The Tory Party

stagger lee on love geometry, calculus, and comparative politics

you know, i`m good at math. i`m good at applied math. but one thing i suck at is emotional math.

i don’t think it should be love math at all. that’s too snarky. emotions are so much more than three-dimensonal, but i don’t forsee any love tesseracts. if there were, there would be a lot more love time travel. you know, when you wake up next to someone that you (supposedly) love and feel a burning desire to…

stab them in the eye with a rusty fork…

it’s time to bail. if there were love tesseracts, people would go back in time and leave before that ever happened.

now that i think about it, it’s definitely not love math. more of a love poltics thing. think about it: what if you’re trying to hook up with someone you don’t think you have a chance with? if you send your friends to talk you up , it’s lobbying. if you try to buy your way in, it’s bribery. trying to be something you’re not is treachery. telling them something you don’t really believe is lying. not listening to your friends for crucial advice is prideful. and sending in your friends to get back at them after they fuck you over is called war. holy fucking republican, man! my love life is fahrenheit 9/11?! now i get it!

Topless Drunken Zombie Mexicans

I don’t know how to explain. Maybe I shouldn’t. Suffice it to say in an email a friend used the term “topless drunken zombie Mexicans,” and shortly thereafter I found myself drawing the following:

See, the thing is, I like drawing hot chicks. But I have no *reason* to draw hot chicks. You might say, hey, baby, you don’t need no reason, but it becomes difficult to explain to people why I have a sketchbook full of hot imaginary women.

And now I’ve discovered a challenge, and thus a reason: create the hot chick from four random adjectives. Right now I`m working on one from four drawn from Lowell Thomas` This Side of Hell: first fancy mint Moroccan. She’s coming along rather well, I think — quite sh-bompin` — and she`ll be done shortly.

Anyway, if you like progressions of things, check this out (click on any to view a larger version):

Fresh out of the scanner

With the colors blocked in, before shrinking for fine work

Accents, finessing and way too many light effects, but that’s how I like it.

I worry that I like the black-and-white version more than the full-color version — prolly because I`m a better penciler than colorist. If you want to do your own coloring job, you can get the big-ass original scan by clicking here. Fun with jpegs!

I also have a much bigger image of the final product, but a-a-a-apparently I can’t remember to bring such things to upload. Will add soon, for those who like topless drunken zombie Mexicans enough to want it 1000 pixels wide. Um. I guess that would be me.

Fun with Print Screen

Sometimes a banner ad just won’t be ignored. Check this out:

The abbreviations… they burn…

This bird has problems. It weaves languidly and peers at itself with a fevered, hyperthyroid eye. Would you get a mortgage from this bird? I hope not.

I don’t even know what these things are, but they dance and they’re terrifying.

Dance… dance forever…

Because nothing in the world is scarier than ass cheeks, some last-minute effort to protect the world’s youth puts a digital skirt on this ass. Almost as funny as all the digital bra parade known as “Showgirls on VH-1.”

New from Land’s End

Also notice the awkward way the product is cut-and-pasted into her hand — it goes well with the crappy way they shaved off her left flank. These are the perils of modeling — one minute, you’re showing off your fabulous ass in a clip-art photo session, and the next minute some crappy graphic artist makes crappy pixelated changes and you’re glad you didn’t authorize use of your face.

Because if they use your face, this might happen:

Your options include seppuku

This woman is doomed forever to peer behind that sheaf of hair for match.com, as she seeks men as young as 18 but no older than Hugh Jackman to send her pictures she can laugh at and ignore.

But she is just a model. This guy is not:

Ten minutes with me will make you pierce your own eardrums

Also in the not-so-tempting offers department:

`Cause you`ll need this if you date through match.com

Check out that “cash transactions only” caveat. That is impossibly shady. I would click to investigate, but I`m afraid tously brunettes would tell me too much about their sex lives.

With just that hint of insanity that’s so attractive in a woman

That was fun.

War of the Worlds

War of the Worlds. I`m glad I saw it in the theater, but I got beefs. I got beefs like Hebrew National.

The Dark Crystal mates with Rand-McNally

It started out perfectly tight and solid and here’s Spielberg showing you exactly what he wants you to see and making you feel exactly how he wants you to feel, and he’s ratcheting up the suspense and making me jump and gasp like a little girl (but not like a ten-year-old girl — get to that later). Almost everything up to Tom Cruise breaking down in the diner is totally hang ten; everything after that kinda comes apart.

Be cool — I think I just saw Mimi Rogers…

Now that I think of it, it seems like all my complaints are with the writing, not the directing, which makes sense, because it’s hard to think of a director as in command of an audience as Spielberg. And, unlike James Cameron, I don’t hate him.

But I got beefs.

• Alien invasion as family drama has been done — and done better — in Signs. See, in Signs people had things like “character arcs” and “characteristics.” The six-year-old girl wasn’t screaming and crying the whole time (still getting to that later). In fairness, I realize what I like the best in these apocalypse movies is how things go from normal to all fubar, and that was 90% of Signs and 15% of this one.
• The creature design for the aliens was not happenin`. Maybe the point is that they’re not physically intimidating, but I wanted something a little more H. R. Giger and a little less baby-faced Grays with a head ridge. Maybe that’s just me.
• Dakota Fanning’s character (believe her name was “Rachel” — it was, like, every other line of dialogue) is *ten*. Yet Tom Cruise carries her the whole damn movie.

  
  Dad, I`m totally ten. You can put me down.

  This might not bother me except 1) kids too old to be carried getting carried is one of my dad’s pet peeves, so I tend to be on high alert for it, and 2) she cries and panics and flips out like a much younger kid as well. I know she’s Dakota Fanning and a better bet to have in your movie than looking for someone younger, but *sheesh.* Did anybody pick you up and carry you when you were ten? Hell, when you were *six*? Would you throw a screaming and crying fit out of fear?

  
  Honey, stop upstaging me.

  Compare this character to ten-year-old Joseph Mazzello from Jurassic Park. Yeah. Think about that.

  I would have liked to have at least seen her get tougher as the movie goes on. Maybe contribute to solving one problem. But no.

• The aliens` EMPs take out all the cars. Fine. The mechanic-on-the-corner replaces the solenoids on Tom Cruise’s car to get it going again. Fine. I don’t remember no stinking physics, but wouldn’t the solenoids on the mechanic’s shelf *also* be ruined? Or if the alien EMP only takes out those solenoids with current running through them, wouldn’t it spare those vehicles that weren’t running at the time of the EMP? Yet it looks like Tom Cruise has the only working car in the world.

  Heh heh heh… EXCEPT a totally unnecessary expository news van, which shows up later with all its equipment in perfect working order. How did that happen? Why isn’t Tom Cruise’s first question “how is your van still working?” I worry too much.

• The aliens buried the “tripods” — a who-o-ole lot of them — long enough ago that there’s no human memory (presumably before the age of people — exposition journalist offers “a million years”) and whatever microbe kills them off hasn’t evolved yet. Apparently the aliens knew they would eventually want earth, yet this was somehow a less attractive time to invade than right now. Maybe this was an over-population allegory, I dunno, but it’s hard for me to believe that aliens would rather take over the world *now* rather than a million years ago when the whole place was pristine and there were lots of nice big slow animals running around. But maybe they were too busy burying spaceships impossibly deep in the ground to worry about that kind of stuff. Plan your work and work your plan.
• Furthermore, when it comes to aliens using humans for their own diabolical purposes, I tend to like the “present an attractive front and extend promises of friendship” strategy of V. I would have preferred these warfaring aliens treat us like pests to exterminate (the way they do in the first half, which is inconsistent with later revelations.)
• What defeats the aliens has nothing to do with the protagonists. It’s irrelevant, even. Sure, that’s the deal with the original story, and it’s a cool idea that our gross people germs kill them off, just like all the fun diseases European colonists brought when they came to share the western hemisphere in peace and harmony with its natives.

  
  Everyone takes a break from crying to enjoy the production design

  But it has stone cold nothing to do with anything, and it’s not foreshadowed. I would have liked there to have been at least a bug going around, one cough, one mention of germs, *anything.* Maybe Dakota Fanning could have had the flu, and that would help explain her helplessness. Maybe she could even sneeze in proximity to an alien, which could have added a new element to…

• …the totally mimeographed Jurassic-Park-kitchen scene. Remember that scene? In Jurassic Park? Where the two kids silently move around a kitchen to avoid the raptors that are searching for them? Now imagine it’s in a basement. And paced much more slowly. And not ramping up to the climax. There you go.
• While we’re here, everything with Tim Robbins could have been cut.

  
  Alarmed by Tim’s wifebeater, Dakota spikes the camera

  There was no point to it, except for Tom Cruise’s character to prove he’s no better than the aliens by killing a man for his resources. Lame.

• Oh, man, how could I forget this one — when the alien invasion comes, remind be to be in Boston! Count this among the dubious messages of this movie: rich people not only live, but emerge from their unscathed homes wearing unscathed cardigans! Yay for money!

A-a-a-and ka-spent.

Name an Evocative Smell: Survey Says…

So this is weird.

I was reading a magazine and it had one of those perfume scratch-and-sniff peel-apart ads. So far not weird. It was for “Obsession: Night for Men,” and had this typical picture of Calvin Klein sullen squinty androgynous people in dark water (starring Jennifer Connelly OMG!). Also not weird.

Spooky perfume

For some reason I went and smelt what the ad dealt, and my knee-jerk reaction was “oh, I don’t like that at all.” (This is prolly because I am used to trucking in lady perfumes, not man perfumes, cos…)

Hey wait a minnit…

Sniff #2 reveals that I know this cologne from somewhere… and that I *like* it. Now, the ad says “a new fragrance yada yada,” so I could be totally making this up and never have smelt it before (what I`m thinking is that it isn’t so different from Regular Old Obsession for Men and that’s what I’ve smelt.)

The point is suddenly I realized what this cologne evoked for me was that I smelt it on someone who was hot. Can’t remember who. And I dunno if it was someone I had the hots for on general principle or just the hots right then at that moment.

A year ago this wouldn’t have been a hard mystery to crack. But there are three mitigating factors with film school:

• You have to stand still in close quarters a lot. So I`m 1st AC and crammed in the shadow-proof corner with the boom op for a three-minute take and God help us if either of us forgot pit stick this morning. This means I know what people smell like when ordinarily only their girlfriend or mom or barber would. This also means when people are smelly, and damn there are some smelly ones, you are all up in it.

  
  Smelly!

• When you are on set, at least in my experience, an extraordinary proportion of people are hot for about five minutes. Like, OMG you reverse engineered the digital compressor for the Stage 5 camera and fixed the dead pixel YOU ARE SO HOT RITE NOW*. Then a couple of minutes later they do something obnoxious and you’re back to normal.

  *Imaginary B.S. situation I made up. That pixel is never coming back.

  Also you’re sorta sleep-deprived usually, and if that impairs your driving as much as booze you can be sure it impairs your hottness judgment as well. You got to make sure someone is teh sexay for, say, three days straight before you make an investment.

• When you are acting in someone’s movie, you become *not like the others. Here. In this trailer park.* You can’t move lights or get apple boxes anymore. You just have to stay on your mark and remember your lines and try could you please just try to be quieter between takes kthx? So if there’s another actor in the movie (and as these first year films go it tends to be just two actors) there`ll be fifteen people buzzing around you and you still feel like you’re the last people on earth.

  This may be why actors hook up so much. Though that may also be because actors are incredibly slutty (OMG just kidding! Students of all arts disciplines are equally slutty.)

  
  It can be a problem.

  In any event, I`m unable to rule out that I just sniffed a fellow actor on set and deeply felt that fishbowl bond and thought he was teh sexay. I can think about things like that on set due to my brain is not cluttered with thoughts about how to be a good actor. Due to I suck.

So eventually I`m going to figure out who wears Obsession for Men (a $50 cologne should already narrow the suspects) or something that smells right like it, and I`m going to be either relieved or incredibly embarrassed.

That is a long story. But I worry about things like this, like when I read that line in The Watchmen that said “Superheroes are finished. These days, it’s all pirates,” and I flashed that *someone* had quoted that line to me very recently, and I had just made a silly cow face like, “that was wacky,” because I didn’t get it! I didn’t get it… yet.

And now I have to ask around in the fall to figure out who put this thought in my brain. I have my suspicions, such as the Dungeon Master of a DIY jello-wrestling RPG I played at the last party I went to before I left school. Because that happened.

Anyway — what stories of evocative and startling smells do you have? Like, I can’t cross a sewer without thinking (fondly) of benjo ditches in Okinawa. Ohhh memories.

What smell brings a context or story flooding back to you?

Discuss.