Yeah, it only took me a year, right? But the site redesign is done. Pretty much. There are still things to fuss over, but the hardest part is taken care of. think things are arranged in a fairly sensible way. If you see any weirdness, let me know. Oh, and this is the shiny graphic I was talking about.

It's interesting how polarized the reactions to Wonderfalls are. I don't know if it depends on whether you like Jaye, or what. I haven't been amazed by the last two episodes, but I like the style and the humor. And I do like Jaye. Mostly I think the pace of the episodes is a bit off -- I'd prefer it if it was more frenetic. Sort of Fawlty-Towers-ish, if that makes sense. Could have done without having the yanking on heartstrings in the last episode, but eh.

I watched Willard last night. It's not great, but it's worth watching for the scene with the cat, and a couple of horror-movie homages. The scene with Martin in his office that's a riff on the playground scene from The Birds is brilliant. And of course, Crispin Glover is insane. The DVD is chock full of bonus material: two commentaries, a video for Glover's cover of "Ben," a making-of feature, deleted scenes, and I think there's other stuff. Worth a rental.

Oh, I also saw The Sweet Smell of Success a week ago. As I understand it, it's sort of a cult movie among journalists, since it's about the seedy side of the NYC entertainment biz in the 1950's. Burt Lancaster's character is modeled after Walter Winchell, and Tony Curtis is a small-time agent trying to get his clients mentioned in Lancaster's column. They're both horrible, horrible people. I was trying to figure out what the movie reminded me of, and eventually decided it was similar to Dangerous Liaisons -- initially the manipulations are entertaining, and there's lots of clever dialogue, but these characters aren't just playing with people to amuse themselves. There's a desperation and darkness to them that makes it much more disturbing, and by the end Lancaster and Curtis are just repellent. Neat movie. Abrupt ending, but neat.

Hey, I was at the store yesterday, and Dragonslayer is out on DVD. No extras, though, but I'll have to see if Netflix has it. Such an underappreciated movie. I'm sure the dragon FX won't look as cool now as they did originally, so I'm a little nervous about that.

Music! I like Maroon 5, although they also bug the heck out of me sometimes. I like them more often than not. But I hated "This Love" when I heard the album the first time, so I'm irritated that it's the new single. It repeatedly hits a note that sets my teeth on edge. I like "Through With You" much more. Beyond that, I think it's too pop-y when the nice thing about the band is the Motownish sound. And the video is even worse! Wow, it's irritating. It is worth seeing twice -- once for the uncensored version, which really didn't seem that naughty to me, and once for the "children's hour" version where the nekkid couple is inexplicably surrounded by floating cascades of flower petals that hide their shame. I kind of like it for the surreal value, because the flowers make an interesting change from pixilizing everything. And because they seem as concerned with hiding the male singer's bare chest as with the chick's naughty bits. But mostly I just like screaming "Aaaa! We're under attack by flowers!" And then I pretend that the song is about how they had to break up because of the horrible zombie flowers. Look, I've been getting like 5 hours of sleep a night all week, I'm pretty easily amused right now. Anyway, hate the video, but it's worth seeing anyway.

Finally got out to the comic shop again. Whee!

I got The One, by Rick Veitch. There were a bunch of older books by Veitch that appear to have come out in new TPBs, which is cool. Veitch really impressed me with Greyshirt. The One is... eh. Okay. As apocalyptic fantasies go. It's about the end of the world and three engineered superheroes and some mysterious collective-unconsciousness type figures trying to lead humanity in different directions. Yeah, it's tricky to summarize. I liked elements of it more than I liked the whole thing -- the Nazi ubermaus, and Howard-Hughes-ish Itchy Itch, and Jay-Hole being carried around on a giant mass of worshippers. I guess I liked the really twisted bits, and they didn't seem to mesh so well with the more idealistic parts about mankind being transformed into a loving swirly-faced blob of enlightenment. Or whatever. It's kind of got that Spider Robinson vibe where the dark aspects work a lot better than the cheery aspects. Oh, hey, Veitch has a little corner of the web here and The One is from 1983. Context matters a bit. Anyway, all things considered, I probably should have gotten Brat Pack, which sounds a bit more caustic and more to my tastes. So I'll pick it up next time. This has been an extremely unhelpful blurb, I know, but I honestly don't know how to sum the book up so I give up.

I probably won't do much better describing volume 2 of Warren Ellis's Bad Signal, which collects his random email journals/rants/free-associations from the second half of 2002. Some stuff I'd saved until my tragic email crash is in there: the afterword to Rex Mantooth, and comments about Farscape (which please me because he, too, complains that the fourth season is gibberish intended for hard-core fans and no one else) and Buffy ("I'm not going to look at Buffy until I get some kind of written guarantee that they won't sing again."), and snippets of poor Ron Moore's encounter with Fandom. And the suggestion that Batman could take care of things once and for all if he he just ripped off the Joker's nipples. Hm, and I just noticed that the page numbers in the table of contents are off. Not throughout, but it looks like the trouble starts with the pieces on page 23. Maybe the Illuminati are up to something. They're only off by a page after that, so it looks like someone just forgot page 23 existed. Anyway, it's funny, is all.

Thanks to the fabulous discounts of the "old crap we'd like to get rid of" table, I finally got a copy of The Art of Gormenghast. I'd eyed it somewhat longingly from time to time for, well, years I guess, but it was a little pricey. For 60% off, though, I'll happily take a big book full of pictures of Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Er, and there are some pictures of other people in there, too. I haven't really read it, just flipped through reading snippets, but much like the show, it's pretty. The book's sort of a behind-the-scenes thing; there are chapters about Peake, and some of his original sketches, and blurbs by most of the cast about the characters they played, and the albino crow they were lucky enough to find for the show, and a production diary by the producer. Also, a lot of close-up photos of the costumes, which were incredibly detailed. The buttons on Swelter's uniform were little owl-heads! Way to go, BBC. So now I want to watch the show again. Unfortunately a certain someone I can only identify as "My Brother" has borrowed the DVDs. Harumph.

And I think I got some other stuff I haven't read yet, so I have even less to say about it.

I enjoyed the Wonderfalls premiere. Johanna thought it was a little too sweet, I think, but I'm keen on the whole pinball aspect. My understanding (which may be shaky) is that each week, Jaye does some apparently random things on the instruction of the animal avatars, and then the chain of cause-and-effect leads to an unexpected happy ending in the last act. Which is a premise that, I hope, lends itself to some clever writing. I like Jaye a lot -- and I think the actress is great, her expressions crack me up -- but there's my whole thing where liking a character wouldn't really be enough for me to tune in by itself. The possibility of being surprised (!) by a network program is a lot more appealing. Since it's in the timeslot of doom, and I have a lot of respect for Tim Minear, I figured I'd give it another plug and link to his plea for people to give it a try. I like Minear because he's funny, and he wrote some good, dark stuff for Angel, and he's got the stones to interact with people online, which has to be maddening sometimes. I mean, I'm sure I've been one of the madness-inducing things from his point of view. And I've been maddened myself, but at least I'm getting paid for it. Plus, he's earned a lot of goodwill from being willing to diss his own work on occasion. Anyway, I thought Wonderfalls was fun, and I'd like to have something on TV that doesn't qualify as "work" or "guilty pleasure," so give it a try. Fridays on Fox, 9 PM EST.

Oh, and the official site has an audio commentary for the pilot, which is a really neat thing to do. I listened to it on a dial-up without problem, which is even neater. Plus there's the goofily cheesy (or possibly, cheesily goofy) video for Andy Partridge's theme song.

Reread Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things. The problem with Auster is that he's so much about style. And if you like the style, it's fun. But it's hard to talk about the plot. I mean, okay, it's a story about a woman who goes off to a big dystopian city, and the first few chapters are just describing a civilization in decay, and it's not quite SF but you could certainly read it that way. And then she has misadventures, and makes some friends, and then horrible things happen, and then more horrible things happen, and then things start looking up, and then there's random violence, and then it wraps up with a vaguely optimistic ending. The plot is there, but it isn't... well, important, in some ways. It's not my favorite Auster book by a long shot, partly because it's so full of misery. But I reread it pretty quickly, so it's not like I hated it.

I followed it up with Mr. Vertigo. Which is officially my least favorite Auster book. I just don't know what the point was at all. I don't even want to talk about it. It's not even that I hated it; the book is just a series of events without much meaning I can discern, so I honestly have nothing to say. I guess most Auster books could be summed up that way. So maybe it's that the events aren't even particularly interesting to me? Or maybe I just don't like the narrator much.

I read Harlan Ellison's Web of the City a while back, when I remembered that I'd bought it a long time ago and hadn't actually read it. This is is first novel, based on a few months he spent running with a NYC street gang when he was just a tiny little baby, practically. It's not great. But it's interesting if you like Ellison, and it's certainly not bad. It starts with a kid who's trying to leave the gang he's in, and then it becomes a murder mystery. It reminded me a lot of Vachss, which surprised me -- it the hardboiled prose and the removed narration and just the life-on-the-streets plotline. The characters are a bit cartoonish sometimes, although he does a good job of explaining what the kids get out of being in a gang. And sometimes the prose is over-the-top, and then sometimes it's quite nice. I don't know if I'd seek it out if you aren't an Ellison fan anyway, but it's not just a curiosity. It's sort of damning with faint praise, but for a pulp noir story from 1958, it's a good read.

In some recent comic store jaunt I got Human Target: Final Cut, by Peter Milligan. It's prettier than the floppy I picked up whenever that was (the art in this is by Javier Pulido) plus having a whole story made it little easier to get a grip on the premise. Hm. It's been a while, but: I liked moments, and I liked the plot, but somewhere in between in didn't grab me as much. But it does feature a lot of fucked-up people doing awful things to each other, which Milligan always does well. I guess I'd give it a B; it's worth checking out if you don't see something else you want more.

Oh, geez, I can't believe I didn't talk about this. My comic shop had The Factor on their "going cheap" table. It's cool! It's from 1998-99, and there are 5 issues by Nat Gertler & various artists. Per the blurb, it's "about the effect the presence of a superhero has on others." Each issue has a couple short stories about people talking about this superhero, "The Factor." Who only appears in their descriptions of him. So it's another version of the "realistic treatment of superheros" but it's a really interesting version. And you don't ever get any details on what, if any, superpowers The Factor has; the focus is just how other people feel or behave as a result of this vigilante running around fighting crime. A woman has romantic fantasies about him, kids pretend to be him, criminals worry about him, victims pray for him, movie studios prepare to market him, websites discuss him, other comics parody him... All very post-modern and stuff, but most of the stories are really interesting by themselves, and I'm happy I bought it. "To Serve and Protect" is probably my favorite story; it's about a cop talking to a shrink about The Factor.