JASON MICHELITCH

DON'T MIND ME, JUST FORGOT TO TURN THE LIGHTS OUT

2009-04-23T23:23:00.006-04:00

I am still getting the same average number of hits per day after not posting anything for four months as I was when I was posting semi-regularly. By which I mean people are still google image searching for "super heros naked" and then finding my blog and being disappointed.

Also, recent search terms that brought people here were "blaaaaaaaaargh," "highly detail," "how to deal with scum," and "blinky dingus aka jesse james." I swear I did not make any of those up and/or google them myself. If I were a smarter person I would be able to learn something from this.

THIS CHEERS ME UP A LITTLE

2008-12-18T09:04:00.003-05:00

Virgil Goode officially gets to go sit in the corner now, and think about what he's done.

I know almost nothing about his Democratic opponent, Perriello -- he could turn out to be the worst congressman in history, I couldn't tell you. But no matter who replaces him, you can't help but smile when an odious little bigot like Virgil Goode is given his walking papers.

Three cheers for Virginia for continuing to enter not quite the 21st century but at least the late 20th.

BLAAAAAAAAARGH

2008-12-17T22:49:00.003-05:00

Rick Warren gets to say the invocation at the inauguration? RICK "gay Marriage is equivalent to incest" WARREN?

Fuck that.

I guess this is officially the first time Obama has seriously pissed me off. I'm sure it won't be the last. I knew he was a politician when I voted for him, and I'm not sorry that I did.

But seriously, Barry, on this one? Fuck you.

I don't have the energy or the class to say anything else about it.

HIGHLY DETAIL ORIENTED

2008-11-27T09:37:00.007-05:00

Flipping through Previews last night, I found the following ad on page 219, for a new comic book called Aegis. It deserves to be reproduced in its entirety. Trust me, you have to read the entire thing:

I was paralyzed by this ad. I had to find someone else to look at it, to make sure it was real, at which point I was able to collapse into a sort of half-weeping laughter. This is one of those jaw dropping things that cause you to realize: not only is it amazing that something this dumb exists, but whoever created it PAID MONEY to place that ad. They read this over and thought, "What a good job I did -- I'd better whip out the check book so that as many people as possible see this."

When I read the top line, "ANOTHER GRAPHIC NOVEL MADE FOR FILM?" I thought, for a moment, that they were about to try to temper my now regularly-made assumption that most shitty adventure comics are made with at least one eye, if not both, on a potential Hollywood reaction. But...no. They were simply trying to call attention to the fact that they made their comic hoping for a movie deal. Their weird Italics-into-Bold/Underline choice of graphic design maybe should have tipped me off that I should not be expecting cleverness.

The actual body of the ad is a symphony of weird idiocy, starting with the first line, which makes no sense. What in the hell is a "professional comic book consultant," and why do I care that this consultant has a "self-invested" comic book? "Self-invested," by the way, is not the term they're looking for, as a quick google search shows it to be a term mainly associated with British pension plans that give the recipients control over where their retirement funds are invested. I think what they mean is "self-financed," but I'm not making any assumptions where these people are concerned.

We also learn that the book is under consideration by filmmakers who have worked with such names as D. B. Sweeney -- D. B. Sweeney? How did they get D. B. Sweeney? I can't even get a call through to his secretary's secretary, let alone to the man, they myth, the name D. B. Sweeney -- producing films for the (wait for it) Sci-Fi Channel and "other major networks." With (and this is my favorite part) "productions in the millions."

All of that is vague enough to be completely meaningless. "Filmmakers," for all anybody knows, could mean a key grip that "N. T. Moore," the writer of the comic, went to high school with. And D. B. Sweeney (that huge name) is a steadily working television actor (or so imdb tells me -- I had never heard of him), presumably good enough to be hired a lot, presumably not someone who can get a television show or movie green-lit. The Sci-Fi Channel speaks for itself, but that last phrase: "with productions in the millions." What...what does that mean? Does that mean that these anonymous filmmakers' productions number in the millions? That doesn't seem humanly possible. In fact, some quick math tells us that if you worked for 75 straight years, no days off, and you worked on a new production every day, you would fall short of 30,000 productions. Considering most productions take more than one day of work, I'm going to say that what the ad means is that the filmmakers' productions have cost millions of dollars. To which I say, congratulations, anonymous filmmakers: you have worked on some productions, in television, where a single music video could cost a million dollars. This still tells us nothing.

The second paragraph informs me that "This is probably one of the few, highly-detail oriented, titles you'll come upon." First of all, I know it might be nitpicky, but there shouldn't be a comma after "oriented." Second, and this is clearly the Wagnerian theme of this ad, crashing to the surface again and again: what the hell does that mean? I leave it to better minds to uncover.

The coup de grâce is the quote at the bottom: "We believe in the good old fashion [sic] way of publishing and distribution. We hope to make a good impression on retailers."

Keep on hoping, Aegis. Keep on hoping.

(Fun bonus fact: Aegis got a "Spotlight On" in Diamond. I didn't realize that people just payed for those like any other ad. Oh well, you learn something new every day...)

THE GRIM FACED PUNCHING MACHINES

2008-11-16T09:56:00.003-05:00

So, writing this post probably just means that I have given over far too much of my brainpower to Batman and James Bond. But you know what? They're easily the two best Anglo action heroes of the 20th century, so, y'know, I'll give them an idle minute here.

In his review of the new Bond film, Scintilla of Naptime or whatever it's called, A.O. Scott laments slightly that the grim, vengeful Daniel Craig bond has left behind the charm and the wit of previous film incarnations of the character. From the review:

But while the exploration of Bond’s psychology makes him, arguably at least, a deeper, subtler character — and there is certainly impressive depth and subtlety in Mr. Craig’s wounded, whispery menace — it also makes him harder to distinguish from every other grieving, seething avenger at the multiplex.
...
I know grief has always been part of the Dark Knight’s baggage, but the same can hardly be said of James Bond, Her Majesty’s suave, cynical cold war paladin. His wit was part of his — of our — arsenal, and he countered the totalitarian humorlessness of his foes with a wink and a bon mot.

Now, I don't want to come across as defending relentless grim-faced seriousness in action films, because, frankly, I enjoy the bon mots, too. But you can hardly say that a damaged psyche and a vicious, vengeful nature haven't always been a part of Bond. As a literary character, Bond is charming, sure, but he's also cruel and cold. In the films, you see some of the wolf that is Bond come through in Connery, who always had an air of danger behind his eyes. True, Connery's films got increasingly silly, until Roger Moore took over and turned them into full farce, but that was a transformation of the character, not the primary text Scott seems to think it is.

In much the same way, Batman was flensed of the darkness and violence that had been part of the character since his debut in 1937 through the sillification of, first, the 1950s comic books, and then the 1960s television show. Treating the comedic aspects of the later Connery films and the Roger Moore mockeries as the guide for how Bond ought to be is the same as saying that Batman ought to be patterned on the Adam West version in perpetuity.

Now, that said, do the current versions of Bond and the Bat run too far in the opposite direction? Yeah, maybe. I mean, I hated The Dark Knight because it was self-important and boring, not because it was dark and griefy, but I can certainly see the complaint holding water. I can see it even more with Bond, because while Batman quite literally wears a manifestation of his psychoses, Bond's are always buried under a thick scar-tissue layer of cynical charm. Plus, as much as I want the character of Bond to be closer to the books, I'd hate to give up the accoutrements of the films. The books don't have any secret volcano lairs or laser satellites, for example. But I imagine the balance I'd like to strike is not quite as playful as the one Scott is longing for.

I should probably go apply my mind to, well, anything else now, really.

R.I.P. Michael Crichton

2008-11-06T08:12:00.004-05:00

Author Michael Crichton dies, 66

I always liked Michael Crichton. I know it can be fashionable to look down on any bestselling author -- the assumption being, I guess, that anybody so loved by the masses must be nothing but generic pablum. It's an attitude I can find myself lapsing into every now and then, but all I need to do to shake myself out of it is to remember how completely riveted I was reading Jurassic Park for the first time. Crichton may not have been a Great Author, but he was a good writer.

Like Stephen King (another snobbishly maligned good writer who sells like crazy) Crichton was often lumped in with writers like John Grisham or Danielle Steele, but he was in a higher class than that. His books were smart and entertaining, and were important to me, growing up. I read Jurassic Park on a family road trip when I was nine. Shortly thereafter, my mother read it, and we embarked on several years of Crichton back-and-forthing. She read and passed on The Great Train Robbery to me, and I handed her Sphere in return. We complained about the idiotic changes that Hollywood made when adapting his books to the screen (our favorite example was from Rising Sun, where in the book, one character goes on at length to another one about how, when meeting with a Japanese businessman, you should never bow, because bowing in Japan has many nuances and subtleties depending on the situation, and an American wouldn't know how to do it correctly, and may cause offense. When the book was made into a movie, the character was played by Sean Connery, whose advice now was, "Just bow." That cracked us up every time.)

I had honestly stopped reading his books awhile ago - he's written an awful lot of them, and not every one is a winner. Plus, as I said, he wasn't a Great Author - and there's a lot of work by Great Authors out there to get to. But while I may not have had space in my reading schedule for Prey or State of Fear, I never gave up the spot in my affection for the best of his books. I was sad to see him go.

ALL RIGHT THEN

2008-11-05T09:31:00.003-05:00

It's been a long four years since I saw this live from the 2004 Democratic Convention:

...and thought to myself, "Oh man, I want a chance to vote for that guy."

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Now let's get to work.

THE FALL MOVIEPALOOZA WHOOPSIEDOODLE FUNFEST POST

2008-10-26T00:19:00.006-04:00

I love Fall Movie Season. I love it so much that I love Entertainment Weekly's Fall Movie Preview issue - I buy it every year, just to have an easy paper list with nice printing and color pictures to flip through, marking which films I'm most interested in seeing. I love Fall Movie Season because, despite being a full-bore film snob, I still love Hollywood movies. And not in the ironic "Oh they're so expensive and dumb and unintentionally funny" way. I mean, I love unintentionally funny, too. But I still legitimately believe in the ability of Hollywood to put out awesome movies. And they do it! And when they do it -- barring the odd out-of-season release -- they do it in the fall.

The autumn is when every studio rolls out whatever they figure to be their best bet at some Oscars love. Sure, sure, a lot of these 'A' pictures are, in fact, crap. I have no great hope for, let's say, The Secret Life of Bees, or The Soloist. But there is some great looking stuff coming down the pipe this year. Let me turn to my list and I will extrapolate...

Burn After Reading already kicked the season off right. Best new comedy I've seen since...geez, I dunno, Punchdrunk Love? I liked Burn even more than No Country (HA! Take that, Boisture.) Absolutely set the seasonal mood correctly.

Hmm...looks like I missed Miracle at St. Anna and Choke, but I should still be able to catch Appaloosa and W -- although Renee Zellweger in the former and rumors of boring even-handedness in the latter make me a little wary of each.

Looking ahead...The Road could easily be very good, and Milk looks great. In the realm of summer-film-in-the-fall, there's the new Bond -- and I love me some Bond, so I'll be seeing that, even if Quantum of Solace is a silly name. David Fincher doesn't always hit right with me, but The Curious Case of Benjamin Button looks intriguing. And while Ron Howard is not the director I'd necessarily have picked for Frost/Nixon, I am a sucker for all things involving the previous title-holder for Worse President in Modern History. Eastwood's got two he's directed coming out this fall, and while I'm not so interested in watching him as an aging Korean War Vet tackling his own bigotry in Gran Torino, I do want to see Changeling, written by J. Michael Straczynski. Looking over the film schedule in the magazine, I seem to have written "Ha Ha" next to The Spirit. I will probably see it, though, if only because that image from the trailer of the main character shimmying out of a giant woman's mouth was just too bizarre to pass up.

The film that has me the most excited this fall, however, bar none: Synecdoche, New York -- new Charlie Kaufman! The man has five previous feature film credits, and they're five of my favorite films of the last decade. I don't even know what this new film is about, nor do I want to know. I know that Phillip Seymour Hoffman is in it. Oh, and I know that Rex Reed hated it. I love it when a shitty critic pans a movie I'm excited about. Nothing makes me happier or more excited to actually see the movie. Seriously, studio executives take note: put "Rex Reed wept blood at the critics' screening" on your lobby poster, and you have at least one guaranteed ticket sale right here.

Reed's review is hilarious, not least because he seems to be unaware that synecdoche is a word in the english language, and instead assumes it's merely a mispronunciation of "Schenectady." I mean, sure, I hadn't heard of it before either, but -- you're a writer, Rex. I assume you have a dictionary; look it up. Reed proves his comprehension of the popular taste with such probing questions as "Does anybody even remember Borat?" while attempting to put Sacha Baron Cohen's film in the same grouping as every Adam Sandler movie (and also Apocalypto? That...makes sense...) The review is also filled with lines like this:

"[Kaufman's] directorial feature debut reminds me of the spiteful, neurotic brat kicked out of school for failing recess who gets even by throwing himself in front of a speeding school bus."

...which doesn't really make a lot of sense as a metaphor. Unless Rex Reed is literally being reminded of a bizarre, traumatic childhood experience, in which case: Rex Reed has led a horrifying life, and his reviews make a lot more sense to me. I guess with a background that traumatic, you can be forgiven for claiming that a film is incomprehensible when you didn't even stay to see the end of it. Not that Reed would have probably been able to glean much from it, even if he did stay. He calls Being John Malkovich abominable, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a "jabberwocky" (seriously, what? From the context it's clearly meant as an insult, but -- what does it mean? Rex Reed, you incomprehensible jabberwocky, you!) -- this is clearly not someone operating in any realm of taste or discretion that I'm interested in (except as comedy).

A BRIEF CHECK-IN ON THAT ELECTION THING.

2008-10-25T22:38:00.005-04:00

Look, as an Obama supporter I don't want to seem overconfident or anything, but when your stump attacks start boiling down to saying that your opponent is beating you thoroughly and acting like it, you should probably call it a day.

In remarks in New Mexico on Saturday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) accused his opponent of taking a “victory lap.”

“Well, my friends, when I pull this thing off I have a request for my opponent,” McCain said, according to Reuters. “I want him to save that manuscript of his inaugural address and donate it to the Smithsonian and put it right next to the Chicago paper that said, 'Dewey Defeats Truman.'”

The Obama campaign denies that they've written such a speech of course, and if you think about it for even half a second it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they would have. If nothing else, there's going to be practically three months worth of stuff going on in the world between Election Day and Inaguration Day, some of which might end up being relevant enough to reference in a President's first speech. Even if they have somebody working on one, though, I can't really see the upside for McCain in pointing out just how far ahead in the game Obama is -- maybe Barry looks overconfident for a minute, but pretty soon that just turns back into regular confidence in the eyes of the public. Besides, overconfidence didn't the hurt the last guy with the electorate. I don't want to jinx anything, but McCain just makes me feel more confident about November 4th every time he opens his mouth.

Just remember, it all ends more or less like this.

COERCION!

2008-10-22T07:53:00.005-04:00

Found via Journalista: Alan Elliot of Queen City Bookstore wonders aloud about the sincerity of Marvel's grief at the passing of artist Michael Turner:

In Astonishing X-Men #26, there is a full-page tribute to Michael Turner. Along with a photo of him is the following quote...

"...His name is Michael Turner. The world is less special without him. We miss you and love you. 1971 – 2008”

How gruesome is it that the real way Marvel Comics is honoring [Michael Turner's] memory is by dangling his work as variant covers in a cheap attempt to coerce retailers to order more issues of Hulk #7 than they did for Hulk #1 ?

Maybe I just haven't had enough coffee yet, but this ghoulish idiocy really set me off -- by which I mean Elliot's complaint, not the variant covers. Variant covers were Turner's major artistic output for the last several years. Unless Elliot has some sort of damning evidence, proving that Marvel was somehow coercing Turner into churning out cover after cover while cackling all the way to the bank, claiming that they are somehow operating unethically by continuing to publish planned variant covers that were already drawn is paralogical lunacy.

Look, I'm not a huge fan of variant covers, Marvel, or Michael Turner's art, in general. But it hardly seems like civilized behavior to use a tribute page run In Memoriam by a company that employed the deceased (and likely employs the bereaved) to take a shot at a mildly annoying publishing practice that has been going on for ages, and in which the deceased was actively -- and for all we know, quite happily -- participating. Using a public expression of grief to take a shot at a comics company -- this is what makes the internet a lovely place to wake up to in the morning, isn't it?

I definitely haven't had enough coffee yet.

HELLO EVENING (again)

2008-10-18T19:31:00.006-04:00

Aw heck, I'm from Virginia, I can't be all classy with the wines and the jazz all the time.

OLIVER STONE DON'T RUIN MY FUN

2008-10-11T10:59:00.004-04:00

Look, I'm still committed to getting smashed on bourbon and seeing Oliver Stone's "W" in the theater. Frank Miller's "The Spirit" may actually beat out Stone for most absurdly shitty film this year, but if "W" is even half as stupid and awesome as "Nixon" I will be one happy drunk idiot. However, I'm pissed off that I'm going to have to wait for the DVD to see the two dream sequences featuring Saddam Hussein which Stone has cut from the theatrical release, ostensibly for pacing. Read these descriptions!

One scene in “W.” has Bush watching television and seeing Hussein on the screen cursing at him before Bush chokes on that infamous pretzel. The other imagines Bush flying over Baghdad on a magic carpet while Hussein stands atop a hill, literally rattling a saber and screaming obscenities.

If I had actually seen these two sequences in a movie theater, I don't think I would have ever needed to go see a movie again.

CRYSTAL HEAD

2008-10-10T19:07:00.000-04:00

You should watch this video, which is basically Ghostbusters 3 as filtered through an alternate reality Saturday Night Live where Dan Akroyd never left and the writing got progressively less joke-oriented.

BLAH BLAH SUPERHEROES (did I just post three days in a row?)

2008-10-07T12:41:00.008-04:00

My good friend Laura Hudson, prompted by a particularly horrible issue of the comic book NIGHTWING, seems to be in the midst of the existential crisis that strikes all of us who have grown up reading superhero comics while simultaneously developing intelligence and tastes distinct from the genre. As Laura says herself, what she writes isn't revolutionary, but it's a common enough experience and Laura expresses it so well that I think her post is worth reading.

It's interestingly timed with Dick Hyacinth's recent rage against the tendency in comics to elevate mid-level work to exalted status. Speaking as someone who thought that 8 out of the 10 most recent Best Picture Oscar winners were films ranging from mediocre to terrible, I can't say that I agree with the implication that comics people indulge in this kind of philistinism any more than movie people (a comparison Dick draws in his post). I do think that anytime a consumer of any art limits, through ignorance or choice, the variety of the art they consume, the result will be the championing of work that is only Great in comparison to other work in the same limited range. Which is to say, I enjoy ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, but I am not in danger of confusing it with WHY I HATE SATURN in terms of the level of art on which each operates.

I think the ingrained notion of "The Comics Industry" as a context for comics discussion tends to steer conversation towards superhero comics an unnecessary amount of the time. If what we care about discussing is the material that sells to weekly comic shop patrons, then I suppose Nightwing is a worthy object of scorn. If, instead, what we care to talk about is comics as a medium, then Nightwing is a little blip on the radar, a flock of geese that too many critics will mistake for a volley of nuclear missiles. Just because 50,000 Batman fans buy Nightwing every month doesn't make it worth talking about, even to point out that it's complete shit. The majority of superhero readers, with their insular tastes and hermetically sealed spheres of artistic experience, are irrelevant to the larger medium of comics. Most of them will never venture out of their bubble to find even Brubaker's CRIMINAL, much less ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY. When we allow the conversation about comics to become too heavily loaded towards superhero comics, we are allowing the philistines too much power to dictate talking points. Even posts such as Laura's (and I've been in the same place she is), in which she talks about "breaking up" with superhero comics, places too much importance on superhero comics as some sort of bloc, as opposed to merely treating superhero fiction as just another genre, with each individual work left to stand or fall on its own in the huge arena that is the comics medium.

The eventual end-point for the existential crisis of the superhero fan, is for that fan to realize that they can approach a superhero book just as any other comic - pick it up if it looks interesting, enjoy it if it is enjoyable, put it back down if it is not. Don't allow the genre as a whole to waste your time, or to preclude you from enjoying the few gems it occasionally offers.

YAY FOR SKETCHES (SPX!)

2008-10-06T11:14:00.007-04:00

Two books I really looked forward to picking up at SPX were a copy of Richard Thompson's CUL DE SAC collection and Kate Beaton's web-to-print HISTORY COMICS ABOUT HISTORY minicomic. Beaton's mini is exactly the kind of work SPX is designed to make accessible, whereas I could probably have picked Thompson's book up easily in a Barnes & Noble. Both of these cartoonists are exciting and recent discoveries for me, though, and both bring me an inordinate amount of joy through their work, so one of my goals was to buy something from each of them directly and let them know how much I like their stuff.

Richard Thompson was signing at the CBLDF table, so instead of directly purchasing Cul de Sac I received a copy in exchange for a donation, which made me plenty happy since I love the CBLDF. Thompson was a very nice guy, easy to talk to, and through our conversation I learned that he actually lives within five minutes of both my father's house and the high school I attended in Arlington, VA. We were even having dinner in the same shopping center Saturday night. Without me even asking, he drew this great cartoon in my copy of Cul de Sac. I didn't look at it until I had already walked away from the table, at which point he was swamped with other people wanting to talk to him, so I didn't get to tell him how much I liked it.

In case you can't read the dialogue, it is: "I've heard of this 'Arlington'. It has actual through streets. Unlike my neighborhood."

Kate Beaton was, conveniently, directly across the aisle from the CBLDF booth, so I got both of my desired books withing about five minutes of each other. Beaton asked me what I wanted drawn for my sketch, and I asked for two of her recurring characters, her Younger Self and the Fat Shetland Pony. She revealed the closely guarded secret that they are, as far as she's concerned, more or less the same drawing with only slight cosmetic differences. The sketch came out great:

Since I forgot my camera both days, these scans are the only visual aids I have for talking about the Small Press Expo. So I might talk about something else next. Or not. Unpredictable!

BRIEF SPX NOTES

2008-10-05T22:54:00.006-04:00

I attended the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD this past weekend. SPX is one of my favorite comics related events - it's just a big room with lots of people who love comics showing off their new stuff (and some old stuff). It's really wonderful to walk around and let your eyes just take in all the different work, whether lo-fi or hi-fi, glossy or newsprint, bound like a book or painted on a series of bricks. I always walk away from SPX with something new to love.

On my way into the con on the first day, I saw someone (I never did quite figure out who - it didn't look like Santoro, Hodler, or Nadel, and I don't know what Lane Milburn looks like) kneeling assembling newly printed copies of COLD HEAT with a long arm stapler. I thought seeing someone literally putting together a comic with their own two hands was a pretty great way to kick off the show. That made me pretty happy.

I wanted to vote in the Ignatz Awards, but I'm such a lazy ignoramus that I had read almost none of the nominated works. Luckily, the ballot was easily re-purposed as a shopping list once I got out on the floor.

On day one there was a lone guy wandering around the hotel dressed up as a superhero in yellow spandex. At first I thought he was just confused, but then later in the day I saw that he was working in one of the booths, and I assumed that the costume somehow related to the book he was selling. This made him a much less tragic figure, but also a much less interesting one.

Favorite conversations include talking to Frank Santoro about color, to Carla Speed McNeil about facial expressions, and to Richard Thompson about the fact that we both live in Arlington, VA. Thompson drew me a really nice personalized sketch in my copy of Cul de Sac, which I should scan in and show off later, when I'm not about to collapse from fatigue.

R.I.P. Paul Newman

2008-09-27T10:33:00.002-04:00

R.I.P. Paul Newman

Just keep thinking there Butch, that's what you're good at.

PULP FICTION (HA HA I BET NO ONE USED THAT PUN YET, RIGHT?)

2008-09-16T08:06:00.007-04:00

So the Ridiculous News that DC Comics pulped an issue of All-Star Batman because it accidentally printed naughty words in such a way that people could >gasp< read them, has led Rich Johnston (comics' own hard-hitting gossip columnist) to uncover two other recent instances of books being pulped. One was a Superman comic which showed Clark Kent drinking a beer (...seriously?) and another portrayed a fictional female GOP candidate's whose image was deemed a little too close for legal comfort to Condoleeza Rice. And of course, we all remember Paul Levitz's past Adventures In Putting His Own Books In The Shredder (One of Alan Moore's books for a completely stupid reason, a book with a Kyle Baker story for a mostly stupid reason).

I don't know about anyone else, and I certainly don't know what actually goes on behind the closed doors of DC Comics, but right now I'm just enjoying the idea that DC's editors apparently are sequestered in a room at the end of the printing press assembly line. There, after the writers and artists and colorists and letterers and digital layout guys have put the comic together with no oversight whatsoever, the printed comics are delivered to them, and they flip them open with some horrible trepidation. And then one of them sees the word "cunt", or a beer bottle in Superman's hand, and just flips the fuck out. "Goddamnit," he screams, "destroy them all! Why oh why do we all sit at the end of the printing press and look at these things AFTER they're printed? ISN'T THERE A BETTER WAY?"

Just the fact that DC is becoming the company specializing in creating product that they then have to destroy themselves...cracks me the fuck up. Oh, whoops, forgot the black bar on that "fuck". PULP THE INTERNET!

OFFICIAL DC EDITORIAL GUIDELINES

Bloody corpse of Robin
PUBLISH THAT SUCKER!

Robin saying "Fuck"
KILLITKILLITKILLIT!

AMERICA! OUR STANDARDS ARE HILARIOUS!

Adventures in Loving Things: BURN AFTER READING

2008-09-14T12:22:00.005-04:00

I saw BURN AFTER READING on Friday and I could not have asked for a better opening shot for the Fall Movie Season. Ignore all the humorless critics with their bad reviews who seem to be riding a post-Best-Picture backlash - I liked Burn After Reading even more than No Country For Old Men (take THAT Manohla Dargis)!

The film is an anarchic comedy, which is my favorite kind. There are a half-dozen major characters and they're all complete messes, and the film just tears them up and spits them out one by one. The cast is just immense: Malkovich, McDormand, Swinton, Clooney, Pitt, not to mention Richard Jenkins and JK Simmons. Everybody's on their A-game.

I'm trying to think of how to describe how good the film is without giving anything way. The best I can come up with: did you ever see the movie Be Cool? Sequel to Get Shorty? Terrible, terrible film. One of the worst films I've ever seen. BUT: it nevertheless contains one of my favorite moments in ALL OF FILM. And, no, I'm not talking about The Rock's Bring it On bit. That's great, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a very brief moment near the beginning of the film, and there may be no way for me to convey it over the internet, but here goes:

John Travolta was just a witness to the murder of James Woods, who was married to Uma Thurman. Travolta is visiting the distraught Thurman, who is very "emotional", and Travolta is completely sedate and casual. The dialogue goes something like this:

UMA
I... l've had him cremated, and I wanted to
do something special with his ashes, you
know. Do you got any ideas?

TRAVOLTA
Well, nothing that makes sense.
(pause)
Say, is that an Aerosmith tattoo?

Then they just move on from there. I love it. The line is just tossed out there, never commented upon again, and they just roll on with their dumb movie. And the delivery - Travolta is AWFUL in that movie, but the delivery on that line is perfect. "Nothing that makes sense." Just one great throwaway moment that I think about at least once a week. And Burn After Reading is full of moments just like that.

There are just so many little things about the movie that crack me up, even more than the big jokes (which is not to say the big moments don't work too - Clooney alone has three or four just epic bits that work like gangbusters). There's a line early on, delivered by Malkovich, and his delivery, what he does with his hand gestures, just fantastic. Tilda Swinton at her place of work, that scene - it's a small scene, but it killed me. There are ideas or bits brought up and never returned to, tossed out just for the moment. YET, it all holds together as a piece. It's beautiful.

It's got some rough chuckles in it - a lot of the film is not for people who don't like their comedy to be mean. Rough Chuckles is the name of the game these days, though - FACT: Rough Chuckles is actually the title of the book that will be written in 2020 about the two-and-three-quarters terms of President Sarah Palin, from John McCain's slipping away after lasting for One More Christmas in 2009 to the 2012 and 2016 elections that Sarah will win by shooting her opponents from a helicopter. Ha ha, just kidding - by 2020 President Sarah Palin will have succesfully banned all books except for a judiciously edited Bible.

Anyway...

BURN goes right up alongside Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski in the competition for Best Coen Comedy. Knocks O Brother Where Art Thou right out of the running. Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were, obviously, not even eligible.

Thank you, Coen Bros., for getting me as excited about Fall Movies as I am dreading Fall Elections.

BAD CRAZINESS IN DENVER

2008-08-26T08:31:00.004-04:00

Ok, so first Pelosi is evacuated from her hotel due to a man checking in with four guns, which...y'know, it's Colorado, that could just be that guy's standard weekend thing: go to Denver with four guns. That's understandable.

But now there are potentially-white-supremacist meth heads getting pulled over and making threats against Obama's life. Which is...harder to dismiss? Oh, wait, it's not - here are federal officials to make sure we DON'T PANIC OH GOD EVERYTHING IS FINE:

NBC News has learned that federal officials are downplaying the arrests, saying when one of the men was arrested, he made a threat against Obama, but they do not believe it was based on any kind of plan or actually intent.

"It looks like one guy just made a remark trying to act important," one federal official told NBC News.

Yes, just one guy trying to be important. Juuuuust a crazy meth-head who thinks that saying he's going to try and kill a Presidential nominee while being arrested is a really smart idea. But nothing more than that, officials assure us.

Aurora Police arrested the first man, 28-year-old Tharin Gartrell of Centennial, early Sunday morning after a routine traffic stop. During the traffic stop, officers found two rifles, boxes of ammunition, one rifle scope, a bullet proof vest, walkie-talkies and methamphetamines. Gartrell is being held in the Arapahoe County jail in lieu of $50,000 bond and has a felony criminal record.

Uhhhhh....

Look, if he had a couple of handguns, or even a hunting rifle or a shotgun, I could see an argument that he was just on his way either to a drug deal or to shoot rats at the dump.

But a scope, a vest, and walkie talkies...

Bad craziness seeps up through the cracks in Denver.

THAT BEING SAID...

2008-08-23T10:06:00.001-04:00

The inevitable Biden v Romney Vice Presidential Debate is going to be my favorite reality TV show ever.

YES WE CAN...

2008-08-23T09:59:00.003-04:00

...pick a somewhat douchey, loudmouthed member of the Delaware Hair Club For Men to be Vice President.

I mean, yeah, ok, sure. Joe Biden. Foreign policy experience and a bombastic speaking style. And the seniors love him. Obviously he isn't picked to appeal to me, but to appeal to people who don't like people like me but still vote.

But...Biden? Really?

Man, I hope Barack knows what he's doing.

THIS IS GETTING EMBARRASSING.

2008-08-06T08:32:00.005-04:00

I'm actually hitting the comic store in the early hours of a Wednesday, which is not something I do regularly. Granted, I'm helping sort the new comics shipment - that is nominally the reason I am going, to help out, to be a nice guy. But why am I really going?

FINAL CRISIS.

I can't help it. Two issues in, third one's out today, and I'm a junkie. I'm back on the sauce. I need it.

What the hell is going on?

My history with crossovers and superheroes is not all lovey-dovey "I pretend to hate you while buying three copies and masturbating over the obscure references" like some fans. My history with crossovers is more like "gee, I guess I have to stop reading my favorite super-hero book because I can't understand it anymore". I gave up Spider-Man as a kid because I kept losing the thread of the damn Clone Saga. I ditched Priest's Black Panther (or at least stopped actually reading it - I think I kept buying it out of Underdog Empathy) when it tied in with all that alien nonsense and I had no idea what was going on. I was enjoying New Avengers just fine until Civil War came along and phhhhhht. I haven't successfully read more than a few issues of any main-universe DC book since....damn, since what? James Robinson's STARMAN? Peter David's SUPERGIRL? I'm hard pressed to think of anything else.

But FINAL CRISIS...man, that damn book's got me. It's hitting my buttons. I mean, I have a pretty big Morrison button to begin with, but this is working for me better than his Batman (which didn't click for me) and even better than large swaths of his X-Men. JG Jones is good, but he's not the kind of artist that keeps me on a book by himself - I wouldn't overlook a crappy story just for JG Jones, is what I'm saying. So I must think the story is good. Am I just being a sucker for Morrison's dialogue and storytelling tics? Am I sucker? I feel like a sucker, yet I am still enjoying the hell out of this comic book.

Maybe I was just craving superhero fiction and didn't realize it? I am a little fanboy at heart, no matter how far I run from the nonsense of comics culture and try to pretend it was all a bad dream, a good drawing of Batman can still set my heart a-flutter.

I don't know. It's kind of embarrassing. As a comic book store clerk, I actively judged people who handed me money for Infinite Crisis. But here I am, salivating for issue three of the FINAL CRISIS. I'm even considering buying the........TIE-INS (only the ones written by Morrison...but still!)

I don't even know who I am anymore...

THE SUMMER OF NERD

2008-08-04T09:51:00.013-04:00

I'm full of the comic book movies. FULL. Stuffed like a rat in a cheese shop. Except OH NO IT WAS POISON CHEESE and the rat is writhing on the floor as its nervous system is burned out from the inside. (Seriously, a poisoned rat is a fucked up thing to watch.) (But more entertaining than HELLBOY 2. OH!)

Yeah. Too many nerds at the box office. And I was one of them. Out of some perverse nerd need, I've forsaken other, better looking films in order to see the Nerd Movies so that, I guess, I could have opinions about them? I'm starting to think this wasn't a great idea.

I've been trying to write some kind of nonsense about the Big Six (IRON MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, HANCOCK, WANTED, HELLBOY 2, THE DARK KNIGHT), but, really, I keep losing steam halfway through. I just don't care enough, because none of the movies were all that great (NONE OF THEM, INTERNET). They all bored various amounts of crap out of me. I think, if I had to rank them in order of Least Crap Bored Out of Me to Oh Holy God There is So Much Crap Coming Out of Jason (It Is Because He is Bored) it would look like this:

HANCOCK
THE INCREDIBLE HULK
IRON MAN
THE DARK KNIGHT
WANTED
HELLBOY 2

Yeah, that's right! Didn't see HANCOCK coming in at number one, did you? I mean, don't get me wrong - it's a crappy movie. But it's also a completely weird movie. It doesn't really make any sense, and it seems as if the film is just making itself up as it goes along, but it's so loud and confident and dumb about it all that you can just sort of go along with it. If you care at all for Will Smith, that is. I happen to enjoy watching Will Smith. If you don't, well...I think you already knew that this film was not for you.

But, yeah: weird movie. ALSO, completely racist. Which just makes it more fun to dissect, right? I mean, here's the plot: A black man has superpowers. He gets drunk and then mocks some Koreans while causing massive property damage, and is then convinced by white people that to become a better person he needs to go to prison in Los Angeles. And, hey, guess what? It works! The moral: Black Men in LA need More Prison. Anyway, the film ends with him performing the two most heroic deeds a black man can perform in our society: making an endorsement, and getting the hell away from a white woman. Fun! (Some of this streamlined racial summary I stole from Abhay Khosla.)

Anyway, yeah - the movie has all sorts of moments that, on the page, must have read like big, broad action-comedy moments. Total pie-in-face pants-split clown moments. But Peter Berg's direction is so completely earnest that the moments play...well, weird. Half-serious, and thus funnier? I don't know, but the fact that I don't know is what makes Hancock more interesting than any of the other five movies on the list, because in those I knew everything and didn't care all that much.

IRON MAN and the HULK were fine. IRON MAN was glib, with some good dialogue scenes and a horrendous third act. HULK had a little bit more cohesive of a plot, with a much better villain (no offense to Jeff Bridges - you were great in IRON MAN, Tim Roth was just given a much more fun character to play), and I thought looked better as a film. But both were mostly forgettable. WANTED was abysmal, though borders on "so-bad-it's-good". I mean, it's a film about weaver-assassins who get their marching orders from a magic "Loom of Fate", so there are obviously some good laughs to be had. But also a whoooole lot of boring, punctuated only occasionally by some ridiculous-and-thus-worthwhile moments. HELLBOY 2 was eye-bleedingly boring. I think I smiled once or twice. Mostly I tried not to fall asleep. It was real pretty, but that's about it.

And what about the 500 pound gorilla, the greatest film of all time, THE DARK KNIGHT?

Meh.

Ledger and Oldman were good. Eckhart was pretty good too, and Gyllenhall probably would have been if they'd given her more to do. Michael Caine delivered exposition. Morgan Freeman delivered punchlines. Christian Bale growled unintelligibly. There were a lot of explosions and a lot of attempts to be "realistic", and the whole thing was just kind of drab. I liked the end of the first Batman scene, where he jumps down through the parking garage and crushes the Scarecrow's van, but other than that none of the Batman scenes really worked for me. There was no romance to it, it was all very plain and straight-faced, which isn't really the way I've grown to like my Comicky Movies. Complaining past that is probably just fanboy territory, except to say that the Big Set Piece, the truck chase in the middle, was just riddled with holes. From a normal movie-going point of view, I really wasn't into it at all. But, yeah: inflated sense of self-importance and brownish cinematography. Not really my idea of a fun time with the Batman.

So, in conclusion, The Summer of Nerd has been diverting, but fleeting. Nothing from these six movies is really going to stick with me. They were diverting, occasionally entertaining - but they weren't good. And I think I'd really like to see some good movies now.

UNLOCKED

2008-08-04T09:14:00.004-04:00

My blog got flagged as a potential spammer somehow, and I was locked out pending investigation. Someone out there thinks I'm a computer randomly generating text and image for advertisement purposes. Which I guess isn't so far from the truth, if you want to get really metaphysical about it...

Now that I have access again I guess there's no excuse for not posting something. I've caught up on a bunch of comics reading and I have gone to the Multiplex and sat through the Summer of Nerd, so I should have some good and pointless stuff to blather about. Back in a minute.

HA HA HA HA OH GOD IT'S NOT A JOKE?

2008-07-18T18:57:00.002-04:00

RIGHT ON SCHEDULE

2008-07-17T05:31:00.004-04:00

As predicted here, it took me a few weeks, but I am now completely in love with the new Silver Jews album, and have integrated it into my every waking moment flawlessly.

Where I thought it was rhythmically stilted, it has revealed itself to be delicate and wonderful. Where I thought it was brash and wrong-footed, I found out it was just one step ahead of me, I just hadn't turned the corner to realize where it was going.

I love the ongoing saga of David Berman as told through his band's ever-changing lineup and morphing musical attacks. I wish everyone loved this band as much as I do, but with the way it is now at least I can still afford tickets to their concerts.

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, LOOKOUT SEA takes its place in the pantheon:

HE LOVES TO LAUGH

2008-07-15T19:28:00.000-04:00

The Dark Knight is out at the end of the week, and the most exciting thing about that is clearly the chance to see Heath Ledger's interpretation of the Joker. In anticipation, I thought it would be amusing (for me) to look back at the past three big-screen iterations of everyone's favorite cackling homicidal maniac and see how they stack up against each other. This is the kind of nerdy fanboyish behavior the internet was made for, right? Right. So let's go:

1966 "Batman"
(Cesar Romero)

The older I get, the more I absolutely love the 60's Batman TV Show. Mark Millar once wrote about it: "We loved it as kids, hated it as teenagers and love it all over again as adults," which is spot-on, and this is probably the only time I'll ever run a Mark Millar quote in a positive manner, so you know I'm talking about something special. That said, I think Cesar Romero's Joker was one of the less interesting of the villains. It's not Cesar's fault. He's great, but there's just no competing with Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, Frank Gorshin as the Riddler, and Lee Merriwether as Catwoman. While the Joker should be the most memorable of all Batman villains, he just didn't stand out all that much in 1966. So Romero's Joker places third in my rankings.

1993 "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm"
(voiced by Mark Hammill)

I shouldn't even include this, because Paul Dini and Bruce Timm wreck the curve. The 90's animated Batman is the very best Batman has ever been on any screen, big or small. BUT, I can't help but think that live-action films deserve a handicap when going up against this behemoth. Not that animation is easy, but it seems that it would have a leg up on live-action in making its characters look like they sprang out of a comic book. Plus, Mark Hammill's laugh is an unnatural (and unnerving) advantage. How to play this one fairly? Oh, I know - I'll just go with the fact that while the Joker is in "Mask of the Phantasm", he's a secondary character, and all his real shining moments are in the animated TV show, which, since I'm just talking about theatrical releases here, doesn't count. Second place.

1989 "Batman"
(Jack Nicholson)

I don't get people who complain about Nicholson as the Joker. Sure, he's over the top, he chews the scenery, he steals the show. So what? While I can sort of understand when people get annoyed at Nicholson for doing that kind of stuff in other films, I feel like this is the one case where it's exactly what he's supposed to be doing. He's the goddamn JOKER for crying out loud. He's a clown that kills people. He's the life of the party while taking lives. Nicholson's Joker (as written by Sam Hamm and Warren Skarren, and, reportedly, Charles McKeown, who Burton brought in to punch up the Joker character) straddles that perfect line between sensical and nonsensical behavior. The Joker has to make some sense or else he'd never get anything done, and wouldn't be as much of a threat - but he has to operate on a certain type of skewed logic that only really makes sense to him. He does what he does because he thinks it's funny. That's why he's laughing all the time. And he doesn't much care if you're in on the joke or not. In the Burton "Batman", Jack Napier (pre-Joker) cares about money, women and power. He's sadistic, but he's also realistic. Once his face turns white and his hair turns green, though, he doesn't care about money or power except as a means to further spread chaos and death - which he does to amuse himself. He pursues Kim Basinger, but tries to disfigure her the first time they meet. You really get the sense that he doesn't care about anything and is completely unpredictable. Plus, he's funny. The Joker's gotta be funny. Which is why Nicholson gets the number one slot in my book.

LOOKING AHEAD:

2008 "The Dark Knight"
(Heath Ledger)

I haven't seen the film yet, but the trailers and ads are ubiquitous. I'm not going to pre-judge based on advertising, because that would be stupid, but I will say that everything they've put out so far has underwhelmed me (aside from the first scene of the first trailer I saw, with the cops sorting through the Joker's umpteen knives while he just sits looking menacing - that was kinda nice). Ledger seems to be taking a much more toned-down approach to the character, which fits with Nolan's completely straight-faced attitude towards the material. Ledger never looks like he's smiling or laughing, he just looks like he has face-paint on. Which is fine, and maybe it will work. But I hope they don't play the character as just strange and ruthless. For my money, he needs a sense of humor and a sense of absurdity to really play. But then, I hate Batman Begins and everyone else loves it, so my sense of what the public wants is probably not precisely on point. We'll find out on Friday.

THESE DUCKS ARE ROUGH CUSTOMERS

2008-07-14T09:10:00.007-04:00

So, Dirk over at Journalista linked to a Carl Barks Donald Duck story on Scans_Daily, and I love me some Barks ducks, so I'm over there reading it. It's a spy-spoof story in which Donald and his nephews go chasing after spies on the French Riviera. And it's a great story...except for one, little thing that's sort of disturbing.

Donald's nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, are BRUTAL MOTHERFUCKERS.

Seriously, they're like the original Jack Bauer, if Jack Bauer was three ducks. Check this out:

They straight up bully their uncle into stealing a train (check out Dewey - or maybe it's Louie - invoking some heavy Bush-style Homeland Security rationalization there. "We're trying to SAVE our country - remember?" And poor dumb Donald is like the country, not even understanding what the hell is going on - "I seen 'em do it in the movies. You just shoot 'em in the kneecaps and they tell you everything. I seen it!"):

Then they convince their uncle to abandon the train while it's still running at full steam, without any care for who or what it might eventually smash into:

Huey and Louie (or maybe Dewey and Huey) are in charge of keeping an enemy spy quiet, and their first thought is to use a fire hose to inflict genital torture:

And somewhere along the line, Louie (or Huey or Dewey, I don't fucking know) straight up ices a guy by forcing him to jump from a moving train on a bridge:

Damn. I mean, I knew Huey, Dewey and Louie were little bastards, but I didn't realize they were full on train-stealing, ball-hosing, throw-a-dude-off-a-bridge bastards. I guess the fact that most of America probably grew up on these guys explains a lot about our attitude towards things like "the Geneva Conventions" and "morals."

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MORE ENTERTAINMENT FROM ALCOHOL IN THE NEWS

2008-07-13T12:13:00.005-04:00

Just read this article from the Wall Street Journal, titled "This Bud Might Not Be For Them", about the impending merger/takeover of Anheuser-Busch by Belgian company InBev NV. Part of the article is about the very real and understandable concern about the effects on Missouri's economy the merger will have, but the article is overwhelmed by the completely stupid people crying about the "King of Beers" not being from the US anymore. There are too, too many good lines to pull. I mean, here's the lead paragraph:

ST. LOUIS -- Jordan Moore took the news that his beloved Budweiser could soon fall into foreign hands very personally: He decided he would scrap his plan to get the logo of the King of Beers tattooed on his right rib cage.

See, right off the bat you understand that this is hard-hitting journalism.

"I'll tell you one thing," said the 21-year-old concrete worker during his lunch break at The Brick of St. Louis bar, in the shadow of this city's storied Anheuser-Busch Cos. brewery, "if Budweiser is made by a different country, I don't drink Budweiser anymore. I'll go back to Wild Turkey." (Wild Turkey, a Kentucky bourbon, is owned by French drinks giant Pernod Ricard SA.)

Ah, the power of easily inserted parenthetical facts to make dumb people look even dumber.

"I'm stunned. I'm in a state of shock," said historian Maureen Ogle, author of "Ambitious Brew," a history of the beer industry. In her view, family ownership is crucial to the hard-edged competitive spirit that will ensure the success of a brewing business. "This will effectively destroy Anheuser-Busch," she said. "When you remove the family, it just becomes another corporate brewer."'

Yes, Ms. "Beer Historian" (read: old drunk who sits on her porch and tells half-hallucinated stories of the "good old days"), because up until now Budweiser was the model of a mom-and-pop business. This story was written by Tom Burton and Ilan Brat. The only possible reason this story would need two writers is if one of them literally died laughing while trying to type it up, and the other had to step in and finish it, the convulsing, still-giggling corpse of their co-worker writhing on the floor.

And then, of course, there's the pièce de résistance:

[Ogle] even expects the Bud recipe to get watered down for cost-cutting purposes, though some craft-brew drinkers insist it already was watered down a long time ago.

I can't even make a joke out of that. People are actually worried about the taste of Budweiser? I understand if you're a jingoistic redneck who's never had any other beer and think that drinking an imported brew will turn you into a gay communist or whatever, but you must at least realize you're drinking the equivalent of a wino's piss. Actually, a wino's piss probably has a higher alcohol content. You're drinking the piss of a wino who is miraculously three days sober, and is celebrating by pissing in your mouth.

Some craft-brew drinkers...

InBev handles beers like Beck's, which is around the low end of drinkable, but is still drinkable. So, if anything, Budweiser might get an upgrade out of the deal. Or, who knows, maybe InBev will realize the profit to be had by making even shittier beer and their entire line will become undrinkable, and we will have Budweiser to thank.

Me, I'm sticking with Old Dominion, my local craft brewery which just started distributing through Anheuser-Busch. So the InBev merger means Dominion might get international distribution? I like the sound of that. Hey, I think I just became everyone in St. Louis's worst enemy. GO INBEV!

RED WINE VS MEAT CANCER = JASON WILL BE PERPETUALLY DRUNK AND FULL OF STEAK FOR ALL TIME

2008-07-12T11:34:00.004-04:00

From The Economist:

...a group of researchers led by Joseph Kanner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has discovered that pairing red wines...with red meat appears to be more than just a matter of taste. If the two mix in the stomach, compounds in the wine thwart the formation of harmful chemicals that are released when meat is digested.

...the digestion of high-fat foods such as red meat releases oxidising toxins. One in particular, called malondialdehyde, is implicated in arteriosclerosis, cancer, diabetes and a host of other serious diseases...as he reports in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the wine concentrate did indeed reduce the formation of malondialdehyde. It also cut the level of hydroperoxides, another group of oxidising agents that cause cell damage.

You hear that internet? My Malbec is a VACCINE FOR CANCER I AM IMMORTAL BRING ME MORE STEAK AND CABERNET NOW.
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America Day Re-Run!

2008-07-04T13:22:00.003-04:00

I don't have time to write anything new here, because I'm late to get my beer and massive hunk of meat ingestion in celebration of our country's squealing birthday...so, enjoy a re-run of my post from last Fourth of July. The fact that I have even had this blog for a whole year makes my head spin and my nose bleed and then I black out for about an hour and pretend it was all just a bad dream.

HAPPY AMERICA DAY!

As people who know me are already aware, I can be pretty snarky and mean about this great country of ours. But on the Fourth of July, I'm reminded of things I truly love about living in the ol' U S of A.

1.
That we celebrate our country's birthday by blowing things up and imbibing legal intoxicants.
2.
That as a fairly well off white man I am pretty much free to do almost all of the things I would want to anyway.
3.

So Happy Birthday America! I will drink a beer in honor of the ideals for which you stand. And then, I will keep on drinking until my brain seizes up and my eyes bleed.

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WILL IT...PUNISH?

2008-07-02T02:58:00.006-04:00

Is Punisher War Zone secretly going to be Marvel's best movie this summer?

Don't get me wrong, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk were fun and all, but they didn't make what I'd call a lasting impression. Both had pretty sloppy endings, and each coasted more or less on the strength of its leading man. Iron Man actually looks worse to me in retrospect, possibly because Robert Downey Jr. does not live in my head and smooth over my memories of the awful third act with his sexy patter. Oh, but how I wish he did.

But, yeah - forgettable, powderpuff entertainments. Nothing poetic enough or mental enough to stick with you down the road or prompt you to ever try to watch them again.

Punisher War Zone, on the other hand...this may have possibilities.

I know, I know. This is crazy talk. But I will convince you.

Watch that trailer. There's a real sense of absurdity in there, of larger-than-life ultraviolent melodrama. Those crazy unnatural reds and greens - those represent to me all the colors that are leeched out of other comics when they're adapted to film. Like Batman - I understand that Batman is a dark character, but the entirety of Batman Begins was some shade of black or brown. I don't think of that movie as moody, just sort of dingy. Drab. In Iron Man we even had the scene where Robert Downey's computer is making fun of him for wanting to paint his armor red, like the film feels the need to apologize for using a primary color or something. You're a comic book! Act like it! Just get crazy and do crazy stuff and be weird and fun and over-the-top! I WANT people to hiss/spit lines like "Some days I'd like to get my hands on God."

As The Beat points out, War Zone is being directed by Lexi Alexander, who is a female ex-kickboxing champion. What? That's amazing! And going to imdb.com, I find out she directed Green Street, which came and went in this country as Hooligans, which was supposed to be really good but which I never saw. But I think it was about Elijah Wood breaking bottles off in people's assholes, which, I don't know, can you go wrong with a premise like that? I don't think you can. I think mere association with that premise (along with being officially recognized as being able to kick more or less anyone's ass) earns Lexi Alexander a little cred.

Looking around the imdb listing for Punisher War Zone: I'm looking at the writers' credits. One of them wrote a whole lot of television, including an episode of The Sopranos which I probably hated, because it was in the fourth season and I hated the fourth season, but whatever, moving on...two of the writers are also two of the writers on the multi-scribe clusterfuck that was the Iron Man script. Maybe they were two of the better writers? Maybe I don't care? The cinematographer is Steve Gainer, who was D.P. on Mysterious Skin and John Waters' A Dirty Shame. Again, what? This is the D.P. on the Punisher? How is that likely at all? Amazing. Also, I haven't been reading the comics, but there's a guy named Looney Bin Jim in the movie. Looney Bin Jim should be the title of a movie.

Is this movie going to "rock my socks"? I mean, I wouldn't have thought so yesterday. The last Punisher movie made the first Punisher movie seem like a good idea. But the last Punisher movie wasn't lit with christmas lights and helmed by a female kickboxer who writes things like this on her webpage:

…don’t expect this Punisher to be set in an ultra-realistic world. Every director has to make a call on the vision and style of a film and putting The Punisher in a realistic and gritty setting would be like having Det. Vic Mackey of THE SHIELD run around with a big ass skull on his chest, or Ray Liotta’s character in NARC suddenly go: “Hey, I think I just saw a guy whose face looks like a Jigsaw puzzle.” Ha, ha.

My god, I think I'm in love with that paragraph. Mark my words! When Iron Man is rusted out and The Incredible Hulk is, uh, something else that means decay, Punisher War Zone will be winning all the thermonuclear high fives from the not-afraid-to-be-nuts awards. Or something. It's 3 in the morning. I'm very tired.

CRAZY PEOPLE

2008-06-29T18:45:00.002-04:00

I don't think I've read Matt Taibbi before, but in this article on John McCain he brings the bile and hate like it's his job (it is). I'll be on the lookout for more articles by Mr. Taibbi, as he supplies what my political reading has been missing: incisive ground-level observational rage.

For those who read Tucker Stone's liveblogging of his trudge through the Uncanny X-Men Omnibus and were disappointed when he didn't shoot himself at the end of it, you can go over and read his comics reviews from this week, which are clearly the product of a broken man.

PROGRESS

2008-06-25T12:06:00.000-04:00

California gay couples rush to wed as vote looms

See that up there? That's called progress. Otherwise known as "the world becoming a better place, despite some people's strongest efforts."

The next up in those efforts is the amendment to the California constitution banning same-sex marriage, up for a vote this November. The amendment will go down in flames. It's only real purpose is to galvanize conservative voters and get them out to the polls to vote for Oldy McGrumpus for President. It may not even accomplish that much. Witness even the Orange County Register - one of the most conservative papers in the state - proclaiming what those on the right (not the Right) side of this issue already know to be rational and true:

Our preference would be for the government not to be involved in marriage....Whether a marriage is valid should be up to the people involved and the churches, synagogues, mosques or other religious institutions that choose to perform them or not.
As a practical matter, however, the government has so entwined itself into our daily lives that state recognition is important. Filing taxes as a married couple or as individuals makes a difference, as does the ability to own real estate, make end-of-life decisions or adopt children. Considering all this and the importance of equality before the law, the high court's decision [to overturn the same-sex marriage ban] was justified.

The toothpaste is about to be well out of the tube. Decades from now, kids will learn that there was once a debate over whether or not to allow two grown people who love each other to get married, and will look on it with the same disbelieving revulsion that we felt when we first learned that whites and blacks used to have different water fountains. I think the proper phrasing of the reaction is: "Wha-a-a-a-a-a?"

There's still a-ways to go. 48 more states, to begin with, not to mention the countless other flaws and injustices and tragedies in the world. But I think a little revelling in the fact that same-sex marriage is becoming flat-out inevitable, ain't at all out of line.

Cheers.

CARLIN

2008-06-23T12:48:00.003-04:00

Fuck. And the other six words, too.

He was one of the best. The absolute best.

He died of heart failure. He had a history of cardiac trouble, and had survived three previous heart attacks. As my father pointed out this morning, Carlin probably would have said: "Hey, it takes practice. I knew one of these days, I'd get it right." He probably wouldn't have stood for any maudlin moping.

But damn, will he be missed.

FAST THOUGHTS ABOUT NEW MUSIC

2008-06-22T18:56:00.008-04:00

Nick Cave's new album DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!! sounds like someone resurrected Some Girls as a Zombie Assassin that wears a sleazy porn 'stache and uses a rusty fish hook to perform its business.

In other words, Essential Listening.

I've given LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, LOOKOUT SEA, the new Silver Jews album, about two half-listens in less than ideal conditions. The Jews are easily my favorite band still in existence, but I always have a rough time listening to each new album. I'm never sure what to make of it, and at first I think they've lost it, and then three months later I think it's the best thing they've ever done. All of which is prologue to me saying: I'm not sure what I think about the new Silver Jews album, and I'm afraid that they've [he's] lost it. But ask me again in three months.

A THOUSAND WORDS ABOUT BEARS RIDING HORSES

2008-06-15T19:24:00.003-04:00

Found via the excellent photoblog, riot rite right clit clip click.

It speaks for itself.

WHY BOTHER, IT'S GONNA HURT ME

2008-06-13T17:10:00.002-04:00

Many who share my age and cultural background are afflicted with the same disease: every time a new Weezer album comes out, we all - even though we FUCKING KNOW BETTER - open our ears and put hope in our hearts that maybe this time Rivers Cuomo has decided he cares more about honest songwriting than bland fame, and has made a record that doesn't suck.

My Pal Boisture has thrown a few mp3s at me from Weezer's new self-titled album (that would make three self-titled albums now - this one is "The Red One"), which he claims are "good". I'm skeptical, and since any of you who might care about Weezer still remember the inhuman feeling of being robotically groped by the Green Album, or the lingering ache of being kicked in the genitals by the vomitous "Beverly Hills", I'm sure you understand.

I've got track 02, "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)", track 06, "Dreamin'", and track 10, "The Angel and the One." I'm listening to them and, yeah...I don't know. Track 02 tries to do a lot, which is more than you can say for any single track on the Green album, but none of it really fires. There's nothing technically wrong with track 06, except maybe that it's a little too long, but there's nothing that makes it any better than, say, this song off of Maladroit. And at least Maladroit got Muppets.

Track 10...this has a little bit of the anguish that made Pinkerton great, which on most new Weezer stuff just comes across as whining. But this is really just "Only in Dreams" redone with shittier lyrics. And worse music.

Look, I know it sucks, but I think Weezer was probably never meant to become a Great Band for the Ages. What made the Blue album great was the quirky nerdiness and the solid songwriting. What made Pinkerton even better (in my opinion) was that the solid songwriting was combined with a more raw, howling anguish and self-hatred. There's an exposed nerve running through Pinkerton that I think we all realize now freaked Rivers Cuomo the fuck out, which is why he retreated into safe, structural pop hits that don't threaten anyone and bore me to tears. Weezer is over - songs can occasionally be listenable, but they're never going to be any more than that. Time to stop carrying a torch for what was, in the end, a phenomenon of time and place and particular energy.

I mean, just look at these two images, and the incredible exponential growth of douchebaggery that just drips off the second one. Time to put this pipe dream back in the box with your sixth grade crush and your daydreams of being a rock star.

Comics Review(s): HULKAPALOOZA!

2008-06-12T02:26:00.008-04:00

Alternate title possibilities included HULKFEST!, HULKSTOCK!, and MONTEREY HULK FESTIVAL!

With THE INCREDIBLE HULK movie hitting theaters on Friday, I thought I might try and score some blog traffic by writing a Hulk-centric post. But what to write about? I don't really want to talk about the movie. I mean, it looks like fun. The special effects that I thought looked crappy on TV looked better during the trailer in front of Iron Man, but I don't care a lot about special effects anyway. I love Tim Roth. I like the rest of the cast. Thus pretty much endeth my pre-game thoughts on the film.

So, not the movie - I'll have to go with comics. I used to love Hulk comics. I was a lucky kid whose Dad had nice reprints of old comics around, so I got to start off with the Lee/Kirby/Ditko Hulk, got to read the Hulk appearances in the old Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four, and got to read a couple of other classic stories by people not Lee, Kirby, or Ditko. Then I started in on Peter David's stint as writer of the regular (and then current) Hulk comic and fell in love, so much so that I had a really hard time reading anybody else writing the character after Peter left. I gave Bruce Jones a try, and I liked the beginning of the run all right, but as soon as John Romita Jr. left I started paying attention to the scripts and realized I didn't actually like them all that much. And I don't think I've read any Hulk comics since then.

SO...when I was in the comics store yesterday I decided that I would buy and read any Hulk comics that were new this week. My reasoning was (and is) that those comics would be what retailers would be most likely to have on hand this weekend when people wander out of the multiplex and decide that they might want to try one of those comic book things.

I found three books that fit the bill.

MARVEL ADVENTURES: HULK #12, the latest issue in a series of Hulk comics targeted towards kids.

HULK: RAGING THUNDER, a one-shot Hulk comic targeted towards teenagers and adults, which also contains a reprint of a Hulk story from (I want to say) the '70s in the back of the book.

and SKAAR: SON OF HULK, which has a great, dumb, comic-booky name and which may or may not feature the actual Hulk. But it has Hulk in the title, and a big green person on the cover. So it counts for my purposes here.

And awaaaaaay we go...

HULK: RAGING THUNDER
(lead new story, "Unbeatable", written by Jeff Parker, art by Mitch Breitweiser - back-up reprint story, "Thundra at Dawn!", written by Gerry Conway and pencilled by Ramona Fradon, inked by Joe Sinnott)

Well that was...underwhelming. And not at all what I was expecting. This comic is not actually about the Hulk - he's in it, but he's not much more than a plot device. Instead, the protagonist is a woman named Thundra, who is from a post-apocalyptic future in which men and women have been at war with each other for four generations. One might pause to wonder: if men and women have been at war, how have there been ANY generations? The book offers up a line that explains that "human parthenogenesis" had been developed, but since that's defined by the OED as "reproduction from an ovum without fertilization", that doesn't really explain anything. Parthenogenesis implies that women are just having virgin births, but at one point a character says that no woman has been pregnant for four generations. So maybe the writer (Jeff Parker) means "cloning"? I'm really not sure.

Anyway, this comic is basically about Thundra traveling to the past to place a booty call with the Hulk in order to become pregnant, and then traveling to the future to give birth to a superhuman baby which wins the war against men. Time-travel is always a sticky plot device, and in my opinion should be avoided by pretty much everyone other than Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Moore, or Chris Marker. The obvious question springs to mind: why would Thundra waste time-travel on the very dubious plan of getting pregnant with a weapon which takes nine months to bring to term and presumably many years to grow and program/educate and train to fight? Wouldn't there really have to be a much more direct, consequential strategy in which one could employ a time machine? This is the kind of story that doesn't really hold up even on a casual read, and the more you squint at it, the more it falls apart.

Also, in more disappointing news, the back-up reprint story isn't about the Hulk AT ALL. It features him in one (admittedly amusing) panel, but instead it's about Thundra fighting The Thing. No booty-calls this time, though. The story is pretty bad, but penciller Ramona Fradon actually pulls off several lovely sequences of very fun, cartoony art. There's one two page sequence with the Thing walking into a packed stadium that feels like the Fantastic Four by way of Charlie Brown or something. I don't know, maybe it'll look different when it's not 1:30 in the morning, but I found it pretty odd and affecting. I know Fradon's name but I've never really payed any attention to her work - now I'll have to dig into it and see if she worked on any more worthwhile material than Gerry Conway's limp script.

Tangentially, there was this line in Jeff Parker's story that refers to the Hulk as a "21st Century Titan". That seems weird, doesn't it? The Hulk, even more so than any of the other 60s Marvel characters, seems so firmly tethered to a particular time and place to me. He's a man who got hit with an atomic bomb and became a huge monster that sometimes tries to be good and sometimes just wrecks shit and gets followed around by a rock'n'roll teenager. That's such a uniquely mid-20th Century American product that it makes me a little depressed to see him referred to as a "21st Century" anything.

Moving on...

MARVEL ADVENTURES: HULK #12
(written by Paul Benjamin, pencilled by Steve Scott, inked by Nathan Massengill)

This one is actually pretty fun. It's sort of a modern Saturday morning cartoon version of the old Hulk TV show - Bruce Banner is a man on the run, taking odd jobs, turning into the Hulk when you make him angry. In this version he's accompanied by Rick Jones, who in the original Hulk comics was a 1960s teenager as interpreted by grown men in their forties. Here he's supposed to be a contemporary teenager, so he says things like "It's Kool and the Gang, boss." and "Dude, the Champion's so gonna get pwned!" I don't talk to people younger than 21 (seriously, I demand to see ID before any conversation) so for all I know this is what teenagers talk like now. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Also, I've never seen "pwned" written as dialogue before - how would a human being actually pronounce that?

The story in this comic opens with Bruce Banner about to go all Hulk on an abusive factory owner who has decided to try and beat up Banner on the factory floor because Banner's monkey pissed him off. (Yes, in this version Bruce Banner also has a monkey. It is named "Monkey".) Right as the Hulk is about to pound this guy into guava paste, he is transported (along with Rick and Monkey) to an Intergalactic Fighting Arena, where a guy called the Champion challenges Hulk to a fistfight, the catch being that if no one from Earth can beat the Champion, then Earth gets destroyed. It's all handled in a lighthearted, ridiculous manner and so comes off pretty charming. This isn't a book that I would necessarily recommend to adults for their own enjoyment, but if you just took a kid to see the Hulk movie and he wants some comics, you could surely do a lot worse.

And on to the third round...

SKAAR: SON OF HULK #1
(written by Greg Pak, drawn by Ron Garney)

Ok, so, as I suspected, this story is spun off of that story about the Hulk going into outer space that I didn't read. Turns out that's fine though, because the writer, Greg Pak, doesn't belabor the connection all that much, and the book is totally readable on its own. Not exactly a Hulk comic book, but I knew that going in. People less acquainted with comics may assume that a book called "Son of Hulk" would feature Hulk Dad, though, but those people should easily be won over by such lines of dialogue as "It's AXEMAN BONE! Run for your lives!"

It's really hard not to love a comic with a character in it named Axeman Bone.

This is a really great comic. Really. The plot is all people killing other people with spears, and then sometimes they use axes. Oh, and sometimes big alien bugs kill people, but then Son of Hulk kills alien bugs. And people. There's kind of a boring intro in which maybe the dead mother of Skaar, Son of Hulk is talking to the Son of Hulk while the Son of Hulk is still in womb (or possibly an egg? I'm not too sure) but as soon as that's over with it's all fire and alien bugs and barbarian violence. This book may at some point in the future attempt to have a plot or characters or a theme, and on that day this book will probably be completely ruined. But until then you have a book about giant alien barbarians beating the shit out of each other, and bugs. Which is obviously something you need. Right now.

SO...that's it for my Hulk Review Round-Up. I don't know that there's anything here which a person enamored of Edward Norton might find entertaining. But then, The Happening could easily bury The Incredible Hulk at the box office and make everyone forget that comics exist again. At least until the new Batman movie comes out.

.

IN WHICH HE TALKS ABOUT COMICS HE HAS NOT YET READ

2008-06-10T17:31:00.009-04:00

I don't know if anyone has noticed yet or not, but there is a completely fascinating look at the alt-superhero book OMEGA THE UNKNOWN occurring in the comments section of Tucker Stone's blog, where the notion is floated that the series (written by novelist Jonathen Lethem) is a coded exploration of Asperger's syndrome. I haven't read Lethem's take on Steve Gerber's oddball creation yet, so I can't venture an opinion on the matter, but the commenter presents the beginnings of an argument based on what seems to be a fairly thorough reading. The commenter's argument is made all the stronger by the fact that he claims to have Asperger's himself, and can therefore point to his own experiences in drawing comparisons.

Also, speaking of Tucker Stone, he stopped by my post about him from the other day and left me a really nice comment. Which I enjoyed. Thanks, Tucker.

I don't make it to the comic book store every week, but I do get stuff set aside for me, so I usually wind up looking through the shipping lists every Monday or Tuesday. I just got done with the stuff that's coming in tomorrow. Here are a few thoughts and reactions, recorded more or less as I had them:

Marvel is putting Jack Kirby's THE ETERNALS series out in a softcover collection - I missed the solicitation for this one, but I'm glad Marvel's putting this out. As much as I like Omnibuses and such, hardcovers are for die-hards. Softcovers are gateway purchases, and I want as many people as possible to be able to discover good, older work. I'm not convinced that the ESSENTIAL trade paperback series, being in black-and-white, are really good for that. I remember finding the Barnes & Noble exclusive softcovers of the Spider-Man Marvel Masterworks, and how they made great cheaper gifts for and purchases by friends of mine, who otherwise wouldn't have been able to pay fifty to a hundred dollars or more to read the original Lee/Ditko work in full color. Here's hoping that other Archive, Omnibus, or Masterwork style reprints do well enough to warrant nicely-printed affordable editions as well.

Oh, I see. There's a new ongoing ETERNALS series coming out. I guess the softcover reprint of Kirby probably has less to do with demand for that original series and more with a synergistic back-list publishing strategy. Oh well, whatever gets the job done, I suppose. It's not like I have any illusions that DC would be reprinting the NEW GODS or OMAC stuff in the way that they are if those characters weren't involved in their big universe-wide publishing event.

The new ETERNALS ongoing is being written by Daniel and Charlie Knauf. Daniel Knauf, for those that don't know, created the HBO show CARNIVALE, a dark fantasy set during the Dust Bowl, which lasted for two pretty good seasons. I remember being pretty excited when I found out Knauf was going to be working on comics, but I didn't really care to read IRON MAN, which is the book he started with. I care maybe a smidgen more to read a Knauf take on THE ETERNALS, but what I'd really be interested in would be an original concept instead of another trademark upkeep/superhero remix book. Might check this out, though.

I love good titles. Good titles conjure mystery, poetry, adventure. In a world dominated by generic titles like "THE NOUN" and "ADJECTIVE PERSON" and "ACTIVE VERB", a good title deserves to be applauded and have flowers and money thrown at its head. RED MASS FOR MARS is, to my ear, a very good title. I will buy that book.

Ah, I see A RED MASS FOR MARS (full title) is a Jonathan Hickman book. I'm interested by Hickman. I can't say for sure that I LIKE his stuff yet, but you'd have to be stupid not to recognize him as a creator who demands attention. I probably would have picked this up anyway, but with that title I'm completely sold.

Wow, maybe I will be making it over to the comic shop tomorrow. There is a ton of stuff with my name on it coming in. LOCAL #12, DOKTOR SLEEPLESS #7, THE PROGRAMME vol 1 TP, NARCOPOLIS #3, YOUNG LIARS #4...the schlep might just be worth it.

ROBOTS GN. This looks interesting. I always like picking up anthologies, even though they usually disappoint me. I can't find a full list of the talent involved, but the names I've found listed (Leah Moore, Kieron Gillen, Mark Buckingham and others) seem promising. I don't think my local shop will be getting this in, though, and I didn't know of it so I didn't pre-order it. Helloooo, Amazon.com.

What...what the hell is X-FORCE AIN'T NO DOG? The title is completely confounding. Is someone calling X-Force a dog? Is this a valiant attempt to defend X-Force's honor? By "a dog" do we mean to imply loyalty? Ugliness? Failure? Drool? Thank you, Marvel, for offering a perfect counter-example for my little bit on good titles. X-FORCE AIN'T NO DOG, the first comic book to implode into the black hole created by its own name.

Finally: how can you not want to love something called SKAAR: SON OF HULK?

All right. If I actually manage to get to the comics store tomorrow, maybe the inertia of action will result in my blogging some reviews. We'll see.

.

HOW TO DEAL WITH LIZARD SCUM

2008-06-04T17:38:00.006-04:00

As I may have mentioned here before, Joe Lieberman is emblematic of everything that is wrong with politicians as a group. He is a scabrous lizard hack with vomit for blood and a festering pile of dogmeat for a heart.

I could not love Barack Obama any more than I do right now:

(from Roll Call, via TPM):

...during a Senate vote Wednesday, Obama dragged Lieberman by the hand to a far corner of the Senate chamber and engaged in what appeared to reporters in the gallery as an intense, three-minute conversation.
While it was unclear what the two were discussing, the body language suggested that Obama was trying to convince Lieberman of something and his stance appeared slightly intimidating.

Using forceful, but not angry, hand gestures, Obama literally backed up Lieberman against the wall, leaned in very close at times, and appeared to be trying to dominate the conversation, as the two talked over each other in a few instances...
...Afterwards, Obama smiled and pointed up at reporters peering over the edge of the press gallery for a better glimpse of their interaction.

.

NICK, TOM, BO

2008-06-03T13:14:00.003-04:00

I have nothing whatsoever of interest to say. I keep trying to work myself up to review the recent comics I've read, but I can't muster much more than "duh...I likum". Maybe FINAL CRISIS actually shorted out my brain completely.

Anyway, while trying to write something about ULTIMATE HUMAN (which was pretty fun - at this point you either like Warren Ellis' authorial voice or you don't, and if like me you do, well, there it is. Enjoy.), I got distracted and went searching on YouTube for the video to Nick Cave's DIG LAZARUS DIG. I haven't gotten around to picking the album up (maybe today) but ANTI Records has the video up on YouTube so I can keep my appetite for it alive.

Anyway, I found it, watched it, and then noticed that ANTI has also put up a staggering number of Tom Waits videos. I don't usually enjoy music videos all that much. I like the Nick Cave LAZARUS video because it's just Nick Cave being ridiculous in a mustache with a funky backdrop. Normally, though, I prefer the pictures that form in my head while listening to a song over whatever is in the head of some recent film grad the record company hired to direct. Bizarrely, however, the video for Waits' LIE TO ME is almost precisely what already showed up in my head while listening to it. (It's a tie between this and a blurry video of Tom Waits just shaking his hands over his head and shimmying back and forth in an unnatural rhythm.)

Anyway, just to round out this post, here's a video of Bo Diddley, for whom we are still in mourning after his passing yesterday. To bring the post full circle, here's a nice thing Warren Ellis wrote about Bo.

WHO DO YOU LOVE?

2008-06-02T22:11:00.000-04:00

R.I.P. "The Originator".

MONDAY MORNINGINGINGINGING

2008-06-02T11:05:00.004-04:00

I'm cranky and I'm on the internet and I don't have enough coffee, so I offer up to you a companion piece of sorts to the Tucker Stone aphorism I offered up before. Found via Journalista, more proof that Mark Millar is, in fact, the enemy of Art and Human Thought:

“I love the fact that Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my favourite films,” he says. “It’s the worst kind of snobbery to want to be into stuff that most people aren’t. It’s a defect in character. Whereas being into something that everybody’s into, what could be nicer?
“To create something that everybody likes is the ultimate aspiration. Nobody writes a novel hoping that hardly anybody reads it. Novelists get angry when people don’t read their books and then start sniping at JK Rowling.”

For the record, Raiders is one of my favorite movies as well. That's not the part I'm objecting to. Hell, if you have a brain, you already understand what I'm objecting to, and if you don't, then, well, no use explaining it.

.

SATURDAY NIGHT INTERNETTING

2008-05-31T23:59:00.004-04:00

I'm halfway through Tucker Stone's phenomenal feat of heroic idiocy - liveblogging his slog through the Uncanny X-Men Omnibus. While I have fond childhood memories which make me more kindly disposed to Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne's mutant tales than Tucker, I'm finding his take to be both funny and useful from a critical perspective.

I just read this bit from him, which I quote because of its utter righteousness:

And let's not fuck around: if I don't get why it's there, and it doesn't make the story better, I'd just as soon not deal with it. Some people are just like, aw, take the bad, leave the rest. Fuck that. I ain't running a democracy in my brain, and I'm not going to play support group on my taste.

Preach on, brother.

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BEEN GONE, BABY (In Which He Returns, But Just Blathers On About Movies)

2008-05-29T23:50:00.014-04:00

Don't call it a comeback. I've been here for years.

Well, ok, I haven't. In fact, I haven't even been blogging for a whole year. And I've clearly not been here for the last month, apologies to the two people who actually read this thing.

I've been very busy moving all of my belongings and also my girlfriend from the cozy neighborhood of Astoria Queens to my hometown of Arlington, VA. We only recently got chairs and internet in our new apartment, and so I haven't really been in a comfortable blogging position. (My current blogging position: slouched in a comfy chair with my feet up on an end table.)

Anyway, posts may or may not be regular now, but they'll certainly be more frequent. I still have to do things like buy a couch and find a job, but I'm sure I'll find some time here and there for the internets.

Since I'm here, I guess I ought to provide some content. By which I mean bullshit about movies.

***

GONE BABY GONE surprised the hell out of me. Ben Affleck normally makes me itch, but he stepped up and directed a lean, dark detective story which manages to do what the best of its genre always does: be about something other than the mystery on which its plot is hung. The story (from a novel by Dennis Lehane, adapted by Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard) follows Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, private detectives who are hired to help find a young kidnapped girl, and have to go through tight-lipped locals, hostile police, and threatening gangsters. What the film is about, though, is rarer than a two-headed purple mongoose in the world of American cinema - ethics. Ethical dilemmas. Ethical questions. Not morals, which are rules handed down from on high which you'd better follow Or Else, but ethics, which I have always defined as the struggle to figure out how precisely to be a human being. Thus, the film is filled with tough calls, people doing the wrong things for the right reasons and the right things for the wrong reasons, and all of them trying to figure out just where they fit between Heaven and Hell.

Since I caught the flick on DVD, I was able to avail myself of the special features - particularly the deleted scenes, which come complete with commentary from the filmmakers. While watching the film itself, I noticed some spots which dragged and some scenes that felt a little flabby, and was ready to dismiss Ben Affleck as an inexperienced director too in love with his own material to do right by his film. However, once I saw what Affleck cut out of the film (and heard him talk about it) I realized I'd been too quick to judge the man. The ten minutes or so of deleted material on the Gone Baby Gone DVD add up to a focused lesson on making smart decisions in filmmaking. Everything cut was cut for a very good reason, some of it re-purposed to useful ends, some of it discarded despite inherent positive qualities because it did not service the whole.

Most impressively, there is one alternate scene which a weaker director would have included, but which Affleck was smart enough and strong enough to avoid. Without giving too much away, in the scene as included in the film, Michelle Monaghan's character performs an act of blind heroism, throwing herself into danger without even thinking. It's a breathtaking moment in the film, a violent plunge directly to the core of not only her character, but Casy Affleck's as well - he watches her, frozen. What she does, he cannot do. In the alternate, unused scene, however, Casey's character plunges into danger right after Monaghan. The explanation on the commentary is unsurprising - when it came time to do the scene, Casey Affleck expressed concern that maybe his character shouldn't stay on the sidelines. This is (I have come to understand from reading William Goldman) a common affliction of actors - they do not want to look like a bad guy, and don't want to look like a wimp. A weaker director, needing to please his leading man, might have given in to the actor's concerns (and, to be fair, a more insecure or less honest actor might have pressed the issue harder).

Despite any of his sins against cinema in the past, we should all be grateful that Ben Affleck has come out the other side of stardom with the judgment and ability needed to make a rock solid film which ventures outside of mere entertainment and quaint moral platitudes into the realm of art. Gone Baby Gone stands shoulder to shoulder with much of the best of the Private Eye genre. While it is not a Great film (because I try not to throw that around too liberally), it is the highest level of Good, and deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.

Also, Ed Harris looks awesome in it, like a bearded death's head skull fueled by pure hate.

***

So, I know you've all seen IRON MAN by now, because I've seen it and I'm usually the last to get to the multiplex. Some of you have probably seen it twice, considering the giant, cow-choking box office receipts it's been collecting.

I guess I liked it well enough. I certainly laughed at a lot of the jokes, and I appreciated that Stark's character stayed persistently flawed, even after he became a hero. Of course, he's flawed in all the coolest ways - it's not like you're ever prompted to really hate him, just to find him roguishly charming. Still, the pre-credits very end was a nice note of arrogant, self-destructive behavior, and I liked that.

What didn't I like? Well, all of the fight scenes after the first one in the cave were pretty boring. And the final one made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Stane pops back like Freddy Krueger or something after the whole "icing" bit, and the scene goes something like this:

IRON MAN: Pepper! Do the thing with the doohickey that kills everything on the roof!

PEPPER: But you're on the roof!

IRON MAN: Just do it!

Pepper does the thing with the doohickey. Stane and Iron Man are both on the roof. Stane dies. Iron Man...uh...doesn't. Stane also falls into a "clean" power source which then explodes as if it were powered by Wild Turkey 101. The entire building is enveloped in a fireball. Iron Man is still on the roof. With his mask off. And then he's...uh...fine. Which is just one of the dumber, slope-browed moments of scripting I've seen in a big budget movie in a while.

Also, the transition, story-wise, into Stane being a full-out villain felt rushed and sloppy. So when Mark Millar recently revealed that Stane was scheduled to be the villain in the second film and he convinced Favreau to collapse the two films together, I wasn't all that surprised. The first two-thirds of the film and the last third of the film really feel like two different movies, the former being clever and well-made, the latter being every other big budget action film you've ever seen, just with better acting.

Downey and Bridges are both great, though, and they carry the film well beyond its own limitations. Paltrow isn't nearly as annoying as I've found her in the past. And since I am a huge comics nerd, I found all the little nods to continuity fairly charming. And the Stan Lee appearance is the best one since he played Willie the mailman in the first Fantastic Four.

***

The trailer for THE INCREDIBLE HULK made it look a lot better than the buzz around it has suggested. Even the FX, which look terrible on television and YouTube, worked pretty well on the big screen. Of course, I don't really like computer generated effects to begin with, so I'm probably starting from a lower set of expectations than are most other people. Great cast, though.

***

Finally, I don't think I'll be seeing OLDY McJONES AND THE THINGEE OF WHATSIT. I heard reports of CGI farting chipmunks. These reports were corrected to CGI farting prairie dogs. Whatever the fuck they are, I'm sure they have more charisma than Shia LeBouf. And between the two of them, how many decent films have Spielberg and Lucas made over the last decade? One? I'll just stick with re-watching Raiders of the Lost Ark every couple of years, thanks.

***

It occurs to me now that I could have divvied this all up over multiple posts and saved myself some future work keeping up this blog. Damn.

***

.

MUST READS

2008-04-26T09:55:00.005-04:00

For all five of you who keep coming back here, sorry that I haven't posted much lately. I have a few things in the works, but I'm right at the beginning of a big move from NYC to DC, and have three or four other non-blog writing projects to deal with, so who knows when I'll get to them.

In the meantime, though, in case there are any of you who care about comics and read me but don't read Tom Spurgeon or Laura Hudson (and, seriously, if that's the case, what on earth is wrong with you?), let me point out two very essential pieces of bloggery:

Tom's Blistering Take on New York Comic-Con

Working the show rather than hanging out at one, I found a surprising number of booth workers and company employees to be outright unhelpful when it came to doing rudimentary things that is so easy to get people from other industries to do for you at their trade shows. You know, little things like talk to you, recognize you're standing there, solicit a question, perhaps even agree to do something reasonable when you ask for it rather than send you to someone else...
...Here's another way of putting it: I just went to a publishing industry convention and after asking 100 people questions I was only able to learn about three new books.

Laura's Follow-Up with PR Advice for Comics Companies

Let me say to begin: As someone who used to work in book publishing, and someone in the press who deals with both comic book companies and book publishers on a regular basis, dealing with the latter is almost always easier in very measurable ways. Why? Because they know how to deal with the press. As the reviews editor for Comic Foundry, I often find myself leaning towards coverage of graphic novels put out by book publishers (as well as PR-savvy comic book publishers) for exactly this reason. Their generally welcoming behavior, willingness to share information about their products, and no-agony comp policy makes coverage of them... possible, and I like that.

For those who watch the comics industry, these are probably the most important two pieces of writing to hit the internet this week*. Go read 'em.

*Aside from the Gordon Lee Case, that is - go CBLDF!

MIRACLE WETWORKER

2008-04-22T14:09:00.005-04:00

Looking over the list of comics coming out this week, I have discovered the wonder and awe that is HELEN KILLER.

The solicitation text:

"In 1901, twenty-one year old college student Helen Keller, with the aid of a fantastical device invented by her friend and mentor, Alexander Graham Bell, regains her sight and hearing as well as near super-human strength and agility. Helen is enlisted by the Secret Service to protect President William McKinley who has been targeted for assassination by Anarchists. As a deeper conspiracy to destroy America unfolds around her, Helen discovers that her new abilities come with a dark and terrifying price!"

Written by Andrew Kreisberg and drawn by Matthew Rice, neither of whom I'm familiar with. And, yes, as far as I can tell this is a real comic book.

My only question is, who actually came up with this, and why wasn't it me?

NAKED SUPERHEROS PART DEUX

2008-04-17T20:58:00.002-04:00

In my shameless push for more misleading google hits, allow me to link to this story from the British newspaper The Sun, about the Hulk's Gigantic Penis. (found via Eddie Campbell.)

SHOCKED six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll ? and uncovered a giant green WILLY.
Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster, catchphrase “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” at a seaside fair.
And when she peeled off the green comic-book character’s ripped purple shorts, she found the two-inch manhood beneath them.

I'd post a picture, but the Sun went to all the trouble of encoding a very pointed copyright warning which pops up when you go to download the image, so why don't you just click through to the story and see for yourself...

MANIAC(s) ON THE (convention) FLOOR

2008-04-17T17:25:00.008-04:00

If you happen to be venturing out to the New York Comic Con this weekend, and you see either of these lovely people sitting at a booth* bearing their teeth at you with a slightly dead look in their eye, please move toward them (slowly!) and give them some food. Or a tequila shot.

Oh, and be sure to ask them about the magazine they make WITH THEIR OWN BARE HANDS.

Comic Foundry (now with Eisner nomination - part of a balanced breakfast!)

* that booth would be located at H-19 in Artist's Alley, I am informed.

UWE BOLL WILL FIGHT YOUR NERDRAGE

2008-04-16T07:17:00.005-04:00

Uwe Boll is a film director who apparently makes a living through antagonizing video game nerds by making bad movies based on their favorite games. This is a vocation I can at least halfway respect.

Still, I find it hilarious that the Internet has tried to pool its collective Nerd Hate and has created a petition for Dr. Uwe Boll to stop making films. It is additionally hilarious that people sign this petition with "names" such as: "T1gRa", "plz stop it", and "jkhkhk", showing that they have as firm a grasp of how petitions work as they do of the film business.

But topping even the idiotic nerd-rage is Uwe Boll's beautiful response video to the whole shebang:

You hear that, internet? He's not "a retard like Michael Bay or George Clooney, or Eli Roth making the same movie over and over." He's "the only real genius in the business." Put that in your sock and throw it in the river!

I want a new petition to demand that Uwe Boll continue to make films but only if they are about Uwe Boll.

Anyway, speaking of Michael Bay, here's a commercial that made me love Michael Bay in a way I was never able to before:

(all of this mess was found via this thread at Whitechapel, Warren Ellis' message board)

the SOUND SCROUNGE: Astronaut

2008-04-13T10:47:00.004-04:00

(I am a cranky and bitter person who tends to hate new music. I hate a lot of old music too. I am filled with hate. But I also despise stagnation - I need new things. So I try to make a genuine effort to scrounge through the new sounds to try and find something I can listen to without stabbing somebody.)

Scroobius Pip has officially moved, from the list of artists I watch with interest, to the list of artists whose new releases I become inordinately excited about. His collaborations with DJ Dan le Sac, Thou Shalt Always Kill and The Beat That My Heart Skipped became two of my favorite tracks last year, and I'm looking forward to tracking down their new album later this year. Until then, there's his new collaboration with electronic outfit YILA, Astronaut, a terrific song about being the kind of kid who'd rather pretend to be Charles Mingus or the Rolling Stones instead of He-Man or GI-Joe. The lyrics get me right here, y'know? The video is also quite good - YouTube tells me it is directed by Aaron Shrimpton, and who am I to argue with YouTube?

You can find Dan le Sac & Scroobius Pip here, and YILA here. And now, the video: (Enjoy!)

NEW COMICS REVIEWS on PCS

2008-04-12T22:45:00.002-04:00

Two new comics reviews of mine, one for Criminal #2 and one for Young Liars #2, up on the main "Picks 'n' Pans" page at Pop Culture Shock. There are a bunch of reviews on the page, so, tips for finding mine: the Young Liars one is all the way at the bottom (easy peasy). The Criminal review is one of four different short pieces on the same book. Mine is smack dab in the middle, easily recognizable as the one which didn't actually bother to discuss the book itself at all.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

ROB MAISCH HAS DIED

2008-04-11T09:29:00.006-04:00

Reported on ComicMix (found via Journalista): Comic book writer Rob Maisch has died unexpectedly of coronary trouble.

Rob Maisch was a terrifically important figure to me as a kid. His Confessions of a Cereal Eater! collection (the edition I had - still have - pictured below) delivered to me the first autobiographical comics I can remember reading. I must have been around age 12 when I read it, and while my comic-book diet did not consist solely of super-heroes it did have a high percentage of fantasy-adventure, as well as fantasy-humor and fantasy-horror. All very imaginative, bombastic, unreal. Maisch's short stories were the first time I read comics which took place on ground-level, with real people saying real things and doing real stuff.

Maisch's work most often took the form of anecdotes, sometimes of nothing more important than a really good prank that he and his friends once pulled, but I found them enthralling. I must have read the book a good dozen times before I graduated the seventh grade.

Maisch may not have been a revolutionary in the grander scheme of comics, seeing as he didn't do anything that Pekar hadn't done a decade or more earlier, but he was a revolution to me. He detonated the way I looked at comics. I'd always parroted my father before, opining that comics could be about anything - but it wasn't until I read Maisch that I really understood that to be the case. I'm sad to hear of his passing, and I hope that at least that first book of stories will live on to find more impressionable young minds to explode.

NEW COMICS REVIEWS

2008-04-07T07:33:00.003-04:00

New comics reviews up at Pop Culture Shock.

On the main reviews page, two short pieces, one of the promising Anna Mercury #1, one of the disappointing Logan #2.

And on its own page, a longer look at the excellent Ganges #2.

Have a look-see if'n yer so inclined.

COMIC FOUNDRY DELETED SCENE

2008-04-01T12:32:00.003-04:00

If you don't already know, My Pal Laura (pictured above, on the right) is Senior Editor of a pretty terrific magazine called Comic Foundry, the second issue of which is due to hit the shelves of your local comic book store any day now. The latest issue is even more terrific in a lot of ways than the first issue, as it is in full color and contains all sorts of new features and a keen layout. The latest issue also includes writing by yours truly, I suppose to try and balance out all the really good stuff and make the rest of the magazine look even better by comparison. Always happy to help, I am.

I wrote a couple of articles and three reviews for the magazine, but due to last minute space considerations, one of my reviews ended up on the cutting room floor. I am in no way bummed about this, since there are still more than enough words of mine in the magazine to sate the healthiest of egos, including an 800-word review of Mark Evanier's new book KIRBY: KING OF COMICS. (I hate to give away the end of my review, but let me urge everyone with even the slightest interest in comic book history and art to go buy this book NOW.)

The cut review was a short (150 word) piece on the new Jaime Hernandez collection THE EDUCATION OF HOPEY GLASS, and though I figured I would probably just run it here on my blog, it turns out Foundry publisher Tim Leong (pictured above standing next to Laura) has performed the kindness of posting the excised review on the Comic Foundry website. You can read it, if you are so inclined, by clicking here. I recommend that you do, not for my piece, but for the smörgåsbord of other previews and general goodness to be found at the site.

the SOUND SCROUNGE: The Salmon Dance

2008-03-31T23:16:00.007-04:00

DIRTY OLD DRINK COOLER

2008-03-24T09:05:00.007-04:00

My friend Michael Marcelle has been interviewed by Nothing Magazine on the topic of his wonderful photography, many examples of which are included with the interview, which you can find right here.

It's always odd for me to see his photographs, since many of the ones he still has in circulation were taken when we lived together in college, and I recognize places and people and objects, which is a strange feeling since Mike's photography functions in such a way as to make his subjects somehow not resemble themselves. Such as the drink cooler below, which belongs to my father, but which Mike somehow turned into a surreal color object just by looking at it with his picture machine. I'm not really sure how his eye works, but I love his work. You really should go look at the rest of it at www.michaelmarcelle.com

NEW COMICS REVIEWS

2008-03-22T09:43:00.006-04:00

Two reviews I wrote for Pop Culture Shock, one short and one long, have been posted on the website.

The short one, on Wayne Osborne and John Byrne's new IDW book, FX, is somewhere around the middle of this page, along with many other fine reviews by other fine reviewers.

The long one, on Garth Ennis's and Howard Chaykin's new Marvel MAX book, WAR IS HELL: FIRST FLIGHT OF THE PHANTOM EAGLE, is excerpted on that page, but is posted in its 650 word entirety on its own page right here.

Feel free to have a look if you are so inclined.

KEVERORKIAN CAN'T TOUCH HIS STYLE

2008-03-20T14:26:00.003-04:00

from Fox News, found via Boing Boing:

An 81-year-old Australian man has shot himself dead with an elaborate suicide robot built using plans he downloaded from the Internet.

The Gold Coast man, who lived alone, left notes of his plans and thoughts as he struggled to come to terms with demands by interstate relatives that he move out his home and into care.

He spent hours searching the Internet for a way to kill himself, downloaded what he needed and then built a complex machine that would remotely fire a gun.

A quick search on allmusic reveals that, though there have been bands named, among other things, Suicide Sports Car, Robot Death Machine, and, of course, Suicide Machines, there has yet to be a band named any variation of Suicide Robot. This clearly needs to be rectified.

Comics Review: MANHUNTER VOL. 1: STREET JUSTICE

2008-03-18T09:18:00.007-04:00

Written by Marc Andreyko, Pencils by Jesus Saiz, Inking by Jimmy Palmiotti

Considering the metric tons of critical praise heaped on this book when it was first coming out, I expected to enjoy it a lot more than I did. Aside from the move (sadly, daring for a superhero book) of making the main character a strong woman who wears all her clothes to a fight, there isn't much else that makes this more than a perfunctory costumed vigilante story. Character hates criminals, character puts on suit and fights criminals, character kills criminals. Rinse and repeat.

The book opens with the main character, Kate Spencer, a federal prosecutor, making her closing argument in the death-penalty trial of supervillain Copperhead, a snake-man who wantonly kills and eats people and has to be trussed up in high-tech restraints just to sit in the courtroom. Part of Spencer's closing argument is a video from a bank security camera of Copperhead wantonly killing and eating people. Open and shut case, one would think. But no! The wily defense attorney is able to argue that Copperhead, a snake-man with yellow skin, sharp teeth and a flickering tongue, is "a victim of evolution gone awry". His bizarre metahuman mutation, the argument goes, prevents the court from judging him on a scale of normal human behavior, and that instead of being executed Copperhead should be studied and treated both medically and psychologically, so that we as a society are better prepared to deal with any future snake-men who come down the pike.

So, the scenario we have set up here is this: if the court finds Copperhead guilty, he'll go to death row; if the court finds Copperhead not guilty, he'll be confined to a metahuman research facility, presumably one that will take into account his penchant for wantonly killing and eating people. Neither verdict will result in Copperhead walking the streets, free and clear. However, as Kate points out in an interview on the courthouse steps (after Copperhead is found Not Guilty): "Knowing the way these things seem to go, it is only a matter of time before Copperhead escapes and kills again." Kate thinks that she's commenting on the weakness of the namby-pamby bleeding heart liberal court which won't man up and execute a dangerous criminal, but what she's really commenting on is a tried-and-true cliche of superhero comics: the supervillain is going to escape and cause more mischief. And true to the cliche, on the way from courthouse, Copperhead slips loose of his high-tech bonds, resists the sedative gas being pumped into the back of a police wagon, and bursts through the metal grate into the cab and wantonly kills and eats the two guards driving the wagon. All of which then begs a few questions. If Copperhead could do that, how did he ever get to trial? Presumably he was brought to the courthouse in much the same way. Did he just feel like sitting through a trial for kicks? Wouldn't the sedative gas travel through the open metal grate in the wagon and knock out the driver? And, most important to the book's further plot: if he had been found guilty, would it have made any difference at all?

Core to the right-wing vigilante fantasy is the idea that the criminal justice system coddles criminals. Kate reacts to Copperhead's escape as if it's a result of the Not Guilty verdict, as opposed to a result of inadequate prisoner transport equipment. The truth is that he would have been transported to death row the same way, and then sat on death row for years (potentially) pending appeal, all under the same level of security, which, as we see, he can escape any time he wants to. It's not like you get a guilty verdict in the courtroom and the bailiff pulls his gun and pops you right then and there. So this isn't so much a matter of the weak criminal justice system being lenient with criminals, but street level incompetence in detaining powerful supervillains in weak handcuffs. Or, rather, the cliche of the ever-escaping supervillain being treated as a societal problem. Which could be an interesting way to play it, treating the escaping supervillain as a law of nature, the sort of absurdist use of comic book cliches that Alan Moore threw into Top Ten all the time. Writer Marc Andreyko is playing all of this very straight, however, and so Copperhead's escape prompts Kate to take serious, grim-faced action. What action she takes isn't entirely clear, however.

Kate, upon hearing the news of Copperhead's bloody escape, steals someone else's Restricted Access Pass, and goes to what looks like an evidence room. When next we see her, she's running around in a red bodysuit, jumping from rooftop to rooftop and waving a big glowing stick. This is the sum total of her origin story, as far as I can tell. No explanations appear in this book, anyway. Was she hiding her superhero suit in the evidence room? That might make sense if she were shown to already be a superhero, but the book strongly implies that this is her first time at bat. Did the suit belong to someone who was put on trial? How did she learn to jump across rooftops and fight? None of these questions are answered, nor are we given any clear insight into her motives aside from her repeating to herself, "This has to be done", over and over. It's left a complete mystery as to how and precisely why this woman makes the huge leap in sanity and physicality required for her to become a murdering vigilante. Anyway, she fights Copperhead, blows a hole in his head, and calls it a day. Then later she fights another supervillain, and doesn't win. Then she fights him again and kind of wins, but doesn't kill him, so decides to go back to court to try and kill him with a death penalty verdict. End of book.

There are a few clever bits that play well, the best being a sequence in which Kate leaves her superpowerful weapon lying around for her child to find, the results of which are disastrous and not quickly resolved. It's this story thread that brings the book closest to mature and interesting storytelling, though the characters themselves are so thoroughly two-dimensional that it never quite gets there. There's also a thread about Kate blackmailing a scientist who used to make weaponry for supervillains into helping her soup up her super suit and train her to use it. This thread isn't all that interesting in and of itself, but it does provide the best back and forth in the whole book. Kate, to the scientist: "If you focused your talents on curing cancer, imagine what you could do." The scientist shoots back: "Yeah, well, imagine if you dealt with your inner rage like a normal person." Which leaves me to imagine, if Andreyko had brought that level of satirical self-awareness to the rest of the book, would I have found it anywhere near as boring?

TESTING...

2008-03-11T15:25:00.000-04:00

Just testing out Blogger's new video embedding.

This was a scene my sister and I happened upon while wandering the streets of Stockholm at night:

Comics Review: ECHO #1

2008-03-07T09:58:00.007-05:00

This book caught me somewhat unaware. Judging from the title lettering and the cover image (which looks like a woman standing in the rain or snow, but which is actually not), I had assumed that Echo was going to be making further inroads into the emotional soap-opera aspects of Moore's previous series, Strangers in Paradise. Turns out, it is instead a science-fiction thriller. Who knew? (Well, if I'd read any solicitation text I imagine I would have...but a casual browsing customer wouldn't have read solicitation text anyway, so nyaaaaah.) I wonder if the fake-out was intended or not, and if it ends up helping sales by drawing in Strangers fans or hurting sales due to the false impression.

After overcoming my bewildered expectations, I was able to look at the book on its own merits, and it's pretty good. Not amazing, but solid work with an intriguing premise, sort of reminiscent of the kind of fun, smart adventure movie Hollywood used to produce when it remembered how. There's the shadowy military project with a slightly crazy and ruthless leader, the female innocent bystander drawn into the mix by accident, and a charming park ranger who's no doubt destined to become a helping hand or even a love interest (the female bystander/main character is shown to have something of a void in her romantic life). None of the characters really hint at any depth yet, but they seem perfectly likable in the ways their respective roles demand.

Moore's art and storytelling are good as always, though some of the dialogue (particularly surrounding the more sf/tech elements of the story) is a bit clumsy. Those troubled by memories of the increasingly unbelievable organized crime fantasies from Strangers might worry that Moore's take on the espionage/sf thriller might grow to be similarly unwieldy, but for now it's all quite well put together, and I'm looking forward to the next installment.

(images copyright (c) Terry Moore)

ELECTORAL FUN

2008-03-07T06:37:00.000-05:00

As previously established here, I am a huge nerd who looks at electoral math for fun. I'm also not completely terrible at this political prediction thing - even though I was holding out for Romney to win the GOP (wrong-o!), I did manage to write out a scenario in which John McCain wins the nomination that's not too far removed from what actually happened. I then said outright that it wasn't likely to happen, but we won't dwell on that right now.

Anyway, pursuant to my electoral map obsession, I've become somewhat fascinated by two electoral match-up poll maps created by SurveyUsa (found via Talking Points Memo). Here they are:

CLINTON (276) v McCAIN (262)

OBAMA (278) v McCAIN (260)

SurveyUsa has had a pretty good track record this time around, correctly predicting the exact numbers in both the California and Ohio Democratic primaries and giving good indications for many of the other contests. So when SurveyUsa puts a poll out, I pay it a little more mind than other outfits.

For a while now, I've held the opinion that Barack Obama is a much more electable candidate than Hillary Clinton, and I stick with that. Furthermore, I'm of the opinion that if Clinton goes up against McCain, she loses, plain and simple. I have no confidence in her ability to beat him, and these maps do nothing to dissuade that belief, even though they show her beating McCain by only two fewer votes than Obama (four fewer if you factor in Nebraska's electoral vote-splitting, which would give Obama two extra votes, as pointed out here).

Despite the fact that I have no doubt that the SurveyUsa poll is a very good poll, I have a good reason to doubt its conclusion: the Hillary map has her winning Florida. Which will never happen.

The GOP nominating convention is in early September, and the Democratic nominating convention is in late August. Which means, if he wants to, McCain can wait until the Democratic nominee is announced to pick a running mate. Which, if he's smart, he'll do. And if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, this math clearly dictates that John McCain will select his friend, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who handed McCain the nomination with his endorsement in the Florida primary. Whoops. There goes Florida, and thank you for playing Mrs. Clinton. Please select from our array of consolation prizes located back in the Senate.

These maps show some other curious conclusions. They have Ohio going blue and Missouri going red in both maps, and from a mixture of gut-check wisdom and poll watching over the last few months I would have thought those would go the other way. Ohio will be close again, like last year, and Missouri is an important state to watch, as they've gone for the winner in every Presidential contest since Eisenhower. SurveyUSA has it going to McCain either way, which I hope is either wrong or the end of a trend. Of course, the good news about the Obama map is that, with this map, if MO and OH switch, it's still an Obama victory (unless Nebraska doesn't split votes, and then it's a 269-269 tie...which will be a whole 'nother level of interesting and which might be a good way to further point out the idiocy of the Electoral College). The bad news about the Clinton map is that she won't win Florida, and Missouri turning at that point still isn't enough to stop McCain.

Pennsylvania is on April 22, which gives Obama a month and a half to close a twenty point gap in the polls and seal up the nomination in time to give us a fighting chance against another anti-gay, pro-war, anti-choice, and fiscally irresponsible GOP administration. We'll have to wait and see what happens.

Comics Review: YOUNG LIARS #1

2008-03-06T11:08:00.005-05:00

I've been a fan of David Lapham's self-published comic series Stray Bullets for a very long time now, and the goodwill engendered by that series has carried me into any other project of his that comes down the pike. The latest of these is Young Liars, published by DC/Vertigo, released this week. Unlike his previous Vertigo release, Silverfish, which looks and reads much the same as his self-published work, Young Liars more closely resembles other Vertigo books than it does other David Lapham books. The story and characters are intriguing enough but the style and storytelling are more than a little bland.

Part of the problem is the color scheme, provided by colorist Lee Loughridge. Setting aside for the moment that I simply dislike the chosen color palette, I don't think that Lapham's artwork functions well in color. His black and white art achieves a sort of shabby dynamism, using noirish shadows and realistically human character design to appropriately set the mood for his dark, seedy crime stories. Color serves to flatten his artwork, and rob it of those elements which make it interesting to me.

Loughridge's colors aren't the biggest problem I have with Young Liars, though - Lapham's formal storytelling is weaker here than I've ever seen from him before. In Stray Bullets, Silverfish, and even in what I've seen of his Daredevil project, he makes very effective use of rectangular panels set into very clear layouts. One of the hallmarks of Stray Bullets is the eight-panel grid, which is a tool very hard to use correctly, but which Lapham regularly pulls off with such grace it seems effortless. In contrast, the visual pacing of Young Liars seems labored and cluttered - perhaps it's the coloring again, muddling the visuals together, but the layout feels like it's from an off issue of Hellblazer rather than a Lapham comic. There is also an overabundance of first person narration in captions, which adds to the visual clutter and also slows down what should be a much more immediate, energetic story. The narration isn't all bad - there are a couple of places where it provides much needed information quickly, and one spot where what's being said in the narration and what's being shown to be true are played against each other very effectively. And while I do acknowledge that, as a first issue, Young Liars #1 covers a lot of ground and needs to lay a lot of pipe, I truly think it could have been done with a more economic use of captions.

All of this is more the pity because the story itself promises to be quite good. Most of the characters either intrigue or endear themselves to me, most of all the lady on the cover, Sadie Dawkins, who has a bullet lodged in her brain which causes her to be emotionally hyperactive, slightly out of touch with reality, and want nothing more than to fight and dance. Her sort-of boyfriend, a failed guitarist turned grocery clerk named Danny, operates as her keeper, trying his best to keep her safe and others safe from her. And there's a scheming trust-fund-baby named Truman who looks to be the one who'll set the initial plot in motion with certain machinations best left to the reader to discover for themselves. All in all, the story is interesting enough that I'll be buying the second issue to see what happens. But there's no guarantee that the formal and aesthetic problems won't drive me away in the long run.

(images copyright (c) David Lapham but trademark (tm) DC Comics because that's just how Vertigo rolls.)

BAD CARTOONISTS, COWARDLY BLOGGER

2008-03-06T07:36:00.000-05:00

Alan Gardner: Why the anonymity?
Bad Cartoonist: I wish I had a really good answer for this but, I don’t. It all boils down to the fact that there are things I want to say that piss people off and I would rather be able to say them without people knowing who I am.

-from an interview at The Daily Cartoonist.

I keep coming across links which direct me to The Bad Cartoonist, a blog written by an anonymous editorial cartoonist mocking bad editorial cartoons. It's often funny and the Bad Cartoonist picks his/her targets well. But anonymity rankles me. Especially since The Bad Cartoonist claims to be a published editorial cartoonist him/herself. From the same interview as above:

A: Are you a published cartoonist?

BC: Does the Penny Saver count?
Short answer: Yes. You might have heard of me. I have won national awards. But that doesn’t mean much anymore.

If you're going to spend your day taking the piss out of other people's work, you could at least present yourself for equal treatment. It's not like you're finking on a mob boss or whistle-blowing on a tobacco company - you're bitching about cartoons. Stand up and do it in the light, or shut up and work on your own cartoons. At least the cartoonists you're slagging sign their name to the work you mock. Seems only fair you should sign your name to your opinions.

THE "SINGLES" SCENE

2008-03-05T00:30:00.005-05:00

Drooling over the cover to David Lapham's Young Liars #1 this morning, I had the realization that I am far more excited about buying single issues of comic books than I have been since I was eight years old and picking up anything that flashed colors in my hungry eyes. How did this happen, I wonder?

I've been on the graphic novel / collected edition / trade paperback / single volume / whateveryouwannacallit bandwagon since forever. I grew up in the back room of my father's comic book store and have been of the opinion since an early age that the graphic novel is the ideal form for the consuming of real mature comics work, or even of work never intended to be consumed in extended book form. I eventually found my way to Maus and Sandman but I cut my teeth on Lee/Kirby Marvel Masterworks and DC Greatest Stories collections, and even with those collections of pulpy 60s magazines I sensed: these were books, these could last, these could sit on a shelf instead of inside a box. This collected book thing was where it was at.

So why do I suddenly find myself buying so many comics singles?

Criminal, Casanova, Doktor Sleepless, Local and Fell (when they come out), All-Star Superman and All-Star Batman...each of these series I buy in single issue form, and not out of any sort of perverted collector's obligation or compulsive gotta-get-it-Wednesday mentality - I just NEED these particular books as soon as I can possibly get them. (Well, nobody NEEDS All-Star Batman, but I'm there picking up the other ones anyway and it gives me at least one good belly-laugh per issue.)

Part of it is probably the move toward making singles into more desirable, discrete units. Many of those books I just named above deliver "done-in-one" stories (Fell, Local, All-Star Superman - usually) and those that don't (Criminal, Casanova, Dr Sleepless) go out of their way to make the single issue a unique experience, with text pieces and special features in the backs of the magazines.

Design is a big part of the draw too, I think. When a book utilizes the front and back covers, like Criminal, or Jeff Smith's RASL, I feel more like I'm buying an object of inherent value, as opposed to one of Marvel or DC's flimsy, ad-heavy books, which often seem designed more as a holder for those glossy fake-comic advertisement inserts (which are often printed better than the actual comics!) than to deliver any sort of aesthetic experience. Bendis and Oeming's Powers is a good example of a well-designed single issue, but I don't buy Powers in single issues anymore - the story itself ceased to be satisfying in a serialized format, and I switched to trades. The lesson learned, of course, is that design alone cannot feed a man, but teach him to tell short stories and he'll fish for a year. Or something.

Looking at this week's releases, I see more singles destined to sit on my bedside table: the aforementioned Young Liars, another issue of Casanova, and Terry Moore's new project Echo. Young Liars, Echo, and RASL are still in the trial period, but the fact that I'm this excited about reading them as single issues is only partly a testament to the strength of Lapham, Moore and Smith as creators. All three are benefiting, in terms of my buying habits, from the renewed sense I've developed of the single as a worthwhile end unto itself, which is something I never would have predicted if you'd asked me five years ago.

the SOUND SCROUNGE: Old Time Relijun

2008-03-04T09:10:00.001-05:00

(I am a cranky and bitter person who tends to hate new music. I hate a lot of old music too. I am filled with hate. But I also despise stagnation - I need new things. So I try to make a genuine effort to scrounge through the new sounds to try and find something I can listen to without stabbing somebody.)

Old Time Relijun has been around for a while, apparently, but their saxophonist is relatively new so I don't feel like I must have missed that much. Don't get me wrong, the songs are good - but it's the squealing skronky sax that shifts Old Time Relijun from good ol' yowly lo-fi rock to a terrifically warped version of The Revels, Intoxica-style surf rock filtered through Captain Beefheart and the Pixies. In case you don't know The Revels, here's "Church Key":

Now click here and listen to "Indestructible Life!", the first cut off Old Time Relijun's latest album Catharsis in Crisis.

Fuzzy lo-fi surf-noise with avant/out jazz sax and yowling caustic vocals - it's probably too rough for some, and I suppose others might find it pretentious, but to me this is perfect morning music.

POLITICO'S SAUSAGE

2008-03-03T10:10:00.007-05:00

Over at Politico, a web site devoted to political news, they've run a story called "How the Sausage Gets Made", which delivers a look at how political news stories are put together. The piece revolves around a dispute between the Obama campaign and a Politico editor over the fairness and accuracy of this Politico story.

"How the Sausage Gets Made", written by Politico Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris, is interesting overall, but contains the following passage which bewilders me:

Among the items agitating the Obama campaign was the initial headline: "Obama support soft among Catholics.”

Mahtesian ordered it changed to "Obama slow to gain among Catholics.”

No, the difference between those would not be obvious to me at first glance, either.

Now, to me, and I would hope to the Editor in Chief of a major political news organization, the difference between those two headlines couldn't possibly be any more obvious. The former implies a lack or a losing of support from a false perception of superiority (numbers that are "soft" are usually thought of as being reported stronger than they actually are, and therefore "soft" support is perceived but could be false, or could go away at any moment). The latter, on the other hand, implies growth, however small, from a solid and correctly perceived starting point. Put more broadly, the use of language in the former implies bloated weakness, the use of language in the latter implies underdog strength. If support is "soft", then he has a certain amount of support which will likely abandon him. If support is "slow to gain", then he has some concrete support already on which to build upon.

I hope that Mr. Harris was being disingenuous in stating that the differences were not obvious to him. I would suggest, however, that in a piece designed to inform the public on the ins and outs of political reporting, disingenuous writing might be discouraged. A much better tactic would be to say: "The differences between these two headlines are..." and go from there. To pretend the differences are somehow obscure is misleading. And, of course, the other possibility is that Mr. Harris truly doesn't perceive with ease the differences between two such headlines. In which case we should probably worry a bit more about the quality of the reporting coming out of Politico.

DEATH TO SPRINT

2008-02-29T10:41:00.003-05:00

I chortled with evil glee at this.

from Bloomberg News:

Sprint Posts $29.5 Billion Loss on Nextel Writedown

Sprint Nextel Corp., the third- biggest U.S. wireless carrier, posted a $29.5 billion loss and scrapped its dividend after writing down most of the Nextel Communications Inc. acquisition from two years ago.
...
Sprint, based in Overland Park, Kansas, fell to its lowest level since October 2002. The stock dropped 86 cents to $8.09 at 4 p.m. on the New York Stock Exchange and earlier reached $7.75, its steepest percentage decline since Jan. 18. The shares had fallen 32 percent this year before today.
...
Subscriber losses, triggered by complaints of dropped calls and poor service, ballooned to the most since the Nextel purchase and probably won't ease in the second quarter, Sprint said. If it loses an additional 1.2 million users, the carrier will have shed 5.9 percent of its contract subscribers by the end of June.

I don't really understand all the financial talk and for all I know Sprint will come out the other side of all this just fine. But this weekend I am happily becoming one of the proud many fleeing the clutches of Sprint, as a result of having voicemails and text messages show up obscenely late and sometimes not at all, and having almost no billing periods in which there wasn't a billing error, overcharging me, and leading to four hours or more on the phone in order to get the errors fixed. Not to mention that I can no longer count on my hands the number of times Sprint employees have outright lied to me in the guise of providing "customer service". Goodbye, Sprint. Please crumble and die.

FOUND ON THE STREET

2008-02-28T07:47:00.000-05:00

Seriously, I found this thing on the street:

Just...just take a moment to absorb that image.

...

...what the hell is that?

_____________________________________________________

On a slightly opposite note...I like to make fun of Scientology as much as the next person, but I also found myself nodding in agreement with John Rogers in his recent post, in which he made the excellent point that "all religions sound crazy if you don't believe in them".

Which means, as an atheist, the two videos below sound more or less the same to me, just taken out of two different socio-political contexts (and with one of them just being way more excited). Still, with all that in mind...what in the hell is on the cover of that book?

THE ZEN OF NO GARFIELD

2008-02-26T07:09:00.003-05:00

Q: Is it possible to improve upon the spiritual wisdom and profundity of The Garfield Randomizer?

A: Yes.

Some mad, beautiful genius has gone through the trouble of removing Garfield from his own comic strip. Behold: Garfield Minus Garfield.

(link via The Beat who found it via Matt High)

OSCAR LIST CHALLENGE: BOISTURE v MICHELITCH

2008-02-25T09:24:00.007-05:00

the Oscar List Challenge:

Top 5 Films from 1999-Present Not Nominated for Best Picture

the Contenders:

Yours Truly vs. My Pal Boisture

The Challenge Accepted:

Lists were compiled during the day before the Oscars.

The list was rolled out one-by-one via text message during the ceremony.

NOTE: It was later realized that AMERICAN HISTORY X was from 1998, thus making it ineligible for inclusion. Luckily, Boisture had not put it in his top 5. Disaster was thus averted.

In short, we are both gigantic nerds, and it is a miracle that we have girlfriends*.

Major disappointments from the actual Oscars:

realizing that Paul Dano was not nominated for Best Supporting Actor for There Will Be Blood, which somehow escaped my attention before and is a crying shame.
that the only decent song (from August Rush) didn't win, and that I had to listen to all the other songs being performed.
that the score for Atonement beat out the score for Ratatouille.
that the script for Juno beat out Michael Clayton.
that Norbit didn't win for Best Makeup. People need to do more things in life solely to entertain me.
exclusion of NOT THE BEES from the montage tribute to bees.

++

*Actually, my girlfriend, the Lovely Lucy, made a list of her own. After confirming that Sexy Beast and Enduring Love were, in fact, foreign films and thus ineligible for inclusion, her list shaped out like this:

5. Eastern Promises
4. Mulholland Drive
3. Syriana
2. Station Agent
1. You Can Count on Me

As you can see, taste in movies is one of our relationship strengths. It makes up for her not liking most jazz and me not liking avocados.

OSCAR PICKS/PREDICTS

2008-02-24T13:20:00.006-05:00

Looks like I'm getting these in just under the wire - approx. 8 hours to showtime as I type this.

Much more interesting and fun Oscar Lineup this year than last year - as much as I loved seeing Marty finally get a statue, I didn't care that much about the rest of the contests. Last year served mostly as a palate cleanser for the year before, when, for the first time in my Oscar-watching experience, four out of five Best Picture nominees were films I could happily live with as winners (three I just couldn't decide amongst: Good Night and Good Luck, Munich, and Brokeback Mountain; and one I could have merely been happy with, Capote). That was, of course, the year Crash won in an upset and left me frothing with anger, kicking over trash cans in alleyways and picking fights with people in wheelchairs. So when last year brought forth no real bones of contention, I welcomed it as a nice break. This year, however, we're back to business. Here's a link to a full list of nominees, to bring you up to speed. And here, sorted by category, are my picks for what I'd like to win and some predictions on what I either think or fear might win:

BEST ACTOR
Daniel Day-Lewis is the easy pick for Best Actor, and, honestly, also my first choice. Part of me wants Viggo Mortensen to take the statue, though, just so that Eastern Promises ends up with some kind of something. Utter bullshit that it isn't up for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Score.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Javier Bardem is another easy pick for Best Supporting, and as much as I loved Casey Affleck and Tom Wilkinson this year, I'd like to see it go to Javier.

BEST ACTRESS and BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
I'd like to see Cate Blanchett win both Best Actress and Best Supporting, just because it would be funny. And also because I love Cate Blanchett. I also love Laura Linney, though, so she's welcome to win Best Actress. And part of me would love to see Amy Ryan take Best Supporting just out of loyalty to "The Wire".

BEST ANIMATED FILM
I've heard Persepolis is very good, but c'mon: this is Ratatouille's award to win. If animated films weren't ghettoized into their own subcategory, Ratatouille would be the spoiler in the Best Picture category.

BEST ART DIRECTION
I actually have very little opinion about the nominees in this category. Art Direction is one of those areas like Editing that are very difficult for the average viewer to judge, since a lot of the best work in these areas blends into the background and doesn't make itself conspicuous. So I don't really know who I want to win. As far as predictions go, I'd probably guess Sweeney Todd, since it had the most conspicuous and self-conscious Art Direction, and since it isn't really up for much else and people liked it a lot.

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Roger Deakins did it up for Assassination of Jesse James, but for my taste he did it up a little too much. While that may have been a result of demands from the director, I still found a lot of the pretty shots and trick photography to be distracting, on the whole. So I'll throw my pick and prediction to There Will Be Be Blood, both because the film looked great and because I think Deakins, while a deserving winner after a long career of great work, is going to split his own votes being nominated for both Assassination and No Country for Old Men.

COSTUME DESIGN
I only saw one of the films nominated here, Sweeney Todd, so I'll just pick and predict for that. Again, everybody loved it, and it's only up for awards like this, so it'll probably take them. But maybe Atonement. Or maybe something else. Moving on...

BEST DIRECTOR
There's certainly an argument to be made that it's the Coen Bros. turn this year. It's also nice that they're nominated for one of the first films on which they've been allowed to have both of their names on the Directing credit (I'm not sure if DGA rules have changed or if they're simply defying them), so that if they win, they both get to go up and accept. Still, as much as I liked No Country, I am on record as a There Will Be Blood partisan. So, my pick: a tough choice between Blood and No Country that ends with me just barely nodding toward P.T. Anderson. My prediction: the Coen Bros. will take this one, unless the "serious" vote splits among the two and Jason Reitman floats up to the top for Juno. Hey, McWorld, anything could happen.

BEST DOCUMENTARY, DOCUMENTARY SHORT, FILM EDITING, FOREIGN LANGUAGE, MAKEUP
A whole bunch of categories in which I ether haven't seen enough of the nominees to know what I want, or have no pretense to any kind of faux-expertise to make any predictions. I will say that Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg should be up for either Best Documentary or, since I guess it's Canadian, Best Foreign Film. And I will use Winnipeg's exclusion as an excuse to just move on, noting only that if Norbit wins Best Makeup I will be so insanely, perversely happy.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
This is apparently Atonement's award to lose, though what I've heard of the score was blandly unimpressive. In a completely ridiculous and capricious application of arcane rules, the Academy disqualified Johnny Greenwood's phenomenal score to There Will Be Blood, so without that horse to back I'll switch allegiance to Michael Giacchino's score for Ratatouille, both because the score was very good and because (if I'm informed correctly) it is one of the last major Hollywood releases to be scored with a real orchestra, the studios all making the cost-effective switch to computer-synthesized orchestras this year.

BEST SONG
Enchanted will probably split it's own votes three ways, so either Once or August Rush will take it, but I haven't seen any of these movies so I don't really care.

BEST PICTURE
Heeeeere we go. Now, I am foursquare a backer of There Will Be Blood. It was, no contest, the best film I've seen this year, and I think in many years. If it doesn't win, No Country for Old Men had better take it. That's my second choice, and I know that will make My Pal Boisture happy. If we're looking at an upset, I can live with either Michael Clayton or Juno, but please, please, please not Atonement. (It's going to be Atonement, isn't it? You bastards.)

SHORT FILM (ANIMATED), SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION), SOUND EDITING, SOUND MIXING, VISUAL EFFECTS
Another batch of categories in which I either have no inclination or ability to make picks or predictions. Every year, I tell myself I'm going to get off my ass and take advantage of the many opportunities to see the nominated Short Films, and every year the Oscars roll around without me seeing any of them. This makes me a Bad Film Nerd. For Shame.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
I care more about the writing categories than anything else, as in most years it's where the really quality films are able to win awards (or at least get nominated) while being ignored by the bigger-profile Picture and Director awards. This has been changing a little as of late, but as a budding screenwriter and fetishist of scripts, these are still my favorite awards to handicap and bitch about and root for. I'm actually going to break from my fanatical love of There Will Be Blood to state that I would like to see No Country for Old Men win this category. Blood, for all the similarity it has to the Upton Sinclair novel it was loosely based on, might as well be an original screenplay. No Country, on the other hand, is a very close adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, while still doing the hard work of making it a story told visually. A really impressive feat of screenwriting, and both my pick and prediction for this category.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Again, a crime that Eastern Promises isn't up for this award. Since it isn't, I have to make the hard choice between Ratatouille and Michael Clayton. I think I'm going to come down on the side for Tony Gilroy, because even thought there are a lot of elements of Ratatouille that are more clever and more original, Ratatouille is going to take Best Animated in a walk and Michael Clayton, a really good movie, is going to get shut out of most everything else by that pair of 500 LB Gorillas, Blood and No Country. So, hey, Tony Gilroy: win this one for the Gipper! As far as who I think will win it, my money's on Juno, since it's such a popular favorite and critical darling, but will also likely be shut out of Best Picture and Best Director by Anderson and the Coens.

All right, there we go...it's now seven hours to showtime, so I have to start working on my pre-game binge drinking. Jon Stewart hosting, lots of good movies up for awards they deserve - it might all go horribly wrong, but right now I'm looking forward to it. Hope you are too.

NAGINATOR

2008-02-23T15:20:00.004-05:00

INTERVIEWER: "Do you fear for your safety?"

RAY NAGIN: "Well, I've got coverage, y'know? Somebody approach me, I'm just gonna cold-cock 'em. That's the bottom line. You can come with that foolishness if you want, but you gonna see a side of Ray Nagin that you haven't seen."

Thus are spoken the words of Ray Nagin of New Orleans, America's Greatest Mayor, in a recent local television interview. (link via Wonkette.)

The full video interview is about how people knowing his schedule and blogs publishing this picture of him goofing around with a gun are a threat to his family and to America. Or something.

The video is actually very worthwhile watching for the clear portrait you get of the quintessential politician - sitting down and throwing fire at unimportant enemies he doesn't quite understand (mocking blogs), claiming that his objections to news coverage about his worthlessness are really concerns for his family's safety, and proclaiming that he answers all news questions unless "you're a talk show groupie kinda thing, [then] I'm not interested."

Go, WATCH.

HELLO EVENING (deux)

2008-02-22T21:43:00.004-05:00

Part 2 in a series.

HE TALKS ABOUT COMICS AGAIN

2008-02-22T12:10:00.006-05:00

This blog started out with a pretty heavy focus on comics, but I realize I haven't talked about them in a while. I tried to get up the energy to discuss the recent Hibbs v Deppey Bookscan spat, but I gave up halfway through writing a longer analysis. My take basically boils down to the fact that I think both of them are making too much out of incomplete numbers to bolster their own side of the argument (though, in fairness, Hibbs does it first and Deppey does it partly to point out that that's what Hibbs is doing). The big number discrepancy is that Bookscan shows poorer sales for artcomix in bookstores than the Direct Market, and in opposition Eric Reynolds asserts that Fantagraphics does only one-fourth of its business through the Direct Market. Experts guess that Bookscan's accuracy is anywhere from 65-75%, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's that low not because of miscounts of graphic novels but because of miscounts of diet books and paperback bestsellers. A large portion of the retailers who don't report to Bookscan are Wal-Mart, drugstores, and supermarkets, none of which are carrying comics in any large number, if at all. They certainly aren't stocking LOVE AND ROCKETS. The Bookscan count for graphic novels is probably a lot more accurate than those percentages suggest. At the same time, Fantagraphics bookstores sales are probably disproportionately made up of things like the Peanuts collections. As always with fights about numbers and comics, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and until everybody has hard, accurate figures arguing about it is mostly pointless. Maybe we can all just agree that Borders opening up a "concept store" which features Graphic Novels as one of five "categories of emphasis" (along with Travel, Cooking, Wellness, and Children's Books) is good news for the medium's long-term economic health in the American market, and move on to other things.

OTHER THINGS would, for me, be a new review posted over at Pop Culture Shock. This week I've turned my attentions to Ultimates 3, the new Marvel comic by Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira, which is showing strong potential of becoming a new regular source of unintentional hilarity. And if you know me, you know I love unintentional hilarity.

Here's a little excerpt to whet your appetite:

With such witty repartee you might think to yourself, “Am I watching a movie made in the 40s starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn?”, but of course you are not - you are reading a superhero comic written by Jeph Loeb, in which this exchange exists only as an excuse for Hawkeye and Wolverine to “fight” for a single double-page spread, in which Hawkeye shoots Wolverine five times and Wolverine swings his claws around. None of this seems to bother anyone else in the room beyond just being kind of annoying, but a page later when Hawkeye utters the dreaded word “#@*%”, Ultimate! Captain America stares him down and tells him to “watch that language”. Not, y’know, the many bullets he’s just fired indoors while surrounded by teammates, but the language.

If you want to read the rest, click here and give Pop Culture Shock the webpage hit. I'm sure they'd appreciate it.

THERE WILL BE SO MUCH BLOOD

2008-02-21T07:23:00.010-05:00

I was fully expecting to leave struggling with which film would be my favorite for
the year; There Will Be Blood or No Country for Old Men. That wasn't a problem.

-My Pal Boisture over on His Blog, 1/15/08

TEXT MESSAGES:

ME (2/20 3:55 pm): Dunno if you want to see There Will Be Blood again but I'm finally catching it at 7 at 59th and 3rd. More than welcome to join.

BOISTURE (2/20 3:56 pm): Nah man, nah. Once is all you need.

ME (2/20 3:57 pm): Yeah, says you. I'm expecting to come out and scoff you. Scoff!

SENT VIA EMAIL DURING THE MOVIE:

From Boisture:

Private Message: Scoff if you'd like, but this is EXACTLY how I feel.

MORE TEXT MESSAGES:

ME (2/20 10:17 pm): Movie's Over. I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, that was amazing. Sun nite, you v me, Country v Blood. I AM THE THIRD REVELATION

BOISTURE (2/20 11:04 pm): Well of course YOU liked it. Sunday it's on.

ME (2/20 11:05 pm): I TOLD YOU I WOULD EAT YOU

BOISTURE (2/20 11:06 pm): But I drink your milkshake!

(NOTE: Atonement will actually win Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay and then, I dunno, Juno will win Best Director. This is because the Oscars exist only to frustrate idiots like me who watch them.)

.

GRAMPA GETCHER WHIP

2008-02-20T10:50:00.001-05:00

This blog hasn't had nearly enough raging nerdy fanboy stuff recently. So let's get down to geek stuff. Let's dissect a movie trailer.

I've decided to start paying attention to Indiana Jones 4 (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Now, as My Pal Boisture will mention anytime he can't think of anything else to say, I often come across as a big No-Fun Sourpuss with the Stick of Snobbery lodged permanently up a not nice place. I've done a lot to earn this image. I very vocally hate on Star Wars, for example, and people label me No-Fun for that, despite the fact that Star Wars is a children's movie with stilted dialogue and no real characters and all I'm doing is pointing out the obvious. I also carry around a special metal pipe with which I hit people who think they've gleaned philosophical insights from The Matrix very hard where their brains should be.

Anyway, in defiance of this cultivated No-Fun image, I love love love Indiana Jones. Raiders of the Lost Ark is easily one of the very best Adventure films the West has ever produced, and the other two movies (while not quite as good) have enough great moments to guarantee me sitting through either of 'em. As opposed to Star Wars, which is only really worthwhile if you're actually eight years old, the Indiana Jones movies work for the eight year old inside an adult.

Still, as much as I love the Indy flicks, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has inspired some small amount of trepidation. Trepidation about Harrison's age, trepidation about the ever-unreliable good taste of Mr. Spielberg (some days you get Munich, some days you get (yecch) The Terminal), and trepidation about the scripting chores ending up with David Koepp (who ain't Lawrence Kasdan or even Jeffrey Boam by a far sight). Watching the trailer a few minutes ago has done little to alleviate the feeling. Take a look for yourself, first:

Ok...things that jump out at me: First of all, yeah, the last movie was almost 20 years ago, so I can understand wanting the little reminder clips at the beginning of the trailer. But all that did was remind me how much I enjoyed those movies and gin my expectations up - expectations which are not met by Grampa Jones running around with Junior LaBeouf in weightless computer generated stunt scenes. I mean, take a look at this six second clip:

I'm not sure how well it comes across in compressed YouTube video, but on the HD trailer this scene looks annoyingly fake. I don't know if Spielberg is demanding bad lighting in his films or just not caring anymore, but this looks like it was shot by the B-unit. And it doesn't really help the age perception that Harrison's big punching scene in the trailer is delivered sitting down.

More personally annoying to me, though, is this image from the trailer:

Roswell? ROSWELL?

I know Dr. Jones is an archaeologist, but do we really need to dig up a plot element this dead and buried? I don't even like Roswell Alien stories that much to begin with, but even if I did they've been redone and rehashed and refried to the Nth degree. There was even a teen show on the WB about it. And now it looks like this movie is going to hinge around it in some way. Color me excited.

I'm not going to judge the film before I've seen it. There is every possibility that Spielberg and Koepp and Ford have pulled it off, and if they have I'll be overjoyed. But it's not looking likely.

I will give them this, though - this shot, with the hat, and the shadows, has just the kind of fun, semi-mythic feel that Spielberg used to be really good at. A little less LaBeouf and a little more of this, and we should be in good shape:

(All video clips are presumably copyright 2008 Lucasfilm Ltd, and are posted here for review purposes only. Will be removed if requested by copyright holder.)

TOP FIVE (Music Production)

2008-02-18T11:50:00.001-05:00

(Top Five lists are pretty self-explanatory. I should point out I'm not claiming any intellectual mastery of whatever topic I make a list on, and that a lot of my lists are ever-malleable. Ask me tomorrow, I might name a totally different five.)

Top 5 SIMPLE but BRILLIANT PRODUCTION TRICKS in American Pop Music

(whether apocryphal or not, I love these stories of behind-the-music tricks)

5) Phil Spector pulling a gun on the Ramones. (Would be higher on the list, but I'm in the camp that demotes Phil Spector gun stories in the light of recent of events.)

4) David Byrne running around the block at top speed before recording each verse of "Life During Wartime" (Achieving a perfectly paranoid out-of-breath sound.)

3) Johnny Cash putting a dollar bill on the neck of his guitar, under the strings, to create a backing rhythm on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, where drums were banned. (I just really love the faint cultural terrorism feel to this move. "Oh, no percussion allowed? TAKE THAT.")

2) Link Wray stabbing his amp's speaker cone with a pencil. (Great rock has always been about beating the crap out of your instruments until they give up the goods. )

1) Arnold Maxon getting Screamin' Jay Hawkins blind drunk to record "I Put a Spell On You". (So much so that to his dying breath Hawkins claimed to not remember the final recording session and that he was horrified on finally hearing the hooting and hollering and howling.)

BEEP BEEP YEAH

2008-02-14T15:15:00.002-05:00

DEAR DRIVER,

I would like to apologize to you, Driver, for our little misunderstanding this morning. When I entered the crosswalk, with the light and the walk sign in my favor, I had no idea I was being so inconsiderate to you. If I had known you were in such a hurry, I would never have been so rude as to get in your way.

When you honked your horn multiple times, careening toward me in your sloppy left-hand turn, I began to understand your plight. Sadly, I did not understand it well enough to walk faster, or care at the time that I was in your way. I apologize.

Driver, I am also sorry that as you drove by me, yelling at me through your closed window, I turned and stared at you as if you were a circus freak. In my defense, you were quite ugly. I couldn't tell if you were a man or a woman, which is why I am using no gender-specific nouns or pronouns - just the gender-neutral "Driver".

Lastly, Driver, I profoundly apologize for further delaying your commute by forcing you to slow down in the lane after you'd completed your turn, roll your window down, and yell at me as I walked away, too inconsiderate to even pay attention to you. I can't imagine what stopping to hurl epithets at me did to your clearly precious schedule. Because I made you stop and scream incomprehensible insults at me, you probably had to speed even faster toward the next crosswalk. I hope that, for your sake, and the sake of the world and the children and America, there wasn't an even more inconsiderate person than me waiting for you at the next intersection. My goodness, Driver, it must be hard being you.

Love,
Jason

BLOODY VALENTINE

2008-02-14T07:48:00.006-05:00

Seriously, I hate Valentine's Day. Good couples don't need it - they have an anniversary. Bad couples don't need it - they have an anniversary. For better or worse, anniversaries turn out how VD turns out, and anniversaries are private. Which brings us to the third point - single people don't need it, for obvious reasons. More than any other hallmark holiday this is a day just designed to make people feel like shit and buy stuff.

I mean, if we're going to celebrate the holiday of a martyred saint, shouldn't we have, I dunno, paper cut-out dead clergy, instead of red hearts? Or, as Warren says:

Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

So, either way this should be a much more violent and horrifying celebration than it is. Well, actually, it's pretty horrifying already. Case in point:

Lucy and I are going to relax with our annual movies-and-beer Valentine's boycott. If I were a praying man, I would thank some kind of god for the fact that my girlfriend hates this fucking "holiday" even more than I do.

.

the SOUND SCROUNGE: Vampire Weekend

2008-02-12T22:54:00.008-05:00

(I am a cranky and bitter person who tends to hate new music. I hate a lot of old music too. I am filled with hate. But I also despise stagnation - I need new things. So I try to make a genuine effort to scrounge through the new sounds to try and find something I can listen to without stabbing somebody.)

My Pal Alex turned me on to Vampire Weekend, a hipster neopostpunk-newnewwave band from NYC. By all normal rules of engagement I should hate them, as I hate the Killers, the Strokes, Jet, the Vines, Franz Ferdinand, and all those other bands I can't tell apart from each other. But Vampire Weekend seems to have a little something extra, apart from just the word "vampire". Maybe it's because their clean guitars and open production pulls a little more from the David Byrne playbook than the other bands, most of whom lean more towards overproduced third- or fourth-generation copies of David Bowie/Iggy Pop songs. There's space to breathe inside the catchy riffs of Vampire Weekend's songs - a lighter, frothier feel that sort of makes me smile in spite of the cloying Upper West Side indie posturing.

Note the carefully placed copy of "Fear of a Black Planet".
I think that's supposed to mean they have "cred".

They have several songs up on their myspace, so you can judge for yourself: http://www.myspace.com/vampireweekend. The short and punchy bundle of energy "A Punk" is the track that sounds like it's destined for however much popularity Vampire Weekend ends up with, its punky-reggae (I'd say "ska" but that might frighten some of you) bassline and fat guitar strum running through a toe-tapping two minutes that knows better than to overstay its welcome (a rare wisdom in modern pop bands). I prefer the track "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa", though, a more laconic tune that plays somewhere among the umbras of Paul Simon's Graceland, Jonathan Richman's solo work, and early Talking Heads.

With today's "alt rock" scene made up mostly of record collection bands, it's nigh impossible to find something you haven't heard a million times before. Vampire Weekend only sounds like you've heard it once or twice, which is sort of refreshing in a weird way. It's the best thing I've heard this week, anyway.

BONO'S HAT GONNA CUT YOU DOWN

2008-02-11T11:04:00.002-05:00

So, the Grammys happened. Which is not something I normally care about, and, you know, I still don't. But even stupid things can be fun to blather about for a few minutes. It was nice to see Herbie Hancock beat out boring old Kanye West. Even though I haven't heard and may never listen to Herbie's album, it's Herbie Hancock, and I half-rooted for him (for the twelve hours before the Grammys in which I knew who was even nominated) just on general principle. It's also comical to see Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" be referred to as "now-prophetic" by the Grammys' press release. I would have said "self-parodic", instead, but then I'm generally cranky and mean and these are reasons no one talks to me about music. Along those lines, it's cute to see that people are still pretending that "Icky Thump" is a good record. Jack White is so fragile and it's really considerate of everyone to put up such a pretense for his benefit.

I did perk upon seeing that Johnny Cash had won best short-form music video for "God's Gonna Cut You Down" (directed by Tony Kaye). Johnny and Rick Rubin's recording of "God's Gonna Cut You Down" is possibly the best version I've ever heard of the traditional gospel song (some of you may know the Bill Landford version as the song Moby sampled at length for "Run On" off of Play). I had loved Mark Romanek's video for "Hurt", and in the hopes that lightning had struck twice (I never like music videos) I hied myself to YouTube to check out this award-winner.

Turns out that aside from some prime moments of unintentional laugh-out-loud comedy, I really shouldn't have bothered. The entire video is composed of various celebrities looking very solemnly into a wide-angle lens and occasionally singing along or doing ridiculous things like falling backwards into water (looking at you, Woody Harrelson). And just when you think things can't get any dumber, Bono shows up in a folded newspaper hat. Which is, I think, a new maxim for life.

Anyway, so as not to taint the song by association, watch the video with the sound off and get a few dirty chuckles:

Return of the Fat White Duke

2008-02-10T14:02:00.000-05:00

I haven't even looked at the stats on this weblog in ages but I can't imagine there's more than 15 or 20 people looking at it day-to-day, if that. But to those (2? 5? 7?) people who might care: sorry if my not posting in a while has affected you negatively in any way. I got very busy helping out with Barack Obama's NY Super Tuesday effort and then I got very busy being horribly sick, which I am just now beginning to get over. I also didn't find myself able to talk or think about much other than the day-to-days of the Presidential election, and as much fun as the upcoming Votepocalypse is to talk about, even I recognize there's a limit to how much other people can take.

Anyway, I should have at least some time to post here over the next couple months, so I'll try and beef up my action for y'all. I'm going to try to talk a little more about fun things, like music and comic books, and less about horribly un-fun things like war and death and politics and religion. But since I haven't been here in awhile, I'm just going to ruminate for a few about the election, to get it out of my system.

People keep asking me (in real life) if, as an Obama advocate, I'm happy about the results on Super Tuesday. I'm fairly satisfied with Super Tuesday (could have been better, but could have been a lot worse), and I'm very satisfied with how yesterday's elections (Nebraska, Washington, Louisiana - he swept all three) turned out. Clinton will probably take Maine, but the Potomac (Maryland, Virginia, DC) are all looking good for Obama. He's going to win a lot of states, and a lot of delegates. Still, she's been winning the really big states, and Texas, sitting at the end of a long road, looks to be hers for the taking as well. The race is going to be very close, and it's looking more and more likely that neither candidate will have the requisite 2,025 delegates pledged to them by the time of the convention. Which means a brokered convention. If John Edwards had managed to stay in the race longer and performed better he might have collected enough delegates to play kingmaker, trading his delegates for a nomination as Attorney General or even Vice President. As it stands, however, most of the elected delegates are going to be split between Obama and Clinton, and the only deciding factor left will be superdelegates. Superdelegates are party officials, elected or otherwise, who each get a vote at the convention. Here's what appears to be a list of just who they are.

If the decision comes down to superdelegates, Clinton has the clear advantage. She's a powerful party hack, her husband is one of the pillars of Democratic power, rivaled perhaps only by Ted Kennedy. There's little to no question that much of the establishment within the Democratic Party would rather Hillary than Barack be the one to take the reins. Obama's really only got two chances if it comes down to a brokered convention.

One is that he will very likely have, while not the majority needed to secure the nomination, a plurality of pledged, elected delegates. An argument could be framed for the media that having more pledged delegates than Clinton means that Obama is the choice of the electorate, and that if the superdelegates were to nominate Clinton they would be ignoring the will of the people in a most undemocratic manner. This narrative runs into trouble as soon as Clinton brings up Michigan and Florida, two states which had their delegates stripped by the Democratic National Committee for moving their primary date before Feb 5 against the instructions of the DNC. All candidates pledged to not campaign or participate in the primaries in those two states, but Clinton left her name as the sole candidate (aside from Kucinich) on the Michigan ballot and seriously fudged her pledge against campaigning in Florida, and took both states (by decent margins, though it's worth pointing out that each contest was basically uncontested, and Obama has won with far larger margins in heavily contested states such as South Carolina). Despite the fact that the exclusion of Michigan and Florida was unanimously consented to by all the candidates ahead of time, Obama might take a hit in the media if he's seen to be arguing for respecting the wishes of the electorate but against respecting the electorate of two major states.

Which brings us to Obama's other real chance: Ted Kennedy. He may not have been able to deliver Massachusetts to Barack, but he closed the gap by a large amount, and he still has his hands on all kinds of party strings. If whatever magic Kennedy has left is enough, he may be able to work enough superdelegates over to Barack's side to give him the nomination.

It's really times like these that I wish I had no horse in the race. A full-on bloody floor fight at the convention would be terrific entertainment if I felt I was screwed whichever way it came out. It's looking like Huckabee may give McCain a bit of a run for his money on the Republican side, and I'm hoping he does, as it will be a welcome distraction. If nothing else, having both parties in disarray over their nominations will keep this election from being a complete rerun of 1972, in which a smooth GOP Nixon renomination showed up the messy and chaotic Democratic nomination of McGovern over the desperate and vicious Hubert Humphrey and the Jimmy Carter-led conservative Democrat "Anybody But McGovern" coalition. The Democrats were weakened right out the gate by the image of disorder they presented, and having large swathes of the Democratic power structure sit out the general in revenge against McGovern didn't help either. (And neither did the revelation of McGovern's VP Eagleton's history of shock therapy, but that's a whole other discussion. Go read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.)

Anyway, the ideal scenario at this point is that Obama keeps winning state after state and Clinton steps down for the good of the party and her Senate career. I don't really see that happening, though, as the Presidency has always been Hillary's endgame, and she knows that this is her one and only chance. She's in this for blood. And there's nothing for the rest of us to do anymore except vote in our primaries and hope that it counts. And then get good and drunk in May either way it goes, and hopefully pass out until November when we can do it all over again.

SPRBWL TXT MSGS

2008-02-04T07:19:00.000-05:00

Transcript of a text-message conversation between myself and My Pal Boisture last night during the Superbowl. Unsurprisingly, we talk only about the commercials.

Clicky clicky to make it bigger:

"Welcome to Eltingville" Pilot Online

2008-01-20T10:43:00.000-05:00

Hey there, Evan Dorkin fans! The pilot for "Welcome to Eltingville", Dorkin's adaptation of his own hilarious comic strip for Cartoon Network, is now available to view on Adult Swim's video page. Here's a link directly to the pilot. In case you aren't familiar, "Welcome to Eltingville" follows the embarrassing and often outright horrifying misadventures of the "Eltingville Comic-Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy-Horror, and Role-Playing Club". For those of us only a few degrees removed from the world being mocked, it can be distrubingly dead-on in its satire of the worst of the nerdish fans. Even if you weren't these guys (and I hope you weren't...jeez, I hope I wasn't...) then you definitely knew them, loudly and proudly doing everything in their power to make you want to burn all of your comic books and flee to a normal life of khaki shorts and TV sitcoms.

"Welcome to Eltingville" never got picked up for more episodes, but I always thought the pilot was good. It was made before Cartoon Network really worked up the balls to amp up the obscenity on Adult Swim, and it suffers a bit from that - I would have loved to see Dorkin really get to cut loose (well, as much as late night cable which still bleeps the curse words would allow) on a filthy, perverted, profoundly unsettling Eltingville, just like it is in the comics. Still, what we ended up with is pretty terrific. And the Adult Swim video player is surprisingly good, so go check it out.

And if you want to check out Evan Dorkin's even better actual for-real comic books, mosey over to your local excellent comic book shop - and if you don't have one of those, visit the store at Dorkin's website, the House of Fun.

A MILESTONE

2008-01-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

I feel so special.

I finally got my first search hit from "naked comic superheros".

I also got one from "wonder woman naked".

This way lies high traffic and internet gold, or so I'm led to believe.

Me, I just feel faintly unclean.

NAKED SUPERHEROS

2008-01-17T07:47:00.000-05:00

That title ought to get me some google hits, eh?

Laura already took care of the whole Wonder Woman Playboy cover "controversy" pretty well, but I just thought I'd get her back, and speak to a particular line in Greg Rucka's response to...that cover:

Do you really think it's a coincidence that Playboy chose this year, the issue for the month containing "Tsunami Tuesday," to run this particular pictorial? Do you really?

I can hear the WB wanks right now. "As long as it's tasteful...."

Bastards all. You've no idea the damage you've done. No idea at all.

Mr. Rucka, I have all the respect in the world for you and I like your writing very much. But asking if we "really think it's a coincidence" implies a level of insidious conspiracy that "You've no idea the damage you've done" seems to directly contradict. I realize this is just an internet post, but if you are trying to lay some kind of socially damaging blame at the feet of Playboy, you should probably choose whether they're malevolent or just idiots.

Also? Hillary Clinton is the Senator from New York, in which exists New York city, in which exists a porn shop on every corner. If pornography was going to scuttle her political ambitions, I think it's had its chance. If the worst Hill has to worry about is the cover of Playboy, Obama and Romney are doomed.

I really think that in order to complain about things like this, people need to pass a simple test:

Name five children you know who have read a Wonder Woman comic in the past three months.
Explain why you expect these children to also be reading Playboy, particularly if the only children you can name are your own.
Acknowledge that, if your worry is that the children will simply see the cover in passing due to our media saturated world, you either need to burn down the whole internet and throw away your television, or LET IT GO.

KISSING BABIES

2008-01-14T07:30:00.000-05:00

Slate.com has an interesting article up by a man named Darren Garnick. Interesting in a way, that is. Garnick is a resident of New Hampshire who has dragged his baby daughter around the state, taking pictures of her in the arms of the various Presidential candidates. The article is avowedly idiotic, a bit of dopey fun. But that doesn't mean that it is completely devoid of substance, even incidentally. Here's the link. (found via Mark Evanier.)

Candidates photographed with the child are Obama, Giuliani, Clinton, McCain, Edwards, Romney, Richardson, and Huckabee. Incidentally, Garnick claims he got shots with every candidate except Thompson by happenstance and Gravel by choice, but Ron Paul isn't pictured and nor is he mentioned. Now, don't get me wrong: Ron Paul is drenched in bigoted idiocy (the kind that America excels at pretending is homespun smarts). But I can't help but sympathize with his supporters' lamentations at what they perceive as his widespread exclusion by the mainstream media. I don't think there's a vast conspiracy or anything, but with Fox News unfairly excluding Paul from the debate and people like Garnick going out of their way to mention Gravel but not Paul, I can see how one could get a persecution complex about it all.

But back to the photos: aside from the obvious comedy of the Giuliani shot, there are some fun observations to be made. The more left-leaning candidates tend to look at the baby, for example, while the more right-leaning candidates (starting at Richardson and moving up) tend to look at the camera or at the crowd. The exception to this is Edwards, who stares at the camera with the most dead-eyed burnt-wiring thinking-about-murdering-you-all look I've seen an American politician get caught wearing. Special mention can go to Mitt and Ann Romney, who look like they've just strangled the child and are holding her up as a hunting trophy. Obama and Clinton seem the most expert at properly holding a baby of that age. There's not any truly worthwhile information you can take from fun-stories like this, but I can't say there's nothing to be learned from them, in an informal, intuitive manner.

MORE NOISE

2008-01-12T14:22:00.000-05:00

A few more tracks from 2007 worth mentioning.

"Peacebone" by Animal Collective.
I don't think they're ever going to do anything again that lifts me up to heaven the way that Who Could Win a Rabbit did, but Animal Collective is always worth a listen.

**

"Still Alive" by Jonathan Coulton (with Ellen McClain)
This is apparently from a video game called Portal, which I have never played. There are a few lines that seem like they must be direct references to the game, but are no more obtrusive than an obscure/personal reference by Bob Dylan or David Berman. And the rest of the lyrics are just perfect. Pop triumphs can show up in the oddest places.

**

"Heimdalsgate like a Promethean Curse" by Of Montreal
Another one from Alex, lovingly filling out the indie-power-pop requirement for the year.

**

"Zombie" by Nellie McKay
This is a fun one from Nellie McKay, not her best, but the only song from her new album I could find on YouTube.

**

"Ghost Hardware" by Burial
I found myself listening to this around 1 AM last night and finally decided to put it up. As I am an ignorant person who doesn't know his garage from his jungle or whatever, I initially called this song "techno", got yelled at by Alex, and can now correctly identify it as "dubstep". Whatever it is, it's quite good.

**

JASON MICHELITCH

DON'T MIND ME, JUST FORGOT TO TURN THE LIGHTS OUT

THIS CHEERS ME UP A LITTLE

BLAAAAAAAAARGH

HIGHLY DETAIL ORIENTED

THE GRIM FACED PUNCHING MACHINES

R.I.P. Michael Crichton

Author Michael Crichton dies, 66

ALL RIGHT THEN

THE FALL MOVIEPALOOZA WHOOPSIEDOODLE FUNFEST POST

A BRIEF CHECK-IN ON THAT ELECTION THING.

COERCION!

HELLO EVENING (again)

OLIVER STONE DON'T RUIN MY FUN

CRYSTAL HEAD

BLAH BLAH SUPERHEROES (did I just post three days in a row?)

YAY FOR SKETCHES (SPX!)

BRIEF SPX NOTES

R.I.P. Paul Newman

PULP FICTION (HA HA I BET NO ONE USED THAT PUN YET, RIGHT?)

Adventures in Loving Things: BURN AFTER READING

BAD CRAZINESS IN DENVER

THAT BEING SAID...

YES WE CAN...

THIS IS GETTING EMBARRASSING.

THE SUMMER OF NERD

UNLOCKED

HA HA HA HA OH GOD IT'S NOT A JOKE?

RIGHT ON SCHEDULE

HE LOVES TO LAUGH

THESE DUCKS ARE ROUGH CUSTOMERS

MORE ENTERTAINMENT FROM ALCOHOL IN THE NEWS

RED WINE VS MEAT CANCER = JASON WILL BE PERPETUALLY DRUNK AND FULL OF STEAK FOR ALL TIME

America Day Re-Run!

WILL IT...PUNISH?

CRAZY PEOPLE

PROGRESS

CARLIN

FAST THOUGHTS ABOUT NEW MUSIC

A THOUSAND WORDS ABOUT BEARS RIDING HORSES

WHY BOTHER, IT'S GONNA HURT ME

Comics Review(s): HULKAPALOOZA!

IN WHICH HE TALKS ABOUT COMICS HE HAS NOT YET READ

HOW TO DEAL WITH LIZARD SCUM

NICK, TOM, BO

WHO DO YOU LOVE?

MONDAY MORNINGINGINGINGING

SATURDAY NIGHT INTERNETTING

BEEN GONE, BABY (In Which He Returns, But Just Blathers On About Movies)

MUST READS

MIRACLE WETWORKER

NAKED SUPERHEROS PART DEUX

MANIAC(s) ON THE (convention) FLOOR

UWE BOLL WILL FIGHT YOUR NERDRAGE

the SOUND SCROUNGE: Astronaut

NEW COMICS REVIEWS on PCS

ROB MAISCH HAS DIED

NEW COMICS REVIEWS

COMIC FOUNDRY DELETED SCENE

the SOUND SCROUNGE: The Salmon Dance

DIRTY OLD DRINK COOLER

NEW COMICS REVIEWS

KEVERORKIAN CAN'T TOUCH HIS STYLE

Comics Review: MANHUNTER VOL. 1: STREET JUSTICE

TESTING...

Comics Review: ECHO #1

ELECTORAL FUN

Comics Review: YOUNG LIARS #1

BAD CARTOONISTS, COWARDLY BLOGGER

THE "SINGLES" SCENE

the SOUND SCROUNGE: Old Time Relijun

POLITICO'S SAUSAGE

DEATH TO SPRINT

MORE POSTS ABOUT COMICS AND LOVE LETTERS

FOUND ON THE STREET

THE ZEN OF NO GARFIELD

OSCAR LIST CHALLENGE: BOISTURE v MICHELITCH

OSCAR PICKS/PREDICTS

NAGINATOR

HELLO EVENING (deux)