Found Him

With Great Power Come Great Movie Seats

Someone must've heard my incessant references to Amazing Spider-Man #33, because last night my friend Chad invited me to the red carpet premiere of The Amazing Spider-Man, a movie for which my excitement stemmed almost entirely from the video above. Say what you will about how comics and movies don't need to keep rehashing origin stories, but Andrew Garfield is clearly a guy who gets Spider-Man and cares about the character, and that goes a long way with me.

Plus, free popcorn!

The premiere was in Westwood, near UCLA. I took a few pictures of the crazy premiere ambiance, but didn't get any action shots of the time I tipped a large machine over onto Mr. Garfield so I could watch him escape while delivering an inspirational speech, nor did I photograph our subsequent team-up after we resolved our petty differences to fight a common evil. J. Jonah Jameson would have my head.

Spider-van, spider-van! Does whatever a...I'm sorry.

The view from the front of the line.

This was the theater with the stars in it.

There were two theaters, one for talent and one for us. The producers, director (the aptly-named Marc Webb) and cast did pop in to our theater to say "Hi" right before the film got going, though.

It was all a dream...or was it?

Six Seasons and an Art Show!

This past weekend I had the good fortune to attend the Six Seasons and a Movie Art Show hosted by the PixelDrip Gallery in Koreatown. The trailer above explains it better than I can, but basically the event was a collection of fan art celebrating the cult NBC sitcom Community. To say I am a fan of Community is similar to saying that Captain America did not take a shine to Hitler. Anyone who has heard me fail to shut up about this consistently heartfelt and innovative series knows that it is a big part of why I love television, and yesterday afternoon I got to hang out in a gallery filled with fans and artists who felt the same way, and most of whom were as talented as all hell.

Come with me on a magical camera phone tour! Be warned. We're about to look at a bunch of fan art that references a sitcom that references its own references to TV and film tropes. If you're not a fan of the show, it'll get confusing in there. Keep tight hold of my hand.

You enter through a Dreamatorium, so right away you know these guys aren't playing:

The art show, while in many ways a celebration of Community's narrowly escaping cancellation this past season, was also something of a wake for series creator Dan Harmon, who was recently fired by NBC after three seasons as showrunner. Here's a piece called Harmonless, by Harmon's Channel 101 co-founder Rob Schrab:

Note the reference to the Dan Harmon/Chevy Chase phone feud in the background.

Luckily there will be some continuity in the writers' room when Community resumes in the fall. Megan Ganz, who wrote some of the series's best episodes, including "Cooperative Calligraphy" and "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking", will still write for the show. She also contributed a ton of origami sculptures that she made during meetings, fittingly entitled Meeting Notes.

If Ganz were any more my hero, she'd be Batman.

I only caught the tail end of the weekend-long event, but activities included a live band, electronic remixes of music from the sitcom, viral video screenings (this Dark Knight Rises trailer mashup was my favorite), trivia, a Winger Speech contest, and my favorite, textbooks that attendees could deface with their own doodles, just like unenthused students at Greendale Community College!

A Darkest Timeline lemur. The evil goatee is from the Community episode "Remedial Chaos Theory",
which itself references the old Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror". See what I mean?

Inspector Spacetime inspects the cover of this Spanish textbook.

There were plenty of other shout-outs to the show, like Boob-a-tron here:

And this playable demo for Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne:

The references continued into the men's room:

Extras aside, there was some bloody marvelous art on display. The show officially became nerdy enough for me when I saw John Trumbull's picture combining Troy and Abed with Jack Kirby villains MODOK and Arnim Zola:

My new favorite artist from the show is Jennifer Jeong. The works she had on display were crisp and cartoony in a way that nailed the spirit of the series for me. Check out her Evil Abed:

Here's a more elaborate picture by the same artist: Remedial Chaos Theory, an ensemble portrait commemorating season three's best episode.

Check out how simple and different all the individual expressions are: Shirley's indignation, Pierce's sinister good humor, Abed's contemplative puzzlement, Jeff's "Couldn't give a shit" look, Annie's wariness, Troy's defiant candy-cigarette-chewing, and Britta's happy, awkward abandonment. It's an intricate picture with a ton of heart, and for me it shares those qualities with Community itself.

But really, there was never any question about which of Ms. Jeong's prints was going to end up on my wall:

Inspector Spacetime is Community's thinly-veiled version of the long-running British sci-fi series Doctor Who, so this action shot of Abed, Troy and Annie reenacting an Inspector Spacetime adventure is basically a portrait of the baby my two favorite shows had.

Needless to say I'm glad I went. The talent on display was an inspiration, and basking in a room full of love of a television show that is itself based on a love of television...well, it felt communal.

Ikea Week Ends

My apartment now looks like someone lives here or something!

I AM AN ADULT.

Post-it art. Very avant-garde.

The cushion covers are tiny maps to Snugglevania.

The writing desk transforms into a small dining table,
which will be useful when I've written enough to earn meal privileges.

With the studio mostly furnished (and because Stockholm Syndrome was setting in), I turned, tears in my eyes, and bade the Burbank Ikea goodbye. For now.

This all cost a dollar. You can't make me leave.

Why yes, that is an Inspector Spacetime poster propped on the desk! And therein lies a tale. A tale of back alley Koreatown trivia contests, of bowler hats and textbook vandalism. More on that tomorrow.

Ikea Week: Achievement Unlocked

Bed Update: It is now a bed.

Bed!

Thanks to everyone who wrote with bed recommendations, especially Uncle Bob (who advocated for a Murphy) and Em (who recommended a box spring that doubles as a storage container). I'm glad that both of you are as reluctant as I am to give up the dream of owning Transformer furniture. Someday.

Further exploration of the premises has raised disturbing new questions about the apartment. Namely, how the hell did the lady who lived here before me get her hairs stuck to the bathroom wall above the damn mirror?

It curls like a beckoning finger, ushering the beholder into mystery.

Someone explained to me recently that many women, having longer hair than dudes, will stick strands of hair to the shower wall because otherwise the strands would cling to wet skin, in the revolting manner of long, wet hairs the world over. Well and good.

But how and why did someone stick her hair to bathroom walls well outside the shower and above head height? In multiple places? Did she climb furniture to do it? Did she routinely jump up after a shower and slap some hair on the wall in the manner of Georgetown's Hollis Thompson making a slam dunk? Was she a very tall person with terrifyingly long arms? Did the hair float up from the bathroom floor at night and cling to the wall through some combination of static and after hours California weather patterns?

These are the questions that haunt me after sunset as I lie on my Ikea bed and the traffic mutters by on Los Feliz Boulevard.

Ikea Week Lurches On

Erin came through again and helped me resolve my furniture lifting dilemma. I have a bookcase and most of a bed now!

Doesn't look sleepable just yet. Maybe if I put a bedspread on it?

When my furniture starts to look like furniture you can read about it right here.

The Coming of Ikea

Now that I've picked up the keys to my rocking new Los Feliz studio, I have to buy some furniture to replace the imaginary furniture I'm sitting on now:

I didn't like the pattern on the imaginary futon, so then
I imagined a new one that goes much better with the imaginary bed.

I spent much of this afternoon wandering around the Ikea in Burbank, looking for the type of hobbit-sized kitchen table that would fit into the space available, and contemplating buying a combination futon/twin bed/foldout double bed, which would be like rooming with a comfy Transformer.

Ultimately, I decided to sleep on the other stuff and just buy one of those easy-to-assemble, fifty dollar bookcases. Struggling unsuccessfully to lift the bookcase, I saw this cartoon:

Fuck those tiny men and their fucking friendship.

This made me deeply sad.

Then on the drive home I stopped at Emerald Knights (where they pre-polybag everything!) and bought a household item that made everything better.

"Allow me to uppercut your sadness, old chum."

When I go back later in the week, I'm bringing reinforcements.

LACMA

See what I mean about LA's freak-ass urban planning? Look at all these damn streetlamps.

My friend Erin and I went to the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) today to get our museum on.

Excellent things at LACMA:

-The sculpture pictured above, Chris Burden's Urban Light. It's made up of 202 vintage streetlamps from the LA area. It is impossible to own a camera and walk past it and not have a photo op or a chase scene, as demonstrated by the numerous models and little kids who were posing and chasing just out of frame.

-Belgian Surrealist René Magritte's painting La Trahison des images ("The Treachery of Images").

Translation: "This is not a pipe." That sound you hear is Magritte blowing your mind.

-A whole German Expressionism section that will make your hair stand on end, with copies of Albrecht Dürer's apocalypse prints:

Death does not have his game face on. Too stoked.

-An entire, beautifully designed and lit building showcasing Japanese calligraphy and painting, half of which depicts Zen masters being dicks to their pupils. My understanding of Zen is that a master could poke you, hit you with a stick, tweak your nose, cut your finger off, etc, in an effort to shock you out of conscious thought and startle you into enlightenment. There are a number of stories and paintings praising the practice, probably because the storytellers and artists realized that Zen masters were psychopaths and would fucking murder them if their depictions weren't flattering.

Showcasing gorgeous paintings of insane teacher-on-student violence. Also, allegorical gibbons.

Also so much Picasso you guys.

And it's free the second Tuesday of every month! Erin and I only saw a wee bit of the art housed in the eight-building complex, so I'm definitely going back.

Way in the Middle of the Air

My first grown-up novel was Abington Free Library's copy of The Martian Chronicles. I don't know if that was my first encounter with Ray Bradbury; at around the same young age I also read his short story, "The Fog Horn", in the literary treasury my Mom used for her middle school English classes. Both works are as beautiful, imaginative and heart-breaking as anything else ever written. The Martian Chronicles depicts the human colonization of Mars, the extinction of Martian culture, and the eventual destruction of human civilization in a nuclear war. "The Fog Horn" is about a lonely sea monster falling in love with a lighthouse. I cannot overstate how cool and influential these stories are when you come across them as a kid.

The first halfway decent thing I ever wrote (a short story about a kid who foresees nuclear apocalypse while posing for his yearbook photo), and all the terrible-to-middling short stories I wrote in high school and college, were attempts at Ray Bradbury stories. Most of the scripts I write now are attempts to find my own way to places Mr. Bradbury showed me when I was growing up. He proved, decisively and very early in my life, that you could write about rocket ships, time travel, and robots, and still say as much about humanity as any dozen more realistic stories.

Even better than that, the guy was in love with writing itself. His prose is an adrenaline rush, whether he's writing about a haunted house on Mars or a small town in Illinois. He wrote the best science fiction ever, but he also wrote horror stories, disguised memoirs, and detective stories. He threw genres together like a painter making new colors (The Martian Chronicles alone is a rainbow of alternate history, dystopian sci-fi, gothic horror, and more). He wrote every day and credited writing with his long life. He died last night at 91, and from what I've read he never slowed down.

Most people will never be as good or work as hard as he did, but his imagination and his output are constellations by which to navigate. He wrote one short story in which the narrator sees an old friend who used to be a talented young writer but fell out of the habit. Bradbury's narrator (whom I don't think Bradbury even attempted to depict as anyone other than Bradbury himself) is so angry about this that he immediately hops in a time machine, goes back to when the washed-up old ex-writer was still a talented young writer, and kicks the young man's ass until he promises to keep writing. The story's a great motivational tool, and I doubt I'm only young writer who uses it as such.

My copy of The Martian Chronicles is in a box somewhere, but my favorite story therein is "Night Meeting", which is about a lone human meeting a lone Martian on the road during a night drive. From the human's standpoint, the Martians and their cities are all long dead, and from the Martian's standpoint, the human colonists haven't arrived yet and their towns haven't been built. So the Martian tells the human about the wonders of the Martian city, a place of wine-filled canals and ravishing women of flame, and the human tells the Martian about the Earth towns springing up all over the red planet, and the two part as friends, each bewildered by a glimpse of a weird, dreamlike world neither one of them would have found on his own.

Mr. Bradbury has boarded a rocket for parts unknown. But, bless him, he and his works are also still here, like that Martian on the road and the otherworldly city he calls home.

Moving Day