Swimming in the Land of Dreams

I don't have many recurring dreams, but this one has been rerunning a lot lately:

I am on a beach in Florida (As a kid, my family used to drive to Florida just after Christmas for our vacation. I haven't been to Florida, though, since I was about 12 or 13). The skies are usually overcast, but the water is mostly calm and warm. Sometimes, I just go swimming in the ocean. Other times, I am swimming towards a small island.

The island is not much bigger than a sandbar, but it has a few palm trees and a couple of rocky outcroppings. It feels very familiar, like some place I have visited many times, even maybe played on as a child (I have no actual memory of such a place). Though I am not a strong swimmer in real life, in the dream it is very easy for me to swim in the ocean (whether or not I am swimming to island in the dream's storyline). When I get to the island, I feel like there is something important about it that I can't remember. When I wake up, I can remember the island so vividly, though, that I can draw a map of it, including the locations of trees and rocks.

Last night, I had a variation on the swimming dream. I am wearing a cute, 1950s-ish one-piece swimsuit and at an indoor pool where there are many people swimming. One of them is a guy I have a horrible crush on and I want to go into the pool, but I am intimidated by all the people around. He sees me and tries to get me to dive in, but I am too afraid of the water (this dream has rather transparent imagery, no?).

Some questions are better left unanswered

After running errands on Saturday, I decided to visit Terry at his comic book shop. A little while later, a young mother came in with two small boys (both probably under five). They were very polite, but very curious and had lots of questions about the characters, so I decided to help.

"Excuse me!" one would say to me and then lead me to a comic. "Who is that?"

"That's Hobgoblin."

"What does he do?"

I don't really know much about Marvel characters, so my answer was vague. "Um, he's a bad guy. He doesn't like Spiderman, so flies around and throws things at him."

"What does he fly on?" he asked.

Terry helped me out with "a glider." And then the other brother had a question.

"Excuse me! Who's that?"

An easy question. "That's Supergirl. She's Superman's cousin. She has powers like Superman's."

"Excuse me! What's that?"

I turned and saw the other boy was pointing at a comic called North 40. For those of you know don't know, it's a book about librarians accidentally raising Cthulhu in a small, southern town. The cover has a deputy cowering while tentacles from offscreen slither towards him.

"Um, that's a sheriff." I deflected.

"What's a sheriff?" he asked.

"He's like a policeman."

He pointed to a tentacle. "What's that?"

"Um, that's Cthulhu," I said brightly.

"What does he do?"

I smiled brightly. "He's an elder evil god."

Before the boy could ask anything else, Terry mercifully interrupted. "He's a giant frog that lives in the ocean."

"Maybe we should look at the comics over here," his mother suggested, leading him to the kid-friendly section.

How to Get Chicks into Comics

Every couple of months, someone, usually male, writes about how to get females to read comics. I find this entertaining. Usually, the article is little more than a list of “female-friendly” titles and writers. I play a little game before I read the article to see if I can guess which comics the writer will suggest. I can usually guess them all, unless the writer has really put some thought into it or likes manga (not my thing). The comics he suggests are usually good ones, some of them even are my favorites, but that’s not the point. Usually, the writer’s passion is genuine and the advice is well-intentioned, but it misses the mark. This happens so frequently that I am compelled to write about this topic from a rabid fangirl perspective. Luckily, getting a female to read comics is a two step process.

First, ask yourself one simple question:

Step One: Why?

That's right, why do you want to get females to read comics? Is it to get your girlfriend/wife/mom off your back to get rid of your 20 long boxes of comics? Is it so that your girlfriend/wife won’t roll her eyes when you want to go into a comic book store or go to a movie based on a comic book? Is it because you want to see more women at the comic book store because that’s the only place you feel comfortable but you still want to get laid? Is it because you don’t want women to go slack-jawed and dead-eyed when you go on your 30 minute tirade about how Hal Jordan is a better Green Lantern than John Stewart?

Have I offended you yet? If so, please keep that feeling in mind. It’s how we feel when someone says “all women like this or do that.” Don’t fall for that trap. If your motivation for doing this is because you want to introduce a special someone to excellent writing, gorgeous artwork and a fun medium that combines the best aspects of reading and movies, please move on to step two.

Step Two: Ask her what she likes.

No, really, ask her what she likes to do, what movies she likes to see, what she likes to read. Take a good look around her (or your) place. What books or magazines do you see lying around? What artwork is on her walls? What is/was her major or her hobbies? Chances are good that there might be a comic title or graphic novel that is related to something she is already interested in.

I lied; there is a third step.

Step Three: Better yet, bring her into a comic shop, let her look around and offer to buy something for her.

If you really want her to understand your hobby, act like a drug pusher and make the first one free.

Don’t point anything out unless she asks. Don’t explain anything to her unless she asks. If she is going to be interested, she will naturally gravitate to the things that are attractive to her, the same way you did when you first got into comics. Let her choose and don’t make fun of her choices or reasons for liking something.

Be prepared that she might never like comics. Even if she decides she does, she might not like the same comics as you or enjoy talking about them. The best that can come out of this is that she will understand your passion for comics. If she becomes a fan herself, that’s all gravy.

listening to "What's going on - Marvin Gaye" on Blip

It's sort of cliche, but I can't help but think of this song today #Iranelection

Review of Moon (Spoiler Free)

Moon is a difficult movie to talk about without giving away too much. No, it's not one of those movies with a twist, but half of the fun is the discovery and watching how the plot unfolds. The premise is simple: in the near future, a company has discovered a way to "mine" limitless power on the dark side of the moon. A man named Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) works at a mining station on the moon; he is near the end of his three-year contract on the station, where he has lived in near isolation. The satellite communications are down, so the only outside contact he has are occasional videos sent from the company and his family. His only companion is a cumbersome robot name Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). While checking on a malfunctioning harvester, Sam gets into an accident. And while he is away from the station, his replacement arrives.

What makes the film so compelling is Sam, both the character and the actor. For most of the film, Sam Rockwell is alone on screen and his haggard appearance is mesmerizing. In the same moment, he can be hilarious and heartbreaking. He makes you feel Sam Bell's loneliness and desperation to go home. We get to meet and really learn about a character, something that is rare in films. The film is so beautifully well-written that even Gerty the robot is a complex character. Gerty is supposed to be a helper on the station, but ends up being more of nanny, reminding Sam to eat or suggesting he take a nap when he is agitated. On a small screen is Gerty's face, a simple yellow smiley face, which changes appropriately to frowns or other "emoticons" as needed. It would be easy to create a robot character that was simply comic relief or worse, another evil robot like HAL from 2001, but Gerty is neither. He actually makes choices within the frame of his programming, showing that he can follow the spirit of the program if not its literal intention.

The other beauty of this film is in its cinematography and design. The station is grubby, well-lived-in and full of little details: photographs, magazine cuttings, scrawled writings on sticky notes everywhere (including on Gerty), a whole garden planted in food packaging. Outside, the moonscape is silver and black, stark and alien. The earth is always in the sky, tantalizingly close but so far away.

Something I've noticed is that in the last 5-10 years, most of the best science fiction films have been low-budget, independent ones like Moon. Sometimes we can confuse scifi with special effects and explosions, but like great scifi novels, the best scifi films are really about us and our relationship with science. Moon is one of those unusual films that can make you think and feel without being heavy-handed or self-important and be fantastic and visually interesting without being overblown.

27 April 2009

Had a dream that my friends Terry and Lisa were having a second wedding. They lived in a huge Victorian house with lots of rooms, some of them strange and whimsical. They set up a theater-in-the-round using risers in their living room and dressed in a pseudo-medieval style. All of their friends (of which hundreds of them attended) were invited to perform skits, songs, etc. Someone even used puppets.

Although we were having a great time there was some drama. In the dream, Lisa had three sisters and four half-sisters (this is not the case in real life). The half-sisters were jealous of Lisa and Lisa was angry at them because they took advantage of her. Also, a mutual friend of ours was banned from the wedding (I won't say who because I don't want to hurt any feelings); apparently I had gotten into a very bad fight with this person and banned them from my life(!). To my surprise, Terry and Lisa decided not to invite them either. Suddenly this person was stalking around, trying to sneak into what was becoming the wedding party of the century, but the bouncers at the door (!) saw they didn't have an invitation and wouldn't them in.

A Death in the House

Fans of the TV show House got a pretty big shock this week (Monday, 6 April was when the episode aired). If you haven't still seen the episode, you have no business reading blogs right now.

So Dr. Kutner committed suicide. And judging by comments on popular web sites, people are pissed. "Kutner's suicide came out of nowhere" seems to be a common complaint. It seems like a cheap ploy by the writers.

I can respect that opinion. It does seem like stunt, to get viewership and make things happen when the writers don't know what else to do with a plot or a character.

But I was actually moved by the episode. It felt real to me: seeing the shock of Foreman and Thirteen finding his body, the way she recoiled from him when she realized she was too late to save him. I was stunned. I felt blindsided.

Suicide is like that. Sometimes it does come out of nowhere. Sometimes it does seem out of character, because, lord knows, depressed people can be really good about hiding their pain. They are very good at hiding who they really are as well. They can come off as generally likable, but aloof or shy. That was Kutner: a generally nice guy who was in always in the background, the guy you took for granted.

Strangely, one of the things I loved about the episode was one of things people hated the most; House's reaction to Kutner's death. He tried to make sense of it. He went through denial, preferring to believe Kutner was murdered. Then, worst of all, his angry, awful blaming of Kutner's parents for their son's suicide. I can remember a lot of the horrible things I thought and said when my mother died, things that I still feel ashamed of. I felt a lot of sympathy and embarrassment for House then, more than I have all season, as well as a good helping of thinking he was a total asshole.

(Yes, I am fully aware that I am projecting my feelings onto a character.)

I think it was something of a brave move to do this to a character. The writers could have simply had Kutner quit and move away, sure, and everything would have continued on as it had. But now, the characters, House included, will have to face that they never really knew him and they will never know why he did it.

I'm interested in seeing where the writers take this and what happens next. I just hope they don't fuck this up.