This is one of those days when I’d love to be writing here, reporting news (not much but that’s not a complaint), saying long thank yous (Nizzibet, Fuzzball, The Expatriot, The Brazilian) and engaging in general long rambling. But it’s been a busy day at work and when I get home I’m under deadline for those last Black Seal illustrations and Aged Mother will be wanting attention.
So, just this brief ramble and it’s back to work.
Cheers y’all!
A tribute to Scott Tolson by someone who knew him better than I.
I’ve posted a memorial page for Scott Tolson to the Tribes section at Sentient 39. You might not be able to access it if you’re reading this on Saturday night. Keenspace has a lot of other pages in the queue already.
Peace.
Like You Needed My Opinion
Nizzibet and I picked up a few more videos off of Rain City’s sale table. Last night we watched Murder by Numbers (the Sandra Bullock vehicle, not the Peter Greenway film) and Hulk.
Murder by Numbers was more entertaining than I expected. I enjoy watching Sandra Bullock. Not a great actress. She’s as good as her scripts and her character is poorly written here. She’s a detective who acts too much on hunches and whose vendetta against her suspect doesn’t fit her backstory.
Part of the entertainment came from the sloppy crime scene investigation. I noticed it in this movie more than others because I’m in the process of reading Scene of the Crime by Anne Wingate. It’s a writer’s guide to crime scene investigation by someone with real world experience. The schtick of Murder by Numbers was that one of the killers had studied up on CSI and so knew how to fake and plant evidence. Neat schtick but since Bullock’s character arrives at her suspects because of her hunches and prejudices more than because of her smarts it stays just schtick. Since the character is such a pain to work with and actively sabotages her personal relationships it stretches credibility to have her investigation so driven by gut feeling. She needed to be cleverer in her investigative work in order to balance her social incompetence otherwise why would would the police keep her around?
Hulk was … odd. Mostly I liked it. It’s a monster movie. That’s a plus. Monsters = Goodness in my book. It’s longer than it needs to be. Unlike Spider-Man it’s not an adaptation of any of the stories from the comics, at least none of the comics I’ve read. It’s a weird amalgam of the TV series and some of the characters and ideas of the comics.
The kid in me loved the Hulking out scenes, the mass destruction and monster battles.
What the kid missed was the Hulk. What the TV series and the movie don’t get is that, for a kid, the hero of the comic isn’t Bruce Banner, it’s the Hulk. The Hulk isn’t a werewolf story about some poor schmuck who becomes an uncontrollable beast, the Hulk is a Jeckyll/Hyde story about a man with warring personalities. There’s Bruce Banner and then there’s the Hulk. (In later issues of the comic, there are Hulks, superpowered multiple personalities created in Banner’s abusive childhood and given by manifestation by the Gamma Bomb.) Banner wants to get rid of the Hulk, the Hulk just wants to be left in peace. The Hulk of the comic was human, had thoughts (“Thinking hurt Hulk’s head”) and made plans (“Hulk smash puny humans!”). The Hulk in the film and the TV series is a roaring monster.
Ah well. Consider the source. Did anyone really expect Ang Lee to make a rip roaring superhero movie?
Schuyler Waynforth reports from England and Lovesettlement reprints it.
Tim posts his thoughts and memories of Scott Tolson.
Almost finished with contributors’ portraits for The Black Seal website. I volunteered for the job (heck, I invented the job) as a way to make our fictional contributors seem more real. Disquising a fiction by creating a larger one. It’s been an interesting exercise.
I don’t do portrait work generally and the few times I have I’ve usually either already known the person pretty well or had the person in front of me. For this project I’m working off a photo or two emailed to me from a far off land. I don’t know how close I’ve gotten to representing any of these guys. I’ve had to invent expressions when the ones in the photos didn’t match the mood I wanted. I’ve knocked off a pound or two. I’ve drawn more eyeglasses in the last couple months than I probably have in the last couple of years.
Once these last two are finished (hopefully tonight) I’ve got four more largish illustrations and I’m done with my allotment for issue #3. I believe that January is the intended publication date. The website will probably update sometime around then as well. I’ll make note of it when it happens.
Work continues slowly on The Cauldron. I’m debating whether I want to even commit to a regular posting schedule. I know I’ll have the first (and probably the second) page done by the First but I wouldn’t bet anything on whether I’d be ready for even biweekly publication in the first half of 2004.
I’ve promised Derek that I’d have the Dictionary illustrations for Mandate of Heaven finished by the end of the year. The work itself isn’t difficult. Finding a place to spread out my reference material and the time to work at it in between Aged Mother duty, household chores and reminding Nizzibet that, yes, she is My Favorite Everything, is the magic trick.
Sometime last night the geoffdarrow mass of life support equipment keeping Scott Tolson’s body alive was shut off. Donors had been prepped to receive his organs. He didn’t need them anymore. He was declared brain dead on Wednesday.
The miracle (there are always miracles if you look at them from the right angle) is that Scott lived as long as he did. He had an unusual, unstable nerve cluster at his brain stem that should have gone years ago. So we had his big smiling face around longer than we deserved. He will be missed. Judging by the number of people at the hospital yesterday, he will be missed by multitudes. As his father said, one of the measures of a man is how many friends he has.
Scott Tolson was big man.
I could lie. I’m not that attached to the truth. Not here. I could claim that having Aged Mother living with us is a growing and learning experience, that it’s deepening our relationship in ways I’d never imagined, that I’m so grateful for this opportunity to repay her for all her sacrifices.
Uh hunh. I could say that.
I could also mention that it snowed last night. It was still coming down when I got up this morning. Very pretty. It changed to rain come the dawn and now there’s no trace of it. Just more lovely grey.
