BURU SURI

This post’s title is inspired by a skit from Azumanga Daioh which has for some reason stayed with me, even if it’s been more than 10 years since I watched the series in 12th grade – proceeding to draw Sakaki-san on the Eastpak school backpack I used to carry around back then.

I don’t remember who says what, but the characters make fun of the fact that “Bruce Lee” sounds exactly like “Blue Three” in Engrish: both are in fact pronounced buru suri. Just give me a second to google that and have something to back up my words with.

…there.

So, how come? Last week some indomitable urge to rent a movie took over me. Yes, rent one. Legally. Amazing, right? I couldn’t remember how many years it had been since I had last actually gone to the video club, browsed the available titles, having to weigh in rent duration as a factor – to decide if I should rent a newer movie for a single day or a slightly less recent one for three.

In an age of instant gratification and unlimited libraries (Steam, Netflix etc) small limitations such as these can be truly relieving. It’s the same kind of ease of mind you get when you only have one book to read and all the time and energy you would otherwise put into deciding which book to read is converted into actual time for reading!

But, as usual, I’m being overly romantic about anything that does not exist in purely digital form or exclusively on the internet, or which had already existed before I was born: only while typing out the lines above did the numerous instances of the same archetypical memory of arguing about which movie to rent with the same, but different, friends, in the same, but different, video club, come rushing back. So, you might disregard all the nonsense I wrote above, if you wish.

Anyway, what inspired me to go out and watch films legally was that I suddenly realised that I have a Bluray player (my PS4) sitting under my television, but I’d never actually watched a fim in Bluray, something I realise is not entirely unsimilar from declaring in 2011 I’d never watched a DVD. “Why not get with the times”, I thought.

I didn’t go to my neighbourhood movie club, Video Blue, which I must say would have been rather apt, but chose Seven instead. Looking around for a bit, I saw that they had an offer for three movies for three days for only 5€. Their advertising offer worked on me and rent three movies I did.

Without further ado now then, here are my brief opinions on what I watched. If you are to keep something from this post, may it be that media consumption can be more beneficial and memorable if done mindfully and with some kind of artificial limit placed on it.

Ex Machina (2015)

I’ve been meaning to watch this since Autómata, which dealt with similar themes: true AI has come about; what do?

I’d like to divulge as little as possible about this one. The pacing, the dialogues, the setting, the characters, the music, the feelings, the effects, the acting, the twists… all top-notch, no beats missed whatsoever. I really can’t think of a single thing I didn’t enjoy about it. If you like soft science fiction and a slower film that will give you a lot to think about but even more to feel about, give it a shot.

While you’re at it, watch Arrival, another sci-fi film I watched recently, that one at the cinema, which single-handedly made it very close to the top of my list of all-time favourite science fiction films.

Boyhood (2014)

Richard Linklater, maker of Waking Life and the Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight, started filming Boyhood in 2002, when the movie’s main character Mason was only 5 years old. He kept filming as the boy grew older, and what we got by the end is a movie about the mundane little moments of growing up.

It’s true that Boyhood could have been a lot more than the uneventful story it turned out to be, namely about a kid more or less like any other American kid, but watching it I didn’t get bored at all. Apart from the fact that it worked as a real-time recap of events that marked the ’00s and my own earlier years, it was fun watching characters develop and age, and I could more than relate with the whole broken family and mother-in-search-of-replacement-father thing, even though I must say I did feel pangs of jealousy at the appearance of so many (step-)siblings.

It was a long movie at ~150 minutes, but in typical Linklater style, the most banal conversations were somehow the most engaging and I didn’t feel it draw out at all.

Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

This one’s probably the best known out of my buru suri films. Grand Budapest Hotel is an experience, like all Wes Anderson films. Intense colours, over-the-top aesthetics, completely wild situations, humouristic, heart-warming, clever little touches that challenge and reward the viewer… it’s by no means a bad film. On the contrary.

However, there’s something in Wes Anderson’s work I can’t quite put my finger on that I find obnoxious. I would like to look into what it is exactly that puts me off films like this, give it a name, cause I think it’s fascinating how a film I should theoretically quite enjoy didn’t work for me – how whether you’ll like a movie or not depends on such little factors that work together to create a satisfactory feeling… or not.

REVIEW: IN OTHER WORDS: SF AND THE HUMAN IMAGINATION

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a neat little collection of Margaret Atwood’s history in the field of science fiction. It’s split into three parts:

1) Her thoughts on science (speculative?) fiction and the persistent problem of defining the genre; thoughts on how science fiction is a continuation of much older, mythological sorts of fiction; commentaries on her early life in rural Canada, what made her move into the field and inspired her to write the novels that marked her career.

2) Reviews, articles and talks she’s written and given over the years on seminal works and writers such as The Island of Dr Moreau and H. G. Wells, Nineteen Eighty-four, Animal Farm and George Orwell, Brave New World and Aldous Huxley, She and H. Rider Haggard, The Birthday of the World and Ursula K. Le Guin (her name is seriously pronounced “gwin”?) and others.

3) A selection of her own short stories, some of which I remembered from reading Bones and Murder some weeks ago.

Listening to this wise old lady speak of her long life and pose difficult questions about SF in general was very pleasing for the mind. I also found it quite revealing, and I’m hardly versed in her work. If you are more familiar with it than I, you know what to do.

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REVIEW: BONES AND MURDER

Bones & Murder by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Found this book used for 10lv at Elephant bookstore in Sofia. This was my first real exposure to fiction by Margaret Atwood, and it was enough to make me think that reading longer works from her will be something I’m going to enjoy deeply.

While looking for the real title of the book on Google, I stumbled upon this review which just so happens to portray my feelings for it pretty much exactly. Allow me then to do the unthinkable and use that review’s words instead of mine. Thank you Kelly EasyVegan.

“The stories cover a little bit of everything: fantasy, mystery, science fiction, speculative fiction, feminism, rape culture, gender wars, dating, death – you name it.

Many of the pieces are hit and miss; my favorites are the scifi stories that hinge on an environmental or animal-friendly theme:

– “Cold-Blooded” – An alien race of matriarchal moth people visit planet earth – or as they call it, “The Planet of the Moths,” a nickname owing to the fact that their moth cousins outnumber us by billions – and find humans sorely lacking in both culture and intelligence;

– “My Life As a Bat” – A series of reflections on the narrator’s past life as a bat, including a disturbing (and, as it just so happens, true) anecdote about WWII-era experiments in which bats were made into unwitting suicide bombers;

– “Hardball” – A piece of dystopian speculative fiction in which humans, having decimated their environment, have retreated to live under a giant dome. Since space is limited, the population must be kept in check: for every birth, one person is chosen to die via a lottery. Care to guess what becomes of the remains?

Also enjoyable are those stories which reimagine classic literature: “Gertrude Talks Back” gives voice to Hamlet’s long-suffering mother, and “Unpopular Gals” and “Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women” celebrates those villains and “airheads” without which fairy tales would not exist.

While at times difficult to read, “Liking Men” is another standout; this is the piece that deals with sexual assault, vis à vis a woman’s journey back to coping with – and even loving – men (or rather, one man in particular) again after her rape.

A must for fans of Margaret Atwood!”

But seriously, those eyes on the cover…

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REVIEW: BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED

Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You can read the book for free on Huxley.net but I recommend you read it either off-screen or not on a web page.

It’s been demonstrated time and time again that people who can come up with incredible, fictional worlds that have something tangible to say about our own, have the ability to do so exactly because they understand this Earth and universe so well. Huxley was no exception, and his addendum to Brave New World is a beautifully lucid account of where his original work, written 25 years previously, had failed to anticipate the great emerging forces that were threatening freedom as Huxley perceived them at the time. This list of the book’s chapters might give you some idea of what those threats were:

I Over-Population
II Quantity, Quality, Morality
III Over-Organization
IV Propaganda in a Democratic Society
V Propaganda Under a Dictatorship
VI The Arts of Selling
VII Brainwashing
VIII Chemical Persuasion
IX Subconscious Persuasion
X Hypnopaedia
XI Education for Freedom
XII What Can Be Done?

I’m incredibly curious what Huxley would have to say about our 21st century society and where his hopes would lie today – whether he’d still think that

“meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them. “

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REVIEW: HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read this on my phone.

Hey look! A novel about a guy in a corporate time machine killing/getting killed by his future/past self and getting all paradoxanalytical about it! That’s a word I just invented, by the way. It describes the way a lot of science fiction novels try to express and explain paradox just by throwing more words at you. It sort of works like writing a recipe for a cake just by using the chemical compounds and formulas involved, complete with instructions using moles for ingredient mass and the Kelvin scale for when it’s time for the cake to hit the oven.

Let’s get back to the book. It was just a ceaseless bout of self-reference. The premise was interesting and the writing had some inspired moments idea-wise, at least when it didn’t come out as narrated by a completely socially incompetent nerd – which the protagonist actually was, by the way… huh, maybe he was a well-written character after all and not just mirroring Mr. Yu himself… It didn’t take long, however, for all the meta to become too much for me. That and the oddly-used jargon too rigid to peer through, or the “science fiction” part of the story too often spoken about, described, but not represented in an engaging or memorable way. “Oh, this machine has permitted the existence, trademarking and patenting of entire universes”. Sounds great, it does, but where did you go with that Mr. YU?

It all felt like reading the diary of a Companion Cube (yes, I’m old) that suddenly through some bug in Portal’s code (the 2007 game we all loved) turned into a sentient hypercube and got existential agony. I respect the cube’s feelings but, yeah, I have no idea what being a hypercube would or should feel like. The protagonist was human, but his feelings came off as little more than the hearts the Companion Cubes have painted on them in Portal. Programmed into him, just like they were programmed into them, and just like they were programmed into the couple of sentient-like operating systems he had in his TARDIS – I mean time machine – I mean TARDIS; it even says in the book the time machine had the shape and size of a phone booth. Come on.

While in theory I should have enjoyed reading page after page of convoluted twisting thoughts on the paradoxical nature of time as part of the physical world and then some, I just couldn’t get into it.

Yes, left-brained. This book was left-brained through and through.

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REVIEW: THE FIRST FIFTEEN LIVES OF HARRY AUGUST

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Caught it in audiobook format.

I was expecting something in the vain of Replay, the book that, so they say, inspired the movie Groundhog Day. In Replay, the protagonist goes over the same ~25 years again and again and lives the period between the ’60s and the ’80s countless times. Here, it’s the period between Harry August’s birth in 1918 and his eventual death in the ’90s of the same illness every time (I forget what it is) that goes over and over and over.

Clearly, if you cannot see the point of time-loop stories such as these, the premise might sound boring. And in the case of Harry August it did get boring at some point. I thought character development was rather shallow for all the lives they had gone through; yes, they, because—minor spoilers ahead—Harry isn’t the only person to have the gift of apparent immortality in his world. There’s a whole club of them, in fact, but at no point during the story did I feel as if the lives and storylines of the other characters really matter. To top it all off, the bad guy’s motive was very hazy and his relationship with Harry could have been more meaningful and intricate. It was an opportunity lost, especially at a point closer to the end of the book when everything, or so I thought, pointed to Harry having actually fallen in love with the bad guy. Claire North didn’t go through with that, though.

I realise it must be very difficult to write characters that are immortal in the conventional sense while managing to weave a narrative that makes them neither amazingly powerful on the one hand— still somewhat relatable—nor too much like a mere mortal in their wishes, desires and motivations on the other. Harry August and many of the book’s other special characters seemed to fall closer into the latter part of the spectrum above—they had all this power, yet could do so relatively little with it to break their curse of what the Buddhist would call samsara, the pains of (repeating) earthly existence.

What’s more, the world itself didn’t change almost at all between Harry’s different incarnations (if you exclude the plot-related accelerating technological progress), which disappointed me a lot since half the reason I read books like this is for the alternate histories and timelines that emerge. Replay, again, did a better job.

All in all Harry August was an okay book. I found Claire North’s rationalistic, deterministic, somewhat strict writing style enjoyable and quite fitting, and props go to her for writing a book such as this in her ’20s. Regrettably though it fell short in most other respects. It didn’t use its own material sufficiently well, I found.

In other words, I would recommend Replay before The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August if you want to read about a character who goes through time loops.

PS: I went back and read my review for Replay. I seriously remember I had enjoyed it more. Well if you look at that!

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REVIEW: INVISIBLE CITIES

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Zenobia, the city on stilts. Vitoriana first told me about this book and sung its praise by describing the mental picture of this city in particular.

Invisible Cities is another of those difficult-to-review books I’ve been going through lately, although perhaps “trudging through” would be a more accurate description. Another one enjoyed in audiobook format, too, and another one I couldn’t concentrate on and retain as well as I would have liked. I have walking, running, wandering through wheat fields, traversing rocky capes and enjoying less-or-more-than-imaginary landscapes in Samothraki to blame. Or it could just be my complete inability to focus on three things at a time—in this case my ears, my visible eyes, and my inner eye. It does sound just a bit too much, now that I mention it.

What I can say is that Invisible Cities turned out to be a very interesting idea of a book—or is it a book of an idea? Marco Polo visits Mongol leader, tells him of his travels to incredible cities far and wide—most of them named curiously similar to ancient-sounding Greek and Latin female names, some rather common in Greece even today—and proceeds to have deep discussion with the Mongol leader (sounds a bit oxymoronic as I’m writing it) on the nature of language, experience, travelling, story-telling… the general business of empire-ruling and noblesse.

Those invisible cities of Marco’s all have some distinctive fantastical characteristic: one’s buildings have no walls, the pipelines defining the cityscape; Zenobia, pictured above, is built on stilts (like Venice, just without the water—Venice, as Marco Polo’s hometown, also plays a rather central role in this book, perhaps as the archetypical invisible city bar none, just as big a mystery to Kublai Khan as the rest of this book architectural and cultural urban menagerie); another still is a meeting place for merchants who trade stories instead of wares. One city is special in that all visitors remember it perfectly just by visiting it once, while another is its visitor’s memories of it. And so it goes.

Invisible Cities is highly structured yet defies usual narrative conventions; it is abstract, exploring imaginary realities through the kind of what-ifs I’ve most often found in science fiction, yet it does so by looking at human history and existence as a whole, rather than at just its future. Calvino’s language is descriptive while being poetic and profound, inviting the reader’s inner eye to see the Invisible. In all honesty, the vibe I got from this book is that of a geometry-twisting, meta philosophical indie video game in the vain of Fez or The Stanley Parable.

Would Italo Calvino have been a genius game developer had he been a millennial?

Invisible Cities is just one of these books that stands out just from how different and unique it is and how ahead of its time I perceive it today to have been. Or maybe it wasn’t ahead of its time at all: we’ve just internalised precious little about the intellectual zeitgeist of the ’60s and ’70s and the early days of radical postmodernism in literature. Could it be that instead of them being ahead of their time, it’s us who are lagging behind and have progressed less than we think we have, perceiving our intellectual maturity as greater than it actually is?

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REVIEW: THE UFO PHENOMENON: FACT, FANTASY AND DISINFORMATION

The UFO Phenomenon: Fact, Fantasy and Disinformation by John Michael Greer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Discovered this while eBrowsing for John Michael Greer eBooks.

It never ceases to amaze me how wide Mr. Greer’s education is. Not only can he write books like The Ecotechnic Future, The Long Descent and Not The Future We Ordered, all about what the future of humanity in the mid-collapse and post-collapse world will probably at least resemble: he can juggle between rationally arguing pro and against science, “conspiracy theory”, apparitions, aliens… He’s remarkably open-minded but somehow managing to avoid the negative traits the New Age or or other spiritual movements are associated with, e.g. naivety, or confusion of science and “pseudoscience”, a term I despise but which can be used to describe a lot of what New Agers say to portray their beliefs as valid and/or worthy of so-called mainstream scientific investigation.

To cut a long story short, Mr. Greer doesn’t believe that UFOs are actual spaceships piloted by alien intelligent life; his main argument is that most UFO sightings (Unidentified Flying Objects, remember?) have been the result of a shifting public consciousness: in over 70 years, people have learned to interpret mysterious lights in the sky in very specific ways, mostly because of science fiction and popular culture that goes back to the first half of the 20th century, in turn a particularly American cultural phenomenon that for geopolitical and social reasons went global.

“I want to believe” goes part and parcel with the clumsy moves involved in the change from a world dominated by religion to one were religion has been replaced by overwhelming materialism: when there’s nothing to believe in any more, something to believe in has to be invented.

In a recurring theme for Mr. Greer, he makes the point that it’s not just the “believers” that are looking for something to latch onto: scientism, materialism and positivism are the skeptics’ pacifier, and both believers and skeptics use flawed reasoning to win over the other side. The former states that UFOs exist but fails to imagine that there can be other answers to “what is that thing flying over there?” apart from “aliens, of course!”; the skeptics, on the other hand, fail because they restrict themselves to debunking the believers: either the believers are right or they are not, which somehow gets warped to “UFOs are alien or they do not exist”, which is a false dichotomy. They of course proceed to give all the reasons why any sighting must either be a hoax, or a hallucination, or “swamp gas”; Mr. Greer is right to ask “what if a UFO sighting is legit, that is to say, not a hallucination or a hoax, there really was a strange light in the sky, but it simply was not alien?”

Before listing his own attempts at explaining UFOs, he goes over how a hypothesis has to be disprovable in order to be scientific—in fact, that’s the very basis of the scientific method. He mostly leans towards American or Soviet secret/black budget projects, as of yet unexplained natural phenomena and aethereal/immaterial encounters, reports of which have been appearing in cultures all over the world for millennia.

For me the most interesting was the chapter on the black budget projects (think Area 51) and the secret aircraft: it would actually make sense that the US government through its denial and refusal of disclosure would fuel the fires of suspicion that what its Cold War secret military projects really were were alien spacecraft and in this way muddy the waters. Get your population as well as the Ruskies to believe that UFOs are a thing and you can fly any superweapon around and draw little suspicion as to what you’re actually doing.

Mr. Greer discusses these conspiracy theories with so much data and references to draw from and paints such an easy-to-follow picture, always within context, it’s just insulting to claim the material discussed is merely conspiracies at this point. Of course, each case is unique and some are still shrouded in true mystery, but that’s precisely what Mysterious Universe is for!

Great book, amazing and inspiring man. Couldn’t stop flicking my phone’s screen running PDF Reader.

Just one thing: for all that’s good in this world, do try and find a better cover artist!

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REVIEW: PLUTO

PLUTO: Naoki Urasawa x Ozamu Tezuka, Band 001 by Naoki Urasawa
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a review for the whole series, not just Pluto #1.

I read it on my smartphone. What a time to be alive!

There’s this I’ve noticed with manga, anime and how I take them in: very often, such series as Pluto, or Neon Genesis Evangelion while we’re at it, they start off strong and interesting, they throw you in well-crafted worlds with characters I want to know more about. The art is captivating and undoubtedly masterful. By the end, however, the plot’s typically so messed up I find it difficult to keep caring. And that’s precisely what happened with me and Pluto. Should I give up on “serious” manga?

That said, I concede that Pluto portrays a society where artificial intelligence has penetrated human society quite convincingly. A killer robot that’s left its (his?) past life behind and just wants to play the piano? Now that’s something I want to read more about.

Also, what’s with Urasawa and Germany? Monster also took place there and it seemed kind of arbitrary that it had to.

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REVIEW: CHILDREN OF DUNE

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

That was difficult to finish. Just like with
Dune Messiah, I found that most of it wasn’t about Arrakis itself. It tried to have a more complex plot centred around politics, but it ended up disintegrating and getting more convoluted all at the same time. All the new characters were boring and roughly everybody from Dune #1, including those we thought were dead, somehow appeared out of thin, dry air in order to fill in the gaps.

When I started reading Children of Dune and as I do mention in my review for Dune Messiah, an acquaintance of mine remarked that he’d given up on Dune somewhere around the beginning of Dune #4; “waaay too much religion, precognition and mysticism for my tastes.” I never thought there could be such a thing as too much religion after I was done reading Dune #1, but seriously, I have the unshakable impression that this one went one spice-induced trip too far, even more so than Dune #2. So many visions, parallel paths and characters becoming less and less relatable and in some ways interchangeable, and not enough about Dune ecology and cultures that made Dune #1 so fascinating and even relevant today. Agreed, a lot of that was insinuated, but let me tell you, I’d pick discovering more about the changes in Fremen culture and the dying worms over more helpings of bland, supernatural politics any day.

I have to admit that the last few tens of pages were a bit better, and Children went out with an awesome bang, so now I am a bit curious to pick up God Emperor of Dune and find out whether the series ever went back to the more earthy, natural direction the first one had instead of going further down the supernatural path, but I’m almost certain visions, precognition, supreme retro-cognition, concepts much too abstract even for me, continued playing an important part in the series, by the looks of it an increasingly important part.

Slowly but surely I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s not only more coherent, but also more entertaining reading plot synopses of the Dune sequels than actually reading the books themselves.

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