Big Rock Cat Presents: Writers of the World Series - Gemini by Gabrielle Entwisle

(photo by Bobby Pfeiffer - A Creative Writing Student and the Crack, Tate Modern 2007)

Gabrielle Entwisle is an Australian in London. She writes stories. Here's my favorite one:


Gemini

(Gurgle gurgle)

M: What was that?

G: I think she’s having curry again.

M: Oh god you don’t mean-

G: Yep here it comes...

A loud rupture swarms their ears.

M: God! She always does that.

G: It’s the chilly. She just doesn’t learn.

M: I hope it isn’t that sag paneer again – I hate that stuff. The taste

really lingers.

G: It’s all those books she’s been reading. You know, ‘eat food full of

iron and protein’.

M: Does that explain the huge amounts of tofu?

G: Probably.

Pause

G: Hey, would you mind squidging over a bit, my legs getting stuck

again.

M: Ow!

G: Damn, sorry. Solar reflexes.

M: I thought they weren’t supposed to have developed yet.

G: I’m not sure. I think it all starts to work towards the end you

know. I mean we are supposed to be fully functional by the end. Not

like those first months-

M: Oh please don’t remind me!

G: Do you remember the blindness?

M: Couldn’t see a thing!

G: And the turbulence, I thought I was going to be sick every time.

M: She’s really learnt to balance herself now.

G: Well you know what her yoga coach was telling her:

G & M(simultaneously): ‘Like a rolling ocean, your body should move

with the tide’

M: ‘Feel the rhythm of your body.’ Huh! I can’t believe she fell for

all that stuff.

G: Still, less motion sickness right?

M: Yeah, I guess so. You know I think she really fancies that guy from

the class.

G: Who, the instructor?!

M: Yeah. Every time he says bend over she gets this funny feeling – you

know, down there.

G: That’s just weak bladder syndrome.

M: Whatever you say... At least she’s stopped fancying that other chap

from the book shop-

G: I know! Could never get any sleep when he’s around.

M: Up and down and up and down.

G: And when he would read us those poems.

M: Urgh!

G: Robert Burns, what a sap.

M: ‘My love is like a red red rose....’

G: Oh I’m going to be sick.

Pause.

G: What music do you think we’ll get tonight, Beethoven?

M: I do quite like that – makes me sleepy though.

G: It’s supposed to make you smart.

M: Well that’s a waste of time. We already know you’re the one with the

brains.

G: You’ve got the great figure!

M: Pfft, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

G: Don’t think I haven’t seen you.

M: What?

G: Checking yourself out when I’m not looking.

M: I do not!

G: Come on, I’ve seen you!

M: Maybe once or twice. You can’t tell me you’re not curious.

G: About what?

M: What you’re going to look like.

G: I’ve got faith. She’s a pretty good template.

M: Just please god don’t give me that nose!

G: Hey, it’s alright.

M: Yeah if you want to look like Bette Midler.

G: Shh.

M: I’m still gutted she didn’t go for stem cell option, just think, we

could be like Paris Hilton! Blonde, thin, -

G: A bimbo...

M: Yeah yeah. Still, it could have been fun.

G: I think I’m happy just the way I am thank you.

(Another rumble from above)

G: Wop, hold tight.

M: Jesus! Just one helping’s enough you know!

(Sniffing) Hey, can you smell beer?

M: Oh no you don’t think she’s-

G: Not again!

M: I thought she’d weaned herself off that stuff.

G: Me too.

M: It’s the doctor’s fault. He never should have told her Guinness is

good for you.

G: Remember Matt and Beth’s wedding? She just couldn’t resist that

bubbly.

M: Oh, the karaoke.

G: You loved it! Don’t lie.

M: What do you mean!?

G: Come on, you were singing and swarming all over the place. You

kicked so much she thought she was about to give birth!

M: I can’t help it - it’s Prince! When I hear it I just gotta move.

(sings): Gonna party like it’s 1999...

G: I think we know who can hold their liquor though hmmm?

Pause

M: Ooh!

G: What?

M: Got a real bad itch just there, do you mind scratching it for me? I

can’t get to it.

G: You’re gonna have to roll over.

M: Ok, just let me…

G: Ow!

M: Sorry.

G: You and your elbows.

(Scratching)

G: So have you thought anymore about it?

M: About what?

G: About what you want to be when you grow up.

M: Not this again!

G: It’s important. You know we’re supposed to decide before we leave.

M: I hate deciding under a time frame.

G: You were never good with deadlines. In fact, 10 bucks says you come

out early.

M: 20 says you’re wrong.

G: Although if I remember correctly I seem to recall you crossing that

line before…

M: Come on now be fair. It was just once. I only wanted to take a peak.

G: Yeah well you know you shouldn’t, it’s dangerous out there. You’re

not supposed to go until she’s ready.

M: I know I know. There’s just so much to see, I don’t think I can

wait.

Pause.

G: Do you think they’ll like us?

M: Who?

G: Them.

M: Well I didn’t go through all this mumbo jumbo just to be ignored.

G: I know. I just don’t want to disappoint her. She’s done so much for

us.

M: She’s gonna love you, don’t worry.

G: But what if I do the wrong thing? What if I’m not right? What if

she…

M: What.

G: What if she… likes you more.

M: Huh?

G: Do you really think it’s possible to love two at once?

M: I think you’re being stupid.

G: But listen to me...

M: I am listening, and you sound like you’ve had way too many

antibodies.

G: I’m being serious. Aren’t you just a little nervous about it?

M: Nope.

G: Two of us. Constantly there. Constantly compared.

M: I figure it’s like ‘buy one, get one free’ – double the goods.

G: Maybe.

M: You are definitely the worry wart in this relationship.

G: It’s just so… scary. What do you think it’s really like out there?

M: I think it’s just like it is here. Only more… space.

G: Hmm.

M: It’s gonna be alright. And even if it isn’t I’m still around.

G: Really?

M: Of course stupid! What, you think I’d just ditch you at the finish

line? 9 months of skin on skin contact and then zip? Come on.

G: But what if you, you know.

M: What?

G: What if you find someone else?

M: Are you crazy? Who else do you think I could have spent this much

time with? Who’s seen me eat and shit and still never leaves me. If

there’s anyone that I’d want around it’s you.

G: You mean it?

M: Of course.

G: I must admit, I have got pretty used to having you around.

M: Exactly. Now stop being so wound up and help with this cord. Damn

thing keeps getting tangled again.

Rage Against Another Pop Christmas

I don't watch TV - I haven't spent a single hour in front of the idiot box since early 2007. It made me a very happy and healthy person.

Not only I am better informed now, having the benefit of endless Interwebs news sources to choose from, than when I watched the news every evening; and not only I am better entertained, downloading the newest/best movies and shows of my liking (instantly!), instead of waiting for them to be broadcasted, depending on the mercy of greedy TV producers.

Oh, and I had avoided the torture of at least a million sanitary napkins commercials (blah, I hate those) and the brain dead chatter of TV presenters in bad clothes.

But maybe the greatest thing about not watching TV is not watching British TV. Because the worst thing after Bulgarian and American TV (The Hills, sweet Jesus!) is British TV. As I said, I am a very happy human being!

While I don't watch TV, I selectively follow what's going on there, and I compensate with listening to radio (mainly online). That's how I learned about this year's boycott of pop music over Christmas. Apparently something extremely interesting is happening right now here in Britain - Rage Against the Machine are about to become a number 1 Christmas hit song with Killing in the Name Of. Oh, my!




I am just dying to see how a 1992 rock track will top up the God awful UK charts! This will be my best Christmas so far.

Untitled By John

Her Love is like a Rose
That grows and grows,
Her Love is like a River
That flows and flows,
Her Love is like the Interweb
That just goes and goes,
I want to tell her
But she knows, she knows.



I found this poem by John to me while I was rearranging my pile of memory stuff - you know, stacks of greeting cards that people had sent to us, newspaper clippings, tickets from movies we've seen and scraps of paper with love notes to each other. I think it is good exactly because it is so simple and borderline cliched. Of course, no one else could write this, it must be John with the Interwebs and all.

Photo by Katarina (another favorite Flickr contact).

Funny Quotes by Random Great People XIII

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
- Umberto Eco

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk? - Laurence J. Peter

Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.
- Edgar Watson Howe

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end. - Jerry Seinfeld

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
- William James

Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend their lives. - Sue Murphy

Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.
- Philip Guedalla

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. - Jean-Paul Sartre

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
- Don Marquis

There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it. - Mary Wilson Little

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
- Oscar Wilde

Dance like it hurts,/ Love like you need money,/ Work when people are watching. - Scott Adams

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books to the ceiling,/ Books to the sky,/ My pile of books is a mile high./ How I love them! How I need them!/ I'll have a long beard by the time I read them. - Arnold Lobel

This set of quotes are my favorite in the sequence up until now!

Let It Snow!!!

This is how the weather forecast for tomorrow looks like:

For this occasion I am posting two videos that illustrate how to have fun in the snow:





Far out!

By Louis Quail

The photos by the mysterious photographer who came to my door a while ago arrived today. I have to admit, we really need to paint the house over :)

The Perfect Woman is a Pin-up Girl

The other day I had some time to lose between classes, so I went to a bookshop and browsed through Taschen coffee table books and photo books, all the while scheming how one day I will have an enormous shelf at home where I will collect at least a hundred of those precious things, fat with glossy images and heavy with hard covers. One of those books was dedicated to Gil Elvgren, the great American pin-up artist. Oh, my!

Let me tell you something funny: If I were a man, my type would be exactly the woman Elvgren portrays over and over again - a creature with big eyes, playful smile, small frame and soft curves. This actually is my type of woman as a woman too, or at least that's what I would like to look like, only with brains. The image of the pin-up girl is just so very attractive! It has no trace of emancipation yet it is powerful, it's sincere and warm, it's seductive but friendly. In short, the perfect woman!

Also, Elvgren's painting technique is stunning - he uses photographs as templates and then he paints the objects over cartoonish, carefully polished and rounded with well defined colors, attention to the detail and lighting/shadows that are realistic and multi-dimensional. The pin-ups look as if they will jump out of the picture any second, and smother you with kisses! See for yourself:

Favorite Flickr Contact - Stefan and His Stormtrooper Project

Here I want to share a project of a Flickr contact of mine, Stefan - it is his Stormtroopers 365. I had so much fun going through all of the photos he'd taken so far, and I give you some of my favorites. The rest you can see here, and remember: playing with toys is good for you, no matter the age!

A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Creative Writing Student

On Saturday I was on the phone with my father in law. I was lying on the bed in our London house with the heating on, the traffic rumbling outside and the rain tapping on the windows, and he probably sat on a chair in the kitchen of his Central California house, while my mother in law clicked dishes and the dog barked outside where the mountain stood pretty and wild.

"I am going crazy," I said, "I am considering going to the desert, like Jim Morrison in the movie..."

"Crazy?" There was a goodhearted humor in his voice. "You know, when I was in construction, me and my crew working outside, carrying buckets of gravel and cement all day, and someone complained of back pain, I used to tell him - hey, don't complain, there are people in the world who couldn't do our job even if they wanted to!"

I laughed.

These regular weekend conversations with John Senior, as short and seemingly small talk-natured, are little treasures. I was telling him about the hardship of writing a novel, and he did much more than to understand in those few minutes on the phone, he actually cured me. It's a shame that people don't really appreciate how important parents are until their late twenties. Then life gets tough and they would give anything for a minute of blessed patronizing that will take all the responsibilities off of their shoulders and nurture them back to confidence.

John's voice soothed me and brought me down to earth. He didn't say it, but his message was clear: Don't be silly, do you know what I was through?!

Complaining from end-of-the-semester blues is not constructive but makes me feel a little better. In the last two weeks I realized how far I had gone in my writing explorations, but also how utterly not enough that is. The way I see it, the process of becoming a good writer looks approximately like this:

At first you have to make yourself to write, to stop thinking and to sit down and do it. Once this is achieved, you find out that you haven't gotten up for about 4 hours and that you forgot to eat. You are a bit dizzy and distracted, but a good night sleep will fix it all. Then you discover that you can't really sleep well, you get up in the middle of the night to write down notes to yourself. A week passes and you notice that your eyebrows need plucking and that your nail polish is chipping away. Not a big deal, you can groom tomorrow. But tomorrow you write all day and you forget to go grocery shopping. Soon you don't measure time in hours or days, but in pages and word counts. You haven't spoken with anyone in weeks but that's okay, you are working. You haven't had sex in a month, but who needs sex when one has this great story. Just another paragraph, just another chapter...Oh, there are days when nothing comes out and you sit there, pulling your hair to find the right word for "rain". Rain, after all, is too banal. You will never win a Booker by saying simply "rain". Nevermind what they say, those sinister people. Criticizing makes you want to drink a lot of alcohol, but you have an idea in your head and if only you could write it the way you feel it. Few months later you wonder if you can feel anything at all. The neighbor lady screamed yesterday when she saw you in your back yard, half naked, biting on a cigarette, talking to a plant. And one day you snap back into reality to find yourself with your head in the oven (Sylvia Plath style) and you know - you must be good. Yes.

No wonder that there's such a high percentage of unhappiness, madness and suicide among writers. I am, of course, not succumbing to this cliche, I would rather be the first perfectly happy, normal and very much alive successful writer. How to do that, however, is still a mystery to me and I will make sure I tell you all when I discover the answer! Somebody must do something, it's just such a waste to lose writers to depression all the time.

But seriously, writing a novel is not easy. And my education appears to not as helpful as I hoped....

On Friday I saw Nick Johnstone, my writing project tutor, on the corner of Wells Street campus. He was in a hurry, and before he went away to his business he raised his hand and said: "Send me progress!", with a knowing expression on his face.

We meet every other week with the rest of the Creative Writing group and we talk about our ideas. Up until now, I don't think anyone in this group has something else than ideas, including myself, so I felt pressured to send something concrete to Nick, something to show how hard I have been working. So I did - I emailed him with 2300 words of "progress" the next day. On Monday, he replied in 3 sentences, saying basically this: stop thinking, dive in, write.

Now, this came as a shock to me not because I didn't know how different Nick is in his teaching approach, but because writing without thinking is all I ever knew until I went to University. You see, I always lived with those stories in my head, stories that doesn't necessarily mean something or are of a great artistic value, but they make me feel alive all the same - alive and rich. Then I went for a BA in writing, and I was taught how exactly to take out those stories in a way for people to be interested and touched by them. I was taught about structure and narration, I developed my eloquence, I learned about voice, tone, dialogue. I was trained in different genres, I was forced to read a lot, I was made to think about what I am doing when I write. I was praised, I was criticized, I was marked and scrutinized.

And then along comes Nick Johnstone telling me to forget about all that, to throw it out of the window, to dive in, to feel to the absolute, to write from the heart!

Well, that's what I was fucking trying to do in the first place, but thanks!

Obviously, in my "progress" email I got carried away with being all rational, trying to show off how much I learned in my final year, and that made it clear how little I really know. I was confused and upset.
The University project on one hand - and this project will be examined and marked according to the same rules and expectations Nick is prompting me to forget - and a novel on the other, a personal and true piece of writing that isn't concern with anything outside of its very own labor pains and struggle for existence. And they are supposed to be the same thing, reconciled and unified. How exactly one could find a balance?!


Last night I went to bed at midnight, and for more than an hour I tossed and turned, bombarded by visions of the times I am writing about, memories attacking me with such a power and no mercy. Remembering is one mean business! I could never find the words to write about those things, I thought. What did I get myself into?! Why am I trying to resurrect the past events and relive them again? It was painful enough the first time around... So I woke up John and I cried, and I cried, and cried some more. I was surprised to see how much anxiety (and water) I had in me.

It is strange how the individual and the writer differ in a person. It's a split, a rupture inside of you that nags you and pushes you around, until you are forced to either take control and put the writer into good use before he drives you completely bonkers, or to shut him up forever. The writer, I believe, is the pretentious intellectual, the craftsmen guy, the little bee worker. He drains the emotional juice out of the individual, and feeds on his memories and fantasies. I wasn't prepared for this split. I wasn't ready to use my life as a template for literature, to dig and excavate and make sense of my past all over again. I don't know what was I thinking, but writing is not а friendly, creative thing. It's more of a mining. It's dirty and dark.

But then again, there has to be something. There's always something, and at the end of the day there isn't much difference between construction work and writing. Nevertheless, Nick Johnstone is right too - you have to let go of expectations and do the thing, because planning and analyzing can take you only so far. Even in construction, just like in writing, you have to put one brick after another, with no thought how many brick you have to lay before you build the entire house. Thinking about the finished house will overwhelm you, tire you up in no time. I resolved to keep putting one word ater another and see how it goes. Crying and playing tortured genius didn't help me much anyways...

So here we go.

Lolcats Forever

I simply couldn't resist (click to see original size):

Let the mountain come to Mohammad

The most bizarre thing happened today.

I was working on my Writing Project aka The Novel during the entire morning, and by noon I was fried. I decided I need some protein to make up for the damage, so I prepared myself eggs. At the moment when I arranged them in my plate - runny, with a side of cucumber, bread sticks and some hummus - there came a knock on my door.

It's unusual for anyone of significance to knock on my door. For the most part there are the rather daunting visits by Jehovah's Witnesses, the gas meter guy, or a suspicious person looking for someone who doesn't live here. The merriest knock is usually by the postman holding a package from my Mom in law, but I knew it's early for that. So when I looked through the window and saw a guy holding both a SLR Canon and a film Mamya (the old kind with the visor on top!), I beamed happily and opened the door wide.

His name was Louis and he was doing a project on North Circular. He said he liked the view of our house. Now, to understand how strange this sounded you must know that our house was built in 1930's and has been repaired maybe only once since then. It's practically falling apart. But then again, he was a photographer, so it makes sense. He asked if he can take a few photos of the front windows, and I agreed. It never occurred to me that those peeling windows might be of any interest to anyone, but I was flattered just the same. Then he asked me to pose in the shots, which stressed me out a bit - I wore my 100 years old Puma jumper and my hair was a mess from the unconscious tugs I give it when I write - but I told myself that it's all in the name of art.

I posed for about 10 shots and some of them were not half bad. Louis thanked me, shook my hand, gave me his card and departed. I am currently waiting for the photos, contemplating on his website and on my incredibly good fate to have such a distinguished professional to pop up on my door like he did....

This guy is good. He appears to have published in the Times and Guardian, and I love his Vegas Weddings set. In light of my recent purchase of a 50 mm lens and my desire to go shooting sharp portraits and depths of field with shining bokehs, it was a surreal but great experience to meet Louis Quail.

Here's the only photo of him I managed to find on the interwebs (he, like many on the trade, rarely finds himself before the camera)

Just Because: A Short from Tony Scott

I particularly like the ending :)

Sunday Visual Feast: The Bubble Burst!

No High or Low Art, Just Wall Art

La Vitrine - Montreal from steven bulhoes on Vimeo.

My New Favorite Band: From Japan With Love

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Little Big Planet - a View from Up There

Hey guys and gals,

It's another day in which I will show and not tell, and this time the reason is not me being busy writing, but the fact that John's taking a day off and when he's around I simply can't concentrate on anything even remotely serious or highly artistic, with the exception of blogging.

So, here is another bunch of wonderful, funny, inspirational and, mainly, pop posts for your viewing pleasure, the first of which is all about bird-eye perspective.

I. A few sweet Google Maps finds:








II. Natural Disasters Seen From Space:

Indian Ocean Tsunami, December 26, 2004

Hurricane Ike, September 13, 2008 - viewed from the ISS.

Chaitén Volcano, May 2, 2008


A dust storm over Bolivia



Tornado hits La Plata, Maryland, April 28, 2002

III. NASA Satellite Images of Remote and Mysterious Places on Earth - the photos are big: right click and open in a new tab to see better!


* The alpine lakes of the Tibetan Plateau are some of the most remote in the world. This mosaic of astronaut photographs, taken along a single International Space Station orbit track, depicts Lake Puma Yumco during the winter season. The lake is located at an elevation of 5,030 meters above sea level (16,503 feet), and is considered ultraoligotrophic, meaning that nutrient concentrations in both the water column and lake sediments are extremely low. The most striking feature of the image mosaic is the intricate ice block pattern on the lake surface. (NASA)

* The Arabian Peninsula's Empty Quarter, known as Rub' al Khali, is the world's largest sand sea, holding about half as much sand as the Sahara Desert. The Empty Quarter covers 583,000 square kilometers (225,000 square miles), and stretches over parts of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The Enhanced Thematic Mapper on NASA's Landsat 7 satellite captured this image of the Empty Quarter on August 26, 2001.

* The Dasht-e Kevir, or Great Salt Desert, is the largest desert in Iran. It is primarily uninhabited wasteland, composed of mud and salt marshes covered with crusts of salt that protect the meager moisture from completely evaporating. (NASA)


* South of Khartoum, Sudan, where the White and Blue Nile Rivers join, a dizzying arrangement of irrigated fields stretches out across the state of El Gezira. The several bare-looking patches are small villages. This image was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and ReflectionRadiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite on December 25, 2006.

* Houses and streets in bustling Las Vegas, Nevada are seen in this image from the commercial IKONOS satellite taken in September of 2004.


* The Bear Glacier on the Kenai Peninsula along the Gulf of Alaska seen by the IKONOS satellite took this on August 8, 2005. This image shows the ablation zone where the glacier is primarily losing ice. Upslopefrom the lake, the foot of the glacier is riddled with crevasses - cracks in the ice caused by the glacier's movement over a rough surface. Down the middle of the glacier run dark gray stripes. As a glacier moves, it picks up dirt and debrisfrom the rocks it passes. When two glaciers merge, as they have here, the dirt and debris they carry form parallel stripes, or medial moraines, on the ice surface.

* Harrat Khaybar in Saudi Arabia contains a wide range of volcanic rock types and spectacular landforms, several of which are represented in this photograph taken by an astronaut abourd theInternational Space Station on March 31, 2008. Jabal ("mountain" in Arabic) al Qidr is built from several generations of dark, fluid basalt lava flows. Jabal Abyad, in the center of the image, was formed from a more viscous, silica-rich lava classified as a rhyolite. (NASA)


* This image of forest in the northern Republic of Congo was captured on June 27, 2002, by the commercial satellite Ikonos. Dirt logging roads (orange lines) cross the center of the image. This image is one of hundreds of satellite images from commercial and NASA satellites that scientistsfrom the Woods Hole Research Center used to create a map of logging roads and forest disturbance across 4 million square kilometers of tropical African forests in the three decades proceeding 2003.


* A blue-green veil of water tumbles 51 meters over the rocky precipice of the Niagara Falls in this Ikonos image, acquired on August 2, 2004. Every second, more than two million liters of water plummets over the half-circle of the Canadian/Horseshoe portion of the Niagara Falls, shown here, making it one of the world’s largest waterfalls.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Laughing

...or maybe crying. Or both.

I have officially reached the point where I not only can't watch movies anymore if I recognize bad writing; now I can't even watch movies by my favorite directors without the risk of disappointment.

Dear friends and neighbors, due to the occupational hazard of having increased demands for quality, I have dethroned Quentin Tarantino once and for all! I am still not sure if seeing my idols crashing down (and unspectacularly so) is sad or an occasion to celebrate a triumph. In any case, I simply must elaborate further:

Inglorious Basterds falls short of being the next Tarantino masterpiece for so many reasons.

Kill Bill I&II - his first projects in the millennium - showed Tarantino's eagerness and resourcefulness to incorporate technology (in the form of special effects) and to explore pop-culture as an addition to his favorite spaghetti western genre (through animation and comics-like motifs). This worked very well. Uma Thurman was also a great choice, as she was visually both extremely sexy and fragile, and at the same she successfully masked her intelligence under a humorous, mock super-hero character. In Kill Bill there was an elaborate plot, enriched by many sub-plots, and they were all carried out with precision and attention to the detail. The dialogue was clever, the narrator's voice was powerful, and the action scenes were breathtaking. We were given the best of knife fighting, kung-fu, sword battle, and of course some inevitable shooting. To mix the plains of Arizona with the neon lights of Japan was truly a Tarantino thing to do, and everything else, from the delicious nick-names to the rocking music, deserved only the highest praise.

The scene of BB breaking free from a coffin where she's buried alive, or her attempts to move her big toe in the Pussy Wagon after she had woken up from a 4 year-long coma - this was a cinema in its purest, most powerful shape. That's why people are apt to forgive the buckets of spilled blood - because Trantino always finds a way to show a single red droplet somewhere in between, and to convince us that it is beautiful. And if all else fails, he employs the oldest device in the world: revenge. Revenge is in the heart of drama.

His next project, Death Proof, lacks the spectacular nature of Kill Bill, but still has its charms - the almost entirely female feeling to it, produced by the row attractiveness of the cast, the girl-gang's witty dialogue and the sensual soundtrack. Death Proof has color, which gives it a certain degree of depth and warmth. However, the tendency of minimalism is already visible and when the end of the film comes it feels slightly premature and unfinished. And most importantly, we never really understand why in the world Stuntman Mike goes around, killing young pretty girls. If there's a hint about his reasons, it has escaped me.

In Basterds we don't get any of the above. There's no plot whatsoever, or at least not an unified one. The chapters follow each other, failing to create a wholly story, annoyingly fragmenting it instead. The film is utterly colorless and has a grainy texture - something that might have been planned as an imitation of the quality of the 1940's film - and as result we are to watch a gray-greenish blotch deprived of any contrast or sharpness. We see less close-ups, less blood, less intriguing scenes. The characters, with the exception of Christoph Waltz's Landa, are two-dimensional, trivial and downright boring. I didn't pinpoint even one fellow who was passionate or believed truly is what he does in this picture. The developments came almost by chance, the dialogues were flat, and the whole thing appeared completely pointless.

Why? Maybe because Tarantino decided that he could mess into the Great World History, and thought that he will deal as successfully with it, as he dealt with American folklore up until now. However, the WWII seem to have too heavy and deep implications than Tarantino can handle. It is plain that the non-fictional subject of the Holocaust differs from the fictional subject of life in Texas, and the result is tragic.

I didn't just dislike the movie, I felt cheated on intellectual level. Morality is a tricky thing with Tarantino, and I didn't expect him to be politically correct, but the basic deficit of understanding of the WWII events struck me as pitiful and ignominious. I his attempt to create a piece that borrows so much from the b-movie, Tarantino finally managed to make his first real and authentic b-movie. In it, the fate of the world is in the hands of a bunch of scalp-collecting soldiers, led by a semi-dumb lieutenant with a heavy southern accent. They go to France to "kill Nazis" almost for the fun of it, and ultimately, they try to kill the top-crust of the Nazi establishment and Hitler himself by blowing a cinema up. Not only they do a crappy job of it, but at the end a Jewish woman and her black lover actually do the job, as Hitler is shot in the process.

What a lark! So now Tarantino saved us from Hitler! This is the most absurd, and not in a "cool" way absurd, representation of an alternative history I've ever seen! Are we supposed to be consoled for the Holocaust in that way? Or to finally have our revenge? Is the murder of Hitler a heroic act? And does now everything make better sense? It is not only wrong that Tarantino uses this topic to indulge his strange cinema fantasies (as his movie references dominate the entire second half of Basterds), it is extremely selfish and shows him as a terribly misinformed, or worse, intentionally ignorant person. He undermines history in the worst possible way - by taking the WWII with all its unspeakable and incomprehensible atrocities and terrors, and using it as a tool for something completely unconnected and, really, culturally unimportant - the making of a movie for the movie's sake.

I still believe that the best writing Quentin Tarantino achievements are his scripts for True Romance and the original Natural Born Killers, but yet again, in the early nineties he was still this broke, slightly crazy fellow, who, unlike today, wasn't burdened by the crown of the contemporary cinema genius. It is a shame to see how once one believes he can get away with anything, one turns into an absolute jerk. And this time the jerk is not cute, just jerk.

I'm waiting for Kill Bill III to change my mind :)

(and Quentin too!)

Under the Dome Where All Flesh is Grass

I knew it! I knew I have read something that reminded me of Stephen King's latest novel, and today I found what it was.

There's no such thing as an original idea, and although I am sure that Stephen King explores the situation of an invisible barrier over a town in Under the Dome differently than Clifford Simak in his novel All Flesh is Grass, the similarities are striking.

The former is first published in 1965, exactly 10 years before the idea came to King, who managed to actually write it in the past two years. I will try to re-read Simak's piece over the Christmas break, and, hopefully, will acquire and read King's during the Easter vacation (it is a 1000 page monster and I am not that ambitious), and so by late spring I will be able to tell if King was actually influenced by Simak in any way.

However, I am approaching this carefully, because it is silly to accuse someone in plagiarism so light-handedly, especially if that someone is my favorite writer. After all, I know from experience that it is perfectly possible to dub a subject unknowingly, just like I did with my story about meeting the devil. Turns out, Stephen King had already written it (with the details of the black suit and the lack of sweat on a hot summer day), but go prove you don't have a sister...

So, all SK fans and sci-fi readers out there, please let me know what you think about this!

Big Rock Cat Presents: Writers of the World Series - The Good Old Steve King

Okay, I know that this is not exclusive but I love this man and I am curious about his new book. Also, with his rare media appearances and after so many pages I have read by him, it's fun to finally hear and watch him talk.

Hi arrogance and confidence, which are absolutely deserved, make me crazy and I really want to either kick him hard or smother him with kisses, but at the end I think that I could only stutter and look stupid if I had the chance to meet him in person....

Also, don't you remember a short story by a sci-fi author that dealt with an invisible dome sometime in the late 70's or 80's?! I bet my fur I have read it! I will post again when I find the story, and until then - enjoy ol' Steve.

Big Rock Cat Presents: Writers of the World Series - The Taleteller

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends and neighbors, I give you Shan.

(photo by me, edit by Shan!)

He is ageless. He speaks very quietly and virtually in verse. Born in Malaysia, Shan now walks the streets of London and on Mondays we share a Creative Writing class together. Also, he takes exquisite photos which you can see here.

Today I am publishing 3 of his untitled poems. Enjoy!

Poem 1

'Twas hung upon a thread,
Set above knives,
A thing tender - so delicate,
As a candle's dying fire, lies -
naked to that last strong wind,
It is lost in strife
It is lost in vice,
That thing -
That mead of Life


Poem 2

Wine on wine,
My wine, upon thy lip,
Thy lip upon mine,
What's wine now, what's brine?
As crazed man, I lose count,
Our night's heavenly mount.


Poem 3

I'll write myself an epitaph,
but how can I, without first being dead?
So I'll write to a lover lost
Tell her what to write,
And write, that life -
Did my feeble senses, exhaust.