Why I am in the mood I am in,
or, Tin-foil hats for the sophistimacated.
Days like today? Seems like this—
The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our “entertainment” and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!
—is the only possible explanation for this pending promotion—
[national security adviser Condoleezza] Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz are the leading candidates to replace Powell, according to sources inside and outside the administration. Rice appears to have an edge because of her closeness to the president, though it is unclear whether she would be interested in running the State Department’s vast bureaucracy.
—the pending failure of this bit of terribly necessary compassionate conservatism—
Just over half of Alabama voters oppose Gov. Bob Riley’s $1.2 billion tax and accountability package, results from a new poll show.
Less than 30 percent of voters would vote to pass the package, with the rest remaining undecided, according to the poll conducted last week by The Mobile Register and the University of South Alabama.
The survey, conducted Monday through Thursday, polled 820 Alabamians who said they were either “very likely” or “likely” to cast a vote on the plan and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
—and the utter dearth of this sort of outrage outside of a small corner of the Islets of Bloggerhans—
A CBS News tally shows this is Bush’s 26th presidential trip to Crawford. He has spent all or part of 166 days at the ranch or en route—the equivalent of 51/2 months. When Bush’s trips to Camp David and Kennebunkport, Maine, are added, according to the CBS figures, Bush has spent 250 full or partial days at his getaway spots—27 percent of his presidency so far.Meanwhile other Americans are getting no time off from their job.
Stripped of his uniform and laid flat on his back in a first-aid tent, a wounded Army engineer fixed his wide, unblinking eyes on a flimsy overhead tarp that shielded him from the desert sun.
I could go on, but. (But.) What, after all, is the point when this is seen—by anyone, anywhere—as making a valid point, political or otherwise? (You see?)
All I know is, I still don’t have any whiskey.
The mindset in question.
A confession: I’ve never been a huge fan of Spider Robinson.
A fan favorite, and something of an acolyte of Robert Heinlein, he’s most famous for his short stories (and the occasional novel) set in and around Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon—a genial sort of place: the best bar near the big SF convention after the floor has closed; a sort of Northern Exposure-ish utopia small enough so that everybody knows your name, but big enough (in heart) that everybody can be his or her respective self, warts and all. (With SF puzzles, tropes, allusions, convoluted in-jokes, and horrible, horrible puns.) —Robinson is more naïve than he thinks he is, a raging sentimentalist operating under the mistaken assumption that he’s hard-boiled, but he’s got a way with words, and a more inclusive than not view of humanity, which excuses a lot in my book. “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased—thus do we refute entropy”; and if celebrating that is hokey, well, we could all do with a little more hoke around here, from time to time.
But. And even though I knew he comes by a great many of his ideals via the aforementioned Heinlein (let’s just note I’m more partial to Disch and Delany and leave it at that), and that those ideals include more than a dollop of that attitude towards women mistaken by some as feminism but more usually noted as pedestalization—I was still taken aback to discover this particular Robinson quote:
Darling, all men think about rape, at least once in their lives. Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we’ve got to have, more precious to us than heroin… and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping or talking about feelings. Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do—because that’s your correct biological strategy. But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons. Our single most urgent need—and the best we can hope for—is to get lucky. We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
Now, there’s—largely speaking—two responses to this kernel:
- it’s basically true, if a bit overly heated—this is, indeed, the secret underpinning of the war between the sexes;
- it’s a prime example of the tragedy bred by that farce of sloppy thinking, evolutionary psychology—what a fuckin’ cop out.
(No points for guessing where I stand. Biology is not destiny, muthafuckah.)
Those two (largely speaking) responses help determine how people respond in turn to the news that Illinois has modified its definition of rape to include the following:
c) A person who initially consents to sexual penetration or sexual conduct is not deemed to have consented to any sexual penetration or sexual conduct that occurs after he or she withdraws consent during the course of that sexual penetration or sexual conduct.
Either: the stuff is more precious than heroin, and if she’s said “yes” there’s no use changing her mind, as that poor addled rapist-man couldn’t stop if his life depended on it; or good God, of course No means No, decent sex means being attuned to what your partner’s up to as well as yourself, and consent is not a binding oral contract, for fuck’s sake. (As it were.)
Do note we haven’t winnowed all the chaff by any means. There’s still grey areas a-plenty—the pedestalization that underlies l’difference that’s vived in the quote above has more than enough room for the concept of the chivalrous gentleman who damn well stops when his partner says whoa, and I’d never dream of suggesting that Robinson, say, would decry the Illinois law merely on the basis of said quote. (And on the other hand, there’s room enough for concern about the possibilities of abuse in the “what a fuckin’ cop out” camp. —And yet: even here, we find grey, we find fuzz, we find fog.)
But I now find myself in the need of fresh coffee. So.
The Further Adventures of Chickenhawk: Into the Kulturkampf!
So the Supreme Court astonishes everyone by doing the right thing and striking the Texas sodomy law from the books. Goes one further, even, and asserts a more robust right to privacy for all of us than we could have expected. And everyone wondered what the President’s reaction would be.
Sen. Santorum floats a trial balloon, and is roundly, soundly criticized for likening consensual homosexual relations with hot “man on dog” action. And everyone wondered what the President might have to say on the subject.
Pundits began to muse about the possibility of a split in the Republican party, between moderate, socially liberal(ish) swing voters and the rabidly bigoted hardcore conservative bloc—both necessary to a second four years of Bush. What would he do? they asked. How will he handle this dicey dilemma?
But through it all, the President and his various spokespeople remained silent.
Then, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll was released, showing a marked decline on the part of the American public in the acceptance of consensual homosexual relations and the right to marriage or recognition of civil unions for gays.
The President spoke right up.
“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another,” Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. “And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.”
How nice to know he has the conviction of his courage on this one.
Essay question.
Please secure your copy of Suzanne Vega’s debut album, Suzanne Vega, and cue up the eighth track. Play the song through once, paying particular attention to the lyrics. (Those who have lent their copy to a friend and never got it back, or who realized too late it was in the glove compartment of the beater donated to save someone’s kidney, or who’ve left it at the office, or—God forbid—never owned a copy, are hereby directed to this handy crib sheet of the lyrics in question.)
Now. Take up your blue books and your No. 2 pencils—or open up the comments box and fire up your keyboard—and answer the following:
Who is the more sympathetic, the queen? Or the soldier? And why?
Remember: neatness counts, but panache counts more. And while there are no wrong answers, there is most certainly a right one. Or why else ask the bloody question?
Help wanted.
One cartoonist with excellent draftsmanship, a firm yet playful grip on masking, an eye toward the possibilities of the infinite canvas (cribbing perhaps from Patrick Farley’s groundbreaking layouts), a sophisticated color sense (modesty forbids holding up one’s Spouse as an exemplar), and no ambitions beyond realizing precisely those comics I can dimly see in my own mind’s eye that won’t stop muttering page after page of dialogue at me in the wee hours of the night. Mind-reading a plus.
Well, that’s what I’d want, anyway. Ideally. Shaennon Garrity may well have a more equitable working relationship in mind. But if even Shaennon Garrity—queen of webcomics, who’d actually be making a living from Narbonic and Li’l Mel and Trunktown if she were making that living in, say, Paducah, or one of the I states, and not San Francisco—if even Shaennon can’t just trip over a suitable slave cartoonist as she’s picking up her groceries, if even Shaennon has to take out an ad for her latest idea, what hope have we mere mortals?
A night at the movies.
I dithered over what to call this: “What we’re fighting for,” perhaps, or “Which side are you on,” or “The Family or the Sygn,” perhaps (again)—but all that’s reductive and simplistic and combative and decreasing the Us and increasing the Them and that’s not the point. —Though if I had alluded to Delany with that last title, I could have gotten in my dig at that study about conservative thought that’s mostly been (rightly) blasted, by pointing out how much more simply it could have been stated—has already been stated—
[A]ll human attempts to deal with death [fall] into two categories of injunctions: (1) Live life moment by moment as intensely as possible, even to the moment of one’s dying. (2) Concentrate only on what is truly eternal—time, space, or whatever hypermedium they are inscribed in—and ignore all the illusory trivialities presented by the accident of the senses, unto birth and death itself. . . . For each adherent the other is the pit of error and sin.
But what this is about, really, is a movie. One we just got done watching. An ambling, amiable epic: Le Destin, or Destiny, or Al Massir, written and directed by Youssef Chahine. It’s a loose historical about what might have happened when the Caliph Mansur banished the philosopher Abu Al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Rushd, or Averroës, for the crime of insisting that faith and reason did not need to be reconciled, as they did not conflict. Most of the plot swirls around the machinations of the fundamentalist cult promulgated by suave courtier Sheikh Riad and the attempts bumbling and not so by Averroës’ friends and family to see to it that his books—his commentaries on Aristotle and The Republic, his Tahafut Al-Tahafut, his Kitab fasl al-maqal—might be copied and smuggled into libraries in Languedoc and Cairo and out of danger from pyres and fanatics. Plus: beautiful scenery, great architecture, a cast full of eye-candy, bouts of derring-do, and song and dance numbers.
—Irresistable, in other words. (Movie Madness has a copy. [I should maybe have called this “A night in front of the VCR,” but it doesn’t have the same allusive panache.] I’d bet Scarecrow in Seattle does. It’s distributed stateside by New Yorker Films, so you’ve got a shot elsewhere, too.)
And yes, it’s long, and meandering, and heavy-handed, and digressive, and thuddingly obvious, and it doesn’t matter. The flick is “unusual even for a Western film in its espousal of liberal values,” as this review put it, and that’s true (sad, but). And there’s the unavoidable echoes and appalling ironies rung off the here and now—all unforeseen, from this, to this—that will leave you in the mood to ask cheekily leading questions like What are we fighting for, anyway? and Whose side are you on? Why do we mourn the burning of a book? Why must reason and faith be at odds? Why must there only be one side to every story? What is truth, anyway, and can you ask that question without washing your hands of it?
But I’m just getting silly. Of course you can. And it was a good movie; highly recommended. Soaringly achingly delicious Arabic orchestral pop. And I did mention the eye-candy?
—I should maybe just leave you with the thoughts of national treasure Ray Davis and get the heck to bed already.
A chatroom of their own.
My first feature for Comixpedia is up; it’s about how the internet is rather dramatically affecting the ability of cartoonists to find each other and hook up in ad hoc support groups and interstitial schools through such silly, simple tools as email, chat, and LiveJournal. And how these quotidian tools are more revolutionary for comics online than such (admittedly nifty) ideas as Flash-based panel transitions and infinite canvasses. —Email: it’s still the killer app.
Anyway, the piece is essentially a reimagining of this earlier entry, about the Pants Pressers; I also look at a group of cartoonists, writers, and filmmakers who’d met in college and are handily maintaining their scattered, post-academe connections online. And right now I’m wishing I’d read this Shirky piece before I’d written either—not that I want to get hardcore into social dynamics and group theory, and not that I’d want to dwell on acrimonious dissolutions, but still. It’s a great piece, and an important vector to mull over in this vague regard.
But enough with the dwelling and mulling! How about some further Comic-Con post-mortemry? One of the kings of con reports has finally posted his take—complete with shots of what Steve Lieber was up to when he wasn’t in San Diego. Enjoy.
My God, it’s full of—
If your eyes tire of the strain of all that redacted white and black space, then click here to refresh them with twirlingly illusory optical goodness. (Ow…) —Via Medley.
And the whole dern thing has been condemned by ’Merican Express.
I think I found this over at Geisha Asobi: Mr. Wong’s wonderful Soup’Partments, quite possibly the world’s tallest virtual building. Download a basic template (one- or two-storey models available), renovate to your liking (pixels only, please; no anti-aliasing), and email it in; Mr. Wong will find a place for you.
Which reminds me of something from back in the day: the Muckenhoupt Hotel, frequented by a large part of my circle of friends (and others, of course) at Oberlin. Now, keep in mind this was back in the late ’80s: there was no web, world-wide or not, and students bringing their own computers to school was rare. We had a couple of rooms in the library full of cheap idiot terminals all plugged into a VAX 11/780—with a separate room for some MS-DOS boxes, and, my sophomore year, the experimental Macintosh lab, full of cute little SEs. Getting email out of the local network and onto the Internet (it made more sense to capitalize it then) took a little finagling—corresponding with the Runic Robot was always something of a feat, at least for me—and when you made a post to Usenet, it could take 3 or 4 days to show up. And those cheap idiot terminals had monochrome displays: you could pick an amber-on-black or a green-on-black display. No graphics, anti-aliased or otherwise.
Each student could sign up for an email address and a directory with a couple hundred kilobytes, gratis. And we rapidly found other ways to use that k than email storage and statistical analyses—there were emailed serials (most notably the late, lamented Pulp); Infosys, the bulletin board, was full of long-winded, little-read arguments on politics and religion; and of course, games: Hack (or Rogue, or whatever) and Wumpus-hunting and IF and setting up utilities for Champions character generation.
Carl Muckenhoupt pulled an interesting experiment. He set the protections for reading and writing to his directory structure to all, wrote a text file describing the lobby of the Muckenhoupt Hotel, and threw open its doors. Anyone could set up a subdirectory under his directory, and put whatever text files they wanted in it. So people would set up their “rooms,” with text descriptions of what they looked like, and files describing various objects within the rooms. People began leaving objects in each other’s rooms, since you could set your own subdirectories to allow others to write to them (I seem to recall a minor kerfluffle over an anonymously created rose). Crude hypertext hacks allowed you to move through the directories, and even set up “secret passages” that would work in the background to move you unbidden from one room to another. Someone—Carl, I think—cobbled together an ASCII elevator that could move you from one “floor” to another.
This was all in 1987 and 1988, or thereabouts. And while he was far from the only one to come up with the basic idea, and it was terribly ad hoc—there was no coding involved beyond the operating system and the directory-shunting hacks—still, it’s worth noting: this was one of the world’s first MUSHes. (Or MUDs. Or whatever.) Proto-MUSH? Maybe?
(Confidential to Amy: Yes, it is.)
Gresham’s Law in action.
Well, no, maybe not. But watch the numbers flicker by on this cost of war clock and see how every second drives more money into imperial dreams and the Halliburton Highway and out of ideas a sinking, poverty-stricken nation could use. —Or more usual nostrums, like health care, education, public housing…
Actually? Maybe so, but in another way. It’s a limb, but I’m willing to test its weight: maybe the whole idea of bad X driving out good X has a lot to do with this very visceral frustration, one that’s growing and souring in more bellies than mine. “Anyone who can beat Bush has my vote.” Jesus. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Shut up shut up shut up!
It’s not just Democratic representatives, trying to get a reading of a bill at the last minute before a committee vote. It’s also TV stations that dare to air ads critical of the President and scientists who can’t tell them what they want to hear. It’s even fellow Republicans who dare to deviate an iota from the party line. Hell, it’s even you and me and anyone else who wants to maybe try to get some sort of customer service from the folks currently occupying our White House. —Ah, well. At least we’re all of us in good company.
Oh, ye’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll hit Perdition afore ye…
Steve Lieber has a chat with Jen Contino about what it is that’s keeping him off the streets these days. Also, because it’s totally random, and has something to do with the previous post, but wouldn’t quite fit, and it’s really late and I should be writing but I’m in one of those moods: a review of the latest massively multiplayer online RPG. (Do note the skew in one’s original position.) —And, via Patrick: Happy New Year.
So I’m more or less back.
Actually, it’s a toss-up: on the one hand, there was the jubilant chaos of the impromptu party on the little mezzanine balcony overlooking the lobby of the Embassy Suites: Jenn on the floor happily sketching away with Patrick Farley; various Pants Pressers littering couches and chairs hastily assembled into ad hoc conversational nooks: Jen Wang’s sprawled in Derek Kirk Kim’s lap for a photo, Erika Moen’s actually off in search of food, Vera Brosgol just stole my seersucker, I’ve got no idea where Clio Chiang went, and Bill Mudron and Dylan Meconis and Phil and I are trying to figure out this wacky Hamlet game Phil bought the last time he was in Oberlin. I’d drawn the ending where all the kids had to end up out of Denmark and safe, and my first step is getting Ophelia into a nunnery (go!); Phil decides Claudius is going to try to execute Gertrude in the first act (it didn’t work); Bill just wants Hamlet and Lærtes to fight, dammit (how do you solve a problem like Lærtes?); and I never did figure out what Dylan was up to. Craig Thompson stops by, but he can’t stay, and Justine Shaw’s been there all along, and I think that was Cat Garza, and was Indigo Kelleigh there for a bit, or am I confusing this whole merry mess with that first night at Dick’s? I’ve lost track. I’m trying to get Hamlet to France. —When Vera and Erika and Lori Matsumoto and a couple of other people return with hors d’oeuvres and pitchers of beer and Coke it turns out one of the writers of Pirates of the Caribbean is picking up the tab. Over there, smiling quietly, there’s Scott McCloud and Ivy McCloud and Larry Marder, and you know what? This is all their fault, really. In far more ways than one.
But the next day: the next day, Phil grabs me out of the booth Jenn’s sharing with Chris and he drags me halfway across the con floor until we find what passes for a quiet place—one side of a round table under Frank Quitely’s enormous poster of the Endless, in the concession block behind New Line’s schizoid, bloodsoaked forest—half massive shrine to The Lord of the Rings, half creepy recreation of that summer camp where Jason slaughtered so many promiscuous teens. (Apparently, Jason’s fighting Freddy in a movie later this year, which explains as much as anything can why that portly wizard and his vinyl-wrapped slave girl are both sporting bloody make-up furrows on the left sides of their faces.) —Across the table from me some kids are sorting their Yu Gi Oh! decks; up on the balcony three or four sunglassed Agent Smiths are surveilling the con floor, their hands on their earpieces. Phil drops a portable CD player and some headphones in my lap and says, “Play tracks 6, 12, and 18. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” And so I do, and it’s a voice from way back when, Steve Espinola singing about googols in a way that some might denigrate as “mere” wit, as “only” clever wordplay, as if somehow they’ve missed the deep melancholy, as if they’ve forgotten language is the only game in town. So I close my eyes and shut out the smell of spilled mustard and listen to Steve sing about desperately needing to indulge in jubilant, merry chaos through the streets of Manhattan to wipe the tombstones out of the corners of his eyes, and I take my first deep breath in days.
The rest was mostly sex and death with the occasional comic book. Sex and death? Badges of, representations of, icons and eidolons: thrills not sought but sketched, gestured at, pointed to. Consumed. Colliding most often in the prevalent image, inked, airbrushed, modelled in Photoshop, of a sword-wielding, gun-toting woman, her thighs bared, her face either set in a grim rictus or a feral grin—but splintered and scattered throughout: post-pubescent boys in black Punisher T-shirts, fake 9 mils in their hands, browse blood-drenched Champions of Hell comic books while the booth proprietor snatches up his digital camera to zoom in for a close-up of the angel’s ass as she totters by on her six-inch Lucite heels; under her fluffy white wings (held up by an uncomfortable-looking armature of PVC piping), you’ll note she’s wearing her lacy G-string outside her hip-hugging translucent white tights. —Sex and death, and we can tut over the booth bimbettes in their slutty schoolgirl costumes and the swords and the guns and the white boy leers, we can ponder the wisdom of the woman wearing a decent-enough recreation of conquistador plate in the muggy San Diego heat, we can goggle at the tall thin guy in nothing but white socks, Keds, and his boyhood Spider-man Underoos, but we’re missing the point: it’s thrills. Not sex, but the thrill of desiring, and being desired. Not death, but the thrill of danger nimbly avoided in the nick of the last minute, and death cheekily mocked. Or as close as we can safely get, mind. Images, signs, and symbols; icons and eidolons; imagos and half-remembered fevre dreams. Other thrills are easier to realize more directly: the thrill of recognition (“I’ve been reading Bruno since 1996!”), the thrill of brushing fame (being growled at by Lou Ferrigno, and did Angelina Jolie ever fly in by helicopter?), the thrill of hanging out with your peers in your chosen art and the thrill of dropping names (though I never did meet Neil, sigh), the thrills of giddily sudden, Proustian nostalgia and cognitive dissonance, the thrill of finally tracking down the CD with that song that comes at the very end of Cowboy Bebop, the thrill when you realize this new comic really is as good as everyone’s saying it is (Blankets, that is—much like the same thrill when you first read Stuck Rubber Baby), the thrill of finding a brand-new comic or TV show or movie or game or idea—a brand new world—to fall into. To lose yourself in. We may be (however briefly) discussing the state of the comics blogosphere with Dirk Deppey, picking up Tria marker techniques, or dishing the current state of a micropayment beta test (quite healthy, apparently)—but we’re also hunting for the NeiA_7 soundtrack and peering in wonder at giant Japanese robots and when we giggle at the stormtroopers and Starfleet officers facing off for a minute in the middle of a crowded aisle, it’s as much in delight as it is—what? Scorn? Superciliousness? There but for the grace of God? —To pretend that our reasons for being here have nothing in common with whatever it was that brought that woman here in her G-string and angel’s wings would be—dishonest. For all that our respective cups of tea aren’t to each other’s liking.
Thrill-seeking we will always have with us. Comics—like gaming, like cartoons, like (to a lesser extent) movies—make up a potent toolkit for limning the signs and symbols of things too dangerous to confront directly, but nontheless desired deeply (and in many cases dangerous because so deeply desired). Comics allow us to harvest these thrills by brushing up against their illusions. There’s other things comics do well, quite well indeed—the unparalleled intimacy of what is essentially a handwritten note from the artist directly to you makes them ideal for memoir and autobiography, clefed or otherwise: Maus, Stuck Rubber Baby, One! Hundred! Demons!, Blankets, Eddie Campbell’s Alec MacGarry stuff, Derek Kirk Kim, etc. and so forth. And that’s just one of the other things. But it’s the thrills that pull at us (all of us) the most strongly, whether it’s a wittily sophisticated recontextualization or a crude depth charge. Giggle in shock, and tut and frown and look on with concern—there’s a lot to worry about in those nubile half-naked angels of mayhem, those armored robot zombie berserkers. But think back to 1986, or 1990, even 1995 or 1998, and look at what else is going on now, how radically comics are opening up old-fashioned assumptions of what thrills are sought out, and who’s allowed to seek them. It’s not without its problems; hell no. Nothing’s ever perfect. We’re dealing with desire, after all, and desire’s inherently destabilizing. But it’s opening up to let more people in, and that’s as close to a definition of progress as I can come at the moment.
I think I’ve been listening to that last Cowboy Bebop song too much already: “Everything is clearer now, life is just a dream, you know, that’s never ending… I’m ascending…” Whatever. —Look at it this way: the population of a middlin’-sized town came together in the massive barn of the San Diego Convention Center to create a space safe enough for those who want to dress up in Spider-man Underoos or a faux fox tail or a full-on Imperial Stormtrooper’s kit to do so. To flirt with, put on, play with all those eidolons of sex and death, trouble and desire. It’s appallingly geeky, embarrassing, hysterical, hypocritical, stupid, gorgeous, impressive, deadening, exhausting, enervating, infuriating, magical, dull, quotidian, cool, dorky, depressing, distressing, lame, and inherently subversive.
It’s just it doesn’t stop with the stuff you or I might want subverted. Caveat emptor.
If it’s comics you’re after, though, you might enjoy APE or SPX or MOCCANY more. Apples and oranges and kettles of fish of a different color.
(The runner-up? And a close one, too. Wasn’t even a night in San Diego. The night before we got there, in LA, we’re in the theater at the top of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Jenn and I, and Lori and Patrick and David Wilson, watching “Our Lady of the Sphere.” But before that—before that, Patrick had brought a tape of the old Isis show—remember Isis? And we watched a couple of episodes of that, howling with glee and disbelief at the acting and the costumes and the trite morals and the Filmation danger music that was beaten into the coils of my lizard brain so very long ago. Saturday morning madeleines. —It’s a deliriously enchanting place to visit, but would I want to live there?
(Do I have any choice?)
It’s a spy plane! It’s a rock band!
Actually, it’s the table where I’ll more likely than not be hanging out while in San Diego for the next few days: U2, in the Small Press corner of the ridiculous expanse of the San Diego Convention Center. It should be listed under “Baldwin and Lee” in the program. Do stop by if you happen to find yourself in the area.
Morning becomes eclectic.
Scott McCloud has started up the Morning Improv again. Every day, an hour a day, he draws, you know, stuff. Comics based on titles suggested by the viewing audience. Past favorites include “When Luna Smiles,” “Flap Those Flagella Like You Mean It,” “The Meadow of the Damned” (1, and 2), and—of course—the incomparable “Monkey Town.” And he’s adding a feature that will allow you to vote on the next title to be comicked up through micropayments. (Because it�s all about the tiny bits of benjamins.) —Scott: here’s some background on a title I’d love to see you try your improv hand at:
Pork Martini.
Heaping coals of fire on his head.
Roz Kaveny writes a beautiful, well, it’s an obituary, really, for Christopher Hitchens. (Via Electrolite.)
“—just one sentence—”
Okay, maybe I do wish we still had cable. This, from The Daily Show last night:
White House officials are telling me it strikes them as a little nitpicky. If it turns out that instead of Saddam Hussein trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein was not trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons, I mean, that’s a one-word difference in a long, long sentence.
—Thanks to The Note.
