Sushi Soulfood

That Old Deserted Barracks in the Phoenix Park
I had a comment from someone at work about the arbitrary pictures I have been putting on my blog of late. He said that he was intrigued by the picture then disappointed to find nothing about it in the text. Sorry James, but as I explained earlier these photos are miscellaneous pictures I downloaded recently from my phone and are here purely for colour. However, just for you there's a Dublin shot (dull, isn't it?).
I treated myself to a big sushi feed tonight. Aya has improved their selection slightly, though still not enough to bring me back every week. Still I hadn't been there in months and needed my fish fix.
Work is hellish right now with registration just around the corner and no let up in the problems, tweaks and updates caused by rogue updates and capricious customers. Add to that a streaming web conference (haven't we already done enough of those?), that no will give a crap about, and then those other big projects that won't go away, and you can understand that I need sleep. Those big problems (redesign, redesign, redesign!) watch me smugly every day, peeking out from the paper pile and other mess I keep on my desk deliberately to keep them out of my sight. The Blue Letter day cannot be far around the corner! (Sorry, I have some Carter Burwell playing).

Herk Harvey as The Man!" Last night I watched 'Carnival of Souls' again. Blasphemous though it might sound, I see some similarities to Kubrick in this low-budget horror flick. The high contrast, 'realist' look of the piece puts me in mind of 'Killer's Kiss', while the amusement park by the salt lake has more than a hint of 'The Shining'. Some
bad dialogue and atrocious acting (witness the doctor who is far more hysterical than Candace Hilligoss's tormented - and dull - heroine could ever be) cannot disguise a real eerie originality. I have pointed out more than once how Peter Weir's 'Fearless' owes more than a small debt to 'Carnival of Souls', ( as do other films like 'Dead End' and 'The Survivor'). Herk Harvey, the director and 'The Man' who stalks through the movie, deserved to have more than this shot at feature film making. Ironically he spent his whole life making movies, well documentaries, for the Centron Corporation, but 'Carnival of Souls' had to be made on his own time, during a two week vacation, and on a shoestring budget. I mean anyone who can make a ballroom of dancing Goths frightening must have some talent. Think what he might have done with a budget, and even some actors!!!!! It still seems far more European to me than any horror being made in America at that time (1962). Hell, I'm too tired to do it justice! Suffice to say for all that it's cheap, it is still by turns beautiful and scary and as memorable an indie as you'll come across. I mean if you have seen it, could you ever forget the zombies coming out of the water, the world going quiet on the heroine until that spooky birdsong, or the funfair, or the wonderful organ music, or Herk Harvey as The Man! Classic!