She escaped! All that lofty talk from me about treating a prisoner as befitted her station and I let her slip through the claws of some blundering goblins under my command. I would say the messy work she made of the nether regions was punishment enough except now I have the Easterlings giving me cold looks--mutinous looks, if you ask me. Blasted Easterlings! I didn't leave Rohan to make peace between orc and Man. But they are reliable, I'll give them that. On their side of camp, the great Grey Girl Beast would be naught but great sport this morning. As it is, I know I shall have somehow to overtake her before nightfall if I don't want an Easterling blade through my back. But where the devil has she gone? What was she doing here without escort? Trying to puzzle over it now, I can seem to remember a look of what I might call a confused determination. Has she lost her mind? Has one of the great commanders of Men lost her wits to go wandering in Mordor on some phantom mission? How bloody wonderful--we may then never guess her movements, for mad as she may be, she covers her tracks well. The Easterlings believe she's gone east, so I suppose that's where we shall go, though I myself believe she's moving towards the Sea of Nurn. Somehow I associate madwomen with the sea. It would be as good a destination as any--as I cannot guess what she means to accomplish. I wish we had not left Khand.

Thriller - En Grym Film (Thriller - A Cruel Picture, or They Call Her One Eye, or even Hooker's Revenge), a 1973 exploitation film starring an adorable little Christina Lindberg.

I actually thought Lindberg was better in Sex and Fury, where she was given quite a bit more material to work with. Which is not to say Thriller must have been a cakewalk, as she's seen in the movie receiving extremely realistic looking karate lessons. Her character, Madeleine, becomes an expert in karate, shooting, and driving in order to exact bloody revenge on the people who forced her into a life of prostitution and heroin addiction.


The first thing that surprised me about the film was how beautiful much of it is, particularly in the beginning, where the camera lingers over autumn yellow leaves, complemented by Christina's yellow dress. However, there is a great deal of dullness to the movie as well; the bare grey walls and naked mattresses of the brothel, the hardcore insert shots of penises pumping stand-in vaginas (very clearly not Christina's own), and the ponderous slow motion shots of guys getting the squibs blown out of them as they find themselves in Madeleine's path.



On the one hand, the movie's glacial pace was tedious, as it was usually not spent in service of character development or action choreography. Yet it did succeed in gradually creating a sort of crushingly grim atmosphere--Madeleine goes from a slow, crushing, inescapable position, to becoming a slow, crushing, inescapable monster. By default, you root for her, but there's almost none of the glee found in the Tarantino movies Thriller inspired.



Still, it's a sort of deathly spooky film, especially because the mute Madeleine's face is Christina Lindberg's--sensual, and finely communicative. On one level, she seems generally disconnected with what's going on around her, but then intriguing hints leak through her features . . .



Here's the trailer, which doesn't entirely communicate the movie's feel;

To-day is a better day. No workmen until 1pm, and I slept 'til 12:30, having gone to bed at 4:30am. Lucky the cat is still hiding out in my room, and Victoria the cat lurks somewhere in the shadows--as always, she is both everywhere and nowhere, but always watchful.

I've been watching Twin Peaks with my sister, and last night we decided to skip eleven episodes of the second season. This is my sister's first time watching the series, and even I was surprised how little there was I needed to catch her up on for the skipped episodes. With the absence of David Lynch, there's really no reason to watch a big chunk of the second season, except maybe Windom Earle, who I still think is a lot of fun.

Already doing a little better to-day. Some Wild Turkey helped me to sleep by 3am (I got the idea watching Wicker Man, when Howie takes some whiskey before bed).

I saved Heroes for this morning. Did I TiVo it? Well, if by "TiVo" you mean "tape", then yes. Did I just give you temporal vertigo? Is there a horrible wrongness in such a casual anachronism, like seeing a group of nineteenth century coal miners crossing the street, or glimpsing a daemon horseman galloping through your neighbourhood? I can't help what I am, this . . . thing.

So, yeah, I didn't watch Heroes in High-Def for once. I actually liked the episode--maybe I was expecting something much worse from Elizabeth Bear's review. I'm with Caitlin in starting to like Sylar. And I like Hiro, though I'm not sure I understand why so many people are absolutely wild about him. As far as I can tell, he's as likely to suffer from bad writing as any of the characters. Last night's was nice not so much for how good it was but for how bad it wasn't. Sylar's thing with his mother was interesting, but mostly the episode was lukewarm, which is still better than outright annoying any day.

Well, I've got pixels to colour. I'm hoping Sarah McLachlan will write a song about me, "Yeah, you're working, colouring pixels, choosing so carefully . . ."

Mono no aware, folks . . .

I am very sleepy. Noisy workmen came to break tile and scare cats upstairs and I had to get up at 9am. I watched half of The Wicker Man while eating breakfast, then, from 10am 'til 6pm, I did almost nothing but colour--I paused only for lunch and to feed the cats.

Yet I did not finish a single page.

THIS IS TAKING A LONG FUCKING TIME. I am in serious need of a new computer with more RAM. My problem is clear when I click an area to fill it with colour and it takes thirty seconds for the colour to appear . . . But I shall persevere . . .

I was colouring six pages at once, six pages with lots of people in them. But scanning these things at higher dpi than Boschen and Nesuko has created all sorts of problems--aside from the RAM issue, my scanner seems to leave thousands of pixel sized flecks that I can only fix by erasing them manually, one by one.

So that's my exciting day. Lunch was an excellent burrito at Tacos Del Mar, Diane. Spinach tortilla wrapped around refried beans, genuinely hot sauce, salsa, rice, guacamole and cheese--delicious. That was five dollars and eighteen cents, but a very large burrito. Weather was ridiculously hot, the air was like hot ooze, but I enjoyed the walk all the same.

Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs), a 1960 film by Mikio Naruse, is a film I'd not heard of, by a director I'd not heard of, until somewhat recently, and yet I think it's a movie I've wanted to see for a very long time. I'd wanted to see a Japanese film about Japanese women living in actual, peculiarly Japanese social roles, preferably from a woman's perspective. The closest approximations I could find were heavily westernised melodramas like Memoirs of a Geisha, or Japanese exploitation films like Lady Snowblood or Sex and Fury, which may have had strong female characters, but they lacked the perspective on traditional female social roles I was interested in. Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki delivered in spades.



In his review of Memoirs of a Geisha, Roger Ebert mentions having seen movies illustrating in the world of geisha "currents deeper and more subtle than the broad melodrama on display" in Memoirs. He may well have been thinking of several of Naruse's films, most of which, unfortunately, seem to be unavailable on DVD. Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki is not about geisha, but it deals with another denizen of the mizu shobai, the bar hostess, who is both on a lower rung, professionally, than the geisha and yet also in the world of 1960 Tokyo's Ginza district, was quickly replacing her.

The movie stars Hideko Takamine as Keiko Yashiro, sometimes referred to as "Mama", due to her alpha position among hostesses in the bar where she worked. These hostesses seem to be endemic of a traditional Japanese attitude which regards the female sex as a servant species. Hostesses lacked the training in the arts characteristic of the geisha, and were not booked for functions, but instead acted as social diplomats, informal escorts, and occasional sexual partners for their successful businessmen customers, who could only be among the higher echelons to afford the services of such bars.



However, the movie is not a study of social hierarchies within 1960 Ginza, but rather a nicely woven character drama that expects audiences to simply know all of these things, which is perhaps why Naruse's films see so little foreign distribution. Yet, at the same time, Keiko's difficult position illustrates problems endemic of the country's economy, social structure, and attitude towards women. And a lot about money.

Mikio Naruse was never a wealthy man at any point in his career, unusual even among Japan's great directors like Ozu and Kurosawa. So perhaps this is why there's a definite sense of how money, and the need for money, traps Keiko in a life she doesn't like--early on, she remarks on how much she hates climbing the stairs into the bar every night, becoming the artificial creature for unpleasant men, and being obliged to drink liquor she dislikes. But there is no other option for her--another career could not provide her mother, brother, and nephew, who live in a poorer, industrial district, with the money they need to live. Keiko herself lives in an expensive apartment and wears expensive kimonos, yet, as she observes, she could afford to do no less as it is precisely this superficial glamour that attracts customers.



This set-up could easily have been overblown melodrama, yet Naruse handles it with a beautiful subtlety, the xylophone jazz soundtrack cool with elegant imagery of dark, burnished walls under hazy neon signs. There are few exterior shots, the movie seemingly confined to a beautiful rats' maze as Keiko goes from one man to another variously to collect fees, to pay off debts, or to tactfully request loans. A number of essays I've read on the movie frequently include a quote from Naruse about his characters; "If they move even a little they quickly hit the wall." We see this as Keiko's attempts to escape her world--and there are only two possible avenues for her, to either start her own bar or marry--are continually thwarted. And every thread of plot is constructed with a heartbreaking credibility, until the web prevents Keiko from moving at all.

In the DVD commentary, critic Donald Richie calls Keiko's attitude at the end of the film mono no aware, a Japanese concept having to do with accepting the nature of ones own existence and circumstance. I can't imagine there are many films equally as brilliant illustrating the concept as this one.

There was an AP article linked to by a headline on Huffington Post to-day about the Rudy Giuliani campaign's complaint to NBC about Keith Olbermann. This comes after one of Olbermann's "Special Comments", an editorial that occasionally comes at the end of Olbermann's show, in this case it was a commentary on Giuliani's assertion that the country would be less safe under Democrats than Republicans (you can see the Special Comment here).

What strikes me most about the AP article is its assumption that we can all see that Olbermann's commentary is corrupted by bias. "Clearly there's a taste in America for both a partisan and nonpartisan press." And yet it doesn't spend one sentence attempting to debunk Olbermann's commentary. Anyone unfamiliar with the pundits and journalists mentioned in the article would have a hard time figuring out what the article's getting at, what precisely it means by "Olbermann's popularity and evolving image as an idealogue has led NBC News to stretch traditional notions of journalistic objectivity." Whether the AP writer, David Bauer, realises it or not, the AP article is itself an opinion piece.

I think this is indicative of the general trend in the media to assume that "balance" is the same thing as "objective". This is what caused Jon Stewart's meltdown on Crossfire years ago. I actually don't think Stewart was very articulate in the encounter, but I think so many people responded strongly to it because we all sensed what Stewart was getting at--that in the mainstream media, giving equal credence to right wing and left wing positions is more important than the truth.

When Rudy Giuliani claimed that there would be more casualties under a Democratic president, he was using terror as a tool. That's simply the truth.

Saturday involved a lot of colouring. I listened to David Cronenberg's commentary for Spider which was, as I'd suspected, particularly interesting. I bought a birthday card for my grandmother that wasn't completely stupid, which still amazes me.

I've just finished some plum flavoured ice cream I got at Mitsuwa a few days ago. It was good stuff, though it tasted peculiarly like bubblegum. Now I have azuki ice cream to try.

I started writing this entry thinking I'd talk about what I was doing besides watching movies and working on my comic, but I just realised I haven't really been doing anything else, at least nothing worth talking about. I saw some ravens tear apart a squirrel in the birdbath. That was sort of interesting. The huge black things carrying away stringy red bits and tufts of grey fur. Lucky the cat is fortunately too fat to excite the birds' interest. Otherwise, they seem to have taken custody of the backyard.

A baby opossum strolled past the open door to the backyard while I was eating breakfast one afternoon. I knelt in front of him and we regarded each other a moment before Victoria the cat came from nowhere to chase the little fellow into a bush.

I went to North County Fair mall on Thursday because it holds one of the only two comic book stores currently operating in San Diego county that I know of, but found nothing of interest. It's a big store, but the only people in there were two cops looking at action figures. I feel like that image implies something, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

Well, welcome to Sunday, folks.

My life is full of spiders lately. A couple days ago, I finally got David Cronenberg's Spider on DVD, I'm currently reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, and I just got back from seeing Spider-Man 3.

It was, as you might imagine on opening day, a very crowded theatre, and as is often the case with crowded theatres, it demonstrated to me that most people aren't very bright, at least not judging by the fact that most of them laughed at every dull, perfunctory punch line in all the billions of advertisements preceding the film. But I have to say I can't blame them for laughing as much as they did during the film.

When Spider-Man 3 did comedy, we laughed. When it did tragedy, we laughed. When a creepy old butler we'd never seen before said he loved Harry Osborne, we were all hysterical. Every time someone cried in the movie, we laughed. Sometimes I felt bad enough for the filmmakers that I managed to merely cringe, but mostly I think Sam Raimi and company deserved a pie in the face.

It's not hard to see the problem--for whatever reason*, a whole bunch of different ideas for movies were crammed into this one movie, giving us only room for brief bites of character development and establishing of motives, so Raimi tried to compensate by putting a shot of whiskey in each bite, only he grabbed the bottle of sugar water on accident.

We get earnest proclamations like "I love you!" at completely the wrong times. We have characters doing phenomenally stupid things to provide motivation for other characters--Peter kissing Gwen Stacy in front of Mary Jane without it even occurring to him that it might make her jealous. Mary Jane insisting Peter doesn't know how she feels when discussing a bad review of her recent Broadway performance because Peter mentions how Spider-Man gets bad press, too**. And there's the Panic Room effect when Mary Jane convinces Peter she wants to break up with him only because Harry, who's out of earshot at the time, has threatened to kill him.

Worst of all is the movie's handling of its Moral--that vengeance is ultimately a bad reason to do things. This is something that's part of a lot of comic book stories, and it's not an unreasonable theme for discussion. But it's gotta be discussed. This is a movie, not a political rally. We all sense it's a profound enough subject that we're all a little irritated when it's handled haphazardly with battling slogans and broad, artificially contrived emotions. Sure, it's bad to kill if you don't have to. But are we really to believe Spider-Man didn't have to kill Sandman***, when Sandman obviously is willing to hurt innocent people and can't be contained by any prison, and seems indestructible anyway?

Well, the movie wasn't a complete waste of time. A lot of the action sequences were fun. Bruce Campbell was the best thing about the movie.


*My guess is, Sam Raimi had decided he didn't want to make any more of these movies and therefore decided to cram every half-formed idea for whole Spider-Man movies into this one.

**No, Peter, I don't want you to go help those people you heard about on the police radio because I need to talk to you about my feelings because I'm a stereotype of a sudden!

***Of course he didn't really kill Sandman, and it's obvious to everyone that he didn't, but he thinks he killed him, and that leads him to a conversation with Aunt May who, despite knowing it was Sandman (in an extremely stupid re-writing of history) who killed her husband, and without knowing the why and how of Sandman's death, can only think to say that it was wrong of Spider-Man to kill. Oh, sure, Raimi, let's just breeze through the philosophy, it's not like this is an extremely sensitive subject that happens to be on everyone's minds because it relates to the war in Iraq and the Virginia Tech. shootings.

And Now, For Our More Dreadful Sacrifice



But where can we find a fool who acts like a king?

As many have pointed out, Bush has declared May 1 to be "Loyalty Day". He also likes to sacrifice people loyal to him. Though he's not technically a virgin, I bet there are a lot of things that would be new to him, like introspection. Perhaps that's the most profound virginity of all.

Well, I can certainly feel the approach of summer. It's already gotten so I can't have my fan on any setting lower than maximum.

I expect to post more later to-day, but, knowing me, I probably won't. Saint Sisyphus asked me to talk about a few more movies.

Number of times I heard the song "Passenger" on Monday in different contexts; 3.

Her Eminence, the Lady Sonya Taaffe of the Snow Shovel Campaign, has requested that I discuss three movies which I recently have viewed; The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, and Re-Animator. One of these things is not like the others.

I'd seen all three of these movies before*, though so long ago that my memory wasn't so great. Now I have all three on DVD, and that's good because they're good movies. Well, maybe I could've lived without Re-Animator, but when I saw it in the store packaged with a highlighter that looks like a syringe, I couldn't resist.

But let's go alphabetically here;


The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d'un poète)
1930 Directed by Jean Cocteau

It's a commentary on artists, and what it means to be an artist, that really speaks for itself rather eloquently. It's a film that uses bizarre imagery to communicate things otherwise incommunicable. Possibly it was the most experimental cinematic narrative up to that point--my own limited experience with movies and the loss of thousands of movies made before 1930 prevent me from knowing. But The Blood of the Poet's unbridled surrealism certainly surpassed in its strangeness the works of Fritz Lang and the German expressionist filmmakers of the time.



A poet accidentally acquires a living, human-like mouth on his palm. When placed under water, air bubbles emerge from the mouth. He can't seem to get rid of the mouth, wiping it on various surfaces, until his hand covers the mouth of a statue resembling the Venus de Milo. The narrator warns against the danger of giving the mouth to a statue, which then comes alive, effectively becoming the poet's muse, and he seems greatly relieved to have invested his talent in the creature.

The statue leads him through a mirror into a hall with a series of doors. Through each keyhole, he sees a different scene of human strife play out, each seemingly without connexion to our protagonist, though entry through the mirror implies that these are things he nonetheless has at least a keyhole sized perspective on. So Cocteau rather wonderfully addresses the poet's ability to connect with the humanity of people in wildly different situations. It's a nice shade of the "write what you know" philosophy.



The poet eventually seems to become a highly regarded individual, perhaps a muse himself. He goes from living in a humble flat at the beginning of the movie, to wearing a tuxedo while playing cards with his statue muse. Opera house balconies filled with aristocrats watching the seemingly perilous game suggest the poet's now become an institution, yet death, in the form of a gun the muse twice makes him use on himself, seems always a waiting consequence of his art. First the gun gives him laurels, then it just gives him death.


Orpheus (Orphée)
1949 Directed by Jean Cocteau

In a more traditional narrative of characters and situations, this modern re-telling of the Orpheus myth also deals with the poet's relationship to death. In his most significant departure from the original myth, Cocteau casts death as an aloof, beautiful woman, who captures the attentions of Orpheus, diverting them from his wife and nearly all other things.



Orpheus is played by the absurdly handsome Jean Marais as a nationally renowned poet at odds with a new generation of poets. Yet the death of one member of that latter group seems to fill Orpheus with an obsessive inspiration. It marks the beginning of a path for Orpheus to explore death and seek to know it; appropriately mirrors are again used as gateways.

I'm still a little unsure about the ending, which diverts from the myth, seeing an Orpheus happily settling into life with Eurydice. I am feeling a bit dim to-day, so maybe I'll come back to it . . .

Oh, once again, I spotted something Francis Ford Coppola took from Cocteau for his Dracula movie;



This is a trick shot where actors scooting across a floor on their backs are shot from above to make it appear as though they're standing against a wall. Then, when they turn an obtuse angled corner, they find themselves apparently somehow falling sideways. In Orpheus, this is to convey the strange physics of the underworld. In Dracula, it happens to John Harker as he's escaping from Dracula's castle. It makes a lot less sense in the latter film, sure, but whatever. It's still a good movie.


Re-Animator
1985 Directed by Stuart Gordon

However, the fact that the opening title sequence of this film blatantly steals the score from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho comes across less as an interesting homage than as wholesale theft. There's no individual "Re-Animator" feeling created with the opening credits. It just made me think, "Oh, it's the Psycho soundtrack. Why?"

In an interview included on the DVD, Re-Animator composer Richard Brand claims his use of the Psycho music was intentional, that it was meant to be "quirky." He maintains that, among everyone working on the film, he was the only one who recognised, from rough cuts, that the film was so over the top that it ought to be presented as a horror movie parody, and to do that he needed to use an iconic horror movie score. He says that it was an accident that no credit was given to Bernard Herrmann originally, and Brand says he personally made sure credit was put in later prints.

That's right--Richard Brand is full of shit.



Still, the movie is good, schlocky fun. Perhaps that's appropriate since H.P. Lovecraft wrote the original story as a parody of Frankenstein, now the movie is a parody of zombie movies. But there is a sincerity in it, too, notably in the form of Jeffery Combs, who plays Herbert West with wonderful zeal.

It's well this movie is so enthusiastically phoney, though, as it allows us to enjoy the gratuitousness;



These things happen.

The special effects are top notch, and most of the budget clearly went to exploding eyeballs and fake limbs, thereby confining the action to four or five rather plain looking sets, inhabited by no more than seven or eight people at any one time.

I can't help wondering how Herbert West would do on an introspective journey through the underworld . . .



When hunting zombie cats, bring your croquet mallet.

*Previously, I'd seen only all but the last fifteen or so minutes of Orpheus. Sonya urged me to rectify this, and she is wise.

How Twin Peaks ended. Maybe.

Wanna see one of the most pathetic things on the internet? Behold! John Mellencamp filling in for Roger Ebert.

MIND OF MELLENCAMP: Well, gosh darn it, if them Eggbert and Roperts aren't the meanest sons o'guns--I'm just gonna give thumbs up to every movie.

Some of my favourite bits; "Well, I didn't think the movie was that bad," "Now--I didn't say I didn't like the music, I said I didn't get the music," "[Vacency] is in the tradition of Hitchcock," "I haven't seen many horror movies."

Of all the well versed movie critics who'd love the chance to fill in for Ebert . . . sheesh.

MIND OF ROEPER: Suddenly I look like a very good critic.

Ebert, come back. Now.

For Poetry Month, here's Jack Kerouac reading his poem about Charlie Parker.

I'm already pretty sick of seeing the pictures the gunman sent to NBC. I don't think the public ought to be denied access, but it's the sort of thing that ought to be relegated to rotton.com, not something that ought to dominate the New York Times web site. The collage of victims' photos was better.

Why is NBC News constantly in the news? First Tim Russert in the Scooter Libby trial, then the Imus thing, now this . . .

Monday I dreamt I was with a class of college students, leading them through a dense tropical jungle on a bright, cloudless day. Persian buildings could be seen here and there, including white towers with golden domed tops rising above the trees. Eventually we came to a bright blue wall that I realised was in fact the sky. There was a large, blank white rectangle painting on it that I knew was used as a movie screen, and I wanted to show the students some movies. But one of the students, a guy who looked like Jay Hernandez from Hostel, which I watched a few nights ago, opened the white rectangle in the middle like a couple of large sliding doors. There was a dark room inside and I told everyone to stay out because I knew Lost Highway was playing in there and that, because Lost Highway isn't available on DVD, going in the room would result in disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, Jay Hernandez didn't listen to me, and soon he and many of the other students were dying of some kind of flesh-eating tropical disease.

I suppose there's some slight resemblance there to the school shootings to-day. The latest and worst of what seems to be becoming a terribly regular fact of life, I can't help feeling a little numbed. With Iraq to think about, and Darfur, the world seems increasingly covered by a boiling sea of violence.

I must admit, what's interested me most so far about this has been the politics on gun-control that appears to have already taken the stage. From the White House Press Briefing given by deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino:

MS. PERINO: As far as policy, the President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed. And certainly bringing a gun into a school dormitory and shooting -- I don't want to say numbers because I know that they're still trying to figure out many people were wounded and possibly killed, but obviously that would be against the law and something that someone should be held accountable for.

Q Columbine, Amish school shooting, now this, and a whole host of other gun issues brought into schools -- that's not including guns on the streets and in many urban areas and rural areas. Does there need to be some more restrictions? Does there need to be gun control in this country?

MS. PERINO: The President -- as I said, April, if there are changes to the President's policy we will let you know. But we've had a consistent policy of ensuring that the Justice Department is enforcing all of the gun laws that we have on the books and making sure that they're prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Q Lastly, in Texas, if I'm correct, he passed legislation, no age restriction on possession of weapons, if I'm correct. Should there be some kind of federal age limit, as far as the President is concerned, raising the age for gun possession in this country?

MS. PERINO: Unfortunately, I'm going to have to go back and look at what the record was in Texas. Maybe Ken Herman could tell us. We'll go to Ken next.

Keith Olbermann pointed out to-day that one of the guns used by the gunman was modified with a special clip that allowed it to hold more than its standard ten rounds of ammunition. Such clips were made illegal by the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, but that law was allowed to expire by the Bush administration.

Olbermann also mentioned a press release from Gun Owners of America that argues that the gunman might have been stopped sooner if the students were allowed to carry firearms.

So they want to see a world where every college guy who thinks he's got a small dick can legally carry a gun? Every boozy frat boy? I have to wonder what ridiculous, slow motion shoot-out is playing in Bushie minds. It seems impossible that anyone can be so stupid, yet if they're deliberately attempting to destroy this country, you'd think there'd be faster ways of going about doing it. Maybe there's just no accounting for delusions. I wonder what remedy Gun Owners of America would recommend for someone whose callous short-sightedness has resulted in American deaths at home and abroad.

I haven't gotten too much done lately, mostly because of birthday stuff--the zoo on Friday and Grindhouse (second time) on Saturday. But I have managed to do a lot of colouring here and there. I just hadn't gotten enough sleep to do any drawing, as Thursday was still Thursday and for some reason my mother wanted me up even earlier on Friday to go to the zoo. It was a nice trip, though. We watched the gorillas playing--there were five or six medium sized ones and a big alpha male. We watched him descend on a smaller male, give him a casual thump on the head, and take what he was eating, all while two females watched. Another enclosure had a voyeuristic ourang-outang, who was pressed up against the glass to watch the human children.

Watching tiny monkeys racing across their busy enclosure, leaping from rope suspended tires over concrete streams to dry, twisted branches, I wondered if Super Mario Brothers taps into buried animal instincts. I wonder what humanity would look like if suddenly deprived of all its cybernetic stuff.

Last night I watched Tengoku to jigoku, which was quite good, and perhaps one of Kurosawa's most blatant statements on his own curious and complex political views.

I had a pretty good birthday, except Kurt Vonnegut died. So it goes. It doesn't seem like that long ago he was plugging a new book and appearing in commercials. I'm sort of surprised he died at all.

Otherwise, it was a good birthday. My sister, in a move of pure genius, prevailed upon my mother to give me a Disney Princess themed birthday. My sister knows me. I also got a Donald Duck Pez dispenser.

I guess I'd better get what sleep I can now . . . My thanks to they who wished me happy birthday.

The old clock inside the computer tells me it's my birthday, so I'm twenty-eight years old now. No career path or college degree, yet I am Time's person of the year. And I'm a muthafuckin' blogger, one of the pyjamahadeen--of sorts. So there's that.

I am optimistic about this comic I'm working on. I've shown bits of it to Sonya, and she seems to like it. I bet a comics publisher would be crazy not to take it. Does that satisfy you, birthday god? You never talk to me.

Mostly people're giving me money, though I haven't bought very much yet. I spent ten dollars at Wal-Mart an hour ago on Bound and Dead Alive, and last week I bought the second season of Twin Peaks. That wasn't too ridiculous, I only bought the first season six fucking years ago. And now I hear the seven episode first season is actually pretty hard to find, so I feel for the poor little lambs coming to the show only now. Of course, unavailability of the first season is still nothing compared to the elusive pilot episode. Believe it or not, if you live in the U.S., the best way to watch the pilot, which is the first episode, was, until a few days ago, on YouTube. You can order an import DVD, but the sound's fucked, which of course, as any Lynch-phile knows, ruins a David Lynch film. But the image quality is better than YouTube--I actually tried to sync the two up, using the YouTube sound with the DVD picture, but it turns out the DVD actually plays slightly too fast. So Warner Brothers gets the last laugh as Paramount's release of the show suffers from the pilot's unavailability.

Most of what I've been watching lately has been anime I got for free from Tim--lots of series I fit on lots of DVDs. Most of them not very good. Last Exile, which'd looked promising, turned out to have writing so annoying that I had to stop watching halfway through the third episode or risk reflexively dashing my monitor against the wall. And ten episodes after the wonderful first episode of Tenchi Muyo GXP, the writing took a nose dive. So I just re-watched The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, a series whose brilliance I'd sort of forgotten (it's a component of a much larger post I've been meaning to write for weeks, so stay tuned).

Yesterday I watched the first episode of Code Geas, though, and was very pleasantly surprised. Interesting writing, beautiful CLAMP character designs, and absorbing unpredictability. Lelouch, the pretty male protagonist, actually has character traits apart from being pretty, a teenager, and supernatural. I know, I was amazed, too.

But I think now I'll go to the nightly Twin Peaks viewing. I'm about three episodes in and, although I haven't watched the series in six years, I'm finding it's still written on my brain from my millions of repeated viewings of tapes in the late 90s, especially the Lynch episodes. Though these are much better quality copies.

I'll be accompanied by cherry pie and coffee . . .

I'm still in Grindhouse afterglow. As you may remember from one of my posts about last year's Comic-Con, I was very much looking forward to the movie. And it surpassed all my expectations.

I was looking forward to a movie that absurdly kicked ass. I got that in Rodriguez's Planet Terror. But in Tarantino's Death Proof, I was treated also to beautiful, foot fetishist photography, beautiful women, nice dialogue, deft characterisation, and an absorbing story. I love Tarantino's patience, his ability to put viewers viscerally into the story by framing easily swallowed dialogue with quiet tension.

The other nice thing that I wasn't expecting was the general atmosphere created by the pairing of the films, the fake trailers, and the retro advertisements. I never experienced the actual grind-house cinema scene, and the only exploitation movies I've seen are Japanese, so nostalgia wasn't part of my enjoyment. It was more like another movie existed apart from yet comprised of the two movies--a storyline of style and sensibilities suggested by the confluence. Like the supplemental articles and interviews in Watchmen--Grindhouse is a meta-movie.

My only complaint, really, is that there's not nearly enough sex in either film. I only hope the DVD remedies that. But otherwise, it's one of the best movies I've seen this year.