Sen. Max Baucus

Kate With Gun

beanbots #13

All my life I've doodled little cartoons of funny things that happened around me. I generally whip them out in pencil or pen, on a post-it or cocktail napkin or whatever's handy, just to get a laugh out of whoever's standing there at the time. Half the time it's just for my own amusement, frankly, and once I've jotted a few lines that capture the idea, I put it down and foget all about it.

This strip is my first concerted effort to take those funny ideas and execute them in finished form. It works like this: my kids will do something funny, and at the first opportunity I'll doodle a strip that would look incomprehensible to anyone but me-- just little squiggles to indicate the key gestures, facial expressions, lines of dialogue. I might get a laugh out of it when I doodle it, or later when I'm flipping through my stack of "scripts" deciding which one to draw.

Which is good, because once I've started drawing it for real it will never ever seem funny to me ever again. Once I'm a little way in I have no idea what I ever found amusing in it, or what comic strips are for, or whether I should even be allowed to own and operate a pencil. It's only because I've made a commitment to the other members of Act-I-Vate that I can force myself not to tear it up, lest some unsuspecting web trawler stumbles across the thing and has their time wasted.

It makes me think a lot about what it must be like to be say, a Judd Apatow, someone who writes and directs comedy movies. Imagine spending several years of your life, utilizing millions of dollars and the talents of hundreds of people, fighting a million battles a day small and large, and then spending another eternity re-watching every second of it over and over in some editing bay. All just to express an idea that you thought was funny over a cup of coffee who-the-hell-can-remember when. It must feel like going insane. I don't know how anyone does it.

Well, with that said, enjoy the strip. I know I won't.

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Inglorious Basterds

It's been a delirious week at the movies for me. For one thing, I actually got to go to the movies (babysitting grandparents rock). But even more amazing, I saw two films in a row that didn't insult my intelligence and piss on my atrophied cinephile heart. District 9 and Inglorious Basterds are the real deal, films that surprised and delighted me and made me remember why I ever liked movies to begin with.

Inglorious most strongly reminded me of True Romance, the main action being a series of conversations, some of which explode into violence, some that don't, but all fraught with the threat of it. As in the past, I think Tarantino gets unfairly labeled an ultra-violent director, where he mostly employs short bursts of extreme violence that we feel more intensely because we're so engaged with the characters. He does more than almost anyone to de-glorify violence in his refusal to present anything like "gunplay". By the time the first shot is fired it's already too late for everybody. The best hope for survival is to be verbally nimble enough that the guns never come out. If you're going to pull a gun in a Tarantino film, you better be willing to die, along with everyone else in the room, and far too quickly to so much as strike a cool pose.

I'm a believer in Tarantino again after this one. I might even go back and give Kill Bill another chance.

beanbots #12

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beanbots #11

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beanbots #10

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Stacy London

A warm-up study for a storyboard job. The fact that I'm storyboarding TLC stars should tell you that I'm still pretty far from getting that call from Hollywood. Nobody's putting Stacy London in an action movie anytime soon. 

At least this time they gave me a celebrity that I'm actually familiar with. This is because I used to take the jetBlue red-eye from NYC to Denver a lot, and the onboard TV pickings at that time of night were pretty grim. it was either "What Not To Wear", or the History Channel's epic 57-part series, "Can We Think Of Another Fucking Thing To Say About World War II."

beanbots #9

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Michele Bachmann

The Huffington Post loves to run photos of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Invariably those photos are of her gesticulating and making a crazy face, and are always coupled with some kind of out-of-context batshit-sounding quote. Because their job is to make Republicans look bad, they love to portray Bachmann as an abject loon, wildly unhinged, with no sense of shame or personal limits. But see, here's the thing, those all happen to be qualities that I find tremendously appealing in a... candidate. Yeah. Yeah, "candidate", let's go with that.

While I'm no fan of Sarah Palin, I can imagine a darkly fascinating scenario where Palin runs in 2012 and picks this woman as her running mate. The combined level of focused, determined wingnut insanity on that ticket would be nearly impossible to resist. If that were to happen I might just end up pulling the lever for the Republicans this time around. And I'm not talking about voting.