December 8, 2009

Princess Goldilocks

I was wandering through the rooms of a hotel and quickly the rooms became the secret passageways inside a castle. I was the clandestine lover of Princess Goldilocks. I would sneak into her rooms at night, half-dressed, and then lead her by the hand through the passageways. All the while, we would sneak kisses and press our partially covered bodies against each other. We were young lovers, but without any of the insecurities and self-consciousness young people often have. The passion and arousal were pure and intoxicatingly joyful.

Then the setting shifted to the desert decades later. Princess Goldilocks had been offered many upper class suitors by her parents (like Daisy and Gatsby, our love hadn’t ever been a serious option for her). Since she hadn’t loved any of the suitors, she chose the one who could give her what she wanted. So she chose the one from the southwest who had a huge villa in the desert–the remotest locale from her childhood castle. Goldilocks, her face leathered by the sun, hair cut short and dyed brown, leads her daughter into the red rocks outside her sprawling hacienda. Her intent is to tell her daughter about her one and only love. A warning. Yet as she stares out into the desert, the immediacy of that youthful passion is inaccessible to her. She can’t even picture a time when she remembered that feeling. And she realizes the desert has done what she had long ago wished it would. She may be hard and emotionless, but she is cleaned out, uncluttered and without any regrets. And so she tells her daughter nothing.

-dreamt a few nights ago

February 12, 2009

excuse our dust

This blog may look weird for awhile as I try to figure out how to make it look the way I want. I have to find all the places in the style sheets that have the things I want to change and then change the code.

February 11, 2009

fade to black

You can see some of the site redesign in the navigation bars (unless you link to this blog directly and don’t see the nav bars). I have also just changed the first page. Check it out here. Let me know if you think black is a good idea or not. The real test is reading text against it.

February 10, 2009

blog back

The blog was down for two days, as some of you e-mailed me about. I don’t know exactly what happened. I had to go into the database and fix a folder. Luckily, the support database at WordPress had a post that addressed my problem.

On another technical note, this site is going black soon. I’m going to redesign the whole thing again. I was told years ago never to make a website black, but monitors have gotten better and I like the reduced glare of black sites. I’m in no rush though, there are plenty of more important things for me to be doing.

January 28, 2009

my grandmother gets me Bollywood connections

So I got an e-mail today from someone involved in an Indian film company, Clapstem Film Productions to be exact, asking me about film rights to the play Right Bed, Wrong Husband by Neil and Caroline Schaffner.

Okay. Why me?

It starts with my grandmother. My grandmother lived and died in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. In the last few years of her life, she frequented the Iris restaurant with three other women. These women called themselves the debutantes of Mount Pleasant. Two of them I had known a long time. Helen had taught at the same elementary school as my grandmother and Roberta was the rich woman who lived round the block (and who believed that UFOs visited the U.S. regularly, but that the U.S. should be English-only). The third, Caroline, I hadn’t known.

Caroline had been an actress. She had traveled throughout the Midwest doing repertoire theatre with her husband, Neil. Together, they formed the Schaffner Players. They were best known for their Toby and Susie shows (see image above). But they also wrote plays, such as Natalie Needs a Nightie and Right Bed, Wrong Husband. Neil died in 1961, but he had dreamed of making a museum dedicated to the history of repertoire theatre. Well, Caroline made that dream a reality when she was in her 90s. The Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana has since become a part of Midwest Old Threshers in Mount Pleasant.

So far, so good?

In the story I’ve been working on, Carnivale, the gravedigger meets an old woman, whom I based on Caroline. I didn’t have any pictures of Caroline, so I decided to look on the web. I started with the museum, but when I discovered that they didn’t have any, I went to Google. What I found were an article on Neil Schaffner’s life and career and a website about playwrights, Doollee. The Doollee website didn’t have any biographical information about Neil and Caroline, though the site had two of their plays listed. So I simply told the people at Doollee about the article I had discovered. Well, they put that article up on the site, but they’ve credited me with writing it.

You can probably put the pieces together from here. Clapstem Film Productions decided to do a version of Right Bed, Wrong Husband and when they went to find contact information about the Schaffners, mine was the name they found. Hence, I got the e-mail.

What a weird, wired world we live in.

January 22, 2009

all things to all people

July 14, 2008

blog update

After playing around with the header, I decided to get rid of it entirely. I wanted a cleaner look, using the nav bar that I had designed for the rest of the site. Having a nav bar in the blog meant that the blog looked different than the rest of the site. Anyway, if you  are reading this and don’t see a pale green bar at the top with “comix, drawing, blog, about, contact” in it, then please go to the main page and click “blog.” Next up, I’m going to try to make the blog wider… 

July 11, 2008

blogeries

I’ve been trying to learn more about how to use WordPress and in the process have been changing the look of my blog. So expect things to shift around here for awhile as I settle into something I like. One upcoming change is that I’ll probably be putting this blog as my main homepage, instead of having a static homepage as I do now.

September 11, 2007

Vincent Perriot’s Entre Deux

I’ve wasted my life.

Perriot’s drawings seem like loose sketches, but contain a level of specifity and depth that sketches tend to lack. He gets an incredible tonal range from building up lines of ink. His work reminds me of an urban Edward Gorey, though he’s more akin to fellow French comix artists Blutch and Christophe Blain.

See here. No knowledge of French required. This is a wordless story.

August 16, 2007

We are experiencing technical difficulties

So I dropped my laptop on the floor a few nights ago and destroyed my hard drive. I’m going to see if I can salvage anything, but it’s not likely. I have backups for a lot of stuff, but I realized that I haven’t done a major backup since March. That means that the files for Carnivale Book 1 are gone. I can recreate them of course, but…

Anyway, I posting this from my wife’s computer. When I get everything sorted out, I’ll post a bunch of stuff. No computer doesn’t mean no drawing.