Damnit, the Comic-Con's over. If that thing went 365 days a year, I'd be a completely different person with a different routine, social skills, and store of knowledge.

Details of Setsuled's Expedition now follow;

I went early on Thursday, the first day. I woke up at 7am. I'd planned to get ahead on Boschen and Nesuko earlier in the week but never managed it. But I was still up appreciably late on Wednesday to make Thursday morning a drag.

I went early because I wanted to attend DC's talent search at 10:30am. But, to spare you the suspense that fragmented my attention for days, I'll tell you now nothing came of it. Apparently I'm not what DC, Vertigo, or Wildstorm are looking for in an artist, which isn't terribly surprising to me. But my hopes were raised somewhat by some of the really crappy comic book art I'd seen recently, especially in some Star Wars comics I'd been reading (which, I know, isn't DC, but, you know, industry standards, I figured). I remembered snickering and pointing with Tim at a particular drawing of Aayla Secura where her arm seemed to be coming out of her head.

But the talent search thing did mean I had to get up early for the next couple days. The worst was Saturday, because by Friday night, not only was I not ahead with Boschen and Nesuko, I was a little behind. I had to ink the last half of the second to last page, pencil and ink the last page, and colour the last four. By the time Friday night was dead and Saturday morning was climbing from the birthing pit, my styrofoam brain was no longer able to comprehend the meaning of my actions and black lines and colour were sort of oozing their ways into existence on the computer screen. But, by the gods, it got done and I got two hours of sleep, to boot.

When I found, Saturday morning, that I wasn't chosen to be interviewed, I didn't really feel bad. I'd started thinking about how I'm not really much of a good soldier. How I'm better off trying to get my own stuff out there.

I wandered the floor, turned a corner, and saw that a young woman had chosen to walk around topless. She had nice, large-ish breasts, a leather cap, and a long black skirt. She walked like she wanted people to think she was perfectly comfortable and courageous, but something about the way she gripped her boyfriend's hand told me she wasn't at all comfortable.

I was trying to get to hall H to see, I think, Kevin Smith and Richard Kelly or something (I forget). When I saw that there was a queue, I decided not to bother, turned around, and saw that security had already spirited away the topless girl. It's a lucky thing, too; who knows how many boys had already been ruined for honourable marriage by the sight?

I saw the Samurai Stormtrooper on an escalator, but I didn't know what it was until Chris Walsh told me about it. And there were many good garden variety Stormtroopers, a good Darth Maul, and lots and lots of people wearing very comfortable looking Anakin Skywalker costumes. I was also privileged to see a pretty young woman in a Leia Slave costume. But oh, the experience is simply too fleeting.

As for actual celebrities, high profile artists, or writers in attendance, I saw far fewer this year than usual, and those I did see I didn't look for very hard. I'm kind of disappointed I missed David Cronenberg on Thursday, and Bruce Campbell for three days, but I simply didn't feel very excited by the idea of sitting around listening to talented people having nothing much to say, especially when I was operating on so little sleep.

I was hanging around one corridor on Friday, wondering where Tim and his friend Amber had gotten to, when I realised that Jhonen Vasquez was speaking in the room next to me, so I went inside and took a seat.

Vasquez was saying how people normally asked really dumb questions at these things, which is true, and I hoped his speaking out against it would discourage all but the truly interesting questions. But Vasquez himself, aside from coming off as being a neat, intelligent fellow, didn't have a great deal of interest to say. Yes, he was happy to've worked on Invader Zim but, yes, it was a pain in the ass dealing with money-conscious collaborators. And yes, he has ideas for other works involving Johnny and Squee.

I was sort of bemused by how he seemed mildly unhappy that many people admired Johnny (the character), whom he'd meant to be somewhat pathetic.

Later that day, I saw Jill Thompson in a corridor talking to some people, but I didn't stop to listen. But, hey, all ya'll, I was close enough to tackle Jill Thompson. Envy me, yo.

I had a good time attending panels on web comics on Saturday and Sunday. I'd never heard of any of the panellists, which was sort of funny as I've been looking at all sorts of web comics over the past couple of years looking for the rare decent one among millions. The panels were on promoting web comics and earning a living off of them. I didn't really learn much I didn't know, but was reminded of some things I've been too distracted to do.

But it was nice just seeing what a bunch of web comic makers were like. Not only the panellists, but most of the people in the room had web comics. It was sort of nice suddenly feeling like I was part of a society.

Anyway, in case you'd like to know, panellists I saw on Saturday were Bill Barnes, Scott Kurtz, James Kochalka, R Stevens, Dave Kellett, and Kristofer Straub. Sunday, in addition to Bill Barnes and Scott Kurtz, there was Steve Troop, David Willis, Raina Talgemeier, and Andy Bell.

They all seemed like reasonably charming people. Talgemeier, the only girl, was very quiet on the How to Make Money with Web Comics panel because, apparently, the poor young lady doesn't make any money with her web comic. It seems her comic requires a subscription to read, which has driven humanity away. A good thing to remember, I guess. I approached her afterwards and offered my condolences, and snagged the only free comic I'd managed to get at the con, a little promotional copy of her Smile. It was cute, and interesting as apparently it was about her getting her front teeth knocked out when she was younger. I could identify as I wear a false tooth to-day for one I lost playing little league baseball as a kid.

I read her comic while waiting for the trolley to take me back to East County. I'd never seen the trolley station so crowded and the blue and orange lines were all fucked to hell because it seems a Padres game was happening the same day as the last day as the Comic-Con--and the stadium is across the street from the convention centre.

So we had a huge mass of baseball fans packed to bursting in the little red trolley cars along with huge masses of costumed comic fans. A hot, sweaty, uneasy atmosphere it was as two social groups were blended as they were never, ever meant to be.

Reading an entry in Franklin's blog, I decided to go out to-day looking for this new Batman comic. And beheld, I did, the comic book store apocalypse.

I knew my previous regular shop at Parkway Plaza had been gone for weeks. So I went to North County Fair and saw theirs had closed as well.

About two weeks ago, I'd been to Mission Valley Centre and had discovered that a cool anime/manga shop, that'd been there for many years, had been driven out by a comics shop. So I went there as, since the store was new, it was bound to still be in existence. I coyly thought to myself, as I ascended the ramp from the parking garage into the mall, that I oughtn't count on this store still being around, the way things were going. But I was still dumbfounded to discover that the shop was indeed closed.

I remembered a little shop near a hospital where Trisa used to work, so I headed there. Yes, the shop still existed, but as I approached, I was stopped by a sign proclaiming that the store's new hours meant it was now closed on Mondays.

So there will be no comics to-day.

Only yesterday I was surrounded by an unimaginably vast universe of comics, and now I can't find one damned shop. So suddenly and violently have I been expelled from heaven. Is it 2006 yet?

The new Boschen and Nesuko is up. Fuck, I'm tired. The text is swimming and my hands are like cheap props. Time to sleep? For a little while . . .

See the man on the street about your boobs.

See the Decemberists about Chewbacca.

It's a strange world, Sandy.

Was just at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and noticed some sort of "Books For Our Troops" affair against the wall. Decorated with copious red, white, and blue ribbon was a table and a R2D2-sized cardboard box filled with paperback books, which customers donated to troops in exchange for a free drink.

Simple, uncoffeed Me, thought, "Oh, what a nice way to support troops and literature at the same time."

Then I looked in the box and laughed. It was filled with Nora Roberts, Danielle Steele, and a couple books from a so-called "Super Romance" series. Maybe they ought to've called it "Kindling For Our Troops".

It strikes me somehow as a metaphor for the insensitivity of those who support the war. It would take someone with a Harlequin romance brain to foist Harlequin romance on professional soldiers.

They ought to send them with a note; "Bow down before the fluff you serve."

I think I'll take a cue from Caitlin and try writing one of these things when I'm not awake.

I did the first page of the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter yesterday and it wasn't easy. Which was frustrating, mainly because it didn't make sense for it to be difficult. I mean, I was a good boy and finished the script on Wednesday, storyboarded the first four pages on Thursday, so ought to have been sitting pretty for Friday. But I think I was sick or something.

I was strangely tired and was brained by the dinner I had with my parents and sister at Olive Garden. All that pasta seemed to weigh me down. In the middle of the day I'd had a pretty easy time with the first two panels, which I thought were gonna be the most difficult, and then after dinner I was struggling to put down one line after another for what ought to have been easy panels.

I will say this, though--yesterday was a peculiarly good day for hands. Some days, no matter how many times I erase and start over, pore over photographs and look at my own hand, I can't manage the hand shapes I want. But yesterday, hands were my bitch. Seemed I could make them do anything I wanted which, come to think of it, may merely mean my perception was fucked.

I actually, honest to goodness, gave up halfway through inking the damn thing. Which is like stopping at the 87% mark. I couldn't help it; I felt like there were tons of dishonest lines.

I asked myself what I felt like doing and realised I simply wanted to lie around and watch a movie. I started watching Hellboy but realised what I really wanted was to see a movie I hadn't seen. What I wanted was fresh discourse with an artwork, which, I realised last night, is absolutely vital to my existence.

So I put in High Noon. I liked it a lot. Definitely my favourite Gary Cooper performance so far, although I still don't think I'm appreciating in him what I'm supposed to be appreciating. He usually seems to me just timid and sort of lifeless. I mean, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda had the thing where they could pull back into a kind of bashfulness but, unlike Cooper, they could also spike up into focused passion. That's the thing--Cooper never seemed like he could focus.

His performance in High Noon was helped a little by the fact that he actually had a bleeding ulcer at the time, so there was an extra bit of honest, wincing pain on his face. But mostly, he was merely good enough. Which may've been best in the movie about an ugly, hot, hopeless day in a shoddy little town. Grace Kelly was also a wonderful presence, kind of a good counterpoint of anachronism with her perfect prettiness and accent.

I saw Howl's Moving Castle on Thursday, which was better than Roger Ebert's review had made it out to be. Sure, it wasn't as innovative as Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. But it was a nice, plain, decent fantasy.

What sort of fantasy? Well, if you have to be an old woman, what would be the best way you could image being one? Perhaps where you're only an old woman because of a curse--you're really young and beautiful--you live in a beautiful wilderness, but can magically reach any shop quickly, and helping you is an obedient and cute little boy who seems to serve no other purpose than being cute and obedient. And also, there's a gorgeous, powerful young man living with you and falling in love with you.

So maybe there's a bit of indulgence in this story. But that's okay. I mean, how many fantasy stories do we have glamorising young manhood? This was kind of a neat change of pace.

I heard about London at around 5am or so. I was just about to go to sleep when I saw Moi's post. I read a few web sites talking about it, and then tried to sleep. Found I couldn't, and switched on the television, first to CNN and MSNBC. I found both, of course, to be comprised of the usual awkward, insensitive readers clumsily wielding their technology. As with 9/11, I wasn't able to find unobtrusive coverage until I got to the BBC.

I hope everyone recovers from this and that this is the end of it. But, hell, I also hope everyone gets to come back from the dead one day. Well-wishes feel rather pointless when you hear about people losing all their limbs, reduced from decent beings of regular human endeavour to peculiar, helpless packages of flesh and blood.

It has my mind turning on a lot of things. I sat in Denny's reading The Call of Cthulhu and thought about how all the beauty and joy of humanity is a small thing in a cold and vast universe. When something like this happens, it's like a hole in our pretty, loose knit scarves.

Probably it was planned by al-Qaida. But what killed those people was fire and kinetics. Al-Qaida may think it controls these things but they'll never get what they want by it. It's not remotely reasonable to expect this will grant them the power they must want. If they are truly the ones responsible, their motives can only be completely delusional, small, and human.

All this shows is that a number of people now shall not be able to continue or obtain happy or fulfilling lives. All this means is that people are dead. All other effects are transitory and insubstantial. And that's why terrorism doesn't work.

I had an incredibly nice day.

Dreamt I lived with a young Joan Crawford in a cold, perpetually night shrouded city with a train. Trains have sure been appearing in my dreams a lot lately.

So I woke up and decided to see a movie. Sitting there contemplating, I thought to myself, "I could see a film of hotly contested virtue. I could see War of the Worlds, or Land of the Dead, and find out where I stand on one of these intriguingly premised movies."

Yes, well and good but, well, I went to see My Summer of Love instead. Am I a chump? What, for picking the movie with the pretty teenage lesbians? I think not.

Roger Ebert's review kind of spoiled the ending, although, part of me thinks I'd have enjoyed the movie less if I hadn't have had a basic idea of where things were going. I dunno. The movie doesn't end as grim as the Ebert review had me anticipating so maybe the foreboding added to the delicacy of some of the scenes.

Anyway, the movie uses merely as a context the story of a girl finding she fancies the gorgeous new rich girl in town. Mona is at the centre of two extremes presented by her brother and the rich girl, Tamsin. Her brother's become Born Again and follows Christ with a nauseating brand of fervour. While Tamsin, meanwhile . . . Well, I won't spoil it.

Suffice to say, I was extremely pleased to find a movie celebrating earnestness as heroism in a world of rampant cynicism and lobotomised zealousness.

Afterwards, I drove down University Avenue in the sunset, listening to Charlie Parker. I can't remember the last time I had a more relaxing day.

New Boschen and Nesuko. It feels shorter than it is. Maybe because there're no eight panel pages with books of dialogue crammed into skinny pink rectangles. Er, enjoy!

In my dream Tuesday night, I was driving just west of Parkway Plaza at night, around the Trolley station. I there encountered Herbie (the "lovebug"). I got out of my car just moments before it and Herbie engaged in a terrifying melee.

The sounds of pounding and screeching metal filled the black atmosphere of the empty night. It was fortunate the Trolley station lot would be so deserted at that hour else scores of passers-by could not help but be pulverised by the grappling vehicles. Before long, orange flames were slashing at the sky as the once car-shaped fighters were now reduced to writhing, desperate strips of gnarled black metal.

But Herbie died and I felt a moment's pride in my own car before it, too, succumbed to fatal injuries.

Anyway, I did a "Lara Croft" version of Nar'eth for the latest Nebari.net pin-up.

Sunday, for no reason at all, I did two pages of Boschen and Nesuko. I don't usually do that unless I'm behind, but I was feeling oddly fired up or something.

Saturday, I'd been thinking maybe I'd fallen out of love with rock music. I was driving along, listening to Charlie Parker, and I started thinking about the keen little depth charges rock used to drop in my mental waters that of late only jazz and Tchaikovsky seem able to do. But Sunday's good Boschen and Nesuko day also ended up being a good rock day. Which was maybe what egged me on to keep drawing, anyway.

I started off with The Dresden Dolls, then Elvis Costello's Blood and Chocolate, Rasputina's Frustration Plantation, David Bowie's Hunky Dory, and finished the rock album section with Morrissey's Vauxhall and I before switching to movie soundtracks (Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo soundtrack and John Williams' Revenge of the Sith). You know, you'd think two pages would require more albums. But maybe the shortness of the list has to do with both pages using the same colour palette. Although I did most of the colouring without music . . . hmm . . .

Aren't I exciting?

Scientology's been a hot topic for derision lately and, sure, it deserves it. I considered myself somewhat ignorant about the particulars of the cult, so I read around a bit on it last week.

I heartily recommend reading William S. Burroughs' thoughts on the subject. If you haven't already.

It's hard to put away groceries when Lucky the Cat is sitting there with an expression on his face like, "Hey, man, what're you doin'? You still have some explaining to do!"

I don't know what I need to explain, what trespass I may've unwittingly made in the cat world. Oh well. He seems to realise I cannot know, for he now gazes, sober, at the trees behind the house.

And about Jimmy Cagney, I say his body was like a dog but his head like a cat's.

I watched The Public Enemy last night. There were a lot of simply good movies in the 1930s. Movies that were just nice stories without worrying about being mega-watt blockbleeders but adhering to a no-sloppy philosophy.

It's the movie that made Cagney a star and it's got the grapefruit in the face scene. And a surprisingly small role for Jean Harlow.

A good bunch of guys who happen to be bootleggers and occasionally robbers and vandals. Done well.

So there's this new Batman movie out and it's pretty good. Batman, for you Kevin Mahers out there, was originally a comic book character who's become extremely popular over the past sixty years and has seen many incarnations. In the media of moving pictures (and no, The Dark Knight Returns doesn't work as a flip book), Batman Begins is the best Batman in nearly every way.

There's a plain canniness about Christopher Nolan's direction and, for the most part, editing is excellently communicative. In fact, especially during the first half of the movie, it can be said that Nolan's direction sinks comfortably into the styrofoam cup holders of our perceptions, and we feel a direct feed with the world of Bruce Wayne.

It's a movie that sits you down and broaches the discussion, "So, just how would a fellow get to be Batman?" And it's an intelligent and stimulating discussion. Christian Bale is excellent at getting the emotions for each segment, and the emotional core of every step on the road to Batmanness is consequentially felt by us. It's two things--there's a more realistic setting and society than previous Batmans and Bale's keen inhabitation of the story. When his parents' killer is on trial, and Wayne goes through a series of very pivotal decisions, Bale brings across the conflict on the face while still being the college misfit Wayne is at this point.

Set design, especially the area of Gotham known as "The Narrows", is beautiful, sombre, and unabashedly Blade Runner-inspired. Which is real good.

By now, actually, I'm sure you've read all about the movie's general greatness. There were only a couple of complaints I had about the film . . . The fight scenes were mostly disappointingly muddled, filmed seemingly with long lenses zoomed in to where you can see only confusing arm and leg motions. Sometimes, that's appropriate, but other times, it's only frustrating. The screenplay had mainly decent dialogue, and the incredible supporting cast made it seem often brilliant. But, as Robyn pointed out, there's this cloying "rhyming" problem, where characters keep repeating certain lines all through the movie. I suppose it's effective for driving certain points home, but I gotta think there're better ways of doing it.

So that's said.

I took a quiz made by Christa Faust, the result of which, as you can see, I have good reason to be proud of;


You are Philip Marlowe


Which Harboiled Dick Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

The new Boschen and Nesuko's up. This one's for the ladies [who're attracted to men. May also apply to men who're attracted to men in participating locations].

What a long, wasted day. Like it was eaten by a whale.

My grandmother had artery surgery recently so she needs me to drive her places, and Thursday morning she decided it was absolutely necessary to go TV shopping at Best Buy. The bulk of the day was then spent listening to Salesman Raoul and a connoisseur passer-by explain the finer points of plasma versus LCD/projection. Over and over again.

Having to run errands for my grandmother on Tuesday made me a day behind, so I worked on Boschen and Nesuko until 6am, before having to get up early for the maids on Thursday.

Ugh. So Thursday night I made damn sure to get the penultimate page done, even though I have to get up early again to-day. I'll probably sleep most of the day after that and not start the final page until evening. Oh, wait, I have to go back to Best Buy to-morrow to sign something . . . I say, ugh. I'm sure it'll all work out somehow . . .

At least when I switched on the television this evening I had Jennifer Connelly to look at, in the trailer for her new mundane horror movie.

The best part of Requiem for a Dream was ogling her, am I right? Hehe.

Seriously, kids, say no to drugs.

It makes me happy that Star Wars is beating Cinderella Man in the box office. Now maybe Ronny Howard'll go on Oprah and cry into her bosom.

I've spent too much time playing Dr. Mario this evening. Over and over, I lose. The game sucks. Right? Right.

I've watched all the special features on the new DVD release of Raging Bull. I was amazed by how much of the dialogue between Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro was improvised. But not as amazed as I was by the real Jake LaMotta's enthusiastic cooperation not only with the making of the movie, but also with the documentaries. He really seems to like and respect the movie. Maybe I'm wrong, but to me that seems indicative of a great deal of maturation on his part. I mean, to enjoy this movie that lays bare his most vulnerable self as well as his most despicable--from portrayals of his violent paranoia and his grovelling self abuse in prison, it seems hardly the image the brutish champion fighter would want presented.

There was an eerie moment in the documentary that had shots of DeNiro in the movie delivering the On the Waterfront monologue inter-cut with shots of LaMotta performing the same monologue. LaMotta delivers it not like he's the character saying it but like he's a movie fan repeating lines that moved him deeply. As though he's saying, "You hear him? How he puts it? He coulda been a contender. He could've been somebody."

It made me think again about the relevance of that monologue in the movie. Obviously, unlike Brando's character, LaMotta in fact was a contender. More than that, a champion. I like to think that it means that to the truly passionate, the accomplishment of goals cannot ever truly be fulfilling.

Things must've really mellowed out after the events of the movie. LaMotta said he even went to the premiere with Vicky, his second wife played by Cathy Moriarty in the movie. He said that, when they came out of the movie, he asked Vicky if he was really that bad. She told him, "You were worse."

I actually drove my car yesterday. It started right up, even though I've not driven it since mid-December. I got an oil change and some gas and to-morrow I get the dratted brake lights fixed. Which shall be free, which is good, as the thirty dollars on oil and gas spent yesterday reminded me of one of the great things about not using a car. Which would be--not spending thirty dollars on intangible, practically frivolous things.

But, gods, it's too easy . . . The route I took to get gas and return was maybe a five minute drive. It would have taken me half the day to walk it. I love the feeling. No wonder I used to casually drive to North County for a cup of coffee, or to La Jolla for a cinnamon roll.

I guess it'll be nice to able to get to La Jolla again. The trolley goes downtown, where, obviously, there're plenty of things available. But Tower Records is in La Jolla, as well as one of the few Landmark cinemas in town.

I really oughta start working on the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter. I have several rather complex plans for it, but I've learned my lesson about trying to write these things before I've had enough coffee. I used to try to write them early in the day, but the past several chapters, I've made sure it was well after I've had at least three coffees.

Ugh, I don't wanna get up early to-morrow. Stupid car. I hope it grows legs with expensive shoes and spats and starts laughing furiously about land deals while puffing a big cigar. I hope it then falls over on its ragged mattress and realises that those gay nights are but a dream of yesterday, and to-day is the mouldy walls of plaster all round. Then maybe my car will have learned something and will come back to me with sense and a willingness to cooperate and run without gas.

Oh, I'm sorry, car, that was harsh of me. You're doing your best, you've taken me over very long, lethargic distances. Gods, crossing a thousand miles is only slightly more difficult than sleeping. It's unfortunate somehow.

Under one skirt.

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.