Hello, the Internet! It’s Saturday afternoon, and K has forbidden me from humming “Voodoo Mama” from the Babylon soundtrack because it’ll inevitably get stuck in her head and she’ll keep wracking her brain about where it’s from. So instead, you can listen to it:
A week ago (30th September), I completed 7 years of no smoking. That means cigarettes, in my case, but no smoking for me always had to be no smoking anything. More thoughts on this in a separate post next week.
I haven’t drawn for a few months because of my issues with back pain. I have a tendency to go into hyperfocus mode, and will often concentrate on whatever I’m doing and not realise that I’m causing myself pain, which kept happening with drawing. Recently, my friend Nitin (with whom I used to make comics a long time ago) showed me his iPad setup, and turned out that worked great for me – my iPad would be vertically aligned right in front of my face, leaving me the flexibility to move my body without being hunched over in one angle.
So when art model Lilian D’Mello started her #liltober project for this year, based on classical paintings, I thought it was a good opportunity to try and start drawing again. I’ve done three drawings so far – I don’t mind if I don’t manage all 31 days – and I’ll start posting them here on a weekly basis, which should be this weekend, or early next week. The best bit for me is that the new iPad setup works and I didn’t have any increased back pain because of the drawing. So I hope I can continue drawing after this project is done. Here’s the first one, for luck:
Work-wise, I started doing some stylesheets for a few short stories I’m lettering for a project that’s currently under an NDA. More when I can tell you.
Other than that, the workweek was mostly revisions on various projects.
The OGN I mentioned I lettered for Iván Brandon is now up on Kickstarter, illustrated by the incredibly talented V. Gagnon, edited by Greg Lockard, and designed by Tom Muller. You can look at The Roman Stars and back it here.
Writer Erin Kissane has started a series of blog posts on the connection between Meta and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. She’s written three of these so far, and I’ve read the first one.
It’s a harrowing read, for many reasons, and I’ve been following the links she’s posted down further rabbitholes, each more disturbing than the last. Given the obvious parallels, this reminds me of things going on both around the world and in India, but one thing struck me years ago when the first reports of the Meta connection to Myanmar began to surface, which I was reminded of as I read this article:
Remember 2015’s “Save the Internet” campaign to retain net neutrality in India? This was a movement by internet activists and politicians to call for TRAI to deny Meta (then Facebook) the permission to run its “Free Basics” service that would zero-rate any data used by a mobile user to browse Facebook. The anti-Facebook argument was that this would not provide other web services a level playing field, and would turn the burgeoning Indian internet into a walled garden – specifically Facebook’s.
The movement worked, and TRAI banned telecom service providers from charging differential rates for data services – which at the time applied to Facebook’s Free Basics and the Airtel Zero platform.
But Myanmar got its free Facebook service, and when the country’s mobile-phone-using population exploded, nearly everyone in the country was on Facebook, because you didn’t have to pay for it. Facebook got their walled garden, and today that is clearly considered a major factor in how fundamentalist Buddhists were able to congregate on one platform and call for violence against the Rohingya population.
India has its own issues with bigotry and communalism at the moment, and the internet (particularly WhatsApp – again owned by Facebook) has played its part in it, but I had a moment of thankfulness that at least we dodged one bullet that might have taken us to a ghastlier alternate universe.
Reading-wise, I’m still on my two non-fiction reads at the moment – For Profit by William Magnuson, and the one I started last week, Doppelganger by Naomi Klein.
The former (a history of corporations) has gotten a bit less fun to read as it converges with the present. It’s still well-written, but the political and economic concepts underpinning this part are better-known to me, so I’m learning less. I should still be done with it by next week.
Doppelganger is an enjoyable read from Naomi Klein where she examines the convergence of the cancelled-liberal-to-right-winger pipeline and conspiracy thinking using Naomi Wolf (ex-liberal feminist and current anti-vaxxer/Steve Bannon cohort) as a stand-in. Once again, I’m finding out little new information, having followed the topic for a few years now, but it’s always a joy to read Klein’s clear thinking and sharp writing. I would’ve said that the book doesn’t need to be as long as it is, but that thought comes from my familiarity with the topic, not anything wrong with the text itself.
I’m still enjoying The Devil All the Time, but I’ve slowed down my read because I don’t want the book to finish too quickly. I’m contemplating interspersing this with finally reading all of His Dark Materials (I only ever read the first book), but until I actually pick up a book, these intentions are malleable in the extreme.
Tv- and movie-wise, I watched three films this week, and finished a tv show I started last week.
Harley Quinn Season 4 was exactly the kind of superhero fluff I enjoy. Season 3 had developed a tedious focus on turning Harley from an anti-hero into something closer to a hero, and Season 4 cheerfully muddled that progression, turning Harley back into the amoral chaos agent she’s best as. There were some rough parts – the last two episodes don’t bring things together as well as one would like, and there was too much focus in the season on good intentions not working out – but overall, a stronger season than Season 3, and a fine exemplar of the tone the show should be focussing on hitting. (Also, imagine my pleasant surprise at how much airplay Nightwing’s naked butt got.)
I mentioned We’re All Going to the World’s Fair in my last post about The Deviant, and I wanted to expand on that in this update, but as I kept writing, it became a piece of its own, so I’ll post that separately tomorrow or Monday. Definitely one of my favourite films I’ve watched this year, and whatever idiot recently said “show me good trans cinema” needs to have this shoved in their face. (I’ll link it here once I’ve posted it.)
K and I watched The Eternal Daughter, starring Tilda Swinton and Tilda Swinton. It’s a lovely, elegiac movie that presents as a horror movie in which the horror is … life and its progression (trying to avoid spoilers). It’s beautifully shot, with great music. Usually, I don’t enjoy a film that is trying to be a drama but plays so many games with its own reality that it loses all sense of human emotion (koffI’mThinkingofEndingThingskoff), but The Eternal Daughter plays exactly one game, and you figure it out early on, and after that, you get to just enjoy how the game’s been constructed. (VAGUE SPOILER) I noted early on that the two Tildas are never in the same shot together, and wondered if this was intentional or an artefact of the film’s low budget, given that Swinton does do some extremely independent fare, and rest assured the question is answered before the end of the film. There was a bit where the dog gets lost, and K (who loves dogs) cringed in her seat in anticipation, and I said with some confidence, I don’t think it’s that kind of horror movie, and it isn’t.
Finally, I wanted K to watch The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and the week after Sir Michael Gambon’s passing seemed as good a time as any to rewatch it myself. K loved the sets, the acting and the music (essentially everything apart from the script) but wasn’t particularly enamoured with the story, while I came away once again thinking of it as a near-perfect film, and perhaps the movie that I enjoy more than any other – I always find something new to be in awe of each time. We both loved Michael Gambon’s performance, though.
Once or twice, I’ve framed this movie to people as “What if Stanley Kubrick directed The Sopranos?” but that’s not actually a good fit given this film’s eschewal of realism. The story isn’t character-based drama, it’s Grand Guignol, and the central love affair isn’t a romance, it’s a fantasy that is eventually going to crash into reality with a sickening thud. The throughline of meat starting out being gorgeous food and ending up a hellish rotten prison is far from unintentional. A better point of comparison, therefore, would be Titus Andronicus. Like Titus, this film is intense, over-the-top, written with a delicate taste for words and rhythm. And of course, someone gets cooked and eaten in both.
That’s it for this week. I’m off to meet a friend who’s recovering from a fractured tailbone, which is a handy reminder that despite all our ingenuity, we are but monkeys standing upright. Bide well!