Angry Robot

weather, dancers

Some of my favourite good-bad lyrics:

She wore faded jeans

And soft black leather

She had eyes so blue

They looked like weather…

Tom Petty, “It’ll All Work Out.” We can assume from this lyric that Mr. Petty lives in Southern California. Here, it would mean, “She had eyes so blue they looked snow white and ice cold.”

I’m as serious as cancer

When I say, rhythm is a dancer.

I believe that is a Snap lyric. The cancer metaphor succeeds in saying, “hey, I’m serious.” What is he so serious about? Some meaningless phrase, “rhythm is a dancer.” Can you really, honestly, cold-bloodedly deploy a cancer metaphor for whatever dumb catch phrase pops into your confused head, asshole?

maniac!

Once you’ve run an ambulance off a large hill high into the air, and crashed it down in the middle of a crowded schoolyard, once you’ve run from the flaming ruins right before it explodes, and taken a call on the payphone ringing right next to you, you’ll know as I do that Grand Theft Auto 3 is a hell of a lot of dirty, nasty fun. Thank you, Rockstar games.

U.S.O.

Yet more oily conspiracy stuff: anti-oil book authors claim oil’s war in Afghanistan is about oil. Hey, it’s not the most shocking thing in the world, but it does mention sweet, sweet oil repeatedly… Mmmmm… gooey delicious oil… must declare war…

CGIxploitation

Okay, this is getting weird. A Korean producer is working on the ultimate bruceploitation movie, in which Mr. Lee is brought back to life digitally.

the brucealikes

Line from Blind Fist of Bruce, one of several bruceploitation films I’m in the process of watching: “I never knew my kung fu was so bad.” Haven’t we all thought that at some point?

photos

I’ve scanned some photos. They’re not recent – two to three years old, or so (except the party ones). Once I find the time to rework my site’s back end, there will be a designated photo page, but until then it’s the iTools thing, which works pretty smoothly.

millenium actress

I want to rave like a dying lunatic about the magical anime masterpiece <a href=http://us.imdb.com/Details?0291350″>Millenium Actress. But there’s no point, as it’s not available anywhere yet. (Lookit me! I’m such an insider!) It’s by Satoshi Kon, director of Perfect Blue. It’s a pomo-Brecht romance odyssey whose self-references somehow draw one further in, as if fantasy was really the best way to tell the story of a real person’s life, and it’s – oh wait, there’s no point, is there?

Teddy

Teddy is a comic about a tragic relationship. It is of high caliber. It is brought to you by Moz and The Velvet Cerebellum, by which I mean via those two blogs, not that they sponsored this post, or that this post would not have been possible without the generous support of some friendly corporate giant, such as Pepsi.

hockey healing

The healing power of hockey:

The game “has nothing to do with race,” he says. “It has everything to do with who you are. I look at it as I’m trying to coach hockey, not coach colour. There’s only one way to pass a puck. There isn’t a white way of passing.”

highlander 2 part 2

Lastly, or this will turn into Highlander 2: The Bloggening: there is a scene in which Connery performs an action-packed act of heroism. It is set to “Amazing Grace” played by bagpipes. More evidence that the makers of the film should be hunted down and brought to trial for Crimes Against Cinema.

ozone

How odd. The hole in the ozone layer is shrinking. This is a plot element from Highlander 2! Oh, ye gods of irony… have mercy on me…

highlander 2

Whaddup with Highlander 2? I mean, what happened here? I’m not the hugest fan of the first in the series, but you have to admire it for its original story, its cinematography, and its breadth. Yet part two is a disaster. Of course, many sequels are disasters, but — oh sweet Moses, this is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Not only is all the dialogue cringe-worthy, but the story doesn’t even make sense. It fails the simplest of water-holding tests. So Lambert and Connery are aliens, and they knew each other on the planet Zeiss before heading to earth, where they either forgot about their friendship entirely, or pretended they didn’t know each other for the entire first film. And the immortal/mortal thing just gets shot to shit. Perennial villain Michael Ironside appears in the “500 years ago on the planet Zeiss” scene as some sort of desert warlord. Now, they’re apparently not supposed to be immortal until they get to earth. Yet, 500 years later, he flies down to earth for the Lambert grudge match – they didn’t mention anything about time travel, did they? And, as an alien warlord enjoying his first earth-visit, he already knows all sorts of action tag-lines – “this is the last stop” after trashing a train, “put it on my tab” after trashing a cab. And MacLeod and Ramirez are called MacLeod and Ramirez on their home planet! What sort of alien names are those? What happened to good old Zor and Ungar-9 and all that shit? “Hi, I’m Jennifer Smith, an alien from beyond time.” Finally, why would Lambert help design an ozone shield for the planet? He was a fucking antique dealer in the last film! Is the global shield made out of brass and pewter?

So many questions… so many. It comes down to this: it’s inconceivable that even the dumbest halfwit mountain people could come up with a script so horribly bad, but this piece of villainy was brought about by the creators of the original: same director, writers, producers. And why the fuck did Connery sign on? Stu theorizes that Russel Malcahy deliberately tried to ruin the film, since he never wanted to make the sequel in the first place. But why would he sign on? Elsewhere I read that partway through shooting the bad producers/distributors took the thing away from the good producers and massacred it. Some explanation may be found on this new DVD. It’s an extended director’s cut, with deleted and even reshot scenes, that abandons the alien storyline. Apparently Malcahy et all explain what happened, what they originally intended, blah blah. Anyone seen it and care to tell me?

oil & drugs, the conspiracy

Great conspiracy site here. The writer in question is Michael C. Ruppert, ex-LAPD. His special interest is CIA involvement in narcotics. I really recommend reading his testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Many of the articles appear to be well-researched and argued (this and that); the one that is generating the controversy is this one that argues the CIA had foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks and did not act. It seems a bit rushed and I don’t agree with it. Nonetheless, there are some juicy tidbits: you have major sources saying a) the war against Afghanistan was planned before the attacks and b) the CIA had a chance to grab bin Laden in July and did not. Most intriguingly, the source for the second point, Le Figaro, is owned by the Carlyle Group, which connects the Bushes to the bin Laden family. And, if the Figaro article is to be believed, bin Laden was being visited by family members, meaning he’s not the “black sheep” they claim him to be.

Okay, enough. I have a massive weak spot for conspiracy stories. And I confess that I deal with them strictly as stories and not so much for their truth value – that’s way too much work. I know that’s degenerate postmodernism, but hey, that’s how I’m livin’. This one I find pretty good. Most conspiracy narratives fail when they try to explain too much. Most are an attempt to debunk official stories (the, er, ‘metanarrative’), but when they argue, say, that Jesus was an alien, they are themselves turning into a metanarrative. This one stays fairly close to home – no claims that the CIA killed Jesus in an illicit drug operation, or anything like that. The touchy part is the inclusion of the Bushes in the conspiracy, which is going a little over the top. Although, hey, Bush Sr. was head of the CIA, as I’m sure we all know…

I am king of jumpsuit

Fucking A plus, I now have the greatest jumpsuit: Puma, blue with fluorescent yellow stripes. 100% polyester, baby. Connotations: Swedish sports, Russian mob, North African hiphoppers. I’m considering destroying the rest of my clothes. I don’t need them anymore.

If you told me when I started this blog that I would ever post something like this, I would have come down to your house and slapped you around with a hot skillet. Sigh…

nice site

Cleaning the Fucking Kitchen for Dummies. (via captainfez)

alias web game

There appears to be an AI-style web game accompanying the new TV show Alias. It seems this fake bank site and this page about a Nostradamus-esque (Nostradamic? Nostradamian?) seer are starting points, although I haven’t investigated very far myself.

I’ve seen one episode of the show, and it was surprisingly good: well paced, well scored and not taking itself too seriously. Apparently the creator, JJ Abrams (who was behind Felicity) is taken with Run Lola Run. I found the show somewhat indebted to The Sopranos and True Lies, in that it examines the domestic life of a character type more frequently seen in action thrillers (in Alias’ case, a spy).

Be that as it may, I’m happy to see that the new phenomenon of the web game did not die with A.I.‘s box office still-birth.

halloween

Challenge to those who have yet to celebrate Hallowe’en, or failing that a note for next year: dress abstract. Dress as a concept, especially one that cannot easily be rendered via costume. Dress vague, dress ambiguous. Avoid “oh, you’re a cat.” Aim for “What the fuck are you?” Sigh, and say “I don’t know.”

Inspiration: two friends’ costumes last saturday. One went as a joint. He was understood to be many things, including a tooth and a KKK member, but rarely was he seen as a joint. (Imagine a costume so ambiguous that one person sees it as a tooth and another sees a Grand Wizard.) The other went as “Barry Anthrax,” an interpretive anthropomorphization of the topical germ weapon. He had a flowing mullet and wore his underwear outside his pants.

Afghan campaign premeditated

This is curious: US had plans to attack Afghanistan before 9.11. Now of course, I don’t doubt that the Pentagon has contingency plans on file for invasions of every country on the planet, but the claim in the article is that they were aiming to attack in October anyway. Then again, we need not trust what Pakistani officials have to say; they played a big part in getting the Taliban in power and many of them would love to make the US look stupid.

Oh damn, I was going to lay off the Current Situation stuff for a while. Blast.

art-tapping

Oh my, this makes me feel better: wiretapping as art.

No, really, it does!

Er, I think it does.

Well, at least it’s making me think.

Current Situation roundup

Is there any point in wringing one’s hands over the USA Act? It’s going through, whether or not you like police black-bagging your home and carnivoring your email without even thinking about getting a warrant. Similarly, here in Canada where we thought the liberals were in power, we get this thing, which US news media can only describe as “sweeping.”

It’s enough that we worry about fanatics distributing biochemical surprises – do we really have to worry about the RIAA terrorizing us as well? If that seems like an abuse of the term “terrorist,” that’s exactly the issue. What is being broadly referred to as computer hacking is now considered a terrorist act. However, the RIAA wants the ability to launch denial of service attacks on copyright-infringers. It didn’t work. Sweet baby Jesus, what a bunch of opportunists.

Similarly, in Canada there is some concern that anti-globalization activists may be considered terrorists under the new act, and thus could be treated to a bunch of exciting new law enforcement techniques. (Torture, anyone? Coming soon!) While the above-linked government page soothes:

The definition is carefully circumscribed to make it clear that disrupting an essential service is not a terrorist activity if it occurs during a lawful protest…

that bastion of leftist resistance, the Canadian Bar Association, complains heavily.

Augh!

That’s enough of the Current Situation for a couple weeks, isn’t it? Without even bringing up the joy of patents or Gulf War Syndrome.

404 Zork

Play Zork, 404-style.

Beta Band live show

Beta Band, Tuesday Oct. 23, Opera House, Toronto

Damn. These cats are amazing. The setup on stage looked like they were a twelve-peice band, but there were only four of them – four musicians who each play at least three instruments. They’d play recordings of some tracks, so at some points there would be a recording of the guitar part playing, while the guitarist was in mid-drum solo. Musically they are borderline indescribable. It’s sort of an indie-rock / electronica hybrid, but not in the sense of throwing a dance beat under a rock song, or looping a few guitar sounds into a dance mix. Their song structures themselves are mutated and entirely unpredictable. They played for about two hours, and It Was Good. Check here to see if they’re playing in your North American Urban Center.

damn Apple

Of course, the preceding post is standard for Apple maniacs: sort of a rumour hangover.

iPod

I now strongly resent my earlier Apple-anticipatory post. The iPod ain’t all that – cool, yes; innovative, no; affordable, fuck no.

dialogue scrap

Homemade dialogue that is caught in my head:

Woman: What’s wrong, Smokey?
Smokey: I quit.