On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running

Jun. 5th, 2025 11:13 pm
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
As my day centrally involved a very long-awaited referral finally coming through and foundering immediately on the shoals of the American healthcare system, it wasn't a very good one. The CDC called for my opinions on vaccination which it turned out I was not permitted to state for the record without a minor child in the house. Because the call was recorded for quality assurance, I said just in case that I had children in my life if not my legal residence and I supported their vaccination so as to protect them from otherwise life-threatening communicable diseases and did not express my opinion of the incumbent secretary of health and human services and his purity of essence. I got hung up on before I could tell my family stories from before the polio vaccine and the MMR.

Of course the man in the White House used the Boulder attack to justify his latest travel ban. Burned Jews are good for his business. I appreciate this op-ed from Eric K. Ward. I hope it reaches anyone it's meant to. I thought I was jaundiced about people and now I think I'm just in liver failure.

It would never have occurred to me that a video for Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977) should have anything to do with psychological realism, but Saoirse Ronan seems to have had a great time with it.
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
Thanks to the Canadian wildfires, our sunset light is Pompeiian red, by which I mean mostly the cinnabar and heat-treated smolder of the pigment, but also the implication of volcano.

Because my day was scrambled by a canceled appointment, after I had made a lot of phone calls [personal profile] spatch took me for soft-serve ice cream in the late afternoon, and once home I walked out to photograph some poppies I had seen from the car.

Did you love mimesis? )

I can't help feeling that last night's primary dream emerged from a fender-bender in the art-horror 1970's because once the photographer who had done his aggressive and insistently off-base best to involve me in a blackmail scandal had killed himself, all of a sudden the hotel where I had been attending a convention with my husbands had a supernatural problem. Waking in the twenty-first century, I appreciate it could be solved eventually with post-mortem mediation rather than exorcistic violence, but it feels like yet another subgenre intruding that the psychopomp for the job was a WWI German POW.

Reading Wednesday

Jun. 4th, 2025 07:14 am
sabotabby: (books!)
[personal profile] sabotabby
Just finished: real ones, Katherena Vermette. This one ruled. I don't have a lot to add to what I said last week except that I really enjoyed it. If you want a good pairing (or you're not super familiar with the context of the Canadian arts scene), Jesse Wente's Unreconciled provides a great non-fiction one. But yeah, I loved the characters, I loved the poetic, Impressionist writing style, it was emotionally affecting without high stakes or pacing, which is something that genre writers could learn a lot from (more on that later). Vermette seems to be putting out great books with impressive frequency but this is the one I've enjoyed most so far.

The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed. This one was imperfect and ambitious, but I'll take that over boring any day. It's a master class in how to do some interesting worldbuilding; there's a lot going on in the background, and you get it only as a sketch. Oh yeah, there are lizard guns. Why are the guns lizards? Eh, don't worry about it, keep up. It's pretty New Weird in the tradition of Miéville and Tchaikovsky (positive) so I liked that quite a bit.

I have two big critiques, one big and one small. First, the small. This is critically acclaimed, nominated for a bunch of awards, and put out by a real press. And yet. And yet. Alefret, the main character, has one leg. This is clearly established in the opening line. His leg is slowly growing back thanks to an experimental serum that's delivered via wasp sting (again, cool) but it's slow and he's on crutches for the entire book, something that is done very well and really gives a good sense of the character's physicality. And then there is a scene where he is having dinner with two elderly sisters who have a cat. Under the table, the cat brushes up against his ankles and he holds his legs very still. WTF? Which editor let that through?

My bigger complaint is that I don't think she quite lands the ending. As I've said, it's ambitious, a story about whether pacifism can survive a horrific war.
spoilers )

Cottagers and Indians by Drew Hayden Taylor. This is a one-act play based on the true story of Anishinaabe people trying to re-seed lakes with wild rice, over the objection of white cottagers. And it's amazing, obviously. Everything he writes is great and this is particularly affecting. It's a dance between two difficult, complicated characters, and while the white cottager character could easily be a hideous caricature, Hayden Taylor is too much of a humanist to take the easy road out. There's also a great afterword by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, because of course there is.

Currently reading: Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls. This is a bilingual (!!!) Indigenous futurist comic about two defenders of the earth, beautifully illustrated in a Formline style. If you want to learn Tahltan, I can't think of a cuter way. There's a lot of pew pew pew and it's very fun.

Withered by A.G.A. Wilmot. JFC not another cozy horror, fuck me. This one starts out very promising, with a teenage girl, haunted by the ghost of her recently dead brother, trying to burn down the family house before it kills the rest of her family. 25 years later, Robyn, who grew up in the tiny town of Black Stone, has fallen on financial hard times after the death of her husband, so she moves herself and her teenage child, Ellis, back home into the very same house. Ellis meets a number of residents, mostly young people, who insist that the house is haunted, and that there's a strange power that it exerts by displacing death into the surrounding towns, while keeping the people in Black Stone alive for a very long time. This is a good set up for horror. I'm here for it.

However, it turns out that the haunted house is nice, actually??? and everyone in the town is very nice??? Ellis is recovering from a life-threatening eating disorder that they in part attribute to "anti-queer cultural norms" and yet they do not encounter anyone who doesn't want to be their friend and/or date them, they immediately get a job at the cool coffee shop without a resume, and everyone in their life is accepting and friendly. Once again, a queernormative setting wants to have its anti-oppression cake and eat it too. I guess maybe the house is somehow making everyone in this small town cool and rad and multicultural, but I dunno, I lived in a pretty small town and it wasn't great.

Also all the kids are goth or alternative in some way and listen to the kind of music that I like. I can buy that there are tons of teenage Black girls in the year of our lord 2025 who listen to Bjork and Sigur Ros. What I cannot buy is that in a tiny town, one of them would just happen to meet and fall for a kid who listens to Frightened Rabbit and the Mountain Goats.

Anyway, I am suspecting that the girl who spent 25 years in a mental institution (what) is going to end up being the villain of the piece, because this is what reading cozy things has led me to suspect. But let's see.
sovay: (Cho Hakkai: intelligence)
[personal profile] sovay
I just had my hand dipped in paraffin for a therapeutic procedure and it was so cool. After four immersions in the bracingly hot, clear, slightly soft liquid which reminded me of candle-making in elementary school, it formed a dully livid, slowly malleable coating in which I could see instantly the possibilities of practical effects, although what I actually said as I carefully brought my mannequin hand over to the table where it would be wrapped in plastic and insulated with a towel was, "It's fascinating. I must be quite flammable." The heat lingered much longer in the paraffin than I had expected from the quick-hardening dots and puddles of candlewax and cooled to room temperature without brittling. It had to be rubbed through to be removed. Tragically it did not peel off like a glove into an inverted ghost hand, but it could actually be worked off my wrist and fingers in a coherent thick wrinkle and took none of the small hairs off the back of my hand with it, like its own Vaseline layer. "Your skin is going to be so moisturized," the therapist promised me. I am still getting a referral to a hand specialist, but it was such a neat experience and like nothing I have experienced at a doctor's. It did not trip my sensory wires and made me think of Colin Clive in Mad Love (1935).
sovay: (Mr Palfrey: a prissy bastard)
[personal profile] sovay
It improves my mood considerably that I can listen to the Drive's "Jerkin'" (1977) because not only is the song itself a brilliant example of stupid rock, the band existed for a grand total of seven months during which it managed to release one un-radio-playable single, manufacture a scandal, blow an important gig, and implode in a puff of 20/20 hindsight, which sounds like a none more punk biography to me. Any myriad of such one-not-exactly-hit wonders would have bubbled through any scene with a critical exposure to Patti Smith or the Sex Pistols—in this case it was Dundee's—but this one left enough traces that I can, thanks to one of the better functions of the internet, experience all six and a half minutes of their total musical record and read for myself their history according to their lead singer, who really should feel proud that so much pleasure can be transferred through a song about masturbation. It has a two-guitar solo! DIY that slide! The persistence of thrown-at-the-wall weirdness makes me feel better about the world. On that note, because I had recent occasion to, as it were, drag it out, Lou Rand Hogan's The Gay Cookbook (1965).
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
All praise to the makers of Bar Keepers Friend, which enabled me and [personal profile] rushthatspeaks to de-blue the shower tonight after he had re-dyed his hair. It took us four tries to find a restaurant that wasn't dark Mondays, but eventually El Vaquero came through with, in my case, a spectacularly stuffed burrito de lengua which did its best to be bigger than my head. I am not at the top of my health and feeling more than a little disintegrated about current events. Have a picture from a window of MIT.

Flashnow

Jun. 2nd, 2025 08:11 am
valancy_jane: (Default)
[personal profile] valancy_jane
I saw a picture today of a dear old friend from Spain; someone I have mentally cheered along all the way though we effectively never talk, pursuing an amazing human rights career. After seeing her go through many fashion phases, she looks almost exactly like she did in college, sans a little punk color in her hair: the black leather boots (though more motorcycle than Docs style now), the short skirt, the tight t-shirt. I wonder if this is like the bluebird of happiness, where we spend years around the world only to find ourselves at home: returning to our true college selves. Or maybe it just pokes its head out now and again, like a baby bird in its nest, hidden but essential, core.
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
City of Fear (1959) has no frills and no funds and it doesn't need either when it has the cold sweat of its premise whose science fiction had not yet become lead-lined science fact. It's late noir of an orphan source incident. Its ending is not a place of honor.

Unique among atomic noirs of my experience, City of Fear couldn't care less about the international anxieties of nuclear espionage or even apocalypse, at least not in the conventionally pictured sense of flash-boiling annihilation. More akin to a plague noir, it concerns itself with the intimately transmissible deteriorations of acute radiation syndrome as it tracks its inadvertent vector through the bus stops and back alleys and motor courts of the city he can irradiate with nothing more than a nauseated cough, the drag of a dizzied foot, the clutch of a sweat-soaked palm. As Vince Ryker lately of San Quentin, Vince Edwards has all the hardbodied machismo of a muscle magazine and the cocky calculation of an ambitious hood, but he's a dead man since he shoved that stainless steel canister inside his shirt, mistaking its contents for a cool million's worth of uncut heroin. It's a hot sixteen ounces of granulated cobalt-60 and it has considerably more of a half-life than he does. Well ahead of the real-life incidents of Mexico City, Goiânia, Samut Prakan, Lia, this 75-minute B-picture knows the real scare of our fallout age is not the misuse of nuclear capabilities by bad actors, but simply whether our species which had the intelligence to split the atom has the sense to survive the consequences. "I doubt if anyone can explain that calmly to three million people without touching off the worst panic in history."

The plot in this sense is mostly a skin for the philosophy, a procedural on the eighty-four-hour clock of its antihero's endurance as the authorities scramble to trace their rogue source before it can ionize too much of an unprepared Los Angeles. In slat-blinded boxes of offices as blank as concrete coffers, Lyle Talbot and John Archer's Chief Jensen and Lieutenant Richards of the LAPD gravely absorb the crash course in containment delivered by co-writer Steven Ritch as Dr. Wallace, the radiological coordinator of the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District who bears the stamp of nuclear authority in his thin intense face and his wire-brush hair, a lecturer's gestures in his black-framed glasses and his quick-tilt brows. Pressed by the cops for a surefire safeguard against loose 60Co, he responds with dry truthfulness, "Line up every man, woman and child and issue them a lead suit and a Geiger counter." The stark-bulbed shelves of a shoe store's stockroom provide a parallel shadow site for the convergence of local connections such as Joseph Mell's Eddie Crown and Sherwood Price's Pete Hallon, whose double act of disingenuous propriety and insinuating jitters finds a rather less receptive audience in an aching-boned, irritable Vince, groaning over his mysterious cold even as he clings territorially to the unjimmied, unshielded canister: "Look, this stays, I stay, and you get rid of it when I say so." Already a telltale crackle has started to build on the film's soundtrack as a fleet of Geiger-equipped prowl cars laces the boulevards of West Hollywood and the drives of Laurel Canyon, snagging their staticky snarl on the hot tip of a stiff just as the jingle of an ice cream truck and the clamor of eager kids double-underline the stakes of endangered innocence. While Washington has been notified, the public is still out of the loop for fear of mass unrest, the possibility of evacuating the children at least. A night panorama of the dot-to-dot canyon of lights that comprises downtown L.A. recurs like a reminder of the density of individuals to be snuffed and blighted if Vince should successfully crack the canister into an accidental dispersal of domestic terrorism: "He's one man, holding the lives of three million people in his hands." At the same time, he skulks through a world that for all its docu-vérité starkness of Texaco stations and all-night Thrifty Drug Stores seems eerily depopulated, a function perhaps of the starvation-rations production, but it suggests nonetheless the post-apocalyptic ghost this neon concentrate of a metropolis could turn into. It might be worse than a bomb, this carcinogenic, hemorrhagic film that Dr. Wallace forecasts settling over the city if the high gamma emitter of the cobalt gets into the smog, the food chain, the wildlife, the populace, Chornobyl on the San Andreas Fault. "Hoarse coughing, heavy sweat, horrible retching. Then the blood begins to break down. Then the cells." With half a dozen deaths on his conscience as the picture crunches remorselessly toward the bottom line of its hot equations, we can't be expected to root for Vince per se, but he isn't so sadistic or so stupid that he deserves this sick and disoriented, agonized unraveling. His relations with Patricia Blair's June Marlowe are believably tender as well as studly, sympathetically admitting in her arms that he just wanted something better for the two of them than an ex-con's "dead meat dishwashing for the rest of your life." A cool redhead, she's a worthy moll, unintimidated by police interrogation or the onset of hacking fever. A sly, dark anti-carceral intimation gets under the atomic cocktail of tech almost in passing—the fatal canister came originally from the infirmary at San Quentin, where it was used in what Lieutenant Richards describes as "controlled volunteer experiments" and Vince more colloquially identifies as "secret junkie tests." Perhaps we are meant to presume that the prison grapevine jumbled the science, allowing him to confuse the expanding field of cobalt therapy for drug trials and thus a lethal radionuclide for a lucrative opioid. The fact of human experimentation regarded fearfully by maximum-security inmates remains. Their radiation safety was evidently nothing to write home about either way.

It's worth a million. )

Co-written by Ritch and Robert Dillon, this terse little one-way ticket was directed for Columbia by Irving Lerner, a past master of documentaries and microbudgets and an alleged Soviet asset while employed by the Bureau of Motion Pictures, or at least he was accused of unauthorized photography of the cyclotron at UC Berkeley in 1944. Wherever he got his feel for nuclear paranoia, it is intensely on display in City of Fear, its montages a push-pinned, slate-chalked, civil-defense-survey-metered feast of retro-future shock. Lucien Ballard once again shoots a grippingly unglamorous noir of anonymously sun-washed sidewalks and night-fogged intersections. The low-strings score by Jerry Goldsmith pulses and rattles with jazz combo edginess, all off-beat percussion and unease in the woodwinds and jabbing brass, closing out the film on a bleak sting of the uncertainly protected city. I discovered it on Tubi, but it can be watched just as chillingly on YouTube where its existentialism, like a committed dose, spreads from the individual to the national to the planetary. No one in it wears proper PPE, but it names its deadly element outright. For a study in whiplash, double-feature it with A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962). This contamination brought to you by my controlled backers at Patreon.

Flicking embers into daffodils

May. 31st, 2025 05:05 pm
sovay: (I Claudius)
[personal profile] sovay
A nice thing to link to: Jeannelle M. Ferreira's "The House of Women" (2025), named after the site on Akrotiri because it is a story from when the mountain was Minoan and the walls of the city where libations were offered 𐀤𐀨𐀯𐀊 𐂕𐄽𐄇 were painted with dolphins and saffron gatherers. I have a great affection for this story with its ground pigments and grilled eel and lovers describable as sapphic a thousand years before the tenth Muse. Even in cataclysms, it is worth holding on.

podcast friday

May. 30th, 2025 07:15 am
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
[personal profile] sabotabby
 When someone tells you that something is "inevitable" or "here to stay," you shouldn't believe them. You should, in fact, do something between vicious mockery and other, more high-level spells on them. They are lying to you and they want you to suffer.

In the past, massive political and socioeconomic changes were enforced through violence. Before Margaret Thatcher could have people believing that There Is No Alternative, she had to crush the miner's unions. Before neoliberal structural adjustment policies were enforced on the Global South, governments and corporations had to rig elections, murder Indigenous people, and starve their populations. 

So why are we accepting this massive change—the enshittification of all things from labour to education to the arts—that no one asked for and no one wants? Because we are a very passive, bovine population that has been conditioned for decades to accept anything that Big Tech tells us that we want. Which is why I get daily emails from companies and my employer giving me best practices for incorporating plagiarism into my pedagogical practice, etc.

The handful of independent tech reporters who still have brains, like Ed Zitron and in this case, Paris Marx, put the lie to that. Tech Won't Save Us has a great episode, "Generative AI is Not Inevitable with Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender" that discusses how obvious it is that gen AI has not lived up to the hype, that it's an industry propped up by wishes and VC capital rather than an actual market, and that we can actually nip this in the bud. It's very empowering and I'm definitely going to check out the book that the two guests wrote.

It's mortal primetime

May. 29th, 2025 10:55 pm
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
I helped cook for eight people tonight, since in a sort of semi-impromptu reunion, both of my mother's siblings were in town with their respective partners and the child of one of them, whose own child is graduating from college this weekend because time isn't even an illusion. My major contributions were sautéing a sort of smoky mélange of rainbow carrots and peppers and shallots and handling the pan-frying of the chicken breasts my father was dredging for the piccata while not scalding more than three of my fingertips on the steamed zucchini with dill. My mother's marmalade cake was enjoyed by all. I am now home in a somewhat deliquescent state, since I had two telehealth appointments before even leaving the house, but this total of people had not been in the same place since pre-pandemic and it was important to be one of them. I can't wait for this pollen season to be over. It turns out if you dunk a chunk of brie into homemade pesto, it's a brilliant idea.

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