greygirlbeast: (white)
I awoke this ayem, sometime before dawn, to my first real New England snow. When I woke again, about an hour ago, it was still snowing. It's still snowing now. The world is white, and all the sharp edges are smoothed away. There is no carnivorous blue sky. There is, rather, a comforting lack of distinction between earth and sky. The rooftops are covered, and the trees, and the lawns. White.

The only really important thing about yesterday is that we finally got to see Tomas Alfredson's Låt den rätte komma in (2008). And wow. A reviewer in one of our local papers wrote, "Who would have predicted that the finest horror picture in years, reminiscent of Val Lewton classics of 1940s Hollywood, would come from Sweden." Well, I might have. Sweden is sort of creepy when you think about it, all those fjords and ABBA and 7th-Century standing stones and what have you. Bang on with the Val Lewton comparison, though. One of the most striking things about this film, which is filled with striking elements, is it's voice. It is so wonderfully soft-spoken. It is a long whisper, punctuated with screams that have meaning because of the whisper. In short, it lived up to my expectation, and I was very pleased with the unexpected gender issues raised in the film. Lina Leandersson, who plays the vampire child, Eli, is especially effective, in her gentle childhood vulnerability and her oddly ancient moments and those scenes where she slips into a feral frenzy. I am pleased with the film's restraint, and by its refusal to submit to either formula or easy morality. And it's just so beautiful. I keep coming back —— in my head, and also when Spooky and I talk about Låt den rätte komma in —— to it's snowy landscapes, its black nights, the smothering cold, and the silence. It's easy to think of many instances when the silence is shattered, but those instances only seem to underscore the totality of the silence, the stillness, the winter that may as well be unending. And, of course, this story permits the vampire to be a vampire. Not a watered-down daemon lover that sparkles by daylight, not necrophilia dressed up as bloodless romance for necrophiles who would rather not admit what gets them hot and bothered (though, it should also be noted that, if Eli is to be believed, she's not actually dead). There is innocence here, and profound corruption. In the end, what Eli truly is remains, at least in part, a secret, one that the film wisely leaves us to sort out for ourselves. Yes, I loved it. I encourage you to see it in the theatre if you can, and, if not, track down the DVD as soon as it's available. Definitely one of the four or five best films I've seen this year. I'm posting the trailer again:




Otherwise, yesterday was just me resting, wishing this part of the semi-vacation did not have to end next week. There was warmed-over chili for dinner (after the movie). I read, first "The aquatic sloth Thalassocnus (Mammalia, Xenarthra) from the Late Miocene of North-Central Chile: biogeographic and ecological implications," and then went back to the long-neglected Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World. Late, we read more of The Fellowship of the Ring. Well, Spooky read aloud to me and Hubero. There were pomegranate martinis. We played WoW for two or three hours, and Shaharrazad and Suraa (my blood elf warlock and Spooky's blood elf paladin, respectively) both reached Level 36. I think that if we are to continue playing WoW, we'll be concentrating on our Horde characters and letting the Alliance ones go. The Alliance was sort of icking us both out, anyway. I'll only play Shaharrazad and my blood elf paladin, Hanifah (who happens to be Shaharrazad's kid sister). And that was yesterday, for the most part. It was bitterly cold when we went out last night, the coldest night I've felt since the trip to Manhattan in November.

The snow has stopped, I think. At least for now.

Behind the cut are two screencaps from WoW, because I've never posted screencaps from WoW:

Blood Elves Out for Blood )
greygirlbeast: (chi4)
After Friday's unexpected warmth, we're getting another small dose of late winter. And here I am, slowly coming back from the dead, again. I have to be alert and working by tomorrow, so today I'm going to clean my office and do some other housework and try to shake off all the dust I've accumulated whilst convalescing this past week. I suspect this is going to be a rambling entry, just bits and pieces of the the last few days, strays scraps of this and that.

Darren McGavin and Don Knotts, and I got the news of both on the same damn day. The icons of my childhood are perishing all about me.

Have I done anything in the last few days worth reporting? Not really. Lots of reading, though not as much as I would have liked. Tuesday night, we watched Hal Hartley's Amateur (1994), which I'd never seen before and liked a great deal. Last night, we watched Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956), which is a favourite of mine, but which I'd never seen on DVD, and now it has me wanting to see Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo (1990) again. And we've seen a great deal of the Olympics. I was pulling hard for Irina Slutskaya, but was still very pleased to see the gold go to Shizuka Arakawa. Yesterday, I dug out some old video that was shot in September 1999 at the water works tunnel in Birmingham for an aborted Tales of Pain and Wonder documentary. And that was very strange, watching the me of seven years ago (even though it hardly seems like seven years). That was the month before Spooky came to stay with me for the first time. Anyway, then we dug out another, older tape, a NYC public access TV interview I did in May 1998, the night that [livejournal.com profile] faustfatale and I had our joint book-release party at Mother. [livejournal.com profile] docbrite was there, as well, perhaps the only time that the three of us have ever been in NYC at the same time. That was even weirder, the me of almost eight years ago looking back at me. There's some older video around here somewhere, a bunch of Death's Little Sister stuff from '96-'97, and one very old tape of me lip-syncing Kate Bush which dates back to '93 or '94. I don't think I have the nerve for that just yet. I should have all this crap dumped onto DVD and let Bill Schafer give it away with some subpress book or another. That would be a scream. Or something.

And yesterday the Earth's human population hit 6.5 billion, which is three and one half times the size it was at the beginning of the 20th Century and at least a third again what it was when I was in junior high in the mid '70s and first began to think about such things. Someone's bound to say that's just fine and dandy, the more the merrier, bring 'em on and never mind a planet's carrying capacity or biological diversity. Me, I just don't find Homo sapiens sapiens quite that goddamn wonderful. Wouldn't a billion be just fine? Just one billion? I'd gladly trade 5.5 billion humans for a few more tigers (<5,000 remaining in the wild), elephants (approx. 40,000), polar bears (approx. 22,000), or northern right whales (<400). Or how about trading a measly 1 billion humans for 1 billion acres of rain forest and another 1 billion for a billion acres of wetlands? That sounds fairer than fair. But I'm sure that's just me, and, having given up my status as human some time ago, I'm probably not technically allowed a voice in such matters, anyway. You might as well let dolphins and tuna and dodos vote! 6.5 billion human beings. Jesus. I think I'm going to go try and calculate just how much solid waste 6.5 billion human beings shit out in a single day...

Perhaps I'll post the results later.

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Caitlín R. Kiernan

February 2012

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