bolder, c-c-cold, gettin' colder

Keeping to the daily routine of posting again this far, but usually I only turn the PC on to draw a panel or something so I can do a screen grab for the blog, such are my terrible organisation skills.

I'm done with The Wire and The Corner and I'm back to the televisual equivalent of comfort food in Leverage and Covert Affairs. Meh.

Looks like we've got a long night of cocaine ahead of us

Well, The Corner was one jolly show and no mistake. For now, I think it's back to watching crap for a bit - Space 1999 and UFO won't finish watching themselves! Also Sherlock Hound, which is something that actually exists.

them shits is da bomb

How miserable is The Corner? The Corner is so miserable that at one point a character actually cheers himself up by going to the cinema to watch Schindler's List.
I'm a bit torn on this show: on the one hand there's a lot that is later refined when the makers moved onto the Wire, but that show realised the good and the bad and came out the other end with something human, while this - apparantly factual - miniseries seems so focused on one tiny element of misery that when it occasionally broadens its scope to ask if the war on drugs is winnable, it just comes across as the makers striking a pose as concerned liberals when they should merely be observing and allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions. Still, if you're in the mood for a preachy holiday in misery, you could probably do worse.

Sheeeeeeeeit

Must. Stop. Using. Filters.

Watching: The Corner, which is good, if a bit stagey in places and suffering from variable acting.
Burn Notice, which is one of my shit shows I watch but if I think about it I don't think I actually enjoy it or anything, but it does have Bruce Campbell being Bruce Campbell, which is always to be encouraged.

"women and seamen don't mix."

I can thoroughly recommend eliminating all forms of caffeine from your diet to any fans of sleeping too late and bad headaches. Small press buggery continues apace.

Watching: The Wire, Season 5 - something was a bit off with this final season for me, though I'm not sure what. Centering on the media, perhaps it's deliberate to have so many Hollywood endings for various storylines but some stuff seems a bit too high concept, which was something the third season's Hamsterdam arc achieved well in isolation, and if anything should have eaten up the run time it would have been better to concentrate on McNulty and Freamon's investigation finally going black without the distraction of all that fake serial killer stuff. Still great television, all the same, and I'm more than willing to concede that my expectations might just have been too high. "I don't want this investigation to sprawl" states Lieutenant Daniels in the most optimistic and ultimately wrong fashion way back in season 1, but sprawl it did and damn, but it did so in fine fashion. If Treme wasn't so damn good a follow-up I'd feel cheated at the mere 60 episodes we got from the Wire, but something went seriously wrong with the cop show standard of crapping all over any given setting, as Baltimore has to be a dead cert for any US roadtrip I make - whoever pegged the Wire as "a bipolar love letter to the city" undersold it.
Leverage - which is shit, but I'm watching it anyway.

I'm going to rearrange your face with hard science. And this wooden plank.

Back on the small press hustle and drawing things that aren't awesome or glamorous. Probably tighten me.

So what, man? You earned that buck like a motherfucker - keep that shit.

Well, back to the business of blogging whatever brain-farts I tend to be illustrating on any given day as my newly unfucked PC finds its way home and the utterly unwarranted self-importance of the blogger asserts itself and forces me back into posting for no better reason than I'm currently unemployed and I usually sketch to relax as much as to fill up small press mags with my increasingly childish scrawls so I may as well be filling up posts in this little corner of the web.
Apropos of nothing, my influence map as best I can assemble it:

Lots of stuff missing, no doubt - but the major players are up there.

What I can remember watching in the last few weeks since I last posted:
The Wire seasons 1-4: much has been said by better and more literate critics and fans, but rewatching does yield an even higher opinion of what I'd already thought of as a pretty damn great tv show. Even so, there's a moment at the end of season 4 where I was just "aw man, Bubbles!" I've oddly never seen The Corner, but that's my next stop after season 5 has been revisited.
The Time Traveller's Wife - a decent weepie derailed a little by a lack of any chemistry between the leads, who come across as very cold to the point I couldn't really care enough to choke up or cry manly tears. There's this bit where the main characters find out they have a time traveling 10 year old daughter who occasionally ends up naked in random places and their attitude is "well that'll be a wee adventure for her!" despite it being what causes her dad's violent death and throughout the film causes him to be beaten up, injured, reduced to thievery , arrested and ultimately alienated from all human contact - still, that's the fucking middle classes for you. The whole time travel element is poorly thought out, as the story dips in and out of being a massive predestination paradox, yet some stuff happens for no reason other than narrative necessity and the whole thing is otherwise brushed off as 'random' even though 'random' and 'predestined' are slightly at odds as concepts. I also notice that Deep Space 9's The Visitor predates the original novel upon which this is based by 8 years. Hmmm...