"The Luck of Some Weird Dice"

I read a short, but cool interview with Ethan Hawke last week in Cowboys & Indians magazine. He was talking about the movie Blaze that he directed about relatively obscure singer-songwriter Blaze Foley. Turns out, Foley's obscurity is part of what drew Hawke to his story.

I haven't traditionally been a huge fan of Hawke's work, but he's been growing on me in recent years and I think he's an interesting dude. I love the generosity expressed here about Foley and other artists and the fickleness of success. Hawke's talking about musicians and actors, but of course it applies to writers, visual artists, bloggers, podcasters, or whatever creative enterprise you might find yourself in.

When I heard the story of Blaze Foley, I thought about my own perceived success, and how it juxtaposed with so many artists who are met with indifference and hostility because of the luck of some weird dice. Maybe it was a reflection or a residue of guilt. That's the negative way of looking at it. But I prefer to think of Blaze as an expression of love and wondering and respect for all the people who I've seen who didn't have the easy path that Dead Poets Society created for me.

Quote of the Day | The Writer at the Bar

By way of explaining what I've been doing today instead of blogging:

Michael Moorcock once commented that the man hanging around in the bar at night telling people he's a writer is not a writer, because if he were a writer he'd be at home writing.

--Warren Ellis.

I'm at home writing; finishing the Neal McDonough story. Have a great weekend, everyone!

(Image via Polished)

Quote of the Week: What Is Love Anyway?

What is love and what does it mean to love? How do you know when you're in love? What does it feel like? What's the craziest thing you've ever done/would do for love?
--Shalomon, via Formspring.

Stop hitting on me.
--Fred Van Lente, in reply.

Quotes of the (Past) Week: Seasoned by Love

I took good care of my own comics because I respected their magic pictures and stories and wanted to visit them again and again. Today they are no longer in mint condition but they do have the additional glow that all things acquire from being seasoned by love over a long period of time.
--David Apatoff, summing up my relationship to comics too.

You shouldn't be glutted with vampires: they should be a spice, not a food group.
--Neil Gaiman, on the current resurgence of the fad.

Nobody likes to feel lumped together - Minnesota and Wisconsin are probably about as close as you can get to states that are similar in the popular imagination, and if you talk about them like they're the same, you're going to get two guys beating you up - one will have a Viking helmet on and the other one will be pounding on you with a wheel of cheese.
--Linda Holmes, on the foolishness of the "Mid-America" demographic group. This also further reinforces my idea that I should have a whole separate feature called Linda Holmes Quote of the Week.

Quotes of Last Week: Bad-Luck Slut

Totally forgot the Quotes of the Week on Saturday. Oops!



I've always wanted Tigra to be a fun-loving character whose cat-like curiosity gets her into interesting predicaments (including fighting monsters). I'm not sure what Marvel's take on her is. Bad-luck slut, maybe? I haven't truly kept up with what's happening with her lately. I suspect I don't want to know.
--Kerry Callen, perfectly illustrating why he should be writing and drawing a Tigra comic.

It's bad enough that Americans have to wait a few weeks or months to watch Doctor Who episodes on BBC America after they've aired in the United Kingdom on BBC One...
--SCI FI Wire, not seeing the irony in that that's exactly how it used to be when Doctor Who was on their damn channel.

It's good to encourage physical activity, but NOT if the purpose of encouraging it is to try to make people thinner. Then it's counter-productive. People will be healthier if they're more active and don't smoke and if they avoid eating disordered behavior (like dieting in particular) ... The idea that people pursue thinness primarily for health reasons is laughable.
--Paul Campos, the author of The Obesity Myth, on the difference between fitness and thinness. As a fat dude, I found the whole interview absolutely fascinating. (Incidentally, I've been getting this message from other health professionals as well. Physical activity as its own reward is a lesson I'm finally starting to internalize.)

No thank you, Ridley. Why don't you just go ahead and work on a prequel to your Monopoly film instead. Tell us how Uncle Moneybags met the dog and thimble.
--Topless Robot, on why the proposed prequel to Alien is actually a pretty horrible idea.

Quote of the Week: Picking a butler

If you want adventure in your household (and if you don’t… BORING!) then it behooves you (yeah… I used the word “behooves”) to sprinkle the premises with a few incidents of flamboyance, and by god if coming home one night only to find Alfred grabbing ice cream from the freezer, wearing nothing but Green Lantern’s underwear and Flash’s gloves, and adamantly refusing to let you go upstairs until he “tidies up a bit,” doesn’t fill the bill, then nothing will.
--Paul Tobin, on who the best fictional butler is.

Quotes of the Week: Early Edition

I'll be on the road on Saturday, so here's some quotage today.



Seriously guys, she’s like, twelve years old ... This is what she should look like. Seriously. Also, she is very nice, and wants to help people.
--Paul Tobin, in an open letter to "all the artists who draw Mary Marvel, and the writers who write her." I've never liked the "Dark Mary Marvel" concept, but I tolerated it with the (perhaps misguided) understanding that she'd eventually change back. Now, thanks in part to Tobin's reminder, I'm at the point where I can't even stand to look at Dark Mary drawings and costumes any more. I'm no longer interested in her journey on the "return to innocence." Once she gets there, I'll start reading about her again.

It's not that audiences conclude that the criticism is inaccurate, so much as it is that the box-office fate of the movie is immune to even accurate bad reviews. There are good movies where stuff blows up, and bad movies where stuff blows up; some people enjoy stuff blowing up whether the movie is good or bad, and they'd tell you so.
--Linda Holmes, non-judgmentally addressing the alleged mistrust that audiences are supposed to have for all critics and further securing the crush I have on her. When discussing my reservations about Transformers 2 with my friends, the overwhelming response I get from them is that they're in that group of people Holmes mentions. And I agree with her that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, even if it doesn't describe my own tastes.

We have to change the negative things into positive. In today’s Japanese film industry we always say we don’t have enough budget, that people don’t go to see the films. But we can think of it in a positive way, meaning that if audiences don’t go to the cinema we can make any movie we want. After all, no matter what kind of movie you make it’s never a hit, so we can make a really bold, daring movie.
--Filmmaker Takashi Miike, as quoted by Warren Ellis who applies the theory to comics. I've heard Ellis make that quote before, but I can never find it when I want it, so I'm copying it down here. If past experience is any indication, I'll need to refer to it about 800 times before Ellis quotes it again.

Quotes of the Week: So he's not REALLY a writer

You will be momentarily excited about having a book published, and in that moment you will tell everyone you know. They will naturally ask "What is your book about?", thinking they might be talking to the next David Foster Wallace. When you tell them your book is called "100 Tea Cozies You Can Knit," their faces will fall. "Oh," they'll be thinking to themselves, "so he's not really a writer." Eventually, you will be so shell-shocked and defensive about your book's subject matter, you will snarl and say "What's it to ya?" when anyone asks.
--THE INTERN, on why you really don't want to get published.

I got to be so suave by knowing what the ladies like. And what the ladies like is... Sandman and Strangers in Paradise trades, amirite?
--Mike Sterling, on his worldliness and sophistication.

Quotes of the Week: Johnny Cash, Zombie Killer

I think the loneliest I ever got was when I put down a gallon container with a half-gallon of water in it and it danced around as it sloshed back and forth and I instantly wondered if there was any way I could put the container down fast enough for me to dance with it for a few seconds.
--As informed and helpful as Tom Spurgeon is about the comics industry, my favorite feature of his blog is always his weekly "First Thought of the Day."

I think another issue that needs to be brought up is that Reverend Sloan is clearly an ageless vampire of some sort.
--Tom Spurgeon, pointing out what everyone's real concern should be about Doonesbury.

“Elvis was bigger than any of us. Wasn’t another like him then, and there won’t be one like him ever agian. There was one sorta like him for a while in ‘82, when that Gypsy woman’s curse caused him to rise from the grave, walkin’ the Earth in search of his blue suede shoes, but me, Carl Perkins and a shotgun took care of that.”
--What Johnny Cash's autobiography would've been like if Chris Sims had had anything to say about it.

Quotes of the Week: Stories Are Built to End

I am forced to admit, painful as it is, that now, this show has given up on me. "Sorry!" it calls out jauntily, sailing off into its own oceans of complexity as I stand on the dock, helpless ... If more shows had end dates; if more shows could count on a life of a fixed length on television followed by a longer life on DVD where everyone can afford to be a completist, maybe we'd get better shows. Imagine the world we might find ourselves in if more creators were willing to say, "If you've been dating us on and off for five years and haven't married us yet, then we're dumping you, how about that?"
--NPR's Linda Holmes, on how the inaccessibility of this last season of Lost isn't a bad thing.

But what superhero comic books, soap operas, serialized dramas and even some sitcoms have in common is a refusal to acknowledge that stories are built to end ... And that's dangerous, because characters, like consumer electronics, have a planned obsolescence. They exist to grow and change; when they stop changing, the story's supposed to end.
--NPR's Glen Weldon, saying what we all know to be true, but don't like to acknowledge.

Quotes of the Week: Overweight Men With Beards

Not really all from this week, but I'm still catching up.

...in a tighter than expected vote this weekend at an emergency meeting of the International Federation of Overweight Men With Beards, Brian Blessed was named world's leading fat, bearded celebrity following the recent death of comic actor Dom Deluise. Deluise had served in the largely ceremonial position for nearly 20 months after the passing of long-time title holder Luciano Pavarotti. Blessed won by three votes over surprise fringe candidate Jorge Garcia, who emerged when John Rhys-Davies was stricken from the field after a qualifications challenge and a last-minute effort to draft chef Mario Batali failed. Blessed's first action in his new position was to order his hawkmen to dive.
--Tom Spurgeon

George R.R. Martin is not your bitch ... You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.
--Neil Gaiman, on fan entitlement.

...I swear to God, if any of you people start writing Young Spock/Old Spock slash fiction, I will hunt you down.
--Mike Sterling, on a possible negative result of the new Star Trek movie.

“Forgive me, Young Spock,” said Old Spock, “for I know this is a thought most…illogical, but my pursuit of knowledge demands that I must know what it is like…to kiss myself.”
--Dorian Wright, being Dorian.

Quote of the Week: Just because a guy likes to wear kitchen gloves...

Just because a guy likes to wear kitchen gloves and is obsessed with dolphins doesn't mean he's a friend of Judy, Damon Beres! GOD! Can't we just respect the porpoise's majesty while simultaneously waging war on dishpan hands?
-- Julieanne Smolinski, explaining to a reader how Aquaman is not gay.

Quotes of the Week

Strangely, Watchmen is the book that taught me as a teenager not to get wrapped up in the success or failure of someone else's work. By far the most of any work in any form I've ever recommended to other people, Watchmen is the book that's come back to me with a "this was really, really stupid" or some curse-filled approximation thereof. As a 17-year-old with insecurities big enough to keep at least two local psychologists in steak and sports cars, this reaction initially took me back. However, I was also smart enough to know Watchmen had value according to how I decided things had value, and it only took a few seconds to realize that whether or not someone else appreciated something I did wasn't a vote on its overall worth, let alone mine.

--Tom Spurgeon, saying the wisest thing I read all week.

I’m delighted Kate Winslet finally got a Best Actress Oscar, because she deserves it for being so good for so long but also because now that means, pace Halle Berry and Charlize Theron, that she will now immediately make a God-awful action film in which she wears very tight black latex, and I’m all for that.

--John Scalzi, being both wise and funny.

O person like me,
phoneless in your distant café,
I wish we could meet to discuss this,
and perhaps you would help me
murder this woman on her cell phone,

--George Bilgere, in his poem "Bridal Shower," which I really shouldn't quote in full, but you really, really should go read. It's short and awesome (even if you don't like poetry).

..I was under the impression that Warner and DC sat down recently to have a big brainstorming session about how to make a decent DC movie universe, or a least a coherent motion picture release plan, given Marvel's recent box office badassery. If doing Suicide Squad was the end result of that meeting -- if they believe they should be making a Suicide Squad movie before a Wonder Woman movie -- then it is frankly amazing these people can put on their pants in the morning without accidentally strangling themselves.

--Topless Robot, on the news that Warner Bros. is planning a Suicide Squad movie.

Quote of the Week: CBS' Unit

I deeply apologize for this one.

CBS' The Unit is getting bigger!

--Michael Aussiello, talking about an addition to the show's cast and showing once again why he's my absolute favorite TV commentator.

Quotes of the Week: Ragging on the Spirit

It's totally cliché to rag on Frank Miller's Spirit movie anymore, but I can't help it if all the best lines this week came from Spirit reviews.

There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.

--Roger Ebert.

...it doesn't seem to matter if people have read the comics or not. If you get what makes the character work, if you get what people like about it in its platonic ideal, you have a successful movie -- Iron Man being a lovely case in point.

Which, I suspect, is why Sin City and 300 worked. They were like having the comics happening up on the screen. The thing that people liked about it was there. With The Spirit, what the reader responded to is Eisner's lightness of touch and mastery of story, his humour and his humanity -- and a world that looks like Eisner drew it. The moment that it's obvious that that isn't there it almost doesn't matter what is there instead. According to Gaiman's Law, the more Sin City looked and felt like what people like about Frank Miller's work on Sin City, the more successful it was going to be with audiences, but the more The Spirit feels like Sin City and not like Will Eisner's The Spirit, the less successful it's going to be.

--Neil Gaiman, not so much ragging as being typically wise and insightful.

In comics, it took Miller decades to devolve into embarrassing self-parody. In film, he's made that leap over the course of a single disastrous film.

--Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club

Quotes of the Week: Namby Pamby Klaatu

Two quotes from last week made me chuckle:

...and the lesson of this story is that people should use "namby-pamby" and "varmints" in sentences whenever they can.

--Katie Cook, summarizing what she learned from a rat-catching expedition.

She discovers his purpose, takes him with her in her car, flees a federal dragnet, walks in the woods, introduces him to her brilliant scientist friend, lets him listen to a little Bach, tells him we can change if we're only given the chance, and expresses such love for Jacob that Klaatu is so moved, he looks on dispassionately.

--Roger Ebert, accurately describing the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.