This is your brain.

This is your brain on drugs;



Any questions? Yes, I imagine you have quite a few.

Your brain is so ginger it's called Ginger and she's one of the central characters of a movie called Ginger Snaps, a Canadian horror movie from 2000 that assumes werewolf stories are more interesting if they're just allegories for pubescent drug abuse. Of course, the opposite is true.

Two sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and the aforementioned Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) are rebellious late bloomers, fifteen and sixteen years old respectively but neither has gotten her period yet. Behaviourally they resist growing up as well, displaying no interest in boys and contempt for any traditionally female behaviour. The two pose for each other in graphic photographs faking their deaths and turn the series in for a class project, an example of their general obsession with the macabre and rebellious.



Ginger changes when she gets her period and a werewolf, smelling the blood, bites her, making her a werewolf too, which means her body goes through frightening changes and she takes an interest in boys. In fact, she becomes rather promiscuous, much to Brigitte's dismay as the two consequently find themselves growing apart as Ginger voyages into experimenting with her body and social identity and Brigitte is stuck behind with hair that looks like a wig.



Wikipedia mentions critics have likened the film to the works of David Cronenberg. A comparison that shows a weak grasp of what distinguishes Cronenberg's films as well as the general point of symbolism in film.

Take, perhaps, the closest Cronenberg approximate to Ginger Snaps--The Fly, a film that also features a character's monstrous transformation and which focuses on how that transformation affects his relationships.

Could we say that Brundle's transformation is a metaphor for drug abuse, for mental illness, for the complicated, inexplicable forces that drive wedges between people? For obsession to the point of self-destruction, the end result of admirable creative or scientific pursuits to which one has dedicated one's life but have only led to ruin? Of course, The Fly can be interpreted as being any of the above because Cronenberg is wise enough not to anchor it to any one. The Fly is the story of a man turning into a giant fly. If you know how to write people, that's all it needs to be to be a meaningful story.

Ginger Snaps, on the other hand, can only be one thing and it's clumsy for it. Is it really helpful to say a girl who likes sex is a monster? Are murder and cannibalism really as bad as drinking too much alcohol? Identifying with monsters in movies is certainly a legitimate way in which to process a story. Stories about monsters can illuminate aspects of human nature. But Ginger Snaps is silly hyperbole.

Sometimes Gregor Samsa turning into an insect is just Gregor Samsa turning into an insect and he means so much more that way.

Twitter Sonnet #510

Tea leaf parachutes absently invade.
Dandelion liaisons drift through blue.
Plywood's exposed where the fake trees were made.
Wire skies take on the vinegar's hue.
Young linoleum watches surgery.
Domestic Justice Leagues laugh at cold wine.
A dull scalpel inks a film forgery.
Mysterious brains so strip tease with twine.
Hell knows brimstones sell when boiled and sweet.
Dark gum is deceitfully hard as stone.
Math rooms locked down for a prisoner's tweet.
Tragic carrots pursued the traffic cone.
Angry ugly oranges ooze mystery.
Sycamores still mind a ghost history.

Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.

Michael Chabon, from _Mysteries of Pittsburgh_

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In 1975, four years after his suicide attempt, Akira Kurosawa made his first and only Russian film, Dersu Uzala. It's easy to see in it parallels to Kurosawa's life at the time; the movie tells the story, based on the memoirs of explorer Vladmir Arsenyev, of a Nanai hunter named Dersu Uzala who lives alone in the wilderness years after the deaths of his wife and children. One thinks of Kurosawa's exile from the Japanese film industry and his depression over the lack of respect he received from the newer generation of Japanese filmmakers. The film is beautifully shot on location in east Russian wilderness and effectively portrays men struggling to survive in hostile taiga.

In 1902, Arsenyev was captain of a military survey team into eastern Russia where they met Uzala early one evening. Arsenyev was quickly impressed by Dersu's familiarity with the region and asked him to be their guide. Dersu agreed, to their good fortune, as in the film we see the Nanai man repeatedly save the soldiers from death through his knowledge of survival techniques.



In the most memorable scene in the film, Arsenyev and Dersu are separated from the others, lost on a snow covered plain, partly land and partly frozen lake. As night begins to fall, Dersu tells Arsenyev their only chance for survival is to cut grass and cut grass quickly.



When Arsenyev wakes the next morning after collapsing from exhaustion while cutting grass, he finds himself in a crude hut Dersu has made from the piles of grass and some rope.

This is Kurosawa's second colour film and its palette is more restrained than his first, Dodesukaden, and the films that would follow Dersu Uzala. Particularly in the above mentioned scene, the desolate, wind-blown landscape recalls some of Kurosawa's black and white films of the 50s, particularly The Hidden Fortress and Throne of Blood.



Dersu is shown to be a deeply superstitious character who regards all things as possessing sentience: plants, rocks, rivers, and animals. In addition to the cultural separation from the other characters, this further seems to isolate Dersu. He's a hermit whose efforts at survival have made him slightly mad, more than can be explained by religious beliefs. When he shoots a tiger despite his fears regarding how the tiger's spirit might take revenge, he becomes irritable and a difficult companion to Arsenyev's group. Yet Dersu never ceases to have keener instincts and knowledge about the environment than anyone else. It's not unlike Kurosawa, who earned international praise in the 1950s and then met with disaster in the 1960s in terms of his career and his reputation. So the movie can be taken as an assertion of an individual's worth independent of social and professional spheres.

I like to think that I am not a total Torquemada when it comes to historical accuracy in novels set in the medEvil period, but there are some clankers which set me to brooding.

Just as a for instance: it is highly unlikely that an English monk living in an eighth-century monastery would be able to see his reflection in a glass window.

Also, it is just as unlikely that a medieval woman would show a guest into her living room.

I know, I know-- I am just a cranky elitist snob throwing the cold water of historical continuity upon some poor author's creativity, but I can't help feeling that authors should make some pretense of not gratuitously crossing over the yellow line while blithely barreling down the highway of poetic license.

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It's not hard to see sometimes why Mikio Naruse movies are so rarely released in the West. I can't imagine many in the U.S. would understand what drives the primary conflict in 1964's Midareru (乱れる, a verb; becoming chaotic. Western title Yearning), which concerns a young man falling in love with the wife of his brother, who has been dead for many years. The movie's not one of Naruse's best, but the first half in particular shows his skill at portraying the destructiveness of capitalism and socially endorsed selfishness.



Naruse regular Hideko Takamine plays the widow, Reiko, who has managed and brought success to the small grocery owned by her late husband's family in the years following his death in World War II. Koji, played by Yuuzou Kayama, is the younger brother and seen as rightful heir to the grocery, but he leads an unfocused, self-destructive lifestyle of alcohol and gambling. We eventually learn that he's fallen in love with Reiko and it's his inability to deal with this fact that has led to various attempts to tranquilise himself.

A supermarket has opened in the town as the movie begins, marking the transition in Japan from an industry dominated by small businesses like Reiko's. Koji's sisters conspire to tear down the grocery and replace it with their own supermarket with Koji as manager along with the husband of one of the sisters, offering Reiko only a small position.



My favourite scene of the movie involves the two sisters explaining to their mother and Koji how sensible their plan is, in part because they're essentially pushing Reiko out of the family. A scene before this had shown Koji's mother and sister delicately trying to explain to Reiko how inconvenient her place was in the family. The sister asks her to think how awkward it would be when Koji marries and she became a nuisance to the real woman of the household.



It was a big part of Naruse's talent that he was able to create scenes of people being thoroughly cruel but sounding merely sensible, constructing scenarios based on tradition to their own benefit requiring the pain and sacrifice of someone with better character, like Reiko.



The tormented love story takes over the second half of the film. It's all right, but has none of the impressive, nuanced cruelty of the first half.

The battery's still dead in my car--I got a ride to school from my mother but I walked home. This is the route I took, starting at the bottom from Grossmont College;



I think that's around four miles. It took me about an hour and a half. It wasn't bad at all, especially compared to the last time I walked home from college, which was a night class when my ride unexpectedly cancelled on me. On that occasion, I walked this route;



Which I think is around eight miles. I don't think I reached home until 1am, though I did stop to eat at a Denny's--this was at least twelve years ago.

I didn't know then about the little hiking trail to the west of the college, linking El Cajon to Santee--different parts of San Diego County. Though I probably wouldn't have used it so late at night anyway. I found it in October 2011 when I shot this video there;



Here's a picture of the area to the northwest of the college from the second floor of the science building;



One can actually see a residential area in Santee so I could tell it wouldn't be so bad. Certainly not compared to the three to nine hour walks I used to take for no reason whatsoever--I used to love walking a lot. I still feel one knows a place better once one's traversed it on foot.

Here are a few more pictures from my walk to-day;



( Click here to see the restCollapse )

Twitter Sonnet #509

Yellow diamonds distinguish the red one.
Reticent stripes enmesh the school's plaid skirt.
Punitive prams supply rattles of bone.
Obvious cocaine can't hide in the dirt.
Symmetry heals horns misplaced by Vulcan.
Captains can steal random ikons from space.
Posh ships still want to be Solo's Falcon.
Brows hold a serial cameo race.
Translucent buildings taper for a nail.
Hammer cranes query construction helmets.
Picnic ants with no sandwich surely fail.
Candle lit baths are no place for marmots.
Lizardless land licked the wealthy racist.
In heaven's band, a bot is the bassist.

So, while using Bookshare.Org's search engine to find out if it had any books by Lucian, the Roman writer, I discovered that Roman writers named Lucian are pretty much non-existent on Bookshare, but it does possess a quite significant pile of paranormal romances with a character named Lucien. Actually, just yesterday I read an Ellis Peters mystery set at a folk music seminar in some English gothic pile, and the bad boy folk musician was named Lucien. My brain did just experience a blip at the phrase "bad boy folk musician," but the mystery was written in the mid-1960s, so those were more innocent days, I guess.

Anyway, now I am pondering if anyone has compiled a list of the most-used names for sexy bad boys in paranormal romance, and if anyone will ever write a paranormal romance with a bad boy names something like Kevin, or Frank, although I think one of the prerequisites for bad boy names is that they need to be able to be speeled with some sort of ominous darkly-shaded spelling like...help me out here, what are some gothy bad boy names? I just know there is a lot of territory for satiric fan fic here.

This entry was originally posted at http://kestrell.dreamwidth.org/236490.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I hope.

This entry was originally posted at http://kestrell.dreamwidth.org/236263.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Just to clear up any confusion: I am already on DW, under the same name, and have been cross-posting to LJ for months now and, as a matter of fact, I am using the DW post form with the link to cross-post to LJ automatically.

I would be pleased to friend any of my LJ friends who wish to friend me on DW. If you have already friended me on DW and I haven't friended you back yet, please post a comment on DW and I will do that. I also intend on fixing my Facebook feed at some point this week--LJ dropped it at some point and I know someone sent me a post on how to create a Fb feed on DW, but I need to go find that info in my inbox.

When I referred to giving DW my money, I was talking about where my paid account will be, but the DW presence should already be established.

I just saw this message when I attempted to look at my LiveJournal account. I guess I will be officially moving to DreamWidth.