New Media Wedding Cakes

Feminist Noir and the Rare Pathetic Sociopath: Natsuo Kirino's "Real World"

When I decided to read "Real World" by Natsuo Kirino I was looking at it online, and I wanted it right now so I drove over to the Grove, the only Barnes & Noble in L.A. that I could find had it in stock.  It was only after I bought it that I read a blurb on the back cover that would have sold me on the book twice over: the Plains Dealer describing it as a "feminist noir."

The story of "Real World" is simple: most of it is told from the points-of-view of four Japanese girls who befriend--or at least are fascinated--by a boy, called Worm, who has killed his mother.

The VALIS Trilogy leads to one conclusion: Philip K. Dick was fucking nuts

I have read, now, all of Philip K. Dick's final works, his so-called "Valis" trilogy, although "Valis" should technically be capitalized, as it is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System.  It was also, apparently, a very real hallucination that sent a pink laser into Philip K. Dick's brain after he saw a fish necklace around a door-to-door proselytizer's neck.  So you know all of this is going to be pretty much totally-****ing-insane.

That cat is terrified.

For the uninitiated: Philip K. Dick was a science fiction novelist from the nineteen-fifties to the eighties when he died, and is the mind behind the stories later adapted into movies like "Total Recall," "Minority Report," and "Blade Runner."  His earlier books are chock-a-block with humor and mindscrews and generally uneven wackiness, sort of like if Jorge Luis Borges stretched his stories to two-hundred pages and included a lot more in the way of drugs and robots.  Later in life, Dick did indeed have some crazy sort of vision, and it made his books in most cases better, a little more psychologically grounded (in terms of characters, if not in terms of plot) and it is my opinion, regarding said vision, that no matter how long the explanation it will not make a whole lot of sense to a sane person, so just stick with what I wrote earlier: pink laser, fish, meaning of the universe.  Or something.

Commercials are the New Surrealism

I don't know what to make of this Japanese commercial for ramen soup.