Pah

Positive Review: Minority Report

My July Project has failed. But, for Ainsley, what I liked about Minority Report:

I liked that John Anderton was a drug addict. Because blockbusters rarely allow their characters to have adult failings, because this is the now of America rather than the future, because Tom Cruise has become too clean cut in recent years.

In fact, I liked Tom Cruise’s performance overall. He does a good driven man (see also Harrison Ford in The Fugitive and Mark Wahlberg in Planet of the Apes).

I liked the shotgun that Tom picked up in the car factory skirmish. Because I like first person shooters and cross-fertilising media codes, because I like gun action movies, because it’s just fun.

I liked the cars that are able to take part in a public transport grid and merge with the city’s architecture. Because I like this kind of socio-technology.

I liked the cybersex baggies that people wrap themselves in. Because it’s so squalid and human, because it acknowledges limitations in technology and usefulness in our own bodies. (Gwyneth Jones mentions similar tech in North Wind.)

I liked the big International Rescue look of the Pre-Crime Division, tapping into Grant Morrison’s anticipation of the post-S11 zeitgeist.

I like movies that have a go at a complete sci fi environment (Star Wars, Bladerunner, The Fifth Element).

And I liked the cinematography. Mmm, white darkness.

Endless Nights

Endless Nights

About a month to go…

The inflatable joke

The inflatable joke

The inflatable boy who goes to the inflatable school was sitting at his inflatable desk listening to the inflatable teacher give the inflatable lesson. Don’t click through if you’ve heard this one.

Aristotelean

Aristotelian drama. I think Aristotle stands for more, though - all those common senses of trad storytelling.

(Babylon 5 is very much taken with Aristotle, and in this sense it is a step backwards from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which kept away from bloodlines, assumed all gods were frockless from the get-go, allowed characters to remain largely unchanged, and happily killed every bit of forboding it introduced.)

Buffy To Go

Let’s have a look at outstanding story points I can think of. Feel free to disagree or tell me something I’ve missed.

Spike. Will his soul stop him killing? Buffy knows the answer to this and so do we: yes. This has been answered again and again in Buffy and Angel. What about him and Buffy? I think that was shown last night. What was the First Evil’s plan for him? …

Willow. Is she evil? No. Compare her love making with Kennedy last night to that of Buffy and Angel in Season 2. But I still think that she will have to face Tara (the show has an excellent track record of getting talent back when they need it, so I don’t think we got Cassie channeling Tara purely for availability reasons).

Andrew. Is he evil? No, he’s definitely done, I mainly mention him to point out the similarity between what Buffy forced him to realise and what she realised herself last night.

Anya. Is she evil? No, just misguided, as we’ve seen. But can she find a human identity for herself? … Will she get back together with Xander? I’d be happy for their story to stop being told at the point we saw them last night. Buffy doesn’t strike me as the kind of story that ends with Happily Ever After (or its negative equivalent).

Dawn. When will she grow up? When she’s older. But I was impressed with her first tentative step at independance last week. She will have to face what Joyce told her about Buffy.

Faith. Too many questions! I think there are a lot of answers that can be found earlier in the series (and Angel) upon consideration. But, is she dead? …

Buffy. How has her revivification allowed the First greater access to the world? This has been kept low key, as it should, but it will have to be glossed eventually, possibly even thematically (though I think not). What is a Slayer? A Slayer is always a girl (and occasionally becomes a woman) so I guess it’s obvious why we’ve been introduced to Caleb.

Will Angel come back before the final moments of next week’s episode?

BtVS: 7ABB20: Touched

Written by Rebecca Rand Kirshner.

Nice how Faith assumes Buffy’s attitude as well as her role, confirming some of what I thought after ‘Lies My Parents Told Me’. Leaders can listen to their followers, but they make the decisions, not the followers. Giles wants to lead from behind - my friends are still convinced there’s something Not Giles about him, but I disagree, I think he’s in character, just out of his element. The potentials want some kind of mob democracy - recalling anarchist cells in the Spanish Civil War who outvoted experienced tacticians and got themselves killed. Leadership is a tricky thing.

I turn the floor over to Mark Bernstein:

Buffy is, obviously, a response to the teen slasher movie, and specifically to the genre’s second body — the pretty girl who enjoys her sexuality without earning it. Whedon says so, but it’s not exactly rocket science to figure it out for yourself.

Note for Watchers: The Blonde Victim is attacked by monsters because everything comes easy for her. She’s pretty, she’s talented, she’s popular, she enjoys her body. She’s blessed — and she does nothing to earn it. And that’s exactly where Buffy starts, back in high school.

Now, very close to the end, Anya (of all people) says the words: “You’re not better than us. You are just luckier. Than us.”

So, we’re doing Isolation Of The Hero, and we’re making a clever little point about relationships by having The Night When Everyone Has Great Sex Except Buffy, we’re courageously making TV safe for gay people, and all the time we’re letting this childhood terror out one last time.

Not bad for about 20 minutes of footage. Or, maybe I’m wrong. I think I know where we’re going, but you never know.

Murder on the Orient Express

This is the first Agatha Christie novel I have read. (I haven’t even seen an adaption of Christie, though the cast photos for the film of this story are packed with yumminess, so I should borrow this one at least.)

Christie is a fine writer, with a light touch, though the denouement is marred by a sudden bout of exposition - probably acceptable when this novel was written. (And her usage of untranslated French passages made me wonder if the language would have been understood by the then audience.) Her plotting is superb.

From a detective point of view, I’m not sure all the clues are presented to us, though again, they might have been present for the audience at the time. It didn’t really bother me: I had heard the solution before, and I don’t really read this kind of fiction to pit my wits against the author’s detective.

The presence of class, racism and sexism are heavy in the novel, opening an interesting window on the ruling class of the Thirties. I particularly liked the passage introducing the passengers in the dining car, starting from a philosophical statement of the wonders of cosmopolitanism and then moving through a number of stereotypical caricatures!

And a line, referring to murder, that can’t be written any more without being crushed by irony: “we are not so wicked as that in Germany.”

Fable

Fable

Rys shares a haunting poem by WS Merwin.

The Horror Timeline: 1990s

The Horror Timeline: 1990s

Hey, Kyla and David have updated the timeline. (And Kyla’s writing one of the Buffy RPG sourcebooks.)

David’s Festival of International Films: Day One

Yesterday:

Max

Director: Menno Meyjes
Country: US/Canada/Germany
Yumminess: John Cusack
Rating: Excellent

The setting of Munich 1918 is intoxicating. Ideological battles, modern art, rotten romanticism, injustice of Versailles. The relationship between Max and Hitler is lovely. Lots of great lines. Subtle film that allows the audience to bring its own readings of individual action or historical inevitability. Beautiful cinematography.

Sex is Comedy

Director: Catherine Breillat
Country: France
Yumminess: Anne Parillaud, Ashley Wanninger
Rating: Very Good

I love the sensuality of Jeanne, how she casually transgresses personal space, as if perhaps everyone is an extension of her psyche. Lots of acute observations of male/female relationships, with an awareness that these observations are not universal. The pseudo-documentary style is absolute with completely convincing performances. Good window into filmmaking. Funny.

Broken Wings

Director: Nir Bergman
Country: Israel
Yumminess: None
Rating: OK, don’t bother

Some nice moments. Excellent score. I enjoyed it more as a Jerusalem travel brochure: I never realised that the city was so lush. The terraced underground station was interesting (I think there might have been one in San Francisco).

Morvern Callar

Director: Lynne Ramsay
Country: UK/Canada
Yumminess: None
Rating: Dire

The heroine, whose boyfriend has committed suicide, moves at a glacial pace through a series of variously cliched and random vignettes with her friend. Eventually she dumps her friend. Excellent soundtrack (though the film keeps hinting the soundtrack, in the form of a mix tape within the narrative, is important, this is never developed). The scene of a Spanish club really terrified me (Wachowski Bros take note) - I’ll have to visit one…

Walken @ Cornish Arms 25/7

Walken @ Cornish Arms 25/7

Cornish Arms: How is it I lived within ten minutes drive of this pub for 18 months without ever visiting it? This is surely a lovely little secret. Top quality nosh (gourmet kangaroo steak meals, wondrous wasabi sauces, and Melbourne’s only mixed grill), a great mix of dining and pool room atmospheres, local premium beers on tap, big stage. And you don’t need to pay the band cover charge if you’re already dining, drinking or playing pool. Plus, they play Mit Gas on their sound system. Only a short distance from Harris, so no more going to Bridie O’Reilly’s for me!

Walken: almost four years, wow. I’m still waiting for the penny to drop, for the mainstream to pick this band up. I know I seem biased, their guitarist is one of my best friends, but I don’t suffer bad art even for my friends (I’d be privately encouraging, not publicly enthusiastic). This is one of my favourite bands and I miss not having a nicely produced CD to listen to, though their live performances are always a pick-me-up.

I grapple with describing Walken. Standard line-up: singer, guitarist, bassist, drummer. I call them a pop/rock band, but a fairer estimation would be folk/funk/punk/pop/rock/metal acoustic/electric superstars! I reference the Chili Peppers, REM, and FNM, and agree with Damien’s statements that they remind everyone of “the best parts of their favorite bands” and “are thus engaging, recognisable and yet unique.” But that’s it: a clever lyric may invoke REM, or a bass line the Chili Peppers, but it’s the overall different feel that I love, not the similarities.

They have a very full sound. Each is an accomplished musician in his role, but no one dominates the other. Each one is always on. Mixing mishaps for the first half of last night’s set really gave their professionalism a chance to shine as they played tight without being able to hear themselves, let alone one another. Even as the audience couldn’t hear one different player from song to song, what came from the other three, though noticably lacking a part, was still musical. The second half of the set was free from technical issues and there the band really soared. Walken may be devoted to perfection but they are ever restless, playing new variations on their songs each time they perform. Sometimes that is as simple as raising the tempo, sometimes there are more complex changes to the arrangement of a song.

Walken are absolutely the antidote if you’ve got The Plurals (symptoms: The Vines, The Drugs, The White Stripes, The blah blah blahs, The etcs). Fifteen songs last night would have put you into full remission. If you didn’t get your cure last night, remember you’re putting the health of others at risk! See Walken as soon as possible.

He-Man On Ice

He-Man On Ice

I drove past a theatre playing Nutcracker on Ice last night, which reminded me of this article by Matt on the Masters of the Universe Power Tour. Why is it that no one but Disney does these things these days? Where’s Dragonball Z on Ice? Even Harry Potter on Ice? (Mmmm, Reptar on Ice.)

And another reminder that Matt can still turn it on (and showing you don’t need Flash to be humourous on the web): Skeletor stars in The Great OPERATION Adventure!

Flashback: Metallica Bad!

Flashback: Metallica Bad!

What with all the recent Flash goodness, plus finally seeing Seabase 2021 myself and introducing Ainsley to Invader Zim, and as (New) Metallica are encroaching our country and airwaves yet again, I suddenly had a flashback to The Year 2000. Talking about it, I discovered that many people had never seen the seminal ‘Napster Bad!’ So here it is or here it is again.

Though I think New Metallica begins with Load and some people cite the Black Album, I find myself seeing a root in the ‘One’ film clip that got me into the band. That’s where Metallica became copyright pirates — because copyright was intended to encourage the proliferation of work, not lock it away. HUAC failed to censor the novel of Johnny Got His Gun, but Metallica have succeeded in censoring the movie, just so they can use clips in their “cool video”. (Ainsley owns a copy of the movie, fuck Metallica!)

Administrivia: Blog Birthday 3

Administrivia: Blog Birthday 3

Tomorrow it’s this weblog’s third birthday, though it was rotting rather than growing for a recent ten month period. So happy birthday.

Reading Update

The liner notes for The Pretenders’ Greatest Hits album calls the band hyperpop. What is hyperpop? Is there anyone like The Pretenders?

Saw Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo on TV the other night. It kind of snuck up on me. This turns out to be a surprising film, with many delightful resolutions to its twists and turns. And forget “male gigolo”, the word is “man whore”…

I read Shakespeare’s King Lear. I found the process a bit wearing. The words are heavy and repetitive, as if the Shakespeare Monkeys were simply iterating through syntactic permutations knowing that they’d hit upon a happy phrase once in a while. With no favour from these heavy and ugly ornaments, the plot seems mechanical also. If you want a good telling of the story of Lear, do yourself a favour and watch Kurosawa’s Ran instead (a must for all fans of Star Wars and anime, anyway).

Finished Hocus Pocus. There are some nice lines, but it really was over by page 183 of my copy, after the anecdote about the golden-haired Lilac Queen, before ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore’.

Of course, though the story stopped being interesting, Vonnegut is a master of plotting: incident and coincidence seem to explode in his novels in the way that they do in the real world. This is worth mentioning, because linking is such an important part of the novel form. The narrative often draws characters together to the extent that they all become related, crushing the world into a tiny, worthless ball. I’ve just started reading 253 by Greg Ryman, which at least has a formal justification for linking - if he didn’t his novel for the internet wouldn’t be a hypertext. It will be interesting to see if he manages this requirement without becoming ridiculous. I’ve just finished and enjoyed Car 1. Worthwhile jumping on points are Passengers 9, 23, and 31.

Tonight: Walken, One Trick Pony

Venue: The Cornish Arms (163A Sydney Road, Brunswick)

Walken: 9:30 - 10:30
One Trick Pony: 10:50 - 11:50

$5.00. Doors open at 9.

The Classic Rock Realm of Ferro-Cement

The Classic Rock Realm of Ferro-Cement

The future past, the architecture of psychedelic science fiction utopianism. (Remember, not even Utopia was a utopia.)

(via FutureCity, via Damien)

BtVS: 7ABB19: Empty Places

Written by Drew Z Greenberg.

Not much to say about this episode directly. Feels like I need to see what comes next to understand what’s happened.

What is a Slayer?
This Slayer has proved her greatest strength to be her friends and family.

Seasonal Climaxes
1: Buffy, really working solo at this point, feels estranged from Giles when he doesn’t tell her what’s going on.

2: Unable to save her friends, expelled from school, thrown out of home, chased by the police… After teaming up with an enemy, she kills her boyfriend and runs away.

4: The Scoobies have grown apart this season and then Adam sends Spike to play on their divisions.

5: Buffy’s mother is dead and now her friends want to kill her sister. She commits suicide.

6: Buffy’s been distant from her friends and sister all season, so it’s up to Xander to stop Willow destroying the world.

Only in Season 3 do the Scoobies manage to keep together, though they do lose Faith. Be careful to see the differences while you look at the similarities.

After Buffy’s declaration to Dawn at the end of last season, I expected a coming together this season. Learning to deal with their own problems, developing a strategy to face the Hellmouth. Was I expecting something of the story or the characters?

Buffy is a rebuke to Aristotelean storytelling conventions, in the large (the existence and themes of Season 6) and in the small (little trips of fan expectation, such as whether Giles was dead). There is no requirement for characters to have flaws, realised or overcome. To see what happens we must see what happens.

Xander’s Eye
Will Xander’s eye be repaired? I don’t think so, invoking the comparison with Tara: She was damaged and she was saved by magic. But the last season brought the utility of magic into question. I don’t think the Scoobies will reach into that bucket so easily again.

But if it could be fixed, would you think that the wound is (from Willow’s POV) a reminder of the limits of power, or (from Xander’s POV) that the wound is an important symbol of the risks heros take? These are historical not mythological characters, people not symbols.

Series Climaxes
What will be Buffy’s closing structure? Will we get an epilogue, or will the final episode be the climax? Given the nature of the show, it could go either way. What we are shown will stop at the end of this season, but non-Aristotelean stories never stop.

What a Slayer is

Season 5 asks the question, what is a Slayer anyway? When it seems like this might get needlessly ontological, the story gets all thematic instead. What is a Slayer? In the season climax Giles says: “She’s a hero.”

Picking up on this thread in the Season 6 climax, Willow posits that a Slayer is a killer. Buffy replies, “I’ll show you what a Slayer really is.” But the question remains open. Early in Season 7, D’Hoffryn observes “Isn’t that just like a Slayer? Solving all her problems by sticking things with sharp objects.”

Before ‘Restless’, everyone knew what a Slayer was: a response to the teen slasher movie. Instead of the blonde ditz who screams, we get the girl who kicks arse. But Mark Bernstein offers a deeper reading:

Buffy is, obviously, a response to the teen slasher movie, and specifically to the genre’s second body — the pretty girl who enjoys her sexuality without earning it.

B … tVS … B … 5

Buffy: Counting Down From 4…

Talk about waiting anxiously for “The Final Five” reminds me of the Babylon 5 days.

Has anyone else noticed the B5 flavour to this season of Buffy?

Buffy as back from the dead generalissimo, a la Sheridan. Willow, who has been doing a Lyta likeness since Season 5, has recently reminded me of the Ivanova+Marcus/Byron thing that JMS wanted to do. And as of last week we have Xander as G’Kar.

Or does the introduction of Caleb signify a riff off American Gothic? “Merly…”

A Friendship Poem

A Friendship Poem

I pointed to a Friendship Poem twenty months ago. Today I discovered it 404′d. I went to the Internet Archive to recover the text for a local archive here, but then discovered it had been prolifically replicated around the net already (see title link). My favourite version, and Google’s, is here.

The Ruin

The Ruin

Excellent early English poem. (via Mark Bernstein)

The Real Thing

Ainsley asks:

What does Mr [Russell] Morris mean when he says that he “is the real thing?”

Johnny Young, who wrote the song while smoking a joint, says:

At the time everything was telling you to do this, or do that, because ‘it’s real’. I wanted to say no to all that - I am the real thing, you are the real thing, we are the real thing.

(If you think this song’s creation couldn’t get any crazier, let me just add: Molly Meldrum produced it. Details here and here.)

Music Humour

What do you call a dog with Wings? Paul McCartney. But seriously, listen:

Sometimes I feel
Like I don’t have a partner
Sometimes I feel
Like my only friend
Is the city I live in
The city of Angels
Lonely as I am
Together we cry

Anthony is telling a story about how he is alone and alive in a sentient City. His melancholy at being the last human reflects the City’s melancholy at being the only one of its kind.

The line about not having a partner is initially mysterious, a hook into the story, and will become clear later. [More]

Review: Review: Psalm 69

I didn’t like my Friday review of the Ministry album Psalm 69. The linked review is good, but I didn’t add much coherent to it. I like the first real paragraph, but it’s really just a review of the song ‘Psalm 69′. The second paragraph tries to set some context, but then I lose all coherency trying to deal with that context.

I think the third and parenthetical fourth paragraphs shows what went wrong. I suddenly tried to relate some of my current context to my past listenings and there really is no relation. In some sense this is the same song, but it’s certainly not the same me listening to it. Reviewing the album I listen to today is a kind of nostalgia and that’s not what I had in mind when I started the review.

Good reviews for me are often all about explaining salient bits of context. Telling a story about how I came to listen to a song I liked. Because musical theory is beyond me and probably most of the people I talk to. I just know what I like. Eclecticism means having no theory to explain what you like. So I give you circumstantial evidence instead.

Review: Psalm 69

Review: Psalm 69

“Congregation, please be seated and open your prayer guides to the book of Revelation, Psalm 69…”

With these words, a musical vista opened before me. Samples, speech, wails, sound effects, unusual instrumentation… complex walls of sounds breaking into a steady pulse then returning to complexity. For me, ‘Psalm 69′ broke open the possibilities of what music could be. I’d already had an inkling and already listened to some amazing stuff, but it was unexamined data. Now my ears were open…

The year was 1992. I didn’t have the album, just selected songs on a mix tape. I thought of this music as heavy metal, I hadn’t heard the term “industrial”. A year later this music confirmed its place in my mind as the future when Clive Barker referenced ‘NWO’ in the first issue of his Saint Sinner comic.

For the world, it was just a phase.

(Heh, listening back ten years I hear a loud song berating George Bush, accompanied by tunes from Megadeth and Rage Against The Machine. Well, I guess we don’t need deafening new political songs yet. It’s not just the musical world stuck in limbo.)

Review: Permutation City

Review: Permutation City

Go away and read the linked review first. I mostly agree with it.

I kind of expected this novel to be full of wild theory and to feature academic prose in service of this, but instead I got a quite well written book that actually spends very little time explaining anything major. There are many unstated assumptions and many intuitive leaps required to understand what’s going on, particularly the central conceit. In the end it is a failure as hard SF or philosophical tract, but there are many grace notes, and Peer’s vignettes in particular are dazzling visions.

BtVS: 7ABB18: Dirty Girls

Written by Drew Goddard, a newcomer this season who has already left his mark with ‘Selfless’ (the Anya episode) and the amazing ‘Conversations with Dead People’ and ‘Lies My Parents Told Me’ (co-written with Jane Espenson and David Fury respectively). Making this episode doubly disappointing. It wasn’t just repeats and the placement that built this episode up, it was the excellence of ‘Lies…’ So much was built up in that episode, so much has been building up, yet this episode seems to just tread water.

Worse, this episode suffered from, as Ainsley put it, “ontological shock”, with the introduction of Caleb. This new complication as the series and season draw to a close promises only to take time away from already running threads. His role furthermore seems bigger than it should be given his previous narrative non-existence, while making the story seem smaller in scope (drawing attention to problems already raised by Angel’s apocalypse, Faith’s ignorance of the First Evil, and the destruction of the Watchers Council).

Look on the bright side: Caleb intriguingly suggests a feminist line from himself, through the Slayer origin and Willow’s rehabilitation, to the Anya episode. Maybe this is obvious to some people, but it only popped into my head last night. And Andrew is a feminised character. I’ll have to think about this. (How does Spike fit in? I can see how Dawn might, but will have to wait to see how Faith’s role develops.)

And the Xander plot development was a brutal Buffy moment in the mold of ‘Weight of the World’. All I can say is: !!!

MIFF tickets

Purchased: 2 mini-passes (curiously cheaper than 1 festival pass).

Booked: 20 film screenings.

What I couldn’t get to: all of the films I was merely “curious” about, plus Music and Murder, Turning Gate, Woodenhead, Burning Paradise and Blessing Bell.

(Regarding the last film, Rich sayeth:

Japanese director Sabu. Two years ago we got to see a film of his called Monday - absolutely horrific full of violence and careless disregard of life - shocking for the most part, but it’s actually a comedy if you know how to look at it. Blessing Bell isn’t as challenging as Monday, but he’s a director you should get to know.

I think Andrew has Monday on video, so I’ll check up on that.)

Films I just couldn’t be bothered with: Asakusa Kid (because I’m not a fan of Takeshi Kitano, having only seen Brother which I thought was only OK), Cabin Fever and May (dull-sounding slasher flicks).

Film I added after seeing it conveniently placed on the time table and rereading the blurb: London Orbital. Sounds like a lovely Invisibles-style spin.

MIFF picks reasoning

American Splendor: This is the one that everyone is saying such nice things about. Biopic about the creator of the famous underground comic of the same name (which I’ve never read). Meant to be formally inventive. Association with Crumb bothers me: I don’t like Crumb or Terry Zwigoff.

The Wind Will Carry Us: The director is “one of the giants of contemporary cinema” and this is a film “you just must see in your lifetime”. Two years ago I found another Iranian film, The Circle, to be pretty dull, but everyone still has a very high regard for that country’s cinema, so I’m giving it another chance.

(Gosh I have objections ready for everything, don’t I? It’s a miracle I ever go and see anything.)

Broken Wings: Has won more awards than it’s worth considering. Israeli domestic drama. If this were American or Scandinavian then the blurb would make me run screaming.

Max: I heard about this one when I was in Europe. Asks the controversial question, What if Hitler had been a better artist? (And while Europe was still reeling from the new Leni Riefenstahl doco.) A good antidote to Hitler: The Rise of Evil, currently airing here. Plus it stars John Cusack, yum.

The Great Dictator: Another Hitler pic! This one actually made at the time, by Charlie Chaplin. Meant to be one of the great films of all time, from one of the great directors. And funny!

(My other picks are based simply on friends’ recommendations or MIFF blurbs.)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Tonight, Buffy. Tonight, after weeks of repeats as Channel 7 kindly aligned it with its sister show Angel. (Remember when stations used to get key episodes around the wrong way, or simply drop them altogether?) Tonight, the first of the final five episodes ever.

MIFF picks

Rich says:

With film festivals you just have to take risks because thats how you discover the great surprises. Buy a week night’s screening and see everything that that ticket will get you in. In all likelihood you wouldn’t have heard of any of these films and when you read a brief description they sound crap, thats why you just have to go in bravely.

So true, and also of novels and regular film releases. Sometimes the one that everyone raves about is the one you like least.

(Note: Andrew is seeing 75 of the 102 films…)

Films I really want to see:

* Broken Wings * Max * The Great Dictator * Resurrection of the Little Match Girl * Intacto * Hukkle * The Sea * Music and Murder * The Original Mermaid * The Mascot * In My Skin * Sex is Comedy * Ballroom * Turning Gate * Dolls * Woodenhead * Blind Shaft

I’m also curious about:

* All the Real Girls * Suddenly * Every Stewardess Goes to Heaven * The Man of the Year * Fong Sai Yuk * Interstella 5555 * Mercano the Martian * Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions * Eaglehawk * bolexbrothers

Time to start looking at a possible timetable…

Theory of the Dust, II

Final implication:

4. patterns are internally consistent, so divine creation and intervention are not possible.

This seems to contradict implications b and c.

Theory of the Dust

This is the central conceit of Permutation City (Greg Egan), the idea that patterns will always “find themselves” in noise, with the implications that:

1. the universe need only consist of a single moment in time containing a 0 state and a 1 state
2. the present not only has many possible futures (which will be actualised in other patterns) but many possible pasts, Occam’s Razor doesn’t apply
3. everything has a pattern in which it is eternal.

Implication c reminds me of Dark Side of the Sun (Terry Pratchett), where the narrative follows the main character into increasingly improbable parallel universes as he survives more and more deadly threats.

Implication b reminds me of the idea in Time’s Crucible (Marc Platt) that, since probability waves are collapsed by observers, reality is consensual. In that novel, magic reigned in the past, until the first scientists enforced their view of reality. As Permutation City moves to find a climax, it seems the local reality is in for a similar ontological shock.

Implication a doesn’t remind me of anything. It seems like an outrageous claim to make. The explanations in the novel are unfortunately slight.

The novel Sleepy (Kate Orman) seems to make a one line allusion to Permutation City to defend the apparent death of one of its characters. Unfortunately the Theory isn’t really strong enough to support its host novel, let alone a parasite.

(OTOH, if you think this is weird, try the state of the art in cosmology.)

Bastille Day

Remembering 14 July 1789:

“I remember the first time I visited Earth: Paris during the French Revolution. There was so much promise there, a sense that anything and everything was possible. I walked the dirty, wine-soaked streets with my granddaughter, and I realized that the old order could be swept away, that people could be happy. It was a feeling I’d never had before: elation at the sound of empires falling.”

“The French Revolution ended in chaos, Doctor; thousands died.”

Review: Hocus Pocus

Kurt Vonnegut. That strange beast who says time and space care little about us, yet who assumes a perspective of cynicism on our actions. Why? He can’t help it. He’s wired that way.

Hocus Pocus is a book mentioned in his essay collection Fates Worse Than Death and happily shares much source material. One thing I couldn’t help thinking after page 183 of the former was his criticism in the latter of certain works. “Ok. Got it. Stop right there.” I keep reading, but as interesting as the anecdotes are and as pleasing as the Vonnegut voice is, this is just an exercise in depression now.

183 pages are just great, if unfinished. But that’s okay, I guess. The Vonnegut voice has always been one that picks up and trails off. Nothing ever begins or end. Here we have the Vonnegut who survived the Eighties talking a treat on the topics of race, nationalism, Vietnam and World War II, insanity, the ruling class, and the tricks of history. I’m always impressed by surprising facts he turns up, the flair with which he deploys them. Of the many topics he juggles, it seems that nationalism is the one that has slipped in unconsidered, but on reflection I realise this is just the voice of the narrator. It isn’t Kurt at all!

Each chunk of text is described as being circumscribed by the narrator’s available writing paper. Did Kurt devise a scheme for the length of each text, or simply write and invite us to imagine a process that would give the same result within a space limitation?

Of course, the narrator can only write what the author can imagine him writing. The seemingly inseparable gulf between men and women in Vonnegut’s novels is more strangely disconcerting than his archaic racial language. Perhaps because I haven’t read a Vonnegut book were he portrays it as anything but a gulf. But he is writing honestly!

What will I remember most about this novel? The American placenames, so unfamiliar: Peru, Scipio, Brazil, Cairo, Rochester, Athena. His attribution of Shakespeare’s lines to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which he casts as the Atheist’s Bible. This story:

[President Kennedy] made love to Marilyn Monro. […] She evidently expected to marry him and become First Lady, which was a joke to everbody but her.

She eventually committed suicide. She finally found life too embarrassing.

(I’ll let you know if my opinion on the final 119 pages when I finish them.)

52nd Melbourne International Film Festival

52nd Melbourne International Film Festival

Picked up the Complete Festival Guide today. First thing I checked: no Hero (China’s answer to Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon). Very disappointing. But Rich recommends American Splendor and I notice that they’ll be screening The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin). Must make time to sit down and go through guide, before Andrew starts telling me what to see…

Review: The Curly Pyjama Letters

Leaving two heavy works half way through, I turned to The Curly Pyjama Letters by Michael Leunig for some gentle solace. Leunig is technically a political cartoonist for The Age, but his work often veers closer to Calvin & Hobbes.

This volume turned out not be a collection of cartoons, but a fictional series of letters between Mr Curly, of Curly Flat, and Vasca Pyjama, an explorer. The text is in Leunig’s characteristic curly, wobbly hand, set off with illustrations of his big-nosed morbid/whimsical cast.

To give you a feel for the writing, here is an excerpt used for the blurb:

In response to your question ‘What is worth doing and what is worth having?’ I would like to say simply this. It is worth doing nothing and having a rest.

Mr Curly lives in the country and values his place in the world without requiring others to share those values (though he is lucky to live in a community that does). Vasco travels the world, constantly in delight with what he finds, though he sometimes has his black doubts. Their correspondance is full of joy and consideration. They always pick the rightest, lightest words, and always know when to make their goodbyes.

Leunig is one of those writers who have in their writing what I call the quality of saying true things. These are not Kevin Costnerisms, homespun twaddle that rolls off the tongue. Not for me, anyway. These are vital and bright things that strike to the heart of the world, they contrast strongly with the dull observations of a “truism.” Leunig is in engagement with the condition of the world. It is always worth returning to re-read his seemingly casual words and always worth re-reading between the lines. I do not always agree with what he writes, but he is always worth reading. And considering.

And his “naive” illustrations enjoying.

Walken, Thu 24 July: The Cornish Arms

Walken, Thu 24 July: The Cornish Arms

Walken will be playing with One Trick Pony at the Cornish Arms (Brunswick) in two weeks’ time. Be there. (Check out some Walken songs, wma and mp3.) If you can’t wait for Walkeny goodness, check ‘em out this Wednesday at the Pony. (Pony cancelled.)

Classical Music reviews, II

Continuing from yesterday.

I mentioned earlier this year that I bought an album of Emerson, Lake & Palmer remixes for my Dad. Though my Dad does have very good taste in music, being the seed for my own excellent taste, I didn’t mean to buy him an album of ambient techno. All I knew was that Dad had every ELP album… except this one in front of me at JB. I ditched my plan to update his collection with a CD of something he had on vinyl. I didn’t look at the cover too closely. I assumed the title, Re-Works, just meant that ELP were doing new versions of old stuff. Later, without looking at the cover too closely, my sisters posited a more accurate theory. Anyway, thankfully Dad likes quite a few of the tracks on this album. I like one or two. I’m not really a fan of any ambient music.

Dad’s imported LP collection was the soundtrack of my childhood. Recently I decided that I needed to actually sit down and listen to some of these albums as an adult and pull that primal sound out of the darkness, make it my present. Inspired by a recommendation from a friend, I pulled out Close to the Edge, by Yes. The first track, ‘Close to the Edge’, takes up one side of the LP. The other tracks are fairly forgettable. ‘Close to the Edge’ is an epic tour de force of progressive rock, in four parts. I love many elements of the song, but it never quite achieves unity for me. What I mean by unity, I don’t know. Let’s say, good song, not for me.

Next up from Dad, a Best Of CD, Deepest Purple by Deep Purple. (Dad tends to get Best Of CDs where he already has many of the original albums on LP. Upgrading to digital (or, even better, remastered digital) is an expensive business.) I thought, at the very least, I loved ‘Smoke on the Water’. Unfortunately, though it has one of the most famous guitar progressions of all time, that’s all it has. If most of the album was survivably average rock, letting such a great riff fall into a mediocre song really killed Purple for me. Still, there was to be one saving grace. A month earlier in a pub, I’d heard an unidentified progressive rock song that I loved - and that was skipped early by the proprietors. It was mostly slowly building howls over atmospheric guitars before giving away to hammering drums and distortion. I loved it. It turned out to be ‘Child in Time’, a fantastic song more reminiscent of Cream. Brilliant. Buy Deepest Purple as the extended single.

Given the total repetitive penetration of The Simpsons, everyone should know Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida by psychedelic rockers Iron Butterfly. As for many Simpsons references, it was Ainsley who pointed out this isn’t made up. This is an 18 minute song with an album as an afterthought. “This sounds like rock and/or roll.” It has a four minute drum solo! Do I need to say more? Well, okay, the majesty of this song is somewhat let down by the competant musicianship of the band. Imagine what a great band could do with this sucker? Has anyone really good covered this?

And now… something actually classical… Mozart’s Requiem. Um. I didn’t like it. It was boring. Someone correct me. Still, I have a plan to see The Marriage of Figaro (some say the greatest anything ever done by humans). The reason for this foolishness? Tim Bray has sold me on trying out the opera.

And now… someone mangling the classics… The Best of Sky… which is ‘Toccata’. Or is it any good? It’s hard to tell sometimes when you enjoyed it during audio-visual interludes on ABC as a child. But certainly the rest of the guff on this album is an insult to both classical and progressive music. Bleah.

And now… and no more and now…

Milon’s Memory

Milon’s Memory

The Milon’s Memory weblog is a living obituary for Milon Buneta, who died in 1981. Bernard Lane explains in The Australian. Intellectually, trying not to be crass, I think this is a very interesting use of a weblog. Emotionally, I think this is an amazing/sad/beautiful thing.

Monash Public Library Service

Monash Public Library Service

Libraries are great. You can go into them and just walk around, pick up a book, sit down and read it. You can’t eat like in a Borders, but you can take the book home with you for several weeks. Or even a video or CD. For free! Crazy! This may sound obvious, but so many people forget about libraries once they leave school. I do, periodically. Then, the joy of the return.

The Wheelers Hill Library is the nicest in the City of Monash. It’s brand new, spacious, quiet, with lots of interesting books and videos, and great views. I shouldn’t tell you where it is, it’s got a secret location, that’s part of its charm.

Mt Waverley is the best for content, but they’re all pretty amazing. (Though not quite as amazing as the Yarra-Melbourne libraries, around where I used to live.) A lot of things I’ve read/listened to/watched in the last six months have come from the Monash libraries. Libraries are great.

(And When Ainsley goes back to uni I’ll have easier access to one of the biggest collections in the Southern Hemisphere.)

Classical Music reviews

At the start of the year I resolved to check out some rock and roll greats who I wasn’t familiar with. I borrowed collections of work by Jimi Hendrix and Santana.

I loved ‘Purple Haze’ (a song I had heard before) but the rest of Hendrix’s Smash Hits left me a little bored. It was respectable stuff, but I couldn’t hear the brilliance that people attribute to him. Theory mine (the Rashomon theory): what was brilliant then is commonplace now. Theory someone else’s: the great Hendrix material isn’t in his studio work, it’s live. So I will get around to listening to some live material.

As the years go by OTOH was an amazing trip that completely redeemed Santana in my eyes. These days he may be putting out limp rock for oldies, but the younger him pumps out songs that still sound new. I’d like to borrow some albums and see what I can find.

While searching through my friend’s CD collection, I mentioned I’d never listened to Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, and was roundly castigated. Especially for my reasons. So I gave it a go. But you know what, Rolling Stone was right. There’s just something wrong with this album coming out in the same year as In Utero. It’s a parody, the kind of dinosaur people trot out to accuse progressive rock. My friend said I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it had been released in ’75, but I just don’t know. There are certainly four Pink Floyds (psychedelic, progressive, Roger Waters, Dave Gilmour) and I only really like one. (OK, ‘High Hopes’ is a very good song, but you’re better of listening to it on Pulse.)

Last year a fleeting online friend introduced me to a great song called ‘Gorecki’ by a British band, Lamb. In the library this year, I discovered that Gorecki was a classical composer. I borrowed Miserere - a symphony of sorrowful songs, lit. “have mercy on me”. Well, Lamb’s song is certainly full of sadness, but Gorecki’s symphony just made me sad I wasted my time. (Do I like classical music? Sure, some Beethoven, some Bach, some Barber, etc, basically all the crossover stuff, plus all the Tchaikovsky I’ve ever heard.)

Administrative notice: comments

Why didn’t somebody tell me my fly was undone? While this site was languishing, I turned off the ability to add new comments, so that I didn’t have to worry about people nesting in one of my old comment threads. When I started posting again recently, I completely forgot about this. I mean, sure, probably no ones posting comments because they’ve got nothing to say (certainly nothing so important they’d tell me that they couldn’t post).

While I’m talking about possible readers (an unseemly thing) let me ask, who are all those RSS subscribers?

July Project update

My notes are good enough that I don’t need to rewatch Minority Report, though I may anyway. The problem at the moment is that the me that wrote the notes is much more interested in what was wrong with the film, mostly through the prism of what I then thought it should be about. I could provide rebuttals for these complaints, though it might be a dry exercise in telling myself to pay attention to what the film is about. I could focus on the positive, but I don’t want to. Is the point of my review simply to mark out a space to protect me from being told good things about this film? I’m not sure I want to post a big thing to stick in the craw of people who like the film.

Words and Pronounciation

This is an unfinished blog entry. Don’t read it.

Can’t find a dictionary with “shouts” in it. Shouts, syn. 1. hello, 2. thanks, 3. props. Usage: “Shouts go out to my B boys.”

I was looking up the lyrics of my favourite Frank Zappa song, Valley Girl. “We’re talking Lord God King BU-FU.” That last word I didn’t know, BU-FU. I love the secondary meaning: “please buy our product.”

In February I dragged Rob along to some thing, he got chatting to a woman who liked to take the conversational initiative. When I used the phrase “ships passing in the night” and Rob said he hadn’t heard that before, the woman expressed disbelief. Rob understood what the phrase meant, he should have shut up. Me and the woman had fun mocking him. Like, don’t you talk english, man? I’m so sure.

Ebb

This is a banal blog entry. Don’t read it.

Late: I’ve been at low ebb all day. Some singing and sitting formally have left me feeling the borders of illness (again - if this develops it will be third or fourth wave). There’s nothing on TV. I watch Big Brother Uncut.

I don’t like Big Brother. (I don’t like any reality shows.) The behaviour is usually tedious and bland beyond belief. But this episode of Big Brother Uncut is interesting. There’s something about the expression and punctuation through casual swearing, the ludeness, the frank discussions, the fun and detachedness that reminds me of university life, of life in Moriah St. The housemates actually seem like people to me for the first time. Like, when people say, “well, it’d just be like that if we were in there,” that could actually be true.

Later: It’s very cold. I feel it in my old man legs. I used to hate the rain, but now I miss the protective cover of clouds that comes with it, keeping the heat in.

Melbourne’s water storages are currently 40.5% full.

Job Description

Advertisement: Is your job giving you stress?

What Dave reads: Is your job giving you cheese?

Cheese-eating surrender monkey. When come back bring cheese. Chees - es!

My job isn’t giving me stress. The above is just silliness. So, what is my job?

I have been looking for a permanent position, but haven’t been able to find one at my level with pay commensurate for that level. Most of the jobs seem to be for grads or architects with ten years of experience. I’m an analyst and developer with almost five years commercial experience. Many jobs at that level are paying suspiciously low. So I’ve been contracting. The market for this is depressed, so there’s no glory in the pay, but at least there’s people who will be sensible.

Mostly I’ve been doing lead/solo development of intranet web applications using .NET and SQL Server 2000. I enjoy the side of contracting that means I get to compare different businesses and industry sectors quickly. (I also like seeing different sides of Melbourne.) But I’d also like to be more involved in analysis and keep an oar in the water when the software’s released.

The #1 problem I have is exceeding expectations. This might seem like a good thing, but not in this market. If I finish a contract ahead of the contract period, then the contract gets terminated. Luckily I’ve spent only a few days in the last six months not working, because new opportunities come quickly too. The last three contracts I’ve had have been terminated prematurely. My friends say that I need to take a refresher course in surfing the web.

The plus side of being good is that I win friends in the places I work and they talk to each other. I’ve won one contract based on people talking about my previous performance. Another I missed out on (ships in the night) but they gave it to a friend I recommended without question, which is a win-win-win situation.

I’m quite happy with my current job. I’m implementing a Repository and Harvester to the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocol spec (OAI-PMH 2.0). I’m the sole person in the job - it’s just me, the spec, and Visual Studio.NET. A prime design consideration is the fact that this project is intended to inspire some other data providers to open up this way, and they might use this implementation to jumpstart their own efforts. I’ve implemented the Repository as a web service in ASP.NET. It’s the first greenfields VB.NET project I’ve worked on, which has given me the chance to increase the “VB” flavour. It’s also my first chance to work with XSLT commercially, which has naturally taught me a lot.

Contract finishes mid-August.

Elsewhere, two years ago

Elsewhere, two years ago

“When I watch my girlfriend stare me in the face, I know what she is seeing, but at the same time I don’t. I know she’s thinking the same thing.”

Two years ago

Two years ago

July Project: Review Minority Report

Several days ago I mentioned my mostly off-again review project. This has two parts.

1. Capture my thoughts, which are extensive and often unexpected, about certain films.
2. Develop a guide to good film reviewing.

I have four and two sorta films in mind. I was going to review the one that someone actually sorta asked me to review, but yesterday I realised that one year ago I was talking about how I wouldn’t see Minority Report. But I did. And I had thoughts. Now I’m going to share them with you.

July Project: Review Minority Report.

Cat and Girl in Cyberspace

Cat and Girl in Cyberspace

Mmm, new comic day. Cat And Girl is a crazy amalgam of so many comic strip things, I love it.

Also, check out this strip of Buttercup Festival.

And thanks to Gav for “when come back bring pie” and Harris for “TROGDOR the BURNINATOR“.

Ontological Shock

Ontological Shock

An ontological shock is one that undermines your reality. Tragedy: September 11. Comedy: empathise with a cat when you grab its tale as it jumps.

The two examples are weak cases of ontological shock. If you’d discussed it beforehand, you’d admit it could happen. Strong ontological shock probably involves glitches in reality, angels, that kind of thing.

The cat example was obvious to me when I started using the term, which I don’t think I read anywhere, but it was suggested by The Invisibles. Doing some quick searching on the internet you can see it used in feminist criticism, theology, X-Files discussion… it’s a song title on The Matrix soundtrack (when the helicopter hits the building).

I’d weigh the term with a lot of irony when discussing fictional ontologies, unless it is a deliberate device. Keep in mind that Highlander 2 is not a bad movie because the Immortals turn out to be aliens, but one of the things that makes The Empire Strikes Back great is how it makes a preposterous revision seem inevitable.

Fight Club is a case of using ontological shock as a deliberate device. The narrator experiences ontological shock within the text. At this point in the film you might empathise with the narrator or experience a Brechtian distancing (strange choices we have these days). Either way the movie has got you.

Some people don’t like to be got. Well, it is called shock.