I’m crap at spatial awareness puzzles, like Rubicks Cube. So what how of I have solving a 4-D Rubicks Cube? None, obviously. But frankly, I could watch it solve itself, as the program allows, for hours.

How long will I be able to resist the new iMac for, then?

Well, that should be the archives fixed. Link format has changed a bit, though.

Alan Moore interviewed. I’ve got half a dozen interviews with him and conversations about magic bookmarked, actually, mostly because my own approach to magic agrees in different ways with both his and Grant Morrison’s ways of looking at things. From what I’ve read Alan seems a lot more structured, which I’m not so big on, but at the same time, there’s a grace to it I respond to, while Grant’s seems much more freeform in a lot of ways, which works better for me, but at the same time, seems oddly sharp and harsh in places, a lack of subtlety that I’m not so fond of, although this may be just the fact that he’s kind of aggressive about it, whereas Alan seems more humorous about the whole thing, I suppose.

But anyway, the stuff that was the stand out bit for me in that interview was this bit:

“One way to look at it is to say each religion is a language, and magic is . . . linguistics. For a linguist, then, there’d be no such thing as a ‘false’ language. It’s not like, ‘Oh yeah, French is good, but Russian is not a real language.’ I mean, there are words in German for which we don’t have a concept in English, and vice versa. So the thing is, you have to accept all religions as being . . . they’re all true languages! I need to understand the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the Gnostics, of the Christians, of John Dee, of current occultists, of the Hebrews, of the kabbalists. To some degree I take the quantum position that in order to see truth, you have to consider a lot of different possible positions and hold them all to be true in some mysterious way. Magic is moving between those different positions, studying them, seeing what information there is to be gleaned from each of them, seeing how they connect up. How a story in the New Testament seems to connect up with an ancient Egyptian legend. And how this in turn relates to one of the Tarot cards. Which gives it a certain position on the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. And if you follow through these chains of ideas long enough, you start to get a different set of synaptic connections in your brain, different pathways. You start to see things in a different way.”

Well, David and Andrew weren’t convinced at all, and I’m hoping that the directors cut will a bit more coherent, but I watched THE STORMRIDERS for the first time last night, and I think I can see what everyone means about it. OK, the film itself was dubious at best, but as I say, this could have been a combination of dodgy editing and a bad dub, but the action sequences were gorgeous. If you like wuxia films (swords and sorcery style HK cinema, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), and have a tolerance for the ludicrous, then I recommend this.

Fiona just sent me an interesting LOTR related link. I think the guy has it fairly well pegged in a lot of places, although it could perhaps do with being made clearer that when he says “children” what he means is “adolescents”.

I’m currently reading Apocalpyse Culture II. J.G.Ballard described its predecessor, Apocalypse Culture as “the terminal documents of the twentieth century.” It follows then, that what I’m reading must be a collection of the inaugural documents of the new millenium. Cannibalism, conspiracy theory, interviews with serial killers, homunculi, mind control, deviant sex, letters to Satan and more, this is the flipside of Popular Culture, the ugly edges of our collective conciousness. Fascinating, disturbing shit. You probably pass these people in the street every day, and don’t know anything about it. Read these books.

Oh, and another LOTR related thought:

Many people tend to excuse LOTR’s cliches by saying that it invented the genre, that we wouldn’t have fantasy without it. They are, of course, wrong. Modern fantasy would almost certainly be very different without it, but it didn’t invent the genre. Conan the Barbarian was around in the thirties, and if you want to really look to the roots of the thing, you’re going back from Conan Doyle and Hodgson via Verne and Wells to people like Shelley and Polidori, and then back to Shakespeare and his mates, and yes, further and further back to biblical and pre-biblical times – the roots of what might be called fantastic fiction, as opposed to fantasy, which is just a subset of the same and grows out of it…

LORD OF THE RINGS, then.

I hate the books. Did my A-level English dissertation on “The Influences Of Norse And Christian Myth On Early Fantastic Literature” with specific reference to LOTR and the Narnia books. (Which I hate even more. I despise propaganda, especially when it’s fed to kids.) I read them several times, in a shorter period of time than anyone should have to. There was a period when I could have quoted large chunks of it verbatim, but mercifully age, and a facility for repression, have spared me a lifetime with hobbits in the brain.

When I first heard the films were being made, I thought I’d just ignore them. Then I saw the trailers for FELLOWSHIP…, and thought I’d give it a go. If I’m honest, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it.

But I did. The effects are stunning, and as an adaptation, it’s pretty first rate. They’ve cut out all the bits that made the book crap, and despite it’s three hour length, it only drags in a couple of places. There are only a few really bad bits – noteably the sequence between Frodo and Galadriel, where the scriptwriter seems to have taken a break and let the tea boy fill in, and the effects department clearly needed to be out of the office by half five. Sadly, most of these slow or just plain bad bits come toward the end of the film, so it’d be easy to come away with a worse impression than the film deserves.

But here’s the big flaw: It’s the first part of a trilogy of films. But as I recall, the book were not written, or first published, as a trilogy. They were written as one book in three volumes. Now, I’ve read the books. I know that some of the things that seem weak or needless in part one are there as set up for later parts. But I found myself saying “that’ll be made clearer later” an awful lot to the friends I saw it with, or “no, you just don’t have the full picture”. One the one hand, they’re a bit constrained by the books. On the other, they’ve clearly felt free to play fast-and-loose with the pacing in other places (and the film is better for it), but there are things I can’t help but feel they could have cut from the film without really losing anything, that would have made it a better film on it’s own merits, rather than just as part one of three.

I just know you bastards are going to point and laugh and generally accuse me of being a miserable sod, but I feel compelled to note that further to having spent a lot of time listen to Wainwright’s version of “Hallelujah”, I have come to the conclusion that the most heartbreakingly romantic song lyrics in the world are

“It’s not a cry

You can hear at night

It’s not somebody

Who’s seen the light

It’s a cold and

It’s a broken Hallelujah”

It’s all in the delivery, I admit, but fuck me, they’re fantastic.