apocalyptic

right. i now know it takes roughly two hours to walk all the way home from the office, slogging through the Riverroads...

i cling to this to keep my sanity...

it's been a right dandy week. i can't tell you how glad i am it's almost over.

Roads are Rivers updated 1250h

i can think of no more eloquent way to put it at the moment, but this place sucks. it sucks so bad and yet can't cope with the pathetic spatter, horrendously tossed about by gale force winds* as it may be, but still only a spatter, at the moment, from the sky, which makes the way this place sucks suck even more.

right. that rant out of the way, i just dropped by to remind those concerned that tonight is supposed to be Ella's debut as one of the latest members of comic improv group SPIT. Catch her, barring postponement-due-to-weather, tonight at 9pm at Mag:Net Cafe Katipunan.

updates as i get them.

right. off to dry my pants.

*

update:1250h

just heard that tonight's show (SPIT) is, more likely than not, canceled.

the world will have to wait just a tad bit longer for Ella's debut.

and now that my pants are dry, it's off to get them wet again. ta


*incidentally, at 130km/h, calling them "gale force winds" is just plain wrong...this is a frickin' hurricane dammit

strange drive

it was one of those high school reunionish things (i could tell because these things almost always take place somewhere that has fragments of our high school gym in it, and this place was an odd combination of said gym and my folks’ house’s second floor balcony), only i was fifth wheel at table with four friends from college rather than high school. they were paired up, and one of them was an ex-girlfriend i had broken-up with a while back and haven’t spoken to since, so needless to say, it was awkward. thankfully, just as i was starting to get an inkling of just how unwelcome i was at the table (despite it being our balcony for chrissakes) the skies clouded over menacingly, and it was time for everyone to head home.

a proper high school buddy of mine who had not been at our table needed a lift, so i said i’d take him home. the drive was a welcome relief: he was one of my best buddies, and the traffic was light enough so i could push past a hundred if i wasn’t in such a laid back mood, but didn’t have to because there wasn’t anybody edging up behind me to goad me into squeezing down on the accelerator: so much better than hell at the table. we were talking about all sorts of meaningless kerfuffle, and at one point i was telling him about Avenue Q, how a friend had given me a copy of the soundtrack and how hilarious it was and how i’d lend him the CD when i could get it to him.

by that time, we’d just crested an overpass. some cars were calmly heading towards us. apart from going the wrong way on the highway, there was something else odd about them. i eased on the accelerator.

that was when the first of the cars hit the bottom of the overpass: the car, a T-bird or Mustang convertible, was the pale green of fresh mint leaves or maybe thyme, and no, we weren’t afraid of collision: the car had coasted gently to a stop at the bottom of the overpass, climbing a few inches up the incline before rolling back down to settle in the trough.

the top was down: nobody was in it. over the horizon, we could see several more cars coasting our way. the entire scene was oddly tranquil, the highway was almost brutally silent, at odds with the very nature of those roads: with our own motor idling quietly, we could tell none of the other cars had their engines on. there was nobody in those cars either.

we decided to turn back. i made a U behind the T-bird/Mustang, drove the car back up the overpass, and headed on north.

at some point we’d decided it was better to leave the car, and we found ourselves on foot with a slowly growing procession of strangers.

we had no idea what was happening, where we were going or what we were going to do, only that we had to head north, that that was the only place we could go, and marching on was the only thing we could do…

*

and because this seems oddly relevant, and is at least every bit as disturbing, probably more so to some of you...

a disquieting update i found this morning on the new I am Legend movie in the works.

looks like Francis Lawrence is starting a tradition for himself, somewhere along the lines of what the Mummy movie guy did to classic horror tropes.

so i've officially turned off my expectations for this one as i did for Constantine, and only hope that the movie is, at the very least, an entertaining if mindless and sacrilegious bit of cinema.

Public service advisory with random links

count myself alarmed.

last night i was eating Pringles potato chips (or crisps, depending on where you are or where you're from) in bed. not wanting crumbs in the sheets, i stuffed each crisp (or chip) into my mouth whole, and did so mechanically, one after the other, having awakened in the middle of the night with a particularly vicious case of the munchies, and wanting to get back to sleep as soon as possible.

this is not something i would advise. the results were the potato chip (crisp) equivalent of paper cuts. they've healed now, but the memory lingers.

if you've never had a paper cut and have no idea what the big deal is about, you might want to try this: 1) take a stiff sheet of paper; 2) put the sheet edgewise between your lips with the edges right up against the corners of your mouth; 3) pull sheet out of your mouth in a quick , jerking sideways motion, making sure the edges of the sheet remain in contact with the corners of your mouth throughout the procedure, i.e., until the paper is no longer in your mouth--apply pressure if possible.

or, much more advisably, you could just read this.

right. obviously grasping at straws for something to blog about. just thought i'd twiddle my thumbs for a bit before getting back to me other life.

twiddle twiddle

almost normal...

...but not quite.

still, i have enough time to post something utterly random. well. almost.

but not quite.

these days, i can't seem to hold too many ideas in my head. my work (my "real" work, the kind i actually "make a living"--barely--out of) has been suffering from much of my headspace being occupied by ideas for a few more stories, on top of the handful already stuck in limbo having met (hopefully) temporary deadends, and so has my blogging: i'm glad i got one of those stories out or i may have gone utterly bugfuck-mad by now.

or is it too late? after all, today i found release by setting down a ramble on word before putting it up here:

i’ve been listening to John Mayer’s Continuum since yesterday. at first, i honestly couldn’t tell what i thought of it. gone is the delinquent-college/garage-days fun of John Mayer’s Room for Squares, which he’d already started to shed with his appropriately named Heavier Things. this is John Mayer stripped down to the soul…and that’s a good thing. only i found myself, initially, at least, a bit disappointed.

don’t get me wrong, it’s all wonderful stuff, the kind i automatically slap the “good tunes” seal of approval on, but i miss the semi-juvenilia of the first album.

from the get-go, i loved the way he seemed to be channeling Marvin Gaye in the first track, “Waiting on the World to Change”, and although none of the other tracks have the exact same feel, particularly when he’s more obviously channeling say, Clapton or Sting, the impression somehow lingers through the rest of the album—no doubt a side effect of the anti-war message that seems threaded in with all the other “mature” themes of the album.

to be honest, all my disappointment may come from the one thing on this CD i was absolutely looking forward to: the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Bold as Love”, which has to be one of the (if not simply the) absolute greatest songs ever written imho.

in “Bold as Love”, John Mayer and his band show the “maturity” and “restraint” that is on display throughout the album. just when you think the band’s about to really rip into the song, they take a step back as if to say “now hold on there, that’s just not where we wanna go.” which is good for the band, but not, imho, for the song.

“Bold as Love” is all about the sweet release of being “bold as love”, and John Mayer’s version has to be the most frustratingly restrained version i have ever heard of the song. it all feels like a bit of a tease really, the way they seem to be stepping up to it, and are just about there, and you can feel the tension building up…only for the band to step back, and let all that built up tension just sort of ooze out. if i had ever learned to play that song, i’d have been blowing amps and snapping all the strings following the lead of the soaring fade-out of Jimi’s version, which has been more than adequately (extreme understatement alert) translated for live performance by Steve Vai in the tribute album In From the Storm…but not John Mayer and his band. they smoothly turn down the energy, just when you think the dam can’t possibly help but break, and they wind down to a jarringly and frustratingly calm full-stop.

are they making a statement? could be. i wouldn’t really know. i stopped paying too much attention to lyrical content when i left college, and listen to most things for the visceral pleasure of it.

given all the “maturity” and “restraint” flying violently out of the speakers, is there any visceral pleasure to be had at all from Continuum?

oddly enough, yes. like i said, this is John Mayer stripped down to the soul. it may feel laid back, “mature” and “restrained”, and it may seem like he’s channeling a number of other musicians, but it’s all Mayer’s guts in this music. this CD feels every bit as honest as Mayer’s other two albums, which is saying a lot these days.

right. whatever, yeah?

Scoop!

as promised, something cool is now up at On an Other Life.

what more can i say? it's all there. enjoy. find the beauty in your lives. while you can.

thanks to Jeff VanderMeer.

just dropping by...

...to say my brain has been too fried from work and inadvertently starting a one-person SF advocacy and work and having something really cool in the works for the Other Life blog and work and work and work to make a truly coherent and useful blogpost...

so before i forget, i have it straight from the SPITtles mouth that my friend Ella and a few other newbies (aka the aforementioned SPITtles) will, in fact, be debuting at the SPIT show on Sept the 28th at MAG:NET in Katipunan.

and the editor/s over at Philippine Genre Stories have informed me that they've altered their guidelines ever so slightly...i hadn't realized i'd been blogging so loudly...

be nice and google all those people and places and opportunities and things yourselves, ok?

right. time to crash.

inflammation

warning: this is most likely highly controversial. and since i can't seem to properly wrap my head around the idea at its core at the moment (reality is coming! reality is coming!) a lot of it is going to be iffy...in fact, the whole thing smells iffy (not to mention fishy) but i'll say it anyway, and let you flame it out in your heads. or possibly the comments section.

most of the SF world is trying to 'transcend' the genre, trying to destroy the 'restrictive boundaries' they create for writers and i'm all for that...but in terms of local literature, i'm beginning to think it might be a bit wrong-headed, or, perhaps, an inappropriate approach for our purposes.

kind of like our country leaping into democracy when the people were never really ready for it, but that's another matter entirely, despite the similarities...

see, i'm beginning to think that our problem, unlike with other markets, isn't that we're saturated with 'substandard' commercial mass marketable fics, that we don't have 'literary-grade' SF (whatever that means); in fact, (ok, here it comes) it seems to me that what we actually have is a terminally acute insistence on literary writing standards that might actually be detrimental to the natural evolution of SF. see, locally, the result of this insistence seems to be that we don't get enough of that kind of SF that can say 'screw your standards, i've got IDEAS!' (a bit extreme, i know, you can't totally screw literary standards and get away with it, but i hope you get what i mean.)

i feel the recent first Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards, with most (though, admittedly, not all) of the stories that got shortlisted, provide evidence of this line of thought.

i'm not saying we need to start churning out Tolclones, but it might be useful to remember the deeply set pulp roots of SF; SF is marginalized for a reason, and that's because it can say 'fuck it' to anyone and everyone else's standards.

that's not what i'm seeing locally. and that's what i think needs to change if SF is going to get anywhere in the country.

of course, if you want to promote a literary tradition that holds no genre sacred, then i suppose we're going in exactly the right direction. call me a dinosaur, but i do love SF.

Traffic

last night: 3rd German Silent Film Festival. film: Joe May's Asphalt. live music: Cynthia Alexander.

right. just to keep things in perspective, i really wasn't in the mood to watch the film; i'd seen The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and missed The Golem, and that was pretty much it with the filmfest for me, and anyway, i would much rather have gone home and tucked myself in between the pages of Shriek. that tells you either one or any combination of two things: (1) i had low expectations for Asphalt, and (2) i was predisposed to not liking it. and watching the film itself, i confess to nodding off quite a few times.

Asphalt exists at the intersection (and divergence) of several filmic roads: between silent films and talkies, between German Expressionism and, well, something else. commercialism, maybe. anyway, the effect is something of an identity crisis: the film features more naturalistic performances and dialogue delivery more typical of talkies, but still retains the lack of audible dialogue and sparse intervening dialogue frames of silent films. most of the overtly Expressionistic elements of the film feel contrived, objectionable not so much because they are 'unnecessary,' but rather because they feel that way. admittedly, however, the subtler elements (such as the really tight headshots that remind me of Jonathan Demme's work) create an intensity that doesn't quite put it in the more comfortable realm of 'commercial' films.

those subtler elements are used to great effect by further augmenting the film's one true strength, in my mind: the aforementioned performances. this film is performance driven. i make this distinction from 'character-driven,' mind you, as the characters are actually rather insipid, not really particularly interesting or complex. Betty Amann has often been lauded for her performance, strengthened by the way her Elsa Kramer (also the most complex character of the film) is always lit and made-up. her character feels deeply rooted in earlier German Expressionist films, with her (literally, perhaps?) hypnotic eyes, oft shaded yet always luminous, and goth-pale flesh. she is all luminous, and the subtle twists of her brow, flutters of her eyelids and lips have a lasting, haunting effect. there are no better adjectives for Betty Amann in this film, to my mind, than those words 'luminous' and 'haunting.'

Gustav Frohlich, however, is also brilliant, despite playing the more conventional (and rather ridiculous) character of the naive policeman seduced by Betty Amann's 'well-dressed thief.' the honest face we meet at the start of the film is utterly transformed by the end of the film.

overall, the movie is well-crafted, with genuinely luminous (i can't seem to get away from that word) moments; i'd call it tepid. but that, admittedly, may just have been my mood.

which brings us to that other element that has drawn the faithful to the filmfest, helping sell the tickets out at every show: the live musical performance.

Cynthia Alexander's music, sadly, was the single greatest disservice done to last night's screening of the film. her band stumbled over (and fumbled) every transition, and it didn't help at all that the band's eastern-tinged music rambled through every minute of film, when so much of it would have been better served by utter silence, or at least a quiet lull. there were moments when the music did work, particularly in the bits when Joe May established the setting of the film with kaleidoscopic, oddly skewed sequences of automobile and human traffic. and there were other brief moments of brilliance, such as when the band mingled that eastern-sound with typical hollywood piano phrases for the more 'romantic' scenes of the film, or the sleazy improv sax that either slunk or swept in during the scenes of seduction.

that said, however, the execution of even those moments was sadly wanting, and one couldn't help feel that Cynthia Alexander and her band had worked-out a set of themes for the film beforehand, only putting them together like an ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle while they watched the film with the rest of the audience.

such an approach could, arguably, have worked: not for this band, though. not for this film. not for this performance.

too bad it was a one-shot. one might think the band could have done better with a second screening. or not.

so i went home disappointed, and tucked myself into a few pages of Shriek before turning out the light.

what crikey means

tonight's the last film of the 3rd German Silent Film Fest. it's Asphalt, directed by Joe May, live music by Cynthia Alexander, screening at Greenbelt 1 Cinema 1. ticks, apparently, start selling at 3pm.

Jeffrey M. Anderson over at Combustible Celluloid says Asphalt is 'considered the last of the German Expressionist movies,' but is 'probably not one of the movement's high points.' still, he goes on, it 'has a certain pulp energy that at least rates it a minor classic.'

i like pulp, but sounds a bit iffy. and i'd still rather have gotten to see The Golem and Drip with Mabel. still, spilt milk and all that, and it is part of the movement, and it's not as though you get German Expressionist films everyday around here, so...

*

for some odd reason, i kept getting songs from Hail to the Thief stuck in my head, even though it's been The Eraser on my spinner all day yesterday, last night, and this morning.

only this morning, finally, it was Black Swan, on the commute to work.

here's some more of the interview i posted yesterday (there may be more bits of it out there, but i can't seem to find them):



again, you can also watch it right off YouTube here.

*

this may seem a bit pretentious, but: as i kept telling people after i learned of his death yesterday, i was never quite a fan, never really watched his show, and only really know (knew) him from interviews, adverts, and white information, and, quite frankly, always thought he was a bit of a loon. but then, i have an affinity for loons, and it seems infinitely sad for the world to lose his indefatigable enthusiasm and sincere child-like wonder; also, as Paul put it, he always seemed unkillable...

that Steve Irwin should be killed by a stingray barb in the heart seems so fitting and ironic at the same time it's almost funny.

this isn't exactly what he's about, and i'm sure there are more appropriate ways to pay tribute to the man, ways he'd appreciate better; still, here's something to remember him by.

R.I.P.

have you seen this man?

ok. i'm committed. Thom Yorke's The Eraser is cool.

more sure-footed than Kid A, more intimate than Amnesiac, more environment-friendly than either OK, Computer or Hail to the Thief, and more German Expressionist than anything previously done by Radiohead. and more Thom Yorke.

here's dad himself talking about his baby:



or catch the interview on YouTube here.

also, just because i have a thing for playing devil's advocate, you probably shouldn't go see this video, which has nothing to do with Thom Yorke, but has everything to do with The End.