Our book group discussed Clive Barker's "Weaveworld" last week. The discussion didn't give me any more reason to like it.
A fellow attendee loaned me a couple albums--Marc-Antoine Mathieu's "L'Origine", and Gradimir Smudja's "Le Bordel des Muses".
The latter follows Toulouse-Lautrec as he parties at the Moulin Rouge and then shows Vincent Van-Gogh around Paris. There's nothing much to the script, but it's quite something to look at.
"L'origine" is the first of the "J.C. Acquefacques" albums, and tells the story of characters discovering they exist inside a comic book--just the sort of nerdy self-referential humor I like. It's fun to see how he manages to put together such an imaginative series of stories from what appear to be such limited means--a bland everyman hero, his tiny one-room bedroom, his neighbor, an anonymous overcrowded city, all done in what seems at first an unwelcoming high-contrast black-and-white style.
Wednesday I stopped by the French conversation group again; it was smaller this time, with a higher concentration of native speakers. It was fun, and they were very nice, but I came away a little depressed about my progress; I can understand a lot, but it's frustrating not being able to form a coherent sentence most of the time....
Friday got pretty much written off; I did some chores at home, showed up really late at work, planned to go renew my driver's license but didn't get to it--didn't get much of anything done, really.
This weekend except for juggling and lunch afterwards at Totoro, I mostly stayed at home and did a little work and reading.
Sara and I have been slowly working through the third season of "Buffy". It gets better as we go. It's sort of impressive that they manage to give it a sense of variety, given the constraints--not a lot of time to work with, regular commercial breaks, a story that has to make sense to people that drop in any time, etc. The episode we saw most recently partially answers the question of whether people in this fictional town ever find it a little odd that they're constantly under vampire attack. (They do, they just don't like to talk about it much.)
The question that always bothers me about this sort of thing, though, is--why doesn't anybody in these sort of stories find it odd that they're surrounded by people that look like movie stars?