True to personal form, I took an academically ill-advised trip on the eve of finals this past weekend. In undergrad I saw the Smashing Pumpkins at the end of two semesters, studying in the car. This time I visited my brother at Kenyon College to go to the senior send-off weekend celebration. The headline act was Talib Kweli (in a rare flyover state performance), and a slew of Kenyon bands. I was fortunate to see Potato Famine in their last performance together. It was a great set- Fields of Athenry, one by Flogging Molly, and a great Irish style version of Freebird as a finale; all complete with two violins and a flute player. Talib Kweli was great too- The songs I really wanted to hear, Old School, Roll Off Me, and Get By were great. It was funny, though, because the jubilant crowd was nearly all academic geeks and trust fund hippies, and nearly all white.

I also got to meet Michael's friends, eat at the deli, and get schooled at Super Smash Brothers- karmic retribution for the DS Halo parties, I guess. I also lost a milk drinking race to Michael's roommate that had warranted a detour to a second dining hall after brunch. It wasn't even close. I had a little more than half done when I heard his cup hit the table- "like pouring it down the sink."

All in all, a fun weekend. I have finals to finish this week and end of year parties to attend. Charlie Don't Surf is playing at the Heorot with some band from Italy tonight, and tomorrow Tool has a new CD out. All this and Free Comic Day next Saturday? I'll be busier than a labradoodle watching tennis.

This is a post about comic books, so if you skip it, I won't blame you.

This was originally an e-mail rant about big events in comic books I sent Gerry. It's long enough that I decided to put it here too.

I’ve seen Marvel fall into this pattern before, where they keep trying to one-up themselves by building event on top of event. I think the staff gets locked into that because they feel like they’re pushing themselves creatively when they upset the status quo. Also, crossovers inflate sales, which keeps the executives happy. This is unfortunate because (we keep saying this!) the major strength at Marvel is the individual books. Some of their best stuff is coming from minds like Whedon, Way, and Brubaker- all more or less standalone storylines. Also, the reason people like Bendis is because of his work on Ultimate Spider-Man and Alias- two staunchly continuity-independent books. I think they got lucky in the past with the first Secret War, the Dark Phoenix saga, and a few other big events, and they’re still trying to create their “Crisis”- the big continuity shattering event to define everything for years to come.

The problem is, they either don’t do enough to resonate throughout the universe (any X-book crossover circa 95), or they go nuts and have to backpedal just to get all their writers and fans on the same page (Onslaught, Heroes Reborn, House of M). Either way, nothing as of yet has really stuck. I think this may be because the Marvel Universe is organized well enough that they don’t need to reboot the universe like DC. The only real chaos for Marvel comes from their big events, whereas DC uses events to simplify things. And the universe chugs along.

To what end, though? A big event will generate sales among the fanboys who know enough to keep it all straight, but the highly coveted new reader will skip it entirely, and the casual reader in Borders may only flip through it if the cover looks good. If I was to act as Virgil to a new reader, I would dissuade them from reading Crisis or Civil War until the trades come out, and start them on Captain America and Astonishing X-men. Or Alias, or Ultimate Spider-Man, or a slew of other self-contained comics with easily accessible characters.

Speaking of comics, Infinite Crisis wraps up this week with #7 and the largest hero-villain battle ever, no hyperbole. The Villains United special this week set it all up, with nearly every hero and villain ending up in Metropolis after a worldwide prison break. Considering how free Geoff Johns has been with killing off characters in this series, and considering that Doomsday, Bane, Solomon Grundy, and a noticably more psychotic than usual Bizarro are all there, the issue is going to be incredible.


Go watch C for Cookie. You'll be glad you did.

I am basically familiar with the Protestant work ethic, but where in this philosophy does it say that labor must be performed at 9:45 in the morning? This morning I had just rolled out of bed and commenced to relieving myself when I heard a knock at the door, followed by the door opening and the heralding of a maintenance man come to paint my water heater closet. I had worked out with the landlady that the guy could come today. I should note that we spoke on the phone at 2:00 in the afternoon on Monday, when this sounded sensible. I ended up getting dressed in the kitchen and scurrying out the door. Presently, the fellow is whitewashing my WC where the leaking water left spots on the wall. His hat did not suggest fealty to Jefferson Davis like the last guy, which I appreciate. He had better not touch my comics.

In other news, the Google Blog just announced the release of a free 3-D app, Google Sketch-Up. It doesn't appear to do much, so I'm excited to see what I can do with it. Simple open-ended apps are great for creativity sometimes. Also, there's a pretty strong rumor that Google will be making a free word processor online soon- basically MS Word in a web browser for free.

The Smashing Pumpkins website is back up after being down for a few years. There's also a new SP guitar book on Amazon, so I hope my neighbors don't mind hearing the opening riff from the song Siva for days on end this summer.

Legal Animatics
One possible place for my skills to pay the bills. Cracker got to get paid, son.

I found this article on Slashdot, about how computer design software has weakened drawing skills in the current crop of art students. It's kind of reassuring to know that I'm not alone in thinking that, and also that there are others with my same problem. When I started pursuing art in a serious manner my approach was from a musical and theatrical/technical background. These parlayed well into computer animation, given my inclination toward using a computer for creative pursuits. Traditional drawing has been frustrating to me for years. In undergrad it was a hurdle; an obstacle between me and what I saw as the land of pixels and honey. I wouldn't say that my work is "uninspired," but I do wonder how much better I could be if I would develop my fundamentals more. I've kept a couple of sketchbooks going for the past couple of years to keep my design skills up, and also because drawing frustrates me, hence I must be doing something right.

Since I arrived at Ball State, I've noticed a glaring lack of realism and figural work from the art department here. Many of the senior exhibitions feature work with human figures, but often the rendering and proportions are sophomoric at best. Not that I can do better, or even as well, but I know what craftsmanship looks like. I've seen great work from my friends in years past, and I am often disappointed with what I see here. Are computer programs to blame, then? Many traditional artists I've known have written digital media off as "cheating," as a quick and dirty way to achieve eye-candy. As ready as I am to argue for the virtue of digital art, I also recognize that most of it is cheap and forgettable. I cringe every time I see a lens flare effect in a professionally produced comic book, but I am enamored with Ben Templesmith's purely digital art in Fell.

So in defense of digital art, here are the artists that I think give legitimacy to the medium as an art form:

Alessandro Bavari: A fantastic Italian artist, and the nicest guy ever I met in Italy.

Dave Devries: He came to Ball State last year and gave a demo on digital painting. I'm still finding new uses for the techniques he imparted to us.

Ben Templesmith: The digital artist of the comic Fell. His drawings are surreal, but each panel pops in a way that few digital artists are capable of.

Tim Bradstreet: He mixes photography, digital, and traditional skill to create some of my favorite contemporary illustration work.

Conspicuously absent (to me at least) is the webcomic Penny Arcade. They're at the top of my list of great web cartoonists, but their art is more "form follows function," rather than producing individual independent works.

Quick link: The Simpsons Movie trailer

Just links and no actual content pertaining to me? This is called the Gerry method. :)

Sunday, Bloody Sunday by U2 remixed with Dubya doing the vocals. Pure ineffable genius.

Star Wars TV series confirmed

"It would cover the 20 years in the life of Luke Skywalker growing up that remains a mystery to most film-goers."

Hmm... this sounds so familiar. An adopted farmboy with paternal issues who is destined for greatness hangs out with his friends in the middle of nowhere and eventually meets an old person who tells him of his future. Perhaps the planet Coruscant is so close you almost don't need a spaceship to get there.

How will this work, exactly? Luke doesn't know anything about the Force when he meets Obi-Wan, and the Empire is barely a presence on Tatooine until the death star plans end up there. On the other hand, Tatooine is a planet run by the hutts, and Luke did a lot of racing in his youth, so this could make for some good TV. The events leading up to his friend Biggs going to the Imperial academy and then defecting to the Alliance could be great, but that would be seasons 4-5, at least.

< /shameless_geek >

The once steel tough fabric of a Union man Was sold and Bartered away Fed to money wolves in the Reagan years, Caught in a drift in greedy nineties days So inside this song is our rally cry

chorus: Your dreams are in danger, and "We Must Rise" Our time has come we are under the gun "It's Do or Die"

Its not a rebel cry of some socialist Scheme to push for human rights Just the facts an obvious mentioned on the Behalf of the working man, for his family and his livelihood

-Do or Die, DKM

First off, happy birthday to my brother from me over on this side of the pond. He's over in Scotland this week, ensuring a little less anarchy in the UK. I look forward to a massive blog post.

I got a new hot water heater this week. The old one leaked a bit off and on until a few days ago when I woke up to the sound of running water. I thought it was just the normal sound of the person above me getting ready, but there were none of the accompanying elephantine stomping sounds her Nimitz-class feet make. On the floor in the closet there was a puddle with actual ripples in it as the water drained. First things first, I moved every comic book in the room to the top shelf of the bedroom closet. It occurred to me to turn off the water completely, turn off the hot water heater valve and power, then turn the water back on. I drained what water I could with the shower, but there was still a pretty good size puddle on the carpet. I lysoled (it's a verb now) the hell out of the area to avoid mildew, so now the carpet smells like dusty wet apples. I bought some "shop towels," which are essentially thicker than average blue paper towels towels in a really manly package. No flowers, bears, or platitudes- just blue. These worked to an extent, and the area is nearly dry now.

The maintenance guys came to inspect the problem in the morning. He turned on the water and said "yup, it's leaking." Brilliant. I'm the one with 92% of a masters, he's the one in the confederate ballcap- one of us is the expert and it's not me. Yadda yadda, now I have warm water.

Off to Scotty's now, for a black bean burger and Guinness with Gerry and Michelle, who are both more Irish than I am in their own ways.

"And finally I'm going to thank all the booksellers of the world. Remember, "Brokeback Mountain" was a book before it was a movie. From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world. All are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book. A wonderful culture, which we mustn't lose. Thank you." - from Larry McMurtry's oscar acceptance speech

This speech and Robert Altman's speech are the two that have stuck with me from the oscars. I didn't see most of the big nominees, mostly due to my schedule. I was happy to see Nick Park and Aardman studios get the win for best animated feature. On the other hand, Batman Begins got snubbed- a best adapted screenplay nod would've been nice, as this is the first Batman movie to get the character right, as well as tell the origin story effectively enough to warrant repeat viewing. That, and for whatever reason, Star Wars Ep. III wasn't in the best FX category. It was good to see WETA win, though.

I saw this on the Onion A.V. Club- set your mp3 player to random and list the first five songs that come up without skipping any, then comment on each. I used my iPod, which only has a small portion of the music on my computer at work, hence no Smashing Pumpkins bootlegs or Muncie music.

Lonely- Tom Waits
A Tom Waits song all about being alone in a room full of people- of course it resonates with me. It's not my favorite on the album, though, that would be either Virginia Avenue or I Hope that I Don't Fall in Love With You.

Get Out of My House- The Streets
Gad, what a weird song. It's a hard one to explain without describing the whole album. I bought the CD for another song after hearing it in a friend's car, and ended up liking the whole thing.

Breathe- The Prodigy
Kind of a guilty pleasure, like all of the music I liked in high school. I used to listen to it at speech meets. Ahh, bass-boosted nostalgia.

Better Man- Pearl Jam
Classic. If you're under 30, you may remember why. The band is still going strong, though their intensity dropped off after their third album.

Bouree- Jethro Tull
A short, all-instrumental flute rock interlude. The album is a little inconsistent, due to the strength of the songs Aqualung, Cross-Eyed Mary, and Hymn 43. They rock beyond my comprehension, and I suspect their may be even more rock happening beyond the human hearing range in each song.

Since moving here, I've found that this area lacks many the resources that I enjoyed in Fort Wayne, such as access to independent and foreign films. There's a theater that shows a few independent movies, but most of the really interesting releases never make it this far into no man's land. I've subscribed to Netflix in order to fill this void. So far, my movie cue consists of a couple classic movies (Young Mr. Lincoln, Once Upon a Time in America), a few favorites (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark), and a few oddities (Primer, Oldboy). There is quite a bit of catching up to do, and if anyone would like to recommend a good movie, feel free. Netflix offers an RSS feed of my cue, and if I can figure it out, I plan to put the list in the sidebar here so that it updates automatically. Because I can.

Last Wednesday I went to the student center to see Dr. Brian Greene speak about string theory. He did a great job explaining it without the insanely complex math involved, and explained where his research may lead. The basic idea is that subatomic particles are made of little strings and shapes that vibrate, and the vibration patterns are what determine what the particle is. The size of these, as near as anyone can tell, is 10 to the -35 meters. Pretty darn small. He also talked about the possibility of other dimensions- not in a sci-fi sense, but in terms of an experiment to be performed in Geneva in the next few years. Fascinating stuff, even to a non-physicist.

Something else of note: there's a new British TV series called "The IT Crowd" about IT workers in the basement of an office building. It's pretty funny, and the network has made it available on Google video: link, and a link to the proper episode order: link

"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair." -John Steinbeck

This is from his acceptance speech for the 1962 Nobel prize in literature. It resonates with me, hence it goes here for digital posterity.

First off, here's an embedded Google text ad from the spam folder section of my gmail account:




Spam, bacon, sausage and spam, if I'm not mistaken. Google ads work by scanning the page for any word that matches the meta tag words in their ad database. As a result, the overzealous ad script found "spam" (used as a negative term here) and served up an ad for MRE-grade meat-based spam fajitas in a quantity that could satisfy the Supreme Court, provided that Stevens declines, citing seniority over canned meat (see Marbury v. Hormel). The option of extra salsa is proposed and left to the discretion of the court.

School keeps me pretty busy. I'm working on a research paper about the portrayal of banks in the movie The Grapes of Wrath. I'm enjoying the research, oddly enough. It's a history paper, so everything is based in fact- no theory at all. The great depression was a more volatile time than I thought it was, and the writing from the era is really interesting. Tomorrow night I'm going to hear Dr. Brian Greene speak in the student center. He writes books about space and time, and people say that he was really interesting the last time he was here.

Also tomorrow- Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-men #13 arrives in my pull file at Alter Ego. Shortly thereafter it will be read on my couch, re-read, flipped through, and passed on to Gerry to sit in his pile of my comics for six months until he has time to read it.

I'm not actually dead, though the prospect loomed unnervingly close in the past two weeks when I had the flu and then a pretty bad sore throat. I couldn't talk, but it took me a few days to realize this, as I don't talk much. I came down with the flu during the last DS Halo fragfest- cold sweats, nausea, headache, the works. I still managed to win four out of five rounds either by myself or with the help of Michelle. The last round the kill count was set at 25, and the level was huge for four people, and all I could think was "I can't go home to bed until this is over." I couldn't even see straight when I shotgunned my 25th kill in the back of the head. I got home, walked into the kitchen, and threw up for the first time in four years. The last time I vomited was when I got sick and had to postpone getting my wisdom teeth removed, thus missing seeing Zwan in Columbus, Ohio- right across from the Ohio State University.

So, I'm feeling better now. Still coughing a bit, much to the joy of my lumbering brick-footed upstairs neighbor. The parents have provided much in the way of medicine and food during this, and I'm gradually eating all of it like Pac-Man.

The semester is going pretty well. I had blocked out all kinds of time to work on my various projects, and recently I've spent this time sleeping and trying to stay at least minimally current with classes.

Two excerpts from Sweeney Todd:

"Mrs Mooney has a pie shop.
Does a business, but I notice something weird,
lately all her neighbor's cats have disappeared."

"There's a hole in the world like a great black pit,
and the vermin of the world inhabit it,
and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit
and it goes by the name of London. "


Why? Because I just read a rumor that Tim Burton will direct a movie musical version. I don't know who else out there is familiar with this particular work, but it's my favorite musical. Link to the story. It says that Johnny Depp is somehow attached, which sounds a bit odd. The titular character is an older man, at least in his mid-fifties or even early sixties. Aint it cool predicts an official announcement in a few weeks.

Most news blog sites have lists of notable events, memes, and novelties that made an impact on various factions of society in 2005. The compulsion to code and quantify such ephemera is not lost on me, and while I can't really explain this, I recall Nick Hornby explaining the phenomena of lists in his novel High Fidelity. Anyway, here is my list of things I enjoyed in 2005.

Comics:
I met Geoff Johns.
Fell- supercompressed Ellis
Loveless- Azzarello's take on Leone's western style
Infinite Crisis- I knew I'd have to read and cross-reference a lot in grad school, but not this much.
Astonishing X-men

Movies:
Serenity
Revenge of the Sith
Batman Begins
The Aristocrats
Corpse Bride
Back to the Future marathon viewing
Batman and Robin/ Superman IV double feature night
Zatoichi

Music:
the Black Keys in Indy
Spookie Daly Pride in Indy
the Tomkats at the Heorot
Charlie Don't Surf in the basement next door
Jethro Tull in my headphones
the faint prospect of a Smashing Pumpkins reunion

Academia:
more animation
a foray into true non-linear storytelling
met a slew of new students, most of whom I hold in extremely high regard
worked on a documentary, didn't actually see any ghosts
got straight A's for the first time in my life
the Fickle Peach- a great place for out of class discussion, pool, and fooseball

Consumables:
macaroni and cheese is still roughly 40 percent of my diet
spicy noodle bowls
far too much atrium food
Boddingtons- it's always nice to name-drop my favorite beer and get approving nods from worldly types
Guiness- the old standby
La fin du Monde- gotta love a beer named "the end of the world"
the brat burger at the Ram
avgolomeno soup from Michelle
pretty much anything I ever ate at Mark and Sarah's place

The sonuvabitch works!!!! Bwa-hahaha! The button states all highlight correctly, the menu doesn't jump nearly as bad as it used to! It all links back to the main screen like it's supposed to! It was due at noon, and I just got it working now seven and a half hours later, but by Yoda it's working.

You just can't rush art. Or this, either.

Last night Jessie and I saw the Empire Brass in concert in Sursa. I was pretty worn out before that from a day spent working on projects, but I walked out feeling great. One of the many highlights of the evening was hearing Rondo alla Turka played on a tuba. These people are amazing.

The documentary is pretty well in the can. I'm going to add some music that Scott and I forgot last night and maybe clean the audio in one section (weird buzz), but the big work is done. Now to finish my animation and assemble the corresponding DVD, and I think I'm done.