Frailty in Science Fiction

I saw Alien when I was way too young. It never gave me nightmares though. Those films that gave me nightmares were always set on Earth. Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton's brash, loud, candy-colored Martian invasion movie was infinitely more horrifying to me than Alien, simply because I recognized the locations. The first time I saw the film it was on TV, so I was spared the gorier details and some of the violence (for example, I don't think I saw Ash ram a rolled up stack of paper down Ripley's throat to shut her up until I was 17). Had I managed to see the final few moments of the infected crew member's life I don't think I could have avoided having nightmares.

Of what I did see, two images stuck with me the most, and they're not even of the famed Alien itself, nor Ripley bashed and bruised and running. I remember the crew member in quarantine, shortly before he "miraculously" recovers from his face-hugger induced coma, and how quiet and uneasy the film is then. I remember very well the first few frames of the scene of his death, because it was my cue to bury my head in something.


I've seen myriad terrible sci fi in my life, many of these films seem to pander to an audience it doesn't identify with or respect. Ludicrously attractive heroes and brainless kickass heroines shoved into space. Look at the crew of the Nostromo. They look like an actual crew, they look like people who had ended up on this god-forsaken mining vessel on this god-forsaken mission because whatever else was out in that universe couldn't hold them. Ripley is sharp and sinewy, not a character who is basically constant fan-service and nothing else. Victim #1 is completely helpless, and the image of him, frail body on a bed in a niche in the dark, his breathing aided by a waiting monster, embodied much more of the horror of the situation for me than much of anything later. I began to recognize aspects of the film. Unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, like Victim #1 they too were just biding time before they encountered the beast themselves. Actually, the worst part for me about the whole film is pasta. Once Victim #1 starts eating my blood pressure shoots up.

Pasta also comes into the second scene which has never left me, but I only know it because I was an avid viewer of the show Movie Magic. Ash is a terrible force on the Nostromo, second only to the Alien itself. Like Hal 9000 he has ulterior motives which run counter to the safety of the crew. At one point, however, he is destroyed, his head ripped not so cleanly from his android body. He is made to explain his actions in this state, decapitated, head propped precariously upright and just barely tethered to the rest of his body by gooey strings and fibre optics bathed in white android blood. The android's innards are pasta (and tripe!) with milk. Somehow knowing this (and I've known this for a really long time) does nothing to soften the squicky effect. It's not much of a comfort knowing that the second physical threat and the top mental threat in the film has been reduced to a pile of offal, because his demise means very little in terms of furthering the chances of the crew surviving. In this state Ash's power is nothing, and watching him try and speak in his condition freaks me out much more than the overt monster parts of the film.

Ripley acts on the knowledge that she's totally powerless in the face of the force that has destroyed the crew, and runs.

Follower

Park yourself in front of a piece of modern art. A field of color, a blank piece of paper on which the barest trace of pencil can be seen, a series of instructions, pieces of monofilament, put yourself in a space you've not been in before. Maybe you'll get something out of it, maybe it will make you more aware of yourself and maybe you'l lose yourself in it. Maybe an angry "what is this?" will come to mind or maybe an ineffable feeling will rise over you and then leave without you having identified it. What matters is that at a certain level the works says nothing, and offers instead an opportunity to make something of it, for the colors to not just resonate in your eyes but in some deeper part of your sensory experience, knowldege, and memory. It's quiet enough so that you have an opportunity to think, to explore your own mind.

Pick a show and start watching. Entertainment is of course not about thinking, at least while the show is running. It's there to lead you through a series of impressions and emotions and have you think about the right thing, like "don't go through that door", rather than about anything else. If meditation is about clearing your mind then a particularly well crafted piece of entertainment can do the job, without the quiet or the mental effort. Being heavily tuned to introspection brings me around again and again to the things which drag my attention away from the series of thoughts which run on endlessly, even without an audience. These things, by and large, are pieces of entertainment, easily digestable morsels of emotional engagement. A show or film, if it is to successfully hook a viewer, needs to have a good guide. Our hero, our main character, or supporting character, anyone who the viewer can latch on to and say, I'm willing to follow you wherever you go. I'm willing to watch your struggle. I can never watch shows whose main purpose is to present terrible people doing terrible things (South Park, Archer, Always Sunny), because I have nothing to connect to, and therefore cannot be carried along. For me, having no emotional involvement means the entertainment hasn't worked. It hasn't delivered me from myself.

The effect of this is that if I am involved with a character I am nearly blind to the other parts of the show which aren't working as well. Once I've effectively fallen in love with a show or film it gets a generous helping of vaseline and careful, rosy lighting. Cliches rankle less, shoddy effects stop registering, obvious plot devices are forgiven and forgotten. I've surrendered any critical thought or keen observation to be again immersed in something akin to infatuation. The best part is that it's always there, pre-packaged and standards-compliant, waiting only for me to start watching a much-loved show for the feeling to be rekindled.

So I've returned to it, again and again. Other feelings, impressions and emotions fleeting and poignant and more real, are kept behind locks which have few keys, rarely found. No wonder I have chosen the path of least resistance.

Most of the things which have insulated me over the past few years have been discussed in this blog. I have waited for something more artistically worthy to catch me like all of the shlock and camp and shiny things have over the years, which is, characteristically, the wrong approach. Do I have grounds to believe that what's not clamoring for my attention will recieve it?

feeling it break

I don't know if you all have heard of this Canadian band called Austra, but I just heard of them today and their new album, Feel It Break, is *good.*

They remind me of The Knife, but their melodies are less jarring, more purely gloomy; and their lyrics are less about horrific diseases and monkeys, more about... well... like, normal stuff. Like insanity and longing.

NPR's streaming the whole thing here: http://www.npr.org/2011/05/08/135996786/first-listen-austra-feel-it-break

Put on your headphones and get lost in outer emotional space, where everything is dark, cold, and shiny

Oh, also: You can dance to this.

Trespasser

I don't understand David Foster Wallace. The last summer I spent at home I walked the half-hour's worth of ancient housing developments and strip malls between our condo and the tiny, pied North Clairemont library, and picked up a set of Wallace's short stories. In reading it his sentences blundered about my skull like frantic birds which I could neither calm nor marshal nor bat from my mind. I picked up a plot but no pleasure, and I understood that for me Wallace could not be the little patron god of modern literature that other people held him as. Yet I couldn't help but be fascinated by the way he affected the people his writing actually resonated with. Somehow Wallace induced people to access parts of themselves and air out parts of their minds that they would surely rather keep hidden-- he made them write about him in relation to themselves in a way I haven't seen with reviews of other writers. Take the recent "review" of Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King on BoingBoing. This is not a story about the book or even the novelist-- it is an account of one man who attempted suicide and his relation with another man who succeeded. The success of Wallace's writing is the way it not only resonates with the reader, but in that it in turn compels the reader to talk about how they found parts of themselves within and around its lines. In Wallace's own words "... there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us... one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing,  capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell 'Another sensibilty like mine exists.'" He's given voice to something within each one of his fans, and it must be heard. An anonymous comment for the above review read "DFW's passing sent me into a depressive tailspin. I didn't even know him, but I felt like he was a part of me. Or gave voice to an essential emotional core that I didn't even know was there before I started reading his work. It wasn't even the subject matter. It was more his style, his tone. It rang in me like a bell."

What it is, I don't know. I'm merely a voyeur, fascinated by this fascination.

Sympathizer

"Describe the moon for me." "It's solitary."

art graveyard

There is this really strange thing about my school (OK, understatement of the year) -- we have an art building that no one ever uses. It's off in the woods, near the library, which in the winter is quite a trek to get to, requiring one to trudge down an icy trail that looks like it belongs in Narnia. People don't really talk about the art building. I think the story is that it's unsafe to hang around in -- not up to code or something. But the strangest thing about it is that it's full of stuff. People's unfinished art projects are scattered all around the place as though one day everyone just inexplicably left and never returned... In short, it's something of a mystery. I have never been in the art building myself, but a student in another residency made this video about it:

"Goddard College: The Painting Building: An Art Graveyard"

Dusk Sky

Curled cloud edge


City glow over Bare Mountain

all dressed up

hee!

Birds

Street of Crocodiles

King of Limbs

A storm had been lashing our house for hours, raging and howling like some a beastly blind thing. It would keep me up for most of the night, but now I sat waiting to hear something which I had never suspected of existing a week before, and the anticipation had made me a ball of nerves. I was waiting to hear another hour's worth of Radiohead's music.