I've been reading a collection of short stories by Peter Beagle, under the collective title We Never Talk About My Brother. This is quite possibly the best short story collection I have ever read.

Noteworthy quotes:

from The Blue Angel: "I don't know a thing about ten-year-olds today; but in those times one of the major functions of adults was to supply drama and mystery to our lives, and we took such things where we found them."

from We Never Talk About My Brother: "She studied Suzie a lot more closely and carefully than she'd done during dinner, and there wasn't any question what she was thinking. But what Willa thinks and what Willa says never did spend a lot of time together."

I must not look in the right places, because this movie was raved all over the place and I heard naught a word. I found it in Netflix and gave it a try.

Quick summary: very good. Delightfully confusing. Nonstandard anime depiction. A drama with action bits seen throughtout.

Fuller review: ( plot spoilage here )

This is the tale that has needed to be told for many, many years.

Once upon a time...

Benjamin Franklin was exploring prehistoric America in his steampowered hot air balloon when his kite was eaten by the ferocious dinosaur, the saber-beaked Pturkeydactyl! Benjamin and the Pturkeydactyl fought an epic battle, but Benjamin slew the great beast with Excalibur. Afterwards, he heard the cries of the Pilgrims and Indians in the distance, so he flew over to them. They didn't have a meat entree for their first potluck dinner, so he cooked the Pturkeydactyl for them all to eat.

All of the male Pilgrims and Indians stuffed themselves silly, as usual, and succumbed to a food coma the next day in the barcaloungers while watching football on TV. The women Pilgrims and Indians left the comatose men to their Blackout Friday and had Benjamin fly them to New York City so they could go shopping at Macy's and Queen Victoria's Secret.

The end.

Put this anime into my Netflix queue, based on the interest mentioned by lordameth.

Quick summation: an interesting idea about cloned teenage fighter pilots fighting a perpetual war, but I was unable to bond with any character, nor appreciate the film in any way other than distantly philosophical.

And now, for something a bit more detailed (but not as detailed as 30 Days of Night, because good god, man!)( Read more... )

I caught (or rather was caught by) 30 Days of Night, the vampire movie that came out a few years ago. It showed last night on IFC and it just so happened I wasn't looking to do anything productive, so I started watching it. Really, that's all it started out as. "I'll give this 10-15 minutes and then move on."

I watched the entire damn thing. I kept thinking, "just another 10-15 mins, really, and then I'll do something else". Finally, I was so far into it that I felt obligated to see it to the end. Which is good, because otherwise I would have needed closure, and had to find and watch it again.

The thing is, I don't like horror films. I really haven't enjoyed the craze of vampires movies, whether in reimagining monsters or wallowing in immortal teenage angst. When the trailer for 30 Days of Night came out, with Josh Hartnett battling weird, angular, piranha mawed vampires, I said no.

But reimagined vampires aren't the heart of what makes the movie interesting and disturbing. It's the premise of what can happen in 30 days, and how that extended time frame is shown in the movie.

( the plot revealed in detail )

Despite my misgivings, it was a good movie. I'm sure the graphic novel is even better, but I doubt I will read it. It's one thing to catch the movie on TV in passing. It's another thing to seek out it actively. I thank those who wrote the story and made the movie for making both so well, even if there are fancypants vampires involved.

.... I could really use trees with autumn leaves that light up on overcast days.

I'm reading Why Read The Classics? by Italian fiction/fantasy/folklorist author Italo Calvino, whose turns of phrases I just adore.

Why Read The Classics? is full of individual reviews of his favorite books of the canonical "classics" category, which despite the drubbing that modern academics have given, Calvino feels is justifiable. Classic books are worthy of being considered above all others and are worth having lots of people read. It's even better if it turns out that you find them interesting or even enjoyable, but the fact remains that they are watershed moments in the writing of their time.

I'm impressed that Calvino considers a lot of non-European authors, although he sadly has not sampled much non-Western literature beyond some classical Islamic texts. But, if you can't read the work in the original language, and adept translations are not available, what can you do?

There's one quote he makes about another Italian author that I particularly enjoy:

"Gadda is a man of contradictions. An electro-technican engineer (he used his professional skills for about ten years, mostly abroad), he sought to control his hypersensitive and nervous temperament by means of a scientific, rational mentality, but only succeeded in making it worse; and he used his writing to give vent to his irritability, phobias, and outbursts of misanthropy, which he tried to suppress in real life by donning the mask of a gentleman from a bygone age full of courtesy and good manners."

This summation is a bit telling about those of us who like to adopt such masks.

There's another bit where he talks about a poem describing the staggering realization of turning around so quickly that you discover what you've always suspected: that the world behind you, beyond your vision, differs from what you saw before you turned away from it. In the poem's case, the discovery reveals that everything out of sight dissolves into nothingness. What I am tickled by is that he mentions an American Midwest frontier legend of the "hide-behind" -- a creature that lurks behind you as you walk through forests and that no matter how fast you turn, you'll never catch sight of it. I know of the hide-behind McBroom's Zoo, where a Midwestern farmer finds legendary creatures displaced by a tornado. McBroom actually turns around quickly enough to see the hide-behind, just as the poem's main character turns around to see the Void behind him.

Simply delighted :)

There's a difference between what I've visualized in my mind, and what I've drawn. The more fully rendered something is in one medium, the less likely I am to visualize it as fully in the other.

Things that I visualize in my mind can be drawn, but not very well. I can translate part of what I visualize mentally into an image on paper, but certain qualities can't be expressed properly. I usually end up having to adapt what I've seen in the hopes of giving a hint of what's missing, what should be there. But generally it fails. Frustration galore. Nowadays, I do a quick sketch and add some explanatory text, and leave it at that. The sketch and words are a reminder of what I imagined. They give me a handle to pull up all of the details and qualities out of fog of memory.

I draw best when I don't allow myself to visualize something completely in my mind. I start off with a specific concept, a strong impression -- "oh it should have this and be posed like this" -- but the less specific I am in what should be there, the easier a time I have in the process of drawing. I'm drawing from scratch, not reproducing something faithfully. The end is a something of a mystery. I don't know (and don't want to know) exactly what I'll end up with.

I'll start with a line, add another line, and continue adding lines, however I like. At some point, that collection of lines suggests something to me: "that's looking like a head". That gives me a focus for what could come next. A head implies there being the rest of the body -- a person, a monster, who knows? The features on the head indicate the mood or attitude of the being. They may also indicate a position or stance. If the being has this attitude and stance, what around them might they be reacting to? That means bringing other characters into the drawing, to fill the role needed. As it goes, a general concept will arise and I'll make changes to support the concept better, make it more distinct. However,I hesitate to changing the first few lines that started everything off; without them and the particular qualities they have, the drawing loses its point of origin.

It's like starting an avalanche. Drop a line onto the page, see what that sets off. Continue adding lines to feed the avalanche, and pull it all together in the end, if possible.

I'm learning, rather late, how to compose a drawing ahead of time, rather than wait for the composition to arise from what I've drawn. Set up the dominant elements first -- there should be a strong diagonal across here, and the perspective should be top-down. Then figuring out how arrange everything around those structural elements and add fiddly bits for my amusement.

The nice thing about having drawn a thing is that I don't have to reserve that memory in my head. To see something again, I have the drawing to go back to.

There've been a few times when I've drawn something that I thought I saw, when it was actually something else entirely, to show others what I imagined. In an gallery, someone had a framed picture of a red pencil line drawing of a nude woman sitting on the floor, resting her arms and head on the cushion of a chair. It emphasized the line from her back to her arms, curled around the dark mass of the chair cushion. When I first saw it, I couldn't make sense of the lines and shapes, and my pattern recognition resolved it into a red squirrel with a huge white belly, bent over backwards in exultation, holding a hardwon acorn in its paws (I imagined it silently saying "YES!!!"). That satisfied my need to know what the image was, and for a long time, I didn't look any more closely.

Finally, something in my brain suggested that very few people would draw an exulting squirrel, let alone frame it and hang it in a gallery (no matter how amusing I thought the idea was). I looked at the drawing more closely and saw, for the first time, the nude woman reclining on the cushion. Stunned, I described the incident to friends, who looked at me, confused. "No," they said, "it's always been a nude woman reclining on the cushion." I tried to point out the red squirrel to them, which they couldn't really see, no, sorry, uh uh. So I drew it for them (or redrew it for them?). Afterwards they agreed with me that, if viewed from a distance, squinting, it could indeed be an exulting squirrel.

Brushing your teeth and ending up with mint-flavored mucus is not an improvement.