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We were talking about sleep (My real talent), which led to dreams (I don’t remember mine), which led to Paprika (I cannot forget my friend Jay yelling “Etchosera!” during a screening of Inception), which led to the late Japanese filmmaker Satoshi Kon, which led to his television series, Paranoia Agent.

This weekend I saw the complete Paranoia Agent. It’s brilliant. Paranoia Agent starts with a seemingly random series of attacks committed by a boy on roller skates, wielding a dented metal baseball bat. This leads to a police investigation, which then moves into unexpected directions. The attacks are not random after all: the victims share feelings of anxiety, dread, helplessness. It is as if their worst fears have taken external shape, like Jung’s concept of synchronicity (“temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events”).

For a simpler illustration, listen to this song by The Police.

(Aye and I used to sing this between classes. I thought the line “Only the rush hour hell to face” was “Only the Russians have soufflés”. Which I think is better. Also I think this was Sting’s audition for the role of Feyd-Rautha in David Lynch’s marvelously terrible film of Dune. Or Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.)

Paranoia Agent (2004) reminds me of other works I love: David Mitchell’s novels Ghostwritten, number9dream and Cloud Atlas (Note David Mitchell’s long-standing Japan obsession) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.

Just seeing this trailer makes me want to watch the movie for the 20th time. Those tracking shots.

And if I watch Magnolia again, I’ll have to see The Earrings of Madame de…(the Criterion edition has an intro by P.T. Anderson and by the way I love Phantom Thread even if I frequently want to strangle Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, which is the point).

Meanwhile, the final chapters of my travel book are waiting…waiting…waiting…

So this is really a post about procrastination.

These appeared in my newsfeeds on the same day.

St John’s Dancers in Molenbeeck, by a follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

500 years ago this month, a strange mania seized the city of Strasbourg. Citizens by the hundreds became compelled to dance, seemingly for no reason — jigging trance-like for days, until unconsciousness or, in some cases, death.

Read The Dancing Plague of 1518 in The Public Domain Review.

And twenty years ago, one of my favorite movies opened in theatres.

When I was living in New York and working on a newspaper, I’d get off work at 2am and we’d go to clubbing at Studio 54. There weren’t a lot of other places in the neighbourhood to go to. I had a tailor-made blue suit that was my sole legacy from my father. It was my magic charm for getting into the club. I was scared of Studio 54 at first – but it wasn’t in the least bit scary once you got in. My first date with my future wife was there.

Read Whit Stillman and Kate Beckinsale: How we made The Last Days of Disco.

Chloe!

Make another movie soon, Whit.

You need to see Army of Shadows, Melville’s masterful film about the Resistance. And Bob Le Flambeur. And Leon Morin.

Photo from Catster

I love tarot cards—the symbols, the myths, the far-out designs. In Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies they communicate using the tarot, and it’s so arcane and esoteric I can’t find my damn copy. I enjoy consulting tarot card readers and distinguishing between the bullshit artists who are only trying to sell you stuff, and the truly gifted who are not bound by regular time (Like Dr Strange and his 14,600,000 possible outcomes). There are a couple of tarot decks in my house, but I cannot read them to save my life—the rational part of my brain starts mocking me and I cannot take it seriously. I have no faith in my tarot interpretation abilities, but I have faith in the movies.

Noel, who is now based in Singapore, gave me these Criterion Collection movie postcard sets. I like them so much that like my Penguin Books and New Yorker postcards, they will never be mailed out. However, it’s occurred to me that each movie poster summarizes an entire cinematic universe with its own language, characters, stories, and could therefore be used for divination. Or as I prefer to think of it, studying the themes that surround an issue.

First I had to pick out the postcards of the movies I had seen and remember well, so I had to leave out Carnival of Souls, Cameraperson, Lady Snowblood and others. This left me with 28 cards, whose meanings can change according to the context. These include

You are ambitious and will go far in life, but nobody likes you because you’re a busybody and a teacher’s pet, and your EQ is low.

What you have is not love, but co-dependency and addiction. Get out of that relationship before you kill each other!

Self-explanatory.

Bitch, stop popping those pills, you’re an addict.

Your plan is idiotic. You think you’re going to solve your problem, but your dumbass strategy is only going to make things worse. Just stop.

So you think you should abandon your successful career and try to be a “normal” woman with a husband and brats, bake cupcakes and do home improvement projects. Hah. Hahahahah, you’ll be dead of boredom in a week.

Okay, who wants a reading?

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Question from Ronigurl: I just went paragliding last weekend, and I found it as sedate as my Lola’s rocking chair. Conversely, I hate sliding down playground slides, and will never ride Anchors Away in this lifetime. Is there something wrong with me?

Rumble Fish is about a disaffected teen abandoned by his mother and living with his alcoholic father, who wants to be badass like his brother, a gang member. His brother says gang life is not as exciting as he thinks it is, and wants to be free and see the ocean. They break into a store and set the Siamese “rumble fish” free. In the end the protagonist gets to see the ocean.

Reading: The thrills you expected turned out to be duds. Go see the ocean.

The flap over that excerpt from Issa Rae’s book—which was published in 2015, and apparently read only last week—reminds me of this scene from a fondly-remembered 90s movie, The Commitments. Say it once, and say it loud.

Our updated Marvel Chris Rankings

Hilarious.
Intense.
Thrilling.
Delivers on threats.
Hurts our hearts.

Also: Dinklage! And Josh Brolin’s Thanos, a properly formidable opponent.

Filipinos in cast

1. Drax (Dave Bautista) caused an entire doughnut to shoot out of my nose when he said, “Why is Gamora?”
2. Ned from Midtown Science High (Jacob Batalon), who delivered the line “We’re all going to die!!!” with such joy.
3. The Banaue Rice Terraces (as wangbumaximus21 pointed out). All we need now is a post-credits scene where our surviving heroes are eating halo-halo.

Bubbles sent this photo which captures how we felt on exiting the cinema.

Taika Waititi (powers: hilarity and reimagining) and Paul Rudd (powers: adorableness, agelessness). Hindi ko alam kung kanino ako naiinggit.