tea berry-blue

So, I don’t do this as often as I used to, but this one has really given me some food for thought. Eug and I went to see Oz: The Great and Powerful on Friday night.  And while overall, I liked it, and thought it was a well-made movie, there were a few things about it that distressed me.

Elizabeth Rappe over at Jezebel already wrote quite a lovely article  about this already, but I feel like while she set up the history and talked about Baum’s own political leanings, there’s a lot of individual points about this new movie itself that don’t find their way into her piece.  Which is good: she’s working with a very specific thesis.

The short version: Baum was very much a feminist, his stories all focused on strong female characters and gender identity in a way that we would probably find revolutionary even today.  Oz: The Great and Powerful ignores all of that to make a movie about a man coming into his own in typical hero’s journey fashion, in a quest that requires him to overpower women who are much more powerful than he is.  It’s like the Grendel’s Mother of twee fantasy, here.  The scariest monsters are always ladies, gentlemen.

I mean, now I’m getting off the trajectory of Ms. Rappe’s argument, but that’s fine.  That was my point here.

So, let’s talk about OZ.  And let’s talk about OZ in the context of modern children’s fantasy.

( (Be warned:  There are spoilers.  And lots of ‘em.) )

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Jess and I got tickets to see a preview screening of Men in Black III last night at the Museum of the Moving Image, followed by a talk by movie makeup legend Rick Baker.

Full disclosure: I found the first MIB movie enjoyable if a bit short to justify the cost of a movie ticket.  I never saw the second one.  But Jess had been talking about how disappointed she was that we got no MIB trailer when we went to see The Avengers, so I figured she might like this sort of thing, and I knew I would like listening to Rick Baker even if the movie was disappointing.

In the end, and without spoiling, I thought the movie was fine.  There was one comic relief character whom I felt was way overused to the detriment of the film, and I think there was only one female character of note in the entire film, which is kind of…disappointing.  There were lots of female bit parts, but only one woman who appeared in multiple scenes, and only one of the substantial bit parts was a female character.  I also felt like the ending was a bit of a copout– there was a different ending that I thought that they were going for, that would have been a gutsy ending to the film, and they didn’t go there, which was sort of a letdown for me.   But there were lots of pretty aliens and such, some very good comedy, and some good acting moments.

Rick Baker was fascinating, and he told wonderful stories. He is one of those people who can take questions from an audience and transform them– it didn’t seem to matter how irritating the question was, whether it was a question someone else had already asked, whether he’d already basically said the answer, whether it was clearly a question designed to show off the questioner’s knowledge more than to ask a question; he fielded them all with grace and with the kind of creative storytelling that made every single one of his answers fascinating.  He talked about having to turn down the opportunity to work on Edward Scissorhands in order to do some movie that he didn’t find particularly good.  He talked about doing monster makeup in his bedroom as a child. He talked about meeting Michael Jackson and working on Thriller, and actually seeing a crowd of zombies dancing, live.

The 3-D glasses we used were a cut above the ones you normally get at theaters. They had a security tag in them, and a warning not to steal them, and that they don’t protect from UV rays, because that is what I have come to expect from 3-D glasses.  They were also, and I was most excited about this, the traditional blue-and-red style 3D glasses, just…amped up.  But one lens was red and one lens was blue and I was very excited by that!

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

One of my friends spent some time in Sweden a few years ago, and mailed me some KEX. Kex, if you don’t know it, is something like our sugar wafer cookies, but denser, and coated in chocolate. That is the best way to explain it. I loved it! Sometimes I can find it in New York, but not often.

But a couple weeks ago, my friends Aleph and Beth, one of whom is Swedish and both of whom live in Sweden, came to visit the US. I didn’t get to see them, but they made their presence known in the form of a box of delicious candy.

In the box was a bar of Kex, but also several bars of flavored Kex, in blueberry and raspberry, something I’ve never seen, let alone tasted. So I was very excited by this development.

Unwrapping it, you can really smell a whiff of blueberry. It reminds me of smelling something else, too, but I don’t remember exactly what– obviously something else berry-scented. I think it may have been a Dagoba chocolate bar, but I’m not sure. I actually procrastinated on tasting it because I liked smelling it so much!

The flavor of it, while having a hint of blueberry, isn’t actually as distinctive as the scent, which was interesting to me. It tasted a little different from regular Kex, and if I hadn’t known the flavor, I would have known it was some kind of fruit, but I’m not sure blueberry would have occurred to me. Hmm. All in all, though, an exciting gift!!!

Mirrored from Nommable!.

The first time I spoke to boxbrown was in the spring of 2008. I was doing a series of interviews that were intended to be featured articles about many of the creators who were posting their comics on WebComicsNation/ComicSpace at the time.

Box was my second interview. The first interview I did was with Shaenon and Jeffrey of Skin Horse, mostly because I knew shaenon well and felt like I could use her for practice, without being intimidated by the idea of talking to strangers on the phone. (I’m kinda terrified of phones, let me just say!)

I picked Box to go second partly by luck of the draw, but also because I contacted the people whose comics I had already read first. I wasn’t reading Bellen! every day or anything like that, but Bellen! was one of the comics I had picked to experiment with when my previous job had asked me to find some comics that looked good on mobile devices.

So I called this dude, Box, and I admittedly was pretty awkward with the whole interviewing thing. (Although not as awkward as I was when I interviewed quirkybird, who went third). Still, I think I asked him some pretty incisive questions, like whether he’d ever had Ben’s really bad haircut from the beginning of the strip (the answer was yes). And I was pretty pleased overall with the interview. Plus, he didn’t seem to think I was psycho. Mastly we just chatted, and it was cool. Box told me about things like the class he had taken with Tom Hart, and how he’d been exprimenting with color in Bellen!

I got better at doing interviews, and better at making phone calls, and I added Box to my LJ friends. I added a lot of the cartoonists I interviewed to my LJ friends, but Box was one of the few who actually added me back.

And I actually started reading his comics regularly instead of just in chunks now and then.

I’m telling this story because Box recently announced the end of Bellen!, which is the comic that introduced me to his work. Bellen! is freaking adorable, let me tell you, and I think that he could probably keep doing it more or less forever if he wanted to. At its most basic, Bellen! is a relationship comic, about a guy named Ben and a girl named Ellen.

It’s sort of autobiographical, but sort of not– in many ways, it strikes me as sort of internally autobiographical: Ben and Ellen seem more like two sides of the same personality. They developed as characters as Box’s art developed in style (You should go back and look at the earliest Bellen! strips, because they look nothing like Bellen! today. While the original Bellen! was cute, Box has become a much more sophisticated artist since the strip began). Ben is half that self-doubts, the half that sees the glass half empty, but also the half that likes being crotchety for crotchetiness’ sake, sort of like a younger, more idealistic Oscar the Grouch. Ellen is the one who keeps her chin up, who always sees the brighter side and pulls Ben up out of the muck. It’s a relationship comic, but it feels more like it’s about internal relationships, the way different parts of our personalities balance each other out.

Box has started doing some other really neat stuff. He’s been working on a series of books called “Everything Dies” which are about faith and religion and meaphysical questions as they are answered by different religions around the world. He also drew a narwhal. I know this, because I bought it and hung it on my wall. I like narwhals. I am hoping he continues to do neat stuff. In the meantime, if you don’t know Bellen!, you should take the time to read it, and to read the little completely-autobiographical comic Box is currently writing, which chronicles the creation of Bellen! and the way his life has changed since he began it. It is really kind of neat, to see the story of how a comic came to be, in comic form.

Nice stuff, Box! I know you are going to just keep on doing more and more awesome stuff.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

So, I don’t normally do this, but I want to start getting into the habit of posting more about the comics I read and enjoy. I have a lot of comic-savvy friends reading, and you might already know about the comics I’m going to talk about here, but I also have a lot of friends who want to learn more about comics, and I thought it would be good to do some promoting of some of my favorites.

Today, I will tell you about a wonderful comic called Herman the Manatee, by Jason Viola.

Last year at MoCCA, quirkybird told me I just had to go read this wonderful comic. So, cacophonesque and I went to meet Jason and purchase his comic and his Shrinky Dinks. Seriously, how awesome is Shrinky Dinks?

Herman The Manatee is about a manatee named Herman who gets hit by a speedboat. Over and over and over again, and then some more. Very much in the spirit of Charlie Brown going for the football every time, he gets hit by the speedboat in all kinds of different scenarios in a sort of fatalistic existentialist dance of speedboat-thunking.

There are three Herman the Manatee books, of which I own two, and I highly recommend purchasing these fine comics or simply reading the strip online (new strips come out on Wednesday).

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

I went to see Inception yesterday morning and I wanted to write up my thoughts about it.

For people who haven’t seen it yet, it’s a movie about a team of people who go into people’s dreams to steal information. Early on in the film, we learn that the title, Inception, refers to the much more difficult task of planting information in a person’s dream. It’s not a super new idea– Neil Gaiman played with similar ideas in Sandman, and there’s a bit of the same concept in City of Lost Children, and I assume it’s much older than that, but those are the two examples foremost in my mind, but applying the concept to a modern-day action movie is pretty new, as far as I know.

From here on in, this is going to be pretty spoilertastic stuff if you haven’t see it yet, but I also don’t feel like it’s the kind of movie that can be spoiled, except for a lone single shot that doesn’t effect the plot of the film. People who’ve seen the movie know what lone single shot I mean.

People who haven’t seen it and want to remain completely unspoiled, the short version goes, I enjoyed it, but there were a lot of things I was hoping for that weren’t there, and a lot of things that disappointed me about it.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

chefcdb

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of tasting two very distinctive American gins, both from Massachusetts.

The first one is Greylock, from Berkshire Mountain Distillers in Great Barrington.

If you’re not a big fan of gins, or if you’re a connoisseur looking for something new, I would highly recommend Greylock: it has a delicate floral flavor that is a touch sweeter than the average gin and light on the juniper.

The second is Gale Force, distilled by Triple 8 of Nantucket, who also make Hurricane, one of my favorite rums.

Gale Force has a much more potent flavor than Greylock– heavy on the juniper, peppery, with a bit of a burn to the finish. I don’t want the “burn” bit to scare you away, because unlike a lot of “burny” liquors, this one still goes down smooth!

The challenge with these two gins was to create drinks that would compliment their very unique flavors. Here’s how I did it:

Grey Fog

For 2 cocktails:
6 oz Greylock gin
1 oz Black Duck Cranberry liqueur
1 small Seckel pear (Seckel pears are tarter than other varieties)
Scant 1/4 cup whole sage leaves

Chill two martini glasses.
Reserve 2 slices pear and 2 large sage leaves.
Dice remaining pear very small, add to shaker.
Rub sage between hands to crush, add to shaker.
Add Black Duck
Muddle contents with wooden spoon.
Add gin, shake.
Strain into glasses, add pear slices and sage leaves for garnish.

(In this case, the sage flavor balances the sweetness– Greylock in a sweeter cocktail might be overpowering, but with something very savory to balance it, you can concentrate on the floral flavors)

Port in a Storm

For 2 cocktails:
6 oz Gale Force Gin
1 oz Amontillado Sherry
6 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters
1 generous tablespoon fruit jam (I used red current & rosemary)

Chill two martini glasses
Add gin, sherry, bitters, stir
Add jam and stir
Shake briefly
Strain into glasses

(in this one, the Amontillado cuts the “burn” at the back end of the drink. The Peychauds’, which has a nutty, sarsaparilla flavor, and the fruit jam complement the peppery flavor of Gale Force, giving it the same kind of balance you’ll get in a “hot & jammy” Red Zinfandel or Pinot Noir.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.