Friday, March 12, 2004

The system does work!

thanks to Randy for sending this link. Let us hope he is not having to join in the class action suit.
Curse you, Kylie!

Luckily, I carry full insurance.
Comics are an odd thing. People tend to think of them as being just stories about people in brightly clad costumes punching the daylights out of one another. And the past fifteen to twenty five years, that's mostly what you could expect from DC or Marvel comics.

But the fact is, there was a time when Superheroes knew how to get their groove on. Even at the expense of the safety of others.

God as my witness, I will learn the Krypton Crawl.

Thursday, March 11, 2004

this will make Jamie chitter with delight, much like a chipmunk.
I do not have any big stories to tell today. Most of what's been going on has been work related, and that's not terribly interesting.

I must find a birthday present for my brother, Jason. It is Jason's birthday on March 17th. He will be 31.

Jason has many interests:
a) playing the guitar
b) playing the guitar while I am trying to watch TV
c) listening to his stereo as loudly as possible so he can hear it over the shower while I am trying to sleep
d) breaking my X-Wing fighter and refusing any restitution or apology
e) insisting that Batman is better than Superman
f) watching movies NO ONE ELSE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD RENT, AND THEN INSISTING "it wadn't that bad..."
g) adopting three legged dogs
h) taking three-legged dogs on slooooowwww walks
i) practicing the law
j) freeing crooks from jail
k) calling me alternately "fatty" or "bitch"
l) insisting my job entails little more than running a VCR
m) insisting his job is soooooooo difficult
n) going to eat enchiladas
o) refusing to get a haircut despite all contrary opinions and common sense
p) keeping Thundercloud Subs afloat
q) swimming
r) reading books about digruntled spies/ cops
s) keeping me abreast of the progress of the Mono Music Ensemble
t) wrestling wild boar

All in all, he has many interests. But what shall I do for him for his birthday? He has requested a hand-drawn cartoon from the League, but the League has a lot of work to do before his birthday.

This will take some sorting out. I might just send an organ grinder and a well-dressed monkey to his office on his birthday.

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Like Icarus, we have flown too close to the sun.
Because I have not posted much lately, here's something to entertain.

With all due respect to people who must wear flak jackets for a living.
Seems that Randy is willing to give up the reigns on his own blog. It appears that, due to a minimum of content of late, Randy has decided others could fill in for him. And that's just fine. If you're interested in posting to RHPT.com, Randy is apparently willing to publish whatever reader's send, provided it meets his minimum safe standards.

You can see him playing with the idea here.

And him giving in to Jim D's peer pressure here.

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

I'm going to do this again, because it's fun.

It's already hot as a bastard out here in Phoenix. Last week I was still wearing a coat in the morning, but I left for three days, and now it's offically 90 degrees (my car thermometer said 92, for the record). Doesn't sound that hot, especially as it will be 120 degrees at some point this summer, but nobody really got time to adapt. I was told that my pal, Al, saw a girl suffer heatstroke during a soccer tournament this weekend.

Yeah, it's hot. Seems like just yesterday we were wearing sweaters in the office to keep warm, and it WAS on Thursday night when hail fell and coated the ground like snow, and it was okay to wear a coat out the door when I left work. But not now. Now it begins.

I hate you Phoenix summertime. I hate you like gum on my shoe.
Why the League refuses to travel outside these blessed United States.

Monday, March 08, 2004

two minor things:

1) Blogger.com, who hosts The League, is going to have some presence at the upcoming SXSW multimedia monkey-fest in Austin, Texas. Sounds like they're going to be at one of The League's former default destinations, Club DeVille, down on Red River.

they say: Mess with Texas Some of us Blogger folks are going to SXSW and to kick things up a notch we're serving up free drinks and t-shirts Monday evening from 6:30-8:00 on March 15th over at Club De Ville in Austin, TX. We provide beer and schwag to our users because we care.

So if you're in town, go get some free shit for The League.

2) The League just saw it's candidate of choice on cable. No, not on CNBC or Fox News or even on Nickelodeon. The Reverend Al Sharpton apparently makes a cameo in the Ryder/ Sandler vehicle, Mr. Deeds.
Home again, home again, jiggity jog.

Kudos to Continental Airlines for not losing my luggage and being relatively on time for both flights over the weekend.

All in all, the weekend was very nice. Kicked it old school on Saturday with the main family unit plus Cousin Sue and "Hopalong" Cassidy.

Sunday, it was down to me and Mum and Pop. Pop and I went and saw Hidalgo at the Woodlands megaplex theater. I'm not really sure what to say about the movie except that it was pretty much you'd expect, and my instructors from film school would have had a field day dissecting the movie. From a non-narrative strategies point of view, I liked how the movie insisted on inserting an evil "Brad"-type character with a better horse. You know, in the end, Sheik Brad will certainly get his comeuppance. We Americans are EXPERTS at doling out comeuppances. But, if you're willing to overlook some questionable thematic issues, and you want to watch a guy ride from screen left to screen right for an hour or so, have I got the movie for you.

I make it sound like I hate the movie. I really didn't. It was kind of a half-baked adventure movie, and after Club Dread, it seemed ingenious.

Anyway, me am home. Melbotis was only half-way happy to see me. It's very warm out all of a sudden, and Mel was revelling in the sun.

Saturday, March 06, 2004

I'm still at Mom and Dad's. All is well. Dad thought he lost his wallet at the convenience store where we each bought a soda. Those nice people still had it.

I need to buy batteries before I get to the airport. I didn't have any in my walkman when I got on the plane. Luckily, everyone was very quiet for the duration.
Nathan Cone is an amazing human being, radio personality and musician. He's also a major film nerd.

Nathan has posted the League's review of Comic Book: The Movie to the TPR website. Look for the film icon when you scroll down the site. The link is in the middle of the page, and the review is in there.

Friday, March 05, 2004

I fly out shortly, but I am watching Sesame Street right now. And Cookie Monster has declared "Me am glutton, not liar!"

Cookie Monster, me know the feeling.

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Because there's a special tidbit for Jamie if reads through to the end.
I'm not sure if Maxwell took my post of yesterday to mean that I believed she was navel gazing. On the contrary.

I am in awe, truthfully. Maxwell may be two, three years younger than myself (what is it Laura? I'm fuzzy on the details.), but she's in NYC, making a go of it as actor/ director/ creative professional. And she appears to be in a stable marriage as well.

There's a narrow window, even for the stout hearted, in these professions. Narrow windows of opportunity, of time between college and realizing the temp job is now your real job, of getting knocked up and having kids and going back out to the suburbs. Narrow windows in which we look back and say "How did I get here?" (Thanks, David Byrne).

But she's out there. She's actually walking the streets of NYC and trying to get from being the little blonde girl in the black sweater who used to bum rides home after Drama Club meetings, to being a name that passes on the lips of folks talking about putting shows on Broadway. She's somewhere between halfway there and a million miles from the passing fancy of most high school drama kids. And she's working at it, too. She's not some producer's daughter, and she's not some indie actor's model girlfriend in a walk on role. Step by step. Bit by bit.

I wonder how that happened? We were in the same program. I remember the folks around her age from that group (anyone else remember Trucker?). Something in that dusty, yawning maw of a stage made her want to try it in college. And even those bastards in UT drama didn't break her or make her throw up her hands and give Psychology 301 a shot (and from what I hear, it's the goal of the program to shatter the undergrads, but not to build them back up again).

So yesterday I catalogued a little. And I tried to pinpoint, because there was a point at which we were all churning out screenplays, and we all had ideas for stories, and we could see them in our mind's eye from beginning to end. Some of us went so far as to cast the projects, dreamed of composers and the gracious things we'd say when they mentioned our genius in print. But that's not how it works. Not most of the time.

Maxwell's right. Read her posting. She is electric. She has to be, or she'd be back in Spring, Texas wondering whether it was Chili's or Arby's tonight for dinner. Or maybe she'd still hanging out in Austin, wondering why that Third Coast thing hasn't taken off quite yet (but maybe next year...!).

So i get to do something. I get to lean on Maxwell and I get to tell her: Hey, Maxwell. A lot of us didn't even start to give ourselves a chance to be stars of stage and screen, or rock gods or poets or writers or whatever the hell we were supposed to be. So it's up to you, kid. We don't even care if you ever get your name in lights, but you don't get to quit. Not yet. You just remember that as things come to pass, and those lights start to lose their luster, you got all of us pulling for you. Go out there and do it. We all know you're electric.
Jamie's in good company.

Jamie had a transplant from her dad in 1994 and another transplant in 2001. Four kidneys the girl to toting around (no, they do not take out your old kidneys when you get a new one. That surprised me as well).

So, folks, fill out your organ donor card. When you're six feet under and pushing up daisies, I guarantee you, you are not going to need either of your kidneys anymore. Those are two kidneys which could save the lives of two people, not just one.

But you know what's gross? They transport the kidneys in something which looks like a beer cooler, more or less packed in ice. I still remember them pointing out the cooler and asking us if we wanted to see the kidney before they put it in. I had to take a pass.
Today i am the jerk who spread the virus. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

there are no details yet, but NASA says they founs water on Mars. Good news, I think.

Stemming from a brief conversation I had with Randy via IM, I think a little clarification is in order. You may have noticed that there was no real hiatus in blogging. Goody for me.

The new editorial policy is that in order to get to your location, you must know how to get there. In order to know how to get where you are going, you must have a place you are trying to reach. The League has neither goal nor path in site, and, consequently, is not trying to bulldoze forward all willy-nilly.

I was struck by a certain quality in Maxwell's recent post. We roll on and on and get rolled over by the next wave and the next. And time goes on.

It's now been 21 months since I moved to Arizona. It's been almost 6 years since I graduated a year late from college. This summer, 11 years since high school. 14 years since I moved back to Houston to finish High School. 20 years since I moved to Austin the first time. 25 years since I moved to Texas the first time. Eight and a half years with Jamie. April 28th is our 4th anniversary. Almost two years since I left my favorite job. Three years since I received rejection letters from every grad school I wanted to attend. Two years, eleven months, three weeks and a handful of hours since I consciously gave up on all that film stuff. 17 months since I started working here. Seven months since I started grad school. Two months since I've been to Texas. Seven months since I've been back to Austin.

Perhaps subconsciously, the League forms a discernable pattern. For example, if one looks at the patterns in the tile long enough, your primordial brain will begin to make faces out of the shapes in the tile. But of course, those are really just geologically produced little blobs and bits. Or, at least, you know it's not really a real face and it's not going to wink at you.