So we're driving back and forth from Phoenix last night. And it occurs to me, as we drive by ABF and USF Bestway trucks, that there's a good chance that I had shipped stuff on several of the trucks that we were sharing the road with. It's not the most significant thought ever, but it was interesting to see an extension of my job out in the rest of the world - I mean, to see a...manifestation of the meaning of papers I shuffle and sign. It was a semantic kind of moment, if you will.

Sex and the City (season one). Interesting. It's certainly that. I can see how the show used scandal as an attractant, and while that's amusing on a shallow level I wasn't impressed so much with the acting and such. What interested me most about it, I think, was the structure of each episode and its potential - ie, a theme is presented, and then the episode generally follows the four different reactions of its archetype-characters. So in the sense of each episode being a sort of narrative essay on a particular topic, I enjoyed it. Beyond that, I didn't dislike it, but I'm not sure it would draw me back to follow the show at all.

I wonder, randomly, how far symbolism extends in terms of chess pieces. Does the knight move one square over because a real cavalry man might have turned his horse at the end of charge to be able to fight to one side? Is the queen a symbol of feminine empowerment over the king? Perhaps the bishops can only move in such an oblique way as a commentary on the nature of politico-religious power.

The Producers, with Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell, and more! Fabulous! I think we can all picture what accent I would have said that in. Despite that little dip into the fruitier side of things, I have to say, Thurman has never been hotter. Yowza. Oh, and the rest of the movie is a lot of fun, too. The songs are catchy, but not annoying-get-stuck-in-your-head catchy, which is nice, and the some of the actors really seemed like they were having lots of fun. Keep it gay! I mean, Uma is very attractive. Yes.

NYX. Wow. Great art, great characters, great writing. A quite original and unique take on the Marvel shared-setting, both in terms of depth of the story and its subject matter, and in terms of the style of art; I wish they would do more comics like this one, I think the genre would be the better for it. Now I just need to find the conclusion of the septet, though, I only got to read 1-6!

A while back, kind of around my lowest point in that recent bout of depression, I caught a feature length cartoon, the conclusion to the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, on late at night, completely randomly. Especially as after I didn't understand what I had watched until after extensive reading of backstory and synopsises (synopsii?), looking back I'm surprised I bothered watching it at all. Convoluted and fractured to the point of being postmodern at times (and I usually intensely dislike postmodernism), by all logic I should have flipped channels in the space of a few minutes.

But for some reason, I was riveted. I could hardly take my eyes from it; when my dad came home from the night shift, I haltingly tried to explain what I knew to him, but stopped when I realized how little that was. And yet still I watched it till I was sitting still after the credits were over, struggling to find some meaning that seemed just beyond my reach, or on the tip of my tongue, or whatever. Anyway, so just coming across that little blurb about the director/creator/dude basing it on his experiences with depression, it got me thinking. Maybe this movie was one of this things where the significance of it all isn't really in the surface story so much at all, but in how it hits you in the back of your head. That is, whether by something Freudian or Jungian symbols or whatever system one might want to look at it, maybe I just really identified with not the shallowest aspects of the story but the underlying, between-the-lines stuff that's not readily apparent at all.

Then that got me thinking, maybe that's how the better aspects of the horror genre work - I suddenly want to go pick apart a good King story or go play Silent Hill.

Google + Shakespeare = I really wish I had this while in school

Ôdishon, with Ishibashi Ryo and Shiina Eihi. Uh. Whoa? Disturbing. Very, very disturbing. In a sense, it was quite reminiscent to me of Mulholland Drive, both in general character and in specific sequences. White was a really bad choice for subtitles in some scenes, though, although that's a nothing-observation. It's hard to talk about it without giving anything away, so I'll say that it's definitely not for the faint of heart, and I'm torn between wishing there was more depth of story and wondering whether that added depth might have taken away from it. Oh, I suppose also I'd be interested to hear whether people thought this was a feminine-empowering movie, or the opposite - I suspect it could be tricky in that regard, like GI Jane.

Fun logic issues started with Theseus' Paradox

And the entry for Ghost in the Shell is rife with interesting starters for philosophical discussion

Conquest of Armageddon, by Jonathan Green. Though there were a few moments that were nice in a cinematic kind of sense, that doesn't go anywhere near far enough to alleviate the not-so-good qualities of this novel. The structure of the narrative for most of it is just plain confusing, for one - for example, I (now) understand that Green was using a combination of flashbacks and dream-sequences for the first third or so, but there is no reason not to delineate those things (as opposed to just blending them all together in a confusing manner). Beyond that, the writing style was excessively wordy to an extreme degree (much to my chagrin to complain about that, as I know I have to keep from doing the same in my writing), which actually wouldn't have been an issue so much were it not for the repetition involved, as well.

I have to say, the 40k shared setting was used nicely, and the novel certainly fits its atmosphere - but if I could I'd write a general letter to authors using that setting to not use the Space Marines; it just seems needlessly difficult to actually make anything but a cardboard-cutout character out of a religious, scripture-spouting zealot. Which the Marines did a lot of in this book. Just not very much character development.

"The unconscious knows no negatives, I was taught when studying Freud. If someone tells me they don't mean to offend me, I know they probably do." - interesting statement - I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the first bit of it means (I mean, the latter part explains it, but it seems there's more to it, maybe)

X-23. Ah, now this was good stuff. Where House of M was certainly epic in scope and had a definite 'wow!' attached to it, this managed to get a similar 'wow!' while being much smaller in its focus - namely, the origin of X-23 before her introduction in the interesting NYX, the more famous character Wolverine's..uh...sister? Clone? Daughter? In any case, while it's a bit gory at times for the average Marvel fare (ie, don't be surprised), it's interesting how much emotional weight can be drawn into this medium (no pun intended).

So I've been feeling really dispassionate lately. Like...neutral. Not really happy or sad or mad or anything. And to be honest, I'm tired of it - I've almost been wanting someone to pick a verbal fight with me or something, just to get me riled up...the trick is, I'm not sure that would even get me going.

In conversations with Ms. Connie, with direction from her I think maybe I realized part of it is self-defense - from myself. I know that there was a specific point when I was recently depressed where I realized how much letting my temper and frustrations etc out of control actually cost me, in details and in the larger scheme, not just in how much pain and trouble I caused externally but how much damage it did to me on various levels. I wonder whether this dispassionateness is me just unconsciously surpressing any sort of...uh...'louder' emotion for fear of repeated pain/damage/trouble/whatever. Hm.

House of M. I believe it was the big crossover event for last year for Marvel (Civil War being the current one), though House of M is more similar to the classic Age of Apocalypse in its tinkering with characters and setting. This one was especially interesting in contrast as instead of a more likely trope of worst-conditions-possible, say, here each of the characters supposedly had the life they really desired. Naturally, what's supposed to be a utopia really ends up not being such, of course, and that's where the story begins, in a way. It's interesting - the utopia aspect of it makes it seem like as horrible as things get, they're always in watercolor (as opposed to, say, the lurid oilpainting AoA was).


Notting Hill, with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. Yay guilty-pleasure romantic comedies....though I suspect something could be done here with William Gibson's ideas of the critical-mass of celebrity, perhaps with his novel Idoru and the lunatic romance therein.

Annihilation, by Peter Athans. Second to last in the War of the Spider Queen...uh...septology? The sixth book, anyway. It wasn't my favorite out of this small shared-setting/multiple-author series (that's still the first book), but it's not the worst, either. The writing is good, the action is solid, the themes and tropes that make this series interesting (questions of theology, alternate societal rules, gender issues) are prodded along a little. I think this novel suffered from being the penultimate book, in that it sets up a lot, but doesn't do as much in and of itself because of that. Still, a very solid showing, and it definitely made me look forward to the conclusion.

In honor of the World Cup - balls! You heard me.

Madagascar, with voices of various famous people. Fun! As much as it's kind of a random animated animal movie, I suspect there's a lot in here to be done with close-reading a solid semantic structure out of it. One thing that would depend upon, however, would be deciding what one wanted to work with the animals as representing, which is so broad of an availability as to almost be daunting. One could go mainstream and have the animals be a direct analogue for some social group, say, or go esoteric and make some moral comment on vegetarianism. Or concentrate on the lemur techno. Which I need an mp3 of, because it's stuck in my head. I like to move it move it. I'm dancing, in my head. Oh! And there was a hilarious American Beauty reference, which I was remarkably slow in getting.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris. Thanks to Mr. Andrew for reminding me of this guy/lending me the book! Sedaris is quite an author; this is another of his collection of memoirs/essays/I'm not sure what to call them. Some of them are just funny and satirical; some of them are funny and satirical, and also make you stop, stare off into space, and think for a while as well. Very easy reading, and quite interesting; it'd probably make for a great book to take on a vacation, just in how it spurs new observations of everyday things.

minced oaths - some vaguely interesting lists near the bottom, peppered with trivia; I was kind of surpised somebody put 'feth' in there

Amber and Iron, by Margaret Weis. Ohhh, Margaret, what have you done to this poor, poor setting. It makes me sigh in a melancholy manner. Actually, the setting is still great, rather, I'm really not too keen at all on this particular story I suppose, and its mangled use of that setting and landmark-characters. I'll note that now that I've actually seen an Aussie shephard in action in real life, I actually quite believe the seeming extraordinary behavior of the one in this book - that dog has facial expressions like nothing else, and is intelligent to an eerie degree.

I apparently have 666 MBs in my gmail account. On June 6, 2006. I'm cursed. Or something. Isn't the actual bad number supposed to be 616, though? I think I saw that on a documentary once.

In other news, congratulations to Lee in Warehouse Two; his team placed 77th out of 3300 international teams at the latest big billiards competition in Las Vegas. At his Vegas peak he was up to $47,000 in his pocket; alas, in trying to hit $50,000, he lost a good portion of it. Ah well.

and an article on whether one's abs should be rock-hard, or strong and supple - little bits of interesting trivia in the beginning, yoga exercises in the latter part

and another small psych quote, still pondering its veracity:
"People get anxious about not being able to control their anger or about not knowing how to deal with situations that make them sad. And that is what fear is — the inability to solve the problem that is making you angry or sad."

completely random, found this in an old Phillip Moffitt article about the pysch. of dealing with disappointment:
"First is the creation of a false identity, a you that is solid and never-changing which is continually reinforced by the story. Just by observing yourself closely, you can see that this isn't true and that your ego is really comprised of a group of personalities which are constantly changing.

The second error is that the story-making can create the illusion that your loss is a fresh event when it is actually something that has passed. These two errors combine to lock you into a ghostlike state in which there is no freedom...you have to actively work to see through these errors and to realize that there is no continuing, unchanging person and no experience that is still happening."

Shopgirl, with Steve Martin and Claire Danes. I'm vaguely interested in reading Martin's novel, which this film is based on, but the movie wasn't quite enough to actually interest me. It was quite cute, quite artsy with quality cinematography, quite good acting, and the characters and story were certainly interesting. But, the story as a whole just wasn't...connected well, there was something not very cohesive about the whole thing - which is where my interest in the novel stems from, that is, I think the movie's structure would have worked better in that format.

really tiny art

and finally, the photos from Colorado; they pretty much all turned out to be from the Denver botanical gardens (which so far blew away my other experience with botanical gardens - basically Cleveland - it wasn't even funny, just...sad for Cleveland) and a couple from the Denver aerospace museum.

The Summer of Katya, by Trevanian. Hm, I still can't get over the whole one-name-thing for the author. Anyway, I liked this novel many, many times more than the other novel I've read by him (her?), Shibumi, which admittedly just plain upset me to read. Katya is a whole different ballgame of writing, however, with plenty of witty and snappy repartee. Beyond that, as a thriller (which I'd normally not be very interested in) it quite held my interest and had me guessing right up till the last few pages.

So the illustrious Sensei Tony was giving an introductory talk to the idea of ki last night - both in the somewhat-metaphorical sense, that of extending one's 'intent,' and in the more scientific/practical sense, that of learning to consciously engage muscles and body structure that wouldn't normally be accessed. For example, in the case of the "unbendable arm" trick, if one focuses on keeping their arm straight, it's easily bent, but if one 'extends their intent' to, say, an opposite wall, a little mental trick occurs where the shoulder aligns into a solid frame and one's much larger back muscles are engaged, making it very, very difficult for someone to bend the arm in question.

Anyhoo, my thought in the middle of all of that was to flip not so much the concept of ki, but that certain aspect of it around to meditation and/or general mindset. That is, the idea that there's more that we realize that can be accessed with just a little mental trick of intent within us - whether in our unconscious or 'heart' or otherwise - in the same way that a trick of intent can reshape our bodies and how we use them almost without us realizing. Just something to ponderball, as it were.

Saved!, with Jena Malone and Macauley Culkin. I went into this movie thinking it would just be a shallow satire of fundamentalist Christians, based purely in its jokes, but was pleasantly surprised to find myself really liking some of the characters (especially the adorable Malone and hilarious Culkin) and finding a certain sincerity. Now, one's average fundy probably wouldn't watch this movie, but I firmly believe they should be tricked into watching it if at all possible, and not just for the hilarity of seeing their reaction.

Nice little rundowns of forward and backbends