Silence and I Tuesday, May 01, 2007

I can take a lot, but I refuse to be outblogged by somebody who refused to let me play a space pirate in his lesbian-android movie. So here I come!

Kids Today! Wrong Turn Jr. continues to be the focus of my life, which is to say he's the pole, I'm the tetherball and necessity keeps whacking me in circles around him. It's amazing how a creature can be helpless and terrifying at the same time. One minute he's begging you to kiss a pimple on his finger, the next he's punching your nuts. All his sentences are either exclamations or commands. Sometimes, implicitly, both: He wants to hold the baby robot on the shelf right now! Current interests include watching television, riding his bike, examining bumblebees, watching television and asking to watch television.

Dios Mio! Faith comes in cycles, just like elections. Mine is at a pretty low ebb these days. My local faith community gets on my last fuckin' nerve, as my mother used to say, what with the vapid pastor, the wood paneling, the Mighty Wind vocalese. More broadly, I'm having a hard time keeping faith in tradition--all those ideas that aren't written in scripture but developed with centuries of reflection. You know, the whole reason we have a church instead of following the latest Elmer Gantry who sets up a storefront. This latest faith-quake comes from a debate in First Things magazine ("hot religious deepthink") about what happened during Christ's descent into Hell. What a spectacle: two top philosophers clawing at each other, impugning each other's motives and bona fides, about a subject that can never be resolved on this side of the stratosphere. It had the unpleasant scent of a couple of geeks arguing about Star Trek continuity. I'm not about to go "bright," not by any means, but it was pretty damned off-putting.

Pigs in Space! I resisted the new Battlestar Galactica because nobody else did. Now that I've given in, and started watching the series on DVD, I'm finding it pretty compelling. The big problem is that it's got serious writer-itis. Everything happens because the script says so, not because it makes sense. It's sort of like The X-Files problem: Why doesn't one of those inside sources just explain the whole plot to our heroes? Why does he delay and delay until he gets killed? Because the script needs it to happen. Combine it with the Phantom Menace problem: Why is the bad guy going through these incredible convolutions to achieve something that could've been done in a much more straightforward--and dramatic--way? Because it's easier for the writers to string out a basic idea with lots of confusing--and admittedly compelling--buildup than to start out with a basic idea and build on it.

Then there are points where the show seems to willfully not make sense--characters don't notice very obvious things about other characters, people don't communicate basic information, etc.--just to string out the drama.

Still, I'm watching. Kudos!

I Got the Music in Me! Some surprisingly strong albums this year, from folks as varied as Arcade Fire (depressive Canuck brights), Tierney Sutton (a talented scatter, but not in the Samuel Delany sense) and Jill Cunniff (muy adorable, late of Luscious Jackson). The biggest disappointment was Lucinda Williams's new one. It's not bad, but it's a relentless downer.

Signing off for now.

@ 4:51:00 AM,

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