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Author: John Scott Tynes

Mr. Teapot contributes this OMAC Link Of The Moment, and it’s a doozy. Long-time cartoonist Scott Shaw! wrote this summary of OMAC #1 for a series of articles on oddball comix. (Special bonus loser points to those who, like me, were once fans of Shaw!’s Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew.)

http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/oddball/index.cgi?date=2001-04-10

Do you have an OMAC Link Of The Moment? If so, post a comment to this dispatch with the word. The first person to use something like Yahoo! Maps to provide us an actual map to Omac, Washington, wins a deluxe gold-plated Revland Dispatches No-Prize.

Gosford Park

I thought The Royal Tenenbaums was the best of the late-2001 films, but darned if Gosford Park isn’t nipping at its heels. I also thought that Cookie’s Fortune was Robert Altman’s best film since The Player, maybe even since M*A*S*H–it’s been a long dry spell for him, and I think his much-lauded Nashville accomplished nothing that M*A*S*H didn’t do–but by comparison with Gosford, Cookie’s Fortune feels hammy and flaccid. Gosford Park is a very satisfying and enjoyably dense film that makes the most of an excellent cast and location.

What’s not to like? Terrific actors like Emily Watson and Clive Owen grab the camera’s attention and do great work, and Maggie Smith kicks ten stories of ass. Helen Mirren comes in with a ninth-inning flourish and Stephen Fry is a riot. Richard E. Grant says little but always does something interesting. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is how the huge cast uniformly keeps themselves busy in intriguing ways, every second of the film, but they don’t upstage each other. The actors’ give and take is so natural, so seemingly effortless, that it makes you wonder why anyone makes films anywhere but England. It reminds me of Ridley Scott’s vague uneasiness working on the American production of Blade Runner, and how the crew members just weren’t servile enough–that’s not how he put it, but that was the implication. If servility means more films like Gosford Park, bring on the damn class system already. This is some wicked-fine Kool-Aid.

The story unfolds beautifully, the country-manor location is gorgeous, and the film has a tautness I don’t normally associate with Altman’s restless, wide-ranging style. I think in a sense he was hemmed in by a great script and a huge and talented cast, to the extent that he couldn’t get away with his usual glorious floundering around. He stayed focused and tight and the film just purrs.

I also suspect that part of its glow comes from the setting, the genteel Britishness of the whole thing. It comes off as a class act, in more ways than one. Somehow, watching aristocratic Englishmen hob-nob feels more credible and respectable than the cheerful small-town clowning of my beloved Cookie’s Fortune. I fear we Americans will always be enamored with proper British society in a way that ensures numerous U.K. actors can continue cashing their paychecks for decades to come.

In any event, I loved Gosford Park and am eager to see it again.

Finally, a use for the now-defunct Macintosh Cube: running the bridge computer displays for that new Star Trek show. They use Macromedia Director and just chunk the Cubes in everywhere. Makes sense: modest CPU needs, small size, and no noisy fans.

Mike Mearls complained about the lack of OMAC content. So here’s the OMAC Link Of The Moment, Powered By Google:

Ottawa Mandarin Alliance Church

http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~azhang/omac/

This is just amazing. This guy’s sister’s iMac was stolen in a burglary. But it had Timbuktu installed, a remote-operation client that registers a unique ID on a server. He found the thief signing on every day, unaware that the iMac was duly reporting in. Then with the help of some AppleScript experts…well, you’ll have to read the whole story below. It’s fantastic.

http://www.macscripter.net/unscripted.html

(Now I’m just being cruel.)

The Blair Witch Project’s Derelict Web Site Drinking Game

Go to the official Blair Witch web site and start poking around. Every time you find a broken image or a link that takes you to a 404 error page, drink. Every time you find a reference to an upcoming event that actually happened at least six months ago, drink twice.

You will need a lot of booze.

Yesterday went really well. I solved several computer issues and, gloriously, Mac OS X is running very well on my system these days. I also made some important progress on the Adepts chapter for UA2, and got some Avatar work underway as well.

Today I had the pleasure of commissioning some art from Dream Lord–otherwise known as Haroudo Xavier. He’s an amazing photomontage artist in Brazil who is a devoted fan of Unknown Armies. For the last year or so he’s been creating a series of graphics for use as desktop pictures on your computer, each based on a school of magick in UA. Now he’s doing nine original works for the UA2 rulebook. You can see a few of his existing UA-inspired works at his online gallery, along with many other creations. He’s done a lot more of these UA pieces than are on that page, but I haven’t found a directory of them all on his site. Gorgeous work in any event, and I’m pleased to have him in the book.

Today and tomorrow I’m working on the Delta Green computer game project. My task at present is prepping the second round of publicity for the game. I seem to be serving as de facto marketing director for the project, which is fine by me. This is the round where we release screenshots. Instead of just emailing screenshots to the news sites, I’m setting up a dossier of “found” documents from DG. So I’m writing a couple of field reports based on the screenshot images, and am dummying them up with handwritten annotations and so forth. I think I’ll also create some audio bits–wiretapped phone conversations and so forth. The point is to create a fun, bush-league Blair Witch-style little publicity project that’ll be more enjoyable and noteworthy than the usual press release + screenshots would be. It should all come together in the next three weeks.

I spent the evening in Karen’s studio while she was at woodworking class. I scanned eighteen of her Greece & Mongolia paintings tonight, which is good progress–though there are something like fifty works all together to get done. After her class we had mediocre Thai food for dinner.

That came about because for breakfast I’d had soup from QFC, the local grocery store chain. They have those big pots of soup steaming all day, and they’re actually not bad. The soup is supplied by a company near Snohomish called Stock Pot Soups. I drive by them every time I visit Jesper. This morning I saw one of their offerings in QFC described as “Coconut milk, curry, chicken with rice,” and I thought: Tom Kah Gai! That’s one of my favorite soups, a Thai preparation that is just delicious, and it is indeed coconut milk, curry, chicken, and spices. So I tried Stock Pot’s version and discovered that while yes, it was clearly inspired by Tom Kah Gai, they felt the need to put cheese in it.

That’s right. Coconut milk, curry, chicken, and cheese.

I can only guess that their thinking ran like this: “Well, Tom Kah Gai is kind of orange and creamy-looking, and when our customers see orange and creamy-looking they read that as a cheese soup, like cheddar broccoli. So let’s put cheese in it!”

The result wasn’t exactly terrible, but it wasn’t exactly Tom Kah Gai. Sadly, the Thai restaurant’s Tom Kah Gai wasn’t so hot either. It’s just been a day of soup failures.

Friday morning, bright and early, Karen and I and her studio partner Mary are blowing town for Mazama. This is some sort of little ski village on the eastern side of the Cascade mountains, and during the winter it’s about a four-hour drive since the passes are snowed in. Karen and her circle of friends have been going to Mazama for a weekend for several years now, but this is the first time I’m going. She keeps muttering darkly about me and cross-country skiing. I’ve always viewed a ski as the shortest distance between me and a broken leg, but we’ll see how it goes. Her housemate Noah is going and bringing his PowerBook, and since he’s not a big winter-sports person either we’ve made secret plans to bring an Ethernet crossover cable and play kill-crazy games of Aliens vs. Predator, no doubt to the disgust of the other ten hardy souls in the big cabin we’re staying in.

On the way we’re taking an extra hour to swing through a town called Omac, where Mary needs to do something or other. Every time they mention Omac I want to laugh. OMAC was a short-lived Jack Kirby comic book from DC in the early 1970s, around the time of his “New Gods” phase. (Those of you who understand that sentence, meet me by the chemical sheds.) It’s an acronym that stood for One Man Army Corps, and OMAC was some sort of cyborg warrior badass guy in a dystopian near-future. I’ve never actually read any issues of OMAC, but we had them at the comic-book store I worked at in high school and the name stuck with me because the cover to the first issue was so incredibly freaking weird. Don’t believe me? Here it is. OMAC is the guy with the mohawk.

And because it took me so much Google searching to find that graphic, here is an awesomely obsessive write-up of the entire series. And here is, and I shit you not, OMAC fan fiction.

So on Friday, I’m going to Omac. Oh yeah. Can’t wait.

Speaking of Thai food and obsessive internet presences, I love this web site. It’s for a Thai restaurant just down the street from my house. They opened about four or five years ago, and for ages I’d see the banner hanging outside that said: “VISIT US ON THE INTERNET! THAIDUSIT.NET!” And I couldn’t figure out why they had a web site. Then I finally went to it, and I still don’t know why they have a web site. But it’s fun to look at. Go straight for the Tour page, where you can see photos of the cool shrine outside the front door and, of course, read about the Thai Rock ‘n Roll of Chamawong Suriyachan, who was apparently the lead singer of a band called All Purpose Adhesive before coming to the U.S. It’s all too much. But the food is very good and their Thai ice tea is fantastic–that’s a potent tea made with sweetened condensed milk because, hey, why not?

OMAC!!!!! Let’s see that again!!!!!

Oh I crack myself up. OMAC!!!!!

Karen’s art show went off beautifully. We had excellent crowds both nights and much fun. I missed the slide show of photographs from the Mongolia trip on Saturday night, unfortunately–even more unfortunately, it’s because I was in a theater watching Blackhawk Down.

Blackhawk Down

Ridley Scott knows his way around an image, but he needs a strong actor to get emotion into the frame. There are some good actors in Blackhawk Down, but it’s an ensemble film and no one ever gets to shine. The result is a technically strong work that never connected with me.

As for the events, I read Mark Bowden’s book–the source of the film–last year and it’s an amazing piece of journalism. The film makes the interesting choice of cutting the story down not so much to avoid narrative complexity, but moral complexity. Where Bowden really told the story from all sides, thanks to interviews with Somalis in Mogadishu, the film drops the Somali perspective entirely. It hunkers down and just watches the specific actions of the Rangers and Deltas involved that day, keeping blinders on the rest. There are only two Somalis who get to speak. One is a captured arms dealer who has a meaningless confrontation with the American general, swirling his cigar and making dire proclamations. The other is a soldier who briefly questions a captured Ranger. Both are narrative shorthand, stopgaps put in the screenplay to justify the excision of so much more.

There’s even an incredibly silly moment with the arms dealer, still in captivity: right after the first helicopter goes down in flames and screams, we inexplicably cut to a shot of this guy, sitting in his cell on the Army base, smoking a cigar and grinning maniacally. He doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the chopper going down–except, perhaps, having sold the rocket that did the job–and doesn’t even know it’s happened. But because he’s the only Somali character we’ve seen who isn’t dead within three seconds, the filmmakers show him to us so we have someone to blame. “Look, a chopper went down! Look, this guy is laughing! You can blame him!” It’s a cinematic trick that goes back a century to the Lumiere brothers, who discovered they could show a shot of a firing squad and a shot of a woman clutching her body and falling over, and audiences would connect the two events. But here it’s employed to no purpose whatsoever because there is no meaningful connection between the two images.

The troops on the ground did good work in a bad situation. They responded to bad orders, bad planning, bad intelligence, and bad strategy with good tactics. But even the film’s portrayal of the soldiers’ work and the challenges they faced is undercut by the insistence on only presenting a simplistic heroic perspective. The truth is far more interesting, and makes their actions that day all the more worthy of our respect–yet the film denies us that truth for the sake of easy money. If you really want to know just how smart and talented and brave and passionate our soldiers were that day, even when they made mistakes or got lost or yelled at each other, read the book.

The film is hackwork. Calling it trite suggests it tries for something better and fails, but the truth is sadder: Blackhawk Down aims so low that even a crash landing is a heroic triumph.

I have a lot of catching up to do and maybe that’ll happen later tonight, but I wanted to share a minor bit of good news. The newspaper I’m writing my film column for just won a nifty award:

Utne Reader, the nation’s leading magazine of alternative ideas, announces the Reader’s Choice Award of Best New Title goes to Tablet Newspaper.

Nominated by the Utne Reader editors for Best New Title in October 2001, “Tablet is a great example of creative, beyond-the-mainstream thinking, and we are proud to honor it with a nomination,” said Jay Walljasper, Utne Reader Editorial Director.

Tablet is the Northwest’s only all-volunteer biweekly newspaper. Through a core staff of dedicated volunteers and contributors, Tablet has achieved an amazing amount of success in its inaugural year. The first issue of Tablet was published on October 4th, 2000. Since then the paper has grown in page size and has increased its distribution by thousands. Being nominated for a 2001 Utne Reader Alternative Press Award is a true honor.

Since 1989 these awards have showcased the best from the alternative press in categories including “General Excellence” and “Best New Title”. Utne Reader’s editors select nominee publications through their extensive reading process and careful examination, rather than a competition requiring entry forms and fees. In this way, Utne Reader honors the efforts of small, sometimes unnoticed publications that provide innovative, thought-provoking perspectives often ignored by mass media.

Utne Reader is the nation’s leading digest of the alternative media. In addition to the magazine and corresponding web site, (http://www.utne.com), the company recently launched Utne Communities (http://www.utne.com/communities), dedicated to helping educators, non-profits and companies develop successful online communities.

Tablet will support and promote emerging music, art, and political communities of the Northwest and beyond, through bold design, a feisty attitude, and affordable advertising. — Tablet mission statement

The piece Mike and I did aired on TechTV today and seems to have gone well. I haven’t seen it, unfortunately, and they don’t have an actual clip of Mike’s appearance on their web site. But you can read the accompanying article we wrote and watch the video we made. It’s online here. The quality of their streaming video is pretty poor, from what I saw. We’ll have a good version on Mike’s site sometime soon, hopefully with his actual appearance on the show to boot.

Lots more to talk about, but as a friend of mine likes to say: “I have so much to do that I am going to bed.”