I find myself using iTunes now to listen to my mp3s--I had to install the programme when I got my iPod, but I hadn't used it for anything besides putting stuff on my iPod. Then, a few days ago, I saw my sister had taken to using it and I realised I could use it to play the m4a files Sonya* had sent me, which I'd so far only been playing in the Media Player Classic that comes with the Combined Community Codec pack (I point Mac users to MPlayer), which can play anything but doesn't have a handy playlist feature. I wish WinAmp would play the m4a files, though, because fuck if iTunes isn't one of the most bloated programmes this side of Adobe Acrobat (by the way, those of you who think you're stuck with Acrobat when reading pdf files, I point you to Foxit). It takes iTunes nearly thirty seconds just to open, whereas with WinAmp, it's just a matter of clicking the icon and blip, it's open, with a full playlist of all my mp3s, plus a snazzy amateur-made Evangelion skin I downloaded years ago. iTunes can't even seem to display all my mp3s at once, and its playlists thing is a slog.

Anyway, I finished Daughter of Hounds last night. I don't know if I'd call it Caitlin R. Kiernan's best novel (though it might be), but it's definitely the most fun. I mentioned Tolkien and C.S. Lewis before, but the more I think about it, the more I perceive a definite Alice's Adventures in Wonderland influence, which is something you'd think I'd have noticed before considering I happened to've been reading both books at the same time. And the similarities become stronger the further one gets into Daughter of Hounds, as both books feature precocious young girls confronting citizens of what seems at one level to be a non-sensical, dreamlike fantasy world, but with sublevels of curious, rarefied logic.

There's also a fair bit of Lewis Carroll charm, in the almost Caterpillar-like character of the Bailiff**, and one might see Odd Willie as a twisted version of the White Knight, at least as seen through Emmie's perspective--Emmie being one of the precocious young girl protagonists. In fact, scenes of six year-old Soldier*** being treated to sweets by the Bailiff while having conversations and thoughts about identity and dreams--coming up against the Bailiff's inscrutable, vaguely dangerous, but almost sedentary strangeness--comes off as an interesting play on Alice's anxiety over having changed so many times in the day that she's hardly sure who she is anymore. The similarities become even stronger when we discover what the Bailiff's done to Soldier, and what Soldier needs to do in order to fix it.

I've pointed out to Caitlin recently that her characters seem to spend a lot of time arguing with one another. I really became aware of this while reading Daughter of Hounds as I noticed it's rare for any character to say anything that isn't somehow a dismissal of what another character had just asserted. In her previous books, this had a tendency to ramp up tension as the characters become angrier and angrier with each other. I'd feel bad for them--I'd frequently want to grab one and say to herhimit, "Why are you wasting the energy?" In fact, characters frequently seem to ask each other this question. In Daughter of Hounds, there are actually a few characters, most notably the Bailiff, who seem able to keep arguments going without noticeably expending energy, which has the effect of being somewhat funny, and there's a consequential broadening of the environment, somehow.

And it's a book of beautiful prose. It made me just about every kind of happy while reading it.

So, to-day I think I may just try to catch up on colouring. I'm really far behind on it, and it's no surprise--I spent four hours colouring just one panel last night. I suspect that this is a combination of the greater amount of detail I'm putting into the work, the slightly more complicated techniques I came up with while working on Moving Innocent, and the fact that I'm working with images a few thousand pixels larger than I've ever worked with before. Gods, this computer needs more memory.


*I told Sonya I'd try using footnotes in emulation of her.
**The Bailiff uses a kukri at one point. I love it.
***This is the character portrayed, somewhat inaccurately, I think, on the book's cover with teased-out, 1980s-ish hair. I personally imagined it more unkempt and kept out of the way in a pony tail, as Soldier seems to consider herself utilitarian and no-nonsense. You get the impression that she's got hair-trigger reflexes and she's always ready to kill, and yet she seems to spend a lot of time talking in nearly every confrontation in which we see her, giving her an interesting, unselfconsciously diplomatic nature.

I don't know what I'd have done without Daughter of Hounds yesterday. It was Thursday and I was kind of broke, but instead of just killing three hours, I had a really nice time sitting on a mall bench reading the book.

And then, at around 12:40am last night, the power went off in my neighbourhood. Again. And it always seems to happen in the middle of the night. There must be some frayed cable somewhere people're too lazy to fix.

Anyway, I spent another three hours with Daughter of Hounds at a Denny's. What a really nice book. I felt proud Caitlín's my friend. I've frequently noticed a J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis influence in her work, but I think this is the first time she seemed like a writer like them.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I'm finished, and I'm only thirty pages away. But I thought I should note it was the first time in years where I felt like a book was my companion through the day. It took me back to when I was going to school and stealing as many hours as possible on whatever book I was reading, and just letting my consciousness disappear in it. Dostoevsky, Bronte, Tolkien, and Kiernan have done that for me.

Okay. Pencilled two pages. That's not so bad for eight hours. Now at least I won't feel as bad about Thursday preventing me from getting anything done.

I hadn't wanted to go out all night, but at 2am I realised I actually needed groceries. When I came back, I had some Earl Grey tea while playing Doom 2 and listening to Family Guy. Afterwards, I started reading the new Sirenia Digest, which is so far reminding me of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Thirty minutes to sleep . . . I'll read. I've been reading more lately, and more books at once. I read a bit of Daughter of Hounds, Maggie the Mechanic, Saiyuki, Anne Sexton, and of course, I'm reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland yet again. This after I recently viewed the Disney movie on DVD. Alice, as a character, really got short-changed in that film--she's more a picture with random quotes from the book, utterly stripped of human motivation, than she is a character. But I do still think it looks beautiful--the years Disney's team spent designing it certainly paid off.

Everything's Okay When You're a Moron

Posted by Nancy Pelosi on YouTube; "The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform holds a hearing: 'Allegations of Misconduct at the General Services Administration.' The hearing inquires about allegations that GSA Administrator Lurita Doan failed to follow proper procedures for awarding federal contracts, attempted to intervene in contract negotiations, and engaged in partisan political activities on federal property. Rep. Braley questions GSA head Doan on a political briefing given at GSA headquarters."

Blugh. My life feels weirdly cluttered lately. At least there's never a dull moment. I've got a tug of war inside me for my feelings about progress on my current project. There's no denying I'm moving a lot slower than I ever did with Boschen and Nesuko. But on the other hand, I'd say the quality of work is definitely better. I've been allowing myself to stop whenever I really don't feel up to drawing anymore. Which has been nice, but it's left me feeling less intimate with the story than when I was constantly in the thick of things. But on the other hand, it's made me automatically daydream a lot more about the future of the story, which is actually really useful.

Oh--so why is my life so cluttered right now? I guess it just seems like a lot of little things, and a lot of it's probably in my head. Yesterday, I woke up early because there was an irregular tapping at my window that had been fighting with my slumber for hours. I thought maybe it was a raven, and nothing more, but it turned out to be hail. I found the outside world was having a blustery day. Lucky the cat still wanted out, though, especially when he saw a dead leaf fleeing in terror across the patio. So I let him out, and he promptly ran back inside as a wave of dead leaf soldiers descended upon him.

I had to take him to the vet on Monday to replace his plastic claws. Now both he and Victoria have fresh sets of purple toes. So, on Monday, there was that, and also my failed attempt to buy some minutes for my phone--gods, people in Santee must be the most pathetic people in the world. I showed up at the Verizon store to wait thirty minutes while the three clerks helped three customers before I gave up, went to the mall, bought the first volume of Saiyuki and coffee, and came back to find the same customers were still working the clerks, nearly an hour later, asking questions like, "How big are the phones?" and other things one could easily find through a website or one of the numerous pamphlets. Adding to the frustration was the store layout, which is in the vein of the "grazing free-for-all" customer-service philosophy wherein no queues are defined and everyone's expected to wander about, anxiously checking now and then to see if an associate's become available, under the quaint delusion that representatives are always available. One woman stopped a salesman to ask if there'd be much of a wait.

"I'll be with you as soon as I'm finished helping these people here."

"Well," said the woman, "do you think I should get Cherry Chocolate or Champagne?"

I couldn't make out the salesperson's response, but it sounded like he started sucking happily at the egg she handed him.

I waited another twenty minutes before giving up again. Fucking people.

Anyway, I'd better focus again on pencilling the fifteenth page of this thing . . .

I felt weirdly weary all Sunday, like I had lead weights stapled everywhere, especially on my head. I didn't, and still don't, feel up to especially complex activities or thoughts.

It was in this spirit that I went to see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Which, as Ninja Turtles media go, was probably the best piece of work so far, except for maybe the comic. I haven't read a lot of the comic, but it seems so far the only version where the writers relaxed and didn't seem to feel like they were trying very hard to hit certain notes before they finished.

The new movie had this problem, seen in the kind of overreaching sentimentality that makes you want to spend a few days eating oatmeal and playing Solitaire. But, as all the positive reviews have been saying, the tension between Leonardo and Raphael actually manages to be genuinely interesting and their climactic confrontation is impressive and absorbing. The movie mostly looks good, too, with shadowy city nights, burnished brick walls, flaring fluorescents, and realistically textured turtle skin. The character designs look similar to those of The Incredibles, with Mr. Winters, the villain voiced by Patrick Stewart, a near dead ringer for Mister Incredible. The design scheme seems to've benefited the turtles themselves the most--usually I don't like the slightly oversized hands and feet that seem to be in vogue nowadays, but it works for the heroes as it is somewhat turtle-esque. Unfortunately, part of this design scheme seems to be an edict that all women need look like eight year-old twig girls. I'm not just speaking as a guy who likes voluptuous women. April O'Neil just looks wrong.

I was a huge Ninja Turtles fan as a kid, and the movie did please that kid who's been dismantled and compacted for storage somewhere in my freezer heart. I'm sort of in the mood now to dig out the old Nintendo games and action figures . . .

But I think for now just I'll find something beautiful and slow to watch and hope this funk I'm in is gone when I wake up to-morrow.

I think this movie is destined for more parodies than Brokeback Mountain;

In the five hours of sleep I managed to obtain to-day, I dreamt I lived in a one storey, brown stucco apartment complex. People had begun to disappear, and somehow it was determined that a man living at the end of one row of apartments was killing them. He never appeared to leave his apartment, but everyone knew he was a cannibal and that he had metal teeth.

So one night, I and two of the tenants, Donald Duck and Suzanne Somers, decided to break into the man's home and kill him. His apartment was dark and lit by only a few candles casting orange light on the walls with strangely hard edged, arching shadows. But we caught the man and started dismembering him, as somehow we knew that if he was not thoroughly torn apart, he would revive. I distinctly remember grabbing his mandible and maxilla in each hand, feeling the steel teeth under my fingers, and pulling. Eventually there were brains on the floor like soggy ramen with blood resembling Easter egg dye in the cracks. I put some seaweed in the brain matter and asked the man if he could hear me and if he could still think.

"Yes," he said. "But my thoughts are going through the seaweed and it's difficult.

I took the seaweed away and worked at more completely dispersing his matter. The next day, I visited Suzanne Somers in her apartment where she was entertaining guests. She couldn't speak of last night before the outsiders, but she thanked me for saving her life.

I felt like an angry water balloon yesterday. Bloated. I don't know why, but after my first pot of coffee, I had to make urine several times, and my head felt like it was going to burst. I felt like water or blood was going to leak from my ears every time I leaned over the page of comic I was working on.

Fuck, I was chomping at the bit to get work done, too. But all I managed was to pencil two pages over the course of seven hours. I actually had to completely erase and start over on two panels, something I almost never have to do. I finally had to call it quits at around 9:20pm when a difficult angle on a crowd shot was utterly defeating my cognisance. I felt like there was a hex on me. If so, fess up now--which of you was it? Maybe it was a general hex on comic artists cast by someone I don't even know . . . Anonymously hexed; how depressing. Que mala suerte.

I did manage to find an 85% cocoa chocolate bar last night. That's dark, baby, yeah. I also re-watched the first episode of Dirty Pair because Tim'd found a new fansubbed version--apparently it's being released on DVD in Japan. Which would explain why Sunrise took the theme off YouTube.

Anyway, it's one of them fucking Thursdays, so I better open up negotiations with sleep. Though I have been managing to get to bed as early as 5am lately. So I may well have six hours of slumber ahead of me . . . By the way:

DOOM!

So Zack Snyder's the latest example of a young, overrated Hollywood director hitting it big. And like Brett Ratner before him, not only does Snyder look like a weasely prick (shown here being Ernie to Frank Miller's Bert), but he also has a weasely prick name. I woke up early to-day as I found myself thinking up the names we'll see directing future low-brow, high-earner zeppelins;

Mega-Successful Weasely Prick Directors;

Mick Lecker
Gus Shatner
Chett Snipper
Tod Tucher
Ky Goila
Cliff Tekker
Cid Cutter
Jet Filnan
Scot Kiltner
Lyn Bobner
Win Casher
Jack Slammer
Ham Jacker
Kip Comer
Pop Zipper
Brad Pulner

As usual, I've been watching things on the screens. I just a couple hours ago watched Sanjuro for the first time and found it to be a very satisfying experience. I bought it last week as part of Criterion's new Yojimbo/Sanjuro package. I had the old Criterion edition of Yojimbo, but I wanted the new one for its commentary and superior image quality --I watched it before Sanjuro and found it well worth the purchase.

I suppose I neglected seeing Sanjuro for so long because I'd heard it was inferior to Yojimbo, but I guess a Kurosawa movie's still a Kurosawa movie--it's really hard to judge degrees of brilliance for a filmmaker who invariably draws me completely into his films.

It was nice to hear Masaru Sato reprise his raucous theme for Sanjuro from the previous film, and Toshiro Mifune slouching into the group of awkward boy samurais was nice, but it is a very different film from Yojimbo. Where Yojimbo is a dusty, corrupt village and its denizens, Sanjuro is a series of formal rooms and gardens populated by stiff samurai and politicians. There's a more conventional beauty to it, and I loved shots of samurais framed by flowers.

The movie features several actors from the first film in different roles, even recognisable stars like Takashi Shimura and Tatsuya Nakadai. Though Shimura's role as the brewer in the first film was almost invisible and Nakadai both looked and acted almost like a different person. Still, the showdown was inevitably between him and Mifune once again, and very bloody for a Kurosawa movie--and even bloodier for this otherwise bloodless and almost gentle film. There seems to have been more of an attempt to comment on the function of heroic psychopaths in a society as one character refers to Sanjuro as a "sword that is never sheathed" while noting that "a sheathed sword is more powerful".

Let's see . . . I'm about nine episodes into Tenchi Muyo: Galaxy Police. Mostly it's been disappointing, not one episode even resembling the brilliant first episode in terms of writing or animation. But my interest was renewed when I found out the character named NB is in fact a robotic version of Nabishin from Excel Saga, because both series' were directed by Shinichi Watanabe. So I'll stick it out a little longer . . .

Also recently I've watched Young Sherlock Holmes and The Wicker Man, and my thoughts on them may be found here and here, where you can see me being forward with Sonya.

I would also add to my comments about Young Sherlock Holmes this question for all who've seen both that movie and this adaptation of Silver Blaze; am I the only one who remembers Moriarty's first name is "James"?

Here's an old favourite, guilty pleasure. Only the first two episodes, unfortunately;

Something that needs more attention; a debunking of the recent New York Times article that attempts to discredit the acknowledged severity of Global Warming and Al Gore.

I saw 300 last night. It was okay.

Actually, except for some mildly pleasant action sequences, my overall reaction to the movie was about as dispassionate as its dull colour palette was pretty much grey. But that could just be me--I am, after all, the guy who never screamed on rollercoasters, and I don't claim to have the slightest understanding of audience mentality. My main interest in seeing the film, actually, was to be able to engage in discussions of the various controversies it seems to've provoked.

One criticism that intrigued me in particular was Robyn's seeming contention that the movie was sort of anti-feminist. Having seen it now, it's my opinion that the movie was not meant to be anti-feminist, in a sense, it isn't anti-feminist, but in practice, it is. About the same thing can be said of some of its other negative aspects; it doesn't mean to be racist, it isn't racist, but in practice, it is. It doesn't mean to be homophobic, it isn't homophobic, but it is.

I think the key to all this is a sentiment director Zack Snyder has expressed in interviews, as in this Suicide Girls interview; "No it’s not for the kids! Fuck the kids! I got some shit I want to show you!"

He wants fun, R-rated movies. Movies with fucked up shit for people mature enough to handle fucked up shit. The only trouble is, most adults these days aren't mature enough to handle fucked up shit, as the giggling from the audience during 300's rape scene demonstrated to me.

You see, I can appreciate a story where we can acknowledge and even admire the military superiority of a few Spartan men over thousands of Persian slaves, at the same time that we recognise that the Spartans tended to kill a lot of their babies and had rigid customs regarding the roles of men and women that invariably put women on a lower peg. And in the Suicide Girls interview, Snyder says, "I always said 'We're not Spartans in the movie.' They throw their kids off cliffs and beat the snot out of them. Whenever I could I tried to remind the audience, 'Guess what? You're not a Spartan. It is fun to be with them and hang out with them. But it ends in death on the battlefield. That’s how that road goes.'"

There are only two problems with this; for one thing, lots of people do beat the snot out of their kids. For another, audiences have short memories. During the slow motion march of the rippling muscled Spartans, they either tend not to remember or tend to forgive a previous scene where baby skulls sat at the bottom of a cliff.

So also there's a very obvious problem with the fact that the movie is white, heterosexual good guys versus stormtrooper-like, homosexual, physically deformed black people. The movie's cheerfully stylised--the heroes are impossibly beautiful naked people, the villains are over-the-top ugly and/or bizarre. That in itself is okay, but coupling dumb fun with obviously loaded social issues seems irresponsible to me. In a story that obviously cherry picked only the facts that filmmakers found most exciting, it's hard to argue it had to be this way. If you choose to make the Spartans fight without armour, in order to show off their muscles, why must you also choose to portray evil as the condoning of homosexuality? Especially since homosexuality was apparently accepted in Sparta. It might also have been worth noting that Spartan women enjoyed greater rights and freedoms than in most other societies at the time.

I wonder if General Pace saw 300 over the weekend before his Chicago Tribune interview Monday when he infamously said "I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts."

Here's Alice in Wonderland, the 1903 film.

Celebrating Birthdays this day, March 10;

Osama bin Laden and Chuck Norris.

Also born to-day was Barry Fitzgerald, who perhaps somewhere is raising a glass for poor humanity.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Monday's featured article on Wikipedia was The Battle of Ceresole, which happened to occur on my birthday, April 11, four hundred thirty-five years before I was born. Maybe it's fitting that the date featured a "marvellously confused" and exceptionally bloody battle.

Well, it wasn't a violent day for me Monday, though it did seem cluttered. I planted some flowers for my aunt and I learned I have no interest in gardening.

Sunday night, at Sonya's recommendation, I watched Lost Horizon, a Frank Capra movie from 1937, which turned out to be an interestingly pro-communism movie--just one of the many reasons for the film's alternate cuts through the years.

It was a decent movie all the way through, but my favourite part was the beginning, which was a great adventure escape sequence and a rather obvious inspiration for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A small group of assorted characters narrowly escape a bloody revolution in China by boarding a large passenger plane on a mobbed airfield--however, unbeknownst to them, the pilot's been killed and the plane hijacked by a strange Chinese man.

The movie cost a rather amazing four million dollars, and it shows in the surprisingly realistic footage of the plane and its misadventures through the Himalayas. Eventually, the plane crashes in a snowstorm and the survivors are led by a mysterious group of people to Shangri-la, where much of the tension's drained from the movie as realistic, dangerous flight through exotic locales is replaced by simplistic philosophical drama among indoor sets that come off as a resort hotel.

Sonya and I had got to talking about the film because we were discussing Edward Everett Horton, who I seem to remember having seen in at least two more 1930s movies every time I think of him. And he was good as the nervous, high-strung palaeontologist in this film. Also good were Ronald Colman and Spock's mom, Jane Wyatt, who looked fantastic naked and swimming amongst water lilies while Colman for some reason made a scarecrow with her clothing.

As I said, a good movie, and Capra's characteristic plea for good will towards all men comes through plainly (though the film certainly isn't flattering to women, even for 1937).

Sheesh, 3am already and I didn't do half the things I meant to yesterday . . . I need caffeine.

I guess it'll be a while before another new Heroes . . . Last night's episode wasn't wholly bad, except it brought the show much closer to X-Men rip-off status, introducing a character who's basically Mystique, and showing Sylar to essentially be Magneto. And that's not even mentioning the disappointing diffusion of the Horn Rimmed Glasses with erased memory plot thread. Wouldn't it have been more interesting if, for a while at least, he really didn't know he'd helped Claire escape?

Last night I watched A Good Year, a movie from last year my mother and sister recommended I watch. Since I'd just been having a conversation with Sonya about the classic films of Ridley Scott, I thought it couldn't hurt to see what the old boy was up to these days.

It didn't really hurt at all. A Good Year is a film rife with flaws, but they go down easily, mostly because Scott remains a brilliant photographer. Before A Good Year, the most recent Ridley Scott movie I'd seen was Gladiator, which also starred Russell Crowe. In fact, I wondered if his character in the new film, Max Skinner, was meant to be a descendant of Maximus.

A Good Year is not about the tire company, by the way. Crowe in fact plays in it a vaguely cutthroat, wealthy investment expert who as a boy played by Freddie Highmore would spend holidays with his uncle Albert Finney at a beautiful chateau in the French countryside. Max returns as an adult when he learns of his uncle's death and that he's apparently inherited the chateau. At first Max means to sell the place at the highest price possible, but over the course of the movie he learns through quiet osmosis the importance of love and hanging out with beautiful women at a beautiful French chateau, prompting him to leave his life in England of hanging around with beautiful women and making lots of money by standing around and smirking at lines and numbers.

Did I mention all the beautiful women in the movie? None of them are characters in the movie sense, but more like characters in the sexual role play sense--Marion Cotillard is Fanny Chenal, the remote beauty from the nearby village who's notoriously "choosy", a fact everyone continues to agree upon even after she sleeps with Max on the first date. There's Abbie Cornish as the banal, pretty American girl Christie Roberts who shows up to be Crowe's long-lost hot cousin. And there's my favourite--the unfortunately named but gorgeous Archie Panjabi as Max's assistant Gemma, who's always smirking with him and subtly giddy at the idea of sleeping with him.



Yet, as I said, the movie doesn't hurt. Usually bad writing makes me angry, but the photography in this film was so beautiful and the pace so leisurely, I couldn't feel worse than relaxed. I even chuckled at some of the jokes.

Maybe part of it is that Scott's style is still curiously cold, even in the context of a romantic comedy. A casual lunch conversation looks like it was filmed with eight different cameras, and we cut between angles with odd rapidity. Then there are static, low angle shots of shadowed rooms and dust in the air. This movie, I think, would have been better as a book of photographs.

Here's a surprisingly elusive anime, considering its notoriety.

Of the original, 1985 Dirty Pair series, only clips of the opening and ending themes seem to be available on YouTube. The show itself isn't available on DVD, and the episodes Tim downloaded are of such poor quality--they look like they come from twenty year old VHS copies. But I can't stop watching them--each episode is a perfectly paced piece of action and adventure.

I've also been watching the mid-90s Dirty Pair Flash series, which is good, but not quite as crisp. It doesn't have the same heady feeling of artists treading enthusiastically into the unknown.

Heads up, folks--Lost Highway's gonna be on IFC at 10pm PT to-night.

I got nothing to say at this 6am. But here's one of my favourite movies. It's the movie that made me appreciate the word "sucker".

I dreamt I was Christmas shopping just after nightfall, and I was coming out of a redbrick Target when I saw a homeless cat with whom I'd gone to school. I asked the cat how he was doing, and he said he was fine--I was careful to keep a distance, though, because although I was on friendly terms with the cat, he was feral and had a tendency to lash out for no apparent reason.

I then noticed an enormous spider web across the sidewalk, which I'd seen the last time I'd spoken to the cat outside this Target a few years earlier. "I can't believe this spider web's still here!" I said.

"What spider web?" said the cat.

"How couldn't you have noticed this--it's enormous!" The cat looked to where I was pointing and was duly impressed.

"I wonder what the spider looked like," I said. "It must be long dead by now."

But it wasn't--I saw it the next instant. It was a dark, Swamp Thing green and about twelve inches long. It looked like a small man with disproportionately long arms which ended in curved claws. He used these to cling to the webbing like a sloth. Somehow I could tell he was blind and very dangerous.

I told the cat not to eat it.

I just had myself two--excuse me--damn fine cups of coffee. Specifically, David Lynch coffee. I was so excited when the package showed up that I had to make a pot right away.

It came in a neat black metal cylinder that I'll definitely be saving. The coffee itself tastes a little sweet, which I ought to've expected. Sort of butterscotchy. I had to order it pre-ground, so I have to wonder how much better it'd taste freshly ground.

Progress on my new project has slowed in the past couple days. But Sonya and I have been e-mailing like rabbits--she reviewed what I've been working on and gave me a very encouraging thumbs up, so I'll call that progress.

Not too much else to mention right now, except that I'm very excited Boschen and Nesuko's finally been mentioned in Wikipedia--only as a footnote in the entry for kukri, but still, that's plenty cool. Anytime Boschen and Nesuko's mentioned alongside Dracula, I'm happy.

Here's an anime series I've only seen the first episode of--I've had it on the computer for years. I only recently got access to the rest of the series. But it's one of the best first episodes of anything I've ever seen.

Another show I've been watching lately;

From Ran. Gods, I love that movie.

Fucking Thursday. I'm so fucking tired. But you're just a day, a day among seven, and you'll not best me. So here come this post.



Sonya wished me to discuss Shaun of the Dead, so I shall do so. A fan of the movie, and also relatively unfamiliar with zombie movies in general, she said, "I'm sure there were clichés being tweaked I didn't even see." On this subject, I can't be a big help, at least not compared to some people I know (Robyn). I've seen the original Night of the Living Dead, the original Dawn of the Dead, the Evil Dead movies, Peter Jackson's Braindead, I Walked with a Zombie, 28 Days Later, and many zombie movie episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. From this limited experience, the only clichés I can really see being messed with is the general reactions ordinary people have to the slow, lumbering, flesh-eating dead. Shaun of the Dead imagines--rightly, I think--that many people wouldn't be as panicked by the presence of these easily avoidable creatures as many movies have led us to believe.

Going from this premise, the movie is almost a domestic comedy, where the existence of zombies becomes a device for probing Shaun's relationships with his friends, girlfriend, and mother. A well used device--the zombies reveal things about character other threats wouldn't have--it's a crisis, but not like an invading foreign army as it allows more time for discussion. Not like natural disasters, because zombie movements are more predictable and controllable. So we can have a plausible scene of awkward cordiality as Shaun's group runs into another group led by a casual acquaintance of Shaun's. And we can meanwhile have scenes exploring the nature of Shaun's relationship with his step father, as well as scenes exploring the nature of Shaun's symbiotic laziness with his friend Ed. This is creeping, vaguely silly crises--a catastrophe with room for conversations. It's a very fun movie.



St. Sisyphus asked that I also discuss The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A good movie, I thought, but not nearly as good as Once Upon a Time in the West. Both movies had beautiful visuals, but Once Upon a Time in the West was more about the visuals. Plus, it had a female character. Unless it's an Akira Kurosawa movie, I tend to have a reflexive dislike for movies without at least one prominent female character. My mind starts to wander a little easier.

The absence of a woman is especially felt in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I think. The centrepiece of the film is really the relationship between Blondie (Clint Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach), which at times reminded me of prison sex between otherwise heterosexual men. I can't be the first person to comment on the sort of homoeroticism of the film. Blondie and Tuco begin the movie as partners in an underhanded scheme, but when one betrays the other, Tuco becomes Blondie's bitter rival, tracking the quiet man down and lovingly smoking the used cigars he finds in his wake;




When Tuco does catch Blondie, he sadistically pushes him hatless through the desert, playing games with guns and water. Eastwood's so pretty in the movie, I kept getting a weird feeling I was seeing a woman being sexually abused.

I must say, young Eastwood's prettiness was one of the film's unexpected virtues. Just look at him;



A scarf? In the desert? This is indeed a doll for Tuco, the titular Ugly.

Anyway, character-wise, Tuco was the only one who had any development. As Roger Ebert notes in his review, Eli Wallach has a lot more lines than anyone else, and one of the film's most interesting scenes is Tuco's confrontation with his estranged, priest brother. Aside from this, the movie has a few great action sequences, a nice greed-adventure story about buried treasure, and extremely boring digression about a bridge blowing up.

But the climactic shoot-out is wonderful, staged in a massive graveyard. This is a movie that must be seen in widescreen. For all those who still don't understand the concept (and believe it or not, I know a few such people), let's compare;

Widescreen:


And cropped for approximately average television ratio:

I can't believe it's already 4:30 am. The night's much too short. What's my day--er, night like, you may ask?

Well, Wednesday I woke at 3:30pm or so. I took a shower and then ate breakfast ("Old Fashioned" Quaker oat meal) and started drinking the first pot of coffee of the day while watching Hardball. I finished eating halfway through Olbermann, and went to my room to start drawing.

Yes, days ago I completed a script for the new project and did layouts, and now I've begun actual production. To-day I pencilled two pages and inked one, finishing about fifteen minutes after The Colbert Report, at around 12:15am. I then ate lunch (some excellent spinach quiche my aunt had made), then went to the grocery store to pick up some olive oil and water for my grandmother. I remembered there's now a Wal-Mart open 24 hours at Grossmont Centre, and at 1:30am went there and browsed the movie section, surprised at the lack of good Disney movies, which, after a conversation with Sonya, was what I was in the mood for. Instead, I bought a copy of The Castle of Cagliostro and came back here to watch part of Kagemusha, which I've been nursing for a few nights. I've watched the movie twice since getting the DVD, and now I'm taking it slow, drinking in all the lingering, beautiful shots. It's a movie with far less tension than Ran, and easy to appreciate as a series of paintings.

I stopped watching at around 3:30am and ate dinner (more quiche) before rewatching an episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (episode 11/13)--I'm watching the series in chronological order this time, which is an interesting experience. It's sort of like having two television shows in one. Things fit together differently, and lots of things make more sense, but I'm noticing a few mysteries, such as the unexplained talking cat in episode 01/11.

I've watched quite a few things lately that I haven't gotten around to discussing here. Here's a list--I may talk about some or all of them eventually;

Dirty Pair
Dirty Pair Flash
Excel Saga (rewatching)
Goldfinger (rewatched for the first time in years--mostly disappointing)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Irresponsible Captain Tylor (an old favourite I'm rewatching)
Peter Jackson's King Kong
Last Exile
School Rumble ni gekki
Shaun of the Dead
Tenchi Muyo: Galaxy Police
Veronica Mars; Season One (I believe this is the best show on television right now)

Know this;

I think I've taken too many beverages . . . I just finished a cup of tea, I had a coke with lunch, and that was just after I'd come from the mall with another cup of tea. Now I'm tired of going to and from the bathroom--speaking of which . . .

And I'm back.

Also from the mall, I brought back with me Tom Waits' collection of b-sides, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, and the new, 25th anniversary edition of The Last Unicorn, the animated movie from 1983. Yes, there's finally a DVD edition I felt comfortable buying, even though Peter S. Beagle still isn't getting paid (though he will, apparently, if you buy it through that website). And despite the fact that the word "damn" has been edited out of the audio, few and innocuous though the instances were that it was spoken. Apparently this is for all the parents who aren't buying the movie because they remember it from their own childhood, and who are afraid to let their children hear even swearwords that're allowed on network television. And who think the word itself is inherently worse than Mommy Fortuna's death at the talons of the harpy whose three human-like breasts hang naked on her chest. You know, sometimes it's fun trying to picture the bizarre, self-contradictory monster censorship is evidently meant for. A hydra whose heads are forever multiplying as they compulsively decapitate one another.

Anyway, the new DVD is not only widescreen but has also been remastered decently enough. And it's a pleasure to watch--all the animators, all five or six of them, are listed in the credits, so it makes sense that animation is only sporadically fluid. That's really okay, though--often times, the key to good animation is not to emulate real-world motion, but to use artistic judgement to decide when to animate, and when to let the audience drink in the picture. Mostly good judgement is used here, and I'm not surprised Hayao Miyazaki snatched this team up in the late 80s.

There's a limited colour palette, which at times gives the movie an interesting look, a sort of stained glass quality. Other times, as in night scenes where characters are coloured as brightly as in day scenes, it looks like someone got their Colorforms sets mixed up. Of course, this is largely because paint is expensive, and before the whole process was moved to computers, artists would have to work with thousands of individual paint colours to get the right image. And this was a low budget movie. The only other real problem with it is the horrible America songs, which are much like nails on a chalkboard, especially when Mia Farrow and Jeff Bridges start singing.

Those two do a decent job at acting, though. Even better are Alan Arkin, Rene Auberjonois, Angela Lansbury, and most especially Christopher Lee as King Haggard. I got lost in the movie whenever he started talking.

It's well-written, with a screenplay by Beagle. It seems very much focused on themes of immortality, entropy, and death. Mommy Fortuna keeps the harpy captive despite knowing it shall escape and kill her one day because the harpy is immortal and will always remember Fortuna. Molly laments finding a unicorn now that she's no longer a young girl. The unicorn is most distressed upon becoming human by the fact that she can feel her body dying. King Haggard's life grows ever more dreary, and he greedily grasps at every tiny drop of happiness. Even the tree tells Schmendrick that a tree's love is the greatest because it lasts forever.

It's a good movie. I have a feeling the book's even better. I hope Beagle reacquires the rights and manages to make it into a movie franchise, as he apparently is trying to do.

On an unrelated note, here's a bit of fun (NSFW).

I dreamt a couple of nights ago I was in an empty, very modern, sterile white house at night among some small jagged desert hills. There was no furniture, only very stark lines of charcoal shadow and pale blue light on the walls.

I needed to use the bathroom, but opening the door I found a sort of swamp diorama resembling a cross between Skull Island in the original King Kong and Degobah. I could sense various small creatures in there, among them a fat lizard vaguely like Bill from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a long limbed frog I knew to be poisonous, and a band of five tiny humans on an expedition. I knew also that there was a large and terrible creature of indeterminate shape and size in the darkness intent on devouring the creatures. I needed the light to save them, but I could only flip it on at quick intervals because I knew the creature would then see his prey and zero in. I only managed to save the frog and the lizard before I was forced to flee.

To-day's been dry, draining, and frustrating. After only three hours of sleep, I awoke to the sound of a cat crying in terror upstairs because my grandmother had hired a creepy bearded man who listens to Rush Limbaugh to paint my aunt's room. Lucky the cat slunk quickly into my room and under my bed, and Victoria followed soon after. She didn't seem to know where to go, so I put her in my closet. Unfortunately, I had to leave for the Thursday maid thing, and when I returned I found Victoria gone.

Fortunately, when my aunt came home, we found Victoria crying, trapped in a room upstairs.

And I stink. I hate going out during the day--it's amazing what a little sunlight does. I did get a chance to visit Marty, though. We discussed the modern Spanish speaking director triumvirate of Guillermo del Toro, Pedro Almodovar, and Alfonso Cuaron, but he couldn't help me in my quest to find The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which I've been trying to track down for two days so I can read Sonya's post about the film. I had it in my hand not a week ago, but foolishly rationalised that I might buy two DVDs for the same price as an invariably expensive Criterion DVD. Yesterday, that copy was no longer on the shelf, and I've since been unable to find it at three stores. So I ordered it off Amazon--a used copy ten dollars cheaper than the normal price but now it'll be at least a week . . .

Fuck, I'm tired. And irritable. No reason to be as angry as I am, except all my senses feel muffled. Fuckity fuck.

The connexions no-one makes; the questions no-one asks.

Here's an anime series I haven't watched in years. But the impending devastation of life on Earth has had me thinking about it lately . . .

Here is a post by someone loosely linking the recent Mooninite scandal to the witch trials. I'm inclined to think he has a point, less, maybe, about Boston than about how people react to the Weird. On the other hand, this whole thing's beginning to border on the Lovecraftian.

I think I'm nearly ready to write a real script for this new project. I hope it's not that I'm just getting impatient. It's true; my brain feels liked winged worms dancing in my skull to-day. I'll see what happens. It's not like I don't have three beginnings of scripts from the last three times I felt like this.

I worked on some concept art to-day. This story's going to take place entirely on one alien world, and I actually felt like designing alien flora and fauna. Then I thought about how folklore would revolve around certain animals and their normal effect on the lives of indigenous peoples. I wanted to make some robust stuff for this, because one of my Big Ideas is to contrast it with the imposition of mythology alien to the world.

To-day I drew a landscape with three characters in the foreground, with some trees, mountains, and a fort in the background. I'm finding a lot of the look for this section of the story is being influenced by Ran and, to a lesser extent, Kagemusha. I've been thinking a lot about the concept paintings Kurosawa did before making both movies, and the ways he would use colour. It's having a big impact on my tree designs especially, though I don't think it'd be clear to anyone who didn't know.

I'm thinking of changing the name of one of the main characters. Part of me is strongly warning me not to, as I know I almost always start to hate my own ideas if I spend too much time with them. Which is another reason I'm chomping at the bit about the script lately.

Darby O'Gill and the Little People has put me in the mood for The Quiet Man to-night . . . Last night I watched two thirds of Sixteen Candles, and I may finish it to-night just because I feel vaguely duty bound, but the movie was sort of bothering me. I kept watching because of Molly Ringwald--watching her is an experience I'm finding to be something like watching a beautiful animal at the zoo. I've been trying to remedy my inexperience with 1980s John Hughes movies, so Sixteen Candles follows last week's viewing of The Breakfast Club, which was a much better, though certainly not perfect movie. It had interesting character stuff, and was only truly bad for Ally Sheedy's stupid makeover.

I'd seen Pretty in Pink a while ago, and I found it and The Breakfast Club intriguing for it's portrayal of pretty kids who don't exactly behave realistically, but behave with a certain imperceptible logic that doesn't seem to exist anywhere else. It's like a lost style, and it's sort of intriguing.

Last night I watched Darby O'Gill and the Little People. It was recommended to me by Sonya, who staked her entire reputation as a poet and her integrity and virtue as a woman on this being the greatest, most perfect artefact of cinema to ever be conceived by human hands and minds. I think she promised to wear Leia's metal bikini for weeks if I thought she was wrong.

Or maybe she didn't. Maybe she recommended it with a few strong caveats, actually. My memory's hazy on the subject. She did recommend it, anyway.

I'd seen the movie when I was a kid, and I barely remembered it, beyond that I was frightened by the banshees. Last night I found it to be a good movie, and I also found that the banshee and death coach sequences are still effectively spooky--as is mentioned in just about every review I've read of the movie.

Although it was made in 1959, Darby O'Gill and the Little People was shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio (most Hollywood movies had been shot in widescreen for about six years at that point). This fact, combined with the fact that it was filmed in colour and set in Ireland, all brought to mind The Quiet Man, made seven years earlier. This was somewhat of an unfortunate juxtaposition, as The Quiet Man was shot largely in Ireland while most of Darby O'Gill's exteriors were clearly California. Not that there were many revealing exteriors, as the director, Robert Stevenson, seemed to favour frequent close-ups and even long shots seemed peculiarly close. There's a positively claustrophobic feeling to establishing shots of the village early in the film.

Albert Sharpe is good as Darby, and Sean Connery and Janet Munro are adequate as the requisite, stock pair of pretty lovers, though Connery's huge facial expressions are somewhat off-putting in the gratuitous close-ups.

But the movie really gets on its feet when Darby falls into an old well hidden among some hilltop ruins and finds himself in the leprechaun kingdom. This movie's special effects are extraordinary, particularly considering it was made in 1959. Most of the shots of Darby with the little leprechauns are utterly seamless. No rear projection or process shots were used--instead the technique of force perspective was used, placing Albert Sharpe close to the camera and the leprechaun actors much further away than they appeared. Exactly the same technique used by Peter Jackson in his Lord of the Rings movies--in fact, I was surprised to find several similarities to the new Lord of the Rings movies. A scene later in the film, of Darby finding his daughter injured on a stormy night among the ruins, is almost precisely like the Weathertop Nazgul confrontation scene in Fellowship of the Ring, with Darby standing between his daughter and a looming, sinister cloaked banshee.

Story wise, the movie was good as far as Darby and the leprechauns were concerned. Darby's contest with the leprechaun king has much the tone of a good folktale, and events of Darby's adventures are completely absorbing and fearlessly fantastic. The love story between Connery and Munro was rote, phoney, and somewhat misogynistic.

The movie also featured Estelle Winwood, whose name I only just learned, but looked very familiar to me. Looking at her IMDb profile, I found I'd seen her in many movies, but I mainly remembered her for her small role in John Huston's The Misfits, where she plays a church lady who takes money from Marilyn Monroe as Monroe numbly but fervently attempts to feed salvation.

But, of course, my earliest memory of Estelle actually comes from this.

Everything will be all right.

This is what happens when you fuck with performance artists;



The face of corporate greed, ladies and gentlemen, is wreathed in dreadlocks.

From Dictionary.com;

hoax
–noun
1. something intended to deceive or defraud: The Piltdown man was a scientific hoax.

So why is the Mooninite marketing incident refered to as hoax all the fuck over the place?

If hoax implies intent . . . just what deception was intended? Just what is implied beyond "rude Mooninite"? The fact that it's coupled with an obvious electronic device? Would it really be more likely for a bomb accompanied by a rude drawing to be obviously electronic than not? Anyone with a brain cell would say "no." So, are we to then expect ambiguous public signage to be accompanied by disclaimers?

Two innocent kids are already in jail for what the quivering jelly Boston apparently has for a mayor referred to as "corporate greed". I've looked at one of the kids' web sites. Yeah, obviously corporate greed. Obviously a big, fucking danger. Or maybe I need to be a rich old jackass to see it that way.

If anyone goes to prison for this, even if it's Ted Turner, I think it may be the most 1984-like incursion on the right to free speech yet.

I'm not encouraged by almost universal news coverage of the event portraying it as a narrowly avoided danger or a malicious stunt. So far, Keith Olbermann's the only newsperson I've seen covering it as the piece of ridiculousness it is.

Odd Lite Brite advertisements don't scare me. Piggish government bureaucrats who arrest people for them do.

This blog is not a bomb.



. . . Though some may be fooled.

Hey, Homeland Security, I got a bridge to sell ya . . .

When poets lie, Bjork turns to science;



That's wires for ya. But what of YouTube?

I guess I've been watching plenty of television. Heroes has started up again--we're two episodes into the current, er, half-season. The first episode was interesting with cringe-inducing dialogue. The second had inoffensive dialogue but with a focus on unconvincing and abrupt character development. Caitlin accurately described it as "soap-opera tedium". But at least Christopher Eccleston got to flex his acting-muscles a little.

Speaking of Caitlin, I've just finished reading the latest issue of her Sirenia Digest, which featured one story by her and one story by Sonya.

It goes without saying at this point that both authors effectively created interesting atmosphere with language. Though while the brilliance is regular, it invariably packs a fresh punch.

Sonya's "A Voice in Caves" might have as easily been called "White Narcissus", I think, which she might appreciate for her recent viewing of Black Narcissus. Her story is about a very curious, very mysterious relationship between two people that nonetheless reflects a keen understanding of, and ability to render clear semblances of, human nature. It's quite beautiful, sad, and sort of wonderfully cold.

"The Sphinx's Kiss", Caitlin's story, is an interesting play on Oscar Wilde's "Salome", set almost entirely in a scene reminiscent of the orgy sequence from Eyes Wide Shut, but with an entirely male cast, and featuring a satisfying supernatural quality that I always longed for in the Stanley Kubrick movie.

I've been reading plenty of Caitlin lately as I'm also about 1/8th through reading Daughter of Hounds, which has been very good so far. Lately, before going to sleep, I've been reading Daughter of Hounds until I hit a break, then I read one chapter of Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura's Lady Snowblood, and finish with one Anne Sexton poem.

I purchased Sexton's Complete Poems some time ago, but it'll be ages before I finish as I'm just not someone who can read and digest multiple poems very quickly. My brain works too slowly. Or I'm all about the slow and sensuous, yeah. I got your sexy tortoise right here, you naughty hare, with your fluffy tail . . .

Which reminds me, I have to sleep and be up early for a dentist's appointment to-morrow. I'll close by saying last night I read Sexton's "With Mercy for the Greedy", which contains a line Caitlin often quotes; "Need is not quite belief." I'm not sure I ever felt an active need to believe in Christ, though I can understand wanting to be conscious after death, and wanting something providing spiritual insurance for this stupid, self destructive species. But like the lady says . . .

Here's a rather impressive demonstration of Oblivion's physics engine;

I've got to get my mind off the Valerie Plame thing. I can't help it--I just love the idea that the straw to finally break the camel's back is a complicated story about a female spy. And I so can't wait to see Karl Rove and Dick Cheney squirm on the witness stand (anyone doubting Cheney's perennial dickishness need watch only this.)

But I've got to get my mind on this new project. It's not like I haven't been working on it. I just feel like I could be doing more if my mind wasn't all over the place lately. On the other hand, I think a lot of the day-dreaming I've been doing has been helpful. But there's a lot of bean-counting world building to do. Well, "bean-counting" may be overstating it. I have been compiling material since halfway through last year and I still feel I need more. At least it's starting to feel real in my brain. I think that I've drawn maps and landscapes has been very helpful in that regard.

I think I need to stop changing details about my main characters . . . Despite that, I'm getting pretty solidly behind the central dilemmas of one character. I've always intended the story to centre on two specific characters, but for a long time I thought it was going to be from the POV of one, but now I see the story's definitely from the POV of the other. Figuring that out solved a lot.

I know I'm being vague. But if I had to pitch this, I'd say it's Seven Samurai meets The Picture of Dorian Gray meets The Asphalt Jungle meets Citizen Kane meets Princess Mononoke. Which all makes sense from my POV.

I occasionally feel like I'm over-thinking the setup and have started writing three scripts, each proving to me that I've underthought the setup. But I have a good feeling about the next script.

Anyway, I've of course been watching plenty of movies lately. One I watched a couple of weeks ago, called Sex and Fury, was a fun 1970s exploitation samurai film starring Reiko Ike as a swordswoman occasionally taken to fighting in the nude. There's not very much to say about the movie, other than that it had several surprisingly beautiful visuals, nice action sequences, plenty of nice flesh, and an amazing star in Reiko Ike. No matter how absurd and obviously exploitive things got, Ike always seemed utterly committed to the performance. Closeup shots of her eyes were invariably arresting.

She's Chlamydoselachus anguineus, seen here in much shallower waters than usual. Unfortunately, she died shortly after this video was taken.

When I saw Pan's Labyrinth, there were two of those people in the audience that have to say "Hmm" loudly every time some crucial bit of plot is revealed. I love the Landmark in Hillcrest, but gods the clientele can be silly. Don't get me wrong, it's better than the regular theatres where hicks might chatter for the whole movie. But I marvel at the people who giggled at a casual reference to marijuana in Volver, or the guy who laughed loudly when Captain Vidal said, "Don't fuck with me." Yeah, okay, we understand you get it, you're not a rube. Well, not in the way you think.

Last night I watched A Canterbury Tale and Strangers with Candy, an odd double feature to be sure, but a good one. It was followed by two strange dreams;

In the first, I found myself accustomed to zombies wandering about town and even in my home at night. I was used to swerving to avoid them while driving, and I was used to hurrying past them to get to my room. But one night, I was disturbed to find all the zombies had disappeared. I cautiously entered this dark house, and saw no one. But when I reached for a light switch, I found a warm rotting hand instead--I woke up and was immediately frightened by the rumpled sheets next to me, which looked like a large, sobbing face.

I went back to sleep, and this time dreamt I was running around Baghdad with a large pulse rifle. Aeryn Sun was holding onto me, her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. She wouldn't let go, but she seemed to get angry whenever the alignment of genitals made mine happy. War torn Baghdad at times morphed into grocery store aisles.

I suppose now's as good a time as any for me to finally get around to discussing Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way comes. It's about two thirteen year-old boys and the father of one who encounter a sinister carnival and engage in a battle of good versus evil, innocence versus sin, nature versus perversion. There's a general innocence about the novel, as the first portion describes an idyllic 1950s town with normal and loving families for the protagonists. Some might take the narrative as ironic, but I took it as absolutely sincere--There's a genuine love for how things naturally are for families and communities which is established to reveal the evil inherent in an agency bent on making the young prematurely old and giving unnatural youth to the mothers and fathers.

The set stage made a lot more sense to me when I discovered the novel was based on a screenplay Bradbury had written for Gene Kelly. As Charles Halloway, I'd instantly accept any of the pithy speeches Gene Kelly made, and I'd wholly believe he could defeat evil with his laughter.

The novel still works as interplay of the opposing forces. Some of the atmosphere created around the carnival's Mr Dark and the Dust Witch is palpably sinister.

What's it mean when an almost universally praised, heavily advertised movie is released in only one cinema in the county during a bizarre period of extremely cold weather? It means I was unwilling to wait outside behind sixty people on Monday to catch the 9:45pm showing of Pan's Labyrinth. So I saw Volver instead, and showed up an hour early Tuesday to catch Pan's Labyrinth.

Volver was decently entertaining with a disappointing ending. It's been compared to Arsenic and Old Lace, but it's not quite that fun . . . It begins in a cemetery on a windy day where of scores of women, honouring a custom, are cleaning tombstones of relatives. There's an impressive moment where wind knocks a cup over precisely on cue and we're introduced to three of the principal characters; Sole, Raimunda, and Raimunda's daughter Paula. Raimunda and Sole's deceased mother, whose tomb they're cleaning in the opening scene, soon returns from the dead, frightening Sole as she comes down the stairs of a dead aunt's house in one of the movie's best scenes--Sole seemed so perfectly terrified at even the idea of seeing a dead person walking around that she turns and runs.

Primarily, the movie's about these four characters, and more especially about Raimunda. But the beginning of the movie seems to establish a somewhat morbidly playful element about the dead and about murder that's sadly abandoned halfway through. But even sadder is the abandonment of another element which I won't reveal, as it's the ending.

I must say I adored the movie's closing credits, though, which consisted of a series of animated patterns and flowers reminiscent of the title sequences designed by Saul Bass or Maurice Binder. Though I think it would be fair to argue that such fantastic credit designs are at some discord with a movie that turns out to be a fairly mundane domestic drama.

Anyway, Pan's Labyrinth was a more satisfying movie. This is only the second Guillermo del Toro movie I've seen, the other being Hellboy, and I was struck by how many little pieces of imagery the two films had in common. I have the extended version of Hellboy on DVD, and on the director's commentary track Guillermo talks about how much he loves a scene of Rasputin being shaved with a straight razor, and how much it pained him to cut the scene from the theatrical release. Well, he certainly makes up for it in Pan's Labyrinth, wherein scenes of Captain Vidal shaving, using camera angles and movements similar to the Rasputin shaving scene, are used several times in the film, even leading to an overt bit of visual plot.

Doug Jones, who wore the Abe Sapien suit in Hellboy, plays two strange humanoid creatures in Pan's Labyrinth; "The Faun" (or the titular Pan), and "The Pale Man", whose removable eyeballs were also reminiscent of Rasputin, though the pale man goes a step creepier by keeping his eyes in the palms of his hands. And when we first see him sitting silently and straight backed, the image is more reminiscent of Kroenen from Hellboy.

The Pale Man's discovered by Ofelia, a young girl who's the movie's main protagonist, and for whose name I think we can give Guillermo some credit for boldness. Ofelia's such a loaded name that one can't help looking for Hamlet references the whole movie. The opening shot suggests Ofelia does end up tragically dead, but in her sensibility and situation Ofelia's far more readily reminiscent of Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Maybe there's also a play on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in her initial meeting with the faun . . .

Despite what the trailers might suggest, the film seems to spend far less time in Pan's fantastic world than it does on the "real" circumstance of the Spanish Civil War's aftermath, as Ofelia's stepfather, Captain Vidal, is constantly at odds with guerrilla fighters, remnants of the losing faction. The movie doesn't seem to suggest one world is any more relevant than the other, in fact at times the suggestion seems to be that Pan truly is everything and manipulates even the good old practical "real" world.

Someone is apparently making a Ghostbusters with less personality.

On a happier note, here's why I love Barney Frank.

I recently purchased a copy of Dario Argento's Suspiria, a really nice three disk set, one disk of which is the movie's original soundtrack by Goblin.

I'd seen Supiria once before when I was in high school. My friend, Marty, who was my high school film teacher, had a poster in his class room of the movie with the tagline, "The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92."

"So the end's kind of a letdown?" I said. Marty said nothing could be further from the truth and let me borrow his VHS copy, and I was duly impressed by the film. But not as impressed as I was by this DVD version, which is widescreen and a much cleaner print, preserving the crisp and strange colour palette for which the film is so well known.

Actually, more than an enjoyable experience of fear, I found the movie great more for how beautiful it is, with its art nouveau set designs and boldly strange green, red, and blue lighting effects.

I think it was in The Proposition that I first noticed Danny Huston and I thought to myself, "Another interesting and talented person named Huston? Surely not another of Walter Huston's talented descendents." And yet he is--now there's Walter, John, Angelica, and Danny.

He's good at being abrupt and sort of cerebral. Aside from The Proposition, where he played an intellectual psychopathic outlaw, he was also memorable as the Austrian emperor in Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, and as a rich art collector in Children of Men.

His scene in that last movie is one of its most striking, partly because it's quiet and sort of brobdingnagianly elegant in the midst of a movie that is otherwise an impressive, breakneck exercise of overlapping Orwellian dystopia with brilliantly humanistic action sequences.

Children of Men does a marvellous job of maintaining tension without fatiguing the viewer to the point of losing herhisits suspension of disbelief. A lot of the ads compare the movie to Blade Runner, but it's not quite that good, and indeed a different sort of movie. Blade Runner may in many ways seem to be a credible glimpse of the future, but the movie's not really about trying to predict the future. Blade Runner's about existentialism and dark fantasy, while Children of Men is solidly a tale of humans reacting to the very credible future the movie creates. It's about politics and the ways in which an insurmountable and inexplicable catastrophe can produce totalitarianism through people's willingness to be led away from grim reality. In fact, in many ways, Children of Men is the movie V for Vendetta ought to have been.

In their rush to create anti-Bush propaganda, the makers of the V for Vendetta movie missed the comic book's message about humanity's fear of deadly chaos driving it to create a firm system of Knowns. Though while the V for Vendetta comic pits the impoverished totalitarian state against an agent of anarchy, Alfonso Cuarón's protagonists are more in the camp of vague hope and intrinsic optimism for human nature. Perhaps there's even a spiritual element, as the idea of a miraculous pregnancy to save humanity seems clearly allegorical.

But fortunately (for me, anyway), the movie's more about how people react under the stress of desperate adventures, which is a lot of fun. Clive Owen's great as always, and so is Claire-Hope Ashitey as the pregnant woman. Danny Huston's brief scene is interesting--as a well placed government official, he's used his wealth and resources to save works of art from ravaging mobs, so his otherwise austere white home is decorated with Michelangelo's David and Picasso's Guernica. A pair of pet oversized dogs completes the impression rather nicely of a home I bet the film's art designer would probably have designed for himself.

You're probably aware I love books by Caitlin R. Kiernan, so it's not surprising I've begun reading her new book, Daughter of Hounds, with great relish. But this book seems to be drawing even more praise than usual for the frequently acclaimed Kiernan. So I have no qualms bumping it to the top of my reading list.

This means, of course, that I finished reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I loved, and which I dearly wish I could have seen the non-existent film version of with Gene Kelly. But my thoughts on that book shall have to wait as I'm inordinately sleepy right now . . . My thoughts on so many things have been waiting, in fact; there's quite a backlog. Did you know I saw Children of Men last week? It was great. I also wanted to talk about my recent viewings of Suspiria and Sex and Fury . . .

But, anyway, Daughter of Hounds is a go.

I made a fanfic for Sonya Taaffe's story "Moving Nameless". The fanfic is online now and can be found here.

Considering how long it took me to make, it's a very quick read . . .

Another trip to the dentist's to-day, this time for two fillings, and there'll be two more on the eighteenth. The dentist seemed dismayed at being able to put tooth coloured filling in only one tooth, having to make do with silver on the other. I might have told him neon green filling in that rear molar wouldn't be noticed before my absent front tooth and the pervasive discolouration.

Saliva kept building in my mouth and I reflexively swallowed a few times while he was drilling away tooth decay. "Sorry," I said, "I seem to be having a problem with saliva building up."

"You're not the only one," he said. I probably oughtn't read too much into that. But whatever happened to the days of doctors being cold and impersonal? The dentist is way too friendly, in any case. He shook my hand and congratulated me on the "work" I'd done. Do I transmit the vibe that I need positive reinforcement for my performance as Guy Lying There With His Mouth Open?

Note, doctors of the world. For you I am not a human being. I am an animal.

I just had dinner at my mother's house and she posed the question, "If you were going to die to-morrow, and you could spend the day with just one person, who would it be?" I chose Scarlett Johansson because I heard she likes sex.

Note, Scarlett Johansson. For you I am not a human being. I am an animal.

I always look forward to Valentine's Day because I like the red and violet everywhere, and all the angry couples at the mall fill me with schadenfreude. Also, the Valentine's Day episodes of Futurama are for whatever reason among the best of the series. I love the episode with the killer Lucy Liu bots, and the episode where Fry gets his head attached to Amy's body is my favourite episode of the whole series. It kills me every time that he chooses that moment to break up with her, for only a list of ridiculous reasons.

But it was the episode I watched a few nights ago, where Planet Express delivered barrels of Sweethearts to Omicron Persei VIII, that gave me a weird and strong craving for those same hearts. Even after seeing them being made, in the episode, of bone meal and earwax, and thinking that made sense. So I bought a box at CVS last night. I think it creeped out the girl at the register.

I suppose it wasn't the best thing to eat the night before a trip to the dentist. Why aren't there Night Dentists? I hardly got any sleep to-day . . . But at least I'm finished with pencil and ink on Moving Innocent. Now it's all over but the colouring. Well, and the title page, for which I seem to be leaning towards a vaguely Valentine's Day theme, which wasn't exactly on purpose, but if Sonya takes it as a Valentine's Day gift, I'll call that a fringe benefit.

I'm sleepy, so I don't think I could do anything now that required a lot of concentration. But fortunately, the palette's established for much of the colouring I need to do. On the other hand, I have taken the fanfic as an opportunity to be experimental with colouring. On the proboscis, I've already mapped out the really experimental stuff with the inking. We shall see . . .

Happy Birthday, David Bowie. Here's a song Caitlin brought to mind;

From a BBC story:

"The US Army is to apologise to the families of officers killed or wounded in action who were sent letters urging them to return to active duty."

Somewhat on that note, Keith Olbermann from last week:

Thai coconut ginger noodles are mankind's finest achievement.

Trying a new system with the "Moving Nameless" fanfic--which I've settled on calling "Moving Innocent"--has made me feel a lot further along with it than I actually am. I decided to finish all the pencils first, then do ink and colour. So while pages one through fifteen are the only ones actually finished, I've drawn up to page twenty-two. Which means I have just one more page to draw.

I don't know if I'll use this technique in the future. It's slightly disorienting, but maybe that's just because I'm not used to it. The reason I tried it was that the pencilling takes more concentration than the latter two stages. It works like this--when I'm writing the script and doing the layouts, I can't have any music playing and I want as little extraneous noise in the area as possible. When I pencil, I can work with music but not spoken word. When I ink and colour, I can listen to the news, DVD commentary, and whatever's on Adult Swim. So I figured with pencilling out of the way, the rest would be a breeze.

Did everyone else see the Saddam Hussein execution snuff film? My sister told me about a right-wing friend of hers who was eagerly looking forward to the execution, and I've seen a number of right-wingers online salivating over the video. I think barbarism has gotten too widely to be seen as a badge of honour. It seams like there was a time when most people would be at least ashamed of their bloodlust. It's awfully telling that the same people claim they can't begin to understand how the Sunnis and the Shi'ites continue in a cycle of vicious reprisals. Even setting aside for a moment the fact that the U.S. was courting Hussein as an ally during the period in which he committed the crimes for which he was executed, we can't claim moral authority to feel righteous about killing Saddam or anyone. Not after all the casualties produced by this government. And just imagine for a moment one of these slobbering Anne Coulter-ites in Saddam's position as dictator. Guys without even political savvy to keep them in check . . .

Well, I suppose I oughta get to sleep.

Great prestige:

Ursula-martinez-gala-juste-pour-rire
Uploaded by Gryb

I am Sherlock muthafuckin' Holmes, people!

Remember how I said yesterday, talking about Hellboy: Sword of Storms; "The lighting schemes and the animation itself were also fairly lacklustre. These things tend to be outsourced, and I sort of get the feeling the people at the drawing boards were thinking mainly about paychecks. I believe that's why a regular Japanese television series like Haruhi Suzumiya looks enormously better than a top of the line, American television animated project like Hellboy: Animated--everyone cares more, down to the lowest grunt, and the people in charge are more in tune with the people working under them."

Well, to-day an anonymous person sent me a URL to the Hellboy: Animated production diary blog. Two paragraphs from this entry read;

Okay, let's talk mutation. No, the X-men are not crossing over with Hellboy but it's time to face the reality of the animation process. When I watch a show like Justice League Unlimited or Teen Titans, every episode looks great to me. The are some stories I like more than others but technically, everything looks good to my eye. Not so when you talk to the guys on the production, they definitely have their favorites and gnash their teeth at the fluctuating quality...because they know what they sent and can see the differences in what comes back.

Long ago, I resolved myself to the idea that the design style of a series or movie is not what you send overseas but what comes back. We are lucky to be working with Mad House Studios in Japan who have done great work in both in features and television. We've started talking back and forth about the mood and quality level of what we expect. Sadly, we can't just keep working until everything looks perfect; there are realities of time and money. But with constant communication we have enough of both to make these things look damn fine.

Seems I was right. And apparently there was the added problem of time constraints, and the distressing fact that this guy actually thinks Teen Titans looks good (I like Justice League Unlimited a lot--its style's not as over the top as Teen Titans, but it's still only a watered down version of the great Batman: The Animated Series' look). Sure, he talks about "constant communication", but what's that really worth when you're short on time, you don't speak the same language, and the Pacific Ocean's between you?

Looking at Mad House Studio's credits (the ones where they're most central to production--most big animation projects in Japan get help from all the big studios) isn't very illuminating, as I see many good looking projects and bad looking projects, which may be explained by staff changes and the amount of passion for different projects. Though I see that they're involved in a number of CLAMP adaptations, which might explain why the CLAMP comics are always better than their animated counterparts.

Anyway, if American animated projects are ever going to be interesting again, either more American directors are going to need to learn Japanese and really get in bed with some people over there, or America needs to cultivate some home-grown talent. Maybe I oughta write a letter to Lou Dobbs about this?

You want noodle now, yes?

Happy New Year! Saddam Hussein's dead for crimes he committed when he was our ally! Bush has a trophy! The Empire's marching on America!

I have an ipod! The nicest thing about the little beauty is that it holds eighty gigabytes. I can use it as a portable hard drive--I took twenty gigabytes of anime from Tim's house just the other day. I finally got to see the rest of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which only got better as it went along. Aside from top notch design and animation, the show wasn't afflicted by broad characters and empty, irritating romance teases, as so many anime series' can be. The series is told from the point of view of Kyon, a teenage boy and confederate of Haruhi Suzumiya in her S.O.S. Brigade club. We hear his irritable but copious and interesting internal monologue. The show has far more character coloured dialogue than most anime series', in fact, and it was very refreshing.

Apparently it's going to get a U.S. release, and I dread hearing the English dub most U.S. audiences will inevitably know it by. There's simply lack of appreciation for the role a voice actor plays in animation here. I was thinking about this when I finally caught Hellboy: Sword of Storms on Cartoon Network a few nights ago. The writing was decent and some of the direction was very good, but what was truly nice about it, apart from the familiar Hellboy characters, was the quality of voice acting. Ron Perlman's great, but I'm fairly used to hearing him do voice work (as he does a lot of it), but Selma Blair was the revelation. Not only was she bringing good acting chops to the table, her voice was also wonderfully atypical, reminding me somewhat of Claire Danes in Princess Mononoke. Inflection, thickness . . . All interesting, and evocative of character. It's a shame she looked awful.

Unfortunately, Hellboy: Sword of Storms looks awfully similar to the new The Batman series and Teen Titans, featuring characters with freakish, hard edged, Easter Island statue faces. Hellboy himself comes out fairly well, as the look is somewhat similar to his comic book appearance, but Liz Sherman, Blair's character, suffers the worst, with an oddly triangular head and enormous eyes without iris or light reflection, just huge black pupils that're a lot eerier than is appropriate.

The lighting schemes and the animation itself were also fairly lacklustre. These things tend to be outsourced, and I sort of get the feeling the people at the drawing boards were thinking mainly about paychecks. I believe that's why a regular Japanese television series like Haruhi Suzumiya looks enormously better than a top of the line, American television animated project like Hellboy: Animated--everyone cares more, down to the lowest grunt, and the people in charge are more in tune with the people working under them.

Don't believe me? I invite you to compare;

From the first, which is the second, episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and the Hellboy: Sword of Storms trailer.