Local synapses

tweet time.

Jul. 4th, 2008 at 12:16 AM

minutesofme

03:55 If I lived in MiddleEarth, I hope I would be one of the hobbitses. #

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Risque

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 10:14 PM

leolz

Risque, originally uploaded by leolz.

I am here with pjperez (not gay) for a gay promotional shindig. Open bar? Yes please.

Jul. 3rd, 2008

8:18 PM

sarahinvegas

I just saw myself on tv! They're airing the Last Comic Standing special that I went to with

leolz a while ago. I didn't know it was going to be on tonight, I was just lucky and stumbled upon it.

Mood: blah

Gut Reaction: 'Astonishing X-Men' No. 25

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 6:14 PM

popgoestheicon

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PopGoesTheIcon/~3/326270157/gut-reaction-astonishing-x-men-no-25.html

First, and totally unrelated to the matter at hand, is anyone else sick to death of those Flash ads that overtake your browser until you can figure out where the ad's designers cleverly hid the "close" button? I sure am. If I ever meet you bastards in a dark alley, I'm going medieval on your asses.

OK, back to my Gut Reaction to Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi's Astonishing X-Men #25: All I have to say is that if Uncanny X-Men #500 isn't better than this, I might be packing up my bags, kids. Astonishing isn't a bad comic, mind you, it's just ... it's a confluence of bad elements.

Ellis' dialog writing is tight. It's funny. It's irreverent. At its best, its reminiscent of the smarky-but-playful exchanges from the Chris Claremont-John Byrne era. But at its worst, its like that movie Juno: Every character is way too clever for their own good. The plot is OK, something about a murder mystery and a spaceship dumping groun in Indonesia, but it seems Ellis can't find that dialog-action balance that Peter David has masterfully demonstrated in everything he's written for 30 years. I mean, let's be honest here: Warren Ellis is a great writer, but he is not the right person for the X-Men.

Same goes for Bianchi. The Italian-born illustrator is a terrific, interesting artist. But his style is all wrong for any mainstream superhero comic. Combined with the dull, muddy colors of Simone Peruzzi, this comic is just hard to look at. That might be fine for a weighty, deep graphic novel, but let's face it, kids: This is an X-book. We need bright colors. We need defined action. We need something to spell out what the hell is happening in between Ellis' witty banter.

I might stick around another issue to see if this plot goes anywhere, because like I said, it's not a bad comic, but I have a feeling that as quickly as I put this title on my pull list, I'll be calling my LCS to cross it off.

BOOM!

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 3:44 PM

chris_walsh

Oh yes, Portland can have thunderstorms. It can have lightning. (Eugene can, too, but in the four years I lived there I could count the number of lightning strikes I heard on one hand. The thing is, thunder and lightning in Western Oregon is rare.)

I got to watch a distant lightning storm last night while being A) outside and B) not rained on, because rain hadn't reached Portland yet, as I sat in a lawn chair in a backayrd watching the Twilight Zone-ish black-and-white British science fiction film Unearthly Stranger. The eastern sky was lighting up -- mainly back-lighting the clouds to create these washes of white against the dingy grey of after-dusk -- and a breeze breezed, not yet insistently but with a hint of building punch, through SE Portland. The color was draining from my part of the world in an interesting way, with the black-and-white clouds above the black-and-white film.

(Interesting flick, by the way, working around its low budget much as '60s anthology shows like The Outer Limits or Alfred Hitchcock had to. Unearthly Stranger is the usually low-key -- though with rather hyped music telling you Uh-Oh Something Bad Is Happening -- story of scientists who keep dying on the verge of making a key discovery that, if built upon, would allow humans to travel to other worlds via the power of thought. The discovery is being withheld from humanity, however, by aliens who have already mastered this travel...and have appeared on Earth disguised as women. One alien-woman, the new wife of the scientist John Neville plays, complicates things: she clearly doesn't want to stop his work, and instead she wants to go native, which her fellow aliens do not want to happen. (Neither do kids, who somehow sense something's "off" about her: first a baby in a stroller cries at her, then dozens of grade schoolers in their schoolyard start to back away from her en masse.) Unearthly Stranger is from a different enough time and place (1963 Britain) that the mainly 20-something and 30-something crowd in the backyard found a lot more of it funny than Sixties audiences probably did; we're not used to the acting and filming styles employed. Still, we appreciated it. Writer D.K. Holm, the programmer of half of these movie nights and who was able to attend the very end of the screening, joked "that's the most boring film I'll show!")

Post-film, I treated myself to a sharply tasty Cherry Limeade Slurpee and drove home, then I went to bed. And for the first time in years was awakened by lightning and thunder. Almost immediately the thunder; the stormy weather had reached me. I wasn't yet to restful sleep, anyway, so I was jolted and shaken and close to full wakefulness in a moment. More almost-right-on-top-of-me strikes struck, obliterating for the time being my chances of getting back to sleep. For a moment of insanity, I thought of getting out of bed, getting on the computer and live-blogging the storm, before I thought Dude, using electricity during an electrical storm? Be glad you're awake enough to know that's a bad idea. I waited, watching through the slits in the blinds hoping to see something dramatic -- but not too dramatic, like a tree behind my place getting split in two The Natural-style.

I would like to say now that no tree behind my place was split in two The Natural-style. (Jeez, Chris, if you're gonna be a writer you might want to learn how to build suspence! Get better at making people say "And then?" And not in the Dude, Where's My Car? way, either!) The rain arrived and began to hammer, though, and for another moment of insanity I started to wonder if my car's window was slightly open, and that I should go out in the oh-my-God-Mother-Nature's-water-broke rain splatter and check it. I came to my senses then, too (good thing, 'cause my windows were rolled up tight, I discovered this morning) and simply waited, for the storm to ease (it did) and for me to fall asleep again (I did).

That was my night of not enough sleep, for good reasons and for not-as-good reasons.

Oh, and to borrow from myself, earlier I looked back at my dramatic-weather experience in a comment on this entry by author Cherie Priest:

Portland had that slamming-lightning weather last night: actually woke me up with one lightning strike really close to my apartment.

Before that, lightning was east of town, so while Portland was dry I got to hang out in a backyard, watching an old SF film projected onto an outside wall, with the sky lighting up soundlessly. Neat.

I'm a thunderstorm aficionado, as a lot of former Southern residents seem to be. (I lived for several years in Virginia Beach and then Northern Virginia. Spiritually not the South, not really, but geographically sort of Southern.) I was lucky enough never to go through really serious damage from these storms; never got hit by a hurricane, for instance, though I sat through storms that were close to hurricane-power in Virginia Beach. But being on the dry side of a sliding glass window: good times.

Jul. 3rd, 2008

4:39 PM

pinkindia

[16:15] Me: i think i had a little bit of a mental breakdown at work today
[16:16] That guy:

[16:16] That guy: are you ok?
[16:16] Me: oh yea, i'm fine
[16:17] Me: i just got to thinking
[16:17] Me: about how people go to work and do mindless stuff.
[16:17] Me: over and over
[16:17] Me: and how we don't really think much of it
[16:17] Me: but then i started thinking of it. A LOT
[16:17] Me: so then i just burst out into laughter
[16:17] Me: i couldn't stop laughing
[16:20] That guy: yeah
[16:20] That guy: I think about it sometimes
[16:20] That guy: but usually I get frustrated
[16:20] Me: me too. but this time i laughed
[16:21] Me: what the hell?
[16:21] That guy: it seems to be I could live my life a lot better than I think I am
[16:23] That guy: Well they say laughter is a mechanism to deal with stress
[16:23] Me: well
[16:23] Me: i guess that makes sense
[16:24] That guy: you get tired of being angry or depressed or scared so your mind just says "this is funny"
[16:25] That guy: it's kind of comforting that we built not to let ourselves take things too seriously
[16:25] Me: it is
[16:25] Me: i agree
[16:27] That guy: I drop a lot of contractions when I type

[16:27] Me: ARE YOU GOING INTO LABOR?
[16:28] That guy: boo
[16:28] Me:

[16:38] That guy:

Bellagio

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 1:08 PM

leolz

Bellagio, originally uploaded by leolz.

Here dropping off some media. The crowds are in full force!

How did I not notice the Robert Crumb exhibit under my nose?

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 11:57 AM

popgoestheicon

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PopGoesTheIcon/~3/326031538/how-did-i-not-notice-robert-crumb.html

Yesterday I went to the opening reception for "Pop: Images of the British Invasion" at Symbolic Gallery in Las Vegas, a collection of iconic black & white photos by Ian Wright. While his images of the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and the Moody blues were awesome, I was not aware that in a side gallery at Symbolic, there's a semi-permanent collection of Robert Crumb original artwork from the late-'60s and early-'70s.

I've never gotten into the underground comix stuff, but after spending a few hours in the gallery and actually reading most of the walls filled with framed R. Crumb art featuring characters such as Mr. Natural and Big Baby, I kinda think I might pick up a collection or two. The work is alternatively insightful, incendiary, salacious, ridiculous and plain fun -- which Crumb fans already know, but hey, I'm late to this party.

I tried to get some clear shots of the artwork, specifically one page that was going for more than $143,000, but my phone's camera was not being cooperative. If you live in or are visiting Las Vegas and want to see some of this legend's original art --including notebook sketches and other rarities -- up close, contact Symbolic Gallery at (702) 507-5263. They have awesome lowbrow art and an entire Johnny Cash room as well. Rad.

C A N D Y I C A N ' T L E T Y O U G O .

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 10:15 AM

beatnikside

As of today I have been living in Seattle for six years, and I've been living with my darlin'

4hour_ramona for six years minus four days or so. (I had to go back to Vegas to pick up the car.) Lorien looked it up and discovered that for the sixth anniversary we're supposed to give each other candy, so after work tonight we're going to find a decent candy store, eat handfuls of choccies and wash them down with Jolt Cola, and stomp around in circles while listening to Descendents records. The cats will regard us with the shocked expressions pictured above.

Six years. That's pretty wonderful, innit? I think so.

This made me lol

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 10:27 AM

leolz

The Life of Leonard Rosenman, Part One

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 8:28 AM

chris_walsh

Film Score Monthly, as it did for film music composers Basil Poledouris and Shirley Walker, has compiled an "in his own words" summing-up of the life of late film composer Leonard Rosenman. He was the often modernistic composer who scored (among others) Rebel Without a Cause, Fantastic Voyage, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Barry Lyndon, and the '70s animated Lord of the Rings. Part One ran this week, where he speaks of his friendship with James Dean and his entrance into film scoring with East of Eden:

I knew absolutely nothing about films, and I asked for something I thought was impossible. I wanted to go through the whole process, from beginning to end, to watch the filming, work with the actors, and let the music be an integral part of the film...

On East of Eden, I went along on location; I wrote the scenes while the film was being shot. I worked with Kazan right from the first day of shooting. And when the film was rough-cut the music was rough-cut. I played the music for the actors before they went out to do their scenes. In scenes where the music carries forth the rhythm of the scene rather than the dialogue, Kazan let me dictate the action of the scene by directing it with me like an opera. To my amazement, he said that he had often wanted to work like that. That's ideal.

More Our Town

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 6:47 AM

brush_rat

For those of you who liked reading about me firing a machine gun, here's a link to me writing about being beaten with sticks.

Stratosphere #390

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 6:45 AM

brush_rat

"Can Batman and Robin outwit such a cunning trio?"

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 12:01 AM

prog_ruin

http://www.progressiveruin.com/2008_06_29_archive.html#6087225552078072074

Now while that does look like an impressive lair for this trio of Batman baddies, one can't help but notice some...deficiencies. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this cutaway does exclude necessities that, perhaps, were located in the area that was cut away, allowing for a more uncluttered view.

Even with that being so, the Vulture doesn't appear to have much room for anything:

Sure, he's got plenty of room to play "Dogfight" with his model pla...er, I mean, "generate and practice strategy for future aerial criminal endeavors." I'm guessing he has room, maybe, for a fold-out couch or something...maybe that was against the opposite wall.

The kitchen's not bad...pretty sizable, and while I'm sure we're missing something that's been cut away, the presence of pots and pans implies at least some form of stove...unless they're being used to prepare cold foods, or, ahem, they're being used to address the bathroom problem (see below).

~~I can't tell if that's some kind of vent about the fridge, or a stack of really large pancakes, or big serving platters, or what.~~ (EDIT: Read the comments to see me get schooled in the ways of '50s refrigerators.) I don't see a door to get in, either.

The Fox has it pretty good:

Plenty of room, even has a stool, and lots of theoretical not-visible-in-this-cutaway space for a bed, or some kind of barcalounger.

It's the Shark that got screwed, at least when it comes to headroom:

At least he seemed to be reasonably furnished, and plus, he has direct access to the ocean. I don't see anyway way in, but since he's beneath ground level, maybe there are some exterior "basement access" doors we're not seeing.

Another thing I'm not seeing is any kind of plumbing, which again, might be obscured by the cutaway. Or maybe there's an outhouse just off panel we're not seeing. Or, as I referred to earlier, perhaps those pots and pans are being used to collect their leavings for later disposal (i.e. dumped into the ocean). The Shark's got it easy...he's already got a big hole in the middle of his floor....

images from Detective Comics #253 (Mar 1958), reprinted in Batman #176 (Dec 1965)

Jul. 3rd, 2008

3:18 AM

i_heartdynamics

They'll probably fix it, but there's some really great stuff going on with some of the translations related to the Bettencourt Incident. This is my favorite thus far. After awhile, the voice starts to separate. Sounds like Steve Reich on a Klonopin bender.

tweet time.

Jul. 3rd, 2008 at 12:20 AM

minutesofme

16:59 I prefer qualitative over quantitative. I also prefer print to broadcast. In other words: depth over breadth. #

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Whoa.

Jul. 2nd, 2008 at 11:59 PM

chris_walsh

Possibly the longest copy in existence of Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis has been unearthed in Argentina, including several long-thought-lost scenes. (Here's another quick article.)

Mood: impressed
Music:Johnny Cash, "The Man Comes Around"

Jul. 2nd, 2008

10:05 PM

leolz

I don't usually do questionnaire memes, but... well... the mood hit me.

I swear I didn't cheat, but I so happen to be an Aquarius anyways, so it appears to be pretty accurate. I hope a certain someone can keep up. *grin*

Your Sex Sign is...

You're a 22nd century lover - without any rules or hangups.
You're a typical 'trysexual'... well versed in the bedroom and curious about everything you haven't tried.
You give everyone you run into the most exotic sex ever.

Aquarius, you are a 22nd century sexual being.
Your tastes and attitudes are totally futuristic.

You are very adventurous and curious about everything.
Aquarians are the 'seekers' of the Zodiac.
You aren't possessive or materialistic - and you make your own rules.

Your sexual personality is exotic and bohemian.
You love to talk about sex - anywhere, anytime.
You enjoy hearing about other people's sexual exploits, and you completely unshockable.

You reached sexual maturity at an early age.
You have had many varied sexual relationships, and you have dabbled in just about anything - if only for the experience.
Above all, you aspire to become better and better in bed.
You love to be taught new sexual tricks.

You love to experiment sexually.
You have a preference for the most exotic sex positions - Hindu, Japanese, and especially Tantric.

'What is your Sex Sign?'

at QuizUniverse.com

Best all-you-can-eat sushi/sashimi?

Jul. 2nd, 2008 at 10:07 PM

jacqueline1776

lasvegas

Which are the best all-you-can-eat sushi/sashimi buffets and restaurants in town, open for lunch? Thanks!

Mood: hungry

And now for something completely different.

Jul. 2nd, 2008 at 9:30 PM

brush_rat

For those of you who were wondering if I was capable of producing non-phalic tower content anymore, here's a link to the View blog featuring video I shot of a delightful old hippy turning a nickel into art.

tweet time.

Risque

Jul. 3rd, 2008

Gut Reaction: 'Astonishing X-Men' No. 25

BOOM!

Jul. 3rd, 2008

Bellagio

How did I not notice the Robert Crumb exhibit under my nose?

C A N D Y I C A N ' T L E T Y O U G O .

This made me lol

The Life of Leonard Rosenman, Part One

More Our Town

Stratosphere #390

"Can Batman and Robin outwit such a cunning trio?"

images from Detective Comics #253 (Mar 1958), reprinted in Batman #176 (Dec 1965)

Jul. 3rd, 2008

tweet time.

Whoa.

Jul. 2nd, 2008

Best all-you-can-eat sushi/sashimi?

And now for something completely different.

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