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Last night's tweets;
No-one knows a cure for delinquency.
No-one in Second Life speaks English now.
Schwarzenegger's on E.T.'s frequency.
Deanna Troi was a real tranquil frau.
I watched Kenji Mizoguchi's 1936 film, Osaka Elegy last night. Like his Sisters of the Gion, another of his films from the era, this one demonstrates how women are pinioned by a network of society's subtle mechanisms in 1930s Japan. It's a melodramatic tale of a young woman who's gradually forced into being a sort of high class prostitute as the pressure of her father's debts leds her to become the mistress of two wealthy men.
The movie stars a young Isuzu Yamada, who somewhat resembles a young Joan Crawford, and, combined with the film's plot, I couldn't help thinking of Crawford's string of "shopgirl" movies in the 1930s, which typically featured Crawford as a poor, working class woman who faces the dilemma of exchanging her virtue for a more comfortable lifestyle. But the steps shown in Osaka Elegy down the path of social disgrace are considerably more credible, despite cumulatively amounting to a melodrama. Because each step is believable, the brutal conclusion works like the end of a good film noir--Yamada's character is no femme fatale, she's more like the poor schmuck noir lead who tried to do the right thing but just had one too many turns of bad luck with her riskier decisions.
Yamada would later become a Kurosawa regular, her most memorable performance perhaps being the Lady Macbeth character is Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth. But Osaka Elegy also features a far more prominent Kurosawa regular, Takashi Shimura, in a tiny role as a police detective. Maybe it's the weight of the later movies preceding him for me, but even in such a brief role, I couldn't help noticing what a presence he already was onscreen. He doesn't even get a single close-up, but he managed to communicate so much from a distance.
I walked to Tim's yesterday and I think I'm still a bit tired from it. The DMV's lagged on sending me my car registration, so I'm walking everywhere. One of the reasons I went to the zoo on Thursday was that was my last day with a motor vehicle. Here're a few more clips from that trip;
The music's "Madiana" by Josephine Baker.Current Mood:  groggy Current Music: "Lady Stardust" - David Bowie |
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The music in that one is "Light of Green" by Nakagawa Koutarou from the Code Geass soundtrack. I was finally able to get to the zoo yesterday because I'd somehow finished the last two pages of the new Venia's Travels on Wednesday night, and the zoo finally has decent hours for people like me during the summer.
I got a lot more pictures and video than I'm posting now--I may post more to-morrow.
( Hungry hyenas and too many human children. )
Twitter Sonnet #38
All centaurs are more human than satyrs.
Neither of them ought to be sawed in half.
In dreams dwell the advocates for waiters.
Who are real humans in the final math.
Italian album takes twenty seeds.
Now deluged by sundry contributions.
Every earnest, hidden muppet has needs.
But they skip the bukkake ablutions.
There's no rain holds a candle to whiskey.
But the Roo cannot to-night be consoled.
Camera weary at dusk is the monkey.
But no-one in this house has yet been sold.
The convenient vehicle is too tall.
Teacup totem ladders too quickly fall.Current Mood:  hungry Current Music: "Whatever Happens, I Love You" – Morrissey |
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The new Venia's Travels is online. I'm pitching this one as Alfred Hitchcock meets Alice in Wonderland. It may distress foot fetishists.
I went to the zoo to-day and took a lot of pictures and video, most of which I will probably post to-morrow, but I wanted to post this peacock right now. It was wandering around in the middle of the road and didn't mind me walking right up--it was so much like my hippogriff dream.
The music's Bernard Herrmann from the Vertigo soundtrack. I doubt I'll be keeping any of the native sound on these videos as you mostly just hear people screaming--children, mainly, but an alarming number of adults.
( Some still pics of the peacock )
There's an intriguing new website promoting Caitlin R. Kiernan's next book, in case you're wondering.Current Mood:  tired Current Music: "Gimme Shelter" - The Rolling Stones |
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Two pretty wild dreams to-day--the first, I dreamt I was taking part in some kind of celebrity charity foot race where the runners had to carry the large egg (about the size of a watermelon) of an endangered bird to the finish line--there was only one egg, and only the person carrying the egg could officially be the winner. I'd just read Roger Ebert's review for Bruno before going to bed, so maybe that explains why there were two Sacha Baron Cohen's in the race--a good one and an evil one. There was also Bill Corbett and Ian Holm in his Bilbo Baggins costume. For some reason, the egg was already broken at the top and clay like, yellow yolk protruded from the fissure and was bigger than it, as though it had spilled out, foamed, and then froze. There were also markings in black felt pen all over the egg, none of which I could decipher, except one of them appeared to be a crude eye. No-one seemed to mind the egg's less than fresh state.
I remember winning the race, despite the machinations of the evil Sacha Baron Cohen, but some kind of technicality I'm not clear on prevented me from accepting official victory. I actually woke up laughing when a stop motion animation triumphantly announced, with a grey clay building from which emerged a flag like at the end of a Super Mario Brothers level, "And the winner is . . . Undisclosed Enterprise!"
I don't remember much else about that dream except a scene with Jason Mewes at a supermarket that seemed like a deleted scene from Mallrats.
In my second dream, I woke up to discover that I'd become an attractive young black woman. I even had a new set of clothes--a rather nice, stylised red velvet three piece suit and fedora. None of my friends or family believed I was me, and seemed angered by my attempts to convince them. So I was wandering the neighbourhood alone at night when I saw something moving quickly about the street that might have been a dog, but it was much too fast. When it got closer, I saw it was a bird--it had a curved, eagle-like beak, wings, and four legs, like a big dog or cat. It kind of skittered about on, I guess, talons, poking about the gutter, trying to find something. I brought out my camera and got some really great footage, though at first it seemed I wouldn't as it immediately leapt into the sky when I pressed record, turning into a tiny dot of light before circling back down to the ground to give me a fabulous close-up. Somehow I knew it was okay to pet it, and I scratched under the feathers of its neck, wary of the very dangerous looking beak.
"It's a hippogriff," said one of the neighbours, standing a few feet away.
Later in the dream, I eventually managed to convince my sister I was who I said I was, but no-one else would believe me. I remember wearing armour and encountering an evil king at one point, too.
Last night's tweets;
Italian album takes twenty seeds.
Now deluged by sundry contributions.
Every earnest, hidden muppet has needs.
But they skip the bukkake ablutions.
I was downloading a collection of songs by Italian singer Mina when, remembering a self described "bukkake queen" and her Italian boyfriend who were on Howard Stern a couple weeks ago, I couldn't help imagining the concept of torrent seeding as bukkake. I was downloading Mina because I had a sudden impulse to have the Goodfellas soundtrack, only I discovered on the CD's Amazon listing that the official soundtrack only has 12 tracks, which right off the bat seems wrong, considering there was music constantly throughout the movie, and there were several notable omissions, like the Sex Pistols' "My Way" and all the Rolling Stones' songs. The absence of the Stones' songs didn't surprised me, since I know their greedy former manager is notorious for charging obscene amounts of money to license early Rolling Stones, and this, I suspect, is why The Rolling Stones aren't as prominent in the culture's mind as they used to be.
Anyway, a commenter on Amazon posted this useful tracklisting of songs actually used in Goodfellas, which led to some sonic adventures for me last night;
( Songs to repeatedly stab someone in the trunk of a car by. )
A couple of these I still haven't been able to find, most significantly any Giuseppe di Stefano. But I did manage to find a number of flac versions of tracks, which I suspect are of much higher quality than the 1990 soundtrack. But the Mina stuff turned out to be lousy remixes from 2004. Why do people do that shit?
Current Mood:  okay Current Music: "Let It Bleed" - The Rolling Stones |
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Last night's tweets;
All centaurs are more human than satyrs.
Neither of them ought to be sawed in half.
In dreams dwell the advocates for waiters.
Who are real humans in the final math.
I'm feeling peculiarly benevolent, so to-day I shall explain the tweets to you, supplicant reader.
The tweets reference Lenny Bruce's prediction that waiters shall be the final oppressed minority, Howard Stern's live shows when he had been fired from NBC and he practiced a gruesome variant of the "saw a lady in half" magic trick, and the first tweet refers to the fact that World of Warcraft classifies centaurs as humanoids but not satyrs. What this means is that Lelia, my undead warrior, can feed on the flesh of centaurs but not satyrs, which was inconvenient because it was satyrs I was battling in Ashenvale last night.
I actually got caught up with my comic last night, finishing the sixth page of the next chapter at around 12:30am, unexpectedly finding myself with an hour and a half of free time. It was extremely disconcerting--I played World of Warcraft while drinking gin, but felt a little ill at ease, keenly feeling like I shouldn't have gotten done all I'd gotten done. Maybe that's why I've been so productive to-day so far--I've already pencilled and inked the last two pages of Chapter 29. I've only a lot of colouring to do now.
Last night I also played with my level four human rogue a bit (this is her);
Nothing remarkable yet, but I'm proud of the name I snagged for her--Galatea. Though I suppose it would've made more sense for my undead character to be Galatea. Oh, well.
Happy birthday, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kittygothCurrent Mood:  productive Current Music: "Spira Mirablis Gekijou" Revolutionary Girl Utena OST - J.A. Seazer |
| » The Expired Milk is Fresh and Was Always Here or Was Never Here |
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Twitter Sonnet #37
Thirteen minutes are similar to ten.
Fireworks never end when you expect.
The new shogun prefers women to men.
All peaceful plans to sack Edo are wrecked.
Tomato sauce has taken the whole plate.
A cat might make a mess of a lizard.
For some spoils mercs will forever wait.
Lazy monks attend them in a blizzard.
There's barely time now for Technicolour.
The angry black cat sleeps in seclusion.
Matters of gross human height are solar.
Brought to a not jolly green conclusion.
The checkout is not your home or your bank.
The world's big with better places to think.
Finally catching up on a lot of things to-day I've been behind on lately, most importantly colouring. It's still going to be rough getting ahead for Comic-Con, though.
With breakfast to-day, I watched the final episode of Natsu no Arashi, which was one of the most gloriously self indulgent works of art I've ever seen. Filled with completely inexplicable and unabashed fanservice. Every few moments, all the characters abruptly changed into different, skimpy costumes for no reason at all, and the dialogue was composed entirely of riffs from two previous time travel comedy episodes, the best bit being a discussion of whether or not a carton of milk would still be expired if taken back in time to before its expiration date and swapped with its past, unexpired version and brought back to the future. The characters present different possible solutions to the paradox while wearing increasingly smaller and stranger clothes.
I think the last conclusion was that the milk existed but only Schrodinger's cat could drink it. Or something.
The time travel comedy was one of the best aspects of the series, which switched between comedy and a drama where a boy and the ghost of a high school girl travel back to the 1940s to rescue people from bombing raids. Interestingly, the show demonstrates repeatedly that the past cannot be changed, and that everything the characters do in the past had already happened, all the people they save had already been saved and remembered being saved by them. In one case, a man informs the characters that they saved him before they go back and save him. I found this a fascinating deviation from standard time travel story telling, though I suppose it might have dissolved tension for a lot of people.
The comedy episodes supported the idea of inalterable history as well, with Hajime, the 13 year-old main character, convincing Sayoko, the ghost girl, to go back in time for his petty schemes, the fruits of which it inevitably turns out he's already experienced. And then there's a great sex comedy subplot about Hajime's co-worker, Jun, who's a girl posing as a boy, though eventually it's only Hajime who is fooled and some nice comedy is produced by the absurd lengths to which Hajime's stupidity goes to prevent him from realising Jun's true sex, even to the point where the two switch bodies and Hajime is so caught up in distress over the absence of testicles on Jun's body that he evidently fails to notice the vagina.
The drama aspects of the show were good, and kind of jived well with all the Japanese movies from the era I've been watching lately, but, if there is another season, I hope it concentrates more on the comedy. Maybe I ought to get the manga . . .
Jul. 7th, 2009 @ 09:49 pm
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| » Illusion and Cruelty |
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My tweets from last night;
Tomato sauce has taken the whole plate.
A cat might make a mess of a lizard.
For some spoils mercs will forever wait.
Lazy monks attend them in a blizzard.
While colouring yesterday, I listened to critic Donald Richie's commentary for the Criterion DVD of The Lower Depths. Most of his analysis centred on the idea of the necessity of illusions for survival, particularly among the poor, which I also felt was the film's chief concern in my analysis. Though Richie, who knew Kurosawa personally, also remarked on Kurosawa's feelings about the subjectivity of criticism;
Of course, my going on like this, about the aesthetics of the Kurosawa film is something with which the director himself could not have disagreed more. He didn't like this kind of talk, like I'm talking now, and in fact when he heard anybody talking like I am now he would either leave the room or stop listening. He simply was not interested in this. If you asked Kurosawa, you know, the meaning of what he was doing he simply had no answer for this. If you asked him how he had done a certain scene, he might be interested enough to answer. His interest in his pictures and indeed life itself was never in, you know, why a thing happens, this was not what interested him. He was very interested in how it occurs. How it could be put together, how indeed it could be reassembled . . . but he simply wasn't interested in any past aesthetic, categorical talk, he disliked the kind of generalisations that I am lavishing on this particular recording. What he liked was the detail, the single detail which showed all, and which rendered all generalisations redundant . . .
He'd say, "Look, I'm making a film. If I could've said this in words, I wouldn't have needed to make a picture of it, right?" And of course, he's quite right. He's implying that the kingdom of words and the kingdom of images are separated by this great gulf and no bridge is ever going to go over it. And, indeed, what we say about a thing and what the thing itself consists of are two entirely different things, which never agree. I mean, post-modernist structuralism says exactly the same thing, and it is quite true--the words create an image by themselves. As you are listening, I am creating an image of those images that you are looking at, but the images you are looking at are the real thing. I'm the illusion, or the delusion, here. The images themselves carry everything we know and we do not need to question what they mean . . .
Which is a fitting enough discussion with a film about people needing their own personal illusory worlds to survive.
Richie digressed quite a bit in this commentary, which is by no means a bad thing, as it sounds as though he has quite a lot of stories, having known several of Japan's greatest directors since the 1940s. I was surprised to hear him say he'd actually suggested to Kurosawa that he cast Toshiro Mifune in Ran. The decades long rift between the director and the man who'd starred in 16 of his films had seemed so profound to me I couldn't imagine someone bringing it up so casually. Kurosawa's reply, apparently, was that he wouldn't work with anyone who'd make something like Shogun, which was an American television series Mifune worked on in the 1970s. But, Richie said, Mifune had been forced to take the role after participation in his last film with Kurosawa had made him unavailable for years after he'd been used to doing two movies a year. He never curbed his extravagant spending, so he was forced to take the first big paycheck that came his way after Red Beard.
But one of the most interesting things Richie had to say about The Lower Depths, to me, was a remark on the casual cruelty of the characters
Of course, illusion is also delusion . . . illusions are against the whole idea of reality, that's why they're called illusions. And so they are delusions in that they separate us from reality, but they also make reality something which we can live with. All these people . . . hope that they are somebody else . . . Both these people are motivated by hate, self hate, usually, or, in the case of the thief, doubts about self. We will shortly see a man who calls himself an ex-samurai and who may well be one. But the important thing is this is the shell, this is the character he has drawn. We see a prostitute later on, and she lives on the illusion, the delusion, that she has had a very great love in her life and that this love is somehow going to go and come back in some way and is going to make her life having been worthwhile.
. . . Here comes the samurai. And you'll notice the way in which the other characters refuse to believe he was a samurai and make fun of his ambitions just as they are extremely cruel to the prostitute. Cruelty in this picture turns out to be a natural function, sort of like eating, or going to the toilet . . . And so, the idea of an evil, something which is larger than ourselves, is not addressed in this picture at all, nor do I believe Kurosawa entertains any such idea. Cruelty is something which is absolutely inbred in us and is based upon our concept of who we want to be and who we think the other person is. In this case, all of these people who are making fun of this man who says that he is a samurai are boosting their own idea of who they are by doing this . . . They have discovered an "other" against whom they can project themselves and hence realise who they are. At least they aren't samurai, at least they don't lie . . . If you look at it closely, everybody turns against everybody else, in that they refuse to accept the illusions which the others feel are necessary to live. Mifune, who has problems of his own, is like a child, he's so delighted, to be able to affirm himself against what he would see as the pretensions of somebody with whom he has to live.
Jul. 6th, 2009 @ 09:59 pm
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| » The Natural History of Love and Demons |
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Well, looks like a prequel to Anne of Green Gables has come to Japanese television. It doesn't look quite as bad as 90% of the mass production anime out there with featureless buildings and cookie cutter character designs, but there's still the notable lack of attention to details of period architecture and dress--I expect that from most anime series, but what surprises me is the lack of enthusiasm for flora and fauna--the forests and mountains in the backgrounds of even some of the cheapest looking anime out there tend to be beautiful. This looks like late 1980s American plastic trees and shrubs along with eerily still forest animals--I mean, it's the theme song, this is where the animation's supposed to go all out. I can only imagine the show itself--it must be like a slide show.
On the other end of the anime spectrum, the new season of Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei premiered yesterday. I hope someone fansubs it soon. Until then, there is the opening and ending on YouTube--the opening's not much to look at, and I wonder if it's temporary, like the plain openings for the first few episodes of the first two seasons. But I do kind of like the ending;
I did watch an Akiyuki Shinbo show to-day, though--the last three episodes of Natsu no Arashi were finally subbed. I'm guessing I'm one of the few people who was looking forward to it, since the comment on one of the raw, unsubtitled uploads was, "Seems like this is the end for this crappy show." Apparently someone hasn't seen Konnichiwa Anne. And anyway, I don't see how anyone can watch this opening and not grin;
My tweets from last night;
Thirteen minutes are similar to ten.
Fireworks never end when you expect.
The new shogun prefers women to men.
All peaceful plans to sack Edo are wrecked.
I have to admit I really don't understand fireworks. They're loud and kind of boring, really. But my sister was really keen on seeing them this year for some reason, so I walked with her and my mother. I didn't dare move my car all day, since this neighbourhood seems to be where half the county goes to watch fireworks.
I did talk my sister into watching 1776, which is so far the best Independence Day movie I've ever seen, but I can't seem to drum up enthusiasm for it from anyone else.
There've been a lot of lizards around here lately. I watched Snow chase down two in the backyard, ignoring me completely in the process. I just hope he eats one of them.
I was eating lunch at the time, and I had the television on The National Geographic Channel, which has depressingly taken to referring to itself as "Natgeo". Who the fuck's that for? History buffs with short attention spans?
Actually, the show I was watching had a definite yellow journalism quality, a kind of charmingly trashy special about the Codex Gigas that clearly wanted to give you the impression that experts are pretty sure it was written by Satan and that everyone who possessed the book was cursed--the show used a lot of blatantly selective reasoning, like mentioning the decline of Emperor Rudolf II after he'd acquired the codex, or the hard times a monastery faced years after acquiring it. Somehow I remember National Geographic being a reputable publication. I suppose I was given that impression when I was a kid. Still, it's sad. Though I couldn't help loving a ghost story told with such earnestness.
Jul. 5th, 2009 @ 09:33 pm
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| » My Resignation |
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I found this beautiful resignation speech by Sarah Palin deeply inspiring;
So inspiring, I recorded my own resignation speech (for some reason Vimeo cut the sound off the first few seconds);
Resignation from Trompe Setsuled on Vimeo.
Jul. 5th, 2009 @ 02:23 am
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| » Quick Spiders |
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Twitter Sonnet #36
I'm looking for a tree in a forest.
Another lovely World of Warcraft day.
A zombie makes an uninspired tourist.
But they're cool with going any which way.
English dubbed anime still sucks ass.
Sounds classy as a used car commercial.
It's always the same Canadian cast.
Money they make, talent they could marshal.
Ten dollars says Willow Palin's pregnant.
To-day was all about the blueberry.
Though they're really more violet in pigment.
Lenny Bruce was an orange spider faerie.
"Red was the colour of the dress she wore."
And there are neckties all over the floor.
I finally did a quest with a group last night in World of Warcraft--two players that just happened to be nearby. They probably thought I was pretty rude because I barely talked--I was playing on Tim's wall mounted television and the chat text was too small to read. But it was fun.
A couple shots of spiders on the back porch last night--
A dead one;
A live one;
Jul. 4th, 2009 @ 06:29 pm
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| » When the Dumb Talk |
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Last night's tweets;
English dubbed anime still sucks ass.
Sounds classy as a used car commercial.
It's always the same Canadian cast.
Money they make, talent they could marshal.
This was prompted by seeing the trailer for the upcoming U.S. theatrical release of the first Rebuild of Evangelion movie. It'd been a while since I heard English dubbed Evangelion--I'd forgotten how astonishingly awful it is. And yet it's par for the course for English dubbed anime. It's funny how they don't tell the celebrities involved with the Hayao Miyazaki dubs to adopt extremely phoney sounding affectations. "This is how it's done! Talk like your little sister begged you to do the voices while reading a story you really hate." I honestly don't know how the productions studios aren't tremendously embarrassed by these products, and then I remember all the money they make off of the incredible imported animation.
I was excited to read about the second Rebuild movie on AICN, which is currently in Japanese theatres. The AICN piece says, "The film took in $5.37m (Y512m) - for comparison, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen opened at $5.88m (Y560.7m)," which is slightly comforting after I read about the spat between Michael Bay and Megan Fox in which she said, "I mean, I can't shit on this movie because it did give me a career and open all these doors for me. But I don't want to blow smoke up people's ass. People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting."
To which Michael Bay replied that he 100% disagreed and added, "Nick Cage wasn't a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in Armageddon. Shia LaBeouf wasn't a big movie star before he did Transformers -- and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from Bad Boys."
To which I reply, What?
Can Michael Bay really be that deluded a motherfucker? Holy shit, Megan Fox must have only cut off a steady stream of ass smoke for a split second. Does he honestly not know about the hit sitcoms Shia LeBeouf, Will Smith, and Martin Lawrence were all in before he cast them? Or Good Will Hunting? And--Nicholas Cage--holy shit. Really, Michael? You never heard of Moonstruck, Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona, Honeymoon in Vegas--fucking Leaving Las Vegas for which he won an academy award a year before he appeared in your aptly named The Rock for being dumb as?! Do you spend more than twenty seconds a day without a sycophant's mouth around your cock? Holy fucking shit.
Not to mention he took Megan Fox's characterisation of Transformers as an attack on his career as a director. What a fucking infant.
Jul. 3rd, 2009 @ 06:46 pm
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| » Love on Your Own Terms |
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I just came back from lunch at my parents' house where my mother had the television on CNN's endless Michael Jackson coverage, in this case Larry King's tour of Neverland Ranch, and I couldn't help thinking of this;
As much as Citizen Kane was an illumination of the ultimate, distilled destiny of the American Dream, so, it seems to me, is the life of Michael Jackson. It's the hardwired sense that the rational objective in life is to obtain sovereignty through money. It doesn't mean Jackson was cruel or despotic--neither was Kane, or William Randolph Hearst. It's just a reflection of the shame felt by Americans for depending on anyone else financially--creating one's own financial fiefdom is the natural result of pulling away from that shame. As Leland said Kane wanted love "on your own terms";
Both Michael Jackson and Charles Foster Kane were people obsessed with reclaiming something from childhood--innocence, or more specifically, the ability to accept love. They were both, as children, betrayed by the world of adults so what they're left with is the American psychological programme and the freedom to exercise it to its conclusion. I find myself thinking again about the sort of freedom granted by internet socialising and how text and online society might reflect the fundamental nature of the American psyche.
Anyway, I'm running very late to-day. Look what I just screwed to my desk!
Last night's tweets;
I'm looking for a tree in a forest.
Another lovely World of Warcraft day.
A zombie makes an uninspired tourist.
But they're cool with going any which way.
I was also sorry to hear Karl Malden passed away to-day. Looks like it's another celebrity apocalypse. I guess this one started with Dom DeLuise? Why didn't Dom DeLuise get round the clock CNN coverage?
Jul. 2nd, 2009 @ 09:00 pm
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| » Proper Cropping |
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Twitter Sonnet #35
Only the farmer you need is missing.
He always buys bait in the pier cafe.
Proper world wars often break for fishing.
Parrot networks are loud, lofty and fey.
Harpies never do anything alone.
They'll drink boxes of tea in one sitting.
The night is as boring as a bald bone.
While an idle, hungry fire's spitting.
A cow can keep a building very warm.
But it's much smarter to keep it frozen.
Some tasty fish swim in a handy swarm.
Stranger meat's delivered by the dozen.
The world is almost as flat as flat bread.
And wet as Weary Willy's nose was red.
I forgot to mention yesterday how happy I was that Al Franken finally got the Minnesota senate seat. But, jeez, you wouldn't know it from the news channels to-day--all I see when I switch between CNN and MSNBC is Michael Jackson coverage. Yeah, it's a sad story and everything, but enough already.
I'm starting to run out of steam, but I actually got quite a lot done to-day so far--I've already drawn and inked a page, gone to the bank, and unloaded the dishwasher. I have a bottle of sake I want to finish off, maybe I can to-night.
I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a couple months now and last week I reached the end of the third season, so now I'm switching between Angel and Buffy. I'm kind of considering abandoning Buffy though--next to even just the first couple episodes, Buffy is clearly nowhere near as good as Angel. Though, to be fair, Buffy at college was a quickly abandoned storyline for a reason and the mayor turning into a lousy cgi monster had to be one of the worst payoffs in television history, so this isn't exactly Buffy at its best.
I am surprised to find third season Buffy in widescreen--I guess I really haven't watched it since it first aired, when the network probably cropped the image. The odd thing, though, is that it often doesn't seem to have been composed for wide screen. Whedon seems to forget what was actually in one shot when he switches to the next--like here--
Oddly halved, nervous Buffy face doesn't quite match up when we cut to--
Buffy face in false contemplation.
I guess it doesn't seem strange after all the cameos by the boom mic in the third season, but Whedon seems to mess up at least one shot in every premiere--a film crew member's sneakers accidentally make it into a shot on the series premiere of Angel, and who can forget this accidental showcase of Alan Tudyk's mime skills from the Firefly premiere;
But I guess I can't imagine the stress of running three television series at once. None of these problems seem as bad as Willow's haircut, which I think actually mainly speaks well for the show. Gods, I miss second season Willow. She calls a guy a "cutie patootie" in a third season episode. Ugh. Willow brand cute must have been a difficult balancing act, but she tumbled right off the tightrope on that one.
Jul. 1st, 2009 @ 08:41 pm
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| » Voyages Across the River Styx Include Free Peanuts |
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My tweets from last night;
Harpies never do anything alone.
They'll drink boxes of tea in one sitting.
The night is as boring as a bald bone.
While an idle, hungry fire's spitting.
Last night, Sarah Silverman tweeted, "If this is real it's incredible. Worth the remote control moment alone." And she posted a link to this video;
Since it seems to be part of a series, I think it's unlikely to be real, but I find it fascinating anyway--the kid's very committed to the role, and of course, it's his or the writers' idea of what they consider believable, so it's something of an indicator of what World of Warcraft means to kids.
I had my own World of Warcraft frustrations last night as I found myself playing it an hour later than I meant to, trying to kill a certain quota of harpies near the Stonetalon Mountains. Part of the frustration was just in knowing I'm probably not going to have time to play WoW again until I've finished this next chapter of my comic and I wanted to accomplish something. I was doing okay killing one harpy at a time, but the fiends kept wanting to gang up on me. I gradually completed the quest, chipping away at it eventually by letting myself get killed by other harpies as I concentrated on just killing one. It occurred to me this might be the heart of the game--past the package and everything, this is the bit that engages in strategy for a solo player, trying to figure out how to kill things slightly more powerful than you, or obtaining a level up by other means.
I suppose matching wits against other players is more enjoyable--I've been getting more invites to join guilds lately, often from people who aren't even nearby, which makes me wonder what interests them in my humble level 24 undead warrior. So far, Tim's all the WoW society I've really needed. I haven't really experienced the joy of team coordination yet, but I think I can say at this point with some certainty that World of Warcraft isn't as good a game as Warcraft II (I don't know about Warcraft III, I've never played it).
I know I probably just sound like an old jerk who thinks everything was better in his day, but much as I was saying about Super Mario Brothers a couple days ago, I think there's demonstrably more of a game present in Warcraft II than in World of Warcraft, and I think the key factor here is the concept of levelling up.
In the classic role playing game, levelling up was simply a way to gauge the knowledge and skill a character had accumulated. But now it's kind of become something that makes computer RPGs seem like the place where the capitalist myth went to die. All around me, in real life, I see people who've worked hard all their lives for something not being rewarded at all, or certainly not in the way they desired. The world of writers, artists, and musicians is an even stronger example, as capricious subjectivity of the audience, and the unreliable preparation granted by traditional training, deny guarantees of success for hard and/or good work. Which is not even mentioning the people who give all their lives to their art and genuinely aren't good at it.
That's not how it is in World of Warcraft--in World of Warcraft, you kill a bunch of enemies, you do your quests, and you will gain experience points--you will level up, you'll get status, precious objects, abilities, and what used to be difficult will become easy.
Warcraft II--like most older video games--wasn't like that. The more you played, the harder it got, the more it demanded from your intellect. The fun in Warcraft II was in strategy, learning to deploy your units in the right locations, from the right directions, in sufficient numbers. It was probably harder to design a game like that--you'd need to figure out the right balance, decide what was reasonable to expect from a player. It probably ought to give one pause to consider that chess doesn't have level ups--it isn't a game one looks for in computer RPGs, and it's not role playing either.
I'm so tired right now. I just came back from lunch at my parents' house with which I had a glass of wine. I suppose I probably shouldn't have. I'm thinking I'll probably put off drawing the first page of the next chapter 'til to-morrow. Which means I'll probably be seeking the level up teat to-night, too. Here's what Lelia, my character, looks like right now, by the way;
I have to admit, she's not keeping those eggs very warm.
With breakfast to-day, I read the new Sirenia Digest. The first story, "THE MERMAID OF THE CONCRETE OCEAN", strongly reminded me of another story by Caitlin, the title of which escapes me, which was about a woman and a young man who desired to know the dark secrets of the woman's past which she dreaded to divulge, and when it was eventually told, the dark secret the young man had sought turned out to be less fantastic than he imagined yet was precisely the sort of heartbreaking horror--made more terrible by its simplicity--that would cause someone to spend a life seeking ideas of more fantastic horror. The new story features an old woman talking to a young man about the motive of an artist she loved to paint mermaids all his life. Again, the root is a simple horror, that if told straight would probably hold no horror for the reader at all. So much of Caitlin's work is in creating the horror by how the characters feel about it--Dogs with really long legs aren't particular scary. The more important thing is how they disturb the people who see them. Much of Caitlin's work seems to be negotiating with the psyche of the reader to respect the sanctity of what's truly terrible*.
Following "THE MERMAID OF THE CONCRETE OCEAN" is another new Sonya Taaffe poem, which is very pretty and sweet, apparently about someone getting more than they bargained for.
Lastly, there's another story by Caitlin called "THE ALCHEMIST'S DAUGHTER", or rather a partial story. It's set in H.P. Lovecraft's dreamlands, in the city Ulthar featured most prominently in Lovecraft's "The Cats of Ulthar", and those cats, indeed, play a part in Caitlin's story. Mostly it seems to be an autobiographical fantasy with Caitlin casting herself as an alchemist's daughter engaged in experiments, attended to by a nurse in a setup not unlike her Second Life role playing relationship with her partner, Kathryn Pollnac. It's an enjoyable read, and it's nice to see another narrative perspective on Lovecraft's dream world, which was always one of my favourite subjects of his works.
Yesterday, my sister went to the mall with me to help me pick out glasses, and she spotted this fellow in a shop window;
Fabulous, no? We also poked fun at this oddly anxious bust of Zeus;
"Um, I'm, like, king of the gods? Okay? If--I mean--you won't hit me, will you?"
*By reader, I don't mean the literal audience, but the hypothetical, phantom one prose addresses by existing.
Jun. 30th, 2009 @ 09:03 pm
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| » Between the Sky and the Ground |
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Here's some footage from yesterday;
The music is "Sous le Ciel d'Afrique" performed by Josephine Baker.
To-day was another busy day, and to-morrow shall also probably be busy. I think it's mainly that I let so many things accumulate while I was working on my comic last week that they're all dog piling me now.
Saturday night, I watched Women in Cages, a 1971 grindhouse film directed by Gerardo de León that'd been on my "to watch" list for a couple years. It floated to the surface of the internet soup for me a couple days ago, and my appetite was whetted by a quote from Quentin Tarantino on the Wikipedia entry about it, "'[the film] is just harsh, harsh, harsh,' he said, and described the final shot as one of 'devastating despair.'"
It's not a happy ending, though I'm tempted to make a top ten list of movies with more impressively bleak endings, except such a list would probably ruin the endings of those movies for people. The influence Women in Cages had on Tarantino isn't as blatant as Lady Snowblood or Thriller - A Cruel Picture, but neither of those pictures as strongly resembles Tarantino's sensibility for composition as Women in Cages.
( Torture and prison, tidy hair and makeup (NSFW) )
My tweets from last night;
Only the farmer you need is missing.
He always buys bait in the pier cafe.
Proper world wars often break for fishing.
Parrot networks are loud, lofty and fey.
Jun. 29th, 2009 @ 10:11 pm
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| » The Day is a Treadmill |
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Twitter Sonnet #34
Sink water is pretty clean for the hands.
Two glasses of drinking water's not cheap.
Dangerous aliens have acid glands.
Jeff Bridges has a secret hover jeep
A blank screen can start a nasty rumour.
Jerri Blank is never acceptable.
The tall centaurs have no sense of humour.
But to courtesy they're susceptible.
One axe is better than two if it's big.
Grindhouse violence is cheap, potent tender.
Economic traps are easy to rig.
Mary Poppins is greater than gender.
You won't be too dry when you have oil.
Entropy is the fate of a foil.
I had million and one errands to-day, beginning with the wonderland of Wal-Mart and its denizens of mullet men and angry, enormous women on motorised buggies with noisy children running around them (I was there for an oil change).
Later, my quests took me west to Ocean Beach. Here are some pictures;
( Spots lucky and otherwise )
Jun. 28th, 2009 @ 09:44 pm
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| » The Artificial World is Yours |
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I love the crazy angles on those buildings.
Last night's tweets
A blank screen can start a nasty rumour.
Jerri Blank is never acceptable.
The tall centaurs have no sense of humour.
But to courtesy they're susceptible.
Sometimes World of Warcraft reminds me of an enormous miniature golf course, which, I know, seems to be a contradiction in terms. But the way it has theme areas partitioned off from one another, there's no way anyone could mistake it for organic, unlike the regions in Oblivion.
When one looks at the area where Durotar ends and The Barrens begins, one sees that the dirt changes abruptly to a drastically different colour like stripes in Neapolitan ice cream. Last night, I ran all the way from Crossroads, in the middle of Barrens, to some mountainous area in the west and then north to a small, isolated valley with a bunch of elks and centaurs. My character's level 22 and everyone there was between levels 24 and 29, so I figured it was just right for me. I did okay, so long as I could fight one at a time, until I ran into some level twenty-nine elf-centaur lady, who mopped the floor with my ass. Didn't stop me from trying five times--I got her down to less than half her hitpoints. Tantalisingly close. Of course, sooner or later, I'll just level up and it won't mean as much when I beat her.
I watched the 1932 version of Scarface last night, which I hadn't seen in a while. It's a little more sensational than I remember, but I still think it's easily a thousand times better than the cheesy Brian DePalma version. I love Paul Muni's innocent glee and the way he pushes around his bosses. You get the impression he's like a monstrous puppy, playing with the world and not quite having a sense of the harm he's causing or what his decisions say about him. The violent anger provoked by his sister going out with guys would disturb even the most meagrely introspective person, but not Tony. Which is what makes him seem so dangerous--he has absolutely no internal compass. At the same time, it's what prevents him from seeming evil. He just seems like another hapless force of nature.
Happy birthday, robyn_ma (it's her birthday, nothing's meant by the juxtaposition. Though she may be a hapless force of nature, who knows).
Jun. 27th, 2009 @ 04:07 pm
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| » Back Through the Looking Glass |
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Okay, here's the Snow video. Try and ignore the ellipses.
And while I'm at it, here's a video Amanda Palmer just posted on her Twitter of her covering "Billie Jean";
Really nice. And a female vocalist kind of contributes to my interpretation of the kid being metaphorical. The piano sounds great--Palmer seems consistently great at doing covers.
Jun. 26th, 2009 @ 11:35 pm
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| » I'z in Ur Wormhole, Disrupting Ur Timeline |
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Twitter Sonnet #33
Five apples will usually defeat four.
Coppola's claret's better the third day.
Most cars are much too noisy to ignore.
Yet they have very little to convey.
In the evening, stone ducks won't run from cats.
Split pea soup oddly resists exploding.
I avoid a variety of fats.
But some banks never commence eroding.
On the fifth day, the claret's not so great.
Plastic plants never want to be broken.
Lots of people don't mean there's a long wait.
A caterpillar army has woken.
Kittens can be consumed by pure wrath.
Cats quietly project psychic bloodbath.
Looks like I forgot to finish the sonnet yesterday--that's how tired I was. I guess I'll pass last night's four tweets onto the next sonnet, which were;
Sink water is pretty clean for the hands.
Two glasses of drinking water's not cheap.
Dangerous aliens have acid glands.
Jeff Bridges has a secret hover jeep.
I think I actually got eight hours of sleep to-day and I woke up at 12:30. That's progress. After yesterday's marathon, I think to-day shall be dedicated to slacking off in the most satisfying ways I can manage.
With breakfast I watched the new Haruhi Suzumiya. The previous episode had been a pretty low key, "summer vacation" episode where the characters just engaged in various normal summer activities like swimming, lighting fireworks, going to a bon festival, and catching cicadas.
To-day's episode featured the characters living through the same events, though with Kyon, the POV character, experiencing deja vu. Eventually, he and the esper character discover Haruhi has trapped them in a time loop of that particular August. This show just keeps being great.
Anyway, remember there's a new Venia's Travels online to-day. And here are a couple new cat videos;
EDIT I was rather irritated to discover YouTube chopped off the end of the new Snow video below so I deleted it and uploaded a new version with a credits sequence comprised of two periods. Hopefully that's enough image information so no-one freaks out too much from black screen. What the fuck, YouTube? I'll do my own editing, motherfucker.
Edit again It got fucked up again. Nevermind, maybe I'll fuck with it later. I'm too hungry now.
Jun. 26th, 2009 @ 05:42 pm
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| » Venia and the Forest Creatures |
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The new Venia's Travels is online. Well, that only took twelve hours. Shit. Still not as bad as the sixteen hours on Chapter eight of Boschen and Nesuko, but, fuck, I'm tired, and I still need to pick up pasta sauce.
Jun. 26th, 2009 @ 12:45 am
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