Crosshatching

Back in Warsaw. The festival was great, and I'll try to do a proper post about it, but only after I've gotten some sleep.

On my way back I dug deeper into China Mieville's The City and the City, and I really like what it does with my head. It starts out as a pretty straightforward noir crime novel, but as the camera pans out, you learn it's something much more complex. And you're not really given any sort of systematic backstory to all the weirdness, you have to kind of reverse-engineer the big picture from various everyday practicalities. These hints are delivered so subtly that at first I actually took them for witty turns of phrase.

An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling way. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

And with a hard start, I realized that she was not on GunterStrasz after all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent (...) after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away...

To my surprise, they turned out to be quite literal. Without giving away too much, it's the story of two cities (city-states, really), Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupying the same space, with parts belonging to just one (referred to as being "total" from one's perspective, or "alter" from the other's), and a whole patchwork of shared areas. The citizens of both are trained to only perceive their home city, or rather, to fail to perceive the other one, and its inhabitants. Openly and deliberately noticing the other entity is a very serious existential offense (again, trying not to reveal too much), and inadvertently doing so causes great unease:

I policed a music festival once, early in my career, in a crosshatched park, where the attendees got high in such numbers that there was much public fornication. My partner at the time and I had not been able to forebear amusement at the Ul Qoman passerby who tried not to see in their own iteration of the park, stepping daintly over fucking couples they assidously unsaw.

The fun part is both cities are sovereign entities and it is for example revealed that they were on opposing sides during World War II, and that to this day Ul Quoma is the target of an American embargo (think Cuba). Another neat, and I'm hoping deliberate twist is that you can't pinpoint the city's whereabouts. You are given plenty of context: ther's mention of Balkan refugees, direct flights from Budapest and Istanbul, and Beszel street names sound decidedly Hungarian... but then, the city is a sea port. So whenever you are given another scrap of origin information, you feel this low-level anxiety/frustration as the exact location keeps eluding you - which echoes the descriptions of people "unseeing" its phase-shifted streets.

I read most of the book on the train from Wroclaw to Warsaw, and when I got out of the train station, I couldn't help but look for glimpses of the city I just left - fully realizing how silly it was. I couldn't shake it even on the tram home, and kept comparing the two, noticing how empty Warsaw streets look in comparison.

Between the cities, Breach watched. None of us knew what it knew.

You couldn't get in

It's been quite a while. Guess it's a testament to how... settled my life's become (the word "routine" was quietly put down behind the shed before it had a chance to get a foot in).

Anyway, tonight was unusual and hilarious.

It started out with a delicious dinner at tiny new Sri Lankan place (although they use the name Ceylon, which I thought was politically incorrect - go figure), followed by the Warsaw Film Festival opening gala. The gala itself turned out to be something of a black tie event, with an actual red carpet and stuff, so we - me and... let's call her G, as she always makes a fuss about being featured in online stories - were a bit screwed from the get-go (her moreso than me), but hey, free champagne and people in costume! Yay!

We immediately devised a score system - 3 points for every celeb you spot, 2 points for a pretty person, and 1 point for someone you personally know. G was way ahead of me within minutes ,so I decreed she was cheating (she claimed 6 points for someone she then refused to point out in the crowd, for example, how's that kosher?). It didn't help matters that the first familiar person I saw was someone I didn't really want to interact with - one of those very distant, awkward acquaintances - so I ducked out of sight. G schooled me in the best way to deal with these situations: you avoid eye contact, and if for some reason that fails, you look them straight in the eye, say "Hello!" and walk right past them. And sure enough, that's exactly what they did two and a half hours later when we incidentally locked gazes.

The movie itself was pretty bad. The best part was when halfway through half of the screen was filled with the logo of the subtitle projector - the machine went into some sort of standby/screensaver mode, so several minutes of the huge fucking festival premiere in Sala Kongresowa went without Polish subtitles, while the tech guys scrambled to restart the system (we even got a glimpse of Norton Commander, how old school is that). For someone who knows people who work in subtitling it was the equivalent of a spectacular nip slip.

Afterwards we mingled, bumping into various acquaintances, including G's friend Ewa, who in my cosmology features as probably the only strikingly beautiful girl I know who is also perfectly aware of her good looks. She isn't obnoxious about it, or anything, but it seems like she certainly knows how to get her way. I also met another friend of G... but for that, we need to go back ten years.

It is 2000, I'm 18 and about to apply for uni. I'm taking these weekend preparatory courses in history, organized by the university, and so is W., my best friend from high school. I've always been too intimidated to yell out answers to the teacher's questions in class (omg what if I'm wrong?!) so whenever I knew one, I would mutter it under my breath to W. Now, there was this guy who sat in front of us, and whenever I muttered the answer, he would repeat it to the teacher, only outloud. I shared this observation with W. and at first we both thought that he might just know the same things I do, but we tried it out a few times, and he only spoke up in class after I'd croaked out the answer in my impotent nerdiness. Needless to say, he became our running joke for the rest of the course.

And so, who comes waltzing up to G at the gala? That's right. At first I wasn't sure if it was really him - it was ten years ago, after all - but it turned out he's my age and he majored in something that likely required a history test, so... Yeah, I got a giggle out of it.

Meanwhile, another one of G's friends called (they are legion - let's call this one "DJ friend") that there's some sort of party in the basement of the Europejski Hotel, so we decided to move there. The history prep guy actually works at the festival and said he'll try to get us to the venue in one of the festival town cars if we only pretend that we're some sort of festival guests. He sized us up and decided we should pose as "short film directors" which I thought was spot-on - "director" sounds impressive, and the "short film" part somehow gives leeway in terms of age and general blubbering idiocy, at least in my head. We agreed we'll pretend to be FOREIGN (because of course we did) and poured into the car spewing English platitudes. History prep guy immediately blew our cover by asking us something in Polish, so we spent the next couple of minutes trying to supress a bout of decidedly undirectorial giggles.

When we arrived at the spot, we learned that G's DJ friend would come get us in about 20 minutes. We weren't really sure how to get in there on our own, so we hung out in front of an inoperational automatic door to the hotel, watching equally confused people try to get in and bounce right back. Until suddenly, a girl with two guys walked up to the door and without missing a beat just pried it open with her hands, like they do to elevator doors in movies. We went "score!" and followed her inside, but once we entered the dark lobby, the girl turned around and said "I wouldn't follow me if I were you - I actually work in this place". This initially confused us, so we stopped dead in our tracks, uncertain, but before we could discuss this new development amongst ourselves, one of the girl's male companions apparently felt the force surge strong within him, so he extended his hand towards us dramatically (fingers spread out and shit), uttering with deep conviction "No! ^* Stop!" Ewa, as I mentioned, is very pretty, and probably oblivious to inadvertent Star Wars references, so this bizarre little display merely inspired her to walk right past the dude and into some random corridor. I'm good at doggedly following in other people's wake, so off we went.

Now, the party was supposed to be in the basement, so obviously G led us to a staircase leading up to the next floor. It's good that she did though, because the hotel was quite incredible at night - totally deserted, and really Shining-esque, except the corridors are green, and when you stand in them, the light reflected off the walls makes you look greenish as well. It's very creepy. Hopefully there's even a photo to prove it, but I didn't take it, so I'll have to get back to you on that.

It turned out that we went upstairs to find an elevator that would take us to the basement. Long story short: it didn't work out, we got caught by the security guy and asked to leave. We ended our little escapade just in time for G's DJ friend to appear and "get us into the club" which translated into paying 1/3 less than the regular folks, so not exactly the stuff of glamour fantasies, but at least we didn't have to stand in line. There was also a pretty hilarious "I got in, you couldn't get in" moment, as the DJ got stopped by the bouncer, and did a little "They're with me" spiel (even though we had already actually paid to get in), to which the bouncer replied "Great, dude, but where's YOUR pass?"

The music inside was the thumpy stuff of CSI murder-at-a-club montages. There was some more drama with additional passes to the "chillout room" which to everyone's confusion and dismay was revealed to be the nightmarish club next door, but apart from that, nothing else of note happened. To my surprise, there was quite a lot of talent around (that is what the kids are calling it, right? At least the sleazy ones?) but it was all of that peculiar variety that comes up as white noise on my scanner, so I honestly couldn't tell which ones - if any - worshipped the schlong. And that's sort of demoralizing, even if you're just window shopping.

Unfortunately, the free booze from the reception had evaporated from me around the time of our short film director town car extravaganza, so I soon vacated the premises, feeling a bit like I'd just recaptured a managable slice of the crazy youth I never had.

And now it's fucking late. Good night.

* ^ is voiceover lingo for short pause in delivery

Whistling sound

We went to Cambridge and ate huge baked potatoes stuffed with butter and cheese and beans and oh my God my left ventricle just collapsed. Wanted to go to Hitlerton upon Ruhr too, but never made it - we did glimpse Lolworth though. Had awesome balti, played some Civ4 hotseat, swapped spit (by way of inflatable mattress) with our host, saw Tamara Drewe (so British), bought a bunch of pretty awesome books (like this one, and this one). In other words, had quite a lot of lazy fun.

It's strange to think this was the last one of these trips (in this format, at least). Maybe that's where that need for instant gratification came from - knowing that I'm working on a deadline.

I always feel sad leaving, even if I really want to be back home already. It's a funny sort of sadness though, completely divorced from reality. Like a shot of nostalgia for something that never fully materialized. Could be a byproduct of partial idealization. Could be that they don't play movies on intracontinental flights and getting out of my own head was never my strong suit.

I love inorganic emotion.

Undelivered

It's tricky when an ongoing thread becomes part of your personal narrative. Once you've used that shorthand enough times, you start expecting reality to follow suit and wait for it to provide you with the encoded experience. As opposed to experiencing it in real time and expanding that code. That's about as close as I was able to get to what I wanted to say.

My narrative is that these little trips to the UK are what's been keeping me sane for the rest of the year, since - short as they are - they constitute my only holidays. The pattern has been established, the mental shortcut made, so I expected heavenly bliss to blast a hole clear through my head upon arrival. Instead two really nice, relaxing days happened.

So yeah, ongoing threads are tricky. But when you drift off for a moment on evening #3 and upon return notice you're looking at the people at your table through a vaguely bliss-shaped hole, you realize that sometimes they become part of your narrative for a reason.

Roses, condensed

Sometimes I really love my job. Probably never more so than over the past week. I was contracted by three different people to translate three different movies, and... well, let's just say Banksy's hilarious mockumentary turned out to be the least engaging of the crop.

Unfortunately, the trailer for the only feature offering of the bunch is a bit lackluster and all over the place thematically, so I'll showcase the last one:



The scripts I translate movies from often aren't 100% compatibile with the finished product - they contain scenes that were later cut, present the dialogue in a different sequence, or in some severe cases are only superficially related to the actual movie. It's a pain in the ass, but there's nothing I can do about it. This time it led to me translating a story that as it turns out never made the final cut. For once, though, I'm really glad it did:

There was this kid I grew up with, sweetest person you’ll ever meet, and could sing just like James Taylor, had a beautiful voice. His daddy was a Pentecostal preacher and he grew up in the church and ended up marrying a girl whose daddy was a preacher. And he was just surrounded by Jesus and he was a sensitive soul and he didn’t fit in the church. Didn’t fit there, but kept trying and trying until one day he just went to the hardware store and bought him a can of paint. He went to the church, he painted love on one side, he painted hate on the other. And then he sat down on the front steps crying. He just couldn’t find the middle.

Ok, back to work.

Side road

I've been going to sleep around 4-4:30 a.m. and waking up at almost 2 p.m. for the past few days, but today I have a breakfast appointment and had to drag myself out of bed at 10. I was totally zombiefied and had very little control over my thought patterns, so my brain was going off on all sorts of tangents. I got out of the shower somewhat more conscious, but with a very specific, and unshakeable soundtrack in mind.

I popped it on, and as I was pulling on my socks, and the ruckus in my head subsided, I had the oddest bout of nostalgia for that fleeting pocket of quiet before the shitstorm I associate with my school/university days. That stretching of of every second in your rapidly collapsing bubble, when you've already resigned yourself to your fate, but decide it's perfectly within your rights to ride out those last moments of escapism.

I never thought I'd miss that. And actually, I don't think I do. But the wistfulness stands.

There's not much chance of coming out clean

Sometimes i forget how amazing this movie is. Never for long, though. Never for long.

Gulliver's Travels

(Previously called voyages, until I googled Gulliver to learn how his name was spelled).

Went to a small party tonight, full of circumstantial acquaintances at best. At one point a guy who as far as I know is a DJ and has nothing to do with translations reacted to something I said with "Oh yeah, I heard you're problematic profesionally". When pressed, the most diplomatic answer he could come up with was "Well, I mean, you're demanding." He wouldn't divulge any personal information, so I'm just gonna resent whoever the fuck I want for that little piece of gossip.

I returned home by cab. As I settled into the backseat, the driver asked me if I wanted to take Wolska or Kasprzaka. Disclaimer: I'm the shittiest Varsovian on record. I don't know anything about my home city's topography. I did remember checking the route on google maps before leaving home though, and the name "Wolska" popping up, so I just said that, in a confident voice, feeling very proud of myself.

The trial wasn't over though. After about 5 minutes, the driver went "But do you want me to actually drive into Plac Mirowski? Because then I'd have to take Grzybowska and turn around..." I mulled this over for a moment, and summoning all my cognitive powers, I asked if it was possible he took Solidarnosci, and then took a right turn into Orla, and then another one into Elektoralna (something I vaguely remember my father doing at one point). He went "Ok, we can do that."

It was all I could do to keep myself from demanding that we invade Finland next. I felt like the master of the universe.

There was more. But I'm sleepy, and drunk.

Maybe later. I hope.

Nowhere bound

Had a wonderful weekend which kind of proved that a temporary absence of work can be a blessing when mixed with people and spritzers.

Also, my running water's back. I totally Papa Bear'd this crisis, so I'm extremely proud of myself now. Another morale booster.

Finally, the vague uneasiness surrounding the Breslau Epilogue has dissipated. It's a chapter very neatly closed.

Sealed

And so, after a brief delay, the Breslau File has finally been closed. Not exactly a story for the ages, but at least an interesting episode. Complete with time warping and a sort of out of body experience. I have to say that last part was pretty unnerving, but I've been assured that the problem might only pertain to this particular scenario, and not be a systemic issue.

Sorry for the obfuspeak, I don't feel like dragging this thing out into the open, but I'd still like to have a marker for it in here somewhere. And so, here it is.

I still have no cold water in the kitchen. It's been about ten days now. While trying to fix it, I broke my toilet seat. I also have absolutely nothing to do, work-wise, and it's driving me crazy. I was supposed to get this awesome assignment next week, but today I got a call saying "really sorry, but the boss's son is going to get it". It really bummed me out, so I decided it was time for little pick-me-up in the form of a banana milkshake - my go-to comfort food this summer. And the blender died on me.

My world is literally crumbling, it seems.

But tomorrow I'm taking my laundry to my parents'... This was supposed to be a motivational list of the things I'm gonna do tomorrow to turn this trend around, but that's literally all I could come up with. Let's hope it's enough.

The Breslau Files, Closure Pending

Back in Warsaw. This year, Wroclaw was... weird. Filled with work, and not much else. I think I only managed to leave the office before midnight once throughout the entire festival. And in this case, by before midnight I mean around 11:45 p.m.

Still, inexplicably, I did have some fun. And ate a lot of good food. And experienced some requisite social anomalies.

I also had a Disney moment. On the last day, as I was being gallantly escorted through the empty city to my hotel at daybreak, my companion asked if he could wrap his arm around me. I agreed, he did, and after literally 2 seconds we heard some two drunk girls down the street yell FUCKING FAGGOTS! Cartoon fireworks exploded, the last meatball rolled to the middle of the plate, etc.

Oh, how we laughed.

The Breslau Files

So I'm in Wroclaw, doing my festival gig. It's way more hardcore than I remembered. On the first day, we left work at 4:30a.m. And it wasn't the happy go lucky kind of "oh my look at the time" 4:30. It was gnaw your arm off get me outta here 4:30.

And then the same thing happened on the next day.

Now we're down to leaving around midnight, so I feel almost relaxed.

I'm eating tons of really unhealthy food and quite possibly already gained a couple kilos. Perhaps in response to that, my jaw stopped working today. It's happened to me once already, and last time mild anti-inflammation medicine worked, so I went to the doctor and told him just that. And he prescribed me Ketonal, which from what I understand is something akin to a horse tranquilizer. Anyway, I popped one and suddenly I was able to chew again, so I'm not complaining.

The work itself is kind of a pain, but the company is good. My co-translator was a very good bet. She is probably the most effortlessly cool person I know, has a good sense of humor, and appears to be completely unphasable, which comes in handy when dealing with the assorted freaks and geeks of ENH. Case in point - tonight, festival club:

bdq, walking up to her at the bar: Hello. I just wanted to look into your eyes.
dorota, meeting his gaze levelly, after a beat: And now, good bye.

There's humor, but it's of the unquotable, highly hermetic variety - either related to the sometimes absurd nature of our work, or springing from exhausted brainfarts. The current expression du jour is "shut down the reactors!", inserted whenever we have absolutely no idea what the person in the movie we're translating is saying (it's an actual quote from one of the translations, which inexplicably appeared on the screen instead of "I have a headache" or something equally unrelated).

I took it easy with alcohol tonight on account of the horse tranquilizer, so I had a rather Sober and Unkissed evening, but that was more than made up for by the unusually flirty Consort to the Beast, and the server goblin, who has taken to - literally - humping the wall. Something's gotta give soon, and I just hope I'm not anywhere near when it happens.

Oh, also: met (well, got better acquainted with, really) two new, potentially stellar people. So there's that.

Quickie

I already wrote about Pajiba vs. io9, but I forgot to mention that while io9's True Blood recaps are absolutely hilarious, Pajiba's are... just terrible. Bloated, boring, and utterly devoid of wit. (Yet their Entourage coverage is inspired. Go figure.)

Anyway, I loved the last episode so much that I even checked out the Pajiba recap, and sure enough - the things I liked about it most were the exact same things that got panned in the first paragraph. And the entire episode was written off as a disaster.

Meanwhile, I thought it was absolutely hilarious. Anna Paquin's delivery killed, I watched her crying scene at least 3 times... (actually, you can watch it here, in the io9 recap, and read the whole damn thing while you're at it. "Miley Cyrus, is that you?") I now firmly believe that all the flak she gets for playing Sookie is completely undeserved, it's not her fault her character's unlikable, and whenever they let her fly, she soars. I'm so happy that her Bill Compton's "Sookeh!" impression was just a first taste, and I hope they keep giving her comic material.

The new werewolf guy is a very nice addition, and I'll be completely on board once 1) I get over how cartoonish his body is and 2) he stops reminding me of Felicity's Scott Foley gone the way of the steroid.

The deranged new vampire guy is pure win, and he was Alvaro de la Quadra, the Spanish ambassador in Elizabeth, so obviously he was meant to rock (the laughable post-orgasmic void line from the previous ep notwithstanding). His car conversation with Tara was golden.

"It's skinny!" Even background characters got good material!

And they played that beautiful Massive Attack song in the strip club scene.

Ok, to play us out: a short interview with Sookie and the new werewolf guy.

I'm getting over the body as we speak, but at some angles, Noel Crane still rears his wholesome head.

Otherwise we'd go crazy

The festival is almost upon us, and it has imbued everyone involved with a seething hatred for Jean-Luc Godard. I get to translate a metric ton of his brain sewage into English, so I've developed a bit of an immunity, but still, sometimes the pain pushes through. To wit:

So, we asked to be told only about this, not about us, not about you – about something between us and you, you, who are we, we, who are you, we, who came from you. We placed “us” among “us”. We’re among us. Television is a family matter. Dad – day and mom- night. Dad – before and mom – after.

And then 20 more hours of that. Fun!

Anyway, I'm in more or less constant contact with my boss/server goblin, who uploads* the movies I then distribute among our translators. Whenever she's about to leave her house, she asks if I need something uploaded before she goes. It's a sort of ritual. At one point, when I copy-and-pasted my order from our Big Spreadsheet, she went "Pfff! How about a challenge for a change?" So when I sent her my next order, I snuck in Inception, in full Big Spreadsheet regalia (director, running time, language, etc). This became a sort of running joke, until last night I got another yousendit package with a file called Inception. Inside it was this:

You've guessed it. That's Jean-Luc Godard.

Sometimes it's worth it.

* through a series of trial yousendit accounts, so I've already received files from: Buffy Summers, Amber Benson, Sookie Stackhouse, James Marsters...

Mosaic

As I grew up, I discovered that I loved to wear women's clothing as a way to express my sexuality and myself, even though I was quite evidently straight (...) My later girlfriends usually found it a huge turn on and we'd always have fun trading clothes, amongst other things (...) The story I always tell people is I was about ten years old, swimming at my grandmother's house. My cousin and I were in front of a mirror, he had a buzz cut hairdo, and I had a little kid mullet. All of a sudden, he bursts out laughing and pointing at me and the bit of wet hair that was kind of curled around my neck and says,"HA HA, you look like a girl! You look like a girl!" I did look like a girl. I had very soft features for a boy and with my hair a bit longer, it wasn't a hard sell. But his teasing didn't make me feel bad. I thought I looked kind of... cool. I was intrigued by my androgyny and felt almost empowered by it. So I grew up thinking that since I certainly wasn't born to look like some gruff, muscled out Dude-Guy, I might as well work with what the good lord gave me, which happened to be a good, sassy pout and a sweet ass. So, off I went.

Godspeed.

Charting out and analyzing all the different permutations has never been my thing, but something about this quote fascinated me. Well, not something, it's not nearly as vague as that: straight guys acknowledging they have a sassy (sassy! I died and went to heaven) pout and a sweet ass fascinate me. That's such an... abundant, multi-pronged space. Every time I stumble upon someone of this ilk, I feel slightly better about the world at large.

Oh, and here's the author: