skywaterblue

I grabbed Mouse Guard, Mermaids and the Avatar the Last Airbender comic. I also got the Superman comic, and I bought the Saga trade because going to FCBD and not buying at the store is the supreme height of rudeness.

This weekend is a busy one for me. I saw Iron Man 3 on Friday. I have conflicted feelings about this one. It could have been great, but at best it was a pretty fun watch.

( Spoilers are like fortune cookies )

I am also seeing all the Cremaster films this weekend AND giving a panel talk on the Armory Show of 1913 at Chicago Axis show tomorrow at 10 am if you're into that.

Kate Arthur of Buzzflash digs into the backstage shenanigans that made this show such a mess and finds... Mary Sueism?

The issues occur when that person creates a show with obvious, worsening problems and won't listen to anyone else — and that is what happened with Rebeck.

Oh really?

But Julia faced bigger bumps than her unflattering clothing; Rebeck based the character on herself, and yet wouldn't allow Julia to have a good arc that would satisfy or endear her to the audience.

If the writers wanted to give Julia something to do that was hard and that she would eventually get through, "Theresa would say, 'It's not a struggle! She doesn't have a problem! She's the hero! She saves everything!'" said someone who witnessed this oft-repeated discussion.

There are other reasons discussed in this article and a lot of juicy gossip, but I love the subtle takedown caused by posting a version of the above photo with the final picture of the article, this one of Rebeck.



Oh. I see. I see indeed.

First, I was to say I was saddened to hear about the passing of iamsab. As far as I know, despite being in many of the same fandoms we never had direct contact, but I deeply admired her work in West Wing fandom, and she was far, far too young.

Second, for those of you in West Wing fandom: TWW-Caps is here to provide you with HD episode caps.

I'm pretty distraught over the news that JJ Abrams is abandoning Trek 3 to Star Wars. Not that I thought he was the greatest to ever put his hand on the franchise, or that he had this real deep understanding of what makes Star Trek great or anything. It's just difficult not to feel jilted; not to have really deep fears about the next guy, about the franchise withering on the vine again. There's also something deeply boring about the choice on the part of the Disney/Lucasfilm merger. All your franchises WILL taste like hamburger.

It bothers me that I basically wish Skyler White away, actually. I am not normally a person who takes the side of people who argue that female characters are useless for having feminine interests and couch their argument in misogyny. And I've had scraps with people whose opinions (lizbee, selenak) I usually respect.

But I think the actress is deeply miscast in the role, evincing no chemistry with her lead and consistently hampered by bad writing to boot. I'd argue that Skyler should die for the narrative drag she brings on the show, but that would be fridging and her existence is already too predicated on giving the main male lead reasons to do things. Still, it tasks me, because I do not want to be on Team Skyler Sucks. They seem to be uniformly awful people with whom I don't agree. In fact, I think it would be appropriate if Skyler is the one to off Walter in the end - if Walter should die at all.

So I started looking at her CV, because maybe somewhere on it she was in something I liked, and that can sometimes be an entry to liking the actress and her choices more, right?

Oh! Deadwood! Never finished it, hmm, but that was a good show for...

Oh. Right. Anna Gunn was the reason I straight dropped that show in the second season. I never even finished the DVD set before selling them back.

I'm sorry, Skyler White. We were never meant to be.

From selenak. It'll be short because I don't own a TV and my ability to download is pretty limited.

Which TV shows did you start watching in 2012?

Legend of Korra, Breaking Bad, and The Newsroom. Oh, and Dallas. Was Smash this year? Smash.

Which TV shows did you let go of in 2012?

The Newsroom, in the middle of the second episode I got so squicked by the subtext of the whole 'embarrassing commentators' screwup that I turned it off. Even though it was the only thing I had left to watch on a 3 hour trainride from Basel to Kassel.

I stopped watching Smash after the episode where Derek decided to do naughty!Marilyn and it became clear that even hatewatching wasn't enough to make me care.

I haven't seen most of Dallas either, but I intend to get back to it so I'm not calling it a quit.

Which TV shows did you mean to get into but didn't in 2012? Why?

Almost everything.

Which TV shows do you intend on checking out in 2013?

I'd actually like to finish Treme? It seems more my speed than The Wire and I got hooked during the time I had HBO.

Which TV show impressed you least in 2012?

The Newsroom. I powered through every episode of Studio 60 even though that's literally the worst show ever written, but damn. I saw which way the wind was blowing and skipped out fast. I was really optimistic about this one, because I thought Sorkin might really have worked through his issues but now I think he's just always been a mediocre writer with an ear for good dialogue. It's one thing to be so sick of his issues with women, and another for him to stick those same issues in the same plot for the fourth show running.

Smash was of course, terrible.

I thought Mad Men had a pretty 'meh' yeah - though, seriously Hollywood Foreign Press? You picked The Newsroom for a nom? In anything?

Which TV show did you enjoy the most in 2012?

Legend of Korra, probably, in terms of nothing in that show made me feel shitty or bad. I haven't rewatched anything but the last arc episodes and I'm really excited about season 2 because I have NO IDEA WHERE IT GOES.

I also really liked the third season of Downton Abbey, believe it or not. Most of the things that annoyed me about S2's horrific love triangles are gone now that Mary and Matthew are together, and they prove to be very effective leads together. I thought that season went from strength to strength and was a fairly effective unjumping of the shark.

While it blows that 9/10ths of American media consumed in childhood is now owned by a single corporate entity, in a lot of ways once the shock was over it makes more sense than Marvel selling out. Disney had long owned the park rights to Lucasfilm properties - haven't been on the new Star Tours yet, but the old one and the Indiana Jones rides were favorites as a kid. And there have been rumors since I was knee high that the House of Mouse wanted to own them outright. George Lucas is pretty much a one-man band in his mid-60s with two franchises that he'd run into the ground, so it makes sense that he'd sell the family business rather than try and pass it on to a kid.

What it clarifies for me is this:

- corporate monopoly in all forms blows, especially for artists. Good luck if you've pissed off the Mouse, future animators/character designers of the world. Your options are now extremely limited.
-- sub-point: be well, friends who work for Lucasfilm. Long may you be employed.

- I still can't believe Marvel sold out. Why? WHY? You were poised to own their ass with your own media empire!

- I have never loved the corporate masters of Star Trek more. STAY FREE, PARAMOUNT.

- So Princess Leia is now officially a Disney Princess, eh?

- I will probably see Star Wars 7, but I hope that it's something fresh and magical.

But wow, does it blow that about 9/10ths of American media is owned by Apple Computers/ABC/Disney-Pixar/Lucasfilm/Marvel. It's such terrible, terrible news if you care about creatives.

I have apparently not updated this blog since I returned from Europe. I had a jolly good time, although I ran out of money well before the end AGAIN which sent me home early and has led me to the conclusion that I am a fail backpacker but not remotely wealthy enough to travel like the boho vagabond I aspire to be. Shorter, more planned trips from now on.

Some of the highlights:

- Both Tates! BOTH OF THEM. And the Olympic Park and the British Museum on the return leg.

- The neon exhibition in Paris was entirely worth the trip. Actually, pretty much all the days in Paris, even the night where I fucked up my hotel reservations and drank until five in the morning outside the Moulin Rogue. Salmon Croque Monseur at Le Comptoir. Two days at the Louvre. No one telling me I couldn't spend two days at the Louvre.

- I made a couple of really good friends on the Italy trip, if I can ever manage to meet up with them now that we're all home in the states. Mostly I got claustrophobic in the tiny tiny town, and sick from pork being in everything.

- Randomly running into cute guy from my math class working the ticket booth at the Peggy Guggenheim for the summer. It's a small, small art world.

- Schmitt and Andie took me to an amazingly beautiful zoo and I pet a lemur! And we got drunk and watched Germany smash some other country - Greece? Yeah. And I had to pretend to root for Germany but I was secretly rooting for you, Greece.

- Eurocup final match on Circus Maximus with all of Rome, which was awesome despite the scary almost-assault from a drunk dude outside my hostel. Actually, someone stole money out of a purse I had left in the room for an hour to have drinks with my hostelmates at that place, so I wouldn't necessarily call Rome a highlight.

- Except for the emotional plotz I had in front of the 'School of Athens'.

- Finding out the kosher place I ate at in Rome's ghetto was the place Mark Zuckerberg had taken his bride on their honeymoon and stiffed the waiter. Very good food, reasonable.

- That day in Venice when a couple of days after the bad encounter in Rome, I thought I had lost my iPod with all my pictures and had a total breakdown online, followed by finding the security guard at the Muriano Glass Museum had picked it up and saved it for me. Backtracking works sometimes, even if you have to take an hour boat ride to do it!

- Art Basel is totally overwhelming. Jeff Koonz at the Foundation Beyeler. Basel is a beautiful city.

- The same with dOCUMENTA 13, but going to both of them back to back will give you mental whiplash. Kassel is fairly nice, not sure why the Germans slam on it. Maybe it was uglier post-war.

- The best thing about the Accademia wasn't just the David, but the inspirational quality of the museum mixing its modern collection with its historic one. There is something fascinating about the juxtaposition of a Yves Klein blue painting with a 12th Century Virgin Alterpiece, or the cement blocks with the artist's pressed body forming voids next to Michelangelo's Slaves.

- Gelato all up in my face.

- Barcelona! What a lovely city. TAPAS ALL IN MY FACE. I ate at 'Tickets', Ferran Adrià's follow-up to 'El Bulli' after waiting in line for way over an hour. I was not that impressed, actually, though I'm glad to have gotten to go.

I shall stop now. I was very whiny and cranky for a lot of this trip, particularly as the money ran low and my bad experiences began to overcrowd the good ones. The great thing about the memory though is that you begin to forget all the bad parts of travel and remember the good things: the people you met who were awesome, and the things you saw that were great.

from musesfool, the ever-admirable:

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

~Lisel Mueller

Yup.



H/T: Bleeding Cool

Barring anything odd happening, it looks very likely that The Written Word will end up getting funded.

On the one hand, as I'm about to launch my own Kickstarter project (to raise the money to build a neon shop in my studio) I'm always happy to see another group use Kickstarter successfully.

On the other hand, my deep misgivings about the project were never solved and one suspects it is a gap that won't or can't be bridged. They left the conversation still feeling their product was revolutionary, and more power to them for believing in their work.