Deep Thought

Three of the four original Ramones are dead.

All four of the original Sex Pistols are alive*.

Whenever I remember that, it always strikes me as weird.

*Sid Vicious replaced Glenn Matlock, who co-wrote the majority of the songs on Never Mind the Bollocks.

27 years old

Yesterday I was talking to some friends about John Lennon and we came around to talking about how young the Beatles actually were, and I realized that Lennon was 27 years old when he wrote "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I Am the Walrus."  Now I am listening to "I Am the Walrus," and I am realizing that the man I am listening to singing on this recording, that I have been listening to for years and years and years, is my age. 

Sigh.  I've wasted my life.

Luminous Beings Are We, Not This Crude Matter

So, Irvin Kershner has just died. 

It's so odd.  Last night, I had just watched Empire again.  I had watched it too see what my normal DVD would look like on a  blue-ray player, since I had watched it earlier on my normal DVD player through my new LCD television, which I had bought after watching Star Wars and Empire on my old television and DVD player.  I had actually been pushed to buy the LCD TV and blue-ray player because of  the way Empire had looked, and watching it last night, on a forty-inch screen, in so much detail I felt like I was watching it for the first time, I spent the whole time analyzing all my favorite bits to it, like the now-famous "I love you"/"I know" exchange (due almost entirely to Kershner), reveling in the old school special effects, the performance of the actors, and I realized, after I had basically spent a thousand dollars so that I could watch this movie in higher quality, that it was probably my favorite movie.  So it's incredibly weird to read the next day that the man I saw at the time as most responsible for making it so had died literally within hours of that. 

Rest in Peace, Mr.  Kirshner.  And thank you. 

PAYPAL IS THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD

Because I don't mind doing a favor for John Cole. 

Fragment for later

"Greetings to the last soul to speak to my father while living."

Jack looked up.  Floating out from the forest was a bowl of thorny horns, a stag's crown, growing out from a head almost human.  The face was furry, and ancient in a way beyond age, bearded and chiseled, everything a dark nutmeg in the pale moonlight, crossed by shadowbranches.  The face was bound to a body, the bulk of a bull in the mold of a man, massive and mighty.  The apparition passed from the forest, walking with a cadence of one entranced, but the beastman's eyes were as lucid as lakeripples. 

"He has rejoined us now, and is once more beyond us all."  The voice was whistle of wind through wood, breath across jugs.  Deep and warm and rich and soft.

This makes no sense, thought Jack.  He stared at the creature before him, rising up above like an ocean wave headed to shore, and felt a creeping sense of the familiar, and of the unreal. 

"Do I know you, sir?" asked Jack of the creature.  

"We have not met, though we know of each other.  You have been told of me, by journeymen across the sea.  I am the Horned One.  The Second One.  The Good One."

"I see," said Jack.  Suddenly he wished he had a weapon.  The party was close, but now oh so far away.  "Well then—hail, sir.  Well met."