wildcat

1. The sun's long down and I'm listening to Tom Waits's "Warm Beer and Cold Women," the window open and a cool-cool breeze drifting on by. Originally, "The Hotel Detective" had a scene in a hotel bar with Frank Sinatra playing on the jukebox but this is better, worn-out and hopeless. Fits the scene a bit better. Although, perhaps, "What's he building in there" would be a better choice for the overall theme of the story.

2. First draft's finished, by the by. Clocks in at 40 pages, 12,310 words. It needs a lot of work, but revision is where the art is, where the style is, where the slickness is. It's where you make the words work for you. Or you figure out what to feed your baby, whichever. I have a lot of underutilized characters, a couple unseen ones who are relatively important and I need to figure out if they are important enough to bring out into the light.

3. Right now, revision is notes, questions, bits of song lyrics and random poetry. Anything that might spark up a new way of looking at a character or a scene. I need to work in the strange old man, wandering around and asking for a bible over and over. The moths. Insects and lizards recur as images, so I need to build them up a bit.

4. The solution's a bit ridiculous, of course, but I've always had a habit of liking really esoteric mysteries.

5. Today was an expedition up island to investigate some wineries. Well, four wineries and a ciderie. Christian and Lisa provided a very extavagant picnic and we all enjoyed it a lot. It was nice to blow the city's popsicle stand and zoom off in the big van, fresh with Sunday dripping upon our heads, having drips and drabs of wines and ciders. Picked up a couple bottles, including a blackberry port-- perfect for the dinner club nights.

Some time ago, I talked about Brandon Graham's KING CITY, a fat little comic put out by Tokyopop. And last night, Graham's latest project was waiting patiently for me in my mailbox. The first issue of Multiple Warheads, put out by Oni Press, who are also responsible for publishing Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim.I've been really enjoying Graham's work and picked up his collection of short comix, Escalator a little while ago.

(Cover art for Multiple Warheads by Brandon Graham)

"Tear drop adventure. Read 'em and weep. Russian werewolf epic.
Made with: bitter struggle, blind faith, licorice and sugar."

So opens the first issue: a vast, Buddha-like statue of Chairman Mao, pocked with frozen, crashed rockets and MAO AND LATER painted across the chest. Overlooking this is our heroine, Sexica. Yes, Sexica. Sexica, one of Brandon Graham's punker, big-lipped women, is climbing over grandiose communist statues to cross the wastelands and make it to the Dead City. She's smuggling bizarre organs. The Dead City: if King City were Graham's private New York, Dead City would be his Moscow, Sexica smuggling organs into the city from elsewhere, to sell them to strange alien creatures that combine Lovecraft's sense of design with plush toys. She's got a boyfriend in the city, Nikolai -- Nik's the source of the title. She smuggled a werewolf penis on one expedition and grafted it to him as a birthday present. Consequently, Nik turned into a werewolf.

And that's the set-up, more or less, when we're introduced to the characters. The series is to be a road comic -- the kids are heading out in a living car Nik built out of spare parts, they're leaving the Dead City, and this is very much an opening issue. It's got Graham's usual high standard of rubbery, smooth-lined organic drawing, strange designs and firings of grafitti. His realities are always flexible, ill-defined enough to give him room to move without feeling lost in a tailspin. It's very casual world-building. It's very erotic in a sloppy, goofy manner -- sex is handled with an off-handed reverence, subtle, and blends into the rest of the story without standing out too much. Nikolai describes his dreams, his wolf-dreams. You can see the Herge influences, the Tintin undercurrent, the adventures woven into the Dead City's daily life. There's myth and horror and sex and love and cute things. Rocket ships fall out of the sky. I'm looking forward to the second issue, I walked away from this comic wanting to know where they're going to go, I want more of wolf-dreams.

On the whole, the World of Tomorrow is a bit shit. I realized, this morning, that it really is the future, only it's some hack writer's prognostication from a small-press science fiction magazine published round about 1976. There was a commerical on the television for a product called "Toothbrush Tunes," an electric toothbrush that plays music inside your mouth while you brush your teeth, two-minute songs designed to encourage children to brush their teeth for that full two minutes.

Imagine it: waking up half-choked by the bedsheets and then stumbling down a poorly lit hallway in your adult-sized Spider-Man underoos, clawing around for the lightswitch as you crash into the bathroom. Imagine glaring at yourself in the mirror, yawning, and then applying coconut-flavoured paste onto your Dentomuse or whatever, shoving it in your mouth and brushing your teeth as they vibrate embarassingly with the opening strains of "Mustang Sally," not quite sounding right as it hums over your nasal cavity and down your throat. You really hate tomorrow. You hate tomorrow all day long.

Welcome to the dead-end future.

Well, there's no receipt in my pocket for a cheap motel, but it's dark outside, been raining off an on all day, my shoes are across the room, untied. Dishes in the sink, baby, and I'm writing. Which means I'm going to waltz across the room (mechanical repetition of box step -- classy) and do those dishes and then I'm going to sit up with Pynchon's V. a while yet, occasionally frowning at my sentences as they read on screen ("Hey baby, why don't you come up to my place and we'll listen to some smooth music on the stereo..."), fuss with them. I am shocked at how many boozey puns emerged naturally from the text as I wrote it. Maybe detectives are good for that ("Hey, I don't need you, baby. See, it's a well known fact -- I'm four sheets to the wind. I'm glad you're gone. Glad you're gone and I'm all alone, glad you're gone and I'd wish you'd come home..."), and maybe this story won't turn out so bad. Maybe.

1. You know, it's shameless to trawl quotation sites for something to put up as your blog entry title. Shameless: like walking around in fishnets without any underwear on. Like emerging leg-first from behind curtains.

2. The red lentil dal was mostly successful, although there was a little bit of burning because I wasn't paying enough attention to the lentils while I worked out the situation with the onions and tomato. Right amount of garlic, though. I need to play around with the spice levels some more. I have some leftover to take for lunch tomorrow, and I feel confident about making it on Tuesday for the potluck. Probably could have done with a little more cayenne.

3. Well, obviously, I should be writing right now. Working on those revisions. Various writers and artists have passive-aggressively guilted me into getting to work on the story this week, through the medium of published missives. None of them have ever met me but they like to remind me what kind of a lazy-ass I am.