Setsuled's Journal

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Warm Stratosphere

Just got off the phone with a guy from my cable company who tried to get me to change from my current 40 dollar a month plan to a 106 dollar a month plan.

"What kind of shows do you like to watch when you're at home?" he asked.

"I don't own a television," I said.

"I see. What kind of internet do you have?"

"Cable."

"Okay," he said, "I can't get you a package with internet, a landline phone plus HBO and Showtime, plus free DVR."

"I don't own a television," I said.

"Oh?" he said adopting a sly tone. "If you don't own a television what do you have cable for?"

"I use the internet."

"Oooookay," he said as though I'd said something incredibly ridiculous but wasn't going to waste time fighting with this obvious madman.

He seemed slightly angry for the whole conversation. I don't think he feels appreciated.

At 8am, I received a call from another angry person, a woman this time, whose speech was almost incomprehensibly slurred: "ha'osirur cephonenum'ur-ranmum-y-shosewinree coupon foryinrested in that?"

"I'm sorry, I couldn't understand what you said."

She sighed. "Your cell phone number wasramumishozenfreetravulcoupon are you interested?"

"Are you sober?" I asked.

A pause, "What?"

"Have you been drinking?"

She sighed again, "Are you interested?"

"No thank you," I said.

"Can I ask why not?"

"I think you should sober up." I suggested. "Maybe have some coffee or something?"

She hung up.

I had two dreams last night--in the first one, NASA was developing a way to send astronauts back to Earth naked and without any sort of vessel in order to cut costs. They chose Rob Corddry as a test subject because his bald, slightly pointed head was deemed aerodynamically most suited. I think he survived at the end of my dream.

I also had a dream where I drove a great distance into desert after the Apocalypse. My car broke down so I entered a casino run by Russian mobsters and got in a fight with a short guy in a really nice grey polyester suit. I realised I was wearing a similar suit. I won the fight after a few punches, marvelling that my knuckles didn't feel particularly sore. No-one in the casino paid any attention to the fight.

Twitter Sonnet #588

Faded verdant painted clouds are culling

Lemon rinds too thin for taking seed's side,

Where vacuum pulled a gold canine filling,

Tongueless, castanet scaled wyrms dance outside.

For flavour moguls who deny power

Waiting room recipes blacken timers

When unused glasses show a lost hour

And the minutes remain in stove summers.

Octopus steam suns blister horizons

Roughly cut from bad aquarium food,

Muddy electric liquid liaisons

Charged with changing funds to sycamore wood.

Seven hour ignitions start the car.

Benevolence dreams flares from the pink star.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Loving on the Cold Intestine

Montag the Magnificent tells the audiences of his nightly magic shows that everything is an illusion. We believe him because there's not a single decent performance in 1970's The Wizard of Gore. Also, there's this guy's toupee:

William Shatner looks natural as a forest by comparison. I can't imagine anyone still makes toupees like this. And the bad acting in this movie isn't quite the same as bad acting to-day. In addition to the individual circumstances and motives that led to a bad actor appearing in a movie one can also get a sense of how movies and acting were perceived in the common qualities of inept performances of particular eras.

There's less of the self-awareness you see in to-day's bad acting, the culturally conditioned tones of broad irony cultivated through behind the scenes documentaries and video interviews with stars. There's none of the artificial, stiff vocal training of bad actors in the first talkies. In this 1970 low budget film, you witness a handful of regular folks who memorised some words and went on and tried to say 'em like they mean 'em real hard.

It was such an innocent mediocrity. There's a kind of monotone shoutiness in the male protagonist (Wayne Ratay). The female protagonist (Judy Cler) is a little better, mostly guilty of overemphasising her lines, but at least she gives some variance in tone and her laughter sounds more natural than everyone else's.

Ray Sager as Montag is broadly phony but that does at least fit his character. The movie earns its title, to be sure. Montag uses a chainsaw, a punch press, and swords on women he hypnotises to come onstage. Or, well, he uses them on the obvious dummies and butcher shop merchandise substituted for the actresses.

Sheep carcasses soaked in Pine-Sol, according to Wikipedia. None of the injuries actually look like they're caused in the way they're supposed to.

After Montag slices through the woman's stomach, the film cuts to a close up of blood and guts that appear to have been lying around for some time. There's no arterial spurting, the organs seem to be arbitrarily piled about before Montag picks them up and plays with them for the camera. There is a certain zest in these scenes, though, and one has the feeling the director, Herschell Gordon Lewis, really loved innards and that everything else in life--the romance between the protagonists, their careers, the cops--was just tedium.

Monday, January 20, 2014

The Pitiless Wall

In 1938, a German and Austrian team scaled the formidable north face of Switzerland's Eiger ("ogre") Mountain for the first time. 2008's North Face (Nordwand) is not about that historic climb but rather about one of the many failed attempts at climbing Eiger's north face, a 1936 attempt by two Germans and two Austrians. It's a grand, somewhat subversive movie about cold, meaningless failure.

The two German climbers were Toni Kurz (Benno Furmann) and Andi Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas). The movie unwisely invents a love interest for Toni, a young newspaper photographer named Luise (Johanna Wokalek). Her boss at the paper, Arau (Ulrich Tukur), is working to push Nazi propaganda about German racial superiority and so he sends Luise back to her home town of Berchtesgaden in the hopes she can convince Toni and Andi to climb Eiger. In the movie version of events, the three grew up together in Berchtesgaden.

Andi's established as being the more youthful, reckless, and motivated by the esteem of others. Toni is quieter, prudent, and established as being less influenced by promise of prestige. Both German climbers come off better than the somewhat broad and cartoonish Austrian climbers they're eventually forced to team up with. The movie somewhat unwisely lays much of the blame for the failure of the attempt on the selfish and short sighted actions of the Austrians.

I've heard there was some controversy about the film in Germany, that people were uncomfortable about a movie set in the 1930s, about presumably loyal citizens of the Third Reich, without being overtly critical of the Nazis. But I think one could argue Toni's point of view, which sees him mountain climbing seemingly out of a strong, personal love for life and nature rather than to compete or to diminish others by contrast, as fundamentally opposed to the Nazi philosophy. And as such, the movie conveys by contrast, manifested particularly in Arau, the very human motives that built the Nazi Party. The team's failure to live up to the athletic ideal, to be the German heroes the newspaper wanted them to be, shows up the hollowness of not just Nazi vainglory but self aggrandising ambition of any kind.

As I said (and apparently Roger Ebert held the same view), the introduction of a romantic interest was unwise. Particularly in the climax of the film which portrays the incredible circumstances at the end of the climbers' adventure with considerable accuracy--a fact which surprised me because what transpires is a series of incredibly unlikely and traumatic events. But the film, in adding Luise wandering onto a ledge on the North Face without any equipment to shout through the wind and communicate with her beloved somewhat diminishes the impact particularly considering, as Roger Ebert pointed out, "the reputed lovers got along perfectly well apart for 10 years."

The movie has some absolutely stunning location footage of the actual Eiger and surrounding countryside without reliance on cgi.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Green White

One of the reasons I finally forced myself to finish The Sopranos is that I started watching Breaking Bad--I'm two episodes into the second season now and so far I'm impressed. The cast deserves the gushing letter of praise Anthony Hopkins sent them--something I consider to be one of the biggest reasons Bryan Cranston won the SAG award last night. Which is not to say I don't think he's amazing. His is the best performance of a show filled with good performances, partly just because he's the central character and has to carry more but also specifically because of the kind of character he plays--a man who's gone along with what his family and society want and need against his own feelings for so long that it's built this constant emotional wall around him. Cranston conveys this while at the same time conveying specific emotional motives for each scene. It reminds me a little of Cary Grant's performance in Notorious.

But, again, the rest of the cast is great. What I especially like is how these are kinds of people one knows from life without being sitcom stereotypes. Particularly Walter's cop brother-in-law who could very easily be the dumb, authority obsessed cop stock character. But even when he's ridiculous, like when he takes Walter's son on a misguided "scared straight" field trip, he's believably human. Which is crucial as he represents one extreme end of one of the show's driving forces, the debate over recreational drug use. Though it's perhaps a tad too obvious when he unselfconsciously produces a box of Cuban cigars to share with Walter.

Walter himself is an effective point for an argument not merely about anti-drug laws but about lazy, selfish thinking that expects invisible forces of law and social decency to sort life out. I remember seeing articles with headlines asking why we sympathise with Walter even though he's clearly a villain. I haven't seen anything so far that clearly casts him as a bad man but, assuming he eventually is firmly established as one, I would say what makes people so invested in him is that he's a character who decides to break out of this artificial world that has kept him emotionally pinioned for so long. The fact that he makes ultimately unwise or flatly bad decisions only strengthens the appeal because it acknowledges the usefulness of social contracts. It's a more honest comparison that way so that we can ask ourselves, is the sort of freedom Walter chooses worthwhile even if he fails?

Twitter Sonnet #587

Tiny colourless crabs glimmer for ships.

Cypresses lean in the shade of a house.

Hands and mouths reflexively clutch the chips.

Pink fan fiction builds around the lab mouse.

Chrysler oaks're swallowed by chrome sparked fog.

Treasonous surveys foiled crab congress.

Lamps are hewn of a legless old spruce log.

Emerald needles crown a waiting empress.

Diplomatic diplodocus can dream.

Kinetic treacle can tap a deep well.

Ornate ornithology can redeem.

But bicycle salad dressing can't sell.

Crustaceans short-change challenged blue granite.

Uncharged coils linger in our bonnet.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Protection Racket of the Doctor

Tell all of my friends

(I don't have too many

Just some rain-coated lovers' puny brothers)

Dallow, Spicer, Pinkie, Cubitt

Rush to danger

Wind up nowhere

Those are lyrics from "Now My Heart is Full", a song by Morrissey. I've listened to it many times but never knew Dallow was the Doctor--the first Doctor or William Hartnell, anyway, in the 1947 film adaptation of Brighton Rock, a nice English film noir.

Even then he knew bow ties are cool. Just look where it got him.

Dallow, Spicer, and Pinkie are members of a gang operating in 1930s Brighton, a place, opening titles inform us, once steeped in crime which has all been cleaned up somehow by 1947.

Seventeen year old Pinkie (Richard Attenborough) is the leader of the gang despite the fact that Hartnell was thirty nine at this point. Hartnell comes off a bit like George Raft in the original version of Scarface--a cool headed enforcer, content to be second in command. And Hartnell is great in the role not only managing a good cockney accent but also exuding that threateningly indolent body language of a gangster. Better than Raft did, really.

Attenborough's performance is no less impressive as another kind of gangster, more like the kinds played by Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, with a violent pride that mistrusts anything he can't control. He starts with one murder and continues killing and dissembling throughout the film in an attempt to make sure life stays simple.

One could say the film is about the foolishness of youth. Pinkie starts making time with a kind of heartbreakingly innocent teenage waitress, Rose (Carol Marsh), when it turns out she witnessed something that could damage his alibi for the first murder. She's never had a boyfriend and seems like she's led a pretty sheltered life up to this point. Marsh manages to give the character a credible excitement at the idea of being with this tight lipped, handsome young man she barely knows.

One of the things that makes this more of a film noir than the gangster films that influenced it is that the closest thing the movie has to a hero is a middle aged barfly and possible prostitute named Ida (Hermione Baddeley) who investigates the first murder Pinkie committed when the police won't listen to her suspicions. There's the suggestion that the police are too jaded to be more than passively disgusted by crime anymore, leaving it to Ida and her considerably more limited means to crusade for justice.

Which is ironic considering the intense paranoia felt by Pinkie. It's not hard to see the young man would have no trouble with the law at all if he simply didn't bother taking the violent and erratic tactics he takes in trying to cover his tracks. But that's a foolish youth, or one kind of one.

He and Rose have a conversation about religion when he sees a rosary fall out of her purse. It turns out they both have faith in teachings of the Catholic Church. Pinkie tells her he certainly believes in Hell but when she asks him about Heaven he seems to think the idea is ridiculous.

Friday, January 17, 2014

Exoskeletons or No Skeletons Please!

To-day I have a whole heap of crustacean and mollusc pictures. I went yesterday to the tide pools at the Cabrillo Monument at low tide. It seemed like the dense population of tiny sea life went on forever.

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Cabrillo is at the end of a long, skinny peninsula. The water is far below the road but the ocean was plainly visible on both sides of me as I drove. Somehow there's also a massive cemetery on peninsula, too, and starfields of seemingly identical white tombstones.

It was a good thing I got there an hour before low tide because there's a lot of interesting things up on the hill.