Ben Newman

It was very nice to be told by the ophthalmologist this afternoon that I do not need surgery on my eye. I had been given some reason for concern. It was aggravating to be told that I should persist in spending hours of my time with a warm sheep, i.e. the cereal-filled microwaveable hot pack that lives in our freezer applied to my face, but at least it's working.

I read like a medical diary. Yesterday had social interludes in the form of rushthatspeaks and selkie and genarti who dropped unexpectedly by with a lifetime supply of bagels and other heymishe staples from Mamaleh's. I paused Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (宮本武蔵 完結篇 決闘巌流島, 1956) in order to show spatch that Kōji Tsuruta lived up to his character's billing of looking more like an actor than a swordsman, which had sounded self-referential until he stepped onscreen as if exactly out of an ukiyo-e print. This evening I felt so set on fire that I curled up in bed for an hour and Hestia snuggled herself under the covers and pushed her head kitten-fashion against my knee. I made myself a sesame bagel with chopped liver and watched another of the Warners B-pictures written by Raymond L. Schrock that TCM has been running to more than fast-cheap effect so long as they do not contain Ronald Reagan. I feel as though I measure my time by what I can do in between managing my health.

I cannot manage the state of the world and it remains exhausting. Nearly a decade of my life seems to have folded itself like a tesseract of the Echthroi and it is hard at the moment not to feel that all that happened in the interval is that people died.

Long story tired, within a week of recovering from last month's double ear infection I was exposed to some other viral crud and now I have a double ear infection all over again. Next I return to the ophthalmologist. I am rethinking the entire concept of having a head. In the meantime I lay on the couch and watched Hiroshi Inagaki's Musashi Miyamoto (宮本武蔵, 1954) while Hestia basked in the cat tree. WHRB introduced me to Pansy's "Woman of Ur Dreams" (2021) and Nia Nadurata's "i think i like your girlfriend" (2023). I like this color study which feels a levitation away from being a surrealist painting. If it played vaguely near me, I would watch a film about Mark Fisher.

Under very few circumstances while watching Ishirō Honda's Atragon (海底軍艦, 1963) does one have to hand it to Agent No. 23 of the Empire of Mu, the shoregoing operative of a barbarically advanced civilization gathering itself from the bed of the Pacific to reclaim its former colonies which in the millennia since its Atlantean sinking had the temerity to strike out on their own as the nations of Earth, but he is played by Akihiko Hirata in a gold-glint of dark glasses and an out-of-season scarf tucked against the chill of the surface world and when he is held at gunpoint with his back to the tide-line, he only smiles in the slightest of farewells before leaping into the day-for-night-blue surf without even taking off his shoes. "He escaped into the sea?" His introductory getaway was more technically audacious when he drove a stolen taxi straight off a quay, but if he were human he would look like a suicide and once he's in the water instead he rejoins his phosphorescently submerged comrades without so much as catching a bullet. In a high-concept blend of lost-world pulp and post-war politics, he's a wonderfully uncanny touch without special effects, which is not to deprecate the film's ingenious panoply of images from hydronauts in a looseleaf of silver scales to a dragon coiling like a moray from the side of an oceanic trench to the crimson-clouded detonation of a geothermal sun. The people of Mu run hotter than seals: the sea smokes like a geyser around them, a wrench turns red-hot in the agent's contemptuous grasp; one of his colleagues appears capable of generating an eellike stunning charge. "We have special energy. It's useless." Elsewhere their civilization resembles a sort of Egypto-Minoan fusion by way of Verne and Haggard, its laser cannons sheathed in the coils of bronze ceti and the blinkenlights of its enormous computer banks carved around in cyclopean bas-relief. The empress of Mu looks like a nascent anime design with her hood of clementine-colored hair and new wave eyes, a casual ransom of pearls collared over her brilliant draperies and finely ringed mail. Humanity's last, best hope if it can be repurposed from a dream of militaristic nationalism to the defense of global ideals, the Atragon-class submarine of the title suggests a garfish down to its countershading, a sleek leviathan of spy-fi industry artfully equipped with a few indistinguishably magical tricks of its own. When Mu calls in its marker on the land, the inevitable destruction of Tokyo is a one-two doozy of practical and animated effects—business districts jolted to flinders by a precisely triggered earthquake, container ships set ablaze by an enemy sub's lancing ray—but the eye candy doesn't crowd out the food for thought when the sunken empire makes such a successfully fantastical double for the imperial past that Japan must explicitly repudiate in order to inhabit its international future. I wouldn't kick any of it out of bed for eating seaweed crackers, especially not the first glimpse of the sea-dragon Manda, a thick shield-wall of scales, seemingly endless, breathing. I just remain enchanted with the liminal simplicity of Agent No. 23 in his anonymous dark suit, a Magritte figure whose very ordinariness makes him surreal. His voice will narrate a history of his empire from a spool of 8 mm and deliver its modern ultimatum on reel-to-reel. "Admiral, this earthquake isn't a coincidence. Remember me?" He'd be namelessly memorable even if I hadn't loved his actor since Dr. Serizawa. This sea brought to you by my special backers at Patreon.