By the Rivers of Babylon

Vibration

2011-12-29T18:41:00.002-06:00

"Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fulness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors' shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in a back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor which led to words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound." (Mrs. Dalloway)

A Narcissistic Hermeneutic

2011-12-13T13:58:00.000-06:00

Lists, right. Stacking things up and ordering them, slotting them into hierarchies of... what, exactly? It's certainly not a list of objectively great games. There are, objectively, better games in 2011 than Catherine. Skyrim obviously. But I still like Catherine better than Skyrim, if for no other reason than that it is out-of-its-mind bonkers and, at least in the North American market, absolutely unique. And Shadows of the Damned. Oh, gosh... Shadows of the Damned. I love that game the same way I love Bayonetta--guiltily. So I could have easily placed it on this list. But it's not a great game--not like Gears of War 3, with its polish and razor-fine production, each system operating in perfect harmony with the others, is a great game. But Gears of War 3 isn't on this list because I don't like it as much as I like these games. There are probably several rubrics out there for measuring a game's achievement, importance, or greatness, rubrics against which games can be evaluated and then fitted into a scheme, but the only one I've learned to care about (and the same goes for movies and television and books) is whether I like it. It's a narcissistic hermeneutic, I admit. But I don't care what the Metacritic score for Modern Warfare 3 is. I'd rather frantically push blocks around to form a path so I can escape from the gigantic demon-version of the girlfriend I cheated on (long story), or die over and over again banging my head against a boss until I figure out how to take him down, or neurotically scour every corner of a crime scene for that last little clue that will let me nail the son of a bitch to a wall. So, lists. Here's mine. Click images for trailers.

Occupy Skimpole!

2011-12-13T12:22:00.001-06:00

"Why," he slowly replied, roughening his head more and more, "he is all sentiment, and--and susceptibility, and--and sensibility--and--and imagination. And those qualities are not regulated in him somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for them in his youth, attached too much importance to them, and too little to any training that would have balanced and adjusted them; and so he became what he is."

"Live, and let live, we say to them. Live upon your practical wisdom, and let us live upon you!" (Bleak House)

Diffusive

2011-08-12T20:39:00.000-06:00

"Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." -- (Middlemarch, last paragraph)

Coarse Pattern

2011-06-18T19:31:00.001-06:00

Himmler and his daughter, Gudrun

This is the kind of photograph I can look at for hours. And after those hours I am no closer to comprehending the image than when I started. It's the proximity of contraries that troubles--the fact that a young girl sits on the knee of a man who helped redefine humanity's capacity for evil. And that she loves him. And that he loves her. It disturbs. Fate hangs heavy in this photograph. Was she always doomed to receive her father's coarse pattern and have traced upon her soul, "practically blank as snow as yet," the legacy of his evil?

Wounds

2011-06-07T19:18:00.003-06:00

He had left the theatre after the first kill. She had said she wanted to stay and see the rest. Something dark, something that lies hidden in most of us, had been activated in her, and she said she needed to see it to the end. It was important that she did. He had looked at her, more sad than upset, and said okay, but he wasn’t staying. He’d seen enough and knew where it was going and he didn’t want to see it. She nodded distractedly, eyes fixed on the screen. He had waited looking at her. She had turned and looked at him and then turned back to the screen quickly. Her eyes were big, taking in much. He said he’d be waiting outside. She nodded and he left. He wasn’t alone. Several others had got up and left with him, as if emboldened by his act to say they too had had enough and didn’t desire to go where the film was taking them.

He stepped outside the theatre and lit a cigarette. He had seen his share of horror and knew enough about himself to feel himself balancing along the edge of something deep, something he had fallen into before and didn’t want to fall into again. He thought of some of the things he had seen, some of the things he had wished he hadn’t seen but that he had sought out anyway while in that trance that lasts only until the thing is done. What was it, he wondered, that called to them through these images? Because it certainly was calling.

It was late and dark outside. It was a midnight screening. There were not many people out. The few that were moved quickly and with apparent purpose, as if wanting to get where they were going as fast as possible. Several other people were standing outside a bar down the street. They weren’t going anywhere quickly. He heard them laughing and it seemed genuine and he wanted to go over to them and join them. A few more people came out of the theatre, their eyes tightened aggressively. One of them was apologizing.

He kept hoping she would be among the fed-up but she wasn't. His leaving had probably only provoked her to endure what he thought she shouldn’t see. Down the street the people went back into the bar and he was left alone. He would wait. If she decided to come out he wanted to be here, waiting.

They had read about the film on the internet. It was generating quite a bit of controversy and people were talking about it. Some were calling it brave, important, a searing allegory of contemporary society and its need to consume. Others called it trash, exploitation, not so much a flirting with but an actual courting of evil and a celebration of violence, humiliation, and degradation. On both sides, the same things that were always said were repeated. Things about censorship and freedom of expression; things about deterioration of morals and slippery slopes. Both sides sounded trite and tired to him and nothing anyone actually said comprehended the wounds such things could inflict. He didn't want such things banned. But he did wish they didn't exist.

She had convinced him they should see it. They were both students of literature, and both of them thought they should be committed to ideas of metaphor and transgression. He remembered she had said something about social justice but he couldn't remember why she had said it or how it could possibly apply. Someone had to say these things, had to shout these things to a dulled audience. It was important. The blood of it all was just a vehicle for the message. That’s what she told him and tried to tell herself. He had agreed, partly not to disagree with her but also because something inside him was tugging him towards it as well.

But he should have known better. He had absorbed much of what horror as a genre could give to him. Most of it was nonsense, the ephemeral visions of violence that momentarily flash brightly over the eyes—attempts to provoke a primal reaction for a fleeting, almost narcotic experience of detached abstract feeling; a transgressive jolt of electricity pumped into an audience comfortably living without a day-to-day taste of real violence. To those who live without the constant threat of death or rape, both can be aesthetically pleasing exercises. Most of what he had seen had washed over him without leaving much of a trace, emotional or psychic. But then there were the other sorts of films, the kind that try to hurt you. Some of the images, some of the things he had seen, had scorched deep into him and become a part of him the same way a wound is a part of the body.

He lit another cigarette. She hadn’t come out yet.

He should have known better, should have warned her about what being hurt like this would mean and how these images linger. He liked to think he had learned a few things already. But she had wanted to see it, had sought it out, and he, having sought it out himself in the past, felt he couldn’t say anything, even as the worst of the things he’d seen played again in front of his eyes.

He was a student of literature, like her. The movement from innocence to experience is one of those themes that recurs, he knew this. He had come to think that this movement could be forced without any actual event but vicariously, by witnessing it, even by witnessing it only at second-hand, or through the fictional visions of others.

He thought of all the things he had seen and tried to remember something beautiful. But he was worried about her and suddenly all he could remember where horrible things, things that she might be seeing right now. He wanted to go in and get her, at least sit with her, but he didn't.

In the abstract, he wasn’t opposed to horrible, violent images. They served a purpose; or, at least they could serve a purpose when they are harnessed to some sort of moral vision; or, lacking that, when they were at least presented as wrong. The world could be a genuinely horrible place. For people around the world this was true. Lives and bodies were consumed daily to gratify the appetites of those for whom people were not people, but things to be played with, chewed up, consumed and discarded. He remembered reading a news story about a dictator that kept a house of virgins he had taken who he would rape and then murder. People should be reminded about this because often they forget the cruelty humans are capable of. And stories, he thought, and especially images, are strong ways of reminding people. He tried to think of an example of this moral horror. But all he could think of was how in the most extreme cases, such as what she was watching now, death transcended whatever message that had provided the pretence, which now lay soaked underneath the blood. Nihilism would be one thing. But the lurid gaze transfixed by blood does not believe in nothing; it believes in blood.

Maybe it was different in books where you didn’t actually have to see it, where terrible images remain blurry in the imagination and so can be more readily arrested by more intellectual concerns. But he knew that books could wound, too.

The film was over and people were coming out of the theatre. Most of them were silent. Some were joking and laughing too loudly. The silent ones left quickly. He recognized two people from the university, a professor and a student. They were discussing the film’s political metaphor. The professor was excitedly elaborating his ideas of rape and murder as social metaphor.

“Society both celebrates and condemns sex, see, glorifying it at the same time as it condemns those that dare to enjoy it, a vicious, nasty practice that kills what it loves. Humans are often fundamentally ambivalent about these things. And did you notice the way she stopped screaming after the first couple of minutes? Or rather, how her screams of pain becomes screams of pleasure? That’s important, see. At some point, she gave in to the pleasure of it despite what society says of such things, enjoying a rape, see, indulging the natural impulses that society had forced her to sublimate, that’s important. But at the very moment that she gave herself over to the natural drive and came, see—it’s important that she had an orgasm, you see that?—at that very moment, he begins to stab her over and over again, a penetration that punishes her enjoyment of the other penetration. She had been made a sexual object. But at the moment when she refused to accept objectification for another’s pleasure and chose to enjoy the experience for herself, he again objectifies her, this time in a literal sense, making her a corpse. But she’s still coming as she bleeds, as if refusing to accept his punishment. Even when she's finally dead she still has an expression of bliss on her face. It’s rather beautiful, see, when you think of it. It’s a refusal to be what society tried to make her be. And, of course, it must all end in death, because that’s what society does, it kills.”

The student was nodding, but perhaps too vigorously, as if she wasn’t convinced but wanted to appear more sophisticated about these things than she felt at the moment. She was trying to fit together the things he was saying with the images she had seen. But the allegory of it all wasn’t what she remembered. She remembered individual shots, the way the camera lingered too long, the twists of pain and terror that spiral through the soul. She remembered the humiliation. Her face was white and there was a nervousness about her eyes. He caught her eye and she recognized him but didn't acknowledge him. The professor hailed a cab and they got into it together, the professor still talking about how beautiful it was. Every time I see it, he was saying, I’m more and more convinced that it’s important.

He watched them drive away and felt depressed.

Finally she came out. She was one of the last and he knew she had sat through the credits as those around her had left until finally she was alone. She looked smaller now but maybe that was only his imagination. She came up to him and didn’t say anything. He asked her how she was and she shrugged. She stood in front of him not saying anything and looking at his shoes. Finally he put his arms around her and she leaned into him and started to cry softly, just small little tears, nothing excessive or sharp. Then she was quiet and he kissed the top of her head, saying that he was sorry. She had received the wound she’d wanted, and it had hurt more than she thought it would.

He took her hand and they walked silently to the car and drove home.

I have a long history with horror films, much of which I have enjoyed. There are, however, things I wish I had never seen but that can't be scrubbed out of my mind. There are things that I refuse to see but that, nevertheless, still activate an impulse inside me that desires to see them.

Dimensions

2011-06-04T13:49:00.001-06:00

Noon in the Hayfield, detail (1897) by Sir George Clausen

"Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life--a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic First Cause--her all; her every and only chance."

Syntax

2011-04-04T13:46:00.000-06:00

"But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!" - Vanity Fair

Saint Agnes

2011-03-12T02:13:00.000-06:00

Agnes was the daughter of a Roman noble. She was very beautiful. Many men lusted after her. But she was pure. Though her parents were not Christians, her nurse, a family slave, was, and it was through this slave--through this shimmering sliver of a Providential design plotted through the motions of an uncaring empire that bought and traded in human lives, through this more-than-mother who loved her dearly despite being the daughter of her masters--that Agnes learned of Jesus and the Gospel and became a Christian. She dedicated her life, her blood, her virginity to Christ. But Phocus, the son of the Roman prefect Sempronius, fell in love with her. He offered her riches; he tried to seduce her. She refused them, refused him. She told him that she already have a Lover, and that this Lover was a better, more powerful, and more rich Lover than he could ever be. Rejected, and enraged, Phocus left. Lust consumed him. He could think of nothing else. But when he discovered that she was a Christian, he was elated and thought he'd found a way to possess her. Diocletian was emperor at the time, and he had ordered the persecution and execution of Christians. Christian blood flowed through the empire, choking the ground, crying out to Heaven. Phocus, assuming she would much rather give herself to him than face an empire's wrath, denounced Agnes as a Christian to his father, and she was brought before him to answer the charge. She freely professed her faith. Sempronius then gave her the ultimatum: make sacrifices in a Roman temple or be executed. She was steady; she did not hesitate. She chose execution. She would rather bow her head to an executioner's sword than to a pagan god. She was condemned. But a Roman law stood in the way, apparently. Virgins could not be executed. It was considered inhumane. Sempronius therefore, in deference to the law, ordered her stripped naked and dragged through the streets to a brothel, where she could be raped in preparation for her execution. It would not be right, after all, to execute an innocent, and so such would be this empire's tender observations of decency. This happened. This is a thing that happens in this world. But it did not happen as Sempronius imagined. As she was being dragged naked through the street, her hair miraculously grew and provided a natural covering and protection for the virgin from the eyes of all those who watched. And there were many who watched. She was thrown into the brothel. An angel appeared and gave Agnes a garment to cover herself. God does not abandon His beloved; the shape of His comforts and tokens of His love, however, are not often recognized in this world. Because this world means something else to Him than it does to us. And so though He may not spare us the trials we must face, His grace is the sort that allows us to face those trials with dignity, knowing that a loving bridegroom stands ready to embrace us at their end. Grateful, she wrapped herself tight, terrified but steadfast in her faith. Men lined up to rape her. Word spreads quickly, especially when youth and beauty are being offered up, and there is never a shortage of people willing to do this, not then and not now. But when they were admitted into the brothel and saw her... well, accounts vary. Some say that any man who looked at her was immediately struck blind; others say that they simply looked at her and did not dare to touch her, so beautiful, so pure, and so young as she was.

She was very young, after all. She was only twelve years old. Entire empires die for things like this. Worlds will burn for things like this.

The men began to flee the brothel. Phocus, who was outside, mocked them, ridiculed them for their weakness, for not being able to rape a small, defenseless child of twelve. See, it was not enough for him that she be violated before being executed; he did not simply want to find a way to overcome a bothersome law; he desired that all the filth of a dying empire penetrate every part of her and erase her intolerable purity. Having once loved her--loved her, that is, in the vulgar, contracted, animal way which was all a mind like his was capable of--and having been once rejected by her, that love turned, and he now desired that no such thing as her exist. So he himself entered the brothel. He would rape away that purity; he himself would smear his stain onto her innocence. He pushed through the crowds of fleeing men and entered the chamber where she was kept and when he saw her he was struck immediately dead. Just like that. But Agnes, though she had no worldly reason to, prayed for him and he revived. I imagine he must have been terrified. I imagine he could not look at her. Sempronius could, however, and he immediately accused her of witchcraft and decided they should dispense with the prohibition on executing virgins. Though Phocus now pleaded with his father to spare her life (perhaps because he, like Pilate's wife, now knew that something awful was happening), she was nevertheless tied to a stake to be burned alive. And here again accounts vary. Some say the wood would not burn no matter how hard they tried to light it; others that it did burn but that the flames refused to touch her, that they actually bent away from her as if the very elements of this world recognized and reverenced her purity, so that she stood--inviolate and inconsumable--within a crown of flames. Sempronius was enraged; Phocus, again I imagine at least, must have fled and spent the rest of his life contemplating the meaning of what he had witnessed. But maybe he did not do this. Maybe he remained insensible, the terror of his encounter with the Divinity through the intercessions of that Divinity's beloved bride gradually fading until it was only an uncomfortable memory, a shining possibility of redemption now reduced to a cancer in his soul. But I do not know what happened to him; I can only imagine. But at the scene of the burning, the living Agnes, the young girl, the betrothed of a Great Lover, would not die; her flesh that man could not touch was not touched either by flame. Eventually, as Sempronius's rage, and probably his terror, increased, and as the mobs that had gathered to cheer on and witness the utter destruction of a young girl gradually began to understand that something terrible, something awful, something holy and beyond their comprehension was happening, and as their long-dead and now too-late pity finally turned towards the innocent girl, the Roman officer in charge, probably fearing that Sempronius's rage would fall on him, drew his sword and cut off her head. And so Agnes died. A child of twelve was martyred for her faith--a faith that could not be staggered, could not be humiliated, could not be unsteadied, and above all could not be touched. And from this dark world and into the arms of her Great Lover she soared.

At her trial Agnes said "To Him I have given my faith; to Him I have commanded my heart. When I love Him then am I chaste, and when I touch him then am I pure and clean, and when I take Him then am I a virgin. This is the love of my God."

127 Hours

2011-03-09T23:46:00.001-06:00

Gotta say: it's contending with Alice Creed right now. Bless him, Danny Boyle does not disappoint. For him, the human suffers, often in extreme and grueling circumstances, often to the point of despair... but ultimately survives, endures, hopes. While not as visceral, or quite as devastating-slash-triumphant, as the remarkable Slumdog Millionaire (a movie that returned Boyle to the kinetic, bursting-at-the-seams, lusting-after-life energy he'd harnessed in Trainspotting), 127 Hours continues the aesthetic and thematic direction set in that movie: one motivated by hope, spun through with life, and held together by an abiding conviction that the "human spirit," ambiguous a term as that may be, or clichéd as it has been by more cynical artists, has the capacity to overcome and burst its way upwards towards redemption.

Trailer. IMDb.

Alice Creed

2011-02-05T22:58:00.001-06:00

The ridiculous "grippingly twisty thriller" quote on this poster notwithstanding, this is my favourite movie of 2010 (unless I'm allowed to count the North American releases of either The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the Red Riding trilogy). The less you know about Alice Creed going into it, the better the movie plays. In fact, don't even watch the trailer. Watch this movie cold.

Compact

2011-02-05T22:27:00.000-06:00

"And indeed, my dear, I know not how to forbear writing. I have now no other employment or diversion. And I must write on, although I were not to send it to anybody. You have often heard me own the advantages I have found from writing down everything of moment that befalls me; and of all I think, and of all I do, that may be of future use to me; for besides that this helps to form one to a style, and opens and expands the ductile mind, every one will find that many a good thought evaporates in thinking; many a good resolution goes off, driven out of memory perhaps by some other not so good. But when I set down what I will do, or what I have done, on this or that occasion, the resolution or action is before me either to be adhered to, withdrawn, or amended; and I have entered into compact with myself, as I may say; having given it under my own hand to improve, rather than to go backward, as I live longer." -- Clarissa

Walkabout

2010-12-06T13:06:00.000-06:00

The centerpiece scene in this film, the scene which this somewhat horrible and sensationalist poster references--a scene of a white teenage girl lost in the Australian outback swimming in a rock pool while her younger brother and their befriended aborigine explore and hunt---is perhaps one of the best erotic scenes I have ever not been aroused by. It is a beautiful scene, but not a sexy scene, and that is its triumph. It's flesh, but it is flesh as life not flesh as object; it is flesh as subject in nature, as subject of nature, as a thing unto itself--warm, vital, nascent, and feather-like fragile. Nicolas Roeg finds the balance that so many lesser directors, fumbling to portray innocence from their own so-experienced position, often trip over. The scene is about innocence and sexual naivety awakening to, and glorying in, its own sensuality while still being childishly ignorant of the darker impulses, impulses both from within and from without, that can overcome it and that will, as the film unfolds towards its end, threaten it. But here, now in this scene, there is no hint of shadow. Here there is no outside other. Here are memories of Eden. There is display in the girl's action. She vibrates with sensual energy. But it is an unwitnessed, un-ritual display, a self-display; she swims naked for herself. Here is lightness and water and a camera that, aware of how precarious an edge this moment hangs on, does not gaze but that humbly witnesses. For us watching her swim there is perhaps some voyeurism, but it is voyeurism couched in time and memory--and while we look at the girl, the girl becomes us.

IMDb. Trailer. Criterion.

In Elevated Strains but Broken Accents

2010-12-01T22:01:00.000-06:00

"She was tolerably recovered by the time I came; and the doctor made her promise before me, that, while she was so weak, she would not attempt any more to go abroad; for, by Mrs. Lovick's description, who attended her, the shortness of her breath, the extreme weakness, and the fervour of her devotions when at church, were contraries which, pulling different ways (the soul aspiring, the body sinking), tore her tender frame in pieces." -- Clarissa

The Red Shoes

2010-11-23T19:47:00.000-06:00

Simply stunning. The quintessential backstage drama, as Criterion appropriately describes it. This film is magic. There has perhaps never been a better movie about the so-called "life of the artist." I put this disc in a few nights after watching Black Narcissus for the first time and was hardly prepared for how much I would love it. It's exquisite. It's haunting. It's beautiful. It's lodged tightly in my brain.

IMDb. Trailer. Criterion.

Insensibility

2010-11-23T19:25:00.000-06:00

"I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde." -- G. K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy

Abysses

2010-09-11T13:56:00.000-06:00

"... we are of a broad, Karamazovian nature--and this is what I am driving at--capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, an abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, an abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation." - The Brothers Karamazov

The Misses Vickers

2010-08-30T14:46:00.000-06:00

The Misses Vickers (1884) by John Singer Sargent

La Miseria

2010-08-30T14:41:00.000-06:00

La Miseria (1886) by Cristobal Rojas

Anna Karenina (excerpts)

2010-08-24T18:38:00.000-06:00

I wish I could write like this...

'Please don't be frightened! It's nothing. I'm not a bit afraid,' she said on seeing his alarmed face, and she pressed his hand to her breast and then to her lips.

He jumped up hastily, hardly aware of himself and without taking his eyes of her put on his dressing-gown and stood still, gazing at her. It was necessary for him to go, but he could not tear himself away from the sight of her. He had loved that face and known all its expressions and looks, but he had never seen her as she was now. How vile and despicable he appeared to himself before her as she now was, when he recollected the grief he had caused her yesterday! Her flushed face surrounded with soft hair that had escaped from beneath her night-cap shone with joy and resolution.

Little as there was of affectation and conventionality in Kitty's general character, yet Levin was astonished at what was revealed to him now that every veil had fallen and the very kernel of her soul shone through her eyes. And in this simplicity, this nakedness of soul, she whom he loved was more apparent than ever. She looked at him smilingly, but suddenly her eyebrows twitched, she raised her head, and coming quickly to him she took hold of his hand and clinging close she enveloped him in her hot breath. She was suffering, and seemed to be complaining to him of her pain. And for a moment from force of habit he felt as if he were in fault. But her look expressed a tenderness which told him that she not only did not blame him, but loved him because of those sufferings. 'If I am not to blame for it, who is?' he thought, involuntarily seeking a culprit to punish for these sufferings; but there was no culprit. She suffered, complained, triumphed in her sufferings, rejoiced in them and loved them. He saw that something beautiful was taking place in her soul, but what it was he could not understand. It was above his comprehension.

*****

He only knew and felt that what was happening was similar to what had happened the year before in the hotel of the provincial town on the deathbed of his brother Nicholas. Only that was sorrow and this was joy. But that sorrow and this joy were equally beyond the usual conditions of life: they were like openings in that usual life through which something higher became visible. And, as in that case, what was now being accomplished came harshly, painfully, incomprehensibly; and while watching it, the soul soared, as then, to heights it had never before known, at which reason could not keep up with it.

*****

And suddenly, out of the mysterious, terrible, and unearthly world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself instantaneously transported back to the old everyday world, but now radiant with the light of such new joy that it was insupportable. The taut strings snapped, and sobs and tears of joy that he had not in the least anticipated arose within him, with such force that they shook his whole body and long prevented his speaking.

Falling on his knees by her bedside he held his wife's hand to his lips, kissing it, and that hand, by a feeble movement of the fingers, replied to his kisses. And meanwhile at the foot of the bed, like a flame above a lamp, flickered in Mary Vlasevna's skilful hands the life of a human being who had never before existed: a human being who, with the same right and the same importance to himself, would live and would procreate others like himself.

*****

Before that, if Levin had been told that Kitty was dead, and that he had died with her, that they had angel children, and that God was there present with them--he would not have been astonished.

Zao

2010-08-11T23:15:00.000-06:00

I recently discovered--somewhat to my amazement (though why I should be amazed is slightly mysterious now that I think about it: I've all but ignored entire scene for several years)--that I band I really liked, and I mean really liked, a long time ago, was still around. They had disbanded just about the time I lost interest in the entire Solid State scream-o, grind-core, metal, whatever it's-just-loud genre. The band was called Zao. I mean, well... it's still called Zao, I guess. But it's not Zao, you know? No. Whatever. Turns out they pulled themselves back together when I wasn't looking. (Coincidentally, Living Sacrifice is still a thing, too. Christian metal's still a thing. Huh. Ever notice that, that when you lose interest in something it seems absurd, almost ridiculous, that it keeps going without you? I mean, what's the point? I'm not interested anymore, and that's the main thing. Right...? Where was I?) So Zao's still a thing. They were epic. Man, they were great. I mean, you couldn't be into Christian metal around the turn of the century and not know them. They defined early Christian metalcore. Their influence was enormous. They, along with the aforementioned (and also still around) Living Sacrifice, basically played godfather to a genre, spawning an embarrassing legion of less-than-impressive but no-doubt well-meaning sound-alikes. But I guess that's not their fault. They were just great, and everybody wanted to be like them. But those wannabe bands are what eventually killed the scene for me. It all sounded the same, and second rate. Zao and Living Sacrifice had already done it, so why bother with the rest? Plus, well... I grew up, evolved, possibly mutated, and a band's loudness no longer was what compelled me. I started listening to all sorts of bizarre things. Bizarre, that is, for me; normal for everyone else. I started listening, for instance, to Jars of Clay. Jars of Clay?! Growing up is odd. But, to be all literary and stuff, the past in never dead; it isn't even past. A while ago, even though I for the most part get irritated by the sound of it now, I (feeling some strange vibration run along a long abandoned, but once affectionately played, power-chord in my heart) loaded up some old Christian metal albums onto iTunes, an exercise in which Zao featured prominently. Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest brought chills; Liberate to ex Inferis still terrified me. But there was also a strange sense of disassociation, like looking at old photos. It's me, but it's not me now, and you get that distinct feeling you are no longer who you were and who you were actually makes you frown or blush. But autobiography aside, their music, even after years of neglect, still produced the distinct throb and tension in my chest, the desire to just scream until your throat bleeds. It was an epoch, I realize. It was a chapter. It was a time in my life that I value but that I'm glad is gone. I'm rambling. Zao. Still a thing. So poking around in the iTunes store, following up links and recommendations (I can't remember the specific trail that brought me to it, but surely it was something arcane and possibly occult, a digital incantation that resurrected a long dead-to-me band), I suddenly saw that "Listeners Also Bought" Zao. Zao? Zao! That's still a thing? Not only is it a thing, it's a thing with three albums I didn't know about. 30 bucks later, I prepared to enter the past. The past, it turns out, is smaller than it looks. What was enormous before casts a much smaller shadow now, as if the sun had risen higher (which I suppose, if I were to push this particular aging metaphor further, means that the shadow will get larger again as I grow even older and the sun sets... and that's... wow, that's almost terrifying. I can almost imagine pulling out some of these CDs or MP3s from a dusty box and playing them for my kids. Yes, MP3s in a box. Where do you keep yours? But to return...). I guess what really disappointed me is how almost exactly the same the new Zao sounds, as if no time has passed. But time has passed. A lifetime has passed. Possibly several lifetimes. Or at least that's how it seems, if you measure a lifetime by how much you've changed. I'm a completely different person now: different politics, different aesthetic, new priorities, bald. An entire metamorphosis. How is it possible some things stood still while I moved forward? It just seems odd. But wait, no, that's not quite true. What I said about them sounding the same, I mean. It's not quite true. They don't sound the same. They sound younger. Or maybe I listen older. Reading the lyrics, listening to Daniel Weyandt scream and grind and gurgle about how shallow Americans are, how difficult life is, about the struggle and injustice of it all, I wondered, were they always this angry and immature? Surely not. Surely, surely not. Because, if they were... that would have awkward implications for myself. Because I really liked them, thought they were intelligent and important and stuff. And they were. Important, I mean. To me. To the me of then, the different me that I sort of recognize now.

What is all this? I don't know. It's odd, that's what it is. It's self-indulgence, I know, and I'm sorry. I don't really have much to say about Zao, I guess. I liked Zao, but I liked them better in the past than in the now.

Limbo

2010-07-24T00:34:00.001-06:00

This game is wonderful. It only takes three to four hours to beat (you know... depending on how clever you are when it comes to physics-based puzzle solving) but those three to fours hours are very satisfying. Like Portal and Braid, Limbo demonstrates that some of the most innovative and intriguing game development is happening in small studios and on small projects.

Thomas Hardy's Wessex

2010-07-19T12:11:00.001-06:00

"In these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old; his old time are still new; his present is futurity." - Far from the Madding Crowd

Cor

2010-07-17T15:13:00.002-06:00

"Except the Lord of heaven create new hearts in us, of our selves, we have Cor nullum, no heart; all vanished into Incogitancy. Except the Lord of heaven con-centre our affections, of our selves, we have Cor & Cor, a cloven heart, a divided heart, a heart of Irresolution. Except the Lord of heaven fix our Resolutions, of our selves, we have Cor vagum, a various, a wandering heart; all smoaks and Inconstancie. And all these three are Enemies to that firmness, and fixation of the heart, which God loves, and we seek after."

- John Donne

Part-time this summer, I've been helping to edit and prepare the texts of a number of John Donne's sermons for digital editions. It's been a very interesting and enjoyable task. I've scanned 400 year-old books, edited the scanned images, run the images through OCR (optical character recognition), edited the transcriptions, and turned them into XML documents for web distribution. I've acquired a number of skills I wouldn't have otherwise developed. And, of course, I've had the opportunity to read Donne's sermons. The summer has been good.

The Scarlet Letter (excerpt)

2010-07-16T15:45:00.000-06:00

Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, 1926.

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and unkindly-visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious school-boys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a hold-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to start into her face, and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length; for, haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and come to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the marketplace. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathanial Hawthorne

The Wings of the Dove (excerpts)

2010-07-14T12:32:00.000-06:00

Girl in White Resting on a Sofa, by Alfred-Emile-Leopole Stevens

There was something deep within him that he had absolutely shown to no one--to the companion of these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew--what Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it; in spite of which it was as if his act, so deeply associated with her and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of that menace: to the degree that she saw at moments, as to their final impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn't undo.

*****

He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus a little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, with her head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own person might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the objects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some such consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the day of Kate's mounting of his stairs, almost swingingly rapid. They contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait, actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly, to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted, something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but a thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person he might have shared it with. He kept if back like a favourite pang; left if behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. But so it was before him--in his dread of who else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly's letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know; only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge given not to save it--into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it--doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn't complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.

The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

Epoch

2010-07-12T14:10:00.003-06:00

I used to review movies here. The reason was simple. For years, for almost as long as I can remember, I had been committed to the idea that films are art, that actors are artists, that directors had something important to say and that whatever it was they were saying was worth listening to, or at the very least worth analyzing. From Cronenberg to Kurosawa, from torture porn to historical drama--from sci-fi to horror to romantic comedy to nearly everything I could get my hands on--I watched it all. I was large in film. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the wonder, the amusement, the excitement, the arousal. I took it as a whole, as one amalgam, one attempt to trace the boundaries and fill in the gaps of the human condition. And all the while, I brought what I hoped was a dedicated critical eye. I didn't submit to film; I submitted film to judgment. My dedication to film grew from the same root as my dedication to literature: a desire to understand, and to sympathize with, the human.

I haven't reviewed a film here in almost a year. The reason was, again, or at least at the time, quite simple. I was busy. I had begun my graduate studies, see. Suddenly I didn't have as much time for old hobbies as I would have liked. I suppose that, like I did with other interests, I could have made time, rescued time, snatched time for movies. I didn't. I didn't even try. I didn't because what I'd discovered was a gradual departure, a sort of out-growing, that has made a new epoch in my life. There is a rift--and a rift that at this time I see no chance, or even desire, of bridging or repairing--between what I want from art and imaginative creation and what Hollywood, as a mythic whole, as an institution, as a collection of individuals artist working together, can offer.

As film gradually began to occupy less imaginative space for me, several developments within Hollywood itself enlarged the rift, made it more pronounced, made it a chasm. It was at first only an imaginative rift: I simply wasn't interested, either on an intellectual or entertainment level, with what was being released this last year. Never before had I been so disinterested in film. From Avatar to The Hurt Locker and even A Simple Man... I simply didn't care. It all looked boring. It all looked contrived and manipulative. I had better things to do. But then it wasn't just an imaginative rift that separated me from film. It was a moral and spiritual rift. When in horror I sat and read the list of names of Hollywood elites, filmmakers I'd dedicated time and mental space to, who had signed a petition to release Roman Polanski and absolve and forgive him for the the 1977 drugging, rape, and sodomy of a 13-year old girl--names such as Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Wes Anderson; when I realized that people whose art I'd admired pretended to think their art and their status entitled them to a few liberties such as the occasional bit of forced anal sex with a minor; when I heard people like Whoopi Goldberg attempt to defend Polanski and say it wasn't "rape-rape" because, c'mon, the 13-year old drugged girl was just asking for it, and besides, Hollywood is "a different kind of society" that "sees things differently"; when I read, and realized, and heard all this, everything changed. Hollywood revealed itself. Perhaps not in a new light; perhaps it had always been like that, embracing a double standard and indulging in the worst forms of amoral transgression; but it was a a new light to me. Or maybe it was a light I simply didn't want to see it in or could until now ignore.

Today, Swiss authorities, who had been holding Polanski under house arrest until he could be extradited to the US, decided not to extradite and to release him. He's now free to do whatever he wants. Hollywood is quietly celebrating. And I'm done.

I'd always dismissed comparisons between Hollywood and Babylon, or things like that, as alarmist, if not ridiculous. I don't know now if Hollywood actually is Babylon. Perhaps it is. That seems likely. Who else but Babylon could give a standing ovation to an unrepentant child rapist? Whatever Hollywood is, however, I've turned away from it. I've turned my back on film. It will never be for me what it once was. It's not as if I'll never watch a movie again. That would be an absurd thing to say. But I'm now much more aware of the disconnect and the deeply distressing hypocrisy that separates what a film seems to be about and what a director or actor thinks and says. It may be helpful to trust the story and not the teller. Actually, it would be really helpful right now. I wish I knew nothing of the personal lives and opinions of the men and women who have produced so many of the films that I have loved. But I do know these things. I know them because Hollywood hasn't even tried to hide them, has been proud of them, proud of their moral deficiencies. Super-producer Harvey Weinstein defended Polanski and said that “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.” Its compassion, however, lies with the rapist and not the raped. And when the difference between the story and the teller is that enormous, it annihilates, at least as far as I'm concerned, the value of the story.

The strange thing is how easy film is to walk away from. I'm not distressed by this. This isn't a Lenten act of self-denial. My waning interest in what film can offer, combined with a new and ugly insight into the heart and mind of Hollywood, has made this an easy break, has made Hollywood a dead thing to me. It has simply ceased to hold any imaginative grasp on my mind.

That's okay. I have better things to do.

Daniel Deronda (excerpt)

2010-07-07T14:42:00.001-06:00

Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant? -- in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh vigour making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely: when women on the other side of the world would not mourn for the husbands and sons who died bravely in a common cause, and men stinted of bread on our side of the world heard of that willing loss and were patient: a time when the soul of man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been beating in him unheard, until their full sum made a new life of terror or of joy.

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection.

Saint Cecilia

2010-07-07T14:35:00.000-06:00

Sainte Cécile, by Adolphe Lalyre.

Cecilia was the daughter of a senator, and a Christian. She was married by her family to Valerianus, a virtuous pagan. On her wedding night, however, she told him that she was betrothed to an angel who would guard her body and virginity. Her husband, probably frustrated by this, because Cecilia was very beautiful, and also probably wondering whether Cecilia was entirely sound or not, reasonably asked to see the angel. Cecilia told him to go to a certain street, and he obeyed. There he met the Bishop Urbanus, who converted and baptized him. Maybe Valerianus hoped this would satisfy the angel and he'd be able to sleep with his wife. However, he returned to Cecilia and an angel, perhaps Cecilia's betrothed (but perhaps not), appeared to them and crowned them with roses and lilies. Valerianus never slept with her. Cecilia remained a virgin. Instead, Valerianus and his brother, who was also converted and baptized, dedicated themselves to Christian service, supporting the poor and burying martyrs. This of course attracted the wrong attention, and Valerianus and his brother were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. However, and this must have infuriated their persecutors, they converted their executioner, who instead of killing them decided to die with them. The three of them were martyred together, and Cecilia buried all three in a single grave. With her husband and brother-in-law dead, Rome came after the virgin herself. She was arrested. She made a glorious confession of her faith. She was sentenced to death. She was to be suffocated by steam in her own bathroom. But though they super-heated the room beyond what is humanly endurable, she was not hurt. She did not die. She sang. Terrified and enraged, they sent in an executioner to cut off her head with a sword. Perhaps he was too scared to do it properly; perhaps no amount of strength would have been enough. But the executioner attempted three times to cut off her head. Three times he sunk his sword into her neck; three time he was unable to sever her head from her body. Terrified, he left the virgin drenched in her own blood (he had cut her, after all; he had mortally wounded her; but he couldn't cut off her head) and fled. They didn't try to kill her again. She lived three days. She saw her family and friends--they came to visit her and comfort her as she died. She sang. I imagine it was very quiet singing, whispered maybe, a trembling song falling from her lips in perfect harmony with her faith. She dedicated all her money to the poor. She left her house, where she had received her martyrdom, to be a church. She finally opened her eyes for the last time, looked at her friends and family, closed them, whispered one last trembling song of faith, and was translated to heaven. Urbanus buried her with the bishops and the confessors because they knew she was a saint. They could see. Much later, when her remains were discovered and removed as relics to the church dedicated to her, it is said that she held out three fingers on one hand, and one on the other, three in one, a confession of the Trinity. Because she sang, she is the patron saint of musicians and is often depicted playing an instrument.

Saint Agatha

2010-06-16T14:11:00.008-06:00

St. Peter Healing St. Agatha, by Giovanni Lanfranco.

A Roman prefect, Quintianus, wanted Agatha, who was beautiful. But she had dedicated her body, and her virginity, to Christ, and so denied him. He was furious. Knowing of her Christian faith, he arrested her. He himself was her judge. He expected her, threatened with torture and death, to deny her faith and give herself to him. She did not. Her mind and spirit were firm. Quintianus had given himself over to lust and flesh and so he gave Agatha over for a month to a brothel, where she was raped, assaulted, and humiliated. Quintianus thought this would break her and bring her around to his way of thinking. It did not. He imprisoned her next and subjected her to tortures. He cut off her breasts. But St. Peter appeared to her in prison and healed her. Quintianus's sadism mutilated her, attempted to defile the flesh, destroy the body; Peter's love healed her, restored her, made her whole again. (I can imagine his tender hands and fingers trembling as he touched her. I can imagine him weeping with her and comforting her and giving her strength.) Quintianus finally sentenced her to death: he sentenced her to be rolled naked along a bed of coals. He went from wanting to enjoy her flesh to wanting to utterly destroy it. Her body, denied to him, had become an offense, a thing meant for fire. Thus the world loves. And so they put her on the coals. But "anon the ground where the holy virgin was rolled on, began to tremble like an earthquake, and a part of the wall fell down upon Silvain, counsellor of Quintianus, and upon Fastion his friend, by whose counsel she had been so tormented." Her last prayer before she died was "Lord, my Creator, you have always protected me from the cradle; you have taken me from the love of the world and given me patience to suffer. Receive my soul."

Peter's hands were only a promise. He was tender and careful, a paternal power moved not by an impulse to rage and to revenge but by a more delicate desire to hold and to cherish. Things must look different to God. He sent Peter not to save her, not to take her out of prison, not to bring fire and damnation upon the enemies of Agatha's flesh and spirit. He sent him to heal her breasts.

Saint Lucy

2010-05-31T21:06:00.001-06:00

The Martyrdom and Last Communion of Saint Lucy, by Paolo Veronese.

"No one's body is polluted so as to endanger the soul if it has not pleased the mind. If you were to lift my hand to your idol and so make me offer against my will, I would still be guiltless in the sight of the true God, who judges according to the will and knows all things. If now, against my will, you cause me to be polluted, a twofold purity will be gloriously imputed to me. You cannot bend my will to your purpose; whatever you do to my body, that cannot happen to me" - Saint Lucy.

Lady Jane Grey

2010-05-23T19:46:00.003-06:00

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833), by Paul Delaroche.

An image like this fills my mind. I can't escape it. It works in me, arresting me with its cold horror until abstraction is lost and all I can imagine is the reality of those last moments. It's an over-charged human sympathy: an inability to extricate myself or to enjoy any sense of detachment. It activates inside and tightens into a knot that makes me feel ill; it casts a shadow over the world. The delicacy of this particular image is tormenting. It's the last whispers, the slow reluctance, the inevitable swing. No one involved seems to want this act to happen. And yet it will happen. It's a moment in history. History removes, the lines blur, the human moves further away. Lady Jane Grey, queen of England for a little over a week, was executed by beheading in the Tower of London because she was protestant. She was either sixteen or seventeen years old. History slouches through the blood of individuals and personal moments of horror and sorrow.

Middlemarch (excerpts)

2010-05-23T19:43:00.000-06:00

One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long, but abundant and curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment, had just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican and was looking out on the magnificinet view of the mountains from the adjoining round vestibule. He was sufficiently absorbed not to notice the approach of a dark-eyed, animated German who came up to him and placing a hand on his shoulder, said with a strong accent, "Come here, quick! else she will have changed her pose."

Quickness was ready at the call, and the two figures passed lightly along by the Maleager towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the draper folding around her with a petal-like ease and tenderness. They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming firl, whose form, not shamed by Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish grey drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backwards from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair. She was not looking at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor. But she became conscious of the two strangers who suddenly paused as if to contemplate the Cleopatra, and, without looking at them, immediately turned away to join a maid-servant and courier who were loitering along the hall at a little distance off.

"What do you think of that for a fine bit of antithesis?" said the German, searching in his friend's face for responding admiration, but going on volubly without waiting for any other answer. "There lies antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the complete contentment of its sensuous perfection: and there stands beauty in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in its bosom. But she should be dressed as a nun; I think she looks almost what you call a Quaker; I would dress her as a nun in my picture. However, she is married; I saw her wedding-ring on that wonderful left hand, otherwise I should have thought the sallow Geistlicher was her father. I saw him parting from her a good while ago, and just now I found her in that magnificent pose. Only think! he is perhaps rich, and would like to have her portrait taken. Ah! it is no use looking after her--there she goes! Let us follow her home!"

*****

She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highlands; and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been. But in Dorothea's mind there was a current in which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow--the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good. There was clearly something better than anger and despondency.

*****

But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectations dies, or some new motive is born. To-day she had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from Mr Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is not longer reflection but feeling--an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects--that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

Christina's World

2010-05-17T21:34:00.001-06:00

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

I've been staring at this all day. I have no vocabulary for this sort of art. My grammar is entirely literary and cinematic. I can say this looks like an image from a Terrance Malick film, for instance; and if I had never seen this painting and someone told me it looked like something from Days of Heaven, I'd have had a surprisingly accurate, though admittedly rough, sense of its feeling--of its loneliness, its pathos, its desperate beauty. But the still, mute force of an image like this... I'm not equipped to write about it. All I can do is sit in front of it all day.

Degas

2010-05-17T17:04:00.000-06:00

Vor dem Spiegel

Place de la Concorde

Vier Tänzerinnen

Ballettprobe

Saint Barbara

2010-05-16T22:15:00.001-06:00

Saint Barbara by Mikhail Nesterov

The Portrait of a Lady (excerpt)

2010-05-15T15:56:00.001-06:00

Mlle. Irene Cahen d'Anvers (detail) (1880) by Jean-Auguste Renoir

This last week I read The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Isabel Archer, I think, shall live long in my imagination. Most of the time, characters in a novel make sense only within that novel. What they say, what they do--it's all contained in a limited vision. They begin and end between the book covers. These characters exist as pieces of a large machine, moved and plotted by events and fitted exactly to situations. Isabel Archer is larger than her novel. Rarely have I felt so convinced of a character's reality. She is real. She is living now, in my imagination. I felt hollowed out, emptied, after I finished the novel, which I devoured... or rather, I think, which devoured me. This is one of my favourite early passages. Enjoy.

"One wet afternoon, some four months earlier than the occurrence lately narrated, this young lady had been seated alone with a book. To say she was so occupied is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilising quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of fresh taste in her situation which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to correct. The visitor had not been announced; the girl heard her at last walking about the adjoining room. It was in an old house at Albany, a large, square, double house, with a notice of sale in the windows of one of the lower apartments. There were two entrances, one of which had long been out of use but had never been removed. They were exactly alike--large white doors, which an arched frame and wide side-lights, perched upon little "stoops" of red stone, which descended sidewise to the brick pavement of the street. The two houses together formed a single dwelling, the party-wall having been removed and the rooms placed in communication. These rooms, above-stairs, were extremely numerous, and were painted all over exactly alike, in a yellowish white which have grown sallow with time. On the third floor there was a sort of arched passage, connecting the two sides of the house, which Isabel and her sisters used in their childhood to call the tunnel and which, though it was short and well-lighted, always seemed to the girl to be strange and lonely, especially on winter afternoons. She had been in the house, at different periods, as a child; in those days her grandmother lived there. Then there had been an absence of ten years, followed by a return to Albany before her father's death. Her grandmother, old Mrs. Archer, had exercised, chiefly within the limits of the family, a large hospitality in the early periods, and the little girls often spent weeks under her roof--weeks of which Isabel had the happiest memory. The manner of life was different from that of her own home--larger, more plentiful, practically more festal; the discipline of the nursery was delightfully vague and the opportunity of listening to the conversation of one's elders (which with Isabel was a highly-valued pleasure) almost unbounded. There was a constant coming and going; her grandmother's sons and daughters and their children appeared to be in the enjoyment of standing invitations to arrive and remain, so that the house offered to a certain extent the appearance of a bustling provincial inn kept by a gentle old landlady who sighed a great deal and never presented a bill. Isabel of course knew nothing about bills; but even as a child she thought her grandmother's home romantic. There was a covered piazza behind it, furnished with a swing which was a source of tremulous interest; and beyond this was a long garden, sloping down to the stable and containing peach-trees of barely credible familiarity. Isabel had stayed with her grandmother at various season, but somehow all her visits had a flavour of peaches. On the other side, across the street, was an old house that was called the Dutch House--a peculiar structure dating from the earliest colonial time, composed of bricks that had been painted yellow, crowned with a gable that was pointed out to strangers, defended by a rickety wooden paling and standing sidewise to the street. It was occupied by a primary school for children of both sexes, kept or rather let go, by a demonstrative lady of whom Isabel's chief recollection was that her hair was fastened with strange bedroomy combs at the temples and that she was the widow of some one of consequence. They little girl had been offered the opportunity of laying a foundation of knowledge in this establishment; but having spent a single day in it, she had protested against its laws and had been allowed to stay at home, where, in the September days, when the windows of the Dutch House were open, she used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the multiplication-table--an incident in which the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion were indistinguishably mingled. The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother's house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste--she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece--she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost inhuman, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in especial , to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender little girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had not wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side--a place which become to the child's imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror."

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James. New York: The Modern Library, 1951. 27-30.

Psyche and Cupid

2010-01-17T15:53:00.006-06:00

Psyche et L'Amour by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Amor and Psyche by Antonio Canova

Amor and Psyche by Johann Heinrich Fussli

With Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis took Psyche and Cupid's already allegorically charged myth of love, perseverance, and redemption and re-told it as an extended metaphor for the human soul's relationship with God. It is one of the only novels that haunts me. Its images live powerfully in my imagination. These paintings, which have nothing to do with the Lewis novel, I know, nevertheless take from my eye a retrospective light: Till We Have Faces, for me at least, eclipses the myth, or at least becomes so entangled with it that I cannot look at these images as anything other than before-the-fact illustrations for a novel that hadn't been written yet. There might be some sort of temporal-hermeneutical anomaly happening here.

Pamela, by Joseph Highmore

2010-01-16T19:37:00.009-06:00

Pamela and Mr B in the Summerhouse

Pamela Leaves Mr B's House in Bedfordshire

Pamela Shows Mr Williams a Hiding Place for Her Letters

Pamela Tells a Nursery Tale

Clarissa

2010-01-03T19:58:00.003-06:00

Robert Lovelace Preparing to Abduct Clarissa Harlowe by Francis Hayman

Magnificat

2009-12-24T16:44:00.004-06:00

My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for He has been mindful of the humble state of His servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me-- Holy is His name.

Merry Christmas, my friends.

Pamela

2009-12-24T01:24:00.011-06:00

Pamela in the Bedroom with Mrs Jewkes and Mr B, by Joseph Highmore

I recently, and by recently I mean in the last couple days since I put a bow on top of and kicked in the ass term one of my MA, read--okay, perhaps devoured--Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela. After four months of reading postmodern, postcolonial lit, it was a relief to sink into what I will arrogantly refer to as real literature, literature that--as Northrop Frye describes it--you can live inside.

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was written in 1740 and is often referred to as one of the first, if not the first, true novels. The eponymous Pamela, a girl born, as one character ominously insinuates, either to undo or be undone, is a sixteen year old handmaid who, when the lady who raised her out of poverty dies, finds herself the unwanted object of Mr. B's, that late lady's son's, rakish desire, even though Pamela's honesty and virtue (eighteenth-century euphemisms for, particularly, virginity but also, more generally, for an entire moral and religious ethos) are her only concerns. She resists repeatedly and steadfastly his advances, which grow stronger each time he fails to seduce her, until, just when she thought she was finally free to return to her parents, he makes her his prisoner, kidnapping her and carrying her off to a private estate where, aided by the sinister Mrs. Jewkes, his house-keeper, he hopes to force her to his will. After she continually refuses his bargains and advances, he attempts to rape her--again aided, quite literally, by Mrs. Jewkes, who holds the stripped Pamela down on the bed for her master. "What you do, Sir, do; don't stand dilly-dallying," Mrs. Jewkes encourages. (The image above is from this scene: Pamela is undressing for bed; Mrs. Jewkes, who is Pamela's jailer even when she sleeps, is ready; and Mr. B, disguised as a drunk and passed-out servant, is watching and waiting.) But Pamela, as she has several times before when Mr. B tried to force her, and because of her delicate mind and because this is, after all, the age of sensibility, falls into a fit, one so violent her attackers thought she was dying. When he sees this, Mr. B, who apparently does love Pamela quite sincerely but has grown up never having his desires frustrated, repents his actions, leaves her unspoiled, and (I'll just skip over a whole bunch here) eventually reforms, and (I'll just skip over a whole bunch more here) finally marries her, much to everyone's relief and happiness, including and especially Pamela's.

There's too much to say. The novel does so many things that my brief gloss only hints at. It upsets hierarchy, placing Pamela, a mere servant girl, in the centre of a new moral order--one in which handmaids and princesses have equal merit. It projects a moral cosmology that transcends class and gender. It offers a vision of justice and reward based on personal moral agency. It vindicates the oppressed, reforms the oppressor, and ends in a subtle apocalypse (by which I mean revelation) of an ordered, unified, purified world. Through Pamela, sort of like an eighteenth-century Beatrice, the world is made better.

What I most love about Pamela, however, is its sincerity, especially in its vision of sexuality. It could be read as a metaphor, I guess, sure, but that is not how Richardson wrote it. It is about virginity and sex; it does not treat them lightly but injects into them weight and gravitas. Which, again... after four months of postmodern lit--and here my well-documented conservative streak emerges--I was ready for a little sincerity and gravitas.

I had selfish reasons for reading Pamela and for now reading the much more formidable Clarissa (Richardson's masterpiece, the novel he will always be remembered for. It's 1500 pages long. There go my holidays). Those reasons might be guessed by those aware of my own projects. Too many of the themes found in Pamela touch very closely those of The Execution... too closely, in fact, for me not to have read it and been aware of it, though I suppose canonical influence isn't what it used to be. The central image--a girl facing the sexual menaces and devices of an all-powerful oppressor, aided only by an unassailable and impenetrable surety and purity of self--is dramatized much differently here than in my own novel, much to my relief (I was worried for a while... and still might be, having only just started Clarissa). I know now that Pamela will, somehow... I'm not sure how... creep into The Execution. It must. I've read it; I can't unread it. But perhaps, as with C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, which I've always thought of as the guiding literary light that I want to follow in The Execution, only I will see the influence.

(Just a note: inspired and slightly put off balance by Pamela, I've been compiling a list of books that I should probably read or be aware of as I continue with The Execution. It's a long list. Mostly, though... and this might sound strange... I've been coming up with a very particular list, a list of books written by men in which the central character is a woman. There is something--and I know many people who will think this sexist, so I'm sorry--about the image of woman that perfectly suits her as a symbol of moral or religious integrity. Dante uses a woman as his central image. So does Donne. So does Richardson. Dickens, too (not always). Lewis, of course. The list goes on. There are, I think, metaphors hardwired into our bodies. Into and out of our bodies can be read metaphors... some arising naturally, I think, others being scribed onto us. I'm interested in seeing what those metaphors are or can be. There might be a dissertation in there somewhere.)

Trailer :: Bad Lieutenant

2009-11-14T22:19:00.007-06:00

Except for his dual performance in Adaptation, I can't say I've really liked much of Cage's work since Wild at Heart (full disclosure: have not seen Leaving Las Vegas). But the idea of him and legendary director Werner Herzog teaming up is intriguing and... tantalizing.

Reports of My Untimely Demise...

2009-09-29T21:32:00.006-06:00

... Probably don't exist, but it's nice to think that someone, somewhere - perhaps some deranged and forever unknown devotee of cynical film review and cultural skepticism lurking out there in this troubled and convulsing series of tubes - has noticed a certain plunging towards flatline drop-off in my posting regularity. Perhaps I need more fiber, or at least fiber's internet equivalent. (You see, in this metaphor, mixed and vexed as it is, posting on a blog and pooping are essentially equivalent activites.)

I am not without excuse for this update shortage. Oh no. I have many excuses in fact. Good ones. Graduate studies in English have commenced, once again at that institute of dubious credibility, the University of Saskatchewan. I now descend even further into the stygian corners of academia, taking on not only the role of bewildered pilgrim, stumbling and fumbling about and occasionally stopping to shout out some curse against the prevailing powers-that-be who keep, ridiculously and with increasing futility, trying to tell me that things like postmodernism and theory are important... but also, apparently, and now when did this happen, the role of guide, of some Virgil-esque (-ish?) agent of academic mercy, sent of help shuffle freshmen students across the seething currents of Acheron and file them away in some departmental bolge, all while avoiding the chomping, slobbering advances of that insatiable beast Cerberus, who in this by now incomprehensible metaphor doesn't really represent anything at all, except maybe my own irrational need to render university as if it where some Dantean punishment. Anyway, in case you didn't catch all that, I'm now leading a first-year English lit tutorial. That, and my own studies, keep me busy.

Also, and I have no half-cooked metaphor to describe this, sorry, I am still writing The Execution. It has become, uh well... distracting. Which is a downgrade. Before, it was consuming. But even so, when I should be reading, I'm writing. And when I should be writing, I'm writing, but not, see, what I'm supposed to be writing, which is essays and seminar presentations and other necessary but, you know, really intrusive things like that. However, I remain pleased with the results. This whole thing has been a remarkable experience. I really had no idea what I was setting out on when I started. It has already surpassed all the personal goals I set for myself. Work on the novel has dramatically slowed with my reentry into the academy, but it remains my primary focus. I might regret that later. You know, when professors start glaring at me that projects are due. But much, much later, when I'm published and celebrated and really filthy rich, it will all have been worth it.

And in whatever time remains, I indulge in grandiose and narcissistic fantasy. With all that, I'm swamped!

So in the next little while, as I attempt to find anything approaching a working knowledge of the English language in freshmen papers; struggle to prove that I myself possess such knowledge, however limited, in my own writing, academic or otherwise; and as I once again consider the merit of complete withdrawal from human civilization - I don't know, up on a mountain somewhere, or in the middle of the desert, perhaps surrounded by landmines, or at least a moat - I may not update the old blog all that much.

Review :: Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-21T22:25:00.017-06:00

The last lines in Quentin Tarantino's latest film, Inglourious Basterds, go like this: "You know... I think this might be my masterpiece," (or, you know... something like that). It's hard not to think, when you hear lines like these, that the filmmaker is talking to us; hard not to think he's smirking at us from within the tangles of his complex-seeming layers of cinematic self-reflexivity. But I don't really care who you are or what you have directed, those lines have no business ending a film. Any film. But they especially have no business ending a film when they are simply not true.

Inglourious Basterds (and yes, that's how it's spelled), though displaying real moments of creative brilliance, is indulgent, nearly bereft of humanity, and far, far too long. I've been on-board with QT for much of his career. But now he's making it hard to support him. Kill Bill was an explosive, highly entertain homage-slash-pastiche-another slash-tribute to what we are now, rightly or wrongly, calling "grindhouse" cinema. And it was fun. It was fun seeing him revel in these absurd conventions, adapt them with winks and nods to a modern film context, and so produce a set of films that simultaneously reworked and yet revered the ridiculous and tired formulas we've seen used in countless B-grade films for years. And after making films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction or even Jackie Brown, Tarantino had built enough of a reputation that I think many people were willing to let him indulge and create something absurd. If nothing else, it was a successful experiment in cinematic self-awareness. But then came Death Proof, the partner-film to Robert Rodriguez's regrettably bad Planet Terror... and that's when this whole grindhouse thing started to get a little awkward. For while Death Proof was still fun and goofy, even if it's cinematic heritage was much more myopically fetishistic and less accessible than anything else he'd produced (carsploitation, after all, isn't really all that big in the theatres these days), it left me wondering if films like this and Kill Bill weren't just the indulgent digressions of an otherwise talented director but instead the trajectory of all future QT projects. This nagging suspicion, along with a quick survey of the sorts of films he's been producing and helping get off the ground... it was all very worrying indeed. With Inglourious Basterds Tarantino needed to prove that he was still the same man who made Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

He did not. Not to me, anyway.

The film takes place in Nazi-occupied France and follows several characters as they move around and do generally unpleasant things. There's Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his titular troupe of Basterds - a small but viciously efficient squad of Nazi killers who have been parachuted into France to wreak as much havoc and retribution as possible. There's Col. Hans Landa of the SS (Christoph Waltz), the so-called "Jew Hunter," whose job it is to, well... hunt Jews, and who we see coldly and with sliding smiles massacre a Jewish family at the film's opening. And then there's Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), the lone survivor of that massacre, who flees to Paris where she eventually runs a small theatre, and where she will eventually be offered her own opportunity for vengeance. And there are other characters. And their stories intersect and overlap and all come together for the film's impressive, if by then long-overdue, finale. It's essentially a Jewish vengeance film. It riffs on that most suspect of film genres, the Nazi exploitation film. It winks and it nods and it swaggers and it smirks. And it all feels a little tired. This is the first time in a Tarantino film I was bored. The dialogue, for which he is often and rightly celebrated, simply becomes indulgent and sloppy; it is in desperate need of a maniacal editor. Unlike the "Royale with Cheese" discussion in Pulp Fiction, most of the talking in this film lacks the verve, the edge, that dizzy delirium that Tarantino can bring to it. It rarely advances the plot, except for a few expositional moments. And it hardly reveals character either. It's just there, taking up time.

But unlike Kill Bill or even Death Proof, which were goofy and campy and allowed to get away with pretty much anything, Inglourious Basterds exposes Tarantino to some awkward questions he doesn't seem capable of answering. In his hands, this material - the slaughter of a Jewish family, the atrocities committed by the Nazis, the rightness or wrongness of vengeance - is roughly handled. Actually, I think mishandled. His "wouldn't this be cool" style of filmmaking reduces WWII to a aesthetic exercise. And that might be okay if he had anything to say. I have nothing against style. But as his last two films have already suggested, Tarantino can throw a lot of words and great images at the screen and yet manage to say nothing at all. And if you're gonna take on WWII, you need something to say.

What is Inglourious Basterds about? It's ultimately only about itself. Even the characters seem more like stylistic foci than actual people. QT does have a gift for characterization. But he doesn't use it here. One of the worst things I think a filmmaker can do is ignore his characters' humanity and treat them like objects. And Tarantino does just this. Never once do you believe any of the characters mean anything or that they are on screen for any other reason than for Tarantino to push them around and use them as props. I don't think Tarantino despises his characters like some directors do; I just don't think he cares about making them seem real. People show up, they talk and talk and talk, and then some of them die in quick moments of explosive action. The only two characters in the film that seem interesting are Waltz' Hans Landa and Laurent's Shosanna Dreyfus. Waltz brings a disarming charm to his vicious Landa. He owns this movie when he is on screen. And Melanie Laurent is simply stunning. If nothing else, Inglorious Basterds has introduced her to North American screens, and I hope we get to see more of her. Unfortunately, and this is not her fault, she doesn't have much to do here. As a survivor of a massacre, she's supposed to be sympathetic, a tragic figure and, unless I'm wrong, she's supposed to be Tarantino's representation of the Jewish struggle. But QT doesn't give us much to work with here. He gives us a few cues and tells us to go with it, which is sloppy. But for much of the film Laurent is tasked with playing it cool as she plots her revenge. And she does. Play it cool, I mean. But in those few moments when the turbulence underneath breaks through, she's gorgeous and haunting and I wish Tarantino had given her more to do. Instead, she's often forced to play her character Uma Thurman in Kill Bill style - stilted and stony and more and more unsympathetic as the film progresses. I wanted more. And from what I can tell I think Laurent can give us more... but not with QT as her director.

With Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino exploded the cinematic landscape with almost New Wave-style brand of energy and vibrancy. But since then he has slowly slid into self-aggrandized autophagia, the victim of his own awareness and reflexive proclivities. Inglourious Basterds is about itself and it is about movies in general. Or at least we're supposed to think it's about movies. But aside from the pastiche feel of many of his projects and the obvious references to other films scattered throughout his work, Tarantino just doesn't have anything to say about film. He's no Godard. This isn't film as criticism. So all those moments of media self-reflection in the end feel more masturbatory than meaningful.

I think all of what I am trying to say can be best explained by the film's worst misstep. Hitler is here. Yes, Hitler is a character in Inglourious Basterds. And he comes off as a cartoon, an offensive mindless cartoon. If these are the sorts of films Tarantino really wants to make - these experiments and exercises in retro-exploitation B-disguised-as-A-grade films - then I'd suggest he stay away from historical representations or subject matters that require a more deft and sympathetic hand. Stick to samurai swords and vehicular homicide.

If the film had been a good forty-five minutes shorter (it clocks in at a solid 2.5 hours); if it had paid greater attention and been more sensitive to its characters instead of treating them as elements in an excited little boy's set-piece; if Tarantino seemed at all interested in telling an actual WWII story instead of tactlessly using WWII as the backdrop to his own stylistic obsessions, Inglourious Basterds might have been his masterpiece. He didn't and it isn't. There are things to like in this film. Of course there are. But they are outweighed and shouted down by all the things the film gets wrong.

Liel Leibovitz over at Tablet puts his finger right into another one of the film's open wounds. I wanted to touch on this, too... but this is a much better articulation than what I would have said. Link.

Sharon Tate

2009-08-04T18:02:00.011-06:00

Sharon Tate was a rising star in Hollywood. She was married to Roman Polanski, who she met when he directed her in The Fearless Vampire Killers. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in Valley of the Dolls. She was a 60's symbol of beauty and sexuality. On 9 August 1969, forty years ago next Sunday, she, along with four other people - close friends who were at the house that night while Polanski was away in London - was murdered in her home by the followers of Charles Manson. She was stabbed sixteen times. She was eight and a half months pregnant. Her murder, I think, closed the 60's and brought us the 70's.

I tend to crawl through the internet, picking things up and poking at others, until something explodes in front of me and spiral through link after link until a full picture - sometimes wondrous, other times horrifying - rises up. I knew about the Tate and LaBianca killings and the Manson family's murderous rampage, of course. Who doesn't? But it was only recently, as I was researching a few things for a short story I am writing, that I followed an incredibily convoluted trail of links and the Sharon Tate story opened up to me, and then I spent the evening stunned almost to tears by what I was reading. She was pregnant. She was 26. She was gorgeous. She was lovely and loved. And they destroyed her.

I don't want to treat her as a symbol. I want to preserve her humanity. But if anyone's death symbolizes the senselessness and the injustices that so often torment this mortal shuffle, it may be Sharon Tate's.

In these images she looks nearly immortal. There are crime scene and coroner's photographs on the internet. I found some of them. I won't post them or encourage finding them for yourself. Beauty can be destroyed - viciously, senselessly, and without mercy. It can be left broken. It is the task of the living to preserve the beautiful, however... not to shrink from evil but to stand against it. And so I stand and celebrate beauty.

For those who do not know the story, here is her Wikipedia entry.

Pornographic Reflections

2009-08-02T22:44:00.008-06:00

This article is about pornography, yes, but it is not explicit and should likely not offend. Still, it's about porn. Also, this is more a collection of thoughts than an argument... just a few things that have lately been running through my mind...

I've been thinking about pornography lately. Wait, let me start that again. As part of the writing process for The Execution, I've been thinking about what pornography means and what it does to the people who view it and make it, porn being not so much a theme as a recurring image in the novel. In the spirit of full disclosure, let me just get it out there (as if it weren't already obvious) that I am a white male fast approaching thirty. And so I, like so many men growing up in this slide between centuries, have a history with pornography, especially the internet variety... you know, the kind that so easily entangles.

OED time. Pornography, n. "The explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings." As one crude distinction between "art" and "porn" puts it, if after you've masturbated to it you are bored with it, it's porn and likely has no artistic value, despite whatever pretensions it may play at.

A few weeks ago, I watched a documentary called 9to5: Days in Porn, a film that followed (loosely, I think) several people in The Industry - girls (some now famous), directors, agents, producers, the like - for two years. No real thesis emerged - the filmmakers, as much as documentarians can, remained invisible (their attempt, I guess, to remain "objective," whatever that means). A recurring theme emerged amongst the subjects, however: their own happiness and sense of achievement. They claim to enjoy what they do, even the husbands and wives of pornstars, who themselves are often involved in the biz. While I don't necessarily think they are liars, and while I feel certain that no one could survive in that business without at least some measure of self-deception, I also think that the kind of people who produce and participate in porn and purport to find pleasure in it (okay, I'll stop alliterating P now...) actually lack the apparatus and capacity for true happiness (... sorry, I tried). Let me put it like this: I think it takes a certain damaged personality to willingly sell yourself, and an even more damaged one to film your wife or girlfriend with other men. I'm not talking about a history of abuse, or drug use, or anything like that. I'm talking about moral and spiritual devastation. Maybe they are happy, but that's only because they are not whole enough to reach for anything higher.

But I won't lie and say that porn doesn't have a certain attractiveness, especially for the consumer. I won't say that it isn't erotic or arousing or that I'm immune to its enticements. But I've found that the eroticism of porn is tyrannical, and the more time you spend with it the more it rearranges your own ideas of the erotic. In a sense, porn reveals to you your own impulses and sexual imperatives. You could tell a lot about someone, I'd guess, from the type of porn they look at, were they willing to tell you (most of us probably aren't, and that shame is, I think, a good thing). But in another sense, a much more dangerous sense, porn not only reveals them but guides and shapes those impulses, so that after consuming it for any length of time it no longer reveals but dictates, and you find yourself somewhere entirely different and often not pleasant.

The pornographic camera is, for the most part, extremely myopic; it's sexual epistemologies are hermetically sealed and reduce sexuality and eroticism to a function of organs and anatomy, which is simply tragic and repulsive. I myself have several times had to undergo a "cleanse," a deliberate re-mapping of the erotic and sexual, in order to purge myself of these broken images and put back together the sort of mentality and desires that I want. This is hard. Re-mapping your own mind is a very hard thing to do. But it is very valuable and freeing.

I bring all this up because the writing of The Execution has in many ways been a cleanse. For those of you who have read some of my drafts, this may sound odd, given some of the novel's more unflinching episodes, several of which contain elements of sexual cruelty. But it's true, at least for me, the bewildered author. I think Christian literature, and I mean modern Christian literature, lacks a full confrontation with the erotic. It wasn't always like this. Dante certainly didn't avoid such a confrontation. Neither did Milton or Blake. For all three of them, the sexual and the erotic are major themes; and all three of them put the sexual and the erotic into an intelligible and, I think, valuable context (even if Blake's context was... idiosyncratic). I am trying to do that as well. Of course, I'm no Dante, Milton, or Blake, and would never claim to be. But they are my models, my spiritual grandfathers, if you will. In a world where porn has, as keeps getting repeated, gone mainstream, I think it is important, and only going to become more important, to fight back in order to keep the pornographic camera from being the only hand shaping society's vision of the erotic.

Why So Serious?

2009-07-30T07:09:00.001-06:00

Abandon All Hope...

2009-07-24T15:34:00.012-06:00

A while back, Electronic Arts announced that they were adapting Dante's Inferno as an action video game, as a sort of God of War clone, but one in which a Medieval Christian iconography, as depicted in the first canticle of the Commedia, is substituted for the Greek mythos. If that makes no sense to you... that's because it makes no sense. Look:

I've been trying to figure out what to make of this. My initial reaction was unmitigated hostility. That anyone could even think any aspect of the Commedia was suitable material for an action game boggled and enraged me. And that then shifted into a sort of anxious curiosity. Translations, even from one medium to another, are not necessarily, in theory, doomed undertakings. But now that I've looked at some of their publicity material and seen some of their PR stunts, the hostility is back. The game is shaping up to be an offensive, ugly parody of Dante's intention... a prurient and savage mockery of his moral and religious kerygma. Leaving aside the more obvious narrative departures (especially what looks to be an unforgiveable mutilation of Beatrice), the developers seem either not to understand or, I think more likely, to be willfully working against the poem, as can be seen here, where they talk about their interpretation of the Circle of Lust. I can only assume most of them, if they've even read the Inferno, read it only to revel within, and now exaggerate, the poem's strong images. I'm going to guess that, if the game is even partially successful, the sequel will not be called Dante's Purgatorio or Dante's Paradiso.

It's not so much the imagery and art direction of the video above that agitates me. It's the fact that this - this! - is being called an interpretation of the Inferno. If you want to make a game about hell and about a warrior (not a poet or a pilgrim, but a warrior) dismembering demons and damned souls... fine. But don't call it the Inferno. Don't bring Dante into it.

In the past, I have posted about the Commedia. Dante's work, not only the Commedia but also his lesser-known works like La Vita Nuova, have had a profound impact upon me. In my personal canon, the Commedia is a central text - not a planet but a star around which spins an entire textual universe. To see it used like this, reduced like this... it feels a bit like witnessing a sex crime, one committed against Dante, against Beatrice, against the entire history of Western literature.

I hope this game fails... I mean really fails.

Review :: Slumdog Millionaire

2009-07-23T11:28:00.010-06:00

In my distraction last year, Slumdog Millionaire was one of the films I unfortunately let fall to the side, which is odd because I am quite the fan of Danny Boyle's work. But there seemed, to me at least, to be something about the film - actually, now that I think about it, probably something about its campaign and publicity, which tried to sell it as a "feel-good movie" - that turned me off, even when the Oscar glitter descended around it. It puzzled me that the man who had very nearly reinvented the zombie genre would make this film. It seemed a bit... I don't know, a bit like James Cameron making Titanic, or something, and that left me twisting in cinematic ambivalence. And in a sense, I was right. Slumdog marks a bit of a thematic shift in Boyle's work - or, if not a shift, then at least a maturation into new territory. Gone is the satiric acid of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting; gone are the thundering apocalyptics of 28 Days Later and Sunshine. In their place rushes and grins a new bounding sense of sincerity, life, and struggle. Slumdog Millionaire startled me by just how alive it felt - like it was bursting and surging and breaking loose across the screen. And almost immediately, as the film started, I found myself victim to it - I let myself fall into Boyle's hands, and for the next two hours he worked upon me, tortured me, and then sent me soaring into the air. Slumdog Millionaire is pure cinematic exhileration.

Jamal (Dev Patel) is a young man from the slums of Mumbai who finds himself on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire... and he's winning. But the life that has led him to this moment has been one of constant struggle, pain, and heartache. He has, for so long, been trying to find and rescue the girl that he loves, Latika (the luminous Freida Pinto - seriously, this girl destroyed me. Just look at her!), and every time he finds her some horrible circumstance will pull them unfairly and violently apart. Now, one question away from winning it all, his hopes for finding her seem balanced on a knife-blade. It sounds like a strange set-up, I know, which is partly why, fool that I was, I let this movie escape me for so long. But though the premise sounds slightly ridiculous, there is so much packed into here - tragic vignettes from Jamal's life, the moments of hope and terror that have constantly provoked him; a stunning picture of squalor and poverty in which life somehow still flourishes; moments of bleak hopelessness and fierce determination. The gameshow narrative - important, sure - isn't really the story of Slumdog Millioniare; it's just the conceit that ties everything together and provides the framework on which Boyle will hang the stories from Jamal's life.

The soundtrack grooves in some Western/Eastern tehno-pop hybrid, and it works. The gorgeous and lush cinematography, always a feature in Boyle's films, glitters and stuns. The edits slash and stitch so rapidly sometimes and with such feverish vitality they spin your head and leave your breathless. It all works, story and execution.

In a sense, Slumdog is pure indulgence. As I browse around and skim the reviews, forums, and comments for the film, I'm bewildered (and enraged) at some of the things I'm finding. There are people who don't like this film! There are people who think it's cheesy, simple, or - most puzzling to me - boring. But it's the film's simplicity and sincerity, its uninhibited embrace of all things pure and immediate, that gives it so much power. Yes, the ending is an uninhibited display of emotion that - I suppose, maybe... - you could look at as being... uh, I guess discordant, as not fulfilling the gritty and wrenching realities that have come before it. But I would say that the film, and its ending, are entirely cohesive, and that the end, which seems not just to take a dip in but actually to dive headfirst into fairy tale sensibilities, reveals the movie's true intentions. All the grit, all the dirt, all the struggle that has kept Jamal from Latika... it's all groundwork for the film's final, nearly transcendent conclusion. It is the "feel-good movie of the year." It's just a feel-good movie that destroys you before it recreates you. It will drag you through the mud and shit (literally, at one point) and then it will lift you up.

And now I'm just gushing and it's getting embarrassing. I'm actually listening to the film's soundtrack as I'm writing this and it's... infecting me. I absolutely adored this film. Not in the same way I adore something like Synecdoche, New York or Let the Right One In... but in that pure way. It's the kind of movie you watch not to be challenged but the kind you watch to see life and hope affirmed. And it's rare to find a film like that these day and even rarer to find one that does it so well and with as much vitality and sincerity as this one. I love Slumdog Millionaire... and you should, too.

The Execution (Excerpts)

2009-07-15T06:55:00.006-06:00

In the last little while I've been hard at work on The Execution. A rough draft of the novel's first section is now complete and I feel pretty exhausted. I've written essay for the past eight years of my life... writing like this, however, is very different. It's draining. But I'm please with the results. I'm eager to start getting some feedback. Here's a quick look at some of what I have so far. The novel is about David and Alee, a young couple who have been arrested for their faith and are awaiting their sentence. But the sentence isn't simply: it's called the Demonstration and it's designed to break a person's will and faith through torture and degradation. These two passages come from early descriptions of the two of them.

During the day, when the business of survival was not so immediately pressing, Alee helped with the cooking, taking care of the remnant children, mending clothes, or, if she had a moment to herself and Carly wasn’t around to talk, she’d read some of the books that David had managed to salvage before the New Order’s grip on the surrounding territory had forced them to stay huddled on the farm. She had already read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Perelandra, Till We Have Faces (David was a big C. S. Lewis fan, see...) part of The Broom of the System (she didn’t like it, she said, when she tucked it back in with the others; nothing happened in it, and the things that did happen are confusing...), and The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, which startled her and made her laugh. She was now, or had been before the raid, reading a sermon called Death’s Duel. David has said it was one of his favourites. Most nights, in their closet, sometimes before, sometimes after they made love, which, depending on how early in the evening they shut the closet door, required a degree of self-mastery and discretion in order not to wake the people sleeping or talking just inches away from them, David would read to her, quietly, just barely whispering, and she’d fall asleep while the words of great authors, and sometimes not so great ones, wiggled their way into her mind and her dreams. Though she always liked the sound of his voice, she didn’t always like the stuff that David read to her. Blake upset her; Pynchon offended her. When she’d tell David she didn’t like what he was reading to her, he’d sometimes laugh, sometimes nod, but would always offer to change books, which made Alee feel guilty because he obviously loved these books that were strange to her, and she’d also feel a little stupid for not seeing in them what he saw. When she told him this one night after he had put down Blake and was picking up A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the small library he kept stacked in the closet along with their clothes (his few books, their clothes, and a small collection of precious things – Alee’s diary, some pictures of both their families, a Bible that had belonged to David’s mother and one that had been given to Alee by her father and mother on her sixteenth birthday – this was all they owned, really), he paused, the book not yet opened, and looked at her and, after thinking for a moment and coming up with nothing to say, kissed her instead and blew out the candle. “Don’t feel stupid,” he whispered to her as they curled into each other.

***

Their first night together, back in the dying city, they had found a basement to hide in and sleep while the bombs and the gunfire continue to rattle and burst. Most of the house had been destroyed except for the basement, which had one bathroom, two bedrooms, and what had obviously been a play area for children – toys scattered about, a TV turned-off and somehow suggesting Death, the kind of old and worn furniture that gets banished to rooms not meant for entertaining guests. David had offered to sleep in the other bedroom but the girl had insisted they stay in the same room, so he had taken the floor. He found a blanket and a pillow in the other room and lay down beside the bed. There was no light, only the glow of moon coming through the window. This must have been a young girl’s room, she had said, stating the obvious. The room has done up in soft shades of pink. I guess so, he had nodded. Before lying down on the bed, she spent some time just sitting on it, looking at the room, at the posters on the wall, at the clothes lying on the floor that hadn’t been included in the hasty retreat; she picked up a stuffed animal and hugged it close. Then she lay down above the covers. David lay in the semi-dark, listening to Alee’s quiet crying, feeling useless and miserable and, looking at her – face smudged with tears, clothes dirty and in places ripped – afflicted, as oh God what’s this? ... as several pornographic fantasies, not all of which included a willing partner, rose up in him with alarming haste. He had never before felt tempted by, even flirted with, the idea of rape, of power... but, could that maybe have been because, oh dear... because there were rules outside of him? And if the outside rules were gone, did inside rules take their place? The world had gone away... so too, perhaps, had its expectations? A chance to reinvent...? A chance... for anything...! So then, here is the Question. David discovered several unpleasant things about himself that night. However, he had fallen asleep, determined, at least, if not to resolve the Question right now then at least to delay it until morning. (He never told her any of this later, by the way... how could he?)

Alee was awake longer. She stared down at David on the floor next to her for a long time, puzzling with her own question, evaluating him, unsure whether she should listen to and trust the voice in her heart that seemed to say he will protect you – a voice not necessarily her own but belonging to Something Else, who was apparently certain about which side of the Question David would eventually – and quite soon in fact – land on. Later, when David woke up in the middle of the night, gunfire jangling through the darkness and flaring down his legs into the clench and curl of toes, he found Alee wiggled up under his blanket on the floor next to him. Her eyes were open and she was staring at him, face ready, in the dropped flutter of a skipped heartbeat, to respond however David’s next move would demand. A test! And so soon... ? Alee – and she probably wouldn’t have been able to say why if questioned – had decided to force the Question, to use herself, to submit herself as the test, right here, now, tonight, knowing that, if she had somehow manage to misread entirely the man in front of her that she could be lost forever, would turn to vapour and drift away and cease to be Alee. An entire world, two of them, in fact – his and hers – hung in the Moment, and David once again found himself on the frontlines of that ancient duel... the Question: Good vs. Evil... a struggle now concentrated in him, only him, faced with the only decision in the universe left to make. And here she is beside him... vulnerable and waiting... “Uh,” is how he stumbles his way out of kicked-up dust, clearing his throat and declaring himself for Good with all the eloquence of firm resolution, “... you okay...?” She smiles, tears somehow still fresh around her eyes, and, after a relieved sigh, whispers, mouths really but David understands her, “Yes. Thank you.” Her evaluation of him apparently complete, he passing several tests he hadn’t even known had drawn swords with him, tests put to him by her and, yes, by God, too... She moved in closer to him and asked him to put an arm around her, which he did, and like this she eventually fell asleep, head resting on his shoulder and now-and-then fretfully rolling in her sleep towards his chest, leaving him – moral victor, yes, but still subject to all the hungers and wants of flesh, yes oh yes – to ache out the night in confusion and, strange he thinks in this confliction, in a settling sense of purpose and, perhaps, yes perhaps, a promise of future contentment...

A Chorus of Resistance

2009-06-12T16:04:00.006-06:00

In the last little while, I've noticed that I've become increasingly sensitive to the problem of evil. This has probably come through in my writing in the last little while, I know. But there has been a softening in my heart, and I'm not exactly sure why... but it has left me struggling not to give into despair.

It's not the presence of evil that bothers me. I'm equipped, through years of philosophical and theological training, to understand, at least on a conceptual level, why evil exists. I never ask myself - as I read headlines of horror, as I watch movies that depict it, as I read novels that dive deeper into human heart than is comfortable - why the world is like this, why people hurt each other, why God doesn't intervene. Those aren't the questions with which I wrestle since I consider them answered, resolved. No, instead, it's my experience of evil, even from afar, that plagues me, that turns my stomach, that keeps me up. I feel it. Either through some newly developing sense of sympathy and empathy, of through a more now more keenly felt awareness that I, even I, participate in these structures of evil, I feel the consequences of evil, the dear human cost, the suffering... I feel it more these days then I ever have before. Sometimes, like just recently when I watched the movie Taken, an overwhelming sorrow comes over me and I'm moved to tears. That movie isn't a great movie. It isn't particularly well directed or acted. But it deals with a subject matter - young girls being kidnapped, turned into prostitutes, and sold like merchandise to the highest bidder - that, I'm finding, I am calibrated to be devastated by. I watched that movie several weeks ago and there is still one image, the image of a young girl standing in glass room, terrified, while calm but depraved businessmen casually bid on her... bid for the privilige of destroying her... I can't shake it, this image. It haunts me; it haunts me more than an image from a movie this B-grade should... but I guess the filmmakers, probably unintentionally, stumbled upon something more powerful then their clumsy hands could handle.

A while ago I heard a story about young Muslim women being targetted and raped, only to have another older woman come up to them later and, under the pretext of help, encourage these poor girls to strap bombs onto themselves in order to recover the honor that had been raped away from them... How do you live in the same world as this? I heard this and nearly wept. I could hardly talk. Even a year ago, my reaction to story like this wouldn't have been so visceral. I would have still recognized the evil here, recognized the terrible logic of hell, but I wouldn't have been moved to tears.

But lately any story, fictional or factual, that involves rape or murder leaves me feeling hollow and helpless. Each victim in those cases - the raped girl, the family of the murder victim - they have all had their lives, their worlds, devestated. And I can imagine their pain... with empathy run wild, I can feel it. This isn't something mysterious that I'm describing. This isn't the synopsis of some latest supernatural thriller feeling others' pain and helping them. It's basic human identification, perhaps only amplified now, for some reason. I'm not sure why this is, why this has developed in me now. Perhaps it is the weight of reading that hangs over me now; perhaps it is something built into me. Perhaps I'm growing into a sensitivity I never expected... or sought.

What I'm writting right now, this novel or story or whatever that I mentioned in my last post and which I am right now, at this very rough stage, calling The Execution, is an attempt to resolve some of these feelings. Not do away with them, but place them in a context that is manageable and, more importantly, that does not dull or belittle the human condition, as so many depictions of evil do. It is an explicitly Christian story, something I never thought I'd write. Hopefully I'll have more to say on it soon - I may even have a draft in a month or two -but right now it is only a collection of images onto which I'm working to impose a narrative, or at least enough structure to make it intelligible. What I will say about it is this: the story is about two people, David and Alee, a young husband and wife, who because of their faith are tortured and eventually murdered by an evil State as part of what's called "The Demonstration," a show of will and power meant to make obvious faith's futility. This execution, however, which should by this time in the story's fiction have been rather ruitine matter, becomes the focus of a struggle, both visible and not, between good and evil. The terms of victory sought by this State and by the persecuted Christian remnant are, however, very different.

So that's what I've been thinking about and doing lately.

This Cake is Delicious

2009-06-02T17:56:00.008-06:00

I'm Still Alive. Get it?

Life's moving along at a sure and steady clip, right now. I've decided to write, or at least try to write, by which I mean try to write and this time actually complete, a story... a short novel, I think, or rather a novella. We'll see how far ambition alone takes me. So far, I'm pleased with what I've manage to put down. I mean, I can actually read back and tolerate the next day the things that I wrote the day before, which, let me tell you, when it comes to matters of fiction and fantasy and my own flights into either, this has never happened before. As for the story itself... it is, or at least I hope it will someday be, a combination of the most beautiful and the most horrific things I can think of. It started, actually, as an exercise in purgation and has developed into an attempt both to redeem certain images and to put others in their place.

Project TRICO

2009-05-20T09:40:00.004-06:00

The last couple posts have been a bit heavy, I know. Time to lighten the mood a bit. Here's some footage, a leaked trailer I think but probably legitimate, of the so-called Project TRICO, the Playstation 3 follow-up to the brillaint Fumito Ueda games ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, two games that both help to legitimize video games as a possible art form. Enjoy.

The Whip

2009-05-07T18:31:00.003-06:00

Today I don't recognize the world rising up around us. There are still pieces of our old civilization scattered about, a residual memory of ethical behaviour and of sane and rational thought, but these pieces have been torn from the body, and are rotting fast. The American Left, unknown to most of its citizens, and executed with all the haste and desperate earnestness of a moonless sex crime, is passing its so-called "Pedophile Protection Act," which would classify as hate crimes anything negative or demonizing said about pedophiles. They want to make it illegal to protect and defend our children from monsters. This - this program of sanctioned suicide - will not end until the only crime left is the idea of crime itself. And then we will have destroyed ourselves utterly. I'm not a soldier. I don't know how to fight in a world like this, a world that wants to treat child molesters as citizens afforded special protection and Christians as hate-mongers - I don't know how to fight. But I don't know how to live in this world, either. A choking sadness has caught in my throat and my eyes are itching. But I find that in the face of such evil my sorrow turns vicious and I long to hold a whip in my hand.

By the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat down and wept,

When we remembered Zion.

2666

2009-05-02T10:42:00.007-06:00

A warning: the novel 2666, though I suspect it of being strongly moral, describes some horrific things, like the rape and murder of children and teenagers, rapes and murders not made up but based on real-life serial cases from Mexico, and so this post contains some disturbing content.

The last few months, the first months in almost four years that I haven't been a full-time student at one university or another, have been reading months. As much as you'd like to read a novel or a book of poetry during school, mental commitments to others tasks, not to mention time commitments (though these, I find, aren't nearly as stringent), often keep the mind occupied elsewhere, distracted, if a life-time commitment to education can be called a distraction, and generally prevent simple leisure reading. In the last four months, I've reread Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, read Pynchon's Against the Day, and am now approaching the end of Roberto Bolano's 2666.

2666 is a terrifying novel. It is sprawling, chaotic, probably unfinished, apocalyptic, and charged with a sort of savage sympathy. Though there are several stories here, some more or less self-contained, they intersect and bleed into each other in unpredictable and sometimes misleading ways. The one thing most of these stories share, however, is a connection - faint in some cases; horribly clear in others - to the serial rapes and murders of Ciudad Jaurez, in Mexico, called Santa Teresa in the novel. The novel's fourth part, called "The Part About the Crimes" (Bolano isn't above being unflinchingly literal), is a protracted description of the horrors inflicted upon the young victims. I didn't exactly count the number of cases described, but for about 280 pages Bolano sketches one rape and murder after another, mercifully from the perspective of the ineffectual, corrupt, and perhaps complicit detectives of Santa Teresa, so that the prose ends up feeling detached, clinical, like a police or coroner's report. And yet, as each description piles up, as the trash heap of victims grows higher and wider, threatening to choke out the sky and all breath, as the combined weight of all humanity's suffering funnels into Santa Teresa, brief glimpses of light and humanity weakly glimmer. In Bolano, there is no shining moment. Hope and sympathy are snatched from the fire, and are often burned and covered in ash, but not necessarily irredeemable.

The excerpt below follows the discovery of two girls, fifteen and thirteen, found tortured, raped, and dead in a house. Estefania Rivas, fifteen, had been hung upside down from a hook on the ceiling, raped, strangled, and shot twice in the back of the head. Herminia Noriega, thirteen, and been raped, beaten, and eventually shot in the back of the head, twice. But that's not what killed her. At some point, during the abuse, her heart had just stopped. As the medical examiner in the story says, "The poor little thing... the torture and abuse were more than she could stand. She didn't have a chance." When I read this, read it in Bolano's coolly detached prose, prose so empty of sentiment or emotion, I wanted to cry, but didn't. I'm not sure why not. It's one of those things, one of those horrors you find in this world, made more horrific not because it is fiction but because you are sure that it isn't, that even if it's made up it's still true, that sink into you, that feel like the onset of a long illness. Immediately following the description of this crime, however, Bolano perfectly shines a light onto the effect his prose has on readers, on this numbing, dulling horror.

"For many days Jaun de Dios Martines thought about the four heart attacks Herminia Noriega had suffered before she died. Sometimes he thought about it while he was eating or while he was urinating in the men's room at a coffee shop or one of the inspector's regular lunch spots, or before he went to sleep, just at the moment he turned off the light, or maybe seconds before he turned off the light, and when that happened he simply couldn't turn off the light and then he got out of bed and went over to the window and looked out at the street, an ordinary, ugly, silent, dimly lit street, and then he went into the kitchen and put water on to boil and made himself coffee, and sometimes, as he drank the hot coffee with no sugar, shitty coffee, he turned on the TV and watched late-night shows broadcast across the desert from the four cardinal points, at that late hour he could get Mexican channels and American channels, channels with crippled madmen who galloped under the stars and uttered unintelligible greetings, in Spanish or English or Spanglish, every last fucking word unintelligible, and then Jaun de Dios Martinez set his coffee cup on the table and covered his face with his hands and a faint and precise sob escaped his lips, as if he were weeping or trying to weep, but when he finally removed his hands, all that appeared, lit by the TV screen, was his old face, his old skin, stripped and dry, and not the slightest trace of a tear."

Follow-up, May 3: Let me explain. I posted this because lately, for the past six or seven months, actually ever since reading A Tale of Two Cities, a novel that upset me more than I'd imagined it would, what with its descriptions of Revolutionary France's insatiable thirst for aristocratic blood, descriptions that planted a knot in my stomach that hasn't yet quite come undone even all these months after, I've been contemplating the nature of human evil, specifically the desire for human sacrifice, by which I don't mean the institutional practice, Aztecs ripping the hearts out of virgins, children thrown into open furnaces, that sort of thing, but rather I mean the fulfillment of some goal, whatever goal - political agenda, religious mania, sexual depravity, etc - at the cost of human life. This happens all the time. We just don't usually call it human sacrifice. We call it something more tolerable, like murder, war, business, postmodernity.

I can think of no crime greater than the rape and murder of a girl for simple sadistic pleasure, the transformation of another human subject into an object, or at least that's what we say it is, what all the feminists are up in arms about, female objectification. But that's wrong, I think; objectification isn't what's happening here: that's too evasive an answer. It doesn't stare this beast in the eye, but rather flinches. The real horror is that crimes like these, like the darker blood-dreams of the French Revolution or like rape or like murder, isn't that they reduce people to the play-things of unleashed human nature, but that they confront a person in all his or her subjectness, and simply deny that subject the privilege to exist. It's the dark god, the throbbing pulse of the human stain: brutal mastery of another. It is objectification, I suppose, but a very literal objectification, a process of objectification, in which a human subject is, literally, through murder, transformed into an object. Blake's dark satanic mills, always grinding.

I try to tell myself that such crimes are inhuman; I try very hard. But I know that they are all too human. Terrifyingly human. That's why I posted this. Because somehow I must deal with what I know it means to be human. Deal with it, or collapse in a heap of broken images, and finally weep.

Bolano, Roberto. 2666. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2008.

Against the Day

2009-04-21T21:18:00.015-06:00

After you've read Thomas Pynchon, everything else, all other prose, seems boring, muted, and dull, as if it were coming at you from deep under water, or as if you were under water - drowning perhaps - and someone was trying to yell at you. But you can't hear them, because you're under water.

Introduced to his novels by a Christian English professor at a Christian college in the Saskatchewan prairies, which is I imagine one of the least likeliest places to encounter Pynchon (a Christian English professor who, by the way, once told me he'd had to think long and hard to decide, when it came down to writing his Ph.D thesis, between a focus on Pynchon and one on John Milton, a decision that is doubtless evidence of some great and incomprehensible psychic schism in his personality),* I have been reading Pynchon for several years now, having made my way heedlessly and recklessly though the sickly and wet corridors of Gravity's Rainbow at least twice, and in parts far more than twice, and through the circuitry and broken synapses of The Crying of Lot 49 more times than is probably healthy or sane. I've only read Vineland once. I have not yet read either V or Mason & Dixon, and I'm not sure why but I'm not really in any rush to, either.

There's really no way to take on a novel like Against the Day, or a novelist like Pynchon, except by diving straight into it, hurled headlong, immersing yourself within its inky and sticky depths, flailing around in it, probably drowning,* or at least feeling as if you're drowning, only occasionally breaking through some surfaces, if only momentarily, to see the sunshine above you, or if not the sun then at least some terrible counter-sun, a solar doppelganger shedding not light but anti-light, Pynchon's light, as he turns the world you know into something alien, menacing, dangerous and erotic in all the wrong ways.

The novel's narrative, if the definition of narrative can be manipulated to include a novel such as this, is carved out during the time between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair to the time just following World War I, when the world, newly made (or perhaps newly destroyed, its pieces left strewn about Europe), is taking its first steps into what we now understand to be the current situation. If you're not into that whole abstraction thing - and I probably wouldn't blame you if you weren't but I would also suggest to you that Pynchon, probably not your cup of tea - the novel is about Frank, Reef, and Kit, the sons of one Webb Traverse, dynamite-hurling anarchist and union man, and the ways in which the three of them deal, or don't deal, with his (spoiler!) murder. There is a lot more to it than just that, however... a whole heckuva lot more. Just look at this: here, out of context, are just a few things that happen: a set of boy adventurers, along with their Henry James-reading dog, travel through the Earth in a hydrogen balloon; they then, later in the novel, travel under the desert in a sub-desertine ship; a man teleports, and changes race and hair colour, through yoga; a man nearly dies under a wave of mayonnaise; people communicate with an intelligent tornado. It all takes a bit of getting used to. As in Gravity's Rainbow, but ramped up in Against the Day to fever pitches, history and science, the very world we've come to know and rely upon, unhinges, blends without warning into pseudo-scientific phantasmagoria, dimensional instability, and moral horrors only slight exaggerated. Things drawn from nearly every conceivable corner and province of the early 20th century, things like the mysterious Tunguska Event, the collapse of the St. Mark's Campanile, the minutia of early 1900's fashion, the bloody politics of the Balkan Peninsula, the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot, the Reimann Zeta Function, a form of calcite known as Iceland Spar notable only for its properties of double refraction, religious mania, sexual obsessions and depravities, all and more... worlds and worlds more... it's all here, everything you didn't know about the world. Pynchon is one of those authors who apparently not only knows everything, but has subjected everything there is to know to his own often horrific, often hilarious re-imagining of reality. The end result is a work of literature as likely to baffle and perplex as it is to dazzle and seduce.

It's clearly not for everyone. I've been reading Pynchon for a few years now and I had trouble accepting what he was doing here. But for those willing to sail the skies with Pynchon in this strange airship of a novel, the rewards, and the incredible and simple pleasure, of reading a master who not only wants to say something but have fun saying it are without comparison. Read Against the Day.

* He chose Milton.

* Drowning is the metaphor of the day. Deal with it.

Review :: Synecdoche, New York

2009-04-19T17:16:00.011-06:00

Sorting through my initial impressions of Synecdoche, New York, the directorial debut from Charlie Kaufman - the madman and perhaps genius, perhaps hopelessly self-indulgent scriptwriter behind Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - I find that, like with a David Lynch film (his later films, I mean... say Mulholland Dr or INLAND EMPIRE) I'm left not so much with a thesis, or even a clear idea of what the hell just happened, but rather I'm left with a list of adjectives that I can throw at, or at least hopefully hurl in the general direction of, the film, the appropriateness of which I cannot fully guarantee: humane, honest, empty, dead, dying, brilliant, indulgent, smug, detached, nihilistic, hopeful, neurotic, narcotic, loathing, fearful, obsessive, possessive... I could go on, but I need to drop a period in here somewhere and here's as good a place as any. There is a type or class of film, like a David Lynch film, like the films that Kaufman has written before this, that don't so much defy criticism as - seemingly deliberately, invitingly - turn criticism in upon itself, leading critics and reviewers to talk more about themselves and their reactions to what they just saw instead of the film itself. Kind of like theory, I guess. Navel-gazing can be fun, I know... but it usually doesn't get us very far. So, Synecdoche, New York.

Synecdoche, New York is the story - though that might be a too generous use of "story," so let's instead say it's the image or impression - of Caden Cotard (Philip "Mattress Man" Seymour Hoffman, who, let's all just agree, is nearly flawless when it comes to picking roles... except for that unfortunate Capote business), a man apparently living in a constant state of midlife and identity crisis. (Aside: though still important: the "Cotard delusion" is, according to Wikipedia (I know, I know), "a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost his/her blood or internal organs.") When we meet him he's about 40, I'd say, married to Adele (Catherine Keener), has a daughter with her, and is directing a production of Death of a Salesman. Adele leaves him, however, (of course), and takes his daughter, Olive, off to Germany, where she (Adele) becomes a world famous artist right?... you know, the nauseatingly "modern" type. I don't think we're supposed to hate her, but I did. Cotard's production, meanwhile, was very well received (he cast young people to play Willy and Linda Loman, that visionary bastard), and he eventually is given a grant to create his own play. And here's where the whole thing becomes thoroughly "Kaufman." The play he ends up staging is as complete a recreation of his own life, and everything around him, as is possible. Actually, strictly speaking, probably more than is possible, but let's not get too strict about what is and is not "real" here. Lines between art and reality blur; characters are doubled, redoubled, sorted into various tiers of reality and simulacrum, fall in love with characters and counterparts from outside their own tier, etc, etc; gender lines are crossed and recrossed, more etc, etc... it all becomes a bit metaphysically confusing, especially when he throws his then-wife Claire (Michelle Williams), who is playing herself in this aggressively neurotic play, into the mix with another actor, maybe stalker, who seems to be playing Caden better than Caden seems to know himself.

I think the whole thing is probably less confusing than it sounds, really. The search for meaning and identity, in which some of us, so many of us really, are hopelessly, desperately mired, always seems pretty straight-forward to those on the outside and so incomprehensible to those on the inside. Looking at Caden from the outside, as spectators to a life far more ordinary than it at first appears, with all its compulsions, obsessions, and generally pathetic behaviours, a strong audience urge to reach out and penetrate the art/reality boundary in order to slap him, shake him up a bit, begins to take hold, or am I only speaking for myself here? I felt frustrated with Caden. But the urge to slap him comes not because he's so different from us (me) but because he reflects us (me) perhaps too well. Not in the specifics, obviously (I don't have a German-speaking, tatooed lesbian daughter, nor neither the Cotard or Capgras delusions... I think), but in the general "feeling" Kaufman manages to capture of this uneasy life.* It's easy to diagnose someone else's life from the outside; easy, as Another once put it, too see the splinter in someone else's eye. We are, all of us, however, trapped inside; we are, all of us, from time to time in need of that godlike hand that occasionally comes crashing through whatever membrane separates us from our audience to slap us; like Caden says, in what for him is a rare moment of perhaps clarity, there are billions of people on earth, and none of them are extras: they are all the stars of their own plays, whether they are consciously staging them or not.

But now I'm victim to the film, too, and it's got me talking less about it than about my feelings and impressions inspired it. I'm not even interpreting it at this point but have used it to talk about something I'll just go ahead and guess Charlie Kaufman didn't even have in mind. Not very critical of me, I know. But Synecdoche, New York isn't the kind of film that you just give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to... it's the kind of film that you watch and digest, the kind that you put on a shelf and take down again some time later and think about. It's the most "literary" film released last year, by which I mean it feels more like a novel than a movie. It just operates on another level, one that you wouldn't say seems terribly interested in obeying rules and conventions. Actually, one of the only films I feel I can probably compare it to, besides a few of Lynch's more risky metaphysical tableaux, is Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Wait, don't leave! What I mean is that, like that film, it appears to be operating on the dream-level, where everything is given that slight lateral shift and bumped just left of reality, where cause and effect aren't quite as chummy as they are over here in what we call the real, where nightmares and fantasies come marching down the street, apparently having been given license to be out and about by nothing more than a stray thought, an unpursued impulse; it's the territory inhabited by people like Michele Gondry and Terry Gilliam, where all the signs that this is a dream, and follows dream rules, appear to be there but without ever giving us any reassurance that, yes, relax, this is actually a dream. It's a bit hallucinatory, and a bit dizzying, but when you discard a strict definition of the real, you're free to dazzle people. And dammit, Synecdoche, New York dazzled me.

* And "feeling" is an important part of this film... the way a scene feels, the image and impression that it leaves, is as important, perhaps more important, than the actual events of it.

Review :: Persona 4

2009-03-29T12:16:00.011-06:00

Last year, amidst all the blood and sweat, all the claw scratching, biting, and eye gouging of the current gen consoles' battle to emerge amongst consumers as the best gaming option, a battle that took shape as Microsoft launched their New Xbox Experience (NXE) and Sony desperately tried (and failed) to make Home sound interesting, and finding itself thrust into the gore-slicked frontlines against the likes of Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Fallout 3, titles that were supposed to redefine gaming and take it to new heights, titles that had gamers the world over blogging furiously and screaming blood-curdling murder against those who might appear indifferent or unconvinced... shrugging off all these corporate plottings and technological wonders and fanboy rantings was a little Playstation 2 game, Persona 4.

Persona 4, or Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 if you want to get all technical and geeky about it, is, as far as I can tell, the Playstation 2's last contented breath. This is the way the console ends... but not with a whimper, no sir... with a bang. A big, bloody fantastic bang. On a console noted for its outstanding JRPGs, Persona 4 is one of the best. Never receiving the same level of attention or coverage as the by-now-bloated Final Fantasy franchise or the phenomenally popular and probably demon-inspired Pokemon species of game, at least not here on North American soil, the Persona series has been quietly building up a niche of faithfully devoted fans or, as I like to call them, the upright heart and pure. Amongst those who know, there is hardly a franchise out there that inspires as much affection and devotion, which either means we are a faithful remnant sown on the rocky soil amongst weeds and serpents... or that we're all bonkers in need of long-term institutional care. I'm an optimist (and an egoist) so I maintain the former.

So, Persona 4. You play as a young teenager recently transferred from the bustling and as your are quickly and often told utterly corrupt big city into a small rural town, a small rural town soon shocked out of its foggy malaise of would-be innocence and naivete by a series of brutal murders. When one of the victims turns out to be a fellow high school student, you and your recently made new friends set out to catch the killer. All is not Nancy Drew here, however, as you discover that, far from being a case of routine homicidal mania (few things ever are in video games), the killer is actually... um, well this is strange... killing people by throwing them into a world that exists inside the TV! These victims soon show up on the ominous Midnight Channel, a Videodrome-style* program that only appears on televisions on rainy nights at, yup, midnight, after which their bodies are soon discovered in bizarre locations. However, mercifully, you almost immediately discover that, for some reason (sometimes things don't need reasons, you know), you possess the ability to enter this television world by climbing into the screen, and you soon make it your mission to save as many of the Midnight Channel victimes as you can. Inside the TV, the true Persona raison d'etre takes hold, and interiors become exterior. You see, everyone, all people, have more than one side, the side they present to their friends and to society, the good and acceptable side, right? and then the dark, creeping, perhaps Freudian but let's not push that idea too far side of them, the side that contains all their unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, desires. In the world inside the TV, these sides become separated, and the dark sides, the Shadow selves, reek havoc. Tamed and defeated, however, these Shadow selves become Personas, powerful manifestations of that characters personality, which are able to perform combat moves and cast spells. It's a surprisingly rubust gameplay system and an even more surprisingly sophisticated theme for a game to tackle. Soo... I guess think Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Silent Hill meets Final Fantasy.

Gameplay is also divided into two types. In the real world, Persona 4 is essentially a social sim. You make friends, attend class, participate in school clubs and activities, take part-time jobs, gather together with your team of friends to solve the case, and, um... date girls (some critics have crudely described the game as a dating sim... bah, I say. Bah!). In the television world, however, Persona 4 is a strong, though let's be honest not the best, JRPG combat game, in which you fight peoples' Shadow selves, often grotesquely themed versions of their hidden desires, and a host of smaller Shadows who are just there because... well, because you need some monsters to fight, dammit! But while the gameplay mechanics are functional and at times addictive, they are not the star of this show. Rather, startlingly unlike almost all other games, Persona's real charm lies in its characterizations, narrative, and themes. Though there are a few cultural hurdles to clear, and though there are some things you just shake your head at and write off as "Japanese," the characters here are some of the most well-defined, best-executed I've ever seen. It approaches cinematic quality (well, surpasses it actually, depending on what you hold up as your cinematic standard). Some of it is quirky, some of it is strange and bizarre, some of it is just a little too precious at points... but it all comes together to form a cohesive whole, one that feels psychologically and emotionally authentic. These aren't caricatures, aren't stock characters, aren't game cliches, but rather are fully formed characters, many of whom I enjoy spending time with, a rarity in games. So often game developers focus almost exclusively on mechanics (which are important, don't get me wrong) and end up ignoring, or simply tacking on, character development. Not Persona 4.

There is also quite a bit to enjoy on the thematic end of things. The Persona series has never pulled punches. It's solidly rated M, and for good reason. I mean, in Persona 3 the characters summoned their Personas with "evokers," gun-shaped tools with which they shot their own heads. You could actually see what I guess is sort of a psychic debris coming out the other side as their Personas appeared. (The teen suicide motif was not lost on critics, nope, no siree.) Persona 4 continues that mature tradition, though unlike many other M-rated games, Persona never feels as if it were exploiting its rating when it comes to things like violence of profanity. It feels more as if they simply made their game and accepted whatever rating they were given, which, given some of the games sexual themes (the Midnight Channel version of the biker gang member's repressed homosexual fantasy comes to mind), is, naturalich, M for Mature. And some of the things here are deftly handled. This isn't a clumsy or ham-handed treatment of repressed personality. In one particular confrontation, a friend's Shadow self, who had already revealed all that person's deepest and most embarassing romantic feelings, confronts her friend, a standoff that dives into the awkward depths of how friends really feel about each other. The sort of thoughts we all have - my friend is better than me, so I hate her; he's holding me back; he's the strong one, I'm the weak one - get played out. It's not as metaphorical as in, say, Silent Hill 2; some of the things are a bit on the nose. But the game gets credit just for going there, for setting up a sort of arena of the interior and allowing characters to battle it out and hopefully find some peace not only with each other but also with themselves. It's horrifying and touching.

(Um... that trailer might be enough to scare off some people... sorry.)

Persona 4 is simply a fantastic game. Its characters and themes are some of the strongest and most fleshed out in the industry, its combat is quick and fun, its storytelling is, even considering everything it's up against with the current gen releases, outstanding, add to all that a compelling art direction, some great anime cutscenes, and a snappy, hip soundtrack and you get not only of the best JRPGs in a long while but one of the best RPGs in a long while. It puts things like Fallout 3 and even Mass Effect to shame (though it's really not all that hard to shame Fallout 3... especially in the character and narrative departments). It's not without a few annoyances: the game does rely on some heavy grinding** in some parts, and it has a frustrating habit of making you click through a number of information screens a hundred times over, but those aspects are negligible. I should probably also point out that I haven't actually finished the game yet. It takes something like 50 to 70 hours to wrap this one up... so at least you're getting your money's worth.

If you like RPGs, and can handle a tolerable dose of some JRPG stylings (oh, sorry... an RPG is a "role-playing game" and a JRPG is a "Japanese role-playing game... and believe me, there is a distinction), Persona 4 is a must-play. I don't really want to get too deep into RPG theory, but Persona 4 breaks nearly every convention and improves, and I mean dramatically improves, on the already established Persona style. After playing it, I've had to rethink my choice for 2008's game of the year. Sorry, Dead Space. But any game that challenges Silent Hill 2 as one of the most psychologically and emotionally compelling games of all time simply must have my recommendation.

*Isn't that just the most bizarre trailer you've ever seen? Seriously, what the hell!?

** Grinding, for all you non-gamers, is a mechanic in which you simply fight battle after battle in order to advance not the plot but your character's level. It can turn some people off.

Dr. Manhattan's Penis

2009-03-21T09:59:00.024-06:00

At work, as I stand in a billowing cloud of dust, a haze I suspect of being both physical and epistemological and one that I'm trying my damnedest to see through, one of the many things that I have been thinking incompletely about lately (it's hard to follow any single thought to conclusion inside this cloud of dust... hence, epistemological haze) ever since the release of Watchmen at least, a movie that I can't seem to get out of my head, but not for the right reasons, not because I liked it so much, but because for me, being a fan of the Alan Moore graphic novel, that film highlighted for me in ways that I hadn't quite thought of before the limitations of the cinematic medium, and not just the limitations of an uninspiring director, nope, but of the medium itself, but so anyway, one of the things that I've been thinking about lately is that a terrible clarity exists in film. Film, pictures of any sort really, impose a vision - one might say version - of reality upon us that, at least as far as our visual sense is concerned, should be accepted as reality. Pictures make certain demands upon or awareness of reality. Of course, when it comes to films, most of us, instead of being left to the mercies of clogged doors of perception, appeal to an epistemological structure that does not depend solely on sight, allowing us to discriminate without much hesitation or confusion between reality and fantasy. But I am not talking about artistic irony or suspension of disbelief. No, I'm talking about perception and how it relates to artistic interpretation. The clearer the image, the less room we have to negotiate with what we are seeing. I am talking, you see, about Dr. Manhattan's Penis.*

In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan, previously John Osterman, is a sort of atomic super-being. Having been literally atomized in a laboratory accident, he reconstructed himself, particle by particle, into something else entirely, a being capable of manipulating matter and energy with nothing more than thought and will. As his fellow scientist and friend put it after John's post-accident reappearance: God exists, and he is American. But so, John, now far beyond anything recognizably human, finds himself slowly becoming detached from normal, everyday experience, a withdrawal that plays an important part in the Watchmen narrative. One of those detachments, it seems, is clothing. Though he does wear a sort of loincloth, or even sometimes a suit, when appearing in public, these are really more concessions to public morality than attempts at true modesty. Dr. Manhattan, probably because they have no meaning for him, just doesn't normally wear clothes, and in a novel so concerned with costumes and the way they create or conceal identity, this is likely important. So, for a good deal of Watchmen, you have a giant, blue-glowing man who recalls, more than anything, Da Vinci's Vitruvian man,walking around with no pants on. Just, you know, swinging in the breeze. On paper, in the panels of the novel, this works, partly because on the page the whole thing remains largely conceptual but also because of the way that Dave Gibbons chose to draw him (see above linked image), you do not so much get a penis as the suggestion of a penis.

In Zack Snyder's Watchmen, however, Dr. Manhattan's penis thrusts itself off the page, out of the realm of the conceptual, and into the full monty of visual clarity. There is no negotiating with this penis, no sir. It is there, on the screen. It moves. It possesses a lurid gravity.

Setting aside - setting far, far aside, so far aside, in fact, that you can't even see them, since they really aren't what I want to get into here - questions about the morality of on-screen nudity, it seems to me that something is lost, something perhaps critical, in this transition from concept to image, something I'm only starting to become aware of. The graphic novel is already a bridge between what is strictly textual and strictly visual, but even on the page, in this gentle blending of mediums, wiggle room can be found. A great deal of imagination is required to bring to life the images, either visual or literary. Readers aren't only consumers, they are participants. In film, or at least in most films, however, this type of imagination - which brings to life the art in the reader's mind, which brings the opportunity for self-evaluation and interpretation, which brings moments of insight - is no longer required. Another type may be, but not this one, not normally. Much of the imaginative, and what's worse, much of the hermeneutical work traditionally performed by the consumer of art is now done by the film itself. This is not an insurmountable hurdle, however, but it does require a deft hand and and a bit of trust in the audience. It requires relocating the conceptual, being aware that, though there are a few, there are not many overlaps between the literary and visual mediums. What is preciously ambiguous in one is crudely, vulgarly made obvious and dull in the full light of the other. A picture may be worth a thousand words but make that same picture move and its worth suddenly plummets. Ten words, maybe. Or fifteen. It is analogous, I think, to language. In the fuzzy passages of abstraction and conceptualization, a thought grows and expands, fills cathedrals worth of psychic pages: the thought is infinite. Spoken aloud or written down, that thought is shackled, chained, shoved roughly through Blake's dirty doors of perception. Limited, probably unintentionally, by our fumbling attempts at language.

Recently, Battlestar Galactica came to a triumphant finish. In poking around the various discussions online, however, I came across an interesting species of thought: some fans were actually disappointed in the series' finale because it left so many things "open." This sort of puzzled me because, other than a few narrative threads that simply didn't get treated (and most of these weren't terribly important), the last episodes wrapped up all the big questions. Wrapped up, that is, in that much was suggested, much was implied, much left in appropriate ways to the viewers imagination. But some viewers seemed angered by the endings provided. They apparently wanted everything spelled out. Perhaps they would have been satisfied if Edward James Olmos had turned to the camera and narrated each characters conclusions in detail, perhaps including such pointless things as what each of them ate for breakfast the next day. Maybe then they would have been satisfied. But this sort of petulent demand for absolute clarity is, I think, a consequence of what I am talking about. having grown accustomed to the cinematic medium's ability to provide absolute visual clarity, the viewer/reader's place in the creative process is lost. It goes beyond want... most viewers need everything spelled out to them, just like in a CSI episode.

We have lost the ability to negotiate with art. We are no longer adults, conversing like friends. At the feet of art, we are children. Uncomprehending. Dull. Unable to fully engage.

There are ways for the visual medium to be challenging. In the hands of filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, the late Stanley Kubrick, people like this, filmmakers who understood the strenghts and weakness of visual communication, movies possess as much power, as much ambiguity, as much "literariness" as literature. There is no reason to settle for dull art.

So, trapped in my dusty haze, I ponder these things. Incompletely. No single medium is without limitation. And I am growing more and more aware of film's limitations. Watchmen isn't a horrible film. But it does highlight the problem of a medium's versitility. Brought to life, Dr. Manhattan's giant blue member is distracting. But Snyder was, I think, trapped: he could either be "faithful" to the text** (whatever that means) or adapt it to the new medium. Neither is entirely preferrable, so I think Watchmen should have stayed exactly what it was. But Watchmen isn't the problem. It only tugged into the open a question that had been slowing gathering force in my mind. As we hurl ourselves headlong into new technological frontiers, with ever expanding entertainment vistas opening up in front of us, as hi-def technology becomes more readily and easily available, I'm wondering if a clearer, sharper image is really what we need. Maybe the older, fuzzier images nurtered healthier imagintions.

*****

UPDATE: As my friend Life of Turner points out - and I can always trust him to point these things out - I may have come across as a bit too iconoclastic here. I'm not dismissing the medium entirely. As anyone who has met me or reads this site already knows, I have invested a great deal of my time and mental activity into film. I'm not about to abandon it. I think great directors, and sometimes even not so great ones, powerfully employ the medium, twisting it, manipulating it, forcing it to play on our emotions and intellects in ways we may not have been prepared for; they throw back into Marshall McLuhan's face his aphoristic assertion: the medium may be the message, but we can manipulate the medium. However, unless you*** are Lynch or Herzog or Cronenberg or (P. T.) Anderson, or some one of the other very few people out there really making films, and I mean really making them, you are more likely the manipulated in this situation and not, as you may think, the manipulator. And for the self-unaware, mediums are tyrannical masters: they will break your back and take from you everything. The cinematic medium is a savagely literal one. It relies, almost exclusively, on sight, and sight, as my master William Blake taught me, is defective. "We are led to believe a lie / when we see not thro the eye." Years of literal conditioning has left audiences far less jaded and sophisticated than they think. They are often imaginative infants, craddled within the medium's dictatorial arms. What we read, what we watch, what we play - these things shape our minds. So this isn't a dismissal of the medium. It's a desire to see the medium used properly. As long as filmmakers rely on their medium's visual clarity (and those who do almost always couple visual clarity with dialogue so utterly banal and dull as to boggle the mind - a double crime against art), as long as, in other words, we as viewers are meant to turn off our minds and simply accept what we are seeing, film and television will continue encouraging us into a downward spiral that ends in the opposite of enlightenment, in mental darkness.

Too much? Nay, not enough!

*Interesting side-story. The other day I found and uploaded onto photobucket.com this picture of Dr. Manhattan taken from the Watchmen graphic novel. When I logged back into photobucket, however, I was told that the image, I guess because it includes a picture of a penis, had been moderated. Frustrating. I wonder if an uploaded picture of David would receive the same treatment.

** I think that he, by remaining so visually faithful to the text (in this case image), probably thought he was being "edgy" (whatever that means) by so prominently including the Doc's giant dong. Sorry, Snyder... it just adds another layer of tonal schizophrenia to an already confused film.

*** This is perhaps my most inappropriate use of "you" ever. Really, it doesn't make any sense.

Review :: Watchmen

2009-03-07T17:00:00.020-06:00

When asked how he would make Watchmen, beloved auteur of the bizarre and all things strange Terry Gilliam, who was once attached to direct the film, said that it should be made as a twelve-part mini-series; when asked how he would make Watchmen, series creator and crazy-looking person Alan Moore, who is famously upset because of several movies poorly adapted from his work (among which is the disastrous The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the not-so-disastrous but still not very good V for Vendetta), said he wouldn't. Watchmen shouldn't be adapted; it's unfilmable; it would be irreparably damaged in translation. However, cutting into some middle ground between Gilliam's hypothetical twelve plus hour epic and Moore's self-important insistence on zero, director Zack Snyder, convinced of his own directorial abilities, which, let's be honest, does include a powerful if somewhat shallow eye for spectacle and visual invention, has brought Watchmen to the big screen in what I am sure he thinks is all its giant, blue-glowing glory. But does Watchmen survive translation? The graphic novel is, if not the greatest, than at least very high on the list of greatest graphic novels of all time; it is one of those works of art that not only uses its medium to the fullest potential possible but which transcends that medium, elevating it beyond what was thought possible. Though the same can't be said for the film, Watchmen is a serviceable adaptation. Which is to say that it is disappointing.

Watchmen is the story of the end, or perhaps the beginning, who knows, of the world, and it is set in an alternate universe, one resembling our own but just ever-so-slightly laterally shifted off centre. It is a 1980's-ish universe in which Richard Nixon is serving his third term, America won the Vietnam war, and in which costumed heroes and masked vigilantes, heroes and villains both, are not the stuff of comics and kids stories but of every day life. Or at least they had been until a government act banned "masks" and outlawed costumed heroes. Now, most of these former heroes and villains live ordinary lives, haunted by the deeds and heroics of their past shadow lives. But when, with the doomsday clock sitting at five minutes to midnight and with the Americans and the Russians staring down the barrel of mutually assured nuclear annihilation, one of these former heroes, The Comedian (Jeffrey Dead Morgan), is murdered, the one costumed hero who has refused to give up his vigilante ways, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), suspects that a plot to kill off "masks" has been hatched and sets off to find answers. What ensues is a sprawling, ambitious super hero epic, one that quickly spirals much deeper then one dead former hero into a plan to change the world, entirely, forever.

Though I love the source material (and I mean really love it, which probably only exacerbates my disappointment), and though there are parts of this film that work, and work really well, Watchmen as a whole doesn't work. I don't know, perhaps no adaptation of it could work. I'm not quite sure how to nail down my criticisms of it, however, since individually all the elements seem to work on their own. The casting, especially Jeffrey Dead Morgan and The Comedian and Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach, is dead on, and the decision to go with relatively unknown actors (Billy Crudup as Doctor Manhattan and Malin Akerman as Silk Specter II are probably the most recognizable actors here) probably serves the film well since none of the actors bring too much of their filmographic baggage to the show. The effects, and many of the set-pieces, like the prison break scene, also work very well. Zack Snyder, who's last film was the vacuous though visually arresting 300, can obviously direct action and manage CGI. But, though everything looks good on paper, and even looks good on film, and though the film is remarkably faithful to the novel, perhaps even to a fault, something is missing, and I'm not only referring to the cut material. As a fan of the source material, it's impossible for me to separate my expectations for the film from what I already know and love of the novel. And though I can tolerate and even appreciate (when done well) changes or updates when it comes to adaptations, I can't forgive shallowness. Watchmen the film only skims across the surface of Watchmen the novel, never diving deeper into its murkier depths. So while all the important components of the story are present and accounted for, they aren't quite used to their proper effect.

To illustrate all this, especially the film's failings as an adaptation, a comparative digression. As if the darker pages of Marvel or DC had spilled over into reality, allowing costumed heroes to roam about the cities, accepted - even if begrudgingly - as a feature of ordinary life, Alan Moore's Watchmen deconstructed the super hero genre. However, Moore's heroes are not the shiny, wholesome types of heroes we've come to expect from comics.* His heroes, instead, are ones that fight or participate in crime in order to fulfill the needs of some psychological disorder. Costumes don't hide identity; for the characters in Watchmen, they create them. Walter Kovacs is Rorschach's alter-ego; the ordinary man is the vigilante's disguise. So sociopaths, lunatics, and borderline schizophrenics: these are the kinds of people putting on costumes. These are the watchmen guarding society - ethically suspect, viciously violent, teetering on the fine edge between moral certitude and outright insanity. In Zack Snyder's Watchmen, however, these ambiguities and subtleties of character are never explored. They are present, yes, but only in some perfunctory sort of way. An example: a scene, a pivotal one in the Rorschach origin story, is clumsily represented. Instead of letting us feel what Rorschach felt, instead of developing the scene in a way that allows audiences to share in his moral outrage, we are hastily told what Rorschach felt. What should be experience becomes exposition. Another example: the lust and sexuality hidden in both Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson)** that emerges as the two of them resume their long-repressed costumed ways is present on screen (boy is it ever) but isn't given its proper weight. It comes off more as cinematic titillation and as a strong desire to earn that 18A rating than as a psychological imperative driving these characters. Now both of these examples would be fine (though probably not so graphic) if this were just another Spider-Man movie or X-Men movie or just another of any of the major comic book movies plugging up theatres all over the place, but with is Watchmen, dammit. The film has pretensions beyond this. It deserves to have its themes handled by a steady hand and not by someone more concerned with making them look right. And when the film so obviously wants to be taken seriously and considered portentous, it needs to offer more than Snyder seems capable of delivering.

Since Christopher Nolan re-launched Batman and gave us what were essentially arthouse films disguised as summer blockbusters, comic book movies have been trying to outgrow their ordinarily B-grade britches. Now, here is a story ripe for such a treatment - demanding such a treatment, screaming out for it - but which gets, instead, Zack Snyder. While I have no doubt that he loves Watchmen, I do doubt Snyder's ability to direct anything of real emotional or intellectual substance. When the Watchmen teaser debuted a few months ago (conveniently embedded above), I watched it over and over again, reveling in its visual splendor, salivating over its images and the promise that they offered - an adaptation worthy of its source. Now, having seen the final product that Snyder delivered, I know why I liked that trailer so much and why I am so disappointed in the film. Snyder is a surface director. He can make anything look good. But while Watchmen looks good, it never gets past the make-up and the CGI, never dives into those deeper waters. It's like he pain-stakingly recreated the panels of Watchmen without actually understanding what they meant, giving us a pretty forgery instead of a true adaptation. I want to love this movie. I want Watchmen to be brilliant. Even just watching the trailer again, I wonder if I've got this wrong. But I don't think that I have.

Experto Crede: Though visually stunning and lovingly rendered, Watchmen fails to deliver much more than a shallow recreation of the graphic novel. It's a decent film, sure, but it's not the film the novel deserves.

* This worked better, and packed a heavier punch, I imagine, when the graphic novel was initially published, in the late 80's. Now, sociopathic heroes are all too commonplace.

** Um, just ignore the genealogical numbering. It would take too long to explain. Let's just say I'm too much of a purist to leave them off.

UPDATE: Here's a link to an AICN interview between Quint and Zack Snyder. While Quint is polite, and geeks out at the right moments, the whole interview only confirms my suspicions: that Snyder, probably through no fault of his own, I don't know maybe he's too young or something, should not have directed the film.

Review :: Choke

2009-02-28T16:27:00.012-06:00

When it came out in 1999, Fight Club seemed like a big deal. I was only 18 at the time, but after seeing that film, and after veraciously reading the Chuck Palahniuk novel upon which it was based, there came over me a sense that this - this schizo-social satire and savagely sardonic examination of masculinity coming out of the raggedy last breaths of a tormented millennium - was important. The film opened up a new world to me, the world of film as art, a world in which big questions could be asked, and maybe answered, on screen.* So I have a bit of a soft spot for that film. However, it struck me then, and it still strikes me now, that Fight Club, perhaps because of David Fincher's direction, perhaps because of the actors (I still can't see Edward Norton without thinking of Jack's smirking revenge), feels better suited to the cinematic medium than to the printed one. Now, nearly 10 years later, another Palahniuk adaptation, Choke, lurches forth and, having already read the novel, the same question swirls about in my head. Does Choke work as a movie? Well, sort of.

Choke, directed be one Clark Gregg, is the story of Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), a sex-addict and all around self-involved degenerate. His life is depressing: he and his best friend, a fellow sex-addict and chronic masturbater, Denny (Brad William Henke), work as "historical interpreters" in one of those lousy recreations of an early colonial village, which they both, of course, despise, despite being the default posture in this sorts of situations; his mother, Ida (Anjelica Houston), who apparently raised him while mostly on the run from the police, she being one of those anarchist, pseudo-revolutionary types who spend most of their time pulling mean-spirited pranks, has been hospitalized because of a rapidly deteriorating, and drug-fueled, mental condition and she only occasionally recognizes him; he compulsively has meaningless sex with strangers, though he is, well now this is just awkward, apparently unable to perform with people he might actually like, the self-loathing prick; and, just to top it all off, he and Denny, in a nihilistic tour de force, go from restaurant to restaurant staging chokes: Victor will deliberately choke on his food, you see, and then flail about the place, giving a stranger - preferably a wealthy one, wealthy people generally being the self-hating types who will always give away money in an effort to convince themselves that they are not, in fact, wretched people - the opportunity to "save" him. He is, in other words, hopelessly lost.

If this all sounds a bit overdone, if it sounds a bit like a Slothropian spiral into pointless deviance, that's because it is. Unlike Fight Club, in which deviance was used to treat the societal disease, the deviance being often more tolerable and appealing than the plastic and manufactured norm of a soulless and largely homogenized society, Choke uses deviance as an end unto itself, so that, as with Victor's friend's self-pleasuring addiction, the result is basically potency without creation. All the elements of a satiric roll in the cultural hay are here but none of them feel genuine, as if both Palahniuk and the filmmakers just decided to sit down and manufacture of sort of Thomas Pynchon-lite experience, one that on the surface seems meaningful and important but which is ultimately not much more than a hollow recitation of moral horrors and empty obscenities. If I may make a comparison, the appeal of the Tyler Durden character lay in his refusal to participate in, and his willingness to viciously exploit, the casual shallowness of post-modern society. Fight Club felt like a mythic restructuring of culture at the hands of cultural deviants, and it all appeared teleological - Durden was burning down society but in order to create another one. His actions had an end, a goal. Victor, on the other hand, is a character with no power (even though Rockwell is a powerful actor). He is neither the rallying, messianic figure of a post-modern cultural revolution nor is he an audience surrogate, a stand-in for some sort of shared cultural experiece. If this is some half-addled attempt at satire, it is lost on me because satire requires at least a few points of affinity, some touchstones with which we can say Yes, that's me or Yup, that's true. But there are no touchstones here. It seems too disconnected from ordinary experiance, too outrageous in its pruriance to be meaningful satire.

And yet, even after this heavy mountain of criticism, I'd be lying if I said that there's nothing here to like. Sam Rockwell, for instance, is fantastic. It always seems to me as if he is on the very edge of greatness but always fails to get the recognition he deserves. Also, tonally speaking, this movie is dramatically different than Fight Club, which I appreciated, and which is probably a good thing, both for director Clark Gregg and Palahniuk. (I keep bringing up Fight Club, and I feel bad about that, but that film/book really does cast quite a long and deep shadow over the rest of Palahniuk's work and over all other, but at this point largely hypothetical, Palahniuk adaptations (Edit: oh, I just checked IMDb and I guess another Palahniuk adaptation is on the way)... anyway, but so Fight Club had this iconoclastically epic feel to it, which was appropriate for a film about cultural apocalypse. Here, Gregg wisely steers the project into a much more subdued, and dare I say intimate, direction.) Though, returning to my earlier criticisms, I do think that an unintended, or probably unintended, consequence of this direction is that the film's subversive elements, if there are any here, are undercut by a sense of stylistic mediocrity, as if the movie's style and theme don't quite cooperate with each other.

So out of all of this can I pull a recommendation? Sure. It's not a bad movie. It just isn't great. But coming from Palahniuk, the man who gave us Fight Club, I want greatness, or at least I want meaningfulness. This just feels small, and not in a good way, but as if both he and this film are retreading already well-worn paths, and not treading them nearly as well as others, or as in Chuck's case, as well as he himself, have done in the past. It's satire unhinged, aimed at nothing, and in the end more nihilistic than useful.

Experto Crede: Choke isn't all bad. It's just not all that good either. If you are counter-cultural, or if like me you just enjoy every once in a while adopting a counter-cultural posture, you might like this. You just as likely won't, though.

* This has more to do with my own biography than with any innovation on Fight Club's part. I simply hadn't seen many "important" films at that time in my life.

Trailer :: Inglourious Basterds

2009-02-20T17:58:00.004-06:00

Upon Closer Inspection :: Part 4

2009-02-18T19:22:00.007-06:00

1300. Act III. A still and breathing silence and now is the only time in which you can hear footfalls in the emptiness... Heavy boots and occasional clattering of doggy toes sliding and scampering retreating bouncing barking. Easy calm in this silence... quiet; speech is smooth and relaxed now... but weighted with the expectation of dust and noise. Then: the whooshing roar white noise thick as water and just as wet A totalizing noise rushing out seeping into and filling everything - the noise of a tyrant or priest: demanding all and leaving no room for anything else. The constant inhale of lungs hungry for dust eventually blends effortlessly into the hum of blood Steady and unconscious invisible sound. It is backdrop, canvas. It blurs out of focus for the foreground sounds. A bumblebee mean and angry buzzing in my hand sliding and chattering over rough grain imposing a vision of sound leaving only a smooth trail, an easier surface. Into a deeper, darker sound now. The pure white rrriip of the hungry maw. Modernity in microcosm. Teeth spinning, patiently ravenous, aggresive, howling, grinding, reducing, an arboreal holocaust producing: a perfect blank, prestine, stripped of the old self, made new, made ready. A conversion of wood. Mathematics - fractions and 16ths - now narrowing, now widening, planes arising and sliding out, the playful imperfections of nature rubbed down into human measurements. This is an act of imagination, human and holy: this sound, this over-bearing, splitting rip. A few decibals to the left now: the shriek. Ripper. Not a buzz but a spinning scream, a circle of knives cutting giant aural swatches through the air, a sound only immitated in grammar by blood veins bursting in the bvvvvvvvvvv of extreme mimesis. Drifting dust whirls, smoke sometimes rises, the hot teeth endlessly cycle. Beside this sound, the gentle swath of a beach in the wind with grains gently sliding. Warm dust floats and permeates, the finely ground atomies of maple and oak. The whisper of thighs on clean sheets. And above it all twining from sound to sound is the constant inhale of those hungry lungs. The suck: a rush of chips and dust, torn bits rattlesnaking up and through the tubes, unwilling, resistent, but compelled by vacuum authority. And it all, all of it, this clattering, shrieking apocalypse, comes from under water, each shriek each scream each groan each howl is muted, their razor's edge dulled, behind the gentle padding, foam and plastic, hugging my head. Inside the noise, I am silent.

Review :: Zack and Miri Make a Porno

2009-02-16T14:57:00.007-06:00

What would happen if Boogie Nights knocked up American Pie? I don't know, but it would probably look a little bit like this:

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is Kevin Smith's latest film, following hot on the heels of the under-rated and savagely funny Clerks 2. Platonic roommates and best friends Zack (the very quickly going to wear out his welcome Seth Rogan) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are losers. Ahem, I mean slackers. They are both working dead-end jobs and are losing money fast. When their power and water get unexpectedly turned off (unexpected inasmuch as they didn't pay their bills), things begin to look bleak until Zack, brilliant mind that he is, stumbles upon the idea of making a porno together. So, rounding up some View Askew alumni (Jason Mewes and Jeff Anderson), they set out to make a few bucks - the dirty way. What they don't plan for, however, is their personal feelings getting in the way, as they always do in this situations, and they soon find themselves living every "sex is complicated" cliche that romantic comedies have been recycling for the past, oh I don't know... forever.

Now, let's get one thing out and in the open here: I've been a Kevin Smith fan for a while. Not a fanboy, mind you... just a fan. His particular blend of genuine heart, crass humour, and his normally sharp eye for interpersonal maneuvers and dynamics, a blend that was brilliantly delivered in such films as Chasing Amy and Clerks 2, has always appealed to me, even if some of his more over-the-top digressions into vulgarity have left me shaking my head. Zack and Miri, however, just feels empty, like an uninspired retread of material and themes he has developed (and developed much better) in other films. It feels more like we are watching a masturbatory fantasy play out than like a genuine cinematic experience. And that's a problem. It all comes across as adolescent, like school-boys giggling over strong language and naughty pictures. It's hard, in fact, to see much of the Chasing Amy Kevin Smith in here. Example:

(During interviews for the their porno)
Zack: What's your name?
Lester: Lester... Lester the Molester Cockenschtuff
Zack: Wow. That's a great porn name.
Lester: I get to pick a porn name? Then I want to be called... Pete Jones.

In Chasing Amy, the characters talked about dick and fart jokes in a very self-aware, very meta-fiction sort of way; in Zack and Miri, we just get American Pie-style dick and fart jokes with little-to-no awareness or tongue-in-cheek irony. But these aren't just American Pie-style jokes, oh no: they are the straight-to-video American Pie-style jokes, the kind which rely only on out-grossing the already gross. Take the above dialogue. That's a dumb joke. And that's about as clever, or as clean, as any of the jokes get here. Smith seems to think that simply ramping up the explicit and naughty nature of the story will make it funnier and more endearing. It doesn't. In fact, the two moments in the film that I think Smith thought would be the most hilarious and outrageous just feel disingenuous and soulless and very, very pre-pubescent.

(Uh, beware: this is the red band trailer, so it does have naughty language in it. But it gives you an idea of what the film is like.)

So the whole thing is disappointing. I like Kevin Smith. But it seems that for every Dogma or Clerks 2 that we get we also get a Mallrats or Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Experto Crede: while it's not as bad as the Apatow school of comedy, it just doesn't live up to what I know Smith can do.

Upon Closer Inspection :: Part 3

2009-02-10T16:47:00.004-06:00

1015. Act II is much like Act I. So is Act III, actually. Try as I might, I'm finding it hard to impose an actual trajectory or arc on any of this. Shop life basically consists of one task after another.

1020. Wait, I suppose I could talk about the life of an order. There's a bit of a trajectory there. A work order comes to us as a list of parts required for a job. If it's a railing order, and most of our orders are railing orders (the other kind of order we take being door orders), the list will look something like this: x feet of rail, x amounts of rail accessories (wall brackets, which hold the rail to the wall; goosenecks, piece of rail curved on one end that allows the rail to change directions vertically; elbows, like a gooseneck but which allows the rail to curve horizontally), x amount of stair accessories, x posts, etc, etc. We take the order, look at what me need to manufacture, and get to work. The first bit of business for nearly every part is grabbing an appropriate piece of wood. Wood comes to us as 10 or 11 foot lengths of various depths: 4/4 (i.e. an inch. Well, technically, about 15/16's of an inch but... whatever, that's a detail), 6/4, or 8/4. We work primarily in hardwoods, maple being the norm, but occasionally we get some more playful types of wood: rustic hickory, alder, beech, cherry, and oak. After we've grabbed the wood and made a nice big pile of it on a cart, we truck that cart over to the jointer (something like this) a-and grind it so that at least one of the edges is straight and smooth, allowing for a quick and easy cut on the tablesaw, which is usually the next step. After it's been sized on the tablesaw, depending on what its destiny is, the piece of wood gets run a few times through the planer (this), a sort of much more aggressive and no-nonsense version of the jointer, a howling banshee of a machine. Now, that sumbitch of a board is much smaller than it started out as and is ready to fulfill it's tree-ish destiny: i.e. it becomes whatever the hell we want it to become. If it's rail, we laminate it together with another piece, making it nice and strong; if it's wallbrackets, the part gets traced onto the board and cut out with a bandsaw; if it's parts for a post it gets sized on the circular saw and has either a male of female dado put into it; if it's... well, you get the point. It's putty in our hands. Hard, splintery, sliver happy, slam-your-fingers-in-it-and-regret-it putty. On their journey towards human convenience and luxury, most parts, not all but most, require routing. A router is essentially a motor with a spinning bit on the end that cuts a profile into a piece of wood. Some routers are small and whiny; some glare at you; others are demon possessed; and the biggest ones are filled with spite and malice and you don't put your hands anywhere near them but allow a power-feeder to do the work for you. So, for instance, with rail we rout the board four times, once on each edge, to create a nice, round (depending on the profile) piece of rail that anyone would want to hold onto and caress. After it's been routed (routered? I'm not all that sure about the verbiage here), it's ready for sanding, which is what I spend most of my time doing. All the above processes are hard on wood, you see. They leave marks, jaggies, tears, scratches, chatter, rips, and sometimes blood on the piece, all of which sanding is supposed to remove. After everything is smooth and ready for the prom, it, like Laura Palmer, gets wrapped in plastic, labelled and then stands around awaiting installation, which isn't our job.

1100. But so, let me tell you the story of my feet. For the past eight years, my feet have lived a comfortable, stress-free life, the extent of the demands leveled against them being nothing more strenuous than carrying me from one sitting position to another. They carried me to desks, chairs, couches, car seats, bus seats, movie theater seats, church pews, and, their favourite, the kitchen table chairs. Theirs was a life lived in innocence. Occasionally, they were forced to stand in a line somewhere, which they resented greatly, but they managed, they coped: their mostly pampered life out-weighed whatever small inconveniences they every so often encountered; they knew they had it made, and had it good, so they kept their mouths shut during those brief stints when actual participation was required. When they carried me out of the university last Christmas, however, they found themselves walking into a very different lifestyle. Now, instead of carrying me from sitting position to sitting position, they carry me from standing position to standing position. This is a terrible thing, I assure you, and they have voiced their protests most vehemently, drawing into their protestations my calves and lower back, all of who feel very put out by this change of affairs. It's a full-body mutiny. Their plan is to incapacitate me.

1130. Their plan may be working. Throughout most of the morning, I feel pretty good. Around 1130, though, which is the mid-point of the day, pain begins to set in. Remember, gentle reader, that I've been a slouch for nearly eight years, a slacker of the highest order. That it takes about four hours for fatigue to start setting in isn't embarrassing - it's an accomplishment.

1200. Lunch is nearly here.

1215. I've noticed that, in writing about the minutiae of my day-to-day life, I've created something of a paradox. In physics (or quantum physics, meta-physics, or something - I can't really recall), there is a law, or at least a principle, or maybe it's only a vague, effervescent notion (I'm talking out of my ass here, I know, but I swear to you I've heard this before... somewhere) that says simply measuring a thing actually changes that thing, so that the very act of observation defeats the purpose of observation, i.e. to see that thing as it really is. In writing about what I do at work, I've created a lovely little meta microcosm because at work I've begun thinking about writing about being at work. What's worse, I am at this moment writing about being at work thinking about writing about being at work. So I've now descended, perhaps irredeemably, into a post-modern miasma of self-consciousness. I've officially spilled over, blurred subject and object into an indistinguishable, indistinct mass of self-aware and rhetorical narcissism. I've kicked loose, lost balance. I've stumbled into a more frightening rabbit hole.

1230. Lunch. Lunch will save me. Now I've got something solid onto which to hold. An empty, grumbling stomach pushes away all those Gordian concerns. Take that, post-modernity.

Upon Closer Inspection :: Part 2

2009-02-06T15:35:00.017-06:00

0730. The work day has begun. I work at a small stairs and doors shop that sits, as if trying to avoid the bustle and intrusion of the metropolitan buzz, just outside the city of Saskatoon (a city without much buzz, sure, but the detachment is nice, if sometimes a little awkward), and we specialize in, as the logo says, Curved Stairs & Railing And Custom Doors, a strange little sign - one obviously amended at some point to include "And Custom Doors" - that I guess is geting the job done since business, even in this depression-panicked economy, has been steadily growing. It's a fairly new shop, only a few months old right now, but it's quickly established itself within Saskatoon's industrial milieu. Its production team consists of exactly my father, my brother, and me, and I'm a fairly recent addition at that. In addition to the three of us churning out product there are: three sometimes four installers, of which Boss is one; an office manager-type/customer relations person, Boss's Wife, who is our go-to person when a question comes up; and one very small, very energetic dog, a terrier/chihuahua-looking thing, named Bear, who spends most of his days in the office with Boss's Wife but who, immediately upon release during one of her many quick visits to the back in order to relay information, tears around the whole place, runs up to you, runs away from you, and is generally too adorable to believe. Besides this core team, every once in a while someone else will pop their head into the shop, fiddle around, and disappear, their actual contributions to this whole thing being a mystery to me. (EDIT: Ah now, some clarification: these are not employees that I'm talking about. Nope. An employee's contribution, especially in a business this size, where everyone's work is noticed, is not questionable or mysterious. Naw, I mean the random people, people unknown to me, who occasionally are present and seem to be doing... well, something, I'm not sure what. This happens in every shop I've worked in and seen.) But now so, in the silence before the day's labour of dust and noise begins, a small, impromptu meeting occurs. It's not really a meeting, though I'm sure some executive somewhere would insist on calling it a Power Meeting or something like that but really it is only a few words exchanged between Boss and the three of us to make sure that we are all pulling in the same direction. The factors influencing what work gets done in a day are various, some predictable, some incomprehensible, some occult. A white board calendar hangs over the shop desk, on which the month's schedule is only occasionally sketched out, but this rarely determines the day's actual events. Attempts to impose vision or order upon any of this are almost always futile gestures. Most of the time, the official-looking schedule is abandoned in order to deal with the sundry pressures at hand: railing orders that are suddenly due; orders that were modified are filled incorrectly (rarely our fault, but oh-well); completed orders that have been standing around for weeks, slowly being pirated for parts, all of sudden being demanded, requiring a hasty effort to once again fill in the now-pirated pieces. You see, the construction business is apparently not at all as devoted to schedule as you might imagine. When a half dozen companies or contractors are all involved in, say, putting up a house, a condominium, etc, juggling everyone's activities becomes an exercise best left for fuzzy thinkers and laid-back hippies. The truly anal retentive or highly organized person will quickly lose, or hurt, his or her mind in the confusion, cunning, and compromise involved in staying afloat here. So scheduling is often myopic and changes day-to-day. However, the day's (or at least the next few hours') schedules established, the actual work begins.

0735. I'm sanding. Like I said, I'm fairly new here, only one and half months full-time now, so my role is often that of sander. Nearly all parts produced need sanding, see, and sanding is, in terms of production difficulty, fairly easy and doesn't require a very deep knowledge of a whole lot. You stand in front of a bench for hours, holding a palm-or orbital-sander (think world's worst, and most aggressive, sex aid), running it back and forth over the piece, making sure all machine marks are gone, all chatter marks are removed, all rips smoothed over, etc, and basically making sure the part looks good. I actually like the work. Me, I'm a fairly obsessive guy, with just a hint of perfectionism - not the kind that manifests in odd compulsive behaviour but the kind that demands that I make sure things are done right. Sanding is all about getting it right. During production, parts are man-handled (sexist, I know, but this is the third shop I've worked in and I've only met a few women, okay one, who does this kind of work, so if it isn't politically correct it's at least a well-established commonplace), bumped, dumped, and generally treated like pieces of wood. So I'm left to clean them up and get them ready to ship. It's not quite as mind-numbing as it sounds. Obsessive behaviour aside, the job does require careful attention. Sure, you can doze off, hit automatic for a bit and enter the zone, but then you start to miss things, important little things like cross-grain scratches, or chips in the joints, or holes that should be filled with wood-filler and cleaned up. Basically, at any given moment, there are a half-dozen things for which you should be alert and watching. So, the sorts of things you start thinking of while you're sanding aren't very involved. You start singing to yourself old songs that you like but haven't listened to in months or even years; you begin going over your favourite scenes from movies, imagining yourself within them, striking impressive poses (in your head) and spouting menacing one-liners; you relive moments from you own life with a revisionist sweep - this is what I should have said to That Guy at That Time, or if I had done this then, maybe this would have happened. You know, things like that. None of these thoughts are very important and they blink away the moment something interrupts them, popped like evanescent mental bubbles, only a slight residue, a mental scum, left remaining afterward. A thousand of these thoughts develop and vanish over the course of a day. They are byproducts, really, side-effects of a mind occupied but not entirely occupied.

0845. I'm still sanding.

0900. 0900 is an important hour. It represents a cross-over, a step taken past the first moments of the day into the day proper. It's a mental thing, I guess. When you do the same thing over and over, you establish little goals.

1000. Coffee break. Our work day is divided thusly: 0730-1000, coffee break, 1015-1230, lunch, 1300-1500, coffee break, 1350-1600, home. I've taken to thinking of the day in terms of three acts and an epilogue. Or denouement. Act one is long. Long like a son of a bitch. But each following act is incrementally shorter, meaning that once you've pulled yourself across the threshold of Coffee Break 1, you can tell yourself that you are more or less done for the day and almost believe it. Coffee Break 1 is a good thing. After 2.5 hours of work, depending on what you've been doing (some jobs are less strenuous than others), you are still feeling pretty good. You have that satisfying newly worked feel. Later in the day, that feeling will disappear and be replaced by other, less pleasant feelings. Coffee break with my brother and father is, for the most part, much like breakfast, i.e. quiet. If someone else is in the coffee room, like Boss or Boss's Wife or anyone else, conversation tends either to be politely hollow or filled with minor bits of business. Generally not serious stuff. If it's just the three of us, though, it's mostly quiet. Fruit, yogurt and protein-rich energy bars are eaten; a few pages of books are read (reading a book exclusively during coffee breaks and lunches is unique - it gives you a strangely saturated feeling, like you've been soaking in the book a lot longer than you expected); newspapers are perused and either guffawed or huffed at; walls and ceilings are vacantly observed. Occasionally, a news story is picked up in brief conversation. Even more occasionally, a philosophical or theological query is offered, though the time limitations don't usually afford the kind of treatment any of us like for this sort of thing so usually we leave this for supper (or dinner, if you're an ass), where a full, lively debate can be unleashed. We are a family of debaters. Throughout most of my life, supper time has been a time not only of eating but of higher learning. When I moved away to go to college,* I found that in terms of critical thinking I was better equipped than most people my age. This isn't bragging, just noting. Most people, as you no doubt already know, are very hard to engage in serious conversation. In colleges and universities, where I've spent most of my time for the past eight years, it's not too hard. It's even expected. But outside those temples of thought, serious conversation is difficult. You certainly don't talk about predestination, or the fundamental differences between Left and Right, in the coffee room, so any talk like this usually breaks off, out of polite deference and not embarrassment, whenever someone else walks into the break room. But so anyway, the main thing I'm trying to say is that Coffee Break 1 is usually quiet, a time just to pause. All the machines are off, the dust collector silent, the door closed (installers or Boss might be working on something), and we just sit, eat, and read. It's nice.

1015. Act two begins. I've not yet figured out what sort of play this is. I doubt the metaphor actually works, but I like it.

*Maybe now is the time that I should mention that, yes, I'm living at home at the moment. I moved away for five years to go to college (5 years = two degrees) but then moved back home afterward in order to attend another university (2.5 years = third degree). Canadian student loans being what they are, the Saskatoon housing market being what it is, and me being me and determined to keep my grades up as high as possible, all meant that renting, much less buying, a place was a silly thought. I've only been out of school for two months now, and I plan to enter school again in about seven months, so I'm probably just gonna continue living at home, at least for the next year or two. It's not as bad as you'd think** and pretty damn convenient when three of you work at the same place.

**Sometimes it is.

Upon Closer Inspection :: Part 1

2009-02-05T17:31:00.007-06:00

0625. I'm awake. My alarm doesn't go off till 0630, but I'm awake nevertheless. It's not full consciousness that I'm experiencing, just that fuzzy kind that's capable pretty much only of bemoaning the fact that it is stirring and not sleeping, slowly being pulled towards the day. The scattered remnants of the previous night's dreams are still drifting through my head. I'm a dreamer, yes. I don't normally remember my dreams but in the first few minutes of waking life I can still feel their impressions. These impressions will have mostly vanished by the time I'm dressed, fed, and out the door but for now they are there. If a dream has been particularly vivid, I might dwell on it for a moment or two. What makes one dream more vivid or memorable than another is a mystery, I suppose. Like take this one from last night. I dreamed about Aliens. Yup, the movie Aliens. This confuses me because I haven't watched any of those movies in a long while and I can identify no real reason why, seemingly for no reason, I would dream about it. As I lay puzzling about it, perfunctorily waiting for the alarm to sound (I on principle refuse to get up before 0630 even if I'm awake), I notice that I can't recall any of the dream's details. It's like knowing the title of movie but now knowing what happens in it: I know I had the dream but don't know what it was about. Was I Sigourney Weaver (this has happened before - this isn't the first time I've dreamt of Aliens); did the alien kill anyone; was it Aliens canon or an apocryphal tale? Why I remember it at all, why it didn't just roll back down into whatever subconscious vault it broke lose from, is a mystery to me. But it's one I'm not terribly concerned with solving at the moment. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out the best way to avoid 0630. Or, time manipulation options notwithstanding, how to avoid the implications of 0630. I do this everyday. Everyday I'm faced with 0630 and everyday I attempt to negotiate with it. Am I sick? No, not today. Is there any reasonable reason to stay in bed? Doesn't look like it. Can I quit my job? Yes, but I probably shouldn't. 0630 is drawing closer. I roll over, turning my back to the clock in one last, petulant effort to deny the reality before me. I'm warm, snug, but can't quite convince myself that I'm actually ignoring the clock. I'm sadly aware that I must soon face the cold. My house isn't heated by conventional methods, you see, but by a wood-burning furnace, which means that the house is only heated as long as someone is tending the fire, or is awake to start one for that matter. So it's always cold in the morning, which doesn't make 0630 any more appealing. Nevertheless, temperature and clocks and dreams aside, I'm milking every last damn second out of my time in bed.

0630. Negotiations have failed. I must rise. It's cold.

0640. Breakfast. Breakfast usually consists of a bowl of porridge and a ciabatta bun (it's a triangular piece of bread, not quite white, not quite brown, but hefty and filling and good with peanut butter and syrup (a condiment combo I've been eating since I starting eating solid food and still loving very much, thank you) and chicken, jam and cheese and just about anything you'd want, really). Some days I have cereal. I'm particularly partial to Golden Grahams. But since I started working again, and since the time between breakfast and lunch is considerable, I find cereal to be not quite enough, so porridge it is. After breakfast, I prepare my lunch bag, usually another ciabatta bun (today it's a turkey and cheese sandwich), some fruit, yogurt, pudding, and really whatever's at hand. I then grab my coffee and sit down in front of my computer for 10-15 minutes.

0713. I'm out the door. I'm now fully awake - and if I wasn't, the blast of the cold Saskatchewan morning ensures that I am. I drive to work with my brother and father, who I work with. I'm a big guy, but I usually take the back seat in my brother's car, which means that I have to squeeze my way past the folding front seat. Getting in is a pain in the ass but once in it's comfortable enough. In the front, my knees brace uncomfortably against the dash and I can't move my legs at all, one of the only physical sensations that actually has the potential to throw me into a semi-panicked state (for the same reason I can't sleep in a sleeping bag, which is something I discovered my first year as a camp counselor, after the first week of which I switched, with great relief, back to a sheet and blanket, making the rare "sleep out" nights rather interesting), but in the back the padded seat gently presses against them and I'm fine. I'm not one to indulge psychological myth interpretation, finding them too reductive and rather domineering, but, wrapped in winter wear, a scarf secured around my head so that my breath is warm and wet against my face, me folded into the back seat so precisely that a seat belt feels redundant, I'm aware that there may be something vaguely uterine going on here. I've actually thought about this, on the way to work. I haven't thought about it much, or bothered to parse what it means about me, it just crosses my mind every once in a while, more in an ironic and detached way than any other. Anyway. Once we are all in and underway, there is no conversation, just silence. It's the same during breakfast, actually. A few mumbled details about the coming day may escape, but that's about it. The silence isn't awkward or weird but the silence of people who for the most part get along well, already spend their days together, and have nothing much to say at the moment. Wait, that's not right. There may be no conversation in the car, but there sure isn't silence. There's my brother's car. It's nothing special, as far as cars go. It's a Cavalier ('99, I think) but he's done... something to it. We live a few kilometers out of a small town, but people in the small town can hear it. It's a muffler thing; he's very fond of it. But so, in the back of this small car, sitting above what could be the province's loudest after-market muffler for all I know, moving through the dark winter morning along with all the other unfortunate cars carrying people to work, I'm content. It's not a long drive, only about 15 minutes. The shop that we work in is only one town over, so there really is no commute to speak of. The day is going to be long. All the days are long now. But, at the moment, I'm not at work and I'm enjoying these last work-less moments.

0728. We arrive at work and I once again am forced to wrestle with the front seat. It's an inelegant sight. The shop is visible from the highway and I imagine motorists seeing me - legs twisting for footing, the car more birthing me than admitting me - and chuckling at my expense. The thought is more of a reflex than anything else. I've never really being laughed at that I recall but I've imagined through much of my life that someone, somewhere is laughing at me. It's a symptom of being too self-aware, and not the good kind of self-aware. Most of the time, these sorts of thoughts don't even register on a conscious lever but rather manifest as sort of mental tics, like someone (okay, me) constantly pulling at their shirt in an effort not to let it bunch up or tighten in a way that highlights one's (mine) unflattering figure. And so I'm finally out, and I tug at my jacket to get it back into place, that smirking seat having tried, since it couldn't hold me, to at least strip me. I walk into the shop, in which hangs that strange silence that's only found in those places normally cacophonous and aurally dangerous. It's the same kind of silence heard in schools after school and in churches during weekdays, the silence that shouldn't be. In minutes, it will be overwhelmed by a rush of engulfing noise, noise not only heard but felt, sound that moves through as well as around you. I stow my lunch in the small lunch room, and grab my gear. Someone, me or my brother or my father, turns on the dust collector, a sort of vacuum nervous system with arms and tentacles stretching throughout the shop - there is a second in which you can hear the metallic scraping as the motor spins up, the mechanical equivalent of taking a deep breath, and then a whooshing roar, a sort of sonic wave that sweeps through and takes hold of the shop, and the day has begun.

Review :: Let the Right One In

2009-01-31T23:42:00.020-06:00

In my last post, I mentioned, after giving The Dark Knight top honours as my favourite picture of the year, that significant gaps existed in my experience of 2008's movies, which meant that my choice came with some heavy qualifiers. Let the Right One In was one of those gaps. Now that I've seen, I don't know if my choice has changed. It has been challenged, however. And this challenger comes with some damn sharp teeth.

What was the last good vampire movie? I mean the last really good vampire movie. 1922's Nosferatu? It could be reasonably argued, I think. F.W. Murnau might have single-handedly created and ended the vampire horror movie genre. Since then, nearly every creature of the night movie has tread the same path. After all, when it comes right down to it, the vampire mythos, with its convoluted rules and gimmicks, its well-worn and by now utterly tiresome tropes and conventions, are just not all that interesting. Sunlight. Garlic. Stakes. Blah, blah, blah. I mean, just look at this. Look at it. Look at it and try to resist the urge to find something sharp and pointed to drive through your own heart just to escape its soul-crushing banality. This is what vampires have become: icons for disaffected teenagers; once potent metaphors of human evil reduced to the boring cliches of high-school drama. But it's not just the recent spate of glossy, teen-marketed films. From Lestat to Blade to Buffy (which, the careful reader will know, I love), it's hard to find anything in vampire cinema to get excited about. (A few exceptions exist: Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht and E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire and... well, maybe that's it.) So, when I started hearing buzz about a new vampire film wowing festival audiences - and not just a new vampire film, a Swedish vampire film - I was initially skeptical. If there's one thing I don't need, it's to suffer through more imported, sub-titled Anne Rice style undead angst and sexual ennui. However, I did finally overcame those apprehensions and watched Let the Right One In. And I'm glad that I did. Let the Right One In isn't the new definitive vampire film; it probably won't enter the popular consciousness in the same way that the over-rated Interview with the Vampire did (at least not until the recently announced, and entirely pointless, American remake is set loose against us).* But, cinematic cynicism aside, it is the most haunting and beautiful vampire story told since Klaus Kinski donned his make-up.

Based on a novel of the same name, Let the Right One In (Lat den ratte komma in), directed by Tomas Alfredson, is the story of a bullied and lonely 12-year old boy, Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), who one day meets and befriends the young girl who has just moved in next to him, Eli (Lina Leandersson). But there is something a little... uh, off about this girl. By now, if you've heard anything about the film, or even seen the trailer, you know that this young girl is actually a vampire. But in meeting and falling in love with her, Oskar begins to gain confidence and stand up for himself. And really, that's it. That's the story. It sounds more like a coming-of-age** story than a vampire story, I know. But one of the things that the film does so beautifully is blend in a number of different elements and genre conventions in such a way as to make those conventions and their influence nearly invisible. There's a poignant adolescent love story here. There's also a revenge story here. There are nods towards slasher films and family dramas. Insufferable as some of these things normally are, in Let the Right One In none of these elements are allowed to become too strong; they are ghostly influences, subtly colouring the audience's lens; they are all wrapped tightly within and managed by a stark Swedish aesthetic and an ethereal and lyrical realism. It's an arthouse film, but one that has been stripped of pretensions, stripped of smugness, and stripped of affectation. There is a strict economy here - an economy of language, of effect, of style - and the result is an ominous, lonely film, drenched in a blighted aesthetic that is at once realistic and slightly dreamy. It's beautiful, in other words.

Vampire movies usually take one of two paths: either they are lurid, over-sexed affairs or they are bloody, gory massacres (and if you are really lucky, they are sometimes both). In either case, it's usually an exchange of fluids thing. Vampires are hot and messy; they are lightning rods of teen angst, which means, once you get past the morbidity and death-glamour of the whole thing, that they are dull, boring, usually obnoxiously self-aware atrocities. Let the Right One In avoids all of this by tracing a rather ambivalent path through the wreckage of vampire films past. It remains firmly committed to its vampire elements, presenting them with a savage eye that never blinks away from its murderous nature (the lengths that one character in particular will go to secure blood is both horrific and oddly affectionate) (though, I should point out, the film more gives the impression of violence than an actual portrayal of it); at the same time, however, the vampire side of the story never feels primal, that is, it never feels as if it is the film's central concern. There is something mundane about the film's horror. Its violence is neither sexy nor self-indulgent; it is bleak, barren and gorgeously unaffected, by which I mean that it de-glamorizes vampire life, presenting it not as a grand, romantic retreat into darkness, a la Interview with the Vampire, et al, but as a lonely, empty waste where every day is just another twist down a spiral of shame and self-loathing. There is something genuinely arresting about such a portrayal, about such an impoverished aesthetic. This ambivalence runs throughout the film, both in terms of narrative and cinematography. Extreme close-ups compliment long, barely moving tracking shots; motivations are sometimes a bit murky, but never unreasonable; entire stories are suggested by two-minutes scenes or single shots. And the film's final conflict, which resolves the film's action in a disturbingly satisfying way, is a master class on cinematic style: a nearly perfectly executed use of framing and off-camera action.

If Ingmar Bergman had made a vampire film, I think it would have looked an awful lot like Let the Right One In. Though this film isn't fraught with as much existential angst as that other Swedish master always seemed to prefer, and though it doesn't have people sitting around thinking about the meaning of their lives or the death of God, it does bear some striking resemblances, especially aesthetic and dramatic ones, to the works of Bergman. I don't know, maybe it's a Swedish thing. Outside of Bergman, I'm not very familiar with Scandinavian cinema, however, so I can't really comment on their entire industry without sounding reductive and ethnocentric. If Let the Right One In is any indication, however, some exciting things are happening there. Certainly this is the most exciting thing to happen to vampire films in a long time. If you are a vampire fan, or better yet, if you are a good movie fan, Let the Right One In deserves your immediate attention.

Experto crede: a heavy contender for best film of 2008. Forget that Twilight shit, this is the vampire movie of 2008. in fact, it might be the vampire movie of the last ten, twenty, or thirty years.

* I do not understand Hollywood's recent fascination with re-makes, especially foreign language horror re-makes. It all smacks a bit of xenophobia, if you ask me. Perfectly good films, like Ringu, which work so much better in their original milieu, get hacked and slashed into sterile and artistically bereft star vehicles. One of the more high-profile victims of this trend is Chan-wook Park's Oldboy, one of the more dark and twisted revenge flicks of recent memory, which, it was just recently announced, will soon be given the Hollywood treatment at the hands of Steven Spielberg and Will Smith. It should be so lucky. If you know anything about this film, you know how preposterous an idea this is. American horror is, for the most part, boring. If suffers from a strangely puritan impulse, a no-doubt studio mandated directive never to give audiences anything more than gore and titillation, never, in other words, to cross the line from opium cinema into intellectually or aesthetically vibrant filmmaking. It plays it safe, staying well within its permitted bounds. So, when Hollywood, roused from its stagnant slumber, notices that other brands of horror - be they Japanese, Korean, Swedish, whatever - are not only doing well but receiving actual critical attention, something American horror hasn't received for a long time, it gets jealous and decides, in a fit of terror and outrage (prompted by premonitions of its own irrelevance, no doubt), to grab those properties and subject them to the production line re-make procedure. This usually means that the re-make makes more money, if only because the anesthetized North American audience will apparently watch just about anything. But it also means that those very things that made the original films interesting are cut, or at least aggressively sanitized, to the point that no one wants to see them. Fans of the originals are left disappointed while new viewers, who never saw the originals' brilliance, pass them off as nothing more than just another boring horror film in a long string of recent boring horror films. It's artistic rape, really.

** The most pretentious and boring of all pretentious and boring cinema.

The List, 2008 Edition

2008-12-31T12:22:00.005-06:00

Now that I got all that self-pitying out of the way, I can move on to what the end of the year is really about: lists! Nothing sums of 365 days like reducing it all to easily digestable snippits of largely decontextualized information. Ah, bullet point hermeneutics. This isn't a themed list, however. This isn't the top ten movies, or games, or albums. Oh no. This is The List. The dcornelius list of top ten... things. I just don't feel like being comprehensive this time around. So, with drums rolling and crowds roaring, I present the definitive list of 2008. Take that, John Cusack!

FAVOURITE MOVIE

The Dark Knight. Between writing my initial and embarassingly glowing review of The Dark Knight and seeing it again this holiday season, a number of criticisms grew in my mind. The movie was too long; it betrayed subtle story-telling; it was a bit too cartoony in some of its more extreme elements. The second viewing, however, though it didn't completely erase those criticisms, eclipsed whatever objections I had to the point that they didn't really matter. It is a great movie. Runner Up: My Winnipeg. (Due to a variety of factors, I missed a lot this year. Synecdoche, New York, Man on Wire, and Let the Right One In are all movies that I still want to catch up with).

FAVOURITE TELEVISION SERIES

Dexter. Season three is a wrap and it was brilliant. Nothing really compares with the first season of this serial killer drama, but season three comes close. Michael C. Hall can still make anything, any small and mundane activity, seem menacing, ironic, and chilling. Runner's Up: Battlestar Galactica, The Shield.

FAVOURITE MOVIE THAT I SHOULD HAVE WATCHED LONG AGO BUT DIDN'T

L'Armee des Ombres (Army of Shadows). Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 film about the French resistence during WWII is breathtaking. It, along with several of Melville's other films, such as Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge, completely transformed the way I watch movies and what I expect from the medium. Runner Up: the films of Mario Bava.

FAVOURITE VIDEO GAME

Braid. I can't so more than I already have about this game. It still blows my mind. Runner Up: Dead Space.

FAVOURITE BOOK THAT I RE-READ

Gravity's Rainbow. Okay, I didn't really read the whole thing again in 2008, but I did go back and re-read many, many passages. It's bizarre, grotesque, hilarious, morbid, ironic, irreverent, terrifying, and obscene. It's also brilliant. I don't really know what the term "postmodern" means (and I suspect no one does) but if it means anything than that definition comes alive in Gravity's Rainbow.

FAVOURITE BOOK/AUTHOR THAT I FINALLY READ

The poetry of William Butler Yeats. Being a student often means that you end up reading things you don't want to read and not reading things you want to read. I finally got to spend some time with Yeats, however, and I'm damn happy that I did. Runner Up: Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

FAVOURITE ANACHRONISM

Silent Hill 2. Yeah, it's that good.

FAVOURITE ALBUM

The Slip and Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails. Yes, a tie. It was a good year for NIN fans. Runner Up: Vida La Vida by Coldplay.

FAVOURITE BAND THAT I JUST NOW DISCOVERED BUT WHO HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR A WHILE

Sigur Ros. Icelandic rock, post-rock, alt-rock, emo, whatever. Their music is beautiful and haunting and for weeks I was transfixed by the song "Milano." Sometimes, purely by accident, you discover things that you end up really loving. This is one of those things. Runner Up: Coheed and Cambria.

So there it is. The highlights of an entire year's worth of watching, listening, reading, and playing summed up, dissected, and delivered in neat little, bloodless packages. There is a sort of butchery involved in making lists. It assumes that anything in life can be decontextualized, anatomized, and isolated. A list is an autopsy. How, for instance, can I talk about Sigur Ros without darkening the discussion with how I felt at the time and the emotional affinities it created? How can I evaluate the sadness that I felt playing Silent Hill 2? I can't. I don't want to. A list is just taking a step back, re-evaluating. It assumes the largely fictional detached vantage point, which is probably something we need at the end of the year.

Good Riddance

2008-12-30T21:35:00.004-06:00

It's the end of the year. The end of... something. For me, it's the end of school.

For eight years, I've been an undergrad. Eight years. Hell. However, I've put three degrees in the can and I think I'm better for it. I started at Briercrest College, a small-ish Christian college in southern Saskatchewan, where I hammered out two bachelor's degrees, one in theology and one in the humanities (vague, I know). I spent five years there, and though it didn't really open the doors I'd hoped it would, the training that I received there - academic training, moral training, personal, spiritual, etc - has been invaluable. I am who I am in large part because of that place and so I am grateful. After that, I skipped over to the University of Saskatchewan with every intention of banging out an English Literature degree with as much haste, and posthaste, as possible. However... see above closed doors. The transfer credits didn't amount to squat, so I spent three years (well, two and a half, plus some summers) padding my educational resume and fulfilling the requirements. I am, as of now, and notwithstanding some as-of-yet still unpaid tuition fees, an English graduate. Degree number three, in the bag. Now, on to bigger and better things. Bigger, at least. Greener pastures, right?

So it's been a good year. And it's been shitty. Upon reflection (and what else is the end of the year for besides reflection? Oh right, booze. Well, I'm drinking wine as I write this so I've got that covered), every plan that I made, every hope that I laid, turned brittle, fragile, and pretty much crumbled at my feet. I graduated, but just barely. It was a fight to the finish. (I'm speaking financially, by the way. Academically, I nailed it.) A conspiracy, its tentacles seemingly stretching into all sectors of my life, both public and private, was launched against me. At every turn, and on every front, frustration bit me in the ass. Scholarships were denied. Loans were reduced to rubble. Jobs disappeared. Things that I had assumed were guaranteed turned out to be smoke, vapor. Life is fragile. Dreams are even more fragile. Both can be upset by the smallest decision of another. Both can be set back, darkened, and even snuffed out.

But I'm being dramatic. I'm indulging. I did get that third degree locked down, and I did it with style. I'm proud of the scholarship that I can produce. Academically, I'm no slouch. I may slouch in other areas of life, but not in school. No sir.

So 2008 is done. Good. Get rid of it. It was a stressful year. Highs and lows, ups and downs, cliche here, cliche there, etc, etc. All that proverbial knowledge, all those gnomic sayings and all their sickening banality, their tedious mundanity... they are all true. School is tiring, family is tiring, money is tiring, lack of money is tiring. Life is tiring. What I'm saying is I'm tired. I need a break. I have eight months to kill before I enter graduate school, which seems like a good thing but I honestly have no idea what I'm going to do and it's a bit scary. I thought I had a job lined up but... the conspiracy. Thwarted again, and at the very last minute, at just the moment when the conception becomes reality, where life is most fragile.

I'm not sure what's going to happen in 2009. Actually, I'm quite nervous about it, and that's not good. There are two things I can't deal with like an adult, being bored and being uncertain. Both tend to drive me towards unhealthy trespasses into my past: a renewed interest in the heavy metal music of my adolescence and re-runs of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Both are comfort food to me, and they tend to appear, like not-so-subtle screaming klaxons, right when I'm most depressed.

Yes, lately I've been listening to Tourniquet and crushing on Sarah Michelle Gellar. Again. I'm in a state of emotional regression, I recognize that. Thanks again, 2008.

So here I am, on the raggedy edge. Graduated. Unemployed. Three degrees. Tired. Damn it. I need a new year, maybe one a little less fraught with peril and disappointment. Also, a miracle would be nice. Maybe a finger stretching out from the clouds, pointing the way. Yeah? Yeah? I know, probably not going to happen. It's not that I don't believe in intervention. I do. I just don't expect it, not for myself anyway.

Okay, enough. Like 2008, I'm done. This post is upsetting me now. It was supposed to be ironic catharsis. But now I'm not sure what it is. It's more sincere than I intended. That bit about Buffy... that's revealing more of myself than I'd planned. Of course I could delete all this. I'm considering it. But I won't. Maybe tomorrow I will.

Anyway. To 2009. I'd toast but I'm out of wine. Cheers anyway.

9

2008-12-30T21:29:00.005-06:00

Okay, I'm intrigued.

It's a feature-length adaptation of a short film by the same name, 9, directed by the same guy, one Mr. Shane Acker. Looks to me like he's got more than a little visual prowess, though I wouldn't yet call him a "visionary," an entirely over-used word in the film industry (I mean, come on. I liked 300, but I wouldn't call Zack Snyder a visionary, though the Watchmen trailer sure wants you to think he is). I'm not sure what to make of Russia's Timur Bekmambetov's involvement, though. I liked the Night Watch and Day Watch movies, or at least I liked their visual style, and I'll confess to looking forward to the forthcoming Twilight Watch, but I kind of hated the obnoxious Wanted. But since he's only producing here, I won't get too worried. Also, as a final note, Burton, Acker and company, or at least their publicity department, have good taste. The song playing in the trailer's second half is "Welcome Home" by Coheed and Cambria.

Here's the original, eleven minute-long short that Acker made, and it alone is enough to secure my anticipation of the feature adaptation. Enjoy.

Some Thoughts on Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

2008-12-22T18:05:00.009-06:00

In my downtime, while I'm searching for things to do now that I'm no longer entrenched within the mud and blood of academics, I've been catching up on a few "last-gen" games that I missed. I know these games have been out for years but this is my blog, dammit, and I'll write about whatever I want to write about.

I had never played a Metal Gear Solid game before, so when Substance (the Xbox version of Sons of Liberty) arrived in the mail the other day, I was moderately excited, especially now that the semester is over, I'm officially finished my third, count 'em third, undergrad degree, and I have some extra time on my hands, which, I know, could be more profitably used - by, like, reading Joyce's Ulysses (honestly, I'm getting to it) or finally sitting down and writing something meaningful - but I'm tired of all that shit. I need a break. I've read enough and written enough in the last eight years that I really want to just lay about, mentally speaking, for a while. So game on, I say. Where was I? Oh, excited about Metal Gear. I'd say that in terms of anticipatory arousal I was about a 7, 10 being an almost undeniably urge to couple with the game, like with Silent Hill 2, and 1 being the flaccid disinterest I feel every time Square Enix announces yet another excursion into hermaphroditic heroism. There's an aura about the MGS franchise, a tone used when speaking of it usually reserved for religious ceremony. Solid Snake is one of those icons of gaming, one of those god-like figures apotheosized by millions of devoted (and, let's face it, probably sweaty, lonely, and sexually confused) fans. I knew a bit about the franchise. I knew, for instance, that the games are strangely fixated on Snake's ass, which in all the games have been very lovingly and carefully designed (see) so as almost to give players a whiff of Snake's musky greatness. I also, and more importantly, knew that the games have a tendency to be... um, bombastically dramatic. By which I mean incomprehensible. But, I was still excited, ready to feel up this franchise. Only an hour into my Metal Gear dalliance, I already knew two things: one, this game is old and two, it's still pretty fun. The mechanics are ancient. They were ancient, I fear, when they first launched. Just one year after Sons of Liberty's release, for instance, Ubisoft would launch Splinter Cell, which in terms of stealth gameplay absolutely eclipsed Metal Gear Solid. All the stealth aspects of MGS2 just feel like a game, as if mimicking anything approaching reality was the furthest thing from the designers' minds. Stealth in MGS2 is governed by very rigid sets of rules and parameters. You can run, flat out sprint, past a guard and unless his very short and limited field of vision is aimed at you, you are invisible and silent. So it all feels very contrived. But that's not all that wrong here. I'll make a list. The weapon combat is clumsy as all hell, basically requiring you to switch to a fixed first-person view if you want to hit anything. The hand-to-hand and sword combat (yes, a sword... stealthy) is even worse and basically only lets you fumble about in the dark, like a clumsy and desperate teen attempting to unclasp a bra and reach the promised land. But, worst of all, the camera seems to be alligned not with the player but with the terrorists as it continually refuses to show you anything. On top of all of that, the game is a clinic on how not to pace your game. Hideo Kojima, the mind behind Metal Gear, is apparently in love with every last freakin' word he writes and so makes you sit through hour after hour of exposition and talking heads. In the last 45 minutes of the game, I played for about five minutes, the time it took to beat the boss. The rest of the time was spent watching character after character pontificate, reveal plot twists, confess parentage, etc, etc, on and on, until the player is rendered comatose, which I'm taking as a mean-spirited gameplay mechanic: lull the player into torpor and then laugh when he tries to rouse himself to fight. But, despite these archaic limitations, despite gameplay that has been improved upon by almost every other entry into the stealth genre, despite the game's best efforts to leave me unconscious, despite my better judgment, I found myself having fun. There's a lot here that I don't like, and writing it all down I realize that I should not like this game. It's pretentious, over-written, and ludicrous, yet it also has something else, an X-factor if you will, some unquantifiable aspect that keeps all those criticisms from locking the game away forever in limbo somewhere. It's a fun game and, I assume based on this second entry alone, a fun franchise. Not by any stretch of this writer's imagination (and that imagination is stretchy, let me assure you) is this game art, which is what I'm always looking for these days. It didn't even fulfill the expectations I had for it, but it was a decent holiday distraction and I'm glad I finally caught up with this franchise, if for no other reason than that now I know what it's all about.

Flight of the Conchords

2008-12-21T00:03:00.002-06:00

Okay, time to champion a little-known television series. Flight of the Conchords, an HBO sitcom just entering its second season, follows two independent (read: failing) New Zealand musicians and their dubiously credentialed manager as they try to launch a career in New York. It's like Once meets Napoleon Dynamite. While the stories are fun and clever, and usually feature more than enough humiliation and self-deprecation to suggest outright derangement on the creators' part, the real meat of the series lies in its songs. I don't know how to describe them without spiraling into meaningless cliche: they are "off-beat" (whatever that means, especially in a musical context), quirky (but not sickeningly so), self-referential (but not sickeningly so), and... well, just fun. I lack the grammar to intelligently talk about music, especially music so obviously odd, so I'll just show you what I mean.

Retrospective :: Silent Hill 2

2008-11-30T21:49:00.013-06:00

This trend of reviewing or discussing games here is starting to upset me. Nevertheless...

For the past year, ever since I was made aware of its existence, I've been trying to hunt down a copy of Silent Hill 2 for the Xbox. Not one of the stores here in Saskatoon have stocked it in years, which isn't surprising, and I've been sitting on the Goozex queue for over a year, which is a bit more surprising. People who have it don't want to part with it, it seems. I finally got a used copy of it from Amazon.com. After a year of patiently waiting, I finally clutched it in my trembling hands. Reverently, I placed it in my Xbox. I felt like I was about to have a religious experience. I tingled all over. I shivered and quivered. I broke into a sweat. I was terrified that it wouldn't live up to its legendary reputation. I, in other words, was more excited to finally play this seven year old game than I was to play almost anything else released this year, including Gears of War 2 or Fallout 3. I closed my eyes, closed the tray, and played the game.

And it was nearly sublime, as sublime as a game can be I suppose. I thought I'd experienced most of what games have to offer at this time. I thought things like Braid and Bioshock represented the best argument for games as art. I knew that the medium's potential had been hinted at in the past but I had no idea that someone had actually crossed, with bold step and stern gaze, the invisible threshold separating entertainment and art upon which games always stumble. I thought I'd already seen the medium used as effectively as anyone knew how to use it yet. I was wrong. Silent Hill 2 is the single best argument for games as art. Or perhaps it's an argument for how games are not art, since its exceptional nature only casts all other attempts into shadow. I've always known that the series had some serious punch to it. I liked Origins, which was the first Silent Hill game I played (lame, I know), I liked the action-oriented Homecoming probably more than it deserves, and I loved The Room... but those games are nothing - and I mean nothing! - when compared with the genius of Silent Hill 2. (Okay, The Room is still damn brilliant. It is much, much better than either Origins or Homecoming.)

As I was playing it, everything just felt right. The game mechanics, the dreamy sometimes atonal, sometimes discordant music, the ambiguous dialogue scenes, and yes even the dated graphics engine that powers this "last generation" title, all seemed to perfectly coalesce into an experience unlike any other. Silent Hill 2 transports you. You play as James Sunderland, an emotionally damaged man looking for his wife, Mary. Mary's been dead for three years, however, having died of a terminal illness. Yet inexplicably, James receives a letter from her saying that she is waiting for him in Silent Hill. So James sets out to find her, to discover the truth, and in doing so is propelled into a nightmare that is poignant, haunting, horrifying and absolutely beautiful.

The Silent Hill franchise is famed for its horror, and rightly so. Its twisted human shapes, dredged from the depths of eros and thanatos, can be truly disturbing projections of agony and despair. What the series is less famous for, though, is its beauty. The Room hints at this beauty but the American efforts at the series, Origins and Homecoming, basically banish it from town in favour of a constant sense of oppression that developers seem to think horror gamers require. Silent Hill 2 is beautiful, however. Tonally, it's like Braid meets Hellraiser. And shockingly, it retains the intelligence of both (and by Hellraiser I mean the Clive Barker film and not the bastardized sequels that followed in which, like the recent entries into the Silent Hill franchise, the parts that made it special were jettisoned to make room for the more spectacular parts that only made it conventional). Silent Hill 2 isn't just a survival horror game, you see. Like Braid, the game is an exploration of a theme. It is a psychological landscape translated into game mechanics. It is the projection of a troubled psyche. If you just want to be dropped into a town and be able to start blasting away at beasties, stay away from this. Play Resident Evil. Or Homecoming. Silent Hill 2 requires something more from the players, though. It requires human sympathy and a familiarity with the ambiguous. The game won't fill in all the pieces, won't launch into scenes of unnecessary exposition in which what you are seeing and doing is explained. The game doesn't interpret itself for you. It lets you feel the game. The metaphors are never mentioned, they are played. James rarely, if ever, comments on what he is doing. The player directly experiences the horror, the pathos, and the bright shining moments of insight, and the developers leave it up to the player to make of those moments what he can.

This sort of story-telling is rarely found in games. Developers almost always, and I don't know why, feel as if they need to spell out the game so explicitly that every single moron that picks up the game can follow it. Even Dead Space, my choice for Game of the Year, is pretty obvious on the story end of things, though it is admittedly more maturely crafted than most major releases. And I think that is what's missing in most games, maturity. Silent Hill 2 is mature. I don't mean "mature" as in Rated M (though it is); I mean mature as in grown up, sophisticated, self-aware, meta, etc. It feels like a game made for a truly adult audience, not the prurient adult audience that simply looks for blood, breasts and bad language.

2008 is being considered one of the best years for gaming in a long time. Aside from a few notable releases, however, most of the games currently being celebrated are the quivering fascinations of the moment - the shiny, hot, but ultimately shallow ephemera of an always insatiable market. Not one of the major developers show much interest in crafting compelling, introspective, thematically tense games. They are only after the spectacle. We have an entire industry scrambling to foist upon the market nothing more than summer blockbuster-style extravaganzas... and we have an audience gobbling it. Silent Hill 2 demands a higher standard.

A while back, I wrote that gaming grew up with Braid. I was wrong. Gaming grew up a long time ago with Silent Hill 2 but, outside a few of the upright heart and pure, nobody seemed to notice or care. You should care. Silent Hill 2 is a masterpiece, the type of game rarely attempted and even more rarely executed. It has flaws and limitations, but those are mostly matters of technology and software. In vision it is nearly perfect.

Trailer :: Star Trek

2008-11-18T22:17:00.003-06:00

Geeking. Out. Now.

4 November 2008 - It's Time for Change

2008-11-04T23:02:00.005-06:00

The new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

And freely men confess that this world's spent,

When in the planets and the firmament

They seek so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out again to his atomies.

'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All just supply, and all relation:

Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,

For every man alone thinks he hath got

To be a phoenix, and that there can be

None of that kind, which he is, but he.

-John Donne, "The First Anniversary," lines 205-18.

The Zombie Expert

2008-10-27T15:52:00.004-06:00

All my years of cinematic splatter and undead carnage are finally beginning to pay off. My devotion to Romero and Fulci is being noticed. Now, not only am I among the very few who are actually prepared for the inevitable zombie outbreak (and the outbreak is coming, trust me, whether it be caused by voodoo mumbo-jumbo, rage-infected monkeys or alien interference) but other people are starting to recognize my expertise in the field. Yesterday, I, as a credible zombie expert, was interviewed by a reporter from The Sheaf. Sure, it's only a local university newspaper doing a Halloween special but at least the very real and important message of zombie preparedness is starting to be heard by the largely ignorant public. I can only hope that, when the zombie apocalypse does come and the undead begin to feast insatiably on all our juicy, fattened North American flesh, that people, in their darkest hours of horror and despair, will remember my words of wisdom - perhaps, just perhaps, they will save someone's life.

I'll post a link to the article when it's published.

UPDATE: Here's the link to the article. It's on page two. Enjoy. And remember... you don't have to outrun the zombies, you just have to outrun your friends.

An Elaborate Excuse

2008-10-24T22:59:00.004-06:00

I always wonder how much of myself I should bring to this blog. As people, we are always more then we present ourselves as. Whatever the context, whether it be a university class, a church pew or an internet forum, we pick and chose those aspects of ourselves that we want other people to perceive and so there is always a sense of theatricality embedded deeply within not only our social lives but our written lives as well. This isn't a matter of deception, however, and the at-this-point cliched notion that we all wear a variety of false masks, a piece of important-sounding psycho-vomit which seems to have been designed to suggest that we ritually select whatever personality fiction is most expedient at the moment and alter our actions accordingly, thus foregoing an "authentic" personality, is fundamentally flawed because those masks are not impositions of personality but rather manifestations of a personality too large to be constantly disclosed. We select the ways we represent ourselves not out of some deceptive agenda or because our "authentic" personalities are so stillborn as to receive whatever imprint stronger personalities may impress upon them (though I suppose both could be true in some cases, but not, I think, in most), but rather out of politeness and an unwillingness to burden others with forced intimacy. Full disclosure of a personality can be an awkward experience for everyone involved and so it is often best, and most simple, to present only those parts of yourself that a situation requires.

Anyway, when it comes to Babylon I've deliberately put certain restriction upon myself in an effort of guide my readership's perception of me (this readership is, I fear, largely illusory or at the very best rather small, which means all my efforts to guide others' perception of me has ended in a self-reflective knot in which I'm now discussing how I've deliberately shaped an audience's perceptions of me when I myself am in fact the audience. I am both perceiver and perceived and, I just noticed, both of me have a headache). I've kept gaming, a rather large element of my personality, and of my day, mostly hidden or at least I've relegated it mostly to the background, only letting that portion of myself out every once in a while to express either exasperation or affirmation in what I think are special situations. I've tried to keep the geek impulse in check, in other words, in order vainly to appear both knowledgeable and wise perhaps even charismatic (okay, some elements of self-representation are purely fictive) but also because personalities, despite their usually multiform natures, are so often judged on the basis of only one of their aspects and are thereafter slotted into prefabricated stereotypes. Personally, I'd much rather be sterotyped as an English student or a film critic than as a gamer. And since in the public consciousness one person can rarely occupy more than one stereotypical space, I often work very hard to ensure that some elements of my personality are privileged over others.

But now that I've rambled at length about it I feel it only appropriate to transgress my own self-imposed restrictions regarding personality disclosure, to transcend my self-fashioned self image by incorporating another image, one that might, it's true, damage that first so carefully laboured over image, which I can only hope is at this point strong enough to absorb such a decadent and low-brow disclosure as this (the fact that this post directly follows one on Dante has not gone unnoted). You see, all of this babbling has really been nothing more than an elaborate excuse to say that recently I've been playing Dead Space, an extremely violent and no-doubt violence inducing game, and that I love it so much I want to share this excellent trailer. Seriously, it's one of the best game trailers ever made. So, uh... enjoy. And hopefully whatever image of intelligence I've built up over the last year or so isn't about to be entirely reduced to rubble.

Pictorial :: Michael Mazur

2008-10-18T13:59:00.009-06:00

I've been reading Dante's Commedia lately. During my research, I stumbled upon a gorgeous collection of Inferno etchings, made by painter Michael Mazur. Enjoy.

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard - so tangled and rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
-Inferno, Canto I.1-5

He hurled the sinner down, then turned to rush
Back down the rocky crag; and no mastiff
Was ever more impatient to shake the leash

And run his fastest after a fleeing thief.
The sinner sank below, only to rise
Rump up - but demons under the bridge's shelf

Cried, "Here's no place to show your Sacred Face!
You're not out in the Serchio for a swim!
If you don't want to feel our hooks - like this! -

Then stay beneath the pitch." They struck at him
With over a hundred hooks, and said, "You'll need
To dance in secret here - so grab what seam

You're able to, in darkness." They then did
Just as cook have their scullions do to steep
The meat well into the cauldron - with a prod

From their forks keeping it from floating up.
-Inferno, Canto XXI.43-58

We had left him, moving on
When I saw two shades frozen in a single hole -
Packed so close, one head hooded the other one;

The way the starving devour their bread, the soul
Above had clenched the other with his teeth,
Where the brain meets the nape. And at the skull

And other parts, as Tydeus berserk with wrath
Gnawed at the head of Menalippus, he chewed.
-Inferno, Canto XXXII.124-131

Dante, Inferno. Translated by Robert Pinsky, The Inferno of Dante. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

The entire collection of Mazur's Inferno etchings can be viewed online here.

A Matter of Life and Death

2008-09-18T16:56:00.011-06:00

Whenever the time comes to write anything about politics I feel sliding sickliness wash over me and a nearly overwhelming sense of apathy and depression opens up around me and plunges me into a dark cloud fraught with dragons and reptiles of the mind. It's not that I don't understand what is happening in the world, or that I don't recognize the shapes, spirits, and forces that are guiding it and dragging it down dark well-trodden paths, it's that all the things that I see twisting and turning in the winds and over the lands of once great nations, all the white-washed rhetoric, all the thinly veiled deceit, all the posturing and moral dissolution, only seems to confirm and validate within me my desire to step out, kick the dust from my shoes, kick the very world to pieces, and simply walk away. World be damned, I want no part of you. And yet I am, reluctantly at times, still a part of this world -- a sort of resident alien -- and so can only ignore it to my own peril, can only detach myself so much before my detachment becomes itself not an act of self-preservation but an act of sabotage and irresponsibility. So, with both Canada and the United States dancing on the razor's edge, two very different hells to find on either side, I feel compelled to add my own voice to the already over-loaded and terrifying cacophonous roaring din that is North American democracy.

In all things, there abides either life or death; in every action we perform, we perform either life or death; in the words that we say or write, we validate either life or death; in the ways that we think and in the ideologies to which we cling, we are either struggling up the bright and rough mountain or sliding down into the dark pit, into a centre that cannot hold. I understand that such an absolute conception of the world is outmoded and no longer fashionable and I grant that there may in fact seem to be, in certain cases and under certain circumstances, shades of grey in our perception of the world, times when it is not clear if we are choosing life or death. But the world itself is not grey; it is not nearly as polymorphous, ambivalent and relative as we, grasping for self-satisfying justifications, so often try to convince ourselves that it must be. Life or death. Good or evil. This is the nature of the world and this is the nature of people. These are not mere philosophical considerations; they are not abstractions or moral hypotheticals; they are not metaphors or tropes -- you, me, everyone: we are either choosing life of we are choosing death. And recognizing which is which is not nearly as difficult or complicated as it often seems. Life corrects; death permits. Life builds; death dissolves. Life searches for truth; death denies its existence. Life faces reality; death ignores it. Life speaks for the voiceless and abandoned; death consumes them before they can speak. Life recognizes evil and calls it such; death lies and says that evil does not exist. Life, because it does not deny the existence of evil, defines the boundaries of freedom; death, because it fears definition, sets fire to every bounding line and declares that there are no limits. Life is self-affirming; death is self-immolating. Life loves; death hates. Life lives; death dies. Life is eternal; death, like grass, whithers and vanishes.