Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
just got back from an extended weekend in the southeastern chunk of
utah (and must have left the shift key out there, though i don't
remember bringing it with).

for anyone driving a loverly road trip, the driving experience really
is enhanced quite a bit when read to while driving. i read stardust to
the boy and he read a moomin book to me. :)

any way, utah was gorgeous, and any stuffy-headedness I had melted
somewhere on top of one of the rocks (along with a good portion of my
lung capacity).

reg - you're asking for a musical part when you once declared to me
that you couldn't carry a tune if it had handles? :P

tree - get better? will bad punny joke-things help?

jouni - email me when you get a chance (favourite_stalker@snafu.org) i
have something of a request.

um, that's it.

squeaks, who would say something more interesting, only i'm still out
of it from the long drive yesterday
  

    
Back from WisCon. Soon off to Montreal for Convergence 8. No time to read
the books bought at WisCon, which include _Reading the Vampire Slayer_ by
Roz Kaveny, whom I believe Neil has mentioned here. Unless
I decide just to teach at C8 and not to merchant, and therefore to take raw 
materials to teach with at my table and spend the time I would
have spent making stock to take up there on reading books instead.

Am looking very much forward to Coraline. Waiting on at least nineterhooks, 
if not ten.

Oh, and I got new hair. Waist-length extensions. Quite the thrill,
actually. And Joan Vinge made some earrings for me, which she presented to
me at WisCon. It was a weekend of artistic exchange in many directions. Saw
Neil, who had eighteen million things and people clamouring for his
attention. (Therefore, Reg, I suspect that any dalliance with chundering in
the old pacific sea is merely a palliative momentary excursion brought on
by the stress of busyness, rather than by having too much time on his 
hands.)
  

    

Joan Vinge!  I want to hear all about the earrings!
  

    
Email from Jouni Koponen:

Hello Neil and others!

Just wanted to drop by and say hi.

Busy...

working...

playing with Joonas...

and if that leaves me with any free time, I spend it doin' illustrations
for Maure's poem (done five pictures so far).

Jouni (Coraline will be out soon! Yee-ha!)
  

    <scribbled by dfowlkes Tue 3 Jul 12 10:14>
  

    
Earrings:
asymmetric, both with glass beads up top
from that hangs a rough diamond-shape of greenish glass, patterned with what
appears to be a snake-scale pattern of cracks; the glass diamondish shapes
are bound at the edges in copper foil
from the greenish snakepattern glass on one earring depends a metal snake,
itself wearing a small glass drop around its neck
from the greenish snakepattern glass on the other depends a ring, which
carries a small glass drop and has several smaller rings all threaded
through it and dangling together, much like an armload of bracelets in
miniature

The snakepatterned cracked glass, she told me, is from the windshield of
their car, which got totalled by a semi.  I told her I was glad she was
still here.

She made several pairs of earrings, I believe. This one was especially for
me. She's got a necklace I made, one of four from the series called "To Know
Is Not The Same Thing As To Understand".  (The WELL's own <kuhrig> has
another from that series, presented I believe as a nuptial gift by the
lovely and talented <mcow>, who had the good taste to marry her.)

And I am again reminded that Maddy is one of the coolest younger-set humans
I know, although I might just be biased because she was amused by the blue
lightstick I carry in my purse pocket, and because she was very patient with
repeating the title of the Mr. Leakey book until I could lipread it
successfully.

Tomorrow, Montreal for Convergence 8....
  

    

Damn it, Miss Lioness, when am I going to get to see your work??

Thanks for the description of the earrings.  And I am so pleased to hear 
that mcow married kuhrig!  I did not know.  Clearly I don't hang in the 
right conferences.
  

    
<lioness> Have fun at Convergence. Apparently there was one in San
Francisco a few years back that I went to without entirely realizing I
was there... go figure. As for hair, what colour? :) 

squeaks, who just removed hers to reveal dull, boring (even with the
grey streak) not-even-shoulder-length and completely uninteresting
locks. must remedy!
  

    
Oh! but I want to see your nekkid locks, Squeaks!!
  

    
I saw one of Jouni's illustrations for a verse, and it is gorgeous.
Mildly disgusting in what it depicts, but gorgeous. You really are
fabulous, Jouni.

I saw Donnie Darko. What a strange and interesting movie! It threw me
into an Echo and the Bunnymen kick. I bought the DVD and watched the
deleted scenes. It was weird, because when I was a kid, I loved the
movie Watership Down. It gave me terrible nightmares -- I was a kid and
bunnies dying, bunnies on barbed wire, and blood running over the
fields etc. were scary -- but I loved it. I hadn't thought of it for
forever, until I watched some of the deleted scenes that used the book
and film. Then later that day, Mom called to ask if I had either the
Rats of Nimh or Watership Down, for her class to watch on movie day. I
have not heard her mention Watership Down for as long as I had
forgotten about it. She didn't know why she had thought of it, either.
I love weird coincidences.

neil,  I am very excited to hear what little you will say about the
new music you heard. I'm jealous, too.
  

    
Speaking of weird coincidences, Maure, we just rented Donnie Darko the 
other day. 
  

    
Yay! Did you like it?
  

    

Yes, we did.  A lot.  We've spent a lot of time twisting our minds around
the Philosophy of Time Travel and how it was illustrated in this film.  
(I would have liked some words from the living Rebecca Sparrow, though,
and I would have liked to have seen her reaction when she found a letter
in her mailbox.)  I like movies where everything is not spelled out and
all details resolved.  I'm still thinking about the various versions of 
Frank, and about how the family could simultaneously be on the airplane 
and also on the ground.  I'm being vague on purpose because I don't want 
to spoil it for anybody. 
  

    
There's some illuminating information at the website (it's a very cool
site, too):
http://www.donniedarko.com

There's a section with pages from The Philosophy of Time Travel at one
point - it sheds some light on some points that were left obscure in
the film. 
  

    

Oh, thanks!!
  

    
The DVD's deleted scenes also sort of lend more information, although
more toward the personal aspect than the time travel aspect. I really
like this film.
  

    

And that URL is the best interactive Website ever.  I couldn't have 
navigated it without Maure's help, though!
  

    
Neil - re: Blog
I'm curious now.. just how many of us *are* doing theatrical
adaptations of your work? It's kind of amusing to me that for an author
who's never written a stage play per se, you get produced so much!
also, I'm eagerly awaiting the unspeakable as of yet CD from the
artist everyone knows you're talking about.

Dan
  

    
and dammit, Snow Cherries From France!  *sob*
  

    
     For some odd reason, amid the discussion of TAPKATA (The Artist
Presently Known As The Artist*) I'm imagining an album called LIPSTICK
AND COMPACT DISC.  Should, I suppose, have a Roy Liechtenstein cover,
though I bet Art Spiegelman would have a good time with it.

*If you say "Recording Artist" it becomes the slightly more euphonious
TRAPKATRA, though that sounds like an anime film with Richard Burton
and Liz Taylor as interdimensional demon hunters for hire or something
(with Roddy McDowall as the voice of King Kai -- "Do you know, it's
almost going to distress me to extract your soul").  but I digress. 
  

    
Mike: snort. grin. snort.

just finished writing a Sherlock Holmes Meets the Cthulhu Mythos story
for a Sherlock Holmes Meets the Cthulhu Mythos anthology. (Shakes head
sadly at the mechanism that leaves me completely blank when someone
sends me an e-mail offering enormous amounts of money for "anything you
want to write" but produces a Sherlock Holmes Meets the Cthulhu Mythos
story at the drop of a deerstalker.) 


Stagewalker -- it's odd, isn't it? It's one of those things I don't
understand, like the mechanism that makes young filmmakers want to do
"We can get them for you wholesale".

Ariadne -- I'd never heard of it before she sang it to me. 

Really lovely sort of song, with a beautiful melody that has that
folk-song quality of being instantly memorable (I could hum it back to
you now, which I couldn't do with any of her other songs on just one
hearing in a car).
  

    
Neil- I second what Maure said. I too look foward to an ambiguous
review of The Album. And I can't wait to read all of this stuff you
keep talking about.  

Okay. So I listened to you people and rushed my happy ass to theater
and saw Star Wars. Um. It was a lovely cartoon...
  Although it was much better than Episode One...I dunno... I coudln't
tell if it was the acting that was bad or the script. Maybe it was
both. Ewan Mcgregor saved the day for me though.
Yup. A lovely cartoon. 

   Speaking of Star wars: I can't believe George is adding queen
amadala and fucking Jar Jar to the original movies. He's going to
tarnish everything. He's lost his damn mind. It makes me sad.
 

john-mike- oh please keep digressing:)Oh!I just finished TLHT. Very,
very good book. I'm now reading The Final Reflection. It's my very
first Star Trek book. Weee.


Erynn, who is now taking Zyban and feeling a little funny.... 
  

    
?? I can't believe George is adding queen amadala and fucking Jar Jar
>> to the original movies.

   I thought it was Anacin that Amygdala was . . . uh, never mind.

   I was reading Roger Ebert's review of the FINAL FANTASY movie
(which is in heavy cable rotation).  This is a picture, derived from a
video game, that is completely computer-generated, human characters and
all.  Alec Baldwin, James Woods, and the perhaps inevitable Donald
Sutherland are in the voice cast, and do okay.  The movie is . . . the
least bad movie ever derived from a video game.  The plot is "collect
the story coupons and defeat the weird aliens before the bad human
general uses his doomsday machine."  There are endless close-ups
designed to show us how well-animated the facial features are; they
-are,- but in a live-action movie one would assume the director just
wasn't very good at his job.
    Anyway, it came out a year-plus ago, and Ebert's interesting
comment is that he thinks this is where Lucas will go with STAR WARS,
possibly including "human" principal actors.  That may count as the
most prophetic film criticism of 2001 (the year, not the movie).

   I believe the only reason we haven't seen a bunch of CGI porn --
particularly just-short-of-actionable slash-type porn, which is very
common -- is that it's still a lot more skilled-labor-intensive than
just dressing up a couple of live people as (say) Michael Douglas and
Sharon Stone, or Illeana Douglas and I. F. Stone for that matter, and
pointing the camera at them.  In fact, it may always be; I tend to
doubt the idea that live actors will become obsolete, just because it's
so easy to do something in front of a camera than to try and give
instructions to a machine (and motion-capture, which is how FINAL
FANTASY's actors were done, requires -both- operations).

   But hey, the multiplex finds its own uses for things. 
  

    
Krynn -- thank you.  See, sometimes I really -am- digressing from the
important part.
  

    
Neil, you had to go mention a deerstalkers :evil grim: I have just
returned from a working a gaming con, RuneCon, local and struggling but
fun as all get out and the most interesting conversation I had was how
in the world did a deerstalker get it's name.

Star Wars,......I liked it,....but I went into it not looking for a
deeper meaning,....what I want from the story is the later half, which
I don't think I'll live to see, so I've read about it, it's firmly
planted in my little mind and anything else is like frosting to me.
Like it but really don't need it.
However,.....Yoda flipping around was very cool.

Tracey who got a 24 hour-get to stay home and play on her new
laptop-bug