It’s pretty, but now what?

I’ve finally succeeded in making my Wordpress look virtually indistinguishable from a LJ. Go me.

I start training for my new job tomorrow; this makes me happy. It also makes me worried because it’s an evening shift 40 hour a week job and not the much-hoped for grad assistantship. I am apparently an alternate for a tuition scholarship, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Given the pay drop at my new job (it’s about $4 or so less than the one I left) I’ll need something to help pay the rent. Especially if 40 hours a week + 12 hours of graduate classes = dropping grades. Especially since it’s a 15 mile drive from school to work and I live smack dab in the middle of the two. Yay for loads of gas!

Next project: fixing up one of my mostly defunct domains, as soon as I figure out what the hell to do with it. Or successfully manage to pawn the space off on someone else. Either way works. And then finally doing a needed reorganization of my del.icio.us. I’m anal like that. I get in these “MUST CLEAN AND ORGANIZE NOW” mood and… I clean and organize like crazy. I got up this morning and switched out the litter and swept the floors and double checked my book and movies databases. I need to edit the forms a bit, I think, since there’s a lot of extraneous information I built into the databases to input (like publish year or lead actors) that I haven’t bothered to use. And I need to update my games database. Oh, and make a burned stuff database. I haven’t bothered with a music one because I’ve moved to a totally digital collection. So now that my house is clean and organized (I did laundry on Friday and even moved furniture around in my bedroom today). I’ve got photos from moving in up on my flickr, though my personal favorite is probably this one because I absolutely adore my corner shelves.

The place needs more pictures on the walls, though. I really wish my cat hadn’t eaten Africa ages ago because I love maps and and starcharts and Africa was a particular nice one. (Ha, now you all know what to get me for Christmas. Hangable detailed maps!)

Though every time I talk about maps, I always think of that West Wing episode, Someone’s Going to Emergency, Someone’s Going To Jail (S2), in which C.J. discovers that maps are wrong. (For the record, the one you can see hanging in my living room in those pictures is a Winkel Tripel projection. circa 2005.) I suppose, if I wanted to do another post for about real cultural imperialism, I could talk about teaching to the Mercator projection and bring up all the points that Aaron Sorkin made for me in that episode. But I’m lazy and hot and hungry and Youtube serves up the point precisely in about 2 minutes.

Hypocrisy, Now

I’m not exactly the Queen of Dropping Things, but seriously, people, learn to let shit go. Mostly it’s a waste of time and energy harping on the small stuff. It’s mostly a waste of time and energy harping on the big stuff too (unless you have lots of money/fame to gain a mouthpiece and national attention), I realize, but far more worth it.

Also, for the record, sometimes reality has absolutely nothing to do with what is perceived as reality. If perceived reality was truth, then a lot of us in the US would be a hell of a lot economically better off than we really are. Also the continents of South America, Africa, Asia, Antarctica, and Australia wouldn’t exist. Oh, and Canada too. Canada’s gone, except for the tv studios. Those are relocated to California.

And unconnected to the random real life stuff above, I’m watching Stir of Echoes: Homecoming on the Scifi channel and they’re showing promos for The Invasion. As much as I’m ‘meh’ on yet another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, seeing the promos every five minutes has me pondering a little about how a lot of classic horror movies run to this weird sort of normative progressiveness.

Like one of my all time, hands down, favorite movies: Night of the Living Dead, the original Romero 1968 version, with one of my all time favorite movie heroes of all time: Ben (played by Duane Jones). This movie, no matter how many times I see it, still gives me nightmares. But Night of the Living Dead works on more than just the horror level; Romero has always been all about the social commentary. Night of the Living Dead portrays a strong, intelligent commanding black man as the hero. At one point, one of the film’s more odious white racist characters, Harry, locks Ben outside to be eaten by the dead and Ben still outlives him. And even deeper than that, you have issues of male pride/territorialism (”You’re the boss down there and I’m the boss up here.” — said by Ben, so it doubles as a pretty bold statement about segregation and racism for 1968), the urging of dependency in females who are in relationships, and even the obsessive need to consume.

Though if you really want to talk about zombie consumption, there’s no better movie than Dawn of the Dead. Yes, the original 1979 movie (the sequel was fun, but it was vapid, Synder lost all of the deeper meaning). Not only do you have some hilarious 70s clothing styles, but you have a pregnant woman who is essentially the hero (also, Tom Savini and Ken Foree for the excessively geeky), discussions of abortion, of apathy, of immigration, and of the conspicuous consumption of zombies on escalators. Zombies on escalators!

I haven’t seen the third in the trilogy, Day of the Dead since the 1980s, so I don’t remember the social commentary from this one as clearly, though I believe there was a lot going on in terms of social programming and closed door politics. Maybe I should rewatch this.

And then of course you have the newest, fourth movie, Land of the Dead, which not only has Dario Argento’s daughter (Asia) in it, but is also one of the most blatantly Marxist movies I’ve seen in a long time. After all, the dead are the majority and the living are the privileged class, aren’t they? (Plus, yes, he makes this point with the living too.) There’s also a polemic on entertainment as distraction, the muck under the green, and fear tactics in internal and external populations.

I guess I sort of think of George Romero the same way I think of Wes Craven. Where Romero has always been good at including minorities using horror as a vehicle for commentary, Craven’s most famous horror series (Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream) feature female leads. As leads. Who actually don’t need to be saved. They often end up doing some saving themselves. After all, Nancy Thompson was my hero as a child when I first saw the original Nightmare on Elm Street. She reads up, she investigates, she takes shit from no one, she forces the people around her to listen, and she fights back physically and mentally. Would that all female horror heroes had her gumption.

Yes, btw, I am using the term ‘hero’ deliberately, as ‘heroine’ tends to imply a different sort of character slant. That’s changing somewhat but, still, female leads usually end up on screen to prop up their male counterparts. But that is a discussion for another day when I’m less moody. And have chocolate. Stupid lack of chocolate.

Anyway, to get back to my original point about Invasion of the Body Snatchers… Essentially, I watch those promos and wonder if they’ll include a lot of the coding the first movie did. I know the biggest reading is probably “BETTER DEAD THAN RED!” but there’s a lot more stuff going on in that movie too. Such as the hints that the pods are being supplied by immigrants as a possible alternate reading. Or the way you have these two very interesting ideas of conformity contrasting, one that is perceived as good and current, and the other that is encroaching and evil, and it costs sanity (points) to try and reconcile the two. That’s just plain weird no matter how you want to read the allegory of the film. I guess all films, at their heart, are preaching “my way not their way,” but each way differs. You just get it a lot more explicitly in the original Body Snatchers, as the standard conformity is changed and sanity is lost for the lead characters.

Anyway. I saw Stardust yesterday and it was good, even though I went a bit ‘hmm’ at some of the changes from the book. (I have the hard bound edition with illustrations. Signed. One of my prized possessions, yes, sirree.) Though for me, Michelle Pfeiffer really carried the movie (with some help from Robert DeNiro). Part of this was because of the changes they made and part of it was that they (both Pfeiffer and DeNiro) really looked like they were having fun on screen in a way the leads Charlie Cox and Claire Danes didn’t. Still, I recommend it.