Scribes & Scoundrels

Random Dumb Thought

2011-04-02T02:42:00.007Z

The standard line on the business success of the wonderfully gory EC horror comic books from the fifties was that a lot of G.I.s enjoyed comic books as cheap, disposable, and entertaining junk reading in the trenches and later retained the habit when they were demobilized and returned to civilian life.

My renewed interest in science fiction is much more prosaic than that of a G.I. who just wanted something quick to read in between dodging sniper fire and grenades, but disposable, cheap, and entertaining is an accurate description of some of the science fiction short stories and novellas that publishers TOR and 40k have made available on the Kindle.

I wonder what impact the sales from these eBook titles have on their bottom line, and how successful they have been at winning back older readers who have gafiated from the genre since their youth?

From the "There Is Nobody More Sexist Than a Self-Proclaimed Progressive, Enlightened, Liberal, White Male" Department:

2010-12-02T23:15:00.012Z

Reading former National Lampoon editor Tony Hendra's, Going Too Far, a history of humor during during the sixties and seventies, I was struck by the following sentence:

The piece was written by Kelly, Choquette, and the Lampoon's first (and only) major female contributor, Annie Beatts.

I guess it sucks to be Mara McAfee and Shary Flenniken, huh?

Obamanomics Explained

2010-11-30T19:23:00.012Z

President Obama has decided to put a federal pay freeze on the negotiating table to help lower the federal deficit. The deficit is currently about 1 trillion and change a year, and the pay freeze, according to this article, would save about 2 billion a year, which would help reduce the deficit by a whopping 0.2 percent.

It's like a family of four with a household budget in the red to the tune of $100,000 a year thinking that they can dig themselves out of the hole by not purchasing a Wii for Christmas this year.

It's a good thing for our Commander-in-Chief that there isn't a Math section on the LSAT.

Watssit Worth?

2010-11-12T19:00:00.011Z

Last weekend I bought a new smart phone – the Motorola Droid X. One of the more interesting apps that I’ve downloaded is an Inflation Calculator. Playing around with it, I plugged in the sales price of comic books from the 1950s, ten cents, and learned that a dime then is worth about 0.91 cents now.

Comic books in 2010 sell for as much as $3.99 (DC recently lowered their prices to $2.99) which in 1950, was worth about 0.44 cents – or for the price of one comic book today, you could have purchased the equivalent of four comic books in 1950.

However, all things considered, would I really want to read those comic books from 1950? As historical curiosities, they are interesting, but I wouldn’t want to buy or read any of them on a month to month basis, despite the fact that comic books (in terms of page length) were more like “books” and a lot less like the pamphlets that I pick up once a month at the comic book store.

A fairer comparison, in terms of format – and quality – would be with 1986, the year I started to buy and read comic books on a regular basis. $3.99 was worth about $2 in 1986, which would have let me buy two comic books (pricing varied between 0.75 cents and $1) with as much as two quarters left over to spend at the arcade, or a Big Gulp at 7-11, but not both.

The comic books were printed on newsprint, but otherwise, there were no significant differences in the artistic or written quality of the comic books that I enjoyed then and now.

The bad ones still suck for pretty much the same reasons now as they did then: artwork that looks like a photocopy of a photocopy of a rejected John Byrne page for The Uncanny X-men, and, well, the less said about the writing, the better.

And as for good comic books, they are every bit as good now as they were back then. However, nobody has really brought any radically new narrative, visual, or thematic treatments to the table since Frank Miller, Alan Moore (working with artists Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, et al), and Dave Sim were doing their ground-breaking work on titles like Batman: Year One, Swamp Thing, and Cerebus.

So it really does beg the question: is the fancier paper really worth the extra buck or two?

Don't You Wish You'd Gone to Med School?

2010-10-21T13:54:00.010Z

High school math was sheer, absolute, misery. Torture, really. I spent many hours agonizing over problems, late into the evening. Around ten every evening, I'd still be plugging away at it, and "Easy Street", a CBC radio program that featured classic jazz. I don't remember much about how to plot a sine, tangents, or functions, but I did acquire a taste for John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Ella Fitzgerald.

The torture was heightened by the fact that if I wanted to escape Winnipeg, and enjoy that sort of high-brow, artsy lifestyle associated with the likes of Messrs Davis and Coltrane, I'd need cash to do it. A lot of cash. The kind of cash that only math skills can bring. Unfortunately, in grade twelve, I had to bite the bullet and take what I thought was the more practically oriented (and easier) math course to meet my high school graduation requirements.

Balancing checkbooks, and figuring out the difference between my gross income and net income was the best I'd ever be able to do. I took my "B+" or "A-", and was just happy that I wouldn't have to go to summer school to get my diploma. A sense of failure still gnawed at me, and the future, which had always looked as bleak as a Manitoba sky on a cold winter's day, looked even harsher in the light of that compromise.

The perks that I'd come to associate with being a professional like Mr. Rockwell - the only CPA in a small town our family had briefly lived in - vanished from my sight: the big house, the go to hell utility vehicles, cable television, trips to Disneyland, and a little disposable income for the memorabilia associated with the little distractions we all love. In Mr. Rockwell's case, it was the Montreal Expos, for me, it was, and still is...comic books, strips, animation. Any kind of commercial illustration really.

I wanted to be in business like my father and Mr. Rockwell, but Dad had drilled it into my head that retail was not the best way to do it. It's a good game when you are young, and have a lot of energy, but it progressively gets harder as you get older. I made feeble attempts to break into journalism, but in all honesty, it was like aspiring to be a rock star, and well, I certainly would be enjoying a much more...frugal lifestyle if I'd actually succeeded.

That failure to finish out the higher level math course gnawed at me over the years, but had almost disappeared entirely by the time I'd written my LSAT. For the first time in my life I had a real metric for my intelligence. I could point to a quantifiable, measurable score, and not just drop the names of a bunch of dead writers nobody had ever heard of into a conversation as a means of asserting my intellectual bona fides.

I wasn't able to get into law school, but eventually, I was able to break out of the education track and into business, and enjoy some of the perks that Mr. Rockwell enjoyed. I want to hold on to those perks however, and get more of them, and to do that I need a bigger salary and bigger bonuses. I signed up to take one of the prerequisites for an accounting certificate.

To my surprise, it uses the kind of math that I became familiar with from what I thought was the "Easy A" high school course. After three weeks in the accounting course, I've come to realize that the math being used in that high school course wasn't so easy after all. It's a lot of hard work, but I've done fairly well on the assignments so far.

I might just be a little bit brighter than I thought I was.

Splatterstick Box Office #Fail

2010-08-21T17:12:00.011Z

The Evil Dead II scared the shit out of me before I even saw the film. I was mesmerized and repulsed by the video box cover when I was a kid, so much so that while I'd stare at it intently, I couldn't bring myself to look at the back cover. I finally got around to watching it while I was teaching in Japan. I'd seen everything I pretty much wanted to see at the video store by that point, and I wanted to know what all the fuss was about...

And it was freakin' awesome. Scary, because I didn't know what to expect when that freaky deaky Raimi-cam rush started, but also a lot of fun, equal parts Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Three Stooges. I watched The Evil Dead trilogy in reverse order, and went on to enjoy some other horror films from the eighties that mined a similar splatterstick vein - Re-Animator, Bride of Re-Animator, and Return of the Living Dead.

I'd always thought that the production of horror films was cyclical, thematically speaking. The eighties were a period of relative prosperity, hence the infusion of comedy, while the seventies, and to a lesser degree the oughts were a little bleaker, and as a result, the movies themselves had a darker worldview.

However, after looking at the numbers, I realize that hypothesis is probably...bunk. The box office receipts show that people prefer their torture, murder, mayhem, and misery on the silver screen without a soupçon of black comdey to help lighten things up.

Let's take a look at the numbers for two of the splatterstick films that I like, Evil Dead and Re-Animator.

The results aren't bad, given that both films managed to make money, and the fact that they were written, directed, produced, and performed by a group of relatively unknown people. But when you compare the financial results of The Evil Dead and Re-Animator with similar efforts from the seventies like Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the results are much less impressive.

The financial performance of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is especially noteworthy in light of its relatively low production costs when compared with a similar freshman effort, The Evil Dead and the overall box office gross for both productions.

Given the healthy box-office performance of grimmer fare from the seventies, and the continued success of that bleak cinematic outlook in the oughts, I doubt we'll ever see a "mainstream" splatterstick revival even if the economy improves during the teens of the 21st century: bleak is just better business sense.

I did find a couple of interesting anomalies in amongst the box office receipts of aging celluloid horrors. Films that had no gore, no nudity, and were for all intents amateur productions shot on a digital camera, out-performed all the other horror films that I looked at by wide margins.

So who knows? As computer animation gets cheaper, and amateurs get more proficient at using digital cameras, maybe I will live to see an "indy" splatterstick revival.

Nota Bene: All film grosses reflect performance at the box-office, and not the revenue from rentals or sales of cassettes or DVDs. The adjusted productions budgets for The Evil Dead and Paranormal Activity were calculated using numbers for 1981 and 2007, however, the adjusted box-office grosses were calculated according to the years that they were released, which was 1983 and 2009. Numbers for the box office gross and production budgets were found on IMDB, while the adjusted ticket prices were based on the figures from Box Office Mojo. Production budgets were adjusted using the CPI Inflation Calculator.

Man v. Superman

2010-07-23T16:21:00.015Z

Superman and Batman are the two basic superhero archetypes. Superman is gifted with abilities that mere mortals do not possess: flight, strength, x-ray vision, heat vision, invulnerability, and super-human senses. Batman, on the other hand, is made, not born. Circumstances and training have made him the crusader for law and order that he is. In theory, anybody with time, patience, training, and cash could be the Batman, but most people missed out on the chance to become Superman when Krypton exploded.

So which type of superhero do readers actually prefer? This has provided endless fodder for debate in comic book shops across this land for ages. However, as far as I know, nobody has ever actually crunched the numbers to see how people vote on this particular question with their wallets.

I looked at the sales figures for eight (8) different superheroes over the course of sixteen (16) months, and learned that readers prefer the Superman archetype, but with some caveats. These are the total number of copies each title sold over the course of 14 months:

Even when two most popular examples of each archetype (Spiderman and Batman, respectively) are removed from the equation, the superman archetype still dominates:

The grand-daddy of the archetype is the least popular title amongst his super-powered peers. In fact, Superman lags behind Spiderman, Hulk, and Green Lantern in terms of sales, and has seen a steady drop in sales over the last fourteen (14) months.

I think the easiest explanation is that readers want some limits placed on their heroes. Spiderman, the Hulk, and Green Lantern are all very powerful, however, they aren’t omnipotent in quite the same fashion that Superman is.

Two interesting things became apparent while I was looking at the sales data. The first was that nice guys don’t finish last – they trounce the competition. Batman, a character known for not carrying a gun or killing bad guys, outsells the Punisher by a factor of two. Daredevil has an ethic not all that dissimilar from Batman and has a somewhat erratic publishing schedule - Marvel publishes fewer issues per year of Daredevil than Punisher. Daredevil still managed to out sell the gun-toting, homicidal badass by roughly 35,000 copies over a fourteen month period.

The second was the sharp decline in sales experienced by both Superman and Punisher during 2009, and which show no signs of reversal in 2010.

This isn’t the first time that the Punisher has experienced an overall decline in his fortunes, but I’m surprised heads haven’t rolled for the marked decline in sales for Superman – the character is almost synonymous with its publisher, DC comics.

In the contest of man versus superman, superman might be the clear winner, but Superman alone won’t win the battle. For that, he is going to need a little help from his ring wearing and web spinning friends.

Nota Bene As with previous posts, all sales figures can be found here. Please keep in mind that all the sales figures pulled from this website represent estimates from independent comic book shops, and do not take into account sales figures from online retailers like Amazon, independent bookstores, news stands, or big box retailers like Borders.

Matt Murdoch Should Have Been A CPA

2010-07-06T15:16:00.013Z

The first time I used a comic book as a coaster for a drink I felt pretty…smart. For years I’d obsessively put all my comic books into little plastic bags. But even though I could barely get past signing my name on a high school math test, the numbers I’d been reading in trade publications and newspapers made sense. If there were two or three million copies of Spiderman, X-Men, Spawn, or X-Force in circulation, but an audience of only 100,000 hardcore comic book readers, all of whom were bagging and storing everything they could get their hands on indiscriminately, than the future value of any new comic book I purchased was exactly zero.

Old habits die hard, and while I couldn’t be bothered to keep my comic books in little baggies, it took me awhile to take it to the next logical step: throwing them in the trash when I finished reading them. Heresy? Maybe. However, a comparison of the market prices (and returns) for original artwork versus the value of the actual comic books themselves is enlightening.

Recently, the cover that Frank Miller drew for Daredevil 188 was sold at an auction for $101,575. If a collector had a little bit of foresight back in 1982, he could have bought the artwork for about $1,500 and a copy of the comic book for $0.60. Our hypothetical collector would have seen a return on his "investment" of 6771.67% if he bought the original cover artwork. A quick check on eBay shows that the top price for a copy of Daredevil #188 is $50, but there are also copies of that issue being sold for as little as $2.24, for a return on investment of 8333.33% and 373.33% respectively.

That doesn’t sound bad, but at best, the actual comic book itself is worth only 0.05% of the value of the original artwork. If you were the owner of a retail establishment that specialized in selling comic books, you would have to sell 2,031.5 copies of that particular issue of Daredevil at $50 a pop before you saw the same amount of money commanded by one single page of original artwork by Frank Miller!

Vindicated!

2010-06-30T16:14:00.005Z

In an earlier post, I made the suggestion that DC could sell more copies of Wonder Woman if they gave her a more modest costume. It looks like Dan DiDio and Jim Lee took my advice.

The PEN is not quite as mighty as the sword

2010-05-02T15:04:00.009Z

Dear American PEN:

Can you rescind the literary service award from this wrinkled hoser? Writers like Matt Stone and Trey Parker (not so much as a shout-out in the old bat's speech, BTW) are getting death threats from religious fundamentalists, but Atwood has figured out who the real censors are:

I hope however that this recognition is not the equivalent of the gold watch to the retiring manager. No, surely not! For writers can’t retire, nor can they be fired: As we hear constantly from those who think there should be no arts grants, writers don’t have real jobs.

Of course writers have real jobs! Or at least, they can put their skills to good use as technical writers, editors, journalists, or copy-writers while they wait to hear back from Random House about their manuscript. It's a low overhead activity that doesn't require much more investment than a netbook, printer, and the occasional trip to the library. A novel can be written while waiting on tables, and more often than not, it gets done exactly in this fashion in the good ol' US of A.

Free markets, free minds. Americans have built a whole publishing industry around that very concept, without any Canada Council grants, or government sanctioned cultural protectionism.

If Atwood is going to use the podium to hammer the Canadian government over government arts funding, and can't be bothered to mention Trey Parker and Matt Stone, does she really care about fighting censorship, or is she just a partisan hack masquerading as a concerned activist?

I'd put my money on the latter.

Blockhead

2010-03-12T19:44:00.003Z

Books. No cable, not a lot of movies, but there were always lots of books and periodicals in my house. And Xenu bless 'em, my parents worked their way through them, from cover to cover. It rubbed off on me. I took great pride in my ability to slog through any kind of printed material. If I started something, I was going to get through it, no matter how many times I drifted off to sleep.

This was easy enough to do while I was still in elementary school, and was reading mostly novels or popular history. In junior high school, I got it into my head that I should try to become a well rounded person, and would take the occasional stab at biology, mathematics, physics or philosophy. My patience and understanding quickly hit a wall, and with the exception of philosophy, I gave up trying to understand anything scientific or math related.

Still, that work ethic remained, and I'd doggedly try and get through Plato and Montesquieu, Dante and Pound, Joyce and Pynchon, succeeding more often than failing, but when I couldn't bear to continue on with the print equivalent of Ambien, blaming myself for my lack of discipline and stick-to-it-ness.

My first indication that there was a better way to read occurred while I was reading a magazine interview with the French cartoonist Moebius. I don't remember anything about the interview, except the fact that he mentioned one of his comic books was inspired by a book of poetry that he never finished reading. I was scandalized at the time, and thought less of him both as a human being and an artist.

So I continued mindlessly plodding through the world's great literature through my years as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba. Sometimes it paid off, as in the case of Foucault's Pendulum, but more often than not, well, it pretty much went in one ear and out the other.

Perversely enough, a film studies course made me realize that reading books all the way through from cover to cover wasn’t always the best use of my time. During a class discussion, someone made a comment to the effect that they never walked out of movies. For a brief moment, we all sat around nodding and murmuring our assent, smug in our belief that we were all good, tolerant, and open-minded people.

Then our professor spoke up. “I do,” he said, “All the time. When you get to be my age, you realize life is too short to sit through something you don’t enjoy.” I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. At first I used this newfound bit of wisdom only in extreme circumstance, and only when watching movies.

But gradually that attitude began to seep over into reading. It started slowly at first: I finished the first part of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, and then quickly gave up on ever finishing the rest of it a couple of pages into the second part. Soon I was gleefully skimming and skipping my way through works of non-fiction, and happily giving up on novels after reading a hundred pages past the start or when I was only fifty pages away from the end.

My attitude toward finishing books became even more extreme, more insouciant. I used to devour novels by Christopher Buckley and Will Self, but after paging through their latest efforts I realized it was more bother than it was worth. In fact, my go to hell attitude has become so extreme, I realized the other day that I had finally come full circle: maybe I’d been too quick to delete Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. I enjoyed reading the first hundred pages or so, but as it was a little long, maybe it was a little bit like the television series Oz: something best enjoyed in small doses over an extended period of time.

Besides, if I get bored I don’t have to finish reading Quicksilver. I can stop reading it whenever I want...

Flatliners

2010-03-04T22:51:00.013Z

Flat, flat, flat. Flat, gloriously flat. Superflat. I’ve always wondered whether or not trade paperback collections cannibalized sales of monthly “floppy” comic books. Looking at the sales of The Walking Dead, it looks as if trade paperback collections don’t eat into the monthly sales of traditional comic books in their "pamphlet" format. But more on that later. Let’s take a moment to put flat, at least in the floppy context, into perspective.

Are flat, steady sales really all that interesting? Maybe. Since looking at a relatively straight line of sales figures for The Walking Dead is well, kind of…flat, I thought I’d compare it side by side with the sales figures for Superman:

While it is true that Superman outsells The Walking Dead, it is interesting to note that sales for the former title have been in free fall, and more importantly, Superman has a cultural resonance and a legacy that The Walking Dead doesn’t. With all the toys, merchandise, cartoons, television series, and movies out there, it’s surprising that circulation has been in a steady decline for the last fourteen months. If sales figures on Superman are anything to go by, the core audience for that title probably isn’t that significantly larger than the audience for The Walking Dead.

The trade paperback sales for The Walking Dead indicate that there is a larger audience for the title beyond that of the floppy readership. All trade paperback volumes and hardcover compilations combined account for roughly 33% of all sales of The Walking Dead comic book series. No trade paperback volume or hardcover compilation ever comes close to exceeding sales of the monthly title.

While the combined sales for all trade paperback volumes and hardcover compilations don’t exceed – with two exceptions - those of the ongoing monthly series, Image (the company that publishes The Walking Dead) does manage to sell an impressive number of copies. January and August saw the release of new trade paperback collections. Some combination of trade paperback followers and die-hard collectors of the series helped gave a boost to the sales of the new trade paperback collections released in January and August.

Given the length of the series (it has been around for over five years) I’ll assume that the number of people buying “Volume 1” of the trade paperback collections are probably all new readers. The total sales figures for each of the trade paperback volumes over the course of the year bear out this hypothesis. There is some evidence of attrition as there is a drop in sales for each volume, but chances are that if a reader likes the first volume, that reader will continue to buy more.

What about the future of The Walking Dead, once the series has reached its inevitable end? If sales of Watchmen or V for Vendetta are anything to go by, The Walking Dead should be generating a steady stream of revenue for Image long after the series has run its course.

Nota Bene Watchmen made its film debut in 2009, so V for Vendetta is probably closer to the norm in terms of sales. As with previous posts, all sales figures can be found here. Please keep in mind that all the sales figures pulled from this website represent estimates from independent comic book shops, and do not take into account sales figures from online retailers like Amazon, independent bookstores, news stands, or big box retailers like Borders.

Lesson Learned

2010-02-25T21:40:00.005Z

Well, I might have missed the boat on Marcel Dzama, but I like to think that I've since learned my lesson, and have bought some illustrations done by Rob Ullman, a local illustrator who does stuff for the City Paper, Richmond Magazine, and a ton of other places.

My sweetie bought me a nice pin-up from Ullman's website for my birthday, and when my bonus was deposited into my bank account, I decided to add another a piece that is DNSFW to my collection.

Like Pia Guerra,, Ullman has a nice, clean style that is reminiscent of earlier comic book artists like Dan DeCarlo or Carmine Infanito. Not a lot of artists emulate that sort of look, but when they do - as Ullman does - it stands out on the page like nothing else out there.

Sex Cells?

2010-02-18T21:36:00.022Z

Does sex sell comic books? It's hard to say. There are relatively few female superheroes that have their own solo titles, and the top seller in the female superhero category, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon has described Buffy as such in interviews) ties in with a television series. Despite the television tie-in, I think it is worth pointing out that Buffy is in the top twenty best-selling comic books and outsells all of her female counterparts and most of her male competitors without having to wear a skimpy costume.

As further proof that more flesh doesn't always lead to more sales, Power Girl, Spider-Woman, and Batgirl all started relatively late in 2009, and either went on to surpass, or closed the gap relatively quickly (in terms of sales) their more scantily clad counterparts, Red Sonja and Witchblade.

Spiderman, Batman, and Superman outsell their female analogues, however, the distance between Superman and Supergirl - in terms of sales - is not that great.

While the sales of Batgirl are eclipsed by that of Batman, it is interesting to note that the disparity between Batgirl, and another Batman spinoff, Red Robin is not that significant, if the sales figures for the first five issues are anything to go by.

Co-relation doesn't always equal causation, but if the sales of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Batgirl are anything to go by, the editors of Wonder Woman and Power Girl might want to think long and hard about serving up more cheesecake in 2010.

All sales figures can be found here.

Update: Slightly tangential, but an interesting post on marketing comic books to women can be found here.

2/18/07

2010-02-18T12:47:00.006Z

Two slash eighteen slash
two thousand and seven I
felt lucky, happy,
and loved when you said "I do".
two one eight zero seven

Coffee

2010-02-17T01:43:00.002Z

Writing is...okay, but it's DEFINITELY not even ⅛ as fun as making a film with a friend!

Red and Blue Make Green

2010-02-15T03:55:00.031Z

She-Hulk and Swamp Thing are two superheroes that I've been following on and off since I was twelve. I've been buying up the trade paperback collections of She-Hulk and Swamp Thing on Amazon and half.com like crazy lately, and while I was jonesing for my latest Swamp Thing fix, it occurred to me that color might help explain the sales of superhero comic books.

I've always liked offbeat superheros - She-Hulk, Swamp Thing, Booster Gold, and Animal Man to name a few - and the two common denominators that they all share is middling sales and costumes or pigmentation consisting of unusual colors.

Since I was curious to see what impact color might have on the sales of super hero comic book, I crunched the sales figures for a number of different superheroes over the course of 2009:

A couple of notes about my data. The sales figures were pulled from this website. The Amazing Spiderman is the only title that comes out three or four times a month, while the Hulk, Green Lantern, and Batman were all featured prominently in major storylines that without a doubt goosed the sales of their titles.

While I'm hesitant to draw any conclusions about green, I think red and blue, or some combination thereof, is the clear winner when it comes to comic book sales:

Having been raised on a diet of "grim 'n gritty" comics from the eighties through the ought oughts, I'm surprised black isn't a more popular color. While Ms. Marvel and the Punisher outsell their blue and yellow counterparts, Booster Gold and Nova, they only do so by about a 75,000 copies a year.

White is the clear loser in terms of sales. There aren't that many superheroes that incorporate white as a major part of their costumes, but when they do sales fade faster than a pair of Levis in the wash.

Red and blue puts Marvel and DC in the black, while white puts them in the red. However, for this comic book reader, green is the only color that "pops" on the cover of a comic book.

Update: I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings for the Occasional Superheroine, but as further proof of my thesis that a white costume kills sales, Emma Frost (a superheroine who likes to fight crime in white lingerie) had her own solo series that made its debut in July, 2003. The first issue sold a respectable 54,107 copies, however, when the series was canceled in December of 2004, only 24,519 copies of the final issue were sold.

The REAL Mad Man

2010-01-02T19:25:00.007Z

A vibrating Santa. Stuffed, plush, and cute in that really bland, obnoxious way that Hello Kitty is. And it vibrates. Worse yet, it laughs. When Dad showed it to me years ago, I winced. Maybe I was in my early twenties, still in university, and had a lot of vulgar, half-assed Marxism rattling around my noggin. Or it could have been my late twenties. By then the half-assed Marxism would have been pounded out of my skull by cold, hard reality. However, my fear of remaining forever on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder brought a pained expression to my face.

But not this year. When my sister brought it out, that tacky ball of plush fabric stuffed with cotton made me smile. My Dad sold a million of them. It was one of many good calls that he made during his career as a buyer for Saan Stores, a discount clothing retailer in Western Canada. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teletubbies, Big Mouth Billy Bass, and countless other fads. The executives above him would hem and haw, but the old man had a gut instinct that was never wrong.

Even when he got kicked to the curb, forced out into early retirement, Dad had the last laugh. Almost to the month after his severance package ran out, the company went bankrupt. Anyone that had stayed on with the company, including the Doubting Thomases that second guessed my father's judgment for a good chunk of his career, got nothing.

When Matthew Weiner was still running around getting half-caf no foam soy cappuchinos for David Chase, my Dad was the original Don Draper. Dad earned a fraction of what Draper earned (adjusted for inflation), didn't smoke, was a moderate drinker, and was faithful to his wife, but inasmuch as I love watching Mad Men, I consider it an accurate reflection and vindication of my father's core values as a businessman: hard work, honesty, integrity, dedication, and loyalty.

Brooks Brothers Anarchist

2009-09-12T17:22:00.017Z

Pranks, hoaxes, fraud, and forgery. I've always loved pranks and hoaxes, and while I certainly don't condone fraud and forgery, I'd be lying if I said I didn't find those subjects fascinating. Mad Magazine and The Great Brain gave me a taste for that sort of thing as a child, but I didn't fully realize all the anarchic, comedic possibilities of a well done hoax until I was in junior high school.

After a long, boring (in the coma inducing sense of the word) day at school, I'd hang out with my friend Sigurd Jarlson in his parents rec room. Usually we would watch cartoons or read comic books, but one day Will discovered his father's old comedy albums. Cheech and Chong found their way on to the turntable, as did McLean & McLean, the Canadian knockoff of the aforementioned, mostly American duo.

As much as I enjoyed both acts, there was another, and as far as I know, unheard of gem in Mr. Jarlson's collection. It was a cassette tape, and on it, hastily scrawled with a black sharpie, someone had written: Id's Shit. I don't know who was responsible for it, but it was hysterically shocking, and even funnier was the back story that went with the recording. The person or persons responsible for the recording had mailed copies of it to disc jockeys all across the United States, and then sat back and laughed as as competing radio stations sued each other over who owned the rights to the recording.

That, in my eyes, then and now, was brilliant. Raising hell just for the sake of it. Sticking it to the man. For years I labored under the assumption that the man was older, white, wore a three piece suit, aviator frames, voted Republican, went to Church every Sunday, and held the kind of opinions associated with that kind of person. Liberals, well, liberals were, or should have been, a lot like my wife or Seth McFarlane: funny, smart, sophistacted, handsome and or beautiful, well-read, and for the most part moderate, but having an admirable sympathy for the underdog and or downtrodden.

P.J. O'Rourke, and later, Tommy Chong, of all people, challenged my assumptions about who the good guys and the bad guys are. "Ship of Fools", an essay about O'Rourke's trip down the Volga river with a ragtag bunch of aging American leftists, demolished my hitherto unassailable belief that all liberals were like my wife or Seth McFarlane: funny, smart, sophistacted, handsome and or beautiful, well-read, and for the most part moderate, but having an admirable sympathy for the underdog and or downtrodden.

But it was Chong's appearance on a local television chat show that was the real intellectual dynamite. Bearded, but wearing a slick Armani suit; a guy who made a fortune selling comedy albums to stoners, but who collected vintage modernist paintings. The talk-show host was appalled and enraged by both his success and his non-chalance about how he achieved it. It was funny. Chong's appearance and answers were definitely about hell-raising for the sake of hell-raising, but something was off-kilter about the interview, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

It took awhile for it to sink in, but then it hit me: the talk-show host held all the correct and liberal attitudes Canadians are supposed to have on a variety of issues. Nobody has any serious disagreement with the consensus on peacekeeping, multiculturalism, or single payer healthcare.

However, the woman's mindset was fundamentally conservative. If she agreed with any of the Canadian shibboleths mentioned above, it was because she didn't like change, rather then whether or not any of these things were actually good or useful. Being a liberal, a conservative, a skeptic, or a believer is a state of mind or an approach to looking at the world, not a set of opinions about any given topic.

If James O'Keefe doesn't consciously understand this principle, I think he grasps it on an intuitive level. The nice nihilist in me enjoyed O'Keefe's recent video sting. So welcome to the club, Mr. O'Keefe: it's pretty exclusive, as very few people are like my wife, Seth McFarlane, Tommy Chong, and P.J. O'Rourke: genuinely funny, smart, sophistacted, handsome and or beautiful, well-read, and for the most part moderate, but having an admirable sympathy for the underdog and or downtrodden.

However, if you want to keep your membership and avoid becoming just another right-wing Michael Moore clone, I hope you realize that an anarchist can be quite comfortable in a Brooks Brothers suit, and still piss off the establishment, regardless of which petty troll is pulling the levers of the machinery.

Just ask Tommy Chong if you don't believe me.

The Apple & The Turtle

2009-08-31T22:54:00.006Z

Computers were, initially, a crushing disappointment. When our sixth grade teacher announced that I was one of the special few that had been chosen for the computer class, I was excited. The machines certainly looked better than what I’d seen on Star Trek. A monitor and keyboard encased in beige plastic certainly looked more futuristic than the big boxes with blinking lights that dotted the pop culture landscape.

But using those Apple II computers turned out to be nothing like what I’d seen on The Jetsons. The first couple of times that I made the little green triangle move across the screen were fun, but pushing it across the screen got progressively less and less interesting the more our little class of brainiacs did it.

And when our teacher tried to get the little robot to move in tandem with the “Turtle” on the screen, the results were…underwhelming. Our teacher spent most of the class racing back and forth between his computer and the twitching, humming, slow moving robot on the floor. Real-life computers and robots weren’t half as glamorous, or smart, as the ones I’d see on Astroboy after school.

When I found out that my friend (who had been deemed less intelligent) had spent an agreeable morning drawing and painting in an extended art class, I asked if I could drop out. However, quitting was not an option, according to my teacher. I was intelligent, resources were limited, and I should be more grateful for the opportunities presented to me.

Suitably chastened, I resumed spending most of computer class watching the teacher try to make the robot work its magic on the floor. Since then, I’ve taught my share of classes and I realize that Steve Jobs wasn’t the person responsible for the dull class. The blame for that can be placed entirely on the shoulders of our teacher, who probably hadn’t done adequate lesson planning.

All was not lost. The public sector of The People’s Republic of Saskatoba might have dropped the ball when it came to preparing me for a fun-filled future full of flying cars, holo decks, and replicants, but the private sector, in the form of my Dad, helped revive my flagging interest a few months later when he purchased, or started buying, the components of a Commodore 64.

Our family was one of limited means, so the purchase was made piecemeal. The keyboard was the first piece that we had. I hooked it up to the black and white television, and to my delight, discovered that I could make pictures with the keyboard. I started building little forts, tanks, cannons, and aircraft, and set about demolishing them using the delete and cursor keys.

It was certainly a lot more fun than watching the turtle move ever so slowly across the screen. And once we got the disk drive…oh, the wonderful mayhem I could unleash on the screen. Mom might have flipped out when she saw the X-Men cover where Storm was getting ready to stab some hapless evil mutant with a dagger, but I could strike down as many foes as I wanted to with a digital katana and I wouldn’t hear so much as a single objection from my mom.

Was really I learning anything about computers, though? I suppose, at the very least, that Commodore 64 taught me that computers wouldn’t bite. At best, Dad grasped on an intuitive level (and I learned from his example) that a desktop or a laptop represents better all-around value for money than a gaming platform.

As for that friend of mine whose intelligence was deemed insufficient enough to handle the challenges of computer class?

He is currently teaching high school chemistry.

Huck Finn

2009-08-16T02:26:00.005Z

Canoes are awful. I have fond memories of driving to and from fishing trips, but the actual fishing trips themselves...not so much. Out on the water I remember periods of blissful calm that were punctuated by frenzied moments of pure terror whenever we had the grave misfortune to catch a fish.

Dad, all six feet, two inches, and 220 pounds of him, would leap quite literally into action running and jumping up and down the length of our canoe, to grab the net and get the fish into the boat. He did all this while yelling, "Don't move! Don't move! You'll tip the boat".

I was, of course, petrified with fright, and clutched the gunwales of our little craft in abject horror at the thought of of being the one responsible for sinking our little ship. In hindsight, the only person who was going to drown us was the maniac I referred affectionately to as "Dad".

Rafts, and not canoes, as far as I was concerned at the time, were the only way to travel on a lake or river. Grandma Guppy had given me a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a gift, and I loved the adventures that Huck and Jim had on the mighty Mississippi. Gliding up and down the river using a pole sounded like heaven.

I finally got a chance to find out for myself what riding a raft would have been like. My sweetie pie and I went white water rafting in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania this afternoon. Our raft was made of rigid rubber, and we used paddles, but sustantively, it couldn't have been all that different from what Huck and Jim experienced: fast,bumpy, occasionally scary, and fun.

Fun for me, but I'm typing this at a bed and breakfast after a nice hot meal. Not so fun for Huck and Jim, travelling on that raft for days. I'm surprised they didn't commit suicide early in the novel - life on the raft would have been bumpy, damp, and miserable.

So a raft wouldn't have been quite the pimped out ride my eight year old imagination thought it would be. I'm just glad I've never had to paddle a canoe in my life. My Dad might have been a man of limited means, but he was also one of the most clever men I have ever known (or will know). Our canoe was sixteen feet long, made out of aluminum, and manufactured by Grumann. Dad was able to mount an outboard motor on the back of our craft.

Huck and Jim would have eaten our wake if we ever zipped by them on the Mississippi.

After the Hal Sparks Show at the Arlington Cinema N Drafthouse

2009-08-09T04:04:00.006Z

Me: Cool! Hal Sparks is a non-drinker just like me.

Sweetie: That's right. Penn Jillette, Hal Sparks and you could have a party. A party with no drinking or smoking. A very boring party with just the three of you.

4 Colors

2009-08-08T05:50:00.006Z

Browsing through the shelves of comic books at Tramp's Records and Books was an eye opener. I was all of thirteen, and comic books were becoming works of art. Companies had just started printing some comic books on fancy paper. At first blush, it was a counter-intuitive gesture. Funny books were for kids. What was the point of printing them on expensive paper?

It was clearly a move to price impressionable adolescents like myself out of the market. I loved looking at all those comic books printed on glossy paper. Frequently, they had naked people in them, or the writer would drop the f-bomb.

However, there was no way I could buy a comic book like that and bring it home. Some friends of mine had unwittingly discovered a means to hide comic books from their parents: their collection was so huge, there was no way their parents would stumble upon the "adult" graphic novels buried underneath the pile of tamer fare.

Unfortunately, I didn't have their purchasing power, so I had to confine my appreciation to the store shelves or leafing through the stuff my friends had hidden within plain sight in their homes. There was another reason for the expensive paper. If I opened up a book like Blood: A Tale with artwork by Kent Williams, that slick paper made perfect sense. Watercolors wouldn't look so good on newsprint:

Over the years, comic book companies started to print everything on slick, glossy, and very expensive stock. My interest in comic books started to wane as they got more expensive. I'd initially chalked up my dislike of the pricier paper to a misplaced sense of latent artistic elitism.

But paging through the copy of Blood: A Tale that I bought for Lisa made me realize that my distaste for the more glossy offset or stiffly starched baxter paper had nothing to do with cultural conservatism. Ninety percent of the time, better paper doesn't do anything for the artwork.

Take any panel, or page from Sin City by Frank Miller, and it's going to look just as good on newsprint or fancy paper. It's all ink, and done in very simple and bold lines:

Nothing is lost if it gets printed on newsprint, and nothing of value is added to the artwork. But it doesn't have to be simple. Dave Sim and Gerhard brought an almost Baroque level of complexity to the artwork for Cerebus the Aardvark, but the art never suffered because it was printed on cheap paper:

Slick paper is here to stay, at least until Jeff Bezos can figure out a way to make comic books readable on the Kindle. As for myself, I'm just glad I have the purchasing power to buy whatever I want, and more importantly, have a wife who enjoys reading comic books as much as I do.

N.B.: If the Cerebus artwork doesn't look so good, believe me, it's a blog--not a newsprint--issue.

Fett's El Camino

2009-07-30T23:10:00.008Z

The Millenium Falcon is really a van. A van with a wizard airbrushed on the side. There are hot babes wearing chainmail bikinis clutching the wizard’s knees. And I don’t care what the song says. Fett’s ride would have been an El Camino. With flames painted on the side. And the car’s horn would play “La Chucharacha” every time he hit it. ‘Cause that’s how the Fett Man would have rolled, baby.

While Boba Fett’s earthbound ride would have been pretty pimpin', when I think about it, his actual choice of spaceship was kind of…retarded. I’ve been working on a model of the Slave I, and if the model and movies are correct, the ship takes off and lands horizontally, but flies vertically.

Think about it. The most deadly, dangerous, bounty hunter in the galaxy lies prone on his back staring up at the sky for a few minutes every time his ship lands or takes off. This would give any enemies a perfect window of opportunity to blow him to kingdom come while he struggles to get into or out of his seat.

I’m definitely not the first person to have noticed this flaw, as the good people at Lucasfilm have come up with a half-assed explanation of sorts. If the manufacturer was clever enough to build a spaceship, surely they would have been smart enough to recognize this design flaw in the first place?

Painting the Slave I and the Boba Fett figurine has been labor intensive, but fun. Since nobody is going to see much of the interior anyway, I’m trying to use as many different shades of gray as possible, even though the instructions want me to spray paint pretty much everything one shade of gray, with little touches of black thrown in.

Working with spray paint is a lot of fun. It’s a shame that law abiding, suburban youth--not unlike my considerably younger self--aren’t introduced to this wonderful medium. I spent countless hours in class, filling up loose leaf and defacing binders and textbooks with silly doodles when a much more worthwhile art project was literally parked right under my ass.

I had, in grade seven, a very cool ride: a chopper bicycle. Or rather, it would have been cool if it had been the late seventies. It was the late eighties, and everybody had a BMX. I, on the other hand, was pulling into the school bike rack perched on a banana seat, and getting teased mercilessly for it.

It was a shame I wasn’t a little more confident at the time. That bike had everything: mud guards, high-rise handlebars, and a sissy bar on the back. I’ve long since forgotten, and don’t really care about the taunts. The one thing I do regret is not pushing the envelope with that bike.

The paint had begun to fade, and repainting the bike might have taught me a useful skill. Even if I botched the job, spray painting the bike in a bright, day-glo color would have been fun, and the visual equivalent of a large, upraised middle finger to any classmate who thought my bike looked lame.

I’d like to think that’s what the Fett Man would have done, if he were in junior high school.

Update, Extreme Geeking Edition

For all you Sealab 2021 fans out there, Rocky sent me this message and a link: Hesh = M.C. Chris

Me Am So Smart

2009-07-25T05:39:00.008Z

Every single time I've used watercolor pencils with a fountain pen, I've smeared ink all over the place and wrecked the drawing I was working on. I couldn't figure out how Graham Roumieu, the author of In Me Own Words, Me Write Book, Bigfoot: I Not Dead did his water color renderings of Bigfoot without smearing the ink.

I was doing a sketch of one of his Bigfoot illustrations, and looking closely at the watercolors, it hit me: he did the watercolor first, AND THEN he drew over it in ink.

I tried it. And whaddya know. It does work!

Or, after seeing this video, maybe I need to go back to the drawing board...

Update: An anonymous commenter was kind enough to point me in the direction of ink that won't smear when used with watercolors.

Dungeons, Dragons, & Brokers

2009-07-24T21:10:00.004Z

The lead miniatures that were sold at the hobby store looked really cool. I didn’t have a clue as to how to paint one. They were so tiny. I left mine, a paladin, unfinished, and never gave a second thought to painting it. On the few occasions that I played Dungeons & Dragons, I’d put it on the table and stare at it, sliding it back and forth across the table.

The little metal sculptures were a source of endless fascination, done in a medium, lead, that I was unfamiliar with, and had a slightly greater range of subject matter and detail than I was used to. My experience with sculpture up to that point had been confined to toys like G.I. Joe figures (plastic), Royal Dalton Figurines (porcelain), Saints (plaster, and occasionally plastic), and Jesus (wood, plaster, brass, plastic or various combinations thereof).

Mom didn’t want me to play Dungeons & Dragons, but in the end, she shouldn’t have wasted any time worrying about it. Not unlike my classes in school, I found it hard to stay focused on the game. Role playing games went over my head, because at their heart, RPGs are a collective and co-operative enterprise.

While collecting comic books and playing RPGs frequently go hand in hand, I probably represented the extreme end of the comic book collector bell curve: equal parts bibliophile and pseudo-speculator. Collecting comic books, for me, at that particular point in time, was a highly individualistic and speculative endeavor.

Living in the People’s Republic of Saskatoba, I had no idea what a libertarian, let alone an anarcho-capitalist was, but I brought a Monopoly mindset to what should have been a communal endeavor. I was more focused on acquiring gold, weapons, and magic objects for my character than whatever the hell it was the Dungeon Master was trying to get us to do.

More importantly, it was hard to relate to the games on an aesthetic level. I know that there are many different kinds of RPGs but at the beginner level, it’s all about Dungeons & Dragons, which relies heavily on Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft for its mythology.

I’d read stuff like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy which mined the same fictional vein as Howard and Lovecraft before I tried Dungeons & Dragons, but Bilbo and Frodo never had a hold on my imagination in quite the same way that Superman, Han Solo, Captain Kirk, Indiana Jones, and Tom Sawyer did.

Apart from the aforementioned miniatures, the games didn’t have much in the way of visual appeal either. While the cover art for the game boxes, player manuals, and novelizations invariably “popped,” inspired, in part, by Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta, the black and white illustrations contained within were invariably…crude and stiff. The RPG manuals and character sheets had all the charm and warmth of a school textbook and worksheet.

On the other hand, comic books were a riot of color and frenzied activity. And the late eighties were a good time to be a comic book collector, especially if you were willing to go off the beaten path and sample what the horror, humor, war and crime genres had to offer.

But that’s a story for another day…

Pimp My Tie Fighter

2009-07-18T03:27:00.003Z

The Tie Fighter is the first Star Wars model I should have built. It's easy to paint. In fact, it is a little too easy. Everything is so monochrome, nothing but different shades of gray and black. I'm trying to liven up the cockpit a bit. I'm painting the seat tan, and the control column silver.

The model company should include more optional accessories and decals in these kits. I'd feel more free to pimp out these Star Wars models if the X-wing came with Bomber Girl fuselage art, or if there was some itty bitty fuzzy dice for the Tie Fighter.

Blue Sparks

2009-07-16T01:26:00.005Z

Sparks. Blue sparks. Maybe, the sparks were green. The sparks could have been blue and green. It has been years since I’ve read Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, but those sparks made smoking cigars seem like magic. Cigars that had been soaked in rum or brandy. The secret to not getting sick, at least according to the narrator Leonard Neeble (or was it the eponymous character himself who advanced the claim), was chewing bubble gum while smoking the cigar.

I never got to test the theory. Apart from an abortive attempt with ragweed when I was thirteen, I didn’t experiment with smoking until I was in university. I can’t remember my first cigarette, but I can remember my first cigar. Living north of the border at the time, I was able to purchase a Cuban – I believe it was a Romeo Y Julieta – for my inaugural experience with that noxious weed.

It was awful, but not in the way one would have expected. My Dad is the worst kind of non-smoker – an ex-smoker – so I didn’t want him to find out what I’d been up to. I tried to smoke it out on the patio, but that cold prairie wind made lighting the thing difficult, if not impossible. I don’t know if I ever got it properly lit. It was dry, and relatively flavorless, and after a few puffs I was bored and cold. So I stubbed it out, went back inside, and brushed my teeth very carefully. I might as well have rolled up the five dollar bill I used to purchase the cigar itself and smoked that instead, for all the good it did.

I’ve smoked cigarettes, but they’ve never held the same iconic fascination that cigars hold for me. Leonard Neeble, Allie Fox, Howard the Duck, P.J. O’Rourke, H.L. Mencken, Groucho Marx, George Burns, Bill Cosby, George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, James Gandolfini, and Wendell Pierce – the cigar has a full nelson on my imagination that a cigarette will never have. A cigar is more than just a cultural statement though, and while I’ve smoked my share of cigarettes, they’ve never really become a habit for me.

A cigarette is kind of like a potato chip. You can’t have just one, and chips are a snack, not a meal. Any cravings that I have might have been placated, but they will return shortly, and with a vengeance. A cigar is a lot like the steaks that get served at Mortons. I can order the baked potato with the steak if I want to, but there really isn’t any point. Once I’ve finished that steak, I’m done. And I feel fine.

It isn’t just the cigar itself that makes smoking so much fun. The accessories help enhance the experience. Humidors are probably the most important thing to own, next to the actual cigar itself. Nothing brings out the flavor of a cigar quite like a humidor. I’ve smoked my share of Cuban cigars in Canada and Japan, but they’ve never been quite as memorable or enjoyable (albeit very satisfactory, as most cigars are) as the every-country-except-Cuba cigars that I’ve stashed for a week or two or three in a humidor here.

The other missing part of the accessories equation is the means by which the cigar is lit. I know that some connoisseurs would frown on the practice, but for me, I like the retro charm of firing up a stogie with a Zippo. However, with someone who smokes as infrequently as I do, there is just one catch: the Zippo doesn’t hold a charge.

Nic and I were out on the balcony, and I had just broken out the cigars that I had been saving in the humidor for the last three weeks. But I couldn’t light the cigar because all the fuel in this masterpiece, this classic of American design and engineering had…evaporated. If I were a regular smoker, I don’t think this design flaw in the Zippo would ever have become apparent, but it was cruelly driven home to me that evening.

All was not lost. Nic had the foresight to bring a torch with him, and we puffed away on the Tabak Especial Balada Coffee infusion cigars he had purchased in Texas. After all, regardless of how the cigar is stored, or lit, or for that matter where it was grown, or how much it cost, as Freud once noted, a good cigar is a smoke.

Books That I Enjoyed Paging Through in Libraries and Bookstores, But Have Not Read From Cover To Cover Until Now

2009-07-06T22:18:00.009Z

The official picture posted online doesn’t do the building any justice. One of the first places my parents took us to in Winnipeg was the St. Vital Library. At the time, it looked the way I thought a library should look. It was all brick on the outside, and had winding staircases and rooms crammed with shelves of books on the inside. For some reason, I’ve always remembered it as a whimsical, gingerbread-gothic hybrid, all cupolas and gables, designed by some lovable, eccentric, and unknown local architect.

The building clearly isn’t a miniature Smithsonian, but rather something a little bit more modern. The quirkiness of the design itself can be chalked up to unusual shape of the property that the library was built on, and not just the whimsy of some lovable eccentric. And that anonymous architect has a name: George A. Stewart. So the building is a little bit more prosaic (though still something of an underrated local landmark) than I remembered it, but that isn’t terribly important.

What really matters is the world of education, enlightened ideas, and imagination that the City of Winnipeg opened up for a young boy who had blown his allowance on comic books, slurpees, and video games, and had nothing better to do with his time. Dickens, Zola, Descartes, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Proust, Locke, Marx, Tolstoy and Hegel: a feast for the mind, and all free of charge.

Hegel was, well, I’d seen his name referenced in a back issue of Howard the Duck, and it took me all of one sentence to realize that Hegel wasn’t my cup of tea. Stephen King showed much more promise than any of those dead boring guys. The book that got me interested in his work was Cycle of the Werewolf. On my frequent visits to the library, I’d take it off the shelf, flip through the book, admire the beautiful illustrations by Berni Wrightson, and occasionally read a line or two from the text itself.

The only part of the story I read in its entirety was the chapter where the fat chick gets chewed up by the werewolf. Was Mr. King such a master of terror that I couldn’t bear to read the book? With all due respect to Mr. King, that wasn’t the issue. I certainly didn’t have any problems reading Christine, The Tommyknockers, or The Running Man. However, for whatever reason, I enjoyed paging through the novel, but never read it.

Cycle of the Werewolf wasn’t the only book that I’d leaf through and enjoy, but never actually read. This is a pattern that has repeated itself with all the books written by my favorite authors. I thumbed through The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test at the library and owned a used paperback of The Right Stuff, both written by Tom Wolfe, for years before reading either title, despite the fact that I enjoyed reading Bonfire of the Vanities. Before I even knew who P.J. O’Rourke was, I’d paged through National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook parody on many different occasions in the humor section of the bookstore, but it didn’t occur to me to actually read the thing until Rugged Land reissued it in 2003.

Of course, once I got around to actually reading these titles, I wished I had read them sooner. I thought I’d worked my way through that list until I had a conversation with my sweetie, and I mentioned that Cycle of the Werewolf was one King novel I hadn’t read, even though I’d enjoyed looking at those Berni Wrightson illustrations for years. About a week later, a first edition of the trade paperback arrived in the mail – it had even been signed by Berni Wrightson. The colors popped, and Wrightson’s line work seemed even more detailed and ornate than I remembered it.

Of course, the book sat on my shelf for a few weeks. I’d pick it up, flip through it, and admire Wrightson’s illustrations. I even read the part where the fat chick gets eaten by the werewolf. But I didn’t start reading it from start until finish. Until last night. I couldn’t get to sleep, and I started reading it, beginning with January. I made it all the way to May, and I’m going to finish it when I get home from work tonight.

It’s so good, in fact, that I wish I had read it sooner.

My Andy Warhol: An American Valentine

2009-07-04T22:47:00.014Z

Dad was a performance artist. I hadn't even heard of the word when I was seven, let alone what it might have meant, but if Dad wasn't a bona fide, dues-paying member of that body fluid spraying tribe, then I don't know the meaning of the term. I can remember Dad settling a bet with a next door neighbor, and he cut him a check.

But not just any check. Dad got a big piece of poster sized bristol board, a sharpie marker, and a ruler, and got down to business. Mr. Deutscher even cashed that bristol board check, although I don't think the bank was too happy about having to honor it, but honor it they did.

Which is a long, very roundabout way of saying that if I have even the smallest spark of creativity in me, it probably comes from my father. Unfortunately enough for Canada, that sort of creativity didn't attract a lot of media attention on the Canadian prairies during the eighties. Nor did it pay the bills. Dad had to work full time at a discount clothing retailer to do that. Art was just something he did, unconsciously, on the side.

On the other hand, if you happened to be Andy Warhol, and you lived in New York, art was something you could do very consciously, full time as a matter of fact, and not only pay the bills, but make even more money than what a Canadian discount retailer could ever dream of making. Not only that, but your death would attract considerable media attention.

I don't think I really knew or understood what the difference between Canada and the USA was until I watched that CBC documentary on Andy Warhol. I'd never given any thought to where I would live when I was older, let alone where I wanted to live. But after watching that tribute to Andy Warhol, I knew that Saskatchewan wouldn't cut it. The images and, ironically, the music ("Andy Warhol" by David Bowie was playing in a continuous loop during the documentary) and the lifestyle, well, it was as far away from Claude Langevin landscapes, potato salad, paper mills, and guys wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts as a geek could get in those days.

At this point, I should say that all this occurred during the eighties. There were no two-hour waits to see a GP at a Canadian hospital and, despite the slightly higher unemployment rate, I suspect that those who were gainfully employed could have counted on a level of job security that an American probably couldn't be certain of. Pinkie (especially the Canadian variety) brains routinely got their panties in a bunch about Ronald Reagan wanting to destroy the world. New York was an ungovernable hellhole, and American manufacturing had seen much better days. Living in Saskatchewan or Manitoba wouldn't, and in fact shouldn't, have been such an unattractive option.

But unattractive it had become. Being a Mad magazine reader, I was well aware of all of America's negatives, but there was something so much more magnetic about our neighbors to the south. I might have gotten Andy Warhol's paintings confused with Ray Lichtenstein's canvasses, but the point is they both popped in a way that a Group of Seven poster never could. Even during what everybody thought was a decline in American influence, the culture still had more energy and vitality than everybody else. And I wanted to be a part of it.

And I would become a part of it, quite literally, as I currently live quite happily in Alexandria, Virginia with my beautiful California girl. However, I think being an American is as much of a state of mind as it is about living in an actual physical location, and I hadn't quite reached that stage yet. Andy Warhol was going to help me get there.

It was easy enough to look at picture of Frank Zappa, and say, "Cool man:"

And then see a picture of Gordon Lightfoot and snicker, "How lame:"

But it's a little harder, at least when you're worried about slipping a rung or two further down the socio-economic ladder, to embrace Kid Rock, at least in all his bizarre, hedonistic, let your freak-flag fly high glory:

Ella Fitzgerald and alt-rock were what I believed to be the more socially acceptable musical options, but I did have my go to hell moments. For my money, I prefer the lesser-known work of Vaughn Bode, to the more high-brow stuff produced by Robert Crumb. I've always had an affection for the works of P.J. O'Rourke and Tom Wolfe, but there was a time when I'd have explained my interest in Stephen King as nothing more than junk reading.

I don't want to come off as some reverse-snob, pissing on somebody's high-brow tastes just to justify some of my low-brow tastes. As a matter of fact, I don't really see it as high- or low-brow anymore, it's all just part of one big, beautiful... no-brow. The highs and lows can't exist without each other, and the best way to appreciate either extreme is to embrace the other side with equal vigor.

And that's what I love about living down here. I love that go to hell ethic, like the colors in a silk screen by Andy Warhol. It took me awhile to appreciate it. I had my own hang-ups about slipping further down the socio-economic ladder, but I managed to get glimpses of that freedom, of just liking something for the hell of it, and not giving a fuck what anybody really thought.

The first time I saw Takashi Murakami's artwork was in 1997, in South Korea. I couldn't read hangul, so I didn't know who he was. I couldn't play the status game, one-upping my imagined betters. I just liked those paintings, statues, and big balloon installations because... the colors "popped," like Warhol, and Murakami was riffing off the Japanese anime I'd grown up with as a boy and young adult. It was brilliant. I didn't know why, or even how, but I knew it was... beautiful.

It took awhile, but that was where it all began. I couldn't articulate it at the time, but it was the first time that I realized that there was nothing wrong with what I liked. I already knew it was okay to like William Faulkner and Ella Fitzgerald, but it was also okay to embrace The Cramps and Stephen King. Andy Warhol was great, but so were Playboy and the illustrations in Stephen King novels. I was raised just as much on the latter, even if my parents didn't know it, and it was artistically every bit as valid as what Warhol was doing. In fact, I'm sure that it is what Andy had been trying to tell me along. Once I learned how to say, "Fuck it. I don't care what anybody thinks," I knew I would be happiest living in the USA.

So thank you, Andy, for the inspiration. Despite the best efforts of the Canadian media, pinkie-brains north and south of the Canadian/US border, brain dead politicians (with D's or R's behind their names), and the Wagon Queen Family Truckster, I've found a place to live - and thrive - that I love like no other.

Me & Malvina

2009-06-27T19:18:00.015Z

Weeds stopped using "Little Boxes" as its introductory theme song and opted for a cold intro last season. I think it was a sound decision. I prefer the pithy visual puns, and "Little Boxes" has to be one of the most smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious songs ever written.

I didn't always feel this way about Malvina Reynolds's, ugh, classic. Dad loves the Pete Seeger cover version, and I'm certain the first time I heard it was on the drive back home from a fishing trip with my father. Later, in university, I thought the bit about how "the system" forces us to conform and become "lawyers and doctors and business executives" quite clever and perceptive.

However, working summers in a warehouse convinced me that being a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or a business executive wasn't such a bad thing. If someone has the moxie and discipline to put themselves through school and become an architect or engineer, only an asshat would mock them for it. Despite my mercifully short stint in the blue collar trenches, I still retained some residual affection for the song. After all, nobody really likes a McMansion, no matter how hard the owner worked for it, right?

Maybe. Although I still had pleasant memories of fishing trips and sympathized with the class warfare angle (those lawyers might be rich, but they have no taste, ha-ha) I didn't fully appreciate what a douchebag Malvina Reynolds was until I saw this photo:

Malvina Reynolds is a soulless, bloodless, ~~"political activist"~~ freak. The houses are by no means "ticky tacky". They were built out of red wood, which is apparently one of the most durable woods that can be used in construction. As for the "boxes" charge, these are the kind of suburban homes latte sipping, Prius driving, urban hipsters would throw their own Grandmas under a Hummer to own.

In other words, these are creative, attractive homes to live in. It's not just the fact that there are X number of floor plans that can be combined in any number of Y different ways. Look at all the angles and cantilevers on the homes. It's straight out of Frank Lloyd Wright. The design is done in a fundamentally modern, American idiom. Why any self-styled "creative" person would want to mock it is puzzling to me. Malvina Reynolds is nothing more than a philistine for heaping scorn on the architects and the developer that built this development.

Look at the shriveled old bat:

It's not that hard to imagine someone like Malvina being taken on a tour of some Xenuawful concrete monstrosity of a Cuban or Soviet apartment complex and clapping her hands with childish glee upon seeing the communal kitchen or hearing that the happy workers only have to walk or bike two miles to the nearest bus stop.

But middle class people in America looking for a nice, affordable home? They can go fuck themselves as far as Marvina Reynolds is concerned. The architect who drafted the plans for these houses doesn't get any credit for his creativity from Malvina either, although some commie hack probably got a blow job of a "folk song" for his concrete abomination, if Malvina Reynolds ever visited the USSR or Cuba. And brainiacs like Malvina Reynolds profess astonishment when Ayn Rand's novels are embraced as classics by the masses in America???

So, Malvina Reynolds, you, like your hero, Karl Marx, can go suck it. As for me, I'm putting Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Mid-century Suburb by Rob Keil on my reading list.

Geek Bling

2009-06-26T01:25:00.007Z

Rocky had the coolest watches. Nice, retro digital watches: one was a Fossil, and the other one was ordered directly from the maker online. Very bling, very geek chic. At the time, I was still under the thrall of the WASP credo that a watch should be understated.

Which was kind of retarded, now that I think about it. It's easy to be "modest" and wear a plain Timex when the cuff links you're wearing were inherited from your grandfather. But for those of us without the benefit of a trust fund - a category to which I most definitely belong - next to our wedding bands, watches are probably the nicest, and only really acceptable pieces of jewelery most men get to wear.

Thanks to Rocky's inspirational example, I've been wearing big, chunky metal time pieces strapped to my wrist for the last five years. However, until last week, I didn't have the courage to follow his more fashion forward example. That changed, when I saw the Projects Iridium Watch.

Since I check my Blackberry constantly, watches have become more jewelry than timepieces for me. Accuracy is not an issue with this watch. It's a simple design, but I like how the blank white face "pops" because there are no hands visible on the face, just the red and blue dots moving beneath the face of the watch.

While I do love this watch, I don't like the fact that the wristband is attached with screws to the case. Pins would have been appreciated. This is the kind of watch that would look great with a grosgrain strap, but that is no longer an option due to the difficulty of removing those tiny screws.

Which is a shame, because when I saw this online, I knew I had to have it. Next time I see another clever timepiece from Projects, I'll think twice about the purchase because of that odd design quirk.

Red Squadron

2009-06-19T23:50:00.003Z

Putting glue on the little plastic pieces of a model and sticking them together is the easy part. Actually painting all those itty bitty parts is the big challenge. Masking tape and tweezers help. And that black paint that got mixed in with the red paint? It adds realism to the X-Wing fighter. Now it looks like it has seen battle against a whole squadron of Tie-Fighters.

Bikini Girls With Machine Guns

2009-06-19T01:59:00.017Z

James Ellroy once said (and I'm quoting from memory), "Don't write about what you know. Write about what you like to read." It's good advice, and if I'd followed it when I was younger, this blog post could have been a comic strip.

When I was in junior high school, I loved comic books, and I liked drawing. The classroom was my studio, my binders and the lined paper within a canvas, a Bic ball point pen was my brush, and the various denizens of the Marvel and DC Universe were my inspiration.

For some bizarre reason, I also enjoyed drawing punk rockers with large mohawks. I'd seen a review of the bio-pic "Sid & Nancy" on television, and although I was surrounded by legions of hair metal headbangers, my heart beat in solidarity with the punks. Workingclass London toughs and New York City hoodlums trump Canuckistani Beavis and Butthead everytime.

I was probably more Jean-Michel Basquiat than Leonardo Da Vinci, but what else was a young boy living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan supposed to do? Certainly not pay attention to the teacher droning on in front of the class.

My parents, who either wanted to encourage their budding Keith Haring, or at the very least get their little brat to stop destroying his school supplies, bought me a sketchbook and some charcoals for Christmas. This had the unintended effect of killing off any desire to be an artist on my part, although I did stop defacing my binders.

Of course, my parents weren't to blame for strangling any artistic sensibilities in the cradle. Their gift opened my eyes: until then I had no idea what a difference the right tools could make. A Bic on a maroon vinyl binder cover just couldn't give me the same results as charcoal on heavy bleached white paper stock. Ironically, it was the very comic books that inspired me to do sketches on any flat surface that put a stake in the heart of any desire I had to draw.

I'd read the letter columns of my favorite comic books (I was a weird kid, and there ain't a lot to do if you're raised to be a devout Catholic in Manitoba) and the advice from editors, writers, and the artists themselves was the same: anyone who wanted to be a pro shouldn't use comic books as their only artistic model

It was good advice...of a sort. I'd agree that if an artist isn't careful, he can end up drawing a lot like Rob Liefield, who has obviously spent a lot of time drawing boobs, boobs, and more boobs:

And not much else. Adam Hughes draws beautiful tits:

But one of the reasons why the tits are so spectacular is that the hands look pretty good too. And hands are a lot harder to draw than a pair of breasts.

Combine it with a general appreciation of the human chest in all its permutations (see the Justice League cover at the top of this post), and it's no wonder that Hughes can make an easy living as a cover artist while Robert Liefield, well, I don't think that Obama would want to hang this in the Oval Office:

Still, as a neophyte just starting out, ray-guns, dinosaurs, and bikini babes with machine guns would have been better practice than using coffee cups and the tree in my backyard. The latter are boring, and even when done fairly well, are never quite as satisfactory to draw, initially anyway, as an alien blob getting ready to chow down on some little green men.

And if the boring sketch of dull everyday objects doesn't pan out, the process quickly becomes one great big cycle of negative reinforcement. By the time I got to university, I'd given up drawing everything, except for the occasional spiral in the margins of my notebook. There were a few coughs and splutters of artistic activity, but by my late twenties any interest I had in putting pencil to paper in a non-verbal capacity had died out.

But the story doesn't quite end there. My muse and I were buying some games for our nephew at a Toys 'r Us, and she suggested that we purchase a copy of The Boy's Guide to Drawing for myself. After one very happy month of drawing aliens from the book almost every day, I've hit a wall on one robot I've been trying to sketch. I can't nail the right perspective on a pair of tank treads that I'm trying to draw.

I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. My brother-in-law has some "How to Draw in Perspective" manual that is gathering dust on his bookshelf. I flipped through it a year ago, and thought it looked pretty dry, but it is starting to look a lot more interesting now. How else am I going to learn how to draw the best bikini girls with machine guns this side of Adam Hughes?

And Step On It!

2009-06-17T11:02:00.007Z

Crystal meth vending machines: I'm okay with the idea. Back in the day, when I grew my hair down to my shoulders and struggled to get through The Communist Manifesto (all forty miserable, tedious, soul-crushing pages of it) I would have snorted and dismissed the idea. Now, even though I wouldn't use them myself, I don't think they would be such a bad idea.

Part of the credit (or blame) for this change of heart can be laid directly at the feet of P.J. O'Rourke. During my senior year of high school, I thought that he was funny, but there was no way his ideas could work in the real world. I still think he is funny, ten years later, and now I think he might be on to something with that whole unfettered capitalism thing. If it's one thing a Commie or a Christian hates, it is the idea that someone out there might be enjoying themselves.

All of which is a roundabout and extremely tangential way of saying that I'm really enjoying O'Rourke's latest book, Driving Like Crazy. Reading the introduction to his latest collection of articles, I remembered the reason why I was originally drawn to his work in the first place: he can argue, effectively, for ideas that I thought I would never seriously entertain. In this instance, that American automobiles are, or were, the best designed and engineered cars on the planet.

I don't know enough about cars to judge whether or not P.J. O'Rourke's arguments are correct. But that is really besides the point. It's nice to read authors with whom I agree. However, it takes a lot of talent to hold someone's interest when the author is writing about a subject the reader is unfamiliar with, and goes against what he thought was the commonly accepted wisdom on the subject.

Thanks to recent advances in medical treatment, I'm sure I'll be enjoying O'Rourke's cheerful brand of iconoclasm for years to come. And despite his answer to my question about his plans to write a memoir about his days at The National Lampoon, I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope he changes his mind about that firm "No" he gave me.

As for Karl Marx: you, sir, can go suck it.

This Is Just To Say Sweetie

2009-06-13T16:53:00.006Z

The dull notes
are best
post-it on
the counter

from my
wife "Good morning please
vacuum
the carpet

Love, Lisa"
I love these letters
so sweet
and so warm.

This is just to say, sweetie, that I had no idea how true that William Carlos Williams poem was until I got married. The most mundane notes from my wife are better than anything I've ever read in the The Odyssey.

Greg Gutfeld Wants To Blow Your Mind

2009-05-28T11:23:00.005Z

Anarcho-capitalism is the only answer. I cut my teeth on the techno-utopianism of Kevin Kelly and the pharmaceutical optimism of Jay Stevens (authors of Out of Control and Storming Heaven in the mid-nineties.

It took awhile for the implications of both these books to fully sink in, but when it did, there is no looking back. It's why Red Eye is such an interesting show to watch. On the surface, the lighter tone of Red Eye is a refreshing change of pace from the pompous, oh-so-serious tone of the O'Reibermann monster.

Those guys are the broadcasting equivalent of brussel sprouts. Even when he is talking about waterboarding, the host of Red Eye, Greg Gutfeld can do it with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye.

On a deeper level though, I think Gutfeld really gets it. If we haven't read the same books, then we've certainly come to the same conclusions about drug legalization and global warming. On his television show, Gutfeld tends to soft-pedal the implications of his ideas, but if you follow the link, you can see the truly radical direction of where his ideas are going.

Figurative is the NEW Abstract

2009-05-23T04:54:00.022Z

Bleeding Jesuses. Lots and lots of Bleeding Jesuses, with the occasional radiant, doe-eyed Virgin thrown in for variety - that pretty much covered my early childhood exposure to figurative art. I can remember my parents discussing the purchase of some Norman Rockwell prints of old Saturday Evening Post covers, but nothing ever came of it.

In junior high school, any exposure I received to non-Bleeding Jesus figurative art was through Iron Maiden t-shirts and album covers. Which weren't really all that different from the Bleeding Jesus pictures. I think that's why I was drawn to Bill Sienkiwicz's more abstract artwork. It was about as far away from Iron Maiden and the Catholic Church as I could get, in terms of Sienkiewicz's ethic and look. It was great.

Consider Sienkiewicz's version of a Daredevil's arch nemesis, the Kingpin. The Kingpin has always looked like a tool in his purple pants, white blazer, and cravat, or as some wag at Details once said, "More P.J. O'Dork than Tom Wolfe". Sienkiwicz's version of the Kingpin, was Tony Soprano fifteen years before he made his television debut:

I love the vest and the rolled up sleeves. And the cigar? That is just gravy.

But then something funny happened on the way to the comic book shop. I stopped at the library. Paging through a Stephen King novel, The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, I was sucked in by the illustrations Phil Hale did for the novel.

Part of the appeal of those paintings that Phil Hale did was the fact that his idea of a "Western" look was exactly in sync with what I thought the American Old West looked like: the Spain of Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy. Sorry, Michael Whelan fans: Roland is "The Man With No Name" and not just some generic cowpoke featured on a Louis L'amour cover.

The other thing that I couldn't articulate at the time, but can now, is the fact that Phil Hale was working within a style that I was familiar with (Norman Rockwell) BUT, unlike the carbon copy Bleeding Jesuses and Eddies that I saw everywhere, was also moving that style forward.

Rockwell is good at capturing a specific moment in time and freezing it, the moment that everybody sees and remembers. Hale has firm grip on "bullet time", for lack of a better term. It's like Hale can capture events that the viewer would never be able to see with the naked eye if they were to occur in real time.

So thank you, Phil Hale. The Bleeding Jesuses and Eddies have never been my cup of tea. However, I don't think I'd enjoy those John William Waterhouse prints that my sweetie pie hung on our bedroom wall quite as much if it wasn't for your earlier outreach efforts in the pages of a Stephen King novel.

Rip & Read

2009-05-20T13:43:00.002Z

What is the best way to read a magazine? It's simple - I just tear off the pages as I read them. That way I never lose my place when I'm reading a copy of GQ or Juggs.

I learned this trick from Penn Jillette. Apparently, he loves Moby Dick, and rather than use a bookmarker, he tears off a chapter when he is finished reading it. I wonder how many copies of Moby Dick he has purchased during his lifetime?

Nota Bene: If the magazine is stapled together, this method for reading periodicals quickly becomes a lot messier and needlessly complicated.

The Cell

2009-05-15T00:58:00.001Z

Beep. Beep. Beep. Some asshat was typing a text message next to me while George Pelecanos was doing a reading from his new novel, The Way Home at Politics and Prose. His phone had gone off, and when he silenced it after four rings, I thought that would be the end of it. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Beep. Beep. Beep. I was wrong. The old man wore a cheap burgundy sports jacket and brown trousers. He accessorized this ensemble with his antiquated, ugly, candy bar, cell phone. Pelecanos looked dapper in his grey suit and neatly trimmed beard. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Beep. Beep. Beep. When he sat down next to me, he seemed polite enough. He had a warbly, watery voice, the very anti-thesis of the smooth baritone that Pelecanos possesses. Upon seeing my Kindle, he announced that he was a "paper man" himself, and we had a brief discussion about its relative merits. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Beep. Beep. Beep. This wasn't just rude. It was downright cruel. Two days ago, George Pelecanos lost his father, and the funeral was held this morning. I hope he didn't hear that cell phone. I couldn't help myself, I had to find out what the emergency was. I looked down at the cell phone. Beep. Beep. Beep.

"I'll call you later."

The Adventures Of Badass Roland & His Friend Eddie, Who Is Also Really Cool

2009-05-13T13:39:00.004Z

After a brief, uhm, 13 year hiatus, I've started reading The Dark Tower by Stephen King. After reading part three, I thought I'd had enough of King's epic. For some reason, the character known as "Jake" really bugged me. To paraphrase the esteemed film critic Peter Griffin, "He insists upon himself."

Fortunately, I've forgiven Stephen King for this Jar Jar Binks like transgression, and have resumed reading the saga. I've been reading Wizard and Glass, and it is hard to put down.

I think King should have called the series, The Adventures of Badass Roland and His Friend Eddie, Who Is Also Really Cool and they could go around and just have adventures, like killing mob bosses and hunting down Osama Bin Laden. Roland and Eddie could live in a mansion, and Susannah and Jake would work in their crime fighting lab, and we would only see them at the start or end of the novel.

Most of the stories would just be Roland and Eddie shooting bad guys. And oh, yeah, Oy should be a ninja robot. It would be even cooler if Oy was a ninja robot who could transform into a car. Then Roland and Eddie wouldn't have to walk, run, or ride horses.

Stephen King should hire me as his assistant writer. I could help him re-write his novels and make them really awesome!

Crackberry Apps

2009-05-11T03:28:00.002Z

Heh. I think I just found a way to update my blog on my Crackberry without getting dinged for SMS text messages. Technology rulz, dude!!!
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

But I gotta figure out a way to remove that last sentence next time.

LMAO

Iron Man, Objectivist?

2009-05-09T15:45:00.007Z

Jesse Walker wrote an interesting article about the politics of superheroes. However, I think he ignored or didn’t discuss what I increasingly see as a major fault line between different kinds of superheroes. I love Iron Man because, at least in theory, you’d have to get some college education to build armor like that, and you do see Tony Stark working in a lab perfecting the suit.

On the other hand, a character like Wolverine just sits on his ass, smokes cigars, occasionally "trains" in the danger room and is just "naturally" gifted with a magical healing ability that makes him nearly indestructible. He has no visible means of supporting himself or any marketable job skills. Those adamantium claws aren't going to help him enter data any faster into an Excel spreadsheet for a marketing report.

Superheroes in the Superman and Wolverine mode have a smug, aristocratic, sensibility. I think it goes a long way to explaining why Superman is definitely a part of the popular culture, but has never really been taken seriously in the same way that Batman has. Superman is the Pete Seeger of American comic books, a slice of Americana that doesn't quite ring true to the spirit of the USA.

Get a job Logan, and try to show a little more ambition, Clark Kent. If you were really "Superman", fifty years is more than enough time to become the publisher of The Daily Planet.

Update: Mark Steyn responds to Jesse Walker.

Hot Pink Kindle

2009-05-07T00:27:00.006Z

Amazon rolled out a new version of the Kindle, but I don't think this is going to help The New York Times. All this does is draw attention to the fact that American newspapers look so drab and lifeless that Kindle owners won't think twice about making the switch from paper to e-ink. As much as I love my Kindle, textbooks and newspapers aren't going to win over consumers. A color screen that would make me reconsider my subscription to the dead tree edition of Wired, however, just might do the trick.

Update: Via Marginal Revolution, why the Kindle won't save newspapers.

Fallen Arches

2009-04-30T17:11:00.008Z

"If the New Balance sneakers I ordered don't arrive here on time, I could always wear my Converse sneakers to the basketball game," I said.

Ritchie winced. "Don't do that," he said, "They've got no support. You'll get hurt out there."

Ritchie, Russell, and my Dad are just a few of the people in my life who have offered that trenchant (and all too true) observation about canvas sneakers. And yet I feel strangely drawn to them. Growing up, by the time I realized how cool Vans and Converse sneakers were, retail outlets weren't selling them in my size.

Thank Xenu for the internets. My wife just bought me a beautiful pair of black Vans. I'll only be able to wear them once, or maybe twice a week, when I know I won't have to do a lot of walking. I still love 'em. I do think it is odd though, that unlike other classics of American design - the Zippo, Levi's, the iPod - the shoes are all aesthetics and no function.

Update: Now that I've had a chance to walk around in them, I realize I haven't been entirely fair to the good people over at Vans. The shoes offer much more support than the classic Converse sneaker - similar to what a good loafer would offer. I wouldn't want to run a marathon in them, but the shoes do allow for a more vigorous range of activity than just a little bit of walking.

In the Clouds

2009-04-11T05:20:00.003Z

For a couple of years now, I'd clung to my Hotmail addresses, even though I'd been using my domain name as my primary e-mail address. Part of it was pride in being an early adopter. I'm not a Super Badass Ninja Hacker, but I never had to use an underscore, number, or a middle initial with my primary Hotmail address.

Today I finally made the switch to a g-mail address. And this time around, it's painfully obvious that I'm getting on the bandwagon a little late, although I haven't had to stick an underscore or number next to or in my user name, thank Xenu. It does feels good, but in a weird way, I think it has finally killed any plans to replace my iBook.

One look at the applications available to me on gmail, and I knew that if I ever need a laptop, a netbook will suffice. The cloud rules.

Jump the Shark

2009-03-27T02:50:00.003Z

Intellectuals kinda jumped the shark when Dubya got elected. What a dumbass I was in the years before the 2000 election, wasting my time reading William Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh.

To be a member of the bien-pensant class in the salons of Winnipeg, all I had to do was say the following words: "Bush is stoopid. He scares me." I'm sure the bar was set just as low everywhere else. Nothing could be simpler - I didn't have to waste any time going to art galleries, reading books, listening to jazz standards or watching documentaries. It was as simple as nattering on incessantly about a politician everybody hated.

Now I can't be bothered. Mr. Siegel, you can grapple with Hegel, Marx, and ugh, David Brooks all you like. I'm off to bed, and while my wife reads, I'll play Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on my PSP.

Shopping In Alexandria

2009-03-15T22:44:00.004Z

It smelled like freedom, lube, and...sticking it to the man. Lisa and I had brunch this afternoon at the Overwood, and we thought it would be the perfect time to check out the the newest retail outlet on King Street, Le Tache.

I love it. I would hate it if Old Town looked like Times Square in New York circa the seventies, but it is hard to feel sorry for the city government after reading this:

Zarlenga spent $350,000 on plans to expand his hunting and fishing store, the Trophy Room. He worked with city officials for almost two years and thought he had their support -- until the architectural review board told him he couldn't alter the historic property.

So to all the soccer moms shopping for vibrators, middle aged men looking at the she-male DVDs, and frat boys purchasing American Gokkun, I say, "Thank you." As far as I'm concerned, you aren't a bunch of libertine perverts. I prefer to think of you as libertarian freedom fighters. Keep on sticking it to the man.

A Good Cigar Is A Smoke

2009-03-15T00:11:00.007Z

Picking out a Zippo is tough. It is the sort of thing you can hand down to your kids. And it has that classic, all-American mystic, developed for the US Army during World War II. The big question: would I let my freak flag fly high, and get something with a fancy design, or just go with the basic chrome?

I opted for minimalism. Lisa likes to buy cigars for me, and I like to smoke them, so when my father-in-law got me a gift certificate at an online cigar store, I figured it was time to get a humidor. Nic talked me out of getting a humidor that was catnip for Marks - a clear acrylic jar - and I opted for a small humidor with the classic spanish cedar wood lining the interior of the box.

Since I've just upped my game from Swisher Sweets to Arturo Fuentes, I thought spending a lot of money on a titanium Xikar cutter would be silly, so I opted for something a little more utilitarian in stainless steel.

No more wooden matches and scissors for me - I'll be lighting up my cigars in classic bad boy American style!

Would You Trust This Man With Your Television Series?

2009-03-07T19:29:00.008Z

Via Occasional Superheroine,Devin Faraci unwittingly nails the problem with Alan Moore:

Getting into writing and drawing mainstream comics today is like being in a cover band - you want to do your version of Aquaman. When the superhero dies, it's going to be like being in a garage band. You do it because you love it, because you have songs to sing. And maybe somebody will take notice and you'll make some bucks off it. And just as it is with music today, the ways that you sell your art to people will be different. Just like bands no longer rely on Sam Goody to carry their CDs, comic creators won't be stuck with Diamond and comic stores. Again, this has already begun.

Faraci's insight explains why Watchmen, despite what the editors at Time magazine would have us believe, will never be great literature. At best, Watchmen, and pretty much everything Alan Moore has ever written is fan fiction.

High quality, really well written, "professional" fan fiction, but fan fiction nevertheless. Apart from some clever narrative tricks, it's fundamentally no different from what Trekkies have written about Kirk and Spock.

Let me put it to you another way. Which guy would you rather hire to write for your television series: the guy whose best creative work was built on the shoulders of other people, and who probably hasn't showered for years:

Or the guy who created an entire comic book series from scratch and kept readers coming back for month in and month out for five years:

Just from looking at the two pictures, I can tell you I'd rather be sitting next to Brian K. Vaughan at a staff meeting. I bet you he uses a really nice cologne.

I rest my case.

The Kindle Has Landed

2009-03-02T15:01:00.008Z

Note to Jeff Bezos: The Kindle is a lot of fun. I love it. I really do. Cheap magazine subscriptions, the Wall Street Journal waiting for me as soon as I wake up, and brand new hardcovers like Outliers selling for less than the price of a trade paperback: I'm in love with my Kindle.

But you need more books from the obscure sections of the back catalog like this and this. I know it can be done if you are already selling a DNSFW book like this for the Kindle.

More suggestions for improving the Kindle here, and Wil Wheaton has an excellent post on the dustup over the text to speech feature on the Kindle 2 here.

Rum, Sodomy, & the Lash

2009-02-25T03:58:00.008Z

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jeff Bezos

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

The Kindle cometh. It should arrive this week. Lisa said it was shipped today. Watching this interview with Jeff Bezos, the modern Prometheus responsible for this amazing technological feat, made me feel uneasy. It rubbed me the wrong way. Jon Stewart's line of questioning...was so...stodgy...conservative...so like a Canadian liberal, lower case and UPPER CASE.

Jon Stewart is a professional comedian, and the stodginess is what makes the interview funny. But man, it's a lot less funny when you have to live under the jackboot of joyless prigs like Heather Mallick. Oh, she doesn't want to look like a prude:

The professors are careful to say that they are "pro-sex" and not either pro- or anti-porn. Me, too. Whatever floats your boat is fine with me. But they show us the real cultural landscape and it's a shock.

But the shriveled up old bat shows her true colors:

From then on, mainstream culture became increasingly sexually explicit and misogynistic.

We knew early on what Madonna's crotch looked like up close, even before she produced an entire coffee table book about it. Snoop Dogg popularized hard-core rap, daughters started demanding Bratz dolls (dressed like hookers) and glittery abbreviated stripper clothes, sons began rapping and killing prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto.

And then ordinary homely adults, far from pornworld, changed the way they looked at themselves.

I prefer American liberals, who tend to be more funny, hip, and with it, especially if they are red-blooded females like my beautiful wife. Or Ana Marie Cox:

Yesterday’s Reliable Source item got most of the facts right regarding my retirement from this smutty spot; if you’re wondering what word they bleeped, the unadulterated quote about my reasons for stepping down as chief Wonkette was: “My ass is tired,” pause, “From the sitting, I mean.” Heh. Just for old time’s sake. Ass-fucking used to be the new black; I’m pretty sure that sodomy has now, uhm, jumped the shark. (Which is, of course, legal in Texas.)

So come on all you liberal Democrats, the choice is clear: you can cheerfully embrace sodomy and technology like Ana Marie Cox, or try and approximate Heather Mallick's joyless plagiarism of the worst elements of Maureen Dowd and Jerry Falwell.

I know which side I'd rather be on: assfucking and twitter are much more fun than whatever brand of clapped out puritanical socialism Mallick is selling. Sodomy and technology. That's the American Way.

Update: Democrats can add monkeys and pot to the list of fun things they should champion.

I'm not sure if I've already linked to this, but since I'm too lazy to check my older posts, Wired has a review of the Kindle 2.0 here.

Suck

2009-02-23T23:41:00.006Z

Reviews are tough work. Doing them on a regular, week in, week out, schedule ain't easy. So this isn't really a review, since I haven't finished reading his new book, Why We Suck. This is more of an observation: is it me or is Denis Leary seriously over-rated as a comedian? Maybe his work loses something on the printed page.

Dubya jokes in a book that is published, as I recall, about a month after the presidential election are kinda passe, no? Not unlike having a 9/11 "truther" on Rescue Me seven years after the fact and during the fourth season of the series, it's not the most artistically courageous move.

Just sayin'.

Cotton and Mud

2009-02-20T01:20:00.003Z

Mud. I loathe the stuff. Try being a clothes horse in Winnipeg during spring. It's painful. The damn stuff gets all over your shoes and pants. It doesn't matter whether you travel by car or foot, that stuff is going to get all over your shoes and trouser cuffs. The grit gets in your face. You never really feel clean for the first few weeks of spring.

I'd try and read Wordsworth and other romantic poets, but for some reason it never took. It wasn't the fact that they lived in the nineteenth century. I loved reading Mark Twain. And then, while I was reading Huckleberry Finn for class, it hit me: Twain understood mud.

Wordsworth and the other romantics would blather on about how beautiful spring was. But while spring brought welcome relief from the freezing cold temperatures of winter on the Canadian prairies, it was also ugly as sin. In other words, lots of mud. And Twain understood it, and no doubt understood my pain, if his famous white suit is anything to go by.

This is a long winded way of saying why I love reading not just Mark Twain, but P.J. O'Rourke. The man speaks my language:

Of course, at 10, my critique of the House of the Future was, “It’s neat.” But, within the limits of childish understanding, I would have tried to explain. I was an architecture fan like my friends were sports fans, and a big Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie School booster. And I couldn’t help but boo the diluted, piddle-colored brick version of the International Style that filled the construction sites of my childhood. The only way you could tell a shopping center from a grade school from a minimum-security prison was by the amount of floodlighting and fence wire involved.

My wife and I were having a discussion about architecture recently, and she was shocked and appalled when I expressed my admiration for the way they had paved over everything in Osaka, Japan. At the time, I was being contrarian just for the hell of it - while I admire many things about Osaka, and even Winnipeg, cold, institutional, concrete architecture is not one of them. I'm perfectly happy to spend my days living amongst old, beautiful, buildings made out of red brick with you, sweetheart.

The Brave and The Bold

2009-02-16T16:29:00.015Z

Note to Sony and DC Comics: If conservatives like the Hyacinth Girl get God of War and a really hot lesbian version of Batwoman, surely the least you can do for libertarians is bring Bio-Shock to the PSP and give us back the real Question.

And I don't mean some John Bircher like Rosarch or a conspiracy nut like the Jeffrey Combs version of the Question. I want him quoting Von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Megan McArdle while he is beating the shit out of ELF terrorists or bitch-slapping the evil Pelosiwoman and her henchperson Dr. Krugman for stimulating the economy.

A Slightly Related Tanget: Geekgasm! Mike Zeck (one of the best Punisher and Batman artists) is doing the character designs for Batman: The Brave and the Bold, one of which is the greatest superhero you've never heard of, Booster Gold! Scroll down to the bottom of the page for more info.

Random Comic Book and Video Game Links: Watchmen update here. Slate has a good article on video games here.

Postscript: While I wasn't willing to take the plunge on the complete series, I did buy the first TPB collection of Denny O'Neil's revamp of The Question. I'm not sure why I didn't buy this series when it first came out. I loved the covers by Denys Cowan, and hell, if I'm going to do junk reading, I've always preferred crime to sci-fi.

Maybe it's Denny O'Neil. Since I'm so lazy, read this (very interesting) post, and scroll down for my reservations about Denny O'Neil's take on The Question and why it might not be so bad.

The Seven Deadly Fins

2009-02-15T06:12:00.006Z

Stick to theology asshat:

According to the Archbishop of Westminster, the economic downturn could be the very thing that brings us to our senses. “It's the end of a certain kind of selfish capitalism,” Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor said. “This particular recession is a moment - a kairos - when we have to reflect as a country on what are the things that nourish the values, the virtues, we want to have ... Capitalism needs to be underpinned with regulation and a moral purpose.”

Or at the very least, try reading the fucking financial section of the newspaper a little more carefully:

The study of “Soviet Britain” has found the government’s share of output and expenditure has now surged to more than 60% in some areas of England and over 70% elsewhere.

Experts believe the recession will tighten the state’s grip still further as benefit handouts soar and Labour directs public sector organisations to create jobs to soak up unemployment.

In the northeast of England the state is expected to be responsible for 66.4% of the economy this year, up from 58.7% when a similar study was carried out four years ago. When Labour came to power, the figure was 53.8%.

So how does this heartless, money grubbing, capitalist system compare with Russia? Take some notes, Cardinal:

The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.

Another Bishop railing against modern society here.

Buckets of Blood: Happy Valentine's Day Sweetie!

2009-02-14T19:19:00.004Z

This is one film buff who is eternally grateful that you continued dating (and later married) me despite the fact that the only DVD I had for us to watch on our third date was Videodrome. Thank you for playing Angie Everhart to my Cryptkeeper all these years!

I Want My MTV

2009-02-13T18:50:00.010Z

The burning and deeply controversial issue of Canadian cultural protectionism and censorship is something I've wanted to blog about since I read Mark Steyn's latest post about his legal difficulties:

If, in the interests of "cultural protection", the state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign bookstore owners, foreign TV operators out of Canada, why be surprised that, in return, it assumes the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?

All of it is certainly true, and it's nice to see someone kicking sand in the face of the Canadian establishment. But all my previous drafts sounded bitchy and whiny. It's not enough to know what you are against, you have to be for something as well. That's why I loved the following bit from Will Wilkinson's discussion of liberty in Canada:

It’s true that the U.S. has in many ways a more libertarian culture and political tradition than does Canada. But then isn’t it all the more interesting to note that, despite America’s unique “land of the free” self-conception, we’re no more free than Canadians? I feel strongly that American culture is more varied, alive, weirder, synthetic, and creative than probably any other. This is in part because of, and not despite, the odd conservative and religions strands in American culture. And it is a culture especially amenable to all sorts of entrepreneurial experiments, which gives American culture a level of innovation and vitality (including countless varieties of religious weirdness) that I think partly explains why it is the world’s dominant exporter of culture. And I think the U.S.’s wealth relative to other countries is actually underestimated. We are astoundingly rich (recession or no recession) and this is a place of crazy opportunity. So I think the U.S. does better in positive liberty terms than it sometimes gets credit for.

I'd just like to correct one misconception in the comments section. Nicole wrote:

I think you might be on to something here. I lived in Canada for five years and I would never want to go back, for exactly such reasons of cultural alienation. The conformity, and especially the conformity as progressives, got to be exhausting, frustrating, and frankly boring. But in terms of actual freedom, and absence of social conservatism, it was nice. Except when I got sick. Then it really did suck.

I pretty much agree with everything Nicole wrote, except for the bit about social conservatism. Depending on where you live, Canadians can be socially liberal and tolerant on issues (such as gay marriage or medical marijuana) that don't really have any impact on their lives at all. This is commendable.

However, if the issue concerns something that their husbands or boyfriends might actually enjoy - like a lap dance (See Section 15.1), cigar, or until last year an HBO subscription - than a certain, uhm, segment of the population can show a remarkably intolerant, socially conservative streak. That nameless segment of the population has no problems passing legislation or keeping obsolete regulatory agencies around to police whatever they consider to be socially deviant and unacceptable behavior.

A Somewhat Related Tangent: More America, F*ck Yeah! here...

I Wanna Be A Rock Star

2009-02-11T13:40:00.021Z

Update: Whoops! My bad. It turns out Julio is just a freshman. I still think he is just a punk with a sense of entitlement. I'd delete the post, but I suspect he'll still be in the same boat once he is finished his degree. I fail to see how studying broadcasting is a realistic plan to get him out of his current situation.

Update II: While I'm not unsympathetic to poor Julio's plight, 19 is a little young to be the CEO of McDonalds, even if he has been working there since he was 15. Suck it up, bitch.

Wait a minute. This ass clown is studying broadcasting, and doesn't understand why he is still working at McDonalds after four years? It's a field with more applicants than positions even during the best of times.

I can't believe the staff at The Daily Beast or ~~Connie Chung~~ Julie Chen couldn't be bothered to ask Julio Osegueda some of the most obvious questions that come to mind: did he do any serious reflection or research when he picked out his major? Did he have a back-up plan?

That whiny little bitch got an internship with a television station after he told his little sob story to Obama. Why wasn't he pursuing internships while he was a student? I always wanted to be a rock star, but you know, that boat sailed a long time ago when I quit taking guitar lessons in grade ten.

sss

Bonfire of the Hardcovers

2009-02-09T15:36:00.017Z

This just in: Amazon has unveiled the new Kindle. My sweetie pie is going to buy me one for my birthday. I'm very excited, and I think the new name is very symbolic. I'll finally be able to burn all my stupid, heavy, and now obsolete books that are printed on paper. So, in a sense, the Kindle has turned my old library into...kindling.

On a slightly more serious note, I like the fact that the Kindle reduces one of the risks associated with purchasing books. Since I can't be bothered to finish reading something I don't like, I'm usually hesitant about purchasing brand new hardcovers that retail for $30 or $40 a pop.

At $9.99 for a new e-book however, it's easier to write off books that I don't enjoy reading. Thanks to the Kindle, I'll be a little more willing to purchase new books written by authors whose works I haven't already read in another book or magazine.

Megan McArdle talks up Kindle 2.0 here.

Postscript: I was at the library yesterday, and some asshat had torn a P.J. O'Rourke article out of the December, 2008 issue. I had my sister drop my gift subscription because of all the drivel that Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan were writing for it. O'Rourke wasn't contributing enough articles to make a subscription worthwhile, but subscriptions are so cheap on a Kindle, I think I'll pick it up again.

Postscript II: I linked to John Siracusa's excellent article on e-books below in the update. In it he bemoans the following fact:

We Mac guys at Peanut Press saw the future as clear as day. Indeed, it seemed that Apple, and Apple alone, had the complete package: a mass-market reading device to target—one that they owned, no less; an online store with millions of customers who'd proven their willingness to buy things from that store; unmatched experience negotiating with "digitally unsophisticated" (to put it charitably) content owners. One by one, the dominoes had fallen. It all seemed so inevitable.

The e-book market was Apple's for the taking.

And then a funny thing happened: Apple never took it. Peanut Press and the other early e-book innovators stagnated or faded away. The iPod sold in numbers that made the PDA phenomenon look quaint. And still Apple didn't move. No one moved. The entire e-book market was stalled.

I think Siracusa has stumbled upon a way for Bill Gates to increase market share for the Zune.

Update: Is it the new iPod? Specs and a test drive here. A Brief History of e-Books.

Update II: Competition for the Kindle?

Let Them Eat Cake

2009-02-09T14:31:00.029Z

Jacob Weisberg, scourge of those once mighty and all powerful libertarians who ruled over this once great and mighty nation, defends a much maligned minority group:

One obvious point is being lost in the rush to flagellate Wall Street: The vast majority of toilers in the financial vineyards had nothing to do with the catastrophe. Most are themselves victims of poor judgments they didn't make, didn't know about, and would not have understood if they had known about them. The current crisis came about through a toxic cocktail of reckless lending into a government-subsidized real estate bubble and misjudgments about the risk of complex financial instruments. There were other factors, too. But only a small fraction of those employed on Wall Street worked in areas connected to the big failures. At Wells Fargo, the largest subprime lender in 2007, mortgage specialists amounted to 10,000 out of 160,000 employees. At Citi, Lehman, Merrill, and Bear Stearns, the proportion was far smaller. Even within the units that helped to blow up big firms, the damage was done by a minority within the minority.

More on their suffering and plight can be found here. With bailout and bonus apologists like Weisberg, who needs enemies:

The current peasant revolt, which blurs indignation at the underlying inequities and the search for culprits in the catastrophe, has been far too categorical.

It is entertaining to watch some liberals become defenders of corporate ~~greed~~ welfare and the status quo. However, Weisberg isn't quite as smart as he thinks he is:

Moreover, grotesque rewards for banking jobs are themselves an illustration of how the market can misallocate resources, sending too many intelligent people to chase diminishing returns in financial intermediation and away from more economically productive (and stimulating and fulfilling) pursuits.

The market did have a mechanism that would have corrected this misallocation of resources, asshat: it's called bankruptcy. Unfortunately, the official opposition also has a hard time understanding this crucial market mechanism. More on the suckfests that are stimulus packages here.

Update: Gutfeld live blogs the stimulus conference, I love his take on yet another Ed Rooney:

Here comes Helen Thomas - God she's sexy! In her question about Pakistan, she refers to terrorists as "socalled" terrorists! Nice one you old stinky bat.

Update II: Cut 'em some slack. They're just doing their bit to stimulate the economy.

Update III: So much for bi-partisanship. Fight deficits, tax porn and beer!

A Somewhat Related Tangent: Megan McArdle on more mundane, middle-class austerity measures here. Plus: this article fuels mirth, rather than resentment, because the tech sector never had a government bailout. What does Weisberg think of the Wall Street Hooker ring? And last but not least, the Hyacinth Girl on the stimulus here.

Mandatory Japanese Weirdness and Shameless Soda Shilling Post

2009-02-07T22:42:00.010Z

Lawyers, teachers, and a hairstylist. The people I liked to spend my time with in Japan had interests that were prosaic: classical music, motorcycles, and oyster diving. Some of my friends met people with interests that were a little more hinky, but the stories they told pale in comparison to the stuff in this article. The following link isDefinitely Not Safe For Work.

Today's mandatory bit of Japanese weirdness is brought to you by Tentacle Grape Soda. Don't forget: Tentacle Grape Condoms, Nancy Pelosi's favorite kind of economic stimulus are also available.

A Somewhat Related Tangent: The man always comes first. To paraphrase Penn Jillette, a hypocrite is doing at least one thing I like:

Surfin' Dead

2009-02-05T13:56:00.020Z

Via The Daily Gut comes news that Lux Interior, lead singer for "The Cramps", is dead. Read more about it here. This is a real disappointment, as I will never get to see them play live.

I discovered the musical awesomeness of "The Cramps" relatively late, when I finally got around to renting Return of the Living Dead, when it was first released on DVD. The box for that film, featuring a group of punked out zombies, is permanently etched in my memory.

Growing up on the mean streets of Winnipeg, I'd see Return of the Living Dead in the horror section of Video Rental shops and wonder what horrors lurked within. When I finally got around to watching it, I was blown away by not just the visuals but the music, especially "The Cramps" contribution to the film's soundtrack, "Surfin' Dead".

Digging through their back catalog - and what a back catalog it is - I came to the realization that it Return of the Living Dead wasn't the first time I'd been exposed to "The Cramps". I'm pretty sure that "Color Me Black" was used in the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, although it didn't appear on the CD. It's the song playing in the background at Jack Rabbit Slim's before Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace go on to win the dance competition

Despite the obvious musical and film associations with decadence and excess I've always found "The Cramps" inspirational in the most counter-intuitive and perverse way: I want to lift weights whenever I listen to their music. If Snatch was the film that motivated me to get off my ass and get a gym membership, than "The Cramps" were the band I listened to as cycled down to Gold's Gym in order to pump iron.

So on that note, in memory of the late, great Lux Interior, I'll listen to their EP "Fiends From Dope Island" on my Zune while I'm doing preacher curls at the Death Star gym today.

Update: Gutfeld has a full length obit for Lux Interior here. Dean Wormer weighs in and more coverage here.

Lost, Season 5, Episode, 4, "The Little Prince"

2009-02-05T03:15:00.003Z

Lots of nosebleeds in this episode. At first it was just Charlotte, but now Miles and Juliet are starting to get in on the hot, bleeding from the nostrils action. It's what all the cool kids are into these days. At first I assumed that the "sickness" only happened to new arrivals, since Miles and Charlotte had symptoms but Juliet, Sawyer and Locke didn't.

That little theory was shot to hell when Juliet started bleeding. However, given the fact that she was the third person to start gushing, I suspect that Charlotte and Miles, whether they know it or not, have spent quite a bit of time on the island, with Charlotte being the most senior resident of the island.

I don't have a whole lot more to say about the episode, other than the fact that I really liked the very slow chase scene on the outriggers. It was like an aquatic parody of the chase scene in The French Connection. I have nothing to say about the storyline that took place off the island, as Jack and Kate seemed more irritating than usual in this episode.

California License Plate

2009-02-02T23:23:00.019Z

Tramp stamps are really hot, but barely legal teens, MILFs, and cougars everywhere should think twice about having Kanji or Hanzi etched on their lower backs. More bad ink can be found here and here. Even abstract or tribal designs can be risky.

A teacher I worked with had a really cool tribal design - it was a sleeve that ran all the way down his arm. Whenever he was asked about it he would explain that he would be in a lot of trouble if he ever went to prison. It turned out that he had unknowingly picked a design used by a white power group.

However, for some truly regrettable tattoos porn actresses can't be beat. You have been warned: this link is DEFINITELY NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

Update: It's not a tattoo, but this definitely qualifies as a garish act of self-mutilation. Or is she something more? At least she waited until after she had children to get her boobs done.

A Somewhat Related Tangent: Where is my invitation?

America, F*ck Yeah!

2009-02-02T16:46:00.009Z

Move to China, asshat:

The US is declining very quickly. We’re not going to be the world’s leading nation any more. The economy may have a dead-cat bounce left in it, but we’re going into a recession which will never end. We’re going to settle permanently at a lower level of prosperity and power, and we may experience a near-depression on the way to that level. The self-destruction of conservatism is probably just one of the tools that will be used to work this judgment on America. Conservatism is right and natural and healthy, and it makes nations strong, so it has to be diminished in order for us to decay. The right’s mismanagement and abandonment of the Internet are just instruments of the right’s downfall.

American greatness has nothing to do with it's political class or it's status as a world power. For that matter, I don't think it's linked to economics, although I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I'm disappointed that I got here just as the party started winding down.

Do you want to know what makes America great? Hint: there is no promise of fabulous wealth or grandiose political power in these words:

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Update: Gutfeld sums it up nicely. Another reason to love the USA.

Update II: The post I originally linked to was taken down, explanation here.

Definitely Not Safe For Work

2009-02-01T23:23:00.015Z

Punk rock isn't political, asshat:

The arts have failed. They no longer keep mass culture in check with thought-provoking art that challenges the establishment. Now they’re in charge of spreading the mainstream mandate of the Liberal Vatican. There isn’t an original thought among them, just a thousand-mile stare, a blue logo and the drone-like vocabulary of emotive, vaguely inspiring chants.

Punk rock is fun:

How douche bags like Warren Kinsella have gotten away with trying to yoke whatever brand of lefty snakeoil they want to sell with whatever artist they happen to like is a mystery to me.

I'll say it one more time. Punk rock is not political. Punk rock is fun:

The Cramps - Like A Bad Girl Should

Don't try to force it guys. All politics, all the time is not much fun. Just sit back, crank those Bose speakers up as high as they will go, and enjoy the music.

Update: Even Johnny Rotten has to put bread and butter on the table.

Update II: You have to scroll down for the money quote, but Gutfeld really nails why I loathe liberals like Kinsella, and despise conservatives like TenNapel:

We gauged our success on the groups we manage to turn into sputtering messes – whether it be PETA, GLAAD, Media Matters, and the finger sniffers at assorted left wing blogs. The strategy was based on an idea I coined, called "The Dean Wormer Effect," named after the hapless character from the classic film Animal House. For so long, in movies and tv, non-liberals were always portrayed as stiff, shrill joyless types – typified by Dean Wormer. The stereotype went completely unquestioned, but it was totally dishonest. My goal at Red Eye was to reverse that polarity: to turn the lefties who think they`re edgy and cool into contemporary Dean Wormers – because in their hearts that`s what they are - PC crybabies determined to root out all the fun in the world. In a word: jackasses.

Update III: Ed Rooney dishes it out! She bangs, she bangs, give us some more of that pinky brain flair and style Ed Rooney:

I'll give Ed some points for liking the "Yuppie Pricks".

Last Man Standing

2009-01-29T17:36:00.006Z

It's perfectly obvious to me why men rule the planet: they know how to delegate, you silly bitch:

My daughter, Cleo, was self-sufficient and independent from the time she could walk; my boys can't take a piss without my help, and even then they can’t manage to get it in the toilet bowl. My boys have been slow to walk and talk, impossible to potty-train, and refused to give up breast-feeding. I had none of these problems with my daughter.

Although it does sound like your daughter Cleo is doing a better job of outsourcing labor:

When Cleo was five, I came home exhausted from work and fell asleep on the sofa. I opened my bleary eyes to find her eating pizza.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“I called Domino’s.”
“Where did you get the money?”
“Your purse.”
“Did you tip?”
“Twenty percent.”

I can’t imagine any of my boys, much less my husband, taking such proactive measures against personal hunger.

“Mom, can I have some cereal?” Peik, my 13-year-old son asks.
“Sure,” I say.
Fifteen minutes later, he starts whining, “Mom, I’m hungry. Aren’t you going to get my cereal?”
“No, I said you could have it. You can get it yourself.”

With advances in cloning techniques, it is only a matter of time before the male of the species becomes extinct...

Lost, Season 5, Episode 3, "Jughead"

2009-01-29T03:42:00.005Z

"Jughead" was the name of tonight's episode, and it is further evidence of the producer's love affair with retro technology. In hindsight, it was a little disappointing, as all we got to see was a hydrogen bomb hanging from some scaffolding. Well, that and the army uniforms and carbines that The Others had in their possession.

In other episodes, they've featured turntables, archaic desktop computers, VW buses, and Huey helicopters. I think the least they could have done was thrown in a World War II era jeep for a little extra verisimilitude. Thanks to the hydrogen bomb reference, the audience now knows that The Others have been on the island for (at least) almost fifty or sixty years, and that Richard Alpert had some sort of relationship with Jacob since the start.

Another interesting revelation happened during this episode - Charles Widmore was a member of The Others sixty years ago. While he might have been a member of The Others at one point, I'm curious as to what his relationship with the Dharma Initiative might have been. At one point in the episode, the Charles Widmore of the present day had a conversation with Desmond. One of the paintings in Widmore's office had the word "Namaste" written on it.

It was one of those "blink and you'll miss it" moments, but as the painting was done in that sort of abstract expressionist style that had it's heyday in the fifties, it was a clever bit of set design linking the Charles Widmore of the past to the Charles Widmore of the present. It's also symbolic, of the reason why the episodes have been pretty much consistently good since season four - having to compress as much action into a much shorter season invariably makes for more interesting episodes.

Update: Tor has an interesting round-table discussion of last night's episode here.

Further Adventures In No-Brow

2009-01-27T14:40:00.016Z

How much did I love the ~~comic book~~ graphic novel, Y: The Last Man? I loved it so much that I am purchasing a page of original artwork from the series. Pia Guerra's art is deceptively simple. The clean lines and straight forward layouts of her work are reminiscent of Chas Troug's beautiful pencils on Animal Man.

Pages featuring Yorick (the hero of the story) weren't in my budget, so I wound up buying a page with Agent 355 in it. However, since Y: The Last Man wasn't a superhero series, it didn't seem as important to have artwork featuring the protagonist in it. A supporting character is, in this instance, every bit as worthwhile as the actual hero himself.

I'm interested in purchasing more artwork by other artists online. It's nice to know that I can get a page from Booster Gold drawn by Dan Jurgens, featuring the titular character at a reasonable price. Some of Keith Giffen's earlier work is available at dirt cheap prices, although most collectors would correctly point out that the pages don't feature any memorable characters.

However, I don't think it really matters because Giffen, not unlike Peter Bagge, has such an unusual style that his work tends to be interesting in and of itself. I'm not such a big fan of Giffen's later work, but earlier in his career, Giffen drew a lot of mind blowing stuff.

Giffen could really push the envelope when it came to using the minimal amount of lines to convey the necessary visual information to the reader. It was a very abstract style, but worked well on the cheap newsprint that comic books used to be printed on. Hanging on a wall, his artwork should look pretty good. It always had a photo-negative quality to it, so it should really "pop" in black and white.

A Somewhat Related Tangent: A while back I wrote about Paul Pope's Batman: Year 100. Tor has an excellent review here.

A Somewhat Related Tangent II: First Geek-in-Chief here.

A Somewhat Related Tangent III: Comics grammar explained here.

How's the smut business, Jackie?

2009-01-26T04:13:00.029Z

Larry Flynt and Joe Francis might have been caught with their pants down recently, but not this guy:

As opposed to many who were hit unexpectedly by the severity of the downturn, Rotten said he was ready. “I knew there would be a backlash and I prepared for it,” he said. “I’ve downsized and I limit the number of movies I make a year.”

Rotten offered a tip that could probably apply to just about any struggling business with a product in today’s economy. “The movies I put out and are affiliated with, we actually care about them,” he said. “Even though it’s an adult movie, I try to make the best movie I can within my allotted budget.

That's the kind of all-American gumption that is going to pull this country out of a recession. In the end, cash doesn't mean a thing. It's all about having a passion for what you do and delivering a quality product.

Update: Even Jackie Treehorn has to tighten his belt. More bad news for Jackie Treehorn...

Update II: Pelosi backs off? Gutfeld on Pelosi. Shake your moneymaker and love for sale!

Update III: Obligatory reason link here, but I beat them to the punch on this one! Still, the headline alone makes it worth reading...More federal stimulus here and here.

Update IV: This is the best thing to happen to the Superbowl since that wardrobe malfunction. There is no justice in this recession...Scroll down and you'll learn why Ron Paul is the most swinging congressman ever. Ron Paul in 2012! Some of the girls at Jackie Treehorn's Superbowl party.

Update V: Joe Francis behind bars.

Update VI: Interesting work if you can get it...

A Somewhat Related Tangent: This ain't a good sign...

It's not just a soda, it's a lifestyle

2009-01-25T23:43:00.010Z

Trojan. Durex. Ramses. World famous prophylactics. Now, there is a new kid on the block - Tentacle Grape Condoms. Whether it's for a one night stand, or long term family planning, let your freak flag fly high with Tentacle Grape Condoms!

Update: Nancy Pelosi could be picking up the tab for those Tentacle Grape Condoms. Video here. The Japanese government, on the other hand, wants less recreation and a little more procreation. A buyers market in sperm and eggs?

Update II: Will Nancy Pelosi and Rick Warren show some bi-partisan support for saddlebacking?

Update III Hope for all of us!

The Maverick Strikes Again!

2009-01-25T05:29:00.009Z

John McCain is kind of like Freddy Krueger. He just keeps on coming back for more. Matt Welch has done an excellent job of documenting the media's love affair with John McCain, and it looks like it's starting all over again:

Two and a half months removed from his defeat in the race for the presidency, colleagues say, McCain bears more resemblance to the unpredictable and frequently bipartisan lawmaker they have served with for decades than the man who ran an often scathing campaign against Barack Obama. In some instances, he's even carrying water for his former rival.

"Mac is back!" one of his devoted friends in the Senate declared as McCain walked into the chamber Wednesday to deliver his first speech of the 111th Congress: a blunt admonishment of Republicans delaying Hillary Rodham Clinton's confirmation as secretary of state.

"I remind all my colleagues: We had an election," McCain noted. "I think the message the American people are sending us now is they want us to work together, and get to work."

McCain is correct. There was an election, and he lost. That means voters don't want him working alongside Obama and the Democrats. The voters spoke loud and clear: they want Democrats to run the government, not Republicans.

Republicans are now the official opposition. That means senators with the capital letter "R" next to their names on C-Span should be trying to curb government excesses and act as watchdogs. If John McCain wants to be the government whip, maybe he should consider becoming a registered Democrat.

Update: John Dickerson on the bi-curious president.

Update II: Matt Welch has more on media coverage of McCain here.

That rug really tied the room together

2009-01-23T13:47:00.013Z

The president's new press secretary received some mixed reviews after his first press conference, but everyone loves his tie. First up, John Dickerson at Slate:

When Gibbs arrived, he looked a little nervous in his baby-blue tie. "Give me one sec to get organized here," he said, shuffling his papers. The cameras clicked away. If the attention of the world weren't nerve-racking enough, the cameras should have been. Every time Gibbs gesticulated, a thousand shutter snaps exploded.

Next, Joseph Curl at The Washington Times:

"I do," the spokesman said, his cornflower-colored tie suddenly looking a bit too tight. "Are we allowed to repeat that name?" Mr. Gibbs answered by citing as precedent of Brazilian soccer stars being known only by a single name - sure to one day be a classic White House non-answer.

I love that sort of attention to detail in reporting. It's amazing how a throw away reference to something like the color of a tie can spice up a even the most prosaic article, or in Curl's instance, is leveraged to provide some psychological insight.

To hell with whats-her-face, the inaugural poet. These guys are the real Walt Whitmans of our time.

Update: Click here for a critical analysis of the inaugural poet's festival of suck.

Lost, Season 5, Episodes 1 and 2, "Because You Left" and "The Lie"

2009-01-22T04:06:00.005Z

An analog alarm clock goes off, someone puts a record on a turn table, and we watch as one of the people connected with the Dharma Initiative goes about their morning routine on the island.As my sweetie pie pointed out, it's how the previous two seasons started, and this season was no exception.

This time, it was Doctor Cheng who was the focus of the season intro. He is informed by a work crew that they have discovered a mysterious energy source. It's the same source that Ben Linus used to move the island in season four. Cue scary eerie music and the revelation that Daniel Faraday is one of the work men.

We still don't know how Doctor Cheng lost his hand, but my guess is that it has something to do with the accident. Time travel was a constant in both episodes, and I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of the Dharma Initiative later in the season. It was weird, because while I don't think any questions were really answered, it felt like they were being answered.

That can be chalked up to the lack of flashbacks in either episode. Even though there was a lot of jumping around in time, it was always done with the purpose of advancing the current storyline. This is a much better show without flashbacks, or for that matter, flash forwards.

When I saw Kate featured prominently in the previews for the season opener, I winced. I thought it would mean lots of pointless melodrama, long takes where she squints at Jack while he mopes around, and none of that happened. It was all forward momentum.

If the writers can take the two characters I like the least on the show - Kate and Jack - and can make their scenes every bit as interesting as scenes featuring Hurley, Locke, Ben, Sawyer, Juliet, or Desmond, then I think the fifth might just be the best of the series.

When fanboys get it wrong: Lisa correctly points out that Seasons 2, 3, and 5 start off the same way but Season 4 does not. My bad.

Update: For those keeping track, a link to the various solved and unsolved mysteries on the island. I wasn't all that happy with how this post turned out. It's been awhile since I blogged about television. I wish I'd caught all the stuff that Sepinwall did in the first and second episodes. I loved reading Andrew Dignan but couldn't get into Justine Elias, however, I think I'll be following what Todd VanDerWerff has to say about Lost.

Approximately 303,824,640 bricks

2009-01-21T18:41:00.006Z

Uncle Mark is tired of playing with Duplo bricks. When he is a little bit older, I can't wait to buy my nephew a Lego kit like this:

They have every single character there, from his wife Michelle and his daughters Malia Ann and Sasha—the youngest resident of the White House since JFK Jr—to Vice President-elect Joe Biden and his wife Jill, President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, VP Dick Cheney and wife Lynn, George Bush Sr. and Barbara Bush. as well as Dr. Rick Warren.

The fun thing is that every single one of them can actually be recognized (specially Barbara Bush, that's genius), according to Lego designers who did the brick caricatures of the main characters as well as Senator Dianne Feinstein, Aretha Franklin, John Williams and performers Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo-Ma, Gabriela Montero, Anthony McGill, the Unites States Marine Band, the San Francisco Boys Chorus and the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Even Oprah Winfrey is in the crowd.

I'd never really thought much about sculpture. Raised on comic books, television, and movies, I think I am biased towards painting and photography because they are flat and two dimensional. However, when sculpture is done in a medium that I'm familiar with from my every day experience - like plastic or styrofoam - I really, really, enjoy it.

Update: Lisa sent me some links to some really cool and very expensive Lego model kits here, here, and here.

Hail To The Chief!

2009-01-20T18:30:00.024Z

The comparisons that everyone is making between FDR and Obama are unfair to Obama. Since Obama has been President for less than two hours, I can't say he is a better president than FDR. However, I can say with absolute certainty that I like Obama's first inaugural speech a lot more than FDR's first inaugural speech.

For years, like everybody else with access to a television set or a radio, I'd heard that famous soundbite, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." What I didn't realize, until I listened to a podcast of the complete, original speech, was just how authoritarian FDR was:

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize, as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take, but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress can be made, no leadership becomes effective.

We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and our property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at the larger good. This, I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us, bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in times of armed strife.

While I loathe community service - I came here to let my freak flag fly high and do my own thing - at least Obama isn't using creepy, goosestepping, martial rhetoric to advance his political agenda.

Update: Out with the old, in with the new.

Update II: Will Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher need a bailout?

Update III: Some not safe for work inauguration fever here; Hitchens on Gore, Kerry, Bush and Obama here; and a collection of Steyn's greatest hits here.

Update IV: Republicrats strike!

Update V: Sore Loserman Redux and worst President ever?

Update VI: Because it was so much fun the first time, Roberts and Obama decide to do it again. An endorsement that Obama doesn't need...and another one.

No Reservations, Season 5, Episode 3, "Washington, D.C."

2009-01-20T05:13:00.007Z

For years, I thought the idea of Anthony Bourdain was good. Professional chef turned novelist and non-fiction write. What's there not to like? I'd even picked up his books at bookstores, leafed through them, and put them on a mental list of things I should read.

I wasn't even aware that Bourdain was a broadcaster until relatively recently. I've been a fan of No Reservations since I saw the episodes he did on South Korea and Japan a few months ago. I've since started reading, and enjoying his books, every bit as much as his television show.

No Reservations is a lot like CSI - it's clever, but Bourdain never loses sight of the fact that he also has to entertain people. So when I saw the promo for the DC episode, I was pretty excited. Bourdain went to all the places that you would expect him to go to in DC, Ben's Chili Bowl being one of the more obvious choices. While I did enjoy the episode, I thought Bourdain spent a little too much time highlighting non-food aspects of the city.

The spy museum and the soup kitchen are both interesting places, I guess, but it would have been nice if more places like Murky Coffee or The Tackle Box got the nod from Bourdain.

And Now For Something Completely Different: Lisa and I watched the season finale of Momma's Boys and while I enjoyed it, I was disappointed that there was no showdown between the Playboy Playmate and the Penthouse Pet.

I'm completely heartless, so I'm just going to come right out and say it: was Erica hiding the fact that she posed for Penthouse because it is dirtier than Playboy, or because it's so second rate?

Privatize The Lincoln Memorial!

2009-01-19T18:35:00.025Z

Lisa and I watched the pre-inaugural concert from the comfort of our living room. Thanks to the good people at Panasonic, it felt like we were actually at the event, without the cold and large crowds.

When Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, and some unidentified beardo sang "This Land Is Your Land", we had an interesting discussion of America's Living National Treasures. Or more to the point,
how nobody really cares about them:

So the Los Angeles Times headlined its big story about yesterday pre-inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial with this misleading title: "Big stars rock the Lincoln Memorial." Sure, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Beyonce, etc. were all there and are indeed all big rock stars. But so was folk mummy Pete Seeger, who is the musical equivalent of spinach. He's the Jeff Lynne of folk; always somehow in the room but clearly nobody's favorite. (And let's not even get into his questionable reaction to Dylan going electric).

Barack Obama and Joe Biden looked pretty sharp in their suits. Some of the rock stars, like Bruce Springsteen and U2, were dressed casually, but they also managed to look urbane while doing so. Seeger, on the other hand, was wearing a toque, flannel shirt, and jeans. In other words, he looked like an octogenarian special ed student.

And while I won't accuse Arlo Gutherie of being as smug as Malvina Reynolds, I wasn't all that crazy about the inclusion of "This Land Is Your Land" at the concert. It reeks of church and grade school, of having to share your toys with the other kids, eat godawful casseroles, and all the other horrible stuff you have forced upon you as a kid.

Update: Scotus, a braver man than I, actually went to the concert. Note to Dave McKenna: nothing is more American than outsourcing and free trade.

Update II: Liberalism à la carte: take a principled stand only when it doesn't offend the beliefs of soccer moms out in Minnesota.

Update III: Why do people loathe baby boomers? Look at that picture again you posted again. It's a historic moment and both Springsteen and Seeger can't even be bothered to put on a tie for the occasion.

Update IV: Stuck in Canada with Stephen Harper as Prime Minister, ha-ha! Another baby boomer loser tries to hop on the Barack Obama band wagon.

To the last I grapple with thee

2009-01-16T13:04:00.013Z

A long time ago, before the fall of acid wash denim and the final triumph of khaki chinos, there were turtleneck sweaters. The man responsible for this sartorial grooviness did not wear them himself, preferring instead to display his magnificent, bronzed pecs for all the world to see:

The brilliance of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is that it is a retelling of the classic novel Moby Dick — and that worked perfectly with William Shatner’s over the top acting style which Nicholas Meyer brought out and encouraged instead of playing down. And the reason that Shatner’s performance is still memorable with fanboys yelling KHANNNNN!!!! all these years later is that Montalbán was also playing his role over the top — and damn it but it was brilliant to watch on the silver screen. But what makes that performance so amazing is that if you look at every other role that Montalbán played they were always latin lover characters who were laid back and smooth, which makes his performance as the ultimate foil all the more amazing.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was one of the first VHS tapes I ever watched, and when I bought my first DVD player in Japan, it was one of the first DVD films I rented. It was also, in it's own way, inspirational, at least in a counter-intuitive sense. By the time I got to junior high school, I had accepted the fact that I'd never be an astronaut, and as much as I wanted to make out with really hot green chicks, that option wasn't on the table either. Life in Manitoba was grim, prosaic, deathly dull, bleak, and more often than not, freezing cold.

However, watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan did make me realize that even if you couldn't command a star ship, being able to quote Charles Dickens or Herman Melville off the top of your head was just as cool. That easy air of sophistication that Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley had while they discussed the ethical implications of the Genesis device was readily obtainable by anybody if they showed a little bit of curiosity and cracked open a book now and then.

And the best part of a liberal education? It doesn't matter where you receive it. Reading Melville on the barren wasteland that is Ceti Alpha V is every bit as good as reading Dickens at Starfleet Academy. In the end, it's not where you learn, or who you learned it with, or even what you did or didn't read, but how you leverage your education that matters. At a time and a place when everything in my life frequently looked harsh, cruel, and arbitrary, that wasn't such a bad lesson to learn.

You Are Number Six

2009-01-15T18:55:00.015Z

Patrick McGoohan passed away recently, and if you haven't seen The Prisoner already, do yourself a favor and watch it before the current season of Lost airs next week. It's amazing how much Lost owes to this wonderful cult television series from the sixties. It can be done in one marathon weekend - only seventeen episodes were made. Believe me, it's worth it.

If nothing else, the opening title sequence is nothing short of spectacular. McGoohan was able to compress all the back story the viewer needed into less than two minutes of footage, dialogue, and some really groovy music. Star Wars wouldn't have been such a lopsided mutt if George Lucas had taken the time to study what McGoohan did in The Prisoner.

Don't just take my word for it. Todd Seavey and the good people
over at Tor have put up some great posts on McGoohan, The Prisoner, and the remake that is coming soon from AMC.

I did find it ironic that Christopher Butcher, the author of the Tor post, can't watch the AMC streaming video that he linked to in the post. Why?

I have to admit that, being from the great white north myself, my sympathies lie with all of you that can't see the streaming episodes at the AMC website.

Shades of the village! The evil CRTC strikes again, protecting Canadians from harmful foreign influences.

Department of Dubious Accomplishments: Looking through the production photos for The Prisoner it's uncanny how the wardrobe designer anticipated the rise of business casual in the early nineties. I thought the clothes were pretty cool when I was wearing acid wash jeans back in the eighties. I never thought that I'd be wearing pretty much the same stuff as the inmates of the village (minus the white trim on my blazers) to work in the ought oughts.

Update: reason has a brilliant piece on The Prisoner here.

Update II: More Tor coverage here.

Update III: Another McGoohan obit here.

Update IV: Libertarian folk hero, or hippie douchebag? Dust My Broom reports, you decide!

Greed Is Good

2009-01-14T21:19:00.011Z

A sequel to Wall Street is being made, and just in time for
the coming depression! I still prefer The Boiler Room to Wall Street, if for no other reason than the fact that the view from the cheap seats is a little easier to sympathasize with. Gordon Gekko would never give me the time of day, but occasionally I work out with Vin Diesel at the company gym.

I've blogged about Wall Street and its sequel before, and I only wish Hollywood could speed up their production of topical films and television shows.

Mandatory Japanese Weirdness and Shameless Commercial Plug

2009-01-14T03:03:00.010Z

Tentacle Grape Soda is the perfect beverage for when you are surfing the internets and reading about the latest cool, weird, new trends in Japan.

Marginal Revolution pointed me in the direction of the latter link. Earlier today they posted some choice excerpts from
Dogs and Demons, by Alex Kerr. If pundits are interested in where this recession is possibly headed, Japan during the nineties and ought oughts - not FDR and the Dirty Thirties - is what they should be reading up on.

Huffington Post: Buy Amazon Stock!!!

2009-01-13T00:46:00.012Z

Via Matt Welch, this has to be the dumbest public policy proposal I have ever read:

It looks like we're going through a painful transition from analogue to digital newspapers, from print to Internet. A comprehensive piece of legislation--let's call it The News and Information for Democracy Act of 2011--could help lubricate the transition, determine whether there are common or collective approaches that would make the transition smoother, and possibly provide some transition support and supplement the working of "the market" with a sense of what the path should be from here to there.

Here's an example: bring down the price of the Kindle or Sony Reader to under $25 and make the devices universal delivery systems for local and national papers; have each Kindle default-programmed to receive one of several competing national digital papers and one local paper, building in an annual fee for a newspaper fund that is billed to the holder of the low-cost or free apparatus.

Kindles retail for $359, so the government would have to make up the difference, which would be about $334.

Based on how many people voted in the last election (approximately 128,000,000) and presumably care enough to follow politics on television, magazines, internet, radio, or newspapers, the government reckless enough to enact such an idea would be faced with an initial bill of $42,752,000,000.

Update: Sony might want to jump on the Huffington Post bailout proposal. Jack Shafer explores the downside of using the Kindle as a content delivery device here.

Update II: More Welch on a newspaper bailout here.

A Somewhat Related Tangent: Ministery of Culture is proposed.

The Final Member of the Oceanic Six: Rush Limbaugh

2009-01-11T23:18:00.014Z

Spoiler alert! Spoiler Alert! In the season premier of Lost it will be revealed that the final member of the Ocean Six is, in fact, Rush Limbaugh. Ben Shapiro is so very, very, wrong about Lost:

1. Sawyer: Josh Holloway’s Southern con man, James “Sawyer” Ford, is the best conservative character on television, bar none. Sure he sleeps around – what con man worth his salt doesn’t? But he votes Republican – in Episode 16 of Season 1, Outlaws, Sawyer admits that he has never voted Democrat. He’s a proud gun-toter, carrying rifles and pistols with equal authority. He’s a true capitalist, buying and selling like Warren Buffet at a flea market. And he hates communism. When one female character suggests that everyone share a cache of food, Sawyer sneers, “Oh sure, Moonbeam, and then maybe we can all do Trust Falls and sing Kumbaiya.” Sawyer is the first to engage in racial profiling – he labels fellow crash survivor Sayid a terror suspect in Episode 1, Season 1 – but he also develops a deep friendship with Sayid as the show progresses.

I hate to break it to you, Shapiro, but from your own description, Sawyer is a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, which means he is a libertarian, and not a conservative. Not that I'm all that eager to claim a con artist as a libertarian with Madoff in the headlines.

Big Hollywood is not the answer for conservatives. Conservatives already have the commentary bag pretty much all sewn up. The National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and The New Criterion are just a few examples that immediately come to mind. Conservatives need more commentary like they need a hole in the head.

What conservatives really need are...directors, writers, producers, novelists, and journalists, real ones, who do what Eric Schlosser does, and not Op-Ed columnists, like Shapiro. Off the top of my head, the only living "conservative" director that I can think of is Whit Stillman. And Stillman, given his less than stellar productivity, isn't going to be enough to turn the tide. And the less said about his choice of subject matter, the better.

Even as a film commentator, I'm not so sure that a conservative like Shapiro really gets film. I mean, look at the guy's resume:

Ben Shapiro was born in 1984. He entered UCLA at the age of 16 and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in June 2004 with a BA in Political Science. He graduated Harvard Law School cum laude in June 2007. Shapiro was hired by Creators Syndicate at age 17 to become the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the U.S.

Is this really the CV of a person who enjoys film or television? Consider some of the "jokes" that he makes while "writing about" Lost:

In Season 2, he rips a bullet out of his shoulder with his bare hands. Ask Al Franken to do that.

His motto: “Don’t Tell Me What I Can’t Do.” As opposed to the liberal motto: “Please Give Me Your Money.” So think of him as Rick Warren meets Bear Gryllis.

3. Benjamin “Henry Gale” Linus: AKA Benry. Benry is evil to be sure – but he’s pure, solid, wonderful evil in the mold of Dick Cheney.

This is a clearly a person who watches Lost only as a means of killing time in between books from Ann Coulter. On the other hand, consider libertarian brainiac Todd Seavey. This post is on the subject of intellectual property, but in the comments section, you can tell his eyes lit up when he got a chance to write about Watchmen:

DC Comics in some sense has three versions of the characters in _Watchmen_ walking around right now — the original 60s characters they bought from Charlton comics (who now interact with Superman et al), the Watchmen based on them by Alan Moore (who is also the anarchist genius who grouped public-domain characters into the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and put Peter Pan’s friend Wendy, Dorothy from Kansas, and Alice from Wonderland into an erotic graphic novel called _Lost Girls_ — even though Wendy turns out not to be public domain), and just recently a (resurrected/reformulated) Earth-4 housing Charlton characters with just a _dash_ of dark, Watchmenesque tone — indeed, you can see that world’s “Quantum Superman” interact with the traditional Superman _in 3D_ in two weeks when the second and final issue of Grant Morrison’s _Final Crisis: Superman Beyond_ miniseries is released.

Seavey has street cred. He knows what he is talking about, and it shows. This guy could be writing for Newsarama, but is equally at home talking about property rights. Seavey is a well rounded person, with diverse interests, while Shapiro, no matter how many pop-culture references he makes, will always sound like a bloodless freak.

While it was nice that Andrew Breitbart wants a big tent, if I'm looking for some politics mixed in with my film, I'd still rather go here.

And Now A Word From Our Sponsor

2009-01-09T01:55:00.003Z

Thanks to the good people at Tentacle Grape Soda, I'm going to be able to do something I've wanted to do for a long time. $ellout. See that banner ad just below the "About Me" blurb on the sidebar? If you click on it, and order soda from this fine company, I'll get a 10% commission.

Other bloggers (left, right, and somewhere in between) will put up those "Paypal" donation buttons, but I like to consider myself a libertarian, damnit, and capitalism, not electronic panhandling is the only way to go.

Porn In The USA

2009-01-08T00:47:00.014Z

Banks, the auto industry, newspapers, and now porn. It’s a sad, sad, day when the adult entertainment industry needs a bailout. Just the other day, in a conversation with my sweetie pie, I said that the American porn industry as a shining example for the Canadian film industry. Boy was I wrong.

In Canada, a film called Young People Fucking can’t get made without government grants. Think about it: the producers couldn’t find private investors willing to finance this venture. A film about young people, fucking. How could anyone lose money on a production like this?

If it’s anything like this little gem, Lost and Delirious, it’s painfully obvious why Canadian porn (whether it's soft, hard, or slightly turgid) can’t make a buck. Lost and Delirious is a boring film about high school lesbians. Think about it. High school lesbians in a private, all girls, boarding school. Wearing kilts, blazers, white blouses, and knee high socks. And it’s boring.

What kind of retard makes a dull film about high school lesbians? A retard that spent more time filling out requests for government funding than looking for private investors, that’s who. I know where Larry Flynt, circa 1977, would have told the director, writer, and cast of Lost and Delirious or Young People Fucking to stick their ideas about “plot”, “character development”, and “artistic integrity”.

While I don’t condone suicide, it would be nice if more people, especially the rich ones like Larry Flynt and Joe Francis, could you know, learn to suck it up:

The wife of a Long Island broker shot herself in the heart; a utilities executive in Rochester, New York, shut himself in his bathroom and opened a wall jet of illuminating gas; a St. Louis broker swallowed poison; a Philadelphia financier shot himself in his athletic club; a divorcee in Allentown, Pennsylvania, closed the doors and windows of her home and turned on a gas oven. In Milwaukee, one gentleman who took his own life left a note that read, 'My body should go to science, my soul to Andrew W. Mellon, and sympathy to my creditors.'

Department of Dubious Accomplishments: reason scooped me on this story, but it looks like I was one step ahead of Mark Steyn and Megan Mcardle on this one.

Update: Mark Steyn is jumping on the bandwagon, and links to Jules Crittenden in his post.

Update II: This wouldn't be the first adult entertainment bailout.

Update III: More layoffs that affect consenting adults, but one person is doing well despite the economic downturn.

Update IV: The AVN awards show was a much more sombre affair this year.

The Eco-Grinch

2009-01-07T01:58:00.008Z

Stuff like this makes me see red, both literally and figuratively. Communism didn’t die. It just switched colors from red to green. I hate the joyless Puritanism, the sheer gradgrindery of it all.

My wife and I purchased a plasma screen not because we’re mindless consumers, but because we love movies. The plasma screen makes a big difference. It was obvious that a lot of the movies I was watching on the old television were well photographed, but I had no idea how good the cinematography was until we got a plasma screen.

A smaller screen can never do a film like Get Carter any justice. Looking at Michael Caine’s sideburns or cufflinks, you can tell that the cinematographer was interested in getting the details right, and a plasma screen enhances the experience.

And you don’t have to be a degenerate aesthete to appreciate nice television screen – just ask any sports fan what they would prefer to watch the big game on. But the ~~monks~~ concerned activists must have their way.

I love this quote from a retired government bureaucrat who is “concerned” about the environment:

"They should take them off the shelves," said Sam Ortega, a retired state worker. "We need to monitor our energy. It's good for everybody."

If what kind of television you own is determined by the government, is it such a big leap to imagine that the next step is for the government to determine what gets shown on it:

Starting last night, thanks to Le Prez Nicolas "Bling Bling" Sarkozy, France's four (count 'em!) national public television stations are now prohibited from broadcasting commercials between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Lest you think this is some kind of Hungaro-Gallic starve-the-beast ploy to get L'etat out of the TV biz, think again:

The government says the reforms will improve the quality of programming on public television by freeing it from "the tyranny of ratings" and it has pledged to make up for any shortfall in advertising revenues. [...]

The reform creates a funding gap for public TV which will largely be filled by a levy on private broadcasters and Internet providers and by government support.

The 2009 budget includes 450 million euros to compensate for the loss of revenue[.]
The usual protest strikes are scheduled, etc.

I'll take Arrested Development over Little Mosque On The Prairie any day of the week.

Update: Maybe Raul doesn't like cellphones because they leave a big carbon footprint.

Update II: Communist dictators aren't the only people regulating technology for the public good.

Update III: First they came for the plasma screens, then they tried to take away google.

Fishwrap

2009-01-01T21:25:00.012Z

While I was watching the opening credits of No Reservations, I noticed that there was a shot of Anthony Bourdain reading The New York Post. It was a sudden revelation: I'd been complaining (on my blog, and other blogs)about how dull American newspapers were since I came to this great nation, and the answer was staring me in the face all along.

What this city needs is a great tabloid. It's already got a pretty good one in the form of the express, but it could be better if they beefed up the content and charged for it. Newspapers don't need a bailout. It's time for journalists and publishers to learn something from P.J. O'Rourke. First off, try and lose that inflated sense of self-importance:

Relying on government help raises ethical questions for the press, whose traditional role has been to operate free from government influence as it tries to hold politicians accountable to the people who elected them. Even some publishers desperate for help are wary of this route.

During a job interview a crusty old magazine editor, marinated in whiskey and cigarettes, told me what the three "C's" of journalism are: crime, cash, and uhm...sex. Those are the three reasons why people read newspapers. If journalists, editors, and publishers want to hold the government accountable, I'd suggest they start working the phones for political candidates instead.

A Somewhat Related Aside: Ken Whyte, former editor-in-chief of The National Post, and currently the publisher and editor-in-chief of the resurgent Macleans magazine has written a biography of a William Randolph Hearst, a publisher who knew a thing or two about raising newspaper circulations.

A Somewhat Related Update: Nick Gillespie has a post and some links on the problem of "Zombie Newspapers" here.

Return of the Living Zune

2008-12-31T22:21:00.004Z

How could you do this to me, Mr. Gates? When my Zune wasn't working this morning, I was pissed off, and thought it was just a battery problem. It turns out it wasn't just my Zune - every Zune on the planet has mysteriously frozen up. I'm going to smash mine before it rises from the dead and tries to kill me when I'm sleeping.

Update: My Zune is working again. It looks like all the 30 gig models came down with a version of the Y2K bug.

Grand Guignol

2008-12-31T00:29:00.009Z

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx. Directed by Kenji Misumi. Starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, Akihiro Tomikawa, and Kayo Matsuo.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx is one of those films where you will grab your wife or girlfriend, and make her sit down on the couch so she can watch cinematic genius unfold on your plasma screen television. The film opens with a sword fight between Ogami Itto (played by Tomisaburo Wakayama) and a couple of evil red shirts.

Director Kenji Misumi’s use of crosscutting in the opening is even better than what Francis Ford Coppola with that technique in The Godfather. Close-ups of grim faces, severed limbs flying through the air, an impalement, a sword buried in a skull, and geysers of blood make it all quite the visual spectacle.

The plot is about as basic as it gets – instead of white hats versus black hats, Kenji Misumi gives us masterless ronin against evil ninja bent on helping the Japanese Shogun corner the market on fabric dyes, or something like that. The story really isn’t all that important – Misumi delivers on the action, in all it’s colorful Fuji film glory.

I’m usually indifferent to actors, however I thought casting Tomisaburo Wakayama in this series was an interesting move. The man has the body of an endormorph, and it makes the action scenes visually compelling as he looks slow, but tends to move quickly and gracefully. Despite his somewhat soft features, he does have a gaze that is every bit as withering as Jason Statham or Clint Eastwood.

Although this is the second film in the Lone Wolf and Cub series, if you’ve never seen a Japanese martial arts film before, this is a great place to start. If you like Quentin Tarantino films or comic books by Frank Miller, you’ll never be as impressed with their work again after watching Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx.

It's Naomi Klein's World, We Just Live In It Now

2008-12-28T21:14:00.019Z

April has her eye on the big picture, but speaking for myself, I just want to continue drinking Quadruple Venti Mocha Frappuchinos With Double Whipped Cream and put the brain in neutral while I try to level up in Grand Theft Auto.

In order to do that, however, the economy is going to have to get out of the doldrums. Unfortunately, it looks like the disaster socialists are going to get their way. Naomi Klein and her ilk can cheer as that symbol of corporate evil, Starbucks, is going down the tubes, but did they ever think of what the baristas are going to do when they're out of work?

Speaking of gainful employment, while I’m not sure what this guy does or who he works for, I thought there was a beautiful symmetry in this article, whether or not the author realized it. If Washington, D.C. is the political capitol of the U.S.A., then New York is America’s commercial capitol. In the wake of the financial meltdown, Washington D.C. currently has the upper hand, and isn’t afraid to show it:

“I understand the concept that people don’t want to be seen spending a lot of money,” says Bruce Culmer, a 62-year-old resident of Washington, D.C., in town visiting a friend. Culmer is leaving Hermès with his purchase—three silk ties—proudly swinging in an orange bag.
“People shouldn’t be flaunting what they have. But it’s kind of silly to hide it."

Making fun of investment bankers is infinitely more satisfying than slinging mud at government bureaucrats. When you mock the rich, more often than not, you're doing it from a relatively comfy perch. However, when you're driven to satirizing government pencil pushers, invariably it's because the trust funds of the celebutards have been picked clean by the IRS and everybody else is generally worse off.

An Aside: Who needs that dull drip Naomi Klein anyway? Katherine Mangu-Ward shows off her mad skillz in this recent article - I think reason might have another Ana Marie Cox in the making.

Update: As I sip my 100% Guayaki Yerba Mate in the mug that I purchased from the reason online store, it occurs to me that class and status play an important part in all of this.

Update II: Retail sales are down, how many Rolex watches does one person need anyway?

Update III: If "two or more" is the correct answer, it looks like jeweler's are going to be the next in line for a bailout.

Update IV: Worrying about brand name goods is a luxury, especially when everybody is currently more worried about keeping their jobs.

Update V: Bubbles are popping everywhere.

Baruch Wane

2008-12-27T22:34:00.015Z

Writing this post makes me feel old, because I'm jumping on the bandwagon three years after the fact. But to hell with it, even if there is nothing sadder than an aging hipster, the kids have got it right - Paul Pope is the best thing to happen to Batman since Frank Miller. For my money, I'd argue that his take on Batman is superior to Miller's version of the caped crusader.

Artistically, I find Pope the more interesting artist of the two. I was reading the notes he'd written about the character sketches, and not only was he dead on about the boots, I think he was on to something with the swim trunks and adding seams to Batman's clothing. Frank Miller might have been the first person to seriously rethink Batman's costume since Neal Adams, but it wasn't until Paul Pope came along that Miller's vision was fully realized.

I find the whole convention of superheroes wearing costumes kind of silly. I mean, if you were the Wolverine, chomping on a cigar, with a military background, would you really be caught dead in a yellow and blue costume? He looks like he would be more comfortable fighting crime in a pair of jeans, a wife beater, and a leather jacket. It's nice to know that there are writers/artists out there like Paul Pope thinking along the same lines.

And as a bonus with the Batman: Year 100 trade paperback (at least for reason subscribers), a libertarian superhero story!

Update: Todd Seavey wrote about Berlin Batman and Ron Paul here.

A Somewhat Related Aside: Brian Doherty has written some more comic book related stuff recently in reason.

eXXXtreme geeking

2008-12-26T23:03:00.006Z

Of the many cool gifts that my sweetie bought for me this year, I think I've enjoyed the Lego kit the most. It's a model of a Star Wars AT-ST, and it's very intricate. The amount of detail in just one of the legs is so amazing it constitutes an objet d'art in and of itself. As a kid I thought those model ships in a bottle were pretty cool, but didn't quite realize just how aesthetically pleasing something as common as Lego could be. I'd like to get one of these Lego figurines to add to my growing collection of No-Brow art.

I'm not quite operating on the same high level of geekiness as April over at the Hyacinth Girl. In less than month she has installed a new flavor of Linux and has made some cool Sci-Fi and pop-culture references when talking about politics, but I'm doing my best to be more competitive.

Sniff

2008-12-24T20:12:00.002Z

It’s final: VHS has gone the way of the Betamax. When I bought my first DVD player I never looked back, but there is something almost, well, magic about watching a scratchy version of The Evil Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on VHS. Maybe Panasonic could add a “Scratchy VHS” setting to their plasma screen televisions…

Beyond Low & High Brow: No Brow!

2008-12-24T00:27:00.005Z

The comic strip I ordered from Mr. Peter Bagge arrived in the mail today, and it is a thing of beauty. Having worked for newspapers and magazines in the past, it was nice to get my hands on an actual artifact - after four moves over eight years, my collection of memorabilia just isn't what it used to be.

It's pretty impressive - comic strips always look so clean when they are on the printed page, but up close, in addition to the black ink, there is white out, and sometimes even traces of the black and blue pencils used to sketch the drawing. The letters aren't as straight as they look on the printed page either, but that's all part of the charm. I can't wait to get it framed!

Blackbelt Zombie Platypus!

2008-12-20T01:39:00.011Z

Zombie Strippers. Directed by Jay Lee. Starring Robert Englund, Jenna Jameson, and Roxy Saint.

Karate Fight. Directed by Rocky Bergen. Starring Girish Manuel, Rocky Bergen, and Valerie Maendel.

Until I saw Zombie Strippers, I thought George Romero was about as subtle as Leatherface chasing after a young hottie with a chainsaw. Boy was I wrong. Jay Lee makes George Romero look like one of the greatest American social commentators since Tom Wolfe.

Enough has been written, by people much smarter than myself, about zombie films as political allegories. I’ll just add that one of the reasons why zombies are effective political allegories is that almost every film director (Joe Dante being the sole exception) has observed the basic rule of “show, don’t tell”. Someone should have told Lee that if soldiers are running around a high tech lab shooting zombies after an experiment goes haywire, the audience really doesn’t have to see a lot of images of Bush and Cheney to get the point.

Speaking of Dubya, stupid people referencing quantum physics or existentialist philosophy is always good for a laugh - which is done once in Zombie Strippers, and very effectively in the first act. However, if it’s deployed as a running gag (as it was done on multiple occasions during the second and third acts), I think it betrays a lack of self-confidence on the part of the director. Say it loud, and say it proud: I’m here to provide cheap thrills and titillation. Anything else is just a bonus.

Now we get to the fun part: the sex and violence. Just how good was the violence? On a technical level, I didn’t understand why Lee included CGI head explosions. Even if the cost of digital effects is getting cheaper, I think squibs still get the best results for productions with a low budget. As for the sex, Jenna Jameson has definitely seen better days, but the other ~~breasts~~ girls provide enough entertainment in between periodic eruptions of violence.

So now that I’ve told my reader(s) what I think makes for a bad small scale production, it’s only fair that I give them a good example of film making done on a shoestring budget. It just so happens that my friend Rocky Bergen has accomplished just such a feat with his second short film, Karate Fight.

If Rocky has never consciously thought about how to write a screenplay, he definitely has a deep, intuitive understanding of how to write a good script. It’s just six minutes, but he hits all the right beats, and as a cinematographer, really knows how to mimic they style of his subject. Enjoy - Rocky Kurosawa strikes again!

And here is the trailer. Since it’s roughly 1/3 of the length of the actual movie, I recommend watching the feature first.

Muttonchops

2008-12-13T05:32:00.005Z

Get Carter. Directed by Mike Hodges. Starring Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland, and John Osbourne.

Get Carter is a bleak thriller, and definitely well worth watching. Director Mike Hodges has a bleak, almost nihilistic vision that makes the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino look as tame as an animated film by Walt Disney. Unlike Tarantino, the violence isn’t just played for laughs. This is a revenge flick, where the death of a brother and the corruption of a niece up’s the ante, dramatically speaking, in a way that Tarantino has never really been able to pull off, anal rape notwithstanding.

The clothes worn by the men and women in Get Carter are stunning. However, the well tailored suits and nothing left to the imagination mini-skirts stand in stark contrast to the perpetual bad hair day every man in this film seems to be having. Despite the at times comical hairstyles on display, this is one bleak thriller worth watching.

If I didn’t have a plasma screen, I don’t think I would have noticed how the uniformly bleak urban landscape plays off the sharp sense of individuation that each characters clothes and hairstyle bring to the film's visual palette. How good are plasma screens? In any medium close up of Michael Caine , his sideburns were in such desperate need of a trim I couldn’t focus on anything else in the picture.

The score was also surprisingly good, at least when compared to other films of the period. The jazz sounds like…jazz, and not the sound audiences in the aught aughts have come to associate with parodies of period pornography. The rock sounds like rock, and not some old jazz guy’s idea of what rock sounds like.

All in all, Get Carter is a very slick little production. I’ve been watching a lot of Japanese action movies from the seventies, but after seeing Get Carter (as well as The Wicker Man a few months ago) I’m going to make a point of putting more British films from the seventies in the Netflix queue.

The Real Naomi Klein

2008-12-10T17:04:00.011Z

As Naomi Klein drives down Bay Street in her Yellow Hummer, she likes to hurl Timbits at random pedestrians. She says this daily ritual is her own special way of “Giving something back to the community, this great country, that has done so much for me and my family.”

Was my lede made up? You betcha! However, does the following quote, from Naomi Klein in a recent New Yorker ~~hagiography~~ profile sound any less insane:

The only time she has ever felt a whiff of utopia was in Buenos Aires, in 2002, when the political system had virtually disintegrated – during the time that she and Lewis were filming “The Take”. “That moment in Argentina was an incredible time because a vacuum opened up,” she says. “They had thrown out four Presidents in two weeks, and they had no idea what to do. Every institution was in crisis. The politicians were hiding in their homes. When they came out, housewives attacked them with brooms. And, walking around Buenos Aires at night, there were meetings on every other street corner. Every plaza where there was a streetlight, people were meeting under it and talking about what to do about the external debt, I swear to God. Groups of one hundred or five hundred people. And organizing buying groceries together because they could get cheaper prices, setting up barters because the currency was worthless. It was the most inspiring thing I’ve ever seen.”

This is Klein’s ideal society? Political instability and a return to the barter system? I’m no economist or intellectual, but her idea of what constitutes a utopia is pretty scary, and sounds really boring. I’d rather play Grand Theft Auto on my PSP then debate economics with a bunch of strangers on a street corner. Unfortunately, I’d probably have no choice as Klein would confiscate my PSP, Red Bull, and satellite dish for her own personal use:

She had spent the day curled up on the blue sofa in her living room, watching CNN while she waited restlessly to hear what would happen in Washington. She fortified herself with cups of coffee and a smoothie. She checked her iPhone for messages from an economist friend who was keeping her posted on what was going on behind the scenes.

reason has a review of Klein’s latest book here and a post on the New Yorker profile here.

Update: Another choice bit from the article:

“Other forms seemed linguistically and ideologically flaccid…We didn’t want to view our history - our radical history - as if from a riverbank, we wanted to jump in and splash around in it…We debated, for instance, the ethics of nominating a live pig for the presidency: what should we feed it, and where should it stay?”

Let the good times roll, baby!

Update II:

A different take on the subtle form of class warfare engaged in by pedigreed leftists like Naomi Klein can be found here.

Update III: Mark Steyn as usual, pretty much nails it. We're about to get the world Naomi Klein has been dreaming of, and it ain't pretty.

No-Fi

2008-12-10T00:42:00.007Z

As entertaining as beating up hookers and shooting pedestrians can be in Grand Theft Auto, one of the most fun games I’ve played so far on the Sony PSP is Loco Roco. Hit the left button, move left, hit the right button, move right, and hit them at the same time to make the little guy jump. It’s simpler than Pac-Man. If Grand Theft Auto is a compendium of references to such auteur directors as Brian DePalma, Martin Scorcese, and Francis Ford Coppola, than Loco Roco is a homage to the art of Mondrian, Piccasso, and Matisse.

It never ceases to amaze me how the best games are frequently the least complicated. I played chess for years. It’s fun, but after learning to play backgammon, it occurred to me that all my chess playing had been nothing more than a masochistic ritual. Backgammon can be a ruthlessly logical game, but the dice introduce that random element that can upset any carefully laid plans, and it adds a lot of zip to the game. And not unlike backgammon, now that I’ve finished the last level of Loco Roco, it’s a game was deceptively more complicated than it first looked.

Update:
Gamers can't get no respect...