greygirlbeast: (multipass2)
Why am I using my Leeloo Minai Lekarariba-Laminai-Tchai Ekbat De Sebat multipass icon? I have no idea, except maybe it's Dada, using it without knowing why, and I'm in sort of a Dada frame of mind.

Monsieur Insomnia made another appearance last night, and both Seroquel and Sonata were required to make him go away. Yes, insomnia is definitely male. I was up until after five a.m. I signed into WoW and got the "Fishing Diplomat" achievement, because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, or the Dark Iron Dwarves, or some crazy-ass Sin'dorei warlock on a talbuck rushing the gates of Stormwind City at dawn fucking thirty.

Got an interesting email from my agent, but now she's at lunch. Might be something good. I'll know later in the day.

Also, does anyone out there (this is a long shot if ever there was one, asking this question) have contact information on the estate of Zdzisław Beksiński? I'm hoping to be able to use one of his paintings for the cover of Two Worlds and In Between (the "best of" collection), but I have a feeling it's going to be a pain tracking down the contact.

Has anyone else ever noticed that on Azeroth the moon rises in the north and sets in the south? Or maybe it's the other way round. I should ponder out the planetary physics involved.

---

No writing yesterday, and no work to speak of. I was delirious from a lack of sleep and the Ambien that hadn't yet worn off. I'm waiting on Vince's illustration so I can finish up with Sirenia Digest #58 and get it to subscribers before we head to the HPLFF.

Instead of work, I needed a new bag (haha), a new shoulder bag for the trip, because I've been carrying around the same Hello Kitty backpack since about 1995. So, we went to Thayer Street, and, for reasons known only to...well, no one and nothing...we went to Urban Outfitters. It's like fucking Target for hipsters. Off-the-shelf punk. It actually made my skin crawl. And shit's crazy expensive. We left and went a few doors down to the army/navy surplus place, and got a couple of Israeli paratrooper bags (that look like they're made to last forever) for half the price one of those ugly Urban Outfitter bags would have cost.

Thayer Street is a sad sight to behold. Sadder for Spooky than for me. She remembers the heyday of Thayer Street. By my first visit, in 2000, the corporate invasion had already begun. We walk down the street, and she points to a Great Cuts and says, "That was a really cool record store called In Your Ear." It seems like every corporate nightmare we pass used to be something cool and funky. Vintage clothing stores, bookstores, record stores that have made way for Starbucks and Johnny Rockets and City Sports and fuck knows what else. Twenty years ago it had a vibe. Now it hardly has a pulse. College students these days, I fear, want exactly what they left behind, and what they want is bland and cookie cutter. Anyway...a few cool places have survived, tucked into the nooks and crannies, like the hardier creatures that manage to endure the introduction of wave after wave of invasive species. But it depresses Spooky, and she tries not to look.

---

Last night we found an odd little gem of a movie on Netflix, Billy O'Brien's Isolation (2005). It's an amazingly effective horror film, that makes great use of mood and lighting, sound and space, to create almost unbearable suspense. Excellent creature effects, good action, good cinematography, all in a low-budget Irish monster movie. This is the sort of film that the "SyFy" could be making, if they could be bothered to give half a shit. Really, I was impressed. I wanted to bathe for hours afterwards. There were one or two sour notes (including an unnecessary and cliché "epilogue"), but, all in all, Isolation is very much worth your time. Think Alien and The Thing, but in rural Ireland.

---

I will have no— I repeat NO —internet access while in Portland. This is a good thing. I just don't want people disappointed that I'm not tweeting every time I go to the toilet or whatever. We're not taking the laptops, and I have no iPhone, and our cellphones are too old to manage The Future. So, my last contact with the web until after the festival will be tomorrow, most likely.

---

Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thank you.

That's all for now. The mothmen and the platypus concur.
greygirlbeast: (white)
An odd day yesterday. After breakfast, I sat down and did my journal entry. I emailed my editor at Penguin, and I emailed Andrew Migliore about the Lovecraft Film Festival. And then, suddenly, I felt as though I was coming down with the flu. Within half an hour, I was aching and could hardly sit up, much less think clearly enough to write and/or edit. Which was all rather terrifying, given what is left to be done on The Red Tree , and given it has to be back in NYC by the end of the work day on Monday. And that I immediately have to get Sirenia Digest #39 written and out to subscribers. No time for the flu. Or anything else virulent. So, I loaded up on elderberry and used zinc swabs in my nasal passages, then went to bed, hoping desperately to stave off whatever might be happening.

Spooky read to me from Let the Right One In. I dozed. And by late in the day, just before dark, I felt quite a bit better. I began to suspect it was only exhaustion, the way I've been pushing myself the last week, the stress, the insomnia. I sat up and tried to clear my head by doing some Tarot work (mostly with the Fool, the Magician, and the High Priestess). But I dozed again, and Spooky woke me just before dinner. I felt much, much better. We had a proper Kindernacht, which has been so neglected of late. Hot dogs for dinner, then two movies. The first, a Spanish film directed by Isidro Ortiz, Eskalofrío (2008; English title, Shiver). A murderous feral child story, that had a great deal of potential, hints of Angela Carter, and was almost a pretty good movie. But it kept stooping to horror-film clichés, including a dumb, tacked-on final scene to remind you it really was a scary movie. Still, worth watching. However, our second film was the direct-to-DVD farce Species III. Now, I hated Species, and I loathed Species II, and I only watched the third film out of a dim, misguided curiosity. It was even worse than the first two. If you can't make alien sex sexy, especially when you have Giger designs to work from, you should just pack it, forget about film making, and get a job flipping burgers or something. Lots of nudity. Lots of very mediocre alien effects. Actresses who delivered their lines with all the conviction of porn stars. Now, I have to watch Species IV, just to see how much worse it can get.

Anyway, I feel pretty much okay today, which leads me back to the exhaustion theory.

After the movies, there was about an hour of WoW. And there was one good moment, when the head of our rp guild ejected someone seconds after he or she or it had joined. Some bozo who asked in guild chat, in which we are only permitted to speak ic, "So what the !@#!*@ does rp mean? lol" Now, this is an rp guild, on an rp server. Our guild master then asked this person, named "whydoilive," why hesheit had signed onto an rp server, before bothering to understand rp. "My buddies told me to come." To which our guild master replied, "Wrong button," and immediately ejected whydoilive from the guild. Very satisfying, that. And, while we're at it, I begin to suspect that "lol" is becoming a new punctuation mark. Increasingly, I see it ending chat messages, whether the line calls for "laughs out loud" or not. In place of a period or exclamation point, there's "lol." I almost begin to believe it's some defense mechanism for an irony-obsessed generation incapable and afraid of taking anything serious. "My cat died lol" "onoes! i left teh baby in teh car like 7 hrs ago lol" Yeah, whatever.

Oh, and I finally bothered to pick up "Professional Master" in skinning.

Speaking on language abuse, tyransitiuon is now an official, full-fledged neologism. Congratulations to [livejournal.com profile] stsisyphus for defining it:

tyransitiuon: (noun) An object which steadfastly refuses to be dislodged, moved, or otherwise displaced from its established geographical, geological, or astronomical location, and in fact manipulates events and causality in communal non-consensual time-space as to actively prevent removal or disturbance. Certain esoteric sects and psuedo-scientists place considerable importance upon these rare objects, occasionally manifesting in hysterical and apocalyptic cults. Creation of a tyransitiuon on the subatomic level has been posited as one of the possible applications of supercollider technology.

Okay. Gotta get back to The Red Tree, as the clock is ticking. But, I will remind you to please have a look at the eBay auctions, if you have not yet done so.
greygirlbeast: (chi3)
This morning I feel at least twenty years my senior. As if I slipped through some wrinkle in time somewhere in my sleep, and my face in the mirror reassures me that I must have slipped back again, but maybe this is the sort of hangover one gets from time-traveling in one's sleep.

My mother wants us to come to Leeds today. I don't yet know whether or not that will happen. I don't want to deal with the sun or the traffic. I don't want to leave the Perimeter, and I surely don't want to be in Alabama. All my clothes are dirty. There's a mountain of work. See? I have a zillion excuses.

Most of my writing time yesterday was spent dithering about with the Bradbury introduction. Finally, I realized I was only rearranging words, which should never be confused with actual writing or even revision, so I e-mailed it to Neil.

This morning, I'm in one of those moods.

Last night, I stir-fried string beans with red peppers, garlic, porta bellas, fresh basil leaves, lime, and thai chilies, and made a pot of jasmine rice. We had another bottle of the nice Syrah. We took Hubero out on Sophie's old leash and determined that he needs a better harness.

And then we made the mistake of watching Poseidon, Wolfgang Petersen's 2006 remake of The Poseidon Adventure. It's not so much that this is a bad movie. I mean, yes, it certainly is a bad movie, a very bad movie. But I expected that. The real crime here is that it's a dull bad movie. How anyone can take a story wherein a one-hundred-foot wave capsizes an ocean liner, forcing those trapped inside to find their way through the bowels of the inverted ship to the surface — and then make it dull is entirely beyond me. I've always had a soft spot for the original 1972 film. Of all those '70s disaster films, The Poseidon Adventure is probably the best. It has Gene Hackman, Red Buttons, Shelly Winters, Roddy McDowall, and Ernest fucking Borgnine. It has characters. It even has a subtext. By comparison, Poseidon has Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss (both of whom deliver their flattest performances ever), plus a bunch of interchangeable, blandly pretty people. This film isn't so much weighted down by the water filling a sinking ship as by what [livejournal.com profile] setsuled has called "the glamour of dull." Honestly, other than Russell and Dreyfuss, I found it almost impossible to tell one character from another. Everywhere the original film succeeds, the remake fails. The upside-down hell of The Poseidon Adventure is here replaced by a purgatorial slog. Some of the SFX are pretty, but, surprisingly, not that much more impressive than the original. And instead of Hackman's bitter, agnostic priest, pitted against his god in his struggle to save a handful of survivors, we get Russell fretting about the pretty boy his daughter's sleeping with, doing noble things whenever the story calls for him to do noble things, because, you know, it's in the script. Everywhere the original felt epic, the remake feels somehow cramped and rushed. I was amazed that I could come to a film with such low expectations and still be disappointed. Please, tell me it tanked at the box office.

Afterwards, we watched the last two episodes of Serenity, "Heart of Gold" and the especially superb "Objects in Space," which managed to sweep away the haze of that dull, dull movie.

Mostly, I'm thinking it's time I read a little more and watch a whole lot less.

As for today, well, here it comes. We shall see.

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Caitlín R. Kiernan

February 2012

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