Another "Dino-Faux" Comic

OK, it's hard to photograph a whiteboard, especially when you're in a hurry. Lots to do tonight. But since it's probably hard to read even if you click on the image to Dino-size it, a quick transcript:

1. T-Rex: WOW! I think I'm almost done with this bad boy...

2. T-Rex: Two and a half years and I'm ALMOST DONE!

3. T-Rex: I must stomp for joy now. Dromiceomimus: I was beginning to wonder if that "bad boy" would be done before the comet came. You know. Extinction...

4. Utahraptor: But don't rush it. It'll totally show that you rushed it.

5. T-Rex: I'm not.. Utahraptor: Assuming you give a crap about Quality.

6. T-Rex: Utahraptor! You dick! You're like a DINO-DEMOTIVATION POSTER. But really, I'm almost done!

*****

It's going to be a while before I can disclose what this project is. Truly it has been two and a half years in the making, and probably much more time will pass before the public gets to see it. But I'm approaching a major milestone and I'm chasing it down for all I'm worth. Damn, it feels good! Thanks always to the creator of Dinosaur Comics, Ryan Q. North, for making this unique outlet here possible. Go show him some love.

Cool Flicks: Ian McKellen's RICHARD III

I suppose to be absolutely correct I should refer to this as Richard Loncraine's Richard III but it seems so very much McKellen's baby -- it's perhaps the mark of a true actor to manifest a desire to pretend to be Richard III or Shylock or MacBeth at some point, no? -- that I can't help but call it such. McKellen shares screenplay credit with Loncraine and, of course, William Shakespeare, and he is also an executive producer. And he has much of which to be proud in this big, noisy adaptation of one of Shakespeare's nastier plays.

I do not say noisy idly. From the roars of the MGM Lion -- rumbling and dog-startling over my Harman Kardon Soundsticks III -- to the swinging soundtrack music, full of deep, heavy bass plunks and fruity vocals, to the climactic Battle of Bosworth Fields (about which more anon) (also highly dog-startling) this is a film to match aurally the bombastic dreams of a would-be tyrant. Zounds!

Directors love to do up Shakespeare's plays in alternate settings, don't they? They're occasionally happy to let the actors wear pseudo-Elizabethan garb but more often they want other costumes, other eras (sometimes, as in projects like 10 Things I Hate About You, even other dialogue). For this Richard III Loncraine and McKellen have imagined a sort of alternate Edwardian England for this tale of the last Plantagenet (Edwardian as in Edward VII, in the early 20th century; not as in Edward IV, Richard III's brother, who reigned in the mid 15th. I found the superimposition of the Yorkist's reign over that of the first Windsor an odd one, but as it gave an excuse for lots of lovely cars and Art Deco sets and costumes I let it go). Thus the opening scenes, in which Richard murders Edward of Lancaster and his father, King Henry VI can feature an opulent Art Deco study and library being destroyed by a great big tank smashing through its outer wall, from which Richard emerges with a machine gun, blowing Edward to bits and then firing out the movie's title letter-by-letter. One thinks of Pulp Fiction. Richard III was a Bad Motherfucker.

All in all, I was amazed at how well this really quite brutal story translated to these ravishingly elegant settings. I suppose the casting here helped quite a lot: Dame Maggie Smith as the Duchess of York, Richard's mother; Jim Broadbent as the Duke of Buckingham; Jim Carter as Lord Hastings; Nigel Hawthorne as the Duke of Clarence... and some amusing casting choices as well, like Tim McInnery, whom I first came to know as the silly Lord Percy in Blackadder (the first series of which took this self-same play as its springboard into hilarity), as Catesby and Robert Downey Jr. as Lord Rivers and Annette Bening as Queen Elizabeth, chosen perhaps for the talent for histrionics she displayed so well in American Beauty, much-needed to play a woman who not only loses her husband but also her two sons, the latter to a fabled murder plot in the Tower of London, in the course of the play. I give Bening points for not even trying to fake an English accent.

What really sells it all, of course, is McKellen himself, from his very first lines, morphed for this film into a light after-dinner speech at his brother's posh coronation ball. He gets up before a gorgeous Unidyne microphone to observe "Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York" to light applause and polite, inappropriately timed laughter from a crowd that really isn't listening, eager to get on with its gaiety; the latter part of this famous speech he does not impose on that audience, but shares with us as he leaves the stage and retreats to his private apartments, there to confront himself in the mirror and reveal "I am determined to prove a villain." It's all right there in that opening speech, as Richard III should be, whether in doublet and hose or white tie and tails.

This film teems with brilliant re-imaginings like that; later in the play, after Richard has himself been crowned, he gloats over a black and white newsreel of the event as he tries to tempt Buckingham to murder the Princes in the Tower -- and plans to do away with his no-longer-useful wife, Anne (Kirsten Scott-Thomas, who does Anne as a numbed drug-addict, shooting up hourly just to be able to tolerate her life with Richard). The backdrop of Richard's finest moment playing out in grainy black and white even as he plans his foulest deeds yet works deliciously well.

Then there's the Battle of Bosworth Fields. Oh my, they sure gave us a lot of battle. Henry Tudor (played here by Dominic "The Wire" West with his native accent but an entirely wooden demeanor) has barely made appearance in the film (and he's not much more present in the play) and suddenly he shows up, come from France with a full modern army complete with bombers and tanks. I found this a stretch; a pretender to a throne in the late middle ages might plausibly raise a good number of knights and peasants to fight in his cause, and these all supplied their own horses, weapons and armor, but that one might somehow be able to raise planes and pilots and tanks and tank drivers strained my credulity to its utmost. I realize it was probably the only way to be consistent with the rest of the society invented for the film, but it didn't quite work for me -- though of course I loved this film's version of Richard's death as he plunged backwards, grinning manically at the camera, into a fireball below, almost exactly prefiguring Gollum's in the last Lord of the Rings film (in which, of course, McKellen played Gandalf, to much acclaim).

So once again, I must tip my hat to Juan and Lee at Movies You May Have Missed for bringing my attention to this splendid film I would, indeed, have missed -- for I tend to prefer my Shakespeare films more traditionally rendered, with my favorite example being Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. I think I can hear Lee's teeth grinding from here...

My Dinosaur Comics White Board Is Here!

Click to Dino-Size!

My friends on Twitter already know of my great enthusiasm for Dinosaur Comics, that wondrous webcomic whereat Ryan Q. North makes his daily commentary on modern life as viewed through the perspectives of a dysfunctional and self-centered Tyrannosaurus Rex (who is addicted to stomping on houses and cars, Godzilla-style), a Dromiceiomimus who is sort of T-Rex's ex, and T's comedic foil Utahraptor, who exists mostly to deflate T's giant ego bubbles.

And yes, it uses the exact same artwork every day -- yet still manages to be fresh and hilarious. Take a look through the archives and you'll see what I mean. Watch out for in-jokes that have been known to appear upon my own personal chest in the form of tee-shirtery.

Today the Mud Room of Squee brought me more Dinosaur Comics goodness in the form of a white board with the standard art permanently affixed. I can now leave notes to myself like which very logical place I put the peanut butter away in or let the two hemispheres of my brain duke it out in battles royal whenever I want, just like Ryan does!

Above is my first one, mocking my enthusiasm for Dark Shadows and also making a lame joke about hipsters and the difference between bird-hipped and lizard-hipped dinosaurs which I'm sure Ryan could do better (and maybe has done) but then again, maybe not.

Ryan?

100 Books 22 - (Super-Secret Beta Reading!)

I've got a lot of beta-reading on my plate this spring, entire novels in the rough that I'm examining for their authors (I have a lot of friends who are authors or inspiring authors). I'm going to count them toward my 100 books, but I can't really blog about them for obvious reasons.

Book 22 is a secret. I finished it yesterday and sent it back to its daddy with many notes. It's a sci-fi/horror hybrid I'd been not-so-patiently waiting for ever since its author told me of the idea he had for it, and it was lots of fun, but since I take my beta-responsibilities very seriously, it was also a lot of work.

It's gonna be good, I can tell you that.

100 Books 21 - Christopher Priest's INVERTED WORLD

I tore through Inverted World as if the world was falling apart behind me, swept along with the City of Earth on its rails. It's one of the most peculiar, brain-hurting novels I've ever read, more akin to a Douglas Hofstadter treatise or an extended thought experiment than an ordinary genre tale, but more, rather than less engaging for this fact.

It snuck up on me, though.

I took this one up for two reasons: I like Christopher Priest and the old-school British science fiction writers like he and John Wyndham represent, and I've developed a curious fascination with a very specific and peculiar sci-fi trope of which Inverted World seems an early (1974) example: the railroad in perpetual motion, pulling up its tracks behind it and building new ones ahead, on and on perhaps forever. This peculiarity appears in the culmination of China Mieville's Iron Council, in which the convict laborers building a railroad through the badlands of Mieville's baroque and unsettling fantasy universe of Bas-Lag seize control of the works and turn the train and the railroad into a perpetually moving city that disappears into the physics-defying Cacotopic Stain; it shows up again in Alastair Reynolds' Absolution Gap (Revelation Space) in the form of a parade of mobile cathedrals traveling a planet's equator in order to keep an astronomical anomaly always in view. It's a deeply weird thing and if you, my few but wondrous readers, know of other examples, please share them!

The perpetual railroad in Inverted World carries a whole city on its back. It both is and isn't what you are thinking now; the city contains a few thousand inhabitants and is a multistoried warren, but it's built mostly of wood in various stages of weathering. When finally seen by an outsider, it's a bizarre and baroque monstrosity. The city, which the inhabitants refer to as Earth (sometimes specifying Earth city as opposed to Earth planet, on which they do not believe they live and from which they continually await rescue), moves along at a pace of about a mile every ten days, in fits and starts. Tracks are pulled up and moved to the front and then vast winches within the city's structure pull it forward. Occasionally this is delayed when natural obstacles like rivers appear, when a crack team of bridge builders hurries to construct a suspension bridge that can bear the city's weight, which bridge is then just as quickly torn down that its materials may be used in the next bridge.

The city moves in pursuit of the ever-receding "optimum," a locus in their world at which time and space behave normally. This is vastly important because time and space manifestly do not behave normally elsewhere; north of optimum, bodies (living and otherwise) lengthen and thin and the subjective time of a visitor speeds up so that weeks spent north of the city pass as mere hours back home. South of optimum, bodies broaden and splay (even mountains flatten out into something that can be clutched in one hand as one hangs off the ground, feeling gravity as a pull southwards rather than down) and time slows so that a few weeks spent south pass as months or years (or actually "miles" as the city measures time; hence our protagonist starts his tale as a young man of 650 miles old). The sun and the world (which can be seen in its near totality from the northern and southern extremes of the city's route) appear as hyperbolic solids rather than spheres.

And the very ground is moving, too, southward, it too pulled by the same "centrifugal force" that pulls on the poor man hanging on to those tiny, flattened mountains by his fingertips. If the city stops chasing the optimum, it will be destroyed by this force and all will perish.

Within this universe is contained only a slight narrative; we experience the plight of Earth City through the aformentioned youth, who rejoices in the hilariously apt name of Helward Mann. Following in his rapidly aging father's footsteps, he becomes a member of the guild of Future Surveyors, those who travel north and scout out the city's route. In doing so, he becomes privy to the nature of the world he inhabits in the way most other residents of Earth City do not, for it was decreed long ago that it would be best of ordinary citizens were kept ignorant of the city's true plight. No windows look outside of the city at the hyperbolic sun, and children are still taught that they live on a spherical planet.

The crisis of this civilization does come as a result of our hero's actions, as well it should in anything that could claim to be a novel, but as I said before this book really isn't about the plot. An explanation is eventually given for why Helward's world is so deeply weird (and the theory I developed as I read turned out to be wrong, but the "truth" was better than my theory, so I was satisfied) and I finished Inverted World quickly but sorry to see it end. My pulse did not pound, I never feared for the hero's safety, there was no romance, but the mystery of the inverted world obviated the need for these and kept me turning the pages just as quickly as one might in a cracking good suspense novel.

I wouldn't say this book is for everyone, but it was definitely for me.

100 Books 20 - Brand Gamblin's THE HIDDEN INSTITUTE

As I was finishing up Brand Gamblin's follow-up to the excellent Tumbler, a thought kept occurring to me that I couldn't shake: If my buddy Brand (for buddy he is, on Twitter and from Balticon) keeps it up, he could be a 21st century L. Frank Baum. I can think of no other writer whose work can beguile a precocious pre-tween and a cynical old grown up to this degree. And I have evidence: my friend's ten-year-old daughter has read Tumbler at least three times since I gave to her in December, and all of my grown up friends who have read or listened to it seem to enjoy it just as much.

The comparison doesn't stop there, though. Brand tells charming and fanciful stories with a lot of wide-eyed innocence and just a smidgeon of jeopardy -- and the jeopardy is as likely to be social as it is physical. That's as true of Tumbler as it is of The Hidden Institute, though they are otherwise very different books: Tumbler concerns a young woman struggling to make her way as a beginning asteroid miner, while The Hidden Institute concerns a young man dealing with a more earthbound -- but also more fanciful -- situation.

At the heart of The Hidden Institute is a chillingly possible (and becoming more so almost daily) future society in which our own near class-wars have been mostly settled and the extreme divide between the haves and have-nots has gelled into what amounts to neo-feudalism. A new cadre of aristocrats has seized control of the economic and political levers of a neo-Victorian society that may remind readers of that in Neal Stephenson's staggering The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, but has a heaping helping of a slightly grittier version of Baum's Land of Oz thrown in.

Our hero is Cliffy, an extremely lower class youth who blunders into a bizarre chance to better himself when he witnesses and records what appears to be a murder at the hands of an aristocrat. To hush him up, the seeming criminal gives Cliffy entree into a special, extremely secret, school (no, not Hogwarts) where he can train up to be a gentleman, then seek placement as a higher-level servant in an aristocratic household -- even though even these rather menial posts are reserved for the lower nobility (in this world, aristocrats' servants must be nobly-born or at least ennobled by the King. And yes, this takes place in America!).

Cliffy's journey through the school, with his lessons in history and culture, his deportment lessons (one day it takes three hours to get through a bowl of soup!), self-defense classes, and his foray into bear polo -- hold the phone! BEAR POLO -- it's exactly as it sounds, it's polo played riding bears instead of horses! -- is peppered with very acute observations on what it really means to be an upperclass gentlemen: obeying your servant is at least as important as learning to affect that je ne c'est quoi.

And Cliffy's interactions with his servant Whister, a seemingly omnicompetent robot valet, that give The Hidden Institute most of its Ozziness. I couldn't help picturing Tik-Tok, though Whister does not seem to share in any of his predecessor's limitations; say half Tik-Tok, half Tin Woodman, yet never fearing water or rusting. Such a robot is probably impossible any time soon, but Whister is totally plausible within the narrative because he's just part of the craziness of the story.

But what happens, you might ask, besides the school thing? Quite a lot. Cliffy runs afoul of not one but two conspiracies, either of which could quite easily get him killed. I won't spoil these except to say that fans of the podcast have already nicknamed the distaff conspiracy the "Silk Goon Squad."

The only thing that spoils this delightful read (and this is only problem if, like me, you're sensitive to usage/grammar issues), is a problem that I cannot 100% lay on Gamblin's door because I strongly suspect it's a technology issue. While yes, there are occasional flubs that illustrate again how completely the English language's many homophones are the bane of modern writers who rely on computer spellcheckers("discrete" is used where "discreet" is meant a couple times, with unintentionally humorous consequences), what really drove me nuts is the preponderance of the wrong "its." Every instance I found where either "it's" or "its" might appear, it was always the former, the contraction for "it is" rather than the latter, the possessive form of "it" -- and usually it was the possessive that was wanted. It's a small quibble but it highlights something I think lots of writers and aspiring writers need to be wary of.

I'm not certain that Gamblin has an iPad but he runs with an iPad-loving crowd, and I know a lot of them enjoy writing novel drafts on the device. That means, of course, that a little feature, much complained of, called AUTOCORRECT is a factor, and one of that feature's most annoying habits is always insisting on changing "its" to "it's" because, you know, it knows better than you. I curse it often when I send tweets via my iPod Touch and shudder at the thought of trying to compose a novel-length piece while constantly fighting it off. This is just my theory about what happened though.

The screechy brake sound my brain made whenever I encountered that small issue (and I'm sure your brain has made it in some point reading this blog entry; I type really fast and don't always see my errors until after I've hit "publish") notwithstanding, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Read it yourself and give it to a ten-year-old. Talk about the bear polo and you might even get your teenager to read it. Then you can all have a good sit-down and talk about economic injustice, opportunity and the importance of a good education. Bravo!

A final note. Gamblin has been hinting to me via Twitter that he's contemplating a sort of companion short story or novella centering on a doping scandal in the wild and wooly world of bear polo. If you're at all fond of me, or if you read this book and enjoy it, please join me in urging Gamblin to stop teasing and write the damned thing.

I lied. This is the final note. If you are e-book challenged, you can stil enjoy this one, either as a free audio podcast at the author's website or you can order a copy on dead tree HERE. It says pre-order but I got mine right away.

100 Books 19 - Sakyong Mipham's TURNING THE MIND INTO AN ALLY

My good friend Isoban Valian (aka Christopher Butler) has observed that meditation will make you feel like crap and I'm often inclined to agree. I first dipped my toe into these weird waters about a year ago, and began an earnest effort to practice regularly maybe six months ago, and I still don't feel like I know what I'm doing most of the time, except falling very briefly asleep and having intensely bizarre and imaginative dreams before a hypnic jerk and a guilty start brings me back to watching my breathing.

Why bother? What's it for? My mother wanted to know last visit. And I had a tough time answering her. But the title of this book, Turning Your Mind Into an Ally, given as a hostess gift by a very dear friend last summer, that's what I'm hoping for. That's what I want.

I didn't learn from this book how to get it, but then, despite the title, I didn't expect to. I've read and watched the Dalai Lama enough, read enough other books about religion and spirituality (a non-believer myself, I still find the topic endlessly interesting. Ask me about the astonishing array of Christian heresies I've studied -- but only if you really want to know) to be pretty sure that a how-to book on Buddhist practice is an all but oxymoronic notion. This is no step-by-step guide to enlightenment or inner peace or perfect accord or any of that bulldada.

What it is, is a kindly intended, gentle and slightly amusing excursis on a lot of the basic tenets of Buddhism and how they relate to the practice of meditation. A lot of it explores what it means to suffer because of attachment to things or ideas or people, because of resistance to change. Digging in your heels and gritting your teeth and trying to push against the forces of time and circumstance burns up a lot of energy and can do physical harm (ulcers, migraines, high blood pressure, actual physical energy from temper tantrums -- myself I tend toward migraines, the kind that last three days and are so debilitating my only relief lies in turning off all the lights and sitting in a hot shower in the dark -- conditions which I tend to try to simulate when I sit down to meditate. Aha!). If we can learn to let go, Mipham and his fellows advise, accept what has happened, not worry too much about what's going to happen, just focus on things as they are right now, we have a far better chance of reducing our own suffering and maybe that of others. Maybe.

From what I see in other reviews, a lot of meditation books out there are loaded with jargon and what the skeptic community loves to deride as "woo-woo." Turning the Mind Into an Ally is not one of these. Sakyong Mipham comes from a line of Tibetan Buddhist teachers who are held in great reverence by their community, but he writes like an ordinary American, friendly, familiar with our pop culture and our folkways and our struggles and fears, and relates to these as he discusses how, not to resist these blandishments and detours, but accept that they are there and try just to be anyway -- without ever resorting to a paternalistic or patronizing tone. He comes across as a patient and true friend, who may know more than we but is not going to emphasize it or even acknowledge it unless we insist.

I don't know that I'm any better at meditating than I was before I took up this book, but I'm more comfortable with the idea that that doesn't matter. What matters is I'm taking the time, letting things go and have reached the point where I look forward to doing so. No, I've never achieved that kind of high serenity that Isoban mocks in his post, but friends and colleagues have noticed that I'm a lot more relaxed and subdued and open, nicer to be around -- and I think I'm getting more stuff done in a day than I used to.

Not bad!