SPINE | The Quarter Bin

Let's dig through the four-for-a-dollar comics-commentary box and see what we can find:

New X-Men
Thanks to everybody for the kind words on last week's New X-Men post, and particular thanks to Fanboy Rampage, Insult to Injury, Sean T. Collins, Neilalien and anybody else who linked to the post. GLFC reader Christopher wrote in with an astute comment on the U-Men, the "fallen world" and the audience's role in the X-Men's lack of evolution--so astute, in fact, that I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it first. His point is that the U-Men, humans who profess to love mutants so much that they want to become mutants, which in turn leads them to kill mutants to harvest their organs, represent the readership--literally, they're "you-men." Just as the U-Men claim to be the next step in evolution but are actually part of Sublime's plan to keep the mutants from evolving, the majority of X-Men fans (and the publisher, for that matter) claim to be in favor of progress but summarily reject anything that takes their beloved characters out of the status quo they were in when the readers were twelve years old. See, for instance, how Marvel has decided to build on the new foundation laid by Grant Morrison's run, which as I stated earlier was an inoculation against all the old X-Men tropes made popular by Chris Claremont: by handing the keys to the X-Men franchise back to Claremont. You can see a preview of his upcoming return to Uncanny X-Men here; it's like New X-Men never happened. (The preview also points out one of the more immediate pleasures of Morrison's New X-Men, the one that makes you want to read the comics in order to find all the subtext: Morrison's characters have witty, interesting, intelligent things to say to each other. His dialogue isn't particuarly "realistic," but it conveys real emotion and real points of view. Claremont's dialogue conveys the feeling that the characters are little more than exposition machines and robots programmed to embody one and only one character trait. They feel as two-dimensional as the paper they're printed on. Perhaps this is a subtle continuation of Morrison's metafictional explorations, but I doubt it.)

To properly address Christopher's comment requires more thought than I'm able to muster up at the moment, but it has got me interested in the idea of "the fall" in New X-Men. That idea just sort of popped out at me when I was putting the initial essay together, so I didn't get into it too deeply, but I think it's worth exploring further. Emma Frost completes her seduction of Cyclops when she tells him to "stop being such an old super hero" and "fall;" the U-Men refuse to breath the air of the "fallen world;" Beak literally falls after standing up to Magneto, but survives and returns to fight Magneto at the head of a ragtag group of X-Men; U-Men leader John Sublime falls to his (apparent) death. In Morrison's second issue, Cyclops and Wolverine fall from the sky as Sentinels attack their jet. Their conversation as the jet crashes, which seemed like clever throwaway dialogue at the time, now seems central to Morrison's handling of Cyclops's fall from super hero to human being:

CYCLOPS: Relax. I've survived more jet aircraft crashes than any other mutant. Insurance takes care of everything.

WOLVERINE: You know what I admire most about you, Summers? Your icy calm lunacy under pressure.

CYCLOPS: Call me Cyclops during missions, Wolverine. It keeps things straight.

There's lots more to explore here, but I don't quite have a handle on it yet. In the meantime, check out this elegant little essay on New X-Men at John's Commonplace Book.

Be a Man
I picked up this little comic by Jeffrey Brown from Top Shelf (May-retta's finest comics publisher) at WizardWorld LA. Brown is an associate of Paul Hornschemeier and the cartoonist of the autobiographical graphic novels Clumsy and Unlikely, which I had avoided, despite excellent reviews, because they gave off a very "sensitive tortured artist talks about how sensitive and tortured he is" vibe. If I wanted to hear that, I'd listen to myself.

But whether that's a fair description of Clumsy and Unlikely or not, Brown is fully aware that that's exactly how he's going to be perceived by many readers and non-readers. Be a Man is his hilarious riposte to such ill-informed critics. It's a series of short vignettes, each one apparently an inversion of a similar scene from Clumsy, which recast Brown as a caricature of your basic modern neanderthal, the kind of guy the word "guy" was invented for. Or, as "Jeffrey Brown" himself puts it: "Rarrr, beer, sex, sports, ungh, unh, porn, kick ass, fuck, explosions, trucks, breasts, meat, bitch." Over the course of these 29 vignettes, most of them dealing with "Brown"'s attempts to get laid, Brown dismantles both the "guy" image and his own sensitive artiste persona, revealing them both for the pathetic facades they are. It's uncomfortable, funny stuff, and a great showcase for Brown's rubbery, deceptively sketchy cartooning; in a short gag with "Before" and "After" versions of a single panel from Clumsy, Brown displays his command of the craft by using a few extra lines and shadows to turn himself and his girlfriend into Hollywood sex gods.

Be a Man is ultimately too slight and too focused on a single point to join any sort of comics pantheon, but it's a great introduction to Brown's work. And it makes me want to read Clumsy, because it shows that Brown, unlike many indy autobiographical cartoonists, has a sense of humor about his own shortcomings and, more importantly, perspective on his own work. Another recent autobio graphic novel about a sensitive, tortured artist, Craig Thompson's highly-regarded Blankets, is begging for the sharp critical self-awareness that Brown displays in Be a Man.

You can buy Be a Man and Jeffrey Brown's other books here.

Hellboy
The movie Hellboy opens this weekend, and everybody I know has one of two reactions: "That looks retarded" or "That looks awesome." Me, I don't know. It's weird to see Hellboy as a big tentpole action-flick, when it got its start as an excuse for creator Mike Mignola to draw Jack Kirby monsters hitting each other. Hellboy's main charm is not its large cast of oddballs, its involved ongoing good-vs.-evil story, or its mishmash of Silver Age superheroics, Lovecraftian horror, obscure folklore and action-hero cool; its main charm is the way Mignola draws all those wonderful monsters. Mignola's style is so specific--and the design of Hellboy and his companions so suited to that style--that it may not translate well to CGI and prosthetic makeup. Though Mignola was heavily involved with production, the look of the movie as seen in the trailers is more X-Men than Mignola. There's just not enough black; the average Hellboy page is composed of great jagged swathes of black ink, with the occasional flash of blood red peeking around a corner. But at the very least the movie looks like fun, and I find it hard to resist anything with Selma Blair, so there you go.

In case the movie piques your interest in the comics, I suggest you go with the short-story collection The Chained Coffin and Others. Hellboy publisher Dark Horse has recently reprinted all five Hellboy collections with big numbers on the spines, so you know in what order to read them, but the first, Seed of Destruction, from which much of the movie's story is taken, is also the weakest. Mignola, who had prior to Hellboy made a living as a superhero artist for Marvel and DC, was not yet confident in his writing abilities, so he asked John Byrne (Chris Claremont's old X-Men partner) to write the dialogue. But Byrne's old-school superhero verbosity doesn't mesh well with Mignola's inky art and unconventional page layouts. Better, instead, to get a taste of the Hellboy world with The Chained Coffin, which includes both Mignola's awkward first attempts at scripting ("The Wolves of St. August") and later stories in which Mignola's twisted sense of humor and affection for folklore bring out the best in his art ("The Corpse"). "The Corpse" is also currently available as a solo 25-cent comic, and it's a bargain at twice the price, but you'll have to venture to a comic shop to get it; find one near you with The Master List.

Dark Horses's Hellboy Zone is your one-stop source for all things Hellboy.

The Hellboy library, in order:
Vol. 1: Seed of Destruction
Vol. 2: Wake the Devil
Vol. 3: The Chained Coffin and Others
Vol. 4: The Right Hand of Doom
Vol. 5: Conqueror Worm

If you want to check out Mignola's work, but prefer men dressed as flying rodents to trash-talking demons, you might like 1990's Gotham by Gaslight, written by Brian Augustyn, in which a Victorian-era Batman squares off against Jack the Ripper. It's much less stupid than it sounds.

SUBSTITUTE | Nick's Film School of Hard Knocks, Part 3

Unfortunately, due to an illness Nick was unable to get his article turned in on time, so instead we turn to the Film School of Hard Knocks mailbag:

Dear Nick,
I’m not a producer but I say I’m one at parties. Yesterday I made a really good cup of coffee and Dreamworks promoted me to "associate producer." They gave me a chair to sit in, which was nice, but does this mean I have to do actual work now?

Yours,
Gastrointestinally Distressed in Glendale

Dear GD,
You have nothing to worry about. You just have what’s called an "honorary title." You'll often find that writers, production assistants, gaffers, small rodents, etc. are given the title Associate Producer so the production can comply with certain union guidelines without paying union fees. It’s like paying for Arby’s (like anyone would do that) but getting McDonald's. So have no fear--you’ll still have time to hone your coffeemaking skills, but now you can tell people you're a producer without having to lie. Of course, if telling the truth was high on your priorities list, you wouldn't be working in show business in the first place.

On the off chance that you do get a real promotion, here is a list of the different producers and their functions--see if any of these sound like you:

PRODUCER | These are the people directly responsible for packaging the talent--actors, writers, director, replacement directors, replacement replacement directors, etc.

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER | This is the person (or group) that raised the money, or knew the people with the money, or slept with the people who had the money to get the money that money money money--just think money. Also responsible for procuring rights to source material in the case of adaptations, remakes and sequels. But how many of those do you see? Hollywood's got better things to do than remake B-movies from the 70s.

CO-PRODUCER | This is a title that is usually reserved for someone like a unit production manager (we’ll discuss later) who splits time between unit-production-managing and line producing. Alternately, a coffee gopher who’s been an associate producer for too long.

LINE PRODUCER | The person who reports back to the other producers about how each line item (hence the title, duh) of the budget is coming along. If it doesn’t look like the film will meet budget, that means curtains for the production; if it looks like it’s under budget that means curtains for the production office windows.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER | The "Hey you want a credit in my movie?" title. Either someone who had something to do in the development of the project (like suggesting "Hey, what if Abraham Lincoln were, y'know, hipper?") or the guy at Starbucks who puts extra whipped cream on the executive producer's Frappuccinos.

Next week: Convergence! What is it? Nick promises to find out in time to tell you all about it.

SPEAKER | Ain't seen nothin' like that on television in like an hour

From August 1994 to May 1995 I was fifteen and a sophomore in high school. I have a theory, based entirely on the experiences of one person (me), that sophomore year is when your musical taste is more or less cemented: whatever you were listening to that year, that's going to be your favorite music for the rest of your life. You're old enough to be able to listen to music with a discerning ear, but you're still young enough to be affected by pop and hype. You're right in the heart of adolescence, so you're surly and weird and Nobody Understands You, but you're not old enough to drive, so the best you can do is sit in your room and listen to music. Lots and lots of music. And most mainstream rock music is directed right at the fifteen-year-old mindset; Nine Inch Nails have a lucrative future ahead of them as the perennial favorite band of fifteen-year-olds, because when you're fifteen, Trent Reznor sounds like a genius. He sounds like he's speaking directly to you. Not so much when you're 24.

My sophomore year doesn't seem like it was that great a year for music. The grunge explosion was three years earlier; we were left to deal with the fallout from Kurt Cobain's suicide and the implosion that went with it. It was a year of Grunge Lite, the beginning of the next downturn in the music cycle that probably hit its nadir at Woodstock '99. But this was also the year I discovered the Pixies, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Jane's Addiction, Nick Cave and a hundred other great bands; it was the year I saw my first rock concert (Aerosmith/Collective Soul, Lakewood Amphitheatre), and the year that, thanks to CMJ New Music Monthly and multiple memberships in the BMG and Columbia House record clubs, I began my obsession with music in earnest.

The GLFC mix-CD theme for March, thanks to James, is "A Year of Your Life," so here's Gardner's Sophomore Year. Since I'm a compulsive overachiever, at least when it comes to trivial nerditry like this, I've made two different CDs; those of you in the club will each get one selected at random.

DISC ONE

1. "Ezekiel 25:17" by Samuel L. Jackson
2. "Jungle Boogie" by Kool & The Gang
I saw Pulp Fiction in early '95 but, thanks to my friend Zane, I was already very familiar with it; I had read the script and listened to the soundtrack many times before I saw the movie. I believe I even participated in a Zane-directed, Pulp-parodying adaptation of E.A. Poe's "Hop-Frog" before I saw the film. In this video, which I hope no one ever sees again, I (a rather large 15-year-old) played the dwarf Hop-Frog, while Neal (six feet tall and probably 90 pounds) played the King, whom Poe describes at the story's beginning:

I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He
seemed to live only for joking. To tell a good story of the joke kind,
and to tell it well, was the surest road to his favor. Thus it
happened that his seven ministers were all noted for their
accomplishments as jokers. They all took after the king, too, in being
large, corpulent, oily men, as well as inimitable jokers. Whether
people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself
which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to
determine; but certain it is that a lean joker is a rara avis in
terris.

Irony, get it? So then I, as Hop-Frog, set about inflicting various Tarantino-esque tortures on the King, all set to such Tarantino-approved hits as "Jungle Boogie."

3. "Thursday" by Morphine
Guitarless jazz-grunge three-piece from Boston. "Thursday" is their most rock-n-roll song, and therefore also probably their most well-known (I think it was used in a third-season episode of Homicide). From Cure for Pain, a great album that I, at the time, thought was even greater because I was the only person I knew who had heard it.

4. "Girl Named Sandoz" by The Smashing Pumpkins
An Animals cover from the Pumpkins' B-sides disc, Pisces Iscariot, the liner notes to which are really a treat, in a can't-look-away-from-a-car-crash kinda way. Billy Corgan obviously never learned how to type...

5. "Shitlist" by L7
From the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, another artifact of the Year of Tarantino. I spent a lot of time my sophomore year riding around aimlessly with Zane, and this was in heavy rotation on his CD player. It's a perfect surly-15-year-old singalong, because it's all about making lists of people who piss you off and saying "shit" a lot. The next two songs were also popular driving-around-aimlessly favorites:

6. "Bad Habit" by The Offspring
A song about shooting people who cut you off on the road! I like it because it's socially responsible! Also, the "stupid dumbshit goddamn motherfucker" breakdown was like the pinnacle of rock lyrics-writing to my fifteen-year-old ears. It makes you feel better!

7. "March of the Pigs" by Nine Inch Nails
Still my favorite song off The Downward Spiral. Reznor pushes the Pixies/Nirvana-style soft-loud dynamics to their natural extremes here.

8. "Debaser" by the Pixies
The first song on Doolittle, the first Pixies album I bought. I've got nothing clever to say about the Pixies. I'm just happy to be seeing them at Coachella. Lyrically, "Debaser" is the Reader's Digest version of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's 1928 film Un Chien Andalou, most famous for its eyeball-slicing scene and, if I'm remembering correctly, a shot of a nun on a bicycle that seems to be alluded to in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

9. "Crush with Eyeliner" by R.E.M.
My favorite song from R.E.M.'s 1994 album Monster, their last album as proper rock stars. This song had an incredible video, directed by Spike Jonze, that starred lip-syncing Japanese teenagers in a karaoke bar.

10. "Selling the Drama" by Live
Live were all over Atlanta's 99x in late '94. This was the first single off Throwing Copper, and it didn't get played as incessantly as "I Alone" or, especially, "Lightning Crashes," but it's this one that turned a lot of people, including me, onto the band. The Live of "Selling the Drama" is a more muscular R.E.M., basically. Lead singer Ed Kowalczyk even pulled a Stipe and shaved his head in time for the "I Alone" video, though he left a long braided rat tail at the back. Part of me thought that was cool, but a larger (more intelligent) pat of me knew it was really stupid.

11. "Seether" by Veruca Salt
Remember when Veruca Salt were the next big thing? Yeah, me neither. But if you ever get a chance to see former VS frontwoman Nina Gordon live, take it--she sang a few covers (as a member of "The Electrick Snowflake") at comedian Greg Behrendt's "Bring the Rock" show at the Largo in Hollywood a few months ago, and they were just incredible. A slowed-down, acoustic "Running with the Devil" and a Cure/Pantera mashup. Great stuff.

12. "Plowed" by Sponge
Woo! Fake grunge! This song, more than any other, just epitomizes early 1995 for me. It's so much a product of its time that I can't even imagine it existing today--like it has a built-in expiration date and would die if it ever saw 1996. Listening to Sponge is like riding in a time machine for me.

13. "Teen Angst" by Cracker
"Low" is the Cracker song that was all over the radio in '94, but "Teen Angst," from their eponymous 1992 debut, is the one that always made me happy whenever 99x played it. "Think I'll drive and find a place / to be surly" is Gardner's Sophomore Year.

14. "Against the 70s" by Mike Watt with Eddie Vedder
From Minutemen and fIREHOSE bassist Watt's solo album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat? I was like "Yeah, man, fuck the seventies! You tell 'em, Eddie! Revolution!"

15. "21st Century (Digital Boy)" by Bad Religion
I know they were punk pioneers and have a huge, dedicated fan base, etc., but I'm convinced that you really only need to hear one Bad Religion album--one song, even--in your life. This should be the song.

16. "New Age Girl" by Deadeye Dick
The rise of alt-rock did not mean the death of the one-hit wonder. 99x played this a thousand times a day, though you may remember it from the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack. I remember someone playing this at a youth-group lock-in at the Methodist church; when it got to the line "she don't eat meat, but she sure likes the bone," the youth pastor, normally supercool, started shouting "Turn it off! Turn it off! I know what that means!" Ah, good times.

17. "Tomorrow" by Silverchair
Woo! More fake grunge! Dig the crazy Australian lyrics:

There's no bathroom, and there is no sink.
The water out of the tap is very hard to drink.
Very hard to drink.

Is that because the water goes down the drain clockwise down there? I'm so confused...

18. "Shine" by Collective Soul
When I first heard this on the radio, I thought it was new Pearl Jam. Then I thought, "Man, the new Pearl Jam sucks." But Collective Soul opened for Aerosmith at the first rock concert I ever attended, and they were much better live. This song is just sort of lifeless on record, but you can't fight history.

19. "Not for You" by Pearl Jam
Another song tailor-made for fifteen-year-olds:

restless soul, enjoy your youth
like muhammad hits the truth
can't escape from the common rule
if you hate something, don't you do it too...too...

small my table, sits just two
got so crowded, i can't make room
oh, where did they come from? stormed my room!
and you dare say it belongs to you...to you...

this is not for you
this is not for you
this is not for you
oh, not for you...ah, you...

all that's sacred comes from youth
dedication, naive and true
with no power, nothing to do
i still remember, why don't you...don't you...

this is not for you
this is not for you
this is not for you

On a tangential note, iTunes keeps forcing on me "Bugs," the accordion goof from Vitalogy. It "randomly" brings it up like two times a day.

20. "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" by Nirvana
A Leadbelly cover from their Unplugged set. You don't get this with just the audio, but if you ever see the performance, watch Kurt Cobain during this song: at 3:58, just before the final "...night through," he takes a breath and his eyes get huge, like he's staring down his entire short future right there.

21. "Sleeps with Angels" by Neil Young & Crazy Horse
From the album of the same name. One of a number of Cobain eulogy songs from that year. R.E.M.'s "Let Me In" is another, and like "Sleeps with Angels," it uses heavily distorted guitar fuzz as its main musical component, as if the magnitude of their grief is so great it transcends individual notes; it can only be conveyed in great prickly sheets of feedback.

22. "Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues" by Todd Snider
A live version from Near Truths and Hotel Rooms; the version that received airplay on 99x was a bonus track on Songs for the Daily Planet. This is a hilarious, brutal skewering of grunge, and makes a nice double bill with "The Grungies" from The Ben Stiller Show.

DISC TWO

1. "Felt So Cool" by Adam Schmitt
The only Adam Schmitt song I've ever heard. From Live X for Humanity, a CD of mostly unplugged "Live X" performances from 99x that benefitted Habitat for Humanity. It also had a great acoustic version of "Creep" by Radiohead, and a sleeve by Howard Finster urging listeners to "help Jimy Carters building fund."

2. "You Don't Know How It Feels" by Tom Petty
Somehow, this song just doesn't sound right when the word "joint" isn't reverse-tracked and sanitized for MTV consumption.

3. "All I Wanna Do" by Sheryl Crow
Inescapable that year. Based on the poem "Fun" by Wyn Cooper.

4. "Voodoo Lady" by Ween
I've tried to like Ween, but I saw them at the 40 Watt in Athens in '98 and...let's just say the first three mock-death-metal goofs and ten-minute guitar solos were funny, but the other thirty-five weren't. Still, Chocolate and Cheese is high on the Best Album Cover Ever list.

5. "Rock and Roll Lifestyle" by Cake
The very first single from Cake, better known for "The Distance" and a white-boy cover of "I Will Survive." Yet more skewering of hypocritical rock fans, which seems to be a theme this year.

6. "B-Boys Makin' with the Freak Freak" by The Beastie Boys
Included only because in '94 I thought the "If it's gonna be this kinda party, I'm gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes" sample was the funniest thing ever.

7. "Regulate" by Warren G & Nate Dogg
When you search for "Warren G" on Amazon, the most popular results are two Warren Zevon albums. Hmm. In other news, this was the suburban-white-kid rap anthem of 1994.

8. "Supernova" by Liz Phair
I'm sure, in 1995, some people thought "Supernova" was Liz Phair's sellout song. I wonder what those people think of her now?

9. "Saints" by The Breeders
Anybody who wants to parse the lyrics to this song, please get back to me as soon as possible. It's kind of a cheat because the song does mention summer, but this really is a perfect summer song, and manages to evoke the season even with its nonsensical lyrics.

10. "Violet" by Hole
I just wanted to make sure you all saw this.

11. "Down by the Water" by PJ Harvey
It's weird how your memory works sometimes; I can't remember half the people I went to school with in '95, but I distinctly remember my mom hearing this song on the radio and saying how much she liked it.

12. "River of Deceit" by Mad Season
A grunge supergroup consisting of Layne Staley (Alice in Chains), Mike McCready (Pearl Jam), Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees) and another guy, John Baker Saunders. Their AllMusic bio is morbidly fascinating: the band got its start when McCready met Saunders in a rehab center; their first band name was The Gacy Bunch, after John Wayne Gacy; and both Staley and Saunders later died of drug overdoses. I was so excited about their only album, Above, I made Zane drive me to Rome to buy it they day it was released. Unfortunately, it's not a very good album. But "River of Deceit" is a pretty great song, with perhaps Staley's best vocal work (and stupidest haircut, as evidenced by photos of him from early '95).

13. "Far Behind" by Candlebox
Fake grunge, part three. According to the 1995 Calhoun High School Jacketeer, this was the third favorite song of the Class of '97, behind "On Bended Knee" by Boyz II Men and "Murder Was the Case" by Snoop Dogg.

14. "Everything Zen" by Bush
Fake grunge, part four: British variation. Soft verse/loud chorus and free-associate lyrics about sex, violence and Elvis do not a Nirvana song make.

15. "Milquetoast" by Helmet
From Betty and, in a slightly different version, The Crow soundtrack, which has the honor of being the first CD I ever bought.

16. "When I Come Around" by Green Day
"Basket Case" was the ubiquitous Green Day song from my sophomore year, but "When I Come Around" is far less annoying.

17. "Eiffel Tower High" by Hüsker Dü
From the Dü's first major-label album, 1986's Candy Apple Grey, possibly the worst-sounding album ever made. I got into Hüsker Dü because Black Francis found Kim Deal by placing an ad looking for a bassist into "Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary." I never got into Peter, Paul and Mary, though.

18. "Ugly" by Violent Femmes
The corollary to my "Musical taste is determined during your sophomore year" theory is that every year, the Violent Femmes' first album will be discovered by a new batch of sophomores. They weren't the most popular band, they weren't the most influential, they're good but not particularly great, but there's something about that album, "Blister in the Sun" and "Add It Up" in particular, that's iirresistible to fifteen-year-olds.

19. "Little Bastard" by Ass Ponys
One of the bands I was proud of liking because only I had heard of them. "Little Bastard" is from 1994's Electric Rock Music, and they've only gotten better; this blog's current title-bar quote is from their stunning 2001 album Lohio.

20. "Lone Star Song" by Grant Lee Buffalo
From 1994's Mighty Joe Moon, which, as you can tell from "Lone Star Song," is all about using rock music to both mythologize America and tear down that mythology. This was, and remains, one of my favorite albums; it's well worth checking out (you might remember "Mockingbirds," from the same album, which got some radio play at the time). GLB have since broken up, but frontman Grant Lee Phillips continues as a solo artist and occasionally pops up on the TV show Gilmore Girls.

21. "Time" by Hootie and the Blowfish
Hootie owned 1995; I know it, you know it, and Hootie knows it, and it probably kills him every time he remembers it. Yes, I know Hootie wasn't Darius Rucker's nickname. His fault for picking a stupid band name. "Time" is the best song from Cracked Rear View, just a big ball of schmaltz-rock, and it sounds exactly like what Hootie was: R.E.M., if they were fronted by a Top-40 R&B balladeer instead of a weirdo like Michael Stipe.

I've started a third disc, but I'm not happy with it (if you're wondering where Weezer, TLC, Montell Jordan, Filter, Oasis et al are, that's where)--I keep finding songs I'd forgotten about. "Can't Even Tell" by Soul Asylum (from the Clerks soundtrack)? "Head" by Lotion (Thomas Pynchon's favorite band--he wrote the liner notes for their second album)? "Delivery" by Compulsion? (Actually, if any of you have "Delivery," let me know. I want it.) These all exist on the fringes of my memory, either as snippets of lyrics or melodies or bits of trivia, like the Lotion/Pynchon connection. Maybe there'll be a sequel, as I excavate further.

MICROFICTION | In the Neighborhood

So Ultiman moving into the neighborhood was the last straw for me. I mean I put up with Boswell the Bear moving into Miss Glickman's old house; he can get a little rowdy, sure, and there was that thing with the Kensingtons' dog, but look, nobody liked that dog, and Boswell's an all right guy as long as he's not hungry. Plus he's got the best TV on the block, and if seeing the Super Bowl on a 60-inch plasma widescreen means every once in a while a neighborhood dog goes missing, I can live with it. I got a cat, and I don't like it that much anyway.

But once Boswell moved in, it's like Wexford Pond Subdvision turned into fucking Story Time Village or something. Look, I know the kids love the pirates these days, what with that Jack Sparrow fruit prancing around in that movie and all, but that does not necessarily mean you want Cap'n Blackhand the Undead Pirate moving in next door. For one thing, and I don't know if you know this about zombies, they stink. Especially zombie pirates, because from what I've since learned in my internet research about my new neighbors, taking a goddamn shower wasn't high on anybody's priorities list in the 18th century, much less a pirate's. All right, so there's the smell, number one. Number two? The constant singing. Goddamn sea chanties. "Yo ho ho," et cetera. And I've seen the way the Cap'n looks at my daughter, my little Jacqueline, and I don't care for that one bit. If Cap'n Blackhand and I share views on anything, it's on the uses of wenches, but not when it's my Jacqueline. He keeps subtly bringing up the idea of white slavery with me, as well as casually mentioning how many doubloons and pieces o' eight he's got stashed in his split-level. He's got another thing coming if he thinks I'm gonna sell him my precious Jacqueline.

And at every Subdivision Association meeting he forces a vote on whether he can bring his ship in, and I keep telling him Wexford Pond doesn't actually exist.

So after the Cap'n bought the Sternberg place, some sort of intelligent slime mold moved into Jimmy Davis's house, and apparently there's a completely theoretical family living next door, but hell if I've ever seen 'em. At least they're quiet. Not like TruckoTron, the goddamn transforming robot across the street. Every morning at 6:30--on the fucking dot--all his pistons are clanking and the hydraulics are hissing and he's making a hell of an unholy racket turning into his truck form. I told him at the Association meeting, I said why don't you transform at night and just sleep that way, in the garage? Because I don't get home from the Wal-Mart till three in the morning, so when he wakes me up every morning at 6:30, it seriously fucks up my sleep schedule. And Mr. Grubb's noticed, and I just know he's waiting for the okay from Chesterton so he can fire me. I figure I got a week before Chesterton gets back from the annual meeting in Arkansas.

But that shit with TruckoTron ain't nothing compared to this Ultiman jackass. The day after he moved in, a damn black-hole bomb swallowed up Mrs. Holloway's house. And all her cats. I mean she was 92, so it's no great loss, but what if that had been the Wordmores'? Sometimes the only thing that gets me out of bed in the afternoon is the thought of watching Nancy Wordmore do her evening yoga in her living room, with the big picture window and all. I mean I love Shirley, but if Ultiman ever fucks up Nancy's yoga routine, he's gonna have to come up with something a hell of a lot better than four-dimensional super-breath to stop me.

Two days ago I had to go into work early to cover for Earl, the greeter, which is fine except for, you know, greeting's for old people--but anyway, that meant I couldn't pick up Jacqueline from band practice, and TruckoTron was off searching for the Prime Matrix or something, and Boswell can't drive, and obviously I'm not letting the Cap'n anywhere near my daughter. So I asked Ultiman if he'd pick her up, and of course he said yes because he's all about helping, the putz. And the next day when I picked Jacqueline up, all she could talk about was how Ultiman wants her to be his "ward" or something. I don't know what kinda kinky shit they get up to in Topaz City, but no daughter of mine is gonna be anybody's ward, and I don't care if he saved the earth from Dr. Argon that one time. You can save the earth and still be a pervert.

But Jacqueline's young; she can't read people like I can. She thinks Ultiman's better than her old man because he's got a quantum spleen. I figured I better put a stop to this "ward" nonsense before it got out of hand, so I went over to Ultiman's house last night to have a talk with him. He didn't answer the door, but it was cracked a little, so I went on in. I found him lying on his kitchen floor in a pool of blood. I checked his pulse--that's how come my fingerprints are on him. I'm telling you, he was dead when I found him. There was a cutlass sticking out of his back, is all I'm saying. Even if wanted to kill him--and I didn't--I don't think I would even be able to. He's Ultiman, right? And I mean he may have been a pervert, but he did save the earth that one time. That's gotta count for something. I didn't like the guy, but that didn't mean I couldn't have gotten to like him. We never had a chance to have a beer together, that's all. He was always off fighting supervillains, and I've got the night shift at Wal-Mart, buffing the floors. It's tough, you know. Shirley works two jobs just so we can keep making payments on Jacqueline's tuba. She can barely carry the thing, but she loves it. I ain't no superhero like Ultiman, but I do what I can. I wouldn't wish death on anybody, even some pervert from Topaz City. You heard about that last sidekick he had, right? That's all I'm saying. You just want your daughter to grow up in a good neighborhood. I mean Ultiman's from the future, so he's got a different way of looking at things. He knows what's coming. I don't. I'm trying to make a future for Jacqueline. Trying to make the future as good as she is. I don't want the future to let her down like it let me down.

SPINE | There Went Tomorrow

Secrets, cliffhangers and revelations are integral parts of serial storytelling, and that is especially true in superhero comics. Grant Morrison's New X-Men is no different; its 41 issues have a handful of major secrets and a dozen smaller ones. Many of these will be revealed in the following essay, so if you have not read New X-Men #114-154 but think you would like to, I suggest you read the comics before reading this essay. I enthusiastically gush over the series in this previous post, if that helps any. Morrison's entire run is collected in the following books:

Vol. 1: E Is for Extinction
Vol. 2: Imperial
Vol. 3: New Worlds
Vol. 4: Riot at Xavier's
Vol. 5: Assault on Weapon Plus
Vol. 6: Planet X
Vol. 7: Here Comes Tomorrow (not yet published)

New X-Men Vol. 1 Hardcover (collects E Is for Extinction & Imperial)
New X-Men Vol. 2 Hardcover (collects New Worlds & Riot at Xavier's)
New X-Men Vol. 3 Hardcover (not yet published)

PROFESSOR X: Thoughts on the new school uniforms?

WOLVERINE: Suddenly I don't have to look like an idiot in broad daylight.

BEAST: I was never sure why you had us dress up like super heroes anyway, Professor.

CYCLOPS: The professor thought people would trust the X-Men if we looked like something they understood.

PROFESSOR X: That's correct, Scott. However...I've been working on better ways to encourage people to trust mutants. - New X-Men #114

BEAST: Because every few hundred thousand years, evolution, which emphatically does not proceed smoothly, takes huge catastrophic jumps. Old life forms get wiped from the fossil record overnight in periodic mass extinctions, and are replaced. I think Cassandra Nova is the first of a new unforeseen species. I think she'll instinctively use her outlandish natural gifts to wipe us out if she can. This could become a war for the domination of the biosphere.

JEAN GREY: Domination? War? Henry...Can't we think of a better way to deal with this? - New X-Men #116

The X-Men are superheroes. And what superheroes do is fight. They fight supervillains, they fight the giant robots sent by the government to kill them, they fight alien menaces, and they fight each other, endlessly. Unlike most superheroes, the X-Men also fight intangibles--hatred and prejudice--but they do so with their fists and claws and optic blasts. Professor X preaches a pacifist doctrine that seeks to effect nonviolent change, but sooner or later someone always ends up hitting somebody else.

Last week, with the publication of New X-Men #154, writer Grant Morrison finally stated explicitly the overarching point of his three-year run on the series: this fighting, this constant superheroic aggression, is keeping the X-Men from doing what their very premise suggests they should do. It’s keeping them from evolving. And just as the fictional mutants are unable to evolve past their punchups and fisticuffs, so have Marvel's X-Men books been unable to evolve past the formulas created for them by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and later by Chris Claremont and John Byrne. What Morrison offers in New X-Men is a way to move past these old formulas--a way for the comic book itself to evolve.

Morrison, a Scottish writer who had previously explored the limits of comic-book reality by writing himself into Animal Man, revived the moribund Justice League of America, and possibly inspired The Matrix with The Invisibles, took over X-Men in May 2001, immediately renaming it New X-Men. The "New" was not just a cosmetic change, as Morrison introduced new characters (Xorn, Fantomex, and a school's worth of students), new costumes (leather jackets and motorcycle boots to replace yellow and blue spandex), secondary mutations (Emma Frost’s "organic diamond" skin, Beast's new feline form), a new villain (Cassandra Nova), and a new sense of purpose. "Feared and hated by the world they have sworn to protect" has always been the X-Men equivalent of Spider-Man's "With great power comes great responsibility"--it's the basis of the oppressed-minority metaphor the X-Men have participated in for four decades. But in Morrison's third issue, #116, the Beast (aka Dr. Henry McCoy) discovers an extinction gene in the human genome. Humanity will be all but wiped out within four generations, to be replaced by mutants "or something even stranger." While this revelation would give humans a new reason to hate and fear mutants, it also places the struggle between the two species into a larger perspective. Professor Xavier thinks humans and mutants can leave peacefully together; Magneto, the Malcolm X to Xavier's Martin Luther King, thinks mutants should conquer humans, or, failing that, separate themselves from humans entirely (which is exactly what he did, declaring himself ruler of the mutant nation of Genosha). But in the long run, evolution says neither doctrine really matters.

In New X-Men #115, Cassandra Nova launches a Sentinel attack on Genosha, killing 16 milion mutants, including Magneto. In an instant, the ideological struggle between Xavier and Magneto, which had lasted since the very first issue of X-Men in 1963, is over. Xavier wins by default, but Magneto, thanks to the extinction gene, gets the last laugh.

"Your species truly is more aggressive than homo sapiens. And even quicker to persecute and demonize others. We like to model your behavior, you see, to learn from your every move, so we can be more like you. Even the way you sit betrays an arrogance and self-confidence few ordinary humans attain in a lifetime." - John Sublime, New X-Men #118

"You...you run around fighting like Greek gods and...and monsters...If you want the truth, it's that people hate mutants because trouble follows you wherever you go!" - A human journalist, New X-Men #123

"The mutant species has registered toxic levels of aggression--nature itself has chosen to deal with your kind." - Imperial Sage Araki 6, New X-Men #133

The X-Men’s greatest villain is dead, and "after Genosha, the old troublemakers don’t seem to bother," as Cyclops puts it. In the absence of traditional supervillains, the X-Men look for new ways to bring about Xavier’s dream. Xavier outs himself as a mutant and takes the X-Men public, forming the worldwide X-Corporation; the Xavier Institute becomes "an outpost of the future, here and now, where we can actually push at the limits of possibility and rehearse the world of tomorrow." Xavier and his X-Men are actively working toward integration with humans, but, as always, trouble follows them: Cassandra Nova, Xavier's twin sister, who wants to exterminate all mutant life on earth; John Sublime and his U-Men, humans who accept mutant organ grafts to become members of the "third species" homo perfectus; Weapon XII, the latest mutant-killing supersoldier created by the Weapon Plus program, which turned Logan into Wolverine--aka Weapon X--years ago. There is something connecting these new villains, all of whom are dedicated to either destroying the mutant species or to turning man and mutant against each other. No matter what they do, aggression and war always find the X-Men. Or, as Wolverine puts it in NXM #133: "You know? Here's me trying my best to honor the strict pacifist principles of the Xavier Institute...and here's a bunch of slave traders filling me full of lead."

QUENTIN QUIRE: So much for the dream! All my life I've waited for this "dream" to come true! We were promised peace and security! All my life! Where is it? This place has taught me nothing but what it was like to run and fight and hide and--

PROFESSOR X: You could have submitted your critique in the form of an essay, Quentin. - New X-Men #137

ESME: Well...just because Miss Frost’s old students wore spandex and flew around like idiots doesn’t mean we have to be stupid, too.

SOPHIE: Stop fussing, Esme, and hand me the Kick. Haven’t you ever wanted to be a super hero? - New X-Men #137

In "Riot at Xavier's" (#135-138), a group of students led by the powerful telepath Quentin Quire and influenced by the power-enhancing drug Kick take over the Xavier Institute on Open Day, when humans are invited to the school. The students are protesting the alleged murder of mutant fashion designer Jumbo Carnation by a human gang, but the riot is really fueled by a combination of Kick and Quire's feelings of youthful rebellion and inadequacy in the wake of the news that he was adopted. The riot is yet more aggression, this time directed from mutant to mutant, but inspired by the belief that man and mutants are at war. That aggression leads to the student Sophie deciding to be a "super hero" and stop Quire by taking Kick and using Xavier's telepathy-enhancing Cerebra machine to boost her powers, a decision that results in her death. The X-Men subdue Quire, and before he is "liberated from his physical cocoon and born into a higher world," he has a revelation: "What if we were both wrong, Professor X...and it wasn't humans to blame at all? What if the real enemy...was inside...all along?" It turns out Quire is right; the real enemy is inside the mutants, as Morrison reveals in his final issue. But Morrison, through Quire, is making a larger commentary on X-Men and superhero comics in general--the aggression and belligerence inherent in super heroes is what keeps them from evolving, just as the X-Men’s constant battles keep them from achieving Xavier’s dream. "The supermen fight and die and return in a meaningless shadowplay because we make them do it," says that internal enemy in issue #154, and that sentiment could just as easily come from the dark hearts of superhero publishers and writers. The decision to be a "super hero" is the decision to hurt someone, and in Morrison’s New X-Men, that decision leads to death. And you can’t evolve when you’re dead.

"These new encounters suggest puzzles I must solve. Equations of brute force. Calculus of conquest and annihilation." - Weapon XV, New X-Men #144

"Why didn't it kill me, Fantomex? Weapon XV...it was like...it was like running a fight program...like pro-wrestling..." - Cyclops, New X-Men #145

FANTOMEX: This was to be their headquarters...our headquarters. I was supposed to sit here, brooding under the spotlight while we targeted mutant nests for extermination. An unbeatable team of living Sentinels, custom-grown in The World. And Weapon Fifteen there...or "Ultimaton," God help him live that down. And Weapon Twelve..."Huntsman." You see what they were planning, Monsieur Summers? Market research. How better to introduce new strains of highly controversial, genetically-engineered supermen to the public? How else to unleash these hybrids on an unsuspecting population? This genetic cleansing operation disguised as a comic book fighting team.

CYCLOPS: Then it's war, isn't it? Humans never trusted us. They never will. They won't rest until we're all dead. - New X-Men #145

Morrison’s commentary on the limitations of super heroes reaches its metafictional peak in "Assault on Weapon Plus" (NXM #142-145). Wolverine, Cyclops and Fantomex, aka the rogue Super-Sentinel Weapon XIII, infiltrate the Weapon Plus program to find the truth about Wolverine’s past. What they find indicates that Wolverine was born and raised to be nothing but a killing machine--fighting is all he was ever done, and all he was ever meant to know how to do. "They chose me because I like to kill, Jeannie," he tells Jean Grey later, in #148. "All I'm good for's killing." That's true in both the intra- and extra-comic sense. Wolverine is by far the most popular X-Men character (in any given month he appears in at least three different monthly series, along with numerous guest appearances, if that gives you any idea), and that popularity is based largely on the fact that he likes to hurt people. He's the one with the razor-sharp claws popping out of his hands, remember? He's the very embodiment of superheroic aggression: a character who exists only to fight and kill, and who can’t be killed himself. The first page of Morrison's first issue (#114) is a shot of Wolverine tearing a giant Sentinel robot to bits with his claws; Cyclops, standing below him, says "Wolverine. You can probably stop doing that now." In Morrison's final issue, #154, Phoenix warns Wolverine, locked in a battle with the archvillain Sublime, "Don’t let Sublime contaminate you! Don’t fight!" These two bookending statements sum up Morrison’s attitude toward the X-Men’s superheroic aggression, as personified by Wolverine: they can probably stop doing that now. But Morrison knows they probably won't; he allows Wolverine to achieve peace, but he achieves it only by getting himself killed.

The second secret of the Weapon Plus program is that the various Weapon Plus Super-Sentinels, including Fantomex, Weapon XII and Weapon XV, were to be unleashed upon Earth’s mutant population in the guise of a superhero team, one modeled to a degree on the Justice League of America. Here is where Morrison makes explicit the connection between the "toxic levels of aggression" to be found in both mutants and superhero comics. The Super-Sentinels will turn mutant against human once more, and retard the process of evolution by distracting mutantkind with pointless battles, just as traditional superhero comics keep from growing and changing by offering up slam-bang action every month. More specifically, in the case of X-Men comics, the comics can’t evolve and change until they move past the "feared and hated" routine, past the "classic" X-Men trappings. And there’s no X-Men trapping more classic than Magneto.

MAGNETO: Wolverine! Maniac! If I must fight, at least it is for a cause! You do it for pleasure! Too long have I planned, X-Men. Too long has mutantkind suffered! This time, my victory will not be denied!

STORM: It will, Magneto, because it must be! If we are hated and feared, it is in large part because of you! - Uncanny X-Men #150: "I, Magneto" by Chris Claremont & Dave Cockrum, October 1981

"Magneto had become a legend in death, an inspiration for change. Now look at you--just another foolish and self-important old man, with outdated thoughts in his head. You have nothing this new generation of mutants wants...except for your face on a T-shirt. They have ideas of their own now. Perhaps it's time we put away the old dreams, the old manifestos...and just listened for a while. Your way will never work, Erik. This can't go on. I think you've had enough. I think we've all had enough." - Professor X, New X-Men #150

After "Assault on Weapon Plus" comes "Planet X" (#146-150), in which Morrison brings back Magneto in a resurrection that was both shocking and shockingly well-integrated into the series; clues to his reappearance had been planted since his death in #115, but they were so subtle as to be undetectable until the stories were reread, at which point they were unmistakable. Magneto's plan represents old-school supervillainy at its most absurdly grandiose: he had been lying in wait at the Xavier Institute for months disguised as the mutant healer Xorn, recruiting students to his cause, before announcing himself to Xavier and the world, destroying the Institute and taking over Manhattan, declaring it New Genosha. Next he plans to reverse the earth’s magnetic poles, killing every human. But the Magneto here is not the noble ruler he had become before his death; his powers enhanced and his mind ravaged by the drug Kick, he is a power-hungry, human-hating lunatic who inspires nothing but contempt in his newly recruited Brotherhood of Mutants. "This guy’s no hero, he’s a jerk," says former Xavier Institute student and Brotherhood recruit Beak. "Magneto is nothing but a jerk!" Morrison turns the traditional Magneto story on its head here. Magneto’s conviction has always drawn other mutants to him, but now his drug-fueled plans to kill mankind push them away; he is unable to inspire the mutants of New Genosha with his over-the-top speeches, which his lieutenant Toad dismisses as too “Shakespearean.” Magneto, and the cackling brand of supervillainy he represents, is exposed here as a sham. He was able to recruit Xavier’s students only in his guise as the pacifist Xorn. The students were drawn to the gentleness and wisdom of Xorn, who represents everything "new" Morrison tried to add to the X-Men. Once the students see Magneto for who he is, however, they turn their backs on him, and, symbolically, on the old X-Men paradigm he represents. In Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum's Uncanny X-Men #150 from 1981, the X-Men prevent Magneto from destroying the world by showing him the errors in his doctrine; but in New X-Men #150, Wolverine kills Magneto. Morrison knows that Magneto, though he may change, would always revert back to the power-mad supervillain he once was--Magneto was an infection, preventing the X-Men from evolving. He had to be eradicated.

EMMA FROST: Stop trying to live up to such ridiculous, restrictive ideals. Let yourself fall. Stop being such an old super hero, Scott.

CYCLOPS: But I’ve never been anything else...I’ve never been allowed to be anything else. - New X-Men #138

"Scott. You’re my favorite super hero." - Jean Grey to Cyclops, New X-Men #126

What Morrison has attempted with New X-Men is an inoculation. He injected the series with all the old viruses--Magneto, Sentinels, evil twins, dystopian futures, the Phoenix, Weapon X, the Shi'ar Empire--but in altered forms that showed them for the diseases they had become. They worked in the past, but now they keep the X-Men idea from progressing--they keep the mutants locked in an endless series of battles and reworkings of past ideas. Morrison's New X-Men is one last shot of all the old tropes, a chance for the characters and the readers to build antibodies against them so they can't come back. So the X-Men can evolve out of the superhero box they were shoehorned into (given what has been revealed so far of Marvel's post-Morrison plans, there’s only a slim chance of this actually happening). And Morrison's not just talking about the old superhero saws of pacifism vs. violence and should-we-kill? vs. we-shouldn't-kill; he’s talking about the aggression at the very core of superhero comics. Superhero fights started as metaphors, but now they refer only to themselves, and the only progress made is in the level of graphic detail. The idea of the superman, New X-Men tells us, has the potential for much more than just an excuse for earth-shattering wrestling matches. We created the supermen, and there is still more we can learn from them, just as they are capable of more--even something as profound and simple as love.

Cyclops--Scott Summers--is the X-Men's prototypical super hero, their leader and all-around stick-in-the-mud. He's married to Jean Grey, a telepath and telekinetic who every once and a while plays host to the destructive cosmic power of the Phoenix. But Scott's not happy with the marriage, and he can't tell Jean--but he can tell the seductive Emma Frost, with whom he begins a telepathic affair. So begins Scott's descent from super hero to human being (mutant, actually, but you get the point), from boring cliché to screwed-up, vibrant, living person. It's a fall, but also a rebirth, and that rebirth is the heart of Morrison's New X-Men. The fall is what makes us human; a super hero who never falls isn't a hero at all, but an untouchable god. Beak becomes a hero after a literal fall caused by Magneto; the organ-harvesting U-Men refuse to breathe the air or touch the ground of the "fallen world." But the fallen world is the only world we, and the X-Men, have. Utopia is an unachievable dream, and Eden is the eugenic nightmare of Sublime in Morrison's final story, "Here Comes Tomorrow." At the end, Jean Grey, as the Phoenix, must choose between the perfect, cold, superheroic "love" she and Scott had, and the messy, complex love he shares with Emma. She chooses the fallen world; like Morrison, she burns away the past to make room for the future.

SUBSTITUTE | Nick's Film School of Hard Knocks, Part 2

Special guest edumacation by Nick. See part 1 here. - G

I was going to rant for two or three pages on the importance of collaboration on a motion picture project, but instead I will be true to my word and discuss the importance of producers and schmoozing at parties.

Schmoozing at parties

The first thing to remember when going to your Hollywood party is that everyone believes that they are the most important person in the world. And even if they don’t believe it, they want you to believe it. So when you walk into the party, start sizing people up. Are they attractive? Then you shouldn’t talk to them. Nice? Is there a big crowd around them? Do they seem really happy to be there? Avoid them like carbohydrates. In fact, only go out of your way to talk to the really hideous guy in the corner, as he is no doubt the heir to the Wal-Mart fortune and would love to finance your next movie/headshot/house. He’ll be standing next to the bar, and that's where you’ll want to be anyhow.

As you make your way toward the bar you will probably be stopped by a number of people. Remember everyone is looking for the "next big thing," and for all they know it could be you (it's not). So they will stop you and introduce themselves and ask a scripted series of questions. The first question you will be asked is "What do you do?" followed by "What are you working on?" Then--if you’re me--it’s followed by the comment “Oh, um that’s nice, I’ve got to go wash my hair now.”

Chances are if you’re reading this, your answers to these questions are "I sell sea shells down by the sea shore" and "the square root of not much." These are fine and clever answers, and that is exactly why they will not work at a Hollywood party. Most of the attendees of Hollywood parties are not clever people--they may be intelligent (though not likely), but definitely not clever. If they wanted clever they would have watched Mr. Show instead of Saved by the Bell: The New Class.

No, gentle reader, your answer shall always be "I am a producer." (Hey, I am a producer. -G) Even if you’ve only produced a really funny looking piece of crap in the toilet, you’re still a producer. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world have no idea what a producer does* and an even smaller number of producers know what one does. People just know that they are important and thus it is important to know them.

Now take a second and think of your favorite Three Stooges cartoon (if you can’t think of Three Stooges, a Saved by the Bell episode will work fine). (I like the one where Jesse takes speed. "I'm so excited," etc. - G) Wouldn’t it be cool if that instead of being just 10 or 22 minutes long, it was an hour? Think of how cool it would be to see Larry block Moe’s eye gouge for thirty minutes! Or how great it would be if Zack and Kelly’s prom was in real time! Now that you've thought about it, you’ve begun development of a project. So your answer to the second question is now "I have a comedy/drama in development."

Now that you've hooked your mark, they'll want to remember your name. Which raises an interesting prospect. Remember that cool guy in high school? The one that all the girls used to drool over and a lot of the guys did too? Remember how smart and funny he was? Remember how he’s not you? Well now is your chance to be that guy (though now he’s probably living in a trailer park with two kids and a '78 Thunderbird he’s months away from paying off). So when they ask a second time what your name is (and they will, oh they will) just toss out that guy's name, then tell them that you’re sorry, you forgot, you just recently changed your name to something you felt was a little bit hipper (don’t use the actual word "hipper"--never use the actual word "hipper" unless you’re at the party and you realize that everyone surrounding you is a porn star--then it’s OK). Once you’ve fed them the B.S. about your new hipper (Did you say hipper? You better not have...) name, then hit them with your real one. You’ve now created a sense of mystery about who you are. Way to go, don’t get cocky.

Now the person you are talking to will probably try and romance you with some boring story about how they’ve done this and that and charities and orphans or whatever at which point you should blithely walk off and begin a conversation with someone else. The only time you should not walk off is if they begin to tell you about how they won all that money off of Powerball or that Imclone stock sale and now they're eager to part with it.

Should you finally get to the bar and the Wal-Mart heir is still there and isn’t getting shot down by some hot starlet who doesn’t know who he is, don’t worry about trying to talk to them because they’ll be so wasted/high/Gary Busey by the end of the night that they won’t remember talking to you anyhow.

And remember to smile!

*In an effort to educate the literally fives of people that read this, here is a quick breakdown of the role of the producer. The producer is the package maker. After finding the content he/she then gets the talent together and finds a way to raise money from anywhere she/he can. There are different types of producers, but it’s 12:02 and I’m tired so that will have to wait for next week's film school, along with a rant about relinquishing control of a project.

Nick has never been to, or known anyone who’s gone to, a Hollywood party. (Dude, I've been to plenty of Hollywood parties! But you're right--the bar is the place to be. -G) The closest he’s come has been an Oscar party where he kept hoping that Encino Man would be the write-in winner for Best Original Screenplay.

SPEAKER | There's nothing more than this

The planned Living Colour retrospective, as well as another music post I'm working on, will have to wait, because they both require actual research and lots of writing and it's 12:21 am on Monday at the moment, and I'd like to either go to bed or read some more New X-Men in preparation for Wednesday's comics post, so today I'm just going to throw some MP3s at you and ramble about karaoke. Man, this thing is like a job, except I don't get paid and I don't have to wear pants. But I am wearing pants, so don't get freaked out.

So, karaoke. Thanks to my karaoke-obsessed friends, last year I also became obsessed with karaoke, which may comes as a surprise to anyone who's known me for any significant amount of time, since I don't even sing in the car if other people are around. (And I've got a pretty good idea why, too, but I don't think you come here to watch me self-diagnose personal psychoses.) But karaoke is great for someone, like me, who harbors dreams of being a rock star, yet has no musical talent. Also like me. Let's be charitable and say that my natural singing voice is somewhat Leonard Cohen-esque (there's a line in "Tower of Song" where Cohen growls "I was born with the gift of a golden voice"), only without the gravitas or the cigarettes and whiskey.

Karaoke is most fun when you get to sing a lot; getting drunk and fumbling through "Paradise City" is a lot of fun, but it's torture to sit through someone else getting drunk and fumbling through "Paradise City," which is six minutes and 46 seconds long and feels like three hours. Likewise, it's always best to pick a song that you know the words to. It's occasionally charming when a cute girl futzes around with a song and doesn't know the words; it's considerably less charming when anybody else does it. It's also good to pick a song that lets you send coded, passive-aggressive messages to other people at the bar; as anyone who's seen Lost in Translation knows, that's the real point of karaoke.

Song selection is usually a mixed bag; I could never understand why the one Night Ranger song in the selection at the late, lamented Crazy Jack's wasn't "Sister Christian." If you're going to sing a Night Ranger song, isn't that the one you want to sing? I'm convinced that there's a fortune to be made in recording karaoke versions of relatively obscure alt-rock songs. I know it's fun to sing Bon Jovi, but if any karaoke place ever had a Pixies song in its selection, I would probably die of happiness. It's hard to say I have "favorite" karaoke songs, since I think the only song I've ever sung twice is Living Colour's "Cult of Personality," but here are a few songs that I liked singing the most.

"Sweet Jane" by The Velvet Underground
The first song I ever did karaoke-style (it was actually a Lou Reed solo version, but it's close enough). This is, in all seriousness, one of the five best songs ever written, but it's not a great karaoke song because no one's ever heard it. I was shocked that it was on the list. But it was a pretty great karaoke song for me, because I can't sing, and neither can Lou Reed. Furthermore, he has a distinctive, easily-imitated voice. And if you can't sing, it's best to pick a song by someone with a bad voice that you can at least do a halfway-decent imitation of (see also: Bob Dylan). Just sing through your nose! It's easy!

"Pump It Up" by Elvis Costello
Another easily imitated singer with a not-great voice. This one's a little more difficult, because the vocals have an odd clipped rhythm, and it's very lyrically dense, but it's a lot of fun to sing. And I must have done pretty well, because I got the thumbs-up from a couple of barflies. And believe me, impressing shady alcoholics with your karaoke skills is one of the best feelings ever. They're not there to humor you, so if you can get them to look up from their bourbon and nod at you in approval, you know you've done a good job.

"She Talks to Angels" by The Black Crowes
Okay, some of you may have read the microfiction from a few weeks ago and wondered if that had anything at all to do with real life. Why, yes indeed it does. Except for the murder part. I made that up.

"She Talks to Angels" is a gorgeous song, and kind of a difficult one to sing, but it sounds easy, because Chris Robinson has raspy Southern voice that sounds easy to imitate. So I sang it at the Big Fish Bar & Microwave, our new karaoke haunt now that Crazy Jack's is no more, and I thought I did okay. But near the end of the night, another guy who came in after I sang it got up and did the same song. Most karaoke places have a rule that prohibits two people from singing the same song, and without belaboring the point or sounding insane, I'd just like to say that the rule is there for a reason, and that reason is to keep people like this guy from singing "She Talks to Angels" about a thousand times better than I did, to the point that BFB&M karaoke host Sy spent literally five minutes gushing over how great a singer the guy was, and thereby crushing my poor fragile dreams of being a rock star. That's all I'm saying.

But that guy, whoever he was, sure could sing.

"Waiting for Tonight" by Jennifer Lopez
As the above comments might attest, I'm a bit competitive when it comes to karaoke. Which is why I love the PlayStation game Karaoke Revolution which lets you compete against your friends in a karaoke contest while digitally animated hoochies and prettyboys dance around on the screen. We all got together at the GLFC headquarters one night to play this, and after spirited readings of "Bizarre Love Triangle" and "You Really Got Me," I was in the lead going into the final round. In the final round, the computer picks your song, and the PlayStation spat out J-Lo's "Waiting for Tonight." In case it's not obvious, this breaks my karaoke rules, in that I don't know the words, and even though J-Lo can't sing, her voice is not easily imitated. But I like to think that my performance of the song made up for in intensity what it lacked in lyrical or tonal accuracy, and I'm glad to say that my voting competitors agreed. Either that, or they were so frightened by my interpretation of the song that they were scared to vote against me. Either way, I won, and that's all that matters.

You got Andre in my Patterson!

I know this'll be of interest to at least a couple of you:

Largehearted Boy has a link to Drive-By Truckers covering Outkast's "Hey Ya!"

MICROFICTION | Jenny Rex vs. The Five-Dimensional Ninjas: A Recaplet

Worst episode of Jenny Rex ever? I know there's been, like, four hundred episodes (379, to be precise.--Ed.), but still, this is definitely a contender. Despite the new haircut/hat combo (bright red femme mohawk/plaid Burberry derby), Regina Ryan is finally starting to show her age as our plucky heroine; I mean, Jenny's signature commando-ballerina style has gone all the way around the cycle, from trendy to so-last-year to retro to just old to trendy again. And ninjas? Granted, they're five-dimensional ninjas, but are the Jenny writers so bereft of ideas they have to bring in the ninjas? What's next? Monkeys? Robots? Pirates? Robot pirate monkeys? With throwing stars?

So anyway, the ep starts with Jenny surrounded by like a hundred ninjas, and, yes, she's no longer 18 (or 28), but Jenny still looks pretty fierce and fabulous, and I'm sure that any ninjas whose asses she can't kick will be disarmed by her charm, except--EXCEPT--these are five-dimensional ninjas, which I'm not really sure what that means, and I don't think the writers do either, but some of them are moving backwards, like their own personal life-video is being rewinded, and others are disappearing and reappearing elsewhere. So right away we know that these five-dimensional ninjas are BAD NEWS. But then, just when they all charge Jenny, in a refreshing departure from the usual ninja M.O. of "attack the hero one at a time," she disappears. Wha?

Credits. (Attn: producers--after sixteen years, the theme song's getting pretty tired.) Then we're back at the big ninja hootenanny, and so is Jenny, except it's not our Jenny--she's much younger, and also clearly not Regina Ryan. (I checked the credits, and the actress playing Young Jenny is not listed. Weird.) And so Young Jenny is obviously a bit surprised to find herself surrounded by five-dimensional ninjas. Five-dimensional ninjas who are screaming and charging right at her with swords and throwing stars and stuff and also some of them are rewinding and whatnot. But Jenny just takes out a gun and starts firing, dropping five-dimensional ninjas left and right. What? I've seen all 400 (379.--Ed.) episodes of Jenny Rex, and not once has Jenny ever fired or even carried a gun. In fact, at least one episode a year is devoted to a boring-ass morality play about how Guns Are Wrong, and Jenny will never use one because her dear departed Auntie Whatever was killed in a drive-by blah blah blah...But the point is: Shooting ninjas? Out of character much?

So after she's wasted the entire posse of ninjas (What's the correct collective noun for a group of five-dimensional ninjas? A "rad?"), Young Jenny storms into Jenny Rex HQ for the obligatory post-battle musical number. But no musical number is forthcoming! Instead, Young Jenny marches up to a nonplussed Agent Danvers and demands to know where she is, who he is, what happened to something called "The Everett Precinct" and some people named "Prince" and "Queen," and if Danvers is working for a "Kage" or a "tall man." Now, Johnny Webster is a fine actor, but even he falters in the face of this obviously unscripted rant. Whoever's playing Young Jenny, she is definitely off her meds. I'm surprised the network even let this fiasco on the air.

Once Danvers and/or Webster figures out that Young Jenny is cuckoo, he fights back, asking her what happened to good old Jenny/Regina, who the hell she (Young Jenny) is, and where he can find some of whatever she's smoking. After seven minutes and thirteen seconds of this pointless screaming match, network security, hastily disguised as JRHQ agents, arrive to drag Young Jenny away. Unfortunately, Young Jenny shoots both of them too. Then she takes everybody at JRHQ hostage. With everybody on the floor, cowering in what I assume is all-too-real fear, Young Jenny turns to the camera and addresses this "tall man" again; she says she knows "these people" are all his "agents," and that she'll "kill every last one of them" if the "tall man" doesn't give her back her "spinners." To prove her point, I guess, she shoots Danvers. The last half-hour of the show is devoted to Young Jenny brandishing her gun around the room full of terrified actors and crew members.

Next episode: Who the fuck knows? Has Jenny Rex gone to visit Uncle Stevie, or is something horrible going down at J. Rex Productions? Does anybody actually know?

SPINE | Forlorn, Funny



Young cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier is most often compared to Jimmy Corrigan creator Chris Ware, for a number of reasons: their talents as graphic designers, their use of color when most indy cartoonists stick with black and white, their Chicago roots, and the way humor and unrelenting malaise commingle in their work. But Ware's work, as dense and virtuosic as it is, can often be a struggle to read. His characters are so downtrodden, his worldview so cynical and bleak, that you finish one of his comics admiring his enormous skill but feeling glad you don't have to spend any more time with Jimmy Corrigan or Rusty Brown. (I remember slipping into a very strange funk for a few weeks after reading Ware's Acme Novelty Library #4, a faux catalog that advertised such novelties as "Things That Look Like Other Things: Adults who look like children. People who look happy. Also, new for this season: little girls who look like prostitutes, little boys who look like killers. Modern World, 50 cents.") Hornschemeier has not yet attempted anything of the scope of Corrigan, nor does he have Ware's skill for meticulous detail and inventive, diagrammatic page layouts. What he does have, however, is a boundless experimental drive, and the ability to harness his experiments in sequential storytelling to sympathetic, fleshed-out characters. Hornschemeier's recent graphic novel Mother, Come Home is, like Corrigan, somewhat autobiographical, and, also like Corrigan, stars a protagonist with an active fantasy life who tries to connect with his father in the absence of a mother. But unlike the stunted man-child Jimmy Corrigan (facetiously named The Smartest Kid on Earth), Mother, Come Home's Thomas Tennant is an actual child, so his flights of fantasy are a natural coping mechanism instead of the desperate cries for help of a pathetic, lonely middle-aged man. Ware invites us to observe his characters from a distance; Hornschemeier puts us right in the middle of things with them. In that sense, Mother, Come Home has as much in common with Chris Thompson's massive autobiographical Blankets as it does with Ware's work; but Hornschemeier has a command of prose and a sharp sentimental-bullshit detector that Thompson lacks.

Hornschemeier got his start self-publishing his Sequential series while still in college. As its title suggests, Sequential was a forum for Hornschemeier to try out different storytelling experiments, from four-panel gag strips to long stories that could be read in multiple ways, depending on how you arranged the pages. In 2002 Hornschemeier started producing Forlorn Funnies, the first issue of which was a free-associative spin through a dozen different shorts held together by ingenious segues and hilarious one-liners. Forlorn Funnies #2-4 serialized Hornschemeier's first longform work, Mother, Come Home, which was recently published in a complete edition by Dark Horse Books. The book tells the story of Thomas Tennant, a seven-year-old whose mother recently died of cancer. As the story opens, Thomas's father, David, a professor of symbolic logic, has become almost a ghost in his own house, unable to cope with his wife's death. Thomas has appointed himself Groundskeeper, and in a lion mask and cape he patrols the parts of the house and neighborhood that belonged to his mother. Eventually Thomas makes a mistake that leads to his father being taken to a psychiatric hospital. The rest of the book concerns Thomas's attempt to rescue his dad, and the understanding that David and Thomas finally come to.

Mother, Come Home continues Hornschemeier's storytelling experiments, but it puts them in the service of a more ambitious story. The book opens with a sort of superdeformed version of David floating through a nightmare landscape, talking to his dead wife; only later do we realize that this is some kind of afterlife (not heaven, because David still finds no comfort there). Hornschemeier then presents us with the book's important symbols: a half-eaten sandwich, Thomas's mother's snow-covered grave, Thomas's lion mask. It's the mask that allows Thomas to escape into a fantasy world where he is the Groundskeeper, protecting his mother's legacy by smacking spiders with rolled-up magazines. Thomas's fantasies are illustrated in a flat, childlike style, where Thomas is the lion and adults are giant birds and cats. A fantasy sequence opens the book's third and final chapter; in it, Thomas imagines breaking his father out of the asylum. After the fantasy version of David tells Thomas what will happen, and then floats away, Thomas morphs from the cartoon lion-child into the Thomas of the "real-world" story. It's the last such sequence in the book, and the final shot of the sequence is a full-page splash of the "real" Thomas looking back at the fantasy on the previous page, knowing that the time for such fantasies is over. It's a powerful sequence, made all the more powerful by the ways in which David's prophecies come true at the end of the book.

Hornschemeier enjoys playing metafictional games with his readers, as can be seen in short stories like "It's Just So Cute," and Mother, Come Home is no exception. The entire graphic novel is presented as Thomas Tennant's introduction to Mother, Come Home, which occupies only the final page. The conceit could have fallen flat, but that final page, in tandem with the prophecy that David makes in Thomas's fantasy, makes the conceit necessary. But Hornschemeier's metafictional gamesmanship doesn't stop there; both Chapter 2, "The Men for Father," and Chapter 3, "We Make Good Our Escape," are titles of books that characters read during the course of the story. The Men for Father can be seen on the Tennant's bookshelf next to David's book, Evolving Symbols. One of Thomas's classmates reads aloud a passage from We Make Good Our Escape, which mirrors events that happen between David and Thomas in Chapter 3: "'The leaves do not turn white,' the man said. The boy seemed confused and looked at him as if to question: 'What do you mean?' 'You see the underside, from the wind, that is all.' The boy seemed to understand. Here there was some sort of metaphor and he imagined the man explaining it to him." The metaphor comes to explain Thomas's lion mask and groundskeeping, and David's refusal to accept his wife's death: "Things that are not really true, but are easier to accept than the intricacies of reality."

Since the publication of the collected Mother, Come Home, Hornschemeier has also published Forlorn Funnies #5, a one-man anthology called My Love Is Dead, Long Live My Love. The book is printed flipbook-style, with one side being Funny and the other Forlorn. The Funny side, Long Live My Love, showcases Hornschemeier's gift for absurd humor, ranging from the previously mentioned "It's Just So Cute" to the adventures of "Whatever Dude" to the international-geopolitics-as-a-high-school-relationship of "America, Your Boyfriend" to a surreal tale starring Vanderbilt Millions, the worst boyfriend in the world, and Taylor Handsome: Marshall from Forlorn Funnies #1. The centerpiece of Long Live My Love is an "Artist's Catalogue" that takes the piss out of art-school pretension with high-concept, low-humor pieces like "Accidental Late Night Sex with a Radiator," "Cocaine and Pillow Fight in Polar Bear Heaven" (I won't ruin the jokes of either one, but you can probably guess what they are) and a page of hilariously pretentious notes and sketches for "Dialect on Preference," which turns out to be a South Park-esque single-panel gag. Of course, Hornschemeier then presents us with a fake critique of his own work, in which a "Charles Lipp" takes Hornschemeier to task for his "obvious use of formal masturbation as a means to compensate for his deficit of talent, inspiration, technical skill, and wit."

The My Love Is Dead half of FF #5, meanwhile, lets Hornschemeier show off his "formal masturbation" in a series of short Forlorn pieces. "These Trespassing Vehicles" is a Magnolia-esque story of murder gone wrong, with brighter colors than Hornschemeier usually employs. "We Were Not Made for This World," a story about a robot searching for the people who made him, manages to wring both pathos out of a faceless robot and a number of interesting variations on the same basic shot: a robot walking through the desert. The best story in the Forlorn side is "Underneath," a wordless short about a bearlike creature attacking another creature underwater in an attempt to eat it. When that proves too difficult, the bear-thing takes one of the other creature's young and eats it instead. It's completely surreal and horrific, colored entirely in purple and black, and yet Hornschemeier conveys real emotion in the sea creature's offspring's response to the attack, and the end, as the still-hungry bear-thing looks back to the ocean, is chilling.

Together, Mother, Come Home and Forlorn Funnies # 5 show that Paul Hornschemeier has an almost unlimited range as a cartoonist, and it's likely his best stuff is still ahead of him. There's a nice little interview with Hornschemeier here. If you're interested in Hornschemeier's comics, you can purchase them all directly from him. When I bought some of his books, he even sent me a personalized sketch:



Bonus! The Best Comic Book Ever!



The Doom Comic! Based on the Doom video game! It's a work of genius. I almost want to think that the dialogue is a put-on--after all, it does quote both The Dark Knight Returns and Army of Darkness--but no. No one is smart enough to write dialogue this funny intentionally. This is like all the horrible comics I read and created as a twelve-year-old rolled up into sixteen pages, only a thousand times better. Link via Tim O'Neil.

Next week: More Notes toward a Better Superhero, probably. I'm also going to the Wizard World LA convention this weekend, so I might have something to say about that. I might also be posting pictures of freaks dressed as Wolverine from the con, so keep your eyes peeled.

SUBSTITUTE | Nick's Film School of Hard Knocks, Part 1

You may have noticed that the GLFC's URL is now the much more sensible and easy-to-remember gardnerlinn.com. Tell your friends!

You may have also noticed that we've got new stuff on a Tuesday, right here. I put out a call for guest bloggers on Tuesdays, aka "Gardner's Day of Rest" (if it worked for God, it'll work for me), and Nick was the first to answer. Here's how Nick describes himself:

Nick is a guy that slept on Gardner's couch for a month. He recently completed a telephone survey about DVD buying habits, and was told that he "gave some really good answers." He figured this qualified him to write an article about film making.

I might also add that Nick is an excellent cinematographer, has great taste in film and literature, knows his way around DV and HD cameras like I know my way around Taco Bell, and was by far the best houseguest I've had. His "Film School of Hard Knocks" will run for the next few weeks, but after that I'm looking for more guest Tuesday bloggers. And I'm open to anything--essays, advice columns, sordid tales of drunkenness, recipes, fiction, poetry, music, art, photos--anything in a digital format that I can stick up on the blog. Except for stories about your dog. Unless it's a really funny story that also involves a celebrity in a compromising position. Then maybe. If you've got something to share with the literally fives of people who read the GLFC, you can reach me at busorama@hotmail.com.

Take it away, Nick.

Nick's Film School of Hard Knocks, Part 1

People are always asking me, "Hey Nick, how can I be more like you?" to which my response is always "You can’t." But now as a gift to the poor huddled masses, and because I have 15 minutes free here at work, I will attempt to enlighten everyone with the basics of moviemaking so those of you who come out to L.A. to live the dream won’t get stuck working at a rental house and developing rickets because there aren’t any damn windows in the janitor's closet that is your office...uh, hypothetically speaking of course.

The Basics
There are basically three different aspects to a movie; in the business we call them the Three Ps (not really, but who are you to judge me?): pre-production, production, and post-production. (There are arguably five if you toss in the Ds of development and distribution.)

If you have a finished script and someone is looking at tossing in some money to make it into a movie, congratulations--you’re in pre-production. If you have a movie and have made it to pre-production, awesome: you’ve now made it farther than 90% of the “filmmakers” (author included) out there. If you don’t have the money or the script you’re in development, which means 1) there is a novel concept and someone is looking to make it into a movie, but has no money; 2) there is a finished script but someone wants to change it to make it more “marketable” (aka worse) so that they can get some money; or 3) some people are looking at making a movie and have neither a novel concept nor a finished script, but have money they want to put into making something. (These people are called producers, aka lawyers, stars, stock brokers, oil tycoons, idiots…)

When you have the means to shoot something (be it $40 or $40 million) and you have a script that everyone agrees should get made (but will probably be changed at least once by each person who touches it), then you begin pre-production. Pre-production is the time that a movie is raising more money and ironing out a script until that fateful day before shooting that everyone goes out and gets wasted.

During pre-production you have the first version of the story that will become the movie, so one could argue that the writer is in charge of the ship now--of course we all know that writers aren’t in charge of anything, but to make them happy people say that writers are the captains of pre-production. Well, I don’t, but I’m sure some people do.

While the script is being polished, reread, scuffed, polished again, burned, tortured, gagged and bound, other people also begin to work on the movie. This is a particularly busy time for the art department, the office production staff, and the accountants--but they’re always busy. As the producers choose who will direct the film and what will be left in and cut out of the shooting script, the art department gets started on the set dressing, locations and general look of the movie. The head of the art department (we’ll call him the production designer, but only because I’m not sure what else to call him or her) will need to work closely with the cinematographer, whose job is to make sure that no matter what the art department accomplishes it is not in accordance with the director's vision, so the director can change everything on the day of shooting.

Meanwhile in the production office, the UPM or the unit production manager has picked his staff of senior coffee getters (production coordinators), junior coffee getters (assistant production coordinators) and coffee getters in training (office production assistants and production secretaries). All of these people are responsible for catering to the whims of the people who can keep the movie from getting made.

Next week we’ll discuss producers and the important process of schmoozing at parties, as we build to the production process.

SPEAKER | CyberBlogoSpheroTron

Thanks to 103.1, I've started listening to LA radio again, but most of my exposure to new music these days comes from music blogs--sites like FluxBlog, PopNose, Said the Gramophone and Stereogum that post MP3s and commentary on a wide range of music. It's a combination of radio and music journalism that, in terms of exposing listeners to good new music, is better than either. Even the best print music reviews and criticism don't allow you to actually hear the music; and most radio provides neither context nor the taste and POV of an individual music fan. Of course, there are obvious copyright issues with musicblogging, most musicbloggers are conscientious of those issues and are careful not to turn their blogs into one-stop-shopping quasi-SoulSeek archives. Furthermore, the best musicblogs use the MP3s as a jumping-off point for discussion of the music or artists, or at least as a way to alert people to good music they might not hear otherwise. It's called salesmanship, and it works, and more labels and artists would do well to learn from the best musicblogs.

Today's MP3s are all from artists that I first heard and read about on musicblogs. If you're wondering whether the "first-hit-is-free" model actually works, take note: these are all from artists whose musicblogged samples I liked well enough to purchase the album.

(Also: See this post on The Tofu Hut for an eloquent defense of musicblogging.)

"Jesus Walks" by Kanye West
West is one of Jay-Z's fave producers (c.f. Hov's declaration "Kanye, you a genius!" on The Black Album's "Lucifer"), and his first solo album The College Dropout is his debut as an MC. For a producer, he's a suprisingly good rapper, and for one of Jigga's pals, he's surprisingly "conscious," too, in that Arrested Development/De La Soul kinda way. But he doesn't let his lyrical aspirations get in the way of his beats, nor does he lose his sense of humor: "Always said if I rapped I'd say something significant / But now I'm rappin' 'bout money, hoes and rims again."

"Jesus Walks" is a Christian call to arms with a pounding, implacable march beat, aided by a sample of "Walk with Me" by the ARC Choir, a Harlem choral group composed of recovering drug addicts. Obviously, the subject matter ain't for everyone, but you don't have to be a Bible-thumper to get caught up in the huge, undeniable stomp of the beat. Nor is this a bit of Passion-esque literalism; it's about the search for redemption, wherever you can find it:

I ain't here to argue about his facial features
Or here to create atheists into believers
I'm just trying to say the way school needs teachers
The way Kathy Lee needed Regis
That's the way I need Jesus

"Dreams" by TV on the Radio
TV on the Radio first came to my attention via their brilliant doo-wop cover of the Pixies' "Mr. Grieves," from their 2003 EP Young Liars. "Dreams" is from their new album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. TV on the Radio are from the same Brooklyn circles as the Liars and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but they're not making garagey noise or disco-punk; the focus here is on singer Tunde Adebimpe, who has both some serious pipes and the willingness to take risks with them (I reiterate: a doo-wop cover of a Pixies song that doesn't come off as a joke). On "Dreams," the band backs up his crooning with churning, throbbing, slow-burning low-end noise; it's both mystical and menacing, befitting a song that turns a relationship-gone-sour into something apocalyptic: "You were my favorite moment / Of our dead century."

"The Rat" by The Walkmen
The Walkmen rose out of the ashes of 90s alt-rock footnote Jonathan Fire*Eater (a little JF*E for you: "When the Curtain Calls for You," from Wolf Songs for Lambs and, um, the Dead Man on Campus soundtrack) and are making a minor splash with their second album, Bows & Arrows. They have a little of that Strokes-y New York vibe, but there's nothing self-consciously cool about the desperation and frustration of "The Rat;" singer Hamilton Leithauser sounds like he's trying to claw his way out of a padded room. Or a Brooklyn club. Either way. Meanwhile, the band have made an art of the drone, wringing endless variations on texture out of the same handful of notes. Their secret weapon is organist Walter Martin; I've always thought that an organ instantly improves any song, and Martin gives the songs on Bows & Arrows an appropriately tense horror-movie vibe.

"Ding Dong" by Nellie McKay
From the 19-year-old supergirl's debut (double!-)album Get Away from Me. McKay (pronounced "muh-KYE") reminds me of the voraciously intelligent kids in Spellbound, particularly the precocious, wise-cracking Emily, except that instead of etymology, she absorbs musical history. Except she skipped everything from Elvis through Eminem. The result is an album that melds supper-club jazz with hip-hop energy and takes listeners on a crazed tour of a musical prodigy's brain; she's a bit like a less-tortured Fiona Apple. McKay doesn't yet have the experience and wisdom to back up her talent and energy, but Get Away from Me is still full of delights. Particularly "Ding Dong," which starts out as a diary entry about her cat's death, segues into Dylan-esque stream-of-consciousness surrealism, and becomes a showcase for McKay's ability to convey shifting personalities with her voice. And it's all set to a sunny, bouncy pop track that could be on the soundtrack to a Doris Day movie from the sixties. McKay is playing the Knitting Factory in Hollywood on March 29, and I'm greatly looking forward to it; I get the feeling she puts on a hell of a live show.

I would've included some Scissor Sisters, Fiery Furnaces and Franz Ferdinand mp3s, but they get enough ink on the CyberBlogoSpheroTron as it is; I think you get your blogging license revoked now if you don't gush over Franz Ferdinand. But anyway. If you like these samples, I strongly urge you to check out the albums they came from--they're all well worth your time and money.

Next Monday: A look back at Living Colour.

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay author Michael Chabon offers a fascinating review of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy at The New York Review of Books. He also suggests that there is a proper fourth volume in the series, The Book of Dust, in the works.

Thanks to my daddy for the heads-up.

MICROFICTION | Grey

The others don't like me. Maybe that's not true. Maybe it's that they don't understand me. Winter, Monk, Nico, the Royal Family--they all stumbled into this life. Winter has his cute little Halloween story, Monk has his bitter drunken rants about whatever godforsaken peat bog he grew up in. King discovered the truth when one of her alternates, distraught upon learning of Courtney Love's suicide, killed herself, and now she's worshipped as the pop god Jenny Rex on half-a-dozen parallels. I know Black and White like me--they sort of have to--but they don't understand. I was born for this. They weren't.

Maybe that's why I'm having trouble remembering my name. Maybe that's why I haven't talked to any of them for six months.

Let's get a few things clear, here at the beginning, so maybe this can be a beneficial relationship for both of us. I've forgotten my real name; all I know is that my friends, if that is what they are, call me Grey. Or called me Grey, more accurately. I go by another name, as well, but I don't wish to speak of it now. You are you, whoever you are, reading this years from now, I imagine, after whatever happens to me happens. Maybe Black and White find me and bring me back in, and then we'll all have a good laugh. Maybe I'm captured and killed for what I've done. I'm sure there'll be some laughter then too.

Actually, I'm sure both of these things, and more, will happen. The question is which one I'll remember.

So now you have my name, of a sort, but not what I am. If you, as I suspect, are some average person in some average future who has just stumbled across this book, then I also suspect you would be surprised to learn that there are worlds beyond your own--parallel worlds. I'm sure Winter could explain the physics, if he were here. But there are parallel worlds, and there are a very few people who can move between these worlds. Most of these people, myself included, are employed by an agency whose remit is to patrol the borders between the worlds and to investigate incursions from one parallel into another. Lately our jobs have been getting harder; the borders are not as strong as they once were. Six months ago this agency sent me on a mission, the details of which I was strongly encouraged to forget. I'm afraid that soon I will forget that I was even sent on this mission. And I am afraid to even imagine what I will have become by then.

As my memories of the recent past have deteriorated, I have thought more and more about my childhood, and specifically my father. What I remember about my father is that he looked a lot like the person I now see in the mirror, on the rare occasion I see a mirror. I remember people called him "Grey" too; it must be our family name. He was tall and rich, always dressed in an immaculate suit; I never knew the proper phrase for what he looked like until I came to Winter's world. He looked like a movie star. Errol Flynn, perhaps.

My father taught me a great many things, that I remember. He taught me etiquette, how to function in polite society, and languages--our house was always home to emissaries from far-off lands, all of them close personal friends of my father's. Many of them spoke languages I never heard again until I learned to jump between worlds and became familiar with the tongues of Winter's world. He taught me literature and science, how to fence and how to ride.

Most importantly, he taught me to kill.

He gave me my first gun on my tenth birthday. It was called a Luger, he said, a thing from another time and place. He spent three years teaching me to shoot. The mechanics of aiming and firing came easily, and I was a better shot than even him; but the psychological distancing of myself from the act of killing, which my father called "focus" and which I still, though just barely, am able to call "insanity," came more slowly. But it came nonetheless.

When I turned thirteen my father revealed what I had suspected for some time: that he was able to travel between parallel worlds. He conjured up a spinner, the first I had ever seen, and took me through it. It felt like dying. It felt like I'd been waiting my whole life to feel that way.

We came out of the spinner in a room that looked just like the one we had left. A boy who looked just like me--who, I realized on some intuitive level, was me--ran into the room to investigate the noise. He saw me and froze. My father told me to shoot the boy, and before I could think of a reason not to, I had done it. I could feel two bullets tear through my chest just as they tore through his, but I lived while he lay on the floor dying.

My father gave me a syringe and a small vial and told me to collect some of the blood that was pouring out of the boy's chest. He said this would let me create spinners and jump between worlds on my own. As I bent down next to the boy to collect the blood, the last of the his life passed from his body. As he died, I felt for the second time in less than a minute the sensation of dying. I knew then it was something I wanted to feel again.

I still keep the vial with me, but hidden, so no one will know who I really am. I keep it hidden well. I’m not even sure I know where it is, now.

MICROFICTION | Grey

The others don't like me. Maybe that's not true. Maybe it's that they don't understand me. Winter, Monk, Nico, the Royal Family--they all stumbled into this life. Winter has his cute little Halloween story, Monk has his bitter drunken rants about whatever godforsaken peat bog he grew up in. King discovered the truth when one of her alternates, distraught upon learning of Courtney Love's suicide, killed herself, and now she's worshipped as the pop god Jenny Rex on half-a-dozen parallels. I know Black and White like me--they sort of have to--but they don't understand. I was born for this. They weren't.

Maybe that's why I'm having trouble remembering my name. Maybe that's why I haven't talked to any of them for six months.

Let's get a few things clear, here at the beginning, so maybe this can be a beneficial relationship for both of us. I've forgotten my real name; all I know is that my friends, if that is what they are, call me Grey. Or called me Grey, more accurately. I go by another name, as well, but I don't wish to speak of it now. You are you, whoever you are, reading this years from now, I imagine, after whatever happens to me happens. Maybe Black and White find me and bring me back in, and then we'll all have a good laugh. Maybe I'm captured and killed for what I've done. I'm sure there'll be some laughter then too.

Actually, I'm sure both of these things, and more, will happen. The question is which one I'll remember.

So now you have my name, of a sort, but not what I am. If you, as I suspect, are some average person in some average future who has just stumbled across this book, then I also suspect you would be surprised to learn that there are worlds beyond your own--parallel worlds. I'm sure Winter could explain the physics, if he were here. But there are parallel worlds, and there are a very few people who can move between these worlds. Most of these people, myself included, are employed by an agency whose remit is to patrol the borders between the worlds and to investigate incursions from one parallel into another. Lately our jobs have been getting harder; the borders are not as strong as they once were. Six months ago this agency sent me on a mission, the details of which I was strongly encouraged to forget. I'm afraid that soon I will forget that I was even sent on this mission. And I am afraid to even imagine what I will have become by then.

As my memories of the recent past have deteriorated, I have thought more and more about my childhood, and specifically my father. What I remember about my father is that he looked a lot like the person I now see in the mirror, on the rare occasion I see a mirror. I remember people called him "Grey" too; it must be our family name. He was tall and rich, always dressed in an immaculate suit; I never knew the proper phrase for what he looked like until I came to Winter's world. He looked like a movie star. Errol Flynn, perhaps.

My father taught me a great many things, that I remember. He taught me etiquette, how to function in polite society, and languages--our house was always home to emissaries from far-off lands, all of them close personal friends of my father's. Many of them spoke languages I never heard again until I learned to jump between worlds and became familiar with the tongues of Winter's world. He taught me literature and science, how to fence and how to ride.

Most importantly, he taught me to kill.

He gave me my first gun on my tenth birthday. It was called a Luger, he said, a thing from another time and place. He spent three years teaching me to shoot. The mechanics of aiming and firing came easily, and I was a better shot than even him; but the psychological distancing of myself from the act of killing, which my father called "focus" and which I still, though just barely, am able to call "insanity," came more slowly. But it came nonetheless.

When I turned thirteen my father revealed what I had suspected for some time: that he was able to travel between parallel worlds. He conjured up a spinner, the first I had ever seen, and took me through it. It felt like dying. It felt like I'd been waiting my whole life to feel that way.

We came out of the spinner in a room that looked just like the one we had left. A boy who looked just like me--who, I realized on some intuitive level, was me--ran into the room to investigate the noise. He saw me and froze. My father told me to shoot the boy, and before I could think of a reason not to, I had done it. I could feel two bullets tear through my chest just as they tore through his, but I lived while he lay on the floor dying.

My father gave me a syringe and a small vial and told me to collect some of the blood that was pouring out of the boy's chest. He said this would let me create spinners and jump between worlds on my own. As I bent down next to the boy to collect the blood, the last of the his life passed from his body. As he died, I felt for the second time in less than a minute the sensation of dying. I knew then it was something I wanted to feel again.

I still keep the vial with me, but hidden, so no one will know who I really am. I keep it hidden well. I'm not even sure I know where it is, now.

SPINE | Notes toward a Better Superhero, Part 3

In Part 1 we discussed what superhero comics are and how they can be improved; in Part 2 we talked about specific ways the form of superhero comics can improve. In Part 3, we'll talk about the content of superhero comics.

If you've decided, as I have, that Story is the most important aspect of any attempt to improve superhero comics, then the obvious followup question is "What kind of stories?" Traditional superhero comics have two kinds of stories: origin stories, in which our hero suffers his trauma, gains his powers, and makes the fateful decision to put on a costume and fight crime. As hokey and jury-rigged as many of these origins are, at least they're stories. They have beginnings (Peter Parker is a nerdy high-school loser), inciting incidents (Peter is bitten by an irradiated spider), middles (Peter discovers his powers, becomes a wrestler, inadvertently contributes to the death of his uncle) and ends (Peter realizes "with great power comes great responsibility," decides to use his powers for good). It's no surprise, then, that when filmmakers adapt a superhero comic to the screen, they usually adapt the origin story. You may notice, however, that in the films, the villain is frequently ntegral to the hero's origin (in Tim Burton's Batman, the Joker's alter ego Jack Napier killed Bruce Wayne's parents) and is usually killed at the end of the film. A neat little story arc like that isn't often found in the comics. The Joker still torments Batman every few months, and Batman still agonizes over whether he should kill the Clown Prince of Crime and end it all for good. He doesn't, of course, and the Joker returns to bedevil him again. This is the second type of traditional superhero story: Supervillain concocts a plan to rule the world/rob a bank/kill Superhero/etc., Superhero fights Supervillain, and after a few twists and turns, Superhero wins. This is a perfectly good story format, on its own. But when you string hundreds of such stories together over the course of decades, with no end in sight, you don't get a story. You get a perpetual motion machine.

The writers and artists who have seen this problem and tried to overcome it have usually gone the route of making superheroes more "realistic." (Which can itself be done in at least two different ways; see Part 1.) But, as Zed at MemeMachineGo! points out, this usually results in one of two outcomes. Either the superheroes try to take over the world to make it better (The Authority in Coup D'etat) or they get co-opted and broken down by the government (Watchmen). Superheroes and realism have a very tenuous relationship, because superheroes are inherently unrealistic. I know you're immediately thinking "spandex," but forget that--if superheroes really did exist, they probably would wear spandex, because that's what superheroes have worn in sixty years' worth of comic books--it's the powers. Most superpowers are based on ridiculously bad science. Try to wrap your mind around how you would "realistically" depict Plastic Man's powers, and see how far you get. And there's the problem, which Alan Moore tackled in Watchmen, of how the world's political power structure would completely change if even one superpowered person existed. Now, imagine that hundreds of superheroes existed, and the most powerful of them joined up to form a Justice League, and they set up a base on the moon. It's a wonder that the US government--any government--even exists in the DC Universe, much less acts a lot like the real US government.

Superhero comics exist on a continuum, with pure stark realism at one end and insane acid-fuelled fantasy at the other. Most modern superhero comics lie in the middle of this continuum--the conventions of the superhero genre are taken for granted and either not explained or slyly winked at, but the characters act like real people and live in a world that largely resembles the real world. Near the "realism" end of the continuum is something like Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's Demo (published by AiT/Planet Lar), a series about superpowers in the "real world." No costumes, no codenames, just "real" people dealing with superpowers. Over on the opposite "fantasy" end are books like Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart's upcoming series Seaguy, which embraces all the ludicrous superhero tropes and uses them to tell a completely fantastic, yet internally consistent story (I'm assuming Seaguy will fit that description, but based on Morrison's past work, I think it will). Most attempts to improve superheroes--and usually that implies deconstructing them--veer toward one of these two ends of the continuum. But on one end you have superhero books with no superheroes--which aren't really superhero books at all--and on the other you have "superhero" books, which are more about superhero comics than about characters who are superheroes. What I'm trying to do in these little essaylets is find a way to tell superhero stories without relying on all the cheats and inconsistencies and ludicrosities (in both the Faulknerian sense and in my own made-up sense) that have plagued superhero comics to this day.

And, of course, that brings us back around to the old question: What is a superhero? What requirements does a story have to meet to be considered a superhero story? Obviously, the character(s) has/have to have superpowers. (And I already hear you screaming that Batman doesn't have superpowers. True. But his intelligence, his physical perfection, his martial arts skills, his vast wealth and arsenal, and, most importantly, his near-psychotic hatred of crime--these all add up to equal something very much like a superpower. Which, in combination with various other elements of the Batman mythos, makes him a superhero.) But is it enough for a story to be about a person with superpowers? As I said above with regard to Demo, I think not. Look at two of M. Night Shyamalan's films, for example. The Sixth Sense is about a person with a superpower--the ability to see and speak with the dead--but it is emphatically not a superhero story. It is, in fact, cloaked in the trappings of the horror genre. But Shyamalan's Unbreakable, which in tone, setting, themes and lead actor greatly resembles The Sixth Sense, is a superhero story. And it's not just because Bruce Willis's character has a superpower. It's because Shyamalan builds those superhero tropes into the film, however subtly. Willis's character has the trauma (two traumas, actually--his strained relationship with his wife and the train wreck), he has a costume (of sorts--his security jacket), and he has a supervillain (Sam Jackson's Mr. Glass). Willis even goes out and fights crime.

So are those tropes necessary for a story to be classified a "superhero" story? To some degree, I think so. And that's what we'll talk about in NtaBS Part 4, in two weeks. As usual, this thing is proving to be more daunting than I thought when I sat down to write it. Next week I'll take a break from superheroes to talk about two recent books by Paul Hornschemeier, the graphic novel Mother, Come Home and the one-man anthology My Love Is Dead, Long Live My Love, aka Forlorn Funnies #5.

SPEAKER | Pabst Blue Ribbon!

Today, for no reason at all, is David Lynch Day here at the GLFC. (All right, there are reasons, but they've got nothin' to do with nothin'. Reason #1: March's GLFC mix-CD theme, per James, is "Songs You Were Listening to in the Year ____." I'm considering making 1997 the year for my mix. In the summer of 1997, I was working the night shift in the Wal-Mart SuperCenter bakery, frying up donuts. I had a couple of mixtapes full of loud, angry music to get me through my shift; two of the selections on those tapes were Nine Inch Nails' "The Perfect Drug" and Marilyn Manson's cover of "I Put a Spell on You." These songs both came from the soundtrack to Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway. Reason #2: Yesterday I started reading David Foster Wallace's Everything and More, a treatise on the mathematics of infinity. One of my favorite essays in Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is "David Lynch Keeps His Head," a piece originally written for Premiere magazine that focuses, in part, on the filming of Lost Highway. See? Nothin' to do with nothin'.)

So, anyway. David Lynch. In terms of music, Lynch's films usually have two distinct sounds fighting/complementing each other. One of those sounds is the goth-noir avant-jazz and ambient industrial throbbing of composer Angelo Badalamenti. The other is pop cheese, usually of a 50s-60s vintage. The result of throwing these two strains of music together is that the Badalamenti stuff starts to sound normal, while the pop songs take on a disturbing, otherworldly quality; all the creepy subtext in the songs comes to the fore, and they start to sound alien, like they were written by that backwards-talking dwarf in Twin Peaks. Lynch does for these old chestnuts what he did for suburbia in Blue Velvet: not revealing the sordid horrific underbelly below the banal surface, but showing that the horror lies in the banality itself.

"In Dreams" by Roy Orbison
Lip-synced by Dean Stockwell, using a mechanic's lamp as a microphone, in Blue Velvet. The fact that I heard this song for the first time while watching Dean Stockwell sing it into a lamp means that I can never hear the song without thinking of that scene, and of the wrongness that pervades that scene, and so whatever pure intentions Orbison had when writing and singing "In Dreams" are distorted and perverted by just how goddamn creepy the line "The candy-colored clown they call the sandman / comes into my room every night" really is.



"Llorando" by Rebekah del Rio
More Orbison, this one a Spanish-language cover of "Crying" performed a capella by Rebekah del Rio in Mulholland Drive. Del Rio's performance of "Llorando" is the second-most riveting part of the movie for me (you can probably guess the first). By turning a familiar song into something literally foreign, Lynch and del Rio make you focus on her voice and not the words, so instead of hearing her describe longing, you hear her embody longing. And of course there's that Lynchian twist--in the film, del Rio isn't singing the song live; she's lip-syncing (that again!) to a recording of herself singing. What does that mean? Who knows! It adds another layer of artifice: it's a film of a performance of a recording, instead of a film of a performance. It adds one more layer of distance between the audience and the performer; it becomes less about a woman singing a beautiful song and more about the performance, about the context in which the performance happens. It invites you to question just what is really happening and what is imagined, just like the rest of Mulholland Drive.



"In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)" by the Pixies
A cover of a Lynch-written song from Eraserhead, which I haven't seen (bad, bad Gardner). This is from the album The Pixies, which comprises some of the band's earliest demos. This is one of my favorite Pixies songs, because it's such a perfect example of their energy and particular brand of insanity: it's just a minute and a half of Skilsaw guitars, machine-gun drums and Black Francis screaming the same line over and over until his vocal cords snap.

For more info on Eraserhead and the Lady in the Radiator, I refer you to this article:

As Lynch pulled himelf out of his personal gloom, a little light penetrated the world of ERASERHEAD. "One day I was just sitting in the food room, and I just drew this little lady, and little foetuses were falling out of her," said Lynch. "And I thought she would live in the radiator, where it’s nice and warm, and this would be a real comfort for Henry. So I went running into this set, which was just across the hall, and I looked at the radiator, and lo and behold!, there was this little square in it. It was perfect. And not only that. We had shot scenes with Henry looking at the radiator two times; there was nothing extra we had to shoot. It fit in perfectly."



"Red Bats with Teeth" by Angelo Badalamenti
From the aforementioned Lost Highway soundtrack. Bill Pullman, as a jazz saxophonist, plays this in a club, and it's included here because I like DFW's description of the scene, from the aforementioned "D. Lynch Keeps His Head:"

...there are also some scenes of Pullman looking very natty and East Village in all-black and jamming on his tenor sax in front of a packed dance floor (only in a David Lynch movie would people dance ecstatically to abstract jazz)...



"Mysteries of Love" by Julee Cruise
From Blue Velvet and Cruise's album Floating into the Night, co-written by Lynch and Badalamenti. Cruise popped up occasionally on the Twin Peaks soundtrack, and even appeared in at least one episode (Floating into the Night also includes "Falling," a version of the Twin Peaks theme with vocals).

Speaking of banal, check out Lynch's lyrics:

Sometimes a wind blows
and you and I
float
in love
and kiss
forever
in a darkness
and the mysteries
of love
come clear
and dance
in light
in you
in me
and show
that we
are Love

Sometimes a wind blows
and the mysteries of Love
come clear

If I was still editing a high-school lit mag, that would totally get published. But with Cruise's impossibly light voice singing those lyrics over Badalamenti's massive synth pile-up, it comes close to profundity. I hate to call someone's voice "angelic," but Cruise just isn't human here.

(FYI: DFW says "Mysteries of Love" is "one of the great make-out tunes of all time," so good luck and godspeed, kids.)



An Embarrassment of Riches (har har): Forksclovetofu, curator of The Tofu Hut, has graciously allowed me to participate in his mix-CD reviewing experiment, and the results are up right here (if that direct link takes you to a post about Annie Ross, scroll down a bit until you see the header "Sunday, March 07, 2004" and a picture of Jay Sherman, who looks kinda like me without a beard). Essentially, Forksclovetofu made a mix-CD called "MUSIC I HAVE LISTENED TO AT THE GYM THAT I WOULD BE ASHAMED TO LET OTHER PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT," sent it to me, and I wrote up a review which he has now published on his blog. Go check it out. And check out The Tofu Hut every day, because he posts some amazing MP3s there on a daily basis, usually obscure and very cool jazz, blues and folk stuff, with links and annotations galore. And if you clicked over to here from the Hut, thanks for stopping by. Make yourself at home.

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)

Sign of the Apocalypse #1,497: Three-Headed Frog

MICROFICTION | Who would've thought that a boy like me could come to this

"You were at the Red House Bar and Grill last night, Josh?"

"Yeah. 'Bar and Microwave,' we call it."

"Funny. You go there a lot?"

"Yeah."

"Every night? Every weekend?"

"Every Wednesday. For karaoke."

"Karaoke. You ever do karaoke, Daryl?"

"Nah. I get stage fright."

"Yeah, right. Don't let that placid exterior fool you, Josh--my partner here loves the stage. He's a fiend for musical theater. You were the lead in the department production of Jesus Christ Superstar last year, weren't you, Daryl?"

"Sure, Nick."

"Now, Josh, you know why you're here, right?"

"The--that guy that got killed."

"That's right. A Mr. Harold Roosevelt Jenkins, stabbed to death outside the Red House Bar and Microwave last night. Daryl and I were just hoping you, since you were there, might have seen something."

"Did you see anything, Josh?"

"Like what?"

"You tell us."

"What--you think I did this?"

"Come on, Josh."

"You know how many times we hear that?"

"Everybody we bring in here says that."

"Everybody. 'You think I did this?'"

"We're just asking if you saw anything."

"Like if you saw Mr. Jenkins get stabbed."

"Or if you saw somebody there who maybe had too much to drink, got in a fight with Mr. Jenkins, that sort of thing."

"That's it."

"So, Josh--did you see anything?"

"I don't know. I mean, there were a lot of people there. Everybody likes Tony."

"Tony?"

"He hosts karaoke on Wednesdays. He's got a better selection than Pearl. She hosts Mondays."

"Better selection?"

"He gets newer stuff. Updates it more often. He takes requests."

"You ever request anything?"

"Sure. All the time. He always gets whatever I want."

"What's something you requested?"

"Um...'Sister Christian?' You know that?"

"Sure. Night Ranger."

"Classic."

"That one of your favorites, Josh?"

"Yeah. Totally."

"Did Mr. Jenkins sing anything last night?"

"Yeah, he got up there a couple of times."

"What'd he sing?"

"Oh, man...I don't know..."

"Try to remember."

"I think...I think he sang some Cheap Trick, maybe?"

"'I Want You to Want Me?'"

"No, the other one--"

"'Dream Police?'"

"'Surrender.' That's it. He sang 'Surrender'--"

"That's a hard one. That Robin Zander, he's got a high voice, y'know?"

"Yeah, he couldn't quite hit all the notes. I mean, I'm not one to talk..."

"I bet you're pretty good."

"I'm all right. You do it long enough, you get better."

"Was 'Surrender' all Mr. Jenkins sang?"

"No, he did a couple others. That Coldplay song--'The Scientist.' He really fucked that one up."

"I bet it's hard to listen to some people."

"Sure."

"I mean, if they just can't sing, you just want them to get off the stage, right?"

"Some people are better than others."

"Some people are a lot better than others, right?"

"Sure. But everybody's just there to have fun."

"Did Mr. Jenkins sing anything else?"

"Yeah, he did one more. Um...'I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight." By Cutting Crew."

"Whoa! Spooky!"

"That's downright eerie."

"Eerily prescient."

"I bet he didn't think that was gonna come true when he picked the song, huh?"

"I guess not."

"That's a good song, though."

"It's a great song."

"I haven't heard it in a while."

"A long while."

"You remember how it goes, Daryl?"

"Oh, jeez, man, I just remember the chorus. How 'bout you, Josh? You know the words?"

"Sure. I mean, it helps to have them right in front of you."

"You want to give us a verse or two?"

"What?"

"Just kidding. Did you sing last night?"

"Of course."

"What'd you sing? 'Sister Christian?'"

"No, I don't like to repeat songs."

"You must've gone through the whole book by now."

"Just about."

"What'd you sing?"

"I did, uh..."In the Midnight Hour" first."

"Wilson Pickett."

"Wicket Wilson Pickett. Nice."

"You got good taste, Josh."

"Thanks."

"That's not all you sang, right?"

"No, I did a couple more. Guns 'n Roses. 'Paradise City.'"

"Man, you don't mess around."

"You go right to the hard stuff."

"What else?"

"'Kiss,' by Prince. That was the last one."

"You are a brave man, Josh."

"Prince Rogers Nelson. Not many people can pull that off."

"You must be damn good. C'mon, you gotta be, right?"

"Like I said, man, you just do it long enough and you get better."

"So is that all you sang?"

"Yeah."

"You sure?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Cuz I think you sang one more."

"I think you did too."

"We talked to Tony, Josh. He said you sang four songs last night."

"I don't--"

"You know what he said your fourth song was?"

"He said it was "I Just Died in Your Arms.'"

"The same song Mr. Harold Jenkins sang."

"Now, I thought that wasn't allowed? I thought you weren't supposed to sing a song that somebody else already sang?"

"So who sang it first, Josh? You or Mr. Jenkins?"

"I don't remember singing that..."

"Come on, Josh. Tony says you sing it every week. Says it's your favorite song."

"It's not my favorite--"

"Who sang it first, Josh?"

"I don't remember..."

"Yes you do."

"I had a lot to drink last night."

"Look at me, Josh. I'm not accusing you of anything, okay? I just want to know who sang the song first."

"I...I think I did."

"Okay. There you go. You do remember."

"I don't know what difference that makes."

"How'd Mr. Jenkins do?"

"What?"

"How'd he sing the song? Was he good?"

"I don't know."

"Don't give me that, Josh. You go to karaoke every week. You know you're good. You can tell when other people are good singers."

"Saying he sucked doesn't mean you killed him, Josh."

"He...he didn't suck. I mean, he did when he sang the Coldplay song, but not when he did 'I Just Died in Your Arms.' He was good."

"How good?"

"Really good."

"Like just-like-the-record good?"

"Better."

"Wow! That must've...but he wasn't as good as you, right? I mean, that's your song. You probably knocked it out of the park."

"Kicked his ass."

"He may be Sammy Hagar, but you're David Lee Roth."

"Sure."

"Sure? They must've gone crazy for you, if you sang it better than Mr. Jenkins, right? That must be a good feeling."

"Almost like being a real rock star."

"Is that what it's like, Josh? I don't know; I can't get on stage without just about wetting my pants. Daryl here lives for that kind of stuff, but not me, you know? I don't know what it's like to be so good at something that everybody's clapping for me, cheering, telling me how good I am; that's gotta feel great. I'd love to know what that feels like. To be that good at something. Even if it's just singing somebody else's song. Can you tell me how that feels, Josh?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"How can you not know? You're the best at this! It's what you do!"

"You showed Harold Jenkins how good you were, didn't you?"

"Josh, you gonna answer the question?"

"Come on, Josh. I just wanna know what it's like."

"Just tell us. We're cops, man; we don't get a chance to be stars."

"Just tell me, Josh."

"I don't know!"

"Why not?"

"Because he sang it better than I did, all right? He...fucking...that was my song..."

"And that's why you stabbed him?"

"..."

"You stabbed him because he sang some awful piece of shit 80s song better than you."

"It's not a piece of shit! That's my song!"

"And Harold Jenkins made it his song."

"He knew the fucking rules! Tony never should've let him sing it! He knew that was my song! He sang it so fucking well...It was like being right there at a concert..."

"Was that your knife you used?"

"It was my pocketknife...I got it for graduation...I can't believe I stabbed somebody with my pocketknife..."

"Why didn't you kill Tony too?"

"What?"

"I mean, he's the one who really broke the rules, right?"

"Yeah, but...I don't want Pearl to take over Wednesdays."

© 2004 Gardner Linn

If you're at all interested in comics, or writing in general, you should go read the Alan Moore interview at Alan David Doane's blog. Moore is the writer of From Hell, Watchmen, and countless other brilliant comics, as well as the novel Voice of the Fire. He has also apparently requested that his name be removed from the credits of Constantine, the film based on John Constantine, a character he created in DC's Swamp Thing series in the 80s, and who has starred in the series Hellblazer for over a decade now.

(Update 3/5/04: Apparently not.)

SPINE | A Finer World

Coup D'etat: Sleeper #1 by Ed Brubaker & Jim Lee
Coup D'etat: Stormwatch Team Achilles #2 by Micah Ian Wright & Carlos D'Anda
Coup D'etat: Wildcats Version 3.0 #3 by Joe Casey, Ale Garza & Trevor Scott
Coup D'etat: The Authority #4 by Robbie Morrison, Whilce Portacio & Trevor Scott
Published by DC/Wildstorm

Universe-spanning crossovers are a much-maligned staple of superhero comics, and for good reason: they're usually bald-faced money-grubs whose sole purpose is to get fanboys who may read only Batman or Superman to buy fifteen other comics in order to read "the whole story." That's bad enough. But from a storytelling perspective, crossovers are almost useless. In the Marvel and DC universes, real change can never occur. Any character who can still be milked for licensing money can't die or change dramatically (Aquaman died in 2002's DC crossover "Our Worlds at War;" he already has a new monthly series). It's almost impossible for a crossover to have long-range repercussions on an entire line of comics. Even Crisis on Infinite Earths, which "rebooted" the entire DC universe in 1986, was being undermined almost from the start, largely by superhero trickster-god Grant Morrison. Superhero universes always trend toward order; no matter what changes you put major characters through, they will always revert to their original status quo given enough time.

That's why Coup D'etat, the recent Wildstorm Universe crossover, has the potential to be the start of something very interesting, despite its flaws. Wildstorm is a relatively new universe (it started with Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.s #1 in 1992), and, for reasons that I'll get into in a later essay, is the first postmodern universe in superhero history. It's small--currently comprising only four monthly titles (Sleeper, Stormwatch: Team Achilles, Wildcats Version 3.0 and The Authority) and the sporadically-published Planetary, which really exists on the fringes of the universe anyway--and the titles' connections are built-in, instead of corporate-mandated. And because Wildstorm characters aren't internationally-recognized icons, the writers have more leeway in what they can do to the characters. They can actually tell stories.

Coup D'etat begins when Tao, the brilliant, inhuman leader of an international criminal syndicate, manipulates the US government into ripping a hole in the Bleed, the metaphysical space between parallel universes. This results in an alien ship crashing to earth and destroying Florida. In steps The Authority, the earth's premiere superheroes; after saving the earth on various occasions from A) insane terrorists, B) invaders from a parallel world, C) depraved Avengers analogues, and D) God, and receiving for their troubles only an assassination attempt from the G8 leaders, who are rightly scared to death of a bunch of leftist troublemakers with godlike powers who ride around in the Bleed in a city-sized spaceship, they decide they've had enough. At the end of Coup D'etat: Sleeper, The Authority declare themselves the new rulers of America.

And that's it, really. The Stormwatch and Wildcats chapters show how those characters react to The Authority's coup. Stormwatch, a UN-backed military team tasked with bringing down rogue superpowered beings, sever their ties to the UN and go on the run, planning to remove The Authority from power. Jack Marlowe, the android CEO of the Halo Corporation (according to writer Joe Casey, Halo is the superhero in Wildcats), has a little talk with The Authority in which he warns them that what they're doing is simply "acting out old paradigms." In the final Coup issue, The Authority assassinate the President, suspend democracy and formalize their new status as the world's one superpower.

So in terms of plot, Coup D'etat is pretty light. There are certainly none of the big superhero throwdowns that are the raison d'etre of most crossovers. In fact, a good portion of the Wildcats chapter is given over to meta-commentary on the old rules of superhero crossovers, as we see in Jack Marlowe's speech to his old superhero partner Cole Cash, who wants to blow up The Authority's ship with a "negative gamma-particle bomb": "I understand your rationale. We were both born of that world. It was all we knew for so long. I also know that you've spent inordinate amounts of time clinging to those old-world notions of heroism and violence. Those things are not so interconnected as you would like to believe. Your efforts to engage The Authority will only prolong a way of life that I'm convinced we can rise above." Casey might as well be speaking directly to fans who demand more kick-splode in their superhero comics. Wildcats, Sleeper and Stormwatch are steps, however small, toward a new kind of superhero comic; The Authority is one of the last bastions of old-school spandex violence. In Coup, The Authority are cast as the villains, a role that their creator Warren Ellis has claimed for years they were always meant to play. Even in Ellis's first Authority stories from 1999, which recast Justice League-style superheroism on a larger scale than has even been attempted, there were moments that showed The Authority's by-any-means-necessary methods weren't exactly "heroic," as superhero comics have usually defined the term; note The Midnighter's gleefully psychotic smile when he destroys Gamorra in The Authority #4.

But in casting The Authority as their villains, the Coup writers have erred in making them one-dimensional. This is most apparent in the Stormwatch chapter. Micah Wright has a talent for writing believable military group dynamics, and his political satire is often funny, but his parody of George W. Bush (under Wright's direction, Wildstorm's fictional president Patrick Kent spouts inanities like "They're wrong! And America will show them wronger still!") is so broad that it's working against the story rather than with it. And he writes The Authority as idiots and lunatics. Upon seeing a superpowered terrorist whom Stormwatch C.O. Ben Santini executed, Midnighter says "He was probably just some innocent kid born with superpowers. This is a message for us. This proves Santini's a dangerous psychotic. This proves what we're doing is right." Now, I know Midnighter likes to dress up in leather and beat up people for fun, but that doesn't mean he has to jump to conclusions so fast. And at the end of the issue, the entire Authority discover Baron Chaos, a very funny Doctor Doom parody whom Santini also shot and left for dead. They immediately take this as another sign that Santini is evil and dangerous; Authority leader Jack Hawksmoor actually says "Woe betide anyone who disputes that with me." Woe betide? While turning The Authority into such one-note villains provides some humor, it ultimately does a disservice to the larger aims of Coup.

In the final chapter, Robbie Morrison lets us see things from The Authority's side, and what we see are doubts. Hawksmoor wonders what their first leader, the late Jenny Sparks, would think of the coup; Swift questions "Since when did we become about compromise?" And on the final page of the series, the Midnighter looks directly at the reader and says "That was the easy part. What the fuck do we do now?" It's a question that has both internal and external consequences for the four Wildstorm series. Because of The Authority's coup, each series has a new status quo, and they have more potential to go somewhere interesting than your average superhero comic. But in a larger sense, Morrison and the other writers are asking where superhero comics can go after The Authority; once a superhero team kills God, once you can say "fuck" in a superhero comic, once you can out your Batman and Superman analogues (Midnighter and Apollo) as gay lovers, once your superteam stages a coup and takes over the US, where can you go? What else can you do? Is there still life left in the superhero comic book? The Wildstorm books are attempting to answer these questions monthly, and hopefully next week I'll get back to my ongoing attempt to answer those same questions.

It's called Rome for a reason

This story is funny for obvious reasons, but it's even funnier for me because it happened at the movie theatre I most frequently visited in high school. I always knew it was evil.

Link via Stereogum.

SPEAKER | To a guy in Kentucky, I'm Mr. Unlucky

I love mix tapes. I love making them, and I love receiving them. My gigantic iTunes library exists for the sole purpose of making mix CDs to give to other people. We're a long way from declaring the album dead, but the personal mix CD, aided by the MP3/Napster/SoulSeek/iTunes revolution, is becoming a legitimate art form. It may very well be to the early 00s what the 45 was to the fifties, the album to the 60s and 70s, and the music video to the 80s and 90s: the format that shapes the content. For better or worse, it involves the listener in the creation of the art; on a good mix CD, song selection and sequence are just as important as the quality of the individual songs. It has a lot in common with sampling and DJing, and when CDs are too expensive, corporate radio forces the same 20 songs down your throat, and the technology exists to make it possible to own almost any song you want within seconds, there shouldn't be any surprise that personal mixes are becoming an increasingly important force in music.

The best mix tape I've ever heard was a gift from a friend of mine nearly six years ago. It was actually two tapes, each 110 minutes long and filled end to end, named "Gardner's Garnish of Sound #1 & 2." "Eclectic" doesn't begin to describe the song choices; Nina Simone is followed by Everclear, who are in turn followed by Yma Sumac. These tapes have largely informed my musical taste; at least two of the songs I consider my all-time favorites (Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" and The Stone Roses' "I Wanna Be Adored") I first heard on "GGoS." Over the past six years I've listened to these tapes more than anything else in my music collection. Soon after receiving them, I spent a summer in Tanzania, and I took them along. Each song brings back memories of specific places and times: The Pixies' "Motorway to Roswell" is the soundtrack of my next-to-last day on Kilimanjaro, hiking from Kibo down to Horombo after a failed summit attempt, Black Francis wailing "Last night, he could not make it" in my freezing ears. When I first moved to LA and found myself working a horrible temp job in the hinterland of Torrance, I listened to the tapes every day on the commute to remind myself that things were better before, and would get better again.

I've lost "GGoS" #2. It's gone. Probably somewhere in the bowels of my car. But I still have the case with the tracklisting. "GGoS" #1 is on its last legs. I'm trying to recreate the tapes in digital format, which is proving to be somewhat difficult. SoulSeek helped, as did iTunes, but some of the stuff is just too obscure. Of the tracks I've been able to find so far, here are a few of the best:

"Jack's Lament" by Danny Elfman
From the soundtrack to The Nightmare before Christmas. Elfman, Tim Burton's favorite composer, as well as the composer of the theme to The Simpsons and frontman of New Wave band Oingo Boingo, wrote the music and lyrics and provides the voice of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town. Jack, though a "master of fright," has grown tired of the Halloween routine, and this is his "there's something more for me out there" song. Oddly touching, with clever lyrics: "And since I am dead / I can take off my head / to recite Shakespearean quotations." Despite the specificity of Jack's situation, this song should perfect sense to anyone who's ever wondered what they might find away from home.

"Play Dead" by Bjork & David Arnold
Theme song to the 1993 film The Young Americans, directed by Danny Cannon and starring Harvey Keitel. Arnold wrote the score for this London-set cop movie and provided the musical setting that Bjork plays in here. Arnold has scored the last few James Bond movies (and produced a very interesting album of covers of Bond themes), and you can hear that combination of spy-movie cool and orchestral pomp in "Play Dead." Bjork takes up Arnold's challenge and gives one of her most intense vocal performances; the song's power comes from the tension between her intimate lyrics and the over-the-top grandiosity of the vocals and music.

"Vetchera I Rado" by The Bulgarian Women's Choir
From the BWC's album Tour '93. A choral a capella version of, I believe, an arrangement of a Bulgarian folk song by composer Philip Koutev. I don't really know anything else about this song or what the words translate to in English, but it's a beautiful piece, and the brief detour into dissonance makes the harmony that much more compelling.

There are still a few songs on "GGoS" I haven't been able to find without resorting to hunting CD stores; if anyone has MP3s of the following they'd like to send my way, I'd be forever in your debt:

"Wanda's Whorehouse" from "Screens" by Phillip Glass & Faday Musa Suso
"Who'll Sop My Gravy" by Jas. Mathus & His Knock-Down Society
"There Is No Other Way" from Pacific Overtures by Stephen Sondheim
"Vissi D'arte" from Tosca by Eileen Farrell
"Little Impulse" from The Piano score by Michael Nyman
The studio version of "For Love or Money" by Joni Mitchell
"Your Whole Life" and "Soul Station" from the Bodies, Rest & Motion score by Michael Convertino
"Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas, read by the poet (I assume) (Update 3/4/04: Well, hmm. I just discovered I do own a recording of Dylan Thomas reading "Fern Hill," but it's not the same as the one from GGOS. But it'll do in a pinch.)
"Gullharpan" by Lena Willemark & Ale Moller
"Tanha Tanha Yuhan Pe Jeena" from Ranjeela (A Bollywood soundtrack, presumably)
"Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps (Quizas Quizas Quizas)" by Doris Day
The Wonder Woman theme song (Found! Link via Largehearted Boy)
The old Slinky commercial jingle ("What walks down stairs," etc.)
The old Mr. Clean commercial jingle
A Chinese song whose name whose name isn't on the tracklisting; and since I've lost the tape, I couldn't even attempt to phonetically spell out the lyrics. I think it's either a folk song or a standard, though, as I'm pretty sure I heard it performed live in Xi'an four years ago.

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)