Cats making biscuits, television, a movie, not quite buns in the oven, typesetting, and more.
[A] Cats making biscuits: A is being particularly cute as I type (while making dinner). She is the more temperamental of our two girls. She’s also more partial to me than E is, though both prefer me to Ms. S., which at times naturally annoys Ms. S. When she was but a tiny kitten A was very much a lap cat, and I have many photos and videos to prove it. Nearly every morning, often before I went to work but even on weekends, she would spend time sleeping on my lap, but I just realized today that since late summer it’s been a less-frequent activity, and E has taken her place in a way.
E is the quiet one. Except she can meow, whereas A merely mews in a way that imitates a chirp. It’s almost as if after being adopted by us she spent none of her formative time amongst other cats and so never learned proper cat-speak. She’s our own Kaspar Hauser or wolf child or similar … anyway, E. E pouts when punished; she goes off to a quiet place, often a corner or window, and sulks. Then in the evening she wanders back, slowly, as if it means nothing to her, and without drawing much attention to herself she cuddles up on a lap.
[B] Television: Today we got in more than expected. First there was our continued excursion with ‘The X-Files.’ Ms. S. uses the time to knit and progress on a project that has been vexing her for some time. She has a deadline … the holidays. Back to Mulder and Scully. We had our slight ‘Twin Peaks’ crossover with Michael Horse in episode 18 of season 1, “Shapes,” which takes place on a fictitious Montana reservation and features skin walkers / shape changers / werewolves. In a way it’s a very straight-forward episode, as both the audience and our FBI agents get “the truth,” though much of the “evidence” is destroyed, meaning there is no “proof.”
There never is.
It’s just a monster of the week sort of thing, but it is our first jab at integrating Native American themes into the show. With mention of Wounded Knee and the early/mid-90s reevaluated view of the FBI / “Feds,” we have Mulder and Scully as “outsiders” (as “insiders”) in a way they aren’t within the Bureau and differently than when they’re just in “Oregon” or “Tennessee” and dealing with territorial local law enforcement who don’t enjoy having the Feds interfering. There’s a hint of a political consciousness at work here, but we’re also only two episodes beyond introducing The Lone Gunmen and the true conspiratorial underbelly of the show.
And that returns a bit in “Darkness Falls,” the next episode.
In both of these outings — in the “wilderness” — our federal agents have been called in not because we’re dealing with an “x-file” but because of another interest: murder and a reservation, eco-terrorism on federal land. But “Darkness Falls” is also interesting because, as with “Forever Young,” we have a more or less entirely ‘naturalistic’ monster-of-the-week, though not one of the Dr. Frankenstein/Mengele variety. There’s an obvious eco-political allegory at work here as well, though nearly twenty years on it’s less interesting now than it was then, perhaps. We’re far beyond the spotted owl. Anyway: purely naturalistic though science fiction, and it’s something that even Scully believes in. It’s highly self-contained and a straight-up genre piece. But the “powers that be” part that fits in with the smothering conspiracy talk shows up again when Mulder and Scully are in quarantine. The government will wipe out the bug … failure is not an option … yet these men in white suits answer to nobody on this show. And you know samples are being taken and this bug is being weaponized. Who wouldn’t want to research it? But whenever I see such white outfits and quarantine tents and the like, I always think of E.T.
We also took in episode 5 (season 1) of ‘Relic Hunter,’ “Thank You Very Much.” We get a bad, bad Elvis and a ridiculous Elvis impersonator. The casting was terrible … “George,” Elvis’ buddy from Germany, has to be around 60 when he seeks out Sydney, yet Willam Colgate, who plays him, is nowhere near that. And by ‘nowhere’ I mean not within a decade or two … at least. The material set in ‘Germany’ was ridiculous yet not as over-the-top-bad as it needs to be. The laundromat scene(s), though, nearly redeem it all. The real shame in ‘Relic Hunter’ (I know, I know … low-hanging fruit) is that there is so little effort put in at the script level … at the level of plotting. All the pulp-fiction plot cliches you would expect, the double-crosses, and arcane and baroque shadowy intrigue? It’s a perverse irony that none of it is there … that the show instead plays nearly everything straight.
[C] A Movie: Yesterday we finished watching the truly inept “Assassin’s Bullet,” aka “Sofia,” a recent paycheck for Timothy Spall, Christian Slater, and Donald Sutherland, in which the first treats it seriously (“I’m going to give it my Brian Cox best!”), the middle sleepwalks, and the third knows what sort of ‘movie’ he is in and wishes only for and oilier and longer mustache to twirl. Elika Portnoy must have watched too much ‘Alias’ before coming up with the story … oh, wait, I’m sorry. There is neither plot nor story here, but, alas, someone failed even to thematize that properly. It could have been a glorious, glorious mess.
But today? The 2012 remake of ‘Total Recall.’
It’s bad. We knew that going in. But compared to ‘Sofia’ it did less with more. All that money, all those effects shots, all those actors with names we recognize … and nothing to show for it. And take our primary antagonist, someone played with such gusto by Ronny Cox in the ‘original’ … here we get Bryan Cranston phoning in an at best generic performance (he was more distinctive and memorable in ‘John Carter’ … as a voice!), and we kill off — *spoiler alert* — hammy Bill Nighy after giving him a scene and a half.
Really?
And yet here is the thing … I find this movie fascinating. Terminally boring as produced, but fascinating. From wasting Nighy and, in a way, Cranston, as well as by John Cho, to the nods to Verhoeven’s (regardless of whether the material was in the Dick story upon which both are based) that *always* come up short (3-breasted woman here or there? receptionist at Recall/Rekall here or there? ‘you’re suffering a psychotic break and snap out of it!’ encounter here or there, and so on and so forth) it just comes up uninspired. Yet there are ideas; and Verhoeven’s had almost no ideas. It has action and execution. It had plot. It had visual, cinematic storytelling, but it had little in the way of ‘ideas.’
Here we get a world and backstory, here we get a villain on a grand scale. Cox was a petty dictator. But here we have potential genocide, here we have robotic policemen/soldiers, here we have a tunnel through the center of the earth, the vast majority of the planet uninhabitable after (bio)chemical warfare, and so on. We have our protagonist teaching another guy on-the-job, as well as small-talk with colleagues, work politics, banter, and more. And we have John Cho contemplating objective-vs-subjective reality (and illusion). There is the hint of depth here. And Verhoeven gave us only surface.
But there’s also nothing original here. We get nods to moments in the earlier movie, even dialog (or, more often, monolog) that seems targeted to reminding us of that movie. The look of everything in Australia? How can we not think of ‘Blade Runner’ at every turn? Of ‘Robocop’ meets ‘I, Robot’ with the synthetic officers? Of any number of other post-apocalyptic dystopias — such as ‘Equilibrium,’ given that Kurt Wimmer co-wrote this one and directed that –, and so on and so forth. And John Cho’s spiel? It’s straight up Morpheus in ‘The Matrix.’ I’m immediately reminded of ‘Looper’ earlier in the year, in which Jeff Daniels’ mob boss (of sorts) chastises J.G.L.’s young punk for the way he dresses … because it is based not on how thugs dress or dressed, but rather on how they thought they dressed based upon generations of popular culture imitations.
There is nothing deep to say here because (1) it is about surface (yes, a lame pun) and (2) it has all been said before … especially in all that ‘French’ theory we love to mock. And sometimes in that other ‘critical theory,’ (see also: The Frankfurt School). Just more art imitating art.
[D] Not Quite Buns in the Oven: But, rather … potatoes. And a big sweet potato, an onion, a thick carrot, chopped. A little oil, plenty of salt and pepper, and depending on the root or tuber some dill or rosemary. 400F for about an hour, turning/tossing once or twice.
It’s not a particularly high-protein meal or basis for a meal, but it is (1) colorful, (2) nutritious, and (3) filling. After I put it in the oven I realized, oh, wait … that’s a lot of food. 200g potato, 300g sweet potato, 100g onion, and 100-150g carrot. There’s 700-750g, or more than a pound and a half to eat.
[E] Typesetting, and More: As part of my learning/relearning project (one of many) I began reacquainting myself today with the ‘memoir’ class, a big-a** LaTeX package that makes typesetting books (see also: memoirs) and other types of text easier (than even the regular LaTeX packages do).
It’s an all-in-one sort of thing. Monolithic if you will. You get novels and poems and the like in one package. LaTeX’s strength has always been science and math, especially the latter; the humanities have often seemed like an afterthought. LaTeX has support for verse, and there are additional poetry packages and the like, but none of them have ever really felt satisfactory. And you’re always needing to use multiple additional packages and encountering situations the packages don’t support. And several such packages don’t like to play nice together, etc. Enter ‘memoir,’ which has saner defaults than most such things, etc.
My interest at the moment, though, is typesetting stage plays, and I’m not sure ‘memoir’ is the way to go. One the one hand I have less than two weeks to do the typesetting I need to do; on the other at least the texts I’m going to work with are, to some extent, already in a usable text form, so I only have to do formatting, not transcribing (though with most/all I’ll need to do some editing and proofing). Then print and bind.
And for better or for worse I think a LaTeX package and approach is the best, as things like Markdown, rST, and AsciiDoc are not designed for this sort of work; and while AsciiDoc leads to DocBook and the latter *is* designed for such things, at least in a way, I do not want to descend into XML-Hell just for a little Schnitzler and Lessing.
