'...around the alter rise the arches of a great church, and its walls keep moving further and further out. What they enclose is -- sacred. You can no longer get to it, no longer touch it. Shrieking with the hunger that devours you, you wander round about these walls in search of the little that is profane, and the circles of your course keep growing more and more extended. Soon that church will embrace the whole world, and you be driven out to the extreme edge; another step, and the world of the sacred has conquered: you sink into the abyss. Therefore take courage while it is yet time, wander about no longer in the profane where now it is dry feeding, dare the leap, and rush in through the gates into the sanctuary itself. If you devour the sacred you have made it your own! Digest the sacramental wafer, and you are rid of it!' - Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own

'I am utterly amazed that men should want to subject reason, the greatest gift and the divine light, to ancient words which may well have been adulterated with malicious intent. I am amazed that it should not be thought a crime to speak disparagingly of the mind, the true text of God's word, and to proclaim it as corrupt, blind and depraved, while deeming it the highest offence to think such things of the mere letter and image of God's word. They consider it pious not to trust their reason and their own judgement and deem it impious to have doubts concerning the reliability of those who have handed down the sacred books to us. This is plain stupidity, not piety' - Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise

Olympus

Four issue mini abt two demigods keeping the peace on earth and the guys from the underworld out. Not a lot to it, on a substance level. The intro goes on abt how the gods have left us to our own devices, and the story itself brings out the relationship between the two brothers rather well. But I didn't get a lot else.

But we're ignoring the artwork, of course. It's something pretty special. Contoured faces, Klimt colours, blocky shapes, extreme perspectives and the scratchy / crayony / scanned photography mishmash popularized by Sienkiewicz and co. Good layouts too. One that stuck with me was Cassie in hell, where the P.O.V. does a one-eighty as he runs to his target. Slick. Very nice sense of momentum.

So. Christian Ward is a more interesting new talent than Nathan Edmondson. It will be interesting to see where they end up.

Ungirthed

It's fair to say that my friends are pretty suspicious of P4k, and I can understand their attitude even if I don't share it. Personally, I think parsing thru their recommendations is worth it if once in a while you unearth something like this. The review does the song some justice, I just can't help adding some of my own slobbering over it. This is beat and vocal science applied to pop like nothing else. White gusts of chopped 'Aaah's crash against strategically fired 'Boh's over stuttering ticks, starting and stopping, stumbling and lurching. And that's BEFORE the vocal comes in. And what a vocal -- high and clear and light and sweet and sly and pouty and innocent and high and clear, all soft consonants and slurred vowels. Yes the rapidly repeating "ears ringing / teeth clicking" quivers are a highlight, but my fave bit is when the vocal and synth acends dramatically ('the air is familiar...') leaving you momentarily adrift, before everything drops back down. Oh and how it ends! Sharply winding back, leaving a final "ears ringing" refrain. It just makes you want more.

Whenever I play it, I can't simply listen to it once.

There is a lot of synthpop here, but also glo-fi's fuzzy colours, southern hip-hop's clattering hi-hats, and dubstep's low-end punch. It's like Purity Ring have picked the best bits moden music has to offer and built this little happy pulsing diamond of a song with them. I really can't wait for what they are going to do next.

Frankenstein's Womb

From Hell, the Warren Ellis version. It's not Jack the Ripper, but Mary Shelley that have birth to the future. Maybe by inventing science fiction? Our ability to dream about the future? Dream and believe the dream and call the dream real life? But it cuts both ways. Frankenstein -- science -- is a "dead child". Its works burn indiscriminately. The pursuit of alchemy leads to destruction.

And the alchemist realises this. Hope lies in the private, interpersonal virtues of love and self-sacrifice.

That's what I got out of it anyways. Ellis is writing poetry rather than prose here, and you can read him in lots of ways. It's a beautiful book, with exactly that Hellboy atmosphere I needed (props Marek Oleksicki -- where does Ellis find these artists??)

Kinda want to read the rest of the Apparat line now...

Doktor Sleepless

V For Vendetta with a lot of Frankenstein and a little bit of Waiting For Godot in the mix, as well as other stuff I don't recognise, probably. Oh, and written by Warren Ellis. One of the best things he's done. It's pretty much ALL ideas -- Aaron Sorkin length speeches about the world being fucked up: environmental disaster, overpopulation, privatised security, politicians building bunkers against their own people and culture manufactured for profit. This isn't the future we were promised, the book says. We have to burn it down.

Or do we? The Doktor thinks demons from other dimensions are waiting to eat us i.e. he's more than a little unstable. And then there is Sing. Ellis often leaves a (female) character to puncture the anti-hero's grand schemes for saving the world. Look at what yr doing! Yr hurting people, you arrogant asshole!

Lovely stuff about the real / the fantastic as well. People feel safer with imaginary characters -- they won't be able to affect yr life, not really. But the mad scientist persona is a masquerade. You WILL get touched.

A note on the artwork: perhaps it's the political Alan Moore vibes, but to me it feels like Dave Gibbons filtered thru the Wildstorm house style. Maybe that's just me...

Grindhouse

Have seen both films separate, and can add my own voice to the consensus that the original double-bill release is superior, not only for the added trailers and cross-references. The two films are of a piece thematically as well, so it really is better to see them as they were originally designed to be seen.

Planet Terror is pretty much one of my favourite films ever. Even better, because more silly, than Rodriguez's adaptation of Sin City. Why do I love it? Well, Cherry Darling is a Go-Go Dancer (not a stripper!!) who wanted to be a doctor. She left her ninja boyfriend because she thought he thought she was worthless. Keeping up? The film is basically about her gaining confidence in herself and taking over from ninja boyfriend in the ninja business. There's a similar kind of story going on with Dr. Dakota Block, a lesbian trying to escape her sadistic husband. Both ladies get their freedom with the help of gentlemen: ninja boyfriend and father respectively. Still, the film can be read as a commentary on female empowerment. Cherry starts off cavorting with the camera, and ends by firing a minigun at zombies. It's fulfillment of a sort, the sort you get in sleazy pulp movies...

Also, the brothers bickering about the secret recipe to the best BBQ sauce in the world. The striving for transcendence, and the barriers in the way. The film ends with their reconcilement and death. In its own way, quite beautiful.

Death Proof is more tricky. The film is divided into two: one set of ladies get mauled by a serial killer, another set of ladies manage to fight back, and we're asked to spot the parallels. The first group are smoked-out, one has been pressured into demeaning herself, one of them is bitter at being stood up. They are weak and die easy. For Stuntman Mike, it's a power thing. He is the driver, the victim is the passenger. Man and wife. His victim begs for mercy, and he shows none.

The second group contains two stuntwomen -- the ladies now have access to those positions of power. Abernathy isn't, but wants to join in, and she sacrifices Lee to do so. When attacked, they fight back, and this time it's Stuntman Mike who begs, and the ladies who show no mercy.

Sidebar: Kurt Russell seems to me to be doing a Quentin Tarantino impression, and Tarantino himself plays a gruesome sadist in Planet Terror. Is Quentin punishing himself for his misogyny? I smell catharsis...

If you were being really pretentious (ahem), you could describe Planet Terror as portraying female emancipation as the ladies being able to achieve fulfillment / transcendence / flourishing -- carving out a small corner of tranquility in a planet full of terrors. Death Proof is like the negative liberty flip to that -- not freedom to do but freedom from. Female emancipation means becoming death proof. It's a bleaker picture, where the gents aren't any nicer, it's just that the ladies are better able and willing to defend themselves. And not all the ladies at that. Lee, the gullible fool, the innocent cheerleader, the actress who must sell herself to magazines, is left to be torn apart by the predatory male. Uncomfortable stuff.

I liked the positive angle more, being a guy who wants guys to be constructive. But writing this, I'm even more convinced that you need both angles. Grindhouse as a whole, then, goes down as one of the more impressive geek films of recent times. And so, inevitably, one of my favourites.

'...it is better to be headstrong than cautious, for fortune is a lady. It is necessary, if you want to master her, to beat and strike her. And one sees she more often submits to those who act boldly than to those who proceed in a calculating fashion. Moreover, since she is a lady, she smiles on the young, for they are less cautious, more ruthless, and overcome her with their boldness.' - Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Happy Birthday Dollhouse Hothouse

Another year, and these pages still just about living. To celebrate, I was going to write a long self-important post about what I get out of this blog and what other people might get out of it. But then that would be sickeningly indulgent, wouldn't it? And boring. So I thought I'll write a short post about those things instead!

First, these pages exist because I have a terrible memory, and I want to log thoughts about stuff before I forget them. Second, the act of writing itself helps with spotting patterns, refining arguments and solving problems. Remember the pensieve in Harry Potter? A metaphor for this process, I'm sure of it. Third, there's the thing mentioned here -- Adam Smith's love of system applied to criticism and commentary. Building a logical machine that works is adding another psychological bulwark against the horror of a chaotic cosmos devoid of any inherent meaning.

But enough existentialism! What this should tell you is that I don't put in a lot of thought about audience. Or not anymore, at least. At the beginning I was more keen on trying out voices and getting attention, but both enterprises failed miserably so I've given them up. I suspect my writing has improved as a result. Now a lot of posts look like notes, which is pretty much what they are, tho I still try to tidy them up a bit to make them understandble to someone who isn't me.

What that means is you don't get reviews, but immediate judgements and sometimes more thought-out commentary. Spoilers and obscure references abound. The focus is on ideas, because I'm useless at anything and everything technical. The one virtue of all this is that posts are short. More bloggers should think about word count, tbh. A reader's time is precious in an age of info overload.

So. No pretence. These pages are just little nuggets of my consciousness -- with all the incoherence, contradiction and offensiveness left in. Defences and justifications aside, I do hope they are worth reading.

If you think they are, I invite you to raise a glass.

Long life Dollhouse Hothouse!

Let's see if it survives another year.