darth potter

File this one under, "I'm a Big Nerd."
Reading this week's crime report, I immediately went for the item that had apparently taken place at Dragon*Con.
Ah, memories.
I was trying to come up with two appropriate 'Con characters who would be fun to draw. The chubby Darth Vader didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped, but my over-the-hill Harry Potter still makes me smile. It's also meant to be a tiny in-joke for my old friends: Harry was my Halloween costume back in 2001.

Blotter: One man wore a mask, the other man did not ...

confessions

1. I'm embarrassed to admit that I only just now got around to seeing Napoleon Dynamite, which was like the cult film of 2004. If you miss the boat on something like that, there's really no going back, and then you feel like an idiot when you bring it up in conversation. Yo, like, vote for Pedro! Tina, come get some ham!
Pathetic.
2. I'm less embarrassed to admit that the BF and I caught Little Miss Sunshine, easily the cutest little comedy of the year, even if we were somewhat late seeing it. Oddly enough, the film reminded me of Napoleon Dynamite. Misfit families, attention to nerdly losers, big dance sequence at the end. Discuss.
3. I'm embarrassed to admit that I've gotten sucked into the new season of "Survivor." Also known as Racist Island. It's just too rich to ignore. Have you seen the show? The black folks are an absolute wreck, cracking jokes about low-income housing when they built their hut, barely able to put their boat together. The Asian team, meanwhile, poked fun at themselves for being lightweights and able to row faster, while the white team is, like, so lame. This show is clearly setting race relations back by years, but what a ride.
4. I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm a slave for the new Justin Timberlake song, "SexyBack," even though I think it's already worn out its welcome. The album itself is a bit of a snore.
5. I'm not embarrassed to admit that I have mixed feelings about the new Scissor Sisters CD, which I think will prove to be polarizing. The first single, "I Don't Feel Like Dancing," makes me want to attempt questionable booty-shake moves in crowded E-Vill bars, but the rest of the disc is just weird. Maybe it'll grow on me.

disco nap

The latest drawing for the crime report. It was an item about a guy who passed out on a club's dance floor. Not cute.

Trivia: I loosely based the colors of the illuminated floor on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack cover.

Blot: One Friday night at a Buckhead club ...

the soviet challenge

Comment from a co-worker:

"I like your blog's redesign. It's very Tetris."

Um, thanks. I think.

red is the new black

I don't normally share my meandering iChat conversations, but this exchange with my friend who has a toddler was too rich to let vanish into the ether.

sturm und drang

"It's like an orgy of grief," a friend said to me last night about all the 9/11 anniversary coverage, "and it's frankly offensive."
I tend to agree, even if the BF and I have been willingly sucked into the nostalgia whirlpool for the past couple of days. The other night we watched almost all of National Geographic's Inside 9/11, arguably the best and most even-handed exploration of the events leading up to the attacks. I'm still haunted/fascinated by one scene showing the towers burning above while canned muzak plays on in the plaza below — such a creepy Stanley Kubrick moment.
Sadly, many of the other 9/11 docs and specials have proven less compelling. We started watching ABC's controversial The Path to 9/11, but I found it overwrought and a bit too conventional. Really, it was just a bad TV movie that got a lot more mileage than it deserved. The BF flipped us over to A&E, where he sat through most of The Man Who Predicted 9/11, another rehashing of the days events, though mostly told from the perspective of office workers who escaped.


We finally landed on Logo, surely a shiny gay bauble that would whisk us away from all the woes of a world at world? Think again. We got there just as the opening credits of WTC View were finishing, and ended up watching the whole movie.
It's another low-budget gay flick with hoaky acting and limited sets — and a surprisingly moving story. Protagonist Eric lives close enough to the towers to have seen them fall, even if his apartment went untouched. But in the weeks after the attacks, he can't find a new roommate, nor can he sleep because of lingering anxiety and fear. It's a little contrived, sure, how he opens up to every would-be tenant who comes to check out the apartment, but the movie says volumes about the different ways we all processed 9/11.

Today, however, is 9/12. Maybe I'm a bad American, but I'm seriously ready to move on.

docs vs. hollywood

Can there be any doubt we're living in the Documentary Decade?

I'm not talking about the hoopla over ABC's (seemingly) Republican-friendly "docudrama" The Path to 9/11, but about the crop of left-leaning documentaries that seem to have supplanted traditional investigative reporting in the national conversation.

The most obvious examples may be Fahrenheit 9-11, which I found entertaining but a little too giddy in its partisanship, and Morgan Spurlock's shocking Super Size Me, which made even mighty McDonalds retool its menu.
When Al Gore shows up on MTV's Video Music Awards to reenact a bit from An Inconvenient Truth (which has grossed more than $23 million), it's clear that there are seismic shifts happening on a national scale.

The BF and I are suckers for such.
We loved The Corporation and cringed at the low-production values but alarming message of Outfoxed, which takes on bias at Fox News.
The other weekend we happened across Why We Fight, one of the better entries in the recent spate of exposés, this one looking at why every president since Eisenhower has gotten America entangled in some foreign fight or another, and how our propensity for warfare is fueled — encouraged, in fact — by the rise of the military industrial complex.
It's scary stuff, but it casts the events of the last half century, and especially the last five years, in a gruesome new context.

Last night we caught another doc concerned with diabolical conspiracies, shady government characters and the rise of American agression, though this one focused on the questionable dealings of the folks who rate movies.
This Film is Not Yet Rated takes on the unchecked power of the MPAA, a top-secret board of supposed parents who decide how many seconds of an on-screen orgasm constitute an NC-17 rating — as opposed to how many bullets in the face can pass as a PG-13. (Quite a few, it turns out.) The movie makes a valiant effort in showing that the ratings process should be more transparent, and handled elsewhere.

I was personally shocked and offended to learn that two members of the clergy — Episcopal and Catholic priests — actually sit in and vote on the appeals proceedings. It's censorship at its finest, with an empowered few legislating morality from a secret star chamber.
Gays get especially shafted (pun not intended) in the ratings process, with any hint of homo-love landing NC-17s, while the same scenes with straight people get Rs. Oddly enough, the board seems equally grossed out by women having orgasms. Extended scenes of female bliss are often censured, or so argues the filmmakers.

It's a flawed documentary, sure. Director Kirby Dick obviously fancies himself as a sort of Michael Moore-esque crusader for the film industry, and as in Moore's flicks, his own time on camera tends to the weakest. There's a whole ridiculous plot involving a private eye who chases around members of the MPAA trying to nail their identities, which felt to me like a bad episode of "Remington Steele." Still, Dick's argument about the industry is cogent, and I'm curious to see if anything comes of it.
Best of all, the film was funded by Netflix, which surely has a stake in the way movies are rated. Then again, isn't Netflix sort of the antidote to big Hollywood telling us which flicks are fit for mass-consumption?

tom cruise buys asian baby!?!

OK, I bit.

I'm ashamed to admit that I went to Barnes & Noble today just to pick up the new issue of Vanity Fair with exclusive photos of the TomKat spawn. I feel dirty even typing the word: TomKat. Jesus, Mary and Josephine Baker: Has it really come to this?

Flipping through the 84-page photo spread (don't laugh; the new issue weighs more than the Oxford English Dictionary — unabridged), I sure got my $4.50 worth of voyeuristic delight. God bless you, Annie Leibovitz, for sharing your talents with the hungry world. How clever you were in these unforgettable compostions. Here's little TomKitten perched on Joey Potter's bosom. Precious! Here she is lifted to the heavens, like a tussle-haired sacrifice to the gods. Adorable! Even more creative, here are the beaming parents laughing with their pea-sized bundle of joy — except, the three of them are all in a bed! Together! I swear, it's like a candid lifted from the private Cruise-Holmes photo album. I feel blessed to be part of this intimate family moment. Thank you, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, for inventing permanent photography. You've truly given my life more meaning.

But amidst all this unbridled happiness and outright elation, I'll have to say that one thing does bother me. Joey Potter's last pullquote from the package: "I think she has Tom's eyes. I think she looks like Tom."
And it's true: The spawn does bear some resemblence to her doting dad — but not in the eyes. Not with that Mongolian slant.

Why, a less trusting soul might suspect there was a turkey baster and a healthy payoff in Singapore somewhere in Suri's not-so-distant past, but not me. I'd never stoop that low on the feeding frenzy. These are celebrities, and they deserve our respect. And even if they don't, even if we might suggest that the whole marriage photo spread is just one wildly extended publicity stunt, there's now the life of a hapless infant caught up in the showbiz spectacle.
Little Suri didn't ask for any of this. Not Annie Leibovitz. Not Graydon Carter. And definitely not her wacko parents.
Seeing these photos of the little one smiling uncertainly, I have to think: Enjoy the innocence, the ignorance, while you can. Because, mark my words: It's only going to go downhill from here.

i ride the beat like a bicycle

This week's Blotter doodle is sponsored by ghetto superstar Kelis, whose now album is now available from La Face Records.
I'm loving it.

Diamonds on my neck, di-diamonds on my grill.


The Blot: The man answered by shaking a gold necklace in a small baggie and saying, "Cheese."

fun with vamps

I'll confess: I was a fan of the short-lived Beetlejuice cartoon, which had surprisingly clever writing (sometimes) and funky artwork with a low-rent Tim Burton feel. It was like nothing else on Saturday morning TV at the time.
Thoughts of the show surfaced when I wrapped up the newest Blot illustration, though I didn't intentionally set out to reference Beetlejuice (pay no attention to those stripes in the background). For some reason, the item itself — about with an elderly man who believed that his wife has been replaced with an imposter — made me think that maybe he was the victim of a succubus. I mean, duh.
My final drawing looks more like Vampira than a demon — or maybe a grown-up Lydia from the afore-mentioned cartoon.
Anyway, here's the link:

Blotter: An alarm went off at an apartment ...

While we're on the topic of Vampira, I'm just about beside myself with nerdly glee: I had the chance to interview Elvira, Mistress of the Dark today. How freakin' cool is that? My story isn't running until closer to Halloween (naturally) so check back for the link then.

Last thing about All Hallow's Eve: I'm happy to see that the Halloween New Orleans folks have updated their site and are planning to put on the annual costume ball this year. Last year's events were obviously flooded out by Katrina, but you can't keep those Queens of the Damned down. It's also my favorite party of the year. Go figure.

technical difficulties

I keep hearing about problems with the site not showing up in some browsers. I'm still trying to figure out what's broken. Let me know if you have any suggestions.