42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

What’s on my mind, to keep my mind off buyouts …

Books

Reading Moonseed by Stephen Baxter. A hard sci-fi novel driven by real science. Venus explodes. And not too long after, Earth starts to be eaten away by a contamination of a sample of moondust. It’s up to an astronaut and her geologist ex-husband to put together a mission to the Moon with no time, hoping they’ll find a way to stop the infection of silvery dust that is creating mass destruction on Earth. I can see this book as a movie, but as a movie, I wouldn’t watch it. It’s full of catastrophes and shifting characters. I’ve seen this movie called Volcano or Deep Impact or The Day After Tomorrow. But worth a read because I was tired of rereading all my old books.

Music

Zydrate Anatomy from Repo: The Genetic Opera. I don’t understand either, OK? I don’t want to talk about it. It’s very catchy, though. I first saw a clip from this upcoming musical on YouTube. I thought it was hoky, but I kept going back to it, to listen to it again. I’ve heard the upcoming movie called the next Rocky Horror. We’ll see. If you want to cultize something before it’s even released (Snakes on a Plane, anyone) you might be doomed to failure.

Movies

Idiocracy. A Mike Judge flick about stupid people in the future. We have enough in the present, thanks. Stop breeding! I didn’t laugh as much as I expected. I don’t know if that’s because it wasn’t side-splitting funny or if it was just too true to be funny. I can see us with huge garbage mountains teetering in avalanches. I can see the president being a flashy wrestler. I can see reality TV devolving to new levels like Ow My Balls. And advertising has taken over the world, even the government.

Juno. Maybe not worth all the hype, but a good enough story about a teen girl who decides to give her baby to a seemingly perfect couple. I liked the creative opening sequence.

V for Vendetta. Sorry that I didn’t catch this when it was newer. A stark commentary on government, tolerance, control and people finally having enough.

A Scanner Darkly. Cool. Weird. Nice animation effect called rotoscope. I took off my glasses sometimes and it almost looked like the original live action. A twisted story about an undercover drug cop who becomes part of an investigation of himself, because nobody knows what he looks like. His Substance-D-drugged friends are scarily messed up; they can’t figure out why a 18-gear bike only has nine gears that they can count. I know this movie is sorta dark but I actually laughed a couple of times.

MirrorMask. I am disappointed I had never heard of this movie until I was reading about one of my favorite movies, Labyrinth, and how MirrorMask was compared to it. Disappointed, because this movie was brilliant. Gorgeous. Whimsical. Sometimes a bit creepy. Charming. Full of odd objects and fantastic drawings with a life of their own.

It’s about this girl whose family runs a circus. She’s tired of being a performer and fights with her mother, as all teens do. Then her mother becomes ill, and the weird collection of performers is left at loose ends while her mother is awaiting surgery. The girl, Helena, is literally drawn into another world where she starts a quest in a hazy golden flickery world of light and dark, of creepy human-faced winged cats and spewed-out darkness.

Drop whatever you’re doing and find a copy of MirrorMask. It’s hard to impress me, and even harder to get me to say that a movie was better than Labyrinth. Which is, after all, connected to two of my favorite people: David Bowie and Terry Jones.