Very sore neck today from falling asleep on the floor last night watching Monty Python. My friend Jeff and I tried to move my couch downstairs but it was a no-go due to the high back of it. So it's now on the balcony awaiting when I can get two guys together to try to lower it to the street. Then I'll just put it in my garage and try to sell it or donate it.

All this was because today I had a new couch and loveseat delivered. Dark brown leather. They came this morning but I had the couch sent back because it came with a scratch on the front. So the replacement came tonight and in trying to get it up the stairs they put three much worse scrapes into the center cushion. The cushions are attached so I can't just flip it over or anything. Pain in the ass. I'll have to arrange for a technician to come out but not sure what he'll do. I don't think the brown pen will be quite good enough; maybe they'll have to send a third one.

Saturday my son had a baseball game and it was a really good one, very close and everyone playing pretty well. He caught a line drive at shortstop and in the bottom of the sixth (games only go this long at this level) he got a three run inside-the-park home run to tie the game, which is how it ended because we didn't score anymore and they don't break ties. Very cool. Then we had the team party (we have two make-up games left, but whatever), and that was all right, though I was the only single parent there.

I've been enjoying Grand Theft Auto IV a lot--looks great, good story, not too hard yet. As with pretty much every videogame, I'm sure I'll come to a mission I'm unable to pass without devoting my life to it, but so far all is well.

Music - as far as current stuff that's holding up to repeated listens it's mainly the veterans like the latest from R.E.M., Radiohead, The Breeders, and now Portishead and Elvis Costello's newest are grabbing me. Very much looking forward to the new Death Cab and preordered it from iTunes because it comes with some extra demos and videos. Also downloaded the latest from a band called Augustana that I saw a good review of. It's like a softer Jayhawks or an American Travis. Sounds good but kind of slides right out of your head. Of more current bands, Vampire Weekend and Dengue Fever impress me.

I have a lot of work left to do before tomorrow, as well as laundry and maybe making some pasta, so...later.

Saturday I spent a ridiculous amount of money on margaritias and overpriced appetizers at a pretty-good Mexican eatery near me. Seared ahi tostaditas were nice but should have been much better or in bigger portions for the price, but the guacamole was fresh and good and the fried calamari with honey and a chile vampire donkey blood salsa was extraordinary. Had a dvd fest with a friend afterwards, watching Act of Violence, which was in Vol. 4 of Warner Bros' Film Noir Classics series. Like about half the films in there, it's not really a noir, just a black-and-white crime film from the '40s. We chose it because of the back cover description of "gimp-legged war veteran" Robert Ryan, who limps his implacable way to the door of Van Heflin, his old CO whose deal with their Nazi POW camp commandant led to Ryan's injury and the deaths of the rest of the men trying to escape the camp. Heflin was trying to save their lives by informing, but that's not how Ryan or the courts would see it, so Heflin tries covering up his lie and keeping his genteel suburban life going. Janet Leigh is his wife and she's ridiculously dumb and hysterical, a fault of the script and direction rather than hers. There's a pretty good tension going for a while but the pace is just too slow to sustain it and soon enough we were MST3King funnier dialogue.

On the other hand, earlier in the week I did enjoy some other films from the set, The Big Steal and Illegal, both on the same twofer disc. The Big Steal is a Mexican romp with Robert Mitchum on the run from a corrupt Army CO, teaming up with the acidic but eventually charmed Jane Greer, his earlier costar in Out of the Past. Mitchum is a hoot, and probably pretty risque' for the time, as he openly looks Greer up and down and his whole demeanor makes clear he wants to bone her if they get a free moment. Greer is a bit too thin and hard-faced to be a sexy screen goddess, plus she has a hard, Alice Kramden voice, but that's part of her appeal to me. Ramon Navarro's white suit marks him from the start as a lothario of weak character. Some fairly exciting chases for the low-fi filmmaking of the time, with what I'm guessing is Palm Desert subbing for Mexico. It's a fun one.

Then I went into the Edward G. Robinson legal thriller Illegal with low expectations, but really liked it. Robinson was getting older, in between his gangster and wise old man roles, and grey-listed due to suspicions of Communism (he wasn't) so he wasn't getting a lot of prime roles, but he makes the most of this one. He's a district attorney who quits after his conviction leads to an innocent man's death. He goes on a long bender, then climbs back as a defense attorney of dubious and flashy practices, such as punching out a witness exiting the stand to disprove the man's claim that an average man couldn't knock him out (Robinson had a roll of nickels hidden in his fist). He lets his former assistant and secret love Nina Foch marry a bright young DA because he thinks he's too old for her, and both men separately come under the spell of a big crime boss, Albert Dekker, due to their legal skills. Robinson refuses to be in Dekker's pocket but does turn a blind eye when his defense efforts aid the boss, while Foch's husband directly informs Dekker of the DA office's plans. Foch discovers his treachery and ends up shooting him in self-defense, and Robinson defends her and stands up to Dekker in the bargain. It's a brisk and surprising film with a great Robinson performance, dynamic, funny and at times melancholy. Also look for the debut of Jayne Mansfield as the crime boss' new moll and pianist; she sings a song and has a pivotal scene on the witness stand.

We also tried watching Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, which I'd seen and dug about 10 years ago, but it was the wrong vibe for it this night. It's pretty slow. I did love the hotel scene, though.

I discovered I have the Sundance Channel, or maybe just for this weekend, who knows, so I watched an Iconoclasts with Samuel L. Jackson and Bill Russell that was pretty good if a bit too easygoing and lightweight. I also saw an episode of Live from Abbey Road, featuring performances and interview segments with Kasabian, Josh Groban and The Good, the Bad & the Queen. Kasabian are a decent if unexceptional British rock band. I have their first CD, where they're more dance-oriented. The lead singer has an almost perfect look--handsome unshaven face, Beatley hair, striped shirt--but he's getting a little fat for it, and I was curious why the guitartist/songwriter sang one of the three songs when clearly his voice isn't that good. It's that Oasis thing all over again. There were a number of string players and oddly enough, they were all really pretty women. Josh Groban is someone whose music just isn't for me at all, but he comes off well enough in the interview bits. Who knew he was so influenced by Peter Gabriel? The Good, the Bad & the Queen quite rightly finish the program as they're the most musically interesting, with the African/West London potpourri they brew up. They decorate the Abbey Road studio with squares of hanging red fabric and bare bulbs for atmosphere, singer Damon Albarn's red-lensed shades probably a deliberate choice, and they all had nice black or pinstripe suits. I already liked their music but this performance should net them some more fans.

The presence in the band of Tony Allen, first known for his work in Fela Kuti's Africa 70, made me seek out some Fela music, finally, and I found the albums Open and Close, Shakara, He Miss Road, and Expensive Shit (the title comes from an incident where Nigerian police try to plant weed on Fela, who swallows it and eventually has an um, expensive shit) for really cheap, as each album is only two or three long tracks. His songs are long jams with some similarities to James Brown in the horns and chickenscratch guitar. I kind of knew what to expect of the music and yet had never heard it before. It's really good, though, almost trance-inducing in its funky repetition. I read some on Fela and discovered his middle name was Anikulapo, or He Who Carries Death in His Pouch. I have to use that somewhere, as well as the character in one of his songs, Suffer-Head.

Also downloaded Shit Robot's first two EPs, which are pretty good DFA releases. Good club stuff. Also got Robert Forster's The Evangelist, which is his first work after the death of friend and Go-Between partner Grant MacClennan. I don't really know their work, so this was sort of an odd introduction, but what I've heard I'm liking a lot.

I got a haircut yesterday and my stylist, Le Sean (woman), informed me that Atlanta provides the best shopping for African-American women. You may now go forth and use this conversational tidbit wherever you feel it will most help. You're welcome.

Night of the Hunter is a terrific, weird, cheap, beautiful, dreamy and tacked-together masterpiece, a rare auteur film from the '50s Hollywood studio system as stylized as Douglas Sirk but all the more remarkable for being the sole directing effort of hammy but riveting actor Charles Laughton. It's a black-and-white fable with two innocent children--precocious Pearl and man-before-his-time John, defending their late father's stolen nest egg and their very lives from evil con man, phony preacher and legitimate psycho Robert Mitchum, he of the "LOVE" and "HATE" on his knuckles, lifted by De Niro for the Cape Fear remake. It's a film you have to give yourself to, because there are ample exit doors: the intentionally crude sets, with barns and houses often looking no better than school play dressing (clearly intentional), the thankless, infuriating mother role for Shelley Winters, who so quickly falls under new husband Mitchum's spell and betrays her children; and finally the cackling, hysterical hypocrisy of supporting character Icey Spoon (Evelyn Varden). It's a high-pitched movie at times that somehow turns into a quiet, nature-filled dream just when it should by rights start cranking up the action.

The film is not a noir, though it is sometimes labeled as such. It does start with some police activity, as murdering robber Peter Graves is arrested in front of son John, but after that crime isn't really the point. And neither, really, is the money. That's what creates the conflict between John and Mitchum's Harry Powell, but the movie is more a dark fable than anything else. Much power is derived from just how bad Mitchum gets with the kids. Laughton dispenses with cat-and-mouse games and one feels in several scenes that given just one more minute, Mitchum would just kill the children to get the money. Holding his own is Billy Chapin as John, his wise young face and even stride signaling to the viewer that he is the only one capable of standing up to Powell.

But he's still a boy, and as his unsuitable father figure, the drunk fisherman Birdie Steptoe, crumbles, John and Pearl take a journey upriver, the harmless frogs and bunnies on the shore eventually giving way to the predatory fox as Powell closes in, but there is safety in the Mother Goose-like Lillian Gish, a saintly woman caring for children abandoned during the Great Depression in which the film is set. What's at stake in the film is not money but innocence, and she does her best to keep John, Pearl, and the other children safe. In one of many haunting scenes, she sings a spiritual, "Safe in the Everlasting Arms," shotgun poised, as Powell lurks outside, harmonizing with her. They share the same God but seen from very different angles. The ending is surprisingly moving.

Curiously, IMDB uses "Oedipus complex" as a key phrase in their page for the film, but I don't see that at all. It's true that with the dad dead, John is the man of the house in the brief period before Powell arrives, but John is not competing for the job, nor is he competing for his mother's affection. He's a daddy's boy all the way, and both children are very distant from the Winters character. She hardly has any scenes with them.

Kill Baby Kill! and Baron Blood

Two more Mario Bava movies consumed. Kill Baby Kill is the last disc in the first dvd box set, about a town literally haunted by the death of a little girl. Apparently she is forcing people to kill themselves. There ends up being a little more to it. It's another low-budget Gothic gem from Bava, with great atmosphere and some unnerving sequences. It's creepy whenever you see the girl huddled silently in a corner of the room, or wherever.

Baron Blood is in the second box set, and it's a little curious how Anchor Bay packaged these because it's very hard to tell the chronology of these films. I picked this one because another one in the set said it was made after the widespread success of Baron Blood, so I figured I'd start with a good one. In late '60s or early '70s Vienna, a young man comes to his ancestral castle, curious to unlock the mysteries surrounding his ancestor, known locally as Baron Blood for his Vlad-like terror upon the citizenry in his time. The castle is undergoing renovation to become a tourist attraction or hotel, and there he meets international sexpot Elke Sommer, a student helping with historical details about the castle. They read an incantation to bring the Baron back to life, and it starts to work, so they read the one to cancel it. But later, they do it again, and the old parchment gets burned, so they can't undo what they've done, and the shambling Baron goes a-killin'. The movie gets a bit disjointed with the arrival of Joseph Cotten as the new owner of the castle, bought at silent auction. I guess it was just being cleaned up for the sale, because then Cotten goes through with the real renovations. He's creepy, and has his eye on Sommer, and whether he has any connection with the Baron should not be a surprise to anyone. Bava as usual gets great value out of his surroundings: the castle, the foggy Viennese streets, the wooded countryside. There's a great scene with a medium they ask to help them undo the curse. Some nice tracking shots inside an airport, apparently a first for Vienna. This one has commentary from the author of a book on Bava and though I put that on ostensibly to put me to sleep the other night, what I heard was pretty interesting as far as how the film came together and where the cameos were. It's a good one. It should be noted these films are not up to very high standards technically--they're pretty grainy, and it's a crap shoot whether a film has subtitles or is dubbed into English, but they're quite enjoyable.

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

I finally bought this acclaimed Wilco documentary. I don't know why I waited; I guess I was concerned it was going to be mainly about stuff I already knew a lot about, like their record label drama and the dismissal of band member and co-songwriter Jay Bennett. But not only is all that much more interesting to see play out chronologically during the film, the film is just great because you get to see this committed, creative band working out their music in front of the cameras. It's not phony, and none of the performances seen here end up being exactly how the CD sounds. Better still, this dvd is I believe a reissue, with bonus disc of more performances, and a very detailed booklet which features a David Fricke essay and film diary entries from director Sam Jones. It's one of the most content-heavy dvd booklets I've seen, almost in the realm of what Criterion includes in their releases.

I also picked up the CD/DVD version of Wilco's 2007 album, Sky Blue Sky, as the DVD is another short Sam Jones film (this time in color) of the current lineup rehearsing nearly all the tracks on the CD, along with some brief interviews with Jeff Tweedy and other band members about the CD. Essentially, Tweedy felt the times we're living in are some fraught and complex that he wanted to make some more direct music, lyrically and arrangement-wise, with few overdubs. He also wanted to make music for his wife that she could enjoy, free from references to painful times they'd been through together.

Labels: Wilco

I saw this Saturday night with a friend. Very well done, funny romantic comedy written by and starring Jason Segel, also starring Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Jonah Hill and Paul Rudd. As far as I'm concerned, another success from the Apatow gang. Segel gives a great performance--he's just a naturally likeable actor, plus he gets to show some musical skill and...other assets, too! Kudos to a guy willing to do full frontal in the name of comedy, and it actually made for a good full circle element to the story. I also admire that he gave the ex-girlfriend some dimension (I hate when they're depicted as total shrews because it makes you respect your hero(ine) less, like Why was s/he ever interested in this person?), and even her posturing rock star new BF ends up kind of appealing. I always thought Mila Kunis should be a bigger star, and hopefully this helps her a bit. I don't imagine this will be a megahit, but it's a very worthwhile date movie that will not disappoint either party.

Continued my Mario Bava thing with two more from the five disc Anchor Bay set, Mario Bava Collection Vol. 1. The first was The Girl Who Knew Too Much and I think it was Bava's last movie in black and white. It's supposed to be the first giallo which I think means first slasher film, but it's quite tame and not that interesting. Well...I was watching it in bed and fell asleep, so when I watch the second half again maybe I'll feel differently and redact this statement.

I did enjoy Bava's color Viking film, Knives of the Avenger, which finds the bizarre-looking Cameron Mitchell protecting a queen and her son from the same marauders who had sacked his village and killed his own wife and child. The problem is, in his madness and grief during that time, he had raped this queen while wearing a mask. He falls for her now, but she is loyal to her husband, who has been at sea for three years, but obviously when he returns there's going to be a problem.

This film was described as virtually a remake of the classic Western Shane, which I cannot confirm or deny, as I saw that movie many years ago and don't remember much about it. It does have the feel of a Western, though, just with a different setting and outfits. Mitchell looks kind of like Anthony Quinn at that age, with orange-blond hair and strangely sculpted eyebrows. In the fight scenes it's obviously not him as the haircuts and body builds don't match well at all. Still, for its low budget it's effectively made, with decent performances and good use of the settings, including a great cave where the film reaches its climax. I just have one more film in the set to watch, Kill, Baby, Kill! Then I will get Vol. 2.

I also finished the entirety of the Twin Peaks set. I thought the final episode, directed by David Lynch, was very good despite having to resolve tons of plotlines and then not resolving the main one with Agent Cooper. It was really creepy for network TV, to the extent I had to turn the volume down during the Black Lodge stuff because I was worried it would wake up my kids or subconsciously give them nightmares. As far as the last disc, which has the bonus features, the contemporary conversation between Lynch, Kyle MacLachlan, Madchen Amick and Lynch assistant John Wentwood was very good, if a little contrived with the diner setting, coffee and cherry pie, etc. Still, it was great-looking. Of course, one would have liked other contemporary interviews with some of the series stars as well. In fact, I went to IMDB and read the bios of the entire cast, pleased to find out where life has taken Sherilyn Fenn and others. I was also happy that aside from Jack Nance, everyone else seems to be still alive. I am curious why there wasn't anything with Mark Frost, who Lynch said was responsible for at least 50% of Twin Peaks and for whom he didn't appear to have anything but respect.

Little Things: A Memoir in Slices
By Jeffrey Brown
Published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. $14.00 USD

The prolific Jeffrey Brown returns with another thick collection of endearingly imprecise slice of life stories and vignettes. That this is for a large "real" (i.e. not comics) publisher like Simon & Schuster is no cause for alarm, nor should one expect a leap forward in artistic growth or ambition. It's just more of the same, with one exception, and that's just fine. The stories do benefit from the fact that many of them document travel experiences by Brown, so he's not always in the same Chicago haunts, and a couple of health issues don't hurt, either, though Brown laudably doesn't mine them for sympathy.

The exception here is the last story, which finds Brown with a partner and infant son. Even if this is your first Brown book, it's bound to be jarring, because the stories preceding it dealt with Brown in and out of relationships; nothing steady or long-lasting and no extended romantic bliss or this-is-the-one moments. In a way, it short-changes this current relationship, which the credits indicate is very real and ongoing. Of course, it's not the reader's business whether Brown wants to chronicle this relationship in comics as he has with so many others before, but it does feel like a very separate piece from the others in this book, enough so that I'm surprised that the editor didn't exclude it. At any rate, this is another winning compilation from Brown, who seems to effortlessly make even the most mundane incidents entertaining.

That Salty Air
By Tim Sievert
Published by Top Shelf Comix. $10.00 USD

That Salty Air is a graphic novel that really had to be published by Top Shelf: heavily inked art style not too many nautical miles away from Craig (Blankets) Thompson; spacious storytelling; and, unfortunately, an editorial stance that pretty good is good enough. Let's start with the good stuff, and there's enough of it that the book merits a look. Sievert's art is big league in the silent, scene-setting panels, a little less polished but still appealing with the figures. I like that the wife is just as much of a lead character and not merely window-dressing--she goes out and tries to fix things herself rather than wait on her mama's boy husband to get his shit together. And the cover is lovely.

As for the not-as-good stuff, well, the lead character is, as mentioned, so broken up about the death of his mother (unseen until near the end) that he abandons his responsibilities as breadwinner and expectant father. He only takes responsibility again when his wife pleads with him, and even then reluctantly, and his actions even then are spiteful, destructive and irresponsible. It's really hard to feel much for him or his redemption (more just an escape) because it's not earned, nor do we feel anything about his relationship with his mother because it's not shown. Sure, most of us love our mothers and would be broken up about their deaths, but so what? Beware of blurbs calling a book "deeply felt" because it's not relevant how deeply the author feels about what they've created; it only matters how he makes the reader feel. At the end, what I felt was kind of sorry for the wife, who has chosen to stick with this shithead, now even less useful.

And while I understand the story isn't meant to be realistic--it's rightly described as a parable, deeply felt or not--I had difficulty buying into a vengeful and then forgiving octopus, handing (tentacling?) out judgment on whether someone exceeds the fishing limit. It just seemed clumsy and too convenient. Sure, we'd all like to know our dead parents have gone onto a better place, but isn't it more moving for a character to grow up without the aid of ghosts and deus ex cephalopods? It's not that this is a bad book--it's a nice-looking, good-hearted, fairly competent little story--but while I think Sievert has demonstrated enough talent that he bears watching, I also think this isn't good enough to be called good. It's a start, and the next one needs to be a whole lot better.

I took a rare day off (scheduled), not to relax from the trying 4/1 quarter at work but to a) get my home theater installed and b) file my taxes. I succeeded at both, not without some difficulty. As I worked downstairs, I heard a thud as the Best Buy Geek Squad dropped the center speaker off the cabinet as they were moving it. It made a small dent and groove on the top of the cabinet, near the front. Not enough to be too upset about. And of course, though I thought I'd paid for everything, I did end up springing for the Harmony remote to run everything easily, and the programming of said remote. Better than dealing with several remotes. I did have to chase after the guys before they left, because I found I was watching cable but hearing the sound of Spider-Man 3, which was in to demonstrate the surround. We got it figured out, but the guy did notice a couple buttons on the remote didn't work and he had to do some additional programming. That's the thing I find about almost every customer service rep or contractor--they can't wait to get the job over with and frequently that means something gets overlooked.

I went to H & R Block to do my taxes, and that was fine, except I didn't have a receipt for my mortgage interest. I found a current bill but not the 2007 statement. Although Washington Mutual's bills and phone menu recommend doing almost everything online, it's really difficult to set up your log-in and have it pull up the account you need. It took over two hours of phone calls to actually get a profile set up for my 2007 loan and another for my current loan (I refinanced a month ago). Part of it was just stupidity on the part of one of the customer service people, as she kept suggesting whatever was easiest for her to do or understand rather than what I needed. Eventually, it did get done, and I was able to get right back in to the tax preparer and get it filed. Looks like pretty good refunds coming, plus that economic stimulus thing.

Good thing, too, as I have been on a dvd/blu-ray tear lately. Buy.com is currently selling Criterion dvds for substantial savings, especially on multi-disc sets. I'll start reviewing those as I watch them.

Tonight I watched Kansas beat Memphis in the NCAA tournament. A very good game, though lacking in a "sexy" story. No particularly charismatic players or coaches, just good basketball, though I was honestly surprised how Memphis blew it. The lack of urgency in particular I would have to put on the coach for not drilling it into the players enough.

I also watched a couple eps of Twin Peaks--I think 21 &22? I'm getting near the end. It's all new for me--I was a huge fan of the first season and then for some reason didn't watch much of the second at all. It's easy to see where things get off course, but there's still great stuff in each episode.

Big box of graphic novels arrived. I have been lax on comics for a long time and really need to start catching up, despite this movie fever. I read some of the first volume of Terry and the Pirates last night, and today I got through most of the first volume of the new format Comics Journal. I liked it a lot, though it's kind of a ringer--who doesn't like lists of great comics? It either supports your own tastes or gives you suggestions for what to check out. It's not tough--Exit Wounds was a very well done book, and since there are only a handful of well done (new) books each year, of course it will be on most people's lists.

I enjoy most of the regular columnists and critics like Crippen, Kreiner, O'Neil, Harvey--cool to see R.C. is very much up on current stuff rather than just old strips. I think it was Crippen who did the long piece on Stan Lee (using a book of interviews and Stan's most recent Marvel scripting job, The Last FF Story as an excuse to explore his theories of Stan the Man, Stan the Boss, Stan the Collaborator and Stan the kindly Hollywood Pitchman). After a couple pages of shots, I started wondering how long this old hat was going to go on, but then he found a groove and it ended up feeling pretty fair. Whether it's accurate, I don't know, but it felt like it was probably pretty close. He has a great line in there about how everyone loves Stan, and if they don't, it's because they've taught themselves not to (I'm paraphrasing and it might be better than that). It's true, and Crippen should know, because his piece is probably just about the best example of what I feel is pretty much an unavoidable assignment for comics critics--reconciling or rationalizing or somehow addressing how the magic of the '60s Marvels came with resentment and greed and other human failings.

By the way, I did flip through the final volume of the Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus, and while I'm happy it's here, I think customers were sold a bill of goods as far as the "original Mike Royer inks" on The Hunger Dogs. I didn't expect to just see the original graphic novel with the bad D. Bruce Berry inks, and then tiny thumbnails of the original inked pages. Even at that size you can see how much better a job Royer did, but still, it's really difficult to read. I think it was a lame decision, unless they decide to put out a separate Royer version of Hunger Dogs. I liked Evanier's Afterword.

Speaking of Evanier, I know I wrote that his Kirby-King of Comics wasn't the thorough bio I expected, but as I'm reading it, it's really good. Evanier finds just the right note for it even if he doesn't have the room for lots of anecdotes. He's wry, admiring, loving. I think it's quite a worthy effort.

At It's A Grind I also read a book of short fiction by Sarah Manguso, part of a three-volume set comprising a recent McSweeney's release. This is 52 of the 81 pieces in her volume. I wouldn't really call most of it fiction at all, just observations:

The entire morning passes but I'm already tired of all the old themes. In the afternoon, still we love and are unloved, still we understand no one, still we and our love will die, still reality is hard to admit and harder to escape, still the essential moments are unexpected yet nothing is new, still we were wrong about the past but the future is about to begin, still things make sense, still there is but one reliance.

At It's A Grind in the late morning, I realized that no matter how old I get, I'm always going to have a sweet tooth. I'm always going to crave a rectangular pastry with chocolate and cream and nuts and goo, and hopefully I'll also always have the urge to stick my index finger in it and then poke it into someone's willing mouth. I'm just sayin'.

Not that the 1979 Bill Murray vehicle Meatballs benefits much from being in hi-def, but I DVR'd it and watched it this afternoon, and damn if it isn't still a charming little slobs vs. snobs/coming of age comedy. There's a gentleness there that's absent from most teen comedies, and Murray is very funny in his post-SNL grubby lounge lizard glory. The clothes are an added bonus--the short shorts on girls AND guys, the too-tight shirts, the lack of bras, and Jesus, women really wore thigh high, striped socks back then, huh? I wish American Apparel was successful in their attempts to bring that back, because it’s pretty hot.

Labels: bill murray

I hope that by now readers realize I don't plug every project just because a friend asks me to. I remember a buddy asking that I post something about his needing a new liver, and I had to decline, because frankly that liver had been coasting for years. So believe me when I say that although I have known Rob Vollmar for years, I wouldn't be promoting something he did if I didn't really like it. In fact, I loved BLUESMAN from its first installment. The guy isn't Eisner-nominated for nothing, folks. He's a really fine writer and unlike a lot of comics writers out there these days, he just does one project at a time, honing it until it's perfect. He clearly has a love and feel for early 20th Century Americana, with the romance of the hobo or itinerant musician, and in BLUESMAN he builds on the atmosphere of earlier work THE CASTAWAYS to create a more ambitious, larger and yet more taut, thriller about, well, a blues performer and the trouble he gets into. It feels right, it's gripping, and amidst the suspense are subtler moments that will stay with you. I'm very happy for Rob's continued success, which finds the three chapters of this book finally collected in a deluxe edition hardcover from NBM. Make sure to preorder it and help support one of the more talented writers in the comics medium. Find out more at Bluesman Project.

I’ve got two separate filmmaker obsessions going concurrently: Jean-Luc Godard and Mario Bava. Watched Bava's first feature, Black Sunday, on Friday (I started it earlier in the week and fell asleep, so watched it from the beginning with a friend). It's corny but has that great cheap but atmospheric feeling, with the ominous European countryside and trees and old tombs. Creative special effects, too. His shots linger a bit long here and there but over all it'ss a lot of fun, and star Barbara Steele justifies her cult status. Not exactly beautiful but really charismatic.

Tonight I watched another early Bava film, Black Sabbath. It should be noted these were the U.S. titles and the first film is really The Mask of Satan and Black Sabbath is something like The Three Faces of Fear, as it is a triptych of scary stories apparently very loosely based on stories by Tolstoy, Gogol and Chekhov. "The Telephone" is an early giallo, or "He Knows You’re Alone" type suspenser, with the twist that the guy she thinks is terrorizing her is really her spurned former lesbian lover, who decides to forgive her and come clean, but not before the real guy shows up to try to bump both of them off. The Wurdelac is the second story and features Boris Karloff, a peasant patriach turned vampire, and the wurdelac version wants nothing more than to suck the blood of their loved ones. Creepy scene with a little kid, probably all the better for not having to see his face. Hot American actress in this as well, with the kind of figure you don’t see any more in films. The third story is probably the weakest, involving some old woman who comes back to life just to get back the ring a nurse stole from her dead body.

I also finished watching Godard's seminal Breathless (A Bout de Souffle), which I liked a lot though not as much as Band of Outsiders. I do think there’s probably more to gain from Breathless after more viewings. It’s the closest to a thriller Godard would ever get, though it’s also film criticism in itself, and Godard mixes innovative, influential jump cuts with some very long shots, including a legendary bedroom scene nearly 25 minutes long (not a sex scene). Jean Seberg is absolutely stunning, just one of those timeless movie icons like Gene Tierney or Marilyn or Garbo. Unbelievably sad story of the rest of her life in the bonus features. Jean Paul Belmondo is very cool and natural, a born star but not really a cocky one. He’s sort of innocent even while he does some terrible things. As this is a Criterion dvd, the bonus features and booklet are terrific and illuminating. I also bought Alphaville, A Woman Is a Woman, and Pierrot le Fou, so I’ve got plenty of Godard to watch for a while. Plus the Bava set is 5 films.

I know I've been spending too much lately when I just realized I ordered two dvds I already had--The Incredibles and Looney Tunes Vol. 2. I'll return them, but it's a little annoying. I guess I'm kind of excited by getting a big TV and home theater setup. That's supposed to be all hooked up Saturday, though I'm not sure exactly what they're going to do as far as mounting speakers, hiding cables, etc. So in anticipation I've picked up a few Blu-Ray discs as well as some music-related dvds. It's been a few years since I had a similar setup and I want to rock out, hear loud explosions and guns and all the rest.

Moved my old TV to my bedroom and for the past few days have fallen asleep to Jeff Tweedy's Sunken Treasure Live dvd, which is pretty soothing as it's just acoustic.

Finished a great book, Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. I guess you'd have to call it magic realism. There are supernatural events, talking cats (or I should say some human characters can talk with them), living ghosts, what you might call gods, a seminal event during WWII that may have been an alien visitation. It's strange but very human, touching, often erotic. I loved how everything pulled together--essentially it's about a young man pulling his life together but in a metaphysical way; it's like some characters are more parts of his self and he needs to pull them back inside to be whole? That's one interpretation at least. As odd as Murakami can get, one will be struck by the lack of melodrama and essential goodness and kindness of the characters. Even the ones who could be villains in lesser hands are just being true to their natures, without malice. He's one of my favorite authors, and this is right up there with his best work.

Also picked up the Evanier Kirby book, which is beautiful but not what I was expecting. I thought this would be more of an insightful bio rather than as much of an art book as it is. I'm not complaining, I just honestly wasn't expecting a coffee table book. I'll read it soon but want to get farther in The Best American Essays 2007.

Finished a good book today called Legendary Sessions: Highway 61 Revisited. It's an attractive hardcover (I like slick, no-jacket binding) delving into the history behind the legendary Bob Dylan album, with great detail on the folk prophet/spokesman for a generation straitjacket Dylan tried to shake off as he explored amplified rock on the breakthrough hit, "Like A Rolling Stone" and the subsequent Highway 61 sessions. There's a lot on the Newport Folk Festival at which Dylan went electric and shocked and offended much of the audience and festival board members like old folkie Pete Seeger. It's really interesting now to read about respected musicians and musicologists like him or Alan Lomax being so dismissive or outraged at what Dylan was trying, and the book leaves necessarily vague (as Dylan has been close-lipped or contradictory on the subject) how much of his Newport appearance was just unstoppable artistic inspiration and how much was intended to offend.

Another revealing part of the book is just how haphazardly Dylan's session band was assembled and how the tunes came together without clear direction from Dylan, just the talent of the musicians and their patience as Dylan worked out his vision. The book also does a great job offering clues and likely interpretations of the lyrics or the subjects of the songs, without coming down definitely on one answer, recognizing that it's never simple with Dylan. There are quite a few random factoids in there as well about the musicians and producers and who they worked with before. For instance, now I know Tony Bennett's signature song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," wasn't a number Bennett cared much more, knocking it out in three takes at the end of a very long and wearying session.

I haven't posted anything for a couple months, I know, so why should a relatively innocuous post by Alan David Doane cause me to respond, point by point? I dunno, really. I'm doing some work from home on an otherwise uneventful Easter and wanted to take a break.

So, you'll need to go read Alan's piece on the forgotten foods of his youth he has not passed along to his own household, but I'm going to just make my own comments on his selections.

Rack of lamb with mint jelly - I've never had this in anyone's home that I can recall. The few times I've had it have been at wedding receptions, so I don't think I've given lamb a fair shake yet. I like mint all right but would go along with Alan that mint jelly is repugnant, but my problem would be the consistency and lack of dimension. I think the lamb is probably better served with an herb-filled marinade perhaps incorporating some mint along with garlic and other things. Jelly one gets from a jar has no place atop an entree.

Harvey Wallbanger Cake - I've had liquor-flavored cakes before, not specifically this one. I like the idea of them fine, as whiskey or rum do add good flavor to desserts due to their complex sweetness. I also have a soft spot for antiquated cocktails.

Liver and onions - I'm sure Emeril or someone has a killer recipe. Otherwise I'm not very interested in this, and have never had it. Growing up, I did always enjoy the fried chicken livers my stepdad would make with a fried chicken meal. They just had so much more concentrated flavor than the other chicken pieces. This probably holds true for human flesh as well.

Chipped Beef on Toast - I come from the Midwest, so creamy dishes like this are familiar. However, my mom and I only ever had this as a Stouffer's frozen boil-in-bag entree, and rarely would we have it on toast. More often we would pour it, or Creamed Chicken, over a heated frozen biscuit or toaster-ovened puff pastry cuff, probably made by Pepperidge Farm. Most people like creamy and salty if you get a few drinks in them first.

Codfish - Never had this at home. I've had it plenty in fish and chips, with malt vinegar squirted over it, and cod is a nice if bland fish, which is why you bread it and add vinegar. It doesn't sound like Alan had it fried as a kid, and if not, I can see not being excited about it. I can't see it having a strong flavor unless that's just from starting to rot, or maybe the wood box it came in.

Turkey Soup after Thanksgiving - I don't think I ever had this. Plenty of turkey sandwiches, though. These days I really don't want leftovers. Turkey is really boring. It's a bit better if it's free-range/organic and sufficiently spiced, but still, one meal a year is enough.

Spam - Never. Not a snob about it, though perhaps my mom was. I did always like canned corned beef hash. I think my problem with Spam is that I don't really like ham all that well unless it's accompanied by good cheese. Starbucks has a baguette of ham, brie, honey mustard and dried cherries (yes!) that's delicious heated.

Vienna Sausages - I don't think so. The pale color always threw me off, as it does with the milkier bratwursts. I want a marbley look to my sausage. You can quote me on that.

Beets - No. The closest I've come is crisy vegetable flavored chips, but I think those are still potato with a little beet flavor and color added. The color is great but it always upset me how the beet juice would run and ruin the other items on the plate.

Mincemeat Pie - Never had it, but wouldn't be against having an authentic one in an Irish pub or something. Steak and Kidney Pie isn't bad.

Filet Mignon - Sure, who hasn't? Filet mignon is very good, though as I've gotten older, and fatter, I tend to prefer a New York Strip for the character and flavor of the meat--all that pure, unmarbled meat in the filet isn't going to taste as good as a cut with some fat running through it. I made steak for my son and me Friday night, a real rarity for him, and not something I eat often, either, and it turned out really well and though I had to cut his meat for him, he didn't have any problem chewing it. Many old school steakhouses do still wrap their filets in bacon.

Raw Oysters and Frog Legs - I love oysters, and most seafood. I think they're sexy. I really want to go to New Orleans (I know oyster production is way down since Katrina, but still) or somewhere else with abundant oysters and eat buckets of them with beer. Yum. Frog legs is one of those antiquities from when French cuisine made its biggest influence on the U.S. cooking scene. I've had them maybe twice in my youth, I think once was as a Christmas Eve appetizer. I remember them as being good, and yes, tasting like chicken. So much so that it's hard to see the reason to get them now rather than a bunch of chicken wings. For the record, while I love animals and want to preserve areas where they can thrive, I have little problem with eating them. I mean, I'd draw the line at monkeys, dogs, horses and cats, but even there I'd have to say the reasons are sort of nostalgic, the stigma against them being so strong the food would have to be really remarkable for me to overcome it.

Let me add a couple dishes I enjoyed from my childhood restaurant experiences that you don't see anymore:

Beef Wellington - this is a tenderloin with a kind of mushroom paste smeared over it, wrapped in puff pastry and baked until done. I like beef, mushrooms and pastry, so this one was a hit to me as a kid. I think today the reason you don't see it much is that people want to see the meat they're getting and don't really want it diluted with a layer of buttery pastry around it.

Swiss Steak - Not sure how Swiss this really was. This wasn't a restaurant meal--my stepdad would make it now and then, not on the regular rotation of fried chicken, tacos, meatloaf, etc. (Oddly I can't think of a full week's worth of meals now..what happened?). Swiss steak is round steak beaten with a tenderizing mallet until tender, then simmered with stewed tomatoes and onions until it's a tasty mess. Knowing my stepdad, it no doubt had plenty of garlic salt added. You can extend the meal by serving it over mashed potatoes.

Also, as a kid I once had King Crab legs at a family dinner and from that moment on was a real pain in the ass, ordering that, or lobster, or steak. I hardly ever had grilled cheese or similar kid friendly dare.

Now, as an adult, I've found there are some foods I love that I would never attempt at home. Sushi is #1 in this category. Just the expense alone is prohibitive. I also find a lot of fish grilled at home to be almost inedible compared to restaurant technique. On the other hand, I almost never order tomato-based pasta dishes in restaurants, as I tend to like my own home cooking better there.

Leftover Chinese. Gym. 3:10 to Yuma. Shower. Slept in. Read Phonogram. Work. Internet. Read good Doane piece. Downloaded Saint Etienne best of, Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca. Takeout burger. Folded laundry. Boxed books. Wiped coffee table. Started Sturm/Tommaso Satchel Paige all-ages bio.

Phonogram: Rue Britannia
Written by Kieron Gillen
Art by Jamie McKelvie
Published by Image Comics. $14.99 USD

As someone who's very into music, and was into a handful of the Britpop scenesters who made some impact on U.S. shores, I was pretty excited to get this. Don't make anything of the months it took before I picked up and read the thing--if you saw my office you'd understand. The plot of this six issue mini-turned-GN is about the least important part, but it concerns David Kohl, a "phonomancer" who uses the magical properties of music. His personality is still centered in the Britpop movement of the '90s, which is dangerous because his goddess, Brittania, is dead but somehow being resurrected. This is a bad idea somehow.

Honestly, I was pretty lost with the goddess stuff, which makes the climax a bit of a drag (it's also very talky). The problems with the book are fundamental: it's not very clear what David does, what he wants, and why it's important that he stop this thing from taking place. Lesser problems are that Gillen has people talking in bars and restaurants too much and doesn't give McKelvie enough cool stuff to draw. McKelvie is great at drawing pretty girls, a bit bland with the men, but in all fairness he's not given a script where we can really see what he can do.

All that being said, I did actually like the book. Maybe more to the point, I liked the idea of the book and the emotion Gillen clearly invested in it. It's a love letter to his youth, it seems, and a way to put it into perspective and move on without denying its importance. That is, under the premise--which is a clever one, just not clear enough--there's a real heart beating here, and even if, like me, you maybe knew Blur and Oasis and Pulp but not Kenickie and Echobelly and The Auteurs, you should still be able to hear enough of that beat to smile and let yourself go.

Labels: britpop, phonogram

I saw this last Tuesday, which was kind of a weird day. A friend at work told me in no uncertain terms that as tenacious as I was in pursuing our mutual friend, it just wasn't going to happen. I hate when people diagnose themselves as bipolar, so I'll just say I go through fairly extreme mood swings, so the rest of the day and night was kind of rough. I was smart in going to this movie, though, because it's fantastic. I don't have anything against genre films, but I do have a special fondness for those films that are big and hard to categorize. Paul Thomas Anderson's first film, Hard Eight, was a genre exercise--a gambling film, sort of a cousin of the heist picture but more apt to end without the big score achieved. Since then he has defied genre with the large ensemble dramas Boogie Nights and Magnolia, followed by the underrated but admittedly very edgy romance, Punch-Drunk Love.

There Will Be Blood is inspired by Upton Sinclair's early 20th century novel, Oil!, and it's about a ruthless oilman, Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. To get much more into the various plot twists would spoil too much, but in broad terms it's about greed and selfishness, and the importance of blood (as in hereditary legacy). Daniel battles the elements, battles for the loyalty of the townfolk, and battles his inner demons. Well, more like he embraces those demons and lets them out whenever he can get away with it, and sometimes when he can't. Day-Lewis gives a full-bodies performance that somehow dwarfs the one he gave in Gangs of New York, and he's matched with some excellent work by Paul Dano, whom I hadn't realized I'd seen before as the willfully mute teen in Little Miss Sunshine. Anderson adds another great entry to his body of work, and damn, we need more big, weird, intense movies like these, American or otherwise. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood does the score, on instruments of the period, and it's really stirring and strange. I don't buy a lot of scores, but this one is worth it. Go to the Warner Nonesuch site and you can buy the cd and cd-quality download for $13.99 with three exclusive bonus tracks not available anywhere else.

My son has started getting some of the Lego Indiana Jones sets, so I figured it was time to watch Raiders, even knowing the ending is pretty scary. I'm actually not that bothered by the thought of scaring the shit out of my kids--better it's from a movie. I hadn't seen it in probably 20 years, and it's still a lot of fun. Pretty lame dvd menu as far as execution, but they had the right idea at the time. I was almost falling asleep, but it was still pretty early, so I started Danger: Diabolik for them. My son turned away at the kissing scenes, and they're frequent--I forgot it's a pretty sexy film, though no nudity or language, not even double entendres. They both liked it, especially my daughter, who kept wanting to watch more when it was over, not believing there were no sequels or even bonus features. I would have loved this as a kid, too--it's really colorful and has the cool underground lair, fast cars, gadgets, etc.

I have been on a bit of a Cabaret Voltaire jag, just receiving a cd of their 1982 release 2 X 45 from England. The title comes from it originally being two 12" singles packaged together. It's nearly album length--songs range from 5:00 to 13:00 minutes. I liked it a lot better listening to it at the gym than I did 20 years ago. I think at the time I wanted it to be slicker, as I was getting into the band with "Sensoria," but now I love the distored vocals and plucked bass and dirty saxophone runs. It's a really funky, weird masterpiece, unlike anything else. Perhaps the best known song from it is "Yashar," with its repeated sample (or tape loop), "There's 70 billion people there--where are they hiding?"

My son went with his mom and her husband to the Buick Invitational today. He got Rory Sabatini's autograph. I already had signed both kids up for a free workshop at the Apple Store, so I took my daughter and she and another girl there made a song together that's pretty cool. I ended up buying one of the keyboards like they were using--it's just $99, and spent a good deal of the rest of today making two songs in GarageBand. I see now, though, that I need to buy at least one of the Jam Packs--add-on software with hundreds of loops and other instruments. It's really hard to make a drum loop yourself, stopping the recording at the precise moment you stop playing. So I ended up just playing for a couple minutes, keeping time as best as I could. I did okay, but I can tell I'm a little off. It's fun building up your song and altering the sounds you've chosen with different filters, echo, reverb, etc. I have to resist the urge to put effects on everything.

Oh, finally--got an email about a week ago from a woman I knew in high school. We were school friends but never really socialized, not that I was very social then in general. But I always thought she was really cool. I found her on Classmates.com and emailed her and a few others in October. I heard from my second girlfriend, who's nice, and now I finally heard from this friend, Amy, and she's great and looks and writes pretty much like I expected. Not only has it been really nice catching up with her, she mentioned she's kept in touch with Tim, one of my best friends from then, whom I'd also lost touch with around college. So now we've been emailing each other as well, and it's strange and fun the things I'm remembering now that I haven't though of in so long. I mean, with a gun to my head I probably couldn't come up with Footloose as my first date movie, and a double date at that, but now I remember it, and that that theater had a Robotron videogame in the corner.

I saw this last Tuesday, which was kind of a weird day. A friend at work told me in no uncertain terms that as tenacious as I was in pursuing our mutual friend, it just wasn't going to happen. I hate when people diagnose themselves as bipolar, so I'll just say I go through fairly extreme mood swings, so the rest of the day and night was kind of rough. I was smart in going to this movie, though, because it's fantastic. I don't have anything against genre films, but I do have a special fondness for those films that are big and hard to categorize. Paul Thomas Anderson's first film, Hard Eight, was a genre exercise--a gambling film, sort of a cousin of the heist picture but more apt to end without the big score achieved. Since then he has defied genre with the large ensemble dramas Boogie Nights and Magnolia, followed by the underrated but admittedly very edgy romance, Punch-Drunk Love.

There Will Be Blood is inspired by Upton Sinclair's early 20th century novel, Oil!, and it's about a ruthless oilman, Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. To get much more into the various plot twists would spoil too much, but in broad terms it's about greed and selfishness, and the importance of blood (as in hereditary legacy). Daniel battles the elements, battles for the loyalty of the townfolk, and battles his inner demons. Well, more like he embraces those demons and lets them out whenever he can get away with it, and sometimes when he can't. Day-Lewis gives a full-bodies performance that somehow dwarfs the one he gave in Gangs of New York, and he's matched with some excellent work by Paul Dano, whom I hadn't realized I'd seen before as the willfully mute teen in Little Miss Sunshine. Anderson adds another great entry to his body of work, and damn, we need more big, weird, intense movies like these, American or otherwise. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood does the score, on instruments of the period, and it's really stirring and strange. I don't buy a lot of scores, but this one is worth it. Go to the Warner Nonesuch site and you can buy the cd and cd-quality download for $13.99 with three exclusive bonus tracks not available anywhere else.

My son has started getting some of the Lego Indiana Jones sets, so I figured it was time to watch Raiders, even knowing the ending is pretty scary. I'm actually not that bothered by the thought of scaring the shit out of my kids--better it's from a movie. I hadn't seen it in probably 20 years, and it's still a lot of fun. Pretty lame dvd menu as far as execution, but they had the right idea at the time. I was almost falling asleep, but it was still pretty early, so I started Danger: Diabolik for them. My son turned away at the kissing scenes, and they're frequent--I forgot it's a pretty sexy film, though no nudity or language, not even double entendres. They both liked it, especially my daughter, who kept wanting to watch more when it was over, not believing there were no sequels or even bonus features. I would have loved this as a kid, too--it's really colorful and has the cool underground lair, fast cars, gadgets, etc.

I have been on a bit of a Cabaret Voltaire jag, just receiving a cd of their 1982 release 2 X 45 from England. The title comes from it originally being two 12" singles packaged together. It's nearly album length--songs range from 5:00 to 13:00 minutes. I liked it a lot better listening to it at the gym than I did 20 years ago. I think at the time I wanted it to be slicker, as I was getting into the band with "Sensoria," but now I love the distored vocals and plucked bass and dirty saxophone runs. It's a really funky, weird masterpiece, unlike anything else. Perhaps the best known song from it is "Yashar," with its repeated sample (or tape loop), "There's 70 billion people there--where are they hiding?"

My son went with his mom and her husband to the Buick Invitational today. He got Rory Sabatini's autograph. I already had signed both kids up for a free workshop at the Apple Store, so I took my daughter and she and another girl there made a song together that's pretty cool. I ended up buying one of the keyboards like they were using--it's just $99, and spent a good deal of the rest of today making two songs in GarageBand. I see now, though, that I need to buy at least one of the Jam Packs--add-on software with hundreds of loops and other instruments. It's really hard to make a drum loop yourself, stopping the recording at the precise moment you stop playing. So I ended up just playing for a couple minutes, keeping time as best as I could. I did okay, but I can tell I'm a little off. It's fun building up your song and altering the sounds you've chosen with different filters, echo, reverb, etc. I have to resist the urge to put effects on everything.

Oh, finally--got an email about a week ago from a woman I knew in high school. We were school friends but never really socialized, not that I was very social then in general. But I always thought she was really cool. I found her on Classmates.com and emailed her and a few others in October. I heard from my second girlfriend, who's nice, and now I finally heard from this friend, Amy, and she's great and looks and writes pretty much like I expected. Not only has it been really nice catching up with her, she mentioned she's kept in touch with Tim, one of my best friends from then, whom I'd also lost touch with around college. So now we've been emailing each other as well, and it's strange and fun the things I'm remembering now that I haven't though of in so long. I mean, with a gun to my head I probably couldn't come up with Footloose as my first date movie, and a double date at that, but now I remember it, and that that theater had a Robotron videogame in the corner.

So we're now through eight days of 2008 and I have to say I'm pretty proud of myself. My resolutions have always been halfhearted and unfocused, but so far I'm doing very well at my two: 1) writing regularly and 2) exercising/losing weight. The latter wasn't even one I had thought all that much about, at least not much more than, "yeah, I need to work out more." But in talking to my mom on New Year's Day, she was starting a diet and proposed a weight loss contest, and I agreed. I'm much bigger than her and suspect it will be pretty easy to beat her, but that's not really the point. The point is just to lose my gut, get healthier, and hopefully look a bit more appealing. I think I've worked out four or five times so far. I could really feel it tonight--I can go longer on the elliptical, but I was tired much faster with weights. It's cool, though.

As for the writing, when I get off I'll finish the four panels I have left for today's page of comics script, and that will make nine, so with my goal of a page a day I'm actually slightly ahead of the game. I've found I really like writing longhand, in public places. That old-timey feel of scribbling in a notebook just seems to work for me, at least in the first draft phase.

Tonight I went to eat after the gym and a dad and his 11? year old son came in at 9:05. Why so late? It seems almost certain Dad is divorced. The kid was interesting, too--while Dad was ordering, he was in the booth sliding a salt shaker back and forth like it was a hockey on ice, and it fell to the floor three times in a couple minutes. They must be plastic. It was annoying, but maybe the kid has some problems. Besides, those interesting, human little distractions are valuable.

I also bought some art supplies. Many years ago, while married, I bought a little start-up set of acrylic paints, and then never used them even once. No wonder I'm divorced. So, with the kids in tow, I got a new set, a set of charcoal pencils and sticks for sketching, and pads for the sketching and the painting. I felt it presumptuous to buy art boards or canvas for the painting right away. Yesterday I looked at my new Sierra Club desk calendar and sketched (yes, I took my supplies to work--since I'm the second most productive underwriter at my company I've gotten a little ballsier, plus after such long, unhealthy hours leading up to 1/1 I felt like I needed to take more of my life back) a polar bear cub, and the beginnings of a very bent, gnarly oak tree, based on the calendar pictures. I'm not half bad, and the cool thing about charcoals on a heavy, grainy paper is all that extra texture automatically makes you a better artist. I'm not saying a good artist, but the line just has more gravity and character to it.

What else? I read Frederik Peeters' Blue Pills, which is a very good graphic memoir of his loving, ongoing relationship with a woman with HIV and an HIV-infected son. It's not depressing, nor is it too gooey. The art is obviously an influence on Craig Thompson, who provides a blurb, and nothing against Thompson, but one hopes that his future work approaches the maturity of Peeters'. I also read the new Acme Novelty Library, which is the first big chunk of Ware's ambitious Building story. Not sure if he will ever return to the young woman with the prosthetic leg who stars in this chapter; he seems to have pretty well told her story already, enough that this is definitely a graphic novel rather than a section of one, like the Rusty Brown installments. It's really great, too--just when you think, yes, another nice page of quiet desperation, you get a devastating scene like the one about the cat with the bloody paw and the woman's boyfriend joking about it. You'll know it if you read it. Ware also seems more controlled here, possibly due in part to much of this originally being published in The New Yorker, I imagine. There are fewer formal effects, with the ambition going into both the overall scope of story but also in the hard-to-pull-off idea of the sentient building. More importantly, though, the woman here is about the best-written female character I've ever read in graphic fiction/comics/etc.

New Year's Eve was quiet for me. I actually got a bit drunk on Saturday AND Sunday, which is rare for me these days, but I had the kids for New Year's Eve and we just stayed in and watched Planet of the Apes. I had to be stern when my five-year-old daughter repeated the famous line, "Get your filthy paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" but inside I was very amused. Afterward I watched the "final cut (2007)" of Blade Runner, which seems to be the 1992 cut with punchier sound and maybe some subtle, un-Star Wars-like special effects tweaking. It's still a great movie. Not a brilliant movie, but I think the key to Blade Runner is that it looks like a plausible, lived-in and liveable world, and every set piece and action sequence is cool. I also appreciate that it doesn't spell everything out, and that you can take or leave the suggestion that Harrison Ford's character may also be a replicant. In fact, I have to admit if I hadn't read that somewhere I don't know that I would have figured it out from that unicorn sequence. Afterward, I watched bits of the other versions. The tacked-on ending to the original U.S. cut is still kind of lame, and I was surprised not only that the narration was dumb and unnecessary but that it was recorded so low and tinny.

I really wanted to go see There Will Be Blood today but it's apparently not playing in San Diego yet. WTF? What I've heard of Jonny Greenwood's score is very good. I also bought the complete Twin Peaks and I think I'm liking it even better now--the pilot episode hits me a lot harder now that I'm a parent.

It was a good New Year's Day. Took down the tree and ornaments. Made a couple very complicated paper airplanes for my son out of a book. This book defined five different types of folds, if that gives you an idea how hard these are. I don't think I quite got the second one right, though it flew pretty well.

Watched most of the Capitol One Bowl and part of the Rose Bowl, then dropped the kids off and went to the gym. I worked out pretty hard and then got a half sandwich/half salad thing at a bakery restaurant chain near me, Panera, with four cups of iced tea. I made a ton of notes for my long-in-the-works graphic novel The Solution, and wrote a page of full script. I felt really good about it, because I really figured out just what I want to do with this section (I'm writing it like the fourth issue of a six issue miniseries) and came up with a way to do it that's both more emotional and more erotic than I had in the months I've known the basic plot for the issue. I don't know why, but I just tend to get a lot of good work done if it's outside my house. Less distractions, I guess.

Hope all of you had a good one.

Some more stuff I've read in the past couple months..

Asthma by John Hankiewicz. Sparkplug Comicbooks. $17.00 USD. I had a vague memory of liking what I'd seen of Hankiewicz elsewhere--probably from an anthology or two--so I gave it a shot. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I didn't hate it. I could pull any of dozens of arch, bizarre lines from it and make fun of them, like "I never dreamed I'd raise my shade and by the moonlight have a landau of my own," but I did like his use of language. If you're open to it, there is some amusement here of a very dry, absurd variety, but it's a lot of work, and over perhaps too generous a selection. In other words, I had a hard time finishing it. One problem is that I think that while Hankiewicz displays a number of different art styles here, he's not great at any of them, so it's like he tries to hide that fact by the sheer variety, by exaggerating figures into grotesques or absurdities, and employing obsessive crosshatching for backgrounds without achieving beauty with them. I can't recommend this one, but as with anyone who's trying to do something different, one hopes future work will find him better synthesizing his ideas into something more coherent and compelling.

Apollo's Song by Osamu Tezuka. Vertical, Inc.. $19.95 USD. I hadn't read Tezuka for about a year, intimidated by the size of the volumes that kept coming in and being filed on the desk hutch in my office. I always forget how quickly they read. This one is over 500 pages but I blew through it in a couple nights, and the thing is--I had to read it that quickly. Astonishing story about a cynical, emotionally scarred young man cursed by a goddess for his hatred of love to experience many lives of doomed love. The idea seems to be for him to eventually love another more than he loves himself, but the ending isn't quite as pat and, I guess, Western, as one might expect. Melodramatic, profound, erotic work with startling scenarios from a Nazi falling for a concentration camp-bound Jewess to a dystopian future where a man loves the ruler of the race of clones who have subjugated their human creators. Most cartoonists, if they did a work half this good, it might be their crowning achievement, but for Tezuka it's just one of many; in fact a largely unknown work until now.

Daredevil: The Devil, Inside and Out Vols. 1 & 2 by Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark and Stephano Gaudiano. Marvel Comics. $14.99 ea USD. Much as I like Ed Brubaker's writing, I hadn't read any of his DD run until catching up a bit with these. At some point I had drifted away from Brian Michael Bendis' run, but it's not difficult to get into the new status quo here, and indeed Brubaker strikes a great balance between the tone of what has gone before and delivering new stories, based more or less equally on gritty crime dramas like Oz and Homicide as well as the more glamorous world of espionage and subterfuge found in James Bond and Bourne films. Some good twists, interesting ideas, and nice character work, though Brubaker doesn't seem to know quite what to do with Matt's wife Milla at this point. It must be a great temptation when your lead character is married to a character you didn't create, that isn't a longtime fan favorite like, say, Mary-Jane Parker in Spider-Man's books, to kill her off and start fresh, especially as the Matt Murdock character is quite used to losing lovers this way. Anyway, I'm not sure what's going on with the series currently, but these first two trades are extremely well done.

White Rapids by Pascal Blanchet. Drawn & Quarterly. $27.95 USD. This is a terrible book, probably the worst from the normally reliable D & Q. Blanchet has a love of Art Deco and Modernist design and employs it here like a kid, with the graphic novel being his personal candy store. The idea of using this attractive design to tell the history of a Quebec power plant in the '30s to its closure in 1971 is fine--there's promise in essentially setting a typically American story of progress and hope in another country. But Blanchet just can't tell a story. There are no characters here, no structure, nothing to strive for or against. He gets by for a while with the idea for the plant and the plans to build it and its surrounding village, but once that's done, he's lost. Pages are wasted on a typical family driving on the new road, singing, or the legend of some big pike that no one can catch, and then the plant shuts down and everyone has to move out. One would presume, as the biographical material says Blanchet hails from a town not too far from Rapide Blanc, that the motivation for telling this story is something of a personal one, and yet there isn't any personality here. Oddly enough, the glib, slick art is actually undermined by the use of recycled paper, which dulls the effect with its buff coloring and little brown dots of recycled material embedded in the paper. At $28 this is one of the more expensive softcover graphic novels you'll find, and it's a ripoff at half the price, an utterly empty exercise in craft. I'm old enough now where I don't necessarily think one lousy book is an indication a publisher is heading in the wrong direction--Drawn & Quarterly will survive this folly just fine, I'm sure. Let's just hope they lose Blanchet's number next time he wants to string some posters together and call it a story.

The Amazing Spider-Man: The Complete Collection DVD-Rom. By Gitcorp, $50 USD. This dvd contains every issue of ASM up to about the middle of 2006, three months into the Civil War saga. It's useful to have it all on one disc, easily accessible on pdf format. The scans are two to a page and normally appear fairly small, so you'll have to zoom in a bit to read it easily. Your feeling about the quality of the scans may have something to do with your feeling about downloading comics illegally. Perhaps not as much these days, but it was once a very simple matter to find all these issues in much clearer scans, and without a rather annoying Marvel logo superimposed over every page. These scans are from actual comics, so the '60s and '70s issues will show some yellowing at the edges but otherwise look okay. Still, none are of such great quality that anyone is going to use them for an illegal purpose, so it's pretty irritating to see them here, when you've purchased the disc. I must admit I haven't really read any of these issues in this format and am not sure I want to. Maybe I'll be bored and want to read some Romita-era stuff that hasn't appeared in a nice hardcover yet, or catch up on the JMS run, or something. It's interesting to see things I'd forgotten about, like how long Jim Mooney's and Mark Bagley's runs were, or that Erik Larsen filled in for a few issues after John Byrne's ill-fated run in 1999/2000. It's depressing to see how many mediocre artists like Keith Pollard, Tom Lyle, Raphael Kayanan and others, as well as mediocre writers like Tom De Falco and Howard Mackie, were allowed to steer one of Marvel's flagship series. It's also depressing that if you had to pick the 50 best issues of the series, almost all of them would come from the first eight or nine years of this 40+ year book. Also, the second Clone Saga (of which one can only get bits and pieces here due to ASM crossing over with several other Spidey series, miniseries and one-shots) holds up a lot better than most of the mid-to-late '70s material.

I have to admit, I don't pay that much attention to the monthly output of Marvel and DC these days. I catch up on trades and hardcovers here and there. So I hope you will forgive that I have, until now, not been aware of the grave crisis concerning Peter Parker and his wife Mary-Jane, who have to make Sophie's Choice between letting Peter's elderly, oxygen thieving Aunt May finally die for, please God, a final time, or making their emotionally retarded, creatively desiccated marriage as if it never was, in order to free up Peter to be a goofy, never-laid bachelor again, to be more accessible to the target audience.

This is, of course, a sound idea, since Peter's marriage in 1987 started a ripple effect where sales of nearly every superhero comic went into decline. I remember when that hated Amazing Spider-Man Annual came out, saying to myself, "Well, it won't be long now before the New Universe titles are cancelled," and sure enough I was right.

I don't know why anyone is surprised. Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has said repeatedly he hates old people, often when in the salad bar line at Sizzler. I just feel a little bad for J. Michael Straczynski, who wasn't in favor of this storyline, and had to rework a lot of other bad story ideas he had ready in order to write this particular bad story idea. We'll wait for ya, JMS! There is a rumor, though, that JMS will get to incorporate one of those ideas into this story, when it is revealed that Aunt May and Mephisto are one and the same (I always suspected this--look at their chins!). It's not widely known, but wheatcakes are a form of Satanic host. If this doesn't turn out to be true (or Marvel gets scared), the plan is for Mephisto to pull his usual trickery, not only nullifying the marriage but damning May to Hell for long ago fornicating with then-fiancee Nathan Lubensky.

I'm ambivalent about doing a Best Of 2007 list. As with every year, there are always some acclaimed books I haven't gotten round to reading yet, and even some I've only just noticed on other people's lists. That said, I have a pile of books I've read over the past few months that I have yet to review, since it invariably takes me longer to write a book review than I expect. So I thought this might be a good way to get some books off the list, even if they're not "properly" reviewed.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. I spent a good portion of today reading this, and it really is one of the best books I've read this year, and a fitting end to the LOEG books, if indeed that's what it is. I also watched the first disc of Penn & Teller's BULLSHIT series, and it occurred to me that there was an interesting contrast. B.S. exposes frauds and fallacies as diverse as psychics, aliens and the Mozart Effect, and the hucksters who take advantage of people's wanting to believe. On the other side, Moore's LOEG celebrates a similar need--the need for fiction and magic--but in a joyous way, a sincere way. Moore believes all these characters exist on some level, even if he can have a chuckle or two about believing it. I suppose some may be a little disappointed in this volume's relative lack of action, and indeed I found the mentions of past adventures with Mina and Allan whetted my appetite to see them, but I really liked how the book ends up as not only an LOEG sequel but a kind of sequel to Lost Girls as well, eroticizing fictional characters and worlds. Production-wise it's a treasure, and in terms of craft it's a master class for Moore and O'Neill, as they display amazing prowess at imitating a number of styles of fiction, nonfiction, illustration and graphic art. I did find the 3-D section at the end a little irritating. If I had any other criticism it would be that the youthful Allan Quatermain is boring and a bit emasculated in Moore's aim to make Mina the leader in the relationship. Really great book.

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! by Fletcher Hanks, Edited by Paul Karasik. I must confess to not being as much a fan of this work as some others. As a critic, I know in my heart there is an urge to bring forgotten work from the past forward as some wonderful work of genius deserving of admiration and study. It's one thing to review an established great like Alan Moore and say of his latest work, yeah, he's still great, but another to say that this crazy cartoonist from the '40s who nobody cared about back then was really ahead of his time. I do think Hanks' work is interesting, primarily for his distinctive art style and the creative vengeance his heroes visit upon the villains, but it's also a kind of shtick, that vengeance. It's a lot like how people still fondly recall the Fleisher/Aparo Spectre stories, where he'd make a compass gigantic and then stab a bad guy with it. It's not that they're great work--it's kind of shock value. Hanks' weird energy makes for compelling reading even with the stilted writing, but it's not something you'd exactly recommend to non-comics readers.

Comic Art #9 Edited by Todd Hignite. There's too much good stuff in here to go into detail about, but I particularly liked the features on Jerry Moriarty, Abner Dean and Jesse Marsh. I haven't read the Kaz interview yet. The Ivan Brunetti pamphlet has started very well, but I haven't read further because I'm thinking of actually following it like a class.

Swamp Preacher by David Sandlin. I'm just kind of turned off by the intentional ugliness and sloppiness of it. That may be intentional--you don't come up with a persistent green-and-sickly-pink color scheme by accident--but it just makes it hard for me to get into it.

Silverfish by David Lapham. Lapham writes a good crime story, still, and while this is a bit more sensational and simplistic than Stray Bullets, it's still encouraging.

Martha Washington Dies by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons. I really shouldn't have gotten this. I should have known by its presence that Dark Horse was going to be doing an omnibus of the entire Martha Washington saga and had probably commissioned this as a suitable epilogue, and just waited for that collection, which apparently is coming in the new year. It's not a story, more of a little speech, followed by a little unused material from 1987, which undoubtedly will find its way into the collection as well. Nice Gibbons work, but I'm disappointed I fell for this bit of greed.

Joseph by Nicolas Robel. Nice looking little story but it left me fairly cold. Fiction, including comics, is rife with stories of the boy who didn't fit in, and to my mind, if you're not going to even attempt something on the order of Chris Ware, why bother? I'm not saying it has to be as good--not at all--but Robel's effort here is kind of sloppy--typical dreams/fantasties--and the one interesting idea about his toys talking among themselves, acknowledging their existence being due to Joseph's imagination--isn't developed much. I guess I'd leave it as a mildly promising debut.

Batman and Son by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert. The first time I've liked Kubert's work, and some solid work from Morrison. What I like about him is even with fairly conventional plots he can't help putting in fun touches, such as the dinosaur in formaldehyde suspended from a ceiling at a cocktail party, or the multiple Man-Bats. The idea of Batman fathering a child growing up wring under Talia al-Ghul is a good one and going well so far. The John Van Fleet-illustrated Joker text story isn't entirely successful, but it's just one issue. The second serial is interesting due to Bruce Wayne seeming to really like a woman and getting laid, though I'm sure this is about the thousandth Batman story where he really ought to heal up but instead rushes out to stop the bad guy. Yeah, yeah. yeah.

Groo: 25th Anniversary Special by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier. A real treat--a solid stand-alone issue as good as any Groo issue, with a few laughs and the usual Evanier social commentary, this time about how doctors would rather profit than cure illness for good. There's also a Little Groo story that could be a little sad if it didn't have some comeuppance in it, and a fun rhyming alphabet piece that serves as an entertaining intro to Groo's world, much better than a handbook. Evanier offers some reminiscences and debunks some rumors about Groo and who does what, and we're out. I haven't read any Groo stuff for years but I was very happy reading this, and now in the mood to read more.

Next Time: More Comics, and some non-comics reading (i.e. actual books)

Shortcomings
Writing and Art by Adrian Tomine
Published by Drawn and Quarterly. $19.95 USD

Adrian Tomine finally concludes and collects his three part story from his Optic Nerve comic into a typically handsome D&Q graphic novel. Maybe too handsome. When I look at the serious faces on the cover, framed in a serious beige, I'm wondering what kind of message Tomine and the publisher are trying to convey to prospective readers. Reading the inside cover, we're told that the story "pits California against New York, devotion against desire, and trust against truth," but that even though the "charged, volatile dialogues" are "unlike anything in...comics in general," this is "no mere polemic." What a bunch of bullshit.

Shortcomings is a very smart, observant story about desire, yes. Most importantly, it's very funny--Ben Tanaka is one of the most enjoyably loathsome characters I've ever seen in comics. He's sort of like the Jon Favreau character in Swingers in that you can see him blowing it with women and are helpless to stop it, but he's different from that character in that you don't really root for him. You're very interested, yes, but he's not a sympathetic character. He's dishonest, directionless, self-absorbed, unsupportive, and completely in denial. I was reading a comment on another graphic novel today where the person called this kind of story "mandolescence," or a seemingly adult male going through a kind of coming of age story. That's what this is, and though it is among the best of its kind, ironically Tomine will get more mileage out of it because the lead character isn't white like all the others.

Rather, this is not a shocking new chapter in Tomine's career but a natural progression. As Andre Arnold wrote of his last graphic novel, Summer Blonde, Tomine captures "the slacker generation, growing older but not wiser." Tomine is a tightass with hangups like anyone else, and his work continues to improve because clearly here he evinces a growing awareness of those hangups and a willingness to mine them for drama and comedy. I don't know that Tomine is into blonde, white women per se, but I can't believe there's not a lot of Ben in Adrian, and likewise I have to think he has a friend like the refreshingly self-aware, lustful Alice Kim. She's a great character, and proof Tomine can write women well, and she is an excellent counterpoint to Ben in many ways. She's almost fully realized, and only held back a little by her wanting to be accepted by her parents for being gay. In fact, the only problem Tomine has here is in writing Miko. She's fine, but the cover copy would lead one to think this is as much her story as Ben's, and that "what unites them is their shared hypocrisies, their double standards," blah blah blah. No, she's just Ben's girlfriend, and he drives her away because he's an asshole, and the next time we see her she is in touch with her sexuality and has found someone who appreciates her. If Tomine is making a point with her new boyfriend being white but into Asian women, it's a small one, and unfair to use as an example of her "hypocrisy" when she never said she would only date Asian men.

The original title of this story was, "White on Rice," which is funnier than Shortcomings, and more apt. Shortcomings seems to refer to the stereotype about Asian men having small penises, which is only a brief joke in the book. Amusingly, the book's cover, under the dustjacket, features a yardstick or tape measure at the bottom. The fact that, for whatever reason, Ben Tanaka has a thing for white, blonde women is interesting, but it's just one characteristic of Ben. Tomine and his publisher should have trusted the strength of the story and the characterization rather than trying to paint this book as some shocking exploration of racial identity. The book is excellent--just go into it expecting deft writing, crisp, evocative artwork, and lots of dry and bawdy humor, and if you find there's more to it than that, bonus for you.

Amazing Fantasy Omnibus
Written by Stan Lee
Art by Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers, Don Heck, and Paul Reinman
Published by Marvel Comics. $75.00 USD

Some months before the Marvel Age began in 1961 with Fantastic Four, there was Amazing Adventures, which found Jack Kirby continuing to draw monster comics as he had since the mid '50s, and Steve Ditko drawing moralistic science fiction stories of aliens, ghosts, and many selfish or ignorant men. All these stories, plus some one-page text pieces, were written by Stan Lee, who had yet to become a great success but was always trying to give people what they wanted. With this series, he was capitalizing on monster movies and The Twilight Zone, and if the stories were rather facile (and with many of them only two pages long, depth wasn't what he was after most of the time), at least he had two great interpreters of his ideas in Kirby and Ditko.

Kirby was the more dynamic artist, and today some of his monsters are fondly remembered, though mainly for their kitschy names, like "Krogg," "Torr" and "Monsteroso." He would take his ability for creating memorable grotesques to Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The Uncanny X-Men and other titles, where the grotesques were humanized and made heroic.

Ditko remained on Amazing Adventures, which changed to Amazing Adult Fantasy with its seventh issue, and continue drawing all the twist-ending sci-fi stories Lee cranked out. Ditko was dynamic in a different way than Kirby. He made the common man interesting. Every nebbish, every smug tycoon and every two-bit thug lit up the page. He also drew a lot of cool aliens, and also a fair representation of Death, seemingly inspired by a similar incarnation in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film, The Seventh Seal. A typical Lee/Ditko story was, "Why Won't They Believe Me?" from AAF #7, where a man finds a hidden spaceship with written plans of world invasion by aliens changing to human form. He tries to warn the authorities with no one believing him, until finally a government scientist does buy his story, pointing out that only the man could decipher the log book, because in fact he was the alien, having suffered amnesia from the impact of the flight.

There are some interesting tidbits here for Marvelphiles. Lee tried one recurring character for the series, Dr. Droom, a yellow-skinned bald mystic of indeterminate origin, but highly respected by others in his stories. He is a clear precursor to the other Lee/Ditko classic character, Dr. Strange, not to mention the name losing a letter to become the name of the Fantastic Four's greatest nemesis. Droom himself would eventually become Dr. Druid. One can also find examples of Lee's famous penchant for alliterative names here, as well as a scientist with the last name Storm, and a young mutant named Thad who is led away to a secret mutant sanctuary until the world is ready for their kind. And of course, we get the first appearance of Spider-Man, in the renamed-but-shortlived Amazing Fantasy #15, a story that has appeared in a couple Omnibus volumes already, but here we get the other Lee/Ditko stories from that final issue as well, before it was cancelled to make room for a series with a bit more staying power, Amazing Spider-Man.

Although the stories are corny and dated now, the result of over 40 years of other twist ending stories bearing the influence of Rod Serling, the work here