LXXXIII

Nice day of reconnecting with grad students, first with Janine Windolph whom I've not discussed before. She is doing a video documentary project which has evolved significantly over this past year to be a very brave look at her family and family history. Today we discussed some new revelations as two of her family members are discovering repressed memories of violence from years ago. If the project is as engaging as our conversations, it will be amazing.

This evening Chrystene Ells and Raul Viceral came for dinner. Chrystene told me a variety of tales of problems and annoying activities on the set of Sisu that she wouldn't even mention in her own blog such as .... well perhaps if she doesn't publish, I shouldn't either. We talked quite a bit about her thesis and potential critical discussions for her support paper. She suggested a slightly maligned idea about "community" which on further thought might not be bad, especially in regards to community coming together to celebrate a mythic figure that the community distrusted and destroyed just a generation before. How does a community collectively redeem a person over time?

Raul brought me a copy of the September 2007 issue of "Real Valuable Comics" (this one called "Valuable Comics from Space!" with his first local publication. He's a great illustrator, he did hundreds of storyboards for "Sisu". His story is really good, a clever opening chapter to some sort of robot cop story that I'd definitely look for new issues of if I thought there were any. The print run is much smaller for this issue so you'd better run out and get it. In exchange I gave him a copy of "To Be Announced" #1 published by paul Stockton and his company Strawberry Jam Comics from back in the 1980s. I rewrote "Strawberry Fields Forever" to be "Strawberry Jam Forever" and it's printed on the back cover -- my first (and only) comic book publication.

We ate espresso cheesecake.