All you have to do is pick the best bird sounds and then write another number one single and then more money will come to you. It is hard to see how this project could fail. All you have to do is continue to be a commercially viable genius forever, easy if you keep working hard.
The wind is soft now and she lights a match over you, lights her cigarette, holds you close and smokes at the moon. Her scarf blows over you like a blanket, like thick lunar wings, Brian.
She used to sit in English class as kids struggled with the grammatical notion of a complete sentence and what it meant to be the kind of person who could write one, and while she sat she thought about her bedroom and she wrote titles in her notebook for a career’s worth of movies that she’d make. She divided this future career into phases: her early works (she’d make three of these, the second of which would be an understandable mishap and the third of which would represent a striking early maturity), her mature subject matter (issues of the day, based on the politics she would one day learn, a mastery of visual storytelling, and a kind of optimism through adversity that would suffuse every shot in a way that adult directors were fools not to take advantage of), her later experimental work (avant-garde breaks with the unities of time, place, and action, debauched plotlines, a blurring of traditional lines of genre and medium that would baffle critics, make them say she had lost her way, how dare she they would say), and finally a kind of strange summation—a single work, an aleph through which all the previous films and dare she say it her very life might be viewed—a final accomplishment that she would finally become capable of when she was fifty, sixty, however long it took. She wrote the titles of these movies backwards not only to thwart spies but also to make it take longer to finish the list and so to sweeten the accomplishment. When she was done her English teacher was screeching chalk in the diagramming of a sentence and she exhaled and felt the cold classroom air surround her skin, unable to get inside it. Her entire life lay ahead of her, backwards across a single sheet of notebook paper with the fringed edge tearing from the spiral ring binding at the top.
I’m Jeanne Thornton and I’m working on a comic series called The Man Who Hates Fun about a Stoic philosopher dealing, Ignatius J. Reilly-style, with the vagaries of being in one’s twenties in Modern America that’s been running for a long time and that got hijacked by Gender Allegories a couple years ago — I guess the place to start is prolly http://fictioncircus.com/Jeanne/comics/elvira-ellisons-adventures-in-teaching-9/.
But I am less interested in all that stuff than I am in shouting out re: my comix pal Kathleen Jacques, who I don’t think is on Twitter, but who DOES do a comic called Band vs Band that’s like a classic homage to stuff like Jem and the Holograms/Josie and the Pussycats, but with infinitely greater design savvy and lesbian subtext (and often enough just TEXT.) Link: http://bvbcomix.com. THE WORD MUST BE SPREAD ABOUT THIS.
A while back, I asked for creators who identified as LGBTQ to announce themselves and promote their work in a massive thread right here on Tumblr. It got hundreds of responses and tons of links to some incredibly wonderful work, most of which has not yet received the exposure it deserves, quite a…
Another Man Who Hates Fun strip, this time feat. a Third Color
Ideal purples
Test drawings for a short story I’m writing. It’s just a sketchbook project so it doesn’t distract from other stories too much. It’s called “Feef,” it is an unabashed combination of Tron, Reddit, and Wuthering Heights, and goes some rather cool places, if it ever gets there.
I <3 vellum so much.
—It’s kinda a Mozart thing but with Chuck Berry ideas incorporated, so, you say. —Tom wants us to do a song about the diner so they’ll pay us some money for the endorsement so I think this’ll be that, you know?
—That’s the worst idea, Phillie says. —How much money?
—Like five hundred dollars, you say.
—That’s a lot, he says. —Yeah, okay, do it.
—I mean there’s always more genius where that came from, you say.
I have a friend. He goes by Raymie(spelling?) or Seth. He is a female-to-male transman.
now, tuesday was valentine’s day. At my school, we play a game called the heart game. Each girl is given a heart which she writes her name on. Girls are not supposed to talk to boys for…
(Source: lampsu)
Tom Happy watches you eat, looks at the glittering chrome clock above the long bar.
—Girls, he says. —Girls like muscles. They demand them. I mean put yourself in their position. According to evolution the whole purpose of ladies is to watch over children and prepare a home, meals, and so on and such. What’s missing from this domestic picture? Men, with the muscles and the moral certitude you need to defend any home, no matter how domestic it may be. Women need a mate with muscles and it’s just basic evolution.
—What if women just got muscles themselves? you say. —I mean, gee, they could work out with brooms and buckets and stuff too. They’d probably even be better at getting muscles that way because they know the ins and outs of that stuff more. Then they’d have babies and good houses and food and muscles and I guess moral certitude also and I don’t even know what they’d need men for at that point.
—Real interesting hippo thesis, Tom says.
—I guess they’d need, uh, you know, seed, for the babies, you say. —But that’ll probably be easy to get. There could be like a farm.
—It’s like you think the rules don’t apply to you, Tom says. —Muscles, Brian.
At the Slinks house you’re served macaroons and almonds in a dish; sink into a deep yellow sofa cushion while Stacy tells her father about how wonderful your song about drive in sex was… . Ramona smokes, curled in an armchair at the outer edge of the coffee table, her denim-wrapped legs pulled under her; Ramona keeps quiet. Just off the living room there’s a staircase. Family photos hang along the railing of it, tobacco clouds at the corners of their frames. The macaroon filling is custardy and after the disco fries makes you want to throw up.
—One day he’s gonna be a great music teacher, Daddy, Stacy says. —I can already see it. He’s brilliant with children. He thinks like one. He loves Beethoven.
—Beethoven, says Mr. Slinks. —Longhair music. Abstract. Intellectual.
—Yeah well I don’t really love Beethoven, you say.
