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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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  • Weird Studies

    • Weird Studies/Stalker

    16 Oct 2022 - 17 Jun 2023
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      • The zone appears. Makes me realize how much Annihilation owes to this. Kind of overly obvious now that I think of it.
      • Huh maybe not
      • Compare with Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren and read a wonderful William Gibson intro...have to get ahold of that.
      • Some stuff on color vision that had me gritting my teeth and wanting to go science-nerd on them. Not all that wrong, but still. Led to a discussion of qualities inherent in things (as opposed to the modern materialist view, where they are mostly held to be products of brain processes). Brought up what sounds like a really dumb Searle theory Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception.
      • Some of the film suggests a merging of technology with something else. Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology, techne vs poesis. (This particular quality of zones also a big part of Ballard's Crash, see Weird Studies/JFM on Zones )
      • Monkey (the telekinetic girl at the end) as representing some kind of ubermensch brought about by this union.
      • Can you live in The Zone? No, its impossible...even though people are drawn to it. "Every true artwork is a zone". You can visit but you can't live there.
      • Stalker as prefiguration of Chernobyl
      • The Zone as a return to Eden (well...a weirdly transfigured eden, but everything recovering its natural overgrown state). Monkey as Becoming Natural.

      • Notes from watching Stalker

        • Can't believe I haven't seen this before, esp since I've seen some much more obscure Tarkovsky films like Andrei Rublev, back in Boston when I had an intellectual life.
        • Very little science fiction in this, it's all Zone. Not a problem at all but don't mix it up with Robert Heinlein.
        • The physical depiction of the zone – as an overgrown former industrial wasteland or battlefield, muddy, decaying, and broken – is stunningly good, one assumes there is enough of this wreckage lying around the USSR that it was just a matter of scouting locations (not really true).
        • The commentary tracks on the Criterion disk were pretty good. Pointed out some of the cinematic techniques (the camera POV etc). Also the insanely difficult production history where a whole year's worth of footage was lost. And some glimpses of Tarkovsky's character and strikingly handsome visage.
        • The cinematography does not just show the weird, it itself is weird, violating the usual laws of coherence. In subtle ways that create a feeling, draws you in, doesn't hit you over the head with cleverness.