Bodega

New link: Bodega. They publish some tasty looking comics, and unlike most comics publishers I'm into nowadays the comics are available in small affordable formats, not enourmous expensive coffee-table formats. Although I like the coffee-table formats too.

Someday I will be able to afford a two-dollar comic book, and on that day I will place an order with Bodega.

Over the weekend I...

1. saw a couple of shows, both on their last night (Chicago, which I've never seen but which is now on my short list of favorite musicals, and 'Night Mother, which the women in the audience seemed to respond to on a deep level, but us guys just found it depressing).

2. Didn't do all the cleaning I meant to do.

3. Bought Jason Thompson's new book Manga: The Complete Guide. It's pretty depressing. It's mostly capsule reviews of manga titles available in English, and for all that Thompson is a manga translator, editor and fan, his book really drove home the corporate-driven formulaic sameness of most manga. I was an early adopter of manga in the West, but the novelty value's worn off. Osamu Tezuka and Moyoko Anno are two I'm still willing to spend money and time on, and I don't regret my big collection of old Rumiko Takahashi stuff, but otherwise the thrill is gone.

4. Reread Chekov's The Seagull (Chekov is evergreen).

5. Waddled around a bit but compensated by eating a wheelbarrow full of chocolate.

6. Woke up nauseous on Sunday and missed church. Is there such a thing as a dessert hangover?

7. Watched Pootie Tang, a movie my friend J'miza swears buy. It more or less spoofs junk TV and junk movies. I can see why it would resonate with J'miza, whose sensibilities have been shaped by loads of junk culture, but my parents mostly banned TV when I was growing up, so it didn't really hit home with me. My favorite parts involved hysterical women, for reasons I'm afraid to think about too hard.

Last week I watched The Passenger, about which I wrote nothing. This week I watched Pootie Tang, about which I wrote quite a bit. How embarrassing! I guess I'll say this about Passenger, which was directed by Antonioni and stars Jack Nicholson:

1. Nicholson's famous for his hammy acting, but he's really good at subtle underplaying too.

2. Antonioni's color stuff doesn't excite me the way his black and white stuff does. Black-and-white suits the spareness of his films, and brings out textures that color overpowers.

3. They should steal the ending of The Passenger for a Bond movie. Bond fans would argue about it forever.

4. I'm one of the many viewers who wanted to like the film but thought the thriller aspects of it got in the way of the angsty drama, and the angsty drama got in the way of the thriller aspects. Bring back old Antonioni where the whole story is people who love each other, but only a little bit, meandering around and feeling bad!

A couple jottings

Ancient abstract art. It pleases me to think that abstract painting isn't a Twentieth Century invention, but that it has an ancient pedigree.

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A few days ago I read the prologue to a book titled "Tales Before Tolkien" which stated that Tolkien himself saw his work as an outgrowth of the Heroic Romance, rather than the novel. This cleared up one of the big questions in my life as a nerd: as much as I love Fantasy, Tolkien doesn't thrill me. A few years back I decided to reinvestigate the genre I loved as a kid, and I found that, like Brian Aldiss (who, in his critical history Billion Year Spree, compared and contrasted passages of Tolkien with passages from Peake) I regard Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and Gormenghast as my preferred key fantasy novels (although, also like aldiss, I'll concede it's a matter of taste). Peake's novels, like most fo the genre novels I enjoy, draw more from the lineage of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens than from this stuff. Although I was spellbound by The Worm Ouroboros in high school, and loved the Arthurian romances I read in college, so I guess I can enjoy the Romances (not to be confused with romance novels) too. Looks like I need to revisit Tolkien with my new understanding of his genre lineage

Larry Langford Elected Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-H. L. Mencken

Tidy Art Vs. Drunk Art

Over on the M. John Harrison blog the idiosyncratic fantasy writer offers Dionysian advice to those who would be his peers. Check it out here. I posted a link in the comments to fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay's website In which Kay offers a more Apollonian approach to fantasy. I like both writers and both approaches, but in thinking about this I got to thinking about how Apollonian or Dionysian I am.

As I understand it, an Apollonian approach emphasises form, specificity and structure. It's controlled and conscious. A Dionysian approach breaks down the orderly distinctions of Apollonian art much like drunkenness breaks down our conscious and subconscious social controls. Bach is Appolonian; G. G. Allin is not.

Well, personally I'm just Apollonian enough to be uptight and just Dionysian enough to be a slob. As an actor I suppose I try to blend the two approaches. Appolonianism(?) helps me learn my lines, Dionysianism (??) allows me to tap into all the parts of myself that I usually try to keep under tight wraps and put them on parade when it's time to play someone who's letting the icky side of the Human come out. I reckon most actors have the same basic blend of A and D. I've noticed improvists do better with "drinking a lot before a show" than actors do, which says it all about the level of Appolonianism (???) in improv.

Minor grammatical editing because I'm ashamed to think folks from these skilled writers' blogs would check this post out and have their retinas burned by awful English usage. There's probably a host of remaining solecisms I'm missed, though.

At Last, Poor Yorick

Everything's great except I'm broke and out of shape. And my apartment is still not in a state I'd feel comfortable showing to anyone. But hey, this gives me plenty of goals towards which to work, right? "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" as Camus said.

Anyway, I'm doing the Shakespeare at Sloss Autumn gig, and it promises to be a blast. I'm Horatio in the graveyard scene; basically Hamlet talks and I interject the occasional "E'en so, my Lord." The premise of this show is that guides lead the audience around Sloss Furnace, an old industrial site, and at various points along the tour folks do excerpts from The Bard. Our site is an enigmatic patch of the Furnace park; a walled-off, arid abandoned industrial field straight out of J. G. Ballard. No one seems to know what it was for, but they call it Industrial Stonehenge, and it does look like some sort of graveyard memorial site. I can't wait to stage this scene on the site: this is the kind of play (in the verb sense) I think I'm ready for; classic material, modern industrial setting. Something about this blend satisfies my soul.

Can You Kill Me Now?

I've remained a Luddite on cel phones. For some reason I can't put my finger on, I always get depressed whenever I see more than two pedestrians in a row talking on cel phones. A while back it occurred to me that I should actually celebrate this; instead of walking alone, these people are connecting with their fellow human beings, and it's so important that we make and maintain those connections, right?

Then I heard this on NPR's Fresh Air. Jeez louise, cel phones cook brains. A few decades from now will people's cel phones have been absorbed into their rippling, pulsating head tumors like some kind of infected cybernetic graft?

That may be an appropriate fate. Twice now-twice!-I've gone into public restrooms and heard guys pleading with their women to take them back while simultaneously taking thunderous bowel movements. And once I walked into a public restroom and heard a guy openly having phone sex in a toilet stall. Giving the whole world brain cancer may be God's way of correcting these errors.