Chronicles of Awesome vol. 1: America! Fuck... no?

Korean Dictator Kim Jong Il, feeling ronery.

Proof, if any were needed, that anything America can do North Korea can do retardeder: Fucking USA
This clip, from North Korean tv, did the rounds a bit a while back, and now some ultra-obscure world music hipster band have gone and done a cover. Like one was needed. Fucking USA speaks for itself, it simply is, no explanation needed. Oh, and the ultra-obscure world music hipster band shares an ultra-obscure hipster label with the gloriously named Master Muscians of Bukkake. Props to the Underground for that jem of a title. You think they play weddings?

I heart my new notebook

(my new laptop. Not pictured: my 'laptop', if y'know what I mean, eh?)

(note: this post was composed entirely for my new laptop PC, a Toshiba Satellite M55. It frankly disccuses my deep, private and very disturbing feelings for this piece of technology. If you are not my Toshiba Satellite notebook then please navigate away from this site.)

Where to begin? You leave me speechless -ironic behaviour for a communications device but one of your many quirks which I have grown to love. Quirks like the odd placement of your delete key, the playful way your cursor will drag when highlighting text, that excited yelp from your cooling fan when I turn you on. My uncle once told me that we like people for their qualities but we love them for their defects. Yes. Love.
Yes. That was actually a line from that movie 'Hellboy'. In the short time we have been together, Toshiba Sattellite M55, I have come to realise that I love you. It frightened me at first -proving that it was really love and not base lust- but now I realise that I have never felt any emotion more strongly or truly. Love. Lovelovelovelovelove.
I cannot lie to you, there have been others. I have recently seperated from a desktop unit. I thought it was love at first; we played together for days on end, she took me through a Martian research station into the bowels of Hell, we paused to watch the way the sun reflected on the water on the coastal road connecting parts of City 17. She let me fill the custom radio station in Vice City with fifteen identical copies of 'Raining Blood' and, when I was bored, 'Baby Got Back' and 'Cop Killa'. But, later on in our relationship, something in her changed. The pixel-shaders that had once made Half Life 2 such a joy were wearing her down and whereas once we stayed up until six AM using her firm grasp of Newtonian physics and my limitless capacity for degrading violence to club Combine soldiers to death with toilets, now she froze after fifteen minutes of gameplay. Barely enough to walk through the train station and listen to Doctor Breen's 'It's safer here' speech, not nearly enough to build a relationship on. The matt-black case and blue neon light that once I found so appealing now seemed bloated and cumbersome. I tried to turn things around with extravagant gifts like a new graphics card, but my efforts were as futile as those of Sisyphus or Cervantes' eponymous knight. There was something wrong, deep in her configuration, that prevented us from regaining our lost spark.
For the longest time I blamed myself, lying on my bed contemplating ending the whole sorry mess of a relationship while she busied herself with some domestic task, like downloading that Family Guy movie from bittorrent. Had I done something to change those settings which were once so perfect? Was it unreasonable of me to expect an Athlon 2400 with 512m/b of RAM and a Radeon 9800xt graphics card to play Half Life 2 at 1200x1600 resolution? By the end, she wouldn't even play Starcraft without locking up, sullen and silent. We had been reduced to playing back the same MP3s and watching the same DIVX movies, we had become like my parents, barely interacting, ghosts of what we used to have. And the less I say about that case of Jeefo worms she had the better.
With you I promise it'll be different. I'll be different. No more games, no more playing hard and fast with startup options, regular checks for viruses and spyware. This will be an adult relationship, built on trust and regular updates.
Oh, and I hate to broach this to you in such a public setting but when me and my other computer broke it off we kinda decided to be, y'know, 'friends with privileges' or whatever they call it here. Anyway, I kinda bought her hard-drive in a caddy and, y'see, I kinda noticed you've got that firewire port- I'm just going to come right out and say this- I was thinking that maybe I could, y'know, plug her into you. I think you two would get on, she's got about ninety gigs of music and films. I just really don't want to shut her out of my life completely. There were bad times but there were good times too. No, it's not your hard-drive. I don't think 80g/b is 'too small'. Quality is better than quantity. Sorry, that came out wrong. What I mean to say is, she's a little older than you, she's had all these experiences and she has all this valuable data. I really don't want there to be compatibility issues between you two.
Oh, and, uh, you might want to get tested for Jeefo worms. I'm just saying.

America - *heck* yes.

Well, I'm in America, typing on a Mac of all things from the air-conditioned IT facility of Reed College, Portland, Oregon.
Those of you who have been to the U.S will know about it's fluctuating levels of realism. Driving down the streets I pass cars from the Grand Theft Auto games, I hear the same smatterings of conversations and the radio -ah yes the radio- plays endless, and endlessly bizarre, adverts that seem to have been lifted directly from that game's much-acclaimed soundtrack. Then there's the parts where reality is far too close, like the meth-addicts and the smalltalky introductory sessions I've been having. Last night was an uphill struggle from nine until one to find and drink beer. Me and some people who half an hour ago were strangers passed from room to room like ghosts, congregated under street lamps, smoked cigarettes, drank forties from paper bags. Unlike a lot of the people here I'm old enough to drink legally, and unlike most of them I smoke like Krakatoa about to erupt, so there's a little distance there.
So far I've managed to read the new Bret Easton Ellis novel (you can tell from the blank, unnaffected prose and Gen-X malaise, right?), which is pretty great; the Oddyssey, which I suppose is very important, and The Men Who Stare at Goats, which veers between being laugh-out-loud funny and kind of uncomfortable. All come highly reccommended, but then there aren't many things that I don't like. Except Macs, which are flimsy, toy-like computers with a gimmicky design hiding their grindingly slow operation (Five minutes to log-in, two minutes to open up Firefox, browser windows that judder like Michael J. Fox)

Movie Review: Le Island

Scarlett Johannsen, not pictured: my erection.

I don't really dig paying for films. That's why I use bittorrent to download them. It makes a lot of sense; if I had gone to the cinema to see some of the films I've seen recently then I'd have paid money to spend ninety minutes waiting for the guy from the Shield to say 'It's clobbering time!' and seen films which any reasonable cinema viewer would compare to having raw sewage injected into their eyes. I would have also parted with £5 a pop to sit through an admittedly quite scary horror film only to have my viewing experience end with possibly the most stupid ending since the tap-dance number at the end of Zatochi. Without downloading I would also have paid full price for a DVD of one of the most relentlessly stupid films I've seen in my entire life.
That's why I downloaded Michael Bay's summer blockbuster The Island, or to give it it's correct name, The.Island.INTERNAL.FRENCH.TS.REPACK.1CD-IcE-TEAM.avi.
It turns out that I should have really listened to the 'French' part.

Director: Le Bay Michael.

Cast:

Scarlett Johannsen
-Her Breasts.
Ewan McGregor
Steve "Steve Buscemi" Buscemi

In futuristic France, the French government has built a vast underground cloning facility to supply the population's insatiable hunger for meat created in the cruellest conditions possible. Ewan McGregor is Six-Écho De Lincoln , a clone whose skin and organs are destined for the Parisian dinner tables. Consumed by bitterness and self-loathing he engages in cold, mechanical sex with Delta De la Jordanie Deux (Scarlett Johannsen), a prostitute who may also be his sister. In one thrilling scene (shot enitrely in black and white and comprising 39 minutes of the film's running time) Jordanie has Lincoln swear his undying love to each of her body parts in turn, a conciet that may have been derivative if the scene hadn't been shot on Jet-Powered Hover Bikes.
McGregor and Johannsen's dialogue only amounts of five minutes of screen time, allowing the pair to communicate entirely through languid stares and smoking. It is a testament to director Michael Bay's unflinching artistic vision that he interrupts potenitally crucial scenes to show a close-up of a clock or glass of water, and film viewers must surely appluad 20-year old ingenue Scarlett for only attempting suicide four times after shooting a gruelling hour-long rape scene with co-stars Buscemi, Michael Clarke-Duncan, Sean Bean, Rocco Sifferidi and Asterisk which was cut from the final film.

Memorable Quotes
Six-Écho De Lincoln : Je pense qu'ils vont vous tuer.
Deux-Delta De la Jordanie : Je vais à l'île.
Six-Écho De Lincoln : La Jordanie, là * est * aucune île !

Overall: Le l'île is a challenging, thought-provoking piece of world cinema that deftly explores human relationships, close-ups of objects and France's complicity with their Nazi occupiers in World War Two. Maybe I'm being a little presumptious, but I think the next Palm D'or is in the bag.

Want to see how a dictatorship falls?

The New York Press has a great review of one of my favorite movies, Il Conformista, to coincide with it playing at NYC's Film Forum. It does a better job than I can of saying how beautiful and inspired this film is, and how influential it has become. I still can't find it on DVD, or even VHS, so I'm holding out for a re-release. Also an end to war and suffering.
Also, I Heart Huckabees is great. It's a Existential Comedy so good I can't believe Charlie Kaufman didn't write it. You have to check it out, I can't do it justice here. Please, please, for God's sake don't let the fact that Jude Law's in it put you off. I had my doubts, but you must let go of your ego, and suchforth. You can go back to hating Jude Law after the film's done. Oh, and Britney Spears was originally down for Naomi Watts' role. And Shania Twain's in it.
This is why I have a court injunction barring me from promoting films.