Hexed!

"52 Pick Up, Chapter 3: Hexed", Booster Gold. Written by Geoff Johns & Jeff Katz, layouts by Dan Jurgens, and finishes by Norm Rapmund.

The story in this month's Booster Gold is still self-contained within the larger framing narrative, but it's nice to see that Johns and Katz are moving away from the standard set up for these stories.

I enjoyed issue two, but it was going to look like every issue was going to start with Rip Hunter appearing in the time bubble and giving Booster his new assignement. The top secret mission was going to prevent something like the standard Marvel What If... plot from happening.

In those stories the Hulk, Wolverine, or the Punisher because some key event in their origin or a memorable storyline goes awry. Usually a popular character like the Hulk, Wolverine, or the Punisher goes insane and kills every superhero in the Marvel Universe. The endings of these stories are just as predictable. Reed Richards invents some device that can contain the hero gone bad, or Captain America delivers a homily on how the hero has become worse then the monsters he has set out to destroy. When Cap delivers that little speech, the the Hulk, Wolverine, or the Punisher, feels so guilty they immolate themselves in an act of heroic self sacrifice.

The reader can see how quickly this kind of story would get tedious, no matter how good the writers were. I enjoyed the first two issues, but in the end they were just light hearted takes on that standard "imaginay story" template the superhero genre has been doing since the silver age.

Johns and Katz have a few more tricks up their sleeve. Jonah Hex was the guest star this issue, and his involvement in the story was tied into Superman's origin. It was a less obvious point of departure for the story, but an interesting twist all the same. I liked the set up for the next issue. Rip Hunter's time machine crashes into the Flash's cosmic treadmill in the timestream.

Unusual causal chains will keep the series a lot more fresh and interesting. As long as Johns and Katz use the Silver Age Superman stories as a template rather than Marvel's ill conceived What If... series as a model, the new Booster Gold title will be moving in the right direction.

Weeds, Season 3, Episode 12, "The Dark Time".

What's more beautiful than Alexander Ovechkin scoring a goal on Tampa's empty net with just ten seconds left in the third period? I didn't think the Caps could top that, but they did when they played the Leafs tonight. Final score? Caps seven, Leafs one.

I screwed up, and forgot to set record Weeds on the DVR. I only missed the first minute or two, so I feel comfortable writing up this weeks episode. I was relieved to find out that this is not the season finale, and there are three more episodes left.

Missing the first couple of minutes was a blessing in disguise. Tuning in and seeing Nancy pressing a knife to Celia's throat was shocking. It really drove home the fact that Nancy is a criminal, whether or not she can admit it to herself. Later on in the episode, Nancy asks Conrad how Silas is doing, and she looks uncomfortable when Conrad says Silas has a future in their business.

The other big surprise this episode was the realization that Sullivan is really shady and sleazy. It wasn't the fact that Sullivan smashed Doug's bong with a golf club that clued me into this. It was the shot of the sign on his office building. The sign reads like this on the building:

Absolute
Truth
Ministries

ATM has two meanings. It can mean Automatic Teller Machine, but it also has a slightly less common usage, Ass To Mouth. Sullivan is sleazy and shady enough to appreciate a pungent double entendre such as that. I suspect Sullivan is being set up for a big fall at the end of season three or the start of season four. Celia is letting Nancy use one of his homes as a grow op, and if the house werer to be busted by the feds, all of Sullivan's assets could be forfeited.

The show started with a bang, and ended with a bang, quite literally - Conrad and Nancy finally got it on. I suppose it was eventually going to happen, but I thought the writers were going to string us along until the end of the fourth season. With some deft twists and turns, it's too hard to predict where the storyline is going, but it's starting to look like one hell of a toboggan ride.

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta.

Niches are a fascinating subject to me. I like Tom Wolfe's idea of "statuspheres", and while my eyes glaze over whenever the subject of religion comes up, I do find the idea of a consumer oriented Evangelical sub-culture fascinating.

Tom Perrotta explores this subculture and how it interacts with the mainstream in his new novel, The Abstinence Teacher. A high school health teacher, Ruth Ramsey, has a run in with the local evangelical church over her sex education classes, and later falls in love with one of it's members, Tim Mason, who coaches her daughter's soccer team. Sex in the classroom and prayer on the soccer field light the fuse in this skirmish between the secular and the saintly. It has a narrower scope than his last novel, Little Children, but that isn't such a bad thing as it brings the dramatic conflict into focus.

Perrotta is a solid storyteller, but even harder, he is a brilliant humorist. Consider this exchange that occurs between a teacher and an administrator at a refresher course for recalcitrant sex-ed instructors:

"One thing you might want to consider," JoAnn continued, as if C.J. hadn't spoken, "is encouraging parents in your communities to sponsor chaperoned after-parties in their homes. If you go to our website, you'll find a list of recommended group activities that'll help keep the kids out of trouble and restore some of the lost innocence back to prom night."

"Nude Twister," muttered Roger.

JoAnn stared at him in disbelief.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Old enough not to give a crap," he replied.

"Ugh." JoAnn grimaced, as if she'd just swallowed something unpleasant. "I can't believe they let you teach children."

Perrotta has a good ear for the rhythms of the school staffroom. One of his earlier novels, Election was the funniest work of fiction about the educational establishment since Doug Kenney and P.J. O'Rourke penned National Lampoon's 1964 High School Yearbook. It's safe territory for Perrotta as a writer, but he is still able to keep it fresh.

Christianity, on the other hand, is unfamiliar water for Perrotta, and he navigates these treacherous shoals with relative ease. Near the start of the novel, Perrotta handles the subject with kid gloves. The description of Pastor Dennis's conversion is humorous, but Perrotta finishs on a sympathetic note:

Tim remembered seeing the grainy video on the TV news - he was going through his divorce at the time and was a long way from God - and thinking, "Big deal, the jerk had it coming to him," which he later realized, with a feeling of deep shame, was exactly what lots of "good" people must have thought two thousand years ago, watching a half-dead man getting whipped by soldiers as he dragged a wooden cross up a hill in the desert.

However, Perrotta doesn't airbrush his portrait of Christianity either:

It seemed like a glaring omission, considering that Jesus had a fair amount to say on other points of sexual morality, including one that was particularly inconvienent for Tim: "Anyone who divorces is wife and marries another woman commits adultery." You couldn't get much clearer than that, and yet Pastor Dennis hadn't objected to Tim's marriage to Carrie, far from it. He'd just let the whole remarriage-adultery thing slide, tempering God's harsh law with a dose of human compassion. Tim couldn't help feeling gay people deserved a similar break, a recognition that a choice between a life of sin and a life of celibacy was no choice at all.

It's a nice passage, because while it isn't bitter, it does make the trenchant observation that these churches are more about self-improvement than salvation. At times it's almost as if the church manages to fuse together the worst of the secular and the religious worlds.

Evelyn Waugh was a writer who straddled the border between the secular and the profane. Like Perrotta, his earlier efforts were strictly comic, but as time passed, Waugh dabbled in more "serious" works. Lately, Perrotta has been moving in a more serious direction, and while Little Children had it's moments of sunshine, it was on the whole a very sombre book. It's nice to see Perrotta using his comic touch to illuminate this particular tale about a clash of values in suburbia. There is nothing wrong with moving in a more serious direction, but in The Abstinence Teacher, Perrotta shows that he hasn't forgotten what made him a success in the first place.

Golden Brown

My sweetie pie wanted to buy me some "boy bling", so she got me custom made ring from a goldsmith. I liked the design of my domed titanium wedding band so much I told him to make an exact copy of it.

Titanium is cool because it's lightweight and used in sporting equipment, fighter jets, and bullet proof vests. Gold is flashier, but unfortunately, no baby seals or puppy dogs are harmed when it gets mined, processed, or made into jewelry.

Nothing says married quite like a 7mm band made out of the shiny yellow stuff, and I want to represent. Whether its titanium or gold, I'm still proud to wear my ring sweetheart, because you are the one thing I cherish more then anything else.

Frostbite

30 Days of Night. Directed by David Slade. Starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, and Danny Huston.

Life is a frozen hell in a small northern town. I can't imagine a worse way to die than being mauled to death by vampires on a snowbank. To add insult to injury, the vampires in Thirty Days of Night like to spout aphorisms that sound suspiciously like Nietzche. Frostbite, continental philosophy, and blood sucking ghouls: what fresh hell is this?

It's a clever premise - vampires terrorizing a northern community - and it's hard to believe that nobody has thought of it before. Daylight being one of Dracula's chief weaknesses, it makes sense to move him and his ilk to a locale that experiences little or no sunshine during the winter. Think Northern Exposure meets Alien, and you get the gist of the plot.

While the setting is unusual, the characters aren't. Josh Hartnett is well cast as Eben Oleson, the sheriff of a small town in Northern Alaska that experiences thirty days of night. However, the domestic drama is predictable, as the crisis serves asa a catalyst for reuniting Eben Oleson with his estranged wife, Stella Oleson, played by the suitably gothic Melissa George, back together again.

While the action sequences are always well staged, it takes away from the time developing the characters. This tends to minimize the dramatic impact of the horror. When Eben discovers that his partner, Billy Kitka (Manu Bennett) murdered his family to prevent the vampires from killing them, the impact of the scene is muted because while the audience has heard of the family, it never gets to watch the family together in happier, ghoul-free times.

The movie is a good mash up of the horror and action genres. I didn't think there was anything terribly original about the film except for the setting, but it does deliver a good, solid two hours of entertainment.

Watching the Hockey Game With My Sweetie Pie

Sugar: Wow! Hockey players are really cute.

Me: You've never seen Bobby Clarke smile.

Weeds, Season 3, Episode 11, "Cankles".

Nooooooooo!!! All those other posts were horribly wrong, at least the bits where I was whining about Mary-Kate Olsen's character. I think I see where the writers are going with Tara, and now that I understand, I hope this episode isn't the last we've seen of her.

When Tara tells Silas she is going out on a date with another guy, it all came together. Whoever cooked up that twist was brilliant, but I should have seen it coming, the clues have been there all along. Tara isn't meant to be a hypocrite, she is just a cafeteria style Evangelical. It's funny, it's true to life (I was raised amongst the Catholic variety), and best of all, it isn't bitter. I wasn't crazy about the Majestic storyline at first, however, the last few episodes have shown that the writers want to do more than just hit one note with the subject.

The Christian angle is a nice foil for the suburban crime story thread. Nancy's discussion of Tara with Silas really underlines how Weeds can be such a spot on parody of The Sopranos. When Nancy calls Tara a "good earner", it's almost as if she is chanelling Tony Soprano. At this point I think the comparisons between the two shows are inevitable, and it's nice to see the writers run with it.

In one respect, the writers have surpassed The Sopranos. Every season would bring a new arch-nemesis for Tony, and by the end of the season, the potential rival would be dispatched in a suitably gruesome manner. The conflicts on Weeds come to a boil much more slowly, and dramatically it isn't quite as repetitive as the last three seasons of The Sopranos.

It wasn't until the final minutes of this episode that I realized the show had been building towards a conflict between Nancy and her frenemy, Celia. Their rivalry has simmered for quite some time, but I think it was a smart move to turn up the heat before the season finale. I suspect the ups and downs that Nancy experiences are going to be even less predictable then Tony Soprano's.

Solar Decathlon

Lisa and I went to the Solar Decathlon at the National Mall yesterday. It was the last day of the Decathlon, an exhibition of solar powered, energy efficient, environmentally friendly homes. I'd never seen so many men with ponytails gathered together in one place.

As for the houses, well, the exhibition looked like a tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian homes. The homes looked like something I'd build for my Sims when I start playing the game and they have no money.

This design philosophy, which looks like it was dreamt up by lifelong homosexual bachelors for childless, professional couples, reached it's nadir with the winning entry from the Technische Universitat Darmstadt. The home is obviously an ironic (or given the dearth of famous German comedians, not so ironic) tribute to Malvina Reynold's song, "Little Boxes". Although it didn't win any prizes, a close runner up in this particular category wasThe Kansas Project Solar House (Kansas State University and University of Kansas) which looked like a highbrow trailer home for ironic hipsters that want to prove their environmental street cred.

There were quite a few bright spots in the exhibition. I'd say The Universidad Politecnica de Madrid managed to escape the curse of the Howard Roark School of Heartless Modernism. The University of Missouri - Rolla produced something that an actual suburban family with 2.5 children could live in comfortably.

Although it was a little cramped on the inside, I really liked Texas A & M University's entry. It's not a place I'd want to live in all year round, but it would make a great summer cottage. I can only assume that the giant patio was designed with the idea the the environmentally aware consumer who buys this home actually likes the great outdoors.

I wouldn't want the obviously childless German architects designing my dream home out in the suburbs, but I wouldn't object to some of the teams from the American universities (or Madrid for that matter) taking a crack at building our family home. Just remember that in Virginia, a pitched roof is necessity, and not a superfluous, bourgeois adornment.

Weeds, Season , Episode 10, "Roy Till Called".

With the focus squarely on white collar crime, this episode zipped along at a good clip. The writers seem anxious to get Nancy out of the DEA's sight, and I suspect, into Valerie's grifting grip.

Maybe Valerie wants what she considers to be rightfully hers, but I suspect she might be working a different angle. I'm not sure why Nancy displays a modicum of scruples about stealing money from Agrestic but feels morally obligated to pay back Valerie, when legally the money belongs to Nancy.

The only reason why Nancy should feel obligated to payoff Valerie is to keep attention away from her business. However, Nancy seems more interested in cultivating the friendship then drawing unnecessary attention to her litle cottage industry.

Justin Kirk got to stretch a little bit artistically with this episode. They've been using him for comic relief so much in seasons two and three, I'd forgotten Andy could play the nihilistic Jiminy Cricket to Nancy's naive Pinnochio. With the line "Jail comes before Hell," Andy showed the shrewd side of his character that the writers have kept under wraps for awhile.

I still hate Tara, but this synopsis wouldn't be complete without mentioning the chemistry between Romany Malco and Hunter Parrish. I really enjoyed the scene in the greenhouse, and it would be nice to see the two paired off with each other. Conrad playing the surrogate father to Silas is cool, but it would be really interesting to see the writers kick it up a notch in season four.

For now, the focus is no longer on the greenhouse. It looks like the last two episodes are setting up a showdown between Celia, Valerie, and Nancy. I found the Mexican standoff that finished season two unsatisfactorily resolved at the start of season three, so I hope strong finish in season four sets up a strong start for season five.

Surgical Masks

Carved. Directed by Koji Shiraishi. Starring Eriko Sato and Haruhiko Kato.

Digital cameras can be very effective when shooting daylight scenes in horror films. 28 Weeks Later had an opening sequence that really got in the viewers face. Unfortuanately, Carved, directed by Koji Shiraishi, didn't take advantage of what a digital camera can do. Throughout the film the camera is stationary and static, when the camera should have been taken off the tripod and allowed to get closer to both the monster, the protagonists, and the audience.

One of the few things I enjoyed about the film was that it appeared to have been shot on location. If you are thinking of teaching in Japan and want to know what it's going to look like, Carved will give you better local color then Lost In Translation.

Carved is a ghost story about an abusive mother who has come back from the grave to prey on school children. Like using abortion as a plot point in a sitcom, having the ghost carve up little kids was just icky. Conventional camera work, poor lighting choices, and poor taste shown in the directors choice of victims, make this one horror film that would leave Count Floyd shaking his head with disgust.

Update: My sweetie pie provides much better, more in-depth commentary and analysis of the films we saw Sunday night here.

10 Minute Mile?

Not quite. I can do a mile in eleven minutes now. Ever since I started street hockey, I've been moving like a tank. My size is no advantage to me on Raue's Pond, because I've been running about as fast a zombie in a George Romero film. When the puck drops during the faceoff, I want the defenseman to know fear when six feet, four inches of muscle, sinew, and bone comes rushing at him.

Weeds, Season 3, Episode 9, "Release the Hounds".

Dean's handlebar moustache was really groovy. I'm not sure why they didn't have Andy Milder grow one sooner. It's a shame to let Dean fly his freak flag fly high when it matters the least. That moustache just emphasizes how pathetic Dean is after he was badly injured in the motorcycle crash.

I did like how the writers tied in the dog urinating on poor Dean with the Doctor's explanation of how he survived the accident. Andy Milder has had less of a presence on the show lately than Kevin Nealon, but it was nice to see him used so effectively. Dean is so hapless, and I'm surprised that they don't use him more often for comic relief.

After stalking Peter's ex-wife Valerie last week, Nancy starts what looks like a love affair between two heterosexual women. While the crush between the two is convincingly played, I'm really not sure what the basis for the attraction is other than the fact that they both fell in love with the same man. I'm not sure if Nancy plans to use Valerie in her little operation, or if this storyline will spin off into a different direction by the end of the season.

Tara is definitely starting to annoy me, but pairing up Silas and Conrad was a good move. I like how the show is bringing the suburban crime angle back into focus, but the grittier urban underbelly should be every bit as interesting with a new suburbanite experiencing it for the first time.

It's not quite as clear where things are headed for the season finale, but it looks like the show is getting all it's ducks lined up this week. Where the show is going to finish, and possibly pick up again in season four, should be more clear next week.

Robert D. Kaplan at Politics and Prose

The author of Imperial Grunts, Robert D. Kaplan, was at Politics and Prose earlier this evening to promote his twelfth book, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts. The turn out for the reading and book signing was unusually small, but that might have been due to the Columbus Day long weekend.

Kaplan described his new book as a "gap filler" that focuses on the U.S. air force and navy in the Pacific. Although Kaplan isn't quite as electric as Mark Steyn or Christpher Hitchens, he does hold his own as well as Christopher Buckley and P.J. O'Rourke when he is at the lectern.

The number of young people in the audience was impressive. When I was in college, I was hip to O'Rourke, but wouldn't have been into Kaplan. I was still in my hippy dippy, "give peace a chance" phase, and talking about putting Noam Chomsky on my list of books to read.

However, when I was in Seoul, my American room mate pointed out that if the godless red hordes came pouring across the DMZ, it would be the U.S. Marines that would make sure any Canucks that got caught in the crossfire were airlifted back to the land of maple syrup. The Canadian embassey would foot the bill for all this, but the Yanks would be the ones doing all the heavy lifting. So much for Chomsky.

I'd rather read a good reporter like Kaplan, or an unapologetic humorist like O'Rourke who once noted, "Age and guile beat youth, innocence, and a bad haircut". It's nice to see that there are some kids out there who are a little ahead of the eight ball.

The "B" Team's Sophomore Slump

52, by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, and Keith Giffen.

Why didn't I write about volume two of 52 sooner? To be perfectly honest, I didn't like it as much as the first volume. I thought the pacing was a little bit sluggish.

The Black Adam and the Everyman Program storylines occasionally lack oomph. Too much time is spent with John Henry Irons lecturing Natasha what being a superhero means, and not enough time is spent showing Natasha what being a superhero means. Ditto the Black Adam storyline.

One more criticism before I move on to other thoughts. I know that the run on The Question by Denny O'Neill was held in high regard from reading the notes, but I think it would have been more interesting to have gone with a more Ditko-esque slant on the character. One of the things that made Grant Morrison's Animal Man story arc so interesting was taking Animal Man's connection too the animal world to it's logical, pro-environment extreme. Taking Ditko's ideas seriously, might have differentiated The Question from your normal, run of the mill "everyman" kind of superhero.

Moving on to the bright spots of 52, with volume two, I finally began to warm up to The Question storyline. Bringing in Richard Dragon was a nice touch, even if it was an all to brief appearance. The writers have done a good job of exploring the more down to earth elements of DC's organized crime universe, but I think a better job could have been done of looking at the more "down to earth" superheros in the Batman mold.

I loved the Booster Gold/Supernova storyline, as well as the Adam Strange/Animal Man/Starfire lost in space narrative. In volumes one, two, and three of 52, these plot threads always have lots of forward momentum, and do a good job of bringing in a lot of the fringe dwellers of the cosmic and SF elements of the DC franchise.

I was lukewarm on the Ralph Dibny storyline when it made it's debut in volume one, but enjoyed it a lot more as it began to pick up steam in volume two and three. Full disclosure: I thought the rape of Sue Dibny was one of the most boneheaded editorial decisions ever made at comic book company, so that narrative strand had one strike against it when I started reading the trade paperbacks.

However, whenever the writers really look at the obscure, less cool corners, of the comic book world, they hit paydirt, and after a weak start, I suspect the Dibny storyline will end with a nice bang.

I did "cheat" and had picked up the occasional issue of 52 when it was released in single issue form. What can I say? I was pissed off when they killed Booster Gold, and happy when the brought him back. When I read online that they were bringing back the multiverse, I had to read the final issue. Booster Gold helping to midwife the whole new parallel universe thing didn't hurt either. Despite the fact that I've read some spoilers, I still think I'll enjoy reading volume four, as it looks like it will have plenty of surprises left for the reader.

Old-timey Hockey Tales!, by Robert Ullman.

District residents probably know Robert Ullman best for the illustrations that appear under his name in City Paper. Ullman is also a talented indy comic book artist, and his Old-Timey Hockey Tales is an interesting labor of love. It's pretty obvious that Ulllman loves hockey as much as Robert Crumb likes jazz.

I prefer Ullman's clean line work to Crumb's cross-hatching, and personally find his choice of subject matter much more interesting than Crumb's. The stories are an interesting mix of famous(and some forgotten), people and moments in Hockey history.

Full disclosure: I'm an expat Canadian. Although I'm a new to the game, I'd heard of "The Rocket Richard" riot and "Terry Sawchuk". However, I'd never heard of Toronto Maple Leaf's defenseman Bill Barilko, and his story was the most interesting because of his relative obscurity.

Reading this slim volume , I had no idea just how popular hockey was in the Northeastern United States and the mid-west. Even if you don't like hockey, this comic book is still worth reading because of the quality of research and Ullman's draughtsmanship.

Stand in the place where you live

A friend of ours needed help cleaning out her shed, and I found a really cool copy of The Stand by Stephen King. I don't think it's a first edition, but it was published in 1978 when the novel was first released. It's a hardcover, and the dust jacket is in great shape.

The picture of King used on the inside of the back of the jacket is very seventies. King's jacket has lapels that reach his shoulders, his hair looks like a helmet, he has a cigarette between his fingers, and there is an impish grin on his face.

The font used on the cover is a nice and clean, but it has a slightly sinister air about it. I wouldn't be surprised if the desgner based it on the font used for the original Dawn of the Dead movie posters.

This post wouldn't be complete without mentioning the cover art. I find it as eye catching today as when I first saw it at the tender age of eight. At the time I thought Stephen King was trying to rip off Star Wars, and wondered what sort of twisted variation on the film he had come up with. I googled John Cayea, who did the illustration, but there was no biographical information on him. Cayea's CV is impressive - he has done a lot of book covers, as well as illustrations for The New York Times and The National Lampoon.

Weeds, Season 3, Episode 8, "The Two Mrs. Scottsons".

Why does Nancy do this? In season one, and season two, the answer looked obvious. Nancy was trying to put food on the table. Nancy has just finished her period of indentured servitude under U-Turn, but she still wants to get back in the game, despite the fact that she is now gainfully employed.

When U-Turn suggested she get a job early in season three, it finally occurred to me that Nancy wasn't quite as innocent as she looked. Amidst the gleefully overgrown adolescents Doug, Dean, and Andy, Nancy does look mature. Sucking diet sodas and iced frappuchinos through a straw all the time gives her a slightly delinquent air.

The money Nancy got from Doug was anything but juvenile. The money and the drugs could translate into serious jail time, but the rewards are potentially greater. Nancy playing the hard nosed entrepeneur rather than the dilettante who dabbles could really ratchet up the drama as much as the Mexican standoff did last season and early this season.

Speaking of delinquents, Peter, the DEA agent Nancy was dating, finally turned up in a backed up drainage pipe. The fact that Peter was a corrupt cop was a natural progression, but I'm not sure if it was done to cut one narrative thread (the investigation into Peter's death) or to start a new one (the search for Peter's dirty money). However, there is no reason why it couldn't have been done for the former and latter reasons.

I loved the last scene between Sullivan and Celia. As Penn Jillette once said, "A hypocrite is usually doing at least one thing I like." I don't know if Sullivan was sincere, but the occasional glimpses of depths in these characters enormous shallows is what keeps me tuning in week after week.