Waterfall Underbelly
Funny day today - reminds me of the book I'm reading. Usually it's people, tones of voice, particular social customs or events that inspire that feeling of literary deja-vu... but today it's all things ambient.
I'm reading J.G. Ballard's Drowned World, wherein solar radiation spikes melt the polar ice caps, delving most everything between the poles into silt-swamped Triassic haze. Lizards and dragonflies burst into enormous mutative sizes, and the biologists picking through the new phyla find that something strange is happening to them, too. It turns out that the very nature of this new earth - its ambient light levels, temperature, background noise of oversized insects - pulls from deep within us ancient genetic memories. The humidity and malaria degenerating the biologists' nervous systems also begins a regression down the physical spinal column itself - into the bottom-most components, which evolved first. Though largely dormant during temperate times, in this new Mesozoic age they are devices for devolving characters - a very interestingly scientific machine-for-fiction Ballard has constructed.
Anyhow, with the haze between streets and fog between blocks the book is harkened to feeling rather than mind, so to speak. It's an endless precession of simulacra.
Supposed to be running a photo shoot later this afternoon for the cover of a play. A friend of mine launched it last spring, so far as the thespian effort was concerned, at a theatre nearby, and now it looks like enough positive attention was generated to give it a publishing run or three. I'm quite excited, though I was hoping for more of a provision from the realm of natural light - setting up lighting rigs in a rusting old bathroom isn't my idea of a great time on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps something underwater... the drowning continues!
Katya flies to California to dance this week, after New York ( - what seems like months was only) two weeks ago, then we take off for a much-needed vacation together after Labour Day. We're heading to Ottawa for a few days to visit (and for me to meet) her brother and sister-in-law, then retreating North to anonymously hidden locales for another week. I think it will be nice to be inaccessible.
For all of those searching for a fabulous-looking ARG, Waking City from the TorGame crowd is coming up very soon... you can even check out the accidentally retroid trailer music I put together, HERE on Google video. I wonder if I could find a way to promote this game through "work?"
ExposedBrain.com Version