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"And they were a zephyr, blowing past you."

It's been a while since I've done an ayem blog entry, but here's one. Why the hell not. The world's back on Caitlín Standard Time, meaning I'm no longer early for everything, and I figure an anti-celebration is in order.

1. I'm at sixes and sevens over the fact that Sirenia Digest #75 has been ready to be PDFed and emailed since March 4th (!), yet it still hasn't gone out to subscribers. Because I wouldn't pay $200 for the MS Office bundle, and because the free 30-day MS Word trial for Mac won't download properly, and because thingunderthest and I have yet to find a work around. But, this evening something will go out. It won't be perfect, which I so wanted #75 to be, but it will be entirely readable and as pretty as we can make it. And then, when I do have MS Word again, which will be soon (Fuck you both, Pages and OpenOffice, and why is everything perceived as cooler if you leave out the space between words?), I'll send out a second "printing" of the issue, which will be the official printing. And again I apologize (even though none of it's my fault).

2. iGoogle is, I will admit, useful, but it still freaks me out. Also, much to my surprise, Facebook's timeline crap doesn't really bother me, and the fact that it doesn't (but ought) freaks me out. You have to understand, kittens. I mean the young kittens. Not the Elder Kittens. I saw the birth of the World Wide Web, in long ago 1995. It was nothing at all like this.

3. I have changed Mithrien's name to Lúthien. It just seems more right. Righter. More appropriate. Less wrong. Whatever. And our auctions to pay back Spooky's mother for the Dead iMac Bailout of 2012 continue. Especially, I will draw your attention to the keyboard from my last iMac, Arwen, upon which so much of what you have read by me was composed. It has a nice bid, but it could have a nicer bid, all things considered. Thank you.

4. I'm trying to finish Alabaster #5, and I'm on Page 19 (of 22), but I'm about to have to rewrite the last three pages, the last three that I wrote, because I've had a pounding migraine for two days (no headache advice, please), and I know I screwed up some important stuff yesterday. And...interviews. I'm sick to death of interviews, but you pretty much never say no to interviews. Almost never. But I have to admit that they're wearing me down. Between interviews for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and those for the comic, I've done at least fourteen in the last three weeks. Some are now online, and some are not yet online. And more are in the works. You can only think of so many ways to answer the same question before the desire to cut and paste starts to become overwhelming. Thus far, I have resisted.

5. I've lost 14 lbs. (and done so in a healthy fashion, simply by modifying my diet), over the past two months. Booya.

6. Since my last entry, Spooky and I have been working our way through The Fellowship of the Rings again, and we've just finished up the Council of Elrond. Oh, and out of the blue, I feel like declaring that Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves are the two most brilliant speculative fiction novels of the last twelve years (an oddly arbitrary number). Period. And those who disagree because of they can't overcome fears of "meta" and/or the idiot ouroboros of RadFem politics*, to hell with the lot of them. No, I'm not trying to be an asshole. Apparently, it just comes naturally. But where was I?

7. Since last we spoke, Spooky and I have seen a couple of very good movies, though they were very good in very different ways. Both were from Kindernacht last. The first is Scott Charles Stewart's Priest, with which he entirely redeems himself for having made that celluloid shitwad Legion (2009). Once again, he's back with the horrors of Catholicism, only this time, it works. It works a lot. Priest is what happens when you create a mashup of Blade Runner/1984/I Am Legend/every Sergio Leone western ever made and...okay, it's an endless stew of the great and the lousy and the somewhere in-betweens. A stoup. It's a great, wondrous, FUN stoup of a movie. The art direction is gorgeous, creating a post-apocalyptic world I wanted to believe in, if only for that surreal, absurdist, terrible beauty. The acting and script are far better than they have any right to be, and I'll especially single out the performances of Karl Urban, Maggie Q, and Brad Dourif. The script is even decent. I expected utter crap, but I enjoyed pretty much every minute. Still, this is the sort of film that the "too cool for school" crowd's gonna hate. You know that from scene one, and it's reflected in the movie's ratings at Rotten Tomatoes. But whatever. Fuck 'em. Watch the movie.

The second film deserves much more serious attention and a more careful examination, but I have time here for neither. Lucky McKee's The Woman. Which I expected to loathe, because of Jack Ketchum's involvement. But, truly, it is a thing of brutal brilliance, a lesson in humanity thrust upon us by a nightmarishly inhumane situation. Rarely has the Perfect American Family been better portrayed as the (more often than not) treacherous crucible that it is. Ozzie and Harriett meet Angela Carter (that's your goddamn warning label). If you've seen St. Vincent's video for "Cruel," it's sort of like that...only with feral women...and cannibalism...and anophthalmia. Oh, and Pollyanna McIntosh is astounding. This – like Laugier's Martyrs – is not a film for the faint of...well, the faint of anything. But the intrepid will be rewarded. This is a powerful and an important film, and I sincerely hope it will be recognized as such. McKee continues to amaze me.

8. Tomorrow, an announcement about both The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir.

But now I ought to go, as the platypus is looking antsy, and I have more to do today than Woonsocket has vultures.

Aunt Beast

* Frankly, when I first saw "feminist" objections to The Road, for about ten minutes I was too fucking stupefied to speak.** To paraphrase Jayne Cobb, where do people even get so wrong? And yeah, I've lived my life as a pretty outspoken feminist. Which at least gives me the right to weigh in.

** There's a comma problem in that sentence somewhere, but I do not presently have time to work it out.


Mar. 13th, 2012 01:30 am (UTC)

I never understood the vast dislike for Priest, and never will. It has everything to like and pretty much nothing not to. For some reason it just drew so much of peoples' ire, apparently by simply existing. Another film like that is the new John Carter, which surprised me with how much fun it is and how stupidly marketed.

Yes. I disagree with nothing here except that I don't think the marketing of John Carter was botched, though I know that's the popular notion. Mostly, I think people are too ignorant for subtlety.
Lawrence Carlin
Mar. 13th, 2012 06:18 am (UTC)
Yes, too ignorant for subtlety, too limited for ambiguity, too stunted to feel emotions other than fear and hate. Likely that most of our fellow creatures are in fact, not our fellow creatures. Just a thought.