No embloggination today; shooting dinos at the Houston Zoo.
There are days this is the greatest job on Earth.
Monsters in the library
I am bemused by the fact that my Sherlock Holmes post of a few days ago has randomly generated a link to a “New Jonas Brothers Myspace blog” as being “possibly related”. Even the Great Detective would have trouble with that one.
So in my latest haul from the library, I have a tome from the John Stanley Collection, Melvin Monster. John Stanley is probably better known for Little Lulu; Melvin Monster ran only nine issues, but it’s a bizarre, utterly charming book. Melvin lives in Monsterland in a horrible house with his monstrous parents, Mummy and Baddy. Mummy, needless to say, actually is a mummy, and Baddy has given up on his son because he wants to go to school and be nice to people.
Melvin was around from 1965-1968, during a great monster boom in popular culture brought on by the rediscovery of the Universal horror flicks via TV, and magazines like Famous Monsters. There was literally not much else like Melvin on the marketplace, except possibly The Milton the Monster Show. a cartoon with a suspiciously similar name but lacking the whimsy of Melvin.
Aaah! Noooo! Take it away!
The book from Drawn & Quarterly is a thing of beauty, from the binding to the printing – even the pages within have a yellow cast reminiscent of yellowing newsprint. These folks are serious about their publications; this book is the sort of handsome beast I would love to have on my bookshelf. The John Stanley Collection is apparently an ongoing project, and I looking forward to future volumes – especially if they go further into his career, and eventually reprint issue #1 of Ghost Stories, a comic which still give me the creeps decades later, and raised such a furor among parents that Stanley was never let near a horror book again, which is a damned shame.
Probably the most famous of the nightmare makers was the story that led off the book, “The Monster of Dread End”, and luckily for you, (or perhaps unluckily, depending on how well you sleep at night), The Horrors of It All has scanned it and put it up on the Web for your reading… heh… pleasure.
Dormez bien.
Gettin’ all Sherlock Holmes on ya
First things first: despite misgivings, Lisa performed in the show last weekend. She did great, but was totally exhausted. Sugars generally staying under 200, which is a pretty dramatic change from her last few months, when any slight dip under 200 was cause for celebration.
While flipping through channels yesterday, found myself watching the last ten minutes of the Hammer Hound of the Baskervilles on a local station. Not my favorite version, but a good, solid one nonetheless. Cushing is a remarkably unsympathetic Holmes (he’s much more likable in the BBC series he did later), and Christopher Lee seems uncomfortable in the somewhat boring Baskerville role – but Hammer movies are pretty much always entertaining, and at the very least, pretty.
But what this did was kick my usual lust for Holmes back into my forebrain. I mean, I even sought out that gawdawful Asylum attempt to cash in on the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes, entitled, surprisingly enough, Sherlock Holmes. That link will take you to Chris Sims’ review of it, so I don’t have to dwell on it too long. I believe my reaction at the time of watching it was, “This is a movie deliberately designed to piss me off.” But let me quote Mr. Sims:
“Believe it or not, this was actually the first Worst of Netflix selection that I was actually looking forward to watching, for the simple fact that it’s got SHERLOCK HOLMES FIGHTING A DINOSAUR on the cover. Call me a man of simple tastes, but that is literally all I need to hear to get excited about something, and that’s before you throw in the sea monster and the dragon that are also pictured on the cover.”
Don't do it, man - you'll regret it!
Oh, if only it were worth that excitement. Now, there are some good points: they pull off a period movie on an obviously small budget quite well, and the acting is several cuts above Asylum’s usual fare. Gareth David-Lloyd’s Watson and William Huw’s Lestrade are particularly good. But the script is a pretty horrifying wreck, invents an entirely new brother for Holmes (when Lestrade says, “I talked to your brother,” I assumed he was speaking of Mycroft), and we find out Sherlock is not his first name, because David or whatever the hell it was wasn’t a good first name for a detective. It also would have been good if I hadn’t had to wait for the end credits to find out that the villain was supposed to be Spring-Heeled Jack.
We’re not even going to talk about how the history books have shamefully overlooked that London was attacked by a fire-breathing dragon in 1890.
The disc is at Half-Price Books. God help me, I should probably buy it.
Fortunately, what I did have to hand was a pre-viewed disc of the movie whose coat-tails the Asylum job was attempting to ride: the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes. I’d seen it in the theater, of course – this was one of the few offerings that could make me overcome my complete antipathy toward what movie houses have become and get me into a comfy stadium seat. I rather enjoyed it, and spent some time defending it to my friends who were getting huffy about the obviously disrespectful tone.
Again, as with his casting as Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies, Robert Downey Jr. brings some life lessons to his portrayal of the brilliant, on-again off-again drug addict Holmes (I still haven’t seen Iron Man II, so I don’t know if they’ve alluded to Stark’s alcoholism yet); they possibly went a bit far in deflating Holmes a bit, but I still find it within Canonical limits.
Hell, yes, I'd watch this movie.
But what I came out of the theater with was a newfound respect for Jude Law, who is an incredible Watson. I generally find my opinion of any Holmes venture rests on the treatment of Watson, and Law’s is a crackerjack. Actors cast as Watson seem to tend to be older than Holmes, which I suppose is a conceit that started with the Nigel Bruce/Basil Rathbone pairing (though Bruce was actually three years younger than Rathbone). I’m not a hardcore Holmesian enough to pull out the character’s relative ages, but the more or less contemporaneous pairing of this movie feels right. And Law is the first Watson I’ve seen since Robert Duvall to play the limp, the result of the Jazeel bullet that put an end to Watson’s military career.
No, the only problem I have with the movie is the character of Irene Adler, who has somehow become the Victorian equivalent of Catwoman. Rachel McAdams is pretty enough, but seems dreadfully miscast; then, the character is not given that much to do. I am also sorrowful that the DVD is a bare-bones affair. I would have loved to find out how much research was done for the period, and those fabulous CGI vistas of a London over a century gone.
Inevitably, there’s a sequel in the works. They’ve certainly seemed to set up a Final Problem adaptation with the shadowy Moriarty a presence in this first film, but I dare hope for a Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Sherlock vanishes for the middle portion of the story, and Watson steps to the fore as the confident, capable fellow we all know him to be. Until Holmes shows back up and starts mucking things up.
"Did he actually say we fought a dinosaur?" "Well, I believe we now know who stole my drugs, old man."
Weekends? And those are-?
Results of Lisa’s follow-up visit: she’s a mess. There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this. Dosages were increased, new meds given, come back in a month. Her sugars are still high, but within a narrowing range; they’re not roller-coastering all over the place like they were before she went into the hospital.
I’d like to think fondly of the coming restful weekend, but nothing could be further from the truth. I have a meeting later this afternoon with some folks I’ve done script work for in the past, hopefully meaning there is more work in the wings. Rehearsal tonight, and a show tomorrow night. Last week’s show was canceled due to a lack of ticket sales (and a good thing, too, I guess, what with getting Lisa out of the hospital and motoring around to get prescriptions filled and picking up dinner during what would normally be show time). I’m more than a little concerned because Lisa also performs in the show, and I’m not sure if she’s physically up to it. Naturally, pushing herself to the edge and beyond is one of the things – the major thing – that got her into the hospital in the first place.
Anyway: think good thoughts for me, especially on the new work front. We still have no idea what those four days in the hospital cost, but extra money would be nice. Grocery bags full of it would be even better.
And I thought I’d run out of steam
I seem to be out of righteous dudgeon today. So please breathe a sigh of relief, then grit your teeth as I get boring again.
First things first: Lisa’s follow-up appointment is today. We’ll see what good and bad comes of that.
I’ve re-started my project to read the complete Cerebus series; I had reached a more-or-less natural stopping point after Volume 10/issue #200, and took the opportunity to decompress a bit. I just checked, and the Cereblog, the site that got me onto this kick, hasn’t updated in a year. I’m not going into it on such a magnifying-glass manner as they (for one thing, I spent a lot on these phone books – several of them autographed – and don’t want to set them on fire, har de har), but I will be talking about them soon. So those of you who get all huffy when I talk about comics, sorry, but they’re at least as big a part of my life as movies.
In the meantime I read a whatchacallit, actual book, you know, one without pictures. I don’t know why I went years and years without a library card, since I live in a county with a county-wide library system that has access to thousands upon thousands of books, and that’s without even accessing Interlibrary loans. I’d wanted to read Gene Wolfe’s latest book, An Evil Guest, for some time, but hadn’t really had the opportunity until now.
Wolfe doesn’t write your typical genre-related novels, and this one was no exception. Set a hundred years in the future, it concerns an actress named Cassie Casey who finds herself an ofttimes willing pawn in an undefined power struggle between two men who appear to be sorcerers. The story, though, is largely told from the point of view of Cassie, who gets so overwhelmed by the floodtide of events that analysis is defied. The last quarter of the book takes a radical turn in tone, and Lovecraftian elements come to the fore. If Cloverfield was a daikaiju flick told from the point of view of a member of those nameless crowds fleeing Godzilla, An Evil Guest becomes, at the end, a complicated pulp story related by Margo Lane, who never had time at the end of the adventure to be debriefed by the Shadow. I’m going to be mulling this one for a while, which is a good way to feel about a novel.
I’ve also been slowly draining the Fort Bend Library system of all their comic content, which is, gladly, going to take a while. I’m gleeful to discover they have the E.C. Segar Popeye collections, which I’ve lusted after forever and a day, and now I can at least read them, if not own them – at least as soon as they travel from their far-flung branches. I’m currently plowing through The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen, reprinting some of the batshit crazy stories from Jimmy’s book, Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, in which the ginger chump is turned into a genie, a giant turtle (“What is on his huge,twisted turtle mind?” wonders Superman), and horror of horrors, a fat person. Since, as we all know, fat people are hideous freaks.
Also in my possession for a few weeks is DC Universe – The Stories of Alan Moore, which contains some Moore stories I actually hadn’t read (I had not thought that possible). But one of the first books I checked out was also by Moore, a story I hadn’t read but only heard about: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
Whatever Happened -? was the coda to umpteen years of continuity, before the John Byrne-penned Man of Steel reboot (which, frankly, I never liked). It takes place in the the-near future of 1997, as a reporter interviews a retired Lois Lane on the 10th anniversary of Superman’s disappearance. Leading up to Superman’s vanishing act is an all-out war with his old foes, all of which have turned from relatively harmless bank robbers and schemers to outright murderous lunatics, leading up to a climax with a bunch of cast members dead and Superman walking into a room with gold kryptonite (which destroys his super-powers) after he’s committed the unforgivable – to him – sin of destroying the being responsible for all the mayhem before it can kill himself or Lois.
And this is one of the more sedate moments from Rise of Arsenal
Finally reading this story after all these years – a quarter-century after it appeared, apparently – something occurred to me. Moore is one of the people who changed comic book superheroes forever with Watchmen, and judging from what I’ve read of modern offerings from DC, Whatever Happened-? is more or less providing the blueprint for the currently slaughterrific state of affairs there. Every DC comic I read these days seems to have at least one horrific murder (often more) in what seems to be a race to out-grit Marvel, and which I suspect is going to lead to another Seduction of the Innocents-type social backlash.
Well, at least we can’t blame Whatever Happened -? for the rash of DC rapes and near-rapes in the last few years. For that we have to go to The Killing Joke, also by Moore, also in the DC Universe collection.
Too bad that so few people working in comics today took something else from Moore’s work: quality writing.
Too Much Time on Their Hands
Hurm. Didn’t mean for yesterday’s post to turn into a mini-rant, but it did. Which leads to an analysis of why it did. What I meant to be an amusing anecdote became a full-blown complaint, and you know who I blame? Internet comments.
To put it in purely geek terms, conversations are the internet comments you can’t ignore, and you should always ignore internet comments. Yet, like that extremely vocal argument taking place across the street, you just can’t resist glancing over, can you? Taking just one peek. Maybe something interesting will happen; but no, like comments threads, it is usually merely tawdry and depressing.
If you want your nose rubbed in exactly how stupid, crass and uninspiring the bulk of the human race can be, all you need to do is look underneath any YouTube video. The most saintly among us would be rationalizing euthanasia within five comments.
To digress slightly – yeah, I know, big surprise – I made the mistake a few times of clicking “Everyone Near You” on UberTwitter, my Crackberry’s Twitter app, and, to quote Goering, that’s when I reach for my revolver. Using Trending Topics is equally horrifying. I think it was Kevin Church who had the bright idea to change the Trending Topic locale to Brazil – at least now I can’t understand them, and they can’t hurt me.
Now. To get back to what I was bloviating about: A few months ago, I was looking at some Internet video, or possibly some incredibly complex Lego creation, or… well, it wasn’t this video, but it was something like it:
I think you can imagine what the comments ran to, and I am going to admit that I have been guilty of trotting this one out far too often: “Somebody had way too much time on their hands.”
The difference is – and here is one of those instances when, like the argument across the street, I looked and something interesting did happen – this time somebody had a good rejoinder, to the effect of “Why do people say things like that, and always when something creative is involved?”
And they’re right. Alex Varanese didn’t do that animation in just a few minutes. It took time, and the patience of a thousand monks. Were I my former, relentlessly negative self, I would opine that a better reply would be, “That’s right, he had time on his hands, and he didn’t use it watching American Idol or sitting on his fat ass staring at a computer monitor and taking pointless evil potshots under cover of anonymity like you, you worthless piece of—”
Well, as I say, I’m not like that anymore (though I can certainly fantasize about it. Just like I fantasize tracking every idiot down on “Everyone Near You” and smashing their smartphones to dust with a ballpeen hammer. I’m not that guy anymore). But that one comment, that was truth. Every time I had said “Somebody had way too much time on their hands,” I was probably motivated by jealousy, in one way or another. And it was just plain wrong to be so dismissive of someone else’s work, to trivialize it as something some idiot did while they were bored.
So I’ve been working to remove that phrase from my vocabulary, and for what it’s worth, I think that’s where my sturm and my drang over “I gave up on that <arbitrary amount of time> ago” came from yesterday.
I gave up on that years ago
At the very least, I found my wristwatch and wedding ring.
Attempts to return to a normal life continue; I’m back to trying to get through to the media relations folks at the Houston Zoo to shoot the footage I need for the second half of my July story. My hair did not get miraculously shorter (just thinner and grayer) over the weekend, so I need to take care of that. Yes, various utilities, I know you require my attention and money but I’ve been busy.
The oddest thing: despite, well, massive indifference among my peers, I’ve been itching to get back to my project of reading the entire run of Cerebus. It’s not so much indifference as Tweets to effect of “I gave up on it about (name of story arc)”. I know, I know, so did I. The exact point is kind of problematic for me, as I kept trying to get back into it. I’m about to start volume 11, Guys, and I know I’ve read parts of it, I can remember at least one bit with fair clarity, yet most of the stuff in the preceding two volumes were news to me.
The “I gave up on that” meme has been floating around in my life a lot lately. Most notably during the final season of Lost, when every mention I made of the show was almost inevitably followed by a sniff and a vaguely superior “Oh, I gave up on that years ago.” Well, (to channel Paul Lynde, who has also been in my life a bit much of late) good fer you. I guess you cured cancer in the time you saved.
What really brings it to a head was just before our last crapfest, when Dave had, prior to our arrival, been watching some box set or other of ‘Allo, ‘Allo, and I mentioned that ever since seeing Inglourious Basterds, it was impossible for me to watch a scene in the cafe without expecting it to degenerate into a bloody firefight. This gave rise to a universal, “Yeah, I haven’t seen it, I gave up on Tarantino a long time ago” chorus.
Okay, folks are entitled to their opinion. No, wait, folks are entitled to their informed opinions. “I gave up on that years ago” is not an informed opinion. My movie watching is full of instances of giving directors, actors, writers another chance, and it pays off. Brian DePalma usually gives me a rash, but The Untouchables is one of my favorite movies. So I think that ignoring an Academy Award-winning movie because you somehow associate the director with Pogs or Push Pops or similar embarrassing crap that you left behind when you grew up is just plain stupid.
Yeah, I expect this to bite me on the ass sometime in the future, when I get high and mighty about something in some media or other. Probably when someone tries to get me to watch a Brian DePalma movie. And it will serve me right.
There have been rougher weekends
…and more tiring, but I didn’t live through those.
As you know if you follow me on Twitter (and if you don’t, why not? I’m not that annoying), on Saturday, the hospital made Lisa a deal: if she could keep her lunch down, she could go home. She was intensely excited to get a choice of soft foods for her lunch, instead of the usual nourishing chicken gruel (“it looks like bad gravy”), and chose beef stew, which she did, indeed, keep down. The fact that they shot her full of something that put her to sleep afterward may have helped.
Eventually, though there had been a spike in her sugars in the morning, she was given the okay to go home. After waiting a couple of hours for paperwork and someone to pilot the wheelchair to get her downstairs. Okay, waiting for the wheelchair was my fault, but after supporting her in the brief walk to the bathroom, I knew there was no way she was making it to the elevator, much less all the way down to the lobby and front doors.
Which resulted in my pulling up to the pharmacy five minutes after it closed (6pm on Saturdays. Really?). Walk her into the house, get her settled, then head back out to a 24-hour pharmacy to get the new prescriptions filled. While they worked on that, buy some groceries in a scattered, unfocused way. Then stop at Chili’s to get a cheeseburger, because the invalid demands one, and I cannot say I blame her. It’s not like I’m up for cooking.
I get all that done, and it’s my turn to collapse. The cheeseburger is wolfed down, which is quite heartening (my wife does not wolf – that’s my job).
It’s astounding how behind I had gotten on a lot of stuff. Okay, not astounding, it’s only to be expected – but astounding to me… it somehow still felt like Thursday. I had been reading Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest and always went to the hospital with it, but rarely got more than a paragraph or two read. To no one’s surprise, I was up until 2am that night, catching up on reading.
And awakened at 7am by the sounds of cat rugby in the hall. The smaller cat reminds me of the kid in the movie Parenthood who likes to hit things with his head. Except that the cat does not put a bucket on its head. I get up and feed the damned things, then shoo them away from the dog’s food until she comes down to protect her food herself. One of life’s injustices: we moved the cat food bowls up onto a table so the dog couldn’t eat their food, and now they feel entitled to eat hers at will. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I’ll leave it up to the pundits to craft it.
After an hour of playing Lone Ranger over the dog food, I climbed back into bed, thankful it was Sunday and such things were possible. Like an idiot, I hadn’t put my phone on silent, and people starting calling to check on Lisa. Like a freaking idiot, I didn’t put it on silent after the first person called.
There was another trip to the grocery store – this time a list was involved – and an eventual nap. (PS. the alarm on a Blackberry is CHRISTALMIGHTY LOUD) Now, on Monday morning, I think I detect a few more gray hairs on the rapidly thinning thatch atop my head, and strange leftovers litter my life. The towels that never got folded, the laundry merely tossed on the floor. I have daily taken off my wristwatch and my wedding ring and placed them in the same place for years, and today I have no idea where they might be.
There have been rougher weekends, but I didn’t live through them.
My new favorite image, above, is from BoingBoing, and the story is here.
If you were wondering
There is a slight possibility Lisa will be coming home today, but it’s much more likely to be tomorrow. Her blood sugars were still hovering around 300 yesterday, and I’m told by other acquaintances who have been longtime diabetics that when they get so high, it takes several days to get them back under control.
I helped her to the bathroom so she could brush her hair and teeth, and both made her feel better, but the effort completely wiped her out. She hasn’t even turned on the TV, which is probably the most worrisome thing. They finally allowed her to have food, but she’s also quite nauseous, so Jell-O 1, Lisa 0.
Still haven’t gotten my 12 hours sleep, bourbon, or pony. Did remember to take my vitamins this morning, however. Nico the Mutant Cat is constantly yelling at me that his favorite blond pillow has gone missing. Also: pug-dog banging on my door to tell me my alarm clock was going to go off in five minutes. My morning. Very tired.
LATER-THAT-DAY UPDATE: She’s still not keeping any food down, so they’re keeping her for another night.
drfreex.com 