Synchronicity
Friday, April 27, 2007
"I don’t mean to slight the artists or, I guess, the works — both series loomed large in my formative comics-reading years — but those aren’t even (arguably) the best works by those creators. If I were itching to choose a Marv Wolfman-George Perez story, I’d pick 'The Judas Contract' from New Teen Titans over [Crisis on Infinite Earths], any day."
- "/These/ are the top comic stories 'of all time'?" from Newsarama
"Not everyone shares Thurdlow's confidence. 'Crisis on Infinite Earths was a hackjob, pure and simple. Wolfman and Perez did much better work back in the third run of New Teen Titans in '82, '83,' said Toronto's Ed Fruem."
- "Comic-Book Store Employee Slated To Talk To Girl" from The Onion
posted by Griph @ 1:31 AM, ,
Natalie Curtis Wants Revenge
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
So I just finished She Wants Revenge's self-titled album. It's nice that in this day and age, a band can get popular simply by running Substance through FruityLoops' "indistinct nightclub" filter. If you're going to buy this album, at least the royalties will be enough for a copy of Reason and a six-month degree in audio production at the local community college.
Really, I have nothing against this band; they don't offend me at all (I'm looking at you Panic! At the Disco, you goddamn titans of fucking insufferability). In fact, just like the HorrorPops, there are two and a half songs proving I wasn't just hearing track one on repeat: I Don't Want To Fall In Love: genuinely danceable, fun, and the only saving grace of the album, Disconnect: an interlude, and god forbid considering it anything but, and Us: a half mark for cribbing Depeche Mode for a change.
The band also gets some extra points for killing the music track (Bad Habit, anyone?) at the end their single Tear You Apart so you can clearly hear Warfield intoning "I want to fucking tear you apart;" just in case it was necessary to be doubly sure their listeners were correctly Sharpieing the phrase onto canvas binders/entering it as a new MySpace display names.
posted by Griph @ 1:39 AM, ,
One live body, brains still somewhat intact.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Flying is not something I particularly enjoy doing when it's from somewhere I have to fend for myself. I spent a significant amount of time securing every latch and lock in the house; I don't give a shit if I'm living in one of the safest towns in Southern California. The god damned floor-to-ceiling glass panes that protect our precious personal possessions (signed copy of Invisibles #1/stuffed panda wearing headphones/photograph of Hiroshima used as postcard in the 50s bought on eBay/whatever else it is that Kathy holds dear) from the outside world, or, more specifically, from our numerous and seemingly innocuous neighbors that insist on regularly having shouting matches at two in the morning (he used the word 'nigga' the way old telegrams said STOP) and who stole my cigarettes off the porch when I wasn't looking.
Then, of course, is the battle of Will This Rot? Simply enough, the answer is "yes". And yet there's always the feeling like I forgot to throw something out and will come home to some sort of gigantic, intelligent mold colony. What, outside of Playstation games and getting the fuck out of there, said colony will get up to is beyond my concern. If there's a sentient being in the apartment that isn't Kathy or myself it damn well better have both been invited and realized that more often than not the invitation was made from courtesy alone (with several neighbors, having proved themselves to be respectable, decent human beings, excepted).
Then there's the airport. Never, ever forget to take anything that you can buy at the airport because a moral dilemma will undoubtedly arise. Is six dollars too much to spend on two pairs of triple-A batteries? Is six dollars too little to flip one's shit over after being completely convinced the shopkeeper, who uttered English syllables like a Speak-and-Spell found in a fault after an earthquake, had misspoke?
Oh, and do you like Sudoku? If you do that's great. The airport is the place to be, the airport is your Studio 54, the airport is Valhalla and Nirvana rolled into one. They've got sudoku books, sudoku pencils, sudoku pocket LCD games, sudoku television games, "Sudoku for Dummies", "The Sudoku-Driven Life", "DaSudoku Code", "The Seven Habits of Highly Efficient Sudoku Players" (owns pencils/can count), and the seminal favorite "Sudoku Does Dallas". Do you like crossword puzzles? Because the airport also has a stick which you can shove up your ass for on-board entertainment because there's no way in hell you're getting a book of crossword puzzles that contains something a little more challenging than figuring out a four-letter word for a common expletive directed at either a belligerent woman (US) or anyone/thing in particular (UK).
The flight itself was completely ordinary. I re-read Neuromancer for what seems like the tenth time.
posted by Griph @ 11:01 PM, ,
Lost or Stolen
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
When I was a little kid, I became sad on a regular basis when I regularly realized that one day I would grow tired of my toys and not play with them anymore. I don't think I've yearned to own things on a general basis since.
I found myself faced with an odd moral quandary today. Before I so much as expand on it, I want to mention that I'm not writing this to tout my, uh, superior ethical standing and you'll soon see why. I like to think that when the time comes to do the right thing, I try my best to do it unless it's particularly inconvenient.
Anyhow, I now live in a town of pretty affluent people. Affluent compared to where and how I grew up, although, possibly even moreso than the average (a conversation I overheard in class just today between two fellow students, no older than nineteen: "You drive a Lexus too, right?" "Yeah.") It's the damn suburbs. This is the place where soccer moms are born and die. Walking around during business hours, when I have things to take care of, I can see the remnants of the valley girls from every 80s movie you've ever seen, twenty years down the road. They're not particularly awful people, by any means, usually upbeat and polite housewives in sweatpants and bleach jobs that are long overdue for a touch up. I go to school with their sons and daughters and feel like I'm watching from overhead; a steady evolution to a two car garage with a Chevy Suburban in it, a house with a living room bigger than several apartments I've inhabited, a couple of kids and a spouse of Means (or being the Means oneself, of a Serious Business persuasion) and a generally sedate life. Once again, maybe it's where and how and with whom I grew up, or just my own ignorant and twitchy youth, but (and this is a personal preference here), it's a cautionary tale of the consequences of living by the book. I may have no idea what I'm going to do with myself, nor how I'm going to accomplish it when I do, but I sure as hell have a clear cut picture of what to run screaming from.
I found an iPod today. It was just laying around in the smoking pits they set up in the school (insert picture here of my puffing away under just about ever No Smoking sign on campus). I wasn't about to keep it. I stole a calculator from a classmate I despised in Junior High once and buried it under some books when I got home. Eventually, classic Tell-Tale Heart-style, I was forced to idly throw it at him during lunch the following week claiming that I found it in the bathroom. I took it to the lost and found, knowing full well that anyone losing the item wouldn't do more than a cursory search for the damn thing and admit to themselves that it's gone. Hell, having thought I had lost my glasses at one point and asked around, I don't think many students (or instructors for that matter) knew there even was a lost and found. I put two and two together and asked if there was a statute of limitations on it (as I know the police, at least in New York, have one on found property). I was also told there's a goddamn stack of them at the office. Imagine that. A stack of MP3 players, each one a good half month's rent, just sitting there. Even now I'm thinking I shouldn't have bothered, and yet I know I wouldn't have been able to live with myself. The chances were against the damn thing having as much monetary value to the person that lost it compared to myself, or it being as irreplaceable to them as it would be had I gone out and bought one. The kids here are rich, and they don't know they're rich. I'm greatly overstereotyping of course. It's also Christmas season and it's not like I haven't met people that replace perfectly functional electronic equipment with the new breed just for novelty.
...then again, I've got two pairs of new sneakers in the closet and I'm still wearing the pair held together by duct tape and hope.
I think the point of this entire story is that conspicuous consumption makes me ill, but that's a glib and political assessment and not so much applicable as overhanging. But it makes me sick not just because it exists, but because it throws my radar of right and wrong off to a disturbing extent. And, really, that radar is all I've got.
posted by Griph @ 4:59 PM, ,
Rumself resigned. Yeah, you've probably read this roughly six hundred times these next few days. Not that it's not great news or anything but, somehow I know how it's going to look in twenty years.
A little something like this:
REPORTER: So did that disappoint you, when Jon Stewart was nice to Kissinger?
WINSTEAD: I don't mean that you would necessarily need to grill Kissinger. But to let it go...
REPORTER: So you should jokingly say, "Say, Dr. Kissinger, what about those 2 million dead Cambodians...?"
WINSTEAD: Exactly! As a way to say something. To me, it seems like the elephant in the room.
So how about it, Mr. Rumsfeld. How about those ever-rising figures of dead Americans and Iraqis?
Resignation is the misdirection in the nation-fuck magic trick of zero accountability.
posted by Griph @ 2:36 AM, ,
Get off my lawn, you damn kids!
Monday, November 06, 2006
"The pieces are chock full of expertly selected, expertly told anecdotes, such as the L-train 'iPod wars' in New York, where subway riders challenge one another to coolness battles that consist of facing off your iPod's current track against another rider's, to see who has the better taste."
Fuck you, Cory Doctorow, fuck you to death. It's one thing to write a book about this idiocy, it's a wholly different to rave about how
posted by Griph @ 11:28 PM, ,
Inventory
1- TV shows that I have seen over and over again make terrific background radiation for activities. For a long time now, on a near-nightly basis, I'll watch a TV show that I've seen the complete run of, repeatedly, while doing whatever it is I do online (usually browsing Wikipedia entries). It started off with Newsradio, which has been a favorite show of mine since age twelve or thirteen, and has recently been Seinfeld. I don't laugh at the jokes anymore, and I can recite most of the content from memory (especially Newsradio), but somehow it's comforting. Hell, I'm watching "The Barber" as I write this.
2- I have absolutely no sense of rhythm. At all, I mean, completely. I can not make a simple beat with my hands. I can't dance or even snap along with music. One of my coworkers would regularly catch me trying to snap to a Buddy Holly song and then start twitching, as if in the throes of an epileptic seizure, and snap with her fingers flailing wildly. It was funny, actually. My dad was a musician, so I guess there's nothing genetic about it. Still, it's scary how so much as trying to follow the bass line on the 4/4iest of songs devolves into an acoustic rendition of a Merzbow track.
3- After getting that god damned tooth extracted, it loosened up a stretched-out piece of cheek or gumline right around the back molar. Now it constantly feels like I'm trying to swallow something stuck in the back of my mouth, but can't. There's a Sisyphean ordeal going on back there and I'm not supposed to poke at it or anything. Adding to the problem, I despise putting my fingers in my mouth, what with knowing exactly where they have been.
4- Chris Onstad (the guy responsible for Achewood) has a grasp of the English language unlike any writer I have ever read. There's something completely effortless about the way he writes, with constant bait-and-switch statements, odd grammar, and utterly surreal imagery. I couldn't give anything about golf, and yett: "His sole club, his five-iron, is one of those brand new high-tech numbers with perimeter weighting, carbon-fiber honeycomb shaft, and peanut allergies, so his shots are given and precise, despite the fact that his swing resembles a man beheading a gopher with an adze." I could read that for hours on end. Hell, I do. I don't think there's anything I've reread as much and as often as his blog, followed closely by the Achewood back issues, and the blogs he establishes for his characters.
5- Speaking of Wikipedia, I recently made my first edit (it's the last entry under Trivia). It was just a sentence identifying a Batman reference, of all things, but I'm still proud of it. The fact that someone is going to read that sentence and think "Huh! Whaddayaknow," is a nice.
6- I read comic books. I read a heck of a lot of comic books. And yet, I still read more about comic books than the books themselves. For some reason, I need much, much more concentration to read work from even the late 80s than from books from the mid-90's forward. Sure the art has considerably changed, the framing, among just about every other visual and verbal aspect, but I still can't explain it. This really limits my scholarship in the field, as it depends mostly on what others have written about certain topics. About a year or two back Andrew regaled me with the last fifty years of Green Lantern history and continuity.
7- Codeine makes me pass gas like a bagpipe in a chili-eating contest.
8- If I ever decided to get a tattoo sleeve, I'd use Kirby Dots as space filler. I wonder if there's tattoo artists specializing in comic book imagery. I once saw a Nightcrawler on a sanitation worker's arm that was worthy of the page. Kathy refuses to listen to my tattoo ideas anymore because I change them every, well, several hours. The second subdermal ink nanites are availible I'm getting all of me injected. I guess that means tattoos are meant for people that, specifically, are not me.
posted by Griph @ 11:26 PM, ,