Anodyne: 03/01/2015 - 04/01/2015

I have only two emotions:
Careful fear and dead devotion.
I can't get the balance right.
Throw my marbles in the fight.
I see all the ones I wept for
All the things I had it in for
I won't cry until I hear
'cause I was not supposed to be here.

Everything I love is on the table.
Everything I love is out to sea.
I'm not alone,
I'll never be.
- posted by cjb @ 9:47 PM

There's no ghosts in the graveyard
That's not where they live
They float in between us
'what is' and 'what if'
And cast our own shadows
Before our own eyes
You don't get them up here though
They don't come up high

Joy to the city
The parking lot lights
The lion of evening
With the rain in its eyes
Joy to the freeway
Joy to the cars
And joy to you baby, wherever you are
Tonight, tonight, tonight
Tonight, tonight, tonight
- posted by cjb @ 9:33 PM

"With cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, Mitchell evokes the widescreen visual mood of John Carpenter’s Halloween, with its flat light and bland suburban houses lining wide streets (the movie is set in the suburbs of Detroit). And, crucially, he uses as inspiration Carpenter’s method of hiding his killer in the background, out of focus, or far to one side of his widescreen frames.

Another nod to Carpenter is the score, by Disasterpeace, which is partially very modern, loud, and dissonant, and partially reminiscent of Carpenter’s ‘70s music.

The followers in It Follows don’t run. They walk. As do all the best movie killers. One of the scariest scenes is at a lake where Jay and her friends have fled to. They sit on the sand or float in the water while, quite a ways in the distant, a lone figure marches steadily closer. In another scene, at a high school, the camera slowly spins around in a circle. Every time it passes a window, a follower draws closer and closer. Sometimes our heroes don’t even see the followers. But we do."
- posted by cjb @ 9:26 PM

Imperceptible cognitive decline often predates by many years the precipitous downturn that occurs once compensatory strategies, like relying on well-rehearsed phrases and simple words, fail and an individual can no longer mask his cognitive deficit.
- posted by cjb @ 9:01 PM

Email: "Got your goretex pants, fleece, and most of your Powells books here plus an Adidas hat that you left in the bedroom and never even brought on the trip."
- posted by cjb @ 7:22 PM

Camden, 2014
- posted by cjb @ 8:29 PM

"In the end their bid for fortune becomes a death march. We see a black vulture drifting overhead, biding its time. A settler falls, exhausted and dehydrated. The Cayuse sings a funeral chant over him. The other settlers look on not with the Christian contempt we’ve come to expect but a numb resignation that might be respect.

Then the party comes to a lone tree in a dell. The music shimmers with portent; it’s a dream landscape. In its last scene, like those of 2001, La Dolce Vita, or Barton Fink, Meek’s Cutoff shifts levels from the naturalistic to the overtly symbolic.


Another bird as bad omen.	The tree: salvation or ruin?

'A tree can’t grow without water,' says one of the men hopefully. And indeed the tree at first seems like a symbol of hope; Solomon holds a branch with berries tenderly in his hand, reminiscent of the branch the dove brought back after the flood. But the tree is also an eerily ambiguous image: only its lower half is alive and green; its upper branches are dead and bare. Is it an omen of salvation or ruin? Is the Indian leading them to water or a slaughter? 'We’re close, but we don’t know what to,' says one settler. This is not just a story about one lost wagon train, but a parable about a dying civilization come to a moment of fateful choice, a fork in the road, like Curtis La Forche’s.

When someone appeals to him for advice, Stephen Meek says a bizarre and utterly unexpected thing:

'I’m taking my orders from you now, Mr. Tetherow, Mrs. Tetherow. And we’re all taking our orders from him [nodding toward the Cayuse], I’d say. We’re all just playin’ our parts now. This was written long before we got here. I’m at your command.'

He seems to speak with a voice and a wisdom not his own. His braggadocio is emptied out; Meek finally lives up to his name. The film’s title doesn’t refer to the place-name in Oregon or some movie-Western maneuver, but the point at which Stephen Meek’s power is revoked. After all his boasts and threats and promises, our patriarchal leader, having led us to the brink of extinction, has finally admitted failure, ceding his authority to those who’ve so far been kept subservient and voiceless: a woman, who’s assumed moral leadership of the party, and an aboriginal, who goes on ahead, little caring whether we follow. Those long relegated to the margins now assume center stage."
- posted by cjb @ 5:50 AM

- posted by cjb @ 5:44 AM

- posted by cjb @ 5:38 AM

- posted by cjb @ 10:11 PM

- posted by cjb @ 10:08 PM

RIP Christopher Brayshaw, ecologist, master botanist, doppelganger & kindred spirit.

"He loved solitary field trips and once climbed 'with a canoe on his back on a treacherous mountain to find a rare lily in an alpine pond,' said a eulogy by Mary-Lou Florian, a friend from their 1950s PhD days at the University of British Columbia."
- posted by cjb @ 10:42 AM

-Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeey CJB. You still doin' that art stuff? Yeah? Huh.
- posted by cjb @ 5:39 PM

Thunderegg Llc, Claim #OROR---066038

"KR This summer I’ve been watching all the Kitchen Sink films from the ’60s. The heroes of those films are all stuck in lower economic classes and resentful of their lack of options. Your films have some of that.

GVS Lack of options?

KR People who are aware that people are living another way but they can’t get to it—whatever the restraints are; it might not be class."

- posted by cjb @ 8:50 PM

I'm piss at you!

Epic troll of no-limit hold'em poker advice site, verbatim:

"Im play the top pairs wit top kicker like say you and i get the $hit beat out of me. I take my savings to casino after work and piss it all away on you advice. first i wait for almost 3 hours for pair better than 9s and during that time i lose over $30 in blinds plus the players trick me to bet this straddle BS but i don't play any hands so I throw away another $50 with this before i quit it. Now I'm down $80 and i decide to play Kc-Qc, like you say and son of betch with A-K rocks my world when K hits the boards. After that hand i have only $8 left. Now, I look down and get pocket rocket and snap shove all in. The entire table call me and crack my weapons of mass destruction. Player with 8-3 off beat me!!! I lose my stack like this 2 more times and then i'm out $600, plus $40 for table massage, another $30 for tips and $200 for hooker to make me feel better and all we do is talk, then i find out i have to pay for room, which is another $140 and they say no comps because you play poker so i no get to eat nothing!! I lose all this money and now i can't pay rent. Im piss at you! Why you give such bad advices?"
- posted by cjb @ 8:25 PM

(esp. 1:44-on)
- posted by cjb @ 11:48 PM

Bottle-dash stucco (aka "Sparkle stucco")

"The red colour is from the rocks packed in from Red Bluff just outside of Quesnel and carefully screened by hand. The green in the stucco is made of crushed ginger ale bottles and the amber is from smashed beer bottles. The white is marble brought in by train from Vancouver. . . ."
- posted by cjb @ 11:47 PM

- posted by cjb @ 9:14 PM