The swirling inner layers of our sun cause charged particles to generate magnetic fields. As charges accumulate on the surface, magnetic field lines readjust themselves and release huge quantities of matter and electromagnetic radiation into space. This particular Mass Ejection is traveling at over 900 miles per second and has an energy level equivalent to 160,000,000,000 megatons of TNT. Credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory/Goddard Spaceflight Center
astronomical wonders: Solar Eruptions - A Coronal Mass Ejection The swirling inner layers of our sun cause charged particles to generate magnetic fields. As charges accumulate on the surface, magnetic field lines readjust themselves and release huge quantities of matter and electromagnetic radiation into space. This particular Mass Ejection is traveling at over 900 miles per second and has an energy level equivalent to 160,000,000,000 megatons of TNT. Credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory/Goddard Spaceflight Center From the narrow, half-shuttered kitchen window, no insolent Persian whores obliged Susan’s effort to picture them beside the fountain, though she stood squinting over the sink with a forgotten cigarette between her lips. Out in the yard the morning still belonged to the surrounding trees, lying supine in their branches and keeping the stony enclosure waiting in shade, the light from the window rolling softly on the black water of the reflecting pool. The sounds of verbal contention echoed along the wall and grew louder with the approach of the contending; Étienne, disheveled in sagging grey cable-knit and battle-stained jeans, trailed Gideon, the former attempting to impress something upon the latter, who refused to entertain it. In pondering Étienne’s tribulations Susan almost missed the bullet-like stroke of his mentor’s arm, Gideon landing a blow to the youth's mouth that knocked the sullen accusations from it, along with some of its more fundamental contents. His victim staggered, found his knees with his hands and let the bloody fragments trickle onto the flags while Gideon delivered his dispassionate analysis. They broke without another word, the elder dragging his shirt from his head as he walked toward the stables, the younger taking his misery to the car parked beside the yard. A voice behind her addressed her unwitting proximity to the kettle still breathing steam on the range. “That’s just boiled... don’t go burning yourself.” it advised. Susan turned to see a stranger seated at the kitchen table, his hand around a coffee cup; she was seized by the narrow, glancing idea of his familiarity but her surprise and vague embarrassment overcame it. Before she could think of anything to say, he rose and excused himself with a tip of his head, leaving through the door to the yard and walking to a battered, bright blue Morris waiting across the bridge. Voyeurism chastened by the visitor, she waited a discreet while before venturing out herself. The stones were cold through the soles of her slippers as she tied the robe of violet cashmere purveyed by her host and lit her cigarette, walking on toward the stables. One of the half-doors shuddered at her approach and the faint glow of gas flame pushed through the gaps in the weathered panel. She stooped beneath the divided door, blinking in the darkness of a space cleared of the partitions that had once delineated milking stalls and loose boxes. On a wooden bench topped with a stained and broken slab of corpse-white marble, the great head of a stag sat squarely on its cleanly-severed plane beneath a mighty umber coronet of antlers, their weight propped against one of the stone piles that stood like the pillars of a neolithic temple. The animal's brass-coloured eyes were downcast beneath their heavy lids in a look of modest resignation. Blood had wicked slowly across the low end of the bench onto the straw beneath. Like a Hadean chorus, a row of cervine forms hung before the furthest wall, curing in the darkness, the dry blue of their flayed flanks glowing softly in the gaslight. Gideon stood beside the body of the stag in a black butcher’s apron, the lamp hissing while the animal’s weight swung slowly from the ceiling truss; she sat down on a milking stool with an absented gaze. “You had some sleep?” he asked, reaching up to release the deer’s skin from its hocks with a small, leaf-bladed knife, turning the carcass slowly. Susan had become accustomed to the polarity of his commonplace inquiries, their simplicity creating a curious ease. Slowly he began to punch the hide down over the musculature, catching it in slack, silky pleats upon his forearm and tugging it free of the attenuated neck before setting it aside. “Not really.” she replied, rubbing her eye and watching the curiously bloodless process in silence until he leant toward her, soliciting a draw on her cigarette, which she supplied, the smoke thickening their already misted breath. The dark weave of his apron formed a sharp-edged contrast to the colours of his naked arms and shoulders. “Forgive the contrétemps. Étienne... his boyfriend fucks his sister an the whole world is in flames. Je m'en fous, you know? I am not eighteen." “Everything’s complicated when you are.” Susan reminded him. “So it seem.” “There was someone in the kitchen. Brown hair... sounded Irish?” “Lawrence... a friend.” Gideon related as he wheeled a clean barrow up to the neck of the suspended carcass, positioning it carefully. He paused with his blade on the narrow belly and gave her a warning glance, to which she shrugged, thoughtlessly. She was not prepared for the speed with which he exposed the gleaming paunch of grape and olive-hued organs, nor the deft intrusion of his arm into the cavity; it was swallowed to his shoulder before the entrails emerged and slithered down into the barrow, settling into a mass in which each shape remained discreet within their elastic cauls and membranes. He cut the liver free and offered her a slice, the feted organ's fine black grain relaxing on the blade, from which she accepted it, watching him lick the back of his knuckles. The taste shocked her, as dark and heavily metallic as a mouthful of her own blood, pushing her back off the stool as she ejected it onto the straw; it put a vampyre's gargoyle head on the neck of the body swaying from the ceiling and returned one of Siobhan's stinking candles to her hand. Her host chuckled. “I thought you are the girl who like new things.” Gideon's smile conveyed the gently contumelious nature of the remark, though she did not reply. He stripped off his apron and left it hanging from a rafter, dousing his hands in a bucket. “Déjeuner?” His retinue had abandoned empty bottles and greasy dishes on the pine benches lining the kitchen. Cursing them in absentia, he swept an armful of debris into a roasting tray and set off along the hall, returning in a fresh shirt without it while she stood in the light of the refrigerator door. “Motherless salops. If Luc can’t learn manners, he should learn to lock his door. What have they left for us, these merde oiseaux? Half of a lemon an some bad milk?” When his prediction proved substantively correct, Susan took a chair and reached for the box of cereal she had secreted in the highest row of cupboards, enraged to find it empty. “Bastards!” she exclaimed, dropping down beside the table in an attitude of dejection. The lycanthrope sighed and began to slice a head of garlic on the bench beside the range, feeding a piece of chestnut into the firebox and setting a pan on the heat. The smell of toasting fougasse drifted past her without visible effect; Gideon trimmed the liver neatly before addressing the spirit that oppressed her. “You don't know why you don't hear from him.” he suggested. She propped an elbow on the table. "Three weeks is a long time to not hear from someone who can’t be quiet for three minutes.” “It’s not personal, Sussan... don't take it that way. If you don't know where he is, no one can learn it from you. It’s okay... he does his best for you.” He laughed, the sound coupling with the flash of the meat tossed in the pan. “You don't think this is hard for him? What would he love more than to know you cannot live without him? Poor Sachiin.” “I don’t think it would kill him to make a bloody phone call.” He exclaimed to himself, shaking his dark head vehemently at the peevish tenor of her complaint, the galvanic strength of his arm scraping the base of the pan across the hob. “Young people... you have everything, but you can’t clean a dish or wait a day, or take a bad thing like a man. So fucking impatient. In my own day, I wait six month to hear if my family had burn to death, and was pleased to at least have the truth, but now everyone they bitch an cry for nothing. He don't call you? Qu’est-ce que? Et alors! If you don't like it, take a little piece of plastic an fly to the far side of the world. Endure nothing. Putain... now I burn this.” Smoke rose from the edges of the pan and he pulled it from the heat. The folded documentation on the table before her included one stained by the foot of a coffee cup, and he nodded down at it. "You know what that is? That fils de pute in Praha, last year he buy the hahdri over the river, an now he bribe the mayor to cut the trees, to fuck with me. One time you could walk from Lensk to Rouen in the shade... now, I will have twelve more Étienne with nowhere to go, crying at my door. Don't worry, Auberjonois, they all say... you are geris alujh... chef de meute... no one will come for you. But they will, I know, an where do I run? Where can I take a hahdri and these baby alujha? You want troubles, choux? I will trade with you." He shook his head to himself and threw wild thyme into the pan. The sight of him muttering over the bench drew her to her feet, and she joined him, easing two plates beneath his elbow as he dished out. “Everybody’s pissy today.” she suggested. “Don’t look like that... it’s not you, ça va? You’re okay with me.” He sat down at the table with her and rolled caramel onions onto the tines of his fork. “Don't worry about Sachiin. When he wants to leave, that’s not a secret he can keep. With me it was like this... our aventure, three hundred eighty nine years... to say au revoir... nine long month in the same argument... bordel de merde... he could have given birth.” He ate another mouthful and laughed to himself quietly, glancing back to her. “Allez, Sussan... you know there is no cruel bone in him... he is too lazy. You must pay him an command him to be cruel, if that’s what you want. Why push a shit uphill?” “You know where he is, don’t you?” “They are like ducks... if there is trouble, they go up.” he replied, flicking his thumb at the ceiling. “They are on a mountain somewhere, spitting an calling each other names." Her hair had set in a tall curve over the clip pressed to one side of her head by her pillow, its accidental shape amusing him, though she did not notice in her frowning intent on her plate. “My god, I sound so old and grognon. Crazy old loup, not so good in the morning. Keep your eyes open for the good an for the beautiful, as I told you. Fais moi confiance. An you know, Sussan, there’s always a place for you here.” Her fork grew still in the ensuing silence and her head rose slowly, eyes finding his and allowing them to direct her toward the white shape beside the cup abandoned by the stranger. The sight of her name pencilled alongside Gideon’s in the midst of the envelope caused her to rise and seize it, both fists struggling with the thick bonded paper until booking confirmations and airplane tickets cartwheeled onto the table, a flat, cherry-red lollypop cowled in fluted plastic clattering amongst them. In her delight she remembered the breakfast left cooling before her and set the tickets down, reclaiming her seat and devoting herself once more to the meal. “It’s been sitting there all morning, hasn’t it?” she smiled. “It come with Lawrence, on his way back to Praha. So ah, yes.” he admitted, watching her slide the lollypop into the pocket of her robe. “How much longer were you going to let me go on?” He picked a sprig of thyme from his gravy and set it aside. “Pendant un petit moment.” C O N T I N U E D N E X T W E E K © céili o'keefe do not reproduce * Don't be a tightarse- buy the Book * Catch up onsite * Best of the Blog *SNOWPIERCER (Bong Joon-ho, 2013) Sounded promising, didn't it? Unhappily, Snowpiercer is a really awful hackneyed, explosive techno-shart of a thing that just does not work, on any level, and reminded me why I've never been a fan of Mod Asian cinema's penchant for 'whimsical' arbitrary bullshit. Did everyone else really enjoy SP as much as they publicly professed? Insert Mugatu GIF here, because god damn, we passionately hated virtually everything about it. From the incredibly lazy and I'm just going to say it, retarded, premise, the peanut-headed lead (Chris Evans, human adult contemporary station) an unbelievably ponderous and literal progression, the swishy sub-sub-Matrix, jazz-handed, violence-inducing violence and an unforgivably hammy Swinton, the thing schlumps along toward the kind of denouement that deserves dragging on a chain behind a car. Oh but it's an allegory! Like Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a fucking allegory. Don't believe the hype. If you're even passingly familiar with/fond of the genre you'll find it neither challenging nor clever. I'll say it again- whimsical arbitrary off-fucking-broadway panto effluent. Study the screencap up there and tell me I'm wrong. Look at the Swinton. LOOK AT HER. We were both bored and angered. THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY (Hossein Amini, 2013) When their grift goes bad in 1960's Greece, two grand-touring shysters (Kirsten Dunst and Viggo Mortensen) find themselves reliant on another wayward American (Oscar Issac) to get them out of the country, their tenuous association tightening into a fatal tailspin. TTFoJ is an arrestingly beautiful thing, to be sure, blessed with a top(ish) shelf cast, gilded locales, outstanding photographic and technical values. It's also reassuringly adult, played out over a framework of grown-up tensions, potentials and frustrations, guile and desperation morphing into affinity and back again. All this should be a recipe for solid-state awesomeness but it's just too polite. So much tasteful choreography in the face of everything we know about cornered people clawing at each other. That's a genre issue as much as anything, as is The Two Faces of January being rather overly familiar, though I'm not one to kick at a flick for riffing on venerable themes or wearing honest homage on its sleeve. Performance-wise, Dunst and Issac delight both the eye and the critical faculties, their entanglement offering a display of charisma and professionalism that spills out over the limitations of the material- always a pleasure to behold. I was less sold on Mortensen's crusty instigator, but I often find Viggo a bit like a hermit crab poked once too often when he senses deficits in the material and have come to suspect this stubborn opacity is less the product of disinclination than (dare I suggest) creative insufficiency. It is an indictment of our current cinematic climate that something so six-out-of-ten/adequate outshines so much else. TTFoJ exhibits few of the really penetrating personal quirks and twists that distinguish the blue ribbon stuff in this genre and upon which such distinction is so utterly dependent. I felt very little in the course of my observation, the soft-focus genericism at work here unfortunately transcending the sum of its more decent elements. And does everything circa the Bosphorous have to end in a dramatic foot chase through a jewellery quarter? One more thing; Oscar Isaac is fucking dreamy. The Two Faces of January is a honey-coloured num-num moderately deserving of your Sunday afternoon. AMERICAN SNIPER (Clint Eastwood, 2014) The title says it all, really, doesn't it? Uninspired, tone-deaf, witlessly pedestrian; if American Sniper was a puppy, it would crawl in a circle, not that such considerations would ever halt an oscar campaign. When precis tell you who they are, believe them: Kyle the Murican gets mad at all the spooky foreigners blowing up his homeland for no reason, dammit, joins the military, clips randoms from Iraqi rooftops and eventually catches one himself (did I spoil the ending for you? Whilst children are apparently legitimate grist to the gratuitous sadism mill, Kyle's death-by-the-sword is discreetly veiled out of a respect accorded no one else.) But you don't have to wade through the politics to smell what's cooking here; this isn't (all) claw-handed liberal bitching and our audible recoil has probably obscured the fact that American Sniper is just a crap MOR movie, considered dispassionately. Every lol cliché is dished out in an endless brown buffet; boring Hurt Locker-retread action, sinister bloodthirsty dirka-dirkastanis, horrifically inadequate interpersonal sequences and dipshit private imperatives that are a perfect microcosm of the wider political fuckfest. Sienna Miller is neither recognisable nor memorable as the virtually nameless Standard Issue Home Incubator Unit. Bradley Cooper serves up all the charmless, chook-eyed monotone a mouthbreather could wish for in their favourite homicidal simpleton. And the whole thing looked like it was filmed through a fucking coffee filter by a team of Ambien-chugging nematodes on a really tight budget. It may not sound like it, but I don't hate absolutely everything Eastwood does just because I suspect he's a pointlessly conservative arsehat gliding on a greasy slick of masculine privilege. I had some time for Mystic River (in spite of everything) and still enjoy Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (with robust caveats), but they hung heavily, nay- exclusively- on individual performances and when you look at the rest of his efforts, American Sniper nestles right in the midst of the truckload of unsubtle bollocks he's been shovelling for a long time. What we have here begins with thematic toxicity and ends with directorial fail. Clint the peekaboo jingoist is calling American Sniper an anti-war piece now. Wonder if that's the kind of language he used to get it green-lit. Conclusion- we watched it so you don't have to. * Had enough or do you want some more? * Best of the Blog * Read the Book onsite *Not sure if I've posted these before/don't really care if I have. I blew the equivalent of a whole roll on these snooty camelids, last year or 2013. So many money shots, but these are the two that really shone in B&W. My best faunal images thus far. They live over the hill from us on a Blueskin Bay property. I rode a camel (and an elephant) once, I think at the San Diego Zoo when I was a kid. Lumpy. * Photoessays * Best of the Blog *After about a year and a half of diet reform and exercise, I have reached my goal waist measurement. There's still enough subcutaneous junk happening to throw up a gentle blob on either side of that tightly-pulled tape measure, but fuck it- I'm calling it. A year ago I deemed 10cm thicker than my skinny-minny partner ideal-ish, and I'm sick to death of taking my damn clothes in all the time. It's an odd feeling, attainment; a surprisingly passé sort of thing given the level of emphasis our society places on the somatic, underscoring the banality of our own private bodily struggles and the smeary halo of false attribution that surrounds being smaller. No one rushes up to you with a magnum of Cristal and complimentary jewelled thong once you hit size whatever. You're still not the especial seckssay. No trumpets sound. But I'm shitting all over something hard-won and positive like that's some sort of reflexive action :) I made a highly ironic pizza to celebrate, because I wanted to queen all those delicious empty carbs hard. According to the stats, I deserved that cheesy fucker, even though it's giving me a headache, bloat and facial flush (because empty carbs aren't that delicious after all); less than 5% of the people who embark on this degree of shrinkage either achieve or maintain it for more than a year. My resting heart rate is 56 bpm. So I'll take no-trumpet tumbleweeds over the stabby pangs of sludgy stasis and self-excoriation. Not sure how much further I'll go. I'd like to keep my hip-to-tittay equilibrium (the top's bigger than the bottom now which is freaking me out) and a decent portion of pantsmeat (Dad's side veers dangerously close to arselessness). I'm going to write more on the effort itself some time soon, in the hope it might help or encourage someone else; if I can do it, virtually anyone can, and more people need to believe that. This week in blogging: I think a bunch of especially concise film reviews. Because brevity is the soul of... something, and most of the films we've sat through lately deserve a fucking short shrift. Looking at you, American Sniper. You sucked. There is an exceedingly beautiful moth, like a flake of powdery birch bark on the dark wall by my bedside lamp. It will never have to worry about its waist to hip ratio. to lepidoptera, beauty is perfume tendered to filamentous antennae. Taiko- the opposite of moth. This is Kodo Taiko, in honour of physical awesomeness everywhere. Enjoy. |
Independent Creativity
|