pink sweater
» Saturday, March 31, 2007

I took this last fall with Schmutzie's camera. I generally don't like taking self-portraits, mostly because I'm always surprised at my own face. But I like the look of this one.

Labels: photos

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mister wide head
» 

Heigh-ho. Here's a screwed-up sketch of a guy with a really wide head. He hangs out all day in front a coffee shop with several other guys, whom I have named Old Struwwelpeter, The Hacky-sack King and The Doll Collector. Old Struwwelpeter has a huge shock of frizzy grey hair surrounding a sharp-featured face. Over the years his expression has become set in a look of wary boredom. The Hacky-sack King is a tall man in his mid-fifties who styles himself like a twenty-year old hipster. When not sitting in front of the coffee shop he can be found in the park, hacky-sacking away with twenty year old hipsters and teenage crystal meth junkies, who occasionally break from their exhausting meth-related schedule to kick a tiny bean bag around. The Doll Collector collects dolls.


You may think that I simply can't draw. This is true. But's it's more true that this guy has a really wide head. Bonus random note on rural hockey rink maintenance included.

Labels: sketches

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crazy-style template change-a-roo
» Friday, March 30, 2007

Hello, sports racers people who read. The design art stylings of Schmutzie have reworked my template. In unrelated news, my sidebar content has vanished. I'm rebuilding it from memory. If there's anything I'm forgetting, drop me a comment. In the meantime, please comment in praise of Schmutzie's design eye.

Labels: metablog

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the increasingly specific meme
» Thursday, March 29, 2007

In ancient times there was a Schmutzie who was married to me. She participated in the internet blood rite known to post-Dawkinites as a meme. I continue the meme in memory of her.

10 FAVORITES

• Favorite Color: Gold of the slaughtered honeybee. I mean blue. Didn’t mean to bring up the bee thing.


• Favorite Food: My curried cauliflower recipe, which is hotter than the core of the sun and just as tasty.


• Favorite Month: September.


• Favorite Song: My favourites in pop music always shift. I prefer to ride the wave of my taste instead of dropping anchor. So right now I’m going to go with “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem, a group whose sound is so geared to my jaded mid-thirties demographic that I may be imagining them.


• Favorite Movie: I like any movie where Lily Tomlin sleeps with Keith Carradine and Jeff Goldblum travels around on a chopper bike for three hours. It’s Robert Altman’s stoned mashup of country music and dirty politics Nashville! If you travel back in time to 1975 and only see one movie all year, this should be it.


• Favorite Sport: Sports are the creation of the secret athletic agenda that controls our liberal media and has taken over our public execution arenas with meaningless contests of physical skill. If we could root out this cancer at the heart of our society, then all our social problems would topple like evil dominoes.


• Favorite Season: Fall.


• Favorite Day of the week: Saturday.


• Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Butterscotch ripple. When I was young I was sorry that it existed only in ripple form, but in retrospect I’m glad.


• Favorite Time of Day: That hour or so of horizontal gold light before sunset known as magic hour. It puts me in mind of our fallen honeybee brothers and sisters. Damn, there I go again.

9 CURRENTS

• Current Mood: Bee-mindful, bee-wistful.


• Current Taste: Coffee.


• Current Clothes: Black short-sleeve button-up shirt, khaki Dickies and a nice pair of Keen sneakers.


• Current Desktop: Are we talking computer desktop? An image that I snipped from Andrea Heimer’s site.


• Current Toenail Color: Lepidopter.


• Current Time: Ten to three. That’s not only the time, it’s also pretty good odds.


• Current Surroundings: Divided boardroom. On Monday I move into an office, where I start my new job. Did I mention that I got promoted? I did, I did.


• Current Thoughts: Sex, bees, Sylvia Plath, trying to have sex with Sylvia Plath while the bees buzz around us, inability to do so because of all the bees, angrily accusing Sylvia Plath of trying to seduce me.

8 FIRSTS

• First Best Friend: Bo MacKinnon, whom I met when I was only two. We hung out, tricycled around, went to each other’s birthday parties.


• First Kiss: You know, I’m not sure I remember. Was I thirteen? Did I come that late to kissing? Man.


• First Screen Name: Palinode.


• First Pet: The first pet I remember was a black cat named MacAvity. I remember when he died, but now that I write about it I don't want to relate the story. It was unpleasant.


• First Piercing: May 4th, 1985, gold stud in my left earlobe.


• First Crush: Her name was Katrina. Grade 3. Not particularly requited, except on the few occasions when it suited her. She was, as the song goes, a little Dutch girl.


• First CD: Since I’ve never thrown away a CD in my life, I imagine it’s sitting in a milk crate somewhere. My music snarfing career began with vinyl and cassette, and I vaguely remember buying a 45 for 'Hungry Like the Wolf' in grade 6. In grade 8 I joined the Columbia Music and Tape Club. The first thing I ordered was a cassette tape of The Smith’s 'Meat Is Murder'. I’d never heard The Smiths before but I liked the title.

7 LASTS

• Last Cigarette: August 3, 2000. It was a dried-up handrolled Drum.


• Last Drink: On Tuesday after work to celebrate my promotion.


• Last Car Ride: I caught me a taxi to work this morning. Now there’s a story.


• Last Kiss: This morning when I said goodbye to Schmutzie.


• Last Movie Seen: I’m in the middle of watching a pirated screener of The Host. If it weren’t dubbed in Spanish from Korean and subtitled in awkward English, I’d probably enjoy it more.


• Last Phone Call: I talked with Schmutzie. She wanted me to remind her of something, but god only knows what that thing was.


• Last CD Played: I think it was either "Lose All Time" by You Say Party! We Say Die! or the B-52s album with "Rock Lobster" on it.

6 HAVE YOU EVERS

• Have You Ever Dated One Of Your Best Guy/Girl Friends: Twice! The first time did not go well. The second resulted in me standing around drunk in a suit in front of my relatives. What the hell was that about?


• Have You Ever Broken the Law: Yes, but in a good way.


• Have You Ever Been Arrested: I've had plenty of run-ins with bored cops, but no arrests.


• Have You Ever Skinny Dipped: No. It’s cold outside of my clothes. Have you ever worn a suit of night water? Freezing.


• Have You Ever Been on TV: Back when I was working in TV, I ended up on camera quite often. I was in a room full of smoke, I was doused in freezing cold water, I was laid out on a lawn covered in soot, I struggled in a hospital bed. I did voiceovers. I learned juggling (but not very well), ate fire, did all kinds of silly things.


• Have You Ever Kissed Someone You Didn’t Know: Oh hell yeah.

5 THINGS

• Things You’re Wearing: Silver ring with topaz, couple o’ jaunty earrings, 1 niobium nipple ring, a pair of lively boxers.


• Things You’ve Done Today: Bought a coffee, bought a coffee, bought a coffee. Set controls for the heart of the sun. Optimized my body for light combat.


• Things You Can Hear Right Now: The grumbling of my computer fan, the click of the keys as I type, a distant thumping in another office, a heavy door clicking shut, the ringing of a phone.


• Things You Can’t Live Without: Books, a Fine Lady for taking out, the internet, sunshine, my ‘manliness’. And by ‘manliness’ I mean my framed lion-wrestling certificate.


• Things You Do When You’re Bored: Pace, stretch, stare at an object until everything else goes blurry, wish for a book, compose paragraphs in my head.

4 PLACES YOU’VE BEEN TODAY

• My office.


• The food court.


• The local Second Cup.


• An elevator. Oh boy oh fucking boy.

3 PEOPLE YOU CAN TELL ANYTHING TO

• Schmutzie.


• My old roommate Tony.


• Benjamin Franklin. He's always amazed at today's technology and faintly amused by how little humanity has changed.

2 CHOICES

• Black or White: Polar bears, those savage killers of the North, are white. I’ll take black.


• Hot or Cold: Polar bears, those savage killers of the North, are cold. I’ll take hot.

1 THING YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE

• I want to learn the art of emulating a Mormon so closely that not even the elite High Guard, with their Mormon-dar, can sense the difference when I enter the Temple. Already I have mastered the techniques of Wearing Shirtsleeves in the Bath and Disapproving of Exposed Female Ankles. Soon the Temple will be mine, and I will crush all who oppose me with a gigantic iron weight that will materialize above my hapless victims. For extra effect the weight will say '10 tons' on it.

Labels: lists

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euphemisms
» Monday, March 26, 2007

Yesterday I picked up John Hodgman's endlessly informative almanac The Areas of My Expertise. Among the many useful topics, including History's Worst Haircuts, Secrets of the Mall of America and a Timeline of the Lobster in America, Hodgman also lists a series of popular hobo terms for alcohol. My favourites include stutter milk, juniper jizz, jazz chowder, and of course, stun gravy. In the spirit of making things up, I've come up with a few more choice nicknames for various kinds of alcohols (can you guess what they are?). In some particular order:

Coma-Cola
Ginger Ale, but with Alcohol
Bile Flyer
Flask Fountain
Teenage Soda
Cheney's Hunting Drops
Tears of Bacchus
Potato Syrup
Purity of Essence
Kilt Squeezings
Old Dr. Slumberditch
Peat Drippings
Loudon Tippenthorpe's Patent Remedy for Sobriety
Monk's Mischief
The Horizontalizer
Pirate Pitch, or Tar's Tar
'Sblood!

Please submit further entries in the comments.

Labels: alcohol, lists

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poker faces
» Thursday, March 22, 2007

There must be a poker tournament going on in the casino across the street. When I bought lunch in the hotel coffee shop, a group of four men, all dressed in combinations of denim and stressed brown leather, played Texas Hold ‘Em at one of the tables. A case of chips lay open on the short ledge separating the coffee shop from the rest of the lobby, yellow- and red-jacketed chips held in green felt.

Poker, like drinking in public, is an activity that looks unseemly and maybe dangerous before noon. Your instinct is to sweep around them in deep orbit, avoid that gravity well of sorrow and threat. But these guys didn’t have that menacing aura. They had a golf buddy aura, a Sport Utility aura, with twangy accents that placed them somewhere on that landlocked strip that runs down the centre of the continental United States. One man with a pencil moustache and a mockneck shirt the colour of an old bruise seemed to be on the losing end of the hands; I couldn’t see the distribution of chips from my vantage point, but from the man’s agitated glances to the side and his occasional slumping back into his chair, I could tell that the cards were aligned against him.

My favourite of the bunch was the all-denim man, a hefty guy in his mid-forties with a nap of light beard and a brightly reflective skull. I don’t know if he was winning, but he had an alternative language for poker that suggested either extreme confidence or pure assholery, or maybe both. A couple of times he would raise extravagantly or go all in, intoning, “Fire in hole, ladies and gentlemen… fire in the hole”. More than once he declared to another player that “he was going to teach [him] a lesson”. Maybe he was a professional Texas Hold ‘Em instructor, but I’m placing my chips on Amateur Asshole.

Fifteen minutes in, a couple of young guys in the early twenties spotted the game from the down escalator in the lobby. Until this morning, I did not know that the sight of a poker game in progress can trigger fits of stadium-intensity screams. “That’s what I’m talking about!” yells one of the young guys on the escalator. “Here’s where the action is, right here in the Roasting Bean!” Amazingly, the guy remembered the name of the coffee shop, even in the throes of Hold ‘Em ecstasy. He continued to shout and whoop at high volume, not caring that each second conveyed him closer to the people he was shouting at.

Then they all stood up and donned hooded robes. “We are the damned,” intoned the bearded man. “We are the damned,” repeated the rest of the table. The young guy tried to run back up the escalator, but the uncaring risers escorted him down towards the players, waiting in their ceremonial garb, waiting with long curved blades. “May this sacrifice please All-Hold’em,” said the bearded man as they grabbed the young man and methodically cut out his heart. “May we be worthy in His sight,” agreed the players as they adorned themselves with parts of their victim’s body: a scalp, a flayed face, ears on a string of beads, and from his very chaps an intestinal loop drawn out for a belt.

When the cops arrived, all they could say was “He wouldn’t shut up”.

Labels: autobio, lies, poker sacrifice

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unfortunate sequels
» Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Solyaris 2 – Years after Chris Kelvin lands, another group of astronauts arrives at the watery planet that gives dreams a human shape. This time they set up shop and dream of a tourist paradise with great sport fishing and a raw bar right on the beach. One morning Jimmy Buffet shows up. And then another. And another. They try to weed out the Jimmy Buffet population by drowning, shooting, burning, whatever they can manage, but they can’t stop the Buffet onslaught. Eventually a tribunal is convened to find out just who has been dreaming constantly of Jimmy Buffet and unwittingly calling him forth. The rule of law breaks down utterly when one of the tribunal members turns out to be Jimmy Buffet. Late night abductions and rumors of torture haunt the long sunlit afternoons. The tourism industry crumbles. Eventually the astronauts desert the planet, leaving behind thousands of Jimmy Buffets. They immediately found the nation of Margaritaville and walk into the sea.

Mulholland Drive 2: Erotic HüskerDü – A surreal dream sequence in which Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts have sex for two straight hours. One camera setup, a couple of curtains and some slinky faux Egyptian outfits that look like old costumes from a Burton-Taylor epic. Occasionally you can hear David Lynch saying “Move your hair out of the way” and “Oh yeah, that’s really hot”. At the very end, Naomi Watts wakes up, turns to Harring and says, “Let’s have even more sex in the waking world”. Then they throw pies at each other naked.

King Kong 2: Even Konger - A group of Depression-era filmmakers travel to an uncharted island where they find Peter Jackson, naked and blistered with sunburn, rolling around in mud and filth. He implores the ingenue to “scratch my back, it’s soooo itchy,” whereupon she screams and runs off into the jungle. The crew finds her shattered body at the bottom of a ravine a few days later.

Weekend at Bernie’s X: Bernie Beyond - Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman reprise their roles for this whacked-out comedy in deep orbit! Two astronauts (McCarthy and Silverman) find their crewmate Bernie (Terry Kiser) dead in his seat after liftoff. Unfortunately, a film crew has accompanied them on the voyage for an interactive live broadcast for President’s Day celebrations. The hapless astronauts are forced to wire up their dead crewmate’s suit and make him go about the business of life in space for the ever-present cameras. Tensions mount when a crisis occurs and Bernie is the only one qualified to fix the problem! The spacewalk sequence where they make Bernie dance to “Space Cowboy” on the hull exterior is just, oh, it’s fucking hilarious.

The Ptarmigan - This is not a sequel. It’s a ptarmigan.

Mission Impossible 4: The Decruisifier - The opening sequence starts with Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt being fed into a gigantic machine of cast iron and terrible blades, a Victorian nightmare of limb-devouring ferocity. As Cruise talks on his cell phone, a conveyor belt moves him smoothly into the spiky teeth of a rotating drum. Cruise is flattened, punched, pulped, pasteurized and poured into a sealed drum. The drum of Cruise-pulp is then strapped to the entire supply of the world’s nuclear armaments and shot into space, where it detonates with a blast so ferocious that the unlucky masses who witness the event are rendered colour-blind. Ving Rhames turns to the camera and declares “He’s never, never, never coming back. We will now find somebody else to keep this franchise going”. High fives all round.

Grumpy Old Babies - A prequel to the Grumpy Old Men series, this movie features two infants in the Matthau-Lemmon roles. Witty voice-overs from Bruce Willis and Roseanne Barr supply endless moments of cutesy hilarity, although the breast feeding jokes wear thin after a while. And it’s never explained how a movie about a brother and sister relates to a franchise about two old men with a lifelong love-hate relationship. John Travolta and Kirstie Alley star as the troubled but loving parents. Most surprising is the sight of Kirstie Alley, who looks 100 pounds lighter and fourteen years younger.

St. Elmo’s Fire 2 - Oh my God. Is that Ally Sheedy? What the – has she been homeless and shooting up for the last twenty years? What is this movie about? These people are old. There better not be any David Foster music this time around. Ah crap, there it is. Who wants to see a bunch of broken-down actors who used to be popular? Except for Rob Lowe, who I think was laminated around 1990. When that plastic coating splits he’s just going to flop out all over the place.

The Senate Subcommittee Hearing Proceedings of the Dead - George A. Romero continues to hone his skills as a political commentator in this installment of the popular and always topical “Dead” movies. In this thinking man’s gorefest, the General Accounting Office (GAO) notes troubling irregularities in certain subcontractor charges related to the zombie internment camps. A preliminary investigation leads nowhere in particular for three years, until a hearing is called in which leading members of the zombie community call the living to account for their systematic mistreatment. Members of the panel praise the main spokeszombie for being “articulate”. A surprisingly in-depth report comes out condemning the entire system of zombie containment, calling it “nothing more than a pork barrel scheme to enrich the friends and associates of Washington insiders at the expense of the walking dead,” but attention is diverted by the sudden announcement of the We’re Going To Go Live In Space And Leave This Shit Hole To The Zombies And The Rest Of You Act of 2012.

Labels: film, scorn, zombies

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the honour and the gory
» Monday, March 19, 2007

I am a reasonable, reasonable man. I may have come into this world with high expectations, but the last three decades have tempered my optimism. I do not expect great coffee from a Chinese lunch kiosk at the food court. I do not expect to find love in Dick Cheney’s heart, and I do not expect to get away with draping myself in the corpse of Don Knotts and dancing down the Hollywood Walk of Fame, screaming “Where’s my star?” I really don’t.

When I pay ten dollars and more to see a movie, though, I expect in exchange at least one memorable image, one watchable scene, one line of dialogue that doesn’t make me want to plunge a sharp Spartan spear through my eye and ravel out the neuronal string that carries the memory of having sat in an inexplicably crowded theatre and watched Zack Snyder’s lame muscle epic 300.

What can I say about 300, a film that could have been made by Leni Riefenstahl, if Leni Riefenstahl had never heard of depth of field? If Zack Snyder had been the mind behind Triumph of the Will, the Nazi empire would have folded like a lily at dusk. Only the over-the-top solemnity and relentless pomposity of the story saves it from being truly offensive. The rhetoric is pitched so high, the fight scenes so monotonous, the betrayals and tragedies telegraphed so achingly early, that any engagement with the film is damped down in favour of dull amazement that this soggy homoerotic thrustfest ever got made. No gladiator flick has ever assembled so many near-naked over-buff meatheads, just to have them march around in boots and capes and leather Speedos.

A brief run-down of the story (there are spoilers here, I suppose, but since this is a butchering of a 2,500 year old story, I don’t feel like I’m spilling any fresh beans): King Leonidas grows up in the harsh world of Sparta, a place where grown men beat up five year olds for fun. He earns his crown through the venerated tradition of kicking everyone’s ass all the time. One day a godless ambassador from Persia and his pyjama’d entourage come to visit with a message: give us Sparta’s natural resources and we promised not to murder you all. Leonidas takes the diplomatic route and has the Persians thrown in a conveniently placed well. Despite this provocation, the politicians hem and haw, being the spineless debate-paralyzed toads that the movie needs them to be. Leonidas, Mr. Action himself, climbs a phallic-looking mountain to consult the Oracle in what is THE STUPIDEST SCENE in movie history. I won’t describe it, but it will make you long for the pleasures of Mel Gibson’s filmcraft.

The Oracle delivers a message to Leonidas: don’t go to war with the Olympics approaching (if only that admonition were observed today). The wicked, inbred, corrupt priests and the wicked, inbred, corrupt politicians urge noble, free, buff Leonidas to heed the Oracle’s words, but Mr. Action brooks no tradition and, after a night of scronking with the fierce, noble, tigressy Queen Gorgo, picks three hundred WWE rejects to march off to Thermopylae, a narrow corridor where a small band of soldiers can slice and dice the invading hordes.

And hordes they are. If you thought that Asia was made of ordinary folk such as yours and my own self, 300 is here to set you straight. Pantalooned, festooned and a little too fancy for the red-blooded male comfort zone, the Persians and their vassals from the far corners of Xerxes’ empire trudge straight off the checklist of Orientalist clichés: slavish, silent masses of disposable meat so interchangeable that they can be whipped and killed with impunity by their own commanders. Behind their masks, the elite shock troops of Persia are bloodless monsters. Imposing Africans with faces draped in gold ride angry rhinos and elephants over the helpless bodies of infantry. The Spartans slaughter them all in a slo-mo whirlwind o’ gore.

Even though the Spartans are ‘free men’ who will not be ‘enslaved’ by ‘mysticism and tyranny’, they eventually fall due to treachery at home and on the battlefield. O treacherous traitors, with their treachery! How they traduce! A hunchback named Ephialtes, rejected by Leonidas, leads the Persians through a narrow pass to flank the doughty band of buffsters on both sides. Thwarted in his desire to join the Spartans, Ephialtes’ deformity makes him morally weak (in the graphic novel, he redeems himself somewhat) and naturally ignoble. Welcome to Anatomy as Destiny 101. Back in Sparta, Theron, the oilest politician ever to rape Queen Gorgo and throw the charge of adultery in her face before the assembled council, is a kept man of the Persian Empire, who seeks through delay and inaction to leave Sparta and the rest of the Greek city-states open to the rampaging drag show of Xerxes’ armies.

Then they all die. Deserted by their Thespian allies, Stabbed in the back and surrounded by sodomites, all three hundred of the 300 are thrashed thoroughly. No density of pec or ab may block the scorpion-headed arrows of Xerxes, who appears to be an eight foot tall drag queen so powerful that he brings his own runway with him, borne on the backs of hundreds of slaves. Leonidas goes out fighting, launching his spear at RuPaul Xerxes and shaving off some of the emperor’s precious facial jewellery. Predictably, this results in a whole lot of screaming followed by a general overarrowing of Leonidas. We go out on a note of hope, as 10,000 Spartans in their ridiculous outfits run screaming towards the camera. According to Dilios, the lone survivor, this is supposed to herald in a new age of freedom and reason. Sure, why not.

Oh yeah, and the dialogue sucks. Most painful is the voice-over narration, which helpfully tells you precisely what you’re looking at. Since the images of 300 are depthless and blocked out like a sidewalk theatre show, this is hardly necessary. Here’s an example: early on in the movie we witness a wolf circling a boy. The narrator provides context: “The wolf circled the boy. Sniffing the night air. Hungry for its next meal”. No shit. I never would have guessed from all the circling and the sniffing. Or how about the scene where they’re marching, and the narrator says: “We march”? Dude, it’s like you’re sitting right behind me, telling your blind friend what’s going on. I can almost feel the bits of popcorn and drops of Mountain Dew being sprayed on my neck.

Labels: film, scorn

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your local union of pushin' around a lotta little old ladies from flarida
» Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Ah, holy hell. Via Boing Boing, here's an old ad for AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Either this is an alternate audio take from the original ad in the late '70s - early '80s (I'm a bit skeptical) or someone's done a good job of reproducing the recording tech from the era (slightly disappointing but way more likely). Whichever it is, this is hilarious and completely aurally obscene. Turn the volume low or plug in some headphones if you're at work. Or you'll likely end up fired. Unless you're in a union.

Labels: video

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less-discussed superpowers
» Monday, March 12, 2007

Blindness (Daredevil)

I’ve never quite figured out why Daredevil’s blindness is considered such an asset. I mean, isn’t it possible to do all those crazy acrobatic things he does without being blind? And really, instead of forming an audio ‘picture’ from sound waves, wouldn’t it be simpler just to look around? And maybe see how ridiculous that devil costume looks? But you've got to love his secret identity:



Super Tights-Wearing

Enough already. Just – stop wearing tights. Why do the citizens of Gotham need to see Batman’s package every time evil’s afoot? Why? He chose the bat costume because criminals were a superstitious and cowardly lot who would be frightened by a man dressed up as a bat. Personally I’m frightened by any man who will show up and pound the living crap out of me, whether he’s dressed like a bat or Jose Feliciano, but the tights thing adds an extra dimension to the scenario that I’d really rather not contemplate.



I don't think this guy has violence on his mind, if you follow me.

Important-Being

Batman’s great power is being the filthy rich child of filthy rich people. Superman is the sole survivor – if you don’t count all the other survivors – of a lost planet, plus he has his own fortress. Wonder Woman is some kinda princess? The Black Panther is a king or something? To be honest, I don’t run in those hoity-toity circles, where the superbeings of this earth gather for the all-night coke orgies with SuperParisHilton and Lady Lohan of the Skankonites. When it comes down to it, there’s a whole lotta superheroes out there that strike me as bored swells looking for kicks, like they’re living out a screwball comedy with costumes and punching. Go fetch William Powell from the dump and leave the rest of us alone.

Unlikely Breasts-Having

Unlike tights or well-defined pecs, the crazy tits of comicdom seem distributed equally well among the entire adult female population. Unless you’re an old lady or a society matron, or a monstrously mannishly deformed lesbian driven mad by the Feminazi virus, if you’re a nubile young woman in a superhero comic book, you’ve got bajungas to spare. If you’re a heroine, then welcome to the world of poured-on latex. It’s all so empowering. And if you’re evil, then your nipples probably shoot lightning or something. Witness a bored She-Hulk, slumped on a park bench like she hasn't got green skin and massive hooters.



Optimistic Punch Pose



Do you wonder why Superman flies through the air with one arm thrust out in front, the hand clenched in a fist? You probably thought there was some aerodynamic reason, like Supe’s arms controlled pitch and yaw. No. The outthrust fist is actually an element of Supermanic efficiency – basically, he’s saving himself the miniscule amount of time it would take to make a fist when he arrives at his destination, which will hopefully contain an enemy for punching. With this pose, he can fly right into the crime scene and have everyone pummeled before his feet even touch the ground. Not only is it efficient, the Optimistic Punch Pose is extremely proactive – it’s the kind of forward thinking that would make Superman an excellent candidate for a community committee on recycling. And kicking ass.

Here he is with the Eye-Poke Variant:



Crime doesn't pay, especially when it means getting your eye poked out at supersonic speeds by a flying alien in a circus strongman costume.

Labels: comics

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saturday
» Sunday, March 11, 2007

The cats are eating sunflower seeds. Every ten minutes I drop a small handful, about a dozen or so, on the computer table and they crowd around the little pile, pushing the seeds around with their noses. Every so often a seed drops off the edge of the table and they crawl down to stalk the nearly invisible pellet. I'm not sure how many of them are getting eaten. I do know that I'll have to sweep up later.

A woman drifting up the pedestrian mall, tacking back and forth to warn passersby: “If you're going to call home, do it collect”. People crane their necks in the other direction, swing their arms and hunch their backs, generally pick up the pace, anything to avoid the terrible news from this woman in secondhand clothes. Everyone's got some place to be when the crazy people start sailing into their waters. The woman wanders into the street, passes through a pack of smoking teenagers. “Call collect,” she advises. The kids draw on their cigarettes and nod in agreement.

I'm the only other person in the coffee shop. The two men at the table by the window are in the midst of a conversation. One wears a silver beard, an oiled outback hat, a bomber jacket, with an orthopedic cane for an accessory. When he stands up for a refill one leg swings out straight, rotating as if on a pivot. The other man is younger, at least a generation removed from his friend, a baseball cap encasing a hairstyle short but somehow still shaggy. They look mismatched, as if one were sponsoring the other. Or maybe they're propping each other up.

Old: Ah.
Young: What's that?
Old: I can taste the sugar in my coffee.
Young: You can taste. It's a miracle! It's a miracle!
Old: Just a bit of sugar.
Young: It's a miracle!
Old: It's no miracle, it's just sugar.
Young: You told me you couldn't taste anything.
Old: I can't.
Young: But you can taste the sugar!
Old: No, I can just tell it's in the coffee.
Young: If you can't taste it, why does it even matter to you?
Old: I don't like sugar in my coffee.
Young: Why not, if you can't taste it?
Old: It's just the way I am.
Young: I'm sorry.
Old: You don't have to apologize.
Young: Apologize for what?

They go on like that for at least a half hour.

Labels: conversations, useless

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santa
» Thursday, March 08, 2007

Schmutzie: So far two people from my past have found my weblog and figured out who I am.

Palinode: Well, holy spit.

Schmutzie: I wonder who's next.

Palinode: It won't be long before ole Santa's going to come knocking for you.

Schmutzie: Yup.

Palinode: You think so, hey? Santa?

Schmutzie: Yup.

Palinode: Did you understand what I meant when I said that?

Schmutzie: No.

Palinode: I was hoping you could explain it to me.

Labels: conversations

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squirrel butts don't glow
» Monday, March 05, 2007

Even though the consensus has been crumbling over the last decade, everyone knows that Ed Wood is the lousiest filmmaker of all time. Even people who’ve never seen an Ed Wood film seem to know this, as if Plan 9 From Outer Space were so terrible that it had irradiated the blood of a generation and looped our proteins into a mutant judgment on an obscure Z-grade 1960s director. And then there’s Tim Burton’s biopic, which dramatizes precisely why his films were so bad: Wood had such a passion for his films that his heated ambitions for them overshadowed what he shot on set and even what he saw onscreen. I would guess that Wood thought of filmmaking as a kind of alchemy, the transformation of celluloid by incandescent will. Substitute a garden shed for an alien spaceship? No problem. Throw a bunch of night shots and day shots together in a single scene? Minor detail. Replace an old and shrunken Bela Lugosi with a six-foot dentist, mid-shoot? Why the hell not? It’s all the magic of cinema, yes?

And so it is with Terry Gilliam’s Tideland.

Just out on DVD, filmed in 2005 in the city where I live, Tideland finally came to town for an eight-show run at the local arthouse theatre. Tideland gave jobs to a number of my friends, brought in experienced film techs who provided much-needed set training for local workers, and generally raised the spirits of film geeks all over the province. This is a small, flat city parked on the prairies, but Terry Gilliam’s presence put some gas in its sputtering engine. If nothing else, Tideland populated all the sushi bars and faux-Irish pubs in town with skeletal, huge-teethed women and men in baseball caps and promotional windbreakers. Blackberries littered restaurant tables for months.

Last year the reviews came out. By all accounts, Tideland was uniquely bad. The total nadir of Gilliam’s work. The absolute bottoming out of his moral and aesthetic imagination. People seemed to hate nearly everything about it, from its flatulent junkie father (played by Jeff Bridges) who spends most of the movie as a rotting corpse, to the queasy quasi-sexual relationship between the prepubescent main character and a brain-damaged man in his twenties. Here was a Terry Gilliam movie, filmed right in my back yard, that pushed the boundaries of taste and craft. So hell yeah, I was going.

That seemed to be the predominant mood among the crowd that night as everyone filed in, threw off parkas, swung their heads around to see who else had shown. Film profs, industry professionals, art students – what you might call a target audience for this kind of film. Hell yeah, their eyes seemed to say. We don’t care what Roger Ebert and his shadowy hordes proclaim. We were an audience united in the faint belief that the critics had overstated their case, had smelled Gilliam’s blood in the Hollywood pool and dove in, madly thrashing their acumen.

Afterwards we gathered in the lobby, carefully avoiding too much talk about the film. A friend of mine asked my opinion, but voiced it so delicately that I could not tell if he had watched the film or just shown up moments ago. People shifted their weight from one foot to the other, avoided eye contact, studied the beams in the ceiling or the tile floors. We were engaged in a collective effort to strip our minds of having watched what will likely be remembered, if at all, as Terry Gilliam’s Plan 9.

One good thing I can say about the film is that it presents a strong argument for shooting in Saskatchewan. The exterior scenes in which the characters run and dive through shafts of wheat are absolutely gorgeous. There are great wide shots with Jodelle Ferland’s face filling up the centre of the screen with crenellated gold hills bisecting the background. The opening shocks us with close-ups of locusts balanced on wheatstalks in the manner of Terence Malick, then a sudden cut to a nightclub full of coke-snorting metalheads and nightclubbers.

In between these scenes, all sky and space, are Gilliam’s familiar cluttered interiors, impossibly overdecorated sets shot in wide-angle takes that fill the screen with detail. It’s the overheated dream of a manic packrat, and at first it’s funny, over-the-top and comically grotesque. But after a while it’s just grotesque. Scenes that should cut back and forth to reflect their manic energy go on too long with one camera setup. Takes that should have been discarded, for their distractingly uneven performances or confusing blocking, are kept in. To compensate for the stillness of the camera – likely the result of a compressed shooting schedule – the actors rocket around the frame, their faces and bodies in constant spastic motion. It doesn’t quite work, and it seems like a strange misjudgment for a director who’s been working in film as long as Gilliam has.

But Tideland seems full of strange miscalculations. The weight of the film rests on Jodelle Ferland, the eleven year old actress who plays the hyper-imaginative Jeliza Rose. Some people have said that she gives a terrible performance; others have said that she gives a great performance for such a demanding role. The truth is that no eleven year old could give the kind of performance that the film demands. Jeliza Rose is innocent and wanton, childish and preternaturally adult, a quicksilver persona shifting registers and voices from scene to scene. Disturbingly, we rarely see her fantasy world; instead we are witness to a wacked-out girl talking to doll’s heads, feeding globs of peanut butter into the mouth of her father’s corpse, and trying to make out with a brain damaged adult. Really.

Jeliza Rose is intended as an updated Alice, a character whose rabbit hole is the long dark tunnel of her sanity, but she bears a closer resemblance to Terry Gilliam: manic, unflagging, burning on a reservoir of conviction so pure that the real world is just another fantasy, ultimately of less significance than the inverted worlds that his imagination conjures. Maybe Gilliam saw Tideland clearly, but it’s likely that he was watching an entirely different film.

And I bet that film is awesome.

Labels: film

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customer complaint
» Friday, March 02, 2007

Do you have branded carabiners? I drove a long way to get here. I said carabiners. Give me five branded carabiners or I will sue. I'm a decent man but I have limits. I drove all the way from Des Moines to get here. I want a half dozen branded carabiners for promotional purposes only with mini compass and LED light. My kids need to clip their keys to their belts. My wife left us and now my kids are latchkey kids, they come home and no one's there, not even the fucking television. My wife took the television and now there's no entertainment value in my house. In my house on the edge of Des Moines. It has a two-car garage with only one car in it. Goddamn it's sad, one car, the Escalade gone and the television in the backseat. My kids need something and I took our single car and drove five hours for your outdoor safari experience. The A/C was on the blink. We spelunked. We ate your shitty cotton candy and now merchandise is nigh. Give us our branded carabiners. It's in the constitution. I am a decent man but. I have a gun. Are the lanyards included?

Labels: lies

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