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Southland Tales

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:27:47 GMT

You've heard the boos from Cannes and the "what the--?s" from reviewers. Even many of those who are well disposed toward writer-director Richard Kelly, some of those who liked--maybe loved--Donnie Darko, have given up on this movie. Well, I liked it.

Tonight Zach and I saw a preview screening of the version that's now slated for wide release. The audience seemed pretty polarized. Judging by the walkouts, some hated it. Judging by the people who stayed in their seats through the credits, talking passionately, some loved it. I didn't love it, but I liked it quite a lot, and I enjoyed watching it, which means something kind of different. A lot of little things were extremely funny, and some scenes were just delicious to look at. And it was fun seeing people like Jon Lovitz and Christopher Lambert in utterly unexpected little roles. The sound track is awesome, in a Mobylicious way, and there's a bizarre scene set to one of my favorite songs--"All These Things That I Have Done" by the Killers--that would alone have been worth the price of admission, if we had paid one. Overall, it's a weird and perhaps over-ambitious mishmash, but it's not stupid, and I wasn't bored.

And there aren't enough movies about the space-time continuum, anyway.

Oh, and I came to the film with no backstory. I haven't read the Southland Tales graphic novels, but now I'm going to give them a look.

Halloween Xerxes

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 01:47:22 GMT

Xerxes has become something of a pet among the nurses and technicians at our vet clinic, due to his all-too-frequent visits and his tractable, good-natured behavior. The other day he had his teeth cleaned. I dropped him off in the morning, and when I came to pick him up in the afternoon he was sporting gleaming teeth and also this dapper neckerchief, with which the nurses had decorated him:

This isn't a very lively picture--he was still dozy from the anesthetic and just napped on the floor all evening--but it's the only one I've got of him in the scarf where he isn't moving. He doesn't seem to mind the neckwear, which we've put it on him for an hour or so several times since then. He is, of course, wearing it today. Maybe he just likes the fact that we keep telling him how adorable he is, and playing with him, but by now he knows he doesn't need a scarf for that. He has got us utterly whipped.

Happy Halloween to all four-legged, two-legged, and no-legged friends.

How to Write a Book

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:10:15 GMT

I'm crunched for time on a deadline right now, but it's been a while since I posted, so I'll take the lazy way out and post someone else's clever stuff.

This piece on "How to Write a Book" was forwarded to me by my eagle-eyed and all-knowing pal Magda, from www.yankeepotroast.org, a site that bills itself as "The Journal of Literary Satire: Hastily Written and Slopilly [sic] Edited."

Do absolutely nothing until you can see the whites of your deadline’s eyes.
If you’ve got cowriters, try to disagree as much as possible. If you’re of the same opinion regarding a section of text, bicker about dinner choices.
Criticize what little progress you’ve achieved and doubt what little talent you possess.
Do not write any new words when there are still old words that have only been rewritten twelve times. No sentence is complete until it’s lost all traces of your original thought.
Complain about the pressure of a looming deadline to everyone you know. This will ameliorate the jealousy and bitterness felt by friends without book deals. It will also put an end to social invitations that may hamper your writing progress, as your former friends will now hate you.
Stop sleeping. Complain about how tired you are too.
Never have a mental breakdown before 11 p.m.
Do not postpone other projects so that you can focus on the current one. It’s better to spread yourself so thin that you produce an evenly distributed amount of complete crap.
If you’ve gotten this far without a single technical foul-up, now’s a good time to download something viral.
Make a schedule for yourself, but do not even remotely follow it. Instead, continually do some mental math that divides your remaining pages by the rapidly dwindling number of hours.
The best writing is that which is compiled from dozens of different documents, including things you’ve e-mailed or text-messaged to yourself. Try to create separate documents on as many different computers as are available. Some things will be irrevocably lost, and hours will be spent cursing. Learn a lesson about orderliness, but do not act upon such knowledge.
Some terribly constructed sentences always make good low-hanging fruit for your cowriters to edit, thus protecting your awful idea from their meddling.
Were you napping? Stop that. It’s 11 o’clock already. Start freaking out, hard.
If you’ve worked hard three days in a row, take a hard-earned day off. And it looks like snow tomorrow, so you might as well take the whole weekend. But a day off from writing is not a day off from complaining!
If you haven’t drastically gained or lost weight, you’re just not writing well.
Assume your sources are reputable. When some accidental research reveals the source that serves as foundation for your work to be as reliable as grandma’s memory, briefly consider the amount of work it will take to correct things at this late hour, then fuck it and move on.
Pick up any book on your bookshelf, skim a few pages, and admit that it’s a terrible book… but better than anything you’ll ever write. Cry.
If one of your cowriters is something of an optimist, shit in his hat.
If you’re not panicking, call your agent and request they he or she panics. You’ll have no problem panicking afterward.
Call your mom.
Your time is more valuable than your money. Spend as much cash as you’ve got in your pockets.

Yep. That's about right.

Mushroom Update

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 05:32:27 GMT

I ate a few of those Purple Corts tonight and was not impressed. On the bright side, I wasn't killed, either. Yet.

First I dry-sauteed the two small ones. This is a method I often use for cooking fresh-picked mushrooms, as they contain plenty of moisture on their own. Dry-sauteeing lets you taste the mushroom itself without any butter, oil, shallots, wine, or whatever else you might use when sauteeing mushrooms. In the case of the Purple Corts, this was not a big advantage. Their texture was pleasing, as was their rich black color (I could imagine using them in pasta dishes for contrast), but they did not have a lot of taste, and what they did have was on the bitter side.

Unable to leave well enough alone, I sauteed one of the bigger ones with a little butter, a splash of wine, and just a hint of garlic--a clove swiped around the pan. The result was a moist mushroom that tasted like ever-so-slightly bitter butter and garlic. Made a beautiful presentation, but I did not even finish it. I'm going to dry the rest of them and see if they will work in a soup later on.

I now feel rather bad about having picked them all, but I won't do so again. And I have read some things online from people who like eating them, so it was worth trying.

Chanterelles tomorrow! Now there I'm on familiar fungal territory.

Fun with Fungi

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:50:41 GMT

No, this isn't about Zach's and my visit to Amsterdam a couple of years ago. Though that was fun.

Yesterday afternoon my friend Kathleen and I went mushrooming on Larch Mountain in the Gorge. Our haul of chanterelles was disappointingly small: those are mine on the right. But we found a bunch of the most beautiful mushrooms I have ever seen. They look black in the photo, but they are really a deep, dark, velvety purple.

They are Cortinarius violaceus, the Violet Cortinarius, also called the Purple Cort. According to several mycological guides I've checked, they are the only member of their large family that it is safe to eat. It is unsettling, though, when a mushroom is labeled "Edible, with Caution." All of the other cortinarius mushrooms, apparently, contain bad substances called cortinarins. The onset of the deleterious effects is delayed, such that you don't know you have a problem until 3 to 14 days have passed. Still, the identifying characteristics of the Purple Cort are pretty conclusive.

Kathleen and I have never collected these mushrooms, because we have always had much better luck with chanterelles and have concentrated on them. This year we had to branch out. She got a lot of angelwings, and I got these satanic-looking beauties.

The Purple Corts are said to be not particularly savory. They are also said to darken to black when cooked. I propose to start with those two small ones and see what happens. But aren't they gorgeous?

Good Stuff

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 22:20:56 GMT

Last Thursday evening Zach and I saw a musical called "The Ghosts of Celilo," which is having its world premiere here in Portland. It was composed by Oregonian Marv Ross (of Quarterflash!) and is a time-twisting story about the intersection between two groups of characters: four ghosts at the bottom of Celilo Falls, which disappeared when the Bonneville Dam went into operation on the Columbia River in 1947, and three young people at an Indian school run by missionaries. The music is an interesting fusion of rock, Native American, and musical-theater influences, and the singer-actors were wonderful. One of the best was mindseas' brother, who is a well-known and deservedly acclaimed figure on the Portland stage.

Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. Sweet--and not just because it gives me the perfect opening for a kids' bio of Gore I'm updating this month for Lerner Publications. I originally wrote the book when Gore was VP, and last updated it in 1999. The new edition will focus on his global warming crusade rather than his political career, but I'd love to end the book with his announcement that he's going to run again. Don't think it'll happen, but I could be wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.

A fat package arrived for me in the mail today. Yay--I finally got around to obtaining a book I should've bought when it was published in 1997: Clute and Grant's Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Even though it's not completely up to date, it's 1000+ pages of entries that make me want to abuse Interlibrary Loan and do nothing but read for the rest of my life.

The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:12:54 GMT

Last weekend was the annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival here in Portland. (Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!) In recent years the minions of the Old Ones have gathered for this event at what I consider the perfect venue (and not just because it's close to my house): the Hollywood Theatre, a shabbily magnificent old-style movie palace, with three screening rooms, one of which is enormous. A winding ramp leads up to the second floor. The ramp is oddly off-kilter, but its non-Euclidean geometry is the perfect introduction to the Mall of Cthulhu on the second floor, where vendors hawk all kinds of good things: books, comix, Miskatonic U. athletic wear, and much, much more. I always treat myself to something during the festival. This year I bought a CD of a 30s-style radio play of At the Mountains of Madness. It was produced by the good folks at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, who also created the wonderful silent-film-style live-action Call of Cthulhu a year or so ago. I haven't yet listened to the CD. I'm saving it for the end of this month, when Zach and I may venture into the aeon-blasted peaks surrounding the fabled plateau of forbidden Leng . . . er, drive to Chico to visit Z's stepmom, then take the long way home on back roads through the Klamath and Siskiyou mountains. We shall strictly avoid any ancient buried cities we happen to find.

Each year the HPL filmfest presents half a dozen or so feature films, old and new, and several blocks of shorts. Some are directly based on Lovecraft's fiction; others are indirectly Lovecraftian--sometimes very indirectly, but the festival's organizer, Andrew Migliore, is pretty good at keeping the focus on weird and cosmic horror rather than pure grue. I often find the shorts to be the best of the fest. They are wildly varied in tone and quality, but they always represent wonderful inventiveness and energy. Another reason I like to I catch all the shorts blocks is that at least some of the features are available on DVD. John Carpenter's The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness, frex, were screened this year. So was Larry Fessenden's new film, The Last Winter, which sounds very promising. I would've worked it into my fest schedule had I not learned that it will play at the Hollywood for a regular run in December. There are, however, always features that are difficult, if not impossible, to get on DVD. (I will never forget an amazing, confusing, but very Lovecraftian Italian film I saw at the fest a few years ago; last time I checked it was not yet available in NA format.) A film called Wishbaby had its world premiere at this year's festival, and one called Chill, based on "Cool Air" had its regional premiere.

Highlights of the weekend, in no particular order:

--A very funny live skit by Chuck and Dexter, a pair of prankish auteurs who have contributed some of the cleverest videos to recent festivals . My favorite short of theirs is "Antiques Road Show: Arkham."

--A 21-minute short called "Of Darkness" that I thought was brilliant. It was a simple idea, filmed in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with very a simple set and minimal props. It was about half a dozen kids (not professional actors, but amazingly well directed) in a simple, terrifying story about a book that opens and lights that go out.

--"The Masque of Ollock," an eerie 8-minute animated horror fantasy created by Robert F. Kauffman, based on his book of the same title. The soundtrack was disturbingly cool; I scanned the credits and saw that it was by The Church, which reminded me of how much I liked that band and launched a search through boxes of old CDs when I got home.

--"A Short Film About John Bolton," a funny-scary parody of a BBC documentary about a British painter; spot-on skewering of a pretentious gallery owner and a clueless interviewer; a nod to "Pickman's Model."

--Nobody, a 90-minute feature that made its regional premiere, starring Costas Mandylor and George O'Ross (the director, Shawn Linden, was at the fest). It was slow and stately, but deeply atmospheric and filmed in extraordinarily good, lived-in-looking 1950s period detail. It's a film noir about the fateful intersection of a mobster, an assassin, and a witch on a winter night in some nameless city . . . with structural echoes of Groundhog Day and Memento.

--Two adaptations of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth: Cthulhu, a feature length piece filmed here in the Pacific NW, and "Call," a 43-minute "long short" made in Scotland. I liked Cthulhu but liked "Call" more--the setting in a Scottish seaside city, with actors speaking their lines in Trainspotting-thick Scots accents, added piquancy.

I was too busy all week, finishing an overdue book about Rodents (couldn't work in a reference to "The Rats in the Walls," though), to write this up. As I went to bed last night, I was thinking about the festival and preparing to write about it. Then I had a dream about NEXT year's HPL film fest. Zach was there (highly unusual--he almost never goes) and so, for some reason, was Sharon Stone (I think she had a bit part in some horror movie that was showing and stopped by to sign autographs or something). A bunch of us were sitting around in what looked like an elementary-school classroom, talking, and she asked, "Who is this Lovecraft and why do you like the stuff?" Everybody started babbling enthusiastically, and after a minute she said, "Maybe I should make a Lovecraft movie. What are his women characters like?" General hilarity ensued. Just then a crane outside the window accidentally drove a long metal bar right through the wall, about 3 inches above Sharon Stone's head. Everyone sat there stunned for an instant, and then Zach said, "Stuff like that happens all the time in Lovecraft." I was about to take issue with him and point out that he's never even read any Lovecraft, but I woke up.