Sir, you have lived a fine and useful life. You have responsibilities, yes, but one of those responsibilities is to know when to relinquish power. —- Giles Cunningham – The Asphyx
I walked to the Starbucks near my house, did some typing, then sat down with my new tablet to watch a movie. I had a handful already downloaded, but the Starbucks had a good internet connection so I streamed a film from Tubi. I had seen a YouTube video on forgotten horror movies and remembered one from Hammer Studios called The Asphyx.
It was available for free on Tubi (with some ads) and the Starbucks WIFI was good enough for streaming, so I was able to enjoy it for free.
It came out the same year as The Exorcist and therefore, failed miserably at the box office. It was one of the older, less graphic, psychological horror offerings and couldn’t compete with the sudden modern makeup effect-driven splatterdom. Over the years, it has maintained a bit of cult following… also, the gimmick of scientists creating device to catch a spirit, entrap it in some containment, and then seal it away would be the basis for the 1984 film Ghostbusters.
But I have an affection for the older, thinking horror, especially the Hammer Horror and thoroughly enjoyed The Asphyx.
“It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got ricing pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it’s only natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me, that is just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin. I suppose I’d be shocked, of course, but I don’t know, I think I’d be kind of relieved too. Or at least I think I wouldn’t be so upset, because that would feel, in some ways, a whole lot more real.” ― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“Life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.”
“I hide my distress, just like the blessed birds hide themselves when they are preparing to die. Wine! Wine, roses, music and your indifference to my sadness, my loved-one!” ― Omar Khayyám, Rubaiyat De Omar Khayyam…
“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down….” ― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton
I’ve been walking more, trying to average at least three miles per day. Once the daily horror lessens a bit (if it does) we want to be able to get out, take the Casita on trips – and I will be substituting a lot of hiking for my bike riding. I have enjoyed my walks – sometimes listening to podcasts, sometimes stopping for coffee, sometimes stopping for writing in my journal.
I haven’t been using my DSLR lately; any photographs I take have been done with my phone. I miss the heft, the sound, and, most of all, the versatility of the big camera. But who has time to mess with shit like that?
Today, I figured out how to combine all three. I rode my Giant cargo bike (which is very slow, yet useful during the winter months) about three miles to a parking lot at the trailhead for the Spring Creek Greenbelt in Garland. Then I locked my bike up and went for a walk (only managed a couple miles, but that’s OK) with my camera, looking for photographic opportunities.
I enjoyed it. Looking at the maps, I found another trailhead within biking distance that offers a more extensive trail system. May try that tomorrow, before the nasty weather has a chance to get here.
Manhole Cover, Spring Creek Greenbelt, Garland, Texas
“You know how I always dread the whole year? Well, this time I’m only going to dread one day at a time.” —Charlie Brown
For New Year here in Dallas they put fireworks on the Reunion Tower downtown – which I’ve seen before and is pretty cool. Unfortunately, they had to cancel the drone show (I’ve never seen one – want to) because of the awful accident a few weeks ago.
Still, I had wanted to ride my bike down into the Trinity River Bottoms, find a spot on a levee, set up a tripod and my camera. Unfortunately RWD (real world disasters) intervened and I had to stay home, watch TV, and listen to distant booms at midnight.
More than a decade ago, (not on New Years Eve, I don’t remember why they had the fireworks display) I did ride my bike down to an abandoned parking structure (sprinkled with homeless shit) – which turned out to be an excellent vantage point. I took some pictures with varying exposure times (from a tripod of course – carrying one on a bike is something I’m still working on). Here’s what I came up with:
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
I remember the first time I saw the Reunion Tower. It would have been a year after I graduated from college, 1979. The thing was pretty much brand new then and we drove past it on the way from Hutchinson, Kansas (where I lived, working in a Salt Mine) to the beach at South Padre Island. I was gobsmacked – the thing was so modern and odd and unexpected.
Then I saw it in the PBS movie The Lathe of Heaven (I saw it on the only time it aired in 1979 – it had a long, odd history, disappeared for two decades, but you can see it now – here’s the part with the Reunion Tower) which was filmed in Dallas, and the tower was a stand-in for the evil scientist’s ultimate reality-bending dream machine. Dallas was considered very futuristic at the time and other spots (City Hall, the Water Gardens, DFW airport’s people movers) were also used in the movie.
Then, when I moved here, for years the revolving bar at the top was a go-to spot to take visitors or to celebrate special events. I haven’t been in decades… maybe it’s time for a re-visit.
I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.
Werner Herzog
Found by a photobooth,
Molly’s At the Market, French Quarter, New Orleans
For Christmas… I ask my friends and family for Amazon gift cards – at my age, the stuff I want (my lifelong quota of tchotchke and cute gifts is long overfilled)tends to the expensive side – far greater than the generosity of one person towards me. This way, I can accumulate them and add my February birthday haul to reach my consumerist goal. For example, I saved up and bought a decent camera a few years ago.
One unanticipated benefit of this – if you call a few minutes of amusement a benefit – is the time I spend looking through Amazon, deciding what to get. It’s kinda fun.
This year, I settled on a decent pair of binoculars. I have always had a soft spot for these. When I was a small child, my father brought back a pair of Soviet Military binoculars from Korea (how did he get them? I have no idea. The case had bullets holes in it). I loved those things… They lasted for decades but are now lost… Something had gone wrong, maybe a prism had come loose, and how do you fix something like that? No Russian optics repair shop down on the corner.
They were big and had the traditional porro prism arrangement. Yes,I did research on the various ways binoculars can be designed. Because of that, I was at first leaning toward a porro prism binocular – like this one. But nowadays the preferred arangement of glass seems to be the more compact roof prism. So after some (a lot, really) of research, adding and removing from my wish list – I arrived at the Vortex Crossfire. These are entry level, but quality scopes from a popular brand. Plus, they seem to come with a nice case.
They are now winding their way to Richardson from some unknown binocular warehouse somewhere. I’m surprisingly excited.
So, if you had, let’s say, somewhere between one and two hundred bucks in Amazon gift cards (not a lot of money, but enough for something) what would you buy. Fun to think about… but not to obsess over.
It was good, maybe really good – but more than that it was unique.
Does a work of art have to make sense? Is it fair for a work to be purposefully ambiguous? Can perplexing be a positive attribute?
Or is life too short for all this?
Something in the Dirt is definitely purposefully ambiguous. It implies that it is a documentary – there are interviews with multiple cameramen, special effects experts, and a string of directors – they talk about making the film that we are watching which may or may not duplicate events that may or may not have actually happened.
It’s fun if you can relax and let it wash over you, if you can embrace the chaos – and I imagine it would be maddening and frustrating if you can’t.
The key is, I think, in the dedication at the end. It is dedicated to friends making movies together. The writers/directors/producers/stars have a long string of odd movies in their history – most with much larger budgets and production budgets than Something in the Dirt. Now I’m going to work through the other films, there is some real creativity going on here.
This one looks like the two of them decided to get some friends together and make a little film while they were in Covid lockdown and see what resulted.
“You’re going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.”
—-Fay Wray, quoting Merian C. Cooper on King Kong.
There was the promise of cable-cutting…
First there was cable TV. I remember in ~1983 stringing cable into a bedroom for a second TV (a rare luxury back then) thinking, “I wish that television could come right out of the air, instead of through a wire, then I wouldn’t have to… wait a minute! It does!”
But over the years, cable became more and more expensive… and then cable-cutting! For a few heady years, that was the cat’s pajamas – until the streaming world became more and more bifurcated and expensive, until you have to have so many paid subscriptions that you forget what you’ve got and the one thing that you want is always on a stream you don’t have and you scroll for hours and can’t find anything to watch anyway.
But I have found a streaming service that has a carefully curated selection of wonderful content, no ads, available on all smart TVs, phones, tablets, and computers, and (with some limitations) is completely free. And a lot of people haven’t heard of it.
It has fantastic content. I subscribe to The Criterion Channel – which is great – but certain odd, classic, or foreign films kept showing up on this “Kanopy” thing – so I had to check it out.
One catch is that it is only available through your library, if your library offers it. My local library did not, so I was shit out of luck. Until I discovered the next city out in the string of suburbs did offer it – and they had a deal with my town so I could get a card. It was only a few miles drive and I was signed up. So now I had my Kanopy subscription (and a whole new set of libraries to visit).
The second catch is that you are limited to the number of films per month you can watch. But in this new year, I discovered that my city now offers it too – so I can sign up twice and get twice the monthly limit. And I’ll sign up with my wife’s card (and maybe send her to the neighboring city) and get even more.
I’m sitting in my living room, in my comfy recliner, drinking my morning coffee and trying not to watch any YouTube videos (I’m addicted). So I’m listening to music. Instead of Spotify, I’m listening to my own CDs – ripped into digital format and stored on a server.
I upgraded my desktop – installing Linux on my son’s old gaming PC. Then I took my old Linux machine, wiped it, and installed Ubuntu server on it – using it as a headless server on my home network. The most useful thing I’ve done so far is installed Jellyfin on it. That lets me keep digital movies and music on the server, then consume them from any device in my house.
There are hundreds of music CDs on there – over the years, I ripped most of my collection into MP3s and now store the digital files there. I know that most of these are available on Spotify but there is so much there, like drinking from a firehose, that it is hard to find anything to listen to. These old CDs are pre-curated by myself and arranged in a familiar, useful format.
So there.
At any rate, I’m listening right now to an album from Sergio Mendes and Brasil ‘66. I love this shit. It is so much better than ANYTHING being recorded right now. A smooth concoction of latin jazz, just sophisticated enough to transcend elevator music, yet not so challenging to interrupt my morning coffee.
So there.
Brasil ‘66…. I remember them when they first came out – they were on all the TV shows. I was only nine, but I remember.
2023-1966 = 57. This music is from fifty seven years ago. Since I remember it, it doesn’t seem that long ago. I’m sure some of this music is still being played on the radio – on “oldies” stations – on adult contemporary – maybe even on some cutting-edge independent radio. It’s so good it can still be played for itself – not historically, not ironically… shit, I’m listening to it right now.
Fifty seven years old. I was born in ‘57. Music this old, when I was born, would have been recorded in 1900. The gap between 1966, which I remember, and now is the same as between my birth and two turns of the century ago.
That doesn’t feel right. Think about 1900 – did they even have recorded music then? What the hell? I mean, in 1966 nobody thought about having music on a computer and streaming through the house, but that’s only a difference in convenience. I could easily have a turntable and listen to a 1966 album – lots of people I know do – I imagine that some Brasil ‘66 albums are still being pressed and still will be fifty seven years from now – at least in some form.
My mind reels. I feel the flow of time, the death of possibility, the terror of eternity.
Better finish my coffee and get some errands done.
Bill Chance 