All in a golden afternoon...

...Full leisurely we glide;

For both our oars, with little skill,

By little arms are plied,

While little hands make vain pretense

Our wanderings to guide.

Today is Charles Dodgson's birthday, or would be if he were alive. He is one of my favorite authors and is well known by almost everyone, although by a different name.  Charles Dodgson's pen name was Lewis Carroll.  Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as Sylvie and Bruno and The Hunting of the Snark.  I've been a fan of the Alice stories for a long time, I bet we all have, and I've taken my childhood appreciation of Carroll's work into adulthood and have collected some of his work in first editions, as well as some other peripheral books.  

Today, for bloggers, is Down the Rabbit Hole Day, and you're supposed to blog about something that's not your style to blog about.  I pretty much only blog about movies, so I guess anything's fair game, so I guess it makes sense to write a little about Lewis Carroll and his works that have given me so much joy.

Through the Looking Glass used to be my favorite Carroll work, until I read The Hunting of the Snark.  It's a poem in rhyming style, and is only about 20 pages long, without annotations.  The story tells of a group of people, a boots, a barrister, a broker, a billiard marker, a banker, a beaver and the Bellman, who go on a long sea voyage to find a snark.  While on the journey they all get in each other's hair and when they hit land they go searching for the snark being careful not to find a boojum instead.  The tale is illustrated by Henry Holiday in a style that is described by Martin Gardner as "grotesque", but not in the sense that the pictures are disgusting.  They are just oddly proportioned and strangely creepy at times.  Also, there are many hints at what is happening in the poem hidden in the illustrations, but there are also inconsistencies between the description in the poem and the pictures that accompany the words.  Sometimes these can be chalked up to the pictures having been completed, and the text having been edited at the last minute, but some of the alterations are motive-less and it all adds to the surreal atmosphere of the whole work.  The Hunting of the Snark is a fun, easy read that has many strange elements as well.  I fully endorse it.

The poem at the top of the post is the opening verse of "A Golden Afternoon" which is the poem that begins Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  Dodgson created the Alice stories for his three little friends, the Liddell sisters.  Alice herself was the middle child.  Dodgson was a logic and mathematics professor at Christ Church, Oxford, and the little Liddell girls were daughters of a co-worker of his.  The poem refers directly to them by saying "little skill", "little arms", "little hands", as "little" and "Liddell" are homonyms.  Dodgson did a lot of fun stuff like that in his writing.  Another great poem of his that I like is "Phantasmagoria" a poem in seven cantos in a collection of his poetry called Rhyme? And Reason?.  In "Phantasmagoria", a man comes home from a night of drinking with friend to find a ghost in his flat.  He and the ghost strike up a conversation and end up telling each other all sorts of things.  The ghost starts telling the man the differences between ghosts, spectres, phantoms, etc.  

Charles Dodgson gets a lot of flak for being a pedophile, and while he did have tendencies that were of that nature, the people who knew him maintain that he never acted upon those urges, urges which he himself has said had haunted and tormented him.  He took photographs too.  I have a couple books of his photography and it's all amazing.  He has great photos of animal skeletons and still lifes, as well as many many...far too many...pictures of little girls and boys portraying scenes from literature.  The Liddell girls in "Chinese dress", St. George and the Dragon, etc.)  He was perhaps more prolific a photographer than he was a writer.  

For better or for worse, Charles Dodgson produced some great art in his lifetime.  I will make sure my future kids know Alice in Wonderland, and all the versions of it that there are too.  For the record Disney's version is alright for a fusing of the two books, The Natalie Gregory version from 1985 made for TV is great because of all the people in it, but the strangest and most interesting one is Jan Svankmajer's Alice from 1988.  it's a strange fusion of live action and stop motion animation, but it is not or the faint of heart.  It's surreal and odd, and those are understatements!  Check it out if you feel up for something off the beaten path.  Thanks for reading.  Wish Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson a happy birthday for the 27th and me a happy birthday for the 28th!

Good news for media!

No, I'm not talking about newspapers...they're still all dead or dying...but the sharing of digital media has gained ground. I talk a lot on here about DRM, copyright infringement, etc., and there is a lot of back and forths going on around the web on whether or not people actually lose money by having their songs and/or movies downloaded for free.  Here is some conclusive proof:

Monty Python, which you can find all over YouTube in very poor quality, is doing something good and making money from it.  Monty Python got sick and tired of having their stuff thrown onto YouTube for free and in bad condition so they have created their very own YouTube channel.  Everything is free and in great quality.  They specifically sought out the most watched videos on YouTube and uploaded pristine editions of them to replace the pixelated versions. All the Monty Python stuff is free...but there are links all over the page that will bring you to Amazon to buy their DVDs.

Since Monty Python's YouTube channel has been active, their videos are the highest rated and most watched on YouTube, and the sales of their movies and TV show DVDs has risen by about 23,000%.  Is there a better argument for free and unrestricted sharing of media and digital entertainment?  Locks only keep dishonest people out, and the people who illegally download the most MP3s are also the ones who legally buy the most CDs and go to the most concerts. Refusing to let people share media does more harm than good.

Wanna make yourself think?

By far the best thing I've read today is this paragraph:

"...more items are invented and manufactured – while the total number of hours in a day to enjoy them remains fixed – we spend less and less time per item. In other words the long-term trend in our modern lives is that ALL goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore all goods and services are candidates for rental, sharing, and the social commons."  -  Kevin Kelly

The entire essay/blog post is here.  I recommend you read it.  Even if you don't agree with everything Mr. Kelly is saying, it's still rich food for thought, and is indicative of where things are headed.  (For most of us we are here already.)

Some creative stuff

The only new things I've seen lately are Juno, which was hilarious and all sorts of emotional awesomeness, and Bringing Up Baby, which is also very enjoyable and funny, if you can forget that Katharine Hepburn's character is fucking nuts and annoying as hell. If I were in Cary Grant's position, I never would've been so insufferably polite. But I digress.

Since I'm sure no on out there wasn't to read my thoughts about teen pregnancy and Juno, and you just heard what I think of Bringing Up Baby, here are some pictures I've done today and yesterday for the GF. Enjoy!



If you see this broad on the street, back off and find a new route. She's obviously got some craaaaazy mood swings!

Heartbreaking & Awesome

This is hilarious, disturbing, creative, pitiful and ridiculous all at the same time. The music and the image come together perfectly.

Chocolade Haas

Let the Right One In

Last Friday night I saw the Swedish horror film Let the Right One In. It's one of the very few horror films to come out of Scandinavia, and of course Dead Snow is on its way too, so maybe this is the sign of a renaissance of horror films from the bitter cold of Norway and Sweden?

Let the Right One In has made many horror "Best of..." lists for it's great story that makes the vampire elements secondary and incidental. It's boy-meets-girl in a very simplistic and pure approach. The boy is 12 and is a bullied only child from two divorced parents. The dad provides little structure and the mom is left to basically be the iron fist, preventing her from finding a healthy balance between discipline and friendship that every parent needs. It's not a healthy environment and the boy has no self esteem or confidence. He lies about bruises and cuts from his bullying at school.

Enter the girl, a seeming 12 years old herself, but really she's a 100+ year old vampire who moved into the apartment next door. They meet in the courtyard one night and a tentative friendship begins to form, even though each one makes sure to tell the other how disinterested in having friends they are. The rapport between the two kids is great, and it's funny to watch them being children, then realizing that one of them has been around for centuries. In the background there are townsfolk reacting to the various murders perpetrated by the vampire's adult "helper". The movie moves at its own pace, which might be a bit slow for some, but the story is genuinely touching and the gore factor is something you forget about between the sparse, but vivid, bloodlettings.

Half-way through the movie, which follows very classic vampire mythology and rules, it becomes apparent that the title has a three-fold meaning: the girl is an old vampire and has to be careful who she trusts, the boy is also careful about who he "lets in" because of his experiences with bullies and alienation from his parents, and they each have to be careful about who they let in to their personal living spaces. A vampire cannot enter a dwelling unless he/she has been invited, and we find out what happens when they try without that formal invitation. The boy needs to be careful who he lets into his room, and he makes a good choice with the girl; she is a vampire in whom he can trust and confide.

A hesitant camaraderie becomes a fast friendship, even though the boy doesn't really catch on to the true nature of his friend until wall into the final third of the film. (Watch the sparks fly when he decides they should be "blood-brothers" and cuts his palm in front of her.) She looks out for him, and in the end he has to do the same for her. They both reach depths of feeling that they never knew existed before.

The dark, long winter of Sweden makes for a fantastic and unsettling backdrop. Snow has never looked so beautiful, yet after watching a movie like 30 Days of Night, you're reminded of how long those nights can last in the winter months and how that can drain hope and joie de vivre. The most suicides occur in the winter, and I can rightly assume, the most vampiric killings. Let the Right One In is a beautiful film with a beautiful story. It has horror elements, but when you leave the theater you'll only be thinking of the great coming together of two beings who found friendship, not the eerie scenes of blood-sucking.

WTF

I don't know what the purpose of this robot is, but over at Boing Boing Gadgets there is a video of a Japanese push-up robot who turns evil. I especially like the arterial spray.