The by now infamously stupid article from the Times has already been responded to more than adequately by at least four blog posts I've read (One by Robyn, one by Neil Gaiman, and two linked to in Gaiman's post). But I felt like adding my cents to a few things;

The question is: who gets to the money first? The answer, of course, is the comic-book geek. Why? Because the other three are figments of his imagination.

With his opening paragraph, Mr. Maher seems to borrow a bit from Chasing Amy. While it's true the Several People on a Road analogy isn't original to Chasing Amy, the context can't help but bring the movie to mind. Directed by the notorious comic book fan Kevin Smith, any pilfering of its play would be pathetic hypocrisy on Maher's part. But let's wait and see if Maher makes any other Smith allusions . . .

[Sin City] is so steeped in fetishistic adolescent imagery and casual misogyny that it overexposes the sinister appetites of its hardcore fanbase.

Are fetishism and adolescence sinister? It's true, teenagers can be annoying, but not necessarily wicked. And anyway, most of the main characters in Sin City aren't teenagers, nor do they say or do things that are normally confined to teenagers--shooting, killing, fighting, rescuing people, looking good. As for fetishism, what's wrong with really liking something specific?

Oh yeah, and casual misogyny. Maher doesn't back up this claim, so there's nothing to argue with. For the record, Sin City isn't misogynistic. What, I have to prove its innocence? You first, Maher.

(paedophilia and slut-killing are big in Sin City)

Yeah, among the villains. You'd almost think they were bad things.

and so relentless is the leering softcore depiction of prostitutes, dancers and slatternly lowlifes, that the movie unwittingly reveals the frank and masturbatory hatred of women that is fundamental to any understanding of the comic-book geek.

Never mind that these women are often shown doing intelligent and powerful things (Miho taking out a carload of bad guys, Gail running a small society of women who regularly best two societies of men). Unless I'm missing something, the women all seem to be cast in a very favourable light. The drama hinges on the audience wanting things to go well for them--Marv's quest to avenge Goldie needs us to feel sorry she died (or sympathise with him feeling sorry about it), Hartigan's quest to save Nancy needs us to feel she's worth it (which the story doesn't seem to feel it needs to try very hard to accomplish), and the Big Fat Kill is all about saving a whole bunch of women garbed in, as Maher might have it, the cloth of Satan. Masturbatory, maybe. Hateful, gods, ludicrously not. My suggestion to Maher is that he try masturbation. He might find it gives him a surprisingly positive view of imaginary women.

For most people (those who have a life and don’t actually care about the great intergalactic struggle between Marvel and DC comics) contact with comic books is generally a secondary experience. It is something filtered through the enthusiasm of publicly anointed geek figureheads, such as the director Kevin Smith . . .

We have another Smith allusion, folks. And remember, if you care about comics on more that a peripheral level, you should see a doctor.

What these men represent, with their giddy encyclopaedic knowledge of comic lore, their tired eyes, and soft, unthreatening, roly-poly demeanours, is the cosy comfortable face of a jaded industry that’s male-dominated and entirely hostile to women,

Yes, they who are entirely hostile to women are soft, unthreatening, and cosy comfortable. Oh, whatever shall women do? To compound it, the characters in Smith's movies often seem to really dig women. What cunning! What could he be plotting?!

action “heroines” with enormous breasts and great boots)

Okay, enormous breasts can look silly, but great boots? Honestly, what kicks ass better than a great boot?

Anyway, what's wrong with large breasts? If drawn properly, I think they can look pretty decent. Sure, they're not realistically useful for combat, but neither is spandex--and the guys wear plenty of that, too.

If the idea is that mass approval of large breasts lower the self-esteem of women with small breasts, I say this is a silly argument. Since Greeks have been making statues, people've been looking at beautiful, unattainable versions of humanity. Why? Because people like looking at pretty things, and it's even better if they're sexually attracted to them.

You can't make better, more mature people by dictating what physical attributes they ought to be attracted to. The realisation that a person with a great mind is a more fulfilling companion than one with a great body is not something that can be instilled with images of breasts. It's something a person works out on his or her own.

And similarly, a woman who doesn't feel she can get the man she wants without a perfect body needs to mature to the point where she realises a man with that resolute priority for his mate is not a better man for it.

In any case, let's not sacrifice our beautiful pictures for the sake of fools.

In the past, some half-hearted attempts were made to divest the industry of its porn connotations.

Yes, half-hearted non-porno series like Superman, Spider-Man, and The Incredible Hulk. Notice how Maher avoids mentioning the more well-known heroes and heroines?

Sadly, today, despite some pretty lonely websites such as Friends of Lulu (“Bringing Comics to Women!”), the fundamental law of the comic-book universe states that the geeks are male, and the breasts are large.

Yes, it's a fundamental law, as long as you ignore all the exceptions. Or refer to them as "lonely."

Not convinced?

Not convinced, you adorable bobbin.

Listen to Knowles pontificating online about Sin City. A self-declared “friend” of the director (he nabbed a walk-on part in Rodriguez’s The Faculty), he warns his fellow fanboys that Sin City will “sate each and every perverted drooling doodle of a thought you’ve had”.

For we damned of the comic fandom hover miserably in our heathen hovels, pummelling our own feverish minds with condemnation of our perversion! Or maybe Knowles doesn't consider it a bad thing and that was meant tongue-in-cheek. Who knows? Who could interpret that fiendishly ambiguous statement of moral perspective?

He then describes the sexual experiences that he’d like to have with various Sin City babes, before summing up the movie, and the entire comic-book world view, by declaring that Sin City is ultimately about “everything that made Robert and Frank’s d***s hard . . . the culmination of dreaming the big dirty dreams about d***s and dames!” Nice. Let’s hope he spends his $100 bill in the right store.

Gee, why would someone use sexual arousal as a metaphor for joy? That's just weird. Sex is so icky.

Next, Maher makes cute lists of the characteristics females in comic books are known to sport.

Appearance:
Tiny waist, thunder thighs, muscular buttocks, watermelon breasts and non-existent costume.

Unlike the realistic features of comic book males.

Superpowers:
Unlike male counterparts, female comic heroines are skilled in the mundane arts, such as gymnastics (DC’s Huntress), “online skills” (seriously! See DC’s desk-bound Oracle) and messing with the emotional centres of the brain (typical woman! See Marvel’s Malice).

Yes, for things like super-strength, one needs to seek out obscure heroines like, oh, say, Wonder-Woman. Meanwhile, men are never saddled with mundane acrobatics or computer skills (except for the little known "Batman" and a million others not worth mentioning).

Adventures:
Rarely privileged with central roles, comic babes are restricted to supporting parts on the villainous periphery — see Spider-Man villain White Rabbit or Batman’s voluptuous stalker, Harley Quinn.

Man, comic book geeks hate women so much, they hardly ever demonise them! What's up with that? You know, looking at the large absence of female villains in comics through history, you'd almost think these mythologies got started in the 1930s and 1940s!

Says:
“You’re right about me! I’m nothing but a selfish slut who threw away the only man she ever loved . . . I’m such a fool. Such a selfish stupid slut.” (Ava in Sin City).

I'm sure there's no context issue here, and I'm sure the character Ava speaks for everyone and is being in no way self-deprecating. And if she were, self-deprecation is a trait we only give to people we despise and don't identify with in any way. We all know how perfect we are.

Career Prospects:
Not promising. Batwoman is killed, Batgirl is paralysed, Mirage is raped, while Black Canary is tortured, made infertile, and de-powered!

How come bad things never happen to the men? It's not like Superman ever died . . .

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter's up. Boy, was it ever difficult. For several reasons. I got a lot happier with it, though, after I changed one, single line of dialogue. Funny how little things can go such a long way.

I noticed, the other day, that someone had made a shopping cart gallery over by the Michael's. In the empty lot, someone had lined up carts, one representative for every fleet in the vicinity. One from Michael's, one from Wal-Mart, one from Target, one from Ross, etcetera. There were about twelve of them, some of which must have come from stores a couple of miles distant. The lineup's been there for several days now.

I was at Michael's to get another pad of tracing paper. In case anyone doesn't know, I make the Boschen and Nesuko pages by drawing them in pencil on a sketch pad first, and then inking them on a piece of tracing paper I staple over the pencil drawing. I've been doing it this way since chapter four--before, I'd ink right on the sketch pad paper. I have a feeling I oughtn't use staples as it occasionally creates bubbles, but I don't have a better technique available at the moment.

I'm a little curious to see how this new chapter goes over. There's a good chance a lot of people are going to find it extremely disappointing. But, all's I can say is this is where the story seemed to be going, to me. It seems like what ought to come next. And I think I would be disappointed by anything else.

Here I am getting all defensive about something people haven't even read yet . . .

Could anyone tell I modelled King Olveib after Adolphe Menjou? I don't think I made his jaw quite big enough, but that's okay . . . It's King Olveib, not Adolphe Menjou, after all.

I'd better get to my tasks for to-day. Yesterday, Poppy Z. Brite was wantonly committing LJ sins, a blasphemous orgy of wickedness that culminated in her creating a quiz which I, like many, partook of. So now I know where to eat if I visit New Orleans;


You are Marisol. You are eclectic, innovative, and
a little dangerous, but not quite as crazy as
people tend to think -- you have strong
principles and a solid grounding in culinary
tradition. You do exactly what you believe in
and don't give a good goddamn what anybody
thinks. Some people resent you for that, but
you really have no choice in the matter; you're
incapable of compromise.


What Famous New Orleans Restaurant Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Tim put a lot of anime onto disk for me and I'm slowly watching it all. It's all fan-subbed, which I often prefer to the "official" subtitled release as the fans are generally more hip to which Japanese words are well known to English speaking viewers and don't need translating. And some words are, instead of translated, given brief definitions. Which is nice. Many Japanese words lose some of their nuance when the translator makes a judgement call to use what he or she feels is the most relevant substitute English word for the context.

First I watched the first episode of Negima: Magister Negi Magi. How was it? Think of softcore porn. Imagine something softer. Now imagine something softer than that. Keep going. Keep going . . . and . . . there. Now you've got it. Now insert a main character who's a copy of Asuka from Evangelion named Asuna and another who may be a copy of Harry Potter.

The story takes place at a girls' high school. We follow a single class taught by a ten year old boy and filled with an array of distinctive, beautiful, homogenous girls. Dull hijinks ensue, and Asuna overreacts.

I next watched the first episode of Elfen Lied, a somewhat more daring programme featuring lots of blood, decapitations, and nudity--although Japanese censorship, in its wisdom, does not allow the existence of female genitalia to be publicly acknowledged, so the ladies get a depressing blank space of flesh between their legs.

The episode opening credit sequence is a series of reproduced Gustav Klimt paintings with Elfen Lied's main character, Nyuu, inserted as the subject. After the credits, we're in a normal anime underground military facility where we see the pretty naked red head escape from confinement, albeit with a restrictive metal helmet obscuring her features.

Which made me laugh out loud because this is one of those anime series where all the main characters look exactly alike, but for their hair. When the helmet does finally come off, the "big reveal" felt more like a "big joke."

Aside from that, the show is also a clone of Chobits. Nyuu's hair ornaments are almost identical to Chi's and Nyuu gets her nickname in exactly the same way--when she's brought home by the young man who found her, naked and derelict, all she could say was "Nyuu." Of course, in Chobits, Chi is a persocom, a common robot servant the boy found in a dumpster. In Elfen Lied, the boy assumes Nyuu's human, and there's no explanation as to why he and his female cousin casually take the stray naked girl home like she's a new pet.

Finally, though, I came across an actually good series on the disk; Gunbuster 2: Aim For the Top.

The original Gunbuster was one of Gainax's first series' and was directed by Evangelion's Hideaki Anno in the late 1980s. I've never seen it, although Tim is a big fan, despite apparently never having been able to find a decent copy. Gunbuster 2, however, seems to be a very different series.

This one was from the creative team of FLCL and is more of a comedy than the original. It follows a clumsy young woman and her enthusiastic attempts to become some sort of space pilot and/or warrior.

Sounds simple enough but, oh, what a breath of fresh air after Negima and Elfen Lied! Gunbuster 2 has dynamically stylistic animation, wonderful character designs (people who'd look different even if their heads were shaved!), and atmosphere that's absorbing and amusing. Now, of course, I really wanna see the original series . . .

What else . . . ? Oh, I've been hopelessly addicted to Maison Ikkoku manga lately, but that's just sad, and the less said about it, the better.

I've seen Revenge of the Sith twice now. I suppose it's time I said something about it.

Star Wars has been much on my mind for several months now, and I've accumulated a great deal of secret opinions and theories that I feel now I ought to share. But, before that, to save some of you skimming, I will say that yes, I liked Revenge of the Sith a lot. It's a good movie. Thumbs up.

It's better than Return of the Jedi. But I haven't been liking Return of the Jedi very much lately.

A few months ago, I watched Empire and Jedi over two nights. As I watched Empire, I couldn't help but compare it to Episodes I and II, and try to determine precisely what it is that makes Empire Strikes Back a far superior film. The answer, in part, is subtle characterisation. For everything a main character says in Empire Strikes Back, there are a thousand things he or she expresses without saying. These quieter things are expressed in ways somewhat analogous to the way we intuit things about the people we meet in life.

Think about the exchange between Han and Leia at the beginning. Han tells the general he's leaving, Leia looks on with a somewhat ambiguous interest. Han confronts her, and we can't gauge much from either but a stiff formality. Then Han becomes annoyed and says, "Don't get all mushy on me. So long, Princess."

Leia had not sounded remotely close to mushy, and we had no reason to expect her to. Han's being sarcastic, but not necessarily, as he insists, because of her hidden feelings for him, but more likely because of his clumsy feelings for her. She seems remote to him--throughout the movie, he constantly refers to her as "Princess" and "Your Highness" as though these are insults, and it seems clear he regards her as a being that's too frustratingly far from him. But apart from Han's words, we don't actually receive the impression that Leia is particularly arrogant and frigid, as demonstrated by her defiant kiss with Luke in the medbay or her earnest words in the briefing with the Rebel soldiers. What Leia is is inexperienced and sheltered--as demonstrated by her inept insults hurled at Han, the innocence of which amuse him ("Who's scruffy lookin'?").

Han doesn't understand his feelings for Leia and neither does she. And she seems little able to comprehend her own eventual affection for him, just sort of helplessly going along with it after some initial resistance to the unfamiliar emotion. And we might wonder how much her affection for him might be based entirely on the situation they're in.

So then. What do these two people look like? They look like kids. Adolescents, clumsily working their way through strange emotional territory. This makes them seem vulnerable, and this adds to the suspense of their flight from the Empire.

Because we don't sense any confusion in Vader. He's tall, dark, mechanical, and adult. His overwhelming Star Destroyers loom over the human interactions, threatening to crush the helpless little organic tendrils with a solid metal boot. One might infer that the "quick and easy" path of the Dark Side is Vader having sidestepped the uncertainties of youthful human emotion to embrace the decisiveness and efficiency of machines and tyrannical rule.

The other main storyline of Empire Strikes Back, Luke's, is also very good. Not a love story, but a more personal story of self-confrontation, culminating with the clear symbolism of the Degobah cave. Where, as Yoda notes, Luke fails. In fact, Luke starts the movie as a self-confident young man who knows what Dak means when he says he feels like he can take on the Empire by himself. After all, Luke's done just that, having destroyed the Death Star in the previous film. You know how the teenage ego can be. How can it be knocked down from that peg? And in fact, despite being mauled by a beast on Hoth and chastised and somewhat humiliated by Yoda, Luke doesn't loose his childish front until he's at Vader's mercy. Not until his brashness looks like it shall certainly lead to his doom.

We sense all this, without it ever being spelled out for us. It's made plain by Vader's costume, his ships, Harrsion Ford and Carrie Fisher's performances, and the dialogue. Even Mark Hammill, who'd been somewhat gratingly inept in the previous film, delivers an effective performance here.

But it's all over with the closing credits because Return of the Jedi is a different animal, somewhat more akin to a monster truck show. The virtues of Jedi are its special effects and action sequences, so it's little wonder that children tend to prefer it over Empire.

The tender, inexperienced Leia is gone, replaced by an action figure lady. She's light-years more mature than the girl in Empire Strikes Back and we're never told why. She returns Han's "I know" to his "I love you" like it's the punchline to a joke, for any emotional resonance their relationship has is residue from Empire. Han is himself reduced to a creature of broad, quickly appreciable lines, and the only time we sense vulnerability in him is when he's got hibernation sickness. When Leia deigns to mention to him that Luke's her brother, he looks like he's won a prize at the fair, after he'd very maturely told her he'd get out of the way if she wanted to be with Luke. Actually, Harrison Ford's really good here, and I can sort of believe Han from Empire might behave this way, if it weren't for the fact that I feel he'd be creeped out by Leia's lobotomy.

Speaking of lobotomies, perhaps Jedi's biggest flaw is the walking corpse passing for Luke Skywalker. Utterly gone is the kid from Empire and suddenly we have the cool, almost ghandi-like man, again with no explanation, no discernable character arch. Sure, maybe the big blow at the end of Empire led him on the path to nirvana, but that's taking an awful lot of development as read, particularly considering the "pay-off" is a guy Spock would probably describe as stuffy.

We don't sense any flaws in this guy. So what kind of tactic is team Palpatine/Vader supposed to use to bring him to the Dark Side? Why, endlessly repeating "Dark side", until maybe Luke goes, "Hmm. Dark side. That sounds kinda cool."

In Empire, Vader appeals to the desire for peace. He expresses the idea that, with the great power of the Dark Side, he and Luke can end "this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." To Lucas's credit, he picks up on this idea in the prequal trilogy and makes it one of Anakin's central character traits.

But it's nowhere to be found in Jedi. In the corridor after Luke's been captured, what's Vader's big argument? "You do not know the power of the Dark Side!" And what's Luke's? "I will not turn and you'll be forced to kill me."

And no, we don't for a moment really feel Luke will turn. When he angrily attacks Vader after Vader's threatened to corrupt Leia, I guess we're meant to believe that Luke's afraid of losing her. But how exactly is he supposed to go from that to being a servant of the Dark Side? In order to save Leia from the Dark Side, he's gonna go to the Dark Side? Huh? Hey, in order to save you from your sandwich, I'm gonna eat it for you and love it. You're welcome.

And Vader's soul is apparently saved by Luke as Luke almost sacrifices himself to Palpatine. So Vader realises he doesn't want the people he loves to be hurt. Okay . . . that still doesn't provide a counterargument for his tyrannical bent. After all, he wanted the Empire to bring order to the galaxy, right? So looks like Vader's got some more development to go but--oops, he's dead because the movie's almost over and that would be too much to deal with. So hurrah, dancing Ewoks, the end!

Now that brings us to the prequel trilogy, and a whole different set of strengths and weaknesses.

The Phantom Menace was the best movie for Padme Amidala. Some people say Natalie Portman's a bad actress, but I think it's merely that she's kind of a reserved person. I've known people like this. And there're other actors like that; Clint Eastwood and Kim Novak are two examples. Not as much emotion tends to leak out of Portman--not as much as Carrie Fisher. But this makes Portman perfect as the doll-like queen. Imagine Carrie Fisher in the makeup and headdress and you'd see an entirely less ethereal effect. Portman's big virtue is her statuesque beauty, and I wonder if perhaps her casting provides some insight into George Lucas's view of women and if it is perhaps similar to J.R.R. Tolkien's.

It's much remarked upon how all the female characters in the Lord of the Rings books are very remote, very awesomely beautiful figures. As with Tolkien, all of the most powerful emotional tales in the Lucas-written Star Wars movies (which include episodes I through IV) tend to be about the men, and only occasionally about their feelings for women.

So perhaps this is why, when the attempt is made to bring Queen Amidala down to earth for a love story in the second movie, it really doesn't come off. It feels more like the broad outline of a love story than an actual love story as Lucas too hurriedly dashes from one point to the next, their declarations of love feel like Lucas prematurely ejaculating.

People can point to the flaws in the second movie as being its poor editing, its lack of a clear villain, and convoluted plot. But to my mind, the only truly relevant flaw is the failure of the love story--all the other things would have been at least good enough if the love angle had worked. All the prequels have beautiful sets, costumes, and action sequences, which make them acceptable as eye-candy.

But what finally works on an emotional level is Revenge of the Sith. And what works about it has little to do with the love story, and just about everything to do with the relationship between Anakin and Obi-wan.

Every time Anakin and Padme use the word "love" in conversation, it feels wrong. What we're seeing isn't a human relationship, but a very lofty, porcelain sculpture of royalty that doesn't fit in with the rest of the movie. When Obi-wan says "love" near the end of the movie, we really feel it. Because we have been enjoying the relationship of these two men as brothers, and Anakin's betrayal is heart wrenching.

There is one level on which Anakin's relationship with Padme does work, and that's her as a factor in his decision to turn to the Dark Side. This is epitomised in a wonderfully, eerily quiet scene on Coruscant where Anakin stands in the Jedi Council Chambers and Padme stands in her room, looking out at the city.

But for the most part, poor Natalie Portman has the unenviable task of saying things that are almost alien to the narrative. In Revenge of the Sith, it's Anakin we're riding along with for the most part and since his love for Padme seems insubstantial, her pleas based on it feel hollow.

But I think Hayden Christensen did a good job. Some might say he seemed too stiff but, remember, Vader was pretty stiff. I had the impression that Christensen was making a concerted effort to have his voice match in cadence and rhythm with James Earl Jones. Which isn't an easy task without sounding silly or at least implausible. But I think he pulls it off. What you get is a sort of deadening after he turns to the Dark Side. After he's first bowed before Palpatine, and he's given his new name, he rises slowly, tiredly, similarly to how Vader would rise in the original trilogy. As though the conflict in him is an almost palpable weight.

Now, I want to move on to two aspects of the Stars Wars films that seem to make people very angry these days and I'm not entirely sure why. These two aspects being the politics and the Force.

First of all, I love the politics. I don't know why. Maybe it's because it's stuff I've wondered about since I was a kid. How did it get to be an Empire? Were all the people involved really evil inside? It's like Dante and Randall's conversation about the people on the Death Star. I have to admit I find it difficult to sympathise with those who call the politics dull and distracting. I find it fascinating--it's called Star Wars, after all, and if you're going to talk about war, it's good when there's more to it than running around and fighting. I wanna know how the fight got started, and I like that it's for complicated and sinister reasons.

And the Force--anyone who's figured out what the Star Wars reference was in the latest Boschen and Nesuko chapter also knows that I don't agree with everything Yoda says. But that doesn't mean I don't think it's a valid point of view.

We're strongly compelled to hate religion these days, and I'm not fond of religion myself. But maybe there is something noble about leading a life of self-sacrifice, even of chastity. We're only told the horror stories that result, but perhaps it's not wrong to say that there is a psychological advantage to be gained this way--by becoming removed from human passions. I don't think so, but I wouldn't insist that I'm right, and I certainly think it's a worthy topic to explore. Empire and Sith make some points, although the clumsiness of Jedi provides some counterarguments.

And that's something that Sith really has over Jedi--idealistic cohesiveness. Lucas's writing may not be perfect, but at least he holds true to his motives in this one.

I'd like to close by pointing out something about Star Wars that I don't see mentioned very often but I think is the strongest quality of both Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. And that's the Flash Gordon factor.

Some of the dialogue people complain about is the way it is for a very specific reason--when Obi-wan says, "You won't get away this time, Dooku!" we're perhaps reminded of the thousands of times we've heard these words used in parodies of old superhero movies and television shows. So many times that many of us can only appreciate this sort of dialogue on ironic terms. And we are a more cynical people than we were in the 1930s and 1940s.

The really great thing Lucas does is take the child-like, earnest attitude of wonder and treat it absolutely seriously. As if this always truly was the way we would confront space and alien worlds and fantastic action sequences. I like it. For all the convolution, it feels remarkably bullshit-free.

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter's up. I'll say nothing more.

Oh--for bonus points, spot the Star Wars reference!

The weirdness continues.

While watching 12 Monkeys last night, an actor playing Madeleine Stowe's superior at the mental institution looked familiar to me. I looked him up on IMDb and saw that he was Frank Gorshin who, among other things, played The Riddler on the Adam West Batman television series. Going through his filmography, I noticed he's the only credited crewmember for a 1997 film called Threshold, which I twigged on as it's also the name of one of Caitlin's books.

Anyway, to-day I read that Frank Gorshin died yesterday.

Will it end there?

To-day I bought the new special edition of 12 Monkeys. Here's a movie I haven't watched in . . . I'd say it's been at least seven years. That seems strange to me because I was absolutely gaga about it when it first came out. Actually, it's an important movie for me for a number of reasons; it's the first Terry Gilliam movie I ever saw. Its soundtrack was the first source from which I heard Tom Waits, and I replayed "Earth Died Screaming" constantly, years before I ever bought my first Tom Waits album.

More importantly, the movie opened up for me a new facet of fiction. I loved Star Trek and Star Wars and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. 12 Monkeys was the first time I understood why sorrow could be a part of great art.

The whole time paradox thing was something I was familiar enough with from Star Trek--12 Monkeys was for me like the same song played at a different tempo, with different aspects emphasised. I knew and understood the lyrics, considered them part of my identity as an observer, so I was pulled like thread by a needle through fabric into a new understanding.

So, yeah, it was a very important movie for me and I haven't watched it in forever. And now I have a different perspective on it. Which is more interesting because the movie contains a scene of the main character, Cole, watching Vertigo, remarking how he'd seen Vertigo as a kid, but that he had a different perspective on it now because he was a different person.

And so, since I've since seen Vertigo, I can spot the references to Vertigo in 12 Monkeys--notably the scene in the theatre lobby where music from Vertigo is playing while Cole first sees Kathryn Raily in her blond wig and grey coat. He's reminded of his dream, and I'm reminded of the scene in Vertigo when Kim Novak's re-made over in blond with grey coat, and she's revealed bathed in neon light, in much the way Madeleine Stowe is. In fact, on IMDb trivia, it's pointed out that in Vertigo, it's an actor named James with a character named Madeleine, while in 12 Monkeys, it's a character named James with an actress named Madeleine.

The whole thing gives me a touch of, well, vertigo. Especially as in recent times, Vertigo as been as important a movie for me as 12 Monkeys was for me as a child. I could go on to make something of the fact that 12 Monkeys is a much newer film, though it impacted me first, in much the way time's twisted for Cole as he sees the end of the movie when he's a child . . .

Oh, but I am too sleepy for this stuff.

Only managed about three hours of sleep for Tuesday night before I was awakened early Wednesday morning by a loud radio somewhere and my stomach reminding me that I hadn't eaten dinner. Before going to sleep, I'd had the thought that I might go to Einstein Bagels for breakfast. Since in the morning my mind hadn't yet reacquired the ability to create new thoughts, I immediately went ahead with that plan.

I decided after my humus and feta on ciabatta that I would go downtown by trolley and then walk up to Hillcrest in order to see Palindromes at the Landmark, the only theatre in San Diego county where that movie was playing.

Before getting on the trolley, I thought it best to use the bathroom, so I stopped in at Target. In the Target men's room, there was a man and a woman, both between fifty and fifty five years old. The man was saying something about his ex-wife and the woman had her pants around her ankles while trying to pee standing up. The first thing I saw when I walked in was her square shaped ass. So I turned around and left.

I was entertained on the trolley ride downtown by a gumball left on the window sill beside me by a mentally impaired gentleman. It stuck at first, but then began to roll from one side of the sill--away from me--to the other--towards me. This gave me something to look at since the games on my phone have stopped working--well, in Spacedudes, I'm still able to move my ship, by the aliens don't move and neither do my missiles. And in Brick Attack, there's simply no ball with which my paddle might attack said bricks. What if Mario woke up to find every koopa, every goomba, every piranha plant, had simply disappeared in the night? It must be a lonely thing.

But the gumball was veiled from me eventually by a young man who wanted to recline and watch me from under his hood after I'd taken a moment to show my ticket to a police officer. I thought about telling the young man about the gumball he was leaning on, but I was too amused by the idea of Little Mister Badass walking around with a shiny pink gumball stuck to his shoulder.

I got to Hillcrest with about an hour to spare, so I went in a bookstore looking for an Ann Sexton book. Sexton's been spoken well of by a variety of people in my world lately and I've never read her--so I thought some poems would be good to read while waiting for a movie to start. But of the three bookstores on that street, not one had an Ann Sexton book of any sort. At the last one, a place called Bluestocking Books and Bindings, there were several feminist posters up so I sort of had high hopes. But the poetry section was very sparse.

As I left, I asked the skinny blond woman behind the counter if Ann Sexton was indeed filed under poetry.

"Yes!" She sounded very pleased, "That's a good question, I'm glad you asked . . . We don't have any."

The place also had an adorable poster of Han Solo in carbonite, decorated with a glittering purple boa. There was something strangely Amazonian about it.

So, Palindromes was a decent movie. The only Todd Solondz movie I'd previously seen was Storytelling, which had a little bit of a clearer agenda.

Palindromes tells the story of a 13 year old girl named Aviva who wants lots of babies more than anything else in the world. She's played throughout the movie by a variety of different actresses of different ages, sizes, and colours--but all are meant to represent 13 year old Aviva. This is perhaps the most overt statement in the movie about Solodz's essentially anti-existential idea; no matter what we look like or where we are, we're always the same, and we'll always do the same things. We're cursed to live without free will.

Or maybe the most overt statement of that idea is when Matthew Faber's character, who somewhat resembles Solodz, comes right out and says it. The above is almost a paraphrase.

Anyway, Aviva's strategy to get pregnant results in one of the movie's funniest sequences. She hangs out in the bedroom of a family friend's son, who is about her age. The walls are covered with cheesy photos of naked women, the boy is wearing a shirt bearing a cartoon man with an erection, and he seems to think nothing of sitting down with Aviva to watch a pornographic movie. Aviva takes it much better and a lot more innocently (probably because she's only 13) than Cybil Shepherd did in Taxi Driver, and she manages, despite the boy's somewhat poor sexual performance, to get herself pregnant.

Aviva's mother, played by Ellen Barkin, is understandably upset, but here Solodz does an interesting thing. Aviva's mother tries in a variety of ways to explain to Aviva why she needs to get an abortion but Aviva stubbornly refuses. Aviva's innocent, childish desire to have a baby to hold and love is somewhat endearing making Barkin's pleas, however rational they might be, begin to sound selfish and ogre-ish. So this film is not a black and white pro-choice, pro-life, but instead uses abortion as a plot device, and not a plot point. Which is really, in my opinion, the best thing to do with it in fiction. The only people who respond well to preaching are people who agree with the preacher. Everyone else is merely annoyed.

So Aviva is guilt-tripped into an abortion, after which she runs away, hitch-hiking, and adventures happen, and things really do feel like a fable, which is how Solodz describes the movie.

One segment of the film, called "Huckleberry" (the film's divided into titled segments), features Aviva sleeping in a little boat floating downriver. While the title would seem to refer to Huckleberry Fin, the scene seemed to me more like a reference to Night of the Hunter, which featured little children on the run sleeping in a similar boat on a similar river. There's even a shot of the floating boat with a lamb in the foreground on the shore, mirroring the various animal-in-the-foreground-kids'-boat-in-background shots in Night of the Hunter.

The kids in Night of the Hunter ended their boat journey by reaching a house where a variety of orphaned children are cared for by the movie's heroine, a religious woman played by Lillian Gish. Aviva ends her boat journey at a house where a number of adopted children with disabilities are cared for by a religious woman named Mamma Sunshine. But the zealous Mamma Sunshine bears more resemblance to the blindly faithful Shelley Winters character. Her husband and his cohorts have a number of things in common with Robert Mitchum's Harry Powell.

Anyway, Palindromes was an interesting movie.

Last week, a fellow named Charles Barker e-mailed me requesting that I make a Mitsumi Nevijen wallpaper. So I did--it's up on the Desktop Wallpaper page. It's Mitsumi enjoying a good book.

I've just finished drinking a Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. I actually quite like it. Well, I barely paid attention to it. I was concentrating on the ramen. I was hungrier than I was thirsty . . .

Yup, it checks out. I really don't have anything interesting I want to talk about. I do want to sleep, though . . .

Well--I've filled out the papers and I'm gonna buy cheques to-morrow. I just might make use of my automobile again soon.

I've gotten so accustomed to walking. I think nothing of walking across half of Santee to get to or from Tim's. It's probably a healthy way of living. Gas prices are unbelievably high. Everything I need, and most of what I want, is within walking distance. So why am I starting to get a slight itch for the motorcar?

Well, although there are three Starbucks within walking distance . . . I'm starting to miss the one by the Vons in La Mesa. There, that's it. And why not? Are there better motives in life? Are you sure?

It's a nice big Starbucks, you see. And there's always a seat there.

Hmm. There seems to be a good amount of old, cold coffee in my mug from this morning. What's it say that I enjoy a sip of it? I'll tell you--it says I have character and dignity. Maybe not the nationally recognised variants of character and dignity, but the ancient brands of character and dignity buried in the secret holy soil of the human frontal lobe.

I've just watched Monsieur Verdoux, a movie I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting to. A lot of reviews and documentaries on Chaplin, I think, lowered my expectations a bit. There seemed to be an almost universal consensus that Monsieur Verdoux was a great miscalculation of Chaplin's and I think I was a bit influenced.

Based on an idea given to him by Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux: A Comedy of Murders is the story of an unemployed French banker who supports his wife and child during the Depression by seducing wealthy women, murdering them, and taking their money.

Although the plot has a credible logic, it's not a very realistic movie, and seems to be, in part, a slapstick comedy starring a serial killer. Which is just cool. It's also a lot of fascinating, thoughtful dialogue--this movie's a lot more dialogue than any of Chaplin's previous films.

Some of the quotes on IMDb; "Henri Verdoux: Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.","Henri Verdoux: Wars, conflict--it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify!"

The movie is kind of an impish meditation on humanity's truly terrible nature. It was the melding of two seemingly incompatible artistic modes, giving both a fresh effectiveness. It's a good movie.

The new Boschen and Nesuko is up.

I really oughta make a regular entry here, huh? Hmm . . . maybe later . . .

I noticed the other day that there's a link to Zai'Pi Super Snail on the 24 Hour Comics Day blog. There're a lot fewer online 24 comics listed than I would've thought. I've read through a couple and they're pretty fun reads. There seem to be several, I've noticed, including my own, begining with a character wondering where he or she is.

I've noticed the Desktop Wallpapers section on my site has actually been getting a number of hits so, for those people, I've put up a new wallpaper of Nesuko looking rather feminine here.

To begin with, happy birthday to Owl. I hope you have a good time.

Let's see . . . I've been watching a lot of movies starring Joel McCrea lately. Last night I watched the wonderful Dead End. Made in 1937, it was filmed entirely on an enormous, rather marvellous set representing a street in New York that had rich apartments and homes on one side, and the terrifically poor buildings on the other. McCrea plays a fellow who's worked his way through college to be an architect, yet still has to scrape out a living doing odd jobs in the neighbourhood.

Humphrey Bogart's also in the movie, as Baby Face Martin, formerly one of the little hooligans on the street, now a big time gangster. Bogart's really good in this movie, and it was a delight seeing him teach the street kids how to fight a rival gang--Nuts to the agreed on rules; throw electric light bulbs and bring knives.

My favourite performance in the film, though, was Sylvia Sidney's. I recently got in a ridiculous argument with an LJ user who insisted that "Old American movies are so dumb, the female characters are always psychotic and then the men hit them and it's a love story."

Anyone with a fourth of a brain knows this isn't true, but one of the nice things about this movie was that it so casually provided evidence to the contrary. Sylvia works, Sylvia pickets, Sylvia gets hit by cops and fights back. And she's adorable the whole time. Imagine my surprise when I later discovered that she grew up to be Juno the Caseworker in Beetlejuice. Wow, did her voice ever change! And little wonder, since her imdb profile says she died in 1999 from throat cancer.

And in Beetlejuice she plays a chain-smoking ghost with a smouldering hole in her throat. Eerie, ain't it?

Now, on to something decidedly unpleasant--the episode of South Park I watched last night.

I've written before about South Park irritating me when Matt and Trey decide they've got special knowledge and are gonna teach America a little lesson about themselves and morality or some shit. Last night was, by far, the most foolish and mean-spirited example of that aspect of South Park's decay from clever fun to idiotic wallowing.

I knew things were bad when I saw the commercials for the episode; Mr Garrison gets a sex change and we see him making a scene in a supermarket as he tries to buy tampons.

Sometimes trailers can be misleading, which was why I watched the episode, so I could give a fair trial. It did not redeem itself.

Stupid characters in television shows are often given specific kinds of stupidity in order to suit specific episodes. In this case, Mr. Garrison was made the kind of stupid where he thought getting a sex change would let him have periods and babies and, in a few cringe worthy scenes, appear on Girls Gone Wild. And what was the point of that, Matt and Trey? That all people born female are considered worthy fodder for Girls Gone Wild?

Yeah, the humour is supposed to be dryly stated arguments for their apparent belief that getting a sex change is invariably foolish. The beginning of the episode features live action footage of a vaginoplasty being performed, while the South Park doctor remarks on how natural it is. The juxtaposition of his statement and the footage is, apparently, to make us say, "Wait! Why, you scamps, surgery isn't natural at all!" So, score one for the Amish, I guess. I hope neither Matt nor Trey finds himself with a tumour any time soon.

The episode dissolves into various stories of people getting surgery to alter themselves--Kyle becomes black, and his father tries to become a dolphin. The idea being that wanting to look different from how you are badly enough to get surgery is always wrong. Never mind that in real life, Kyle's dad would probably be informed before surgery that he's never gonna be made much like a dolphin, and that Kyle's interest in being black in order to join the basketball team won't actually make him play better, and that he can listen to rap music and still be white. So what would Matt and Trey say to someone who's deformed or with severe burn scars? That they ought to be able to deal? Or is surgery acceptable when we are socially unacceptable?

The end of the episode had Garrison making a quick statement about learning to accept life as woman, albeit one who can't have babies. Maybe at this point Matt and Trey were making themselves sick and they wanted to go back. Well, guys, you can't go back if you refuse to dwell anywhere but within the stink of your own ignorant opinions.

A couple nights ago, I tuned to BBCAmerica while eating dinner and saw a pretty blond woman with a dim grin sitting next to Graham Chapham, who was wearing a white lab coat. It was a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch about alien blancmanges trying to secure a victory at Wimbledon against earth--and all earth's tennis players had been turned into Scots.

I didn't see the end of the sketch, as I had something to do when I finished eating. The next morning, I felt a little sorry. It's not often I see Monty Python on TV these days. As I ate breakfast, I turned on the television and was confronted again by the same woman and the same Graham Chapham. Earth's battle with the blancmanges had begun again.

That's a sign from the gods to me, it is, and I don't need to tell you what it means.

I'll tell you something else that's unrelated;

A few days ago I was walking home from Tim's and stopped in at a Round Table Pizza I used to eat at a lot when I was a kid. I'd been looking at it now and then, meaning to go in for the nostalgia or something.

The place had changed only a little. It was still a very enclosed restaurant, with only one wall of windows, leaving the rest of the place a somewhat difficult labyrinth of booths. I remember it having dark, reddish wood walls, but now it has white wood walls. Which was disappointing--it was such a dark, warm place with few lights before, which, combined with the name Round Table Pizza, always allowed me the vague fantasy that it was a medieval mead hall.

I was delighted to see that the very, very old Super Mario Brothers machine was still there. I remember it showing up at the restaurant at about the same time as the original, 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System came out. This was not your usual arcade, stand-up setup, but a sort of table thing that allowed you to sit down and play comfortably, albeit with a joystick, which feels pretty unnatural with Super Mario Brothers.

I sat down to it for a while, found that the A button stuck a bit, and proceeded to make a fool of myself on level 1-2. Like a bird continually ramming itself into a window, I could not shut off the confident feeling that I could jump over any of the level's pits. At Parkway Plaza mall, I frequently almost beat the same game on a newer, cheapie system whilst waiting for my latte, and here this machine of my youth, with its cunning, sticky button, was schooling me.

So that didn't last, and I was too slow with quarters to continue. So I looked the place over a bit more while my order was taking an impressively long time. I found that there was a new, separate video game section, where the place had accumulated a few of the standard, stupid side-scrollers of the past twenty years.

Among them was what I trust was a relic of 9/11--a platform shooter called Target: Terror. Its start screen featured photos of Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush floating by in the background, much as one would expect to see a Ninja Turtle or a gun wielding anime girl.

You didn't condemn this sort of thing very harshly in the months following 9/11. Everyone was pretty unnerved and we sensed that maybe this was, for many of the more simple-minded around us, the only way of coping with the events. Now it just looks like the ridiculously crass artefact it is. A toy fashioned by and for people who have only a hazy grasp of mortality and the dangers of this world, and see man-initiated catastrophe as an a excuse for the glorious story they want to be the hero of.

The world needs the Mario Brothers.

I put up a Google ad on my site a few days ago, but I took it down to-day because it looked as though it probably wouldn't pay ten dollars in ten years. Oh well. I will think of a way to make money with this, one day. Mostly I'm thinking of doing a 100 page or so online graphic novel thing, and charging 25 cents per view.

It the meantime, I decided if there's gonna be an ad on my site, it might as well help a friend, so I put this up;



Yesterday I picked up the Citizen Kane soundtrack, which is great to listen to and, for some reason, a lot subtler than I was expecting. It has to be played very loud to be heard at all, most of the time, and creates this really great, murky mood in the room. And then the opera scene comes on and it flattens you.

This isn't the original recording, but one made a couple years ago by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Joel McNeely, as is my copy of the Psycho soundtrack. For the most part, both recordings are rather straight copies of the original orchestrations, except with a better recording quality. But the Opera scene is sung by a woman named Janice Watson, who seems to be the singer Kane wished Susan Alexander to be.

There's a lot of information about Bernard Herrmann and his early career in the CD booklet, including a cable sent to Welles in July 1940. Regarding the Opera scene, Herrmann wrote, "FEEL THAT SUZY SHOULD HAVE A SMALL BUT RATHER GOOD VOICE. THIS IS THE TICKLISH PART OF IT. EVEN G[ANNA] W[ALSKA] HAD SOMETHING OF A VOICE. FEEL SHE MUST AROUSE SENSE OF PITY. MUSIC SHOULD BE INTENSELY DRAMATIC AND SHE NOT UP TO IT."

Which is a nice touch. It would have been terribly over the top to give her a truly horrible voice, and a lesser film would've made Kane seem utterly delusional about her.

Well, that's just one small good thing about a movie full of great things . . .

A man approached me in the Nordstrom bathroom and asked if I had a coconut. He was wearing a bright red jogging suit and baseball cap and I assumed "coconut" was a code for cocaine or a sexual favour. I said no, and it was only after he'd gone that I realised the whole room smelled like coconut . . .

Trisa visited San Diego last week. We had a pleasant time, she has a very nice new haircut, and we watched Napoleon Dynamite.

I was expecting to have a much stronger reaction to the film than I did. I expected to hate it or love it. It turned out my feelings were slightly warmer than lukewarm.

There's a sweetness about it--I get the impression that the filmmakers had a genuine affection for these characters, that they were not sadistically exploiting them as many reviews for the movie insist.

Perhaps this misimpression arises from the fact that none of the characters really become more than mild caricatures--you can see the kinds of guys they're trying to be, but they never quite pull it off.

The movie is a very mild comedy. The best jokes make you smile or sort of chuckle. One of the film's problems is an over-reliance on the comedy of tedium--especially in the first two thirds of the movie, there are endless static shots of people standing very still speaking in slow monotone. There were several instances where I got the joke midway through the delivery, but the movie insisted on dragging it right along anyway.

It was, on the whole, a pleasant movie, but I think by the third viewing I'd jump out of a high window. It's a little like Braveheart.

There. Finished.

That was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Still, I don't think I'll ever do anything like it again if I don't have to.

I'll be posting my 24 Hour Comic here. I've decided to make it about a group of cartoon characters I created when I was about nine or ten. I've made references to them in Boschen and Nesuko, but otherwise I remember almost nothing about their personalities or relationships. It ought to be an interesting experience.

I'll try to update with each page as I go, starting at midnight (for me, it's currently 9:23pm).

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter's up. I hope it doesn't make anyone puke.

And now I have to run off again because I'm gonna do the 24 Hour Comics thing and I wanna get supplies . . . Gods, nobody better give me anything to do on Sunday.

I saw Sin City again a few days ago and, afterwards, I dropped by Borders and noticed I'll Sleep When I'm Dead was out on DVD.

I remembered very badly wanting to see this movie when it was in theatres, but I'd never gotten the chance. I was very intrigued by Roger Ebert's review. Maybe because it was a British film noir, maybe because it was a good movie featuring Malcolm McDowell in a good, sinister role. Maybe it was because it stars Clive Owen, for whom I had a mysterious fondness even before I'd seen him in any movies (perhaps this is explained by the bit of trivia off his IMDb profile; "Is a huge David Bowie fan and has called singer 'the biggest musical influence on my life.' He says, 'I don't know why, but no one else has ever had such an effect on me. I didn't have most of his work. I had everything.' In the 1970s, when Bowie was changing his appearance and style with every album, Owen would re-dye his hair whatever color Bowie's was at the time.")

Anyway, I felt it an omen somehow that I should be looking at a Clive Owen film noir after having just come from seeing Sin City, so I bought it.

It's a good movie, and considerably more true to the grim existential spirit of film noir than is Sin City.

It is not remotely what one would call a thriller, in spite of being mistakenly marketed that way. It's the story of Will (Clive) coming back to London after having been living reclusively in the forest for three years, attempting to avoid his past as a fierce crime boss.

But his brother's suicide in London brings Will back and into a quest for revenge, and inevitably amongst his old enemies and friends. It's certainly a noir idea, and is enhanced a bit by the man seeking revenge for what is unquestionably a suicide.

Perhaps the most innovative element director Mike Hodges brings to the table is the tone. When I say it's not a thriller, I ought to stress that it's practically the opposite pole of thriller. It's quiet, ruminating atmosphere of Will walking about London simply dwelling in his hellish endeavour, all the more hellish for how unsentimental and coldly the movie puts things. Really, perfect for the main theme.

Good movie. I'd probably say more except I'm feeling the absence of coffee . . .

Because I'm a productive member of society, I made this:

Caitlin's reactions to a film called What the [Bleep] do We Know?, intrigued me enough that I sought it out and watched it. The movie consists of a series of interviews with physics students, spiritualists, doctors, and, supposedly, the channelled spirit of an Atlantian warrior named Ramtha. At intervals, the movie follows the fictional story of a young woman played by Marlee Matlin. Her life as a divorcee and photographer is used to demonstrate and gloss arguments seemingly made by the interviewees regarding a connexion between quantum mechanics and the idea that we humans are capable of altering physical reality purely by effort of will.

Having read the information Caitlin found showing the film's most important proofs to be false, I knew going in that the film had no real scientific basis for its arguments, despite its pretensions to the contrary. But I was curious, as it seemed a stimulating point of conversation and several very intelligent people seemed to have been taken in by it. What I would have thought of the movie if I'd not known the illegitimacy of its evidences, I can't say. What I did find was a movie that was silly and pathetic.

The first portion is an overwrought justification of the title, What the [Bleep] do We Know?, as it states the old idea that we don't know if our reality is really real, or a sort of dream, or something else. This can be sort of fun to think about, but a surprising lot of people tend to not realise that the concept in itself neither proves nor disproves anything.

Then we segue somehow into quantum mechanics, in which there is a theory that an infinite number of alternate realities exist, one for every alternate possibility. Which is interesting, but hardly is this the first time the concept in art has been explored. I remember it from the seventh season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Parallels", in which Worf was continuously shifting between different quantum realities. Data explained the idea a lot more effectively than What the [Bleep]'s experts ever do.

So from there, the movie reaches its real point, which is to say that somehow we can take control of our lives--have better jobs, relationships, self-esteem--by consciously tapping into alternate realities. "Creating the day", effectively, by visualising what we want and making ourselves believe it until it's true.

What I'd like to know is why it's supposed to be easier to tap into an alternate reality to change things than it is to simply decide to do things differently and doing it. Yeah, we have our habits and they can be hard to break, but is it really harder than shifting to an alternate reality?

You know, these are just the sorts of people that ought to never get their hands on a time machine. "I magicked my ex-wife to death!", "My mental powers got my horse to win!", "I eradicated all pigeons every where, every when!"

But perhaps most heinous of the movie's crimes is that damned wedding scene with those shrill cartoon peptides. Think Son of the Mask, only worse.

And one final, evil thought--did Marlee Matlin ever ask Ramtha to take her to the reality where she's not deaf?

Entries I would have posted if Blogger hadn't been on the fritz;


From 2005-04-11 11:04:00

I went with family to a couple of malls in Orange County yesterday. They gave me some money for my birthday, so I bought some Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes, Jill Thompson's Little Endless Storybook, a Charlie Parker CD, Thelonious Monk's Monks Dream, and I re-purchased The Smiths' Meat is Murder, having lost my previous copy.

I was tipped off about Monks Dream by Peter Straub's wonderful site. Having just begun to cultivate an interest in jazz, it's nice to see what a writer I respect recommends. It's a very sweet album. Many things I've read on Monk seem to describe him as being a sort of creature removed from other pianists, and it's true I've not heard anyone play piano like this. It's restrained, in the good timing way, but very wild, with chords played just out of synch--or the normal conception of in synch, anyway.

We ate at a restaurant called P.F.Chang's yesterday, which I cannot advise against strongly enough. I had spinach and garlic stir-fry, which tasted something like mulched salt licks. Much of my time at the malls was spent in the bathrooms thereafter.


From 2005-04-08 19:13:00

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up. With decorated robots.

Has anyone ever noticed that "Migrations" by Jocelyn Pook, off the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack, and "Renholder" by A Perfect Circle, are almost exactly the same song? Does anyone else even have both the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack and the debut A Perfect Circle album? Could I be the only person in the world who's noticed this?

Eyes Wide Shut came out a year before the Perfect Circle album, so if anyone's a crook, it's A Perfect Circle. And now you know.

Lately I've been annoyed by people who seemingly can't relate to anyone of the opposite sex. I've talked to a couple women recently who couldn't get involved with the male characters' story in certain movies. And I watched The Outlaw Josey Wales a few days ago.

I don't think I've seen a movie that is more palpably insensible of its female characters while simultaneously exploiting them. Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood in 1976, the movie takes place at the end of the American civil war, and follows the exploits of a bushwhacker named Josey (Clint). Early in the film, Josey's family is slaughtered by Union officers led by the nefarious Red Legs, so named for his evil red pant legs.

All the Union soldiers in the movie come off as mindless villains while all the Confederate sympathisers are noble, sometimes conflicted men. No one mentions slavery. Why would they?

When it becomes clear the south has no hope, the leader of Josey's bushwhacker gang, Fletcher, is offered a deal by the Union--his group can go free if they give up their arms and swear allegiance to the Union. The whole group grudgingly agrees, except Josey--which is how come he's the outlaw Josey Wales.

The Union ends up going against their word and tries to slaughter everyone but Fletcher who, for some reason, they have a lot of respect for and are going to employ in the hunt for straggler bushwhackers. They succeed in killing all the other bushwhackers, except for one annoying young guy, who Josey rescues by commandeering a gatling gun.

After this, for reasons that are never explained, Fletcher hates Josey fiercely, vowing to hunt him down at all costs.

Thankfully, the annoying young guy dies pretty soon after this, and we're left to bask in Clint's steeliness as he adventures through the country solo. It couldn't last, though, as an old Indian chief caricature joins his party. Another thing about this movie--rife with the Native American stereotypes it is. This particular fellow was a pretty bad actor, too, always conspicuously conscious of being in a movie.

It's soon after that we meet our first female character, who is also Native American, which I suppose makes two strikes against her. She's irritatingly referred to at all times as "the squaw", and is in fact not very different from the squaw bride in The Searchers--a John Wayne movie which I did not find to be racist, despite having a racist main character. In fact, none of the John Wayne movies I've seen are as racist or as sexist as Josey Wales.

Anyway, the Josey squaw, who is at least credited as being named "Little Moonlight", is not given, by the writers, the ability to speak English, despite the fact that when we meet her, she's working at a white man's general store. The man hits and berates her with familiarity, and while Josey ambles about the place, two men proceed to start raping her. Josey seems disinterested until the would-be rapists recognise him and try to capture him for his bounty.

Josey kills them and now, of course, Little Moonlight considers herself his slave. She doesn't do anything else for the rest of the picture except follow him and have sex with the old guy.

Josey, outlaw loner, or not, starts to collect people. He comes across a wagon being raided by bandits--the wagon carries an old woman and a young pretty blond woman, who they begin to rape while Josey watches in consternation from a hiding spot on a nearby hill. The bandits show the audience the woman's breasts and ass and Josey sorta/maybe starts to go for his gun, before the bandits come up with a vague excuse suddenly about needing the woman unspoiled.

Later, Josey defeats the bandits and seemingly acquires another slave girl, this one blond and English-speaking, even if it's only, most of the time, to say things like "Josey!" and "Wait!"

She eventually makes a watch chain for him out of her hair and they fall madly in love. Or something.

The movie has one or two good moments, most of them involving Clint gunfighting--although the final confrontation with Red Legs is rather lame.

Sin City is an excellent movie.

Film noir dialogue of the sort pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler is something between tough talking and poetry. It has a unique sound and has been mocked and tossed about over the years until it's almost been made to seem phoney and silly. It's a style, and a beautiful one. And in Sin City, it's made relevant again.

An unprepared viewer may go in and find the 40s-ish street talk between Michael Madsen and Bruce Willis to be more off-puttingly artificial than the computer generated backgrounds. But it's when the hard, human reality of ghastly situations set in that we find ourselves clutching desperately at those beautiful words, the pulse that has the brain walk right on through the razor wire and severed limbs and still look up, grin, and say we like this place.

Yes, I liked just about everything about Sin City. Except Jessica Alba. Otherwise, it was great.

What was wrong with Jessica Alba? She's not a very good actress, and she didn't get naked.

Pervert, you cry! Well, look. One thing that was refreshing about the movie was how uncompromising and comfortable it was about nudity. And then we get to Nancy Callahan's story, and we have a stripper who doesn't get naked, not on stage, and not in another, even more unlikely situation. So, Alba, why all the clothes? Why did we have a scene where you said, "Let me put some clothes on" when you were already wearing more clothes than half the other girls in the movie? Alba recently had this to say;

"You know, nudity was an option . . . We could have done it if we wanted to. Obviously, it would have been more authentic. But I felt dancing around with a lasso and chaps was going to be sexy enough. I think being nude would have been distracting and I really couldn't be bottomless. My dad! He would freak out."

Which I translate as, "Initially, I told Rodriguez that I'd be willing and then, after I'd signed the contract, I 'changed my mind', and there was not a damn thing they could do, as it wouldn't exactly look good to fire a girl 'cause she wouldn't get naked."

Although I'm willing to believe Jessica Alba's clueless enough about sexuality to think that a girl with lasso and chaps is as sexy as a girl without clothes.

I don't mean to sell the movie short. Just about everything else is tops. The Marv story, starring Mickey Rourke, being, by far, the best. In fact, if I'd been editing the film, I'd have suggested closing with it. It's the most pure expression of the underlying ideas in all of the stories.

Oh . . . I promised to talk about the Star Wars Holiday Special.

In the mid-1980s, George Lucas vainly attempted to destroy all master copies of this 1978 CBS special. So of course, Tim was quickly able to find a copy on one of his file-sharing programmes.

It stars Mark Hammill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels--everyone but Obi-Wan, really. And it has Art Carney and Bea Arthur. Why not? And, hey, why not have a five minute segment of a Wookiee family having common, domestic discourse, made up of unintelligible growls, in what appears to be a contemporary Earth home (poor matte paintings assure us it's in a tree)? Oh, and throw in Jefferson Starship, only make them tiny.

It was incredible.

In a set that must have been comprised of, at best, pieces of the one used in the first movie, we see Han Solo (indeed, Harrison Ford!) and Chewbacca in the cockpit of the Millienium Falcon, en route to the Wookiee homeworld so that Chewie can celebrate Life Day with his family. Scores of awkward, commercial-like close-ups ensue (this was not directed by George Lucas). Han Solo blushingly tells the ridiculous ball of fur passing as Chewie's wife that the Wookiees feel like family to him. Princess Leia appears to be working as a bank teller when we see her furiously typing at a keyboard behind a plain, plastic desk while C3PO stands awkwardly by.

In the end, all the Wookiees wear red robes and carry glass orbs through space to wind up at a foam cave set where Luke, Han, and Leia await wearing too much makeup. And then Leia sings about the Tree of Life--to the tune of the Star Wars main theme.

And it's all the original actors. You know you want to see this.

Actually, there was one bit of quality stuff--a brief animated segment involving the heroes' first encounter with Boba Fett. A good, decently written story, with intriguing dialogue--Boba Fett, posing at first as a friend, has a disconcerting way of ending sentences in an eerie neutral tone with the word "friend." The alien designs are great and the whole short is enriched by a coherent style and good, expressive animation.

It felt like ambrosia compared to the rest of the special.

The Nar'eth Winter Special is now up. Written by Caitlin and illustrated by yours truly, it's a bit of Farscape fan-fiction, and was a lot of fun to make. I tried a lot of new things, and learned a lot of new things just through the process of working with Caitlin.

In any case, I hope it goes over better than the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, which I watched earlier this evening. I'll post thoughts on it later. I have complicated, astounded, horrified, bemused, outright betwirtled thoughts about it.

Oh, my tongue, my tongue.

A few days ago, I noticed Tim eating a burrito from Tacos Mi Pueblo, a Mexican restaurant near here. My family used to eat there all the time when I was a kid, and I was sort of pleased to find, when I went in two days ago, that it had changed not at all. So much in Santee has transformed, you see.

To-day, I ordered a bean and cheese burrito and tried the very hot sauce. "Would you like something to drink with that, Sir?" asked the fellow. "No," says I. Why douse the flames of heaven?

Soon, the world was eclipsed by scorching hot refried beans mixed with blood red sauce. Sauce you peered closely at to see ingenuity; all the slices of jalapeño, chips of pepper, that you could think of to make soft human tissue shrivel to threat level; ghastly.

It was the taste of a particularly jubilant Dizzy Gillespie. It changed my day.

The Mexican polka on the radio sounded violently spirited in a way I'd never noticed before, and I dwelt in that beautiful pulverizing until I'd dipped my last appetiser tortilla chip in the sauce. I wandered out into the street, savouring the giggling devils circling my tongue with their pitchforks.

Here's another fun thing to try;

Go to a Subway and order a Veggie Delight. Ask for lots of jalapeños, get the meal so you can have some jalapeño chips as well. First bite of the sandwich, half the jalapeños fall out. Open yer chips, dip and enjoy. That's warp zone jalapeño level, folks, and I mean 1+(97x1)=!.

Nothing like this ever happens at my school.

Technically, I have nothing to do to-day. But I'm starting to think I might do some research for the next Boschen and Nesuko chapter. What, you say? Research for a galaxy I completely made up? It's been kind of surprising how often I end up needing to look up something or other. Last time I called Trisa to ask how one would cut off someone's arms without killing the person.

But maybe I'll do something else because it's not very comfortable around here at the moment. The toilet in my bathroom's been removed, so I've kind of been living out of the Barnes and Noble. Sort of reminds me of when my mother kicked me out and the mall felt like the closest thing to home for me. If only every place was open twenty four hours.

You know, now that I think about it, there are all sorts of things I can do out there . . . See a movie, read a book, or simply wander . . .

Accidental Coup.

Cripes, if someone'd told be yesterday that civilian protesters would take down an armed government practically by accident, I'd have said they were crazy. Kind of makes me wonder if the old president didn't simply decide to get while the getting’s good.

Bush should take note--this is what happens when you don't control the news networks and the churches.

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up to-day, a day early, again. I've gotta quit doing that. Anyway, I think a lot happens in this one by anyone's standards.

In the bathroom at Barnes and Noble to-day, I noticed someone had written "SATANIC BIBLE" on the side of the baby changing station.

Oh, what hideous truths are so casually revealed! The terrific drama now shows plain in my minds eye--honest, Goodman father making as proper, cleansing his helpless babe, only thinking to bestow bonny health and virtue--but nay! For, as he tasks, the serpent injects with spirit shadows, his unwholesome invisible dictates!

We clearly must needs drown everyone.

Anyway, I had many adventures in La Mesa to-day. Here're a few things I don't like about people;

Why do boys have to spit so much? I was waiting at the trolley station, leaning against the fence, reading Plato. To my left, two fellows were sitting, wearing hoods in the popular Jawa fashion. To my right, another person who, upon coughing, revealed herself to be a girl. Immediately, the boys' conversation ceased, they glanced repeatedly at her and then, at intervals, fired doses of saliva and snot at the concrete. Why? And why does it make me want to kill them?

Another thing--waiting at a stoplight with a number of pedestrians, a woman in front of me decided she could predict the "walk" sign. She boldly stepped out into the street when the left turn light came on in front of us. Of course, she was caught in front of a stream of cars turning left, while someone trying to turn right honked from behind her. She proceeded to lamely wave her hands, as if she'd suddenly been inspired to act as a crossing guard. What do we really lose by waiting for the light to actually change, people? It's not a significant amount of time, I'll tell you that. People seem to feel they'll lose self-respect or something if they can't out-badass the little glowing blue man.

And that's not to mention how many cars have to run the light just after--just after just after--a tinse after just, just after--hell, long after the light’s changed. In the words of Hellboy, "Red means stop!"

It's all probably tied to the spitting instinct, I suppose.

A couple days ago, I got back from my sister my copy of Caitlin R. Kiernan's In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers. What a pretty book--a little green hardcover with illustrations by Dame Darcy. I like just having it sit here next to me.

I watched the 1951 version of Show Boat last night. It's the first version I've seen and I gather it's not as good as the 1936 version. Still, I kind of enjoyed it. It starred Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, and Ava Gardner. I'm actually starting to like how Keel always seemed like he was doing a Superman impression, with an affected sounding deep voice and eerily good-natured veneer. He's simply impossible to take seriously, which somehow kind of makes me take him seriously.

Kathryn Grayson was a pretty lady with a decent voice and acting ability. And that was good enough. She looks a bit like a huskier version of Claudette Colbert, and I enjoy admiring her rather perfectly shaped nose.

Ava Gardner had a supporting role and didn't appear in 70% of the movie, but she was in practically all the best scenes. The movie shines when it digresses into meditation on the relations between black and white people in 1894. Not to mention 1951--The Breen Censorship office tried to get a scene removed where it's discovered that Ava's character had a black parent and a white parent. This fascinating little scene, where the lady is fired because of her heritage, segues into the song "Old Man River", performed beautifully by a large black workman on the boat, who seems to have almost no interaction with the main characters for the rest of the movie. The scene is easily the most emotionally effective in the movie and you wonder if Oscar Hammerstein wanted badly to take the film in a direction utterly impossible at the time.

I oughta get moving as I need to be out of here pretty soon. I'll probably go eat at Einstein Bagels, although I hope that doesn't turn out like yesterday, where the Veg-Out on Sesame Bagel mysteriously came with bacon and turkey on, a fact I didn't discover until I'd taken a bite. I've been a vegetarian since I was thirteen or fourteen years old, so maybe that's why a single bite of bacon gave me such a monstrous stomach ache that I had to find a bench and just sit down for about an hour.

Or maybe I'll eat somewhere else.

Yesterday I bought a copy of Jedi Knight II: Outcast. Easily the best Star Wars game I've played in a decade.

I'd been playing it at Tim's for some time, so I knew already how lucky I was to find it for just ten dollars. I also knew where to get all the good mods.

The game is basically a Doom style shooter. But its big asset is lightsabre fighting, which is done through third person. You reprise your role as Jedi mercenary (sure it makes sense!) Kyle Katarn, involved once again in a complicated story of . . . running around killing bad guys.

The lightsabre leaves scorch marks in the walls. It burns anyone and anything that touches it, even when you're not swinging it. Add Force powers like pull, push, and grip and the game because one of the most satisfying exercises in slaughter that you could imagine. And then add the extra violence code and you will become a better person.

An illustration:

One of my favourite things to do these days is to grab a Storm Trooper's throat from a distance, raise him high into the air above me, and then simply let him drop on my idle lightsabre blade, whereupon his body falls into pieces that rain down around me.

You can push people of high catwalks; you can cut off their hands, and then execute them while they're kneeling before you, begging for mercy. You can throw your spinning lightsabre and guide it with the Force through the necks of a whole row of foes.

It's really hard to get tired of.

Kyle Katarn gets boring, though, so I downloaded some mods to play as other characters. The Darth Maul mod was decent, but I think I've settled on using Indiana Jones. It's too wonderfully strange. You can change your lightsabre colour with a code, so I've given Indy an orange sabre. Seems to go best with his outfit.

It's a great model too, actually resembling Harrison Ford. The hat's slightly wrong, though--the model maker gave him a stetson instead of a fedora. I don't really blame him, though. There are about twenty different kinds of hats at Disneyland that all claim to be official Indiana Jones hats, and not a one of them, from what I've seen, is an exact replica.

Has anyone else around here carried a bad Indiana Jones fixation since childhood? I didn't think so . . .

I bid farewell to Trisa this morning. She's moved to San Fransisco. She and I have been good friends for about four years, I think. I don't keep a lot of real live friends, so I was pretty sorry to see her go.

We had breakfast this morning at Einstein Bagels. I recommended the Hummas and Feta on Ciabatta, which she found to be quite messy, which I suppose it is. She's moving into a segment of an old Victorian house, temporarily, until the place closes down later this year. Then she'll get herself another place in Ol'Frisco. She's a success, and a great dresser. I loosely based the design of Nesuko's latest outfit on the one Trisa was wearing last week.

So now I guess I'll be going back to seeing all the strange movies by myself. And the Rasputina concerts, if I can ever manage to get into the gear of the concert scene. Trisa's good for music. My tableau's gonna be very different without her around.

Hmm.

So what else for the blog to-night . . .

This house is being painted. My room isn't. My room, being shut up against paint fumes, is becoming a terrarium, smelling of a boy who spends days curled over the desk drawing things. It doesn't smell good.

The painters seem like white trash, and they listen to a radio station populated by derivative rock and lacklustre talk radio. But they sure get drowned out easily by my Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie CDs. And I think it annoys them--you know, I heard somewhere that the trumpet is the most audible musical instrument. I believe it.

I slept poorly last night. I had a series of nightmares--in one, I dreamt Robyn dropped by carrying a zombie movie DVD. She was telling me how good it is, and I, trying to engage in the conversation, said, "Oh, so is it like Night of the Living Dead?"

Her eyes glazed over and she dryly replied, "Yes. It's like Night of the Living Dead." I felt embarrassed and awkward, which is interesting, as I don't think I would have felt that way awake.

Anyway, I was sleepy to-day. I worked on a Nar'eth page, but didn't finish it. Mostly, to-day, after the concentrated efforts of Thursday and Friday, I just felt like vegetating.

And on that note, I shall now make like a carrot and sleep.

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up a day early, because I'm probably going to be busy to-night. I put way too much work into this one.

It's weird being so sleepy at just after 10pm.

One thing I enjoy doing is going into computer stores and putting weird things on their display computers. I went to Tim's RadioShack a while back and quickly made a web page which simply said, in large red letters;

RadioShack(tm) will eat your baby.

Tim complains about the silly job lately, and he seemed to get a good kick out of my gag, until I brought it back up the other day and he overheard a lady customer, upon seeing it, saying, "Oh, my!"

In terror, Tim restarted the computer and locked it from any other miscreant's tampering.

In other news, I've set up for myself several somewhat difficult challenges with the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter. Hopefully they work out. I'm about halfway through it and already it has a slightly different flavour than I thought it would when scripting it.

And this evening I made myself a mozzarella quesadilla. With very hot sauce. Now that's a pizza pie.

At long last, I finally picked up Notorious on DVD last night. I am very happy. I've watched it already and it's gorgeous. I love Criterion DVDs.

I also recently picked up a collection of Cocteau Twins songs that Spooky recommended to me. I'd been looking for a while but any Cocteau Twins album seems to be almost impossible to find around here. I finally spotted this one filed with John Cocker at Borders.

I'm enjoying Stars and Topsoil, but I wished I'd gotten Treasure. However, Trisa picked up a copy and said she'd copy it for me, so it all works out . . . This is the blog of happy endings, you know. Welcome.

Or maybe not all endings are happy. For example, the new Tori Amos album has ended up being a significant disappointment. It pains me to say that because I've been an enormous Tori Amos fan for a long time. But this LP has strayed into vain, banal territory.

Well. I got nothing against pretty, I suppose. Even pretty for pretty's sake--I was able to enjoy Gigi and American in Paris, after all (both of which, incidentally, I got on DVD in a pack for just twenty bucks). But this is Tori Amos! There used to be more to her than that. And--actually, the problems with the album go beyond vanity. It also seems to bespeak a lack of self-awareness on her part.

This point is epitomised in my least favourite track on the album, a song called "Hootchie Woman." Whether or not that title is cheesy, you may decide for yourself. But regardless, Tori sings from the perspective of a financially successful woman who catches her husband cheating on her with what she refers to as a "Hootchie Woman." She goes on to revel in the fact that she is the breadwinner, and the powerful person, in the end. Basically; "Victory!"

Now, compare this with one of her earlier works, a song off Under the Pink called "The Waitress." This was a song about rivalry between waitresses having to do with male attentions. The song was far more effective in conveying the viciousness of the emotions involved, and it also had a thoughtful quality to it. A feeling of regret that these conflicts seem to result from a persistent tragic flaw in the characters of so many people.

And this went with the general premise of Under the Pink--the idea being to cut through the sort of sweet pretence she perceived in women, and show the effects of this emotional atrophy.

So with that in mind, her new album, The Beekeeper, could justifiably be called On the Pink. "Hootchie Woman" is the celebration of one woman's victory over another. It's as though she has effectively become one of the characters in "The Waitress."

All in all, I'd say Tori's basically ended up in the same place, artistically, as she was in the days of Why Kant Tori Read. But . . . Hell, she did have a good run in between. Most artists don't get that much. And we'll always have the recordings.

I hate feeling this way about Tori.

Watching the third season episode of Star Trek: TNG called "Ménage A Troi", the subplot about Wesley Crusher receiving a field promotion to Ensign struck a funny chord in me.

Seeing his gelatinous face warming with boyish blush in response to Picard's fondling gaze, I couldn't help but wonder at the state of Picard/Wesley Crusher slash fic on the net.

My searches first yielded this result. I particularly liked the haiku;

Pert arse through jump-suit
Commander badge of red gold
Long nimble man legs

Or perhaps;

Fuck me senseless, Wes
Beam me with your Star Trek sperm
Kling on to me, boy

I never liked Wesley when I was a kid watching TNG. But now that I'm older, although I do not share in it, I can at last understand somewhat the forbidden man/boy-pupil love that inspired Wesley's character. For truly, the only people who could possibly have an interest in Wesley Crusher are people who are sexually aroused, whether they're aware of it or not, by stupid pretty children. His vague technical genius only conveniently serves to stave off full self-awareness of an attraction to his impenetrable naïveté. The only level on which his character can function is as a player in a wet dream. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, it just makes him boring to any of us who aren't attracted to that.

Well, I suppose that's hardly a revelation.

I'm gonna have a lot more time to-day than I was expecting, so I think I shall work on the Nar'eth winter special. And perhaps I'll watch a movie.

A few days ago I watched 1942's Somewhere I'll Find You. In spite of the fact that I could not find a single positive review for it on the internet, I rather enjoyed it. Sure, it was war propaganda, but in the middle of it Clark Gable and Lana Turner were captivating and the dialogue was decently witty. Not exceptional dialogue for back then, but if it were written to-day I bet it'd be hailed as startlingly ingenious. Certainly it's as good as anything Kevin Smith's ever written.

I woke up two hours ago, after having fallen asleep at around 10:30pm. You see, Sunday began for me 10pm Saturday. So now I find myself suddenly cast into another strange new schedule. Let me explore this wondrous plane.

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up. Little happens in it. Or maybe a lot happens. Depends on how you look at it.

I say, have I ever expressed a dislike for Thursdays? Well! What a horrid day is Thursday, I mean, really!

Broad ambitions did I have yesterday. I planned to draw from dusk 'til dawn. But in all, I only managed to draw and ink two comic pages and colour three. That's because at about 2am I was feeling wretched and antsy, and generally in need of inspiration.

So I watched 1931's Inspiration, starring Greta Garbo. I was foolishly pleased by this standard, MGM melodrama vehicle. I could go for some quality time with Garbo.

Anyway, that and eating were the only things I stopped for until 6:30am, when I decided it was time to go to bed. And in bed, I read The Amazing Spider-Man Annual number 1, with the Sinister Six. And at around 8am, I decided I wasn't going to get any worthwhile sleep before the maids arrived at 11am. Oh, well. I just hope I'm not too wrecked to-morrow to do the last two pages of the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter.

And when I say "to-morrow", don't worry. I don't have any idea what I'm talking about, either.

I've been rather clumsy to-day. I keep bumping into things, tripping on the various bags, CDs, and books stacked about the room. It's becoming distracting.

Looking over hits I've gotten at Boschen Nesuko lately, I saw that yesterday someone submitted it to a web comic site called The Web Comic List. Apparently someone called "zonarius", and I can't find any information about him or her.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I suppose it's a good thing; I've already gotten some hits from it. But I kind of would like to've been told beforehand, so I could attach a graphic to the profile.

I didn't even know about this list page until this incident. Maybe I would've found it eventually . . . The gods know I could go a significant ways further in promoting my site than I have been. I keep meaning to, but I forget. Honestly, my brain is too, too cluttered.

I hope I'm more energetic after I've slept. To-morrow I don't just want to do a Boschen and Nesuko page. I want to do Nar'eth pages. And maybe some of the other projects I've had bouncing around my head lately.

And I want to pick up the new Tori Amos album. It’s true that I haven't been as enthusiastic about her newer stuff. I still haven't finished watching the Welcome to Sunny Florida DVD, and I wasn't very fond of the new mixes on the Tales of a Librarian collection. But I'm a Tori fan, and one can't be a Tori fan without being at least a little zealous.

Well, it's 6am. I think I'll have some cereal and then see if I can actually get to sleep early.

A few days ago I read this article by Hunter S. Thompson. And to-day he's dead, reportedly having shot himself.

Maybe I'm naive, but this didn't seem like him. Of course, I didn't really know him, but great writers live in your brain, and are real there. This feels a damn nasty trap door.

This is simply, plainly awful. That man deserved better. He, after all, was great.

Last night I saw a commercial where a little girl, obviously reading off a cue card, informed the world that smoking killed her dad, who was her best friend. And then a snappy "act-now-wait-there's-more" man's voice talked about a wondrous and affordable new method for breaking a cigarette habit. From admonishment to enticement in ten seconds. Now that is wondrous.

A couple days ago I saw three cars stop in the middle of the street to form a blockade against a fire truck with its sirens blaring.

That same day I also came across a young man with a Jamaican accent who asked me where he'd get if he kept walking north of Santee. I told him "Nowhere. There's nothing north of here." Which is perfectly true, but he didn't seem satisfied.

My point is no one knows what they're doing. I think that's my point, anyway.

Em, I seem to be quite back to my old schedule. It's about 6:30am and I haven't gone to bed yet. I did make a quesadilla with a crumbled up hard boiled egg in, and hot sauce.

And then I put in a tape.

The RKO logo came up and I thought, "I bet this'll be a Fred and Ginger picture! Please be Fred and Ginger, please be Fred and Ginger, please be Fred and Ginger . . ."

It was Fred and Ginger. Two people who definitely knew what they were doing. The movie was Swing Time, the plot was simultaneously slightly silly, slightly witty, and thoroughly sweet. Fred follows his lucky quarter to a dancing studio, leading to a really great moment where he saves Ginger her job by--what else?--dancing with her. Ginger Rogers looked particularly cute in this movie, with soap suds in her hair or dressed in a translucent cape. When Fred sang he loved her just the way she looks to-night, I agreed with him.

Fred had an amazing solo dance with three shadows of himself projected in the background. His ability was so keen that at first it appeared to be three copies of the same footage--but then slight alterations reveal otherwise. The whole sequence was startlingly good.

The final big dance number is delicate, and lovely. Performed to a song involving Astaire singing about how he won't dance without Rogers, the whole thing travels among just the perfect magnitudes of hints. Oh, it was too sweet. So, yeah, Swing Time's a good movie.

You know, these days I'm noticing what a profound effect great art can have on my entire disposition. Well, I've always been that way, but lately I've been thinking about it. So now I think I'll go read some Spider-Man.

Hiya.

So, let's see . . . I've been working on the Nar'eth winter special, I've been watching movies, I've been reading, and I've been walking. I keep saying, "Oh, it's bloody well time I looked into getting car insurance again," and then I keep not doing it. One thing leads to another, you know . . . I don't even like thinking about the car and what sort of little grand breakdowns I'm likely to experience once I do have it up and running again. But, hey, that's what being part of civilised mutant art farms is all about.

Last night I watched Bela Legosi and Boris Karloff in the 1935 film The Raven. Having little to do with the Poe poem for which it's named, the story involves a mad doctor (Legosi) torturing people with a pit and pendulum, and a room with crushing walls. Yes, it was a perfect movie. Quite unpredictable, really, moving from cool mood moments with an interpretive dance based on the poem while Legosi recites part of it in voice-over, to Karloff having half his face disfigured so he's forced to act as Legosi's henchman, carrying people off in the night to be tortured. It doesn’t get better than that.

Looking at the manga section at Barnes and Noble yesterday, I released that most manga provokes a tingling sensation in my sinuses, making me feel like I might sneeze. There's just such a sweet uniformity to it all, adorable large-eyed androgynous creatures drawn precisely the same way, over and over, with the passion of a mechanic. Don't get me wrong, there's good manga. But looking at that enormous section, I can't help feeling like I'm looking at an army of howitzers in lingerie.

Chevrolet reaches out to a new market:

I've updated Boschen and Nesuko a day early. Boy, this thing goes much better when I'm not sick, and I have a whole day to concentrate on each page.

You know, now that I think about it, it's kind of an anti-Valentine's Day chapter.

Hey, I hate Thursday. And yes, it's because the maids are here. Spoiled brat, am I? Well let's see . . .

Advantages of having maids here; floor gets vacuumed, the little table next to the bed gets dusted, and the sheets might get washed.

Disadvantages; I only get four hours of sleep, I have to somehow get everything off the floor and stuff it into my closet, I have to hide my coffee thermos so it doesn't get washed and all coffee put in it taste like soap for days . . . Okay, the worst part is the sleep thing, not merely for the lack of sleep. But because it bisects my day; I'll spend the time wandering listlessly, until I come back and fall asleep again, often times getting nothing done all day, never actually feeling rested. But, hurrah, the floor's vacuumed.

In better news, I picked up the 1938 Robin Hood DVD a few days ago. Just gorgeous; impressive, lush Technicolor. And Errol Flynn is such a wonderful bastard--I believe he really could waltz in and have a smug little dinner conversation with President Bush--I mean, Prince John--before handily escaping his guards (Marion; "You speak treason!" Robin; "Fluently!").

To think Jimmy Cagney was originally up for the role! I'd have been waiting the whole movie for Sir Guy to get murdered while Robin cackles away into the night. Still, Cagney, who at least was a good actor, would've been better casting than, oh, say, Kevin Costner.

The DVD came with a lot of bonus features, including a wonderful 1938 Movie Experience thing that had a bunch of the shorts and news reels that were typically shown before a movie in 1938. A lot of really sweat swing stuff.

Anyway, I oughtn't even to be pretending wakefulness right now . . . Better start walking . . .

Last night I finally had a dream that didn't end in misfortune somehow--which has been the trend for some time, now. Last night I simply dreamt that Warner Brothers, in the 1930s, was trying to come up with an efficient method of manufacturing magma and using it in movies. I woke up feeling gloriously neutral.

I dunno what sparked the trend. Some of the dreams were fairly innocuous, like the one where I went back in time to try to save Jack Kerouac, and failed. The night before last's was pretty interesting, though. I dreamt I could levitate, which made me safe from the queen alien (from Aliens), who was living in a cave just west of my old neighbourhood. While she was making ready to attack, I visited her to waylay her with a philosophical discussion about the usefulness of having living, happy people around you. I was somewhat dismayed that I couldn't even provide an argument that satisfied myself. So the queen alien, with an army of wolves, managed to devastate the world. I hovered through the empty cities, finding the occasional furtive survivors.

My sister had managed to survive--I noticed her with a group of five other people in front of a church. In fact, I noticed groups of about five people in front of nearly all churches. And all of these people had very tan skin and pale blonde hair. The wolves completely ignored them, and they moved in these odd, meaningless gesticulations, speaking gibberish like Sims characters.

I got a lot done yesterday. And now I want a bagel . . .