(no subject)

I've taken my recent l33t (heh) video skillz and looked at Utena. My God, that has been illuminating as all hell. It's not just me and my dirty mind. It's not me making the leap that the observatory thingie (I keep wanting to call it the astronomy tower, but I suspect that's a Potterverse term.) is, well, symbolic. That would not be me. I thought for a while that maybe, possibly, it was me and I was reading into the thing. No. It is not me. That's intentional. The number of camera-ogles that the tower gets? Way too many if we're just establishing location. And, damn it, they're suggestive. The whole entire anime is suggestive. The car. Sooo intentional. The leering. The whole business with the couch. They vogue, they pose, they sprawl. Yes, that is his hand on his crotch. Yes. Why is he surrounded by potted cactus plants? Would that be because he's such a prick?

Then there's the roses. My god, the fucking roses. Not only is the entire world decorated with roses, stylized and realistic... but they keep being not just-a-cigar. The damn rose bride grows them. The evil bastard bites one and tears off a petal. The duellists wear rose signet rings, which, god help me, resonates in my mind with Story of O. The duellists wear roses in the duels. The victor wins the duel by, er, deflowering the other person. With a SWORD. Mmmm-hmmm. And after the duels are over, the defeated one dies, kinda. It's not a big death, because they're walking around perfectly fine a scene or two later, but it's certainly *a* death because they are all sprawled out and not moving. We could call that a little death, I suppose. Honestly, what am I supposed to be taking away from this?

I was looking at Utena because, for the last three years, I've wanted to make a music video of Utena to a particular song. Every time I've heard the freaking song on the radio for the last three years, I've thought about what a nice Utena music video it would be. Probably I need to get out more. Anyway, the whole making-a-music-video thing was why I was looking at tiny pieces of Utena in slow motion obssessive mode. Nobody but me really wants to see Utena done to Grand Funk's Some Kind Of Wonderful, but life would be no fun at all if we weren't allowed the occasional guilt-free wankfest. Sometimes, it's all about pleasing yourself and I reckon this is one of those times.

Speaking of wanking, Florence Nightengale felt compulsive guilt about the whole thing. She kept notes about it in her diary. No lie.
See here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1277111,00.html (scroll down quite a bit. This is a nonfiction blog, so y'know, it's in there.)

(no subject)

I stopped in at my grandma's on the way to work (she's 92) and dropped off three perfectly-ripe peaches and a smallish jar of peach preserves. She doesn't get out much, so fresh, perfectly-ripe peaches are as much of a treat as my shining face. Peach preserves... she likes them and can take them to her table at breakfast for a spot of "my family cares more about me than all ya'll's families care about you". High drama in the old folks' home, I guess.

Anyway, in the course of making conversation, I tried to explain to her about my recent adventures in video piracy. The operative word here is 'tried'. Grandma has a fairly vague idea of what 'anime' is. I think she's got "cartoons from Japan" but she hasn't figured out that, say, Yu-Gi-Oh is the same as anime even though it's in English and on TV in the U.S. I am not sure she has a grip on a 'music video', either. I'm damn sure that she wasn't following the part where I talked about lossy vs. lossless codecs or the part where I discussed interlacing and why it was important to deinterlace source prior to editing. She didn't get why I thought the macrovision checkbox thing was so hilarious, either. (Macrovision was pitched as this big copyprotection thing for the dvd-to-vcr copying market. It's largely academic at this point, and there's a minor checkbox on an option sub-screen in one of my softwares that says "disable Macrovision". It's checked by default. I find this amusing as hell.)

*sigh* I'm starting to think that one of the horrors of getting old is that the world makes less and less sense.

I know that my grandma's personal horror for *being* old is suddenly losing it, like my cousin Josh's wife's grandma. She was fine last summer, fine at this past Christmas, and then all of a sudden, she was a drooling idiot who didn't know her own children. Grandma mentioned this as a frightening thing while I was rambling on about video editing with virtualdub. I didn't know what to say. She also mentioned it happened with one of the people at her current home, and they took him away to Donahoe (the local nursing home for the more-nearly-vegetative). Again, I didn't know what to say.

We aren't allowed to put people down when they don't know themselves or their children anymore. We are supposed to cherish and value all human life, even that which drools and shakes and doesn't know who we are anymore. What am I to tell my grandma when she says she doesn't want to be like that? Sorry, grandma, I'd kill you if I could, but the law is that we aren't allowed to do that. No, I didn't think so. Even I know that's not very reassuring.