Lego Vampires Below!
Today was an unusually pleasant day in PlayNewYork (my name for Ann Arbor, as it seems like a Lego version of a big city sometimes; the impression is strengthened when you look at the mayor, John Hieftje, who looks like one of those Lego guys).

I woke very early to see the sun rising over the cemetery through a crisp morning sky and a colossal thatch of bare trees. Curiously energized, I decided to knock off the beard (which seemed to take an hour), eat breakfast, watch "Coronation Street" on the CBC, and go for a walk in a wealth of brisk nearly-spring air.

The latter took me past a fairly standard sight for Ann Arbor, a political protest outside a university building. An academic conference on Israel filled the Michigan League building on North University Street, and this offered another opportunity to call for divestment and assert that Palestinians were people. I actually went to the Israel conference in 2003, and it was very interesting, looking at such topics as water sharing strategies between Israel and Jordan, and the Orientalist perspectives of early Zionist settlers in Tel Aviv during the 1920s. There was very little overtly political content, and so I couldn't really tell the point of the demo. It's better, though, than the "Jewish Witnesses For Peace" protests outside Temple Beth Emeth on the Sabbath, which I find irritating even as a Gentile supporter of the two-state solution. It's the kind of thing you really can't get away from in this town (and, of course, many people would argue, nor should you).

Every Sunday, at 1:00 p.m., Lou Goldberg of the University of Michigan Cinema Guild shows movies in the basement of the Modern Languages Building (usually Room B-122) at the corner of East Washington and Thayer Streets. It's always a fun time, and we've been watching Mario Bava movies for the past couple of months now. Today it was Planet of the Vampires.

Planet of the Vampires (1965) was apparently the primary inspiration for Ridley Scott's Alien (and, in its emphasis on strange forces taking over human minds in outer space, of just about every early "Red Dwarf" episode). A human expedition lands on the planet Aura, and immediately falls prey to strange forces, etc. It's a great job on a low budget, and Bava explores his trademark themes of corruption and terror, exploiting the tropes of the horror movie to excellent effect in a sci-fi context. The soundtrack is also available; what stumps me is that people have actually bought it!