#489

Oh No! Forgot last post was supposed to be list day! List day for my precious, precious readers, to whom I gave solid assurances!

You poor things, to be such worms on my hook. 

There, there. I have arrived, with more lists that you could ever have bargained for.

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Maybe that's a bold claim, maybe I'm here to wreck all your concepts. Guess we find out together.

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video games I have completed lately:

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII: Reunion (this has to be one of my favorite games ever. I am not kidding. I know a lot of people take issue with a lot of things about it, maybe the PSP version was worse [I think maybe I got to hold a PSP once. Once] but I think it is a masterpiece. Activate my combat mode, bb)

Final Fantasy IV (somehow it just never gets old! I love this stupid story so fucking much)

video games I have started lately but not yet completed:

Final Fantasy XIII (finally! finally. And you know what? Feels good. It really is an amazingly fun game to play. Faults it has, and they vary in gravity from personality to personality, but the game is so great to play and so amazing to look at, and the story is a remarkable thing remarkably told. Playing a bunch of its predecessors in succession has, as I hoped, help me see it in a new light and raised in in my estimation from "fifty percent genius lashed to a pain machine" to "compromised yet sacred vision". This is probably the nex game I will beat, unless it is...)

Final Fantasy V (getting to be pretty close to done with this bad boy--and it was so rad! That sexy, sexy job system. Another bonkers, silly-ass, beautiful, magnificent tale. Music's not as good as IV or VI, but that's ok. The maps are also iconic.)

INSIDE (almost exactly halfway, kinda stuck on some part of a puzzle that as I type this, makes me unsure that it's a puzzle...I should probably fire it up and try something new right now...anyway INSIDE is very very very good, I have a perception that everybody knows that already and they are right)

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (taking my sweet time with this one. It's just that, from the moment it started, I didn't want it to be over)

Final Fantasy VI (really liking it, but I'm at the first juncture where the party gets big and then they split it--like in XIII!--and I took a break there)

video games I particularly wish I could play, but can't right now due to reality:

Final Fantasy VII: Remake+Intergrade

Elden Ring

video games whose soundtracks I have been obsessed with/were FINALLY made available

All Final Fantasy games, to varying degrees, the intensity of it might actually be a little embarassing

Eastward (FINALLY FINALLY THE SHEER PLEASURE OF IT)

Kingdom Hearts II

Golden Sun

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild+Skyward Sword

albums I have listened to lately from start to finish for the first time

Soul Supreme | Soul Supreme

#KingButch | Butcher Brown

Zelda: The Themes on Piano | Arcade Player

As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again | The Decemberists

Fractures+Folding+Flight of the Sparrow | Anderholm

200Xad | Mega Drive

Atom Heart Mother | HARU NEMURI

(Per la) via di casa | La rappresentante di lista

Reaching Fourth | McCoy Tyner Trio

Today and Tomorrow | McCoy Tyner

Plays Pretty | Oscar Peterson

Riverside Profiles: Thelonius Monk

Takin' Off (Expanded Edition) | Herbie Hancock

GUNSHIP (Instrumentals) | GUNSHIP

Syndicate Shadow | Neon Nox

Nocturn | Tonebox

Athletic Progression | Athletic Progression

Vince Guaraldi Trio | Vince Guaraldi Trio

Black Classical Music | Yussef Dayes

Quarantine Sessions | Tom Misch

What Kinda Music | Tom Misch and Yussef Dayes

Quarantena | Tenderlonius

Keys To The City Volume One+Black Radio III (Supreme Edition)+Code Derivation | Robert Glasper

BREAD | Sofi Tukker

A01 | OLDUCT

Symphonie Pacifique | Greg Foat

Black Focus | Yussef Kamaal

Think of One...+Black Codes (From the Underground) | Wynton Marsalis

movies I have watched lately

The Batman

The Boy and the Heron 

Namoo

television programs I have watched some or all of recently, some ongoing

Severance

Adventure Time+Distant Lands+Fionna and Cake (rewatch)

documentaries I have watched recently

Chimp Crazy

The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin

Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God

(this is kind of a morbid viewing pattern but I guess I just want to understand these types of mindset better)

comics I have read recently

Vattu+Rice Boy+Order of Tales+3rd Voice | Evan Dahm (reread what I had covered then finished Vattu after a couple years away, which allowed time for a complete and a delicious backlog of 3rd Voice to accumulate--this website is among internet's absolute foremost, and has been since Rice Boy's very first strip--reread that and Order of Tales)

Demon's Mirror | Harry Bogosian

Skin Deep | Kory Bing (reread, catchup)

Octopus Pie | Meredith Gran (reread, but there was also a post-covid story I hadn't read yet with [spoiler] some weddings in it)

Buttercup Festival | David Troupes (reread, catchup)

comics I am about to begin and catch up with because I am just now finding out they exist because one misses these things sometimes and just has to live with the pain and fatality of that knowledge

Blikada | C. Spike Trotman

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It is reasonable to ask how I accomplish such a media diet along with sustaining life and keeping house and meeting any number of other temporal demands. In the first place, I am dedicated. Some would say, obsessed to the point of self-sabotage. For I think of myself as a fairly efficient manager of my days and times in certain senses, depending of course on the day and season, and it bears out in terms of how much I get done. The obverse, of course, is what I basically never get done, what I end up crushing into the last minute, the sacrifices and excisions of other activities necessary in order to pursue my many, errant threads. 

But we are all weavers, eh? This is my tapestry, and I put it together my way.

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Guess that wasn't too crazy on the list front. Well, keep an eye out. I don't know what happens next either.

--JL

#479

There was a conceptual moment in which I wasn't sure what I would get at when I approached the text field today, so I determined that I might warm up with my most favored of fallbacks, a list. Perhaps, I thought to myself, two or even three lists might fit the bill. I think things like that because I am a pervert and a sadist and I love to make you pay for my free content.

Anyway, when I actually did start writing, the topic burst from the back of my skull and fruited, drawing nutrients from my husk with a barbaric, starveling swiftness. But, hey. Listen.

Guess what.

You're still getting the lists, baby. Strap the fuck in. That other shit will be here tomorrow.

even more fucking video games bought (I have run out of money)

Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Collection

INSIDE

books I didn't tell you I bought or picked up off the ground because I was doing a thing, whatever

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson

Wise Blood/The Violent Bear it Away/The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (I went to the used bookstore specifically to give them my copy of The Violent Bear it Away I mentioned so I could knock a buck off owning this instead)

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question & The Gift of Death & Literature in Secret by Jacques Derrida (literally the same translator and everything else as my old copy of The Gift of Death, but [presumably] improved, plus of course Literature in Secret. The timing was perfect; I have lent out my old copy of The Gift of Death and need not worry that it may never return)

The Golden Pot and Other Tales by E.T.A. Hoffman, transl. Ritchie Robertson

Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon

Synthedroid Saviors by Mark Lindquist (I am a little loth to record this, since from this self-published treatise on himself on the back of his book here apparently the guy lives in my town, may be completely insufferable, and could conceivably be weird about this. Whatever though; you make something and leave it around, people find it and make an opinion. That's how art usually works and it is certainly how this stupid blog works; anybody can say whatever they want about this heaped pile of whatever I have toiled on to no profit and think whatever they want about me on that basis. This is the bargain that we strike as creators, is what I am saying, one with God and the Devil both)

Hospital Series by Amelia Rosselli

The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change by Randall Collins (can you tell that he is a Harvard man? Can you tell that Harvard published this, more specifically, the Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, Boston Massachussets, London England? I tease beacause I am literally pumped to see what this horsehit is all about)

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson

Magical Writing in Salasaca: Literacy and Power in Highland Ecuador by Peter Wogan

The Water Street Reader by Various (this was made by anarchists and they filled it with whatever the fuck they wanted apparently--I kept it because it contains at least one bell hooks essay, so we'll just see what else this curation packs. They obviously spent real money on it, so I suspect them to be adherents to a breed of anarchism which, hm. Anarchists with straight, white, even teeth and a unified aesthetics of tattoo; indeed, a kind of uniform in which beanies and Dockers feature prominently. This is a hypocrisy I have witnessed for so long that I am inured to its bullshit. I just get what nutrition I can and move on)

Selected Stories by Lu Hsun

IMAGINE: What America Could Be in the 21st Century by Various, edited by Maryanne Williamson (honestly don't know what I'm in for here, but I got it because basically it looks like none of these visions came to pass, zero. These authors seem as though they are optimistic, enlightened, freethinking beatificants, and what actually happened is now we live stuffed up into the leaking asshole of a rotting carcass that does not know it is dead. I thought this lozenge of completely misspent hope and vigor might be good for a laugh so bitter I could easily die from it)

it's not over yet! I fucking told you! movies I have watched since last I spoke on it

New to me:

Heretic (in theaters, brilliant, loved every minute basically)

Rewatch:

Batman Returns

Batman Forever

Batman and Robin

Jurassic Park

Honorable Television Mention: The Penguin

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The movie list is fairly anemic because of all the screen time video games take up. Didn't feel like dragging myself into a theater for all that other new shit I was talking about; I'll get to it when I get to it, like everything else. Also Ezra and I have been watching Gotham, though it may be more explicative to say that we are exposing ourselves to the show and enduring actual mutilations at its hands in exchange for the crisp, delicious slices of powerful characterization and storytelling layered through this brutal, senseless pulping and mulching of the setting and the great majority of its inhabitants. The Riddler is thus far the only character to have gotten through this thing mostly unscathed, but we have like, two whole seasons left.

It's not that I don't like it. It's that apparently only a few of the writers and producers like me. Or were allowed to try to manifest that affection.

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So many obsessions whirl and tumble in my brain that plenty I care deeply about may not have been revealed even in five years and damn near five hundred posts. I'd like to concentrate more on more exhaustive coverage--I mean, I mentioned recently that I am weird about Batman, and you can see I am cruising througha fresh Batman phase even now, but I realized that you, dear reader, basically would have had no idea about that before then. But I'm a nutcase about fucking Batman! Read that last sentence however you want. 

Something has to change. I need to focus around here. 

Tomorrow, we shall look at Spongebob Squarepants--specifically, Band Geeks.

--JL

#472

To round of Factually Game Theory 2024, I thought it might be interesting to explore some of the negative space on the subject, i.e. what I don't play, even actively avoid. Also it's probably best practices to stress that I know what game theory is and that none of what I have said resembles it. I possess this awareness.

Jokes. They happen sometimes, in your vicinity, whether you appreciate this truth or just drool onto yourself a bunch while you wait for someone to wipe the drool off.

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One must exercise caution, because the exploration of negative space too quickly becomes "I don't play these games because they are the byproducts of rot and the minds they issued from are morasses of putrefaction aqnd disease". That would be a moribund and sterile effort, noise without meaning, and if you disagree, I have excellent news: there is more of this kind of writing being generated about games per second than there is any other kind of writing on the planet, except pornography involving characters not generated by the author. You can be reading fresh ideas from brave new voices with only a nominal amount of clicks and keystrokes.

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In my fecklessness and lack of self-regard, only Fallout 3 ever made any purchase on me among all the houses of its throbbing, radioactive lineage. I don't know, it's just true. Never played the ones that came out before 3; think there's two, seems reasonable to guess two, but I have been burned before. Never played any of the ones that came out afterwards.

It is as though I am trapped in my own chronoshard, where 3 condensed from total intangibles and never reproduced.

Anyhow. It is clear, no matter the internal particulars, that this Fallout thing makes me a heretic in the ways that I think are actually suboptimal, instead of making me smile. If I weren't me, I would respect me less--the objective facts of the case speak to me of a person of low character.

Because the person is me though, I give myself a pass. Maybe it's you who might consider that 3 is in fact enough Fallout, an island of sufficiency.

Skyrim is pretty much the only Elder Scrolls game I play, also. This sweeping away of the cape reveals that I merely like Bethesda games developed and released within a particular span of time and at a particular scale and resolution.

Still play Fallout 3 sometimes, and my blatantly unhealthy relationship with Skyrim is something I have had to face quitting the way one quits drinking. I should throw both the 360 disc and the Switch cart in the fucking garbage, today. But I know I won't. Might make the disc into art, though. 

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Man, this has been like pulling a struggling wombat from the living earth. Well, I can't physically do that and would be surprised if it could be done without a tractor hitch, but I digress.

Long story short: I don't tend to play a lot of shooters or hyperrealistic games, with Halo* being a strong exception, plus the occaisonal spy thriller. Pure puzzlers are not a big one for me, I become completely obsessed, but only with a very few. However, puzzles should be everywhere in all games. If you could do a puzzle every time a chess piece moved in order to secure the move or gain bonus effects, for example, that by itself would be a great game. I don't play games that stress live disembowelment or active rape mechanics or whatever the fuck it is that breeds at the bottom of the barrel of human endeavor. I don't play games where you do nothing but kill without context, or engage in power fantasies for the sake of power fantasies, or engage in the extermination of the Other; I am not opposed to violence in media, but beyond a certain threshold it just makes me sick. Games which are not specifically fighting games that are purely competitive, dating sims, granular-type sims, gem-matching, cookie-clicking-type things are no, and games which do nothing but PvP until the very earth cracks with age are out for me; Overwatch and Unreal Tournament for example, feel to me like just big balloons of nothing. No MMO's. Bounced off WoW instantly and failed to engage with The Old Republic. Whatever Fortnite is, I don't care about it, to the point that I can't even pay the kind of attention it takes to define it, even though I've read a lot about it. 

Anyway. Enough of that negative bullshit.

Let's just wrap this with a story instead. Stories are better.

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My parents were reticent to provide me with video games, and thus, a large part of my memories of childhood is the waging of a relentless campaign of propagandistic attitition in the pursuit of digital entertainment. My case, almost from the get-go, of course, was that it was digital literature I was after, just like books and movies, which in fairness and praise to my parents, they provided in spades. I grew up reading and watching literally whatever the fuck I pleased basically on my own recognizance. Encyclopedias, young adult literature, and the shorter classics were all part of my repertoire before I turned seven, shortly before I would start on philosophy. Also Quentin Tarantino and Mel Gibson movies, and stuff like The Ghost and the Darkness, Congo, Predator, and of course--of course--Jurassic Park were all included my video diet, along with more regular, defensible stuff like Willow and Star Wars and The Dark Crystal. I had seen Blue Velvet and Silence of the Lambs before I turned six, though. Lmao!

No video games of my own, though. No Mario, no Zelda, no Donkey Kong. Perhaps you knew someone like me in your own game-filled childhood--pathetic wretches, rain running down their faces as they pressed their hands against the glass of your window. The only games they got to play were at your house, man. You'll never know the pain.

Not that I was truly suffering under any real deprivation. Toys--yes. Everything else a kid could have or want? Yes. Only games were dangled out of reach. Well, console games--the PC as a platform was tolerated, and edutainment software was played into the ground, as well as some early browser games, and, for some odd reason, Command & Conquer: Red Alert. So, really, it was primarily console games I didn't have access to.

I have no bitterness about this anymore; my childhood was totally rad, even if bitterness about games was a big part of it. It's not like I sat around pining. You know me: into many things at once. Plus, DK3D and C&C:RA? Pretty sweet groundings in gameplay and design. Disney Interactive games also slap harder than they need to, specifically, The Hunchback of Notre Dame Interactive and Ready to Read with Pooh. Math Blaster is also cool, but Reader Rabbit...I dunno anymore.

Eventually, of course, faced with the twin suns of my long-fought campaign and the birth of my feverish Pokémania, my parents finally cracked and got me a yellow Game Boy Color and a Pokémon Blue cartridge. 

Man, I can still smell those objects new out of their boxes. What a memory.

Of course, human beings are what they are, and this taste meant I needed more--the very outcome my parents had bulwarked themselves (and me) against for so long. I needed an N64. I needed Pokémon Stadium, duh, but I needed Starfox too, so badly. I needed Goldeneye and Super Smash Bros. I wanted Ocarina of Time so bad it almost scared me. Being given Gameboy carts of Tetris and Super Mario Bros Deluxe only stoked my ardor, as well as refining me in the classic senses as a player of games. 

My education about games was piecemeal and patchy. I didn't have access to or even knowledge about many of the periodicals and news sources that would have informed me more broadly about the space and its history. It was mostly commercial and hearsay, sources in their human forms--a buddy who had a lot of games showing me Civ II, the overhwelming presentation of arcades, knowing Sonic was a thing but never really playing the games, etc. Bingo balls rolling in a basket. So it was that it was years and years of life and games and all that stuff and somehow, at the age of eleven, I had not yet heard of Final Fantasy.

Knew about Cloud, sure. Had seen pictures of Cloud and Sephiroth. But I didn't know what game they were from. Incidentally, at this time in my life, all I knew about Samus Aran was a story invented mostly out of whole cloth by an Italian friend. Basically, he said her name was Metroid, and the bakstory he created for her was, shall we say, graphic. The armor, in my mind, did not encase a blonde beauty with all her fingers and toes. There were scars, missing pieces everywhere, in my mind. A cheek that was just teeth.

Our neighbor heard me and my little brothers were into games and she gifted us her son's old collection of game stuff he'd left behind. At last, we had a Super Nintendo and library for it, as well as a Sega Genesis (ah, so you're Sonic! Gotta go fast, you say? I see) as well as bolstering our library for the N64 we'd gotten for Christmas that year.

One of the Super Nintendo games had fancy golden script over the hilt of a sword on a red field, declaring itself to be Final Fantasy II. I didn't try it out for a while, because, well, abrogations of logic tend to confound me, and I know you can't have a second final. Little did I know that this was in fact the fourth final, but that hardly would have improved matters.

Teaching myself to play this game all the way through to the end, exploring every pixel all by myself, securing every weapon and extra boss, all the summons and secret places, ranks as one of the greatest things I have ever done. Pokémon built itself enough out of its bones (the D&D/Ultima bones) to render the source stock instantly legible to me, and so I was able to enter through that little archway into a world I had theorized was possible, a world I had confidently assured my parents existed and was worth exploring, and which blew my mind wide open with its living, breathing actuality.

Digital literature. Yes. I took it up on its promise, and was blessed; now I bear its rod and staff, and its holy word is ever upon my lips.

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Literature, that is, art, is the Prime Good of All Existence, as is well understood. Video games are a part of it, so, you know, they make life better, a lot better. So, I think they're all right.

I like 'em.

--JL

*Halo's setting--in scale and magnitude--is too powerful. There was a point when I had seen lots of stuff from the game and thought it was merely ok, like, yeah, cool jeep and shit. Nice energy bolt you made there. But seeing the ring, Halo itself, from space shifted something deep inside me and lit my brain up in brand new places. A top-tier game memory.

#459

Alright, alright, I'm beginning to adjust to being a MANager again. The heavy investments, in time and currency, I have made towards video games have leavened the portion and granted me the necessary rise.

Boy, I'd hate to find out what full-bore description of maniac I would be without video games. The government would no doubt have me developing something gruesome, conceptually or experimentally. Or I would be a priest. It's hard to say with me, with the past, with the might-have-beens and probablies.

With the priest thing, I do not visualize the kind that messes with anybody but definitely the kind that drinks too much and turns up dead. At least, from the vantage point of the phenomenon I am in this universe, in this iteration, that is the kind of thing it is easy for me to imagine. We are all of course one of infinite versions of ourselves, including infinite shadow doppelgangers we barely dare and perhaps cannot imagine, let alone confront.

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It's a good month to entertain spooky, twisted, maladroit, and outright horrifying notions. And what better way to celebrate this quirk of the human mind than by doing a thing here on the ole blog? Let us enjoin a brash and rousing session of 

FACTUALLY MACABRE

2024

yessssssss

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One rather feels that, with the consideration of real beings, real persons, invaders from another universe whose familiarity to you and with you is as absolute as their proclivities and appetites and attitudes are abhorrent to you, I have already completed the mandate for the day. But perhaps we can drive our scalpel deeper, and observe how marrow will issue from a cut in living bone.

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Haven't watched The Substance yet, but I'm gonna! Before it leaves theaters, I will do this thing. My buddy almost passed out! To lose consciousness right in a movie theater; imagine.

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I will also watch the second Joker and F.F. Coppola's Megalopolis by F.F. Coppola. All of these viewings will take place near the end of the run of the film, maybe on or close to the same day I bet. 

Also I would like to see The Wild Robot,

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We're gonna roll Akira this month at the old theater. Gotta catch that shit; never seen it on the big screen. If that is not factually macabre piece of art, man, I dunno. I guess the scope of "macabre" is to a certain extent whatever you decide it is, so "macabre" might define a fairly narrow band of light. I think of it more like a vein of substance that runs through many different sedimental layers and types of bedrock, and is component to many alloys and composites. 

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Oh, skeletons. Yes, the simple skeleton is macabre, natural and of a piece with something as basic as shitting or eating or having sex. One does use one's skeleton for all these things, after all. Don't you ever think about that? The way your skeleton looks underneath it all, as you wait in the elevator with a bunch of other flesh-sheathed, organ-laden skeletons? As you grind your flesh into the flesh of another in the heat of passion, do you imagine two skeletons having come together to perform a bizarre mummery in which they pretend to but never quite touch? 

How ridiculous your skeleton looks as you fuck. As you wipe your ass. You fool! Cover that thing up!

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Cool. Cool. Some food for thought, eh? I mean. Some maggots to devour your brain even as you stumble from horror to horror here on

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024 

--JL

#457

Took a promotion at work. Didn't really want to, but it's the done thing.

It happens to be true, and some children seem born with the wisdom to see it and the boldness to say it aloud: being a grownup in modernity sucks and the alleged perks are entirely worthless. Indeed, to grow up is to betray what is human and free in the soul, trading it for--what? For fucking nothing, that's for what. I was one of those children, but unlike Oskar Matzerath, lacked the supreme dedication to myself and my own dignity required to remain as a person ought to remain.

Well, he fucked it up anyway. Moral of the story. We merely have to do our best with our fated maturations and deal as uprightly as possible with the unremitting fruits and blooms of senescence, as well as the almighty noise and hopekilling stench of the world humans have made and which we must take part in if we profess to love any part of it, or the world over which it has laid its such deleterious dominions. 

Indeed, it is an insult to children when groups of grownups acting like grownups fuck things up and can't get things done to such a degree that they need finally rely on an adult person capable of speaking simply and honestly in the service of doing the next right thing--and then they call that person "the adult in the room", meaning that these grownups were acting like children till someone reminded them to grow up. 

Motherfuckers--no. Reassess this world and the lives that live in it. Starting with yours.

I will admit that if we must mature, and must take certain mantles upon our shoulders as our lives take us through our part in the life of the world, then we had better be adults than grownups.

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I wonder if the whole Amerinativist psychology of keeping immigrants out--a psychology that is only nurtured and fed by the powers that be until some massive project needs to get done whose human cost is astronomical, necessitating a temporary heel turn till the job's done; then we fill the moats and post the sentries again--is sustainably fed by the knowledge that this whole situation of having power over this vast territory and its resources is only possible because the people that were already living here didn't butcher the English, Spanish, and French by the individual boatload as they came, the way you kill cockroaches that come into your house.

Should they have done? I think when people act like we have to keep immigrants out, they are stating that yes, they should have. A hot take if true.

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Hm! Coming across pretty spicy today. What happened? I don't even know! None of this stuff is what I thought I was gonna write about when I approached the ole text field. Perils of the job, I guess.

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Started reading The Violent Bear it Away, by Flannery O'Connor. Been meaning to read her work for ages, but seeing Wise Blood, plus the last ten minutes or so of Wildcat, has made me eager. It is pretty awesome so far, specifically because she is a fucking amazing writer. Like touching electricity. 

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Finished Final Fantasy X (not the best playthrough I could have done and I'd like to do it again perfect relatively soon, like in the next five years [that's how this guy five-year-plans, folks--and in no other way, believe it]), started X-2 and it was good but the differences between it and the way the standard installment operate, as well as an itch to get back into Ivalice, spurred me to shelve it for now and get into FFXII: The Zodiac Age. A little over sixty hours in and I am glad I waited for this to be the version I played through. I run through this game at fast speed a lot, and I don't think I'm halfway through yet--my party is mad overleveled at 47-48 and I estimate endgame side content to push into requiring mid-80's--but what would the playtime have been on the PS2? A hundred and ten hours already, probably. As I have mentioned, Final Fantasy playthroughs can and do run into the two hundred hour range. Also it is so much more beautiful to look at and listen to and fun to play. Having a fantastic time with this one. And it has whetted my appetite for XIII! Just as soon as I finish Game of Thrones: Ivalice Edition.

That does remind me of a problem. Maybe the single greatest thing about this version of XII is the ability to have the original Japanese voice track on, rather than the English dub, a feature not available on X, X-2, or--and this is actually bad--XIII. X and X-2 have their English issues, but I can tolerate them. I absolutely loathe listening to the English voice actors for XIII talk. It made me reluctant to move the story forward. I know they worked hard and did their best. I appreciate their efforts. It fucking sucks to my ear, though, and it is next to unbearable. Shit that is dubbed is always just plain wrong, subs every day all the way, but not all dubs are created equal. Some have merit. I will try to find XIII's, but man. Not looking forward to that aspect of things.

Listening to Snow and Vanille is like a punishment. Ok? It's like getting taken out to the woodshed for a hi-test bareass beatdown. None of them are good, but those two are a punishment. Also I don't know that human bone structure actually allows for how Vanille is shaped and moves. I think she's Gumby people. She's cool though. Snow is the worst character that has ever been in a Final Fantasy; at least any one I've ever played. Just one man's fervent opinion.

I dunno though! Maybe, hearing him in Japanese, I would understand his actual thoughts and feelings even one iota, even if I could understand a lot less of what he was actually "saying". Language is crazy like that. 

Why not mute the game? Maybe you can, but you can't hear the music if you mute the game. That is always a problem, but I believe in Final Fantasy, like in Star Wars, the music is absolutely paramount, absolutely fifty percent of everything. Mileages and tolerances may vary, of course.

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Alien: Romulus was fucking INCREDIBLE. Today I will go see The Substance, which has been generating profoundly intriguing reactions and comments. Thrilling!

*

It's raining, but I gotta go buy weed before I see this movie. Still not smoking cigarettes. Haven't even talked about my recent back pain, which I think is related to my promotion (amongst a host of other factors), or how Ezra and I decided to go separate rooms to help us get rid of stuff we oughta get rid of, optimize our office spaces, and do sex stuff with third parties. This post is being typed looking out of a very similar window to the last one--but on the opposite side of the house. My books and art stuff are still in the office, but my writing stuff and my completed artworks, as well as all of my my instruments and music stuff, are in what was formerly the bedroom and is now my bedroom. It's cool having my own room again. The upstairs guy! I'm into that.

*

Was that too long? It took awhile. But then, it's been awhile. 

Things are always changing. Life goes and goes. What can you do?

Till next time: soon, it can be hoped. We always have the solace of hope, after all.

--JL

#454

Well, well, well. Bitching and moaning about having to participate in an economy again, eh, Joseph?

Sure. Yeah. It's the most demonic imposition in modern times, with infinite nested impositions that serve to make our existences incredibly stupid and subject to the most unnecessary pressures and mandates.

As Tony Soprano says, eloquently as any human being ever could: "Cocksuckin' motherfuckin' money."

*

But whatever. The actual point is I didn't have anything useful to say, or fun to look at. That defeats the purpose of engaging with the fifty million layers of money and bullshit I accept into my life when I plug in a laptop and use it to interface with anything. 

A flash of insight, a moment of entertainment. That's the best I can do for you, and the best we can grab for ourselves day by day in this fucked up T.S. Eliot poem we call life, the Beckett play of history.

*

Sadly, I don't have much to say. I just want to make visual art right now. And play Final Fantasy. Played through and beat VII again recently, which spurred me to VIII, which I am within a hair's breadth of completing, and then I shall play IX. Probably X after that, very likely, and maybe X-2, XII, XIII and XIII-2 after that. We'll see. I'm pretty into that jag at the moment.

As for other media, well, how about a list? Just of movies. That and the games are all that have been up aside from the odd Star Wars book or splash of comics. More details on those another time. Movies!

Only Yesterday

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children* (yes, this marinated for a while and then gave rise to the subsequent intense reengagement with FF, said series having had an instrumental hand in making me the person I am today)

Cadet Kelly*

Men In Black *$

Basquiat

Pig

Leaving Las Vegas

Topsy-Turvy

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Chef

The Island *

The Marvels

Captain Marvel*

Alien: Covenant *

Bram Stoker's Dracula*

Your Name.$

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

Muppet Treasure Island*

Also, documentaries:

Jim Henson: Idea Man

Game of Thrones: The Last Watch

*

Probably Ezra and I will go see Alien: Romulus on Sunday morning.

*

What else is up, and good? Put some cute Pokémon stickers on my metal water bottle, whose current stickers were getting hella decrepit despite their mod-podge coating. But it's brightened up and freshly coated, so that's nice. Got a Magikarp on there, one of my favorite little dudes ever. In one or another of the latest Dex entries, the developers went so far as to call Magirkarp an idiot. Actually an idiot, right there for the children! Perfection.

*

Work is cool because it is easy, and I get to sketch and doodle there a lot. Also it is a great place to have fun conversations, including with one of my best friends. What more could you want, frankly? All that and free movies, when you can get 'em. Part of me still marvels that it can be like this. I should indeed be grateful--and am--to an adequate measure. No reason I shouln't get universal basic provisions as well, amirite boys?

*

Nest time I'll probably write about how fucking cool Final Fantasy is. 

K peace

--JL

#449

Watched a lot of movies since the incident of which I will speak no further till the chickens come home to roost. 

Yeah, I said I was busy, and when you see how many movies I'm about to write down, you'll be all "what the fuck, dude. Is this what you call busy?"

Yes, actually. Watching a movie or a cartoon is a thing I take almost as seriously as reading a book or a comic. Don't you know that these things I have mentioned, plus video games and like, sculptures and paintings--though of course a video game is made of sculptures and paintings, and a movie is many photographs and a sound recording of music and lyrics and lines like from a book--are the only god damn thing that makes all this other solid nonsense tolerable? The assholes and the wars and the massive human and terrestrial cost of carrying out the project of a civilzation?

Anyway. The movies. Watching this many movies and paying the kind of attention to them that I do is work, the most worthwhile kind of work there is. All movies were new to me unless marked with a "*". "$" will indicate ones I saw on the big screen. Finally, "%" symbol will show you the three I watched with other people; otherwise, I was by myself.

Schizopolis

Ernest Goes to Jail %

The Universal Theory $

Jack *

The Blob (1958)

Earwig and the Witch

Tales From Earthsea *

Darkman %

Godzilla King of Monsters

The Kid

Osaka Elegy

Beowulf

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest %*

Under the Volcano

Kinds of Kindness $

Yojimbo

Man Bites Dog

Joy

The Heroic Trio

It's Not Just You, Murray!

Only Yesterday

Also, documentaries:

Disciple: The Stevie Van Zandt Story

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind

*

In addition, the odd new Craig of the Creek and the currently condensing drip of The Acolyte and House of the Dragon have taken up some brainspace. Also started fixing up my destroyed-ass office finally, been a wreck since April; as well as the usual doing of chores, gathering of materials for art, smoking, working, general decay.

Summer's good because you decay in comfort, and amidst great beauty. The world is always beautiful, but summer is easiest to exist in. Fall is best because it is also comfortable and the decay matches everything around you.

*

Ok peace

--JL

#445

Whoo! Got-damn, shit, and HELL FUCK. 

Silence has invaded this space, never a thing I like to let stretch out, but the times demand what the times demand. Typing that made me itch to segue into current affairs, but I'm not going to do that. Commentary on this planet and its human doings has never been easier or less necessary. Necessary isn't exactly what I mean, but I didn't want to say pointless, because then that would sort of make it my job.

What I mean is that in the current moment, everyone knows what is wrong and why, and no one can do a single thing about it that's going to affect our sinister momentum.

We are but spectators, trapped in a garish, filthy arena which constantly extracts a toll we cannot refuse to pay; our untouchable criminal overlords ensconced in a crystal bubble set above it all, gurgling and fondling themselves as they roll around in a reeking paste of champagne, melted butter, and various illegal meats. Anyone pretending otherwise is part of the toll-extracting process, their perverse ambitions driving them towards that lofty perch I was just describing. 

Our only autonomy, indeed, our only ability, is to stop paying attention, try to enjoy each day as much as we can fashion ways to do so, and let whatever is going to kill us kill us in its own good time. This peasant wisdom is all that remains.

For my money, the expectation is to be killed by a drone. Accidentally or on purpose and designated an accident, or finally on purpose for a specific reason but the stated reason being something completely different and probably defamatory. Does it matter? I've decided that it doesn't at all. Drone, wild animal, heat, zombie, plague, explosion, impact, bullet--who gives a flying fuck how it happens and what people say afterwards if they even notice. Drown me. Choke me out. Defenestrate me. Fire me into space. Put a plastic rifle in my hands and send me out against ten million desperate, starving kinsmen  you call my enemies. I'll chuck it off to the side and wait for it to happen. I'm not fighting anyone about any of this. Can't bother with feelings about it anymore.  

RRRRRRANYHOW, reason I haven't posted since the last post is no longer that I am too tired and still adjusting to all the change--adjustment does continue, but at least my energy is rising nicely--but that I actually have too much to say. It has been difficult to approach the text field with confidence that I could walk away from it without making a massive dirigible of a post ten topics deep, thousands of words per topic.

I'll just talk about some culture today. I mean, now that I've already talked about all that other shit.

Culture! Love that stuff, and there's plenty to tell.

*

Ezra and I have been watching Star Trek all the time, maybe I mentioned it. Been going on awhile. A few episodes of the original series, most of The Next Generation, and now Voyager. We'll be watching Star Trek for a good minute, I expect. It's good! It's way better than Trekkies made it out to be. No one makes Trek as unappetizing as its evangelists. 

But it's good. Good as fuck, actually. There can be no settling of this debate, but naturally I am of the opinion that it's no Star Wars, though that is not the fault of Star Trek, as nothing can be. Frankly, it's not even a good comparison. They are in fact extremely different animals.

*

I have sometimes mentioned about movies I have seen here, but never anything even remotely approaching the exhaustive record-keeping I apply to the books I read. Even with the books, there are probably at least fifty or even more I have forgotten to mention. In fact I watch a lot of movies! Happens all the time.

However, the tenor has changed. My most intense period of watching movies--multiples in the day and night--was in my early twenties, and my rough estimate is about five hundred movies in a two-year period. I have gone through several more periods of a movie or two every day since, the last one being in 2019 and 2020 when I wasn't recording much of anything. Sometimes I don't watch any at all for long periods, or only occasionally.

Beginning before I started at the theater to two nights ago, I was watching cartoons and concentrating on other long-form stuff. The only movies I've watched all year were all the Star Wars movies, though I did those at least twice each.

Now that I am at the theater and now that I am done rewatching all Adventure Time and Steven Universe materials, I am ready to watch ten million movies again and shall endeavor to mark them down as I do the books, except I'm not going to bother with directors or anything, Titles only, man. Lionizing directors is not a thing with me, though I respect the role as much as anyone. Movies are everybody that made them though, and if you're interested, find them, watch them, and read the credits clear through to the end.

Wise Blood

Tuesday

Janet Planet

These movies were all excellent.

*

Been reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, by Stephen Apkon. Fun stuff to read in tandem, trying to balance nonfiction and fiction more closely by consistently being reading at least one of each.

*

What movie will I watch today? I'll find out, and you'll hear about it in good time.

*

Musicwise, been sharpening my knowledge of and rabidly consuming cartoon soundtracks, game soundtracks, chiptunes, vaporwave, African folk (especially Malinese, my favorite), exciting jazz records minted in recent years, oddments and explorations here and there. Albums and other recordings of note inclide Deltron 3030 and the Deltron 3030 instrumentals, new extended recordings of the soundtracks to The Lord of the Rings movies by Howard Shore PLUS a six-movement orchestration of the music from all three films also by Howard Shore--the new choral arrangements in particular are amazing.

Heard belatedly that John Frusciante was back with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they cut one with Rick Rubin, which has resulted in true greatness in the past, so I listened to part of that endeavor before getting bored and doing something else. I guess maybe they should finally have made an instrumental album if they wanted me to care. Anthony was once one of my icons, but now he's like my dad--lovable, worthy of respect, but needs to get the fuck out of my way. It's funny because they were born the same year, and I sure did rely on both of them to grow up. But one also grows beyond; it is the way of this world. I am more than they, as they were more than their fathers. I still need them, too, but on different terms and different timelines, for different things. Anthony keeps doing the same thing, though. 

Maybe I'll like that record in a couple of years, or their next one right away. Hope so. I like liking stuff, put work into enjoying stuff. It's an important thing to bring to culture, to criticism, to how you live your life. It's easy to hate, simple to excoriate. No flex at all, just gunpowder, and gunpowder is weaksauce. Loving something, seeing something beyond yourself and the power you get from tearing it down, is hard work, but essential. That's where the growth comes in. That stregthens the heart and the eye and the mind and the stomach. 

Not to say some shit doesn't need tearing down. Just that it should come after a great effort to love and understand deeply.

*

(Kermit the Frog voice) 

That's probably the correct note for my exit.

PEACE YOU MAGNIFICENT BITCHES 

(end Kermit)

--JL

#411

With civil war bearing down upon us, we dutifully trudge to the cineplex en masse and consume a movie entitled Civil War. 

Well, if that isn't just too fucking perfect and complete.

Have heard that this film asserts that journalism is our only hope. Jesus, can that be true? It plunges into my stomach like a depth charge how unequivocally fucked we are if so. Unless the thesis of the movie is that a nontrivial percentage of the citizen body should transform themselves into a renegade verifiable information supply chain, here in the times of the tail wagging the dog openly and without artifice. Guess I should watch it and see. One should not talk too much about what one don't know.

Just wanted to point out in that first paragraph how utterly, completely steeped in Modern Americanism this situation is. We wouldn't believe it was possible or even desirable to go to the moon until Walt Disney said it was ok. It's just how we are. 

People don't need porn to fuck nasty, but movies tell us how to act nonetheless. Art reflects life, which can only reflect art. Indeed, I have met many people who seemingly constructed their identities and based their speech patterns on a loose mix of perennial and recently perused films. I myself borrow from fiction in these ways--it's only human. But it is always possible to be a little too human. 

*

Lately I have been seized in philosophical and ethical paroxysms that can only be called fits or perhaps fevers of anarchy. Never have I perceived more clearly its allure as a basis for action. 

Because why should we hew and cling to this stability we have enjoyed? To nurse at its teat is to drink a black poison, and all our choices are tainted by our demanding the ability to pay good money for our best lives while existing as the justification and topsoil for corporate and political vines which strangle and destroy our human dignity and the life of our planet. We aid and abet it no matter how much we make noises of outrage or legally protest or whatever, because we are convinced we can have our cake and eat it too and guess what, fucks? The cake is a lie. Always has been.

If we want to enjoy our nice sunny days, it might serve everyone better if we did it without having governments and companies that are literally Ahriman. There is no better way of illustrating it. Maybe we'd get sick and die a little more, maybe there won't be a whole eleven billion of us. Maybe that's ok.

I don't fuckin know, though. I didn't make this world. I don't get to decide these things, or know if my feelings are right. I get stressed out and fight response just from seeing and hearing this motherfucker down the street from me run a gas lawnmower. I can't set policy. I'd collapse every economy on the planet in under a week and many hundreds of millions of people would die. Is that worth saving the world? I don't know. I'm not likely to find out.

Too paranoid to ever make a difference in any way, shape, or form, you see. Can't trust anyone far enough to throw them, let alone enough to coordinate anything. How can I commit to action under conditions which have driven groups of people to act inhumanely since time immemorial? It's a guaranteed way to compromise your ethics, and then, you have to keep going. If you find yourself fighting a war, you have already lost more than half the fight, and the rest is seeing how quickly you can put an end to it or get out of it or die for it--how grave the loss and how compromised you will be before the end.

Plus ultimately I am more interested in expanding my rock collection and playing video games than I am in actually holding myself or anyobody else accountable for anything.

There's your moral high ground. Like all other systems that tempt a human being towards irrational and irretrievable actions which help no one, anarchy is not lucid or explicative. It cannot feed or clothe you. It will not help you make decisions that are more moral or efficient or superior in any way than choice-paths supplied by any other ideologies, systems, worldviews, or hybrids or adaptations derived from existing sets. 

It's all just a lattice we set in front of our eyes in order to try and see an incomprehensible infinite vastness as limited and quanitifiable. All our mistakes start there, because it isn't.

Action is absurdity. The sacred infinite cares not. We are dust motes falling chaotically through time; fixed points on tesselations; fractals made of fractals made of fractals all the way down and all the way out.  

*

Have a nice day? 

Fuck that guy mowing his lawn. Seriously. I hate people acting like anything we've done this past century is something we can just keep on blithely doing till the sun falls down. We need to change everything. Why the fuck are people building houses? Stop it! We have to stop! Stop mining shit, stop making new shit, stop fueling evil tech with massive energy costs! Goddamn it, this other fucking bitch just started in with an even bigger, louder lawnmower! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

--JL

#256

Hm. So I got a bit tired of my own output, as I do, and have been working on slightly different breed of post. Not tossing it all off in one go, even though working long-term on a single post kinda messed me up a little last time I did it, which was already breaking the rules. Just, it was refreshing for awhile to return to the short, immediate blast. But, this is, in the end, an autobiographical blog, and though it does count--matter--qualify--earn points--whatever--to talk about what I have read since the last time I posted about what I read (which, yes, I will be doing in this post), I feel the endeavor also requires the occasional substantial longer-form tale about or around me. 

There'll be more explaining in the post itself. This isn't that post. Worked on that one for a bit but also want to do this. Don't even know what this is yet, though.

*

Oh! Of course I have also been very busy, too busy, being the big department boss. Good experience so far. Learning loads.

*

Anyway all I really have right now is the stuff I've been reading and watching, and perhaps the odd thought about that. My bandwidth is crunched, and that is simply that, as they say. Maybe I'll come up with something to finish strong on, who knows.

Since I last mentioned the topic--quite some silence ago now, it feels--these are the things I have read, played, and looked at. To unburden myself of any kind of strain at all beyond the minimum, I shall list them in no particular order.

A General History of Quadrupeds, by Thomas Bewick, figures engraved on wood by same, newly introduced by Yann Martel. A book of exquisite interest and beauty. I loved reading it and looking at it so much.

Billy Summers, by Stephen King. The dude still plays for fucking keeps. Amazing book. I'm not saying anything else about it except that perhaps the truth is stranger and more brutal than even the most brilliant and cutting fiction is allowed to or even could be.

Godzilla, by Stephen Molstad, a novelization of the critically shat-upon U.S. film Godzilla, directed by Roland Emmerich and co-written between him and Dean Devlin. I grabbed this at a thrift store in the northern part of the state along with many other books* and reread it eagerly. Or thought I did! The novelization of Godzilla that I read as a kid was actually Godzilla: A Novelization, by H.B Gilmour. Of these three pieces of media I will say that the superior iteration has to be the H.B. Gilmour mid-grade novel, but I very much like all three. Admittedly fraught, mismanaged, and bastardizing of itself, the '98 American foray into the mightiest of kaiju properties is comprised of underrated efforts nevertheless.

Jurassic Park and The Lost World, by Michael Crichton. I have lost track of how many times I have read these scientifically imprecise and technically outdated books, and still to this day I learn from them and am delighted by them on the reread, and am more amazed at their depth, prescience, truthfulness, and philosophical acumen. They are, for me, emblematic of what makes a classic. They are among my personally iconic duos.

Hound of the Far Side, The Far Side Observer, and The Far Side Gallery 2, by Gary Larson. Speaking of classics.

What Makes You Think You're Happy? a "Peanuts Parade Book" by Charles M. Schultz. A slim but lavishly tall and wide printing of a noble run of older Peanuts strips. The classicism appears to be relentless.

Only Yesterday, by Frederick Lewis Allen. An illuminating, incisive little history of the 1920's, written early in the thirties of that same momentously recent century, scoping the United States of America by the stats, the fads, the scandals and the dramas on the global and the individual level. Certainly a lot to think about from a timely little tome. It is the twenties, after all, and the parallels can really make one smirk and wince.  

Probably a few other comics and a book or two I'm missing. But you know, it's very difficult at the moment for me to try and grasp a reality in which that might matter.

*

Notable recent watchings of photo film sequences include Lars Von Trier's The House That Jack Built, a work of art I do not feel called upon to comment on at the moment, and perhaps I never shall.

Also watched Pacific Rim. I guess I don't feel too compelled to blather about this movie either, but for very different reasons. It just sounds like a restaurant, you know? It's not a restaurant, though.

Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV was quite an achievement in many ways, though fails to grasp that magical touch Advent Children never lets go of. On its own, with no game under consideration, I feel this movie suffers badly from technology that overreaches slightly, taxes patience, and sometimes actively sucks, but ultimately rewards patience, triumphs emotionally, and excites cinematically. The hero's arc and what he has to say for himself are also interesting enough to think about closely, though I didn't believe so till very late in the game. Overall, worth required effort. 

The final installment, for the nonce, of Adventure Time: Distant Lands, Wizard City, was fabulous. 

Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, by the people who made the thing. Nick Park and the Aardman Animations. Steve Box or something. Peter Lord. The British. So good, so funny. Ralph Fiennes was in it. Ralph Fiennes is plus one thousand to everything he appears in.

More stuff, can't bear to think about it any more right now. While on the subject of the Queen's own England, though, might as well state that Ira and I have been absorbing the psyop that is The Great British Baking Show nightly. No defense.

*

Played Skyrim a lot. As one does.

Also this new game Eastward I have been very much looking forward to has dropped and I got it and it is undiluted joy. Pure goodness. Ship of the fleet in the lush, surprising, gorgeous "2D" renaissance currently underway. Seriously it is so fucking goddamned orgasmically beautiful and fun. 

To cap it off, Katamari Damancy: Rerolled and Star Wars: Republic Commando and Mario Kart 8 and dipping into whatever random fancy my Switch hides within its depths. The Metroid: Dread drop approaches with extreme swiftness, and that game must be played and beaten. Soon, apparently, I shall be able to play a host of Nintendo 64 games on my machine, much as I already have access to many OG Nintendo and Super Nintendo titles as long as I'm connected to internet. The future past is constantly almost here, and I don't give a fuck if I have to pay for it the rest of my life. I grin and laugh and caper with glee as the Nintendo-logo train speeds me towards my personal oblivion. 

*

This blog has been running for over three years now! This is the first post after the first collection cutoff**. The first post of the next three years. The first post of the rest of my life. G'bless, all. Happy to be typing.

*

Do no harm, some say. Let me just...breathe.

--JL

*only now do I realize how many books I have acquired without ever writing them down. I suppose at some point it would be perhaps all right to post pictures of the books. Not quite yet. A vastly improved percentage of the books are shelved these days; few piles remain, but it's not quite photographable yet.

**this did not turn out to be applicable; the book became unwieldy well before this point. 

#201

Since yesterday, I have not listened to the Two Gallants or Gogol Bordello albums that were released while I wasn't participating in anything that was happening, but I did listen to the Caspian album that was released during that strange, deeply isolated time.

Wildly off the chain. So everfucking mothercrashing good, so far beyond superlative. These dudes continually exceed their promise, giving me everything I could want from their next record every time and an order of magnitude more. Every time! Dust and Disquiet. So beautiful I cried a tiny bit as I walked home, during the first swell of "Sad Heart of Mine". Hyperawareness of the total permeation of the complete love of God in everything before my eyes and infinitely in every direction overfilled my torso and leaked out of my eyes. That is how that was.

*

Probably tomorrow I will get to those other two or at least one. In addition oughta finish hearing  Aesop Rock's The Impossible Kid and also Malibu Ken. Whenever, though. That seems less important at this juncture.

*

Also of special note on In League With Dragons are the songs "Going Invisible 2", "Clemency for the Wizard King", and "An Antidote for Strychnine". Those four are my special favorites from the album, the fourth being "Possum By Night", as I mentioned yesterday.

*

The sunset did so many crazy things as I finished typing this post. 'Twas a magnificent time. It was a great, blazing hot day and I had tremendously great walks. My special shoes are back from the shop and the joy of walking is back to full power. It's been a lucky week and a lot of good stuff happened.

Yo. Y'all. Midsommar, written and directed by Ari Aster, is no joke flat-out one of the best movies ever made. Period. My girlfriend and I went and saw it yesterday evening, testing out the renovation on our once-crummy and hella run-down local small pre-1950 theater. Both the newly splendid theater and the film were everything anyone could possibly want from the stated purposes of the phenomena in question.

Seriously one of the best movies ever. I haven't seen anything that good in years and years, maybe more than five or even seven years. Everybody in the world (who has some confidence in the strength of their stomach and the resilience of their nerve) should watch this thing.

I should probably qualify a little more. The movie is fucked up, maybe more fucked up than any movie I've ever seen. It's funny as hell and gorgeous to look at and groundbreaking in a dozen discrete ways but yeah, this is stuff that has made people leave theaters in panics and rages and rants and have to go be sick and stuff.

Nothing gets me off more than shit like that, provided it is done artfully, to a perceptible point and purpose, but the point is if you freak out easy, this is a movie you should not watch. Even if you don't, this bad baby might push your limits. Antichrist is one of my favorite movies ever, and I think this goes considerably further in a couple key ways. If I can even compare a movie to Antichrist it's an incredible day at the office; I cannot even compare it to the rest of its director's oeuvre. Here there are ample comparisons to be made, and things that keep each work fully in itself and beyond comparison. Midsommar brings it to that level and maybe a notch or two further out.


It's a fuckin trip, check it out if you can handle a bad trip as well as a good one.


--JL

#198

Finished up Stranger Things 3 (basically perfect, it is crazy what good writing happens in Stranger Things and knowing how much this kind of artwork pisses a certain kind of person off is just extra sugar) and also watched My Neighbor Totoro for the second time ever. The thing about that movie is how plausible and correct I find the yokai element* contrasted to how unbelievable I am forced to consider the actual human characters. Well, just one character. Everything is real in My Neighbor Totoro except for the father, who is a fantasy. Too good of a dude. 

Not saying dudes like this don't exist, or that their existence is not desirable. No, if you asked me, I would tell you that to be like him is everything I want; to be in that place in life and be the sort of man who acts and speaks as he does when faced with what he faced with and blessed with what he is blessed with ought be the aim and hope of every honest dude. But have I ever met anyone like that dude? I have not. Never.

I suppose, though, that most fathers have something in common with him. Mine does, different as they are. It's something in how they stand on their feet to balance the load. And other common mysteries whose answers lie bare to the sunshine, for all eyes to see, while somehow remaining secret.

*

One can't really spell these things out. It's why show and don't tell is the one short rule of writing I consider absolutely indispensable. It's why the character works, and works better than a "real" man; a character can be an emblem, a sigil; can emerge less formed from the collective unconscious and by its vagueness be more truthful. 

*

Beneath the heart and the head, oft-forgotten, lies the gut, without whom neither serve any purpose and could not even exist.** 

The gut does not think or feel. It cannot rule, and must make do with what it is given. It only tells the truth, and without it, we are lost.

*

God isn't in any detail, any explanation, any bloodline or object. 

God was only ever and can only ever be in the gut.

--JL

*to restate a position, I unequivocally believe in ghosts, fairies, monsters, gods. Everything is literally real.

**see Aesop's fable concerning the Belly and the Members.