Hello, Tailor

by Colin P. Delaney on May 16, 2012 at 12:00 am

Sooooo, maybe this is a good time to mention I love costume design. Which, Dear Reader, you may think is somehow related to today’s comic, but really, it’s not. It’s more that I stumbled onto a very cool website all about costume design on the same day as one of our intrepid heroes steps out of (a however transparent) closet. So, maybe it’s coincidence or maybe it’s the universe grinding it’s gears into place, but regardless, good for Cam for coming out and even even better for President Obama for standing up.

Moving on.  I love costume design because it can be just so clever in how it can subtly re-enforce a story, where an element of a character’s identity can be so cleanly delineated by the cut of his suit, as opposed to a lengthy monologue about…you know, feelings (woof).  Which is all to say…have you meet Hello, Tailor?  It’s a lovely blog that’s all about finely deconstructing costume design in movies.  Right now, they’re running a series on The Avengers (have you heard of The Avengers?  It’s a small indie movie about the power of friendship) and I really love the attention the author gives to the details that make up the grand design.  One of my favorite moments comes from this little break-down of the SHIELD agents’ uniforms.

It’s all well and good for the crew of fit 30-somethings on the Helicarrier be kitted out in catsuits every day, but even if people in real life were as uniformly slim and well-muscled as the average SHIELD agent appears to be, I still doubt they’d be entirely comfortable about wearing that to work every day. Particularly if their entire job is to sit in front of a computer screen and zap any pigeons that look like they might be getting near to one of the Helicarrier’s rotor blades. The best reason I can think of for the ubiquity of pointless jumpsuit-wearing is that it helps to normalise the costumes worn by the superheroes themselves. Captain America’s and Black Widow’s skin-tight outfits — both manufactured by SHIELD — bear more than a passing resemblance to the SHIELD uniform jumpsuits.

And speaking of interesting perspectives about the button-&-zipper-set, have you seen Slate’s ongoing series about Mad Men’s costuming? Written by Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, Mad Men Style does a wonderful job of zeroing in on all the small moments of color and seam that add so much to any scene. It’s like a delicious piece candy after a really great meal and ask me, Season Five is like the Saturday Night special at Le Bernardin.

‘Happy Wednesday!

~cpd

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Back in the Saddle

by Colin P. Delaney on May 14, 2012 at 12:00 am

It was a quiet (last) week in Lake Catbegon, Dear Reader, as your humble corespondent had a thing every night after work—The Avengers on Monday, a friend’s improv show at UCB on Tuesday, Wednesday we were at BAM with Miss Wit (whose “NRD” shirt I cannot recommend enough) and Thursday, dinner with friends at Dumont Burger, where you can find the best milkshakes this side of Newton Creek. By the time Friday made her entrance, all this corespondent wanted to do was curl up on the couch and watch a season’s worth of Community.

Which is all to say that there were many, many, many things I wanted to say last week, but, alas and alack, I did not. So—let’s do a fast rundown of missed flash facts and tiger tidbits!

Let’s start with lion, yes?

Point of order: The lions outside the Main Branch of the NYPL (the work of sculptor E. C. Potter, by the by) are named Patience and Fortitude. The one pictured below is Patience (no, I don’t know that, I made that up).


What the hell is up with this lady? Well, I  know, obviously, but I hope you weren’t too thrown for a loop. Flash fact: When Tony and I were talking character designs for our above Mystery Date, I may have giving him this as a reference.

I mentioned this on Twitter last week, but I think it bears repeating—this:


Is the Court Square Diner in LIC, Queens. See, after being saved (however unknowingly) by the Mystery Date, Cat & Co. ran down the street and jumped in the nearest subway, which just happens to be the 7 train, right around the corner from the Library.

Court Square is third stop into Queens and our gang got off and decided they needed a post-monster-attack cheese-fries-&-coffee break, which, well—we’ve all been there, haven’t we?   Anyway—ask me, I think Tony really nailed both the external and interior shots of the Diner, but you don’t have to take my word for it—you can see the real thing here.

And another thing: I really love the composition of this panel:


The balance of dark and light (dare I say chiaroscuro?), the bird’s eye POV that highlights the emotional separation between Cat and her father, the slopped-shouldered shadow, unable to offer any sort of comfort or peace, the sheer loneliness of it…I just love it and wanted to say as much.

Oh, and to publicly answer an email I received about last Friday’s page:

No.  Cat is, in fact, NOT dead and Bruce Willis will NOT be making an appearance in these pages anytime soon.

‘Til, Wednesday, Dear Reader!

~cpd

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“…that old gag.”

by Colin P. Delaney on May 4, 2012 at 12:00 am

Happy Friday, Dear Reader—are you as happy as your humble correspondent that the week is finally done and done? And it’s not just because of The Avengers, although I am very interested in seeing how Joss Whedon handles the adventures of John Steed and Emma Peel! …oh, that old gag.

Actually, after the film’s LA premier, I made that same  joke on Twitter and quickly received a slew of angry emails from friends demanding to know how I managed to see the film early and why the hell did I not bring them?

When I mentioned this to my (special) lady (after explaining why the joke was SO VERY funny), she replied that—just maybe—jokes that require (1) an explanation and (2) a knowledge of BBC spy-shows from the 60s were not, in fact, “jokes” at all.

She might be onto something.

Have a great weekend!

~cpd 

 

 

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Attack of the Words!

by Colin P. Delaney on April 30, 2012 at 12:00 am

It’s been awhile since we had an ole’-fashioned re-cap, hasn’t it? So! To re-cap…

  • library
  • a tween Lord of Darkness
  • Shakespeare’s hand-written Tempest manuscript
  • throwing-up
  • a trip to the beach and new friend
  • RUNNING
  • giant stone hands
  • another trip to the beach
  • and…

I think that about gets us up to speed, yeah?

So! Last week I asked if anyone recognized the “spell” Cat was fumbling with and I got a few responses, which, alas and alack, were all wrong, but still you’re all winners for trying. Cat’s “spell,” in full, reads below:

I am a spear that roars for blood;
I am the shield for every head;
I am a salmon in a pool;
I am the womb of every holt;
I am a wonder among flowers;
I am the blaze on every hill;
I am the queen of every hive;
I am a stag of seven tines;
I am a tear the Sun lets fall!

The first time I was introduced to this particular poem was as a middle-schooler hungrily devouring the work of Susan Cooper, an author best know for her The Dark is Rising series of novels. In them, Cooper re-configures Arthurian romance with older Irish, Welsh and English mythology and overlays all of that with an entirely new story of her imagining—Light v. Dark, the world’s ending, that sort of thing. They’re really lovely books for young readers and although The Dark is Rising novels lack the dystopic blood and fury of The Hunger Games, they’re still plenty engaging.

But I’m getting off-track. The poem—Cooper uses it as a plot device in the …fourth book of the series? I really can’t recall, but the language and the rhythm always stayed with me. I had the thing more or less memorized and for years, I had assumed that she had invented that poem entirely on her own.

Flash-forward, I’m a freshman at NYU and one of my workshop teachers starts going on about Robert Graves and The White Goddess. Anyone familiar? As I understand it, The White Goddess was VERY big in the sixties and the seventies as the main thrust of the work is an analysis of a fundamental Mother Goddess cult existing in Europe and the Near-East that informed and determined much of our collective psychology and which, was eventually repressed by first  the Romans and then the Christian Church. Very counter-culture and all that. So, I read it (I’m always game) and while parts of the book are very interesting, Dear Reader, let me tell you——the finer (and sometimes excruciatingly exhaustive) points of Welsh and Irish philology? Not that engaging. Well. I’m sure to some.

Anyhow, Graves ends up sending a lot of time on The Song of Amergin, a poem-prayer by the Milesian bard Amergin that was recorded in the Irish Book of Invasions. Graves goes into some detail about how the poem is a sort of coded message about…something…involving the secret druidic language of the region, which is all about trees and…look, I can’t recall and it’s NOT that interesting anyway. Point is—a sliver of The Song of Amergin was what Susan Cooper used in her novel and what I’d been carrying around with me since my days in short pants!

Now, I know I wanted something interesting for Cat’s creating of the word-gargoyle above and when I was working on the scene, I worked out a number of really, really terrible concepts (from the Doctor Strange-style exhortation to your basic rhyming couplet) that I hated.  Then one night, while I drifting off to sleep, a snatch of the poem flashed across the inside of my eyes (“I am a blaze on every hill”) and I thought, why not? Can’t imagine old  Amergin would mind, what with him being both dead and mythological. So! I futzed with the clause-order a bit, but the thing is mostly still the thing and I hope you enjoyed reading it.

And speaking of reading pleasure, below you’ll find the whole of the poem, using Graves’ translation from The White Goddess. I’ve no idea what it means, but I like how it feels.

‘Till Wednesday!

~cpd

The Song of Amergin
translated by Robert Graves

I am a stag: of seven tines,
I am a flood: across a plain,
I am a wind: on a deep lake,
I am a tear: the Sun lets fall,
I am a hawk: above the cliff,
I am a thorn: beneath the nail,
I am a wonder: among flowers,
I am a wizard: who but I
Sets the cool head aflame with smoke?

I am a spear: that roars for blood,
I am a salmon: in a pool,
I am a lure: from paradise,
I am a hill: where poets walk,
I am a boar: ruthless and red,
I am a breaker: threatening doom,
I am a tide: that drags to death,
I am an infant: who but I
Peeps from the unhewn dolmen, arch?

I am the womb: of every holt,
I am the blaze: on every hill,
I am the queen: of every hive,
I am the shield: for every head,
I am the tomb: of every hope.

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Apropos of Nothing

by Colin P. Delaney on April 25, 2012 at 10:13 am

On the subway this morning, my head is buried in my book, but in my peripheral I can see a man flitting back and forth among my fellow straphangers and handing over sheets of paper with a note he’s scribbled. Now, I’m thinking it’s most likely a plea for spare change. From time to time, you get that—little notecards (sometimes from Vistaprint) with a few sentences about the person’s situation and an ask for whatever you can spare.

Some people are fanatically opposed to giving over spare change. Personally, if I’ve got a nickel (and no, I don’t care if said nickel going to booze or whathaveyou), you’re welcome to it. A woman on the subway yelled at me once for it, telling me she gives to charity, she shouldn’t have to give on the subway and what I was doing was encouraging “them.” That’s one way to look at, but to me, if the poor bastard has sunk so low that s/he’s begging for change, who I am to quibble?

I’m getting off track. So, this dude, the one flitting around—he comes up next to me (and again, I’m reading and flashing my sub-rosa NYC call-sign that reads “DO NOT ENGAGE WITH ME”) and starts to scribble, looking over at me, then down at his pad, over, then down, one then down.

Oh…the hell is this? I think. My stop comes and I stand up and the dude with the pad and pencil gives me…

Isn’t that a lovely way to start the day? On the botom, there was note encouraging tipping, which I did with the two dollars I had in my pocket. That said, however, this portrait of yours truly makes me think a bit of a grown-up Tintin who’s gone to seed.

Now, when it comes to the comic—the spell Cat’s reciting is hardly new. Do any sharp-eyed readers know what I’m quoting (or stealing).

Happy Wednesday, Dear Reader!

~cpd

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