Echo Erosion and an Egret

Well, the new webcomic is online, it's called Echo Erosion. Have a look. Feel free to comment.

Also, here are some pictures of an egret I saw on a nice, secluded spot on the river when I went for a walk the other day;

Twitter Sonnet #393

Armchair amulets cast lazy glamour.
Canaries are tied round the albatross.
Leaves are treasure in the clean Hate Hummer.
All regular guests need plaques to emboss.
Infinite staples recurs the grape seed.
Ornate OshKosh flattens the armoury.
Bushroot's whirlybird's blade is just a weed.
So the lost Ward was called Montgomery.
Alvin acclimates chipmunk changes bad.
Lilies sort rings slowly at the old bank.
Yarn can double a suit's level of rad.
2D pawns can slip back to the wrong rank.
Wilting shadows pack the elevator.
Coal potpourri eggs an alligator.

Force of Colour

Artists generally exist in worlds that don't accommodate them. For every artist who's financially successful, there are thousands who aren't, and this isn't a reflection of the artist's ability or passion. Take Vincent van Gogh. Vincente Minnelli's 1956 biopic of Van Gogh, Lust for Life, gives us a story about an artist who never made a living off his art but remained passionate and committed to his work nevertheless. The story is somewhat simplified in a typical, 1950s mainstream manner, but Minnelli made a beautiful film that presents important ideas very well.

One can see how Minnelli was an appropriate director for Van Gogh's story--Minnelli loved contrasts and strong colour much as Van Gogh did, and one suspects Van Gogh had been an influence on Minnelli long before Lust for Life. There are shots in the film cleverly designed to resemble Van Gogh's paintings;

Though of course Van Gogh's paintings are much more complex than Minnelli's compositions. A good way to describe what Van Gogh achieves--and what a lot of great artists achieve--is to say that his paintings simultaneously have a wonderful simplicity and a wonderful complexity, that these two effects are one impression.

I couldn't help thinking of the Doctor Who episode from a couple years ago, "Vincent and the Doctor", in which the Doctor meets Van Gogh and there were shots similarly designed to look like Van Gogh's paintings. That episode was written by Richard Curtis, known for making romantic comedies like Bridget Jones' Diary and Notting Hill, and so perhaps it's unsurprising that his work about Van Gogh should be less effective than Minnelli's, but mainly I'd say Lust for Life outshines "Vincent and the Doctor" in the casting of Van Gogh himself, who's played with teeth grinding fervour by Kirk Douglas in Minnelli's film.

Particularly in his courage to look unattractive, desperately falling at the feet of the woman he loves who's disgusted with his unvarnished passion, Douglas elevates the very linear, traditional Hollywood biopic quality of the film. And we believe and go along with Douglas as he pursues painting beyond the bounds of conventional reason.

The movie, in its discussions between artists, is also pretty instructive, telling the audience the importance of considering the light reflected off of everything in the vicinity of a subject. And I liked a line Van Gogh has about not wanting to paint people but "their expressions."

A Man Who Knew How to Travel

I didn't sleep well--or at least, every time I woke up I felt anxious, like I was neglecting something. When I was asleep, my dreams weren't especially bad. I dreamt the whole town was underwater and I swam to the movie theatre and the drugstore, where several people were swimming around to shop. The superstitious part of me wonders if my anxiety had anything to do with the death this morning of Ray Bradbury.

The first thing I saw on my computer to-day was an "RIP" comment on my last video of Bradbury, from the last time I saw him at Comic-Con in 2010;

I remembered he reemphasised, in the end, the importance of pursuing love. Certainly you could see it in his writing--his commitment to and passion for evoking beauty in his work was amazing. I still think this description from Fahrenheit 451 is prettier than Julie Christie;

The autumn leaves blew over the pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it the kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting.

We have a new generation of ducks around here and they're aggressive. Twenty or so of them started following me the other day even though I didn't have anything for them. They got closer and closer, probably wondering why the bread dispenser wasn't doing anything. So I went back the next day with a hamburger bun.

Nervous Conduits

A big part of Marilyn Monroe's appeal was her vulnerability, the rawness of her reactions. She was a great actress, she was able to bare her cognitive process adapted for dialogue. 1952's Don't Bother to Knock is a decent film, populated by great stars--in addition to Monroe there's Richard Widmark, Elisha Cook Jr., and, being thoroughly overshadowed by Monroe in her first film role, Anne Bancroft.

Bancroft barely appears outside of book ending scenes in the lobby of the hotel where the whole film takes place. She has a job singing in the hotel lounge and it's her spurning him that's gotten Widmark tied up in knots. At this point in his career, Widmark seemed to specialise in playing bitter, resentful, anxious hoods.

Monroe plays Elisha Cook's mentally disturbed niece--Cook at this point was finally too old to keep playing boys. He's elevator operator at the hotel and he recommends Monroe as babysitter for a wealthy couple staying on the sixth floor. Monroe hasn't recovered as much from the death of her pilot fiancé--and her subsequent suicide attempt--as Cook thinks, and once she's alone with the little girl, trouble ensues.

Widmark, strewing in his room across the court from Monroe, spots her dancing in the window wearing her employer's negligee and jewellery. When Widmark decides to go over and see her with a bottle of rye, we get the best scene in the movie, as Monroe spins various made up stories for him while Widmark struggles, trying to decide whether he cares if she's telling the truth.

She inadvertently throws out support for him, saying things directly opposite about his sensitivity to what Bancroft had told him when turning him down, complaining he was too cold and closed off. In the scene, both characters are minefields of raw nerves and the two play it beautifully.

The film missteps in a typically mainstream Hollywood bit of logic that assumes we need a plot about Monroe trying to kill the kid so she can be alone with Widmark. But the movie is more than worth watching for the mood and performances alone.

I was surprised to see that the film was directed by Roy Ward Baker, who in 1970 would make the wonderful almost softcore porn Hammer adaptation of Carmilla starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing, The Vampire Lovers. Who'd have guessed when he was directing a mainstream Hollywood film in 1952 he'd in eighteen years be directing naked women chasing each other around a bedroom?

Twitter Sonnet #392

Dishwasher error removes a dirt doubt.
Forks casting shadows further than knives fell.
Operation Bacon became a rout.
Hero dog molecules are in the well.
Sorbet love is milkless and very cold.
There's nowhere to sit in the strawberry.
Roo's no name for a kangaroo who's old.
But handles fit Governor Rick Perry.
Whipped garbanzo rattles in the light bulb.
Seltzer Chicklets dissolved life insurance.
Feral unicorns burned down the Old Globe.
Recalled flashlights ended light's endurance.
Divided brontosaurus brains punch stars.
Pawn bristles brushed the scalp stale candy bars.

Inevitable Flowers

There is a cruelty present in aesthetic philosophy easy to overlook when conveyed in academic language. Luchino Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice, based on a Thomas Mann novella, highlights the personal pain that can result in a struggle between Dionysian and Apollonian. It is a film of beautiful, lingering images paralleled by slow, inevitable death.

The story follows a fictional, famous German composer named Gustav (Dirk Bogarde) who travels to Venice for his health. It's not specified what his health issue is, but it seems as though it may be a nervous breakdown due to violently negative reactions to his recent work. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say he suffers from a profound, spiritual horror as the failure of his self-consciously artificial composition proves his vehemently Dionysian friend correct in his criticism of Gustav's aesthetic philosophy.

Gustav's friend rejoices in victory, perhaps not suspecting the cruelty in what is happening to Gustav. In discussing his point of view in contrast to his friend's philosophy of artistic beauty being that of the senses, Gustav says, "Reality only distracts and degrades us . . . The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act . . . It's only by complete domination of the senses that you can ever achieve wisdom, truth, and human dignity."

When one considers that Gustav is a closeted homosexual and is forced to live with the death of a young daughter, it's no wonder that he should regard reality as an enemy. It's in Visconti's gentle, sensual filmmaking, particularly in Gustav's helpless, compulsive observing of an attractive Polish boy staying at his hotel, that the wonder of irrepressible reality is impressed on Gustav and us.

In a final, persuasive stark contrast, a barber makes over Gustav with absurd white face paint and hair colour in an attempt to triumph over his natural aging which is contrasted with both a cholera epidemic in Venice and Gustav's continued, unavoidable admiration of the Polish boy. But one doesn't sympathise with the glee Gustav's friend feels in being right. Perhaps one of the strongest pieces of evidence of the supremacy of the Dionysian over the Apollonian is that it serves no-one's agenda or comfort.

Behind Evenly Spaced Bars

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from one of the cleanest prisons ever seen. It's funny, narrator Red (Morgan Freeman) says early in 1994's The Shawshank Redemption the story he's about to tell us isn't a fairy tale. Despite the fact that Freeman tells us this during a rape scene, a fairy tale is exactly what the movie ends up being, and a pretty lightweight one at that. It's a satisfying film in a very easy way--it's almost junk food.

I read the Stephen King story the movie's based on--Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption four years ago so I don't quite remember all the differences between story and movie, but I remember the story being a similar easy bit of fun told through Stephen King's peculiar voice. There's pretty much nothing peculiar about director Frank Darabont and the movie he delivers feels so remarkably plain.

As I said, Shawshank prison looks like one of the cleanest prisons I've ever seen, most of the sets look like they were built yesterday, contrasting rather sharply with shots on location at an old prison. Everyone's clothes look brand new, have no stains, hair and skin perfect, and the lighting is a study in the blandest text book movie lighting.

And I feel like the instructions Darabont gave the casting director were simply, "safe and friendly." Every guy in this movie looks like the nicest guy in the world. The funniest is Gil Bellows, the nice guy lawyer from Ally McBeal, as some sort of greaser.

This is a reflection of how the movie stacks the deck generally--Not only is Andy a nice guy, he's imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, he's abused, and he goes out of his way to help everybody. There was little moral ambiguity in this story to begin with and Darabont flattens it even more. But not all of Darabont's contributions amounted to basically padding--I liked the presence of James Whitmore, though Darabont obviously tripped over himself writing lines for, according to Wikipedia, his favourite character actor.

When Andy is assigned to work as Whitmore's assistant in the library, Whitmore is made to remark, "Ain't that a kick in the head?"

Well, no. No it's not. It's hard to imagine anything being less of a kick in the head than being a library assistant. You just wanted Whitmore to say "ain't that a kick in the head?" didn't you, Darabont?

But neither is this movie a kick in the head. More like a brief, gentle pat on the head.

A Web for Every Spider

We're really into spider season now. This is a funnel weaver that's taken up residence on the rear of my car.

When I drive somewhere, she crawls up into her funnel. I guess she's been sampling the bugs from all over town.

Here's a baby garden spider that made a home between some wine glasses on a shelf in my parents' house;

The light was difficult, I couldn't get a better picture.

I probably got less than six hours sleep last night. I lay awake, hung up on how much of the world is controlled by greed and competition. The sort of sick mechanism where people crawl over piles of other people to get anywhere. It's like Lennon said in "Working Class Hero"; ". . . first you must learn how to smile as you kill if you want to be like the folks on the hill." I had a bad ball of poison in me about it last night and I couldn't get away from it. It hurt inside and was stifling me from outside. Most of all I just felt a deep revulsion for how "the world" works, mostly from how people have allowed their fears to make it work. I started watching Parsifal again and it made me feel better enough to get to sleep but it didn't fix everything. Now maybe I should be happy that I'm too tired to feel very much.

Twitter Sonnet #391

The broken boulevard conducts marriage.
Atlantean monkeys shelter in dreams.
Exploding diners rain us with cabbage.
Cocaine canola drizzled through the seams.
Purple lead pulverised a tonsil thought.
Freud filled Kool Aid pitchers with laughing life.
Glaucoma's the scourge of irony's pot.
Feet take vertical gum from the last wife.
One sees opaque fishbowls murder the point.
Unsafe teeth play songs on the sea lion.
Abacus pianos poison the joint.
Upset reflections burnish the cyan.
Transformers decay with a rusty blush.
Sandpaper silk surrounds a centre hush.

Into the Neutral Zone

Well, I suppose I ought to say something about a good Star Trek episode. I know, I know--bear with me.

"The Enterprise Incident" is a third season episode with the strongest female character I've seen in the series so far, a Romulan Commander (apparently the equivalent of captain, since she commands a starship) who goes unnamed despite the whole episode being about her. She's actually kind of our POV character because we don't find out about the ruse Kirk and Spock are employing with her until well after she's been subjected to it.

Ordered by Starfleet command to go into the Romulan neutral zone to gather information about the new Romulan cloaking device, Kirk pretends to have gone mad and reckless while Spock acts like he might be willing to defect to the Romulans. This is the first episode I remember the rule about the Vulcan inability to lie being explicitly stated, but Spock lies throughout the episode as he has in many previous episodes. Maybe it's because he's half human, or maybe it's because it's the least adhered to rule in any fictional universe.

Apparently the Romulan Commander was an even stronger character in the original script, but Roddenberry demanded a revision where she throws herself at Spock. Nimoy and the actress playing the Commander at least successfully lobbied to have their love scene changed from passionate exchanges of kisses to actually pretty interesting two finger caresses.

But the episode is a nicely constructed and paced little espionage story.

I spent most of yesterday working on my comic again, but it's looking like the portion I do in the summer may have to be the whole comic. From the way people are talking around here, I may be living out of my car in six months, if I still have a car. I've been threatened before by people who have power over my living situation, and it's typically come to nothing, but now things are too tenuous for me to engage on a long term project unless I can get some significant income, and I've failed to get even an insignificant income for years. I guess I'll just have to keep doing what I can and hope for the best.

That Dame's Got Spock's Brain!

I'd like to take a moment to say a word in defence of "Spock's Brain". The episode, the season premiere of season three, is infamous, many people consider it the worst episode of the series. It is silly, to be sure. But it makes me smile. How could I not smile at all the lines where McCoy desperately rasps at Kirk about "Spock's . . . brain! His brain, Jim . . . it's gone! His brain!" Also, you get to see a full shot of Nurse Chapel's panties;

Every once in a while, I guess Roddenberry used his own wife for fanservice. I do appreciate the fact that no attractive woman on Star Trek ever wears more than a tiny skirt and the tops are often the sort where modesty wouldn't be accommodated by bad posture. But as a fellow pervert, I probably would've sat Gene down and put it to him, "What's the point exactly of a short skirt when what's underneath looks like the trunks of a 1911 strong man?"

How can one not smile when Spock assists McCoy in the surgery to put back his own brain? It's all very silly, but it's not obnoxious bad like "The Omega Glory". At least there's not a really broad statement about the superiority of American white men.

"Spock's Brain" isn't even the worst episode of the third season I've watched so far. That honour belongs to "The Paradise Syndrome". It's been pointed out that "The Paradise Syndrome" relies on stereotypes of stupid Native Americans, but I ask how can you tell the Native Americans in the episode are especially stupid when we see Kirk, Spock and McCoy casually strolling about a planet when they've just remarked they have only thirty minutes to get back to the Enterprise in order to stop an asteroid from destroying the planet? Or when Kirk goes missing, we see Spock telling McCoy they need to get back to the ship in order to stop the asteroid and have to give up on searching for Kirk, it apparently never occurring to him that even one of the over four hundred members of the Enterprise crew could be left behind to search, maybe with a shuttle craft?

Meanwhile, the alien Native Americans (there's a term to wrap your mind around) are stupid because one of them can't figure out how Kirk's shirt is laced on, and they take him for a god for saving a child's life. Some characters are born for stupidity, others have stupidity thrust upon them. How much difference does it make in the end?

Web Schedules

The first garden spider of the year. It seems like I've been seeing them earlier every year. This one is currently tiny--I'm afraid I had to tear down his web to get the trash cans to the street, but I let him get to a nearby leaf first.

More pictures I've taken lately;

Mainly to-day I've been working on my comic, the first chapter of which, by the way, will be online next Saturday, June 9.

I'm going to be doing this comic a little differently--I can no longer afford to go years concentrating exclusively on a comic, so to accommodate my school schedule, I'll be doing this one in segments. This summer, June, July, and August, I'll be putting a new chapter up every two weeks, and that'll be Part 1. Part 2 will begin in January 2013, consisting of chapters I've done at a much slower pace over the fall. I honestly hate to do it this way, but I'd hate to put school on hold, too. So I hope this works out. I guess it'll be pretty much like television seasons tend to be nowadays.

Twitter Sonnet #390

Orthopaedic octaves buttress bad songs.
Squeaking scotch skins the Goliath's bathtub.
Uranium rights midnight drugstore wrongs.
Bigamists bow to the five dollar sub.
Broccoli arms span the astronaut's garage.
Health beats horror into a cheap starship.
Native Nibelungs deny gnome's mirage.
Pigs call porcupines for extra ketchup.
Telephone holes inhibit slow sunlight.
Minotaur traffic trampled red signals.
Gangrenous Otter Pops prove Lime was right.
Space's suns rise and set round Orson Welles.
Storage weeks can withstand cluttered closets.
Night conceals armies of Farrah Fawcetts.

Paris When It's Parallax

In The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower, characters played by Audrey Hepburn and William Holden fall in love with each other. In Paris When It Sizzles, the two characters who write the screenplay for The Girl Who Stole the Eiffal tower, also played by Audrey Hepburn and William Holden, fall in love with each other. In real life, according to Wikipedia, William Holden was in love with Audrey Hepburn and she wasn't interested in him during the filming of Paris When It Sizzles. The romance buck stops with reality, I guess. Which adds an intriguing element to this light post modern romantic comedy. A film about pointing out the phoniness and cliches of the movie industry turns out to itself be idealised. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, in all the business to show us how fake everything is, the movie ends up with a dull deficiency of characterisation, but it has its good qualities.

I was reminded of 1965's Pierrot le Fou, which came out a year after Paris When It Sizzles, and also discusses the ways in which cinematic language manipulates the audience, how we've been trained to respond to certain plot patterns and musical cues. Pierrot le Fou does this with more solemnity, while Paris When It Sizzles cynically tosses out its observations in the process of serving us with what seems to be exactly the sort of shallow, hackneyed plot it's criticising.

Many of the cliches and concepts of fiction criticism Holden's character, a screenwriter, discusses with the typist to whom he dictates his newest screenplay (Hepburn), are things I'm very familiar with from reading actual film and literature criticism--the necessity of switches, the reliability of the "prostitute with a heart of gold" character, how My Fair Lady is essentially Frankenstein. But while Holden speaks of these things with bitter fatigue, he condemns New Wave film and method acting, two things the movie presents in satirical form--Hepburn's character talks of meeting the director of a New Wave film about people who get together to play Scrabble and never play Scrabble because, the director says, film should be about what doesn't happen, while Tony Curtis has a small role in the movie as a method actor, displaying all the "ums" and scratches that Holden accuses such actors as using to destroy the rhythm of a screenplay.

By attaching these experimental forms of cinema to Hepburn's character, they become the objects of Holden's character's jealousy and one starts to see Paris When It Sizzles as a soapbox for George Axelrod, the real life screenwriter of Paris When It Sizzles, and his bitterness towards modern ways of filmmaking. He presents the old fashioned screenwriter as a drunk, completely disreputable, so he can dig his way to redemption, along with traditional studio filmmaking, by the end of the film, winning Hepburn's heart, a barometer for the audience's, in the process. Except, of course, Holden didn't capture Hepburn's heart in real life and in less than decade after Paris When It Sizzles the traditional studio film would be a thing of the past.

The movie does have its good points, like I said. Holden's performance is sort of monotonous, but I could happily listen to Audrey Hepburn read the phone book putting random emphasis on words in her peculiar way. The movie's funny, too, in pointing out the cliches of traditional film. A cutaway seems to Hepburn too obviously implicit of coitus, but Holden points out we don't actually know what happens after the dissolve, saying he chooses to believe the characters are playing Parcheesi. Which leads to the classic line from Hepburn later; "After last night's Parcheesi game, I'm yours forever." There are funny cameos by Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra. But mostly the movie reminded me of a hipster who can be very funny criticising media but, when it comes to it, is creatively impotent himself.