(Not So) Permanent Vacation

My least favorite Rohmer so far.

June 13th

This one had a lot of poetential with some good dialogue but the premise kind of falls apart early on and takes the “good guy” wins as a cop out. Sinatra is pretty good.

Finished June 4th

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Another dive into the Youtube archive. Some Cali psycho-thriller wouldn’t really recommend it because some of the scenes are oh so stereotypical to what we see all of these movies. The double personality, the damsel in distress, the young detective falling in love with the suspect...Still, there are some good lines in there:

“Let me pick up the pieces.”

“They should have two names, one for the poor tourists.” (in reference to Mexican hotels with Spanish names)

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Everywhere? Not quite. When an individual person was defenseless, a business was not. The big economic forces had managed to remain free, although virtually everything else had been absorbed by the Government. Laws that had been eased away from the private person still protected prop- erty and industry. The SP could pick up any given person, but they could not enter and seize a company, a business. That had been clearly established in the middle of the twentieth century.
Business, industry, corporations, were safe from the Security Police. Due process was required. Rethrick Construction was a target of SP interest, but they could do nothing until some statute was violated. If he could get back to the Company, get inside its doors, he would be safe. Jennings smiled grimly. The modern church, sanctuary. It was the Government against the corpora- tion, rather than the State against the Church. The new Notre Dame of the world. Where the law could not follow.

Finished May 30th

Beauty
The beautiful, the fair, the elegant,
Is that which pleases us, says Kant,
Without a thought of interest or advantage.

I used to watch men when they spoke of beauty
And measure their enthusiasm. One
An old man, seeing a ( ) setting sun,
Praised it ( ) a certain sense of duty
To the calm evening and his time of life.
I know another man that never says a Beauty
But of a horse; ( )

Men seldom speak of beauty, beauty as such,
Not even lovers think about it much.
Women of course consider it for hours
In mirrors; ( )

A shrapnel ball -
Just where the wet skin glistened when he swam -
Like a fully-opened sea-anemone.
We both said 'What a beauty! What a beauty, lad'
I knew that in that flower he saw a hope
Of living on, and seeing again the roses of his home.
Beauty is that which pleases and delights,
Not bringing personal advantage - Kant.
But later on I heard
A canker worked into that crimson flower
And that he sank with it
And laid it with the anemones off Dover

I Saw His Round Mouth's Crimson
[I saw his round mouth's crimson deepen as it fell],
Like a Sun, in his last deep hour;
Watched the magnificent recession of farewell,
Clouding, half gleam, half glower,
And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek.
And in his eyes
The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,
In different skies.

Finished May 28th
Quite enjoyable, I didn’t even know there was a genre called LitRPG, hopefully I can read some more during this three month camp. In terms of this book specifcally, I think there was great world building and concepts for a zombie apocalypse, one of my main critques would be the voices of some characters, they sometimes come off as corny — this could just be because of the target audience being young adults.

Finished May 27th


This is like free base jazz — I will try to deconstruct what I mean by that… This book reads like a mind after a post relapse. Wait that might be a bit off the mark, this book is a bit like this description. A bit. I’m afraid I won’t be able to describe this style effectively becuase I too am a little out of it today. Here is an excerpt to give you a taste of the words:

Soldier Clothes

Millions pretend
that water is white noise

The people part of memory
sleeps beside a soda can
or two

Beside a chair’s eye view of revolution

Anyways, I read two of Tongo’s books now. It builds, like a drumming, each poems barely clinging to the next so that by the end you get this clear picture, even though it may be abstract, absurd and frightening.

Finished May 25th
I had this one on my tablet for a while, finally got around to watching it. I have to agree with the listal community on this one, it puts the dramatic in melo-dramatic. So much tears but no really emotional connection to the characters. I am still on my hunt for a great romance anime!

Back from the rubbish heap I return, distractions begone!

Finished May 23rd
The Blaxorcist, pretty decent. Watched this one on Youtube, I would think there are better quality prints than the one I watched. This film though it may fall behind (quality wise) to films like Ganja and Hess and Candy Man it is still pretty good, touching things issues like God and the real problems we face, the ancestral past that remains in black conciousness...possession and female freedom.

I have been on this book for weeks, now that my day job is on hiatus, maybe I can finally finish it.

Finished May 20th
This one starts very slowly and even in the middle with the back story, it loses the reader a bit but this earlier work of Dick does contain some elements of greatness. The interaction between the three main characters is a undercurrent tension that builds throughout the novel. I think its only towards the latter end of the novel that the action really starts to pick up and my interest accordingly. There are elements in this work that make Philip K Dick my favourite writer (I can say that though I haven’t read so widely) like the paradisal roaming or a paradise lost like we see in Martian Time Slip and the incompetent or even impotent main man, Carl in this sense that mirrors the author quite closely. Either way despite it’s faults I still enjoyed it towards the end, I can imagine this being massacred in a workshop if Dick ever attended those things.