You, You, You

I heard on Howard Stern a week ago that PETA's been complaining about the Groundhog Day ritual featuring Punxsutawney Phil. Now, I'm all for animal rights, but PETA has really gotta learn how to pick its battles. This is like promoting responsible drinking by dubbing in "ginger ale" whenever James Bond says, "Vodka martini." It's not going to improve the image of animal rights activists as spazzy busy bodies.

Which reminds me of the third episode of Being Human, which I watched last night. It featured a ghost character who liked to quote from Smiths songs, mentioning "meat is murder" when the ghost girl brought up the fact that her werewolf friend generally only eats rodents. I guess maybe the idea's only to make this one character ridiculous, but I kind of got the impression that the makers of the show didn't quite understand Morrissey or were hoping to court viewers who are annoyed by him. Included was a somewhat flatfooted use of "Girlfriend in a Coma". Sometimes I don't think the British get British humour. But maybe being a huge Morrissey fan makes me oversensitive. Anyway, I'm still basically enjoying the show, though the ghost plot may be the weakest, the most concerned with allegory nonsense.

I also watched Key Largo last night, a John Huston film I'd never seen before. Not a bad movie, though it's not one of his best. An adapted stage play, most of the action takes place inside a hotel where war veteran Humphrey Bogart, lush Claire Trevor, hotel owner Lionel Barrymore, and his daughter Lauren Bacall are held hostage by crime lord Edward G. Robinson. The movie seems to only scratch the surface of its principle theme of self-perception--Robinson plays Johnny Rocco, a mobster who's lived his whole life trying to prove he's bigger than anyone else and easily has the biggest part in the movie. Trevor plays Gaye Dawn, a former singer turned drunk who's forced to sing a cappella by Rocco for a single drink. The best scene in the movie, you can see its Rocco's sadism at work as Trevor's forced to confront the dream of herself she's been trying to forget with alcohol.

Bogart plays Frank McCloud, who seems almost an extension of his Casablanca, "I stick my neck out for nobody" character who ends up unable to deny his fundamentally noble nature. Lauren Bacall's almost totally wasted in the movie, relegated to basically playing his cheerleader. She'd have been better off in Trevor's role with maybe the character she does play being deleted entirely, but I suspect some forces were reluctant to let her play such an undignified woman.



Last night's tweets;

Camera shy seagulls prefer large, fresh fish.
The sea is grimly devoid of fruit juice.
Betty Grable provides an ample dish.
Rusted, deep metal holds an old cooked goose.

Storytelling is Carried and Distributed Throughout the County

Twitter Sonnet #107

Child motorists hate petrol stations.
But purple dinosaurs open their veins.
Dead plush stinks of stale libations.
Giant pinballs hoard the left freeway lanes.
Fast bipeds with tails fall prey to footpads.
Some cat monsters always have big noses.
Plastic kid octopi have absent dads.
And nowhere to go when Sea World closes.
A pawn moves slowly across countryside.
The white rabbit was never a chess piece.
A music video's no place for pride.
The best sculpted stars have a wooden fleece.
Young yoghurt golems never leave last wills.
Murders on trolleys pale next to train kills.

I finally took my car in to-day to repair the damage caused when a guy backed into it in November. I won't have it back until Thursday or Friday and I had to take the trolley to get back across town from the dealership. I was surprised to find standing room only on the trolley. In front of me were a young couple dressed in black--the girl had a big, poofy, inconspicuous jacket and long, straight black hair in a ponytail while the guy wore a pin-striped, button down shirt and had a large, dishevelled black afro (they were both white). She read aloud to him the whole time from a Christopher Pike novel, which I somehow found really cute.

When I got back to Santee, I discovered the city had closed off part of my usual route when walking from the trolley station, forcing me to make a big detour. I got back here at almost 7pm, sweaty and exhausted, and I still needed to write the new Venia's Travels script, which I wound up having no time for yesterday after I spent hours creating and compiling information for it. I had trouble sleeping last night because I was thinking about it--I often see the chapters as being comprised of Tetris blocks of story that need to be arranged in a certain way. By the time I got back to-day, I had pretty good idea of what the chapter's going to be, but I'm still having trouble getting started. I wrote the first page before I took a shower, but I think I'm going to need to rewrite it.

I guess I'd better get to it . . .

This lizard on the back porch to-day let me get really close to him. I thought he was dead until I started lining up for a shot in front of his face and he scrambled away. I think he was a little cold and, looking at the photos later, I saw his leg's kind of mangled;



I think he's been through quite a lot. Looks like he dropped his tail at some point and has been growing it back for a while;



I wonder if someone could harness this power to treat human amputees. Brilliant idea that would be, I don't see how anything could go wrong with it.





I watched the first proper episode of Being Human last night. See Bri Run had told me the series cast had much better chemistry than the pilot cast and, boy, was he right, particularly in the case of the vampire Mitchell. They swapped out the guy who looked sort of like Vincent Gallo for a guy who looks sort of like Gavin Rossdale and, more importantly, who gives a much warmer performance. He and the werewolf, George, actually seem like legitimate friends now instead of people forced to live together for some mysterious reason.

I still like the original ghost girl better, but the new Annie is at least nicely vivacious, though I got a little worried when the characters used the word "relapse" when referring to something about her being a ghost. I find it silly to use fantasy monsters and entities as allegory for real life issues that can be dealt with directly. Humanoid monsters ought to be about addressing the unexplored territory of the human mind, things that we can't articulate directly. But, luckily, there hasn't been much of the former so far in Being Human. This one looks like a keeper--I really like the characters now.

I watched the final episode of Dollhouse with breakfast to-day. I went in expecting to be disappointed and my expectation was met. It was a few kinds of cynical--coasting on the great Epitaph 1 finale of season 1 for its premise and much of its drama, adding an awkward "Oscar clip" furniture breaking scene for Eliza Dushku that probably exists because she's a producer on the show, and one senseless plot development after another in the name of cheap melodrama, most notably in the form of Topher's martyrdom because this technical genius can't make a remote trigger for the explosion that somehow saves the world. There were a lot of little moments that seemed like ideas in need of fleshing out, particularly Felicia Day's crew--her relationship with the Asian Mad Max bandit, the kid Caroline, and the landscaper guy. All kinds of things introduced only to go nowhere.

All in all, a disappointing end to a series I'd still argue has a lot of great moments, especially in the latter portion of the first season and the beginning of the second. Oh, well. Better luck next time, Joss Whedon.

Last night's tweets;

Fast bipeds with tails fall prey to footpads.
Some cat monsters always have big noses.
Plastic kid octopi have absent dads.
And nowhere to go when Sea World closes.

Most Eligible Naked Werewolves

Pee-wee Gets An iPad! from Pee-wee Herman

I watched last night the pilot episode of Being Human, a series Felis Demens recommended to me. It wasn't bad, and I always find it comforting to see so much fanservice for straight women and/or gay men. I hate to think of us heterosexual men having all the fun.

The show's about a werewolf, vampire, and ghost living together. The ghost is the only female character, and she appears to be the perfect untouchable female POV character amidst attractive, tortured boys, one of whom, the werewolf, is played by an actor who really seems to enjoy being naked. He actually reminded me a lot of Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters, particularly when the two men are looking at the flat they're thinking of moving into and the gag of Ray running downstairs, clearly more enthusiastic about buying the firehouse than Bill Murray and Harold Ramis, is lifted by Being Human when the werewolf does essentially the same thing.

The men are created as very clear character types, with the vampire being the aloof, emo, possible misogynist (or maybe he just feels superior to humans) and the werewolf being the affable, rambunctious footballer type. It's hard to imagine how these guys became intimate enough friends to where we see a montage of them cuddling lounging with incidental, close physical contact on the couch in their new flat, and the show never goes into how they met, but there's certainly potential for two such characters to play off each other.

I liked the ghost girl, though for some reason the writers decided to make her really touchy about the word "ghost". It seemed like a broad, cheap ploy for laughs that I couldn't really get into.

Anyway, after watching the pilot, I discovered that when the show was picked up for a series it was retooled and everyone was recast except for the werewolf. I guess I won't really have a sense of the show until I've seen a couple episodes of the real series. But I'm already disappointed to see that the woman playing the ghost in the series isn't half as attractive as the woman in the pilot.

I didn't do much else yesterday. I'm feeling pretty burnt out from that last Venia's Travels chapter, and I'm already dreading what kind of gruelling project I'll be writing for myself to-morrow in the new script.

Last night's tweets;

Child motorists hate petrol stations.
But purple dinosaurs open their veins.
Dead plush stinks of stale libations.
Giant pinballs hoard the left freeway lanes.

I watched a few more YouTube videos of Alexandra Kosteniuk. I love how Magnus Carlson walks away in a snit in this one;



I think it might be satisfying to see anyone named "Magnus" humiliated.

Castles in the Sand

My pessimism just got rerouted. I think Obama sincerely thinks he can make the Republican caucus listen to reason. I was almost convinced Obama wasn't as good as he seemed coming into office, now I think the problem is simply that he's too good. He still has faith in constructing a reasonable argument, refusing to give in to the fact that the Republicans appear only to take his statements as, "Blah, blah, death panels, blah, blah, big government."

Well. Whatever happens, I do think it's important to put reason out there, for someone, somewhere, to see and understand.

Twitter Sonnet #106

Beware the sleeping cookie scale dragon.
The shadowed mountain smells like a bakery.
Hot dough creates corpses by the wagon.
And deer puke Slurpee by royal decree.
The smart cursor is announced as "pretty".
The jurors furiously write this down.
Troubadour lawyers evoke no pity.
After some thought, the reeve thinks he might frown.
The criminal waterskin has fallen.
Ale ransacks all the warm human bodies.
A kid lost his dice to Woody Allen.
Random men now move King's commodities.
Millions of cheese wedges become white noise.
Food is valued less than McDonald's toys.

Sometimes I like to imagine the young white trash around here who dress like it's the 1980s are actually time travellers from 1985. I saw a kid wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off to-day when I went to the bagel shop to get breakfast. I thought he ought to be a Goonie.

I had to go out to breakfast because I'm out of coffee--one among several errands and chores I had to let slide yesterday because from 2pm to 6am I had to work on my comic. Subtracting half an hour for lunch and dinner--that's mainly for lunch because I worked while eating dinner--I worked on the damned thing for fifteen and a half hours. I didn't even think I was so far behind. When I started yesterday, everything was already drawn and inked, I'd completely coloured the first two pages, had mostly coloured three others. I thought I'd be going to 2am at the latest. Part of the problem is this computer, which runs Paint Shop Pro 8 pretty slow. I also need a new mouse, which has had a tendency lately to randomly make the cursor shoot across the screen. What gets me is I actually could've upgraded this computer if it weren't for hospital bills. If only I lived in a civilised country . . .

Venia's New Headaches

The new Venia's Travels is online. Sorry it's so much later than usual--I really underestimated this chapter. I guess that'll teach me to try to find an interesting way of introducing thirty new characters at once. I hope you enjoy it--I can't look at it, or anything, without my vision changing the shapes into cheerful dancing worms.

Clues of the Night

I watched The Hangover while I ate dinner the past couple nights. Good movie, reminiscent of Animal House, a kind of young men's screwball movie you don't see much anymore. I particularly liked that the plot actually held together--these guys wake up after a boozy night they don't remember to find all kinds of crazy things going on--a tiger and a human baby in their hotel room, one guy's missing a tooth, another guy's just missing. And everything ends up having a real explanation that ends up being funny and facilitating opportunities for the actors to be funny.

Also a bit anachronistic was that the movie was honest about caring about the characters instead of using irony as a weird defence mechanism. I blame homophobia.

I've been colouring all day to-day and still have a long way to go. So I'd better get back to it. I'm so tired, though, I kind of don't want to. I wish everyone was naked in this chapter, I'm tired of filling in all the little pieces of clothing.

I saw Snow the Cat to-day, so I guess the coyotes haven't gotten him. He followed me while I brought the trash cans up from the curb like an attentive lieutenant.

By far the best J.D. Salinger obituary can be found here.

Last night's tweets;

The smart cursor is announced as "pretty".
The jurors furiously write this down.
Troubadour lawyers evoke no pity.
After some thought, the reeve thinks he might frown.

Thoughtful Transportation of Goods

Last night's tweets;

Beware the sleeping cookie scale dragon.
The shadowed mountain smells like a bakery.
Hot dough creates corpses by the wagon.
And deer puke Slurpee by royal decree.

Having mentioned chess a few tweets ago seems to have gotten me on the list of over sixteen thousand people Women's World Chess Grandmaster Alexandra Kosteniuk is following. I hadn't heard of her, but I've suddenly gotten addicted to watching YouTube videos of her playing chess.



That she thought a few moves ahead of time so quickly to that Knight fork at the end blows my mind.

I only watched three videos of her, though, because I've been drawing pretty much all day. I pencilled two pages to-day in the time it took me to pencil single pages of the whole rest of the chapter. It's lucky these last two pages ended up being easier--I keep the difficulty of drawing the pages out of mind when I write the script, so I can only hope the next chapter will be easier.

I also watched part of Obama's State of the Union Address while I was eating lunch. I thought it was rather surprising the Republicans would so blatantly avoid applauding when Obama talked shit about lobbyists. I suppose the GOP has good reason to be cocky, though.

I've been getting more and more pessimistic about the people in government nowadays, but I have to admit the guy gave me a glimmer of hope with charm alone. But it didn't take long for the reality of the Republican strategy of ceding absolutely no ground came back to my mind.

Last night I dreamt I became a club DJ and hired a stripper to be my personal assistant. I bought an angry, dancing iguana, which made my stripper/assistant upset because she already had a twelve foot long white reptile of some kind which she kept in an aquarium filled with opaque, black liquid.

All Appointments are On the Studio Lot

Twitter Sonnet #105

The Death Panels shall be blind seamstresses.
Federal Satan bots shall roam on stilts.
They'll hand welfare cheques to all addresses.
And force all straight men of age to wear kilts.
Melted, cold apples kill the cranberries.
Bread and soup pull arms off at the market.
Your CD's accepted by car faeries.
Like an eye having sex with its socket.
Coquettish checkstands tease hamburger buns.
A pretty bank teller slyly watches.
Limelight shows up as a hundred cold suns.
Frogs feebly offer a box of matches.
Five hundred thirty five chessmen frozen.
Crippled cattle's cheaper by the dozen.

Over the past couple nights, I watched An Affair to Remember with dinner, a film that works almost entirely because of Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr's good chemistry. The screenplay's pretty clunky, except an observation about Grant's character--that the critic in him kills the artist in him--is interesting, and the last scene has some dialogue that's exciting for letting you watch the characters figure things out for themselves credibly.

I kept thinking how Michael Powell referred to Deborah Kerr as the most intelligent of actresses, and she does always come across as much sharper than most of even the best female leads of the era. She's able to take awkward dialogue in this movie and make it sound just about natural. I also loved her clothes;




In fact, Kerr's wardrobe is by far the most visually interesting thing about the film, which seems to be extraordinarily set bound, even for a film of the mid-1950s. The action goes from a cruise liner, a coastal French town, to New York City, and it's pretty clear neither of the leads left Los Angeles during filming. It's worst when one scene relies on Deborah Kerr finding Grant's grandmother's villa absolutely gorgeous when it barely looks more credible than a Star Trek set.

This is one of the reasons the second half of the movie is far better than the first. If you can forget that the process through which the two fall in love doesn't make much sense, despite their chemistry, the last portion is an appreciable little romance, except for a couple totally extraneous scenes of children singing.

Untranslated Warm Transmissions

So tired. This new chapter of my comic's been a real pain in the ass. I should be okay if I can pencil and ink two pages on Wednesday. Which is not to say I'm behind, I just need to get ahead to be done on time. Which I guess means I'm behind . . .

Reading about Neil Gaiman losing a sweet cat named Zoe lately, I've been thinking about how much cats impact my life. 2007 and 2008 were pretty bad years for me, and thinking back I realise now that it was due in no small part to my aunt moving out and taking her cats with her. The daily reality of existing without the cat presences you're used to is actually sort of repetitively bleak. It's a loneliness that can't be alleviated by humans. Humans have too much bullshit. A dying cat seems like a massive injustice--maybe somewhere in my mind I'm still locked into death as being related to mankind's deal with supernatural forces. Cats seem like they should be exempt.

But I guess that's exactly opposite of the way one's supposed to feel about animals. I saw another coyote outside the other night and I'm hoping Snow the Cat's okay. I haven't seen him since the storms started.

The sky's been clear for days now and it doesn't look like there's going to be more rain, though the water on the umbrella I keep in my back seat seems to have transformed into an invisible, stinking cloud in my car. Condensation coats the inside of my windows when I start the car at night. I can't wait for summer. I need to live somewhere where it's summer all year long.

Last night's tweets;

Melted, cold apples kill the cranberries.
Bread and soup pull arms off at the market.
Your CD's accepted by car faeries.
Like an eye having sex with its socket.

Tom Waits is No Weasel

The Wool Keeps Spinning

Surfing for porn a couple nights ago, I came across a site called Hot Chicks Smiling at Ground Zero (actually SFW). I guess there's something misogynist about guys getting off on this ("Get a load of the dumb broads"), but I find this observation overwhelmed by the blissful callousness on display. This may be the ultimate example of obnoxious tourists--my favourite is this one of the girl, wearing an FDNY shirt, giving her boyfriend bunny ears while a passer-by looks on in disgust.

My schedule lately has been to work on my comic every Sunday through Thursday and to take Friday and Saturday off, but there was a lot of colouring piled up from the first pages of the next chapter, so I coloured last night after dinner until just after 2am. I wanted to try to get to bed earlier, but I wanted something to do. I thought about looking to see if anyone wanted to play chess in Second Life, but, still feeling sort of ill from Taco Bell the day before, didn't feel like socialising. I ended up just watching Spirited Away again. That really is one of the few perfect films in this world.

I watched part of Vertigo again on Friday. You'd think at this point that movie would be much too familiar to me, but actually I still find every scene so rich in layers of detail I can't help but love it. It's like a great painting you can stare at all day.

I really need to find a new television series to watch with dinner now that I'm done with Angel. I don't think Mad Men's going to cut it--I noticed it's using a couple Twin Peaks directors, (Tim Hunter and Lesli Linka Glatter), which seems smart--why not choose the directors David Lynch chose? But there's something monochromatic about that show. It can't seem to get past observing in various ways that the culture in which these people live causes them to feel emotionally disconnected, so mostly it's kind of dull and depressing. Maybe it gets better, but I want a series that's proven to be valuable in every episode. As much as I complained about Battlestar Galactica, there was almost never an episode I felt like stopping part way through. I'd say the same for Angel, Buffy, Firefly, Farscape, and Veronica Mars. If anyone wants to recommend to me an hour long drama, Sci-Fi, or comedy series, I'd appreciate it.

I'm short on time to-day, so I'll have to call this a post.

Last night's tweets;

The Death Panels shall be blind seamstresses.
Federal Satan bots shall roam on stilts.
They'll hand welfare cheques to all addresses.
And force all straight men of age to wear kilts.

Meet Me in Technicolour

Twitter Sonnet #104

White mad eyes roll on sweaty skin over
Sigmund Freud's new black fibre optic beard.
A jury pool wants to be your lover--
Government dating services are weird.
Scarecrow's shredded documents have vanished.
They functioned as his liver and kidneys.
Digested telegrams are now tarnished.
His guts known to would-be Antigones.
Flax flowers awe the soul of a minotaur.
Now suddenly sleeping, he falls downhill.
A new country's across the valley moor.
He strolls through the heath barely by his will.
Sanitised glass goblets are sparkly clean.
Alcoholic Santa's simple, not mean.

I got some Taco Bell for lunch last night out of respect for the recent death of the restaurant chain's founder. Since then, my stomach's been lecturing me on why I shouldn't be so sentimental. Oy.



Last night I watched my favourite Vincente Minnelli film, Meet Me in St. Louis. A beautiful, thoroughly engaging film--you become very quickly involved in the Smith family's dramas, they're a charming group of vivid characters. I love the surprisingly earthy dialogue for a 1944 film, from the little girl talking about blood spurting from a poor guy being torn apart by horses, to the young man, having been beaten and bitten by Judy Garland, comparing the experience to gym class, only "more fun with a girl."



And, gods, is the full might of MGM ever on display here, with every insignificant item on screen full of intricate, beautiful details. Look at the window in the bathroom seen for less than a minute in the entire movie;



I loved the wallpaper in the dining room that almost seemed to glow;



The yellow drapes turned gold by afternoon sunlight;



Coming with TCM's bundle of four musicals also including Easter Parade, The Band Wagon, and Singin' in the Rain, this edition of Meet Me in St. Louis still has an absolutely gorgeous, pristine picture.

What Brings Girls to the Goblin Market

Thinking back to Wednesday's Howard Stern Show, when I laughed hysterically as Stern, Robin Quivers, and Fred Norris jokingly imagined a scenario where Quivers was gang raped by her co-workers every morning, including a bit replicating the infamous gang rape scene from The Accused, after Stern played a clip of Joy Behar asking Quivers how she survives working with men, I may be the wrong person to address whether or not casual use of the word "bitch" somehow makes light of rape. Oh, well.

Can I watch a movie without it turning out to be Vertigo in some way? Just days after talking about Cathy Moriarty's resemblance in Raging Bull to Kim Novak's character in Vertigo, I watched Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film In the Mood for Love, the wikipedia entry for which has this quote from the director;

the role of Tony in the film reminds me of Jimmy Stewart's in Vertigo. There is a dark side to this character. I think it's very interesting that most of the audience prefers to think that this is a very innocent relationship. These are the good guys, because their spouses are the first ones to be unfaithful and they refuse to be. Nobody sees any darkness in these characters - and yet they are meeting in secret to act out fictitious scenarios of confronting their spouses and of having an affair. I think this happens because the face of Tony Leung is so sympathetic. Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, 'This guy is really weird.' It's the same in Vertigo. Everybody thinks James Stewart is a nice guy, so nobody thinks that his character is actually very sick.



This resembles my own feelings about the genius of casting James Stewart in Vertigo, and the odd actions of the two characters in In the Mood for Love I think would probably automatically be taken as normal because of Tony Leung's persistently open and earnest countenance. But I still see the relationship portrayed in the film as quite innocent, and maybe it says something about Kar-wei himself that he does not find it innocent.

I'm not sure if he means to imply anything sinister with the word "dark", but in my mind darkness and innocence are very closely related as both suggest a lack of moral consciousness, a lack of concern for morality, or a, shall we say, unrefined perspective on morality.

The impression I had was of two people who have suddenly realised they don't really understand how love works, having been comfortably ignorant of true passion in the socially prescribed institution of marriage. Their strange play acting relationship is an attempt to understand how to process the feelings that their spouses have shown them are natural, and which they themselves begin to feel without the influence of their intentions or courtship conventions.



Very little of this is conveyed in dialogue--the movie's vital organs are its excellent actors, music, and beautiful compositions of shots. One of my favourite examples is this very Hitchcockian shot of Maggie Cheung;



The shot lasts for a while as we watch Cheung, alone in her bedroom, almost expressionless, begin to cry. Cheung gives a very subtle performance throughout the film of someone very tightly controlled whose feelings, strange to her, are breaking through without perfect understanding from her. I thought about how much better she'd have been in Maggie Gyllenhaal's role in the movie Secretary, which I watched again a week ago. There's a bit where James Spader tells her character that she seems very "closed", but she doesn't. I like Gyllenhaal, but she exhibits far too much self confidence and warmth to ever seem closed, which is a tricky thing for an actor to do while still communicating to the camera. Maggie Cheung pulls it off brilliantly.

The above shot so nicely conveys someone tortured by being alone with herself, unable to express her feelings when she needed to and now finds those feelings endlessly reflected back on her to the point of intense pain.

I also loved shots of the hallway outside of the room where the two protagonists regularly meet in secret;



It's the often replicated shot from Cocteau's Belle et la Bete of billowing curtains in a hallway, in this case bright red curtains, a bit of environment, serving as so much of the atmosphere of the film, to exhibit the feelings of the two leads who don't know how to express feelings themselves.

With breakfast to-day, I watched the third episode of Baka to Test to Shonkanju. This show is just plain great. I loved the tagline on the faux Apocalypse Now poster in this shot;



Last night's tweets;

Scarecrow's shredded documents have vanished.
They functioned as his liver and kidneys.
Digested telegrams are now tarnished.
His guts known to would-be Antigones.

Bitches and the Related Unspoken Animal Rights Issue

Last night's tweets;

White mad eyes roll on sweaty skin over
Sigmund Freud's new black fibre optic beard.
A jury pool wants to be your lover--
Government dating services are weird.

And I wrote that before I heard about the Supreme Court significantly loosening restrictions on corporate political funding. And, oh, isn't everyone just so very upset? Oh, sorry, that was the sound of everyone not giving a fuck. Sort of like how the election of a Republican Senator in Massachusetts will mark the point in time when the president and congress went from doing nothing to doing more nothing. Honestly, how can people question the Democrats at this point? Hasn't the game been obvious for at least six months?

Speaking of uphill battles, I read this in Neil Gaiman's blog to-day;

I was going to write a long blogpost today about how I was quoted as saying I "wasn't anyone's bitch" in the New Yorker (something that I don't remember saying, because it's not the kind of thing that I'd say, unless we'd just been talking about the Entitlement Issues blogpost) and how yesterday I was deluged with FAQ emails (and a handful of Twitters) explaining, with varying degrees of civility (which I appreciated) or incivility, that having used that phrase undid all the good I'd ever done by writing positive women, supporting RAINN etc, because it showed that I was minimising the horror of rape and revealing my underlying misogyny (I think it started here); and I apologised a few times on Twitter and in the New Yorker chat; and how this morning's FAQ email has been filled with people saying "Look, I'm a feminist and I have to tell you I'm really disappointed in you for giving credibility to those people from yesterday who are trivializing very real issues..."; and how I'm rapidly moving into "a plague on all your houses" mode; but honestly right now, I haven't the heart, and probably it's only getting to me because I'm actually really worried and upset about a very small cat.

Gaiman doesn't mention that his fiancé, Amanda Palmer (who was dressed brilliantly at the Golden Globes, though I could've done without the panties), started a thread on her forum encouraging fans to design "Amanda Palmer is Not Your Bitch" t-shirts, an outgrowth of Gaiman's original statement in that "Entitlement Issues" post, which, quoting exactly, was, "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch," in response to fans asserting that they had a right to expect Martin to write and publish fiction faster.

My take on this is that the people asserting that Gaiman's statement, or even the statement which was apparently inaccurately attributed to him, is somehow glorifying rape, making light of rape, or in any way causing rape to be more acceptable in this culture are incorrect.

For one thing, the obvious; stating that someone is not a bitch does not implicitly or explicitly support the institution of bitches. If anything, it rejects that institution.

This blog post, which Gaiman links to has having started the fury against his statement, says, "The use of 'bitch' here is not merely a misogynist slur. To be someone's 'bitch' is to be sexually subservient to hir, and the phrase is typically associated with nonconsensual sexual subservience, i.e. rape. (Specifically, it originates with prison rape.)"

One might point out that prison sex is typically between two individuals of the same sex, but I suppose the response might be that the word, originally meant for female dogs, is meant to indicate that an individual designated as female and animal is okay to sexually abuse. So perhaps these folks might be better with Amanda Palmer using the word than Neil Gaiman--sort of like a white man saying he's "nobody's nigger."

It might be helpful to examine why being considered someone's "bitch" is different from being someone's "nigger". Nigger was more less used interchangeably with negro and black to refer to African slaves and their descendants in a derogatory way, to imply there is something about being black that makes one a lower being. "Bitch" can be understood to refer to anyone, male or female, of any colour, its gender component reflecting traditional, sexist attitudes about a woman's place in society. So while I think one could say the word "nigger" is something a black person is more entitled to use in humour, "bitch" is a little more vague.

Next, I'd like to point out the absurdity prescribing an appropriate word to describe someone in a state of total physical and/or emotional subservience to another. "I'm nobody's slave," might seem appropriate because, if you look back far enough, every colour's been a slave. There are still slaves to-day, and you might note that by using the word "slave" in this context, one does not seem to be endorsing it. But because slavery is widely considered to be a remote problem to modern culture, it's not nearly as funny as "bitch". Bitch has some graphic immediacy because we know on some level that it relates specifically to a form of abuse and oppression going on nearby in the modern world. An important component to humour is shock value, something that humourless people frequently fail to grasp, people who dislike any hint of unpleasantness in the public discourse. Ironically, more and more of these people consider themselves resilient and open minded.

So, people might be sensitive to a word and might be offended by it. People who've lost loved ones may be offended by Gaiman's take on the afterlife in The Graveyard Book. The prospect of offending people is often the price of being interesting or provocative--you have to rub the sensitive spots to elicit feeling.

Is the statement, "I'm no one's bitch" going to make a would-be rapist out there feel a little more okay about raping someone? Does anyone seriously think so?

Inches of Water

Twitter Sonnet #103

Wild horses will relax when you're cloaked.
Time for the belle minotaur to decide.
The round track architect was always coked.
It's the same cardboard cylinder inside.
Only good brothels may service Wonka.
Lime candy carpet coats the upstairs floor.
Zangief paid the new girl to blow Blanka.
Electricity leaves her somewhat sore.
Wind and rain to-day knocked out the power.
Some strange keys somehow showed up in my car.
Two umbrella hands point to each hour.
To rain runoff, the gutter is a star.
Elicit sandwiches subdue the cops.
Spiders disguised as lilies steal raindrops.

It's been raining pretty hard for days. I've just gotten back from grocery shopping in it--hopefully I won't need to go back out until Friday. I ate at Subway Sandwich while I was out and listened to an apparently mentally impaired police officer talk to the employees, enjoying his sandwich so much that he loudly said, "Yeah, baby!"

I have the home page on my browser set to go to a random article on Wikipedia, and when I opened Firefox earlier I saw this article about a Polish settlement with one resident. I don't know how an article about that settlement can't even mention the person's name.

I dreamt last night I was out for a long walk and forgot to bring my camera. I consequently saw several interesting things, including a spider that looked like an upside down lily with the stamens being the spider's legs and a bunch of really friendly, pale grey, smiling mice with long noses. Maybe it's time I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland again.

A couple weeks ago, I was at Tim's house when he got American McGee's Alice working on his computer. Like all adaptations of the Alice books, it's missing a lot, but it's actually an extremely good game with some of the best atmosphere I've ever seen in a video game. Chris Vrenna's score is part of it, but even more crucial is the constant ambient noises, especially a persistent creaking noise like you're in a wooden structure slowly pulling itself apart or a giant upset stomach.

I watched the final episode of Angel last night. So ends the Buffyverse viewing saga I began eight months ago. It's incredibly obvious Angel went before it's time--the ball had just gotten rolling with Illyria, Spike was still settling in. I guess Angel's death, despite being a successful show, was one of the early signs of the death of expensive fiction shows on television.

It was a good episode, despite Wesley going out like a sucker. I mean, couldn't he have been a little better prepared for his fight with the guy on dialysis? Whatever happened to his ever present firearms? But I liked Illyria's stuff, Angel signing away his prophesied salvation, and how Adam Baldwin beating Illyria up made him seem especially threatening. I gotta read the comics.

Thinking Makes It So

I found this story rather amusing; "Royal Caribbean's decision to dock ships at Haitian resort creates controversy". Royal Caribbean defends the decision by saying;

"We also have tremendous opportunities to use our ships as transport vessels for relief supplies and personnel to Haiti . . . Simply put, we cannot abandon Haiti now that they need us most."

So what are the passengers really complaining about? Having their vacations ruined. Boo, hoo. Fuckers. If there's a ghost of a chance cruise ships can help out, shut the fuck up and bear it. Being far from Haiti doesn't make it fiction.



I watched Raging Bull again last night. I was thinking about how much Cathy Moriarty as Vickie La Motta looks like Kim Novak in Vertigo, and I wonder if Scorsese had that in mind when he cast her. Her looks serve a similar function--strikingly beautiful and often sort of frozen. Neither actress conveys big emotion, and I think in both cases this is meant to reflect the male protagonist projecting his imagination on her. We see many scenes of Jake La Motta interrogating her and others because of some paranoid idea of his that he's being insulted or cheated behind his back, and her face singularly gives him nothing. We think he's just paranoid, until later when La Motta's brother, Joey, sees her at the Copacabana with some other guys. Nothing in her face told us that she would be going out behind Jake's back, and nothing in her face told us she wouldn't.

She's a stark contrast to Jake's first wife, who engages with him in regular screaming matches early in the film. Rarely do we see Vickie raise her voice, but she's hardly submissive. There's a sweet, very physical understanding between the two of them.



When she finally leaves him, she has to tell him from inside her car without rolling down the window because she knows if she lets him touch her she might change her mind. We see her packing her bags after he'd beaten up both her and his brother, only to change her mind because he put his arm around her waist and quietly pleaded.



I'm talking about what people's facial expressions say because, although there's plenty of dialogue in the movie, few of the important character and relationship developments are directly communicated this way. La Motta is controlled by his emotions, and interprets the world through them. If he's upset, there must be something wrong with the world, and he has to tear away at it until he can confirm the problem and overcome it, rarely guessing that it's his own pushing that creates the problem. We don't really get a sense that he's aware of what he does until he's banging his head against the wall in solitary confinement. And you realise the guy is stuck with himself. His irrational behaviour puts a wall between himself and others--even before his wife leaves him and his brother stops talking to him, we see Joey beat the shit out of the guys Vickie's out with at the Copacabana only to not tell Jake about it later--he's rightly afraid Jake might kill Vickie.

The title card at the end says a lot;

So, for the second time, [the Pharisees] summoned the man who had been blind and said:
"Speak the truth before God.
We know this fellow is a sinner."
"Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,"
The man replied.
"All I know is this:
Once I was blind and now I can see."

- John IX, 24-26
the New English Bible

In spite of all his behaviour, and the vivid portrait painted of him by the movie, we can't really say Jake's a bad man. He's a likeable man, in a lot of ways. All we can say for sure is we can see him.

Last night's tweets;

Only good brothels may service Wonka.
Lime candy carpet coats the upstairs floor.
Zangief paid the new girl to blow Blanka.
Electricity leaves her somewhat sore.

More than What Things Are

I've just gotten back from my parents' house where my sister and I watched half of La Vie en Rose. I feel bad about abandoning a movie halfway through, even one as lousy as this movie had been, but I got to thinking about the other things I could be doing with my time. Focusing on the life of Edith Piaf, the film follows her childhood growing up in a brothel and being uprooted various times by her parents before becoming a street singer, all of which proved that a movie needs more than subject matter to be interesting. Director Olivier Dahan somehow managed to make everything as dull as dishwater, totally lacking in point of view. Little Edith's temporary blindness, the prostitute who cared for her like a mother being torn away from her, everything was flat and limp as a cellophane fish on a plate. Not to mention it's another movie that sees fit to go crazy with blue filters. I'll be so happy when modern filmmaking parts ways with this fad, but I suppose unimaginative filmmakers will just find new ways to be boring.

A couple nights ago, I watched Kurosawa's adaptation of The Lower Depths again, and thought about how, even more than Mullholland Drive, The Lower Depths is a story about how dreams can be both destruction and salvation. In this viewing, I found Bokuzen Hidari's monk character a little shadier, and I could believe he might be someone with a dark past, but as he says, also "a stone whose rough edges have all been smoothed". My original review for the movie is here.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I think I'm finally starting to understand the actor's suicide at the end of the movie--the prostitute runs off saying she's going to commit suicide, but doesn't. Seeing her life in large, tragic terms is the prostitute's way of coping, as we see in her story about the lover who supposedly told her her heart was as pure as a virgin. But the duty of an actor, or any artist, is to bear dreams as reality. Everyone uses dreams to cope, but no-one really buys their own delusions quite like the actor, as we can see from the gambler's statement at the end, about how they were all having a nice time until the actor decided to ruin the evening with his suicide.

I watched the second episode of Baka to Test to Shokanju with breakfast to-day--another good episode. Looks like this is definitely the best new anime of the season.

Last night's tweets;

Wild horses will relax when you're cloaked.
Time for the belle minotaur to decide.
The round track architect was always coked.
It's the same cardboard cylinder inside.

No Place for Rabbits

Twitter Sonnet #102

Trash bins withdraw into a blue shadow.
Feline, pink bellhops block confused rabbits.
Recycling's gift wrapped by a black widow.
Spiders prescribe guests' vacation habits.
Necromancers kill any thief they find.
Their kitchens are stocked with some skull shaped peas.
But undead Johnny Appleseed is kind.
Apples burn with the dust of their old trees.
Supermarkets make dust juice for your cup.
Restaurants loom on all sides of the lot.
You're of no threat to a coyote pup.
Leaving the lit space you're quickly forgot.
Doctors and Gods pass through the head hotel
The plastic girl coup will undo Mattel.

I spotted a small animal running across an island of shrubs in front of my car as I pulled up to the curb last night. I thought it might've been a large cat at first, but as I was getting groceries out of my car I saw it had stopped to watch me--it was a small coyote, about half the size of an adult. It ran away when it saw I was watching it, but I noticed a moment later it had only gone a few feet before stopping behind a shadowed shrub to keep watching me. 99 percent of the time when I get home at night there are a dozen or so rabbits congregating in the cul-de-sac, and if they're not there, I've more than once seen a couple coyotes flitting about. They seem to be getting more comfortable with humans around here--I remember seeing one get caught in the middle of a busy street, pacing and anxiously watching cars speed by on either side. My mother, who lives a few blocks away, just told me about walking at around 11am and suddenly noticing a coyote walking next to her who ran off when she looked.

I watched the second to last episode of Dollhouse with breakfast to-day. The best bits were references to "Epitaph 1", but mostly it was pretty sloppy. It was very obvious that the whole episode had been filmed before anyone remembered that Boyd had been shot in the gut in the previous episode, which necessitated the inclusion of very obvious looped dialogue over some quick cuts early on; TOPHER: "But, Boyd, you've been shot!", BOYD, "I've been shot before, and I've got meds!" I guess if gunshot wounds hold no surprises for you, they really can't have much of an effect. But that's only the most extravagant example of the episode's lack of logistical integrity as characters frequently did things that don't quite make sense (the plan to take down Rossum began with everyone just strolling into the lobby?), though it was nice that Rossum's CEO ended up being somewhat sympathetic. I liked seeing Amy Acker play Clyde, though it would've been even better if she could've managed an English accent, and Whiskey was also another victim of writer's neglect necessitating looped dialogue, in this case Topher, as everyone was fleeing the exploding building, exclaiming off screen, "I got Saunders!" even though she's clearly not present in the shot of team Adele just hanging out outside the lobby of the office building with a series of explosions inside.



Yesterday's breakfast was a little better, as I watched the first episode of Baka to Test to Shokanju, which Sal Dream recommended to me. Definitely one of the most genuinely funny anime series I've seen in a long time, it successful pulls off some great timing in sequences of absurdities. The concept is some kind of high school for summoner sorcerers whose "attack power" is based on their test scores. It takes ironic video game humour to a new level while also managing to remind me of Urusei Yatsura with its great gags based on sensitive kids reacting very personally to complete nonsense.

Fruit of the Heat Lamp

Last night's tweets;

Necromancers kill any thief they find.
Their kitchens are stocked with some skull shaped peas.
But undead Johnny Appleseed is kind.
Apples burn with the dust of their old trees.

I played some World of Warcraft last night, that makes two times in the past three months. My undead warrior's at level 54. I probably don't play enough to justify 15 dollars a month, but it's an excellent thing to do while drinking, which is what I was doing last night, a glass of Bombay Sapphire.

I got to thinking to-day about how it's actually a bit disturbing that our culture buys into really painless, fantasy wars like WoW and Avatar while our country is actually engaged in two wars. The sense I get is that the masses are surreptitiously trying to re-conceptualise the nature of war into something more innocent than movies about Vietnam and World War II of the 90s. People could afford to acknowledge the despair in those days, but to-day there's a reflexive need for denial and escape. Someone to wake us up and say, "Hey, it's not as bad as all that, really."

I'm still watching Angel, and I'm only five episodes away from finishing the fifth season. Maybe I haven't been writing about it because I've been enjoying it so much--I really feel the last season of Angel is the most perfect work of the Buffyverse--I think the makers of the show had learned by that point what worked and what didn't and were able to optimise everything. So far, there've only been two episodes I consider at all weak, the awkward Buffy related episode "Damage" and the David Boreanaz directed "Soul Purpose". But these are vastly overshadowed by great comedy episodes like "Smile Time" and "Harm's Way", mythic episodes like "Why We Fight" and "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco", and the rather nice meditations on death presented by "You're Welcome", "A Hole in the World", and "Shells".

None of the season long character conflicts are bad--Angel and Spike's fractious relationship is funny and has an interesting arc, perfectly playing off the similarities and differences of the two characters. The premiere episode, in which director Joss Whedon put a lot of somewhat odd (but enjoyable) fanservice shots of Fred is followed by a cool werewolf episode written and directed by women that successful turns Fred into a female POV character. And Wesley's dialogues with Illyria, thoughtful and melancholy, are excellent. This show really was killed too soon. I suspect I'll be looking for the comic book continuation when I'm done watching it.