HERE COMES A CHOPPER TO CHHHHHHHHH

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine brought to my attention an off-broadway production of every high schooler's collective favorite dystopian future novel, 1984. I, not being one to miss such a heroic attempt at live-action, low-budgeted adaptation, sought to buy tickets to see a Saturday matinee performance of it. At a paltry $25 per ticket (plus applicable convenience charges), this 80-minute uninterupted spectacle of postmodernism is well worth the price of admission.

Without spoiling too much, this envisioning of the 1949 George Orwell novel does a more-than-adequate job at capturing the disconnected, lonely feeling of Winston's troubles throughout the course of the story. Naturally, minor details are cut in favor of cramming the main plot points into something that's just barely under an hour and a half, but the important bits are there. It's done by a group of artists known as the Godlight Theater Company, who have worked on similar adaptations of other novels such as Blindness, Slaughterhouse Five, Farenheit 451, and so on and so forth. I could go over their merits as a company, but to be honest this is the first time I've ever heard of them, so if you're so inclined to learn more about them you can just click on the link. That's the magic of Al Gore Presents : The Internet, Hard at Work!, hard at work.

The acting was delightful, especially the pasty, soft-spoken yet intimidating man who played O'Brien, although Julia looked somewhat similar to a girl I once dated who dumped my loser ass swiftly, so that totally took me out of it. I also very much liked how the actor who played Parsons reacted in an explosion of nervous fury when he was sentenced to Room 101, as his sentiments very closely parallel mine whenever I'm told I have to go to school, or work, or outside, or basically anywhere that involves leaving my basement.

Perhaps the most interesting of design choices involved the lighting - there was often a square of light in the center of the stage, which was treated differently in each scene (for example, in one scene it's treated as an imaginary table). The telescreens were depicted by four women standing at the outer edges of the stage, quietly chattering away as the action unfolded in the center and wonderfully illustrating the claustrophobic feel Big Brother hammered down on the doomed city.

It's currently being shown at 59E59 on 59th Street between Madison and Park, and it's a grand old time and highly recommended by this sci-fi fart in the wind, so take that as you will.

HE KNEW IT WAS HAPPENING ALL OVER AGAIN

I have a tendency to have frightening dreams based on whatever I'm critically engaged in at the moment.

A few weeks ago, I had begun playing killer7 for the Gamecube again, a videomajiggy that features co-design credits of Shinji Mikami, creator of the campy Resident Evil series. In this game, enemies would laugh maniacally before slowly crawling towards you, invisible, and if you didn't take them down quickly enough they'd grab you and explode, wrecking your shit. I had a dream where I was running down tight corridors, and I heard the laughter and got very frightened, as if an army of invisible bad guys were waiting behind every corner.

Again, just last week after a hardcore 1984 session, I had a dream that involved telescreens. I had, apparently, broken some mortal law that was about to be scrutinized by the Party, and I had done it in front of a telescreen, which has the ability to watch the viewer at all times. Knowing that I was about to be erased, panic began welling up inside my chest. To me, in a nightmare, there is nothing scarier than knowing you are, undoubtably, going to die. Not even death itself is a scarier concept than knowing that your inevitable doom is slowly spreading through you like the slowly retracting jaw of a snake, ready to attack and strangle its prey for a quick meal. Holy mother of balls.

Needless to say, I have woken up the past few nights in a cold sweat. Sometimes I wake up with the fear still inside of me, as if the dream hadn't ended yet, and it has somehow manifested itself into my waking life.

So perhaps it is not a good thing that I have begun reading Ring, Koji Suzuki's horror novel that spawned the popular films. I briefly mentioned this in my last post, which I will not dignify with a link (scroll down). I, admittedly, have never seen the movies. I'm not much for the horror genre, in case you can't tell. But I find the book engrossing, at least in the first fifty pages, and despite the morbid air and atmosphere it is a casual, fun read.

The translating/publishing house is Verticle, who also has a hand in translating a few of Tezuka's works including Black Jack, which is fucking awesome. It's about an unlicensed surgeon who has the ability to perform miracle cures on patients. He is generally considered an outcast and a thief, considering how loner qualities, deformed appearance, and outrageous doctor's fees. However, we know he's grossly misunderstood - Black Jack is unbearably tragic, constantly the victim of circumstance and a bastion of moral indignity - he is essentially the human, adult version of the serialized Astro Boy and repeating his laundry list of woeful sorrow would be best left for a post later on, when volume 3 is released later this month.

Unfortunately this blog post must be cut short; I have decided that taking a winter class that forces me up at 6AM was a good idea, and so my recent nights have been cut tragically short. I shall end this post with a YouTube video of the Talking Heads, because if I can't see David Byrne live then I can at least close my eyes and pretend I'm there.