Tederick.com: January 2006 Archives
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How sick is it that Revenge of the Sith doesn't even get nominated for visual effects... but Narnia, with its gimpy Liam-lion, does? I express my outrage in blog form, because we spent most of this week's Mamo talking about the rest of the Oscar jive, and Sith don't really enter into it much. So be it, Jedi.
After I was done pouting in blog-form last night I tucked Tederick under my arm and we went and watched Batman (poutingly). Man, that's some fuckin' good Batman. Batman's pretty much the desert-island movie at this point. I've watched it about five times since I (belatedly) got the DVD, and it just gets better every time. And it made me feel hella good last night. So: yay Batman. It's just apalling how great everybody in that movie is. I mean, it would have been fine if just Batman was great. But you've got Morgan Freeman being great, Rutger Hauer being great, Michael Caine being great... I mean every fucking person is great. It's almost annoying. Liam Neeson: that guy is fucking great. I mean, I admit I missed the whole Ra's bait-and-switch out of nothing more than my own ignorance, but nevertheless... when he shows up again at the end, it's like the whole movie just revolves into an entirely different order of movieness. And that, I must admit, is great.
Today I got my "Hush" Catwoman action figure, which narrowly beat out the "Long Hallowe'en" Catwoman action figure as the cat-of-choice on my somewhat-reorganized toy shelf. Now she's standing next to Emma Frost, who looks way cooler when she's not on that stupid fireplace base they packed with her. So now I'm wondering: who wins in the Catwoman vs. Emma Frost matchup? Ems clearly has the early advantage given that she can both throw a punch and make Catwoman believe that her vagina is made out of raw tuna... but in my long history I've never found it wise to count out Selina Kyle. There's a lot to be said for scrappiness and an uncanny survival instinct. So... well, I guess there's nothing for it but locking them both in the microwave and seeing what happens.
I've sort of always had a notion that something like this had to exist somewhere.... but for fourteen hundred bucks for the set, don't you think the dolls could have been just a little bit... I dunno... better?
It's possible that my genitals have grown. I'm not sure. I seem to be busting out of my pants right now, like a newborn baby boy exploding out of a diaper from the sheer swelling. I feel like I'm carrying around a decent-sized steak in my left pocket. It's distracting, and at least vaguely disturbing. I will monitor and report back.
Today didn't entirely suck, but it tried really hard for it. I don't know. My job still feels very "hit and fade," six weeks later. It's all frenzied activity or nothing at all. Like the other day, I had a fairly hefty meeting scheduled that was going to take my entire morning, with nothing in particular on the boards for the afternoon, but I figured with half the day gone I could make some work and get by. Nope: the all-morning meeting concluded in ten minutes, and suddenly not only did I have nothing to do, but I was hours ahead of schedule on it. This morning was similarly blank - plus there's the teensiest possibility that I was (quite accidentally) still a hair on the high side when I arrived at work - until a gigantic spring rain of solid work landed on me in the early afternoon and I was washed downriver for the rest of the day. Hallelujah. But minimal sleep from last night, plus some vaguely annoying passive aggressive shit from the X wars around midday, really sapped the life out of me. I had to summon up the last reserves of my Jedi strength to run downtown after work and meet a guy who wants to conscript me to do some voice work for some audio tours of T.O. that he's putting together; this was the highlight of my day, because he really sold me on it, and that's cool. I came home, and at various points a) stripped naked and lay spread-eagle on my bed staring at the ceiling, b) played Donkey Kong and yelled at Dixie a lot, and c) ate chunks of dark chocolate to sublimate my rather pronounced need for a day of all-day snuggling. But now I am tired and can still taste my sour mood in my mouth. Thank you world.
Here, this'll mess with your productivity:
Get them all across the river.
Things to know:
I read some Arkham Asylum tonight and fuckin' hell that's good. Then I abducted the Super Nintendo from my parents' place so that I could play Donkey Kong Country 2, and suddenly it's 1995 again and I have every single episode of My So-Called Life on tape with the commercials cut out, and I'm editing Super-8 black and white film with a shitty little Super-8 splicer in my old bedroom. Awesomeness. Doll that up with the pipe I bought this aft while downtown with Bex and I'd call this a fairly spectacular day overall. I had to tear myself away from DKC2 and force myself to write, but write I did, and what came out wasn't entirely what I'd had in mind but was interesting anyway... I'm now thoroughly curious about whether I'm ever going to share this script with anyone at all. It's going to some strange, fucked-up places, and it's about to go to some even fucked-up-er ones. As a writing exercise alone, though, at least it's getting me back on the horse - or more accurately, teaching me what a lazy little bitch I've become. Work ethic? Gone. But no worries. I'm cozied up in my bedroom and don't entirely mind that the work week is starting tomorrow; gonna open the window, snuggle into the sheets and do a bit more Asylum reading before bed. I feel no particular desire to sleep yet.
I'm in what could generally be classified as a creative rut, given that I really have no creative projects on the go right now, in favour of a seemingly endless stream of extra-curricular web site builds and other consulting gigs. Two creative projects have been discussed in the last 24 hours, however, that might serve to de-ruttify me rather nicely.
I realize that I'm woefully, woefully beached on Mongoose, but I'm going to try to make some progress on it tonight. Clearly the Jan 31 deadline isn't going to happen, but I still think I could get through this rough draft within a week if I really set my mind to it. The rest of the film sort of unfolds in 20-page chunks that carry me all the way through to the end, and I've just concocted a rather significant twist that changes the outcome nicely. So we'll see.
All right, I did it, I ordered Big Fuckin' Hermione, the dolliest doll I have ever, will ever, could ever own. She will stand proudly next to Big Fuckin' Hellboy. I will wed them, and then Big Fuckin' Hermione will have to see if her Hogwarts jumper still fits while she's pumping out endless streams of ugly, mewling, pinkish-red demon babies, provided (of course) that she's even capable of surviving the passing of a baby Right Hand of Doom at all. Human doll-wombs are so fragile these days, and holy crap I've gone insane.
I got the recording of the podcast down to just over an hour today, which is still way too long a bite out of my time for this particular show, but hopefully I can slim it down even further in the weeks to come. I don't want to abandon either podcast, but I also don't want to spend every Sunday morning for the rest of my life wrestling with mics and Wavelab and Quicktime (which, particularly, has been fucking me in the ass all week, making Apple my current Public Enemy #1).
Today's show deals with Match Point and Eve and the Fire Horse, among many other things.
For her first feature film, Kwan has achieved a number of things with Eve and the Fire Horse. It's more technically and thematically accomplished than the majority of the Canadian films I've seen in the past five years, yet like so many of its brethren, it also feels somehow "lesser," like an overlong Calling Card piece or a graduate thesis from a Masters' program.
Go here, watch the ad (I recommend the extended version), and hold in your mind the fact that it was shot 100% practically.
Some people get to play with all the best toys. 
Photo by Christian Pena.
Awful. Absolutely fucking awful.
Peanut butter sucks now. More specifically, Kraft Peanut Butter (Creamy), which has been my mainstay brand of choice for well over a decade, sucks now. The prevailing theory is that the panic hysteria over trans-fats has caused Kraft to radically alter their formula, resulting in a regular, non-diet Peanut Butter that tastes worse than Kraft Diet Peanut Butter ever did. (And that was bad. I shudder to think what it would taste like now.)
Listen, here's the thing: I'm a grown fucking man. I've been eating trans-fats my entire goddamned life. If I want to eat trans-fat infused peanut butter, I'd pretty much say I have every right to. But seeing as how Responsible Parties have apparently elected to make that impossible, I must now attempt to secure a new brand of P.B. which tastes better than this Kraft de-trans-fattified shit.
For the record: I eat a lot of different varieties of peanut butter in a number of different situations. What I am looking for, specifically, is a good brand of creamy/smooth peanut butter that can be purchased for under $5 a bottle. Again, Kraft's green-lidded "creamy" variety has been my major staple for a very long time. I will now begin the process of seeking its replacement.
To continue the trend, here's a picture of a custom-built uterus-shaped coffin:
And just for the sake of equanimity, here's a picture of the man who actually has the largest cock in the world (13"). No, it isn't me.
He claims that said wang has actually ruined his life... but he also claims he's had sex with hundreds of women and men. So who freakin' knows. I certainly wouldn't want that town-tamin' tallywacker smashing around down there.
Earlier this week I got an e-mail from Jen Selk, who fell off (well, got kicked off... ahem) the face of the earth over two years ago. All things being equal, this appears to be Being Friends With Ex-Girlfriends month at the Tederick.com offices. The secretaries are mightily overwhelmed, and the phones are ringing off the hook.
Most of my friends are resolutely of the "scorched earth" approach to post-breakup relationships - and don't even get my sister started - but I just can't seem to summon up the necessary reserves of cold disdain. I am, even if on an intermittent basis, far too curious about the beings who have been key players in The Story Thus Far, in spite of the fact that correspondence can prove to be a jarring and tumultuous process. Shit, I'd sit down and have a beer with Scott Adair (my grade-school bully) at this point in my life out of naked curiousity, so why not the people I was variously in love with for years upon years? (Man, it just occured to me right now that in the space of the last three weeks, I've talked to all three of them. Yeah. I cope like a champ.) And so, I respond to e-mails, go out for drinks, occasionally get myself in way too far over my head, and yet somehow, rather lucklessly, always fail to have sloppy, emotionally-destructive post-breakup sex. But then, that's my life in a semi-permeable nutshell.
The only real side-effect of all this is a very slight, but perceptible, slip in your mental tally of time and place. Honestly, the date, the nature of my job, and the identity of the ex I was currently chit-chatting with all eased out of my brain at at least one point today, and it took effort to pull it all back into focus. Otherwise, I'd say, bully for the satisfaction of everyone's enduring curiousity. Matt Brown: dating him sucks, but man howdy he's interesting afterwards.
(That was the joke part. Calm yourselves. Boy, sometimes around here I feel like Bilbo at his birthday party, and not just because I drank too much wine and tried to make off with Mrs. Proudfoot.)
Mmm.... Tederick.com porn....
Let me tell you something: I sincerely hope that the presence of Voltron in Charlie's first dream sequence is one of those little hints that the Lost producers are so famous for. Because that would be awesome: if the secret of the island somehow involves a cadre of primary-coloured lion robots, who have the ability to merge together into a gigantic black man-shaped super-robot. That would pretty much explain everything.
Let me tell you something else: the presence of an Evil Locke Camera Spin in last night's episode was proof enough for me. Locke is fucking evil again. Him and Eko are gonna do some massive Backgammon battle atop the highest mountain. There could be flaming swords of some kind involved. Yay!
So let me see if I got this right: Lasseter got control of Disney's production division and the first thing he did was to cancel the production of Toy Story 3, with his only cited reason being that "sequels shouldn't be made unless there's a really great story."
Is this... real?
Have I slipped off into a parallel dimension where Hollywood is run by the sort of common sense that every single moviegoer on the planet seems to share, yet has never been directly evidenced by a single production of anything that's come out of that town, ever?
I've seen Star Wars how many times and I've never noticed this thing? Fuck, I gots ta make me a custom.
I can take one, two, or even three of these characters in a good movie, if there are others in the film that I'm actually capable of empathizing with and/or rooting for. Certainly, too, I would be remiss if I failed to point out that by generating such gigantic wellsprings of lusty hate for each and every one of these people, Match Point is certainly no technical failure.
You know what my total income for 2005 was? Just shy of fifty-eight hundred dollars. And I had a girlfriend for half that time. It's amazing I'm alive.
Just got back from the laundromat, where the change machine was broken, and then the woman at the convenience store refused to give me change for a five, so really, it's also amazing I'm sane.
Alex is the name of the crazy french lady's son.
Also, in an unrelated column, the producer of Smallville quipped that "Lost kills a character every week," which is of course false... but would be SO GOOD. Can you imagine how excellent that would be? If every single frickin' week for the rest of the season they pull a Survivor and kill off a principal character? Fuck, now I'm all nipply.
Ah, comforting minority. Our very pretty space robot with his very pretty makeup (zwuh?) just pulled one of the more predictable elections of my lifetime. Conservative minority - check. Liberal smackdown but not such a hard one - check. Martin steps down - check. Layton steps up - check. Come on. Some drama, please?
The one thing (surprisingly) that really freaks me out this morning is Harper's backwater-dumbass idea of reducing the GST - and not just in the rather obvious "he's going to destroy the economy" sort of way, but just in terms of... well... I like seven percent. It's a nice round number and it adds up with our province's 8% PST to make a comfortable 15%, which is ever so much easier to calculate on invoices (or in your head when you're buying tacos) than, say, 14% or 13%. And now I know I'm Canadian: I want to pay more taxes because the numbers are pretty. Our home and grateful land, or whateverthefuck it is.
Last night while all the election shit was going on, I gave the proceedings a clean miss and Matty Price and I went to do our Mamo and then ate quality meat products at Allen's. Then we tried for the Friendly Stranger to get my pipe (no go; store was closed), then we tried for Bay Video to get Kontroll on DVD (no go; movie was sold out), then we went to the Varsity to see Woody Allen’s “comeback” film Match Point (no go; film sucked). I had a good time throughout, but man... unsatisfying!
In today's Mamo, we essay a topic or four, let the conversation run rangy, and sit back stroking our bellies while casually "seeing what happens." The nice thing about going free-form every once in a while is that it brings you back to 1: good conversation, good dialogue, and minimal pressue.
Click here for the voice(s), encoded with this newfangled "empy three" technology.
Today at work I was sent two CSR (that's Customer Service Request) tickets within ten minutes of each other, both proclaiming the same error which (with our resident Java expert out of town) I was not entirely certain how to solve - I had two possible solutions, but had tested neither. So I sent one solution to one guy and the other solution to the other guy and it was only after I finished doing this that I realized I'd pulled a Dr. House, and merrily sat back waiting for the next hour or so to see which patient recovered, and which died of a splenic rupture. After that I limped around the office chewing codeine like it was Tic Tacs and told each and every female employee what I thought of her blouse. But I was going to do that anyway.
I voted on the way home. I think I exist in an omnipresent panic state about the democratic process. I've moved a few times since the last election and my driver's license doesn't match up with my current mailing address, and I was so convinced that this was going to eat a gigantic portion of my evening to get it sorted out. And, well, nuh-uh. In and out in five minutes. I realized as my form was being processed that this paranoia has existed since the day I started voting. For some reason, I seem to have some deep-seated psychological belief that voting is going to be hard for me, which must have somehow grown out of a deep-seated psychological fear that I'm going to be bureaucratically prevented from exercising my voice, which itself must spring from a deep-seated psychological understanding that I am in strong jeopardy of having my opinion ignored like the passive little nerdy loser I am. Which I blame entirely on being given glasses when I was in the third grade. So there.
Yesterday when I went to the Box I made sure to put a couple of really big chocolate bars in my pocket. They're all on this crazy no-sugar no-wheat no-nothin' diet and while Bex was interviewing me I just started taking them out of my pocket and eating them like I was going down on Jesus' very own cock. Which was hilarious. I left the wrappers on her floor and hopefully, the result will be similar to my having left a bag of treats open in my bedroom a few days ago for Zam - i.e. a complete schizophrenic freak-out. We'll see. 
Today's election day - so get out there and elect, ye Canucks. I'll be voting NDP, though I don't say that with the thought of swaying anyone. Boy, it's rare that I've seen anything more despicable than the Toronto Sun's front page yesterday - "100 reasons not to vote Liberal." I slag on the Post a whole lot, but in their wildest dreams they never could have come up with something as fascisistic as that. I mean (and Good Night, and Good Luck reminded me) we all know that the news isn't actually impartial, but is a little veneer so much to ask?
Today I drove out to the Gooloph to be interviewed by the Bex; I could have just kept driving. There are days - particularly in these scrubby-grey days of mild winter - when I could be entirely content just driving endlessly along the highways of southern Ontario, if the music on my iPod was good and the light was the right colour of opalescent dusk. There are ways to find yourself that involve strange paths through dark forests, and then there are ways that just need everything else to get the hell out of the way, and give you time to think.
Bex and I talked on the record for a few minutes about my various comings of age - personal, sexual, artistic, intellectual; ones that happened at precise, lightning-bolt moments in time, and the ones that are still happening now, or haven't even started. When the tape recorder clicked off we talked some more, about crises and traumas and girls and boys and sex and love and those strange paths through dark woods. And about the naked frustration of having sincere, serious life goals towards which you can currently take absolutely no positive steps. And about the sheer number of people who have taken it upon themselves, in the last five months, to tell me how well I've coped with everything - and how, earlier this week, in an e-mail to Bex I snorted: "Yeah. I cope like a champ." Because if I actually have, then I should get my fucking money back. Coping is annoying.
She's seen the other side, though, and she knows how much I really got fucked up; hearing that made me feel better, and then worse, and then better again. It's all mercifully of the past anyway, so who cares - I have absolutely no more time for disappointments and loss, and far too little time for the things I really do want. Something new is starting, I can hear the snap-hiss more and more, and if the next turn is still hidden in the foliage, then so be it - I'm walking anyway, coping/not coping be damned. On the drive home I actually burst out laughing. I was listening to Automatic for the People, which has always been my favourite album, and will always be my favourite album, and not even because I listen to it so terribly much, but just because when I do, every single moment of it somehow seems to strum in the exact same rhythm as myself. And when you come out over that hill and all the yellow stars are laid out before you, it feels pretty good - this is an ocean of time, and we all flow forwards whether we want to or not.
One of the nice things about doing a podcast right now? It keeps me going to movies, out of the sheer naked fear of not having anything to talk about. Man, you can't count the number of ways I've sold out on one hand. It takes at least two.
Really, it seems to me that it should be fairly difficult to go to a movie you won't enjoy. Haven't we taken all of the mystery out of this? Shouldn't the average joe sixpack be able to use the massive resources at his disposal in this, the Communication Age, to get a reasonable handle on any flick he's likely to see, and thus allow himself the opportunity to weed out the ones he might not enjoy? it seems so to me, and yet there were more than a couple of dudes in the screening of The New World tonight who seemed absolutely flabbergasted, like they'd been sold a Buick having been told it was a butter croissant. I actually asked one of them as he was running from the theatre in dismay - "what did you think you were going to see?" When you go see a Malick flick, don't be expecting Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Blowing trees. Rippling water. Poetry. That's the ticket.
I did the two-movie dash today, from the Varsity to the Mt. Pleasant in twenty minutes. The Mt. Pleasant's a ratty old dump, and between the gigantic clattering air conditioner directly above me, and the comatose old geezer snoring her way through the flick directly in front of me, it's amazing I heard a word of dialogue in Good Night, and Good Luck at all. Still, I had a great time. I met my parents there, by semi-accident, and it's been a dang long time since I've been to a flick respectable enough to see with my folks. And if there is a word for GN&GL, "respectable" is it.
See? Two for two on a double feature, and all because I used my powers of deduction to pick movies I'd actually enjoy. There are worse things than the internet.
Now off to bed; must give my kilcher a good q'oriankin'.
(Yep, been saving that up all day.)
I admire what Clooney is doing with his filmmaking - this is quiet, effective work. Gone is the flash that marked his directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind; this film feels more like the remake of Fail Safe that Clooney produced (but did not direct) - a workmanlike recreation of the flavour and manners of live-to-air television drama of the 1950s. Clooney is evoking a style here.
The New World, like its director, is often elusive and frustrating. It's rarely perfect, and even when it is, it feels insubstantial, like a remembered dream or a strand of smoke. It's a beautiful dream, though, and beautiful smoke, and it lingers in the mind's eye in all of the best ways.
I'm reading Revenge of the Sith (the book) again, which I admit I find a bit embarassing (especially given the in-office buzz of late about my voracious reading habits and high standards of content), but there's no way around it, this fucking thing is just so fucking good. I mean, this is a surprisingly well-written book, novelization or no. Is it Shakespeare? Clearly not. But in a lot of ways, Stover has a better idea of how to tell the Sith story than Lucas did. He seems to understand it better, or have thought it through more, or something. Plus, he's got the Zen components absolutely wired - this book not only makes you truly understand what it might be like to exist in a universe with the Force, but it also clearly delineates how Lucas (and Kasdan and Katz and Huyck and Brackett and anyone else) reassigned basic Buddhist principles to their galaxy far, far away. As a read, it's almost meditational - which served me rather well today at yoga, where I closed my eyes at the beginning of class and simply did not open them again, turning all of my awareness inward to the simple bass-note rhythm of my chest cavity. This worked brilliantly for about half the class, until I peeked my eyes open during a cat stretch, and noticed that the Original Yoga Hottie was not only doing a cat stretch right in front of me, but was wearing a dark Lulu Lemon outfit so ludicrously fitted, that when she stretched backwards like that, the folds of her body underneath could not possibly have been more prismatically delineated. I mean, it was like looking at her pussy painted black. After that, it was significantly more difficult to keep my eyes closed. But I fucking did it. Desire leads to possessiveness, possessiveness leads to jealousy, the shadow of greed that is, etc.
After yoga I went up to the DVD Wave to pick up my last (almost) Kurosawas and my last (definitely) Jackson, along with a French-Canadian flick that I ordered on spec, which I discovered to my horror doesn't actually have subtitles. Oh well; I'll use it as an opportunity to learn French. I'm using French more and more in my job these days anyway, and my comprehension doesn't completely suck... it just mostly sucks.
Additionally - and this will sound strange - today was the first time I actually sold DVDs. Four of 'em. I don't know why I held off from doing this for so long; I blame DVD Profiler and its numbering system, and my desire (explored at length in the car with Matty Price last summer) to see my DVD collection as something more permanent than, say, a stack of magazines. But (and thank goodness!) this morning I realized that I was basically just chasing my own tail for no reason. I broke the number system permanently when I hit 400 and did some restructuring, so it doesn't really matter anyway. From here on out, it's a more organic process. Bring on the double-dips.
Well, it's just after five, and though I was slightly ahead of schedule when I sat down to write this, I am now merely abreast. Banana bread's in the oven, first movie starts at 6:30, and I've got to finish off a consultation document in about 30 minutes in order to maintain my self-respect.
There's now a phone in Chris' room, which is rather alarming, because after 17 months of having no phones on the third floor of 3QF at all, suddenly I have the once-distant ringing of phones so much closer to me... it's unnerving. For a guy who works at a telecom company, here's my dirty little secret: I hate phones. HATE THEM. Have always hated, will always hate. I can remember hating phones as far back as seven years old - and if a seven-year-old finds them creepy, chances are he's not going to grow out of it.
It simply goes to the old phrase of "being at the mercy of the telephone." I resent the fact that this device gives such extraordinary rights of invasion to people. At any point in the day (or night), a friend (or stranger) has the ability to essentially set off a fire alarm in your home... and usually, it's a fire alarm that is accompanied by flashing red lights. What?! This is the fucking development of human society?! Worse, we've all been programmed to believe that if a telephone rings, it's our human duty to answer it immediately - we go running through the house, dropping whatever we're doing, completely disrupting our lives to answer the clarion call of the shrieking box. If you miss it, the Information Age round-robin begins - the cell phone rings, then the e-mail arrives, then the MSN flashes orange. There's nowhere left to hide on this miserable, technology-besotten earth.
I hates me the shrieking box. This device should be at my disposal, not the other way around. Is there nowhere in the world that you can get a phone whose only alert that someone is calling you is to silently illuminate a small green tally lamp, and then just as quietly stop, if you choose to ignore it?
A couple of vagina-related items that landed on my desk this week:
For people who enjoy pictures of said thesnaris, there's The Genital Arts, which would be a rather tacky blog in all respects if it weren't for the fact that some of the pictures are just so gall-darned fascinating. It would be nice if he got a different model or two, but hey, that's being picky. Cheers to Torontonian pussy!
Then there's Why I Play With My Cunt which is somehow rousing and off-putting at the exact same time. But hey, that's art for ya.
And I don't think I mentioned it last month when I heard about it, but here's the video game bunny who teaches women how to play with themselves. Although in that case, Montreal-based innovation notwithstanding, I have to throw out a rallying cry for good, old-fashioned do-it-yourself experimentation. If you can't lock the doors, turn out the lights and give the jacuzzi jet a throw when you're still in the process of figuring out your body, aren't you just missing out?
I'm basically delighted through to my bones with Sideshow's Star Wars rollout so far - today Kit Fisto went on sale, and though I have no particular interest in the Nautolan (nor was Anakin's sculpt last month good enough for me to want to drop $65 on him), I couldn't be happier with Luke and Obi-Wan, and am really looking forward to see what character they choose to do next.
Naturally this has me thinking about what's worth the Sideshow price (usually $50-65 US/figure) for my collection, now that said collection is dwindling down ever more into increasingly specialty-oriented (read: nerdy) items, like the Astromech 10-pack that will shortly be decorating my office. So since I have nothing better to do right now, here's the wish list for the Sideshow line:
I'm assuming they'll hit us with cool stuff like Aayla Secura and Endor Han and Biker Scouts and any number of other things I might be interested in, depending on sculpt; I'm also assuming that when they do Vader it will be kick-ass, but I'm still so mightily fond of my 14" electronic one from 1998 that I would probably not deign to replace him, in spite of his flaws. It's a slippery slope. With the connection winnowing down, the uniqueness of individual pieces is more and more important - and not seeing the trees for the forest has always been a problem. I want pretty things.
Hmmm... "More stuff" followed by "More danger." That looks a bit off, doesn't it?
I can feel it somewhere to the left of my belly-button: Astonishing is coming back soon. Not sure exactly when, might be a while yet, but it's in the offing. An offing has been presented. And I know this with such a happy little dwarf star in my brainheart that I don't really need to do much with it, except let it know I know it's there, and smile a bit. Mmmm, Astonishing is coming back.
So Joss and his boys had a wee telephonic press conference to talk about it, and I'll let you go read it as long as you understand that there are some preview panels from issue #13 on the page, and at least one of the things they reveal is rather... well, astonishing. Okay? Good, here it is. And if you're curious, the entire interview is transcribed here, although that's a bit wordy, even for me.
Joss is boss. Oh lordy lordy, Joss is boss.
The one title I forgot to mention in my comic book call-back earlier this week was Star Wars: Republic, which isn't terribly surprising; let's face it, it's the poor bastard stepchild of my comic book collection, no matter how good it occasionally gets. Ostrander and Dursema have been M.I.A. for the last few issues, too, which means the book has sucked more than one might even expect of it - though I must give all due appreciation to the substitute writers' willingness to have a 14-year-old Padawan girl get wet enough during the Order 66 purge, on an ice world no less, that she has to strip down to nothing but her panties and her lightsabre, and have a two-page conversation with her gigantic, male, Beast-like Jedi Master, who gives her a good mental smacking-around before providing her with clothes. Subtext is nice for a while, but sometimes it's just nice to see text.
Now Ostrander and Dursema are back to bring Republic to a close; naturally, they've let their beloved Quinlan Vos survive Order 66 (in spite of having been visibly killed off in the Revenge of the Sith comic) so that he can go on a kill-crazy rampage against the Clones that shot at him. I am so sick of Quinlan, and the fanbase's inexplicable belief that he is somehow an interesting character. He makes Boba Fett seem positively fleshed-out. We're one issue from the end now, and hopefully, it'll bury this bastard once and for all.
Runaways concluded its visit to New York City in grand style in issue #12, relying on the ever-true maxim that when you want real comedy, have a 12-year-old girl beat up Wolverine, because that's always funny. And at this point, pretty much there is no female comic book character that I want to see naked more than Nico Minoru. Holy hannah, that's some hot hair. When she kissed Chase last month I actually dissolved into a fit of high-pitched giggles.
This brings us to Superman All-Stars #2, which... yeah... fuck that Morrison guy, fuck him hard. He is consistently one of the cleverest writers in comics when it comes to both subverting and exceeding expectation - this issue is absolutely nothing like what I expected, and ultimately seems trivial on first read... and yet is so intensely well-thought-out and delivered that it's sort of a perfect little thing, all on its own. At this point, SAS is looking like it will turn out to be legendary - and I'm already salivating at the thought of Batman & Robin All-Stars #4 next month.
Are the Jack episodes always the really good episodes? I'm hard-pressed to think of a Jack episode that sucked. Last night's certainly didn't suck. For one, it was about our cast - you know, the people we actually care about and not six or seven total strangers. Man, I can't even remember the last time we had a little runner that mostly just involved Jin and Sun talking to each other in Korean. (Notice how Jin's skills at understanding English seem to significantly decrease when he's got Translation Matrix by his side.) Or a scene with Sayid being funny. Or a scene where I actually wanted to shriek at the TV "JUST KISS KATE YOU FREAKING REPRESSED TWAT!!!" And as for Scary Santa, well... he's no Ethan Rom. But he is scary and Santa-like.
Thanks to Chris for pointing it out, and to anal masturbators everywhere. Rock on with the ring!
There have been a bunch of things since Monday morning that I've been meaning to blog about. And now I shan't. Shan't shan't shan't! Because I just never got around to it and now the thought of moving backwards in time just doesn't appeal. This is not a good week for blogging.
The key points were:
And many more.
Don't forget to go pick up your copy of All-Star Supes #2 tonight... I've got to figure out when I'll get ten minutes to sit down and read it (twice).
Neither Matthew nor I was particularly sure if the Golden Globes were happening last night; it turns out they were. Whoop-de-frickin'-do. We podcasted up a new Mamo instead, talking about (among other things) Jennifer Aniston, Bubble, and our predictions for Oscar nominations. It's looking like Brokeback's year... but who knows, we'll find out whenever the Oscar nominations are announced, another date that I have no real clue about.
And I do this (non) professionally.
Well, that was intense: after a full week of not working on Mongoose because (in spite of a rather out-of-character spate of outlining) I was completely hung up on what to do next, I sat down tonight to at least try to get a couple of pages out... and ended up writing 8 really, really unsettling pages. I suppose this is basically the first act break, or the first major reversal, or something. Having situated Milton and Jeremy in a relatively safe camp site, I knew that eventually I was going to have to force them out - the original idea having been, as lame as I knew it was, the arrival of a bear to challenge their hold on the territory. Well, fuck that: what I could not accomplish with an animal I have achieved rather spectacularly with a gigantic quantity of fire and destruction. And also craziness: both of my characters are definitely starting to go a little bit Lord of the Flies at this point, although still in relatively subtle ways. Nevertheless, it's starting to get really creepy to write this script... which is good. This is what I wanted. There's this thing that happens sometimes when I blog something that's a bit too personal, and it leaves me feeling all nervous and twittery - because I've cut too close to the bone, or in the metaphor I generally use with myself, left a lot of fresh, pink skin exposed. Well, right now Mongoose is making me feel like that: like there's a fuckload of shiny pink skin out in the air right now, a bit too much in fact. I don't know if this is healthy or not. I just know that it feels damn satisfying, if in the most uncomfortable, unnerving way possible.
Fathers and sons. I certainly didn't get into this to write about my own father, and I really haven't. In fact, I don't really know yet who Milton is: he's not my father, and he's not the father I might become. He's a well-meaning screw-up, and I don't know exactly what part of my brain he's emerging from. I suppose it's the same with Jeremy; both of these characters are so far off my normal chart that I don't really have a common reference from which to write them. I don't know what that means, or what it will lead to. I didn't know I'd be writing about fire tonight, either. Hell, an hour ago I was going to skip the whole thing and go read comic books. But sometimes things happen to you, more than the other way around.
Poor blogTO, I have been neglecting it horribly - first I lost my voice and skipped a week, and then the New Year / new job / new everything clusterfuck happened and I skipped another week. I turned today's Cinematheque experience into a show, though, and I'm positively salivating at the thought of returning next week having had a glance at New World. May this actually be the week, and may I not once again be floating through deep space.
It's sort of a working weekend; today I got up and finished off a consultation document for one client and then spent some time organizing my life - which basically means scribbling all my "extra-curriculars" on the white board and trying to mentally determine which ones I can cross off more quickly than the others. There are currently seven of them. They stare at me.
At noon I went out - I figured I'd best feed the blogTO podcast with something Toronto-related, so I went down to Cinematheque to check out the Mikio Naruse retrospective they've been doing. It truly apalls me that this city is capable of swinging from a balmy 12 degrees to a less-balmy -12 degrees in about 24 hours (one degree per hour, apparently), and though it was a beautifully bright and clear day, and the film was fun and going to Cinematheque was fun (in spite of one dumbtarded woman who, milieu notwithstanding, nevertheless persisted in having an entire conversation on her cell phone in the middle of the movie), I scarpered off home as soon as I could - just too damn cold for me. I discovered this when I went to go to the bathroom before the movie, reached into my pants for my penis, and couldn't find it. I knew a woman's pain.
(Ha! I wish.)
With Kurosawa and Jackson out of the way it's looking like 2006 is going to be the year of the foreign-language film in my DVD collection. Most of the things I'm anxious to buy at this point are from places not here. Maybe it's the challenge of finding stuff that you can't get at a Best Buy, or maybe I'm just sick of hearing the English language spoken aloud. Whichever, I'm after pretty things about people whose cultural priorities are a bit less in phase with my own.
And one last lovely side-effect of the new job: increased reading. A nice fat 30-minute commute both ways means that I'm into books in a way you just can't be when the only reading you do is the five minutes before you go to sleep. I'm still reading I Capture the Castle, which is such trash really, but ever so entertaining with the marriages and the gossip and so forth. I got way more out of Lovely Bones reading it last week than I had the time before; in December there was From Hell which solidly kicked my ass (in a good way) and even a fat stack of Cinefex issues I hadn't read before. It's all dreadfully fascinating stuff, flitting this way and that across the literary landscapes. Now Matty Price has put it in my head that I ought to read Don Quixote next, and I just might, though I've also got a mad chocolate craving to locate a copy of Below the Root, the one book that every single person I went to school with between grades 5 and 8 had to read at least once, meaning that the wait list for it at the library was literally about a year long.
Anyways. Must podcast, and write, and wouldn't mind finding ten minutes to browse books or read Batman.
April: You know who he reminds me of?
Brenda: Who?
April: Gary Oldman.
Brenda: ME?!
A couple of months ago D-Coc was over with Brenda and we were talking about Oldboy for some reason and how freaky it is (I hadn't seen it yet and they had) and then we were talking about The Secret of NIMH and how freaky it is (we'd all seen it when we were kids and had the kiddy-panties scared clean off us) and so naturally we decided that at some point we should do an Oldboy/NIMH double feature, which is what we did tonight. The idea was to basically use the vengeance/slaughter/incest/fucking craziness of Oldboy to try to speedball NIMH and see what happens. They turn out to complement one another fairly well, though I think the entire affair would have been served a hell of a lot better on a consciousness-expansion protocol. Still it was fairly hefty when Freaky Mouse was voodooing her children out of the swamp in a big wooden box, and I started wondering if the box would turn out to contain photographs proving that she was, in fact, in love with her own son. No such grim luck.
But man, NIMH. Wait, first Oldboy: awesome. Just skullfuckingly awesome. And hey, erotic ickyness that actually sells; and also a guy taking out a corridor full of thugs with nothing more than a hammer and his rather bad mood.
But NIMH: that is some fucked-up shit. They made this thing for children? As much as I thought that my fear had completely erased the flick from my memory, it turns out that there's about twenty-five seconds of it that are seemingly tattooed on my brain because as soon as they started, I pretty much started shaking like an overcompensated crank shaft. (What does that mean?) Rats in a lab. Mind-enhancing chemicals. Mutation! Consciousness! LIFE!!! You do not show this shit to a six-year-old!! Man between that, The Green Forest and Dr. Snuggles (the river was afraid of the sea!!!) it's amazing I don't spend every single night of my life curled up in the fetal position sweating my weight into the dank, urine-soaked sheets.
I am gonna kick my mother's ass.
I had a few minutes to spare before tonight's thing gets started, so I went ahead and had a look at the 10-minute cut of Far, Far Away, which I've been successfully procrastinating for what, about ten weeks now? Well, it turns out that cutting 11 minutes out of a 21 minute movie isn't actually that hard. You just yank out all references to Tim Hortons, ex-girlfriends, Warwick Davis, Red 6, Lego Star Destroyers, and any and all sense of the passage of time, and voila: it's 9 minutes and 47 seconds before you can even bat an eyelash.
Still, I'm not optimistic about this. The rules for the Star Wars Fan Film Awards (for which I prepareth the document) are just stupid: no Star Wars music, a roster of about six sound effects, no trademarks, no SAG actors... soooooo... yeah, it's entirely possible that there's just no way FFA will ever be able to wiggle its way into the running on this thing. It just wasn't made with these kinds of strictures in mind. It was made to be, y'know, good and stuff. Foolish me and my over-reaching!
Well folks, Tederick.com has lost its first post. I wrote something at 1:00 today about my Chewbacca action figure... and as you can probably see by now, it's gone. And I can't recover it.
Zwuh? Yay for the automated blog?
If anyone out there has the post sitting in their feedburner, let me know, yeah? It was rather funny and I liked it.
I have a Chewbacca action figure. A rather spectacular Chewbacca action figure. My very favourite Chewbacca action figure, in fact. And no matter what I do, he just won't stay standing up on my monitor. And given that he's a Chewbacca action figure (and not, say, a Yoda action figure), when he falls off my monitor he can cause a fairly significant amount of destruction.
Why, Chewbacca? Why?
At some point last month I reorganized all my comics on the shelves so that they're finally in some sort of cohesive "order," but this also means that it's harder to immediately pick out the most recent buys that I want to talk about here. It's been a while since I've done this so I want to be thorough, but I've also got about 27 minutes bankrolled for this post, so brisk efficiency is the watchword. I've got my bacon tea right here. Let's see how this goes:
In the X-verse I've been limiting myself as much as possible in the post-House of M world, because if Marvel had their druthers, each and every one of us would be buying every single title they've put on the market, just to see what the hell is going on. I'm not that guy. I am reading New X-Men for the first time since Morrison quit, 20 issues ago, because after the NYX/X-23 hardcover over Christmas I was in the mood for a lot more X-23 (hmm, I wonder why?) and she's just been added to the New X-Men permanent roster, doing her creepy "I killed a whole bunch of people" thing. The good news is that her parts in New X-Men, so far, have been pretty good; I'm 3 issues into their first post-M-day arc (Childhood's End) and so far, watching the X-kids deal with Decimation has been fairly entertaining. The art tends towards the animé-ish and some of the plotting is childish and stupid, but on the whole it's been decent.
Also starting this week was The 198, a 5-issue series about - yup - the 198 mutants left after Decimation. Good setup for a story so far, although anyone who actually manages to draw Emma Frost ugly pretty much should quit comics and never come back, as far as I'm concerned.
Really, all of this is just me killing time until Joss comes back with Astonishing next month, because the only Decimation story I'm really interested in reading is the one he's writing. So we'll see if I keep up with either of those titles once AXM13 is in my hot little hands.
Then there's Angel. We're two issues into the second arc, "Old Friends," and yeah, it sucks. It's better than the first arc (whose title I can't remember but which I'm willing to call "Arc of Absolutely No Plot Whatsoever and Far Too Many Issues Besides") but it's also the biggest cheeseball fan-wank of all time: get the Fang Gang back together post-series and see what they're doing. Guess what? They're all doing exactly the same thing! Look, I understand why you can't actually go messing around with the characters in any permanent way (given that there's this Spike movie still floating around in the realms of possibility), but with that being the case, how about - oh, I dunno - leaving the property alone, for Christ's sake?
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Bendis' Powers, too, continues to be among the most fun I have every month... I'm aware that there's supposed to be some kind of TPB collecting issues 1-12 at some point (or maybe it's already been released), and I want that thing likie crazie. And on the other side of the "Joss Whedon's favourite comics" axis, Runaways is also hauling some serious ass, with a multi-issue spread putting our heroes in New York City. Y'know, where Spider-Man lives.
I think that's everything big that's happened in the last few months. I'm reading Batman: Hush for the first time this weekend after doing Long Hallowe'en last month; I'm still not convinced Jeph Loeb is the genius everyone else thinks he is, but he sure as shit knows how to write Catwoman, and that's good enough for me.
Oh right: the All-Stars. I'm sure I already gassed about Supes All-Stars #1 on this blog, but I've also picked up (and I shame myself for not having done it sooner) Frank Miller's Batman and Robin All-Stars, and now being three issues in... fuckin' hell it's good. There's a 2-page spread in issue #3 which is, I think, the single most dynamic panel of comic art I've ever seen... and it's just a damned bar fight. It so specifically guides the eye when you turn the page to it, that the art actually seems to move. If comics get cooler than that, I don't want to know about it.
Hey, I did that in 19 minutes! That leaves 8 minutes for masturbation!
Uh... wait, what was I just doing?
For costume detailing alone, this should be good for some kind of prize:
It's howling like a bastard outside, which makes working up the resolve to go to yoga in a couple of hours kind of difficult. But I do have a passing interest in seeing if Kendra the Vampire Slayer comes back...
Last night I think I dreamed the best movie ever made. Initially my brain thought I was watching The New World next week, but eventually (as often happens) I was actually inside the movie, and then I was also consciously making the movie - while still being an audience member, impressed at just how skull-fuckingly cool this movie was. In my dreams, I guess I get to be all three: spectator, character, and director, more literally than in real life, where these things are all still somewhat true, but not as directly. In this dream there was a tropical island with a vast lagoon-like bay, and there was a visiting party from America in the 1800s, who had brought the American president with them and set up a camp on the beach. We (the natives) emerged from the water to attack them, and there was a moment of excruciating tension (and my mind saying "this is the most intense sequence of film I've ever seen") while we stood in the water very near the shore line, staring down our quarry who were, of course, mirroring us on the sand, frozen in uncertainty. This lengthy staring contest continued until a complete camera move had tracked all the way along the beach, behind us, until it came to rest on the American president, who was (of course) asleep in a chair. We abducted him. We pulled him away into the water by way of a series of mechanical zip-lines under the surface of the bay, which allowed us to escape to our secret island stronghold, a series of cathedral-like modernized catacombs that exist beneath the island, like a cross between the bunker in Lost and some gigantic church. The Americans came to treat for the return of their president but were frightened and amazed by our clattering computer technology, which so vastly outstripped their Jules Vernian contraptions that they began to think that it was we natives, not they "civilized" men, who were in fact gods. There was a handsome young Captain on their side, and a beatiful native princess on my side (who both was, and was not, me), and though kind words were spoken between us, the great confrontation between our utterly divergent worlds and peoples was, at this point, inevitable, and we knew it. The music throbbed low. And then I woke up.
You know what? This was a damn good week. The holiday blahs finally cleared out on Monday, and everything since then has been up and up. This was helped along considerably by my job finally kind of settling in and fleshing out, which makes it a little less like combat and a little more like work. Which is nice. And as for dropping a cheque in the ATM and then coming home and hitting my credit card debt with a gigantic whackload of fresh earnings... well, maybe to some folk that sounds trivial, but to me, it's about the most satisfying thing in the world. It has indeed been a long winter.
I got home and Amy dropped off the postcards for this year's 1MFVF call for submissions; I'm sufficiently excited about the design to want to spend at least half of my Saturday building the '06 version of the site. So that's cool. And following up on my Obi-Wan dollie rant from last week, I'm off the waiting list and onto the "you're actually gonna get what you want" list. Which is cool.
And for the stupidest thing that occured to me all day: I finally sort of understand why Friday night ended up being date night. After an actual work-filled Mon-Fri 9-5 under flourescent lights and in front of a computer, I just don't have any desire to be at home doing nothing tonight. I was completely spastic and hyper all day. End of the week, that energy boost hits you, and you want to take yourself into the weekend with a bit of grinmaking. (I know, I'm discovering all kinds of things this month that most normal people have known all their lives. What can I say? I sit at the back of the bus.) Add to the fact that girls smell nice, and suddenly, it all makes perfect sense.
Well anyways, I'm outta here.
Really, the degree to which the Angel comic sucks cannot be fully appreciated by man, beast, or other.
Honestly I've been meaning to give a look at recent comics, covering the period since I was last writing about comics on this blog, but for now I must be content to simply stare at the suckness. In the name of Sheba, bring back the Whedon.
Freakin' hell it was gorgeous out today, a fact I discovered when I dashed across the street for lunch... and on the way back, I pretty much wanted nothing more than to locate a soccer ball and kick it around in the quad, absconding from all work. Goodness knows what I'm going to be like in May. Back up at the desk I learned a thing or two about action scripts in Flash while updating a course, which made me feel nerdily satisfied. It's the little things.
I finished reading The Lovely Bones for the second time on Monday so now I'm reading I Capture the Castle, and it's making me feel rather like a proper English schoolgirl. Which, I suppose, is not terribly uncommon for me.
Sure, it was a good Lost. How could it not be a good Lost? You've got our man Eko going all crazy and religious on folk, you've got Nigerian flashbacks, you've got Kate sandwiched between hunky Sawyer and hunky Jack for a moment of nether-tingling indecision. It's money in the bag. What's really becoming bothersome is the damned giganticness of the cast. I am sick to death of whole episodes where two thirds of our principals have to fight it out to get a single line apiece. The producers should do us all a favour: put Michael, Sun, Michelle Rodriguez, Libby, Walt, and maybe even the originally-awesome Sayid himself in a boat. Then, blow the boat up (with bombs). Let's get back to some fucking character dynamics here, people.
It's pretty cool, though, that the only two people who have looked the Big Scary in the face are Eko and Locke, the aforementioned black and white backgammon pieces that featured so heavily in the post-planecrash furor. And thank goodness that after a season and a half, the Big Scary finally lost its camera shyness and was willing to stand up and say "Yeah, I'm a big scary clackity puff of smoke, and gorrammit, I'm gonna hold myself in frame for longer than a second just to let you look at my particles." Next time, can it please eat someone?
Robert Altman!
You hate to watch another tired man
lay down his hand
like he was giving up the holy game of poker
HOLY HANNAH HOUSE ALMOST GOT HUMPED AND THEN HE DIDN'T!!!!
Can you imagine what would happen to you if you actually ate this cow?
Today was Team Day at the j-o-b, basically an opportunity for the entire e-team (all nine[?] of us) to get together and tell each other what we've been up to and make a general effort to streamline our workflow by keeping each other informed on how we do our jobs. There was also some professional development, and I fell ass-over-spankhappy in love with Macromedia's Captivate, a software package so freakishly cool and jaw-smackingly well-designed that it actually had me in giggle fits for a good fifteen minutes. Wow. My first job-related cummy.
Mark came over tonight and we watched some tapes from when he was a kid, and were absolutely startled to discover what is, in effect, a prototype for Man in the Closet, filmed in his grandparents' basement in Warkworth with Ryan as both the Adam character and the Man in the Closet / Old Lady Who / Old Captain Who / whatever. Well, it's not exactly a precise translation, but you can definitely see the germ of the idea in there. So the real question is: exactly how scared of basements was Mark when he was a kid?
After reading that Kevin Smith post about his butthole that I linked to last week (hey cool I'm using my permalinks!), I gotta say that my crapping practices have been foremost on my mind. It's actually not something I wanted to have foregrounded to the degree it's been foregrounded. Now it seems like I can't get through a good solid dump without worrying that I'm breaking one of his "how to crap without ripping your asshole open" commandments. Really, shouldn't they have taught us this stuff when we were kids anyway? Maybe during the anal stage, that would certainly be appropriate.
Boy, the anus. I don't know what happened but it seems like last week was all about the anus. Everywhere I turned, somebody was telling me something significant about their butthole.
Well, there's only one thing gonna put out this fire.
Unsurprisingly, the next Narnia chronicle is moving ahead; they're going with Prince Caspian, which is indeed the next book in the series and features the same four kids as The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe... but is a pretty piss-poor choice for a sequel, I think. Caspian never didi it for me - too much of the same thing, not enough escalation, not enough variation in the story. With Lion as a somewhat-shaky proof-of-concept, they'd do better to jump ahead to Dawn Treader, but I guess that's too much to ask. I guess the real question is, what's Walden Media going to do with a movie where the Christian allegories are kept to a relative minimum?
Mmm, Mamo. Where would we be without Mamo? This week we look at whether movie stars are all that. Can I have a bag of chips?
Lately Max, Leah and Matty Price have taken to calling me "Uncle Matt" - i.e. "it's Uncle Matt on the phone!" Tonight when I called, Max asked to speak to me so that he could tell me that he really likes the Obi-Wan Kenobi figure that I bought for him. (I discovered that he didn't have an Obi-Wan figure, and freaked.) Which, pretty much, best thing ever. Meanwhile, Matty Price has discovered that Moby Dick is an amazing novel, and while enjoying his enthusiasm I'm somewhat mystified by the efforts to express this news. Surely, "Moby Dick is good" has, at this point, been adequately covered?
On another note: after catching myself thinking about it at least three times in the past week, I have added a new category to my honourable mentions in film for 2005: Best Use Of A Prosthetic Pregnant Belly To Make A Hot Naked Woman Even Hotter, which clearly goes to Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardner. Man howdy, let my boys be swimmers, because that's some hot naked pregnant belly. That brings me to a grand total of 6 sex-related categories in the HMs this year, but hey, that's my wheelhouse.
My bad mood broke at around 12:05 today. I saw a way out and I took it. My legs now are by no means steady, but at least they're out of the mud.
Jasper Beardly.
Did everybody get that?
The last week or so, I've been noticeably overwhelmed by the blandness of things right now - a sort of omnipresent malaise that comes of doing all the things I'm expected to do (and expect myself to do), but without a single shining thing in the center to make doing them worthwhile. I'm in the waiting room. With the immediate period of crisis now past, I'm into the middle distance, the wide salt flats, which have nothing to make them inherently bad, but nothing to make them necessarily good either. I'm spending my time waiting for the next good thing to start. I realized this today - that if there are two or three things that I truly want/need in my entire life - the "main goals" if you will - then this is probably the first time in memory that I've actually had none of them. That sort of makes me want to sit down. I know, I've got the air in my lungs and my health and my friends and family and all that, and everyone I know wants that to be enough, but it's really not. I'm sure I'd miss those things if they were gone, but there will always be the bigger things, the sorts of interlocking puzzle pieces of the soul that make your life feel like a journey worth taking, rather than an endless attempt to kill time.
The hard part of writing something that isn't quite fully formed in your mind yet is the sheer quantity of unknowns that you reach on a daily basis - just simple scene phraseology that needs to be worked out and hasn't even occured to you yet. It's really flying blind. Sometimes - like today - this is incredibly frustrating.
Well, incredibly is a strong word. It was hard today. Like pulling taffy more than pulling teeth, but hard nonetheless. I had this scene with a bear that I wanted to write, because no movie of mine is taking place in northern Canada without involving at least one bear. The trick is not to turn it into some stupid run-and-jump adventure story, because that's not the movie. I think I found a nice way to hook it and just make it one more unwieldy confrontation between civilized man and his more primal roots, but I dunno. It should have been longer. Richer somehow.
Tomorrow I need to do some outlinining of the next 12 pages or so and then after that, I don't know how much more time I'll have for writing this week. Juggling all of these plates is proving a real challenge, but I'm still pretty sure I can have this draft done by the end of the month, and be on to the next thing.
Waking up early - before 9 - and without a hangover, which is a grace I haven't earned, but I'll take it. One of those mornings when your immediate energy level surprises you - a good Sunday. A day of bright white light and curling up in the reading nook looking at photographs, or collecting the collateral of the past months by updating my CV, or writing letters and notes. These days are getting rarer. The blank-stare frenzy is starting to set in.
It clearly says above my bed that I'm not supposed to sleep with anyone who doesn't love the movie Gerry. It's been there the whole freakin' time. Maggotballs.
Now here's an idea: somebody's gotta make a movie of Christopher Walken and James Woods bare-knuckle boxing for 2 hours. Who wouldn't pay good money to see that?
You begin to feel like a patched-together verison of yourself - like on Six Feet Under when Claire was making those faggy art pieces by ripping up photographs and then gluing them back together. Only you're made up of a whole bunch of different photographs of you from all throughout your life, and they don't match together particularly well. You're two-dimensional, and strange looking, and when you move, you move weird. But all the pieces that are supposed to be there are there, if only because they're supposed to be. You're not sure they represent you any more, or if they're just shreds of a picture you took of yourself a long time ago.
I went back to yoga today for the first time in about six weeks; for some reason, no matter how I try, I always end up giving December a clean miss for absolutely no good reason and then coming back to it in the new year. At one point during the relaxation I caught myself thinking about the ex-X and noticed that I could actually feel my body realigning itself into tightness and pain, my breathing getting shorter and harder, until I cleared my mind and stepped past it. Something similar happened at work this week; it was about 2:30 in the afternoon and I went to the washroom, and on the way back I noticed that my body was hunched forward and closed inward, and my breathing was shallow and vapid. I stretched back and opened up and took what felt like my first deep breath in several hours. I've spent so much time lately being hyper-aware of my mind and my heart; it seems like I've completely forgotten my poor body. Today my arms felt like long ropes of scar tissue; my blood was as thin as rainwater.
At this time of year I become unusually obsessed with the view out of subway windows when they emerge from the tunnels. I pay close attention to what my eyes are doing as they continually adjust and reframe the passing action outside the car into a flurry of impressions. I'm looking at buying a digital camera in a little while and when I do, I might try to put some of this into images, if I could figure out some way to avoid the soot-stained subway windows mucking up every shot. Prying the doors open, maybe, or riding on the tops of the cars.
This life is rated PG-13 for disaster-related peril and violence, nudity, sensuality, and brief language.
Ain't no two ways about it, I got screwed today, and not in the pleasant way. The Sideshow Obi-Wan Kenobi doll - sort of the toy I've been waiting for all my life - went on sale at 1:00. I didn't take a lunch today, just so that I could actually be online and and at my desk to order the thing as it became available. Except, it never did: the Sideshow server crashed at 12:56, reasserted itself well after two, and yet somehow by that point (in spite of, by my experience, an absolute impossibility of accessing the site at all... I mean the domain itself was unresolvable, let alone what must have been going on with their server) the toy was long sold out, meaning that it's gonna cost me mightily to pick one up on Ebay - probably in the $250-300 range. Sideshow could not have fucked this up better if they'd sat around flinging dog shit at their customers. Really, there should be a notice posted in the offices of all vendors: you do NOT mess with Matt Brown on issues of Obi-Wan Kenobi. You just don't.
1. Tea can taste like bacon and still be good!
2. Evil space robots give speeches.
3. No matter how old you are, sex is complex.
4. Ripping through your socks never gets old - it's like your foot becomes The Hulk. RRAAAARHHAH!!
5. I need to better plan what I'm going to wear each morning, because I am such a woman when it comes to picking clothes.
Hey kids, if you've got a minute and you enjoy the blog, go nominate it for the 2006 Bloggies. Why? Because snowballs are melting in hell, that's why. Knock up Mamo! and blogTO while you're there. And hey, it never hurts to toss a nomination towards Matty Price, Bex, Ben, T.J., or even "There's a Skyperbole in the World"-faced Chris.
A note to Canadians regarding the upcoming election:
1. We want to live in a free country where the same personal liberties are enjoyed by all citizens.
2. No matter what the Tories tell you, the sponsorship "scandal" does not affect you personally.
3. Stephen Harper is an evil space robot.
That is all.
Every morning I've woken up this week, my brain has wondered if it's Friday. On Fridays I get to turn my alarm off, rather than just resetting it for the next day. No such luck yet.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but at this point aren't the days supposed to be getting longer? When does that start to kick in? Not only is it pitch black every day when I get up, but yesterday my coworkers and I actually became fearful of the arrival of the apocalypse, given that it was dark as midnight outside our building by about 3:30 in the afternoon. We stood in the conference room and gawked at the blackness, wondering if e-learning will have any particular importance in a post-apocalyptic world.
Just a couple of pages of scripting tonight, because I'm knackered. A 2-page scrap more than 2-page scene, but it needs to be where it is, and it's important for me to actually put the stuff down that I think to put down, rather than assuming that thinking of it is good enough and that it can wait for anothe day. It rarely can.
Mentally, I'm gabbidy-gabbidy at the moment. While writing the script I wrote the following line: "a try im mediately apposite him." This was supposed to be "a tree immediately opposite him." So clearly, the brain-to-typing-fingers line has been disrupted rather nicely. Serves me right, too; I spent the whole day at work assembling a hefty spreadsheet, and my fingers are just plain tired, even with all my stretching and breathing and desk-yoga. I can stands no more computers. I guess wanking to cyberporn is out for the evening. Besides, I've gotta shove a bunch of shit from one drive to another to get ready to do the "completely selling out" cut of Far, Far Away.
Work is going well. Everybody loves the new guy; I'm the latest thing. They come to my cubicle sometimes to look at me. The Star Wars figures are helping; even people that I thought didn't like me very much were coming over today to talk about toys their spouses have or they had when they were kids or whatever else. Ah, Star Wars: forever and always the great leveler.
I'm going to go watch videos and think about a monochromatic universe.
"Maybe you should worry a little less about your pride, and a little more about the creepy-crawlies Shawshanking their way out of your balloon knot."
- Stewie Griffin
Today I finished the King Kong issue of Cinefex, which was excellent (but too short). The most entertaining revelation was that it's Rick Baker (who played man-in-a-suit Kong in the 1976 version) piloting the plane that shoots Kong down (PJ, of course, is the gunner); the most poetic revelation was that although incredible quantities of effort and detail went into creating a reasonably-accurate 1933 New York cyclorama for the movie and particularly the final sequences, the sky above the Empire State Building in the film's final moments is the sky over New Zealand.
There's a Peter Jackson interview on the magazine's web site, for those who care to look.
I had kind of an icky-sticky moment a couple of months ago with a prospective employer, where they made it known to me in a somewhat creepy way that they'd been to my blog and poked around, in spite of my not having given them any means to do so. It's not exactly like this thing is immediately Googlable, either; I think if you search my full name it comes up like sixth or seventh on the list or something [verifies this, returns], which doesn't make it impossible, but does require some time and attention. I'm not saying that I was unaware of the possibility that outsiders would find this site without a direct reference, because that's not the times we live in. But these people weren't just on here, they were into the deep code. They made reference to a couple of articles that I wouldn't even know how to find myself with ten minutes of looking, meaning that they put some serious time and effort into digging into me. It was ewie.
The result of this was that in spite of my recent efforts to really unchain the blogging in terms of the sorts of things I want to be talking about and feel comfortable talking about, I sorta got spooked about what I can and can't do on here. I have a new place of employ that I would personally prefer not become a den of Tederick.commies, just because that kind of penetration is somewhat threatening in the personal life / professional life duosphere. More significantly, I have all those stupid bad things that happened last year that everyone who knows me knows about, and for which I know many people are forever scanning these lines looking for some kind of indicator of this heartbreak or that quivering upper lip, just to see if it's there... and let's face it, I've had a longstanding difficulty, not just with crying in public, but with crying in front of anyone who isn't absolutely my flat-out for-real-this-time soulmate, because as emotionally available as I am consistently trying to be, I just tend to be more guarded about my own pain than I'd generally like.
And on top of all that, I have a great personal need to frequently use this blog as a weapon against my own insecurities, by putting my best foot forward and feeling generally kickass. Which I do, much of the time.
So today I was cruising the blog of one of my enemies, and it so completely pissed me off. It was snivelly and whiny and self-actuated almost to the point of causing physical pain, and just so goddamned viscerally honest and rant-y and as lucid in the good times as it was in the bad. Urge to kill... rising... Mostly I just hate it when someone I don't like does shit better than I do, and makes it look easy.
No resolution at the end of this story, just trying to kill the last twenty minutes of a long day by splinching my guts. Last night I dreamed I was on my porch, smoking a big fat joint with a guy from the office who I've met all of twice. The dream-smoke has been shadowing me all day, and it's been smelling pretty sweet.
Crap. It's been so long since I've played my didgeridoo that I kinda forgot I had one.
For shame, Jessica. For shame.
Today I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to write. I knew what was going to happen in about ten pages, but didn't really have a clear plan for what was going to fill the time between now and then. So naturally, it was mostly about not filling the time - some mood building scenes, some character work, a glance towards someday unveiling the meaning of the title. (Titles have meaning?) A protracted pre-dawn campfire scene with Milton alone, which is important, because when he's with his son, Milton is essentially playing a character... and we need to see him when his guard is down. Someone named "Wendy" was mentioned; I'm not entirely sure who she is yet or if I'll pay it off at all. With seven pages down I'm not quite at the next bit yet, but I can see it from here. I got one dandy little follow-up scene between dad and son out of the deal, and at least one nice "time has passed" transition involving a frantic cold-water swim and a really pissed off fish. (Not the man-eating variety, just the "I don't want to be pulled out of the lake for human consumption!" kind which, I suppose, is at least somewhat true of all fish.)
Road to Perdition was eschewed in favour of the Moria-to-Lothlorien passage of the extended Fellowship score. Moria, particularly, worked well for writing the no-light pre-dawn scene.
Anyways, that's that. I went to the post office to pick up some photography books that I ordered (a Nan Goldin book I've been eying forever and that Bubble Bath Girls dealie I saw at CAYA last week), and while walking home I just sort of mentally went through the motions of the pages I wanted to write, and came home and wrote them down. Sometimes, it really is that simple.
...but check out the 2-day epic of Kevin Smith's anal fissure, which is easily the most gobsmacking bit of blogging I've read in a long, long time. And so glad my butthole is functional in a pleasant and harmonious way.
Naturally I left my first night of solid writing of the new year for so late in the damn day that I could barely keep my eyes open while doing it, but at least I got through it. I'm starting with Mongoose, and had originally planned to try to get this draft done by Feb 28. Now I'm thinking maybe Jan 28 would be more like it. I'm hungry, and I want through this.
It's a wilderness survival story with a father and son (Milton and Jeremy), making it one of the few features I've worked on with no perceivable variation on the young girl character, which is a bit of a hoot. It's been a very, very long time since I've written a 12-year-old boy, and I'm still trying to figure Jeremy out - I kind of have a handle on his voice and the various things he needs to go through in the next sixty pages or so, but I'm also meeting him as we go, so who knows where things will end up.
The real trick on this script is doing as much as possible without saying anything. That means non-dialogue, and it also means that when there is dialogue, it talks so far around the point that you'd never notice the point was in there at all... points by way of dark stars, observable only by gravity. I'm writing to the score from Road to Perdition, to attempt to preserve some sense of stillness. Perdition, in fact, has been observably linked to three of the five scripts I've scheduled for this year... so I guess I'm going to be listening to it a whole lot.
Anyways. I wrote 29 pages in the fall and tonight's goal was just to go through them and get back into the flavour of the script, but I ended up adding another 2 pages anyway just by osmosis. It's my way. After 30 pages on the road J&M have arrived at their destination, so I'm going to have to go over the notes tomorrow and see what direction to move in next. It's vaguely "making this up as I go," but mostly in not knowing exactly how I'm going to stage the two dozen elements I've brainstormed out as being part of the rest of the story.
And with that rather painful day 1 behind me, I am finally going to bed. Rodriguez might be onto something with his write-first-thing-in-the-morning deal; this end-of-day stuff is weary work.
My favorite way to spend a weekend
At Blue Mountain, either slicing Happy Valley with my snowboard, or back at the resort, snuggling in one of those gigantic bathtubs of theirs
....damn, I just got the giddies...! Mmm, snuggling.
Oh right, I forgot: Nerve sucks! Dang that all to sonofabitch christ.
Anyways. I spent a whole bunch of time today trying to dig myself out from under the big pile of emotional garbage that's been sinking onto me for the past five months. Not that it hasn't been fun under here - kinda safe and warm and all - but the smell was getting terrible. So I'm tunnelling up. Comes a point in a man's life where you have to look around and say, "yep, the hurt's not getting smaller... but I'm just so damn bored."
The biggest gift/curse that the past five months has given me is this ludicrously heightened self-awareness. This means that I'm basically being pulled apart by contradictions all the time. I'd love nothing more than to believe The Lie, but once you've reached a point in your life where you're beginning to get a true handle on just how random and meaningless all of the things that you do and the things that happen to you really are, it's sort of difficult to continue to buy into "everything's gonna turn out all right" or "if you're a good person good things will happen to you" and all the other bulljive homilies that you hear all day when your life is supposedly in the shit. Not that I don't appreciate just how important it is for most folk to believe that sort of thing; it's just that I can't be there any more. I've seen the Eye. And that's a problem.
The other gift/curse is the same old one I've always had: that down at the core, I'm still just a stupidly happy person. I tend towards okayness at all times. Which, at times of great pain, is probably the most annoying trait of all. I'm more inclined to laugh than to scream, more inclined to sit in a coffee shop working out my various mental kinks than to beat up a toddler. It's annoying. I was watching something on TV the other night about somebody repressing something or other, and I thought to myself, "boy, that would be nice, wouldn't it?" But oh well. I live as a seive.
So I've got a fat list of things I'm looking to secure in my life and my feelings about myself, and a few ideas of how to get started. Ever forward, for lack of anything better to do.
I got a message on my new cell phone - for which I haven't even given out the number - from someone who didn't speak particularly good English but wanted to wish me a happy Christmas, New Year's and also Valentine's Day. Not sure why the Valentine's Day. Anyways she wanted me to call her back but I don't think I'm gonna. Cuz I hate phones.
New Year's was indeed quiet. I watched Revenge of the Sith and slunk off to bed at 11:50. Today I got caught up with the Mer-Bear who's headed back east tomorrow, and then went to the parents to eat the gnocchi that has so far made two separate individuals lose consciousness after consuming it. Now I'm watching Sin City Recut & Extended and having entirely too much damn fun. The motion menus alone are worthy of some kind of medallion, shiny and silver.