Happy Hank Day!

For Jane

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

Charles Bukowski

(August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994)

So, yeah...

...has this become a boring blog, or what? I'm talking about pancakes and squirrels for chrissakes. And now...

Bagels!
How did I ever survive earlier in my life without a toaster? I dunno. I've gotten hooked on Montreal style bagels. With cream cheese they're dangerously good. Gonna miss them when I go back to France.

and Hoarding!
I thought I was so above reality tv shows. It was something that didn't interest me at all. But I've gotten hooked, again, on a show called Hoarding: Buried alive. It's about people who fill their house with what they consider valuable objects that to everyone else is just garbage. I can't help but watch, probably because I recognize a part of myself in these people. It's never gotten that bad, luckily, but I can see the strange comfort in surrounding yourself with stuff.

Okay, back to drawing cats and dogs dressed up in clothes.

R.I.P. Joe Kubert

The man sure knew how to use a brush. I will try to spend the rest of the day looking heroically out of the corner of my eyes, like a Kubert character.

Squirrels

The cat beneath the tree in my backyard is back, looking up at the squirrel. It might be an other cat. It might be an other squirrel. The best place for squirrel-watching in Montreal is probably Parc La Fontaine. Except the benches all have Fresh Paint notes on them. I saw a white squirrel there the last time.

I long for the days of waking up by the chirping of birds. Now it's by carpenters in a neighbor house, starting hammering and electric saws at 8 in the morning. There should be a law...

The book: Getting closer to the end. It's around 25 half finished pages left. Hope to have it done by the end of the month or early September. There's still some details and backgrounds + colour penciling left on the pages back in France. Also the covers and endpapers. But hopefully it should all be finished and scanned by the end of October.

Dark Knight Rises

So, I went to see Dark Knight Rises. The difficult third film... Ok, it's not as bad as Spider-Man 3 or X-Men 3, but it was disappointing compared to The Dark Knight. I thought the two first films were good, but ruined by dragged out, chaotic third acts. If I re-watch the second film, I usually just turn it off after The Joker in nurse uniform scene. The third film I found to be the opposite of this. The two first acts of the film are pretty dull and clunky, and then it's saved by the quite exciting last act. Nothing as memorable as the pencil scene or The Joker sticking his head out of the cop car window, though.

It's a problem in the Nolan films, all the exposition. There are seldom people talking the way actual people do.There's also a self indulgence creeping into the later films, possibly because people are throwing money at him. I almost wish he would go back to the low budget film making of Memento, his best film in my mind. I don't think Inception would have lost much if he had been forced to cut the silly James Bond stuff. Still, at least this last Batman film has a personality, it's not a safe, by committee-film, no matter how much of a mess it is.

Rushmore

five easy pieces