bitterfig

I saw Dark Knight  a couple days ago and was more or less blown away. 

 

I grew up with Batman—watching the 60’s television show, reading the comics.  Characters like Batman, Batgirl, Robin, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, the Joker, Catwoman, Two-Face, Penguin, the Riddler, and Poison Ivy have been a part of my consciousness for over 30 years.  It’s kind of amazing to me that I can still be so captivated by such a familiar story, that there are still new layers to be reveled.

( cut for spoilers and length )

I got back from my visit to my parents yesterday evening and tomorrow I’m back to work.  Today was devoted to reacquainting myself with everyday life, things like going grocery shopping and collecting the Kitty from my sister’s where he stayed while I was away (thankfully he didn’t scratch my niece or nephew). 

 

Upstate New York is breathtakingly beautiful this time of year, fields of wildflowers—tiger lilies, Queen Anne’s lace and blue chicory.  I saw turkeys, deer, hummingbirds, a rose breasted grouse beak and several fat, furry woodchucks, visited my grandmother everyday, went to a fascinating exhibit on Synagogue carvings at the local art museum and read a pile of comic books, mostly back issues of Elfquest and Urusei Yatsura.

 

I can’t say I’m exactly refreshed from my vacation however.  The tension between my parents grated on me like fingernails on a blackboard during the entire visit and perhaps to drown it I sort of created my own internal white noise by drastically cutting down on my daily caloric intake while drinking huge amounts of caffeinated diet soda in addition to sampling some of the prescription grade painkillers Mum had left over from a root canal she had last month (a Hydrocodine tablet and half a Vicodin a couple of days later—I didn’t really get buzzed at all but they did help with the shin splits I had from walking on hilly terrain).  

 

I’m not sure what gets into me when I go back to my parents.  Half of me that strives to be the perfect daughter and the other half works equally hard to be a perfect horror.  Interestingly I got some insight into this watching Batman Unmasked a History Channel special on the psychology of Batman.  It talked about how Batman is a person who is filled with overpowering rage and fear yet is able to master it and how in a way that strength of will is his superpower.  Joker on the other hand is described as seeing the world through a mad kind of logic wherein the existence of injustice cancels out the possibility of justice and where the fact that innocence is corruptible means that no one is innocent.  Sometimes (like this last week) I feel like I contain both these persona and they’re warring it out in every decision I make.  No wonder Batman has always appealed to me so much.

I e-mailed my sister about how it had hurt my feelings when she told me I had embarrassed her and that I felt like I needed encouragement more than correction at this time.  She apologized so I guess we’re okay though I’m a little nervous about the upcoming holiday.  I’m off on July 4^th so I guess if I’m invited to any kind of family thing I need to try to go but either not drink at all or limit myself to two glasses at the most.  I feel like I always have to watch myself and keep a rigid control over myself though I guess that’s what everyone has to do if they want to function in the world. 

 

Last Monday, I had off from work and I did some painting for the first time in ages and finished my sister’s Christmas gift.  I like to give multi-part gifts and since my sister has been fascinated by Batgirl since we were children the first part of her gift (which I actually gave her in December) was a collection of Batgirl stories from the 60’s. 

The second part (which I finished last week) was a sort of Batgirl/Marie Antoinette painting.  The basic concept of the painting owes a lot to Ray Caesar, a digital artist who uses a lot of Batgirl and Catwoman type imagery, but it’s pretty much in my own style which is much more low-tech/decorative/folk art derived.

The library in Bucktown got in a whole bunch of volumes of the Natsuki Takaya manga Fruits Basket so I’ve been reading them for the past few days.  It really is an excellent series though sometimes it does get a too cutesy and overblown for my tastes.  It really does an effective job of illustrating the way unconditional love can make a difference in people’s lives and also what a risk it can be to allow your self to love and be loved. 

 

In a way it kind of makes me ashamed of my own writing which is so focused on cruelty, repeated patterns of abuse, and succumbing to hopelessness.  A particularly vivid illustration of this is the Fruits Basket fan fiction pieces I’ve written, which in essence are almost diametrically opposed to the actual series.  While Natsuki Takaya focuses on characters changing, growing and getting over their damage my writing is all about damage, bad memories, and being beaten down.

 

I think this is of special concern to me because of a class I took about two weeks ago.  It was called “Healing Minds, Healing Memories” and was taught by a co-worker of mine who’s big into alternative healing and has studied in a couple different shamanistic traditions.  The class basically dealt with making painful memories and disturbing dreams more bearable by re-imagining them, changing things around to make them less upsetting.  

 

In a way, it sort of reminded me of my writing process which usually starts with a dream or a memory which I proceed to fuck with.  I thought this was fitting, because in a way I view writing almost as a form of prayer or spell-craft but if that’s the case, what kind of spells am I casting? 

 

Not very good ones. 

 

It’s not that I think writing is literally magic, that if I write something it will come true.  I do however think that if you go to the trouble of envisioning something as vividly as possible, working through it step by step and committing it to paper it seems real to you.  Wouldn’t it be better for me to be imagining positive things, situations where people open up, accept themselves, gain confidence, overcome adversary and connect with others? 

 

Of course there is a part of me that honestly believes I only have so much control over what I write—often stories and ideas take on a life of their own and go in a completely different direction than planned. 

I just finished reading Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume 1 and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume 1 is about the formation of a sort of Victorian era superhero team made up of characters from thrillers of the period- Mina Murray from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Haggard’s African adventurer Allan Quartermain. While the series parodies (and sometimes seems to parrot) British Empire xenophobia, racism and sexism of the time for the most part it’s a straight forward adventure comic except for a prose story at the end which provides the back Quartermain’s opium addiction (which he is in the thralls of when his character is first introduced.) In this story, under the influence of a mystical, time and space bending drug Quartermain encounters H. G Wells’ Time Traveler and H.P Lovecraft character Randolph Carter (as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter who I didn’t recognize, having never read any of Burrough’ book). This prose story is full of Alan Moore weirdness and suggests that the crossover potential within the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Universe might just be limitless.

This limitlessness comes to fruition in Black Dossier. Set in the late 1950’s it follows the still youthful Allan Quartermain and Mina Murray as they retrieve a book called the Black Dossier that documents the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s history over the centries. Volume 1 was a comic book with a single prose chapter that mimicked adventure stories of the period Black Dossier is made up mostly of the sort of pseudo-ephemera documents that began each chapter of Watchmen. These documents—chapters from novels, 1984 retold as a Tijuana Bible, postcards, official reports, a Shakespeare folio and a section in 3D-- basically set forth the history of a parallel world where pretty much everything Alan Moore ever read seems to exist all at once. It’s almost as if Moore is striving to do for pulp/pop fiction what Joyce did for literature in Ulysses. Maybe he succeeds too well, because as with Ulysses, 90% of the references are probably going to be lost on the casual reader. I recognized a few of Moore’s allusions—Metropolis, James Bond (not a favorable portrait to my delight), Shakespeare, Jack Kerouac, the gender shifting and immortal Orlando, Fanny Hill, O’Brien and Big Brother of 1984 but missed even more as I’m not familiar British boy’s adventure books, the meta-verse of Michael Moorcock. The Avengers (as in Emma Peel not Iron Man) or fictitious French arch-criminals (to name just a few of the references that were significant enough to the plot that I had to look them up—who knows how many more were made in passing that I just skipped over).

I can’t say I would really rank either book of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in what I consider Alan Moore’s best works (Watchmen, early Swamp Thing, V For Vendetta, Promethea, and From Hell) but reading them has given me more ideas. One of the thing I find really interesting about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it’s a legitimate derivative work. It’s fan fiction in that it uses familiar characters yet it places them in an original context beyond the novels they originally appeared in. And of course since all the works referenced are public domain, it’s perfectly legal.

Almost makes me think it would be interesting to do some sort of a feminist revisionist crossover based on some of the books that were important to me when I was young. The titles that immediately come to mind are Little Women, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series and L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Just imagine what could happen if mega-brats Amy March, Nellie Olsen and Jellia Jamb all joined forces in a sort of Legion of Obstinate Schoolgirls.

Another interesting idea would be to bring together some of the female characters from the novels I had to read in high school. Even when I was fifteen with no knowledge or understanding of feminism I could tell there was something wrong with the curriculum. All the books and plays we read seemed to be by and about men. The Shakespear plays we read were Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar. Merchant of Venice at least had Portia who uses her wits to save her fiancé’s ass of course she has to pose as a man to do it and the fact that she ends up making a Jewish character convert of die sort of soured the whole thing for me. On the plus side novels like A Separate Peace, The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men kind of put the idea of homoerotic subtext into my nasty little mind but still it always bothered me that women tended to be passive love interests, victims or just plain nuts. I think the only novels by women we read were Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar In a Sieve and Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth both of which painted infinately depressing pictures of the lives women in India and China. Equally down-trodden was the heroine of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, one of the few books I remember that had a woman as a main character.

It would be sort of cool to write a story with zombie versions of Tess, Ophelia, those pathological schoolgirls from the Crucible, and ass-kicking versions the long-suffering Rukmani of Nectar in a Sieve and O-Lan from The Good Earth.

I’ve developed something of a passion for the manga of Ai Yazawa, mostly Nana (I’ve devoured the first eight volumes) and also Paradise Kiss (which I’ve read the first volume of). 

 

Her series Nana was recommended to me based on a bit of Princess Tutu yuri I’d written and right before I lost my second job at Biff’s office I decided to take a chance and secured copies of the first eight volumes of the series from e-bay.  A rather significant risk, I might have hated the series, but as luck would have it Nana turns out to be one of the better manga series I’ve ever read. 

 

Basically it’s about two very different 20-year-old women, both named Nana who come to Tokyo, meet and whose lives become increasingly intertwined.   No science-fiction or supernatural elements, just a pair of girls trying to build their lives and become themselves. 

 

Nana Komatsu is an exuberant but essentially aimless young woman.  Good hearted but clueless she allows herself to drift through life in the wake of whoever she happens to be in love with.  When her friends, including her boyfriend, move to Tokyo to attend art school, she follows them.  On the train to the city she meets the other Nana, Nana Osaki.

 

Nana Osaki is a punk rock singer with very definite goals.  Her previous band, Blast, was a local success in the small city she is from but that ended when their bassist Ren left to join the major label band Trapnest.  Ren was also Nana’s lover and he asked her to come with him but she declined as it would have meant being relegated to “rock star’s girlfriend.”  Their affair was put on hold and in Tokyo, Nana O is determined to become a success at least equal to Ren, with her new band.    

 

Nano O is guarded as Nana K is open, sharing little about her painful childhood or her personal life.  Yet her music has the ability to move people deeply.  Through her music, she seems to speak for them. 

 

While there’s some cutesy stuff, overall Nana is much more adult- as in grown-up, than most manga I’ve read.  Also it’s more novelistic, things seem to develop, grow and deepen with each installment. 

 

Also it has a sensibility I love. 

 

While so much manga seems to focus on students in school uniforms who aspire to the student council, Yazawa’s characters are hip bohemians, artist and musicians in Nana, an enclave of edgy fashion designers in Paradise Kiss.   They shop at thrift stores and vintage shops and garner inspiration from the Sex Pistols and Velvet Goldmine- definitely my kind of scene.  In a way Nana reminds me somewhat painfully of my college years, especially Nana K’s desire to be included in Nana O’s circle of punk musicians.  

 

Though I’m quite late to the party, I’ve started watching the BBC series Torchwood.  I polished off the first season on DVD and am two episodes into season 2 via downloads.  Overall I like it quite a bit.  Season One was fairly uneven.  There were some good episodes but some truly baffling suspensions of logic were required (I’m sorry, but any solution that involves reading the complete works of Emily Dickinson aloud is not acceptable).   Still, it’s amazing what you can forgive of a show that makes just about everybody in its entire cast more or less bisexual.    

 

And when I say everyone I mean everyone.  The leader of Torchwood (an alien hunting organization that’s sort of the UK equivalent to Men In Black) Captain Jack Harkness  openly admits to lovers of both sexes, is sexually involved with a member of his team but still manages to have a kind of “unresolved sexual tension” thing going with Gwen.  In addition to holding up her part of the UST with Jack, Gwen has a boyfriend and has an affair with the team’s medic Owen.  This doesn’t stop her from kissing a woman processed by an alien in the second episode of the show.  Computer expert Toshiko, who seems to have a crush on Owen has an affair with an alien who is female in human form.    An episode is devoted to another team member, Ianto’s efforts to resurrect his girlfriend but it’s gradually revealed in future episodes that he’s become involved with Jack.  Even Owen, a compulsive womanizer and seemingly the straightest member of Torchwood makes out with a guy in the series premiere and during an apocalyptic moment suggests that both Ianto and Toshiko have end of the world sex with him. 

 

I sort of love this kind of stuff. 

 

Season One had a lot of promise which I hope Season Two will deliver on.  It definitely seemed to be off to a good start in the first episode (appropriately titled “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” when Spike (yes, that Spike—Buffy Spike) shows up looking for Jack to be his Drusilla.  Okay, it’s not Spike.  His name is Captain John Hart.  He’s brunette and American.  And he’s not a vampire, he’s some sort of time agent thing that I’d know about if I’d actually watched Dr. Who before watching the spin-off but basically it’s Spike engaging in violent making out with a really cute (if full of himself) guy and in my book, that is pretty stunning. 

 

On the literary front I just finished reading Sarah Water’s novel Fingersmith.  It’s the third novel I’ve read by Waters (I admit it, I have a thing for Victorian lesbians).  The others were Tipping the Velvet (my favorite) and Affinity.   

 

I’d seen a BBC adaptation of Fingersmith a couple of years ago so I knew the basic outlines of the plot, which is probably a good thing.  I’m less concerned with being surprised than I am with knowing what’s going on and Fingersmith is full of the sort of twists and turns and reversals that often times confuse the hell out of me.  Knowing where the story was going freed me up to focus on the characters, the wonderful period dialogue and the rich atmosphere that Water’s evokes.  This atmosphere is by turns sensual and sickening.  Water has a way of making you smell the 19^th century and what with chamberpots and close rooms on rainy nights reeking of dog and unwashed bodies it doesn’t always smell good. 

 

In Fingersmith, Waters seems to deliberately set out to write a sort of post-modern  Dickensonian novel brimming over with melodramatic contrivances such as switched babies, ghastly uncles, and dastardly plots as well as expanding Dickens social themes to include issues of gender and sexuality as well as wealth and class. 

 

Another bit of post-modern pseudo-Victoriana I’ve indulged in lately is Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige, about a pair of rival illusionists.  This was my second viewing of The Prestige.  I have to admit my first left me rather baffled.  As I said, I’m not so good a following plots and The Prestige is extremely complicated, a puzzle of a movie in much the same way Nolan’s Memento was.

 

The film’s complexity is encapsulated by its framing device—much of the movie concerns a man reading another man’s diary about reading his own diary.  Follow?  Of course both diaries were intended to be read and are full of deliberate misinformation.  Appropriate for a film that’s central themes are doubles, the creation of illusion and how things are not what they seem to be.  I definitely got much more out of the Prestige by seeing it a second time and I’d like to watch it again just to clear up some details I didn’t really follow.  Also having watched it, I’d rather like to see Nolan’s contribution to the Batman mythology.  I’ve been intensely interested in Batman as a sort of masculine   archetype since I was a teenager but somehow I never got around to seeing Batman Begins. 

I was home sick again today.  This absence brings me 4 and a half points out of a possible 6 (you get fired at 6 points) but I just felt really bad.  It’s a combination of things.  I started the pill last month and because of some hormonal quirk I’ve had my period for the last 10 days, plus the beginnings of a cold, plus the 5+ pounds I managed to lose since November and working long mid-shifts all weekend.  Everything just added up and yesterday I could barely drag myself through the day.

Today I didn’t do anything—I didn’t vote which I feel awful about, I didn’t work out, I pretty much just lay in bed and re-read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis graphic novels.  I’d gone to see the film adaptation (which is wonderful--truly beautiful animation) last week and really wanted to read the books again. 

Marjane Satrapi is three years older than me, my sister’s age, born in 1969, and I’m amazed by the way our lives have been similar despite the vast differences.  She speaks of being an Iranian in Europe and a Westerner in Iran and that’s very similar to how I’ve always felt, carrying the baggage of my repressive upbringing with me even when I’m in an environment with very different standards while also feeling out of place amidst my family and in the place that’s supposed to be my home.  The way I live now sort of reminds me of the periods of self-imposed isolation Satrapi goes through when she’s living in Austria as a teenager and the depression she suffers when returning to Iran. 

An update on what I’ve been reading lately.

 

I finished re-reading John Nathan’s biography of Yukio Mishima quite quickly.  I find his story is so fascinating, his desire to move from the realms of fantasy and creativity to those of action and physicality, from thoughtfulness to what William Butler Yeats would call “a mind that nobleness made simple as a fire.”   Given the state of the world today I really do find something disturbingly relevant in Mishama’s conscious decision to embrace nationalism and fanaticism. 

 

Currently I’m about two thirds of the way through Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, a stiletto sharp, whip smart riff on the end of the world which I’m enjoying very much.  I think Kevin Smith’s Dogma, which I love, must owe a certain debt to Good Omens.  The portrayal of the workings of heaven and hell and the tone seem similar to me. 

 

Between Mishama and Good Omens read the first two volumes of a really interesting manga series called After School Nightmare.  It’s a really bizarre and psychologically complex story about a school where certain students are brought to a subterranean infirmary to participate in a special class they need to pass before they can graduate.  In this class the students enter a dream where they appear as they truly are and compete with each other for a key that unlocks a door they must pass through to graduate.  After a student graduates, they’re completely forgotten by their classmates so the school is eerily full of empty desks and lockers.

( cut for spoilers, pictures )

A couple of weeks ago I was read the manga Earthian.  It’s an earlier work Kouga Yun the mangaka (writer/artist) responsible for Loveless, a series I’ve had an ambiguous fascination/revulsion relationship with since I started reading it last year because of the eroticized, highly romantic manner in which it deals with the relationship between a 20 year old man and a 12 year old boy. 

 

Earthian was disturbing in different and similar ways.  Like Loveless, Earthian focuses on male characters but what bothered me was the manner in which the primary female supporting-- Aya, Elvira and Miyuki-- were portrayed. 

( cut for length and spoilers )

Things I’ve been reading lately:

( The Bull From the Sea by Mary Renault )

( Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess )

( Strangers in Paradise Vol. 11-16 )
( Veronica by Mary Gaitskill )

I hadn’t mentioned it before because it shows how psychosomatic/lazy I am but I was so worked up about my impending court case on Wednesday that I ended up calling in sick to work on Tuesday.  Since this is my third absence in less than 90 days it means I’m going to get a counseling statement and that if I call in again between now and October 12 (when the 90 days since my first absence ends) I’ll get an unsatisfactory work warning so I really need to stay semi-healthy for a while.  Though I have to admit, when I went into work yesterday after three days (I was legitimately scheduled not to work on Wednesday and Thursday) I felt much better than I have in a long time.  No nausea or dizzy spells, my legs didn’t ache the way they have been and I wasn’t nearly as tired or irritable as I have been so I do think the extra time off did me good. 

 

Wednesday of course I had court which turned out to be no big deal.  I waited around for about half an hour while some other cases were heard and while some lawyers argued about whether or not a case should be heard in traffic court of “on the fourth floor” whatever that means.  Then my case was called.  No one showed up from Chicago Transit Authority so the ticket was dismissed and I got my license back.  It took a grand total of two minutes.  I didn’t even get yelled at or called irresponsible or asked if I’d learned my lesson any of the things of that nature I was expecting.  Also I didn’t have to plead guilty, which is good for my insurance case (which I have a bunch of paperwork I need to do for and a couple of phone calls which I can’t make until Monday when the offices are open). 

 

After court I walked around downtown Chicago a bit.  I looked at an exhibit of Contemporary Art from India at the Cultural Center then walked around Millennium Park.  There were some ballet dancers rehearsing in Pritzer Pavilion who I watched for quite a while.  As someone who has absolutely no coordination I am always amazes by what real dancers are capable of.  Then of course I went to my favorite Borders at Randolph and State where I browsed for an ungodly amount of time and looked at all the pretty books I’d buy if I have a couple hundred dollars to spare.  They have a nice big selection of manga.  I noticed that the sixth volume of Loveless is out and I’ll probably pick that up at some point because I’ve sort of made the commitment to see the series through even though I have some serious problems with both the content and the manner of storytelling.  What I was really tempted to get was the first volume of a series called Venus Versus Virus, which is a science fiction story about gothic Lolita lesbians that I would very much like to read. 

 

Thursday I worked at Biff’s office and afterwards met Sunqist, a livejournal friend who lives in Chicago, at a coffee shop by the Damen Blue Line stop.  It’s the first time I’ve met one of my on-lines friends in real life and I had a really good time.  Unfortunately a very severe thunderstorm hit while we were talking and I got to ride my bike home amidst pouring rain, lightening and strong winds.  There was a big tree down at the end of my street and when I got back to my apartment, I discovered that the screen had blown off my front window and all sorts of leaves and twigs had gotten in.  Also one of my CD towers and a lamp had blown over and a couple pictures knocked off the wall.  Riding to work the next morning, there were trees and branches down all over the place.

 

Pa-daddy arrived in town yesterday morning, so after I finished work I went over to my sister’s to see him.  He had a good trip (he takes Amtrack and on Amtrack any time the train is not five hours late you consider it a good trip) and was playing with the kids and seemed pretty happy.  I don’t have work till 3:45 p.m. today so at about noon I’m going to meet everyone at the Bucktown Arts Fest.  Tomorrow I have a mid-shift so I probably won’t get to see much of Pa but I have Monday off so I’ll be able to spend the day with him then. 

In one of the bouts of reckless extravagance I’m unfortunately prone to I bought all five volumes of Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III’s graphic novel Promethea on Ebay a couple weeks ago.   I started reading it on the plane to New York last Friday and finished it up earlier this week.  I definitely don’t regret buying it.  While not a perfect series (like Watchmen), Prometheus was still wonderfully witty, with excellent art and some really cool characters and ideas.  ( cut for length, spoilers, images... )