I've been loading up on :wumpscut: lately; I've nearly obtained the whole catalog now, including releases either rare or solely German. Some of the tracks are better than others of course -- I tend to prefer the more ambient electronic stuff (although the best :w: industrial is among the best industrial music there is, for instance "Golgotha"). I could sit and space out on "Jesus Gone" for hours (and in fact I did during the Irak II war as armored columns penetrated through desolate desertscapes toward the enemy's heart -- "we begin bombing in five minutes.... we begin bombing in five minutes.... we begin bombing in five minutes...." -- it's enough to smear your mind for a long time.)

Much of this music is a retrospective soundtrack for me. Back in the early nineties, you were cool if you listened to Skinny Puppy or Front Line Assembly, but you were *really* cool if you listened to Wumpscut.

After careful auditory consideration, the winner of this comparison of new music is Early Day Miners. While certainly derivative of the trademark 4AD sound (especially Red House Painters and Low), this band is able to honestly and ably move that tradition forward, with an earnestness like Walker Evans and a subtlety like William Faulkner; it has the feel of terrain, of prairie and withered age and lingering memories in fading light. Both Placer Found and Let Us Garlands Bring are recommended. 9 handfuls of dust out of 10.

This is what passes for a crisis in the Old Europe after the End of History. Also, this morning there was a cricket in the pot I use to cook spaghetti. Coincidence?

Today I shall travel to the river whose conveyance allowed for the arrival of those signers of a certain shocking document, and I shall watch mock cannonades again make virtual assault upon the lasting commitment of their descendants to defend the words writ upon it. British no longer, and beholden to no Crown, our destiny rightfully our own, and so should be for all! And I shall meet KG there, and attempt to get in her pants.

The Star Wars Kid has become quite the net-meme; now there's a rumor Lucas is putting him into episode 3. This is all very funny in a Larry David sort of way, but also very chagrining for those of us who can empathize with the poor bastard. I would be both pleased and surprised If he makes it into the movie -- I never would have suspected that Lucas et al gave any attention to the internet and its silly torrents. (Thanks JD for introducing me to the SWK some months ago.)

I've finally gotten Office 2003 beta working without any serious annoyances. There were some issues with email rules in the last build (they would only run when starting the application, then seemed to vanish for every subsequent sync), but this most recent one (5329) appears to have taken care of that.

The best new stuff is in Outlook 2003: a new preview pane that takes up the right side of the interface (there are three columns now: nav|email-list|preview), and I've found it more useful than the old layout. The entire interface feels cleaner and less clunky now. Email is automatically grouped depending on sort order; when sorting by date, you get groups of Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Two Weeks Ago, etc, each with an Explorer style expand/collapse (+/-) box. The navigation pane is more configurable now, merging the old "folder view" with the "outlook bar"; items can be minimized into Outlook's own little quick-launch bar at the bottom. Best of all is an "Unread Mail" view which just shows unread email regardless of their containing folder (somebody must have said "Oh, duh!" over in Redmond). There's also a "For Follow Up" view to show all the emails that have been flagged, and flags are easier to work with now too: every email has a little flag icon at the end of it that you can set with a click (or customize with a right click).

Outlook and Word seem better integrated now. In previous Office versions, when letting Outlook use Word for composition, you'd have to wait while an instance of Word started up before writing an email (which was annoying of course), but that wait is now gone with 2003. Outlook keeps an instance of Word open in this case, and appears to unload its integrated editing code, so if you're like me and pretty much keep Word open all the time, you're actually better off (in terms of RAM) letting Outlook use Word.

Word is more or less unchanged, and it still has some trouble with mixed fonts and the cursor sometimes not keeping up with the text input. This is an old bug, and one that nearly made me dump Office XP -- I'm disappointed to see that it persists. I haven't worked with any large documents yet, so I don't know if those issues also remain.

I guess this is a children's movie, but it's a good one, concerned with concepts like justice, loyalty, and enterprise, old fashioned values that Hollywood isn't generally all that interested in anymore.

I've seen this movie twice now. The first time it was called Terminator 2. 5 sloppy seconds out of 10.

28 Days Later: I didn't notice this movie until recently -- thinking it the sequel to something with Sandra Bullock in it, I had ignored it until I learned it was a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland movie. I love those! This is a sub-genre I'm somewhat expert in, having formed the key components of my imaginative framework around the late seventies and early eighties (when gas shortages, nuclear proliferation, and incompetent leadership made it look like the Doomsayers had it about right); I watched Charlton Heston in Omega Man, played Wasteland on my IBM PC compatible, read SF novels like Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Delany's Dhalgren, Shute's On the Beach, Stephen King's The Stand, Brinkley's The Last Ship, and a slew of other titles not worth remembering. I even wrote my own Post-Apocalypse novel some years ago (it was called The Other Country as a matter of fact, though mine was more of a satire).

This one does a decent job of paying homage to many of those earlier works, and it includes many of the standard themes: crazed feral mutants, everything-is-free-now euphoria, the penultimate currency of women, etc. In fact, it really doesn't add anything of its own other than a juvenile and silly attempt to equate the human capacity for barbarity under extreme circumstances with infectious rabies (rolling eyes all around). The characters behave like naïve children, and make choices I hope I wouldn't make, but somehow scrape through despite ridiculous odds (or something else also somehow related to selling Pepsi Cola, which has prominent product placement in this movie -- even though the world has ended, you can still enjoy a refreshing Pepsi!).

Danny Boyle directed 28 Days Later, which came as a surprise for me at the commencement of the end-credits. This is the guy who made Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, two British-for-British films (as opposed to British-for-American films like James Bond or anything by Ridley Scott) which I remember liking a lot. Then he made The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio (a film Leo was *not* able to avoid ruining for his part), based on Alex Garland's novel. Second surprise: 28 Days Later was also written by Garland. And it has much the same feel: cool feral humans in extreme circumstances doing extreme things in order to survive (extremely) with a happy ending stapled on for the middle class crowd.

Anyway, I always enjoy a good end-of-the-world story, but I'm happy this isn't the only one available: Jeremiah should be starting its second season in September....

6 Greased Scottsmen out of 10.

When if by chance -- and upon occasion I'll aver -- a woman should succumb to my advances and deign accompany me to the Map Room, she will without failing note to the detriment of my reputation the uncleanliness evident in my lifestyle, observing as if by chance that an ashtray must have spilled in the corner by the waste canister, or that recent foul weather had left its imprint of grim upon the outside and somehow unaccountably also the inside of my windows and sliding porch door, or that my manners to vagrant drunkards must tend toward the liberal given the various unsavory odors of stale alcohol left smudged upon the air within. That these women choose invariably to offer implication over accusation is a testament to their breeding and social prowess; which fine standards my experience informs me will forever prove insufficient to coerce them into remaining in the Map Room for longer than is necessary to impart those words and then bid farewell. My experiments with an elevated diction notwithstanding.

The new Office also has a "Research" component that occupies the task pane like "Styles and Formatting" in Office XP. Providing dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, and translation, it has been proving very useful, and has reduced my need for WordWeb. Once installed, it's also available to IE, with links to Microsoft's Encarta website, which has improved a great deal over the past year or so. The dictionary is better (I believe MS has borged Dictionary.com), and now passes the "fool test" (provides both the verb and the noun form of the word "fool"; the informal adjectival form is optional), although Word's thesaurus still fails it (giving synonyms only for the verb form). What's more, you can add your own sources and modify the ones it uses.

Looking at this is almost exactly what it's like to be on acid. If you wallpapered your house with this, I wonder how long it would take for you to go insane...?

Formerly -- and for close to a decade now I suppose -- my conviction was that Pale Fire was ultimately solvable, that a real if convoluted and camouflaged path to its core meaning did exist, and that I, humble reader, could guide myself there by locating the clues to find the keys to open the trapdoors to descend levels of meaning until landing finally at the last one on the bottom. But a strange thing happened this time around: once there at the bottom, there were still more clues, which rather than taking me another level deeper, took me back to the top. Recursion!? Infinite regress!? What is this impossible object?

The revelation is perhaps more interesting than a secret core of deepest meaning. The act of reading Pale Fire, it turns out, affects its interpretation. At any given time the reader must employ a particular perspective pertaining to internal authorship -- narrative responsibility for the text beneath that of the author's own -- and while exploring any given perspective, one discovers overlapping, warping, and paradox. As the diligent, active reader that VN demands constructs a semantic model of the text, establishes an understanding of a fundamental if possibly temporary meaning at the novel's heart and the framework such a thing requires -- this reading infringes on the integrity of itself and affects the limits within which a wholly defensible interpretation can exist. Thus a mutation takes place on a basic semantic level, and the novel becomes different.

Pale Fire ultimately resembles one of those Escher drawings (this one for instance, or this one) that twist dimensions through perspective, where once a stable perspective of one plane is achieved, the other planes are made impossible since each plane or perspective overlaps or bleeds into another. As the eye of the viewer -- or the mind of the reader -- shifts perspective, the plane is made to transform (the game of Word Golf played in the Index demonstrates a simple parallel). The entirety, in order to remain stable, is in a fluid state, like a tornado or a whirlpool (and VN loved those spirals). Perhaps though, this Escher drawing makes a more suitable parallel to the novel: the stuff of art warps into the stuff of life, and vice versa, not Schrödinger's Novel as much as Schizophrenia's Novel.

BBC News has become like some shrill uber-PBS, but BBC's Sci Fi continues to kick mivoks (albeit with a boot mostly borrowed from the US). They're now airing the missing Firefly episodes, which turn out to be quite good, and also supply the revelation that a feature film may be possible. Once again, one scratches one's head wondering why Fox didn't bother to show these three remaining episodes of their aborted production run.

As with ninjas and mutants, any movie about pirates is worth watching, and this is the best one in recent memory (i.e. it's better than Cutthroat Island and Waterworld). I would have loved this movie as a kid, and that's who it's really made for (although the PG-13 rating is a bit strange). I was initially skeptical about a movie based on a theme park ride -- we must be well out of ideas, thought I. But this turned out to be great entertainment for those of us who knew and loved that ride as kids (it was one of my three favorites at Disney World, along with The Haunted Mansion (a film presently in production) and Space Mountain), seamlessly interpolating scenes from the ride (which, like much of the original Magical Kingdom, is little more than a themed exposition of animatronics technology) in a script that actually doesn't suck. It's also another homage film (the 2000s must be the decade of honoring the past, opposed to the 1990s decade of making fun of it), with most of the expected and best pirate tropes from Robert Louis Stevenson to Errol Flynn to the pirate-movie renaissance of the 1950s (and thankfully ignoring the musical-comedy pirates of the 1980s). Now if somebody could just make a space-pirates movie that doesn't suck....

8 out of 10 parenthetical notations.

How about this one: Santa's elves have obtained a nuclear device and threaten to set it off unless their demands are met (better wages, shorter hours, more camp whores). Now it's up to... I don't know, Teddy Roosevelt to save Santa. Benjamin Franklin? How about me, Joe Blackface?

I've nominated Skinny Puppy's One Time One Place as the best Nightmarish Authoritarian Dictatorship song. (One of my many hobbies is listing these things.) It is the song that actually introduced me to Skinny Puppy back in the days of lore. Another contender was Faith Collapsing by Ministry.

Back in those days of lore, we came to the conclusion that Beckett had been too influenced by the French in his time, and so his characters gave in to their fate (and their despair) too easily. What if, we wondered, Vladimir and Estrogon had been American? Would they instead become angry, break things, fight with each other? Or at the very least complain loudly to whomever they thought was in charge? If they had been Russian they might have reflected sadly upon how much better things had been in the old days, back when there was always food on the table, the trains always ran on time, and Godot showed up promptly. If they had been German they might have devised a schedule for when Godot was most likely to arrive, then planned accordingly. If they had been English they might have gone to hunt Godot down wherever he might be hiding. If they had been Jewish they might have sighed knowingly, then said no more on the subject.

How about: The North Pole is the secret seat of the world's conspiratorial power, pulling the strings of all the world's leaders by way of its elfin agents placed in the pipes and behind the wallboard of governmental buildings. Now it's up to Teddy Roosevelt to hunt them all down. Or perhaps... lure them to one spot and....

Tritism #34: That mine with all the important resources is somebody's Sacred Place. So is that land where they're building the new codos.

Which brings up a question: if Franklin was the great 18th century American, and Roosevelt was the great 19th century American (keep those Washington and Lincoln comments to yourself), then who was the great 20th century American? FDR? Neal Armstrong? JFK? Ronald Reagan? Bill Gates???

The worst thing about insomnia is that you can't get to sleep.

How peculiar! Kenneth Anger -- whom I had assumed quite dead or at least thoroughly missing in space-time -- has emerged with a new film! This one, a short called "The Man We Want to Hang", is apparently a bunch of shots of Aleister Crowley's artwork, and purports to show a softer, gentler side to the The Beast. How peculiar!

Speaking of such things, one observes that brotherblue.org has been taken off the net (presumably by the Scientologists), but fortunately one knows how to track down that which had seemed lost.

I've been reading Jennifer Egan's Look at Me. This like many (especially contemporary) novels begins with a hook (or teaser) then immediately digresses into the past for (what promises in this case to be) the rest of the narrative. The structure could be a product of editorial practices that prefer a novel to start strong in order to move it off the shelves, since many buyers scan the first page to get a feel for the writing; or to entice a slush pile editor into reading an unsolicited manuscript (presumably not the case for Egan, but the lessons stick with you); or even a result of watching too many television dramas. Or it could be a reflection of the writerly process of memory excavation.

Trying to separate the Novel (any or all novels) from Memory -- attempting to discern a demarcation -- proves an interesting exercise. Locating an example of the former clearly unbound to the latter is like trying to find a word with four adjacent consonants. Novel-writing is close kin to memory, where digressions weave and skip through the matter of life to coalesce into narratives, and images condense from faces and voices and events and objects loose fluidly within. The process of forming these images through language is an act of compartmentalization, fencing off those with relevance to subject and intent, discarding what seem to be irrelevant while asking why irrelevant and if maybe not -- sucked thus into a vortex of Proustian expansiveness, and returning to ask fewer questions. So far I've got weaLTHY, fiLTHY, steaLTHY... but no novels yet.

Egan's book is good so far after a dubious and ill-advised start: she's included an epigraph from Ulysses, which is something of a literary cardinal sin, indicating an inflated self-opinion, or worse, that she's unaware of her own audacity (maybe Thomas Pynchon could get away with this -- maybe). She has a great (if only rarely employed) feeling for adjectives though, for their versatility, and the potential for synthesizing description. For instance, she describes a particular woman's voice as "wobbly, almost childish", and the image of a head crashing into a windshield as "a bright, splintering crack." Which reminds me of something that struck me in Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex:

"Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret.' … I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' ... I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."

To which list I could add for hours, and isn't this also the purpose of the Novel? To express that which cannot be expressed in any other form in any other length...? Novelists and people who love novels cannot be satisfied with learning that someone is "sad" or "happy" or "grumpy." These words ultimately express very little -- in fact they connect referentially to preconceived structures of meaning that may be wholly divorced from any true emotion. I once had a girlfriend who would sometimes ask playfully, "Are you happy or sad?" It was the very notion that one or the other choice could be a sufficient response that made it amusing; embedded implicitly in the question were further questions: how, why, to what extent, for how long, ...?.

And so on.

Speaking of Jeremiah (which I wasn't, but who cares anyway), this post to SciFiWire reports that the series creator J. Michael Straczynski is quitting the show, claiming irreconcilable problems with MGM, "the most heinous, difficult and intrusive studio I've ever worked for". Then, as if somehow NOT preemptively distancing himself from the work just completed, he adds, "none of this should be taken as a diss of the coming season. I honestly think that the second season is [yadda yadda yadda]", which sounds like political gibberish to me.

And speaking of Farscape (which I was, but who cares anyway) this guy notes some similarities to that series in Star Trek: Enterprise's "exciting new direction" for next season, noting for those lucky many who haven't been paying attention to Rick Berman over the past decade that Star Trek has routinely pilfered from other SF shows (Deep Space Nine = Babylon 5, Voyager = Battlestar Galactica). This time around it's Farscape, which I suppose is fortunate: it could have been Andromeda (itself a poor-man's Farscape). Now if they would only change the theme song....

Salon has a new advertising idea that, while annoying, may be on to something for content-provider sites. They give around the first 300 words for free then make you watch a commercial in order to get the rest. Look at this piece on the Save Farscape movement for an example (and a good article).

Segue -- this article brings up some rants:

SF and television don't mix because -- according to the people responsible for budgets -- chicks don't dig SF. One of the more successful SF shows, "Stargate SG-1", is now in its 7th season, and its 2nd on that kill-box network Sci-Fi Channel; but its ratings have dropped suddenly to a 1.1 this past week -- not a good number on Sci-Fi where the noose seems to hang below 2.0 for larger budget projects (like Farscape). Thing is, Farscape *did* appeal to women; but since Stargate doesn't, Sci-Fi's decision to slot them together may have eroded Farscape's ratings by driving them away.

Which brings up a question that's often aggravated me: what's with the television rating system? Isn't it a bit archaic now? They use these so-called "Neilsen families" -- 5,000 households whose viewing habits are recorded by Neilsen Media Research -- to determine what the entire country is watching. Last time I checked, 5,000 households (* the average household of 2.5 = 12,500 people) does not make a fair sample for a population of 280 Million, not to mention the many other countries where such products are often exported. (What's more, Sci-Fi channel for instance only has around 75 Million subscribers, so they can rely upon only a subset of this number.) To make matters worse, the data isn't even collected in a scientific manner: it's recorded by the families themselves in "ratings books", the accuracy of which can't be anything but dubious. Why is it still used? How could it be that decisions involving such tremendous amounts of money are based upon such meager data?

Because scripted programs often aren't as profitable as the networks would like them to be, there are and will be new trends in television. One frightening idea is advertising-centered shows, where the very premise of the show is based upon moving some sponsor's product. Much like sponsored stadiums in large cities (ours is called the First Union Center, aka the FU Center), this idea would both embed the advertiser's interests firmly within the program itself and make an end-run around technologies like TiVo that are able to filter out commercials. Imagine the results of such a program! "My name is John Crichton. Five years ago I was sucked through a Doritos bag, and now I'm trapped aboard a living Volvo surrounded by strange fast-food lifeforms. Somebody help me with my taxes; I'm being pursued by various other television shows airing later tonight... Earth may not be ready for the interest-free checking I've seen."