So I put out the fire and I wrote you a note

[sovay]

I am really not sleeping. I can't tell if I'm sick or not. I am exhausted to the point of staring throughout my day, but I don't fall asleep until I've spent useless hours in bed and the light comes in around the windows, no matter how little sleep I got the night before. It takes forever for me to put sentences together and then I don't like the results, but I don't like absence, either. Things about which I have been too tired to write recently:

On Monday night, gaudior and B. and I saw Nobuhiko Obayashi's Hausu (1977) at the HFA with the director in attendance. Correctly divining that this event would sell out in advance, we arrived an hour and a half early and—after some place-holding switching around of feeding meters and picking up foodstuffs—ate dinner on line without incurring anyone's wrath and got perfectly reasonable seats while the house filled up around us and we waved at teenybuffalo. I hadn't realized we were getting a short before the feature: Emotion (1966), a forty-minute avant-garde curiosity which plays like an art-house melodrama run through a Cuisinart until about five minutes from the end, when the director muses wistfully on his plans to make a movie about Dracula someday and then does so in the time remaining. (Obayashi's Dracula has greasepaint Lugosi eyebrows and drinks from his victims demurely, through a soda straw. I suspect it's charming even if you haven't just seen the real thing.) Hausu was as gonzo and weirdly adorable as I remembered it, full of camera tricks and deadpan sendups that somehow combine into a real ghost story, albeit the kind with bananas as well as bakeneko. Obayashi himself turned out to be a delightful interview subject, especially since he was visibly trolling his interviewer: asked to speak about his relationship with 8 mm film, he told a story about being three years old and mistaking a 35 mm projector for a "choo-choo train," from which he expanded on his history with both trains and cinema, complete with sound effects—his train coming through the mountains is worthy of Pete Seeger and he does a great Tarzan yell—and at no point actually answered the question. We could not stay until the end, but the evening was very much worth all its logistics. I am not sure why Hausu should register as a comfort film when it contains an unstoppable haunting and a cast of characters being devoured in surrealistically freaky ways, but it really does.

On Tuesday, I met Matthew at Pandemonium and we browsed their used book shelves while talking about other books. I bought three Magic cards from a box of lands and artifacts, all selling for fifty cents to three dollars: Brushland, Adarkar Wastes, and Urborg; I always liked them when they were under glass at Hit and Run Games. I did not buy for a dollar a card I remember retailing for much, much more in 1995; I didn't like it that much then. Afterward I stopped by Rodney's, where I found a copy of Elizabeth Goudge's The Joy of the Snow (1974) for rushthatspeaks and a well-read hardcover of The Theatrical World of Angus McBean for myself. I have a book of his portraits already, but these are mostly a mix of selections from photo calls, designs for posters and programs, and portraits of actors in character. Right at the start of the non-Shakespeare section was a shot of Pamela Brown, Richard Burton, and John Gielgud in the 1949 Globe Theatre run of The Lady's Not for Burning, after which everything else was a bonus. Elsa Lanchester as Peter Pan in 1936, poised in the window with her eyes on top-hatted John: that production must have been nightmare fuel.

Sparked by a conversation with fleurdelis28, I have started watching seaQuest DSV (1993–1996). It's on Netflix and not only did I miss it when it was on TV, I wasn't aware it had even existed. At this point I would not say that it's a good show, but it's flawed in ways that incline me to keep watching until it either bores or annoys me too much to continue. I am fascinated by the worldbuilding of the first season. By 2018, the sea is the source of all natural resources because humanity has wrecked the land, so there are aquaculture stations and mining operations on the deep seabed, slowly growing into colonies and communities jealously guarded, patrolled, and sometimes raided by submarines from neighboring confederations while the seaQuest itself serves as an enormous one-sub peacekeeping force—it's like the militarized bizarro version of Arthur C. Clarke's The Deep Range (1957). There are video calls, holograms, dolphin-to-human speech translation software. The seaQuest's hull appears to make use of a squidlike organic tech and the boat's weapons include plasma torpedoes, which I take as one of the reasons Fleur-de-Lis described the show as "Star Trek set underwater." Otherwise it looks and sounds incredibly of its year, right down to the feathery undercut hair on the cocky genius teenage hacker and his grunge-style flannel overshirts. The diversity mix is not brilliant, but for 1993 it's not terrible. The scripts are some of the clunkiest dialogue I have ever heard professionally produced. People don't have motivations so much as they explain them. Information flies out of left field and then vanishes without a ripple. You would really expect some aspects of this future to work differently given the things we learn, but not as far as I can tell. I have become unsurprisingly attached to the communications offer, an angle-faced polyglot in round-rimmed glasses: he's "fluent in six languages, okay in a dozen more," susceptible to claustrophobia in a way that doesn't seem to have screened him out of serving on the seaQuest, and intermittently telepathic with the resident dolphin, at which point I realized that my ideas of worldbuilding and the show's are not the same. Is telepathy normal in this future? Is it normal that it works across species? Did anyone know this was a thing about the communications officer? Did anyone know that dolphins in this future are not just intelligent, but sentient? Who knows! Nobody says a thing! Personally I am now assuming until proven otherwise that Lieutenant JG Tim O'Neill is intermittently telepathic with everyone and it's just been camouflaged for years as an uncanny gift for languages, but I fully expect the show never to return to this subject again. (I am also a little nonplussed that the character is apparently Catholic, considering how much Ted Raimi looks and sounds like many fine nerdy Jewish guys I have known, but that's probably more me than the show.) Anyway, I've seen the pilot and three episodes so far and seem to have gotten into a routine where I watch an episode, complain to Rush-That-Speaks about the plotting, the dialogue, and the science fiction, and then watch another one. I guess that means it's working out.

Today is Wednesday, although I'm having trouble with the concept. As of last night, thanks to the generosity of desireearmfeldt and Jan, derspatchel and our cats have returned to Somerville. I plan to see them tonight. I have found it useful to learn about new bus routes these last few months, but I admit I'm looking forward to being able just to walk twenty-five minutes.

Comments

[genarti]

gaudior tells me that the only thing they remember about seaQuest is the dolphin. You were not alone.

I remember the dolphin and a vague impression of very 90s hair, especially on the (blond?) hacker(?) teenager, and a vague impression of some of the sets, and thaaaaat's about it. The dolphin is the really important part, obviously.

I was especially delighted by the episode with the sunken Library of Alexandria and the trio of psychics who just want to stop working for the government and retire and read a book on a beach somewhere.

Oh my god sunken Library of Alexandria WHAT. That sounds marvelously wtf! I have deep sympathy for the trio of psychics, though. If I were a psychic employed by even the most benevolent of governments -- and I have no recollection at all of how much that was the case for SeaQuest -- I would definitely want to retire young and go read some books in privacy out of the range of people's thoughts.

We watched The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Autolycus fell asleep on my lap while Hestia prowled her new territory, making sure the living room especially was secure. It was wonderful.

That sounds like a wonderful evening. Good, good, good.

[sovay]

very 90s hair, especially on the (blond?) hacker(?) teenager

Right on all counts!

If I were a psychic employed by even the most benevolent of governments -- and I have no recollection at all of how much that was the case for SeaQuest --

It's also really unclear! The world government of seaQuest is the United Earth Oceans, a vaguely defined alliance of underwater confederations and surviving "upworld" states. It is presumably analogous to the United Nations; we haven't heard much about how it developed out of present-day politics, but the tipping point doesn't seem to have been World War III so much as an ecological breakdown combined with the economic boom of ocean exploitation that redrew all the maps, most of them underwater. The Alexandria episode confirmed that a bunch of contemporary Mediterranean nations still exist—Egypt, Libya, and Israel all got diplomatic representation¹—and we know the seaQuest was built in San Francisco and headquartered in Pearl Harbor, but I'm not actually sure of the position of the United States in the UEO. The seaQuest itself is heavily American, as is the other military infrastructure we've seen so far; it's an American show. So far it isn't presenting itself as the kind of science fiction where the government is the enemy, but the very first episode features the Navy essentially tricking Roy Scheider's Captain Bridger back into service, so I'm not sure if we're supposed to believe it.

There is no sense whatsoever of the number of people in the world with psychic abilities or the degree to which their existence is widely known. One of the telepaths² recollects consulting for the police on the case of a missing child whose abductor was in a coma, so their work can't all be globally vital and clandestine; her parents fled the Soviet Union before her birth in order to avoid their abilities being used by the government, but her father has spent the last thirty years feeling that he ended up in exactly the same position with the UEO, just without the secret police. ("'No' is a powerful word."–"They come to the door anyway.") Nonetheless, when it transpires that the captain himself has a strong "psi factor"—to which the Rossoviches attribute his excellent intuition and career-making ability to judge motives and intent—it's going to make absolutely no difference to his life because he's under no obligation to report this discovery to the UEO and get himself mentally trained, to which my reaction was dude, are you lucky the Psi Corps are the next future over.

1. I really did like that the deciding artifact of that episode was Phoenician—the great sea-empire of the ancient world, whose cities and colonies reached from Syria to Spain, evoking a shared heritage of the ocean. It was one of the show's few genuinely subtle moments so far and I found it very effective.

2. The dialogue refers to them misleadingly as "parapsychologists"; the plot makes it quite clear that they can read people's minds, albeit not in the clear book-like fashion popularly believed. I am therefore calling them telepaths until the show comes up with a preferred terminology. Incidentally, I was correct that nobody talks to Tim about his dolphin telepathy. Missed opportunity.