The Diamond Island

Okay, so like I’m eaten alive by the Blob, right? Well, no. If only it were that easy. There’s another movie in the chain of gross girl germs that unsettled my young brain stem when it comes to female power archetypes. It’s an old movie known as The Green Slime. It’s a science fiction movie where an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth on a collision course. Of course, that means bad news, so the space men and women of the international space station of action and adventure send a rocket to the asteroid to set a bunch of atomic charges and blow the space rock sky high before it hits the Earth. The space people accomplish their task, but when they return to the space station, their boots are covered in a green slime they picked up on the asteroid.

The space suit cleaners blast the suits with “germ killing energy”, except this slime absorbs energy and grows into two-tentacled, one-eyed monsters that kill through electrocution by touching you. The more energy the creatures absorb, the more they multiply. Pretty soon, the creatures start to slowly take over the space station and the crew fights a losing battle against them.

The creatures can be killed (by laser blasts from the laser guns the crew carry), but there are so many of them, that the crew is unable to do more than give ground and think of ways to slow them down. Eventually, the crew blow up the space station and escape in a rocket back to earth. But is this really “The End?” The green slime might have managed to get on the rocket, which the way the movie ends you can’t help but wonder.

This is another one of those movies that scared the pants off me. There’s a scene where a maintenance worker is trying to repair a circuit room that has lost power, back when the green slime creatures are only just starting to infest the station in individual incidents. It’s dark, and the guy is bumbling about, when this glowing eye opens. You know the dude is doomed. That scene where the eyeball opens has scarred me for life!

How did I get to here from the Blob? I let the free association carry me to the next line of thought, and I remembered this old movie. You didn’t want to touch these creatures, because they’d electrocute you and you’d turn into a crispy critter. Like the Blob, their presence grows greater with every scene, and they take over what up until now has been a nice, orderly male-dominated space game. It’s another of those “escape the onset of evil icky goo power” movies. Again, we have the invasion from outer space of a “monster slime”, and once more it’s up to the hetero-normal couple to work together to fight against the evil menace of nasty alien contamination.

This time the fear is not so much of being “eaten” by the Ultra-Feminine Uber Goop, but of being touched and losing control. It’s a development in terms of the psychological outlook behind this adventure yarn. The danger is more individualized (by the numerous collective tentacled creatures) and easier to deal with (gun phallic symbols actually work now), but the problem is unchanged. The transport vehicle (a tiny rock in The Blob, a tiny canister in Beware! The Blob, now an asteroid you can land a rocket on in The Green Slime) has grown in size, suggesting a more immediate impact problem. Green is the color of putrification, and of rot. It is also the color of spring growth. Things are growing and at the same time rotting away. There is change and transformation going on.

The movie has to present the typical fear of a feminine force “moving in” and draining all your energy away for it’s own purposes, taking over by means of gradual increase of numbers. The only solution is to “break up” by “exploding” the residence the encounter takes place in, also known as the space station of “the relationship”. But that only works until the next asteroid shows up. There seems to me to be another puzzle here, where the issues of the Blob were not resolved. Instead of “the present”, we are in a sci-fi “future world”, indicating this happens later along the line. The issues are the same, contact and inter-relation. But how do you relate to crazy green aliens with tentacles, coming toward you to give you the electric embrace of crispy death?

Okay, so the Blob relationship didn’t work. Here comes a new relationship, and things are similar, if not quite the same as before. It’s another go, as it were, and now you have to deal with more mature concepts (moving in, cooperative adaptation, boundaries – how much are you willing to put up with before you bogue out and call it even). One could look at it as simple case of infection, like a skin rash or athlete’s foot, to be treated with medicine as one would any non-intelligent (as far as we know) life force intruding upon our territory. Or one could imagine it as a wake-up call to learn a new lesson in relating to something important.

Obviously the unconscious thinks this is important enough to keep sending rocks-as-spaceships to establish contact. The problem is, the slime takes over everything, as a psychic infection is likely to do. It destroys personal relationships and wrecks the rules by which a society lives by. The ego has no choice but to enter a reactive state and try to preserve its fragility by retreat, stalling and in this case, scorched earth.

I say thee nay! I’m going right up to these green slime monsters and I’m bringing rubber gloves and boots. Shock me Amadeus.

It’s a typical Satyrday night. I’m mixing up the medicine, a nice tangy rum punch designed to make me more receptive to the forces of the universe while I do my chores. One can easily learn the secrets of Kung Fu while scrubbing the bathtub of scrum, it’s all a matter of training. I’m also chopping up the ingredients for my yummy beef stew. K and are planning to watch some Grey’s Anatomy to a steaming bowl of stew and a glass of thick, rich milk to make a party in our tummys (so yummy, so yummy).

Cooking is an unpredictable venture. The formula of a recipe should ensure a consistent result every time, but the real world operates on a random adventure generator on a regular basis. You can’t always count on what kind of experience you are going to get out of life. So it is that as I’m mixing up the punch, it turns a brilliant red, and no matter how much I try to get it to behave, it remains red, instead of the off-orange and feathery brown it usually is. I examine my ingredients, and realize I bought a bunch of juices that have nothing to do with the original recipe. Well, it’s always dinosaur hunting when I have to go to the supermarket, and its likely that the robots in disguise had me so distracted that someone else pulled the strings when I made my juice selections. I do try to be open to outside messages, after all.

I start work on the stew, and for some reason it turns out a deep red color instead of the brown-brothy color it usually does. I look at my ingredients and I realize that instead of using my jar of home-jarred tomatoes, I used a can of Nature’s Promise tomatoes instead. I shake my head and realize I’m acting on some kind of puppet-master control field and try to get to the bottom of things. The stew and the rum punch taste excellent, it’s just they are, well this shade of red that I feel means something. You know, like in that scene from Close Encounters when the main character starts realizing there’s some meaning to what they are building with a mountain of mashed potatoes.

So I sit down and I visualize the color red in my mind, and decide to see what comes up. The image that flashes into my brain is the Blob, from the old 1972 movie Beware! The Blob, a sequel to the original movie in 1958. Whoa, that takes me back. The last thing I want to do is consume anything that reminds me of the Blob, because that thing was a deadly poison that killed and consumed you if you touched it! But here I am sucking down a ceramic cup of the good stuff and preparing a pot of stew that has a meaningful connection to that which scared the pants off me as a kid.

As a young pouchling, I watched a lot of movies on the TV. Back then independent stations were more common, and even the big networks had a creative side. The late night monster movies were a staple back then, and you could always be assured of picking up something weird past ten P.M. One movie I saw was, of course, Beware! The Blob. It made an impression on me as a kid.

At the end of the original The Blob movie, the creature known as the Blob is frozen and dumped somewhere in the north pole with the titles “The End?” showing. The intimation is that this is not the end of the matter. Beware! The Blob (also known as Son of the Blob, which I think is false, more like daughter of the Blob) picks up from that loose end.

An oil pipeline worker digs up a canister and brings it home. The canister contains, you guessed it, the Blob. It thaws out, and starts eating everything in sight. A pair of young love birds clue in to the danger while the authorities stall. The blob is a nasty, icky, bright red jelly creature that can move quickly and squeeze through any crack to reach it victims. It sticks to you like glue, and quickly engulfs you to digest your body. As it absorbs animals, insects and people (it apparently doesn’t like plants) it grows in size. The only thing that stops it is cold. If you freeze it, the blob can be stored and transported (as it was in the original movie).

In Beware! The Blob, the final showdown occurs in a skating rink, where the hero of the movie finally lures it onto the ice rink and turns on the cold, freezing the creature and saving the town. The sheriff poses in front of the creature, and the lights of the news media thaw a piece of the creature where it reaches out to grasp the guy’s boot. Again, the titles “The End?” appear as the movie ends.

This movie terrified me as a kid. The Blob could appear anywhere and strike quickly. Once it got a hold of you, there was no escape. You would live long enough to be absorbed into the creature and turned into liquid lunch. In one scene, a guy gets a haircut, and as he’s getting a shampoo from the barber, the blob squeezes out of the sink drain and snags the guy by the head. I absolutely refuse to get my hair shampooed at a hair cut establishment to this day because of that scene.

In the movie, the presence of the creature is always accompanied by a spooky sound tone. That musical tone has lodged itself in my brain, and I always jump when I hear that exact tone of music played somewhere. The Blob ain’t gunna get me! Although, where could you run? Your only hope would be to splash it with cold water or throw ice cubes at it.

The memory is not quite as fierce or terrifying as it used to be. I’ve had to go about my business despite the fear that at any time that sound might begin, and I find myself washing my hands while a red slime oozes out the drain and tries to get a hold of me. But I haven’t forgotten that primal terror, the fear that would keep me from going to sleep at night, because the light in the hall was making that same dull hum as the Blob.

As I’m stirring the pot, and mixing the punch bowl, I realize in a sense I’m consuming the Blob at this very moment! You can’t escape the Blob, only postpone the inevitable. The creature always thaws out and comes at humanity again and again. The test of survival never ends. Of course, in the movies, consuming the Blob is always fatal (the guy who drinks it from his beer can dies horribly as it consumes him from within). The Blob comes from outer space (the deep unconscious), and needs to eat everything in sight (to what end?). The idea of anyone consuming the Blob and surviving is as preposterous as the existence of the Blob itself.

The thought strikes me that the Blob is an archetype of feminine power, engulfing everything and devouring all in its path, growing larger and stronger. I’m cool with that, as long as I don’t lose my own individuality in the process. It’s the hero/heroine pair up in the movie that always defeats the Blob, or more accurately, puts it on hold until next time. So perhaps the individuation of certain characters is what moves the plot along. The Blob is too strong for any one person to take on, and yet, it’s the individual response to the reality of the growing Blob’s power that determines the outcome.

I’m thinking that the Blob represents nothing less than the fear of girl power. That nasty contamination by women that always wrecks things and makes life more difficult. What does the Blob want? It must be looking for a connection of some kind, and anyone who doesn’t measure up to the requirement gets eaten alive. The people who are smart enough to flee or avoid contact with the Blob might be the very people the Blob is trying to contact. The Blob comes from outer space (the heavens), maybe it’s trying to make contact, and the outer space girl power needs to hear a message from the right person to move things forward.

The Blob keeps getting put off, because we love the fear of running from the gross girl germs that might give us cooties. The movies keep coming. But maybe it is way past time the process moved to the next level. Humanity has to grow up eventually, or be stuck in a never-never land of childish dependence. I hear the message, I’m not a kid anymore, and I’m letting the Blob get inside of me!

Every so often, a movie comes along that gets under my skin and changes my world. Titanic is one of those movies. A wild, passionate affair, never to be forgotten. You know, where you still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and scream it’s name. Sigh. Well the memory of that time is not as bright as it once was. The scar has healed into the natural folds of the skin, and so isn’t quite as visible as it used to be. But I’ll never forget those crazy nights of lifeboats and signal rockets.

I saw Titanic for the first time in the theater on a Friday, right before it became a phenomenon. A co-worker had gotten all worked up over it, and recommended I see it. I figured what the heck, there wasn’t anything else in the theaters, and even though it looked like a crummy romance movie, it might be fun to watch the ship sink. I’ve always had a soft spot for movies with an “escape the sinking ship” motif.

All I remember from that first viewing was walking out at the end in shock, and knowing I would see the movie again, the next day. The last time I felt that devastated was when I walked out of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum with some student friends, where we proceeded to walk the streets in a daze until we ended up in a bar. Not that I’m comparing the two in terms of historical significance, but in terms of personal relevance they both socked it to me (but for different reasons).

So I went and saw it on Saturday. Then I went and saw it again on Sunday. After that it became a ritual every week to see it. I started smuggling in six packs of draft cider, and would watch the three-hour spectacle bombed out of my skull and weeping my eyes out. All in all, I saw the movie in the theater eleven times. I bought both of the CDs, the poster, the calendar, and the White Star Lines tee shirt. I played the Titanic: Adventure Out of Time video adventure game and pretended I was on the ship solving the game mystery while Jack and Rose were having their adventure. I even bought the book Futility to get into the whole spooky premonition aspect of it. It became my favorite movie of all time, knocking Star Wars off the top slot like a Ronco Record.

I think the simplest explanation for my obsession with the movie is that I saw it as an allegory for my own life. Certainly, from a detached and rational point of view that could seem ridiculous. But that’s how I saw it. In real life, I felt that my life as I knew it was sinking into the depths as I scrambled to stay afloat and reach some kind of rescue. And I saw it as a real world allegory, for the state of the world itself, headed for disaster and ruin, where only a lucky privileged few make it out alive. Where higher consciousness concepts like love only make it through bitter sacrifice.

I didn’t latch onto any one character. I sympathized with Cal, the “villain” as much as I did with Jack or Rose. They were all representing qualities, or states of mind in the story as influenced by what the real star of the story is – the great ship itself. In the spiritual journeys of some vision quests, the boat or ship often represents your voyage towards the islands of higher consciousness, and is made of your innocence. I’d lost mine, and I’d failed at whatever great task I had been supposed to do in life. I’d never reached my destination, whatever that had been.

When I watched Titanic, I re-enacted the experience of my own life’s failure as a mythological story. By obsessing over it and getting into every nook and cranny I made the wound my own. No one can tell me Titanic is a horrible movie, because I know it is. I lived it, people.

The progress on my book continues. I’m 87% through the revisions, and am about to tackle the climax of the story. Come on, big creative push!

I got my hands on the DVD for Hawk the Slayer, and am very pleased I made the acquisition. It’s a sword and sorcery movie from 1981, and is actually watch-able, in a Beastmaster kind of way. The dialogue, characters and plot are all hilariously awful. I place the movie somewhere between average and good. It’s not “good enough” to be good, but it isn’t “average enough” to be average. This is the kind of movie you can watch with friends and have some laughs. Though nothing will beat the sheer WTF-ness of The Core. All I can say is that the universe must have taken pity on me for having suffered through The Return of Captain Invincible, and compensated me with a movie that is both bad and fun.

Just finished Season 1 and 2 of Heroes by means of Netflix. K’s new computer, plus our nifty high speed FIOS connection, equals “watch now”. Apparently, you can watch Netflix movies on your computer, who knew? Because we subscribe, we get a certain amount of free hours of viewing each month, so we’ve been draining that account dry to get caught up with the show. Maybe I’ll go into analytic detail of the show in another post, but for now all I’ll say is the show is worth watching. Lots of problems and plots that don’t add up, and Season 2 drops in quality significantly, but I’d say Season 1 was a heck of a lot of fun.

Musically, I’ve been listening to The Cure’s Wish and really digging it a lot. It comes on the heels of Disintegration, which carries the distinction of being my big breakup album. So to hear the post-breakup energy many years later after putting college way behind me, it’s very cathartic and enlivening. I’ve also been listening to Deutsch Nepal, a dark ambient sound that I’m really starting to dig. I’m going to have to get some more of this stuff. It puts me in the zone when I need to concentrate at work or hash my book revisions out.

On the cat zone, K and I got a large bath mat for the upstairs bathroom, and Frankie loves it. She uses it as a springboard to dash downstairs, then comes back up and rests on the bunched up mat. Frankie made sure to trill at K and give her the head-butt leap of affection to let her know this was approved. Meanwhile, Michael and Blink got a new soft throw to lay on. The fuzzy warm goodness does well on the couch, and when a human sits there with the throw over them, the two cats gravitate. Even independent Frankie has been taking turns resting on it. Wow!

My car was broken into the other night. I drive a bucket, and one of the doors doesn’t lock all the time. Needless to say I never keep anything valuable in there. Just a glove compartment jammed full of napkins ripped off from fast food joints, some moist towelette packets, and a pad of paper with a pencil. I could follow the progress of the intruder exactly. First, the pad and pencil tossed casually to the floor of the car. Then all the napkins got shoved out of the way and left on the passenger seat. Finally the moist towelette packets had been thrown on the ground outside of the car in disgust before leaving the door semi-closed. I had to laugh, because it’s a lot of effort to clear the compartment out for zero returns.

It may be winter for all practical purposes, but I’m still looking forward to next spring’s planting. K and I got ourselves a garden weasel finally, and aim to test it out as soon as the ground dries out a bit from the recent snow we had. The ground hasn’t hardened quite yet with the cold, but the weeds and other plants are on the defensive. I’ll give the scoop on how reliable this ding dang darn thing is when compared to the TV commercial soon enough.

And on a final note, I have yet to begin writing my Xmas cards. The beat down looms!

Star Trek is dead, and it’s never coming back.

Seriously. The only person who may have really understood what Star Trek was about was Gene Roddenberry, and he’s passed on. I submit as evidence the decline of the Star Trek franchise after the man’s passing away. Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and all the ridiculous Star Trek movies after the first have increasingly failed to capture either the magic or the message of the original show. I can’t watch any of them without thinking about how unlike Star Trek they are.

It’s like putting Conan the Barbarian in place of Aragorn for Lord of the Rings.* You’re watching someone with the same name, but acting completely out of character for what you thought you were watching.

Star Trek as I originally “grokked” it, was about the exploration of problems in consciousness. It had nothing to do with outer space at all; it was all about inner space. Or, as Q very rightly put it, “the unknown possibilities of existence.” The external world of Star Trek seems to be the only thing fans have increasingly latched on to or developed, with all the techno-gadgetry, identity politics of different “planetary races”, and space battles most of all. Got to have space battles! People have gravitated towards the “mapping stars and studying nebula” aspect of Star Trek, and have shied away from the more difficult task of rendering the far out and the unknowable.

If the fans don’t get it, you can bet your two-hundred Quatloos that the studios and networks sure aren’t going to come within a hundred parsecs of the message. But that won’t stop anyone in a suit from trying to resurrect the franchise and give the aging fans one more shot at nostalgia to keep the money rolling in. Yes, it’s coming, the Foetal Scooby Doo version of Star Trek. A “reimagining” of the franchise, now that the old one has hit rock bottom, and the fans are left staring around like stunned fish after a depth charge.

Forget it people! Star Trek is never coming back. We’ll only ever see some space action adventure show with people named “Kirk” and “Spock”, shooting phasers at anyone who isn’t a member of the Star Fleet Empire. That’s all anyone will ever get now. The innovation and creativity of the original has been drained to a husk, and we’re just sucking corpse dust through that straw.

The vision has been lost. If it shows up again in our lifetimes, it won’t be in anything bearing the name of Star Trek.

So go enjoy the space battles. That’s what advanced, interstellar civilizations are based on, right?

* Oh wait, Peter Jackson already did that. Thugs in place of “high men”. I especially loved it when Conan!Aragorn chopped off the Mouth of Sauron’s head. Today’s heroes have to be dark and edgy, rather than courteous and courageous, otherwise they might be considered “sissies”.

Speaking of prize tables, I headed out with K and the folks to the Civitan Garage Sale this weekend. We were hunting for goods to bring back, as well as the thrill of finding hidden treasure. It’s the last garage sale of the 2007 season, and the chilly weather kept some of the vendors away, but the turnout was good. Lots of folks of all sorts hobnobbing and finagling over items of dubious value. Pretty keen! The usual food nexus was there, with hot dogs, pizza, doughnuts and soda for the famished and thirsty participants. Like a good little mule, I had my backpack and plenty of ones and fives for the hard-core bargain extravaganza.

Depending on how you look at it, I either bought the most junk or had the best luck. K found a nice soft sweatshirt and a wall hanging of “uses for herbs” to put in the kitchen. Pa came away with a measly lamp finial and a small metal bird. Ma managed to buy a nice crystal for the window, and learned some cool information about the origin of “indian beads” (sometimes information is a find in and of itself). Me, I got my hands on a number of cheap VHS tapes of Subway, The Speed Racer Movie, two episodes of Far Out Space Nuts (I said, “lunch”, not “launch!”), and Raiders of Wu-Tang. Picked up a cute Little Golden book about a firehouse cat named Sam who saves the day, and a number of Big Little books of Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Tweety, and The Invaders (of all things!). Oh yeah, my Christmas holster is gettin’ loaded with plenty of six shooters this season!

I picked up a birthday gift for my boss to get bonus points on. And finally I picked up a battered 1974 Fischer Price Castle to revisit a little childhood nostalgia before giving it away to Goodwill, so I’m covered from multiple angles. See the power of the prize table? Everyone else was grumbling, even though they found something, and it could be argued that I didn’t so much as score as wiped out on junk. Spirits went back up after we visited Mario’s Pizza for lunch. I still say you can’t beat that square pizza and those delicious steak and cheeses. It’s a total power up, to the max. Enabled us to get home and go over the loot. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to explore all the sellers. I got bogged down in the glasswares and VHS tapes. I even missed out on the hot dogs, which always taste excellent somehow – probably because of the atmosphere. That’s how it goes.

I watched Raiders of Wu-Tang, and unfortunately it was one of those Kung Fu movies that really stinks. That wasn’t enough punishment, so I watched The Return of Captain Invincible. I’d mentioned this earlier, and now I wish I’d not ventured too close to this one. Good, grief. This movie is a warning to all reckless fools in search of bad movies that are good. No one I know had ever heard of this movie and now I know why. It’s unredeemingly awful. The movie tries to be a superhero version of Rocky Horror and fails miserably. The only tolerable moments are when Christopher Lee is on screen, and even then it’s eye-gouging misery to watch grown men and women humiliate themselves for public consumption in this manner. I still don’t know what happened in the movie, and I watched it! I get jumbled images of the President singing to his staff, a battle with vacuum cleaners, a fire breathing Volkswagen Bug, and numerous scenes with magnetic powers causing women’s clothes to pop off. Words fail me.

Which means I was ready to strike out a third time, of course. I watched the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man starring Nicolas Cage and while it was no Captain Invincible, it was amazingly awful. I haven’t seen so many mainstream actors and actresses throw their careers into the gutter in a single movie like this since Dungeons and Dragons. Unlike Captain Invincible, there are numerous moments of unintentional humor, as this clip attests. My favorite is the “get off the bike now” scene, where Molly Parker’s fine work on Six feet Under and Deadwood evaporates in less than three lines, and Nicolas Cage goes from Moonstruck magic to Evil Dead minus the funny on a dime. Truly, there are moments of terrible movie making that defy all rules of logic and this movie is full of them. I’ll never look at a bear suit the same way again.

Luckily, K was there with a resuscitator kit to bring me out of shock and confusion. Third season of House and the tried and true formula of jerk doctor solves mystery illness with loads of wacky wit and irascible shenanigans! Okay, much better. I think somebody needs to pilot the Netflix Queue for a while. Watching the detritus to fertilize my brain and make it a happy medium for good ideas.

Talk about doomsville city at the garden. We had a frost finally in late October, after having a record hot month. The majority of plants left all seem to have taken a major blow. Even the weeds are getting nervous. The bees are gone, and the general insect population seems to have cleared out. The birds are still around, but not to the degree they were a month ago. K and I were busy scavenging up what we could in the way of herbs, but hoo boy it was brutal out there in the trenches.

Tomatoes go bye-bye. The only thing left is the lettuce, which we harvested gratefully and had a small salad with our dinner, hooray! Pretty soon it’ll be time to dig up the horseradish, I can’t wait! Unfortunately, half my seeds haven’t dried out right, and have grown horrible molds. Still, not bad for my first try. I harvested the last of the basil, and some oregano for a Pizza of Doom I’m making for work. But it looks like the garden goodies have hit the bed and are passing out of time and space until next time folks.

Since it’s Halloweenie, I need my costume. I dug into my enormous bookshelf of tricks and pulled out a 1976 copy of Make-Up Monsters by Marcia Lynn Cox. Oh, I gots ideas galore thanks to this book. Hopefully, with the make-up stuff I have acquired, things will come out neat. Some of these, I haven’t tried out since I went trick or treating with my cousins or my elementary school friends. Oh yes, and I scored a pumpkin, though I’m guessing I’ll be my usual unskilled self and create a rather mundane jack-o-lantern. I don’t know. I just haven’t got the right touch for doing a pumpkin right. Maybe I need a kung fu master to show me what I’m missing. And of course the bowl is filled with candy for the screaming brats. Hopefully K won’t eat all the Mr. Goodbars.

My friend, Dr. C, called me up the other day and we rapped about what he’s been up to. I’m totally psyched for him to be doing what he’s doing. He’s been busting his buns through med school and his residency, and now he’s finally at the point where the powering up starts. Basically, he’s getting to write his own ticket for the hospital he’s going to be working at, and he’ll be living in a fabulous area for his family (and dog). I’m very happy for him, because there were some times where his life was pretty bleak and I was very worried for him.

That brings up another old friend from way back, someone whom I haven’t spoken with in a long time and only hear of through the astrosending, but I was thinking about a lot in the last week. Mainly in the terms of some spiritual connections we made back in the day, which still resonate with me now. Looks like she’ll be getting a website soon, which I’ll shamelessly plug here, but it’s not up yet. So get kraken, Xtine!

Going even further in the wayback machine on YouTube, I found someone posted a copy of The Frog Prince, with Kermit the Frog and Robin the Brave, plus Sweetums the Ogre before he was made safe for work consumption. Oh, wow, this takes me back a ways. I had this on vinyl, along with many other records, and played it often as a kid. But now it’s unavailable on DVD, and only rarely can you catch it on cable (when I was still mooching off my folks). That’s a shame, because the musical numbers are fantastic, and the story itself is both charming and wholesome. I still have the record, but it’s in rough shape. I’d love to get my paws on this one. Still, to see it on YouTube brings me to a deep place inside full of happy feelings and warm thoughts.

This weekend Lush came out with some new products, so K hinted that we ought to go to the nearest store and check them out. Since I was out of bath bombs and shampoo bars, I thought today is the day we replenish our ammunition or perish. Pricey luxury stuff, but its on my top list of bath goodies so we had to go. I stocked up on my usual array of nice things and she got herself some hair treatment prizes. K then proceeded to cut her hair, change it into a nice cerise color, and pamper it with wonderful hair-treatment goodness. Me, I’m set for the next alchemical treatment. I started using a new flavor of shampoo bar and so far its got good value. I was getting annoyed with the generic soup du jour of shampoo you can get at any supermarket, anywhere in crumbsville.

And I worked on my book. I finally decided on a teaser page to show you all. One that doesn’t reveal too much, but gives some good thoughts on what I’m about. I just have to turn it into a PDF and post it, which given the Halloweenie whackiness, might be a few days. I’m 70% through the revisions, so I’m getting closer to my current goal. I’ve accumulated a list of things that will have to be addressed in the polish stage, but I think most of it is minor work. It may be that my work will have only just begun after I finish my revisions, but it’s a major goal just the same. I’m still considering my cover. What color it will be, what the picture and text will consist of, and the spine. I’m not satisfied with my notes, so I predict I’ll have to spend more time on this when I’m not distracted.

I hung out with my gamer friends, and it was a blast. We watched the unimaginably horrible Universal Soldier: The Return and had a lot of fun mocking it. The game we played was a nice little gem called Arkham Horror, which is based on the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos. In a nutshell, it’s the 1930s, and alien horrors are coming into the town of Arkham as precursors to the outright monster apocalypse of a randomly generated Elder God of Evil. Players take the part of archetypes from the era (Flapper, Gangster, Archaeologist, etc.) and try to gain the knowledge and power to kill the monsters and defeat the ultimate bad monster before the town is destroyed.

It’s one of those games with tokens for every single thing in the game, and it’s a long game, but the mechanics seemed solid and the setting was hard not to get into. Everyone cooperates to stop the monsters instead of competing against each other. And the artwork and production values are very high. It was a blast walking around with my researcher and checking out all the various spooky places for clues and fighting off ghouls and alien fungi with my pistols.

I’ve been trying to record my dreams this October, but something about them has not wanted to be put down on paper. The messages from the unconscious haven’t wanted any photographs taken at their press conference, I suppose. As the Celtic New Year draws to a close, I’ve got a lot to ruminate on from this last year. A lot has happened, both in the external world and the internal.

I think the “cold” war has been won. The germs are giving up the ghost to the combined pesto-pasta and tomato slice beatdown with a dram of fresh squeezed orange juice. Both K and I appear to be improving rapidly, and are getting main power back. We spent the weekend catching up on life patrol and the maintenance of our Slack pool.

She bought herself some new jeans, as her current selection was getting beyond threadbare and the ability for the astronautics fields via sewing to repair. I spotted for some Halloween goodies, as I think this will be a Celtic New Year where I have the motivation to actually dress up. I’m going to be Bloody Gore Face! Aieee! We also got ourselves a new futon, as the previous one had decided it just didn’t have the will to go on anymore. To recap, clothes, decorations and a good night’s sleep vitaly important to well-being. I see my Sims bars going up now. All about the tyranny of objects drill sergeant!

Long range patrol even brought back some fascinating tidbits from the internets for me to mull over. The uncommonly cool Designated Sidekick is doing a survey on what people want from their comics. I took the survey (it’s a long one), and have to say it was informative just considering the questions. I want sex and violence in my comics, and the mask is a must-have, but I’m more interested in believability and consistency than what superheroes are wearing or that the leaders of a team always have a certain quality. I think it’s ultimately neat that such questions are even being examined now, by someone, rather than relying on the good old staples. The bronze, silver and gold ages of comics are over. Now it’s time to get busy!

Some aliens on other planets are just plain disturbing to my sensibilities, but good grief, bless them for keeping the universe alive! I’d just gotten done talking about Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, and that movie’s musical oddness. Well my science officer told me over in the Occasional Superheroine galaxy, there was a sensor reading of Christopher Lee sings. From an 80’s movie called The Return of Captain Invincible. Dear, sweet baby yeh-seus, I gained some Insanity points. Oh, can’t wait to see this one in its entirety. Christopher Lee certainly has lived a fascinating life!

Meanwhile, back at the bat-garden, the tomatoes continue to go down. The marinara sauce is on back order now, so it’s smooth sailing. But I don’t think we’ll be getting too many more tomatoes out of the deal. Maybe the last wave in the next two weeks, but then that’s it. The herbs are all going to flower, and it’s gotten harder to harvest them regularly. farming isn’t just growing and harvesting, it’s also preserving and storing them properly. The Jalapeno plant refuses to give up, however, and this brave little plant is putting forth a nice juicy array of peppers that are all turning red now. Wow, love to ya, little plant. You go!

We did the fertilizer thing, did some weeding, though the pesky weeds have free run of the place. Too many orcs for this tag team to take on. We’re going to have to call in the garden weasel or something. A huge wolf spider jumped out of its burrow, deciding that the watering was not to its liking and ran for the storm shelter. Sheesh, talk about what big fangs you have! Which brought me to thinking about how K and I have been battling a lot of spiders lately.

A host of them have been running loose in large numbers on the bottom floor. Even the cats, who do cave cricket patrol, leave them alone. I’ve had to squash these intruders, because I resent having my body turned into an emergency liquid nutrient supply when the lesser insects get overwhelmed. And man, reddish translucent scary spiders (Gnaphosids?), brown nasty hairy biters (Sac Spiders?), and even a few large rapid-moving wolf-like spiders (Wandering Spiders?). What, did I just enter a sequel to The Giant Spider Invasion?

Love that movie. Great late night show for a kid to watch and get scared out of his wits! Special guest stars are Alan Hale Jr., also known as “The Skipper” from Gilligan’s Island, and Leslie Parrish, also known as the inspiration for Richard Bach’s soulmate novel The Bridge Across Forever and the crewmember who decides to go with Khan in the Star Trek episode where Ricardo Monteban tries to kill Kirk with his “genetic super-soldier” army. Both Alan and Leslie are outstanding avatars of cultural development in The Giant Spider Invasion.

I will note that the main female character, a scientist played by Barbara Hale, survives in the movie. I attribute this to her having a pair of pants on at all times. The women who run around without any pants on do not fare so well, as you can see in the trailer. Remember, being a sexy woman in a movie nearly always equals death, injury or unconsciousness! Well, at least there’s a cheesy giant spider wrecking havoc in downtown that looks suspiciously like a modified VW bug. You get your culture points where you can get ’em!

I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite goodies in the Slack menagerie, and I figured I might pass them along to some of you looking for Scooby clues to your own personal mystery. I’m something of an explorer junkie, and I get a thrill out of finding new and exciting things that delight me. I have a certain rarefied taste for the weird, the exotic, the forgotten, and the “snake fingers”. Or at least I tell myself I do!

There’s an artist named Eric Shanower, who is doing a comic book adaptation of the Trojan War, called Age of Bronze. When he completes a story arc, it gets published in a graphic novel (I’m sorry, “trade paperback”) form by Image Comics. Two of the seven volumes, A Thousand Ships and Sacrifice are out now, and the third volume is coming out by the end of this year. I’m getting the shakes just thinking about it.

The writing and the artwork are nothing short of stunning. Eric has studied his subject well, and he manages to make the culture and the historical events come alive in a way I’ve never quite seen before. Every character comes across so you know who they are, and what part they are playing. The clothes, the weapons, the intrigues and customs are so fascinating, I can’t pull away. I highly recommend anyone who loves ancient cultures, epic stories, or human drama pick this up. The realism and the believability are very high. The sex and violence are handled very well, played out as matter-of-fact experiences suitable to the era. There are no cheap thrills here.

Two things really move me about the series. One is the way in which the “gods” are handled. When it comes to the supernatural, dreams become messages from the Gods, centaurs and nymphs are a particular type of people studying a certain kind of craft, and storms become visible manifestations of a deity’s divine disfavor. It’s all in their heads, but the psychic influence is very real. The characters in the story come in all shapes and sizes of “belief”, but they all accept the supernatural as a given explanation for anything beyond their immediate psychological experience. It reminds me of the closeness of aboriginal peoples to the unconscious, and yet these are all characters who are setting down one of the foundations of western culture. It’s fascinating.

The other thing that moves me is the way in which the story makes the Trojan War accessible and interesting. I just haven’t had an interest in reading about the Trojan War, even though it’s something that is set down as a classic of “literature”, simply because nothing hooked me about it. But this stuff is awesome. Eric’s writing manages to juggle dozens of names, kingdoms, and events and keep them down-to-earth and understandable. You want to know about these people, because you become invested in their stories, from the problems of King Agamemnon, to the destiny of Achilles and the hubris of Paris, it’s captivating in a way that makes history (such as we know of it) fun and exciting.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m a “gamer”. I have a lot of hours of the roleplaying game culture under my belt, some of it productive, some of it not so much. Right now, there’s an independent movement in the roleplaying game community, and it’s producing some of the best gameplay and theory I’ve ever seen. While the big models lose money and produce increasingly meaningless drivel, creator-owned and developed games are hitting the market from left field in a way that is exciting and amazing.

One of the games from this fertile field is Lumpley’s Dogs In The Vineyard. You play the watchdogs of God in a wild west that never was. Essentially, you are traveling witch hunters who deliver the mail, lend a hand in the community, and purge the faithful of their demons and sin. The background is some of the most awesome stuff I’ve ever read in a roleplaying game. The rules are pretty simple; you have a character sheet of “traits” that measure how much narrative control you have over conflicts. When there’s a conflict, everyone rolls dice and describes how they bring their traits into the fray. The dice are used like cards in a series of “raises” and “sees”, until somebody runs out of luck and has to give. The game can be played in four hours and tossed aside, or played for long-term character development.

The gamemaster is a just another “player”, and the group has to collaboratively create the game’s story as it moves along. There’s no “prep”, really. You make up characters, the gamemaster makes up a few proto-NPCs and a basic town structure, and everything gets created as the play moves along. Players are expected to be effective and win, and the gamemaster is not allowed to have an outcome in mind. The challenge is in coming up with conflicts that escalate out of control so that when the players get to decide the outcome, they have to decide if it’s worth the cost.

What I like about this game is how the focus is all about the moral decisions of the players. People do the unexpected, and the story can change at a moment’s notice. At the end of it I’m exhausted and exhilarated. You can play with timing and effects so that the conflicts work out in amazing ways, giving the group a lot of freedom to decide on outcomes that make sense and are cool. You don’t sit there and expect the gamemaster to entertain you, or lead you along a story they’ve already written with a few “yes” and “no” answers along the way. I haven’t felt this hopeful and delighted about gaming since 1987. It’s an explosion of creative energy.

There was a remake of The Wicker Man, starring Nicholas Cage, which probably has to be one of the funniest crummy movies I’ve seen in a while. It made me go back and watch the original starring Christopher Lee (You know, the dude that played Saruman in that horrible Two Towers gorefest) and Britt Ekland (Who played the “Bond girl” Mary Goodnight from The Man With The Golden Gun, which also, maybe not-so-coincidentally starred Christopher Lee). I also cracked out the CD and listened to the music from the film. Crumbs, its all evidence supporting Gore Vidal’s contention that good movies only get made by accident in the “entertainment industry”. Or maybe it was an accident that this movie slipped through the cracks in the mid-seventies and was made at all. The story of how the movie survived is worth reading about.

If you haven’t seen it, an English policeman comes to an isolated island off the coast to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan Morrison. Lord Summerisle (played by Christopher Lee), the local aristocrat, runs the island. The town’s source of wealth is a yearly harvest of apples. The policeman finds that nobody knows who the girl is, and that everyone practices a form of paganism based on the old traditions of their ancestors. The policeman is a deeply devout Christian, so he soon comes into conflict with the island inhabitants. Despite the uncooperative nature of the townsfolk and Lord Summerisle, the policeman learns that last year’s harvest failed and in a few days the missing girl will be sacrificed to restore the fertility of the apple orchards!

There’s a sinister aspect to the townsfolk, and yet they are all very musically inclined. Many people who watch this horror classic are stunned to encounter the musical numbers of this film, and the context in which they are presented. The musicians who worked on the soundtrack were pure talent, and have crafted some memorable numbers. From “The Landlord’s Daughter” sung by the men in the pub to honor the gifts of Venus, to the tense fear of “Chop Chop” as the townsfolk place their heads one by one in a circle of intertwined swords, hoping the Hobby Horse doesn’t choose their head. You will certainly laugh at the fiddle work of the “Maypole”. The pagan version of sex-education is, well, original I suppose.

The reason to check it out is because there’s nothing else like it. The movie stands on it’s own as a unique work of art never to be repeated. It really is one of the best horror movies ever made, with the theme of personal and group ignorance at the end haunting you in a way that won’t let you sleep at night. The town and it’s inhabitants have to be seen to be believed, and Christopher Lee gives what is probably, and rightly so if it is, the best performance of his entire career as Lord Summerisle. Brrr.

In any musical genre there’s the dross mixed in with the gold. I have a hard time finding a dark ambient artist that tops the spectral atmospheres and cavernous sensations of Lustmord. The entire catalog of this artist is showing up on Soleilmoon, and I’ve been snapping them up as I get the bonus warp power from my engineer.

I came across some scattered MP3s that friends had on their memory sticks and I was like, “whoa”. My tastes are really weird and unpredictable, and part of that combination involves music that I can space out to, relax with, and go into deep imaginations with. So when I heard the landscapes of a couple of tracks off of Stalker and Where the Black Stars Hang, I had to see for myself if the rest was any good.

Well, save for Metavoid, I have yet to be disappointed. The aural landscapes Lustmord paints are dark, threatening, and deep. It’s like going into the depths of Loch Ness and touching the slimy back of something alive, encountering the monolith of 2001: A Space Odessey, or traveling through the secret tunnels of the Great Pyramid and witnessing a rite never seen by outsiders. You can’t help but walk away from these soundscapes and feel stunned. Gotta love it! I’ve still got a few left to snatch up, and am looking forward to further journeys into the unknowable that Lustmord makes possible.

But don’t take my word for it, scare these goodies up in your online search and see what other people have to say. It’s all about the lucky coincidence. These veins of mithril found me, maybe they’ll find you!

The so-called “Magic Kingdom” doesn’t seem to have what it takes for me to take notice these days. The mouse has roared, Neverland offers discount coupons, and I’m clapping for Tinkerbell, but she’s passed out drunk on the floor with phone cameras snapping away. Where did it all go wrong? The decadence of King Arthur’s court can only end in Mordred at this stage.

Yet, there is a time I remember when I lived for the Magic Kingdom and all its wonders. Perhaps the decrepitude of today is worth it for the glories of yesterday. I suppose it’s a fair trade, and I’ll always have Paris, if you want to look at it in a stoic, Humphrey Bogart kind of way. I loved Peter Pan; he was my idol. Dressed up for him on Halloween once, and I probably have every line from the record memorized for all eternity in some reptilian part of my medulla oblongata.

But today, I’m jonesin’ for a hit of one of my favorite all time movies, Escape to Witch Mountain. The movie is about as primitive as you can get by today’s standards, but imagination needs so little to take flight, I don’t care. Mild spoilers follow.

Tony and Tia live at the orphanage. They are siblings but don’t remember much about their parents, save jumbled images that come to them in dreams. The other kids don’t like them, because they’re weird. I’ll say! The two children can communicate with each other telepathically, and possess varying degrees of telekinesis (the ability to move objects with the mind) and precognition (the ability to see the future). Tia can sense the future better, while Tony can move objects better, but only when using his harmonica as a focus. Tia also has a pet black cat named “Winky” with whom she can communicate with.

One day, they save a rich, evil multi-millionaire from death in an auto accident by predicting it and warning him. He adopts them, and gives them anything a kid could want – huge playrooms with countless toys, tennis courts, horseback riding, the good life. But they can’t leave his estate, and they have to predict the stock market for him. He’s got lots of guards and attack dogs to keep them from attempting any foolish ideas.

Plot devices move forward and Tia discovers a clue that might lead them to answers about their past: A place called Witch Mountain. So using their powers, they make a break for it and become runaways looking for Witch Mountain. They experience many hardships, and find both friends and enemies along the way. Meanwhile, Mr. Evil Capitalist does his best to find and recapture his prized “assets”.

In particular, they find an old man driving around in a Winnebago camper who has become bitter at the way his life has turned out. He’s a good man who just needs to learn to let go of the past and live again, and the two kids in true mouse moral fashion, bring out his true character. He becomes their companion and helps them thereafter at great “risk” to himself.

Since it’s a mouse movie, of course the children reach their goal, and find the answer to who they are, and what they are. Happy ending? You betcha! Hey, I bought into it; I’m not going to complain.

What particularly moves me is the interaction between the old man and the children. He very closely resembles the person they need to speak with at Witch Mountain, and so it makes sense that they would form a bond with him. But I can’t help but feel that the main character of the movie is the old man, rather than Tony and Tia. Their adventure is important, and the dangers they face very real, but there’s almost a strangely divine character to them, as though their problems were of a higher order then mere human existence. Though I’m sure they operate just fine as a means for children viewers to project upon and imagine themselves as being!

The old man has no magic powers, and it is his assistance that the children need. Their predicament only allows them to travel so far, so fast. Being an adult, he is able to investigate for them in ways they could not, and take care of them in ways they haven’t learned for themselves. But it goes both ways. They provide psychic assistance when his own experience can’t meet the demands of their ordeal, and they give him a joyous sense of being alive again. He gets to protect the children he never had, and makes peace with the demons that have haunted him. The scene where Tia tells him exactly what is eating him alive is devastating, and a release. Pretty heady stuff for a kids show. But sometimes the message gets through in the most mysterious of ways. In the end, he is reconnected with himself, and is the real winner. The bad guy should count his blessings. A lesson about greed, perhaps.

I never tire of seeing it. Simple, decent length, fantastical elements, moral lessons, and a solid story that resolves itself. The mouse can keep his Mulan 8 “The Final Chapter Begins” and Cinderella 4 “In the Hood”. I got the hookup right here.