Happy birthday Cool Geoff! Now that the surprise is done and over with, you've opened your gift of the first volume of "Icon" (there is at least one more that I saw!) and we can "unpack" why DID I go with Icon?
Let it be SUPER known that I passed it by because I thought it'd be too weird. You know why. And when I went back and picked it up, I put it back down. Again, because of weirdness.
But then I was all: Listen, am I REALLY just going to pass on buying this book just because of the characters racial appearance?? (if you've read the first bit, you know why just saying 'race' wouldn't have quite made sense) That's messed up!
I've read the first issue of Icon before, if not the first trade (can't remember for sure), and it's a unique book for the reluctance to get this hero into the game. The origin, powers wise, was easy. Getting him into "the never ending battle" was hard. It's usually the reverse for characters; more often then not at the very least.
Take the Fantastic Four as the prime example I could think of (Spider-Man actually works against my argument, so forget I said Spider-Man. Spider-Man!): they go up in a rocket, get bombarded by space rays, crash land on Earth, get horribly mutated (some FAR more horrible than others), and what's the first thing they do after freaking out about their new powers? Collectively decide to pull together and use their powers for good. Getting the powers was the tough part, using the power for good? Everyone was assumed to be onboard with this, and they were!
There's also the cultural appeal in seeing what Dwayne McDuffie was aiming for with his Milestone books. He wanted to see more people of colour in his comics, and so he made it so. Have to admire him on that one.
Ah, but, naturally, had the first volume of Static been around, I'd have gone with that one for sure.
Hope you like it and it's not too weird a present for you! Becaese that'd be bad!
That's it, I've typed alls I can writes and can now writes no mores.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
My Dinner With Andre
No, I haven't seen "My Dinner With Andre"... and now if I do see it I'll be rather hung up on blog post titles... but I had a friend over and we had dinner and watched Psych, because I figured it's a show he'd like, and he did! I did it! I'm a hero!
To commemorate the occasion we had chips and strawberries and pasta and alfredo sauce and mint chocolate chip ice cream!
Talk about your calories over here. But it was worth it. Plus, calories basically burn themselves off.
I don't generally invite people over to my place, like, ever, but as far as houseguests go, this was a mighty obliging one. "My way is Isaac's way" was repeated several times when asking about whether or not certain customs were deemed weird or off-putting. Ex: It's cool to rinse the strawberries? (this was a relative no-brainer) Separate bowl for the things? I just washed my hands, but you may not be comfortable with me handling this fruit preparation, is it okay for me to do this?
A highly careful manoeuvre that seemed completely unnecessary. Glad it was done though, after the fact I feel like maybe I was a pretty good host.
I almost said "host guest" because that would have made sense.
Interesting the perspective that comes from adding a new element to ones environment. I'm already WELL aware of my tendency to over explain things. Mostly jokes because I think it's funny, but just simple everyday stuff too. It's not necessarily bad, but it happens, and my brothers get in on the act too.
I probably shouldn't call it "over explaining"- I think it's generally useful to define terms and get everyone on even ground, a tactic that negates most of all fights. Intellectual arguments at least. Physical brou-hahas may be a different animal altogether.
My ability to focus my vision isn't doing so hot, so I'll cross my fingers there aren't any spelling problems, post this, another, and then bed.
To commemorate the occasion we had chips and strawberries and pasta and alfredo sauce and mint chocolate chip ice cream!
Talk about your calories over here. But it was worth it. Plus, calories basically burn themselves off.
I don't generally invite people over to my place, like, ever, but as far as houseguests go, this was a mighty obliging one. "My way is Isaac's way" was repeated several times when asking about whether or not certain customs were deemed weird or off-putting. Ex: It's cool to rinse the strawberries? (this was a relative no-brainer) Separate bowl for the things? I just washed my hands, but you may not be comfortable with me handling this fruit preparation, is it okay for me to do this?
A highly careful manoeuvre that seemed completely unnecessary. Glad it was done though, after the fact I feel like maybe I was a pretty good host.
I almost said "host guest" because that would have made sense.
Interesting the perspective that comes from adding a new element to ones environment. I'm already WELL aware of my tendency to over explain things. Mostly jokes because I think it's funny, but just simple everyday stuff too. It's not necessarily bad, but it happens, and my brothers get in on the act too.
I probably shouldn't call it "over explaining"- I think it's generally useful to define terms and get everyone on even ground, a tactic that negates most of all fights. Intellectual arguments at least. Physical brou-hahas may be a different animal altogether.
My ability to focus my vision isn't doing so hot, so I'll cross my fingers there aren't any spelling problems, post this, another, and then bed.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Daria
I've currently substituted my Kamen Rider watching with the catching up on a cultural milestone, MTV's "Daria".
I'm not sure if you'll be surprised or not when I say I really REALLY like this show. Some people know me as this really upbeat guy (I feel like the number who believe that to be the whole of who I am has been over taking the other group), and the other group that thinks "why wouldn't you like Daria? It's basically you on screen there."
I was quite surprised by the emotional nature of the character. Despite the monotone voice, the extra helping of intelligence, the rigid expectations (hmm, perhaps BECAUSE of the rigid expectations..)- she is very often an insecure girl that is just lashing out. Oh, not all the time. No, don't worry fans, Daria most assuredly strikes a blow against the inane for the sake of itself, but she also does it because she's angry or scared or whatever. Sometimes she even realizes it too. She may even realize it once an episode (okay, that's taking things too far).
Regardless, though I'd have enjoyed her as a mouthpiece for cynical outbursts, I'm quite glad to see her as a sympathetic role model that offers something to her audience beyond caustic wit.
I've gone through over 3/5's of the series, with special note going to the season finales. Burning through so many episodes so fast, I'm not sure if this is the second or third finale, but the episode where she engages in writing a "roman à clef " (a concept I have introduced to the blog before, but wikipedia it if you forget. Or if you need a handy copy paste source so you can get the accent over the 'a' easier) was really great as far as I'm concerned. Daria can't figure out what to write because nothing she comes up with says anything about anything. Her mother ends up giving a speech about how Daria cuts people off from her true thoughts with a glib joke, that maybe instead of using her talent for pointing out how things are wrong, that she actually sits down and writes what she'd like things to be like. What would be right? Show us that! And she proceeds to write a story about herself, an adult now, visiting her parents, her sister shows up and has matured into a caring mother herself, and it's really sweet to get this from Daria. We cut to the "real" world as the mother reads this story and cries with joy at it.
It was really great, if nothing else, watch that episode. I'm almost positive it stands up on it's own, no previous familiarity required. Though it surely helps, emphasis wise.
I'll be sad when this show is over, but hey, there's always more Kamen Rider to get back to. (A lot more!)
I'm not sure if you'll be surprised or not when I say I really REALLY like this show. Some people know me as this really upbeat guy (I feel like the number who believe that to be the whole of who I am has been over taking the other group), and the other group that thinks "why wouldn't you like Daria? It's basically you on screen there."
I was quite surprised by the emotional nature of the character. Despite the monotone voice, the extra helping of intelligence, the rigid expectations (hmm, perhaps BECAUSE of the rigid expectations..)- she is very often an insecure girl that is just lashing out. Oh, not all the time. No, don't worry fans, Daria most assuredly strikes a blow against the inane for the sake of itself, but she also does it because she's angry or scared or whatever. Sometimes she even realizes it too. She may even realize it once an episode (okay, that's taking things too far).
Regardless, though I'd have enjoyed her as a mouthpiece for cynical outbursts, I'm quite glad to see her as a sympathetic role model that offers something to her audience beyond caustic wit.
I've gone through over 3/5's of the series, with special note going to the season finales. Burning through so many episodes so fast, I'm not sure if this is the second or third finale, but the episode where she engages in writing a "roman à clef " (a concept I have introduced to the blog before, but wikipedia it if you forget. Or if you need a handy copy paste source so you can get the accent over the 'a' easier) was really great as far as I'm concerned. Daria can't figure out what to write because nothing she comes up with says anything about anything. Her mother ends up giving a speech about how Daria cuts people off from her true thoughts with a glib joke, that maybe instead of using her talent for pointing out how things are wrong, that she actually sits down and writes what she'd like things to be like. What would be right? Show us that! And she proceeds to write a story about herself, an adult now, visiting her parents, her sister shows up and has matured into a caring mother herself, and it's really sweet to get this from Daria. We cut to the "real" world as the mother reads this story and cries with joy at it.
It was really great, if nothing else, watch that episode. I'm almost positive it stands up on it's own, no previous familiarity required. Though it surely helps, emphasis wise.
I'll be sad when this show is over, but hey, there's always more Kamen Rider to get back to. (A lot more!)
Spare parts for a 'Lord of the Flies' stage show...
What is this preturnatural ability to summon forth storms just before I'm scheduled to go off to some strange new work place. Granted, I didn't have flying daggers of ice striking my face (ala my trip to Vaughn Mills Mall) , but today has to be the soggiest we've been in months. Rain, snow, slush. Wet feet in consequence.
All to accompany me on my adventure to the pig slaughter business factory place! Yay!
So, it was pretty horrible, mostly just for the smell. It won't go away! Why did I wear my jacket that I've worn for years? Oh, well, that may be why. But either my brain has broken such that I am stuck imagining the ephemeral smell of the place, or it has soaked into me a bit. Yes, yes I did shower when I got home.
I hope my jacket is okay, with some airing out. Nobody let me wear that when I head back tomorrow! Ah, but then I may ruin TWO jackets... this is a problem.
So why have I journeyed to a place where live pigs walk and squeal into one end then come out in separate parts, forever silenced? For money, silly!
A terribly, terribly, inadequate amount of money.
Interesting that I haven't been struck a vegetarian at the sight. It's severely grossed me out, but I'm not morally upset about eating animals. Is this odd since I do my best to literally live up to the axiom of "wouldn't hurt a fly". I've WANTED to kill some annoying flies, but I've let them off. Spiders have long since won me over, though I'll still sometimes take them outside (more often than not I'll see one crawl by, think "Cool!", and then go about my business. I've even spared those ultimate in creepy scary grossness, the, you know, many legged-hairy looking thing.
This seems like a paradox. Thinking it over, I believe the principle difference is that an animal I eat, well, I'm eating it. If nothing else, were I a hunter in the forest (riiight) I'd be killing to live, to stave off the ghoul of hunger. Considering a live or dead bug means little to me (obviously disease carriers matter to me), why indulge in the extinction of life? The operative word I'd want focused on here is "indulge".
And the guy training me kept talking about how much he loves pork chops! Dude! Not cool man.
I really hope I don't go back there after these next two shifts. I'm an outcast enough withought having to constantly worry about whether I smell of dismembered pig.
So messed up.
All to accompany me on my adventure to the pig slaughter business factory place! Yay!
So, it was pretty horrible, mostly just for the smell. It won't go away! Why did I wear my jacket that I've worn for years? Oh, well, that may be why. But either my brain has broken such that I am stuck imagining the ephemeral smell of the place, or it has soaked into me a bit. Yes, yes I did shower when I got home.
I hope my jacket is okay, with some airing out. Nobody let me wear that when I head back tomorrow! Ah, but then I may ruin TWO jackets... this is a problem.
So why have I journeyed to a place where live pigs walk and squeal into one end then come out in separate parts, forever silenced? For money, silly!
A terribly, terribly, inadequate amount of money.
Interesting that I haven't been struck a vegetarian at the sight. It's severely grossed me out, but I'm not morally upset about eating animals. Is this odd since I do my best to literally live up to the axiom of "wouldn't hurt a fly". I've WANTED to kill some annoying flies, but I've let them off. Spiders have long since won me over, though I'll still sometimes take them outside (more often than not I'll see one crawl by, think "Cool!", and then go about my business. I've even spared those ultimate in creepy scary grossness, the, you know, many legged-hairy looking thing.
This seems like a paradox. Thinking it over, I believe the principle difference is that an animal I eat, well, I'm eating it. If nothing else, were I a hunter in the forest (riiight) I'd be killing to live, to stave off the ghoul of hunger. Considering a live or dead bug means little to me (obviously disease carriers matter to me), why indulge in the extinction of life? The operative word I'd want focused on here is "indulge".
And the guy training me kept talking about how much he loves pork chops! Dude! Not cool man.
I really hope I don't go back there after these next two shifts. I'm an outcast enough withought having to constantly worry about whether I smell of dismembered pig.
So messed up.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
A Tale of Two Cities
It took a while, but I finished this one.
Okay, hold on, if I start this now I'll never get out the door. I'll be back in a few hours, alright?
*A few hours later*
What a series of adventures! I sloughed off my external layer of filth in the shower, and bought creamed corn! Oh, boy, creamed corn!
Right, right, Dickens, A Tale, right.
So I watched Star Trek II with Simon a month or so ago, and the ending funeral uses a famous quote from A Tale of Two Cities "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."
Not only that, but the latest Batman movie Dark Knight Rises featured the exact same quote as read by Gordon for Bruce Wayne's funeral!
I have got to read this book!
The last few times I've met up with a particular group of friends, toting this particular tome with me, I've been met with (mock?) derision. Seems Dickens isn't that well liked a figure with this group. Well, I like him just fine!
That said, the opening chapters were ROUGH to get through. Yes, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." is about as famous a line of literature as there is, however the doubling and the perhaps paradoxical language continues on for quite some time afterwards "... it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness..." etc. etc. It keeps going on like this!
(Brief aside on the notes in this volume: much as the notes were so often useful at providing informative context, did note the 1st REALLY need to happen after "It was the best of times"? You couldn't even let me finish that most famous line in one piece before you ask me to jump to the back of the book and break the flow of the line.)
For a nearly 400 page novel, it feels like there's a lot of room for compression. I guess that's why they could have this story as the basis for an episode of Wishbone (now I wish I'd watched the thing. I guess I just really am not that interested in dogs telling stories. Or just dogs. Or, at that age, t.v. shows that didn't star Batman or Spider-Man. Or Turtles or Power Rangers. Moving on.)
The language is needlessly circuitous, mostly just at the first few chapters, giving us a slow start. The consequent effect is rather neat then, that you get so absorbed in the activity at the very end, you get a fast end.
Of the various characters, my favourite (a word used in place of "the most important" just to be safe) is Sydney Carton. It is, perhaps, his last words we hear recorded by the omniscient narrator at novels end after he switches places with the much more reputable but doomed ex-French aristocrat Charles Darnay, and gets la Guillotine where it would have come to Darnay otherwise.
What a convoluted, but at least slightly nice sounding, few sentences there. As ever, I mimic the last work read.
Sydney thinks he's no good, that he's wasted his life. A pivotal moment has him sequestered with the lovely Lucie Manette, to whom he confesses his love, but with a twist. He's so sure that there's no chance that she could love him back, and he's right (!), but the interview does inspire a new respect for him, and more importantly, Sydney pledges to do anything in the world in the service of Lucie. Years later, taking the place of her husband Darnay, he makes good on his word, and in so doing is forever uplifted in each of their hearts and minds. (This confessional love scene rather reminds me of the one between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (Oh, Mr. Darcy!) where he confesses his love, with the interview ending rather worse for Darcy than with Carton, though Darcy's situation eventually improved drastically in that matter. Timing wise, seems Pride and Prejudice was printed in 1813, almost 50 years before A Tale got out of the gate. I wonder if Dickens read Pride and Prejudice...)
To make this bit of high sounding rhetoric more crass and in keeping with my usual tone and topics... he's basically Batman. He hates himself because he's no good (say, because he couldn't save his parents) and sacrifices himself for the happiness of others. There were parallels enough in The Dark Knight, but MAN Dark Knight Rises IS basically A Tale of Two Cities. They've even got a snooty business guy named Stryver hanging around in the movie- yup, that's a character in the book!
The "power to the people" Occupy Wall Street motifs, which I think most people realized were coincidental as the film was at least scripted before those happened, were actually just a modern day re-enactment of the French Revolution. Bane breaks the prisoners out of Blackgate prison, rather, the Bastille. Bane and Talia are the new Defarges, with Madame Defarge once again emerging as the really terrifying threat.
I say Bruce Wayne/Batman is actually pulling double duty as both Darnay AND Carton. Bruce Wayne is the embodiment of the high society extravagance the League of Shadows fought against, but still a sympathetic figure for his good works, and more importantly it is Bruce Wayne's survival that is ensured by the sacrifice of Batman at the movies end. I think that may actually be why there was no way for the time to work out for Batman to save the city and himself- he DID die with that action, leaving Bruce able to continue with his life, or maybe to just start it.
That is a more symbolic reading for the finale of the Batman trilogy, but I wouldn't put it past Nolan to be making that move. Of course, with people expecting a "realistic" Batman from him, do to his own words (probably, again, not meant literally. Perhaps "real" in this context meant "has feelings about stuff" which is in itself another problem, since that means Nolan is disregarding the longstanding tradition of Bat comics with feeling.)
Back to the book itself, right at the end there's a wicked sweet fight between Ms. Pross, who speaks only english and is a friend to the Evremonde's (okay, that's the secret french aristocrat name that Darnay descends from, so Pross probably isn't familiar with it, but it's a cool name and I wanted to leave it somewhere) against the ruthless Madame Defarge, who only speaks french, and has a personal score against the Evremonde's and is thus the enemy of Darnay and his wife and child.
Taking a moment to consider Madame Defarge's motivation, it's easy to sympathise with her. Her brother and sister were ultimately killed by the Evremonde family, though Charles was just an innocent boy at the time, and she swore revenge.
In summary, cool book, I'm tired. (Boy, I sure am great at conclusions)
Okay, hold on, if I start this now I'll never get out the door. I'll be back in a few hours, alright?
*A few hours later*
What a series of adventures! I sloughed off my external layer of filth in the shower, and bought creamed corn! Oh, boy, creamed corn!
Right, right, Dickens, A Tale, right.
So I watched Star Trek II with Simon a month or so ago, and the ending funeral uses a famous quote from A Tale of Two Cities "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."
Not only that, but the latest Batman movie Dark Knight Rises featured the exact same quote as read by Gordon for Bruce Wayne's funeral!
I have got to read this book!
The last few times I've met up with a particular group of friends, toting this particular tome with me, I've been met with (mock?) derision. Seems Dickens isn't that well liked a figure with this group. Well, I like him just fine!
That said, the opening chapters were ROUGH to get through. Yes, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." is about as famous a line of literature as there is, however the doubling and the perhaps paradoxical language continues on for quite some time afterwards "... it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness..." etc. etc. It keeps going on like this!
(Brief aside on the notes in this volume: much as the notes were so often useful at providing informative context, did note the 1st REALLY need to happen after "It was the best of times"? You couldn't even let me finish that most famous line in one piece before you ask me to jump to the back of the book and break the flow of the line.)
For a nearly 400 page novel, it feels like there's a lot of room for compression. I guess that's why they could have this story as the basis for an episode of Wishbone (now I wish I'd watched the thing. I guess I just really am not that interested in dogs telling stories. Or just dogs. Or, at that age, t.v. shows that didn't star Batman or Spider-Man. Or Turtles or Power Rangers. Moving on.)
The language is needlessly circuitous, mostly just at the first few chapters, giving us a slow start. The consequent effect is rather neat then, that you get so absorbed in the activity at the very end, you get a fast end.
Of the various characters, my favourite (a word used in place of "the most important" just to be safe) is Sydney Carton. It is, perhaps, his last words we hear recorded by the omniscient narrator at novels end after he switches places with the much more reputable but doomed ex-French aristocrat Charles Darnay, and gets la Guillotine where it would have come to Darnay otherwise.
What a convoluted, but at least slightly nice sounding, few sentences there. As ever, I mimic the last work read.
Sydney thinks he's no good, that he's wasted his life. A pivotal moment has him sequestered with the lovely Lucie Manette, to whom he confesses his love, but with a twist. He's so sure that there's no chance that she could love him back, and he's right (!), but the interview does inspire a new respect for him, and more importantly, Sydney pledges to do anything in the world in the service of Lucie. Years later, taking the place of her husband Darnay, he makes good on his word, and in so doing is forever uplifted in each of their hearts and minds. (This confessional love scene rather reminds me of the one between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (Oh, Mr. Darcy!) where he confesses his love, with the interview ending rather worse for Darcy than with Carton, though Darcy's situation eventually improved drastically in that matter. Timing wise, seems Pride and Prejudice was printed in 1813, almost 50 years before A Tale got out of the gate. I wonder if Dickens read Pride and Prejudice...)
To make this bit of high sounding rhetoric more crass and in keeping with my usual tone and topics... he's basically Batman. He hates himself because he's no good (say, because he couldn't save his parents) and sacrifices himself for the happiness of others. There were parallels enough in The Dark Knight, but MAN Dark Knight Rises IS basically A Tale of Two Cities. They've even got a snooty business guy named Stryver hanging around in the movie- yup, that's a character in the book!
The "power to the people" Occupy Wall Street motifs, which I think most people realized were coincidental as the film was at least scripted before those happened, were actually just a modern day re-enactment of the French Revolution. Bane breaks the prisoners out of Blackgate prison, rather, the Bastille. Bane and Talia are the new Defarges, with Madame Defarge once again emerging as the really terrifying threat.
I say Bruce Wayne/Batman is actually pulling double duty as both Darnay AND Carton. Bruce Wayne is the embodiment of the high society extravagance the League of Shadows fought against, but still a sympathetic figure for his good works, and more importantly it is Bruce Wayne's survival that is ensured by the sacrifice of Batman at the movies end. I think that may actually be why there was no way for the time to work out for Batman to save the city and himself- he DID die with that action, leaving Bruce able to continue with his life, or maybe to just start it.
That is a more symbolic reading for the finale of the Batman trilogy, but I wouldn't put it past Nolan to be making that move. Of course, with people expecting a "realistic" Batman from him, do to his own words (probably, again, not meant literally. Perhaps "real" in this context meant "has feelings about stuff" which is in itself another problem, since that means Nolan is disregarding the longstanding tradition of Bat comics with feeling.)
Back to the book itself, right at the end there's a wicked sweet fight between Ms. Pross, who speaks only english and is a friend to the Evremonde's (okay, that's the secret french aristocrat name that Darnay descends from, so Pross probably isn't familiar with it, but it's a cool name and I wanted to leave it somewhere) against the ruthless Madame Defarge, who only speaks french, and has a personal score against the Evremonde's and is thus the enemy of Darnay and his wife and child.
Taking a moment to consider Madame Defarge's motivation, it's easy to sympathise with her. Her brother and sister were ultimately killed by the Evremonde family, though Charles was just an innocent boy at the time, and she swore revenge.
In summary, cool book, I'm tired. (Boy, I sure am great at conclusions)
Monday, February 25, 2013
Surprising things
Dictionary.com's word of the day is "yare", it means quick/agile/lively, and is pronounced exactly like you'd think. Yay-R.
Except that it has an ALTERNATE pronounciation. Yah-R.
It can even be spelled "yar". THAT'S RIGHT! THE WORD OF THE DAY IS PIRATE TALK!! YAR!
I was just really surprised about this. (Title drop)
New topic. Have you ever heard of a "Faraday Cage"? Though it seems Benjamin Franklin made observations in regards to this phenomenon, Michael Faraday invented the thing in 1836. They are enclosures of conducting material that work to block external static and non-static electric fields. It seems the conditions for creating a Faraday cage are relatively easy BECAUSE (and this is the surprising part) you know how your cell phone loses a signal in the elevator? And you're like "dude, what's the deal, there's barely anything between my phone and the outside world with its various cell towers and whatnot" WELL the elevator itself is acting as a Faraday Cage! How awesome is that?
According to the wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage) there are people who work with crazy amounts of electricity from the relative safety of walking Faraday cage suits! Good luck using your bluetooth set, fellas!
Finally, less surprising and more heart breakingly well done. I was directed to this clip from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as an example of Will Smith being a good actor. I already knew that, but wanted to check it out regardless. Good scene, sad scene.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmerFuzRNZ4
Except that it has an ALTERNATE pronounciation. Yah-R.
It can even be spelled "yar". THAT'S RIGHT! THE WORD OF THE DAY IS PIRATE TALK!! YAR!
I was just really surprised about this. (Title drop)
New topic. Have you ever heard of a "Faraday Cage"? Though it seems Benjamin Franklin made observations in regards to this phenomenon, Michael Faraday invented the thing in 1836. They are enclosures of conducting material that work to block external static and non-static electric fields. It seems the conditions for creating a Faraday cage are relatively easy BECAUSE (and this is the surprising part) you know how your cell phone loses a signal in the elevator? And you're like "dude, what's the deal, there's barely anything between my phone and the outside world with its various cell towers and whatnot" WELL the elevator itself is acting as a Faraday Cage! How awesome is that?
According to the wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage) there are people who work with crazy amounts of electricity from the relative safety of walking Faraday cage suits! Good luck using your bluetooth set, fellas!
Finally, less surprising and more heart breakingly well done. I was directed to this clip from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as an example of Will Smith being a good actor. I already knew that, but wanted to check it out regardless. Good scene, sad scene.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmerFuzRNZ4
The description says Smith had father issues of his own to pull from, but another commenter says that isn't so. I don't know which is right, but good job regardless.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Highly creative, highly refreshing dream time
I had some serious trouble waking up today, so I just didn't. Made some new (ish) security/job work for March, had breakfast, watched an episode of Blade, chatted with my friend Josh then BOOM back to sleep.
I can only think that my brain needed the rest to fire on all cylinders, because I dreamed the entire time and it was a cool ride. Basically an entire comic style cosmology came to me. The majority of characters were hi-tech Bat-copies (I mean to say, this character was clearly Batman, this was clearly Nightwing, this was clearly Red Robin, etc etc) though none of them were physically identifiable as such, my brain had done complete and AWESOME redesigns that are too complicated for me to reproduce. I seriously have no idea where this stuff came from, but I like it. At one point I remembered thinking "man, I wish this wass what the new 52 stuff was like" but then realized, even while I'm STILL dreaming, that I can just take these characters and use them for myself. It's not like I dreamed them as particularly like anything that already exists.
The guy that I want to record the most is someone that really sprung fully formed into being. He was a mission control type of character, a bit gaunt, completely bald, but with a sort of neon yellow/green brim of a, let's call it a halo, but it actually surrounds his head as a brim just above the eye-brow level. I imagine there'd be a connective square of a device just at the back of the head. Not sure if the circle surrounds the head with space between, or if it is filled in and follows the contours of the head, but regardless it'd make for a unique silouette, a very nice bonus for making a character standout. I dreamed that this was the guy that was in the background, the ace in the hole coming in to save everyone's skins. It was actually rather tense, he was travelling THROUGH solid rock, which was naturally claustrophobic, and the brim was glowing as the source of light, and a few times a sharp digging implement could be heard searching for this guy.
To translate him into a useable character, I don't think I want to give him phasing powers, those tend to be rigged. Rather, I want him to be a walking Oracle (much more elegant than Cyborg) with the halo serving as his connective device to, well, may as well just say the internet. He'd come equipped with several small rectangular devices, probably all holstered inside his jacket, because that always looks sweet, which he'd plug into whatever hubs of technology that he'd want to control/gain information from. The go-to move for him is to access his control device that he'd always have located at the areas powerstation, to remotely cause all the electricity to go out- bam, instant cover of darkness, while he's got a handy virtual guide to walk through the darkness unperturbed. The downside in that situation is he'd have to turn off the power to a whole section of the city (that's how that works, right?) but as he goes he'd pop his little control devices into whatever center he needs for more specific control. Like, once he gains access to the power room of some evil underground base (or whatever) he could then turn the city's power back on and have the evil base shut itself down.
As a consequence of this being his go-to move, I figure I'd call him "Brownout". What do you think? Blackout is too obvious, and probably taken. That's where I'm leaning anyways.
There was this one surprisingly foul mouthed woman with mind control bullets, who was fighting two other people in an enclosed ring, and all she did was, whenever they turned on her, she'd shoot them so they'd fight each other, and then yell in their faces "F- YOU! AND F- YOU!" it was pretty funny actually. Then when she had to leave the ring to climb out she tossed a grenade down BEFORE she'd climbed out, sort of as a timelimit, incentive to get moving. Definitely a chaotic character.
Moving on to the guys that seemed like the Bat-characters, let's start with the most obvious one. He's actually an Iron Man/Batman fusion. So you have a ridiculously wealthy man (of course) driving through town in his black limo, but flying above and just behind was this giant torpedo of an airship, being driven by the wealthy guys "bodyguard". Yeah, you see where the Iron Man thing plays in. So at one point a huge plume of smoke envelops the limo up to the torpedo, and a zipline connects the two, flinging an occupant into the torpedo and it flies off to do whatever. Not sure why I dreamed the smoke, because the crowd was very aware of the wealthy guy being moved to the torpedo, they all just said "oh, he must have thought there was danger around".
So here's the concept: acting as the dark bodyguard for himself, he (the mysterious armoured half of the equation here) gets contracted out to various highest bidders in need of protection, who will invariably be evil (at least, all the ones that'd get stories told about them). The guy will take this evil person down from the inside, and then have this person impersonated for however long afterwards to maintain the public facade of being a bodyguard, thus getting more work, thus continuing the cycle. It's like Iron Man (with the bodyguard aspect I mean) meets Human Target.
Nothing particularly earth shattering about the Nightwing and Red Robin kind of guys. The former was clearly reporting to the torpedo guy, and had a sweet jetpack with the same feel as the Brave and the Bold Batman look to them. Compact, just sort of stretches out from behind the back. I actually dreamed them more shaped like the Batwing-wings from the Tim Burton movie, if that helps. The Red Robin was awesome, of course, though he didn't have a speck of red on him, but I still have to refer to him as such since he was one of the few guys that actually were called such in my dream. Ah, well. So what was cool about this guy was he was flying around with a jetpack/glider that he held onto from under neath. Sort of like a compact rocket powered hang glider. While I've got this figured out- I just realized what his mask looks like, it's like the mask Richocet wore, and with the "sad" Spider-Man eyes, ovals with the tops cut off by low angled cuts across the top of them. I aught to be able to recongnize what I mean with that description. Anyways, the guy with the jetpack caught sight of the guy with the glider, and shot a cable at him to stop him from getting away- but he was already flying over the edge of the building!- so he starts to fall, and he cuts the power to the glider, aims it at a building, and fires his own cable at it, then cuts off the restrictive cable the jetpack fired at him, then swings until it's possible to start up the glider again. Crazy unsafe to just hang onto the bottom of a rocket powered glider. Also, the "height" of cool.
Additionally I dreamed up a new Spider-Man costume, one that I liked better than what they had in the most recent movie... but only because it was more evocative of the original suit. Really, just stick with what you've got people! Stupid movie designers. It's there! Rgiht int he book! Just do what the book says, make money. Easy. Uh, yeah, but since it was clearly just Spider-Man there's nothing for me to take and use. Whatever, I feel like I won big time on this one.
I can only think that my brain needed the rest to fire on all cylinders, because I dreamed the entire time and it was a cool ride. Basically an entire comic style cosmology came to me. The majority of characters were hi-tech Bat-copies (I mean to say, this character was clearly Batman, this was clearly Nightwing, this was clearly Red Robin, etc etc) though none of them were physically identifiable as such, my brain had done complete and AWESOME redesigns that are too complicated for me to reproduce. I seriously have no idea where this stuff came from, but I like it. At one point I remembered thinking "man, I wish this wass what the new 52 stuff was like" but then realized, even while I'm STILL dreaming, that I can just take these characters and use them for myself. It's not like I dreamed them as particularly like anything that already exists.
The guy that I want to record the most is someone that really sprung fully formed into being. He was a mission control type of character, a bit gaunt, completely bald, but with a sort of neon yellow/green brim of a, let's call it a halo, but it actually surrounds his head as a brim just above the eye-brow level. I imagine there'd be a connective square of a device just at the back of the head. Not sure if the circle surrounds the head with space between, or if it is filled in and follows the contours of the head, but regardless it'd make for a unique silouette, a very nice bonus for making a character standout. I dreamed that this was the guy that was in the background, the ace in the hole coming in to save everyone's skins. It was actually rather tense, he was travelling THROUGH solid rock, which was naturally claustrophobic, and the brim was glowing as the source of light, and a few times a sharp digging implement could be heard searching for this guy.
To translate him into a useable character, I don't think I want to give him phasing powers, those tend to be rigged. Rather, I want him to be a walking Oracle (much more elegant than Cyborg) with the halo serving as his connective device to, well, may as well just say the internet. He'd come equipped with several small rectangular devices, probably all holstered inside his jacket, because that always looks sweet, which he'd plug into whatever hubs of technology that he'd want to control/gain information from. The go-to move for him is to access his control device that he'd always have located at the areas powerstation, to remotely cause all the electricity to go out- bam, instant cover of darkness, while he's got a handy virtual guide to walk through the darkness unperturbed. The downside in that situation is he'd have to turn off the power to a whole section of the city (that's how that works, right?) but as he goes he'd pop his little control devices into whatever center he needs for more specific control. Like, once he gains access to the power room of some evil underground base (or whatever) he could then turn the city's power back on and have the evil base shut itself down.
As a consequence of this being his go-to move, I figure I'd call him "Brownout". What do you think? Blackout is too obvious, and probably taken. That's where I'm leaning anyways.
There was this one surprisingly foul mouthed woman with mind control bullets, who was fighting two other people in an enclosed ring, and all she did was, whenever they turned on her, she'd shoot them so they'd fight each other, and then yell in their faces "F- YOU! AND F- YOU!" it was pretty funny actually. Then when she had to leave the ring to climb out she tossed a grenade down BEFORE she'd climbed out, sort of as a timelimit, incentive to get moving. Definitely a chaotic character.
Moving on to the guys that seemed like the Bat-characters, let's start with the most obvious one. He's actually an Iron Man/Batman fusion. So you have a ridiculously wealthy man (of course) driving through town in his black limo, but flying above and just behind was this giant torpedo of an airship, being driven by the wealthy guys "bodyguard". Yeah, you see where the Iron Man thing plays in. So at one point a huge plume of smoke envelops the limo up to the torpedo, and a zipline connects the two, flinging an occupant into the torpedo and it flies off to do whatever. Not sure why I dreamed the smoke, because the crowd was very aware of the wealthy guy being moved to the torpedo, they all just said "oh, he must have thought there was danger around".
So here's the concept: acting as the dark bodyguard for himself, he (the mysterious armoured half of the equation here) gets contracted out to various highest bidders in need of protection, who will invariably be evil (at least, all the ones that'd get stories told about them). The guy will take this evil person down from the inside, and then have this person impersonated for however long afterwards to maintain the public facade of being a bodyguard, thus getting more work, thus continuing the cycle. It's like Iron Man (with the bodyguard aspect I mean) meets Human Target.
Nothing particularly earth shattering about the Nightwing and Red Robin kind of guys. The former was clearly reporting to the torpedo guy, and had a sweet jetpack with the same feel as the Brave and the Bold Batman look to them. Compact, just sort of stretches out from behind the back. I actually dreamed them more shaped like the Batwing-wings from the Tim Burton movie, if that helps. The Red Robin was awesome, of course, though he didn't have a speck of red on him, but I still have to refer to him as such since he was one of the few guys that actually were called such in my dream. Ah, well. So what was cool about this guy was he was flying around with a jetpack/glider that he held onto from under neath. Sort of like a compact rocket powered hang glider. While I've got this figured out- I just realized what his mask looks like, it's like the mask Richocet wore, and with the "sad" Spider-Man eyes, ovals with the tops cut off by low angled cuts across the top of them. I aught to be able to recongnize what I mean with that description. Anyways, the guy with the jetpack caught sight of the guy with the glider, and shot a cable at him to stop him from getting away- but he was already flying over the edge of the building!- so he starts to fall, and he cuts the power to the glider, aims it at a building, and fires his own cable at it, then cuts off the restrictive cable the jetpack fired at him, then swings until it's possible to start up the glider again. Crazy unsafe to just hang onto the bottom of a rocket powered glider. Also, the "height" of cool.
Additionally I dreamed up a new Spider-Man costume, one that I liked better than what they had in the most recent movie... but only because it was more evocative of the original suit. Really, just stick with what you've got people! Stupid movie designers. It's there! Rgiht int he book! Just do what the book says, make money. Easy. Uh, yeah, but since it was clearly just Spider-Man there's nothing for me to take and use. Whatever, I feel like I won big time on this one.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
I don't know if it's counting the few drafts that have languished un-published (that's fine, any existing have at most a paragraph or two to them) but the main screen told me that I've reached 400 posts. That's really cool! And even with my short cheater posts, I'm still quite confident that I'm left with at LEAST 400 actual pages worth of stuff.
Now if everything here just magicked itself into a single topic publishable book, that'd really be something.
Due back at the library today was my copy of 'Rime'- it included creepy illustrations by (checks note) Ed Young. Creepy drawings for a creepy story. Well, how was I supposed to know that?
Despite my love of Kubla Khan and the interesting history between Coleridge and Wordsworth, I hadn't yet gotten to read this one. I was SUPPOSED to have read it for my romantics class, but well, there's only so much extra studying you can do in the car ride to the exam, and I was unprepared for how long it was. My bad.
Interesting note: not only is this poem the source of all "albatross round my neck" quotes, it's ALSO the source of "water water everywhere and not a drop to drink" HOWEVER the actual line ends "nor any drop to drink".
As you could tell, the poem's about an ancient mariner. And you're probably familiar with the albatross having SOME baring on the tale. Well, here's the other half: when the mariner kills the albatross, the ships good luck charm and the only guide the ship had for sailing out of the misty, uh, antarctic-y ocean area, the ship is stranded in the ocean with supplies dwindling. Eventually they see another ship and think their troubles are over. Nope! It's a ghost ship which carries both Death and Life-In-Death (something like that anyways). Well, Death wins the crew from Life-In-Death, so they all die, but she (Life-In-Death) wins the mariner, and so he's doomed to wander the earth, telling his story to any who'll listen.
I wasn't expecting Pirates of the Caribbean, but that's what it was. Surprise!
Also, late 18th century *spoilers*. But there really is a limit to these things!
Now if everything here just magicked itself into a single topic publishable book, that'd really be something.
Due back at the library today was my copy of 'Rime'- it included creepy illustrations by (checks note) Ed Young. Creepy drawings for a creepy story. Well, how was I supposed to know that?
Despite my love of Kubla Khan and the interesting history between Coleridge and Wordsworth, I hadn't yet gotten to read this one. I was SUPPOSED to have read it for my romantics class, but well, there's only so much extra studying you can do in the car ride to the exam, and I was unprepared for how long it was. My bad.
Interesting note: not only is this poem the source of all "albatross round my neck" quotes, it's ALSO the source of "water water everywhere and not a drop to drink" HOWEVER the actual line ends "nor any drop to drink".
As you could tell, the poem's about an ancient mariner. And you're probably familiar with the albatross having SOME baring on the tale. Well, here's the other half: when the mariner kills the albatross, the ships good luck charm and the only guide the ship had for sailing out of the misty, uh, antarctic-y ocean area, the ship is stranded in the ocean with supplies dwindling. Eventually they see another ship and think their troubles are over. Nope! It's a ghost ship which carries both Death and Life-In-Death (something like that anyways). Well, Death wins the crew from Life-In-Death, so they all die, but she (Life-In-Death) wins the mariner, and so he's doomed to wander the earth, telling his story to any who'll listen.
I wasn't expecting Pirates of the Caribbean, but that's what it was. Surprise!
Also, late 18th century *spoilers*. But there really is a limit to these things!
Howl
I've left this post hang for a disconcertingly long time, I think I was more or less ready to go ten days ago (seeing as that's when I'd finished reading the thing), but here we are. Let's see if I can remember what I wanted to say.
Shamed by my ignorance in having not yet read Allen Ginsberg's seminal piece, Howl- what could I do but get the thing from the library? Sent my way was the 50th anniversary edition annotated by the author himself, and yes, you better believe I went through the various notes and appendices.
I started reading it on the transit ride over to meet up with my friend Andy for dinner (remember you owe Andy a dinner, me) getting to the end of part II or III by the time I reached Yonge and Bloor. Naturally I enjoyed the image I projected of the cool intellectual, leaning against the wall, my sole accessory an oversized book containing a single poem.
(Style note: didn't even consciously avoid repeating sole/sole or single/single, yet happened onto sole/single. A nice surprise, and some alliteration to boot)
The introduction by Ginsberg raised a red flag regarding the annotations. It's great that the notes are from him, there really is no better method of getting into an authors head (if we really must do so) than by asking the author himself, however we have to beware of the potential for Big Brother style historical revisioning. The line "In publishing "Howl," I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy." is hard to take seriously. Either he thought that at the time of publishing in 1956, or it came to him in the "now" of 1986, but either way it sounds arrogant.
It's difficult to comment specifically on the text largely because of the long form style used (and then there's the rorschach factor, but I'll try to ignore that). Individual images get lost in the jumble. "Hydrogen jukebox" is a fun one, and I love the line
"...boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in/
grandfather night,"
as the form perfectly follows the function, the speaker/the listener is seeing a train pass by with the repetition of boxcars. Were this designed to be read instead of heard (actually Ginsberg went to great pains, and additional expense, to make sure the script was just exactly right- so the poem was in fact also designed to be read) I'd call this an imagist bit of poetry. That probably isn't the right term, I'm just referring to the imagist movement as exemplified by Ezra Pound and, more importantly, William Carlos Williams- I say more importantly because when I think of imagist poetry I only ever think of his "The Red Wheelbarrow", but also because Williams was a big influence on Ginsberg, personally supporting the mans work, and even writing the introduction to the first printing of Howl and Other Poems back in '56.
I should note that the title is probably more correctly referred to as "Howl for Carl Solomon", a close friend, perhaps lover (I forget, but I'm sure it's mentioned in the book here..) of Ginsberg. The first part of Howl was written upon learning of Carl's getting sent to a psychiatric institute, something that would have elicited strong enough feelings on its own, but far and away compounded by the fact that Ginsberg had just authorized a lobotomy for his mother(!) who was at the same facility at some point.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,"
Ginsberg is raging at the system that would take someone who is different and crush them until they fit an acceptable mold- fair enough. But according to THE Carl Solomon in a note after the text, he was institutionalized by choice. It's unclear if he means he signed the papers himself to get committed, or if his "crazy" actions and getting committed were all a rather convenient way for him to make a statement, or prove a point to himself or others. My money is on the latter option. Regardless, Carl seems to think Howl was written under false pretenses, and there's a very interesting account
(how often have I said something was 'interesting' in this piece? It already feels like a lot, with more on the way..)
of Ginsberg going to Carl and apologizing for, in effect, reducing him to a single image and broadcasting that image to the world. This, I thought, demonstrated a humility that I found endearing in Ginsberg.
Returning to Howl, I'll complain about something that really gets under my skin: the start of the 43 strophe (man, I hope you know what a strophe is, it's pretty much Ginsberg's favourite word when discussing poetry... well, it comes up a lot. It's not a big deal though- (in modern poetry) any separate section or extended movement in a poem, distinguished from a stanza in that it does not follow a regularly repeated pattern.) is all praise for Neal Cassady. I always got the feeling that the Beat obsession with Cassady stemmed from either being hopelessly in love with the guy or with being completely jealous of him. If it were me, I think I'd be jealous of all the attention he gets. Maybe I AM, and that's the source of my irritation. So, yeah, not necessarily a literary justification to dislike this passage.
A similar distaste for the other Beat peoples sort of clouds my opinion of the Footnote to Howl, with the proclamations of "holy Kerouac... holy Burroughs...", however I appreciate that the point of the footnote is to say that EVERYTHING is holy, and it's a point well taken. Less well taken is the exaggerated space filling of the first repetition of "Holy!" My suspicion is that this was a purely visual aesthetic choice, 15 "Holy!"'s to exactly cross the typed page, run across as a banner for the rest of the Footnote. For a poem that lasts almost a half an hour of being read out loud this strikes as self indulgent.
My collection then goes on to showcase several drafts of Howl, copied from their original typewritten forms, with pencilled in notes, with a clearer version typed up on the opposing page. I very quickly lost interest in going over this gradual evolution of the work, however one change did jump out at me: the first line originally went
"I saw the best minds of my generation
generation destroyed by madness
starving, mystical, naked,"
With the chief difference being the replacing of 'mystical' with 'hysterical', I think with the purpose of removing any positive connotation that could arise with the martyrdom of being one of "the best minds of a generation" destroyed.
It's no wonder I skipped through all these different draft notes- it's a hundred pages of a 194 page book! Yeesh!
Then comes the section with commentary by Carl Solomon, a meandering retelling of his time in therapy, being brought in and out of insulin comas, without any direct reference to Howl, excepting of course that it showcases the manner in which the best minds get destroyed.
If I seem to hold too fast to the opening line of the poem, well, I'm taking it as the introduction of the piece, it frames the entirety of Howl. I think the line deserves to be held on to.
("on to" or "onto"? Both have been looking weird to me lately..)
Page 118 has a highly revelant quote touching on something I will return to again and again (I've, uh, basically got the last line of this post all ready, it's written in my litte notepad beside me, and this quote *spoilers* basically states the point right now. That doesn't mean stop reading!)
"The case of the so-called lunatic opened up by Artaud and no other writer is really the case of Socrates, who was condemned to death for being what, in his day, was considered "bright," that is to say not stupid. I say that we live in a generation of charlatanry, propaganda and corruption, and that there is no room for an honest man on either side of the Iron Curtain."
P. 124-146 contains the real meat of the annotations, with every allusion in the poem broken down and explained. Sure enough, the number of literary allusions is staggering, but more often than not the allusions are to in-jokes/personal anecdotes that only friends could have had any hope of being on the ground floor of. At a web-series premier I was talking to a friend of mine, D (I feel what he says, and I'm about to record, makes him sound a little myopic, so a sneaky initial will have to be his name here. But if you wanted to be a little sneaky yourself and figure out to whom I'm referring, here's a hint: the D is for Double. Cool Geoff could almost certainly figure out who this is from that clue- but don't say who it is in the comments below, I'd have to figure out how to delete comments!)
Anyways, I say to D how I'm reading Howl, and having difficulty wrapping my head around it. Is it good, is it bad, do I even like it? I mention the allusions, and to this he has something grandiose to say, "when something can't be understood by everyone, is it art?" I'm slightly paraphrasing, but that was ultimately the gist of it. It's been long since drilled into me to be fairly accommodating with my definition of art, so I went on the defensive. However, I took the wrong way to go about it, talking some nonsensical gibberish about art being in everything, citing a sunset as my example. Well, D isn't talking about nature, and wasn't having any of that. It was just about here that the lights went down and we went our separate ways for the show, but the conversation stayed with me.
I'm not sure how it happened, but eventually I thought of the question in terms of Barney the Dinosaur. Yeah, I REALLY have no idea how that happened- I'm thankful I was too old for that monstrosity when it showed up on the scene- but that's the thing right there. I don't like Barney because I'm not the target audience. I can still appreciate the craft that goes into creating something that hits its target audience so successfully (your mileage may vary on that one), but it just isn't for me.
With that example in mind I attacked Howl with a new perspective. Who IS the target audience? Well, the highly literate, sure. So it's on an even keel with scholarly publications as far as its impenetrability goes. That it goes further into the in-side stories, well, what of it? The target audience is simply trimmed down that much smaller. It doesn't delegitimize the work. I do think that a necessary consequence of having such a small pool of insiders to speak to suggests that the vast majority of Howl's extended audience is made up of people projecting their own ideas onto the poem to enjoy. Well, what of THAT? I dare say the lions share of poetry is enjoyed in just that manner... it's rather a consequence of that intellectual leap to understand another persons ideas. Forget poetry- this is every day human interaction!
I left myself a note in my book mark here to check out the bottom right of p. 131- okay, right, it's an excerpt from a book by Carl Solomon (titled "More Mishaps"). It's a bit dismissive, but hardly a unique opinion, and phrased in a rather fun manner:
"History moves in strange ways, I met for the first time my fellow Beatnik to be, Allen Ginsberg. I gave Allen an apocryphal history of my adventures and pseudo-intellectual deeds of daring. He meticulously took note of everything I said (I thought at the time that he suffered from "the writer's disease," imagined that he was a great writer). Later, when I decided to give up the flesh and become a professional lunatic-saint, he published all of this data, compounded partly of truth, but for the most raving self-justification, crypto-bohemian boasting ala Rimbaud, effeminate prancing, and esoteric aphorisms plagarized from Kierkegaard and others- in the form of Howl. Thus he enshrined falsehood as truth and raving as common sense for future generations to ponder over and be misled."
The page turns over, and I may as well include this quote, though I know you already get the point already concerning Carl's opinion of the piece: "Ginsberg was just having a verbal orgy at this point. He likes words. No hallucinations were involved in the 'breakdown'; just overexposure to the metaphysical imagination of Manhattan's crackpot intelligentsia vintage 1956."
Quick note to self: it's rather ridiculous that you needed dictionary.com to look up "aberrated". Characterized by defects, abnormality, or deviation from the usual, typical, or expected course.
You know, as in "aberration". Buh.
Last note and I can throw out this bookmark/nofrills receipt.
Ah, this is a note informing me that Carl Solomon worked as an "editor for his uncle A. A. Wynn's Ace Books, publishing Burroughs' "Junky" and contracting Ur-text of Kerouac's "On the Road"." Not what you know, but who.
I recall wanting to mention this as well: printed immediately below on p. 143 are two rude letters to Malcolm de Chazal and T.S. Eliot. A pre-internet version of trolling.
Man, I've spent far and away too much time on this, and haven't even yet gotten to the obscenity trial or the direct literary inspirations on Ginsberg. All right, the bare bones of the obscenity trial is that for something to be classified obscene in the U.S. it must be deemed to have NO social value/commentary. IF there is no social value/commentary, then it can be evaluated whether or not the work is obscene. Despite the prosecution's best efforts to trip up the various poets and professors (discounting their own witnesses of course) they couldn't even argue that it had no social value/commentary. Therefore, not obscene, free speech, constitution, yada yada. And of course the free publicity from the trial was a nice bonus.
Sorry, looking back at the book, replace my use of social value/commentary with "social importance". I'd go back and change what I previously entered here, but I think it'll be clearer if I leave it as is.
Mustn't leave out this gem from the end of the courts ruling: "In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: "Honi soit qui mal y pense." (Evil to him who evil thinks.)"
As for the listed influences on Ginsberg, besides the ever present Williams and Whitman, there's:
Christopher Smart
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Guillaume Apollinaire
Kurt Schwitters
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Antonin Artaud
Federico Garcia Lorca
Hart Crane
You'll forgive me if I skip the act of recording which poems are cited here, but sure enough you can see the thread connecting them all together for Howl.
That's it, that's everything in the book. Yeesh, I mostly came out sounding negative about the whole thing, and I see I've skipped out entirely on any mention of Moloch from part II. You know what I think? One persons brilliance is another persons insanity. That was basically the ruling at the trial, and it's the message of Howl, with the further addendum that society is built to destroy those it views as insane. The fact that, whether by design or accident (I'm still not convinced one way or the other), Howl works as a device to sort those who accept "brilliance" and those who dismiss it. That's kind of amazing.
Bet you wish I just said that at the start and skipped all the recording of minutiae from the book, huh?
Shamed by my ignorance in having not yet read Allen Ginsberg's seminal piece, Howl- what could I do but get the thing from the library? Sent my way was the 50th anniversary edition annotated by the author himself, and yes, you better believe I went through the various notes and appendices.
I started reading it on the transit ride over to meet up with my friend Andy for dinner (remember you owe Andy a dinner, me) getting to the end of part II or III by the time I reached Yonge and Bloor. Naturally I enjoyed the image I projected of the cool intellectual, leaning against the wall, my sole accessory an oversized book containing a single poem.
(Style note: didn't even consciously avoid repeating sole/sole or single/single, yet happened onto sole/single. A nice surprise, and some alliteration to boot)
The introduction by Ginsberg raised a red flag regarding the annotations. It's great that the notes are from him, there really is no better method of getting into an authors head (if we really must do so) than by asking the author himself, however we have to beware of the potential for Big Brother style historical revisioning. The line "In publishing "Howl," I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy." is hard to take seriously. Either he thought that at the time of publishing in 1956, or it came to him in the "now" of 1986, but either way it sounds arrogant.
It's difficult to comment specifically on the text largely because of the long form style used (and then there's the rorschach factor, but I'll try to ignore that). Individual images get lost in the jumble. "Hydrogen jukebox" is a fun one, and I love the line
"...boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in/
grandfather night,"
as the form perfectly follows the function, the speaker/the listener is seeing a train pass by with the repetition of boxcars. Were this designed to be read instead of heard (actually Ginsberg went to great pains, and additional expense, to make sure the script was just exactly right- so the poem was in fact also designed to be read) I'd call this an imagist bit of poetry. That probably isn't the right term, I'm just referring to the imagist movement as exemplified by Ezra Pound and, more importantly, William Carlos Williams- I say more importantly because when I think of imagist poetry I only ever think of his "The Red Wheelbarrow", but also because Williams was a big influence on Ginsberg, personally supporting the mans work, and even writing the introduction to the first printing of Howl and Other Poems back in '56.
I should note that the title is probably more correctly referred to as "Howl for Carl Solomon", a close friend, perhaps lover (I forget, but I'm sure it's mentioned in the book here..) of Ginsberg. The first part of Howl was written upon learning of Carl's getting sent to a psychiatric institute, something that would have elicited strong enough feelings on its own, but far and away compounded by the fact that Ginsberg had just authorized a lobotomy for his mother(!) who was at the same facility at some point.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,"
Ginsberg is raging at the system that would take someone who is different and crush them until they fit an acceptable mold- fair enough. But according to THE Carl Solomon in a note after the text, he was institutionalized by choice. It's unclear if he means he signed the papers himself to get committed, or if his "crazy" actions and getting committed were all a rather convenient way for him to make a statement, or prove a point to himself or others. My money is on the latter option. Regardless, Carl seems to think Howl was written under false pretenses, and there's a very interesting account
(how often have I said something was 'interesting' in this piece? It already feels like a lot, with more on the way..)
of Ginsberg going to Carl and apologizing for, in effect, reducing him to a single image and broadcasting that image to the world. This, I thought, demonstrated a humility that I found endearing in Ginsberg.
Returning to Howl, I'll complain about something that really gets under my skin: the start of the 43 strophe (man, I hope you know what a strophe is, it's pretty much Ginsberg's favourite word when discussing poetry... well, it comes up a lot. It's not a big deal though- (in modern poetry) any separate section or extended movement in a poem, distinguished from a stanza in that it does not follow a regularly repeated pattern.) is all praise for Neal Cassady. I always got the feeling that the Beat obsession with Cassady stemmed from either being hopelessly in love with the guy or with being completely jealous of him. If it were me, I think I'd be jealous of all the attention he gets. Maybe I AM, and that's the source of my irritation. So, yeah, not necessarily a literary justification to dislike this passage.
A similar distaste for the other Beat peoples sort of clouds my opinion of the Footnote to Howl, with the proclamations of "holy Kerouac... holy Burroughs...", however I appreciate that the point of the footnote is to say that EVERYTHING is holy, and it's a point well taken. Less well taken is the exaggerated space filling of the first repetition of "Holy!" My suspicion is that this was a purely visual aesthetic choice, 15 "Holy!"'s to exactly cross the typed page, run across as a banner for the rest of the Footnote. For a poem that lasts almost a half an hour of being read out loud this strikes as self indulgent.
My collection then goes on to showcase several drafts of Howl, copied from their original typewritten forms, with pencilled in notes, with a clearer version typed up on the opposing page. I very quickly lost interest in going over this gradual evolution of the work, however one change did jump out at me: the first line originally went
"I saw the best minds of my generation
generation destroyed by madness
starving, mystical, naked,"
With the chief difference being the replacing of 'mystical' with 'hysterical', I think with the purpose of removing any positive connotation that could arise with the martyrdom of being one of "the best minds of a generation" destroyed.
It's no wonder I skipped through all these different draft notes- it's a hundred pages of a 194 page book! Yeesh!
Then comes the section with commentary by Carl Solomon, a meandering retelling of his time in therapy, being brought in and out of insulin comas, without any direct reference to Howl, excepting of course that it showcases the manner in which the best minds get destroyed.
If I seem to hold too fast to the opening line of the poem, well, I'm taking it as the introduction of the piece, it frames the entirety of Howl. I think the line deserves to be held on to.
("on to" or "onto"? Both have been looking weird to me lately..)
Page 118 has a highly revelant quote touching on something I will return to again and again (I've, uh, basically got the last line of this post all ready, it's written in my litte notepad beside me, and this quote *spoilers* basically states the point right now. That doesn't mean stop reading!)
"The case of the so-called lunatic opened up by Artaud and no other writer is really the case of Socrates, who was condemned to death for being what, in his day, was considered "bright," that is to say not stupid. I say that we live in a generation of charlatanry, propaganda and corruption, and that there is no room for an honest man on either side of the Iron Curtain."
P. 124-146 contains the real meat of the annotations, with every allusion in the poem broken down and explained. Sure enough, the number of literary allusions is staggering, but more often than not the allusions are to in-jokes/personal anecdotes that only friends could have had any hope of being on the ground floor of. At a web-series premier I was talking to a friend of mine, D (I feel what he says, and I'm about to record, makes him sound a little myopic, so a sneaky initial will have to be his name here. But if you wanted to be a little sneaky yourself and figure out to whom I'm referring, here's a hint: the D is for Double. Cool Geoff could almost certainly figure out who this is from that clue- but don't say who it is in the comments below, I'd have to figure out how to delete comments!)
Anyways, I say to D how I'm reading Howl, and having difficulty wrapping my head around it. Is it good, is it bad, do I even like it? I mention the allusions, and to this he has something grandiose to say, "when something can't be understood by everyone, is it art?" I'm slightly paraphrasing, but that was ultimately the gist of it. It's been long since drilled into me to be fairly accommodating with my definition of art, so I went on the defensive. However, I took the wrong way to go about it, talking some nonsensical gibberish about art being in everything, citing a sunset as my example. Well, D isn't talking about nature, and wasn't having any of that. It was just about here that the lights went down and we went our separate ways for the show, but the conversation stayed with me.
I'm not sure how it happened, but eventually I thought of the question in terms of Barney the Dinosaur. Yeah, I REALLY have no idea how that happened- I'm thankful I was too old for that monstrosity when it showed up on the scene- but that's the thing right there. I don't like Barney because I'm not the target audience. I can still appreciate the craft that goes into creating something that hits its target audience so successfully (your mileage may vary on that one), but it just isn't for me.
With that example in mind I attacked Howl with a new perspective. Who IS the target audience? Well, the highly literate, sure. So it's on an even keel with scholarly publications as far as its impenetrability goes. That it goes further into the in-side stories, well, what of it? The target audience is simply trimmed down that much smaller. It doesn't delegitimize the work. I do think that a necessary consequence of having such a small pool of insiders to speak to suggests that the vast majority of Howl's extended audience is made up of people projecting their own ideas onto the poem to enjoy. Well, what of THAT? I dare say the lions share of poetry is enjoyed in just that manner... it's rather a consequence of that intellectual leap to understand another persons ideas. Forget poetry- this is every day human interaction!
I left myself a note in my book mark here to check out the bottom right of p. 131- okay, right, it's an excerpt from a book by Carl Solomon (titled "More Mishaps"). It's a bit dismissive, but hardly a unique opinion, and phrased in a rather fun manner:
"History moves in strange ways, I met for the first time my fellow Beatnik to be, Allen Ginsberg. I gave Allen an apocryphal history of my adventures and pseudo-intellectual deeds of daring. He meticulously took note of everything I said (I thought at the time that he suffered from "the writer's disease," imagined that he was a great writer). Later, when I decided to give up the flesh and become a professional lunatic-saint, he published all of this data, compounded partly of truth, but for the most raving self-justification, crypto-bohemian boasting ala Rimbaud, effeminate prancing, and esoteric aphorisms plagarized from Kierkegaard and others- in the form of Howl. Thus he enshrined falsehood as truth and raving as common sense for future generations to ponder over and be misled."
The page turns over, and I may as well include this quote, though I know you already get the point already concerning Carl's opinion of the piece: "Ginsberg was just having a verbal orgy at this point. He likes words. No hallucinations were involved in the 'breakdown'; just overexposure to the metaphysical imagination of Manhattan's crackpot intelligentsia vintage 1956."
Quick note to self: it's rather ridiculous that you needed dictionary.com to look up "aberrated". Characterized by defects, abnormality, or deviation from the usual, typical, or expected course.
You know, as in "aberration". Buh.
Last note and I can throw out this bookmark/nofrills receipt.
Ah, this is a note informing me that Carl Solomon worked as an "editor for his uncle A. A. Wynn's Ace Books, publishing Burroughs' "Junky" and contracting Ur-text of Kerouac's "On the Road"." Not what you know, but who.
I recall wanting to mention this as well: printed immediately below on p. 143 are two rude letters to Malcolm de Chazal and T.S. Eliot. A pre-internet version of trolling.
Man, I've spent far and away too much time on this, and haven't even yet gotten to the obscenity trial or the direct literary inspirations on Ginsberg. All right, the bare bones of the obscenity trial is that for something to be classified obscene in the U.S. it must be deemed to have NO social value/commentary. IF there is no social value/commentary, then it can be evaluated whether or not the work is obscene. Despite the prosecution's best efforts to trip up the various poets and professors (discounting their own witnesses of course) they couldn't even argue that it had no social value/commentary. Therefore, not obscene, free speech, constitution, yada yada. And of course the free publicity from the trial was a nice bonus.
Sorry, looking back at the book, replace my use of social value/commentary with "social importance". I'd go back and change what I previously entered here, but I think it'll be clearer if I leave it as is.
Mustn't leave out this gem from the end of the courts ruling: "In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: "Honi soit qui mal y pense." (Evil to him who evil thinks.)"
As for the listed influences on Ginsberg, besides the ever present Williams and Whitman, there's:
Christopher Smart
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Guillaume Apollinaire
Kurt Schwitters
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Antonin Artaud
Federico Garcia Lorca
Hart Crane
You'll forgive me if I skip the act of recording which poems are cited here, but sure enough you can see the thread connecting them all together for Howl.
That's it, that's everything in the book. Yeesh, I mostly came out sounding negative about the whole thing, and I see I've skipped out entirely on any mention of Moloch from part II. You know what I think? One persons brilliance is another persons insanity. That was basically the ruling at the trial, and it's the message of Howl, with the further addendum that society is built to destroy those it views as insane. The fact that, whether by design or accident (I'm still not convinced one way or the other), Howl works as a device to sort those who accept "brilliance" and those who dismiss it. That's kind of amazing.
Bet you wish I just said that at the start and skipped all the recording of minutiae from the book, huh?
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Warm Bodies
Well, sure, it's Valentine's Day, sounds like a good day to talk about the movie Warm Bodies.
The main thing that interests me on this one is the continuation of the zombie movie-as-social-commentary. Though I haven't seen that many zombie flicks (mostly the zombie pastiche flic's Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland) the zombies representing whatever social ill, is a long standing trope, making cries against "The Red Scare", commercialism, any isms really.
But the zombies here were representative of a lack of appreciation for life... that sounds like a google translation of the actual thing being represented. Heh, maybe it is: zombies as personification of ennui. What makes this movie different from any other zombie story I know of is it doesn't just analogously decry whatever the zombies represent, it offers a prescriptive solution. Finding and feeling that life. Getting back into the saddle. This movie isn't about the last few survivors at the tale end of a zombie apocalypse, it's the discovery of a cure that rejuvenates the zombies, the world. The word the movie specifically uses is 'exhumed'.
I was mostly struck by this because of how much I identified with the neurotic main character R the zombie... yeah, I've been a bit depressed for this past week, walking around with zero energy, yup, that's me as a zombie. So how could I not be happy to see R get better and become human and alive again, and leading the way for the rest of zombiekind to get less brain eaty. It was a heartening movie in that way and just what I needed. I feel like I'm out of that down phase and back to normal... that said, I walked around a lot today and am exhausted, so I don't have energy at this exact moment, but close enough.
Ah, but another possibility is that I was just physically ill and didn't know it. I ran out of breath and got light headed far too easily, which is evidence of just plain being sick.
I'm falling asleep at my keyboard here, so yeah- it was Romeo and Juliet with zombies, but with a happy ending. I think I've avoided spelling mistakes. Good night!
The main thing that interests me on this one is the continuation of the zombie movie-as-social-commentary. Though I haven't seen that many zombie flicks (mostly the zombie pastiche flic's Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland) the zombies representing whatever social ill, is a long standing trope, making cries against "The Red Scare", commercialism, any isms really.
But the zombies here were representative of a lack of appreciation for life... that sounds like a google translation of the actual thing being represented. Heh, maybe it is: zombies as personification of ennui. What makes this movie different from any other zombie story I know of is it doesn't just analogously decry whatever the zombies represent, it offers a prescriptive solution. Finding and feeling that life. Getting back into the saddle. This movie isn't about the last few survivors at the tale end of a zombie apocalypse, it's the discovery of a cure that rejuvenates the zombies, the world. The word the movie specifically uses is 'exhumed'.
I was mostly struck by this because of how much I identified with the neurotic main character R the zombie... yeah, I've been a bit depressed for this past week, walking around with zero energy, yup, that's me as a zombie. So how could I not be happy to see R get better and become human and alive again, and leading the way for the rest of zombiekind to get less brain eaty. It was a heartening movie in that way and just what I needed. I feel like I'm out of that down phase and back to normal... that said, I walked around a lot today and am exhausted, so I don't have energy at this exact moment, but close enough.
Ah, but another possibility is that I was just physically ill and didn't know it. I ran out of breath and got light headed far too easily, which is evidence of just plain being sick.
I'm falling asleep at my keyboard here, so yeah- it was Romeo and Juliet with zombies, but with a happy ending. I think I've avoided spelling mistakes. Good night!
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Kamen Rider Ryuki (I spoil the entire series, fair warning)
Okay, let's get to this post. I've been putting it off for a while, but all that's accomplishing is keeping me from moving on to the next Rider series. Also, I keep making the main characters henshin pose in front of mirrors, and not just before getting on the bus with my metropass (which is obviously acceptable). That, PLUS I just dreamed I could jump into the mirror world ala this show. So I clearly need to get this out of my system.
Wait, actually, give me a second to review what I've already told you about the show... alright, if and when it fits into this piece I can link back to my earlier post. Moving on. Ah, and a quick disclaimer, some of what I'll write here will surely be stuff I've read on tvtropes.org or wikipedia, so I apologize in advance for any copied sentiments. Man, will I get to it, or what?
The laconic premise behind the show is that it's Kamen Rider meets Highlander. You have a bunch of Riders and they have to kill each other until only one remains.
Up until this point, all Rider shows had the good guy fighting against the clearly defined bad guy (arguably it's a bit murkier for the previous series, Agito, but on the surface anyways it keeps to form)- this series is a HUGE departure. Ah, I've lost the thread. I really need to start at the beginning.
We meet the hero, Kido Shinji, a cub reporter for ORE Journal, as he's helping investigate a series of mysterious, seemingly impossible, disappearances. At the home of one victim he finds a card deck- which is an accurate but misleading way to describe this thing. It's more like a 2x3 inches plastic box containing cards (I don't want you thinking he just pick up a stack of cards off the floor). This box is called the 'Advent Deck' and is the transformation trinket, the henshin device, for the series.
It turns out that all the disappearances are caused by monsters popping out of reflective surfaces, leaping from a mirror world, to feed on humans. By picking up the henshin device, Shinji gains the ability to see into the mirror world, to sense when a mirror monster is on the move (a convenient plot device to get Riders into action when needed), and becomes targeted for destruction by a giant mirror monster dragon called "Dragredder". I don't know how it got a name like that, but whatever.
Two other people, besides the senior ORE Journal reporter, are in the area investigating the disappearances. Except they aren't investigating at all, because they know exactly what's going on: Ren Akiyama- Kamen Rider Knight, and Kanzaki Yui, a girl that can also see into the mirror world despite not being a Rider. They meet Shinji and Yui gets him to use the Advent Deck's contract card to make a pact with the dragon monster so it won't keep trying to eat Shinji. I forget how it worked, what with it being a while since I saw the first episode, but I recall Yui had somehow given Shinji an out, that he could keep one card that would protect him from the monsters, but give up the Advent Deck and thus avoid becoming a Kamen Rider. Regardless of what that out was, Shinji decides to become a Rider to protect people.
Which would be great, if this was a regular Kamen Rider series. But it isn't. What he signed onto instead was for a job where he'd be constantly attacked by other Riders that want to kill him, the mirror monsters might kill him, and to top it all off, if he doesn't participate and at least feed a defeated a mirror monster to his dragon every so often, his dragon will get hungry and pop out of the mirror world to eat him.
Pleasant dreams. "One who does not fight will not survive." is the tagline for each episode, and rightfully so.
Most of the Riders in this series don't happen to luck into these Advent Decks and into this horrible fight to survive. Rather they are handpicked by the shadowy Kanzaki Shirou, Yui's missing brother (her interest in all this is to find him) who is perhaps trapped in the mirror world and has little ability to interact with the real world. Kanzaki promises various desperate individuals with the promise of a wish should they become the last Rider standing. For example, Ren's girlfriend is stuck in a coma, so he wants to wish her back, another Rider is dying of cancer, so wants to cure himself. Shinji is a spanner in the works that doesn't belong in this battle.
It took a long time for me to warm up to Shinji because I couldn't tell if he was supposed to be silly or determined or what. But I get it now: he's a well-meaning, good-hearted idiot specifically in the wrong story, wrong genre. If he were in a Shonen manga or whatever, he'd try hard enough, and ultimately save everyone, and they'd all be happy and friends. He'd even be okay if this were ANY other series of Kamen Rider. But it's not. Instead, he's stuck in a show where YOU CAN'T WIN.
You want to stop the Rider battle (this becomes Shinji's chief goal throughout the series)? That means curtains for Ren's girlfriend, the guy with cancer, and (SPOILERS) Yui. You can sacrifice yourself for the sake of someone else's wish, but that still means 12 other Riders will get killed in the process. There isn't a happy ending here. It's this unreconcilable clash of genres between the idiot hero Shinji and the tragic failure-is-the-only-option setting that leaves Shinji paralyzed with indecision for most of the show. That's why I'm on Shinji's side- I feel horrible for him! In all the Kamen Rider series I've seen so far, no one has it tougher than him.
Let's get into random things about the series.
The Henshin pose that Shinji makes is interesting in that it is far and away the simplest of all the Riders in the show. It's highly imitatable (I can attest to that) while also being a visual cue setting Shinji apart from all the other Riders in the series. In addition, teamed up with Ren's Henshin pose, the two apparently allude to the henshin poses of the original Kamen Rider 1 and 2 (see images below) which is just a cool bit of history:
Shinji and Ren are the two guys on the far left here. The Ryuki/Shinji design actually still bugs me, you'd think I'd like it after all this time, but no. It's always looked somehow cheap to me, a bit rubbish. Which is perhaps well in character for Shinji, but we are supposed to like his suit. The bits around his shoulders, which of course you can't see in this picture, always looked awkward to me, you'll notice the knee pads on all of them and are a design element that pops up in other places on the suits.. they have less to do with looking cool than with locking on to the weird motorcycle things that transport people through mirror world and are never adequately looked at or explained. It looks like something an action figure would have to accept despite what a designer would want, but here it's celebrated. Finally, I think the red jump suit may just be too jarring to me, as the base for most Rider uniforms is black, as you can see in the above picture.
In contrast, Ren's Kamen Rider Knight suit is very slick, I dig that one a lot. Ryuki gets a powered up form later that I actually like well enough.
Now may be the time for this part, so if you haven't yet, read my previous post on episodes 27 and 28 here: http://stonetextures.blogspot.ca/2013/01/ryuki-episode-27-28-my-8-button-isnt.html
You're back? Great! So with the clip show episode we're introduced to the concept of Kanzaki Shirou having the ability to rewind time. Despite all appearances from what I've written thus far- THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!!!
While most of these series have movies made that don't quite fit into their respective series continuity for one reason or the other, it's specifically the case that the movies are different try's of the Rider Battle, with everything we see in the main series just the latest iteration of the Groundhogs Day Loop that is this series. Here's a quick quote from Kanzaki Shirou that I think illuminates the thinking that went into the creators reasons for making the leap from mirror world monsters to time travel/different timelines: "Mirrors facing each other create an infinite number of worlds. There is more than one fate. The only thing that's the same is desire. All humans desire. That's why they fight. And when that desire becomes so great that it becomes unbearable, people... become Riders. The Rider battle... begins."
I think it's a bit of a stretch, and can't help but think (uh, think followed immediately by think in the same sentence. Bad style!... I almost wrote is as "By style!" before fixing it, but I kind of like that, sort of a "By Lucifer's beard!" outcry. So long as you imagine it as said by Kelsey Grammer) that they wasted two pefectly excellent premises by not committing to either one or the other.
We're introduced to the time travel twist in episode 28, but it doesn't really come back until the very ending of the series, not counting the movies. Something so pivotal should have had a bit of foreshadowing to it. Or rather than say "should", I would have preferred it. I've read it suggested that the reports we hear of Kanzaki dying out in America when he's clearly working in a lab in Japan before the start of the Rider battle is evidence of a fraying time-line, but if so I would have liked that to be addressed... because I need things spoon fed to me, apparently. Maybe I just would have liked way more crazy discrepancies like that to make things clear.
Ultimately we learn the source of the mirror monsters, they were Yui's drawing she made in front of the mirror when she was little, and the whole battle was set up to steal life energy, i.e. the wish, for the sake of granting Yui new life, as she'd died when she was little, and had only continued existing thanks to her mirror self giving up her life/replacing the real Yui, but her borrowed time was just about up... the fact that we don't get more stuff dealing with mirror copies of people (Shinji had a mirror copy of himself in the movie "The 13 Riders" but other than that, the mirror world is completely empty but for the monsters roaming around) is another wasted oppourtunity.
Did Yui create the mirror world? Is Kanzaki Shirou trapped in the mirror world? Maybe he's the mirror version of Kanzaki, and the real version of him died in America, that would actually really make a ton of sense, perhaps the two versions of himself were working on a way to save Yui.
Despite all these questions, the ending is amazing/amazingly sad.
Shinji is still trying to work out what the right thing to do is, to fight or what, to kill or allow to die, when an invasion of mirror world insect monsters run through the real world (tough since the Riders powers seem to be mostly non-existent in the real world... I'm not sure why the monsters don't just fight longer in the real world, though it's likely they can only survive so long in the real world, same as the Riders can only spend so long in the mirror world.). Shinji dives in the way to protect a little girl and gets stabbed in the back by one of the creatures.
The girl runs off, and Shinji is stumbling a bit, and you think he's got hurt in much the same way everyone gets hurt on these shows- undefined ouchies that can be overcome by heroic willpower!- and then a bunch of blood comes out his mouth (!!) and you're like "Woah, this is the real deal!" He struggles up to henshin and go into the mirror world to help Ren wipe these monsters out. That done, he pops back in the real world and slumps down against a car, a streak of blood showing his slide to the ground. Ren, a character that has done his level best to be cold and unattached to any other character in the show, fully expecting to have to kill them eventually, gets choked up and tells Shinji he's supposed to live. It's super sad guys, not even joking in the slightest. That the series got me choked up too earns it major points. Not that I like being sad, but I can't help but be impressed by something that elicits an emotional reaction from me.
Then Shinji dies.
Yup, the hero of the show dies without beating the bad guy (whoever that is), without figuring out what he was supposed to do... but he definitely went out like a hero.
Ren goes on to fight the last Rider, an over powered puppet controlled by Kanzaki named Kamen Rider Odin, Kanzaki's trump card to cheat out the Rider battle and win the wish/life energy for himself to save Yui (who has already died/disappeared by this point). Kanzaki finally decides that Yui will never accept the gift of new life if it means sacrificing all these others (he's tried multiple times before in previous Groundhogs Day attempts), Odin disappears and Ren goes to his girlfriend Ari, who revives just as Ren loses consciousness. Did Ren die from his wounds fighting Odin? Maybe. But that doesn't matter, because Kanzaki makes one final time jump, this time stopping the mirror Yui from taking over for Yui, allowing her to die. We're shown a scene of Yui and Kanzaki, accompanied by their younger selves, drawing happy pictures of their group. Whether this is the afterlife or a moment stretched out in the mirror world, or whatever, it's oddly heartwarming.
In this new timeline without Kanzaki Shirou to create the Rider battle, there's no mirror world attacks, no Riders, the guy with cancer got treatment early enough, Ren's girlfriend didn't fall into a coma (not a surprise, since it was a mirror world monster/Kanzaki's experiments that caused her coma in the first place)... basically everyone is fine, except Yui's aunt is clearly lonely now, and Shinji and Ren don't know each other. Bittersweet, but as good an ending as they could hope for. Not that they know anything had happened.
I'd be interested in a continuation of the series, where some other source of mirror monsters shows up (is the mirror world dependant on the Kanzaki's to come into being, or could it return in some other form?). It'd be a fun fanfic anyways.
The japanese word I learned from this show was "tatakai" ( 戦い <- guess="" i="" it="" kanji="" p="" recongize="" s="" t="" that="" the="" though="" wouldn="">And in that deep voiced way Kanzaki says it, it sounds more like "tat O kai" but I'll trust google on this one. It means struggle, battle, or as I think of it, simply "fight". Kanzaki basically says this every other word:
Why are we doing this?
"Tatakai"
What do you want?
"Tatakai"
Who are you?
"Doesn't matter. Tatakai."
It sounds really cool the way he says it, I've basically spent the last month mimicing it. I took Jordan to the gym and when he was working hard on some last reps I'd go "tatakai", and he'd laugh and have to quit.
I THINK that's everything important about this show. I've already spoiled the ending for you, so that was important to do. I haven't gone into depth on any of the other characters on the show besides Shinji, but there are a million characters and I've already been at this for a while. You see why I kept putting this post off.
I guess now I can start watching Kamen Rider Blade...
Wait, actually, give me a second to review what I've already told you about the show... alright, if and when it fits into this piece I can link back to my earlier post. Moving on. Ah, and a quick disclaimer, some of what I'll write here will surely be stuff I've read on tvtropes.org or wikipedia, so I apologize in advance for any copied sentiments. Man, will I get to it, or what?
The laconic premise behind the show is that it's Kamen Rider meets Highlander. You have a bunch of Riders and they have to kill each other until only one remains.
Up until this point, all Rider shows had the good guy fighting against the clearly defined bad guy (arguably it's a bit murkier for the previous series, Agito, but on the surface anyways it keeps to form)- this series is a HUGE departure. Ah, I've lost the thread. I really need to start at the beginning.
We meet the hero, Kido Shinji, a cub reporter for ORE Journal, as he's helping investigate a series of mysterious, seemingly impossible, disappearances. At the home of one victim he finds a card deck- which is an accurate but misleading way to describe this thing. It's more like a 2x3 inches plastic box containing cards (I don't want you thinking he just pick up a stack of cards off the floor). This box is called the 'Advent Deck' and is the transformation trinket, the henshin device, for the series.
It turns out that all the disappearances are caused by monsters popping out of reflective surfaces, leaping from a mirror world, to feed on humans. By picking up the henshin device, Shinji gains the ability to see into the mirror world, to sense when a mirror monster is on the move (a convenient plot device to get Riders into action when needed), and becomes targeted for destruction by a giant mirror monster dragon called "Dragredder". I don't know how it got a name like that, but whatever.
Two other people, besides the senior ORE Journal reporter, are in the area investigating the disappearances. Except they aren't investigating at all, because they know exactly what's going on: Ren Akiyama- Kamen Rider Knight, and Kanzaki Yui, a girl that can also see into the mirror world despite not being a Rider. They meet Shinji and Yui gets him to use the Advent Deck's contract card to make a pact with the dragon monster so it won't keep trying to eat Shinji. I forget how it worked, what with it being a while since I saw the first episode, but I recall Yui had somehow given Shinji an out, that he could keep one card that would protect him from the monsters, but give up the Advent Deck and thus avoid becoming a Kamen Rider. Regardless of what that out was, Shinji decides to become a Rider to protect people.
Which would be great, if this was a regular Kamen Rider series. But it isn't. What he signed onto instead was for a job where he'd be constantly attacked by other Riders that want to kill him, the mirror monsters might kill him, and to top it all off, if he doesn't participate and at least feed a defeated a mirror monster to his dragon every so often, his dragon will get hungry and pop out of the mirror world to eat him.
Pleasant dreams. "One who does not fight will not survive." is the tagline for each episode, and rightfully so.
Most of the Riders in this series don't happen to luck into these Advent Decks and into this horrible fight to survive. Rather they are handpicked by the shadowy Kanzaki Shirou, Yui's missing brother (her interest in all this is to find him) who is perhaps trapped in the mirror world and has little ability to interact with the real world. Kanzaki promises various desperate individuals with the promise of a wish should they become the last Rider standing. For example, Ren's girlfriend is stuck in a coma, so he wants to wish her back, another Rider is dying of cancer, so wants to cure himself. Shinji is a spanner in the works that doesn't belong in this battle.
It took a long time for me to warm up to Shinji because I couldn't tell if he was supposed to be silly or determined or what. But I get it now: he's a well-meaning, good-hearted idiot specifically in the wrong story, wrong genre. If he were in a Shonen manga or whatever, he'd try hard enough, and ultimately save everyone, and they'd all be happy and friends. He'd even be okay if this were ANY other series of Kamen Rider. But it's not. Instead, he's stuck in a show where YOU CAN'T WIN.
You want to stop the Rider battle (this becomes Shinji's chief goal throughout the series)? That means curtains for Ren's girlfriend, the guy with cancer, and (SPOILERS) Yui. You can sacrifice yourself for the sake of someone else's wish, but that still means 12 other Riders will get killed in the process. There isn't a happy ending here. It's this unreconcilable clash of genres between the idiot hero Shinji and the tragic failure-is-the-only-option setting that leaves Shinji paralyzed with indecision for most of the show. That's why I'm on Shinji's side- I feel horrible for him! In all the Kamen Rider series I've seen so far, no one has it tougher than him.
Let's get into random things about the series.
The Henshin pose that Shinji makes is interesting in that it is far and away the simplest of all the Riders in the show. It's highly imitatable (I can attest to that) while also being a visual cue setting Shinji apart from all the other Riders in the series. In addition, teamed up with Ren's Henshin pose, the two apparently allude to the henshin poses of the original Kamen Rider 1 and 2 (see images below) which is just a cool bit of history:
(Shinji makes his pose)
(Ren starts his- I couldn't find a picture of him crossing his left arm in front, which is how he ends the move... weird there's no picture, you see it in just about every episode... but you get the idea)
(Kamen Rider 1 and 2- you see the resemblance?)
While I'm posting pictures, let me get this last one out of the way:
In contrast, Ren's Kamen Rider Knight suit is very slick, I dig that one a lot. Ryuki gets a powered up form later that I actually like well enough.
Now may be the time for this part, so if you haven't yet, read my previous post on episodes 27 and 28 here: http://stonetextures.blogspot.ca/2013/01/ryuki-episode-27-28-my-8-button-isnt.html
You're back? Great! So with the clip show episode we're introduced to the concept of Kanzaki Shirou having the ability to rewind time. Despite all appearances from what I've written thus far- THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!!!
While most of these series have movies made that don't quite fit into their respective series continuity for one reason or the other, it's specifically the case that the movies are different try's of the Rider Battle, with everything we see in the main series just the latest iteration of the Groundhogs Day Loop that is this series. Here's a quick quote from Kanzaki Shirou that I think illuminates the thinking that went into the creators reasons for making the leap from mirror world monsters to time travel/different timelines: "Mirrors facing each other create an infinite number of worlds. There is more than one fate. The only thing that's the same is desire. All humans desire. That's why they fight. And when that desire becomes so great that it becomes unbearable, people... become Riders. The Rider battle... begins."
I think it's a bit of a stretch, and can't help but think (uh, think followed immediately by think in the same sentence. Bad style!... I almost wrote is as "By style!" before fixing it, but I kind of like that, sort of a "By Lucifer's beard!" outcry. So long as you imagine it as said by Kelsey Grammer) that they wasted two pefectly excellent premises by not committing to either one or the other.
We're introduced to the time travel twist in episode 28, but it doesn't really come back until the very ending of the series, not counting the movies. Something so pivotal should have had a bit of foreshadowing to it. Or rather than say "should", I would have preferred it. I've read it suggested that the reports we hear of Kanzaki dying out in America when he's clearly working in a lab in Japan before the start of the Rider battle is evidence of a fraying time-line, but if so I would have liked that to be addressed... because I need things spoon fed to me, apparently. Maybe I just would have liked way more crazy discrepancies like that to make things clear.
Ultimately we learn the source of the mirror monsters, they were Yui's drawing she made in front of the mirror when she was little, and the whole battle was set up to steal life energy, i.e. the wish, for the sake of granting Yui new life, as she'd died when she was little, and had only continued existing thanks to her mirror self giving up her life/replacing the real Yui, but her borrowed time was just about up... the fact that we don't get more stuff dealing with mirror copies of people (Shinji had a mirror copy of himself in the movie "The 13 Riders" but other than that, the mirror world is completely empty but for the monsters roaming around) is another wasted oppourtunity.
Did Yui create the mirror world? Is Kanzaki Shirou trapped in the mirror world? Maybe he's the mirror version of Kanzaki, and the real version of him died in America, that would actually really make a ton of sense, perhaps the two versions of himself were working on a way to save Yui.
Despite all these questions, the ending is amazing/amazingly sad.
Shinji is still trying to work out what the right thing to do is, to fight or what, to kill or allow to die, when an invasion of mirror world insect monsters run through the real world (tough since the Riders powers seem to be mostly non-existent in the real world... I'm not sure why the monsters don't just fight longer in the real world, though it's likely they can only survive so long in the real world, same as the Riders can only spend so long in the mirror world.). Shinji dives in the way to protect a little girl and gets stabbed in the back by one of the creatures.
The girl runs off, and Shinji is stumbling a bit, and you think he's got hurt in much the same way everyone gets hurt on these shows- undefined ouchies that can be overcome by heroic willpower!- and then a bunch of blood comes out his mouth (!!) and you're like "Woah, this is the real deal!" He struggles up to henshin and go into the mirror world to help Ren wipe these monsters out. That done, he pops back in the real world and slumps down against a car, a streak of blood showing his slide to the ground. Ren, a character that has done his level best to be cold and unattached to any other character in the show, fully expecting to have to kill them eventually, gets choked up and tells Shinji he's supposed to live. It's super sad guys, not even joking in the slightest. That the series got me choked up too earns it major points. Not that I like being sad, but I can't help but be impressed by something that elicits an emotional reaction from me.
Then Shinji dies.
Yup, the hero of the show dies without beating the bad guy (whoever that is), without figuring out what he was supposed to do... but he definitely went out like a hero.
Ren goes on to fight the last Rider, an over powered puppet controlled by Kanzaki named Kamen Rider Odin, Kanzaki's trump card to cheat out the Rider battle and win the wish/life energy for himself to save Yui (who has already died/disappeared by this point). Kanzaki finally decides that Yui will never accept the gift of new life if it means sacrificing all these others (he's tried multiple times before in previous Groundhogs Day attempts), Odin disappears and Ren goes to his girlfriend Ari, who revives just as Ren loses consciousness. Did Ren die from his wounds fighting Odin? Maybe. But that doesn't matter, because Kanzaki makes one final time jump, this time stopping the mirror Yui from taking over for Yui, allowing her to die. We're shown a scene of Yui and Kanzaki, accompanied by their younger selves, drawing happy pictures of their group. Whether this is the afterlife or a moment stretched out in the mirror world, or whatever, it's oddly heartwarming.
In this new timeline without Kanzaki Shirou to create the Rider battle, there's no mirror world attacks, no Riders, the guy with cancer got treatment early enough, Ren's girlfriend didn't fall into a coma (not a surprise, since it was a mirror world monster/Kanzaki's experiments that caused her coma in the first place)... basically everyone is fine, except Yui's aunt is clearly lonely now, and Shinji and Ren don't know each other. Bittersweet, but as good an ending as they could hope for. Not that they know anything had happened.
I'd be interested in a continuation of the series, where some other source of mirror monsters shows up (is the mirror world dependant on the Kanzaki's to come into being, or could it return in some other form?). It'd be a fun fanfic anyways.
The japanese word I learned from this show was "tatakai" ( 戦い <- guess="" i="" it="" kanji="" p="" recongize="" s="" t="" that="" the="" though="" wouldn="">And in that deep voiced way Kanzaki says it, it sounds more like "tat O kai" but I'll trust google on this one. It means struggle, battle, or as I think of it, simply "fight". Kanzaki basically says this every other word:
Why are we doing this?
"Tatakai"
What do you want?
"Tatakai"
Who are you?
"Doesn't matter. Tatakai."
It sounds really cool the way he says it, I've basically spent the last month mimicing it. I took Jordan to the gym and when he was working hard on some last reps I'd go "tatakai", and he'd laugh and have to quit.
I THINK that's everything important about this show. I've already spoiled the ending for you, so that was important to do. I haven't gone into depth on any of the other characters on the show besides Shinji, but there are a million characters and I've already been at this for a while. You see why I kept putting this post off.
I guess now I can start watching Kamen Rider Blade...
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