Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

A Happy New Year to all my peeps...wishing everyone a healthy and
prosperous 2003.  

Dan -  Guess we'll be peepin' da B-Dil aka MC First reprezentin' for
Middle Earth at the next SOURCE awards, yo? And he's talkin' 'bout yo'
Mama's Mama?   Damn, he be seriously blowin' da spot on the whole East
Coast vs West Coast vibe son. Jay-Z betta watch his azz, and y'all
better recognize! ;p

Neil, never thought to ask but what other languages do you speak? 
This question was prompted by something you posted the other day, but
I'm still drying out and can't remember exactly what that was right
this minute.

Christy - Welcome sweetie..I look forward to your postings with glee. 


Anastasia is such a sensual name...even has a lovely contraction in
'Stasia'.  It's definitely one of those names a grrrl can grow into.

  
  

    
Anastasia is one of my favorite names, too.  But girls named Mary name
their daughters Anastasia, or Siobhan......

Neil--how about the script for Midsummer Night's Dream?  Or one of the
episodes in A Game of You?

Stagewalker--I can't even play the audio & I'm laughing my ass off. 
Sick!

Did I ever mention the extra cool CD I got for Christmas?  From the
Endless Band?  It totally rocked--thanks, Adrianna!

I saw Gangs of New York and Two Towers on New Year's Day (yes, I sat
in a movie theatre for almost 7 hours--what's it to ya?).  They're both
brilliant, and completely different.  Day-Lewis is at the top of his
game, and when he kicks in the aft thrusters, there is no one, and I
mean no one, who can catch him.  He's funny, offensive, charming,
appalling and mesmerizing, all at the same time, and he makes it look
easy.  Scorcese has a *lot* to say about racism, violence, the birth of
the modern era, etc.  I was actually surprised that the violence
wasn't worse--there was surprisingly little blood in the first battle
scene, given that they were fighting with knives and axes.  Jim
Broadbent as Boss Tweed is wonderful, and DiCaprio & Diaz were fine. 
Be nice to see Marty finally win a little gold man....not that this is
necessarily his best film, but I certainly think it's one of the best
this year.  

Two Towers rocked.  I suspect on repeated viewings I may find it a bit
cheesy, but I totally dug it.  Legolas is still the prettiest.....

Must bugger off to bed now, as it's obscenely late, and I must rest in
preparation for a bad movie marathon tomorrow.  Cleansing the palate,
you know......

Mary (reading If at Faust You Don't Succeed by By Roger Zelazny and
Robert Sheckley)   
  

    
Mary, David, and Rocky -- Thanks for the welcomes!

And Rocky, good question, and probably the first one I ever asked on
the FAQ line.  I've always wondered whether he spoke any foreign
languages, or was still just having too much fun with English.

Mary -- (Love the MM allusion, BTW.)  One of the first babies I ever
met, if not <i>the</i> first, was named Siobhan.  For some reason, I
sat on her.  I guess I thought she looked like a bench.  (What?  I was
barely two.)

The name Anastasia always makes me think of the first place I heard
it, in one of L.M. Montgomery's wonderful <i>Betsy, Tacy, and Tib</i>
books.  (It was Tacy's real name.)  I almost forgot how much I used to
love those.
  

    
Christy--thank you for getting that.

Ok.  Let's face it.  There are films out there that are a waste of
time.  There are films that make you say, "I'll never get that 2 hours
back".  And then there are films that are hazardous to your health. I'm
talking toxic.  Memorize these titles, and never, I mean never, allow
*anyone* to convince you to be in the same room with them.  "Black
Ninja".  "Cemetary Man".  "Appalling" doesn't begin to cover it. 
"Reprehensible" might be a start.  Movies so bad they have to be seen
to be believed.  But don't--please don't.  I beg you.

Black Ninja is apparently a different movie every time you run it--our
friend Alia (whose *brilliant* idea this "Craptastic Film Fest" was)
said that the movie she had heard about featured Black ninjas that
leaped up into the air and spun around to change into their ninja
costumes.  The one we saw was about.......well, I'm not sure really.  A
guy road a motorcycle for about 10 minutes.  Some ninjas (none of them
Black) skiid for about 10 minutes.  A guy walked down a city street
for another 10 minutes.  None of this appeared to be connected in any
way, really.  There was a Black man in a karate ghi on the cover, but
he wasn't in the movie.  The fights were a level of bad seldom seen in
Nature.  

Cemetary Man starred Rupert Everett, and I swear, if he hadn't taken
off his shirt, repeatedly, it wouldn't have been bearable.  He played
the watchman at a cemetary where the dead kept coming back to life, and
the only way to kill them was to split their heads open.  If this were
a straight-ahead schlock horror film, it would have just been bad, but
no--this was played as an attempted comedy, with existential angsting
for added flavor (or pretentiousness--whichever you prefer to call it.)
 Gross, bizarre and stupid.  Sample dialogue--"Everything is shit, and
the only thing that isn't shit is sleep".

Really, that's probably the best summation of the film viewing
experience, right there.

We had an absolute blast MST3King the hell out of both films (best
line was probably when my friend Jeff, on seeing a long sequence of
shots of feet and legs walking in Black Ninja said, "Very tall
cameraman on break.  very short cameraman take over now".  You probably
had to be there.)

In other news, have found my copy of Al Stewart's 24 (P)Carrots and
listened to it for the first time in at least 15 years.  Thanks, Neil!

Mary, crashing.
  

    
Mary, you know I love you, but you're absolutely insane. Cemetery Man
is fantastic. I own it, even! How can you dislike any movie that
features a busload of Boy Scouts crashing into crazy teenage
motorcyclists, and at the funeral, people singing happily, "Shouldn't
have gone to the Boy Scout picnic . . . ?" I mean really. That's
cinema. And when Nagy jumps on the leaves to stop them from blowing
away? That's funny. 

Re: Anastasia: I worked with a little Russian girl by that name. Her
nickname is Sasha. I always liked that.
  

    

*Note to self*  - DO NOT read conversations with Maddy Gaiman while
drinking tea unless you want end up blow drying your keyboard. I
howled. What a little darling!

Christy - It was FAQ'd?  Damn.  I haven't come across it yet.  So what
was the answer?  ;)
  

    
Geez, take a little time to be insane by yourself and you miss two
holidays, a changing of the topics, and something like 140 posts! 

No time or energy to read EVERYTHING I missed, but a quick and
cheerful <<<hug>>> to Pammy! 

X-mas was tolerable (which is better than it usually is!) and NYE was
only slightly explodey outside... er, more KABOOMey than explodey,
actually, but you get the gist, it was good. And so far this year is
being all kinds of better than last year - as I hope it is for everyone
else so far.

Now to get back to organizing all those comic books that have been
piling up because I kept forgetting to buy another damned long-box (for
8 months!). I'll be back when I finish (sometime in August, probably).

Oh, and my tally for LOTR:TTT is currently 3 viewings. Would have been
5, but there were issues over running out of tickets for one and
needing to send out late X-mas presents instead for the other. Anyone
have any idea what color Legolas's eyes are supposed to be? Just
curious.

squeaks, who is not being online right now... it's a figment of your
imagination.
  

    
Ariadne -- no idea who'll be casting dir for DEATH. Wait till the
green light... you'll know when it happens.

Christy -- your lovely FLEXart things arrived safe and sound, and
thanks so much. Haven't had the heart to light the sushi candles yet...
loved the photo of Maddy on the steps.

And I heartily recommend the first three Fletch Books (Fletch, Confess
Fletch, Fletch's Fortune) and the Flynn books. The other Fletch books
are up and down, although they can be addictive.

Dan Guy -- what a great name Anastasia is...

Rocky -- I read French and German, and have a little latin, greek and
a smattering of Hebrew. The last time I was in France I was surprised
to discover that after a few days I understood everything being said
around me, although I think it'd be a month of immersion before I was
actually speaking it. The same, at a guess, for German.

Mary -- I have a strange fondness for Cemetary Man. It's an Italian
comic. As long as you think of it as an Italian comic, it's kind of
cool.

(Did you have the 24 Parrots with the 3 Bonus tracks or 5?)

Rocky -- my wife just read the journal entry and went off into
hysterics as well.

Michelle -- welcome back.
  

    
Maure--cool--we can argue this one for days next time we get together.


Neil--believe it or not, mine is the original cassette tape from 1980.
 The plastic of the cover is the same appalling shade of orange as the
carrots.  I don't think there are any bonus tracks.  I'm considering
trying to replace it on CD, but of course it is OOP, so we'll see. 
Your favorite song?  I'm betting on Merlin's Time....

And your fondness for Cemetary Man is strange, though I will concede
that it gets under your skin--that last scene...somebody had been
reading too much Beckett.  And I don't like horror movies to begin
with, so I freely admit to a bias.

Yay!  Mousy!  Hi!  Glad you weren't here just now.  Please don't come
back again soon!  ;-)

Rocky & Christy--thanks for asking that question--I've been meaning to
ask it for ages.  And Neil, thanks for answering it.  I am intensely
jealous.  I barely have enough French to survive an Eddie Izzard video.

Rocky--sorry about the tea.  I'm way glad that I wasn't drinking
anything when I read that--it's bad enough that my neighbors sometimes
wonder why I howl with laughter in an empty, quiet apartment......

Mary (off to finally assemble the cross-stitched Christmas ornaments
she's been stitching since October...hey, I still have one more day! 
Happy Epiphany!)
  

    
Aaaaaah!  Tara cut her hair!  And she's *so* cute!

http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=taraljc&itemid=105277#cuti
d1

Mary (the big gossip)
  

    
My viewing of LotR now stands at 2. 

Went Sunday with a pal I haven't seen in about 2 years. Had a stab of
nostalgia Saturday and called a few people haven't seen for a bit. She
came to my condo (which I moved into since I last saw her) and
critisized my unpacking and housekeeping. Since I'd been out all day
the day before car shopping I'd not done much except what I could do
that morning. THEN she made a mild racist comment in the movie theatre
as we were waiting for the movie to begin. "There comes the great
unwashed." But the real horror of discovering the reason I gradually
stopped making the effort to get in touch with her was the email she
sent to me this morning of a LotR review which stated that Tolkien was
right in making all the bad guys black people with negroid features and
all the good guys good white caucasions. ANd gets worse from there.
This piece of *^(*^%^ was like it was written by the grand poopah of
the KKK! I couldn't believe it. When did this woman go off the deep
end? Maybe I sensed this in her before? Or maybe it was so subtle
before that I got introduced to it gradually and only after a lack of
seeing for two years did it hit me with a 2x4 in the face? She also
told me that she never THINKS about the movies she goes to see. She
just sits back and enjoys the scenery. In other words. Turn off brain
and let the film flicker over your eyelids. This was when I wanted to
discuss what we'd just seen. Might as well have gone by myself. 

Ahem. I didn't mean to go off on that. But it was SUCH a shock.
Anyway. Am going to see LotR for the 3rd time next Sunday. Also saw
early Sunday another old pal I haven't seen and he and his church class
are going as a group next sunday. Yay. BTW. Read an actually
interesting take on LotR in Salon about how Sauron represented progress
and industrialization and if he'd won the war, how different history
would have written him. Seeing as how the winners write the history.
Hm. Sauron was really a forward thinking guy and the evil old Elves and
human Kings and grasping little Dwarves will do anything to keep
things from changing and ...  Also discusses why LotR is especially
appropriate and wanted by moviegoers right now. They are into the
romantic movies with Kings and stuff because the modern days aren't
really a lot of fun.

Might buy a luxury car. Used. Couldn't afford one new. Test-drove a
Porsche and a BMW - used - that would cost the same as the Camaro Z28 I
started out wanting. This is, BTW not what you want to do if you are
driving a Chevrolet and was planning to get another Chevrolet. Egad.
the P & B drive like a DREAM. Suddenly I'm car mad. Sigh. Give me a
month or two and maybe I'll buy a VW Bug. They're cute. 
  

    
Happy Epiphany, everyone!

Dan, that rap song is priceless -- they even sample Leonard Nimoy's
Hobbit song!  LOL

Rocky -- I said I'd asked it.  I never said it was answered.  ;)  So
thanks for bringing it up, and Neil, thanks for satisfying our
curiosity!

And the journal entry cracked me up, too!  Neil, sometimes I don't
know whom I miss more -- you or Maddy!  :D

[Side note:  71.43% of the above sentences end in an exclamation
point.  Perhaps I should put the chocolate away for now.  Or the
calculator.]

Neil -- So glad you got your gifts!  The notebook is, or can be, a
refill for the leather journal I gave you in NYC.  And yeah, that Maddy
photo makes me smile.  :)  (see?)

Thanks for the recommendations, too.

Good to "imagine" you again, Michelle!  <waves and smiles>

G'night, all.
  

    
Huh.  Both Mary AND Dodge slipped, but Engaged only told me about
Dodge.  (Good luck with the car, and I hope your third viewing is more
fun than the second was!)

Mary's right, Tara!  Very cute!  :D
  

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

    

Dodge -  Sorry to hear about the negative experience you had with that
friend, but sometimes we just grow beyond the people we use to know.
That said, I once had a conversation with someone who shared your
friend's view on what the darker races represented in LOTR...they're
both crazy!  "An orc is an orc of course of course..."  ;p

Ms. Mousey! [HUG]

Christy - In all the years I've been attending Neil's book tours and
appearances, that's only the second or third question I've actually
asked him in a public forum.  There's very little he hasn't been asked
over the years, but thank god he's still so generous with himself. ;)

Tara, I second that emotion! :D


  
  

    
If you look at them, their skin is actually a pale green - the orcs
and hura kai. They never bathe and paint themselves ebony black with a
white hand slapped on somewhere about the head or face. So. Hah!
  

    
Neil--thanks, I'll keep my eyes out for the casting dir.

Mary-YAY, thank you for the nice comment, I'm glad you got it!  It's
our way of thanking you for supporting us.  

Two Towers count so far:  4 times.  *blush*  It's just that friends
keep coming to visit...and...you know...they all want to see it at the
Cinerama dome!
  

    
Yep. I still have a couple over in South Houston that never gets out
of the house unless I show up insisting they go to a movie with me that
I haven't talked into going. 
  

    
Everyone must go see Frida. I want to see it again and again. Everyone
who had anything to do with that movie deserves lots of awards. 

LOTR was good too, of course. 

John-Mike- You lived in Bloomy? I love it here. I'm so happy I moved.
Yeah, a lot has probably changed. I barely recognized it and I was here
four years ago. I live across from the College Mall off of Third.
Don't know how long it's been there. Was Jiffy Treet here when you were
here? MMmmmmm. Homemade ice cream shop that delivers to your house!
What could be better than that? And yes, the school libraries are still
open to everyone which is nice. Oh, and I found Princes of the Air in
a little paperback store in the GOTHIC section of all places. I'll be
reading it shortly.

Christy- Hello! My story may still be up at aphelion-webzine.com but
I'm not sure....

Danw- I have a feeling you'd make a fabulous director. 

Squeakies- Hi.

Neil- There's too much of your stuff at the comic book store across
the street. I'm not supposed to spend any money right now. But they
have a whole section dedicated to you there. Alan Moore is right next
to you. I thought I owned almost all of your work. No. Your name is on
too many things. I get searched before I leave the house, because that
store is like a magnet; it keeps calling me there and I keep
accidentely buying things. This is very good and very bad. There should
be, like a warning label on anything with your name on it like on
cigarettes. Only reading your work is healthier than smoking of course.
But probably more addictive. If you find yourself able to buy a small
yacht in the near future, you'll know why. I ramble. How are things?
How are the kitties and kiddies?

I've been working 10 hour days and my feet are going to fall off, but
I love my job and my Chinese friends. We spent New Years Eve with them.
It's not even their New Year, but they sure know how to party. 

I hope to make it to Chicago soon. I used to go there almost every
weekend, but haven't been in a while. It would be great to meet some of
you. And this summer everyone can come down here and go camping!


I'm sorry if I missed anyone or any fun discussions. I'm SO tired.
this is my only day off this week and I'm seeing things that aren't
there (or are they?) and I need to sleep. Bad.
nighty-night.
  

    
Rocky:
>"An orc is an orc of course of course..."

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  Or as Sigmund Freud might say, "Sometimes an orc
is just an orc."

And yeah, I've always been grateful that Neil's many talents include
such great "people skills."  (There's also that
looking-darn-good-for-a-guy-who-sits-behind-a-desk-all-day talent... an
enviable trait, and one I just cannot seem to master.)

LOTR II -- I've only seen it once, but it was at the Uptown in D.C.,
an iMax theater... and we ended up right in front (on the left)!

Erynn -- It is!  Squeeee!  I've bookmarked <i>and</i> downloaded it
so that I can read it whether or not they take it down soon.

That bookstore sounds like they know what's what!  Not that that helps
your wallet any....  I definitely agree about the addictiveness
factor!  LOL!

Glad you're enjoying your new job!  When you enjoy your co-workers,
man, that can make all the difference.

From that e-book article Neil linked (at bargainpda.com):  "...our
digital media collection will permit patrons ... to borrow eBook
versions of the latest titles from best-selling authors such as Michael
Crichton, Neil Gaiman, Tony Hillerman, Clive Barker, or Joyce Carol
Oates."

Who else is proud of Neil for being casually mentioned in a list like
that?  <waves hand vigorously in the air>  It's like people have heard
of him or something.  ;)

NP:  The Magnetic Fields -- no, not the one you're thinking of.  This
is the Lithuanian techno band that turns up when you search MP3.com for
a band of this name.
  

    
I'm in a band now. I have a band. I don't know how this happened, but
our first gig is in three weeks, and I'm terrified. We're called
Abrikosi. I wrote some of our first song lyrics last night, and Chrissy
(the groove box/synth player who is just really funny) is writing the
music for them. I'll bring you details of the abject humiliation and
absurdity as they happen . . .
  

    
Maure, congratulations! How splendid! I look forward to hearing all
about it, although I suspect there will be a good deal less humiliation
than you predict. Absurdity, however, is part and parcel of being an
entertainer/artists... so I expect lots and lots of that.

Erynn - I feel your temptation, m'dear. And thanks for the compliment.
I've never directed film, but by all reports I'm not half bad as a
stage director.

btw... I've got the redesign done, although not all the content is up
yet. But if you're up for a lark, feel free to check out the new
website. http://www.danwilsonshow.com
you'll need Flash, so be warned.
  

    

Maure, how wonderful!  We'll need pictures, downloads, and an
Absurdity Journal.  ;p   

What is the origin of "Abrikosi"?  

Dan - That's cream free chowder I hope?  Sounds yummy, but nothing
beats the common cold chicken soup. Hehe..which reminds me of how the 3
Stoogies made chicken soup by pouring boiling water down the neck of a
plucked chicken.  Don't ask what made me thing of this..it's way past
my bedtime but I can't sleep. Sending some healing vibes your way. :)
  

    
Dan,  I hope you're right about the less humiliation than I suspect.
heehee, thanks for the encouragement.

Rocky, Abrikosi is a funny-spelled english version of a Russian word.
We had some good band names lined up, but at the last minute, Chrissy
said, "Give me a Russian word!" and that's the one that popped into my
head. I wish I could tell you that Abrikosi is a dangerous angel in
Russian folklore, or at the least, some interesting demon or character.
But I can't. Abrikosi means avocados. I think it may be appropriate
that we're named after a bunch of fruits.
  

    


Avocados?  God I love it!  :D