Dear Mabel

everytime i go through the whole check-in and immigration process back at NAIA, i arrive at the conclusion that the entire system was designed to get your mind off all the things that might ostensibly keep you from wanting to ever leave.

but then you finally make it through to your gate, and all those sentiments you were worrying at all weekend and on the ride to the airport start crowding back in your head. particularly when your boarding time gets pushed back half an hour or so.

in my case, it's the realization that no matter how much time i take off work to be with you, it can never be enough.

'GODDAMNED STORY'...more than a blasphemy, in this case it's a pun

i'm usually pretty happy when stories write themselves. but then i have to go back and make sure they work. some of them do, some of them don't. The Saint of Elsewhere and Troll's Doll were two stories that mostly wrote themselves and ostensibly worked in most places, and where they didn't, they were agreeable enough with my small manipulations and tinkerings (much of those in the former thanks to Q's suggestions--credit where credit is due) to turn into something that still managed all right in the end. the one i've been working on lately wrapped itself up almost a whole month ago, long enough for me to start another. but now both stories are in limbo because i CAN'T GET THAT GODDAMNED STORY TO WORK. it's done. it wrote itself. but it seems to have set itself in stone. there are a number of things wrong with it--most of which are things i know are wrong with it--and i've made some changes--some of them pretty drastic, mostly to do with deleting large chunks of it--that i have no doubt will ultimately prove to be for its own good. but i can't seem to change what it essentially chooses to be. it isn't that it doesn't say or do most of what i wanted it to when i started, and a few other things i didn't that i probably haven't picked up on yet as well; just that it doesn't work.

it's frustrating and depressing and taking the fun out of my vacation, and keeping me from doing other things i should be doing.

so why write?

sigh. right. of course. well. on with the motley.

guess you had to be there

i'm writing you to catch you up on places i've been.

a bit late, but just spent a loverly weekend at Balai sa Laiya with Mabel. loverly place. perfect for not-so-active people who just want to kill that kind of time at the beach.

and yes, sorry: no 3 x 5s. not that i ever had to overcome the urge to fit the world inside a picture frame.

i also had the pleasure of finally finishing off Heroes. i found the ending a bit flat given the build-up. and i can't say i didn't see the Petrelli's 'final solution' coming.

the most interesting thing i find about the show is the perspective it seems to offer on the effect of the sort of 'evolution' that forms one of the central conceits of the series. people who develop superpowers tend to be hobbled by their abilities; a bit too concerned about what they literally can and can't do, if you will. the most interesting characters for me, then, are the ones without 'special abilities'.

i'd say more, but i'm on limited access. i will add, on a totally unrelated note, that there may be some big news here soon. big for me anyway.

right. later.

more on porn

i forgot to end with this link as i'd intended last night:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/10/baseduced110.xml

don't ask me what it says. i haven't read it.

call me queer, but i like hanging out at the airport. i like being much too early for a flight. every now and then i like the feeling of being a non-entity in a non-place. and Changi is one of the most comfortable non-places there is to be a non-entity in. null pointe. and with free access to the internets. and Bundaberg Root Beer. joy.

i should be catching up on The Daily Show, as i may be missing the next couple weeks of it, except when i get to spend a couple weeknights over at E.Cross Saltire's place, but my man Paul just sent me the latest Radiohead; the internet access here is amazing. i've almost got the complete playlist on my harddrive and the player's only on track two.

so far, i have to agree with Paul: this is amazing stuff. it has the Eraser vibe, but is far more accessible. and yea, hints of Hail to the Thief.

there. back on track one (typing and downloading has its hazards...such as accidentally clicking open file when you only want to add the file to the wmp playlist. ah well. so far this stuff is good enough for me not to mind. and besides. it be Radiohead) and i've just completed downloading all ten tracks.

the box still looks mighty tempting though. (which can be found and ordered here:

http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/Quickindex.html)

anyway, where was i? oh yes, hanging out in nowheres. i was the first person through immigration. unfortunately there is no door prize for that, except maybe complete privacy when using the facilities, but i get ahead of myself. anyway, i just barely got out of a gazillion-course lauriat-style whatever-you-call-'ems-Chinese dinner thingies my boss threw to thank everybody who helped out at the Hanoi meeting a couple weeks ago. don't get me wrong, Chinese food is tasty, but dammit i can't take very much of it. so the cab i'd called for arrived just in time to save me from a very harsh, very impolite, very nasty, very slow gastronomic death.

and i still had to use the facilities when i got here. which is why it sometimes pays in very practical ways to be insanely early for your flight.

i'd just gotten my luggage from the bosses car when i was informed the taxi had arrived. my exit was as unceremonious as it was sudden. sometimes i think all goodbyes should be so easy.

right. enough rambling. time to soak up In Rainbows. yea, thank you grampa Paul.

drat. just realized i forgot my mp3 USB cable. ah well. i doubt i'll be using the ol' autism inducer while i'm home. i do have my trilby though, so that's all right.

jiggety jog

in about 24 hours, if all goes according to plan, i'll be getting on a plane and flying home for a much needed two week break.

from the look of things back at the office, however, it's going to be a working vacation. sigh.

i don't know if i'll be able to blog again soon after tonight. we haven't got a decent connection to the internets back home, and any time i spend on that connection will probably have to be used on work things, and it looks like i'll be racing to my flight tomorrow night so i probably won't be blogging from the airport, either. meantime, any readers this blog might still have can sink their teeth into this, from Grantian Florilegium:

http://www.kingsmeadow.com/2006/06/home-again-home-again.html


i'm a bit worried about how a story i just started tonight will survive the change of scenery; the past few weeks had put me on a rather pleasant routine of starting and actually finishing things--something rather new for me, and really rather more delightful than the phrase 'rather pleasant' might imply--though i only got one story out between Spooky and this one. hopefully i'll want to get this done enough for the inevitable break in my momentum to not matter. maybe i've actually got this 'getting stories done' thing down for good. one can hope.

for the incurably curious, i'm currently working on a little meditation on pornography i'd always wanted to do. some of the ideas i want to put in it are stated quite eloquently by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie in this interview by the brilliant Susanna Clarke, on Lost Girls:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/07/sv_alanmoore.xml&page=1

what they say will probably prove to be far more eloquent than what i'll eventually manage, so maybe it wasn't very bright of me to have put anybody on to it, but there you go. i'd been mulling over it for some time now, and reading the interview convinced me i had to do it. i hadn't known quite how to begin, but tonight i picked up my copy of Kathy Acker's Literal Madness and read a bit of Kathy goes to Haiti, and found just the right voice--i think--for this piece. As Susanna Clarke puts it (from page 3 of the interview):

Pornography by its very nature has a deadening effect on story.

hmm. thinking about it now i wonder just what i've gotten myself into. for a long time i also hesitated from starting because it seemed the ideas i had would be better served with a more visual medium than plain prose, and seeing Inland Empire just made it seem even more inadvisable for me to even try. ah well. fingers crossed. (obviously i still don't trust myself enough with the craft of writing to stop believing luck has anything to do with getting anything done.)

Empire building

i suspect that rather than narrative, we are confronted with fragile raw material for a disembodied subconscious, of the sort for which, ostensibly, a way might be found to put the pieces together into something resembling things like 'character', or 'personality'. philosophers like Campbell might have you believing they are the same thing, that narrative is the summation of subconscious. David Lynch seems to argue otherwise. instead one realizes that 'narrative' is as artificial a construct for the subconscious as 'plot' is for real life.

the narrative exists, but rather than being the framework upon which 'events' are hung like adornments, the narrative hangs delicately from the events, or visions: typically, for Lynch, a framework that consists of a mishmash of hallucinations, memories and nightmares/dreams. (remember: the mind makes no distinction between any of them; it is mere consciousness that imposes such definitions, and disallows substitution and transitivity.) also, the framework, the skeleton, is the meat.

in the end, however, in spite of or perhaps because of all that, Inland Empire manages to be the most surprisingly uplifting of Lynch's films. when what might possibly be reality--and we are never told that it is: Lynch presents, instead, a naked id we must clothe with our own egos to come up with anything approaching 'sense'--when what i think might be reality finally breaks through all the hooplah, we are given, thankfully, some relief from the grotesquerie, the guignol, and, more than that, we are offered that startling gem that is so valuable when it is found in arthouse cinema: a happy ending; and a surprisingly sympathetic, 'meaningful' one, at that. Lynch's work has always been informed with a core of humanity, no matter how obscure or deeply buried, but Empire seems more so than the rest, and we eventually come to realize that it is a film that, again more than any other in the Lynch catalogue, wears its heart on its sleeve. but is it really 'good cinema'? i suspect not. in fact, in many ways, it is a horrible piece of 'cinema', perhaps even the worst. but i suppose it wouldn't hurt if we were to call it 'art', if only in the Lanarkian sense of the term.

and damned if i don't love every crudely pretentious, obscurist minute of it.

and yes, while i see no real point in saying it since most reviews seem to gravitate to the fact eventually, and it seems the one point of agreement between most (all?) critics of the film, i say it here because, dammit, it is deserved: Laura Dern is amazing.

right. been reeling from all that balderdash since last night. glad to finally get it all out.

more pretentiousness on Inland Empire here:

http://messageboard.inlandempirecinema.com/forum/index.php

on the spinner: Challengers, The New Pornographers, and Voodoo, Terez Montcalm.

currently reading: The Wave Theory of Angels, Alison MacLeod and 334, Thomas Disch

children of Спутник

"The Sputnik launch changed everything."

here's how, according to Ivan Semeniuk, last month at the New Scientist:

http://space.newscientist.com/channel/space-tech/sputnik-legacy/mg19526201.200-how-sputnik-changed-the-world.html

"...we were children of Sputnik. Although we weren't yet born when the Soviet satellite made its startling debut on 4 October 1957, we were of the generation that grew up in its considerable wake. ...Fast forward to today, and the results seem disappointing. Space travel - the technology we had seen as the emblem of our future - has so far turned out to be more emblematic of our past." (my ellipses)

later, he says:

"Access to space has not, on the face of it, transformed society in the same way as the car, air travel or the internet, for example.

Or has it? Could it be that human society has been so thoroughly altered by the emergence of space flight 50 years ago that we are no longer able to recognise the change?" (my ellipses)

ultimately, Mr Semeniuk proves to be an optimist:

"[Sputnik's] impact on day-to-day life in 1957 was essentially nil, but its influence is immeasurable. Through the huge investment in higher education it generated, Sputnik was the most important catalyst for human development there has ever been. This is the hidden dividend of the space programme, and we are just beginning to feel the full impact.

"For my childhood friend and I, the space age was about what was going on "up there". Five decades after Sputnik, that view seems too literal. ...it will take many more decades to discover where the changes triggered by Sputnik are leading us. In a society driven by scientific discovery, the possibilities are virtually endless.

"Perhaps, somewhere down the road, we may even get a vacation to the moon
out of it."

meanwhile, NASA explains our status as 'children of Sputnik' by reiterating the definition of modern man as Homo consumerus:

http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/

and while Burmese powers refuse to let the perspective of the rest of the world and the Word of Mass Media influence their rule:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7018285.stm

Filipinos--all too conscious of 'Mass Media'--find themselves indignant over the thoughtless comments of a fictional television character:

http://michellemalkin.com/2007/10/03/desperate-housewives-insults-filipinos/

(update: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7027551.stm)

the Space Age at 50, ladies and gents. how would you define your reality?

Feast of the Guardian Angels

as a child i remember saying one prayer every night, reciting it in the sing-song cadences of something learned by rote; a phonetic echo, lacking the clear, overpowering layers of a self-consciousness with meaning that grows rather than eases with maturity.

i miss that old sincerity; as hungry as i was to learn the 'real' socially-derived definitions of words, they were then still only as powerful as i was willing to let them be. the dictionary was a curiosity, not an authority; the cool, laid-back uncle rather than the terrifyingly stone-faced aunt.

words were personal. the words i used were mine, they served my needs and not anyone else's.

the romantic in me can't help but look back and be filled with the sense of it all having been a much simpler time. which, in some ways, is completely true. and yet, having been there, i know better than to let myself believe just that.

when the cynic in me looks back and hears me utter those words each night, kneeling in the dark before the Sto Nino with its soft, unreadable smile, the cold porcelain face lit from below with a flickering pair of red electric bulbs that pretended to be candle flames...

now when i look back and hear myself utter those words i can't help but feel a brief shiver run down my spine:

Angel of God, my guardian dear,
to whom God's love entrusts me here,
ever this day
be at my side
to light and guard,
to rule and guide.