| A Softer World: July 23 |
[Jul. 23rd, 2008|10:56 pm] |
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=332
This is today's comic!
Last night I fell asleep watching The House on Haunted Hill, the 1959 version. When we were living in Halifax, and Maggie was away living with the birds for weeks at a time, I used to fall asleep to this movie night after night. There's something really relaxing about a very familiar movie. In university it was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I just bought one of those DVD box sets, where you pay fifteen bucks and get 50 old movies. I love old horror movies, in a very different way from how I love modern horror movies. The quality of acting is so different. It's not better, really, but it's more... charming? Old fashioned, I guess. I love the guy in House on Haunted Hill who's so deadly earnest about the ghosts. Pritchett. I like this movie much better than the other Vincent Price movie in the box set - Last man on Earth. It's so much funnier. The dialogue between Vincent Price and his wife is amazing. Last Man on Earth is good, but it's not WONDERFUL. I have been in the mood for wonderful, lately.
My friend Jon sent me a link to Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog, and he sarcastically mentioned that maybe I hadn't heard of it yet. I hadn't! I don't know how someone can spend their days on the internet and not have heard of it, but it completely escaped my notice until it was complete and I could watch the entire thing. I think Neil Patrick Harris is hilarious. I am sorry, Maggie, but I would leave you for him in an instant. But I would write! I would write and tell you all about him. That has to be worth something, right?
Last night there was an amazing thunder and lightning storm here in Toronto. Huge forks of lightning! Loud, rolling thunder! These happen so often here. We never got thunder storms like this in Nova Scotia. It is a checkmark in the Toronto column, despite the fact that everyone I know here seems to be a workaholic, and I spend a lot of my days just hanging out with my cat and my Barbarian character in Diablo II. Maggie and I sat out on the balcony. We're on the "14th floor" (you know what floor we're REALLY on. Jump out the window - you will die earlier.") and just watched for an hour. It made me want to watch My Own Private Idaho again, for some reason. There's no thunder and lightning in the movie, but it got me thinking about those beautiful landscape shots. About the huge glaring pink title cards.
I'm sort of rambling, and jumping from topic to topic. I guess none of these things are related, except that this is what my life is like, now. These are the things that make up my days, and I have to find a way to understand them together if I'm going to make any sense of my life. |
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| An interview with Ryan North |
[Jul. 21st, 2008|12:07 pm] |
Hello, I have been working on a new project. Here is the first installment:
http://www.asofterworld.com/bw-display.php?id=1
It is an interview with Ryan North, and I hope that you find it interesting. I am going to interview people who are important to me, so this might not be a weekly feature or anything. More like, when I have material that I think is good. But, in the meantime, here is an interview with my friend. |
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| A Softer World: July 16 |
[Jul. 16th, 2008|06:37 pm] |
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=330
I bought some heavy chess pieces for using in all those outdoors tables I keep seeing around. I'm gonna start trying to play in parks more. Get outside! Do you live in Toronto? Want to play a game of chess? Email me! |
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| Thomas M. Disch, suicide. |
[Jul. 11th, 2008|02:20 pm] |
I'm reading an interesting remembrance of him by Elizabeth Hand at Salon, and this bit hit me just right:
"The Genocides" was published in 1965, a vision of Earth as an agribusiness run by extraterrestrials who sow the planet with a single vast plant crop, then methodically exterminate the human pests who infect their harvest. It ends badly. As Disch cheerfully pointed out in a 1990 interview published in the British journal Foundation, "Let's be honest, the real interest in this kind of story is to see some devastating cataclysm wipe mankind out ... My point was simply to write a book where you don't spoil that beauty and pleasure at the end." |
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| A Softer World: July 11 |
[Jul. 11th, 2008|01:56 pm] |
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=328
Here's today's comic. We hope you like it.
Also, maybe we hope that you're a rich movie star, who has fallen in love with us and who has decided to make sure we never want for anything, for the rest of our weird little lives. |
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| A Softer World: July 7th |
[Jul. 7th, 2008|11:30 am] |
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=326
The problem with a lot of the people I've met who are "romantic" is that they don't really treat the object of their affection as a real person. More like a prop in the romantic fantasy! This is all fine and good as long as things go fine. But if not, well! That's when the anger comes out, and you can see little traces of the cognitive dissonance going on behind the scenes! But I love you, you stupid fucking whore! |
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| A Softer World: July 4th |
[Jul. 4th, 2008|12:14 pm] |
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=325
Friday again! I am getting all worked up about this Dark Knight movie that's coming out. And, I will admit it, it's Heath Ledger's Joker that has me squirming in anticipation. The stuff we see in the ads is so good. His voice is this great mix of Jack Nicholson and Pennywise the clown. And he looks so demented, not just the makeup, but his tilted hand clap, him swaying out the window of the police car, like the music is moving him. I'm excited.
I read a few interviews with Christopher Nolan, and in one he compares the Joker character to the shark in Jaws. No back story, just carving a swath of destruction across the movie. The Joker ought to be an insane, outright violent anarchist artist killer, a man who cannot be reasoned with or understood. He's not a super villain, he's the monster in a horror movie. And that's what this looks like. |
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| Saturday's reading. |
[Jun. 30th, 2008|11:26 am] |
This past Saturday I did a reading in Toronto, at gay pride. I got so nervous that I ended up spending half the time telling the most embarrassing personal anecdotes I could think of. Sometimes, when I get embarrassed, the only way I can deal with it is to embarrass myself even more on purpose. This is probably some sort of way of trying to maintain control. If I’m going to be embarrassed, it might as well be because I’m telling you about making a misguided pass at a lesbian who has just suffered a head injury, or about having two pee holes, not because sometimes when I read at a gay event I feel like I’m just not gay enough. Or like I have something to prove.
Maybe I’m underestimating people. I know that there are people who show up to the readings no matter where they are, gay event or not, because I don’t read very often. And they wouldn’t care about the gay content percentage of the reading. And probably most others don’t care anyway. But there’s always someone at those things who needs me to place myself on some sexuality spectrum. I read with some gay authors last year, and afterwards another author asked me, "So, you have a girlfriend, right? What are you even doing here?"
I don’t know what to say to that. I have to give you a detailed sexual history? So you can count how many boys I kissed against how many girls? It’s like the government and their bloodline percentages to prove I’m really Indian. Man, I'm not there to trick people into thinking I'm gay. I'm there to read from my writing.
And anyway if you could see how hot my girlfriend is, you’d understand. |
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| A Softer World: June 27th |
[Jun. 27th, 2008|12:43 pm] |
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=322
Today I started reading Broken Angels, by Richard Morgan. Altered Carbon was great. Everything I wanted from a pulpy sci fi mashup thriller. This book is supposedly less pulp, more war stuff, but I can enjoy that too. I like stories about badass, hyper trained dudes. People who are very good at what they do. Also, I love stories about people who get beaten again and again but don't give up. I am a sucker for that shit. This is why I loved Mulder from the X-Files. Dude got shot, stabbed, possessed by alien gunk, beat up, drugged, and just kept going after it.
I've been listening to Neil Young's greatest hits over and over again, alternating with Rising Down, by The Roots. The Neil Young is so beautiful. And it's the perfect balance to the Roots album, which is one of the best rap albums I have heard in years. It's so harsh and intense. Some of the songs get me riled up like nobody's business. They're just bang bang bang bang bang, relentless, with amazing drums and lyrics that are more brilliant the more you listen. I keep thinking, fuck, this is exactly what I want from rap. Go listen to "75 Bars" at their myspace. The rhyme scheme is amazing. On first blush, it sounded like rhyming the same word again and again, but there's internal rhymes too, and then the repeated rhyme starts bouncing around in the lines, too.
And Maggie and I have been watching season two of the Muppet Show. I love the early Muppet Show stuff. This was back when they looked just insane, like if you asked mental patients to make puppets out of garbage. And the jokes are so cheesy and classic. Statler and Waldorf make me laugh with just the stupidest jokes. It's a kind of television that I wish people still made. I don't mean to make big sweeping statements or anything, but the Muppet Show is the greatest American work of art ever. |
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| A Softer World: Jun 17th |
[Jun. 17th, 2008|12:51 pm] |
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=318
Hello! It is Tuesday, but there is a comic anyway?
Have any of you read Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan? I've just started, but I am really enjoying it. |
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| Overqualified: 69 |
[Jun. 16th, 2008|12:57 pm] |
http://www.asofterworld.com/oq-display.php?id=69
Another day, another monstrosity. I hope you like it. If you do, then tell somebody about it! Spread the word on menus nation-wide. I am starting this Overqualified nonsense back up. And hopefully people will read it. And also, hopefully I won't get arrested.
There'll be a comic later today, too. |
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