Men look good in cowboy hats
Random: Today, the cat stepped on the on/off switch to my power strip and I lost an amount of work that might be roughly estimated at "a whole lot."
Grr.
On New Year's, Dustin and I walked down to the beach. There are long rocky breakwaters for the Marina, and the bike path is nicely kept-up, and it was all in all more pleasant than I expected though next time I'll need sunglasses. It was also 70 degrees. On the 31st of December.
I'll never get used to this.
Anyway, I went to bed at 11:30, but it turns out the Marina fireworks happen about a mile away STRAIGHT out my bedroom window, bright enough to wake me up. So, actually, I watched fireworks with Dusin for New Year's. Yaay. (Also? The fourth of July here will probably be awesome).
I have to do a traffic school thing, for that ticket. (The court makes you pay $39 bucks just for the privilege of being allowed to pay the traffic school itself $20, but I digress) All it consists of is "read this material, answer questions at the end of each section" so, AWESOME. Because I don't have a lot of skills in the world, but "skim for section headings, numbers, and definitions, and answer questions" is most definetely one of them. At four sections of maybe 15k words each, I'm thinking... let's say an hour.
Except that the court mandates eight hours of traffic school, so there's a timer on the website. It's divided into all these little tiny subsections that count down a 15-minute timer until they declare you done with it. And the timer only counts down when that tab is focused. And if you don't move your mouse or scroll for too long, the timer stops again. So I have to sit here, BABYSITTING this damn timer for fifteen minutes on a section that takes less than a minute to skim and I can't do ANYTHING ELSE. I did that for hours on Tuesday and all evening last night and I still have hours to go, because it takes LONGER than eight hours because the timer keeps turning off and... GAH.
They expect you to take eight hours to read significantly less than 100,000 words. The hell?
So I have read and watched a ton of stuff recently, and I was just blown away by a lot of it.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
This is normally described as a post-apocalypse in the grand SF tradition, but it's a massively different feel. Most SF post-apocalypse works with a world without PEOPLE, but with a basically functioning ecosphere (even if it is radically changed from the current one). In The Road, we have an utterly dead planet (we see no plants still alive except some fungus, and no animals except a few feral dogs) but still with a human population, largely cannibal. The nature of the disaster is never made clear, and the book picks up several years after whatever it was. It's also not clear how complete or widespread this devastation is, whether there is any hope of some kind of new ecosystem coming together. These things aren't relevant to our man, who can see absolutely no farther than immediate survival.
The entire thing takes place in a weird shadow-world, with a sky that never clears of clouds of constantly falling ash and never gets bright even at noon. As the man starves, his thoughts become even more dim and only vaguely connected to the world around him. It's pretty effective.
McCarthy's prose is brilliant, right at the most basic level. The way he puts words together just... it makes your chest constrict, makes it a little hard to breathe for just simple, mundane moments. Every sentence falls into order like pearls sliding on a string, soft startling jewels all in a row. He writes about a world of death and cannibals and rusting metal and rotting corpses and fire and ash and darkness and slow starvation, and every moment of it just glows from the inside until your heart aches with the sheer quiet, knife-sharp beauty of it all. ETA:I just found this review: Few authors are as dedicated to the art of pastiche as McCarthy. It’s a debt he acknowledges in the first of two interviews his agent managed to wrangle out of him: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books,” he remarks. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”
It then goes on to talk about The Road through a lens of intertextuality, and pretty specific reference to his older books, Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men. Especially the issues of fatherhood, literal and cultural and metaphorical, connection to, disconnection from- the essential tension in The Road between "Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground" and "the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time." This review makes McCarthy make sense to me in a way he didn't before, or did only on a vague, unarticulated level.
I Am Legend
So I guess Will Smith can act, huh? No, really, I'm blown away by him. And, of course, by Sam. And by their fantastic CGI for a very creepy, haunting, overgrown Manhattan. There were emotionally manipulative bits, but not as bad as I was afraid of, the emotional arc of his insanity and loneliness and sacrifice worked well, the zombies were quiet scary, and the ending voice over made me sob like a baby. Good show.
3:10 to Yuma
I spent most of this movie laughing in pure joy at the massive slashiness. Ben/Dan! *grabby hands*
I do not, however, want Ben/Charlie. Because I think Charlie is a such a FANTASTIC character just the way he is- completely psychotic and I kind of like him as a completely cold sociopath without, y'know, normal sexual urges. That might be just me. But I do kind of want Ben/Will hero-worship future fic. A little. You know, when Will is maybe 19 and he's trying to run the ranch and take care of his younger brother and mother and stretch that $1000 windfall even as he starts to get beat down by life the way Dan was and he's not having all those experiences that he feels that he's entitled to as a young man and he's trying to remember what happened to all those big dreams he had when he was 14 and helping his Pa bring Ben Wade to the 3:10 train... that's when Ben shows up. Porn ensues.
Stop looking at me like that. I'm not gonna write it. Someone else should.
Anyway, this was fantastically fun. Ben Wade belongs in that pantheon of Truly Awesome Villains. Like everyone else on the whole planet (it seems like EVERYBODY saw this before I did) I adore the fact that it's just a straight-up Western. It doesn't try to be anything else, no strange narrative structure or gimmick, just a Western, and it is just STEEPED in the genre. The settings and visuals are stunning and detailed and immersive and perfect, and Christian Bale and Russell Crowe are both too perfect for words in these parts (Russell Crowe especially is living in that area where the actor's public personality interacts with and informs the character's in really interesting ways- which is the polite way of saying Russell Crowe is pretty good at being a charming asshole). The plot is so simple- transport person X from point A to point B while people try to kill you- but it works just perfectly as a framework for intense character development and wonderful moments of interaction and connection and strongly drawn themes and environment and texture and more texture.
Completely apart from any subtextual vibes that may or may not be there (and they ARE here, trust me), Westerns always strike me as inherently slashy, in that they're thematically obsessed with masculinity: performance of, maintenance of, perception of, proof of, defense of, and the language and the skills and the props that go along with it in this particular context. In this movie that obsession moves from underlying to overt theme (Dan: worthiness/heroism of, very gendered construction) and it's just... *hands* just really suited to slashy fangirls who like to wallow stuff like this? Whatever, this will be a really long essay if I keep typing, so:
Really, really, really enjoyable movie for several reasons.
Grr.
On New Year's, Dustin and I walked down to the beach. There are long rocky breakwaters for the Marina, and the bike path is nicely kept-up, and it was all in all more pleasant than I expected though next time I'll need sunglasses. It was also 70 degrees. On the 31st of December.
I'll never get used to this.
Anyway, I went to bed at 11:30, but it turns out the Marina fireworks happen about a mile away STRAIGHT out my bedroom window, bright enough to wake me up. So, actually, I watched fireworks with Dusin for New Year's. Yaay. (Also? The fourth of July here will probably be awesome).
I have to do a traffic school thing, for that ticket. (The court makes you pay $39 bucks just for the privilege of being allowed to pay the traffic school itself $20, but I digress) All it consists of is "read this material, answer questions at the end of each section" so, AWESOME. Because I don't have a lot of skills in the world, but "skim for section headings, numbers, and definitions, and answer questions" is most definetely one of them. At four sections of maybe 15k words each, I'm thinking... let's say an hour.
Except that the court mandates eight hours of traffic school, so there's a timer on the website. It's divided into all these little tiny subsections that count down a 15-minute timer until they declare you done with it. And the timer only counts down when that tab is focused. And if you don't move your mouse or scroll for too long, the timer stops again. So I have to sit here, BABYSITTING this damn timer for fifteen minutes on a section that takes less than a minute to skim and I can't do ANYTHING ELSE. I did that for hours on Tuesday and all evening last night and I still have hours to go, because it takes LONGER than eight hours because the timer keeps turning off and... GAH.
They expect you to take eight hours to read significantly less than 100,000 words. The hell?
So I have read and watched a ton of stuff recently, and I was just blown away by a lot of it.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
This is normally described as a post-apocalypse in the grand SF tradition, but it's a massively different feel. Most SF post-apocalypse works with a world without PEOPLE, but with a basically functioning ecosphere (even if it is radically changed from the current one). In The Road, we have an utterly dead planet (we see no plants still alive except some fungus, and no animals except a few feral dogs) but still with a human population, largely cannibal. The nature of the disaster is never made clear, and the book picks up several years after whatever it was. It's also not clear how complete or widespread this devastation is, whether there is any hope of some kind of new ecosystem coming together. These things aren't relevant to our man, who can see absolutely no farther than immediate survival.
The entire thing takes place in a weird shadow-world, with a sky that never clears of clouds of constantly falling ash and never gets bright even at noon. As the man starves, his thoughts become even more dim and only vaguely connected to the world around him. It's pretty effective.
McCarthy's prose is brilliant, right at the most basic level. The way he puts words together just... it makes your chest constrict, makes it a little hard to breathe for just simple, mundane moments. Every sentence falls into order like pearls sliding on a string, soft startling jewels all in a row. He writes about a world of death and cannibals and rusting metal and rotting corpses and fire and ash and darkness and slow starvation, and every moment of it just glows from the inside until your heart aches with the sheer quiet, knife-sharp beauty of it all. ETA:I just found this review: Few authors are as dedicated to the art of pastiche as McCarthy. It’s a debt he acknowledges in the first of two interviews his agent managed to wrangle out of him: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books,” he remarks. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”
It then goes on to talk about The Road through a lens of intertextuality, and pretty specific reference to his older books, Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men. Especially the issues of fatherhood, literal and cultural and metaphorical, connection to, disconnection from- the essential tension in The Road between "Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground" and "the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time." This review makes McCarthy make sense to me in a way he didn't before, or did only on a vague, unarticulated level.
I Am Legend
So I guess Will Smith can act, huh? No, really, I'm blown away by him. And, of course, by Sam. And by their fantastic CGI for a very creepy, haunting, overgrown Manhattan. There were emotionally manipulative bits, but not as bad as I was afraid of, the emotional arc of his insanity and loneliness and sacrifice worked well, the zombies were quiet scary, and the ending voice over made me sob like a baby. Good show.
3:10 to Yuma
I spent most of this movie laughing in pure joy at the massive slashiness. Ben/Dan! *grabby hands*
I do not, however, want Ben/Charlie. Because I think Charlie is a such a FANTASTIC character just the way he is- completely psychotic and I kind of like him as a completely cold sociopath without, y'know, normal sexual urges. That might be just me. But I do kind of want Ben/Will hero-worship future fic. A little. You know, when Will is maybe 19 and he's trying to run the ranch and take care of his younger brother and mother and stretch that $1000 windfall even as he starts to get beat down by life the way Dan was and he's not having all those experiences that he feels that he's entitled to as a young man and he's trying to remember what happened to all those big dreams he had when he was 14 and helping his Pa bring Ben Wade to the 3:10 train... that's when Ben shows up. Porn ensues.
Stop looking at me like that. I'm not gonna write it. Someone else should.
Anyway, this was fantastically fun. Ben Wade belongs in that pantheon of Truly Awesome Villains. Like everyone else on the whole planet (it seems like EVERYBODY saw this before I did) I adore the fact that it's just a straight-up Western. It doesn't try to be anything else, no strange narrative structure or gimmick, just a Western, and it is just STEEPED in the genre. The settings and visuals are stunning and detailed and immersive and perfect, and Christian Bale and Russell Crowe are both too perfect for words in these parts (Russell Crowe especially is living in that area where the actor's public personality interacts with and informs the character's in really interesting ways- which is the polite way of saying Russell Crowe is pretty good at being a charming asshole). The plot is so simple- transport person X from point A to point B while people try to kill you- but it works just perfectly as a framework for intense character development and wonderful moments of interaction and connection and strongly drawn themes and environment and texture and more texture.
Completely apart from any subtextual vibes that may or may not be there (and they ARE here, trust me), Westerns always strike me as inherently slashy, in that they're thematically obsessed with masculinity: performance of, maintenance of, perception of, proof of, defense of, and the language and the skills and the props that go along with it in this particular context. In this movie that obsession moves from underlying to overt theme (Dan: worthiness/heroism of, very gendered construction) and it's just... *hands* just really suited to slashy fangirls who like to wallow stuff like this? Whatever, this will be a really long essay if I keep typing, so:
Really, really, really enjoyable movie for several reasons.