tl;dr

There are years when you have more to say, and there are years when you have less to say.

This is one of those years.

Apophenia

A stone with strange inscriptions on it. It’s the only line I remember from Fort. It has been four years and four months since I last mentioned it.

Tudor breasts and the parade of daughters (blowers, bonesetters, heretics, alchemists). At least one of them from something Imani said, somewhere, some time ago.

I read Dr. Bloodmoney a few days ago. I’m trying to save them for the years to come. Some day I will have read them all, but— they say Dick got here before the rest of us did, and I don’t want to have to leave him behind.

I love Cayce Pollard, I think. That’s why I reread her -to be with, or to be her, the familiar partly-tamed pathologies and obsessions. Postdrome migraine euphoria is like shoegaze drone, pleasant and buzzy and sad, made for the end credits of a movie with Bill Murray as the gaijin face of Bikkle. It’s the first and gentler half of the book that I love the best, before events overtake us.

I’m having trouble with the year, the October that won’t end. The season, but more so than usual, and what should have been over by now has crept into me and will not out.

I need to take care of myself, I know. And I am, in my fashion. But it should hurt when you break something, and it does.

Feeling Very Strange

One thing, in reading, that gives me great joy is when a story manages to dislocate me completely, a total-body, total-Weltanschauung dysmorphia; when I stand up, midway through the book, to go take a leak or drink some water or just take a cigarette break, and find it shocking to look down at myself, to see my arms, my stride, to measure my height from the ground (too much or too little), and to remember at a distance my name, my yesterday, my probable tomorrow; that I am this animal and not that fiction.

The Weight

One of the best things about sonically dense music is that it doesn’t give you any room to breathe. Empty spaces are too easy to fill. Give me walls of sound I can rest my head on.

The Best Jesus vs. Dinosaur Fight Scene Award, 2007

The Best Jesus vs. Dinosaur Fight Scene Award for 2007 goes to Jeff Rowland, and will probably be the same for 2008, or forever, if nobody can top this.

This post is about movies that I have watched recently.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a pretty awesome movie, and I would like to thank whoever leaked the R5 dvdrip because frankly, we were dying out here. I need to watch this again.

And not knowing anything about film as an art-form, for me it usually boils down to whether I would watch something again or not. In rare cases there are movies which I really liked but could not bring myself to watch again, but none of this set falls into that category. Also, given that I watch movies almost exclusively via torrents and have only so many gigabytes of disk space to work with, a Darwinian imperative comes into play, with the delete key playing the role of Grim Reaper.

Once a year or so, when I am mildly depressed, I watch Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi, better known to the anglophone world as Spirited Away. Something about it soothes the soul.

Why do I watch the same thing again and again? I don’t know. There are many books I re-read, some of them regularly. Part of it is the simple comfort of familiar ground, and part of it is the precise opposite of that, a delving into things that you haven’t noticed before. And there’s something else, I think; things that you return to have -even if in a small way- mythic importance, and myth thrives on resonance and recurrence.

But we were talking about movies.

Sunshine is an unexpectedly great sf movie. A big part of the unexpectedness is that the cast includes that androgynously pretty dude from Breakfast on Pluto, Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four, and Michelle Yeoh. And yes, it works. May or may not watch it again, depending on whether the mood strikes before I run out of disk space.

Wanted, on the other hand, is a movie that sucks tremendously badly. Not only is it a stupid movie, it manages to not have anything to do with the Wanted comic. This isn’t just me complaining about adaptations: for example, I thought the last Harry Potter movie, Order of the Phoenix, was a pretty great movie that stripped away most of the tedious dross from the book. It is possible for a movie to improve on a book, especially if it has Helena Bonham Carter in it. Wanted, on the other hand, raises the question -what’s left in this story that ties it to the comic Wanted? The book was not great, but it had a fierce humour, a great love of the pulp and trash of the spandex-pants superhero genre, and perfect dedication to the spirit of being an asshole. The movie was just… damp. Deleted after watching, and had a shower.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall was not bad. I generally prefer movies with explosions in them, eh, but I had to see the post-Veronica Mars Kristen Bell. And on seeing her, I suppose I realized that it wasn’t Kristen Bell that I thought was so awesome, it was Veronica Mars, and Sarah Marshall was somebody else altogether. Which in turn is something of a compliment to Kristen Bell, I suppose. But basically, candyfloss comedy, not the sort of thing I could stand to watch twice.

One more: Teeth; also unexpectedly a good movie. I don’t fault plots for being predictable, because that would apply to every story mentioned so far. Pitch-perfect as horror-comedy, I think, where every moment of the one is also one of the other. The abstinence-movement meetings, for example, are funny, but also horrific; the castration scenes are horrific, but also hilarious. Only the self-aware, mocking tone of the whole thing makes it shallow. It’s difficult to make a film genuinely surrealistic, I suppose; it looks too much like the real world. But if this were a book or a comic book, I think it could have transcended mere cleverness.

War In Heaven

I have been missing from my usual haunts on the internet for a few days because I have been reading David Zindell’s War In Heaven, which I have been waiting to read for many years. And before I could read War In Heaven, I had to go re-read The Wild, the second book in the trilogy, just to make sure the story was fresh in my mind.

Years ago, I found the first book, The Broken God, by happenstance, yellowed and tattered, in one of those second-hand bookshops in Maradana. And now the story is finally over, and I have to say -of all the many, many books that I love, I love these books the best. I’ve given the first book to a few people over the years, and a few have loved it, even as I have, while others found it tedious or meandering or too philosophical. So, as they say, your mileage may vary.

But for each of us, there are stories that fit so perfectly with the shape of our minds that they seem to have been written, personally, for us. For me, War In Heaven is perfection, and truly as magnificent as I have always expected it would be.

I plan to spend the rest of the day floating in a blissful haze.

The Knights Templar are suing the Pope

The Knights Templar are suing the Pope, hilariously.

The only thing more awesome than this would be if zombie Galileo and zombie Bruno were to invade the Vatican riding dinosaurs and carrying lots of guns, blowing the Swiss Guard’s stripy baggy pantaloons off while shouting “Eppur si muove!“

JJ Abrams vs. Moratuwa

Fringe has a comic-book prequel, scans of which can be seen here.

This comic is supposed to be giving us more background on “the pattern” -a series of inexplicable, seemingly paranormal events- that will presumably be the central mystery of Fringe. This preview describes several such events, including:

• 200 mysteriously dead cows in Kansas
• a tsunami that wipes out Moratuwa and kills 83,000 people
• a missing American kid re-appears (nobody dies) in Munich
• a man wakes up from a decades-long coma in Lisbon (nobody dies)

Is there anything about these events that seems just a tad unbalanced to you? Eh? Eh?

Yes, it’s this: where all the dead white people?

Now, I know this is a preview of a comic which is a prequel to a tv show, which means it is probably complete throwaway handwaving, just part of the hype machine -I don’t even know who writes it.  And I’m not saying that JJ (or whoever) can’t kill a whole buncha fictional Sri Lankans in any way he pleases. I myself often fantasize about The point is -well, if JJ Abrams had, instead of an inexplicable tsunami in Moratuwa, had a mysterious plane crash into some towers in an American city (and casually named a death toll more than twice as high than that of 9/11, to boot) would that have been an equally acceptable “mysterious disaster” to the audience of Fringe? I imagine not.

JJ has used Sri Lanka as shorthand before; in Lost’s “Sri Lanka video” thing this place was just, almost literally, a certified sticker of exoticity. It was just a way of saying “somewhere far away and inconsequential”. Now, in Fringe, the place and the disaster are conflated together into a convenient package -emotional shorthand layered on top of the geographical shorthand. And that would probably have worked fine in my head if he had made it, e.g., a volcano. Or an invasion of marauding carnivorous platypuses, whatever.

Ah, well. When you’re brown and poor, you take what you can get, amirite? Moratuwa should be thankful just to have been mentioned.

Porngate

So apparently the next big thing is banning porn. Well, not “banning”: we have to go pay (more) money to get a “password” to the unrestricted internets, whereas otherwise we can only browse the චින්තනය-approved internets.

Presumably this means that some government subdepartment is gonna have the job of pre-emptively trawling the entire internet for porn, so as to restrict it? At first, this may sound like an enviable job, but I’m a little worried about the health of the sheltered geezers assigned to it, especially by the time they stumble onto the midget amputee gore-porn. Or, god forbid, one of /b/’s Rule 34 threads.

(Or maybe they’ll just do this the *easy* way: whitelists instead of blacklists. Just restrict everybody to say, news.lk. Five minutes of that and you’d have a queue of people with money in their hand…)

While we’re on the subject of paying a few bucks extra to get to the “unrestricted” internet, I wonder if Mahinda would mind slipping banned news websites into the same category. I mean, Tamilnet and whoever else is (or is going to be) banned for terrorism. Is that also for sale, or is that not available at any price?

Who watches the Watchmen trailer?

Who watches the Watchmen trailer? I’m not sure why I’ve watched it half a dozen times. It’s interesting, but not necessarily good. Ozymandias looks nerdier than I thought he should; Laurie just looks completely different -the ridiculous vamp-stalk through the flaming wreckage just has me rolling my eyes- and Dan seems to be lacking that distinctive owly pudginess.

And I don’t know. Presumably the Watchmen movie will not have the Hollis Mason story about the garage owner with the fake boobs and the Ride of the Valkyries. It probably will not have Blood from the Shoulder of Pallas, Dan’s little monograph on owls. It pretty much can’t have the shipwreck-pirate-horror story-within-the-story. And I don’t know if the Mars sequence can even be done outside of comics at all.

I am just complaining for the usual reasons. The movie will probably be all right, for a movie. It’s just, you know. It’s the goddamn Watchmen. You have higher expectations than your common-or-garden Hulk movie. Mind you, I thought both Hulk movies were pretty good.

Tardigrades! In space!

Tardigrades! In space! It’s more than a little ridiculous that they are called “water bears”, but at the same time it is extremely awesome.

Finally, the ultimate terrist-foiling technology: just ring the city with laser beams. We will all get used to the constant protective pewpewpew soon enough.

Never drink beer and coffee at the same …

Never drink beer and coffee at the same time.

The King of Sentences by Jonathan Lethem.

For a minute, I thought “tweet-shirt!” but then I realized that this was just stupid. If my shirt is going to get involved with the interbutts, it needs to do most of the work. Or ideally, all of it.

What kind of net artist are you? No, not one of those quizzes. Just a list of questions, plus the associated argument. This is about the point where I roll my eyes, and I invite you to do the same. This will be the birth of a new net art movemement based on the collective, distributed rolling of eyes at pretentious artcock. Your suggestions for a name for this movement are welcome.

Things that explode unexpectedly

Things that explode unexpectedly: now including lakes, frogs and ants.

I’m thinking of getting a Device, and attaching it to my head or something. When the red light starts to blink, duck.