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I
have seen the future, and it is squishy.
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Now & Then (a Log)
Aliens have strange diets. Aliens may not be able to digest most human foods. Because of this, they are limited in the types of foods they can eat, and they may become vegetarians. Watch out for people who eat a lot of melons -- that's an alien favorite.
Fear the Melon
From "10 Ways to Tell If Your Co-Worker Is an Extraterrestrial!" (via Spinster Librarian): Aliens often wear huge sunglasses to hide their eyes. Most aliens have large, staring eyes that are hard to conceal. Sunglasses help them appear more normal.
New Era
This makes me want to run to the nearest bookseller and buy some Trollope. T'would be a nice break from the science fictiony stuff I've been ingesting of late. I haven't read much Victorian-era fiction, although Jane Austen has long been a favorite. Rachel's intriguing take on Trollope has left me eager to devour some, and I love the humor and vigor accompanying her analysis. So, time to abandon the future for the past again.
Perhaps I'll read about what the future holds for the Magic Kingdom after that, and in between continue the P.K. Dick collection I'm reading here and there.
I Was Never a Skater, But I Play One at My Job
Doing skater culture research for a project at work, I came across these nifty Quiet Life tees (click the "teeny tiny store" link). If I thought bright yellow wouldn't make me look like a corpse, I'd be tempted to pick up the "Snorkeling with Snacks" tee. I have this strange compulsion to print out the OHIOGIRL maze... quite a lovely home page. And this is kinda cool... Crailtap sells short stories! Gotta love the DIY thing. The Crailtap site is, in general, a big mystery to me.
Skater ads come in a variety of flavors; while some attempt to be slick, others cling to a wink-and-nod "yeah, we're trying to sell you some crap" mentality. I saw these self-aware enjoi ads the last time I did skater research, and they made me giggle again this time. Sure, some of them are pretty juvenile, but others border on ad genius. I'm particularly drawn to the "follow the heard," "more issues than national geographic," and "the scandal/potty-training my old lady" ads. I also dig some of the Toy Machine ads.
I could write more about about how researching this stuff gives me an odd disembodied feeling and reminds me ever more of my passing youth, and the fact that skater culture is filled with foreign tropes I could never hope to understand from my limited perspective, but I'm feeling lazy.
Meanwhile, it's all Elvis, all the time over at Bellona Times. If you've a hankering to learn more about the King, sidle on over there.
Just a wee Travis update today. He's doing well; went into the vet yesterday for a re-check and they didn't have to place a feeding tube (thank the gods!). They said he's looking well, or at least as well as can be expected, and now he just needs to get his strength back.
The Trav, He Eats!
Yes, it's another Travis update. His condition is consuming most of my mental energy right now, so pardon the cobwebs around here.
I brought him home last night, after a week of hospital care. He's looking well, purring contentedly, and mostly managing to make his way around the house. His belly has been shaved for an ultrasound (the hair had almost grown back from last time) so while he's probably a bit cold down there his bare belly looks awfully cute.
What he really needs to do now is eat; if he's not eating well by Thursday afternoon they'll have to place a nasal feeding tube. I went through weeks of tube feeding with him the last time he was sick, and it's a pain in the ass for both of us. This morning he ate some canned food (yay!) and let me give him some pills without too much of a fuss. I think he's so happy to be out of the hospital that he's not being as much of a brat as usual about the pills.
Last night he slept peacefully at my side, waking occasionally to purr and preen. Hope you'll send some eating energy to the Trav. We'd both appreciate it.
Travis Update
Mainly for friends and family, or anyone else who cares how the kitty is doing...
I went to visit him last night at the hospital. The vet tech said he'd been grumpy, and of course he wouldn't eat anything. He was slightly alert but wasn't interesting in getting much attention.
The vet says he's not out of the woods yet -- there's still a chance things could go horribly awry -- but generally animals recover fully from ketoacidosis. Last time he was in the hospital for six days, I think. We're on day four now. Hoping he'll eat something and be able to come home soon.
In the Garden
Driving in to work this morning I heard a story on NPR about landscape designer Piet Oudolf, who's been chosen to create the Gardens of Remembrance in The Battery. From an article on the NPR web site:Oudolf likes kinetic plants: Dierama, Molinia and Miscanthus. Oudolf likes edgey plants: Eryngium, Echinops and Angelica gigas. And Oudolf likes plants with purpose, that romp, sway, tickle and cavort. He likes them red and orange, blue, purple and pink; he uses them as curtains, globes, buttons and spires. His grasses weep with joy.
Oudolf's landscapes convey a not unpleasant strain of controlled naturalism. I tend to prefer less ornamental gardens, such as Winnifred Lutz's installation at the Mattress Factory, which combines prairie calm, urban residue and an organic electronic soundtrack. But something about the formalness of Oudolf's designs strikes my fancy -- probably the dynamism of the plants, in their wild combinations, as they sit in constructed space.
Ugh
My cat has another nasty case of ketoacidosis. If you're reading this, perhaps you could send a little positive energy his way? Updates to the log will probably be less frequent than usual for a while (not that they're usually frequent, but whatever).
Here're Your Damn Links
A coworker (Pat) pointed out that I didn't link to Doonesbury in a recent post about how those comics helped me get over my post-Shining blues. To correct this stunning faux pas, I hereby offer not one, not two, but three exciting links for your perusal.
And I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't link to the already linked-to-death Doonesbury strips on blogging.
Contrast
Among the many fascinating search terms people use to find this site:gun related deaths in foreign countries
Let it not be said that we don't offer content for every readerly taste.
pee my pants
Love Thy Mess
For those seeking to validate the mess that surrounds them, here's a great article correlating productivity and desk clutter -- at least among the knowledge worker set (via Arts & Letters Daily). On filing versus piling:According to Mr Whittaker and Ms Hirschberg, the assumption that filers can find stuff more quickly is wrong. Filers, they say, “are less likely to access a given piece of data, and more likely to acquire extraneous data...In moderation, piling has the benefits of providing somewhat ready access to materials as well as reminding about tasks currently in progress.” Filers have two problems finding stuff: they tend to file too much, because they have put so much effort into building a filing system, and they often find it hard to remember how they categorised things.
The article also points out the fallibility of the "virtual office" concept via a discussion of Chiat/Day's notorious experiment. This splendiferous Wired article tells the whole tawdry tale.
The Debt I Owe Doonesbury
This is the second in an occasional series on my childhood obsessions (read the first here). I'm sure I'll veer into teenage obsessions as well, since those are ridiculous and fun. My goal is to capture the past: to remember what I found compelling back then and reflect on it. My childhood memories are hazy at best -- quiet apparitions begging for flesh. We'll see how it goes...
A particularly dark period of my childhood emerged right after my first viewing of The Shining. The Shining is not scary in the “why are you going into that room when there’s an axe murderer in there, you idiot?” sense, but in a steady and pervasive ill-at-ease-feeling sort of way. That kind of scary leaves a much more visceral impression on a young mind, and mine was duly scarred.
As I closed my eyes to go to sleep at night my mind was haunted by images of eerily pristine twins confronting young Danny in the hallway, naked old women in showers, receding footsteps in a snow-drenched labyrinth, etc. One of the interesting things about the movie is that it’s Danny’s fears that become your own. Shelley Duval’s fears never really do -- partially because of the way she played the character -- but Danny is someone you can identify with. So it was Danny’s experiences that came back to haunt me, along with the score. (The music in a Kubrick film -- generally stuff that wasn’t composed specifically for the screen -- just seems to belong there in a way that a John Williams score never does. It enhances the viewing experience rather than drawing unnecessary attention to itself.)
So anyway, I was a frightened little child who had a miserable time getting to sleep at night. And only one thing could cure the dis-ease that haunted my mind: Doonesbury comics. My parents, being good liberals with a sense of humor, had a large stash of books filled with past Doonesbury strips, none of which I remember well enough to describe. What I do remember is the effect they had. Slowly, gently, I was pulled out my fear- and depression-filled rut, and learned to laugh and fall asleep easily once again.
For a while there afterward I tried to read Doonesbury in the paper. But I couldn’t really follow it; the characters’ lives had taken turns I didn’t understand from a perspective limited by what I had read in the books. I haven’t read Doonesbury since. But I’ll always feel grateful for it, and cheer it on, for the cheer it brought into my life. I felt pretty darned good there for a few years, until thoughts of nuclear annihilation began to invade the ol’ brain, forcing out an unanswered letter to Ronald Reagan. But that’s another story.
Further reading:
The Kubrick FAQ: Clears up some misconceptions about his involvement in A.I. (e.g., he really did want that ending, but not exactly how Spielberg ended up shooting it).
Another great mood-setting film score whose resonance stems from music composed for other purposes: The Hunger.
One of my all-time favorite film scores is Ennio Morricone’s for Days of Heaven. Not a great film, but the cinematography and soundtrack combine to deliver a unique cinematic experience.
Don't Read My Mind
Last weekend I went to happy hour with some friends, and the inevitable "what are your New Year's resolutions?" question came up. I responded with my stock answer -- "I don't make them" -- and felt a bit guilty about the fact that I don't make resolutions because I'm afraid I won't keep them, that the practice has rarely proved worthwhile to me.
Last year Matt, who I didn't know very well at the time, impressed me his sole resolution: No one will ever wonder what I'm thinking. This is the sort of resolution I can get behind, one that demands to be acted on (especially for an internal type like me), and it stuck with me for most of last year. I didn't lay my soul bare at every opportunity, but being mindful of the resolution did lead to some small epiphanies in my interactions with coworkers and friends.
I'm glad Matt has it on his list again this year. Being as open as the resolution requires isn't something one can achieve in the span of a year, but it's a damn fine goal to aspire to over the course of a life. Maybe by the time I hit 80, no one will have to read my mind.
Consensus Reality
David Chess posted a nice riff on what he calls the consensus interpretation of Mulholland Drive, wherein he expressed his unease with interpretations such as this one in Salon. I second his distaste for such analyses; the beauty of the film lies in not trying to overly interpret what's going on but in surrendering to the madness.
As in his other films, Lynch uses a wholesome v. sordid dichotomy in Mulholland Drive to underscore the notion that those two extremes aren’t really as different as they seem. Ambiguous polarity is at the heart of Lynch’s movies. It’s a structuralist’s worst nightmare and a postmodernist’s fondest dream, because only a lover of gray in-between-ness can embrace such ambiguity and deem it eloquent. And it's this gray that's worth embracing, that elevates Mulholland Drive from being a film that begs to be picked apart and reconstructed into a sensible framework (à la Memento) to one that speaks the vibrant language of art.
I think the best way to view a good Lynch film is to give in to the sensations imposed by its moving images and sounds without attempting to follow the plot (or lack thereof). An inability to do this with Dune is probably why many people didn't think that movie worked; it’s based on a beloved SF story that has very particular meanings to most. But if you can turn your internal critic/movie logic meter off, there are many delights to be found within Lynch’s dreamscapes. His is a visceral sort of storytelling that unfolds through imagery and dialogue, and it reminds me of hearing a really good myth or fairy tale whose meaning relies on what the listener projects into it.
Mr. Chess brought up a couple of points that work against the consensus interpretation defined in the aforementioned article:Down in the details, I see two problems with the consensus interpretation's actually working as a full reading of the film: it requires a character to have a dream or fantasy that is influenced by the details of her own death (tough to fit into ordinary reality), and I'm pretty sure (but prepared to find myself mistaken on a careful rewatching of the relevant scenes) that the Blue Key shows up at least once in a place where it couldn't be under the consensus interpretation.
I certainly wouldn't put it past Mr. Lynch to throw a little wrench (or in this case, a blue key) into the mix to deceive any logic some might try to find in the plot. I'll have to watch more closely for blue key appearances next time. I will say to Mr. Chess that my own experience watching the film for the second time, after having read the consensus interpretation, was less fulfilling than the first. Much of the magic was gone.
But who knows; maybe when I watch it again with this reading in mind I'll still like it, for reasons similar to and/or entirely different from the reasons I liked it the first time.
This is the work of Abbi Ball, and is licensed under a Creative Commons License.