Ilium

As I've stated before, I recently made a relatively-legal-by-society-standards kopis, which is a sword weilded by the ancient Greeks, the Spartans in particular (a city-state which I greatly admire). Also, about a year ago I purchased a Corinthian helm, the accepted style of head protection of the same proto-Greco tribe, and have recently made it battle-ready, save for the inclusion of a chin strap, which I may just borrow from my previous, inferior helm, though I beileve I'll make a new, special one. I'm also creating a new set of armor for myself, one that is more appropriate for an ancient Hellenic.

And, finally, reading the Great Western War scenarios for the great battle in less than a month, I've learned that the entire war, the entire war, is going to be a re-enactment of the Trojan War. There are ship-to-ship battles crossing the Aegean, there are beach stormings, there are champion battles, there are sackings.

I... I think I'm wet.

With my new fighting regalia, my adoration of anything ancient Greek, and the Mrs. coming full-force with me in chitons and klammys aplenty... it's going to be the best war I've ever been to. I guarantee it.

So... how best to honor this occasion? What's the best way to pay homage to this incident that holds such a place of fascination within this ivory dome? How will I show my rapture at the chance to actually fight the Trojan War?

Simple. I will build a trojan horse.

I have begun construction on the thing which, when finished, will not quite be life-sized, but will still get the point of "horse" across, as well as serve as a table for us back at camp until we put it in front of the gates of Troy. The head is removable, so it won't get in the way. Once finished, I will, of course, include pictures. Which brings me to another interesting development.

The Mrs. and I recently adopted. I know, I seem young and irresponsible, but we both couldn't turn away once we saw his shining face, and decided that he would be ours and that, together, we would care for him and keep him as our own. True, it's a little difficult getting used to having him around, but he's so much reward for such relatively little adjustment. I had to admit that I was nervous when we first brought him home. I didn't know how to hold him or if I might hurt him if I did something wrong (I have a tendency to be rough with delicate things), but they prove to be a lot more forgiving than you might think, and now we play together all the time, and I'm no longer afraid of damaging his little form. The Mrs. and I couldn't be happier, and I can't wait to watch, over the years, how much richer he is going to make our lives.



His name is Digital Jones. He weighs 130 grams and is 86 mm long.

...

I totally cut out all my armor, my new cuirass and pteruges, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to fix it up, boil it and all, before war. If not, Ainwulf said I might be able to do it at war, which I don't necessarily think is plausible, and yet am extremely excited about the possibility of doing. The idea of going to war, and only then making the equipment I would so desperately need for it is exceedingly appealing to me. I need to boil it in water, shape it, emboss it (if at all possible), then carbouli it, and then I will have a gorgeous, flexible, muscled cuirass.

THEN, I need to bevel and dye all my peices for my pteruges, rivet every other pteruge (as they are) onto the main belt, get some ties and hopefully rivet some dished silver discs onto the end to give it a bit of flair.

And I need to give my helm a chinstrap. So I can fight in it. Desperately. And fix my kopis so's I can stabs 'em with it.

Everything else, except the horse, is pretty much taken care of. I have the clothes all done, I have housing set up, the boys are taking care of the wall that's going to go around the encampment, and I'm taking care of the stakes to hold the wall in place. I'm feeling fucking fantastic about this war. Even if I had to leave everything behind; the horse, the armor, the togas, the wall, everything; this would still be, I think, the best war we've had yet. Maybe I've just been watching Troy too much, reading Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea too often, but I simply can't wait.

...

Also, the Mrs. and I have been getting along fantastically lately. Initially, I think the stress of the event and trying to prepare for it got to us, but I recieved some extremely good advice and now we have no problems, we're getting along, we're tremendously happy, and I think we're just going to stay like this. The advice I got was that we're simply too young to take everything so seriously (not our relationship, but the things we fight over) and we should use thsi time to have fun, to be happy, not to waste it away screaming at each other (which we'd both always agreed upon, it being a collosal waste of time). With this in mind, we're much calmer now, and we smile a lot more, and things aren't so fragile when we're around each other. There's no more danger of us tearing each other's heads off because we're tired. Revelatory, really.

All in all, I'm happy, which is a hell of a thing. I think I go through these moods (which, a machine in a Disneyland store in Frontierland once told me, is due to my biorhythms) wherein it's much easier for me to see the happy qualities of things, which inevitably give way to the moods that let me see the bad. Right now, everything's aglow. Everything's lined up. Post Office was a fantastic book, war's in less than a week, I have a pretty good job (even if parts of it irk me to no limit) and school's going according to plan. I feel at peace. Maybe it's only because of the promise of war that I feel this way, I don't know.

I'm sure in a week or two I'll post with how awful this fucking job is and how much I want to strangle most people around me. I recently made, at work, a list of "People who can Straight Up Suck my Balls," which was a tour-de-force of absolute, fanatical hatred.

Sometimes I feel I hate so much, I need to share it with the world or I'll just explode.

...

In other news:

Starfish Hitler. STARFISH HITLER!!!



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STARFISH HITLER!!!!

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Starfish Hitler.

Danse Macabre

Of late, I have been making more recent trips to the cineplex, in the hopes of kick-starting my once-lagging predilection for the feelms of which I have grown so fond. Inasmuch as it can be considered a success, I have also started to think more about things in general, which is nicer for me than the malaise and relative catatonic state I enter when not actively being taught or, at least, learning.

So... on with it, then.

Corpse Bride



European Title: And Then She's Buterflies

Tim Burton, bastard child of Nicholas Cage and Neil Gaiman that he is, has been desperately trying to recreate the amazingly commercial and, specifically, marketable success of The Nightmare Before Christmas ever since the first puffy, bad-skinned, eyelined malcontent put on a pair of blue stockings with Downward Spiral playing in the background and drew stitch marks all over her legs. The success of the claymation film (as the medium is referred to, though it seems to almost detract from the true artistry of Nightmare) set a standard for the genre (if, indeed, it can be called such) that has yet to be mathced, although the highly anticpated arrival of the first feature-length Wallace and Grommit film promises to give it a run for its' money.

At any rate, Tim Burton has found, in the form of little clay figurines, the artform that best manifests his private visions, his true concepts, and the manner through which he will show the world his unique expression. So why, Timothy, are you attempting all these other coups, some good (Sleepy Hollow) some bad (Planet of the Apes), when you've already found your perfect medium. Do you know how long some people search for theirs? Do you understand that most people will go through life so caught up in what they believe to be important that they'll never even attempt art, let alone find their most efficient outlet for it? You have your chosen genre, why do you refuse to work in it?

Enter Corpse Bride, a Burton attempt at resurrecting his grip on the pseudo-goth stop-motion animation corner of the earth. While adorable are the models all and memorable is the artistic direction, and surprisingly delightful is a guest voice appearance by Dany Elfman, the characters remain undefined largely in defiance of their presented sculptings and the general flow and accepted universal rules of the story are ill-established and not fleshed out.

When you think of why Nightmare was so much more enjoyable then Corpse Bride (a comparison that can't help but be made), you assume it's because the former stuck with you for longer, took more time to tell its story. Nightmare seemed to spend a lot of time establishing a universe, these separate places gleaned from congealed holiday animus, and the dissilusionment of one particular character.

In Depp's recent foray into voice acting (charming as he is), his tiny, Victor/Vincent archetype hardly has a reason for living, let alone a reason to want life. His desire to stay in the land of the alive for any other reason than being away from the land of the dead isn't really established until halfway through the film, and any character quirk or defining quality (his drawing of the butterfly... did we all forget that in the beginning?) is lot in a sea of production design. Tim Burton seems content, in this incarnation of his very psyche, to spend time designing interesting-looking jawbones rather than a coherent and compelling storyline, the kind that seemed to stem so naturally out of Nightmare.

But, of course, Nightmare had much more time to do it in, didn't it? This one just wasn't long enough to warrant enough time to truly delve into this world and ingratiate the audience or, indeed, ANYONE who would care. Right?

Wrong.

Both films have the EXACT SAME running time of 76 minutes, and while that seems like an extremely short amount of time for something like Nightmare to take place in, Corpse Bride feels and plays like it was over almost as soon as it started, like the director, having expended his ideas for art direction, simply didn't want to do it anymore. Indeed, the final scene of the film itself seems like Burton got to a point and said, "Eh. I'm bored. I'm going to go re-make a 70's classic in which someone is taken to a world that is a culmination and apex of something that has, until now, had moderate significance but no real power in my life. (Twice.)

I didn't dislike this film. It was a ton of fun to watch, the look of the film and the basic premise are fantastic. The problem with the movie, and it's a big one, is that it isn't necessarily set in this world of default fantasy. Sure, the forms are warped and the typical Burton stylization is everywhere you look, but mid-nineteenth century austerity doesn't equal ghoulish apparitions and won't unless you take the time to establish it. If they're committed to the length, they should have cut the songs (which are pathetically and sadly lacking considering they are all of them born from the tragic skull of Danny Elfman) and should have spent a little more effort saying how the worlds of the living and the dead relate to each other (as in Beetlejuice) how the relationships of the people involved intertwine and the subtleties and complexities of the emotions involved therein (as in Big Fish) shown the amount of separation between the two spiritual worlds and the subsequent perversity of a breach of that separation (as in Sleepy Hollow) and put a damn ending on the film (as in every other fucking film Tim Burton has ever done... save Monkey-Town.)

(I MEAN PLANET OF THE APES, NOT MONKEYBONE... SPEAKING OF WHICH...)

Perhaps our Timmy isn't really cut out for the claymation direction position. After all, he didn't direct The Nightmare before Christmas, how can we expect him to do any better with this one?

He... he WHA?!?!

No, he didn't. Henry Selick, director of other Burton-attributeds such as James and the Giant Peach and the conceptual highway robbery that was Monkeybone, acted as the choreographer behind the day-to-day direction of Nightmare. And were those films coherent? Sure, the monkey left something to be desired, but it was still a viable plotline, and the film was over when it was over. The monkey didn't just fade into a bunch of boll-weevils and crawl off into the sunset while behind him are left flapping in the breeze the many loose ends the story contained. Corpse Bride has so many loose ends, the fucker's fringed.

And now I hear Selick's doing an animated version of Gaiman's Coraline.

CAN'T. WAIT.

And this is what it's come to. While a fine film, lots of fun, nothing great, Corpse Bride has destroyed, for me, the chances of every having another Nightmare, or anything remotely of the equivalent. The guy who did goddamn Monkeybone is coming out with a movie about a book I've read, and if Burton announced tomorrow he was directing a claymation version of Where the Wild Things Are, I'd cringe instead of smile. Dammit, Burton.

So go and see it. It's fine. It's a floater, but only in that the sucker isn't sinking, necessarily, and pulling the rest of us down with it. On the oher hand, if we were talking about it's weight on our expectations, this would be a much different review.

Well... most likely not, but it'd still have an ending.

...

I drove the missus out to L.A. myself to see the film open before it opens here in the O.C. Parking was money, rather than availability like it is here, and I had to endure some white dude with blonde dreadlocks playing one badly-formed chord on an electric guitar over. and over. again.

Still, I liked it.

It occured to me that the only other time I made a journey to see a film before it's nationwide release date was when I went to Mann's Chinese Theater for the opening of Sleepy Hollow. I still wear the free shirt I recieved, and retain fond memories of how much the drunken chick behind us enjoyed the film, to the extent that she felt the need to sloppily applaud, while favoring the on-screen projection of battle-ready Chris Walken with many a slurred "bravo" as well as a bottle rolled lazily down the slightly-inclined theater floor. Also, upon the beheading of one non-important character, she took the time to inform us that the horseman had "gone wild," which was thoughtful of her, lest one of us miss the filmmakers intentiong of portraying to us just how 'wild' the headless horseman had, indeed, gone.

So... I will only make a pilgrimage for Burton, and only when Burton uses Depp.

What does that say about me?

...

Also, don't channel Peter Lorie for you "adorable" maggot sidekicks.

Ever.
...

Rick.

Downward Spiral? Why not Disintegration? Took a risk! Oh, you!

Golem

Mark it. 11:34 last night. Out of tape and rattan and steel, I have forged my greatest accomplishment. For years I had planned its creation, for weeks I have labored at the construction. I have fought and broken and bled and bent for its birth and now, here, I have it. The greatest and most awesome of all my earthly works.

This... glorious creature that it is... was purchased by me a year ago, that I might have the falcata itself (the kopis, in my native Greek) to possess and to covet, but also to inspire. And now, I have my life's ambition.

I have a working, SCA fighting model of it.

The thing is beautiful. It is gorgeous. It is terrifying. It will be that which kills and that which is feared by everything in its path. I will weild it as a red-hot scythe through a field of wheat, I will swing it as the singular will of Ares. It is the avatar of my war-soul, it is the apex of my bloodlust. I will honor it, and I will use it, and we will, together, bring down the armies that dare stand against us.

We are Makareus.

We are mighty.

If I can fanagle it, I wil post pictures of the thing, as a new father does for his suckling babe.