Saturday was definitely my favourite day of Comic-Con, for several reasons. I really didn't expect it to be--as it was the day to sell out first, I assumed being there would mostly involve shoving my way through crowds. And yet it turned out to be the day that gave me the least amount of trouble with mass humanity; the busiest day at the Con felt for me like the least busiest day.

I didn't take the trolley that morning because my aunt Gaylene wanted me to accompany my cousin Courtney's friend Susan. Courtney and Susan wanted to go to the Con even though Courtney was working most of the day. Before Courtney showed up, my aunt wanted me to escort Susan because Susan had never been to the Con before and I guess someone, she or my aunt, was wary of the behemoth. So Susan and I got the Convention Centre at around 9:30am, thirty minutes before the Con officially opening.

I didn't talk to Susan very long; apparently she was mainly there to see the entire cast of Heroes, so I talked to her about how silly I thought the ending of season 1 was, and I explained to her my theory about how the writers screwed up with the Haitian character. She didn't say much, and then we were separated at the gates when pre-registers (her) had to go in through a different entrance than people who already had their badges (me). I waited around for her a while in the Sails Pavilion upstairs but gave up after a few minutes. So much for my chaperone career.

There I was with my portfolio and a printout of the first issue of my new comic, and I'd already learned that the portfolio reviews weren't worth my time. So I decided to go downstairs and talk to the people in the small press area of the Event Hall. People were going down there even though it was only 9:45am, but it wasn't very crowded. I've now arrayed about my keyboard all the cards and fliers and little handmade booklets I collected from the various booths and it's sort of dizzying to think I actually had conversations with all these different comic book artists and writers. I can't even quite remember the order in which I talked to everyone, nor can I remember all the faces attached to these comics and cards. I'll do my best, but my apologies to any of you who might actually be checking my blog and getting miffed that I utterly forgot a long, meaningful conversation we had.

The first person I spoke to was a guy who worked on a comic called SPaZ. I glanced through his comic and told him I liked the colouring. I showed him some of my comic and he told me I definitely ought to join the west coast chapter of a comic artist guild. Apparently, it's a bigger thing on the east coast. Considering I've noticed that another two comic book stores have closed around here recently, I'm beginning to think comics are more of an east coast thing in general.

Let's see, I'll just go by cards here . . . Kelli Nelson was pretty cool, and seemed like she had a good sense of humour. Her books were in some amazing, handmade bindings, and she told me about a specific dye or material she used for one book in order to get an interesting thick, glossy texture with oddly good traction.

I met Randy Reynaldo at his booth, and he seems like he has a very nice comic . . . Val Hochberg, creator of a comic called Kick Girl, seemed very sweet, giggled a lot, and really seemed to like my comic.

I met Brion Foulke, creator of Flipside, the only creator I met Saturday whose comic I'd actually read and the only comic creator who'd actually read Boschen and Nesuko. That was a rather pleasant surprise. He told me he really liked my work, and that he didn't always say that to people. I told him I liked his, which I do, though I haven't read more than two-thirds of the Flipside archive. He was doing a radio show or something at the time I spoke to him and I told him he had kind of a radio voice. He was with the creator of another comic called Paradigm Shift, which also looks well drawn.

In the booth next to him was Jennifer Brazas, who I think is Brion's girlfriend, and also the creator of Mystic Revolution. I had a slightly odd conversation with her because she and I were wearing exactly the same hat and glasses (though her fedora had a c-crown). She looked through some of my stuff at Brion's urging.

"You'll like it, it has naked women," he said.

"So I see," she said, for although I'd thought about restricting my portfolio to my less explicit work, I actually had a really hard time finding any significant groupings of pages that didn't feature at least a few NC-17 items. So I didn't bother with self-censorship, which really perturbed the creator of Zecta, to whom I'd spoken earlier. Upon looking at my comic, the first thing he very soberly said to me was that I ought to have a mature content warning on my cover. He seemed very concerned that children might get a hold of my comic.

"It's very hard for me to think that way," I said. "I'm too much of a pervert."

I don't think this was a statement he appreciated. He was also the only person to tell me I needed to replace my handwritten lettering with computer text. We may very well have been broadcasting at polar opposite wavelengths. His comic is about robotic insects.

I spoke very briefly to the creator of Bob the Angry Flower, who was wearing a very stylish cardboard headdress of yellow petals. The comic sample I picked up from his booth was very funny, too.

I spoke to three of the makers of Bushi Tales, and we admired samples of each others' comics, noting how we seemed to be exploring mildly similar design concepts. I had a very interesting conversation with Bushi Tales artist/Co-Creator Lin Workman about colouring programmes. He uses PhotoShop, the industry standard, while I'm still using my 1998 shareware copy of Paint Shop Pro 5 (who wants a copy? Here you go. Now you can colour exactly like me. Results may vary).

There was another artist I spoke to who had some very good stuff, but I seem to've completely lost her card . . .

Next to her was Athena LaRue, creator of The Adventures of Onion Boy, and she seemed very intrigued by my work, just from overhearing me discussing it with the girl whose card I lost. LaRue's comic is rather nice looking, like a cross between Tim Burton and Maurice Sendak.

I spoke to GB Tran and we had a conversation about the butterfly effect, how he used it in his comic, and how unfortunate it is that there's an Ashton Kutcher movie of the same name. I pointed out that I'd heard a character in a Star Wars game refer to the unforeseen dramatic effects the flapping of a mynock's wings can have, so maybe the concept is adequately proliferated in our pop culture regardless of Ashton Kutcher.

There was another guy I spoke to who was charging fifty cents for his little cards bearing his URL.

"Fifty cents for one of your cards?" I said, thinking he hadn't understood what I wanted.

"Yes," he said with perfect sincerity.

"Er, I'll pass." So no link for him . . .

I then made for a booth for a comic called The Devil's Panties. I spoke to its creator, Jennie Breeden, who was wearing a really cool tan coloured, space military looking coat. She explained to me the comic is autobiographical, so I asked the obvious question; "Do you wear devil's panties?"

"We figure the devil would go commando, actually," she explained, and I could tell she's answered the question many times before.

I'd have advised her to own the concept, say, "Yeah, I wear the devil's panties, and they're always on fire!" or something. She seemed to like my comic, and recommended I use a site called www.lulu.com for my self-publishing needs, though she said my comic, being in colour, might be quite expensive.

"I knew I was doing the bad thing when I went with colour," I said, sighing. "But I did it anyway . . ."

Next I spoke to Kelly Lynn Jones, who was quite appalled when I told her about the guy charging fifty cents for his cards. She gave me a card and a nice postcard, free of charge,

Well, it's time I did something else to-day, so I'll finish Saturday next time. Yes, there's more. Lots more . . .

So where was I . . . ?

Ah, I forgot to mention that Zack Snyder actually won a few points with me when he talked smack about the V for Vendetta movie. In discussing the fact that there has yet to be a decent movie based on an Alan Moore comic, Snyder said, "The problem with V was that the filmmakers acted like Alan should be so lucky that they were making a movie from his comic--that they knew better."

Fifty points. But 300 still sucked.

Anyway, after the Warner Brothers presentation, I waited in line at the Con cafeteria until I got close enough to the menu to read that a small, notoriously awful pizza cost eight dollars. So I walked to Horton Plaza and got a nice slice with tomatoes and feta cheese and things for less than four dollars. That's how it's done, as Mitsurugi would say.

I was rather disappointed to notice later that I'd missed Ridley Scott doing a panel about the new Blade Runner cut, but I was upstairs seeing Neil Gaiman speak. I figured it just wouldn't be Comic-Con if I didn't see Gaiman at least once.

This was in Room 6CDEF, which is one of the larger rooms upstairs. There was an enormous line upstairs, but at least we were inside. Ahead of me was a middle aged man leaning on a cane and wearing an extraordinarily placid smile. For some reason, he decided to speak to me; "Seen anything interesting so far?"

Maybe it was because he was so peculiarly calm, but after a brief description of the Warner Brothers presentation, I let into a bitter rant about 300, going on about how it was misogynistic, homophobic, and racist. The man nodded peacefully, smiling, saying, "Yes, that's what I read."

"I'd like to see a good adaptation of an Alan Moore comic . . ." I said.

Behind me was a guy in a button down white shirt and little glasses accompanied by a female assistant-type lady. The man said, "Couldn't [so and so] get us in?"

The woman replied, "[So and so] was talking to [someone else] and [someone else] and finally she had to start saying 'no'--She said everyone--everyone wants a piece of Neil."

"He's like a god," said the man.

I got a seat near the back of the room next to a dark haired kid I could see staring at me in my peripheral vision. I didn't really mind being far away--there are huge screens, and I have no desire to touch Neil, as much as I like his writing.

The crowd cheered as he got on stage and the first thing he said was something like, "There's nothing like looking out on a crowd of several thousand people and thinking . . . I really should have prepared something."

In fact, mostly he repeated almost verbatim a few stories from his blog. He actually took off his leather jacket at one point--a garment that's always looked slightly ridiculous in San Diego weather--and thousands of female voices screamed.

"What was that?!" he asked his swooning masses.

The guy actually looked like he was in better shape than I remember him in previous years and in DVD special features. Though the dark circles under his eyes were much darker.

He told a story about this line of "Scary Trousers" shirts people are selling featuring a cartoon image of himself. Apparently the phrase comes from an incident where Gaiman, having lunch with Alan Moore, became slightly ill when Moore discussed in detail some of the more gruesome moments of From Hell, which he'd been writing at the time. As Gaiman had to step out for, I think, the third time for air, Moore said, "Well, well, well. Neil 'Scary Trousers' Gaiman . . ."

Gaiman said Moore is very tall, and looms, and is hairy, and it occurred to me later, after on Saturday I'd seen J. Michael Straczynski mention Moore as example of a truly great comic book writer, that Alan Moore looms over the entire Comic-Con, even moreso because of his perpetual absence, year after year. I see from the Con's Wikipedia entry that he was at Comic-Con in 1985 "in his only U.S. convention appearance." He's like a vast, dark shadow over everything.

So maybe Gaiman's more of a steward. Alan Moore's the god.

Anyway, I have to cut this short on account of it being Thursday . . .

Friday I made it a point to be in Hall H in the morning. Hall H is where the big studios shill their stuff, and Thursday I'd missed the Paramount presentation, which, from what Tim's friend Amber had described, sounded fantastic, with stuff about the new Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Beowulf, and Stardust. I learned later that there was even a full screening of Stardust.

So I caught the Warner Brothers presentation on Friday. Hall H is the biggest panel room in the convention centre, but there are always thousands of people trying to get in, so this year the line stretched outside the convention centre and wrapped around the back of the building. I had to wait under the sun once this year, after all. Matters were made worse by the poor separation of lines--I saw a skinny Superman near the front of one line, only to later see him gloomily trudging to the back of the line I'd gotten into. Overhead, a skywriter wrote, "HA HA HA." This turned out to be marketing for the new Batman movie, but the Joker's sting was felt by many that day, I think.

Actually, the line starting moving pretty fast after I'd gotten into it. It wasn't long before I was in the big dark chambre where I'd seen the absolutely wonderful panel for Grindhouse last year, though I wasn't to see anything half as interesting this year. Immediately upon entering the room, everyone was handed big white t-shirts with "CONTROL" printed in big black letters on the front and "KAOS" on the back. This was for the new Get Smart movie, and the film's director, Peter Segal, appearing on stage, followed shortly by cast members Nate Torrence, Masi Oka, Ken Davitian, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and Steve Carell.

I'm a big fan of Steve Carell, despite the fact that I have trouble maintaining awareness of Evan Almighty. He was my favourite correspondent on The Daily Show, he was the best part of Little Miss Sunshine, he's great in the American version of The Office, and I even liked The 40 Year-Old Virgin.

Vague speculation I'd heard months ago that Carell actually might have a tighter grip on Get Smart's creative reins than its mediocre director seems perhaps to have been accurate. Carell unabashedly answered a question about the movie's vision;

"I wanted the world to feel like the world of The Bourne Identity." When people laughed, he said, "No, I'm serious." He explained the threat in the movie, personified in a villain played by Terrance Stamp, is meant to seem very real. Carell said he didn't want an unrealistic world around his bumbling character because, in his opinion, it's much funnier when such a character is up against realism.

I'm not sure I think it's necessarily funnier, though I think it can be. But it might make for a better film. Certainly such a philosophy falls in line with all of Carell's best work to date.

The Rock was actually pretty charming, and I'm always surprised by how much I like him in interviews, despite the fact that I've never felt slightly inclined to see one of his movies. There's actually an affable guy under the thick gloss of fake sweat. When a kid asked if they had any funny, behind-the-scenes stories, Carell said, "Peter Segal never wore pants for the entire shoot." The Rock added, "Yeah, and he always wanted us to call him 'Big P'."

Masi Oka received an enormous applause when he came on stage, and several feminine screams of adoration. He always seemed awe-struck by what had probably been a pretty consistently effusive fan-reaction at the Con. He awkwardly explained his and Nate Torrence's roles in Get Smart as being tech guys, sort of the movie's Q, but explained their gadgets don't always work properly, adding a very self-conscious sounding, "Yikes."

Ken Davitian, a large man who played Azamat Bagatov in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, last appeared at Comic-Con in the form of some preview footage of himself and Sacha Baron Cohen fighting naked in a hotel. So when asked about his role in Get Smart, he replied simply, "I get to wear clothes."

The notorious nude footage had apparently been a point of discord between Twentieth Century Fox and the Comic-Con administration as those latter folks, trying to market the Con as a family event, were unhappy not to've been told about the Borat footage ahead of time. So this year, Con administrators insisted on screening any footage studios planned to present before it appeared before the Con audience. Which was kind of funny in light of the fact that, after Get Smart, Warner Brothers gave us two fairly gore and horror laden previews. First to The Invasion, which was accompanied only by a perfunctory and substanceless recorded introduction by Nicole Kidman, and then for a remake of a Takashi Miike movie called One Missed Call. The movie's stars, Edward Burns and Shannyn Sossamon, appeared onstage. She seemed incredibly nervous, while he seemed comfortable and charming, explaining he plays "the cop with the heart of gold who doesn't try to sleep with her."

After them came the gory trailer for Whiteout. Appearing on stage were producer Joel Silver, director Dominic Sena, creator of the source comic Greg Rucka, and, after a fifteen minute delay, the film's star, Kate Beckinsale. Beckinsale is another one of those stars who's so much better to see interviewed than to see acting in a movie. She seems to be one of the most charming people in Hollywood, making cute references to crewmembers groaning whenever she bent over during the filming of Underworld, and gamely grinning and waving at the audience as the panel ended. I get the impression that she has kind of a domineering husband, though, as she kept prefacing things by saying, "Well, my husband would think," or, "My husband probably wouldn't want me to." She also explained she probably wouldn't be in a James Bond movie because it would require her to appear in her underwear, and she thinks she's "getting a bit elderly for that." For the record, she's thirty-four. No-one throw beverages at her, okay? She seems really sweet otherwise.

The funniest part, though, was when a small kid asked a twitching Dominic Sena, who looked like he'd just snorted a Radio Flyer wagon full of cocaine, if the cast and crew played any pranks on each other.

"Oh, they're probably a little too X rated for you," he said. "They involve Kate and dildos . . ."

A moment later, Greg Rucka said to Sena, "You realise that kid was like seven, right?"

The big event of the Warner Brothers presentation, though, was Zack Snyder, who appeared at first alone onstage, but was later joined by two cast members of his upcoming Watchmen film, Malin Akerman, who'll play Laurie, and Jackie Earle Haley, who'll play Rorschach. Both actors, I'll admit, actually look like their roles. Though they didn't get to speak at all. I heard Haley say, "That's passion" to Akerman when a fan dressed as Rorschach got up to ask a question, but otherwise it was only an intriguingly inarticulate Zack Snyder speaking.

As much as I didn't like 300, I felt kind of bad for Snyder when someone asked him if Watchmen might finally be the movie Alan Moore keeps his name on. Snyder sadly replied, "No, he's already said he doesn't want his name on the movie." He said, "We all want to please Alan . . . it's not so much to ask, wanting the guy who actually creating the fucking thing to like your movie . . . I just hope some rainy day in England he'll put in the DVD--and he probably won't--and say, 'They didn't fuck it up that much.'"

I must say, though, that if I'd never seen 300 and I didn't think Watchmen could be done in under a five hour running time, I'd actually be pretty optimistic for the film based on what Snyder said; it's going to be rated R, it's set in the 1980s, Snyder wants to include the Black Freighter segments, and he even wants to keep Sally Jupiter's poodle haircut.

Well, that's all I have time for to-day, and I still haven't told everything interesting about Friday. Tune in next time . . .

So Comic-Con's over again. I have much to tell but I think I'll begin by saying I saw Sailor Mercury bend at the waist. I was behind her.

Little white panties.

But that was Saturday. I'll start with Wednesday, which was Preview Night. I didn't have to wait at all for my badge, unlike thousands of poor schlubs who queued up around the convention centre under the cruel Yellow Face. It actually wasn't so hot this year, never getting above 85 degrees, a significant difference from last year's 111 degrees.

At 2:30pm I started walking towards the Con from a sandwich shop I'd stopped at six blocks north of the Convention Centre and I already started seeing people walking past me with badges. The site had said pre-registered people could start picking up their badges at 3pm, but as seemed to happen so frequently at the Con this year, the mob forced things to move a little faster, which probably explains why I was able to get to the event hall at 9:45am on Saturday, fifteen minutes before opening.

The Wikipedia entry says there were two hundred thousand attendees this year, and I can certainly believe it as the masses of people built up around the front of the convention centre were slower and more dense than I'd ever seen at any previous Con. Even on preview night, navigating the event hall was difficult. I didn't hang around that day as I was really just happy to've gotten my badge so early, meaning I could simply walk right in on Thursday morning and perhaps thereby gain some advantage at the portfolio reviews.

Joining me on Thursday were Tim and his friend Amber. We took the trolley, which is roughly an hour trip from Santee to the convention centre. The trolley stops in front of the centre where its track runs parallel to that of an actual train. As I said, masses of people were attempting to move to and fro all day, every day of the Con, and these people had not only to contend with crossing the busy street, but also the trolley track and the train track. We had to wait nearly ten minutes for a train engine with a single car attached to stop in the middle of everyone's path and blow its extremely loud horn several times. The conductor was leaning out the window and he looked familiar. To Tim, I said, "Is that Ben?!"

"It could be," said Tim. "He always wanted to be a train conductor."

And I remembered then how Ben, whom Tim and I knew from elementary school and high school, would ride his bicycle with a small electric light on his helmet, and how, when he'd gotten a car, he'd attached massive, working train horns to it--I think he actually got pulled over for that one. Ben wasn't a talkative guy; he communicated by being annoying.

So when Tim wondered why the train was simply stopped there in everyone's way, I said to him, "It has to be Ben. And he wouldn't even understand that he's pissing everyone off."

During the Warner Brothers presentation on Friday, Kate Beckinsale was about fifteen minutes late because, she said, her car was caught behind a train.

Anyway, after the train backed up--that's right, after all that, it went back the way it came--I was indeed able to walk right into the Con. Tim was buying his badge that day, so he had to wait a long time, and Amber, who'd pre-registered, had to wait ten minutes longer than Tim, which goes to show something. I guess, unless you did it like me and registered for the four day pass and picked it up on preview night, pre-registering has ceased to be an expedient and has become merely a way of getting a badge before they sell out, as they did, for the first time this year.

I quickly found the little portfolio review area and discovered I'd overestimated the number of people who'd be there--there was never more than three hundred comic book artists waiting there at a time. I managed to get my name on the first page of the Dark Horse call list and sat down with everyone else. One of the first things I noticed is that we almost all of us looked the same--guys in our late twenties or early thirties with ponytails. I was the only one with a fedora, though there were plenty of those elsewhere at the Con. The standard issue hat for the aspiring comic book artist seems to be a backwards fitted baseball cap, usually navy blue in colour.

Although I was on the first page of the call list, the wait was kind of excruciating because I had to go to the bathroom really bad. I didn't want to leave because I saw that the few bozos who did, for what ever reason, walk away were skipped over after the girl called their names a few times. So I sat and watched Dark Horse Senior Editor Randy Strandley talking to one guy after another--and one very gorgeous auburn haired girl in a long brown skirt. I don't know what anomaly she came from.

In the Comic-Con schedule, the Dark Horse portfolio review thing read thusly; "Dark Horse editors will be reviewing the storytelling work of professional-level comics artists. They will be looking at consecutive story pages only, with an eye toward storytelling as well as drawing skills. A minimum of five consecutive pages is required. Please bring your most recent work. Artists with cover paintings, inking or color samples, pinups, or sketches are invited to submit work by following the instructions at www.darkhorse.com/company/submissions.php. It is suggested that this review be treated as a job interview."

The sign at the review explicitly requested portfolios from pencillers only. Despite the fact that I've always considered my pencils the sloppiest in the world, I got my hopes up for some reason. I'd printed up five consecutive story pages from Moving Innocent as well as the pencil versions of those pages. Here's the first of the five I showed to Randy Strandley;



The first thing he said was, "You have a long way to go." He told me to go downstairs to the event hall and look at some original pencils. He said it would be a real eye-opener. I was a little irritated by the suggestion that'd I'd never seen pencils before--I showed him some finished pages from my new project, which, I explained to him, is from the first issue of a five part mini-series I'm trying to get published.

He said that, since I was that far along, I ought to submit it to a contest Dark Horse holds on their site for new creators at certain times of the year. And that was that.

I didn't bother with any of the other portfolio reviews--the whole thing wasn't nearly as useful as I was expecting. The schedule listed only twenty-one companies reviewing portfolios, and most of them were either video game companies, people looking for conceptual artists, or people wanting artists to do specific kinds of imitations. These weren't the publishing avenues I was looking for. So it's back to submitting this new series to comics publishers through the mail, which I've only just begun to do anyway. And if that fails, I'll try self-publishing, something I got a great deal of advice about on Saturday when I spoke to people at the small press booths downstairs. But that'll be another entry . . .

To be continued . . .

I was at Grossmont Centre in my dream last night--Grossmont Centre being a mall near here, except in my dream it was Grossmont Centre as it was when I was a kid, and it still had the cinema where I barely remember seeing Supergirl (1984). In my dream, I was trying to buy minutes for my phone, and the first place I tried was the cinema where a big bearded guy at the concession stand sold me fifteen dollars worth, which happens to be exactly what I bought yesterday in the waking world.

After buying minutes in the dream, I wandered the mall a while before deciding I wanted more minutes. I went back to the cinema only to find the interior had completely changed. It was now a dimly lit bar run by two elegant, beautiful, dark-haired Russian women. The older of the two explained she couldn't sell me minutes until I purchased a hundred dollar insurance contract from her. She was smiling and looking down her nose at me so I could tell she was toying with me and didn't care if I could tell. The younger woman was trying not to laugh at me. I liked those two.

Anyone else wonder if global warming is actually caused by secret experiments with an ancient, gigantic creature in Antarctica?

After much going up and down stairs yesterday, my room is finally back together and I have a desk again so I think I'll do some drawing to-day.

I've been getting up at 8:30am lately. Can you believe it? I've been setting my alarm so I don't continue sleeping when it feels natural to do so, despite the fact that I've been getting to bed at 12 or 12:30. I don't have much time for anything before bed except one of Sonya's poems, so I haven't been watching many movies lately. Last night I watched the final episode of Harvey Birdman (see below), which featured the supremely triumphant return of Stephen Colbert ("Ha ha ha! Final episode stunt casting!").

Looking forward to Comic-Con still. That's why I've been sleeping at night. That and the broken air conditioner, though it's been a little better since my grandmother let us open windows at certain times of day (she's now afraid of mould flying in the windows). I finished bringing things into my room and unpacking this morning (though a few bags remain in my car). I actually made some attempt to organise my books, especially my manga, but it's kind of impossible with so many things wedged in a garage. What I wouldn't give for a place with book shelves . . .

I've been thinking. We've heard recently that Al-Qaeda's back to it's pre-9/11 strength. We've heard that Michael Chertoff has a gut feeling there'll be an attack during the summer. And now Fox has suddenly, mysteriously pulled out of the Comic-Con.

There's going to be more than 123,000 people there this year. Friday, the second day of Comic-Con, is 7-27.

Ah, hell. I'm still going.

The air conditioner's broke, and it's hotter inside than it is outside, where it's 84 degrees. I've been through worse; it got to be 111 during Comic-Con last year, but I don't seem to be handling heat very well lately. It's making me sluggish and confused. I did get to use my mother's office a few days ago, though, and got a little drawing done. Otherwise, I'm not sure what I'm doing. To be honest, I'm not sure I ought to be doing anything. I have one printout of the comic I'm submitting to publishers and I can't afford another colour ink cartridge right now. So I think I'll save this one for portfolio review at the Comic-Con, and if no-one seems interested in it, I'm not sure that there's a whole lot of point in doing a second issue.

I do feel slightly encouraged about this work, though. I'm thinking I'll turn it into a five-shot mini-series, as that's close to the sort of thing a lot of publishers seem to want (this Wikipedia page is enormously helpful).

Anyway, it'd be awfully convenient if I oughtn't to be doing anything right now and I kind of can't do anything right now. Even if I had a desk, I don't know if I could work in this heat.

My aunt's friend Violet came to visit, and the timing of her bargain flight was rather bad as there's no more bedrooms left here and she's had to sleep on the floor in an air mattress. I offered the guest room I'm occupying, but it was not wanted, possibly because there are no washed sheets. And Violet couldn't get a hotel room because they're all booked for Comic-Con.

Oh, yes. For those of you who don't know about the size of Comic-Con, know that every hotel in San Diego county is full up more than a week before the first day of the Con. It gets bigger every year, last year there were 123,000 attendees, and this year the four day passes have already been sold out for a few days. I'm looking forward to this.

Nothing much to say for yesterday again. Yesterday and yesterday and yesterday . . .

CNN's released responses to the point-by-point responses on Michael Moore's website to Sanjay Gupta's infamous report on Sicko. It's pretty sad, as the best CNN can seem to do is point out that there are very minor differences in numbers between the legitimate sources Moore references and other sources. I loved this bit from the CNN site;

Gupta believes picking and comparing numbers from different places and times to suit an argument is not the best approach to a complicated issue like this one.

Just conveniently ignoring the fact that, in choosing the most recent statistics available, Moore was forced to use what actually exists.

As Moore puts it; "That U.N. report does list American health care spending as only $5,700, but it's a few years old. Since then, the U.S. government has updated its projections for health care spending, to $7,498 in 2007. So we used that number. It's the most recent, and comes right from the Department of Health and Human Services. If the Cuban government gave a figure on 2007 projected health spending, we'd have used it."

I finally saw Sicko a few days ago and it's a good movie. It follows several personal stories of people who've experienced the ridiculousness of the American healthcare industry firsthand, and the stories are put together very well. All the statistics are really there, even if you're looking through CNN glasses, that this industry is fucked, and Sicko does what a documentary ought to; it illustrates statistics evocatively. That Moore spends time focusing on the advantages of foreign systems simply seems constructive to me; he's showing us the ways in which we might fix our system.

It's been hot around here lately. It was overcast yesterday, but still there was inescapable heat. I start to feel like I'm absorbing it during the day, like a rock, and it clouds about me like an aura while I sleep in what ought to be a cooler night, with the fan on at full. Even with an air conditioner blanketing the room with forceful cool, I can feel all matter fighting to be hot. Ass, thighs, and back on the seat in the car become soaked with sweat no matter how cold my front is from the air conditioner.

I've got to stop driving so much. I bet I'd save a lot of money. These days, I pretty much only drive to the grocery store, my parents' house, and Tim's house, except for a couple trips to the mall or Fry's. It's more than necessary when just about everything I need--and more--is in walking distance. But then there's the matter of the heat . . .

Why do all the transformers in the new movie look the same? Why does the trailer for the new Lady Chatterley's Lover seem like a grindhouse trailer? I really have only questions to-night, I'm afraid . . .

"But, sir!" I hear you say, "What have you gotten done?"

A little colouring. Various forms of reading. Almost no writing. I guess I could call this a vacation. Except it feels more like summer camp.

Some Elvis Costello to-day . . .

Pretend I'm MTV. But with music videos.

More mid-90s Tori;

Part of last night's dream can probably be explained by the sight of Victoria staring at me from the living room darkness before I went to bed last night with glimmering green eyes. But the dream began in a complicated three-dimensional white stucco maze of a house, where I lived with a few relatives. Some of those relatives had begun to complain about an infestation of demons in the garden. This garden, which I viewed through one of several large, pane-less, fully open windows in the first storey bedrooms, consisted of miles and miles of flat, red, sandy desert, like a Martian landscape. The demons were clustered in slow moving herds a couple miles away. They looked like hunched, emaciated red clay skinned old hairless men. I knew the only way to kill them was to use bullets made from cat matter.

I couldn't find any dead cats, so I stuffed Victoria alive into a small, transparent shell, like the gelatine case of a pill. She shrank easily, and crouched at the end of the shell to stare warily back at me with the glimmering green eyes. I somehow managed to kill all the demons with the one bullet, but I was afraid to look inside the shell afterwards to see what had become of the cat.

I drove to North County Fair mall yesterday and saw this poster for the upcoming Stardust movie in the form of huge banners all over the mall, and even pasted on the elevator doors. I have this bad feeling Stardust is going to be a very good, but quite unsuccessful movie. I just can't imagine many people wanting to see a movie based on this poster. I like Tristran's overtly phallic sword and Yvaine's expression that seems to say, "I know quite a bit more about important things than you possibly could, but I'm willing to let you join in my fun for a few hours." But I'm not sure I like these things in the right way, and the movie already has to work against a title that might suggest to people a 1970s Ice Capade.

As I was approaching my grandmother's house on my way back from the mall, I found myself behind a white utility truck which pulled over to the left, facing the wrong direction. I didn't think too much about it, parked, put my iPod back into my bag, got out of the car, and heard, from a distance away, "You need to slow down!"

I turned around to see a large man with a big white moustache had gotten out of the truck and was now glowering at me from across the street. I laughed and said, "What the fuck're you talking about?" I think I've been waiting weeks for an opportunity to say that to someone.

"You were driving too fast!" he said, "I was backing up--I could have hit you!"

Now, anyone who's ever ridden with me knows that I'm ridiculous about observing the speed limit. I'm never in a hurry, and I'm annoyed by all the pricks who have to rush by everyone on the freeway so they can buy a new cell phone or whatever. I especially hate people who speed in a residential area, particularly around here where there are often kids playing in the street. I also don't, under any circumstances, tailgate (and I love orange juice. I've patterned my life after Robert Loggia).

I said, "I was behind you, jackass, if you're backing up, it's your responsibility to look out for cars behind you!"

"You were speeding!"

"I was going the speed limit, if not slower!"

"Do you want trouble?" This guy was big--he looked exactly like Paul Teutul, Sr., and I had no doubt he could pound me into the pavement. Even so, all this made me think was that I didn't have to go easy on him;

"What the fuck do you mean, trouble?"

"I'll call the cops."

I laughed, "For what?"

"I'll tell them you were speeding."

"I wasn't speeding, asshole!" How exactly I could have been speeding if I was behind him is an interesting question that sadly wasn't addressed.

"You don't have to cuss."

I laughed again; this was incredibly rich, and I was starting to feel really good, "Ah ha."

"What does that mean?"

"I was saying 'ah ha' like you'd said something threatening, like you'd said something intimidating."

He seemed chastised but still sore, "I was just telling you to slow down . . ."

I grinned, showing him my missing front tooth again. It occurs to me now I must look like a Jack O'Lantern. I said, "Oh, okay," and left him alone.

I think what I learned is that I like fighting. A lot. Sure, only when it's called for, but when it is, I love it, I have to admit. I am from Mars.

From 1997, my favourite era of Tori Amos;

I spent nearly all day yesterday reading about conservative philosophy. I thought I might write a huge journal entry about it, but now it seems hardly worth the time. Mostly what I found, I think, was best summed up by a quote from Benjamin Disraeli I saw in Wikipedia's entry on conservatism; "A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy."

You see, I wanted to defend my statement from a few days ago, that neocons aren't very much different from regular conservatives, which was a bit of a reaction to people like Ron Paul who seem to feel the havoc wrought by Bush and Cheney derives from a secret plan of theirs to create Big Government instead of respecting individuals property rights and states rights that right wingers seem to hold sacred above all else. It's a pretty naïve and self-contradictory system of thought, really; the idea that everyone pursuing their own self interest will somehow work out to the common good. It explains two things about the Bush administration; how the government got bigger under them, and how they didn't seem to plan it. They didn't think about whether or not invading Iraq would be good for the American people--they thought it would be good for their own interests.

Anyway, I may yet post about it. I don't know, I've kind of tired myself out on the subject, but I did reaffirm my fondness for Nietzsche.

So what else have I to talk about? Using the computer is a little uncomfortable right now--I have the monitor set up on a table about two feet from the foot of my bed, which is a slender but oddly tall thing. I sit between it and the table, looking up at the monitor because there's no room for a chair and sitting on the bed is uncomfortable because of the altitude and the tiny font size I prefer. But I'm still enjoying a house to myself. Oddly enough, it's made me want to read more because I feel less of a need to blot out the presence of other people with loud music and movies--reading's just not something I can do with music playing. Music contaminates the mood of a book too much for me.

I'm really not so great at separating music from what I'm doing while listening, and sometimes associations become permanently bound to certain albums or artists. For example, I can't listen to Tori Amos' Boys for Pele or Jane's Addiction without thinking about Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Fortunately, I've managed to start listening to music while writing lately. It's a barrier I broke in myself while doing the Lord of the Rings fanfiction thing. Unfortunately, I haven't been in a good place for writing lately, and even less of a good place for artwork. It'd be nice if things settled down around here soon . . .

I turned on CNN to-day just in time to see Michael Moore feasting on a Wolf's lifeless carcass. The video's finally online here, though I wish it included the Sanjay Gupta hit piece that preceded the interview. Moore was right to be as pissed off as he is in the video. Gupta's report, while trying to appear fair-minded and giving points to Moore for bringing to light stories of Americans fucked by this country's healthcare system, also included what seems to be the right-wing counterattack strategy, which is to mention problems in Canadian and French healthcare systems Moore's film doesn't mention, as though that somehow means Moore "fudged the facts" (as Gupta put it in his piece. Moore uses the phrase deliberately in his criticism of CNN's coverage). Moore says he's going to put corrections to the hit piece on his web site to-night, but the bias is already clear; if the problems with Canada's, Britain's, and France's healthcare are so egregious, than why is the U.S. still ranked worse than all three countries? And if universal healthcare means higher taxes, isn't that still better than a country where a large portion of even the employed population doesn't have healthcare coverage?

EDIT; Here's the page where Moore refutes CNN's false information, point by point.

It's just me, two cats, and three large air-purifier things here now. Gods, I love being alone, even under these circumstances.

Lucky the cat has been rather clingy, practically glued to my calf wherever I go in the house and meowing constantly. I was thinking he's like a girl who's chosen a man because he's always been sweet to her and provided for her, only to find in a seemingly threatening situation, she has a primal need to feel protected by him and she's not sure he's up to it--so she tries to find out by constantly demanding attention.

It was an interesting night's sleep. Victoria the cat was perfectly cool, content hanging out next to me while I read before she retired to the closet for the evening. Lucky, meanwhile, was continually pawing at my door to be let in and, when let in, he'd walk around the room for a few moments, meowing, before pawing on the door to be let out. He repeated this sequence of actions several times between 4:30am and 6:30am--and just leaving the door open didn't help, either. He merely jumped on my pillow and began pawing the wall behind my head.

However, I did manage to get to sleep at the incredible time of 1:30am, which I suspect I owe to lack of sleep from the previous night and a glass of whiskey. Surprisingly enough, Catch-22 is a much better book with a glass of whiskey. Suddenly prose that seemed half-hearted and distant became rather amiable and warmly enthusiastic. Suddenly it makes sense that this novel was a bestseller in the 50s.

I was genuinely awed by Sonya Taaffe's "Kaddish for a Dybbuk" in her Postcards from the Province of Hyphens. It's strange to think I converse regularly with someone so brilliant--the poem in question so nicely captures the atmosphere of grieving at a funeral and gives it a supernatural package as keen as anything Neil Gaiman wrote for Sandman--that wonderful feeling of seeing something absolutely fantastic and feeling every detail of the thing resonate with you as it's so human an experience as to be personally yours. She's impossibly good, this Taaffe girl.

I'm tired. I'm not exactly sure what's going on. But yesterday I moved everything out of my room, including the furniture, and I was told we were going to need to be out of the house on Tuesday. Only I awoke this morning to find my grandmother was gone, and my mother, also trying to figure out what's going on, had called my grandmother to find out she'd rejected staying at one aunt's house because it smelled weird, had decided to sleep in her car, but changed her mind and is on the 8 freeway looking for a hotel. I'm still here, meanwhile, having managed to set up the computer in the upstairs guest room, and the two guys working downstairs on my room aren't wearing masks. Looks like the carpet's been torn out and there's a plastic covering over the door with a big pump attached.

The cats are terrified, but at least nothing's being done to my aunt's room, so I don't need to worry about them. I'm mainly just deciding what I can do to-day. I suppose I can catch up on my reading. I'm up to page 25 of Narbonic, which is still so far a pretty good series. I'm almost done with Maggie the Mechanic, and I'm about a third of the way through Catch-22, which is a book I'm afraid I must at this point describe as no more than mildly entertaining. Maybe I just wish it had stronger threads, maybe I'm just sick of the relentless tongue-in-cheek. Sometimes the character peculiarities are genuinely interesting, especially in the context of a commentary on war--like Yossarian's unabashed acts of self-preservation or Dunbar's fondness for people he doesn't like in order to stretch time. But then there are flat, cartoonish characters like Chief Halfoat whom I just find tedious. I do sort of like the references to war as being a business where strangers blow up strangers. War as a dehumanising bureaucracy is a good picture to paint, to be sure . . .

Busy packing things away to-night. But it's always a good time for Morrissey;

I'm losing a wall in here on Saturday, so once again me and my things're tossed in the air like confetti and I don't know exactly where all of it's going to land yet. It seems like things and people around here are getting crazier by the day. I expect I'll spend the next couple of days packing things up again, but for now I intend to goof off for a bit. Who knows when I'll get the chance again?

Here are some especially cool Oblivion videos I found on YouTube;

The opening from Fallout 2, the best computer RPG ever made;



Bethesda's in charge of Fallout 3, and I'm fervently hoping that they don't fuck up the dialogue and speech interface, the best part of Fallout 2. I really hope they don't use the tedious colour wheel thing from Oblivion.

Things from Fallout 2 that I'm afraid won't be in Fallout 3;

The ability to hire prostitutes.
The ability to hire prostitutes for your NPCs.
Drugs.
Drugs that temporarily improve character stats.
The potential to become chemically addicted to a certain drug, taking a hit to your stats when you can't get a fix.
Hubology, a rather harsh, and very funny, parody of Scientology.
The ability to become a porn star.
The potential to fail an audition for a porno in an embarrassing manner based on your stats.
Children.
The ability to kill children.

These kinds of things are getting to be pretty rare in video games these days. What we need is a return to traditional video game values.

I saw 1408 last night, and it was exactly what I expected it to be, which was fine, since it was exactly what I was in the mood for. It was a nice little haunted house story with several effective little scares, and when they weren't effective, they were at least fun--they even rather unabashedly borrowed something from the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. The movie did a good job of creating a consistent, interesting mood, and Samuel L. Jackson as the hotel manager proved to be far more essential than I thought he'd be. I especially loved when Cusack challenged him to name the haunt a "phantom" or a "spirit" and Jackson just says, "It's an evil fucking room." When Samuel L. Jackson says something, especially a fucking something, you know he means it.

There was decent character development, and the scenes addressing the repressed emotional baggage of Cusack's character served as excellent breaks between freaky bits, and it kept things feeling fresh. A good way to spend an evening.

I had a big pretzel with salt and cheese. Normally, if I ever get a pretzel, I get just the core, unadorned bread thing, but I felt like being conventional last night, since I was seeing a relatively normal movie in a decidedly normal theatre. I didn't even mind the people talking during the movie, not even the girl behind me who saw to heralding much of the movie's plain visual statements ("He's still in the room!", "It's her!", "A thermostat."). I guess I just wanted to enjoy the sort of night of entertainment modern humanity and commercialism had prescribed for the average citizen. Well, I guess I just wanted to give my brain a rest, since I'd been working on three different projects yesterday and I am simply not built for multitasking. I know it's a stereotype that girls are better at multitasking than guys, and I'm afraid I fit the bill. Multitasking gives me a feeling of dizzy panic, like a neanderthal piloting a spitfire. I guess I did get some things done, but such days never feel very productive.

In what was probably a malevolent moment of serendipity, I saw an article this morning on msn about working as a comic book artist that mentioned how artists are typically paid between 100 and 300 dollars a page. This immediately filled my head with stupid fantasies--like, if my 23 page comic is accepted, I could expect at least 2,300 dollars? That probably sounds like small potatoes to most people, but I never dreamed of earning that much money. I have got to get my hopes down . . .

The new Sirenia Digest came out a couple days ago, Sonya recommended a web comic to me called Narbonic, and I realised I hadn't been reading much of Catch-22, so I decided to devote as much of yesterday as possible to reading. I finally broke down at 1am and watched Charlie Chaplin's The Circus again, but mostly yesterday was a pleasant reading day.

I'm really bad at reading web comics, something I'm quite ashamed of, especially in light of the support my own web comic's received from nice web comic makers like RMG and the folks at Yamara--both examples of web comics I've read some of but not all of, in fact I've yet to read any entire web comic, except Scott McCloud's very short pieces. Oh, and I think I've read all of Return to Sender, but that one's short and unfinished, so it doesn't count.

But Sonya exerted intense feminine wiles, overwhelming me with the beautiful mystery that is woman, so that I was powerless to refuse on the grounds of not merely my hormones but also due to the shear awesome panoply of sensuality and sexuality as it may be transmitted though the internet tubes (her exact words were "Start here and read"). So far I've managed to read the first ten, which leaves, oh, just six hundred forty five to go. But it is good so far. There's a clear Futurama influence (the show's already even been explicitly mentioned), and it's got nice mad scientist and doomsday device humour.

So many of the things I've been reading lately make me wish I could slow time down. The pace of Narbonic makes me feel like I can be satisfied with one or two pages a day, and Catch-22 is like a more laconic and inert Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I can appreciate the sort of exquisitely crafted humour in just a couple paragraphs, but then it's a little obliterated by the exquisitely crafted humour of the next couple paragraphs. It almost feels like reading good poetry--I'm also currently reading Sonya's Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, and I find I'm deeply satisfied by just a single poem, so I've been going through the book pretty slowly. It gives me something of the feeling I had when reading books as a kid, when a single novel would seem to fill up months, making a consistent alternate reality for me to jump to. Yes, friends, density is good.

I didn't get very much done yesterday--I mainly did a lot of character sketches. But I'm very happy with several of them.

And I'd like to say happy birthday to Robyn, though I think she's still sore at me because I completely pwned her in an argument we had about censorship a few months back. But I don't hold it against her . . .

I've slacked off quite a bit so far to-day, choosing to watch the 1939 Alfred Hitchcock movie Jamaica Inn at three on TCM--I can't tape movies anymore because the cable's gotten weird in this room.
Jamaica Inn's not bad at all. It has beautiful, expressionistic sets that look half Disney and half Murnau. Hitchcock's pitch perfect talent for editing and pacing was fully there, and Maureen O'Hara, in her first role, has never looked better. The best part of the movie, though, is Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey, who comes off as a sort of corrupt and finally insane caricature of Oscar Wilde--or, perhaps, for the covetous yet cruel way he approaches Maureen O'Hara's character, a dark avatar for Hitchcock himself. The movie's based on a book by Daphne Du Maurier, and the story has the broad strokes favouring the female character, having her making rebellious decisions that often end up saving the day where no-one thinks it can be saved. But a lot of these decisions seem to come from only barely logical motives, while Laughton emerges as a charming and intriguingly complicated and corrupt nobleman.

I watched Keith Olbermann after that, who I think has accurately predicted the end of the Harry Potter books.

Well, I supposed I'd better go and do some grocery shopping before getting some writing done. But before I do, is anyone else irritated and perplexed by all the love a xenophobic, capitalist homophobe named Ron Paul has been getting?

GwaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH! AAAUH! PIRATES!! GET AWAY!! FUCKING LEAVE ME ALONE!!



And my favourite of the numerous parodies;

A much better day for writing to-day. I felt pretty solidly wrapped up in the characters, and their motives and communication techniques felt like they were nicely weaving. So at around 5pm, I got some food at Del Taco and went to Tim's, where the computer I normally play Oblivion on is cracking up in interesting, often amusing ways.

For a while, the whole computer'd randomly been rebooting. That doesn't happen anymore, but oddly enough, things have started to get weird within the game. I loaded one game that I'd saved during a clear day only to find it was suddenly night time during a heavy rainstorm. My character was still in a vineyard south of Skingrad where I'd left her, only she'd completely lost her body, and all the people were gone except for a lone guard by the town gate, and all of his clothes were missing.

So I started a new game--the game starts off in a dungeon where you join the Emperor (voiced by Patrick Stewart) and his small retinue of guards as they're trying to escape some mysterious assassins called the Mythic Dawn. Everything was going fine until the Emperor fell through the floor. The guards and myself soon followed and soon the four of us were freefalling through empty space before automatically teleporting back to the dungeon where of course we immediately fell through the floor again. All the while, the Mythic Dawn were scrambling around madly still trying to fight us.

So now I'm back here and maybe I'll work on some character sketches.

By the way, happy birthday Spooky.

Too tired again. Lost some sleep last night because my uncle came by to drill stuff into the other side of one of my walls. It could have been worse--yesterday my grandmother wanted him to tear the wall out before he finally managed to convince her it was actually not necessary. I'm still not sure she won't try to hire someone else to do it. But at least I'm out of the woods for the moment, and I'm daring to hope I can get things together for submissions. Comic publisher sites I'm looking at seem to want outlines for proposed series or graphic novels, as well as scripts, so I'm working on a second script for this new comic. Only I'm so out of it to-day that mostly what I'm writing lacks all kinds of energy. I know well what I want to happen, but it's got to happen in a more interesting manner than what my fingers are tapping into the keyboard.

I'm not sure how most writers work at this sort of thing, but to have consistent themes and discernable arguments, I tend to tell myself what I think the themes are going to be early on, then let them sort of drizzle on my brain and try not to think about them, so they kind of seep out naturally. For Boschen and Nesuko, I wrote the first chapter without knowing anything about the rest of the series, then analysed the chapter and thought about what issues I'd presented myself with, and the whole series ended up reflecting those sort of naturally.

Anyway, what else have I to say . . . Oh, I liked Hostel: Part II. Better than the first one, though I liked how the first one forced you to root for an unlikeable protagonist. The new movie's final act is much better than the first movie's, which actually became a little dull.

The setup is good in Part II as well--I liked how Roth manipulated the audiences emotions along with the three young women, who are at first a little afraid of the creepy nude model lady, but then find her a welcome companion on an unpleasant train ride. The dialogue and series of events in the train car are so perfectly orchestrated, using each character credibly, and never seeming forced.

Most of the positive reviews for the movie talk about the other branch of the plot, where we see things from the perspective of two of the would-be torturer/murderers as they first bid on the girls, and then become members of the nefarious international organisation that runs the market. They're both created as full characters with decently established psychological motives for wanting to torture and murder people. Roger Bart plays Stuart, the slightly more sympathetic of the two, and his conflict is interesting for its nuance, but Richard Burgi, the other guy, also ends up being somewhat interesting for his seeming simplicity, and we're forced to realise guys like these really aren't far-fetched at all.

I also liked the return of the semi-feral gang of street children and I wondered how Heather Matarazzo can hang upside down without her face turning red.

Matarazzo plays Lorna, a nerdy, rather inexperienced character who comes off as a believable shallow introvert, something it seems like I don't see very often in fiction. I sort of wondered if the movie wasn't setting her up as too much of a joke, but then, part of the fun of these movies is seeing people getting punishment just slightly worse than they deserve.

I saw this trailer for the new Invasion of the Body Snatchers when I saw Hostel: part 2 yesterday;



"The Invasion" isn't half as interesting a title as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (at less than half the words). I hate the inclusion of the kid. But I like Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Roger Rees, so I'm a little hopeful. I wonder if there'll be overt attempts to modernise the political allegory aspects of the story.

Wednesday was about printing my twenty three page comic thing. Sixty dollars for ink cartridges. Really? I had this idea of renting storage space the other day. That's a no go, because it's something like 85 dollars a month for a 5 x 5 space. But of course I had to give my phone number to a web site to get quotes--why does it have to be a secret?--and even though I specified that I preferred to be contacted by e-mail, some joker saw fit to call me at 10am.

Me; "I said I preferred to be contacted by e-mail."

Guy; "We already sent an e-mail."

Me; "Yeah. Was I supposed to reply to that?"

Guy; "Er, well, call us if you're interested."

Me; "I'm not going to call you."

So I think I'll send this comic off to publishers, and also bring copies of it with me to Comic-Con, as well as select pages from Boschen and Nesuko and, if Sonya and Caitlin don't mind, some pages from Moving Innocent and the Nar'eth comics. Maybe now would be a good time to do the sketches for The Lay of Sindeseldaonna I promised the latter lady.

And why've I been silent the past couple days? Wasn't I just last week ruing my lack of internet access? Well, I spend a lot more time reading than contributing to this ball of fortune twine. But also I've been exchanging e-mails with Sonya, and if I have her attention, why should I care about anyone else?

I've been going to sleep and waking up about two hours earlier, a side effect from Stupid Week. It's weird--I feel like a bumper car in the koi pond. I'm getting around, I feel like I'm accomplishing something, but I also vaguely feel like I'm not at optimum performance and I'm also sort of intruding on the routines of others. Well, that's how I'd feel driving a bumper car in a koi pond.

I've just seen Paprika. I recommend you see it too. It's absolutely incredible, one of the best anime movies I've ever seen.

There are so many things I could say about it, so many ways I could talk about it. It's a movie about duality; male and female, reality and imagination, free market and altruism, action and complacency . . . and how those dualities relate or coexist or are more connected than we might suspect. Or the ways in which people arbitrarily might connect the sets to suit their own goals or psychological compulsions.

It's a movie that successfully combines the Sci-Fi psychology of Neon Genesis Evangelion with the sort of neo-mythological qualities of Hayao Miyazaki movies. It's about the crisis of individuality being lost in Japan's groupthink oriented society--a theme I'm seeing in increasing prominence in anime.* And Paprika is all this in a package of charming and interesting characters, as well as extraordinary visuals. See this movie.

Oh, and Devin Faraci really is either a dolt, or for some reason he really doesn't want to like anime--the explanations for everything he complained about as being vague or utterly inexplicable are actually extremely obvious.

*There's a plot thread that strongly reminded me of Gendo Ikari's Human Instrumentality Project from Evangelion.

I just found out Paprika stars my favourite seiyu, none other than Megumi Hayashibara. I fucking have to see this movie now. For those who don't know, she's the voice of girl type Ranma (Ranma 1/2), Lina Inverse (Slayers), Rei Ayanami (Neon Genesis Evangelion), Faye Valentine (Cowboy Bebop), and a few bazillion other anime characters. Also, this;

I'm back. Extremely tired, but back. Though who knows what the future holds.

Living without easy access to internet was surprisingly strange. If anything, it felt like I'd travelled back in time eight years, when I mostly hung out at the mall or the college, sitting in my car drawing, writing, or reading. An untethered little existence, and I have to admit I identified very much with Judi Dench's character in Notes on a Scandal, which I watched a few days ago*.

I truly didn't know if I was ever going to get this computer back, and so I begged people I know for use of their computers to work on my comic. But it was as if the gods were actively trying to deny me internet access. First I tried my mother's house, and I worked on my comic for one day there. However, her internet connexion just suddenly went on the fritz and was only there in spurts. And after that day, my mother, who seems to regard me as a walking virus when it comes to her computer, wouldn't let me touch the thing again because she was convinced I'd somehow caused the problems.

My next resort was Tim, on whose second computer, which is hooked to a widescreen television, I normally play Oblivion. Things seemed absolutely fine on his computer, and I got a lot of work done, except yesterday it started crapping out and restarting randomly. First just programmes, but then soon the whole shebang. Internet usage is somewhat awkward there anyway, as my weak eyes are too far away to comfortably read the tiny text. So I'm very glad to have this thing again. I know, it's only been a few days, hardly even enough time to relieve anyone reading of their Setsuled-fatigue, but it seemed like an eternity to me, especially since I missed Zombie Apocalypse Day.

*Sorry, Sonya, but I thought the Philip Glass music was perfect. I thought it brought a wonderful stream of tension--it knotted my gut.

Well, my computer's in pieces and I don't know how soon I'll be able to tackle restoring it, and I don't know how long it'll take me to sort out the tangle of cables and wires when I do have the opportunity. So correspondence with me will be difficult. Just so everyone knows. I'm typing this on my sister's laptop and this keyboard's hurting my wrists.

I'm tried and irritated. More irritated than tired. To-day has been spent moving all of my things into the hall or the garage or my car. The hall's littered with huge stacks of movies, CDs, bags, and books, and I still have a ton of all those things to move and, for the most part, I have no idea where I'm going to put them. This is all, of course, because of a paranoid fantasy that's taken hold of my grandmother, who now roams the house wearing a mask because she's afraid of some kind of mould. It's one of those days where I very much wish I lived in my own place, or at least with someone I got along with.

Thank the gods for my iPod--I spent a lot of time backing up files onto it, because who knows if I'm going to be able to put the computer back together properly. I wish I just had a quiet, soundproof, subterranean pod where I could work on my comics, watch movies, read, and no-one would pester me with their stupid, meaningless tasks. Or a space station. That'd be better, because then I could have windows if I wanted them.

Man, I can scarcely believe how much stuff I've to shift . . .

Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well), is a 1960 Akira Kurosawa film noir starring Toshiro Mifune.

And here I'm already talking about a transposition of a Shakespeare play that I like. In this case, it's Hamlet, though just barely, and I believe one of the reasons Kurosawa's Shakespeare movies work so well is that he's not afraid to change a lot of the content in order to suit the new setting, avoiding dissonance between dialogue and visuals. Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru departs from the source material even more drastically than Ran and Kumo no su jo, with varying degrees of success.



The movie is also an indictment of corporate corruption, and the corruption that breeds in the relationships between private companies and government institutions, which, in these days of scandals involving the likes of Halliburton and increased attention on corporate lobbyists, gives the movie a certain timeliness. Of course, Kurosawa was referencing the prevalent corporate corruption existing in 1960 Japan, and the grafts dealt with in the movie seem somewhat less grandiose. Iwabuchi, despite being the movie's Claudius, is only vice president of Public Corp., and the president himself is seen only briefly at the beginning of the movie, though it's implied that he is in on the kickback scheme between Public Corp. and a company called Dairyu.



Mifune plays Koichi Nishi (perhaps an ancestor of Nareth Nishi) in the Prince Hamlet role. His father was Furuyu, a midlevel employee of Dairyu who was in on one of the schemes between Dairyu and Public Corp. and was coerced into committing suicide by Iwabuchi and his subordinates, Moriyama* and Shirai. Furuya leapt from the seventh story of a Dairyu office building, and Nishi, who was Furuya's illegitimate son, changes his name and marries Iwabuchi's daughter Yoshiko in order to get close to the three bureaucrats and exact revenge.

You can see already some of the departures from the play, a few of which work perfectly fine, while others do not. In my mind, the biggest problem is Yoshiko, who, forced to carry water (no pun intended) for both Ophelia and Gertrude, loses credibility of character under the weight of a little too much melodrama. Though the problem really may have been that Kurosawa was simply no good at romance, or even, really, at relationships. Kurosawa's talent for creating characters seems to come from superficial introductions and interactions that somehow paint truly deep and elaborate studies. Reading again bits of Hamlet to-day, I was struck by the scene in Gertrude's bedroom where Hamlet tries to convince Gertrude to acknowledge the truth of what Claudius had done to her previous husband, and what Gertrude was guilty of for marrying Claudius. After Hamlet has accidentally killed Polonius, the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to sharpen the prince's "blunted purpose", and Hamlet finds that his mother does not see the ghost.



I was reminded of something I said to Caitlin recently about her Daughter of Hounds, that, "it works as a meditation on innocence and the relationship between perception and reality—that perception has less effect on reality than some people would like to think." Gertrude cannot see the ghost because she cannot acknowledge to herself what she knows to be the truth.

In Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru, there is no ghost and no similar scene with Gertrude. Instead, Kurosawa introduces a character named Wada, a Dairyu employee who, like Nishi's father, is persuaded to commit suicide for the good of the company--the concern being that Wada would eventually crack under police interrogation. Iwabuchi, Moriyama, and Shirai have effectively used Wada's feelings of guilt to their own ends. Wada took kickbacks, but he's still a decent enough person that is he is not willing to drag the company down with him and ruin the lives of other employees.



Wada goes to a Public Corp. construction site, and Kurosawa shoots his lonely figure isolated among trails of mist and ominous mountains of dirt. Before Wada can kill himself, Nishi intervenes and reveals himself as an agent of vengeance for the first time in the movie.



Mifune's packed into crisp business attire and given conservative eyeglasses and tightly slicked haircut, and the big guy from this point on seems like a volcano always on the edge of eruption, Mifune's natural fire steaming around the seams of his improbably subdued costume.

He fakes Wada's death and takes him under his wing as accomplice. After a brilliant scene where Nishi and Wada watch Wada's funeral from a distance while Nishi plays tape of Moriyama and Shirai joking with each other about how they convinced Wada to commit suicide, Wada becomes Nishi's reluctant ally. He also becomes the ghost.



In one, wicked act of the movie, Nishi allows Wada to be seen twice by Shirai after Nishi has already manoeuvred the situation so that it appears to Iwabuchi and Moriyama that Shirai stole some illicit funds, the whereabouts of which only Shirai and Wada knew. Thus is created a scenario where Shirai is desperately trying to convince his cohorts that he's seen Wada, and at first Iwabuchi and Moriyama think Shirai's trying to weasel out of stealing the money, and then eventually they think he's lost his mind. Iwabuchi and Moriyama can't see the ghost, because it's easier to assume Shirai's double-crossed them than it is to think Wada may have survived. So, in a sense, this is similar to the spirit of the scene with Gertrude, though it lacks the delicacy and the straightforwardness.

When Yoshiko learns what sort of man her father truly is later in the movie, she can't blame Nishi for wanting to take revenge, though she herself can't hate her father. There's internal conflict, but nothing like the complexity of Gertrude's dilemma.



As Ophelia, Yoshiko works a little better, and though Nishi, while menacing in a wild way, is clearly not mad, Kurosawa does a good job of portraying the unnatural state of mind a quest for vengeance can be, and the unnatural effects it can have on a relationship. Nishi, unlike Hamlet with Ophelia, clearly loves Yoshiko, but cannot bring himself to consummate the love because he ostensively married her only to get close to her father.

Unfortunately, Kurosawa decided he needed the two characters to come to an understanding, and I can see why he would want to. Ophelia is a compelling character, and wondering about how she and Hamlet might have ended up together has some of the intrigue of wondering about what it would have been like if Scottie and Madeleine had ended up together in Vertigo. But relieving that tension here, as it surely would in Vertigo, serves to deflate this aspect of the story and we're left with some fairly mundane soap opera melodrama. Though, aside perhaps for its density, this really is the movie's only flaw, in my opinion.



The ending is more bleak than Hamlet's, as it sees Iwabuchi discovering Nishi's plot, tricking his daughter into revealing the man's location, and hiring some yakuza to kill him.** The movie ends with Iwabuchi victorious, talking to Public Corp.'s president and saying goodnight, only to realise it was actually daytime, which leads to the movie's final line where Iwabuchi says he confused night and day.

And this is an important point about corporate corruption, and it's one tied to the idea of self-delusion. We see Iwabuchi at home in one scene, in the backyard with apron and mittens, and several times in the movie we sense these guys aren't just looking out for themselves, but their families as well. The bad things they do mostly have nebulous consequences, but the stakes for themselves and their loved ones are high enough that they do terrible things out of a sense of self preservation.

It's little wonder that Kurosawa immediately followed this movie with Yojimbo, of which he wrote, "Here we are, weakly caught in the middle, and it is impossible to choose between evils. Myself, I've always wanted to somehow or other stop these senseless battles of bad against bad, but we're all more or less weak--I've never been able to. And that is why the hero of this picture is different from us. He is able to stand squarely in the middle and stop this fight. And it is this--him--that I thought of first."

Basically, Sanjuro is everything Nishi needed to be but wasn't. Sanjuro's purpose is not blunted because he is, as is observed in Sanjuro, a sword never in its sheath.


*Moriyama's played by Takashi Shimura as the sort of fellow he was up against in Ikiru.

**There is a Laertes character, who functions almost precisely like Laertes, except in that he never fights Nishi.

Schadenfreude.

Seconds later, the judge announced his decision: "The defendant is remanded to county jail to serve the remainder of her 45-day sentence. This order is forthwith."

Hilton screamed.

To-day I managed to buy two nice four piece sets of luggage for twenty dollars each. That's around forty dollars total. And why? Because to-day I learned the carpet's getting torn out in this room, too, and I'm reminded again that I don't really live here, I just stay here. Before Monday, I need somehow to get all of my things out of the way. The carpet destroying noise has already been chiselling my sleep time away and I have this weird feeling that if I were properly rested, I'd notice something critical about my situation and actions to-day I'm completely missing now. Maybe several somethings. All I can seem to think about now is that I need less sodium in my diet, while I run around alternately forgetting if I'm dealing with my room, the missing driver's license, or my comic.

Opening for Morrissey on Monday, I forgot to mention, was a young woman named Kristeen Young. At the time, I thought she was decent, though not incredible. I did like her costume (one of many nice costumes of hers, as I see from YouTube, though the San Diego performance isn't available). I thought she sounded a little like Switchblade Symphony. I was surprised to read on her Wikipedia entry that she's had training as an opera vocalist, that she's worked with David Bowie, and that some of her albums were produced by Tony Visconti. Maybe one needs to hear her studio recordings to truly appreciate her. I do like the title Breasticles for her third album.

Tired. My grandmother's having the carpet torn out upstairs. Not really for any reason, if the truth were acknowledged, as it so infrequently is. It's noisy around here.

I seem to have lost my driver's license. Probably at the bank, which is the only place I ever take it out. It was another noisy, sleepless day last week, and I was probably too tired to notice when the girl forgot to hand the ID back to me. Yesterday I learned the bank shreds lost IDs after three days. I guess simply calling me would have been bad form. So now I've a DMV appointment at 3:45pm to-morrow, which ought to be a jolly good time.

Only six hours spent colouring yesterday. The day before I believe I spent around nine hours. All together, I must have coloured one and a half pages. Suddenly it doesn't seem terribly realistic that I can draw, ink, and colour a monthly comic, at least not at my current quality standard. But at least I'm going to be able to put together a very nice portfolio for Comic-Con next month. The Morrissey concert was right behind the convention centre, and walking past the big empty place brought back good memories. It really needs to be an all-year thing. Less a Comic-Con than a Comic-Embassy.

Well, I'd better put my limited cognisance to what use I can . . .

My favourite Onion article of recent weeks;

Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.

Not that I mind people putting Shakespeare in weird contexts. But I think it's too rarely acknowledged how very rarely a director actually accomplishes anything more than distraction with the technique.

Though I still wish I'd seen Orson Welles' Haitian Macbeth.

There've been a lot of spiders around here lately. Especially cellar spiders. There's a big one crawling up my bathroom wall right now. I watched her make her way for a few moments, and she fell twice. Last night, I found one in bed with me while I was reading. I carried him outside.

I was reading Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, a book of poems by Sonya Taaffe. It's been a nice read so far--the poems have mostly been rather overtly erotic.

Of course, with this spider talk I ought to mentioned the book I just finished, Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, which was quite enjoyable. It's family relationship comedy in the context of a modern world influenced by the reality of ancient folktales. Where Gaiman's American Gods was about a sort of apocalypse in the same world, Anansi Boys is more just a story of gods being gods and making their mischief with mortals, something I really respect. In most fantasy fiction, particularly in the movies, it's normally expected that each successive story be about a larger calamity. I wish more writers realised that it's not the size of an explosion that makes a good story.

I still have a healthy stack of books to read. Sonya recommended to me an order in which to read them, and it looks like I'll be reading Catch-22 next.

Ah, I think I ought to mention that I went to a Morrissey concert on Sunday and that it was fucking great. The concert was held at the embarcadero, and to get to it I walked through seaport village next to water and a variety of boats, including a replica of a 19th century yacht called the America.

I met my sister and two of her friends at the concert and the four of us managed to be only about five people away from the stage, which was pretty damned close considering we were packed like sardines and I couldn't even lift my arms to clap. When Morrissey finally came out, the press of screaming human bodies around me reaching for the cool fellow onstage was amazing. I really don't think I could expect an experience closer to seeing a god in my lifetime. He's Morrissey, you know.

Unfortunately, Moz wasn't so happy with the sound system, and he continually complained about it throughout the show. "The sound like a bleating goat you hear," he said, "I'm afraid is my singing voice. I promise you I sound much better in the bath."

He opened with "The Queen is Dead", and the lyrics that normally go "She said, 'I know you and you cannot sing,' I said, 'That's nothing, you should hear me play piano,'" Sunday night went, "'I know you and you cannot sing,' I said, 'Of course I can't sing.'"

The very performance:


I think he may've been slightly upset that his own voice often wasn't audible through audience singing along. He closed with "How Soon is Now?" and the audience's singing was so overpowering, Morrissey left halfway through the song and never came back, forgoing an encore, much to the very loud displeasure of the audience--he'd only been onstage for about an hour. But it was still great, and even that final act was so deliciously Morrissey.

And I loved how he tried to incite mischief. "When you bought your ticket I bet you didn't expect an army of security men in front of the stage," he said at one point, referring to the row of red-shirted men, "No fun."

Of course, during his next song, "I Will See You in Far Off Places," someone immediately managed to climb onstage, earning a comment from Morrissey, "That's the most exciting thing to happen all night."

It was a good set, and his voice sounded perfect, when it was audible. I was surprised to hear "The National Front Disco," which must be completely unintelligible to most American and Mexican fans (I'd say about two thirds of the people in the audience were Mexican). He also performed "Irish Blood, English Heart," changing the lines, "I've been dreaming of a time when the English are sick to death of Labour and Tories, and spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell," with, "I've been dreaming of a time when Americans are sick to death of Democrats and Republicans and Republicans, and spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell." I'm not sure how much he thought ahead on that one, but it's interesting to think about the current American political landscape carrying on the tradition of Oliver Cromwell.

Sunday was overcast and there was sea on either side of the stage, so one song was all too appropriate;

Report: 70 Percent Of All Praise Sarcastic

Actual conversation with my mother yesterday:

Me: "Going to the movies with a guy seems like a waste."

My mother: "That's kind of sexist."

Me: "Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with women. I just like them better."

On The Difficulty Of Conjuring Up A Dryad (mp3)
Sylvia Plath

Ravening through the persistent bric-à-brac
Of blunt pencils, rose-sprigged coffee cup,
Postage stamps, stacked books' clamour and yawp,
Neighbourhood cockcrow—all nature's prodigal backtalk,
The vaunting mind
Snubs impromptu spiels of wind
And wrestles to impose
Its own order on what is.

‘With my fantasy alone,’ brags the importunate head,
Arrogant among rook-tongued spaces,
Sheep greens, finned falls, ‘I shall compose a crisis
To stun sky black out, drive gibbering mad
Trout, cock, ram,
That bulk so calm
On my jealous stare,
Self-sufficient as they are.’

But no hocus-pocus of green angels
Damasks with dazzle the threadbare eye;
‘My trouble, doctor, is: I see a tree,
And that damn scrupulous tree won't practice wiles
To beguile sight:
E.g., by cant of light
Concoct a Daphne;
My tree stays tree.

‘However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk
To my sweet will, no luminous shape
Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip,
To hoodwink the honest earth which point-blank
Spurns such fiction
As nymphs; cold vision
Will have no counterfeit
Palmed off on it.

‘No doubt now in dream-propertied fall some moon-eyed,
Star-lucky sleight-of-hand man watches
My jilting lady squander coin, gold leaf stock ditches,
And the opulent air go studded with seed,
While this beggared brain
Hatches no fortune,
But from leaf, from grass,
Thieves what it has.’