| Thursday, September 29, 2005 |
 | Friday was spent very agreeably in the opening section of C.'s festivities. Dinner at Questo, which made the deadly mistake of offering an all-you-can-eat option. The fools. I may never eat elsewhere again, until they are reduced to penury and I have the belly of an otter.
Then, rolling gently onward to see Howl's Moving Castle at the Curzon Soho. Many have praised Billy Crystal's performance as Calcifer, and I have to admit that I was both surprised and impressed - I had no idea he even spoke Japanese.
But seriously, folks. I would like to see the English-language version of this also, although I am not sure that the decision to cast Gene Simmons as the older Sophie seems to me to be a bit adventurous, a little... avant-garde.
Anyway, I liked it very well, and quite forgot fairly early on that it was a foreign-language film, not least because of the turn-of-the-century Englishness of so much of the scenery. Which is interesting - something which I liked very much about the book which does not translate is the way the characters are very aware that they are operating in a fairy tale narrative, and have to get round that using wit and a degree of stroppiness.
Which does lead to my complaint. Although the world in which it happened is full of terrifying engines of war, Howl is generally, one quality tantrum aside, too calm, too kind and too gentle. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas... Felt more like a sort of youth-team Chrestomanci at times. Awfully pretty, though. In fact, the entire world was beautiful, although very different from the Wynne Jones vision - giant, semi-organic battleships sailing through the air, one-man ornithopters buzzing over Market Chipping and lots of lovely militaria.
It has also inspired me to reread the original, and it's startling how much of the dialogue so far is the same, although this is before the plot starts diverging.
"I am a total stranger," Sophie lied firmly remains one of the most successful single lines in written English.
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| Friday, September 23, 2005 |
| Priest seeks to advertise priesthood by dressing as Neo from the Matrix - not, to be blunt, a huge aesthetic distinction. Apparently he got the idea from watching a revue skit at the U.S Seminary in Rome, in which a group of seminarians batlled Satan in a series of, and I quote, "mock martial-arts confrontations".
Oh, those seminarians. It's amazing how many of them lose their faiths and become homicide detectives reluctantly drawn into a war between angels when they have crazy fun like that.
Nagraj vs. Shakoora the Magician, featuring Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. It goes largely without saying that Superman is a dick pretty much whenever he is not paralysed by magic. Whether he's failing totally to prevent massive property damage, committing cold-blooded murder, calling a dwarf "dwarfy", selling out his friends to the evil magician for no reason beyond colossal stupidity, he's an all-you-can-eat buffet of dickery throughout. If you can work out whether Lou Albano is supposed to be the wrestler Lou Albano, or just an Indian circus ringmaster called Lou Albano, and if you can further work out which of these options is more bewilderingly demoralising, give me a shout.
The evolution of nominally Chinese food in New York's restaurants.
Rubber masks with girls' faces. Really not sure how this is supposed to make me feel, except for "inclined to surf with images turned off".
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| Wednesday, September 21, 2005 |
| Oh, thank Heaven. Molatar is back. I suspect that this may, in fact, be a loving piece of reconstructive surgery performed by a dedicated admirer, combing the caches of his community of Molatarphiles.
I feel for Molatar. In part, because he has chosen a very difficult row to hoe - very few born-again Christians will want to hang out with a dragon, very few dragons will be interested in born-again Christianity, and those who are neither born again nor dragons will laugh their Godless, unscaled bottoms off at him. But also because he is trapped in what I feel must be the most impressive case of false consciousness ever. Check out his thoughts on homosexuality. He has homosexual friends whom he loves like brothers. He has homoerotic fantasies, although he is trying to cut down. He believes that porn makes you gay by abrading your natural revulsion to the genitalia of your own sex, but finds lesbian sex "boring as hell to watch". He hates his body, and dreams of changing it into a powerful, beautiful form that commands love and respect and can never be harmed. He devotes a loving paragraph to describing the sex organs of the male dragon, whereas lady dragons get one sentence (clitoris, two vaginas. Why two is never made clear, but then neither are the eight testicles clarified. Hmmm. Clarified dragon testicles. No well-stocked kitchen should be without). And from all of this he concludes that he is, in fact, a dragon.
Yeah. Dragon.
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| Monday, September 19, 2005 |
| Apparently, the White Hart in Wytham crops up in an episode of "Morse". This should not come as a surprise, as the blast radius of Inspector Morse must by now have reduced most of Oxfordshire to rubble. On my last day at college, as I left the gantries were being set up to record one of those beloved scenes where Morse pulls up outside Christ Church, strides through Univ quad and opens a door into the Classics Lending Library. If it had been my first day, it would have seemed almost designed to play into the megalomaniac tendencies of the egocentric young man. As it was, it felt as if I was being encouraged to get out of shot as quickly as possible.
At a guess, the Inspector Morse version of the White Hart is not the shiny gastropub that formed the venue of a concerted attempt to pour three days' worth of food into three hours of relaxed if endurance-based dining. High points: the carpaccio of beef (first beef in years, but I was weak, damn it), the halibut with pesto risotto and the poached pears. Low points probably the inability to think, move or sleep afterwards.
Returning home on Sunday, popped in on the Museum of the History of Science, a relatively recent addition. The astrolabes of Africa were beautiful, looking like hood ornaments from a Phillip Reeves future. Bye bye blackboard was strangely touching. The ones prepared as considerations of the artistic possibilities of blackboards were lifeless, but where the diachronic addition of detail was visible in an explanatory diagram, where you could wonder if that was real Eno spit marking out the round, clear circles or note that - Holy God - Einstein had written on that blackboard and somebody had preserved it until now, it made for a different spectacle entirely. As Chris Patten wrote, if it were not for the squeaking he would prefer a blackboard to his laptop. Because of the squeaking, I prefer shrews to both.
On the way back to the train station, a man with a Thames Valley accent and a walkman passed jauntily on the other side of the road, merrily and loudly singing "Everyone is dead, who messed with me and my friends". Occasionally he would address a fellow traveller.
Are you dead, mate? You dead?
Everyone took it rather well - the odd affirmative nod, a distracted thumbs-up. Possibly this question had come up before. Unfortunately, before I had a chance to confirm or deny my life or lack thereof he turned right onto the canal path and headed north toward Jericho. With a bit of luck he will ask Philip Pullman at the Castlemill Boatyard, and get a trilogy in response.
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| Mordecai Vanunu risks re-imprisonment to reassure Metro's sixty-second interview feature that he is all about the ladies:
Did you suspect the woman in the honeytrap [in which Vanunu was tempted to Rome, kidnapped by Mossad and returned to Israel]?
No. I really liked her and trusted her.
Are you now more wary of women?
No, that experience did not, and cannot, change my human nature to love and enjoy the friendship of women and their company. In fact, it's the opposite. I want to prove that 18 years in prison has not changed me.
Mordecai Vanunu. Whistleblower. Peace activist. Stone-cold fireproof hetero.
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| Wowzer. Katrina: The Gathering. A high-risk flip off the top rope.
Last night I met up with Ben, Matt, Tom, Ben C and others. I'd forgotten how restful the company of people who know an awful lot about stuff about which you know nothing is, and also how early normal shindigs break up in midweek. Also, I heard a story about Matt and Legoland which demonstrates once again that he has perhaps the most perfect and crystalline mind you have yet to encounter. Well, you know, unless you already have. I swear I'm going to start writing Mattfic. The world needs to know.
Alterations in blog behaviour. In part, I suppose, this is the dead hand of Livejournal - the once-ubiquitous "beer with" post now has another native home, along with the "one day she will come back and I wll forgive her, but not him. Never him", and indeed the "we'd never tried it before, and I'd recommend spending more time on an exit strategy before starting" post. Which leaves us to blog about the important stuff: politics, gaming and what it's like to be the new winner of Best European Weblog (my money's on Zach Braff to beat Wheaton's lock this year).
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| Shockingly, the US media appear to be finding their teeth - the image of the staffers deciding to burn George W Bush a DVD of recent news reports in order to catch him up on the situation is a little spine-chilling. Especially since there is nothing to suggest he actually watched it. It may be early to start the obituaries, but now that GWB has accepted responsibility (to the extent that the federal government failed, which extent to be decided in an inquiry to be chaired by GWB), who knows what fish-in-trees madness may ensue?
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| Tuesday, September 06, 2005 |
| In the pub on the day after the July 7 bombings - what the media are already beginning to call July 8 - a friend mentioned that he had been a little perturbed to find that the dayglo jackets of the professional-looking men wandering around the scene read not "Police" or "Ambulance", but rather "Church of Scientology Emergency Minister". What, he pondered, the bollocks would emergency Scientologist ministers actually do that they could not do as concerned citizens? Offer free stress tests?
You seem to be very stressed. Now, it may seem right now that this is because your whole leg's off, but perhaps there are other, deeper reasons. Would you like to come downstairs for a longer... oh. Oh well. Stress test, sir?
It turns out that Scientologist emergency ministers are not uncommon - even as we speak a bunch are operating in New Orleans:
Larry Byrnes, who was wearing the distinctive Church of Scientology minister T-shirt, said they had mounted similar operations in New York after September 11, in Sri Lanka after the tsunami and also in Israel and Africa. "We were the first on the scene at Punto Gordo [where the hurricane struck in Florida] last year."
Still doesn't specify what they're actually doing, though, does it?
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| Meanwhile, back in the jungle...
Qaim, makes a man take things over...
Speaking as one who previously thought that Qaim was a chat client, this is a bit of a surprise. And no, it isn't funny, but at this point I think my "Oh, bollocks" machinery has been overloaded, has heated to a red glow, folded inwards and collapsed into the gigantic ravine above which all such machinery is inexplicably built.
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