handful_ofdust

Day "off" tomorrow, which I must spend part of finding out about my x-rays, while also making the appointment to get Cal assessed which Steve has hitherto failed to do (he said he’d do it on Monday). But I thought I would practice for the weekend by mentioning the things that are cheering me up/keeping me sane:

A) Tonight I finally finished watching Surface, the third late, great, cancelled-after-one-season show of 2005…and you know, I have to say that I liked it better than Threshold, in some ways. Oh, it certainly doesn’t have quite the same amount of freak factor, or creep factor, but it’s far more painstakingly constructed overall, with virtually no cheese involved (probably due to lack of Brannon Braga participation). I like all the characters, particularly poor Cajun insurance investigator Rich Connolly, who’s often so wonderfully out of his depth, yet entirely able to make and act on leaps of logic which seem so nuts they read more like leaps of faith. He’s emblematic of the lovely way ALL Surface characters embrace, even celebrate, their own essential humanity: Getting drunk when they’re unhappy, getting scared when they’re threatened, getting giddy over even their smallest successes. The central mystery is a twisty one, yet never boring in its convolution, and the season finale is one of the best of its sort I’ve ever seem; "It’s a new world," scientist Laura Daughtry remarks, looking around at the devestation that ensues, and she’s actually understating things. Highly recommended.

B) My copy of Amphigorey Again, Edward Gorey’s final collection, arrived through the mail over the weekend; I was oddly moved to discover that it concludes with the incomplete manuscript of what would have been his final book (The Izzard Book, by Mrs Regera Dowdy), had he been able to fill in all the pictures. The highlight, however, is The Raging Tide: or, The Black Doll’s Imbroglio, a Choose Your Own Adventure-type series of senseless scuffles between sinister toys (pg. 16—"Hooglyboo [a one-legged teddy-bear with a collander on its head] and Figbash [a weirdly elongated black spectre] dropped a lump of suet on Naeelah [a girl-doll with a head like a featureless china turnip]. If you want to get on with the story, turn to 24. If you’d suddenly rather be doing something else, turn to 29.") And there’s life-lessons, too, as on pg. 18, which sadly yet truthfully announces: "There’s no going to town in a bathtub." Just the thing for those 3:00 A.M. I-ate-all-my-friends blues.

C) Finally, there’s Ian Christe’s essential Sound of the Beast—The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, in which Christe’s painstakingly exact descriptions of things are often a million times more amusing than the things themselves could ever be. On pg. 241, from the chapter titled "Death Metal Deliverance", Christe talks about Death, the original, um…Death Metal band: "Epitomizing adolescent horror, the intro to their inspired 1985 "Infernal Death" demo was a sludgy riff over rolling drum tubs, while Lee screamed "Die! Die! Die!" as shrilly as possible at the top of his lungs. It sounded like a torture session in a suburban basement, the graphics looked like a kindergartner’s Halloween project, and it all worked terrible wonders." Sometime I wonder if I should use this as a shopping guide, but you know? I’m just as happy simply browsing it.

So there we go—another evening down. Back to Lilim, and then to bed.