-
“Yes they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness, / But it’s better than drinking alone”
2003-11-26 00:27:35
The title here serves as an adequate answer to the question ferrett posed a few weeks ago in his “paying for loneliness” journal post that I forgot to reply to. I’d go more in depth, but I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.
I was so unbelievably angry earlier today about something my boss said to me at work that it’s taken until now to internalize all the anger and process it into despair so I wouldn’t wind up sending him a four page detailed e-mail explaining exactly why I was quitting. I’m not going to get into it here and now, lest it piss me off again. So I’m gonna wander off into a more harmless direction and see if I can’t process some of this burgeoning ennui into some sort of creative surge. (One of my other friends said that she was insulted when someone suggested that she uses her art as therapy. I, unfortunately, do.)
Since a couple of other people have posted their weird-ass and mildly disturbing dreams lately, I thought I might pass my own along from last night. It’s very rare that I remember my dreams, but this one had a couple of really vivd moments.
I was in some sort of housing complex, like a college dorm system or something similar, with a group of rather non-descript friends. Suddenly the power started failing, and as we all went downstairs to investigate we discovered that we were trapped in, either by barred doors or a raging storm outside. Standing around in the dimly-lit lobby with maybe three dozen other people who’d come down, I started noticing how badly the place had fallen into disrepair. Every time I turned around (literally, this being a dream, the same spot would be worse each time I looked at it) there was more broken plaster with cross-slats showing through the wall or iron-bar scaffolding against a crumbling brick mantle. Exactly how the next part happened is rather unclear to me, but we all sensed that we were in danger from something, and began arming ourselves with whatever was handy. I ended up with a fire axe, which was better than most. Somehow we all realized that each one of us was the target of some specific fiend or monster, and someone started handing out items that determined what we were to expect. It was clear to me that the person handing out the items wasn’t doing the determining, but was just the bearer of the bad news. Didn’t get a clear look at him.
Anyway, the first really vivid part was when I got my item. It was a newspaper clipping, yellowed with age, folded in a few places and worn to velum at the edges. I looked down at it and gave a loud “OH FUCK” with a petulant little stamp of my foot. The title of the clipping read quite clearly “Axe-Murder Victim Found Stuffed Full of Sawdust.” (Whoever says that you can’t read text in a dream is lying. I specifically remember going back and reading that sentence two or three times, hoping it would be different.) From this I realized that I would be going up against an Axe-murderer, which had me really worried. I was surprised and a little frightened, thinking I’d gotten an odd choice and thinking that everyone else was dealing with supernatural nasties like wolfmen or vampires, but looking around the room I saw that everyone was armed with things like lengths of chain or rope or lead pipe, or other oddities for weapons, which would be linked to whoever they were going to be fighting. (As usual, the dream logic twisted around, and my selection, which was merely ironic earlier, was now implicitly linked to the monster.) Despite deciding to try and keep the group together, we got spread out a little by the time I confronted my monster, at which point he was way too overwhelming for anyone to help me with. (They were all expecting their murderers as well.) Somehow we’d wandered into a large, vaguely oblong display room about 65 feet long and two stories high, tapered so that it came to a skylight at the top. The place was wood-paneled and had dusty, dry-rotten wooden flooring. A single filthy display case like the ones in a jewelry department sat in the center, with piles of dust and dirt scattered around it. There was only one real entrance, a pair of rickety old wooden double doors at one end of the room. I was standing near those doors when they were flung open and the “axe-murderer” entered. He was a tall man, about a head taller than me, but strangely rotund, his belly ballooning out slightly like an egg. He was balding, with a tuft of dusty grey hair on either side of his bare pate, and had bushy eyebrows. He was dressed somewhat formally, in suit pants, white shirt, and vest, but missing the suit-coat. All of his clothing was a dusty, faded brown. In either of his large, muscular hands with stubby fingers he held a large one-piece-cast knife with a weirdly elaborate and awkward-ly shaped metal handle. I was caught a little off guard and limply swung the axe at his head. He blocked it easily under the blade with one knife, and, moving surprisingly quickly, grabbed hold of the handle. I thought to pry one weapon loose from him and made a grab for the knife he was clumsily holding in the same hand as the axe. He gave a massive tug on the axe. Now he had the axe and one knife, and I had a knife.
Crud.
I backed away quickly, thinking I could outrun him, but it was then that his friends joined in. Two or three zombies ran after me as I dodged around the display counter. I knew they were zombies because of the desiccated skin of their faces and hands, despite the speed they moved at. The only one I got a good look at looked like a badly-preserved Western villain, with a wide flat hat, silver-decorated hat-band, string tie, leather vest and chaps. His clothing too was all a dusty brown, the silver was tarnished, and stiff grey hair stuck out in individual strands from under his hat. He hissed something out at me as he came after me, but I don’t remember what it was.
I actually got a couple of good stabs in on the “Axe-murderer” (I realize now that he was more like a necromancer, hence the “sawdust” weirdness......in fact, I think he was modeled after the necromancer in that episode of Angel, only much rounder and taller), jabbing him in the stomach with that knife of his as his zombies caught up, but every time I stabbed him I couldn’t get more than an inch in. It was like trying to drive a knife into a tightly-packed sandbag. He took no notice, slashed me up pretty good, and then I caught a strong one from the axe. (This is pretty unique. I don’t usually loose to monsters in my own dreams, having actually gone against both Freddy and Jason on occasion....although they proved to be really massively stupid in my little version.)
Here it gets pretty weird, because I didn’t wake up when I “died.” It’s pretty certain that I died, though, as I remember thinking exactly that when the axe dropped. After a brief period of whirling darkness, I was thrown up out of a large black well. It looked like a weird cross between an enormous rotted tree stump and a natural rock formation with odd vines growing out of it. There was an odd black whirlpool in the center of the stump, and I washed up and out of it into one of a series of little side pools between the roots/vines. The rest of the area was heavily forested with tall, spindly trees and a large crowd of people had gathered in the area. Somehow I realized that this was where the people went who’d been killed in the conflict. The monsters ended up here as well, but were apparently under some sort of agreement or threat not to kill any of those who’d already been killed. As I made my way down from the stump I heard some arguing, and, looking over, saw the three zombies talking loudly. One of them warned the zombie in the flat hat not to “do it,” but he waved that one off and stepped menacingly towards me. When he got right next to me, he pulled something out of his pocket and hissed in a low voice “I want you to know that Mr. Smooth wants the other one of these, and he’s going to kill you to get it.” He showed me something that looked like a little obsidian stylized goat’s head made into a pin or ring of some sort (like a sharper-edged version of Yohko’s ring), and then made a grab for me. I backed up, but needn’t have worried. A large medusa-like-snake-lamia-thing unfolded itself from where it had been a part of the rocky stump and hissed at the zombie, who hurriedly backed up. The gorgon-creature weaved back and forth for a moment, its lower serpentine half still a part of the rock, and said to the zombie “He is under my protection.....and know this....that he is not one of this world.” At the last bit the zombie stuttered something about “but that means....” turned exceedingly pale (which is hard for a zombie to do), and ran off.
From there the dream got really, REALLY weird and progressively more abstract, as well as strangely vulgar. I’ve no idea what the “not one of this world” thing was about, but it apparently granted me some strange powers, including the ability to manipulate the form of Hummel figurines at will. I’m not kidding about that last part. Flippin’ weird.
In other, much less gruesome news, you can now say that you’re reading the journal of a published author! Sorta. It’s just the abstracts for the two posters I’ll be presenting at the start of next month for the ASH conference. A paragraph apiece in the abstract book of ASH’s flagship publication. It’s an enormous book, so my contribution is really insignificant, and conference abstracts are considered to be the bottom of the barrel as far as publications go. On the other hand, everything else aside, it is two listed publications in “Blood,” a journal kept on the shelves of every US medical institute, and most of the rest of the world, so I hope y’all will allow me a little pride. Unfortunately, due to a screw up with them loosing my registration check, they didn’t send me my copies of the abstract book, or I’d have it right here to list the reference and page number to y’all. (I do know that they’re in there, ‘cause I checked with my lab-mate’s copy.) I’ll check on it and send ya the reference when I next get a chance.
On the doubly-good side, I seem to have shaken the cold that was bugging me the last couple of days. Looks like it was just a 48-hour bug.
As a celebration, and in an attempt to stave off the despair that work generated today, I’ve decided to do something that I’ve been considering for a while now. I’m gonna post one of my stories. It’s an old one, from way back in undergrad, and I’m mostly doing it because it also happened to be written in the form of a series of journal entries. I’ll be posting it piecewise, entry by entry at the tail end of my own journal entries for the next week or two. Don’t worry, the story is entirely written, so it should appear more regularly than my own entries, and the whole thing is only about six pages long, so you needn’t worry about my endless windbaggery in my actual fiction. Besides, I was trying to do something a bit different with this story, in a desperate attempt to develop my own distinct style, and I’m curious if it worked or not. Please leave comments, but keep in mind that this is from several years ago, so there’s likely to be some glaring flaws. Also, there are two things I never really liked about it. I was never able to come up with an adequate title, and I was never really able to carry the mood through to the end. I may do some re-writing in the final journal entry to that end. Without further ado, I give you “McTyrie.”
_____________________________________________
I brought this journal along by chance. In order to relieve some of the tedium in my daily routine, I have half-heartedly begun to record those occurrences of any real interest, but my entries have always been sporadic at best. I certainly didn't intend to bring it along with me when I set out on this call, but I'm glad now that it was accidentally left in by bicycle-pack.
I understand that doctors who make house calls are becoming a rare breed these days, but when your patients live in as small a town as mine do, there could be nothing more dangerous to your practice than a bad reputation. Therefore, I do the rounds in Salmon City (God, I hate that name) in person, regularly visiting the bedridden and lonely, who, despite my expert care, never seem to recover completely. Contrary to the ideas of these chronic hypochondriacs, severe illnesses have always been a rarity in this town. Thus far, the McTyrie's case seems to be no exception. A man with a whisper-thin voice called into my office today, asking if I would mind making a house call. It seems that his wife had been feeling rather unwell for the past few days and was feeling sickly enough today that she wouldn't get out of bed. A typical complaint in these parts. The women were rarely considered sick unless they refused to work. Horribly chauvinistic of their husbands, but it rarely led to anything serious.
So, with my medical bag lashed to the mini-rack on the seat of my bike, I set off to keep this appointment. The McTyrie's house wasn't on my regular rounds, being much further out of town than any other of my patients. In fact, before the call, I don't think I'd ever heard of them. This didn't surprise me as I’ve yet to explore many of the outlying areas of the community. I wound along the twisting wooded path towards the house, following carefully the directions given to me over the phone. House doesn't really do it justice. Mansion would be closer to the mark. This building must have over a hundred rooms nestled away in three brick stories, surrounded on all sides by the oak and chestnut trees of the labyrinthine wood which clusters about the house. Great three-story picture windows and massive paneled doors front this monolithic structure, strangely seeming more a part of the woods than the trees themselves.
Grinding my bicycle to a halt in the graveled driveway, my immediate impression was that no one was home. The beautiful windows all had their curtains pulled and the mighty doors were shut tight. Apparently this is a habit of the family's, so I have refrained from opening the shades in any of the rooms excepting my own. I was about to call out, asking if anyone was home, when I noticed a young girl sitting on the marble front step. I was momentarily taken aback, for she was staring at me with incredible intensity, sizing me up, estimating my worth with a maturity that I would have found surprising in a child twice her age.
She couldn't have been more than five or six, about as tall as my thigh, and possessing a pair of shockingly blue eyes. She was undeniably pretty, the picture of a young princess, but was strangely unkempt, dress torn and soiled, face dirty, and shoes scuffed. She seemed almost a wild animal, which might at any moment take flight into the surrounding woods. Tousled blonde hair moved slightly in the breeze, matching that of the doll's which she kept clasped tightly to her breast. She was wearing a short blue party dress with scuffed black shoes, reminding me for all the world of Carroll's Alice. She appeared to posses none of the congeniality of that fictional character, though, and said nothing as I paused to collect my thoughts.
"Is you mommy home? Your daddy called me and said she was sick. I'm the doctor."
Stolidly, with no visible change in expression, the little girl, whom I now know as Andrea, stood and led me inside the massive house. The house itself was as still as death, but Andrea led me a merry chase down halls and corridors until halting before a small, unassuming wooden door. Entering, I found myself in the bedroom of my patient. The presence of a lone single bed did not surprise me at the time, though now that I think of it, it makes me wonder where her husband slept. Upon my entrance, the sleeping form in the bed woke and turned to face me.
"Doctor, how good of you to come." Said the mother, smiling weakly at me. "I'm sure it's nothing, but you'd best check. I don't want my little Andrea to go unattended."
Despite her apparent good cheer the woman was obviously quite sick. She was sweating profusely and her complexion was quite pale. From the slight shaking of her hands and the stutter in her voice, I concluded that she was also quite weak, a result, I found, of her inability to keep down even the simplest of meals. However, a cursory examination relieved the worst of my fears. She had not been severely weakened by the illness, her muscles responding strongly and smoothly, and she had no fever. In fact, her body temperature was slightly reduced, but nothing to worry about. She was unable to think very clearly or answer many of my questions about her illness, being unable to remember what she had eaten beforehand or even how long she had felt like this. Now that I think of it, the latter is not unlikely, since her windows, like those of the rest of the house, were heavily shuttered and there was no clock in her room. At one point I even tried to get answers out of Andrea. She also seemed oblivious to my questions, except when I asked her how long her mother had been this sick. As before, Andrea remained silent but now held up one tiny fist with her three littlest fingers sticking out. Three days was quite long for a case of what appeared to be the flu, but I am not overly concerned for Andrea's mother's health.
Nevertheless, the illness could easily grow into something serious, and so I have decided to spend the night. My practice is not so busy that one day away from the office will cause many difficulties, and my nurse is competent to handle anything that comes up. Andrea, silent as ever, took me to one of the seemingly endless empty rooms where I might unpack the change of clothes I keep in my bike-pack. While doing so, I found this journal which I must have picked up by mistake this morning. It is not quite as useful as the novel I was reading, but it will serve to keep me occupied. It wasn't until I sat down on the bed that I realized that Andrea has played a joke on me. Apparently Andrea took me to one of her old rooms, for all of the furniture is built low to the ground, the bed barely twenty-four inches off the ground, and makes me feel a bit like a giant. I am annoyed, but it is easily remedied come morning, and the bed is the proper length at least. I shall see that Mrs. Mctyrie gets a little supper, and then I shall turn in. Mr. McTyrie, I presume, will be coming home shortly, for I haven't seen him yet.
________________________________________________
-
Read me second.
2003-11-24 12:30:46
That’s almost the whole book. Essentially, Asprin slips into Piers Anthony’s rut (I hated Anthony even as a kid because of the relentless punning in Xanth) with three separate plots against Skeeve’s direction of raising taxes. There’s the local bow hunting club, who can’t actually hit anything, run by a man named Robb...and his friends John, Tuck....you get the idea. Then there’s the rich kid running around in a costume (Batman) and the local RPG group who think they’ve gotten ahold of “Skeeve’s ring of power” (LotR) Nunzio, Spyder, and Pookie sort out the mildly dangerous ones easily, entirely ignore the LotR group, and putter back to the Capital. This takes roughly the first 120 pages of the book. The book is only 180 pages long (not counting the appendix).
Everything else is odds and ends. Massha gets married to General Badaxe, which gets a dozen or so pages. Gleep the dragon gets accidentally shot, but no serious damage is done. Skeeve finally finds out that the dragon is intelligent. These are all kinda strung together randomly, though. The best example of how far the series has fallen is in a secondary section at the end of the book labeled “MYTH inc Instructions.” One of the wedding guests, in order to try and make his boss (mob boss) loose favor to his own advantage, a villain named Don Dedondon (read it out loud...best joke in the book) rigs one of the presents as a bomb. Gleep thwarts it, the crew figures it out, stage a fake explosion, and expose the dirty Don. Now, thing is, we’ve never met this guy before. He was introduced in name only on page 172. The plot is exposed on page 174, and resolved on page 180. I hate to say it about one of my favorite series from childhood, but this is just filler. He needed something to pad out those last ten pages, so he invented an entire subplot to keep us busy. The whole book was padding, measuring time off until we get to the only important event in the book. At the end of everything, when all is said and done, Skeeve turns down rulership of the kingdom, resigns the presidency of MYTH, and leaves (on the best of terms with everyone) to go study magic, with Bunny as his assistant. Pookie takes off with Spyder, Massha goes on her honemoon, and the remainder of the crew meet to discuss the future status of MYTH. Which we aren’t told.
What this feels like is the end of the show. It’s possible to write stories after this one with the cast given (or pulling any one of them lamely back in again), but this book felt like it HURT to write. Little fun, little of the energy and snazzy that I loved the older books for. Hell, you know all those fun little ironic quotes he used to preface chapters with? He only bothers with quotes for the last four chapters. “Some of my best friends are dragons” (Siegfried); “I was hoping for a little fatherly advice” (J.Christ); “How can it be a wedding without an aria?” (Figaro); and “I suppose you’re all wondering why I called you here” (D. McArthur). This one actually makes me afraid to go back and read the old books (like I had time), fearful of finding them all similarly bedecked with problems.
In short, a sad ending to a great series. Read only for completeness-sake.
-
Read me first
2003-11-24 12:30:02
Everyone hold on. I had Krystals for dinner and am following it up with a couple Guinness, so this could get pretty weird pretty damn fast. Plus I’ve got a lot of points to hit, so I’m gonna be jumping around pretty rapidly (the Krystals should help on that point). First off, you’ve probably all heard about the landmark case in Massachusetts (God, can anyone spell that without a spellchecker?). The Massachusetts State Supreme Court found that same-sex marriage was constitutionally supported by the Constitution of Massachusetts. Read that last bit careful-like, you’re gonna be hearing about it a lot over the next 180 days (a breathing-period granted before the verdict goes into effect to allow everyone the ability to get ready for all the forms and conventions it’s going to change, or get their crap together if they’re going to object.....I think.....again wandering around outside my standard range of knowledge...). Kobold (creates Something Positive in his spare time....when he has any) posted something that got me to thinking.
Actually, he first posted something that succinctly summed up the REAL ramifications of this decision: http://www.livejournal.com/users/kobold/86990.html
My God! Who will think of the children?
Then he went ahead and posted the more thought-provoking point. http://www.livejournal.com/users/kobold/87122.html
Essentially, he’s asking the detractors of the decision if there’s any stance for forbidding the legalization of same-sex marriages that A) makes sense, and B) does not invoke religion. The latter can be applied, naturally, because of the supposed separation of church and state in the US. Now, this piqued my interest because it’s speaking directly to the point I had last time about “people who refuse to see the complexity of an issue.” There are two definite sides to this issue, and they’ve both got enough defenders that you can’t dismiss it entirely as the crazy-person contingent or those with political bacon to be made. Therefore, I should be capable of determining a reasonable argument for both sides, no matter where I lie personally. So I thought I’d do what no one else seems to have done, and went to the source of the decision. I’ll do an interpretive Fisking of the court opinions below. (I should first point out that the decision was not unanimous, but a marginal 4-3 decision. That doesn’t mean, however, that the line of opinion was drawn as closely down the middle as you might think, as I’ll elaborate later.
*stars* indicate excerpted text, for my AMV.org readers.
(Snitched from instapundit.)
*Unofficial Synopsis Prepared by the Reporter of Decisions
The Supreme Judicial Court held today that "barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution." *
There’s the meat of the issue. Notice the slight legalistic wording here that makes the statement into an explanation. The court is not legitimizing gay marriage, it’s stating that to prevent someone from receiving the benefits of marriage because they want to marry someone of the same sex is discriminatory based upon the irrelevant modifier of their sexuality, and therefore impermissible. Now one of the arguments you’re going to be hearing from some of the ‘fringers is that, now that gay marriage is allowed, what’s to stop the removal of age limits on marriage, effectively buying the NAMBLA line? The quick counter to that position is to insert “child” into the above line. “barring a child from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Mass. Constitution.” This statement is true. However, the marriage would be prevented on OTHER grounds, namely that one participant is a CHILD, and therefore not permitted to take on the obligations of civil marriage on the grounds that a child is not mentally or socially sufficiently adapted to handle obligations reserved for adults. Age limits on marriage are entirely different issues from the matter at hand.
*The court stayed the entry of judgment for 180 days "to permit the Legislature to take such action as it may deem appropriate in light of this opinion."*
The breather I mentioned before.
*"Marriage is a vital social institution,"*
Get used to that phrase.
*wrote Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall for the majority of the Justices. "The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In turn it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations."*
This sets up the central question rather well. Whatever your idealistic take on the matter, whatever your ideal world may look like in which “marriage doesn’t really matter, who cares anyway if a same sex couple lives together LIKE they were married even if it isn’t officially recognized,” in THIS world, marriage is an institution, a body politic that’s been around a lot longer than this country, or any recognizable facet of Western culture. It’s stuck around because it’s convenient, it’s traditional, and because it works. It is a central stone of our society, and one upon which a great deal of our lives, social and historical, are built. Messing with something that’s worked for so long is a daunting task, as, whatever the manifold legal ramifications, it all comes down to an enormous pile of paperwork that no one ever really looks at, whereas on the societal level the ramifications have the potential to affect the way in which we perceive one another and interact.
* The question before the court was "whether, consistent with the Massachusetts Constitution," the Commonwealth could deny those protections, benefits, and obligations to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry.*
Again, notice the legalese wording. It asks if it is legal to deny someone something, not whether it is proper to grant it. A perfectly fair way to put it, but the wording is pointed enough to discern what the answer is already.
*In ruling that the Commonwealth could not do so, the court observed that the Massachusetts Constitution "affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals," and "forbids the creation of second-class citizens." *
Halleluiah, a stance I can get behind. (Oh shut up you....) I think I’ve seen this wording somewhere before. I think it was in Lincoln’s defense of the Emancipation Proclaimation. I think it was in the granting of women’s suffrage. It seems like every time the US makes some major breakthrough in citizen’s rights, it’s from going back to that musty old document and tripping over those words again and again..... “We hold these truths to be self evident....” Apparently not quite so self-evident, or we might’ve gotten it all correct the first time around. Oh well, it’s easy to be a smart-ass in retrospect. What might the world regard as self-evident fifty years from now? After all, God snuck into the document in several places, and his self-evidence is being questioned on a daily basis. (I understand that there’s a fringer’s movement to submit a constitutional amendment (Mass. or US., I’m not certain which) defining marriage as being between a man and a woman.....which a few decades ago would’ve been considered self evident...but in which case, if it passes, I think the document will become self-contradictory. It’s also worth noting that almost all of the US Constitutional amendments grant rather than take away rights. The most notable exception is the 18th....and we all know how well that went.)
*It reaches its conclusion, the court said, giving "full deference to the arguments made by the Commonwealth." The Commonwealth, the court ruled, "has failed to identify any constitutionality adequate reason for denying civil marriage to same-sex couples."*
Whoop, note the wording. Leaves open a door for if someone ever comes up with a good n’ proper reason.
*The court affirmed that it owes "great deference to the Legislature to decide social and policy issues." Where, as here, the constitutionality of a law is challenged, it is the "traditional and settled role" of courts to decide the constitutional question. *
Qua? Keep an eye on this part. Seems a little out of place, doesn’t it? This figures big in the dissenting opinions.
*The "marriage ban" the court held, "works a deep and scarring hardship" on same-sex families "for no rational reason." It prevents children of same-sex couples "from enjoying the immeasurable advantages that flow from the assurance of 'a stable family structure in which children will be reared, educated, and socialized."' "It cannot be rational under our laws," the court held, "to penalize children by depriving them of State benefits" because of their parents' sexual oreintation.*
Hmmm. The problem is being framed as a social injustice through the eyes of the children of same-sex couples. A legitimate point, but coming at the issue in a roundabout way, addressing the fact that the law will affect more than just the people it’s applied to, rather than the people it’s applied to first. Odd to bring this point up so early in the discussion.
*The court rejected the Commonwealth's claim that the primary purpose of marriage was procreation. Rather, the history of the marriage laws in the Commonwealth demonstrates that "it is the exclusive and permanent commitment of the marriage partners to one another, not the begetting of children, that is the sine qua non of marriage."*
Major issue here, addressed and dispatched with little elaboration. Tells me that there’s a lot of elaborate evidence to plough through that has to fit together properly to make sense. This is the wording you use in scientific papers when you have to summarize twenty papers into a single conclusion. “history.....demonstrates that” (footnotes 23-84)
*The court remarked that its decision "does not disturb the fundamental value of marriage in our society." "That same-sex couples are willing to embrace marriage's solemn obligations of exclusivity, mutual support, and commitment to one another is a testament to the enduring place of marriage in our laws and in the human spirit," the court stated.*
“The court remarked”.....well, I guess that settles it then. This, as far as I can tell, is the central issue of the opposition, that it does, somehow, disturb the fundamental value of marriage. I happen to agree with the court, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to dismiss the central argument of the opposition with a “t’ain’t true.” Honestly, I’m being a bit harsher here than is justified. The full opinion may thoroughly address this issue, and I haven’t the time to read it all.
*The opinion reformulates the common-law definition of civil marriage to mean "the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others. Nothing that "civil marriage has long been termed a 'civil right,"' the court concluded that "the right to marry means little if it does not include the right to marry the person of one's choice, subject to appropirate government restrictions in the interests of public health, safety, and welfare."*
This is the first admission of the court that something is actually being changed instead of merely a correction in application of a position. I’m guessing that it’s generally better to bury the point in your opinion where you start altering existing law.
*Justices John M. Greaney, Roderick L. Ireland, and Judity A. Cowin joined in the court's opinion. Justice Greaney also filed a separate concurring opinion.
Justices Francis X. Spina, Martha B. Sosman, and Robert J. Cordy each filed separate dissenting opinions.
Justice Greaney concurred "with the result reached by the court, the remedy ordered, and much of the reasoning in the court's opinion," but expressed the view that "the case is more directly resolved using traditional equal protection analysis." He stated that to withhold "relief from the plaintiffs, who wish to marry, and are otherwise eligible to marry, on the ground that the couples are of the same gender, constitutes a categorical restriction of a fundamental right." Moreover, Justice Greaney concluded that such a restriction is impermissible under art. 1 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.*
Hello.....actual references integral to the decision, admission of exactly what it is you are doing, and framing the debate on a more fundamental level than depending of the effect on “the couple’s children,” instead addressing the issue directly to the people you are applying the law to. I think I like Justice Greaney.
*In so doing, Justice Greaney did not rely on art. 1, as amended in 1976, because the voters' intent in passing the amendment was clearly not to approve gay marriage, but he relied on well-established principles of equal protection that antedated the amendment.*
Wait.....what the hell is this? Ignoring an amendment? Let’s hunt a bit.... here’s the first article as formulated in 1780: “Article I. All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”
Hmm... nothing to debate there. Now let’s find the amendment in 1976.....(Whoa...along the way I find that “In Massachusetts, the marriage statutes are derived from English common law, see Commonwealth v. Knowlton, 2 Mass. 530, 534 (1807), and were first enacted in colonial times.” The number of ways in which this must complicate things are innumerable....also encountered a marriage law case entitled “Hyde vs. Hyde”) OK, I can’t frickin’ find it. To the best of my ability, I can manage that there’s an elaborate reference to the the “ERA” in the full opinion: http://www.state.ma.us/courts/courtsandjudges/courts/supremejudicialcourt/goodridge.html The “ERA” was the “Equal Rights Amendment,” which, to my ability to tell, was created in an attempt to prevent discrimination between the sexes by forbidding the creation of any law that treated the sexes differently. To that end, the opinion specifically states that the law against same-sex marriage is not discriminatory on the basis of sex, because it won’t allow the marriage of two gay men as readily as it won’t allow the marriage of two lesbian women. Which I suppose is true. Guh....getting turned around here. Although I can’t find the wording of the amendment, from what I can gather, the statement in the segment above isn’t saying that the justices are ignoring an amendment, it’s saying that they’re not leaning on a crappy cheap shot that’s built into the Mass. constitution by trying to say that prevention of same-sex marriage is a violation of the sex discrimination laws. (Damn....go plumbing around in the full opinion text....fucker’s long even by my standards, and ludicrously convoluted....mostly out of an effort to address every single possible angle on the subject.)
Oh wait...here it is: (Damn you Google and your infinite sense of proprietary ranking.)
“Article CVI. Article I of Part the First of the Constitution is hereby annulled and the following is adopted:-
All people are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness. Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin. “
Oh......OK, uh....I don’t see how using the revision would’ve changed the verdict in any way....it just makes sure that we’re talking about both queer and lesbian couples....I think. (God I’m drunk.) On to the dissentions.
*Justice Cordy, with whom Justice Spina and Justice Sosman joined, dissented on the ground that the marriage statute, as historically interpreted to mean the union of one man and one woman, does not violate the Massachusetts Constitution because "the Legislature could rationally conclude that it furthers the legitimate State purpose of ensuring, promoting, and supporting an optimal social structure for the bearing and raising of children." *
Hmmmmm...... So, essentially, they’re saying that the prevention of same-sex marriage doesn’t violate the Mass. constitution (effectively inverting the argument made by the consenting judges) because it is reasonable for the legislature to conclude (ie. an argument can be made) that the law encourages the forming of the best social structure (one (1) man and one (1) wo-man) for the children. They’re “thinking of the children first.”
Fuck that noise.
What, we’re going to restructure the world on the justification that the final structure we build is “the best thing for the kiddies? Fuck that. I want the world to be the best possible structure for ME, and I have no little rugrats, so what do I care about the raising of the anklebiters? Whoa, 5th Guinness going to the head a bit. Seriously, law is arranged for maximum benefit to everyone. The parents of a gay marriage as much as the children they might (somehow) come to be raising. If nothing else, the parents outnumber the progeny, so they should be receiving the majority of the benefit. This is leaving entirely aside the statement that one man and one woman is an “optimum” child-raising environ. For all we know, the optimum is reached when we stick them in a Skinner box.
*Justice Cordy stated that the court's conclusions to the contrary are unsupportable in light of "the presumption of constitutional validity and significiant deference afforded to legislative enactments, *
ie. “legislative enactments involving the constitution are stronger and more valid than judiciary decisions”
*and the 'undesirability of the judiciary substituting its notion of correct policy for that of a popularly elected legislature' responsible for making it.' *
ie. “(A) the legislature decided something, (B) the judiciary disagrees, (C) the legislature is an elected body and thus a more accurate representation of the public’s will....which we are supposed to be representing.....therefore legislature trumps judiciary.” Again, bullshit. There are a lot of people out there who might be surprised to be finding this out, but the appointment of judges to the supreme court is yet another balance in our system of checks and balances. There’s a reason that the judiciary is appointed and not elected, as a balance against the rule of “king mob” and in this case their decision...if not trumps than at least counters.....the statements of the legislature from a quarter decade before. Often the appointment of judges is held up by the liberal wing as a vestige of the old conservative system....and “old boys” system for entrenchment of outdated ideals. Doesn’t look so bad when that side is working for you, does it? Fact is, it’s a good idea to have an equal-but-countered wing of the government that doesn’t have to worry about popular support every fourth year. Ensures reasoned opposition to even the most popular of notions. And in this case, to bring through (by a bare margin) an ideal traditionally associated with the liberal wing, against the popular conservative bent.’
However, it does bring up a legitimate question. Does the judiciary have the authority to rule on this particular issue? The consenting judges seem to think so, but I confess that the jurisdictional topics involved are way too confusing for me to tackle. All I can say is that the reason given above is bullshit in my estimation.
*Further, Justice Cordy stated that "[w]hile 'the Massachusetts Constitution protects matters of personal liberty against government intrusion at least as zealously and often more so than does the Federal Constitution,' this case is not about government intrusions into matters of personal liberty," but "about whether the State must endorse and support [the choices of same-sex couples]*
Hmmm....seems about right. True thus far. “Endorse and support” is danger-language, though. That’s the kind of thing you use when assaulting someone legally. “So you endorse anal sex with men, Senator Klaghorn?”
* by changing the institution of civil marriage to make its benefits, obligations, and responsibilities applicable to them."*
Here’s the point of dissent foreshadowed by the consenting opinion. Is an actual change being brought about? Is it merely the proper application of a concept miss-applied since the colonial days? I would say, in my unprofessional opinion, that an actual change is being applied, although I think it is one long overdue.
*Justice Cordy concluded that, although the plaintiffs had made a powerful case for the extension of the benefits and burdens of civil marriage to same-sex couples, the issue "is one deeply rooted in social policy" and 'that decision must be made by the Legislature, not the court."*
Wow. Honest dissenter. “I don’t think we have the authority to make this change.” OK buddy, that’s a reasonable objection. The jurisdictional matters involved are more than I can take. Would have to refer to a lawyer for this one, but it effectively strands the argument away from criticism. Whatever this guy believes, he believes that the choice ain’t his to make.
*Justice Spina, in a separately filed dissenting opinion, stated that "[W]hat is at stake in this case is not the unequal treat..nt of individuals or whether individuals rights have been impermissibly burdened, but the power of the Legislature to effectuate social change without interference from the courts, pursuant to art. 30 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights." He emphasized that the "power to regulate marriage lies with the Legislature, not with the judiciary."*
(That is the weirdest placement of ellipsis I’ve ever encounted.) Much the same conclusion as the previous dissenting. (Article 30 is: “Article XXX. In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.” In other words, balance of power leading to a deadlock, and being of no frickin’ help in this situation where you are attempting to legislate touchy social change. Nonetheless, the same dissenting conclusion, untouchable from my perspective.)
*Justice Sosman, in a separately filed dissenting opinion, stated that "the issue is not whether the Legislature's rationale behind [the statutory scheme being challenged] is persuasive to [the court]," but whether it is "rational" for the Legislature to "reserve judgment" on whether changing the definition of marriage "can be made at this time wihtout damaging the institution of marriage or adversely affecting the critical role it has played in our society." *
Damn, here we go. An honest dissenter who is falling back on actual arguments an not coppin’ out on a technicality. A rational argument directly against the issue. Albeit a largely paranoid one. In other words, will “marriage” within gay couples “work,” and will it adversely affect the social definition of “marriage” for all those who’re married? The problem here, of course, is that there’s no real definition for “work” and the concept of “adversely affect” is enormously open to interpretation. Any person might claim that their marriage had been “cheapened” by the admission of gay marriages, and how the hell would you reply to them? “Cheapening” when not applied to actual pawn-able objects can’t be argued from different perspectives at all, since the concept is entirely relative. “Damaging” is a bit more widely defined, and raises specters of the “infinitely-divorceable nest of sin and hedonism that signals the end of western civilization.” Essentially, even among the non-religious supporters of marriage, this speaks to the gradual crumbling away of sacred bonds and the essential family unit to the unslaked thirst of hedonism and self-centered-ness of people who would get married on a whim just to ridicule the bonds that others take so seriously....resorting to divorce only in the EXTREME case where one might encounter a better lover than one’s current mate. Marrying that one only until a still better harem offer comes along. Essentially an insult and disintegration to the institution that they hold most sacred.
In other words, an entirely aesthetic revulsion.
Which, of course, has no business dictating law.
To the credit of this judge, she’s saying that she DOESN’T KNOW if this sort of damage will result. “If we let the gays into our club, we don’t know if they’re going to wreck the place.” To her I say, TAKE A FRICKIN’ CHANCE.
*She concluded that, "[a]bsent consensus on the issue (which obviously does not exist), or unanimity amongst scientists studying the issue (which also does not exist), or a more prolonged period of observation of this new family structure (which has not yet been possible), it is rational for the Legislature to postpone any redefinition of marriage that would include same-sex couples until such time as it is certain that redefinition will not have unintended and undesirable social consequences."*
Oh this is just too clever. “If we don’t have a consensus.....which, knowing people, we never will have..... or all scientific studies of the matter don’t conclude the same point.......which they never will since it involves psychiatrists and sociologists who’ve never come to any sort of a consensus......or more time to watch these “gays” in the wild to judge their nature......which has no real time limit on it (where were you during the 70’s?)...... we should put off any decision about redefining our club admission rules until we’re sure that the gays won’t wreck the clubhouse.
So, beyond my fisking of this decision, have I any ACTUAL opinions to offer? (Beyond the fact that I use the word “actual” far too frequently?) Well, they do have a point. Essentially, the governmental recognition of gay marriage is a big step. A step out into thin air. The debate over whether or not the country is ready for such an acknowledgement of same-sex relations largely depends on where in the country you’re from. The whole of the US isn’t California (thank God....some of us can balance our checkbooks) and it’s not at all certain that all groups are going to take this lying down. The resulting vilification of gay individuals that this will stir up in some areas weighed against the benefits reaped in the areas where people will take it in stride is a judgment I’m not qualified to make. I do not think that allowing gay marriages will destroy the institution of marriage as far as the govt. is concerned, unless they start forcing all religions to recognize it, in which case we’ve got oppression of religion. But no other advancement has ever involved such a thing (forcing recognition) outside of tax-law and hiring quotas, so I fail to see where the issue lies on that topic. From what I can tell, most of the argument against states that “the US isn’t ready yet....and they never will be...because they know that homosexual sex is wrong!” I can’t speak to the first or second point, as that’s largely sociological. The last point I disagree with.....but can’t factually back up, because I’ve no system for proving that something isn’t “wrong” when it involves first principles. (You start either believing that homosexuality is “right” or at least “OK” or “wrong” for various unassailable first principles. These, being the basis of your logic, cannot be dis-proven within the structured world of your founding logic.) So the requested logical argument that doesn’t involve religion that is against the recognition of gay marriage is that it’s essentially a massive experiment. This would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s actually messing with people’s lives through the legislation of societal arrangements. The argument says that too much is at risk and the outcome is too uncertain. What precisely some people think will be the negative results of this decision is sort of irrelevant, because their argument is that no one really knows, and no one can really predict, because there isn’t enough precedent.
This, at least, is a point that can be argued with. Negative consequences that can be anticipated could be argued on a point for point basis, but the statement that “no one knows” is sort of a generic out with no real way to argue against it. In a way it’s right. There is no experimental model for the societal impact of this decision, and change shouldn’t be visited upon actual people and actual families just to “see what would happen.” Having considered this perspective, I still have to approve of the legal recognition of same-sex marriages. I do think that the US is ready for such a decision, based on the slight precedents we have of some legal recognition granted to same-sex couples that is granted to married couples (some job-related benefits, some governmentally-recognized benefits in a few states, etc.), I don’t even grant a nod of recognition towards the conspiracy theorists who view this as the first step in a great descent into Sodom and Gammorah, and I do not think that being raised by two parents of the same sex will irrevocably fuck up children. These are all things I think and believe, but to be honest, I cannot KNOW that I am correct, and I am at no greatly advantageous position for coming to this decision. Unbiased sociologists (if you can find one) would be a better expert on the matter, but I do the best with what I have.
So, having handled a weighty topic while wasted, what’s next on the agenda? Whooo..... Long list here.
Let’s hit an easy one first, the promised Halloween photos. http://loewnauphotography.com/images/October_2003/
(Really should’ve taken off the glasses before the photo was taken. I showed up late, so you’ll have to scroll down a good ways before I show up.)
This is a matter for another time, but I’m always taken aback whenever I see photos of myself, whatever the situation. I have a major case of cognitive dissonance with my self image that’s led me to really hate mirrors or photos. Put simply, I just don’t look how I think I look. It’s not really an ego thing either. I don’t imagine myself better or worse looking, just totally different. Quu put up a note asking people to sketch him from memory a few days ago. I should try to sketch MYSELF from memory, to try and get my self image down on paper so I could point out how it’s different. (Only problem, can’t draw.) It’s actually disparate enough that I have trouble recognizing caricatures of myself in the few instances where they’ve shown up. I have to stare hard and narrow the guesses down logically from the choices available. (‘Cept for in “VAT Breakdown”, simply because there wasn’t anyone else I _could’ve_ been.)
On another point, I really HATE lj right now. I’ve only just now discovered that during the last update they flipped some switch improperly and fucked me over royally. See, I do all this writing in a word document (lost one too many posts to a disconnection with the web for me to compose them in those little boxes) and then cut-and-paste them into the page and hit enter (after a little tag-editing).
Well, the old page worked the same way that the amv.org journals did. If you went over the wordlimit, it just refused to put any more characters into the little box, leaving you unable to enter any more words, and necessitating that your post be split in twain. When lj updated, they took that little function out. NOW you can just type to your heart’s content, filling up 30+pages of text into that tiny little square. Problem? The old wordlimit is still there. They just don’t tell you about it until you hit the “submit” button and they chop the bottom nine pages off your post, consigning them to the oblivion between pixels, and leaving your post with a stupidly-dangling half-sentence. Having only realized this just now, I’ve suddenly discovered that there’ve been several posts over the last month and a half where I broke wordlimit, lj lopped my post apart, and I didn’t notice. I’ll be posting the tailings and dross in completed form sometime later, which will consist mostly of a bunch of reviews that’d been cut off in mid-vituperative-rage.
In conclusion, if you notice that I’ve broken off in the middle of a sentence, please say something in the comments, and I’ll gather the strings back together. Thankfully, I’ve been posting this stuff over at amv.org as well, which calls attention to when I go over wordlimit, so the full text is floating around out there.
Played a few games of Warcraft recently. Turns out I still suck. Go figger.
Right, right. Reviews. Damn, got a pile of ‘em here. I wanted to tack on another full-bore review of an online comic I like since I managed to direct a number of people towards Jack last time around, but it looks like that’s gonna have to wait. I’ve got two books and two movies lined up, so they’ll all likely be more abruptly concluded than usual. (Which is probably for the best, all things considered.)
Yeah, Yeah, I went out and saw Matrix III. This is probably the most unnecessary review of the lot, since I saw it later than anyone else, took no notes, and had no real insight into the film itself. The general consensus seemed to be that it was better than #2 and not as good as #1. Those who reviled it as the worst of the bunch seemed to be expecting something in the fashion of an explanation or supporting concept set fort to justify the muddle that was the high-school philosophy class of the second. Some great bringing together of all the postulated concepts and proposed variants on zen mindset and weird-ass religion. Some honest-to-God good reason for that rave/orgy in the second. And a really kick-ass battle, a metaphysical confrontation visualized as someone getting kicked in the stomach repeatedly. Well, they were bound to be disappointed. ‘Cept on that last bit, where opinions vary.
Basically, this was a good film severely hamstrung by two factors. A) Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, Bruce Spence, and Harrold Perrineau are the only people in the film who can actually act, Laurence Fishburne, for some unknown reason, decided NOT to act, and the latter two were given all of five lines apiece in a total of three scenes. B) The ending makes no frickin’ sense. And I don’t mean I don’t know what happened, I mean I don’t know why anyone would make the decisions that were made.
So, the basic rundown, from 10,000 feet. We rejoin our cast after Smith has made it into one comatose individual (unbeknownst to anyone), and Neo has manifested magic powers in the real world, that knocked him into a coma as well. They’re both recuperating on board one of the hovering gunships sent to rendezvous with them in the second movie after the loss of the Nebuchadnezzar. Trinity and Morpheus are tending to their bodies and trying to locate Neo’s mind, which seems to have disappeared down the same dark void as Keanu’s acting ability. The get a call from Seraph, the kung-fu hop-saki guy who was acting as a guardian of the Oracle, who tells Morpheus to come see the Oracle. They both jack in, and do. When we get to the Oracle, we’re handed another batch of weird-ass non-attributals.
Neo is apparently trapped in a “between place” a world between that of the Matrix and that of the real world, which is manifested as a subway station. Uh, OK, but what exactly does that mean? Discounting the general “magic land” attitude that’s given about this place in the film (no explanation given other than it mediates between the “real world” and the matrix.....leaving us with the impression that he’s somehow slipped into “Mathamagic” land, only a lot less interesting and without the helpful narrator or apoplectic duck), let’s try to substitute in something that actually makes sense, seeing as how this is supposed to be science fiction. Are we saying that he’s slipped out of the Machine’s Nintendo and into the non-simulation programs and is now bugging around in the programs running the actual machines? Somewhere between that, trapped in a firewall? Ummmm.....maybe. While he’s there, he runs into a program family. I’ll skip over the various philosophical ramifications of the resulting conversation, but basically it’s moved on from the “if your whole life was nothing but a simulation, would that make your world any less real” that was the focus of the first film, and into “if a program is able to experience a full range of emotion and causative choice within a simulated world, is it any less a person than a real live person in the real world?” There he’s told that two service distribution AI programs (one’s a nuclear power plant controller, and I forget the other) have somehow interfaced to create a child that they’re having ferried.....uh.....elsewhere. Not to the “real” world, as we later see the little girl following the Oracle around. They do this by bargaining with the Merovingian for the services of the Trainman. The Trainman is cool. Neat character design, neat concept. Sorta a cross between Map from Hellblazer and the subway ghost from Ghost. Needless to say he gets a grand total of five lines and three scenes, and is never seen again. He’s the coolest character next to Smith yet, and there just isn’t any room for him in the show. Dammit.
Anyway, the Oracle sends Trinity, Morpheus, and Seraph to go discuss things with the Merovingian and make a deal for breaking Neo out. Fortunately for the audience, the Merovingian is throwing a party. What kind of party? Guess. Rubberist/Fetish rave party. Naturally. (Hey, the casters who made up the credits list knew a little bit. The people in the party (uncredited) are listed as “Trainees” “patrons” “slave” and “pony girl.”) There’s a scuffle in the coat-check room where the good guys open fire and manage only to blow away the unarmed weapons-check guy in the first salvo. There’s a long gunfight a-la the lobby in the first film, only with the fetishist-adorned guards (even one in a gas mask). Either I’m growing tired of these bullet-time fights (entirely possible) or this was really something of a notch downward in the skill and symphony of gunfire, because it felt almost entirely unnecessary and went on about three times too long as the opponents blazed away at one another in close quarters while rarely managing to hit one another. (The number of guards seemed to multiply as the scene went by too.) Surprising no one, the three get past the coat check and proceed into the party for an overflow of eye-candy for the latex/pvc/and just plain partial nudity fans in the audience, followed by an “audience” with the Merovingian.
Again, this scene feels totally unnecessary. There’s banter. Then more banter. Then the Merovingian names his price “the eyes of the Oracle”, a request that goes ENTIRELY UNEXPLAINED FOREVER, because Trinity, like the audience, tires of his atrocious accent (can you believe he’s actually French?) does some impromptu acrobatics and points a gun at the Frenchman’s head. Instant renegotiation behind the scenes, and they’ve got Neo back.....really, almost that simple. (The Trainman is “God” in the train station he created and able to flip Neo tail-over-teakettle with a flip of the wrist. His boss, the Merovingian, doesn’t live in a similar situation, capable of avoiding even the trifle of the far-less-talented Trinity? *Sigh*)
So let’s backtrack. Seraph contacts Morpheus, so Morpheus will contact Oracle, so Oracle will send them to Merovingian, so Merovingian will send Trainman, so Trainman will get Neo. Long trail of “find A to find B to find C” that we saw in the last film. Bleh. Further, I have yet to understand why Trinity is the love interest in this flick. Her interaction with Neo is still as forced and uncomfortable for the audience as ever, although we’re spared a full nude scene this time. (Trinity just seems so uncomfortable in her own skin....I suppose it’s no surprise that she’s even less comfortable and less attractive in a second one while in the Matrix.)
A return visit to the Oracle, who is just as informative as ever, and the story really picks up. Meaning that the plot goes away and we get down to the real thud and blunder of kickass action. Back at Zion, the machines are almost there, and they prepare for the battle. Meanwhile, back in the middle of nowhere, after much discussion, it’s determined that Neo has some undefined plan, and Niobe gives him her ship. Neo and Trinity, race off to the machine city with an unknown plan, while the remaining ship tries a back road to Zion.
What follows is really damn cool. The piddly stuff first, the material Smith has snuck aboard Neo’s ship in an attempt to kill him. During the resulting fight, Smith sticks an electrical cable to Neo’s temple, and electricity arcs through his face, frying his eyeballs like eggs.
Now to the cool stuff. The battle at Zion is massive. It’s massively cool. Enormous CGI battle scenes with machine-gunning exo-suits vs. literally tens of thousands of those squid things. Giant drills dropping through the ceiling. Heroism. Racing between the fire and massacred individuals. Tragedy. Fallen comrades. Ironic final speeches. That wonderful overblown writing that actually almost works given the buildup. It is also, however, really really stupid. And I don’t mean from a military expert viewpoint, I mean from concepts that a ten year old would spot if he was given a chance to sit down and think about it instead of being utterly wowed like the rest of us by the coolness of the graphics.
Oh, and they are cool. Zion is mostly defended by an assortment of constantly moving tunnel-rats with rocket-launchers, and mostly the Exo-suits, enormous robotic devices similar to the armament loader in “Aliens”, only carrying really big guns. They stand on these enormous 12’ thick wrought-iron catwalks that make up the central docking bay to the city, and fire into the oncoming sentinel squids. The squids pour in en-masse and swarm about in serpentine clusters, swooping down to pluck individuals off the catwalks or to tip over an Exo. There must be twenty solid minutes of watching this battle rage, and it does so with all the non-stop action of a really fuckin’ hard first-person shooter videogame. As a matter of fact, I recognized where I’d seen that swarming pattern in aerial combatants before. Serious Sam on “Serious” level with those harpy things. Don’t move quite as fast, but very similar swarming techniques. The battle is ended when the ship Niobe pilots finally makes it back to Zion, crashing through an almost-closed gate, and blowing its EMP weapon, wiping out every squid in the dock.
Now, I don’t want to take anything away from how cool this whole scenario looked, but I have to question the planning of both sides in this battle.
Why do you have to INVADE Zion? You just want ‘em dead, right? Pour a lake down there. Drop in a nuke.
Why haven’t the machines mastered the use of a ranged weapon?
Why don’t they use those lasers at any greater range?
Why are you using the Chinese infantry method? (Send in thousands of melee fighters until your opponent runs out of bullets.)
WHY ARE ALL YOUR TROOPS SWARMING AROUND IN MID AIR WHILE BEING SHOT AT?
Why are all your troops in clusters when your opponent is essentially firing a turret? Spread OUT.
Can those suits even shoot straight up? Try coming down from on top.
Why aren’t the squids equipped with anything more deadly than grapplers? Like a stabby-arm? (Look at the squad leader....just swarmed by over a hundred squids, he should’ve been in pieces.)
Here the machine mind is....brain the size of a planet....and his basic strategy is a clumsy Zerg rush.
Oh, but that doesn’t let Zion off the hook.
Why do the Exos not have anything in the way of armor for the pilot? The rest of the thing is made out of 4”thick iron I-beams, but not enough for a tin sheet over the pilot’s chest? Chickenwire? SOMETIHING? Hell, at least a shield to keep the hot brass from raining down into the cockpit. That would hurt.
I realize that you wouldn’t know where the extra ammo would be needed until the battle. But the EXOs are essentially stationary. Couldn’t you have put up a roof over the delivery route to give the ammo carters SOME cover?
Kid....you woke yourself out of the Matrix....you were an expert hacker......that thing in the EXO’s hand is a RANGED WEAPON. You could’ve shot out the counterweights from where you stood up the first time.
And the really big one. EMPs. Electromagnetic Pulse weapons. Basically discharge an enormous battery into a magnetic charge that fries all the squids in one shot. WHY WEREN’T THERE ANY OF THOSE AT ZION? Hell, why weren’t there a dozen of them in a row? Start with 8 EXOs’ standing around an EMP generator waiting for the first wave. Wait until the entire first wave is in the docking bay. Fire the sucker off. Run out another eight EXOs and another EMP. Wait for second wave. Repeat indefinitely by scooting out the expended EMPs and fried EXOs between waves and fixing them. Faraday cage of those thousands of tons of structural metal in the docking bay would’ve meant that one room to the left you wouldn’t have felt anything.
Meanwhile, back at the hero’s house, Neo, though blind, still manages to direct Trinity into flying his hovercraft gunship into the side of a building, killing her. Although it’s one of those deaths where she gets to talk for a long time after the dying. Wish him well, etc.
Now here’s the part that makes no sense. Neo walks out and has a little sit-down with the big swarming face that’s the center of the Machine city intellect. At which point he strikes a bargain. You see, Neo noted that Smith had become the enemy of his enemy. Therefore....it’s time to help your enemy! OK, I understand that a Smith-controlled world-spanning intelligence might be even worse than what we’ve encountered before. Nonetheless, you’re still allying with someone who harvests your people for energy and keeps them in unknowning servitude for the entirety of their lives.
So, we make a choice wherein, in order to save the remaining 20,000 inhabitants of Zion, Neo promises to rid the Matrix of Smith for the Machine intelligence. Makes sense? Sort of. But it’s a bargain with absolutely no foresight.
The quick details of the matter are that Neo jacks into the Matrix through a chair provided by the Machine Intelligence, where he discovers that every person in the Matrix has been re-written as Smith. Neo faces off against Smith in an enormous battle of blood and thunder and DBZ allusions, but gives up the fight in the end, an lets Smith replicate in him.....at which point, the Machine Intelligence “pulses” and chain-reaction-wise destroys all the Smiths. Simultaneously, the Machine Intelligence pulls its forces out of Zion, and we see as the MI transports Neo’s body off into the horizion with all the solemnity of Arthur’s delivery to Avalon.
OK, so what, precisely, does all this mean? Smith has taken over every person in the Matrix. This means that he’s rewritten himself over the minds even of all the sleeping batteries in the billion-strong power-plants that the global machine runs off of. Does that kill them? Dunno. Don’t think so, as the Smith planted in the escaping Zionist in movie two just had his mind rewritten as Smith. Then Neo is absorbed, and pulsed, and all of the Smiths are destroyed. Does THAT kill everyone? “No, you say, because look at all the people left in the Matrix!” To that I say, look closer. Every person who wakes up in the end wasn’t a person, but one of the key programs. Oracle, Saphi, and the Architect are the only people we see (IIRC). Presumably there are others, but the city is plainly underpopulated. The only person who we have to judge from is Neo. And he’s daed.
So, in order to secure the freedom of the 20,000 Zionists, Neo blows himself up to kill 16 billion.
There’s an alternate interpretation, but it falls back into Mathemagic land. Neo is the opposite of Smith, right? He’s the one, Smith the many, etc. etc. Like matter and anti-matter, the two meeting and melding obliterates both, killing Neo and wiping away Smith. That’s one theory, but there’s nothing in the film to support it specifically.
OK, let’s assume the best. Everyone in the Matrix is returned to their natural state. Neo is dead, but Zion has an indefinite stay of execution. All the programs that wanted to leave the Matrix are granted free passage.....uh......out. To wherever it is they have to escape to. Which makes no sense, because the little Indian girl escaped INTO the Matrix under the guardianship of the Oracle in order to get away from something in the real....or somewhat real....or intermediate ...Mathamagic land.....or something. Anyway, let’s assume that wherever the hell the programs go, they get where they want to be.
Thus Zion is at peace, surrounded on all sides by a monolithic country that holds billions of people as slaves and breeds them as a never-ending supply of battery acid. The people in Zion aren’t allowed to pull more people out of the Matrix, because that would break the peace. The Machines aren’t allowed to destroy Zion, so Zion will keep growing until the point where a conflict is forced. At which point the computers will have advanced along side Zion and still be able to roundly kick their collective asses. Before, the Machines always knew where Zion was, they just tolerated it until it was time to cull the place again once more before they grew to an actual danger. Now they’ll just grow to slightly larger than that or until the humans initiate conflict. That’s even assuming that the machines will hold to their end of the bargain (I know, the conversation with the Architect seems to say that they will). So the only actual change to this go-around with the Neo-of-the-month is a delay of the purging, and the release of all the unwilling programs. OK, the delay is worth some happy noise, but it’s hardly a conclusion, and since when did the main purpose of the trilogy become about the freeing of a bunch of itinerant algorithms? I mean “Horay! Return to status quo! Where humanity is doomed and enormous machines have regained control of themselves, the surface, and everywhere that isn’t right where we’re standing! And everyone else is in chemical baths.”
Excuses me for not cheering. I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. Peace is not passive. Just get the machines to declare peace, and all is right with the world? Totally flawed concept, flawed interaction with world, and doesn’t even leave us off at a point where we can make our own story up that leads to an ending of ANY kind. (We could state how avante-guard it is to have a concluding story line that just loops itself back to the beginning, but Longshot did that way back when with the screwy looping of the Mojoverse.) Despite that, undoing this mess would’ve taken so little. Just add that Neo’s death woke all the human batteries up. A fade out where the people in the tanks start opening their eyes. That would’ve given us some sort of point. There was more of an ending at the tail of the first film with that superman flight up into the sky. This is just badly conceived, especially as an ending to such a long-anticipated series. Here, there’s just a bunch of pomp and circumstance of writers who’ve written themselves into a corner and can’t pull themselves out, so they cook up something that collapses in on itself when you take a hard look at it.
So, in conclusion, acting bad, story ill-concieved, philosophy rarely elevating above a high-school level, but some really kickass fights and war scenes that make up for it. Go with lowered expectations, expecting a crap action sci-fi flick, and it’ll do you wonders. The mystery that I loved about the first film, that whole first third of “what the hell is going on” actually returned for the first fifteen minutes or so where we weren’t sure what was going on with the subway station, but that’s quickly dismissed with a comparatively short lecture from random background individual that they liked so much last time around.
Eh....go see it. You know you want to, and if the “eh” reviews coming out everywhere weren’t enough to solidly deter me, then there’s little hope for you. But if you’re going to see it, see it on the silver screen. There the films positives shine much brighter and bigger. On the small screen you’ll just note how much better an actor Keanu is when we can’t see his eyes.
Next up, anudder review! Or some of one anyway. As I specifically noted that I didn’t want to be doing anymore, I’ve gone and written this particular entry over a couple of days. I’m long over the 5-Guiness buzz (personal best) of several days ago, and now I’m just wallowing in the lair of Nyquil and Halls, as I appear to have contracted the plague. As such, I may just say “screw it” and hit the sack, delaying this by another few days. I’m hoping it’s just a 24-hour plague, as I woke up with it this morning, and feel absolutely crappy right now. (Don’t worry, writing is one of the most immobile things I can do to take my mind off the condition of my throat.
So, what to review? I’ve been a regular bookworm the last few days, finishing off two books in a week. (Not exceptionally fast for me, until you consider all the time I’ve been spending at work lately.)
First up, we’ve got a book my dad lent me, thinking I’d be interested, called “Serious Business” by Stefan Kanfer. It’s basically the history of animation and animation companies in the US from way back before Winsor McKay up to Toy Story, Bevis and But-head, and “The Maxx.” (copyright 1996) No, anime doesn’t get a mention. Not for the sake of belittlement, but because it’s the history of US animation.
It’s really a pretty good book. Only 240 pages long, but with a set of color plates in the center and a half-page picture every ten pages or so. The first third or so concentrates on the methods and techniques of the animators rather heavily as it covers the formative days of the art, but past that point there’s much more attention paid to the inspiration, the personalities, political machinations and the like. Surprisingly little attention is paid to the cartoons themselves....sort of. The zany goings-on are described enough for people who’ve seen ‘em recognize which picture they’re talking about, but writing out the gags of a cartoon longhand so strips them of their humor that I’m betting the author tried it for a while and finally just gave up on describing individual cartoons.
At any rate, the history involved is great. The constant back and forth between Disney and his animators, those who called it quits and headed out on their own, the zany antics of those first studios, the Herculean efforts of the first animators, are all described by a biographer who plainly appreciates the medium. The book is full of rhapsodic waxing on the lost masters. From McKay’s rendition of the “Sinking of the Lusitania”
It hits all of the major influential studios and the origins of their major stars, but does editorialize a bit on why this or that character never caught on like a Micky or a Bugs. The criticisms are generally correct, for the handful I’ve seen, and filled me in on a bunch of stuff I didn’t know. Like why Walter Lantz and Woody Woodpecker were so damn popular (mostly good timing of their first appearance), where Koko the clown came from, telling how Walt Kelly was an animator before “Pogo,” and pointing out that McKay wrote and drew both “Little Nemo in Slumberland” AND “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend” (the latter was a favorite of mine as a kid.....Welsh Rarebit is a weird poor-man’s dish of toast, sliced tomatoes, and cheese sauce drizzled over the top that was apparently famous for the nightmares it brought on, and McKay told some fantastical dream-logic stories of increasingly terrifying incidents until the victim wakes up, a victim of the Rarebit fiend. The few times I’ve had it, I didn’t have nightmares, but it gave me the worst case of the trots ever.)
Special attention is paid to Walt Disney, as one would expect, and his flaws, while not central to the book, are pointed out clearly. Specific examples of his rather rabid anti-semitism, his partial nervous breakdowns, and his embittering clashes with the unions over wages and hours when he incorrectly assumed that they were all one big family. There’s also a mention of something called “Finian’s Rainbow” that was torpedoed by McCarthy when the head animator of DCA came under suspicion of being a communist. Then there’s the high-stress wackiness of Termite Terrace, where practical jokes abound, and they lived for the thwarting of the Hayes office or their own hated immediate superiors. (From my unschooled eye cast upon the works of Adult Swim, it strikes me that the CN crew are the real torchbearers of that old group, if only in spirit. Though WB is showing great promise on the drama front. With practically no warning, this new season of JLA stopped sucking and started ruling. Damn. Catch it some time.) Also greatly valued are the quotes of animator recollections from the old days. Especially candid was the summary of the old days from the Fleisher studios. Which I just tried to transcribe, but came out totally unreadable out of context. Oh well.
While it hits a lot of greats I was only marginally aware of (like the long lost Gerald McBoing-Boing, or the idea that Mr MaGoo was actually funny at one point), it’s also notable for its exclusions. Strangely missing is any mention of the Fleishman Supermans, the author described The Secret of NIMH as a major letdown all around, and Heavy Metal barely gets a flippant nod. Kinda gored a couple of my sacred bulls.
Nonetheless, an excellent book that I’d recommend to anyone looking for a good general overview of the whole history of American Animation (and thence, world animation.....like it or not, the US served as the example which nearly everywhere else aspired to in their animation. Osamu Tezuka never let there be any doubt about the debt he owed Walt Disney.....although some would argue the debt’s been repaid with the uncredited theft of “The Lion King.”)
(One last bit from the book. In talking about the animator’s attempt to meet with “PC” concepts of the age, we encounter the following bit: “In time the [guardians of children’s sensibilities] went wild. Fringe groups affected to see cartoon shows as satanic enticements. The insipid My Little Pony and Care Bears series could easily have been attacked for their relentless commercialism and their utter lack of wit. The religious censors had other objections in mind. To them, Pony’s friend the unicorn was nothing less than a symbol of the one-horned Antichrist, and Papa Bear’s homilies were carriers of unwelcome Eastern philosophy.”)
The other book, unfortunately, I can’t say the same for. I’ve stated in the past that I was an old-timer fan of the “Myth” series by Robert Asprin. I loved those books for their clever plots and characters ever since I stumbled into the middle of the series in the Bloomington Public Library. The hero “Skeeve” essentially bumbles through a handful of amusing adventures with a slowly-growing troupe of friends, somehow ending up further and further into the stratosphere of success in this fantasy world as he accumulates daemons, devils, dragons, and thugs. (They’re all mostly inhabitants of other dimensions, each dimension cleverly named to attach apparently supernatural monsters to him. The best of the bunch are the friends “Chumley” and “Tandanda”. Chumley is a troll. Tandanda is a trollup.) I wrote a review a while back about the latest book in the series to come out, and you may recall I was disappointed, but shrugged it off as the effect of Asprin deciding to jump backwards and make book 11 sequentially book 3.5.
Well, tromping through the campus Borders (I hate the design of that place...but that’s a rant for another time) I came upon another sequel. Book 12, “Something M.Y.T.H. Inc.” It took several hard minutes of staring to sort out that it was, in fact, book 12, and it sat in sequence where 11 should’ve. But.......hmmmm. I hadn’t heard anything about this book. The previous one had been released with a small amount of fanfare, but this one came out last year and I didn’t even know it existed. Doesn’t look good. Oh well, it’s only $7.
I think I got just about my money’s worth.
Really, this book feels like it’s treading water, trying to keep it’s head up the whole time. It doesn’t even really center on what’s supposed to be the main character, Skeeve.
When we last left the group, Queen Hemlock had essentially dumped the whole kingdom of Posseltium (in Skeeve’s home dimension of Klah...making him a Klahd) in Skeeve’s lap after discovering that.....conquering the world? Fun. Ruling the world? Boring and hard. Book 10 essentially told this story from Skeeve’s perspective....about six years ago (Asprin’s been a bit slow in production lately due to personal issues). This book tells it again from the perspective of his Bodyguard, Nunzio. See, he goes missing early on in book 10, and it’s taken until no -
“Ethylene glycol would do it. Yeah, it’s antifreeze, but it’s not that bad...”
2003-11-13 00:24:43
Quote was from the CHBE seminar today. The lecturer was talking about sickle cell anemia (instead of the usual petroleum distillate lectures) so I actually managed to stay awake through this one. Basically, he was examining the nucleation dynamics of the hemoglobin polymerization that causes all the problems in sickle cell. See, it’s enormously complex, but sickle cell anemia has a single source for all its problems, the mutation of a single gene that creates a hemoglobin chain (oxygen carrying red blood cell component) with a single altered amino acid. That alteration changes the charge distribution on the molecule such that, when the molecule is deoxygenated in the microvasculature, the hemoglobin gels out of solution, forming long polymer-like spindles or columns that stress and distort the cell. Oxygen reverses the process. Leads to the anemia (early red cell death) and, indirectly, to the microvascular occlusion (clogged microvessels) that slowly destroys the patient’s organs with extremely painful local oxygen starvation events.
Thing is, the process of the gelation is really weird. There’s a time delay of a handful of seconds at the start before nucleation, but once nucleation begins, it takes off like a rocket, seven orders of magnitude faster (10,000,000x) than nearly any other protein crystallization. So the idea is to extend that time delay at the start, which is apparently (via his hypothesis) due to an odd formation of density gradients prior to nucleation. Extend the time delay to around 14 seconds, and hardly any cells would get a chance to sickle, since they’d make it back to the lungs by then. To reverse that particular process, you’d have to introduce something that would break down the density gradient buildup. Problem is the rather hazardous nature of anything that would work in that capacity. “Acetone would do it, but I don’t think the patients would be too happy about drinking acetone. Ethylene glycol would do it. Yeah, it’s antifreeze, but it’s not that bad...” He was, of course, joking. It’s not that far from actual treatments, though. About fifteen-twenty years ago there was an alternate treatment for sickle cell.
Mustard gas.
Nope, not kidding. Actually rather clever. The idea was to occupy a small portion of the hemoglobin in the red blood cells by attaching something to them that they couldn’t “get rid of” like they do oxygen. This effectively dilutes the hemoglobin in the cell, and, since the reaction rate depends on hemoglobin concentration to the 15 to 50th power (depending on the publication) removing a little bit of hemoglobin slows the rate down a LOT. Give the patients a tiny dose of mustard gas, and some of the hemoglobin in all their red blood cells is occupied, but all the cells stop sickling. A treatment that worked on the same theories was carbon monoxide therapy. They both worked like a dream. The problem was, of course, dosage. And the consequences of improper dosage were a little too severe to keep the treatment around.
Then, of course, there’s the modern treatment. Hydroxyurea, a drug that works by KILLING OFF PART OF YOUR BONE MARROW. But that’s a discussion for another time.
So, where have I been for a while? Well, truth be told, I’ve been avoiding lj for a bit on purpose. I’ve been having a lot of work loaded on me lately, both in my personal and professional lives. I’d tune into lj to discover several of the people on my friends list going off on a decidedly political bent, and not only in a direction that directly opposes my own views, but in a direction that refused blindly to acknowledge the idea that the other side might possibly have a point worth discussing. No less than four times in one week I was told what it is that I thought. I consider myself a moderate conservative, though I come to this position honestly, as I find myself independently choosing the side of the debate where they stand before finding out where they stand. And yet, when I encountered posts from people on my friends list railing against this or that policy they consider it incumbent upon themselves to include a statement or two about “what conservatives believe,” and they were, grossly, hysterically, wrong by overestimation, oversimplification, and grandiose hyperbole. And this on the heels of a paper by a respected psychology journal saying, effectively that conservative opinion was a psychological disorder. (http://www.poliblogger.com/poliblog/archives/001225.html I linked to a commentary on the article, as the article isn’t available online without a subscription.) No kidding. Claimed to be drawing on 50 years of experience.
Frankly, the stuff I was seeing in lj was pissing me the hell off. There was a time when I would have gone in and discussed the matter at great length with the individual, pushing aside the implicit hostility and stifling my own in order to come to some sort of understanding of the matter that didn’t base itself off of absurd stereotypes of the opposition’s argument. Hell, there was a time I DID do that (discussion on the existence of God and the source of morality that went on for about eight months online with famously lengthy replies), but frankly I’m entirely too busy with other matters to even consider such an attack.....added to the fact that the last time I attempted such an approach (although, admittedly, I was snarkier than I should’ve been at the time) I stepped into some kind of explosion of liberal self-righteousness. And I say this not as a stereotype of liberals. This one person in particular went off on me with as much snarky, sarcastic hysterics as she could muster, to the point where I simply didn’t have the appetite to return and respond.
Hell, this is the sort of thing I built the sound-proof box for, and I was more than tempted in the last few days to haul it out, but, again, such an undertaking would be more than I have time for, and excursions within the box, to the extent that they matter at all, should be well-thought-out, lest the door creak open again and someone outside shout suggestions into my ear.
I mean, I hold no hostility to those involved. They are welcome to their opinions. Hell, it’s their lj, and despite the frustration I feel about their posts, it’s hardly my place to criticize what they put in there. The frustration doesn’t even really derive from someone having different opinions than mine, either. It’s from the fact that they seem entirely incapable of admitting that there might be a legitimate other perspective on the subject. Nothing frustrates me more than being told that the answer to a real-life problem is simple. It’s never fucking simple. I work in a lab, and there it is so nice when the answers are obvious. Where a response is 95% vs. 2% instead of 40% vs. 65%. But it means that I’m more qualified than most to recognize when the answers AREN’T obvious. That’s the nature of real life. Life is made of complex questions, not true/false quizzes. Take the concept of abortion. That’s a toughie. I’ve no problem with someone saying to me “I’ve reviewed the situation to the best of my ability. I’ve considered the philosophical ramifications of weighing the apparent life of a fetus against the forced conscription of a woman’s entire life for a minimum of nine months to bring the child to term. I’ve resisted the efforts of one side to convince me that it’s all a patriarchal conspiracy to keep women in their place, and the other side to gross me out or horrify me with pictures of aborted fetuses. I’ve considered the predicted consequences of either course of policy. Having looked at the options, and realizing that it’s a choice between two unwanted consequences, I’ve decided that my opinion lies on this side of the line.” Wherever the final decision lies, I can respect that opinion, even if it differs vastly from my own. (I tend to err on the side of “pro choice,” for reasons that aren’t as obvious as you might think.) What I cannot stand is people who’s entire argument (and not just a summary of their argument....their entire argument) is shouted out as “Abortion is murder!” or “My body, my choice!” The internet is rife with people who think that a snarky comeback a legitimate political position makes.
Nonetheless, consider my position. Weighed down by work, I am confronted by a snarky ad-hominem attack on something that I’ve considered in depth and decided upon. It’s just aggravation I don’t need and haven’t the time or desire to reply to. As such, I may be cleaning out my friends’ list sometime soon. If nothing else, the number of posts are getting a bit out of hand.
And now, I feel the need to vent somewhat. So I’m going to, completely hypocritically, snarkily attack a few stand-alone examples of punditry that I’ve run into over the past two weeks.
For a few years now, my instinctive response to an entreaty to “Question Authority” is the reflexive “DON’T ASK WHY, JUST DO IT!” Knee-jerk questioning of authority is just another manner of blind obedience to an authority. The authority that snarkily questions every action of the people in power. After all, if they’re in power, then they must be up to something sinister, right?
I actually ran into someone who asserted that war was solely a masculine endeavor. (Damn, brit lit catching up to me....I spelt that “endeavour”) “I mean, look at missiles! Isn’t that just the biggest phallic object ever?”
O_O -_- O_O
You know what’s also a phallic symbol? Anything taller than it is wide. You know what a thing is when it’s wider than it is tall? A phallic symbol lying on its side. OK, this is called “object / symbol confusion.” You know where symbols exist? In books. In media. TV shows, comics, fiction, paintings, drawings. IN YOUR MIND. You know where symbols don’t exist? IN REALITY. This may be hard for you to understand, but when a missile launch is fired, there isn’t a furious masturbation session in the control booths as they watch the installed cameras display the missile speeding to its destination. The missile is NOT actually a penis. The target is NOT actually a vagina, or a woman, or whatever the hell sick fantasy you’re attaching to it. It is ACTUALLY a three-story tall fuel-filled explosive moving at a five hundred miles an hour to a designated point, where, if functioning properly, it will widely disperse a great deal of matter, and burn a great deal more. It is not sex, and it is not treated in a manner having anything to do with a phallus. (Oh! But what about it’s shape? It doesn’t have to be that shape! Look at birds!) Birds do not have to fly through the air at five hundred miles an hour with fire shooting out of their ass while carrying three tons of explosive device. Its dimensions and shape are dictated by the laws of physics to minimize air resistance and maximize effortless steerability. Practically the only thing not solely dictated by physics is its color, and you may notice that missiles are not, in fact, painted to resemble dildos. A handful of heavily armed social rejects are not striking back at the jocks and preppies in symbolic revenge for all of those of us who were teased or ridiculed in high school anywhere but in the deep, impenetrable confines of your brain. The only thing they are factually doing is walking through a school shooting actual unarmed people according to some designated design cooked up in their feverish little brains. They are not a movie, they are not a book, they are not a poster on your wall. The moment you move them to that capacity, you’ve transferred them from the realm of hard fact and irrefutable meaning to the ephemeral dream world of symbols and fiction.
This even works with actual symbols. A man with a battle jack flag on the back of his truck is not actually leading a force of southern soldiers against the “northern agressors” in 1860. The only irrefutable physical meaning that it has is a block of red color with some white and blue markings on it. Symbology is entirely mutable dependant upon the individual. The only place a symbol has meaning is in your head, and that can readily change dependant upon individual experience and intention. (By the same count, you’d have to be an idiot to not expect someone make interpretations about your intentions if you walk around wearing a swastika, since everyone’s individual interpretation is fairly uniform for that symbol.) What I do with movies is interpret the filmmaker’s intent, which I can do rightly or wrongly, and pass judgment on their skill at the portrayal. Thus, if I were to call “Miracle on 34th Street” a parable about the evils of capitalism and the commercial abduction of Christmas, I would be incorrect as far as the maker’s intent was concerned, but correct as far as WHAT THAT FILM MEANS TO ME. (It doesn’t, by the way. Just the best example I could think of.) Treating the latter as an absolute makes as much sense as me being arrested for indecent exposure because I’m carrying around a banana.
Finally, the main thing that I’ve learned from this whole experience is the accuracy of the adage known as “Jane’s law.” (http://www.janegalt.net/)
”Supporters of the party in power are smug, condescending, and overconfident. Supporters of the party out of power are insane.”
There, got that particular bit of bile out of my system. Glad I waited this long, as it was considerably milder than it started out.
This actually is something of a growing concern for me. I’m a relative newcomer to politics in general, and I have to say that the frustration involved in even the mildest, most even-tempered disagreement is becoming a source of considerable internal tension. On the one hand, the issues being handled are some of the most important of the day, and how can I regard myself as intelligent in the least if I do not at least consider them. On the other hand, I do not actually dictate policy, the number of minds I change, even at the most optimistic estimate, will be few, and the stresses and depression it is visiting upon me are stressing my circle of friends. Having an opinion, and, more importantly, keeping an open mind, is infinitely more conflictive than just dismissing the entire issue out of hand by turning away from the issue. In the end, being involved in politics will always generate more enemies from friends than vice versa.
In a final bit of good political news, I ran across a new Iraqi blog. At some point a few entries ago, this fairly thinly-visited blogger got some wiseacre on there who apparently asked “if you’re so against the terrorist bombings, if you’re so gung-ho about rebuilding Iraq, then why are you sitting in a café running this stupid little blog instead of out there arranging anti-terrorism rallies? You people are so ungrateful...”
His reply is a great insight: (http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/archives/2003_11_01_healingiraq_archive.html#106802883205716753)
In essence, his response was “Hey buddy. Fuck you. We’re a little busy over here. You know, rebuilding the fucking country?”
My response was the following:
_______________________
This is the first time I've come across your blog, but from just this post alone, I can assure you that I'll be back many times in the future.
It's difficult to describe, but I hope you'll read all of this response before judging us ignorant Americans. See, the problem is, that we ARE ignorant. We're standing in the difficult position of knowing that we're being lied to, but not knowing in which direction the truth lies. We see that handful of teenagers, and we don't know what it means. We don't know how many other people feel like they do. I read your mention of your friend with the reconstruction of the airport, and his bravery and determination gladdens my heart, but I don't know if he's the exception or the rule. We feel responsible for the actions of our country, and this is the most massive thing its done in a decade. Being the instant-gratification nation that we are, we want proof, some sort of evidence that the right thing was done, and that we haven't committed some hideous mistake either in mis-applied good intentions or in taking the word of our leader when he was lying to us.
Of course, the gratification of the American public should mean very little to the people of Iraq right now. The most heartening news I hear coming out of Iraq is news of construction and development. Iraq has an enormous job ahead of it, an extremely complicated and confusing one, and the Iraqi people should certainly concern themselves with doing this job long before they should worry about assuring the US that they did the right thing. But please, consider our perspective. The headlines here announce every day a US soldier is killed. We're told day after day how there's been "an increase in attacks over the last few weeks." Stupid tragedies born of confusion get highlighted. And those teens celebrating the death of US soldiers gets flashed on TV all the time. One side of the fence argues that this is disproportionately focusing on the negative. The other side says that it's closer to the truth. The ordinary man on the street simply doesn't know which is true.
You're right in saying that it's not your problem if our media is giving us slanted coverage. It's our problem. Entirely our problem, and it's enormously dwarfed by even the smallest of problems you have.
But we have no way of helping ourselves to solve this problem. We have no connection with Iraq aside from the media, and those of us who know soldiers who've rotated back to the US. We're forced to stumble about randomly in our opinions, based on which paper we read or which commentator sounds the most truthful.
Please continue to post on your blog. It's come down to the point where the only resources I actually trust are first-person accounts like yours. Believe me, your time is well spent relieving the ignorance of those of us sitting in the sidelines.
____________________
I think it sums up my frustration nicely.
So.....what else, in less controversial terms? Well, I haven’t been accumulating movies like I do normally. I’m actually keeping to my word about not seeing many in the theaters lately in an effort to assuage my bank account. Haven’t even been out to see the latest Matrix flick yet, and from the reviews coming out......I have no idea if it’s any good. Whole frickin’ range from “worst of the lot” to “OMGWTF good.”
Did catch “Kill Bill” .....sorta. Someone brought over a quick-to-video bootleg of what was apparently a pre-production reel of the flick and I watched that. Generally the same as the wide release with a few different cuts and missing some of the more extravagant audio effects. Honestly, I don’t think I was depriving anyone of any income. I hadn’t been that interested in the flick to start with, as Quentin Tarrentino hasn’t greatly endeared himself to me over the years (Pulp Fiction has its moments, but has been more over-hyped and force-inserted into the pop culture vocabulary at this point than the Matrix, Jackie Brown was legitimately good and entertaining and well crafted, but is balanced out by the rimshot that was Dusk till Dawn’s headache-inducing stupidity. Yes I know it was supposed to be stupid. OK, the stripper was good, I’ll admit that, but the rest was some weird conjunction of “The Monster Squad” and a 40-minute graphic dick joke. Reservoir Dogs is a saving grace mostly due to the skill of the actors, but it was his first film and he’s been moving away from that brilliant simplicity ever since.) That, and, simply put, I’ve no real reference for the experience of the film. I know horror. I mean, I _KNOW_ horror. Got it cold. Action / kung fu I don’t know. It’s just not my thing. I could watch five or six bad-to-terrible horror flicks back-to-back (<homer> Ghuguuglllll.....</homer> ) but honestly get bored with a mediocre asian action flick before even one is over. Those amazing fifteen-minute action sequences start up, and by minute six or seven I’m checking my watch. Jackie Chan is an exception, but mostly because he’s the Harold Lloyd of action films, always turning it into a comedy of some sort. (On the other hand, animate it.....)
I’m not making this an excuse either. I mean, I know a lot of people who regard horror films with much the same eye. A great suspenseful creep down the hallway is greeted with a “get ON with it” from some people. It just happens to be what I love. Kung fu action just isn’t. I live for the final trick, stunt, or ironic turnabout that does in the monster or the final victim. Other people look for the special move that does in the final villain. Kill Bill looked, in essence, like it was trying to become the be-all end-all of martial arts action films. Tons of references to other films. Homages. All time great actors of the genre. Asides. Winks to the audience. Atmosphere. Staging. And I was going to miss all of it. Someone would have to sit next to me and footnote the film for my viewing enjoyment. Tell me what’s classic genre, what’s new, and even what is and is not parody (the last, like horror, being somewhat difficult to differentiate from homage in a genre with a history of low budgets). So, finally, I was fairly certain that the film would be good, just not that good for me. And I’m entirely unqualified to review it.
So, for what it’s worth, I liked the flick. I’ve no desire to see it again, and several things that the rest of the crowd absolutely loved I thought were annoying (the whistling, the silly cross on Daryl Hannah’s eyepatch, and the fact that about twenty minutes of it was flashback. Go go was cute, though....) but all in all a well acted, well shot, well directed film. Heavy on style, low on plot. A few pieces of severity inserted to remind us that this is Quentin Tarrentino directing. Genre fans will go wild over it. Still, I’ve no real desire to see the sequel if someone tells me how it ends. (Didn’t help that, for some reason, every time Uma was onscreen I kept thinking of her in her Poison Ivy role.... “....immune to poiSONS toxINS and all manner...” but that’s more my problem than anyone else’s.)
In other news, I’ve been watching those first season disks of MST3K that I got bootlegged. Quality’s all over the place. It’s sorta surreal watching “The Mad Monster” on DVD and seeing color rainbows crawl across the screen, and that weird cyclic audio warp kick in that you see with cassette tapes who’ve aged badly through repeated copying. Other disks are real top quality. In general, though, you can easily see that they’re transitioning from cable access to the old “Comedy Channel.” They’re not sure exactly who their audience is, making obscure political or pop culture jokes during the movies, but reading and showing viewer mail from five-year-olds. Dr. Eckhart had potential, but I’m glad he made way for the vastly superior Frank. Tom Servo’s first voice is similarly warped with massive inflection and emphasis problems, and most of the puppet work is clumsy and awkward at best, but much of the potential and charm manages to shine through nonetheless. And ads for “The Higgens Boys and Gruber.” Only problem is that the first disk appears warped, since my player can’t read it. I’m gonna give it another shot, as a few of the eps had trouble initially and can’t hold a stop point, but have little hope.
Now the real fun begins.
Halloween.
Best Halloween ever.
Last year, you may recall, I posted that “So, I suppose you all want to know what the big horror-movie fan did for Halloween? Surprise, surprise, it didn't suck. Normally my Halloweens really suck because I'm not really outgoing enough to go out in costume, and few of my friends are the type to throw really good Halloween parties. (And I haven't the space to throw my own.) Pretty much anything I do outside of that I would be doing anyway, so it all ends up kinda pathetic and I end up drinking myself into a self-pitying stupor.”
Well, this year was also an exception, so apparently I’m on a roll. This one kicked last year’s ass royally, though. Why?
I thought of a costume.
Kinda pathetic, huh? I mean, I’m supposed to be this big fan of everything halloweeney, and yet I’ve next to never gone out in costume after I passed the trick-or-treat age. (Doesn’t help that my labmates, all from foreign lands, are apparently under the impression that trick-or-treating doesn’t stop for little things like reaching 20.) The sole exception was the last time that I thought of a vaguely clever costume back in undergrad. That time, after spending a month trying to find something as rare as a red scarf in Atlanta in October, I actually managed to assemble a full costume of “The Shadow.” Borrowing the black trenchcoat and fedora from a friend, he asked me what I was going as.
“Guess....I’ll be wearing a black trencoat, black hat, and a red scarf.”
“Uh.....Father Guido Sarducci?”
O_O
“No, but that’s a DAMN good guess!”
So what did I go as this year? I’ll tell you, I thought I was going to have to punk out as usual and not bother with a costume for the Halloweeney proceedings, but the idea finally struck me quite suddenly out of nowhere. I’d been bemoaning the fact that there aren’t any real male horror icons who have long, scraggly hair like mine, when I remembered that there was one who did...
Lessee....I’ve got a suit....white shirt....hell, I’ve got the cane too. That means all I have to pick up would be a top hat and white gloves.
And, of course, the greasepaint.
Alice Cooper
Damn, but how well it worked. I’ve been waiting for Shelly to post links to the pictures from the party so I could at least see how I looked, but everyone assured me that it was a great costume. Hell, I practically got an ovation when I first walked into the room. (One of the disadvantages of having a costume of a character who doesn’t wear glasses is that I’ll never know how I look without them. My focal distance is about two inches in front of my nose.)
The real problem, however, is that Halloween fell on a Friday this year. Which is the usual CoC night. Now, how could I turn down running CoC on Halloween? Especially when it looked like major resolve-time for an entire story arc. And I seriously doubted that that group of friends had any other plans. So, disastrous plan as usual, I’d planned to go to the game real frickin’ early, play until reasonable hour, then go to Patrick’s party. But no time inbetween to actually get in the costume. Which meant conducting the game in full makeup. Ah well, maybe it’ll add to the ambiance, a factor that’s been sorely missed since the joining of one friend who’s asthma prevented us using the usual candle-light and enclosed space.....dammit.
Naturally, I also got blood the night before. *Sigh* So I run an experiment and come home at four in the morning. Wake up at one-thirty. Call in to let them know that I won’t be making it back. (Hell, I’d’ve used up a sick day if necessary.) Sat down with my copy of “The Last Temptation” (comic of Alice written by Niel Gamian and drawn by Zuli) in front of the mirror on the door of my wardrobe, turned on Spike for background noise (and occasional perusal in the mirror), found out they were showing a 13-hour marathon of Friday the 13th flicks, and started applying the greasepaint. Took me damn near two hours, as I’ve never used greasepaint before. From this experience I learned two things. The area around your eyes contains an enormous amount of residual grease sopped up in the skin and ensures that the greasepaint will always stay wet there. The second is that Spike TV edited Friday the 13th part VIII, widely considered the worst of the bunch, for sex and violence. Spike, the self-proclaimed “network for men” cut the sex and violence out of Friday the 13th on Halloween.
LAME
A good deal of effort later (hard to get straight lines on a slick surface without smearing) I took off for the game around 3:30. By some remarkable synchronicity I got all the way to the car without encountering anyone and stressing my already strained self-confidence. Got to the game at 4:45, ate (ish, paranoid about smearing the greasepaint) started running at 5ish. Took us until about 9:30 to just cover the five minutes of game time that comprised the final wrap-up. Massive, complicated battle scene with an unknown number of assailants. Hilarous mis-steps. One creature gets knocked into a very expensive radio set. Characters open up and blaze away.....at the radio. (8 misses, one hit on the creature.) Gunfire, explosions, spinning saw blades, and eventually the characters SURRENDER to the monsters because they’re running out of ammo. The monsters take what they came for and leave. Resolve the equivalent of “experience.” Or, as James put it, “the monsters showed up, pantsed us, took our lunch money, and we got SAN for it.” Really fun game, and everyone thought the costume added to the ambiance. I touch up the greasepaint, and make a run for it out the door, with time to spare.
Or so I thought. I get caught in a traffic jam. Took over an hour for me to get one mile and past the wreck. (Incompetently handled. We were standing still for most of it, when only two lanes of a six-lane highway were blocked off.) So instead of arriving at the reasonable 10:30 like I planned, I show up at the almost insulting 11:30.
Dammit.
Fortunately, it being Halloween, practically no one had left, (I wasn’t even the last to arrive) and I got a rousing ovation at my entrance.
I know it sounds kinda sad, but this really was what I needed. Things have really been bearing down on me lately. Actually coming up with a good, reasonably creative costume idea, pulling it off, and getting approval is a nice affirmation. I may act all above it sometimes, but I do have an ego that needs feeding on occasion, and god knows I get no compliments from my superiors at work. Hell, none of them even asked about my Halloween until prompted. Feedback here in lj is much the same for feeding my ego, but you can’t here spontaneous applause in text.
Having made my entrance (and managing to upstage the end of Army of Darkness), I set off to complete the costume by drinking heavily. That accomplished, I toured the facility (massive turnout this year) and sat down to watch “The Undead,” an Australian horror flick about....the undead. (This is called the “Australian naming convention”.) Now having not had more than half a sandwich since I’d gotten up finally caught up with me. I was really soused for most of the movie, and have a distinct memory of making exactly the same joke about one of the characters at least half a dozen times. (Even still, it was STUNNING how much that guy looked like Torgo. I’m tempted to say he’d actually been made up to look like the old character as an inside joke.) I didn’t follow the film very well, what with the talking and the room moving and all, but the one scene I do remember means that I’ll be borrowing it from Mike at some time in the future to watch when I’m actually conscious. After much effort, one of the characters finally succeeds in getting a plane off the ground as the undead start closing in. Flying up into the night sky, the pilot encounters several dozen zombies who’ve apparently gotten interrupted in mid-abduction, as they’re just suspended there in the sky, six hundred feet up. The pilot then experiences the ultra-rare “zombie-strike”. Three words. AIRBORN ZOMBIE ROADKILL.
So I think I made it through the night without embarrassing myself too terribly, manage to only upend myself once in a kiltered office-chair, but eventually sober up around six and drive back to the apartment.
Where, covered in greasepaint, and sticky with sweat from wearing three layers of clothing all night, I discover that the building has no hot water.
Gahhhhh........
Oh well. Despite some stupid futzes, still one of the best Halloweens I’ve ever had. The only real downside is that I’m not going to be able to top this year’s costume ever again. (Especially since NO ONE knew I was even coming in costume before I walked in the door.)
-
Nope.... (read previous first)
2003-10-26 22:29:19
So where does that leave us with TCM? Well, let’s see, Leatherface wearing another person’s skin, charging around holding the chainsaw out in front of him with both hands, the hitchhiker cutting himself up, and that weird scene of four men all strangely unable to “handle” one woman as they wrestle an old, limp corpse of a man forward to try and finish her off. Oh yes, and then there’s the hanging-girl, lifted off her feet by penetration with a pointed hook. Most analysis of TCM is mercifully shallow, because so much of the movie is devoted to charging around screaming that there isn’t quite as much there to analyze. What subtext is there is pretty damn focused and directed. The big problem with the fourth film (IMHO) was that it was an amaturish film-school attempt to bring all of this stuff out in the open, with Leatherface becoming a transvestite, the weird relationship between the woman in red and the man with the TV-remote controlled leg (she gets a hold of his remotes, and causes him to spasm uncontrollably before a makeout session), and don’t even get me started on that CIA guy.
So the rough subtext outlines are established in the first film. However, they’re blown all to hell in the remake. Is this bad? Ehhhhh...... Only for the film analysts. Which is the probable reason that all the “thinking class” are decrying the remake so soundly in comparison to the first film. See, they added women on the “monster’s” side. The two trailer-hags and Leatherface’s momma. Having women on that side of the equation, especially the presence of Leatherface’s momma, completely screws with the basic tenant that the slasher monster is impotent except in the stabbing-persuasion. (You could argue that this was a basic fall-through in “House of 1000 Corpses” but I don’t credit that film with that much foresight.) The presence of children, especially the hitcher’s, also fucks with this theme, as it implies potence SOMEWHERE down the line. It also screws with the idea that the whole “kill passerbys for their meat” idea and “penetrate their flesh with pointed objects” is solely a male-impotence-frustration-thing if you’ve got the trailer-hags killing for their own ends, or momma slaughtering in “defense” of her boy. And yet, at the same time, almost in defiance of the fucking-up of the original themes, Leatherface is still there, chasing after the buxom young girl in the soaked white T-shirt, killing off her boyfriend and wearing his face as well as killing any other “competition,” swinging around that phallic chainsaw. There’s even a couple of scenes that scream a follow of the ancient tropes, where Erin does a quick split after landing on her ass in the basement, and barely misses getting....uh.....bisected as the chainsaw sparks a few inches from her groin.
Then there’s the hitcher and her baby. Wow. This plunges us into a whole other set of issues that were entirely absent from the first film. The hitcher’s presence and the implied rape and subsequent birth just blow the whole “impotence” angle to hell and gone, without even knowing whose child it is. What on earth are we to do with this? To some degree it seems as though the film is rolling sex and childbirth together into a massive, hideous, gory mess. We could try to pull in the molestation of her corpse by Ermey, but I can’t even tell if that’s reaching. (I’m an amateur here, fumbling about in a realm only experts should wander, whatever your opinion of my work might be.) The real clue to these themes, in my estimation, is in the comments to the hags in the trailer. Erin screams at them “That’s not your baby! You STOLE her!” to which the scrawny (flat) one clasps the child tight and says with a truly haunting emphasis “she’s MINE...” Later on, Erin steals the baby away from them to escape, and the final scenes are her driving off, playing with the child. Hmmmm. Again, I’m an amateur here, but how’s this for a theme: The legitimacy of mother-child bond and the illegitimacy of facades. The children of this film all take after their parents to an extreme degree. Jedidiah has the hideous, almost caricatured features of the backwoods folk. Leatherface has the hideous, rotted visage that is implicit in the people of this family (rotted like the rotting meat behind the counter in the general store) representing the horrible decrepitude to which the family has sunk, the baby resembles it’s mother sufficiently that Erin can realize it even in her drugged stupor. Counter to this is the family’s attempts to break away from the degeneracy and rot to which they’re consigned by their genes and actions. (Sort of the opposite extreme of racial purity? Ig.....dig around the cemetery of tropes and subtext here long enough and you’re likely to find some buried pets.) Leatherface tries to cover up his inherited rot by preserving and wearing the faces of their victims.....trying to “become” someone better (it’s not just a disguise, he wears the masks all the time), but failing, naturally, since he’s resigned to crawling into their decaying corpses to imitate them. The mother-child bond, it seems, is irrevocable, since Leatherface’s momma essentially justifies EVERYTHING....the killings, the isolation, all of it, as a defense for her poor disfigured boy. The pretty people deserve to die because they were like the ones that made fun of her boy. Oh, and the trailer-hags. Child-envy. Capture a woman, have her raped and carry a child to term just so they can have a baby of their own. Presumably they’re barren, and they’re both portrayed like that, the scrawny one especially looks like an AIDS victim two weeks from death....emaciated, hollow-eyed, pasty-skinned, completely asexualized.......wait, that makes sense with the other theme.....the women are asexualized *defined as “unable to have children”* and thus employ the house of perverse serial killers....also asexualized, impotent in their own ways; either grandpa missing both legs, Ermey’s obsession with corpses, or Leatherface’s rot covered over with a mask.....to “get them a child.” So they capture a “sexualized” *able to bear them a child* woman. Curioser and curioser. But the film, by these tropes, cannot allow the ‘impotent’ or ‘asexualized’ characters to have an honest-to-god baby (as opposed to Leatherface or Jeddidiah), so the sexualized (mostly by way of the camera treatment and that dunk in the basement....as well as her status as buxom young teen) woman in the film, Erica, makes off with the only “clean” child in the end. This is a little more supported when you consider how odd such a finishing scene is for a film like this. Therefore, in the world of the film, “sexualized” is irrevocably linked to “childbearing” and “motherhood.” One isn’t even allowed to fake being a mother when one isn’t “sexualized” or the child is whisked away by a “proper mom.” A whole other layer of subtext was laid down in the remake that was never present in the original. You’d think the critics would like that, but I guess they’re not up for the challenge of anything other than rote analysis anymore.
See the kind of crud you come up with by navel-gazing in the wrong company? A lot of the time, interpretations like this are taken as an inherent insult to the genre. Horror fans think that re-structuring Leatherface as a symbol of raging impotence is a massive joke designed to suck all the cool out of their hobby, insult their heroes, and indirectly call them all pencil-dicks. Honestly, it’s really not. It’s just unfortunate that the most appropriate words chosen to describe the characters aren’t inherently complimentary ones. No other genres ever fare well against the unrelenting onslaught of bored academics, and, frankly, telling horror fans that there are sexual undertones running through most of the genre is telling them something they already knew in their hearts. Just look at Dracula! Or the tradition of scream queens!
For those that actually read this far, I feel like I should have some sort of disclaimer here rather than risk those sidelong glances that you cast someone when you’ve accidentally stumbled onto their porn collection and found out that they’re distinctly freakier than you are...and not in a good way. I’m not really sure what the disclaimer should say, though. My mind honestly doesn’t work like this unless I force it to (the gears had rusted up a good deal, but got jolted loose by that ultra-creepy “MINE!” from the hollow-eyed hag). I don’t view the world like this, I don’t hold these opinions (the ones in the analysis) myself, but they are what I think the ideals the film was build around were. What can I say? They’re pretty sick puppies. Or they make themselves be. But then you have to be, to imagine a world of horror to take your audience into. Internal consistency is the hallmark of good film, and when you are delving into a world of horror that’s run by its own rules, you’re going to have some pretty nasty, stereotyped threads running through it. That’s why it’s scary, even on an intellectual level. It shakes you up, assaults your mind. Otherwise it’s all just cats in the closet.
There’s a very little bit more here, but mostly just the drugs as a stand-in for “teens having sex” as distinguishing who gets to live through the film. (She tosses out the only roach handed to her, but then stands accused by the cop of taking drugs later.)
Well, somehow I doubt many will be reading all of this one. Not many of my friends are interested in seeing TCM in the first place, even among the horror fans (‘cept Mike and Shelly, whom I know have already seen it), much less are interested in an in depth analysis. Mostly I’m putting this here for my own reference, to get it outta my head.
‘Night
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
Current server time: Dec 28, 2024 07:57:15