Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs), a 1960 film by Mikio Naruse, is a film I'd not heard of, by a director I'd not heard of, until somewhat recently, and yet I think it's a movie I've wanted to see for a very long time. I'd wanted to see a Japanese film about Japanese women living in actual, peculiarly Japanese social roles, preferably from a woman's perspective. The closest approximations I could find were heavily westernised melodramas like Memoirs of a Geisha, or Japanese exploitation films like Lady Snowblood or Sex and Fury, which may have had strong female characters, but they lacked the perspective on traditional female social roles I was interested in. Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki delivered in spades.



In his review of Memoirs of a Geisha, Roger Ebert mentions having seen movies illustrating in the world of geisha "currents deeper and more subtle than the broad melodrama on display" in Memoirs. He may well have been thinking of several of Naruse's films, most of which, unfortunately, seem to be unavailable on DVD. Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki is not about geisha, but it deals with another denizen of the mizu shobai, the bar hostess, who is both on a lower rung, professionally, than the geisha and yet also in the world of 1960 Tokyo's Ginza district, was quickly replacing her.

The movie stars Hideko Takamine as Keiko Yashiro, sometimes referred to as "Mama", due to her alpha position among hostesses in the bar where she worked. These hostesses seem to be endemic of a traditional Japanese attitude which regards the female sex as a servant species. Hostesses lacked the training in the arts characteristic of the geisha, and were not booked for functions, but instead acted as social diplomats, informal escorts, and occasional sexual partners for their successful businessmen customers, who could only be among the higher echelons to afford the services of such bars.



However, the movie is not a study of social hierarchies within 1960 Ginza, but rather a nicely woven character drama that expects audiences to simply know all of these things, which is perhaps why Naruse's films see so little foreign distribution. Yet, at the same time, Keiko's difficult position illustrates problems endemic of the country's economy, social structure, and attitude towards women. And a lot about money.

Mikio Naruse was never a wealthy man at any point in his career, unusual even among Japan's great directors like Ozu and Kurosawa. So perhaps this is why there's a definite sense of how money, and the need for money, traps Keiko in a life she doesn't like--early on, she remarks on how much she hates climbing the stairs into the bar every night, becoming the artificial creature for unpleasant men, and being obliged to drink liquor she dislikes. But there is no other option for her--another career could not provide her mother, brother, and nephew, who live in a poorer, industrial district, with the money they need to live. Keiko herself lives in an expensive apartment and wears expensive kimonos, yet, as she observes, she could afford to do no less as it is precisely this superficial glamour that attracts customers.



This set-up could easily have been overblown melodrama, yet Naruse handles it with a beautiful subtlety, the xylophone jazz soundtrack cool with elegant imagery of dark, burnished walls under hazy neon signs. There are few exterior shots, the movie seemingly confined to a beautiful rats' maze as Keiko goes from one man to another variously to collect fees, to pay off debts, or to tactfully request loans. A number of essays I've read on the movie frequently include a quote from Naruse about his characters; "If they move even a little they quickly hit the wall." We see this as Keiko's attempts to escape her world--and there are only two possible avenues for her, to either start her own bar or marry--are continually thwarted. And every thread of plot is constructed with a heartbreaking credibility, until the web prevents Keiko from moving at all.

In the DVD commentary, critic Donald Richie calls Keiko's attitude at the end of the film mono no aware, a Japanese concept having to do with accepting the nature of ones own existence and circumstance. I can't imagine there are many films equally as brilliant illustrating the concept as this one.

There was an AP article linked to by a headline on Huffington Post to-day about the Rudy Giuliani campaign's complaint to NBC about Keith Olbermann. This comes after one of Olbermann's "Special Comments", an editorial that occasionally comes at the end of Olbermann's show, in this case it was a commentary on Giuliani's assertion that the country would be less safe under Democrats than Republicans (you can see the Special Comment here).

What strikes me most about the AP article is its assumption that we can all see that Olbermann's commentary is corrupted by bias. "Clearly there's a taste in America for both a partisan and nonpartisan press." And yet it doesn't spend one sentence attempting to debunk Olbermann's commentary. Anyone unfamiliar with the pundits and journalists mentioned in the article would have a hard time figuring out what the article's getting at, what precisely it means by "Olbermann's popularity and evolving image as an idealogue has led NBC News to stretch traditional notions of journalistic objectivity." Whether the AP writer, David Bauer, realises it or not, the AP article is itself an opinion piece.

I think this is indicative of the general trend in the media to assume that "balance" is the same thing as "objective". This is what caused Jon Stewart's meltdown on Crossfire years ago. I actually don't think Stewart was very articulate in the encounter, but I think so many people responded strongly to it because we all sensed what Stewart was getting at--that in the mainstream media, giving equal credence to right wing and left wing positions is more important than the truth.

When Rudy Giuliani claimed that there would be more casualties under a Democratic president, he was using terror as a tool. That's simply the truth.

Saturday involved a lot of colouring. I listened to David Cronenberg's commentary for Spider which was, as I'd suspected, particularly interesting. I bought a birthday card for my grandmother that wasn't completely stupid, which still amazes me.

I've just finished some plum flavoured ice cream I got at Mitsuwa a few days ago. It was good stuff, though it tasted peculiarly like bubblegum. Now I have azuki ice cream to try.

I started writing this entry thinking I'd talk about what I was doing besides watching movies and working on my comic, but I just realised I haven't really been doing anything else, at least nothing worth talking about. I saw some ravens tear apart a squirrel in the birdbath. That was sort of interesting. The huge black things carrying away stringy red bits and tufts of grey fur. Lucky the cat is fortunately too fat to excite the birds' interest. Otherwise, they seem to have taken custody of the backyard.

A baby opossum strolled past the open door to the backyard while I was eating breakfast one afternoon. I knelt in front of him and we regarded each other a moment before Victoria the cat came from nowhere to chase the little fellow into a bush.

I went to North County Fair mall on Thursday because it holds one of the only two comic book stores currently operating in San Diego county that I know of, but found nothing of interest. It's a big store, but the only people in there were two cops looking at action figures. I feel like that image implies something, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

Well, welcome to Sunday, folks.

My life is full of spiders lately. A couple days ago, I finally got David Cronenberg's Spider on DVD, I'm currently reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, and I just got back from seeing Spider-Man 3.

It was, as you might imagine on opening day, a very crowded theatre, and as is often the case with crowded theatres, it demonstrated to me that most people aren't very bright, at least not judging by the fact that most of them laughed at every dull, perfunctory punch line in all the billions of advertisements preceding the film. But I have to say I can't blame them for laughing as much as they did during the film.

When Spider-Man 3 did comedy, we laughed. When it did tragedy, we laughed. When a creepy old butler we'd never seen before said he loved Harry Osborne, we were all hysterical. Every time someone cried in the movie, we laughed. Sometimes I felt bad enough for the filmmakers that I managed to merely cringe, but mostly I think Sam Raimi and company deserved a pie in the face.

It's not hard to see the problem--for whatever reason*, a whole bunch of different ideas for movies were crammed into this one movie, giving us only room for brief bites of character development and establishing of motives, so Raimi tried to compensate by putting a shot of whiskey in each bite, only he grabbed the bottle of sugar water on accident.

We get earnest proclamations like "I love you!" at completely the wrong times. We have characters doing phenomenally stupid things to provide motivation for other characters--Peter kissing Gwen Stacy in front of Mary Jane without it even occurring to him that it might make her jealous. Mary Jane insisting Peter doesn't know how she feels when discussing a bad review of her recent Broadway performance because Peter mentions how Spider-Man gets bad press, too**. And there's the Panic Room effect when Mary Jane convinces Peter she wants to break up with him only because Harry, who's out of earshot at the time, has threatened to kill him.

Worst of all is the movie's handling of its Moral--that vengeance is ultimately a bad reason to do things. This is something that's part of a lot of comic book stories, and it's not an unreasonable theme for discussion. But it's gotta be discussed. This is a movie, not a political rally. We all sense it's a profound enough subject that we're all a little irritated when it's handled haphazardly with battling slogans and broad, artificially contrived emotions. Sure, it's bad to kill if you don't have to. But are we really to believe Spider-Man didn't have to kill Sandman***, when Sandman obviously is willing to hurt innocent people and can't be contained by any prison, and seems indestructible anyway?

Well, the movie wasn't a complete waste of time. A lot of the action sequences were fun. Bruce Campbell was the best thing about the movie.


*My guess is, Sam Raimi had decided he didn't want to make any more of these movies and therefore decided to cram every half-formed idea for whole Spider-Man movies into this one.

**No, Peter, I don't want you to go help those people you heard about on the police radio because I need to talk to you about my feelings because I'm a stereotype of a sudden!

***Of course he didn't really kill Sandman, and it's obvious to everyone that he didn't, but he thinks he killed him, and that leads him to a conversation with Aunt May who, despite knowing it was Sandman (in an extremely stupid re-writing of history) who killed her husband, and without knowing the why and how of Sandman's death, can only think to say that it was wrong of Spider-Man to kill. Oh, sure, Raimi, let's just breeze through the philosophy, it's not like this is an extremely sensitive subject that happens to be on everyone's minds because it relates to the war in Iraq and the Virginia Tech. shootings.

And Now, For Our More Dreadful Sacrifice



But where can we find a fool who acts like a king?

As many have pointed out, Bush has declared May 1 to be "Loyalty Day". He also likes to sacrifice people loyal to him. Though he's not technically a virgin, I bet there are a lot of things that would be new to him, like introspection. Perhaps that's the most profound virginity of all.

Well, I can certainly feel the approach of summer. It's already gotten so I can't have my fan on any setting lower than maximum.

I expect to post more later to-day, but, knowing me, I probably won't. Saint Sisyphus asked me to talk about a few more movies.

Number of times I heard the song "Passenger" on Monday in different contexts; 3.

Her Eminence, the Lady Sonya Taaffe of the Snow Shovel Campaign, has requested that I discuss three movies which I recently have viewed; The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, and Re-Animator. One of these things is not like the others.

I'd seen all three of these movies before*, though so long ago that my memory wasn't so great. Now I have all three on DVD, and that's good because they're good movies. Well, maybe I could've lived without Re-Animator, but when I saw it in the store packaged with a highlighter that looks like a syringe, I couldn't resist.

But let's go alphabetically here;


The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d'un poète)
1930 Directed by Jean Cocteau

It's a commentary on artists, and what it means to be an artist, that really speaks for itself rather eloquently. It's a film that uses bizarre imagery to communicate things otherwise incommunicable. Possibly it was the most experimental cinematic narrative up to that point--my own limited experience with movies and the loss of thousands of movies made before 1930 prevent me from knowing. But The Blood of the Poet's unbridled surrealism certainly surpassed in its strangeness the works of Fritz Lang and the German expressionist filmmakers of the time.



A poet accidentally acquires a living, human-like mouth on his palm. When placed under water, air bubbles emerge from the mouth. He can't seem to get rid of the mouth, wiping it on various surfaces, until his hand covers the mouth of a statue resembling the Venus de Milo. The narrator warns against the danger of giving the mouth to a statue, which then comes alive, effectively becoming the poet's muse, and he seems greatly relieved to have invested his talent in the creature.

The statue leads him through a mirror into a hall with a series of doors. Through each keyhole, he sees a different scene of human strife play out, each seemingly without connexion to our protagonist, though entry through the mirror implies that these are things he nonetheless has at least a keyhole sized perspective on. So Cocteau rather wonderfully addresses the poet's ability to connect with the humanity of people in wildly different situations. It's a nice shade of the "write what you know" philosophy.



The poet eventually seems to become a highly regarded individual, perhaps a muse himself. He goes from living in a humble flat at the beginning of the movie, to wearing a tuxedo while playing cards with his statue muse. Opera house balconies filled with aristocrats watching the seemingly perilous game suggest the poet's now become an institution, yet death, in the form of a gun the muse twice makes him use on himself, seems always a waiting consequence of his art. First the gun gives him laurels, then it just gives him death.


Orpheus (Orphée)
1949 Directed by Jean Cocteau

In a more traditional narrative of characters and situations, this modern re-telling of the Orpheus myth also deals with the poet's relationship to death. In his most significant departure from the original myth, Cocteau casts death as an aloof, beautiful woman, who captures the attentions of Orpheus, diverting them from his wife and nearly all other things.



Orpheus is played by the absurdly handsome Jean Marais as a nationally renowned poet at odds with a new generation of poets. Yet the death of one member of that latter group seems to fill Orpheus with an obsessive inspiration. It marks the beginning of a path for Orpheus to explore death and seek to know it; appropriately mirrors are again used as gateways.

I'm still a little unsure about the ending, which diverts from the myth, seeing an Orpheus happily settling into life with Eurydice. I am feeling a bit dim to-day, so maybe I'll come back to it . . .

Oh, once again, I spotted something Francis Ford Coppola took from Cocteau for his Dracula movie;



This is a trick shot where actors scooting across a floor on their backs are shot from above to make it appear as though they're standing against a wall. Then, when they turn an obtuse angled corner, they find themselves apparently somehow falling sideways. In Orpheus, this is to convey the strange physics of the underworld. In Dracula, it happens to John Harker as he's escaping from Dracula's castle. It makes a lot less sense in the latter film, sure, but whatever. It's still a good movie.


Re-Animator
1985 Directed by Stuart Gordon

However, the fact that the opening title sequence of this film blatantly steals the score from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho comes across less as an interesting homage than as wholesale theft. There's no individual "Re-Animator" feeling created with the opening credits. It just made me think, "Oh, it's the Psycho soundtrack. Why?"

In an interview included on the DVD, Re-Animator composer Richard Brand claims his use of the Psycho music was intentional, that it was meant to be "quirky." He maintains that, among everyone working on the film, he was the only one who recognised, from rough cuts, that the film was so over the top that it ought to be presented as a horror movie parody, and to do that he needed to use an iconic horror movie score. He says that it was an accident that no credit was given to Bernard Herrmann originally, and Brand says he personally made sure credit was put in later prints.

That's right--Richard Brand is full of shit.



Still, the movie is good, schlocky fun. Perhaps that's appropriate since H.P. Lovecraft wrote the original story as a parody of Frankenstein, now the movie is a parody of zombie movies. But there is a sincerity in it, too, notably in the form of Jeffery Combs, who plays Herbert West with wonderful zeal.

It's well this movie is so enthusiastically phoney, though, as it allows us to enjoy the gratuitousness;



These things happen.

The special effects are top notch, and most of the budget clearly went to exploding eyeballs and fake limbs, thereby confining the action to four or five rather plain looking sets, inhabited by no more than seven or eight people at any one time.

I can't help wondering how Herbert West would do on an introspective journey through the underworld . . .



When hunting zombie cats, bring your croquet mallet.

*Previously, I'd seen only all but the last fifteen or so minutes of Orpheus. Sonya urged me to rectify this, and she is wise.

How Twin Peaks ended. Maybe.

Wanna see one of the most pathetic things on the internet? Behold! John Mellencamp filling in for Roger Ebert.

MIND OF MELLENCAMP: Well, gosh darn it, if them Eggbert and Roperts aren't the meanest sons o'guns--I'm just gonna give thumbs up to every movie.

Some of my favourite bits; "Well, I didn't think the movie was that bad," "Now--I didn't say I didn't like the music, I said I didn't get the music," "[Vacency] is in the tradition of Hitchcock," "I haven't seen many horror movies."

Of all the well versed movie critics who'd love the chance to fill in for Ebert . . . sheesh.

MIND OF ROEPER: Suddenly I look like a very good critic.

Ebert, come back. Now.

For Poetry Month, here's Jack Kerouac reading his poem about Charlie Parker.

I'm already pretty sick of seeing the pictures the gunman sent to NBC. I don't think the public ought to be denied access, but it's the sort of thing that ought to be relegated to rotton.com, not something that ought to dominate the New York Times web site. The collage of victims' photos was better.

Why is NBC News constantly in the news? First Tim Russert in the Scooter Libby trial, then the Imus thing, now this . . .

Monday I dreamt I was with a class of college students, leading them through a dense tropical jungle on a bright, cloudless day. Persian buildings could be seen here and there, including white towers with golden domed tops rising above the trees. Eventually we came to a bright blue wall that I realised was in fact the sky. There was a large, blank white rectangle painting on it that I knew was used as a movie screen, and I wanted to show the students some movies. But one of the students, a guy who looked like Jay Hernandez from Hostel, which I watched a few nights ago, opened the white rectangle in the middle like a couple of large sliding doors. There was a dark room inside and I told everyone to stay out because I knew Lost Highway was playing in there and that, because Lost Highway isn't available on DVD, going in the room would result in disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, Jay Hernandez didn't listen to me, and soon he and many of the other students were dying of some kind of flesh-eating tropical disease.

I suppose there's some slight resemblance there to the school shootings to-day. The latest and worst of what seems to be becoming a terribly regular fact of life, I can't help feeling a little numbed. With Iraq to think about, and Darfur, the world seems increasingly covered by a boiling sea of violence.

I must admit, what's interested me most so far about this has been the politics on gun-control that appears to have already taken the stage. From the White House Press Briefing given by deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino:

MS. PERINO: As far as policy, the President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed. And certainly bringing a gun into a school dormitory and shooting -- I don't want to say numbers because I know that they're still trying to figure out many people were wounded and possibly killed, but obviously that would be against the law and something that someone should be held accountable for.

Q Columbine, Amish school shooting, now this, and a whole host of other gun issues brought into schools -- that's not including guns on the streets and in many urban areas and rural areas. Does there need to be some more restrictions? Does there need to be gun control in this country?

MS. PERINO: The President -- as I said, April, if there are changes to the President's policy we will let you know. But we've had a consistent policy of ensuring that the Justice Department is enforcing all of the gun laws that we have on the books and making sure that they're prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Q Lastly, in Texas, if I'm correct, he passed legislation, no age restriction on possession of weapons, if I'm correct. Should there be some kind of federal age limit, as far as the President is concerned, raising the age for gun possession in this country?

MS. PERINO: Unfortunately, I'm going to have to go back and look at what the record was in Texas. Maybe Ken Herman could tell us. We'll go to Ken next.

Keith Olbermann pointed out to-day that one of the guns used by the gunman was modified with a special clip that allowed it to hold more than its standard ten rounds of ammunition. Such clips were made illegal by the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, but that law was allowed to expire by the Bush administration.

Olbermann also mentioned a press release from Gun Owners of America that argues that the gunman might have been stopped sooner if the students were allowed to carry firearms.

So they want to see a world where every college guy who thinks he's got a small dick can legally carry a gun? Every boozy frat boy? I have to wonder what ridiculous, slow motion shoot-out is playing in Bushie minds. It seems impossible that anyone can be so stupid, yet if they're deliberately attempting to destroy this country, you'd think there'd be faster ways of going about doing it. Maybe there's just no accounting for delusions. I wonder what remedy Gun Owners of America would recommend for someone whose callous short-sightedness has resulted in American deaths at home and abroad.

I haven't gotten too much done lately, mostly because of birthday stuff--the zoo on Friday and Grindhouse (second time) on Saturday. But I have managed to do a lot of colouring here and there. I just hadn't gotten enough sleep to do any drawing, as Thursday was still Thursday and for some reason my mother wanted me up even earlier on Friday to go to the zoo. It was a nice trip, though. We watched the gorillas playing--there were five or six medium sized ones and a big alpha male. We watched him descend on a smaller male, give him a casual thump on the head, and take what he was eating, all while two females watched. Another enclosure had a voyeuristic ourang-outang, who was pressed up against the glass to watch the human children.

Watching tiny monkeys racing across their busy enclosure, leaping from rope suspended tires over concrete streams to dry, twisted branches, I wondered if Super Mario Brothers taps into buried animal instincts. I wonder what humanity would look like if suddenly deprived of all its cybernetic stuff.

Last night I watched Tengoku to jigoku, which was quite good, and perhaps one of Kurosawa's most blatant statements on his own curious and complex political views.

I had a pretty good birthday, except Kurt Vonnegut died. So it goes. It doesn't seem like that long ago he was plugging a new book and appearing in commercials. I'm sort of surprised he died at all.

Otherwise, it was a good birthday. My sister, in a move of pure genius, prevailed upon my mother to give me a Disney Princess themed birthday. My sister knows me. I also got a Donald Duck Pez dispenser.

I guess I'd better get what sleep I can now . . . My thanks to they who wished me happy birthday.

The old clock inside the computer tells me it's my birthday, so I'm twenty-eight years old now. No career path or college degree, yet I am Time's person of the year. And I'm a muthafuckin' blogger, one of the pyjamahadeen--of sorts. So there's that.

I am optimistic about this comic I'm working on. I've shown bits of it to Sonya, and she seems to like it. I bet a comics publisher would be crazy not to take it. Does that satisfy you, birthday god? You never talk to me.

Mostly people're giving me money, though I haven't bought very much yet. I spent ten dollars at Wal-Mart an hour ago on Bound and Dead Alive, and last week I bought the second season of Twin Peaks. That wasn't too ridiculous, I only bought the first season six fucking years ago. And now I hear the seven episode first season is actually pretty hard to find, so I feel for the poor little lambs coming to the show only now. Of course, unavailability of the first season is still nothing compared to the elusive pilot episode. Believe it or not, if you live in the U.S., the best way to watch the pilot, which is the first episode, was, until a few days ago, on YouTube. You can order an import DVD, but the sound's fucked, which of course, as any Lynch-phile knows, ruins a David Lynch film. But the image quality is better than YouTube--I actually tried to sync the two up, using the YouTube sound with the DVD picture, but it turns out the DVD actually plays slightly too fast. So Warner Brothers gets the last laugh as Paramount's release of the show suffers from the pilot's unavailability.

Most of what I've been watching lately has been anime I got for free from Tim--lots of series I fit on lots of DVDs. Most of them not very good. Last Exile, which'd looked promising, turned out to have writing so annoying that I had to stop watching halfway through the third episode or risk reflexively dashing my monitor against the wall. And ten episodes after the wonderful first episode of Tenchi Muyo GXP, the writing took a nose dive. So I just re-watched The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, a series whose brilliance I'd sort of forgotten (it's a component of a much larger post I've been meaning to write for weeks, so stay tuned).

Yesterday I watched the first episode of Code Geas, though, and was very pleasantly surprised. Interesting writing, beautiful CLAMP character designs, and absorbing unpredictability. Lelouch, the pretty male protagonist, actually has character traits apart from being pretty, a teenager, and supernatural. I know, I was amazed, too.

But I think now I'll go to the nightly Twin Peaks viewing. I'm about three episodes in and, although I haven't watched the series in six years, I'm finding it's still written on my brain from my millions of repeated viewings of tapes in the late 90s, especially the Lynch episodes. Though these are much better quality copies.

I'll be accompanied by cherry pie and coffee . . .

I'm still in Grindhouse afterglow. As you may remember from one of my posts about last year's Comic-Con, I was very much looking forward to the movie. And it surpassed all my expectations.

I was looking forward to a movie that absurdly kicked ass. I got that in Rodriguez's Planet Terror. But in Tarantino's Death Proof, I was treated also to beautiful, foot fetishist photography, beautiful women, nice dialogue, deft characterisation, and an absorbing story. I love Tarantino's patience, his ability to put viewers viscerally into the story by framing easily swallowed dialogue with quiet tension.

The other nice thing that I wasn't expecting was the general atmosphere created by the pairing of the films, the fake trailers, and the retro advertisements. I never experienced the actual grind-house cinema scene, and the only exploitation movies I've seen are Japanese, so nostalgia wasn't part of my enjoyment. It was more like another movie existed apart from yet comprised of the two movies--a storyline of style and sensibilities suggested by the confluence. Like the supplemental articles and interviews in Watchmen--Grindhouse is a meta-movie.

My only complaint, really, is that there's not nearly enough sex in either film. I only hope the DVD remedies that. But otherwise, it's one of the best movies I've seen this year.

Huckabees director apparently does not heart Lilly Tomlin.



I think what impressed me most about the second segment is what a cool cucumber Jason Schwartzman is. And wow, does Dustin Hoffman look uncomfortable. How the hell did they finish making that movie?

That's a picture from Los Angeles, but I saw something similar yesterday at Fashion Valley mall here in San Diego--I couldn't find photos of that, but I did find video, thanks to the local ABC station. Thanks again, Disney.

I was going to the mall for lunch yesterday with my mother and sister and as we were pulling into the parking lot, I first noticed a clothed woman holding a sign I thought read "Blueberry kills animals", though I found out later the culprit was actually a store called Burberry, who's selling real fur garments. Then, as we were turning into the lot, we saw the nude trio, who were encouraging passers-by to wear "faux fur". I say they were faux nude, since no one could see any of the good bits.

Still, there's something oddly guilt-inducing about naked women standing around in public. I was a little reminded of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, and I actually felt a little guilty about my fur hat and leather jacket. Though mainly I just felt sorry I'm not getting laid.

Hopefully there're more naked girls in my future to-day as I mean to catch Grindhouse. Somehow to-day I've also gotten a little work done on my comic. Not much, but still, I was sort of expecting to-day to be entirely shot considering there'll probably a good wait at the cinema . . .

You know, I get ridiculously pleased when Disney does something good. I guess there's a part of me that wants to think of Disney as an entity that provides fun for humanity, and not an evil, bloated corporation.

The cats around here eat Royal Canin brand food, so of course I checked the web site to see if Royal Canin is among the pet foods involved in any of the recent recalls. They're not, and I love the snooty message on their site:

We want to make it very clear to pet owners that the nationwide pet food recall does not include any Royal Canin USA dry or wet pet food products.

The safety and nutritional quality of our pet food is our top priority because for many people, their pets are their top priorities.

See, the other companies just don't care about your pet, or people. That's why this is happening. We try to keep our humble corner clean, but we can't help it if all the others are loud, smelly, obnoxious savages.

That's just the attitude I like to see from a French company.

I find myself using iTunes now to listen to my mp3s--I had to install the programme when I got my iPod, but I hadn't used it for anything besides putting stuff on my iPod. Then, a few days ago, I saw my sister had taken to using it and I realised I could use it to play the m4a files Sonya* had sent me, which I'd so far only been playing in the Media Player Classic that comes with the Combined Community Codec pack (I point Mac users to MPlayer), which can play anything but doesn't have a handy playlist feature. I wish WinAmp would play the m4a files, though, because fuck if iTunes isn't one of the most bloated programmes this side of Adobe Acrobat (by the way, those of you who think you're stuck with Acrobat when reading pdf files, I point you to Foxit). It takes iTunes nearly thirty seconds just to open, whereas with WinAmp, it's just a matter of clicking the icon and blip, it's open, with a full playlist of all my mp3s, plus a snazzy amateur-made Evangelion skin I downloaded years ago. iTunes can't even seem to display all my mp3s at once, and its playlists thing is a slog.

Anyway, I finished Daughter of Hounds last night. I don't know if I'd call it Caitlin R. Kiernan's best novel (though it might be), but it's definitely the most fun. I mentioned Tolkien and C.S. Lewis before, but the more I think about it, the more I perceive a definite Alice's Adventures in Wonderland influence, which is something you'd think I'd have noticed before considering I happened to've been reading both books at the same time. And the similarities become stronger the further one gets into Daughter of Hounds, as both books feature precocious young girls confronting citizens of what seems at one level to be a non-sensical, dreamlike fantasy world, but with sublevels of curious, rarefied logic.

There's also a fair bit of Lewis Carroll charm, in the almost Caterpillar-like character of the Bailiff**, and one might see Odd Willie as a twisted version of the White Knight, at least as seen through Emmie's perspective--Emmie being one of the precocious young girl protagonists. In fact, scenes of six year-old Soldier*** being treated to sweets by the Bailiff while having conversations and thoughts about identity and dreams--coming up against the Bailiff's inscrutable, vaguely dangerous, but almost sedentary strangeness--comes off as an interesting play on Alice's anxiety over having changed so many times in the day that she's hardly sure who she is anymore. The similarities become even stronger when we discover what the Bailiff's done to Soldier, and what Soldier needs to do in order to fix it.

I've pointed out to Caitlin recently that her characters seem to spend a lot of time arguing with one another. I really became aware of this while reading Daughter of Hounds as I noticed it's rare for any character to say anything that isn't somehow a dismissal of what another character had just asserted. In her previous books, this had a tendency to ramp up tension as the characters become angrier and angrier with each other. I'd feel bad for them--I'd frequently want to grab one and say to herhimit, "Why are you wasting the energy?" In fact, characters frequently seem to ask each other this question. In Daughter of Hounds, there are actually a few characters, most notably the Bailiff, who seem able to keep arguments going without noticeably expending energy, which has the effect of being somewhat funny, and there's a consequential broadening of the environment, somehow.

And it's a book of beautiful prose. It made me just about every kind of happy while reading it.

So, to-day I think I may just try to catch up on colouring. I'm really far behind on it, and it's no surprise--I spent four hours colouring just one panel last night. I suspect that this is a combination of the greater amount of detail I'm putting into the work, the slightly more complicated techniques I came up with while working on Moving Innocent, and the fact that I'm working with images a few thousand pixels larger than I've ever worked with before. Gods, this computer needs more memory.


*I told Sonya I'd try using footnotes in emulation of her.
**The Bailiff uses a kukri at one point. I love it.
***This is the character portrayed, somewhat inaccurately, I think, on the book's cover with teased-out, 1980s-ish hair. I personally imagined it more unkempt and kept out of the way in a pony tail, as Soldier seems to consider herself utilitarian and no-nonsense. You get the impression that she's got hair-trigger reflexes and she's always ready to kill, and yet she seems to spend a lot of time talking in nearly every confrontation in which we see her, giving her an interesting, unselfconsciously diplomatic nature.

I don't know what I'd have done without Daughter of Hounds yesterday. It was Thursday and I was kind of broke, but instead of just killing three hours, I had a really nice time sitting on a mall bench reading the book.

And then, at around 12:40am last night, the power went off in my neighbourhood. Again. And it always seems to happen in the middle of the night. There must be some frayed cable somewhere people're too lazy to fix.

Anyway, I spent another three hours with Daughter of Hounds at a Denny's. What a really nice book. I felt proud Caitlín's my friend. I've frequently noticed a J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis influence in her work, but I think this is the first time she seemed like a writer like them.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I'm finished, and I'm only thirty pages away. But I thought I should note it was the first time in years where I felt like a book was my companion through the day. It took me back to when I was going to school and stealing as many hours as possible on whatever book I was reading, and just letting my consciousness disappear in it. Dostoevsky, Bronte, Tolkien, and Kiernan have done that for me.

Okay. Pencilled two pages. That's not so bad for eight hours. Now at least I won't feel as bad about Thursday preventing me from getting anything done.

I hadn't wanted to go out all night, but at 2am I realised I actually needed groceries. When I came back, I had some Earl Grey tea while playing Doom 2 and listening to Family Guy. Afterwards, I started reading the new Sirenia Digest, which is so far reminding me of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Thirty minutes to sleep . . . I'll read. I've been reading more lately, and more books at once. I read a bit of Daughter of Hounds, Maggie the Mechanic, Saiyuki, Anne Sexton, and of course, I'm reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland yet again. This after I recently viewed the Disney movie on DVD. Alice, as a character, really got short-changed in that film--she's more a picture with random quotes from the book, utterly stripped of human motivation, than she is a character. But I do still think it looks beautiful--the years Disney's team spent designing it certainly paid off.

Everything's Okay When You're a Moron

Posted by Nancy Pelosi on YouTube; "The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform holds a hearing: 'Allegations of Misconduct at the General Services Administration.' The hearing inquires about allegations that GSA Administrator Lurita Doan failed to follow proper procedures for awarding federal contracts, attempted to intervene in contract negotiations, and engaged in partisan political activities on federal property. Rep. Braley questions GSA head Doan on a political briefing given at GSA headquarters."

Blugh. My life feels weirdly cluttered lately. At least there's never a dull moment. I've got a tug of war inside me for my feelings about progress on my current project. There's no denying I'm moving a lot slower than I ever did with Boschen and Nesuko. But on the other hand, I'd say the quality of work is definitely better. I've been allowing myself to stop whenever I really don't feel up to drawing anymore. Which has been nice, but it's left me feeling less intimate with the story than when I was constantly in the thick of things. But on the other hand, it's made me automatically daydream a lot more about the future of the story, which is actually really useful.

Oh--so why is my life so cluttered right now? I guess it just seems like a lot of little things, and a lot of it's probably in my head. Yesterday, I woke up early because there was an irregular tapping at my window that had been fighting with my slumber for hours. I thought maybe it was a raven, and nothing more, but it turned out to be hail. I found the outside world was having a blustery day. Lucky the cat still wanted out, though, especially when he saw a dead leaf fleeing in terror across the patio. So I let him out, and he promptly ran back inside as a wave of dead leaf soldiers descended upon him.

I had to take him to the vet on Monday to replace his plastic claws. Now both he and Victoria have fresh sets of purple toes. So, on Monday, there was that, and also my failed attempt to buy some minutes for my phone--gods, people in Santee must be the most pathetic people in the world. I showed up at the Verizon store to wait thirty minutes while the three clerks helped three customers before I gave up, went to the mall, bought the first volume of Saiyuki and coffee, and came back to find the same customers were still working the clerks, nearly an hour later, asking questions like, "How big are the phones?" and other things one could easily find through a website or one of the numerous pamphlets. Adding to the frustration was the store layout, which is in the vein of the "grazing free-for-all" customer-service philosophy wherein no queues are defined and everyone's expected to wander about, anxiously checking now and then to see if an associate's become available, under the quaint delusion that representatives are always available. One woman stopped a salesman to ask if there'd be much of a wait.

"I'll be with you as soon as I'm finished helping these people here."

"Well," said the woman, "do you think I should get Cherry Chocolate or Champagne?"

I couldn't make out the salesperson's response, but it sounded like he started sucking happily at the egg she handed him.

I waited another twenty minutes before giving up again. Fucking people.

Anyway, I'd better focus again on pencilling the fifteenth page of this thing . . .

I felt weirdly weary all Sunday, like I had lead weights stapled everywhere, especially on my head. I didn't, and still don't, feel up to especially complex activities or thoughts.

It was in this spirit that I went to see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Which, as Ninja Turtles media go, was probably the best piece of work so far, except for maybe the comic. I haven't read a lot of the comic, but it seems so far the only version where the writers relaxed and didn't seem to feel like they were trying very hard to hit certain notes before they finished.

The new movie had this problem, seen in the kind of overreaching sentimentality that makes you want to spend a few days eating oatmeal and playing Solitaire. But, as all the positive reviews have been saying, the tension between Leonardo and Raphael actually manages to be genuinely interesting and their climactic confrontation is impressive and absorbing. The movie mostly looks good, too, with shadowy city nights, burnished brick walls, flaring fluorescents, and realistically textured turtle skin. The character designs look similar to those of The Incredibles, with Mr. Winters, the villain voiced by Patrick Stewart, a near dead ringer for Mister Incredible. The design scheme seems to've benefited the turtles themselves the most--usually I don't like the slightly oversized hands and feet that seem to be in vogue nowadays, but it works for the heroes as it is somewhat turtle-esque. Unfortunately, part of this design scheme seems to be an edict that all women need look like eight year-old twig girls. I'm not just speaking as a guy who likes voluptuous women. April O'Neil just looks wrong.

I was a huge Ninja Turtles fan as a kid, and the movie did please that kid who's been dismantled and compacted for storage somewhere in my freezer heart. I'm sort of in the mood now to dig out the old Nintendo games and action figures . . .

But I think for now just I'll find something beautiful and slow to watch and hope this funk I'm in is gone when I wake up to-morrow.

I think this movie is destined for more parodies than Brokeback Mountain;

In the five hours of sleep I managed to obtain to-day, I dreamt I lived in a one storey, brown stucco apartment complex. People had begun to disappear, and somehow it was determined that a man living at the end of one row of apartments was killing them. He never appeared to leave his apartment, but everyone knew he was a cannibal and that he had metal teeth.

So one night, I and two of the tenants, Donald Duck and Suzanne Somers, decided to break into the man's home and kill him. His apartment was dark and lit by only a few candles casting orange light on the walls with strangely hard edged, arching shadows. But we caught the man and started dismembering him, as somehow we knew that if he was not thoroughly torn apart, he would revive. I distinctly remember grabbing his mandible and maxilla in each hand, feeling the steel teeth under my fingers, and pulling. Eventually there were brains on the floor like soggy ramen with blood resembling Easter egg dye in the cracks. I put some seaweed in the brain matter and asked the man if he could hear me and if he could still think.

"Yes," he said. "But my thoughts are going through the seaweed and it's difficult.

I took the seaweed away and worked at more completely dispersing his matter. The next day, I visited Suzanne Somers in her apartment where she was entertaining guests. She couldn't speak of last night before the outsiders, but she thanked me for saving her life.

I felt like an angry water balloon yesterday. Bloated. I don't know why, but after my first pot of coffee, I had to make urine several times, and my head felt like it was going to burst. I felt like water or blood was going to leak from my ears every time I leaned over the page of comic I was working on.

Fuck, I was chomping at the bit to get work done, too. But all I managed was to pencil two pages over the course of seven hours. I actually had to completely erase and start over on two panels, something I almost never have to do. I finally had to call it quits at around 9:20pm when a difficult angle on a crowd shot was utterly defeating my cognisance. I felt like there was a hex on me. If so, fess up now--which of you was it? Maybe it was a general hex on comic artists cast by someone I don't even know . . . Anonymously hexed; how depressing. Que mala suerte.

I did manage to find an 85% cocoa chocolate bar last night. That's dark, baby, yeah. I also re-watched the first episode of Dirty Pair because Tim'd found a new fansubbed version--apparently it's being released on DVD in Japan. Which would explain why Sunrise took the theme off YouTube.

Anyway, it's one of them fucking Thursdays, so I better open up negotiations with sleep. Though I have been managing to get to bed as early as 5am lately. So I may well have six hours of slumber ahead of me . . . By the way:

DOOM!

So Zack Snyder's the latest example of a young, overrated Hollywood director hitting it big. And like Brett Ratner before him, not only does Snyder look like a weasely prick (shown here being Ernie to Frank Miller's Bert), but he also has a weasely prick name. I woke up early to-day as I found myself thinking up the names we'll see directing future low-brow, high-earner zeppelins;

Mega-Successful Weasely Prick Directors;

Mick Lecker
Gus Shatner
Chett Snipper
Tod Tucher
Ky Goila
Cliff Tekker
Cid Cutter
Jet Filnan
Scot Kiltner
Lyn Bobner
Win Casher
Jack Slammer
Ham Jacker
Kip Comer
Pop Zipper
Brad Pulner

As usual, I've been watching things on the screens. I just a couple hours ago watched Sanjuro for the first time and found it to be a very satisfying experience. I bought it last week as part of Criterion's new Yojimbo/Sanjuro package. I had the old Criterion edition of Yojimbo, but I wanted the new one for its commentary and superior image quality --I watched it before Sanjuro and found it well worth the purchase.

I suppose I neglected seeing Sanjuro for so long because I'd heard it was inferior to Yojimbo, but I guess a Kurosawa movie's still a Kurosawa movie--it's really hard to judge degrees of brilliance for a filmmaker who invariably draws me completely into his films.

It was nice to hear Masaru Sato reprise his raucous theme for Sanjuro from the previous film, and Toshiro Mifune slouching into the group of awkward boy samurais was nice, but it is a very different film from Yojimbo. Where Yojimbo is a dusty, corrupt village and its denizens, Sanjuro is a series of formal rooms and gardens populated by stiff samurai and politicians. There's a more conventional beauty to it, and I loved shots of samurais framed by flowers.

The movie features several actors from the first film in different roles, even recognisable stars like Takashi Shimura and Tatsuya Nakadai. Though Shimura's role as the brewer in the first film was almost invisible and Nakadai both looked and acted almost like a different person. Still, the showdown was inevitably between him and Mifune once again, and very bloody for a Kurosawa movie--and even bloodier for this otherwise bloodless and almost gentle film. There seems to have been more of an attempt to comment on the function of heroic psychopaths in a society as one character refers to Sanjuro as a "sword that is never sheathed" while noting that "a sheathed sword is more powerful".

Let's see . . . I'm about nine episodes into Tenchi Muyo: Galaxy Police. Mostly it's been disappointing, not one episode even resembling the brilliant first episode in terms of writing or animation. But my interest was renewed when I found out the character named NB is in fact a robotic version of Nabishin from Excel Saga, because both series' were directed by Shinichi Watanabe. So I'll stick it out a little longer . . .

Also recently I've watched Young Sherlock Holmes and The Wicker Man, and my thoughts on them may be found here and here, where you can see me being forward with Sonya.

I would also add to my comments about Young Sherlock Holmes this question for all who've seen both that movie and this adaptation of Silver Blaze; am I the only one who remembers Moriarty's first name is "James"?

Here's an old favourite, guilty pleasure. Only the first two episodes, unfortunately;

Something that needs more attention; a debunking of the recent New York Times article that attempts to discredit the acknowledged severity of Global Warming and Al Gore.

I saw 300 last night. It was okay.

Actually, except for some mildly pleasant action sequences, my overall reaction to the movie was about as dispassionate as its dull colour palette was pretty much grey. But that could just be me--I am, after all, the guy who never screamed on rollercoasters, and I don't claim to have the slightest understanding of audience mentality. My main interest in seeing the film, actually, was to be able to engage in discussions of the various controversies it seems to've provoked.

One criticism that intrigued me in particular was Robyn's seeming contention that the movie was sort of anti-feminist. Having seen it now, it's my opinion that the movie was not meant to be anti-feminist, in a sense, it isn't anti-feminist, but in practice, it is. About the same thing can be said of some of its other negative aspects; it doesn't mean to be racist, it isn't racist, but in practice, it is. It doesn't mean to be homophobic, it isn't homophobic, but it is.

I think the key to all this is a sentiment director Zack Snyder has expressed in interviews, as in this Suicide Girls interview; "No it’s not for the kids! Fuck the kids! I got some shit I want to show you!"

He wants fun, R-rated movies. Movies with fucked up shit for people mature enough to handle fucked up shit. The only trouble is, most adults these days aren't mature enough to handle fucked up shit, as the giggling from the audience during 300's rape scene demonstrated to me.

You see, I can appreciate a story where we can acknowledge and even admire the military superiority of a few Spartan men over thousands of Persian slaves, at the same time that we recognise that the Spartans tended to kill a lot of their babies and had rigid customs regarding the roles of men and women that invariably put women on a lower peg. And in the Suicide Girls interview, Snyder says, "I always said 'We're not Spartans in the movie.' They throw their kids off cliffs and beat the snot out of them. Whenever I could I tried to remind the audience, 'Guess what? You're not a Spartan. It is fun to be with them and hang out with them. But it ends in death on the battlefield. That’s how that road goes.'"

There are only two problems with this; for one thing, lots of people do beat the snot out of their kids. For another, audiences have short memories. During the slow motion march of the rippling muscled Spartans, they either tend not to remember or tend to forgive a previous scene where baby skulls sat at the bottom of a cliff.

So also there's a very obvious problem with the fact that the movie is white, heterosexual good guys versus stormtrooper-like, homosexual, physically deformed black people. The movie's cheerfully stylised--the heroes are impossibly beautiful naked people, the villains are over-the-top ugly and/or bizarre. That in itself is okay, but coupling dumb fun with obviously loaded social issues seems irresponsible to me. In a story that obviously cherry picked only the facts that filmmakers found most exciting, it's hard to argue it had to be this way. If you choose to make the Spartans fight without armour, in order to show off their muscles, why must you also choose to portray evil as the condoning of homosexuality? Especially since homosexuality was apparently accepted in Sparta. It might also have been worth noting that Spartan women enjoyed greater rights and freedoms than in most other societies at the time.

I wonder if General Pace saw 300 over the weekend before his Chicago Tribune interview Monday when he infamously said "I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts."

Here's Alice in Wonderland, the 1903 film.

Celebrating Birthdays this day, March 10;

Osama bin Laden and Chuck Norris.

Also born to-day was Barry Fitzgerald, who perhaps somewhere is raising a glass for poor humanity.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Monday's featured article on Wikipedia was The Battle of Ceresole, which happened to occur on my birthday, April 11, four hundred thirty-five years before I was born. Maybe it's fitting that the date featured a "marvellously confused" and exceptionally bloody battle.

Well, it wasn't a violent day for me Monday, though it did seem cluttered. I planted some flowers for my aunt and I learned I have no interest in gardening.

Sunday night, at Sonya's recommendation, I watched Lost Horizon, a Frank Capra movie from 1937, which turned out to be an interestingly pro-communism movie--just one of the many reasons for the film's alternate cuts through the years.

It was a decent movie all the way through, but my favourite part was the beginning, which was a great adventure escape sequence and a rather obvious inspiration for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A small group of assorted characters narrowly escape a bloody revolution in China by boarding a large passenger plane on a mobbed airfield--however, unbeknownst to them, the pilot's been killed and the plane hijacked by a strange Chinese man.

The movie cost a rather amazing four million dollars, and it shows in the surprisingly realistic footage of the plane and its misadventures through the Himalayas. Eventually, the plane crashes in a snowstorm and the survivors are led by a mysterious group of people to Shangri-la, where much of the tension's drained from the movie as realistic, dangerous flight through exotic locales is replaced by simplistic philosophical drama among indoor sets that come off as a resort hotel.

Sonya and I had got to talking about the film because we were discussing Edward Everett Horton, who I seem to remember having seen in at least two more 1930s movies every time I think of him. And he was good as the nervous, high-strung palaeontologist in this film. Also good were Ronald Colman and Spock's mom, Jane Wyatt, who looked fantastic naked and swimming amongst water lilies while Colman for some reason made a scarecrow with her clothing.

As I said, a good movie, and Capra's characteristic plea for good will towards all men comes through plainly (though the film certainly isn't flattering to women, even for 1937).

Sheesh, 3am already and I didn't do half the things I meant to yesterday . . . I need caffeine.

I guess it'll be a while before another new Heroes . . . Last night's episode wasn't wholly bad, except it brought the show much closer to X-Men rip-off status, introducing a character who's basically Mystique, and showing Sylar to essentially be Magneto. And that's not even mentioning the disappointing diffusion of the Horn Rimmed Glasses with erased memory plot thread. Wouldn't it have been more interesting if, for a while at least, he really didn't know he'd helped Claire escape?

Last night I watched A Good Year, a movie from last year my mother and sister recommended I watch. Since I'd just been having a conversation with Sonya about the classic films of Ridley Scott, I thought it couldn't hurt to see what the old boy was up to these days.

It didn't really hurt at all. A Good Year is a film rife with flaws, but they go down easily, mostly because Scott remains a brilliant photographer. Before A Good Year, the most recent Ridley Scott movie I'd seen was Gladiator, which also starred Russell Crowe. In fact, I wondered if his character in the new film, Max Skinner, was meant to be a descendant of Maximus.

A Good Year is not about the tire company, by the way. Crowe in fact plays in it a vaguely cutthroat, wealthy investment expert who as a boy played by Freddie Highmore would spend holidays with his uncle Albert Finney at a beautiful chateau in the French countryside. Max returns as an adult when he learns of his uncle's death and that he's apparently inherited the chateau. At first Max means to sell the place at the highest price possible, but over the course of the movie he learns through quiet osmosis the importance of love and hanging out with beautiful women at a beautiful French chateau, prompting him to leave his life in England of hanging around with beautiful women and making lots of money by standing around and smirking at lines and numbers.

Did I mention all the beautiful women in the movie? None of them are characters in the movie sense, but more like characters in the sexual role play sense--Marion Cotillard is Fanny Chenal, the remote beauty from the nearby village who's notoriously "choosy", a fact everyone continues to agree upon even after she sleeps with Max on the first date. There's Abbie Cornish as the banal, pretty American girl Christie Roberts who shows up to be Crowe's long-lost hot cousin. And there's my favourite--the unfortunately named but gorgeous Archie Panjabi as Max's assistant Gemma, who's always smirking with him and subtly giddy at the idea of sleeping with him.



Yet, as I said, the movie doesn't hurt. Usually bad writing makes me angry, but the photography in this film was so beautiful and the pace so leisurely, I couldn't feel worse than relaxed. I even chuckled at some of the jokes.

Maybe part of it is that Scott's style is still curiously cold, even in the context of a romantic comedy. A casual lunch conversation looks like it was filmed with eight different cameras, and we cut between angles with odd rapidity. Then there are static, low angle shots of shadowed rooms and dust in the air. This movie, I think, would have been better as a book of photographs.

Here's a surprisingly elusive anime, considering its notoriety.

Of the original, 1985 Dirty Pair series, only clips of the opening and ending themes seem to be available on YouTube. The show itself isn't available on DVD, and the episodes Tim downloaded are of such poor quality--they look like they come from twenty year old VHS copies. But I can't stop watching them--each episode is a perfectly paced piece of action and adventure.

I've also been watching the mid-90s Dirty Pair Flash series, which is good, but not quite as crisp. It doesn't have the same heady feeling of artists treading enthusiastically into the unknown.

Heads up, folks--Lost Highway's gonna be on IFC at 10pm PT to-night.

I got nothing to say at this 6am. But here's one of my favourite movies. It's the movie that made me appreciate the word "sucker".

I dreamt I was Christmas shopping just after nightfall, and I was coming out of a redbrick Target when I saw a homeless cat with whom I'd gone to school. I asked the cat how he was doing, and he said he was fine--I was careful to keep a distance, though, because although I was on friendly terms with the cat, he was feral and had a tendency to lash out for no apparent reason.

I then noticed an enormous spider web across the sidewalk, which I'd seen the last time I'd spoken to the cat outside this Target a few years earlier. "I can't believe this spider web's still here!" I said.

"What spider web?" said the cat.

"How couldn't you have noticed this--it's enormous!" The cat looked to where I was pointing and was duly impressed.

"I wonder what the spider looked like," I said. "It must be long dead by now."

But it wasn't--I saw it the next instant. It was a dark, Swamp Thing green and about twelve inches long. It looked like a small man with disproportionately long arms which ended in curved claws. He used these to cling to the webbing like a sloth. Somehow I could tell he was blind and very dangerous.

I told the cat not to eat it.

I just had myself two--excuse me--damn fine cups of coffee. Specifically, David Lynch coffee. I was so excited when the package showed up that I had to make a pot right away.

It came in a neat black metal cylinder that I'll definitely be saving. The coffee itself tastes a little sweet, which I ought to've expected. Sort of butterscotchy. I had to order it pre-ground, so I have to wonder how much better it'd taste freshly ground.

Progress on my new project has slowed in the past couple days. But Sonya and I have been e-mailing like rabbits--she reviewed what I've been working on and gave me a very encouraging thumbs up, so I'll call that progress.

Not too much else to mention right now, except that I'm very excited Boschen and Nesuko's finally been mentioned in Wikipedia--only as a footnote in the entry for kukri, but still, that's plenty cool. Anytime Boschen and Nesuko's mentioned alongside Dracula, I'm happy.

Here's an anime series I've only seen the first episode of--I've had it on the computer for years. I only recently got access to the rest of the series. But it's one of the best first episodes of anything I've ever seen.

Another show I've been watching lately;

From Ran. Gods, I love that movie.

Fucking Thursday. I'm so fucking tired. But you're just a day, a day among seven, and you'll not best me. So here come this post.



Sonya wished me to discuss Shaun of the Dead, so I shall do so. A fan of the movie, and also relatively unfamiliar with zombie movies in general, she said, "I'm sure there were clichés being tweaked I didn't even see." On this subject, I can't be a big help, at least not compared to some people I know (Robyn). I've seen the original Night of the Living Dead, the original Dawn of the Dead, the Evil Dead movies, Peter Jackson's Braindead, I Walked with a Zombie, 28 Days Later, and many zombie movie episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. From this limited experience, the only clichés I can really see being messed with is the general reactions ordinary people have to the slow, lumbering, flesh-eating dead. Shaun of the Dead imagines--rightly, I think--that many people wouldn't be as panicked by the presence of these easily avoidable creatures as many movies have led us to believe.

Going from this premise, the movie is almost a domestic comedy, where the existence of zombies becomes a device for probing Shaun's relationships with his friends, girlfriend, and mother. A well used device--the zombies reveal things about character other threats wouldn't have--it's a crisis, but not like an invading foreign army as it allows more time for discussion. Not like natural disasters, because zombie movements are more predictable and controllable. So we can have a plausible scene of awkward cordiality as Shaun's group runs into another group led by a casual acquaintance of Shaun's. And we can meanwhile have scenes exploring the nature of Shaun's relationship with his step father, as well as scenes exploring the nature of Shaun's symbiotic laziness with his friend Ed. This is creeping, vaguely silly crises--a catastrophe with room for conversations. It's a very fun movie.



St. Sisyphus asked that I also discuss The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A good movie, I thought, but not nearly as good as Once Upon a Time in the West. Both movies had beautiful visuals, but Once Upon a Time in the West was more about the visuals. Plus, it had a female character. Unless it's an Akira Kurosawa movie, I tend to have a reflexive dislike for movies without at least one prominent female character. My mind starts to wander a little easier.

The absence of a woman is especially felt in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I think. The centrepiece of the film is really the relationship between Blondie (Clint Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach), which at times reminded me of prison sex between otherwise heterosexual men. I can't be the first person to comment on the sort of homoeroticism of the film. Blondie and Tuco begin the movie as partners in an underhanded scheme, but when one betrays the other, Tuco becomes Blondie's bitter rival, tracking the quiet man down and lovingly smoking the used cigars he finds in his wake;




When Tuco does catch Blondie, he sadistically pushes him hatless through the desert, playing games with guns and water. Eastwood's so pretty in the movie, I kept getting a weird feeling I was seeing a woman being sexually abused.

I must say, young Eastwood's prettiness was one of the film's unexpected virtues. Just look at him;



A scarf? In the desert? This is indeed a doll for Tuco, the titular Ugly.

Anyway, character-wise, Tuco was the only one who had any development. As Roger Ebert notes in his review, Eli Wallach has a lot more lines than anyone else, and one of the film's most interesting scenes is Tuco's confrontation with his estranged, priest brother. Aside from this, the movie has a few great action sequences, a nice greed-adventure story about buried treasure, and extremely boring digression about a bridge blowing up.

But the climactic shoot-out is wonderful, staged in a massive graveyard. This is a movie that must be seen in widescreen. For all those who still don't understand the concept (and believe it or not, I know a few such people), let's compare;

Widescreen:


And cropped for approximately average television ratio:

I can't believe it's already 4:30 am. The night's much too short. What's my day--er, night like, you may ask?

Well, Wednesday I woke at 3:30pm or so. I took a shower and then ate breakfast ("Old Fashioned" Quaker oat meal) and started drinking the first pot of coffee of the day while watching Hardball. I finished eating halfway through Olbermann, and went to my room to start drawing.

Yes, days ago I completed a script for the new project and did layouts, and now I've begun actual production. To-day I pencilled two pages and inked one, finishing about fifteen minutes after The Colbert Report, at around 12:15am. I then ate lunch (some excellent spinach quiche my aunt had made), then went to the grocery store to pick up some olive oil and water for my grandmother. I remembered there's now a Wal-Mart open 24 hours at Grossmont Centre, and at 1:30am went there and browsed the movie section, surprised at the lack of good Disney movies, which, after a conversation with Sonya, was what I was in the mood for. Instead, I bought a copy of The Castle of Cagliostro and came back here to watch part of Kagemusha, which I've been nursing for a few nights. I've watched the movie twice since getting the DVD, and now I'm taking it slow, drinking in all the lingering, beautiful shots. It's a movie with far less tension than Ran, and easy to appreciate as a series of paintings.

I stopped watching at around 3:30am and ate dinner (more quiche) before rewatching an episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (episode 11/13)--I'm watching the series in chronological order this time, which is an interesting experience. It's sort of like having two television shows in one. Things fit together differently, and lots of things make more sense, but I'm noticing a few mysteries, such as the unexplained talking cat in episode 01/11.

I've watched quite a few things lately that I haven't gotten around to discussing here. Here's a list--I may talk about some or all of them eventually;

Dirty Pair
Dirty Pair Flash
Excel Saga (rewatching)
Goldfinger (rewatched for the first time in years--mostly disappointing)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Irresponsible Captain Tylor (an old favourite I'm rewatching)
Peter Jackson's King Kong
Last Exile
School Rumble ni gekki
Shaun of the Dead
Tenchi Muyo: Galaxy Police
Veronica Mars; Season One (I believe this is the best show on television right now)

Know this;

I think I've taken too many beverages . . . I just finished a cup of tea, I had a coke with lunch, and that was just after I'd come from the mall with another cup of tea. Now I'm tired of going to and from the bathroom--speaking of which . . .

And I'm back.

Also from the mall, I brought back with me Tom Waits' collection of b-sides, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, and the new, 25th anniversary edition of The Last Unicorn, the animated movie from 1983. Yes, there's finally a DVD edition I felt comfortable buying, even though Peter S. Beagle still isn't getting paid (though he will, apparently, if you buy it through that website). And despite the fact that the word "damn" has been edited out of the audio, few and innocuous though the instances were that it was spoken. Apparently this is for all the parents who aren't buying the movie because they remember it from their own childhood, and who are afraid to let their children hear even swearwords that're allowed on network television. And who think the word itself is inherently worse than Mommy Fortuna's death at the talons of the harpy whose three human-like breasts hang naked on her chest. You know, sometimes it's fun trying to picture the bizarre, self-contradictory monster censorship is evidently meant for. A hydra whose heads are forever multiplying as they compulsively decapitate one another.

Anyway, the new DVD is not only widescreen but has also been remastered decently enough. And it's a pleasure to watch--all the animators, all five or six of them, are listed in the credits, so it makes sense that animation is only sporadically fluid. That's really okay, though--often times, the key to good animation is not to emulate real-world motion, but to use artistic judgement to decide when to animate, and when to let the audience drink in the picture. Mostly good judgement is used here, and I'm not surprised Hayao Miyazaki snatched this team up in the late 80s.

There's a limited colour palette, which at times gives the movie an interesting look, a sort of stained glass quality. Other times, as in night scenes where characters are coloured as brightly as in day scenes, it looks like someone got their Colorforms sets mixed up. Of course, this is largely because paint is expensive, and before the whole process was moved to computers, artists would have to work with thousands of individual paint colours to get the right image. And this was a low budget movie. The only other real problem with it is the horrible America songs, which are much like nails on a chalkboard, especially when Mia Farrow and Jeff Bridges start singing.

Those two do a decent job at acting, though. Even better are Alan Arkin, Rene Auberjonois, Angela Lansbury, and most especially Christopher Lee as King Haggard. I got lost in the movie whenever he started talking.

It's well-written, with a screenplay by Beagle. It seems very much focused on themes of immortality, entropy, and death. Mommy Fortuna keeps the harpy captive despite knowing it shall escape and kill her one day because the harpy is immortal and will always remember Fortuna. Molly laments finding a unicorn now that she's no longer a young girl. The unicorn is most distressed upon becoming human by the fact that she can feel her body dying. King Haggard's life grows ever more dreary, and he greedily grasps at every tiny drop of happiness. Even the tree tells Schmendrick that a tree's love is the greatest because it lasts forever.

It's a good movie. I have a feeling the book's even better. I hope Beagle reacquires the rights and manages to make it into a movie franchise, as he apparently is trying to do.

On an unrelated note, here's a bit of fun (NSFW).

I dreamt a couple of nights ago I was in an empty, very modern, sterile white house at night among some small jagged desert hills. There was no furniture, only very stark lines of charcoal shadow and pale blue light on the walls.

I needed to use the bathroom, but opening the door I found a sort of swamp diorama resembling a cross between Skull Island in the original King Kong and Degobah. I could sense various small creatures in there, among them a fat lizard vaguely like Bill from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a long limbed frog I knew to be poisonous, and a band of five tiny humans on an expedition. I knew also that there was a large and terrible creature of indeterminate shape and size in the darkness intent on devouring the creatures. I needed the light to save them, but I could only flip it on at quick intervals because I knew the creature would then see his prey and zero in. I only managed to save the frog and the lizard before I was forced to flee.

To-day's been dry, draining, and frustrating. After only three hours of sleep, I awoke to the sound of a cat crying in terror upstairs because my grandmother had hired a creepy bearded man who listens to Rush Limbaugh to paint my aunt's room. Lucky the cat slunk quickly into my room and under my bed, and Victoria followed soon after. She didn't seem to know where to go, so I put her in my closet. Unfortunately, I had to leave for the Thursday maid thing, and when I returned I found Victoria gone.

Fortunately, when my aunt came home, we found Victoria crying, trapped in a room upstairs.

And I stink. I hate going out during the day--it's amazing what a little sunlight does. I did get a chance to visit Marty, though. We discussed the modern Spanish speaking director triumvirate of Guillermo del Toro, Pedro Almodovar, and Alfonso Cuaron, but he couldn't help me in my quest to find The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which I've been trying to track down for two days so I can read Sonya's post about the film. I had it in my hand not a week ago, but foolishly rationalised that I might buy two DVDs for the same price as an invariably expensive Criterion DVD. Yesterday, that copy was no longer on the shelf, and I've since been unable to find it at three stores. So I ordered it off Amazon--a used copy ten dollars cheaper than the normal price but now it'll be at least a week . . .

Fuck, I'm tired. And irritable. No reason to be as angry as I am, except all my senses feel muffled. Fuckity fuck.

The connexions no-one makes; the questions no-one asks.

Here's an anime series I haven't watched in years. But the impending devastation of life on Earth has had me thinking about it lately . . .

Here is a post by someone loosely linking the recent Mooninite scandal to the witch trials. I'm inclined to think he has a point, less, maybe, about Boston than about how people react to the Weird. On the other hand, this whole thing's beginning to border on the Lovecraftian.

I think I'm nearly ready to write a real script for this new project. I hope it's not that I'm just getting impatient. It's true; my brain feels liked winged worms dancing in my skull to-day. I'll see what happens. It's not like I don't have three beginnings of scripts from the last three times I felt like this.

I worked on some concept art to-day. This story's going to take place entirely on one alien world, and I actually felt like designing alien flora and fauna. Then I thought about how folklore would revolve around certain animals and their normal effect on the lives of indigenous peoples. I wanted to make some robust stuff for this, because one of my Big Ideas is to contrast it with the imposition of mythology alien to the world.

To-day I drew a landscape with three characters in the foreground, with some trees, mountains, and a fort in the background. I'm finding a lot of the look for this section of the story is being influenced by Ran and, to a lesser extent, Kagemusha. I've been thinking a lot about the concept paintings Kurosawa did before making both movies, and the ways he would use colour. It's having a big impact on my tree designs especially, though I don't think it'd be clear to anyone who didn't know.

I'm thinking of changing the name of one of the main characters. Part of me is strongly warning me not to, as I know I almost always start to hate my own ideas if I spend too much time with them. Which is another reason I'm chomping at the bit about the script lately.

Darby O'Gill and the Little People has put me in the mood for The Quiet Man to-night . . . Last night I watched two thirds of Sixteen Candles, and I may finish it to-night just because I feel vaguely duty bound, but the movie was sort of bothering me. I kept watching because of Molly Ringwald--watching her is an experience I'm finding to be something like watching a beautiful animal at the zoo. I've been trying to remedy my inexperience with 1980s John Hughes movies, so Sixteen Candles follows last week's viewing of The Breakfast Club, which was a much better, though certainly not perfect movie. It had interesting character stuff, and was only truly bad for Ally Sheedy's stupid makeover.

I'd seen Pretty in Pink a while ago, and I found it and The Breakfast Club intriguing for it's portrayal of pretty kids who don't exactly behave realistically, but behave with a certain imperceptible logic that doesn't seem to exist anywhere else. It's like a lost style, and it's sort of intriguing.

Last night I watched Darby O'Gill and the Little People. It was recommended to me by Sonya, who staked her entire reputation as a poet and her integrity and virtue as a woman on this being the greatest, most perfect artefact of cinema to ever be conceived by human hands and minds. I think she promised to wear Leia's metal bikini for weeks if I thought she was wrong.

Or maybe she didn't. Maybe she recommended it with a few strong caveats, actually. My memory's hazy on the subject. She did recommend it, anyway.

I'd seen the movie when I was a kid, and I barely remembered it, beyond that I was frightened by the banshees. Last night I found it to be a good movie, and I also found that the banshee and death coach sequences are still effectively spooky--as is mentioned in just about every review I've read of the movie.

Although it was made in 1959, Darby O'Gill and the Little People was shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio (most Hollywood movies had been shot in widescreen for about six years at that point). This fact, combined with the fact that it was filmed in colour and set in Ireland, all brought to mind The Quiet Man, made seven years earlier. This was somewhat of an unfortunate juxtaposition, as The Quiet Man was shot largely in Ireland while most of Darby O'Gill's exteriors were clearly California. Not that there were many revealing exteriors, as the director, Robert Stevenson, seemed to favour frequent close-ups and even long shots seemed peculiarly close. There's a positively claustrophobic feeling to establishing shots of the village early in the film.

Albert Sharpe is good as Darby, and Sean Connery and Janet Munro are adequate as the requisite, stock pair of pretty lovers, though Connery's huge facial expressions are somewhat off-putting in the gratuitous close-ups.

But the movie really gets on its feet when Darby falls into an old well hidden among some hilltop ruins and finds himself in the leprechaun kingdom. This movie's special effects are extraordinary, particularly considering it was made in 1959. Most of the shots of Darby with the little leprechauns are utterly seamless. No rear projection or process shots were used--instead the technique of force perspective was used, placing Albert Sharpe close to the camera and the leprechaun actors much further away than they appeared. Exactly the same technique used by Peter Jackson in his Lord of the Rings movies--in fact, I was surprised to find several similarities to the new Lord of the Rings movies. A scene later in the film, of Darby finding his daughter injured on a stormy night among the ruins, is almost precisely like the Weathertop Nazgul confrontation scene in Fellowship of the Ring, with Darby standing between his daughter and a looming, sinister cloaked banshee.

Story wise, the movie was good as far as Darby and the leprechauns were concerned. Darby's contest with the leprechaun king has much the tone of a good folktale, and events of Darby's adventures are completely absorbing and fearlessly fantastic. The love story between Connery and Munro was rote, phoney, and somewhat misogynistic.

The movie also featured Estelle Winwood, whose name I only just learned, but looked very familiar to me. Looking at her IMDb profile, I found I'd seen her in many movies, but I mainly remembered her for her small role in John Huston's The Misfits, where she plays a church lady who takes money from Marilyn Monroe as Monroe numbly but fervently attempts to feed salvation.

But, of course, my earliest memory of Estelle actually comes from this.

Everything will be all right.

This is what happens when you fuck with performance artists;



The face of corporate greed, ladies and gentlemen, is wreathed in dreadlocks.

From Dictionary.com;

hoax
–noun
1. something intended to deceive or defraud: The Piltdown man was a scientific hoax.

So why is the Mooninite marketing incident refered to as hoax all the fuck over the place?

If hoax implies intent . . . just what deception was intended? Just what is implied beyond "rude Mooninite"? The fact that it's coupled with an obvious electronic device? Would it really be more likely for a bomb accompanied by a rude drawing to be obviously electronic than not? Anyone with a brain cell would say "no." So, are we to then expect ambiguous public signage to be accompanied by disclaimers?

Two innocent kids are already in jail for what the quivering jelly Boston apparently has for a mayor referred to as "corporate greed". I've looked at one of the kids' web sites. Yeah, obviously corporate greed. Obviously a big, fucking danger. Or maybe I need to be a rich old jackass to see it that way.

If anyone goes to prison for this, even if it's Ted Turner, I think it may be the most 1984-like incursion on the right to free speech yet.

I'm not encouraged by almost universal news coverage of the event portraying it as a narrowly avoided danger or a malicious stunt. So far, Keith Olbermann's the only newsperson I've seen covering it as the piece of ridiculousness it is.

Odd Lite Brite advertisements don't scare me. Piggish government bureaucrats who arrest people for them do.