Warren Ellis is damn good writer. Which is why I sometimes don’t like him putting images in my head, which happens a lot with Fell.

Ellis seems to look for and find all the messed up crapped people do to each other, which he jots down for use in a story elsewhere. Fell really brings this stuff out because it’s about Snowtown, a part of the city, where all the human trash has been place. Think ghetto on Riker’s Island and you get the idea. It has its own rules and brand of crazy and the rest of the city is only too glad to leave it there.

In Fell #6, the main character, Detective Richard Fell, takes a personal day, since his boss has decided to learn magic to deal with the crime in Snowtown. Yeah, it’s that kinda book, BUT GOOD. He tries to spend with a woman he’s interested in. Naturally he gets caught up a case, a domestic one, involving a mother, a father and a kid. It’s a messed up situation, one of those things you might read about from a social worker’s case notes. Just another slice of human cruelty, served up in well told story.

So yeah, it’s good, like all of Fell has been. But I’m starting to dread it each mouth, ‘cause it likes to linger in dark places.

Here’s a link to the first issue, all online.

Sometimes we might come to a movie expecting one thing and then get perplexed when we get another. Expectations can throw you off.

Freedomland throws you off. It starts off straight forward, you can see where it’s going (you think), just a standard murder/action/kidnap/mystery thing. But the film is less aobut the act and more about the people around it: how this act happened and the personal and community repercussions of the death. Good movie, but awkward in the beginning, as in gaping plot holes. Edie Falco and Julianne Moore are especially good here.

I dream of cotton fields, white balls and black dirt. The sun hides behind clouds, the world is gray and cotton rustles in a dry, stale breeze.

Brenda liked knives and I liked Brenda, so her knives loved me.

They were delicate things, small and discreet, ornate with designs from around the world and hidden under her clothing. They were the only thing soft about her. Everything else was sharp and unyielding and she dared you to see that with her eyes. To see how long you swallow that piece of info, that knowledge that she could and would severly hurt you, except that there were laws against it.

But I always let her know that my friends knew where I was and knew when to expect me back. She didn’t expect that and it intriuged her, pulled her closer, the better to examine this strange new toy.

Brenda, I think, had never been this far before. Everyone else had left either right before or right after the first knub on the pinky disappeared. Not me, I was indestructible, though I never knew my body could lose so much blood and still function. She peeled away layers and let me find the self I had suppressed and hidden.

I liked the hurt and I liked the pain, so Brenda loved me.

I stole Twilia’s fingernail rig and become schizo for a day. It was timed coded, set to expire right after my last day at work. It was alternating blender of thought; chop, then puree, then chop with a long puree once security had been called. Didn’t care. The job was cherry, but it didn’t matter. Twilia was leaving me, though she didn’t know it yet, but I knew it and it was killing me. Nothing mattered, so why not fuck the world with the lights on and shades up.

Twilia sought me me out, for reasons I don’t know or don’t want to think about. I had been at Club One, trying to rig this sweet piece of tail, taking the rig off my index finger for her to try, leaving it bare for her to give, when Twilia slid in. The tail was pissed, we had been connecting, but I was all groupie and panting for Twilia. She took my hand, held it up to my face, palm out, fingers spread, while she pulled the orange and blue stripped rig off the tip of her index finger and gently placed it in mine. My head exploded as I switched sexes and then species while she lighted a cigarette. She was dreadlocks, coffee skin and red lips painted blue.

Later, she took it back and gave me others, the dangerous ones. I swapped and switched, tried on different personalities, phobias and psychosis. It got so bad that I started to remember too much and had some memories repressed, wiped by a tiny asian women with nubs where her fingernails use to be.

Twilia never took my rig. No point, her shit was outta this world better. She gave me hers, an orgy of colored and carefully designed fingernails, watching as I plugged them in, one at a time and slowly blew out the back of my skull.

She just watched.

On Thursday night, around 7 o’clock, I finally got Jesus.

It had been a long hunt, but the we finally ran the fucker down and Chris managed to get him with the net.

We had heard reports of him being up in Canada, trying to lose himself in the tundra. We didn’t go looking, just hung out on the border, knowing the bastard liked hanging out ‘frisco, ‘cause he though it was funny. I didn’t laugh, there were too many damn fine queers in that town, many of them needing Jesus in a way that didn’t involve him, a ball gag, a bottle of oil and a billy goat.

Anyway, he skimped down over on the East Coast, tricky dick. Who’d though Jesus would go to New York?

A revenant in the Middle Ages was an animate corpse which rose from the grave to haunt the living

Gorgeous, moving, and full of power,Tsotsi is full of moments where the story seems to leap off the screen. Yeah, it’s a little too neat and pat at times, but the performances, cinematography and direction easily overcame any negative points.

Got Early 21st Century Blues as an early birthday present. It’s mostly covers, which usually isn’t my thing, but it’s the Cowboy Junkies, so it’s good.

Except for the last track, where they cover “One” by U2. I don’t know what the hell it is about that song, but everyone seems to want to do some version of it, and now I’m just “Oned” out. I’ve never actually just rebelled from hearing Margo Timmins sing, but jeez, it sounded awful, in the sense that it wasn’t a song for them to do, but it was technically good. Just don’t make me listen to it.

Why didn’t slave owners in pre-emancipation America make slaves of the Native Americans, opting instead to import slaves from abroad?