Routeen Halloween

This Halloween, for the first time in about a decade, I handed out candy to trick-or-treaters. I was oddly nervous about it because in my imagination I visualized trick-or-treaters as aggro adolescents who might deface my car if they didn't care for the little candy bars we offered. To my relief trick-or-treaters turn out to be tiny children with sweet and/or shy dispositions, the timidest monsters I've ever seen.

I was aghast, though, to see most of the kids were being driven around our safe, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood in big suburban utility vehicles instead of walking. It was different for me and mine. We would go outside, in the dark and the Autumnal chill, tripping on our costumes, struggling to see through our masks, exploring our neighborhood on foot, knocking on doors we didn't know. It was a cozy adventure, almost an initiation ceremony; our parents were close behind, but still, the moonlight filtered down through the branches and made everything look like a less trustworthy version of our daytime world. Experiencing it on foot, fully outdoors, haunting or being haunted by the enormity of the starlit sky, made Halloween just a wee bit eldritch. Experiencing it from the back of a boring everyday vehicle just doesn't cut it; that's how kids experience everyday banality. It's neither a trick nor a treat; it's just average.

I fussed about this on Fecesbook (and let's face it, everybody who reads this blog is facebooked to me so you all saw it) and an old high school friend stood up for the automotive trick-or-treating process on the grounds that parents are tired. Well, I'm pretty sure my parents didn't have it any easier, but they still had the decency to lead us on our disguised walkabout. I was surprised this old friend took such a bourgeois stance, since in our younger days she'd been a devoted Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft fan. You'd think she'd retain some love for the real Halloween spooky spirit.

How To Sleep the Aaron Way

If you're wondering why it's been so long between posts, it's because

1. I haven't watched anymore Rahxephon, because the first two episodes were so boring,

2. This is post # 665. Gettin' skeery! Twice in my life I've tried to purchase something, had it ring up as $6.66, and seen a cashier freak out. One gave me a penny discount, the other demanded that I buy something else. A third time the cashier just ran it through with no trouble, and her co-worker started teasing her for loving Satan. I figure I should save post #666 for Halloween.

So anyway, How To Get To Sleep the Aaron Way.

When I'm having trouble drifting off there are a couple of tricks that work for me, but I often forget about them. I hope that by typing them out consciously I'll make my waking self fully mindful of them, placing the tricks at my disposal anytime. Or neutralizing the tricks' effectiveness by dragging them into the daylight. Whichever.

One trick is a childhood favorite: Imagining that I'm being pursued through a forest by faceless heavies, but they'll never find me because I'm hidden in a cave deep within the earth. The threat of the pursuers is an essential part of the comfort here, for some reason. If I'm just underground it's not relaxing, but if I'm underground and thereby beyond the reach of danger, tension flows away. I was reminded of this recently by an Episode of Lost that employs the same basic situation; I guess it's a pretty obvious narrative troupe. Hiding underground. Works for other members of the animal kingdom, so why not us?

The best way I know of lulling myself to sleep during an insomniac mood, though, is to let my inner eye become a screen onto which my subconscious can project an animated film. Somehow when I do this I perceive a flow of images that my conscious mind could never cook up, and it's never the same twice. It's usually as if Paul Klee teamed up with Stan Brakhage, but I never know quite what to expect. Sometimes there's some Fleischer Bros. in there. Sometimes Matthew Thurber. It's a little frustrating to realize that somewhere in my cranium there's a wealth of visual creativity that I can only access as a sleep aid. Maybe I should buy some oils and some Ambien, and see what happens.

Rah Project

If you're feeling a strange, intangible excitement, a sense that something wonderful is immanent, rest assured that it's not just your imagination: I've started rewatching Rahxephon, and I'm going to keep you posted on an episode-by-episode basis. You're welcome.

Why am I doing this? Because I bought the whole series (I don't know why, I just did, okay?) and might as well get my money's worth. Plus it's out of print apparently, and unless people discover a way to, I don't know, download bootleg copies of video material from the Internet or something, it may be hard to find, so someone should keep some kind of anecdotal record.

Having rewatched the first two episodes: Okay, blandly attractive boy has goofy friends (whom I found tiresome the first time I watched it, but now prefer to the endless fighter-jet and giant robot routines. This is a rare instance of something from a anime becoming LESS tiresome to me over time.) KABOOM military attack, fighter jet porn, and his friend-who's-a-girl gets a slight cut. Wait a minute, her blood is red; as I recall a key plot point about seventy episodes later is that her blood is blue, indicating that she's unknowingly a Mulian (the filthy rotten alien invaders.) Is there a continuity screwup here, or do they justify it later? Something to watch for.

So protagonist-boy runs around bumping into several Mysterious Girls. Rei Ayanami of Neon Genesis Evangelion started an anime fad for Mysterious Girls, so this show has a bunch of them. One of the other big trends in anime at the time was the so-called harem anime, in which a nebbishy boy socializes with five or six hot girls. Rahxephon tries to subtly cater to the same adolescent-boy urges while maintaining plausible deniability with furrowed-brow Lost-style seriousness and plot complexity.

The only interesting things in episode one are

1. the Mulian giant robot things look like art projects: pseudo ethnographic, with broken doll heads and such. Sadly the main herobot, Rahxephon, looks much less interesting, like a big boring robot toy, plus feathers.

2. One of the mysterious girls is actually a mysterious woman, with hips and body fat, and therefore more interesting to look at than the usual willowy mysterious girls.

The only interesting things in episode two are

1. the inevitable connection between the boy and the robot is kept uncertain for a while, which in giant robot shows represents an innovation.

2. The boy's Mom is an evil scientist who, like all scientists everywhere, is doing something nefarious. Plus her minions seem to be keeping tabs on the boy hero for some reason. Some of the best episodes will revolve around Satan-Scientist-Mom. The Japanese, like the ancient Greeks, always do well with lurid family conflict.

3. The version of Tokyo where this takes place kinda sorta reminds me of Birmingham, and all the running and driving around prettily painted urban locations sweeps me back to happy days of tooling around The 'Ham. Cheap instant nostalgia is half of what anyone watches anime for.

So far there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to keep watching this thing, but as I recall other fans who had seen more assured me that the series gets more interesting once it's established its giant robot bona fides, and they turned out to be right. One of the reasons I found this show compelling was that each episode had its own identity, even if that identity was often not much of an identity. It never quite felt as if I'd watched slight variations on the same episode three times in a row, which can't be said of most anime.

P. S. this is dated September 15 because I started writing it then, but I posted it October 2nd. Thanks, Blogger. What do you want for free?

One Man Show

I recently heard an NPR story about Hal Holbrook's one man show about Mark Twain. It's got me inspired. I'm planning a show about Edgar Allen Poe in which I get drunk and hit on teenage girls, followed by a show on H. P. Lovecraft in which I have a seizure if a non-WASP is in the audience.

Color Correction and Incorrect Conning

Today I was strolling across the college campus where my Wife works when a dude in a car (I don't notice things like makes and models, but it looked pretty nice) pulled up by me, leaned out the window, and started giving me a spiel. Started with a very long, very rehearsed routine about how he was a data something-or-other-supposed-to-sound-technical-and-impressive, doing fancy-pants computer work for the college, but he was in Charlotte by mistake and needed to get to Charleston and was out of gas money and his phone was booby-trapped or something, so could I do him a favor and go to an ATM with him and withdraw some money, he'd pay me back honest, he makes $130,000 a year and is totally good for it if I'd just help him out here.

Although one fantasizes about telling off con men, I slipped into my default response to such routines, which is a sort of counterspiel, a "huh, whu, I don' geddit, no speekie de engwish, duh der diddle doo, oh look a sunbeam."

He said "Sorry to interrupt you," and sharked off.

Thanks to my wife I know a lot of people who actually do work with technical stuff, actually do travel around, and actually do make a lot of money.

Item 1: They have better problem solving skills than the kind of shmoe who stops random people on the street to get help. In a jam they'd find campus security or whoever was arranging for them to be doing a job in the first place. They have connections, and even if they are desperate for money, they don't get desperate about the money, at least not in front of strangers.

Item Two: They don't lead with a Life's Work infodump. People who do sophisticated work, like people of breeding, communicate who and what they are with their bearing first and foremost. They don't bling it, they just are it. They'll bring up specifics when specifics are called for, but if they need a stranger's help they don't start with "Hey buddy, I do XYZ and I gotta favor to ask," they start with "Can you direct me to Campus Security?"

#

The other night we saw a cheezy 80's movie; what I think of as a time capsule movie, where you're not there for the narrative or whatever, you're there for clothes, hairdos, cars, all the cultural bricabrac. And we were satisfied customers. I bring it up because, in paying attention to the bright colors of the film, I noticed something you won't see in newer films.

The heroine was outdoors on a sunny day, and the different planes of her pale-skinned face were reflecting various colors, including green and blue. She really looked like a Fauvist portrait, but one would never notice it if one weren't contemplating the color scheme of the image, because our eyes harmonize this kind of thing all the time in real life. Without looking like amateurish filmmaking, it gave the picture a little reality.

You won't see that in modern films. We watched some Lost Sseason Two) the next night, and I looked for any stray bits of reflected color on peoples' faces.

Fergit it. One thing future generations will mock about current movies and TV is that they color-correct everything to death. Got a face? It'll be beige, chocolate or orange. So will the background, if it isn't blue.

That's one reason I find myself drawn to older films (okay, it was Teen Witch, pure schlock but wonderful Eighties duds and 'dos.) Whatever may be phony or false in them, the reflections on the actors' faces have some bearing on reality.

Slivers in the Tree

I have a suspicion about abstract art. I suspect it came to prominence in part as a result of the imagery of the microscope and the telescope as it became widely available to the public through, y'know, Life magazine and textbooks. Images of nebulae and microorganisms provided a very different way of looking at the world and its structure(s) than the naked eye could. Most representational art takes a human's-eye-view as the baseline; abstract art takes the telescopic and microscopic views as new baselines. I'm not interested in getting into Sharks Vs. Jets stuff between abstraction and representation, because I value them both, but I think one reason the representational partisans object so zealously to abstract art is that it denies a comfortably human point of view as a sufficient base for looking at the world, and that probably unsettles some people. For some, though, it opens new possibilities. Old-fashioned God-as-man-with-beard art tried to picture God, The Sublime, in humans' eye view ways, which has its virtues and its charms, but Rothko gets much closer to my conception of God.

#

I'm reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Apparently it's caused some trouble in a high school lit. class. I'm not deep into it; about 30 pages of a 600+ page book. Still, it's clear from Chapter One that this is going to be an R-rated text. The (married) protagonist is sitting around the apartment, hoping someone will call with a job offer. Instead an anonymous woman calls and starts talking explicitly dirty to him. He hangs up, and the incident bothers him for the rest of the day. The phone keeps ringing, and he refuses to answer; he's too icked out by the first call of the day.

I can see why some people would be uncomfortable with this material, particularly for teen readers. But I can see the possible value of it. What teen can't relate to the your headspace, confusing and frustrating you, icking you out all day. I suppose the student who objected to the book saw the book itself in those terms. But still, the book offers an opening into a serious discussion about these kinds of problems, and advanced students need to get outside their comfort zones in order to address difficult topics. I hope that when the young protestor goes off to school she won't be lost at sea when sexuality gets increasingly persistent in her life, which it will. Maybe she'll remember the book and give it another try then; it contains wisdom from which she would be well advised to learn.

I recently finished Silver On the Tree, the last book in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series. Computer game nerds have a term for games that aren't open-ended, games in which the player has to go along a predetermined path to complete the game: "on rails." Like an amusement park ride, right? Cooper's plots are on rails. Will and company mostly have to go along till they get to the next hypnagogic semi-interactive showpiece, then let an old guy lecture them on the Matter of Britain symbolic significance of what's happening, then repeat til the conclusion. There's a pair of nice dilemmas for some characters at the grand conclusion, but the climax itself is pretty much a matter of "Then the children hoisted the magic treasures they found in the other books, and the treasures zapped the bad guys with magic beams and the day was saved, then the old guy gave a really long speech about good and evil, the end."

I Don't Wanna Go Back

I've written before about weirdoes at the laundromat, but as I sit here doing laundry in our own household machines I recall there were many as-yet undocumented but unsettling encounters. It was a 24 hour place, open to all, so all kinds of people showed up. If you were there in the early morning and wanted to have a sexual encounter with a sweaty trembling tweaker you were usually in luck. Not that I ever availed myself, you understand, but they made their presence and their proclivities known.

If you went on a Saturday afternoon you'd always have to contend with the big ruddy guy in the muumuu who didn't wash his clothes in the machines. There was a large sink the custodian washed his mop in; it was always kind of cruddy. And Muumuu Man would dump his laundry in there, pour on detergent, and turn on the faucet. He'd also smoke inside even though there were No Smoking signs everywhere. Once he stood right in front of the only exit, blocking the path with his big circus-tent-looking body, smirking as people tried to get around him. Oh, Muumuu Man.

One night was particularly noteworthy. I put my laundry in the machines and went for a little stroll around the nearby park. It was dark out, and I heard a howling that I took to be a dog. Eventually, though, the howling resolved into a phrase: "I DON'T WANNA GO BACK TO PRISON," over and over again. I went back inside. A bunch of cute college kids were doing their laundry and chatting. They were mostly white females and black males, and clearly very happy to be together. It was nice to be on the periphery of such a warm crew; like sitting near a campfire.

Then a scraggly hillbillyish guy came in, looked at them with a manic grin, walked all around the room, loudly slammed a top-loader lid, and stormed out.

Light nervous laughter. "That was random," one of the kids said.

Then the guy came back in the door with a thick branch in his hand.

"Now yew all get on out of here," he said. "We don't want yew messin' with our women."

One of the young black men said something appropriately inappropriate. The ridiculous person left. One of the kids called the police, who drove around but didn't find the guy. I wonder if he ever went back to prison.