Jason's Blog, page 140

Happy birthday, Leonard Cohen!

 I said to Hank Williams: how lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
A hundred floors above me
In the Tower of Song

Rendezvous

I remember watching this French tv series as a kid about a man avenging the death of his girlfriend. Some hunters in a small plane throw a bottle out the window. It hits a woman on the head and she dies. Her boyfriend finds out what happened and one by one kills the people on the plane. He has a notebook with their names written down. After each death he puts a cross by the name and says, -Puni. Punished. That's about all I remember, but that series made a big impression on me. It was a major inspiration for my story Emily Says Hello.

It was exciting to discover that this story is based upon a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Some googling made me learn that the tv series, Rendez-vous en Noir,  was made in 77, with Daniel Auteuil as one of the actors. And the boyfriend doesn't kill the killers, he kills their wives or girlfriends. I remembered that wrong. Anyway, the book is ordered and I look forward to reading it. I might set myself up for a disappointment. Will the book make the same impression on me as an adult as the tv series did on me as a kid?

Draw Me A Detective...

I've been goofing off lately, not drawing anything. The story is told, all the decisions have been made, all the dialogue written. What remains is the boring stuff, background details and so on. But only one week remains in Montreal, and I will finish the last ten pages before going back to Europe. Once I'm back (unless my apartment has burned down or something, who knows) I will scan some of the pages and put them up here. The book should be published, both in French and in English, in the spring next year.

One For My Baby

Play It Again Sam

Let's go home, Debbie.

Les Simpson

It's strange to watch episodes of The Simpsons dubbed into French Canadian. It's very different from the French dubbing. It's also strange to watch the early episodes, how much it has changed. But it is only to be expected, I guess. It takes some time for cartoonists and animators to find the characters. I also saw a newer episode and was a bit surprised by how far the quality has sunk. In the episode Lisa meets a boy referred to as hemingwayesque, and in a dreamsequence we meet Hemingway's two first wives, Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer. So it was interesting, surreal almost, but it forgot to be funny!

There's about 50 channels on my tv here, a mix of Canadian and American. There are lots of shows I've never seen before, but the only one that actually is pretty funny and has likable characters is Big Bang Theory. One of the channels sends an episode each evening, so I will have seen the two first seasons by the time I go back to France.

And, apropos of nothing, is there something particular about Canadians and tattoos? It just seems a lot more common here than any other place I've been.

Madeleine Peyroux

               I was sitting in a Starbucks enjoying a caramel macchiato when they played this song, and for a second there I thought I was in heaven. What would a Leonard Cohen song covered by Billie Holiday sound like? Well, something like this.        

Stuff bought in Montreal

Books:
Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill
The Collected Stories by Carson McCullers
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
Goliath by Tom Gauld
Papa: Hemingway in Key West by James McLendon
Hemingway: The Toronto Years by William Burrill
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

I already got the two Chandler books, but I really like the design of the Vintage Crime / Black Lizard editions. I already got five books in this series, and will probably go look for the two last ones as well, even though I already got those in other editions. Just to have all nine books of the series complete on my shelf, and I can see the similar spines each time I walk by! Why is that so important, really? I don't know! Help!

Dvds:
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by David Fincher
Season 8 of Seinfeld
Season 6 of Northern Exposure
Season 2 of Louie

The Girl is well done, but strangely uninvolving and less re-watchable than Seven and Zodiac.

You better talk to my mother