Sleepless in the Animal Kingdom

This is the lizard who fell in love with a stone.

I saw him on the way back from lunch to-day. On the way to lunch, I saw this mystery insect;

He was alive but he was flopping around, sometimes on his back. I saw a cockroach doing the same thing nearby and I'm guessing someone's gotten zealous with the pesticide.

I don't know what kind of insect he is. I've never seen one like him before.

Finally, here's the more photogenic of the two egrets I saw yesterday;

I ought to have tried getting closer.

I'm barely awake right now. I got up early for a guy who was coming to do work on the kitchen ceiling catastrophe. Maybe the brandy with cocoanut ice cream I'd had last night contributed to this grogginess. And I still have lots of colouring to do . . .

I watched the first episode a couple days ago of what's being called Bakemonogatari: Second Season but which is called in its opening credits Nekomonogatari (Shiro)--猫物語(白) (Cat Story [White]). I hope it being called the official second season means it's going to be better than Nisemonogatari and Nekomonogatari (Kuro). So far, it's not bad and one thing it's definitely delivered is change. Disappointing in terms of the fact that two of the gorgeously long haired female characters now have less flattering short haircuts, intriguing in that the episode is told from the point of view of Hanekawa, the girl who in the original Bakemonogatari and in Nekomonogatari (Kuro) transformed into a murderous cat demon. In her human form, she's a pleasant, very intelligent, tightly wound young lady who always seems to have an answer to Araragi's questions--in fact her catch phrase, when Araragi inevitable says, "Wow, you know everything," is "I don't know everything, I just know what I know."

Her cat form is supposed to be all the emotions she's suppressed breaking loose, first for her feelings of abandonment due to her negligent parents and then for her unrequited feelings for Araragi. The voice actress, writing, animation, and direction work together nicely to create an impression of this girl always skating on the thin ice of her restraint.

Araragi, the normal point of view character, is completely absent from the first episode. One misses the rapid and keen delivery of voice actor Hiroshi Kamiya anchoring the episode with Araragi's straight forward observations. But having the resignedly and insistently pleasant voice of Hanekawa narrating gives the story a somewhat sorrowful mystery.

I was impressed to see that, since the episode is from the point of view of a heterosexual female character, the show's fan-service remained faithful to her POV and the only closeups on the bodies of girls we get is what would naturally draw Hanekawa's attention--like Senjogahara stripping down to her underwear.

The episode's divided into numbered scenes and, as Hanekawa remarks in voice over, "Ah! Scene 8 is missing." This coincides with Hanekawa sleeping. One assumes later we'll learn she was rampaging in cat form but I liked how, since she has no memory of it, we have no memory of it. But even better is Senjogahara showing up and acting very subtly strange--slapping Hanekawa and crying, something the normally cool Senjogahara would never do, particularly not with someone like Hanekawa whom she doesn't know very well. And of course there's her insisting on taking a shower with Hanekawa. I fear the explanation of all this will be far less interesting than the mystery.

Here's the new theme, "Chocolate Insomnia", which YouTube hasn't deleted yet--it's the usual combination of cute and sinister. Less sinister than usual;

The People's Assassin

An innocent faced young man wandering by a lake stumbles upon a half naked woman being filmed for a music video. He asks about the song--it turns out to be by Nautilus Pompilius and from then on, Danila, the young man, becomes an earnest fan. So begins 1997's Brother (Брат), an endearing and simple gangster film with some slightly troubling subtext.

The film takes place not long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Danila comes to Saint Petersburg after he's been released from the army. He meets up with his brother, Viktor, who works as a hitman for local mob. The army's made Danila good at killing and generally rather cool about things so Viktor passes some of his contracts to his younger brother.

Danila is fearless and laid back but also feels an instinctive desire to help others. He befriends a poor German street merchant whom he saves from a hoodlum trying to put the squeeze on him. With the gun Danila takes from the hoodlum, he later forces some guys on the trolley to pay their fine to the ticket officer for not having tickets. Danila seems to embody the movie's title--a strong and capable military man, he becomes everyone's brother and here's where I started to see the perhaps unintentional political perspective offered by the film.

Danila is essentially a superhero--if he intends to kill somebody, he pulls it off without difficulty. If people shoot at him, he survives. If he gets injured, he immediately shoots his attacker.

By contrast, every other character in the film is weak and fearful, sometimes treacherously so. The German can't defend himself from the local thugs; Viktor shows his loyalty to be infirm but is quick to grovel; Kat, a prostitute Danila repeatedly encounters, will do anything for money or drugs but seems utterly devoid of empathy. Here are a bunch of people who might need a nice strong Tsar to look after them.

There are three women in the movie he seems to have chemistry with--Kat, the unnamed music store clerk who tells him about Nautilus Pompilius, and Sveta.

Sveta drives a freight trolley for a living and saves him from a couple gangsters shooting at him (not before he shoots and kills the one who managed to wound him, of course) and falls for him. She's married but all we ever learn of her husband is that he's gone most of the time and when he shows up he's angry and beats her. The first time he sees him, Danila socks the husband in the crotch and while the man's doubled over in pain tells him he'll kill him if he ever comes near Sveta again.

But, by the end of the movie, we see that no-one really appreciates our poor boyish paragon Danila. All these people need a strong man but for reasons the movie is at a loss to explain they don't ask him to stick around.

The only flaw we see in Danila's character is when he mentions to the German that he hates Jews. Perhaps it would be unfair to infer much from this. It is strange to note, though, that Sergei Eisenstein's unabashed propaganda films actually seemed more even handed that this film.

The County Sized Incubator

This baby lizard sat still for a macro shot for me yesterday. I guess the reptiles are rather loving this weather--I walked to lunch to-day and had to stop at a place halfway to where I'd intended to go. I just couldn't continue.

To-day I've been colouring. I now have nine pages left to colour in this thing before I release it in its first twenty five page instalment, also a cover to create and a web site to put together. I'm projecting a Friday release right now. Certainly before Comic-Con, which is next Thursday. Hopefully the heat'll die down by then--anyway, the Con is only a few feet from the bay. Really, it's so close I think a long jumper might be able to get to water if he or she sprang from the top of the convention centre. Don't try it. Of course, it got up to 111 Fahrenheit at the Con one year anyway.

Here are some more pictures I've taken lately;

Twitter Sonnet #525

Powder doughnut smudges corrupt the rain.
Clouds that gather in Krispy Kreme divide.
No-one guesses beneath glaze is dough pain.
Through the mocking spit guard we will decide.
Matter transfers cash through silver hub caps.
A remembered dog looms over the duck.
A giraffe will wear inadequate chaps.
There's a whole warehouse of tuneless throat luck.
The pink tendrils conduct the wan halos.
Seas wound drum tight take over the tape deck.
Surreptitious ceiling fans watch furloughs.
The lost tanker was classified a wreck.
Long coffee pots circle back to perky.
Islands of black lashes keep pools murky.

Our Man

When you take your harem out to dinner, it's good to make reservations. This is something every good spy knows, as seen here in 1966's Our Man Flint, a half parody, half sincere James Bond knock off starring James Coburn. It's not funny enough to be an especially good comedy and the comedic logic deflates too much of the tension for it to be a good action/adventure film. It's also not exactly the most feminist movie in the world but it's a bit too weak to be really offensive. It's like a sexist pomeranian.

I did dig the visual style. Especially all those vintage super death machines with tapes and flashing screens with wiggling lines.

James Coburn might come off as a little too grounded for the role. For some reason Sean Connery is more fun as a pervert. Coburn feels too much like someone's dad. And he's barefoot too much in the movie--I don't generally approve of bare feet on men, but I especially object to Coburn's gnarled dogs.

But I guess the 1960s insisted bare feet were necessary to establish someone as a master of Eastern martial arts and philosophy.

Flint is established as being unbelievably wealthy and talented and reluctantly accepts a mission from his old boss in the U.S. military to stop a group of scientists from controlling the world's weather. He doesn't carry a gun, he calls the one he's offered "crude". All he carries is a cigarette lighter that works also as a blow torch, radio, and 82 other functions. Then he's almost immediately captured when he breaks into a safe. Fortunately, one of his captors is a beautiful woman who of course immediately falls for him and wants to join the harem.

Naturally she turns against her nefarious organisation who, would you believe, wanted to turn her into a sex slave! Fortunately Flint counters the hypnosis by telling her she's "not a pleasure model." She's saved, she smiles, and files in with the five other beautiful women whose entire purpose in life is to serve Flint's pleasure.

This could in fact be the joke. It's pretty limp either way.

Sex with Elvis

It was a girl, my friend Trisa, who introduced me to 1993's True Romance around twelve years ago, and yet it seems rather like a male fantasy--to be sure, a very nice one. Like Christian Slater's character Clarence, I'm a guy obsessed with movies and would happily sit through a Sonny Chiba marathon. I would never dream a flawlessly beautiful woman would walk in, spill popcorn on me, and almost instantly fall completely in love with me. I would certainly fantasise about it--except I hate popcorn--but I wouldn't dare write it expecting an audience to buy it. Quentin Tarantino, it seems, has better vision. He wrote the screenplay for this wonderful film directed by the late Tony Scott.

Tony Scott's style always struck me as a less distinct version of his brother Ridley's. He was unquestionably a more mainstream director with films like Top Gun and Crimson Tide in his filmography. As such there's usually less in his movies that would challenge the regular movie-goer--he shared Ridley's love for high contrast lighting with lots of darks diffused by smoke or mist. But you didn't see things like Ridley's love for condensation and beads, or strange and effective shifts between close-ups and long shots that helped convey the feelings of the characters. But I wouldn't say I think anyone could've done a better job with True Romance than Tony Scott. His plain but smart style perfectly delivers Tarantino's screenplay. It's to his credit he didn't decide to swap out Sonny Chiba with Bruce Lee or something else in an attempt to make the reference more mainstream. The movie's filled with movie references, in fact, that one suspects could only have come from the consummate cinephile Tarantino.

Between Lost Highway and True Romance, Patricia Arquette is the incredibly, perfectly desirable woman. In both movies, the character she's playing is essentially meant to be that, yes--but there aren't many actresses who could pull that off quite as well as her, not even a more beautiful actress. She reminds me of Kim Novak in Vertigo--their bodies are similar but more importantly they both have that enigmatic, oddly frail voice. It creates an impression of vulnerability which is attractive but because it's simply her natural speaking voice one can't trust that impression of frailty--nor wholly disregard it. This creates a compelling mystery while also lending the actress an ethereal quality in exciting contrast to her curvaceous body.

Arquette's character in True Romance, Alabama, is clearly an Elvis woman, as Uma Thurman's character in Pulp Fiction might have said.

Her style is southern rockabilly trashy which is nice for those of us who find that sort of thing appealing but is made doubly so by that voice of hers.

And of course this is another thing that makes her an improbably perfect match for Clarence, who tells a woman at the beginning of the film that despite not being gay he would happily fuck Elvis.

Neither Clarence nor Alabama is free of common, lower class bigotry, which is a typical Tarantino touch. Despite all the big things that happen in his movies, he never writes movies about paragons, his characters always seem to be reflective of a social group or milieu, which is an effect of Tarantino's philosophy of not imposing his own moral outlook on his characters. This of course facilitates one of the most famous scenes in the movie, where Christopher Walken as a mafia Don interrogates Clarence's father, played by the late Dennis Hopper.

Tarantino and Scott avoid inserting some "I'm not a racist," cue. They trust the audience to know the point of Hopper telling Walken his great grandmother had sex "with a nigger" is that Hopper knows how much it would offend Walken. And maybe Hopper's character is racist, too--he's a former police officer living in poverty in Detroit, it's not outside the realm of probability. The great thing about the scene is the sense that, between these two men, all notions of discretion and decency are completely out the window. Walken is unquestionably going to beat Hopper to death, and Hopper is unquestionably not going to crack--and the way he demonstrates this shows not only his resolve but also his complete departure from civil consideration.

And the film's other famous interrogation sequence, between the late James Gandolfini and Patricia Arquette, is no less impressive. Gandolfini has something like seventh or eighth billing but this scene by itself has has far more to it than Brad Pitt's entertaining pot head or Gary Oldman's complex and threatening poseur pimp.

Like Hopper, Arquette is absolutely firm in her conviction not to give up information. But she's a little smarter, she's cool as a cucumber when she tries to bluff Gandolfini at the beginning and if Gandolfini hadn't already had good information that she was the girl he was looking for one thinks she may have gotten away. But she doesn't and he proceeds to beat the shit out of her.

But this is hardly the typical scene of a man beating a woman--even of a mobster beating a woman. He makes no attempt to sexually assault her, there seems to be a mutual understanding between them, even a respect--on top of which there's a psychological battle going on that's almost separate from the physical beating. The beating is almost a formality, they both seem to acknowledge this is what has to happen.

His real ploy is when he sits down and tells her what it's like to kill people, how his first time was hard, the second time wasn't quite as hard, and now he does it just to see a person's expression change. He's letting her know how far he can go, but like a good actor knows he needs to have real feeling in his performance, one senses he's telling her the truth; this is what killing is like for him. And from how impersonal the beating is, and how disconnected it seems to be from his level of respect for her we can infer it's the truth.

Tarantino seems fond of the interrogation scene as a platform for a psychological discourse and character development--even one sided interrogations like the ones in Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction. Christoph Waltz spends almost all his screen time in Inglorious Basterds conducting interrogations.

Clarence is an oddly passive character for most of the movie, but that's fine. He actually doesn't really need to do anything after he goes after Alabama's pimp--that piece of the story starts out with the viewer thinking, damn, this kid's about to do something incredibly, pointlessly stupid and somehow this makes it all the funnier and sweeter when he succeeds. It's the essence of why you pull for Clarence and Alabama--their "true romance" is sort of stupid but oddly perfect and completely wonderful. They're both characters of simple, unshakeable resolve.

Bigger Than Gamera

The first garden spider of the year. It seems like they show up earlier every year. I remember them not showing up until August.

It's only in the 80s outside to-day. I've been walking to lunch and stores again lately. I saw an enormous turtle yesterday--I didn't get a particularly good picture but he's visible here gazing at the ducks in the distance.

People tell me how they see turtles at the nearby river all the time but I hardly ever see them. I think it was my sister who told me when she worked at a nearby restaurant she'd see homeless guys trying to sell them.

Here's a crow using the fountain in front of the Wal-Mart as a bidet;

And, finally, here's a bee;

I was sorry to hear things are already a mess in Egypt. It's a shame Morsi has now given the Democratic process such a bad name. Sounds like they'll be going back to military strong men.

I think the problem is that Morsi was confused about what being an elected president meant. The way he keeps bring up the fact that he was elected in defending himself makes it sound like he saw it as granting him a divine right when of course it's designed to counter precisely that sort of governing.

I seem to have a bit of a cold. Maybe it's related to the pina colada I had last night. Anyway I'm feeling sluggish. Fortunately all I have on plate to-day is colouring . . .

Twitter Sonnet #524

Parties come to gangs of spoonless diners.
A dough desert awaits virtuous nuts.
Knickerbocker's medic embarrassed Mars.
Wooden wainscoting warps what it abuts.
The moon almonds are gathering for war.
Stardust Betsy Rosses now weave optics.
Mustered nerves press into the museum tour.
Anger blossoms in states on blank topics.
Cartoon spaghetti's condemned to blue night.
Pentagrams tarry in cobalt waters.
Circles so soon scatter out of our sight.
Nuclear tea monsters bear deep daughters.
Helpless breakfast leaks some jam in the bed.
Toasted butterflies will flash what is said.

Freedom is Somewhat Nebulous

Happy Independence Day, people in the place called America that's actually the U.S. because it doesn't include Brazil. Yet.

Happy troubling purgatory, people in the place called Egypt. I wonder if Egypt will be celebrating July third as Independence Day two hundred years from now. George Washington was a military General after all. I wish them luck.

I guess there is good reason to be proud to be an American (in the U.S.) this year with the watershed on gay rights. Yesterday while drawing I was listening to George Takei's bachelor party on The Howard Stern Show from 2008. I wonder if Takei groping a man with a fourteen inch penis while millions of people listened had any impact on the national attitude towards gay rights--Stern tends to refer to the 24 million people subscribed to Sirius/XM as mainly being fans of his show. He could be right, I doubt many people are paying money just to listen to music. Then there's the fact that Stern's audience largely consists of the very people whose minds probably needed changing. How much credit does George Takei get for publicly debating whether or not to play Naked Twister with Richard Christy?

There's certainly been a lot of sources in media exerting a positive influence, though. I watched "Cold Stones" last night, an episode of The Sopranos, the last of the arc with the homosexual mob capo played by Joey G (Joseph R. Gannascoli). It was a very good episode--I liked how they didn't make the guy a saint. He tries to lead a good life on the lam with a perhaps improbably perfect fireman but he misses gambling and extorting for a living so much he risks his life to go back to New Jersey. The confusion among his homophobic comrades on how to handle the situation is very well played and nicely unsentimental.

Anyway, I don't have too much more to say to-day so here's a mix tape I put together for the holiday. YouTube sure has made it a lot harder since the last time I did this;

Seeking the Strange for Days

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. -Frederick Douglass from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

To me, the most interesting thing about 1995's Strange Days is the character of its central protagonist, Lenny, played with desperate, sometimes cowering empathy by Ralph Fiennes. In a world of increasingly severe violence and social unrest, he seeks to elevate the lives of himself and others with stories. He knows what he's pushing isn't escapism but an answer to a basic human need for a more textured, more interesting existence. Aside from Lenny, the film is a decent action film which draws influence from Philip K Dick, William Gibson, and David Cronenberg. But it's a much more conventional story than those produced by any of those men.

Lenny peddles, in a fictional 1999 (future to the film made in 1995) an addictive virtual reality apparatus called a "SQUID", a cap that can both record all of the wearer's sensations--sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell--and play back those recordings in the body of a wearer.

Lenny collects "tapes"--actually small disks--of mostly prostitutes and robbers and sells their experiences to people who lead less exciting lives, like a lawyer he meets in a bar in one scene who hears Lenny's aggressive and earnest sales pitch--Lenny calls himself "the magic man."

But it means more to Lenny than voyeurism and sensationalism, as his friend Mace (Angela Bassett) knows. Lenny used to be a cop and in flashback we see the two meet on the day her ex-husband had committed a horribly violent act. Mace goes to her daughter's room and finds her safely being read to from a children's book by Lenny. This is why, we learn, Mace puts up with Lenny despite her disgust over his use of the SQUID to replay experiences with Faith (Juliette Lewis), Lenny's rock star ex-girlfriend.

Juliette Lewis performs a cover of P.J. Harvey's "Rid of Me", an interesting contrast to Lenny's unwavering love for the woman, despite the fact that she seems now dedicated to the owner of her record label, Gant, played by omnipresent 90s action movie villain Michael Wincott, seen here in pink light.

The movie certainly has a distinctly 90s fondness for gel lighting from lemon/lime alleyways;

To purple crime scenes;

I guess gel lighting is the 90s version of the 21st century's addiction to lens filters.

Strange Days is the second Kathryn Bigelow movie I've seen, and it's certainly better than the other one, K-19: The Widowmaker. But, having been written and produced my James Cameron, it bears many of the characteristics of his films. One of the things I love about old James Cameron movies is that if he had a woman who could kick ass in his movie, she actually looked like she could kick ass.

This tautly muscled lady is part of a group of thugs who beat the shit out of Lenny in one scene before he's saved by the equally badass Bassett.

The tendency in most other films, like Zoe Saldana in Columbiana, is to use editing and angles in the vain attempt to make a skinny little dame look like she's hitting like a freight train. There's an implicit cynicism in this, I think--it's essentially saying that no woman is ever going to really look strong so why bother trying? Anyone who's seen Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 would tell you a woman who looks as powerful as the story would lead you to believe is definitely worth watching. I would suggest it's the failure of filmmakers to recognise this that's led to the lack of successful female superhero films. Cast a female MMA fighter as Batgirl--I'm telling you it'd work like gangbusters.

Monsters Against Pain

Apparently two Frankenstein's monsters an opium addiction makes. I suspect much of the audience viewing 1958's Corridors of Blood did not expect the luridly titled film starring Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee to be about a fictional Victorian surgeon's attempts to develop an effective anaesthetic. It's not a bad movie, though, succeeding mainly for its performances and cinematography.

Karloff's at the centre of the film as the surgeon Thomas Bolton, perhaps loosely based on William T.G. Morton, though the two men have little more in common than being surgeons and trying to develop anaesthetic in the 1840s--among other things, Bolton is English and Morton was American. Making Bolton English also allowed the filmmakers to create a den of Dickensian vice in which to ensnare him. He's lured there to write phoney death certificates in exchange for the opium the chemist eventually refuses to supply him with. Among the thieves, hustlers and prostitutes is the quiet and savage Joe, played by a looming Christopher Lee.

Lee's tremendously effective in this relatively small role. I thought of an interview with him I heard where he contrasted his technique with Peter Cushing's, saying Cushing liked to use as much of his body and face as possible while Lee preferred to see how much he could accomplish with as little as possible. One can see it in Joe's unnerving way of holding a gaze.

He's helped a great deal, too, by Geoffrey Faithfull's cinematography--he shoots the movie almost like a German Expressionist film from the 1920s, shaping the shadows with hard, disjointed edges.

Oops, someone has some panties from the future.

Karloff does a fine job as the doctor though the movie's discussion of the addiction has the naive paranoia of the late 1950s. The story relies on a lot of things that don't make sense--why would a wealthy surgeon not employ an assistant in his laboratory, why would he conduct all the experiments on himself?

Still, it's genuinely painful to watch when rotten luck causes Bolton's first demonstration of his anaesthetic to be a farce. Then we watch as this driven man never realises his ambition is gradually turning into addiction before it's much too late.

Twitter Sonnet #523

The younger Carl contains nameless death.
The ghost of burnt dog hair diverts the thief.
Wizards knock glasses from the one called Seth.
The Scottish bride disturbed a lurid leaf.
Dark boughs wreathed the imitation fruit snack.
Wand'ring laundry is an ocean that's dry.
Too much lacking in damp for the fish pack.
Other trades the muppet monger must ply.
Dubious Liberty Bell holograms
Light the Taco Bell fire with Saint George.
Cockney cowboys condemned to Anagrams
Rapidly can see their blocked hats engorged.
Two grey faces are later presumed green.
Ragged top hats can make a doctor mean.

Blonde Jheri Curls: The Final Frontier

In case the person who called me at 7:30am from a private number to breathe into my ear before hanging up was seeking to ascertain whether I'd replaced the phone killed in the laundry last week--yes, I have. In fact, Tim rather kindly gave me his old Motorola phone which, while being a bit bulkier for being six or seven years old, is clearly more expensive than my old one. It allows one to access e-mail and various other arcane things including the ability to assign ring tones to callers. I assigned Tim a happy little tune called "Jitters" as a reflection of my gratitude. So he's promised to never, ever call me.

The dehumidifiers are gone, too, and I'm working on my comic in a cool artificial environment. Artificially cool, I mean. Like The Backstreet Boys.

It's in the low 90s outside and even a bit cloudy. I've probably now gotten past the opportunity to wear this;

I'm guessing when they were casting for this, the eighth episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation from November 1987, they weren't looking for any Michael Fassbenders or Jon Hamms or Milton Berles, if you take my meaning.

"Justice", as the episode's called, isn't quite as bad as I remembered or as bad as its reputation would have it. It is pretty bad--the story of Wesley Crusher being condemned to death by a society of people wearing toilet paper for falling on a bed of flowers is going to be a bit silly however annoying Wesley is. But it's kind of refreshing seeing a show where a society of free love is considered innocent and the crew of the Enterprise has deep, heartfelt anxiety about insulting the laws and customs of an alien culture. If the show were produced now, I imagine there'd be a scene of Picard jumping into a flower bed, throwing down a ball and doing an endzone dance while inviting the aliens to suck it.

Why don't I ever see people dressed like this at Comic-Con?