Second Thought

All my Twitter followers were standing in line to mock my new name, Wolverine jokes were made, and three or four people seemed to like the change. Yes. Everything seemed to be going just as I expected it to.

Then I started to go through my account profiles on all the services I use.

Oooh, shit.

Google was the main concern, since messing with it caused a catastrophic mess on GMail once. Then there’s Whitechapel, where I’d have to create a new account for the name change to be the slightest bit useful. Not to mention ComicFury, where PITCH BLACK is hosted, and IM services –

– fuck it. It was a bad idea after all, something that didn’t occur to me while the fireworks where coloring up the night sky and I thought, “I do need to start this year on the right foot,” and ended up doing the exact opposite. Never make a decision while caught up in the celebration of a new year.

So, humbly (i.e. feeling like a jackass), I take back my decision to change my artistic name. André Navarro it remains. There were way more reasons to change it than those described in the previous post, but even those reasons don’t make the whole mess worth it.

I’ll still be getting a new website, though. Right after I finish PITCH BLACK 150, which I’m dedicating this week to.

The Death of 2010

I get some perverted amusement out of the idea that a year doesn’t end, it dies. Several of my previous years deserve to be slowly dipped into bathtubs full of acid, but 2010 can go nice and quietly in the arms of a loved one.

Obviously it had its share of shit, but this time it came with an equal share of pleasure and satisfaction. The projects I worked on, finished and started have in their majority gone well — especially PITCH BLACK, which has a modest but growing number of readers.

Some changes are in order, though. One of them is my name.

I write for an English-speaking audience and I intend to keep doing that. So the name André Navarro is a bit of a mouthful. It is a source of some humor to see people trying to pronounce it right, but in the end of the day it’s still not a comfortable name to read or utter in English. If I’m speaking English, I can’t pronounce my own name correctly without a pause beforehand to get the tongue ready.

From now on, the name I will attach to my Internet presence and artistic efforts is Andrew Logan (middle name: James). On the next few days I’ll be changing my username pretty much everywhere, and creating a new website. This one was originally intended as a place to compile everything I do in several websites, but as it turns out it was left abandoned most of the time. The next one shall be updated much more regularly, and not just with PITCH BLACK (although the regularity of that also took a kick in the balls recently).

2011 will be a year of complete dedication to several projects. It’s the year I get Serious. So let’s do it Right.

Happy New Year.

Cheers,

André Navarro.

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I mean, Andrew Logan.

DEXTER – Season 5

(This spoiler-ridden post is to be read only by people who have followed every season of DEXTER)

The pieces were all in place. Lumen Pierce turned out to share Dexter’s darkness and became his inseparable parter in crime. Stan Liddy had a sewer’s worth of shit on Dexter, including audiovisual recordings of him planning his murders. Joe Quinn was reluctantly involved with Liddy, and therefore Liddy’s illegal surveillance methods could be traced back to him. Dexter knew someone was watching him and Lumen, but he was thinking it was Quinn, not Liddy. Debra was after the same man Dexter was after, so the two of them colliding was a possibility. And Jordan Chase had Lumen at his mercy. These are the ingredients of a good season finale, one that could have shaken the series up like the finale of the previous season did. Plus, the directors were doing a competent job and the cast was fantastic, especially, and as usual, Michael C. Hall.

So how was it all resolved? Well, Liddy captured Dexter. Despite having proved to be a smart and resourceful private investigator, he doesn’t bother to restrain Dexter properly even though he knows the man’s a dangerous killer. Which Dexter proves by killing Liddy and destroying his recordings. Huh. Okay. So that’s a subplot that dominated half the season thrown out the window. Oh wait. A drop of blood fell on Quinn’s shoe. This can mean trouble for him later. I will for now ignore that he quickly leaves the place without looking for Liddy properly or trying to find out why he isn’t there. Why would a detective want to investigate something suspicious that has to do with the man he hired to investigate Dexter AND Dexter himself? Still. Blood on shoe. This can lead to something interesting.

So Emily Burch lures Lumen into a trap. Jordan Chase is waiting for her there. And despite wearing Burch’s blood as a necklace that symbolizes the strong bond between them, Chase doesn’t hesitate to bludgeon her to death with a fire poker. Oh well he’s a psychopath, right? Maybe he needed more blood for the necklace and ended up overdoing it, I don’t know. Anyway. He kidnaps Lumen. So once again Dexter’s got to search the entire city for someone.

Chase, however, suffers from the same syndrome as every supporting character in DEXTER: they are geniuses most of the time, except when one of the screenwriters has a sudden case of writer’s block and turns them into retards to move the plot forward. So Chase transports a poorly-restrained and barely unconscious Lumen in his trunk. She wakes up, starts screaming and kicking around, a witness hears it, Chase speeds away, hanging plot thread is established.

Debra picks it up and starts closing in on Chase’s hideout. So does Dexter, with his typical — and, in this case, fairly plausible — resourcefulness. But the writers can’t have too much plausibility, so LaGuerta just happens to glance at the near-microscopic blood stain on Quinn’s shoe while both characters are standing and identifies it as blood after looking at it for a few seconds. So that’s Quinn potentially fucked. After all, his prints are all over the van, he’s been talking to Liddy recently — LaGuerta knows that, everyone knows that, and now there’s a drop of blood on his shoe. Forget “potentially”. He’s fucked.

Dexter arrives at Chase’s hideout. But he’s distracted by his father’s ghost who isn’t actually a ghost just Dexter’s projection of his father even though his projection of his father talks like it has a mind of its own and not like a proj — fuck it, Dexter’s distracted and caught in a trap and his car flips. Chase captures him and, still affected by plot-device-syndrome, restrains the extremely dangerous serial killer by tying his feet with rope and his hands behind his back with more rope. Y’know, that material which can be cut by a knife, which Dexter has about twelve of.

So Dexter cuts the rope and kills Chase. That could have been more of a challenge. Chase didn’t even hurt Lumen, he just waited for Dexter and then even after he had Dexter he just kept fucking around like a James Bond vill –

OH HOT SHIT!! Debra arrived! Please don’t let this be a Jonathan Demme-esque same-location-different-time thing. Wait for it, waaaaait for it — yes! She’s there at the same time as Dexter and Lumen!

Oooooh no there’s a thick sheet of plastic between them blurring their silhouettes. Ah but maybe that’s for dramatic effect. Let Debra trade a few words with the unknown perpetrator and then she finds out it’s her brother! Wait, what’s this…? Her monologue seems to indicate sympathy towards the two unknown killers who for all she knows might be two complete psychopaths planning to kill a lot more people, potentially innocents this time. Ah, warning shot! She wants them to stay right where they are. But now it’s back to the sympathetic monologue. Mm, she’s probably softening them up for the arrest and — WHAT?! “If I were you, I’d be gone by then”?!! She’s not gonna OH FOR FUCK’S SHE JUST WALKED OUT

There’s a dead man on a table and two possibly very dangerous people on the other side of a fucking plastic curtain and she doesn’t even sneak a peek to see who they are? Yes, the writers have been psychologically preparing her to be more tolerant towards murder for the entire season, but not to let two killers who might for all she knows assassinate cute defenseless puppies most of the time just walk away. And here I was thinking that this series couldn’t get any dumber than Dexter being kidnapped by Vince fucking Masuka on season three.

Okay, all is not yet lost. Maybe something will happen in this episode that will shake things up enough for the next season to pick up on, develop competently and make us forget this retarded moment that shits all over the character of Debra Morgan. Mm, no, okay, that’s impossible, but maybe the writers will still do something right, goddamn it.

Lumen suddenly wants to leave Dexter. Now that she killed the last of her tormentors, she’s fine, really. She can now leave the man who helped her and loves her because he kills bad people, something she really seemed to admire, mm, a day ago. Not to mention all the other things she admired about him, such as everything. So I guess this truly interesting character, brilliantly interpreted by Julia Stiles, and who by extension makes Dexter’s character even more interesting than he already is, will not remain for the next season. Because she is, after all, a truly interesting character, brilliantly interpreted by Julia Stiles, who by extension makes Dexter’s character even more interesting than he already is. Why would any writer want to keep her?

But there’s still Joe Quinn. For all of Dexter’s lapses of humanity, he is still a psycho. Of course he’ll have no problem letting Joe Quinn take the fall for him, especially considering Quinn brought this on himself. And Dexter shed no tears when Doakes died, right? Besides, it’s not like Dexter can save Quinn. Even if Dexter faked the blood results from Quinn’s shoe, the guy’s fingerprints are all over Liddy’s van, and everyone knows he’s been talking to Liddy recently, and…

And…

…

Dexter faked the blood results from Quinn’s shoe, and now everyone’s smiling and hugging Quinn, and Quinn is thanking Dexter and saying he owes him one.

Debra Morgan is being congratulated for having solved the barrel girls case, even though all she did was call in a crime scene with, mm, nothing on it.

Astor really loves Dexter now.

…

Chip Johannessen and Manny Coto. I’ve got your names, you cunts. I hope everything you ever write from now on instantly deletes itself in shame.

New Twitter – Pros and Cons

Recently Twitter has gotten a new version. Initially I wasn’t sure why. Twitter didn’t need a breath of fresh air, it needed a bowel cleansing. The previous version had a fundamentally good design but the subtleties were handled by someone with a doctorate in Uselessness.

First, the “next/previous page” buttons were replaced by a “more” button. I guess this was sadly necessary, since the entire planet and probably a few others started using the service, resulting in five galaxies’ worth of tweets, but a separate site for older tweets should have been set up. Some have tried making apps for it, such as the retardedly-named Twimemachine, but it can’t go back further than 128 pages. Another problem of the “more” button is that, since it loaded more information on the same page instead of loading a new page, you ended up with a gigantic column of tweets — and if you wanted to reply to one that’s five miles down, clicking the “reply” button would take you back up to the text box.

But while the “more” button is understandable, there isn’t a way to defend the sluggish information boxes that started showing up when you hovered your cursor over a nickname. Aside from the information itself being absolutely useless, you had to overwhelm the box with incessant clicking until it let you see the person’s page. And a while ago some bastard added a “Who To Follow” feature, not only annoying but a worrying sign of Facebookization.

Twitter also had the problem of being constantly drunk. Sometimes it told me I had no tweets, or no followers, or seven million direct messages. I’d click several buttons and they would ignore me. I’d delete a tweet and Twitter would try to fool me by making it disappear until the page was reloaded, at which point it hoped I wouldn’t notice. Not that this one matters, since the hundreds of Twitter desktop clients out there make the “delete” button pointless.

However, the designers were active and constantly experimenting. While initially hated, the Retweet button was an excellent idea. I was puzzled as to why it was hated at all, considering it did nothing but offer an easier way to re-tweet. You could still use the clunky RT@ method if you really must add a “LOL” to the RT. The one real problem was Twitter’s alcohol issues making it difficult to check your re-tweets because the bloody buttons wouldn’t acknowledge your existence. The “List” system was also useful for those of us who were carried away by the magic of Twitter and found ourselves following five hundred people.

So, while the basics worked, Twitter had rough edges. Maybe smoothing them out would have been the way to go. Instead, they decided to make a new Twitter, which worried me greatly. After the “Who To Follow” feature, I was expecting the 140-character limit to disappear and a “like” button to show up next to a picture of Mark Zuckerberg grinning at you with a baby’s leg sticking out from between his bloody teeth.

Surprisingly, though, New Twitter is competent. The interface is, mostly, more intuitive. The reply button now opens a drag-and-drop pop-up instead of forcing you up to the text box; your latest followers’ avatars show up on the column next to the timeline, so you can see who they are without having to click the “followers” button, and the same goes for the latest lists you’ve been added to; the “more” button is gone, with the act of scrolling down automatically loading up older tweets; when you see a reply, you can easily check the tweet it’s replying to by clicking on the balloon icon, which loads up a column — a fairly convoluted column, but better than loading up an entire new page to display a single tweet, as it happened previously; and seemingly Twitter has been through rehab, so my number of followers and tweets remains constantly accurate.

Which doesn’t mean New Twitter is a pool of roses and chocolate. When you click someone’s nickname, you are happy to see the dreaded box is gone, but a new column loads up next to your timeline with information about the person — good — and their latest three tweets — bad. Usually I already know most of what I need to know about the people in my timeline, so if I click on their name, I want one of two things: to see their ten or so latest tweets, or to direct message them. So when you hover your cursor over a tweet by a person who follows you, a “DM” button should show up on the highlighted tweet along with the usual other buttons such as “reply”. And when you click on their name, the column that shows up should have their complete, scrollable time-line. The way things are right now, you’re requesting more clicks than necessary from the user, both for direct messages and checking up latest tweets.

Direct messages are now organized by name. NO. There should be an option to organize them by date. Not to mention several of my direct messages — some of them cherished — have disappeared, while still accessible on old Twitter, where they’re organized by date.

There is still no warning when you receive a reply (unless you’re on the “Mentions” timeline) or a direct message. You know, Twitter, a number in parenthesis next to “Mentions” and “Messages”, or maybe just a “new” icon, likely won’t break the site. Not that I’m programming-savvy or anything. And while we’re at it, I don’t need to be reminded of the latest tweets I’ve favorited. Because I’ve favorited them. Recently. I think my memory can be trusted on that one. If you need to occupy space on the column next to the timeline, how about “latest replies” or “latest DMs”?

The “Lists” button hates me. It’s sluggish, requiring that I click a certain pixel at a certain time of day while in a certain Kama Sutra position with my feet operating the mouse and then it will load my lists if it’s on a good mood. Okay, maybe I’m being overdramatic, but it’s a sluggish button.

As for the future, I hope Twitter doesn’t change its basic functionality. Fortunately, there seems to be no indication of that. The 140-character limit is fortunately here to stay, judging by the message that shows up when your tweet exceeds the limit: “Your tweet was over 140 characters. You’ll have to be more clever.” The “Who To Follow” feature, as much as you might hate to admit it, might help new users — although the option to close that fucking feature would be most welcome. Still, if that’s the only hated aspect Twitter will borrow from the gigantic gated community that is Facebook, no problem.

All in all, New Twitter needs work, but it preserves what I like best about Twitter — it’s still social networking at its best, and as fun as always.

My Live Interview

The first time I got interviewed was via e-mail, for Paul Grimsley’s In To Views. So, easy enough. Long time to think about the answers, write them, revise them and add the usual tasteless jokes.

But a few weeks ago, The Outhouse’s Brian Osserman (aka Prozacman) invited me to do a live interview about my webcomic PITCH BLACK. And I agreed to do it before my brain put the words “live” and “interview” together. When it did I was taken by overwhelming panic and the absolute certainty I would fuck it up. The problems were countless: I’m not good at talking over the phone, my brain and my mouth are never in sync and my spoken English is flawed. Okay, so they weren’t countless, but shut up they seemed countless to me at the time. I tried rehearsing by myself, deciding whether a British accent would work better than an American one (or at least make me seem smarter) and even predicting which questions I would be asked and writing down the answers to minimize stammering.

When the big night arrived, I had three answers written down in front of me for two hours of podcasting. Needless to say, I’m a shitty Nostradamus.

Things didn’t go too bad, though. I had fun, they tell me they had fun and that the podcast was a success, so hey, I’m certainly not gonna try detecting any lies there.

And by the way: during the interview, I told them about a question a friend of mine once asked me: “Why are Brazilian porn stars so hairy?”. Apparently I look like the right person to ask, but surprisingly I’m not, so I didn’t know the answer. On the interview, though, they were telling me about a podcast that talked about porn, MoleHole Radio. So during my interview, I mentioned the question my friend asked me, and after the interview Brian sent the question to MoleHole Radio. And told them, of course, that the question was mine.

They answered it on the air (at the 55 min mark). So now I’m internationally known as a pervert interested in male body hair, while the actual pervert interested in male body hair is at this moment laughing her ass off so hard she’s in danger of losing a buttock.

Changing Things Up

I am currently suffering a brainquake. Call me melodramatic, but the point is I need to shift gears, to use a very cliched and somewhat ironic term since I don’t drive at all. You’ll know when I start, by the increase on Rio de Janeiro’s hit-and-run statistics.

Thing is, a daily PITCH BLACK schedule was a good idea. I thought so then, and I still think so now, even though I feel several years older since “then” and part of my hair started falling and I think my chair’s molecules have fused with my arse’s. But it was a good idea. It taught me a lot about myself, how fast I can work if necessary and how long I can go before I realize I haven’t had lunch (about three or four days).

But now it is a bad idea, a daily schedule. Too much to deal with, and my mind is too unstable. I feel like part of it might leak out my nostrils if I so much as nod. So I’m reverting to the three-times-a-week schedule, which will allow me to spend the week thinking up strips, choosing my three favorites to draw over the weekend, and repeating the process. This should also allow me to work on my other projects, something that has been much more difficult since I began self-flagellating with the daily schedule.

At the moment, PB is on hiatus, and should come back soon, probably next week. Meanwhile, I’m doing some house cleaning. I’ve chosen another look for the website, which is tidy and slick enough for my purposes. My purposes, of course, you’ll only find out when it’s too late.

I’ll try to post more stuff here, as the website has become an endless column of PB strips with the occasional movie review here and there. Maybe I’ll cross-post stuff from my Tumblr too. I’ve also deleted and slightly altered some of my first posts here, written under the influence of badly-prescribed medication during my rougher years, which led to me using the caps lock key stupidly often and saying shit that made no sense.

Okay, so I still do the latter.

LOST – A Commentary About The Series

(DON’T READ ON UNLESS YOU’VE WATCHED THE SIX SEASONS, THERE’S SPOILERS AHEAD)

Since it started, LOST has grown exponentially crazier. It began with the fairly straightforward premise of a bunch of people stranded on an island, and ended with a guy trying to stuff a gigantic cork in a hole to stop said island from sinking, only to die along with everyone else and find them again in the afterlife. And that was the beauty of the series: seeing the writers come up with more and more stuff while visibly struggling (they reportedly knew a lot in advance, including the ending, but they still struggled with some plots) to keep it all coherent, compelling and intriguing, and even though the final result is definitely flawed, it’s more than satisfying. LOST was never about six seasons of build-up to a mind-blowing finale. It was about enjoying the mysteries, the discoveries and especially the characters’ reactions to them. The job Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof and the rest of the extensive LOST crew had was to wrap this all up, and the real joy of the series was never the island, it was the characters. The entire narrative structure was built to develop them in every episode, with the flashbacks and flashforwards.

All you have to do is compare the way they used to be in the first season, and what they have become now. Jack went from a man decided to leave the island to a man decided to save it, Locke went from a wise and driven man to a confused puppet of his own faith, Benjamis Linus went from a loyal servant of Jacob and master manipulator of people to a man seeking redemption while still incapable of leaving his darker side behind. LOST juggled so many subplots, so many different storylines about so many different characters in so many locations, that watching their growth alone was more than enough reward. And this is mainly thanks to the fantastic narrative structure LOST went with: flashbacks that turned into flashforwards that turned into time-traveling that turned into alternate realities, the series toyed with so many ideas that it’s impressive it managed to remain coherent. Regardless of how crazy it became, the story was never hard to follow, always retaining some sense and most importantly, always being fun to watch.

This was all supported by exceptional performances, especially from Matthew Fox, Terry O’Quinn, Michael Emerson — actually, if I start listing everyone I think did a great job in this regard, I’ll leave very few people out. It’s important, however, to stress how Evangeline Lilly and Jorge Garcia grew as actors. Her expression in this last episode when she remembers her time on the island is nothing short of perfect, and Garcia has played one of the most likeable characters I’ve ever had the pleasure to see. The cast was incredible, the dialogue was mostly well-written, the editing was masterful, Michael Giacchino’s music was absolutely remarkable, the directors were competent (especially Jack Bender, as he proves in this last episode) and the pacing of the series, which some would call slow, I would call brave. It wasn’t in any hurry to explain anything. It would do so whenever it fucking wanted to, and if you didn’t like that, just stop watching.

And it did explain a lot. Only a few questions were left unanswered, and fuck these questions. Who’s Jacob’s mother? Who cares? She hasn’t been waiting to be explained since the third season, as Jacob was. What’s the light? The series left enough clues as to that. You don’t want everything chewed up for you, do you? Meanwhile, we know the true nature of the island, we know how Jack’s late father showed up alive on the first season, we know what the numbers mean, we know what the Dharma Initiative was, we know the true nature of the Smoke Monster, and so on. The major answers were delivered, and even if not all of them fit right, they didn’t hurt the series either, with the characters remaining the one great constant in terms of quality. Even they would remark on how ridiculous some of the things they had to do were. The series was self-aware about its plot, because that wasn’t the main focus.

There were some missteps, of course. I always suspected the true nature of the island would be an underwhelming revelation, but it was actually downright disappointing. A fucking light that needed to be protected from the evil nature of humanity. How the light (an electromagnetic source, apparently) came to be, that’s never explained, and the writers should have racked their brains a little more to come up with something less simplistic than a man in white and a man in black fighting over a goddamn light. Some of the characters, such as Miles, never really became interesting enough to be worthy of concern, regardless of the actors’ competence. Some narrative elements were definitely clunky, such as Jacob’s first appearance in season three, which doesn’t really fit with the later seasons. It resulted in one of LOST’s most shameless cover-up lines, when Ben explains to Locke (in this season or the fifth, I can’t place the episode) that he didn’t actually see Jacob that night and had no idea why the house started shaking. For fuck’s sake.

The writers didn’t seem to know what to do with some of the characters, such as the pilot Lapidus, who only showed up when needed, and when he happened to be around during a scene that didn’t require his presence, all he did was drop a cute one-liner. Only in this episode did he become truly important to the plot. And that temple the characters ended up in on the beginning of season six didn’t really go anywhere very interesting, serving only to change the characters’ personalities (such as Sayid’s) to fit the plot.

However, there were the episodes centered on Desmond, especially the ones where he time-traveled; there was the episode where Ben Linus kills his father and the whole Dharma Initiative, the episode where he loses his daughter and the episode where he’s facing his death, and tries to run to the Man In Black because he’s the only one that would have him (one of Emerson’s best performances, and that’s saying a lot); there was the episode centered on Hugo and his relation to the mysterious numbers which caused people around him to die while he became the luckiest man in the world; there was the scene Kate cries over Aaron and the thought of abandoning him, and the scene where Sawyer tries to save Juliet; there were so many memorable scenes and entire episodes in this series, that even if the ending downright sucked, I would have been unable to think of it as a waste of time. It was more than worth it.

As for the ending itself, I found it personally impossible not to be touched by the characters who, while living in the alternate reality (i.e. afterlife), remembered their time on the island when faced with echoes of their past experiences. The moment between Kate and Claire is especially powerful thanks to Lilly’s aforementioned stupendous performance. I found the rain during the climactic battle between Jack and the Man In Black a little too much, and the same goes for Jack’s father opening the doors of the church and innundating everything with light. I was disappointed by Mr. Eko and other characters not making any further appearances in the finale, it would have been nice to see them getting acknowledged (like Ana Lucia was). But I loved the pacing and energy of this episode, and the way things come full circle in the ending, with a close-up of Jack’s eye closing, in a beautiful rhyme with the very first scene of the entire series. Having spent six years with these characters, it was a naturally emotional episode with no great flaws and a lot of beautiful narrative rhymes.

The show’s theme? It’s in the very title: LOST. Not “lost in some insane island somewhere near Fiji”. Instead, “lost in life”. The characters were all troubled people, struggling with their life and their choices, until they find themselves in a new, intriguing and dangerous place. They look for answers, for a purpose. They find each other instead. In the end, that was far more important than a fucking light in a cave. In the end, the island and all its mysteries are left behind, and together, they move on. Thematically, the ending was perfect. Putting it in a church was just for symbolism’s sake — there is no religious propaganda here. You don’t need to open the Qur’an or the Bible to find the meaning behind it all. The show created an internal mythology complex enough to support its crazy story, and to develop the characters as much as possible; if there was one thing that made sense in LOST, it was the character development. I consider the character to be the most important part of a story, and the ones in LOST are absolutely unforgettable.

A nice wrap-up to an inventive and unique series that answered its major questions and was a hell of a lot of fun. Its ambition paid off. I say with no second thoughts that LOST is a great success.

Black Lantern’s URGE MODE And The Process Of Making The Logo

My mate Bram Gieben (aka Texture, aka Weaponizer) has launched a new music channel on his BLACK LANTERN label: URGE MODE, which “provides experimental bass music for the wide eyed and bushy tailed – incorporating sounds from dubstep, future garage, techno, electronica, breaks, hiphop and more. Deep, mental, hard, chilled, rough, smooth, techy, organic, dark, warm, straight up or just plain weird. There’s a time and a place for it all.”

I listened to their debut EP, THE SPINAL CONFLICT, by BLACKMASS PLASTICS. I really enjoyed it, which is uncommon for that kind of music, or any kind of music, since I’m a little hard to please in that respect. There’s very few albums I can listen to all the way through with pleasure and without skipping any songs (Goldfrapp’s FELT MOUNTAIN and The Gone Jackals’ BONE TO PICK, for example).

Five months ago, Bram and his associate Hamish asked me to design the logo:

Here’s what it took to get to that:

Bram asks me to design the logo. I scratch my head in confusion as to what could possibly have given him any indication I was qualified for this, considering I am as skilled at visual design as a whale is at poledancing. I might be able to draw a recognizable human figure and disguise the many anatomical flaws with convenient shading, but when it comes to typography and design a squirrel on meth has a better sense of what to do. However, Bram is completely insane, so that explained it.

I always like a good challenge (especially when it comes with the potential of money). So I said yes, and after hitting myself with a stick for half an hour for being so fucking stupid, I got to work.

As a workout and to get the horrible cliched ideas out of my head first, I did the drawing equivalent of a first draft — a first batch of fucking awfulness:

This was enough to make me so ashamed of myself my brain got off its rear lobe and started making those neurons dance. It was time to ideastorm. I submitted four new ideas (plus a few subtle, unimportant variations):

The one chosen for me to improve on was the first one. Obviously. I mean, they had to choose the one with a human spine, the most difficult thing to draw in the human body. My ability to self-sabotage never fails to impress me. Enter Google Images and a frantic search for proper spinal reference.

Of course the vertebrae have completely irregular shapes, plus the top ones look very different from the others. Of course. After a lot of work and crying for help on Twitter, I delivered five variations of the same, more polished image (but still with several flaws, such as the horrible-looking brain, which I would leave for tweaking when working on the final image, and which image that would be was up to Hamish):

Then Hamish sent me a re-arranged, mashed-up version of the logo which he’d put together from two drawings from the second batch, adding a few colors and a font, thus resulting in the logo you saw above — the final logo.

This caught me by surprise, and I expected Hamish to require a better version, since that logo was made out of my then unfinished, poor drawings (simplified spine, sloppy lines, innacurate brain ridges). So I spent more time re-drawing the mashed-up logo, which resulted in these versions:

Hamish, however, told me he liked the spontaneity and innacuracy of the mashed-up logo and that he’d prefer to go with it. After working on the third and fourth batches for so long, I momentarily fantasized about disemboweling Hamish with a spoon, but only momentarily, since Hamish is a really cool guy and great to work with (and just as crazy as Bram — these two probably cause bodycounts when hanging out). Also, I fantasize about disemboweling everyone with a spoon at some point or another. Most times I resist the urge.

Now, after five months, I’m surprised that I can look at the final logo and not projectile vomit, as is the norm when I look at anything I sketched more than a few months ago. This is probably a good sign.

Now Accepting Donations

This might surprise you, but I happen to like money, and PayPal just so happens to have this handy “Donate” button that can be pasted on a website and in fact I just pasted it on the sidebar right under RSS look LOOK DAMN YOU —>

I did resist the urge to scrap the entire sidebar except for a gigantic “Donate” button, for I am not a greedy person. At all. What I am is in need of some financial incentive, which would not only make me feel like I actually have a job, but it would also convince me there’s someone actually reading this website.

Of course, I am a realist, and don’t expect that button to ever be clicked on.

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(Which is your cue to surprise me, by the way.)

Kevin Smith’s new enemies: movie critics

Annoyed by the bad reaction to the film’s he’s directed, COP OUT, Kevin Smith decided to shit on movie critics via his Twitter.

(1/5) @coked_up_jesus “I gotta say that every day I hate film theory & film students & critics more & more. Where is the fun in movies?” Sir

(2/5) sometimes, it’s important to turn off the chatter. Film fandom’s become a nasty bloodsport where cartoonishly rooting for failure gets
about 14 hours ago via web

(3/5)the hit count up on the ol’ brand-new blog. And if a schmuck like me pays you some attention, score! MORE EYES, MEANS MORE ADVERT $.
about 14 hours ago via web

(4/5) But when you pull your eye away from the microscope, you can see that shit you’re studying so closely is, in reality, tiny as fuck.
about 14 hours ago via web

(5/5) You wanna enjoy movies again? Stop reading about them & just go to the movies. It’s improved film/movie appreciation immensely for me.
about 14 hours ago via web

Seriously: so many critics lined-up to pull a sad & embarrassing train on #CopOut like it was JenniferJasonLeigh in LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN.
about 14 hours ago via web

Watching them beat the shit out of it was sad. Like, it’s called #CopOut ; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? You REALLY wanna
about 14 hours ago via web

shit in the mouth of a flick that so OBVIOUSLY strived for nothing more than laughs. Was it called “Schindler’s Cop Out”? Writing a nasty
about 14 hours ago via web

review for #CopOut is akin to bullying a retarded kid who was getting a couple chuckles from the normies by singing AFTERNOON DELIGHT.
about 14 hours ago via web

Suddenly, bully-dudes are doing the bad impression of him, using the “retart” voice. The crowd shifts uncomfortably. #IfOnlyDaltonWasHere
about 14 hours ago via web

And you may impress a couple of low IQ-ers who’re like “Yeah, man! Way to destroy that singing retart!” But, really? All you’ve done is make
about 14 hours ago via web

fun of something that wasn’t doing you any harm and wanted only to give some cats a some fun laughs. #YesIcomparedMyFlickToARetardedKid
about 14 hours ago via web

It was just ridiculous to watch. That was it for me. Realized whole system’s upside down: so we let a bunch of people see it for free & they
about 13 hours ago via web

shit all over it? Meanwhile, people who’d REALLY like to see the flick for free are made to pay? Bullshit: from now on, any flick I’m ever
about 13 hours ago via web

involved with, I conduct critics screenings thusly: you wanna see it early to review it? Fine: pay like you would if you saw it next week.
about 13 hours ago via web

Like, why am I giving an arbitrary 500 people power over what I do at all, let alone for free? Next flick, I’d rather pick 500 randoms from
about 13 hours ago via web

Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why’s their opinion more valid?
about 13 hours ago via web

It’s a backwards system. People are free to talk shit about ANY of my flicks, so long as they paid to see it. Fuck this AnimalFarm bullshit.
about 13 hours ago via web

I would like to simply say “what an ignorant fucking dipshit” and move on, but I like exposing my opinion on something as detailedly as I can right off the bat.

Let me start by compiling a list:

CLERKS: Rotten Tomatoes 87% (47 reviews) – Metacritic 70% (17 reviews)

MALLRATS: Rotten Tomatoes 50% (out of 38 reviews) – Metacritic 41% (out of 18 reviews)

CHASING AMY: Rotten Tomatoes 91% (out of 66 reviews) – Metacritic 71% (out of 28 reviews)

DOGMA: Rotten Tomatoes 67% (out of 122 reviews) – Metacritic 62% (out of 36 reviews)

JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK: Rotten Tomatoes 53% (out of 148 reviews) – Metacritic 51% (out of 31 reviews)

JERSEY GIRL: Rotten Tomatoes 41% (out of 167 reviews) – Metacritic 43% (out of 35 reviews)

CLERKS II: Rotten Tomatoes 62% (out of 156 reviews) – Metacritic 65% (out of 29 reviews)

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO: Rotten Tomatoes 65% (out of 176 reviews) – Metacritic 56% (out of 33 reviews)

COP OUT: Rotten Tomatoes 19% (out of 127 reviews) – Metacritic 31% (out of 34 reviews)

All of the above are from reviews by movie critics, compiled on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. While the former’s main score is based on whether or not the critic has given the movie a positive review (fresh tomato) or negative review (rotten tomato), Metacritic is an average of scores (although RT also has an average rating, but it’s not considered very important by the own site).

So taking a good look at the list, doesn’t really look like the critics are out to get Kevin Smith, does it. In fact, response to Smith’s movies tend to be positive. His only films below 50% on RT are JERSEY GIRL and COP OUT, and on MC, those two plus MALLRATS. All six of his other movies had mostly positive reception, some times barely, some times definitely, with CHASING AMY being the clear winner.

This, of course, puts a huge question mark on why Smith is downplaying an entire profession and depicting critics as a crowd of haters who are no different from “the people” (because apparently critics are from another planet as well).

My point: if I’m gonna show it to 500 arbitrary people for free, I’d rather show it to 500 arbitrary people off Twitter. What’s the diff?
about 11 hours ago via web

Because among the 500 arbitrary people off Twitter, one of them will certainly be a regular Roger Ebert, right? Apparently being a critic takes no effort, it’s just a matter of watching movies and writing about them. Surely you don’t have to learn about cinematography, filmmaking jargon and filmmaking history in order to be a critic, all you have to do is watch a movie and say whether or not it’s cool. No need to explain why.

It was just ridiculous to watch. That was it for me. Realized whole system’s upside down: so we let a bunch of people see it for free & they
about 13 hours ago via web

shit all over it? Meanwhile, people who’d REALLY like to see the flick for free are made to pay? Bullshit: from now on, any flick I’m ever
about 13 hours ago via web

involved with, I conduct critics screenings thusly: you wanna see it early to review it? Fine: pay like you would if you saw it next week.
about 13 hours ago via web

Oh, right — so because the critics saw it for free, they were supposed to love it. If they wanted to do their jobs like they are supposed to, it’s only fair they pay to do their job of giving their honest opinion on a film. If they see it for free, though, they must spit a bunch of positive adjectives with exclamation marks to be featured on the poster.

(4/5) But when you pull your eye away from the microscope, you can see that shit you’re studying so closely is, in reality, tiny as fuck.
about 14 hours ago via web

The art of filmmaking: tiny as fuck. Jesus, not even the analogy works. Just because it’s seen through a microscope it doesn’t mean it’s simple, or learning about the inner workings of a cell wouldn’t take more than a single high school class.

Critics have never been Kevin Smith’s enemies in any way you look at it. Of course, not all critics are good, as absolute imbeciles such as Fiore Mastracci exemplify. The list above shows that, according to the critics, Smith has had an excellent start and an irregular but mostly positive career which was enough to establish him in the movie business and give him a lot of creative freedom, and critics were NEVER in the way of that — in fact, if anything, they helped. Or did CLERKS receive the International Critics’ Week prize on Cannes by mistake?

One of Smith’s most pitiful arguments is this:

Watching them beat the shit out of it was sad. Like, it’s called #CopOut ; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? You REALLY wanna
about 14 hours ago via web

shit in the mouth of a flick that so OBVIOUSLY strived for nothing more than laughs. Was it called “Schindler’s Cop Out”? Writing a nasty
about 14 hours ago via web

review for #CopOut is akin to bullying a retarded kid who was getting a couple chuckles from the normies by singing AFTERNOON DELIGHT.
about 14 hours ago via web

I’ll try to ignore that Smith called his own movie a retarded child, since nothing I say can make the stupidity of this any more obvious, and focus on the “expectations vs. reaction” thing he’s putting forward — that critics apparently treated COP OUT as though it wanted to be much more than it actually ended up being, hence the bad reviews. Indeed, movies should be judged based on their premise, their ambition, what they promise and what they deliver.

Critics happen to know that. After all, CRANK, its sequel and SHOOT ‘EM UP were liked by, respectively, 61%, 62% and 67% of critics on RT. And if you criticize these movies while comparing them to THE GODFATHER, you’ll consider them crimes against filmmaking. When criticized with their premise in mind, though, they’re good films (well, I don’t like CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE, but still, I’m talking statistics here).

Yes, critics are perfectly aware of all this; and I haven’t yet watched COP OUT, but it’s a comedy, correct? It wants to make people laugh, right? Well, just read some of the reviews and you’ll notice a lot of critics labeled the film unfunny. And when a comedy fails to be funny, it’s a pretty valid argument against its quality.

Critics are not perfect: lots of them act like they know whether or not you’ll like a film based on their opinion; others just try to be controversial to call attention to themselves. But a lot of them are doing their job of watching a film, dissecting it, giving their detailed opinion and explaining why they think this worked and that didn’t. This is vital and difficult work, and not rewarding, as people — mostly idiots — tend to be offended at opinions different from their own.

I like Kevin Smith’s films, and I like Kevin Smith. It hugely disappoints me to see him dismiss a crowd that was never his enemy because they didn’t like his latest film, and to treat films as something you’re supposed to simply go and watch, but not read about.

Reading critics’ reviews made me learn a lot on writing, narrative structure and made me more selective about the films I like. I enjoy less movies than I used to, but it’s much more wonderful when I do, and even better to be able to explain why.

I’ve got longevity on my side now. I’ve been doing this since 93: so 17 years. I’m a veteran of the film biz. And as a veteran – not just a
about 11 hours ago via web

just some spectator with an opinion – I think I know what’s better for me & my career than total strangers whose Google-able history proves
about 11 hours ago via web

they’ve NEVER had my best interests at heart. So I’m gonna listen to THOSE people? Nyet. Listening to me, not them, has gotten me THIS far.
about 11 hours ago via web

Yes, you’re a veteran now, Kevin. You’re THIS far, so now you can shit all over a profession and depict all movie critics as a hater mob because they didn’t like your latest film.

I guess I’ve said enough to justify calling you an ignorant fucking dipshit. And I hope I’m wrong and you’re actually the nice guy you seem to be, but this is just too much.