THIS BEAUTIFUL, RIDICULOUS CITY (Kay Sohini, 2025)
Only six weeks into the year and we've been gifted 2025's first Great comics work: by turns beautiful, informative, poetic, mouthwatering, and heartbreaking, Sohini manages to make me miss cities even more than I do all the time. Her true gift here, though – thanks to her impeccable eye for the beauty of the smallest detail – is that she makes me feel as at home in her NYC as I felt when I made my first treks to that magical city all too long ago. She has found her home’s beating heart and is in perfect synchrony with it; highly, highly recommended.
replicate
Waiting patiently for my flame-retardant blankets to arrive so I can make MetalShack a little safer for all involved but already the benefit of a dedicated metalshop is evident. Started clearing out the workshop side of things – much nicer space without buckets of scrap metal all over the inside – and figuring and staring at the present metalwork WIP. In so doing, a realization: metal is the first medium I've played with in which full-scale, tactile replication (or gathering, but why would an ornamental hermit like myself do that?) is the only way for multiple people to experience the work as it was intended: in other words, if someone wants a work that I want to keep, I either have to remake the work or part with it, bleeding and screaming. Sure, I can take a picture of the work and stuff it online, but that's not the work: that – unlike writing, unless intended solely for physical release – is an approximation of it. My 10 minutes are nearly up: perhaps I’ll ruminate on this notion further tomorrow or later today maybe or move on to some other similarly useless mental gymnastic.
enter: metalshack (mind your head)
Honoring David Lynch's wisdom to always have a setup (and perhaps ameliorate today's midday concerns?) by transforming my scrap wood space into a dedicated metalwork shack behind The Shed. Still have to figure out the power situation and add fire retardant blankets or tarps as walls (including over the metal sheets that separate MetalShack fromThe Shed), but it's getting there.
spacepoint
Been having a hell of a time getting myself into writing mode, hence the return of these daily things (finally settled on midday), "What's the point?" being the operative thought – though I have a feeling that's more the result of an all-encompassing emotional exhaustion sourced to the last 15 years. Perhaps it's that I use/d writing as a way to emotionally (and rationally, sometimes) process things and the only rational and emotional answer is I just can't anymore. But here I am anyhow, because what else am I going to do? Current quandary: how do I make my writing side as appealing as the workshop side of The Shed in a way that makes "What's the point?" moot? Notions simmer.
FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS (trailer)
I’ve got a good feeling about this.
