The Magician's Police Box

Look, I already thought of another reason to post a picture of myself;



Almost exactly the same hat! Sadly, The Doctor ditched his after one scene. I actually like the crown of his hat better than mine.

So, yes, I've started the Jon Pertwee episodes of Doctor Who. So far, I find myself laughing a lot more at this phase of Doctor Who than laughing with it--every scene seems to have a glaring absurdity everyone onscreen is overlooking, often having to do with the point of The Doctor's presence with the "Unit" team. I think so far the most useful idea he's contributed was that they ought to check out the plastics factory after everyone's been attacked by living mannequins.

But there are things I do like--I like Jon Pertwee. He seems more fun than all the stills I'd seen of him, which always made him look very serious. His large, sad eyes and big nose make him look like a Rankin/Bass character.

I love that the show's in colour now, as the series just seems more fundamentally suited for colour. And I like how clearly The Doctor seems destined to have sex with his new female companion;



But I just can't buy into Unit. And it's not just the name, and the fact that The Doctor and Ms. Shaw in a small lab appears to be their entire science department. Unit just feels too Adam West Batman, and take up far too much screen time that should be occupied by Pertwee.

I Made Chicken

Twitter Sonnet #170

Soft bean foam sloughs into the baseball cap.
Each Simpson has a rational motive.
Screaming amber men coalesce from sap.
Sprites see retirees remain active.
Some bodies belatedly sprout light bulbs.
A silent punch line leaves a wet t-shirt.
Nipples are north poles on painted breast globes.
Lactose intolerant Santa is hurt.
Water cider sufficed in burnt orchard.
Leatherface is a knowable neighbour.
Candy lights rot the impact of Deckard.
Limes burst to mess on the new light sabre.
Citrus fruits are abandoned ghost eyeballs.
Solidified gin packs roll round the halls.

I started growing this van dyke last week;



I look like Colonel Sanders, don't I? I'm still sorting out my feelings about this. I'm considering getting a white suit and black bow tie and starting to introduce myself as Sanders 2010. Maybe I'll stand in front of KFC and greet people, "Welcome! Get ready to have a fantastic experience with chicken! Relax, and let me escort you and your family to a realm of ecstasy involving poultry, and if there's time, I'll introduce you to the robot servant I invented."

Maybe I'll just cultivate an obsession with chicken. Who knows, the possibilities posed by silly facial hair are endless. I think it needs a weird, monotone, high pitched laugh to go with it, and maybe I'll walk around cradling an old fashioned cash register like an infant.

Feeling a bit tired to-day--I stayed up late, all the way to 1:30am!--because I was talking to my friend Iain, who's in town, until 11:30pm at a coffee place. It really seems like I have permanently settled on a day time schedule, despite the things that keep happening at night trying to convince me to go back to the nocturnal schedule. I'm looking forward to this more normal schedule causing me to have abnormally rational thoughts or something.

Taming of the Time

I went with my family last night to see a production of Taming of the Shrew at San Diego's Old Globe, which is modelled after the Globe Theatre in London built by Shakespeare's own playing company. It certainly was a nice venue, despite a big red neon sign above the stage that read, "The Taming of the Shrew" with the W turned as though about to fall off, I guess implying that things are just so whimsically awry.

The cast was mostly in period attire, which I liked (though Lucentio's servant for some reason wore ray bans when disguised as him), but the whole production was thwarted by an effort to play to the modern audience. I didn't really mind the broad, modern feeling deliveries, I even kind of liked that the guy playing Grumio, Petruchio's servant, played him like Don Knotts. The problem was that the actors playing Petruchio and Katherine crafted their performances around either a fundamental misunderstanding of the material or a deliberate revision of it. The result being that their characters never got purchase, never stopped feeling like just performers dressed as the part, and the broad comedic subplot about the competing suitors for Bianca came out as far more effective.

Jonno Roberts played Petruchio as I suspect he plays every role, with a sort of cocky, smarmy handsome guy shtick that's almost Shatner-esque with its peculiarly timed pauses. He also whined and deployed sitcom double takes and broad panic at some moments, while Emily Swallow as Katherine seemed to constantly be mugging for the audience with two-bit sassiness, often seeming to be silently saying, "You know what I'm talkin' about ladies." Her final monologue about the importance of respecting a husband as lord was delivered with grating and unrelenting sarcasm so at odds with the writing it was impossible not to wonder why the company even chose to do this play.

If people find the philosophy at play in Taming of the Shrew to be sexist and archaic, that's fine. But absolutely nothing's accomplished by playing the play as exactly the opposite of what you think it is. At it's heart, Taming of the Shrew is about the sensibility of a cooperative relationship, but the process by which it reaches this point depends on the idea that a man holding intellectual and emotional superiority over a woman is a plausible and good thing. When the actors insist on tapping into modern sitcom preconceptions about the invariably, lovably goofy guy and the fundamental intellectual authority of women, who graciously tolerate their apish lovers, it just becomes a noisy mess. I honestly don't think these people are acquainted with the concept of using one's imagination to temporarily appear to adopt a philosophy and mode of life different from one's own, otherwise known as acting.

It wasn't all bad, though. Joseph Marcell as Gremio was really good. I'd have liked to have seen him as Petruchio, actually. I see he was in a 1988 episode of Doctor Who.

My Doctor Who watching stalled a little bit while Amee was here, who, though she is a Doctor Who fan, I didn't want to plunge into the middle of a serial she hadn't seen the beginning of. Like the fan I talked to at Comic-Con, she's mainly familiar with the new Doctor Who, which I've still managed to avoid having seen. It's weird how I can still relate to the fans of the new show, though--it does feel like time travel.

But last night I watched the end of the very long War Games serial, the last one with Patrick Troughton as The Doctor. I'll miss him, although he leaves just as his mannerisms are starting to feel tired to me. But I like his arching eyebrows and his almost buck teeth that together make him look like an evil rabbit, and I loved the way he'd puff his cheeks out whenever he was afraid.



The War Games was at times engaging, at other times too tiresomely pulp to me. Especially with the seemingly meaningless and rather unlikely process of everyone escaping and getting captured over and over. The villains, the War Lords and the renegade Time Lord are among the series' so far most unintentionally hilarious, delivering some of the most over the top, teeth gnashing, hammy villain acting I've ever seen. And I loved the renegade Time Lord with his special evil claw sideburns and inverted Hitler moustache;

This Shit is Aptly Named

With breakfast to-day, I watched the first episode of Cat Shit One, a new Japanese CGI series that comes across a bit like Art Spiegelman meets Steven Seagal.

At first I was kind of amused by the cute bunnies in serious military situations, but it wasn't long before I realised I was watching lightweight military action porn softened further by transforming the humans into cute animals. It's almost totally bloodless, and plays a bit like a team first person shooter. Set in a vaguely Middle Eastern desert, the bunnies fight Arabs who have taken the form of camels, and the show comes across as the crass naiveté I associate with rich young military enthusiast wankers, the kinds of guys who thought going into Iraq was a good idea because it would be an opportunity to kick some ass.

Some of the action sequences are decently put together, but I got frustrated watching the rabbits waddle around to avoid fire. Rabbits are supposed to be fast, as Bobby Peru said, but I guess hopping about on all fours would violate the concept of rabbits that are actually humans in all but appearance. It occurred to me the show would be a million times better if the rabbits could bound from cover to cover too fast for the camels to possibly catch. And maybe the camels could spit and make those hollow, loud bleating noises camels make that are somehow actually rather startling.



The composition's mostly pretty boring, too, relying on standard, diffuse lighting common to CGI deserts and snowscapes, which shows off the CGI details well without stressing the director out with things like lighting continuity and interesting shadows.

All in all, this show sucks.

Knowing Poetry

At Amee's recommendation, I last night watched Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, a beautifully shot film I quite enjoyed. It's the most plot driven Jarmusch film I've seen, taking a more or less standard hunted man Western plot and fleshing it out with Jarmusch's typical, series of vignette style studies of characters playing off each other. The result is a Western world seen through an unusual prism of credible human social examination.



It was helped to this end by a fantastic cast, including Robert Mitchum actually well used, though briefly, in his final role. It seems age hadn't blunted Mitchum's ability to perform, and as an angry, paranoid company head he seems to almost effortlessly create a character. Some of the other characters, by contrast, I think might actually have been better cast with unknowns, particularly Iggy Pop and Gabriel Byrne, whose appearances don't really last long enough for us to get past the "Hey, look who it is," moment to see the character.



Johnny Depp worked perfectly fine as the lead,though, transitioning credibly from a naive fish out of water to a shell shocked lost soul. Gary Farmer as a Native American called Nobody at first annoyed me with his catch phrase of, "Stupid fucking white man," which seemed to mark him as the kind of obnoxious Native American anti-stereotype seen in a lot of post-1970 Westerns, most annoyingly in Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales. Anyone suspicious about my perspective on this, ask yourself how it would have come across if any non-Native American had, upon meeting Depp's character after he'd been almost fatally shot, said he was "fucking stupid." The humour depends entirely on a preconceived submissiveness and perhaps mystification on the part of the Native American, and a surprise at finding a Native American comfortable busting a white guy's balls.



But fortunately, the movie moved away from the It's Just So Funny He's Not a Moron! thing and not only gave Nobody an interesting back story, but used him to supply the movie's curious relationship with William Blake, which is also the name of Depp's character. Nobody takes this name to craft an interesting, supernatural story around Depp. I thought at first the name "Nobody" could be a reference to The Odyssey, but now I think perhaps it's meant to imply that Gary Farmer's character is a personification of aspects of Depp's story.

Jarmusch's style seems to resist momentum, which is oddly suitable for a Western, allowing us to dwell in locations and moments in a world where travel and communication took much longer than they do to-day. The film's Wikipedia entry identifies it as a Revisionist Western. I'm not quite sure I buy into the concept of the Revisionist Western--I don't really see how films like Fort Apache and Stagecoach are really argued against by films considered Revisionist. They seem to me simply to be different stories told in the same environment, but some of the films listed in the Wikipedia entry for Revisionist Western actually are films I thought of while watching Dead Man, particularly Ride the High Country and The Naked Spur.



Twitter Sonnet #169

Three billion moustaches scar the army.
Spinning airplanes eject extra pilots.
Every twentieth ship captain's barmy.
Nuns turn into white shadows with habits.
Late laundry spins a dry denture blowjob.
A murder of springs step down cardboard stairs.
Illusory rum cake can't please a mob.
Across Bering Strait for Palin came bears.
The sun stops to watch a Norse bell pepper.
Phoney oil burns a lie's reflection.
Lost Club Queen drops an upside down sceptre.
Though the Heart's way is the rigged election.
Blurry flat light spikes off a grey ocean.
Frost infects the veins of a vacation.

Cupcake Tits

I dreamt last night I caught a sparrow without a beak. Instead it had small, floppy lips it couldn't close. A seagull flew at it, shrunk, and dived into the mouth looking for fish, I think. The sparrow spat the agitated seagull out after a moment.

Apparently music videos are still being made--when I saw a headline on Yahoo! to-day about how a studio that owns The Beach Boys' "California Girls" wants royalties from Katy Perry for her "California Gurls", I immediately went to YouTube to find the video thinking it might actually be more of a rip off of The Dresden Dolls' "Shores of California" music video;



Which is itself a parody of the video for David Lee Roth's cover of The Beach Boys song.

However, the Katy Perry video looks like this:



and features Snoop Dogg. One thing I noticed is that it doesn't appear to be related to The Beach Boys song at all, any more than The Cure's "Lullaby", about a nightmarish spider man is related to Marvel Comics' Spider-Man. I'd say the studio who owns The Beach Boys song has, to borrow Katy Perry's metaphor, about a popsicle's chance in a vagina of receiving royalties from this new song.*

I also noticed that the song is, of course, not as subversive as The Dresden Dolls' song, the same going for the contrast between the songs' respective videos. I was struck by how pathetic Perry looks holding whipped cream cans on her tits. I think what I'm seeing is the popular culture perverse humour comfort level, or at least what's perceived as the comfort level. I have this weird feeling that sexually titillating media has gotten to be a kind of polite fiction. Everyone grinning and winking a little too enthusiastically while dead from boredom inside.

To-day I also read "THE YELLOW ALPHABET" in the new Sirenia Digest to-day, and some of the segments of that story are, to me, some of the Digest's best writing. Caitlin has taken various words, in alphabetical order, and used each one as a prompt for a few paragraphs that at times are related to the word in strikingly poetical ways. I particularly liked the one for "Blister", which used the subject of blisters to accent the nature of environment and character nicely.

I read this while eating breakfast, after which I went out for the day to shop for my sister's birthday present. A woman at the gas station greeting me with a "good morning" and it kind of freaked me out. I'm having a slight identity crisis here--but I think I can do this. I think I can take back daylight hours. If I can just stop feeling like such a loser going to bed at 1am.

*Incidentally, Japan is ahead of us on the phallic confection metaphor with the chocolate covered banana on a stick;

Finding the Drink

I got up at 9am to-day, and I've been getting up at least as early as 9am for almost three weeks now. I feel like a kid again, almost--actually I was remembering when 9am meant I'd slept in late.

I'm guessing the general change in my schedule is partly due to Amee being here. I'm wondering how I'll do after I've driven her up to Orange County to-day. She and I last night almost finished off the bottle of absinthe I've had for two, maybe three years. Damn, maybe four--I got it just after absinthe was legalised again. Last night was the first time I tried mixing sugar in it, as Amee had reminded me of the existence of sugar by pouring roughly half a cup of it into her coffee every morning. Turns out I like absinthe with sugar, despite generally not having much of a sweet tooth. Considering I also like mead and sake, which are both very sweet, alcohol seems to be the exception for me.

Though I still don't like mixed drinks. Everyone was drinking Sangria at my mother's birthday gathering. I tried some, and it just sort of lacked that essential fun quality I associate with alcohol. Meanwhile, I was having a vodka martini with Grey Goose because I wanted something refreshing. It didn't quite work for that, but it almost did.

After last night's Wild Turkey and absinthe, I'm feeling a little burnt out on alcohol actually. We watched The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp while drinking last night--I think it was maybe the fifth time I've watched it. I rather forgot about the political and even some of the character content, and was just digging the atmosphere of it. I've been trying to give Amee a whirlwind tour of cinema over the past few weeks, so after The Seventh Seal and Seven Samurai on the previous two nights, I found myself thinking about the tone of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp as an English film distinguishing it from the tones of the Swedish and Japanese films. Of course, a lot of it has to do with the individual filmmakers. But after the broad acting techniques of old Japanese film, and the shadowed intensity of the performers in Bergman's, I appreciated the sort of gentle chaser of scene after scene of Technicolor English aristocracy being mildly flustered.

News from a Shaven World

Twitter Sonnet #168

Splitting ape hairs draws odd chromosome drops.
Fast liquids etch new lines of longitude.
Cow clippers are crewed wholly by milksops.
Bulls have red energy drink attitude.
Low liquid cameras stretch satanic streets.
Wicked laughter plays on innocent loop.
Puzzle pieces assemble Rosebud tweets.
Fake snow swirls in a tiny instant soup.
Distant white fur suns are a small fiction.
Folder carpets file merkin damage.
Liquid humans pull Pringle can suction.
Dust falls backwards to make the real average.
Curly beards strangle the razor of youth.
Monochrome bats epitomise uncouth.

I've been watching a lot more news lately, sitting out in the living room eating breakfast with Amee rather than watching anime on my computer. It seems like a really long time since I sat down and watched The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I know I've caught sporadic episodes online now and then, but I'm a long way from the period in my life where I wouldn't miss an episode of either. The Daily Show is still really good, but there's something oddly strained about The Colbert Report now. I'm not sure if it's me that's different or the show. Maybe both.



But a couple days ago, Amee and I did watch the first episode of Seitokai Yakuindomo, a new anime series Tim recommended to me a few days ago. I specifically asked him if it was a slice of life story, as indicated by Anime Database. He said no, but I think he's lost objectivity. Slice of life stories have gotten very popular in anime nowadays, but so far the only one that's really worked for me is Azumanga Daioh, which has a particular knack for Subtle Weird. Otherwise, my mind completely walks away from most of these shows. I just haven't the cognisant strength to concentrate on them. I can't even really tell you much of what "happened" in the first episode of Seitokai Yakuindomo. All I remember about it, as distinguishing it from other slice of life series I've watched, is that it continues the progression of vigorous fanservice, most of which is just pretty embarrassing. For example, one character speaks very bluntly about her period . . . and that's it. All it did was immediately conjure in my mind thousands of blushing, giggling boys.

But I think mainly it's just not a humour frequency my receptors are tuned to. The animation is good, though, and the design is decent. Everyone's drawn sort of tilted, which is interesting. I do like the ending theme segment.

Suggested Legitimacy of Dreams

A mysterious e-mail I received this morning;



They're saying now that triceratops never existed, that it was a juvenile form of another dinosaur. Personally, I think scientists are just trolling us. They know triceratops is a staple dinosaur, they're trying to fuck with all of us. It's like I said to Amee at an ancient Greek archaeological exhibit yesterday--the main reason everyone insists on using the name "Heracles", whether they admit it to themselves or not, is that they know everyone knows him as "Hercules" now. The least they could've done is added a note to the descriptions, "Heracles, known to the Romans and modern culture as Hercules." Let the people participate.



The Greek exhibit was in the same museum as the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, which was really amazing. I'm always surprised by how many Lautrec paintings I don't normally see on Google image searches.




Lautrec had such a great mind for implying attitude. Not necessarily motion, but things like a guy's gut sagging over pants or the curving side of a slouching woman seem to say something about the basic nature of humanity and what it is regardless of what it tries to be, this lazy, beautiful thing.

My family and Amee and I had lunch at a nearby cafe that used paper placemats. Crayons in buckets in the table centrepieces encouraged defacing the tablecloth. Here's Amee's;



And here's mine;



I always seem to default to weird anatomy when doodling. I call this one "Bad Back".

I've had a couple strange, gruesome dreams over the past couple nights. Last night it was like I had first person perspective in a side-scroller game, and I saw arranged in a row the landmarks of a grey, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Burning trucks and cars lay dormant, and on some of the larger ones the corpses of giants were draped, many of them with bloody messages carved in their backs. I don't remember what most of them said, except one of them had something to do with the SS.

Testing the Bird Humour

A couple days ago, Amee and I went on an ornithological safari of sorts, beginning with the feeding of ducks.





Afterwards, I took Amee to Ocean Beach, which turned out not to be as impressive an excursion as I'd hoped, but we still encountered a huge piece of sea weed wreckage in the sand.




Amee silently implores the sea.


So does this seagull.

To-day was my mother's birthday, and for which I had a nice Grey Goose vodka martini that seems to have left me a bit lethargic. I love Grey Goose, I wish I could get my hands on it more often. We also went to a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition, I expect I'll post pictures of to-morrow.

The Extra Reality

I have a huge backlog of pictures not necessarily related to Comic-Con, some of the best of which I'll post now.


This is a pretty little river I walked across to get to the smaller convention centre to pick up my badge on Wednesday before the Con. It provides a path between the mall and hotel.


Looks like whoever owns the bridge could use a troll.





This place seemed like a nice place for kids to have a fort or something.




One of the big spiders was out making its web oddly early last Wednesday.



And of course Snow was afoot.




A strange bug I saw one night.



Amee spotted this spider in my room.

I've been watching plenty of movies, too--mostly familiar films I've been showing to Amee, The Philadelphia Story, The Misfits, Ponyo, Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, and Duck Soup. But at Amee's request, I rented Mike Judge's Idiocracy, which I thought was a nice social satire. It projects a future based on the fact that stupid, reckless people are more likely to reproduce than smart people, who take into account their own incomes and living situations before deciding to have children. This leads in the movie to a nation governed and populated by morons. Rather than the bloody, tribal chaos one would normally expect from such circumstances, Judge opts for a gentler, less realistic approach in order to lampoon modern culture. My favourite bit was the progression of the name of the Fuddruckers hamburger restaurant to Butt Fuckers

The weakest aspect of the film was its protagonists, played by Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph, written as being the sort of mildly dumb normal folks typically seen on sitcoms. In the environment of the moronic future, there really needed to be a straight man for contrast, but Rudolph and Wilson come across more like characters from another movie. A lot of the satirical culture was great, though, twisted guy I am, I think I'd have found it funnier if the people obsessed with brainless violence and sex were actually murderers and rapists. But I understand why Judge didn't go that route--in a sense, one could look at the world in Idiocracy as being a world of Beavises and Buttheads, and it does feel like Judge is accessing the same point of view here. Though I think the reason I find Beavis and Butthead to be a stronger work is that Judge clearly developed more affection for those two than he did for the people in Idiocracy.

Twitter Sonnet #167

Hardened paper passes plastic's front line.
Suspicious bread is halted by pastry.
Stale mint needles are woven into pine.
Sequoia has grown tired of history.
Purple eyes sink to the back of the head.
A long story spills into the spinach.
Whiskey packs into the girl on the bed.
Drowsiness is the fantastic finish.
Ultimate apples fly to the ceiling.
Clouds of paste stink as hot, melted rain drops.
Dead prosthetic tooth limbs lose all feeling.
Party arteries with confetti pop.
Grapes race round biomechanical tubes.
Carny satyrs fall asleep on soft rubes.

Comic-Con Report, volume 4

This would normally be where I'd make the anime post, except this year some genius had the idea to move the anime theatres over to the Marriot hotel. It completely destroyed the whole point of most of the anime at the Con for me, which was that it was being shown in these nice, dark, cool rooms where you could sit and rest a while and maybe be introduced to some anime you'd never have watched otherwise.

This, however, didn't stop hyperactive cosplaying otakus from congregating in the same area, where they spent the whole time trying to find goofy ways of working off an apparently never ending sugar high.



I did finally take the long, winding path outside, through parking garage, up two flights of stairs, through cafe, past gift shops, outside again, and through lobby to the new anime theatres. Which, I have to admit, were much nicer theatres, bigger and with chandeliers. But probably not worth the walk. I watched an episode of a lousy series I'd never seen before called You're Under Arrest! and episodes of two old favourites, School Rumble and Hayate no Gotoku.



The things kids learn at Comic-Con.

Mostly on Sunday I wandered the floor, taking pictures of costumes.



When she wasn't doing volunteer work, Amee spent most of her time hanging out around the artist's booths. Here's some signed art she got from J. Scott Campbell.



That just about concludes everything I have to report about Comic-Con this year. Remember, new Venia's Travels to-day.