"charming negativity"

Should auld acquaintance be forgot....

Now that it's almost the new year, here is my late The Xmas rundown-
Food: homemade crab dip, stuffed mushrooms and wheat berry bread, Heavenly ham and smoked turkey, roast potatoes, veggies, and stuffing. Italian cookies, mini cheesecakes, and cupcakes.
Drinks: Baileys, beer, and soda
Entertainment: Guitar, Wii bowling, Trauma Center, keyboard DJ, and Dr. Phil
Gifts: 1976 Batgirl glass, freshwater pearl necklace, music, gift cards, more!

And some thoughts on--
Shortcomings
Adrian Tomine profile

Bookslut interview

(Shortcomings was serialized in Tomine’s iconic comic book series Optic Nerve and was excerpted in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13.)

What is it about? It's relationships and art and politics and race, all through the life of the cranky Ben Tanaka, Japanese with a thing for white girls. I really enjoyed the art and the commentary, and the support of characters like Alice, Ben's Korean lesbian friend. But, in the first scene, I felt for his girlfriend Miko-- he was sarcastic and dismissive and not interested in her Asian film fest. Or going to bed with her.

At the end Miko tells him he is "Trying to hold onto something because your're pathologically afraid of change". It's just bad fit relationship issues that most people can relate to.

NYT: Tomine has always been attracted to love gone wrong among the hesitant young men and women of the bourgeois-bohemian set, but he gets his subject across in the unsentimental style of an anthropologist's report.

Publishers Weekly: Tomine does something far more valuable: almost incidentally and without visible effort (for such is the strength of a true artist) he explodes the tottering myth that love is blind and from its million phony fragments assembles a compelling meditation on the role of race in the romantic economy, dramatizing with evil clarity how we are both utterly blind and cannily hyperaware of the immense invisible power race exerts in shaping what we call "desire."