Meet Bradley, the back of the box said
The American version of Breathless feels like the cinematic equivalent of hyperventilating.
Unbleached wheat flour, whole wheat flour,
molasses (cane), palm oil, whey, nonfat milk, oats, egg
powder, salt, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), natural
There has never been evidence that popular entertainment is consistently better than the lesser known.
I don’t want to
Superboy stories take place in the current day. “The stories of Superman when he was a boy…” but they (almost) never take place in a past earlier than date of publication or broadcast. 1950s Superboy comics take place in the 1950s. 1980s Superboy episodes; the 80s. Concurrent with contemporary Superman, though rarely the twain cross.
Children’s literature, like that of Elizabeth Williams Champney, Mildred A Wirt, Grace May North, are more adult, less conservative, more socially aware, and handle consequences better than the average modern day Young Adult fiction. All of the above feature their own issues with ill-examined racism, fatphobia, homophobia, et cetera, and yet, in my estimation, do actual children and actual adults much better than The Giver or a Harry Potter. While there is some great and good stuff in the YA category, the mass fails to be more mature than Bunnicula, and if you have not reread Bunnicula as an adult, you should.
Warren Ellis’ run on Astonishing X-Men ended when he quit. Each arc had a different art team, all top of their game, exploring hauntology and entendre, but the comic had four planned, sequential arcs, and what we got was the first arc, an unplanned arc to touch on a line-wide event, and then the second planned arc as a separate miniseries. The best parts are the artists.
I think I avoided horror fiction in Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies, because every fiction is a sort of horror. We are all a little unnerved, and when we are not is when we might realize we should most be scared.
Most of the things we complain about in music, we like in some other music.
When Marvel confirmed Mystique & Destiny as the biological parents of Nightcrawler, the first thing that happened, was a myriad of fans came from nowhere to proclaim their love for the earlier espoused dad, Azazel, who receded just as quickly into nowhere, when it became obvious there are no Azazel fans, and it was just about being homophobic. This has now turned into fans of Nightcrawler, insisting they know the character to be a very serious, devout Catholic and social conservative, who would definitely be against the gays or sex or nonbinary genders.
The order of information does not teach you as much as sitting beginning to end through a piece will. But, taking a piece outside its order will reveal things that the orderly approach cannot.
Some of the most important political lessons in my life, I learned reading a famous physicist. He was not politically astute. I learned by disagreement. And, I learned that there not really famous physicists; it’s all niche stuff.
The argument that “true horror” is not gore but the uncertainty there has been gore, or whatever, however they choose to phrase that, is convincing until you see certain gore, inarguable gore. Especially, I mean, in real life, where it can stop you in your tracks and keep your brain and soul stopped there for years after, but also in entertainment.
Shimako Satō is one of my favorite filmmakers, a brilliant director and writer. In her first Eko Eko Azarak movie, she smartly turns a producer’s diktat of sexualization into blunt sexual abuse and how confusing that can be. In her second Eko Eko Azarak feature, she implies inevitability and inarguable power with extreme sudden violent gore. You can argue with “magic,” but it’s harder to debate a crushed skull.
It is really hard to take anyone working with small publishers or artists known for promoting hate and bigotry, even if they come from the fine art or motion picture worlds. If it takes a half second to check someone out on social media, via their own posts or likes, there is little excuse left.
It’s funny to me when poets do not take me serious or my poetry. Everything is poetry and I think they are funny, too.
The comic, Supreme: Blue Rose, uses “clues” the way chaff is is used to make radar scans useless. Thick with visual and dialogue references to television shows, comic books, and especially motion pictures, these allusions and borrowed phrases distract from the narrative and world behind them, and serve as a reminder that most “wholly created new worlds” in fiction, are built out of scraps and notes from other songs.
You can fit narrative on the back of a box of dog snacks.
I can take or leave sex scenes, per se, but to be an adult work of entertainment, and even to be a child’s, forms of sexual politics or the existence of sex-politic has to be reckoned with, or you have a vacuum. And, that vacuum: vacuous.
One of the ways in which we can compete with AI, as nonfiction purveyors, is to know when we lie. To know when we stretch or truncate the truth.
The father of the Devil, in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, the “King” of evil, is not launched to Earth in the past and growing from pulp to fruition, which is why our protagonists cannot defeat it, even when they have messages beamed to their heads from the future and believe they have. That future is there, beaming to them. The King comes from then, and their victory, if it is, is to reduce him to pulp backwards through time. Quantum physics. Quantum scale. Newtonian physics. Quantum scale.
Classic sitcoms are horror shows when you remove the laugh tracks. But, they were already terrifying while they had perfunctory laughter.
An author is an artist is an author. “Death of the Author” also means for you to shut up.
To disguise herself before starting an OnlyFans, my friend cut her hair short, and she wears a wig that looks like her old hairstyle on camera. I am thankful she knows comics as much as me, or my Jessica Drew jokes would be wasted and there’d be no Spider-Woman jokes in response.
Most of what we like in some people, we hate in others.
Doesn’t matter what you reference as much as how. People overcomplicate this at all ends.
Deconstruction is not pessimism. Being a little bit analytical and then a little bit pessimistic is not Deconstruction.
I think it is okeh if we use terminology to describe “real people” that they did not or do not use. Without permission. We can say, “bipolar,” or “trans,” or “tall,” regardless of whether they did or do. You simply have to be able to back it up.
One of the reasons I love to write about comics, more than another other media, is that the expectations are low and the material often esoteric, oblique, or only commonly understood through adaptations.
If we received every referent in its totality, we would throw up.
I like putting theory people and out of fashion authors in my work because it can hit an audience like a tray of sushi on a cracker. Cognitive diffusion, like blue sky meditation, is like counting off your parts until you sleep.
I saw The Lost World: Jurassic Park in the theater. I had not seen a theater-sized screen in months, or even a normal television screen, being limited to the playing-card sized black and white of a portable hybrid tv/tape-player. I cannot tell you, to this day, if the showing I saw had the strobe light extra effects in play or if I felt surrounded by affect because of my months of televisual fast.
So many directors shoot far more than they end up having in a movie. More filmmakers should take that unusued footage and craft it into its own viewable art. Adam McKay made it work, by virtue of funny being more important to a comedy than narrative. David Lynch has done it several times, mostly on the strength of being interesting being more important than narrative.
Narrative might actually be the least important thing in narrative film.
The vast majority of movies, feature-length and short, are unavailable on commercial, licensed streaming. A fantastic number of shorts, in particular, are still available, often with the filmmaker’s blessing, on free-to-upload streaming sites.
The move from film stock to digital was the real end of a difference between “television” and “movies.” Neither has figured that out, yet.
I barely pay video games that are not solitaire or Scrabble. I only owned one video game console in my life, a used Dreamcast, which was immediately coopted from me, because I “didn’t need it,” by my brother, who lived across town.
Video games have always seemed prohibitively expense. I never got into them and I cannot figure out where people I know get the money to be into them.
Anything is overwhelming if you pay enough attention or if you are caught unprepared.
We had the first episode of the new television series, The Regime, playing, with the volume very low. I paid attention to keep up. As they discussed sickness, discussed mucus and mold and vomit and showed us discomfort and discomfort, I ran to the bathroom and threw up at the same time as one of the characters.
Everything scary is a bit funny. Some is a lot.
I had an English teacher who chastised the use of, “a lot,” as a phrase. But, “a lot,” is an indeterminate measure, a vague space or count.
More things are recursive that aren’t.
I write about comics the most because, for me, everything comes back to comics. Through comics, everything.
This was a poem I could only really publish somewhere like this. It would be almost cruel to send this to editors.
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