Fahrenheit 452

So, I'm writing this post. It is called Fahrenheit 452.

It is mostly about itself, although it's about this too. And it's about Ray, who has given me some of the most peaceful, pellucid, connected moments I've ever had while holding a book in my hands.

I read my first Bradbury in perhaps 1973, and revisited some of my favorites just in this past year and found their lustre undiminished. As middle age approaches, the kind of nostalgia for a time that never was is stronger than ever, and there are greater pleasures to be found in some of those stories than the ones a younger me was able to fathom.

But he's still being a tool. In the spirit of...well, of shit-disturbing, I guess, I offer this humble suggestion: that anyone who feels similarly post something silly -- even better, something silly in the Style of Ray -- and title it 'Fahrenheit 452' or 'Fahrenheit 911' or whatever. Now that'd be some big blog hijinks!

Like Cory said

Peace.

05:08 PM | () | (0 trackbacks)

The Friday Five -- Lazy Bastard Edition

Because I am a bad person, I have not been scouring the permalinkosphere for nuggets of excellence with my usual steely-eyed vigor this week.

Despair not, though, gentle readers, for I have nonetheless come up with a Single Link of such Power and Glory that it will make up for the notable lack of the Other Four, and quite possibly melt your Snatch Hairs.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

And so [drum roll please] I give you... the Friday One! Do not operate heavy machinery while using this blog.

09:58 AM | () | (0 trackbacks)

Gmail

If you were one of the kind people who dropped some dollars into my (still locked, but I'm working on it) tipjar, and you'd like a Gmail account, drop a comment with a (properly obfuscated) email address and I'll hook you up.

I have two to give away. First come, first served.

[Update : I have three more Gmail invites to give away. Priority is as before (folks who've helped me out with hosting to the front of the line), followed by people I 'know', virtually or otherwise. Random Internet Dudes need not apply. Thanks.]

02:14 PM | () | (1 trackbacks)

Blue Water Virgin

It's late December, 1992. I've been living a life of madness and booze, sex, drugs and slightly dodgy rock and roll for months now. La Passionata is the name of the boat, and Marina de La Paz, or, more accurately, the anchorages just off it between the mainland and the mangrove offshore sandbar called El Mogote, has been my new stomping grounds. La Paz, Baja Sur, Mexico.

How I got into this life of drinking and sailing and drinking and sailing and drinking a whole lot more is a bit of a blur, but burned bronze and blonde-streaked, skinny and intent on squeezing as much random fun as possible out of every glorious day, I'm happier than I have been in a long time.

But I can also feel my personality disintegrating, or at least that's how I phrase it to myself in my saltwater- and beer-stained journal. Maybe the sun and the booze and the whippets and speed and the untrained scuba dives, the days out at Isla Espiritu Santo and Isla Partida hunting fish and lobster and cooking them for the women we'd picked up at the Barba Negra the night before, and the nights back at the bar again running up our tab with the long-suffering owner, Jose, have taken their toll, finally.

Looking back on it now, I don't know how I could have gotten tired of it -- sometimes I'd give my left nut to be back there again, careless, happy, exalted and gloriously befuddled, swimming with whalesharks and flirting with vulpine German tourist girls, being lulled to sleep by gentle motion of the hull in the swell and the quiet slap of warm water against the fiberglass.

I'm tired of waiting in port, looking at the charts of all that crinkled Pacific coast running down all the way to Panama, I'm feeling the effects of all that recreational chemistry, and I've been offered berth on a boat so much bigger than La Pass -- 71 feet of waterline! my own cabin after sleeping in the salon and getting my head stepped on by whoever else crashed aboard on any given night! -- that I've made the decision to jump ship and head across the blue water with Elmo's Fire. And the boys on La Passionata will meet up with us down the coast, they promise. Probably in Vallarta, in a month or so. A little time away from the 24-hour party people will be good for me, I reckon, and so I move my single bag over to Elmo, and dance around a little in my own little two-bunk cabin, up under the bow, before I get to work.

Elmo's Fire's been tied up at the pier in front of the Hotel Gran Baja for years. It is averred by most that Michael, the hard-boozing but indestructible Englishman who's been living aboard since the owners disappeared -- one dead, one in jail for trafficking, one lit out to parts unknown, it is said -- is really the black sheep Viscount Ashley, and survives off a yearly stipend from the Good Family in exchange for a promise to stay the hell away. Whether that's true or not I don't care -- I've heard enough tales tall and wide in the past months to last a lifetime, and I don't care much whether they're fiction or not, they are such glorious mythical water in which to swim. Michael is a good man, and kind, if scatterbrained in the boozer cruiser way, and universally acknowledged to be a fine sailor, veteran of several TransPac races.

A few days later, less than a week before Christmas, and we've picked up a new crewmember at the Barba Negra, which, with Michael's squirrely girlfriend, makes four of us to manage this Ocean '71. The weather has come up -- Chabasco weather in the Sea of Cortez is like hurricane weather over in the Gulf -- and we're riding anchor, tucked safely into the south-facing Bahia de Los Muertos south of La Paz, waiting with nine other boats to make our break for Mazatlan. Nobody's moving. Michael's getting itchy. I'm scared shitless. 'Bay of the Dead' is not an auspicious name for the departure point of my first bluewater sail, not when the wind's howling down from the north at 40 to 60 knots.

Finally, about 9pm, Michael snaps, calls the rest of the cruisers on the open channel cowards, and tells us we're making sail.

I've spent the last few hours working on the SatNav, and it seems to be working as it should (for the first time in months, apparently), and I tinkered with Iron Mike, the autopilot, earlier in the day. With only a few months experience on the boats, that's about all I can do, other than follow orders, and cook dinner. We motor out past the headland, into the swell, Michael points the pointy end into the wind, and we do our deckmonkey thing and haul the mainsail up. The swell rolling down the Sea of Cortez is huge -- it feels like 8 metres, but it can't be more than 4 or 5, probably. That's enough. I'm scared. The night is young, and very dark.

Michael is standing behind the wheel grinning through his scraggly white beard now, and as he brings us around to the east, the mainsail catches the wind, and Elmo heels over, hard. The lee rail is buried in wake, and in a matter of seconds, we're flying along east-southeast ahead of massive following seas. Dale and Lenore go below, and I sit with Michael in the open cockpit, and he teaches me some of what I'm going to need to know. My watch will be 4am to 8am, and the weather could get better or worse between now and then. I sneak the occasional look over my left shoulder at the waves towering over us, and it's even more sphincter-tighteningly scary than the foam and black water coursing along the deck where the rail on the lee side of the boat is well and truly underwater. I concentrate on his lessons.

It's a few hours later -- after midnight -- and the weather has gotten heavier. The SatNav tells me that we're well and truly out in the blue water now, but it's the same dark, foamflecked and howling maelstrom of wind and wave it was when we were mere minutes offshore. The difference is that I know we're many many nautical miles from land now. It's the first time for me.

I don't think I've ever been this scared, but my sailing (and drinking) adventures in the last few months have gone some way towards acclimatizing me to functioning while terrified. I am taking some small pride in my impassive mien when particularly hard gusts push the boat over further, or rogue waves wash through the cockpit. This is going to be OK, I think to myself.

This is when Michael, who's been letting Iron Mike steer for the past hour, I find out, and just resting his hands on the wheel, decides he might as well have a drink. Michael never has just one drink. Neither do I, if truth be told, but then I'm not the fucking skipper on this little passage.

There is one rule that my friends back at Marina de La Paz, most of whom are boozers of an intensity and dedication I'd rarely seen before -- and this is saying a lot -- have drilled into me. You drink in port or at anchor; you do not drink while under way. You do not do it.

Michael cracks his first beer. My eyes go round, my sphincter goes loose, and tightly-wound escalates to underwear-staining. Brown Alert! It doesn't take long to figure out that other than Michael, I'm the most experienced sailor on board. And I don't know shit.

By 3am he is pissed, semiconscious and prone, wrapped in a poncho on the downwind bench of the cockpit. Beer cans are rolling around, awash, in the cockpit. Our other two crew members are below, sleeping, presumably. I am behind the wheel, and the seas are getting heavier, to the extent that the autopilot whines and chatters in protest as it struggles to bring the bow around in the wake of maybe one in five of the huge waves that are sliding beneath us. I disengage it and take the wheel.

For the next 3 hours, I steer that massive boat through the storm. My only time before this behind the wheel of Elmo's Fire has been a couple of hours running before the wind from La Paz down to Bahia de Los Muertos, before the winds came up. Er, yesterday. I'm way out of my depth. What Michael told me before he passed out -- that to jibe the sail in these winds would snap the boom -- keeps running through my mind, and though I try to keep our course as easterly as possible, the crash and rattle of the sail when we come down off the peak of some of these waves hammers at my confidence.

Still, although there are perhaps one or two gusts or monster waves per hour, enough to make me jump and struggle to keep the boat under control, I begin to get used to it. Michael snores away, through spray and hull-slam, and I try to keep the cigarettes I've been chainsmoking dry, and begin to understand that I have not failed, and that we probably won't die. I realize that this night may have been the most important test of my mettle so far in my young life, where I had to rise to the challenge and master it, and that I was doing it, by god.

The horizon begins to lighten before 6am. I've never been so happy to see the sun before, and as the skies begin to grow bright, the winds fall away, and the swell begins to recede. Or that's what it feels like, at least. The monsters that loomed out of the dark shrink away, and in the light of day, fear seems silly and unworthy and unmanly. In instant retrospect (just add sunlight), terror gives way to adventure.

By the time the full disc of the sun detaches itself from the eastern horizon, I can see land, a bumpy darker line above the dark water. Tempted by the memories of too many pirate movies as a kid, I shout, only a little maliciously, 'Land ahoy!' Michael starts into wakefulness, squints at me, nods, creakily limps over to the rail and pisses, then relieves me of my watch. I light us a couple of cigarettes, pass one to him, and move over.

Soon there are sounds below, and the smell of coffee wafts up from the gangway.

We'll be in Mazatlan by sunset. And then we will sail south.

04:14 PM | () | (0 trackbacks)

Shit Happens

I really was going to tell a story of Terror on The High Seas, as promised, but I fell down and a couple of litres of beer somehow splashed into my mouth, and well, it all went to hell, basically, and all I could recall of my past while listening to AC/DC's High Voltage was the unseemly enthusiasm with which my first girlfriend performed fellatio on me those several decades ago, thereby ruining me (in at least one sense) for most of the other women with whom I had sexual relationships in later years.

But you don't wanna hear about that stuff.

Or maybe you do, I guess, but that's not the story I wanted to tell tonight, so here's an amusing image that I've stolen from one of the talented goons at the SA Forums, to make you forgive me for the notable lack of blowjob and/or saltydog stories this evening, instead.

here.

10:46 PM | () | (0 trackbacks)

The Other Friday Five - Guilt-Plagued Edition

Yes, it's Friday again in Korea -- the first time it's been Friday in, like, a couple of months, thanks to new legislation outlawing Friday in Korea in favour of having Thursday twice to reduce alcohol consumption (you read it here first!) -- and so time for the Other! Friday! Five! in which I provide precisely 5 hard-won links to some things that I quite enjoy, and you click on them, and everybody's happy.

Some of our lovely contestants you may know, some you may not. It's all good.

So without further ado, join me down in the government yard in Trenchtown, friends, and revel in the linky goodness.

• John Scalzi
• Long story, short pier
• Ludic Kid
• Ming the Mechanic

and, because I'm an old-school geek at heart,

• tinyapps.org

[Post postscript : I've been daydreaming about The Before Times (™DV Polymedia) lately, and if the delicious frosty beverages I plan to consume this evening treat me right, I may have a tale or two to tell of those times when I should have (in the immortal words of Moe Berg) ended up dead in a ditch somewhere with a mind full of chemicals like some cheese-eating highschool boy. But didn't.

What's the point of doing stupid things unless you get at least a few amusing anecdotes out of it, right? Stay tuned to this channel!]

04:41 PM | () | (0 trackbacks)

Now Isn't That Special

Thanks to your generosity, friends and neighbours, the tip jar I put up last week filled up quickly, and the grand total came to enough to pay for year of hosting plus a few bucks extra.

That made me very happy. Thanks again to everyone who helped out.

But Paypal arbitrarily and inexplicably restricts me from transferring any more than US$100 total out (even if the balance is higher than that), unless I add a credit card number, a restriction of which I can't recall being notified when I created the account.

Problem is : I don't have a valid credit card. I know that this marks me as a freak and a sport, to be warded off with a crucifix and hounded out of the village by torch-brandishing consumers, and I accept that. Korean banks will not give me one because I'm a dirty foreigner and I do not hold one with a Canadian bank, as I have not lived there for more than a decade and do not plan to again in the forseeable future.

So there's money just sitting there, and I have no idea how to get at it. Paypal won't allow me to add my wife's credit card, for example, because her surname (in the way of Korea) is different from mine, and the surname field on the You Must Give Us Your Credit Card, Little Man page is not editable.

Which leaves me up shit creek without a shitpaddle, as Jim Leahy would say, because I still need to transfer $50 to my new hosting reseller before he sends Frankie and Rocco around to bust my kneecaps.

Anyone got any ideas how to get around this?

05:07 PM | 17 comments (closed) | (0 trackbacks)

Thanks

My heartfelt and humble thanks to the folks that have kicked a few bucks (or a lot of bucks, in some surprising but very welcome cases!) into the hosting kitty over the past few days, by the way. I'll leave the button up over on the left, I guess, should anyone else get the urge to help out.

As it stands, though, I have enough for a year or so of hosting now, I think. You people rock!

I promise to try to write more in future. Although given the post just to the south, there, for example, that may not actually be a Good Thing. Your call.

06:01 PM | 4 comments (closed) | (0 trackbacks)

Horrible But Exceedingly Clever

When my old rock and roll alco-compadre DV was here for a whirlwind visit last June, one of the missions on his checklist was to try and track down Takashi Miike movies. He figured, quite reasonably, that it might be easier to find them in the black markets in Seoul than in Chicago.

That didn't turn out to be the case, and we failed Mission Miike miserably, combing the Yongsan black market and Namdaemun in vain. Still, we had a reasonably enjoyable time trying, which is what life's all about, after all.

Although DV's tastes have always been more extreme than mine in most things, I was keen to check out these movies that he was so intent on finding. In the last few months, I've been bittorrenting my little heart out, and have managed to download and watch a handful of Miike's movies, and they've, like, blown my mind, man. Phrases like 'fanatical intensity' and 'horrible but exceedingly clever' are used to talk about Miike's transgressive oeuvre. That doesn't even begin to describe it.

So far, I've watched

• Odishon (Audition)


• Dead Or Alive


• Visitor Q


• Ichi The Killer


• The Happiness of the Katakuris


• The City of Lost Souls


• Gozu

and I've never seen anything like them. I don't know if I love or hate them, to be honest, but I'm glad I watched them. I must admit I don't know bugger-all about Fine Cinema. I don't have any trace of the fanboy otaku fetishization of things Japanese that seems to elevate some of the lamest Japanese culture-crud to cult status. I like David Lynch, and Kubrick, and I like Gilliam and Jim Jarmusch too, but I couldn't possibly engage you in an intelligent discussion of why. I just do, OK?

Don't know much about no art, but I knows what I likes.

Still, I do know when something I've seen or heard or read has reached into my skull and scrambled the curds around. I walk around in a daze for a couple of days, and then puke up some poetry, or get valve-clearing drunk and bang my head against the wall for a while in search of the reset button.

Those are good things, in case you were wondering.

But Miike's stuff? That's a whole other kind of thing.

Here's a little quote from a book called 'Agitator -- The Cinema of Takashi Miike' :

Which sounds a little out there perhaps, but defensible in terms of story and character. If it offends you, though, you'd best not read further.

Because that paragraph doesn't begin to describe what happens later in the scene -- or what happened in the previous scene for that matter (in which Asako is raped and murdered by Kiyoshi) -- events so simultaneously horrendous and hilariously bizarre that you find yourself dazed by the utter nastiness of it. Kiyoshi begins to have sex with the corpse -- filmed in unswerving, all-revealing Miike style -- and finds himself unable to, er, withdraw, apparently due to rigor mortis. After the corpse voids its bowels on him during his struggle to disengage, doglike, things proceed to get worse.

Yes, worse.

Miike's been making movies for a little over a decade, and in that time he's made more than 40 of them. The half-dozen or so I've seen so far have opened up and played a flashlight around in corners of my brain that see the light rarely, if at all. The sex scene, if that's what you can call it, in the last ten minutes of Gozu, for example, as illuminating as it is of the allusively Lynchian psychological mysteries of the main character, had me, unshockable me, sitting there with jaw literally agape at the imagery. I won't go into details, since spoilers suck, but it was the first movie I ever went back and watched again immediately after the climactic (and utterly bizarre) finish, looking for the threads that led to it.

If you want scrape your mind raw, and get down deep inside the churning shitpool that is our modern global culture, get right into some Miike. If you can laugh at rape and murder, giggle along with necrophilia and dismemberment, this stuff's for you. Indelible memories of Miike were part of the engine behind my rhetorical flourishes in this piece I wrote up the other afternoon. The twining of sex and violence is a worrisome thing, of course. Every Miike movie I watch leaves me feeling a little guilty for laughing, and a little dirty for watching, I admit. But I also feel a little awestruck at the artfulness and audacity of it all. And once the distorting lens has been removed as the credits roll, the parodies of human viciousness that I've been watching have illuminated some things for me.

Miike brings it together pretty well himself, in an interview here :

I'd recommend you watch a few Takashi Miike movies, but you might hate me afterwards.

[Update : In some kind weird blogospheric serendipity, I see Matt's just posted something about The Happiness of The Katakuris, which was a Miike remake of a Korean film, The Quiet Family. Weird.]

04:27 PM | 6 comments (closed) | (0 trackbacks)