My Mind's a Cathedral

What if every memory you ever had ended up in a file in your head? Would you be a cathedral? Or a filing cabinet? A great scene from “Doctor Sleep.”

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SciFi Cali

I've been reading BLDGBLOG for I don't know how long. Like Kottke, it's an original blog, steadfast despite the churn around it, and focused on something very specific, which, considering the diversity of the "content," could be categorized as that which delights. At least, that's my experience of it. In any case, Geoff Manaugh has a delightful post up today about a class he's teaching at my alma mater, UC Berkeley, and how California is science fiction incarnate.

"Robinson explained to Boom that, in the blink of an eye, California became a 'completely different landscape. At that same time I started reading science fiction (…) and it struck me that it was an accurate literature, that it was what my life felt like; so I thought science fiction was the literature of California. I still think California is a science fictional place. The desert has been terraformed. The whole water system is unnatural and artificial. This place shouldn’t look like it looks, so it all comes together for me. I’m a science fiction person, and I’m a Californian.'" 

Under the Skin

What a goddamn movie. What a motherfuckin movie. What a great fucking movie. I could not love this movie more if I married it, impregnated it, and lived with it in a backwater trailer. One of the most painfully stupid things about TV critics, movie critics, and book critics these days is their stupid, insipid, lazy desire to/insistence upon fucking recounting the plot of said subject for you. Why the fuck would I want to know the plot if I hadn't seen/read the fucking product yet, you underpaid roadkill? Besides, what's plot anyway? A skeleton worth breaking. That's what plot is. "Under the Skin" has no plot. It has a woman who stalks and kills men the way men stalk and kill women. She is an alien; she is Scarlett Johansson. For those who care, she is naked several times, and she is so moody in the face, so pouty in the mouth, so dripping with weirdness that it will either turn you straight or gay, depending on your gender/sexual orientation. Or bi. What have you. The point is, I loved this movie. The director: Jonathan Glazer, who did "Sexy Beast," which is one of My All-Time Favorite Movies. (The second one, "Birth," was too disturbing for me, someone who likes to be/constantly is disturbed or in a state of disturbance or is attempting to disturb someone or something.) It's based on a book, like that matters. Also: erect penises sinking into black tar pits. Very odd. Very foreign. Very familiar. A man with a giant head. The only movie to accurately depict what it's like to be a woman. Thank you, Mr. Glazer.