Movie time (or is it?)

I'm wondering about comic book people and movies.How one field might see the other as a place of liberation, and how that might effect them.

Guardians of the Galazy is basically two different series in the comics world: one based on the memory of the other and both pretty obscure.  Much has been made of how third-string characters like these never being the subject of movies.

Except now the Guardians are?  What to make of that?  At the Big Two comic book companies, there's tended to be more freedom on titles about minor characters.  But if this movie hits, that might be read as proof that there are no minor characters, so the corporate bigwigs might as well micromanage everything.  So whether the movie is good, bad or indifferent, creators trying to break in or just maintain their independence within the system might want to root for Guardians of the Galaxy to fail.  Or at least to be a perceptual failure like the Daredevil movie with Ben Affleck.

On a very different cinematic front, I watched F for Fake tonight.  This was Orson Welles' last film as director, and it's a "documentary" about fakery of different kinds, including a successful art forger and a journalist who seems to have manufactured an interview with Howard Highes.  (The journalist, Clifford Irving, is an intimidatingly tall man who almost always has a monkey on his shoulder.)  "Documentary" is in quotes because it's obvious that it's going to live up to its name to a large extent, and it's obvious this is supposed to be obvious.  One of the first scenes is of men on the street all ogling the same woman, and it could not be more staged.  (On the other hand, she was his real life girlfriend, so that counts for something.)

The movie doesn't entirely cohere, but Welles' voice and skill as  a raconteur carry it through.

...to be you and me

The Abigail Hernandez case is not the kind of thing I enjoy writing about, and generally I don't. But aside from certain mercies (the victim surviving) and petty pleasures (confidence that I would have avoided Nathaniel Kibby like the plague) there are things to learn here. First:

He was found guilty then of assaulting a female student by grabbing her while she tried to board a school bus. That same year, he faced charges for using false information to buy an “AK-47 type weapon,” according to a police report.

Then:

Kibby later protested the bail conditions in a court filing, saying his firearms were “of immense equitable value” and that he was not a threat because he lived by an “objectivist libertarian moral code.”

I wouldn't say that Kibby is representative of people who call themselves libertarians, but he is illustrative of the fact that the word "libertarian" need not mean much of anything. The most meaningful definition of freedom allows for it to be compatible with the same amount of freedom for all others. It obviously does not support depriving others - specifically women and young girls - of their most basic rights. And yet Kibby thinks he's for freedom. None so blind.

The wrong place?

Today I went to the dentist for my semiannual checkup/cleaning.  They weren't there.  Which is strange enough.  The door was locked, and from a note I learned that they'd apparently been trying to reach me in order to let me know that... what?  The whole story will come out tomorrow, I guess.

Near the dentist's office is a restaurant.  Well, it's not a restaurant now.  And that's the thing.  This location has been on-and-off for years, with different names and different owners.  I've had breakfast or lunch in it a few times.  One of these times was long enough ago for there to be ashtrays on the table.  The most recent guise for this place was Latin themed.  Makes sense, as its a Latin neighborhood, in the main, with a lot of recent immigrants from Central America.  But still it only lasted a few months.

The thing is, I've seen economically depressed neighborhoods.  I've lived in them.  I wouldn't really call this neighborhood depressed.  A lot of places do seem to do good business.  But whoever occupies this storefront always seems to draw the short straw.

Professorial

This is a poem by Miller Williams, a poet from Arkansas and the father of singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.  It talks about going down together, and it's got jokes, which is good enough for me.

The Associate Professor Delivers an Exhortation to His Failing Students
Now when the frogs
that gave their lives for nothing
are washed from the brains and pans
we laid them in
I leave to you
who most excusably misunderstood
the margins of my talks
which because I am wise
and am a coward
were not appended to the syllabus

but I will fail to tell you
what I tell you
even before you fail to understand
so we might
in a manner of speaking
go down together.

I should have told you something of improtance
to give at least a meaning
to the letter:

how, after hope, it sometimes happens

a girl, anonymous as beer,
telling forgotten things in a cheap bar
how she could have taught here as well as I.
Better.

The day I talked about the conduction of currents
I meant to say
be careful about getting hung up in the brain's things
that send you screaming like madmen through the town
or make you
like the man in front of the Jungle
that preaches on Saturday afternoons
a clown.

The day I lectured on adrenalin
I meant to tell you
as you were coming down
slowly out of the hills of certainty

empty your mind of the hopes that held you there.
Make a catechism of all your fears

and say it over:

this is the most of you ... who knows ... the best
where God was born
and heaven and confession
and half of love

From the fear of falling
and being flushed away
to the gulp of the suckhole and that rusting gut
from which no Jonah comes

that there is no Jesus and no hell
that God
square root of something equal to all
will not feel the imbalance when you fall

that rotting you will lie unbelievably alone
to be sucked up by some insignificant oak
as a child draws milk through straws
to be his bone.

These are the gravity that holds us together
toward our common sun

every hope getting out of hand
slings us hopelessly outward one by one
till all that kept us common is undone.

The day you took the test
I would have told you this:
that you had no time to listen for questions
hunting out the answers in your files
is surely the kind of irony
poems are made of

that all the answers at best are less than half

and you would have remembered
Lazarus
who hung around with God or the devil for days
and nobody asked him

anything

But if they do
If one Sunday morning they should ask you
the only thing that matters after all
tell them the only thing you know is true

tell them failing is an act of love
because
like sin
it is the commonality within

how failing together we shall finally pass
how to pomp and circumstance all of a class
nobel of eye, blind mares between our knees,
lances ready, we ride to Hercules.

The day I said this had I meant to hope
some impossible punk on a cold slope
stupidly alone
would build himself a fire
to make of me an idiot

and a liar

Plausible Friday Random Ten

Hope you don't mind the odd layout, here.  Accidentally walked into an editing nightmare here.  One of the more plausible kinds of nightmare, which might be why I chose that header, although I'm not sure anymore.

Probably a good thing that it's the weekend.

1.
Fairport Convention - Genesis Hall
2.
Broadcast - Tears in the Typing Pool
3.
Paul Simon - I Don't Believe
4.
Dirty Projectors - No Intention
5.
The Velvet Underground - I Heard her Call My Name
6.
Laurie Anderson - Walking and Falling
7.
Brian Eno - In Dark Trees
8.
The Band - In a Station
9.
Elvis Costello & the Attractions - You'll Never Be a Man
10.
Tito Puente - Lush Life

Shades of grey

charcoal animation from Alesh macak on Vimeo.

Kind of weird, yes. It would be pretty hard to tease a plot out of it. Of course most dreams are like that too.

The description on Vimeo says it was all done on one piece of paper. Sure used the hell out of that scrap.

A midsummer oops

Sunglasses.  Unless you wear a really luxe pair I think you expect to lose or break them at some point.  So if I misplaced a pair of shades on the bus I'd probably just write it off.  Same thing with a hat, probably.  Hats are replaceable.

This morning, though, I left my backpack on a bus.  It wasn't until the bus was gone and I was grabbing coffee that I realized that.  The bag has an address book in it.  Also toothbrush and toothpaste, because a lot of days I do dental hygiene at work rathter than at home (not counting brushing my teeth at night.)  The real deciding factor was that my partials were in there.  They'd be an expensive pain in the ass to replace.  So I waited for the bus to come up the other way so I could grab my stuff again.

All of which is a bit embarrassing, but we're getting to the part of the year where I can blame the heat/humidity for breaking my concentration.