The Eccentricities of a Night-Hawk

2011-01-01T19:17:00.003-05:00

Gosh, hadn't it got a bit dusty in here? It needed a great deal of smarting up to look presentable. I hope it's worked. Now, to generate a bit of content.

...

...

...

Nah, it's not coming now, and besides, it's a holiday. And I've got a shiny new DVD of the first series of Being Human to watch. That ought to bring forth some think-itude.

Cheers!

More Dreams

2010-04-28T00:13:00.002-04:00

I've been suffering from insomnia again, and more or less on form, caved in and took some sleeping pills last night. I'm always a little loathe to do this, because while they do help me fall asleep, they also ensure that getting us is a right pain, and that instead of sleeping through the night, I wake up four or five times only to descend into a light sleep or pointlessly vivid dreams that usually wake me up anyway.

Which happened last night. One was rather gruesome, but an interest riff on a common dream, and the other was... odd. Even by my standards.

The first began with me renting a tuxedo for my prom. With my mother. We had had actually picked out the tux, and were selecting a matching waistcoat. Yes. I know. You don't wear waistcoats with tuxedos. I pointed that out in the dream, but I wound up picking a sort of brown and tan check brocade thing that resembled some towels from a Radisson hotel in Lisle, IL.

After that, we were walking down the street, when someone being chased by the police jumped through a plate glass window. Then that person was me. I had glass sticking out of me all over. But not like if you had gone through a window. There were pieces stacked together like pages in a book. I remember other people around me freaking out, but I was calmly trying to decide whether to pick them out or leave them in. I was thinking "it's probably like a stab wound. If you take them out the blood will pool and the bleeding will get worse." So I started picking them out. I think there were some in my nose I plucked out, but I began to not be able to breathe, and remember thinking "Ahhh. I'm suffocating. This is more relaxed than I thought it'd be."

Then I woke up. (This is the riff dream; every once in a while I dream I'm vomiting glass shards, so this is similar to that.)

The other dream I had is that I was walking through Astoria. I was walking down Ditmars Blvd towards my old house. As I turned onto 46th St, I saw someone I knew walking a basset hound, and turned away, thinking "How did I manage to time it out this badly?" I walked back down Ditmars and passed a Greek Orthodox that isn't there. I ducked in, and people were congregating in just before a service. There was a weird balcony of sort, of chair balances on a series of ropes that ran across the nave, and there was a sort of red silk rood-screen dividing the choir. You had to climb up the screen to get to the chairs. I did so, and a big Greek guy informed me that the screen was a Disco screen. I didn't argue. I think I got up and left before the service started, because I remember talking to a kid in a newsie get-up on stairs that ran the length of the outside, before a wrought iron fence.

That's it.

Inappropriate Work Anecdote

2010-04-25T23:56:00.002-04:00

So there's this engaged couple where I work. I don't much mind the girl -- about the only way she ever really impacts my consciousness is that I start humming the first song on the New Pornographer's first album when she walks by -- but the guy, for some reason*, I just particularly loathe.

Until I noticed that the girl has a Twilight calendar (well, she would, wouldn't she?) on her wall with shirtless a Jacob on it**. Her fiance is the least Jacob-like person you could imagine, all pale and scrawny and Phish-listen-y. All of which, if you're me, conjures up an amusing image of the girl fantasizing about getting it hard from a wolf-boy while Weasel-boy ruts away single-A style.

Yeah, it's all a bit Artaud meets Sartre meets Genet, but it keeps a smirk on my face during the work week. And I'm preeety sure the grotty little oik totally deserves it.

*All right, he's a jerk and bears an uncanny resemblance to a weasel. Anybody who can get off looking at that probably pre-supposes the rest of this post.

**Not that I object or anything. It's arguably the seco... third... fourth best thing at work right now.

Dreams, Odd

2010-01-25T23:39:00.003-05:00

I've decided I need to keep better track of my dreams. Up till now, it's been a sort of half-assed, I-really-should-do-this type intention, but I had a dream odd enough last night to warrant some attention. My dreams are always pretty vivid, and this was no exception, but this one was rife with meanings I can't help but think will be more apparent upon reflection.

It's also worth mentioning that this was a dream that seemed very long-lasting but no doubt wasn't, and that it occurred in that period after dawn but before time to wake up.

I was traveling with a certain person (doesn't matter who, at least not to you) on a bus going down a dirt road. The road itself was grey and sandy, with low-lying scrub on either side. It wasn't like anything I'd seen before, but it had elements of I-10 and I-20 in east Texas and a ride I took on a bus through the Yucatan in Mexico.

We were at the back of the bus, and I was thrilled to be on a bus on an unpaved road, though I have no idea why. The bus was open to the air in the back, and the over-all effect was rather like being in the back of a Jeep with its top off, or maybe the back of a open-air cattle hauler. I had my iPod with me and was planning on watching something on it.

The next part of the dream was at something like a rest stop or a bus station. My grandmother (who died a little less than a year ago) was there, and I was quite excited and a little nervous to introduce her to the guy I was with. I remember giving her a hug and her saying something, but I don't recall what.

My next recollection is that we're driving down another unpaved lane. I don't know why but I think it was in Texas. My mother is now present amongst the other people, and she tells me we've just passed a sign that says "The elevation will be 7 feet in 7 miles." I am very disappointed that I was unable to take a picture of this sign with the camera I got for Christmas this year.

Before very much longer has passed, we go by a most unusual place. My first impression is that it's a pit mine or quarry -- there's a big hole and it feels like the afternoon sun is putting much of it in shadow. There's a lot of pinks and salmons and oranges and ochres, and later thought makes me think of Escalante National Park, if only in color range. But in the middle, there's a high mountain jutting up, catching the sun. After the fact -- as in, immediately after, when I awoke, but not in the actual moment -- for some reason, I thought of Mount Doom from the Lord of the Ring films. At that moment, a quarry charge went off, removing a substantial hunk of the side of the mountain. We watched the side of the mountain explode and then watched as the rubble rained around us, and hit the roof of the bus in small(ish) rocks. The only thing I've ever seen the like, I think, was in The Hand of Fear, and it was not very similar to that.

Not long after that, there was another, larger explosion on the mountain side that resulted in far larger rubble flying down. This time, the stones were large enough to crush a bus like ours, and watching the falling stones, there was no guarantee my bus would have been spared. I don't know if it would have been: (I think, though I'm not 100% sure), our bus was heading for a cave in a rock face -- a square hole in a sheer cliff -- when there was a sudden lurch, as if we were all falling. This is what woke me up. It was extremely visceral, the sensation of falling.

What makes me wonder is that this is the second time in less than two weeks, I've been woken up by a dream that involves falling off a roadway in a vehicle. Odd.

Score, Sixth Style

2009-08-22T00:43:00.003-04:00

Perhaps surprisingly, I don't often dream of Doctor Who. In fact, as far as I know, it's only happened once before: a rather charming affair with me riding around in Bessie with the third Doctor.

But that's it, really. Just a drive. Nothing else.

Until the other night.

I had me a dream with the sixth Doctor* (so, uhhh, no doubt about me dreaming in colour, what?). I'm not sure exactly at what point it started, but by the time I'm cognizant of what's going on, the Doctor and I am on the crest of a hill. A hill, I think, either in Gloucester (which I favour) or in Yorkshire: the bottom of the hill is in a mere, the top is bright green and dry. In the distance, we can see one hell of a storm bewing; the clouds are a violent black and purple curdling against an evening sky. The Doctor says he needs to know more about it, so I take a running leap off the hill. The valleys are full of giant broccoli stalks**: I run off the edge and leap onto one, which bows down with my weight into the valley, where a storm is fearfully raging. I pop back as it catapults up.

Later (in the sort of Strindbergian connexion dreams have), I'm driving along with the Doctor in a Morris Minor. We pull into the parking lot of my parents' church, only to see a future version of the Doctor -- the one from Real Time and after that sports a blue plaid version of his coat -- along with two versions of Peri. One from The Two Doctors and one from The Mysterious Panet. I convince my Doctor to pop off, so as not meet the future Peris, but this is where my dreams runs out.

What does it mean? Beats me, except:

*Ever since I purchashed "Attack of the Cybermen", I've been going through and listening to the commentary on each episode. I'm up to Terror of the Vervoids, ep. 3, so you can see where the Sixth Doctor angle comes from. Although Col makes one hell of a commentary guide -- second only to the vegetable man.

**Oh, this is so totally from watching that episode of The Powerpuff Girls with the Broccoloids they aired this week!

Oh, and can I just praise the sort of fate that makes sure I listen to Big Finish's "Company of Friends" the same week I re-read Shelley's Frankenstein? It's totally a B+ for effort and a C- for concept! I mean, did anyone bother to do research on Percy? Clearly not! The exigencies of writing a drama clearly take it up the ass here! I'd be more praising if the play were just not crippled by lazy writers!

2009-08-18T23:57:00.002-04:00

Somehow or other, I managed to read both the beginning of Shelley's Frankenstein and watch the episode of Wild Russia on the Arctic on the same day. (If you don't know, the frame story of Frankenstein takes place on a boat in the far north of Russia, past Arkhangelsk and the White Sea). I rather assumed any dreams I'd remember would have been about endless white landscapes and harsh colds.

They weren't. I had a rather odd one, really. To set it up, I should mention that while my academic writing is all done under my own name, most of the rest is done pseudonymously pseudonomically... under a pen name.

In my dream, I'm walking down a street in the town where I went to college. Except this street doesn't actually exist. It was a side street along the main drag which isn't really there; it was all white stucco and tall wooden doors and milk bottles and weeds, like something in Belsize Park.

Anyway, I'm walking down this street with my friend Jamie, who for reasons that remain unclear, is wearing a medium purple pants suit, rather like Hillary Clinton on an old TV set in need of knob-twiddling. We are on our way to a film opening.

Which is in a little cafe that's all brushed steel and glass-top tables. We settle in somewhere in the middle, just in front of a group of people I knew. I don't know who they are now, but they were all people I recognised then. I *think* they were all people I went to undergrad with, which would at least be appropriate to the setting.

And these people are sitting around reading and tearing into a script I wrote. Ruthlessly. I don't know where they got it, and it's clear they don't know I wrote it, but it makes me hugely uncomfortable, and I spend a good few minutes trying to figure out a) how to communicate my discomfort and b) and to tell them I think it's rather good.

The dream itself peters out about there. It's odd because I throw around a fair amount of scripts to people and -- often being harsh in reading others -- expect people to be just as harsh with mine. I'm thick skinned about it, because it's foolish not to take good advice. But apparently I'm not quite as thick skinned as I imagined, at least subconcsiously.

In any event, the next dream I had involved me losing control of a minivan on a slippery road and crashing into a tree. This was also in Chapel Hill -- I could show the exact spot, down to the tree, on Franklin Street going down onto 15-501 where it happend. Weird little book-end...

Seattle Serenade

2009-08-15T13:10:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago, I was in Seattle. I had to step over to a grocery store, and as I was waiting for the car service to pick me up, one of the employees was out front, playing a ukulele and singing.

I asked him if he knew "This Little Ukulele". He didn't so I offered to teach him, since it's only three chords and two verses. (I bet you didn't know I could play the ukulele...) As I was playing it through, someone stopped in the parking lot, pointed, and went "Ohmigod! It's Stephin Merritt!"

I was flattered for a minute, till I remembered the last picture I saw of Stephin.

Another Question.

2009-07-29T22:38:00.004-04:00

Since it's Wednesday night, I thought I'd mention Animal Planet's new show, Monsters Inside Me, a show about parasites. It's oddly compelling and pointlessly over-dramatic at the same time, and it gives a distinctly contradictory message: both "go see the doctor when you get weird pains and unexplained symptoms" -- a point I probably should give a great deal more heed to, since my first reaction to any given medical emergency, up to an including basset hounds ripping my lip off, is "I'll be all right in a minute" -- and "your doctors will never, ever recognize these parasite infections and will only make you worse off!".

And the host is kind of hott. At least some of it is my weird little masochistic streak; more than I should, I enjoy the attractive but slightly snotty biologist talking down to me about how rat lung worm got its name (as the name implies, they're worms that live in rats' lungs) as if I couldn't quite get there on my own. But another part is that he looks vaguely familiar. It's taken me a few weeks to figure it out, but here goes -- I think he looks an awful lot like a guy who did a stroke vid a few years ago for YouLoveJack.com. A really, really good one. Followed up with an equally good two-hander (as it were).

You decide.

Here is "Charlie Duke":

And here is host Dan Riskin:

Okay, so the screen capture yanked from Youtube isn't the best shot to demonstrate the similarity, but frankly I think the inability to find pictures of Dan is a sure sign I'm on to something.

Update!

2009-07-10T13:52:00.002-04:00

All right, so it's been a while. I've been travelling: Baltimore to Rapid City to El Paso, and soon to be in Savannah and Seattle. I'll post a link to pictures soon.

But my update:

Several months ago, I posted about Tanya Lee and Joshua from eHarmony. I postulated they were probably far-right Jesus-freak whackos, and Joshua's flaunted assets in the trousers department notwithstanding, they waited till marriage to get it aaawwhhhn.

And I was right.

One of them -- presumably the male -- writes thus:

Marriage is a biblical union under God that happens to be recognized by our government. It is not subject to amendments. I believe that it would be right of our government to offer some sort of union benefit to those who wish to join their lives in a same-sex union. However, this does not mean that the government has any right to step into the church and redefine "marriage". The separation between church and state is not to keep the beliefs of the church out of our governing systems. Instead is to keep the governing systems out of the church. ...

This is not about rights as a citizen of the United States of America. This is about whether we as a country have the audacity to ammend the Bible. "Marriage" is not the term to be used in homosexual unions. This is not ever been defined in the Bible as such. Thus it is not the place or right of my government to change that. In order to keep separate as so many have suggested the church and the state, we must fundamentally re-examine the suggestions being purposed. (Reported via this site.)

Great stuff, huh? "It's not about rights"? "The separation between church and state is not to keep the beliefs of the church out of our governing systems"? I personally like the idea that American law is somehow subject to the law of god, yet nobody who crafted it, practiced it or commented on it at the time ever mentioned that.

I guess Alexander Hamilton was quite right when he said "We forgot."

People's Court Super-Fan

2009-03-24T00:20:00.002-04:00

Now here's something I bet you don't know. There's a People's Court Super-Frea... Fan. Super-Fan.

I don't know his name; I don't know anything about him, but I first ran across him a few years ago when I actually attended a taping of The People's Court.

See, I myself am a fan of the show. I adore it. And, living in the City and all, I decided to go see it made. And it was worth it.

He was there, you see. And clearly the production staff had dealt with him before. You could tell by the tone of their voice. This time, apparently, he had shown up with a People's Court logo t-shirt. Which they couldn't (or wouldn't, maybe --it was pretty hideous) let on the air. He obligingly turned it inside out. They seated him.

As we were waiting for the taping to begin, someone (a audience relations person or some such) prepared us. She gave us the rules -- don't talk, turn off your mobiles, etc -- and then took a few questions. Which SuperFan proceeded to answer for her.

Anyway, since then, I've always noticed him in the little studio audience. He's there a good 40 or 50% of the time. Look for him: he's a little Asian guy, bald, with glasses. And he seems to almost have an assigned seat, the aisle seat on the second row behind the plaintiff.

Now you Know!

It's Not Just Me, Right?

2009-03-03T23:39:00.004-05:00

Now I'll admit I'd never heard of celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito before tonight's episode of The Biggest Loser.

But man, let me tell you, when I saw him a did a double take that verged on a spit-take. Why?

This is Chef Rocco:

...and this is one of the stars of Eurocreme, Philippe Delvaux:

They do resemble each other, right? I'm not crazy.

Anyway, I don't know where exactly you can see the Chef (I think he may be the eponym behind the Rocco's on 22nd Street), but thankfully, you can find Phillipe in PartyBoy*. And -- so I'm told and will certainly be going to check out -- Indie Boyz 5.

*For god's sake, stop what you're doing and go watch the first scene with him and Alex Stevens and somebody else...

In Your Senior Year Did You?

2009-03-02T22:29:00.007-05:00

Ever since my grandmother's funeral, I've been sick as a dog. For several days, I was literally too sick to get out of bed, and when I did -- thanks to an ear infection -- it was like a bad day at sea. I'm still suffering from a bizarre lump on the side of my throat (someone seriously suggested Mumps, even though I was vaccinated for it) and even more bizarre fatigue. I /still/ can't make it through the day without a nap, and I've gotten by on four or five hours a sleep a night for weeks at a time before. It's got me more concerned than anything.

Anyway, this little meme was floating around Facebook, so I thought I'd yank it and use it here to ease me back into more regular posting.

Now apparently as far back ago as college, I was already artfully re-arranging my high school career with selective back-outs and misrememberances -- my best friend throughout all of high school and college would hit me on the back of the head and proceed to tell me how miserable I was then, since I only seem to recall being reasonably happy. So I can't swear to the total veracity of what you're about to see. But it all seems true. Possunt quia posse videntur and whatnot.

1. Did you date someone from your school?
No, the only person I could even begin to say I dated went to another high school.

2. Did you marry someone from your high school?
They don't let people like me get married. Nor would I want them to let me marry anyone from there.

3. Did you car pool to school?
God, no. My morning routine was timed out to the minute: I left home at 8.07 to make the tardy bell at 8.20. I couldn't depend on anyone else to be that combination of lazy and regular.

Although we did routinely race each other back home.

4. What kind of car did you have?
For the first few weeks, a 1990 Nissan Sentra L. It was replaced by my faithful 1996 Plymouth Neon.

Yes. Just like Sweet Dee's.

5. What kind of car do you have now?
None. It keeps me smug.

6. It's Friday night...where are you now?
In front of my computer, either editing copy of my thesis or working on my play.

7. It is Friday night...where were you then?
I seem to recall a lot of driving around (often to gawp at the local Car on a Stick) or to find a place that would sell beer to minors.

8. What kind of job did you have in high school?
None.

9. What kind of job do you do now?
Dramaturg. Playwright. Critic.

10. Were you a party animal?
Ha! No.

11. Were you considered a flirt?
Ha ha ha! No. I was only vaguely aware of sex then, and not even aware one could attempt to procure it.

12. Were you in band, orchestra or choir?
Nope. I would have been a drama geek, had there been any theatre classes at my school.

13. Were you a nerd?
I was Captain of the school Quiz Bowl Team and Hi-Q team.

So, yes. Yes I was.

14. Did you get suspended or expelled?
No, although one teacher dedicated herself to that proposition after I called her a bitch on state-wide TV. And there was residual flack from the Urinal Cap incident and the religion that sprung up around it. And around the heresy of the hated Burger King Idol and its ritual immolation.

15. Can you sing the fight song?
I don't think we had a fight song. If we did, it didn't matter -- at my senior year Homecoming football game, we lost 96-0 and were proud it wasn't worse.

We did have an alma mater that started out "Dear Old St. X High School, We..." but the local junior high had one to the same tune (and the chorus teacher there forced us to memorise it) and now I can't tell them apart.

That said, I know every word to "Hark the Sound of Tar Heel Voices".

16. Who was/were your favorite teacher(s)?
Beth Haunton, my English and journalism teacher. Poor woman had to teach me 6 classes in 4 years.

Mr Thomas, the mad US History teacher, was a distant second when he wasn't threatening me with bodily harm or threatening to shoot me with the loaded rifle he kept in his classroom.

Really.

17. Where did you sit during lunch?
There was a little balcony for the seniors in the lunchroom. We had three lunch periods -- I had the first -- but there were only a dozen or so seniors in that period. I sat with my friends Darren, Chris and Jonathan.

18. When did you graduate?
1996

20. What was your school mascot?
Uhhh. We were the St X Indians, I think. Or Red-Skins. The high school was one and the junior high the other, and I don't remember any more, if I ever cared.

21. If you could go back and do it again, would you?
Gods, no. The only things I could do differently is tell the teachers they were wrong, but I tended to do that anyway.

22. Did you have fun at prom?
At the prom, no. At the party afterward, yes.

23. Do you still talk to the person you went to Prom with?
I went to my junior and senior prom. The girl I went to the jr. prom with I haven't talked to since I asked her out to fraternity rush event my first year of college.

Yes, really.

The girl I went to my senior prom with I did see when I was at home for Christmas this year.

24. Are you planning on going to your next reunion?
No.

25. Do you still talk to people from school?
No one. Hence the above. They had a Ten Year Reunion a few years ago, and I did get invited but I refused even to respond back.

In Which Our Hero Falls To Fashion...

2009-02-15T22:15:00.002-05:00

...and lists 25 Random Things about himself.

1) I have a mental processing disorder. It's sort of a inability to match up the outside world and the inside of my head. Right and left mean virtually nothing to me, and I can never relate maps or blueprints to real world locations. I get lost a /lot/, even in places I know perfectly well. It's just as well I grew up in the South, where directions are given by landmarks. To this day, I couldn't tell you how to get to The Drama Bookshop, other than you pass the big Synagogue, the door down to the subway that's closed off and past two porno places.

2) The first Doctor Who book I ever read was Nigel Robinson's novelisation of The Edge of Destruction, Easter, 1988.

3) Speaking of Doctor Who, WUNC-TV would air 4 episodes in a row on Saturday afternoons, rather than airing story compilations like they did in the rest of the US. Apparently, when I was very small, I couldn't tell when the story was over and would keep watching WUNC even after Doctor Who went off. The next show was The Almanac Gardner, and my mother would come in and see me learning how to tend broccoli.

4) I have seen one (1) porcupine. It was in Juneau, Alaska. It was a great deal cuter than I expected it to be.

5) There are very few things I hate, but second on the list is deer.

6) I am 1/256th Cherokee. One of my best friends is 1/2 Cherokee and did not fall to the ground laughing when I told him that recently.

7) The best Christmas gift I ever got was a blanket with a tiger on it. I got it when I was 9 or 10 from an aunt and it's one of the few things I've had every place I've lived. And it's still in remarkably good condition -- the only repair I've ever had to do was to stitch the lining back in one spot in college.

8) I learned to make espresso drinks in the Half Moon Junction in Manteo, NC. It's no longer there -- the space it was in now houses its big sister, the Full Moon Cafe, which used to be across the street. It is owned by one of the greatest men I've ever known, Paul Charron, and his wife, Sharon.

9) My favourite painting is La Tempesta by Giorgione.

10) I have never watched an episode of American Idol, nor do I intend to start doing so now.

11) I have broken my right ankle twice.

12) I'm fairly certain that if David Bowie and Stephen Fry had a child, that child would be god.

13) I have never seen a UFO. I have both heard and seen a ghost, though given how much time I've spent in the Outer Banks, this is not surprising.

14) I am an excellent bartender. My bible is a late 1960s Playboy's Host and Bar Book snagged from my father when I was 18. I have only ever made one bad drink on its reputation -- something with Grand Marnier and Rose's Lime Juice -- and only Ben Wheeler and I tried it. I have never mentioned it before now, and may never do so again.

15) I believe Dan Komar's Newshawks is the greatest single gay porno ever made. The first scene has a threesome with Robbie Masters and Cameron Jackson and it only gets better from there.

16) The worst book I have ever read was Caleb Williams, by William Godwin, the father of Mary Shelley and the husband of Mary Wallstonecraft.

17) One morning my freshman year of college, one of my suitemates stopped me and asked if I wanted to go for a drive. There were four of us all told and we drove to Abilene, Kansas -- as far as you can get from Chapel Hill, NC in one day. Then we drive back. It was the first time I ever skipped class.

18) Shows I have seen every (remaining) episodes of: Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Black Adder, Are You Being Served?, Home Movies, Cracker.

19) I can start a fire without matches, with flint and steel. And char-cloth. And I can make char-cloth.

20) I'm always sort of afraid horses are going to step on my feet.

21) I have never seen a full set by The Essex Green -- despite having seen them at least 8 times. It usually has something to do with my friend Alicia: one time she asked me to go get condoms for her (still am not sure just why I did that) and another time she got distinctly ill at the Cat's Cradle and I had to take her home.

22) My favourite memory of Laura Llew is her trying to stare down Chris "Beans" Geddes in one of the dressing rooms of the Carolina Theatre during an interview with Richard Colburn.

23) I always tuck book receipts inside the book I've just bought, so I can remember where and when I bought it. I think the oldest books I have done this for come from 1997.

24) I am afraid of heights.

25) The thing I want most in the world? My very own basset hound.

2009-02-11T00:11:00.004-05:00

I thought I'd put this up here. It's my response to a comment sent to me (the first paragraph), written by a contributor/reviewer to the New York Times. He's suggesting a variation a fairly common analysis* of Edward II -- "No, seriously, it's /not/ about him being gay. It's about him being a bad king" -- that I tend to think is bunk, as I explain, since I don't think his sexual identity can be separated out from his political actions. Not that I'm suggesting he doesn't make political mistakes, mind.

But then again, I'm not sure using the term "downfall" for the action of a tragedy in general is appropriate, and more certainly questionable for /this/ tragedy, so maybe I'm completely talking out of my arse. It is a rough draft, so please ignore the coarser stylistic elements, and I expect its tone will soften a little ere it gets sent. As for the foot-notes, this is Bray; this is Smith.

*It is a rather dated response. I've heard it argued that it rose as response to the sort of de facto censoring the play garnered pre-1968, justifying the fact that politics was able to get more explicit play than sex in performance. Nowadays, I can't help but see the casual split between the personal and the political as an off-hand way to sweep the whole gay issue under the table.

One of the most interesting aspects of “Edward II” for us moderns is that Edward’s homosexuality is blatant but it isn’t the main reason for his downfall. He’s destroyed because of his indifference to the class anxieties of the nobles, who object to Gaveston’s common ancestry much more than to his queerness. The really interesting subject has to do with the political machinations and motivations in the play in general, of which homosexuality forms just one part."

I have, of course, seen this argument – that the play is about a weak king whose homosexuality is to a greater or lesser degree unimportant – before, but I've never felt it to be very compelling. Personally, I find it a little disingenuous and counterintuitive and I think there are significant arguments to be made against it.

Marlowe's choice in taking the life of Edward II as subject matter is among the first: I'd suggest that there must be something uniquely compelling about Edward's life for Marlowe to pick him. If Marlowe's subject was merely that of a weak king politicking with a rebellious aristocracy and external threats, he had many candidates to choose from. Even restricting Marlowe to sources we know he used, Holinshed, Fabyan and Stow, he still could have chosen Stephen of Blois, perhaps, or (as Shakespeare would take up) John, Richard II or Henry VI. But he didn't. It may be impossible to say to exactly what degree Edward's sexual identity influenced Marlowe's decision, but it does strike me as disingenuous to suggest it was “just one part” but instead a significant part of the determination.

I would also suggest that the “class anxieties of the nobles” that Gaveston engenders comes specifically from the sexual relationship he had with Edward. They are inextricably bound up with each other and cannot be teased into parts. If the struggles the nobles initiate with Edward were just – or even mostly – about anxieties over class difference^¹, their struggle would be over if not at the death of Gaveston, then when Edward takes up with the (English) younger de Spenser. But it isn't.

And while the nobles frequently do make reference to class division the very way they do it (they most commonly refer to Gaveston as “boy” and “whore”^²) are specific sexual terms. Not even the persons of the drama are separating out sexuality and politics when it comes to the shortcomings of the king.

In fact, as the drama progresses, Edward becomes a “better” king within some of the terms laid out by the nobles. Mortimer Junior at several points early on questions or insults Edward's martial abilities as a soldier and warrior. But Edward personally leads his forces back into battle in Scene 12 and wins the battle in Scene 16 through superior force. It takes the duplicity of Isabella and Mortimore's secret return with hired soldiers from Flanders to defeat the King.

Admittedly, this loss and his subsequent capture in Wales stem ultimately from Edward's inability to deal with Isabella, but this is again at least as much a personal failing as a political one. It is because of his love for Gaveston that he ignores Isabel, and her gradual personal hurt becomes the impetus for her maneuvering of Mortimer, and in the end their desire for political power becomes indistinguishable from their personal relationship, so this sort of seamless blend of politics and the personal is not something featuring in Edward alone; it is a distinguishing characteristic of the play.

Which is not surprising. The play Edward II is of its time. For the Elizabethans – subject of a queen who most famously adapted her sexuality identity into a keen political tool – there was no sort of dichotomy between the personal and the political, or any way for them to pick apart the concepts enough to say “this is a major constituent of a series or action” and “this is a minor one.” It is a modern, artificial construct placed onto the text, arguably against authorial intent and historical context, and one that fundamentally changes the meaning and interpretation of the work. You can't trivialize or underplay Edward's sexual identity in this play, or suggest in any interpretation or critical analysis that it is not the most significant factor. Edward may well have political failing, but each of them, adduced to its source, is rooted in his homosexuality.

1Or even differences in nationality, since almost as much attention is paid to Gaveston's French nationality than to his class. Yet even nationality is intimately bound up with sexual identity in this period. (I refer you to pg. 73-5 of Bray.)

2I refer to Smith, Chap. 9 for his specific discussion of using the term “boy”, but I do point out its use within Dido, Queen of Carthage to refer to Ganymede and his specifically sexual relationship with Jupiter.

You Gonna Make Me Superman Up on You

2009-02-03T22:14:00.002-05:00

Usually, when commercials leave me puzzled, I get angry. "Who are these people?" I ask. "Why are these people wasting my time?" I ask.

But this one -- from Mo' Money Taxes -- is different. It amuses me.

It begins in Miami, apparently.

It starts out with a group of people talking to a man in a nice car. They complain -- understandably enough, ipsa re -- about taxes, and how much they are. I suppose at a stretch, somebody with such a nice car has lots of money, and therefore knows about money, or at least how to get a good accountant, so maybe random guy in a (well, I can't tell model of car it is exactly -- maybe a Camero Z28 from the blurry hood ornament, but more likely something with a little more intelligence, judging by the noise the engine makes) car isn't the worst guy you could ask.

So random guy places a call on his cellular phone.

Cut to a scene on a beach (quite possibly also in Miami, but you can't be sure). RG's contact it seems, has quit the business.

One assumes the accountancy game, but you can't be too sure.

So has his partner, a big dumb white guy taking several drinks off a scantily clad waitress. Hearing his (ex-?)partner dis him, he talks about the virtue of his shoes -- babymakes, as he calls them -- and threatens the heading of this post. One assumes the blue t-shirt he's wearing has a Superman symbol underneath the pixellation.

Cut to some other guys on a boat. They're on the phone, too, and one assumes to the original random guy. "Don't worry," they say, "We'll be there in less than thirty seconds." Then we're treated to a montage of the yacht saling by for about half the length of the commercial.

I'm glad, frankly, that I don't live in Miami. It seems to me the yachts on the street (as they would have to be to get to ORG) would be a bitch to avoid.

Cut to a pool in front of mansion, where three people are standing. They might be ORG and the two guys on the boat. I don't know; I can't tell. They're wearing vaguely similar clothes to the men on the boat, but I swear it looks like they've switched shirts. The guy in the middle may well be ORG, but I'm not too certain of that, either. Could be the sunglasses they've all acquired.

"Come down and see us -- you'll be glad that you did," they close.

And I believe them. I do. I would give them my tax returns to file in a heartbeat.

Anybody who could make such an incomprehensible ad /has/ to be better at something else, and why shouldn't that something else be accountancy?

I have to assume that this ad is just another in a series I've never seen, so I just don't understand part of the assumed narrative. But even so, the cuts even within this one ad are /really/ unclear, so you can't quite get the connections between the speakers. It would make exactly as much sense if each of the three parts had no connection whatsoever.

However, that lack of clarity -- and subsequent lack of useful meaning -- is what makes it hysterically funny. It doesn't mean to, but it functions exactly in the way an absurdist play /should/ but seldom does. It makes you question logic behind how you piece together the world around you. Connections that seem like they should be obvious don't quite work correctly and things that makes no sense at all appear to connect seemlessly within the narrative.

Or to put it another way, the strange seems familiar and the familiar, strange.

Which is -- of course -- Brecht's classic definition of the verfremsdungeffekt. Bet you didn't think there was much crossover between him and Ionesco. Or Albee. Or that either had much to did with current Urban marketing.

If I ever got to re-edit this ad, the only thing I would change is to have them shout "It's not that way; it's over there!" a few times at the end.

Bet you didn't see that lil' bit of dramaturgical awesomeness coming at you when you started!

Miss Emily Never Had It So Good

2009-01-28T23:21:00.005-05:00

The following story is really not as crazy as it seems.

All right, it probably /is/ but I refuse to take sole credit for it. I was practically invited to write it. But I stand by it -- if I have to justify it, I'll just say it's a response to all the To Kill a Mockingbird crap The Charlotte Observes is foisting on the world at the moment. Frankly, I'm shocked that Southern Gothic never garnered that much parodic response in its own time.

The color of the past is brown.

Not the rich tones of a sepia print or the hazy, golden brown of nostalgia. It's the washed-out, pale brown of dust. Memories don't die, don't get lost as much as they get buried in a sea of choking, wan dust.

At least, that's how it was in that town. Dust colored road. Old clapboard houses, once white, faded down to the color of old dust. Even the stains on the road -- tobacco juice and horse shit -- were brown.

Even old Benbow was brown, old and tanned, and his old linen suit just as faded as the whitewashed boards he sat in front of.

Well, I called him Benbow. I'm not rightly sure what his real name was, but I read a book once -- about flags or somethin' or other in the dust, incidentally -- and he struck me as mighty similar to that Benbow. So I started to call him that. He never corrected me. Looking back, I always assumed he never got the joke. I'm not so sure now.

I walked by him on the way to fetch Mamma some lard and Nehi back from the store.

"I don't take to no women what wear brooches," he said.

That's how he started a conversation with you, a salutation out of nowhere. I say started. Maybe just clued you in to the conversation he already had going on in his brain.

Okay, I thought, I'll bite.

"Why's that Mister Benbow?" I asked.

"Well, you sit yonder there and I'll tell you," he said, as he motioned to the two stairs up to the boarding house porch." When he did so, he returned to silence briefly. After a minute, a brown splat flew out of his mouth and arched delicately in the space between us. When it came down, it covered a scraggly old daisy, the only thing in Miss Hattergold's hopefully desingated "flowerplot" to survive the heat. The only thing in town that wasn't brown.

"I met her down in N'Orleans," he said. "She wore a blue dress with white pokke dots. And gloves. And a big white sun hat. And a silver brooch. Looked like a cat. Almost the size of your fist. That shoulda told me something. But it didn't.

"She wearn't no young woman. Musta been nigh 70. Sorta smelled o' mothballs and sech once you got close to her. And, Lord help me, I did get close to her.

"I first seed her gettin' off the train down at the depot. She just stood, lookin' around with her mouth a little open, as the porter arranged her bags on a cart. Then she clapped eyes on me.

"I warn't but 16 or so. A shoeshiner. Couldn't get no other work that young. Leastways, not addicted to laudnam like I was. Anyways, she claps eyes on me, and I am looking good. I beat a newsie t'death just the day before, and I was all decked out in nearly-new knickers, suspenders, bowtie and a cap. I weren't surprised t'see her lookin', lascivious like.

" 'Lucius?' she asked, a little uncertain.

" 'No'm,' I said.

" 'Surely it's Lucius! The Sweet Lord has finally returned you back from whence he took ye.' She seemed a right smart certain. I wa'n't.

" 'I don't reckon I know nothin' 'bout no Luciuses, ma'am,' I said.

" 'And he's given you back your limbs. You're sound as ever you were! They told me you'd been... injured. All the other boys who came back, they were missing arms and legs. What must have you had to go through if you... couldn't come back to me?' She pulled a little lace hanky outta her sleeve and dabbed her eyes.

" 'I'm tellin' you woman, I ain't no kind of Lucius. My name is...'

" 'I'm a rich woman, now, Lucius. I took the money they gave me and opened a store. And then another store. And then a whole plantation. Now I own 87% of Mississippi, and good hunk of Arkansas, too. They called me hard. They called me a cold woman. But what else could I be when you were gone?' She dabbed her eyes again.

" 'Eighty-seven per cent.?' I asked.

"She nodded.

" 'Reckon you done found your sweet Lucius, sent back by Jesus to find ye. I also reckon He wants you to go and buy me a muffelata. Shinin' shoes and starin' at sweaty male crotches all day is hungry work.'

"She smiled. 'I expect so. I'll be back directly, Lucius.' Then she squeezed my hand. "Then I won't never be far from ye again.'

"I'll be honest here. I thought I had landed in some tall cotton, boy. I expected to be retired for good at age 16. 'Course it don't work that way. Never does.

"It weren't too long ere she came back with my sandwich and a bottle of Co-Cola. It didn't hardly smell like old people when I took a bite. She was happy with just a pickle and a squirt of Old Thomason's Remedy for the Dried Up and Spinisterish. When she suggested we 'repair to my suite at the Pevensy' I couldn't say no. I insisted that we stop at the Woolworth's on the way there so I could stock up on my medicine, though.

"When we got there, she shet the door. She looked strangely at me.

" 'I b'lieve you know what I want now, Lucius. I been a-waitin' since them Yankees up in Fredricksberg done took ye from me them 47 years ago.'

"I weren't no fool. I know'd what she was arter. I war'n't inclined to give it to her, but that 87% of Miss'ippi was a powerful inducement to sweet a-moor.

"She winked at me as she crossed over the room. 'I ain't never bathed since last we were as one. I didn't wanna cleanse myself from your presence.'

"And damned if it weren't true. She took off her pantaloons and the flesh of her thighs above the stockings was black as an ole blue buck. I felt some of the muffelata come back to me.

" 'At least now I knows where old people stink comes from' I thought, as I took an extry large swig of laudanum. I took another just to be safe. I finished the bottle as she took off my shirt.

"I don't rightly know what happened next. I get all hazy. She sort of threw me onto the divan and she took advantage of me. Maybe you heard that 'ere joke about the old workin' girl what suffered the drynesses. I can tell you the first part's true, any road.

"Thank god she kept her top on, so I couldna seen what lay beneath that. All I saw was that ol' cat brooch a zoomin' to me and from me over and over till it was over.

"I say over.

"Th'excitement musta been to much for that old girl, cause she expired right at the height of ecstasy, as it were. Or maybe I choked her to death then. I don't rightly recall. As I said, things went to hazy. All I knows was she was dead when I shot my load.

"I ran outta that room fast as I could get her bony old carcass off'n me. I didn't stop to tell no po-lice or hotel management. What could I tell 'em? Nothin' such as they'd credit. I didn't stop running till I got right to this very spot."

Well, I thought to myself, right there's a moral for a body. Don't be missin' round with no crazy rich war widder. Ain't no gold at the end o' that rainbow.

Ol' Benbow snorted as if he reckoned what I was thinkin'.

"More moral than that. Wa'n't a week passed till my old pecker turned black and fell off. I ain't never had no women since. 'Syphilis' is what ol Doc Forrester called it. Think on that, youngin'."

I got up to walk away. It was almost sundown and Momma was gonna need her lard to fry up a chicken. Benbow's eyes followed me as I walked away.

"Now you mind them old women with brooches on now, y'hear me? You mind..."

This Is Not the Post I Thought I'd Be Writing Tonight...

2009-01-16T23:49:00.002-05:00

I watched a wiener dog die tonight. It was oddly emotional.

This was my parents wiener dog. I had never particularly liked it -- they bought her after they got rid of /my/ dog, a fine (but stupid) Labrador Retriever they simply got tired of dealing with. Looking back now, I can't blame them (too much), but I did love my dog and a wiener is hardly a suitable replacement for a boy.

I hated the dog. The wiener dog returned the favour. She never liked anyone else besides my father. She'd run out across their front yard and attack anything that tried walking down the sidewalk, all the time yapping fit to beat the band, so it was a cert the neightbours hated her, too.

But after I left home, it wasn't too much of a concern of mine. I'd see once or twice a year, when she'd spent her time glaring at me from her corner of the couch. A few years ago, I thought she'd had it for sure when I came home and she was riddled with tumors across her belly. She had breast cancer, apparently, but my parents couldn't or wouldn't do anything about it. But she didn't die. She didn't even act sick. The tumors just grew and grew. And she got older and older.

She turned 15 (I think) sometime last Fall. Like most old dogs, all she really wanted to do was lie in the sun and nap. She'd waddle out the front door to go to the bathroom once or twice a day, and she'd yap all the while, but she was virtually blind from cataracts and mostly deaf. If she wandered out so far as the street, someone would have to go and lead her back in.

Last week, she most have fallen down from her place on the couch, because when I stopped by one afternoon she was balled up in front of the couch, shivering and whimpering like she was in pain. When she took a step or two, her back was held at a funny angle. This, I knew, from basset education, was bad. When I tried to suggest they take her to the vet to get examined, they said she was fine, and the next day she was almost back to normal, even if she still held her back oddly.

It was about this time she lost control of her bladder. Undeterred, my parents still refused to take her to the vet.

This afternoon, when I stopped by to check on her, I found her on the couch. Her cushion was covered -- covered -- in pus. It was leaking from somewhere in her back end. I didn't check where. Too gross. I stayed with her till my parents got home from work.

"You have to take her to the vet," I said. "You have to put her down." They still refused. "If you don't," I told them in typically reasonable terms, "I'm going to take her outside and whack her over the head with a shovel. It's cruel to keep her in this state."

I think they took me at my word, because soon she was wrapped up in her blanket. It was after 5.30, so they had to cajole the vet into staying open late and we had to rush over. (When they saw her condition, they didn't complain.) My father wouldn't drive, so I had to drive both him and the dog to the vet. The vet was astounded when she saw the little wiener dog. She didn't question it was the right time. My father wouldn't stay for the final act, as it were, but I didn't think even this objectionable little thing -- who always resembled nothing so much as an overgrown rat -- should die alone. I stayed with her.

The vet gave her a shot to calm her down. She sighed and rolled over to one side. Then the vet gave her another shot that stopped her heart. And she died. I like to think she looked grateful or relieved or something, but if she felt anything, I suspect she was pissed off that the only person she'd ever even acted like she liked wasn't there. I'm not sure I'd want me about when I was dying, either.

And of course I cried, just a bit. And laughed at the same time. I mean, I hated the thing. Always had. It was funny I was so pointlessly emotional. "It's hard" the vet said as she handed me a kleenex. I felt I had to explain to her it wasn't my dog. I didn't know why I was crying.

It took me a while to realise that was the first thing I'd ever see die. My parents are alive; the only grandparent I can ever remember is still alive. I've had two -- maybe three -- uncles die, but never anyone close enough that I was /there/ for the death. Even the pets I've had have died away from me, either at vet's office when I was too young to be there or while I was away somewhere else.

And as I examined my reaction later on, it occured to me that our reactions about death are seldom about death. They're about us. They reflect our concerns about our own deaths. I didn't stay to watch that dog die because I thought she needed to be surrounded by love as she passed to the next world. I don't believe in a next world. I practically don't believe in love.

I stayed with the dog because /I/ don't want to die alone and it's at least a thought in my head I just might.

2009-01-10T16:42:00.003-05:00

It's been terribly interesting watching them announce the new Doctor, hasn't it?

I mean, I'll save you the apparently obligatory "Doctor WHO?" joke. As if say, Sylvester McCoy or Tom Baker were household names when they took over the role.

But the whole "bring out your prejudice" aspect of it all is what fascinated me. People bending over backwards to convince others that, no I'm /really/ not a racist because I think the Doctor can't be black.

I think Paterson Roberts would have been pants, too, but I thought he was pretty painful in Neverwhere. The colour of his skin isn't so much a factor.

(Although that's not a unilateral dismissal of him as an actor. I don't think his genius is suited to sci-fi in general. Not too long ago he was in the National Theatre's production of The Emperor Jones, and I'd've loved to see that. And not just for the idea of a British take on something that is so essentially an American drama...)

And while Matt Smith's chops don't fill me with confidence (unlike David Tennant), I'm not willing to prejudge before I see anything.

Well, pre-judge too much. In his Doctor Who Confidential interview -- a bit low-key and too full of de rigeur self-effacement for my liking -- he did manage to showcase the fact he didn't know when Doctor Who started. If I were just a tad more cynical than I am, I'd think it's a clever little "Look how different I am from David Tennant ALREADY" plug. Though I think David's love for the show was one of his greatest attributes.*

And... well.. there was the little bit in the Guardian article where he mentioned his girlfriend in Brazil. Rio, was it?

Does that mean Brazil = Canada to the British?!**

*I've always thought the reason Eccleston was so distant in his portrayal was because he'd so much be somewhere else...

**Come on, it's an Avenue Q joke! Although it would take a special lady to get past that huge head. Makes Rainn Wilson look proportionate.

In Further Basset Hound News:

2009-01-02T12:35:00.003-05:00

Bassett Hound and owl strike up unusual friendship

The pair have become inseparable since meeting at an animal refuge, and are quite happy to cuddle up together on an armchair.

Beryl the Basset Hound, who is a grand old dame at 16 years old, and four-year-old tawny owl Wol struck up a friendship when their owner realised they both loved watching television in the evenings.

Sara Ross, who shares her home in Tenterden, Kent, with the animals said: "They are both rescue animals and they're like best buddies. Wol needs full-time care and one day I was giving him a bit of exercise and he just plonked down on Beryl's back. She doesn't mind, she's really laid back and a bit of a pussycat really.

"She didn't mind at all and now you can't keep them apart.

"Four times-a-week you'll see them settle down to watch what's going on in Albert Square. Beryl barks when it's over and Wol gets a bit upset too, with a bit of flapping.

She added: "They are inseparable. They love cuddling up and watching television together.

"It won't come as a surprise that they love nature documentaries, but they also like soaps like Coronation Street and Emmerdale."

She added: "I've never known two animals who are so different hit it off quite so well. They just love being around each other."

Have your hams gone missing of late?

2009-01-02T01:28:00.003-05:00

It could well be the new Stealth Basset Hound model:

I didn't even know there were black basset hounds, but even the local rescue shelter has one.

If You Need It, So Do I

2008-12-29T22:52:00.002-05:00

Not too long ago, I was looking up the lyrics to the Rosebuds' song, "El Camino". It turns out I couldn't find them, which was a shame. It' s one of my favourite songs and has been for yonks, so I was surprised I couldn't locate them on teh Interwebz. So here they are.

The first time I heard the song was live. It was called "El Camino in the Night"then, and the first recording I have of it is on a split album from the Rosebuds, My Dear Ella and the Sames called "A Show With..."

Probably because of all those live shows, my hearing isn't what it could be, and I can't quite be sure of all the lyrics. Anything I'm reasonably uncertain of is in brackets [].

Don't ask me what the second word in the third line is. It sort of sounds like "box-a" to me on the first version, which kinda, sorta makes sense, but in the other recording sounds more like "boxer", which even if it sounds more distinct, makes even less sense.

Mister Fun, what have you done?
You took our toys and left us one
Shiny [boxer] filled with tears.

And in the haze, you've gone too far
In all my ways a perfect car
No rust, [not common] dear.

And through the field light appears
Please hold on close and know my dear
The El Camino is burning tyres.

The El Camino's in the night
Fighting crime and saving lives
And like that, it disappears.

But if you need it, so do I
Away from the traps and the lies
We can ride away and have no pain, my dear.

And through the fields he's coming [my dear]
Shining brightly from our rear
The El Camino is burning tyres.

The El Camino's in the night
Fighting crime and saving lives
And like that, he'll disappear.

But if you need him, so do I
Away from the traps and lies
We could ride away and have no pain, my dear.

The more produced, shined-up version that appears on The Rosebuds Unwind is entitled just "El Camino" and the lyrics are slightly different:

Mister Fun, what have you done?
You took our toys and left us one
Skinny [boxer] filled with tears.

And through the haze, you've come so far
In all my ways, a perfect car
No rust, [not common], dear.

And through the field, the lights appear
Just hold on close, Let's go my dear:
The El Camino was burning tyre.

The El Camino in the Night,
Fighting crime and saving lives
And like that, it disappears.

But if you need it, so do I,
Away from the [traps] and the lies.
We can ride away and have no pain, my dear.

And through the hills it's coming near,
Shining brightly from our rear.
The El Camino is throwing fire.

The El Camino in the Night
Fighting Crime and saving lives
And like that, they re-appear.

So if you need it, so do I
Away from the traps and the lies
We can ride away and have no pain, my dear.

Vapid Prettyboy Seeks Horse-Faced Bitch with whom to Flog Ugly Fashions.

2008-12-27T15:54:00.004-05:00

I don't hate /all/ TV ads. In fact, I don't even hate most TV ads: thanks to the wonders of Tivo, I don't even see all that many. For any ad to come to my consciousness, it needs to a) be repeated roughly 100 million billion times and b) pose some manner of inscrutable question.

Take, for example, Future86's caterwauling about the boons of bundling cable, phone, and internet, or Interactive Male's odd service*.

Or the above ad.

First of all, just who is this guy trying to kid with the "I can't get a date" routine? He's hott. Dullness comes off of him in waves like heat from the sand, but still... One expects some excitement when talking about how one fell in love. Except she's not much better. More bitter, but not more better. It looks suspiciously like she's been using her own features to grind whatever axe she's got going against the rest of the world. Perhaps -- like Mynheer with Vrouw van Winkle -- Joshua's emotional response to her is just to turn low-key and 'bide it out. I can only assume some incipient Carmelita Spats awaits us all in Utero...

Anyway, the Joshua "I can't connect" bit the ad is predicated on: I'm not buying it. I'm certainly not buying it if he has cojones enough to spread his legs like that and show off just what Tanya Lee is getting on a regular basis now that they're married.

Presumably. I mean, eHarmony.com has thinly-veiled Christian fundamentalist leanings -- they wouldn't match up teh Gays till the courts pointed out the 14th Amendment to them and suggested they open up a same-sex sister site** -- so one can only assume that Joshua's visible assets notwithstanding they pulled a Twilight and just held hands till they got hitched.

It makes me wonder how just pathetic the other 87 million people they claim to have connected are, since they won't let any of them on the air to describe the process. Cue Mort and Muriel Goldman's testemontial, I s'pose...

*Have you seen their new ad that covertly replaces the Hispanic guy (but nothing else) with yet another little white thing?

**Chemistry.com made great ad along those lines.

A Conclusion:

2008-12-20T23:25:00.005-05:00

For some years I've been wrestling with this question, since the lovely Helen (ever so lamented in her absence) recommended The Mighty Boosh to me*, but I have decided.

Vince Noir is fucking hot, right down to the (admittedly) incredible hair. Noel Fielding, on the other hand, who has more than once been sighted in the company of Amy W(h)inehouse, is not.

A contributing factor that is by no means exclusive to him is the hipster belt that wraps oh-so-clingingly-and-oh-so-inviting-of-the-rimming 'round the lower part of his arse. Frankly, it does wonders for anyone height/weight proportional, but he can work that shit, down.

The whole post-modern-awareness bit is almost but not quite gilding the lilly.

And I'm happy with this sort of dichotomy, as the exact opposite (actor v. character) holds true for David Tennant, and comes damn close to working for Chris Eccleston.

*The reruns of The IT Crowd on IFC have helped in this as well, as well as complicating my idea of just how cute Richard Ayoude is after Garth Marenghi's various incarnations (but that can be tied back to the Emotionally Feckless Fucker...). Turns out he's straight, but still... cute is as cute does.

2008-12-19T23:04:00.003-05:00

I don't like Christmas.

It's not that I hate it, as such -- though I occasionally I am driven to that -- I just don't care for it. And this pisses people off. More often that not, it's like an affront to their very existence. Every year, I have to listen to someone go on and on about how special and wonderful it is for them. And this is fine. I just wish they'd go be special on their own and leave me the fuck alone.

It was best when I lived in Durham. I somehow got in the tradition of driving my friend IGP to the airport to catch a red-eye flight on Christmas Eve. We'd spend the night before drinking and watching bad movies, often in the company of another friend I'll call Roweena (spot the Romantic-era joke there, folks!). That would descend into inebriated debates over local scenesters' sexual proclivites over The Sound of Music.

I still don't know about Neil and that was always a hot topic. As it were.

The next day I'd head over to the radio station with Roweena and refuse to play Christmas music for a huge shift. It was prinicipal: I was atheist and R. was Jewish. And we both felt like the world needed far more girly pop played in Decemeber.

I'm not sure exactly why I dislike Christmas. (Other than, you know, the atheism...) The only really nasty Christmas run-in I've ever had was when the person I lived with felt obligated to put up a string of lights and was stupid enough to do it on the stair railing. A few mornings later, dashing to work at 5 am, my foot got caught in it and I fell down the stairs.

That was no fun.

I think it mostly comes from indentured labor in my youth. For a period of ten years or so (inclining towards 15), I was forced to be in my parents' church's Christmas play. This meant the wasting of four or five perfectly good Sunday afternoons in Advent* watching a bunch of awkward, poorly-educated children mumble the same tired sing-song Bible verses.

For years, I didn't even have to learn the words since I had the same verse**: "Unto Us a child is born, unto us a son is given. And the government shall be upon his shoulders and he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Unlimited Rice Pudding*** etc., etc.

When I finally was old enough to complain about this -- my father was the Sunday School Superintendant and I was therefore an example -- I got cast as a rock. A rock.

This is separate from the obligatory family Christmas tree decoration. The least said about that the better; suffice it say I was once beaten and told "You will come hear and you will have a good time. Or else."

So I have no love of the Yule. The only thing I /do/ like is music. But only a certain kind. My parents are old; they almost were when I was born, and their taste in music betrays that. Growing up, the Christmas music they played was from the eeaaarrllly 1960s: The Living Strings. Andy Williams. Laurence Welk. Johnny Mathis.

To this day, it ain't Christmas till somebody breaks out The Andy Williams Christmas album and plays "Kay Thompson's Jingle Bells"****. And my favourite single Christmas collection is the one album of their multi-disc Laurence Wellk Christmas Set they disliked enough to let me ruin. I still have it.

Naturally enough, when I'd been gone a few years, I got a hold of some Esquivel and it suits me perfectly.

So... after bitching about the holidays for a while, I am now going to deliver some goods. Good, free Christmas music:

The Real Deal:

The good folks over at Ultra Swank still have available their Retro Christmas album. For Free!

Over at Pyschotic Leisure Music present you with a whole album of Senor Esquivel. Also For Free!

And last but not least -- and also gatis -- our benefactors over at Romantic Air Records have their Christmas album up, and it's a modern take on the same sort of sounds. It's keen!

So take that Christmas cheer and stick it, yo.

*Yes, I know perfectly well there are only four Sundays in Advent. I just don't care.

**Lutherans love memorising things almost as much as they do not changing things.

***Obligatory Doctor Who reference. See how I sneaked that in effortlessly with Isaiah, Chapter Nine? See, I /told/ you Lutherans were into memorising.

****For years, the whole album was unavailable on iTunes. Now it is. Merry Christmas to me, iTunes.

This Isn't a Common Lament of Mine...

2008-12-19T22:53:00.002-05:00

... if anything, I tend to think the exact opposite of this, yet oddly, today was the second time in as many weeks it's run across my mind: it's always very sad when the very pretty aren't very bright.

I am -- properly or not -- deliberately conflating bad taste and militant inexperience with "not-very-bright"-itude.

One of tonight's Jeopardy! contestants* (not the champion, obv.), Daniel, was very pretty and handled himself reasonably well. Through the wonders of Facebook**, a man might be privy to his likes and dislikes and such, and they are disappointing to say least. You really should have a decent book as a favourite before you go on Jeopardy!(.)

:(

The other instance, which I'm not sure I ought to mention, happened when I was in Durham recently, when someone quite fetching said something more or less deeply stupid.

*Yes, another Jeopardy! contestant. Shut up.

**Oh, do the hard work yourself.

2008-12-18T15:34:00.003-05:00

They've revived those ads for Britney Spears' perfume -- "Fantasy: Everyone's Got One". I suppose my fantasy would be finding out just who would want to smell like /her/.

(Or more to the point, who would pay $40 to do so when all you really need to do is wake up on a stranger's floor after pack of smokes, a pint of Jack Daniels and a broken condom...)

But this defies me even more. If it's a gag, then it doesn't work; if it's real, it's far more terrifying than smelling like Britney. *

It sort of backs of my theory that American culture is Teh Fails.

*Although really, the Obesity epidemic being what it is, this oughtn't to be as shocking as it is.

Happiness Is...

2008-12-15T21:00:00.002-05:00

Hearing one of your favourite bands on one of your favourite TV shows, like when I heard "Keep it Clean" by Camera Obscura on Skins last night. (Or, indeed, when they were on Gilmore Girls.)

Sadness is when you realise they were saying something mean about that song and the kinds of people who listen to it.

Bad Skins writers. Unfortunately, short of bitching about it here, my only other form of protest is not to watch the show any more, and *that* is unlikely. So I'll just sit here and stew.

In Which We Learn That The Recitations Of An Asthmatic Hamster May Be More Salubrious Than The Entire Corpus of William Faulkner

2008-12-15T00:02:00.004-05:00

I am very susceptible to suggestion. Virtually anyone who knows me will agree to that. Part of it is just natural... gullibility, I guess. But part of it is training.

Any sort of criticism is essentially a response to the stimulation a work of art gives; formal criticism is just putting that gut reaction into a more informed context.

And while this is true for all art, I think it is even more so for the drama. Most modern acting in the US is more or less based on Stanislavski's System, and all that boils down to is a schemata for making yourself extremely open to the imaginative suggestion of an author's script.

Dramaturgy and directing are even more so, in that dramaturgy is preparation for the more literary, theoretical suggestions underpinning a script, and direction is dealing with the the concrete realities of working actors and their inter-relating physical and mental positioning.

So where is this going?

I finished reading Faulkner's Go Down, Moses not long ago, and it's made me want to go hunting.

This is, of course, ludicrous.

I have none of the necessary skills, nor (really) any of the necessary desires. I mean, sure, I hate deer. I /really/ hate deer, and it must be loads of fun to take one down, but the whole sitting half-way up a tree at 4.30 in the morning of the off chance one might stroll by is pretty much the opposite of how I'd like to spend my time.

And the idea of giving me a firearm ought to appal everyone. I mean, technically speaking, I can fire them -- and have been licensed to do so in front of people in state-run institutions, even -- but my knowledge runs out for anything produced after 1580 or so.

Had I spent more time learning to shoot in Boy Scout camp instead of learning to kiss from the instructor, this might not have been an issue. (And no, for the record, it was not some gross Scoutmaster. It was some over-eager older scout.) In an amusing twist of fate, the state of South Carolina got rid of sales tax on guns the weekend after Thanksgiving. And my brother was going to be there. I asked him to pick one up, but he (wisely) laughingly refused. He was in the army and knows the danger of me packing heat.

But for a few weeks yet, I'll still think the whole hunting thing is something I ought to try. I even learned all about seasons for various game, and the licenses required and bag limits and so forth. One might even hunt bears in the vicinity of where my parents live, which I find equally fascinating and appalling. I didn't know there were bears left there to hunt, but next time I'm there, I'll be more aware of the dark.

Perhaps fortuitiuosly for everyone involved, I've started reading a collection of the works of Washington Irving, an author with whom I have no familiarity. (Other than he used to hang out with Walter Scott and that Mary Shelley carried a torch for him...) I quite like it so far, if for no other reason to find out what Isobel Campbell was going on about in "I Could Be Dreaming".

Yarr.

2008-12-03T19:57:00.002-05:00

As I sees it, few there be with better claims to piracy than me. I knows my way around a sword; I've worked upon an antique sailing vessel, I've studied up on me history. I can do the funny talk with authority.

And I has me a pirate name, now:

What kind of pirate am I? You decide!
You can also view a breakdown of results or put one of these on your own page!
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

!!!

2008-11-26T12:49:00.001-05:00

I love pirates.

I love Weebl.

I love topical news references made into satire.

I love THIS:

Dear The (Twilight) World:

2008-11-19T22:32:00.003-05:00

Concerned as I am over The Curse of the Cullen Hair* -- it's moved into poor Kristen Stewart's real life, and it seems the film version of poor Jasper has been hit upside the head with the clown-hair stick -- I have to take more drastic measures.

Today I saw pictures of Jackson Rathbone in real life. Let it be known: to hell with Team Edward. I'm defecting to Team Jasper. Actually, make that Team Jay** to ensure Beautiful Green Eye Continuity.

*A Horror Movie in its Own Right.

**So says IMDb.com: who am I to judge if fate has destined this?

Sic Probo, or Q.E.D.

2008-11-11T23:03:00.002-05:00

This is a Fraggle (Wembley, to be precise). Note the resemblance to the picture below, specifically in the hair area. This should end all disagreement with my pronouncement.

In Which Our Author Is Pointlessly Catty

2008-11-11T18:29:00.005-05:00

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised (given the contents of the novel) that a Twilight personality quiz would be almost painfully sexist, and certainly not gender neutral. So I played along and took the "Which Male Character Are You?" to this result:

Take the Quiz and Share Your Results!

Reasonable, I suppose, although the picture reminded me of a jovial bisexual Bavarian tourist in 1930s Berlin the morning after one too many absinthes.

Out of curiosity, I also took the female version and got this:

Take the Quiz and Share Your Results!

Which I objected to. Not because she apparently warrants an exclamation point and Carlisle doesn't(!). Not because of the result. But because of Alice's hair. As I've said before, just because she received electro-shock therapy in the '20s is no reason to feather her short hair to give the impression her toe's permanently wedged into a light socket. I mean, she looks like a Fraggle.

(I've also pointed out that, judging by how Edward's pompadour cut gets bigger in each new ad, he'll be able to go Pom to Pom with Liberace in a 'Who's the Gayest Corpse in Hollywood" by the time the film's released...)

Love Without Hope

2008-11-04T00:34:00.006-05:00

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

--Robert Graves

No reason for posting this other than it's quite lovely. It's exactly what lyrical poetry is supposed to be.

(Okay, I've been reading the Patrick Troughton Doctor Who Annuals, which insist on showing him with that hat from his first few stories and it always makes me think of this poem... And bugger all if you can find a picture of the dratted thing)

Edit: oops! No weird agenda with the wrong colour scheme. Just an amusing mistake!

Another quick thought...

2008-11-03T00:41:00.004-05:00

A passing reference a friend made in conversation the other day made me remember some thing. Something that that pricked my conscience.

I never slept with any of teachers*. I was never even tempted (although lots of people thought I had**). One of my stage-managers in college, whilst attempting to get me drunk***, told me she'd slept with her PE TA.

At the time, I thought this was a low mark in sluttiness -- this was before Carolina made you do things like write down your daily calorie intake for a week in your PE classes, so all you really had to do was show up once a week for class and not be dead. I even got credit for an advanced fencing class without ever having been in it. That's how easy they were.

So, at the time, sleeping with the TA just seemed like ultimate in pointlessness and wanton promiscuity.

This is, of course, stupid and very naive. Of all the TAs you'd have, the PE one is the one you'd most want to sleep with: the grade thing is only tangentially related, if at all.

So dear Sarah, I apologise for several years of falsely ascribed low morals. You were clearly more sexually aware than I was.

*Which isn't to say I didn't sleep with people who were TAs, just not my TAs.

**Story of my life. Always the blame for the thing I didn't do, and never any credit for what I did. Except possibly in the stalls of the Greenlaw Hall.

***Talk about causes for St Jude. We found a bottle of white wine in the prop closet. She had one glass, I had three and I practically had to her carry up the stairs of Graham Memorial. Whatever it was she wanted, she didn't get it.

Sundry Observations on Doctor Who

2008-11-03T00:01:00.006-05:00

David Tennant announced he's leaving Doctor Who after the run of 2009 specials. I am surprisingly okay with this. (Not that it would matter if I wasn't...)

It'll be four seasons of him as the Doctor, which makes him one of the longer-lasting incarnations (only Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker lasted longer*) and he's had a good innings with stories like "Blink" and "Human Nature". And he's doing the lovely thing of quitting while he's ahead. He's certainly one of the best Doctors ever, and he -- or the new production team -- won't bugger that up in his time left (*fingers crossed).

Soon, I'll be able to go back to fancying him, which is impossible to do with someone playing the Doctor.

And I'm excited to see who the new Doctor is. If I were as famous as Brian Blessed is, I'd just /say/ it was me and the papers would publish it. But I'm not.

I'm not quite as excited as everyone else seems to be about Steven Moffat taking over as executive producer. I haven't mentioned it because I'm still pondering it over. Lawrence Miles posted his thoughts on the subject, and I was inclined to agree. He may be mad, but he is a very good critic**, and he pointed out that this season's "Silence in the Library"/"The Dead Forest" two-parter is a fairly weak retreading of Moffat's previous stories. However, all the rest of his stories are top-notch, so I'm keeping a sort of guarded optimism. His casting of the new Doctor will be very telling...

By a weird coincidence, I managed to get a hold of the Trial of a Time Lord box set and The Brain of Morbius release both this week, and have been drowning in a sea of stories I haven't seen since... well, since the VHS of Trial came out and... a long, long time for Morbius. The older story is a bit better than I remember; Trial is... well, Trial.

Some observations:

1) Joseph Lidster (Who writer and audio playwright for Big Finish and screenwriter for Torchwood) is way cuter than I expected. He appears on an extra for "Terror of the Vervoids", a special that talks about cliffhangers. Could maybe somebody stick him in front of the cameras for the roughly 800,000 spots BBC America needs for ads shilling their up-coming broadcast of Series 4 instead of Moffat?

2) Apparently, the production team of "Vervoids" asked Bonnie Langford to scream in the same key Dominic Glynn's Season 23 arrangement of the theme tune stings in on. This is, unintentionally, hysterically funny once you know. It gives visions of the Mouse Organ from Monty Python.

3) I have all three novels of the extant "Missing Season" published by Target. Now I want to read them again, although they seem pretty fishy.

4) Brian Blessed is god.

*There's an argument to be made that both McCoy's and McGann's tenure was longer (both at 9 years apiece, 1987-1996 and 1996-2005, respectively, since work featuring their Doctor came out, but it's non-TV work.

**I'd link to it, but like most of his more... contentious posts, it's been taken down.

2008-10-24T15:05:00.002-04:00

You know, I was never a big fan of The X-Files. Largely because the acting was (well, is) pretty awful: the only really good episodes were the jokey ones that sort of went with that. Even Duchovy is under no illusions about his talent. And I can go with that.

But for a good four or five seasons, the character of Dana Scully was one of the stupidest characters in TV (up there with Lois Lane). And Gillian Anderson's performance was about 180 degrees where it should have been, which called more attention to that fact than was strictly necessary:

Dalek Th... Scully: No, Mulder. You are wrong. Even though you have been correct in every mystery every week now for four years now, the Yeti/teh Saucer Pplz/intelligent viruses cannot exist.

I mean, old school Doctor Who girls never believed, either, but then no one mistook them for the brains of the operation. (Except poor Liz Shaw, who got booted out after 25 episodes...)

So imagine my joy in finding Anderson in a bitchy little article for MSN:

It's possible that Anderson doesn't have any dramatic ability. However, it's more likely that she tried for nonchalance, but overshot and achieved nonliving.... more.. She and David Duchovny went together like peanut butter and cheese (or is that macaroni and jelly?).

Au plaisir d'un gentlhomme

2008-10-23T23:53:00.011-04:00

Sounds like a Bond title, doesn't it?

But I'm thinking "Property of a Lady", one of the sources for the film Octopussy.

Anyway, I've be positioned into... No.

Set up to... Grrr.

Put up to... Jeez, isn't there any way into this that isn't vaguely slutty sounding? Apparently not.

So, I've been asked to either a) put up a Sinister post here that I wrote not long ago so a non-Sinisterine can read it or b) relate a story of how I was compared to a certain race of little, blue cartoon... I'm not sure what a Smurf is really, but whatever it is a Smurf is, and how the name stuck.

I'm choosing a), since as sole prop. of this site, I have forbidden all reference to me/Smurf comparison.

"My First Time"!

Sounds racy, doesn't it? Of course, unlike other Sinisterines (looks in askance
at Ken Chu and pines -- pines! -- at the memory of Markelby) I'm
not actually tarty. I just like to pretend I am, sometimes. And I've no idea
why, but in my head just now, I sounded just like Tevye the Milkman
saying that. Anyway.

I want a go at telling my "First time I heard Belle and Sebastian" story!

It's a bit of a long story, so you'll have to indulge me. And it's long
because it's part of a much longer story about a boy (one of /those/ kinds
of boys) and I have to tell at least a little of it for the B&S story to
make much sense.

The boy's name was Daniel. I met him my first year of college, back in the
mid 90s. When I think of him now, I think of him all in corduroys and
Argyle sweaters, but I think most of that is sort of layered on, memories
filtered back through TV and movies. Or maybe this time of year just lends
itself to thinking of people in browns and greys.

He was a year older than me, and I since I was still so fresh out of high
school, I still thought that was a very big deal: in addition to being
very pretty -- all dark curls over bright green eyes and snowy skin -- he
was that much more older and sophisticated. Or so I thought.

I'll spare you all the tedious details of how I actually met him (shoved into
him by the proprietress of a charity shop on Franklin Street that liked to
bill itself as a "vintage" store) and how we got to know one another, and
skip to the part where he decided to go to a Study Abroad semester in London
the next Spring. He was away all that semester, and when it ended he
decided to stay in London through the summer, too, loafing, in my
opinion, in a sort of louche hipster grandeur.

I, on the other hand, spent the summer dressed as an Elizabethan soldier
for tourists at the seaside and tried not to pass out from heat exhaustion

We met up again, of course, that Fall. We were lying together on my twin
n bed in my dorm room, comparing stories about our summers and listening
to the musical treasures he had brought back with him. We were talking about
t something trivial when he remembered something. "Oh man," he said,
"You have to listen to this. You'll love it."

He dug around in his bag and fished out another cassette. It was a copy of
a record he'd heard. He took out the tape we were listening to and put another
one in the little boombox we were listening to, and then cued up the
song he wanted to play. It started, and he looked at me, his eyes shining
with expectation. (Or was it Expectations?)

I listened.

I thought it was crap. I said so. He sort of visibly sank and looked
disappointed. "I'm no big fan of techno," I said. "but that isn't even very
/good/ techno."

To this day, I have no idea why, out of all the songs on Tigermilk, he
picked "Electronic Renaissance", or why he didn't give me some prep for
it, like "Wait, listen to the lyrics!" or "The next song is better!"

I felt really awful, because he had been so excited to share this. I mean,
I know: I've felt exactly that sort of evangelistic glee, too, before
and since, and for the exact same music. But I didn't get it that night.
Not at all. And I really liked him, too, but I was too dumb then to
even try to give it another listen, just for him.

In the end it was all right. He had brought back a ton of music, and we
listened to most of it that night. We ordered awful pizza and stayed up late,
annoying my roommate, laughing and trying to correct the faults in each
ch other's musical tastes, till we found other ways to occupy ourselves.

And clearly I managed to hear some other Belle and Sebastian not much later
and liked it. A lot. But that's another story.

So there you go. I'd've done this for no other reason than ce certain gentilhomme inspired me to break out my old Go-Betweens albums. I had almost forgotten "Love Goes On!" is one of my favourite songs. (Am... Em... Bm... C... G... Em... D... C...)

If all goes to the good, I may not post again this week.

;)

2008-10-22T12:26:00.002-04:00

You know, nothing will make you think twice about stupid, off-the cuff tweets like the sentence:

"Stephen Fry is now following you on Twitter!"

2008-10-21T23:44:00.003-04:00

I did something quite sad this evening. It's finally gotten cold in these parts -- well, cool. For a long time, it's always been my tradition to mull some wine the first really cold night of the year.

I started doing it in college. I remember the first year I did it, I was in a dorm -- Stacy Hall -- doing it for a load of friends crammed into my room. We had chased The Idiot Steve out by telling him we were having an orgy. It almost backfired because he apparently fancied one of the girls, but then Daniel smiled and put his hand on The Idiot Steve's shoulder and he was off. I was greatly complimented when my English(/Greekish/Frenchish) friend Lucie said it was 'just like Fireworks Night!"

I think that may have been one of the nights we went chasing after the Gimghouls. If it was, then it would have been the midnight on 31 October, so a few days later than now.

After I graduated, I remember doing it a couple of times with my friends Christina and Jamie, at Christina's little duplex. And at least one of those was a party (very possibly her birthday party) with at least a dozen DJs from 'XDU jockeying to spin.

It was always a trip in New York, too. It was one of the first things people I started with did en masse. There was -- is -- a liquor store just across the street from Hunter, so w, dropped in and bought several bottle of cheap red, then went back to somebody's Manhattan place. There were five or six of us crammed on somebody's fire escape, smoking and drinking and actually talking for the first time.

Well, anyway, I did alone by myself tonight for the first time. I couldn't go out and get any, but there was a bottle of something alarmingly labelled "Indiana Grape Wine". I used it without trying any. I added the spices (ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and a dusting of allspice) and the rest (lemon juice, a touch of vanilla, and more sugar than is seemly) and heated it accordingly.

It was just as bad as something labelled "Grape" Wine should be. For tradition's sake, I forced a few gulps down my throat, but it was so bad I wound up pouring most of it out. I poured it down the sink lest it kill the grass in the yard.

I think I'm glad of that, actually. Had it been good enough to drink, I'd have drunk all of it and gotten pointlessly maudlin. As it is, I can (just) manage to sort of cheerfully reminisce without falling prey to nostalgia. Although if I brood, I may just fall prey anyway. So I'll stop.

Fate. I temtptz it.

2008-10-11T22:32:00.005-04:00

I don't believe in much, but I do believe in not tempting fate. You don't go around just asking for trouble, for trouble will be sent unto to you.

Looking back on it now, I started to tempt fate just by deciding to go to a Barnes and Noble's. But it's the only -- literally the only -- bookstore in 30 or 40 miles. And I really wanted to get Sarah Vowell's new book, The Wordy Shipmates, which came out this week. For I love her work with a passion roughly equal to Sarah Caudwell, William Faulkner and Uncle Terry*.

Fate can't be blamed for not announcing itself, either. When (of course) I couldn't find it, or even the essays section of the store (for lo, nothing so fancy is to be found in that branch), I walked up to the customer service desk. The girl who helped me was named Laura.

I did not take the hint. When I said what I was looking for, she squinted and harumphed, and asked me to spell the author's last name.

This was clearly a bookstore girl who was not familiar with Sarah Vowell. Another hint wasted.

She took me to where she /thought/ the essays were. There were no essays. Just Westerns. We returned to the CS desk.

"Oh," she said. "It's a new release. It'll be in the front."

I had looked there, you know. First thing. I ignored this hint, too. We went to the front table, where the book was conspicuous by its absence.

"I'll look in the back," she said. She did. No luck.

"You'll have to order it special," she said.

"But it's a new book. Out this week. Major publisher..." By the end, it was more a series of hopeful suggestions than statements of fact.

I ordered the book. It might be here in two weeks. :(

The whole situation was a bit mitigated when the other girl from the Customer Service booth, who was a more typical bookstore girl of about 21, followed me away from the desk and offered to buy me a coffee. It was sweet, but also sad, since it was exactly the right trick from exactly the wrong person. I'm chalking this up as karma for featuring someone I hardly ever talk about -- or even really let myself think too much about -- in a Sinister post I wrote this week, since there's nobody who'd get that more than him...

*Terrence Dicks, who taught at least two generations of Doctor Who fans how to read and unlocked the Doctor's past adventures to legions of his fans before the days of VCRs by turning the episodes into books. Granted, usually by adding "he said" and a few odd epithets to camera scripts: "said the Doctor, with his young-old face and shock of white hair" or "said the Doctor with his pleasant, open face."

Come /on/, Big Finish:

2008-10-08T20:06:00.001-04:00

Let me start out with a compliment: Big Finish does a lot, and it does a lot well. The stories you think are going to be quite cracking ("Time of the Daleks" and "Bloodtide" spring to my mind) almost inevitably are, but -- more impressively -- the ones that sound awfully dull and quite possibly a waste of time ("Assassin in the Limelight" and "The Boy That Time Forgot") almost invariably aren't.

And no, I don't know why the former examples above are so old and the latter so new. And there are some that counts as both in the middle.

Anyway.

I just finished listening to "The Haunting of Thomas Brewster". It counts more as the latter than the former (although me just happening to read "The Cloud Exiles" in the Doctor Who Annual 1967 removes a little of its originality).

The ending of part three. Victorian ragamuffin Pickens dies saving the boy he loves, choked off by the baddies whilst crying out "I lov--".

Please.

It might have been edgy 15 years ago, but now it just seems gratuitously melodramatic. Their (pointedly one-sided) relationship wasn't worth overtly developing in the preceding episode(s), apparently, and subsequently throwing that element to the death scene is an emotionally false way to raise the stakes.

In fact, it sort of falls back old images of the poor gay getting what's coming to him for daring to be out of the social norm. Giving him a little dignity is just a way to appease the straight audience's potential reservations before they can let situation effectively carry out their judgment.

It's why AIDS tragedies are such a popular thing for teh straight people. They can pity the poor fag before he gets exactly what he has coming to him for having all that gay sex. It flatters their egos /and/ their prejudice.

And it's why Tony Kushner and his awful Angels in America, 8-hour-foray into his own ego that it is*, should occupy roughly the same place in the gay noosphere that Vidkun Quisling does for the Norwegians.

[Nor does it help that his pointless complexities are gleefully confused for meaningfulness by audiences too lazy to do the sort of thinking that would recognise it for what it is. But this isn't a slam-Kushner post. It's just hard to get around how much he sucks.]

Anyway, you can't blame just the writer, Jonathan Morris, who generally does wonderful stuff, and in toto "Haunting" counts as that; this, I think, is just a freak of collective something (Laziness? I'm not sure... ) Somewhere, there was an editor or a dramaturg or a director who should have caught this and seen it for what it was.

Of course, I could just be full of myself. ;)

*Angels in America is in exactly the same category as Almost Famous. It's fine if people want to masturbate, and it's fine to watch someone masturbate, if that's what you and them want to do. But it's not okay to /make/ people watch you masturbate by calling that jacking-off a film or a play.

And you deserve a special place in hell if you con people into thinking it's art while you do it.

Dear Teh World:

2008-10-06T23:28:00.003-04:00

So what's her name, you know, Claire Kincaid, her off Law and Order. And Crossing Jordan. Jill Hennessey*. That's it. She was also in RoboCop 3.

I can't help but think /that/ is a wasted cross-over opportunity. But what would it be about?

It hit me.

Robo-Lenny.

Back from the dead and ready to kick ass like he never could. For justice.

Best. Idea. Ever.

Admit it, you want to see this series.

I mean, it couldn't possibly be worse than the new Knight Rider or The Sarah Connors Chronicles.

Why am I not working for Network TV?!

Please return to your regular lives.

If you can!

*Did you know she is a) from Canada and b) half of a set of twins?

2008-10-06T14:18:00.002-04:00

I haven't been sleeping very well lately. The pay-off for this -- if you can call it a pay-off -- is that during the 15 or 20 minutes a night I sleep, I have incredibly vivid dreams. I must have dropped off while thinking of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia last night, because that's what I dreamt about.

I don't remember it all, or particularly coherently (if indeed the dream was coherent to begin with). But it started off with me in Paddy's pub getting hit on by Sweet Dee, who was across the bar. I remember thinking that was odd for several reasons, but I was pretty pleased with myself for hitting it off with that attractive a female, even if I had no romantic intentions at all. It ended with her writing her number on the back of my hand with a mascara wand and rubbing my thigh.

The next part (and only I would have dreams with A and B plotlines) had something to do with me throwing coconuts at Mac and Charlie to get them into a swimming pool. Whatever it was, it didn't work, because I ended up in the pool. But so did they. And we decided we needed to pick up Dennis from school.

Then we were all in a second floor classroom, paneled in wood (maybe an old-fashioned chem lab), at night. I was trying to shove an infeasible number of old Dr Who Annuals in a back-pack and trying to clear out before the next lecture started. Mac and Charlie were using gas taps to blow up condoms. Students started coming in, and a female lecturer started a lesson. I managed to pack all the books away with some pencils and crayons, and all the four of us left. As we exited we passed the pool again.

And then I woke up.

2008-10-03T23:51:00.004-04:00

I'm feeling particularly sad and lonely at the moment, so I'm going to console myself by writing a virtually useless review.

1) The Doctor Who Annual 1966. The text is written by David Whitaker, Doctor Who's first script editor (credited as story editor) and a writer of the series from the beginning up until Jon Pertwee's first season. Whitaker really is the one of the founding fathers of Doctor Who and probably was the first to give it any sort of coherent vision. He was also very, very far out there in some of his writing: the best path to putting it in any sort of context is the virtually ingenious article about him in About Time 2.

The artist was Walter Howarth. I'm not a comics person, but even I understand he's something of a legend in British comics. Certainly his work in this book deserves the highest praise, if for nothing else the colour effect he manages with four colour ink.

This counts as one of the first print versions of the Doctor's adventures. One of the few earlier ones was also written by Whitaker: his version of the events of The Daleks. If you haven't read then... well, you've missed out on one hell of a trip.

At this point, continuity isn't even a consideration. If anything, it's a hindrance. As it probably should be. This volume has (what might be) the Doctor's first encounter with the folk of Vortis and the Sensorites and return brushes with the folk on Vortis and with the Voord from The Keys of Marinus.

But the Doctor here keeps a great deal of his secrets. He might be from Earth (sometimes it's his home, sometimes it's not). Sometimes the TARDIS (err, the Tardis) works perfectly; sometimes it's quite untrustable after a run-in with the Daleks (ho ho -- I'm not even touching the dating od that!).

What we have then is a collection that reflects some of the earliest ideas of the Doctor: always a scientist and traveller. And -- just as Syndney Newman always wanted -- the Doctor survives on a dependence on basic scientific ideas. Although knowledge of more advanced ideas might just be a hindrance...

All in all, the stories are simple (though longer than they ever will be again in the Annuals) but not simply written. They're engaging, and clearly written by someone who not only cares about how the Doctor is presented and developed but by someone who cares that his readers develop something themselves.

But he's not quite the same Doctor we recognize -- or is he? He's happy to drop people off deep in their own past ("Peril in Mechanistria") and to hell with the web of time, and he's happy to maim one of the Voord and let them die at the hands of an angry mob ("Fishmen of Kandalinga"). Be it come to that, he' s happy to let the Menopt(e)ra kill off the last of the Atlanteans ("The Lost Ones").

In the end, as someone viewing these stories from 42 years later, it's hard to say these stories are of /the/ Doctor as much as they are stories of /a/ Doctor. And that makes it all the more fascinating. I love the sort of fluidity it implies, and as long as it's based on a sort of respect for the character, I can go with it. I mean, I didn't throw fits over Richard E. Grant's 9th Doctor, either, even though I loved Chris Ecclestone.

Too bad the next annual wasn't a Whitaker creation!

One Fish, Two Fish; Red Fish, Blue Fish

2008-10-02T23:54:00.003-04:00

Again, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was amusing in just the right ways. I mean, Glenn Howerton at a glory hole is no bad thing, right?

But they had to have Charlie losing teeth. That'll haunt me tonight. I mean, I've gotten to the point now I'm know I'm dreaming when I dream all my teeth fall out of my mouth, but I can't make myself wake up, so it's still gross.

In completely different news, I got a new cell phone yesterday, a Sanyo Katana XL. It's the cheapest one in the store, but I like it. It has a camera, which is all I really wanted. Not that I know what I'm going to take pictures of, but I can.

I almost -- almost -- went out of my mind and got the Samsung UpStage. Actually, this one. Not because it was sleek (though it was). Not because it had an mp3 player (but it did). But because it was red*. Thankfully, before I blew the extra money, I came to my senses and realized I would never use any of its features and if I did, I would run up stupidly large charges at least once.

So now I have my little blue phone with the neat translucent OLED display to amuse me. But when it's folded up, it is rectangular, and it has a little light on top when you take pictures. And it is /dark/ blue. More than anything, I want it to make TARDIS dematerialization sounds when it rings. But I'm not clever enough to do that. :(

*I like red things. My dream kitchen -- and yes, I have fantasized about exactly what it would be like -- would have all read appliances. The closest I ever came to this was a neat red trashcan with a dome lid and a super-duper toaster/oven with red trim.

Needless to say, I retain neither. But I will have a red kitchen.

2008-10-01T23:49:00.002-04:00

So I was reading this article about Michael Cera, and agreeing, thinking, "Yeah, I'd go down on that," when it occurred to me this article is actually about my friend Ross. (Well, except the bit about baby fat. Ross is such that I can't imagine even an ounce of that on him.)

Ross Bryant is everything that they say about Cera, but funnier. More acidly wittier funnier, to be precise. /And/ he was doing it first. So there.

Two Things...

2008-09-30T00:34:00.002-04:00

...which are, so far as I can tell, unrelated.

1) I've been listening to Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 a lot recently. He's fab. I grew up listening to him, you know. When other people were poisoning themselves with New Kids on the Block, Paula Abdul or Snow (ahh, the early '90s, when pop music rolled over and died), I was listening to LPs swiped from my mother's music collection. Sergio featured heavily: she had (and now I have) Ye-Me-Li, Crystal Illusions, and Fool on a Hill. It's bedrock cool: original yet influenced, hot but cool, mellow but intense. Of its time, as it were, but for all ages. Go get you some. I hear he cut a track not long ago, a re-mix of Mas Que Nada with the Black Eyed Peas.

[It's odd, but my mother's music collection for a period is pretty damn cool: Sergio, Fifth Dimension, Jim Croce. It soon sort of fades into mid 70s Streisand and Neil Diamond, and from there into really awful early 80s country and from there into Jesus music. I cannot imagine my mother as someone Into Music, like an Indie kid, for whom music is important, talking about music to other people and really being affected by it, and loyal to a sound, but I had to get it from somewhere. And there was always music in out house. Good music, be it Bach or Bacharach, so maybe she was.]

2) So did you know Tennessee Williams' first published work was in Weird Tales? Yeah, it was: "The Vengeance of Nitocris", (1928). Very clearly of the sub-Lovecraft genre, it's exactly as bad as you'd think. But it's also the lodestone of everything he ever wrote: brother/sister weirdness, revenge, canny women, pretty boys, untrustworthy narrators, death...

Dear It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:

2008-09-26T01:14:00.003-04:00

Thank you for proving that old adage "Be careful what you wish for": tonight's episode was pretty much exactly what I thought I wanted to see for a while now.

But you did exactly what you always did: you made that creepy.

Fortunately, beefcake of TJ Hoban is excessively easy to find on teh internets, proving once again that love should be held on for teh internets.

And, should I ever get rid of my new willies about Glenn Howerton, photo evidence of his time on That 80s Show is still extant to put the kybosh on that.

Also: So, umm, how long before the Waitress and Sweet Dee bang? It's all that's left.

2-D Boys, 3-D World

2008-09-24T22:52:00.002-04:00

So these would be DJ Judas (third from the left) from Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil and Jacob from Octopus Pie.

I know they're fictional, but they're still pretty hot. I have mixed feelings about admitting that. A part of me would like to say "Ah, but I know their real-life counterparts" -- or the type of their RLC -- but I don't.

Having actually worked in a Manhattan organic food store, I can say with authority that there was no-one like Jacob there. Or in the Chapel Hill store, for that matter. In fact, the closest I ever saw was Crazy Brian from Dairy, who was crazy. And worked in the dairy department. And was last seen fleeing to Chicago.

I'm uncertain of the inter-relation of those three things, if any.

Oddly enough, I mentioned him when I was with Laura this past weekend, despite having not once thought of him in years*. He took me to Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill (well... Carrboro) to see a band called Cursive. It was the most awful show I'd ever seen, and was the only one I've ever walked out of, including Pedro the Lion. I hope his taste in music got better.

The closest thing I ever saw to DJ Judas**, despite being an actual DJ, was half of a bizarrely similar, androgynous hipster couple also in Chapel Hill, half of which I once danced to "Cemetery Gate" and sang along to "This Charming Man" with.

Que est-ce que c'est passe a vous, Les Androgynes, mes amours?

Noontime youths,

thighs and groins tight-jean-displayed,

loiter onto Union Square,

junkies flower-scattered there,

lost in dream, torso-bare,

young as you, old as I, voicing soundlessly a cry ...
Androgyne, mon amour,
shadows of you name a price

exorbitant for short lease.

What would you suggest I do,

wryly smile and turn away,

fox-teeth gnawing chest-bones through?

Androgyne, mon amour,
cold withdrawal is no cure

for addiction grown so deep.

Now, finally, at cock's crow,

released in custody of sleep,

dark annealment, time-worn stones

far descending,

no light there, no sound there,

entering depths of thinning breath,

farther down more ancient stones,

halting not, drawn on until
Ever treacherous, ever fair,
at a table small and square,

not first light but last light shows ...

Androgyne, mon amour.

--Tennessee Williams

*She probably would have liked him. She also liked Carl though she never met him, and Carl's claim to fame was that he had been dumped by an albino circus midget. Yes, really. Pity that was the only interesting thing about him.
And no, for anyone who's heard the story, that Carl wasn't the same one who was going to marry a Vietnamese girl to fund his coke habit.

**Although... I *do* know someone who looks like DJ Judas (sort of) but is named Jacob. Weird.

I have this theory...

2008-09-24T12:45:00.003-04:00

...that stupid people think the rest of the world is as stupid as they are. I think that Clay Aiken
actually taking time to say he's gay, as if anyone was unaware of it, is solid proof of this.

But then again, most of his fan base was upset with him for having a child out of wedlock, so his fan-base must self-select some level of functional daily delusion. Maybe some of them /didn't/ figure out he was gay.

Top Five Events of the Weekend

2008-09-22T22:38:00.002-04:00

1) Ms Laura Llew. The best time of the weekend came exactly when I should have known but exactly when I was too stupid to realise. I spent the late morning one day talking about nothing specific but everything important. I'd tell you the topics but... No.

2) Fried Eggs on Hamburgers. Sounds foul, but is the height of delicious. I literally did not eat for almost 36 hours because nothing could ever be as good or as filling. You think endless French Fries sounds hot? THEY FADE TO NOTHING NEXT TO RED ROBIN BURGERS. Even with the Red Robin crack on the Fries.

3) Maxxie from Skins. Oh, how I'd love to put up a picture to illustrate this, but I can't find a picture that does justice to the character over the actor. Anyway, watch the "Maxxie and Anwar" episode of series one, the pre-title scenes have at least one lovely, up-close shot of him (freckles and all) that is pretty much a wet dream. Of course he isn't actually gay. This was the last thing I watched before I left for Charleston, and it gave me not one useful idea.

4) Brazilian Soccer Boys. What, your team had five people to a room in the Charleston hotel? Why, I had one whole empty queen bed, a sofa-bed and a roll-away! For the merest snog, you could have got you some! I can even pretend to speak Portuguese:

"O aria raio, oba oba oba

Mas que nada

Sai da minha frente, eu quero passar

Pois o samba esta animado

O que eu quero e sambar

Este samba que e misto de maracatu

E samba de preto velho, samba de preto tu!"

5) Local Comic Store Boys: Maybe I was spoiled in Chapel Hill, but Comic Store Boys ought to be more than a little cute. Certainly they ought not to insult me for liking Doctor Who. It's not like the Star Trek bitches gots a TV series on at the moment!

I wonder how much of this will last 24 hours?

2008-09-21T22:21:00.004-04:00

It almost seems ungrateful to write the following, considering the lovely weekend I just spent. But my gut tells me this post has a minuscule shelf-life. Self-indulgence*, and that is what this post is, I make no bones about it, is the evil Siamese twin of self-loathing. And like a boil, if it's not lanced, it will only get worse. So onwards and up words (as it were), up my own arse. FTW!

It's amazing just how often you see New York City. On television. In movies. In adverts. I mean, you can make a concerted effort not to see it -- I don't know, cancel the Tivo's season pass to Law and Order or something -- but it will creep up on in something as seemingly innocuous as behind the opening title on Newsnight. Even something as unlikely as a Faulkner novel -- The Mansion, his final novel in the Snopes trilogy, a series about the effects of one family on one county in the Mississippi Delta -- gets a chapter in the City, complete with a beautifully evocative description of the kind only he could write.

Thanks, Billy, we'll chalk that up to the hooch, too. It's either that or think you have a personal vendetta against someone born a decade and a half after you died. And that's just crazy. Isn't it?

Anyway, I don't think you notice as much before you move there, or even while you are there, as much as you do after you leave. And it kills me to see it. It hurts. It leaves a big, five-borough-shaped hole right where my heart would be.

It might be the time of year. This time of year is a just a few weeks after I first moved there. It was long enough after that everything had sort of settled down. I had a rhythm going. I was learning where things were, and how to get around. The summer heat had finally broken, and it was nice to be outside, so I got to take a walk every day between Columbus Circle and Park Ave and 68th Street, right through Central Park.

And even if I didn't have a penny to /do/ anything, it didn't much matter, because just walking around experiencing New York is doing more than you can actively do anywhere else in the world. It's a part of the process that changes you from someone from somewhere else into a New Yorker.

And for a big hunk of the world, that means something. People who are from a city, any city, I think, can never understand that. But being a New Yorker has an allure all its own. You can say it's purely mythical, but it's not. Like any myth, there's some scruple of truth buried in it somewhere. It's a worldliness, a bored kind of savoire faire that comes from too much experience with endless possibility.

And that gets coupled with economic reality. It may be a cliche to repeat "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere", but it is true. And there are industries there that don't exist in the rest of the country. Nobody ever ran away to Des Moines to be a fashion designer; no little kid dreams of making it to the bright lights of Buffalo's Broadway shows. To be there, to be a part of it, just to actively work there is a culmination and success in and of itself, the answer to the prayer of a thousand days of work and the validation of a thousand nights of dreaming. Heady stuff.

And to leave against your will is... I don't know. Whatever the antithesis of hope is. The actualisation of despair? The physicalisation of failure. Langston Hughes wrote about the results of a dream deferred, but is it any more dangerous to shove your face up against the factual negation of an actualised dream than it is to explode? Exploding, at least, does something. It has power.

Hope is a powerful thing. So is the ability -- or is that right? -- to fool yourself into potential. I think someone's who's lost both, hope and its alchemized form, potential, has lost one of the things that makes himself. Or herself. Or hirself.

When I left, I expected to feel this way. I also expected it to get better after a while. It hasn't. What keeps me up at night, what I do now that I don't really sleep in any meaningful way any more, isn't the thought that I couldn't make it back there again. I could, I suppose, if I really wanted to. I just... why? Why slave for a decade and take all the hits in expectation of success when it can all go away in just a few days? Why hope?

It's funny. This weekend, I had a discussion with someone about blogging. "Ahh," I said. "I'm vain enough to think people will want to read what I have to say, but not so vain that I think they want to hear me read it aloud, audio-blog or podcasting style." The point of 95% or so of what I post is legitimately for that purpose, to be read. I think this falls into the other 5%; its purpose is mainly cathartic, I think, though it may then have better been written on flashpaper: to have served its purpose in organizing my thoughts, physically writing them out and editing them into the semblance of coherence, then to let catharsis, that reaction of the heart whose results we all know so well, but whose process remains shrouded in proud Athenian secrecy, work its magic thereon, and then to be burned so purely that no reliquary ash remains.

Through no active desire of my own, nor via any self-teaching, I remain deeply imbued with that deeply Protestant work ethic -- so basic and inherent that it transcends even the notional boundaries that separated the C. of E.nglish from their Dissenting fellows, and even the boundaries of that England from her Continental Reformed siblings, and so became the bedrock of both halves of early America, and which still may be the only thing in common between the South and the rest of the Country -- which holds as self-evident that work is of itself good and that a spell of productivity is the easiest way, not barring even love, for any man to heal himself of afflictions spiritual, romantic or political and that might be my cure**. So my impulse is to work. And I can and do devise a thousand petty tasks a day in the idea that some of it will do something good somewhere, but the little inky spot in the back of my brain keeps pointing out how that isn't working and ultimately a sort of permanent Doing Nothing seems like as a viable an option as doing very little.

And this, in the end, is one of those thousand daily tasks that add up to nothing. Well, I say nothing, but all it does is stir up within me anger and pity and loathing. Loathing all the more since I know mere loathing never did accomplish much (see above). And as much anger and bile it stirs up, it isn't aimless, at least. Never that. I know where it goes. As they say, I have a man for that.

*Mika and his Momma, of course, are wrong. Too much candy won't rot your soul. Self-indulgence will. Wait... No, Mika is cute enough for slack. I'll give this one to him.

**Which is, of course, why our president betakes himself to Crawford Ranch and clears brush all the time.

Southern Comfort*

2008-09-18T12:55:00.004-04:00

Yay.

I'm in Charleston, despite the fact that SC officially discourages my people from making it a deliberate destination. The smell is appalling.

I'm all kitted up to do a sword-fighting demonstration tomorrow night for the release party of Brisingr, a few hours away in South Carolina's up-country, so I have cutlery, WD-40, Brasso and a charged-up iPod for driving music. If I'm lucky, I won't get pulled over: the authorities don't look to kindly on transporting dangerous weapons across state lines (although I guess I've already done that bit, and anyway, I'm pretty sure I can persuade the SC Highway Patrol that a Norman broadsword is just a big ol' Bowie knife).

In other news, I'm pretty sure that my brain is in need of a diagnostic. I was watching an ad for Steven Bochco's** new series, Raising the Bar. Oh, I thought, I'll watch that. the lawyer lad seems intriguing. Until I realised it was Mark Paul Gosselaar. Zack Morris. Eight-six that, then.

But almost immediately afterwards, I watched an ad for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (season premiere tonight) and thought, "Now that Charlie Kelly is rawr."

*Of which I haven't had since a cast party in college for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one of the few parties I've ever been to with photographic evidence.

**In semi-related news, this is the most intriguing item of the day.

"Of course the night only got better when the married straight girl quoted Morrissey to me. Morrissey. To me. From a straight girl."

2008-09-12T23:53:00.007-04:00

Someone's Tweet tonight reminded me of that quote. It was from a friend of mine late one night at the late and lamented (by some*), Chapel Hill bar, Henry's. He had just ditched a party full of lesbians and one straight girl and was suitably vaincu.

Of course, it being Chapel Hill, odds were she was probably bi, at least that night, but quoting Moz to a gay Chapel Hill indie kid like Christopher really was bearing coals to Newcastle. He claimed he had repaired to Henry's for round two of the night's stab at amour, but I suspected he remembered I was going to be there and felt I would be a consoling audience. No idea where he got /that/ from, but it turned out to be a moot point in the end**.

It was about this time of year, I think, sort of the last hurrah of summer. We were drinking gin and tonics -- and, come to think of it, just merry enough to insist on calling them ginantonix in honour of Douglas Adams, who had died in the not too distant past -- because we figured it would be one of the last nights of the year to warrant them.

I think we moved indoors about half past twelve or one o'clock, when the first wave of our friends left the christmas-tree-lit ficus trees and patio table we were at. We switched to vodka 'round about the time we realised that Neil, the local heart-throb cum bartender cum bassist, was tending bar.

We were talking Shelley. Mary, not Percy, and I was trying to make Valperga seem a great deal more interesting than it is. He was trying to convince me to read her mother's Letters from Norway, and wouldn't be convinced I had, even when I quoted the last paragraph from Letter VIII:

What a long time it requires to know ourselves; and yet almost every one has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own, even to himself. I cannot immediately determine whether I ought to rejoice at having turned over in this solitude a new page in the history of my own heart, though I may venture to assure you that a further acquaintance with mankind only tends to increase my respect for your judgment and esteem for your character.

I had used it as the introduction to a production of Williams' The Glass Menagerie; I still thinks it works for that.

You know, this post was supposed to wend itself around and come to a posting of the lyrics of the Rosebud's "El Camino", but I think I'll save that for next time.

*Eric, of course, who lives there now, is one. I'm sure we're not the only two.

**I think I went home with Chris when we both realized neither of us would be escorting Neil home.

Paging the Pious Infant Henry Clump

2008-09-11T13:01:00.004-04:00

I'm not a religious type, nor a fervent patriot. Well, not in the traditional American sense that involves swilling cheap lager beer, lots of shouting and not a lot of thinking, not that I think the Founding Fathers ever anticipated that. Well, they /did/, but never thought the folks that do that would actually take part in government, let alone lead it. During a national crisis.*

So I never say things like "God Bless America". We did a reasonably good job of not including him in the government -- Yes, we did: go read the Constitution -- and I see no reason to drag him in these days.

Especially after 9/11. As I see it, it's people invoking the name of god, and of his special interest in their political affairs, that got us into that mess. In between the death and destruction of that day, and all the wars and invasions and suiciding bombings it's been the cause for, you'd think the people of this country might just stop to think about chucking out the odd "God Bless the USA".

But no. They must reckon /their/ god is better than other people's god, and that our country is better than theirs.

Ahhh. That sort of thinking just ensures nothing like 9/11 will ever happen again, right?

[The title is a reference to Gorey's The Pious Infant, wherein the titular tot goes through books "removing frivolous references to the deity."]

*Oh, all right. John Adams and George W.: nihil novum sub sole, even if Adams didn't get a second term...

2008-09-10T00:28:00.004-04:00

We Americans have, over the years, done a reasonably good job of working through gender and racial stereotypes. Which is pretty impressive considering the northern half of the country was settled by some of the most bigoted people history ever produced. It's saying something that they found Protectorate England so very liberal and permissive that they left it in a fit of pique that would do Victorians novel heroines proud. What's really impressive is that their children managed to construct a mythology where their fathers were virtuous heroes, escaping cruel persecutions that have remained vague and uncertain (and virtually unsupported by fact) at the hands of evil royalists.

One of the up-shots of this is that American entertainment was severely retarded at birth. For instance, we never seemed to go in for one of the most cherished of British comedy standards that pre-dates the colonisation of America by centuries and is still very much at the heart of British comedy. We don't think men in drag are all that funny.

So maybe we started out on a good foot. We did soon develop the Yankee trader figure that appears in the first American play, The Contrast but that's largely faded away. Virtually nobody remembers the 3-or-less limbed Civil War veteran, usually named Snarky or Scumpy, who delivered messages and such in melodramas for the span of five or six decades after The Late Unpleasantness.

Almost completely faded away too have the minstrel shows -- although their ghosts still popped up in cartoons even when I was little, but even those get edited these days -- an black-face as a performance techniques finally keeled over in the last century.

Which isn't to say we don't have our own modern-day stereotypes, but I'd wager to say most of them aren't quite as hurtful or just plain stupid as they were in the not too distant past.

So I'm totally baffled about the entertainment industry and teh Gays. Nobody in their right mind would cast a white man as a woman or a black man and expect him to black up. Nor would they break out the shoe polish when an Arab is called for.

But it's perfectly fine for a straight man to play a gay role.

I just don't get it. Do the people responsible for making TV and film honestly think we think that can't find enough legitimately gay actors? Please.

All of which is a more or less massively round-about way of setting up for the commercial above. I can't quite decide who it's for or just quite what it's trying to say.

First of all, just who is it /for/? All the young men in it seem to be under 30. Okay: young people, then. But I literally do not know one single gay male who doesn't know how to use the Internet to find somebody to fuck. It's far easier, far cheaper and you can get a good lock at the prospective penis. And maybe even the human attached to it, but people looking for that are largely mythical.

Okay then, so it's for older gentlemen who never quite made the leap to the 'net. Then that really changes what those younger men are doing in the ad. It's not the sort of audience identification that you'd might expect (and that gets paid lip service in the copy): it's a presentation of goods: "Gramps, get your chickens here and none of that interweb, computer-y jargon!"

That might explain the gross use of stereotype in what they guy is looking for: gyms, clubs and sex. Very 1978: you'd almost expect to see sleeveless flannel shirts, cut-off jeans and jerky dancing, maybe even a foreign accent and over-developed muscles.

...and you'd be right.

What holds this ads together though is the bizarre subtext. Notice in this ad, the guys aren't dancing together. I mean, I suppose that makes sense if it were a phone sex ad, but this alleges itself to be a way to meet up with people. Oughtn't they to... I don't know, meet?

In both ads, you do get a brief shot two men at the same table, but in both cases, they're literally as far apart as they can be from each other. And making very little actual contact. To me at least, it screams "Yes, we all know I'm straight, but look! I'm touching another man to show I'm supposed to be a gay!" It looks and feels phony to an almost deliberate degree. I wouldn't want to meet somebody who'd look that uncomfortable just talking to me.

Maybe it's my own sense of stereotype working overtime, but it seems like these ads are for closet cases, or maybe old, old school fags, either of which retain a deep-set sort of shame about who they are and what they want, and that hang on to these (hopefully) outmoded stereotypes. I don't think the ads project a healthy attitude, somehow, and that's the sort of resonance they're looking for.

I mean, I don't disapprove of random hook-ups or casual sex. At all. I'm not sure that it does any favours to normalize homosexuals to hetero culture and to valourize monogamy. One of the downsides of doing that is to make all casual sex sleazy, even when it's done respectfully and maturely. Something about these ads, for some reason, manages to make them seem just that sleazy. I think that thing is the weird stereotypes they use and weird subtext the straight actors give them.

Anyway. The guy in the first ad isn't really my type (too much hint of corn-fed goodness and that I'd have to sit down and watch some sporting event with him on TV) but it does seem sad that he's going to grow up to be one of those guys in the second ad.

Bugger!

2008-09-05T20:09:00.002-04:00

Or not, as the case may be.

I just realised that my free sample of Astroglide never arrived. Granted, my address has changed numerous times since I ordered it, but still. It's galling.

Please carry on.

Conssssssprica-ssssy

2008-09-05T00:01:00.006-04:00

It's not much of a secret that I think conspiracy theories are stupid. Stupid in the worst way, because 99% of them are totally derivative of something CTers are too stupid to recognize as fiction --The Manchurian Candidate, The Matrix, V For Vendetta, 1984, Doctor Who (for which, see below) -- but insist as passing off as their own unique theory.

Generally speaking, they're cooked up by people with fundamental social flaws as a way to make themselves feel superior to the rest of us because they've figured out What's Really Going On(TM). It's no doubt a good thing that their retarded social skills prevent the vast majority of them from actually going out and doing anything about Them -- I mean, Timothy McVeigh was a CTer who /did/ go out and do something, but not even the CTers think he managed to accomplish anything useful. Just killing 200 innocent people.

I think that's 0-1 for the CT community, then.

The New World Order people are almost the worst, just under the 9/11 conspiracy idiots who don't even deserve to be mocked: they can't tell you who the NWO is (except maybe the Rockefellers, or maybe the Jews as a fungible mass*, or just possibly shape-shifting reptile people who may or may not be from Earth**) or what exactly they want, but by god, they know they're out there, waiting in the wings to enslave the human race, blow up planet Earth, initiate nuclear fusion in Jupiter (or is it Saturn?) with the Galileo space probe (or is it Cassini?) and live in wealth and luxury on Europa (or was it Titan?).

No, seriously. People think this. And sadly, they expect to be taken seriously, and vae tibi should you point out normality to them.

So needless to say, I don't buy into them. Except one that I heard last year that I thought about today when I saw they're making a live-action G. I. Joe movie***.

This is also stupid. But I will go see it, just like I went and saw the live-action Transformers film. Me and several million other people (uhh, mostly male) who were young in the 1980s are now the dupes of a clever marketing strategy begun by Japan in the mid 1980s.

Of course, back then, all it was was programming us to make our parents via incessant whining go buy the dolls we saw on TV every afternoon after school. And, oh, we did. And we thought that after puberty, it was all over and done with. But no.

Now that exact same programming is making us paw over $12 a pop (Plus dates. Plus popcorn. Plus soft drinks. Plus the damn Fandango surcharge) to see crap movies without a second thought. Really, I just ought to mail Hasbro two $20 bills and save myself the trouble, but I won't. I suppose that even though I'm a lot smarter than I was in 1986, I still don't know.

And knowing is half the battle.

*Yes, just like the Nazis. They even still tend to use 70-year-old "Aw-shucks, we're not really talking 'bout the Jews, but we're talkin' 'bout the Jews"-type circumlocutions like "the International Banking community"...

**Yes, the Silurians off Doctor Who. At least, I've never seen any Terran pre-historic, super-advanced lizard man theory that pre-dates Mac Hulke's 1970 version of them, anyway.

***Joseph Gordon-Levy is playing Cobra Commander****, which pretty much makes it a cert he's a big 'mo. Is he out of the closet yet?

****Honestly, he's not ugly. At all. Especially for a college drop out. Why stick him under a mask?

2008-09-03T23:59:00.003-04:00

I suppose it isn't summer any more. Officially.

It's noticeable that it's getting dark sooner, and it's a little cooler, and the quality of the light in the late afternoon has just subtly changed, proving (I guess) that the sun isn't following quite the same path in the heavens as it did a few weeks ago.

So I suppose it's time to start the transition from summer music into fall -- Dressy Bessy or The Essex Green or The All-Girl Summer Fun Band into Belle and Sebastian and the Tindersticks, winding up with the Field Mice and (appropriately enough) the Decemberists.

It brings on melancholy. Which, like nostalgia, the Elizabethans properly diagnosed as a form of self-indulgence and disease. Such thinking always reminds me of Basil Fawlty in the "Basil the Rat" episode of Fawlty Towers.

So enough with it.

I finished reading Eldest not long ago, and I was fairly disappointed. The sort of disappointed you often get from reading lazy students' work: that from from undelivered promise.

Paolini is not particularly original -- for all intents and purposes, his works are set in Tolkien Middle Earth. Which isn't the worst thing in the world (it worked well enough for Christopher Tolkein), but it does sort of insist that your work either be suitably beholden to the original maker of the world and hold strictly true to his/her style. This is what C. Tolkien did most of his life, and while he never created anything truly memorable, he also never made people throw down his novels in disgust.

What worked in Eragon was that it showed the promise of not going down this road. If he chose to create a carbon copy of Middle Earth, he at least escaped a lot of the tiresome traits that keep people from taking the genre of fantasy too seriously. He didn't, for instance, much try to use a sort of cod-archaic English to convey (in the cheapest possible terms) the seriousness and old-fashionedness of his characters. Eragon let slip a few "okays" in the first book, and there's no better word in English to drag someone kicking from a medieval setting.

But somewhere in the hundreds of pages of Elder, that disappears. The dialogue slowly spirals down into the tedious "thees" and "thous" of yore. If it's an effect to make the dialogue seem old, I don't think it works because often enough, it's used incorrectly (and whether that's a fault of Paolini or his editors, I can't say -- there's a reason William says "to thine own self be true" and not "to thyself be true"...) And just for the record, if you insist on using the verb "to wend" you really ought to know its simple past is "went". Yes, it not coincidentally is the same as for the verb "to go" , but that's the English language for you.

I think it might also be an attempt to add a sort of faux-Tolkien sense of gravitas. If it is, then that fails, as well. The prose of The Lord of the Rings moves along at a snail's pace, but its tempo matches the weeks and months and years that the plot covers. Elder is a long book, but it has a pretty small a mount of plot. It isn't equal to the amounts of verbiage potted on top of it, and you wind up with a story overtold.

If LotR is a sort of lumbering giant, it's one that is bulky and muscular rather than flabby. Eldest is flabby, largely for the same reason people are: a lack of discipline and of understanding. Considering Paolini's age, the novel would have been served by a far more exacting editor that would foster a more practical sort of creativity and a hone the author a little more in his basic writing skills.

Not that many people since Truman Capote have cared that much about being a writer rather than telling a story. (I suppose Stephen King thinks he does, what with his book and all, but like a lot of authors, from Zola and Hugo to Brecht, he has trouble putting theory into practice. There's a reason anyone with literary pretensions should be forced -- forced -- to read Pope's An Essay on Criticism regularly and prove they understand it. Writers like Sarah Caudwell, who write as they do naturally, are vanishingly rare.)

There are some good points to the novel, and some signs of improvement from Eragon. Paolini wisely chooses to paint with a broader palette this time around, and includes sections from the perspective of people other than Eragon. This is a sound choice, since it allows for a much larger scope for the novel and does a good job of providing an international(ish) view of the situation. In the hands of another author, it might also allow for more than one narrative voice to come through, even in third person, which would be an ideal way of underscoring the use of the device, but if Paolini intended to do so, then it just doesn't come through. Which is a shame, because it would prevent some of the drag in the middle.

In the end, there's one good way to judge the quality of this book: Am I going to read the sequel(s)*? Probably. Well, I will give the next one a chance. If more isn't better in the third novel, and disappointments out-weigh promise, then I certainly won't bother with the fourth.

Also: Is it just me, or is that picture above Portrait of a Melancholy Young Man by Isaac Oliver (c. 1590-5) alarmingly similar to the Corpus Christi portrait, allegedly of Christopher Marlowe?

*The fact that what started out as a trilogy is now a tetrology (at least) should speak volumes.

I Just Noticed Something...

2008-08-30T21:56:00.002-04:00

Ever since the BBC (well, Warner Bros. for the BBC) has been releasing DVDs in the American market, they've felt the need to replace the British release covers. And without exception, the US releases are hideously ugly. As in "Oh my god, put that /down/: someone might see you!" ugly.

I will, for sake of example, use the release of Remembrance of the Daleks, where the dichotomy is most obvious:

Yes, in the last few moments of the story, a Black Dalek goes mad and spins around a bit, but I've yet to determine why the designer put two in full spin on the US cover, nor why he thought a sort of neon pus color would be an ideal background.

But with the release earlier in the summer of the Under the Surface* collection, the US and UK releases have been identical! Hurrah!

*Oh, how I long for this! However, since it took me a month to scrounge together the cash for The Time Meddler, I won't see this collection -- which is more than double the price -- for ages. It's not like I don't already have all three stories it contains on trusty BBC Enterprises (RIP)
VHS**, but it's still a better buy than, say, Time-Flight at any price.

**Well, The Silurians and The Sea Devils. I still have an off-air recording of Warriors of the Deep -- "WUNE-TV. Channel 17, Linville." Cor, that doesn't half reveal my age. Or level of sadness.

Reel Around the Fountain

2008-08-27T23:52:00.001-04:00

Or, Why Morrissey is god and Duncan Sheik is an insufferable poseur. Or possibly the other way around.

I have a confession to make. There's this Duncan Sheik song I like.

Well, it isn't a Duncan Sheik song, first of all, it's a Smiths song. But he does a cover of it.

It was released yonks ago, and I grabbed if off Napster, back when I was in college and it was free to do things like that. After college, for some reason, that track never survived -- probably because well, I don't like Duncan Sheik. I loathe him and all his works and all his ways. He is, in his own little way, the opposite of everything I like in music.

But when, in the course of my internet travels today, I saw an mp3 of this song, I was over-joyed. And then drowned in a sea of self-loathing. But it got me thinking:

Why is his cover better than the original?

It hit me: /because/ Duncan Sheik is loathsome and pathetic.

Here me out:

"Reel Around the Fountain" is, like practically every Morrissey song, a song about being pathetic (Deeply pathetic: "Slap me on the Patio/I'll take it now..."). It's Morrissey's delivery of the song, with just the right level of self-awareness, that makes the song ironic. And irony, of course, is based on the existence of two simultaneous levels it is and isn't pathetic at the same time, since it is an honest statement of how the speaker feels, but by being aware of how sad it is, it isn't quite as sad as it could be.

And this wry self-consciousness is what makes oh, every smart adolescent with a sense of style fall hopeless for Morrissey. Your sex doesn't matter. Neither does your sexual identity. A few years ago my friend Maddie Minx, noted Midlands lesbian, went to a Morrissey concert. "Oh," she told me, "I wish I was 18 again, so I could lose my virginity to him*." I remember nodding, and thinking "That is exactly the way I feel."

[Of course, the practical reality is non-sense. We all know he'd ejaculate prematurely onto your favourite t-shirt, then immediately run away crying. Later, he'd write a song about it, and you'd love it and sing it to yourself when you're lonely. But that's hardly the point.]

But Duncan Sheik eschews that sort of complexity. It goes after emotion of the song with all the awareness of a basset hound going after a ham. He revels in it. He recognizes himself in the utter bathos, and brings it out in a way more purely honest than Morrissey ever could.

Which utterly, utterly misses the point.

The song is quite clever, in its way, and Duncan misses it all. Take the verse for example:

I dreamt about you last night
And I fell out of bed twice
You can pin and mount me like a butterfly
But "take me to the haven of your bed"
Was something that you never said...

If you take the time to actually listen to the song, you can hear that Morrissey is quite careful in his phrasing: the middle line, after all, comes in between two references to being in bed; it's fairly obviously a sexual reference. Accordingly, Moz manages to make the verse into a coherent lyrical unit, downplaying the rests between line three and lines two and four. If he were speaking, that line'd be a parenthetical (subjunctive) statement underlying the (indicative) statement of the verse. Irony. Especially considering the concrete blutness of actions of "pin and mount me" with "Take me to the haven of your bed."

But poor Duncan has a plodding rhythm with rock solid rests between the lines: each line becomes another item in a list of wrongs done by the would-be lover. Nothing subtle. Nothing ironic. Just one dumb person getting treated brutally by another. It's almost painful to listen to, since you almost become drawn into the conflict.

Sheik identifies himself with the emotional experience (and knowing anything about his person, this wouldn't surprise you. I don't know that much, but I do know he got locked in a limo by a group of models he was trying to hit on...) completely. He isn't posing, as such, because he is that sad, but he is posing, because he clearly doesn't have the first clue how the song works.

Still, such is the glory of music, I suppose. He gets it wrong, but it's still sort of right. His appeal comes from his forth-rightness, his genuineness, in presenting it. But if you like the original song, there's a fundamental feeling of him missing the mark, a sort of "Yes, but..." that you can't shake. I mean, I suppose I should laud someone that willing to open themselves up to the world, but like I said, it also makes you a party to his abuse and emotional stupidity.

Good lord, I've gone and turned a Smiths cover into a Sarah Kane play. Excuse me, but I'll have to go and masturbate into my shit now.**

*Quote slightly altered to preserve dignity.

**This isn't pointless vulgarity. Honest.

You rub two sticks together until something good happens.

2008-08-21T00:09:00.003-04:00

Pretty, no?

And in the picture I wanted to find, blond, too. But oddly, the photos from Eragon weren't quite as amusing.

Actually, I don't find blond twinks all /that/
attractive; I find them more purely aesthetically pleasing than anything else.

Riiiight.

Anyway, I posted that picture because I'm currently working my way through the novel the film is based on. I've been hired*, you see, to do a sword-fighting demonstration for the release of the third novel in the series. I figured it behooves me to know what sort of sword-fighting actually goes on therein.

And the book's not horrible. It seems to me exactly the sort of novel a bright but not very wordly 15-year-old would write -- he works in the verb "to fletch" on the first page, which ought to tell you enough -- and though I'm none too keen on fantasy, the book works. Too supplement some of its weak spots, though, I've taken to imaging the protagonist pretty much as you see above and his dragon as a giant basset hound**. And added a shower scene or two. And a rather different sort of treatment for chafed thighs.***

But reading the books has done largely what I wanted it to: finding out what kinds of hardware the mention and what their fighting and/or training is like. Pleasantly, they make a point of mentioning training with wooden wasters and there are both (anachronistically) rapiers and broadswords. And target shields.

Although, pointedly****, no daggers with those rapiers. So that'll be a fun thing to fold in.

The only thing I can really find fault with is the use of language. Well, not language, as such. It's pretty much just a "drop a letter from a real Germanic word and pretend it's a new one" deal. It's the orthography is /awful/. I don't think the kid has a grip on what actual diacritical marks mean. I mean, I know I can't castigate someone's /made-up/ language, and only someone trained in hist/comp linguistics would probably even notice, but still.

*Well, asked.

**Okay, that crosses the "creepy" line from fanfic to slash that I am unwilling to actually make.

***Think the Falcor the Luckdragon from The NeverEnding Story, but with more drool.

****Insert rim shot.

Dear Channel 4:

2008-08-17T16:01:00.003-04:00

I don't understand why you insist on casting straight boys in gay roles (I mean, what: you can't find enough gay actors? Seriously?) but I have resigned myself to it.

But do you really have to make them so heart-achingly pretty? It's cruel.

In completely unrelated news, Skins premieres on BBC America tonight.

[The pictures, by the way, are a game. Can you guess which are stars on a Channel 4 series and which are porn models? Didn't think so...]

It's not all about Central Asia:

2008-08-13T18:09:00.002-04:00

Lake Como is also nice this time of year.

One Thing I Absolutely Do Not Understand...

2008-08-10T19:28:00.002-04:00

...is slash.

In any form.

I mean, I get porn. I even get erotic writing. I get fanfic, too, sort of, inasmuch as it's a way for fans to creatively interact with writing and the shows they love. So it there oughtn't to be this huge idealogical gap in me understanding slash in a meaningful way.

And what staggers me is the sheer /bulk/ of it. From TV shows that really don't easily suggest it.

The new Doctor Who does sort of lean towards it a bit, what with Rose and Martha's attachment to the Doctor, so some "shippers"* do something that sort of makes sense. And Captain Jack lends himself to poorly written erotica easily.

But there are Doctor on Doctor freaks. That just short-circuits my brains in all kinds of ways and leaves me twitching and drooling in the corner. There's Adric slash. Tegan-rape. Ugh. That's just as foul, if not worse.

And there's Office Slash out there, which I found out accidentally. (And you know I mean that accidentally, too, since I have no problem discussing actual my porn habits from time to time.)

Gay Office Slash. Which, because it was Jim/Ryan I looked at. Still didn't get it. I mean, I'd /watch/that in a heartbeat, cause I think BJ Novak and John Krasinski are both cuter than average. But it falls a little flat in practice, though, because it's just so creepy.

The Dwight/Michael stuff and the Dwight/Jim stuff -- god help us, there's a /word/, "Dwim," for that, which sounds like a semen euphemism -- I couldn't bear to look at.

I was -- in equal measures -- curious and repulsed so I nosed around looking for other bizarre slash. ER? Kovac and Carter, Malucci and Romano**, and a cross-over so bizarre it makes my brain hurt: Kerry Weaver and Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager.

That's so weird I have to go cry now.

*God, I loathe that word. The lingustics student in me understands it perfectly well but the English major just want to hit people who use it with a big book.

**Erik Palladino is another in the category with Philip Olivier that elicits a "shut up and fuck me" reaction in me that makes /no/ logical sense.

Virtual Dirty Looks

2008-08-10T14:38:00.002-04:00

Heh heh.

Sitemeter is great.

The same day I posted about Sakhalin island, I got several hits from there (*waves).

Привет Друзья в Сахалине! Я надеюсь, что москиты не слишком плохи!

I also got a mysterious hit (no place of origin, no IP address, no referring page) from a government office in Moscow.

Привет Товарищи в ФСБ!

When I posted about Chechnya and Georgia, I got a few hits from the Caucasus!

Прошу прощения для того, чтобы использовать Россиян, но нет никакого ингуша Английским переводчикам в Интернете.

Долой российский империализм! Свобода для Кавказа!

And a few more from gov. offices in Moscow!

Этническое Сельское население - всегда скука, да?

(You can run those through this to see the Russian bits. And see and hear them here. Back translation is a hoot!)

We were born at night, when the she-wolf whelped.

2008-08-08T23:54:00.003-04:00

It feels a bit weird to be writing this, after a recent post. But Russia's invaded Georgia.

I don't claim to know much about the situation, but I do know a bit more than the average American. Before I moved to New York, I worked on a production of a show called The Man Who Tried to Save the World -- about the American, Fred C. Cuny, an American relief worker -- and maybe spy --who disappeared in the last Chechan War. I learned a bit of Chechen language (enough to translate a few lines their national anthem, sort of -- see title quote), and enough to learn their country was more than bomb craters and ravaged cities.

Even the briefest of study of the area reveals a long, nasty history of military brutality. It'd be nice if you could reduce that brutality to just one side, but you can't. The Russian/Soviet/Russian occupation of the area has been anything but pleasant (they pretty much removed the entire Chechan ethnicity away from the Chechan homeland, so there are no natural-born Chechans), but so has the Chechan reaction to that occupation. They've done horrible things to innocent people, too -- murder of aide workers, innocent children of different ethnic backgrounds...

And the situation is happening all over again in Georgia, for the same reasons, it seems. The old super-structure of the old USSR feels like it needs to prove itself against the machinations of some tiny republic with a history of a free past. Whatever he says, Putin is aligning himself exactly with the old-school Soviet rulers, and only someone as deeply stupid as Bush would ever believe otherwise.

And most of America will be looking at Beijing.

Pah.

"I Read About You on the Internet!"

2008-08-07T23:50:00.003-04:00

Or, Sixty Million Tween Girls Can't Be Wrong.

I spent last Friday night at an out-of-town book release party for Breaking Dawn. I was intrigued by the concept, mostly because the proprietress of the store, Miss Laura, had sent me an email specifically barring me from several of the activities.

She mentioned something about the innocence of the teens there, her good name in the small town, and (with a delicate sniff honed, no doubt, through generations of Southern Good Breeding) "my reputation".

*My* reputation, mind, when one of the survey answers to her question, "Name a mode of transportation mentioned in the series?" was a seventeen year old boy. Well, who wouldn't snigger at that? Especially considering some of the seventeen year old boys she's had in the bookstore...*

I was also informed of the negative consequences of introducing alcohol to the festivities. Actually, I wasn't. Those were sort of left up in the air to increase the general air of malignancy associated with them, but they were No Good Things. It was sort of a shame I nevertheless got a thin covering of Crown Royal that night.

I got there early so I could help set things up. She -- in defiance of years of knowing me -- asked me to set up a PlayStation 3. Which I pretty much did. I got all the wires and things plugged in where they were supposed to be. Then I got to blow up balloons. Lots of balloons. /Lots/ of balloons. With little fortunes in.

After that, I went to go get ice. At this point, I should mention that I had grabbed dinner at a local Long John Silver's. ("Oh," I thought, "that'll make a nice change," forgetting that "sea-food" and "quick-service"** go together a bit like "feminine charm" and "Amy Winehouse".) When I came back to my car, I saw the refuse from dinner. Without thinking, I grabbed it an tossed it into a nearby bin. Along with the car key.

I got to dig through the bin liner to get it back. Conveniently, someone left a bottle of Crown Royal somewhere in the middle of the bag, and I drenched myself up to the elbows before I figured out what it was.

There were several other fascinating things in the bag besides the whiskey, like an empty bag of Hershey's Miniatures, a box of sleeping pills and a used container of Depends (though, uhh, fortunately, no actual Depends). I can only assumed I missed a rockin' Seniors field trip downtown...

So I showed up almost 30 minutes later with the ice. The festivities soon began.

It was actually a lot of fun. There were a lot of people -- about 300 teen girls, it seemed, and one guy. Yeah. One of /those/. He was first in line to a get a copy of the book, too, apparently. We all talked about him after the shop closed. It was rather a pity he was so intensely creepy, since he was sort of cute. In a beady-eyed, "don't turn your back on him unless you want a bread knife stuck there" sort of way. Which really wouldn't be a problem as long as he was a bottom.

There were bingo games, and fortune-telling, and arm-wrestling, and make-overs, and raffles and quizzes and Pictionary ("It looks like a homeless man's last will and testament," Ben said, when we looked at it after), and everyone left ecstatic. And clutching their copy of the book.

Which was pretty good, considering that at the climax of the night, a 6-foot ex-marine girl climbed the counter and shouted at people. The guests, except for someone who threatened to rip Laura's face off, were charming, and I met some really lovely people, including Laura's sister, who gave the title quote. Yes. It's nice to be in the same category as Goatse.cx!

Clean-up took a long time, and I didn't get on the road till 3.30 -- which is about my standard for leaving from a trip to see Laura. One day, I should really take a camcorder and record myself singing aloud to Sharleen Spiteri or New Order or the 1989 London cast of Anything Goes about 5.15 to keep myself up.*** That would keep her in stitches for weeks.

You can see pictures of the event here. Though, curiously, I'm not in any.

*Well, not that kind of had, though she probably could have with the Boy G. Not that I would wish that on anyone. Well, twice. (I'd remind you of what Dan Savage says about paying sex workers...)

**That's the industry term for "fast-food". Like all industry terms, it's stupid.

***Granted, the infamous Interstate combined exit/on-ramp, complete with on-coming traffic, I once found on the way back from Laura's worked a lot better at waking me up.

"There's a one-eyed Yellow Idol to the North of Kathmandu..."

2008-08-05T00:42:00.000-04:00

You know, I don't think I've ever mentioned something to /anyone/.

As much as I like to travel, I've never been interested in going to Japan. Or India. Or (most) of China. But I'd love to go to Central Asia. As in the northern branch of the Old Silk Road -- places in Xinjiang, the Chinese far West like Turfan or Urumqi or Gaochang or Khotan, the Tarim Basin where Tocharian mummies were found, The Flaming Mountains and the Tian Shan Mountains.

Places like Bukhara and Samarkhand (in Uzbekistan), Bamyan in Afghanistan, Hazrat-e and Tamburlaine's summer palace at Shahrisabz in Turkmenistan.

(And a little further away, but just as remote and seldom heard-of, the Amur River or the Sakhalin island)

The closest I've ever gotten to any personal contact with the area was my friend Phil who decided to travel the world. After I watched a years old (now) episode of Globe Trekker where Ian Wright goes to that part of the world, I convinced him through a series of lies and promises to get me a Kyrgyz hat. Yes, my virtue was used, but it was long gone before I knew Phil, so it wasn't that much to promise. Unfortunately, SARS broke out while Phil was in China, and he got the boot back home. He never got across the border into Kyrgyzstan, and I never got my hat.

Anyway, you almost never hear of most of these places anymore. Most of them are poor, or have unstable governments, and travel is pretty difficult there. But a few days ago, an attack in Kashgar made it into the news. It made me sad that something like that was the only reason the area got name-checked.

[Blogger, as far as I can tell, give you no options short of editing HTML (a bit beyond my ken) to select where the pictures go. They are -- from top down -- the Amur River; Registan, a citadel at Samarkhand; Shahrisabz; Khan Tegri, one of the tallest of the Tian Shan mountains; and the Flaming Mountains in Turfan.]

[The title quote, which has nothing to do with anything, really, is the opening to "The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God", an interesting poem set in Nepal during the Raj.]

More shilling...

2008-07-24T14:21:00.003-04:00

...for more excellent t-shirtage. This lot come from Ninja-Bot.

I'm not sure when exactly I began to believe that excellent t-shirt-making became a trait as vital to the species as agriculture, bread-making and wit, but I do. It was probably 'round about the time I realized that 90% of my shirts had some band's name across the middle, and that was boring.

If You're Not From Lesbos...

2008-07-23T13:43:00.004-04:00

O Dykes, Rejoice!

The Greeks are okay with you being Lesbians and not Lesbians.

In other gay news, South Carolina is not gay-friendly. Despite what they tell people.

I know. Shocking. And I'm not sure whether it's amusing or disturbing, but SC's response to a gay ad agency doing ads for the state to attract gay tourists was to not pay them. I can't help but wonder if they actually said "Nyah Nyah Nyah" when they refused to pay.

Fucking Pterodactyls.

2008-07-23T13:29:00.002-04:00

These are t-shirts designed by Jeremy Kalgreen available over at amorphia-apparel.com. Needless to say, I adore them. And shall, in the fullness of time, purchase some. When I have teh monies.

Dear Person from Sussex:

2008-07-17T17:36:00.002-04:00

I know -- through the magic of Sitemeter, so don't get any creepy ideas of me stalking -- you're from East Sussex and this happened in West Sussex, but do you know anything about the GrannyKart Blowout?

I found this bizarrely, and maybe macabrely, fascinating. For instance, did happen at Tesco's or Sainsbury's or somewhere else? I don't know why that matters, but for some reason it does. What started it? I could see if it were over the last package of Chocolate Hob-Nobs.* Was either morbidly obese, and therefore have an unfair advantage? One was taken away to hospital, after all.

Update: Further research tells me it happened in a place called Crawley, (Really? "Crawley"? What's the next town over, Little Snivelling?) a new town which has Tescoses, Sainsburyses, and ASDAses and Icleandses.

*Mmmmmm. Chocolate Hob Nobs. Though my research has discovered a Milk Chocolate and Orange Hob Nob, which I would Kill to Get. Yes. Kill.

**Seriously, check out the site. It's angry! No wonder the grans were playing at MarioKart.

Why I hate NC, part 12,563

2008-07-17T17:30:00.000-04:00

Senator Dole:

As one of your constituents, I wanted to inform you how appalled I was at your attempt to attach Jesse Helms name to the recent Congressional bill for AIDS relief.

Helms was a racist and a bigot, and I am sure -- whatever his late actions in office may have been -- history will confirm his legacy as little more than a rabble-rousing hate-monger, and a relic of a less progressive age.

Your attempt to attach his name to the bill was a flagrant act of partisanship and an obvious attempt to whitewash Helms' dark memory. Were you just not able to find the names of some actual victims of the AIDS epidemic to attach to the bill?

While I don't doubt this act will be popular with the majority of your electorate, I think it's important the strong minority make their voices heard.

--Jaylemurph

Dammit!

2008-07-17T02:08:00.002-04:00

The day -- the very day -- I mention ER here, I find out next season will be the last one.

I'm not very torn up about it -- it jumped the shark a while back* -- but still, I had to find out today?!

And in other TV news, who's going to tell that Dayton kid from The Baby Borrowers** that he needs to go somewhere and do a solo stroke flick and/or a Peter Z Pan movie***? Oh come on. You know you'd watch it. And I refuse to believe he uses that much peroxide, Nair and fake tan without self-selecting to look like a twink.

Not that I'm convinced he hasn't already, but he is the sort of ammo that the US twink market needs against Eurocreme and the other leading companies from Eastern Europe. And something in me is adamant that the US can -- and should --compete in this market.

*I'm pretty sure it happened 'round about the time /every/ episode got promoted as "a very special/touching/can't miss episode."

**You should really, really hate NBC for thinking you need to be watch hours of TV to learn that teen-agers are stupid and shouldn't (successfully) breed. I say "you" because *I* watched it and can't personally bitch. Granted, I probably watched with a creepy leer (see above), but I did watch it.

***No? Oliver Twink? Betwinked?**** The Da Vinci Load*****? Tell me he doesn't belong in there, somewhere.

****Well, obviously you know about the dreadful mike problems in the last few scenes. Marred an otherwise lovely film.

*****The gay one. Apparently, there's also a straight porn title called "The Da Vinci Load." Who knew?

Ars Gratia Auctore

2008-07-16T01:04:00.004-04:00

I think it's stupid to take your own photos at an art museum (doubly so at a gallery where you ought to be coughing up actual money for your gawping) , since there's practically no chance you're going to get a better image than has already be made for a post card, coffee mug or calendar.

But there were two I couldn't resist.

One should be obvious to anyone reading this.

The other is for anyone who's ever seen me.

I was also delighted by a Giacametti sculpture of the type I particularly love, and a really engaging Matisse I'd never seen before, "Laurette with a Cup of Coffee"

Trip Debriefing III

2008-07-16T00:28:00.003-04:00

As in St Louis, I didn't actually stay /in/ Chicago, I stayed away in Lisle, a pretty distant suburb, but closer to Union Station than my place in Brooklyn was to Manhattan (timewise, on an express train, anyway).

Now, I may never have mentioned here, but I'm a big ER fan. As in "I have all 9 DVD sets and have watched all of them twice". So my biggest treat in being in Chicago was going to nose around ER locations. Consequently, my first trip was to try to find the Michigan Ave bridge, just down from where Cook Country General Hospital is supposed to be. Of course, I got lost. But I did see the Sears tower and the Chicago Opera House (Which is right on the river. I don't envy their damp problems...)

I went back the next day and found it. And took spent most of the day wandering around, taking some pictures. (And giggled a lot to myself -- "Look at me, I'm Dr Greene jogging by the Lake" or frowning and thinking "Now I'm all serious and moody like Dr Benton*)

I also got a pizza. I was sat next to -- literally -- the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen. I use the word beautiful because it's more accurate than "hot" or even "cute". He was almost like a Botticelli youth, or a similar period cartoon** drawing to gage an artist's technical perfection rather than his talent at conveying actual appearance: his lips and eyes and colour were so perfect they had that look of being drawn on rather than have grown. His lips were literally pink. I've never seen that before on anyone, male or female, without make-up. I had trouble not looking at him. I hope I didn't come over as "creepy" rather than "interested" or, since I know what I can reasonably attain, "appreciative" since I know he caught me looking at him. And it's not like he was the best thing that happened to me there, so I don't know why he gets all these CIs. I guess it shows I've been swallowing the Twilight series virtually whole. In any event, this guy has Edward Cullen nailed better than Oliver-whatever-his-real-name-is-Wood.

I also went to the Art Institute of Chicago, on a Friday afternoon when it was free***. I enjoyed it. I also took a ride around the entire Loop, just to say I had written the El. One picture that I didn't post here was for the CCGH stop (Library-State/Van Buren). Yeah, it's pretty sad I know which one it is.

*Oh all right, Dr Luka probably is a better comparison. Not that chip-on-their-shoulder Docs are hard to come by on that show.

**Not that kind. This kind.

***Thank you, Target. A big box deal I can approve of.

Nerd Topicality: I Has It.

2008-07-15T22:45:00.001-04:00

Yes, The Kings of Convenience were bump music on this week's rerun of This American Life.

Un-hunh. That's right: Jaylemurph has his finger on the pulse of Geek Life.

Dear Pastry Chef Mike from Charlotte on Chemistry.com

2008-07-11T23:54:00.003-04:00

I'm sorry I'm too poor to actually afford to pay for things at the online dating service. You sound quite lovely, and I'm sorry if you think me ignoring your "nudges" is a personal insult. It isn't. Believe me, even if you were a hag -- and I'm not suggesting you are -- being a pastry chef makes you seem a lot sexier.

On a tangential note, I tried baking something calling itself "an old Southern recipe for Sundrop Pound Cake". If you don't know, Sundrop is a lemon soda from the Carolinas and Georgia, notorious for leading soft drinks in caffeine and cholesterol*. I like lemon pound cake, so I thought I might give it a spin. (I'm not going to shame the originator of the recipe with a link.)

It sucks. Even after a made up a lemon glaze for it, it still has no particular lemon taste and the texture is awful. Honestly, it was bad enough I thought I must have done something wrong, but if I did, I can't figure it out. At this point, I'm willing to concede that shitty soda makes shitty cakes. And besides, making soda pop-based baked goods is awfully 1957.

And on a note that's not even tangential: Dear Aaron, current Jeopardy! champion: I love you. You are hot, yet geeky; smart, yet awkward. And you're fooling no one into thinking you're straight by telling Alex stories about kites instead of significant others who are female. I would learn Japanese to please you.**

*For years, the single best thing from my hometown -- and yes, the point was debated all through high school and agreed upon buy Those Who Count(ed) -- was the appallingly-named but infinitely delicious Cherry Vanilla Sundrop at the local barbeque shack. Said shack created a controversy that rocked the town to its roots a few years after a left for college when it switched from Pepsi brands to Coke and had to eschew Sundrop (which is, after three or four removes, owned by PepsiCo***). People still spit on the ground rather than call it a "Cherry Vanilla Lemon Drink".

**And I loathe Japan and all it works and all its means.

***And that little reference, folks, was enough to get a mean virtual glare from the fine folks at PepsiCo. It wasn't even a mean reference to their crappy direct product. Pah. Pepsi. Fit only to be served hot to Turkish soldiers.****

****Very, very obscure reference to a Doctor Who work. Anyone (who is not the author) who recognizes it gets a prize!

Trip De-Briefing II

2008-07-11T01:31:00.004-04:00

I was in St Louis for two days. Well, /near/ St Louis. All right, the St Louis airport. I did break out on Sunday to run over to the nearby Creve Coeur* park, the namesake for Tennessee Williams' late play A Lovely Sunday at Creve Coeur. Unfortunately the river was nigh-unapproachable.

My father wanted to go see the Gateway Arch, so as driver, I got to go too. It's located in an agreeable stretch of park surrounded by a disagreeable reconstruction of the "historic waterfront". For which read: scads of tacky tourist shops and tragic faux taverns in fake stone cladding.

If you didn't know it, you can ride to the top of the Arch. Alas, my fear of heights prevented that jaunt. There's also a museum under the Arch, complete with groovy (or creepy, take your pick) animitronic talking cowboys and indians. It's free to get in. I did go there.

I learned that the reverse image of the new(ish) nickel comes from the reverse of old Presidential medals given to Indian chiefs as a sign of "goodwill".

But my biggest occupation was gawking at the floodwater.

*My French isn't bad, so I've thought for years that it was pronounced "Crev" Coeur. It turns out -- and I have the assurance of Danni, the waitress at Pasta House, Inc. and the sales director of the St Louis Airport Hyatt -- that it's "Creeve" Coeur. Bah.

Trip De-Briefing I

2008-07-11T01:11:00.002-04:00

I didn't take any pictures of Evansville, IN because there's just not that much picturesque there. They were busily involved with their annual (Ohio) Riverfront street fair called "Freedomfest" -- and yes, before you say it, a local told me it got changed to that after 9/11.

The third day, a local woman asked me to pay to get in (I walked in for free the first two). I wasn't trying to be insulting when I laughed and said "Really?" When she told me how much she wanted, I was trying to be insulting when I laughed and said "Really?"

Twenty bucks is a /lot/ to pay for the opportunity to pay to eat deep-fried fatty starches, get free samples of chewing tobacco or try to be recruited by all five of the armed forces.

Curiously, I did get to meet (one of) the people running for County Coroner. It suggests an odd and certainly creepy plethora of pathologists in your vicinity when there's at least enough for an election. To be fair, six people were murdered in the four days I was there, so maybe there isn't the overabundance of them I perceived.

I also stopped at the amusingly named Angel Mounds site, (fnur, fnur) the site of a Mississippian period city full of raised earth mounds. It was mildly interesting except for the ticket seller, who gave me a spiel at least ten minutes long about the State park. I suspect I was the only person she saw that day.

Po-Faced or Pie-Faced?

2008-07-10T22:21:00.002-04:00

I'm a reasonably big fan of the Kings of Convenience -- of all the Bergen Wave movement, really* -- but it's been a while since I had a good listen to their Riot on an Empty Street album. And I had one today.

Is it just me, or does the song "I'd Rather Dance Than Talk to You" song sound uncannily like a Flight of the Conchords bit?

*Even if the bastards wouldn't let me into their country.
*shakes fist t Norway

2008-07-08T00:43:00.002-04:00

Sigh.

I'm back. Unfortunately (and possibly unconnectedly, but I rather doubt it) I'm in a bit of a funk and don't feel like being awfully rakish or a la mode d'un raconteur.

That last, no doubt, stems from being right in the middle of Jane Eyre. Perhaps the rather Victorian bit of a funk is, too. That or being sucked out of the only culture I've been in for a while.

I also have pictures to post. Yes, I know. Whee and all that. Badly-made photographs. Fortunately, I'm not in any of them, so they aren't that hard to bear.

I'll end with this: I wasn't very, very impressed with Chicago. It was a nice city, but I think it's telling that long ago, Chicago self-selected to be America's Second City. It lacks a certain something*, a spark that New York has. There's a palpable feeling in New York that at any second something will happen -- good, bad, or awful. And it usually does. You don't feel that in Chicago.

Also, those fucking obnoxious Midwestern accents drove me out of my mind, in a way that never happened in New York, or even Durham.** I want to buy the entire state of Michigan elocution lessons.

*On further reflection, that something may just be New Jersey.

**I apologize to anyone who has such an accent. I don't think I know anyone who has one***, since I haven't hit anyone recently.

***Well, one girl I knew in college, who played Laura in The Glass Menagerie. As I recall, she seemed to spend at least some time fretting over her accent in the scene where Tom breaks some of the glass animals, but hers was never that bad, and I'm sure was even less noticeable by the time she graduated.

Yeah, I'm waiting for something interesting to happen, too.

2008-07-01T23:19:00.002-04:00

I'll let you know when it happens. Sadly, the good folk of St Louis aren't nearly as happy in the Russian Velvet Mafia department, so to work off any abundance of what Natural Philosophers a century or three ago called Animal Spirits, I've spent a lot of time in hotel gyms. *

I may be the first person to come back from a vacation weighing less than when they left.

*My apologies to anyone reading this line a second time. I thought it was clever -- and true --enough to recycle.

...You are looking at the working week through the eyes of a gigolo

2008-06-28T23:52:00.003-04:00

I'm a whore.

As I said before, I don't really want this to be a collection of tawdry tid-bits, as it were -- him over at Glitter for Brains will beat me out for that every time -- but I have been enjoying this sojourn to the Midwest a /lot/ more than I had anticipated.

It turns out (for some reason I can't even begin to fathom*) that there's a sizeable collection of Russians working in this hotel on short-term --4 to 6 month -- work visas. And my, uhh, conspirator** was about as subtle as I was about this morning.

So imagine my surprise and delight when a waiter from the hotel restaurant showed up at my door. Now, my sense of dignity rather impelled me to tell him to go, but quite frankly, he has the most incredible ass. I felt like it behooved me to entertain him at least for a while.

Now, I know you think this sort of activity is reprehensible, and very possibly stereotypical of Gentlemen That Can't Catch, but I think it's understandable. The past weekend aside, I've always been the model of if not strict monogamy, then monogamy as strict as my significant other at the time demanded (Ooh, that was a fun summer. And to think I spent /years/ with someone who thought getting a handjob while he was riding in a car was the wildest thing one could do...). And my one night stands have been few and far between.

The past few months have been literally no fun. And I've Turned Old within the past few weeks. And even though I've lost almost 30 pounds since March, I still have some measure to go before I feel more than sub-averagely attractive. So all this -- especially with no one coughing discretely and asking for cash when it's over -- has been a decent and probably-more-needed-than-I'd- like-to-admit boost to my ego. I am asserting my sexual identity, like a trashy women's studies professor from the late 1970s.***

And, guys being what they are, there's always a sign of a job well done, so I know I'm not being completely egotistical. It's almost a shame I have to leave for St Louis tomorrow.

*Well, the getting out of Russia bit I can fathom. The whole "picking Indiana out of the whole US to make money in" I don't.

**In the most literal sense. Look up the etymology.

***I'll take "Quotes I'll Regret in 10 Years", Alex.

It's All Go in Indiana.

2008-06-28T16:14:00.002-04:00

While I clearly wouldn't like this blog to descend into nothing more than a tawdry report of my affairs de coeur, I am pleased to report that some scenes long cherished in the realms of porn may be true. Randy hotel maids /do/exist.

Well, whatever one calls male hotel housekeepers.

What makes it all the more sweeter -- for those of you conversant with gentlemen's films of a certain stripe -- was that the young gentleman referred to is, in fact, from Eastern Europe. I am now forced to conclude that all those Eurocreme movies are really documentaries, and that watching them constitutes a form of international studies.

You know what?

2008-06-27T03:43:00.002-04:00

I'd almost forgotten how much fun boys in bands are. I'm happy to report they are still an amusing way to pass a few hours. And then they go away forever. Very tidy.

Wrap-Up, Day 1

2008-06-25T20:22:00.002-04:00

Miles Driven: 520

Hours driven: 9

States crossed: 4

No.of times my father drove off the side of the road listening to his new cheap navigation system: 6

No. of times cheap navigation system gave wrong directions: 3

No. of times I found the right way with an atlas: 3

Average driving speed of father: 60 mph

Fastest driving speed of father: 60 mph

My average driving speed: 80

My fastest driving speed: 93

Arguments over content of "Tigermilk": 3

Arguments over content of "If You're Feeling Sinister": 2

Heart attacks at content of "Savage Lovecast"played in retribution: 1

So, this trip started off rather swimmingly, eh?

Fan-boy Wankery*

2008-06-18T23:38:00.006-04:00

Rumors of Davros returning to the new Doctor Who have been floating around for a while now, so the pictures of him -- looking surprisingly like his old-series self -- are not, in fact, very surprising.

What *is* surprising are images of new, red Daleks.

Red... daleks. I love red. I love Daleks. The effect of the idea of Red Daleks on my person is shameful to admit. But not quite as shameful as admitting just how much my imported, 18 inch, radio-controlled movie-version red Dalek cost.

And I will hug him as I watch the up-coming series finale.

*Literally. By all that's holy, did you see Colin Morgan in "Midnight"? It's a singing testament to RTD's writing I even noticed /a/ plot, let alone the greatest plot in new Who. Forget Edward Cullen when there are actual people who look like that.

Breezes and Surf. But the Wrong Kind.

2008-06-18T22:47:00.002-04:00

I just found out I'm going to the Midwest for 10 days, starting next week.

Do I know anyone in Chicago besides Ross "I'm working a fecking cruise ship in the Med and the Baltic and hence unavailable till Fall" Bryant?

Pour Emily

2008-06-17T21:34:00.002-04:00

see more hipster robot webcomics and pixel t-shirts

You know, I've spent most of the past decade (or longer) thinking Rivers Cuomo is gay.

He's not -- although he does have an Asian girlfriend, so five years ago he could have been bi, since all those "bi-curious" hipster boys of a certain type have all moved on to Asian chicks. Although it is pretty generous to include Cuomo in the "hipster" category.

I'm trying to remember just what put it in my head he was gay, and for some reason I think I remember reading that in an interview in Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. But that makes no sense -- I never stopped to /read/ anything in one of those. I don't think anyone did.

All the Umbrellas of London

2008-06-17T00:30:00.004-04:00

If I make it tonight, it'll be all right.
It'll make a good song or something
I've been trying to give myself reasons to live
But I really can't think of one thing

I drive around, I walk around in circles
'Cause I've got no sense of direction
And I guess I've got no sense at all

[chorus:]
All the umbrellas in London
Couldn't stop this rain.
And all the dope in New York
Couldn't kill this pain.
And all the money in Tokyo
Couldn't make me stay.
All the umbrellas in London
Couldn't stop this rain.

I don't cry anymore, I go out the door
And I usually keep on walking
I will sit in the bar where the cocktails are
But I really don't feel like talking

I lie around and let the darkness fall
'Cause I've got a sense of perfection
And nothing makes much sense at all

I've been thinking a lot about the relationship of lyrics to music, and I've come to the conclusion that, at least, in pop music, there's something odd about them. I think most people would be hard pressed to describe -- to even think of -- lyrics in situ as poetry. But they are.

I think the upshot of this is that that fact hits home every once in a while and get you get struck by this new appreciation of a song you've heard a thousand times. This has happened to me several times recently, and did again tonight when I heard the above song. I don't really know where to go with that, but it seems odd to me that music can have such a masking quality.

(Brecht, of course, was aware of the phenomenon, and used it to his advantage, making happy, cheerful tunes out of black deeds. "Mack the Knife" is a jaunty little tunes about child rape, murder, theft, whores and burning down occupied orphanages.)

In other news, I had a dream about Billie Piper last night. Well not /about/ her but with her in. Which is oddly appropriate as her series The Secret Life of a Call Girl premieres in the US tonight.

We were in a van with several other members of my family, crossing the Rocky Mountains when the van wrecked. There was more to it, involving a kitsch 70s-style hotel, but I don't recall that in detail. I do remember thinking, "How odd to be dreaming of a Doctor Who girl instead of the Doctor himself." I've only done /that/ once, when I dreamt I was racing along in Bessie with the Third Doctor. Even if it was the Best. Dream. Ever., it was still yonks ago.

All in all, I was just pleased it wasn't a tooth dream after last night's Britain's Worst Teeth doc.

For When "Big Mouth Billy Bass" is just too classy.

2008-06-16T15:43:00.005-04:00

America Has Failed.

Don't get me wrong: I love the system of American government. It is an elegant tribute to a generation of men with wisdom, foresight and dedication to their ideals. It is a testament to even more generations that their system has grown and developed with a fervent dedication to the Enlightenment ideas of liberal democracy.

But this isn't about America as a political entity. This is about America as cultural institution. We have failed. Miserably. It's time to up stakes, wash ourselves clean and try a completely new paradigm.

Jingle Jugs: The Jugs that Jiggle to a Jingle.

This is why the rest of the world hates us: Jingle Jugs and Justin Long.

Note to self:

2008-06-16T01:13:00.002-04:00

The person who consistently dreams of his teeth falling out, and who constantly worries the chipped tooth he can't afford to have mended probably shouldn't have watched "Britain's Worst Teeth".

Big-Head Want Dolly!

2008-06-15T22:34:00.004-04:00

So, I have this irrational hatred of Justin Long. And I'm not sure why, really -- most people I hate, I know /why/. But he fills me with an inexplicable loathing. I would love to see him forced to participate in the most disturbing, degrading sex acts, of the type that women justly use to condemn the worst excesses of pornography. With John Hodgman, as payback for those damn Mac ads, even if Hodgman did include a humorous picture of the Cybermen in The Areas of My Experise, under the caption "Typical Cyborg Mischief".

Sorry. I watched Waiting this weekend and my anti-Long feelings have been percolating around.

Other than that, it's been a reasonably good birthday weekend. There were some nice touches from on high -- Tivo recorded (out of the blue, as far as I can tell) my favourite episode ever of Gilmore Girls ("Emily in Wonderland", if you're interested) and there was a question about Faulkner's Snopes trilogy on Friday's Jeopardy!

I spent Saturday night watching a little Doctor Who marathon -- this series is the best yet, by far, so I watched the three latest episodes over again. Alex King was the guest star for the recent Steven Moffat two-parter, so I was a little confused by having Charlotte Corday from ER sniffing around David Tennant. (For a little present -- the only present I got except for Laura Llew's books -- I got myself the DVD of "Timelash". "Timelash" is without question the worst episode of the series original run and should only be watched under the influence. And so I did. It helped immensely.)

The real treat was my trip over to the local Human Society. My father underwent eye surgery recently, turning me into a chauffeur. Which is nice, because I don't have a car and, consequently, don't get about much. On one trip, I took us over to see a basset hound they had at the Humane Society's huge new complex.

His name is Stetson. He doesn't look very basset-y hound-y in the pictures, but he does in real life. I was able to take him outside and play with him for a few minutes -- he was very active for a basset hound. Meaning, you know, he was actually in motion for a few moments. Like most bassets, he didn't particularly care whom he was with, as long as he could smell things, so he wasn't very interested in me.

Typical.

2008-06-12T15:44:00.004-04:00

The day before my birthday is the end of the world.

My close associate, Noes the Apocalypse Kitteh, and I have decided to start drinking heavily at 5 pm and not stop till the end of the world, just in case.

Nobody Writes Them Like They Used To, So It May As Well Be Me

2008-06-12T01:15:00.004-04:00

I should mention that I finished the first draft of my play last night. I should be far more excited about it than I am, considering how long and how hard I've worked on it, but it's almost exactly as long as it should be (110 A4 pages) and actually hits the mark I wanted to set for it -- beginning with normal dialogue and slowly changing into the iambic pentameter of the source.

There aren't any songs (except one) beyond the first act, but I have a fair idea of what songs I want and where they need to go. It needs lots of work, but it's off to exactly the sort of start I wanted.

I need to get people to read it. I'm not ready to post all of it here, but I did want to post some pictures. They're snagged from all over the internet, and I used them -- provisionally as scene backgrounds. They're in no real order.

Clockwise, from top left: The Dungeon where Daniel is executed; castle interior 1; the forest where Michael is killed; the meeting-place of the barons.

I have a few more I might post.

Today's Episode in One Act.

2008-06-12T01:07:00.002-04:00

No. 4 in my list of possible birthday presents: Ira Glass.

Ira is the host of NPR's This American Life with the velvety-smooth voice. That alone is a selling-point; the fact that he's reasonably hot is secondary.

Actually, his response from his show getting named-checked on The OC -- I believe the quote went something like "Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? -- is more than enough to swoon over.

Best. Doctor Who. Companion. Ever.

2008-06-11T00:42:00.003-04:00

No. 3 in my list of possible birthday presents: Philip Olivier.

Since the last two pictures haven't been that exciting, I figured a little beefcake never goes awry.

Olivier was on Brookside and Bo Selecta. He also starred in several of Big Finish's Doctor Who audio plays, though it seems to me that most of his obvious talent didn't get used.

In the productions, anyway.

And if they weren't used at all, then the people of Big Finish have a lot to answer for to the rest of Doctor Who fans who boldly live up to 90s stereotypes.

As an aside, there are very, very few people out there who inspire in me the same pillow-biting, immediate lust to get...

[cut scene of Roger Moore waving]

... uh, busy as Phil does.