Zombie Lapdance

if there are any of you who care, there was a UT football game last weekend. it was only the second game of the season, but everyone was so FREAKIN EXCITED because the game was against OHIO!!! OOOOOOO!!!!

anyhoo, i tried not to take too much pleasure in the humiliating defeat, but as a measure of the hysteria involved, i would like to present the following photos, taken three hours before the game start and two miles from the stadium:

note, the champagne flutes, the foot-tall pepper grinder, and the pretty little tablecloth. can this really be considered tailgating? is it really that hard to find a decent restaurant in austin?

over the weekend i saw a live performance of salvage vangard theater’s (SVT) intergalactic nemesis, a live-action (?) sci-fi radio play. i’m wary of this phenomenon of radio drama performed as live theater (as i reported earlier). as someone who did crew for SVT, i can appreciate the lack of stage effects. those damn things never measured up to even the lamest CGI. but as a fan of radio drama, i find it irksome to have to look at real people while getting my drama. closing my eyes, makes the experience immensely more entertaining.

the intergalactic nemesis is genuinely fun, which i think is what makes it SVT’s most successful production. jessica reisman, the science fiction contributor for the script (jason neulander being the script’s meddler) commented on the production’s general accessibility, although in more disparaging terms.

i on the other hand am certain that the biggest problem facing austin theater is the sad attempts at profundity. for instance, i worked on SVT’s temp odyssey, which marred a perfectly entertaining story about chicken-choking with random and largely inaccurate lectures about black holes (the playwright implied that stars increased their mass as they collapsed).

but it was while working on motherbone, an opera with music by graham reynolds, the guy who made the soundtrack for a scanner darkly, where i developed my theory that local theater is actually NEGATIVELY ENTERTAINING. think of it this way. on motherbone there was a cast of about twenty, an orchestra of fifteen, a librettist, a crew of ten, and almost a score of various volunteers coming in and out of the production. some of these people worked for months on the production, not to mention the director of the theater company who works fulltime year round. meanwhile the opera only runs for a month. each show packs in only slightly more audience than cast and crew.

if you add it all up, the sum total of entertainment manhours subtracted by the work put into the production is ACTUALLY NEGATIVE.

this sort of thing happens in local theater all the time. the only thing for it is to stop funding of local theater entirely and invest that money in a more time-effective form of entertainment.

you know.

like blogging.

there i was hanging out at lovejoys bar in austin, basically a punk dive with homebrewed beers on tap, and my friend daud mentioned some mysterious texts he read about on wikipedia. this being austin, even the punk bars have wifi, so i whipped out the laptop and set it in the puddle of espresso chocolate stout.

the voynich manuscript. a possibly 400 year old book with an unknown writing system consisting of 20-30 unique glyphs. it just showed up in the library of a prague alchemist in the 18th century.

and once you start on the enigmatic texts, you can’t really stop.

the phaistos disk, a spiralling clay disc with an archeologically unique writing system. it was found in the basement of a palace in crete, generally considered to be just another cryptic product of those wacky minoans. but don’t worry, as soon as we get the thing decihpered, there’s already font support lined up.

oh, and another cryptic book, the rohonczi codex. this one just showed up in a donation pile to the hungarian science academy.

could be written in hungarian, maybe romanian. maybe cuman. but isn’t the whole point of writing something down, the assumption that at somepoint somebody is going to read it?

not apparently for the author of the codex seraphinus, an italian designer who just went ahead and created a new language and a base-21 page numbering system. currently undeciphered.

the wikipedia has a convenient listing of mysterious texts here.

and while we’re on the subject of mysterious artefacts, check out the antikythera mechanism.

this is the Xray of an analog computer found in the wreck of a roman ship. greek manufacture from about 80BC. those greeks were pretty damn scary.

from the mural on the side of an east austin laundromat.

and a closeup of the relevant iconography.

how are you celebrating the holiday?

a link to an academic paper went around the slugtribe list recently. it was one of those spoilsport articles about how unrealistic 50s B-grade movies were, with all those giant monsters that could never possibly exist in real life. no freakin duh.

but the author, for all his pompous incredulity did seem to enjoy the movies he debased with his filthy realism, and he actually managed to say some interesting things about biology. for instance, the giant octopus from "it came from beneath the sea" tears down the golden gate bridge at one point, raising his tentacles from the sea all the way up to the traffic deck, a non-survivable suicide jump of roughly 300ft (an easy enough height to remember as it is equivalent to the guesstimate height raymond burr attributes to godzilla). apparently this action would have caused massive fluid pressure, causing a brain embolism and the subsequent retardation of an otherwise sensitive and intelligent animal (doesn’t cephalopod mean ‘head-foot’? surely that means something).

as i had not seen this movie, i went out and rented a copy to search for signs of octopus retardation.

i won’t comment on my conclusions, other than to say the octopus probably just wanted to hang in san francisco with all the other spineless water-bags.

but i will make several irrelevant observations:

1.) i agree that ray harryhausen is a great man, probably one of america’s greatest cultural heroes, right up there with larry flynt, h.p.lovecraft, and daniel pinkwater. but for all the time and energy put into the giant octopus effects, the live footage of an octopus in a fishtank outshone all the stop-motion. the creature moved like a cloud of suckers constantly turning itself inside-out. the actors poured some bait-fish into the tank, and when the octopus shrank from the proferred snack, they made up a lame excuse about radioactivity.

2.) the movie is an artifact of regressive gender politics trying as hard as it can to be feminist. for all the talk of how the female scientist doesn’t need the sub-captain making her choices for her, when the big mollusk attacks the golden gate bridge he shoves her at a cop with a terse "HOLD HER!" while he drives off to do the man’s work. i think the writers were trying, they just didn’t know what they were trying for.

3.) why don’t we see giant monster movies anymore? i mean other than the stupid japanese kaiju rubber-suit embarrassments. have the scientist sour-pusses spoiled our sense of wonder with all their nonsense about exponentially increasing exo-skeleton stresses? is it our overwhelming faith in the effectiveness of the US military? (i mean who seriously believes that a giant caterpillar would stand up against one bunker-buster?) or is it that the whole damn genre had only one plot, and it was a pretty stupid one at that?

(on an irrelevant side note, filed under reasons why i can’t leave the house without a camera, i was browsing through the toy section at target and i came across several velociraptor models which someone had posed in the act of devouring a cow. i tried posing some elephants devouring a kangaroo, but it didn’t have the same resonance.)

pretty much every time i talk to chris nakashima-brown (CNB) he asks me if i’ve read any j.g.ballard. to which i reply that i read ’empire of the sun’ as a kid and failed to get more than ten pages into ‘high-rise’ and some anthology or other.

so, just so i won’t seem like a craven idiot the next time i run into CNB, i extracted ‘the best short stories of j.g.ballard’ from the austin public library. right away i ran off to ruby’s BBQ (this is texas, where every experience must be mediated through meat) and paged to the end with all the goodies: ‘the assassination of john fitgerald kennedy considered as a downhill motor race’, ‘the atrocity exhibition’, ‘plan for the assasination of jacqueline kennedy’, and ‘why i want to fuck ronald reagan’.

luckily all the stories were short. how short you ask? two BBQ brisket tacos short.

i feel that ballard’s sexualization of machinery (and ronald reagan for that matter) shows a deep understanding of the structure of eroticism. you know how they say that you should write from what you know? i never have any sex in anything i write.

i envy writer’s who can distill sexuality from innanimate objects — or dolphins which can copulate with rocks and sea turtles.

sigh.