Semi-hard one-eyed meat cobra

[jere7my]

Why must porn writers invent ludicrous names for their characters' anatomies? How can someone type the words "semi-hard one-eyed meat cobra" and think, "Yeah, yeah, this is sexy"? (For the adventurous, the original is here.)

Happily, this has otherwise been a good weekend for artistic merit. I finished the first third of The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and as usual with Wolfe I'm left with plenty to think about. (E.g.: a statue of Cerberus guards the gate of the protagonist's home, 666 Saltimbanque. These seem like clear indications that the house is, in some way, Hell, but how?) I was delighted and amazed by passages like:

Our stage faced the west, and the setting sun had left the sky a welter of lurid color: purple-reds striped gold and flame and black. Against this violent ground, which might have been the massed banners of Hell, there began to appear, in ones and twos, like the elongate shadows of fantastic grenadiers crenelated and plumed, the heads, the slender necks, the narrow shoulders of a platoon of my father's demimondaines; arriving late, they were taking the last seats at the upper rim of our theater, encircling it like the soldiery of some ancient, bizarre government surrounding a treasonous mob.

I watched the first minutes of Robert Altman's The Company, which we are screening (er, in its entirety) at my theater, and was amazed by the dance routine that opens the film. A dozen or so dancers, lit from the side in red and blue, grabbed the ribbons that hang from above the stage and, by running and leaping in precise patterns on the floor, formed huge and constantly changing cats' cradles in the arch of the proscenium. Then they gathered lengths of ribbon and drew boxes around themselves, their limbs and bodies forming a cross in the center of each rectangle, and each crossed rectangle tilted and pivoted in perfect unison with its neighbors, like the Red Queen's dancing cards, or Janus doors which open on themselves.

I also watched Identity last night; it was interesting, but I think the resolution of the mystery undercut my interest in the story. (To say more would be a spoiler, but my theories were wildly off.) Home Movies was, as always, a hoot, but I fear tonight's might have been the last episode. It had that feel to it.

Speaking of last episodes, Wonderfalls, the best new show this season, has been Foxecuted. Don't look for it this Thursday, as it will be gone. Bastards.

I've nearly got my computer arranged the way I want it. I've settled on Nisus Writer for my word processor, since it has that nice uncluttered draft view for writing, and created a manuscript template (12 point Courier, double spaced, proper headers, etc.) for it. My iTunes playlists are set up in a friendly and self-updating fashion, and we bought our first tunes from the iTunes Music Store today. (Into the West and Bob Dylan's Lay Down Your Weary Tune. It worked perfectly, but I cannot edit the songs in SoundStudio!) My contacts list is synced to my iPod; my Eudora filters are working perfectly; I'm rating my music as I encounter it. I need to learn some Perl so I can write scripts for Nisus Writer, and Unix commands that will let me communicate with OSX via the Terminal.

It snowed last night, and it was melting from Kendra's car as she drove to church. The current temperature hovers around 20°. I was rather hoping we were past all this, but apparently not.

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

I've just started rating my music -- so far I've done almost a third of roughly 2000 songs. I'm doing it very hodge-podgedly, though -- sometimes I've been rating things just by thinking about them, other times by listening to some fraction of random things and then moving on, and other times by listening to whole albums straight through and rating each song as I listen to it.

[irilyth]

The Wonderfalls people should've gone with ABC -- at least they let their terrific but doomed shows finish the season before they kill them.

Wonderfalls

[zorblak.livejournal.com]

Bastards!