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rushthatspeaksBlessings on Eredien, who told us about the Neil Gaiman reading/signing at the Union Square Barnes and Noble, which we would not otherwise have found out about, and blessings on Sei-chan (*snerk*) who told us to get there two hours early. Without You We Are Lost. Or at least a lot more bored.
So Signey came over from Jersey, and met the kitties, who were their usual kittily jumpy you-do-not-want-me-to-go-new-parent-at-this-juncture selves. They liked Signey. See, Signey? Not all cats hate you. So there. My copy of Coraline arrived in the mail from Amazon just in time to go with us out the door, making me very happy, as I wanted to get it signed but with the Amazon 3-7 day shipping thing was not entirely expecting it before next Monday or so. Luckily, this set the tone for the rest of the day.
We took the subway over to SoHo, where there was a gallery which was showing Yoshitaka Amano, which we figured would make a good day with Neil Gaiman. The show, unfortunately, served to prove that Amano really needs an editor, and that New Yorkers will buy anything if they think it is stylish. I don't think he did any actual WORK for this show. He sort of sketched. There were a couple of good things in the catalogue of slides of his work that they had on the end table, but nothing spectacular actually hanging in the gallery, which was aggravating. Still, his brushwork was spectacular, even if the entire show did consist of portraits of characters from Speed Racer, close-up shots of eyes, and the Scrubbing Bubbles.
But it was very pleasant to wander around SoHo and NoHo, and we found a place that was showing old movie posters in various languages, like the Japanese poster for the AIP film Attack of the Crab Monster, and an incredibly kick-ass poster for the original Terminator that actually made it look like a good movie, which it isn't, and Karloff and Lugosi posters in French and Spanish, and the original English one-sheet for The Mummy, which had a man wearing this absolutely astonishing hat that was not Egyptian in the slightest but that nevertheless served admirably to camouflage the significant bits of the naked woman who was lying on the altar behind him. One simply had to stop and gaze at this hat in incredulity. As Signey put it, "Who does he think he is, Amon Ra?" And then we found the store that Keith Haring founded to retail his stuff before he died; the entire inside of the shop is a Keith Haring painting. They had flip books. We very nearly bought stuff but remembered just in time that we were not actually shopping because we have very little money. It had somehow slipped our minds. I've never wanted to take a whole store home with me before, to put in the basement, and check in on every so often.
And we ate at the kind of restaurant you can only have in the Village-- I had a version of nabeyaki udon, Ruth had an avocado and sour cream omelet, and Signey had challah French toast, all this without going near the Mexican side of the menu-- and wandered over to the Barnes and Noble right on time two hours early. There were a lot of people there already, but we still managed seats in the front row side with a perfect view. The intelligent people did line numbers and we started at 16!
Neil Gaiman is a magnificent speaker and reader. I had read Coraline in the two-hour wait and been very impressed with it; I was even more impressed with his reading of it. He read us Chapter 3. He didn't really do the voices, but he did the tones, the inflections. Coraline was matter-of-fact child managing to put up somehow with the complete inability of adults to listen; Coraline's Mother was kind and unaware. Coraline's Other Mother was exactly like Coraline's Mother except terrifying and insinuating and not quite real. The entire audience twitched in unison at the line "But everyone has Another Mother..." Coraline's Other Father was quiet and sweet and ineffectual and evil. The Rats sang a little song, and Neil Gaiman sang it; it had a real tune, which I think he must have written as it certainly wouldn't go with anything else. Fortunately there was a joke just after the song as the song was really too-- not frightening, but wrong-- it needed something after it to break the tension or we'd all have just kept on sitting there twitching. Forever. And Coraline's Other Upstairs Neighbor was vaguely Eastern European and vaguely bloodthirsty. In short, it was a magnificent dramatic reading. Go read the book. It's terrifying, but it's also the perfect book to read to an eight-or-nine-year-old.
Then he did a short Q&A. He was asked, firstly, how he decided to go back and work on Coraline again after he'd left it sitting for a decade, and how he figured out what to pick up again, and he replied that as a writer, he doesn't throw anything away; anything he starts, he will finish eventually, even if eventually means twenty years down the road. Which fascinated me (gods know I don't work like that, and I don't think most people do). So anything he thinks up, we'll see eventually, except this one story he started writing in Venice in late September, after he'd gone to Venice on about the first flight after the planes started working, because he was due for a science fiction conference in Trieste. And he picked it up after the conference, and was reading it and thinking it was neat, when it stopped, and he had no idea where it was going to go; it was exactly like reading someone else's story that stopped in the middle. (This is a cruel thing to mention to an audience. I think I heard people whimper.)
(Yes, I know I am describing this in Very Great Detail, but I was taking mental notes because I knew that some people, mentioning no names, Sei Shonagon, would kill me if I didn't.)
Personally, I figure the end of that story will hit him at some random time when he has forgotten about the existence of the story, but that's just my own idea of the way the universe works.
So then somebody asked him about his statement that storytellers lie, and he went on for some time about fiction and truth, in terms he has pretty well used elsewhere, and somebody else asked him about which of his characters was the most autobiographical, so he said that the protagonist of the boarding school interlude in Season of Mists was exactly him at twelve years old, although not, of course, the circumstances. (Ouch.)
And then Signey asked him if he was ever going to go back and tell some of the stories he left out of Sandman, specifically about the transformation of Delight into Delirium, and he said maybe. He's written six of the seven stories for an original hardcover called Endless Nights, which will be out in February 2003 as part of Vertigo's Big Deal over their tenth anniversary. P. Craig Russell is doing the Death story, but I don't remember any of the other artists. The Delirium story is present-timish, but the Morpheus story is set way, way back, 500,000,000 years or so ago, when the Endless were young. He said that we'll get an appearance of Dream's first girlfriend, and that Delirium was still Delight at that point, and Morpheus was much happier while Death was "a bitchy cow". He didn't say anything about it, but I figure Destruction wouldn't have left at that point and that it would still be the first Despair. So that should be interesting. He also mentioned that he is working on something called 1602 for Marvel, which he isn't allowed to say anything about at all.
After that he was asked if any recent developments in the comics trade have changed his analogy of it to the Holland tulip craze. He said no.
That was the end of the Q&A, but he did a quick FAQ so everyone in the signing wouldn't be asking him about the movie projects and holding up the line. Coraline: absolutely go. Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) directing; Michelle Pfeiffer as the Mother and the Other Mother. That should be interesting, but I don't expect it for a while as it will be effects-heavy. Selick is a good choice to capture the Dave McKean look. Speaking of which, Dave McKean has finished the illustrations for The Wolves In The Walls; expect that soon. Sandman: still dead. (Definite tones of relief here.) Miramax may be getting rid of the rights. Neverwhere: Henson has it, and is waiting to start until the director who did Cube is free, which should be presently, when it will film. Stardust: in limbo. Not even comprehensible limbo; agent-speak limbo. Could be next year, could be when cows fly. Beowulf: suddenly Roger Avary is persona grata in Hollywood again, and he wants to direct it. The studio wants a PG rewrite, as "we did it as 4th-century Trainspotting, lots of blood and mead", but it didn't sound like one would be forthcoming. So the project's still up in the air. Death: The High Cost of Living: waiting for Neil's second draft, which is a year late, but he'd scheduled it for October and he didn't want to write about Death walking around New York City thank you so much so it had to get back in the queue. Soon. Good Omens: Aaaargh. 60 million dollar script, of which 45 mil was lined up overseas plus the entire cast, so Terry Gilliam went to Hollywood looking for 15 million dollars, a small sum in that town, for a pretty straight adaptation of an insanely popular book. Hollywood cowered in fear before Terry Gilliam and hid their wallets. They are now writing a 45 million dollar script. Neil wishes them luck. Apparently, he is still optimistic, but Terry Pratchett keeps insisting it will never happen, no matter how good things look, and it's starting to sink in. "So now I have this small Terry on my shoulder, whispering in my ear all the time, it'll never happen. I really hope he's wrong." Adaptation of some novel called The Fermata for Robert Zemeckis: going so well that he is waiting for some huge weird Thing to happen because things don't go that well in Hollywood.
We got stuff signed. I won't go into detail on that because this is already waay too long.
Then we went out for dessert and Ruth and I bought Volume 2 of CHOBITS at Forbidden Planet and CHOBITS snuck past CLAMP School Detectives to become my second-favorite CLAMP series after Card Captor Sakura. Still couldn't find Mars 2 but I'm sure it will turn up presently. Happy happy good day. More on CHOBITS and on Whispers of the Heart soon.
Angst-O-Meter: 0. Boingy, boingy, boingy...
So Signey came over from Jersey, and met the kitties, who were their usual kittily jumpy you-do-not-want-me-to-go-new-parent-at-this-juncture selves. They liked Signey. See, Signey? Not all cats hate you. So there. My copy of Coraline arrived in the mail from Amazon just in time to go with us out the door, making me very happy, as I wanted to get it signed but with the Amazon 3-7 day shipping thing was not entirely expecting it before next Monday or so. Luckily, this set the tone for the rest of the day.
We took the subway over to SoHo, where there was a gallery which was showing Yoshitaka Amano, which we figured would make a good day with Neil Gaiman. The show, unfortunately, served to prove that Amano really needs an editor, and that New Yorkers will buy anything if they think it is stylish. I don't think he did any actual WORK for this show. He sort of sketched. There were a couple of good things in the catalogue of slides of his work that they had on the end table, but nothing spectacular actually hanging in the gallery, which was aggravating. Still, his brushwork was spectacular, even if the entire show did consist of portraits of characters from Speed Racer, close-up shots of eyes, and the Scrubbing Bubbles.
But it was very pleasant to wander around SoHo and NoHo, and we found a place that was showing old movie posters in various languages, like the Japanese poster for the AIP film Attack of the Crab Monster, and an incredibly kick-ass poster for the original Terminator that actually made it look like a good movie, which it isn't, and Karloff and Lugosi posters in French and Spanish, and the original English one-sheet for The Mummy, which had a man wearing this absolutely astonishing hat that was not Egyptian in the slightest but that nevertheless served admirably to camouflage the significant bits of the naked woman who was lying on the altar behind him. One simply had to stop and gaze at this hat in incredulity. As Signey put it, "Who does he think he is, Amon Ra?" And then we found the store that Keith Haring founded to retail his stuff before he died; the entire inside of the shop is a Keith Haring painting. They had flip books. We very nearly bought stuff but remembered just in time that we were not actually shopping because we have very little money. It had somehow slipped our minds. I've never wanted to take a whole store home with me before, to put in the basement, and check in on every so often.
And we ate at the kind of restaurant you can only have in the Village-- I had a version of nabeyaki udon, Ruth had an avocado and sour cream omelet, and Signey had challah French toast, all this without going near the Mexican side of the menu-- and wandered over to the Barnes and Noble right on time two hours early. There were a lot of people there already, but we still managed seats in the front row side with a perfect view. The intelligent people did line numbers and we started at 16!
Neil Gaiman is a magnificent speaker and reader. I had read Coraline in the two-hour wait and been very impressed with it; I was even more impressed with his reading of it. He read us Chapter 3. He didn't really do the voices, but he did the tones, the inflections. Coraline was matter-of-fact child managing to put up somehow with the complete inability of adults to listen; Coraline's Mother was kind and unaware. Coraline's Other Mother was exactly like Coraline's Mother except terrifying and insinuating and not quite real. The entire audience twitched in unison at the line "But everyone has Another Mother..." Coraline's Other Father was quiet and sweet and ineffectual and evil. The Rats sang a little song, and Neil Gaiman sang it; it had a real tune, which I think he must have written as it certainly wouldn't go with anything else. Fortunately there was a joke just after the song as the song was really too-- not frightening, but wrong-- it needed something after it to break the tension or we'd all have just kept on sitting there twitching. Forever. And Coraline's Other Upstairs Neighbor was vaguely Eastern European and vaguely bloodthirsty. In short, it was a magnificent dramatic reading. Go read the book. It's terrifying, but it's also the perfect book to read to an eight-or-nine-year-old.
Then he did a short Q&A. He was asked, firstly, how he decided to go back and work on Coraline again after he'd left it sitting for a decade, and how he figured out what to pick up again, and he replied that as a writer, he doesn't throw anything away; anything he starts, he will finish eventually, even if eventually means twenty years down the road. Which fascinated me (gods know I don't work like that, and I don't think most people do). So anything he thinks up, we'll see eventually, except this one story he started writing in Venice in late September, after he'd gone to Venice on about the first flight after the planes started working, because he was due for a science fiction conference in Trieste. And he picked it up after the conference, and was reading it and thinking it was neat, when it stopped, and he had no idea where it was going to go; it was exactly like reading someone else's story that stopped in the middle. (This is a cruel thing to mention to an audience. I think I heard people whimper.)
(Yes, I know I am describing this in Very Great Detail, but I was taking mental notes because I knew that some people, mentioning no names, Sei Shonagon, would kill me if I didn't.)
Personally, I figure the end of that story will hit him at some random time when he has forgotten about the existence of the story, but that's just my own idea of the way the universe works.
So then somebody asked him about his statement that storytellers lie, and he went on for some time about fiction and truth, in terms he has pretty well used elsewhere, and somebody else asked him about which of his characters was the most autobiographical, so he said that the protagonist of the boarding school interlude in Season of Mists was exactly him at twelve years old, although not, of course, the circumstances. (Ouch.)
And then Signey asked him if he was ever going to go back and tell some of the stories he left out of Sandman, specifically about the transformation of Delight into Delirium, and he said maybe. He's written six of the seven stories for an original hardcover called Endless Nights, which will be out in February 2003 as part of Vertigo's Big Deal over their tenth anniversary. P. Craig Russell is doing the Death story, but I don't remember any of the other artists. The Delirium story is present-timish, but the Morpheus story is set way, way back, 500,000,000 years or so ago, when the Endless were young. He said that we'll get an appearance of Dream's first girlfriend, and that Delirium was still Delight at that point, and Morpheus was much happier while Death was "a bitchy cow". He didn't say anything about it, but I figure Destruction wouldn't have left at that point and that it would still be the first Despair. So that should be interesting. He also mentioned that he is working on something called 1602 for Marvel, which he isn't allowed to say anything about at all.
After that he was asked if any recent developments in the comics trade have changed his analogy of it to the Holland tulip craze. He said no.
That was the end of the Q&A, but he did a quick FAQ so everyone in the signing wouldn't be asking him about the movie projects and holding up the line. Coraline: absolutely go. Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) directing; Michelle Pfeiffer as the Mother and the Other Mother. That should be interesting, but I don't expect it for a while as it will be effects-heavy. Selick is a good choice to capture the Dave McKean look. Speaking of which, Dave McKean has finished the illustrations for The Wolves In The Walls; expect that soon. Sandman: still dead. (Definite tones of relief here.) Miramax may be getting rid of the rights. Neverwhere: Henson has it, and is waiting to start until the director who did Cube is free, which should be presently, when it will film. Stardust: in limbo. Not even comprehensible limbo; agent-speak limbo. Could be next year, could be when cows fly. Beowulf: suddenly Roger Avary is persona grata in Hollywood again, and he wants to direct it. The studio wants a PG rewrite, as "we did it as 4th-century Trainspotting, lots of blood and mead", but it didn't sound like one would be forthcoming. So the project's still up in the air. Death: The High Cost of Living: waiting for Neil's second draft, which is a year late, but he'd scheduled it for October and he didn't want to write about Death walking around New York City thank you so much so it had to get back in the queue. Soon. Good Omens: Aaaargh. 60 million dollar script, of which 45 mil was lined up overseas plus the entire cast, so Terry Gilliam went to Hollywood looking for 15 million dollars, a small sum in that town, for a pretty straight adaptation of an insanely popular book. Hollywood cowered in fear before Terry Gilliam and hid their wallets. They are now writing a 45 million dollar script. Neil wishes them luck. Apparently, he is still optimistic, but Terry Pratchett keeps insisting it will never happen, no matter how good things look, and it's starting to sink in. "So now I have this small Terry on my shoulder, whispering in my ear all the time, it'll never happen. I really hope he's wrong." Adaptation of some novel called The Fermata for Robert Zemeckis: going so well that he is waiting for some huge weird Thing to happen because things don't go that well in Hollywood.
We got stuff signed. I won't go into detail on that because this is already waay too long.
Then we went out for dessert and Ruth and I bought Volume 2 of CHOBITS at Forbidden Planet and CHOBITS snuck past CLAMP School Detectives to become my second-favorite CLAMP series after Card Captor Sakura. Still couldn't find Mars 2 but I'm sure it will turn up presently. Happy happy good day. More on CHOBITS and on Whispers of the Heart soon.
Angst-O-Meter: 0. Boingy, boingy, boingy...
