Monday Morning Commute: Inception. Spooge. Inception.
My final project for my summer course is finished. It’s been attached to an email. It’s been fired, an electronic missive, scattering across the digi-webs towards my professor’s inbox. And as soon it is received, it shall begin crushing the university’s bandwidth, daring to be downloaded. Enormous. Blathering. Finished.
A week’s worth of work. Thousands of words, a couple dozen pages. Diet Mountain Dew cans consumed into the infinity-range. Spent veins, spent cells, smiles abound.
Hey, it’s like, summer or something?
I’ll be bored and ready for class in two weeks.
Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.
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Watching / Inception
I saw Inception at midnight on Thursday. It has staunchly refused to leave my brain since that moment. Call it intellectual laziness, but I prefer to side-step the usual “Quantity X was Quality Y” comment. I don’t know how good Inception is, but I know that I fucking love it.
I told Pepsibones that I have begun trying to figure out how much I like something by how much it stays within the skullparts of my mushbox. I can’t get Inception out of there, and god dammit, I don’t really want to, either. It brings me happiness. Just when I think it has left me, it returns with cookies and lemonade, and says to me, “Beautiful day, innit?”
And I just smile.
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The purpose of my project was to design a “dream” sequence of literature that I would teach. So I went right to my Love Nest. I began pilfering around for concepts of the American Dream, looking for the texts that I enjoyed that dissected capitalism, materialism, erroneous concepts of social status. The sort of stuff that has stuck, like a splinter in my mind. I came up with a class that taught The Great Gatsby and then segued into Fight Club by way of an episode of Mad Men. It seemed terribly fun.
The depressing part is that it exists only in a word document, and in my mind. After building such a dream sequence, I realized that the chances of me ever teaching it are relatively slim, and that night I ate a second cookie to mask my feelings.
Sometimes I cry through food.
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Reading / Scarlet #1, by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev
Another work of art that I can’t get out of my head is the first issue of Bendis and Maleev’s new comic book: Scarlet. I can’t figure out why. I mean, it’s extremely well written. The main character is interesting, the dialogue is humorous, the story somewhat typical but intriguing, the meta-fictional concept used but fun. But somehow, some sort of synergistic move takes place, and all the good-but-not-amazing aspects came together to give me an initial issue that has really kicked my ass.
One issue in, and it’s my favorite comic book coming out right now.
It’s a reminder that Brian Michael Bendis is a fucking writer, yo. I give him shit because of his work on roughly 95% of the Marvel line, but its obvious that the dude is spread thin. Scarlet proves that. A new title, that has has been given the time to love and caress and bring into the world at his discretion? It’s amazing. Welcome back, Bendis. I missed you.
And Alex Maleev? The art is beyond gorgeous.
Buy this title.
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Playing / Limbo, Xbox 360 [XBLA]
I had never heard of Limbo until a reader of my Press Start! column over at Mishka pointed it out to me. His name is Trismatics, and I owe him/her big time for bringing me onto the scent of this game. It’s hard to explain Limbo. It’s a side-scrolling indie adventure game for Xbox Live Arcade, but it is so much more than that. It’s a beautiful game set within the framework of the main character trying to find his sister within, yep, Limbo.
Watch the video here, you’ll be convinced. Or you’ll suck. The onus is on you, my friend.
The game drops tomorrow on Wednesday and is snagging high praise from around the video game netterwebs.
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What are you swashbuckling degenerates partaking in this week?