My second FMA mix. This time it’s rockier with a bit of psychedelia. Avoided my electronica fix. There are some very neat tracks on this mix: Devolver is definitely a band to follow.
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The best part is by clicking “Download” all the tracks in the mix are zipped up and downloaded. Neat.
I’m almost too late to the Scott Pilgrim party. I’d seen the manga-sized books from Oni Press and heard good things about the comic but it wasn’t until I was wowed by the trailer that I picked up the first four issues and started reading them. And when I say I’m hooked… I’m hooked. It’s been ages since I’ve enjoyed reading something so crazy and fun.
What’s appealing is the world of Scott Pilgrim itself. It’s a life where childhood fantasies and playfulness have continued into adulthood (although I’m willing to bet it resonates with a twenty-something zeitgeist). Plus there’s a blurring of reality and game culture in a subtle way that I haven’t found engaging in Japanese mana. For example, the fight sequence at the end of the first book between Scott and Matthew Patel turns into a stylised fight/dance routine that reminds me of the opera that used to be used as cut scenes in Japanese video games when I played them about 15 years ago. (If you haven’t any experience of them, they are too bizarre to describe. You have to see for yourself. I believe that they are cut out of a lot of the anime that’s shown in US and here.) Plus there’s moments when, following a fight, Scott collects coins – or even at one point – a bonus life.
Ultimately, Scott Pilgrim is more of an indie comic and has a closer relationship with books like Ghost World and Asterios Polyp than trash manga. I’m hoping that the movie – starring Michael Cera, an actor who I think looks nothing like Scott and, to be frank, has underwhelmed me in previous roles – is as funny and captivating as the trailer. The sixth and final Volume, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, is out next month. After three days we’ve finally finished moving! Although it’s gone without a hitch, it was really hard work. By mistake, I’d hired a lorry rather than a van so it only took a small number of actual runs between the houses. Friday was spent moving the bulk of furniture out of the old house into the new. Saturday was spent finishing off (packing the kitchen took hours). Sunday was a trip to the dump and IKEA. We hired a company to clean the house and it looked perfect. Although exhausted – and with sore, blistered hands – I feel like the move went fantastically. The new house is smaller – but much cosier. The old house was BIG but also very impersonal far too open to be completely comfortable.
We also found a Sega 4D ride which Lysander and (my) Alice went on which was like a virtual rollercoaster ride with moving chairs and 3D screen. Lysander loved it. I didn’t go on as I’m less excited about stuff like that.
The environment of the game is filmic and there’s a really powerful atmosphere created quite early on after the main credits. It has the feel of a serious movie – particularly in the way that the main credits “show” the city in which the game is set and the various still headshots of people (all done in a convincinly realist way: for example the woman with makeup running down her face or the boy blinking is eyes because rainwater is getting in). I even like the touch of providing a square of paper and providing instructions about how to make an origami bird while the game loads.
This game is one of the reasons I bought a PS3 last Summer (along with DC Universe Online, which still awaits release) and I can see that I’m going to spend some time playing it over the next month. Yesterday I spent the afternoon in bookshops in London. Alice is in Barcelona for a few days and it gave me the opportunity of spending some time browsing. For someone who has spent a great deal of my late teen and twenties in bookshops and libraries, I was shocked at how insufficient these shops seemed. All the shops had altered since I last visited them: some had been shut (Borders on Charing Cross Road), some had severely stripped their stock down (Foyles) and some were quite dingy (Blackwells). I’m more used to either reading digital versions of texts or ordering books online from Amazon these days and what I found most tiresome was that all the shops had a limited range of titles (apart from – ironically – sprawling ICT departments) which were badly maintained with books only loosely arranged in very broad categories. I’m not sure whether I imagined it or not, but there was a pervading sense of gloom in these shops which had few customers and certainly no one under 30 in them. They had more the impression of second-hand bookshops or shoddy public libraries rather than up-to-date sellers of new material. It probably didn’t help that much of the area where Tottenham Court Road intersects with Oxford Street has been demolished and is in a state of renovation. Equally, I searched Forbidden Planet for the two graphic novels I was looking for and found one which was nearly double the price I could get it for online. I ended up buying a number of books I could get online more cheaply: Tim Brighouse & David Wood’s What Makes a Good School Now?; Neil Gaiman’s Coraline; Paul Cornell’s complete run on Captain Britain and MI13 and Geoff John’s Green Lantern: Rebirth. Things I did see point to changes in bookselling: the number of different ereaders that they are promoting and on-demand printing. Sadly, rather than adopt a common device, each of the bookshop chains have adopted a different device and set themselves up in direct competition. (I would imagine that the iPad will sort out eBooks in the long term). But more interesting was Blackwell’s on-demand publishing. You can take a file into Blackwells and get it printed very cheaply (£30, which is reasonable for a single-copy run). For me, this could be the way that bookshops adapt to the 21st century: they become showrooms for information and literature. Places where readers can get advice on books (much like Apples Guru bars) and purchase eBooks or have single copies of text published on-demand (that way, you could buy any text in existence as a hard copy). It would mean that bookshops would only have to maintain a tiny physical stock but have access to a huge number of books. Discovered this by chance. It’s a Pixar-quality, 6 minute short that took Lucas Martell four years to make on a budget of $5,000 (all spent supposedly on the music). The podcasts that accompany the animation are worthwhile watching, too – as is the Pigeon Impossible blog where Martell explains everything about creating the short. He says that the entire project was created with the purpose of learning how to produce CGI. [As an aside, it's interesting to read Martell's blog about how to learn animation and his description of having "a very laissez faire attitude towards the educational process".] I don’t doubt this guy will be snatched up by the big animation studios very quickly.
It turned out that Batman’s usual side-kick, Robin, now played by Damian Wayne (Bruce’s son, trained by an ancient cult of assassins… don’t ask!) is in some sort of Star Wars healing tank in the Middle East recovering from injuries sustained in last issue (although in the concurrent issue of Batgirl, he’s out and about fighting crime – continuity issues again). It turns out that Batman’s in the middle of gang warfare between Old King Coal (from the North of England) and the Pearly Kings (from London). It’s explained that:
Huh? We find out that the Tower of London is Britain’s version of Arkham Asylum and maintained by the beefeaters (it even has a Transformers-style yellow digger called Metalek!). The criminals here are no match for the Gotham denizens and have names like: The Radio Ghost, Dai Laffyn, Big Don Drummond, The Morris Men and The Highwayman. I groaned audibly when I read this. The laughed (derisively).
Grant Morrison should be able to do better than this. He’s British and can write some pretty good books. Certainly, The Invisibles managed to capture a more convincing portrait of Britain (but that book is now 15 years old!). Has Morrison been too long in the US that even he sees the UK in terms of the awful stereotypes presented in Batman and Robin: red buses, tea, Mrs Thatcher, knights, Tower of London, ley lines and people calling each other “mate” and using words like “bloody”? Perhaps. I know that Morrison wanted to write this book in a more campy way to try and regain the fun and weirdness of the old sixties tv show. But it just doesn’t work. Most awful is the character of the Knight, whose real name is Cyril and speaks like he’s an office worker from Slough. His costume design looks like Batman with a portcullis visor. After my initial enthusiasm for this series – largely based on loving Frank Quitely’s art – I’m now thinking of stopping buying it. I’ll probably wait until issue 10 when the next story arc begins. But the writing needs to improve (certainly to the standard of Rucka’s current run on Detective Comics). Saying all that, I quite liked Cameron Stewart’s art.
This is the third and last act of the Blackest Night Event. From the poster, it looks like some DC characters become lanterns. Is that Scarecrow as a member of the Sinestro Corps? Lex Luthor as an Orange Lantern? Not sure if I’m going to maintain my comic purchases with the follow-up, Brightest Day… |
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We spent today at Bluewater where we saw Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland. The film was a little flat but looked beautiful (why Burton didn’t try a straight retelling of the books is beyond me).
