From the desk of Mattyoung

I wanted this image for the last entry, but didn't find it until last night:



Trust the Doctor.

If someone had asked me if I thought there were people who didn’t like David Tennant’s interpretation of the Doctor, I guess I would’ve answered that given the spectrum opinions and diversity of people such individuals must exist (after all, there are people who claim the oft-reviled ‘80s Doctor by Colin Baker as their favorite). But it was enlightening to read this essay about what makes up the Doctor by a writer who has a long, thought out opinion about what does and doesn’t work about not only David Tennant’s tenure in Doctor Who, but the whole new series in general. I’m especially interested in his thesis that, no matter what fan-appeasement statements the creators spread, the current series has all the signifiers of a “reimagining” of Doctor Who and not a “continuation” in the same way that the new Star Trek movie, for all its dependence on the previous continuity, is a reboot and not a sequel.

It helps that the writer brought up one of my personal pet peeves, the ever-more limitless capabilities of the sonic screwdriver under Tennant’s reign. Having a setting that reconnects cut wire… okay, fine, I gues… but the damn little device is getting to be ridiculously convenient. At the rate things are going, pretty soon there’s going to be a setting on the screwdriver that allows travel through space and time. If Tennant’s going to have a magic wand then he’s got to lose the long coat because otherwise he’s just an especially dapper wizard.

(~Rant over.~)

I liked reading the opinions of someone who had what he felt were serious criticism of the show and its status relative to the old Doctor Who program.

His skepticism for Russell T. Davies, especially, reminded me of some issues I’ve had in regards to the “big endings” each season has had. (The whole “Bad Wolf” thing from Christopher Eccleston’s season, in particular, suffers from the problem the author, rightly in my mind, enumerates.)

I found this writer’s criticism particularly clear-headed after the recent bit of interwebs hubbub about the new Doctor Who logo for the upcoming series, a logo I think is kind of clever. If a person wanted to bitch about it, I think the previous logo is as justifiably contemptible (I mean, let’s be honest here, it’s basically a “spaced-up” cabbie light).

Fanatics need to loosen up. In their own weird way, sci-fi fans… who should be ALL ABOUT change… are just as scared of it as anyone else, always dreading that any new thing will be for the worse and will be unchangeable. I don’t agree with all the article’s points, but I find the notion that Davies’ characterization of the Doctor is a very different person than the one known in the old show hits a strange, true mark. Is it worse? Is it better? At times like this, it’s good to remember that, as Paul Simon said, “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”

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The Pixies are giving away a free EP from their "Doolittle" tour. I saw them when they first reunited. I'm more broke now, so I won't be seeing this, but I think I'll enjoy the songs. You too, maybe?

Over a dozen days since Halloween. What's been going on?

Well, Halloween was a lot of fun. Emme and I went as June CLEVER!!! and her dead husband, Ward.


Immediately after that, I caught the flu with a startlingly immediacy. Monday I went to work, got home, went out and did the majority of my second-job stuff for that week, came home again, and started to feel... odd.

"Crap! I recognize this," I thought. "Illness!"

So I took a shot of nyQuil, dove into bed, and figured I'd be up the next morning good as new. Next morning came, I stood up, and crumbled like a cookie.

I spent the next two days in bed/on the couch, doped up and feverish. On Thursday, in a mad, stupid desire for worthless money, I dragged my rag & bones to work. I probably shouldn't have been there, but I was, all day, and then went immediately to bed that afternoon and slept until I got up on Friday to go to work again. Going to work Friday wasn't as stupid a decision as Thursday, and I wound up at home, tired but not exhausted and absolutely DREADING Saturday.

What!? Dread and Saturday? How does that work, you ask?

See, in addition to my temp jobbing, I picked up a gig last winter working at King Arthur Flour in their warehouse. KAF does... I dunno, I want to say about 60-70%, but I can't remember... anyway... it's a LOT so they do a lot of their business in the last three months of the year as people order from all over the continent for holiday treats and ingredients from KAF. (Last night I packed an order for a rolling pin that's going to Idaho, for example.) So they need a massive influx of workers for a very limited time.

They also fit one of the criteria I like in a job, which is that there's a lot of cardio.
I like going to the gym well enough, but I really like going somewhere to get paid to work out even more. Last year I mostly worked in the shipping department, loading thousands of boxes that weigh as much as 50 lbs and are six different sized and shapes into the back of a truck as high and tightly as possible. In practice, this plays out like something like the biggest Tetris game ever.

But I really wasn't sure I'd be able to handle that truck on Saturday.

I sucked the last few drops of solice from the second bottle of nyQuil I'd drained during my enfeebled period and plowed into bed at the ripe ol' hour of 7:00 pm or so. Saturday rose, and so did I, and together we crawled up the hillsides and poured into the valley. I was a bit over-prepared, I brought three shirts, a sweater, a hat, and two sets of gloves in fear... FEAR (!!!) of falling apart in the un-insulated back of a tractor trailer. But it was all for naught. First, there was a new guy I'm working with this year who's more of a work sharer to keep everyone from getting bored (which I'm fine with), and second, the weather was a ridiculously balmy 57 degrees (which IS ridiculously balmy for Vermont at ANY point in November). As I drove home that evening, simply surviving the day felt like winning the day.

Sunday dawned like a blow to the head, and I got around to seeing what the rest of my life was supposed to be about. Lots of looking at my bank book, figuring out bills, (finally) getting around to looking at the business cards and contact names I'd picked up at the Boston Comic-Con... and, for the first day this month, getting back to the studio. Even if it was only to empty my garbage can and sit down in my chair for a few minutes.

Because writing and drawing have been a big no-go no-show.

Now, for most of last week I was either unconscious or my consciousness was of a kind that would've been no good to anyone, but I was going to do NaNoWriMo this month with my own twist. Instead of writing a novel in a month, I was going to write and thumbnail (and hopefully pencil) my new minicomic. I feel like I've done nothing instead, and the month's 13th days in.

That really terrifies me.

But listen. That's not true. The new book (hereforafter called TGC3) is a series of short stories and other comics around a theme. Not quite a personal anthology, since the theme isn't just "done by me." I started selecting the stories I wanted to tell, and I've been thinking about how to tell them. I don't want to do just a collection of cute autobio. I feel like I'm trying to learn how to write things all over again, and I'm playing with the process (writing a script for one before drawing, straight thumbnails for another, etc...) of making a comic book story. There's a script for one story already almost complete. There's another story that takes place in the Vatican City and is gonna require a load of reference work (to the point I'm pondering prose)... 11 days plus a week of illness. This is doing something.

Isn't it?

I don't know what brought this on. I mean, I haven't been living like a crazy artist lately. I've been getting lots of sleep, doing dishes, watching Harper's Island and stuff...

I think it's about the feeling of inert-ness. I know some of it is seeing something else change for other people, and feeling like I'm missing out by not constantly doing the same thing. Which is a dumb, negative energy to hook into, and the conception is at it's very base self-defeating and wrong. Something to beat.

Here's a post-it I doodled to feel better in the meantime.

All the best, later.

Veteran's Day is tomorrow. 

I've been thinking about it a little bit since I had to do a rather bullshit posting about the holiday for Timken.  Veterans apparently now have the option of taking the day off, according to New Hampshire law.  The gesture is somewhat cheapened by the fact that it's an unpaid day, or is that just me being unpleasant?

Veteran's Day was the spawn of another holiday, Armistace Day, that celebrated the end of World War I. 

Of note: WWI ended at 11:00 am on the 11th day on the 11th month.  How did that happen?  Did someone with a taste for patterns get put in charge of scheduling the war that week?  Is it part of a larger pattern?  Has anyone done anything like that in other wars?

Did whatever general or whoever that was in charge of the surrender want to go all the way?  Does his memoirs look back... "Tarnation!  I was gonna go hog-wild!  November 11th?  Well let's do it at 11:00.  Heck with that, let's do it at eleven after eleven!  Is there a room 1100 we can use?  Something left that high after the war?  Eh?  Oh, that was the plan, but we were moving ahead of schedule... and the whole affair actually ended up being kind of depressing, so we called it a done deal some 11 minutes early..."

Armistice Day was replaced after, well, the SECOND World War and other wars.  The efficiency, if not the love of three day weekends, changed the name if not the date.  (Well, the date was changed for a little while, but then was changed back.)

Eleven o'clock on Eleven Eleven.  Fascinating.

Or not, as might be said by Nine Below Zero:

Happy Birthday, Sesame Street

Here's a self-portrait I did for a documentary about CCS that I'm apparently in.  I think I'll be in it once.



Christ, the internet and I are hating each other today...

Shouldn't the fact that abstinence-only sex ed is lumped in with faith-based initiatives be proof enough that it's success isn't a certainty? 

"Unsafe Abortions Kill Thousands a Year, Harm Millions" - Reuters
Because the Kindle is the hot new porn-y portable:

Quick preamble: My laptop, state-of-the-art six years ago, is stumbling against the minimum requirements for current software. I think I have the processor power to go up one more OS level, but that's going to be it.  

I loaded the new Opera browser onto my laptop last night.  Firefox has been feeling bloated and draggy for a while now, to the pint where updating my Facebook status is an exercise in blind faith since I finish typing any sentence before the first word completely shows on-screen. My laptop is running an OS below the minimum requirements for the new version and, in frustration, I turned to a new option.  Opera.  Just to see if it was even possible.

Well, there's been new-program disorientation, but I'm really falling for this thing.  The loading speed and browsing is wa-a-a-y faster.  I'm noodling around with the themes still, and their in-browser widgets are interesting.  They have their own way of manipulating and saving passwords that I have to work out, but find fascinating. 

Coolest thing thus far?
-I can actually upload comics to my comixpress site now (unable to work on Firefox as I had it).
-I can move around in eMusic without an "unsupported script" error dragging down every artist or album page.  

The biggest bug, and it is some kind of a bug, is that Opera keeps winking out at odd moments with little but an "unexpected error" pop-up to show it was ever there. However, I just re-click on Opera and it jumps back to life, offering to take me back where we left off with the enthusiasm of a puppy that keeps tripping itself up but gets right back up again.  It must say a lot that, even with a browser failing on me twice a day, I still find it attractive... if not More attractive than Firefox.

My laptop has been a real source of frustration lately. It's getting old (lets face it, six-almost-seven) years is a lifetime and a half for most computers. I replaced the dead battery with a new one, so I get a couple hours of life out of it now. I upped the RAM inside of it by another gig, so that's maxed out, but any increase in speed has seemed to be accompanied by an increase in the speed with which the laptop starts to overheat. When your fingertips feel singed after doing a lot of typing? Yeah, not fun. Videos have been running very choppy. And I'm nowhere near the point where I can purchase the new slick thing.

This is where computing becomes a weird scavaging hunt.  

via Boing Boing

Working on something "new" for the Boston Comicon

I've been tearing through a couple of books lately, but I don't feel particularly good about it.   They should've been done forever ago.  These are books I've looked at, sitting next to the bed or in the living room, and they have just driven me nuts.
 
"What??  I still haven't finished that?"
 
Especially since they're good books.

The first is a slim little scream titled Senselessness.

I went to the Dartmouth Bookstore on my birthday, considering the purchase of Nick Cave's second novel "The Death of Bunny Munro," a book about a boozying, drug-abusing, sex-obsessed English salesman named Bunny dealing with the day his wife commits suicide, and his son, in a blackly comic narration... and ended up buying the first book I opened, about an paranoid, often-drunk, sex-obsessed atheist who finds himself working for the Catholic church in a Central American military dictatorship, proofreading a 1,100 page report about atrocities done to natives by the military or, as he puts it, "giving a manicure to the hand which the church intends to squeeze the balls" of the people who run the country.  It's bleak, paranoid, a rush of twisted, funny prose and has one of the most unerotic felatio scenes I've ever read.


The other book is "The Right Madness" a sick, slick... well, not slick, but the prose has been compared to Hunter Thompson everywhere (and for good reason).  It's both verbose and unique, and holds a lot of power as the brutally gory and drug-crazed plot needs a jolt.  Between the strength of the writing and the weirdness of the some of the setting... well, it's an interesting ride.

I'm actually re-reading it.  The first time I was reading it, I got two thirds of the way through, took a little too long between chapters, and got lost.  Now I'm following a little better, though not as well as I'd hoped (it has a few too many instances where names of characters from fifty pages ago are suddenly vitally important again and I've forgotten them).  We'll see how this pulp fiction ends.

Personal remarks:

I don't even know where to begin with SPX updates, even among people I know, except that Cat Garza and Colleen Frakes won Ignatz Awards!  For what, you ask?  For being fucking awesome, that's what!!!  Cat has the kind of web chops I can only aspire to, and if I could get as much done in a week as Colleen seems to do in a day, I'd already be well on my way into the Jim Davis-downward spiral of my career.  I'm really happy to know both of them.

Another studio mate of mine, Sam, makes an incredibly funny comic strip.  I swear he follows my life with spies, removes only the funniest bits, and ferments them into a sweet, sweet elixir guaranteed to leave you with a smile.

In official news:

In the "no shit" school of journalism this morning: Texting While Driving a Safety Hazard.  This blinding obviousness made the Today show. 
 
Woman Boycotts Bank of America, Wins thanks to the power of Youtube.  That's great.  Of course, she now plans to do the same thing vs. the government so she never has to pay taxes again. 

Yeah, that last bit.... not so much.

I think Bruce Willis has proven there's only one case where that's cool:

I finished the last version of the cover to the latest Trees & Hills anthology, Shelter, the night before last.  It’s safe to say I did everything possible to make the process harder on myself.

The opportunity to do a cover came up at the summer T&H retreat.  It was my second time at a T&H retreat, after a first one that was a great deal of fun, and it proved just as enjoyable (and I was even featured in a minicomic about the weekend!).  And when the question of a cover artist came up, I said I'd take a crack at it. 
 
My first mistake was that in the rush to get two stories done for their two anthologies (only 50% of which I succeeded at), I completely forgot about the cover until Colin asked how it was coming.  "Fine," I said.  " Let me get a little more done before I e-mail it over.  Can't wait to show it to you."

Lying, I would learn, was the second mistake.

The biggest reference for the Shelter cover was the previous T&H anthology, Seeds.  Seeds was themed around food, sustainability, and socially conscious consumption.  It came out with a surprisingly consistent tone while still being fun and accessible. 

The comics went out with a little recipe booklet and a envelope of actual seeds - the whole thing was a sweet package wrapped in one of their best covers:  A nice colored cardstock with a good title graphic, fun back cover concept, and a bold and iconic front made with an apple sliced in half and used as a stamp. 

It worked out brilliantly.  Sold really well for T&H and was generally regarded quite well.
 
I knew I wanted to pin down an image, if not a method, as iconic for Shelter. 

I tossed a lot of schmaltz out the window, and I had to repeatedly convince myself not to use the cover from "Rain Dogs" by Tom Waits... eventually, I just abandoned the idea of using people.  I finally started getting down to items, trying for icons.  Things I thought could sum up housing and living and just what shelter represents, offers, holds...
 
And that brought me to the first cover: name of the book, illustration of a set of keys, all set on a full-bleed background of a blueprint (that had the really sweet arc that the title fit into so well).  I left some room on the back for a directory of artists, added some various features (coffee ring, lipstick kiss) to the blueprint, and felt like we were off to the races!  (Okay, so I didn't like the title coloring especially... I thought it didn't "pop" enough... but I didn't quite know how to fix it.  Hey, that's what an editor is for, am I right?):




I sent it out to the anthology's editor, Colin, and he more-or-less promptly replied he really, really liked it.  Except that... well... Trees & Hills wasn't doing a full bleed cover.

 
*Standard Operating Procedure

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I'm clearly turning 30 in the next couple weeks.  Or week, actually.  I've got this deadline-of-a-sort pressure hanging over my head; it feels like I'm trying to get some things Capital-"D"-done in some form.  Trying to get serious about things in life.  I can't wait to get over that mental milepost so I can get back to my usual malaise.  But in the meantime, the big time-suck this weekend has been website construction.

I didn't realize it, but websites are... well, not even "hard," just time-devouring... Galacticus-level devourer of lives, for the comics geeks out there today.  Cat Garza, Ignatz-award nominee (Outstanding Online Comic category), called me and said he could give me a couple hours on Saturday to get my long-struggling first URL into ship shape. 


And I was especially thankful after a few quick questions for him became a few l-o-o-o-ng hours of screen time. 

Mainly, I wanted to get the "Gallery" function working so I didn't have to direct people to a flickr site when I present my Illustration work to potentials.  Nothing wrong with flickr, but the art I'm showing them is amateur enough - the presentation, at least, should be a little bit slick.  So I asked Cat how to get this gallery thing, the "lightbox gallery" plugin up and running because I just had no clue, and he showed me that, sure enough, there was a mystery step I was missing.  While he showed me how it worked, he suggested I just upgrade to the newest versions of wordpress and comicpress since I hadn't really done that much with the site so far (and there would be, then, little to really screw up).  So I did. 

The first part updated automatically and perfectly.  The second part updated pretty smoothly.  It looked like it had all worked flawlessly.  So it is no surprise to me... now... that none of it would work right at all. 

The point of comicpress is to easily upload comics to the top of a page and hold them in a story structure and all this stuff... and the file uploading didn't work. 

The comic weren't even recognized. 

Wordpress has a number of widgets and add-ons for navigation and ease-of-use that you just drag-and-drop into the blog. 

None of them would drag nor drop. 

And I began to understand that programmers MUST be drinkers, because so much of their time (based on the example of my time with Cat) was watching something that should work not work, for no discernible reason. 

And then you get your 21st century sticks and start poking at it to try and make sense of it all, and all of this will take a very long time, while the author... eventually... of the site sits behind the expert and listens while Cat mutters, "What's that mean?  What's going on?" and will try to helpfully, if cluelessly, reply, "Yea, what IS going on?"

Eventually, after 4 hours, you will wrap up and go home for a discouraged sandwich, some wine, and waste the rest of your day finishing the first season of Heroes.  (Thank god, done with Heroes!)

The next morning you will get up, go fiddle with your blog, and find out that the site now (again for no discernible reason) works perfectly.  You will not question this, you will merely thank the capricious will of the internet for turning in your favor, and display your thanks by sacraficing a graphing calculator or other small computing device at the alter of the computer.  Preferably presented within a tasteful arrangement of Blackberries. 

We're obviously hungry to live with royal and aristocratic families so we should really just go ahead and formally declare it:

Bush daughter Jenna Hager becomes 'Today' reporter

NBC's "Today" show has hired someone with White House experience as a new correspondent — former first daughter Jenna Hager, the daughter of former President George W. Bush. . . . She "just sort of popped to us as a natural presence, comfortable" on the air, [Executive Producer Jim] Bell said.  Hager will work out of NBC's Washington bureau.

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it.  They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment.  They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency.  Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from.  There's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.

About this latest hiring by NBC, Atrios observed:  "if only the Villager values of nepotism and torture could be combined somehow."  The American Prospect's Adam Serwer quicky noted that they already have been:  "Liz Cheney."  Liz Cheney is really the perfect face of Washington's political culture, a perfect manifestation of all the rotting diseases that define it and a pure expression of what our country has become and the reasons for its virtual ruin.  She should really be on every political TV show all day every day.  It's almost as though things can't really be expressed thoroughly without including her.  Jenna Bush as a new NBC "reporter" on The Today Show -- at a time when every media outlet is firing and laying off real reporters -- is a very nice addition though.
 

UPDATE: Just to underscore a very important, related point:  all of the above-listed people are examples of America's Great Meritocracy, having achieved what they have solely on the basis of their talent, skill and hard work -- The American Way.  By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor -- who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Bronx housing projects; whose father had a third-grade education, did not speak English and died when she was 9; whose mother worked as a telephone operator and a nurse; and who then became valedictorian of her high school, summa cum laude at Princeton, a graduate of Yale Law School, and ultimately a Supreme Court Justice -- is someone who had a whole litany of unfair advantages handed to her and is the poster child for un-American, merit-less advancement.

I just want to make sure that's clear.

-by Glenn Greenwald in Salon here