wildcat

Honestly! Sitting the laundromat with the sunlight filtering through glass and hitting my back just so, about half-an-hour before I'd even normally be stepping foot out of the Margaret Atwood Boardinjg House, some woman with pastel-painted skin to match her pastel blouse and pastel-turquoise trenchcoat opened the door, hollered something, and then dumped copies of The Watchtower and Awake! Magazine on the unused counter underneath the bulletin board before turning and walking straight back out. Leaving a cloud of chalk dust.

Rather than process the situation, I wrote a reptile's death scene in my little notebook for use in this fictional thing I'm writing, whatever it is.

Then I went for a sticky, smelly ride on the bus and ate Lotus Pond while dark-dark-dark clouds gathered hesistantly on the horizon before bumpering over to work.

But I'd swear the pastel-woman's dust gathered in my lungs this morning and has followed along with me, driving me ever closer, onward, stutteringly into madness...

Possibly the greatest thing is a mad Brazilian chef stumbling tragically through a hotel kitchen, searching for his stolen machine gun. Or: a strange girl in a dead end town, sweet talking her car before the full seduction begins. Names like Benny Profane and Rachel Owlglass. It's a slow read but highly enjoyable (so far): Thomas Pynchon's V.

Working away at something, don't know what, but it gets more real everyday. I sat in the ghetto coffeeshop scribbling sentences this morning.

I always liked her better than Batman.

[Thanks, Ragnell.]

I do not like waking up at 5:30 in the morning with the Fear sitting square on my back with long spiny fingers gripping the back of my head while it whispers shit in my ear. I do not like that, I do not like that at all. I do not like feeling as though I'm not supposed to change my mind ever, about anything, and certainly can't ever change it back. I don't like it when the Fear is crushing my lungs and forces me out of bed an hour early, which is somehow worse than when I can't bear to get up. I do not like feeling guilty regardless of what my decision is, I don't like feeling as though I've screwed myself over. I do not like to be awake this early and thinking about this.

Books acquired from various bookshops in the last week:

1. The Idler Book of Crap Jobs: 100 Tales of Workplace Hell, edited by one Dan Kieran. Sharply designed little number with the expected reproduction of classified ads on the cover, various lines and text circled in red. This is a gold mine as far as research material goes (keeping in mind that I have The History of the Umbrella kicking around somehwere), but it's also doing a good job of keeping my work situation in perspective. Basically an anthology of quick and dirty creative non-fiction about some pretty horrible jobs. Imagine a successful career in pill flicking, damaged food discounting, or (of course) phone sex.

2. Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon. I'm still in the middle of V. and I'm curious to read and compare. I like the way he sets up sweepingly random casts of characters and fires them off in haphazard, premature fashion; like a man with a loaded gun firing directly into the air an entire round. Frenesi Gates has apparently gone missing and has in the past been both a "radical filmmaker" and a "FBI sting specialist."

3. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, by Sam R. Delany. His science-fiction is delightfully fucked, sensuous, inappropriate, dirty, copulating, and wistful. I've really enjoyed his short stories and now want to branch into the novels. This one was like two bucks.

4. Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading. I've found that I tend to like his critical works and poetic theory more interesting than his actual poetry, gravitating on the actual poetry more in the direction of Pound's contemporary and buddy, T.S. Eliot. Pound isn't afraid to bold face things or use a FULL CAPS word when he needs to. Poet and melodramatic cowboy with six-shooters.*

5. Kafka's Prague: A Travel Reader, by Klaus Wagenbach. A tight, red-bound volume that reminded me that "Prague" rhymes with "Travelogue."

* - What's with all the gun metaphors?

Rebranding leads to subverting the rebranding.

Makes me very happy to see that.

Shrek the Third wasn't bad - enjoyable, even, if only to see a gang of fairy tale princesses become a vicious squad of invaders; Snow White starts off with pretty singing-to-her-bird-friends only to start up Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and come over all Hitchcock on the palace guards, commanding her birds to attack them with a fervor normally reserved for Tippi Hedren. Cinderella flinging sharp-heeled glass slippers. The film didn't quite hit the same intensity as the second movie but it did fairly well for a third-of-three, building on what went before without beating too heavily on old jokes. The only real missteps tended to be spontaneously bad characterization - plot comes first, character second - when characters forgot who they were or what they were capable of. It was cute. Justin Timberlake's character was delivered with the expected cliche-riddled, apple-cheeked boy-scout angstful teenager mode but I mostly ignored that for Puss in Boots and the Gingebread Man....

...the Gingerbread Man lost in a fugue as his entire life flashes before his eyes, reduced to sputtering "The Good Ship Lollipop" while all hell breaks loose and Prince Charming leads the Fairy Tale Villains into Far Far Away... Pinocchio playing Heisenberg verbal judo with Prince Charming to avoid the telling of nose-growing lies...

It ends up all tied away and I can't really see them doing a fourth one, thankfully. It was a film preoccupied with the fear of parenthood and generalized middle-age panic -- odd conceits for what is, ostensibly, "a children's movie," and you can take from that what you will.

Previews? Apparently ALL OF HOLLYWOOD IS DYING, WITHERING AWAY TO NOTHING, because they've remade John Waters's Hairspray. What, will they be doing Crybaby next, with Orlando Bloom instead of Johnny Depp and Jessica Biel instead of Traci Lords? Plus, of course, "live action" Transformers (And by live action, we mean "CGI") which is of course going to be a massively huge bizarre carsex robotfuck flick, but at least the preview's Optimus Prime reveal including him transforming with the no doubt patented "transforming robot sound" that I always mimicked when I was playing with my transformer toys as a wee wildcat. It already looks like there's going to be the boring "teenaged sexual awakening" suburban hetero romance and, as Calamity Jon notes, a "Magical African-American" stereotype. Oh well, at least there are actual women in this one, after the 1986 animated epic's solitary female Transformer who turned into...ah...something? And I seem to remember her shrieking a lot.

I feel like reviewing comics! I've been disconnected, morose, bored, and existential about the industry lately but there is stuff coming out that I like and enjoy. In fact, some of it positively makes me want to sing. Or shout from rooftops. Or, well, smile faintly as I drink hot chocolate in the ghetto coffee shop and read them. Mileage, vary, your.

KING CITY

(Cover image by Brandon Graham)

Tokyopop put out this fun piece of weirdness recently -- book one is out and I'm waiting patiently for book two to come out in, oh, six months or so. It's so delightfully strange: Joe is a cat master trained at someplace called "The Farm." King City's a city of spies with nebulous missions, purposes, fees -- gangs sprout everywhere and signs are posted in public places noting that bodies can not be dumped during certain hours of the day. Joe's back in town after his long training and trying to reconnect with the people in his old life, or trying to avoid them. The cat's name is Earthling and has an astonishing variety of special skills and powers, which are further enhanced when Joe injects the cat with "cat juice." Graham's art is skillful, sexy, slightly hypnotic -- he reminds me just a little bit of Damion Scott -- and he writes fun characters who sparkle with personality. The world is suitably flexible, with distant Korean zombie wars and the token futuristic street drug called Chalk; other worlds are name dropped and all in the name of fun. The cat's function as a comedy sidekick, tool, weapon, and sounding board is particularly key -- Earthling's body is ever-changing into periscopes and lock picks, and a memorable scene includes him performing an off-panel autopsy while Joe sits in view, reading through a faux-Cosmo magazine, trying not to watch. It plays with noir tropes like the femme fatale and there are enough plot strands coming along with Joe's that it kept me more than interested.

SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE

(Cover image by Takeshi Miyazawa, colours by Christina Strain)

Romance comics! In the days before Marvel started up with that name and began to publish a new brand of super-hero comics, a lot of artists involved were working away. I picked this up recently having heard nothing but good things about it and was pretty enthralled with it -- it plays off the super-hero tropes only as they relate to the romance, and it's a pretty simple teen melodrama with shiny pop art and some fun work with the old "imaginary love triangle" tropes like Superman/Lois/Clark. The action is mostly restricted to bits of background as Mary Jane's internal life is played out for us, growing up in a world of distant super-heroes. Spider-Man proves to be a boring date and Peter Parker outshines him as potential boyfriend material. Firestar appears as a crimefighting partner of Spidey's, and this leads me to hope for more Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends reduxes with maybe Iceman showing up? The lack of violence is refreshing in the current climate of gross-out comic book "action," and Mary Jane is presented as a well-rounded character with a strong supporting cast. Sean McKeever's writing is straightforward and energetic and I click with Miyazawa's artwork more than a lot of Manga artwork; I first found him filling in on a couple storylines of Runaways. Plus, like King City above and Runaways, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane is being collected in the slick little manga-sized digests for cheap. Portable and affordable.

NEWUNIVERSAL

(Cover image by Salvador Larocca, colours by Jason Keith)

Sometimes I think that Warren Ellis needs to stop writing single pamphlet comics and turn his attentions to the Original Graphic Novel with a greater fervor (I believe Orbiter with Colleen Doran might have been an OGN but I'm not sure off the top of my head), but of course the willingness to venture into graphic novels or simply collected singles is based on the profits generated by the singles. Problem being that Ellis is so clearly into the decompression-style of storytelling and pacing that it always reads better when collected. Which is why I nearly stopped reading newuniversal after the first couple issues. The series is revamp of an old Marvel Comics imprint called the New Universe; the NU was essentially the "real world" after super-humans started to appear. It was of dubious quality and lasted almost no time at all, although for some reason I read most of the Psi-Force series when I was a wee lad with little to no taste. The New Universe books had a lot in common with that Heroes T.V. show. Anyway, fast forward twenty years or so and Ellis starts up a revamp, where it clearly isn't meant to be the "real world" because there's the typical, random "alternative history" easter eggs like references to a very much alive John Lennon (and an assassinated Paul McCartney), a female president of the United States, et cetera. Series follows what happens after a mysterious "White Event" -- the sky goes white across the world for a few moments, and then people start developing superhuman powers. Ellis picks up a couple of the old NU characters but develops them into archetypal power sets that function as a universe-protecting system which kicks in and imposes itself on normal people when the planet accidentally falls into alignment with some weird transdimensional superstructure and a bunch of other science fiction babble. Basically: people get super and then the government freaks out because of Darwinist panic. Salvador Larocca's artwork is mostly swell but a little more "realistic" than I'd like; one of the main characters is clearly photo-referenced from Josh Holloway from Lost, which is irritating, and Ellis plays in the ultra-violence sandbox quite a bit which is distressing (and all the more reason to delve into Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, but the slow burn of decompression is starting to build this into something, although several characters just don't get the screen time I'd like; Jenny Swann working on big robot battle suits that only work because she's just developed a techno-manipulation super-power and knowing that consequently she'll have to be a target of the big robot death machines, for example. I'm waiting to see where this goes but I expect it to come together.

After the union meeting tonight ended after only an hour - really! - I grabbed Alison and Vicky and we decided to go for a drink some place to unwind after what was a rather up-and-down day. Alison said Mo:Lé over on Pandora at Government, so we shuttled across downtown shedding the workday in psychic clumps that caught on the wind and kept flying (Yeah, that's right, you keep flying away!). Frankly, it was a wonderful day and as the sun set and a coolness settled into the air it was perfect. We weaved through the streets and then eventually ended up at the restaurant.

Yes, I know-I know. My set-ups are shit. We get to the restaurant and order a couple drinks. Couple Strongbows and a bit of Al's scotch which really wasn't that bad. Laughed so much which was very much a necessary thing - I'm walking around with too much psychic sludge settled on my brain and I swear I'm becoming a complete bore - and the restaurant was good. Romantic, perfect ambience and lighting. Drinks were a little expensive but not bad as long as you paid attention to the menu. I'm not sure I'd bother with the seven-dollar martinis if Topo's really is offering them for four. Had a nice homemade mango cheesecake with a blueberry sauce, spongy and moist, well put together. Al had a blueberry/banana sorbet. Seems like a good date place and I'll probably take Michael there sometime when we're feeling romantic.