Really Strange

This shot, a close up of the derelict ship in Alien, is one of the most effective shots in the film to me. More effective than the beautiful long shot of the ship--it cuts to this set shot with less fanfare, Jerry Goldsmith's score not changing for the cut, just continuing subtle and anxious. The film doesn't seem to be commenting on the extraordinary thing in this shot--this is the first time we see small details of the alien thing, the ship, and the fact that it's not underlined is scary. It says this alien thing is here, existing, has a discernable complexity, and it's so many things without any human being around to see it. It's a real, Lovecraftian shock.

I was in the mood to watch Alien last night after listening to Jerry Goldsmith's score again. Alien and Chinatown are my two favourite Jerry Goldsmith scores, and they are very different. But I find both are good to listen to even if I'm not particularly thinking about the movies they go with. Alien's score is so understated and nervous, it has this atmosphere of fragility and inevitability. It's like the musical accompaniment of a species going extinct.



And it suits the movie so well. It's a movie that's so off-handedly brilliant in so many ways. From H.R. Giger's designs which are beautiful, strange, and mundane, to the intimately icy direction of young Ridley Scott.

Scott's such a different filmmaker now. His style is superficially similar in some ways--he still likes condensation and shadows, and he still seems to like overlapping sound between shots, but he seems to wield a cudgel now where before he seemed to mould stories out of the atmosphere. This change goes for everything from action scenes to characterisation.

I'm pretty sure there's no way Prometheus can be anywhere near as good Alien. If it's going to be good, it's going to be good in a very different way. I kind of like the viral marketing clip with Peter Weyland as a sort of Steve Jobs type;



At the same time, it shows what I'm talking about. Weyland already seems to be a broader character than any in Alien and the nervous chattering in the audience at 2:20 in the clip is the sort of unrealistic movie cliché I'd have never expected from Scott in the 80s. Of course, Scott might not have even directed this clip.

I'm hoping that we don't learn in Prometheus that the alien was a manmade genetic experiment of some kind. It would make some sense, since the company in Alien seemed to know an awful lot about what the crew would find on LV-426, but we already have plenty of stories about genetic experiments going haywire, I think it would only serve to shrink the Alien universe a little. Gods, I hope that's not what Scott has in mind.

Extraneous Lessons

Sometimes, a girl gets exactly the haunted, tragic, and powerful loner she always dreamed about. Then sometimes, opera productions change the endings of Wagner's operas and take him away from her. The production of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman I watched last night, like the production of Tristan and Isolde I watched recently, made a few unfortunate creative decisions regarding the plot but had some talented performers and beautiful, interesting sets and costumes.

The Flying Dutchman, first of all, is a pretty sweet tribute to the romantic dreams of youth. A young girl dreams of an attractive, damaged, mythological man, then her father turns up with exactly this man wanting her to marry him, and when the two do consummate, it's in a way that totally shows up her father and her pathetically normal ex-boyfriend. The Flying Dutchman lacks the depth of Tristan and Isolde or Der Ring des Nibelungen, but it's not bad, in fact it's quite wonderful if you can get yourself in the spirit of the thing. Wagner's music certainly helps, especially the magical and grim theme for the Dutchman himself.

The production I watched last night was from 1985 at the Bayreuth Festpielhaus, which is an opera house designed by Wagner. It exclusively exhibits his work, which one would think would lead to productions with a little more fidelity to the original operas. The set design is beautiful, fantastically grotesque and sometimes leads to tweaks in the story for how the characters meet one another, as when the bow of the Dutchman's ship, which has massive hands carved on it, cracks open like an egg to reveal the Dutchman inside off the starboard side of Daland's ship.



Simon Estes is good as the Dutchman--he cuts an impressive and commanding figure and seems vulnerable lamenting his curse without seeming whiney. He does a good enough job that it didn't bother me that the other characters constantly sing about how pale he is despite the fact that he's black. And I liked the woman playing Senta, the girl. She had a nice morbid intensity, though I didn't like how the director decided she needed to be present onstage throughout the entire opera, which means that during the first act she's on a little scaffolding like a live picture in picture, apparently daydreaming about the events, a device blessedly diminished somewhat by the video coverage.



When her father brings the Dutchman home, a guy with a broad brimmed hat shadowing his face completely plays the Dutchman and, a little ways in, the wall cracks open to reveal Simon Estes chained up in a neat, gory sack thing.



But the guy with the hat hangs around and it gets a little confusing. I guess Simon Estes is supposed to visually convey the plight of the Dutchman somehow impressed upon Senta by the cloaked man. But the cloaked man hangs around watching the Dutchman and Senta embrace and I'm not sure what, if anything, is being conveyed by this.



There's also the party scene which is supposed to be a dialogue between the crew of Daland's ship and the townsfolk and the ghostly crew of the Dutchman's ship. Except in this production everyone's dressed as a ghost and Senta's, of course, in the live picture in picture thing the whole time, signalling I guess that she's daydreaming about a bunch of ghosts, half of whom are pretending not to be ghosts for some reason.



And, of course, the ending--instead of Senta proving her love by killing herself and her and the Dutchman ending up together in the afterlife, we just see her kill herself. Which is, like, real heavy, man. It's like the director tore up his little girl's glittery scrapbook to teach her a lesson about life.

With breakfast to-day, I read the new Sirenia Digest. The first story, "HERE IS NO WHY", was a really nice steampunk fantasy tale, sort of reminding me of Spirited Away for the young lead character's loss of her name and identity in a fantasy country where she ends up serving a powerful lady. It had nice descriptions and characterisations, though I was disappointed we didn't get to see the girl's introduction to the harem, though the story's arc about identity had pretty much concluded.

The other two stories had more nice sexual shape shifting stuff.

Twitter Sonnet #364

Four directions become one word to-night.
The Sun Chips have spoiled like processed cheese.
Extra milk makes a pointless stomach fight.
Does a planted stairway remember peas?
Pee not to-night for the urine you're in.
Bees wrought a slow and sweet orange by-product.
Perfume goblins quit the sauna felon.
Orcas drift to work with subtle conduct.
Keyser Söze cruelly caught Kim's croissant.
Buttery blood splashed over burning dough.
Vicious forks jabbed in graphic en passant.
Bereft wooden nubs knock at the château.
Wednesday's wicker weasels pinch the free grass.
In space, no-one needs to have a hall pass.

And Now for Something Familiar

It seems lately I've been revisiting a lot of things I haven't read or watched in ten years. Well, I've watched episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus here and there, but lately I've been alternating between watching it and Star Trek nightly. It's amazing how unique and brilliant Flying Circus remains. Much of the time I'd describe the show as imaginative chains of absurdity used to isolate the ridiculousness of human thought patterns. This description applies to a variety of different kinds of sketches on the show, from the superficially both logical and senseless sketches like the "Seduced Milkman" sketch where a clichéd situation of a woman luring a milkman into the house only to trap him upstairs with a dozen others like him, to the more direct commentary on the absurdity of humanity being translated through language, like "The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights".

And such an incredible group of performers, too. Last night I watched "Live from the Grill-O-Mat Snackbar", a second season episode which is linked together by John Cleese playing another in a succession of BBC announcers, this one exhibiting the wonderfully subtle anxiety of someone who is uncomfortably, vaguely aware of the fact that he's a twit and whose job is to speak to a large audience. There are a million guys like this in the media, especially local media, to-day.



This is the first time I've been able to watch the series properly, from the first episode to each successive episode. Distribution of old television shows has changed nicely from the 90s--my old VHS copies were of course collections of various episodes throughout the series in essentially arbitrary order. That was the best one could usually find for television series, for sale or rent. Watching it like this has allowed me to see how the threading of the episodes evolved, from essentially random sketches in the early episodes or long stories, to sketches that tended to be framed and linked by fake host segments or a recurring sketch.

I've also been reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road for the first time in a very long time. I'm reading the relatively recently released "original scroll" version from before Kerouac edited it to change the names of real people and to do the regular work of editing--removing and rearranging scenes, altering some of the language, and so on. I'm surprised how much of it is different, for a guy who all but seemed to equate editing to censorship. There's a whole scene where he goes to an opera (Beethoven's Fidelio) in Denver that I don't remember from the book. Generally the editing seems to have been to give more focus to Neal Cassady, which so far I have to say was wise.

Last night I came across the trailer to the upcoming film adaptation;



I can't really tell if I like the two guys playing Kerouac and Cassady. They certainly seem a great deal more modern than the men they're portraying--maybe it's my imagination, but young men don't seem quite as masculine to-day as they did in the 50s. The guy playing Kerouac certainly doesn't look old enough to have served in World War II. I do love Viggo Mortensen as William S. Burroughs, though, despite the fact that the virile, handsome Mortensen is pretty fundamentally different from the gangly, geeky Burroughs. After seeing Mortensen play Sigmund Freud I'm willing to try him with anything. Maybe Winston Churchill next.

The Lizards are Back, but They Never Really Left

The lizards have started coming out again, though it still feels colder than I'd like. I guess I can't really complain.

Feeling extra groggy to-day for the night of scotch, cherry pie, vanilla rice ice cream, and Skyrim I had last night. I think I was both rebelling against Daylight Savings as well as celebrating the A I got on my Japanese test. That was the test I was expecting to get a C on, so it was a very nice surprise. Suddenly I have no problems with how this class is taught.

Maybe the teacher changed her tactics a little since I don't think anyone did better than a C on the previous test. This latest one was a lot shorter (100 possible points instead of 126) and featured a lot fewer things that weren't on the study guide. Before handing out the test on Wednesday, she said to the class a little meekly and without a trace of humour, "Please . . . don't make any mistakes. I think you can do it."

When we got the tests back last night, one guy got up to quibble over his grade to the teacher--he spoke to her in fluent Japanese. Apparently she'd marked him down for bad handwriting. He seemed furious that she seemed to be actively working against his little scheme for an easy grade.

I have to admit to feeling some pleasure at the failure of John Carter at the box office. There's an excellent line in The Guardian's review of the film;

And as for the red planet, the answer to David Bowie's famous question is no. What a sadd'ning bore it is.

Within a year's time, people will barely remember this movie. In two years, people coming across A Princess of Mars might ask themselves, "Wasn't there a movie made out of this book?" In five years, there will only be the book again, for all intents and purposes, and this movie will maybe be a curiosity in an annotated version of the book.

Maybe one day, when we live in a culture that's not so high strung, we will have the adult adaptation the book requires, rather then a big toy commercial. Maybe then we'll finally get a proper adaptation of Gulliver's Travels, too.

Though I must admit these days I'm feeling less betrayed by mainstream films and more just completely and totally cold to the claptrap. It actually doesn't bother me as much that there are big budget, lousy adaptations of Alan Moore comics because his comics still exist and they easily eclipse the movies in my little world. Though I was a little sad when I ran into two V for Vendetta fans in Second Life a few days ago who'd never read the comic. I wonder how many members of Anonymous haven't read the comic. I did rather like this video Neil Gaiman linked to on his Twitter a little while ago.

Rambo Can Do Anything but People Keep Pestering Him

Rambo finds it is indeed possible to regain the storybook gallantry of the Vietnam War in the awkwardly titled Rambo: First Blood Part II. Because I guess each Blood is like the first. At home in the wilds of Vietnam, the returning hero is generally put upon by American bureaucrats, Russian soldiers, Vietnamese soldiers, and computers, puny little adversaries the surly and sweaty man swats down with the holy justice that comes with being played by Sylvester Stallone.

There's been a real controversy, continuing to this day, where groups have accused the U.S. government of a conspiracy to hide the existence of living United States POWs being kept in Vietnam. There's probably a heartbreaking small percentage of these groups that are actually families of soldiers holding out against all probability, hoping their loved ones are somehow still alive. But it sounds like the main motivation of the group is hazy, tea party-ish paranoia about government bureaucracy. And like many fundamental right wing movements, it's highly susceptible to hilarious and obvious scams. A few are listed in the Wikipedia entry on the issue;

Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jack Bailey created Operation Rescue, which featured a former smuggling boat named Akuna III and solicited funds from POW/MIA groups. Bailey never produced any prisoners and the boat spent years never leaving its dock in Songkhla in Thailand, but the effort proved adept at bringing in money through the Virginia-based Eberle Associates direct mail marketing firm. It was later revealed that Bailey had greatly exaggerated his military record.

I suspect those POW/MIA groups aren't terribly amused by the irony that their actions prompted by an irrational fear of government conspiracy led them to fall prey to amateur grifts.



Such paranoia also led movie goers to fall prey to the mighty Sylvester Stallone who, in the sequel to First Blood, exploited honoured the credulous rancour of those caught up in this issue with a film about one muscular white man making big explosions in Vietnam in order to free a small group of POWs that were being kept, I don't know, for fun or something.

The screenplay was originally written by James Cameron, when James Cameron was still James Cameron, before he made empty, poorly considered left wing polemics and instead made effective, slightly right leaning action films. Stallone, taking over nearly every aspect of production, pushed the rightwards lean off the cliff of two dimensional crazy, culminating in what may be the most accidentally effective portrait of Western international arrogance, a shirtless, muscular white guy calmly killing with a bow and explosive arrow a panicked, skinny Asian guy whose pistol is useless against Stallone's demeanour.



I watched this movie because Jack Cardiff was cinematographer. Yes, the same guy who shot The Red Shoes and The Prince and the Showgirl shot Rambo: First Blood Part II, though I suspect Rambo himself Stallone actually shot much of the film. There were a few shots where I perceived Cardiff, like the green tinted window on a helicopter Rambo appropriates;



And there are a few pretty wilderness shots, but Conan the Destroyer was actually a much better example of Cardiff's work. He really was a cinematographer more suited to the fantastic which, to be sure, Rambo: First Blood Part II is, but only in a slightly insulting way.

Twitter Sonnet#363

Is Mister Poco a time traveller?
His tuxedo is on his pyjamas.
He's watching me across the sand crawler.
All the robots here are dressed as llamas.
Iron cookies blacken against the moon.
All the hours smash against the circle.
The living suspenders woke up too soon.
Time will yet wither the strongest pickle.
Waffles swallowed several women Sunday.
Glutton gods called drizzled the new rice crop.
Buttered batter turns to a good cake lay.
Frank sought a jelly roll for its gumdrop.
Balanced breakfasts combust against the odds.
Rambo's arrows fly for analogue gods.

Indispensable Shadow Life

The main reason I think traditional forms of animation will always be superior to computer animation is the sense of unique life that appears in a work of traditional animation that cannot be replicated. The oldest surviving feature length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, was made in 1926, a silhouette puppet animation, it gives you the feeling of its Arabian myth inspired story taking life and colonising the shadows. The painstakingly stop motion animated puppets are beautiful and so effective, and the techniques of their animation yet so clearly perceptible, it seems almost like inanimate objects coming to life because they're so strongly compelled to tell this story. In this way, also, a feminist argument seems to manifest in the film because it couldn't be repressed.

The story mainly follows the son of the Caliph, Prince Achmed, who is tricked by an African magician into riding an out of control flying horse, which carries him to distant lands. The movie follows his adventures and his further run ins with the magician.



The movie isn't only black cut outs, there are also what appear to be gobs of hair that shrink and expand, oozing liquid of some sort which is used when the magician creates the flying horse, as it begins looking like a melted gummy bear that slowly hardens into the silhouette puppet horse. There's a genie that looks like animated condensation.



My favourite piece of animation was when Achmed comes across the demon Peri Banu bathing with her servants and their reflections in the water appear to be shreds of paper that not only move with the figures but ripple for the water.



And the great thing about it, as with all the animation in the movie, is that it doesn't look realistic, it looks like an impression of reality brought to life, someone's idea of how water moves who doesn't even realise how much of his perception is on display rather than moving water.

Prince Achmed and, later, Aladdin, seem as though they're meant to be the main characters, but a witch who lives in a volcano is introduced and she pretty much takes over the show. She's the African magician's arch enemy--she fights the climactic battle with the magician while Achmed and Aladdin just watch, helpless. She also tells Achmed how to rescue Peri Banu and gives him the magic weapons and armour with which to do so. When Aladdin is too slow to use his lamp at the end of the movie, it falls to the witch to pick up the item, which seems to be more powerful in her hands, and save the day.



The Adventures of Prince Achmed was directed by Lotte Reiniger, one of the few female directors in the world in her day and it seemed to me the witch character was an expression of her perspective on women in society--the hairy little witch isn't beautiful, and it goes without saying she can't live with the princes and princesses in the palace, yet, like Reiniger, it is the witch who wields the magic that shapes the world.

The Things We Do to Level Up

I dreamt last night my Skyrim character got a job at Costco, mainly consisting of straightening and arranging products on shelves. The manager's birthday was coming up and my character was asked to jump naked out of a giant cake for him, which I'm pretty sure is sexual harassment.

This is Brunnhilde, my Skyrim character, currently;



She's wearing light armour despite the fact that I've only gotten her light armour skill level to something like 50 and her heavy armour skill is at 100. This is because I've maxed out all of the skills I'd chosen for her but want to get some of the perks for her maxed out skills I wasn't able to. See, you get a perk point every time you go up in level that you can assign to any perk you choose, a special bonus added to a skill, like in the sneak skill there's a perk that makes you as silent when you're running and sneaking as you are when you're walking and sneaking. You get level ups by going up in skill level, generally by simply using those skills, but I found levelling naturally hasn't given me enough perk points for my preferred skills. One of the skills I'm levelling to poach perks is illusion, since I'd already found out with my magic using character that illusion is almost completely worthless in this game. Since it's extremely easy to level up in illusion, just by spamming the spell called "Muffle", I almost wonder if Bethesda designed illusion to be not much more than a perk point repository.

At 62 now, Brunnhilde's the highest level character I've had in a Bethesda game since Morrowind, in which I managed to game the numbers in such a way to get a character to level 100. In Oblivion, I never managed to get a character past 51, and it took some care to get that far.

Bethesda's always trying to make new ways to make levelling more organic, and players like me are always trying to find ways to get more power from the mechanism. The temptation to circumvent the system in Oblivion was pretty powerful, as you only got level ups from raising your class skills but you could still increase your skill in non-class skills. Which means you could quickly get to a point where you outmatch all the enemies that only keep pace with your actual level. Conversely, if you stick to the beaten path and only level your class skills, its possible to level up by only levelling skills that are generally useless in combat, such as alchemy, which turns you into an easy target for your average enemy.

Skyrim attempts to fix this by eliminating classes entirely, which in some ways works well, particularly since a mage class would be a joke, but it also leaves me feeling like my characters don't start with as much of an identity. Then again, that puts more pressure on the player's creativity, which isn't necessarily a good thing since Skyrim's story and dialogue are so badly written. What would be nice, I think, is a version of Daggerfall with Skyrim's graphics. The whole open-ended thing is Bethesda's strong suit, but the open-endedness has grown steadily less in each game.

Sub-Toupee Strata

I keep getting distracted by Shatner's toupee when I watch Star Trek lately. It's kind of a way for me to gauge how good an episode is--if the story pulls me out of toupee contemplation, it must be good. "The Alternative Factor", which I watched last night, didn't quite succeed at this.

It's the first Star Trek story to feature a parallel universe, in this case an actual anti-matter universe, one where someone from that universe coming into direct physical contact with someone in this universe would lead to this universe being destroyed. It's left unexplained how Kirk can at all travel there safely, but hey, it doesn't bother me that Alice doesn't explode when she goes through the looking glass, though, as is pointed out in the excellent Annotated Alice, she ought to. It's the general laziness of the writing the brings the episode to sub toupee levels, as much of the plot hinges on Kirk and his crew leaving a dangerous man unguarded on the Enterprise, not following up on or communicating to each other obvious important data, and Spock's logic being significantly faulty when he accuses a man of being a liar when he can't immediately find evidence of his claims.

I still haven't gotten to the Creationist museum, but I have been going back to K39 Taco Shop and I was very surprised to see that instead of sports on their wall mounted television they had the Science Channel on, and I was more surprised to see that for once the Science Channel wasn't showing something like an obviously corporate funded documentary on how highlighter pens are produced in the factory. Though those things are always sort of impressive for the amount of enthusiasm the narrator manages to get into his voice, "But once the felt has been placed in the plastic shafts, it's not over yet!" Average American narrators, too, always have this annoying tendency to deliver shit like they're bragging, like they're showing you up, like these highlighter pens kick the asses of any other company's paltry attempt at even thinking about making sentences in text books stand out.



Fuck yeah, highlighters! Eat it, white out! Highlighters want to know if your mom's sore from last night!

That's not even the same highlighter documentary I saw on Science Channel that time.

Anyway, on this particular day, the Science Channel was showing a thing on Isaac Asimov as part of their series called something like Sci-Fi Prophets. Mostly it was pretty cheesy, with hokey reenactments with actors is 50s clothes, one of whom was meant to be Asimov. But my interest was piqued when one of the talking heads turned out to be none other than Harlan Ellison, who talked about calling Asimov for advice, Asimov apparently suggesting to Ellison that people in his story might be able to breathe in atmosphere without oxygen through the use of "anaerobic microbes".

But Ellison was on only for maybe 15 seconds and unfortunately the show used a bunch of footage from the lousy Chris Columbus adaptation of The Bicentennial Man. The programme focused largely on Asimov's non-fiction works and a devil in me was tempted to recommend to the girl at the cash register that she read what Asimov wrote about Creationism.

Twitter Sonnet #362

Offensive sweaters blot out the full moon.
Confused ribbon cages catch in the wind.
Colourless bars stack around the last spoon.
Notecards are like memories you can spend.
Sandwich signals resound through the dungeon.
Tortured corn cobs lay naked on the bed.
Withered pickles make a silly truncheon.
A very big boy's been inside your head.
Late tea can't afford dry purple soap foam.
Bubbles in the hose take the shape of twins.
Fathers soaked with chlorine mindlessly roam.
Pairs of wigs dance forth from all our dustbins.
Blood coats roots invaded by the bad plug.
Crimson beads burn on the phosphorous rug.

Lives Woven in Green

Financial disaster is such a consistent subject for Mikio Naruse that I almost wanted to laugh when Masayuki Mori, in 1960's Daughters, Wives, and a Mother (娘妻母), loses a fortune. Mori's just one of a number of stars in this ensemble film, financial disaster in this case used to illustrate how practical concerns can initiate fundamental changes in how people regard each other almost against their will. It's a beautiful movie about the relationship between practical and emotional survival and how suddenly, subtly, and brutally the landscape of affection can change for a group of people.

There are two leading ladies in this film, Hideko Takamine and Setsuko Hara. Ten years after she'd made a name for herself in Japanese cinema has the eternal virgin, Hara's fresh and open demeanour has been tempered by an extreme tension. Looking at her, one supposes she must grind her teeth when she sleeps.



Now it doesn't seem strange that she retired from acting shortly after this and claimed never to have enjoyed acting. I think what I'm seeing is Hara's own personality coming through, but what I'm seeing is certainly appropriate for the character she plays, Sanae, a recently widowed woman who returns to her large family of windowed mother, two sisters, two brothers, two brothers in law and two sisters in law. As the title suggests, and as Naruse's career would lead one to expect, the movie's centred on the women. The ball of tension gets rolling when everyone finds out that Sanae's been left a million yen by her deceased husband. Soon, everyone wants to borrow money.



This in itself weirds the patterns of affection among the family. Then when Hara lends a substantial sum to Mori's character who loses not only that money but also the family home because he'd mortgaged it to pay for an investment that turned out to be a scam, an intensely strained scene of the family ensues where everyone simultaneously talks about how much of the home each person is entitled to while quietly everyone begins packing and shifting parcels of affection they have for one another. Mori's wife, played by Takamine, has lived in the house with her child and has been accepted as part of the family, but suddenly finds her voice isn't welcome in the discussion. The mother, a respected matriarch paid tribute to recently at her birthday party, is now discussed, to Sanae's horror, as a responsibility someone needs to shoulder.

Sanae's horrified by this unvarnished discussion, but finds her mother's fate weighs on her mind when she has to choose between marrying a very young Tatsuya Nakadai and an old, rich, tea ceremony expert.



Daughters, Wives, and a Mother came out the same year as Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and isn't quite as effective as that film, which benefited by contrast from the anchor of a single, central character. But Daughters, Wives, and a Mother is certainly good, a melancholy meditation on just how fragile human connexions are.

It's also the first colour Naruse movie I've seen, though its palette actually gives it a more muted quality than his black and white films. When Kurosawa, reluctant to switch to colour, remarked how colour films looked like gaudy post cards, he couldn't have been thinking of this film, which is so consistent in its use of greyish greens and yellows, with only the occasional pale pink shirt or bright red prop, it looks almost like it's projected on an olive.

I Think It's Green

Finally some Sulu action. He's been relatively prominent in the past couple episodes I've watched, though not as prominent as I'd like. I wish they'd done that spinoff series with Sulu commanding the Excelsior, but I guess that's unlikely now that we're in rebootsville. If Paramount was smart they'd take advantage of George Takei's recent popularity, but it seems like Star Trek is handled smartly only around thirty percent of the time.

I watched "The Squire of Gothos" last night, the episode that introduced the Q prototype, the child omnipotent being Trelane. It is a pretty satisfying toss of mud at war hawks as Kirk notes Trelane could accurately be described both as a god of war and as a little boy.

"The Squire of Gothos" aired on January 12, 1967, a couple days before the Doctor Who serial The Underwater Menace aired its first episode. The surviving episodes of The Underwater Menace are among the weaker episodes of the series, and I have to call Star Trek the winner that week. Patrick Troughton still finding his footing as the second Doctor is actually fairly comparable to the still relatively newborn characters on Star Trek, "Squire of Gothos" being just the 18th episode produced. Though the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triumvirate was starting to get more of its charm, and McCoy in particular seemed to be settling into a deeper existence, as one subtle moment in the episode showed as McCoy was the only one who casually began digging in to Trelane's phantom food and brandy.

I was surprised by how much "The Squire of Gothos" feels like a Next Generation or Deep Space Nine episode. I read a book about Deep Space Nine production when I was a young high school trekkie and I remember reading how someone had their script edited to include a requisite bit of banter at the beginning of the episode. "The Squire of Gothos" starts similarly--they seemed to be hardcore believers in formula at Star Trek, but sometimes it did work.

Well, I better get ready for Japanese class. I memorised all the vocabulary words and everything in the study guide, re-read the chapter, and reviewed the previous chapter, so I confidently expect another C, which means I'll probably get a D. Here goes.

The Exciting World of Forms

There's a new About the Author page at Anelnoath. The picture of me is from 2004, one of the handful of days in the past fifteen years that my skin didn't look terrible.

I guess I never wanted such a page because I like the idea of being this sort of entity defined totally by his output, but now I want to get a professional badge for Comic-Con and I need to get as much Internet evidence as I can that I have made quite a lot of comics. I'd intended to apply for a professional badge all along since they're free and I actually bothered to read about the criteria and realised I meet them. But I had planned on buying a four day pass just in case and returning it for a refund if I managed to get a professional badge. But the badges sold out in one day--Saturday, when they first became available. I'd been warned by an automatic e-mail the badges were going on sale, but when I looked in the morning they weren't available yet. When next I looked, in the evening, they'd already sold out. Even the volunteer worker badges weren't available. This has all gotten me pretty down--it could be the first time in ten years I haven't been able to get into Comic-Con.

I'm worried the professional badges will be snapped up before they get to my application, I'm hoping living in San Diego will give me an edge since you have to mail in this stuff by snail mail for some reason. I'm more anxious about this than when, last year at this time, I was waiting to find out if I had cancer. My priorities are pretty screwed up, I know.

I am getting ready to start a new comic, by the way. I'm finding research for it a little frustratingly difficult to track down, though. If anyone knows of a good place to get photos of department store interiors in the 1950s, please let me know. I watched Miracle on 34th Street last night, and it was a lot less helpful than I expected, given how much of it takes place inside Macy's. But it showed me enough to corroborate other sources that have given me to understand how very different department stores were in those days. I read about a place in the midwest that actually had a mermaid tank.

It'd be nice getting back to doing something I feel like I can do, in any case. I found out last night I'd gotten 95 out of 126 points on the latest Japanese test--the one I thought I'd done well on. If my hazy math serves, that works out to a low C, which is still better than the previous test. I can take some consolation that I may have gotten the highest score in the class as everyone around me I heard talking (and people are always fucking talking in that class) had gotten in the 70s and 80s. One guy got up to contest his score of 81 and managed to get it changed to 85. The guy in front of me who always likes to show off his knowledge of Japanese got an 88.

I'd memorised all the vocabulary words, I knew everything in the study guide she gave us, and I did do well on all these things. What I didn't do well on was all the stuff from previous and upcoming chapters. A significant problem for me too was minor spelling and grammatical things, like some words I'd used the small つ on which denotes a double consonant where I shouldn't have. Things like this cost me two points usually, and I lost three points when I put two words in the wrong order--I'd written essentially "photograph of family," shashin no kazoku when I was supposed to have written kazoku no shashin, "family photograph". I also lost points for how I wrote hiragana in places, like a ら I'd apparently written with too long a stem or something.

All this wouldn't be so bad if the tests weren't 50% of the final grade. There's a lot of homework but it's worth practically nothing, like 5%. So again, I feel like I might actually learn Japanese and fail the class. It's pretty frustrating, I have to say. But I have another test to-morrow so I'd better go start beating my brains out now.

Twitter Sonnet #361

Grey shells walk legates away from the camp.
Arrows take knees from the sweet roll saviour.
Rubber helmets save the hairless from damp.
One cannot predict mammoth behaviour.
Potato rain falls like fire on spit.
Wolf eyes ping pong throughout the styrofoam.
Gaelic bowlers chomp at the walking bit.
Sentient teeth guards sneak in Mike Tyson's home.
The Lord God sold chips too cheap from His shop.
Warm and juicy lead gripped the pipe cleaner.
Professor Plum removed Miss Scarlett's top.
The candlestick's curiously keener.
Marijuana Fritos learn Nihongo.
Japan hid the yellow craft from Ringo.

The Abstractions that Lead Away from Truth

I stayed up much later than I probably ought to've watching a production of Tristan und Isolde last night. But the last two acts of that opera had me captivated--the ruminations on the nature of delusion and truth are so sharp and breathtakingly beautiful.

It's a three act opera--the first act wasn't as exciting as the latter two, though the overture is of course gorgeous. Primarily the first act is there to make the latter two acts work. It sets up Isolde being forcibly taken by Tristan from Ireland to Cornwall as a bride for Tristan's liege, King Marke. Isolde comes off as a savage and frightened animal having been humiliated first by finding the man she'd used her healing arts on (Tristan) was her husband's killer, then finding she couldn't kill him because of something between them she can't describe, and then being captured by him to be married to another man against her will. The second act ingeniously sets up a contrast between delusion and true connexion, tying them to day and night respectively. On reflection, we see the insight into Isolde's feelings in the first act as coming from her being stripped of the artifice, the normal psychological machinations everyone uses to make life rational and finding her inexplicable actions have condemned her in the rational world of day.



Fascinatingly, Wagner uses the device of a love potion as something that removes the veil of delusion. By making the love between Tristan and Isolde overpowering and on the surface--where it seemed to be present but repressed in both of them in the first act--it makes them both see how the complex networks of reasons they had for their unpleasant actions were in fact illusory and empty in comparison to the truth of their love.

Almost an hour of the second act is spent on Tristan and Isolde singing about their love for each other and it all works, not only because of the beauty of Wagner's music and the poetry of his libretto, but because of the ideas he's working with. One is reminded of "the little death", the French metaphor for orgasm, as Tristan and Isolde's passionate song goes into the subject of death, of obliterating the two of them until they become one in an oblivion.



The lovers sing of day time as the domain of illusion and the night as the domain of truth, their unrestrained love. It's not hard to draw parallels to the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, with ordered and illusory daytime being the domain of Apollo and unrestrained human truth prompted by liquor being the domain of Dionysus. It's no wonder this opera had such an effect on Nietzsche.

I watched a mid 1980s production from the Bayreuth Festival which featured a great cast of performers and incredibly beautiful set design, but I was upset with some of the creative liberties taken. The second act set, while being a beautiful, John Collier-ish forest that had a good versatility for lighting, was a bit confusing when the characters are supposed to be in King Marke's castle. It gives the impression at the beginning that Isolde and her servant have somehow managed to escape. Worse, though, is that this production portrays the bulk of the third act as Tristan's hallucination which, while fitting into the themes of the play, renders Isolde's final appearance rather unsatisfying and makes the singer's delivery less interesting. And it presents the problem that we never actually get to find out what happens to Isolde.

But otherwise, a gorgeous production of a truly amazing work.

Some Appreciable Gusto

If they were my kids, I'd be sort of proud of the gang who made 2008's Bad Biology. As student films go, it has remarkably communicative editing and actually features a few genuinely funny ideas. Unfortunately, it's not a student film.

My favourite part of the movie was a photo shoot where the film's nymphomaniac female lead, Jennifer, has put vagina masks on a bunch of topless models.



The guy who looks like Patton Oswalt is Vinnie Paz, a hip hop artist, and the movie had backing from other hip hop artists, one of whom is apparently somewhere on the Wu-Tang Clan chain of affiliation. The movie's score by John Glazer and Prince Paul unsurprisingly then has a decent hip hop flavour to it.

I like that director Frank Henenlotter classifies himself as an exploitation filmmaker. Bad Biology almost has enough sex to qualify as an exploitation film, and while it indeed has some of the attitude, the humour is more along the lines of Dead Alive or Stuart Gordon's loose adaptation of Re-Animator, with self-consciously schlocky violence and sex. What Bad Biology lacks that was so crucial to those films, as well as the best of the 70s exploitation films, is a decent cast of performers. What kept Thriller - A Cruel Picture or Women in Cages from being tiresome were the performances by the likes of Christina Linberg and Pam Grier. The performances in Bad Biology are sort of astounding in the consistency of their flatness. The screenplay is another problem as lines too often go over the line from schlocky fun to simply lame. And finally, the filmmakers overestimate the value of some of their ideas, and the last third of the film is simply a dull treadmill ride to the end credits except for some cheesecake.



The movie's lead is a nymphomaniac because nature saw fit to bestow upon her the gift of several extra clitorises. She refers in voice over to nymphomania as a pejorative term invented by men to condemn the female libido. Her argument against society's condemnation of women's sexuality is damaged a bit by the fact that she always kills the babies her strange body immediately produces after sex. I would say the filmmakers are actually making a rather misogynist statement if I thought the movie was that thought out.

The male lead is a guy with a giant penis that has a mind of its own, eventually jumping off his body to ravage a series of beautiful women. He has one of the movie's lamest lines when he compares his dick's single minded pursuit of sex to the drive of a spermatozoa, which I guess is sort of like comparing a car to a car engine. His performance is even more flat than the female lead's, though I was most impressed by the woman's assistant at photo shoots who stumbled over the word "orgasm" to say it like "orogasam".

The conflict between the male and female lead over his penis seemed to me like it was meant to be reflective of a broader conflict between men and women over sexual power, but if that was the filmmakers' plan, they don't really go anywhere with it. To anyone interested in a movie that explores this issue well while employing sex and biological weirdness I would highly recommend David Cronenberg's Rabid.

Balloon Wars

Oh, American political discourse, will you ever stop finding new heights of civility and grace? This is Huffington Post's tactful headline for their story about Rush Limbaugh issuing an apology to Sandra Fluke for heaping verbal abuse on her for weeks, calling her a slut and a prostitute because she suggested health insurance plans ought to cover contraceptives. Here we have a guy who deliberately agitated people, issuing an obviously phoney apology because of his sponsors jumping ship, and The Huffington Post using some of its typically cheap, provocative rhetoric to report it. "Rush Caves"? The point of that isn't justice prevails, it's about a shot to Limbaugh's pride, helping to insure the puerile give and take will continue.

I'd like there to be a slightly more complicated conversation about the culture clash fundamentally at play here as well as the hypocrisy. Limbaugh, who was infamously caught returning from the Dominican Republic with a bag full of Viagra, was attacking Fluke from the point of view of two conservative perspectives--that people should have to cover the cost of their own healthcare (and then some) and that people shouldn't have recreational sex.

It's no wonder President Obama personally called Fluke. Democrats have been wanting to set up Limbaugh as the face of the right wing for a long time, and I say it's a good idea. Boehner may publicly decry Limbaugh's remarks, but this isn't the first time Limbaugh's been this ugly and prominent Republicans are frequent guests on Limbaugh's show. Limbaugh represents the sentiments at the heart of Republican political and government philosophy and he gives us a clearer view of them than the politicians' usually more mild presentations.

Mostly I'm just still amazed that Americans can still be so uptight about sex. Remember what I said about the pot fuelled sodomy scene on Family Guy a few days ago? Well, Rush Limbaugh has guest starred on Family Guy twice.

Twitter Sonnet #360

Sentient coal has chosen the big face now.
Hawaiian ice cream wakes in the lost whale.
Only map mode can quickly move your scow.
Only an O can make your taco male.
Cherubs cradle naked chess grandmasters.
Feather duster crowns fall from good wig hair.
Godly questions have dinosaur askers.
Christ can't meet the stegosaurus's stare.
Glass tamale legions coldly make war.
Sixteen sockets collude in the cupboard.
Mermaids manufactured shovels for ore.
Pool hall visions shaved down L. Ron Hubbard.
Giraffe unicorns sit on Satan's arm.
Deedlit wouldn't know how to handle Parn.

The Car Not Seen

It occurred to me last night one could put together a pretty dynamite Carey Mulligan triple feature with Never Let Me Go, "Blink", and Drive. Earlier in the week I heard Richard Roeper mention on The Nick and Artie Show that he'd put Drive at number one for his top ten list of the year. He's far from alone--the movie appears on nearly every top ten movies list I've seen for 2011, often at number one. I waver between Drive and Melancholia for the number one movie, but there's no question the disparity between the Academy's choice for best picture and the year's actually best picture hasn't been so great since Brokeback Mountain lost to the Paul Haggis version of Crash, and at least Brokeback Mountain was nominated.

I find myself thinking quite a bit about how The Artist is not about an artist. I mean, Valentin, the main character of The Artist, is an artist insofar as he's a performer, but the movie's not about his ability to create art or his passion for it, it's about his pride and his love for the female lead. Drive, meanwhile, is about a guy who has no interest in some mob money he comes across. I sort of wonder if this difference between the movies is reflective of the Academy being influenced by sentimentality and greed.

I finished The Birth of Tragedy a few days ago and it's caused me to re-examine my definition of art. In the past I've said I felt art is any abstract thing constructed by someone or a group of people with the intention of having an effect on an audience. This definition includes artists who create for themselves, in which scenario the artist is also the audience. I don't feel the word "art" implies, as many people do, something good. I think a bad movie, for example, is still art, just bad art.

Nietzsche explicitly says art must have both Apollonian and Dionysian qualities, and he seems to feel that many plays and other media have neither. He presents the mode of thought introduced by Socrates that holds reason as the best goal in art and all other things as the thing that destroys both the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Though he also discusses the fact that art seems to emerge in places seemingly by accident from the works of Socratic writers. I think what he's talking about are the inevitably imperfect and subjective perceptions of reality that must creep into a writer's work. I'd say there's an inherent danger when people mix up their myths and their reason. You get things like Creationism, for example.

So I would say there may be as much value in approaching science with reason and art without it.

While I continue to say bad art exists, I find myself sympathising strongly with Nietzsche's argument that art is essential and a wonderful aspect of human culture. And it is hard to explain why, though I would say part of this genie's appeal is that he can't really be bottled.

Take unto Thee His Burrito, His Burrito is Good

Lately I've been getting lunch often at a relatively new Mexican place called K39 Taco Shop. They have bizarrely cheap burritos--I like to get bean and rice burritos and almost every other place in town has them for around two dollars. K39 has them for a dollar twenty five and they're not cooked with lard. To-day, the pretty young cashier greeted me with a friendly, "Long time no see!" since it'd been a week since I'd seen her. Everyone working there seems like they genuinely, eagerly want to be friends which, to a misanthrope like me, is a little off putting. Then, to-day, by the register, I saw a stack of these;



Dino sure looks excited about that ark back there. If you ask me, it looks about as seaworthy as an ice rink. I asked the cashier if the shop was affiliated with the nearby museum in any way and she said, "Well, I think because they're Christian," as though it ought to have been obvious to me that the place was a Christian taco shop. I'm starting to wonder if K39 is a biblical reference. Is there a book in the bible that begins with K? Is there a Book of Krabappel? Oh, I see, there's Kings, two King books. Let's see, 1 Kings 39 (according to this website) is;

39 As for the other events of Ahab’s reign, including all he did, the palace he built and adorned with ivory, and the cities he fortified, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Israel?

Hmm. And what of Ahab's tacos? Are they so recorded in the annals of Israel, is record preserved of his ground beef he adorned with the decadence of cilantro, salsa, and sour cream? For such may it be said of his avarice, it is known Ahab sought in his arrogance to build on the tortillas of corn a kingdom like unto the Lord's mightily conceived spiciness and savoury sauce.

I like to get bean and rice burritos because it's a good source of protein for a vegetarian. From now on I think I'll say I'm swallowing Christ's hot protein.

I remember hearing about the Creation Museum in Santee in my communications class last year. Now I'm seriously thinking about checking it out. This is their web site.

Human Metal

I feel like David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash is both dated and ahead of its time. I think the dated thing may only come in terms of the controversy it stirred, actually. I saw an episode of Family Guy last night where the baby, Stewie, and Brian the dog come across Stewie's parents naked and high on the couch while Lois, the mother, insinuates the father, Peter, is trying to sodomise her. Imagine something like this on The Simpsons, in the early 90s when there was public controversy just about Bart Simpson's bad attitude.

I watched "Bart Gets Hit by a Car", a season two episode of The Simpsons, and thought again about how The Simpsons' focus on insight into human behaviour is so different from Family Guy's to-day. You have the absurdist stuff, like the phoney Doctor the Phil Hartman lawyer gets who's so over the top phoney, but there's a basic sense of characters trying to process this world in their imperfect ways in the episode, particularly from Marge, Lisa, and Bart. Family Guy has been criticised for taking its characters so far from who they were when they were created, but I actually think this is a result of one of Family Guy's strengths, that it's willing to deviate from a template when something more interesting comes along. Stewie as the evil warlord is less interesting than the more difficult to pigeonhole character he's become, a possibly closeted homosexual whose infant appearance seems to work as a visual metaphor for a sexually confused personality. And Brian, who's gone from the smart ass dog to being something more nuanced, a guy with a bit of an ego, an intellectual who has good perspective about some things, but frequently overestimates himself.

When we consider how tremendously popular Family Guy is, it's interesting to note how the personalities of Brian and Stewie reflect the culture. We've become a much more analytical culture as well as a more sexually open culture, at the same time a much more cynical and jaded culture, due in large part to the internet. Or, more specifically, the saturation of information and porn. Internet forums are often pissing contests between people off-handedly demonstrating knowledge or wit, however puerile, and of course it's hard to go a day without seeing porn whether you want to or not.

So Crash, a movie about people who are so sexually jaded they look to car accidents for stimulation, may have more relevance to-day than it did in the 90s. And yet the characters still feel so fascinatingly cold. Deborah Kara Unger's performance in particular is interesting. When she's having sex with Elias Koteas in a car wash, he looks like he's about to literally devour her, but the look on her face is like she's remote controlling her body from a space station.



She's not intentionally blocking the experience. You sense an intelligence trying to analyse sensation in order to obtain the correct formula for pleasure.

Koteas' character seems to be the fertilising element in the group of lifeless individuals, the one genuinely weird guy among people trying to get in touch with the humanity they've gotten so removed from.

Koteas talks about the gradual fusion of man and machine and how it's leading to a new life form and I think about how much more applicable this is to the integration of the internet into human society.

Twitter Sonnet #359

Skeletal Jolie personifies fear.
Double Roger Thornhills float like petals.
Colin Firth just doesn't want to be here.
The Artist's win's like Aladeen's medals.
Yellow mountains only exit in pairs.
Curly eggs cannot see your new glasses.
Remember umbrellas in black nightmares.
Cherry Hell has surplus backstage passes.
Sensitive light switches watch the restroom.
Dental floss extends across the crack street.
Burning apple sockets portend a doom.
Ancient yoghurt was sometimes topped with peat.
Scorn toast shaped liked Alexander Graham Bell.
Phoney metal retracts in a paint shell.

Arranging the Dreams

Doing my Japanese homework to-day felt like scraping the inside of my skull with a metal spoon. There was a test last night and I think I did well on it, but doing the homework assignment to-day I find I've totally forgotten so much already. I'm constantly having to go back and look things up, and then sometimes the book decides to spring things on me that haven't even been covered yet and are hard to find in my Japanese dictionary because they're conjugated versions of their plain forms that have no resemblance. I guess this stuff is supposed to help you learn by making you look for it, but I really don't think my brain works that way. It just seems to be slowing me down in every way. It feels like I'm doing seventy percent of everything wrong.

I got through the test because I made flash cards and memorised all the vocabulary words. But none of this is making me feel like I'm actually learning the language. Maybe I'm too impatient. We're being taught grammar and things but not in a way that's really helping me assimilate it. I'd like to have a discussion about how the language reflects the fundamental difference in how thoughts are organised by native Japanese speakers. For example, in the previous chapter we learned that "fat" as in describing a fat person is a verb not an adjective in Japanese. Futoteimasu, in the act of gaining weight. It doesn't literally translate to someone gaining weight, it's more like being in a state marked by weight gain. Thin is similar--yaseteimasu, being in a state marked by weight loss.

I watched the first episode of a new, not particularly good, anime series called Black Rock Shooter yesterday and I was excited to find I understood most of what the characters were saying without the aid of the fansubs, I guess because modern colloquial Japanese is very simplistic and also because the main character of this series had a tendency to look at things and just speak a single adjective (aka, red, aoi, blue). Then one of the characters said mitte miru which the fansubber translated as "We will go and look." I know miru means look or see, I know mitte is the conjugated form of miru that makes it the command, "Look." But why would mitte miru mean, "We will go and look"? I know it's customary to omit nouns and pronouns referring to oneself and the person spoken to, but how did mitte miru come to mean that?

But again, most of what characters were saying in the episode I was able to understand. The night before, I'd watched Kurosawa's adaptation of The Lower Depths again, in which I'd understood almost nothing.



But gods what an amazing film. I've never read the Maxim Gorky play it's based on--I hear Kurosawa adapted it rather faithfully but in any case his movie is such a brilliant portrait of the importance of abstract thought to the human mind. I think before I thought it may have been about how delusion is essential to the impoverished, but now I think it's more about how poverty makes fragile and naked the delusions fundamental to the human experience. The compulsion to arrange perceptions in a way that satisfies one's needs.

The tinker who prides himself on his work ethic as the only one who spends his day working among the other denizens of the flophouse. He points to his sick wife as the only thing holding him back from a successful career, but when she dies he sells his tools to pay for her funeral and for this reason he complains that he still can't find the success he deserves.

The samurai who may or may not have actually been a samurai, the prostitute who talks about the john who'd told her of the essentially noble nature he saw in her. As the pilgrim points out, it's important to listen to her story not because it may be true but because it's important to her to tell the story. The pilgrim may or may not actually be a holy man, but Bokuzen Hidari's delivery when he tells the tinker's wife about the afterlife is so beautiful, one doesn't care whether he's the real thing. I honestly wouldn't mind having a con man like that by my deathbed.

But all dreams, all carefully assembled perceptions of reality, are dismantled by desperate circumstances in The Lower Depths. To put it in Nietzsche's terms, The Lower Depths is about the failure of the Apollonian. I was reminded of this rather beautiful bit from The Birth of Tragedy;

Thus the Apollonian tears us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in individuals; it attaches our pity to them, and by means of them it satisfies our sense of beauty which longs for great and sublime forms; it presents images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they contain. With the immense impact of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching, and the sympathetic emotion, the Apollonian tears man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the belief that he is seeing a single image of the world (Tristan and Isolde, for instance), and that, through music, he is merely supposed to see it still better and more profoundly. What can the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish when it can even create the illusion that the Dionysian is really in the service of the Apollonian and capable of enhancing its effects--as if music were essentially the art of presenting an Apollonian content?

We Can Survive on Clouds of Sugar, My Bald Darling

So you went ahead and did it, Academy. You gave the Oscar to The Artist just to spite me. I know you did. It certainly didn't win on its own merits.

I can't say I hated the whole broadcast. Billy Crystal was funny at times, though mainly I guess I'd say he didn't have any particular flavour, which is what I think Oscar producers wanted. There was a Cirque du Soleil performance that fell spectacularly flat--the two stoned faced, flying Cary Grants to some icy Danny Elfman music kind of exemplified the disconnect between the shaved cat self-important self-caressing and the actual joy of movies the evening's theme was ostensibly intended to be. Maybe a close second in that department was a montage of famous movie lines with oh-so-precious soundtrack added, giving an embarrassingly weepy ecstatic undertone to Dustin Hoffman yelling, "I'm walkin' here!" Oh! Dustin Hoffman is walking here! This precious movie moment ought to be encased in a diamond swan, dipped in chocolate and placed in our bathtubs for us to cuddle while we're naked and clean!

Yeah, so the Academy Awards are actually really creepy. It's like having lunch with someone you normally get along with, whose personality you instinctively respond to, and discovering that while you've been talking he's been masturbating under the table.

And may I just point out again that the movie that won for best picture rather undeservedly used music from a great movie that wasn't even nominated for an Oscar when it came out. The Oscars aren't about celebrating movies, they're about the idea of celebrating movies, and so you can't celebrate good filmmaking until you're twice removed from the source. It's like how everyone pretends Angelina Jolie looks good while I couldn't stop thinking of a draugr from Skyrim;



That block of writing tattoo on her arm only emphasises the impression of someone who's been living in a concentration camp. She had great hair and a great dress, but it was like seeing Gollum in drag. Though I think Gollum had a little more meat on his bones.

Speaking of Skyrim, I hadn't realised two Skyrim voice actors, Max von Sydow and Christopher Plummer, were both nominated for best supporting actor. Christopher Plummer certainly deserved the win, though I'd have said he deserved it for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which wasn't nominated the year it came out. When Plummer gave his acceptance speech, it demonstrated again how an older actor almost inevitably does better onstage unprepared than the younger generations. He made a joke about how he had been working on his acceptance speech since he was born eighty two years ago that wasn't particularly funny but it worked because he delivered it well. Every single young actor flubbed at least once on stage last night, but Plummer was at ease and intelligible.

But Hollywood honours its own, sooner or later, and will be very proud of itself for doing it, unless you're Sean Young trying to get into a party.

The Perils of Entertainment Not Faced

Oscar predictions from me? I predict The Artist will win. Maybe Hugo, I'd prefer Hugo won, but I think the Academy will choose The Artist just to spite me.

Hugo's not a great movie, but it was better than The Artist. I'd argue too Sacha Baron Cohen would make a better silent film star than Jean Dujardin. His upcoming movie, The Dictator, looks like it may be partly a homage to The Great Dictator, even. I'm glad the Academy is letting him walk the red carpet in character now. Which is not to say I think the Academy has developed a sense of humour.



Yesterday brought the eighth episode of Nisemonogatari, the beginning of a new story arc. The previous one, involving a con man who infected Araragi's sister with a bee demon of some kind, ended rather disappointingly with a face off conversation with the con man that lasted a long time and essentially went nowhere. This new arc seems like it might be a little more promising--continuing in the Bakemonogatari tradition of analysing anime and manga trends, this one is apparently going to explore the issues of sibling incest that underlie a lot of anime and manga stories. This first episode has managed to be simultaneously disturbing, funny, and sexy.

Araragi's sister Karen asks him to introduce her to Kanbaru, but he'll only do it on the condition that she let him brush her teeth for five minutes, figuring she'll never withstand the experience--he doesn't want Kanbaru and Karen to meet because he's afraid of Kanbaru seducing her. Little does he suspect the act of brushing Karen's teeth would lead to something much worse for the both of them.

I do love an anime that treads dangerous ground. So few do. The new story arc has a good new theme segment. The right mix of creepy and cute;



Twitter Sonnet #358

Iris spirals scrunch the trash out toothpaste.
Gamera haunts the foil ear canal.
Magazine salad leaves no ink to waste.
Nostrils are run by the nosehair cabal.
Buying badges drains nature from crayon.
Your grey matter can't directly make sperm.
Soft dinosaur suits are wrong to try on.
Rubber throats do not work in the long term.
Vulture shaped potatoes await dead dirt.
Intestine banding marks a bad wet vid.
Coated rats on stilts must remain alert.
Good goats know they've no message for a kid.
Beige hats hide thinning and romantic hair.
Caramel geta will stick on the stair.