It's nice to be back in the home state and it feels sometimes like I never left. I hadn't seen my mother or my BFF in five years. "It feels like you were always here," said my BFF. We went to the mall. We ate dumplings. Her kids have grown up into hilarious jokesters with no mercy and I love them. "You're a good hugger, Aunt Royal," they'd say. It was terrific. Now I am currently bothering famous anime podcaster Daryl Surat in his home. He has been working on panels for Anime Festival Orlando and I have been moving all of his stuff around. We did do an NES stream the night I got in. I am only good at Super Mario Brothers 3 and I am not good at anything else. (I am not even good at Dr. Mario.) On the plane ride to Florida I re-read Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. The thing about Written on the Body is that for whatever reason, the covers are not very good. There is an ebook version with pomegranate seeds, which is probably the best design-wise but not particularly germane with the book itself. My copy's cover looks like someone made it in five minutes. The one pictured above is, I mean, Just Okay. This is a really terrific, passionate, sad book, with some unexpected humor thrown in that takes the reader by surprise. I laughed aloud at a couple of segments just because I wasn't anticipating a little joke. I hadn't read this book in ages, and I'd forgotten how it ended, which made it a nice plane read because it was almost like reading a new book. I think I wrote about picking this up before on this blog, but this was a book that I lost in one of my many moves and one of my friends was kind enough to re-buy it for me from my wish list of things I have lost because the post office stole them or someone else stole them or they got thrown away. Anyway, like all of the Sleeping Beauty books, this was such a treat. Just a delight. Every time there would be some new punishment for some or another hot naked pleasure slave (consensual!), I would start laughing with glee and Daryl Surat would look over at me and dryly remark that Anne Rice wasn't known for her comedy writing. There is an absolutely wild plot spin towards the end of the book that I was one hundred percent not anticipating and I personally found it silly and hilarious, but I'm sure that, as with most silly and hilarious ideas, someone out there finds it the most arousing thing on the planet and good for them. The plot element was very brief, which was a bit surprising because I'm sure Anne Rice could've turned that into Book #6 all on its own. Maybe that was the plan. I guess we'll never know. With the passing of Anne Rice, we'll have no more Sleeping Beauty books, which is a shame because they're so wonderful and I didn't want this one to end. I'm glad she decided for whatever reason to write a sequel to her old trilogy - it was so fun, and they all are. I wish these could be a show or a movie but it would have to be either a very high budget porn or an anime series and I would watch either of those.
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Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food, good-bye Charlie boy. David Sedaris did a signing and my brother went because I lost my signed visual compendium in my last move. I am getting ready to move again, after a whole roller coaster of a week that ran me through the gamut of human emotion and also through the wringer. I'm headed home and I'm very pleased, because I was staring homelessness directly in the face for a hot second. Here's what I have been into lately. The Wojnarowicz documentary was absolutely amazing and part of the reason it is so wonderful is that David Wojnarowicz was so prolific in terms of the recording of his own life and times. We have his journals, tape journals, collages, paintings, videos; footage of the band he played in, his answering machine tapes. It's sad, it's lovely, magnificent. I'm so grateful that all of these tapes have been preserved so that he can narrate his own life even after his death. (The thirty-year anniversary of his death is approaching, on July 22nd.) I check out anything that looks interesting at work and Friday was one of those things. It's a very engaging story with mystery-solving teens, and I always love a good mystery-solving teen (key word here is good - there are plenty of mediocre mystery-solving teen tales). I like the 1970s style world they're in and the dynamic Teen Detective names. This one ends on a cliffhanger and I can't wait for the next one. Another comic I've really enjoyed lately is Harrow County. The picture I've used here is the first TPB, which caught my eye because I thought it was a reference to hag-riding. It's a really lovely comic that's done in ink and watercolor - the artist actually uses waterproof ink and watercolors OVER the ink, which I thought was absolutely unreal. There are a number of fun witches, monsters, curses, and magic that happens all in this little farmland setting. What I like about both Friday and Harrow County is that there are little sketches and thumbnails and things like that in the back - I love little behind the scenes glimpses at how artists work on composition and character creation. There's an arcade here in Lexington and it has a lot of old games I had not heard of (Gorf??), but my new favorite is Crystal Castles. I had never heard of Crystal Castles, because I didn't have an Atari growing up (and didn't know anyone who had one). I still don't really know what I'm doing or what's going on in this game. The trees chase me. The bees chase me. There's a witch. I pick up little dots. Are they tabs of LSD? Is that why trees are chasing me? I don't know, but it's a good time. I'm actually brainstorming out a piece for the first time in a while. It's strange, because in the past I've just sat down and let them come out and haven't fiddled with them too terribly much. This one, I think, might be a little different, but I don't want to over- or under-work it...I guess we'll see how it turns out.
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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