What's to tell? The house tried to kill me. It almost succeeded

1. For about twelve hours more, B. is visiting. We did not manage to see much more than fifteen minutes of the MFA, although I was able to show him the glazed-tile lion from the Ištar Gate of Babylon, but we had dinner at Mulan (whole cuttlefish!) and then he showed me Pulse (Kairo, 2001). I understand it invented much of the visual vocabulary of J-horror, but it didn't register to me as a horror film so much as an extended meditation on alienation and loneliness so terrible that it becomes apocalyptic; I wasn't sure if it was meant to frighten or simply to explore that sense of exhaustion and isolation which extends even to the landscape of Tokyo. Streets are deserted, classes half-attended, apartments furnished even more randomly and anonymously than the student usual; the lighting is the washed-out overcast that eats shadows off the pavement or the last flat glare before sunset, or it's fluorescents and that hollow, too-bright look electric light gets too late at night, too long alone with your computer, dialing up, trying to connect. The characters don't converse, they talk into the air that sometimes contains someone else. Would you like to meet a ghost? You are living among them already. I wonder if it's actually a film about depression, cleverly disguised. In the face of desolation, do you choose to die? Do you fall into ashes of yourself, a motionless half-life belonging to no world? Do you keep going anyway, into the unknown? Have I done the right thing? And the ocean stretches away to all sides. So I didn't find that the film scared me, although there were sequences I found beautifully eerie; I do think it deals with terrifying things. If his films are all this intelligent, I'll watch more by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

2. On the horror front, though: don't ever watch Lassie Come Home (1943) in the same twenty-four hours as The Legend of Hell House (1973).

( If it had ended, we wouldn't be here. )

3. Rabbit, rabbit. Happy Beltane. Send poems to Strange Horizons.