when art finds us

I watched Steven Soderbergh's Solaris tonight. Quite amazing what happens when we're on the exact same frequency of a certain piece of art. Good art changes every time, since we change, but every once in a while I feel as if I'm on exactly the same frequency, and everything gets... amplified. It's more common with music, since it's more immediate I think... "this is what I feel like listening to now" is a common experience. Movies, books, paintings, anything remotely visual, is harder for obvious reasons, so it's quite amazing when this happens, and even more when it happens unexpectedly, and considering that the timing has to be exact... Somehow the movie's non-personal elements, that is, the atmosphere, the visuals, the soundtrack, reflected how I felt very accurately, even as it differed from the mental image I had created based on the book (which I read in a Spanish translation of the original Polish years ago) and probably precisely because of how it differed, not always in bad ways.

I know, I know. Riddle me this, right? No, no riddles. Just lack of ability to explain further without going on for twenty thousand words.

So, back to the movie: Maybe a bit too introspective, and slightly claustrophobic in that sense (though that could be just me at this particular moment) but very good nevertheless. Soderbergh has achieved a true reinterpretation, rather than a simple adaptation--though I did miss the Ocean as a main character in the story. I know I'm just catching up now, but between Solaris and Avalon these past couple of weeks have been good on the SF front. And with Revolutions now only three months away...

.com viruses?

Dylan has a good question about the use of the .com extension as a Windows virus-propagation system. Considering all the stuff that's been done by virus makers just to get you to open the payload, it is a bit surprising that this hasn't been used extensively.

backblogging

All right. Over the past couple days I've sort of been ignoring emails, and blogging only sporadically. I had a sort of mini-personal crisis to deal with too, an MTV video sort of crisis, intense, short-lived, and, while apparently meaningful, actually superficial. This, plus the release and a cold, left me a bit exhausted. A number of things to do... I think I'll start with a small redesign I wanted to do for the blog...