He'll Have to Go - Tell him to take an umbrella

March came in like a lion and appears to be going out like a very wet lamb, if the sounds outside my window are any indication. Anyway, this song seems like a nice way to transition out. Ry's isn't the first take on this song, but it's a really sweet one.

As to why the subtitles (Japanese? Korean?) are over and done so quickly, I really don't know.

Friday Random Ten? Friday Random Ten

It sort of feels weird to tell people to "have a nice holiday" at the start of a reg'lar two-day weekend. That's Easter for ya. (Actually I do know at least one guy taking an extra day off.)

1.    Elvis Costello & the Attrractions - Hand in Hand
2. Lou Rawls - Your Good Thing (Is About to End)
3. Sarah Vaughan – Pinky
 4. XTC - Love on a Farmboy's Wages
 5. The Beautiful South - I Love You (But You're Boring)
 6. Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again
 7. Ben Folds Five - Away When You Were Here
 8. The New Pornographers – Unguided
 9. The Magnetic Fields - All You Ever Do Is Walk Away
10. Edith Piaf - Un Refrain Courait dans La Rue

In media res

Some interesting points are made here, even if the movie references at the end are less than current.

Until quite recently, as, once again, British novels bear witness, educated people had a cultural common ground based on literature that they could draw upon and refer to in a reasonable expectation of being understood. Everybody who read had read Shakespeare and Alice in Wonderland. Lord Peter Wimsey could quote from either, and we knew what he was talking about. We had even read Homer, if not in the original like Lord Peter (when I went to college, the Iliad and the Odyssey were required reading in Humanities 1), and could field a reference to Achilles or the Trojan War with ease. In contrast, I remember a conversation with a fourteen-year-old cousin in 2004 or so about the movie Troy, which reduced that epic conflict from ten years to three days and took many liberties with the plot. “Have you read the book?” she asked.

Nowadays, not only have our culture’s reading habits changed dramatically, but there’s too much to read. Politics have decreased the attention in the school curriculum that was once paid to “dead white males” like Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll. This is not all bad. I would have loved to be made to study Little Women or The Help instead of Silas Marner and Giants In the Earth, the two most stultifyingly boring novels I can remember being assigned in school.

As the fact that a billion people worldwide watched the Oscars this year attests, movies occupy the space in the collective unconscious that used to belong to books. Movies provide the material by which we communicate through common points of reference. Most people know The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind and The Godfather from the movies they became, rather than the books they were based on. Instead of “To be or not to be, that is the question,” “My kingdom for a horse,” “I can believe six impossible things before breakfast,” or “It was the best butter,” we all resonate with “We’re not in Kansas any more,” “Tomorrow is another day,” and “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” How many people nowadays know that Dorothy originally had silver shoes, not ruby slippers? Some of us have read the books. But the reason everybody knows these references with all their implications is that we’ve seen the movies.

Authors now do face a situation where they can't count on other literature as a common cultural touchstone for their readers. In a way this puts them in the position of pre-Classical writers, those from the time when written language as an artistic medium - as opposed to simply a business tool - was a new thing. Of course that was so long ago that it's effectively new territory, and difficult to trek.

Of course L. Frank Baum is a natural victim of this displacement because of his very creativity. The movie of The Wizard of Oz became the definitive version for most Americans soon after it started airing regularly on postwar TV. To the extent that elements present in the books but not the movie seem outright bizarre to young readers, the silver-not-ruby slippers. And the fact that it's the books that seem strange and not the movie is itself weird. It's the film that casts as a pigtailed little moppet a teenage singer who in most respects was older than her years, not younger.

Seriously, that look was what befit a gay icon most?

They're creepy and they're kooky

Stoker has got an incredible visual sense, obvious from the elegant minimalist credits sequence.  (An increasing number of Hollywood movies, of course, have no opening credits at all.)  It's a film where the story is more a matter of shots than of plot, but those shots are so graceful it kind of works.  The acting is mannered to the extreme.  If you've watched as many episodes of old B&W anthology shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Boris Karloff Thriller as I have, Nicole Kidman's performance will ring a few bells.  (Actually you're about a half hour in before there's any indication this is taking place in the 21st century.)

[For context, a thumbnail description of the plot is as follows: A girl's father dies.  Her uncle she never knew about moves in, then starts working his seductive charm on both her mother and her.  With any experience of the genre you can fill in a lot of other things, but not all of it.]

The violence is  treated mainly as another element of the film's visual design.  And there are some troubling sexual undercurrents here as well.  Or at least there would be, if "undercurrents" weren't such a laughably inapt way to describe them.

In short I'd say that Stoker is the kind of movie that David Lynch has apparently retired from making.  That's true in the good sense and the bad.

At least more fun than Hitchcock's "I Confess"

This seems to me like it would be a fun thing to do.  Walk into a confessional and say, "Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  It has been half an hour since my last confession, and boy!  Do we have some catching up to do."

Problem is that I'm not Catholic.  I have some friends who are, but they don't seem to be in the market for new material.

Headscratchers Friday Random Ten

Yesterday I woke up late, although I made up the time to bepretty much on-time for work.  Figured it had something to do with taking Bendadryl the night before.  This morning I wake up not so late, but still later than I'd meant to, and without ever hearing my clock radio.  When I get home tonight, I notice that the alarm function has been turned off.  Sleeping me is not to be trusted.

1. Brian Eno - On Some Faraway Beach
2. Los Campesinos - I Warned You: Do Not Make an Enemy of Me
3. The Magnetic Fields - The Flowers She Sent and the Flowers She Said She Sent
4. The Kinks - Rosemary Rose
5. Edith Piaf - Le Roi a Fait Battre Tambour
6. XTC - Ladybird
7. David Bowie - Changes
8. Depeche Mode - Behind the Wheel
9. Love - Live and Let Live
10. Nat King Cole - This Can't Be Love

Figuring stuff out

On the writing front, I sent a story out to a planned anthology within the last couple of weeks.  Not naming it, simply because I don't want to get anyone's hopes up before there's reason for it.  Least of all my own.

I think it's good, though.  And just as importantly, I'm figuring out how to put a manuscript together.  A lot of stuff used to just go over my head.  Page numbering, especially.  I had no idea how ot number the pages so that A) the information on each page is in the needed format and B) there's no numbering on the first page.  (You don't number page 1, I guess because it's obvious.)  Now I understand that stuff.

There's another story I'm working on.  It's had its share of false starts. Now it's feeling more like it has a true start, knock on wood.