Reorganisation
Books: The Giggle
Films: Fallen Leaves, Fargo, Bottoms, The Silence of the Lambs
Plays: God of Carnage
As I continue to recover from my back pain, I decided to take a relaxing week spent with friends and family. On Republic Day (26th January), we attended the annual Art Mandai, which I like because it breaks conventional ideas of who is supposed to enjoy art and at what prices. Plus, the proceeds go to concretely improving the infrastructure of the Mandai itself.
Work-wise, I sent in revisions on Dawnrunner #2 and lettered the first five pages of Spectregraph #1. Work continues on Unnamed OGN.
No new releases. I think. (Tracking comics releases is no longer as simple as checking the Previews catalogue, so I’m not always sure what comes out when, even though I’m lettering far fewer comics now.)
Last week, I took some time to move my organisational setup from Trello and assorted apps to Things.
So far, I had a four-tiered system with lots of redundancies to make sure things don’t slip between the cracks. So every new task would be moved from my email to my Trello board, while three Google worksheets would keep track of upcoming projects and invoicing (I have an invoicing software, but I don’t always remember everything I’m supposed to invoice), I used Notion for assorted deadlines (because you can switch a Notion page from a calendar to a board, and assign statuses to each item), and a Google calendar would help me organise each month visually to figure out when I was doing what.1
This system, however, worked on the understanding that I would always be in front of the computer and looking at my Trello board, which would point me to the rest of the setup as required.
Now I’m pretty definitively not overworked, so I stopped using the calendar, and I’m not in front of the computer all the time, which meant I started losing track of a few more tasks than before, because I wasn’t constantly looking at my setup – it only worked for someone who was working full-time.
So last week, I rejigged the whole thing to fit my current work situation – I nixed the calendar entirely (I can always bring it back if I have a particularly full month), and I moved my Trello board into Things, which I already use to track personal tasks. It was a pretty simple process – my Trello already consisted of a basic Kanban board that went “Today – This Week – Soon – Someday” where tasks would move leftwards as required (and each task’s card held its due date as well). I just had to create a new Lettering project within Things, and add the Kanban statuses as headlines, and now I just have a list where tasks move upwards.
I still need two of my worksheets (the one I use for status checks – so I know what I have yet to invoice – and the one that keeps track of the projects and number of pages I’ve agreed to over the entire year), but I now look at them once a week, because the email-to-Things workflow no longer needs to go through them. (My clients will tell you, of course, that they constantly need to remind me to invoice them. I don’t see that changing soon, because I hate invoicing.)
Writing-wise, I felt a bit stuck on the final version of the plot/beat sheet for SEASIDE. I knew the 2-3 changes I needed to make, and they weren’t very big, but I would have to comb through the whole thing to propagate them, and I’d been away from the story for nearly a month. I needed something to break the inertia. So last week, in the middle of the night, I printed out the whole thing, and put a green pen next to it, to tell myself the changes I wanted to make before I sat down to make them, so I wouldn’t have to track them in my head.
That’s helped a ton. I immediately remembered everything I had to do and where I had to do it, and I’ve been marking it on the manuscript so I can retype the whole thing keeping the changes in the mind.
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
I also sketched out a 40-minute audio drama in my writing notebook. I’m going to walk away from it for a week and then see if it’s worth writing.
Links for the week:
- “So You Wanna De-Bog Yourself” – a well-framed list of things that might be the cause for your life not moving in the direction you’d like, and what you could do about it. This won’t solve things for most people, but getting a handle on what’s going wrong can be helpful, as it was for me when I found the procrastination checklist.2 You’ll want to soon move beyond the simplicity of this, but it could be a good start.
- Via Ganzeer, here’s a great long read on Nicholas Saunders, British pioneer in the “whole foods” movement.
- As I write this, I’m listening to this performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony with the great Hilary Hahn on violin. It’s quite something.
The Giggle: This is the novelisation of the third Doctor Who 60th Anniversary special – the one with Neil Patrick Harris and the bi-generation. I’d originally planned to skip this, as I mentioned in my last newsletter, because I hadn’t enjoyed the novelisations of the first two, but Philip Purser-Hallard – my editor on Iris Wildthyme and Forgotten Lives, and one of my favourite sf novelists to boot – said that it did some very creative things with the source material.
I’m very glad I read it, because The Giggle is easily the best of the three, and the one that reminded me most of the novelisations that made me want to read these – i.e. Rose and The Day of the Doctor.
For one, Goss’s writing voice is so much livelier than the other two. You can tell when someone’s having fun with each sentence and trying to say things with it beyond just “here’s what happened”, and that’s certainly the case with Goss here. It’s not immortal prose, but it’s in a different league than The Star Beast and Wild Blue Yonder.
Furthermore, Goss plays a ton of games within the format of the book, playing both with how character is depicted in prose versus on tv as well as the fact that this is a book about games. There’s a bit where the American president’s brain turns into a maze you have to find your way out of, Donna’s section within the Toymaker’s realm is played like a choose-your-own-adventure book, and my favourite of them all, the “Spice World” musical number is depicted as a fight between the Toymaker and a copyright lawyer who’s trying to stop him using the lyrics to the song.
Finally, I feel Goss gets what RTD is trying to do with the 14th Doctor in a way Russell and Morris didn’t always. They get who “the Doctor” is, but this Doctor, with the trauma he’s trying to escape, and how he needs to sit with it and not keep running, comes through in this book in a way he didn’t in the previous two.
The Giggle is a proper delight. The first of these novelisations that is independently worth a read outside of the episode itself.
Fallen Leaves is the latest film from Aki Kourismäki, the great Finnish director. I don’t know that I have much to add on this film apart from the Dan Fox piece I linked the other day and this Mubi Notebook blog about him. I do like how human his films are despite not being realist at all. The plot, slim as it is, is pure melodrama. The cinematography is mannered and careful with colour. There is minimal dialogue, and each frame is people sitting next to each other and looking away from one another, while the precisely curated music, from all over the world, tells half the story. I wasn’t surprised to hear at the end that the protagonists are off to watch a Chaplin film, because Chaplin hangs over this movie as much as any intervening filmmaker. A slight film, as these things go, but quite beautiful.
K and I finally watched the Coen brothers’ Fargo. It turns out I’d heard the plot of this wrong – I thought it’s about two guys who try to kidnap this third guy’s wife and accidentally kill her during the kidnapping. In fact, it’s a much more Coen brothers-y flick, with the lurching pace of something like Burn After Reading or The Big Lebowski. A very funny movie, with a great central performance by Frances McDormand, and a striking soundtrack. A thorough joy.
Bottoms is finally streaming in India, so K and I watched that and the next movie on the same day. I was extremely intrigued to see what Seligman and Sennott would do after their marvellous Shiva Baby. A teenage sex comedy was not what I’d expected. Bottoms hews far more to the structure of a sex comedy than I’d like, but I loved its anarchic sense of humour, its willingness to make its leads look like idiots, and the almost-surreal climax where straight-up mass murder is treated as a teenage triumph. (I think this bit is making a point about how teenage movies treat mundane things like homecoming and football matches as if they’re the most important things in your life, by taking the tack that you can literally go to any lengths for your school. But I think the movie would’ve been funnier if that had been the case throughout the film rather than just at the climax, though I can see a case against that too.)
The other movie from that day’s double bill was The Silence of the Lambs, which K had seen before and loved, and which I’d never seen. I enjoyed the film, though I’d been sold it as a horror movie, which it very much isn’t – it’s a straightforward thriller. You can also see that it hits right up against the boundaries of how far a mainstream studio movie could go in the 90s – there is no ambiguity in any plot point being presented, everything depicted visually is also iterated in the dialogue, and there’s an entirely unnecessary “as you and I both know” exposition dump at the start which screams of a studio executive making sure we know who the main character is. Despite all of that, it remains deucedly odd, and that combination is, I feel why it was a hit.
I was, however, surprised by how much I did not like Anthony Hopkins’s acting. If there was one thing I knew about this film before going in, it was that Hopkins delivers a powerhouse performance as Hannibal Lecter. But, let me be honest, he is Not Good in this film. In fact, after the second conversation between Hannibal and Clarice Starling, I paused the movie to ask K if he got any better over the rest of the film, or if this was it.
For one, he’s delivering a performance that doesn’t fit with any other actor in the film. He’s trying to show us an intensely controlled, mannered presence, both seductive and menacing, but he misses the mark completely and plays the role in a broad, mannered way that feels like a high school kid playing at being a criminal. Which would be fine if that was supposed to be the takeaway, but it isn’t. I was surprised at this, because I’ve otherwise always enjoyed Hopkins as an actor. I’d make my usual allowance here that it might be my mistake, since I’m clearly out-of-step with the larger audience here, but you know what, this time, I’m right and everyone’s wrong.
Jodie Foster is mostly quite good though, even though there are slip-ups later in the movie, usually when she’s bouncing off against Hopkins. I guess he brought her down to his level by the end.
Lest that make you think I’m down on this movie, though, I should say again that I did very much enjoy it – it’s well-directed, the main musical theme is beautiful, and the editing is incredibly artful. The story might be a bit goofy, as is Thomas Harris’s tendency, but that messy strangeness is what makes it still worth a watch nearly 30 years on.
(Sidenote: I’d been warned beforehand that this is a transphobic movie, and while I see that argument, I feel it’s more a film restricted by its mainstream nature and the time it was made in. The point is clearly made towards the beginning that JG’s ambiguous transness cannot explain the serial killings, even if that’s framed with the now-outdated idea that trans people are somehow “passive”. Dated, I’d say, but not necessarily transphobic. You might disagree, of course, and I wouldn’t even say you’d be wrong for it.)
In my quest to read more plays, I read and listened to the LA Theatre Works’s reading of God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton. The play is framed like a modern Who’s Afraid for Virginia Woolf?, with the entire play being a conversation between two couples.
But rather than the older play’s themes of marriage and age, this one deals with civility and civilisation as seen through gender roles, though the two plays share themes of societal expectations. God of Carnage is frequently funny, and The Big Bang Theory’s Simon Helberg does a great job with his character’s oafishness in the audio performance. I did find the ending unsatisfying, but it shares many modern plays’ tendency of dissipation instead of resolution, and I’ve decided to see that as a trend rather than as a specific weakness in this play.
There is apparently a film adaptation of this called Carnage, starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz, which I’d love to watch, but it’s directed by Roman Polanski, and I might need psych myself up a bit before I can watch anything made by him (Rosemary’s Baby is one of my favourite horror novels, and I haven’t been able to watch the film yet).
That’s it for last week. I keep intending to send these off over the weekend, but then the weekend comes and I get lazy. I need to plan better.
- I helped a designer friend set up their organisational system based on mine, and they pointed out that if they didn’t already know I had attention issues before then, looking at my system made it quite, quite clear. They needed maybe a third of everything I was using. ↩︎
- This was something I heard on a podcast – with an actor, if I remember correctly, not even a life guru – and immediately wrote down. The idea is that procrastination is not a cause, it’s a symptom of an underlying issue with the task you’re avoiding. So if you’re procrastinating on something, it might be because the task is a) Boring, b) Frustrating, c) Difficult, d) Lacking in personal meaning, e) Lacking in intrinsic reward, f) Ambiguous or g) Unstructured. ↩︎