Movie Moment — Breaking news, Three Musketeers, 2011, is in pre-pro!

At first I was totally dismayed and worried when I heard there’d been slated a new movie adaptation of The Three Musketeers because Dumas’ adventure books were such good friends to me for so many years (this clearly merits a re-read actually; it’s been too long). But then I saw that Paul W.S. Anderson was at the helm and my sphincter relaxed.

The lovely and talented Ms. Milla J.

Then I saw Milla Jovovich was in it — not because Anderson is her husband but because she is amazing and anyone who says otherwise can shut their piehole or I’ll shut it for them — and I did backflips. I’m going to dwell on this a lot until its release. For today, a quick look at the cast:

Lerman is on the left doing delightful jazz hands.

Logan Lerman (D’Artagnan) was most recently in the movie Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Two-bit Monkeyshines and the Missing Noxzema Pad as the titular Percy Jackson; the most surprising credit on his absolutely stacked resume is The Butterfly Effect. No one gives that movie enough credit. Pretend Hashton Euchre is someone else (as I have just done) and that movie is strikingly awesome. Anyway, I think this kid looks too young to play the dashing Gascon protagonist and I fear he was chosen to appeal to the tween demographic, which has even more worrisome ramifications because a faithful adaptation of the first book can only result in a PG-13 rating at best unless some Disney-style plot-monkeying has been done, but I look forward with cautious optimism to being proven wrong on all counts. Paul W.S. Anderson wouldn’t do me like that. We go back to Event Horizon, man: it’s us to the mortuary.

Wildly underrated darling Paul Dano. What a talent.

If I had been the casting director, D’Artagnan would be played by: Paul Dano or Emile Hirsch. Guys who’ve proven their chops in challenging, dramatic, serious roles (Little Miss Sunshine and Speed Racer, respectively) — just kidding, obviously in Hirsch’s case I am referring to the film adaptation of Into the Wild — and can handle the emotional demands of the part. Again, I would hope with all my heart that Logan Lerman proves me wrong. Good luck, kiddo: I really am pulling for you.

Very talented upcoming actor James Corden. Glad to see him cast in a big part, hope it is worthy of him.

James Corden will play D’Artagnan’s servant, Planchet. That he is billed up in the top 10 is weird to me, so they must have beefed up his part. The casting directors have gone the portly-servant-to-the-handsome-gentleman route with their choice, a trope so cliched as to almost be commedia dell’arte in its typecasting, but not quite that creative; just predictable. However, that is not the kid’s fault and I give James Corden props for having appeared on an episode of Dr. Who. I look forward to seeing what he brings to his perhaps-more-significant-than-normal portrayal of Planchet. (edit: Supafly Gordon Fraser has the skinny on the bigness of Mr. Corden; read all about his popularity in the UK in the comments — mystery solved to a satisfying and encouraging conclusion!)

I would have liked to have seen: a real skinny, fair, left-field, oddball hottie like Jesse Tyler Ferguson or Mike White.

Ray Stevenson is Porthos. He’s been working like a madman lately and clearly has the skillz to pay the billz, Big Budget Picture-wise: Cirque Du Freak, The Book of Eli, The Other Guys, and the forthcoming Thor are all recent credits — dude knows his way around an action flick, for sure. All in all, I approve. He is an Irish boy, so my hands are tied. It is a foregone conclusion that I will adore him. Porthos is the party guy of the Musketeers, so it’s also nice to see that Mr. Stevenson will get to play against type and not have to be strictly the big toughie, but get to enjoy a little wine, women, and song along with his usual dealing-out of ass-kickings.

My ideal casting: Donal Logue. Duh.

Matthew Macfayden has been cast as Athos. Most recently Mr. Macfayden played the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, though his awesomest resume credit is from Grindhouse as “hatchet victim” in the Don’t segment. I wish I could put “hatchet victim” on my resume. Well, on reflection, I suppose not. “Hatchet survivor” is so much more optimistic. Macfayden’s most impressive credit is for the television special Nuremberg: Nazis on Trail, on which he served as the narrator for the episodes on Goering, Hess, and Speer. I admire that.

Athos is supposed to be the oldest of the group and kind of reserved, which works with Mr. Macfayden’s intelligent-but-pinchy face, like he worries a lot about things, but I’m concerned about him being too young and handsome to realistically portray Athos as older than this cast’s Porthos (above). Also, there’s the him-and-Milady thing. Milla is such a badass and so unthinkably beautiful and vital compared to his own type of fitness and vibe, that kind of sinewy, reedy runner build, so if they do any sexytimes flashback I’m concerned it will seem imbalanced. I’m afraid I have to glance askance at this casting and again just hope to be blown away when I see the movie.

I would have chosen: Clive Owen.

Luke Evans is set to portray Aramis, my favorite of the Musketeers. He is very multi-faceted as a character which makes him a satisfying companion to follow when you’re reading the adventures. Aramis is both bookish and restless; a dreamer who also plans; much more religious than the others but also given to double-dealing; patient in allowing his machinations to take shape but simultaneously governed by impulse and wild ambition, which he backs up with intricate, Machiavellian plots that generally succeed. He is somewhat the visionary of the group.

As far as face goes, Mr. Evans looks sensitive but smart enough to accurately portray Aramis, although I’d have preferred to see Cillian Murphy, who could have handled the breezy humor and abrupt mood shifts of Aramis’s temperament, and whose resume could use a famous-good-guy credit after turning in such impressively villainous performances in RedEye and the Nolan Batman films.

Then again, I prefer to see Cillian Murphy in just about anything. Mr. Evans is probably in due to being the sheriff’s henchman in Robin Hood and Apollo in Clash of the Titans, so he will be back in action with Mr. Macfayden. (Did the casting directors go directly to the sets for all these recruitments or is some incestuous, neopotic agency simply teeming with busy bees.)

In a perfect world: Cillian Murphy, as I have made abundantly clear.

Christoph Waltz has got the nod to play Cardinal Richelieu. You know him — Inglorious Basterds, a one mister Herr Landa? Guy spent the last twenty years working his ass off mainly on German TV and has totally earned his day in the sun. Good on him and I think he will bring an appropriately balanced Richelieu to the screen for maybe the first time ever: usually he is portrayed as a straightforward villain. Cardinal Richelieu is a more complex character than that — not as uniquely complex as Rochefort, who in the books eventually becomes friends with the Musketeers many years later, but still less one-dimensional than film adaptations traditionally demonstrate — and I hope for good things from Mr. Waltz.

I would have gone with: meh. I am happy with Christoph Waltz in this role. Richelieu is not the main or most intriguing villain of the piece and I like a capable, team player like Waltz in the part because I would hate to see him pull a Tim Curry-style upstaging of the next character on my list — Milady de Winter.

Milla for High Times, October 1994, related to her appearance in Linkletter’s Dazed and Confused.

Milla Jovovich plays Milady. Yes.

That’s all I have to say about the casting choice. Yes. Yes. I love her almost beyond expression, like admire her and genuinely wish good things for her despite having never met her but not in a crazy way, and I have seen all of her movies so many times over, particularly The Messenger: Joan of Arc — and now she is portraying one of my favorite characters from literature, my darling Milady de Winter? YES. Yes. I want to see this movie YESTERDAY.

I would have picked: OBVIOUSLY MILLA. She should just play all the parts and then go on tour with her live, one-man Three Musketeers and I will go to every show.

They’ve cast Mads Mikkelsen as the V.I.P. villain-cum-henchman Rochefort, seen most recently in Clash of the Titans (Draco) and Casino Royale (Le Cheffre). If this storyline is starting from the popular and most usual point for dramatic adaptations, when D’Artagnan first meets and joins forces with the Musketeers, then Rochefort is supposed to be memorably creepy and a figure of mystery for much of this film. His most overriding characteristic, besides his swordsmanship, is that as a character he is very, very recognizable. Mikkelsen looks great, but I’m not sure he will be creepy enough to believably carry such a stamp, if that makes sense? The very figure of Rochefort is supposed to inspire pervasive dread.

My choice: Crispin Glover, who must surely soon begin to enjoy a renaissance of mainstream key-playing work due to his successful reviews in Alice in Wonderland. He plays a good villain and some time under a sun lamp to gain a proper Gallic bronze would do him good anyway. Plus I think he is hot and I’ve always been a big fan.

Twinkle-Toes P. Banananose, the 4th, has been cast as the Duke of Buckingham. Anyone know anything about this guy? I couldn’t find anything at all on him. Seems he has no career whatsoever and is an utter nobody. What a shame. Moving on.

Alternate casting choice: ANYONE ELSE.

Lovely young Juno Temple (she knows what she has to do to get billed “and talented”) will play Queen Anne of Austria. She was most recently in Dirty Girl, a forthcoming bildungsroman epic of sorts with Milla in it, so I’ll know more about her as soon as it comes out, since, as I mentioned, I have sworn a blood oath of lifelong devotion to Milla Jovovich and would sooner pluck out my eyeballs and eat them than miss one of her movies — but, like I said, it’s not in a crazy way. Or anything. Ms. Temple seems a very young choice for a film that also has the Duke of Buckingham in the cast, because their affair is such a major plot point in the story of D’Artagnan and the Musketeers first collaborating to save the Queen’s honor and defeat Richelieu.

Prediction: the newest incarnation will not feature a Bryan Adams song.

Those who know only the Disney version will not be familiar with this twist — I know, how shocking that Disney whitewashed and played fast and loose with an adaptation of a literary classic; I am as surprised and chagrined as you are. What a terrible and uncharacteristic shock this is. Anyway, if the entanglement between Buckingham and Queen Anne starts now … and Twinkle-Toes P. Banananose, the 4th, is scripted to be pawing this poor kid on the screen … I’m going to be pretty skeeved out. I mean, I know she’s 21 and all, but … ew. He’s just so very ew. Showers are free — just go out in the rain, buddy.

My pick: Anne Hathaway. No brainer.

Final picture of Anne Hathaway for, you know … Science.

All in all, I can’t wait for a picture so close to my heart and directed by someone I trust to come out and I’m sorry but you must expect to hear plenty more about it.

Daily Batman: Robin’s nest is dynamite

via holywowbatman on the tumblr.

Hey. Sometimes a stick of dynamite is just a stick of dynamite.

Movie Millisecond: Teen Wolf

Teen Wolf (Rod Daniel, 1985).

Jeremy Levine, why do you not call.

Enough said.

E.E. Cummings Month: Inaugural Edition and an explanation

Welcome to E.E. Cummings* month.

via.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

via.

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

(E.E. Cummings, “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond.” ** 1931.)

The last line is my favorite. It is sort of aching and bittersweet because I find it beautiful but also sad in that I’m lonely. But here is why I like it. Drops of rain themselves are so small and simple and ought change nothing but in numbers and with insistence they can unstoppably drench everything around them and produce a deluge: that’s a great metaphor for love, which starts with such a small thing like a smile or a handshake and then increases itself even within minutes to become this powerful force that changes what your world was up until that point. Like rain. Does this make sense? I feel like I might have stopped making sense.

*I had always been put off by the lowercase “e.e. cummings” that you encounter in anthologies and the like because it seemed a little dramatic and juvenile, kind of put-on, but I’ve recently found that Cummings signed all his work “E.E. Cummings,” and used the capitalized form professionally and with his peers, and that the lowercase with which we are familiar was a result of several misconceptions at the publishing level which were given shockingly wide dissemination even after having been proven false.

Example of his signature.

There is a good and thorough story about it here, written by Norman Friedman, a writer, critic, and close friend of Cummings and his common-law wife, Marion Morehouse, which includes specific comments from Ms. Morehouse indicating her opinion that the widespread use of her deceased’s husband’s name in lowercase was inaccurate idiocy and asking her friend to intercede with the publishers to remove factual errors from the preface about him having legally changed his name to “e.e. cummings” and have it capitalized on the spine and jacket as well as within. Mr. Friedman wrote a follow-up article three years later, voicing his distress that the error has not been widely corrected and calling the inaccurate lowercase usage “cutesy-pooh” and “pure nonsense.”

Does this look like a dude who would go in for “cutesy-pooh” nonsense? No.

Mr. Friedman also uncovered in the years between the two articles a request from an editor while Cummings was alive asking in what case to set Cummings’ name on a book cover: how should it appear? because he understood the poet to prefer a lack of capitals. Cummings replied, quote, “E.E. Cummings.” Done deal in my book.

At any rate, I’m so glad to shake off of him the dust of what I had always feared was pretentiousness! So I’m capping his name all month and have retconned*** past lowercase usage into uppercase, is the main thing.

**Untitled works — and Cummings seldom used titles — are referred to by their opening line.

***Retcon: retroactive continuity, a term used mainly in comics and speculative fiction which I explained in better detail in my Music Moment entry on Julie Nunes.

Daily Batman: Sleek Jul-Newms edition

Cats = Women, Exhibit xxx.

via batmania.

“Cats are sleek, cats are fast. Cats are … well — they aren’t mean; they’re just wiley. And they will grab your attention in the most seductive way.”

(Julie Newmar.)

Take it to the bank.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Choose wisely, take two

Gotta keep ’em separated.



(Previous edition featuring Rammstein.)

Goethe Month: Sometimes it is good to be wrong featuring guest artist Landy Wardoll

Goethe Month coda and art by that One Guy.

The website from which I took this picture says:

This screenprint is based on a painting by the German artist Johann Tischbein. It depicts Johann von Goethe, a key figure in German literature as a traveller in a landscape of ruins. Warhol has cropped the original composition so as to create a head and shoulders portrait of the writer. Goethe had contemplated painting as an early career choice and published a book on the theory of colour. As the first person to study the psychological affects of colour, it is interesting to think what he would make of Warhol’s representation of him as a Pop icon.

via warholarts.com.
Near the end of his life, Goethe wrote to his friend and editor Eckermann,

My dear friend, I will tell you something that may be of use to you, when you are going over my works.

They will never become popular; there will be single individuals who will understand what I want to say, but there can be no question [that the work will be unpopular].

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter to Johann Peter Eckermann.)

Sometimes it is good to be wrong. Farewell, Goethe Month.

Who’s next?

Girls of Summer: Jonnie Nicely, Miss August 1956

Photographed by Hal Adams.

Total sassafrass: brace yourselves for the sap flood.

Playboy readers are a strongly partisan bunch, quick to tell us when they like something — or when they don’t. Last October, we were faced with the delightful dilemma of choosing between two potential Playmates, each lovely in her own way.

(“Command Performance: A near miss makes a curvy comeback.” Playboy, August 1956.)

We hemmed, hawed, made our choice; and in addition to the Playmate proper, we printed photos of the girl who didn’t quite make it. The result was a deluge of letters telling us we were blind as the well-known bat and should have picked the other girl.

(Ibid.)

I think even in 1956 if a man said simperingly to a fellow bachelor, “Blind as the well-known bat,” with his pinky up all hmmhmmHMM, he would’ve got his ass kicked. Unless it was Noel Coward. That dude was hard core.

The other girl’s name was, and is, Jonnie Nicely. She’s Miss August, and we’re glad. It grieved us to turn her down before.

(Ibid.)

Nice fawning write-up, but the wiki suggests the murky October shenanigans went down differently:

Nicely was originally supposed to be a Playmate for the October 1955 issue, but scheduling and creative conflicts temporarily pushed her aside in favor of Jean Moorhead.

Creative conflict? What an interesting and euphemistic phrase. I wonder what the real story is.

This picture was not included in the original spread but comes rather from The First Fifteen Years. Seeing as it is so close in composition to the picture which was ultimately selected as the centerfold, my guess is that it was down to those two poses and perhaps a few others as to which would be run as the main gatefold shot. I also conjecture that this one didn’t make the cut because she is not quite looking in to the camera.

Ms. Nicely hails from Fort Smith, Arkansas, where the US Marshals have their National Museum. Fort Smith’s nickname is “Hell on the Border.” The town motto is: “Life’s worth living in Fort Smith, Arkansas,” which I understand is to encourage residency and visitation, but all I can think when I read it is, “… unlike in Detroit.”

This picture was not included in either of her Playboy appearances. It must have come from a shoot for a different periodical. I threw it up anyway because I dig the “Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish” vibe that’s happening here. If you know the photograph’s provenance, please feel free to lay it on me.

This is so Psycho. Yes? The italian boy hairstyling, the thick brows and light-bullet bra, the pencil skirt and mirrored moment of intimacy. Very Janet Leigh as dictated by Hitchcock. But the picture predates the film by four years, so I’m not suggesting it was deliberate. Just echo-y.

These pictures are markedly different and grainier than all the others, so they may be the early October shots in question. Alternately, they may be poses for a different magazine, and the photos which are mentioned in Ms. Nicely’s write-up are the ones where she has very short hair and is goofing around in her bedroom with “go, team” type get-ups.

I do lean toward that explanation because it would mean that the shots where Ms. Nicely has longer hair and is in and around the house are more thematically unified instead of the kind of jumble it all looks like now.

This is my favorite shot and I wish I could see it in color.

The first group of pictures had an angle of youth and “oopsie, you caught me dressing,” and these latter group are suggestive of a more mature, consenting, young wifey type leading you around her house after she picks up the milk.

Does this make sense?

She apparently did other modeling work for a bit in the late 50’s, but she jumped ship to pursue work of a totally different nature. Ms. Nicely spent a long and trailblazing career as a mechanic for Rockwell International at their B-1 bomber plant.

The various Rockwell companies list a large number of firsts in their histories, including the World War II P-51 Mustang fighter and the B-25 Mitchell bomber, and the Korean War-era F-86 Sabre, as well as the Apollo spacecraft, the B-1 Lancer bomber, the Space Shuttle, and most of the Navstar Global Positioning System satellites. Rocketdyne, which had been spun off by North American in 1955, was re-merged into Rockwell in 1984, and by that time produced most of the rocket engines used in the United States.

(the wiki.)

I said goddamn, Jonnie Nicely! Way to do it.

Above is a recent picture of Jonnie promoting her Playboy issue and doing signings for fans. Below is a picture from one of my favorite ladies, Dolores del Monte (Miss March 1954), a vintage model who is super-active in the convention circuit and maintains a lovely website.

l to r: Ms. Nicely, Rick Linnehan (astronaut), Dolores del Monte (Miss March 1954), very special Valentine Vixen Kona Carmack (Miss February 1996), Cynthia Meyers (Miss December 1986), and Peggy McIntaggart (Miss January 1990) at the Los Angeles Glamourcon, November 2008.

Keep on rockin’ in the free world, ladies!

Daily Batman: Not the mark of weakness, but of power

Photographed by Nicolas Silberfaden.

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief…and unspeakable love.

(Washington Irving.)

Special thanks to Gordon Fraser for sending me the link to the article from which this picture comes.

Goethe Month: Das Märchen [von der grünen Schlange und der schönen Lilie]

Rachel Weisz for Esquire.

“Remember the Snake in honour,” said the Man with the Lamp; “thou owest her thy life; thy people owe her the Bridge, by which these neighbouring banks are now animated and combined into one land. Those swimming and shining jewels, the remains of her sacrificed body, are the piers of this royal bridge; upon these she has built and will maintain herself.”

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Das Märchen/The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, 1795. Translated by Thomas Carlyle, 1832.)

[Das Märchen] portrays in imaginative form Goethe’s impressions of [Friedrich] Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of Letters. The story revolves around the crossing and bridging of a river, which represents the divide between the outer life of the senses and the ideal aspirations of the human being.

(the wiki)

“Goethe’s Ferryman, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” William Sauts Netamuxwe Bock.

The heroes of Goethe’s very atypical fairy tale are an elderly couple and a female snake. There are also four kings in an underground temple: one king is gold, another silver, the third bronze, and the last a mix of the three. The kings are pushy and really argumentative. I don’t want to judge, but I need to say that they just seem to disagree and threaten much more than necessary.

Cast of the short-lived TV series Four Kings (2006).*

Also featured: a dog named Mops; cabbage; onions and onyxes; a pair of tricky will o’ the wisps; and a dashing prince who is captivated by a beautiful flower. Their love is mutual but the lily is poisonous to anyone who touches her so, to their poignant agony, the lovers can’t consummate their passion. I think that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the complications a prince and a flower might encounter, sexwise, but again — I try not to judge.

“Goethe’s Beginning, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” William Sauts Netamuxwe Bock.

It’s actually kind of murky in Goethe’s story whether she’s a flower or a woman, for the record. Everyone calls her the fair lily and she has flowerlike attributes but she’s also got hands and can talk, and she is traditionally portrayed in illustrations as an actual woman. There is a modern opera based on this fairy tale, but I’ve never heard it. However, I predict the part of the fair lily is played by a human and not a flower. Flowers simply do not have the range for the coloratura compositions that had become the neoclassic fashion in the 1960s.

Beautiful Maria, patronest saintest of all my patron saints.

Look — Callas lily. Get it? God, I’m so awful. All done.




*I will never pass up an opportunity to post up pictures of Seth Green and I am neither sad nor proud about that. Also, Scrubs supafly ukemaster Kate Micucci, she of the brain-asplodin’ cuteness, was on Four Kings. Such a woeful disappointment that the show was canned.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking News — this time it’s personal, “Not gay” edition

He’s having surgery to get rid of the noise. What more do you want?

The man is clearly secure in his heterosexuality. Why do people even keep bringing it up?

I know I am a softie, but I do think this is another sad case. I even hope it is a joke. What if someone had That Much going on in their head? I hope not. I hope no one does.

Goethe Month: The true poetic art

Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin in If Don Juan Were A Woman (Vadim, 1973).

Faust: My heart’s on fire — let us depart!

Mephistopheles: This is the true poetic art
and I have never met with prettier poets;
Could they but keep the secrets of their trade.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Part I, Act 1, Scene 3: “Witch’s Kitchen.”)

Daily Batman: Get down with your crazy self

Bats in the belfry.

via and via.

There is no genius free from some tincture of madness.

(Seneca.)

Hey. I’m home from going home and after I post up a few things, I will work back through the comments. I hope you have all had an illuminating, fascinating, orgasmic last ten days and I am totally willing to hear all about it whether you have or have not. It feels good to be back!

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking News — this time it’s personal, Lonelyhearts edition

No cheating skanks.

Money-grubbing whores okay.

Seriously, I feel really badly for this guy. He must have been deeply hurt to feel justified in such a personal attack on someone he once loved. Bad news bears all around.

Goethe Month: One life to live

Marcello Mastroianni biting Natassja Kinski’s ass. They were having a “whose-name-is-more-difficult-to-pronounce” contest and Marcello won.

One lives but once in the world.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Clavigo, Act I, Scene 1.)

We only have one life. So we must really live it. No pressure.

Take-two Tuesday — Daily Batman: Catwoman and Batgirl, the Naked Truth

Batman Confidential, No. 18. “The Bat and the Cat, Part 2 of 5: ‘Insanity Claws!'” by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire (Aug 2008).

Finally finished up that comic I mentioned buying and starting around a month ago. Things have been hectic lately and I kept forgetting it was in the garage. Like I said, I jumped in mid-series, but I think I can provide a little backstory you will enjoy to explain this panel.

As this issue begins, Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) is hunting down Catwoman (Selina Kyle) because she suspects Catwoman stole her father Jim’s notebook, which doubtless has sensitive personal information, drawings of dalmatian puppies in sunflower fields, and confidential case notes and grocery lists in it — Gordon loves dalmations.

The intrepid Spunky McCheeseball manages to run the kitteh-lady to ground by following her to a scandalous private club meeting. It turns out to be the Gotham Hedonist Society, where everyone goes around nude but for masks and indulges in safe, supervised, kinky insane sex with multiple partners. (Are you surprised in a city known for disguised superheroes and villains that this would become a fetish?) They let Little Red keep her hood but make her lose the clothes. Rules are rules!

She gets the notebook away from her target, and, after some naked wrestling, escapes the club and sadly dresses again, thus ending the one interesting and unpredictable thing she has done for me so far. Luckily, good ol’ loveable Catwoman stalks the drippy gingersnatch to a junkyard and steals the notebook back.

A lively fight and footchase ensues, ending on a rooftop, where the always-misunderstood kitteh-lady reveals begrudgingly that she needs to decode the information in the notebook, which Pippi Purplestocking has discovered is encrypted (thanks a lot, Daddy!), in order to save someone’s life — then promptly gets shot off the roof by a sniper that Batgirl can’t see.

Now I’m looking for the next one in the series. I’ll keep you posted.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking News — this time it’s personal, Attack of the killer tomato edition

via the duty on the tumblr.

It is a long time to carry such a burden.

Daily Batman: Karaoke and litigation

Batman appears to be karaoking the song “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison.

In the late 1990’s/early 2000’s, I was briefly among a number of Napster users warned in an attorney’s letter that Barbara Orbison was suing us for having Roy’s music available for peer-to-peer downloading, and even though I took them down immediately it caused me no end of worry and concern. Ultimately I’m pretty sure she gave up, or, if she continued to pursue Shawn Fanning and Napster, etc, nothing concrete ever came of it because if I owed Barbara Orbison money, I think I’d have heard by now.

Whoa. How did I not know that Roy Orbison’s widow banged Pierce Brosnan in the early 90’s?! Get it, girl! It makes a sad, sweet sense because Pierce had lost his first wife to ovarian cancer in 1991. They probably had a lot of solace to offer one another.

It was an ugly episode, but the main thing of it is that I just realized that by taking the objectionably available mp3s down, I blew my most likely one chance in life to meet Barbara Orbison. Dang it.

Goethe Month: Imagine me and you

Photographed by Jimmy Backius, via feaverish.

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit — this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre: Bk. VII, Ch. 5.)

Daily Batman: Onomatopeia

via