THE RANDOM ROBOT

The Reading Went Well

2011-11-20T21:53:00.000-08:00

Another year is blowing by, too fast for my liking. There doesn’t seem to be enough time for everything I want to do. There don’t seem to be enough hours in the day.
A common complaint for people in their 50s, 40s, 30s… common and familiar, I suppose for anyone trying to accomplish some as yet unfinished thing, or get closer to some life long goal. It’s a feeling that accelerates as the calendar’s pages diminish every year in the fall. It’s a quiet panic I feel on days when I’m already late for work, and the minute hand ticks past nine ever increasingly faster, for every minute I haven’t reached my desk, my phone and my responsibilities.

But at 43, it feels like “autumn” in my life too.

It has felt like one long “November” ever since I turned 28 years old. Every succeeding year, another filmmaker gives up, or another artist calls it quits, or another colleague tells me “It’s great that you’re still out there working.” It’s beginning to sound more and more like ingenuous condescension. It’s beginning to sound like they never believed they would get any farther than they did at the moment they quit.
I don’t like any of it, their quitting, their excuses, their rationalizations or blaming the outside world, finances or family for why they couldn’t or wouldn’t continue.
I didn’t make the choice to become an artist any more than I made the choice to become fat; the only choice I made was to work hard at it, to devote my life to the series of statements that have become my body of work, so far. Not being paid a living wage at it means I’m not a professional, but having a day job doesn’t make me an amateur.

Friday night, with what felt like a throat infection, I read and presented slides from my latest comic book story. Although this is only my 4th or 5th time doing these kinds of performances, it went off without a hitch. The crowd, mostly people familiar with my work for the past 20 years published in World War 3 Illustrated, seemed to genuinely enjoy the story, no forced art-house laughter from the bunch of them. The applause felt great. It served to remind me that although DC Comics, Vertigo and Karen Berger passed on my work yet again in 2009 (a great piece called Cabbie Baba and the 40 Thieves that I’ll get to someday) although several samples for graphic novels I have done for other writers have stalled or been outright rejected this year, although it seems that self publishing will be the only way to proceed as I feel no confidence in the current generation of editors and publishers, I still have managed to created my own stories, on my own terms. In the place of a “deal” or an agent (I have no confidence in any of them anymore either after my last (first and only) agent suddenly expressed confused misgivings about my writing and abruptly quit the business) I have to remain focused on the road I’ve managed to pave without the help or support of institutions who have rejected support for my work.
Remaining largely anonymous, working whenever my “day job” ends, will have to suffice, and I will have to appreciate that opportunity even on the weeknights that take me long past my initial call to sleep as I toil at my drafting table on stories and images that I will have to distribute myself, if they are ever to be seen by the world they are intended to entertain and engage.

It’ll have to do.

I just wonder, -what will I tell myself when I turn 60?
-SJ

Color Posters for WW3 Issue 42

2011-11-12T08:05:00.001-08:00

DRAFTS: Release Party and Art Show for Issue WW3 #42

2011-10-30T21:09:00.001-07:00

8"x11" poster

5.5"x4.25" 2-sided postcard

Poster versions:

11"x17" poster

Maybe Comic Books Need to Undergo a Periodic Death.

2011-10-11T14:11:00.000-07:00

Technological advancements, the attendant euphoria that comes with a medium or a genre’s popularity all inspire far more mediocrity than they do genius, or even meaningful work.When the Polaroid put the power of instant photography in everyone’s hands, it also lowered the bar, capping what was possible for the sake of getting the public a baseline result: a repeatable, consistent result. That the ensuing generations of photographs were of muddied colors and a kind of generalized unmotivated focal plane was the apparent cost of averaging out and quickening the art of photography for the masses. -Just like instant coffee, there is a trade off in taste for the sudden rush and payoff at the press of a button. The same can be said of the camera as a whole (as a successor to the paintbrush.) This may have more to do with the fact that most people are just not thinking much when it comes to creating images or capturing moments in their lives; they allow the machinery to do the thinking as well, and we all know that machines don’t think.
Such seems to be the case with my beloved medium, the comic book. This weekend, thousands will crowd the Jacob Javitz convention center in New York City. This year as in the last 15 years, there will be an increase in the number of “independently” created comic books, as has been the case every preceding year. The vast majority of this “new” material, created by amateurs, some still in high school is unreadable shit. Even some of the entrepreneur based titles and many of the new launches by established house like DC and Marvel are thin examples of the medium’s potential.
The comedian Patton Oswalt (himself a fan of comics and science fiction,) remarked some years ago that comedy had died in the early 1990s, but he added that it needed to die because the comedians sucked, and the audiences sucked too. He insists the rebirth of the stand-up form in the 2000s would not have been possible without this artistic culling. That’s how I feel about the 2000s onward in the comics.
The plethora of licensed adaptations, rehashed concepts, and homogenous autobiographical works is not only depressing and embarrassing for me as a creative artist in the medium; it presents practical problems at the comic shop and digital newsstands. Every time someone like Ed Burns decides to do a Dock Walloper (with Respect to Jim Palmiotti,) he is necessarily crowding out something else by somebody else who isn’t just making a token visit to the comic book medium. Add to this the recurring problem that comics face as a “pop art” ghetto, where any idiot thinks he can write a comic book (Yes, you’re an idiot if you think you can just sit down and write one without knowing the medium as consumer, or as a devoted reader .) Years ago, I had someone tell me they thought teaching art was easy, to which I answered; “Maybe you’re not very good at it?” That guy hasn’t spoken to me since. I’m finding myself having to offer variants of that existential question to many people who say they want “to do a comic book” or “have an idea for a graphic novel.”

I have come to hate the word graphic novel. I only use it out of sheer convenience and custom. I hate the term graphic novel because it’s most often used by people who want to talk about comic books, but don’t know anything meaningful about them.

Today, printing is cheap. The internet is even cheaper as a distribution option. Scores of aspiring storytellers, or “idea” men (read: bullshit artists and opportunists) now no longer have stumbling blocks between themselves and a completion of a comic book, and that means there’s a lot of shit being made out there crowding out the stuff people could be reading instead. I’d put Walt Kelly’s Pogo over just about anything “new” this year, and that’s because whatever material of that caliber is getting produced is getting shoved out of the shelves by the latest celebrity penned graphic novel.
Before you ask someone like me to listen to your idea for a comic book, -ask yourself this:
Have you ever read Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s run on Daredevil (collected as the trade paperback, Born Again?) Have you ever read any of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts work prior to 1968? Do you know who Harvey Pekar was? Do you know who Kurt Busiek is? Do you know who Alex Toth was? Have you ever heard of a company called Charlton?
That’s my litmus test for keeping out the pretenders, and if you know anything at all about mainstream comics, you’ll know it’s not much of a test at all. If you can’t answer those asinine questions, I don’t care how many times you’ve read Watchmen or seen Batman Begins; -you’re a danger to our medium’s level of quality and you need to stay out until you know better. If you think you don’t need to know anything to write a comic book, -well that’s why you’ll suck at it. That’s why I won’t talk to you. I wouldn’t give a minute’s time to a young author out to write his first novel, -who didn’t know who Philip Roth was.
-Get it now?
I’d like to see the next series of over-budgeted Hollywood costume abortions implode their first weekends out. This way, perhaps this beacon of an easy buck or an easy book will stop drawing dilettantes to the world of comic books like mindless moths to a lamppost.
-SJ

Yet Another Post About Steve Jobs...

2011-10-08T12:54:00.000-07:00

I began the Random Robot blog with a post on Steve Jobs, or more specifically, the storied (in my opinion imaginary) dichotomy between the PC and the Apple as products and “cultures.” I ended that post with a sincere wish, which did not come true.

Steve Jobs died on Wednesday.

Although I’d heard for well over two months that he was nearing the end, it didn’t soften the blow much. I was still surprised, I was still very, very sad. Two friends at Oracle had told me that Jobs had stopped by their headquarters in early September, presumably attempting to say goodbye and farewell to friends, rivals, and in the cases of the various other Silicon Valley addresses he visited, -enemies as well. In that way perhaps Jobs was more fortunate than many people facing a terminal illness, he had the money and power to do what was possible to put all of his affairs in order. He at the very least bought himself some time, when his money and influence could no longer beat back the Pancreatic cancer that finally claimed him after years of fighting.
I ran this post past a colleague, who asked why I was going with such an old photo of Jobs (as if it’s possible to over idealize/idolize Jobs at this point.) I picked that photo among the thousands I saw because it’s the first one I remember seeing at all. It’s the image that as sophomore in High School offered me a glimpse at a mercurial figure, part innovator, part opportunist, and all “idealist” to the core. For those of us who are creative people in the arts or sciences of any stripe, Jobs presented us with the first “popular” heroic creative archetype since Einstein or Picasso. Jobs was an “intellect,” not an athlete, politician or a movie star, he was a man who was made by his own mind: a compelling idea for my generation, which grew up with a folksy actor in the White House. Some appraisal will have to made of Jobs as a kind of engineer, in so far as the title is often extended to his predecessors like Da Vinci and the Wright brothers. While I had other heroes in those years, like Rod Serling, Elvis Costello, David Cronenberg, Alfred Hitchcock, David Bowie, Bill Mantlo, John Byrne, Frank Miller, George Perez, Michael Golden, John Buscema, none of them (who were still alive at the time) were actively thinking about how to make a buck by making my life easier, or more productive.
Jobs’s sober counterpart in all this through the years was Bill Gates of course. Together, they were the young yin and yang of the tech sector before the financial world called it a sector at all. Both were visionaries who were in a race (often “stealing” from others and each other) to better serve, better anticipate the focus of those people in America who didn’t even know they needed a computer yet. Gates, respectably and understandably, left this race years ago, but Jobs couldn’t leave it alone, even after having made billions in the sale of Pixar. Therein Jobs was unique. Just think about it:

The GUI.
The mouse.
Drag and drop file transfer.

That last one is possibly my favorite.
For those of us who remember using computers before softwindows and windows, nothing was as annoying, and seemingly unavoidable as having to move a file by changing its directory address manually. The wrong series of keystrokes could send a file into a nameless irretrievable limbo. Steve Jobs did something about that, and it affects me everyday. It will affect the way I work and play forever. …just think about all Jobs had done before he decided on the iPod, before the iTunes store and all the various computers, devices, phones, pads that followed. …just think how much more this man still had left in him before cancer stopped him at 56.

No one is exaggerating when they say the death of Steve Jobs is a big loss: Few have thought as hard about how to make life easier, more productive or more fun than he did.

Steve Jobs repeatedly said that dropping acid was one of the most important experiences in his life, and that it may have in part been responsible for his posture toward problem solving and ultimately Apple’s philosophy. I have never had the balls to advocate the use of hallucinogenics to a single person. Then again, I don’t think I got all the expansion in perspective that Jobs got, -just some funny stories for the effort.
In this age of anti-Muslim hysteria, racism and conveniently selective xenophobia, I hope some acknowledgment of Jobs’s Syrian ancestry is made, if only to remind us that to be American is often to be from somewhere else, and to welcome people from somewhere else. Jobs and his products are perceived as American and as ubiquitous as McDonalds’s, but not as invasive, corrupting or destructive (largely because no one wants to talk about the off shore factories that build iPhones and iPads.) I can understand that Jobs’s reticence to ever discuss his ethnicity came not from any self-interest or paranoia but out of love for the only parents he knew, the only parents he recognized, the parents he loved, his parents: The Jobs family of Cupertino California who adopted him in San Francisco in 1955. We have to respect and understand Jobs’s anger at the words “adoptive parents.”
Much will be said in the coming years about Jobs. Many will cynically, if not justly, point out that Jobs’s products destroyed or off-shored more “jobs” than they created. Others will cite the largely fictional and convenient differentiation between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: Each behaved as a hammer that saw every competitor, every other company, -and some times every business partner, as a nail.
Maybe his most lasting and (for me) meaningful legacy is not that he was the man-of-the-people-as-head-of-a-benevolent-technology-company (no part of that hyphenated statement is true except the word “technology”) but that he was a “man of the consumers.” Quote me on that one my friends.
That Jobs saw the consumers of America and the world as people who could be best served with humane design and increasing simplification, was perhaps his greatest gift. All this I can say of Steve Jobs, and yet I have never once bought an Apple computer: not a single dektop, laptop, iPod, or peripheral device… except for my Quick Time Pro license, a great software buy at $29.95.

Rest in peace Mr. Jobs.

I’m sure we will continue putting what you brought to us to good use, at work and play.
-SJ

Coming November 2011

2011-09-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

Saturday July 9th at 2pm...

2011-07-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

Top Job Skills...

2011-06-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

Free Comic Book Classes in Washington Heights

2011-06-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

A Sad Day.

2011-05-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

Harmon Killebrew, a notable giant in a game where eclipsed benchmarks are almost always forgotten, has announced that he will go into hospice care after what seems like an abrupt illness announced only yesterday; It was only December when it was made known that he was battling esophageal cancer.
The echoes of this man’s home runs rang long into my adolescence, when friends far more knowledgeable than me about the game, would throw his name into conversations about the greatest power hitters ever to menace the plate.
I didn’t know until this afternoon that he had made his start with the Senators. I also didn’t know that he had hit the most homeruns of any player in the 1960s.
Baseball players age much faster than the rest of us watching the game beyond the foul lines in some cruel Einsteinian wrinkle. Mr. Killebrew’s career was longer and more distinguished than the vast majority of players who somehow manage to play in the major leagues, but it still hurts me to hear of them passing on. Even in this era of astronomical paychecks and signing bonuses, and small time personas playing a big time game, baseball gives me something I could not put a price on, something not sold anywhere:

something to cheer for.

I was rooting for Mr. Kilibrew when I’d heard the initial diagnosis. I am rooting for him now in lieu of any thanks I cannot give him for all of the stories of his long, long, long home runs and the arguments his distinguished record inspired among my childhood friends.
Mr. Killebrew, it’s quite something to be 11th.
It really is.
-SJ

An Appreciation of Some of My Favorite Actors

2011-03-31T13:14:00.000-07:00

Jeff Bridges, Harry Dean Stanton, Christopher Walken and many other actors are finally getting their due, and they probably would've been on this list, but the 2000s and beyond have been largely a time of public and critical appreciation for these three actors in particular and for that I am very thankful as a fan of motion pictures.

When Frances McDormand won an Oscar for Fargo way back in 1996, I think many movie goers breathed a sigh of relief at the MPAA getting something right at least, where we the public often get it wrong. No one will ever wonder whether Tim Allen could have done more with the opportunities given him, no one will ever cite him and many, many others who grace the marquees, as unappreciated.

Some of the people on this list just didn’t live long enough to contribute according to the scale of their gifts and abilities. I felt I needed to recognize them too.

This isn't so much a list about actors who are just underrated in my opinion, so much as a look at certain talents in movies who just haven't, or didn't go as far as they could have. Thankfully for many, the shot clock is still running. Harrison Ford could easily have been on this list had he never been cast in Star Wars. Like Baseball's Cooperstown, so very little substance separates the deified icons of cinema from the remarkable talents who remain (for whatever reasons) outside the pantheon of lasting, inarguable superstardom. There is something heartbreaking for movie lovers about those actors who it is assumed are struggling to find work, or appearing in material beneath their prodigious talent, or have yet to reach their full potential... or tragically never will.

Everyone has their hall of underdogs past and present, and this is mine.

***

Elizabeth Shue (Could never act in enough movies to satisfy me.)

Bruce Campbell (If I'd been casting a Superman movie in 1990, Campbell would have been my choice for the lead... or a Batman movie for that matter.)

Robin Tunney,

Eric Bana (Just hasn't clicked yet with world audiences, but he's good in everything he's ever been in; especially his entertainingly overwrought and unrecognizable turn as a villain in the last Star Trek film by JJ Abrams.)

Aidan Quinn,

Rutger Hauer (The man whose performance carried Bladerunner deserved better, bigger projects.)

Emily Watson, (A walking, talking, breathing genius of an actor.)

Courtney B. Vance,

John Cazale (My favorite actor of all time.)

Brooke Adams,

Rufus Sewell,

Patrick Wilson,

Carla Gugino,

Michael Rosenbaum,

James Mason (Sure he was in great movies but he should have been in many more. Once he lost the role of James Bond to Sean Connery, his career took questionable turns.)

Dennis Christopher,

Andre Braugher,

Treat Williams,

Katrin Cartlidge,

Richard Jordan (Simply one of the finest actors this country has ever produced.)

Tim Roth,

Stephen McHattie,

Kyle Secor,

Giancarlo Esposito (Got his start in Taps with Sean Penn, Timothy Hutton, and Tom Cruise, then somehow, for some reason, didn’t become a leading man, a household name or big star.)

Franka Potente,

Andy Garcia,

Damian Lewis (Seriously, someone needs to do something about this guy soon, before he’s relegated to just Masterpiece Theatre in America, and only BBC mini-series programming in the UK.)

Adolph Caesar,

Keir Dullea,

Bill Nunn,

Jeff Daniels (In one of the most notable cases of one star replacing another altogether, Daniels had his career seemingly absorbed by that of Bill Pullman's.)

Michael Sarrazin,

Peter Weller,

John Savage,

Jean-Marc Barr (I'm still praying this guy will suddenly breakout somehow.)

Scott Grimes,

Terry O'Quinn (is just a great actor who has done incredible things with sometimes terrible scripts.)

Howard E. Rollins Jr. (I still think he died far too soon, as did a few others on this list.)

***

If a few of these names struck you as odd, or altogether unknown, search the IMDB website for their filmographies and you may understand their inclusion. If not? Post your own picks in the replies below.
-SJ

Norma

2011-03-09T09:57:00.000-08:00

Norma Iglesias might have been one of the most fascinating people I have ever known in my entire life.

Norma was brilliantly determined, with an incendiary intellect. She was among the first adults I ever knew as a child who didn’t cast aspersions on people who were different, -not that she ever hesitated make fun of anyone or any particular thing, just that she had a deep and abiding respect for people that transcended her outsized sense of humor. Norma was a very cool lady to put it flatly. She was a gregarious Puerto Rican woman, hailing from a generation that fought greatly for an elusive acceptance and begrudged respect attained by few in the last decades of the 20th century.

People were always drawn to her; to her light and warmth and her explosive laughter. She collected life-long friends much in the way celestial stars collect planets, with a kind of unconscious, unaffected magnetism. I was always impressed with her because she didn’t lecture and pontificate as many intelligent people can’t resist doing, but always maintained a knowing posture and shared what she knew as an act of generosity and friendship. She prized intelligence and her values had an enormous effect on me as a child and later as an adolescent. She had hard set opinions about a great many things, as all of us do, and if you weren’t ready to hear the truth as she saw it, it was not going to be easy for you, but she never told people her thoughts as an act of unkindness. Norma once confided to me that she believed keeping a deeply held conviction or perspective to oneself was not only dishonest, but criminal among friends. She was confident in her relationships that way. She insisted that friends not be afraid to anger each other in service of the truth and that opinions should never be secrets, lest they become divisions. Norma also showed me one of the truest measures of wisdom: the ability to say you don’t know something. That particular aspect of her honesty is a quality that I encounter rarely in my professional life, as everyone pretends to be an expert on a vast array of subjects, approaches and technologies. Norma showed me that pretending to know something only convinces those around you of your insecurity, more importantly, Norma always reminded me that you cannot learn things that you don’t concede you need to know and Norma was all about getting on with life at all times: It showed in her professional life, it showed in the way she drove her car, it showed in the way she went to Orchard beach in the summer time.

Norma took me to see Star Wars in 1977 when I was nine, along with two of her lovely daughters only because she’d heard it was a groundbreaking motion picture. I’d always thought that we had a love of fantasy and genre pictures in common. She confessed to me, many years later when I was in college that she disliked Science Fiction, but that she couldn’t let that stop her from taking me to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Norma thought it was important that I see effects work and storytelling other than what was on Saturday morning television. The movies in her opinion, was where all the important work was being done, even if it meant sitting through Ridley Scott’s Alien with me.

She told me “You’re a smart, weird little kid. Don’t ever let anybody give you any shit for it.” And armed with that, I went forward in life at the age of 8. I worked towards becoming an artist. I worked towards becoming a writer. I worked towards becoming a filmmaker. I became a creative person, set largely on my way by her presence in my life.

Blood is thicker than water as the saying goes, but love possesses qualities beyond measure and definition and Norma was more than family to me. I am fortunate. I had plenty of opportunities across a lifetime to tell Norma just how much I loved her, and rarely missed an opportunity to do so, right up until last week when I spoke with her on the phone. It’s a great honor to be able to tell someone that you know just how special they are: I count that among the most important lessons she taught me among all that she gave me across a lifetime.

Norma Iglesias departs, leaving her daughters, her grandchildren and her many friends with much to talk about and remember for the rest of our days before we all move on to join her. For my part, I have to admit that the world is a smaller, duller place for her passing.
-SJ

Another Ranking of the Top Twenty Horror Movies of All Time…

2011-03-06T10:51:00.000-08:00

Lists and rankings have been an Internet staple since at least the early 1990s, always recognizing this and excluding that, to someone’s ire, -often mine. Every time I read a list of the “best all time” horror movies, I'm left wondering just how much more emotionally flat and indistinct (in terms of our aesthetics and tastes) we can become as a movie-going public in America. It's probably not a new complaint, but we don't seem to care that there is a difference between what aims at the visceral, physical, physiological and that which operates on emotional or psychological levels.

There is a big difference between Horror movies and Thrillers or even “Scary” pictures.

I use the word "Horror" in the sense that a motion picture inspires not only fear at the time of viewing but that it also creates a lasting lingering feeling of dread long after the film is over. I think it's easy to disgust people or make them flinch with gore and other superficial and temporary frights, but pictures that "haunt" us psychologically, that unnerve us emotionally are the true horror pictures in my opinion. I leave pictures like the Nightmare on Elm Street series out of my consideration because although they are among my favorite movies, outside of the momentary scares and revulsion they provide during viewing, they are closer to thrillers and action pictures in my opinion, and only cousins to a picture like The Shining. If I opened consideration to shock and gore pictures, clearly films by Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and others would be all over my list below, and believe me those are not omissions or oversights, -but a difference of classification. Some of my selections are almost bloodless productions, but as I've already said, gory and violent spectacles are not necessarily what determines a horror movie; if that were the case, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill pictures would be considered for inclusion, but they both fail entry by my criteria as would Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk 'til Dawn. They are all great, entertaining pictures to be sure, they simply lack a strong enough psychological component to underpin the explicit shock they provide.

Lists and rankings are all about starting arguments; so if I've left any of your favorites off, feel free to list them in response.

My Top Twenty Horror Movies of all Time are:

1) The Exorcist
2) The Omen (1976)
3) The Shining (1980)
4) The Sentinel
5) Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
6) Night of the Living Dead (1968)
7) The Blair Witch Project
8) Dawn of the Dead (2004 remake)
9) Evil Dead
10) Alien
11) Poltergeist
12) Rosemary's Baby
13) Gates of Hell (1980)
14) The Changeling (1980)
15) Quatermass and the Pit (1968)
16) The Innocents
17) The Wicker man (1973)
18) Salem's Lot (1979)
19) The Reincarnation of Peter Proud
20) The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

(I listed years only where I thought there might be confusion due to a remake, and it should be known that it absolutely killed me to exclude John Carpenter’s The Thing, as well as his Prince of Darkness: They would surely make my Top Twenty Five.)

-SJ

Comics Code Seal R.I.P.

2011-02-28T11:20:00.000-08:00

Ugly isn't it?

The comics code seal was a self-imposed, self-regulatory marker crafted by the various comic book publishers to get the government and parents groups off their back.

Last month, it went tits up and died. DC comics, and finally Archie comics, stopped submitting to the Comics Code Authority, basically killing it in favor of their own reader advisories.

Discussions about the legacy of this code, and the motivations behind its rules and haphazard application will go on for a long time. For my part, I've always seen it as a mechanism for censorship, and I've always considered it to be something as un-American and fascist as the presumptuous House Un-American Activities Committee was. As damaging as its control was, the seal itself enabled something just as bad if not worse than the promulgation and enforcement of the subjective morals of a few onto the public. The seal established (-in a way that even Frederic Wertham's books and writings couldn't have-) that comic books were a medium for children. More than any of the CCA seal's insipid and condescending rules about allowable portrayals of sex, crime and violence, it was the presumptions of the comic book audience's makeup, and the parallel assumptions about the sophistication, intelligence and emotional vulnerability of readers that did the most harm.

As a reader and creator in the medium, I blame the seal and the CCA for much of the bad writing in comics for the past several decades, and nearly all of the mediocrity foisted on readers across all genres. I am thankful that I was born late enough to be spared toiling under its yoke.

I can be heard briefly speaking about the Comics Code, and the history of the CCA's predecessor at Troy Price's Completely Comics blog at about 34 minutes in at this link:
http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/audioPop.jsp?episodeId=454653&cmd=apop

-SJ

Don’t (Won't) Get Fooled Again

2011-02-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

Death in the comics is a rare and momentous event, being that comics, especially superhero titles, make a repeated point of defying mortality and even ignoring the age of their central protagonists, month after month, year after year, now on into the 21st century. I’ve written at length about the now institutionalized practice (read stunt) of killing off legacy characters to drum up noise for a title. I still think it’s a weak and cynical trope, and all it really indicates is a lack of imagination on the part of editors and writers. Recent case in point: Johnny Storm, The Human Torch of Marvel Comics, who just met a violent end this month.

As a reader, and sometime comic book artist/creator I don’t have an issue with death in stories, -but I’m not referring to death am I? –Again I’m talking about a stunt; a gimmick conceived to generate buzz, even fury in an indifferent audience. The editors at Marvel have already rationalized, in public statements, that someone such as I wouldn’t even be writing about their comic title if they hadn’t killed off Johnny Storm, -that’s true. Truer still is the fact that I’m still not writing about how good their comic book is, or even buying it again now that Johnny is dead. It’s the leveraging of a death as a scandalous hook that is problematic for me as a reader. I wasn’t reading Fantastic Four comics because “nothing was happening.” -I wasn’t reading Fantastic Four because the stories hadn’t been strong in years. This is the case with many superhero titles at Marvel and at DC, and the solution that seems to be repeatedly pitched on an almost annual cycle is the sudden unexpected killing off of a character, -with no intentions of really keeping him/her out of the world of the “living,” even for very long.

The problem stems from everything related to the event-structured story arcs across titles (DC’s Blackest Night event being a notable recent exception,) to the increasingly puerile shock-driven stories in superhero comics. Ultimately the culprit is a confluence of tired-minded staff writers, and at least the perception in the mind of the audience, of a character’s exhausted potential.

A friend told me yesterday “But superhero comics are supposed to be sensational…” to which I responded; “They’re also supposed to be good.” And I really meant that. Comics, particularly superhero comics, have never been a laughing matter for me. In a post-Watchmen world, -(the world we've all lived in as writers or fans of comics whether we like it or not since 1985,) the standards are supposed to be higher. There have been several watershed moments in the superhero genre. From the earliest work of Will Eisner on the Spirit, to the Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories of the early seventies, to the work of Chris Claremont on X-Men, on to Frank Miller’s work on Daredevil, and further on to Alan Moore’s work on Swamp Thing, we’ve always known how good comics could be, leading up to the explosive work done in the 1990s and beyond By Ellis, Ennis, Busiek, Ward, Millar, Morrison (and Moore all over again.) Writing is the key to all good superhero stories and it is only strong, sophisticated storytelling and character development that allows this genre to rise above simple power fantasies, which is what they are at their worst, and what they degenerate into far too often.

“Johnny Storm’s not going to stay dead anyway,” my friend said over the phone.
-And that’s the problem.

Nobody likes being played, and while kids and older dedicated readers may rush to the racks to buy up multiple copies, they will soon feel as cheated as I did 20 years ago, when Jean Grey returned from the dead, invalidating the significance of one of the longest and most meaningful story lines ever created in comic books up to that point. The death of Phoenix, which was in truth the suicide of Jean Grey, was a singular moment in superhero fiction that was the culmination of a long story told in various background events and subplots strung across many years. The ascension, corruption and then mortal capitulation of Jean Grey was writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne’s illustrated speculation about the nature of power and the dissolute psychology that attends all supremacy, real or imagined. This story was all the more important in the world of the 1980s where two nations, and possibly just two men, held the ability to destroy the world in their hands. That was a meaningful, well written story. It made the X-Men into a superhero comic book of note. It was also a best seller for Marvel.

"There's nothing like a dead superhero to dredge up press and sales," wrote Scott Thill of WIRED on the Underwire blog. And he’s right; nothing sells like death, even the fatal demise of fictional characters apparently.

The question remains, will the inspired/angry fans lighting up the internet care about this latest predictable resurrection in waiting… as they cared for Superman, Batman, and Captain America?

Those were stunts too.

I refused to go along then, and I keep getting told it has more to do with my age than anything else… curiously I haven’t outgrown the need for a good story, or a meaningful adventure with a profound ending. So here’s an idea for a stunt that Marvel and DC should try: Free writers up to write good comic book stories…

Just try it, it used to work all the time.
-SJ

World War 3 Illustrated The Food Chain

2011-01-17T08:45:00.000-08:00

The Comics Journal's Rob Clough kindly reviewed this latest effort, only days after a wonderful story by the New York Times on World War 3 Illustrated's legacy.
Read, Enjoy, forward and recommend.
The retrospective of the show is up until February 5th.
-SJ

Another Year, Another Comic Book Convention.

2010-10-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

Today marks the start of “New York Comic Con.” I’ll be in attendance this evening and all weekend, as I have been for the last five years, not as a fan but as a “professional,” a very kind acknowledgement by the convention’s founder, Lance Fensterman, that I’ve been published for 20 years now. I am not rich, and certainly not well known outside of my medium.

The world of comic books is diverse and bizarre. Today it is part transnational commerce, part entertainment, and partly art, although there was a (recent) time when it was judged uniformly as lacking any creativity or merit of any kind. Some, like the late Dr. Fredric Wertham even tried to blame juvenile delinquency and violence in children on comic books. As of 2010, comics characters of all types from Superman to Garfield have become the most successful brand extensions since the figures portrayed in the bible.

Take that, Dr. Wertham.

This weekend is a gathering of fanatics and readers, collectors and artists at the Javitz center in New York City. It will be crowded, wall to wall with people who love the medium I create in, as well as trekkies/trekkers, Star Wars fans, devotees of Tolkien, and various other outsiders drawn to the fellowship that their common love of particular genres of fiction has created. This is (after all is said, laughed about, and done,) a society. In past years, I had always felt estranged from the crowds, put off by their eagerness, and embarrassed by their enthusiasm, and when I was a kid, there were no girls at these things whatsoever (although it’s been noted that the very first Star Trek conventions were organized by exclusively female fans of Leonard Nimoy and George Takei in the early 1970s.) Only recently did I realize that my discomfort had more to do with the fact that I’d internalized the scoldings of my professors, the ridicule of my peers and replaced my own love, my own “fandom” with a kind of self-conscious reserve. I was never going to dress up as Captain Marvel, or Spider-Man, but why have I always looked down on the kids who did? Is it any sillier than some fat drunk bastard showing up to a Giants game in a Manning jersey? People at Comic book conventions don’t love the characters in their favorite titles any less than NASCAR fans love their favorite drivers: comic book fans tend to show it more, and by and large they’re not interested in appearing detached and “cool” about it.

Imagine if people still got this excited at gallery openings, at the premieres of sculpture, or at poetry readings? –When Mark Hamill (who in addition to portraying Luke Skywalker, also defined the voice of The Joker for an entire generation and now entertains millions as various animated characters on Metalocalypse and Regular Show) walks into a room at a convention, the response is deafening. That’s real love: undiluted, unmitigated and eternal. Why shouldn’t they show it?

I’m going to walk around the convention center this evening and try very hard to stamp out my ingrained shames and groundless misgivings about comic books, and take some pride in all those other fans whose only crime is loving something that I love too.

"Live long and prosper."
-SJ

The Wiz. An Appreciation, 32 Years Later

2010-08-30T14:30:00.000-07:00

There were no blogs when I saw this musical as a ten year old. There was only schoolwork, AM and FM radio, three networks and four local channels flying through all that atmosphere that our cell phone calls now occupy for the most part. Newspapers were the daily history of record, and if it didn’t get covered, it often didn’t “have” happened.
It was a different world in 1978. It was not a world in which a Black man was entertained as a candidate for any office higher than mayor, -other than as a cruel, insulting joke.

I bought the DVD release of the Wiz last year, one of the very few musicals I left off of my list of very few musicals that I love. Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark would be another notable omission. I’ve only gotten around to watching The Wiz again this past weekend, and decided that even with its four Oscar nominations; it has rarely gotten its due.
Among the motion pictures of Sidney Lumet, this is surely a standout for its aspirations, as well as its subject matter. For the most part, Lumet’s hopes (in as much as I can identify the longings of any artist) in cinema were previously relegated to the possible and the familiar in New York (E.g. 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon.) The Wiz is as much a work of Science Fiction as it is a musical, and that’s a very fundamental distinction in need of exploration and discussion because while The Wiz’s “inspiration” or object of commentary uses magic as its principal means of applying force or resolving conflict, Lumet’s film is speculative and “possible...”

Flying Monkeys were traded for motorcyclists this time around.

This re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz, is a fable grounded in “the real.” One of the greatest inherent fantasies in American cinema was the decades-long absence of Black people altogether, as well as their non personhood in history as expressed in the movies. From that perspective, hundreds of American pictures (If not all of them up until the mid 1950s) can be described as fantasies because there were no Black people in them, and they therefore referred to a “non-existent” America, for there has never been a point in the history of the United States where African Americans were not active participants. To look at all the films of anybody crucial to the history of Hollywood like let’s say, George Cukor; an unknowledgeable observer would think that African Americans were late-comer, rare, exotic immigrants and not citizens numbering in the tens of millions largely responsible for building the country for all of the centuries of its existence.

What Lumet’s film gives us is a Dorothy who is not a child, she is a (ahem) 24-year-old kindergarten teacher, in some ways she is the opposite of a child in character which is extremely important for this “adaptation of an adaptation” (this is no remake) that is being crow barred into post civil rights relevancy by Joel Schumacher’s script. The Wiz presents us with a scarecrow made of garbage; a Tin Man who is mechanical toy from Coney Island; and lastly a lion, exiled from the jungle and making his living as a statue in front of the New York Public Library.
These symbols and metaphors are as dependent on the subject of their allegory, the legacy of racial injustice in America, as they are on the original film by Victor Fleming (I doubt the silent 1925 version is remembered by many.)
For if the original Wizard of Oz attempted to reach the possible with the impossible; the Wiz attempted to reach the impossible with the unthinkable:

It is Diana Ross’s Dorothy who tells her teammates that they always had what they were always told they were lacking. It is Richard Pryor’s Wiz who makes the previously unspoken confessions of impotence, and explains the price of political bargains that bring the capable, and the mighty down the path of mediocrity and capitulation. These are much more profound insights and existential speculations than were ever implied in past adaptations of Frank Baum’s American fable about a Kansas schoolgirl living in a reassuringly all White pastoral society where even the economic strata’s bottom was populated by White characters only. Visibility is the mission of this picture, visibility and awareness; of the self, of each other, and of the world.

There are bitter sweet moments in this movie that are made all the more stinging and poignant by the decades’ passage of time since its release. Michael Jackson is sadly buried under all the elaborate costuming and creature effects; presaging in tragically prescient fashion, the very way he would later attempt to erase himself with surgery and chemical burnings. Jackson’s dancing, his kinetic almost superhuman grace is weighed down earthward by boxy fabrics and padded shoes that distract from his height and never succeed in telling you more about the Scarecrow’s plight than Jackson himself could have with movement. Curiously, the “Brand New Day” dance number in which the enslaved shed their heavy layers of monstrous subhuman make up to reveal a mass of variated, lithe, beautiful dancers of every description, draws your attention to Jackson all the more. The grotesque weight of Jackson’s makeup and disguise is made achingly tragic by all of those dancers in flight, -confident in their minds, -confident in their bodies and their very souls.

I pulled one simple message away from this movie as a child: “Dignity Is the Road.”

Today I wonder if two of its stars, tragically tortured by the unavoidable pressures that their meteoric talents and success brought, were able to hear what I thought they were telling me. I suppose I just find it hard to accept that I live in a world with no Richard Pryor in it anymore.

The original release of this picture was a “flop” I’ve always heard, an abject failure. That kind of industry news rarely matters to kids. Kids love what they love, and as a grown man I still love this picture. I can remember being blown back in my seat by the sets, stunned speechless by that skyline with five or more Chrysler buildings in it.

I have to ask people who see this picture now after so many years, with Lena Horne as Glinda the Good, how could anyone not love and revere this movie?
-SJ

This Game.

2010-07-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

I’m through writing obits and remembrances for the year.
I have relatives in the hospital who are fighting for their lives these past months. Bob Sheppard, Harvey Pekar, George Steinbrenner all died within the last five days and although none of these were young men cut off in their prime, I just want to write and think about something present, something alive, and maybe even forward-looking. So it’s strange to pick a subject that is nearly as old as the country itself.
The National League beat the AL for the first time in 13 years this week.
-I’ve heard more than one person on my morning subway ride remark “who cares.”
Well, I still do.
PBS has wisely rerun Ken Burns’ epic documentary simply entitled “Baseball” every Wednesday night, in single episodic installments (as it originally aired in 1995.) It is a detailed and perceptive history of a deceptively simple game that more and more young people see as boring and obtuse with each passing generation.

I’ve never told anybody this, but I have to confess that when the last players’ strike hit, I really thought I might be done with watching Baseball. I have one childhood friend who has stuck by his disgust to this day, and refuses to watch or follow any series or even a single game. In the mid 1990s Baseball asked for a lot of my time and attention, and once again ungratefully reminded me,( as if I had even partly forgotten,) -that it was principally a business and as such, didn’t care about me and my hopes for it. Baseball, in that half year of 1994 on into 1995 seemed to say to me “I don’t even care if you’re not watching, I still go on.”
The weeks and months passed. “And yes,” I said to the old timers, the mustache Petes, the “old fellers” at the Elk’s Head bar in Williamsburg Brooklyn “This IS worse than the Giants and the Dodgers leaving New York.” -Because at least the Giants and Dodgers packed up and went some place to play. -At the very least those teams continued playing. The Bar’s owner, Joe Genna, a retired boxer and great, great man in my estimation asked me, “Why do you even care?” I told Mr. Genna, I’ve never had a reason, I just do.

Just who does have a reason for loving any thing or any body?

I attended my very first ballgame with a man who wasn’t my uncle, but was much more than that and considerably more than any kind of simple blood relation to me. Santiago Pomonti, was a hardworking, tough talking Venezuelan who worked long hours and liked to argue with people until the veins on his head pushed out at his porkpie hat, threatening to pop it off his head like a cork from a bottle. My first game; the very first baseball game that I can ever remember going to or watching, was at Shea Stadium. I remember that I was cold. Santiago had bought me a plastic Mets novelty batting helmet, and I poured my twenty or so toy soldiers out of their tattered plastic bag and into the helmet for the duration. Santiago allowed me to stand in my seat the whole game.
The Mets lost. It was a Saturday I think although probably not, and the Astros destroyed them 9 to 2. That much is etched clearly in memory.
That’s all I remember about Shea that day: -The loss, -Santiago keeping the lousy box score on a newspaper, -and the unwelcoming steepness of Shea stadium’s upper deck.
It wasn’t much of a magical memory. On the ride home, Santiago drove his forest green 60s era Volvo westward, talking a blue streak about the Mets and their significance, as New York City stretched its sky scraper arms around us as we descended from what must have been the 59th street bridge. The man loved to drive. The front seat of his car was his cigar parlor, and even seat-belted in, I slid around quite a bit as he drove up the FDR highway. Santiago talked about the New York Giants, the Polo grounds and he talked about Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers and Ebbits, and my namesake Sandy Koufax. He went on about things I couldn’t know anything about, things that had gone on before I was born. He told me about the Mets’ team logo, which was taken to honor the Giants, and the royal blue of the cap, in deference to the Dodgers of Brooklyn. I couldn’t understand why there was a National League and an American League, “didn’t both words mean the same thing?” I couldn’t understand why Black people hadn’t been allowed to do the things he was talking about for so long, -and about that, he said little.
Santiago and I were in the middle of a variation of Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First’ routine due to my inability to understand that the All Star game was not a game between teams per se, but between representative players from the two leagues when I saw it for the first time: Yankee stadium.
From the pale green wrought iron work of the Macombs Dam bridge, it came into view. It looked like a castle, with copper accents. I asked my uncle what were all the flags: “Pennants,” he said. I didn’t ask him what pennants were, I assumed they had something to do with the “ligas” Santiago kept trying to explain to me. I stared in wonder, it looked so creepy and old, and to my greedy child’s eyes, very nice.

“There’s no game today.” Santiago said, as I followed the ballpark with my eyes. I asked him every question I could think of about the Yankees and he grudgingly complied as we passed Jerome avenue and veered down further into the South Bronx.

My old boss at Kern-Rockenfield, John Kern, once said to me that baseball was a tough game to be bad at, meaning -not that it was easy, -but that it hurt deeply to fail at baseball in a way that it could not hurt in other sports. I’ve thought about this a lot over the years since he said it to me. It’s one of those things that has become “truer” with the passage of time.
The cruelest and most negative assessments I’ve ever been subject to as a human being, were for my baseball playing. I have no “natural” talents for this game. This game that requires an obsessive watchfulness, keen timing and a kinetic awareness of one’s physical position in space relative to actual moving and potentially moving elements and people on the field. This is where baseball’s greatest myths of fairness lie. All the exercise, conditioning and training were never going to make the average kid into a Reggie Jackson, not for all the wanting, sweating and praying in the world. But hard work, studious learning and diligence are indeed rewarded by this game, if only on a purely neighborhood level. Conversely, lack of effort off and on the field is punished and ridiculed. One’s failures become uniquely emblematic in baseball. My frustrations with the game’s fundamentals, throwing, catching and hitting, came early and have remained with me for life. Playing with kids who did it well, and who had already learned by closely watching others, and in silent monk-like drilling sessions meant there was no one willing to explain simple concepts like using one’s own mid section as a line of demarcation indicating when to flip a glove’s fingers up, or down to properly field an oncoming ball. Nobody, not one friend, not one kid in my old neighborhood ever took the time to explain even the basic rules of the game and its idiosyncrasies. I had to learn those things from watching the Yankees on WPIX and concentrating on the ramblings of Phil Rizzuto, Frank Messer and Bill White, who were as likely to talk about restaurants and vacation spots as they were about the game in front of them.
My memories of all my childhood friends who excelled at baseball are punctuated with vignettes of them tossing a ball up and down, fielding grounders by throwing a ball against a wall or curb.

I did none of those things.

I only played baseball when I was asked to. I have never, not once in my life organized a game. I gave no physical or instinctual part of myself over to it. I never put the work in. I learned, -much too late, that unlike our prehistoric ancestors, we actually work at skills to play any game, not play a game to work at those skills. It was a heartbreaking insight and one of those many things that go unsaid in application and go unexplained; like the infield fly rule, the ground rule triple, or why if a left-handed pitcher fakes to first base and turns and looks at third, it can be ruled a balk.
My memories of losing games I played in, of being relegated to a non presence deep in the outfield for my own sake, are lessons in humiliation that I will never be thankful for, even as I recognize their possible necessity.

If I ever have a son, my first words on the field to him will be:
“This game is a game of bad feelings and blame. It asks that you succeed on its terms, not your own. This game is a glimpse into all the unfairness, joy and disappointment of the world to come. Try to remember it’s only a game to people who lose.”

...and I'll try to remember to tell him, "I love this game."
-SJ

FDR And The New Deal For Beginners, Sabrina Jones

2010-06-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

Like a Rainbow in the Dark

2010-05-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

Too many greats are passing in short succession. Last week it was Frank Frazetta, now it’s Ronnie James Dio, -whose name should have probably appeared in bold gothic caps on his birth certificate accompanied by flames. Such was the scale of this physically unprepossessing, diminutive man who sang with a powerful, outsized voice.

Ronald James Padavona, or “Ronnie James Dio” to reformed, or “lapsed” skids like me was born on July 10, 1942. He was a singer-songwriter in a type of Rock n’ Roll that many still insist contains no singing or songwriting in it, and it’s really for those who don’t like Heavy Metal at all that I write this appreciation of one of the last true gentlemen in 20th century popular music.

Along his career, Dio performed with bands with names like “Elf,” “Rainbow,” “Black Sabbath,” “Heaven & Hell,” and of course “Dio.” While all Heavy Metal necessarily sounds the same to those who are “deaf” to it, Dio was known for principally operating within the artistic sub-genre known as “Power Metal.” According to documentary filmmaker Sam Dunn, “Think Swords and sorcery” and you have a superficial but legitimate understanding of its lyrical content at least.

People have asked me, an avid listener of music whose fanatical tastes still range across the boards from folk music (Bob Dylan), to Country (Johnny Cash, The Cramps), to so-called lounge singers (Bill Henderson), to Garage bands, 70s punk, Ska (all eras) 80s Hardcore, Hip Hop and so on; What the hell do I see (hear) in Heavy Metal? While I could use an oft-recited but still inarguable cop-out like “who has a single reason for liking anything?” I choose to answer the question directly to people who hate this kind of music:

-Heavy Metal offers the world that dreams only imply.

...and you can quote me on that, friend.

All of the power and sex, adventure, horror, excitement and violence of our longing is made manifest in Heavy Metal music. This is why it appeals principally to adolescents, young adults and secondarily to people who feel a need to keep in touch with their youth and see an importance in remaining connected to the turmoil of their coming of age.

A few years back, Robert Halford, an aesthetic fellow traveler of Dio’s, came out of the closet, revealing himself to a notoriously homophobic audience and culture that he was and always had been, Gay. While many of us who grew up listening to Judas Priest weren’t surprised (Halford’s stage persona and mode of dress seemed straight out of New York’s leather-clad West Village culture in the 1980s) it was an unprecedented disclosure. While people argued about whether this changed everything or whether it even meant anything at all, I can remember thinking to myself: “Who better than a longtime closeted Gay man to speak to the youth of the world about anger, oppression and rebellion?” And that’s the singular, central thing about Heavy Metal, unlike any other of kind of Rock n’ Roll: It tells the listener to come on in and absorb some power, some courage, and some voltage. Dio and other singer songwriters in the Power Metal sub genre invited, excited and assured you, -whatever you’d been told, “there’s nothing wrong with you that is actually important,” -a necessary assurance amongst all the judgment, exclusion and nonsense of life in modern society.

Ronnie James Dio was not good looking. He was short. He was perpetually balding. None of this mattered to anyone. Ronnie James Dio showed and proved to me and the world that there’s more than meets the eye.
Sometimes you just have to listen.

-SJ

Frank Frazetta Didn’t Paint Heroes

2010-05-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

I can’t say exactly when I first saw a Frank Frazetta cover, but I’m pretty sure those were the earliest works I was exposed to, -his covers. For artists of my generation, he was always there, part of the squad of old master-like forbearers in popular illustration like Frank Paul, James Bama, and Alex Raymond except Frazetta’s work was darker and it was otherworldly in just about every calculable respect.

Frazetta’s Conan is still the definitive characterization of the barbarian: Always a brutal, homicidal would be-king at rest. Frazetta didn’t paint heroes; his sensibilities were too sophisticated and “knowing” for that. Frazetta had no innocence about him as an artist; it seemed he was barely holding back all the sex, fury and violence that were not allowed in the actual pulp novels, comic books and movies he was commissioned for. Frazetta painted protagonists; That in and of itself was a radical proposition and a welcome relief from the commercially established smooth-edged imagery that had at its core an insistence on clear, absolute differentiation between good and evil or the hero and the villain. Frazetta’s work was too nuanced and cavernous to entertain naive distinctions like those. His work was called “adult” at a time when maturity was not the number of an age, but the indication of certain knowledge of the world and oneself. Frazetta’s paintings and imagery demanded that one consider the world inside of his pictures. In a very real sense, he was asking viewers to step forth and meet his world and he made no attempt to make it a safe trip for anyone. Frazetta’s work didn’t reach out; -it asked that you make the effort to walk in.

He had an incredible ability to seduce and frighten with his imagery simultaneously. If you dreamed about running your hands along the body of some voluptuous princess in one of his paintings, you had to contend with the idea that you didn’t actually want to be where she was standing. Some of his paintings appeal vigorously to our erotic longings, -but all of them scare.

For illustrators however, Frazetta posed another type of terror: mediocrity.

I grew up in an era of explosive virtuosity among comic book artists. This was in the aftermath of the aesthetic contributions of Neal Adams and in the wake of the various innovations that he brought to comic book illustration. After Adams, the late 1970s and early 80s became an era of extreme accomplishment in pure draftsmanship exemplified by artists like Brian Bolland, George Perez, John Byrne, Milo Manara, Marshall Rogers, Michael Kaluta, Jim Aparo, Arthur Adams, John Buscema, Michael Golden, Walt Simonson and a few others working in mainstream comics. As an adolescent trying to investigate work that would offer useful examples to learn from, the greatness of these artists was strangely demoralizing. Some of these artists were better story tellers than others, some had strong cinematic sensibilities, while others could express a speed and violence that rattled the pages in your hands, -still others gave you an extraordinarily authentic sense of time and place, as did John Byrne whenever he showed us midtown Manhattan. But all of them were incredible masters at their individual style of execution, and on their own terms, they were arguably perfect... Unless you compared them to Frank Frazetta.

Frazetta was not classically trained, -but classically minded. While there were always gifted painters in the fantasy genre in the time of my youth and earlier, (scores of them shuttling between the world of commercial advertising on Madison avenue, like my personal favorite Basil Gogos) only Frazetta maintained a sustained and unique presence, expressing that haunting sensibility that communicated the disquieting notion that sex, fear, love, power, death, hunger, regret are all present, at all times whether we want them all there souring a “fantasy” or not. The living darkness in Frazetta’s imagery and his skill at moving paint were but the invitation, the psychological world within was the destination.

In my teens, as I wondered in frustration at the work of George Perez who could make debris and wreckage look beautiful, and John Byrne who had figured out how to draw liquid metal, and especially at Brian Bolland who drew so decisively and precisely it made me angry... There was always Frazetta. Even my gods, had a god it seemed, and that made me feel better. On Monday, Frank Frazetta died at age 82.

Frank Frazetta, who was still untouchable by greats like Boris Vallejo, Richard Corben or Gaetano Liberatore, always sat in some distant hall of heroes in my mind, working ever harder, year after year, sending us all turbulent dispatches from his imagination, until his mortal body and health began to betray him.

If Lovecraft, Blake, Donatello, and Rembrandt could have sired a child…

And so it goes. Another master of the fantastic leaves us to join his creations, ascending into a place in our imagination.

-SJ

2010-05-10T06:52:00.001-07:00

Vladek, Vampire Detective

2010-03-06T21:32:00.000-08:00

WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED RELEASE PARTY

2010-02-23T08:04:00.000-08:00

Video Promo for Jon Papernick's New Collection of Stories: ~There Is No Other~

2010-02-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

Good Night Captain.

2010-02-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

Captain Phil Harris, 1953-2010

My Two Cents

2010-01-15T14:20:00.000-08:00

Just saw Avatar. After all the rave reviews and people just about proclaiming it the greatest thing since sliced bread, I went in to the theater ready to be impressed. Here's my quick review:
Character development is about as thin as it was on Titanic. It is also just as predictable as that movie. The bad guys might as well wear appropriately colored hats or twirl their mustaches as they plan their evil schemes. The story is almost exactly the same as "Dances with Wolves", right down to the new language which was created for the movie which sounds a lot like a native American dialect. It was really pretty to look at, so it's got that going for it, which is nice. James Cameron used to write a screenplay and then push the envelope with special effects to fit that story. Now it seems as if he works the opposite way. He figures out what special effects are available and then writes a story to fit those effects. It's a great platform to show off the best in technology, but the story suffers greatly. If you liked DWW and are a fan of shallow character development and predictable plot points, then this is the movie for you. The IMAX 3D was very nice though (I guess they had to make it 3D to make up for the one dimensional characters), but it's DWW with bigger explosions and special effects.

Happy Birthday Stan Lee

2009-12-28T12:25:00.000-08:00

Stan Lee turns 87 today having outlasted just about every pioneer, except one of the men who hired him back in the earliest days of his career, Joe Simon.

It’s difficult to express with words just how important Stan Lee is to comic book artists, writers and filmmakers of my generation. He’s one of those creative forces in the medium who influenced every facet of comic book creation and storytelling in the 20th century.

The story by now is of course legend: Stanley Martin Lieber, changed his name to Stan Lee and along with several notable artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he created Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, Thor, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, and many, many others.
But Stan Lee didn’t just create innovative super heroes and memorably flawed human characters, -he created entire cosmologies, a series of alternate realities that had a concrete continuity (characters referred to past events and interacted with each other often moving around and stepping into each other’s titles and storylines unexpectedly.) This may not seem like much, but anyone familiar with stories from comics’ “Golden Age” knows how limited and unreal early comic books were.

Years ago my dear friend, the cinematographer Joe Zizzo said to me on a movie shoot something that I’ll never forget:

“Everyone invents and is invented by their own version of New York City, whether it’s Jules Dassin, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee or Stan Lee.”

And that’s the thing about Stan Lee; he placed Peter Parker in Jackson Heights Queens, the Avengers’ Mansion was on Long Island, the Baxter building was in midtown Manhattan.

Clark Kent lived in some made up New York called “Metropolis” but Matt Murdock lived in Hell’s Kitchen.

That’s what Stan Lee has given to the world: a posture toward speculative fiction that approaches the rich potential of novels with characters that could be standing next to you on a subway train. Lee’s characters had tough jobs, they paid rent. They had all of the trouble that most comic book characters, up until that time, were incapable of having.

There are two things I’d like to thank Stan Lee for that often go unmentioned:

Stan Lee challenged the Comics Code Authority and ultimately forced it to reform its policies by pushing for stories about serious topics (In the most notorious case it was a cautionary story about drug abuse in an issue of Spider-Man in the early 1970s.) When faced with a series of editorial changes that would have rendered his story about the perils of addiction meaningless, Lee defied the CCA and ran his story without the Comics Code Authority seal of approval on the cover.
-They’ve been on the defensive ever since thanks to Stan Lee.

Lee also introduced the practice of including an entire credit panel on the splash page of each issue. This meant that for the first time the writer, penciller AND the inker and the letterer were credited directly for their work.
-Comic books are far too labor-intensive an enterprise for anyone to go uncredited.

There isn’t enough space on the internet to list and assess this man’s contributions to his medium, so I’ll just say thanks and hope that another dear friend, Ian Fischer didn’t take it the wrong way when I cursed him under my breath for getting to take a picture with Stan Lee at a convention.

Happy birthday Stan.

-SJ

Happy Birthday Elzie

2009-12-08T09:13:00.000-08:00

Elzie Crisler Segar 1894 – 1938

Today marks the birth of EC Segar, one of the most influential, if not the most influential comic strip artists of all time.

EC Segar was the mind behind Popeye, -a character that I, and many others believe, can be arguably called the first superhero of the 20th century. Needless to say Superheroes as we understand them today owe a great deal to Superman and the cosmology created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. After all, Superman is the character for whom all subsequent superheroes appear to be named. But it is important to note that Superman had a direct depression-era ancestor in Popeye the Sailor.

If we are to recognize that Popeye was among the first, it is important to look at what superheroes are at their core: Superheroes, regardless of their superhuman powers or abilities and resources are people who always fight back. Superheroes are people who fight back even when they are not physically able to overcome their adversaries. Superheroes are fictional characters who will risk life and limb to fight for others who cannot fight for themselves. Superheroes never quit. The psychological posture of the comic book hero was born of the Great Depression; an era when individuals (long touted as the strength of the nation) were again powerless against grinding poverty, joblessness and the banks. This era gave birth to the fictional defenders Popeye, Superman, and curiously, the equally fascinating -but very real- gangsters and criminals of the time, John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde. 1919’s Zorro, and even much older legends like that of Odysseus and Gilgamesh certainly preceded him, but there is something about Popeye that sets him apart from the earlier incarnations of heroes in world culture throughout history. There is a quality of “noble bearing,” –and a humility and human fragility that sets him apart from Hercules, Maciste and other “strong men” of earlier myths. Popeye was born poor, he was uneducated, he was working class, and in the earliest episodes of Thimble Theatre, (the strip in which he made his debut,) he was a drunk. Clearly by the look of his early uniform he was not necessarily a Navy man (this changed during World War II,) but more likely part of the Merchant Marine. He was a working man, with forearms bestowed upon him by a presumably hard, working life.

The Spinach and its accompanying leitmotif in the animated cartoons are incidental to an understanding of Popeye as a paradigm from which many of the later heroes were intentionally or unconsciously patterned.

Popeye’s real power was much simpler. He fought back. Popeye always fought back. That was his strength, his “super power” and ability: an attitude of resistance. Popeye never took it lying down; he never let a transgression go unanswered. At Popeye’s core is the very American idea of a man’s insistence on dignity, not enforced by a gun -but by his own hands. It’s important to recognize just how significant this was to Depression-era audiences and the generations that succeeded them in our nation like my own.

The idea of a man who always settled all accounts and went to bed at night unburdened by the spite of a lingering slight is of course at the end of it all, a simple “power fantasy.” Over the years, many critics of superhero fiction have dismissed superheroes wholesale, pointing to a certain “adolescent” obsession with “winning” and being right. I would point out that those desires embodied by Popeye and other characters are born of real disappointment, tragedy and suffering in the 20th century and that these characters are more than just pabulum manufactured to exploit the longings of children.

For my part, Popeye and Sinbad are the first heroes I can remember reading about as a child. What struck me, sitting in a Bronx apartment in the early 1970s as the entire borough seemed to be burning down around us week to week, was how much these two guys traveled, and how far... How nothing ever kept them down. It’s interesting that they were both sailors.

Happy birthday Mr. Segar, and thank you.
-SJ

Half Assed

2009-10-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve often wondered what possesses a person to think they know what’s best for others. Egotism, stupidity, or maybe something else that has long gone without a name. Where does that particular audacity come from? It seems to run in the very genes of planners and designers who like to ignore the guidance and suggestions of engineers.

Hate is such a strong word, but I tell you I hate these fucking seats.

I’ve hated them since they debuted in New York City more than half my life ago in the “awesome eighties.”

New Yorkers have arguably some of the biggest, most diversely shaped asses in the Western world; why then did somebody ask some designer somewhere to come up with a one-size-fits-all seat on the INDs, BMTs and IRT trains in Gotham?

It’s a kind of retarded arrogance that occasionally grips municipal planning as a whole in New York in certain decades. The result in the 1980s was an “egg-crate” approach to designing a new number 1 train fleet for New Yorkers.

Only someone who doesn’t ride trains could have come up with a design this inconsiderate and this inhumane.

If you think I’m being too extreme in using the word “inhumane?” then you’ve never had to ride “the hump” either fully or partially while commuting from borough to borough. What is “the hump” you ask?
"The hump" is the raised partition that designates one “seat” from another (see above). These subway train seats are made of fiberglass and other composites and they are as hard and unyielding to the touch as Formica: Now imagine the crack of your ass, or part of your thigh riding the hump for an hour or more just because the person next to you is a fat jack ass… -Sorry, fat people are not the problem here, although they are often scapegoated for this tragic phenomenon that pits rides against rider, ass against ass for no good reason.

Historically subway trains have had bench-style seating: flat seating surfaces that run entire lengths unbroken until they terminate in a banister or an arm rest. This in fact lets as many people sit down as can be comfortably seated. Apportioning seat widths according to some abstract average is not just stupid, it’s elitist. It’s elitist to award someone, somewhere the power to decide what is enough and what is fair for all the miserable somebodies who rely on the subway train every day of their lives.

-More than that, “the hump” starts fights.

Every single day for about 25 or 26 years, every morning, I see a person spilling over beyond the seat’s edge into the space of another, causing the other person to defend their area. Sometimes it’s not even just asses, my own shoulders exceed the width of these seats easily by three inches on each side. This means that in the best of situations, if I’m surrounded by two uncommonly small people on either side, I still have to hunch forward to keep my shoulders from intruding upon them. By the way, I’m only 5 foot 8: I’m below average height in New York City.

Why did this nightmare happen?

Because someone just thought they knew what was best for others. Someone decided that the flat benches wasted space and figured they could design their way to less crowded trains. Someone thought they could just be more efficient by forcing New Yorkers to sit differently: this someone can’t have ever rode trains, or depended on them daily.

Thankfully the complaints must have gotten up to the MTA board and City Hall over the years. Every new subway car since the late 1990s has featured the old bench style seating. You can see them on the L, 2, 4, 5 and 6 trains that have that automated creepy announcer that sounds eerily like the “Johnnie Cab” in Total Recall.

That doesn’t mean there weren't other dumb ideas proffered in the name efficiency. When Rudolf Giuliani became Mayor, an idea was floated to him: Standing-Only trains during rush hour. This is the kind of nonsense that happens when people don’t listen to engineers. I’m sure somebody must’ve had wanted to have said: “Why don’t you just stand around for the rest of your fucking sad miserable life, Mayor?”

Michael Bloomberg, the current Mayor of New York was pitched the idea of standing-only trains at the start of his term. After consideration he decided not to recommend it to the MTA. The fact that Michael Bloomberg has been known to ride the train may have had something to do with it. Not that I think he’s worried all that much about commuters’ comfort during rush hour… I just don’t think he wants to run into any of them when they see the seats are all gone.

-SJ

Andy Kessler 1961-2009

2009-08-13T14:37:00.001-07:00

It’s weird when you read an obituary for someone you actually knew. The New York Times managed to cover most of the bases, but it still felt like I was reading about a complete stranger.
I first met Andy at Westside Comics back in the fall of 1980 when I was only 12. He had a good seven or eight years on me, but he never passed up a chance to check out somebody’s “black book,” the sketchbook that all New York City boys who wrote graffiti (or aspired to “get up” beyond their own city block and onto actual trains) carried with them everywhere. Andy was a fucking harsh critic.
I wasn’t ever sure if Andy actually worked there or not, since I’d seen him fetch his skateboard from behind the counter more than once. Westside Comics was a “Mos Eisley port” of sorts for kids who had ambitions beyond vandalism. It was a very clean comics shop that had some very “dirty” comics in it, so the kids came from all over and from every walk of life. It was the place I went to for Vaughn Bode reprints, “adult” comic books like Heavy Metal, Epic, 2000AD, Cerebus, and magazines like Warrior and Cinefex. It became a “writers bench north” for a short while, until the store’s owner, a skinny bearded guy with a fucked-up wandering eye got wise and started chasing anybody with “writing” on their clothes out, whether they were in the middle of a game of Q*bert or not. Andy was there a lot, a "White" kid who passed for Latino because he was Greek. When kids got chased out of the store, he’d leave too, even though he didn’t have to and that’s one of the things I always remembered about him through the years.
I say I knew Andy, but everybody did back then, from Amsterdam Avenue, to 125th, to 180th in the Bronx, back down to Alphabet City, and up on over to Brooklyn. He made it a point to go up and approach people he thought were doing cool shit, but that’s not to say he was shy about his estimation of his own talents. Andy could talk some serious trash too. I saw him stun more than one kid into absolute silence, and the man really liked to argue.
Andy was the first community organizer I ever met, -before I knew what the word actually meant, although he probably didn’t think of himself that way, he was too down to earth for that. But I certainly did think of him in those terms often because he got people talking to each other wherever he went. I was from the South Bronx, where nobody rode a skateboard more than 5 feet’s distance thanks to the rotten state of the pavement and broken glass everywhere. Andy was one of the only people on a skateboard I knew of, outside of an eccentric “Rider” in my neighborhood who used to tag/write “Rib.” Skateboarding was something you read about in “Skateboarder.” Anybody who did it in New York City back in those days was kind of crazy.

After I graduated from the Calhoun school in 1986, I didn’t run into Andy anymore except for one day in the summer of 1988 by the Astor Place cube. He was watching kids skate… he said he’d fucked up his foot. He asked to see my sketchbook, which was full of academic drawings of human models in conte and hard charcoal. He really let me have it. With Cooper Union as a backdrop, he gave me all this shit about “conformity” and how “the world didn’t need anymore paintings of naked ladies.” As always, he was just more experienced and sophisticated than I was, due to the difference in our age, and I couldn’t put up much of a fight. He was hell to argue with when he was high, so I walked away without saying goodbye.

The last time I saw Andy was at a show a couple of years back in Williamsburg Brooklyn, I can’t remember exactly where, -a space north of the bridge off Bedford Ave. A good friend of mine named Ezra Talmatch had paintings in a show hung in a typical grey painted floor factory space that had been turned into a gallery… but a permanent wooden ramp had been built for the kids in the neighborhood to skate in. The place was packed, paintings everywhere.

But there was a grown man with slicked-back hair wearing dickies and a dark brown flannel work coat buttoned to the neck, catching air off the ramps. It was Andy.

He saw me and called me over. We shook hands and hugged. We talked for a bit, he mentioned wanting to transform more unused factory spaces around the city into indoor parks, so kids could skate despite the rain or the snow all year round; restating his lifelong mission as if he’d never told anybody before. We complained about Giuliani, Bloomberg. A kid interrupted him to ask him to sign his deck. Then Andy slapped me and Ezra five and abruptly tipped off of the lip of the wooden ramp, down and up, down and up.

I had named a family of characters after him in my 2001 story for “The Innertube Mothership Connection:” -the “Kesslars;” extraterrestrials posing as bicycle messengers on Earth. I never got to tell him about it, or show him the drawings for the series. I never got to tell him that there were no hard feelings about all the shit he gave me, here and there over the years… Well, no hard feelings that lasted.

Andy was flying through the air the last time I saw him, and for all the shit I’m going to read and hear about him over the next few days, about all the problems he had and people he pissed off, and everybody who loved him or envied him, that’s the way I’m going to remember him: in glorious flight.

-SJ

Umberto Eco Versus Dan Brown

2009-05-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

In this corner, writing out of the University of Bologna and the University of Oxford, Umberto Eco! Born on the 5th of January 1932.
His titles include: literary critic, “medievalist,” philosopher, semiotician, and writer of novels; best known for his bestseller, Il Nome della Rosa, (The Name of the Rose 1980.)

…The Challenger, Dan Brown born on the 22nd of July, 1964, his accomplishments include songwriting and writing bestselling novels.
Brown is best known for the novels Angels & Demons and the Da Vinci Code and of course his self-titled 1993 album, “Dan Brown,” which included masterpieces such as "976-Love" and "If You Believe in Love". He decided to become a novelist while vacationing in Tahiti after reading Sidney Sheldon's novel, The Doomsday Conspiracy. Brown’s books have been translated into over 50 languages!

Let’s get it on! (BELL RINGS…)

All right, all right.
I‘ve only read three of Eco’s novels, and recently finished (yesterday) one of Dan Brown’s: The Da Vinci Code. I’ll give a little background before explaining that I will never bother to read anything Dan Brown writes ever again. Anyway:

Ecos’ novel, Foucault’s Pendulum was handed to me by a close friend Jay Park, back in my college days in the late 1980s. I tore through it fairly quickly because despite all the noise about it being post-structuralist, intertextual, and blah, blah –“Oh my God you haven’t read this yet?”-blah, blah… at the heart of it all, the novel was a story about friends who pulled a dim, thoughtless prank and then suddenly found themselves in over their heads. In this significantly pre-internet*, fake conspiracy novel three friends invent an underground scheme they call "The Plan." With references to the Telluric currents and even fabled and biblical weapons of the imagination like the Ark of the Covenant, their rumored age-old fake-ass plot takes on a very dangerous life of its own. Various cult groups and homicidal religious zealots look to kill them for more information about “The Plan” and the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. No one believes they made it all up; their well-played prank grows out of control to a horrifying tragic end. As you’ll see in my bare bones profile here on blogspot, it is one of my favorite novels. To me it is a deeply moving story about the ineffable qualities of those ties of friendship forged in early academic life. It illustrates the wonderfully secret and sometimes toxic life of booklovers who forgo the real world outside their imagination. This novel is also an eloquent and entertaining warning about the dangers of faith and belief.

Since about 2003 or so, several people (mostly folks I know only through jobs that I really hated doing) have recommended The Da Vinci Code to me as “something you’d like…”
-Nothing pisses me off more than when someone I barely know assumes that l’d like something I already suspect is a piece of shit lying in wait. I saw a TV interview with Ron Howard and Tom Hanks on Charlie Rose a few nights back about their new film Angels and Demons, their second adaptation of a Dan Brown book (Although it’s actually his first Langdon mystery/thriller). While I had never put down or disparaged Dan Brown’s work before (I really try to reserve judgment until reading something, but it gets tougher every year.) I have to admit I’d been going out of my way to avoid these books. People who are into Dan Brown's books, are really into them. Like, way too into them. When I worked at A.I.S. in the post dot com days on a graveyard shift, I worked with a guy who believed that The Da Vinci Code was a double-MacGuffin, or a fake story that was actually real. “Read it” he said, “It’ll change your life.”
Let me be clear on my feelings after now having read this asinine book:
If The Da Vinci Code changes your life, then I can’t imagine the colorless, vacuous existence you had before. The History channel is much more likely to legitimately blow a person’s mind, and even they frequently lift and glom from Dan Brown’s cosmology, such as it is.

I guess that what bothers me most about The Da Vinci Code is that, far from being a plagiarized work as is frequently held by its detractors (the conspiracy theories in it like accounts of the Prieuré de Sion among others, have been the central subject or subplot of many, many works of fiction, including comic books like Garth Ennis’s The Preacher) it is an example of what we can call grandiose mediocrity: shitty, unimaginative writing that tries to hide itself under the scale of the Byzantine plots it is describing, and legitimizing itself with claims of a basis in factuality. This is a not-so-new approach to an old formula used for many years by writers of political thrillers or spy novels.

Make no mistake, this may sell books, but it’s killing the very fucking idea of literature.

Every book Dan Brown sells forces another publisher to force another editor to force another writer to do something like this book. Worst of all, Eco’s glib remarks that he “created” Dan Brown don’t sit well with me. It lets the publishing houses off the hook for this drivel. While it’s funny to some readers to point out that Dan Brown could have easily stepped out of the pages of Foucault’s Pendulum, I’ve never thought that charlatans who exploit the superstitions of the “faithful” are harmless, especially when they are making so much money. In this way, after reading The Davinci Code with its extensive notes about how everything is stringently researched (Opus Dei, a real religious order not invented by Dan Brown but featured as the chief antagonist in his book, feels very differently by the way) is no different than the lie a “psychic” tells the world about his purported contact with the dead. As the “Mentalist” the Amazing Maxwell once said to me and my friend Michael Mejias over many, many drinks, “I’m a bullshit artist, I do tricks, and the trick is that I’m fooling you into thinking I’m actually reading your mind, -and not that I’m actually reading your mind.” He went on to remark that while he felt the actors in Hamlet had no responsibility to return after the curtain fell to assure the audience that they weren’t really dead, -people like John Edward really pissed him off. Telling the bereaved that you can talk to their dearly departed is criminal, it's fraud not entertainment or art. Telling readers that making their way through your bad writing is ultimately a process of discovery and illumination of mysteries is also fraud, no matter how many footnotes you plunk down at the end.

The Da Vinci Code is a "Scooby Doo" story for adults who can’t stop ordering shit off late night TV infomercials. It promises novelty, bigness, revelations, profundity but doesn’t even thrill because the actual writing is so damned bad. When I take into account the way Brown tries to distract readers from his juvenile plots and general weakness as an author with allegations of basis in fact, The Da Vinci Code goes from someone’s excusable guilty pleasure to a pretty indefensible read.

And now I will risk your ire by making a recommendation of this bad, bad, bad, book, albeit with a strong qualifier that should keep us both out of trouble… or maybe not:

If you think other badly written books like let’s say, The Fountainhead have something serious going on in them, (in this case other than rationalizing self interest and making it sound okay to be an asshole) then The Da Vinci Code is just for you.

For my part, I’m moving on to the remaining Umberto Eco novels I haven’t read yet to cleanse my palette. I feel I owe the man an apology for straying somehow.

-SJ

*but it should be noted that this novel opens with a friend trying to figure out the password of a deceased friend’s computer, so for 1988 or so, it still feels so very relevant and contemporary.

One of the Imponderables: Propane or Wood/Charcoal

2009-04-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

The origins of the act of Barbecue are impossible to trace… let’s face it, when the first cave dwellers lit a fire and a neighbor walked over with a piece of meat to see what was going on, dropping it into the fire by mistake… that was a barbecue.

I’m sure that butter-fingered hominid was later regarded as the smartest most important knuckle-walker around: the Bill Gates of his age.

Even the the word Barbecue has obscure, questionable origins. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first recorded use of “Barbecue” in English by the British buccaneer William Dampier in 1697. Etymologists maintain that Barbecue comes from the word “Barbacoa” from the language of the Taíno people of the Caribbean: the ancestors, along with the Spanish conquistadors and African slaves of today’s Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. These original Taínos were relatives of the Arawaka peoples of South America. In 1492, Columbus encountered five Taíno kingdoms on Hispaniola, now the modern day Dominican Republic and Haiti. The kingdoms are of course long gone, but “Barbacoa,” translated loosely as "sacred pit of fire" remained and evolved along with the hybrid cultures of the new world that would world forge much of the history of the next centuries in the Western Hemisphere.

There are hundreds of regional species of Barbecue around the world, from the American Southwest, Midwest, North and South to Hawaii, to Japan to the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, to scores of variations in South America.
All of them are awesome in my opinion, but there is a line of division that parses these fire cooked meat traditions made possible by advances in technology: Propane/Gas versus Wood/Charcoal.

As anyone who has watched any episiodes of Mike Judge’s King of the Hill knows, this is no cut and dry matter. I’m going to sidestep the Beef versus Pork strictures that divide so many Americans across the Mason Dixon line and from East to West and every direction in between. I’m also going to sidestep slow smoking versus high heat grilling or this post will never end.

Some people feel that the smoked “char” from wood chips or charcoal bricks is an integral part of the desired flavor of open fire cooked meat. Others have long wanted a way to get that primal taste of fire cooking, without the carbons and coal tar making their way on to their steaks and chops.
That’s not to imply that Gas or Propane Barbecue methods don’t also create particular tastes that don’t divide propane cooking supporters. Propane and Gas produce what some call "wet” heat, -vapors and steam are created that can change the texture of the meat which opponents have called rubbery or “too consistent.” But conversely, all agree this "wet" heat prevents grilled meats from drying out too fast.

So: Propane or Wood/Charcoal?

I don’t know. I just like to eat.

Just invite me over so we can keep the mouth-watering argument going. I hope I never find out the answer, and that we all get to talk it over in each other’s company, in ever annoying detail, everywhere, across the world, for as many summers as our mortal lives allow.

All hail summer.

-SJ

Reflections on a Cinematic Pioneer

2009-04-20T12:02:00.001-07:00

Oscar Micheaux is regarded by many as the first African-American feature filmmaker, and the most prominent producer of so-called “Race Films” in the early decades of American cinema. Micheaux wrote and directed forty-four feature-length films between 1919 and 1948, a staggering body of work for any director in any time period. In my mind he has always stood apart as one of the very first Independent filmmakers as I understand the term today: (An auteur, generally a writer/director who is telling stories and operating independent of the marketing concerns, branding mandates and political and social establishmentarianist postures of a given studio system in a given era.)

Micheaux was one of eleven children of former slaves. This direct connection to the nightmare of American Slavery marks him as unique among all other filmmakers in history, and makes him no less special and remarkable though this distinction was purely an accident of birth. This observation has been the subject of many unresolved arguments concerning the greatness, historical importance (or lack thereof) ascribed to Oscar Micheaux’s films. This has more to do with the issue of race itself in our society, than with anything else. After all, what made DW Griffith unique was his own perspective, made possible by his own luck at being born who he was; where he was; when he was: if indeed we can call any of this luck at all in his case, or Mr. Micheaux’s. I find it hard not to think both of these men simultaneously, as one readily invokes the other in my imagination. I try to envision their conversations, what they would say, (to themselves and to each other) if they could see today’s world, its people, its culture -and especially its media.

Oscar Micheaux was first and foremost a writer, and somewhat of an anomaly as he was a novelist in an era when the theatre was the most common and logical path to filmmaking. At a time when most African-Americans owned nothing, and certainly had no means to create media or mass-distributed images of themselves to counteract the popular racist myths being put forth as fact about them in America, Oscar Micheaux formed his own movie production company. In 1919 he completed his very first film. He wrote, directed and produced a silent motion picture called The Homesteader starring Evelyn Preer. The Homesteader was based on a largely autobiographical novel of his own that recounted his experiences settling a piece of land in a predominantly White region of South Dakota. His first “talkie,” The Exile, revisited what would become increasingly prominent themes of entrepreneurship and the importance of self reliance in the face of adversity: be it racial oppression or a poorly chosen tract of uncooperative land. In 1924, Micheaux made one of his most important contributions to cinema history by introducing audiences to Paul Robeson, in the motion picture Body and Soul.

Micheaux’s film Within Our Gates, was a direct response to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. It is often relegated to the realm of novelty by historians and critics who repeatedly point out that as a polemic, it would not exist without the object of its criticism. The implication here is one of “unoriginality.” I can’t argue with an intentionally narrowed judgment such as this: but I disagree with the critical focus on the film’s inspiration as its sole aspect that determines its significance or worth. I instead insist on pointing out that Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone and even Woody Allen owe many of the polemical possibilities of their cinema to Oscar Micheaux for using film (specifically in the case of Within Our Gates) as the vehicle for a larger conversation about culture, reality and the truth. Micheaux was the first to make a film in direct response to another film, by another filmmaker.

Haskell Wexler, the cinematographer, often said that in the last years of his career, Micheaux was a desperate figure, often simply changing picture frames and moving props around on a set, rather than dress the scene differently or even change a camera angle lest he lose light: therein he presages Ed Wood, and every other independent filmmaker who ever ran out of money. Therein he presages me as well.

For what it’s worth, if there were a “Cooperstown” for independent filmmakers and American pioneers in cinema, at 44 films, Oscar Micheaux gets in on the first round.

Micheaux’s significance as a pioneer and innovator requires the nuanced consideration often lavished on his contemporaries and peers, but strangely absent from most conversations about his legacy.

-SJ

1930-2009

2009-04-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

J.G. Ballard, a giant among storytellers, has left Earth.

For Crash, Concrete Island, The Atrocity Exhibition, High Rise and Empire of the Sun, I am eternally grateful.

-SJ

I Want to Help the Environment, But….

2009-03-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

I was at my second home, The Home Depot, a few weeks ago. I have a room to paint and needed primer (there is no paint color selected yet, don’t bother me with details). I see this new low-odor, low-VOC version of an old friend, Kilz. “What the heck. They make good stuff.” Besides, the wife and kids like to sleep without smelly paint fumes (to each their own, right?). Of course it cost more, but that is the price you pay (apparently) to be good to Mother Earth.

I open a can to find the ingredients completely separated. No problem, I’m a tool hound. Cordless drill with paint stirrer coming up. So I stir. A lot. I put the lid back on and dance the paint can shimmy. The stuff never mixed thoroughly. The stuff either dripped and ran, or dried mid stroke/roll creating blobs.

This low-odor stuff smells. Odd. To me it was a fish smell. My wife smelled crackers. As promised on the can, any odor detected did indeed fade. From the room I was in. Apparently paint chemists have created a way for odor molecules to find another room. The rest of the house smelled terrible.

No water cleanup so I have to clean all my paint tools with mineral spirits and other volatile agents. The walls will need a sanding before real paint goes on. I got less than half the normal coverage. I used more than two gallons, where one should have been more than enough.

Green is a big, in-your-face buzzword these days. Everyone is on the bandwagon. While some are true innovations, such as building houses like they did before central AC to gain passive energy savings, some are just stupid. And I am talking to you “new environmentally friendly shaped plastic water bottle people.” I squint in my hallway because of the lame compact fluorescent. It is supposed to save me many dollars each year, except I keep turning on a table lamp with multiple incandescent bulbs to read my mail.

Okay I have a point. Saving the environment is a good idea. Really. Now that I have children it really does matter. But I am going back to acrylic primers and good old Benjamin Moore paint. I may even take that stupid bulb out. If anyone really wants to save the environment, they should go after the marketing genius that came up with the ridiculous toy packaging we have today. Multiple plastic shrink wrap levels and cardboard inserts and those DAMNED WIRE TIES. Just to show the kids EVERY SINGLE PIECE included in the package. “Wow! Polly Pocket sure has a lot of shoes!”

Why, when I was a kid (shut up), our toys came in a simple box with a painting on it. The toy never could do what the artwork showed and the many extra parts were required to come close, but by gum, you kept the toy in the box until it was shredded dust, further keeping the landfills empty. So let’s get the movement going! Get rid of the wasteful packaging! Save Mommies and Daddies sanity on Christmas morning!! Okay, I have an ulterior motive and I am using the Green bandwagon. Shoot me. But you use lead-free bullets, I live near a school.

Sadly, I Am Reminded that the Human Skull is an Inadequate Helmet.

2009-03-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

The tragic news of Natasha Richardson’s passing last night inspired a flurry of emails, texts and IMs between myself and a couple of my boyhood friends who for lack of a better way of saying it, are bound by the fact that we like to do stupid shit together. Kenneth, ten years my senior, taught me how to operate the clutch array on a motorcycle when I was 15. My old friend Ernesto taught me how to snowboard in 2000.

I have been taught all of my form and procedure by hooligans. But as crazy as my friends are, they have never, ever let me do anything without wearing a helmet. Not that I’ve ever needed any convincing.

We went snowboarding three weekends in a row this year already, spurred by the recession-inspired discounts offered by Windham Resort with the start of the Martin Luther King holiday weekend (I know we should have spent that weekend reflecting considering we’re all conspicuously Hispanic and we should’ve been thanking God for our first African-American president.) I went tear-assing down my favorite route called “Lower Wolverine” and wiped out repeatedly in spectacular displays of Newtonian physics gone horribly, retardedly, wrong. Windham’s near empty grounds that first weekend allowed us all to achieve speeds we’d only seen in X games footage and magazine photos. My sprawling dismounts left my whole left flank wrecked for days at a time, as well as the requisite wrist aches and knee soreness. My head and neck however were always fine, thanks to a very large and comical-looking black full-face Bell snow mobile helmet that I will not step outside into the snow without, -and also a washable foam neck brace I’ve had since a car accident in 1983.
I still take a lot of shit for that beige neck brace.

Bell helmets have saved my life twice. The first time: I went over the clip-on handlebars of my KZ 750, catching my left foot on the gas tank, smashing my head into the well of a steel support column for the elevated train line that runs along Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. The second time: We were testing an inverted fork on Ernesto’s GSX-R, which proceeded to cant and lock, performing a “stoppie” that flicked me on to my head in a parking lot. I only traveled ten feet. My knee caps hit the pavement a second later, in what I assure you is one of the most painful impacts I will ever be subjected to unless I’m someday headed to the moon tied to a giant rocket.
I don’t mean to imply that death or cognitive impairment from head injuries are absolutely avoidable. Here in New York City people are struck and killed by falling debris from construction sites, misaligned air conditioners and all manner of careless hazard. But it is still entirely acceptable to let persons, especially novices, engage in velocity and motor sports with no protection where a head injury is a calculated probability and not a remote possibility. I still see go cart tracks in amusement parks without available head gear. I still see kids on mini-bikes and those popular pocket racers without helmets: these are Two-stroke engine machines that while smaller than the family dog in most cases, can still easily achieve speeds of 40-50 miles per hour with their mufflers off. Add the rider’s diminished height on these replica cycles and I can’t think of a finer guarantee that you will be crushed by an automobile. I see people rollerblading, skateboarding all over the city bare-headed; which is ironic because we are all pretty much in agreement that bicycles, those familiar human-powered speed machines, are not to be ridden without helmets.

Years ago, I tried to track down one of the writers who’d had a terrific influence on me as a youth. His name is Bill Mantlo. He is responsible for, among many things, creating a licensed comic book series for Marvel comics called “The Micronauts” in the late 1970s and early 80s. Issues one through twelve of those comics made me want to become a writer in the fifth grade. Mantlo’s work made me take my writing seriously, even though all but two of my teachers across the totality of my education told me that comics were worthless; not an art form; not literature; not reading of any kind but a medium of sublimated masturbation for half-wits and the unsophisticated (I’ll write at length about this someday). I tried to track Bill Mantlo down in 1999 as I was producing my own first comic book action series “Marley Davidson,” if only to show him what his work had meant to me. It was widely known he left writing comics in order to practice law as a Legal Aid Society public defender… in my own home borough of the Bronx no less.
Eventually, I received a heartbreaking letter from his brother, thanking me for my kind inquiry and informing me that Mr. Mantlo had suffered a severe closed head trauma in 1992, the result of a hit-and-run accident while rollerblading, and that he had been in institutional care ever since. He is severely cognitively impaired and not expected to ever recover.

There’s no federal helmet law requiring motorcyclists to wear protection. Laws vary from state to state even though the United States Air force has long established that a blow sustained from a human head striking a table from a seated position can cause death. There are no laws governing what beginning skiers like Natasha Richardson should wear to protect themselves in case of a fall or collision. That’s just too bad. This isn’t a new or unfamiliar danger by any means.

Our brains and their functions are what make us… ourselves. Robbed of our memories, power of thought and reason, we cease to be sentient conscious human beings.

I hope that the untimely passing of Natasha Richardson, the scion of a proud acting dynasty, who wasn’t anywhere near finished with any aspect of her life, will draw some attention and maybe inspire some protective regulation on the world’s slopes where even children can still be seen falling and colliding with each other at dangerous speeds with nothing on their heads but protection from the cold.

-SJ

“There’s No Coming Back From This”

2009-03-13T15:56:00.001-07:00

…is what I am naming the latest U2 album; CD; recorded abortion; or what-have-you.

To say that I have been a fan of this band since I was thirteen doesn’t quite cover my relationship to their music. They appealed to me precisely because they were Irish, working class, politically aware, socially conscious, progressive lefties and unique sounding amongst all other bands of their time: the late 70s and early eighties.

U2 seemed to be beaming directly to me in my South Bronx housing project in 1981 with their deadly serious, but unpretentious and relevant music. Back when they had only one album recorded, (but about 8 or 9 b sides of their 45 singles and one-shot songs) I greedily ran out and bought anything I could find by them, bootlegged concert tapes or demos at long gone meccas for adolescent weirdos like me: “Freebeing Records”, “Finyl Vinyl”, and “Second Coming Records.” Of the places I relied on for dispatches from the outer reaches of rock music and records of hard core and Punk bands I wasn’t old enough to go see, only “Bleecker Bob’s” and “Thompson Street Records” remain standing today in New York City.
I’m going there after I write this post.

WLIR, an FM station that was unapologetically operating on the fringes of mainstream taste would play their music in heavy rotation. The Edge’s (prematurely) much derided note-riding and over use of digital delay went on to become the most copied style of guitar playing for almost twenty five years. For a band firmly operating within the “New Wave” of European rock music they had distinctly progressive tendencies that owed more to bands like the Beatles, King Crimson and Pink Floyd (listen to the production on “Boy” and “October” again some time and tell me if you think I’m wrong) than it did to the bands they publicly claimed to be influenced by (Punks like The Ramones, The Stranglers and the Clash).

U2 were just kids with a lot of talent back then. They were Irish white boys in their twenties whose listenership was composed of an army of smug, sophisticated kids scattered around the globe. They were creating a music that was distinctly theirs and no one else’s and I loved them. The red and black U2 patch on my MA-1 flight jacket started more conversations with random strangers when I was in eighth grade than anything I ever said or did. There was a time when fans of this band shared a common sensibility and political awareness.
Along with bands like the Jam, The Damned, The Clash, The Specials, The Saints and strangely enough, Bauhaus, The Misfits and Minor Threat, -they were the soundtrack of my early teenage days when the world was revealing itself to me in fits and starts beyond the beginnings of my own borough’s Hip Hop, which back then was too materialistic and apolitical for my tastes. After Melle Mel and Grandmaster Flash cut “The Message,” I had to wait for pioneers outside of the Bronx like RunDMC, Erik B and Rakim and ultimately Public Enemy and NWA before I could embrace Rap openly and defend it as the intelligent, vital music I knew it was, with acknowledgement and my deep respect to the work of Afrika Bambaata.

I lined up to buy the LP for U2’s third album with the only other two classmates who were cool enough to even know who this band was. It arrived on a Sunday morning at a record store I’ve long forgotten on Broadway on the upper Westside of Manhattan somewhere in the 70s, -I want to say 77th street? The owner seemed annoyed and undid the boxes and took our cash on the street before opening his gate for business, angry that we’d made him sell his stock before he could list it for inventory.
The next year, I used all my money from a summer job to buy all of their recordings again, on cassette this time, so I could listen to them on my endless subway rides to and from school on a Sony Walkman.
“October” in particular, was an album I could not go without listening to every single day. I can still play it back to myself, from memory, note for note, in my own head from start to finish.

Then came their fourth album.
“The Unforgettable Fire” was the first sign that the egos of these then young men might have caught up with the unprecedented hype they were receiving. “The Hype” incidentally, was U2’s original name in Ireland and so I guess all things do come full circle eventually.
In 1985, I remember watching Live-Aid at my friend’s house (because we didn’t have cable in the Bronx back then, only HBO service) while their performance of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was cut off by commercial. Then U2 proceeded to waste the rest of their slot and quite a bit of the follow up act’s time (they may have bumped the Special Beat Service out of a chance to take the stage) by performing one of the most appropriately named songs in their catalog to date: “Bad.”
“Bad” was one of the first, inarguably self-indulgent songs U2 composed. At best it’s just preachy and condescending, but it also represents the beginning of a long insufferable period where Bono began screaming lyrics at me. “Bad” is long, ponderous, and well… just “Bad.” This song also marks the beginning of Bono and The Edge taking an almost Lennonist (the Beetle not the Communist) stance of pretentious superiority over their audience. As with John and Yoko’s “Revolution Number 9” they were trying something, their motives probably unclear even to themselves, but they insisted you listen to it, repeatedly until you “get” its profundity and appreciate the song.
I have never been able to stomach “Bad.” For their part, U2 included it on every EP they could, with ever longer, ever insufferable extended variations, live, remixed etc., ad nauseum from 1984 to 1986. I stopped buying their EPs during this time.

The three albums that followed, “The Joshua Tree”, “Rattle and Hum” and “Achtung Baby” were the records that tore them far from the insider audience that on the one hand chastised people for not knowing who they were, and on the other hand were dropping them in a juvenile response to their colossal mainstream popularity. These records/CDs established U2 firmly as an arena band on the scale of The Who and the Rolling Stones. It established them as crafters of songs that tapped into the very heart of rock and roll. But these records also contain certain songs that exemplify just how horrible and lackluster their songwriting could be. Their potential on the last of these albums was frightening.
I submit to you: “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” or for that matter “The Fly.”

Then came three of the worst records ever recorded by anybody, from one of the best bands ever to play Rock and Roll of any kind:
“Original Soundtraks 1”
“Zooropa”
and “Pop”
I responded with only two words when my then girlfriend Barbara, played the “Zooropa” cassette for me: “Holy shit.”
But it wouldn’t end there. Bono was concocting stage personas like "The Fly", "Mirror-Ball Man", and "(Mister) MacPhisto".

Give me a fucking break.

The richest citizens in Ireland and the most famous rock band on the planet were attempting to point out the pitfalls of commercialism and the dangers of the media to me?

How?

By becoming victims of their own distorted self image and collapsing under the sheer metric tonnage of their egos?

For the first time, U2 did not possess the requisite sophistication that their music and lyrics demanded. They didn’t seem to understand the concepts they were attempting to communicate. They left their now immense global audience wondering:
what the fuck did any of this have to do with music?
Watching their multimedia concert clips of the “ZooTV” and “PopMart” tours was like being held at gunpoint by a fast talking idiot who was gripping the pistol backwards. You were just hoping it would all backfire in front of you.
I’ve always referred to “Zooropa” as “The Unforgivable Fire,” but I’ve always been too pissed off to laugh at my own joke. While I hated earlier songs like “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “Angel of Harlem,” I’ve never written them off as failures, simply as things U2 recorded that I didn’t like. But I have to insist that much of what U2 did in the 1990s pushes the boundaries of what intelligent people can bring themselves to call music.

Then in 2000, a baffling but eagerly welcome return to form, a return to seriousness; a return to making music for this band. “All That You Can't Leave Behind” was what many the world over had been waiting for since “Achtung Baby” first frightened, then impressed them in 1991 depending on which tracks they were listening to.

“How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” came in 2004.

At the age of 36, I knew U2 would never be my band again, I couldn’t own them like I did when I was a little kid. Nor would I want to. I was just impressed at how well they had gotten back on course, like they’d never done any of that embarrassing puerile concept rock in the 90s. Their then recent performance on SNL of “Elevation” was like seeing old friends again. Old friends I missed terribly.

Now this shit.

“No Line on the Horizon” is it for me. It is simply an inexcusable, indefensible waste of time. It's one of those rare records that is so bad it offends.

I don’t know what rationalizations go on in the mind of someone as accomplished and talented as these guys when they are faced with their own mediocrity. Clearly, they are no longer strong enough to say “no” to their own bad ideas.

But I am.

-SJ

I Have Always Hated Musicals.

2009-03-06T14:46:00.000-08:00

I know.
It’s a tired, boorish sentiment from a straight man, but seriously, I hate musicals… with five notable exceptions listed at the end of this post.

I should note that I’ve seen enough of them on film, but only three productions on an actual stage, “The Wiz,” “Sweet Charity,” (with Debbie Allen when she was looking ridiculously fine back in 1986 or thereabouts) and “42nd Street.”
Now these where all impressive productions in their own time, before the contemporary standard of special effects, wire work and puppetry that seems to dominate the premier Broadway shows of today. Interestingly enough, the current day standard of pyrotechnics, lasers, smoke effects and stunts are made to lure people like myself (what I sometimes call the 2nd television generation; raised predominantly on action and violence) to the theaters by Disney and others.
Well it’s not working:

I am not going to see “Phantom of the Opera” no matter how loud Michael Mejias says it is.

I have an extreme dislike for the idea of people breaking into song at what seems like random intervals (more on this later). On some level it really pisses me off. I follow a story, and suddenly it is hung up by a song and dance number that recycles the same bit of emotion, information or conflict over and over again, generally in a repetitive chorus like:
“You’re the one that I want,”
“I need this Job,”
or “Hello Dolly.”

I get it, “She’s the one that you want,” so shut up already.

I, like many people, was astounded to have enjoyed this year’s Oscar’s telecast as much as I did. It had more of the shit I hate in it, (song and dance numbers) than any other Oscar’s program I’d ever seen before in my life.
So what was the difference?
Even a troglodyte such as myself, appreciates song and dance when it’s done well, and with self-deprecating humor to boot… or maybe it was just Hugh Jackman channeling James Cagney, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse… and Wolverine?

Being that Hugh Jackman is the first and only actor to play Wolverine (in three successful big budget movies already with a fourth one devoted to him alone coming soon), a character that single handedly raised Marvel’s fortunes in the 1980s and 90s with then-kids like me, it’s not crazy to assume that he acted as a bridge to get me over my hatred of musical numbers.
It’s not crazy, but it’s not accurate either.

After the Oscars were over, I began to think and wonder why is there such a clear divide between the fandom of action pictures and the audience that is devoted to stage musicals. These audiences are today curiously divided along straight and Gay lines, although that wasn’t always the case. Both action pictures and musicals employ a “show piece,” a segment or a phenomenon if you will, crow barred into a narrative: car chases and exploding corridors in action pictures versus the synchronous dancing crowds in musicals.

So the question I was left pondering after the Oscars was:
Is Hugh Jackman leaping into song in “Oklahoma” any stupider than Hugh Jackman leaping into the air as Wolverine and eviscerating swat teams to a guitar track?
I have to say I don’t have an answer for that question… or more honestly, I don’t like the answer that I readily have which is:

“There’s no difference at all other than that of simple individual tastes.”

I realized that while I like music, I don’t like musicals and the reason is that the songs in musicals are almost uniformly terrible in my opinion, with rare exceptions like the score for “Chicago.” The songs in musicals are often constructed to simultaneously entertain and move the story forward, but don’t seem to do either effectively. Dennis Potter managed to do some pretty crazy stuff with musical numbers and the stage musical medium as a metaphor chiefly because he embraced its unreality as a device for the delusions of his characters within another medium: Television.

So on further reflection, I suppose I should say:
“I don’t hate musicals... I just think they suck most of the time.”

…And what a relief that is. I can now say I love the five musicals I listed below without fear of contradicting myself, although I’m probably coming off pretty Gay.
I hope I’m also coming off as not giving a shit.
A fear of presumed effeminacy is a very stupid reason not to like something, or even someone.

Note that these are all films:

West Side Story
Lower class White kids versus Puerto Ricans. Almost six decades later, this shit is still genius. It’s also a brilliantly directed film by Len Wise.

All That Jazz
This movie is so dark and so messed up, it’s almost Metal.I always hope he’s gonna pull through in the end,
then –ziiiip.

The Rocky Horror Show
A transvestite mad scientist. Do I even need to explain this one? Probably, but I won’t.

The Blues Brothers
Aretha does a dance number.The verdict? Totally bitchin’ my friends.

Planet of the Apes, The Musical
“Come on and rock me Doctor Zaius!”

Okay the fifth one has never been staged or filmed, it’s just a great gag from a “Simpsons” episode, one of the last ones with the late great Phil Hartman.

But you’d come with me to see it wouldn’t you?

Come on, admit it.

-SJ

The 10 Best Animated Shows You’re Probably Not Watching:

2009-03-01T15:10:00.000-08:00

This may be the nerdiest post I’ve ever written, so brace yourself or turn back now.

My friend and long time mentor at World War 3 illustrated Seth Tobocman once said that bad writing takes longer to reveal itself in comic books because of the novelty and spectacle of illustration to some degree, -and so it is with animation.
For every movie like the groundbreaking 3D animations “The Incredibles” or “Monsters Inc.”, you also have several more talking animal 3D flicks “written down” to the allegedly (and erroneously) simple mind of a child. On television, what separates a good animated show from an unimaginative one is its writing, regardless of who it’s written for.

“South Park” is one of the worst animated shows I have ever seen… from the standpoint of its actual animation alone. As far as original television series go however, “South Park” is one of the greatest comedies ever produced for broadcast. This is due entirely to the force of the writing on that show. The show is clever, frighteningly original; offering the best commentary on modern world culture available anywhere on TV. If you are someone who has dismissed that show because of its crass humor, I invite you to watch a recent three-part episode called “ImaginationLand.” In these three episodes, Matt Stone and Trey Parker explored the notion that Americans have allowed Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to highjack our imagination, bringing our nation to the point of collective abject hysteria. Those three episodes are the most powerful and prescient example of social political commentary I have seen on television in the last ten years. It effectively deconstructs all of the post 9/11 state and right wing-sponsored fear mongering, as well as the ineffectuality of our advertising sponsored news media as a reliable source of factual information, and the herd mentality of the American voting public in times of war… but those three episodes are loaded with really disgusting jokes, so I doubt that many will recognize its brilliance. South Park is a great show. It has remained a great show by positioning itself as a program for those 14 and over, which speaks to a larger issue of who animation is for.

Animation is not just for kids, and it never has been.
The work of producers like Fred Quimby, Leon Schlesinger, Tex Avery and others from the 30s 40s in the Merry Melodies, Looney Tunes and the multitude of MGM canonical short works is an indication of the savvy, urbane potential of animated stories even when they are populated by furry neotenic animals.

The perennial problems of what determines American animation’s content and tone accelerated in 1954 with a book called “Seduction of the Innocent” by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, who maintained that there was a direct link between juvenile delinquency and mass media, (specifically comic books) in children. His efforts and advocacy led to a U.S. Congressional inquiry into the comic book industry and the subsequent creation of the Comics Code. The chill effect that resonated throughout the media industry at the time resulted in waves of internal preemptive censorship at publishers but also Film and TV studios and the formation of “codes” and reformulations of “Standards and Practices” for any entertainment that might reach a child audience.
Much of the problem with the development of the animation created in the 1960s and afterward, especially programming made for Saturday morning television (The Flintstones was a prime time show in its initial run) was not the idea that animation had to be made “safe” for children but that children had to be “written down to.” There was a notion, in actual practice (if not in theory before the fact) that along with explicit violence, sexually suggestive content and certain other specific moral conventions (E.g. no one can be depicted as getting way with or benefiting from criminal activity) sarcasm, complexity, topical references, politics, irony and any kind of innuendo or double entendré had to be eliminated. In short, sophistication had to be excised from animation.

Animation was hopelessly mired in a strange world of kids-only entertainment after the 1950s despite the masterpieces being churned out by Disney. Animation progressively got dumber and dumber, (see the Al Brodax Popeye cartoons produced in the 1960s for an example of how “Standards and Practices” concerns allowed and emboldened hacks to create absolute garbage for kids.)

Just as Prohibition begot the mafia, and the mafia begot the FBI, censorship always inspires the subject of its control. The world of “Adult animation” was born in the late 60s and early 1970s in motion pictures. There were movies like “Fritz the Cat,” “Heavy Traffic,” and later “Heavy Metal,” “The Lord of the Rings” by Ralph Bakshi, as well as his “American Pop” and “Fire and Ice.” On television, Filmation studios’ “Flash Gordon” animated series and rare short run shows like “Thundarr the Barbarian” tried to challenge the idea that shows targeted for children had to be sophomoric and predictable. But even the writers of “Flash Gordon” were eventually forced to write in a pink baby dragon side-kick in later seasons, and Thundarr didn’t survive its second season despite featuring the art work and stories of great masters like Gil Kane, Alex Toth and Jack Kirby.

The 1980s ushered in a strange era of toy marketing wherein TV shows were created in order to promote action figures and play sets on store shelves. “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” was one of the more egregious examples of this strategy. Instead of creating good animated narratives and entertainment, toys were designed and then TV shows developed to promote them on Saturday afternoon and after school programming slots. That said, the 1960s and 1970s also brought us the Spider-man animated series, the Hanna Barbera or Ruby Spears productions of the various “Superfriends,” shows that while interesting adaptations of their comic book inspirations, fell far below the level of the latter’s complexity of writing. I was one of many children who wondered why Batman comic books were so great, and yet the Batman Filmation produced series on CBS was so bad.

The late 1980s and early 90s brought a number of groundbreaking shows and tremendous changes to televised animation. “The Simpsons” and also a now largely forgotten Saturday morning show called “The Pirates of Dark Water” eschewed the insistence that animation, even animation for kids, had to be written with anything less than skill and sophistication. Volumes could be written about the Bruce Timm produced “Batman, “Superman” and “Justice League” shows in that decade.

Today we have “Family Guy,” “King of the Hill,” “American Dad,” “South Park,” “The Boondocks” and surprisingly after all these years, “the Simpsons,” enjoying massive audiences due to the quality of the writing on those shows. Interestingly most if not all carry parental advisories. As in years past, we still see absolute dreck developed and televised for kids. In most cases they’ll just have to get older before they can see reruns of all the great animation they are missing. Thankfully not all the writing in animation for kids today is mediocre.

As someone who loves animation and their narratives of impossibility, I felt the need to champion certain shows that are being ignored by the mainstream. So here are my ten selections of shows, -regardless of whether they are adult targeted or kids fare that exhibit a level of sophistication and excellent writing that I don’t feel are getting their due, either critically or in terms of their Nielsen data.

“The Venture Bros.”
A truly postmodern, almost fanboy-centric show, it chronicles the adventures of two dopey teenage boys, Hank and Dean Venture, their insecure super-scientist father Dr. Venture and the family’s bodyguard, Brock Samson voiced by Patrick Warburton. Beautifully modeled and animated, this show requires a level of political, media and cultural literacy that would stymie readers of The New Yorker. Thankfully it’s going into its fourth season, even though you’re not watching.

“Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends”
A show in which imaginary friends become physical beings the instant a child imagines them; unfortunately for the friends, the children eventually outgrow them. Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is the place for abandoned imaginary friends seeking a new home.
A beautiful, smart show for kids with a vector-based look that refers to the “splash” layouts of the 1960s in Warner brothers’ cartoons.

“The Marvelous Misadventures of Flap Jack”
I don’t know how to describe this show. It’s for children, but it might be the most subversive thing I’ve seen since “The Pee Wee Herman Show.”
It’s about a kid whose mother is a whale. It has to be seen to be believed.
Seriously.

“Chowder”
Another kid’s show: Chowder is a young child who is the apprentice to a chef named Mung Daal, who owns a catering company serving the fictional city of Marzipan. The show combines traditional 2D animation with stop-motion animation and puppetry. It’s pretty wild looking and legitimately funny for anyone.

“Batman: The Brave and The Bold”
James Tucker, one of the long suffering storyboard board artists/ animators/ modelers/ Directors/ writers/ producers on the Batman animated series, Superman animated series and Justice League series is the producer of this new show which features Batman teaming up with other characters from the DC Universe (as in the comic book showcase of the same name.) The show is much lighter in tone than previous Batman animated shows. Strangely, like the Filmation CBS show, Batman does not appear as his alter ego, billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. But even with the renewed kid-friendly approach, its tone is even-handed and pretty serious although the aesthetics and design of the show harkens back to the Adam West live action show… and did I mention Diedrich Bader is the new voice of Batman?

“SuperJail!”
A show so good, it ought to be illegal. Totally not safe for the kids... and so what?
I feel really bad enjoying this animated show; it’s like laughing at a car crash.
Superjail is built inside a volcano, located inside a larger volcano and run by the “Willy Wonka”-like Warden. Superjail exists in an isolated reality, where time and space are somewhat fluid and can change at the whim of the Warden. At the start of every episode a criminal named Jack Knife is brought to Superjail by the Jailbot. Every episode inevitably leads to a spectacular psychedelic bloodbath prison riot, while Jack Knife escapes in the confusion to be caught again in the opening of the next episode.

“Ben 10” and “Ben 10 Alien Force”
A main character in a kid’s animated show named after the poet Tennyson. Nice. Ben Tennyson finds a mysterious, watch-like device, called the Omnitrix, which attaches itself permanently to his wrist and gives him the ability to transform into a variety of alien life-forms, each with their own unique powers.

“Metalocalypse”
A show chronicling the exploits of a death metal band called Dethklok.
This show is the most important critique of the new facism and the mass cult of celebrity that our media and the military industrial industrial complex thrive on. It is extremely violent. It is frequently funny. It is always profound, even when it’s trying to be sophmoric.

“The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy”
(Originally Part of the “Grim & Evil” show)

One day, The Grim Reaper loses a bet to Billy and Mandy, two children from Endsville, a typical suburb (an homage to the “The Seventh Seal”). The Grim Reaper has to be their best friend "forever and ever": Two little kids with “Death” at their beck and call. It’s the sickest kid’s show I’ve ever seen considering any mention of mortality is generally off limits for Saturday morning TV.

“The Secret Saturdays”
The opening theme music alone is worth the watch.”The Saturdays,” are a family of cryptozoologists who work to protect undiscovered and mythical species from the human race and vice versa. The look of the series is influenced by 1960s-era Hanna-Barbara action series such as the Herculoids, and Jonny Quest and features an interesting use of washed out color plates that remind me of what it was like to watch color animated TV shows on Saturday mornings when I was a kid… which is to say I watched them in black and white, on a tiny Sony TV monitor.

--Honorable mentions that have recently bitten the dust:

“Frisky Dingo” (and the spin off series “The Xtacles” has also been scrapped)
This was a very slick, sophisticated show that followed an extraterrestrial would be conqueror and single parent, “Kill Face” as he threatened to drive the Earth into the sun for ransom. Episodes revolved around his attempts to market and promote the planet’s doom while running afoul of “Awesome X,” the most believable billionaire superhero ever brought to screen. Thankfully, seasons 1 and 2 are available on DVD. Hang your head in shame for not watching this show.

“Fairly Odd Parents”
While this is not a show that was unsuccessful in its intended demographic, I do believe that this show should have had a longer run than it did.

-SJ

Philip José Farmer

2009-02-25T18:15:00.001-08:00

1918-2009

Praise and Requiem for my Smoking

2009-02-23T19:03:00.000-08:00

I won’t have had a cigarette in four years come next month. I recently mentioned this to a co-worker who remarked through clenched teeth that, if I had in fact quit permanently, I couldn’t have ever been a “real” smoker. Not for nothing, but I’m nearly twice this young woman’s age. I was sneaking cigarettes after math class back when her mother was deciding on whether or not to have an abortion.
…I know, too harsh. If I still smoked, I’d say I’d need one about now...
But I don’t –and so I don’t.

I shouldn’t say I was a smoker. I should say: I loved smoking.
I really loved it.
When I was in college, I smoked Lucky unfiltereds, at the rate of a pack and a half a day. At Cooper Union in the late 1980s, you could smoke in class. All my professors were shameless cigarette moochers. You could smoke in the metal shop. My friend Patrick practically smoked in his sleep. I used to smoke while I ate.

Did I mention that I used to love smoking?

I have fond memories of riding between subway cars on the number 2 IRT northbound train with my best friend Michael Davila, lighting up menthols on school nights if we didn’t have anything stronger. Smoking was something we did to take the edge off. It was our decompression from our days at a private school to the ironically lower P.S.I. of our South Bronx neighborhoods.
I was a nerd, I was an artist, I was a brainiac, but even at 12 years of age, walking up-street with a lit cigarette in my swinging fist, I was no one to fuck with. I scared older, tougher kids because they were scared of cigarettes and by extension freaked out by me. I knew this, and I figured it beat fighting all the time.
I knew this and I figured, “let this be my thing.”

A girlfriend once waited for me outside my high school, in a miniskirt, combat boots, fishnet stockings and my battered leather jacket. She was lazily smoking a cigarette leaning against a building’s corner on 81st and West End Avenue. My friend Jeffrey spotted her from a window and leaned over to me and whispered “Your girl is all day punk rock trouble.”

Fuck yeah momma.

I’ll never smoke cigarettes that taste like the ones of my adolescence. That taste of freedom, that taste of delinquency, that taste of procrastination… that taste of getting away with something isn’t an ingredient found in any cigarette I can buy today.

I occasionally have dreams in which I’m smoking. They are always the dreams in which I am being “cool.”

It’ll kill you.
It’ll stain your teeth and make your burps smell like wet ash trays…
It causes all kinds of cancer…

But it looks cool.

It makes doing average things look cool.
It looks cooler than anything else you could do.
That’s the thing that can never be taken away from smokers: it’s cool.

Smoking is fucking cool.

The more dangerous they say it is, the more “TRUTH” ads they put out there, the more likely they make it seem that smoking is something Darth Vader would do…
-and that is fucking cool, my friends.

About four years ago, when I was about to turn 37, I was struck with a very bad flu that nearly turned into pneumonia. For three weeks, I fluctuated between getting better, and then sinking back into sickness at night, breathing with great difficulty. At times it felt like I was under water. I quit smoking altogether about a week after pulling through.

Although I had stopped smoking for months at a time and for a full year during the 1990s, I was always white-knuckling it. From 1995 to 1999, I’d drink obsidian pints of Guinness at a bar called The Pageant and bum half a pack off of my good friend Mark Cassar in one single night.
Today, I can’t bring a cigarette to my lips without feeling a little nauseous, a little put off. Today, a cigarette tastes like a cigarette, -and only like a cigarette and nothing else, and I am left wondering why?
Perhaps it wasn’t the actual smoking itself that I loved after all, but some ineffable state, some dimension I stepped into as a youth whenever I bathed myself in the mercurial light of a match and drew in the sinful, sexy blackness from the end of a cigarette.

I think I was “cool” once upon a time.

I think I was in love with something harder to pin down and describe, something looser and more abstract than the cigarette smoke I drew in...

But I sure did love to smoke.

-SJ

Lux Interior, 1946-2009

2009-02-06T00:34:00.000-08:00

"Roll on.
Rock on.
Raw bones.
Well there's still alot of rhythm in these rockin' bones.

I wanna leave a happy memory when I go.
I wanna leave some thing to let the whole world know,
that the rock 'n roll daddy has a done passed on,
but my bones Will keep a rockin' long after I'm gone.

Roll on.
Rock on.
Raw bones.
Well I still got all the rhythm in these Rockin' Bones.

Well when I die don't you bury me at all,
just nail my bones up on the wall.
Beneath these bones let these words be seen:
"This is the bloody gears of a boppin' machine."

Roll on.
Rock on.
Raw bones.
Well I still got all the rhythm in these bockin' bones.

I ain't worried about tomorrow just thinkin' about tonight.
My bones are getting restless and I do it up right.
A few more times around this hardwood floor,
before we turn off the lights and... close the door.

Roll on.
Rock on.
Raw bones.
Well there's still alot of rhythm in these Rockin' Bones."

Rest in peace, Lux Interior...
or just roll on, rock on.

Forever.

Thank you for a lifetime of great music.

-SJ

How “Watchmen” Might Not Suck.

2009-02-02T12:59:00.000-08:00

“Watchmen.”

That title has a weight attached to it for comic book creators like myself that rivals “Moby Dick,” “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Citizen Kane” in their respective mediums. Back in 1985, everyone who knew anything about comic books understood what they could be…
but that year Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons actually went out and did it.

Of all comic book-to-film adaptations in history, “Watchmen” has the most built in resistance, the most astronomical expectations and the most byzantine lore behind its realization. Terry Gilliam, James Cameron, the Wachowski brothers and David Fincher have all been rumored to be “in talks”, rumored to be “attached” as directors, rumored to be “shopping it around” for years among many other names too numerous to mention.
For people not familiar with it, or who only know it as a graphic novel (its collected form as a single trade paper back) “Watchmen” is first and foremost a comic book about superhero comic books.

“Watchmen” was originally conceived as an inaugural piece for characters acquired by DC comics from Charlton Comics. Charlton was another lesser known superhero based comic book company that was largely regarded as the Connecticut based independent alternative to Marvel and DC. Alan Moore wrote, what was largely regarded in the eyes of DC comics editors like Dick Giordiano, an “R-rated” masterpiece that left the newly acquired characters at endpoints that could not be expounded upon in future stories. It is largely held that it was Dick Giordiano’s suggestion that entirely new characters be fashioned in order to leave the Charlton characters available for future stories. So “Blue Beetle” became “Nite Owl,” “Captain Atom” became “Dr. Manhattan,” “The Question” became “Rorschach” and so on.
“Watchmen” differed from all other series in the 1980s for many reasons. No other comic book in the history of the medium had ever so directly reflected the dread and geopolitical anxieties of its own time. Instead of using superheroes as a power fantasy to ameliorate the tensions readers felt about the cold war and the possibility of a nuclear Armageddon, writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons rewrote actual history, with superheroes as influential actors living in civilization and affecting historical reality. Superheroes and their abilities in Moore’s “Watchmen” are as integral and consequential to history as the machine gun, famine, industrialization and disease are in our own world. The plot was a deceptively simple murder mystery concerning a superhero that eventually leads the reader to a conspiracy by another superhero who hopes to avert nuclear war by staging an extraterrestrial threat. Woven throughout are details of a world, frighteningly similar to our own with horrifying but logical differences. This is a world in which Richard Nixon is running for his fourth term, in all likelihood due to the fact that the Watergate break in would have been performed by government-sponsored superheroes… so they were never caught. It is a world described with supplemental text documents at the end of every episode; magazine articles, police files, textbook excerpts and tell-all books. By far its most subversive and haunting element is a fictional comic book within “Watchmen” itself called “Tales of the Black Freighter.” This comic book-within-the-comic book is Moore and Gibbons' homage and rebuke of the 1950s; lauding its creativity and deriding its conservatism, specifically recounting the effects of McCarthyism on the medium and its bravest creators.

The question for people who have lived with this very heavy, textually dense and semiotics obsessed comic book since the 1980s is:

What film could ever capture these ideas and this experience?

Hollywood as an industry does not have a great track record with regard to superhero movies. Bad movies outnumber good ones by a ratio of about 10 to 1 in my experience. The challenge of bringing any comic book to screen is that it is a visual medium to begin with, employing a specific graphic or illustrated reality. Comics express this specific reality on their pages and superhero comics in particular have suffered in cinema because human beings and even the materials and fabrics they wear cannot look the way they do in a comic book. Comic books are about characters above all else, so a failure in their physical depiction almost always means a failure in a film’s adaptation. While I’ve never thought this was absolutely important (and am largely alone in this sentiment,) even my sensibilities have been offended by uniform designs in movies and television.

The difficulties lie beyond “the look of the thing” however.
I believe the real challenge comic book adaptations face is capturing what my friend Abraham Castillo once called “the delicate truth” of a story, -not exhibiting a direct or shot-for-shot reproduction of the visual elements in a comic book. I experience a lot of resistance on this point. Some fans just want to see, live and experience the exact same thing over and over again.

This is not possible.

Comic books are comic books and movies are movies. Never shall the two meet. They can only reflect and transliterate one another, using each medium’s own unique phenomena, devices and aspects to expand or elaborate on common subject matter and narratives.

A good recent example of how a comic book adaptation can work in my opinion was Robert Rodriguez’s "Sin City". While he uses various compositions and graphic elements straight out of Frank Miller’s artwork, it’s not the visuals that enabled this movie’s resonance as an adaptation. Rodriguez managed (with the help of some actors who are so iconic in presence as to rival clichés in Film Noir for their potency as symbols) to create the world beyond the frame of "Sin City." The world moves and sounds they way the comic book implies. Rodriguez communicated its morality, its dramatic laws and emotional possibilities convincingly because he focused on the “the delicate truth.” The makers of “Watchmen” the motion picture have their own “delicate truth” to assess and communicate.

For “Watchmen” to succeed, I believe it will have to in some way be a “movie about superhero movies.”

One element that gives me hope, other than Zack Snyder’s inspired remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” is a trailer I saw that was scored with a different version of a Smashing Pumpkins song “The End Is the Beginning Is the End,” which was used in one of the most hated and pilloried superhero films of all time; Joel Schumacher’s “Batman and Robin.” The costume designs leaked to the public are very reminiscent of the injection molded synthetic muscle exo-suits used in that film as well. Perhaps there is now enough history in superhero cinema to give this film a chance at expressing the fascinating postures and complex ideas of its printed inspiration by commenting on its cinematic predecessors and stepping beyond a direct, frame for frame adaptation. In short, a movie that aims for as much profound meaning, sophistication and self awareness as the comic book it is named after.

Right now, only Zack Snyder and a few other people know for sure what path they took.

See you at the New York Comic Book Convention next weekend.

-SJ

The Rise of the Disposable Shoe.

2009-01-21T12:03:00.000-08:00

There was a time when you couldn’t walk more than eight blocks in any borough of New York City and not pass a shoe repair place. Like the Army and Navy stores that used to populate Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, they are dying out, steadily replaced by those most dispensable of retailers, the 99 cent store or the occasional nail salon. There are fewer and fewer of them around because people are fixing shoes less and less.

I miss them more and more these days.

I always loved having a place to get a motorcycle jacket re-conditioned or repaired by someone who actually cared and took a specialist’s pride in what they did for a living. I like the way those places smell as much today as I did when I was a kid. It’s probably because I grew up across the street from an old cobbler from Austria who let me play with his guard dog, a bear-sized German Shepherd. I feel the shoe shop is a last connection in our city to the world of the 1930s and 40s when men wore hats and every woman’s bra was a traffic halting inspiration. The shoe repair shop is a last tie to a place and time where, as Raymond Chandler once observed… New Yorkers talked the way they used to talk.

Which is to say, there was a time when just about every man woman and child in this city had class, authenticity and grace regardless of their station in life and despite all the racism and poverty they faced. A newspaper boy in 1935 Harlem looks better dressed in his work tweeds, turtle neck sweater, hobnail boots and driver’s cap than anybody I saw on the subway this morning. Even bums dressed smart decades ago, -despite themselves, because what they wore wasn’t designed to be thrown away the next year, but to last.

The shoe repair shop is still the place where you will line up behind a bus driver, a doctor, a teacher, a brick layer and so on. I haven’t ever found a computer in a shoe repair shop and the cast iron lathes and anvils have probably been in a family’s business for a few generations. A cell phone ring seems horribly out of place and an almost rude incongruity that disrespects the quiet utilitarian dignity of the surroundings.

The extinction of the shoe repair shop is a sign of a decades-long corrosive shift in how Americans think about the things they use. I own several different kinds of Rockports, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to replace their soles. If I find a model of shoe I like, I basically try to strike a deal for two pairs because when I wear them out they’ll likely be discontinued and I haven’t met a cobbler who can fix or patch an injection-molded rubber sole. Ask them if they can patch Neoprene and they’ll they look at you like you’re crazy.

The fusion of the sneaker and the shoe is responsible for this.

The sneaker was the first intentionally disposable shoe in human civilization. Prior to the sneaker, footwear was worn, repaired and worn until the upper, the last or the welt broke down and could no longer hold a sole, in effect until the entire shoe broke down. The sneaker, marketed overwhelmingly to the parents of children, for their children in the 20th century, was made to wear down and be discarded. If you didn’t mind inviting serious ridicule, back in the 70s, you could even have the local shoe repairman retread your sneakers with material from old tires. I don’t personally know one human being who ever did this.

Construction boots like the classic Georgia 5300 series black boot, Carolina’s MC Boot, and at one time the entire Frye boot line, were all made to be “worn in” and repeatedly reconstructed. It was the Timberland boot [1/27/09 SEE PETE LANKFORD'S REPLY IN COMMENTS BELOW: He makes valid counterpoints about Timberland's intentions in regard to their product design] that signaled the death of the repairable work boot in the late 1970s. Built strong and virtually waterproof, the Timberland construction boot forsook a repairable product for sneaker-like comfort. That comfort came with design limits: a sole that was cast, rather than sewn and therefore a sole that wore out beyond practical use. While Timberland was responding to obvious commercial demands to manufacture a construction boot that would be more comfortable than its competitors’ products, these boots may have set a damaging precedent for the design of the shoe unrelated to comfort. Timberland willingly or unwittingly introduced the concept of "planned obsolescence" to that most functional and practical of shoes, the work boot. The shoe industry had long known it was more profitable to make a shoe that can’t be fixed, than one that can. Shoe makers after all, have to sell shoes. The mandate for comfort was the excuse, and a flimsy one at that, because soft-soled shoes and pliable welts and shanks don’t have to be disposable if the shoe is made of the appropriate materials or designed with eventual repair in mind.
With all the talk of sustainability and waste reduction, doesn’t it make sense to consider the amount of waste tonnage generated by Nikes and Reeboks? How long does it take an old shoe to break down into its constituent elements? It all depends on how much plastic there is inside.

Perhaps a return to responsible design and manufacture in our footwear as well as in our cars and food packaging is a step in the right direction.

Regardless, I doubt it will come in time for my local shoe repairman on 207th Street and Broadway.

-SJ

Mac versus PC.

2009-01-16T20:26:00.000-08:00

My first experiences on computers date back to the fall of 1980 at the Calhoun School on the upper West side. I was a 7th grader and the "systems" back then were basically fancy calculators. There was no graphic user interface, (GUI) being that innovations like soft windows were years away from being an industry standard. In fact, up until the early 90s you had to know a little bit of programming to use any computer effectively. At the least, you had to know some basic DOS commands in order to run an application off of a CD ROM.

Anyone who had to install their own CD ROM drive before 1994 remembers the nightmare of aligning IRCs or physically configuring "jumpers" on a sound card in order to play music on their personal computer.
Yes, it was the stone age of the future age, but like all those pikers back in the middle ages, none of us knew just how early in the beginning we were living. My first IBM in 1993 had a hard drive memory totalling 256MB. It's enough to make you cry with laughter.
I think it was 1983 when I first heard the PC (then pretty much IBM) versus Mac arguments among my peers (9th graders) who were attached to their operating systems and branded computers with an almost cultish devotion.
I couldn't afford my own computer at the time. I used whatever systems where available in our lab, which wasn't easy because there was a program called "Dungeon" that every D&D fanatic was trying to either play or mod on any available computer. It was a pretty sad game, kind of like Exidy's "Venture" with only monochrome green graphics and "x"s for monsters while you were represented by a zero. It had no music or sound affects, just beeps.
I will tell you that in all the years, I'm talking 28 years now, of working on Apples and PCs, there is no substantial difference in processing speed, performance, etc. The interfaces are markedly different in their organization and interrelation (and even this has averaged out), but the truth is, and has always been: the fastest computer, the best computer... is the one that is coming out next fall. Period.

I once had an editor in the video department at a dot com company try to explain to me that Apple computers were faster because they "stacked information more neatly." He couldn't tell me how or why he knew this, but that I had to believe him because it was true. "Microsoft builds computers that run slower." He said smugly. When I pointed out to him that Microsoft didn't, and never had manufactured computers, he told me that was beside the point.
The performance fantasy surrounding Apple's computers is a myth that I have heard perpetuated time and time again. It has no technological basis. Computer power and processing speed is determined by the processing power of the chip sets, the hard drive's read and write speeds and the amount of RAM available. Those aforementioned hardware elements have historically varied from machine to machine and can be upgraded according to a user's budget. They are ultimately not a reflection of Apple's or the myriad of PC builders' product lines and design capability but of a user's disposable income.
This is not to say that Apple does not make great computers, and technological products, just that not buying Apple products doesn't make you work slower than everybody else no matter what someone who owns an Apple tells you.
These days consumers are bombarded by ads in TV and print in which a younger idiot says he's a Mac while an older idiot cowers and stutters because he's a PC. The Apple sponsored ads are clearly referencing a younger Steve Jobs and an older bloated Bill Gates to try and create anthropomorphic symbols of these rival product lines but also addressable totems for a culture of users. Neither characterization is accurate as Steve Jobs hasn't been a kid for decades and Bill Gates has never been overweight... what's more they are contemporaries who have crossed paths, collaborated and sparred in the world of business.
They are hardly a generation apart as the commercials suggest.

For my part, I have worked on Macs and I have worked on PCs and don't really see the difference in either except the fact that Apple computers have less software choices available which has more to do with their proprietary business posture than any flaw in design or manufacture. I use a PC in my home studio for the simple reason that my colleagues use PC computers. It's a file sharing, project work flow and compatibility issue, not one of perceived superiority over the "Macs".
One of my instructors once said of Apple computers,
"if the Mac were a car, it would be the fastest car, it would be the best looking, it would get the greatest mileage... but it would only drive on 5% of the roads."
that's cute, but entirely inaccurate. The Macs certainly boast some of the most objectively pleasing design of just about any product line, but to imply that they are so incompatible as to make them closed systems 95% of the time is just ridiculous and could only be believed by someone who doesn't work on one.

The bottom line is this:
if the computer you buy today does what you ask of it right now and for at least a couple of years, then you bought the right computer. Buying a product solely on its looks before looking at what it can do (Or because people say it looks cool) makes about as much sense as buying a car for the same reasons. The computer as status symbol is one of the more idiotic detours in our cultural evolution. Somehow we've managed to transfer the juvenile and emotional fixations exploited by automotive marketers that have kept people the world over buying low mileage, low quality, over priced pieces of impracticality on four wheels.

The computer you can afford, is the computer you should buy.

On a final note, I hope Steve Jobs recovers quickly and completely. I hope he lives to be 150. He's an enabler of creativity and ease of communication and deserves many more years in which to innovate for us all.

-SJ