The Comic Strip Library has high-resolution copies of Little Nemo in Slumberland. Winsor McCay was one of the great founding fathers of modern comics and animation. Seventy-five years after his death, his experiments in animation, entirely hand-drawn, frame by frame, have aged badly, but they still have a particular whimsical charm.
I just felt that this was important enough to share.
Satoshi Kon died last week, a little bit shy of his 47th birthday. He left some parting thoughts on his blog, and, shortly after, Makiko Itoh was kind enough to translate.
I find it hard to explain how much of a loss this is, partly because it’s so hard to explain him as a director. He was one of the few anime directors who can make me sit back and digest his work for a few minutes after seeing it. He had an amazing sense of unity, of visual and narrative composure.
Try Magnetic Rose, for example, part of the Memories collection (someone has also uploaded it on youtube for your sampling pleasure). It’s only about forty minutes long, but he wrung out every second of it, and he left me feeling harder-hit, emotionally, than most directors can after entire two-hour movies. He was a consummate craftsman, always trying to push the bounds of his medium and of his own abilities. Even as he lay dying in a hospital bed, he couldn’t escape that instinct.
While my wife was running around getting things in place for my escape, I was pleading with doctors “If I can go home for even half a day, there are things I can still do!”, then waiting alone in the depressing hospital room for death. I was lonely, but this was what I was thinking.
“Maybe dying won’t be so bad.”
I didn’t have any reasons for it, and perhaps I needed to think like that, but I was surprisingly calm and relaxed.
However, there was just one thought that was gnawing away at me.
“I don’t want to die here…”
As I thought that, something moved out from the calendar on the wall and started to spread around the room.
“Oh dear, a line marching out from the calendar. My hallucinations aren’t at all original.”
Like so much else that he produced, I think that one moment says everything that it needed to say.
For about two months now I’ve been trying to explain something that’s been bothering me about Fanime, but I really can’t find the right words. It makes me very sad to admit this, but it doesn’t feel like home anymore. Instead I feel lost, in transition maybe, surrounded by people I have come to call my own, but ultimately unable to connect, and sometimes unable even to comprehend.
Over the years I’ve made some wonderful friends, and I don’t regret a minute of the time I got to spend with them. One way or the other I plan to see them all again. In between, though, this year felt empty, with long and silent pauses stretching to fill the space, hours of going through the motions without any feeling. I don’t remember cons ever feeling quite so lonely.
I miss really being able to meet people, to sit down and get to know them. I miss making friends that I get to keep, that I still get to talk with sometimes when the weekend is over. Maybe I’ve grown old and serious.
Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess.
I’ve moved to Florida, despite California’s last, harshest attempts to keep me in the state. I like it, for the most part, though in all the rushing around I’ve neglected this site terribly.
I’ll try to catch up. I need to get back into the habit.
I think I saw it coming.
Back in February I posted a link to Don Peck’s article about the long unemployment crisis and the impact it’s likely to have on our country and our culture. It clicked with some long-floating anxieties, and, sure enough, in April, my company closed its virtual doors. The company gave me a little bit of severance, better than a slap in the face but not by much.
It had been a long time coming. Sometimes I look back and I’m surprised that we lasted as long as we did.
The job search was… both better and worse than I expected, really. I decided that I would submit one job application or sit for one job interview, every weekday, until I found a new position. Weekends and Fanime I kept for myself, and I did take one “vacation” day. Job searching took up about two hours out of every day, and interviews generally took between one and three, depending on how much time I had to spend getting there. It felt like a light search, but others tell me that it was actually pretty aggressive.
This week, Adrian has begun the rather frantic process of trying to pack up his entire life and move cross-country. He is also trying to put together a few thoughts on Fanime, but his time is very limited right now. It is very sudden and very confusing. I think he is as surprised by it all as everyone else, but I will try to keep him on track. In the meantime, I am here to entertain you.
Originally I wanted to show you all how to make a nice dinner, but… it has not gone as planned. A wonderful artist named Barlee drew a picture of the ensuing chaos.
