Comic Con Report, volume 2

This is a photograph by Cheryl Walsh, a very talented photographer I found myself standing in line for Ballroom 20 with on Thursday. This is her web site where you'll find more photos of the kind she considers her specialty, photos of women underwater. "Well, this is a good time for that," I said. "It seems like every day a new book comes out with a beautiful woman in the water on the cover. There's Neil Gaiman's Ocean at the End of the Lane and before that Caitlín R. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl which just won a Stoker." As someone who grew up loving mermaids it's certainly not a trend I'm looking to discourage.

I asked Walsh about her influences and she mentioned Annie Leibovitz among others. Mostly she seemed to admire a wedding photographer named John Michael Cooper and she described with enthusiasm the "Trashed Wedding Dress" phenomenon in wedding photography that Cooper began, photos of new brides wrecking their wedding dresses while wearing them in a variety of ways, from shredding and rolling in mud to immolation. She told me about a photo Cooper took of a bride and groom in the desert which featured the bride crammed into the trunk of a car with the groom standing nearby holding a shovel. Walsh explained to me this wasn't meant to encourage violence towards women but rather to convey the transitional experience of going from single woman to wife. Looking at the photograph now, I can see why many people might not have gotten that impression right away.

I talked to Walsh about movies. She seemed more interested in modern film and wasn't especially familiar with older ones. She said she liked J.J. Abrams and I immediately mentioned how brilliant I thought Super 8 was, at least the first two thirds of Super 8, but the last portion wasn't so bad, either. She told me she hadn't seen Super 8, that the story had not interested her.

We talked about the prevalent use of colour filters in modern movies, and she mentioned watching one movie and finding it distracting that in every shot there was a cool spot and a warm spot. I told her about a colour Ozu movie I'd watched recently and how much I admired the ability great filmmakers possessed of making complex colour compositions without filters, how complex colour compositions were probably more difficult to pull off but inevitably more interesting than the somewhat lazier two or three tone compositions one tends to see to-day. This progressed into talking about how much more real older movies often feel because of actors and filmmakers willing to do dangerous things. I mentioned Clark Gable deciding to chase and wrestle a horse to the ground for The Misfits just because he was bored waiting for Marilyn Monroe to show up on set.

Little did I know thirty minutes later I would be seeing Alfonso Cuaron, Edgar Wright, and Marc Webb in Hall H discussing the realism of classic cinema, in particular long takes and physical comedy.

Cuaron was there promoting his upcoming film Gravity, Wright was there promoting World's End, and Webb was promoting The Amazing Spider-Man 2. I immediately saw Webb as the weak link of the three and seemed to have my impression confirmed when Webb informed the audience that, in a movie, "The villain functions as a foil for the protagonist." But he kind of won some respect from me by being the one who brought up Buster Keaton. When the panel was asked about mentors they had as young filmmakers, Webb and Cuaron discovered they were both acquainted with the professor Webb mentioned as his mentor.

And by the way, yes, you read that right, I was in line for Ballroom 20 and then I got into Hall H. How did that happen?

Well, my initial plan was to get into Hall H on Thursday and sit through the Ender's Game panel in order to see Terry Gilliam's panel. Then I found out Gilliam had cancelled his appearance and I got downtown so late I figured there wasn't a chance of getting into Hall H anyway. I saw that there was going to be a Sherlock panel with Steven Moffat followed by an X-Files panel with Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny in Ballroom 20. I honestly didn't think there'd be too much of a draw for those. It's not like Benedict Cumberbatch was going to be there and I'm pretty sure the last X-Files movie tanked. Well, I spent two hours waiting and chatting with the photographer Cheryl Walsh before it was clear I wasn't going to get in. It turned out there had been enough die hard X-Files fans camping overnight to make it impossible. I did get this picture while I was in line of a rather adorable female Samurai Jack and her boyfriend Aku;

I think she actually looks a bit like Elizabeth Taylor.

Anyway, after I gave up on Ballroom 20 I decided to see what the line was like for Hall H, just out of curiosity.

There was no line for Hall H.

For those of you unfamiliar with how things work at Comic Con, it's been just about unheard of for there not to be a perpetual snake of humanity coiled and sweating in the east side of the convention centre. I haven't been able to just walk into Hall H since 2004 and this was less than an hour before the Ender's Game panel on which everyone knew Harrison Ford was going to appear. Harrison Ford, whose surprise appearance at last year's Con was perhaps the biggest story to come out of that Con.

I got into Hall H just as Edgar Wright was joining the other two directors onstage for the above mentioned panel. At one point, the three directors were asked about Steven Spielberg recently predicting that the film industry was heading towards an "implosion" and that there was now much more creative talent on display on television. All three directors agreed, all three talked about how it was virtually impossible to make a small dramatic film anymore and that all the good writers were indeed going to television. Perhaps there's no better evidence for this than the fact that I was unable to get into the room featuring panels for two TV shows--one of which did not feature the show's stars--but I was able to just walk into Hall H shortly before the day's big movie event panel.

As to that panel, it was kind of cool seeing Harrison Ford live and in person, as laconic as he was. I'm sure you've already read plenty about that panel, though I haven't seen it mentioned too often that one fan from the crowd did ask the panel about the controversy surrounding Orson Scott Card's homophobia. The film's screenwriter took the question, saying how they chose to look at the controversy as an opportunity to show their support for the LGBT community. He didn't mention what form that support would take, whether there would be any portions of the film's profits donated to anyone, which is I think the only possible way of staving off a boycott considering its reluctance to send any money or publicity in Card's direction that primarily fuels the boycott. Ford didn't have anything to say on the subject except when the screenwriter mentioned how the story of Ender's Game in no way espoused homophobic sentiment, that it was in fact about understanding. Ford interjected somewhat enigmatically with just one word at this point; "empathy."

From what I've read, a lot of articles are misinterpreting Ford's surly old guy shtick as feelings of genuine distaste for being at Comic Con. I would remind everyone that Ford showed up for the 2012 panel in handcuffs. Do people really think he was kidnapped and brought to the Con by force?

I'm out of time again to-day. I'll leave you with some of the best costumes I saw on Thursday;

Twitter Sonnet #530

The happy guy kneels before his quarter.
He has serious men guard the restroom.
Melted mints are noticed under water.
C.S. Lewis weaves on Tolkien's wood loom.
Beelzebub breaks a believer's horn.
Twenty four hours pass on moving stairs.
In a gas lamp solar systems are born.
The floor was flush with red jokers and hares.
Tennis shoes fade over the antique pump.
The old parking dollar has gone thermal.
A swamp smoothie is the sign of a slump.
Your pal the ant should be extradermal.
Gunpowder too close to coffee is dry.
Mars has encouraged baristas to try.

Comic Con Report, volume 1

This is the cover photo for my upcoming novel, The Back of Day: One Fan's Journey Photographing the Back of Felicia Day. Members of the San Diego chapter of the Felicia Day Spinal Appreciation Club have studied the photo and confirmed in a twenty-four to one vote that this is indeed Felicia Day's back. So I'll have no naysayers.

Well, I ended up on the escalator by Felicia Day yesterday. I said, "Miss Day, can I get a picture?" Her assistant (the woman on the left) said she was in a hurry, she was late for a panel.

"That's okay," I said. "I'll just take a picture of the back of her head. I will say, 'This is the back of Felicia Day's head.'" She did turn and smile for me then, but it was a second after I took the picture. It's true!

I saw her dash from the escalator to a room for a panel. I didn't see any panels the last day of the Con but it was still a good day, the last of a good Con. The only really disappointing thing is that I didn't make it into the Doctor Who panel. I showed up about an hour later than I did for the Doctor Who panel I got into last year. But I think my drive to get in was dampened by two things--none of the pre-2005 series Doctors were going to be there, and the whole panel from last year ended up on YouTube. It's for that latter reason I decided to concentrate on aspects of the Con that weren't going to get a lot of media coverage.

As to the former reason, the fact that this'll be the first anniversary episode where all the surviving Doctors aren't gathered together has dampened my enthusiasm about the show in a kind of fundamental way. I mean, I still love it, I'll still watch the anniversary episode and probably enjoy it. I did stand in line for the panel. I guess it's like the Smiths lyric; "Nothing's changed, I still love you, only slightly less than I used to." It's the sense that people are in control of the show right now who don't understand it in the way I would like.

I did witness this;

And this;

I'm not sure precisely what's happening in these pictures I only know that it's pivotal.

You'll notice in the second picture a fellow dressed as the Fourth Doctor in the background. This would be the only man I saw dressed as the Fourth Doctor. However, I saw six women and one twelve year old girl dressed as the Fourth Doctor;

I didn't get a photo of the twelve year old, whose costume included purple tights for some reason.

If the reason BBC producers are barring older Doctors from appearing on the new series is fear of alienating the show's new sizeable female demographic, I think I can present some evidence to the contrary.

I didn't try to get into another panel on Sunday after waiting three hours to fail at getting into Hall H for the Doctor Who panel--I came close to going to see the Spotlight on Neil Gaiman panel, but I saw Gaiman in the Sandman 25th anniversary panel the day before and figured Sunday would be better diversifying my Con experience. I mainly just wandered the floor. Here's a lousy photo of Ron Perlman signing autographs with the rest of the Sons of Anarchy cast;

The girl in the foreground reminds me to mention this is the first year I didn't run into The Girl Who Makes Dresses Out of Con Bags:

This picture is from 2010, the first year the Con started handing out bags large enough for people to make whole outfits out of. Without trying, I ran into this girl three years in a row, and each time she'd made a whole dress overnight from the new bag. A lot of people have imitated this girl but she was the first. I got a picture of one of the imitators this year.

The mask and cape were nice touches, but it was last year's bag.

That's about all I have time for to-day, but I'd expect at least four more entries. Plenty more Con stories to come. I'll leave you with this picture of another Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast member, Clare Kramer who played the villain Glory. She wasn't in a hurry for anything. Oh, show business!

Comic Con Interlude

It's only half over but already I've had a better Con than last year. Here's a taste;

Twitter Sonnet #529

Vacancies chatter outside the Lion.
Backless aprons are here inadequate.
The D lobby holds a copied scion.
Paper streams tighten plastic etiquette.
The pale archer martini rides three wheels.
Bean mantis green blood is enervating.
Between two kings a copied web congeals.
Archaeologist smugglers are meeting.
Genuine ships shelter pretend pirates.
The Fourth Doctor is a million women.
Prototype teens turn out average pilots.
Spirits resurface in tight wound linen.
The egg goes to the bird who can grab it.
Savage atoms march in matching habit.

They're Gathering

I turned into a neighbourhood and parked my car a few days ago to answer my phone and this couple of ravens either didn't notice me or they're less frightened of cars than people. I watched as the small bird on the left attacked them while they foraged on the lawn;

I've seen these little birds dive bombing crows and ravens before, I guess to defend their nests.

To-night's Preview Night at Comic-Con. I'll be going in to pick up my badge and enormous bag of advertisements. Then I have to pick Amee and her boyfriend up from the airport. Expect short and less frequent entries from me over the next four days and absurdly long entries every day next week. Well, hopefully I'll see more this year than last year. I'm certainly ready to wait in line, with all the peanut butter and jelly I bought a couple days ago.

Twitter Sonnet #528

Brandy magnets galvanise the white horse.
The high ceiling watches the robot hope.
Carpet bookshelves compel kittens perforce.
Useful are the steak knives carved out of soap.
Hang glider eyes climb beneath blue shadow.
Anomalous senses strike the new brow.
Muddy streaks of clouds grip the tomato.
Electric foam numbs the one on the bow.
Fading cornstalks kill the vanishing point.
Noise is a butter knife written in jam.
Wicker offices have pins to anoint.
A good octopus has gone on the lam.
Senator Binks is an amphibian.
Oceanids take us to Albion.

The Unmanageable Heart

The failures of attempted communist states lay in the inability of any bureaucracy to account for the complexity and mutability of personal character and human behaviour. The 1966 East German film Trace of Stones (Spur der Steine) demonstrates this intelligently with one story that encompasses both the professional and the private spheres. And yet its makers were surprised when the ruling communist party suppressed the film. After a brief premiere in 1966, it wasn't seen again until 1989.

Perhaps one reason the filmmakers were broadsided by the censorship is that the film does not ostensibly condemn communism and in fact portrays party members as good people and the effort to create an effective communist government a difficult but worthwhile endeavour. Perhaps in creating three dimensional characters, the filmmakers simply unwittingly exposed fundamental flaws in the system.

The film centres on a love triangle among people involved in an East German construction project--the two men are Hannes Balla and Werner Horrath, the woman is named Kati Klee. Balla is essentially the head of a construction workers' union, to appearances the leader of a gang. He and his men dress in matching vests and broad brimmed hats and have a reputation for amoral behaviour. The film opens with the group of them skinny dipping in a public fountain.

So Horrath's brought in, a man placed in charge of regulating morality. He's a clever strategist and colluding with Klee, who also works in the project's administration segment, he uses her feminine charm to bring Ballas over to his side. Ballas and his men are generally vulgar and provocative in the way of construction workers around a pretty woman but we see quickly the simple hearted Ballas has really fallen for Klee.

And so has Horrath, which is unfortunate since he's already married and has a child. This sort of behaviour for anyone would be trouble but for the man in charge of administering morality it's especially disastrous.

Horrath is portrayed as incredibly weak willed. Of course he constantly tells Klee he'll divorce his wife, and of course he consistently doesn't. In much the way he was unable to restrain himself with Klee he's unable to take the big step with his wife. The problem becomes unavoidable when Klee becomes pregnant with Horrath's child.

Initially portrayed as a reckless misanthrope, Ballas becomes the moral centre of the film, perhaps a reflection of communist sentiments about the working man. He genuinely wants the construction to go forward smoothly, he supports Klee with simple hearted affection despite knowing she bears Horrath's child, and in spite of what Horrath's done he strives to keep Horrath in his position because he knows he's the best man for the job.

It all remains for Hermann Jansen, a high ranking party official, to sort everything out. But while he comes off as a man of unquestionable virtue, who sees into Ballas' heart and recognises a good and honest man, there's ultimately little he can do about Klee's and Horrath's situation that would make for a tidy ending for a movie, perhaps the principal reason the movie was soon suppressed--it was too true.

Bombs, Bodies, and Credulity

Sometimes the wiliest of assassins can be thwarted by the embarrassing misunderstandings between man and woman. This is the premise of 1956's The Green Man in which Alastair Sim plays a pleasantly sadistic gentleman whose latest high profile assassination attempt is frustrated by George Cole as a simple minded vacuum cleaner salesman and Jill Adams as the naive young future bride of Sims' poet neighbour. This is a delightful little screwball comedy.

Cole's character is named William Blake and in one scene where he's trying to concoct a theory as to how the woman's corpse in the piano downstairs came to be murdered, Adams' character, Ann, is sitting on the bed in negligee and remarks how her husband probably won't have memorised his new poem because "it's modern."

"Well, then he can just make it up as he goes along," says Blake in off-handed criticism perhaps from the ghost of his namesake.

The forgotten poem is just one of the pretexts for a series of scenes where Ann's fiancé returns home to find her and the salesman in a compromising situation with an improbable story about murder. The comedy is in how absolutely earnest and innocent the two look while any rational being would probably assume based on the evidence that the two had been making out just before Ann's fiancé discovered them.

The movie continues like this--Sim gets top billing but most of the movie centres around Cole and Adams. Cole looked very familiar to me but I couldn't remember from where. I looked him up and saw that I knew him from 1970's The Vampire Lovers, a movie with several people I've recognised in a surprising variety of films--Jon Finch, who I recognised in Roman Polanski's MacBeth and in a BBC production of Shakespeare's two Henry IV plays in the title role, and the director of The Vampire Lovers, Ray Ward Baker, was a name I recognised when I saw he'd directed the Marilyn Monroe/Richard Widmark movie Don't Bother To Knock. The Vampire Lovers has turned out to have a rather improbable pedigree.

Cole shows himself to be a great hand at the screwball comedy, playing his role with a quick earnestness matched perfectly by Adams.

I would have liked to have seen more of Sim, whose only really entertaining scene involves his attempts to dispose of the body early on while carrying on a chess game with his friend, a police inspector.

Sim is hurried and anxious, frustrated when he finds the can't throw the game as quickly as he'd like, but there's still a fundamental detachment and amusement in him that I see distinguishes Sim's particular charming ghoulishness.

In case you're wondering if I analysed the chess game, the two men never actually seem to get very far past the opening, from what I can see.

Pride and the Food Court

To-day's the second day of San Diego's Pride Festival. I only just heard that George Takei and his husband Brad were Grand Marshals--along with La Toya Jackson for some reason. I see on her Wikipedia page, "The perception of Jackson as an underdog and her support for LGBT rights has led her to be declared a gay icon." The cited source is an interview at Gay Wired in which she says:

Years ago, I remember being at a meeting and my record label said, “Did you know 99-percent of your audience are gay?” I was really excited about that.

So I guess that means around twenty La Toya Jackson fans are gay. I love that her whole record label speaks with one voice, too.

Anyway, I would've liked to have gone to Hillcrest to see Takei though from what I've heard about Pride parades in previous years it sounds like more of a party atmosphere than really appeals to me. Give me events with panels--I figured I probably oughtn't exhaust myself before Comic-Con. It is interesting these two big San Diego events are occurring so close together. It would be kind of cool if a mob of Pride people invaded the Ender's Game panel.

My sister's working at the Pride parade so I look forward to hearing her talk about it. I simply went to a shopping mall yesterday, Mission Valley mall which is at least fifteen miles away from Hillcrest but I was surprised to see rainbow banners everywhere. The remarkable thing about them is that they were clearly corporate produced--this wasn't some hand painted rainbow blankets hung from lamp posts, this was mass produced decoration from Westfield, the massive shopping mall company which bought up malls all over the country. It really hasn't been so long since JC Penney pulled ads from Ellen DeGeneres' sitcom. This has been some year for gay rights, a rather encouraging one. It's somewhat odd next to the weakening of the voting rights act and the not guilty verdict for George Zimmerman. The only consistent thing about civil rights this year is action, it seems like.

I spent a lot of time yesterday looked through the Russian version of imdb while I was having a conversation about gangster movies with a Russian woman in Second Life with the aid of a scripted translator. I rather liked the oddly grindhouse feeling trailer the site has for the 1932 Scarface.

Twitter Sonnet #527

Digital old muffins march in the keep.
A broad doughy hat gave away the thief.
From a liquorice vine he makes a leap.
And lands in the garden of Queen O'Keeffe.
Dilapidated decks begin to point.
Lower hells are where the ham doughnuts go.
U-turns create a tail light socket joint.
Kelloggs deals flakes a slowly burning blow.
The wooden cart's loaded with lost olives.
Indolent steam anthems create no perm.
Plywood chambers prove Digital Joe lives.
Green clouds twist to a hole for a blue worm.
Bold tan puppets play Supermarket Risk.
Just a few thousand hearts fit on floppy disk.

The Space Between Art and You

Again, as a reminder, there's a new Boschen and Nesuko comic. 25 pages for one dollar. Feel free to let me know what you think.

It took forever setting up a payment method. I was originally going to upload the comic to Comixology and Apple's service until I read those sites' policies on things like depictions of genitalia would make utilising them impossible or restrictive to the point of useless. Then I found The Not .99 Method which allows one to receive payments from buyers directly through PayPal without anyone taking a cut--which is particularly attractive compared to Comixology which wanted to split things 50/50

The only problem is that PayPal seems to have changed its notification of payment system since 2011 when the MASSIVE Squirts guy came up with the Not .99 Cent method--the canned reply I made to provide people with a download link for the comic doesn't automatically go to the buyer because the e-mails from PayPal now come from "member@paypal.com" instead of the buyer's e-mail address in their PayPal account. However, the buyer e-mail addresses are still shown in the subject lines of the payment notifications so it's a relatively simple matter for me to forward the download links in the evening from all the purchases I've received during the day. It's still better than Apple's two to four week delay.

So if you buy the comic, expect delivery within the day and curse PayPal for not allowing things to work faster. If I sell enough of The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko #1 I'll switch to a subscription system for subsequent issues which should make things easier for everyone.

Now I can concentrate on Comic-Con. I've been looking at the schedule and from what I can tell the panels I most want to see are on Thursday and Sunday. It's going to be hard choosing between the Doctor Who: 50th Anniversary panel and the Neil Gaiman panel on Sunday. I'm not even sure which'll be more popular, though Gaiman's in a much smaller room so his'll probably be the harder to get into.

The panel I want to see on Thursday is Terry Gilliam's for his new movie but it looks like I'll need to somehow get into Hall H ahead of the crowd for Ender's Game which'll mainly be there for Harrison Ford.

Oh, Harrison Ford. In a weird way, I kind of pity him. As much as you can pity a hugely successful iconic film star. His career since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade hasn't come close to equalling the heights of Blade Runner or The Empire Strikes Back. There were okay movies like The Fugitive and the Jack Ryan films but mostly his choice of roles was puzzling. He's often talked in interviews how he sees himself as at heart a typical working man, just trying to make a good product for an appreciative audience but it seems like he's been living Joel McCrea's character in Sullivan's Travels--he's only recently realised that people loved the adventure films far more than plodding issue movies. So he made Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Cowboys and Aliens, and both met with disappointment.

This despite the enormous reception he received from the crowd in Hall H when he made a surprise appearance for Cowboys and Aliens. I think that's the main reason he's come back for Ender's Game--I think he realised the crowd love from several thousand geeks has the genuine impact of a rock concert crowd, it's not the phoney, opportunistic fawning he may be used to from award shows and screenings. Here's his average fellow he wants to make a good product for.

And now Ender's Game, which he probably thought was a safe bet as the book's considered a Science Fiction classic in many circles. Maybe he didn't know about Orson Scott Card's backward and nasty views on homosexuality which has prompted a boycott of the film which I plan on participating in. It'll be interesting to hear whether Ford addresses the issue on Thursday. Certainly he'll get an appreciative reception again but it'll mostly be from people who don't plan on seeing Ender's Game--only a fraction of whom will be boycotting it. Most people, I suspect, will skip it because it simply doesn't look very good. The Ender's Game movie is not going to give Ford the crowd pleasing home run or even the enduringly beautiful oddity like Blade Runner he might be hoping for.

Nesuko Can't Cook

Okay, it's online, my new comic, The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko #1.

I knew it was going to be difficult getting it online but I didn't know it was going to be this difficult. This would be the day Yahoo chose to slow to a slug's pace.

This issue is the first twenty five pages of a new ongoing Boschen and Nesuko series. The second issue should be available in late August.

Enjoy.

The New Insects Have Arrived

Another day, another insect I can't identify.

I saw it on my way to pick up more art supplies (pencils and tracing paper). From his size, I thought he was a junebug or a bumble bee when I initially saw it buzzing about slowly in the air beside me. On closer inspection, though . . .

I'm starting to wonder if some eccentric local entomologist had a psychotic break a couple days ago and just started releasing specimens.

Well, I'm done with colouring, now I just need to put together a web site and a cover. Hopefully you'll be able to get the comic by late to-morrow.

Twitter Sonnet #526

Hedgehog diapers split the floral sunrise.
Inky bangs twist the library ruin.
Polyester dice click a Morse surmise.
Crayon cracks on the cartoon we drew in.
Pyramids of lavender sequins kill.
A sunglasses store stops a tent's traffic.
Shadow senators stop a solar bill.
All girl nuke tests are radio sapphic.
Tofu dollars taste like denim and sweat.
Mickey Mouse keeps emergency rainstorms.
Ma Bell made liberty an iron bet.
Gradually, the redwood bot transforms.
A wan dollop of avocado schemes.
Galaxy sandwich is just what it seems.

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.