A Fish Out of Water, A Book Yet to Be Read, A Tattoo Yet to Be Done

So I saw "Thor" this evening, and it was actually pretty good. I expected 2 things: boringness and heavy father-son drama, as one would expect from movies that involve Kenneth Branagh (he directed it). Well, no it was not boring. And yes, there was father-son drama.

However, me being me, the parts I liked best were the fish-out-of-water sequences, that on first description sound like the premise for jokes:

Thor the Thunder God walks into a pet store. He demands a horse!
Thor the Thunder God enjoys coffee. He demands more by throwing the cup on the floor!
Thor the Thunder God --

well, you get the idea.

And as overdone as fish-out-of-water sequences usually are, I still find them funny every time. Almost. Somebody should make me a video where they combine fish-out-of-water sequences from movies, and I could sit back and laugh.

I guess. Sort of.

It's just that if you take the fish-out-of-water premise too far, then it just ends up dehumanizing characters, and it can start to sort of migrate into territory that makes me uncomfortable. Look, an American in another country! Look at those crazy foreigners in the foreign land! Look, a person of non-white or American origin in America, look they're totally out of their element! And so on.


I guess you just have to be careful with the fish-out-of-water premise. If it's take too far then it just comes off as intolerant. Or racist. Or something. I don't know. I feel uncomfortable even bringing it up. It is also difficult to not watch "Outsourced" if it's on. I am not altogether comfortable with admitting that.

And then one other thing I found interesting in "Thor." Some blog entries back, I wrote about how in my mind, superhero films, at least the first ones in the series, which are usually origin films, are pretty much coming-of-age films. (Nothing wrong with that. I didn't mean it in a dismissive kind of a way.) But what was different about Thor (after all, this Thor was the Marvel Thor, which yes, is based on the mythology, but it is primarily the comic book Thor) is that Thor already had the power and the hammer and all that. He just needed to mature, learn some anger management, gain wisdom through experience, etc. So unlike other comic book movies, this movie was less of an origin story (he didn't get bitten by a radioactive spider or fall in a vat of toxic waste etc.). But it did have that coming-of-age slant. And by the way, one slant is not necessarily better than the other. It's just interesting, is all I'm saying. And I guess the same way that Thor had a power through birth right, Superman did too, I guess, so that's actually another example of a coming-of-age comic book super hero movie that was less about origin and more about coming into one's own.

By a strange coincidence, today at work I received an ARC (advance reader copy) of the new Grant Morrison book Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. What a perfectly timed arrival, in light of tonight's movie. I'm sure it will be very enlightening and entertaining. Grant Morrison can take any conventional thing and make it trippy and weird and awesome. I think while I read this book I will picture him reading it aloud to me with his thick Scottish accent. For some reason what comes to my mind is him announcing to the 2000 Disinfo Con that he had just taken drugs before he got up to speak. Here is a transcript, if that's helpful in describing what I'm talking about here:

"WOOOOOOOOOW! Here we are! Right! Fuck man, I tell you when I was a kid I read Robert Anton Wilson and all this shit and here we are, we're standing here, talking about this shit and it's real! OK, I'm pissed (Holds up red beaker) and in half an hour I'm gonna come up on drugs, so watch for it!"

You get the idea.

Meanwhile, I spent a great deal of time after work today researching images I plan to use for my next tattoo. I'm getting it on Sunday! It's going to be on my right wrist. It's going to be a karaoke tattoo. Here are some of the images I'm working into it!

So this first picture, I like the Sailor Jerry-esque sparrows and flowers. Instead of "Accounting" it would say "Karaoke." And the stars might be different. I'm thinking about making it more atomic age, like the stars below under this picture.

It would be the black ones, not the outlined ones. Or maybe these stars, which come to think of it, may be a little closer to what I'm looking for:

Another option would be a variation of something like this:

The layout would be an anchor but it would say something about karaoke, and then instead of the bottle and the lady it would have pictures of a microphone and a song list. 

Or maybe I should just do a skull and crossbones but the crossbones are microphones.

No! That's stupid.

My original thought was to do a microphone, a song list, and a TV monitor over a heart with some stars and a scroll that says "Karaoke Forever" or something like that. The problem is that I can't seem to find a good picture of a monitor that I like. Here is what I've come up with so far:

This one pretty much typifies the karaoke TV set up. Except I should mention I went into this karaoke place next to my dentist's office to look at buying new monitors, and the new ones are all flat screen light weight ones. Karaoke of the future! So I have to be careful about not getting pictures of technology that will become outdated too fast. Is there a way of getting a TV picture that's kind of timeless?

OK, so this next one, ditch the stuff on the right. Just the TV and the stand it's on, and the microphones. Except one of the micas has to go. I don't do duets!

I have found some kind of good microphones though:

There's also this:

What I really like about this are the stars and littler star-dot pixie dust around the scroll.

Mmmmm....

It doesn't help that I have kind of small wrists, so there's not a lot of room to work with there.

I wish I was into cupcakes. There are a lot of good cupcake tattoos on the internet. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love cupcakes. But not enough to get a tattoo of one.

Tomorrow night big events! The comics artist Chester Brown is doing an event for his new book Paying For It, about being a John, at 7pm at Quimby's. And then later tomorrow night is also Hillbilly Bingo at The Horseshoe at 4115 N. Lincoln, 9pm.