For quite some time I've had a nice little trick up my pyjama sleeve. My subconscious has been trained by years of therapy to respond to any troubling situation with a rational analysis of the dangers involved. And so, whenever I dream that I am in high school and don't have my final paper to hand in, or when I am hopelessly late and understudied for a college exam, I immediately think to myself, "Hey, wait. You have a high school diploma. You have a BA. Clearly, nothing bad's gonna happen if you fuck up whatever this is, so why not relax and watch some tv. Heck, even if it somehow caused you to lose your BA or high school diploma, you can always say you graduated - it's not like anyone checks this stuff." Many of my scary dorm room nightmares have been turned into sessions of sitting back and chatting with others about classes or trying to figure out how to set up the television for maximum audio and video quality.
Unfortunately, my brain has no such rational response for falling asleep at the wheel of a car after fucking a friend's wife whose body turned into a giant latex balloon engorged with sea water and constantly expanding, like Mr. Creosote from Monty Python's Meaning of Life. I'll have to think this one over....
I got to Monster a little late, so I missed anything that happened before she was drinking in a bar chatting with Christina Ricci. Additionally, since I wanted to get seated as quickly as possible with minimum fuss, I took a seat in the third row from the screen, so the film took most of my vision up.
When you get a piece of information that contradicts what you know, the headshrinking lot say that you're experiencing cognitive dissonance, a lack of harmony between what you believe to be true and some new information to the contrary. I saw Charlize Theron on the screen, knew her to be Charlize Theron, knew her to be extremely hot, and yet she was so fucking nasty. So the makeup's really good. She looks like Aileen Wuornos as I know her from Nick Broomfield's documentary about Nick Broomfield, Aileen Wuornos: the Selling of a Serial Killer. Acted much like her, too. Very nice performance. I tried really hard to see Charlize Theron in that getup, and I never could. So instead I lusted after Christina Ricci, whose head I perceived through third row seating distortion to be a perfect pearlescent sphere inset with mutant watermelon sized eyes. Hot.
Fuckability aside, the film's good. It plays out as a sort of lesbian Butch and Sundance, as all the events are told within the context of Wuornos' relationship with Ricci (named Selby in the movie, Tyria in real life). Aileen whacks some dudes to get money to keep her honey living the high life in a series of slummy motels and rentals. In one of the few scenes which doesn't feature Wuornos, Ricci goes out to a bar and flirts with some ladies of the dykish persuasion and tells one of Wuornos' stories as her own. Wuornos, though physically absent, is the focus of the scene. And once Aileen makes it back on screen, she has a fit about Ricci going out in an incriminating stolen car without her. The end of the film briefly shows Wuornos' Mumia-style courtroom outbursts and completely ignores the bizarre adoption coda to the story. It focuses instead on Ricci's complicity with the police in obtaining a confession from Wuornos. In the end, Wuornos is led off to the gas chamber declaring that a whole bunch of feel-good aphorisms ("where there's life there's hope," etc) are untrue as she's enveloped in a white light.
And so the problem with the film, which this review from the St. Petersburg Times argues, is that it romanticizes Wuornos. She's played up as a sort of female "male antihero" killing people for his/her woman.
Sometimes this agenda obscures the facts. There's a scene in which Wuornos poses with a new gun she's obtained, and it's one of those freaking huge phallic deals with a massive barrel. She checks herself out in the mirror, looking deadly and dangerous with her new supersized Dirty Harry related program activity. This I believe to be factually untrue. All of the murders were committed with a .22, which I believe to be a wee little deal and not the hand cannon that the newly lesbian Charlize delights in demonstrating.
The killings are another matter. The only surviving witness to these was Wuornos herself, so it's hard to say how accurate the film is in its presentation of the murders. Wuornos apparently always claimed that the first victim attempted to rape her, as is depicted in the film. Wuornos also claimed that the others raped or attempted to rape her, but then recanted this story near the end of her life. Wuornos is a problematic witness, though the film decides to believe her story regarding her first killing, which is depicted as self defense against a brutal rape.
In the others, the film has Wuornos trying to work out a rationalization as she's about to commit murder. One of these has Wuornos suggesting that a john is an incestuous pedophile because he wants her to call him "Daddy." When Wuornos blurts out this insane leap of logic, the audience I was with laughed. It's an interesting way to present the murders, though, to have Wuornos working out her cover story as she's committing murder. She's so witless it's charming.
Additionally, when Aileen tries to find normal employment, nobody will give her a job as she has no resume and no experience and is, generally, really freaky. But it's amusing to see her try and dress up and then lose it at a job interview (the story that Ricci ultimately plagiarizes). And so we feel sympathy for Wuornos. And it's kinda funny.
And seven men are dead, ho ho ho. But a film doesn't need to be a moral lesson, and I didn't leave the film thinking of Wuornos as a moral exemplar, or even as an innocent corrupted by an evil society or a horrible life. With the exception of the over the top ending, I enjoyed the film and found it engaging, if a bit too complementary.
But I guess she's going to have to be appealing to the audience if, like Hannibal Lecter, she's going to sustain a movie franchise. We can only hope that one day we'll get to see Freddy vs Jason vs Aileen. Or even Aileen vs Predator. Anything so long as Christina Ricci gets naked and is violated by a tentacled demon. Or some plant's malicious vines. How about an octopus?
For a good recap of the real Aileen Wuornos story, check out The Crime Library.
By the way, Mumia did it. Go find another fucking cause.
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The full-face masks worn by skilled actors in Japanese Noh drama can induce a variety of perceived expressions with changes in head orientation. Rotation of the head out of the visual plane changes the two dimensional image characteristics of the mask which viewers may misinterpret as non-rigid changes due facial muscle action. The figure below shows the same Edo-period Noh mask, Magojiro, at three inclinations.
I have had many dreams about Star Wars, particularly about Episode 3. Often I am watching it in a theater on the day of release. Usually, the films are filled with cryptic, dream-like imagery that I (subjectively) find fascinating. Often bizarre, inexplicable alien landscapes are shown. One favorite of mine had a world that was nothing but blue skies and clouds, with a single building floating in it, Darth Vader's house. The house was shaped as a large rectangle with no floor in its center, as if the whole of the house were the concrete patches bordering a swimming pool. Instead of being filled with water, there was no pool, only a drop into an infinite expanse of blue and white.
The notion of endlessly falling into the sky is a fear that I've had ever since I was young and would freak myself out by staring at the sky and feeling overwhelmed by its vastness, all the while wondering what would happen if gravity were to suddenly stop working for me and I began to leave the ground. For this reason, helium balloons that were let go to fly off into the sky filled me with a prepubescent sense of existential dread, and I took great comfort in knowing that they'd eventually pop and land somewhere on earth. Truly, Darth Vader is a bad ass to live in a house as scary as the bottomless swimming pool.
I recently watched Kwaidan, a 60's Japanese anthology of four stories. The stories deal with the supernatural and feel like nothing so much as Twilight Zone stories. They are all shot on elaborate, vividly painted and lighted sets with minimal sound, including dialogue. There was, apparently, a political point to the film. It was meant to be more Japanese than Western in style, a reaction to people like Kurosawa. The trailer to the film declares Kwaidan to be a bold protest against modernity which features "state of the art set design." The film's a bit trying on the patience, but fun.
Three of the stories have explicit "meta" elements, dealing thematically with storytelling in the stories' content. The final story, presented with narration like the other three, explains that the presented tale exists only as a fragment in early 1900's literature. A fellow of high status, some sort of lord or samurai, sees the reflection of a smiling man in drinking bowls filled with water. This smiling man eventually appears in front of him in a ghostly form which the samurai manages to wound. After the smiling man disappears into a wall, his retainers come calling on the samurai, and another fight ensues. The retainers, though, are similarly ghostly and difficult to kill. After an extended battle, the samurai leans upon his spear to rest, surrounded by the retainers. Sweating, he begins to laugh maniacally. At this point, the narration tells us that the written fragment ends, and the film then depicts a publisher checking on his writer, who has just mysteriously disappeared. The film then ends on a Twilight Zone note as the writer's fate is explained. It's curiously satisfying story made of a beginning with no end and an end with no beginning.
I dreamt last night that, following a wedding at which my father and I did bumps of cocaine together and I tried to nail Mandy Moore, I downloaded and watched the newly released Episode 3. I saved the movie to the latest digital format, a twenty by ten inch lidless tupperware container halfway filled with oatmeal. In the movie, an evil fellow, the true Phantom Menace, encouraged Anakin to undergo cybernetic enhancement. Anakin sat on a production line as car factory robots tore off bits of his body and replaced them with mechanical parts. At the end of the line, he was ready to go off to fight whoever the Phantom Menace asked, but only with Obi Wan Kenobi at his side because, in Anakin's words, "Obi Wan is my boy. We're tight." Eventually, this Phantom Menace is revealed in the movie to be George Lucas himself, whom Anakin and Obi Wan fought in vain. After all, it is George's world and you just can't beat the fellow who's writing it.
In my dream I found this to be an interesting meta direction for the film to take. When I woke up, I realized it was just that my subconscious had a nasty sense of humor regarding George Lucas and the prequels.
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Our circle jerk tightens nooselike around the object of our lust, the sourpussed, smushy-faced, rotten little "Chinese Bulldog," while we humans begin a rhythmic chant of "woof, woof" as if we were audience members during a spirited taping of The Late Show With Arsenio Hall.
...
"As long as living creatures are being degraded somewhere, I'll have a purpose in life."
Truer words were never written by Jim Goad.
Driving back from the video store at seven o clock in the evening, I passed a boxy, maroon 80's car. Have you seen in cities the homeless with shopping carts full of trash, random garbage and plenty of plastic bags? That's what I saw when I glanced into the car. With the exception of the driver's seat, occupied by an older woman wearing thick, slightly opaque plastic frames and a worn fisherman's hat, mixed garbage filled the car to window level. At first I thought she might be moving, but then I noticed that the filler was all crap. Plastic bags, empty plastic fast food cups. When I passed her, I glanced in the rearview and noticed she only had one working headlight.
The difference between kitsch and camp, if there is one, is that camp is affected bad taste, whereas kitsch lacks this awareness. The two terms are often used interchangeably.
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In early 1955, Chicago wrestler Rose Roman won her suit against the Wrestling commission, which had banned women's wrestling in the city on the grounds that it was "unladylike behaviour."
...
The steel-slinging women of BABES WITH BLADES paid tribute to Rose Roman and her successful struggle by turning to wrestling for two nights only in a Benefit show honoring the ladies of the wrestling leagues of the 50's and 60's.
...
Helga boasts two secret weapons and some unique Norwegian holds.
Go ahead, put on some cool, soft jazz or maybe some selected songs from a certain French chanteuse. Grab some cocoa or an alcoholic - but not too alcoholic beverage. Light up a spliff or a cigarette, sit back, inhale, exhale. Let the soft flicker of dozens of refreshes a second massage your eyeballs into pure bliss. It's time for the low key Superelectric update.
Are you comfortable and relaxed? Then remember to bookmark this link for later reading. I found it on talking points memo. It presents extracts from a book about Afghanistan in the 80's and some of the ridiculous things Richard Perle and Ollie North wanted to do back in the day. Specifically, they wanted to encourage Soviet soldiers (remember, this is when the nutty Afghans were on our side) to defect to the US by surrendering themselves to the Afghans who, at the time, were really only interested in doing uncool things to their prisoners' butts. Very uncool things.
But we shall take it all in a spirit of weltschmerz, take a sip of cool and a drag of hot and click our way to a chiller rest of Superelectric update...
Doctor Who
Mmmm, just watched three hours' worth of Doctor Who. I remember being a wee lad on a certain summer night in the 80's. There was no air conditioning, just a fan in the living room to cool us down. It was late night Sunday night, and I had the rare privelege of staying up to watch Doctor Who. It was Genesis of the Daleks, a classic Tom Baker-era tale, in which the Doctor is called by the Time Lords to destroy the Daleks.
The Daleks are evil robots. Doctor Who, more than any other sci fi tv show, understood the value of good robot porn. This was no Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek, where you only caught brief glimpses of one or two Cylons or Borg every dozen or so episodes. Doctor Who always had some Daleks or Cybermen or horrific, tentacled things (close relative of the robot) ready to flop about the screen screeching something in a processed electronic voice. No prosthetic foreheads, no long shots sitting around the bridge set. Lots of running and screaming and fabulous 70's video effects. Oddly enough for a kids show, the sci fi element was usually a lot heavier than it was for the American sci fi shows.
Take Genesis, for instance. The Daleks are evil cyborgs. They look completely robotic, something like salt shakers with a robot eye on a stalk, but this robot exterior houses a small living creature, a poor schmuck who, as a result of the radiation of a prolonged nuclear war and aided by a little genetic mucking about has become a little lump of semi-jelly with a tremendously bad attitude. He's the Dalek's pilot. The Doctor is sent to the time and place where the Daleks are being created with a mission to blow them up before they can begin their metallic existence, the primary goal of which is to go around killing people and doing nasty things while howling "Exterminate!".
And the Doctor gets to the point where he's ready to blow up all the squiggly jelly things, but he stops, sits back, and he contemplates the results of blowing up all the Daleks, both good and bad. And then he decides not to nuke em because genocide is just really not cool.
Which isn't bad for a kid's show. My big brother Steve introduced me to Doctor Who, and twas with him that I saw...
Big Fish
which I didn't care for, although I always like Ewan. Before the show, I experienced a regretfully familiar shock. I saw a trailer for what seemed to be goofy Hollywood schlock, fronted by Tom Hanks playing a ridiculous southern gentleman walking anachronism. It's a story of a robbert of some kind with dopey hijinx. And then the title card "A new film by Joel and Ethan Coen" pops up and my heart sinks. It's a remake of The Ladykillers, a marginally amusing Alec Guinness comedy from back in the day (don't run out to see it, Our Man in Havana's much better). Man oh man, what happened to the Coens.
But don't let that get you down, I saw some really good movies, too, like Ozu's...
Good Morning
Ozu, whom I first heard of when he was called the anti-Kurosawa on a DVD commentary, directed this wee charmer of a flick about two boys who go on strike against their parents, refusing to talk until they buy them a tv. Set in a suburban 60's Japan, the film deals with the failures of human communication, but in a really groovily upbeat, Japaese Brady Bunch sort of way. The kids' moms all gossip nastily about each other, but in a wacky garbled communication sort of way. When the kids go on strike against their parents, they declare that adults talk far too much, saying lots of meaningless stuff like "Good Morning" and "How do you do" and "Nice weather, eh" and so on, hence the title. There's also a great bit of "pull my finger" style flatulence humor that runs throughout the film. Shot in a lovely, stationary style, it's well worth checking out from your local renter of Criterion discs.
If that's too "Seventh Heaven"-y for you, you could always try...
The films of William Friedkin that aren't The Exorcist or the French Connection
Sure, we dig it, thinking back fondly on our own childhood days, when Doctor Who was unreservedly cool, well before our own emerging sexual awareness turned us into a vomit-spewing demoness, but Billy's done some other good movies, like...
Sorcerer
is a remake of The Wages of Fear. Or they're based on the same novel. Or something. The basic story is that four guys - guys with nothing to lose - have to drive a bunch of nitroglycerin to an oil fire so that it can be blown out (incidentally, for a really weird quasidocumentary about the Kuwaiti oil fires, check out Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, which I think you can get as a free bonus rental with Little Dieter Needs to Fly). In the old one, the guys are the pawns of the evil oil company who must face their own well-scripted fears as they travel along the mountain. In Friedkin's, they're all men doing dangerous men's work with little time for talking. No, they'd much rather have cool montages set to the throbbing electronica of Tangerine Dream.
Honestly, they're both really good films. Both are worth watching. Wages is a bit more "thinky," in that the characters talk out their situation and their emotions and the drama, whereas Sorcerer's much more an exercise in atmosphere. In its manly men and brutal synthesized soundtrack, it's not totally unlike a John Carpenter film. Or, given that Tangerine Dream did the Blade Runner soundtrack, a Ridley Scott film.
Similar in tone is...
To Live and Die in LA
which I remembered getting bad reviews when it came out, and it didn't really seem to appeal to me at the time. It's quite good, though. The soundtrack's supplied by Wang Chung. So Billy went from the Blade Runner soundtrack guys to the "Everybody Wang Chung tonight" guys. Well, it works. Starts off with a rather pithy little Reagan reference.
It's about some Secret Service guys doing what nobody seems to know the Secret Service actually does - fighting counterfeiting. A shockingly youthful looking Willem Dafoe's the counterfeiter. William Petersen, now on CSI I think, but the guy in Manhunter for sure, is one of the agents following him, the other being a dude who later turned up on Paul Reiser's sitcom. Funny that.
It has an odd beginning. It's split between long sequences with no dialogue that are fascinating to watch (explicit counterfeiting) and some amazingly cliched-sounding cop movie business. Like there's a guy who's got three days until he retires. Guess what happens to him?
Quite apart from that, it's a really exciting movie about Petersen and Dafoe as two guys who act recklessly and violently in an oddly self-destructive manner. It's quite a different take on, well, weltschmerz, than that of the blogger. The film also has Dean Stockwell in a fair sized part.
Think Heat, but instead of sucking and being really dull, think what if Heat were really cool and an hour and a half shorter. Plus Wang Chung. That's TLADILA.
And that's what I had to say about all that.
Metafilter had a link to three scanned pages of two essays. Here's the link, which says it's a mirror of this site, which shows signs of bandwidth overload. While I do believe there is something special in the original formatting of documents, it's silly not to have plain text versions of the two essays for ease of dissemination. Here are plain text copies of the two essays. Everything's (sic) and the grader's handwritten comments are in parentheses following each essay.
Coming in like El Nino!
Jeremy Lavine
Period 3
El Nino is spanish. It is the spanish word for child. Like all things spanish, it is dangerous. It kills people and burns down trees. This child is more than a child. It really isn't a child at all. It is a storm. A deadly storm that kills people and burns down trees.
Warm water usually builds up around australia. But not anymore with el nino. El Nino moves the warm water from australia to somewhere else, namely to other places. Where are these other places? These are places that also have water, but water that is usually not as warm as the warm water El Nino moves to these said other places. These other places are to the east. Of the water.
In Peru, they have many names for many things. One of the things they have names for is for people who go fishing, go fishing to make a living. If we had a word for this kind of people that word would be "fisherman". But we don't. In Peru, they have different names for things than we do in America. They call that kind of people "pescadores". That's Spanish. That's what they speak in Peru. When El Nino comes, these "pescadores" can't catch any fish. El Nino is caused when the Peruvian gods get angry. They have been angry for millions of years and have made El Nino for millions of years. Many many moons ago, the Peruvians committeed human sacrifice to satiate their gods and end the flood that was caused by El Nino. In today's modern dog-eat-dog work-a-day world of scientists, diplomats, McSalad Shakers, and George Bush Jr., we no longer have access to such solutions. We are too proud. We will not commit human sacrifices. We refuse to satiate the Peruvian gods. Thus, they remain angry and keep killing us and burning down our trees with El Nino.
Instead of satiating the gods, many of these "scientists" have tried to control El Nino with "science". They put up expensive fish-attracting bueys that run on flashlight batteries. Imagine, fighting the power of the gods with flashlight batteries! Needless to say, this didn't work and everyone died.
(Jeremy Please a little less drama!)
Lightning!!!
Jeremy Lavine
Period 3
What is lightning? Where does it come from? What does it mean? Does it have a meaning? Where does it come from? What is it made of? Is it made of light? Some might say it was made of light. Others contend that lightning is made of fire. People used to think that lightning was made of fire. Fire in the sky. Fire that killed people and knocked down trees. Before Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin was a founding father. He fatherly founded that lightning is made of electricity. Electricity in the sky.
But what of the Greek myths, of the Greek god Zeus and of the popular image of Zeus - a Greek God - throwing down lightning bolts to kill people and knock down trees. Where did he find the time? And what of lightning being made of fire? In this workaday world in the era of the founding father Benjamin Franklin we have no time nor patience for such concerns. These are for the third world and schizophrenics.
Some people do not understand that lightning is destructive. They ignore the wisdom of their elders and of the founding father Benjamin Franklin. They think lightning is a lie perpetrated by people with a vested interest. At their own peril!!! Lightning kills people and knocks down trees!!! It a power of destruction exercised by the Greek god Zeus, the mightiest of Greek gods!! But they do it: they ignore such wisdom and taunt the powerful exercise of destruction and they worship their idle gods and stand near trees. At their own peril!! Lightning has the killing power to kill people and the destructive power to knock down trees! When you stand near trees, they will be knocked down by lightning and you will be killed by lightning! There is no escape. Lightning will knock down the tree and knock down your soul. Trees are tall.
Many things are tall. Many things attract lightning. But do the two correlate? A recent study says yes. It says that being tall and attracting lightning do correlate. That means that being tall corellates with being struck by lightning. You die when you are struck by lightning, and your tree is knocked down.
Some people try to measure lightning, they take measurements of it. They use balloons and rockets and their imagination and determination and research money and they put it all in the mixing bowl and they mix in storms - storms with lightning - and so they mix in the lightning and then they get the product if they're lucky of measurements about lightning from the storm? What kind of measurements? We may never know ...
(Jeremy, what the heck is this? This is only one step beyond rambling and babbling. Can you get it together.)
*******************
Since Superelectric does respect the original form, I will describe some of its formatting. They are double spaced pages of times text with a few handwritten notes, here reproduced in parentheses. The first essay's "Like all things spanish...." sentence is circled and question marked. Paragraphs are usually represented by indents, but since I know the double b but don't know the indent, here they're presented as floating blocks. The second n in El Nino is always tilded, but again, I am too lazy to reproduce these accurately.
The supposed grader of the two essays is pretty bad. The only notes are, essentially, "OMFGWTF?!" There are several grammatical notes that could be added. The run on in the last paragraph of lightning, while brilliant, is pretty obviously a run on. Fragments abound, like "At their own peril!!", which also features uncorrected multiple punctuation. Punctuation is incorrectly placed outside of quotation marks, etc. Many obvious errors that should be noted escape the grader.
There are also several phrases that would fall into the category of bad writing. Take a look at the second paragraph of El Nino. Little things like being able to hook the last sentence's "Of the water" fragment to the preceding sentence should be marked off. Also, the "namely to other places" should be elided, as should the "said other places" segment. I point these out not to criticize anybody, but because the whole deal stinks of having been made up. We're presented these two essays as scanned, graded essay pages, and so we are meant to assume that these are actual pages from a student trying to write real essays about lightning and El Nino. However, there are small indications which make me feel that these are intentional works of comedy. Things like the shitty grader comments, which are in no way helpful.
Yes, there are bad teachers who aren't fictitious. I'm reminded of an incident in my high school sophomore English class. The teacher was handing back a batch of graded essays and giving the usual high school English teacher spiel of "why are these so shitty?". She decided to read aloud and comment on the mistakes of one particular essay as a learning experience for the students whom she'd cowed into a sad realization of their ineptitude. She didn't read the name of the essay's author, but as soon as she started reading aloud, the author spoke up to protest the use of his essay as an anti-exemplar. The teacher pointed out that nobody would've known that he was the author had he not identified himself. He said that it didn't matter, he was pissed either way. Which I think is a fair response. Sure, nobody would have known, but by naming himself, he happily outed his shame and was able to share his own guilt with the teacher, which is a pretty slick strategic move. Shame, like happiness, was born a twin. Several awkward moments passed and the class continued. I would like to add that I was not the author in question, just the guy who sat next to him in the great big circle of desks, so arranged to create a collegial atmosphere and which in reality creates a death star like focus on the only free element, the teacher.
At any rate, there are plenty of bad teachers out there, and plenty of bad teachers with really poor ideas regarding helpful criticism, so the fact that the grader in the above texts is so poor isn't necessarily telling, but the poverty of comments and lack of in text error correction are suspicious.
The spelling on the essays is pretty good. The only mistake I caught was "corellate" in Lightning!!!'s "Many things are tall" paragraph. There the error's obvious as the word is spelled correctly two other times in the same paragraph. As the only misspelled word in the two essays, it stands out. If the author were using a spell-checking program, it would've caught "corellate" and, most likely, the capitalization errors in the first essay. It's obvious placement and singularity make the misspelling seem intentional.
There are many phrase repetitions in the text, making it read very much like "ninjas are totally sweet." In Lightning!!!, the repetition joke is about a tree getting knocked down, and it appears almost as a punchline in the "Many things are tall" paragraph. After the ridiculously vague opening statement, there are three repetitions of the sentiment that "being tall is correlated with being hit by lightning," and then the paragraph ends with a reference to the earlier goofy statement about trees being knocked down. Here, though, it's rephrased from "knock down trees" to "your tree is knocked down," adding a possession which doesn't exist in any of the other uses of the phrase. It does make it flow nicely with the preceding clause. That it is rephrased in such a manner makes it seem an intentional joke.
"Work-a-day" and a variant are used and seem odd for a naive, apparently American writer. They feel self-conscious, like Mr. Burns' "Ahoy-hoy" telephone greeting. The workaday list includes W and McSalad Shakers alongside scientists and diplomats, which also reads like intended comedy.
I'm not concluding it's real or it's fake. Basically, my stance is that it's really funny and enjoyable entirely on its own terms. I'm not particularly fond of the genre of "teachers poking fun at their students," as I tend to think the former are awful cunts, but I think that these two essays are worthwhile for what they are.
You know, I've often tossed around the thought of becoming a teacher myself. Stuff like this makes me think twice, though. If I were really handed these essays, I would be torn about grading it. On the one hand, I'd think it's really funny and great and it would probably be a better piece of writing than anything else I'd be handed. I would want to reward its aesthetic accomplishment with a high mark. On the other hand, it's a style of writing that's not going to get an A in another person's class. It's full of shitty writing which is overly repetitive and in no way serves to communicate information. Here's the real problem with school. It's not about educating towards excellence. In English classes, you're not teaching about striving for aesthetic refinement, it's about creating robot members of society who can function first to serve their teacher masters and then, in life, their boss masters. They have to be able to spit out reports and emails about nonsense in a manner devoid of humor and originality, all written in dull business speak which respects a limited set of ideas and motivations. Creativity like this cries out to be squashed by school.
Teachers have an interest in producing students that can parrot back the stories that the teachers feed them. And I don't just mean the rote learning of facts, dates, etc. I actually don't have much of a problem with that stuff. It's the wishy-washy thinking skills type learning that's to blame. The more vague the curriculum, the less standard what can be evaluated, the greater emphasis is placed on playing the teacher. Students succeed not on true originality or intelligence, but on learning what the teacher values, understanding how the teacher frames information. It's not unlike learning a language. Once you've picked up on the teacher's language, the student only has to spit back the information that the teacher wants in a way that the teacher likes to hear. It is a fundamental dumbing down of curriculum, moving it from factual education to a con game.
For my psych 101 analysis, I'd like to offer: educators, having been brought up in an environment which was quite rigid and rote, in which grammar was a solid thing to be memorized, decided to cast off the bonds which they so hated and create a more personable, friendly curriculum which taught towards more real goals, things that are useful, creating solid thinking skills in their students. Really, this is just tossing off one set of arbitrary goals for another, mushier one. It makes me worry about fascism and totalitarianism.
What's appealing about learning facts by rote is that it creates an asocial context which then forces the students to create their own language for dealing with those facts. Yes, the teacher can and will influence and, to a large, extent, create that context, but at least you give the kids a fighting chance at being original and creative. When you stop teaching people facts and start teaching them how to think, isn't that scarier? Isn't that more dangerous? The fundamental lesson is not one of true excellence, but of social utility. Does this essay say what my audience wants to hear? It priveleges con over substance. See Rush Limbaugh.
Well, that's all very off-topic, but I did want to share those two really funny essays.
The question asked of the fat man is this: Does Andy Serkis deserve a best actor oscar for gollum?
Ebert's 458 word response goes a lil something like this:
Paragraph 1: 86 words restating the question.
Paragraph 2: 100 words restating the question.
Paragraph 3: 69 words introducing the concept of the uncanny valley.
Paragraph 4: 91 words describing the uncanny valley, taking it as fact.
The uncanny valley is this Japanese dude's theory about anthropomorphism. No, you don't need to know what that word means to understand the theory. Imagine we have a long line of robots. On the far left end, we've got really abstract, inhuman looking robots, like the things used to make cars in auto plants. As we look from the left to the right, these robots start to look more and more human. At the far right end is a robot that looks like a human being. You cannot tell the difference in fact. Mr. Japanese guy's theory is this: Human beings are generally going to react more positively to more human looking robots. There's a catch, though. As we move from left to right, from less to more human, we'll reach a point where people start reacting very negatively to the robots. This happens as we get pretty close to human-looking. After that dip, called the uncanny valley, people's responses will shoot back up for the virtually indistinguishable lot. The theory is that when things look almost human, they get really creepy-looking and we have to go hide under the bed. The theory's used to keep robotics cute and to explain zombies.
I suspect it's bullshit. What little I can find online regarding the uncanny valley doesn't make me confident in the concept's validity. It seems to be more accepted wisdom than established fact. I'm withholding judgment for the time being.
Paragraph 5: 112 words:
It is possible that the rejection of the sci-fi movie "Final Fantasy," which used computer animation to create "real characters," was caused because it fell into the Uncanny Valley. The genius of Gollum is that it seems like a convincingly real creature -- but not one we have ever seen before, so that its realism does not seem creepy except in the ordinary way. If Serkis brought Gollum to life, other artists fine-tuned the balance with the Uncanny Valley. So this is something other than a conventional performance, and should not compete against characters of a different nature. Perhaps a new category is called for? Beyond the Oscar of the Uncanniest Valley?
This is the money graph. Or is it? Remember, the question posed to Mr. Sweaty Sweater is whether Serkis has a shot at a best actor oscar. After restating the question in two paragraphs containing fully 41% of his verbiage, the widowed Mrs. Siskel spends two paragraphs, 160 words, 40% of the column describing the uncanny valley.
Ebert then offers dopey speculation about Final Fantasy's lack of success and the uncanny valley before finally approaching the question. The answer to this question has, of course, nothing to do with the uncanny valley. Ebert just says that Serkis doesn't deserve a best actor oscar because Gollum's performance is a collaboration between Serkis and cg artists. Words spent answering the question: 34, 8% of the column.
In his worthless attempt to make the uncanny valley relevant to the column, Ebert says that the cg artists "fine-tuned the balance with the uncanny valley." What? The uncanny valley is not a fucking tool, it's a description of a purported human reaction. It can't "balance" anything. And what exactly is being balanced? Nothing! This sentence could accurately be translated thus: The cg artists then hooped the froodle with the speznutz. Ebert is pathetically lost in the absurd comedy of the human condition, dazzled by words he doesn't understand and abstractions of no significance. And he's a fat motherfucker.
Tubbalicious closes with a reference to his own screenplay, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Because, of course, his fucking screenplay so permeates the culture as to make the joke terribly funny. Speaking of terrible, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a horrible, horrible, horrible movie. It's nasty and offensive and stupid in a manner that completely lacks charm. As a reference, compare this very weblog's use of "dothead" in a recent entry - nasty, offensive, stupid...and sublime.
We must therefore conclude that I deserve Ebert's Pulitzer.
I just saw Finding Nemo - nice movie, great DVD. There's an angler fish in it, the fish that's all teeth and a little luminescent lure out in front.
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Another unusual adaptation in anglerfish is their sexual dimorphism. The males are very small in comparison with the females, and live as permanent parasites on the female. The male attaches himself, by biting, to the body of the female. His mouth fuses with her skin, and the bloodstreams of the two fishes become connected. The male is now totally dependent on the female for nourishment. In fact, the male begins to degenerate. His eyes grow smaller and he eventually loses them. His internal organs disappear.The male becomes simply a source of sperm.
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In fact, when deep-sea anglers were first brought up in trawls they puzzled scientists because they were all females. Then someone noticed small "growths" on the female that turned out to be males. When a tiny male meets a female he bits into her flesh and literally fuses with her body. Like the linking together of web sites on the Internet, the two blood supplies also fuse together so that the male obtains nutrients and oxygen from the female. Without any need for most of his organ systems, such as eyes and digestive organs, the male's body degenerates into essentially a pair of sperm-producing testicles. Thus the female essentially becomes a hermaphrodite with up to six or more of these tiny male parasites attached to various parts of her body. Although functionally bisexual, the eggs and sperm come from genetically distinct parents, thus providing vital genetic variability through meiosis and genetic recombination. As a functional hermaphrodite she can have sex any time or place, without worrying about meeting a male in the dark abyss of the ocean. Clinging to her body like minute, blood-sucking parasites, the males have little interaction with the female, except to fertilize her eggs with sperm.
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MARVEL OF GOD'S CREATION #6....She is dead and dead fish can not evolve....The only possibility is that God created the Angler fish with all the fully-functional equipment it needed to survive at great depths....A compound called Luciferin is oxidized with the help of an enzyme scientists named Luciferase....God has made His creation to display His glory and power.... Soon the tissues of the female grow into and attach to the mouth tissues of the male, and the female drops to the bottom of the ocean carrying her parasite male with her not to separate "til death do they part"....Evolution has no answers....God says that as we study His creation, it should cause our thoughts to focus on the Creator and to give Him thanks and honor Him as God (Romans 1)....For a super treatment of the Angler fish and other highly specialized animals read: The Natural Limits to Biological Change....
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its flesh is watery, its bones are very light (barely coated by a thin layer of calcium carbonate) and it can barely swim (there’s not much of a tail).
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Its appearance has earned it a second name of "common black devil".
Bartcop stole this image, so I will too.
It's from this blog, which seems to talk an awful lot about zionism, but I only scanned the blog and only did that after reading about the David Brooks NYT neoconservatism/antisemitism column. Anyway, it's a striking image.
The final New Year's Eve entry at memepool is
It is interesting to compare art composed by those under the influence of LSD, and those experiencing psychosis.
There are two links. The first leads to a series of portraits done by one fellow who took LSD and then, throughout his trip, rendered a handful of sketches of the same subject. As one expects, the portraits become more and then less abstract as the trip rises and then falls away. The second link, which is "memepooled" as I write this, shows a gallery of a couple of artists suffering from psychosis, one of which is Louis Wain.
Louis Wain, whose best tribute is found at Catland, was an artist who rose to prominence by painting fanciful representations of cats. His cats are normally quite whimsical, shown playing around in anthropomorphized form. He was eventually committed and diagnosed with schizophrenia. During his time in an asylum, he continued to paint cats. Some of these cats were rather psychedelic, and Wain has since been used as an example of the art of schizophrenics.
As Catland notes, Dr. Walter Maclay purchased eight of Wain's paintings and then arranged them in an arbitrary order to show a progression of madness, as Wain's paintings grew ever more abstract. Maclay wanted to tell the story of a fellow losing his grip on reality, as depicted in the schizophrenic's art. While what we have from Wain's time at the asylum certainly contains some abstract, "out-there" art, the story of a fellow losing his mind as portrayed by the melting reality of his portraiture is just a story. Catland describes how Maclay's assembled series was taken out of order to tell a story of a descent into madness, they were not assembled chronologically. Wain's art has been reorganized and selectively presented in order to spin a simplistic yarn that isn't true.
Let's look at one of Wain's cats from the asylum period, for example. This Wain picture is accompanied by an inscription:
The solitary one more real persian cat is the one that is now going to be the one that is the real living animal left alone until the call is given to it at night time this evening at the same time as the rabbit can be again put to the test. This can be done by giving the call directly the light is seen after the first sleep is over. The colour is the direct soft tone in the red chalk. The whole is the (?) even (?) tints.--Living its own lonely life this old can (sic) can now come ot the newer existence. It is the perfect cat made the more perfect by the willingness given to it. The whole is the old time rabbit and this has now the greater life given to it to be. The deer too can now be the same in the same way.
To adopt the methods I'm decrying, the telling slip of "can" lends a pathetic sadness to the affair, Wain celebrating his desire for escape from pain as a perfection of willingness.
The text contains the same sort of mad poetry of schizophrenics like Francis Dec, which places the work in a period of psychosis. Yet the painting is extremely normal. The cat is not exploding into a kaleidoscope of variegated patterns. Though the foliage has some menace to it, Wain has clearly not lost the capacity to render in a realistic fashion.
And yet people are tempted to create a tragic myth. This series is accompanied by a text:
The cat pictures are the work of Louis Wain, a prominent British artist of the early 1900's, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was under psychiatric care but lived at home surrounded by his pets. Over a period of years he painted their portraits, which are in a way self-portraits, revealing the tragic odyssey of his feelings. The first one shows a soft and gentle cat whose only alarming trait is the wildness of its eyes. The second cat is not only wild but has become aggressive and evil. The third maintains the aggressiveness, but in the meantime the personality is breaking up, merging into the background. The fourth is like a stupid and inoffensive owl, with all aggressiveness subsided. There is no animal personality whatsoever in the fifth picture, just a charming design.
The handful of paintings are arranged in a presumed chronological order to show a deteriorating schizophrenic. We are made to think that Wain had lost all identity by the time that he made the final cat in the series, as tragically foretold in one of Wain's so-called "wallpaper cats."
In 1964's Life Science Library edition The Mind:
One man's progressive withdrawal from reality to fantasy is cleary traced in the extaordinary seris of cat paintings on these pages.
Again, a presumed order is presented, based only on the abstractness of the paintings, in the oddity of the emotion they evoke in the viewer. Again, this order is meant to tell a tale of increasing psychosis, in this case a "withdrawl from reality."
The text from The Mind makes additional claims, that "images of the body...are almost never drawn without distortion," a claim which is betrayed not only by the orange Perfect Cat, but also by a wallpaper cat further down the page! Furthermore, there had to be a tragic end to Wain's tale, and so "Wain's images eventually lost all coherence," despite the coherence mentioned above, though we are to be soothed by the fact that "the baroque, infinitely detailed designs he produced were far more powerful and original than his former realism." Please note that, in addition to the realistic representations noted above, that the owl-looking cat reproduced on this page bears a very normal, very clear, undistorted signature. Shouldn't this be some illegible psychedelic goo from a 60's concert poster? That it is normal is indicative of an artist simply trying something else. Which is not to say that Wain's psychosis didn't inform his art, simply that the tale of an artist's descent into madness is a bit overly dramatic. As we've seen, Wain did create less abstract works while he was creating the psychedelic art.
It is additionally amusing to see works like these described as "realism."
Since I already stole my Dec links from Corndog, the now-defunct yet still legendary group weblog which flew to close to the sun on wings of collective indifference, let me say that I also ran into an example of this, of psychiatrists inventing a tale of woe, in this picture of a woman psychiatric patient who was made up to look like Ophelia. In this case, as in Wain's, people imposed a simple story on a complex situation and held it up as insight.
Wain's cats are delightful to see, please do visit Catland and enjoy Wain's work. You can see other freakadelic cats there, like Early Indian Irish and The Fire of the Mind Agitates the Atmosphere (a wonderful title which reminds me of another great title: A Huge, Ever-Growing, Pulsating Brain which Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld [Lovin' You]).
Finally, I'd like to say that I really like kitty-cats, as they are very pretty, soft, and elegant.
In Ico, there was one button for managing your interactions with the magical female. When separated, the button caused the horned boy to call to his companion. Together, the button causes the two of you to hold hands. That Ico has a button for holding hands is, though technical, beautiful. When the horned boy sits alone on the couch, pressing the button causes him not to yell or hold hands, but rather to raise his head in a precious tilt to face his companion. It simply describes the difficulty of their task and the wordless compassion of the two. The characters are described most strongly by these emotional components, and for this they are appealing.
Occasionally, the dungeon's exteriors are key to the puzzle, as in an early task I remember for having played several times with nieces and nephews. While ascending a tower's interior staircase, one reaches an impasse which can only be overcome by exiting the tower, walking past the obstruction on the outside, and then reentering the castle. It's a clever puzzle which plays well on the game's strong sense of unity of place. It's novel in that such things rarely happen in other games.
While other games have castles and dungeons set in some explorable environment, rarely does one move so fluidly between dungeon and context. For example, in Zelda, one travels to a lake and then swims underwater to enter a water dungeon. While you can explore the lake and the surrounding fields, once you've entered the dungeon all the elements for solving the dungeon and progressing in the storyline are found in the dungeon. One may have to perform some tasks prior to the dungeon in order to complete it, but this is not the same sort of connection that Ico makes. In Zelda, you have to complete some tasks in order to obtain a breathing apparatus to survive underwater, but once one obtains the apparatus, one completes the dungeon all within the dungeon's confines, one never has to leave the dungeon to flip a switch outside, then return to the dungeon. The tasks are comparmentalized, whereas in Ico the tasks include the context.
This is not intended as a criticism of Zelda, but rather a description of Ico. It also sets up the fact that Prince of Persia has this same puzzle in one of its levels. Ubisoft Montreal must have really liked Ico to have ripped it off so completely. Of course, they added swords, and replaced the original world full of menace, magic, and mystery with, well, India. A fair trade?
I saw the dothead bitch die. And I said to myself, "Gee, if only I had a way to turn back time." Played for a dopey joke in the end, and it's dopey and of course they hook up, because this isn't sexless ico anymore. And you look into the clear dark sky in the middle of the night, it is the dread that grasps your neck and compresses your spine, forcing all the nervous impulses into fusion until your neck's thick cords and that should help with the chronic pain but it limits your range of motion.
All this hoo haw and faw faroo about the need for a new videogame criticism. Let us take the form beyond mere technical details about frame rates and such and create something informed not by triflings point of view or listing features, comparing, doling out technical details in a dry manner, but through a critical aesthetics of the emotional of cut scenes. We are undaunted by the lack of such criticism for traditional games. Chess writings, in their analyses of openings, middle and end games are unrelentingly technical, in a way no discussion of frame rate could ever hope to be. We must have a strong analytical toolkit not bound by the old style. And so shall we be moved by Max Payne's plight, a family eradicated in a drug-induced frenzy by our arch nemesis, the street thug.
Prince of Persia, in title a tribute to A Flock of Seagulls, should be known as Ico with Swords. Like Ico, all action takes place in a single location, a mystical castle. The game follows the quest of a pair to reach a particular part of the castle. In Ico, a young horned boy and magical girl who spoke some unknown language were trying to reach the exit. In PoP, a Persian prince and Indian princess, both speaking English, seek out a particular tower where the villain, shown in an early cutscene, has hidden a large hourglass, the mystical powers of which have turned the raj's taj's denizens into sand zombies. The castle's citizens must have been clones of some strange device, as there are perhaps three men endlessly replicated throughout the environment. There was also only one woman, a tall, tarty knifeslinger a la Elektra. That's the comic book Elektra, not the Greek Elektra.
Like Ico, the castle has a unity, it is one place that persists through the game and its geometry is not violated, no matter how illogical or historically inaccurate. The game also attempts, early in the story, to explain the functions of various rooms and features of the environment in terms of the castle's practical nature. The various swinging blades one must dodge are part of the defense system. The switches thrown to unlock new rooms are part of the security system, allowing free access to the castle only to those who know the layout of the switches, or to a fellow acrobatic and crafty enough to find them on his own.
At this point, you surely have the genre in mind. You go from room to room, solve some basic puzzles to allow you access to the next room. It's like Zelda. Or it's like Doom and the like, dungeon crawlers in geography if not in point of view or gunpowder awareness. We are tired of your bourgeois pigeonholing of games and the excruciating criticism which is so reliant on an intimate knowledge of the rote list of canon styles and games. We shit defiantly on the old order.
One typically asinine criticism of Prince of Persia comes from ign, bloated tyrant of ludography. In it, they compare the game to Ico, noting that in both games you have a female companion, but that PoP's actually serves a purpose other than bringing you down, man, if by you we mean rather your polygonal avatar, the horned boy. Such sexist nonsense. As players of Ico well know, your female companion opens the gateways to all the new rooms in the castle, the opening of which completely eradicates the shadowy villains of the dark. Clearly, the ign reviewer can only see the arrrows that the the princess in PoP shoots, for to him there is no true action but penetration.
Which reminds me. In the George Pal movie version of War of the Worlds (I have not read the original, and my memory of a once heard Welles version, from a wow and fluttered tape copy on loan from the library, is not perfect), a scientist tries to describe the otherness of aliens by giving some fantastic examples. He speculates that Martians may "smell" the color red. In retrospect, this seems less a scientific speculation and more a zen koan. Red is what we call color of a particular wavelength. The experience of sensing red is intrinsic to sight. It is impossible to smell red, as smelling is the detection of gas with no regard to any light it may emit. An odor equivalent of chiaroscuro.