Stolen Vehicles

Twitter Sonnet #116

Thursday's flowers grow sharp with precision.
Haphazard stars fall in cereal milk.
Morning hunger soon makes your decision.
Liquid funds in cloud banks are hard to bilk.
Sleeping's the best way to invite visits.
Some instead watch TV sleep they don't try.
Fatigue gets you the Red Queen's dry biscuits.
You hear Gilbert Gottfried laugh when you die.
Angels speak in an insensitive tongue.
They send cops to murder an alien.
Robbing banks only saves souls for the young.
One book might beat four years of Italian.
The Atlantic carries potatoes here.
An orange tuber's eye sheds an opaque tear.

To-day so far hasn't gone much as planned. Well, it started out exactly as I'd meant it to--breakfast while watching the latest Baka to Test to Shokanju (which featured one of the most gratuitous Evangelion parodies I've seen) followed by some chess in Second Life. I lost both games I played--I almost always lose nowadays. Partly I think it's just that I'm playing against a more skilled group of players than I had been, but also I feel like I've lost some mechanism in my mind that made me figure out offensive manoeuvres. I'm stuck on defence--I have always been a defensive player, and it always took some concentration to shift gears, but it's been ridiculous lately. The moment I was a little ahead in the game I won a couple nights ago, I had a definite feeling of, "Oh, shit, what do I do now?"

Afterwards, my plan was to go to the Japanese market and write the next Venia's Travels script in the nearby Japanese restaurant. Only, when I got there, I realised I'd forgotten to bring my phone with me. It drives me nuts not having my phone, so I just bought some Japanese sweet potatoes and came back. There were some daikons there I considered getting, but I don't know how to prepare them. I wonder if they can be baked like potatoes--they're actually enormous, white radishes.



Last night I watched Bonnie and Clyde. It's a movie with flaws, but mostly it's a good rumination on the frailty of human society on top of the true nature of the physical world. There's not a single character in the movie who doesn't seem innocent--not Clyde Barrow, who murders people in the course of his bank robberies--he sees it as a natural part of his role. Not the police, who take pictures of one another in a bank the Barrow Gang has just robbed--clearly star struck, and as awed by the legend of Bonnie and Clyde they help create for the papers as bystanders and Bonnie and Clyde themselves. The way the robbers laugh in excitement as they flee police and the generally upbeat quality of the banjo on the soundtrack gives one the impression this is all a game children are playing with deadly toys--guns and cars.

One of the Barrow Gang, Banche Barrow, who was still alive when the movie was released, complained, "That movie made me look like a screaming horse's ass." I don't blame her for being unhappy. I read this after watching the movie--I'd been on the fence about her character, who's seen running from gunfire with arms flailing and emitting a comical, persistent scream. A lot of things about the movie come off as slightly campier than I'd have liked, but I generally found Bonnie and Clyde's relationship interesting enough to overcome it. I really wish Faye Dunaway had looked more period appropriate, though. You can't look at her without seeing 1967.



I'd have rather liked something closer to the real Bonnie's style;

Pawns to the Slaughter

I really am trying to keep an open mind about Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. I like some of the stark red and white imagery around the Queen of Hearts, I like the idea of Christopher Lee voicing the Jabberwock. It could very well be a good movie, I totally concede that. I just wish there wasn't one thing after another coming out to give me misgivings. Last night I watched Avril Lavigne's new music video for her song on the film's soundtrack, and it is breathtakingly bad;



It's true, I've never liked Avril Lavigne, I've seen her as a consummate poseur ever since I heard her, at an awards ceremony, clumsily pronounce David Bowie's name as "David . . . Bau-ie?" I was surprised when my sister told me that some friends of hers find Lavigne's music inspiring and cathartic. But if I'd heard she was universally considered the bottom of the barrel, this video would still fall below my expectations. It is the worst thing I've ever seen. It's worse than a pile of dog shit. Well, I guess I can't say that exactly since Lavigne is kind of hot. But the unbelievable cynicism of the song's construction--vaguely Alice related verses about falling down a rabbit hole, reflecting the sort of cursory knowledge of someone I suspect has never read the books, with a cheap, loud, monotone chorus about being a survivor and fighting for yourself or something, part of which sounds lifted from The Decemberists' "The Bagman's Gambit". And the fact that there's more than one closeup on her hands clearly demonstrating that she can't actually play piano, or if she can, it's only an extremely rough version of "Chopsticks". It looks like a bad actor on the Enterprise bridge set trying to look like she's operating a console. I wouldn't blame Fiona Apple if she threw a brick at her television when she saw this video.

Better, of course, is Robert Smith's cover of "Very Good Advice", though I admit I found it a little disappointing;



I found myself wishing it'd been done by late 80s era Cure--this is much too playful. The original version from the 1951 Disney film is far more effective.

But I do find myself kind of liking a version of "The Lobster Quadrille" by a band named Franz Ferdinand.

After winning a game of chess in Second Life last night against someone who didn't speak any English, I played the chess levels in American McGee's Alice. They contain some of my favourite atmospheres in the game;



Lousy dialogue, though.

Last night's tweets;

Sleeping's the best way to invite visits.
Some instead watch TV sleep they don't try.
Fatigue gets you the Red Queen's dry biscuits.
You hear Gilbert Gottfried laugh when you die.

Tim told me last night about a new anime DVD called Sleeping with Hinako. It's essentially forty eight minutes of an anime girl just sleeping, in high def, with a few fanservice shots. Like a lot of bad anime products these days, I find I feel no real joy in mocking it because its existence implies something so unspeakably sad about the people buying it.

Ice and Violence

I watched the women's hockey Olympic competition while I was eating lunch yesterday, though I missed the Canadian team's notorious booze and cigar celebration on the ice. I find it very funny people are outraged by it--it just smacks of a fundamentally phoney morality. I was vaguely turned on by the violent women shoving each other on the ice, and how obviously insincere the post game handshakes were. The tension in the Canadian team's shoulders seemed to eloquently say, "Suck it, bitches." I do wish they could play in more revealing outfits, though.

I've just gotten back from visiting my friend Marty who told me about his recent vacation to Antarctica. He described stopping in a small settlement in the Andes before crossing the Drake Sea--there were six foot waves that rocked the ship he was on in every direction and then totally, eerily calm water. The landscape he saw on the Antarctic peninsula more closely resembled the Himalayas than he'd expected, mountains with ice hanging off. There were thousands of penguins unused to humans, some of whom would walk up and peck his shoes.

There was one place that had buildings, the only place he said he found spooky, an almost abandoned British base that reminded him of the structures in John Carpenter's The Thing. He met a fascinating old British man who told him about dogs in Antarctica--the imported sled dogs who used to be the primary means of travel on the continent. At some point it was decided that dogs shouldn't be kept in Antarctica, so the man Marty met had taken most of the dogs and shot them in their heads. "It sounds very harsh," Marty said to me, "But when you're there, it sounds very natural--of course you kill the dogs, anyone would!" These dogs would live most of their lives roaming outdoors and feeding off the seal meat humans would bring them at intervals. Those few dogs who were transported out of Antarctica failed to breed and most died within a few years of leaving Antarctica.

Marty told me he thought the leopard seals he saw were among the creepiest creatures he ever saw--he found their long, reptilian faces off-putting. As he was leaving Antarctica, he saw a school of penguins, arcing out of the water, somewhat like dolphins, and then suddenly a leopard seal intercepted one, vigorously shaking it from side to side as blood sprayed up into the air, "like a [George] Romero movie." The seal shook it so hard and so quickly that the penguin was turned completely inside out.

I went to YouTube hoping someone had video of something like this, but most of the videos seem to be very penguin-centric--I guess to cash in on penguins being recently in vogue. I was amazed at how obnoxious National Geographic's (or "NatGeo") videos are--filled with hyperactive editing and random bits of sped up footage. The BBC clips are a lot better, actually being in widescreen and lacking the busy quality of the NatGeo shit. But my favourite video actually contained little more than stills;



Last night's tweets;

Thursday's flowers grow sharp with precision.
Haphazard stars fall in cereal milk.
Morning hunger soon makes your decision.
Liquid funds in cloud banks are hard to bilk.

Remember, new Venia's Travels to-day.

Venia's Sensible Hat

The new Venia's Travels is online. I'm so glad to be able to say that this early in the evening, for once.

Shells for Rain

Twitter Sonnet #115

Police don't know what fake tomatoes mean.
Only blurry background pansies make sense.
Khan trembles at the cry of Howard Dean.
Buy bags of big captain feed for tuppence.
Great armies grow from watered petty cash.
Expectant eyes watch from wet produce bins.
Melted Don Juan wears a leader's grey sash.
Trajectories are ruined by leaf fins.
Sweeping women watch you eat nude onion.
Vegetable tears taste like a squished beetle.
Bug boss chooses his least favourite minion.
Exoskeletons contain soft mettle.
Some soft mollusc bodies slime the concrete.
While large living space ships are less discreet.

I had a very vivid dream last night about a strange, catastrophic storm of some kind happening here. I remember trying to walk to my parents' house and struggling not to get swept away by the wind. The thick, grey clouds had formed a central, hourglass core with electricity arcing from it to the other clouds--it very much reminded me of the second Death Star core.

It did rain last night, though I didn't notice until it was over and I went outside to take out the trash out and found wet asphalt and concrete. I also saw about a million snails, so I grabbed my flashlight and camera and took some footage;



The music is Kroke performing a strings riff in the Romanian doina style before breaking into "Hava Nagila". It occurred to me after editing the video that some people might consider it antisemitic somehow to juxtapose snails and "Hava Nagila". Well, fuck 'em. I just happen to like snails and "Hava Nagila".

I find it fascinating how intelligent the snails seem in the video. When I was filming, I couldn't quite figure out if they liked the light or hated it--some of them immediately turned away, and some of them started moving towards it. But they were really everywhere, and I'm amazed I only stepped on one when I took the trash cans down to the street--he ended up surviving, and you can actually see him in the video. He's the third or fourth snail with a noticeably messed up shell. I hope he regenerated okay.

Noticing Full Moons

Last night's tweets;

Great armies grow from watered petty cash.
Expectant eyes watch from wet produce bins.
Melted Don Juan wears a leader's grey sash.
Trajectories are ruined by leaf fins.

I finished colouring thirty minutes earlier than normal last night. I suddenly found myself with a little time for totally guilt free goofing off--it was exciting. Maybe too exciting. I played about an hour of American McGee's Alice and then I couldn't get to sleep. And the whole time I played Alice I was just trying to figure out how to get past the first hub area--where it looks like you get to choose the next level you go to, but actually every portal but one is impassable.

I also read some more War and Peace. I've been actually reading for about an hour every night and my Kindle informs me that in one week I've managed to read ten percent of the book. I'm almost halfway through! Reader Setsuled is back! Haha! I should've known cutting out some television would just lead me to find another way of slacking off. Well, I guess it's not slacking off if I'm actually on schedule.

With breakfast to-day, I watched the seventh episode of Dance in the Vampire Bund, which was from last week but I'd read someone say it was a recap episode--a lot of anime series have annoying recap episodes that are basically montages of clips from previous episodes, made even more annoying by the fact that they often include one or two bits of new story. Some of the best anime series have had recap episodes--Neon Genesis Evangelion, Revolutionary Girl Utena . . . but so far, I hadn't seen one in an Akiyuki Shinbo series. I still haven't, because as I discovered to-day, the commenter was wrong and not only was seven a new episode, it was rather pivotal episode. I guess one shouldn't believe everything one randomly reads on the internet.

The episode felt vaguely grindhouse, and I sort of wanted to watch Sex and Fury afterwards. I guess that's what I took from the little girl vampire transforming into a naked, glowing orange adult woman to fight her werewolf lover in a dark church lit by shattering stain glass windows. There was a sadly evident low budget in the episode--there were lots of extreme close-ups and blackouts and even a frankly live action sequence of burning bibles. I wonder if this episode's going to be drastically different in the DVD version. The television versions of a lot of anime series these days often seem to be no more than long previews for the DVD release.

This is the first time we're given a real good look at Vampire Bund's werewolf design. I like it--it looks like a tall, muscular naked man with a wolf head, very berserker. It's so rare werewolf designs come off nowadays. Being Human's design seemed kind of cool until we got a good look and it started looking like a big, badly controlled puppet. I suppose I ought to check out the new Benicio Del Toro movie.

There was a show in the 80s called Werewolf that I used to love as a kid. Looking at clips of it on YouTube now, I find it doesn't quite hold up, mainly for small scale feeling television direction. The snarling werewolf face kind of works as a surprise for bigness of expression, though I think it would grow old quick. I do like the idea of rods used for the arms, but the whole thing looks like it would ultimately be too unwieldy and stiff.

Cgi werewolves seem to lack the basic rawness one would want, though I think a cgi werewolf made by people who don't overestimate the technology might work pretty well.

Combustible Fleshy Things

I think I hit the peak of my pessimism about the U.S. government about five years ago. Since then, the outrage I once felt has dimmed to a sort of background given so that now when I read an article about how the Democrats want to phase out armed contractors, I actually found myself weirdly excited by remembering that one of the signs of decline for the Byzantine Empire was a gradually increasing reliance on mercenaries. I should be saddened by the fall of civilisation, but for the moment I'm just weirdly comforted that human societies haven't changed all that much.

I forgot to poke holes in a potato I microwaved last night, but it didn't explode. Which was a little disappointing, but I probably ought to be grateful there was no time consuming clean up operation.

I've been eating a potato every night with dinner lately--I just half an hour ago spent some quality time going through potatoes at the grocery store to find five without tiny green sprouts in evidence. Most of them had the weird little dots in their eyes, which suggests to me the ones I did get are probably just hours away from getting them, too. But I couldn't help it--I need to eat a potato to-night.

Potatoes are creepy. Not as creepy as mandrake or ginger, I guess, but any of those curvy tubers that look like distended bits of flesh that you know have parts that are always quietly growing are a little eerie. But I'm compelled to swallow them.

I'm completely done with the first five pages of the next chapter, and the sixth page only wants colouring. Looks like I might be able to avoid another sixteen hour marathon on Thursday. I may even watch television while I eat dinner--last time I did that, I watched "Durka Returns", an episode of Farscape, and next I may just watch the episode after it. It has been a couple years since I watched Farscape all the way through, after all. It's hard for new series to stand up to something like Farscape--it's nice seeing something new, but nothing seems to match Farscape just for character interaction. Though the Goodfellas commentary made me kind of want to give The Sopranos a try.

Last night's tweets;

Police don't know what fake tomatoes mean.
Only blurry background pansies make sense.
Khan trembles at the cry of Howard Dean.
Buy bags of big captain feed for tuppence.

Duplicated Record Cultures

Twitter Sonnet #114

Grey cats do not care about peppermint.
Animal minds push back the time for booze.
Ignore cans in fallout shelters you rent.
Scrambled eggs accumulate in drive-throughs.
A tired avocado stretches out.
When liquefied, an agent buries it.
Oblivion's in many holes en route.
So it's better to follow the rabbit.
Stories must be told to illiterates.
Tall bird plots tweet to air by the dozen.
So broken are schemes of Confederates.
Blue jeans can only be worn if chosen.
Frightened rodents guard remnants of burnt books.
You shouldn't judge twin girl scouts by their looks.

I remember two dreams from last night. The first was kind of frightening--I was staying in a large, very old, dusty house with T.E. Lawrence as played by Peter O'Toole. He seemed very vexed by something, but it was long after sunset and he was trying to sleep on a couch. I was sitting on the floor, looking at where I knew there was a chair across the room. I knew someone was sitting in the chair and I was very disturbed not knowing who it was. Hands reached out to me where I remained sitting crossed legged and I held them a moment. Then I began feeling the person's face, increasingly anxious about the person's identity. I felt smooth skin on a chin and full, smiling lips. My best guess was it was a young Elizabeth Taylor. I think this dream was influenced by the portion of War and Peace I read before I went to bed where the Rostov girls were trying to receive supernatural visions by looking into mirrors facing each other and a candle.

In the second dream, I was following a large, dark blue elephant ridden by Kevin Murphy of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Rifftrax. The elephant's two front legs were white and its right back leg was a lighter shade of blue than the bulk of it. Murphy was riding towards a large, white medieval city somewhat resembling Minas Tirith. A movie was being shown in the centre of the city, and the city walls and buildings had been constructed in such a way as to cause Murphy's voice to echo throughout the city as he riffed on the film. Townspeople could contribute riffs by touching a bag Murphy had attached to his saddle, which somehow funnelled a voice from below to the elevation where it could take advantage of the special acoustics. There'd been some bad, abrasive riffs from the peasants lately, so Murphy had moved the bag to the other side of the saddle, where apparently only the smarter and more considerate peasants could find it.

While inking and colouring yesterday, I listened to the cast and crew commentary on Goodfellas. I found Martin Scorsese's discussion of Henry Hill's voice interesting--Scorsese found the rhythm of Hill's storytelling to be the backbone of the movie, and both he and Nicolas Pileggi talked about a tradition of roaming storytellers in southern Italy, who would go to people's houses with the express purpose of telling stories, which entertained a large number of illiterate people before there was radio. Scorsese seemed to feel this practice had survived in tough kids and wise guys who'd tell stories in the neighbourhoods where he and Hill grew up.

I was also interested in Lorraine Bracco talking about watching the movie again that morning and finding Liotta as Hill very attractive--"very sexy" and she mentioned "falling in love with him again." I sort of wondered if simply watching video of yourself apparently loving someone might be a form of hypnosis.

The Voyager to Hell is Laden with Disappointment

Last night's tweets;

A tired avocado stretches out.
When liquefied, an agent buries it.
Oblivion's in many holes en route.
So it's better to follow the rabbit.

I'm tried already to-day after a lot of pencilling. I got totally caught up last night in spite of jury duty early in the week, and for this chapter and probably a lot more after it, I definitely need to not get behind. I've given up trying to watch any television show with dinner--now I need that time for colouring.

With breakfast a few days ago, I watched "Barge of the Dead", an episode of Star Trek: Voyager written by Bryan Fuller and Ronald D. Moore. I hadn't seen it before--I'd stopped watching Voyager at some point in the fourth or fifth season. I was given to notice again Voyager is one of the weakest Star Trek series, second only to Enterprise, but it has by far the best theme segment--an original composition by Jerry Goldsmith, instead of the recycled Star Trek The Motion Picture theme for Next Generation, and it has the Voyager flying through a lot of space chachkis like nebulae, ice rings, and solar flares of the sort that were only later conspicuously tacked on to Deep Space Nine's awkward revised theme segment.

But Voyager suffered from a kind of odd carelessness, as was evident in "Barge of the Dead" where I kept finding my self asking, "Wait--why are they doing that?" Like, "How did B'Elanna Torres and Harry Kim stay up 'til 3am scanning a piece of metal?" "Why is Neelix up at 3am?" "Why wasn't Torres beamed out of her crashing shuttle?" and so on. But the episode had, for around 80% of its runtime, an actually pretty exciting story about B'Elanna dying and ending up on a barge on its way to Klingon hell. This story's pretty thoroughly ruined, though, by B'Elanna managing to get back there with a simulated death--because the afterlife wouldn't know the difference, right?--and then by the fact that it all ends up being a hallucination. I don't mind stories about people's dreams, but in this case, an actual encounter with Klingon hell would've been a lot cooler, since, as usual for Star Trek dream stuff, it's filled with ham-handed symbols and the dreamer interpreting them to win the episode.

I did go to Tim's last night and played some Oblivion. A while ago, Tim told me about an upcoming video game I'm extremely excited about; Fallout: New Vegas, the latest in the Fallout series. This one's to be published by Bethesda but developed by Obsidian, a company comprised of members of the team who made the first two Fallout games. Which means this game could be the best of two worlds--Bethesda's beautiful engine with the superior writing and character systems of the first two games. Now I really want to upgrade my computer.

Different Ways of Eating

Last night's tweets;

Grey cats do not care about peppermint.
Animal minds push back the time for booze.
Ignore cans in fallout shelters you rent.
Scrambled eggs accumulate in drive-throughs.

I just heard one of the funniest fucking things I've heard in months. You may have heard about a recent Playboy interview with John Mayer where he said, "Someone asked me the other day, 'What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?' And by the way, it's sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood pass if you really have a hood pass? But I said, 'I can't really have a hood pass. I've never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, "We're full. "'"

Of course, only an asshole would look at this statement and say, "Clearly, this guy's a racist." A reasonable person looks at most of what Mayer ever says and thinks, "Clearly, this guy's a self-absorbed douchebag." The statement barely makes any sense. But that was weeks ago, and Mayer apologised in a series of really hilarious, widely mocked, whiney tweets. I thought James Urbaniak's tweets mocking them were among the best. But that was all before I heard Mayer apologise onstage and saw that nothing could be funnier than raw Mayer;



It gets pretty boring halfway through, but fuck, wow. The guy starts crying. This isn't an I'm Sorry if I Offended Anyone. This is a I'm Sorry as Hell That Not Everyone In the World Wants to Lick My Anus.

This has been a great couple weeks for questionable sensitivity. I haven't even mentioned Sarah Palin--I guess most people have heard about her outrage over Family Guy mocking people with Down Syndrome. Seth MacFarlane talks about it in this clip from Bill Maher's show--the guy who used to have a show called Politically Incorrect back in the civil war era or some shit. Notice how MacFarlane doesn't start crying.

I don't have much to say about yesterday. I broke with my routine of taking Fridays off and spent a lot of yesterday inking and colouring, but I did go to Tim's and played some Oblivion. After dinner, I watched about forty minutes of a BBC production of Hamlet starring Derek Jacobi and Patrick Stewart (as Claudius). Great performances all around so far--I'd been looking forward to watching this since I saw this clip on YouTube. Jacobi really puts a lot of work into the performance. I find him a little over the top at times, but he comes off as very earnest. This could be the best production of Hamlet I've seen.

I also read more of War and Peace--the past two nights reading it has been to read Tolstoy's rather exciting and charming description of the Rostovs hunting a wolf, a fox, and a hare, ending with a picturesque evening in the home of small village's lord. There's such affection in the narrative for the atmosphere--it's easy to see Tolstoy's idea at this point was to give us a taste of the Russia everyone's been fighting and talking about at some remove in the earlier portions of the book. He pulls it off beautifully. This is the best tray of hors d'oervres I've ever heard of;

On the tray were various liqueurs, herb brandy, mushrooms, rye cakes made with buttermilk, honey in the comb, both still and sparkling mead, apples, raw and roasted nuts, and honey and nut confections.

Assimilating Monsters

Twitter Sonnet #113

Sickly centipede sergeants are stubborn.
Their glowing bellies burn with cinnamon.
Pixie psychopaths move so fast they burn.
To touch, wrap hands in layers of Charmin.
Bread insulates sandwiches from the void.
You can't have fewer forms of leaves, just more.
New haircuts shouldn't make you paranoid.
Telepathy's from a salon's back door.
World peace is spilt water on the sidewalk.
Step on a trench to break the Death Star's back.
The only clean bathroom's up a beanstalk.
Whiskey's all anyone can really lack.
The red pawns are frozen, sculpted acid.
Fake aliens make everyone rabid.

I've still been thinking about the Evelyn Evelyn controversy, specifically the issue of a work of art taken by the audience as a presentation of facts. The closest thing I can think of to Amanda Palmer's account of the sometimes horrific lives of Evelyn Evelyn being taken as truth without the artist's intention that it should be would be Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast. What Palmer did was actually far less transgressive, as in the case of the War of the Worlds broadcast, people might have lost money and peace of mind in an attempt to protect themselves and loved ones from the threat of a Martian attack. Even so, one can't help but marvel at a brief period in time where many people were genuinely convinced by an artist that hostile aliens had come to earth. That fact is itself a valuable work of art, one that invites discussion about the nature of the human mind and the relationship of art to it.

And then there are works of fiction intentionally presented as fact, I'm thinking mainly of Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Coen Brothers' Fargo. In both cases, the deception was committed with the intention of adding weight to the events of each story, particularly important in the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, which presents a mystery that's never solved. People going in knowing that it's a work of fiction are more likely to simply regard it as an unfinished story, rather than to contemplate it as a record of the unanswerable questions life can present.

The outrage over Evelyn Evelyn comes from a fundamental belief that stories are more important if they're true than if they're not. Somehow, performance artist Amanda Palmer has accumulated a lot of fans who see art as patently a form of escapism. People who are along for any ride so long as they feel safe, who are willing to discuss issues of gender, disability, and alienation so long as its from a theoretical distance. These are people who are desperately afraid of feeling at all violated and Amanda Palmer, whether she's aware of it or not, is an instinctive violator. It's one of the great things about her. It's necessary sometimes to break audiences out of their aloof, academic eggs and remind them that bodies of work aren't there so you can feel smug and on top of dangerous psychological issues--it's about feeling things, about being stripped naked. If you don't think that's necessary, then you mustn't know anyone with personalities preventing them from ever discussing certain issues or who are trapped by half thoughts they never dared to finish thinking and so are instead tortured by a million different, imagined possibilities.

Playing Operation with the World

My tweets from last night;

Bread insulates sandwiches from the void.
You can't have fewer forms of leaves, just more.
New haircuts shouldn't make you paranoid.
Telepathy's from a salon's back door.

I've been pencilling all day, so I've only just now gotten more or less up to speed on the Evelyn Evelyn Internet clusterfuck Amanda Palmer seems to have gotten herself caught up in. I first heard of the project yesterday, I think, when Palmer retweeted something the album artist, Cynthia von Buhler, said and I decided to follow the artist's twitter. Her blog has a fascinating video of a two faced cat and a photo of Evelyn Evelyn themselves that looks remarkably like a pair of images of Amanda Palmer, though I didn't notice at the time. I wasn't then or now bothered by a concept album about the rough life of some conjoined twins.

Amanda Palmer has a nice digest of and response to the uproar in this blog entry, which is in response to another of her blog entries that rather innocently presented Evelyn Evelyn as persons who may or may not be real but who have a definite aesthetic in any case. Personally, I'd have assumed they were real people if I'd read that entry before anything else, which may mean I'm gullible, or possibly that I just wasn't paying close attention, which is often the case with my internet roamings, even regarding people and things I care about.

Anyway, I wouldn't have expected a backlash. I'm not sure if people are angrier about being duped or about the portrayal of conjoined twins as socially awkward or the presentation of Evelyn Evelyn's sexual abuse as apparent fact. That last bit reminds me of how Howard Stern and his people were recently planning on prank calling Oprah Winfrey's radio show with stories about how they were molested as children. I wondered if I should look at this as Amanda Palmer pranking her audience, sort of Andy Kaufman style, but I doubt Amanda Palmer would see it that way.

I kind of did see this coming, though. This thing with the internet community that Palmer and Gaiman are trying to do, to sort of become everyone's friends, something Palmer seems to have pursued especially aggressively, was kind of bound to hit a hitch like this when so much of Palmer's art is intended to strike nerves. I'm contemplating a reality where Marilyn Manson sat down with a community with concerns about offending anyone with his Smells Like Children album.

Though, of course, this whole thing actually reminds me more of The Cure's "Siamese Twins";



Which is a song about Siamese twins in a wretched existence, which, according to this blogger's reasoning, would seem, "designed to keep people like me — real people with disabilities — out; this is not a new thing, considering the attitudes that folks in our culture hold about people with disabilities and their acceptable social roles."

The blogger also says; "Representing Evelyn Evelyn as variously inspiring, freakish, weird and a 'wonder' just reinforces existing stereotypes about PWDs."

You know, those happen to all be facts. This isn't like the myth of the happy black slave, content with his lot. Conjoined twins are weird and wonderful. Most people aren't joined by flesh to other people. Some people are born categorically weird--it happens, and no propaganda campaign is going to change that.

Initially, my feeling was that it was a mistake for Palmer to even address the outcry, because it's not likely to have any effect on most of the aggrieved. But this bit from Palmer's blog changed my mind;

this is something i’ve had to learn to live with.

to get clear, i always have to stop, dig deep within myself and ask:
were my intentions good? could i really stand behind them? was anybody really harmed?
if i’ve actually harmed someone (and the harm isn’t just a drama in their heads), have i owned my responsibility?

when i quiet myself down and find the answer within myself, that’s the most important one.
it speaks louder than the voices outside my head and the anonymous voices on the internet.

it is to this voice you must listen, or you’re FUCKED.

i know a lot of younger people read this blog and i have constant contact with teenagers who are always asking me:
“how do i get brave?”

a lot of that answer lies in situations like these.
when you are forced to sit down, reckon with a situation, listen to people screaming that they hate you, take stock of what you’ve done, look everyone in the eye, tell them what your intentions are, and know that they will either hear and understand you or they will walk away.

and then your job is to not run after them.
your job is to stay calm. your job is continue on with your work.
and the hardest thing, sometimes, is to continue on with your work in a spirit of love, without letting other people’s hate and anger getting the best of you, and turning you into bitter, angry and jaded fuck.

it’s so easy to be afraid. to do nothing. to not make your art, to not follow your calling, your passion, your impulses, to not take any risks for fear of people cutting you down and misunderstanding you.
most people are CONTROLLED by fear, because they’re convinced they’ll do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, write the wrong thing, sing the wrong thing.
those fears are founded. you can see that, here, now.
shit happens, you can upset people.

and you need to do your work anyway, because the world needs you to.

I can see a lot of people rolling their eyes at the implied message, "The world needs Amanda Palmer!" from Amanda Palmer herself, but I think what she means is that the world needs artists to be artists. This, in my opinion, means that difficult and strange straddling of Not Giving a Fuck and Always Giving a Fuck. Not unlike, I'd imagine, a pair of Siamese twins.

Sense and Solubility

Last night's tweets;

Sickly centipede sergeants are stubborn.
Their glowing bellies burn with cinnamon.
Pixie psychopaths move so fast they burn.
To touch, wrap hands in layers of Charmin.



That's from the tree just in front of the house yesterday.

I actually got up at 11:30am to-day after sleeping nine and a half hours uninterrupted. Sometimes that the reward for not having slept the previous night and it is sweet. I've felt terrific to-day--I've already pencilled and inked a page and I've gone grocery shopping. Energy, I have it.

Last night seemed perfect for video games, so I played some American McGee's Alice for a while, spending most of the time defeating the giant centipede boss. I'd forgotten how hard that motherfucker is. Alice is deceptively easy when you start--it's just a few card guards you can kill with a couple hits who always drop more life and mana than you need. Then, when you shrink, things start to get more challenging rather abruptly, mainly for the beetles who drop acorn bombs on you and the absolutely impossible to ride leaf rafts over piranha infested water--the scale is consistently inconsistent, with ants twice the size of the beetles and fish half the size of the beetles, not to mention the Mock Turtle and the Duchess, who are both just slightly taller than the ants. At least the game treats this as a dream world--thanks, Tim Burton, for making it a magic underground kingdom. I hope you found more ways to flatten the story.

I saw the novelisation of the new Alice in Wonderland movie at Barnes and Noble the other day, pretty much confirming the new movie's going to bear little resemblance to the Alice books. Again, I don't mind pastiches, but did the movie have to be called Alice in Wonderland, then? This is another example of the brain dead logic that gave us recent film titles like Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek. Both decent movies, but neither one comes close to encapsulating its respective franchise as the title suggests.

Anyway, that centipede's ridiculous. I'd completely forgotten what I was supposed to do, so I spent a lot of time running around and getting his baby centipedes on me, chewing my face off or something. It took me a long time just to figure out to shoot the bastards with the playing cards--I almost always have the Vorpal Blade equipped, partly because Alice running around with a big knife is an endlessly fun image, and partly because I like how precise the aim is when you throw it. It was ages before I remembered you have to hit the centipede boss in the glowing chink in his armour whenever he rears up. Which he hardly ever does. I tried a bunch of alternate strategies--the ice wand, putting down the exploding jack in the boxes, but no, he had to bare it himself. I ended up finishing up with the croquet mallet because I stopped caring about my life metre, I was so annoyed.

I also watched the sixth episode of Being Human's second series last night. I can tell the writers have completely no idea what they're doing with Mitchell. We went from Mitchell clumsily taking over the vampires, to vampire AA meetings and all the vampires giving up blood, to Mitchell implying to Lucy that he's the only one who's managed to give up blood, to the writers hitting the reset button with explosives. Okay, guys, keep your stories straight this time. And bring back The Vampire Daisy!

One thing I'd really like to see is one or two plots where Mitchell, George, and Annie do something together. They do have good chemistry, but practically every episode is three separate stories, one for each character, that aren't related to each other at all. I sort of wonder if this is because the actors are too expensive all together to keep for the amount of time it takes to film an episode.

I may need to give up on Dead Like Me after having read on its Wikipedia entry, "Bryan Fuller left early in the first season due to conflicts with MGM Television, including disagreement over major script and storyline cuts considered important to the main theme. He stated that the 'lack of professionalism... made it really difficult... it was like being at war... they were constantly trying to strong arm me. It was the worst experience of my life.' According to Fuller, Showtime canceled the show due to 'a loss of quality and a sense the problems would continue.'"

Sounds like sticking with that show would be too painful an experience. On Sunday morning, I watched "The Darkness and the Light", a Deep Space Nine episode written by Ronald D. Moore and Bryan Fuller. Often when I revisit Deep Space Nine I'm struck by the timeliness of the issues it deals with, being the story of a foreign government's presence in a recently liberated society and helping them to put together their own government, learning how much participation is appropriate. This particular episode deals with revenge killings of Major Kira's friends for their participation in a bomb explosion that killed civilians during the Cardassian occupation. It's a pretty good episode, particularly for season 5 Deep Space Nine (season 2's my favourite). I especially liked Kira's line at the end, after having confronted the man who'd been killing her friends; "Sometimes innocents are just an excuse for the guilty."

They Couldn't Hold Me

Twitter Sonnet #112

Private beauty's stretched to public foulness.
Sweet smelling flowers planted in ground Pez.
Consumer oxen yoked by their own mass.
Sugar mist fills complex candy saunas.
Peppermint cleans living walls to the bone.
A grey brothel has a smiling pope bust.
Ghost sheets don't ever hold people alone.
Truths of old records are matters of trust.
Skipping needles are falling fast asleep.
Cheese and limes are tucked in the burrito.
Sushi settles into a longer keep.
As bloody tears fall from the Dorito.
A perfect hat channelled lemon essence.
The occasion sells court for twenty cents.

Oh, fucking thank . . . everything the jury pool got let out before noon and I don't have to go back. It's over! And I only lost one night/day of sleep.

I went to bed at 10:30 last night and lay awake until 2:30am, at which point I put a slice of provolone on a microwaved croissant and ate it. Then I took some alka-seltzer and actually slept until 6:20. Could've been worse.

This was my first jury duty where I didn't have to go downtown, which I was actually initially disappointed by because I always considered the adventure of going downtown part of the meagre consolation for jury duty. But the courthouse nearer my current registered address turned out to have a much better setup for the jury pool that allowed us to roam from the lounge, to the courtyard, to the cafeteria. I spent most of my time in the cafeteria--I'd printed out the new Venia's Travels script and brought it with me along with some newsprint on which I was able to do the rough versions of the new pages to figure out panel layouts and character placement. That killed about two hours, the rest of the time I spent reading a collection of Jaime Hernandez comics and War and Peace, which surprisingly held my attention through the sleep deprivation haze.

The cafeteria had booths with red, faux leather upholstery and pleasantly reminded me of the shopping malls in David Cronenberg's Rabid and Scanners. The cafeteria probably looked the same when those movies were new.

I went to the actual mall afterwards because I had a weird craving for lemonade. I can't remember ever craving lemonade.

Anyway, I'd better start drawing the new chapter to-morrow. I think I'm only going to be good for real mindless things the rest of the day.

The Assertion of Meaning

Last night's tweets;

Peppermint cleans living walls to the bone.
A grey brothel has a smiling pope bust.
Ghost sheets don't ever hold people alone.
Truths of old records are matters of trust.

My head is killing me. It's been killing me since last night. I'm really tired, too, and I'm hoping I can use this to my advantage when I go to bed in a couple hours--I have to be up at 6am to go to jury duty. I was planning on going to-day, but I'd forgotten to-day's President's Day. So I'm going to have to somehow draw, ink, and colour the first page of the new chapter on massive sleep deprivation. To-morrow should be fun.

I was disappointed to learn yesterday through Neil Gaiman's blog of a man being sentenced to six months in jail for owning "obscene" comics. Gaiman linked to an old entry of his in which he defends his position of defending free "icky" speech as part of a response to someone questioning why one should. Gaiman does a great job of describing the grey areas between art and pornography and also paints a useful picture of the people who are unfairly victimised by anti-obscenity laws and rulings. But Gaiman kind of failed to respond to the questioner's main argument, which was that preventing just one child from being abused would be worth some somewhat draconian censorship laws.

There are a couple ways I'd respond to this. One could say that by this logic there shouldn't be air travel, since preventing air travel might be worthwhile in order to prevent the small percentage of the time in which deadly, horrific plane crashes occur. And the counterargument might then be that air travel is necessary now for our society to function, whereas something like lolicon does not serve society in any way. All art is quite useless, as Oscar Wilde said in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, but Wilde also makes a point in that preface to say, "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty."

And he goes on to say there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. His central argument being that it is the corrupt reader who takes to heart corrupt meaning from art. The person Gaiman's responding to mentions "support communities" providing encouragement for people to indulge in deviant behaviour. Even if it were true that proliferation of lolicon were directly linked to an increase in child molestation, one might point out that Prohibition tends to make such problems worse. It might be helpful to contemplate how things might go if the United States government outlawed the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan--the members of these organisations would simply put together new groups, possibly with fuel added by the government oppression.

I haven't read any genuine lolicon manga--my experience with the concept has been limited to the anime series Dance in the Vampire Bund and Hayate no Gotoku, and in both cases I've found in evidence a rule of fiction that's almost invariably true--fictional children are quite different from real children, particularly in adult works where they are usually stand-ins for parts of the adult psyche, a sort of role playing. Neon Genesis Evangelion, widely considered the greatest anime series of all time, is about fourteen year-old kids who are often portrayed in deliberately titillating ways but who are also used to address and explore psychological issues of dependence and identity. I mean, there's a reason I'm often charmed by fictional children while I'm usually annoyed by real children. It's something like this;

FICTIONAL CHILD: "I don't know where I am. I find my fixation on this concept or person is destructive to my concept of self and brings to mind uncomfortable aspects of my relationship with my parents. I'd prefer to just play my cello all day, if it's all right with you."

REAL CHILD: "Can you buy me this? Faggot! I like turtles."

I'm not attracted to kids, but I do think Dance in the Vampire Bund's theme is kind of cool;



And that's a mainstream anime series. The Handley case suggest to me a road to some absurd precedents being set in western law to prohibit Japanese imports.

"Here's to Love"

Happy Valentines' Day, everyone. I've been chopping up cherries for my oatmeal lately and I realised the pits look like rat hearts;



I watched Mullholland Drive last night. I think it'd been at least five years since I last saw it but I could barely believe it's a ten year old film. It felt oddly like I was revisiting a real me I've been taking a break from for the past couple years, which I guess is appropriate. Like the first few years of the 00s were my real life, and now is something else I'm doing. It's not quite a positive or a negative feeling, except I found myself missing again how much time I used to have for books and movies.

Of course, I was delighted again by all the references to Vertigo, another of my favourite films about self perception. I love that Naomi Watts, like Kim Novak before her, is a blond in a grey suit;




Mullholland Drive kind of combines the James Stewart character with the Kim Novak character, as the idealised woman, the woman in the grey suit, is here Diane's fantasy where Madeleine is Scottie's, though I think Judy, "Madeleine"'s real identity, gets a lot out of it.

Of course, I was also thinking of Mullholland Drive being ranked as the best movie of the decade, not just on my list but on several others. I thought about how it reflected the decade, and I could see it sort of does--as Diane's fantasy of Betty reorganises the people and events of her life into something more palatable, something where she can have a more positive perception of herself, movies from The Dark Knight to 300 to Inglourious Basterds to Avatar are popular American fantasies perhaps because they represent the people as they'd like to have been rather than what they managed to be--strong, effective, unhesitant warriors who respected their own moral beliefs as they achieved victory. Instead of a people who bought into a fantasy presented by a smirking President Bush and achieving neither victory nor moral superiority in the first really self conscious steps towards environmental and societal ruin.

Believing we're good people even as we commit actions that hurt the very things that we claim to value in order to satisfy short term needs, which aren't trivial. One wants to see 9/11 answered for, one wants energy sources established to be reliable, and one wants to stay with a system that seems to have worked until now

I was thinking the great stories of the human mind can actually seem pretty small when plainly stated--Citizen Kane's about a man unable to love but who needs to be loved, Vertigo and Mulholland Drive are about creating something beautiful out of people who fail themselves very, very painfully. If these things remain as transmissions in space after we're gone, I wondered if an alien race finally deciphering them might say, "As the fundamental struggles of sentient species go, this one gets, hmm, a B-. It's okay."

Which is sort of why I consider the Club Silencio scene in Mullholland Drive one of the best and most eloquent scenes in movie history--the outpouring of emotion achieved by the woman singing, the raw feeling of a familiar song about crying sung in a language unfamiliar to the protagonist, is countered by the cold realisation, as the stern man at the beginning had said, that the song is just a recording. Betty/Diane's feelings are not valid according to her own heart. Feelings of grief over Camilla's abandonment of her aren't something Diane can feel justified in indulging in, because she sees herself as the person both who has been deemed unworthy by Camilla and as the person who's killed Camilla. It's like a person's heart laid totally bare to an alien audience who says, "Eh. It's nothing significant, really."



I went to the mall with Tim yesterday and I bought myself a five dollar glass chess set. I played against myself last night and felt curiously as though I lost when I was done. See, I played one side as "me" and the other as what I expected my opponent to do. Technically, I was making decisions for both sides. What this tells me is that my imagination works better in terms of what can go wrong rather than it does in terms of what I can do to get what I want. Maybe I should put an action figure at the other end of the board so I can have someone to confront next time.

Last night's tweets;

Private beauty's stretched to public foulness.
Sweet smelling flowers planted in ground Pez.
Consumer oxen yoked by their own mass.
Sugar mist fills complex candy saunas.

Where to Go and How Sauced to Get There

Twitter Sonnet #111

Inky alligators read about squids.
So odd porn magazines keep up business.
Sleepy, smart cheese stockbrokers open bids.
Like dogs before Tom will Jerry Mouse kiss.
Potatoes hide in the ectoplasm.
There are ten rooms but only one dinner.
Outside's a coyote cataclysm.
Rabbit population's getting thinner.
Tensions burn between three sewer raccoons.
Bunny bodyguard rings shield masked rodents.
Canine officers listen to spy moons.
Power is shifted by paws on pavements.
Costly control of day and night is dead.
Suns and moons a quarter from Servo's head.

After losing five games of chess in a row last night, I signed on to Second Life while I was eating breakfast to-day and won two and lost one. Apparently when I'm not sleepy and drinking gin, it makes a big difference. I may go to only playing chess when I can play it early in the day.

One of the games I won was due to a computer opponent crashing forfeiting when it was clear I was going to take its Queen with a pawn without even losing the pawn in the process. When the programme froze I put a short, straight black bob on Tou and started dancing a charleston to the 1920s jazz that was playing in the chess club at the time. When someone asked me what I was doing, I replied, "This is the dance of victory over computers." One of the advantages of playing chess at an S&M club was nobody thought it was strange seeing Tou dance while I played chess. At least it's easier to find players now.

On Bri's recommendation I watched the pilot episode of Dead Like Me. Or I should say, upon Bri reminding me by his recommendation that I'd meant for a while to watch this series, its creator, Bryan Fuller, being by far my favourite writer on Heroes. I really liked Dead Like Me's pilot--Mandy Patinkin's and Ellen Muth's performances responsible for a large percentage of the show's goodness. Muth in particular, playing the newly dead protagonist, George, very effectively runs with some great material, particularly early in the episode when she's just an eighteen year old girl meeting with a temp agency person. George is established as a smart young girl who doesn't know as much about life as she thinks she does without coming across as ridiculous, and the people she's talking to come off as ridiculous as she thinks they are without necessarily being two dimensional. George is actually much closer to Alice from the Alice in Wonderland books than most movie and television adaptations of those books make the character--a young, endearing green character coming into understated conflict with a world of nonsense. My only problem with the series so far is that death kind of lacks a punch--I wish the existence of heaven hadn't been established so early, but maybe it proves later to be less than certain.

Here's some brief footage of a raccoon I offended last night with some Gyorgy Ligeti music to lend it creepy significance;

Dogpaddling in Alphabet Soup

Last night's tweets;

Potatoes hide in the ectoplasm.
There are ten rooms but only one dinner.
Outside's a coyote cataclysm.
Rabbit population's getting thinner.

The coyotes were making a big racket outside last night but I couldn't spare a moment to go out and try to take pictures. I didn't even watch anything with breakfast or dinner yesterday, it was all colouring, colouring, colouring, from 1pm to 3am. I saw to-day there were an extraordinary number of, I guess I can't call them typos since I wrote them by hand, but mistakes anyway in the new chapter's dialogue which I've fixed to-day (the new chapter's online here).

It's probably because I'm usually listening to Howard Stern while inking--I'm not thinking of the dialogue I'm inking over. I've noticed I have an odd tendency to mix up letter order, as in this new chapter the word "going" was written "gonig". Fortunately, it's rather easy to fix this with Paint Shop Pro's magic wand tool.

So there's not much really to say about yesterday. I read War and Peace for a couple hours afterwards. The Kindle tells me I'm exactly 37% through and I've been reading this book, what, a year and a half? Meanwhile, I see Moira finished Anna Karenina in less than a month. I really miss being able to read so much, though it was probably one of the main reasons I did so poorly in school, constantly stealing class time to read the wrong books.

But these big, 19th century books are good companions to have over long periods. War and Peace has so many characters and the events of their lives are often told from an enthusiastic distance, so it sort of reads like a gossip magazine omnibus.

Venia and Stories

The new Venia's Travels is online. I didn't finish ridiculously late like last time, but I'd still like to've finished before 3am, for fuck's sake. What's wrong with me? I blame that week I took off when I was sick. My rhythm's all off.

The Perfect Facsimiles

Last night's tweets;

Inky alligators read about squids.
So odd porn magazines keep up business.
Sleepy, smart cheese stockbrokers open bids.
Like dogs before Tom will Jerry Mouse kiss.

Roger Ebert's posted information about the newly restored version of Metropolis streaming to-morrow. If there's a version with English subtitles I just might wake up early for this. I'm really excited in any case--over an hour of footage that hasn't been seen since the 1920s. Ebert thinks he can follow the story okay without translation, but I don't know. An hour of story is a pretty big game changer.

Yeah, I'm definitely not going to try getting jury duty out of the way to-morrow. Maybe Monday. But I realised how ridiculous it would be to do on Friday when I'm probably going to be up late Thursday finishing the new chapter of my comic. But, having finished pencil and ink yesterday, I've been colouring since I woke up to-day at 12:30 and I'm cautiously beginning to hope that I'll be able to finish this thing well before I need to go to sleep. It's not as complicated a chapter, though hopefully I'll have my shit together for 45, the broad strokes of which I've already got laid out in my head.

Not much to say about yesterday or to-day as I've pretty much just been working on my comic. Well, I took out the trash yesterday. Took out the trash and I'm on fire, as Amanda Palmer once said.

I watched the fifth episode of Being Human's second series and I see I'm going to have to wait until the sixth episode's available now. Maybe I ought to've been clearer when I was asking people to recommend shows to me that I need something with a whole lot of episodes already--I need to be able to put something on immediately rather than getting locked up trying to decide what to watch with dinner. I have a worse problem with breakfast, actually, since before coffee it takes me even longer to make decisions. I need to find another great, already completed anime series I've never seen before. I know I could just do it the old fashioned way and put up with whatever happens to be on television while I eat, but I'm much too spoiled now. Lousy programming actively makes me angry. My brain's too hungry and it doesn't eat astroturf.

Speaking of astroturf, or rather astroturfing I was disappointed to see Joe Quesada apologising for a recent issue of Captain America which sort of implied that tea baggers are racist. We're talking about a group that holds signs showing Obama with a Hitler moustache--tea baggers are the last group of people to whom one should apologise for smearing, justly or unjustly. The most important difference between tea baggers and old segregationist movements is that tea baggers are a total fucking joke.

Ghosts in the Service Industry

I dreamt last night I was going somewhere with my family when we stopped outside a small restaurant with black windows. I was told I needed to go inside while everyone else waited in the car and stay in there as long as it took to get presents.

I found the place staffed entirely by people I somehow knew would much rather the place was an S&M dungeon. I started talking to a pretty waitress with short, copper hair, trying and failing to politely articulate my needs. Finally, she interrupted me and asked, "Would you like me to go to the supermarket and buy paper towels?"

"Uh, okay." I said. I waited in the restaurant for quite a while, maybe an hour. I glanced outside a couple times and saw my family hadn't gotten out of the car and didn't seem impatient.

The waitress returned with the paper towels, which she gave to me, but she seemed very angry with me. I thanked her and she replied, "You only asked me to do that because I'm the whisperer's daughter, didn't you?" I didn't find out if the whisperer was of the ghost or dog variety--I think I assumed it was an S&M term I wasn't familiar with.

I watched the fourth episode of Being Human's second series last night. So far I'm liking this series a lot more than the first, and not just because of the better looking women. The ghost stuff with Annie has been great and George's repressed werewolf manifesting as tourettes is perfect for Russell Tovey, who makes Gallagher look like a subtle and nuanced performer. The only downside so far has been the AA meetings for vampires Mitchell's been holding, which demonstrate why allegory is so lame--in an effort to make blood drinking as much like alcoholism as possible, contortions are made in the world's internal logic. It's never explained what causes all the vampires to go along with Mitchell, even avoiding drinking from people who want their blood sucked. I am kind of digging the Dr. Jarrat or whatever her name is subplot.

Incidentally, this is Pete Townshend at the superbowl versus me this evening;



This still doesn't make me a paedophile.

Twitter Sonnet #110

Shuriken valentines are without waste.
Dog assassins will always howl too soon.
Ravaging chickens is to Dennys' taste.
So to diners, Hassan's ghost grants a boon.
The tomato juice is spiked with pepper.
A strange body failed to notice vodka.
One dame got in transformed from a leper.
Mata Hari written in by Kafka.
Negligent grooming affects a glamour.
Bodies are cons lazy and intrepid.
Funny agents have a runny humour.
The eggs were poisoned with citric acid.
Dour cooks are no match for yakuza.
So Denny's would bring odd ghosts to Gaza.

All Ways are the Queen's Way

One of to-day's random Wikipedia articles alerted me to the existence of Almira Skripchenko, another hot, world famous female chess grandmaster, and apparently friends with the one I learned about on Twitter, Alexandra Kosteniuk. Here they are playing against each other;



It's interesting to me Kosteniuk sounds genuinely sorry to be playing against a friend, as though a chess match is inevitably a very personal contest. They've both been playing since they were little, and I'd have to think they've both lost countless times on the road to getting better, so you'd think they'd have thicker skins. But maybe the fact that it's a prominent tournament makes it a little more sensitive.

Anyway, I've watched several videos of Kosteniuk and every time she plays a woman, that woman is always gorgeous. I really don't get it--practicing chess as much as it must take to get really good would seem to me a pretty sedentary lifestyle, one where personal appearance isn't given the lion's share of attention. But maybe brains wired for chess come packaged with great metabolism and skin.

I've pencilled two pages to-day, feeling frustrated with myself I can't draw faster. I've got four pages to ink now, and I'm starting to get the feeling Thursday's going to be another long day. Then I've got jury duty scheduled for Tuesday--I may go on Friday, since one can go up to two weeks before or after the scheduled date. But I'm getting really tired of there being some big thing I have to take care of when I'm between chapters. Oh, and I'm tired of getting called for fucking jury duty. I guess it's been a couple years since the last time, but gods, I've gotten called four times at least in the past eight years. I really wouldn't mind it if it were at hour sensible for me. Instead, I'm liable to be waiting three hours too tired out of my brain to concentrate on book.

Anyway, I'd better get to inking . . .

Last night's tweets;

The tomato juice is spiked with pepper.
A strange body failed to notice vodka.
One dame got in transformed from a leper.
Mata Hari written in by Kafka.

Warm Mirages

Last night's tweets;

Shuriken valentines are without waste.
Dog assassins will always howl too soon.
Ravaging chickens is to Dennys' taste.
So to diners, Hassan's ghost grants a boon.



I dreamt last night that every photograph of me had been changed into a photo of Clint Howard.

With dinner, I watched the second episode of Being Human's second series. I wonder if someone's going to try to rape Annie in the second episode of every series. At least this guy didn't know she was a ghost--the first guy actually tried to rape a ghost. I was given pause just by the weirdness of that concept.

I hadn't watched Being Human on Saturday night, choosing instead to watch the first half of Lawrence of Arabia. I hadn't watched it because of Avatar, but it is a very good thing to watch as a comparison. Because, as many have observed, Avatar is part of a tradition of white man saviour stories, where a white man becomes an official member of a group of natives who are oppressed by that white man's country, against whom he eventually leads the natives in a successful revolt.

Lawrence of Arabia, based on actual events and, more importantly, a complex and thoughtful work of art, shows clearly how unnaturally simplistic a story like Avatar's is. The natives, in this case the Arabs, are hardly two dimensional saints like the Na'Vi and Lawrence's role as leader alien is explored as being as much related to narcissism and delusion as it was to a genuine desire to assist the Arabian tribes in World War I.

My favourite part of the movie is Lawrence executing the man he'd rescued from the desert. Omar Sharif's line about how "the writing" was still Lawrence's because he had given life and taken it has a resonance that truly does make Lawrence seem godlike.

This is also a bit that reminded me of an opinion piece I'd read that argued apologies without a genuine regret for the actions that necessitated the apology were not valid apologies. It seemed to me blood feuds like the kind that prompted the murder which necessitated the execution Lawrence carried out are the ultimate expression of such a philosophy--Anthony Quinn's tribe could only be satisfied by the man's execution, and Omar Sharif's would then only be satisfied by blood from the other side in return. As Lawrence says earlier in the film, "So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people." Which has kind of always been my view of people who let grudges control their lives to any degree.

By saving the man, Lawrence shows he's not one of Nietzsche's "master" personality types, and by killing him he shows he's not of the "slave" type, which would seem to make him close to an ubermensch.

Meet the New Queen, Same as the Old Queen

Twitter Sonnet #109

Some robots will say they're androids online.
The bot war also had French resistance.
Love is when France and batteries combine.
Then comes electric human existence.
Liquorice loops excite appendices.
Animatronic gypsies need fibre.
A good AI fights every bear it sees.
But cows and flowers placate the tiger.
Aggressive energy transfers are blocked
By a carelessly aligned bounding box.
About the cameras a cat never talked.
And the computer's eye too gently talks.
Just self worth stories are satisfactory.
Wonderland's become a plastic factory.

Just got back from watching the Super Bowl at my family's house. I have to say I did kind of get emotionally involved in the game, maybe just from seeing Poppy Z. Brite's tweets over the past several days. Maybe it's just that New Orleans has a street called "bourbon", which I always thought was cool. The game was certainly better than the commercials, which reached an amazing new standard of message consistency, insuring that viewers would come away with a portrait of a world of men desiring simple pleasures despite the machinations of their frigid, self-absorbed wives. I heard the NFL blocked a gay dating service ad--so I guess the message is, "Women are awful and there's no alternative." The Who halftime show wasn't bad, though. I think Pete Townsend probably regretted wearing the jacket that constantly got in the way of his windmill.

Speaking of brilliant alleged paedophiles, I saw there was an ad for the new Alice in Wonderland movie. I'd actually been reading about it just last night and my expectations keep getting lower. As the Wikipedia entry says, Burton's version has Wonderland in fact being named Underland because it's underground and the reason Johnny Depp's hair is orange is due to mercury poisoning, which was common among hatters as mercury was used to cure felt used for the hats. So Burton's making sense of everything, isn't that nice? Weren't we all saying, "The Alice books are great but I wish there was a more reasonable backstory for everything."

What I keep hearing in my head is Jack Skellington, upon introducing Christmas to the denizens of Halloween Town, saying, "Well, I may as well give them what they want." This Alice movie is about 19 year old Alice asserting herself as an independent adult by way of a fantasy adventure war. This movie's going to be more Tolkien than Carroll, I think, particularly when I see clips of an armoured Alice blocking lightning bolts with a shield. Because we can't expect an audience to enjoy a story about a little girl interacting with a curious, and only sometimes threatening reality. That would require an artist to glide on wonder alone and, really, wonder is so trivial next to combat and the importance of proving you're important.

And, again, we're getting a movie that combines the Queen of Hearts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with the Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass. So does that make Anne Hathaway's character a white Queen of Hearts? Or Queen of Diamonds?

Still trying to keep an open mind. I like Burton and Anne Hathaway does look good in her makeup and costume. But so far the only thing I'm really looking forward to is The Cure's cover of "Very Good Advice" from the 1951 Disney film.

I don't necessarily mind Alice pastiches. Even a fantasy war in Alice clothes doesn't necessarily strike me as a bad idea. I just don't think the cgi's going to be realistic enough for me to be invested in what's going on, and I don't think the writing's going to shine compared to what's in the books.

But I did enjoy playing American McGee's Alice last night, despite its lacklustre dialogue. The sound effects, Chris Vrenna's soundtrack, and the imagery create a nice atmosphere and the game has a decided Doom feel to it, so particularly by the time you meet the Mock Turtle, you get very caught up in trying to survive, which easily makes up for bad dialogue.

I still have Fridays and Saturdays marked as days off. Though being behind with this chapter of my comic meant I had to do a little drawing yesterday, I still had time to go to Tim's and play Oblivion before indulging in diversions here. I thought for about thirty minutes that I'd lost my camera yesterday before I finally found it in my purse and I took a bunch of pictures out of relief, only two of which turned out any good;


It's been raining again lately. I thought this view from my dashboard looked like a 1950s horror movie set.


Tim's cat, Charlie.

In unequivocally good Alice news, I found this site of great, high resolution versions of John Tenniel's illustrations, from which I've made some Through the Looking Glass lj icons, for anyone who wants them;





While I'm uploading icons, here are some Venia's Travels icons I made a couple weeks ago and forgot to upload;






Yes, I do love drawing Wircelia and Kakeshya making out.

Girl Character Sex

Last night's tweets;

Liquorice loops excite appendices.
Animatronic gypsies need fibre.
A good AI fights every bear it sees.
But cows and flowers placate the tiger.

I watched the premiere episode of Being Human's second series last night--a vast improvement over much of the first series. George and Nina's relationship was easily some of the best character stuff on the show so far with the two of them sort of growing apart but being trapped together by the werewolf curse. Some of the best relationship drama utilising supernatural story devices I've seen on a television series, seemingly willing to go to more unpleasant places with its characters than the Buffyverse usually was. Though, as Annie the Ghost pointed out in the episode, there was a werewolf named Nina on Buffy (actually Angel). And I have to say Angel's Nina was a lot easier on the eyes than Being Human's Nina. Maybe the general lack of attractive women on Being Human is reflective of the show's target audience being generally more attracted to men, but I guess I'm shallow enough to really miss all the hot dames. I guess this must be what most women feel like when watching xXx or something. Though there was a pretty hot evil vampire tramp in the Being Human episode.

I watched the first season Farscape episode called "PK Tech Girl" with breakfast to-day, which is a show with plenty of cheesecake, and more than that, I always marvel after having not seeing Farscape in a while how deft and vital characterisation on it often was. Even a moment as small as Rygel asserting that a Dominar wouldn't stoop to looting an abandoned ship and Zhaan pointing out he'd never had a problem with looting before--we realise the current situation has reignited an old struggle of self perception in Rygel. And that's just a moment in a series of great character stuff, which alone would be great but you also have beautiful designs and physically present aliens instead of CGI.

I also read the second story in the newest Sirenia Digest, "Los Angeles, 2162 (December)", which quickly introduced a place and atmosphere well before going into a story of alien and/or mutant sex that ably explored the sort of alternate perspective on intimacy and the language of bodies that distinguishes Sirenia.

Electric Flesh Animation

One of to-day's random Wikipedia articles that loaded as my browser's home page--Battle Monsters, a Sega Saturn game whose entry I found amusing for the line, "The heavy use of digitized footage in the game is ripping off Mortal Kombat." There are Wikipedia entries written by twelve year olds from 1995, apparently. I see an older version of the entry had instead the line, "The heavy use of digitised footage in the game betrays its post-Mortal Kombat origins," which I guess wasn't plain or vaguely scandalous enough for the common folk.

After watching the last episode of Being Human's first series last night, I watched the fifth episode of Dance in the Vampire Bund with breakfast and the juxtaposition, along with the recent film Daybreakers, made it clear that the current effort to maintain vitality for vampire fiction in this post-post-post-Anne Rice world is to go into politics and vampires as a social class. Being Human seems to have pursued this line with somewhat weak focus, only sort of hinting at the vampire guild's intention to convert the whole world into vampires, and rather hastily moving about The Vampire Mitchell's loyalty. The episode focuses, appropriately enough on what being human means as Mitchell moves from feeling superior to humanity to seeing value in humanity and George learns to accept his lycanthropy as part of his humanity. Mitchell's story would have been almost totally arbitrary if it weren't for a nice scene of his former lover sacrificing herself so that he could live, though the scene is diminished somewhat by the baffling use of the Cait O'Riordan/Elvis Costello song "Baby Plays Around". Is Mitchell cheating on her by accepting her sacrifice? Is she cheating on him somehow, since the song's sung from a male perspective? It was really weird.

Dance in the Vampire Bund is partly about the vampire queen, Mina Tepes, creating a partitioned district for vampires in Japan--the titular "Bund", and I'm finding myself really intrigued by the use of vast vampire wealth to negotiate it, usable as leverage due to Japan's national debt. And you thought being in the hole with China was bad. I'm really enjoying the show's simultaneously creepy and charming vampire/werewolf lolicon romance, too .




I finally got my car back to-day after just barely making it to the dealership by way of the trolley--I got there precisely on time. Now my car has a freshly painted hood and front bumper, an odd contrast to the eroded paint on the rest of the car. It looks like a patchwork animated corpse. This cost the other fellow's insurance 1300 dollars, which was apparently mostly for the paint. I'm guessing the dealership wasn't the best deal in town for paint.

Last night's tweets;

Some robots will say they're androids online.
The bot war also had French resistance.
Love is when France and batteries combine.
Then comes electric human existence.

The Voice of the Conductor

Twitter Sonnet #108

Camera shy seagulls prefer large, fresh fish.
The sea is grimly devoid of fruit juice.
Betty Grable provides an ample dish.
Rusted, deep metal holds an old cooked goose.
My bladder has high googly muppet eyes.
Catholic seas are pots of angel urine.
Tom Hanks swims looking for Da Vinci pies.
His small island home rests on Toad's turban.
A bowl of mushroom juice binds a fish mind.
Mercury in bongs makes thermometers.
A one merman army is hard to find.
For the misfit metal sea auditors.
Nurse wheels Poseidon to the podium.
The heart's tax return knows no sodium.

While inking yesterday, I listened to the first half hour of a free audiobook copy of The Odyssey I got from LibriVox, which is a site that features amateur recordings of people reading public domain works. Unfortunately, I was distracted from the story by the voice of the reader, someone named Kirsten Ferreri who sounds like one of those people who are overly conscious of the fact that a lot of people pronounce the letter "T" in words like a "D" (as in, most people pronounce "letter" like "ledder") so she overemphasises the "T" sound constantly. She was clearly in love with the sound of her own voice and interested in showing the world what a perfect reader she was--I started fantasising about how she must be really sensitive and asocial and would probably swoon if a guy touched her. So, yes, it was hard to pay attention to the story.

I read the first story in the new Sirenia Digest with breakfast to-day, "Hydrarguros". A nice, noirish story with an engaging first person narration by an irritable gangster. There were a few nice David Lynch references as well as some interestingly eccentric minor characters. A world's introduced in the story and the ending feels very much like this story is only the beginning of a larger one.

With dinner last night, I watched the fifth episode of Being Human, which was an improvement over the last two. I was disappointed by Annie the ghost's rather weak efforts at haunting her murderer (I think she needs a talk with Juno, the caseworker) which concluded with a pretty tepid confrontation between him and the show's three heroes. But I was charmed more than annoyed by the fact that people making the show seem to have no idea how to write or film action sequences--some vampire thugs threatening them simply stood around and waited for the characters to finish their quirky dialogue. The show took on a very Scooby Doo feeling.

I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by my comic lately. I'm a page behind, having started the first page yesterday and worked on it until an hour before I went to bed last night. I almost finished colouring it--I've got to work on this chapter as much as I can if I don't want another experience like the previous chapter with the 16 hour marathon finale. But I get these silly notions of having a schedule that gives me two hours off after I wake up and another three from when I start dinner to when I go to sleep. I see now this was a very silly dream, particularly as big distractions keep cropping up. I'm feeling pretty ragged lately.

Elephant Jesus Plays the World's Largest Violin

Last night's tweets;

My bladder has high googly muppet eyes.
Catholic seas are pots of angel urine.
Tom Hanks swims looking for Da Vinci pies.
His small island home rests on Toad's turban

I was given a little reminder yesterday of why I don't like children--in line at the grocery store, behind me was a sheriff, who was a little old lady, and in front of me was a little old lady and two four or five year old kids. This lady seemed to be on crack, constantly telling the kids to calm down, which they didn't, and telling everyone around her how she used to shop by herself.

As she was checking out, the kid who'd been jumping up and down in the cart knocked the cart over and began to cry loudly. So the sheriff gave him a badge sticker, which calmed him down long enough to run away from his caretaker and outside, at which point the sheriff threatened to take away the badge. It all seems like a metaphor for some larger social issue, doesn't it?

Does anyone know of a good programme for splitting mp3s? I finally got my hands on a collection of soundtracks to Akira Kurosawa movies, but a lot of them are entire soundtracks crammed into single mp3s. Incidentally, if you've seen Ikiru and you don't start to tear up when you hear its music, you're certifiably a psychopath.

My favourite video game, Oblivion, allows you to place your own mp3s in the game's soundtrack, with different playlists for towns, dungeons, the outdoors, and battles. I recently found a mod that created more specialised playlists with new directories for regions, specific locations, and times of day. So I've been going through a lot of soundtracks and instrumental albums to fill out these lists, a process over the course of which I discovered I really don't like Hans Zimmer. I like The Dark Knight soundtrack, which was composed by Zimmer with James Newton Howard. I guess it's Howard that really makes it work for me, because going through The Gladiator soundtrack and the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtracks, I find something oddly lifeless about Zimmer's work. There's something greyed out about it, no effective highs and lows. Though I was intrigued to notice a track on the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is a pretty unabashed homage to Ennio Morricone's Once Upon a Time in the West score.

I keep thinking about what a missed opportunity the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were. Why did it have to turn into a big, cosmic monster truck rally for the fate of the world? Couldn't we have just had stories of, you know, piracy? Maybe it just needed a better score.

I'm still watching Being Human, and I was fascinated to see that, after an episode making fun of Morrissey, Joy Division, and Echo and the Bunnymen fans for being excessively gloomy, there's an episode where Mitchell the Vampire accidentally lends a kid a DVD of someone having sex which he'd somehow forgotten stashing in a Laurel and Hardy DVD case. Following this, our heroes are persecuted by the whole community and someone gets hit by a car. No wonder the show's writers don't like a song about a guy who doesn't care as much about his comatose girlfriend as he pretends to--where would that leave Being Human's writers? Though, to be fair, this was the only episode written by a guy named Brian Dooley and the previous episode was written by someone named Rachel Anthony. Neither of these writers have written another episode of the series, so neither of their episodes seems worth giving up on the series for.

Anyone else think Russell Tovey looks like David Tomlinson?