From The Morgue

I received a letter from my grandmother yesterday. Brilliant. Letters are great, and letters from beloved grandmothers are one of the best kinds.
I know you read this blog sometimes Felice – you’ll be getting a reply in kind.
—
We had a big fryup for dinner. Mushrooms and scrambled eggs and tofu sausages. Man, that tofu was the blandest I have ever et. I think I have been spoiled forever by the wondrous Engine Shed smoked tofu (thanks Brad).
Still: yum.
—
I finally finished the writeup of the roleplaying game I ran late last year, Providence Summer, on RPG.net. It’s about kids and teens in Providence, RI in the summer of ’61. They hang out, fight, make out, and get into trouble. It was really something quite special. One part Rebel Without A Cause, one part Stand By Me, one part Twin Peaks without the creepy supernatural stuff. One hell of a tale with an ending that’ll stay with me for the rest of my life. Groove.
And the whole point of this bit was that I was gonna link to the writeup now, but rpg.net is down. Ah well.
—
WMD intelligence inquiries. I have a whole rant but I’ll spare you this time – it’s past midnight and I need some sleep.
Good night.

The infamous aura of burning surrounding Edinburgh resident Morgan Davie struck again on Friday. At approximately 4.45pm, Mr Davie’s work PC began to “sound like it was clicking its tongue”. Shortly after, the computer desktop stopped working.
Mr Davie was then shown the error-page known among computer experts as “the blue screen of death”.
Upon investigation, it transpired that Mr Davie’s hard drive had burned out. Scorch marks were visible on the hard drive unit. Crucially, all data stored on the hard drive was lost.
This is an unusual fault in year-old components from reputable manufacturer Dell Computers. However, Mr Davie believes the Dell components were not faulty. “I’ve got this aura of burning. Hard drives always burn out on me. They just do. It’s really annoying, actually.”
Mr Davie has had three hard drives burn out on him in the past, a rate of burnout that is “significantly above the average”.
A Dell Computers spokesman had this to say: “That guy’s just got a freaky aura of burning. What ya gonna do?”
– Reuters

Been meaning to post this link for a while. It’s an interesting take on NZ by an associate (and sometimes fellow blogger) of Tom Tomorrow, Salon’s left-leaning political cartoonist.
I liked it. We likes hearing people talk about our country, yes we do, yes we do, gollum gollum.
~`morgue

I pick that the stupid Academy will do this:
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Sean Penn – MYSTIC RIVER
(possible surprise: Johnny Depp – PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL. Yes, seriously.)
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Benicio Del Toro – 21 GRAMS
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
50/50 between Keisha Castle-Hughes – WHALE RIDER and
Charlize Theron – MONSTER – as a Kiwi I’m backing Keisha. The Anna Paquin factor, y’know.
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Renee Zellweger – COLD MOUNTAIN

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
FINDING NEMO

ART DIRECTION
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

CINEMATOGRAPHY
MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (anything with water gets bonus points)

COSTUME DESIGN
GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING

DIRECTING
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING
(FINally)

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
SHORT FILM (ANIMATED)
SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION)
Don’t know any of the nominees

FILM EDITING
CITY OF GOD (and it’d deserve it, too)

MAKEUP
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

MUSIC (SCORE)
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

MUSIC (SONG)
“Into the West” – THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

BEST PICTURE
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

SOUND
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

SOUND EDITING
MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD

VISUAL EFFECTS
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY)
AMERICAN SPLENDOR
(but it should go to THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING fer chrissakes! it’s the infamous unfilmable book! it’s been made into a great film! grrrrr)

WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY)
LOST IN TRANSLATION

Back in my teens I used to get killer migraines. They’d start off by messing up my vision, just removing parts of the scene in front of me. (This never left a big hole – it was a seamless removal, like a t-shirt image being obscured in folds. Incredibly weird sensation. I vividly remember having a conversation with a classmate when I was about 14 and explaining that I knew I was going to have a migraine because I couldn’t see him, even though I was looking straight at him.)
Then you get the big spirally halos, like when you stare at a bulb and get the afterimage, only the afterimage is a thin strip of metal dipped in oil reflecting rainbows at you. And the halo would get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until it disappeared off the edges of my vision.
And then, about half an hour after that, the migraine would kick in proper and if I wasn’t in a place where I could lie down, it was too damn late. Migraine is nasty. You get the headache mixed in with intense nausea and hypersensitive physicality. Brain is firing all kinds of nonsense, head is aching, stomach feels like it’s in the wrong way. This for about four hours, then another four of decreasing intensity, and then another 48 of gingerly moving through the world with little aftershocks making you watch your step.
Bleah. Anyway, I grew out of them when I left my teens. I had one in 2000, out of nowhere, but apart from that, none since about 94 or so.
Except I had one back at the end of August (the night of the Spearhead gig, curse it) and another one this Friday gone. Two inside of six months after only one in the previous decade… I don’t know what to make of this, exactly. It ain’t a trend I’m encouraging. Hmm.
Anyway, I was in a weird space all that day. I kept having incredibly intense deja vu and presque vu. All the vus. It had got to the point where I had started composing a blog entry beginning “I’ve been spending all day dangling just out of reach of an incredibly vivid but imperceptible other reality.” Or somesuch. That was the idea, though – that it felt like there was another me in another life and I was having crossover. I could never quite grasp the specifics, but I felt over and over again that something was *there*, just out of my mental grasp.
Anyway, then I had the migraine. You can put your cause and effect whichever way you like there.
The migraine was accompanied, when sleep eventually came, by remarkable dreams literally filled with people from my childhood and youth – I remember a group of five polynesian guys I haven’t seen since I was about 12 or 13 and having a big conversation with them. I don’t remember who they were now I’m awake, I don’t remember even if they were real, but I believe they were. One thing the brain is remarkably good at, after all, is remembering faces. Anyway, those five and dozens and dozens more. If you were at my primary school there was an even chance you would have turned up. The only other moment I remember with great clarity was when I dreamed Nikki Schollum (“smile and say hi” type-acquaintance since primary school, some readers I’m sure will know her) being completely unable to remember the name of the big country next to New Zealand. (It’s Australia, honey. You’re welcome.) (Actually, I don’t think I was in the dream at that stage. But if I had been there, I’m pretty sure I coulda told her.)
Anyway. Out of it all now. But migraines are weird things and they mess up your head something wild. Neurons firing all over the show. Wild. And, lest it not be clear, not fun at all.
(Oh – It’s going around, it seems.)
—-
The delightful Craig Duncan was in town this past weekend, not long after his New Years Day nuptials to longtime boyfriend Marcel Hodel – longtime receivers of my morgueatlarge travel emails will remember the photo of those two from back in December, no doubt. I thought it was a great photo. Wonderful to see the old boy.
—-
I’ve realised I’ve got more to say about Lost In Translation, but I’m not going to say it now. Time to go home.
Oh, yeah, my new shoes are T-Mac 3 (since the demise of my beloved Converse to Nike, I’m investigating the exciting land of Adidas). To all (Jon Ball) of y’all (Jon Ball) who are interested (Jon Ball), they are the cool ones with my usual black-with-blue preferred coloration. And you can watch a movie about them over here.
Peace. I windmill whenever I want, apparently.

(which is a Twin Peaks reference, if anyone’s keeping track.)
I rushed out and bought new shoes last night, shoes fer exercisin’ in. I’ve had none since I left New Zealand, which should give you an idea of my current level of fitness – still the same skinny, only now I get tired easily instead of having pretty decent stamina.
Anyway, I’d let myself fall into that trap of not getting the kit because not involved in anything, and not involved in anything because not got the kit. Silly. My sport of choice, basketball, is pretty hidden up here, and I just haven’t seen much else to get enthused about.
Then my boss said ‘come play basketball tomorrow lunchtime’ and i said ‘woohoo’ and now I have new shoes on my feet and a pleasant exercised-tingle in my legs. Lets hope I keep finding avenues in which to play. I’ve got the shoes now, anyway.
—
The shoes are Adidas. I’ve been a Converse boy for years and years, but Converse were bought out by Nike I believe, anyway their shoes are nowhere to be found. So I went with Adidas. They work. I did buy some extra foam inners at the salesguy’s suggestion, and can’t work out how much the decision was mine and how much it was me being suggestive-sold – definitely a combination, but I don’t know the proportions at all. Six quid for foam inners? Crikey! They are extra comfy though, and I rationalise to myself that they’ll make injuries less likely, which is important when coming off a period of no exercise, and… I think I got suggestive-sold. Damn. Am I too lazy to go for the no-questions-asked money-back guarantee? Probably. We’ll find out!!!
—
A bulletin board I frequent was recently attacked by internet trolls, who (I discovered today) were mocking us on their own bulletin board elsewhere. I had the dubious distinction of being quoted and called a schmuck and a dope. Hmm, I haven’t been called names behind my back since primary school, which is about the level on which the trolls are acting.
The experience is kind of meh really. I’m not even remotely angry, but I’m certainly not amused either. It is indisputable that the people involved were being dicks, of course – deliberately trolling a foreign bulletin board for cheap laughs is one of the cardinal sins on the net. Still, I can’t quite seem to laugh it off. Instead I find myself wondering what is going through these peoples’ heads, and whether this kind of behaviour will always be present in the new realm of the ‘net, where concealed identity and the limitation of communication to text only are the default situation and human tribalism rears it head the same ways as usual.
Hey, wow – I just realised that I haven’t forgiven them! Stupid trolls. Do they deserve forgiveness? Hmm.
(For the less net-literate, trolls are folk who post contentious/stupid comments in order to heat up an argument. They win their game when people respond. Yes, it isn’t a very complicated game.)
~`morgue

I have a new phone. It is small and therefore finicky. When I use it I feel like my hands are too big for the job, like I’m King Kong trying to undo the clasps on Fay Wray’s brassiere, only sorta less dirty and hairy. Hmm, maybe that’s a bad metaphor.
—
Cal and I saw Lost in Translation last week. One thing I’m kinda struck by, on reading the coverage and reviews, is how no-one seems to be talking about what’s abundantly obvious to me – Sofia Coppola has based the entire movie on one of her early-teen fantasies. The whole setup is straight out of an intimacy fantasy typical of a daydreaming twelve-year-old girl: the young, pure girl-woman given the opportunity by contrived circumstances to interact with an older, famous movie star who is himself looking for a deep emotional connection, and they spend lots of time together, clearly fall for each other, but do not act on their feelings because they cannot escape their respective cages (and also so the fantasy remains, essentially, pure). It’s the kind of chaste romance a 12 year old girl would imagine for herself.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to read the limbo of jetlag Tokyo as symbolic of the cusp between childhood and adult, where one becomes aware of a new kind of intimate connection between self and other and imagines what it must be like without including sexuality.
After all, Sofia Coppola spent her whole life on film sets, staying in hotels and meeting famous actors. Her films have revealed her to be exactly the kind of imaginative and sensitive person who would write long diary entries filled with yearning for something not entirely understood. I think it’s extremely unlikely she never had the kind of fantasy this film is a development of.
Of course, she’s smart enough as an adult to ground the film without destroying the character of its fantasy. Bill Murray’s character sleeping with the chanteuse is a perfect example – an awareness that the fantasy character is not fully real, and in reality such a person would have a surplus of energy that had to go *somewhere*.
The final stroke of genius, of course, was the final interaction between the two. Sofia Coppola has put a private (if not unusual or uncommon) fantasy into the public domain, but kept the keystone to herself.
I really liked this movie, by the way.

Sometimes I would catch the bus to work. There was a little old man who would catch it too. He would be on the bus, upstairs, without fail.
Recently Cal and I moved. On a completely different bus route, I catch the bus to work.
The little old man is on these buses too. It is the same man.
What is he up to? I am afraid to speak to him.
NOTE: he walks very quickly, for a little old man.

Exiting Return of the King:
“And after all that, they lost the ring!”
She is teh coolest grandmother. Yay Felice!

The Following Please Me:
* keeping up with the fate of the NZ entry in the Australian Basketball League by way of http://www.kiwihoops.co.nz – particularly the rise and rise of Dillon Boucher, whose story should, by rights, be repeated in every NZ school and playground (cue usual rant about New Zealand identity)
* hearing that some of my friends are friends with others of my friends
* watching people make risky but right decisions
* patience, humility, compassion
* Freddy vs Jason
* chai tea (current hot drink of choice)
* Tongan Ninja, the closest thing NZ has to a Flight of the Conchords movie, being on sale in the local Blockbuster
* Tongan Ninja actually being quite entertaining
* seeing people I know in Tongan Ninja and, indeed, in any film (credits included – they also serve who don’t appear onscreen)
* hearing from people I haven’t heard from in a while
* not feeling overly busy
Note: Other Things Also Please Me.