In Search of Shell Beach: February 2007

Wednesday 28 February 2007

Quote of the Day

Not to mention the whole "make love, not war", "peace for peace", "fuck for peace" motif. :D

Tuesday 27 February 2007

It's a mad mad mad mad mad world

Article from Wikipedia

"Warner Bros., the film's copyright holder (New Line Cinema, a division of Time Warner, distributed it), objected to the title Dark City early in the film's production. They felt the title would confuse audiences with Mad City, Warner's soon-to-be-released film starring John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman, which they predicted would be a commercial hit. The filmmakers changed the title to Dark World, but Steven Spielberg's production company threatened legal action, feeling the title was too similar to their film Jurassic Park: The Lost World. The title was then changed to Dark Empire, but legal action was again threatened, this time by Lucasfilm, who felt the title was too similar to their own well-known sci-fi film The Empire Strikes Back (and was an exact match for the Dark Empire comics that had been made about Star Wars) However, by the time the film was completed and ready for release, Warner's Mad City had come and gone from theatres and was not the hit they hoped it would be, and the filmmakers were allowed to use their original title, on the condition that Warner could use the original set of Dark City for The Matrix."

Shout out to Ciggy

How are the withdrawal symptoms? :D

Monday 26 February 2007

A lesson in Discord

- THE BIRTH OF THE ERISIAN MOVEMENT -

THE REVELATION

10. The Earth quakes and the heavens rattle;
the beasts of nature flock together and the
nations of men flock apart; volcanoes usher up
heat while elsewhere water becomes ice and
melts; and then on other days it just rains.

11. Indeed do many things come to pass.

HBT; The Book of Predictions, Chap. 19

Just prior to the decade of the nineteen-sixties, when Sputnik was alone and new, and about the time that Ken Kesey took his first acid trip as a medical volunteer; before underground newspapers, Viet Nam, and talk of a second American Revolution; in the comparative quiet of the late nineteen-fifties, just before the idea of RENAISSANCE became relevant....

Two young Californians, known later as Omar Ravenhurst and Malaclypse the Younger, were indulging in their habit of sipping coffee at an allnight bowling alley and generally solving the world's problems. This particular evening the main subject of discussion was discord and they were complaining to each other of the personal confusion they felt in their respective lives. "Solve the problem of discord," said one, "and all other problems will vanish." "Indeed," said the other, "chaos and strife are the roots of all confusion."

FIRST I MUST SPRINKLE YOU
WITH FAIRY DUST

Suddenly the place became devoid of light. Then an utter silence enveloped them, and a great stillness was felt. Then came a blinding flash of intense light, as though their very psyches had gone nova. Then vision returned.

The two were dazed and neither moved nor spoke for several minutes. They looked around and saw that the bowlers were frozen like statues in a variety of comic positions, and that a bowling ball was steadfastly anchored to the floor only inches from the pins that it had been sent to scatter. The two looked at each other, totally unable to account for the phenomenon. The condition was one of suspension, and one noticed that the clock had stopped.

There walked into the room a chimpanzee, shaggy and grey about the muzzle, yet upright to his full five feet, and poised with natural majesty. He carried a scroll and walked to the young men.
"Gentlemen," he said, "why does Pickering's Moon go about in reverse orbit? Gentlemen, there are nipples on your chests; do you give milk? And what, pray tell, Gentlemen, is to be done about Heisenberg's Law?" He paused. "SOMEBODY HAD TO PUT ALL OF THIS CONFUSION HERE!"

And with that he revealed his scroll. It was a diagram, like a yin- yang with a pentagon on one side and an apple on the other. And then he exploded and the two lost consciousness.

ERIS - Goddess of Chaos, Discord & Confusion

They awoke to the sound of pins clattering, and found the bowlers engaged in their game and the waitress busy with making coffee. It was apparant that their experience had been private.
They discussed their strange encounter and reconstructed from memory the chimpanzee's diagram. Over the next five days they searched libraries to find the significance of it, but were disappointed to uncover only references to Taoism, the Korean flag, and Technocracy. It was not until they traced the Greek writing on the apple that they discovered the ancient Goddess known to the Greeks as Eris and to the Romans as Discordia. This was on the fifth night, and when they slept that night each had a vivid dream of a splendid woman whose eyes were as soft as feather and as deep as eternity itself, and whose body was the spectacular dance of atoms and universes. Pyrotechnics of pure energy formed her flowing hair, and rainbows manifested and dissolved as she spoke in a warm and gentle voice:
I have come to tell you that you are free. Many ages ago, My consciousness left man, that he might develop himself. I return to find this development approaching completion, but hindered by fear and by misunderstanding.

You have built for yourselves psychic suits of armor, and clad in them, your vision is restricted, your movements are clumsy and painful, your skin is bruised, and your spirit is broiled in the sun.

I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.
During the next months they studied philosophies and theologies, and learned that Eris or Discordia was primarily feared by the ancients as being disruptive. Indeed, the very concept of chaos was still considered equivalent to strife and treated as a negative. "No wonder things are all screwed up," they concluded, "they have got it all backwards." They found that the principle of disorder was every much as significant as the principle of order.
With this in mind, they studied the strange yin-yang. During a meditation one afternoon, a voice came to them:
It is called the Sacred Chao. I appoint you Keepers of It. Therein you will find anything you like. Speak of Me as Discord, to show contrast to the pentagon. Tell constricted mankind that there are no rules, unless they choose to invent rules. Keep close the words of Syadasti: 'TIS AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NO MINDS. And remember that there is no tyranny in the State of Confusion. For further information, consult your pineal gland.

"What is this?" mumbled one to the other, "A religion based on The Goddess of Confusion? It is utter madness!"
And with those words, each looked at the other in absolute awe. Omar began to giggle. Mal began to laugh. Omar began to jump up and down. Mal was hooting and hollering to beat all hell. And amid squeals of mirth and with tears on their cheeks, each appointed the other to be high priest of his own madness, and together they declared themselves to be a society of Discordia, for what ever that may turn out to be.

Sunday 25 February 2007

More technical gremlins, uy!

Note to Iro or whoever gets this: my Illusions account has been suspended or hacked or whatever too. Fuck.

Saturday 24 February 2007

Note

Some of my website hyperlinks on the right panel there don't seem to be working for me. I get the old "404 error" screen. The URL's are all present and correct, but with some of them they simply won't load. Now, this seems to be because of the http/: thingy in front of some of the links, as when I remove that and hit Go on my browser, they bloody well work! So, why not remove that bit of coding from my links? I can't. I mean, I can go and change it, but it doesn't stick. Hmm. Sorry. HTML isn't my strong point.

Russian moonshine vodka is a terrible thing

The terrible, shamefull reason the Iron Curtain came down, ROFL!:

1

2

3

4

5

SHHHHHH! Putin's FSB might be watching! Remember what happened to Litvinenko and Politkovskaya? Mum's the word!

Friday 23 February 2007

"There's three kinds of people: dicks, pussies and assholes!"

Hehehe, Team America, love that film.
And in a similar vein:

Thursday 22 February 2007

Clues...

Could this be Shell Beach?

Are you watching Closely?

Empire's reveiw of the film:

"Celebrated Victorian stage magician Alfred Borden (Bale) stands accused of the murder of professional rival Rupert Angier (Jackman). The Prestige traces the course of their bitter feud, as their respective acts of sabotage become ever more deadly.

You always know where you are with Christopher Nolan, in that it’s often hard to know where you are. Or rather when. He’s a filmmaker who clearly believes that every story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, only not necessarily in that order. (Unless the usual order isn’t what you’re expecting; after all, he was the first director to begin the Batman story at the beginning.) So it’s no surprise that the man who brought us a modern noir about a man with short-term memory loss through a brain-straining reverse-chronological structure should present a Victorian murder-mystery tale of such beautiful convolutions that the dizzying struggle to follow it provides half the entertainment.

For, despite the return of Batman Begins’ Christian Bale and Michael Caine, and the big-name face-off promise that Nolan used to sell Insomnia, the film The Prestige most closely resembles is Memento. Hardly a shock when you note that his adaptation of Christopher Priest’s novel was penned with his sibling and Memento co-creator Jonathan, and that they optioned the book around the same time as Memento was released. But it is perhaps more of an eyebrow-raiser when you consider that The Prestige is situated in an entirely different genre. Or two.

Nolan’s already been vocal about how he didn’t want The Prestige to feel or look like a period movie, and it’s certainly steadfastly unconventional. The camera is predominantly handheld, rarely static, situated in interior locations with most exterior shots either blurred, out of focus or shrouded in freezing mist. Nolan is unconcerned with spreading out historical vistas or dazzling us with period detail; instead he wants us to focus on the detail of the characters. Like a street-illusionist making coins dance across his knuckles, he draws his audience in as close as possible. The harder we’re looking, the more we’re concentrating, the more effective his ultimate misdirection will prove.

We begin with Michael Caine carefully handling a twitchy yellow canary as he explains the three acts of a magic trick — the set-up, the performance and the effect, or prestige — to a young girl. He makes the bird disappear, seemingly crushing it to death in the process. As he does so, we cut to a grave-looking Hugh Jackman, as Rupert Angier (aka The Great Danton), performing a spectacular trick that features blue crackles of electricity writhing around a towering array of machinery that wouldn’t look out of place in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. The audience gasps in half-fearful anticipation; Angier invites members of the crowd on stage. One of them is Christian Bale, as Alfred Borden (aka The Professor), in disguise, face swathed in shadow. Borden ducks into the wings, barging into a stagehand who tries to block his way. “I’m part of the trick, you idiot!” he bellows, whipping off his fake beard. Soon after, something terrible has happened and Borden is charged with murder. While gaoled, he’s given Angier’s diary. He begins reading it, triggering a flashback in which we see Angier reading Borden’s memoirs, which triggers yet another flashback. Framing device frames framing device, flashbacks switch to flashforwards, and quickly we’re entangled in a murky conundrum.

Nolan keeps the mood eerie and unsettling, and with all its Gothic trimmings The Prestige comes to feel a little like a slowburn horror picture. Of course, it’s never that simple, and the director requires his leads to deliver a pair of carefully complex performances, like stage assistants for whom a single wrong move or missed mark can spell disaster for the unfurling illusion.

Hugh Jackman, revealing the acting depths that the likes of X-Men and Van Helsing have denied him, is at first glance an obvious fit for Angier. The Great Danton is a consummate showman, all smooth moves and glistening repertoire. Yet beneath the sheen simmers an increasingly sour man who, while initially armed with a hatred of Borden, becomes fixated on stealing the secret of his key trick and bettering it, wringing the morality out of his soul in the process. The closest we’ve come to seeing Jackman exploring such dark places was in X-Men 2, but here we are truly seeing a new side to him — Jackman for adults, if you like.

At this point, it’d be nice to shove in an easy reference to ‘sparks flying’ between Jackman and his co-star Christian Bale. Yet they share surprisingly little screentime. Angier and Borden’s relationship predominantly involves watching each other from the stalls, peeping through disguises and stalking in the darkness, with a blast of violence every now and again. Much of their conflict throughout the film is via proxies: Olivia, the glamorous assistant who becomes a shared love (Scarlett Johansson, struggling so hard with an English accent she forgets to engage her audience, trilling the film’s only bum note); Cutter, the sagacious mentor who believes it’s pointless getting into magic unless you’re prepared to get your hands dirty (a superb Michael Caine); and Tesla, the reclusive electrical pioneer who possibly holds the key to the mystery (David Bowie — the quirky casting only just paying off thanks to his discomfitingly glassy delivery).

It’s Bale, though, who has the toughest job of the cast. Borden is the unsung genius, an awkward, brusque man who isn’t interested in embellishing the usual set of conjurations but in crafting something entirely new. His crowd-pleasing instincts initially stink, but his devotion to his art is powerfully all-consuming, much to the detriment of his marriage. Both his character and many of his actions suggest he’s the bad guy of the piece, but Bale, sensitively tempering Borden’s gloomy intensity, ensures our sympathies are maintained throughout — at times he comes dangerously close to snatching them fully away from Jackman.

The true nature of The Prestige, the themes it explores in its own, strange, fractured manner, can’t, won’t and shouldn’t be discussed here. This movie isn’t just some stylish analogy for the pitfalls of celebrity, and there’s far more to it than its dissection of the corrupting effects of obsession and retribution. Certainly, some of its many sharp turns could confound to the point of exasperation. Some will angrily decry it as cheating. And indeed, the problem with movie-making as sleight-of-hand is you have to reveal the secret at some point; you have to show where that dove went. That’s a problem no magician has to deal with. Yet Nolan, pulling off a masterful adaptation of a difficult novel, performs his big reveal — which, you may be surprised to read, does come at the end — with faultless precision. But that’s all we’ll say, and that’s where we’ll leave it. You wouldn’t want us to spoil the prestige now, would you?

Verdict

Odd, but brilliantly so. It's a small film that feels big, a period drama that looks modern, defying comparison to anything but Nolan himself."

But who was Nikola Tesla, you might never care to ask?

Well, it might surprise you.

Jack White, take it away!

"Just sounds to me like you need to unplug, man!"

Reality, according to Jake Horsley.

Tuesday 20 February 2007

My musical tastes

Some of them, anyway...

I'll be putting links to posts like this in my profile page, rather than filling out the lists, should you care for future reference. Which you prolly don't...

Willy Mason - Save Myself

Groove Armada - At the River

NIN - Beside You in Time

Future Sound of London - Papue New Guinea

I F - Space Invaders are Smoking Grass

Adam Freeland - We Want Your Soul

Sissy - So Long

Mum - Will the Summer Make Good for our Sins?

Gorillaz - Tomorow Comes Today

POE - Walk the Walk

A Perfect Circle - Magdalena

Muse - Take a Bow