Love, Blood and Rhetoric

Welp, it looks like Twittinesis is dead and it may be permanent. Which means my Twitter has no longer been feeding to Livejournal.

Which, well, basically means I have no content here. I rarely do Livejournal any more. The large bulk of all my blogging activity has shifted over to Tumblr.

So, if you're not following me either on Tumblr or Twitter, things are going to be pretty quiet around here. As is the case, I suspect, for most people.

Those of you who do want to keep up with my activities can, of course, follow me on Twitter. However, my Tweets there are protected, so I'll have to approve you as a friend and, to be honest, are now mostly just fed from my Tumblr account anyway.

So, if you do want to continue following my public content here on Livejournal, it's pretty easy. Just add angelophile_tum as a friend. That's the feed syndicated from my Tumblr so any and all posts I make there will turn up on your Friends page. Simple!

I will still be posting here, but most likely on a monthly basis, not a daily one.

"Cheerful Mrs Mole pottered happily around her idyllic home, stitching patchwork, making cakes, stirring pots, arranging flowers, at an absolutely gruesome time in the lives of the cartoonist Ronald Searle and his wife, Monica.The complete collection of Mrs Mole drawings, created by Searle and intended as private, bittersweet jokes never meant for publication, will go on display at the Cartoon Museum in London this week.

In 1969, Monica was diagnosed with breast cancer and given only a few months to live. She was offered a course of what in those days was seen as an experimental form of chemotherapy. Searle, regarded by his peers as the greatest living cartoonist, recalls his reaction: "I had only my talent for drawing ... so I drew."

He gave her the Mrs Mole drawings as she lay in her hospital bed in Paris, one for each of her treatments, showing Monica's alter ego cheerful and busy in a setting heavily based on their own home in a village in Provence.

The drawings were full of details from their domestic life: her grandmother also pottered about carrying a basket of keys, and in the renovation of their own house they had recently discovered a bundle of huge, ancient keys. Monica recalled: "I would lie in bed, living the life he created in the pictures."

She was pronounced clear of the cancer in 1975, and today they still live in Mrs Mole's beautiful house.

Searle, whose first published drawings recall the three and a half years he survived in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and who went on to create the hellish schoolgirls from St Trinians and the immortal Nigel Molesworth, has been awarded a CBE in Britain and the Legion d'Honneur in his adopted home in France. He is a trustee of the Cartoon Museum, which mounted a retrospective last year to mark his 90th birthday.

The museum is working with breast cancer charities on the exhibition, which runs until 20 March."

(Source)

I really want to get to see this. Ronald Searle is most probably Britain's finest cartoonist and illustrators and has had so much influence over his career. Not least on me - my dad owned one of his book of cartoons "Back to the Slaughterhouse" and it was one of my favourite reads as a child. Beautifully twisted and the ideal thing to warp a young child for life in the best possible way.

I’ve been dipping out of Nu Who recently, skipping randomly between Eccleston, Tennant and Smith. It’s quite interesting to pit them against one another and one thing that’s apparent is how much fonder I’ve grown of Matt Smith and Chris Eccleston’s depictions, at the expense of Tennant. In fact, the more I rewatch Nine, the more love I feel. Eccleston’s Doctor is endearing, but he’s got that intensity as an actor that’s missing from Tennant’s run. (Of course, John Barrowman complained that he was too intense, but, well, fuck you Barrowman. It’s an acting gig, not a social club.) When Tennant’s called on to be intense and angry, he does that whole “Oh nonononono,” head-shakey thing and then gets all SHOUTY, like a puffer fish. But when Nine goes that route I really believe he’s going to kick some bottom.

It’s not entirely Tennant’s performance though. Eccleston had some stronger material to work with, the first series of rebooted Who didn’t rely on SUPER-DOCTOR! so often, with the character pulling new abilities out of his bum every other week and he was paired with a likable version of Rose, as opposed to the rather smug and selfish character she later became.

But, yeah, Eccleston. He’s still not my favourite Doctor by some margin, but he’s definitely overtaken Tennant on rewatches, who’s slipping down into the Colin Baker and John Pertwee zone the more I rewatch his episodes. Nine, on the other hand, has been growing on me over time. He’s endearingly goofy a lot of the time - proving that Eccleston could do silly and fun, which is why he apparently took the role - but when he does get serious, he’s superb.

Also, I may never forgive Ten for what he did to Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North, Prime Minister and Former Prime Minister.

You know who she is.

Did finally watch this movie over the holidays. And while I wasn't as enamoured of it as the majority of critics seem to be (trending 98% on Rotten Tomatoes to Toy Story 3's 99%), I did find it an enjoyable ride and certainly a huge step above the standard Dreamwidth's animation studios have usually been attaining in general.

The story wasn't groundbreaking and certainly not on a par with Toy Story 3 for making you feel the whole gamut of human emotion (I still consider TS3 the best movie of last year and one of the best movies of all time, animated or not) but the movie was definitely entertaining and endearing. And the animation was also a step above Dreamwork's norm (although the backgrounds and landscapes were so lovingly rendered in exquisite realistic detail than the more stylized central characters occasionally looked at odds with them). It's just a little bit of a shame that the supporting characters weren't so defined and, as seems to be commonplace in Dreamworks flicks, I walked away not actually remembering the names of any of the characters outside of Astrid, Toothless and Hiccup, whereas even with minor characters like Slink or Rex in the Toy Story movies, their names are reiterated enough to stick in the mind. A little thing, I know, but the little things make the difference between a good movie and a great one.

Anyway, good fun and definitely a good choice as a Christmas present for my nephew who was hooked on the whole thing.

Just wrapped up reading Volume 2 of Scott Pilgrim. More enjoyable than the first volume for me and it's nice seeing the characters start to develop and come into their own. Knives, Kim, Wallace and Stacey are still who I'm reading for, but I was pleased to find myself warming to Ramona after a rather underdeveloped role in the first volume. She's definitely growing on me and I even like her - something never clicked with the movie's take on the character. I guess she was meant to be deadpan, but it seemed more bland, whereas in this volume she's got a lot more personality to her and doesn't just exist in Scott's orbit.

Scott, however... Well, yeah, I get that he's not necessarily supposed to be a good person in the early volumes, but I spent most of my time reading his scenes and reactions and just shaking my head and thinking "what an asshole." I don't think he's a hipster or epitomizes jerk nerds, I just think he's a total jackass. And, much as I wish it didn't, it does dull my enjoyment of the book somewhat. While the supporting cast and quirkiness of the book, and the setting itself, are attractive, it just takes the edge off it when Scott's around. I'll actually give credit to Cera for making Scott whiny and self-absorbed but likable in the movie, whereas I spend most of the panel time with Scott in the comic gritting my teeth.

But it's a pleasurable read otherwise, with everything else about the book being attractive and I'm definitely hooked and looking forwards to seeing what happens to the characters next. Apparently they tried to deliver the next three volumes today, but as I'm currently snowbound, I doubt I'll be able to pick them up from the post office for a few days.

Let's get LJ and Tumblr talking, shall we?

Leave me a celebrity or fictional character in my askbox and I'll give you my honest opinion about them.

Ask!

Here's something I've never seen. The original ending of Little Shop of Horrors has been dug up from the rare Special Edition (withdrawn after producer David Geffen protested this material's inclusion) and made its way onto Youtube. Sadly, the colour prints of the original ending were destroyed in a studio fire, so the black and white work print is all that remains.

It's easy to see why it wasn't popular with test audiences and was changed. Yes, I know that it's closer, if not identical, to the stage version of the musical, but the ending is by far and away my least favorite part of that.

The last part does include Don't Feed The Plants, with a fantastic B-movie styled visuals, though, which I do think was a shame to lose, so it's nice to see it finally. Apparently the sequence cost $5m to produce using various miniatures and paying tribute to movies like King Kong and War of the Worlds, amongst others. But, as Frank Oz commented after it was cut: "In a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don't come out for a bow, they're dead. And the audience loved those people, and they hated us for it."

Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

Yeah, my experimentations with integrating Tumblr and Livejournal seamlessly together seem doomed to failure.

Mostly I've been trying to set up a dual system because I find I'm increasingly using Twitter and Tumblr for general updates. Since going Friends Only here, I've been internally re-designating this journal as more like my own personal space, where I talk about stuff that's been going on in my life, along with Twitter being for general commentary that I only want to share with specific people, rather than the whole world.

Tumblr's evolved into the space I use for other stuff - the non-personal stuff which is just link dumps, videos, pictures I like, etc etc, which I look to share with everyone. (Whether they want me to or not, probably.) But it'd be nice to integrate both personal and general bollocks under one roof.

I have discovered Posterous.com, which is a neat tool to crosspost blog entries across multiple platforms - so it will post content to Livejournal, Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress, Facebook etc with one click, which is extremely useful. It's not seamless, however, and embedding video and pictures isn't as intuitive as Tumblr's own posting styles. I've been experimenting a little with the last few entries, as you may have noticed.

But, I think I'll most likely just scrap the idea of an integrated Tumblr and Livejournal. Instead, if you do wish to follow my Tumblr updates, they'll continue to appear as plain text links in my Twitter updates and also as full entries on a separate syndicated account that you can just add as a friend in the usual way here: angelophile_tum

Syndication appears to be a little spotty so far, with entries appearing out of order, but fingers crossed that'll clear up.

Of course, all this is probably something people have no interest in at all - I barely have any followers on Tumblr as it is. (But then, I don't follow that many people either - it's trier to keep up with than LJ, I find). But nonetheless, there's various ways of stalking following my activities, if you wish to do so.