day. I didn't get out of bed until 12:30, and everything I do seems to take twice as long. I watched Goodfellas yet again a few days ago. I can't believe how many perfect scenes are lined up to make that movie. So many make me smile just thinking about them--the guys beating up the mail man so he won't deliver school notices to Henry's parents, the awkward way Henry thanks Jimmy for that first huge tip, Henry just getting interested in Karen when she gets angry with him for standing her up, the insurance scam with the restaurant of the guy who awkwardly asked Paulie to wack Tommy, all of Tommy's monologues that are scary and funny at the same time . . .

You like Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy, not because the movie glorifies them, but because it makes them human. That's what makes Goodfellas such an unusual gangster film. These aren't mythological figures, these are, as Karen says, "Regular blue collar guys," who only live this life because it's the best way they know. How can you argue with Henry when, as a kid, working with the gang had him parking cadillacs, all the other kids in his neighbourhood showing him and his parents respect . . . Scorsese talked in the DVD commentary about how essential Henry's voice is to the story, the voice over narration, and yeah. He's one of those guys who is just naturally good at telling a story, he effortlessly makes you warm to it, he makes you care about what he cares about.

And I love Scorsese's use of camera movements and editing to bring us into a character's emotional state. Like the double cut on Henry's face when he looks up from the sauce on that last, drug hazed day before he gets caught. The abrupt switching from George Harrison's "What is Life?" to Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" when Henry does a shot of cocaine. It seems like Scorsese doesn't do as much of that now--the modern Scorsese seems more like a director composed of his influences. Which isn't bad, but gods, was he exciting before.

Eye of the Duck

Felt sort of like a motorbike had been grinding its tire on my face when I woke up to-day. I just caught the cold that's been going around. I remember in War and Peace when Napoleon had a cold Tolstoy had him say at one point, "I'm sick of this cold." So this is one of those eternal laments, persisting in spite of the obvious reply, "So you were enjoying it at first?"

I'm sick of this cold.

I'd been making hot toddies for myself for a couple days, but yesterday I decided to try it without whisky. I also made a version with chai tea which was quite nice--I tried substituting it for my morning coffee to-day, but I finally had to make some coffee as the tea just doesn't have enough caffeine.

The sky was finally clear to-day so I went out and fed the ducks. Most of the ducks milled around me chaotically as usual, but this one just fixed me with a stare like he was trying to hypnotise me into giving him all the bread.



The cold seems to have gotten me in an odd Internet meander mood. I was looking at this article about a shakeup of staff at The Daily Show and I saw that Pam DePace, wife of Scott DePace, the politically conservative television director for The Howard Stern Show, has been promoted. I wonder what political discussions are like in that household.

I checked Scott DePace on Wikipedia to make sure my memory was right, and I saw that the guy used to work at Showbiz Pizza. I'm trying to remember if I ever ate at a Showbiz Pizza. I think what I'm remembering is talking about it with other kids one night at Chuck E. Cheese and thinking how glad I was to be in a restaurant with a vaguely cabaret influenced animatronic mouse rather than a restaurant with an animatronic hillbilly bear. I think Showbiz Pizza may have been a last gasp of the mainstream fondness for the redneck aesthetic of the 70s, and Chuck E. Cheese's milieu was considerably more versatile. I would say this is why Chuck E. Cheese succeeded where Showbiz failed.

Cheese for thought. Though I am but a naive babe in the woods of novelty pizza joint punditry.

I really do like my memories of Chuck E. Cheese, though. This dark, enclosed world of noise and neon light and, somewhere lurking, those freak shows--the giant walking grey mice, one a guy in a suit, and the dim awareness that at the same time there was a dormant robotic one waiting silently behind a curtain. I think I remember playing a Superman game in the arcade a lot.

Which reminds me, I forgot to mention watching the trailer for DC Universe Online. Though the trailer itself doesn't contain gameplay footage and is mostly one of DC's lame tangents into the Justice League at War with Batman in his RoboCop outfit, looking sort of like his costume from the end of The Dark Knight Returns, ordering troop movements.

But Tim also showed me some footage by one of the YouTube mmorpg commentators he likes to watch, the Cynical Brit, who's been playing the beta, and the videos show a rather impressive looking free-roaming Gotham City;



Seems like DC's cashing in on what City of Heroes/Villains started (like all mmorpgs, Tim's played that one and tells me he had a character modelled after the Action Man from Venture Brothers), but looks a bit more polished. And the presence of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill as Batman and the Joker, respectively, is definitely a big plus. I kind of like that these guys have become the voices of Batman and the Joker for just about every animated incarnation. I'm not sure why I like that, I just do. Traditional, I guess.

On Issues Manifesting at Inopportune Times

I'd like to make it clear from the start that from here on this entry will make no mention of popcorn. There have been many fine blog entries, books, and essays written on the subject of popcorn. This is not one of those.

So, the comic I'm in research mode for now is set in the Victorian era. Whenever writing characters from a particular period or world, I consider it essential to know as many of the most basic aspects of living as I can. Alfred Hitchcock said he didn't like period films because he couldn't imagine the people using the bathroom, and I can understand where he's coming from with that statement. How, when, and if someone eats breakfast, whether they need to go outside to urinate, the accepted forms of social meetings, all the things that affect routine and how someone acquires knowledge and information throughout their lives, these things affect who people are. I feel like a lot of modern fiction is falling away from this, that characters are too often treated like the tireless, unfettered characters of a video game.

One of the books I ordered from Amazon was Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders. It's been relatively informative, but I'm kind of missing the wonderful impersonal books on the Middle Ages by Joseph and Frances Gies as the tone of Inside the Victorian Home is a little weirdly defensive. From the introduction;

Men were the source of funds, but it was women who judged other women, women who (to the rules of men) made the decisions that activated and continued the social circles that made up the lives of most families. Although there are several fine books on the role of men at home, this will not be another of them.*

And the footnote;

*The role of men is only one of many elements I have been unable to encompass and still have a book of manageable length. Domestic life is protean, and any reader will, with no effort at all, be able to come up with a dozen fields of equal importance that I have not touched on. The bibliography will lead interested readers to books on many more subjects.

Jeez, okay, Flanders, relax. You don't want to write about men, you don't have to write about men. It's cool, really. Er, and, you know, if you hadn't brought it up I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it . . .

Then, from Chapter 1: The Bedroom;

Throughout the period, as well as being rooms for sleeping, for illness, for sex*, and for childbirth, bedrooms served . . .

And the footnote;

*It has been suggested I am more interested in S-bends than I am in sex. For the purposes of social history this is so, and I do not plan to discuss sex at all. There is a great deal to say on the little we know about the Victorians' attitude towards sex, but I am not the person to say it.

Wow. Okay. Um, all right then. Very articulately put, ma'am.

Now I've kind of involuntarily gotten this impression of a woman about whom a number of people have said she is uncomfortable discussing men and sex. Which I think works out to something almost opposite of what she was trying to establish in her little bonus arguments. It's more information than I was looking for anyway.

But now that she's broached the subject, I can't help wondering if she's lonely and bitter. Don't worry, Judith, I'll keep reading. Unless you don't want me to.

Twitter Sonnet #219

Geese the size of ants swarm out a soft egg.
Stem cells flutter down on the packed dance floor.
This year, everyone gets an extra leg.
So now release the glitter mad Time Boar!
Ice hands screw onto dry velvet arm stubs.
Blue scorpions chase Benny Hill to Rome.
Angels batter balls from the blue sheathed Cubs.
Intestines gift wrap a healthy young gnome.
Metal skinned guards fall to Elvis Presley.
Unshaven Supermen glare at the sun.
Useless stars boil water and parsley.
Magnums vanish after a new small gun.
Rabbit motes can trip the tallest gamer.
Barrels bend for hamsters round the aimer.

New Lands and Old Dragons for Toons

My Second Life avatar, Toubanua, affecting something of an ode to Marlene Dietrich on New Year's Eve at the new Water Horse Chess Club.

I had been dividing my gaming time between Second Life and World of Warcraft, but New Vegas has edged out WoW for about a week, especially now that I've gotten into New Vegas itself and I immediately got the sorts of quests I loved most in Fallout 2 and were sorely lacking in 3. Like collecting money from gamblers for casinos, finding prostitutes for specific fetishes, and various other things to curry favour with one gang boss or another. You don't find shit like that in WoW.

Obsidian, in charge of New Reno but using Bethesda's engine, is much better at coming up with fun little stories, though the graphics aren't quite as complete feeling, with a lot more visible seams. But the new game mechanics more than make up for it.

Bethesda, meanwhile, has apparently been working on the next Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim;



I must say I'm excited, despite the fact that the trailer shows practically nothing aside from yet another dragon like the one in the WoW: Cataclysm trailer, the one in the Dragon Age trailer, and the one in the Guild Wars 2 trailer. I half expect to see a dragon turn up in the next Grand Theft Auto trailer. But I figure Skyrim can only be better than its predecessor, Oblivion, and I could happily play Oblivion to-night. And since Skyrim is the Nord kingdom, I'm hoping to see the return of the Bloodmoon werewolf which makes WoW's worgen look like mascots. Well, I suppose WoW's worgen look like mascots when compared to anything, including actual mascots.

I did play some WoW at Tim's house last night, though. I've decided to collect ten unique companion pets with Sichilde, my hunter. I only need one more and I get a skunk for the achievement. I'm working on getting a mechanical chicken now.

Need and the Spirit of Giving

The first two thirds of Chloe are like Miracle on 34th Street and Santa Claus is an orgasm. Or rather, something more--an emotional, psychological orgasm as well as a physical one. Well, I suppose there's something more to Santa than just an old guy who gives you free stuff at Christmas. Chloe's concerned with a need for a particular kind of intimacy. It's also about the destructive potential of two people involved with each other who have matured in different ways.

To think I just wanted to watch it to see Amanda Seyfried naked. Though I have no desire to see Nathalie, the French film of which Chloe's a remake, largely because the girl in Nathalie isn't half as hot as Seyfried. It's hard to imagine a more exhilarating chemistry than what exists between Seyfried and Julianne Moore.

I was sort of reminded of Black Swan when at the beginning Catherine (Moore's character), a gynaecologist, is treating a patient who's a ballerina and who tells Catherine she's never had an orgasm. Catherine explains to the woman that an orgasm is simply a muscle contraction produced by stimulation of the clitoris, that there's nothing mysterious about it. The movie proceeds to build a world around Catherine that alienates her with its mysterious sexuality. Her husband, David (Liam Neeson), appears to her to be shamelessly flirting with every woman he sees, while he insists he's just being friendly. Catherine asks a male friend of hers why men prefer women to have their hair down and he explains to her it's "because they like imagine it wrapped around their--" And Catherine's the only woman in the restaurant with her hair bound in a tight bun. When she returns from the restroom, where she met Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), her hair's down.



Catherine's almost asexuality reminded me of Eyes Wide Shut, and the relationship she begins with Chloe reminded me at first of In the Mood for Love, and I started wondering if I was seeing a new emerging film archetype of the sexual alien, the protagonist who for some reason can't connect with human sexuality. But it turns out Chloe's not like that.

Julianne Moore is so good, so subtle in this movie. The game Chloe plays with her was somewhat obvious to me, as I think it would be to most people, but Catherine is so tied up in knots I can believe she falls for it. Catherine's too busy thinking about her own reactions, it's plain on Moore's face. She's helplessly stimulated and it goes against everything in the universe that seems rational to her, especially as she knows she's supposed to be very upset learning the details of her husband's infidelity.



Amanda Seyfried is really good in the movie too, but it's almost hard to think about anything besides the fact that she's so intensely, impossibly hot. I'm glad she has a good role in at least one good movie here, and that it's a divinely sexy movie helps, too.

I was a little on the fence about how I felt about the last third of the film. On the one hand, it is over the top, it kind of goes to Fatal Attraction territory. On the other hand, no one's exactly a villain or a hero, and it's fascinating to see that while Catherine may be more sexually innocent, the fact that she is a couple decades older than Chloe does count for something. She has some canal locks around her heart, while Chloe wants to give Catherine a treasured family heirloom already. But Chloe's love is by no means absurd, because we see how Chloe sees how Catherine is confused about herself, how she's drawn to Chloe in spite of herself. Chloe's better than average insight ultimately works against her.

I loved this movie. It was so, so nice.



I've had a copy of it around a while, but I kind of forgot about it until to-day when I was looking over Wikipedia's list of films released in 2010 to refresh my memory of what movies I saw so I could compile my rankings list. Boy, I'm glad I decided to squeeze Chloe in. So here's the list;

Best films

1. Shutter Island Wikipedia entry, my review
2. Chloe Wikipedia entry
3. Inception Wikipedia entry, my review
4. True Grit Wikipedia entry, my review
5. Never Let Me Go Wikipedia entry, my review
6. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya Wikipedia entry, my review
7. Rebuild of Evangelion; You Can (Not) Advance Wikipedia entry, my review
8. Machete Wikipedia entry, my review
9. Black Swan Wikipedia entry, my review
10. Iron Man 2 Wikipedia entry, my review
11. After.Life Wikipedia entry, my review
12. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Wikipedia entry, my review
13. Predators Wikipedia entry, my review

Worst (or at least not so great) Films

1. Robin Hood Wikipedia entry, my review
2. Alice in Wonderland Wikipedia entry, my review
3. Morning Glory Wikipedia entry, my review

Doll Muscles

I've been a fan of The Dresden Dolls since 2003 or 2004, I think, but last night was the first time I saw them in concert. My sister went with me and hid my camera in her purse, though it turned out I wasn't even patted down. I kind of figured security wouldn't be too strict about cameras since Amanda Palmer tends to link to them on her blog and twitter. Here's all I got;



As you can hear, there were a lot of people just mindlessly carrying on conversations around me. It got so bad, Palmer herself even asked them to be quiet, at least for the performance of the song "Boston." And of course, practically no-one complied, despite repeated, vigorous shushing by a number of people. When you're competing with a loud, live band to hold trivial conversations, you're obviously doing it out of some shallow existential fear about feeling smaller than the performers, and so the lead singer politely asking you to stop probably isn't going to work.

There are a few other videos online better than mine, like this one of the opening song, a cover of "Cosmic Dancer" by T.Rex. I'd actually always thought it was a Morrissey song until my sister corrected me. So I was taken down from my initial excitement of hearing the Dolls perform a Morrissey cover. Though Palmer did omit the "I was dancing when I was eight," part the same as Morrissey did.

It was a great show, the two have a lot of infectious fun onstage, and I found The House of Blues to be an agreeable venue, as I was able to get a good view from the bar in the back while I sipped Jameson.

I've started to feel a bit stir crazy without a comic or something to work on. I went through a couple ideas a few days ago that I might be able to pull off quickly with little research, but I feel like they wouldn't come out very well. I was getting antsy enough to try one, but fortunately yesterday one of the books I ordered from Amazon for research on the project I'm planning to try to sell arrived, so I think I'll celebrate New Years with some reading.

Twitter Sonnet #218

Rubber straight razors show up in the shop.
Laughing barbers slap the stubble silly.
Fun stops at appearance of Robocop.
So long to macadam Piccadilly.
Twister dots spill across the cobblestone.
Paper flecks infect two hour old wine.
Chill whistles through a ferris wheel of bone.
Lofty breezes smell oddly of fake pine.
Boughs rock subtly in blue and pink starlight.
Sticky bracelet marks the older visit.
Voices across plastic cups start to fight.
Sweat runs out the muscular white faucet.
Numbers age cards quickly in a hedge maze.
Jack Torrance soon learned the Queen goes all ways.

Don't Presume Permanence

2010 almost ended without me seeing Never Let Me Go, which is a bit strange because I'm a fan of both director Mark Romanek and the author of the source novel, Kazuo Ishiguro. Romanek's music videos, particularly the ones he did for Nine Inch Nails, are easily the best of the 1990s, and the 90s were of course the golden era of music videos. I've read two of Ishiguro's books, The Remains of the Day and A Pale View of Hills. I haven't read Never Let Me Go, but now I would rather like to as a number of the reviews I've read for the film have extremely high praise for the book--Michael Philips called the book "nearly flawless". He also says that that Mark Romanek's film is a good film based on a great book.

I loved the movie. I'm disappointed it apparently didn't do very good business, I guess mainly because it's what would be classified as a Science Fiction Chick Flick. Watching it I thought a way to describe it might be, "Blade Runner by way of Wuthering Heights." Both Blade Runner and Wuthering Heights convey the feeling of the desperate, horrific shortness of life.



Roger Ebert's review of Never Let Me Go is one of his best written of the last few years. When he says, "The characters may not know what they're revealing about themselves. They certainly don't know the whole truth of their existence," he describes exactly what I always loved about Ishiguro's writing, his uncanny ability to subtly and credibly express things about characters without the characters noticing. Of course, this makes his work excellent material for actors to show their skills, and this movie has an ideal cast in Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield.

I don't normally like Keira Knightley--I find her to be a bit one note, and her cheekbones disturb me, but both things were perfect for this movie. She seems hungry, all the time, and perhaps of the three most succinctly conveys the horror of the short life spans of the "Donors."



The story takes place in an alternate reality where humanity acquired the ability to completely clone human beings in 1952. A system was set up wherein criminals and poor people were cloned and raised in schools entirely for their organs. In the two Ishiguro books I've read, in one case the story was achieved through the experiences of a Japanese family acclimating to life in England and how buried personal issues manifest in the different environments, while in the other case it was a story of a man whose firmly set personality and mode of life are threatened by the gradual erosion of the culture to which he belongs, his advancing age, and his unavoidable humanity. There are elements of both here.

It's never explicitly stated in Never Let Me Go, but I loved how the fact that the cloning began in the 1950s led to the morality of the Donor system being a complete non-subject by the 90s. There is no resistance group, no Sci Fi action rebellion, as there might have been had this been a movie for the mainstream with studio pressure on its construction. One of the few voices in opposition to the Donor system says that her efforts to prove the humanity of the clones were in essence providing an answer to a question simply no one wanted to ask.



So these people live with the weight of knowing their lives are going to be cut short, of knowing they were cloned from the dregs of society (which sort of seems to work like a consciousness of Original Sin), and the impression that they may not even be human at all. It's no wonder that some of the Donors have no desire to "complete" (survive) their third donation.

None of this functions as a direct allegory for something in real life, for which I was grateful. Instead something more fundamental about human nature is explored. The fact that Tommy, Garfield's character, thinks that humanity in the clones is gauged by their artwork, and spends years drawing because of this, made me think of the life of the clones as a metaphor for the precarious existence of artists.



Ruth, Knightley's character, is someone who lives life desperately trying to cover all her bases without having any confidence in her own decisions, stealing Tommy away from Kathy, who loves him, because, by Kathy loving him, Ruth sees that loving Tommy is proper. She imitates television shows, she quickly answers yes when asked if she's experienced something, deathly afraid of people thinking she hasn't. By the time Ruth's life is over, rather than feeling any resentment for the trouble she caused the other protagonists, I just thought how awful it was for someone to die never having managed to grow out of their shadow.

Kathy, Carey Mulligan's character, meanwhile starts off more mature than everyone else, guesses sad truths much faster. She seems strong, but also seems aware of how little such strength counts for.

Roger Ebert says in his review, "One of the most dangerous concepts of human society is that children believe what they are told. Those who grow out of that become adults, a status not always achieved by their parents."

Maybe being an adult is best described as knowing, beyond any doubt, that life's too short.

Careful Dream

I finally had a chance to see The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya last night, a captivating exercise in combining an alternate timeline story with intense life study.

A not terribly remarkable story about a timeline altered in a few details, and the ripples of broader, fundamental effects is curiously complimented by an attention to detail exceptional even for the detail normally associated with Japanese animation. Brief shots like these are crammed with signifying details;



One can see thought went into exactly what materials the S.O.S. Brigade might need for Haruhi's proposed Christmas party, how those materials might look on a table while being used. This same shot contains little Easter Eggs for fans of the show, like the frog costume visible from the "Endless Eight" arc.



There are a lot of very brief shots dense with detail, telling the story of normal life at Kyon and Haruhi's high school, but there are a significant number of long, lingering shots on trivialities, too. It's for this reason that a plot slightly less complicated than Back to the Future part II stretches out for nearly three hours. This isn't part of the slice of life craze sweeping anime and manga these days--though it's not strange that Kyoto Animation, the studio behind Haruhi Suzumiya, also produced centrepieces of the slice of life phenomenon, Lucky Star and K-On.



The movie, like the show, contains the inevitable Evangelion references, but the themes here are significantly more superficial. I would say magnificently superficial--there is a sickliness about it, and yet a sort of magnificence, too. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is sort of the Mona Lisa of Moé.




The tiny, obsessive details of the environment, the lingering shots of pretty girls' hands and faces suggesting fetishised innocence dovetail with the movie's theme of nostalgia to create an impression of a simulated utopia--a complete, animated world that viewers are allowed to live in for nearly three hours. Because computers can't create the exquisitely inaccurate physics of hand drawn animation--not just eyes and hair whose shapes don't add up from multiple angles, but the movements that occur at alternating speeds without seeming dreamlike or artificial.



Several shots are just beautiful by themselves, outside the context of the movie, and the Blu-Ray edition grants a view of thousands of tiny, precisely created details.



This establishing shot of a drugstore sign went by too fast for me to register the dark shapes as moths.



Kyon remains the irascible narrator, and the centre of the story as the audience avatar. The story hinges again on his grudging admission that he really likes the craziness of the world Haruhi has created. It's sort of like Larry Hagman in I Dream of Jeannie taken very, very seriously. Partly it seems like a male harem fantasy, partly it seems a valuable message about not giving in to a cynical lifestyle. And yet that latter is sort of dampened by the underlying thought that the glory of this world Kyon finally embraces is so unreal.

Wondering How They Eat and Breathe and Other Science Facts

Last night I watched the last episode of the most muddled Doctor Who serial I've so far seen, "The Invisible Enemy", the second serial of Tom Baker's fourth season.

A sentient, hostile society of alien viruses are infecting people on a Titan base, behaving essentially as evil, possessing spirits. Leela seems to be the only one immune, but although everyone in the serial who gets infected is male, including the Doctor, no one even mentions the possibility that it is the fact that Leela is female that makes her immune, even though this is the most obvious, biological difference. Instead, the Doctor hits on some vague theory about how it's because Leela's not much of a thinker and therefore lacks the sort of robust thought patterns the viruses thrive on.

The Doctor is infected by the "Nucleus," apparently the leader of the viruses, and to get rid of it, he proposes to have short lived clones of himself and Leela made which are then injected into his blood stream. He evidently has no qualms about creating two sentient life forms and sending them on this little kamikaze mission. And for some, never explained reason, the tiny clones are psychically connected to the Doctor and Leela, so that when the originals feel physical pain, the clones do, too. The Doctor even seems to retain memories of his clone's actions, though it's unclear whether Leela has memories of hers. The Doctor was unconscious, but Leela was busy guarding the operating room while her clone was exploring the Doctor's brain. So does Leela have two different sets of memories for the same period? Maybe she wonders why the clones' ten minute lifespans lasted for the whole twenty four minute third episode and the periods of journeying through the brain passed over in the narrative.

Maybe I am too much of a stickler for logic in fiction, I don't know. I also finally picked up a copy of Fallout: New Vegas, and I was excited to have the opportunity to play on "Hardcore" mode, which requires your character to eat, drink, and sleep. I haven't even gotten out of the first town yet, so I don't know how much it effects gameplay, but so far I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of dialogue options for it. Apparently the people in the town like me, but no-one offered to let me crash for the night, and I didn't have options in dialogue to ask. I eventually had to find a mattress in an abandoned camper. If Hardcore mode isn't going to effect character interaction, I'm not sure it's going to amount to anything more than a nuisance. I don't know, I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Twitter Sonnet #217

Diamond potholes contain a dead gut's nest.
Familial snakes coil to a solid.
Love in the form of granite rooted rest.
Armpits always told the story Rabid.
Dijon fairies dance on the sinus string.
The gates of the bull are stained with mustard.
Crosby's corpse croons a search dirge sung with Bing.
Sad wasabi songs sneezed out by a bard.
Madmen smear their ketchup in the food court.
Ads for gag drinks drip off the wallpapers.
Scooter gangs smash to hell the Segway sort.
Pity for lame metal mounts so tapers.
No one thinks that toons ever need to sleep.
Cruel necessity clouds drift to Paint Keep.

"It's Not 'Comforting', Cheery or Kind"

Okay. I'm willing to concede that a lot of my feelings of disappointment about President Obama may be leaping somewhat rashly over some subtly won political victories. But there's no fucking excuse for the president to go out of his way to congratulate the Philadelphia Eagles for giving Michael Vick a job. The fact that Obama might be getting support for this "from all sides" twists the sickening to eleven.

Howard Stern was ranting about Michael Vick a couple weeks ago, and I'm echoing some of his thoughts when I say, yeah, guys who've served their time deserve a chance at a decent life. But playing for the NFL in this world is a decadent fucking privilege. And maybe Michael Vick is sorry. I'd have an easier time buying that if he maybe shot a dog once in a fit of passion. But what we're talking about is a lifestyle, a subculture. Read the Wikipedia entry, unless you're trying hard to avoid throwing up. Maybe it's enough to just imagine the kind of treatment a dog might need to receive to be mad enough to kill, all the time.

But hey, at least we can enjoy Vick in his shiny tights running around with a ball. We're free to project our feelings of hope and allegiance on his mighty frame. I gotta get out of this fucking country.

And here I was feeling all rockabilly to-day and ate lunch at In and Out Burger. I got the grilled cheese with onions off the secret menu. I wear a leather jacket and a fur hat, so I'd be a hell of hypocrite to get on people's cases about eating meat. But show some fucking class, assholes.

Languages, Old and New

Saffy the cat, dreaming of the world outside and its bounty of tiny, careless meals.



Twitter Sonnet #216

Darth Maul's sabre destroyed his new suitcase.
Stomach acid rained on cartilage roof.
Pearly pushpins tighten an idol's face.
Karma mobsters can't break Thom's legs enough.
Boneless wool wings flop fast against soft rib.
A sharp cheddar jigsaw puzzle smells bad.
Chains shoot from the blank and unholy bib.
Distant diaphragm is secretly glad.
Black boots stick to greyish secreted slime.
Cheshire grin slices through violent cheek.
And now, somewhere Deer Face knows it is time.
Knobs of ink blood eyes steal at you a peek.
Power eyes watch above meaningful tongues.
Ladders for sleighs all have hollow quill rungs.

I went with my family to see the new Coen brothers' adaptation of True Grit. It was good--not great Coen brothers, just about half as good as No Country for Old Men, not even approaching Fargo territory, but still quite good. I still haven't seen the John Wayne version, and I haven't read the book either, but I was reminded a lot of old westerns by the beautiful shots of American country and forest (some of which were too brief for me in dissolving montage sequences) and in the misfit comrades on a quest vibe. I thought of The Searchers and Ride the High Country, and one of the first shots, a crane shot of a town as the protagonist, 14 year old Maddy, steps off a train strongly reminded me of Once Upon a Time in the West.

Maddy's played with convincing and sort of captivating cutthroat verve by Hailee Steinfeld, from whose point of view the story is told, unlike the John Wayne version which I've read focused more on the Rooster Cogburn character, here played by Jeff Bridges, I suspect, somewhat less flatteringly than by John Wayne. But Bridges' character is played with great humour and works as a classic foil for Maddy--the old dichotomy of sloppy experience versus sharp greenhorn.

And I liked how, unlike most modern Westerns, there was no overblown sentimentalising when people died. Everyone in the story is very practical about death, right down to little Maddy. You need to lose a limb, so-and-so got killed? Deal with it and move on. So it works as a real and decent Western, and was altogether not bad at all.

Afterwards, I went to the big family Christmas party where I was regaled by Ava, the just starting to walk daughter of my cousin Christa, with stories in a secret, complicated dialect. Ava informed me that, "Obliobiabio blio abiwobli." I was stunned to hear the English, "No?" from her, put as a question, when I stopped her grabbing an olive off the table. All I managed to do was repeat to her, "No?" in the same tone like a bird call, to which she replied, "No?" Thinking back, I probably should've provided some commendation at an English word used and properly.

People exchanged gifts based on names drawn the previous year--I'd drawn my cousin Josh's new wife Frances, for whom I'd gotten a Nordstrom gift card, while my name was drawn by my cousin Angela, who got me a bottle of 18 year Glenlivet. Everyone had wish lists that got sent through the grapevine, and on mine, also amongst various Criterion movies and Fallout: New Vegas, I remember distinctly most wanting the scotch. So that worked out rather well. I had two glasses of it while playing chess last night--I won two out of three games, though it was against a guy who rather frustratingly forfeited the instant he made a mistake, so I felt like the only game that got off the ground was the one I lost. But thanks to my scotch, I really wasn't feeling any pain. I also passed up an exposed Queen and a rook.

Speaking of exposed Queens, I've been watching Smiths videos all morning, and I've gotten to thinking this is one of the best music videos ever made.

A Time to Give, Pots, Pans, Mallets, and Sinks

Special Christmas Sonnet Because Twitter's Over Capacity

Screaming cows rampant in whale uterus
Know how to paint a Lego town gone mad.
So the kinky angel four times blessed us.
Because sandwich bags are always just sad.
Dance hall fog rolls into the starship's bridge.
Ping pong zig zag zippers the pointy skull.
Frosty's prayer hands of clay make a ridge
That carves in space a jagged toothy hole.
Grins on mummy elves offend Osiris.
Ant farms generate Easter eggs for bugs.
Life's a chess game for a lone cockatrice
Who's generous with all giraffes and slugs.
Shaving cream slicks the ingrown hair rooftop.
Velocity Santa cannot now stop.

No time for a proper entry, so here's the, er, explosive season finale of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, where heaven descends in lingerie amid the tentacles of hell;



Happy Santa Day, everyone!

Under the Leaves

One of the new team duck hangouts. Their egret mascot was also on hand, but I didn't get a good picture.





I was trying to find the two frogs I could hear ribbitting at each other from under the leaves, but they proved too elusive.

Last night I sat down with some Wheat Thins, white Babybel cheese, cherries I'd chopped up into fourths, and a glass of cognac and watched It's a Wonderful Life. By far, the best part was the snack, as the cheese and cherry on the crackers ended up tasting like cherry cheese cake. The first two thirds of It's a Wonderful Life aren't bad--it's the Sci-Fi section that really doesn't work. Am I really supposed to find it horrible that Mary had lived into her mid-twenties without getting married, wears glasses, and works at a library? Not to mention that the message that the movie ultimate sends is that if you're a beloved community leader, you shouldn't kill yourself. Clarence sure didn't have to work hard for those wings.

I guess these are all pretty old arguments. It's amazing my fondness for Jimmy Stewart survives that movie.

After making yesterday's post on Black Swan, I realised that all my online friends who are into Powell and Pressburger no longer read my journal and don't speak to me. I actually looked at Sonya's blog for the first time in, I think, around half a year, just to see what she'd thought of Black Swan, but I couldn't find anything about it. I don't know if I can go back to check again as when I look at her journal I start getting angry and simultaneously ashamed of my anger. I could talk to Sonya about Powell and Pressburger movies, or any work of art in general, like I could with no-one else. I get angry because she threw that away so easily, and then I get ashamed of being angry because I realise it only seemed precious to me, so I have no right to lament the loss of that relationship on any objective level. And here it is getting me angry still, two years later, so I must really be crazy.

Black Swan Singing in the Dead of Night . . .

I finally had a chance to see Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan last night, and I was pleasantly surprised to find both that I liked it and that it didn't end up being the mopey, ultra tragedy so many of the reviews are saying it is. It is definitely a thriller in its construction--there are a lot of haunted house scares, things popping up unexpectedly around corners and that sort of thing. And it has the fun of a haunted house, as Aronofsky delights in tormenting poor, straight laced little Nina.

A lot of this is accomplished by a Hichcockian fidelity to point of view even more strict than Hitchcock's. In films like Vertigo and North by Northwest, though the tension is largely created in locking the audience into the limited perspective of the protagonist, there are one or two scenes where that protagonist is not involved--like the CIA meeting in North by Northwest or Midge's discussion with the psychiatrist in Vertigo. Black Swan is so committed to Nina's POV that there is not a single scene in which Nina doesn't appear. And a few minutes into the film, I realised that Nina was visible in every shot--sometimes just as a forehead out of focus in the lower right corner of the screen, as a scene in a crowded dressing room with walls of mirrors inconspicuously reflects Nina all over the place, and her worried brow as she gauges the import of gossipy conversations of the other ballerinas. Aronofsky doesn't overdo this and we get some pure POV shots a few minutes later, without Nina in them, but seeing Nina in every one of those early shots makes sense because Nina is always on Nina's mind. She's always watching herself, fussing and adjusting bits of her self-image and interpreting the information she takes in and deciding how it relates to her. The camera frequently cuts back to Nina's face, with the tops of her shoulders just barely visible at the bottom of the frame. We rarely, if ever, see Nina full figure, top to toe, and this helps not only in covering up the fact that Natalie Portman isn't as good a dancer as Nina's supposed to be, but it also helps keep us in the claustrophobic space of the self-conscious dancer onstage. When making Raging Bull, Scorsese was inspired by The Red Shoes to keep the camera inside the boxing ring in order to emphasise the boxers' perspective rather than that of the audience, and I was reminded more of Raging Bull than of The Red Shoes in Black Swan's dance sequences due to the camera's more frequent close proximity to parts of the actors, while The Red Shoes showed us Moira Shearer's very real genius as a ballerina.

Nina's family life is the old story of someone trying to live their lost dreams through a family member, in this case Nina's mother obsessively creating her daughter as the image of perfection she could never achieve. It's good insight on Aronofsky's part that this kind of perfectionism can actually be antithetical to success, as in the mother the emotional absolutism provokes her to want to cut away things sometimes at the first sign of trouble. She starts to throw away a new cake when Nina says she doesn't want a piece at the moment, she endeavours to constantly be at Nina's side, sleeping by her bed, still tucking the young woman in at night. So partly the movie's about Nina's personal liberation, how she learns how to "let go" as she's told repeatedly throughout the film.

All this could be a pretty unremarkable After School Special, much like Requiem for a Dream. Making it a thriller elevates it, as does the introduction of hallucinatory or supernatural elements. One of my favourite fantasy tropes is used, that of the embracing of a person's darker half, represented as a shadow or doppelganger, in order to create a whole person. This is an idea used in the Star Wars films, Ursula Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea, and even in *cough* my own Venia's Travels. Mainly, though, I was reminded of "The Enemy Within", the famous episode of the original Star Trek television series where a transporter accident splits Captain Kirk into two entities, a Good Kirk and an Evil Kirk. Much as is the case with Nina, the good half is weak willed and needs the dark half in order to overcome obstacles or take command of anything.*

Natalie Portman's performance in Black Swan is by far the best I've ever seen her give. She's always struck me as a fairly stiff performer, unable to get in touch with her emotions, but this was perfect for Black Swan. I was reminded a little of Kubrick's choice in casting Tom Cruise for Eyes Wide Shut, where Cruise's own peculiar asexuality was crucial to the film. I'm fully willing to believe Natalie Portman's never had an orgasm, as the film suggests of Nina. Tom, the director of the Swan Lake production in which Nina stars, tells Nina he can very much believe her as Odette, the virginal Swan Queen, but not as the Swan Queen's evil look-alike, Odile, the daughter of the sorcerer who cast the spell on Odette that made her take the form of a swan during the day. The movie gets its title from a decision to suggest that Odile is also a swan of sorts, a black swan. Tom doesn't feel Nina has embraced the darker, more passionate character embodied by the black swan. In the end, Nina finds the black swan in herself, apparently even taking on physical aspects of the swan by way of special effects and makeup. These effects and makeup go quite a ways toward making me believe Nina really has found her inner black swan, but unfortunately, Portman, for me, didn't pick up any of the slack. I still don't feel she achieved black swanhood. I was reminded of Francis Ford Coppola's complaints about Wynona Ryder in his Dracula and her inability to connect with an inner passion to match Gary Oldman's, and it's sort of fitting Ryder has a small role in Black Swan as Nina's predecessor in the ballet company.

I was reminded of Suspiria a lot, another movie concerning a ballerina dealing with dangerous supernatural phenomena, but, of course, more than anything Black Swan reminded me of The Red Shoes, as has been the case for so many other critics. And yet, Aronofsky claims The Red Shoes was not an influence on him at all. From an interview with Aronofsky at film.com;

CH: There are also numerous thematic and even visual similarities to the classic ballet movie The Red Shoes (1948), which, like Black Swan, used a ballet to parallel the emotional and relationship breakdowns of characters. Can you talk about how Red Shoes influenced you?

DA: I actually wasn't aware of The Red Shoes. I mean, I had heard of The Red Shoes, but I didn't see it, and then [Martin] Scorsese did the restoration a few years ago, and then I was like, "You know what, I better go and see it." It's a masterpiece, an unbelievable film, and I saw that there were similarities in the story, but I think that's because we both went back to ballet and pulled from ballet the different characters and stuff. So we ended up in similar places, but I wasn't really influenced by it, and I really didn't ever try to be influenced by it because it's such a masterpiece and the dance sequences, they weren't doing visual FX like that for 20 [more] years, they were [that] ahead of their time. So I just sort of kept it in the back and said, "Look, we just sort of dress it." I forget the year, but it's a long time ago and most people may not know about it, but unfortunately they do.

I can't make heads or tails out of what Aronofsky's saying at the end of this quote. "Dress it?" Is that a typo for "Address it?" It still wouldn't make any sense. I suppose that's the peril of getting a written interview by transcribing recordings of a spoken interview.

Anyway, as for Aronofsky saying he wasn't influenced by The Red Shoes, I say he's just flat out lying. The similarities are just too obvious--notice how the interviewer doesn't ask him if he was influenced by The Red Shoes, but rather asks him to discuss the ways in which he was influenced, because the influence is a foregone conclusion. I remember seeing David Bowie, a long time ago in a discussion on BowieNet, talk about how he never understood why so many artists weren't honest about their inspirations. I didn't know what Bowie was talking about then, but after this and seeing how clearly Star Wars was influenced by Doctor Who, I definitely do now. Aronofsky even borrows one of my favourite sequences of shots from The Red Shoes, where Moira Shearer's performing Swan Lake and we see a series of swish pans from her POV as she pirouettes.

But if Aronofsky's too insecure or something to own up to it, whatever. It won't make me think less or more of Black Swan. If The Red Shoes is a fifteen year old scotch, Black Swan is a shot of Bacardi, and there's a place in the world for affordable rum, even though there're better drinks out there. Like a good scotch, The Red Shoes is more complex than rum, and this speaks to the fundamental difference between the two movies. Black Swan is definitely about someone's struggle with herself, about sex and about how to relate with other people. The fact that Nina is a ballerina is incidental--the movie could've been about a barista. When Craster accuses Lermontov of being jealous of Vicky in The Red Shoes, Lermontov says yes, but in a way Craster "can never understand." I think the idea that Lermontov's libido was perverted and channelled into the ballet is certainly a fair interpretation. But the compulsion embodied by the red shoes speaks to something much bigger than the cathartic personal journey Black Swan ultimately amounts to. In a way, though, this sort of reflects the general cultural change in media over the past sixty years--what was once about giving oneself up to creating something bigger has become more about giving oneself up to creating oneself.


*In my geek fantasy, George Takei mentions this the next time Aronofsky calls into The Howard Stern Show.

Bread Crumbs are Closer

This, as you might remember, was Monday;



This was Tuesday;



And this is Wednesday, to-day;



So, yeah, we've been getting a lot of rain. It sure makes quite a racket at night, it kept me up a little while.





I had two stale hamburger buns to give away and those two ducks were the only ones who dared venture close enough since it seems everyone was taking the brief respite from the rain to walk their dogs.





Twitter Sonnet #215

Grinning bubble man fell on a cork moon.
Stilts grew from the scorched astroturf rubber.
Soles stabbed by mutant cleats choke on twine doom.
The fat pirate in green's a landlubber.
Teams of blue farms blockade the cavalry.
Dry skin crackles under showers of scotch.
Sedentary squid draw ink salary.
Razor wire winds a hazardous watch.
Bogs distinguish turns in the grey blank stone.
Grossly stretched sugar grains scratch DNA.
Voices rot teeth across the sweat cell phone.
All electric dust routes go the same way.
Water shrugs its shoulders in some defeat.
Broader banks make ducks easier to meet.

I liked Michael Moore's appearance on Rachel Maddow last night;

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

He is walking back his ardent support for Julian Assange a little bit, and it is good to stress that it's important to always take rape allegations seriously. Though, of course, it's precisely because of that that false rape allegations can be such a useful tool in character assassination. Sady Doyle, who appears to be the woman who started the #mooreandme hashtag, and who appears to be vigorously taking credit for Moore's statements on The Rachel Maddow Show and for Maddow putting the question to him, points out in her blog that she saw a lot of rather heinous jokes about rape victims posted in forums and comments sections related to the Wikileaks scandal. These might be Internet assholes, the finest distillations of douchebaggery in existence, but it is important to recognise that a cultural attitude of flippancy towards victims or potential victims of rape should be denounced.

At the same time, I don't think calling the allegations against Assange into question is wrong. I really think it's only the lowest common denominator (who, indeed, are still important) who could possibly see it as trivialising rape. As I showed in my post yesterday, there are plenty enough of those Internet assholes on the #mooreandme side making rash statements about Olbermann and Moore.

Naturally, Doyle expresses herself much more reasonably, yet I'm disappointed that someone who appears to be the nominal leader of this small feminist movement isn't quite as level headed as I'd like. She quite casually referred to Olbermann and Moore as "rape-apologists," which I think she at some level must recognise that they are not now or ever have been. A lot of her language is hyperbolically self-defeating, as in her blog where she says;

The widespread cultural belief that every woman who reports a rape must be taken seriously should be a common part of my day-to-day experience. I should expect that people believe that; I should expect that people behave in accordance with that belief; I should have the right to be shocked or surprised when they don’t. But I don’t expect it. It’s not a common expectation.

Really? I suppose I could be the one who's out of it, but it seems to me rape is usually taken very seriously. Thinking back to prominent cases of rape in the media, like Mike Tyson or John Phillips, it seems to me rape was taken very seriously in each one. It is true there was some whitewashing, particularly in concern to Mike Tyson, which is important to recognise, but it becomes harder to bring to light when the proponents of doing so use falsehoods to overstate the matter in a bludgeon of passion for the issue.

I suppose this could just be all part of this media culture which doesn't seem to feel it can express itself until the subwoofer's bleeding.

Meanwhile, apparently Assange is doing a pretty good job assassinating his own character, as Olbermann tweeted last night.