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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) blpurdom | |
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I didn't post this last night because I was too tired but here's the quick version of yesterday: 1. Did another security detail, this time armed with a walkie-talkie, w00t! 2. Attended Andrew Slack's plenary session about the HP Alliance. He was wonderful as always. 3. Attended board meeting in the Ashbury room (opposite the Haight room, naturally). 4. Went to the Welcome (to the Big House) Feast, along with Chris and the kids; Chris Ranking (the HP films' Percy Weasley) was arrested by Aurors! Plenty of good food and in particular some wonderful potato leek soup. 5. Went to a presentation that I won't name that I thought was being given by one person with a particular first name that turned out to be someone else entirely (because I'd forgotten the last name of the person I thought was presenting). The topic had the potential to be interesting and other people certain thought so, since the room was overflowing, but the style of presentation wasn't grabbing me so I left and tried the panel next door, but that was really crowded too, so I decided to prepare for my presentation instead and went back to the room. 6. It turned out that it was a really good thing that I took the time to go over my presentation because I'm not sure I would have felt sufficiently prepared if I hadn't. I went down to the room where I was to do it but the previous presenter was still going so I sat in the hall with Gareth F. and talked about my presentation and the panel he's going to be on tomorrow; I'll have to miss the beginning of his due to the scheduling of my roundtable but I'll be able to catch 2/3 of it. 7. The presentation went really well and a number of people wanted to talk to me afterward and give me their email addresses. As a result, I wasn't upstairs as quickly as I'd originally promised, but it all worked out okay. We went to the food court across the street, in Nordstrom's, for a quick and cheap dinner, then got on a trolley to go down Market Street to the Orpheum theatre for Wicked. 8. I wasn't sure how fast this was going to go but it turned out I didn't have to wait at all to get the tickets at the Will Call window. When the clerk handed them to me, he said, "You have really great seats. Enjoy the show!" We did and we did. :D 9. At intermission Rachel thought the show was over, but Ben informed her it wasn't. ;) The whole thing was a lot of fun and afterward we were able to get out to the street pretty quickly and back to the hotel on the Muni subway train (there's a station right outside the theatre). We didn't want to be waiting for a trolley that late; it had really gotten quite cold. Of course, then when we got off at Powell everyone wanted to walk up the street to get various things at Walgreen's, so we did that before returning to the hotel. (Ben got rather sunburnt yesterday while hiking up Twin Peaks, so we got him some aloe and some sunscreen to wear today while he's out. I've been seeing a lot of people here getting sunburnt on overcast days, which don't really protect you from the sun.) 10. Back home for a little time reading my friends' list on the computer, then to bed. And now I have to be off to serve as a session prefect for two hours, then working Meet & Greet for three hours, followed by a presentation I want to go to and after that my own roundtable! Tags: san francisco, travel
126:  awake
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) newsaramablog | |
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http://blog.newsarama.com/2009/07/19/phonogram-vs-the-fans/ http://blog.newsarama.com/?p=12227 
A couple of weekends ago, a friend and I wandered down to the New York City Zine Fest in Brooklyn. Like me, my friend is a journalist and a product of the 90s punk-rock/riot grrl scene in which making zines was, in those dark pre-blog days, what you did with your angst and anger and more importantly, your sheer love of the music that kept you sane.
The zine fest featured a surprising number of comic creators–surprising to me at first, anyway, though when I thought about it, it made sense. Comics still work best in print, despite some good innovation in the digital forum. Zines, meanwhile, seem completely archaic–they were always artfully not-artful, badly photocopied, self-consciously printed in that same retro-obsessed typewriter font (Courier) even though few people made them on typewriters. Meanwhile, the Internet can assure faster distribution of and greater connection through ideas The zines we saw at this fest were no different than the ones we used to read in the 90s, which says something about the death of the medium. They seemed more an attempt to cling to a period in time that is past, an attempt to find a community that no longer exists. The point of the zine was the ideas, the community, not the medium itself.
So whither a zine about a comic?
Matthew Sheret has created a fanzine for Phonogram, a comic that is itself a bit of a fanzine. The first page of the zine is a screengrab (new technology! un-retro-fitting the zine!) of an iChat window between Sheret and Phonogram writer Kieron Gillen. The text:
M: Kieron, I’ve had an idea.
K: yeah?
M: What do you think about me doing a Phonogram fanzine?
K: …
K: don’t I already write that?
The acknowledgment with just this one little page is that this is not a simple explosion of fandom, but rather an effort at a metatext from someone who is not really a fan, but a friend. It’s a consciously outdated print object containing art and text, about a print object that is made of the interaction between art and text, that is about art that is made of words and music. In that one page, Sheret acknowledges that in one sense, the creation of the zine is an act of retromancery, something straight out of the pages of Phonogram (and something disparaged therein) and that he’s going to have extra work to do to make the project live.
Yet you can pick up and read Phonogram vs. the Fans without ever having read Phonogram, or even having ever read a comic. Well, except for the fact that there are comics in Phonogram vs. the Fans, so if you read it without ever having read a comic, you’d be reading a comic in a fanzine about a comic…OK, I’m making my own head hurt.
Gillen and Phonogram artist Jamie McKelvie open up each issue of the current comic series to a guest artist and to some interaction with musicians and discussion of music, further blurring the line between the different media. Some of the writers here are comics people and some of them aren’t, and some of the pieces have to do with the comic and others are just meditations on music, magic, and media. There’s also an interview with Gillen that makes everything I’ve written here look comprehensible, and pages from a Phonogram test script. And there’s pinup art and the utterly lovely cover, above, done by McKelvie (and the lines just keep on blurring…)
Us comic fans are lovers, for the most part, of the print artifact. We’re the type of people that buy singles and trades and still lust for the deluxe hardcover edition when it comes out even though we already own two versions of the book. And so somehow a zine about a comic is an ode to that impulse in the comic fan, some of whom will want the zine just for the McKelvie cover or the original art within, others of whom will want it for the interview with Gillen or the unread Phonogram script. Media may be changing and we may be learning most of our news about comics on the Internet, but we still love and treasure the thing we can hold in our hands.
And here I am, writing a blog post on a comic website about a fanzine about a comic about music, and I’m a fan at all levels of the fanzine, the comic, and the music, not to mention that now because of having blogged about the fanzine the first time, I’m friends with Sheret and have my own IM conversation much like the one above between Gillen and Sheret. And so the metatext stretches to another medium, another format, another friendship forged through writing about music as magic.
Or you could discount all my pretentious blathering here and just pick up a copy of the zine at San Diego Comic-Con and read it yourself. It’s lovely, and even if you haven’t read Phonogram, you get art and a bunch of excellent writers musing on just what makes music magic. Regardless of medium, it’s worth your $5.
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florahart | |
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Look, I'm relatively over you constantly mangling "should" and "would" (and the auto-spell-checker catches that in Word). I'm a little irritated by your recent inability to spell "remember" without sticking an extra E between the m and the b, but I can teach the spell-checker that one. However, this thing you've been doing where you drop the n-g on -ing words (e.g., 'Are you shitti me?' or 'As long as Bob was goi to the store, he was for damn sure stoppi by the pet shop for a fucki flea bomb.') has Got. To. Go. You do it in all contexts, and I can't teach the spell-checker to fix it because it's not like I can just say "change all things that have an i at the end, some letters before that, and a space after" to -ing." For one thing, I don't think I think the auto-replaceydoo (or ctrl-h find and replace) is that clever with the wildcard characters, and also there are words which legitimately end in i: Staci have driven the semi to every state but Hawaii. Stoppit. Thanks. Tags: letters: sent
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newsaramablog | |
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http://blog.newsarama.com/2009/07/19/review-dinosaur-hour/ http://blog.newsarama.com/?p=12226 I think we can all agree that there are few things in this world as cool as comic books, and that one of those things is probably dinosaurs. This explains why comic books about dinosaurs tend to be fairly awesome, and Hitoshi Shioya’s Dinosaur Hour, a recent offering from the Viz Kids line, is no exception.
Yes, it’s a kids book (recommended for kids ages 9-12 on Amazon), and yes, it’s educational, but don’t hold any of that against it. It’s also a pretty funny sketch comedy starring various dinosaurs from various periods of prehistoric history. The comedy is all physical or character driven, to the extent that the dinosaurs are able to develop personalities in their few page appearances, and is otherwise pretty much realistic and naturalistic.
Basically, it’s a slice of life comedy starring a bunch of dinosaurs.
Each chapter, called a “Bone,” opens with a title page drawing of a dinosaur, in a perfectly straight, serious, this-is-what-the-dinosaur-looked-like style. For example, here’s the clidastes, a type of carnivorous mosasaur:
Within the story, however, that same clidastes gets a bit cartoonier, acting and reacting frantically. For example, here he is after the ammonite he was planning to eat disappeared just before he could close his jaws around it:
It turns out that a pterosaur was snatching the shellfish out of the water before he could eat them, so he develops a plan to catch the pterosaur, which ends with an unexpected reversal of fortunes. This particular piece, like several of these, play out a little like a Roadrunner vs. Coyote cartoon, only without the ACME kits and the forces of nature taking the Roadrunner’s side in the battle.
Other conflicts include a pack of allosauruses trying to figure out how to bring down a gigantic brachiosaurus since they can’t reach his weak spot, various pterosaurs stealing the fish out of a particular pteranodon’s beak, and a carnivorous solar-powered dimetrodon trying to chase an herbivorous, solar-powered caeseasaur through shade, and so on.
Some dinosaurs appear repeatedly, like a nameless, luckless pair of protoceratops, who often end up in the mouth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Rather than a fearsome, alpha predator, this T-Rex mostly sits around with a blank expression on his face, until his prey wanders too close to his mouth.
Here are the protoceratops testing their theory that T-Rexes are blind and hunt by smell. The last time they walked by it tried to eat them, and they assumed it was because he could smell the garlic on their breath. Here they have just eaten mint leaves to hide the garlic smell, so attempt to breathe right on him:
Shioya is great at the simple, panel-to-panel progression necessary in good comics storytelling, progression that is particularly important in comedy comics, as timing is so important in comedy.
The educational aspect ranges far beyond the names, types and size of the dinosaurs (all of which gets identified whenever a new dinosaur is introduced), to incorporate various theories and aspects of paleontology.
For example, an old-school conception of a Tyrannosaurus wanders into one story—you know, highly reptilian, cold-blooded, slow, big, ponderous, tail dragging on the ground—and the protoceratops dinosaurs explain how he’s based on outdated theories, the proper way to hold his tail, and so on. (Again, they end up getting eaten. I don’t know about other species, but protoceratops seems to have gone extinct because of their apparent instinct to do everything in their power to end up between the jaws of predators).
In other, two members of the same species talk about the “rumor” they heard that some dinosaurs might have been feathered. Trying to determine what that might look like, they come up with a couple of possible ideas
but are completely unprepared for the reality:
It’s interesting to see how many different strategies are employed in the course of the book to explore some aspect of dinosaur biology and behavior while also telling a joke about it.
Shiyo does 23 of these short, humorous stories here, amounting to about 200 pages, and it never gets old. Quite an accomplishment considering his youngest characters are at least 65 million years old.
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terrified
hold me closer tony danza