Daymented has hooked up with SJ of "I, Asshole" and is plotting some sort of encounter session with Heather of le petit chou (UPDATE: here's Heather's report).
Now, Heather is friends with Ken, via some circuitous acquaintanceship deal (curiously, not involving blogs); SJ is currently terrorizing the i-school at UW, (currently my front-runner grad school option) and is the sort of fearless being that posts photos of her and her teenage sister engaged in the 24-hour blogathon, or possibly tells many stories involving drunkenness and wild behavior of punk rock moments who also has a child and keeps chickens in the back forty while prompting her sax-playing hubby to get gigs.
Daymented's web presence hints at her own terrible energy. A Seattle Times article I shan't link here and attendant fallout confirms it.
Heather has recently shared photos of the fireplace she works in at the enormous limestone mansion overlooking the water (possibly pulled as it was pretty clear where the pics were taken, I thought), her soccer team, and can be relied upon for blow-by-blows of her own high academic standards and also explained the recently-discussed preponderance of underwear moments in Lost in Translation.
Well, honestly, I have to say, this is the sort of thing that leads to unknown, possibly dangerous, highly-energetic social events.
Furthermore, while I am a retiring sort of local blogger, who politely realizes that tonight is the night I must polish the silverware on being encouraged in a neighborly fashion to drop by at the Meetup or what not, I feel that should point out to SJ and Heather that daymented is someone I knew when she was fourteen.
At that time, my interactions with her were largely confined to sleepily picking up the phone bright and early on select weekday mornings in my college dorm room, whereupon a young girl's voice would respond to my bleary, pot-smeared "Hello?" with the unsettling sobriquet "Dad?"
She would then blithely instruct me to call her high-school principal posing as her father in order to enable her to play hooky that day.
Being a bear of very little brain, I certainly did as instructed, several times.
My understanding is that a few years in Vegas straightened her right up, and today she's a fine, upstanding young woman. A fine, highly energetic, upstanding young woman.
The things you people could get up to frighten me, slightly. But it could be a really great thing, too: like, you could invent a cheap, reliable source of non-polluting energy that's easily manufactured from chicken poop, and thereby bring about world peace and a universal expansion of family-based agriculture. Or something.
Fanimatrix: just what you think it might be. Posted sight unseen, via BoingBoing, as a followup to my thinking out loud the other day, and becasue t has come to my attention that if there can be Star Trek bands, there can be Star Wars compilation CDs.
That's nearly the kind of licensing challenge that makes me think I need to pick up the phone and talk to my licensing schmoes, but Lucas is waaay outta their league.
Huh, looka there:
"6. Dow Jones & The Industrials - R2-D2 (4:20)"
Research reveals that this band is not the band I was hoping they would be.
The connections of that other band, Dow Jones & The Industrials, to my perennial obsession, the Gizmos, are very, very deep. DJI was the other early punk/new wave band in Indiana in the late seventies/early eighties, and in fact shared the 12" split LP "Hoosier Hysteria" with them. The most recent Gizmos reunions were intended as benefits for DJI founding drummer Tim North, who unfortunately passed away before the shows. DJI did play the shows as scheduled, I believe.
Head Gizmo and pilot of the Vulgar Boatmen Dale Lawrence wrote a preview of the shows, and an appreciation of North, in the May 14 Nuvo.
I do not know if they played "R2-D2." It seems unlikely, as it's another band's song. But a song about Star Wars would not have been totally inconceivable; they incorporated a sufficient amount of bleeping techno burble that something intriguing might well have emerged.
And tonight, it's off to Ha Na for raw fish with a chaser of Lost in Translation.
I am a bit concerned about seeing the film; it's been so well received by blog-neighbors it's kind of like going to see that film that all your favorite critics have warmly praised.
Last night I enjoyed a pleasant pub crawl with my pal Don. Being of a certain domesticated temper these days, I spend far less time in bars than I once did, and a salutary survey of the local watering holes was well in order.
We began with the newest kid on the block, Clever Dunnes', an Irish pub that opened about a year ago. They have great food and a good selection of beers, and sometimes they even play Irish music in weekend nights. There was an irish football game on the telly, and we had a pleasant meal and a couple pints of Guinness. I was struck by the low smoker quotient.
(I should note that my old band, the Bare Knuckle Boxers, occasionally plays there. The picture on their site is from a June gig in that location.)
We then headed over to Pike (or is it Pine? after thirteen years, i still can't get it straight) and wandered into Kincora's, another joint that the Boxers have been known to play from time to time. In fact, I've played gigs there going back at least ten years, starting with a Halloween gig (in a different band from the Boxers) in which our guitarist yanked the neck of his Mosrite Black Widow in such a way as to chip the tooth of our lead singer - I was wearing a full-head mask, which made it impossible to see what had happened - I just saw Tod go down like a sack of bricks, and when he got up, there was blood all over his face. He just kept singing, though. What a trouper.
Kincora's has clearly become the hipster destination of choice on the lower hill - it was appropriately seedy and featured a wide variety of creatively dressed pierced, and tattooed young people. It was interesting to me that as far as I could tell, I did not recognize more than one of the people in the bar by sight, presumably a testament to my domesticated status.
From there we wandered up to Linda's, crowded as ever on a weekend night. Linda's crowd remains young, but unlike the aggressively uber-hip crowd I recall from the joint when it first opened, the youngsters bellying up were much less prone to be wearing a mesh-back baseball cap with a seventies satin shirt, for example, or to sport a septum ring. Now, I'm not saying that the bar was full of puffy-haired yahoos, but the overall hipster quotient was quite low. In a way, it's almost a relief to know that there's a place for these folks on the Hill.
Next, we wandered up to the Bad Juju Lounge, which Don had never dropped by before. His curiosity was piqued by my semi-joking characterization of the place as 'the goth bar.' As advertised, there was a distinct preponderance of black garb in the bar; but, as with Linda's, I was somewhat surprised at the diminution of concern with costume among the clientele. I suppose that the presence of the Vogue right next door probably draws off the folks who are most focused on latex-wear and so forth.
We then wandered vaguely by Barca and over to the corner by the Wild Rose - I was surprised to see that apparently the teahouse in the condo building had closed down. We debated the options, but were drawn down toward the bar that I've inhabited more than any other, the sainted, beloved Comet (another place I've gigged, too). They were having a show, and the loud rock was pouring into the street. We stopped by the corner windows and looked in - you can see and hear the bands playing with no difficulty.
It quickly became apparent that the band playing was fantastic. I recognized the imposing bulk of their guitarist, who Karel had introduced to me at the Comet a few months ago. The Comet is right around the corner from a major practice hall, known as the Chophouse, where tons of bands practice; gigs at the Comet can have a kind of hometown vide as a result, since the musicians that pass one another in the fetid, loud, smoky halls of the practice space will frequently adjourn to the Comet for a cold one and conversation. It was clear that this gig was one of those, the musicians interacting with specific people in the crowded space, the play area mapped out on the floor only by the monitors. It was punk rock the way punk rock is at its' best, and Don and I quickly realized it would be better to stand inside the bar with a beer than outside without.
The band was Midnight Thunder Express, and they were playing a farewell show before they head out on a six-week European tour. I can't begin to convey the excellence of the show and the band's sound. It was a perfect way to close out the night - the serendipitous nature of finding the show was wonderful.
Thomas Edison sound recordings, hosted at the National Parks website. Ah! Feel that toe-tappin' noise! Mp3s. Oh yaaas.
Snyder, does your mother know you're out?
Snazzy!
So, speaking of Mark Twain, the exceptionally obsessive out there will recall that I plunked down nearly five bucks for the complete works of Mark Twain in Palm-compatible formats about a month ago. It's a formidably huge amount of data, as I noted.
There's something singularly delightful in the act of reading the material on the Palm - Twain once went bankrupt attempting to fund a typesetting device, and his fascination with the improbable faculties of technology mean I rather fancy that he'd probably own every Newton ever released as well as much more recent models of Palm than my own rather aged device. (The fan of the interweb as a device for the presentation of information may be well-advised to take a peek at that link - it's the nicely put together companion site to the Ken Burns Twain bio from last year.)
On the other hand, the lack of non-integral reference matter - such as original publication dates for the books, front and end matter situating the work in the author's career, drawings, maps, that sort of thing - somewhat undercuts the success of the format, as I have to rely on my sketchy recollections of the facts of Twain's life to figure out when a work was written, for example.
To date, I've completed "A Tramp Abroad," which is a jocular account of a European tour in the 1880s, I think (including the oft-cited essay, "The Awful German Language").
I have also finished "The Mysterious Stranger," famed as Twain's darkest work, full of rage at God for the injustice of the universe.
Interestingly, there's controversy about the authorship of the work.
I've just begun "Roughing It" (Twain's account of his journey to the West and subsequent life there) and will certainly move on to read "The Innocents Abroad" as well shortly; I intend to Google about to learn of other Twain travelogues and read that whole subset before reading the stuff we've all read as kids.
Beyond that, "The Mysterious Stranger," was, to my taste, quite hilarious. It certainly does reflect a world-view that is traditionally tut-tutted over. Yet, it's roughly my world-view, although Twain's deist rage is something I lack, not holding the tenets required for directed anger at a supernatural being.
I've heard that "Letters from the Earth" is another black-humor book, but I was unable to raise it via the project gutenberg search engine. I don't know if it is in the material I have for the Palm, which I think is entirely derived from the Gutenberg stuff. Apparently not published until 1962, I'd guess that explains its' absence from gutenberg.
Amusingly, I still retain a Twain postcard from a childhood visit to Sam Clemens' hometown of Hannibal, Mizzoo.
Reading "A Tramp" was interesting also at least partly because a substantial portion of the work describes travels in or near the Swiss Alps, from the vicinity of Zermatt to the other side of Lake Geneva, near Mont Blanc (which is in France, but Twain was untroubled by this details). As a teenager, I lived in Lausanne, directly across the Lake from the primary French port on the lake for access to the mountain, and so these portions of the book cover Twain's travels to locations I too recall.
I interviewed Ezra Clatyan Daniels today at Zanadu II in the U-District for the next Ink and Pixels (for the first issue out in October). It'll be the first time I try to move beyond the unsuccessful set-questions format I've been using.
I have a good forty-five minutes of tape to boil down to 400 words. I'm sort of not looking forward to the bloodletting.
Daniels is a youngish fellow - in his mid twenties. His gifts are pretty apparent - the maturity of the plotting in the books he just completed, "The Changers" books one and two, each 90-odd pages long, is remarkable. Only occasional narrative or prose choices allow a certain youthful naivete to gleam through.
After our chat I dropped by my pal Spencer's and ranted about my fascination with and interest in fan-created entertainments such as those Star Trek bands I was amazed by earlier this month. See, it's not just stuff like the bands. I actually interviewed Jimm and Josh Johnson, the creators of Starship Exeter, a remarkably successful reimagining of an original-series Star Trek episode, last spring, but never got Cinescape to run a piece in the mag (shakes fist).
Let's not forget my interview, also, with David Sander, the man behind Man Conquers Space.
The Exeter folks also link to Star Wreck, a Finnish Star Trek parody that appears to have outgrown itself and morphed into something unknown; and also to Hidden Frontier, a Trek-based fan-produced series (four seasons to date) that appears to integrate the 'reel-builder' orientation seen in many of the fan-produced Star Wars projects (such as 'Troops').
fanfilms.com appears to be ahead of my personal curve on this material at the moment, in fact.
Additionally, in the lead-in to the release of the first Lord of the Rings, Wired ran a long article about the passionate and eccentric fan-culture that the books themselves had generated in the two generations prior to the flicks.
In my ranting at Spencer, I tied all of this together and riffed into other interesting, slightly hard-to-comprehend florescences of our culture such as, oh, the SCA, of course, and less obviously, historical re-enactors, from Williamsburg (check out that URL: "history.org") to Hal Holbrook and the Civil War.
Somehow, what Stovokor and No Kill I are doing is directly related to what thoise Civil War guys are doing. The fact that the Johnsons, among others, are turning out entertaining product, full of invention and soul and passion, via homebrewed media production techniques, is part and parcel of everything stange and good and economically disruptive in the world. For my money that Star Trek fan film stuff is a great deal more engaging than the slick, ironic Star Wars stuff. But I bet there are Star Wars fan films that are right up my punk-rock, awkwardly sincere alley.
Well, it was a rant. Now I have the task of ordering it into a fertile area to treat as writers' material. Where to begin?
Is it just me, or is there a lull?
I mean, Jim took the month off to climb burning mountains, and Ken took a break. They both came back and are conspicuously wordy. Logorrhetic. Long-winded, like. Charged up, really. Rarin' to go.
But, geez, I'm missin' days - B2 uses the exact same words I did. The cheery bullets in my blogroll are fewer, somehow, than I expect them to be.
Sigh.
Is it the weather? The war? The end of Bennifer? Where has the flow, flow, flow gone?
Ah well.
Analytically, for me personally, it's a combination of things - September always blows for me, in greater or lesser degree. I'm working on an ongoing project which included signing an NDA, which I hate to do and don't worry about consciously but it ain't like I'm blabbin' about it here.
Then there's the whole keeping-my-powder dry issue regarding pieces I'm working on for outside of blogland... It seems that in the past when I've blathered on in undisciplined fashion here as I'm prepping a piece, the piece benefits later as my angle and some hooks and stuff often get worke out here instead of in the first draft.
Humina.
That's about six years old. Both long hair and facial hair are gone. Silly facial hair grown for Halloween, a magnificent Regency swordsman's get up. I may have had a great floppy hat as well. Arrr.
Avast me hearties! I've been swipin' the booty from this scurvy site:
Well t'streets have been swept, And t'leaves have all washed away,
And I find meself stumblin', On somethin' I'm tryin't'say.
Ahoy! t'breathin' has stopped, But t'hair keeps on growin',
T'anchor's been dropped, But t'crew keeps on rowin',
Captain, what be our headin' now?
Just t'echo remains, Of t'refraino'a splice t'mainbraceen song.
That I spent all me days, Trainin' parrots t'sin' along.
Now thar's some kindo'answer, Bein' demandedo'us.
But tonight be infected, I guess we should squeeze out t'pus.
Yeah thar's dust on t'rules, Of this game we're tryin't'play.
So I can't tell if I'm gettin' closer, Or farther away.
Oh, where be you at? And where be you goin'?
T'wind doesn't answer, It just keeps on blowin'.
Arrrrr!
(That be the Peg Leg Jason Weblevich shantey, "Captain, What Be Arrrr Headin' Now")
Today is my dad's birthday, and he spent it partly at work and partly at home in North Carolina watching the power flicker and treelimbs fly by the house.
They finally lost power at around 6pm, my mom says, which places that event at about the time thet Isabel's center was as close to them as it got.
I spent much of my day keeping tabs on the storm via both WUNC, my folks' public radio station, which I listen to anyway for a while each day and also the TV station they were watching, WRAL.
The other predictable web-haunts I had up all day were The Weather Channel and the Weather Underground.
Despite the old-time internet reputation that the the Weather Underground has, I found The Weather Channel's default page design to be my single best source of information The largest graphic all day was a continously updated screenshot of the weather satellite view of the storm's position, in real time.
That was the information I wanted, and all I had to do was glance at the page.
Amusingly, at the end of the day, I was on the phone to someone in NYC (no, not one of the usual suspects). Her antsy concern to be home before the hurricane took me by surprise, considering the calm conversations I had had with my parents about treelimbs cartwheeling by the house. She described the weather she saw out her window as 'apocalyptic.'
I can only imagine what the weather looked like in Chapel Hill, at closest approach, about 120 miles from the eye of the storm.
The Gizmos Songbook has been made available for the perusal of the one or two of you who care about obscure pre-hardcore American punk bands.
Also, due to unforeseen technical difficulties which will crop up at the last minute, I will NOT be able to appear at the Illuminated Donkey Festival, as scheduled:
"Reformatting the Server Whatsits to Clear the Flibber-Flabber" 9:00 P.M. Brunswick Towers Conference Center. Panelists: Michael Whybark and Paul Frankenstein.Longtime Illuminated Donkey contributors and associates Michael Whybark and Paul Frankenstein discuss the latest Internet technology and why it always seems to be crashing. Attendees are guaranteed that at least one-third of all words used will be intelligible to the general public.
It was sweet of Ken to book me. I really appreciate the effort and expense involved (whooee - last minute one-way nonrefundable first-class tickets in and out of Newark will run ya, just ask Ken). I'm particularly sorry to be missing Ken's sure-to-be-a-wowser one man panel, "Thirst, Alcohol, and the Single American Woman," but, being happily married, realize my personal interest in this was a reflection of both prurience and cruelty and so will sleep very well indeed in its' lack.
Oh, the puzzlin' I been doin' over why I ain't been feelin' it of late.
I been a-puzzlin' 'cuz I'm a dumbass.
It's September, as you well know, Mike!
I'll be right as rain agin in a few days.
My folks are getting ready to ride out the hurricane in North Carolina. They are well inland, but the projected track of the storm takes it quite directly to them. Prior hurricanes since they've lived in North Carolina have all come ashore in South Carolina and swung back to the north and east after encountering the Appalachians; thus there's a real possiblity the storm might be more intense than those that have come before.
I think I'm basically behind the curve, but I've just spent the last forty-five minutes laughing my ass off about this. I stumbled into this brilliant lunacy by way of the Big Green House, who also snogged it from somewheres or other.
To boldly go: the Sacramento News and Review goes in depth on the Sacto Star Trek band scene.
Excerpt:
Marooned in this hot, humid, backwater town on an insignificant planet, the Klingon Capt. pInluH approaches the cluster of puny humans who are taking in the action. The captain is nearly 7 feet tall, his left arm is amputated at the elbow--lost in what must have been one glorious battle--and his gut hangs pendulously over his belt. He’s an aging warrior, but he’s bad news to be sure. He swaggers up to the earthlings, humans and some Vulcans, steadily swigging from cans of Old Milwaukee.pInluH queries, "Are you ready to rock?"
The crowd is pensive. The Vulcans just stare at the spiny carapace of his forehead. Some smirk.
"I said," he bellows, "are you ready to rock?" More smirks.
"I do not believe you are ready to rock,” pInluH says with a huff, and then he strides off.
pInluH is the lead singer for Stovokor, a Portland-based Klingon heavy metal band (see this Portland Mercury article). There is a glorious photo of the warriors on stage in the News and Review article. That article, it should be noted, is a fine piece of writing by one Cosmo Garvin that covers the strangeness without condescension, I thought, and also decodes the bits of Trekanalia ebedded (such as the source of one of the band's names, for example).
But wait! There's more!
The grand-daddies of the scene are the long running No Kill I, a band that sounds like it would be great fun to see. They have a cross-town rival band, Warp 11, whose music sounds much less like something I'd be interested in, from the article's description of it.
Both bands have music available online:
No Kill I and spinoff band No Kill I: TNG
Warp 11: Red Alert.
Elijah Brubaker is the guest in the "Five Questions" section of Ink and Pixels in the current issue of Tablet, number 76.
In the reviews, I take quick looks at Elijah's most recent mini-comic, Tatiana Gill's Midnight at the Oasis, and vet Richard Sala's tenth (!) issue of Evil Eye.
The QFC is advertising $3.99/lb for wild Alaskan Copper River salmon.
No, that didn't come out right.
The QFC is advertising $3.99/lb for wild Alaskan Copper River salmon!
In entirely unrelated news (despite the importance to the plot of a Presidential campaign), Taxi Driver appeared on one of our movie channels last night as I was preparing for bed and cast its' voodoo spell, as ever, leading to a much later bedtime than planned.
The print was pristine - I presume what aired derives from a version prepared for DVD release - and utterly hypnotic. The film is so much better than Mean Streets. One wonders if Scorsese knew what he was creating back then withthis film and Raging Bull. Growing up I recall lumping Taxi Driver in with Serpico, The French Connection, and Dog Day Afternoon under the sobriquet of "headache films" becasue of the common tendency toward presenting a gritty, dystopian world via grainy, low-light or available-light cinematography.
On thing that jarred, however, was the film's happy ending! I'd completely forgotten that DeNiro's idiot cabbie actually survives his epic gunbattle. It has to be a mistake. I mean, sure it's not a big wedding or an inheritance or anything like that, but, really, the "bloody finger to the head" schtick sorta tells you everything you need to know, I gotta say.
Seems like others have
Some of you will have heard about the Doonesbury-inspired "flash mob" at the foot of the Space Needle this morning.
To summarize, Trudeau depicted a character in the strip calling for a flash mob via her computer on Monday. Well, by the time Seattle got out of bed on Monday morning, someone in Connecticuit, so it's said, had used the Dean campaign's online tools to schedule the event.
I was asked to cover the event for The Comics Journal (via the good offices of one David Lasky), so I was there and talked to a number of folks, including Jake Metcalf of 8bitjoystick.com (I tried to give him the secret blogosphere handshake but he seemed unfamiliar with this site, if open to the possibility he'd dropped by). He took a picture of
Since I'm writing about it for the CJ and will do a bit for Tablet as well, I'll go light on the detail, but it was a fun way to start the day. The participants did, in fact, hop up and down while chanting "The Doctor is in! The Doctor is in!"
Is there anything as annoying as updating one's resumé?
I don't think so.
Ah well. An unexpected recruiter call lit a fire under my patootie, acually. I also did a comprehensive update last spring - but the really horrible server outage - the one that took the KGP away from us - also kilt my hard-won puffery.
Naturally, I also have some contract work to keep me busy on Friday.
In other news, a test burn of the Gizmos DVD was entirely successful, chapterpoints and all. I will need to doublecheck the entries to be sure I didn't inadvertently miss a song or two and to make sure I haven't brain-farted and mislabeled a tune, but WOO HOO.
(Among the furiously dancing heads of my friends I've ID'd is a wild-haired blond woman, swinging her tresses - nay, her mane - with wild abandon. Could it be a certain buttoned-up editor currently a-soujourning in London?)
JerryKindall.com: Jerry's gathered up some 9-11 links to peruse in thought and sadness tomorrow (I've pestered him for a permalink). Naturally, I can't say I share the political perspectives prominently reflected in his selections, but that's all right.
Note the neat image.
See you on September 12. Hope your day is meaningful and productive. I'm certainly feeling more chipper this year. I suppose the respite from war talk has something to do with it.
Sorry for the dearth of postings - the trip, combined with some media projects here at home, are soaking up my brain and free time.
The media projects are associated with creating a DVD from an old VHS tape of a reunion perfomance by the Gizmos shot the last day of July in 1988 - the tape was edited and directed by Eric White at the cable-access staion in Bloomington, BCAT 3, which unfortunately at the time only made VHS cameras available to program producers except for in-studio work.
The tape is pretty good in every way except video quality - I'm actually quite impressed with Eric's editing.
It being September again, I should note that Eric was working on the editing throughout the saga of my sister's death - and she is quite visible on the tape, as am I, dancing and dancing. The concert stands at the gates of adulthood; the cost of entry too high to predict.
Happily, watching the video (over and over and over as I work the kinks out of the workflow here) is not saddening in the least - it's almost like a video yearbook, and I find myself pointing at the fifteen-year-old video ghosts of my friends and calling their names:
"There's Ransom!"
"It's Katherine!"
"That's Terri!"
May I just say:
and note that further imagery exploring the artistic effects of light abd shadow involved in my recent visit to my in-laws in Laguna Beach on a perfect late-summer weekend may be found here, here, here, and here.
Worthy of note were the amusingly provocative Oracle banners at the SeaTac federal screening positions:
"Oracle makes Linux unbreakable: Everybody knows Linux costs less. Now it's faster and more reliable too."
Translation: "Bill, your software broke last month. Loved it! See you soon - love, Larry."
I also actually went swimming in the ocean for the first time in at least twenty years. It was fun, but, naturally, I seem to have an ear infection. Every time I get in the water, my head soaks it up like a sponge and it dribbles out for days and days.
We were there for my father-in-law's 75th birthday party, and it was great fun.
The trip ended with United's outbound plane experiencing starter failure in an engine - they put us on a direct Alaskan flight that we barely made, and which was so empty I cannot imagine how they can run the service.
A pleasant walk about the neighborhood of a summer night's wee hours is often a salutary endeavor, accompanied or solo.
On this night, amid a quiet unnatural for a city, I spied the winking eye of Mars gazing across the fruited plains of Capitol Hill. I found some scrap wood, half-inch plywood, that is just what I needed to mount a nice keyboard shelf I picked up elewhere, also as scrap because it lacked the needed mounting hardware.
On my return loop, what should I spy but a lovingly-cared-for Pontiac Tempest, the first family car I can recall. Ours was a '67 convertible in an ice-blue flake. This was an aquamarine hardtop with what I'm assuming is a restoration job on the upholstery in cream leather.
Ours had navy-and-ice-blue vinyl upholstery that stank to high heaven of complex, probably highly toxic vynil gasses under the summer sun, something which seriously undercut the otherwise impeccable beauty of this particluar crossbreed of land yacht and muscle car.
It was an interesting sense-memory to feel the door handles and the interior window-lining brushes.
Although very similar to the car I recall, this car featured an older-looking commercial script logo; the body style was otherwise nearly identical, which means, I suspect, that the car I saw in the night was a '65 or '67.
Viv and I are watching The Two Towers on DVD (we actually started yesterday) and there's an hour to go.
POINT ONE:
Gollum, as I've said before, is looking to me like an ambitious miscalculation. Less than a year after the release of the film, each time I see it, the more flaws and shortcomings in the character's CGI I see.
This will guarantee reworking of the films once the trilogy is complete - the question is, how long will it be until we see this?
An additional question, of course, is: how much farther will they have pushed the CGI for The Return of the King? The films still obviously reflect a high-caliber commitment to quality; I can't imagine that effects people and directors on the project are unaware of the issues I see (overly smooth movements, "floating" limbs, ungrounded character presence in certain scenes) and I would assume they were tackling them even before the release of the first film.
POINT TWO:
Geez this is a long film. Apparently, when the extended edition is released in November, we'll see, as with the first film, an additional forty minutes.
I'm buying stock in lumbar cushion manufacturers.
Meant to link to the other pieces in the most recent Tablet, two movie reviews. One was for the widely celebrated "American Splendor" and for the less-universally adored "...And Now Ladies and Gentlemen."
I enjoyed both. Sadly, I typo'ed American Splendor director Shari SPRINGER Berman's name. It had been typoed when the review originally ran on the web, and I knew I wanted to correct it, but apparently I failed to proof it before I submitted it. Dang.
Went down to Bumbershoot to cover the cartoonists' panel at InkSpot and met a number of folks that I've been corresponding with.
I also saw Scott K., who wanted to know why I wasn't working for him (he's an event security manager). One hundred simoleans a day. "Hmm", I had to tell him, "there was no valid reason, in fact, that I'm not."
Despite this he did not immediately offer sign-up bonus.
On the way down and back I read Twain on the Palm, in particular some chapters from his European travelogue, A Tramp Abroad.
An aside: what kind of nonsense publication and title listing scheme is Gutenberg using, for God's sake? If that link points to the material I downloaded the other day, uh, the listing is FAR from complete.
Oh, I get it.
Here's the real link: A Tramp Abroad.
Apparently, natural lingo search on Guteberg is not implemented, so "mark twain" yeilds limited results whilst "twain" gets ya the whole package.
So anyway, here's a NEWS FLASH, direct from 1887: that Mark Twain fella is mmm funnee, bwah, hells yeah. I was chuckling aloud each way, more or less continuously.
Mr. Clemens has been prevailed upon to act as a second in a duel among the French. After his sugggestion "that Gatling-guns at fifteen paces would be a likely way to get a verdict on the field of honor" has been dismissed, his counterpart in the matter suggests pistols:
He fished out of his vest pocket a couple of little things which I carried to the light and ascertained to be pistols. They were single-barreled and silver-mounted, and very dainty and pretty. I was not able to speak for emotion. I silently hung one of them on my watch-chain, and returned the other. My companion in crime now unrolled a postage-stamp containing several cartridges, and gave me one of them. I asked if he meant to signify by this that our men were to be allowed but one shot apiece. He replied that the French code permitted no more. I then begged him to go and suggest a distance, for my mind was growing weak and confused under the strain which had been put upon it.
He goes on in this vein for more or less the entire chapter, and very interestingly, he does this slick, craftsman's trick throughout the whole thing: all the gags are based on size - either exaggerations of distance or gargantuan proportions or as seen here, the lilliputian. Anyway, it's rich reading.
