hospitalterrorizer

this channel, particularly:

these videos are really good. i found myself wanting to just see what anybody might have said about prototaxites, because i found myself wanting to see more stuff generally about that period of time, i was kind of wanting to see that old series, i forgot its title, but the one where there's rather elaborate 3d animation done for very early periods. the world before dinosaurs i think, or something like that. it's tragically subordinated to those things even by standing apart. but this very early kind of life, especially these edges where things had evolved such that they are unrecognizable to us now, i find that very inspiring and interesting. another good one about the first things to live on land:

i really like the reconstructions of cooksonia that i've seen. all those early land plants / things were really mysterious to me as a child, the world's strangeness was kind of contained in the fact that these things used to be here, to me. that and the rather amazing fact, to me, that our spine was the product of early fish, i would go around telling people about that and no one believed me. i liked it because i liked fish so much, it made me feel closer to them. despite the years between us all.

but this channel is a good way to waste time. i found out about a really well named ediacaran creature named the shaanxilithes. very pretty word. they are a kind of tube creature, not necessarily a worm. but maybe a worm. the very interesting thing about these kinds of animals and lifeforms, the thing that i find very exciting, at least, is that they seem rather outside of the configurations of life we are used to. classification is a profound struggle, the farther into the past we reach. each fossil is a kind of gamble and each interpretive act is only based on what is, for a thing that seems itself impossible. centuries spent wondering what the things are, and as with prototaxites, it seems possible to have that revelation, that they might wound our ideas of knowledge, the entire act of organizing threatened by these intimations. they are very poetic objects, these early fossils.

otherwise today's been slow. i prepared chicken, i played video games, i read a little bit of baudelaire but not so much, i want to read some more of these collected late fragments, though. i drew. i also had a moment that worries me quite a bit, where i was making a sandwich and when i looked up from the plate, a pressure entered into my head, and it was as if my eyes came unglued from one another, producing images i could not look at, there was vision but i was struggling to parse it, i knew what was there roughly but my right eye felt like it had begun doing its own thing, looking its own places. it's like being dizzy or like after spinning a while, the room keeps turning, your vision kind of loops on each turn, everything is spinning but never leaving your sight so it's always reentering center vision, escaping, reentering. it was like that in only one eye and i found it very scary and kind of stunning. it corrected itself but i really wish i knew what was going on. it's so sudden. i don't think i've done anything to myself to make that happen. i could say the things i am glad it is not but i don't want to curse myself, despite not believing in curses really.

tomorrow i will try to work on music. i wish i liked how things sounded. i wonder if it's an attitude issue. i don't know. i think it's just that i don't know what i'm doing. it's an issue with my hands being useless. i played guitar and that made me happy, at least.

here is the doodling from today.

i had a dream, i scarcely recall it. i was caught in a mall wandering. i remember many complicated feelings about the act of buying, the slate colors of tiles on the walls and the epoxy floor, or epoxy between tiled areas. some parts were older and more designed. it was all sad and dying.

i need to go sleep,

so,

maybe i should say fuck dynamics and stick weird distortion algorithms / harmonic shaping things on problem songs. it certainly made this thing i've been working on very interesting sounding, which is ideal. i want interesting sounds. sometimes dynamics are good. but what i need is a level of clarity where i can begin to figure out vocal rhythms and more importantly i need a sound which makes me feel ready to perform. i have inched nearer that. it's a sound that kind of scratches my ears, a bit, meaning it is satisfying, i think. may be too loud. i can stand to turn that down soon-ish but maybe it's not as terribly loud as i think. i dunno. dunno dunno dunno dunno. would like it to be instantly perfect, but it's not, but it's interesting and texturally dense in the way i need. it behaves strangely, which is good. some aspects of the sound feel pulled out by the thing i am doing.

i didn't expect to work on music, i was honestly feeling dire about it, and the sense that maybe i should give up was appearing to me as something sensible. this has snapped me out of that, hopefully for a decent amount of time. but who knows. it's hard to be positive about things sometimes, is all i can say.

today we went out, though, here i was, very basic, today:

my gf ended up scheduling us hanging out with a guy she knew since highschool, he knows her brother and he started texting her out of nowhere about hanging out. it seems kind of innocent though, i guess. she said i'd come too and he didn't back out. he seems like he just wants people to talk to about games and anime, his taste doesn't totally align with either my gf's or myself but he's a nice guy, it feels like. he seems pretty into those things, he like started talking about digital circus also, which isn't something i watched but his interest in it was a bit charming. i have seen all that jax fanart because my gf sees it and tells me that i'm 'like that,' and she finds all of the fanart rather cute. he and i talked about some videogame stuff but like i said i don't think we're like, into a lot of the same stuff, which is fine it's nice to talk with him. though at times it feels bad having to like, hold my tongue, like about attack on titan, it's my first time meeting him and he thinks it's like a great ending and great thing, and i just feel like it's all ugly and bad and i don't wanna be a prick. and it's best to not be a prick anyway, but it's also like, how well can i get to know you, how comfortable will i be or how much am i gonna be trying to just keep things flowing pleasantly. because i don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings, my hating stuff seems to do that and it's really rather impersonal, for the most part. it's not like i want to tear anyone down, all the time at least. he's given me no cause to wanna do that. or like, he likes shonen stuff, he likes normal guy stuff, he likes smash, i kind of hate smash, it's just sort of doofy to me i don't know. and it sounds like i think this guy has awful taste, it's just different. more that it's like, hard to talk with people about shared interests or a medium of shared interest and to just have different kinds of values. there was a bit where he was talking about how youtubers now making movies is like really exciting for him and that, for him, that's indie filmmaking (he was in particular interested in obsession which just seems like something i would be allergic to), and it's like, there's so so much, which made me think it'd be fun to show him stuff. but who knows if that'll ever happen. i'd like to, though. i dunno what i'd show him. or anyone, really. maybe we should just invite him to the theater if we're seeing something, or if they show an interesting anime film or something. i'd like to see him more, though, i think it'd be nice to at least try and be comfortable around him, and do stuff with him and talk about that, or see new things and talk about those, like it was nice talking to him even about stuff i don't like at all because he clearly does engage with it pretty closely, and he clearly has creative ambitions which make his viewing of things a bit studious in ways too. i mean, i dunno, i guess if not for my gf i'd probably never talk to him in the first place, and him talking to her again is kind of crazy, since her brother gave him her number, i think because he wanted to ask questions about his upcoming trip to japan, or maybe nothing in particular. or maybe ... (and i wonder, is that on his mind, the especially obvious things (and if so i wonder if comparing himself against me makes him think he has more or less of a shot (could really go either way))). she knew him in highschool, then as her brother's friend. he feels like a class of guy i'd never really interact with, he feels like he has a background that's sort of unfamiliar for me socially.

but we got lunch with him, told him about people we know and stuff we've done and he told us likewise, how he recently had an awful time at edc getting too drunk and then getting the flu, stuff like this. i should have told him about vomiting on a tree in san francisco. after this we got gelato at a nearby cafe, and talked more.

the way to lunch was annoying, we had to walk and it was so windy out, it really blew.

but after talking a while he took us home. i also wonder if we could get him around our other friends.

at home i saw that there was a camrip of the backrooms movie somebody put on twitter which i ended up like, curiously clicking through and then deciding to just watch. i don't know how i feel about it. i would say i'd like it more if it were just the found footage stuff stretched out as much as possible. more silence. i think i do like that the monster stuff in the movie is these weird people-things, more than the weird wire creature. this feels more interesting, at least. a bit more affecting looking too, and the sequence with the woman one in found footage is a bit scary. or her in the room, that looks good as well. i'd say there's a lot that just feels damaged by the a24 stylings coming through, everything is too centered and there's a kind of filmic logic that's too digestible that prevents any of its stranger ideas from being fully confronted by the audience, i think. like that one scene where her house degrades through this system of memory, until it's featureless and there's a misplaced archway. that's an interesting thing, or it could have been, it could have been a much more textural film but it feels like this is foreclosed upon by a sheen and aesthetic guidance that makes this, beyond legible, something that can go beneath notice, it's like how things 'ought,' to go, even if the centered framing of so many shots kind of points to an artifice in the camera it's always a little uncomplicated, it's always pretty much the shortest line between the viewer and information, it's a kind of naturalism of logic, and it's the kind of thing that only becomes painfully apparent if one notices it, it's hard to stop. that's why the found footage stuff works out so much better, it feels like it lands on much more interesting shots. i think they should have tried to work the whole thing like that.

there's probably more to say, but really i think i have some kind of warmth towards it, despite finding it basically like a movie a 20 year old would make, and that the psychologizing stuff, though at points seemingly critiqued by the film (her infomercial thing putting her in league with clark, as well as how at the end her psychological framing of her conversation with him has to fall apart for anything to progress), to be a frustrating thing in the space of the film because at times it feels like it is trying to get you to know it is doing something. i dunno. it feels less like kane and more like a24, that it seemingly neurotically remind you that it's doing something. but i digress, there is some warmth, from me, because that scene in the showroom house thing is a rather shockingly placed texas chainsaw massacre family dining scene pull, and i dunno, it kind of worked. or it made me a little giddy. and it wasn't nearly as brave as that scene is, with its long shot on the eyeball of sally, that it kind of feels like landscape photography there, which makes me think about all the wonderful shocking things you can do with a camera, ways to create tension between images and make us feel ourselves, each inch of being and the fact of embodiment, and that this film largely avoids the experience of the body (outside of some moments in the found footage sequences which feel like a muscular kind of filmmaking and do emphasize one's own presence and infirmity, the way they are thrown around, tape interference and poor focus and unsteady hands), still, clark being giddy about being able to eat the fake people is something i didn't expect. i also didn't realize there'd be a saturn eating his son bit, but that's pretty fun too. it's like more fun than i thought. i guess i hope he can make more movies, and is able to get away from this way of shooting.

i should also probably see it again at some point because a camrip isn't the best way to judge a thing, i was just rather curious about the thing. i do wonder if i'd come away a little less positive because the low quality of a camrip adds some fraying to the images that are not found footage that might cover up some of the sheen that seems to be there.

also found myself rereading john cheevers' the swimmer. they mentioned cheevers in this atlantic article about postliteracy. it'd been a while and i've been curious about revisiting it. i'm not entirely sure why. i don't have a special fondness for it, i think it's good enough, i don't love it, really. i guess that just means it works as a piece of short fiction, beyond any affection it's an interesting enough thing. there are certainly moments i quite like, the description of the storm coming on, the swelling of the clouds and the way they were likened to a city seen from a distant hill, now darkening, now a city over another. the description of the fall constellations and his sadness over seeming to see them. his misplacing himself, and the way it talks about his 'discipline for the repression of unpleasant facts,' it's not so subtle that something bad had happened, the precise dimensions also aren't so unclear but they're a bit floaty, the feeling of losing track of this, not wanting to know these things, and coming up with things like this and being surrounded by a sociality that seems to enable something like this (the kinds of summers where everyone talks of how drunk they are, how they've been too drunk recently), or references to him being a pilgrim, always moving from something. that sense is strong. it makes me think i should have a friend read it, it's the kind of thing i think he'd really really like.

i would also say that it feels like it is the genesis of a lot of bad kinds of writing, and it feels like the kind of thing taught to some extent in writing workshops that creates too great a sense of what a literary affect is / should be. it's not so good that it needs to be that kind of thing, i think. not that anything is. at the end of the day i have a different hunger for things, it's interesting to read something i had to read for a class some years ago, though, and thought was alright.

speaking of writing, though, i got some done today as well. i think i need to try and force myself to do so tomorrow too but i think i found the paragraph necessary to join one thing to the rest of itself which i had planned out and written some of. that feels very good. that and another portion was written, which may be what directly follows that.

i should sleep now,

so,

before the showing later, coming here between things i need to do in working out because i had a thought i'd rather write down than forget / try to dredge up later. it's not a special one really, it's just a sense i get from watching cooper at the end there, and the way the final episode takes from the entire landscape of america a labyrinth he is caught in, both extracting that sense from the red room bits in the epsiode, which resemble the end of season 2 and this entire sequence now a distension of that, in some way, that this kind of being lost and fumbling gives one a sense one has throughout life, of losing track of oneself, one's actions, what they might be doing to others. both the compulsion to fix it, undo it, put it away back into a circuit of goodness, or just that one realizes after living so long what one has done, that is what those final moments feel like. i can't believe what i am, this sort of feeling. diane experiences this in the episode, laura experiences something of the obverse of that where it is her realizing what has happened to her, some mirroring of tragedy, her own being lost isn't entirely dissimilar and she's as complex a being as everyone else, having done things to some extent, to others, but there's everything else too, realizing in proportion to your life, what has happened to you. i suppose cooper experiences this too, of life washing over you at the bottom of experience. this works so well because of those prior seasons and fwwm, of course, we know what they were, we feel what has changed, the length and time spent with these people leaves us with actual senses of loss when they aren't precisely what is remembered, this makes those final moments even more devastating.

the way he seems regretful and the kind of despair over things past, that cannot be smoothed over, reminds me of this conversation i had with my dad over how he disciplined and raised me. at one point he said something along the lines of:

i would have done things differently, i wish i did things differently.

one of the few times i'd seen him cry, which made me think about him yelling at me for years to cry less, cry less, and it felt strange seeing that he could allow himself. he wanted to be a solid force, which is why the discipline was so corporal and rough, growing up, something internally consistent and perfect.

but the sinking feeling of being there in that conversation, in the burger shop (red robin), at least to some extent the end of the series is approaching something like this kind of regular doomed feeling, expanding it, or giving it the space to articulate how it touches every other thing, that this sensation touches mortal fear, a wider sense of life, that the impossible is there, as much as it is shoved away. the inertia of what is ignored dragging one along.

i've returned, from the pilot episode of twin peaks. here is how i looked:

i had to take the really blown out photos of the outfit so the plaid showed better. trying to dress around the colors of the show. a bit.

as i said though, great episode of tv, never imagined seeing it on a big screen like that which made me very happy, and there's issues with audience, everything about lynch being turned into a kind of meme and moments from the show being these things people feel trained to laugh at, so moments like andy weeping in front of the murder site, that horrible nightmarish train, in a scene which makes me cry, especially seen so large and before the force of that image, that massive clot of disused, abandoned infrastructure, the site of passage of people and carrying of objects and lumber, industrial utility, the backbone of the community now in disuse and still employed, there's a lot there to absorb, but also andy being so touched and desperate to be seen as strong, it's overwhelming emotionally. so why laugh, is it because he's designated as funny, this thing the show moves around rather deftly and complicates and then a role he moves into, and out of, it's graceful, and it felt as if the people didn't want to allow it that. or james' big head. and maybe that's the fault of season 2 to some extent, that it makes james kind of a joke in ways. but it also doesn't, not entirely. i found this all frustrating, i can't know what i'm actually meant to feel from the images i just know there's a sense that they come off as trained and trying to appeal to an authority of images employed elsewhere, rather than the thing as it happens. i dunno. it's frustrating and when it's about this, and about what a lot of lynch does, it drives me a little mad. there's also the moment where the girl runs through the schoolyard screaming before the announcement of laura's death to everyone, this horrible premonition, this impossible thing, you know. it's shocking and seems like too much, not that it is too much in the space of the fiction, that it's a wrong inclusion, but it's this eruption of something. it's this totally quotidian thing overdriven, taken beyond itself. it's not funny!! maybe saying it's not funny would make it seem funnier to them. maybe it is funny, maybe i am just stupid, too easily taken in by things?

but enough about them, i think visually it's really perfect, getting to see it presented this way, i don't think it's the intended way but it's a good way, there's some very neat things done that you can't really notice on small screens. for instance, lucy watching harry pick up the phone as pete calls in about laura's body, you can see her in the reflection of the glass. i found that beautiful and there's this greater sense of something a little uncanny there, that she's ghostly and that we're turned from her yet seeing, it has a quality of perversity to it, to notice that after all these years.

certain images are much more violent feeling, even if they aren't themselves violent, or are only related to violence in a distant way. my gf also noting that one scene of the autopsy room with the miscommunication between the doctor and cooper, the flickering light, the way that articulates this navigation of reality / the domestic as sham-like, inconstant and still upheld as if it were the only thing, even in the face of this, and then that moment with andy. i also thought much more about that giant piece of wood on the shore of that pebble beach, as an image of similar effect. the way it is its own place almost, the folding out of a rather full darkness.

also thought about how james cannot see laura, the way he says it makes a terrible sense that she died, and this is both true and emerges from a kind of misunderstanding it feels like, that she's wrapped up in some terrible criminality, and thus she had to die, and not that the relationship between these things is otherwise. as always, bobby's words ring true, it was you good people.

the other thing, regarding the men in the series and james in particular, his whole way of being wounded and the way this offloads things onto the women around him, and we see this much more with laura. it's interesting how this kind of thing's captured here, it's also something one sees all over, that kind of neediness which spills out in such a way that it creates a task others have to manage. beyond anything like friendship or relationships, it's much more of this coddling thing, and in ways james is very coddled. it's not like that's all he is or all he does in the show but it's a part of his character, and this is explored with a lot of the men, benjamin horne as well, bobby of course, the way he treats shelly, leo and shelly. leo is maybe the best example of this dual coddling / control thing (oh yes, harold, too), that the coddling also creates condition for control. leland, as well. but as i said with james, there's more going on and his suffering isn't to be discounted outright but it's the way things spiral out. but this kind of thing comes to mind thinking of some of the men in our lives. how aggravating it can be, beyond aggravating, nauseating, a feeling of being kind of trapped in the social bondage of sympathy and politeness and that there is a thing which must be done about something that requires that you begin to disappear. on top of this, often a material factor involved in this as well, another kind of labor that exists. not to belabor the point but laura being this volunteer, seeming to do an impossible amount with her life, to uphold this image of herself which was needed by all of these other people.

and of course, if meeting him here the first time, this is all much less apparent i think it's this feeling of him post-fwwm that you get. here he is generally likeable, but it's that this changes, and i think it's good it's complicated, it's good that one remembers always that he forces his face into laura's in this desperate kiss because he needs her to love him, beyond proof, it's just a completeness he is crying out for, or that he need to express himself which excludes laura generally, perhaps it is this need to express oneself i ought to point to, and this is where a frustration i have enters into things, but this stoic affect and there still being this flow of expression and the need to express, the overriding of others in that, this is quite common across the series. any of this is subtle at the start, but i do think the way he tells ed that she was the one, both an earnest heartbreak and this strange thing he makes of her. regarding the completeness, it may be too simple to say he does it for coherence with some image he has of himself, of his life, and more that his affection might be able to 'work,' on someone, rescue her from something he scarcely understands and doesn't understand that he doesn't understand and doesn't want to understand that he hasn't even begun to, he sees some lack in her that has to be done away with. as if through her he can redeem the world, make it livable for himself, which is a kind of absolute negation of her. that it can't be as bad as it seems, and they have something pure. the belief in anything pure seems to be a nightmarish thing across the series. it's rather cruel, when he cries out and tells her that she loves him. much of his loves in the series have this quality though. with donna his inability to really commit, flirting with maddie, that going so badly, it's torture for her. one understands why and still, we see enough of donna to know something is shoved away, her trying to occupy the bad girl idea to do something for him, it's so painful. all of this keeping up appearances is torture.

a thing i noticed personally, i've always felt this way but seeing it so large it brought it to mind, how much i want to be in a world filled with that same kind of light, it's so beautiful, and it's so horrific, i think it's that it can easily fall into either, that neither negate the other, that it's all a kind of intensity.

i'm unsure which episode's we'll see in theaters after this. we may do the episode that's 6, 7, and 8. but who knows. my gf finds this friend a little hard to be around lately. we may try with another friend, if we do decide to go. they had pie and coffee at the concession stand, today, they were fine. i want to find a rather good pie out here, i do like pie, generally. maybe i should learn to do it myself.

also this up at the ticket table. they had the popcorn machine wrapped in plastic and 'she's deaaad' written on it which i found a little tasteless frankly, but what can you do. it isn't that it's not a funny show but i think the humor's employed kind of precisely to brush up against the serious stuff and create a kind of disquiet.

also watched this before going:

or most of it, finishing it now. i wonder how much of this history of the surrounding area was consulted for thinking up the show. a lot of the stuff about the modernization of woodcutting and the move away from trains to trucks and so on feels rather embedded into the show, and stuff like electricity coming in, the way the social field is constructed at all, that one can have a sense of that at all, the weirdness of feeling that history at the edges of modern possibility, and what intersects to produce the quotidian. also a great term i never knew, misery whips for those old two man saws to cut down huge trees. whatever the case, it feels like much of this history is pertinent to the show in some way, even if it's just that it offers a lens through which to look at the very real effects on regular lives and on what would come to be a standard of living in this country, the industry which informed that, what technology engenders in life and the ways it folds things into use. beyond that though a relationship to a place. but i dunno, stuff about trains and similar things, stuff about electricity, the presence of war and the way the work force exists, just interesting to note all that from another angle.

i'd like to see more videos like this, i wonder how to find more like it.

it is interesting to consider the way here, at the beginning of the series, the domestic horror sits at the edges, it's in shots of the palmer house, the flickering light, it's something we slip into the stream of, it's always going on and the moments of focus, the turning of the fan, that one dark hall shot from the upward angle, whose up there (leland, of course), or even the scene of sarah's tranquilization which suggests what happens earlier/later, to her. it's just there, it's very flatly there.

i bring it up largely because it's an aesthetic field i am so fond of. i don't know. i just love it a lot, it articulates a very strong feeling i've had growing up, the ways the homes looked, the way other people's lives looked, the kind of things waiting in my past and other pasts of relatives, and then the utility of each day carrying that and subjugating any abjection to maintain the functioning better.

all the crying in the theater, though, has left me with a rather persistent headache. don't feel i will be much good for the rest of the day.

i did doodle, at least, that was fun, here that is:

i should probably go sleep now.

so,