Tuesday, December 23, 2008

A Red Man and I Want to Read, Man (Hold Your Applause)

I saw a Santa Claus at the mall yesterday, in a little gazebo located in the middle of one of the thoroughfares. I heard him first; a loud, "Hello, there!" to a child a few feet away.

It's one thing to talk about the inherent comedy of these guys, but actually seeing them in the wild I can't help but feel acutely aware of why so many children cry while sitting on the laps of these guys. I bet the kids get this indescribable feeling of wrongness just encountering them--it's not that they necessarily didn't believe Santa existed, I just think there's something discordant about having an entity comprised of fantastic concepts illustrated with subtle variation by multiple sources suddenly distilled into a strange man with frequently unconvincing line deliveries. There's a lie there, but it's a lie too big and profound for the mind even to begin processing in a normal fashion.

I see Paul Dini's dreaming of a Max Fleischer-esque Indiana Jones animated series. It's a great idea. But, if anything like that happens, here's what it'll be; George Lucas will decide it's more important to get guys he can keep under his thumb than anyone with independent vision, the series will be cgi schlock like the new Clone Wars series, and we'll all feel a dose of undeserved shame for our childhood dreams.

Also at the mall yesterday, I got the unabridged audiobook of The Children of Hurin read by Christopher Lee. How wonderful does that sound? I'm starting to wonder if my reading is going to shift entirely to audiobooks. I don't really want it to--I still prefer reading the old fashioned way, but I barely have time for it. I squeezed an extra thirty minutes out of my night a couple nights ago to read more of War and Peace. I'm only seventy nine pages in after all this time. I had so much more free time when I was doing Boschen and Nesuko, but I guess this is what I get for putting so much more work into the colouring.

Speaking of which, I'd better get to it so I won't stress about it as much over the next couple of days which, apparently, are Christmas Eve and Day.

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