What the hell did I just watch: Birds of Pretty I mean Birds of Prey

I knew I’d seen the actress who played Oracle (and who I blame for sucking me into watching this damn travesty of a television show, curse it) before, so I checked Wikipedia, because that slightly off nose and those cheekbones were familiar.  Ayup.  Bats.  (Look, I went with a friend who adored cheesy horror and it had Lou Diamond Phillips–don’t judge, OK?  Also, it wasn’t that bad.  Now you can judge.)  Also, the Mentalist, where she was killed off.

So, as astute readers might know, I’ve got a bad leg, so I’m not the spry, handstand performing Vom of ages past (and yes, actually, my usual workouts did involve handstands, no joke).  Nowadays, I walk with a limp and sometimes use a cane, so a superhero who is stuck in a wheelchair appealed to me, especially if she was brilliant, lead a double-life, had a Greek inspired name, and kicked butt.  We all have our ids.

Now, I’d heard this show was pretty bad.  But lots of people hate comics TV on general principal and it garnered a lot of viewers before being inexplicably wiped off the air.  So I thought maybe it was just the usual insular bitching and moaning about continuity or whatever.

Ahahahaha.  No.

This show is truly, deeply, wretchedly bad. Which is a shame, because it had so much potential.

I’ll admit upfront that I only made it through the pilot.  Maybe things get drastically better, but I doubt it.

So, we begin with Alfred narrating a tale of Gotham and talking about Batman and Joker, which kind of annoyed me, because I am not watching this show to find out about Batman.  But anyway.  So Alfred says that Le Bat put away the Joker, but first, the Joker took his revenge by cruelly killing or maiming the ones Batman loved.  We watch Catwoman get stabbed while her daughter watches on (secret lovechild of the Bat and the Cat!) and then Batgirl get shot after a weirdly gratuitous shower scene (I don’t know, because this show was supposed to be for women, I thought) and then we see that a little blonde girl gets visions of all of this.

And OK, none of that sounds bad, actually.  It sounds like a comic made into TV, sure, but not bad.  It gets bad when we watch the young girl, now a teenager, meet a guy on the bus as she goes to Gotham city to make her fortune.  That’s when the cliches start–because he asks her if she’s running from or to and she ends up taking his number and I just rolled my eyes.  I don’t know who the hell writes this shit, but every girl I know is wary of strange guys on buses who sit down next to them and start chatting, cute or not.  I mean, lol whut.  It’s eventually revealed that the guy isn’t so nice afterall.  What a surprise.  I never saw that coming.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  So, the girl on the bus is the teenaged Dinah, and she’s looking for two women she’s seen in her mind but never met.

Meanwhile, we get to see Helena, Huntress, swank around in the most absurd outfit for crime fighting I have ever seen.  It’s like a bizarre combination of floaty fairy-wing and dominatrix, and it just does not work for me.  There’s a weird wide-neck nearly-disco collar but the fabric is gossamer and there’s pleather or something and just….

Huntress is beautiful and cranky and athletic and she’s kicking and fighting and beating up bad guys in dark alleys and yet somehow instead of being enthralled, I’m thinking, gosh, I bet that’s really uncomfortable to workout in.  I hope she’s wearing proper support.

….This is probably not the emotion that the producers were hoping for.

I know it’s cool and all, but my goodness, that would get jabby into uncomfortable places and how could she bend properly to do roundhouses? I kind of want to hand her a Title9 catalog and recommend she look into something made from breathable fabrics and maybe some better cushioned shoes.  Nikes, perhaps, or with all that leaping, maybe some Rykas.

If you think I’m overthinking things in an action show, it’s probably because the editing in this fiasco sucks.  There are long pauses between words.  There’s time for people to strike ridiculous poses and then just….stand there.  It’s kind of weird and sad and I wanted it to stop, because at the heart, there’s some interesting possibilities for storytelling.

The three women eventually come together in a loft with nifty gadgetry (although the head scanner looked a lot like a McGuyver’d cuisinart container, which made me giggle).  Anyway.  Three women, all from rough pasts, making a little family and happiness and fighting crime.

Which would be awesome, except there were all these plot holes.  The docks at Gotham city have been bought up and haven’t been used.  No one’s been there for years.  Dun dun dun.  Really?  No one’s been at the docks in a river-based city?  Really?

Huntress goes to visit a businessman wearing her dominatrix “work” getup.  She looks like a very weird, expensive hooker, but this is what she wears when fighting crime, I guess.  They’ve got goggles that mockup vision miles away but nobody’s thought of undercover business casual, I guess.

It’s just very puzzling.

The villain in the pilot is painfully obvious, and the way the three women battle him is just as obvious.  There’s a moment that should be touching and emotional, when in her mind, Batgirl/Oracle has legs in the villainous dreamworld and then gets crushed down to her new body with no working legs, but it just came off as flat and kind of embarrassing.

And in the bat-leather costume, Batgirl just looked kind of weird.  Not confident and awesome, but, dare I say it, silly.

Which is really the whole problem with this show.  In Star Trek, costume silliness is everywhere.  It’s as if 100% lycra was the perfectly normal and valid lifestyle choice of the future. Only a few people get into funny looking threads and those few are aliens.  The bland Star Trek sets are kind of like community theater.  You’re not supposed to notice them.

In Birds of Prey, the whole set-up is backwards.  Most people, extras and Dinah and Oracle at her dayjob, are all picture-perfect and real as real.  The ones who aren’t real are Huntress, Batgirl, and any villain we’re supposed to take seriously, like the Joker.  And I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t work.  Joker doesn’t look scary.  He looks like my neighbor kid got into the cheap Halloween greasepaint again.  It’s comical, and not in the echoes the fine world of graphic novels sort of way.

Much like any TV, good storytelling would have carried the show through bad costume, silly sets, and ridiculous special effects.  I’m sorry to say that it’s just not here.  So much potential, so many cool characters, and….we get cliches and some heavy-handed acting.

Avatar the Last Airbender: a very fun American anime! (kind of)

So a couple of weeks ago, I came down with a bad cold.  When this happens, I try to be strong, but usually I end up congested, cranky, and bored. Surrounded by books, mugs of half-drunk tea, boxes of kleenex, and my aging but fierce dog weighing down my feet lest I try to do anything shifty like get up and wander around, I laid in bed, grumbling quietly and bemoaning my fate.

Then I decided to poke halfheartedly through my streaming Netflix queue.

Lo and behold, it suggested Avatar, which several of my friends had been trying to get me to watch.  I stared at the first episode with bleary eyes, and thought to myself, You know, this isn’t half-bad.

Several hours later, I’d downed half the first season.

There’s a lot to like about this series.  It’s written for kids and aired on Nikelodean, but don’t let that fool you.  In this universe, actions have consequences.  Some characters fight, become injured, and later die.  Bad things happen. But, unlike a lot of action-packed stories, there’s depth and humor, great characterization, the chance for mistakes and then redemption.

All that said, what the heck is it about?

Katara, a teen girl, is from the Water Tribe.  She and her brother, Sokka, live at the pole and go out fishing among the icebergs.  Katara is a waterbender, which means that she has an ability to manipulate the element water if she makes certain movements, but she doesn’t know how, because her tribe has been devastated by war.  There are four people–Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, and everyone lived together peacefully until the Fire Nation got a wild hair and attacked everyone.

So, Katara’s tribe has only old folks, kids, and her and her brother left.  Katara and Sokka go out fishing, and while they’re hunting, they find the lost Avatar.

The Avatar was supposed to keep the peace, because he can use all of the elements.  But 100 years ago, the Avatar vanished, and war swept the world.

Katara and Sokka find the lost Avatar, Aang, who ended up trapped in a big iceberg.  They decide to travel with Aang to help him master the elements and restore peace to the land.

But really, that’s kind of a cool, but standard plot.  The characters are what make it great, though.   Each of the characters who personify their elements show that element.  Katara is kind and brave, and she sees the best in people .  She’s water, so she reveals wisdom.  Aang, the Avatar, has mastered Air and shows air qualities like humor but also flightiness.  The Fire Nation character, Prince Zuko, is impulsive, but also passionate.  Each of them has qualities that can be advantages of disadvantages.

The world building is thoughtful and cool. Each of the different elements is controlled by a different martial art.  Water is controlled by Tai chi, for instance, whereas Fire is controlled by Northen Shaolin kung fu.  Watching the different elements battle against each other is quite beautiful.  The different elements live in different dwellings, so you eventually find varying kinds of benders in different climates.

I won’t spoil the story, which I still haven’t finished myself, except to note that you might want to check for plot points in advance if you want to avoid sad or depressing stories (if you’re showing it to a kid, for example).

But OK.  I’m just going to be honest for a moment.

The real reason I love Avatar is that it has the coolest creatures of any show ever.

Flying bison! Bat eared flying lemurs!  Badger moles! Saber-toothed moose!  I often find myself asking, if I could only have one cool awesome animal from Avatar, which would it be?  This has entertained me for hours.  Should I get a dragon, or a ostrich-horse?  Would I enjoy a flying koi or one of those swamp alligators?

Also?  There are fox spirit librarians who scour the world for books and scrolls and knowledge and stories and take it to a hidden library deep within the earth, which is run by an owl.  How is that not awesome?

 

Waterlilies: Paintings in Context

A couple of weeks ago, I returned to my roots.

As a kid, I grew up in an art-poor community.   Mom didn’t believe in letting us watch much TV.  And the local libraries were typical of the bible belt–big on religious stories, low on art books.

Mom had a few books, though, and if I was very, very good, I was allowed to sit under the window, in the good light, with a huge art book in my lap and carefully page through it.  Many were the rainy days spent that way, in the VM’s childhood.

Many were the days, and many were the paintings I grew to love.

Now, we didn’t have much money.  Mom’s art books were mostly Time Life books bought at garage sales.  The World of Leonardo, The World of Cezanne, The World of Vermeer.  They brought a lot of joy to my life–their slightly off-color, overly orange and green reproductions with their odd smell and the grainy texture and the slight smeariness.  Today I know they were done cheaply, but at the time, they amazed me and moved me.

We had many late night conversations, my mom and I, when it was too hot to sleep and the world was quiet.  We would sit in the kitchen and eat icy-cold oranges from the frig and enjoy them sweet segment by sweet segment while she told me about these strange painters.  Cezanne, who loved trees.  Van Gogh, whose mind was beautiful but a bit broken.  Degas, who drew the most amazing horses and the most tired dancers.  Marie Cassat, who first taught me that women could paint, too.  Monet, who painted haystacks at every time of day and night, just to catch the light.

I understood that people made art.  I’d watched my mom make contour drawings.  I’d seen her use watercolors and I’d played with them myself.  (I’d even experimented with the smelly oils from the paint by numbers that my grandmother gave me with great disapproval from my mom, who told me I was not at all required to paint within the lines, or even depict the picture as stated.  Naturally, I changed the cheerful kittens to glorious horses and then ran out of gray paint.  But I digress.)

I understood, as I say, that people made art.  That they put pigment on paper or paint on canvas and so created a piece of art.  But what I experienced as art were…small things.

Most of them were reproductions the size of an adult’s hand.  Many were reproductions the size of my own childish hand.

I’d been to the local museum before, to see the knights in their armor when my brother was interested in swords and Camelot, and we’d gone on school trips to see those rooms full of fancy furniture or old relics dug up from the ground.  And sometimes we’d even gone to rooms where the paintings were.  But the paintings I saw were, well, mostly boring pictures of dead guys in black suits and funny hats, looking like they had a bad stomach ache and never laughed.

So when mom took me to see Monet’s Waterlilies, all three, together, it was like a whole new world.

These were paintings as big as trucks.

Bigger!  Bigger than trucks.  And it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen.

Those paintings took up so much space it was like the whole world had gone blue and green and full of light and weedy flowers and if you got close you could see all these brushstrokes.

The brushstrokes were a revelation.

Up until then, I’d never known that you could make a painting that actually showed brushstrokes.  I mean, in a reproduction that’s 2″ by 3″, even the boldest Van Gogh looks like it leaped out of a head fully formed.  But these waterlilies now, they were….different.

They were so big, so grand, so loud, in a watery garden kind of way.

And they didn’t even have people in them!  No lines, either!  Just colors.  But they were so beautiful.  Like walking under the sea should be.

Those paintings moved me and touched me and somehow imprinted on me the idea that it was OK to let the world see that a real hand was involved in making the image, that it was OK to paint as big as you needed, and that art could be a little messy, a little undomesticated.

I’d been drawing even before then, but it had always been hard for me to create any kind of link between the Big Real Art in the books and the carefully crafted pencil and crayon work I made on endless sheets of lined notebook paper.

Years passed, as years do.  I learned more about art.  I visited the museum many times after that, and mom provided me with more supplies so that I graduated from crayons to markers and conte and watercolors. I learned how to check art books out from the adult section of the library, and so learned about more modern artists.   When I had the chance to take a class in high school on art, I leaped at it.  To my initial joy, one of my teachers was an expert on the Impressionists.  She told us that there were three qualities that they had: they were interested in light, they never used lines, and they did not use the color black, ever.

She was furious when I helpfully (I thought) brought in a library book where I’d carefully marked all the paintings that had black.

I ended up barely passing that class, but my love of the art never diminished.  Mom and I got to see the touring Courtauld Collection when it came, but nothing quite surpassed that first rush of awe when I came across those huge three paintings all together, big as the world.

My life grew and changed some more, but weaving through it all was this love of art.  I went back to the museum many times, seeing the single waterlily painting on its lonesome, seeing other art works, falling in love with different pieces, and going home to try my own things, time and again.

In the thirty years since those three paintings were together, I picked up a love of Caravaggio and a fondness for black and white pen work.  Something else changed.

I came to understand something more about these paintings, from an utterly different direction.  I’d heard, in that god-awful class so many years ago, that Impressionists were obsessed with light.  And they were.

But for two decades now, I’ve been not just an artist, but a gardener.  I know the shift that comes at the turn of mid-August, where the high hot sun goes to the right a bit, shading more and burning less, even though the temperatures are high.  I know the dawn cold light that creeps from the East.  I know the warm, sleepy light of dusk as it moseys back down beneath the crown of the world.

Winter’s brightness, pale lemon and cold.

So different from the mellow, long light of Summer.

And I know the feel of dirt under my nails, the endless sweat on the back of my neck, bent to sow seeds or trim, to weed or loosen soil.  The way the toads hang in the shade under clay pots, the chirrup of crickets and the long endless slide up and down drone of cicadas.

It’s a world I can slip into, free from thought, and just be.  Taking in endless variations of the color green, satisfied completely by the visual beauty of a mixed patch of double-dug earth planted with chards and zinnias and silver beet and kale and cottage marigolds.

Picture of a garden

I have not only basked in its beauty, I have run out into it, bare feet slipping on wet leaves, yelling at the top of my voice and shaking my fist, a five foot four whilwind in silly pajamas, chasing off the rabbits from my tomatoes.

I’ve fought slugs with little tins of beer, I’ve stood ankle deep in water where none should be, I’ve planted and ripped out and walked and walked and walked, through all the seasons.  I know my plants in ice, in snow, in the first green blush of returning spring, as well as the glory of summer.

So when I went back to the Water Lilies, I was a different person.

The museum had gone to considerable effort to make it a good experience.  It’s not easy to host a forty-five foot long, fifteen feet tall triptych worth millions, but they did a lovely job.  The wing where it was housed is the ultra-modern add-on, very sleek, all white flat paint and long, sweeping graduated floors.  Frameless art, big windows, quiet thermostat controlled air.

They’d given the Water Lilies their own space and in front of them, they’d grouped benches for seating, upholstered in gray and almost rock-shaped.  The lighting was soft, but focused.  I took my mom and we went on a quiet weekday.  It was possible to sit and look and just enjoy, as if you were at a real pond.  You can see what the setup looks like here.

With all this lead up, perhaps you’re hoping for explosions! Revelations!  Amazement!

But no. Or at least, not of the exciting kind.

I sat down on a pebble-shaped bench and looked at the huge paintings in front me.  So blue and so lush.  It really did feel a bit like stepping into another world.

As I gazed at them, I found my breathing slowing, and I stretched out my bad leg and let out a long, comfortable sigh.  My eye traveled up the painting, to the left, up to the corner, to the right, and back down again, never feeling the need to focus in on only one spot, never feeling the impulse to stop looking, just moving my gaze naturally from place to place.

A bit like I would look on my own garden back home.

Formally, the water lilies are a little off.  The perspective is almost as if from a bridge looking down, but the eye moves up to what should be a sky, but never is.  But I couldn’t care less.  For me, it feels only as if I’m inside the garden.  Feeling it around me, the way my own clayey soil feels sticky and scratchy under my bare feet.

The context that existed in real time–the stark white and gray paint, the smell of controlled air and mingled perfumes, the soft squeak of guard shoes on marble–slipped away.  Instead, I was in a garden, caught in a patch of sleepy shade with the certain knowledge, brought by the tickling breeze and my inner senses, that outside the shade would be hot sun.  The smell of wet, brackish greenery, rotting and decomposing in the summer.  The soft drone of the ever-singing cicadas, nature’s orchestra that serenades late summers and leaves its empty carapaces as bodily echo.

I sat for a long time, content.

*

There are other contexts for these paintings.

I know that the Water Lilies I saw exhibited were only one of the many water lilies Monet painted.  The Museum of Modern Art in New York has another triptych which is even permanently displayed together.  There are beautiful books about the paintings, the techniques, the influences, the painter himself.

The gardens at Giverny are open to visitors, and a good friend of mine visited there just two weeks ago.  She shared the pictures she took (one and two) and I was able to drink in the bright flowers and even note, with a gardener’s eye, the invasives that were going to be giving them trouble in another few years.

I can use an online web tool to view the painting in great detail.  I can use my academic research tools to find out detailed critiques and formal investigations into meaning, technique, history.  I can buy as many books with reproductions of his paintings as I’d like or get myself poster-sized reproductions to hang on my own wall.

In a few years, the parts of triptych I saw will return to their homes, and I’ll be able to visit our panel, as I might visit an old friend.

Monet painted them in his studio together and kept working on them for years until his death in 1926.  I don’t know that he’d have particularly imagined them in that huge, modern white building.  But I think he’d have been pleased that they were together and that they brought about not just critical insights, but also that indescribable summer outside feeling, sleepy and peaceful, soft sky and wet marshy greens.

Nor I do think he’d mind that when I want to recapture that feeling, I might wander outside into my own garden to feel the mud squelch under my toes, and sit under a heavy old oak, and watch the breeze play games with the flowers.

The Roundtable Has Pants: Pantless Pants

Being a critic is kind of like writing an autobiography.  It’s an arrogant act to say, Listen to meeeee, for what I say is important!

The thing is, what I say isn’t all that important.  I’m not going to be in the majority on this one, and I doubt that many people will care about my opinion one way or the other in the grand scheme of things.  This particular comic has been praised by lots of big names and it’s liked by lots of people, and their voices have more impact than mine, and….I’m fine with that, actually.

I’m explaining that not because it’s suddenly all humility hour here at HU (are you kidding?), but because situating myself in the reality of my impact and the smallness of my perspective’s importance is the first step in analyzing The Years Have Pants. Continue reading

Endless Comfort: the sweetest yaoi ever

Endless Comfort, Sakuya Sakura, June Manga.

I admit it up front–I bought this manga for the plucky great danes on the cover.

Look at these faces!  (Note the dark grey nose at the far right, just peeking into the frame!)

The art isn’t bad, either, and I enjoy yaoi, but it’s the dogs that got me to buy this one. 

Yeah, yeah, dogs, mutters someone in the audience, so what?  And to this I say: Endless Comfort is a bit like Zoo Borns, except with porn, deftly handled relationships, and a well-written exploration of the healing of wounds from child sexual abuse.

Uh.  OK.  Maybe not the best ad-copy summary I’ve ever written.

And yet, I feel, fairly accurate.

Let’s try this again.  Endless Comfort is about Kuzumi, a wealthy man who returns to his mother’s manor house in the suburbs which she left to him after her death two years.  The manor house is where he spent his weekends as a child, and it houses the family servants (who helped to raise him), three great danes, and a new dog trainer named Yuu.
Continue reading