A really good movie...

...is one of the highest forms of art, for me.

The Sea Inside – just saw this on DVD. Awesome movie. I cried, and I don’t usually.

Beowulf - I read something about “The new Angelina Jolie movie” yesterday. As though a movie is nothing but a celebrity limo. The fact that Neil Gaiman has been working on this project for ages now is not newsworthy enough I guess. Anyhow, the “new Angelina Jolie movie” is actually a long standing project called Beowulf, and is based on the Anglo Saxon epic poem of the same name. Hero Beowulf fights evil Grendel “descendant of Cain”, and Grendel’s mother, and dragons and things: “...Thus these warriors lived in joy, blessed, until one began to do evil deeds, a hellish enemy. The grim spirit was called Grendel, known as a rover of the borders, one who held the moors, fen and fastness...” It should be a dark and thunderous adventure and I’m looking forward to it.
They are also going to do a movie of Neil’s astonishing novel, Stardust. You should rush out now and get a copy of this book, it’s not like anything you’ve read before and yet you will recognise it all. He is doing the screenplay himself, so it will translate into celluloid beautifully I think.


Rant…

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe -

Don’t read this rant if you don’t know the books and you want to go see the movie and enjoy it for what it’s worth.

I was afraid to go and see this movie. I lived in these stories as a kid, wore them like coats, and tried often to go through my own wardrobe. They were my best friends and gave me courage.
Maybe it had something to do with the 20 minutes worth of ads I had to watch beforehand (Hey! I am paying for this ticket and this stale popcorn and this flat cola and these buzzing speakers! You should be paying ME to watch these ads!), but I was right to be afraid. While the movie looks nice enough on the surface, some of the CG animals, like the fox and the wolves, (and yes, even the lion that they’ve been bragging about so much) fall seriously short. You just can’t really believe in them. And surely there’s a better way to make animals talk? Like maybe let them think aloud or something? Busting guts and harddrive space to make them photo-real and then giving them human mouth movements and facial expressions is just silly. It’s not bending the truth, it’s breaking it clean in two. The faun/satyr/phoenix/mermaid thing works well with CG because you’re not trying to fool yourself about them being real to start with.
With Jadis, I got the feeling that they were onto something, but then they got lazy. She’s cruel and cold and selfish, sure, but not enough. The mere sight of her should stab your heart with a steely icicle, you should tremble at the very thought of her. This does not happen in the movie and her sleigh makes far too much noise. She should be snake-like. She isn’t.
Peter is smarmy. Susan is an afterthought. Aslan… what can I say. You don’t actually end up understanding what all the fuss is about, they don’t explain: What’s so special about this Narnia place anyway? Why is this lion so beloved? Why are they all so keen on fighting this battle? So what if he dies? At one point, he’s supposed to be about to roar a roar that will shake the foundations of Narnia and fundamentally alter all who hear it, it must put courage in some hearts and fear in others. Cover your ears, he says. He roars. Rrooaarr. So?
And then, they’ve censored it silly. Come now. Not one drop of blood. I had to censor it myself when I read it to my kids when they were very small, and they went on to read it for themselves a little later, in full. But telling it this sweetly to a generation of wiseass kids who are playing Doom and Quake and even Vice City (yes, they are. 10 year old kids are playing this. If you’re a parent and you don’t know this then you need to catch a wake up), and who have unrestricted access to adult material of all kinds via their cellphones… that’s just stupid. Does Disney think it’s going to undo decades of gratuity now, by telling only half of a really good story? Now that Disney owns Narnia… oh god. I have a headache.

Well anyway. Lucy and Mr Tumnus are great in the movie. But then, they are not complex characters. So this ends up being just another kids holiday movie, unexceptional. Which is nothing short of a travesty. I wonder how it will go with the rest of the Narnia stories, should they decide to go on with it? There is enough material for another ten years worth of spin-off figurines.

You guys ROCK!

Ek voel so lekker warm and fuzzy. Ek het ‘n unexpected opportunity (half an hour of actual TIME. Can this be true?) gekry om ‘n bietjie te surf. By way of Susynoid, first star on the right and straight on ‘till dawn, het ek ‘n happie van Dignet gelees, en ook Eben se Oord, en ek weet hoe absurd is dit, dat ‘n engelse meisie in Afrikaans probeer skryf, maar julle woorde klink so nice (soos die krikkel van die vuur, na die braai – when it’s just right for marshmallows and ghost stories, or bananas in tinfoil with chocolate and cape velvet), hier binne die koue sieellose internet. Langsaan julle, voel ek so bietjie one-dimensional. Ek het nie een slukkie kultuur om my eie te noem nie. Net English, and we all know how patchwork that is. Toe maar, dis orraait. As ek nie in die band kan speel nie, sal ek sommer net ‘n groupie moet wees.

:-)

xox

Thank you Dio! I have links, because I can cut and paste and I can sort of follow instructions. You have no idea what this means to me. Today, html, sort of. Tomorrow, the cosmos? Somebody stop me!

An it harm none, do as ye will

I had wanted to be cheerful and blithe, but I’m not a good actress so I’ll just be morose, and retain some integrity. Marketers gleefully quoted Charles Bradlaugh today:

"Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race."

In true marketing style, the quote is out of context. Bradlaugh lived in different times and was not talking about sales. He was campaigning for Irish Home Rule, the redistribution of land, birth control, and atheists being allowed into the House of Commons, among other things. These creatures are campaigning for the sale of everything, from our children to the planet; together with many other things we had imagined were not for sale. As with so many freedoms, the ‘right’ to do such-and-such becomes nothing more than an excuse for doing it, in this insane Ripley’s version of a world. The ‘truth’ as applied to contemporary life is a dire culture of entitlement; with gratification as its sole aim, and its war cry has nothing to do with any kind of real freedom or real truth. I can think of many current instances in which the abuse of certain ‘freedoms’ has not died in a day, and is of itself busily entombing the hope of the species. If everyone lived in a little bubble of their own, and their words and actions could not affect the whole, then wholesale freedom of speech would be a fine thing. And although most of us think that we do in fact live in such a bubble, in reality not one of us can or does. We’re either oversensitive or desensitised, and both positions play straight into marketing’s hand.

In my ideal world, no one gets absolute freedom of anything until we have learned - and can apply - compassion, respect and tolerance. Impossible things to measure and truly difficult to practise, but by the time we’re eighty, maybe freedom can be ours in some small way. In the meantime, of course we should feel free to speak – if we think first. Marketing people better batten down the hatches and lay in some supplies, because if they’re to evolve from seething pond scum to thinking person with earned rights, at least three million years must pass.

Nice Dream.

Long live Bradlaugh, and a pox on those who take his name in vain.


In the spirit of the season, here’s something by Ogden Nash:


A Carol for Children (Abridged)

God rest you, merry innocents,
Let nothing you dismay,
Let nothing wound an eager heart
Upon this Christmas day.

Yours be the genial holly wreaths,
The stockings and the tree;
An aged world to you bequeaths
Its own forgotten glee.

Soon, soon enough come crueller gifts,
The anger and the tears;
Between you now there sparsely drifts
A handful yet of years.

Oh dimly, dimly glows the star
Through the electric throng;
The bidding in temple and bazaar
Drowns out the silver song.

Two ultimate laws alone we know,
The ledger and the sword –
So far away, so long ago,
We lost the infant lord.

God rest you, merry innocents,
While innocence endures.
A sweeter Christmas than we to ours
May you bequeath to yours.

Please, thank you, so sorry.

Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) has a new book out called Talk To The Hand, which is all about people having no manners anymore.

When I was a kid you had to be polite to everyone older than you, and nice to everyone younger than you, or else. You even had to be polite to really horrible older people, because the grownups were so busy climbing social ladders that they didn’t know who the really horrible ones were. But we kids knew. And we still had to be polite to them.

Maybe manners do maketh the man, but I’m confused. I just had my pin number filched by a very polite and neatly dressed criminal at the ATM. This is ridiculous, because I’ve been around long enough to know about these things. The thing is, while I was acutely aware somewhere in my consciousness that this impeccably mannered person was hoodwinking me, I was too busy being polite to assert myself by kicking him in the nuts. Years of conditioning has overridden my base instincts and rendered me incapable of self-defence? This is not good.
The lady at the bank rudely rolled her eyeballs at me as if to say, “You idiot,” when I told her my story and begged her to change my pin. I was polite and apologised for inconveniencing her, of course.

I would so like to have tea with Lynne Truss. We could duel politely with our little silver filigreed cake forks, and argue good-naturedly about whether to keep or lose the apostrophe forever.

And I could ask her (politely) why she keeps writing all the books I was going to write.

ROTFLMAO

That was interesting...


:-))))))))))))


I have no idea what I just did.

htmWHAT?!

Having been all inspired by an ancient guru :-) and dear old friend of mine, the intrepid Cosmic Cabman, who also just got a blog, I thought I might try a brave thing like, say, a simple link or two. So I enlisted the Help button and it said:

“…

Links

• Google News
…

… you can simply copy the code above and paste it into your template. You'll probably want it in the sidebar, perhaps next to the archives or previous posts list…
… etc…”

I almost passed out. There’s a word, in Watership Down, which is used to describe a rabbit caught in the headlights: tharn. It’s that state in which you cannot move, cannot think, cannot breathe. That’s me, with code. You can’t just wave some html in my face without warning me first. I need a valium and a fluffy toy to soften the edges a bit. My last brush with html was about five years ago when I flunked the course. But I won’t be scared off that easily this time, so I grabbed a fluffy toy and clicked the link that said, “How do I learn some basic html?”

And that’s as far as it goes, so far. Link, schmink. Maybe I need to try another template.

Billboards and Blogging: Nothing’s for Free

I’ve been wondering about free online-journal/blog services being so FREE, especially to us Joe Soaps. Here is my conspiracy theory:

There is a branch of organised crime called ‘Marketing’

Marketing would like us to believe that a giant photograph of a luxury all-terrain vehicle is better than the view of natural wonders which it is obscuring, and will go to great lengths, including chainsaws, dynamite and bribery of officials, to ensure that the view of the giant photograph itself is not obscured by any natural wonders, such as an annoying old tree, or a pesky rocky outcrop.

These are the people whose evangelistic mission is to get Stuff sold. They are fundamentalists, and their mantra goes, “Stuff is god, Stuff is happiness. Stuff is the measure of your success. In order to access god and happiness, and therefore to succeed, you must get more Stuff. Consumption is the key to your potential, which is as limitless as the happiness you will have access to, if you only consume.”

Now it’s all gone to seed…

‘Seeding’ is the big new thing in marketing circles. A Seed is nothing more and nothing less than a very carefully selected (and paid) peer. Someone who meets all the right criteria is inserted into a group, at school or in the workplace or anywhere else where peer acceptance might register on a success gauge. The Seed will do two things:
1) Hang out and become part of the group, then collect very subtle information from within, the type of information usually unavailable to those not in the group. He learns the group’s ‘code’, if you will, and brings it back to HQ (marketing company). HQ then uses this information to sort of re-encode the schpiel in order to sell Stuff to the group in ways it can positively identify with. The product now speaks the group’s language.
2) Bring ‘buzz’ back from HQ. This is word of mouth, viral chit-chat of the “look at this” or “have you tasted” kind, and if the Seed is worth his salt, ie cool enough in the group to be emulated, the product he’s buzzing about will show rocketing sales figures. Not very nice, but quite clever. Good old-fashioned espionage and propaganda. Yes, they are doing this to our kids and it isn’t illegal. And there we were, thinking the child actually needed this garment/beverage/gadget for some weird teenage reason.

It was only a matter of time before HQ found out about Blogs. What is a blogosphere if not a properly hierarchical peer group?

In 2000 there was an article that said something along the lines of “as Weblogging becomes more widespread among corporations, there's likely to be some resentment from the pioneers who see it as an anti-corporate concept.” Well I’m not exactly a pioneer but I can imagine...

So now there’s this explosion. Anyone can do it, you no longer have to know a hundred programming languages and be a member of Mensa. You don’t have to be the type of person who’d rather spend her spare cash on extra RAM than on that cute new pair of shoes anymore. Joe Soap can do this thing and what’s more, he can do it for FREE. Keep in touch with family and friends, have your say. And that’s not all! Engage with the global community, make new friends and influence people… All for free.

Well I’m not buying it. Which isn’t to say I’m not buying into it because, clearly, here I am. But when I put two and two together, based on my experience with marketing and on my observation of the metamorphosis - of the great worldwide web of shared information into Consumer Central - I get a definite four. Nothing’s for free.

I propose that there is a frenzy of excited marketing dogs sniffing around personal blogs at any given moment, pissing on tyres, picking up on hints people didn’t even know they’d dropped, all the better to target you with, my dear. Monsanto itself couldn’t make a herbicide apocalyptic enough to kill these weed Seeds before they sprout. You can be sure that those who offer free online journal type services (such as this one which is ‘ours’ to exploit) are not only in on this, but cashing in on it too. Mystery solved? Or conspiracy theory? You decide.

The only way to beat these Stuffing lunatics is to renounce life as we know it and find a cave somewhere. One without a billboard within a 50 kilometre radius, that is. If such a one still exists.


Meanwhile…

It turns out that this blog was hidden only to me. Thank you David, for the magic shift button! We all have one I’m sure, but I didn’t know that you could also use it to refresh stubborn webpages… of course, you have to hold it down for quite a while, which took me the best part of the past week to discover. It’s my new toy. I remind me of Eeyore, getting his Birthday Present from Pooh and Piglet, which amounts to a deflated balloon and an empty Hunny jar. Pooh and Piglet are concerned that something might have Gone Wrong with it all, but Eeyore just happily (as happily as Eeyore can at any rate) sits there putting the balloon in the jar and taking it out again.

:-)

Still Testing

Well at least I now have access. Even though the posts are hidden somewhere in "search this blog". This is all terribly amusing.


let it go - the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise - let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go - the
truthful liars and
the fair false friends
and the boths and
neithers - you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go - the
big small middling
tall really
the biggest and all
things - let all go
dear

so comes love.


e.e. cummings



Favourite Movie Moments:

1. Daniel Day Lewis leaps through the thundering waterfall with the words, “I WILL find you!”
- Last of the Mohicans

2. Scarlett tears down Tara's magnificent hunter-green velvet drapes with the golden tassels, for a dress to make Rhett weep, and Mammy's eyes go just about as popped-out as any eyes before or after.
- Gone With The Wind

3. Dory speaks Whale.
- Finding Nemo

4. Angelica Huston sashays through her house saying, “This is my research assistant, Xavier…”
- Life Aquatic


I'm sure that one day, when I have this blog beaten into submission, I will begin to say coherent things in it. Well, I'm not SURE sure, but I hope I will. En Garde, Blogger! Under the old oak at dawn! Victory will be mine!

Enlightenment Lite

Finally, the self-help DVD we’ve all been waiting for. Have your cake and eat it too. You, also, can become god. Forget your troubles, c’mon get happy. See the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know” now, or cook it up in your kitchen.

Here’s the recipe*:

Layer the following in a large plastic bowl -

Metaphysical mixed berries (skinned and seedless)
A handful of new seasonal fruits (NLP etc)
Pasteurised Quantum Theory custard (fat free, sugar free)
Fingers of assimilated but unrealised eastern mystic sponge cake (both Fabulous GuruTM and The Monk Without The Monastery!TM are good brands for this dessert)
Interconnectedness (Patronising consumer version) jelly
A tot of God liqueur

Serve chilled with a sprig of fresh Political Correctness.

*A helping of this should cause no discomfort other than a very temporary high. However, should you eat the whole bowlful, you’ll need gastric lavage and a good slap, and two years community service mopping floors at a government hospital of your choice, during which you will receive a compulsory weekly debriefing with, alternately, Desmond Tutu and Lin Sampson. You might emerge with your feet firmly back on the ground and able to once again tread the little footpaths of your own earthly human existence, the coming-to-terms-with of which is what your life is actually for. But we can’t promise this.


Here, by Popular Demand, is the FAQ…


1. What is Pandora’s Aquarium?

1.1 It’s a song by Tori Amos -
I am not asking you to believe in me. Boy I think you’re confused I’m not Persephone.

1.2 It’s a version of Walter Battiss’ Fook Island, but less messy and without the code-speak, and you don’t need to be Fooked to visit, you just need to be able to survive the End Of Days. And, it has recipes plus incredibly subjective, sometimes emotional, and even occasionally incendiary, book and movie reviews. It’s a sort of attic soup kitchen, the main stage for a largely unwritten-as-yet but partly illustrated comic, which is a version of Sandman but with less Sax & Violins and more mermaids. When only a single comic series of this ilk exists, one has no choice but to copy it. Neil Gaiman set the bar so high that I will probably be dead before I am finished. Thanks so much Neil.



2. Why are you doing this blogging thing?

I’m not sure.

I need a soapbox? No that’s not it. Because I have too much time on my hands? Possibly. I did the blogger code questionnaire and I have double minus scores for most questions so it isn’t because I’m a geek who lives the internet high-life either. In fact, I’m a Luddite. Go on, laugh. Hack me, it’s so easy. We’ll see who wins one day when the lights go out, and they will. I will have vegetables in my garden and you technological geniuses will have to eat your motherboards.

3. Are you some kind of religious nut?

No.

4. So why do you sometimes use religious language?

Because it’s melodramatic.

5. What do you do for a living?

Absolutely nothing official at the moment. I used to be a designer but now I wouldn’t even design you so much as one corporate nametag even if you paid me a million bucks. Ok, for a million bucks I would but I want the money up front.

6. Can you really cook?

Yes.

Jangle Balls

For these few days, the hills are bright with cherry blossom. Longer, and we should not prize them so.

- Yamabe no Akahito

Which is why Xmas just isn't Christmas anymore. From October, jangle bells and Xmas ditties, three whole months of special specials, sweaty plastic-suited santas...