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Robert N. Lee's LiveJournal:
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| Friday, December 21st, 2012 | | 12:00 am |
| | Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | | 9:43 pm |
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – the Worst Movie Ever Made, No Shit.
Theodore Roszak is primarily known, unless you’re a movie geek, as the academic who wrote The Making of a Counterculture way back when. TMofaC was a Big Deal attempt to explain hippies to straights that got on public television and everything.
If you are a movie geek, you likely know him for only one thing, one of his successful efforts at popular fiction over the years: Flicker. To the uninitiated (And it’s not like this is a culty-cult – the novel was quite popular twenty years ago when released, it’s just not much-remembered now, as happens with popular novels, and is now back in print, I think. But my copies used to be more eBayable.): Flicker is one of those sort of Pynchon/Eco-lite novels, which is going to make you think of Da Vinci Code immediately, and I do apologize.
No, Flicker wasn’t written for people who don’t know how to read, like Dan Brown’s books. (Nor was it written solely for people who love taking drugs, like Illuminatus!) It’s not as deep or clever or mysterious as it wishes it were, maybe, but if it’s not a great book, it’s a smart one, anyway, and it’s all about a secret history to the movies, tied to a pending religious apocalypse. And it’s about being a movie geek. So, obviously, this is like the second lodge sign when you meet another one: you drop a joke about or reference to Flicker and see if they get it.
So anyway, Michael Bay has finally done it and turned completely into Simon Dunkle.
You should really read that book.
***
Roszak’s kind of a crank, and I have to agree with the Ty Burr EW review quoted in the Wikipedia article: the second half of the novel, about the devolution of the movies, is shrill and totally Get Off My Lawn.
One of the most disheartening things about getting older is watching people my age start up with that Nothing’s as Good as It Was When shit. No, the music wasn’t better, the roads weren’t safer and the candy bars didn’t taste better when you were ten. And everybody thinks that. It’s so common a human mental aberration as we age, the ancient Jews felt compelled to warn all members of future Earth monotheisms that the notion was foolish, five thousand years or so ago. (Really, it’s in the Bible: it’s stupid to believe it when people say "The old days were better." Even the one your church uses. Look it up.)
Roszak clearly doesn’t like the cult/camp thing that started up around the time he made his bones as a social critic, and basically turns the acceptance of love for Ed Wood and the rise of John Waters into The End of Days, intellectually, culturally and for-really. This is, I think even my most conservative friend – aesthetically and socially – who isn’t a total idiot would agree, overstating things wildly.
Roszak’s kind of a dick on the subject, but it’s forgivable because he knows so much about and loves the movies the same way you do, and the story’s compelling and nobody’s a movie geek without feeling at least a little that way about a lot of movies. If you were happy with the stuff that makes everybody else happy, you wouldn’t have started looking for other movies behind the movies you liked when you were small, and pushed on and ended up the adult everybody asks when they don’t have the IMDb handy.
And most popular work, in any field, isn’t shit. It’d have to try harder to be shit. It’s medicore, it’s trite, it’s the same white bread with fancier spread, over and over. You might suspect this when you’ve seen twenty movies or two hundred movies. You know this on a level that is physically painful, sometimes, when you’ve seen hundreds of times more movies already than anybody else you know ever will.
***
Michael Bay is generally the late King of Pain, the epitome of the Moron Who Got Into Movies Via Music Videos Solely To Get Laid and Succeeded, Motherfucker, and his movies are…just not. They’re not bad enough to get much enjoyment out of them that way, they’re not good enough at anything to latch onto, for real.
Compare Bay to his (slightly older) contemporary blockbusterer Roland Emmerich, a man with the modest goal of becoming the new Irwin Allen, at which he has largely succeeded. Emmerich makes acceptable spectacles, most of them silly, some of them outright stupid, but they’re likeable enough, most of them. You can spend a Sunday afternoon with Independence Day, again, and not feel cheated even if you have seen ten thousand better movies.
Bay’s screen circuses are something else. They’re blanks, seemingly without a person behind them. You may have suspected something frightening behind this, real life frightening: maybe Michael Bay doesn’t even have a person inside to come out in his work. At all. Well, get ready to have your worst suspicions confirmed if you ever thought Bay might be a psychopath, because Michael Bay finally made a for-real Michael Bay movie, baring his soul for all to see, and…
You know that South Park where you see what Cartman sees whenever he closes his eyes? The montage of death camps and skulls and slaughter houses and shitty eighties horror movies?
Like that, only I’m pretty sure it goes on for six hours instead of fifteen seconds. Plus hot chicks. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (and I’m well aware I’m not the first guy to say anything like this) is not a movie. It’s put together like a movie, technically, but it manages to avoid all of the standard conventions of editing movies, of film narrative, of using actors, and…does not accomplish what a dramatic film sets out to do, and often seems to be accomplishing the opposite. Intentionally.
You know how you’d feel about that if anybody but Bay had done it, if they’d hired, say, Gaspar Noé out of the blue to do the Transformers sequel, the way Godard got hired to do a Lemmy Caution movie, once. And he shit all over the movie, everything it was supposed to be about, and turned it into a crawling, visceral depiction of hell with no plot, no characters, no anything going on for two and a half hours but pure hideously expensive mental rape. If he’d gotten hired to make Transformers 2, or hell, Cronenberg, or the two of them together, and they’d produced a wretched, dripping sort of satire of summer movies that was primarily useful for a real world Ludovico Treatment.
You would be so into that. You would be there on opening night, right next to me, and I didn’t even bother going to the theater for the first Transformers movie. Like I care about some cartoon kids ten years younger watched, back in the day.
Well, lucky you and lucky me, because that’s what Michael Bay delivered as Transformers 2, as it turns out, exactly that movie. This is a great movie, if you have any heart for appreciating the wrongest ways movies ever go wrong. It is a demonstration of utter contempt for its audience on a scale that I think I can legitimately compare to de Sade, and speaking of de Sade, like Salo, I’m pretty sure I don’t ever want to see the fucking thing ever again, singular and brilliant as it may be.
Michael Bay will surely go back to his soulless formulas next and never top this: he has made a perfect anti-movie. If we lived in a universe like Flicker’s, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen would be the First Trumpet. Or the Seventh. Or all of them, and the seals and bowls, at once.
This is Henry Miller’s gob of spit, except Michael Bay got into a position where he could hock a loog in the whole world’s face. You have to respect, at least, the Satanic levels of dedication evident in that kind of hate.
If I did shit like giving movies starred rankings, I’d give Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen all the stars, and then some.
***
In Flicker, "the movies" predate the invention of cinema, magical methods precede and infuse the modern and technological, and the entire history of twentieth-century film has been a series of rituals leading to Gnostic apocalypse. There is an antichrist, of sorts, an autistic savant director named Simon Dunkle who makes the world’s last popular movies.
As these things can tend to go, when you finally do get to "see" Dunkle’s work through the novel’s narrator, Jonathan Gates, it’s a bit of a letdown. If you’re going to write a King In Yellow story, it’s usually best if you leave the book in shadows. You may be able to write a good story about the Work of Art That Ends Worlds, but you are mad if you think you can actually write that book.
Dunkle’s work, in the novel, comes across as sort of a long-form eighties Sonic Youth video directed by Larry Clark, mixed with The Road Warrior. Roszak apparently finds just about every aspect of emerging youth counterculture since the one he pinned to a board in the sixties confusing and reprehensible. In his world, the most popular movies are simply two hour-long punk music videos full of half-naked teenagers driving around in the desert and fighting and fucking and repeating the same memey nonsense, "Sub sub." (This is almost all anybody says in the movies, "Sub sub," sort of this "Where’s the beef?" cultural virus thing, anyway, people pack theaters to watch this crap.)
In the real world, of course, you and your friends might go see that movie and argue about it online after, and maybe Autechre would do the soundtrack and it wouldn’t matter to ninety-nine percent of the world at all. This is not only not very apocalyptic, it’s not very good satire. Richard Kern’s movies really do exist. Everybody did not pack theaters during the eighties to see them.
Michael Bay actually managed to do a Simon Dunkle, though. Jesus God, I don’t know where, exactly, to start describing this thing.
***
Nothing happens in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. There is no plot. There are some actors left over from the first movie, but they’re no longer even trying to play the same characters or any characters at all, really. These actors run and drive and sit and talk and this all sort of happens in a story order correctly, but…this is too obvious a comparison, maybe, but Stan Brakhage comes to mind. And he and Cindy Sherman had a baby. And then that baby grew up and had a baby with another baby produced by the union of Francis Bacon and Steven Spielberg. Or something.
Anyway, nobody ever actually seems to be in the same room talking to each other in this movie, or know exactly what they’re supposed to do next.
There are all these robots everywhere, and I guess some of them express unpleasant ethnic stereotypes, but mostly I was just trying to figure out which side they were on, at any given moment, never mind which car they were and what they hell they were doing.
I’m getting to an age where I’m having some trouble reading up close, that kind of thing, so I wondered about halfway through this movie if I was just getting old. I really could not tell what the fuck was going on at any given moment for like half the movie. All I know is that the screen was filled with shifting fields of metal within metal and that this metal sometimes seemed to form individuals who hurt and talked to each other. And then sometimes turned into cars.
(That shit is just baffling, BTW – I mean, I get the cartoon was about some toys and that’s what they did, but…come on. These things can literally jump off the earth into space. But they prefer, when the chips are downest, to travel as cars, on highways, topping out at a hundred or so, stopping every two-three hundred miles for gas. And a sody and a pee for the kids. When they parachute from airplanes, they turn into cars first to do it, god only knows why.)
***
Anyway, it’ s not my old eyes, and I know this because even the humans on screen had to check VINs to keep those robots straight. There’s actually a whole thing that resembles a subplot, were it human, about how nobody including the robots can tell who’s who and what they’re doing. It’s cool, the text is telling you, this is part of the show.
No, it’s the absurd degree to which the FX folks were unleashed to follow the first film’s redesign of the cartoon robots, who, you know, just turned from cars into robots. And back. Pretty basic, but life was just simpler in 1985, you know? And the candy bars were way better.
No way that was enough, not in today’s CGI Loudness Wars, so the robots in the first movie were little micro-universes of transformation, always something shifting and sliding around on them, in them, whatever. It was dealable. You could watch a robot talk and not get carsick in your soul.
Nobody seems to have restrained the computer modelers on this movie whatsoever – in fact, you can imagine Bay with a whip, banks of nerds in chains at workstations, urging them on to greater and greater heights of agonizing ecstasy. The second movie’s Autobots and Decepticons are Cronenbergiger masterpieces of biomechanical disgust. They are constantly at a whirl, everywhere, demonstrating this Lovecraftian robot physiology, in the first place. Second, they fucking weep and sneeze and piss and shit and bleed transforming metal crap all over the place at every opportunity, creating other pools of transformation from which unpleasant new voices may emerge at any moment and never go away.
***
In a sense, this is all hyperbole, yeah: this movie isn’t really a work of art. It’s even predictable, how this happened: this is a Sequel Nobody Gave a Shit About. Nobody cared , not Bay, not anybody in it, everybody working on it was just into doing their own neat shit and moving on to a better project ASAP.
The thing about those kinds of sequels, though, is that they’re generally cheaper than the originals. If you’re going the blockbuster route, you usually try to make a whole second movie, even if it ends up sucking. People sort of expect that.
So there’s the first of Revenge of the Fallen’s reversals on the way to becoming Bay’s masterwork, I guess: it’s a much more elaborate and expensive sequel, and still, nobody gave a shit about it.
It’s magical, even: the worst of what "Hollywood" represents when anybody says it with a sneer, bottled up, preserved forever. A movie that can actually hurt you, a la Infinite Jest and Ringu.
Again, hyperbole. Obviously.
***
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen looks very much like I might expect Hell to look. It is baffling and terrifying and will make you question yourself and all your assumptions about humanity. It is an evil piece of work, in its stupid way, like a two-hour-plus film of a starving baby screaming. It is hard to take, I don’t blame anybody who doesn’t even want to try, but…this is the only Michael Bay movie I’m ever going to say this about, most likely. You have to see it. It’s completely fucking nuts. Even if it makes you throw up a little or a lot in your heart, stick it out.
And then scour your eyes, for serious, and move on.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
USA, 2009
Dir: Michael Bay
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | | 1:58 pm |
Hi, My Name Is:
I’ve said this before, but the first thing I do on a Windows machine is turn all the FX shit off. I prefer that the OS get the hell out of the way and not announce or draw attention to itself, Windows still does that if I ask it to, one big reason I’m still using Windows.
Try and imagine if you had to do an original drawing in the context of another drawing, always, like there was some physical function of drawing that had to be subsumed into a greater and widely accepted work. What if whenever you wanted to draw a picture, you had to start up, say, one of Käthe Kollwitz’ prints and try to do your own work within that picture, with that picture constantly announcing to you: “This is how you draw a picture.”
Designing user interfaces is like that: unless you’re that rare animal, somebody who’s equally a programmer and a designer, you’re going to be dependant, always, on a series of UIs other people made, to make your own UIs. It is a little mind bending, and a good job if you adore hallucinogens. Although I primarily do other work that tends more toward the marketing end of things, these days, UI design still comes into it all the time, and I still like as blank a canvas as possible when I have to do it.
Actually, if there’s anything my thinking about UI design has distilled to, over the years, that’s it: the best UI is the one that gets out of the way the most. You shouldn’t have to think about it, as fast as possible.
I love you so much, Windows, exactly because you are not loveable and I do not care to have personal relationships with my tools.
***
Haven’t been blogging, lately, been swamped and stressed and otherwise engaged and more likely to Tweet if I’m going near the Internet at all. A lot is going on, in all spheres of life, one of those times. I have more ideas and more energy to pursue them and more cool work going on in my life than in forever. Whatever happened to me earlier in the decade, this breakdown, seems to be officially over.
Which, unfortunately, means I am turning into an entirely different person than Evonne hooked up with. It happens. A lot. It’s pretty much what’ll kill your marriage if it’s not money or kids, if it’s going to get killed. She’s never met Robert Who Gets Shit Done and Doesn’t Hide In the House Wanting to Die and Whine About His Life Online before. We’re having to get reacquainted on some new terms. Change is painful, so it goes. (I think there’s still going to be a wedding on Rocky Butte, so don’t get the hankies out just yet.)
Oregon happened, I’ve seen a shitload of movies, read a couple of books, I’m working on a couple of web sites, I wiped everything off our primary machines this weekend and reinstalled – in the case of E’s computer, about two years overdue. Dear god, just restarting that machine was like trying to screw a vestal virgin or something until the day before yesterday, I don’t know how she put up with it.
***
I was in the process anyway, and this is the sort of thing I’m likely to do and do all the time – fuck around installing stuff on my primary machine, I mean. Nothing torture tests like…actually torturing the thing by working on it all day and I can have a pretty fun day the day my computer blows up and takes all my shit I didn’t back up with it, and get that shit back by the end of the day, too, usually. So anyway, I put the Windows 7 release candidate on this thing instead of Vista.
I have nothing bad to report, really, about Windows 7. Chrome’s got some occasional issues, but Chrome’s got the occasional issue, anyway. Other than that, nothing on my Have to Run This and Can Accept No Substitutes list of software punks out, and yes, it does boot and run way faster than Vista, generally, on the same hardware. And yeah, it’s pretty fucked up that Windows 7 is basically one big bug fix that way, a delight as a service pack, no so much as a for-pay upgrade, especially under MS’ exciting new “Oh, you want to encrypt a folder? You need the Extra Special Version” pricing model.
And Vista’s nowhere near as bad as, say, Windows 98 - which nobody in house would use when I was at the company and it was in development – but it’s up there with Microsoft’s Lesser Hits. 7’s a vast improvement, and if I’m still stuck with Windows next year, it’s likely staying on this laptop, anyway. Ca-ching, you bastards.
Beyond the performance increases and other fixes, Windows 7 enhances my absolute favorite new feature in Vista, the Start Menu type-in box (I do almost everything using that thing, anyway, now I really can do everything), and caused me to start using something: Gadgets. That stupid sidebar’s gone, so you can just drop them all over the desktop like God and Doug Engelbart intended, so I have.
…and there are a bunch more I don’t keep turned on all the time because I don’t need them all the time and it takes two seconds to retrieve them. (The RSS headline scroller, BTW, isn’t really All Mamatas, All the Time.)
They don’t add all that much to overhead or startup, that I’ve noticed, and as now implemented, they’re actually useful and a distinct improvement over the previous rote imitation of the OS X Dashboard.
And yes, as you might notice, Windows 7 also passes my eternal Can I Turn All the Pretty Shit Off and Make It Look As Much Like NT 4 As Possible? test. (Actually, I got a little crazy turning stuff off and need to sacrifice a few cycles for comfort’s sake again, here.)
Anyway, most of the new stuff is of the “Won’t See It Until You Need It” variety, and some of that’s pretty sweet – a translucent layer, for instance, now comes up if you try to shut down with apps running, with a list so you can jump to them if you forgot to save or do something on your way out, or just kill them all if that was your intention.
You can’t see it in the picture, really, but MS finally got the great idea of combining the apps you use all the time and put on the Task Bar and open applications, so there is no distinction between the two, and it works a lot better. Your Firefox launch button has all open Firefox windows under it, etc. Nothing groundbreaking, but nice to see it.
***
The biggest single advantage the Mac OS has always had over Windows, every version, MS never changes. I do not get it. Apple’s the gold standard for Not Invented Here Syndrome, MS pretty gleefully swipes whatever it can, but they never change this, and I think they never will.
This is it, BTW, the greatest actual, quantifiable even, superiority in using one UI over the other, consistently, since the competition began. It will not knock you on your ass. It shouldn’t. Remember, the best UI doesn’t assert itself.
Windows puts a border at the top of the screen. The hotspots for the top menus begin twenty pixels or so down from the top of the screen. Which means for almost everybody in the world that every time you use a menu, you have to stop what you’re doing and look for the menu and move your cursor to it and…drop the menu, select, from that point on, things are the same, Mac or Windows.
The Mac OS’ menu hotspots are flush with the top of the screen. You can thus develop a habitual flick to the top of the screen without looking for common functions, impossible to achieve in Windows.
Lucky Mac folks, you’re still ahead on that one.
***
There’s some other stuff – there are gestures tied to windows I’m sure work better on a tablet, but the one where you throw a window into a corner to maximize is growing on me, even with a pad or mouse. Anyway, I’m buying it.
***
I’ll be blogging a little more than I have been and have a few announcements coming up. I should probably finally write something about Watchmen, too, now that I’ve seen the three-hour plus version originally intended for theaters: spoilers, no, it’s not a better movie, it’s a worse one, as is the norm for Director’s Cuts, IMO. If you saw it, you saw it as good as it gets.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Friday, July 10th, 2009 | | 7:08 pm |
Not something I’d normally do…
…but I was particularly proud of this multiple-tweet entry of mine in the #1stdraftmovielines Twitter meme yesterday, and thought I’d preserve it. It begins at the bottom, as these things do.
"You know how to whi – I swear to God, Mr. Bogart, one more time and I’m breaking that thing off." 1st Bacall adlib
"You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You blow, Joe! What? You can’t blow? Was you born in Utica?" Hawks rev.
"You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? When Father caught me pooping in sister’s hat, I love eggs." Faulkner rev.
"You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? Because I don’t. I dare tell no one. They’d doubt my grizzle. Dogs stare."
Arf, arf, arf…
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 5:34 pm |
Dear lord.
Let me also apologize for the overly-aggressive and social skills deficient anti-spam bot employed here for the last couple of days. Management apologizes for Mr. Hashcash’s actions, but wants to make it clear that they do not reflect the policies or standards of Bennylavatoncom.com: The People Place That’s People About People, So People Now, Let’s Be People™.
Also, we would like to stress that Mr. Hashcash was out of uniform and off the clock at the time of these incidents. If you would like to dispute this claim, please feel free to take advantage of our partner firm, Lawyerlavanurantia.tweet: The Lawyer Place That’s People About Lawyers, So Lawyers Now, Let’s Lawyer Up, Even Though We’re Already Lawyers™.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 5:10 pm |
I bought some counterfeit money.
Not really – a kid at the convenience store last night had a couple of fives come up black, this was obviously causing him some distress, so I traded him for real fives. I asked the clerk if she was supposed to take them, she said “I don’t even want to deal with that,” so they’re mine, now.
Am I supposed to blow them up, or something, or turn them over to the cops or treasury? I’m not really sure. They’re kind of interesting – once you start playing with and looking at them, you can totally tell they’re fake, but not at first glance. I suspect if I keep them around the house as some kind of neat found prize they’ll end up grabbed and spent later. I could frame them or something, but…to mean what or remind me of what? “I did a stranger a pretty minor solid one night?” Something “duh” like “THINGS ARE NOT ALWAYS AS THEY FIRST APPEAR?”
Actually, I think I’ve got it: an anonymous donation to one of the many, many police-oriented charities that turn up on “Don’t Donate” lists year after year, they’re so blatantly corrupt. That’s where my ten fake dollars will be best spent.
Any other suggestions obviously welcome.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 4:51 am |
My favorite story ever about my dad.
Because of the cross-posty things I’ve got set up, this will hit Facebook eventually, and at least one person there heard the story when it was freshly happened. You said, Aidan, something to the effect of “It’s like a Jimmy Cagney movie, where Father O’Flanagan comes in to show the local toughs what’s-what,” and yeah, it kind of is. Anyway, there’s my call to outside evidence. This really happened.
So I never play pool, going out with people. I suck. I really suck. Please don’t try to encourage me, it isn’t that I haven’t played or I’m not familiar enough. It is not that at all.
I get it, I get the geometry and I’ve had all the moves and strategy explained to me endlessly, but…I am just graceless, physically. I suck at sports, I’m not much of a dancer – I’m a guy who obsesses about movies and forgotten children’s fantasy writers. Come on.
Anyway, no, if we are in a bar one night and the subject comes up, my aversion to pool doesn’t come from lack of familiarity with the wonders of the game. Far from it.
My sister used to sometimes hustle tourists at pool, in the little town where my immediate family ended up after I was an adult. She’s that kind of good, this is what I grew up with on pool tables. My dad tried to teach us both, the lessons only took with her, really.
So anyway, this is around 1996 or so. The local tavern had an informal pool tournament every Tuesday night or whatever, and it’s going to start in fifteen minutes or so and Michelle’s all known hot stuff and drinking and getting ready and my dad walks in.
So my dad is kind of known as this Christian Guy – he’s the sort of believer who is very outfront and always doing lay pastoring sort of work, called on to preach sometimes, etc. Anyway, he says “Hi” to Michelle and orders a beer and notices the preparations for the tournament and suggests they partner up.
Michelle takes this about as well as you might expect: I mean, good god, but at the same time, it’s Dad, how can you say no?
So she said okay, and they drank, and then the tournament started, and they got first break and he asked if he could break first, and she said okay.
He ran the table six times in a row. I shit you not.
So yeah, that’s why I don’t play pool.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | | 7:32 pm |
| | Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 | | 4:48 pm |
BTW…
…sorry about that “TweetBacks” crap on all the posts, the last week or so. I didn’t even know that was on, it wasn’t supposed to be, yet another plugin banished to WordPress purgatory.
If there’s anything annoying like that turned on here, ever, you can pretty much assume I was screwing around with something and didn’t mean to do that.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 4:12 pm |
For further George MacDonald reading…
It occurred to me that anybody reading the Fantasy pieces (Richard Dansky also wrote about Phantastes) and excerpt and wanting to read further might not know where to even start with George MacDonald. A few of my own suggestions follow.
Everything is public domain, first off, so if it’s e-texts you want, Gutenberg and Penn State got you covered. (Multiple PDFs per title at Penn, BTW, and some of them were actually designed, are quite beautiful, fully printworthy, and great examples of why PDFs don’t suck.)
That’s a big chunk of MacDonald, there, at both archives, and includes poetry, sermons and theological writing, and romance and other fiction. Only a few of the books listed are fantasy – as I said in the article, there aren’t all that many of them.
The adult novels are both amazing, and Lilith should remind you of something, big time. (Hint: it may help if you KNEEL and are GAY, MAN.) From Wikipedia…
Mr. Vane, the protagonist of Lilith, owns a library that seems to be haunted by the former librarian, who looks much like a raven from the brief glimpses he catches of the wraith. After finally encountering the supposed ghost, the mysterious Mr. Raven, Vane learns that Raven had known his father; indeed, Vane’s father had visited the strange parallel universe from which Raven comes and goes and now resides therein. Vane follows Raven into the world through a mirror (this symbolistic realm is described as "the region of the seven dimensions", a term taken from Jacob Boehme).
Inside the world, Vane learns of a house of beds where the dreamers sleep until the end of the world in death: a good death, in which life is found…
My favorite children’s novel must be The Princess and Curdie (and that edition, archived on Google Books, is a wonderfully designed book – I used to have a copy – I think I prefer the Helen Stratton illustrations in the standard available editions, though), although The Lost Princess seems like it, some days. Curdie is a sequel, and while they’re two very different books and I prefer the second, The Princess and the Goblin must also be read. The Day Boy and the Night Girl also has a special place in my heart.
"The Light Princess" is my favorite story, by far, and as you can see, is available in a great Maurice Sendak-illustrated edition, as is MacDonald’s most overtly allegorical story, "The Golden Key." (Craig Yoe, BTW, also did a series of MacDonald books with his own illustrations some time ago, also very nice.)
Lastly, a book I can’t recommend enough and can’t rate, either. It’s a book I just can’t be very objective about – my father read it to me first when I was three or so, it was one of the first "chapter books" I read myself, and it is embedded in my heart the way some people are. At the Back of the North Wind is somewhere in between "The Ice Queen" and The Water-Babies, absolutely gorgeous, and painful to recall, I love it so unreasonably. (It also contains a story-within-a-story, "Little Daylight," that treads similar ground to Day Boy/Night Girl, and is a wonder all by itself.)
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 4:23 am |
| | Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 9:51 am |
Watchmen Director’s Cut…
…got leaked.
Also, Otis is awesome, and it occurred to me that pretty much all the pictures of him here are from when he was little, or he’s curled up sleeping or sick or something. I never show pictures of the reason people always stop and ask us what kind of dog he is. Mostly, it’s the magnificent plumage of his tail. (That and his habit of standing at every opportunity are what make one of his nicknames “Reepicheep.”) You can see that in the following picture, juxtaposed with Ramona’s little cinnamon bun.
BLOWUP REQUIRED. LOOKIT THAT DAMN THING.
Most of the time, though, Otis whips his tail around too much to get a very good picture. I did get him lunging for me and the camera, though. (He’s got something similar to a Jack Russell temperament, but nowhere near as strong.) And you do get to see his fuzzy ears a lot, and can totally see why we’d think there’s some Sheltie in there with the Chihuahua and Dachshund.
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We love our little crazy, fluffy boy.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 6:43 am |
Oops.
Sorry about the spammy bullshit coming out of my blog today. Some plugins were misbehaving. They have been sent to bed without any supper after an extra switching.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Sunday, June 28th, 2009 | | 1:53 am |
| | Saturday, June 27th, 2009 | | 3:13 am |
Gah.
I am more emotionally and physically spent than I have been in quite a while. I am actually a zombie, now. I think.
This is the second week in a row I’ve had to stay up nights and work constantly, like fifteen hours at a stretch, base, with spot naps. I am not twenty-five years old any more, so I am more of a wreck than I would have been back then.
On the other hand, I’ve been doing design work for fifteen-twenty hours at a stretch, pushing myself and occasionally going way beyond the call of duty, and…I’m not sure if I’ve made this clear, but it’s been years. I lost any passion for design or illustration several years ago, and it’s been torture just trying to get it back. (My last couple of jobs involved minimal graphic work on my part – I was either in an oversight position or doing SEO. Lucky me.) I blew a couple of freelance jobs in the last several months pretty badly, like Lose the Client Forever badly, because I fell apart and couldn’t do the work. I had nothing in me to give.
But I keep going, and picking up new work, and I remember, finally, why I like it so much. In spite of the missteps, I’ve done like thirty illustrations recently and a few web sites, just the last couple of weeks. A couple of months ago, I was waiting around for a client to fire me because I just couldn’t build his site. Every time I tried, I had panic attacks.
So anyway, I still can’t sleep because I’ve been working for two days almost straight, so I’m teaching myself how to build sites for phones. Which is pretty fun, actually, although I’m not sure where it’ll come in handy.
And then I owe Bryan Smith a new web site before his next book comes out.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | | 5:35 pm |
| | 5:01 pm |
Otis got sick last night.
Something he ate, probably, as the boy is constantly eating stupid things. He started puking and then was just generally out of it for a while, so Evonne wrapped him up in a blanket and sat next to him. And then Ramona came over to keep him company.
Anyway, it was adorable.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 | | 10:23 pm |
Yay.
Evonne made dinner tonight – steaks and baked potatoes and brussels sprouts – and it was awesome. And just now when we went out for a walk with the dogs, Ramona came upon a frog or something in the grass and hopped straight up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen all four legs off the ground like that before.
Evonne totally missed it.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 2:43 pm |
| | 3:40 am |
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