ChrisW

Mousewife to momshell in the time it takes to get that new tattoo

2012-01-11T19:04:00.000-08:00

is just one of the many bizarre lyrics we are subjected to now that David Lee Roth and Van Halen have released their first new song in many years. "Tattoo" isn't horrible, but the video is just...

It's disturbing. I'm not the world's biggest VH fan, but almost every part of the video felt familiar, like it was brought out of a time capsule, covered in mold and infested with larvae. Let us dissect, shall we?

The first bit of evidence that something is off is with that ghastly "Tattoo, tattoo" which opens the song. It's horrifying and worse, it's the song's chorus and sole hook. This is where Michael Anthony helped as a back-up vocalist. It would work if they held each note longer and maybe sung a little more. You wouldn't sing the words "dance the night away" like that, right?

DLR waving flags on stage was a very clever visual gimmick. However, it amounts to a 'look at me' which doesn't compare to an instrumental solo and doesn't translate to a screen. I think this and most of the other shots involving time reverse came from an early VH video, probably "Jump", but that's where the more knowledgeable fans come in.

The intro is good. DLR looks like he's giving orders to someone during the strobe effect, but it's a very creditable guitar intro and I honestly think they look good, in a weird way. The camera on a dolly works, but feels like it's trying too hard at the same time. Al is almost invisible during the entire video, but Wolfgang makes up for it.

As usual, the lyrics are barely intelligible and not worth the effort. DLR thinks we need to ponder the body of a man pushing 60 in a way that doesn't make us want to hurl. The bass sounds very good and (predictably) internet scuttlebutt says EVH played it himself.

They suddenly switch to Roth in a jacket doing something which makes no sense and isn't in synch with the vocals. While this is common on Youtube, half the fun is in seeing how far off the synch is. After a few seconds, it's clear this isn't that sort of video. But why? The guitar builds nicely though, since the vocals don't.

Shots dropped in of the band playing, and then we suddenly realize we've hit a chorus. Whoever edited the video actually got it right when we see DLR and EVH step together to start singing. Lip-synching in EVH's case, but they're trying really hard to look like they like each other. Like everything turned back and it was just after 1984 again. They're even hip by using words like "mousewife" and "momshell", portmanteaus popularized by a recent popular book. The only concession to age is that these aren't expressly teenage fantasies.

I've developed a theory that Roth lost his heart to EVH in a way he probably hasn't even come to terms with yet. This unique form of manlove ran directly opposite the lifestyle this archtype cock-rocker has otherwise embodied. In 1984, he got too full of himself and demoralized the band to the point that they couldn't work together. He left, expecting to take the world by storm. A few years later, his bubble had popped and he began to make noises about coming back, which wouldn't happen for several years yet.

When the '96 reunion happened, Roth fell too hard, misread things and screwed up as much as he could. He'd waited all this time, but the romance had stumbled. Further failures impeded this glorious moment but now it's here.

It's when the two of them are finishing the first run through "to get that new tattoo" that it looks like Roth's smile is more like desperation. Maybe he's had a ton of plastic surgery that's showing. It wouldn't be out of character, but considering what it must have taken to get EVH to this point, what must be going through his mind. The lyrics were awkward and slowed down the song's pace right when it should have speeded up.

It's also strange to realize that so far, nobody in the video is seen with a tattoo. This is finally remedied when father, son and holee Roth mime the multi-tracked chorus vocals. Someone elsewhere on the screen has something prominent and blurry, so there's that tat.

It's not just that so much of the video feels like a retread, it's that they're clearly no longer as good at it. Roth is no longer a gymnast. And he's wearing bell-bottoms. There was a hint of keyboards, but the song remains firmly in the guitar aspect of the band. Not surprising, it originated from 1978 and caught in multiple bootlegs as a song called "Down in Flames".

It's not that VH uses old unreleased material that causes some to complain (including myself, as we shall see) it's that he has always made the claim to be constantly writing new material. Many people, including Sammy Hagar, vouch for a dozen new albums worth of material sitting on the floor. That's fine for someone like Sammy Hagar, who can come up with something to finish a piece or join another piece to it, coming from roughly the same musical approach as EVH, basic kick-ass rock'n'roll. But otherwise, it's not clear what's there other than him pushing 'record' when he practices, and he practices a lot.

David Lee Roth has to run the show. Reportedly, he edited this video. Hence his return to form, a low-voiced spoken-word gibberish that is thankfully cut to half a verse before it's time to start heading back to the chorus as the guitar gets louder. Visually, the camera twists around for no reason except maybe to change angles. Suddenly things get right again for the strobe effect.

Then they try to stage a clip. The three of them turn around like they aren't ready yet and then start singing. They pass the chick with the tattoo in the background while Wolfy looks really into singing for a second, then turns his eyes to see if he's doing it right. And EVH isn't being serious either.

The transition into the chorus is genuinely effective this time. The music carried the spoken-word portion, which turned into an effective, proper Van Halen chorus, loud and boistrous, "Tat-Too, Tat-Too". You can almost headbang to that. Roth gets off a few shrieks like the old days and they start segueing into the bridge.

If there's a reason for this song to exist, this is it. The guitar solo that metalheads have been denied for so many years is only seconds away. The drums have been strangely muted the entire song, but so has the bass. It's a Van Halen song, people don't listen to VH for that.

This is the sort of material that the boys developed night after night, in between covers until they had enough original material that they could start looking for work in places where cover bands weren't hired. Roth was a great showman and right up through this song, gives it everything he has from the first step. He did the patter and came up with stuff to shout at the right place. Repeat a few times and call it a new song. Maybe Eddie throws in a new guitar solo.

That's what they did here, with the hip transplant guitarist not trying to jump any longer in the footage. And then...

Roth won't shut up. He isn't interested in serving the needs of the song, he has to insert his ugly tuneless voice for way longer than neccesary. Even the Sammy-esque "yeah" doesn't redeem it. Or he could have put his spoken-word bit here.

The guitar solo sounds good. Whoever's behind the camera doesn't have any idea what to do with it. Then we return to the strobe effect where suddenly the vocals are in synch. Roth reads from the teleprompter about his Uncle Danny's union tattoo and he wears the chapter number also. The first time I heard the song, I misunderstood and thought he was also referring to relatives in the Holocaust. Not so, but the relevance of this tattoo (other than to the "union" I think he means) creates a jarring juxtaposition to the tramp stamp the rest of the song is about.

Musically, the song continues. The video becomes strange as they start dropping balloons, presumably as a climax. So why is it still in black and white? Dave and Eddie share a close-up and suddenly Dave's eyes move fractionally off-camera, catch something, and move back as he gets angry. This is where the look of desperation comes from on the next shot, among the streamers.

The album is in the can, DLR has coaxed, nudged and dragged the VH brothers through the album sessions. Maybe there's even songs in there less than 30 years old. But this is as good as it's going to get. Not as good as in 2007, or 2000, or 1996, much less 1985.

The best parts of the video are the clips at the end, piled together in a heady mix of rockin' out and flags, balloons, confetti. There's another shot of Alex in reverse, which gives the drumming a weird effect. Then we're back to the strobe. We have no idea if DLR is discoursing on Western Civilization or attempting a take of a different verse, but he gives up and whirls away, leaving us with a very cool (if morbid) image to fade out on.

Many people spend a lifetime married to the wrong person. Fewer people (presumably) spend their lives waiting for someone. Not like this. It's like a tattoo, once you get one, it doesn't come off.

I guess Kay can't tell Michael that Presidents don't have people killed now...

2012-01-08T09:24:00.001-08:00

They couldn't give what they were doing any thought. They didn't want to think about what they might be getting into. They forgot about the Constitution, Article 1, Section 5, Clause 4.

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

Is the Senate Majority Leader is so derelict in his duties that he assumed the Senate was adjourned without the other House's consent? Was he impeding the President in making appointments? The President's was a Constitutional Professor (we are assured) so he could never make such a gross error. He can still present nominees the proper Constitutional way so his dignity is preserved, but what the heck could Harry Reid be thinking?

Not only that, but he specifically tricked the President into appointing Richard Cordway to direct the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, a post that specifically requires Senatorial approval.

Yet all the people who pretended George W. Bush bent and broke the Constitution will just ignore this like a summer rain. That's doublethink.

This is the desperation of Wile E. Coyote edging further and further out onto a limb that's already sawed off. It cannot be wrong because of Bush/Rush/Fox/Palin/etc...

The OWS movements ran away with their tails between their legs. The last noise they made was some victory nonsense about 'changing the conversation', as though 99% is any different than basic Marxism which they were full of six months ago. That's not change, and all the rapes, assaults, thefts, racism, Jew-hatred and sanitation disasters don't make it so.

The Tea Party has faded away because there's nothing for them to do. And they had jobs, remember? They cleaned up after themselves, went home and anonymously went about their lives. How much money is the Occupy movement costing each municipality to clean up a mess the leeches made? Way to protest there. Good thing the Montgomery Bus Boycott didn't have the same spirit. They actually made it through a winter. So did the Bolsheviks, come to think of it.

I think the extent of the leftist media-fed delusion is rotting and falling away in the face of its own hypocrisies. An internet poll went around asking OWS protestors about Time Magazine naming Protestors the Person of the Year, with a half-hearted nod to Muslim men and women risking their lives across the world. As expected, only one protestor noticed that Time Magazine was a rich corporation, the rest thought it was sorta cool.

A report of OWS analyzes that it was mostly made up of "Communitarians", i.e. people who sought to belong with little intent beyond that, and "Professionals", people who will drop whatever they're doing at the first sign of revolution, because they want in. As the various messes they left in urban areas demonstrates, they can't really plan anything or build anything.

The buzz is now that the Occupy movement doesn't need to "occupy" anything. They're so close to triumphing over reality, it's almost scary.

Yo yo peeps, what it do?

2012-01-01T02:51:00.000-08:00

The new book continues. On a 4-day weekend, my goal was to have 20 pages of editing finished. I was at about 17 and a half finished before I quit last night, with another 5 pages of essays on Popeye that I'd hand-editted when I woke up yesterday morning. So there's not much worry I'll make my goal. I also broke down the structure of Side A roughly into its finished form.

There's so many pages. At least "Polonia" was one story. There was a forward momentum, just in cutting the number of pages until reaching 'the end'. Now, it seems no matter how many pages I mark up and move to the 'finished' side of the binder, there's a ton of them which are marked up and nowhere close to finishing, to say nothing of all the pages which are still sorta clean and fresh-looking.

Then there's Side B, the short short stories where I had assumed I'd let their age excuse the work. I was barely going to polish for grammar. I decided I'd give revision a shot, maybe with the one story written before enlisting (included for completeness) A month or two later, I'd finally re-written all of them and was hoping the spirit of creation was done and now all they needed was the grammar/spelling polish. Nope, it's gonna be @60 corrections a page or more, and that'll just be this draft. This is why I was going to let the age excuse the work.

Of course by the time I get done with all that, who knows how much more I'll have written. One reason I've been glad to spend less time on this blog is for the clear break it will provide. I've also realized that President Obama's term (first term???) can be detached from the other existing material and made into its own 'side', That way the historical essays would end during GWB's term (which seems so distant now) and the majority of political ranting would be confined to its own book. The next book - the historical essays/best of my of other fiction - is already full and I'll have to start cutting stuff out of that in a few months, inshallah.

So after the history book, Book 4 would probably be the Obama book backed with the best of everything I haven't gotten to yet. Book 5 would probably be compiling all the stuff I had to cut out, along with all the new stuff I hadn't included on the way.

Side B of Life and Polonia fits entirely within the seven weeks that it took to write Side A. I could be looking at two or three years worth of editing just to publish everything I have available, and that's without going into messageboards and mailing lists and pulling up stuff I wrote there. That would double the amount of stuff I've written about comics, music, Star Wars and politics. Basically I could spend the next decade of my life editing and publishing.

It's not a bad idea. Certainly it's the quickest way to get me that stack o' books I always wanted, and I could certainly do it. But the editing is getting to me. The prospect of another three books looks daunting, not counting others culled from my internet time (then there's all the notebooks filled with handwriting to daunt even the toughest cryptographers, I know there's salvagable stuff in those).

I doubt it would get me anywhere, but that sounds like a feasible way to spend years. I'm slowly hammering out the plot for the next work of fiction I intend to write. I'm also toying with another short short story to cap off the current book, but I won't write it without a real idea.

I'm also considering doing a comic book real quickly with my existing comics. Between the Seth DeSignor strips and work I made on deployments, I've followed Comixpress' guidelines already. With some help on the cover and the text (excerpts from "Polonia" :D ) I could finally satisfy my dream of making an actual comic book, 48 pages or so. It would actually be readable too, not like the ones I've hand-drawn. As with the prose, it just remains for me to find time to get it finished.

Eric Holder continues to dig himself deeper. For acts, cover-ups and statements that would have gotten any other Attorney General fired long ago in the Fast and Furious matter of giving guns to Mexican gangs without any way of tracking them, leading to many deaths, including a US federal agent. Presumably Holder (and his boss) weren't stupid enough to be any closer to this mess than hearing about after the fact. But then what are they hiding?

Funny how there's no urgency on the part of the media to uncover this. Such a juicy scandal and everything. But then, they spent a lot more effort trying to find out Herman Cain's extramarital affairs than John Edwards. They were flat out given Rielle Hunter's name, and is there any evidence Cain had any affair yet? One woman finally gave her name after it had been dragged out for a long time. Ah well, Rielle Hunter probably didn't come up too often on the JournoList messageboard, the internet service where several hundred liberal journalists got together to discuss, coordinate, brainstorm, etc.

The media (who steadfastly insist that they have no liberal bias whatsoever) never followed up any claims made by John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, the French, Russians, Chinese or anyone else about Iraq's WMD programs, even if those claims were made before 9/11. Did they investigate the oil-for-food scandal, or would that interfere with too many arrangements they've made with despots. CNN ignored covering Saddam's atrocities since 1990 because he had given them access.

Eason Jordan, a CNN executive who admitted Saddam had been favored this way, later accused American soldiers of targetting journalists in Iraq. This accusation, like so many others, was never proven. Just repeated and taken as true by those who call themselves objective. The same thing happened to Jesse Jackson Jr's claim that he and other black congressmen were called "nigger" and other slurs. He even had his phone there to record evidence, but none was ever found. Didn't stop Tea Partiers from being slurred as racist, then or since.

Of course if you go by the media, there's no violence of any kind at any Occupy site, never mind the actual rapes, thefts, assaults, property damage and sense of entitlement that is the only fruit growing at the few locations where people still live up to the word "occupy".

Most have gone home, chased out by low temperatures (which wasn't an option for the Montgomery bus boycott) or police (while the Syrian protestors would be lucky to be treated so gently). They declared victory and went back to what they were doing beforehand with little if any sense of shame. They didn't even clean up after themselves the way we all knew they wouldn't. Or they would have started acting like responsible members of the community and taken initiative to clean up their own feces. Because they aren't leeches and whiners, you know?

Who are they kidding, this way they can comfortably ignore anything they don't like. It's easier to 'unfriend' somebody from a cozy chair than to accept people with uniforms and weapons are needed to "police" the community.

But none of this will be heard from the media. How are Libya and Egypt doing, since OWS claimed such solidarity a few months ago? Oh. Well, there's leftists for you, results are other people's worry. Leftists worldwide gave Iranian Marxists support in overthrowing the Shah and have ignored the place since except to blame the US or Israel. There's probably a lot more Helen Thomas and Nir Rosens than Daniel Pearl's out there.

Obama's given up on any coherent policy, being totally focused on re-election now. It shouldn't surprise anybody, but doesn't it at least disappoint some of his supporters? He could at least push Congress to vote for a budget this year. His polls are supposedly doing better so if he presents one, he might get at least one vote this time. It would show his improvement as a chief executive.

Or maybe he's hoping we'll be at war with Iran and it will save him. They're threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz, currently an important sealane. They don't have any standing to do this, they would be militarily foolish to back it up and within a couple of years, pipelines in neighboring countries will be finished to remove any threat they could have over oil transportation. But the mysterious explosions must be driving them nuts whether they know what happened or not. Who would dare to inform the mullahs they have no idea what happened?

So three years into Obama's Presidency, neither Iran nor the Muslim world at large seems any friendlier or more peaceful. In Egypt, they've burned a library that has been a repository of knowledge since, uh, Napoleon and have discussed plans to cover the pyramids with plastic so the pagan idols will be useless. Presumably destruction will follow. At least the administration wasted three years renouncing their predecessor before coming to the same conclusion, that something should be done and quick. That's why HE'S the President.

Welcome to the world OWS would leave us, tribes scrabbling for survival without history or human progress. Like Nir Rosen and Lara Logan, if you are on the wrong side, you deserve what you get. ["What are your qualifications?" "Rape, murder, arson and rape." "You said rape twice." "I like rape."] All you need to do is mouth some nonsense about social justice and it doesn't matter how well you live, these suckers will let you get away with anything.

Recognizing useful idiots for what they are, here's some of OWS' biggest fans. I am surprised though, Joe Biden? He isn't as deserving as the others on the list, is he?

http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2011/10/31/the-99-official-list-of-ows/

People can freely disagree about economic problems, or social ones for that matter. But appropriating other people's property to promote a gagglefuck of incoherent nonsense and costing other people time, energy and money just to put up with you, much less clean-up and incarceration, it's not a First Amendment issue of any kind.

This idiotic movement will fall apart once they have to start purging all the 99% who don't go along, which is pretty much everybody now that they're safely ensconced in their parents' basement. My primary concern would be for the professional left, the cadre who evolved once it became more than just a cool hang-out.

Once everybody divided into tents, the cadre found it easier to keep accountability and order, but without actual authority - no leaders - they couldn't keep the uncivilized at bay. By the time of the women-only tent and police comments about 'another boy getting raped', anybody with an ounce of sense (and the women too, ba-dump bump) was getting out of there if they hadn't already.

It was actually a decent lesson in the distinction between officers and NCOs, as well as why both are needed. To the extent there was ever going to be any direction in the movement, the cadre were needed to make that happen, and they had to maintain order every day anyway. That would leave them no time for planning the direction, which is the job of officers. Both positions provide experiences that the rank-and-file wouldn't have.

Since money/payment/property/accountability isn't considered, there's no way to set up a chain-of-command (still no leaders) but the mass of occupiers continues to cause problems. Continued, that is, most of them are gone. How are the cadre responding to this? Thing is, if they vote, all of the OWS movement will go with the security of Obama. What else will they do?

If they don't vote or if they primary Obama or vote third party, they guarantee the Republicans win, at least in a can't-afford-to-risk-it sort of way. Even if they all vote for him, he's alienated so many others he couldn't afford to alienate, the leftist base won't make a difference. Even if they're self-destructive, it would make a bigger boom to re-elect Obama and then have him flip out. I'd give a 50-50 chance of his being impeached if he wins, so there's that.

He's just the chance rider though. It could have been Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry or Al Gore steering the leftist ship. Or Joe Lieberman, following a two-term Al Gore?

The Rolling Stones are preparing for something in a month or so for their 50th anniversary. The band's surviving members have showed up to rehearsals although I gather Mick hasn't done much. He's trying yet another solo project called SuperHeavy. Three other singers, one's a chick in her early 20s and another's the grandson of Bob Marley. Yeah, this is a serious project. But I am glad to know the Stones are still on the job for this last hurrah.

I'd love to see them play, play, play and record everything. Engineers can work to do mixes on-the-fly and if they play the same song over, listen to the mixes on a break. This way they can hit every cover, every deep cut, everything. Maybe I'm just projecting. Moving on.

Van Halen has announced the new single should be out in a few days. Some time ago, I noted that they reached their apex with DLR during Reagan's re-election, broke up with Sam during Clinton's re-election and reunited with him during GWB's re-election. An omen?

Eddie Van Halen is still somewhat of a functioning human being. Here's a video for a song he recorded for a porno soundtrack. Don't worry, it's safe for work, directed by the movie's director. For all the bad things I can say about him, it's a pretty awesome piece of music.

Aerosmith is vaguely working. Slash's new album should be out before too long. His live album is full of great versions of old songs, changed from formulaic studio versions. "Rocket Queen", "Civil War", "Mr. Brownstone", this is rock for a new generation.

I'm bored now. But at least I've posted at some point in 2012.

Books for sale.

2011-11-17T04:13:00.000-08:00

The book is finished. People have paid me for copies of it, asked for autographs and everything. Naturally typos are leaping out at me. Almost directly across from each other, I spelled it both "capitol city" and "capital city" on pages 4 and 5. Then I found a few typos which weren't in the proof copy. They only appeared after the most recent draft I saw. Not sure how that happened, but whatever.

While I try to resolve difficulties with PayPal, anyone so inclined can send a check (or just staple 10$+ shipping bill to an envelope) to:

Christopher Woerner
BSC 2/5 SFG (A)
Fort Campbell, KY 42223

The price may increase depending on shipping costs. The book has an ISBN number [ISBN-10: 1466228601 ISBN-13: 9781466228603] but I have no idea what would happen if someone used those, or even how one tries. I wanted the printed books. I'm funny that way. Maybe it's available on Kindle or something. If people start getting copies, someone will start wanting money for it, and the rights are all mine.

The OWS movement is hemorrhaging (or at least converting to a different form. Having been chased out by people who'd had enough with violent assault-committing freeloaders who won't permit the police or health department to do their duties. Attempts at riots all across the country led the most violent and unstable to jail, almost like they were set-up. Not that they really were, but I'm assuming the 'leaders' will reach that conclusion next in their proto-Bolshevik state.

OWS has backed themselves into a corner. They can either stay individuals and whine that they don't have any sense of community or they stay together and devolve into things like this. It won't win them any friends and they don't have the organizational capacities to entrench themselves. They're still pretending that trashing someone else's property is a First Amendement Right.

They should count themselves lucky the police threw them out, sparing them the national embarassment of quitting without even picking up after themselves. How many totalitarians would do that? Occupiers in a California bank today didn't trouble themselves to find the toilets.

Still, at least those inclined towards violence and destruction were inspired to call a Day of Action, getting many of them arrested. Wonder what the others will do without their leaders?

I would like to write more, but I have a very long day ahead. Definitely one of those 'more done by 9AM' days.

“Everything all right back there, Vic?” Stut ushered him to another booth. “Gentlemen, may I present Victor, my esteemed predecessor.”

“A pleasure,” grunted Commander Grinch. He was here to oversee the Tall Tribes, prized runball team of the 11th and 12th Hordes. The two shook hands and turned back to the game. “Tell me,” he asked Victor, “how does this large court work? Why is it in this sport? In my native Svetlandia, what you call runball we call a game with a small number of players. Five players for three teams is considered a very big game for us. Here you have no fewer than three teams with no less than ten players and that is, how do you say, stupidly ridiculous.” Grinch’s aide whispered something into his ear and he continued without missing a beat, “I see I have chosen words badly. May we agree it is overly complicated?”

Victor couldn’t help but smile at someone who cared so little whether he gave offense. Grinch was jocular and articulate in his crudeness so the effect almost negated itself to geniality. “It’s complicated, but don’t give too much importance to the individual players’ abilities. Yes, they’re excellent, but if the overall playing strategy is bad…” He pointed at a player who had just scored for the Pigeons. Over on the wall, large signs were moved across a cloth screen by a mechanism which displayed the name, “Oluf Kluto” who had the ball right now and “7”, his place in the line-up this play.

“See that?” he asked Grinch. “It took seven players to run the ball across the court this far, but they made it. That’s strategy.”

“Hmmm,” the Commander’s expression said ‘I must look like someone who’s thinking seriously.’ His lips pursed under the tiny mustache and his cheeks puffed out, making his face look fat. “But that is, how do you say, wasteful. Look at how many players just stood there doing nothing because they were forbidden to move outside the nyukniks. What do you call those lines on the floor that make little squares that the players have to stand up in when another team is up?”

He went on. “Up north in my country, the players are few and the courts are small. Every player is crucial to obliterating the enemy. But here, with your many pretty men standing in lines, it looks like a bizarre parade or ritual performed for the crowd. Who is the first with the ball? When the ball leaves the player’s hands, is he in control of it or is it a free ball? What constitutes, what do you call, inappropriate touching of another player’s ball? Who cares?”

“That’s fair, I can see that.” Victor and Grinch drank beer and shifted position to see better. They had no audience, only the competition. “Yeah, some of those players get all worked up about their place in the pecking order. On most teams, there’s a player or two who’s no good, but he had the pull to get himself onto the team anyway. It’s a status thing more than anything. That’s the sort of guy who’s likeliest to cause problems, on the court or off.”

“Yes, you see, you understand,” Grinch bit into a gigantic sandwich that dripped with vegetables and grease. “In Svetlandia where I am from, we have no more players than we need. Everybody must fight for the team. Sometimes we kill the losers and burn down their father’s house. Is good sport, you know?”

A Tall Tribesman had just scored and was forming up for their turn. Team captains called out the next play while players stepped to different gridsquares. A Tribesman patted a Pigeon on the ass.

“The fans like it too,” Victor said. “They root for teams, but I wonder if their favorite players are what they really care about. I met half these kids one time or another, usually when they were starting out and dragged to some official function. They’re the ones I follow.”

“Say Victor,” Grinch hadn’t finished swallowing yet, “in my home country up north, when a free ball is picked up, it is called a found ball. What do you call it?”

“Mine ball,” said a woman wearing a distinguished golden dress that matched her hair. “Victor, it’s been too long.”

“Wonderful to see you, Lana,” they embraced.

“SVET-lana, you crass oaf. You always forget. Are you two getting along?”

“Yes,” said Grinch. “Thank you for telling me what to call mine ball.” He set the remains of his sandwich down and grabbed a fresh one. After one more enormous bite, he threw it out the window where it hit the people 15 feet below in the poor seats.

The game halted when the enforcement players argued whether a Pigeon had illegally moved too many gridsquares. “You see?” Grinch asked nobody in particular. “Such a waste of time and people. They could be poking each other in the eyeballs with sticks to kill time the way they do in my home country of Svetlandia.”

“So you’re into sports these days?” Victor asked.

“You could say that,” Lana smiled pleasantly. “I’m the chief diplomat for Svetlandia and being here qualifies as a diplomatic operation between two countries that are not currently at war.”

“That’s reassuring,” said Victor. “How did you get that job?”

“In my country, anything is possible,” she radiated with pride. “Would you like to get together some time during the games?”

Outside, there was applause. Someone had scored and the first quarter was over with a score of 1,0-0,1.

“I’d like that. I’ll bring Wenda. Have you met anybody?”

“My only true husband is Tok Rocksplitter, thundering sky god of the Great Mountain Range. I’m also seeing someone on and off, but we’re in one of our off periods right now. How did you two meet?”

After a few more pleasantries, Victor went back to his booth. As he left, he heard Commander Grinch ask “How do they call this runball when there are no naked women beheading the ugliest one and using her head for a ball? These are all feeble old men!”

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

2011-11-08T23:10:00.000-08:00

The Attorney General, Eric Holder, holds on. At the beginning of the Fast and Furious scandal, the idea was floated that this was intended to be an excuse for gun control laws in the US. How ludicrous, federal agents giving guns to Mexican criminals with no tracking as an argument for Texans and Arizonans to surrender their self-defense?

[Not to mention Occupy Oakland and all the other OWS sites which have attracted far more violence and vermin than the Tea Parties did. But the Tea Partiers had to go to work the next day.]

But Holder's testimony to Congress followed the script. Do they really think this will work?

Not so fortunate is Obama's Chief of Staff Bill Daley. After the President's ill-fated address to both Houses of Congress coincided with a Republican primary, Obama reportedly thundered at his staff for not seeing that coming, because it made him look like egomaniacal tyrant.

If this is true, then Obama (and Daley) don't seem to realize that two or three levels below them, anyone who noticed the events falling at the same time would assume that the President was out to attack his Republican enemies. Wasn't that the point all along?

[I don't know what Obama expected would happen. Perhaps his 'jobs bill' would be passed by immediate acclaim after his awesome speech and he would be the most adored President ever. The jobs bill was a rehash of what the Democrats couldn't pass at the beginning of his term and a long-delayed plan that was supposed to be a response to all the bills passed by the House and the Senate's inability to pass a budget in what must be pushing 1000 days as well as the reason for refuting the President's own commission's recommendations, after he promised a hard pivot to jobs roughly a quarter of his term ago. But he addressed Congress as he demanded and that was a while ago. Is he even saying 'pass this bill now' anymore? Maybe he does and it's just background noise.]

Meanwhile Occupy Oaklanders riot. A continent away, the Leninist state evolves. There is a strange preponderance of man-on-man rape. Salacious detail, or suggesting women are victims because they are easier targets but men are the prey. By now the community has divided into several dozen tents, for each 'group' representing itself. Those who choose to be homeless are reverting to type.

I wonder if this is the source of legal antipathy towards homosexuals in the first place. The male on male sexual predator can find a target in children, in the 'glam' style of romanticizing the subhuman. Women stop being targets because they are women, hence the 'women only' tent. Women are women, so they can find sympathy or sex with a willing partner for better or worse, and it doesn't matter. Especially since there's no risk of children and very little risk of vd.

Stable male homosexual couples either have independent incomes or dependent lifestyles and can do what they want. It's the unstable male homosexuals who are the problem. At this point, there's no distinction between them and the remaining Occupiers. They spout nonsense causes and are easy enough to mooch from. I doubt gender matters much, but male is probably preferred.

Women are excluded from the club because they have the 'wife and mother' option. A community at that level consists of women who desire/need a bond with a man, and/or another woman of compatible nature. They can't become predators the way men can, though they find compensation elsewhere. Men do stupid things with their dicks, that's a given.

The male predators however, are on the opposite line of civilization, and it's through homosexuality that the predators find their targets. They can't exist in civilized society. I would guess they hook up with nomads, gypsies, carnivals as some manner of entrance to society. Especially in show-biz, where they start so young. Gigolos appear, as does whatever homosexual community gathers in towns, bars, dance clubs, places where civilized homosexuals can congregate. Men and women who can earn their own living, either individually or in their own private arrangements, independent of 'husband, wife and kids' which is what a family is. It has been thus for millions of years through quantity and reproduction of human beings.

It's not homosexuality, it's the license permitted by a large enough group for enough men to do enough stupid things with their dicks. Mooch off the rich, pretend to be straight, I can only guess what problems it's caused for militaries. By choice or by nature, it's these unstable people who are the problem and taint whatever homosexual community gathers.

It's attractive to straight women because they can relax with a man who poses no sexual challenge. They can also vicariously enjoy the soap operas, especially when they find men who 'go both ways'. If stable homosexual men are interested in these shenanigans, they participate. If not, not.

If Marxism works, they'll find some appeal there. Sexuality leaves the picture but retains that unreal understanding of relationships which makes socialism so fundamentally attractive to a small but vocal minority. Many of whom are also violent.

Who were the victims of Hitler's purge of the SA? The leadership of his first SS were the ones who were there first. They recognized each other at his speeches perhaps. Recruited others. They saw Hitler for what he was at the start, someone who could organize a crowd. They took advantage, but had to go once too many guys who preferred women were around.

Eliminate the homosexual intrigue and include as much or little violence as required, you have the basis for female stories which males can tolerate (chick flicks, theater). Shakespeare lasts because women are perpetually intruiged by this mysterious language. Men wrote it down at the time and English evolved into present form which still mystifies people but keeps them performing it over and over. Costume changes and sets are helpful. A predator who finds an opportunity for regular food has the chance to get far.

Religion is undoubtedly a good place for such people to hide, and scandal is ever-present. Minister' wives are always good sources of gossip. Homosexuals are quickly excluded but good sources for clothes and food and dance clubs. [The clubs will eventually be appropriated through homosexual migration, first as the rich people who show up will be wearing the same outfits as a rebellion against their rich upbringing, then as the rich straights looking to meet the hottest chicks, the ones hanging out with the coolest gay guys...

These are the least-civilized minority, not yet animals, but not worthy of being human. Women are targets for being weaker and a heterosexual bond is best for both parties. As always, once the women are excluded for that reason, human coexistance becomes male-on-male predation. Once women are included, the vast heterosexual majority reasserts itself. Fashion goes down the social ladder and recycles itself, soap operas go into reruns between seasons.

Men who are inclined to cohabitate with a woman are the vast majority. Stable gay men and women can make comfortable homes with their loved ones and be equal citizens. However, to prosper they need to avoid alienating the vast majority. I think women are inherently bisexual, but some (many? most?) clearly are against the notion. They'll go along with what their man wants. But even the most unappealing women retain the wife/mother option. Gay couples break up because someone decides they want to be straight.

This also becomes humor and humiliation for the straights. The guys can talk a chick into anything (and vice-versa) but then have to look at each other later on when you aren't drunk and she's not so eager. This sort of humor plays well (dare I say it?) with the lower classes.

It also defines celebrity. Athletes don't get far if they make who they have sex with a priority, so they're only available as examples of physical perfection. Actors have stage personas and disconnection from that which they represent, as well as an ambiguous sexuality that threatens as much as provides inspiration for knock-offs.

Preachers recite scriptures and practice rituals which have served those who follow them noticeably well and they are often the majority. They attract the sheep and tend the flocks, who nonetheless retreat to their own vices. But more communities form.

The animosity most of us have towards the notion of guys doing *that* to each other follows from the male-on-male predation that is the lowest end of the food chain. Male-on-female is the next-lowest because it implies the perpetrator makes some distinction. After that, the next-lowest is general male-female violence, the masculine 'never hit a woman' rule which applies even when the woman initiates violence, never mind two women fighting each other and how sexy it can be.

Morally we can distinguish these things no matter what class we were born into. We prosper, men, women, children and non-sexual partnerships alike, by eliminating these 'perversions of human nature'. At least, that would be the viewpoint of women who pick wife/mother. Marxism becomes an intellectual distinction of studious types who share the ideology of the '99% Occupiers' rampaging in their sites. Pampered, spoiled brats left in their own playpens, where men-on-men crime is rampant. A couple of cops were quoted and referred to 'another boy being raped' as a regular feature.

It's not that homosexuality is wrong or homosexuals themselves are bad, but it's the area where the worst aspects of humanity will gather and influence where they see the opportunity. It's not a moral condemnation, just a fact as saying that the place where the gasoline is stored is more flammable than the place where the metal is stored.

As with any gossip/tabloid figure, the story becomes more appealing in the retelling by removing the gay stuff. I assume it's an inborn trait. Young women can be trailer trash or appeal to church or something. Preacher's wife and kids are always popular. Youth is undoubtedly as attractive to older gays as to straights. Demi Moore [age 48]'s boytoy Ashton Kutcher [age 33] cheated on her with a 22 year-old model. Kutcher screams 'ambiguous sexuality' in all the wrong ways and is as prone to chasing the easy life as others of his ilk.

At best the influence is intellectual and verbal. Oscar Wilde abandoned his wife and children and through lavish feasts for starving London thugs for his sexual acts. Wilde described it as 'dining with panthers.' This is wrong for several reasons having nothing to do with homosexuality itself. His literary success is deserved however. Who can judge such things?

The socialist inclinations which have led to the OWS movement become ever more foolish as winter nears and they can't clean up after themselves. Only ideology and determination will sustain them now, or a desire to prey on other human beings. Beyond them there is only the savage.

Because fisking is a dying art

2011-11-06T15:58:00.000-08:00

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27479

A Chill Descends On Occupy Wall Street; "The Leaders of the allegedly Leaderless Movement"
by Fritz Tucker

On Sunday, October 23, a meeting was held at 60 Wall Street. Six leaders discussed what to do with the half-million dollars that had been donated to their organization, since, in their estimation, the organization was incapable of making sound financial decisions.

Six unelected people who have imposed their will upon others to the extent that they can look for monies owed have pointed out that there has been no small committee like them in charge during the entire movement.

The proposed solution was not to spend the money educating their co-workers or stimulating more active participation by improving the organization’s structures and tactics. Instead, those present discussed how they could commandeer the $500,000 for their new, more exclusive organization.

Shocked! I'm shocked to find gambling in this establishment!

No, this was not the meeting of any traditional influence on Wall Street. These were six of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street (OWS).

But we were told OWS had no leaders. What's changed?

Occupy Wall Street’s Structure Working Group (WG) has created a new organization called the Spokes Council. “Teach-ins” were held to workshop and promote the Spokes Council throughout the week of October 22-28. I attended the teach-in on Sunday the 23rd.

They aren't going to come up with theater or exercising or anything productive, all they have are empty gatherings.

According to Marisa Holmes, one of the most outspoken and influential leaders of OWS,

According to whom is Marisa Holmes one of the most outspoken and influential leaders of OWS?

the NYC-GA started receiving donations from around the world when OWS began on September 17. Because the NYC-GA was not an official organization, and therefore could not legally receive thousands of dollars in donations,

On what planet is it illegal for someone to give you money if they want to?

the nonprofit Alliance for Global Justice helped OWS create Friends of Liberty Plaza, which receives tax-free donations for OWS. Since then, Friends of Liberty Plaza has received over $500,000.

How much of a cut do they take for themselves? What role do they play in sustaining OWS? How many of them are Occupiers themselves? What role did people like them play in making it illegal to give money to people just because you want to?

Until October 28, anybody who wanted to receive more than $100 from Friends of Liberty Plaza had to go through the often arduous modified consensus process

Why is this even a fact? Patti Smith sang it long ago, "Free money!"

(90% majority)

Marxism's flaw, you simply cannot determine what the people will do or think. The quantity will overpower everything else and the only ones to thrive will be those who depend on mob rule, as we see in Oakland.

of the NYC-GA—

Even in very small communities, direct democracy quickly becomes an impossibility.

which, despite its well-documented
Really? Who has been keeping those documents? This is the first we're hearing of the money, remember?

inefficiencies,

It's tough to make things work the way they should, isn't it?

granted $25,740 to the Media WG for live-stream equipment on October 12,

Such cheap high-quality communications. Ain't capitalism grand?

and $1,400 to the Food and Medical WGs for herbal tonics on October 18.

I gather these herbal tonics weren't grown in the greenhouse out back.

At the teach-in, Ms. Holmes maintained that while the NYC-GA is the “de facto” mechanism for distributing funds, it has no right to do so,

A "right" is sort of like a "demand", which is the OWS leaders were refusing to articulate a few weeks ago for some bullshit reason. OWS has no mission statement. At this point, "Destroy Israel" would probably get quite a few votes.

even though she acknowledged that most donors were likely under the impression that the NYC-GA was the only organization with access to these funds.

That's another thing that goes along with organization and responsibility, people are more inclined to provide money.

Two other leaders of the teach-in, Daniel and Adash, concurred with Holmes.
I know they're guys, but is anybody else getting a Cirinist vibe?

Ms. Holmes also stated at the teach-in that five people in the Finance WG have access to the $500,000 raised by Friends of Liberty Plaza. When Suresh Fernando, the man taking notes,

The secretary.

asked who these people are, the leaders of the Structure WG nervously laughed and said that it was hard to keep track of the “constantly fluctuating” heads of the Finance WG.

Last I heard, there were about 69 different organized clusters of people with their own little causes. A women-only tent has just been erected [HAH! Get it?] so changes should happen more quickly now. Alliances of personality and influence and ideology have been formed on this camping trip. There's also the challenge that few of them want to quit in front of the others and they'll entertain themselves attempting to dominate or intruigue.

Shifting departments and department heads would be hard for any of them to keep track of.

Mr. Fernando made at least four increasingly explicit requests for the names. Each request was turned down by the giggling, equivocating leaders.

Heh, this could be childish refusal, or people who weren't successful through intelligence.

The leaders of the Structure WG eventually regained control of the teach-in. They said that they too were unhappy with the Finance WG’s monopoly over OWS’s funds, which is why they wanted to create the Spokes Council.

The person who actually knew something about money was the one who took charge of it and became Finance Workgroup for his series of tents. The Structure (someone concerned with the tents themselves rather than the occupants, I'm guessing) WG doesn't like how the money's being handled and wants to form a committee and wrest it away from Finance.

What upset them more, however, was the inefficient and fickle General Assembly.

If Lenin and Trotsky had been recorded during their revolution, this is what they'd have said. In Russian, the language of bad people. Democracy sucks. The people should have no say in what happens to them.

A major point of the discussion was whether the Spokes Council and the NYC-GA should have access to the funds, or just the Spokes Council.

Do we even pretend to give a damn about democracy or just go straight to bunker mode?
Daniel, a tall, red-bearded, white twenty-something—one of the six leaders of the teach-in—said that the NYC-GA needed to be completely defunded because those with “no stake” in the Occupy Wall Street movement shouldn’t have a say in how the money was spent. When I asked him whether everybody in the 99% had a stake in the movement, he said that only those occupying or working in Zuccotti Park did. I pointed out that since the General Assembly took place in Zuccotti Park, everybody who participated was an occupier. He responded with a long rant about how Zuccotti Park is filled with “tourists,” “free-loaders” and “crackheads” and suggested a solution that the even NYPD has not yet attempted: Daniel said that he’d like to take a fire-hose and clear out the entire encampment, adding hopefully that only the “real” activists would come back.

We met Daniel earlier when the reporter arrived, remember? I quite agree, disposing of the human vermin who interfere with your revolution would make sure only real activists return to the Occupation site.

The main obstacle to the creation of the Spokes Council was that the NYC-GA had already voted against it four times.

Fortunately, true revolutionaries never take "no" for an answer. Just like so many others in the Park.

One audience member observed that no organization would vote to relinquish its power. Some of the strongest proponents of the Spokes Council responded that they had taken this into account, and were planning on creating the Spokes Council regardless of whether the NYC-GA accepted the proposal. They claimed that, in the interests of non-hierarchy, neither the Spokes Council nor the General Assembly should have power over the other.

Having declared their independence from the GA, they immediately set to undermining it because the Park wasn't big enough for the two leadership organizations. Who's in charge of the Security WG?

In the minutes of the teach-in on Saturday the 22nd, the leaders recognize that usurping power from the NYC-GA might make people uncomfortable. The Structure WG’s eventual proposal was to keep the General Assembly alive and functioning while the Spokes Council “gets on its feet.”
The leech cannot overpower its host immediately.
Working Groups could still technically get funding through the NYC-GA, but the “GA may stop making those kinds of decisions because people [will] stop going… To officially take power away isn’t necessary,” especially because the NYC-GA works on the consensus model. A small group of people aiming to delegitimize the NYC-GA could easily attend each session merely to block every proposal. According to a member of the Demands WG, this is already occurring in several Working Groups.

The drummers and the drummers-at-heart.

To placate the rest of OWS, the Structure WG amended their original proposal and gave the NYC-GA power to dissolve the Spokes Council. This amendment is irrelevant, however, given the 90% majority requirement in the NYC-GA, and the ability of members of the Spokes Council to vote in the NYC-GA.

I like that they're trying to apply civilized democratic principles. Before Daniel purges everybody anyway.

The newly formed Spokes Council claims to adhere to the “statement of principles” adopted by the New York City General Assembly, including “direct-democracy, non-hierarchy, participation, and inclusion.” The Spokes Council differs from the NYC-GA, however, in three main respects: the Spokes Council has the power to exclude new groups that don’t receive a 90% majority vote for admission; in the NYC-GA, everybody technically has the right to speak, whereas in the Spokes Council each Working Group has a spokesperson, who can be recalled only by a 90% majority; and the NYC-GA allows one vote per person, whereas the Spokes Council operates more indirectly, granting each Working Group one vote

By George, it's almost like a bicameral congress!

When I pointed out the contradictions these differences present to the Council’s stated principles, the leaders of Sunday’s teach-in insisted that the Spokes Council was the most participatory, democratic organization possible—the same slogan they repeated last month about the General Assembly. I felt like I was watching a local production of Animal Farm.

The Bolsheviks profess fealty to the previously-established socialist order, until it is time to overthrow it. You don't need a fable about pigs to see that every time it happens.

I’ve attended two mock Spokes Councils in the past month. At the Spokes Council in Washington Square Park on October 15, the unelected facilitators set the agenda:

You don't have leaders or organized missions. Who the f*ck do you think will set the agenda?

Occupy Washington Square Park. Then they set the terms of debate, breaking the group into three circles: those who wanted to occupy and possibly get arrested, those who wanted there to be an occupation and would assist those being arrested,

The Luca Brasis and the Sonny Corleones?

and those who wanted to build the movement in other ways. I went with the third group.

How large were the first two groups, the ones who wanted to be arrested? How many people did they represent?

The facilitators told each group to elect a facilitator, a note-taker, and a spokesperson who would read the notes from each group’s meeting. Almost immediately, one of the members of the OWS inner-circle asked my group if anybody had a problem if she facilitated. Nobody objected, so she was “elected.”

People are sheep. Treat them as sheep and you will go far.

Although she was in the one group that opposed occupying Washington Square Park, she lectured us about the need to occupy public parks.

Perhaps a Trotskyite 'internationalist' but that's entirely speculation on my part.

I was vocal in my group, arguing that the fundamental problem in our hierarchical, bureaucratic society is the lack of a truly democratic, dialogic way of relating to one another—not that public parks close at midnight. I repeated the arguments I had raised in previous General Assemblies,

Heh, I'm reading about atrocities in Nigeria being performed by Muslims against Christians and others and wondering where that *other* General Assembly is these days?

concluding that OWS’ main goal should be to develop dialogic, democratic methods

That's the second time the reporter used those words in consecutive order.

in the occupied areas, and to extend this way of life into every home, workplace and school, and in local, regional, national and international bodies.

No. Keep your revolution off of my body.

My advocacy for radical democracy wasn’t particularly popular.

Then what's the point of 90% majority votes in the GA?

Ironically, the predominantly middle-class, white men leading the movement claim that their hostility to democracy is in the interest of “protecting minorities,” referring to oppressed genders, races, classes, ages, and nations. Far from being “minorities,” these people make up the majority of the world’s population; the worldwide outcry for democracy vitiates the paternalistic notion that the oppressed need “protection.”

But this is the natural result of leftist outcomes. If the majority of the world's population was capable of fairly distributing its wealth, they would be capitalist and wouldn't need well-fed well-dressed white people Occupying on their behalf.

The discussion turned to which locations the movement should occupy, ignoring the question of whether occupation for the sake of occupation was a good idea. I suggested teaming with evicted tenants and former homeowners to occupy foreclosed homes, abandoned apartments and unsold condos—an act that would strike at the heart of the economic crisis, and endear the movement to the oppressed. This idea generated a lot of support, but was not repeated by my “spokesperson” when the groups reconvened.

There won't be anything in the way of movement to another Occupation site, not for a while. The Stalinist 'one nation first' approach will dominate. The rest of this is Trotskyist delusion.

At the teach-in on Sunday the 23rd, one of the leaders’ main gripes—rightfully so—was that the NYC-GA was inefficient

It's like we can't just do whatever we want whenever we want without consequences. WTF?

and dominated by society’s vocal minorities,

Frankly, people who are silent are very much the minority, unfortunately.

particularly middle-class white men.

Because this "99%" bullshit was only a front anyway.

The underlying cause is not eliminated by the Spokes Council, but is in fact exacerbated by it. The major flaw of the General Assembly is the need for a 90% majority to pass proposals. This “modified consensus” ensures the continuation of the dominant culture through the passage of only the most conservative measures. In the Spokes Council, proposals can be blocked by 11% of the members of 11% of the Working Groups, meaning that a minority of 1.2% can stymie the will of 98.8% majority.

Percentages such as that are the least of your worries in the future.

Instead of cutting to the structural and psychological core of oppression, the proponents of the Spokes Council merely apply a topical cream by demanding that no WG have the same spokesperson more than once a week.

There's always these attempts to mandate people change places, just for the sake of ordering them to do so. It fails and the cadre have to strike harder to stop the movement altogether when they clamp down.

The leaders of OWS seem to understand that a genuinely revolutionary movement would lead to deepening involvement by oppressed communities. The leaders then try to reverse-engineer a revolution by consistently choosing among the few people of color and women involved in OWS to be its spokespeople and facilitators,

No, they're trying to avoid all the obnoxious accusations of racism and sexism by putting the minorities up front. It doesn't help, naturally, because without such accusations, where would this reporter be?

as if this token involvement will guarantee a genuine revolutionary movement. In fact, tokenism obscures the need for systematic change by misrepresenting the demographics of OWS.

Then produce qualified accurate representation. Otherwise, you're inventing a problem ("tokenism") misidentifying the problem ("need for systematic change"), refusing to recognize the symptoms ("demographics of OWS") and prescribing the wrong treatment ("obscures the need").

Tokenism also gives the leaders of OWS an argument to fall back upon when confronted with the fact that they have thus far been unable to mobilize and involve most of the 99%.

Never mind those facts, you fail at everything.

The Spokes Council, in fact, doesn’t have enough regard for working people,

Thing is about working people, mostly, they don't want to be working people. What the OWS choose not to do, for principled stances or not, everybody else *has* to do.

students

Whose teachers are giving them credit to be there.

and people with dependents to have one of their three weekly meetings on a weekend afternoon. Instead of ensuring broad participation of traditionally marginalized and oppressed communities, OWS limits participation to individuals from these communities who are privileged enough to be able to spend three workdays a week at Zuccotti Park.

"Privileged enough" to spend three workdays at the park. Yes, you read that right. Not enough that it takes food out of their kids mouth and time away from the job, what if this is the half-week someone flips out and the cops bust everybody?

The participation of oppressed people in oppressive organizations is not a step towards liberation, but is the deepening of their complicity in their own domination.

According to someone who has never accomplished anything in his/her/its life before. People who find something else to do with their own lives, even passively watching favorite tv shows or getting drunk, are more liberated by that freedom than anything these OWS protestors could understand.

The unabated war on women and people of color in America, during Obama’s presidency, with Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, is a testament to the structural and psychological nature of oppression, and the inability for spokespeople to represent the oppressed.

Really puts Darfur in its place, doesn't it?

After the Structure WG’s teach-in ended, I put together a short summary of what I’d heard. I waited for two hours while the General Assembly slowly got to the announcements--the only part of the NYC-GA open for anyone to participate.

So who decided that rule? Who enforces it? I understand there are internal security forces - victims of sexual assault are not encouraged to go to the police - but I don't recall seeing any names attached to that.

Incidentally, there should be something like Speaker's Corner where people can complain endlessly. OWS never considers things like that.

When my turn came to speak, I brought up the plans of “the leaders of the allegedly leaderless movement” to commandeer the half-million dollars sent to the General Assembly for their new, exclusive, undemocratic, representational organization. Before I could finish,

Hey, I just want to say Beyonce should have won that award.

the facilitators and other members of the OWS inner circle started shouting over me. Amidst the confusion, the human mic stopped projecting what I, or anybody was saying. Because silence was what they were after, the leaders won.

They also see their leaders, the "inner circle" ganging up on somebody who dared to breach the inner circle. That's fascinating in and of itself. Besides, the human mic thing doesn't work very well. There's a reason people use electronic mics.

Eventually one of the facilitators regained control of the crowd and explained that I was speaking “opinions, not facts,” which is why I would not be allowed to continue. He also asserted untruthfully that I had gone over my allotted minute. Notably, the facilitators and members of the OWS inner circle regularly ignore time restrictions.
This reaction shouldn’t surprise anyone.

I'm not surprised. I bet very few people there have a working watch any longer.

It is reasonable to expect any undemocratic organization to be co-opted eventually by a vocal minority or charismatic individual. On Friday, October 29, the proposal to create the Spokes Council was put to the NYC-GA for a fifth time, and finally received a 90% majority. The facilitators assisted the process by denying two vocal critics of the Spokes Council their allotted time to speak against it.

There was the initial purge required to attain respectability...

Sometimes it snows before the leaves have fallen. The ineffective and increasingly symbolic NYC-GA will most likely continue to hang around as long as the people who congregate in Zuccotti Park hold out hope for a more participatory, democratic society. The Spokes Council will only be more effective in its exclusiveness.. Let’s hope the inclusive spirit driving the Occupy movement is not frozen out.

Well of course it'll be frozen out. I'm honestly surprised people have made it through the weekend.

A revolution is not a tea party

2011-11-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

Why is child support paid by men to women and not the other way around? If women are so capable of procuring riches the old fashioned way, they can pay for their food, clothing, homes, medical care anand children through their own time and effort and stop whining about how hard it is all the time. Duh, men have known that through civilized history. It's hard. It sucks. At one point it was worth providing all that for a woman. And kids if she had any.

Paula Jones came forward with complaints about sexual harrassment and the President of the United States had indeed done what she said he did. Anthony Weiner tweeted his wang to women he had not met and who had not asked for wang tweets from him.

In both cases women who knew nothing whatsoever about what happened behind closed doors were prominent in saying that nothing happened. Women at OWS are being encouraged to not come forward about rape and things like that.

But unspecified women make unspecified accusations in private about Herman Cain and that's good enough for some folks. Kobe Bryant was accused of rape. So were the Duke Lacrosse players.

The OWS movement continues to devolve into proto-leninism, as seen here
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/my_in_tents_night_amid_anarchy_of_ush5s5NscUZincUN0tF0yO

“We cannot take him in by ourselves, the cops have to come!” reiterates the OWS security force member.

They call the NYPD -- and it becomes abundantly clear that the cops down there are sick of the antics.

“Every single night it’s the same thing. I mean, some guy was a victim of rape!” an officer snarls. “There comes a time when it’s over. This is a disaster. It’s all we’re doing, every two seconds, is locking somebody up every time. It’s done.

“It’s done,” he repeats. “Occupy Wall Street is no longer a protest.”

Scenes like this -- and far worse -- have been playing out since the Zuccotti Park “occupation” began on Sept. 17.

The parcel is now a sliver of madness, rife with sex attacks, robberies and vigilante justice.

It’s a leaderless bazaar that’s been divided into state-like camps -- with tents packed together so densely that the only way to add more would be to stack them.

and here
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/131094/
“On Sunday, October 23, a meeting was held at 60 Wall Street. Six leaders discussed what to do with the half-million dollars that had been donated to their organization, since, in their estimation, the organization was incapable of making sound financial decisions. The proposed solution was not to spend the money educating their co-workers or stimulating more active participation by improving the organization’s structures and tactics. Instead, those present discussed how they could commandeer the $500,000 for their new, more exclusive organization.”

Frankly, I'm impressed by their spirit. If they can find people to mooch from and survive the winter, some interesting things might come from the experience. One thing I notice is a bizarre lack of skills at anything. You'd think they'd be trying to put together a few people with guitars and harmony singers and really come up with a "We are the World" anthem for the movement. Arts and crafts displays traded between Occupied land in each city. I understand the Occupy Lincoln, Nebraska movement wisely agreed not to interfere with football Saturdays. Bright kids. They'll go far.

For that matter, I'm flabbergasted that Bono and Roger Waters and all the other prominent leftists aren't flocking to set up a concert there. Isn't this what their songs are all about? Or is it tough to wear an outfit that costs more than a million dollars and stand next to someone ranting that no one should be allowed to have a million dollars at all.

Inability to cope with reality or other people marks the occupiers. I'm definitely curious if they'll be permitted to leave, and couldn't honestly blame the city for penning the crybabies up with each other for six months after they start trying to leave.

The revolutionary leaders are reacting in classic fashion, forming cadre. The General Assembly has long been bogged down by over-democracy. A smaller Congress has been formed, and the most recent developments (over money) reveal a distinct mindset in those leaders. The Lenins, Trotskys and Stalins reveal themselves to each other.

There must be a class of officers who make decisions that even the ablest subordinates don't need to be bothered with knowing about. Being leftists who oppose all sense of class, they need to delude themselves into achieving these results, usually in the sense of loyalty or duty that officers of the gentry, the land, the schools usually have towards their men.

I'm more curious about the source and oversight of the food, but I guess the OWS leaders would ask questions about the money first. That's what they're used to, the serious protestors anyway. The security force is empowered to take away the blankets from sex offenders they can catch. Lovely. They've long since realized, even if they won't admit it, the need for a real police force.

Yesterday I heard a member of the secondary government forming to co-exist with the General Assembly accused another of oppression for announcing that whites were overrepresented in the population according to all the info he could get from the Occupiers themselves. He was forced to submit to awareness classes available in one of the tents being set up.

The drummers are a breed apart. That might be literal, it seems there is a sub-species of humanity designed to beat on things as much as possible, eat and sleep and recreate when they can, and everything else is a distraction.

Forgetting how federalism works, the Occupiers of Oakland revert to destruction and mob rule and assume the revolution will follow them. Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it.

If they can survive the winter, there will be experienced cadre to support revolution across the country. But not if they can't get that far.

Tomorrow is the due date for the printed books to arrive. We'll see how the mail works. I'm floundering somewhere in the editing of drafting the next one. I'm sure I've said that before. The blog is obviously being neglected.

I have shown him that a man without hope is a man without change...

2011-10-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

Wow, Obama's almost doubled the number of nations he's sent US military forces, and he's only in his third year in office. That's what a Nobel Peace Prize will do for you.

Well, I guess we have to do something with the sudden surge of new recruits now that DADT is gone, as well as the straights who *would* have signed up if not for their moral objection to DADT. Kicking Central African ass sounds like a good first step. Why are we doing it again?

The "Fast and Furious" scandal continues to unfold. Emails informing Eric Holder that guns were being given to Mexican criminals without any way of tracking them have surfaced from months before Holder's testimony claimed he heard of the event. And there's footage of Obama from months before that saying when Holder first heard of the event which contradicts Holder as well.

Like John McCain being asked how many houses he owns, Obama and Holder don't have the slightest clue what they heard about or when, much less who's asking or why. Now there's a bunch of dead Mexicans killed by guns given to Mexican criminals by US agents, and other US agents shot by those guns. But there's no *there* there, so don't imagine the media will investigate anything.

The Solyndra scandal unfolds with similar lack of interest from the left. The government shoveled tons of money towards a friend in a 'favored status' industry, Obama and Biden both showed up for events. Warnings from long before were ignored, though they accurately said the company's business plan wasn't financially-sound. At least the right-wingers blow their money on drugs and porn stars up front (and tax-free!)

The Occupy Wall Street movement continues after several weeks. They are subsisting on other people's charity, one person even quoted as saying 'the food shows up, we don't know where it came from but we eat it' and putting the can of Spam back on the table. Obviously plenty of freaks, piercings, tatoos and Jew-hatred can be found, as well as calls for violent socialist revolution from people who don't have the first clue how to organize the revolution. Both the American Nazi Party as well as the American Communist Party have endorsed the movements which are spreading nation-wide.

I think it's the nihilism of the left reaching a critical mass. They are not intrinsically evil people, so they aren't going to outright burn and loot (much) but their most destructive elements are raging full force. If they have a chance for success, it will be based on the charity that provides sustanence they could not possibly get for themselves. If they could be provided with virtual reality all day every day for the rest of their lives, they would choose it without hesitation.

Cynical or optimistic, there are moments when I wonder if the point of society is to let 'those sorts' of people get as far away as they desire. The Tea Parties were full of people who had to show up to work the next day.

If times were normal, they would be clearly on the path to deflation, if not popping like a bubble. I think they are but it isn't yet visible. Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. told Obama to disregard the Constitution and treat the nation as in a state of civil war. Why should Palpatine be troubled by the Senate any longer?

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman suggests that the government should act as though aliens were invading because they hate global warming. Then, when aliens turn out not to be invading after all, we'll get the double benefits of whatever leftist boilerplate he had just proposed. Strangely, people still pay attention to him as they do to so many others who have clearly run off the rails.

The CLASS Act, a central pillar of Obamacare, has already been declared a failure. What's amazing is that they aren't going to brazen it out through the election. They already had to drop the 1099 mandate, that would have killed small businesses by requiring a new form every time they buy 600$ or more of anything. Pencils, chairs, filling up the snack machines...

Was it worth it? Was it worth burning up all that political capital to tie up two branches of the administration for two years at 9% unemployment and wars building all over the world? What if they had turned their attention to America's Enemies in Central Africa before "deeming" bills passed? What if they had spent two years flapping their arms to fly like birds? I doubt the unemployment would be any higher, but we'd have a lot less crippling debt. Maybe the Senate would have even passed a budget sometime in the last 900 days like the law requireds.

I'm well into editing the second book. I'm just waiting on word that corrections have been made to the first one and I'll order a bunch of copies. I got my proof copy autographed by many guys in the unit. That's kinda awesome too.

I haven't yet decided how to handle internet 'sales'. Paypal is perfectly workable, but I fear and mistrust technology.

I'm still continuing to think of these books as 'sides', an a-side and a b-side for a collection that's roughly 200 pages. The format makes it work quite well, it looks like a lot of writing even though it really isn't. I'm also trying to decide if I should order the material chronologically or by subject. In a lot of ways it will work better if it's mostly in the order I wrote it, but what about reader convenience? Most people won't care about the stuff about comics, so why not lump it together? Not at the back where it'll be ignored, but up front where it will be skipped.

That way anyone seeing you with it will be amazed that you've read so far into a weighty tome, while skipping for the stuff that people have actually heard of, tv shows and music and movies and stuff. Then I could conveniently bunch up the Star Wars jokes, all for easier accessibility. Either way, I have a great deal of work left to do

It's all falling into place...

2011-10-10T03:23:00.000-07:00

The Occupy Whatever movement is in full swing. It's supposedly speaking for the rights of the people to whatever they want from government.

Would he like toilet paper with that? To service and protect the public, indeed.

Obviously they have no official list of demands. How could they come up with one? They don't have to be at work any time soon, so they can't relate to anybody who does.

Gays now have that reason to serve they'd all been denied, fraternization and ditching that military commitment.

I can't imagine why the military wasn't looking to snap them up all along. No word on whether or not recruitment has gone up yet.

I have the proof copy autographed by most of the people I work with, who were all impressed. I'm finalizing arrangements for printing now, and have begun the next draft of the next book. This one will be pop culture, and the editing is going much more smoothly. It'll still be a while though.

The proof copy

2011-10-04T17:07:00.000-07:00

The Seth DeSignor comics are linked below.

This song has no title, just words and a tune

2011-09-16T07:50:00.000-07:00

Turkey and Egypt prepare to go to war against Israel just as a heavily Jewish district in New York elects a Republican to Congress for the first time since the Harding administration. Unions commit blatant destruction and violence (often against other unions) as the economy flatlines.

In recent days, a surprising number of scandals have opened up. There is the "Fast and Furious" scandal by which the Department of Justice gave weapons to foreign gangs and people died, including government agents whose job is to stop that stuff. All the evidence points to a desire to introduce gun control through backdoor means at some high level, but that is a self-evidently ludicrous accusation for which the evidence is... more than circumstantial. What possible other explanation could there be for not tracking the weapons? Like Anthony Weiner's delusional assumption that lying about his email account being hacked would cover for his wang tweeting complete strangers, weapons are not things you want to lose and there isn't anything else someone could gain from such a scheme.

Then there's Solyndra, where Obama and Biden gave millions of dollars (remember when that used to be a lot?) to a buddy for green energy jobs. They did the paperwork and got things moving smoothly, showed up to public events, put their mouths where our money was. It went bust because a business plan that sounded good to Obama and Biden didn't work so well in reality. It's the closest they've ever been to running a real business.

Y'know, I bet oil companies are among the biggest investors in alternate energy sources, because if and when science discovers superior energy sources and technology to petroleum-based industry, it'll put the oil companies out of business. They might as well get in on the ground floor of the new era. I doubt too many of these innovations will come from the tree-huggers anyway.

Another company came out with similar revelations today, including that the White House influenced an Air Force general to change his testimony.

This is what government corruption and cronyism looks like. Quite possibly it's inevitable regardless of which side is charge, but if that's the case then it benefits the country much more when the people who keep goods cheap and plentiful aren't penalized for being more successful. They don't owe the government nearly as much as big government advocates insist. Rick Perry won applause when he promised to make the government as unobtrusive as possible.

I'm not following the Republican primaries and rarely do more than skim summaries, but I'm impressed at the way they're all going at it with intellectual vigor. They're throwing hard punches at each other and suffering misstatements or contradictions or jarring viewpoints. So do the summaries I skim. "You're wrong because of A, B and C!" "Oh yeah, what about X, Y and Z?" It's intellectual diversity that we haven't seen in a long time on the political stage.

Massachusetts elected a Republican to the Senate for the first time in decades who specifically campaigned on voting against Obamacare. 2010 wiped out Democratic control of the House and now a Republican has been elected to the seat where Anthony Weiner sat. Hopefully it's been cleaned off. The left keeps demanding special elections, as if to give the voters another chance to make the correct decision this time. They waste resources trying to defeat propositions that are the government's only hope for fiscal surival and each loss seems to embolden them further. The longer it takes for them to accept this, the worse they will make things for themselves (and everybody else).

I think what's really surprising the administration of "leading from behind" is that things didn't go to plan. Obama was always expected to be in full campaign mode fourteen months before the election, it was just taken as a given he'd be championing his successes instead of being reduced to "If you love me, you've gotta help me pass this bill" as he said to an audience of several thousand today.

The bill in question is basically all the things Congress refused to do immediately when he took office and languished while they concentrated on the things they did do immediately (Obamacare). It would be like him demanding Congress close Gitmo. Or pass the Free Trade agreements that are still sitting on his desk where they've been for months. Obama's repeating "pass the bill now" because he doesn't know what else to say.

It's not about the bill, it's about "if you love me, you've gotta..." bullshit that no thinking person should fall for and people who do usually deserve what they get. None of Obama's allies in the House rushed on it, so a Republican stole the title ("American Jobs Bill") for a one-line bill, a tax cut. That's funny. The Senate will be moving on it whenever the Senate gets to it. The bipartisan supercommittee will eventually decide how to pay for it.

"If you love me, you've gotta help me pass this bill." So people whose regard for him is only admiration or respect are exempt from helping him pass the bill. Mind you he was speaking to college students, and I'm sure they hear a lot of "if you love me, you've gotta...' Either way, they're not going to be much help passing a bill, regardless of what this "Constitutional scholar" thinks.

Either way, his Presidency's over unless he can stir up the black vote something fierce. It's not a foregone conclusion, but my 'who's going to win' sense is tingling. I can certainly imagine he'd like a real vacation and it's rumored that he may be having issues with depression.

I'm not impressed by critics from the left. They don't make the slightest effort to protest Gitmo or bombing Libya the way they protested GWB so their objections were purely political and renders much of what they say about anything irrelevant. Further, Obama has clearly been giving everything he has to govern from as far to the left as possible. That he hasn't succeeded by the left's standards has less to do with Obama and more to do with those standards. You might as well chastise him for not flapping his arms and flying like a bird. It's not doable. Obama caved and the Democrats have caved in the various debt/budget arguments because they don't have a leg to stand on. They can't explain to their core constituencies that the goal just isn't possible, so they need to surrender to anyone willing to offer terms.

From January '09 through January '11, raising the debt ceiling was a failure of leadership and no one was in charged anyway, so House Republicans were suddenly holding hostages this summer? How does that work? This is an enormous case of willful denial. It will be interesting to see how many Democrats/liberals/leftists have succumbed to this uncritical defense of Obama and how deep that self-deception runs. They want Obama to talk tougher. He's been looking for an ass to kick the whole time. He's Lebron, he's got this. He's a better speechwriter than his speecherwriters. At least he used to be.

Now he's reduced to running to the crowds and chanting "pass this bill", pleading "if you love me..."

Response to Steve Bissette

2011-09-14T19:19:00.000-07:00

Swamp Thing artist and Tyrant creator Steve Bissette writes "Draw My Graphic Novel! Storyboard My Movie!" at http://srbissette.com/?p=13107&cpage=1#comment-7257

For (1), I think there needs to be an agree-on definition for "graphic novel", and I don't pretend to have one. Some sort of page count/time equivalence would apply I think. Some of Marvel's "Essential Volumes" contain more 'one long story that builds to a strong climax' than the more-acclaimed comic books. If we're talking a lifetime devoted to telling one story, Garry Trudeau is possibly the greatest graphic novelist alive. A month's worth of productivity creates X number of pages.

I'll get back to (2) as it dovetails with what what I have to say below.

(3) Legal distinctions could be made specifying the Writer and the Artist. The Artist is responsible for the finished page, and is roughly as important to the process as ten acres of prime soil is to running a farm. Extending the metaphor, every row must be hoed from dawn until dusk every day for months before you see anything and years before you really have things growing.

(a) I'm basing most of my arguments on the assumption of human nature that once an answer or two has been found, everybody will stampede in that direction like... like lemmings would stampede if lemmings were the sort of creatures that could stampede.

As far as where the money to do this will come from, I'd have to say I think it'll wind up being some Max Gaines/Major Malcom Wheeler-Nicholson type, or Larry Flynt (I honestly think if Lindsey Lohan or one of the other burned-out sex bombs of recent memory sponsored an R-rated comic/magazine, it would take off).

Once people who know what they're doing start building something, people who want to invest will show up. I don't know how many dozens of artists churning out pages for nothing it will take to build a profitable company that will pay them what they're worth.

One thing that would help is if there were studio systems competing. Will Eisner and Jerry Iger were pioneers in this, as were Simon and Kirby. That punk kid Jules Feiffer could write a "Spirit" script a lot faster than the artists would draw it, but it kept them all employed.

(b) As I said earlier, my definition of the Artist is the one responsible for the Finished Page. As far as I'm concerned, after expenses are paid it should be a 50/50 split between Writer and Artist. As far as any sort of studio system, either a group of people contract as the ones to do the art (Eastman and Laird farming out the work on TMNT) or similar to what Marvel/DC editors do, matching people on a title. Either way, I would suggest starting at a 50/50 split and going on a sliding scale to include tone, lettering, coloring as part of that system creating a Finished Page. If it takes three or six people to make that Finished Page, those three people or six who act as The Artist need to be paid enough as a group that among themselves they are satisfied.

Most Finished Pages that were created usually had fewer than six or seven primary creators, unless they're a general mish-mash of stuff anyway. If a dozen different people contributed to a page, unless it was a jam piece you could put on ebay, I think more time would be wasted delineating creator's rights in that direction.

I think the principles of creators ownership in comics have been established firmly enough into the soil that stories like Bill Finger will thankfully not need to be told. If you contribute that much to someone else's character, they owe you big time.

That said, I think the Artist should be the least concerned with ownership as far as control of the property. The idea of using agents is a good one. Either the Writer acts as the Agent ("I keep you happy, you keep drawing") or people are hired to negotiate individual books. The former would probably be most likely for the time being, the latter would evolve as a business system once twenty or thirty successes have come along.

A variation of work-for-hire perhaps, where the Artist does not surrender 50% of the proceeds once expenses are paid, but isn't encouraged to interfere in the day-to-day business. The Artist's Time is ninety-something percent of the expense, because the Artist is responsible for creating the Finished Page. Without that, there is nothing.

Which is the opposite of the Writer whose Time is the least valuable. I have written scripts in less than a half-hour which would take a good artist a week to make look good. In some cases, I stayed up late, drew the scripts then and there and I kinda like having the finished comics to show for it.

The Writer is responsible for everything that isn't the Finished Page, basically. The one who looks at the Finished Page and didn't do anything on it, but told those who did this Finished Page what to do. The Writer's time is worth the least.

There should be a sliding scale, or a series of them in the long-term or short-term. At the end of that scale the Writer should reach the 50% part of the profits.

By "profits", this could also be done as a package by editors at Marvel or DC. If the Fables crew will keep producing issues, keep them doing it and budget the company's money wisely to keep them. The ones who make the Finished Page are the jobs to create. If the Writer has given them something to do, his work is done.

The Writer gets the Intellectual part and splits the Property with The Artist.

(c) The exception to the previous sentence. I don't pretend to have a good answer but it's clearly work that goes on the Finished Page. The only thing I could suggest is a distinction between books where The Artist doesn't change and books where people replace others (letterers, guest-artists) I don't have any suggestions for bridging the divide in ownership between Writer and Artist on that one. I still think the Artist should have proprietary rights while the Writer (agent, editor, whoever's footing the bill) steers the overall ship. If making t-shirts of some cool images will bring in money, the t-shirts are going to get made. Unless the artist is paying to make the shirts, I don't think a creator's veto is necessary. The visual look of the characters as intellectual property will only matter when other artists join in or there's a tv/movie option. For that, I don't have any suggestions.

(d) The point is to pay for the Artist's Time. Since I'm hypothesizing out of thin air, I'll assume that the page rates will be large, depending on the competition. Once the Page is Finished, the time it took to create it is gone forever, how much will it take to compensate for that? That's the point where the sliding scale begins to move in the Writer's direction, eventually to resolve in the 50/50 split. If further collaborators (tone, colors, letters, replacement artists) are involved, the overall division shifts more equitably.

Since royalties are nothing to count on, the upfront page rate for the Artist's Time needs to be big enough to accomodate multiple people making the Finished Page. Obviously it's in an artist's self-interest to be able to do all the work his or herself, either because it's more 'jobs' and a larger pay-rate or because it means there's fewer expenses to recoup before the last guy in line, the Writer, gets paid.

I've been picking up John Byrne's Next Men, including the collection. I have only a vague memory of what came before, or who the characters are or what they're doing now, which doesn't make them much different from the superheroes, come to think of it. But I've realized the art is worth it. Byrne draws prehistoric scenes and modern cityscapes and future cityscapes and the pre-Civil War South and various imaginative landscapes and it all looks really good. It's great that he was able to do it, and so quickly.

The problem is that there isn't any incentive for the hungry artist. Not the starving artist who's usually just posing, but the hungry one. The ones who can turn out many Finished Pages in a short period of time. That's a quality that comics have lost and not for the better. The comic book medium wasn't made in its early decades by people who felt entitled to work slowly.

Going along with your (2) I think this is a (probably-unresolvable) conflict in basic working conditions. The Writer wants an art robot and The Artist is not a robot. The Artist's time is the most important but buying out his investment needs to be made as cheap as possible. It's safe to say Matt Groening was paid for that hour he spent drawing new characters so he could keep rights to "Life In Hell".

Sequential entertainment is our strength and our weakness. Daily strips, weekly strips, monthly pamphlets and larger tpb's look like our best bet. We need finished work to get somewhere, and I don't see an immediate outlet for that.

I mean, Take the Lindsey Lohan idea from earlier. I'm becoming a big advocate of a return to the ideas of pulp magazines. A few photographs of LL, dishy fantasy text pieces, ads and 50 or 60 pages of LL stories, as a pirate or astronaut or drug-riddled washed-up sex bomb in her mid-20s, whatever. A lot of people would probably pay 5 bucks for that, or thinly-veiled fictionalized versions of the celebrity scene. The latest Conan movie has already passed, but Slam Bradley still has a future.

[I actually worked out a plot for a 12-part Hawkman/Green Arrow miniseries, where they're arguing politics every issue and on page 2 a building explodes like a Lethal Weapon movie. One guy uses a bow and arrow, the other has wings and uses a mace. They kill people and make smart-ass quips as they fight the social issue du jour. In several issues, they meet non-powered DC characters. Slam Bradley is in a violent racist brawl, the Human Target, James Corrigan, the Question and others all make appearances, illustrating philosophical conflicts that (I like to think) would appeal to readers who have no interest in superheroes. I'm not even sure how often Hawkman would put on the wings, except for when Muslim terrorists take over planes]

[On a similar note, from what little I see of DC's recent publishings, you can't tell me this is all they can think of. Zatanna's failed series features a splash page of her getting slashed in the throat with an arrow. Is that the only thing they can think of? She's a busty chick in fishnets whose gimmick is magically talking backwards. The first issue should have a flaming demon tying her to an altar and then she picks up a sword and hacks him to bits. In later issues, she's a single girl living in the city, dark powers inhabiting nearby buildings. She fights other demons and magicians and evil people, gets tied up every issue or two. Bring me a few dozen pages of that every month, I'll write up dialogue and captions for it. The comic book writer's time is almost worthless. Text pieces could be generated for an overall package.]

The biggest obstacle is that an art robot is just as qualified as an artist brimming with enthusiasm for his or her own ideas. More qualified arguably because of the simplicity of the Time=Finished Pages arrangement. Gil Kane once complained that he suggested to Marv Wolfman that they take (whatever book they were doing) and structure it like a novel so that plots would slowly build over many issues, basically what a lot of people have done since. Wolfman wasn't interested, saying he'd rather just pick up his paycheck, but just think of what Kane could have contributed to if he'd had any modern writers to take him up on the offer.

If an artist loves the book he's hired to do, or if it's designed for what he wants to draw, great. If not, I have to say his feelings would have to be outvoted. The letterer and colorists, tones, they don't work if the artist doesn't produce pages and are probably less picky about whatever's ticking the artist off. The Writer needs to be the last one in line to share in the successful completion, and the Artist needs to be encouraged to Finish the Page and Move On To The Next Page.

I guess I'm saying both sides need to get over some large pretentions about themselves. These are the pages the Artist is being paid to finish, that needs to happen as quickly as possible. EC not only pioneered crediting the artists, but Bill Gaines would stop whatever he was doing - including eating! - to write a check whenever they brought in finished work.

If the artist has work he or she would rather be doing, I don't know what to say. It's the Artist's Time for sale. At what point does a job get created?

I also don't know how it should be handled when the artists contribute story ideas. Creative partnerships are rarely frictionless.

So basically the idea is that someone to be determined makes a large investment in paying a few people for a few years to draw a ton of pages. Here are the thumbnails for my 800-page Mucous Man graphic novel and a new car.

With Gaiman and Vess, or other partnerships you cite, it's obviously in the writer's interest to cultivate good relationships with an artist.

In this age of photoshop, it might be worthwhile to see if an artist could find ways to market his or her style. Writers who can use their own computer enough to manipulate images might provide character descriptions and money in exchange for twenty poses they can use.

In the long term, I think comics are becoming prevalent enough that an Agent system will help provide more work, as well as a return of the studio system.

The writer needs to move to the back of the line and the artist needs to be encouraged to crank out as much material as possible. The Time will be gone forever, so it's in everybody's interests (including the fans) that there as many Finished Pages as possible to show for it.

Unfortunately, I don't see that happening without a radical reorganization of the publishing industry - allowing thousands of people with money to spend to see these wonderful comics and buy them - or a surplus of artists who would be churning out drawings for free because it's what they do.

I wonder if the writers could be employed to design a franchise. Hire artists who really like, say, space opera, and get a writer to generate a few hundred pages of material for them. DC has tried to build franchises from Neil Gaiman's work thanks to Sandman, Preacher didn't lend itself to any spin-offs and came to The End without a hitch. Fables is lending itself to spin-offs, with the 50-issue Jack of Fables (which I think will intersect the main Fables title again, two Cinderella miniseries [which don't interest me], the upcoming Fairest series which I won't read beyond Bill Willingham's initial arc, but maybe others will, regular guest-artist stories which are packaged along with main artist Mark Buckingham's issues.

As I keep saying, I think we should take another look back at the Depression-era pulp characters and scenes. I get the feeling there's a market for stories like that again.

11 Sep 11

2011-09-11T11:17:00.000-07:00

I had to go into work on this long weekend, but otherwise I've spent the weekend getting a lot of the second draft edited for the next book. The first book is still at the printers. I've given my approval to the initial proof and the cover. They should have the full proof ready in a day or two. I'll send back whatever corrections I see and they'll make the physical proof copy. Then I'll order a hundred made, which might last my lifetime. Just in case, I'll number them for those generations who hunt down 'first printings'.

Then I was outside noticing what a lovely day it was and remembered what day it was.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, it hit. Three thousand died and the Twin Towers collapsed. Another strike hit the Pentagon and a fourth simultaneous attack lost all the civilian passengers.

An attack of such magnitude that cannot be treated as any other than a declaration of war. No, this is our home, our land, our nation. The Americas and Europe are lands under our protection. Our alliances across oceans improve the lives of billions.

The terrorists who attacked us that Tuesday morning ten years ago are the infidel, not the West. They are the ones who torture and butcher their own people as easily as they pay for terror to cross border lines. The Jews are the ones who must die, or anyone who opposes Qaddaffi, Assad, Assad Sr. or the Iranian mullahs. Or the House of Saud who has physical control over the holiest sites in Islam, towards which all Muslims bow in prayer five times daily.

They are the infidel. They permit piracy, slavery, female genital mutilation and book burning, but they do not choose to permit Muslims to stop being Muslims. They don't accept that land ruled by Muslims could ever stop being ruled by Muslims. They choose destruction, as Marxists and cult figures choose it. When they incite violence or support unity in the violent acts of others, they must be met with violence.

Western Civilization permits homosexuals to exist and allows women to dress like whores (who do you think makes the outfits?) We allowed this ten years ago and a hundred years ago, while the Muslim world was rife with the same murderous scum we see today, that we saw ten years ago, a hundred years ago. We bring art and medicine, air-conditioning, the internet and an almost self-destructive tolerance for other people's ideas.

They permit an illiterate rag-tag band of nomads to sponsor spoiled rich Saudis as they hijack planes and destroy civilian buildings. No John Lennon among them to imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky.

I'm sure that was a great comfort to the guy who went to work a couple hours ago and ended his life jumping out of a window to escape the burning wreckage of a 100+ story skyscraper. It didn't matter how many possessions he had in those few seconds of free-fall, not too far from where Lennon spent the last years of his life on heroin.

No one would stand up to Assad or Yasser Arafat [now there's a name we haven't heard in a while] and chant "All we are saying is give peace a chance". No, you have to go to Greenwich Village to hear things like that. Or across a continent, with a century's worth of electronic improvements. Those are the fruits of freedom, and they hate freedom.

Fighting them *over there* makes it so we don't have to fight them *over here*. Our families and businesses and unions can continue without the threat of violence, among like-minded or differently-minded. Afghanistan provides a specific target, like the monolith appeared to those apes in "2001: A SPACE Odyssey". They cannot destroy it, and much time needs to pass before people who do not seek to destroy can evolve.

We have our homes and communities to defend, the way the responders of 9/11 threw off any thoughts of personal safety to rescue other Americans under attack. Pension plans are for people who don't live with this sort of destruction. Because President Bush took actions to keep America safe, and because President Obama has continued those policies with or without a Democratic Congress, we have not known that level of attack since. Because the American military, and that of our allies, retains its superiority and supremacy on the battlefield, we have triumphed over there. Our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq can hold communities to their word over time. They may be pure and true Muslims, but we can shoot them if they act up, and they know it.

Libya was singled out for American military involvement (trying to push France into a foreign venture while Germany holds the domestic side together?) while Syria was not despite the vast butchery. In Libya, the impending victors are singling out Black Muslims and putting them in camps apart from the Arab Muslims because they are politically incorrect. Egypt and Turkey are making warlike motions against Israel as the Palestinians beg for statehood despite having two different governments in two different territories who can't keep their people safe from internal reprisals and have long passed their constitutionally-mandated terms in office.

They only care about Jerusalem because someone else cares! It happens to be the Jews so they hate the Jews, but it's the very affront of people who aren't Muslims ruling territory that Muslims used to rule which drives them to murderous rage. The Jews are convenient to hate. Many decades ago, the Muslim Brotherhood were personal friends of Adolph Hitler and published "Jihad" ("Mein Kampf" in Arabic) throughout the Muslim world. It's been a popular seller ever since, second only to the Koran I understand. German political theory of the 1920's, go figure.

When Israel was formed, the US only gave formal recognition and no military assistance. It was the USSR under Stalin who gave the Jews weapons to survive those first crucial wars. Harry Truman agreed under duress from an old Jewish friend who convinced him to give in and recognize Israel in athrown-together ceremony. The UN had already ruled. The British had already offered the land to whatever groups could organize and make a claim. At the ceremony, the old rabbi representing Israel told Truman that it was the will of God that put him in his mother's womb that decades later he would allow Israel's recreation after thousands of years.

And the same will of God who let Stalin arm Israel in his last years, before paranoia about the Jews reasserted itself with him. And who permitted a score of wealthy educated terrorists to overpower four planes with box-cutters and attack our own homeland on a fall morning.

They can't win, all they can do is damage others. We still haven't replaced the Twin Towers. They are still a gaping wound on one of our oldest cities. General George Washington led his army through one Christmas night, miraculously surviving to fight another day. Paul Revere and other first responders did what they had to do for the good of the nation and their fellow men. They didn't even ask anybody to commit suicide as a specific part of the task at hand. The result is generations of Americans who would die if need be for their cause. Our military has fought them in the Middle East so that they could not bring their organizations to our homeland. Enough Arab or Black Muslims have attempted enough acts of terror under this administration that they would be quite justified in singling them out when they try to fly an airplane. So would the previous administration.

It's common sense. If the blue fruit is poisonous and the green fruit is not poisonous, don't eat the blue fruit. Whatever the virtues of Muslim culture, they become the enemy when depending on totalitarians and their terrorist allies. One reason for the disbanding of the Iraqi Army right after the US victory (this is my personal guess) was that there was no NCO corps. There were people in charge and there were people who didn't do anything. Now they have years of experience with the qualities needed.

Ten years ago, I was at work, washing racks and had a guitar riff going through my mind which I was singing a lyric for to help me remember. I was recording my first album at the time. I was reading Anna Karenina at work on breaktimes and had just bought an 8-track mixer, still the same workaholic I am today. The song didn't get finished for a few weeks but is one of the few high points in my earliest recordings.

All that could be taken away by a lunatic with a plane and a culture that supports his cause.

A couple of months later, I was sitting in the chair one Sunday morning with nothing to do and came up with a guitar riff. Fortunately my acoustic guitar was in arm's reach and I spent a few minutes rehearsing it, a few more minutes playing it with a drum machine and finding ways to mess with it. Then I pushed record and eight minutes later was ready for playback. Within a few hours, I had overdubbed another guitar and vocals that I'm still impressed with today. The song was called "Sunday Morning" and dedicated to George Harrison who had died shortly before.

I spent this Sunday morning like I've spent the last few days, working on the next book. It could still all be taken away, but by the will of God, human progress can't be stopped by the true infidels. It can only be destroyed, and we have to fight to keep them from winning.

I can't say I haven't contributed to the fight. Nebraska doesn't have a lot of contributions to the country except the massive amount of food we provide, but this Nebraska recognized the events of 9/11 for the call that it was. I didn't respond immediately, but I've scored several notches on the 'what did you do in the war' meter. My seventh album was recorded on my first deployment and features some of my best writing and playing, and last night I typed up the second draft of a post I wrote here about the recording process.

Now chaos is falling across the worldwide Muslim community. They have no achievements as a civilization to show for the last decade. We have the rise and fall of Lindsey Lohan as a hot young starlet. And solid military victories. We could destroy Mecca and Medina in an hour, render it irrevocably an irradiated wasteland that no Muslim could ever make the hajj again. We don't do that because it would be wrong. Israel doesn't do that because it would be wrong, and they've lived with the daily threat of extinction for how long?

I don't know what to believe about the death of bin Laden. For all I know, he was capped years ago and the footage was withheld for the 10th anniversary. I do believe we've implemented attacks on the Muslim world that go far beyond bin Laden, such as the recent simultanous domestic atrocities the rulers have perpetrated on their own subjects. Obama doesn't deserve any more credit for shooting him than for presiding over the "Arab Spring".

Bin Laden spent his final years (under the official narrative) living a decrepit life until the SEALs tracked him down and blew his head off. The official narrative has changed on whether or not his wife or any other woman or human shield was shot. Bin Laden wasn't the villain. The cause of Wahabite jihad he fought for is the villain. What was Obama going to say, 'if the intelligence is wrong and he's not there, don't kill him'? What would any other President have said in that place?

Muslims take their history very seriously. They remember dates and battles. So do we who use the solar year, and it's in the realm of possibility that President Bush and his administration set a target date for 10 years later for results of this nature. President Jefferson set similar targets for his operations against the Muslim pirates around Tripoli when he sent the Marines without Congress' approval. He won that battle, and domestically set precedents both for his successors in office and for legal definitions of slavery and its reasons for abolition. The Barbary pirates, you'll remember, were taking Americans prisoner and selling them as slaves.

September 11 was also the anniversary of the failed seige at Vienna, the Eastern European line of demarcation against the military advances of the Ottoman Turks in the seventeenth century. Both sides had gunpowder and the Europeans outfought the Turk who went into a long decline from which it is only recovering in the last couple of years.

In the centuries that followed, Vienna attempted to increase its influence in the south, where Russia was inspired to appeal to fellow Slavs. Christian kingdoms were formed and in the remaining Balkans, ethnic and religious tensions built up. They would be put on hiatus during communist rule, exploding in the Serbian genocide afterwards.

To the west, France was arguably formed as a nation when Charles Martel beat the Muslim invaders from Spain, defining Europe from the Atlantic side. To the far east, Muslim inability to co-exist with Hindu led to the creation of two massive nations, one which has lifted millions of people from degrading poverty thanks to its peaceful alliances with the UK and USA, and Pakistan, where bin Laden was found hiding.

In his latest speech to improve everything, President Barack Hussein Obama cited the inspiration of Abraham Lincoln, founder of the Republican Party and named for the prophet of the God of Jerusalem. His last name was given to my home town in Nebraska, where political dirty tricksters assumed that nobody would want a capitol city named for that Republican. Turned out a lot of Democrats were patriotic after the Civil War too, so I've lived most of my life in the shadow of the state capitol building. Also Memorial Stadium, the third largest city in the state on home football games. Although I don't really do anything when I'm at home, there's always a welcoming sense of homecoming when I arrive. I miss Lincoln when I'm gone for too long. Fidelity counts for something. Who is faithful and who is not?

Being forced to be faithful to anything destroys the whole point of faith. Those are the false choices they make. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, in any mortal man's philosophy. Marxists reduce everything that exists to their founder's writings while Lutherans find numerous divisions and reasons to peacably co-exist. Aristotle and Isaac Newton and Ben Franklin still have relevance to our daily lives, Shi'ite and Sunni saints and martyrs not so much.

Jews and Japanese both know a thing or two about self-sacrifice, yet they find common ground in the American marketplaces, in California and Hollywood or New York City. The heartlands feed the vast country that wouldn't have existed except for brave men dying on the fields of Valley Forge or Bunker Hill or Gettysburg or Iwo Jima or Baghdad.

You don't find men like these rioting in the flash mobs which have begun looting in London and now seem to be spreading to American cities. They feel entitled to new cell phones so they break store windows and steal, that won't feed them this winter. It's difficult to say there's no racial component to it either. I don't know how much is Union-directed (in the US or UK) and how much is racial or religious, Muslim organizations trying to agitate.

It was heartening to see Londoners of all races stand up against the looters regardless of color. These are their homes and stores and the mob's fury will not be allowed to rule. Queen Bodeica burned a strip of blackness into the city's bedrock thousands of years ago in a losing attempt to defeat the Roman invaders.

Less cheerful are the related riots in Greece by civil servants who don't want to give up their perks. The wastes of thousands of years accumulate here, where the Mediterranean opens into Russia and Asia Minor and Egypt. The dogmas of an Orthodox Church and Communist rulers set in, as does a brief conquest by the West back in the Crusades.

Eastern Christendom was falling to the Turk and called for help from the West who responded as they did. Europe's southern border was delineated from Spain and the straits of Gibraltar (through which Ulysses sailed), across France and the remnants of the Romans, below the Poles and the Russians and Muscovites.

Ten years later, people have grown up conscious of what can be taken away. They know who stands on watch for terrorists, and they know who blithely ignores the threat. The enemy isn't entirely extremist Islam, but they are a definite enemy.

The enemy unites because individually they can be broken but like sticks in a bundle they are strong. That works from Mussolini to the rash of violent organized labor actions that have followed the Union Boss Trumka's recent call to violence. The good people unite because they seek to minimize the enemy's existence in everyone's life.

I have worried before his inauguration that President Obama might be at risk for suicide because he had never run anything before becoming the most powerful man on earth. We'd be better off if Muslim terrorists didn't try to commit suicide either, and he's nowhere near as big of an enemy to the USA.

President Bush grabbed a bullhorn and shouted to the first responders that he could hear them, all America could hear them, and soon the enemy would hear as well.

The enemy has heard, and seen firsthand what we can do. They called us the infidel and they were looking in a mirror. There is more despicable poverty across the Muslim world than anywhere else. They all rank at the bottom of international lists of living standards and individual freedom. Dictator-for-life is the most secure job position there is whether you happen to rule where there's oil or not. President Obama will only have his current job for five more years at most. President Bush will never have it again. Israel changes Prime Ministers. Iraq and Karzai-controlled territory are watched by American soldiers. Europe squabbles and realizes integration is no longer such a brilliant idea when there's economic troubles and large parts of their own community ruled by immigrants who don't assimilate.

Ten years ago today, we lost thousands of live in an act by evil-doers. They only need to be lucky once, and they were. But we have kept the faith of our forefathers who brought forth a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men had been endowed by their Creator with certain rights, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Can you picture a Muslim woman saying, as Jane Fonda did recently, that her biggest regret is that she didn't fuck mass-murder and big fan of Stalin Che Guevara? Years ago she was complaining about some of Ted Turner's sexual preferences, but the divorce was fresher then. And she was lucky to be married to Ted Turner and not someone else.

The post Y2K era has been unfamiliar to those of us who remember the term "Y2K". Everything operates according to rules we didn't expect, except those who have old rules to follow. Bush Sr. was right to call it a "New World Order". Time has moved on, but we remember.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.

"Listen nitwit, the last thing we need is a trigger-happy lunatic in charge! No, Mr. President, I wasn't talking to you."

2011-09-03T02:54:00.000-07:00

There must be someone in Martha's Vinyard that can afford a video camera. It would make Obama look capable and leader-like if he just recorded his plan now and gets back to work instead of trying to schedule an appearance before Congress and all the rigmarole that entails.

If he really wants to go up against the Republican primaries, why not do that literally? Show up at the primary (or with teleconference) and take questions from the candidates. What's the worst that can happen, they ask about green jobs or his promise to be at 7% unemployment by now or "Fast and Furious" or Solyndra? He's a former community organizer who got elected President, surely he can take questions from a half-dozen American citizens.

Either way, he’d better have some damned brilliant ideas for reducing unemployment in his speech, ideas that were worth saving until the final third of his term in office. Last month jobs growth was the same as Bluto Blutarsky’s grade point average. [According to the documentary of Faber College available on the Double Secret Probation Edition of Animal House, Senator Blutarsky did reach the White House, so maybe it’s not such a coincidence.]

Obama's Secretary of Labor says she believes "we're going the right direction on jobs" so you know this is the administration that believes in smart power.

For months after returning from deployment, I made CDs for the car stereo in lieu of listening to the radio. At first they were Jim Steinman but after another deployment, I grew weary of Steinman and wished to spice things up with songs I’d acquired since enlisting. Songs that, to my mind, I’d never heard previously in a serious way. I didn’t have much access to amazon.com before and now I could enlarge the music collection tremendously.

Call it an appreciation for the album as an aesthetic creation or the compact disc as a technological innovation, but I’ve a fondness for picking favorite playlists.

Anyway, to my mind I’ve heard the songs properly and have been jumbling them up into jukebox-like CDs for a while now. The only rules were that no Jim Steinman would be permitted unless I hadn’t heard it before (which wasn’t a rule, just a general decision that enough was enough; I play him at work and on the computer) and they had to qualify as song I didn’t completely own pre-enlistment. “Mix tapes” didn’t count, so if I taped it off the radio pre-enlistment, I could hear an internet copy burned to disc and repeated in my car. Keep in mind, it didn’t matter how many times I’d heard the song, even pre-enlistment, only this new listening qualified for serious music appreciation.

Recently I burned a new set of discs and a lot of old favorites left the playlist. Let’s see what remains.

The first CD is the first two albums by Rush. I listened to the entire Rush collection when I bought it on amazon, but now I want to give their body of work a chance to seep in through repetitions in a six-disc player. I haven’t bothered up-grading to an ipod player because that’s just the way I am.

A song from their forthcoming album is included on disc 2, a new addition along with Roger Waters’ “Each Small Candle” and Billy Joel’s “Invention in C Minor” Eddie Van Halen sings and plays keyboards with Gary Cherone’s lyrics and backing vocals for “How Many Say I”, so far the final track on the final Van Halen album. All three are effectively among the last embers of each men’s recording careers. The other new addition after previous material’s purging is Sammy Hagar’s live version of “Give To Live” because the original is awesome but I heard it pre-enlistment.

His last album with VH provides “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You” and “Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do)”, and HSAS album just before he joined VH gave us a cover of “Whiter Shade of Pale” that has been among my favorite tracks. I just listened to it a couple of hours ago before I ever thought of writing this.

“Christmas Canon Rock” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra works all year around, with its anthemic rock orchestra sound and gorgeous female lead vocals. I couldn’t tell you which classical composer’s work they appropriated, but I like the result the way I like Queen and Jim Steinman’s work, and power ballads and much classic rock. The Damn Yankees mixed Ted Nugent and Styx singer/guitarist Tommy Shaw for a similar one-hit wonder called “High Enough” which I’ve been enjoying for well over a year and the copy comes from the ‘best of the 80’s compilation on sale at the PX or Wal-Mart. Gene Chandler sings the gorgeous “Duke of Earl”, Phil Spector brings us “He’s A Rebel” which has inspired musical interludes. Like these two, Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” is another long-time pop favorite I had never appreciated before.

I’d always like Linda Perry’s 4 Non Blondes album, and “Life in a Bottle” comes from her solo album a few years ago. “Hey Girl” is a cover song by Billy Joel to fill out his third Greatest Hits album (the first two are a double-disc set that is one of the biggest selling records of all time). He dabbled in classical music after the River of Dreams but (according to regular tour co-star Elton John) has nothing else to say in music. I’ve played “Hey Girl” before. It was one of the songs I tired of early but didn’t erase from the “Make More CDs” file.

“Making Love Out of Nothing at All” is a Jim Steinman demo of his hit with Air Supply, and the vocals are in a tolerable register. The production is enjoyably raw while suggesting the heights that it reached with Air Supply’s recording budget, and it’s technically *new* Steinman which is always good.

“I’m a Boinger” was one of the two tracks released on flex-disc with the relevant Bloom County collection which I listened to when it came out. The other one is also on these discs, but “I’m a Boinger” has such an awesome lead vocal and hilarious lyrics that it’s my favorite. Remember when records were used to promote things like this?

On disc 3, Sammy Hagar is well-represented with his original version of Rick Springfield’s early-80’s hit “I’ve Done Everything For You” and Sammy’s own last big hit to date, 1999’s “Mas Tequila”. Chickenfoot is represented with the gorgeous ballad “Learning To Fall”. Also his cover of “Free Money” from his late-70’s solo album is the song where I truly realized how awesome Sammy was (except as a lyricist but even he’ll admit that). His early-21st century advertisement for his tequila-bar empire involves a cover of Kenny Chesney’s “I Love This Bar”.

I’d always liked Paul McCartney’s first ‘failed debut single’, “My Brave Face” from 1989, Bill Medley’s “Most Of All You” ballad that played at the end of the first Major Leagues movie, Petula Clark’s “Downtown", Tom Petty’s songwriting partnership with Bob Dylan “You’re Jammin’ Me”, Enya’s “Epona” and “Exile” (as heard in Steve Martin’s L.A. Story) and the Proclaimer’s weird-scottsmen-with-irrestistibly-catchy-melody “I’m Gonna Be (500) Miles)” doing what Dexy’s Midnight Runners did a decade before. All of these I have enjoyed for many months, since I first forsake old Steinman, and heard only in incomplete form before enlistement.

Post-enlistment first-hears, “Beautiful Dangerous” featuring Fergie continues to be a standout track from Slash’s self-titled debut album, and “Catcher in the Rye” retains its enjoyability and quality from Axl’s rival album. “Fall To Pieces” is an enjoyable song Slash co-wrote between G’n’R and what he’s doing now, and about the only listenable Scott Weiland singing I’ve ever heard. Linda Perry’s album gives us two more songs, “Fruitloop Daydream” and “Knock Me Out”.

I’ve recently become a big fan of guitarist Jeff Beck, who first came to prominence replacing Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds and hired Jimmy Page to replace him in turn. Beck and Page were and are longtime friends, and “Beck’s Bolero” is one of the fruits of that friendship. The two guitarists booked studio time to record something. They wanted the Who’s rhythm section of John Entwistle and Keith Moon, but could only get Moon so Page turned to session player John Paul Jones for bass duties. They even talked about forming a band, which Moon said would go down like a lead balloon, or zeppelin or something. Page formed his band, and Beck had an erratic career starting with the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart as the lead singer who went solo. “Beck’s Bolero” is still outstanding.

In the re-release of their catalogue, little looks promising in the way of unheard material from Queen. The a capella opera section from “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a stand-out that continues to amaze, but not much else of worth has been released so far. Steven Tyler’s debut single as a solo artist is a gorgeous ballad called “Love Lives” that justifies him as a singer and (almost) the years of silence we’ve heard since Aerosmith’s last album. He wants to do pop music, as his appearances on American Idol demonstrate and his power ballad stylings during the 80’s were no exception. He’s also the guy who wrote “Mama Kin”, so cut him some slack.

More of the final Van Hagar album gives us “Amsterdam” and “The Seventh Seal”, the latter of which is an awesomely atmospheric hurricane of sound. Eddie the keyboard player and guitar player and producer fights to overcome Sammy. (I think it’s a draw, but I’m not sure who called it). These are fairly new additions as is Sammy’s hilarious “Sam I Am” accounting of his career to date. “Up For Breakfast”, “It’s About Time” and “Learning to See” are the three completed tracks from a few short years later when they reunited with Hagar.

The b-side of Rush’s earlier single “BU2B” is new, as is “Waltz #1 (Nunley’s Carousel)” by Billy Joel, John Phillips Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis” and “Suicide is Painless” from the original M*A*S*H movie. Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s new inclusion is “Wish Liszt”, where they play the musical piece,. Best known today from the scene where Daffy and Donald battle it out in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, “Hungarian Rhapsody” by Liszt was favored in old Disney and Warners cartoons and although the TSO does a great job, it falls flat in places (nyuck nyuck). There are places where I think they would have done better to sound like, I dunno, “Christmas Canon”.

A remixed Elvis song became a big hit in England, “A Little Less Conversation” and helped promote 30 #1s in 30 years, Elvis’ anniversary celebrations. I bought the album in AIT and still enjoy “Conversation”. Axl Rose gives us the official “Street of Dreams”, which I’d heard prior to enlistment as “The Blues”. Still one of my favorites of his though. “Ghost” has Slash’s reunion with Izzy Stradlin and is awesome. SSG Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” has featured exactly the sort of build-up I like in my popular music, and I have a personal connection to the unit it was written for. Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” is a powerful bass voice of resentment and lament. Ellen Foley maneuvered her vocals on “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and girlfriendship to the Clash’s guitarist that she recorded a few solo albums with some quality material. “In the Killing Hour” is the one I haven’t grown tired of yet, a powerful bolero performance.

Oddly, I’d heard Roxette’s “Crash Boom Bang” pre-enlistment, but I’d never liked it before, so I qualify it as new. An awesome power ballad with a gorgeous vocal and atmospheric keyboards, it’s just a great pop song.

“The Night Chicago Died” is a quirky one-hit wonder, a retelling of a battle between the police and Al Capone with a great call-and-response vocal.

Queen’s rereleases also include the backing track from “You’re My Best Friend”, a standout hit in that it was written by their bass-player and the follow-up A-side to “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I had always thought it a pleasant pop tune, but quite low on my list of favorite Queen songs. Now, hearing it without Freddie’s lead vocals reveals what an extremely talented band Queen were. It’s an outstanding performance and eventually I’ll get around to listening to Freddie’s vocal again. Probably not soon though.

Disc 5 has the two Red Hot Chili Peppers songs I’ve enjoyed since discovering they had a career before “Under the Bridge” (all pre-enlistment). “By the Way” and “Californication” demonstrate the singer’s ability as a lyricist to manage complicated rhymes. There aren’t a whole lot of tools available to the lyric writer, but ability to form coherent polysyllabic thoughts is one of them. I’d heard the songs when they were new, but now I could buy my own copies.

Elvis had “If I Can Dream” for his comeback, Sammy had “Silver Lights” for his start and “Returning of the Wish” from the same album as “Mas Tequila”, Queen also sold the instrumental tracks of “Seven Seas of Rhye” which I love for the same reason as “You’re My Best Friend”, and “Tie Your Mother Down” which is a brand-new addition to this series of discs that I haven’t yet heard properly. G’n’R has “There Was A Time”, Heart had “Stranded”, longtime favorites, there’s this awesome punk cover of “Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron” that still makes me sing “10, 20, 30, 40, 50 or more, the bloody Red Baron was rolling the score” every time it comes on as it has for months as well.

Two more Sammy songs, one of which I’ve listened to for a couple months is his acoustic rendition of “Dreams” post-VH, and a new one from the same album, “When It’s Love”. His HSAS album also gives us “Missing You” and “Top of the Rock”
Metallica’s “The Unforgiven” continues to be my favorite song of their since I was in high school. Years later, I hated what they did to it with “Unforgiven II”. Now that I can buy stuff legally, I might as well drop a buck on “Unforgiven III” from their latest album which has in common with its predecessors the chord sequences and the general Metallica sound which is worth a buck in my opinion. The Eagles give us “Live in the Fast Lane” which is one of the few songs from the band I really really like.

Billy Joel’s demo “The Prime Of Your Life” is extremely enjoyable. He doesn’t have the lyrics finished yet, although they’re surprisingly developed. It’s light years away from what was eventually released as the vocal-heavy “The Longest Time” with an entirely-different vocal melody and musical approach.

Disc 6 is mostly songs that have come into and dropped out of my listening habits lately. Linda Perry’s “Uninvited” and Sammy’s live “Right Now” are brand-new, as is Jeff Beck’s “Diamond Dust” instrumental (with George Martin’s production).

Def Leppard’s “Two Steps Behind” (about the only song post-Adrenalize I really liked), Queen+Paul Rodgers “We Believe” (my other favorite from the album, so far Brian May’s final Queen composition as far as I’m concerned. He can produce stuff for others, or play with Roger, but all of his other new songs are variations on the “Butterfly” chord sequence, as was the final song Queen recorded with John (for which I travelled to England for a copy), and make up a large part of bootleg Queen songs since “Save Me”. He may have written all the keyboard ballads there were in him.

The release from Roy Orbison’s album at the time he died was “I Drove All Night”, that’s brand new. “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” by Prince was absent for a number of discs before re-appearing (its video was directed by Spike Lee in exchange for funding the Malcom X movie, and probably Prince’s conflicts with Warner Bros’ demands for a single.

Slash’s “Starlight” and Jim Croce’s “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” have been fixtures since I first started burning these discs, as has the 80’s sounding remake of “Ballad of the Green Beret”. “Stray Cat Strut” was briefly included but not yet erased and appears again. Sammy’s iconic song “Red” is included, as is 1999’s “Red Voodoo”. 1989 brought us Brian May, Roger Taylor, David Gilmour, Tony Iommi and others for a guitar hero’s remake of “Smoke on the Water”, and I’ve enjoyed it for a couple months now, along with a previously-unreleased Steinman demo or a previously-unreleased Steinman song, “Train of Love” sounds like a Motown song. Weird Al’s new album has the Un-Steinman “Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me” which I’ve enjoyed since its release date. John Phillips Sousa was also paid to write something by the Washington Post, hence the name of the march.

That’s what I’m listening to these days. When I’ve burned out on a number of these tracks, I’ve made 2 more Rush CDs taking up more of their early career. By the time I get tired of these, I’ll have winnowed them down to a few favorite songs and making further compilations of their body of work will be manageable.

I have more live Sammy Hagar, but enough is enough on him as well in many ways. I also have a couple of songs by AC-DC that I’ve never liked, but they were big hits and it’s important to have them. There’s the first couple albums by Big Star, another one of those bands nobody’s ever heard of but became influential, they forged the ‘power pop’ sound prominent post-grunge and briefly flirted with being somebodies. They didn’t bear up to repeated listening and it’s only inertia that has kept me from erasing them.

I like to think my email to Jim@JimSteinman.com had something to do with the release of unheard demos, and I have a number of them yet unburned to disc. (including "Train of Love" with Steinman singing) I don’t even have all of Sammy’s albums, or VH’s and I’m running out of interest in burning what’s left. I’ve listened to it, and HSAS/Van Hagar will probably filter in to the disc sooner-or-later. Chickenfoot has a new album coming out and Joe Satriani’s first album will probably come back into my rotation as well. Most of the parodies on Weird Al’s album I wouldn’t recognize as parodies if I didn’t know it was Al. The original songs are certainly worth paying for. I had a yen to own much of John Phillips Sousa’s work and only a few tracks have been represented.

There are Sammy songs I like and will probably return to favor, stuff with Montrose or live versions of VH songs. Some of his covers are more annoying than others. There’s still more of Linda Perry’s solo album, and she’s since gone on to write for other chick singers. A few other Queen demos from their debut album which have great merit but I got tired of them. I got tired of Brian May’s young female singer more quickly, as I tired of Ellen Foley’s best songs (including a 3-song EP which I gather is quite recent). A few Bette Midler songs are charming, most of them written by Sammy. The original cast album tracks from Jesus Christ, Superstar remain as enjoyable now as when I was a kid.

Males using female vocalists are represented in work I’ve recently removed from the discs, tracks like Ike and Tina’s long-playing “Proud Mary” and “River Deep, Mountain High”. Ike’s own “Rocket 88” was removed early on, as were the Shangri-La’s “Remember (Walking In the Sand) - later remade awesomely by Aerosmith - , the Spanish version of “Crash Boom Bang” (Roxette is Swedish! It’s same instrumental tracks! Awesome!) and “Soy Una Mujer” (which topped the pop charts as “Fading Like A Flower” in my younger days). Sonny and Cher’s “The Beat Goes On” may one day reappear, as might Linda Rondstadt and whoever’s “You’re No Good”. Phil Spector and whoever’s “And Then He Kissed Me” may return sooner. “Sowing the Seeds of Love” was a hit by Tears For Fears in the late 80’s that was on tapes I dubbed from the radio first, and maintained another impressive run rarely equaled in this collection of songs. There’s something so distinctly 1980’s and British about trying to be 1960s and American and inspired by 1960s English stars… But I enjoyed the song for all my misbegotten youth and for the last year as well. Dennis Wilson’s “Friday Night” gives a stark other side to the Beach Boy’s life and I like it very much, as does the other Enya track from L.A. Story that didn’t make the cut for this round of CD burnings. The rest are similar novelty tracks, show tunes, covers or mashes, funny or surprising.

I wish I could have included the tv theme songs but Windows seems to have some aversion to certain wmv files being burnt to CD. The long-version of the “Sanford and Son” theme is outstanding.

A Night at the Osprey

2011-08-21T07:52:00.000-07:00

The Osprey was a minor character in a minor issue of Fantastic Four by the Lee and Kirby imitators at Marvel in the early 70's. The FF's arch-enemies had long since banded together as the Frightful Four. In this issue, they had taken over the FF's headquarters and was holding the foursome prisoner despite (or because of?) the villains numbering only three. To protect their branding, the Wizard, the Sandman and the Trapster advertised in the Daily Bugle for a fourth member.

Most of them were cameos to set up for future issues (the Impossible Man) or for reasons of continuity. [I still remember the Texas Twister departing with an editorial note where he would next appear]. Then there was the Osprey.

He had a costume with wings on it, but he couldn't fly, not really. Not at all actually. In fact, if one of the FF (the bad ones) could do something about that, he'd really appreciate it. The Wizard slapped an anti-gravity disc on him and the last we saw of the Osprey, he was sailing out into the wild blue yonder screaming 'heeeeeeeellllpppppp!' Even Wikipedia doesn't have a page on him. They've got one on the Texas Twister!

But the Osprey had his two or three minutes on stage. He gave it a shot.

Last night my Dad and I went to see the Grand Ole Opry. Neither of us are country music fans - I'm certainly not anyway - but he had come to visit and we needed a tourist trap in Nashville. He got tickets for a night nobody I'd heard of was playing (although Vince Gill turned out to be the final host for the night, so I must have missed his name earlier).

I have to say there was something intrinsically Southern about the experience. It seemed like a normal public gathering in a high school auditorium in seats that resembled church pews. Most ages were represented, although I didn't see too many kids who wouldn't have preferred a baby-sitter and video games. Just little ones, and a few on stage.

Notable Virginians aside, the South did not produce the people who founded our nation, they were the people who first moved on, and applied to their new land what the founding Americans had created. Tennessee was one of the first new states to join the US and Nashville as a long history (I assume).

The Opry says it made country music popular, and there's probably a good case for that. They certainly gave it a national forum in 1925 when the weekly radio broadcast went national. Sponsors changed, locations changed, they added a television broadcast. One week Elvis Presley stood at the back of the room along with all the other hopefuls for his chance. They told him he had no future in country music and the following Monday he was back at work as a truck driver.

This was when the modern nationwide media truly came into its own. An illiterate southern redneck like Hank Wiliams could sell records across the country instead of the regional markets as he'd been doing. With the glitter of an Opry appearance, he and other touring musicians could bill themselves as Opry musicians and promote themselves as such. However the Opry had to protect its brand name and charged fees for its use. The musicians were also cut into for touring, simply because they couldn't afford to get too far from Nashville and miss a scheduled appearance. The records could travel, the NBC weekly show could travel, but those who stood in the circle couldn't get too far if they wanted to come back.

Again, this is why the experience seemed so intrisically Southern. The opening act was the most... I don't even know how to describe her. I have no idea how one gets the job of warming up the crowd, much less how the Opry makes the selection. Her act was very calculated to look utterly simple and foolish. Heavy drawling, regular references to likin' the fellers, a sales tag hanging from her hat, an appearance and delivery that was so plain, just so... Almost literally a form of entertainment that could not exist above the Mason-Dixon line (wherever that is), this was delighfully off-putting, like something you know you should turn your nose up at in disdain, but there's something so charming about it.

Some of the performances were quite nice. Standing in the wings, you could see where all the other people on the show that night were milling about. A few other people were present, people who were probably the producer, the director, the sponsor, a girl moving sheet music around. The house singers stayed behind baffles except for their featured spot of the night. The house band was swapped out once for one woman's set. One of the better performers was making his debut appearance and promoting his new single available at Old Country Stores, another regional market that people who aren't from the South would scratch their heads about, but Southerners probably know as a regular part of life. [Or at least it seems that way, who knows how *those people* actually live?]

A group of kids were another act, their main attraction being the smallest and cutest one on the banjo. Quite impressive for what they were, a group of brothers who are doing now what their peers will do in high school, form a band that sounds pretty good. But it's where popular entertainment meets grade school talent show, predating "American Idol" by several generations.

And it still works, those kids will always know they got to stand on that stage with Little Jimmy Dickens, 90 years old with jokes even older. "I take my wife everywhere. She keeps finding her way back" was funny because it was so lame. "I ask my wife if she's cheating on me, she says who else is she going to cheat on" was funnier. His performance included a song from his latest album, released thirty years ago.

The sexy young girls who were really dressed up might have been there for Vince Gill, or because they were going clubbing afterwards and the rest was entirely family-friendly. Just enough off-color innuendo to give the adults a different set of laughs from the kids and enough diversity of entertainment that everybody could find something. The band played professionally, the banjo players did some good pickin', there were a few religious songs, a few love songs. There were regular exhortations of how wonderful the Opry is and interruptions by Hosanna, the Life Insurance company sponsoring this segment, who wanted us to know their name and that they were sponsoring this segment. The other sponsors did the same, whoever they were.

There was a reminder of tradition. The segment's host began moving to commercial at one point, but it had slipped his mind and he had to be reminded that it was Saturday night, which meant it was time for the square-dancers segment. He didn't usually work Saturdays, but the dancers sure did. If you want to know what square-dancing looks like when performed by highly-trained athletes, look no further. Wow. And girls in amazing purple outfits too!

Earlier in the day we had gone to downtown Nashville for the Country Music Hall of Fame. That was fun, although it did help illustrate why museums aren't a good place for music. There's nothing to show. The plaques are nice, with modifications when the honoree becomes posthumous. RCA is heavily represented, Studio B is one of the main exhibits (earning its own tour which we did not go on) and you can at least see the patch of ground where so many people passed over the years to do their turn before the microphone. They had to stay within the circle for maximum audio quality.

Hank Williams Jr. is undoubtedly one of the prime movers of the CMHoF, having found a repository for his father's written legacy as well as his own. And Hank III if the kid straightens up. Hank Sr. was banned from the Opry for drunkenness and a few months later, showed up dead to a concert in West Virginia after a snowstorm in Nashville delayed him. He didn't record at Studio B because it hadn't been built yet, but luckily made a couple of recordings in the period where he could no longer bill himself as an Opry performer. That's probably why he was looking for a few thousand dollar payday in West Virginia, he was getting divorced at the time.

Carrie Underwood, Faith Hill and Taylor Swift are all prominent. It's a good investment from the part of their record companies. Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, the Judds all made good career moves by endorsing the institutions. Amy Grant had hits on the Christian chart and one bonafide pop hit "Baby Baby" in my teenage years. Her song was enjoyable like any other on MTV then, and I still have the issue of "Dr. Strange" that her management threatened Marvel Comics over, because cover artist Jackson Guice copied her image and they didn't want her to be associated with satanism.

[Don't you love the way all this stuff works back into comic books sooner or later?]

Anyway, Amy Grant, past her hit-making years but presumably still a talented singer has an album of Christmas duets with her husband whatsisname coming out. The crossover market works.

THAT'S Southern too. It's something the rest of America doesn't have, the historical memory of foreign soldiers coming in, shooting a few hundred thousand of your people and burning down your homes. Blah blah blah, American Indians, it took the Union four years to tear down the South, for American to kill American.

Lemme tellya, those hills in Nashville are tough. The hills where I live are tough. There's some hardy breeds able to thrive there where us flatlanders are wary.

The South is more than Nashville of course. There's Old Virginia, there's the colonial melting pots of Louisiana and Florida. Texas is eternally Texas (the dumb bastards). Beyond the vastness of Texas, it spreads out into the Southwest which is another region of the country. Above Texas it fades into the farmlands of the midwest and arcs towards St. Louis, bounded by rivers until it reaches our nations' historical spine, the Appalachins. Then the South meets the North in DC, and the ocean becomes the borderline.

There's hillbillies and moonshine, there's church songs and rummage sales, they all have that weird accent, but their money's usually good which is better than some folks I could mention. Except when the people down here congregate in such large numbers, it's done like this, just the same as anybody else.

[As a writer, the potential for story material is amazing, whether it's a sexy Vince Gill groupie or a blue-collar lament to God or motherhood. Or a secret agent on a deadly mission moving through the crowd, there's just so many stories that could be told and I genuinely don't see that reflected in other public crowds, fairs, concerts, bar bands, clubs, etc. Political rallies and churches have their reason for existing and could easily be folded into the mix.

Here's Johnny Cash singing the one song of the night I'd ever heard before, "Lonesome Me".

"My wife looks in the mirror and says she's old and fat and ugly and even the slightest compliment would cheer her up right now, so I say her eyesight is perfect."

Meanwhile, in another part of town...

2011-08-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

The Republican primaries are becoming a popular ticket, with a Texas newcomer following Obama's bus tour. This one may burn out like previous new favorites.

It's coming down to Betty and Veronica. Bachman is on the 'inside', going along with the system and wowing everybody, Palin is the 'outside' but with a key constituency. Between the two of them, they'll pick an Archie and I would hope that all the candidates are collaborating in making sure any of the others can use their assets.

The veep slot is another unknown card. In theory, male Republican primary winner could pick one or the other for veep and guarantee enough votes period. However, if two males make it across the finish line (as it were) they might risk the 'chick vote'. If they're collaborating, I'd assume it includes the agreement to time everything in accordance with the plans, whatever those are. Everybody involved will be expected to endorse the eventual ticket against Obama.

The biggest upset would be Palin declaring herself a write-in candidate at the last moment, which would probably give him four more years. If matters get to that point, than no one can foresee conditions on the ground right now, so just go with everybody endorsing the plan. "If we don't hang together..." as someone once said.

Bachman or Donald Trump or Matt Damon or somebody could probably declare a last-minute write-in candidacy with enough votes to matter somewhere. Unless he completely chokes doing the "I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message" recordings, there won't be any challenge for the Democratic candidacy.

I still think Biden might be switched out. My guess is John Kerry will take over, giving his junior Senator colleague a little help in the executive wing. Or some really surprising candidate like Joe Lieberman. Hillary has been mentioned but probably more out of reflex than anything.

Obama has the black vote. How much of it remains to be seen, and I don't have any evidence one way or the other. [Then again, aren't votes confidential? How do they know in the first place?] The 'let's vote for a chick' vote might outweigh that. Or not.

I'm slowly getting the book into production. I have started editing what I would like to do as a follow-up, another book of roughly equal size. Another single, basically.

This book will have "Life and Polonia", the book I wrote last fall in a seven week period, and in a music industry analogy, the flip side will be an edited version of all the other material I wrote in same period of time. One's the A-side and one's the B-side.

So, carrying that idea to the follow-up single, I've printed out all of my essays about pop culture. Comics, movies, tv shows, music, cartoons, etc. I'm even going to go through my Facebook posts and include every Star Wars joke I've ever made, just because.

The flip side will be a series of short stories I wrote at the end of Basic Training through the next few months, as well as a couple more stories featuring the same characters. The main characters are a rock band and the stories take place at various points in their history. They work as a 'side' to this single.

A third book is in the planning stages. That is, I have a print-out of most of the material and it's ready for editing to make a second draft. This would focus on history, the war, poliics, religion. I haven't decided what the flip side to that book would be, but considering I have a ton of pre-enlistment material and several hundred pages of Facebook one-liners (minus the Star Wars jokes) to choose from, I don't think it will be a problem.

I could see a fourth book, compiling the best of what's left into various word pictures from a journal. I already have a few months of backlog that could be edited for a flip side there, and that's assuming I don't complete another lengthy work of prose any time soon.

I have ideas for another work of fiction. I'd like to do a "Back to the Future" rip-off, where the time travel becomes really complicated as its main gimmick, but it works. Basically taking the cool parts of the trilogy (minus the McFly family) and jam them into one plot-intensive book, roughly as long as "Life and Polonia". If it works, I could see a trilogy (of, well, trilogies).

The "Seth DeSignor" strips are still a source of joy, as are some of the other comics I've made with Microsoft Paint. I could do more with those. It'll end whenever Seth DiSignor himself shows up and a funny in-joke will be complete. I have a few other comic ideas, and have even surprised myself by cranking out a few short short superhero stories on a notepad.

In another part of my brain, the urge to record another album of music is growing. I'd need to replace my recording gear and instruments, but maybe I can find some dumbed-down way of using digital technology. Frank Zappa bought the synclavier and it sat around for a couple years because he had no idea how to make it work. He hired someone to read all the manuals and give Frank basic answers. "How do I make this note?" "You push these buttons." "How do I change them in such-and-such a way?" You push those buttons." That's why most of Zappa's compositions in his final years were on synclavier.

If I have to go back to a cheap 8-track recorder from Amazon, I will, but isn't there a better option?

But as you can see, I have quite a few creative irons in the fire, and too few hours in the day as it is. That's not counting my job, sleeping or anything else. And I'm only a few pages into the second draft of the second book, still beginning the printing process for the first. And I'm lazy.

What if Obama ran for...

2011-08-06T16:37:00.000-07:00

Vice-President? If Joe Biden (or Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore) is the Democrats preference for the top slot, could that be done? If Obama sits out the next four or eight years, he can watch someone else do the job and try again. How about Ralph Nader or Joe Lieberman? Both of them were credible candidates for the top two slots once upon a time. Nader would provide a long track record of unabashed liberalism to finally prove to the American people that progressive policies work when the right people do them, people unattached to corporate influences or profit-motives of any kind. Lieberman still votes with Democrats on pretty much everything and he was more qualified for Vice-President than Sarah Palin (not that that’s any major accomplishment, right? She’s an ignorant twat.) He also showed up at the Republican Party convention and said ‘don’t vote for my party, vote for the other party’s candidate’ so it’s unqualified bi-partisanship from a long-time committed Democrat.

I’ve never heard of Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi mentioned or President ever, but if you’re looking for senior level Democrats who could sensibly take the top slot, win an election *and* let Obama learn in office for four years, they’d be on anybody’s top ten list. Hillary’s a long shot, just because she looks like she’s ready to claw her eyeballs out if that will release her from the insane hell she’s caged in. I can’t stand the woman and will applaud the way she’s performed under unbelievable pressures for these three years. You can’t govern as Secretary of State, and it’s the closest thing Obama has to a positive role model right now. If she’s up for another go around, she and Bill have earned the chance to try again.

Al Gore seems much happier as a private citizen so I doubt he’s interested. John Kerry’s still fairly young. He spent 30 years as the Junior Senator from Massachusetts, he might have earned another. This way Obama hasn’t wasted the only time he’ll ever get to be President again and prevented the Democrats from winning a popular majority in ’12.

It would keep Obama’s mojo alive and spare the Party from an embarrassing Nader-esque candidacy. Because at this point, as far as the voters are concerned, why not have Matt Damon run for office? He could call himself a Democrat or run as a third-party candidate, either way he’d probably pick up at least 5% of the vote on general principles, By picking Obama for the bottom slot, Democrats would keep his voting base, and conspicuously reprimand someone for failing to meet basic standards that yes, even Republicans consistently meet. GWB kept an AAA rating and the Senate got bills passed under his tenure. These are good things and Democrats only set themselves up for failure by denying it, who’s going to be the first to say it?

The sooner Democrats realize this, the sooner they can salvage something from Obama’s four years in office and go into November ’12 with a candidate people will want to vote for without having to run against Obama specifically. The alternative is surrendering the Oval Office to Republicans who will have a much more pliant Congress in regardless of how the public votes.

I’d be worried about a third-party candidate, a serious Ross Perot-level wacky person with his own money to throw around. [Jack Nicholson instead of Matt Damon, for instance. Or Rob Reiner. Or Carl Reiner. Now I’m just being funny.]

So, in the interest of Democratic Party victory, what odds would there be in moving Obama to the back because of merit? The Presidency is not a learn-on-the-job sort of thing. Ok, now he’s going to take some time to grow, as a person, and the powder is still dry. In a bloody re-election campaign, someone might snap from the pressure and release his college grades. If he doesn’t run as Veep or get installed as a czar by the next Democratic President, he takes a step down, maybe runs for Senator of Illinois again. Does a reality show with MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, I dunno.

Or maybe the President goes into private business. He builds a big temple to himself, signs contracts committing to a four-year demonstration of ability, and then sells whatever he’s got to sell. A model private citizen, someone who fervently believes in the government’s right to do as he demonstrated in office will now show how the government does it right.

He says he doesn’t need the income he makes from his books, now he can look at Sasha and Mahlia every day and determine how much they are not entitled to from the government. They’ll need new clothes. They’ll still need food. Obama’s half-brother lives on, what, one American dollar a day? Fidel Castro found a use for his brother, the most powerful man on Earth hasn’t given this guy a job yet? Ok, let him create a job, his own (President of the Company) and his half-brother’s (selling what the former President of the United States produces for the world’s benefit). He will abide by all government restrictions no matter how unfair and he will pay any taxes no matter how socially-unjust they are towards the rich. He will support his fine upstanding wife and raise their daughters to be proud Americans and four or eight years later, he will try again to be President.

In this next election, the Republicans will be unstoppable. The US just lost its AAA++ grade from mucky-mucks in the measuring economics department. As the superpower, our economics grades start at the highest level and number two is measured from there. China and India and Japan and Russia and others are measured according to the standards America sets. All the teachers can look at Obama and tell him how brilliant he is for another four years, maybe that’ll be enough votes to win, but it’ll just give everyone else four years without having to be distracted by events or decisions that turn out completely wrong. Even David Lee Roth gets off-stage once in a while. Surely the President would like to take a long nap.

A victory here for Obama might mean this decade in history is remembered like Ulysses S. Grant was in charge. Great general, drank a lot. Lousy President. Oversaw the end of Reconstruction. Stick with the pre-Presidential track record. ‘As God is my witness, the South shall vote Democratic again!’ as it were.

Life is getting in the way, but inshallah I am tidying up the final ends on having an actual book as soon as my check clears. I do have a timeline and hope the resulting books are sturdy enough to travel. A notion to splurge on myself and see Sammy Hagar play in a far-off city got dashed quickly and easily. Now I'm casting about for another creative project although I haven't yet finished this one.

Music is tempting again. I have a job where I can sing again and I can relate to that kind of 'performance'. I'm actually a bit nostalgic for when I sat down and recorded stuff and some of my vocal takes impress me more than I remembered. Even some of the stuff that flat-out sucks has a fun quirkiness to it, but some of it doesn't suck. I mean, I can't play an instrument to save my life, there's an attitude that compensates. As performance art there's some pretty good snapshots there.

The problem with performance art is that there's no record for virtually any of it. It also leaves no time to practice. I made music for years and showed hardly an improvement as a technical player. Dancing, acting, magic tricks, stand-up comedy, live theater, these are all fields that are primarily performance art, where it's all about what happens in the moment. Singing is generally in that area, but with recorded music in the last century, it becomes more of a production matter. You can make Paul McCartney sing "Let It Be" 100 times in a row at any decibel level by programming the CD player, just like you can watch Mark Hamill blow up the Death Star on a big-screen tv. Books are ideas translated into words and about as far from performance art as you can get.

Tired now. Need sleep. Here's Weird Al's not-quite-Steinman but otherwise a great song. Send it to everyone you know.

"I made it up, and it all came true anyway" - Alan Moore, "From Hell, prologue"

2011-07-23T16:45:00.000-07:00

Rock chick whose music I've never heard dies in alcohol-related incident. She was 27, the age of rock'n'roll death. Representative from Oregon suddenly starts copping a guilty plea to inappropriate relationship with internet minor just after a 50-something man marries a 16 year old girl. Anthony Weiner's in rehab.

I've been working long hours and carried it over into the weekend, and somehow I've found time to get much of the 4th draft edited, passing the 75% mark lately. I become more pleased with it, and think it's getting closer to finished. I haven't done the math but I'm pretty sure the first draft took the least time, although I put in more hours per day for that one. More motivated, more free time and I also had a goal that didn't involve words on a blank page. I already had those and didn't reckon with the time involved of editing as opposed to writing.

For the weekend, I've trashed my room. It was sort of a mess anyway, so the best way to fix it is to make it worse. I even tried to do the whole bohemian thing. I'm still wearing the clothes I had on Friday even though I did laundry early Saturday and a shower early today. I tried to sleep on the closet floor last night, just to prove I could, but eventually gave up and found a place to curl up on the bed. I had intended to get a lot hungrier before ordering pizza, but I usually eat more of it when I do.

So you could say I'm not really sure what's going on, but working hard is a consistent part of it. Now I'm trying to decide what to do for a day of rest. Probably not much resting. At the very least I need to restock the closet, move out whatever I can (or at least prep it for moving) and clean up the floor.

The problem is the books really. There are a lot of them and I don't go through them often, but when I want one I expect it immediately. I re-read Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's "From Hell" recently, and had forgotten what a marvelous piece of work, a historical autopsy of the Jack the Ripper murders. Moore just wanted to write a lengthy book on murder as a fixed event in time and space, and wasn't interested in the Ripper murders. When they did catch his eye, he read a bunch of books and picked the theory that best fit the story he wanted to tell. In correspondence with Cerebus creator Dave Sim, he described telling somebody that his version of the story was made up and had about as much bearing on historical reality as Disney's "Pocahantas".

Moore was interested in telling the story. (from "Dance of the Gull Catchers") "As if there could ever be a solution. Dr. Grape. In the horse-drawn carriage. With the Liston knife. Murder, other than in the most strict forensic sense, is never soluble [though Moore admits the forensic sense is far and away the most important one]. Our detective fictions tell us otherwise: everything's just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive and a means, you've solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce complex elements."

The second appendix is an account of how Ripper theories began, with people who were there adding details or changing details (or both) years afterwards, and these are picked up by others years later and begin dovetailing into each other. Eventually, Moore speculates, someone will start counting up cattle mutilations of the era and come up with a 'space aliens did it' theory.

The quote at the top of this post comes from the prologue to "From Hell", back when it was published in a horror anthology, before Moore had decided to become a magician, before the fall-out of the "1963" series (which remains his only real incursion into Marvel Comics-style storytelling). He admitted (in the first appendix that he has no evidence that Queen Victoria's psychic held any of the views Moore wrote into the character's mouth for that scene. Five-ten years later as he finished the series, he was constantly finding evidence that would have proved his point, and through drug-induced magical experiences, began worshipping a sock-puppet/snake god and went to (as Daeve Sim recounted it in Cerebus #186) "the Big White Room. They were all there, Alan informs me. Hawksmoor, Crowley, Vitruvius, Thomas Hobbes, this one and that one. All the Mages of the Ages. 'They are just who they say they are,' Alan observed. 'The Illuminati. Not Jewish Bankers and Worldwide Conspirators. The Illuminated Ones.' I asked if Alan just, you know, saw them or if he had any kind of exchange with them.
"'You know, Viktor [sic], I looked around and I noticed there weren't any women in the room. And I said to' (I forget which one he said it was: doesn't matter), 'There are no women. Is this some kind of faggy boys' club or something, then?'
"This, according to Alan, generated a good deal of amusement."

Moore and Sim would go on to have a lengthy discussion (printed in issues of Cerebus @ #220 and freely available on the internet) where they go into their respective views much more. All these quotes are almost within arms reach from where I type this, so as I say, books are important.

Republicans are displaying several plans to deal with the debt crisis. The administration has set a deadline of 2 August although the President hasn't offered anything more concrete than a budget that received 0 votes in the Senate a few months ago. Has a President ever offered anything to Congress that received 0 votes in its favor? Democrats are sticking with the "Bush tax cuts" as their main point, like they were doing this time last year, like they were doing five years ago and ten years ago.

The Bush tax cuts meant I went from almost being able to pay my rent once with my refund to being able to pay it twice and have change left over. It's not hard to imagine twenty other people in that situation who were similarly aided, and all we have to do to maintain that is not extort from millionaires? I'm fine with that.

Fiscal cuts are coming to national defense, that's a given. I somehow doubt they'll find the money to begin the repeal of DADT. I mean, they're talking about cutting budgets and there's going to be a lot of worthless bureaucratic clutter. Implementing unpopular new DoD programs is going to be atop the list and that one would do it.

Straight guys prefer as few other wangs as possible in their private lives and, Anthony Weiner-type exceptions duly noted - most guys keep those private wangings (to coin a word) to themselves. That's why marriage works best when one partner has a wang and the other doesn't and both are of an age to know what they're consenting to. If being gay is important enough to someone that they refuse to permit other peoples' sex lives to include homosexuality, then they don't know enough about human relation to get married, much less serve in the military.

For marriage, why not just create a new legal concept and specify that it means the same thing as 'one man, one woman + kids/property to be named later'. Or create a new concept for that and let gays have marriage.

For the military, it's not workable. Gays can serve as long as they keep their wangs to themselves. Otherwise, straight soldiers have every right to bunk together without regard to gender, never mind the consequences. But that would be detrimental to good order and discipline. Should segregating soldiers by race become necessary to maintain good order and discpline, that should be an option as well. It's not, because race is not gender is not sexual preference or age. Rank and regulation play too much of an everyday role that someone's always going to feel screwed over and being into other dudes really doesn't need to ever be brought up.

The gays who can serve and maintain/exceed the standards will always be small in number and have already proven their ability under current circumstances, so why invest in DoD-wide changes that can't improve the chances for mission success? Male soldiers will always do stupid things because of their dicks and the Uniform Code of Military Justice doesn't need to deal with that in a time of war. Nor do female soldiers, for that matter.

Beyond that, many of the big-government side are going to find a lot of arguments falling away from them as the debt limit argument continues. Ike's argument about the military-industrial complx stemmed - I'm guessing - from seeing a couple of generations worth of businesses that spring from military spending. It's genuine job creation, where people serve and then form a business (or marriage) right off-post. When Jimi Hendrix was a supply clerk in the 101st Airborne in the '60s, he kept getting in trouble for playing in bars right outside post. When Charles Schultz was a machine-gun instructor for units heading to Europe in the '40s, he was praised for his hand-eye coordination that later gave us Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

Then there's the daughters, from jailbait to MILF, which congregate. Five or fifty years later, that money invested in the soldiers, their location and equipment was worth spending more than possibly anything else the goverment can spend it on. It'll have to be cut like everything else, but clever leaders will cut the things that don't impact the military's ability to win wars, especially after they've spent the last decade proving it.

The black beret has been removed from regular usage and is now only for dress uniforms. This is several years after the military made the switch from BDUs (the green uniforms) to ACUs (the light grey-blues). It's not like they haven't already spent endless amounts of money focus-testing and brain-storming how to make changes to standard operating procedure. Now they'll see what happens when soldiers who get to wear berets look "special" (in a good way).

Again, rank and regulation are going to piss everybody off. I once heard a CSM say something to the effect that if smoking crack made him a better soldier, he'd be on the stuff and expect his soldiers to do the same. Likewise a soldier who's got a problem with blacks, women, gays or Jews/Muslims/other should shut the hell up and treat other soldiers (and civilians) with the respect they deserve. This inconvenience should be equally spread, so that soldiers whose identity is so wrapped up in skin color, gender, orientation, religion or other that they make it a priority at every chance will need to shut up about it themselves. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

As far as all the 'job-creating opportunities' liberals promise that government can deliver, the military programs are going to be the most successful of those, even the ones that are utter wastes of money.

Some people won't want to hear that. They put 'gays in the military' in the same place as the 'Bush tax cuts', they won't hear any dissenting viewpoint, even when time and circumstances change. Republicans have put forth multiple plans for trying to fix things and I just saw on the internet that they're finishing up yet another one. Harry Reid just asked why there was a meeting he didn't know about and Obama just called a press conference where he said he couldn't get a phone call returned. Some people find out too late that they're not in the loop.

One of the earlier plans involved a short-term fix and would give the President the power to raise the debt ceiling three times on his own judgement. We're nearing the third anniversary of his election and his judgement hasn't been very good, which is why I thought the plan was a lousy one. But the longer it was out there and even attracting some bipartisan support as well as dismissals, the more it was interesting in itself. Ok, in some ways it's a total 180, let's give someone the right wing hates the authority to make this call, similar to Senator McCain's attempt to retroactively change the War Powers Act to justify whatever the hell Obama was doing in Libya.

"Is doing" I mean. American bombs and authority are still involved in Libya and have the orphans to show for it, but Qaddaffi's getting nothing except older. Assad just found some protestors he didn't want to shoot, and they stormed the US and French embassies. Funny how that worked. The French reported that they used "live ammo". Good thing there wasn't another hostage crisis, huh?

Anyway, so the debt ceiling's still there, an unalterable deadline, and some Republican had the idea of giving Obama the authority to make judgement calls in this matter. Obama rejected it and didn't counter it with any plans of his own. The Senate hasn't passed a budget in 800 days, so far the House is doing all the heavy lifting. Maybe that's why Harry Reid didn't know about any deal. Even Nancy Pelosi didn't tell him. Sarah Palin just put on facebook that Obama is a lame duck. That's the way it goes.

At the end of his second term, GWB said that there was no money left and the cupboards were bare. He also defended the government bailouts of the auto industry, insurance and housing, saying that he was destroying capitalism in order to save it. He invested his re-election capital in privatizing Social Security, for whatever that's worth nearly a decade later.

Done writing this post now. Maybe later. It's Sunday afternoon.

Can't Get This Stuff No More

2011-07-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

I'm still working long hours, plus trying to get this stupid book finished. This weekend I'm housesitting two large slobbery dogs.

Syrian protestors attacked both the US and French embassies recently. The US is contemplating a lawsuit against the Syrian government in response. Apparently Assad - who shoots protestors he doesn't like - didn't go far enough to stop these protestors.

This is just stupid. Why do we even have diplomatic relations with Syria? Why aren't we bombing them like we are Libya?

And how's that going, by the way? It's been months. Qaddaffi's given up very little in that time. This is the sort of paper tiger bin Laden talked about as a reason for war against us to begin with. For our reputation in the Muslim world, this is a disaster. Sure we proved in Iraq and Afghanistan that when people give us problems, we shoot them and move on, but times change, leaders change and now we're at best coasting on those achievements.

[And let's not forget that GWB spent a long time going to Congress and the UN and building up forces for Iraq. The world woke up one morning to discover we were engaged in Libya with a dubious mission and a command structure that was even moreso.]

I'd certainly like to think we're doing the right thing with Libya, but I don't see how. Opening another front in the Muslim world could be a good step, and there's no good reason for Qaddaffi to keep breathing, but this is almost a deliberate show of weakness, especially when you consider how we've ignored Syria. What are we proving other than that our allies in NATO couldn't defeat a hot dog stand without the US and Britain holding their hands?

Europe, Canada and similar nations have been coasting on the benefits of Western Civilization for a long time without having to pay the price for it. At this point, the US, UK, Israel, Australia and Japan are it for the defenders of civilization. And Japan's got their own problems at the moment.

[Which, I've probably said before, they have been handling astoundingly well. There's almost no news coming out of the country, but that's a good sign, that they're handling the influx of massive disasters and picking up the pieces in a manner exactly unlike the weak-willed soft-boned slugs and leeches that whine about every little thing. It's inspiring and even a little scary. Maybe they're the *true* master race?]

The Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape charges have fallen apart, as the accuser seems to have been entirely lying about them. Apparently she's a prostitute, the sex was consensual and she immediately started talking to incarcerated boyfriends about how much money she could take him for. DSK's reputation has definitely suffered, perhaps deservedly given the other accusations women have flung at him, but this is how the system works.

A rich powerful socialist was hauled off a plane because he was charged with a felony. The immigrant accuser had rights which must be respected. When she turns out to have no credibility, the case is dismissed (and kudos to the prosecutors for not milking it for their own career). Nobody comes out any better for it, but considering other recent cases like Roman Polanski or the Duke Lacrosse Team, this is definitely a sign of a working system of justice.

Trying to think of other stuff to write. I feel a bit guilty for neglecting this blog, which is nearing its fifth anniversary. Facebook posts make it so easy to just fire off a one-liner whenever I come up with one, and with all the other stuff going on, I don't have as much incentive to try to come up with a long public monologue about something. Obviously I could write shorter ones, but that just isn't as appealing.

Van Halen is edging towards their first new album since 1998, after several trips through rehab and changes of lead singer for Eddie. It's strange, I was never a huge fan of VH when they were a genuinely functioning band [which pretty much ended with the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge album and the zeitgeist-snagging video for "Right Now". I liked that song and a couple of the videos with David Lee Roth, mostly because of the sexy girls and his screen persona, that was about it.

The ill-fated reunion with Roth that blew Sammy Hagar out of the band in '96 caught my attention, and then suddenly a switch flipped in my head and I went out and got Best Of Volume One, with the DLR reunion songs. [This has also happened with Johnny Cash; one day I don't have the slightest interest, the next I must get a sample of their work] I certainly enjoyed both eras represented, with a slight edge to the Sammy Hagar era.

I freely admit that the Van Hagar era sounded like more of a generic hard rock band than the records with David Lee Roth. Sammy had more experience as a pop songwriter in addition to being a guitarist himself, and I can understand why some people would think the Roth era is somehow purer for its lack of polish.

But what few seem to recognize is that Roth didn't bring much to the table. He did a great job with what he had, but his voice is limited and his lyrics are barely better than Sammy's. [I love Sammy, but his lyrics are competent at best]. Roth was a great dynamic frontman, but as his solo career demonstrates, it's all sizzle. His self-absorption is also a wonder to behold. During the '96 reunion, he went out of his way to steal all the attention from other members of the band. Even when Eddie - the guitar wunderkind without whom none of this would be possible - mentioned he was getting hip replacement surgery, Roth told him "this night's about me, not your hip."

Roth has never been able to get beyond Van Halen because he can't do anything without EVH's guitar to insinuate himself around. Sammy, by contrast, had a well-established career before joining VH and when the band originally signed a record deal, some of the executives even suggested he replace Roth.

In 2002, when Sammy and Roth went out on the "Sans Halen" tour, the set lists demonstrated this point. Sammy played a total of 8 songs from his time with Van Halen, filling out his set with songs from the rest of his career ranging from "Red" (1977, remade a couple years later by Bette Midler) through "Mas Tequila" (his most recent hit from 1999). In comparison, Roth played 8 songs from the first VH album alone, and only one song from outside VH, "Yankee Rose". He played covers done by VH ("Pretty Woman", "Ice Cream Man"), but his only two solo hits are a cover of "California Girls" (most notable for its video entirely focuses on women in bikinis; not even the pre-"Frasier" Jane Leeves who also appears in it, fully clothed) and "Just a Gigolo", a song from 1929 that has been covered by everybody from Louis Armstrong to Betty Boop.

Sammy has said - and I have no reason to doubt him - that besides the novelty of two former Van Halen singers touring together, part of the reason was to jolt the Van Halen brothers into action. This didn't really happen, they would reunite for a tour with Sammy a couple years later, a tour with Roth a couple years after that, and nothing since then. I also think Sammy was just trying to get along with Roth, whom he'd never met before the tour. Maybe they could swap a couple songs or sing a duet, you know, something the fans would really like. He was thinking it might lead to a stadium tour, Sam and Dave and Van Halen and be huge. No such luck. Roth made a lot more money than he'd been making - he insisted on being paid what Sammy got paid, even though it was Sammy's usual fee which he wasn't even close to earning on his own - but refused to have anything to do with Hagar other than that. The Van Halen brothers didn't rise to the bait.

So Sammy had a really good thing going without ever joining Van Halen. Roth didn't, but he does have those VH records to show for it. Now, over a quarter century after he left the band, they're finally recording again.

I don't know what they expect. The music business they knew is totally gone. They might get some airplay, and will probably sell a number of copies on the novelty alone, but this won't go anywhere. There are several reasons for this, but probably none more central than the lodestone of the band, Eddie Van Halen.

A Dutch immigrant with a family tradition of music, the guy's a guitar genius. He doesn't play difficult chords, but plays them so unbelievably fast and with such control that any teenage metalhead (or adult, let's not fool ourselves) will be enraptured. His "Eruption" solo is the first thing on Best Of and when I heard it, it was like 'oh, ok. THIS is why everybody's loved Van Halen for so long. See, I didn't get that before.'

(live from '94)

Eddie also has (to put it mildly) a serious weakness for alcohol. Sammy's autobiography describes the devastation on tour, and ex-wife Valerie Bertinelli (who was so cute on "One Day At A Time") probably describes the same thing at home in her own book. Ok, it's a common rock star failing, but most rock stars aren't responsible for multiple diamond albums (signifying more than 10 million copies sold). EVH was able to indulge himself far beyond the limits of humanity and it's possible there's not much left.

Having proven his guitar hero bonafides, Eddie went on to demonstrate the potential for crossover in different music areas by playing the guitar solo for Michael Jackson's "Beat It", and he applied his considerable musical ability to learning keyboards with the same devotion he displayed on guitar. [Alex Van Halen described going out on Friday nights as a teenager to party while Eddie stayed at home to play, and coming back six or eight hours later to find Eddie hadn't moved, he was still playing.]

People blame Sammy for making Van Halen's music "commercial" (like that's an insult), but "Jump" was keyboard driven and deservedly a classic song from 1984. Three seconds into that song you're hit by the infectious synthesizer riff and it doesn't let up. Sammy was able to write ballads as well as rockers, and had far more range as a singer, but he didn't force EVH to write that sort of music. One can hear the studio wizardry required to make DLR's vocals suitable for the reunion songs on Best Of. He never had to sing in that key before.

[I also think it was a collaboration with Brian May that helped lead EVH in that direction. Queen was taking a break in 1983, and bored in Los Angeles, Brian May called up EVH and asked if he wanted to do some jamming. The resulting mini-album The Starfleet Project is a guitar fan's wet dream and I'm sure the interaction with another guitar god in a huge pop band led Eddie's thoughts to replacing a troublesome lead singer as well as expanding his own musical range.]

Perhaps none of this is clearer than with the way Michael Anthony was forced out of the band. By his own admission, he didn't participate in any of the writing, but neither did Alex Van Halen. Alex, however, was the brother of the guitar hero. The bass player didn't have any such luck. Anthony's role was reduced in the band until he was ejected for reasons no one but Eddie seems to know. He only played bass on a few songs on the album they made with Gary Cherone and Eddie played bass for the reunion songs with Sammy (on the follow up greatest hits album commemorating the reunion tour from 2004; are you keeping all this straight? There will be a test later). Eddie didn't even want him on that reunion tour except that Sammy insisted, and even then Anthony was given much less money.

This makes no sense. Anthony's no more of a drunken fool than anyone else in the band, he's an awesome bassist, and his replacement is none other than Eddie's teenage son, whose birth was commemorated on the FUCK album with the instrumental "316" (his birthday). This sort of misdirected resentment can only be a recipe for disaster - even if it led to a string of multi-platinum albums, the devastation on their lives and souls would be worse. Anthony, fortunately, has found other work with Hagar since then, but even the most die-hard of Roth fans have to be wondering why he was removed in the first place. Even VH's website briefly removed him from all album credits until they realized how stupid that looked.

After firing Sammy and realizing they still couldn't work with Roth, Van Halen hooked up with Extreme lead singer Gary Cherone, destroying that promising young band in the process. [Extreme opened for Roth on one of his first solo tours and he told them they were good enough to take the crown from Van Halen. Anyone who saw their Queen medley at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert knows this wasn't hyperbole.]

[Heh, Gary even opens with "Mustafa", that Muslim call-to-prayer I mentioned a few posts ago]

Extreme were an extremely talented group. I don't think they really clicked with the public because they wore their influences - Queen, Van Halen, Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, others - extremely loudly. Beyond their one major hit, the acoustic ballad "More Than Words", they didn't have much of an impact on the rock scene. It's a shame because, again, they were extremely talent, especially guitarist Nuno Bettencourt. Here's my favorite Extreme song, from their third album, "Rest In Peace", whose lyrics sound like a hippy peace anthem unless you actually think about them. "Make love not war sounds so absurd to me/we can't afford to say these words lightly/unless our world will truly rest in peace" Great band, very artistic, everything they need for an awesome song except the actual songwriting.

Cherone didn't overplay his role in the band who just wanted a lead singer. His album wasn't a hit - the only non-hit album Van Halen ever had - and he just didn't fit. I think his youth was a part of it as well, but there's no telling. With most of a second album recorded, he amiably left. When Van Halen was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, he was notably not included and to his credit, said he was only a small part of the history that the fans (himself included) were celebrating by the induction. To Van Halen's credit - well, Sammy and Mike Anthony's, since they were the only two who showed up - they thanked him for his role. Yes, he was only a small part of the band's history, but it was still a part and he deserved the public recognition.

The Hall of Fame induction was symptomatic of the problems surrounding Van Halen since Sammy left (the first time). There were endless discussions on who would show up. According to Hagar, he wasn't included in the original induction list even though he was in the band longer than Roth and with more hits to show for it. He suspected his manager left him off the list just so he could get him added and look good in Sammy's eyes. Whatever, then the question was who else would appear. Eddie refused to have anything to do with Sammy or Mike, and this was on the cusp of the reunion tour with Roth. But at the last minute he had to go to rehab, and Alex stayed away as well to support his brother.

Roth was more than willing to show up. However they were being inducted by Velvet Revolver - made up mostly of ex-Guns'n'Roses members - and he insisted on singing "Jump". Apparently the Hall of Fame has some say in what songs are played by inductees upon their induction (why?) and they didn't want that, but were still willing to accomodate him. However, Velvet Revolver didn't have a keyboard player and weren't about to play with pre-recorded tapes like other bands would (like, you know, Van Halen).

[I respect Slash's desire to not play with pre-recorded tapes, that's totally fine. Queen was the same way, which is why it took them years to figure out how to play "Bohemian Rhapsody" live. But it's the f*cking Hall of Fame, you mean they can't FIND a single person who likes Van Halen and is willing to learn keyboards for "Jump"? Isn't anybody else going to be at that dinner, the keyboard player for, I dunno, Journey or some shit? You'd get to play with him (cool) and celebrate Van Halen (cooler) and play "Jump" (still cooler) with David Lee Roth (awesome) who's the one being celebrated by the Hall of Fame. What am I missing here?]

[Slash, by the way, played lead guitar for "Little White Lie", the first song on Sammy's first post-VH album, which is all about his problems with EVH. Since this was just before Slash left G'n'R, methinks he could relate to the issues of a volatile singer/guitarist relationship.]

In the end, only Sammy and Mike showed up to represent the band they used to belong to. They were as complimentary as possible towards everyone else. Eventually Eddie left rehab and the reunion tour with Roth actually happened. Those fans who'd been waiting 25 years for it got what they were after (I guess).

And now they're finally ready to release the follow up to "1984" and the Best Of reunion songs. Oh. Joy.

Has DLR learned to sing in different keys? If not, there's going to be a problem. Reportedly - as in I've heard it from one or two sources but I have no idea if it's the truth or not - he needed extensive help from the producer to put vocal melodies to Eddie's songs way back when. He does a great job of growling and screaming, but he's not that talented as a singer. One doesn't suppose he'll do much better now that he's been spoiled and pampered for decades and Eddie still knows how to play keyboards.

In some ways it's similar to problems with the Who (a big influence on VH). Roger Daltrey could growl and scream with the best of them (the end of "Won't Get Fooled Again" being the best example) and was an amazing front man, but he did not have a melodious voice. "Behind Blue Eyes" is probably the closest he ever got to a delicate vocal, and that only works because it turns into a hard rocker halfway through. [much like "Bohemian Rhapsody", come to think of it]

Pete Townsend taught himself to play keyboards for the Who's third album and with this skill came a wider range of song possibilities. "Won't Get Fooled Again" wouldn't be possible without the keyboards.

[well, sorta...]

But with the compositional opportunities afforded by keyboard playing, Roger Daltrey had a good reason to feel even more threatened by Pete Townshend's dominance than before. This reached its climax with the Quadrophenia album which was more keyboard than anything, and Townshend's raging alcoholism didn't help. Fists were thrown, Townshend spent some time bleeding and unconscious and Daltrey had a bit higher standing in the band than before. Roth actually has done things such as mountain climbing which have tested him as a man, but he's never had to live a poor downtrodden life where rock music was his only salvation like Roger Daltrey did, or Sammy Hagar.

I'll probably get the new album when it comes out, but more out of curiousity than anything else. Van Halen was part of the zeitgeist for a time, and such things aren't dependent on the chronology of cause-and-effect. It would be easy (and tempting) to say that overall, they were a huge, influential band simply to prepare them for Sammy Hagar's time with them. [For a different example, the Beatles would never have become the Beatles without Pete Best spending a few years as drummer, but he was in no way suitable for what the Beatles did, what they became, or what they've meant to rock music for the last 40 years.] But for whatever reason, Eddie is still walking and talking, his brother is still playing drums and they have a bass player Eddie constructed in his bedroom one drunken night back in 1990. And they have that guy who sang "California Girls" and honestly believes his voice provided the soundtrack for several generations of young people.

I don't know what they're doing, I'm just fascinated by the fact that they're still around.

Amazing, I've written all this about Van Halen (a few hours ago I was trying to think of something to write) and I still haven't tackled Aerosmith, truly the greatest American rock band ever. Someday...

In closing, I'd like to link to the Youtube clip of an early Van Halen singing Montrose's "Make It Last", but the embedding feature has been disabled by Youtube at someone's request. Roth once said that Sammy had to sing his (Roth's) songs every night but he would never sing a Sammy song. "Make It Last" was written by Sammy Hagar, so Roth was probably the one who demanded it.

Here's Sammy taking questions from his career, probably promoting his autobiography with Rolling Stone.

Here are more...

2011-07-03T13:46:00.000-07:00

Well, sleep is obviously the enemy. This does leave me less time for whining about politics or the state of society.

Who is Seth DeSignor?

2011-06-24T20:10:00.000-07:00

Long days at work. Things have gotten so rough, I've been putting in late nights as a stripper. Don't believe me?

I don't know what this all means or where it's going, but these were fun to make and I have ideas for more. I just can't let it take over finishing the book. I'm still not halfway through the fourth draft, and it's over three months since I had intended to have a finished product. Work's also been going well.

I could say more, but I obviously haven't gotten a lot of sleep lately, so I should catch up on some of that.

But my goodness, these were fun to make.

Here's a larger version of "Great Wall of China" by Gerhard.

And so this is Father's Day, and what have we done?

2011-06-19T08:44:00.000-07:00

And now the Republican slate of candidates includes two women, the one everybody hates because she might run and the one who's actually winning.

What would "Gilligan's Island" be without Maryanne and Ginger? Even Peter Parker had Gwen and Mary Jane. The shadow of Diane Chambers followed Sam Malone's life [and now I'm picturing a Van Halen analogy where Rebecca is Sammy Hagar so let me try to get back on the original subject]

Michelle Bachman won a lot of fans with her appearance at the recent debate. It's certainly amusing that so much of the hatred went to Palin that she was able to advance this far without anybody noticing. About all I know of Bachman is that she was accused of being a witch in her last election, and not by the intolerant religious right either.

I'm still sexist, I don't want a woman President. But if we must have one, at least the latest candidates are going through the same motions every other candidate does. Except they're not, because contrary to what feminists have said, the personal is *not* the political. Palin wrote emails to her unborn child and so far as we know, her husband isn't texting pictures of his wang to college students and porn stars. Palin's emails were considered public property and legions of volunteers rushed to read them.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the rush to announce Palin-hatred reminded me of nothing so much as a woman who incessantly talks about how awful a certain man is, bringing him up at every opportunity, and it's clear to everyone else that she needs to change her panties. She's as awful as any other Presidential candidate (successful or not), ok, that's a given. She's not even a candidate, so why worry about it? Howard Dean, Al Gore and John Edwards (to pick three names at random) don't arouse such loathing from their opponents.

The White House's current occupant has showed us how difficult the Chief Executive position is for anybody and the concepts of leadership, authority and responsibility aren't easy to communicate to anybody who's never consciously experienced them. Having a family - one man, one woman, a given number of kids - is how most people experience that, consciously or not. Running a business, getting a promotion, holding elected office, owning property, these are all ways people can choose a more difficult - more *conscious* - manner of experiencing leadership, authority, responsibility.

A new scandal - which may or may not go anywhere - has Obama spokespeople rejecting some form he signed in the mid-90's about his stance on gay marriage. It makes a funny joke, he won't acknowledge his own signature, and I've given it little notice. I don't know what his position on the form was, or who he's sent out to give an unconvincing explanation, or who was asking in the first place. Whatever his answer was, gay groups and Democrats were apparently happy with it in the mid-90s up until just recently. The spokesman (or Obama's defenders on the internet; as I say I'm not following the details) say that some staffer shoved the form under his face and it wasn't a literal promise, just a rough statement of principles that all candidates get.

Which they do, but the guy who signed it is still responsible for upholding it. Maybe he was lying, maybe he genuinely believed whatever it took to get elected, but the buck still stops with him whether he was a city-councilman, mayor or candidate for Veep. And that goes whether he's responsible for property or a family or a business or an elected post. And if he'll lie about his legal stance on dudes who are into other dudes, what else will he lie about?

[Chicks who are into chicks are a different story because, you know, that's kinda hot.]

Ok, after John Edwards, Al Gore, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner, what will he lie about? None of them are noted for their ability to say 'ok, you caught me, I'll accept the punishment without complaint.' [Although to be fair, Al Gore has responded admirably, as one would expect of a gentleman and a southerner. He's become ungodly rich selling snake-oil or similar. One doesn't have to disagree with current global warming theories to see that. But the people currently trying anything to rebrand the latest climate change theories have proven, time and again, that they are allied with people who use bombs and bullets to enforce their will. Grant Morrison gave PETA a free ad directly on the pages of "Animal Man", and look what they've done since.

[Remember "Animal Man"? That DC comic from the late 80's about a guy with the powers of any animal? He had a very few appearances in the DCU Universe since his creation but only comic geeks would know that. Grant Morrison was such a comics geek, he started off with a miniseries that had a few neat ideas. I'd never heard of the character, there was nothing in Brian Bolland's promo art that appealed to me. I can take or leave stories about animals, had never heard of the character and had no idea people actually sat down and made the damned things. Made comic books, that is, not animals which are natural beings worthy of respect for what they are. They have their own ways and settle them with the plants among themselves and that's fine. If they can write and draw a cool DC comic, that's fine, just as it would have been in 1961 or 1941.

The ad must have drawn me to the comic, because I looked at the first issue and it appealed to me enough. They were doing superhero stuff I liked but in a different way. A very well-done sitcom family mixed in with villainous silhouettes and scenes that show someone put thought into the nature of a superhero world, television appearances and putting on a jacket because a skintight outfit is embarassing. The first issue ends with this inexperienced but very likeable superhero confronting a smashed laboratory and a merged pile of monkeys. It was familiar, yet different. The straightforward honesty of Morrison's storytelling and the clean, natural art by Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood were appealing. The second issue built extremely multiple storylines quite well. Not for kids, if you consider a drawing of someone's brutally-severed arm unsuitable for children, or a drawing of a dead deer, both of which happened in the second issue.

Obviously when the DC editors saw this, they knew they'd hit a bossible source of wealth. Morrison's career has demonstrated that they were right - in bad ways too, I find it almost depressing to look at the collected volumes and see a lot of what I see in modern comics, except without the clean storytelling. The coloring alone is much more interesting than the computer crap. But I digress.

It was in the first issue he had to write after being asked to do more than a 4-issue miniseries that really sealed the deal. My Dad was talking about how amazing "The Coyote Gospel" was. The passion play starring Wile E. Coyote in which the hero plays an irrelevant role, leading to a twenty issue storyline that combined metafictional theorizing with the decades of DC comics characters and the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" itself. You know, the one where they killed Supergirl and Barry Allen and changed everything forever.

Anyway, the stories continue. They're something charmingly British about the Mirror Master appearance, in which a villain invades the hero's home and beats him every step of the way. The hero's wife comes in with her arms full of groceries, asks the villain what he's doing there and kicks him in the nuts. Isn't there a little "Jiggs and Maggie" in all of them? Or Al and Peg Bundy? Or their cute 'cousins'?

But it's there for us, just like for our fathers and for theirs. The rest is just what we have to do to get through life.

"Excuse me while I whip this out."

2011-06-18T06:40:00.000-07:00

We've made it through another sex scandal in an increasingly-weird series of them.

New York Congressman Anthony Weiner was texting a young woman an unsolicited picture of his wang, but accidentally made it public instead of private. He took the picture down, but evidently there are people who pay attention to his tweets and were able to copy the pic before he did so. The Congressman was asked 'wtf' and responded that his account had been hacked but he wasn't going to call the police or anything and anybody who made any other claims were liars.

Cyberspace is not private, so more information started dribbling out. Weiner became belligerent in defending himself, as did his close friends and all went out for a spree of tv appearances and interviews that no way did he do anything inappropriate and those girls were all over age and only an evil right-wing conspiracy would say otherwise. Prudes.

The multiple times he turned out to send pictures of his wang was bad enough. He didn't send it to the underage girl he was texting with. He admitted that it had all been lies, which pissed off the friends who had been defending him (and it doesn't seem like he had that many friends to begin with). He wasn't going to resign though, and somewhere there was even a statement that he couldn't afford to quit because he needed the money too badly.

[It's an insoluble problem that Congresspeople and other legislators don't get paid very much. The arguments are that the positions are therefore only open to people who have enough money that they can afford to sit out a year or four, and that the low pay leaves them much more open to bribery. On the other hand, they work for the public and who wants to be overcharged for lousy service like this? I don't think there's a good solution.]

In the aftermath, it has come out that Weiner, by his own admission, doesn't hold any marketable skills except campaigning and holding public office. He's not going to get 200 grand a year changing tires or plumbing. Larry Flynt has offered him a job at a similar salary, but it sounds dubious unless you're really desperate.

By the time the porn star was holding a press conference about his unwanted tweets, his former defenders had turned against him, as had his party leaders, including the President. Former President Clinton was also not happy, nor was his wife, the Secretary of State. Mrs. Clinton is Mrs. Weiner's boss and Mr. Clinton officiated at their wedding. Mrs. Weiner started her career as a White House intern in 1996 and 15 years later she's extremely attractive so back then she must tave been scorching.

Interestingly, Mr. Weiner is Jewish and Mrs. Weiner is Muslim. Far be it from me to suggest any behavior on her part, even in jest, at any time inappropriate for a proper Muslim woman. That said, given the level of devotion their friends and followers had, they may well have been an up-and-coming Washington power couple to rival John and Elizabeth Edwards, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Bill and Hillary Clinton, or Al and Tipper Gore. The Weiners had to have *something* going for them to get so far and it doesn't appear that the husband had a lot going for him other than the ability to show off his wang to women he doesn't know and not get arrested.

Which isn't entirely worthless, considering how many men would *love* the opportunity to do stuff like that and get away with it. But it's where sociopathy meets the democratic process. If you practice enough predatory behavior, on the mass of voters or individual women, sooner or later you'll get something. In a democracy, the sociopath has many opportunities and many more if women are part of the group and have an equal say. Gender equality being something of a given in Western civilization, women can be equal sociopaths. Mrs. Edwards, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Clinton all got gigantic mansions out of their marriage - as did Mr.s Dominique Strauss-Kahn - and one wonders how many other wives could put up with a little wang-tweeting/masseusse-molesting/cigar puffing in their husbands if their lifestyle improved similarly. "You mean I get a dream house, endless clothes and servants, and he won't even bother me for sex? What's the catch?"

Mr. Weiner was obviously fine with the deal. He was so fine, he'd go on talk shows and blatantly lie about who he was tweeting his wang to and attack anyone who even questions him. He's a Congressman who deals with sensitive information, if he says his account has been hacked, he needs to go to the police immediately. If he's not doing that, why not? He may not think it's important and the people defending him may not think it's important, but a hacked account and suspicious behavior would leave him a target for blackmail, so that option needs to be ruled out in order to protect the secret information that a six-term Congressman would have access to.

Mr. Weiner's friends were obviously fine with the sort of person he was. Kristen Powers wrote a rage-filled article denouncing him after she found out she had lied for him. In addition to their dating briefly years ago, she admitted that a couple years back (before he was married) the two spent a lovely afternoon together in the immediate aftermath of a painful break-up she had. *That's* full disclosure. I like that. Her anger finds outlet in calling him a misogynist and denouncing a culture that creates such harm for women.

Coming from a woman who's first on-the-rebound response is to call up Mr. Weiner, that's really saying something.

Mr. Weiner's online defenders were the scary ones. They were so avid to defend him because he was a great progressive. Never mind that he didn't have any legislative achievements to point to, in six terms in Congress or prior elected offices he'd held. Never mind that he hasn't achieved anything, he's a great fighter for progressive causes. Does that get anywhere? No, but he's got a great house and a hot wife and a lot of chicks to tweet his wang to. He was out there fighting for the Obamacare bill and then he was out there fighting to get the entire state of New York a waiver from the Obamacare bill.

Amusingly, a couple of days after he resigned, the administration announced that no more waivers to Obamacare would be granted. After September, that is. That's how the chief executive has to look at it, Weiner's a typical party member, depressing as that is, and he's only distinguished by his support of the administration and this. That's how party members become liabilities inside the Washington bubble, he's a typical party member who got caught in an otherwise unexceptional sex scandal.

Weiner's defenders were the acolytes that put him over the top and reinforced his fetish? arrogance? ego? far beyond the point where it was defensible. They lashed out with conspiracy theories against Republican sex scandals and Justice Thomas' wife. At no point did anyone say 'this is kinda fucked up, maybe you should just take your lumps.'

That's groupthink as we see it in operation on the left. It functions the same way on the right, but the right is glad to make use of material wealth and property rights and family values to do it. The left says none of that stuff is important, in fact it's oppressive upon anybody who doesn't share it. These are the basic paradigms that appear in pretty much everything we see.

The right says marriage should be between one man and one woman until death do they part. The left says marriage is patriarchal oppression except for Hillary and Tipper - who both used their husband's wangs to get them high-level government committees trying to fundamentally re-write the contract between the people and the government. And they did so *for the children* even though both support any abortion at any time. Tipper buys a Prince album for her daughter and is horrified that one song is about a girl masturbating with a magazine in a hotel lobby, so she wants to impose rules about what can be labelled and how it can be sold and to whom. [Why couldn't Prince be more like Michael Jackson?]

The right says people should keep the money they earn which goes to create jobs and goods. The left says they shouldn't. Then when they realize they can't implement a single policy upon millions of Americans without the help of a corporate entity, they give all the perks to the ones they like, re-writing laws, seizing assets and never mind the cost in jobs, property rights, contract rights, working conditions or tax revenue.

The right says religion is important and should be respected as an institution and a source of morality. The left says that's not true and proceeds to treat religion as evil, as racist, as oppressive, as an excuse for property and opiate of the people, as something that blinds to reality. The left proclaims it will die for their beliefs. For proof, they point to global warming (minus inconvenient facts) taxpayer funding for experiments on aborted fetuses, "Piss Christ", and there's no sign of them filling the streets like citizens of Cairo, Damascus or Teheran are doing. Even if the President is, you know, dropping bombs in an oil-rich Muslim country that never threatened us.

Sure, the right is just as evil and hypocritical, but their values are what permit Damascus to exist for thousands of years, that permit women to survive childbirth in the first place, that let well-fed people give Michael Moore an award for criticizing his leader in a way Libyans have never known. It's been over thirty years since Jimmy Carter had any elected power, and none of his successors have ever seen him as a threat. Nor did Carter see any of his living predecessors as a threat and deal with them the way powerful leaders do everywhere else in the world. If that's rich religious corporate propaganda, it's still a giant improvement. A disgraced Democrat could have been a snake-oil selling, masseusse-abusing aristocrat in any time or any place. He might have grown up to be Che Guevara and killed as many people as possible in the name of the revolution. Ardent Stalinists don't text their wangs to many people, but they wouldn't live long in a society where that was possible.

I could probably write more, but I could probably have written less. So, in tribute to the former Congressman...

I'd never actually heard the song before, but I love Chuck's diversions into monologues and shout-outs to freedom. "There's the future Parliament there!"

"Those of you who will not sing / must be playing with your..." The great Chuck Berry, ladies and gentlemen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UM9GjnTFIM

Oops, she did it again

2011-06-04T05:54:00.000-07:00

Another female journalist has been assaulted in Egypt. It was one of the first things I found when I checked the news this morning, so I don't have any details. I've noticed I tend to wait a few days for things like this. It's easy to go into attack mode without knowing the facts.

Such as with another female assaulted by journalism. Like most people who care about this sort of thing, I'd heard last night - I don't always wait a few days - that Sarah Palin had said something stupid about Paul Revere, warning the British, ringing bells, and all the things that good well-informed American citizens know never ever happened so she is unquestionably stupid for saying otherwise.

The fact that she's taking a family trip through American historical sites completely escapes her critics. For someone who might enjoy pranking those who irk her (you know, the way any normal human being does) there's probably a dozen things learned at each stop that makes her go "Ohhhhh" in an ascending feminine voice, turning to whoever's next to her and going "I didn't know that", like any woman on a public tour of [insert historical stop here] would do and then turn back to the guide. 'I always thought Paul Revere rode through and yelled that the British were coming. How fascinating!'

But she's a politician who may or may not run for President. This sort of prank is pretty mild as far as those people go. And it's funny. It's a shame John Hughes is dead, he could probably get some great mileage out of the Palin family bus trip across America, minus Christie Brinkley speeding by in a Ferrarri. In the meantime, we'll have to sit through all those people who consider themselves informed about America [slavery, racism, sexism, genocide] calling someone else stupid. Why else would the press be giving her such coverage?

Last week at Westminster Abbey, Barack Obama was signing the guest book, turned to ask someone what the date was, and then put May 24, 2008.

You see, she's stupid. He's thoughtful and competent. That's why he asked somebody first before getting today's date wrong by three years, and that's why it doesn't get remotely the play that Palin's gaffe-that-wasn't gets. Because Obama's opponents are so hateful and condescending.

I've been thinking about national identities recently. Whether deliberate or not, I've wondered if Palin's family trip (and recent career choices) has been a (reference? invocation? affirmation?) of Americana. Some time ago, she told Tea Partiers to party like it was 1773, and got this same accusation of being stupid, ignorant, ill-informed. Of course the Boston Tea Party happened in 1773, so she actually knew what she was talking about, and the people criticizing her didn't.

[These same people rushed to accuse her of murder in the Giffords shooting. You'd almost think they didn't like her, that they didn't think she should be treated the way they'd like to be treated in a similar situation, you know, as an equal.]

It's a little unnerving that she's going straight to references from the American Revolution for these references. In a time of crisis like this - I hear the rapture was scheduled for a couple weeks ago - it makes sense to retrace our steps from the Founding Fathers, but it's a bit worrisome that she has to. This reminds us where we came from. It's what our national identities are. Americans play baseball and bake pies and go to work and watch tv and raise their kids to be Americans, and we're already sick of hearing about the election scheduled in seventeen months, the same thing Americans were doing a hundred years ago, or two hundred.

When Obama wrote the wrong date, it occured to me that it was a case of national identities bumping against each other. Even on vacation, I'm sure the President has to sign and date any number of papers every day, so the likelihood of him forgetting what year it is seems pretty nil, even if he's being absent-minded or having an off-day.

To quote the Reverend Jesse Custer, "This is kinda difficult to put into words an' not sound a little shy in the hat size." I wonder if it was the location itself, and a judgement served by the building itself, or at least whatever historical forces run through it.

Founded by Benedictine monks in the 960s-70s, the actual abbey was built by Edward the Confessor, right before the Norman Conquest. It was spared the wrath of Henry VIII when he took over the English churches. When the abbey was founded, the Magna Carta, one of the basic building blocks of Western Civilization, was still over two and a half centuries in the future. It's been less time than that since Americans signed the Declaration of Independence. Geoffrey Chaucer was even more centuries ahead when he lived there on a royal pension and founded English Literature. Just down the road, the Beatles recorded a few popular tunes. Let's just say it's seen a lot of history in its time.

Since people don't live longer than a century, we don't think in those terms, but if there are any... presences? apparitions? ghosts? they probably do think of a hundred years as being a short span of time. They would probably associate with the places and things that have lasted as long. Their presence may have contributed to the buildings and institutions themselves lasting for so long. Or maybe it's because the places last that "ghosts" come to exist and inhabit them.

I am speculating that these "ghosts" are conscious themselves, while they may just be natural forces akin to gravity or entropy. We record the effects as history but can't do more than speculate the causes.

So when the current historical blip occupying the White House - burned by the English in 1812 - visits Westminster Abbey, the collective judgement of England represented by the building guides his hand to inscribe a date before his election. I don't know why, I don't know what it means, not a clue why he would otherwise choose 2008. Hell, Occam's Razor says that it was purely his own screw-up (because he's so thoughtful and competent, not like GWB or Sarah Palin.)

I'm certainly glad that so many people are paying attention to this or that historical moment (like the story of Paul Revere, who probably hasn't gotten this much attention in ages). But it's a bit depressing to think we have to instead of watching movies or whatever else we'd rather fill up our lives with. But at this crucial time in history, it is important to affirm how we got to where we are and what makes us Americans (or British, or English, or Westerners, or civilized.)

I was hoping to get back to musings on rock music in this post, specifically Aerosmith, but it doesn't look like it'll happen now. Much like a new Aerosmith album...

Instead, here's their early 90's live performance of "Dream On", a song Steven Tyler wrote when he was about 17, long before Aerosmith was formed, before the song briefly appeared as the first single from the first album, before it became a hit when it was rereleased after the 'Smith found commercial success. That's Michael Kamen leading the orchestra, as he's done everywhere from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" to Metallica's "S&M" and G'n'R's "November Rain".

And here's the video for Queen's "Who Wants To Live Forever". Kamen's not in it, but he did arrange the orchestra, so his work's there anyway. I once played this song for my grandmother, and even she liked it. Roger's kind of out of place though. Freddie's in a suit, John's in a jacket, Brian's in respectable dark clothes and Roger's in a denim jacket.

And what the hell, here's "November Rain". Kamen's conducting the orchestra, but strangely he didn't do anything on the song, that was all Axl playing on synthesizers. Kamen was basically the go-to guy for a couple decades when rock stars wanted to use classical orchestration. He's dead now. He also did the scores for all four Lethal Weapon movies, in collaboration with Eric Clapton. and a lot more besides.]

Amusingly if you don't know who these people are, G'n'R is indistinguishable from Aerosmith in the earlier video, down to the tall blond bass player. [G'n'R would be flattered, they certainly patterned themselves after the 'Smith. As with "Dream On", Axl was even working on this song long before the band was formed.]

We never did find out why the guy jumped through the wedding cake at the end. I think it was because the rain had already ruined the cake and the reception, so why not? When else was he ever going to have a chance to do that. Wouldn't you?

2012: Whatever it is, we're against it!

2011-05-30T07:12:00.000-07:00

Another Memorial Day is upon us. This blog definitely isn't high on my list of priorities. Facebook compensates for most of the desires to immediately write something, an insight or one-liner. A blog works for more extended pieces though. I have often been tempted to take some of my multi-part Facebook posts and flesh them out here. But that seems like work.

I finished the 3rd draft of the book this weekend. Went to Kinko's printed it out and started the 4th draft the next day. 65 corrections on each of the first two pages, and subsequent pages average just as many. When I finished the first chapter, I compared the 1st draft with the 4th. The differences were striking and showed a vast improvement, but when am I going to get finished with this?

The weird thing is I'm not as horribly depressed as I thought I'd be. It's probably just trauma from an IED (Infinite Editing Disorder) or something. Maybe it's the long weekend giving me time to work. I've burned through the first three chapters and already typed up the corrections for the first two. Probably by next week I'll be horrified at how much left there is to be done. I honestly thought the 2nd draft would be where the main effort would go. Boy was I so young and naive three months ago!

The 2nd draft turned out to be filling in the missing holes, looking for coherence and otherwise wrapping my mind around the story between the first and last pages. I think I've said this before, but when I started I didn't know what I would be writing and when I finished I didn't know what I had written. I averaged at least fifty corrections a page, and checked the continuity as well as I could mainly with the advantage of knowing the ending. The 2nd draft was for filling in that gap and correcting the most egregious or obvious errors, but at the time I was hoping that the 3rd draft would be quick and easy, just correcting a few typos and things that slipped through.

[By the way, that's not fun either. If there's more than a dozen corrections in a paragraph, unless it's a big paragraph, it's usually easier to retype the whole thing rather than fix each correction one by one, but that has a high rate of creating new typos. I don't have any evidence, just a suspicion that you're more likely to make mistakes when retyping the old ones, and psychologically you'll be more resistant to checking for errors. "I already fixed that paragraph, it's good, moving on."]

Once I realized that the 3rd draft would be long and difficult to complete - somewhere around Chapter 1 page 1 paragraph 2 - it was a serious downer. And deservedly so, I'm pushing a month of editing for every week of writing. I took notes on the characters and continuity and referred to them often, flipping ahead to make more comments. Surely, I told myself, this draft would be it, with all the intensive thinking on every word or phrase, weighting them to make sure they fit with everything that came before and would come after, as well has had the proper cadence, rhythm and spelling. Yes, the 3rd draft is where the book is brought to a pristine shine and after that it's just a few minor corrections.

Nope. Not a bit of it.

The strange thing is that, with as many corrections as I'm making on the 4th draft, they're much more slash-and-burn. 'That word/phrase/sentence doesn't work, throw it out and replace it with...' The first two chapters are half a page shorter now with all that's been cut out. Maybe it's just the long weekend, but this seems to be going much faster. There isn't much thinking going on, it's just seeing where something is wrong and fixing it, even if the result is a complete re-write. Maybe (hopefully) I've internalized what is in the story at any given point, so I can instantly discern how near or far the words are from that given point and fix the problem on the spot. There's a lot of problems, but the work is more like putting shingles and wall paper on the new house than doing drywall.

Oddly enough I had a premonition about this as I was finishing the 3rd draft, where literally on the last few pages, the language suddenly felt like it had achieved the tone I was striving for. This worried me, because it so clearly hadn't done so on all the previous pages. The intuition turned out to be correct - that's why the concept of intuition exists, because it's correct even given false, misleading or absent information and it isn't merely a good guess - so here I am, going through the pages yet again.

I'd like to say this draft will go much faster. That obviously depends on how hard I'm willing to work, but there's room for cautious optimism at present. Unfortunately I can't say this will be the last draft. I am totally not someone who insists that everything be absolutely perfect in a work of art, but to prove that I have to stop fixing things at some point.

Unemployment still high (but GWB ruined the economy) gas prices still high (but GWB was in the oil company's pocket) Obama's wiped his ass with the War Powers Act (but GWB's wars are the evil ones, even if Obama continues them), the Patriot Act was renewed (but GWB is evil for inflicting it on the country) and there's word that the administration has begun considering "regime change" in Libya (but GWB was wrong for "regime change" and anyway, America doesn't get to decide who's in other countries). About the only thing they've got going for them is their complete hostility towards Israel which the whole world can agree on (except extremist warmongers).

I've honestly been trying to think of something else to write, but it doesn't seem to be happening. Not even for Memorial Day.

I'm still edging around some insight about rock stars of [a generation or two before] my era, how they've had to work over a lifetime, but nothing's cohering yet. Different bands work different ways and since most of their business is private, one can only speculate on the processes at work.

Take the Eagles, whom I've never been a big fan of, but are definitely one of the biggest rock bands ever. Their group dynamics devolved into a two-man leadership, Glen Frey and Don Henley, who unilaterally and retroactively demanded most of the money and control over the group, firing Don Felder and deciding who was or wasn't involved in other projects. They can do it because they wrote virtually all the songs, and Henley was the front man (as well as having a much more successful solo career than all the others put together). Personality undoubtedly has much to do with it, but since I'll never meet any of them (and neither will you) it's complete speculation. As rock stars, they live quite detached from reality most of the time - Joe Walsh's solo hit "Life's Been Good" is possibly the best description ever of this experience ("I bought a mansion, forget the price/ain't never been there, they tell me it's nice") - and there's very little one can relate to outside the music itself.

The Eagles have been touring consistently since their last album, the only one they've recorded since 1980 that wasn't live or remakes of their old hits. Their ticket prices have been stratospheric, and one assumes there's a reason for that (beyond being aging wealthy leftists). This lines up with my suspicions about Axl Rose, Roger Waters and others that their constant performing isn't because of a love of playing live. It's quite possible that it's because they need the money.

This isn't remotely unheard of. Michael Jackson was deeply in debt when he died, the only thing that got him to agree to ten concerts at the O2, which was then upgraded to fifty. Elvis before him had an increasing desperate need for cash which was why he toured so much, and everybody could explain away his spending by pointing out that he earned millions of dollars every time he went on stage, so how could he ever go bust?

This work rate probably increased Elvis' drug dependency and other issues. The threat of having to work was probably the final straw for Jackson. In his autobiography, Sammy Hagar says the Van Halen brothers desperately needed money which was why they jumped for the 2004 reunion and were so quick to tour with David Lee Roth soon after that ended.

The business side of things does play a large part. Elvis had to sell most of his music publishing (where the *real* money is in the music business) at the end of his life, so he would have a lot less coming in no matter what. Michael Jackson made tons of money in publishing (like owning the Beatles catalogue) but had heavily leveraged that to Sony. According to Sammy, when he was joining VH and discussing the publishing, Eddie asked what a publishing company was, and said maybe he should get one of them. Given everything else in Sammy's book, that becomes very believable, and reinforces the idea of most rock stars as arrested adolescents who've never had to deal with the consequences of their actions until it's too late.

[For those who don't know, music publishing is the literal ownership of a song, dividing up who created it and what percentage of the royalties they get from all forms of reproduction, from use in movies to cover versions, live performances and printing the sheet music (the literal origin of the term "publishing"; before technology, the only way you could hear a song by Beethoven was if the sheet music was sitting on the piano). These royalties are collected and distributed by companies like ASCAP and BMI. Most rock stars own their own publishing companies, unless shenanigans or incompetence leads them to sell. Paul McCartney wrote [insert Beatles tune here] as a contracted writer for Northern Songs, which managerial failures led to being purchsed by ATV, the company Michael Jackson bought, so when he sings [Beatles tune], he has to pay that company. If Paul doesn't die a billionaire, his family will, but there's no amount of money he or they could offer that would compensate Sony for what the Beatles catalogue can be expected to bring in. Poorer rock stars have even fewer options.]

The Eagles became a two-man dictatorship, common in many bands. Most of these are song-writing partnerships [Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards, Tyler/Perry, Page/Plant, even Brian Wilson and Mike Love] with a few exceptions [Pete Townshend wrote the Who's songs, but Roger Daltrey was the face of the band.] Roger Waters wrote most of Pink Floyd's songs but Dave Gilmour's sound seems to be what really kept the fans. Gilmour has done almost nothing for decades, while Waters is getting ready for his second year touring "The Wall" (released in 1979), after spending three years touring "Dark Side of the Moon" (released in 1973), after spending three years touring "In the Flesh" (named for the first song on "The Wall", where he played 7 of "Dark Side"s 10 songs and every other Pink Floyd song you hear on radio, but virtually nothing from his post-Floyd career. Queen became a two-man dictatorship by default, since their front man died and the bass player retired, and they'd never had any but the original four members.

This is where the speculation becomes difficult, as detached from reality as the rock stars themselves. There's no way to know how the two dominant forces in a band interact amidst the other members, or why they do what they do. Wives and girlfriends are easy to blame, as are drugs or other self-destructive acts. But how much of Eddie Van Halen or Brian May's actions in the last thirty years reflected their relationship with their fathers? It doesn't mean anything to the fans, all we hear is the music and their publicity stunts, but it means something to them. Relationship with a grandparent, or a high school bully, these could be driving forces decades later as the rock star writes and records songs that make the kids dance, in collaboration with someone else who has their own issues.

I do think that the unconventional nature (to put it mildly) of rock stardom makes them good subjects for speculation about the human condition. They're at least as good for the topic as superheroes, looking for universal concepts of law, contract, collaboration, consequence. This is how we notice things running parrallel to each other, or perpendicular or anything else.

Ages ago, I was at someone's house and the tv was turned to a VH1 rockumentary about Styx already in progress, after "Lady" and their early hits. Except for the specific details of the break-up and aftermath, they were indistinguishable from Pink Floyd: art-rockers who spent years honing their craft and it paid off when they hit megastardom. Several monstrously successful albums followed until the lead singer-songwriter became so egotistical and dominant that he squeezed out everybody else's contributions, up to and including the concept-double album involving themes of tyranny, dehumanization, rock and roll which led to the band taking a bath making a tour and movie out of it ["The Wall" and "Kilroy Was Here"]. An album or so later, dominating leader left, expecting the band to collapse without him.

So there's reason to think that Roger Waters, Eddie Van Halen, Axl Rose and more fall into similar parallel lines. But again, it's all speculative. Bob Dylan's been doing a "Never-Ending Tour" for decades now. Does he need the money? Does he just like to play? He seems to have avoided self-destruction much better than almost everybody else, but he's a solo artist and doesn't have to answer to anybody. Maybe he's cultivated an audience that will pay for his simple stage show repeatedly like the Grateful Dead had. The Rolling Stones don't have a simple show, but they don't need the money. Roger Waters doesn't have a simple show, but he's out doing it night after night and he's pushing 70 years old.

"Hope I die before I get old" has long been a rock credo. Jim and Jimi and Janis attained it and have been much less problematic than the stars who didn't die. The era of the stadium concert is probably over for the older rock stars and the audience is too diversified for most of the newer ones to ever fill up that many seats. Package deals can probably do it, but I'm hardly in touch with what's popular these days so I don't know. The Stones may do a concert or tv special, but I doubt they'll ever tour again. Neither will Aerosmith. Whether or not they record any more music is anyone's guess.

It's fun to wonder what Freddie Mercury would be doing if he was still alive. One would hope he'd remain productive, but he himself admitted he couldn't continue the touring because he'd look ridiculous going on stage as a middle-aged man in tights. ["It looked ridiculous then, but it worked. (to the interviewer) What were you wearing ten years ago?"] He'd long said he didn't want to get old, and it seemed he meant it more than the more nihilistic rock stars. He didn't get old and he didn't die young. His productivity and influence were higher, and life was much better than it's turned out for most of his peers.

[although a Zoroastrian who was mostly non-practicing between his childhood and funeral, he turned the Muslim call to prayer into a kick-ass rock song, "Mustafa" which opens up the Jazz album, the track before Brian May's "Fat-Bottomed Girls". Tell all your friends.]

One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Guzzler's Gin

2011-05-18T18:24:00.000-07:00

The other shoe has dropped on the assault of Lara Logan. You remember, the infidel woman dressed like a whore who naively thought that Cairo during a revolution was a safe place to be.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, a white socialist with diplomatic credentials who had a good chance of being France's next Prime Minister, was taken off his plane just before departure because he was accused of raping an African immigrant working as a maid in the $3,000/night hotel he was staying at.

Apparently she's a Muslim too. Even though America ostensibly hates Muslims, and we're oh so racist - I'm guessing the maid isn't white, although it's only been said that she's African which doesn't mean a thing regarding skin color - her accusations are given enough credibility that the alleged rapist was hauled off by the police. Since he's considered a flight risk - thanks to the example set by Roman Polanski - the police are holding him, and reportedly he's on suicide watch now.

False accusations of rape do an enormous amount of damage to the accused. I am coming to think that those who make false accusations of rape should be punished as severely as actual rapists. Since rapists are scum and I have no intrinsic objection to summary execution (so long as the crime is confirmed beyond 'he said/she said') I think that would cut down on false accusations, probably more effectively than punishing rape cuts down on that crime.

Get it? Even a poor immigrant woman has rights in America, rights that are "endowed by [her] Creator", and no one deserves to be treated that way. The American legal system, for all its flaws, will help her find redress to the extent possible. The socialist who didn't give a damn about anything but his own urges - he's been accused several times before - will have his legal rights respected. Sure, fine, no problem, innocent until proven guilty. If he's innocent, I hope the accuser suffers for the harm she caused. If the law isn't sufficient, I have faith in karma.

If he's not innocent, the same thing applies. You don't treat an infidel woman dressed like a whore that way, you don't treat a Muslim woman that way, you don't treat anybody that way. It doesn't matter if you're French, Wrong Is Wrong!

If the reports are true and he's on suicide watch, I suspect it's because he's never remotely been faced with the consequences of his actions and, as a good politically-connected socialist who stays in fancy hotels, he never expected to. To suddenly be called to account for one's (alleged) actions, a lot of people would be driven to attempt suicide in those circumstances.

But it's not America's "puritanical" attitude towards sex that's at fault. It's the motherfucker who forces sex on a member of the servant class (or drugs a 13-year old because she keeps saying "no", as in the Polanski case) who's at fault.

It's tempting to suggest this falls on Dominique (really? A girl's name?) because he's foreign. But so is the accuser. So is Arnold Schwartzenegger, who suddenly admitted to his own infidelities and unlike his catchphrase, won't be back. I won't shed a tear for the Terminator, but at least he was democratically elected, and people knew who he was. Same with Newt Gingrich. Kahhhnnnnnnn! [as James Tiberius Kirk would say] is an unelected bureaucrat in the sort of shadowy offices that such rich depraved socialists favor, with the power to tell taxpayers of the world - who pay their salary - what to do with their money.

As I say, the other shoe has dropped in the Lara Logan assault.

Gingrich (what sort of parents would name their child "Newton"?) has just become the latest Republican Presidential candidate to self-destruct after Donald Trump. He isn't out of the race yet - it's only been about a week since he entered it - but he's already shown that he's not ready for Prime Time. His latest gaffe [I think, I haven't paid a great deal of attention to him] was that anybody who quoted what he said last week was a lying liar who was telling a lie. That's the sort of thing Obama will have to fight against now that he actually has a record, the opposition doesn't need to make the incumbent's job easier.

As a politician, Newt is fine. He has experience, can stick to his guns or compromise as the case may be, and is flashy enough that a large amount of the public could get behind him even if they disagree. But fairly or not, he's seen as a firebrand which is alienating in itself, with a penchant for going out on a limb when there's really no sensible reason to do so, as he's proven in the last week or so. He earned this reputation in the Clinton years - which he ended by having his own party tell him to resign - and attempting a comeback just isn't going to happen. Donald Trump had similar problems, a record of achievement that he got by telling (whoever) what they wanted to hear enough times that he could get what he wanted, which happened to be money and fame.

I think this is the effect Sarah Palin has had on American politics, left, right and center. Simply by being a potential candidate - she hasn't come close to declaring yet - she skews the discussion so far over to one side that no one else has a chance. If Hillary had chosen to run in 2000, it would have had a similar effect on the Democrats, just by being a woman with a credible chance to win.

Let's say Sarah Palin is everything her most devoted supporters say she is, that's still not good enough in my book (even though I would probably support her if she chooses to run; certainly against Obama - if the bar is already that low, why worry about who else can clear it?). A large portion of right-wingers and centrists like her, another portion of left-wingers despise her, and a lot of people don't think she's deserved the abuse she's received. If gender were removed from the equation, she'd coast to an easy victory 18 months from now. But it's not, and it can't be.

Since Palin is a Republican, no other Republican has a chance until she makes a decision. Unlike what Kaaaaaaahhhhhhn is used to, in America women actually have a say in what goes on. Even after she makes the decision, the men will still have to curry favor and win her approval, even on things that don't concern her. [This is why I've stayed single, nyuk nyuk]

Any Republican politican, qualified or otherwise, will have to deal with that fact and win her approval. My guess is she knows she doesn't want the Presidency bad enough to try and has already made that choice, but as a human being [women are sort of human, I guess] of course she wants as much influence on politics as she can get. She wouldn't have become a governor without that desire. Hell, she only got involved in politics because she disagreed with how the school board was doing things in her childrens' classes, and events snowballed from there until she became the Vice-Presidential candidate two years ago.

What, John Edwards was so much more experienced and morally upstanding? He was a serious candidate for the top slot, in two consecutive elections no less, and didn't have his private life revealed until after he'd withdrawn in '08. Even though he lived the sort of life that Dominique enjoyed, unbelievably rich and with no sense of consequences. When his mistress gets pregnant, he tells the world that the baby isn't his, it's his close personal assistant's, and the assistant goes along with it. Briefly, but that's how things usually work out. Yet one of the two major parties still saw him as a credible candidate.

I am not a Republican (political parties are stupid; it's their defining trait) but ideologically, I'd prefer to be on the side where such people are revealed as the self-destructive lunatics they are and fade quickly from power once that happens. At least we got the Contract With America and a bunch of movies from Gingrich and the Kindergarten Cop before they crapped out. Dominatrix Levi-Strauss could have been the next Prime Minister of France, and they'd known for a long time what sort of person he was: A Socialist.

Karl Marx, founder of international socialism, got his lifelong household servant pregnant and blamed his close personal friend Frederich Engels. Draw your own conclusions.

I screwed up on the last post's Youtube links, let's hope this works better. Red Skelton dissects The Pledge Of Allegiance.

I am a genius, while you could hardly pass the entrance examination to kindergarten.

2011-05-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

Time has been slipping by. I'm still going to work, still doing what I do. This week I jumped out of a plane.

The War Powers Act is ready to kick in with regards to our "days, not weeks" adventure in Libya, now that weeks have become months. The administration is pretty clear that they're going to ignore it, or else they've already complied with it so Congress can shut its big yap. Is anybody surprised by this?

There's a huge war brewing against Israel. Its very existence is so offensive to the world that they're uniting to change that fact. This is going to get worse before it gets better. Egyptians mobs torched Israeli flags recently. I guess the assault of Lara Logan is forgotten, hmmmm?

Democrats and the administration still don't seem to be all that interested in producing a budget for the government. They're all about raising the debt ceiling or else catastrophe will strike, but choose to ignore any catastrophe that could strike if the US so blithely keeps spending money it doesn't have.

Besides inflation and the risk to the food supply - what I call Cows, Crops and Orchards, as in 'if you don't have all three of these in your backyard, you're going to get very hungry very fast once the supply chain falls apart' - it's finally sinking in how unneccesary most of society's jobs really are. They can only exist because so many others have the leisure time and money to pay for frivolities. Businesses aren't hiring and, domestically as well as internationally, it's going to get worse.

Here's an excerpt from a WSJ editorial explaining if supermarkets were run like public schools.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2011/05/if-supermarkets-were-like-public.html

Here's Sammy Hagar and Journey guitarist Neal Schon in their mid-80's supergroup HSAS. They only did a few concerts, but recorded those for their one and only album. This is the cover of "Whiter Shade of Pale". I don't think this is the one used on the album, but whatever they used was treated in the studio - removing crowd noise, etc - so it may have been. Love the fan who ran on the stage and was grabbed by security at 2:50.
http://youtu.be/lpw_Hx-ABrM

And here's a more recent concert performance, of his acoustic reworking of "Dreams", the early hit he had with Van Halen. I like the way he dropped the vocal register and turned it in into a jaunty singalong.
http://youtu.be/_zP69RuvYEQ

For another cover, here is Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, and their version of "Uptown Girl". Notice the guitar stays virtually the same all the way through, but they put a lot of work into the vocals. Further covers by this band include "I'll Be There", "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and more.
http://youtu.be/6n18tZjzOJI

I seem to be in a mood for cover songs, so here's Big Daddy, a cover band, doing their version of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds". Mostly Big Daddy remade (then) current songs in the style of earlier songs or eras. "Ice Ice Baby" sounded like a Chuck Berry song right down to the bassline, "Money For Nothing" sounded like "Sixteen Tons" (both similar laments of the working man), "The Living Years" sounded like "Leader of the Pack" (both about people who died in a motorcycle crash). But for their final album (I think) they remade Sgt Pepper, track for track. The best song was "A Day in the Life" as if it were done by Buddy Holly ("I read the news today uh-oh boy!" but this Jerry Lee Lewis pastiche is great too.
http://youtu.be/JGpCqsc2SK8

This is "Smoke on the Water", covered by Rock Aids Armenia. From Youtube: In 1989, artists from Pink Floyd, Queen, Rush, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Yes, Iron Maiden and others joined forces to raise funds for people affected by the Armenian earthquake. Kerrang called it "the greatest array of hard rock talent ever assembled". That's David "Pink Floyd" Gilmour walking into the building at the beginning, followed by Roger "Queen" Taylor as the drummer. The guitarist with long curly black hair and the mustache is Tony "Black Sabbath" Iommi, and the guitarist with long curly black and no mustache is Brian "Queen" May.

"Smoke On The Water", by the way, was written about a fire that broke out in a building in Montreaux, Switzerland, during a performance by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. You see, all these bands knew each other anyway. Everything's connected.
http://youtu.be/1tsw3nKDlBE

I guess this qualifies as a cover, here's Bugs and Elmer singing Wagner. It just occured to me that the cartoon's opening possibly inspired the opening of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" segments of their own show, with the dramatic music, heavy use of black and stilted separation of clouds.
http://youtu.be/MQlmXU1zqfc

I just keep linking, don't I? Here's "Duck Amok", a classic cartoon. I don't think it's all that ha-ha funny - although not having seen it in years, I got more than a couple giggles out of it - but what makes it so strong is the consistency of Daffy's character, and how well he reacts (all things considered) to every whim of his unseen maker. He's able to fill whatever role he's placed in, from musketeer to ski picture, while every aspect of his existance is shaped at random, from the background to the color and sound to the frame-by-frame movement, with "The End" even appearing earlier than it's supposed to.
http://youtu.be/cH6i2Z6mTRE

I'll post this last one before I'm here all day. This is the Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon with the kids and the talking. You've seen it, we've all seen it. From the late WB era, this is probably the cartoonists giving their own interpretation of the cartoons, and the audience who has now graduated to watching them on television shows sponsored by ACME.
http://youtu.be/vl-4XdVVjaM

"They simply don't make terrorists like they used to."

2011-05-05T19:38:00.000-07:00

"Night Court" is back, such as it is. The dvd for season 4 were briefly available at the WB online store, which proved impossible for me to negotiate. I could sign up to order things or I could put the dvd set in my 'cart', but not both, even though both were required to place the order. This was frustrating, especially since one assumes the reason it didn't get such a widespread release was because of low interest in earlier seasons. Then it was withdrawn altogether, before being rereleased exclusively through amazon.

Naturally I did place an order this time, although the reviews made it clear this was an inferior product. I just wanted the episodes.

The reviews were right. There are no scene choices, no episode descriptions, the video and sound quality is lower than pretty much any official dvd I've ever seen and worst of all the discs only play in a device specifically built for that purpose, a 'dvd player', if you will. Not a laptop or recorder or anything that peforms a task other than playing dvds.

Still, this is "Night Court". So I went out and bought the cheapest dvd player I could find just for the purpose of watching this one season of a show I used to love, and have enjoyed the reissues immensely. So far I've watched the first several episodes, and one from later in the season [the first "200 cases to midnight" show]

I'm not having trouble justifying the purchase, and I certainly enjoyed most of what I watched, but I wasn't as enthralled by it as I'd been by the first few seasons, even though they were of lesser quality. [I felt the same way about the new "Bloom County" collection which came out a few weeks ago].

The series is still great, no denying that. With the addition of Marsha Warfield, the cast is now in place, but it's not clear what they're there to do [aside from arraign Manhattan Criminal Court Part 2]. "Night Court" wasn't a character-driven series like MASH or other shows. All the TV guide needed to print was "the Bunkers discuss birth control", and everyone so inclined would tune in to "All in the Family" because they wanted to see what Archie, Dingbat, Meathead and Little Girl would have to say about the topic. Shows like "Family Ties" would make Very Special Episodes part of their trademark.

"Night Court" seemed to share that latter failing, natural since they were contemporary hits on NBC, but even here I didn't think it was as pronounced as the third season, where half the episodes seemed to fill up the last three minutes with "Dan Learns His Lesson" the way Alex P. Keaton filled the role on "Family Ties" [or Gary Coleman on "Different Strokes", whichever "Facts of Life" girl was in the spotlight that week.] The trope probably goes back at least as far as Ralph Kramden so it's not exactly specific to this era or anything, although "Seinfeld" would famously declare that it had "no hugging and no learning."

So far in the episodes I've watched, the "sensitivity" stuff has at least been kept at a lower level, on plots/subplots that specially spotlight the characters, and enough weirdness to compensate. The season opener has Harry finding out that his mother is dead, a later two-party has Dan worried about growing old alone, an episode I haven't watched yet has Mac on a drunken spree when he finds out Quon Lee is pregnant. Lots of hugging, but said season opener also featured John Astin as Harry's step-father.

[While writing this, the dvd player crapped out. What a great purchase!]

I also noticed that most of the characters weren't given much to do. In Roz's first appearance, she didn't do anything except explain her name as a legacy of her mother's love of show business. It worked out better for her than her brother and sister, Slappy and Zsa Zsa. Florence's death was mentioned, but only in passing while Harry talked about his mother. ["Harry hasn't talked to her in twenty years" someone said to Roz. "My brother hasn't talked to my mother in twenty years." "Your brother?" "Topo Gigio."] A witty retort Roz delivered a few episodes later could have came from either of the characters standing next to her, but I suspect it was a matter of giving the new kid on the block something to do and a matter of where they were standing relative to the main actors in the scene. Again, this wasn't a character-driven show.

But it was funny. They're not even pretending to be realistic anymore, with a cavalcade of hilarious legal cases. Someone who legally changed his name to 1987, vowing to take all responsiblility for the new year. ["I'm going to make ABC the number one network again." Harry: "Held over for psychiatric evaluation."] Brandon Tartikoff shows up to rescue a Nielsen Family and they poke a great deal of fun at their own network, execs and stars alike, for a bit that lasts around 45 seconds.

As mentioned, I skipped ahead (before the dvd player died) to watch the first "200 Cases To Midnight" episode, and it was wonderful, a rapid-fire series of jokes that, even when they misfire, there's another one coming right away and it's all so delightfully weird that there's no time for reflection. The cast play their parts wonderfully, especially John Larroquette who functions as a superb utility player. If a plot or subplot can't be hung around Dan Fielding, it's usually not worth it.

Harry Anderson and Markie Post aren't known for their acting abilities, but the writing compensates quite a lot, and they do just fine with what they have as the male and female leads [although Markie Post is wearing too much makeup]. Harry can handle the serious or wacky roles as required, and Christine has delightfully silly moments in between the naivete and being the butt of jokes. The dvd player died on an episode that had her being dragged off to jail in the opening segment, by a female judge who would later sleep with Harry ["if you want to be technical, neither of us did any sleeping"], and she was doing a great job there.

It's a shame that technology can be so crappy. There's got to be a way for interested parties to give WB some money in exchange for decent unedited copies, and what I've seen of this set at least meets that standard. There's jokes in here I know I never saw in syndication.

But I'm feeling muuuch better now.

How long will Qaddaffi keep breathing?

2011-05-02T19:41:00.000-07:00

This is Obama's chance to take a stand that is decisive and could aid in victory in the war. Yes, he gets to take a lot of credit for using information his predecessor gained to launch a military strike against a Muslim country that never attacked us from bases his predecessor established. Obama's the President, he gets the credit, no problem.

But Qaddaffi's still out there, still machine-gunning his citizens, just like Assad is, but Assad isn't riding around in the open. Qaddaffi knows he's got somebody looking out for him and it sends exactly the wrong sign to our enemies - of which bin Laden was only one individual - that he continues to do exist. If he's still alive 48 hours from now, Obama's going to lose every shred of credibility the death of OBL could give him.

I am amused that, as a candidate, Obama did say he knew bin Laden was in Pakistan and if he were elected, we'd go get 'im. I even blogged about it three years and nine months ago.

http://chrisw-chrisw.blogspot.com/2007/08/you-get-to-drink-from-fire-hose.html

He said if he were elected, this would happen, and sure enough it happened. That's a point on the big board, karmically, at least as far as I'm concerned. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner had much the opposite effect.

But given Abdulmutallab, Faisal Shazad, Major Hassan, Qaddaffi, Assad, the mullahs and all the other gangsters of the region, Penn and Teller and the South Park guys frankly admitting they won't make fun of Islam because they don't want to die, even though they ruthlessly make fun of everything else. We have a far different perspective on life in the Muslim world than we had a decade ago. Back then, they had all the oil and they hate Israel and that was it.

That's an argument which is demonstrating how unrealistic it is with every day. No credible person could say Israel treats the Palestinians worse than Assad treats Syrians, or worse than Qaddaffi treats Libyans, or worse than the mullahs treat Iranians, or worse than King Saud treats Saudis and Bahrains, worse than Musharref treats Pakistanis or worse than Mubarek treated Egyptians. Frankly, Israel - in our "smart power" era, anyway - would have nothing to lose except their souls by outright machine-gunning every Palestinian in sight, because that's no worse than the Palestinian people's own defenders have been doing for decades and are doing today.

Here's an idea, let's let Qaddaffi keep driving around in his invulnerable convertible car and while everybody's looking at him, we send a Predator drone into Assad's bedroom. It takes a bad guy off the board and could seriously distract the enemy.

I wonder if that's what we've done with bin Laden. I'm perfectly willing to accept that this was him and we got him, just like it says there with full orchestration and four-part harmony. But I read "Illuminatus" too many times as a youngster, and love a good conspiracy theory. Or even a bad one, if done right. Bush/Cheney stole the election from Al Gore

[and a veep candidate so qualified - "HOW QUALIFIED IS HE?" - he was so qualified that he still votes with the Democrats on pretty much everything even though they threw him out of the party a few years after the election. Who says you can't win an election without a D or an R after your name?]

and arranged that bin Laden's death would be announced in '11. They knew that after 8 years, they'd be so reviled that America would flip over someone like Obama, which is why they plucked him from an unknown post in a Chicago university/Democratic disrict and set him up. If they pick the best person for the job regardless of race or gender, yet constantly get accused of racism and sexism, then they have a significant advantage over everyone hurling the accusations. They knew that America would want him, and their regime wouldn't change in any significant way. Halliburton uber alles.

It still doesn't change the savagry coming from the Middle East. English gentlemen didn't become that way without a thousand years of proper breeding, and if the Arabs and Persians are this eager to turn on each other while still throwing all their hatred onto us (or the Jews), maybe the problem isn't entirely with us (or the Jews, who know something about proper breeding and turning aside hatred).

The problems in the Middle East and the conflicts raging within Islam itself are far too complex to be boiled down to a man like Osama bin Laden. We have demonstrated that the infidel can beat any Muslim power on earth by the same will of God that gives any Muslim victory. It isn't blasphemy to live in a society where women vote or homosexuals can exist or three month-old babies don't get stabbed to death by people who are celebrated for doing so.

From a society of law and order all the way to absolute barbarism, there comes a time when someone makes a decision to shoot some of these motherfuckers and see how they like it then. We saw this a couple years ago when Obama gave the order to shoot the pirates in Somali waters. The pirates are still there, still getting away with murder, looting, hostage-taking. Just like Qaddaffi, and Assad, and all the other anti-Israel group that we've been so mean to all these years. And their subjects are getting the government they deserve. As do we all.

Double-posted

2011-05-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Part of something I wrote elsewhere and continued here because I felt like it.

Quote:Why are you even arguing about any of this, since you think your opinion is no better than anyone else's, including a 10 year old's? On that, we agree.

I think my opinion is the best one there is, but I recognize other people think differently. Your view unilaterally dismisses anybody who likes Van Hagar, anybody who likes ICP, anyone who thinks Abbey Road is better than Robert Johnson, [hardly overlapping groups] for no better reason than that they hold an opinion you don't share. Or else that they're young whippersnappers who don't know what's good for them and can safely be dismissed.

I hate to say that's a strange way for a Marxist to behave, but alas, whenever Marxists have actually authority to back up their opinions, what people actually want becomes a very minor point in the discussion.

Capitalism has to provide law and order for everybody. On a day to day basis, doing it the old way trumps whatever way comes along 9 times out of 10 at minimum, whatever system you live under. What system works the best for everybody involved, maximizing collective security and material comfort?" Why you want make sacrifice to Great Spirit Snake? What wrong with Buffalo God?"

Mao, Castro, Stalin and Qaddaffi can rule for decades in as much security as the President of the United States. Qaddaffi has taken to riding open-air vehicles lately, so you know someone's looking out for him.

In America, we have color television, comic books and rock'n'roll. Gosh aren't we oppressed. So many Marxists who like it here.

Quote:Your view amounts to saying anything produced on American Idol is just as culturally, intellectually, and aesthetically valuable as Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung.

My view is that there is more to culture, intellect, aesthetics and value than is dreamt of in your philosophy. Pete Townshend is in stadiums singing "Hope I die before I get old" and bayou trash mother of several Britney Spears is pushing 30. Capitalism lets people not heavily addicted to self-destruction or heroin rely on law, order, security, legal contracts, where 9 times out of 10 (or more) the old way of doing things is the best way.

Hey, if picking up a guitar to get some pussy (or because you like playing guitar, but who gives a shit about those freaks) is the best option available, you do what you gotta do. At least you're not being lectured to, told to clean your room, get to your place of duty on time, all that Nazi-like behavior. You get to do whatever you want.

So forgive me for not living up to your high fucking standards of rock and fucking roll, ok! God!

Yeah, be sure and let me know when any Marxist anywhere has ever permitted THAT much dissent against their core beliefs when they had the power to suppress it. For now, there's a power ballad needs my attention.
--

I think a 'death is getting pretty damned close' feeling from the boomers is starting to hit the rock aristocracy hard. At least Jim and Jimi and Janis (and whoever else) are all long dead, so that's all you'll ever get forever and, for most of our lives, it always has been.

The Eagles had to give themselves a cozy corporate entity that lets them do drugs and fuck whoever they want and charge outrageous amounts of money for whatever they want to do for the rest of their lives, just from the royalties of "Hotel California" alone. The guy who created that song was kicked out by Glen and Don ages ago, but the band goes on. Hell, I can't stand the Eagles' version - they only have a few songs I really like and a handful of others I find tolerable - but I've recorded multiple version of "Hotel California" because it's an awesome song to sing and play.

To the obnoxiously-decadent and immoral leftists who made it possible, the big corporate drek-producing entity who made a sport of screwing over their own, it's a mark in the plus column on anybody's scoreboard. Good luck with the only judge that matters.

[I do have Don Henley's greatest hits though, enjoy a number of songs from that. He's also achieved the highest honor a human being can bestow, a style parody by Weird Al. Not song parody, style parody. The man is a true genius. Weird Al that is, not Henley.]

Roger Waters is on tour flogging The Wall, having flogged Dark Side of the Moon for three years, and the "In the Flesh" tour ran about as long before that being mostly composed of old Pink Floyd stuff. He's the one who left the band after dominating it increasingly during the 1970's. This is the guy who got thousands and thousands of Berliners to scream, in unison, "Tear down the wall!!!" And, according to Nick Mason's book, he gives his road crew t-shirts with the words "Am I being cost-effective?" printed backwards SO THEY WOULD SEE IT WHEN LOOKING IN THE MIRROR!

Hey, he got Pink Floyd back together at that big concert a few years back though, so it can't be all bad. Unless you're a Syd Barret fan anyway.

I have read it on Wikipedia and sites linked from there so it must be true, but after the reunion, Waters and Gilmour were very public about not doing it again, with Waters bitching about how much of a hassle it was to roll over just for one gig. But more recently he started saying he'd love to play toegther even for fun. After a brief acoustic show for pro-Palestian [philistine] causes, he has received a promise from Dave Gilmour to perform "Comfortably Numb" at one (only one) of the "Wall" performances forthcoming. If such a large-scale operation can be mounted successfully. How's that Marxism working out for you, eh Rog? "Money, it's a hit. Don't give me that do goody-good bullshit" has a lot of credibility for a lot of people. They'll even pay for it.

But I'm listening to the Live8 reunion right now, and it's an interesting historical event, recreating songs from before I was born, made more poignant by the fact that it would be the last time these guys would ever share a stage. They wouldn't gotten that far without the legal contracts and property rights to defend work they were making when they were 'merely profitable' to the record company. They wouldn't have gotten THAT FAR if they hadn't decided it would be eaiser to play gigs and just leave Syd at home to write songs.

Without Sid writing the songs, he would have had a much harder life. Just this moment I've realized I'd mispelled "Syd" in every Pink Floyd reference I made, and it would take very little for the ideas I'm discussing to be relevant to Sid Vicious and the punk movement reacting to the original Pink Floyd Sound. Syd Barret gave us Waters talking about how emotional it is to be up here with these guys as Gilmour plays a guitar line that is unquestionably classic.

"Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for the lead role in a cage?"

No, sometimes I don't wish you were here. In fact, sometimes I wish you'd shut up and go away. In the literal 'I have to deal with this every day' sense that constitutes most human interaction. Unpleasant interaction certainly. At least you can reasonably walk in safety outdoors with your children without bullets and bombs. Or people who will turn you in for unauthorized criticism. At the very least, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

Following a Waters Wiki-link led to a reference he made recently about how contracts were signed when he actually left the band. [or at least I found it recently. This is the internet, it must be true.] At the time, he was being sued by the band because he wasn't permitting them to work as Pink Floyd, even under their recording contract. The record company was displeased as well. This was not Death Row records, these were English gentlemen, so nobody died and everybody went home millionaires. Even Syd, the guy who was kicked out decades ago and had no contact with the band whatsoever, but I digress.

This is true, and Waters doesn't seem to have a good explanation for why he would prevent other members of Pink Floyd from acting as Pink Floyd. The record company was capitalist and evil and Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister isn't really a sufficient explanation decades later. I mean, it makes more sense than the distinctions between Stalin and Trotsky [or Biggie and Tupac] but that's because these guys are English gentlemen.

English gentlemen got to be English gentlemen by centuries of breeding. If this Syd Barret and Nancy circus is what the public likes, and maintains law and order and not being machine-gunned in the street as Qaddaffi does with impunity, then where's the harm?

In America, we find our own gentlemen in our own particular amusements. I myself am a fan of some works of art produced by a couple of New York City Jews in an office building during the 1960's. They did their job, collected their pay, supported their families. They weren't in a union or anything, and some of them got screwed pretty bad. But they could rely on food being at the store, gas being in the station, popular culture, and things that stayed the same because 9 times out of 0, the old way works better day after day after year after year.

Six years ago, Barack Obama was promising he would not run for President. What are his plans for six years from now? Or should politics be avoided as a subject entirely. What else, sports? Movies? Tv? What you read on the internet? Comics? The royal wedding? Another generation's passed for them you know. Is it true Charles has been officially passed over for King? Are they in the Top 40?

Don Henley, Sting, Prince, Grace Slick, CSN&Y, some of them got with the program and produced work over a longer period of time than Jimi, Janis, Jim, Brian Jones. The Temptations and the Four Tops weren't shooting each other, but they replaced members and only had the legacy Berry Gordy built from his own hard-earned work and investment in his rights and property. Kept a lot of food on people's plates, and Berry certainly is no saint. Without him, the Jacksons would be an ordinary black family, church-going, child-raising, tax-paying, wealth-creating group of citizens. Without Berry Gordy, EVH would have never discovered the crossover audience when he played on "Thriller" and DLR wouldn't have made "Dancing in the Streets" a hit again.

One of the reasons I love rock'n'roll is that it appeals to the historian in me, because it makes generational shift more discernable. Have you seen recent pictures of Grace Slick? Do you think Sarah Palin will look that good in twenty years?

Berry Gordy and the session players showed up on time and were presentable every way they needed to be. If they do their job, are on time and play by the rules the way their boss wants them to, they can afford to look out for five or ten years into the future. They could expect law and order and security for themselves and their families and friends. Marvin Gaye's estate is assured a piece of his work as a singer, producer and songwriter. Depending on their deal with Motown or other record companies, they can rely on people trying to impress chicks with "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (or getting a buzz from CCR's jam).

The guys showing up to work every day for a check really got the better part of the deal, because at least that's a known quantity. If you're unreliable, that's a known factor, and 9 times out of 10, that's where it winds up. And they know it too. It doesn't matter if he's a violent drug-fulled lunatic who hasn't heard the word "no" for a decade, the contract is signed and if it's too expensive to maintain, they'll dump him, because that's how the company has survived so far. The same legal system that impedes Berry Gordy from glorious capitalist exploitation will punish you. Diana Ross is hotter than Grace Slick or Janis Joplin ever were, and Berry was nailing that ass at its finest. Sug gives us Dre and Snoop, bitches ain't shit and "gin and juice". They're mainstream too.

One of my favorite R. Crumb stories is the one about the po' Southern boy who hitches a ride to the city, blows his horn and records a few sides that languish in obscurity until some well to-do white boy pays an old lady for them and later shows them off for his equally well to-do friends. [from memory, I haven't read it in years.] It did a brilliant job of describing the levels of decisions being made, the middle-aged white guy executives who can't justify spending money on more field recordings for the "race" market, the producers and players who had to keep showing up on time to work.

I have no idea what Crumb says about the story, but I know he's said things like the reason he moved to France was because Reagan would put people in camps, so I think I can guess. Still, Crumb is part of the intelligencia, as are others of the small community he made possible, by reliably producing his work for a long period of times. The Eagles and everybody whose work they featured - Linda Rondstadt's primary claim to faim at this point was that they started out as her backing band - can earn livings for themselves, their families, their friends and companies, and they don't even have to shut up about the rainforest or whatever they're lecturing about. Shut up and sing.

I don't know why I wrote that, but I obviously needed it.

A Horse Is A Horse: Mr. Ed's Guide To Objectivism

2011-04-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

Ah, the life of a federal employee (minus all the long hours and heavy physical labor part). Four-day weekend, I've given myself a bit of pampering for the first day. Among other things, I saw the Atlas Shrugged movie and did my semi-regular round of buying books and then reading them at Hooters.

The books were, for a change, actual prose books. One of them was a look at the Civil War in perspective, which doesn't look quite as interesting once I read the sentence about extremist Catholics (and, presumably, other Christians) and their influence on the Republican Party which led to the whole bloodshed in the first place. I'm sorry, but when an account of the origins of the American Civil War is indistinguishable from a leftist blog (or rightist) it tends to lower my opinion of what is being written.

I can find writers who tell me what I want to hear on the internet (or their opposite numbers if I want some self-righteous indignation), if you've done an actual book that I'm willing to pay for, at least make it worth writing the book. I'm not even past the introduction and it's already reading - along with some skimming ahead - like an anti-religion/Republican tract, to the point where slavery itself is excusable. It's like trying to read a Shi'ite history of Islam, a lot of stuff will have to be ignored to make the theme fit the narrative.

The anti-slavery movement came out of the churches, just like the feminist, civil rights and prohibition movements. Republicans were at least as much in the forefront of each of those movements as anybody else (for good or bad; cf Sarah Palin as feminist) so, yeah you can blame them, but what's the point?

The other book I bought was much more interesting, a translation of Gilgamesh - the world's oldest written story - by someone who freely admitted in the introduction that it was his own version. Not a scholar, he looked up what he thought were the most accurate translations in multiple versions from multiple eras, and synthesized them into modern English as he thought appropriate, which differed according to the story and available translations, doing for Gilgamesh what Alan Moore did for Jack the Ripper. That's fine, I have my own pre-existing notions of what Gilgamesh was and is (a sub-scriptural tale from the beginnings of modern civilization which encapsulates the basic goal of writing, like every other worthwhile story tries to do).

I'm only a short way into the book, but already we've seen fundamental literary tropes as The Hero (Gilgamesh) The Sidekick (Endiku) Religious and Nationalist Propaganda (mighty-walled Uruk, the various pagan gods and goddesses) Woman As Civilizer of Man (Endiku is an animal beast-type creature, the head priestess/slut is sent out to get him laid for a while, then he's all about the civilized life) Man as Alpha Male (examples too numerous to mention)

[However Gilgamesh the pimp makes a specific point about having every virgin bride in his kingdom before her wedding night. Unless this is a massively screwed up society wherein large numbers of people have to work and act as though they care enough to make sure that any woman is ready for the ceremony of king/thug/two-thirds divine Gilgamesh showing up at every wedding like Santa Claus on Viagra, it reads more like the intent is that lord high almighty Gilgamesh respects a man's property (i.e. wife), but if he wants her first, he gets her and there's nothing you can do about it. It would be thousands of years before the Magna Carta took the concept of property to a proper level, but given Lara Logan, we have an idea to what extent Endiku-like behavior can dominate. From our perspective, this is a trivial and nonsensical concept, but these people were at the dawn of civilized behavior, and they were just beginning the daily rituals of peaceful co-existance.]

Gilgamesh and Endiku together are going through the basic traits of character pairs. The first couple of books are almost entirely about what an awesome heroic alpha male Endiku is - vowing to best G. at billiards or Nintendo or whatever they did for fun back then - before he becomes Robin to G's Batman. I'm genuinely curious about whether there's an actual payoff, and the story turns out to be about Endiku all along.

Then they do the buddy movie thing, heading off to fight Humbaba (I'm not looking it up, so that's just a guess), which I'm still not clear if it's a monster or a man or what. But, following the Batman/Robin/Lethal Weapon type of story, although there's absolutely no reason given for G to go off on this great heroic quest, the implication (if only by ommission) is that the monster Humbaba (or whatever) was responsible for the condition of this bestial Endiku that he's taken under his wing. If this is the Continuing Adventures of Gilgamesh, ok, he finds another fight and there you go. Tune in same Gilgamesh-time, same Gilgamesh-channel.

If this is Gilgamesh: The Novel, then yes, the story of Endiku superceded by the story of Gilgamesh would naturally be followed by a continuity of what led before. For a brief period of time (fifteen minutes or so), the story of Star Wars was two droids stranded on a desert planet. That makes sense as a narrative. Certainly as much as Gilgamesh's Latest Greatest Fight does.

While reading the author's account of the history of Gilgamesh: The Story, it turns out to be (for all intents and purposes) a very recent story. A hundred and fifty years ago, people didn't know it existed. They knew about the locomotive and the telegraph and George Washington, but not the oldest story ever written.

Like other surviving stories from the dawn of civilization, this one has a Great Flood at the chronological beginning. One gets the feeling that the story wasn't relevant to the centuries that followed, so it lay fallow until modern man could discover it. It's almost literally from another world entirely.

The author's forewards (and Wikipedia) give the basic story, I know the basic story that I haven't read aren't going to disabuse me of these notions. But the interest comes from where they will go regardless, or how they will surprise me as the reader. Action, romance, propaganda, I can already tell this story has everything for every possible audience (including generations of college undergrads, with the lines that are basically 'and then the two guys fucked each other').

However the people of that ancient time lived, they were still human beings, and had the same interests and motivations that human beings have today. Being Semites, the writer(s) and audience were part of the culture that birthed the three great monotheistic religions and civilization itself, even if the work itself is clearly pagan. Besides being a great story - and I'm definitely interested in What Happens Next - the value is in thinking about how different society is from then and now, and how much it has progressed.

I also read Part 2 of Astro City: The Dark Age at Hooters, having read Part 1 this morning. This was the story where we finally found out how the Silver Agent died (which I, for one, hadn't cared about) and it began as a sequel to Busiek and Ross' Marvels. It actually was the reason Astro City existed.

I don't remember the specific chronology at this point, but Busiek and Ross did Marvels, a fully-painted retro-progressive (to coin a term) look at the history of the Marvel Universe and a major touchstone in ushering in a respite from the Dark Ages comics were going through.

[Also, I am convinced to this day that I was standing next to Alex Ross when he showed his samples to whoever-the-guy-manning-the-show-me-your-samples-booth was at a Chicagocon in the early '90s. The guy running the booth was saying 'you're way too good to do superheroes' and the chubby comic-book-fan-looking guy with the incredible superhero pics was clear that he'd draw anything they wanted to get his foot in the door, but those superheroes were what he wanted to do. Years later, I read an interview with Ross that mentions he's from Chicago. Unless he did some series in the 80's that absolutely no one mentions - even (Nebraska native) Chris Ware occasionally has to acknowledge Ford Future (or something like that) which he did for Eclipse; the Hernandez Brothers have Mr. X from the same company - that Chicagocon would have been roughly at the time he broke into the business, and he'd probably go for a local con to make his first steps. This is all unprovable speculation, but it's fun.]

Anyway, Marvels was deservedly a hit. Ross went on to do Kingdom Come for DC, which was a hit largely because he was painting it. He wasn't interested in doing a sequel for Marvel, but encouraged Busiek to do so if it would help him as a writer. He'd brought the original idea of a look at a series of points in Marvel history, Busiek was a secondary party. He wrote the damned thing, and it wouldn't have worked if he hadn't, but the writer was a vehicle for the artist, and he was the perfect writer.

He wasn't interested in doing a sequel to Marvels, but he eventually came up with an idea. Marvel, not knowing they'd have a hit with the original, was all over the sequel in ways that irritated him to the point where he withdrew his contribution from the project and kept the original story.

(from memory) He was talking with Dark Horse about doing a comic, and when he now had 'the story that would have been Marvels II' to work into the concept, they loved it. In fact, they wanted to do it before a regular series. Things started bogging down there, and eventually Busiek moved on to Image, and the regular series became the focus, Astro City.

To this day, I think the original collection is the textbook for how to do superheroes that aren't Marvel or DC trademarked properties. Six basic stories of likeable superheroes and the world they inhabit, six stories which are about much more than "good guy fights bad guy". Brent Eric Anderson does gorgeous art, and Alex Ross even provides covers and character designs. This is how you do it, whether you want to rip off a specific character or throw a few different inspirations into a mix or espouse a worldview or go a whole new direction entirely, or just plain have someone else with their own life who turns around for a second and sees these kind of characters. It's like, ok, this is how it's done. And then everything else is just a natural extension. This is superheroes with a manga influence, or a modern director influence, or in the Bruce Timm style.

Anyway, after far too many years of absence, Astro City is now a fairly regular series, and they have completed the sixteen-part epic based on the original sequel-to-Marvels story.

The virtues are subtle. This story spans years, and most of the supercharacters we've never heard of before. I still love the genre, but it makes my head hurt to think we're expected to have any idea who these people are or what the hell they're doing. It works, in the sense that it helps us identify with Charles and Royal Williams, the main characters, and the general everyman sense of what it's like to live in a world where lunatics with capes go around destroying things in the name of truth and justice that the series is about.

But the actual superheroics aren't that interesting in and of themselves. Because this is a generation-long tale, they walk in briefly and then step out again. Except for the Silver Agent, who is travelling backwards in time, eventually to reach the end of his career, where he is tried and executed for a murder he didn't commit. That's the hook of the novel for the superhero fan anyway.

The main story is about Charles and Royal, brothers from a poor black neighborhood. One became a cop, the other a crook. The dynamics between the two are played up in novel-like complexity. Their parents were murdered in a fight between the Silver Agent and a low-level criminal, and it takes half the book before we realize that they have the slightest interest in tracking him down and making him pay.

Their descent into moral ambiguity is paralled by the superheroes of their times. The first 4-issue miniseries is set when Nixon descends into Watergate, Vietnam falls and the Silver Agent is executed. Then there's the heroes who kill without hesitation, the counterculture druggies, the rip-offs of bad-70s movies. Afterwards, the Silver Agent specified Morning in America as his next appearance, when they use some artifact from the previous era to create new problems in the future. [The generic early-80's Point Man, having just fired The Innocent Gun, a rip-off of Kirby rip-offs with its awesome name and relevance to continuity, is told he just made a mistake, and rants "Excuse me, did anybody think to put a sign on it saying 'do not fire this gun or the Earth will die'? That would have been a good idea."]

Then we're into the flashy mid-80s. Enough of the rip-offs, here's the real thing. The low-level criminal who murdered Charles and Royal's parents becomes the villain who ties countless threads of continuity into his absurdly-powerful plans for poorly-defined world domination. He is "Lord Sovereign", a villain for the 80's. Subplots intertwine and culminate with the darker heroes having an arc of their own. The distinction between hero and villain, citizen and crook, become blurred in a variety of ways.

The heroes are more distinctive, the flashy name-quipper, the big plant-god who resembles Alan Moore and is actually the trippy 60's magician reincarnated. And when the Silver Agent reappears for the first time, he gives a description of heroism that would never come from Captain America's mouth, but Marvel (especially under Jim Shooter) liked to pretend it did. And when Point Man hears it, he legitimately mutters 'wow, that's hardcore'.

Then SA runs into Charles and Royal. They're slack-jawed at his appearance. He knows, he's heading back in time to die, but there's no time for that, so he's deputizing them to... They're all 'you let our parents die, screw you.' This is the sort of effect that only a long narrative can have. Short stories and pop songs and 80-minute comedies simply can't have this effect.

Speaking of complex ideas boiled down into easily-digestible entertainment, did I mention that I saw "Atlas Shrugged: The Movie"? It wasn't bad. Nothing leapt out at me as especially brilliant. They did accomplish the seemingly-impossible job of turning the first book of the novel into a self-contained story like it was supposed to be, which the book didn't do for me. Yes, I get the reader is supposed to feel exuberance and triumph as Dagny and Hank make their journey on the John Galt Line, which is then cruelly dashed by the flood of government imposition and Wyatt burning down his own oil fields. It works for the plot, but I was never the least bit invested in the story itself at that point. Interested enough to keep reading, sure, but whether the John Galt Line succeeded or failed, who cares?

The movie did what shorter works are supposed to do, and placed this scene in a more sensible context. Amidst picturesque Colorado scenery, a train goes really fast, yay. Moving on. For the Star Wars-equivalent, the droids have been separated, reunited, they have a new master who's introduced them to "old Ben", and now they're headed off to the hive of scum and villainy that is Mos Eisley.

As I said, there's nothing especially brilliant about it, but it is a decent job of doing what I described earlier (I think; keeping track gets tough at times) as taking the basic plot, using the ideas as inspiration and changing the dialogue to make it work better. The opening sequence clearly explains that aircraft are uncommon, and new dialogue has Rearden planning to build commercial aircraft with his metal. There's a lot of changes that make sense, just to shorten things. Sometimes dialogue is copied literally, not always for the better.

And they don't do a whole lot of talking about the ideas themselves, displaying a lack of self-consciousness that made Rand's later prose so difficult to read. That helps, mostly. I have no idea what the movie looks like to someone who hasn't read the book, but it seemed reasonably coherent as a movie version. There's actually room to make this grow as a longer work. The picturesque Colorado scenery mentioned earlier might look dangerous and forbidding when later scenes take place there.

The actors, I have no idea how to describe. The characters they portray are too much the deliberate puppets of their creator, so it's a matter of how good the adaptation material they're given to work with is, and beyond that it's whether or not they're watchable. Nobody embarrases themselves, although I can't imagine anybody who hasn't read the book having the slightest clue who Francisco is or why he's in the movie. Anything that made him interesting (or distinct, try distinct) in the book is removed for the movie. This is where the recent trend to movie series is actually a good thing, from a creator's standpoint.

All of the great movie franchises of the earlier eras depended on the success of the previous installment. They filmed Superman I and II at the same time, and Back to the Future II and II, and that's about it as far as being confident there would be a follow-up installment and depending on the audience's involvement. I don't believe Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings were filmed simultaneously, certainly the Star Wars prequels weren't. But they've been able to plan further in the future. In the first Spider-Man movie, Harry Osbourne was a boring non-entity character. In the second, he was quite believably obsessed with Spidey, going nuts about it and becoming the noble villain in the third. It worked a hell a lot better than the origin of Darth Vader, I'll tell that.

So as far as the actors go, nobody did horribly, at least no worse than their context [although we don't need an impenetrable foreign accent]. Stuff was glossed over, newer stuff was added. There's reason to be optimistic about Parts 2 and 3. People seriously invested in movies can look forward to watching the epic over and over again.

Some of the mystery is gone. We see John Galt several times (looking remarkably like Steve Ditko's Question) we're told that they're on strike. What that means, wait for the sequel. It's like Star Wars ending with a caption that said "Next episode: Luke meets his father". That wouldn't be a bad teaser for someone who'd just discovered Star Wars and loved it.

Anyway, the movie's nothing to avoid if you're otherwise remotely interested. It's no Gilgamesh though, or Secret Wars II.

Over 40 days after "Quaddaffi must go", he hasn't died yet, even of old age

2011-04-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

Just read a post on a leftist site I check every so often (the kind that wants to purge Democrats of, well, pretty much everybody left to help them win an election including, increasingly, Obama) about a lawsuit filed by one of the people who wrote on Arianna Huffington's website for free for years and the claimant wants a share of the money she's made from selling the website. If you don't know any of the details about this, count your blessings.

Anyway, one of the posters on this thread talked about the devaluation of writing, having been a professional journalist since 1974. [Sidebar: Another poster on another thread mentioned being targetted by J Edgar Hoover, and a third poster on a third thread referred to working on the McGovern campaign. How old are the people on that website?] In this internet age, people are able to write for free, so he no longer gets paid a dollar a word. His bitterness was clear although, in this internet age, obviously he could be making everything up and there's no way to prove him a liar. Personally, I find it easier to assume people are telling the truth and let lies reveal themselves, but I digress...

I certainly can't deny the idea that the internet devalues writing, especially in the 'opinions are like assholes, everybody has one' categories. Fortunately, it and other technological advances like it are also instrumental in fewer people knowing
how to read, so it balances out.

Every so often, an internet meme goes around, citing an actual test from a schoolhouse in somewhere, USA from the year 18-something aimed at sixth or seventh graders. As you've probably already guessed, the questions are difficult enough that very few college graduates could get a passing, and even fewer would have enough, well, education, to even have a grounding in those areas. However smart or stupid a student might have been, to pass those math questions would require not only an understanding of the questions, but all the math that leads up to them. Yes, most of the questions are relevant to today's students, or could be made so without making them easier.

Not many kids could make it that far in school - life was a lot harder in the year 18-something - but those that could would definitely have a grounding in the world that could take them far. You know, the thing education is there for in the first place. It provides opportunities to the bright kids (as well as the idiot sons and spinsters for the wealthier families) which can pay off in the long run. If Ma and Pa and the other kids can work a little harder and keep the farm going without Junior breaking his back 12 hours a day right next to them, the education would be an asset.

Yes, writing is devalued by the fact that so many people can do it, especially in public. It still seems better than the alternative. And with the onset of Generation... what are we up to now, "Z"? What comes after Z? Anyway, these kids with their video games and internet and rocky roller music and hula hoops aren't even going to a school where the basics of a classical education are considered remotely important. "There isn't enough diversity and anyway, math is hard."

Writing is hard too. Even if you don't have anything to say (does anyone?) to keep doing it, and do it well, is something you have to want to do. A dollar a word is a nice incentive/bonus (I would imagine) but it's not the reason for doing it. Even if it's garbage, the person's ability and willingness to write something more complicated than a tweet is itself a decent justification.

[A couple of days after writing the above] I've spend most of a weekend doing little. Went into the office a couple times for some work, a bit of editing on the works-in-progress, major or minor. Today I've killed a bunch of time on at theagonybooth.whatever, a site devoted to extensive recaps of bad movies/tv shows/cartoons/comics. Recaps, not reviews. They go into excruciatingly detailed recaps of the movies. Not scene by scene or line by line, but the writers take us through the movie/whatever chronologically, usually with hilariously-captioned screenshots. They comment with a film buff's eye and as someone who is not a film buff, they usually do so with an enjoyable style.

It's not scholarship they're after so much as a group of creative individuals sharing a common sense of... fun [it's late, I don't have a better word for it]. Many of the movies are stuff you've never heard of, with some interestingly off-the-wall choices [the 1910 version of "The Wizard of Oz" being a favorite] and have recently expanded to pursue a few other lines. There are some 50's comic books, some 80's cartoons and tv shows - as someone who has real affection for "Family Ties", I loved the eviscerations nonetheless and wish to God they'd do more episodes - a number of superhero movies (most of which I haven't seen, or saw only once). There are a number of movies known by reputation - Dune, Battlefield: Earth, Gigli (odd grouping, that) - and a large amount of Trek, which is where the site's title comes from. For a Trekkie, especially one who likes being poked fun at, every part of the franchise has quite a few recaps and they're worth it. The writers obviously work hard on it, and the work reflects their biases. They aren't writing about bad movies just to be writing about bad movies, they have a distinct point-of-view with standards to uphold. They certainly don't take requests.

The Trekkie thing is actually what led me to write this, because I just realized that - having spent a chunk of the day doing so - I'd rather read articles about "Star Trek" than watch any part of it except the handful of movies I've seen and liked. And even there I have no interest in anything other than the original series and the movies based off of it. Once in a while, I happen to think about some aspect of "Trek" trivia, which Wikipedia quickly satisfies. Otherwise the subculture is interesting to me in a way the source material isn't.

Parodies of "Trek" are funny though. The "Frasier" cast doing a Frasier skit, only with Trek humor, CPT Janeway reading all the Frasier lines and you-know-who dressed up as a Klingon? That's funny. A convention beseiged by Zombies in "Night of the Living Trekkies"? Comedy gold. I can watch those over and over. Otherwise, I may see II, III, IV and VI again sometime before I die, but I'm not worried about it.

There's certainly overlap between Trek and areas I am interested in (comic books, Star Wars), so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the material, just that I don't get the interest others have for it. Years ago, this actually bothered me to the extent that I went out and rented a VHS copy of what's considered to be the best episode ever, "The City on the Edge of Forever". And the whole time, I'm watching what's supposed to be a sci-fi masterpiece and wondering 'how is Spock able to build those futuristic machines in the 1930's?' For that matter, what were Kirk and Spock doing there in the first place, since they would have blinked out when McCoy jumped through and changed time just like the Enterprise did. Remember, they tried to hail the ship and failed, leaving them no choice but to follow the Dr. into the past.

So - perhaps much like comic books and Star Wars for other people - I just don't get the appeal. Discussing Nurse Chapel vs. Yeoman Rand, the Borg, Tribbles, no idea what people see in it. [Picard versus Kirk, I get]

Here's the trailer for a small movie that looks like a generic slacker rom-com (as I say, I'm not a film buff) but uses the Artist Formerly Known As Shatner creatively.

I have shown him that a man without hope is a man without fear

2011-04-02T10:57:00.001-07:00

Wow, Harry Reid just shut down the Senate rather than allow a vote that quoted (then) Senator Obama on what the President of the United States is NOT allowed to do with the military.

GWB was recently quoted as saying he hoped the US wouldn't leave Afghanistan, and there's a point to be made by keeping them perpetually aware of something they can't touch. 2001: A Space Odyssey had a point, with the sun rising over the monolith at dawn.

The nutball in Florida went and burned a Koran quietly. Ten days later, when Friday prayers got out, a bunch of Afghanis slaughtered 10 United Nations workers and burned down their offices because of the offense. They would have attacked the Americans, but that never works, so they took their rage out on who they could. Maintaining a presence in the region itself is valuable for that reason. By the time they're able to damage us, they'll already be civilized enough to contribute more and better things, so it's worth keeping them aware over generations of the option always being there.

I think the President flamed out around Christmas, when Michelle and the kids went on a sudden vacation and he started publicly bitching about both the right and left so Bill Clinton had to take the reins at a press conference. It's not clear what's been animating the President since, and I'm actually willing to give him quite a benefit of the doubt in some ways regarding the Libya operations, but in general the office has been vacated.

He's been overwhelmed by the day-to-day tasks of being chief executive that wouldn't leave any time for evil-doing if Satan himself was the one who got you there. Burnout often seen in middle-level executives when moved up the ladder. The people who villified Chimpy McBushitlerburton didn't have the slightest clue what the job entailed and neither did the one they voted for.

I think the choke point will be when he actually has to speak about reelection. Plans can be made - I think John Kerry intends to replace Biden or step up as primary alternate - but when the candidate himself has to actually defend anything he's done, it'll be game over for him. Video and quotes of him saying the exact opposite two, four or six years ago will exist in plenty, and Obama has nothing else to justify it with. I don't think he's enough of a sociopath to be capable of sustaining that performance any longer, just because he doesn't have anything in reserve. Kerry has a proven track record, Hillary was a good girl and proved she could get reelected a second time first, even Sarah Palin at least ran marathons.

In theory, Obama could win a campaign, if he's kept in a locked box and nevre called on to defend any of his decisions or previous claims. He'd have to exploit the worst in every way he could find it, probably leading to civil war. I don't know if the country is as fragile as that, but why should we find out the hard way?

If he can actually sustain a few speeches and tape a few commercials - "I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message" - he won't get past the Democratic Party machinery, who have an idea of what the voters out in Smallville see and want to know their guy is ready for what the Republicans will say. The Hillary voters who were called racist, the people who might actually support getting rid of Qaddaffi, who think spending a trillion dollars is a little extreme even if you don't go on to endorse and expand GWB's War on Terror.

Hell, Bush even put forth ideas for his second term, entitlement reform (privatize social security) and immigration (blanket amnesty for illegals). Does anybody think Obama (or his handlers) are capable of something like that?

The House of Representatives can starve the government of money if not appeased. Such is the benefit of the populist house with the purse strings. Thank you, whichever Founding Father had that bright idea.

Work's going well, the book's going slowly.

I'm sure I posted it before, but here are the Muppets doing their thing.

And here's a clip from a simpler time, a time when good was good and evil didn't smell quite so bad.

A more recent movie from one of the Zucker Brothers, it bombed in theaters but I assume it will succeed in the long run thanks to scenes like these.

Tell Bugs that if he doesn't say "Of course you realize this means kinetic military action", we'll hire Roger Rabbit instead.

2011-03-27T13:55:00.001-07:00

They said if I voted for the Presidential candidate who sang "bomb bomb bomb Iran", I'd get a President who started dropping bombs on nations that never attacked us and pose no threat. They were right.

It's not that regime change is the wrong choice. It's that this is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. 'Drop bombs [or send in the Marines] until Qaddaffi is dead' is a perfectly sensible decision, whether the US does it, France does it, NATO does it, Israel does it, Saudi Arabia does it... Whoever does it, it has to be done, so get it taken care of.

This clusterfuck is completely the wrong way to go about it. All in the name of avoiding looking like GWB, the administration - and Western Civilization in general - is doing exactly what they (falsely) accused GWB of doing. Frankly I think a convincing argument could be made for seizing the oilfields, although it would require bribing China, anyone with prior contracts, locals, etc.

Many have noticed how the Obama administration has - without a pretense of explanation - kept or even expanded rendition, indefinite detention, the Patriot Act, Gitmo, military tribunals. I forget which Muslim terrorist got read his Miranda rights an hour after they caught him, but that seems to accelerated their reversal.

Long days after the bombing started, Obama gave a brief message to the American people. But Qaddaffi's still in power and there are no plans to make him go. The rebels still have nothing to offer except rebellion. The coalition is falling apart like the failed Russian coup of the late 80's. Nobody knows who's in it or what they're doing or for how long.

Syria is now consumed with riots. It's not clear yet if these are comparable to Europe in 1848 or Eastern Europe in 1989. The global Islamic extremists are in the best position, but it's not clear if the people will ultimately be on their side.

Resource consumption is a crucial part of any economy, especially modern industrial ones like ours. That's why I'm half-convinced a genuine "war for oil" might be prudent at this juncture. I don't think anybody on earth could be satisfied by the arguments for such a thing (including myself) but to take physical possession of a needed element for society to continue could have very positive reverberations against the terrorists and tyrants of the world.

Everything runs on energy. Food produced at one part of the world has to be transported to wherever it's processed and packaged for transportation to the local market. That's why vegetarian cruelty-free non-genetically modified etc. stuff is so expensive, even for wealth liberals. Just think how much worse it will get if gas prices go up ten bucks a gallon. Unless you've got cows, cropland and orchards in your backyard, starvation will be about a week away. That won't be changed by all the windmill, solar power and ethanol subsidies in the world.

The nuclear power advocates (of I am sorta a member) have been rightfully shaken by the catastrophe in Japan. But the nation was shattered by unprecedented earthquakes and tsunamis, [kamikaze = divine storm] and the reactors have continued to hold. Moreover, the Japanese people are calmly and rationally picking up the pieces. If there's any validity to a 'master race' argument, Japan (and Asia in general) is scoring pretty high at this point. That said, if the same crisis had struck a Chinese nuclear plant, preventing a meltdown would have been the least of the worries as chaos ripped through society. Ditto in Iran or North Korea, and their nuke-building capabilities probably aren't as secure.

The reactors have held and (inshallah) will continue to hold. One would assume the improvements in engineering since they were built decades ago can improve on this tremendous achievement. There is room for cautious optimism if you think Albert Einstein's theories can provide energy more cheaply and efficiently than coal, oil, gas, etc. However - Germany seems to have taken the lead on this - existing plants are being shut down, as literal a John Galt "turn off the motors of the world" moment as we've seen yet.

Solar power seems like it would be the greatest idea in the world, but so far it doesn't produce enough energy to power anything we actually use. I'm sure if it were possible, they'd make small things like iPods or cell phones with solar cells, and the energy savings would be noticeable because you no longer have to charge the damn things up. Wind power likewise doesn't produce enough energy.

You don't think about things like that when you're a week away from starvation. Civilization is much more tenuous than most people think. Qaddaffi could be an insane murderer slaughtering people no matter what time or place he was born and ruled. But only because wealthy western nations pay for oil does he have advanced technology to kill his people with.

What if someone came to a prominent politician or leader with a plan to create large numbers of jobs at a local, state and federal level. Many different types of jobs would be created with this offer; manual labor, production and use of everything from electronics to t-shirts, food and beverage to large-scale transportation and logistics to media attention. Sounds like a great deal.

Now what if the person who came with this offer is a known heroin addict, or at least speaking professionaly for one? It sounds kind of iffy, but it didn't stop the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Guns'n'Roses, Aerosmith, Red Hot Chili Peppers, anybody working with Eric Clapton in the 70's, etc, other drug users in rock.

The same system that makes the consumer culture possible is the one that's given us the time, leisure and wealth created by energy use.

Not really related, but I've noticed a sudden resurgence of the singer/guitarist dichotomy present in most hit rock bands. Mick and Keith haven't produced much in decades. Slash is winning against Axl, already planning his next solo album. Jimmy Page would love to fly Led Zeppelin again, but Robert Plant's not remotely interested. Brian May has produced a Britpop chick and seems to be having issues with the only other member of Queen left. I don't know what Townshend and Daltrey's relationships are like, but the Who seem to keep up a semblance of functioning [again, the only two original members left]. Eddie Van Halen may (possibly) be putting together an album with David Lee Roth, but it's been so long since he's been a functioning anything, no one cares. Joe Satriani has found a reliable team playing frontman with Sammy Hagar in Chickenfoot. A band like Rush doesn't fit into this category, so we can ignore them. Ditto Metallica, the Eagles, Beatles, solo artists, etc. Nyeah.

I wonder, in the popular entertainment/consumer side of culture, how much of what we've seen in the last half-century has been largely inspired by having to make deals with crazed twenty-somethings who have found success beyond all measure, and still maintain the same capitalist structure that lets completely normal people manage their business as well. Mick Jagger didn't waste himself with drugs (much), but he had to put up with people who did, and realized quickly that the London School of Economics teachings and a future knighthood was better than the alternative.

Here's an MTV clip from the mid-80s, the first Farm Aid (I think) and the first time Eddie Van Halen played with Sammy Hagar. The singer does an awesome job of putting on a show and they rock and roll a Led Zep tune.

And here's the "bomb bomb bomb Iran" joke. Having never seen it before, it's exactly what I thought it would be. A joke, humor that becomes more cynical by the day.

Mission: "Send the Marines back to Tripoli to put a bullet in Qaddaffi's head, then come home"

2011-03-18T16:01:00.000-07:00

So we're invading Libya now. Or something. The UN and the French have given their instructions, and at some point Obama may follow up with Congressional authorization or something. Obama says there won't be ground troops, but if any pilot gets shot down, it's going to suck to be them if there's no boots on the ground. Wait, are we providing the pilots? What are we doing? What's the mission?

I really wish I could shake the feeling that he's been sitting idly for two weeks ("Qaddaffi must go", 3 March) hoping things would work out in his favor, and when it was clear they weren't going to unless he took action, asked himself what the guy before him would have done. The guy who had the most experience what what Obama himself is undergoing. He started a war in the region and got away with it. And this has France and the UN's approval (minus a few abstentions on the Security Council), so he can feel smug about getting permission first.

As I say, I'd like to shake that feeling. Maybe this is right on schedule with the overall war. Maybe this is thrown-together slop that will never come to anything because the C-in-C is over his head and has never lead anything like this. People around him will make a show of carrying out his orders and he'll give interviews (or not) and nothing will ever get done. The queen is surrounded by too many other pieces, and is effectively removed from the gameplay for the moment.

I have no idea if contributing anything to the removal of Qaddaffi and "owning" any part of Libya is a good idea or not (although France doesn't seem to mind; perhaps they're the ones feeling the "Bush envy" now). The abject failure to close Gitmo has demonstrated Obama is fully (if unwillingly) on board with the War on Terror as his predecessor set it up. As long as it supports that mission better than any of the alternatives, fine.

More hell is breaking loose. Saudi Arabia has ignored its relationship with the United States to send its forces into Bahrain, whose government had already fired upon protestors. Saudi Arabia is currently being targeted by Iran, which I didn't see coming. Is this just an attempt to bring chaos to the region, to stir up Shi'ite vs. Sunni, revolution and religion vs. monarchy, Persian versus Arab? Or is it about who controls Mecca?

Domestically, the Democrats are leaderless right now. Republicans are still trying to figure out what to do or how to do it, and they'll be blamed for the result. There was a story recently that Hillary was fed up with Obama's dithering. I can believe it. That's why I'm dubious about Obama's decision to go to war as part of a master plan, much as I'd like to believe it is.

Not sure what else to say. Haven't been doing much other than my job. The third draft crawls along, maybe a quarter of the way finished. I surprised myself and drew a couple of quick comics in a notebook. Nothing brilliant, but it's always a pleasure to have a comic finshed. In comics, I seem to be incapable of doing anything other than superheroes. Which is strange, because most of the basic elements of the genre are uninteresting to me as a writer, and to various extents as a reader.

I don't care about flashy costumes or fight scenes, and although I enjoy reading a good secret identity/love triangle gimmick, I only write one when I have a good idea for it. I do love the continuity aspect, but that's not really exceptional considering my similar fascination with history, rock stars, politics, etc. So although I certainly do non-superhero comic stories and strips, they're mostly one-offs and are mentally thrown on the pile with the rest - as large a pile as I can make it - and I go back to the superhero stories I enjoy doing. My art and lettering will never be professional and it's unlikely I'll ever rise to the level of competent amateur.

In (hopefully) the best sense of comic book continuity, I'm not even referencing the old stuff, so only what I can remember gets reused. Two 4-pagers in a notebook aren't much, but it's two more than I had when I joined years ago. Last deployment, I drew an 8-pager and a sorta-sequel 24-page story (22 pages?) Those were fun to do. I also did two non-superhero 60 (72?) panel strips in Microsoft Paint.

I really have no idea what else to say at the moment. Qaddaffi is making his bid for caliph. It's utterly insane, but so is he, and after four decades of power, he might be right that the alternative to him is chaos. Public unions are getting desperate in the mid-North.

Here's some outtakes from MASH.

I like stamp collecting, but there's a seductive lure... Is a rare 1916 Monaco Windsor worth one's immortal soul?

2011-03-06T06:28:00.000-08:00

Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!!!

Besides, everyone knows stamp-collector groupies are major babes.

I will admit, not bitching about politics and other current events has taken away a large incentive to post regularly. It wasn't exactly a conscious decision, more like 'jeez, give it a rest'. There's no real incentive to start ranting about the outrage of the day. With this administration, there's another one coming along and it's more tiresome than anything else.

Remember when Obama was supposed to be this great agent of hope and change? A lot of people saw that he had no actual experience taking difficult leadership positions, and usually voted "present" in his career. But those people didn't vote for him. Over halfway through his Presidency, his style of leadership is quite clear. Serious question for those who voted for him, two years later, what other explanation could there before why he gets pushed around by Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, Rahm, the Republicans, Iran, Qaddaffi? Obama's not going to stand up for what's true and right and decent, why else would he wait two more years to fight for repealing Bush tax cuts? Why else did he campaign against the individual mandate and then sign Obamacare as written?

Now, does anybody remember anything concrete about him? His leadership position on Middle East turmoil? A brilliant forward-looking plan anywhere? The State of the Union was barely a month ago, did anything come out of that? [I recall something about Sputnik and choo-choo trains...]

Will he win re-election? Well, unless some serious sea change has happened in America's black communities that nobody has noticed, blacks are going to vote for him as unanimously in '12 as in '08. I think racial solidarity is a bad decision to base one's vote on, but it is a democratic right. That's the only thing giving him a fighting chance. The leftists know they're being taken for granted - who else are they going to vote for? - and every other Democratic constituency is fed up with defending their guy. The economy is worse under Obama, and he's not leading on any front. Any other President, he'd be unquestionably toast. As it is, he has virtually no chance, unless everything magically falls his way. Such things are not unprecedented.

Very little is happening as proscribed. The Muslim world is trying to unite, and the required step is a federalist sort of Islam that can credibly support a Caliphate. It could be housed in Cairo, Baghdad, Tehran, Beirut, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Mecca, I'm sure Kabul would work in a pinch, or Khartoum.

A united Islam would be a formidable enemy, but long before achieving major victory, their own internal dissension would tear them apart. Arab versus African, Shi'ite versus Sunni, tribalist versus globalist. The question - from our side - is how much damage they could inflict before this pan-Islamic civil war began. A true Caliphate accepted from Indonesia to Venezuela (ahem) would have to be a peacable one, with Caliphs replaced by means closer to the Pope in Rome than has traditionally been the case.

We'll know Islam is ready for such a state when the individual Muslim communities are able to police themselves in civilized manners. There are hopeful signs, the Egyptian protestors are making a point of cleaning up after themselves. Even the Muslim Brotherhood would have to know that actual governing on existing Middle Eastern models isn't possible without the horrible results demonstrated so far. [Except in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan] Anybody looking to be the next Qaddaffi? The next Saddam? The next Arafat?

The book continues, depressingly slowly. I'm about an eighth of the way through the third draft, and well over 40 corrections per page on average. I was hoping to have it at the printer's by mid-March, and that's been thrown out the window. What if I have to do a 4th draft? I'd be lucky to have the book printed by this year's NANOWRIMO.

I am pleased with the way it's turning out. Very few of the corrections are for anything other than grammar or polish. When I wrote the first draft, I had no idea what would actually happen by the end, and by the time I reached the end, I barely remembered anything from the beginning. That obviously carried over to the second draft, but now that I'm reading the book for the second time, everything fit together very well. The second draft was going through structural deficiencies and finding very few. Now I'm tracking the consistency of the characters and what's going on chapter by chapter. As long as the continuity is maintained, I'll be happy. The whole story needs to fit into a timeline, so that's the other priority of the third draft.

I'm also going back and forth on what else to include in the printed book. As a tribute to NANOWRIMO, my intention has always been to include blog posts and other stuff I wrote during the period of the first draft. I also just like the idea of making the book a complete package, more like an album. The question here is how much extra stuff do I want to include? And how much extra work is that worth?

I like the idea of including "extras". If nothing else, I'd like to have a polished readable version of the material. ["we decided that one big book was better'n two little books and rather than bring one up we decided to throw ours down..."] However, the "pure" notion of nothing between the covers except the story itself is a tempting one. The "vanity" part of "vanity press" would still be satisfied. And it would cut out much time and effort and still give me a book I'd want to read.

Ah well. I've got weeks left before I'll come close to needing to make that decision. The last half-dozen pages I've done of the third draft each have at least 55 corrections per page. There's no incentive to keep going beyond 'if I don't do it, it won't get done.' Depressing.

Speaking of depressing, one assumes the Baby Boomers must be in full *give me grandkids* mode by now, because I'm guessing there's a huge segregation in that population these days. The ones who are retiring have to fill up the hours with something. This will be particularly hard for those whose jobs really were everything in their lives, and the ones who have a crop of grandkids to play with will be noteworthy for that reason.

Anecdotal evidence suggests a resurgence of girly-girl-ism in the female of the species. That's where the Boomers who really didn't think about things like 'family values' before start seeing what really lasts. Read a story a while back about Madonna being horrified at some of the clothes her teenage daughter wanted to wear. I'm guessing that being an Italian Catholic school girl is a little harder to shake off than she thought it was. And if there's anyone who deserves to be shocked by her daughter's rebelliousness...

I've been listening to a bit of different music lately, now that I've overloaded on Steinman for the time being. I've burned a lot of CDs and listened to stuff on the car's stereo. Some stuff is surprisingly good. I still haven't gotten tired of such standards as Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror", Jim Croce's "I Got a Name", a Trans-Siberian Orchestra song or two. I've included some early-pop punk stuff, early albums by the Go-Go's ("We Got the Beat") and Big Star (albums didn't sell, but they were influential). Both bands are tolerable, but will probably be removed from the next batch of CDs. Joe Satriani's debut album, Surfing With The Alien was the biggest hit instrumental rock album in ages, and it wasn't just the rip-off of John Byrne's Silver Surfer on the cover that sold it. An outstanding guitarist. He's also joined with Sammy Hagar to lead Chickenfoot, whose debut album is excellent hard rock.

I'm actually becoming quite interested in Sammy Hagar. Best known as the guy who replaced David Lee Roth in Van Halen and he did that 'I Can't Drive 55' song, he's actually had a long and impressive career. Keep in mind, I haven't actually listened to most of his music, but I'm becoming more and more impressed with what I'm finding.

His first released album was as a member of Montrose in 1973, and up through his second release with Van Halen in 1986, he almost kept up an album a year release schedule. Since then, he's averaged an album every two years. Not noteable for much in the way of hits other than his VH-era releases, he always showed a relentless work ethic to tour and release material, and get to know the record company and radio guys. His collaborations with others became more and more high-profile until he stepped in to give Van Halen its biggest commercial standing.

This would be transitory, as the David Lee Roth releases continued to outsell Van Hagar in the long run. Indeed, modern Van Halen seems intent on erasing Hagar's time in the band at every opportunity. But Sammy continued releasing albums, working with other people, running a liquor empire.

I've only got most of his VH albums, the one he did after leaving/getting kicked out, the three songs he did for their reunion greatest hits tour/album, Chickenfoot, and his cover of Patti Smith's "Free Money" from one of his first solo albums.

The Smith song has always been a favorite of mine, from her excellent debut album in 1976-7. Smith and her band were basically rock critics who knew how to play instruments. She played up the poetess dancing up front while they were a tight rock band who knew all the facets of their craft. The debut album, Horses, has deservedly lived up to the hype, and "Free Money" has always been the song I think sounded most 'pop'. There's psychelic stuff and jams and heavy guitar stuff, none of the lyrics make any sense, and "Free Money" did a really good job of compacting all that in an appealing way.

So, if you only know Sammy Hagar as the generic hard-rock shouter who gets to work and party with A-list rockers, a great guy but not especially deep or outstanding in any field, you might not expect much from his cover of Patti Smith's New York punk poem. I sure didn't.

But I spent a buck on amazon's mp3 section and what I heard was an amazing cover that builds on the original in so many ways, I honestly have no idea which I prefer more. I want to like the original, but...

Here's a cover of some song I've never heard from his first solo album, the one before including "Free Money". This does a lot of the same thing, and I'm sorely tempted to do with Sammy what I did with Rush and Billy Joel, say 'screw it, I'm downloading everything'.

But yeah, Hagar's "Free Money" is perpetually listenable. I'd always wanted to hear "Sixteen Tons", and now I love it. A few standout tracks come from Dennis Wilson's debut album which sound nothing like the surfing Beach Boy burnout he actually was. Very deep and evocative mood music with a raspy voice he never had on Brian Wilson's tunes. Roxette did some great songs in the late 80's, and then redid the vocals in Spanish, so I've been enjoying those. Jim Morrison and Blondie mashed up for "Rapture Riders".

I don't know if Phil Spector needs the money or what, but a three disc set of most of his biggest records has become available, and it's very much worth it. The Ronettes, the Crystals, Darlene Love. It's not complete, no Righteous Brothers or Tina Turner, but most of his pre-Beatles output is represented. "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "He's A Rebel" are excellent productions, and if you can put aside the issue of giving money to a psychotic gun-toting lunatic like Spector, and you like his work, it's well worth the money.

If you can't put that issue aside, it's perfectly understandable. Exceptions will be made for people who create worthwhile commercial work that an audience will continue to desire. If anybody's interested in Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby as classic movies, the pedophile rapist who made them will benefit, that's just the way history works. Personally I didn't follow the Spector trial much. His out-of-control behavior was well documented over the decades - just the details given in Albert Goldman's book on John Lennon are enough - that it's less a case of him being a murderer as it is that someone finally died as a result. The amazing thing is that it hadn't happened earlier, and in that level of success, those around you will let you get away with quite a lot. "Nothing bad has happened yet" will excuse an awful lot of partying.

There's other stuff, Brian May's female pop singer who gave May songwriting credit on songs she did before him, as well as remaking old/new May/Queen songs. The best songs on Slash's album are still among my faves. He played "Sweet Child Of Mine" with Fergie at the Super Bowl show. Didn't watch it, but like Hagar, he's worked himself up to a high-profile superstar. He just took a lot more drugs than he should have to get there. G'n'R could have stayed at that level, but Axl couldn't hack it. [Slash, by the way, played guitar on the opening track of Sammy's first album post-VH, the one that came out seemingly only a few months after he was kicked out.]

The best songs on Chinese Democracy are still on my playlist too. I'm hearing new virtues in "Street of Dreams", and I thought it was a pleasant song back when bootlegs called it "The Blues". [The words 'street of dreams' appears once in the whole song, the words 'the blues' appears once in the whole song. Axl got the music right, but doesn't seem to grasp how to do the words.] But no, Slash got to the top of the rock'n'roll world twice, once with Axl and once on his own. He's even releasing limited edition live albums from his shows. I haven't found one to pay for yet, but the guy singing G'n'R songs does a good job on Youtube. Axl, meanwhile, reached his peak and decided to wear a Charles Manson t-shirt and record a Manson song, then busted up the old G'n'R with a cover of "Sympathy for the Devil," a song with its own bad history.

So, in addition to drugging and raping a 13-year old girl, Roman Polanski is also known for having his wife murdered by Charles Manson. Manson was influenced by John Lennon's lyrics. In the years before being murdered, Lennon lived at the Dakota, which is where Polanski shot parts of Rosemary's Baby. You know, the one about giving birth to Satan.

John Lennon, who had previously encountered gunplay while recording his last album of several with Spector, spent the last years of his life strung out on drugs while his wife bought important household goods like Egyptian mummies, and crucial services like a curse to keep Paul and Linda McCartney from stealing. Seriously. Yoko put a curse on Paul and he gets busted in Japan. John was shot a few months later. The McCartneys remained happily married for decades until one of them died in the other's arms. The other then mourned and moved on.

This all seems like the most convincing irrefutable evidence ever presented for mysticism and the occult (or at least "Instant Karma"). Yes, if you want proof that the universe operates on laws other than measurable science, there you go. More people sing "Give Peace A Chance" than "Please Please Me" (Lennon's first nationwide impact). All of the people involved in paens to Satan (thinly-veiled or otherwise) came to unhappy ends. Paul was too sensible to get so involved, and his record for winning the lottery of life is noticeably higher.

Notice how they clearly ran out of ideas for the last minute.

At least John had the sense to change his song title to "Yer Blues", because "I'm Lonely, Wanna Die" would be creepy. As it is, didn't any of the other Beatles or the producer ask if everything was all right at home? But Phil Spector went out and did "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)", a record which has nothing to recommend it beyond the shock value of the title.

The Adventures of Busty Steele: Mercenary In Leather will be back after these messages...

2011-02-27T09:26:00.000-08:00

It looks like this weekend decided to be lazy on my behalf. Yesterday, all I did was go to Kinkos and print out the second draft. I've been admiring it since, but haven't made the slightest effort to begin the third draft. Of course yesterday I also slept for twelve hours, so I think I made the decision to be lazy last week sometime.

In the middle of those twelve hours I was woken up for work-related reasons, so life's an ever-unfolding challenge blah blah blah.

Speaking of which, Qaddaffi isn't going to get out of this one. Like every other dictator, he'd staved off the Islamists and the Americans for decades. His country is just an arbitrary conglomeration of tribes and oil fields, the alternative to him is chaos. We knew it, that's why we didn't bump him off earlier. But he's one of the people that got a message when we took out Saddam, about how easy it was, how Iraq did not unite for their dictator, and how he'd better play nice with WMD inspectors.

In Egypt, the alternative is not chaos (yet) so Mubarek left much more peacefully. Now the Muslim Brotherhood, the democrats and the military power have to figure out what to do next. Qaddaffi's accrued a lot of hardcore killers over the years, and they didn't restrain.

[When he finally addressed the protests and massacres, Obama stressed "the whole world is watching". They already know that and it already doesn't bother them. Would it be better if the world wasn't watching?]

Qadaffi says he'll die as a martyr, because like every other Middle Eastern leader, he aspires to the gold ring of Caliph-in-the-making. This is a civil war within Islam as the leaders play king of the hill. There is no time left, but Qadaffi's decided to go down fighting, rather than escape with his life like Mubarek did (unless Mubarek's dead, rumors have been sketchy, and like everyone else in the despot club, he's quite old.)

The House of Saud just increased the oil money bribes to every citizen. They have Mecca and Medina, as long as they can fend off betrayal on their home turf, they're good. But they're also in a bind, since not a bit of that wealth comes from Saudi Arabia itself, but rather from the money capitalist nations give them. The same nations who pointed to Saddam, told him he was gone, and made it happen.

Of course the west doesn't have any idea what to do or say about it. Although I am no fan of the administration, everything they do will be wrong for reasons far beyond their control. The best they can do is cover their own asses, not the most flattering leadership position to take, but one they're good at. It's not like they can bribe their citizens to stay loyal.

Wheels are spinning off of things that some people didn't even know had wheels. What beliefs, what practices, what cultures have the most staying power, those will be the winners of whatever comes next. Somali pirates have so far gotten away with killing four Americans. And there must be a lot of Muslims who wonder why they can't have nice easy worldwide spiritual leadership that changes peacefully the way Catholics have.

If that isn't depressing enough, while writing this I did the third draft of Page 1. Fifty-five corrections need to be made. Oh my...

Some times you can really identify with Daffy Duck. Just when you think you've got everything under control...

Now that's just an indignity, I'm not able to embed "Pronoun Trouble" or "Wabbit Season, Duck Season" or any other cool Looney Toons.

So here's something I just discovered, a blog that reprints and extensively comments on early Peanuts strips.
http://peanutsroasted.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=50

Harry the Hat and Gary have a meeting up at Melville's...

2011-02-19T17:25:00.000-08:00

Four months to the day after I started writing the first chapter, I've finished the second draft of the book. That was a gruelling experience, going through every single word to make sure it fit. That said, there were some bits I'd forgotten that I really liked, and I was quite impressed with how the whole 'make it up as you go along' thing worked. I've still got to do at least a third draft, making sure the characters, plot and themes are actually consistent. Everything *feels* right, but there are a few places where I'm not sure it *is* right.

It's actually somewhat educational. I tend to polish quite a bit even while writing the first draft (believe it or not), but very few pieces I've written were scrutinized this much. I must have made 60 changes per page at least, basically one edit every fifteen words. I'm a damned good writer, and it's humbling to see so much that needs to be fixed. In the last few weeks, even the prospect of getting closer to done wasn't an incentive to keep slogging through pages.

Work is going reasonably well. I'm running an arms room and putting up with some long hours and odd problems that arise. Challenging to get used to, but sort of fun that way as well.

Currently a number of Middle Eastern countries are in flames. Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Iran, not to mention Egypt and probably others I've forgotten. There's not a lot of news. A blonde infidel woman who dressed as a whore was sexually assaulted in Egypt by a group of Muslim men who shouted "Jew". Fortunately she was saved by Egyptian women and soldiers, but it's not likely other Western newscasters will journey out too far. It's almost as horrible as covering the Tea Party.

By the way, where are the men of the Muslim world on the assault of Lara Logan? That is a total breaking point between civilization and barbarism. The demonstrators in Egypt seem to be a mixture - that varies for every individual - of desire for freedom and liberty, desire for order and stability even to the point of despotism, desire to be good Muslims and desire to be Egyptians. No nation is civilized where a woman can not walk by herself with a reasonable expectation of safety, even an infidel dressed like a whore. Non-negotiable.

Or, as a British imperialist is once reported to have said, we'll respect their customs as long as they respect our custom of shooting anybody who treats a woman that way.

I'm sure anybody in Egypt who has the slightest inclination towards American interests would jump at the chance to find this mob and serve them up on a platter. It would make a nice test of a civilized legal system, conclusively proving their guilt before execution. But what about those Egyptians who don't have an inclination towards American interests? Where do they stand on this animal behavior?

The leftist internet sites I peruse all work to avoid the elephant in the room that it might have been an expected response of violent Muslim men to sexually assault an infidel woman. Those that don't digress into hair-splitting definitions of rape and privacy in general - with regular references to the awful Republican patriarchy - assume that the assault was committed by thugs of Mubarek's regime with no evidence whatsoever. Then there's the sickos (the kind who defend Roman Polanski, Julian Assange, John Edwards, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, shariat law even when it contradicts their supposed feminism) who think Logan had it coming for being a "warmonger".

But hey, the left is suddenly all about freedom in the Muslim world. Showing no trace of irony, the current demonstrators in Wisconsin are claiming solidarity with Egyptian demonstrators, against governor Hitler Mubarek. Showing his usual good sense, even the President has already opined, first stipulating that he knows nothing about it, but then saying it's clearly an assault on unions and therefore bad. Way to be President of the entire nation there, champ.

Despite every bit of evidence that entitlement spending is creating a crisis in every state and nation, public teachers in Wisconsin are calling in sick to go demonstrate - some of them bringing their students - rather than even consider any changes to their contract that would bring them down to the taxpayer's level. This just four months after said taxpayers voted Republicans for governor and both houses of the legislature. Somebody's cranky.

What do they think they're doing by claiming solidarity with the Egyptian demonstrators? The Muslim Brotherhood is probably the largest and most influential organization in the world still in existence that openly sided with the Nazis during the war, and played a large role in the on-going popularity of "Mein Kampf" (which FYI translates to "Jihad") Are they so blind as to not see who is waiting to profit from their lunacy?

I guess not, they don't have a chance, but they're out there anyway. There's no money. An engine won't move if there's no gas.

It sounds like there's a Tea Party planned this weekend, now that everybody else who had to work for a living has some time off. They already voted for people who promised to cut spending, public employees have no real basis for this strike. They think they're oppressed now, wait until they see their fellow Wisconsans coming out after morning prayers tomorrow.

Here's the montage of "Cheers" clips set to the full-length theme song on its 200th episode spectacular. I'm not sure why I've been thinking of the series lately, but for whatever reason I've been suddenly recalling some line or scene, whether or not I cared for them at the time.

It's still an interesting show. I think, this clip is the first video I've seen of the show in quite some time, but I found myself laughing anyway at how many forgotten moments there were. I barely recall what episode half of them were from, and almost none of them came to mind when thinking about the show before this.

This montage was biased towards physical comedy, but as I remember there was a surprising amount of it in the show. Surprising, but you don't think of "Cheers" as a show about physical comedy. Somewhere between "Night Court" and "Family Ties" on the sitcom scale [courtesy of the Nick-At-Nite "Better Living Through Television" scale of measurement], there was actually physical humor. Sam and Diane's slap-fest, or almost any time Kirstie Alley was genuinely funny. Think about that, yeah the writers gave her some good lines, but the places Rebecca works the best are when she's doing something physical, jumping over the bar or something. Without that, she collapsed into whining and the last seasons really look like the writers had a memo 'don't forget to give Kirstie something to do this week' when putting together every new episode.

The show also worked as an ensemble, where any of the characters were capable of holding a main plot or a sub-plot. I understand it was something of a pioneer in season-long story arcs for the characters, which I assume grew out of the Sam-Diane-Rebecca relationship. It did bring the domestic/romantic comedy into the workplace - unlike "Taxi" or "Mary Tyler Moore", two workplace sitcoms preceeding "Cheers" from the same creators. [Random example: David Lloyd, who wrote MTMs "Chuckles Bites The Dust" wrote the very physically-active "Woody's Wedding" late in "Cheers" run.]

The ensemble cast really helped bring the show to the gold standard of television as episodic entertainment, that of characters we want to see again and keep current on their latest adventures. The kind of show comics used to be good at. I would like to think that it was the last great show, but I stopped watching TV ages ago. After "Cheers", there was "Seinfeld" and then "Friends". Ray Romano had a show, and "Two and a Half Men" has been on for many years before it became "Will Charlie Sheen Live To The Next Episode?" To me the sitcom is dead, but there are many viewers who disagree with me.

On an NBC Anniversary special several years after the show ended, most of the cast reunited, in character, to be there. It was nice to see them all again, as was the reunion for a mid-late episode of "Frasier", a show that had nearly as much objective success as its parent, but never came close to being the same cultural touchstone. As a then-current NBC star, Kelsey Grammar had his own segment of the same anniversary show.

Amusingly, it was interrupted by Bob Newhart, complaining about all these people from NBC being at a CBS function. "Bob, this is NBC." Bob says that's not what he heard, pointing to Bill Dailey sitting in front of him, next to Barbara Eden. "Um, Bob, I was on CBS too." Later Bob showed up and mentioned his first show did run briefly on NBC, and introduced some other guest. It was a fun show, as many various casts as possible were brought out, and in character.

It was followed a few months later by a similar show on CBS which did the same thing. Highlights of that show include John Schneider and Tom Wopat doing a gawdawful country-music medley of CBS theme songs and a clip of Bob Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette waking up in bed, again. "Oh Bob, not that dream about the three woodsmen again."

"Cheers" has been released in full on DVD, I even have one season (somewhere). As has "Frasier", and even "The Bob Newhart Show." Unfortunately, "Newhart" has not been released beyond its first season, which is a shame. It's a show that really stands up, especially because it was so untopical. Except for the outfits and a very few pop culture references, there's nothing whatosever to place what time it was made.

And it was hilarious. "Newhart" was Bob's attempt to follow up his earlier show, with Mary Frann and Tom Poston backing him up. Mary Frann did an excellent job in the extremely unenviable position of following Suzanne Pleshette's footsteps, but watching the first season, nothing prepared me for how awesome Tom Poston was. If the adjectives "understated" and "zany" can be combined, and then given steroids, that's his version of George Utley, banal handyman extraordinaire.

Steve Kampmann was very good as Kirk, the compulsive liar and slimeball who operated the cafe next door. The character was just too limited to be useful, too little Ted Baxter, too much Frank Burns. In the second season, he was given a girlfriend (Cindy the clown) and then written out. Also in the first season was Jennifer Holmes as Leslie Vanderkellen. They gave her lots of interesting things to do, but it just wasn't working. Like Markie Post's early appearances on "Night Court" (or possibly Harry Morgan's appearance in MASH soon before COL Potter showed up), when Julia Duffy makes an appearance having a fling with Kirk, it's clear what direction the show will need to go.

The first season includes most of the characters who would be around for the entire series, mostly as quirky townsfolk. The Mayor and his crony, the sheriff who spoke in monotone, Larry, Darryl and Darryl. These characters and more would go on to dominate the show, but they're all in the first season. Really, Peter Scolari as Michael Harris, producer of Bob's tv show, would be the only change in the cast for the rest of the show. And Michael and Stephanie's baby, if you want to count her.

Dammit, Youtube also doesn't have Bob Newhart's appearance on the Murphy Brown show, come to retrieve his secretary Carol, the one competent assistant Murphy found during her entire show.

Speaking of that show, funny how that one doesn't seem to be remembered anymore. It was topical, no doubt about that. I remember it as being funny too, but it's been a while. That show ran into problems, some of which affect most sitcoms (changing cast members), too much topic-of-the-week, and some of which it brought on itself. In the long run, who was supported by that big deal about Murphy having her baby? Candice Bergen herself said (years later) Dan Quayle was right about a father's importance.

It wasn't the first show to jump the shark after having a baby. But all the extra attention given to the issue because of Murphy's baby - no thanks to Mr. Quayle; I know the Vice-President doesn't have anything better to do, but geez, doesn't the Vice-President have anything better to do? - went away, and then the kid just interferred with their storylines. So they ditched the kid, freely admitting it in E! TV retrospectives and the historical record. Towards the end, when ratings were dropping, they did an oh-so-touching arc about Murphy and breast cancer, and brought the kid back magically aged enough to feel sorry for her. Way to help prove the Muslims wrong, guys.

Atlas Shrugged, Part 1: The Wrath of Khan

2011-02-11T18:21:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a disaster. Much like the Watchmen movie, this seems to have been made by people obsessively-nerdy enough about the source material to get every little detail right, right down to large chunks of dialogue. And, much like the Watchmen movie, it's just not possible to get it right.

As I was waiting for the video to load, I asked myself what the best way to approach an Atlas Shrugged movie would be. This was before I made the Watchmen connection, but I thought the best way would be to keep the plot. Don't explain the thinking behind the story, just take them and as much of the plot as you can dramatize, change everything else.

Other than the twist ending - which I'll admit was a clever change - Watchmen was a lurid pulp-inspired degradation of the graphic novel's brilliance. It was now possible to recreate the comic shot for shot, but as Mark Twain would say, you have the notes but not the music. I don't think the movie bombed (certainly not as badly as Frank Miller's The Spirit, which I've never seen), but that is how it's seen in hindsight.

Atlas Shrugged is in a similar category, with even more connections to pulp fiction and lurid materials. The dialogue alone would make it almost entirely unfilmable, and with so much of the story happening in narration, the whole idea looks pointless.

That's what I mean about taking the plot and doing something else with it. It still builds up to Galt's speech and all the reasons he has for making it, but most of his words would have to be scrapped. Hell, in the original book, he made the speech on RADIO.

With the digital revolution in filmmaking, it's much easier to make a personal vision in movies, although it comes at the expense of real styles. There's a mind-numbing similarity to digital effects - the slo-mo shot is the one that annoys me the most - and the coloring and special effects that can be made by having actors standing in front of green screens. It's why Hollywood has finally been able to film things that for so long were impossible. The Star Wars prequels, Watchmen, the Frank Miller oeuvre, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter: The Franchise, and now Atlas. It takes far fewer people and smaller operations to file actors into a room with a green screen, film them doing their stuff and making the rest on a computer.

Visually, it looks like it could be interesting, although I admit I've never given much thought to what the characters would look like. Rand's writing style was sufficiently intrusive to ward off those thoughts, for me anyway. It's not that English was a second language to her, Tolstoy wrote in Russian and the translations of his writing are majestic and eloquent. Nah, it's just Rand.

I tend to prefer her two earlier books, The Fountainhead and We, The Living, which are each more readable and less overbearing with the philosophy. People talk much more like actual people, and have more complicated personalities - bad people doing good things, good people doing bad things - and they're shorter, which makes the plots work even better. And she did nail the plots, which in all three books are tightly-wound interweaving threads that dramatize whatever ideas she's conveying and build naturally to strong endings.

I don't know if this movie will be a bomb. Someone's obviously invested in a trilogy. If the box office take isn't there to release the sequel, my guess is the three parts (most if not all of which are probably filmed by now) will be put together on the DVD, just to hit those who did like it, or are at least willing to give the whole thing a shot.

As far as I know the other adaptations of her books remain mostly of interest to die-hard fans other than myself. She wrote the screenplay herself - awww, all by her lonesome - for The Fountainhead, which starred Gary Cooper at was a decent hit of the day. It's not a bad movie, but I tend to doubt it would appeal to anybody except Rand fans, Cooper fans or general fans of 1940's office dramas, which probably doesn't include too many people who weren't around for the 1940's. We, The Living, The Movie was, amusingly enough, produced by Fascist Italy because they thought it was a movie about how awful communism was. The Nazis, being more careful about copyright theft and understanding the book a little better, told them to suppress it. I have no idea if Rand knew about the movie at the time, but years after the war someone gave her the film itself, and reportedly liked it.

The Incredibles has often been called a movie about Objectivism/libertarianism, and I might agree with that, kind of. I'm a huge fan of the movie, but I think many of these criticisms miss the point that unlike every other movie I've referred to in this post (except Star Wars) The Incredibles were created to be a film first and foremost. The characters were meant to move and do things for a constantly-moving camera, and the story was what got them to do it.

The plot was certainly of a high quality. With the exception of the Mirage subplot, everything was flawlessly incorporated from beginning to end. Yes, the characters are incredibly (!) similar to the Fantastic Four, but every scene shows extensive work to make them original characters. It's not that easy to just come up with a whole new archtype.

[Literally. I once did a comic serial starring a quartet of superheroes, and spent many hours designing each character and the group as a whole so they would not be FF rip-offs. None of that work shows up on the page. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. Anybody would read the story and assume I ripped off the FF. A lot of that time was spent trying to add or drop a member, and three or five characters just weren't workable. Four worked.]

The FF were never intended to work as a family sitcom the way the Parrs do. Their superpowers aren't such blatant extensions of their personalities and roles in the family. The Incredibles had to be able to function in all of those areas and make it work.

Which they did. One thing that's amazing is how much story there really is. There's only the one scene at dinner that really sets up the family dynamic until the second act is almost done, and then it's an awesome ride through the climax. Frozone only makes a few brief appearances in the beginning and then is off-screen until the big fight at the end, but he's one of the main characters. There's just brief character bits or interludes in a montage that sum up the Parrs' home life, but it's a rich and varied tapestry amidst everything else that's going on.

As an example, look at Dash's interest in sports, which gets mentioned in virtually every one of those character bits. He's gotten in trouble at school for putting a tack on the teacher's chair in class, but even the videotape doesn't show him. Bob is thrilled, "they got you on tape and you still got away with it? Wow, how fast do you think you were going?" Dash can barely be seen in this shot, but just look at him start bouncing with glee when he finds out Dad's impressed. Bob and Helen argue about it that night. Later on, in the montage, father and son go out to throw and catch the football, over several miles. This is a skill that comes in handy in the big fight when they've got the Omnidroid's control mechanism. "Dash, go long!" And of course the final scene is Dash at the track meet. That's a sit-com plot, but fits in seamlessly with the superheroics, and the social commentary.

Let's play "Sid and Nancy." I'll be Sid.

2011-02-03T15:07:00.000-08:00

I was idly thinking, as opposed to busily thinking. Most of America's political disagreements about what the government should do about our problems could be worded as simply as "cut spending first" or "raise taxes first". Different people have different levels of veneration for these ideas, but in the short term, as far as what government actually can do. So why don't the two parties put their views thusly on the ballot in 2012?

You go into the booth, you check your choice for President and Veep, Congress and maybe Senate. You vote for Proposition 23 and get your "I Voted Today" sticker. And you decide if you agree with (or against) 'cut spending first' or 'raise taxes first'. So whoever wins the election, that's their mandate. No earmarks, no fact-finding tours. These hearings will be on f*cking C-Span, unlike Obama's campaign promise.

If they don't design and implement procedures to tax or cut, everybody resigns. Their successors take over within the guidelines of the Constitution. They are then charged with completing the task within a year (in time for the '14 elections), and drafting a Constitutional amendment to make whatever they have done legal.

I don't think it should then come to a nationwide vote in 2014 though. The populist in me says 'of course it should', but the kid in me loves the frosted side, I mean says 'populism isn't everything.' [I bet nobody out there got that pop culture reference]

One of the great things about our system is the specific duration of tenures and the way they vary between the branches. The House is up for election every two years no matter what. But it's only one-sixth of the federal governent. [Perhaps coincidentally, they also have repealed Obamacare, which nationalized one-sixth of the economy. More on this later. Maybe.]

The Senate has three times as long to deliberate, and the chief executive has the average, plus a completely different set of duties and skills. Supreme Court Justices are in office until they retire or die. I don't have any strong opinions for or against these term limits (except for the President, two terms tops). I like the irony of a lifetime tenure in a republic like ours, and think the judicial side is improved by it. If people want to keep voting for the same bozos in Congress for a half-century, they should have the right to do so.

This idea should be a populist vote that up to a point, and I think it would go a long way towards working the poisons out of the body politic. After that point however, the Republic part should take over. The '14 midterms should be treated as normally as possible. With the way much of the world order is eroding before our eyes, American citizens show up like they always do, fewer in the midterms.

The 'spend less first' and 'cut taxes first' ballot will spell this out as simply as possible - well, minus my own musing on terms in office anyway - that no similar vote will be on the ballot for '14. This will not be an opportunity for populism that will damage.

If the elected Congress fails to meet the one-year deadline and their successors fail to carry out the 'spend or cut' mission AND fail to draft an amendment, then I don't know what the repercussions would be.

It's been a while since I've read how amendments are made ("when a mommy and a daddy constitution love each other very much...") so I'm not sure where the movement would go from there.

Speaking of Obamacare, the administration has been issuing more waivers to the law for its buddies in the unions and other corporate buddies - even ones that pressed the administration to enact this health care law, strange - and just today they singled out GE to get out of some EPA regulations. As the President would say, "Winning The Future???" I prefer "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot", but that's just me.

It's not the hypocrisy that's annoying so much as how blatantly they know they'll get away with it. Their own supporters won't withold votes, and they're the ones crying about money being spent on political ads.

Also, over half the states are suing to repeal it, and a judge just threw it out as completely unconstitutional. Last November was a popular mandate, and I think more could be done along those lines. It should definitely have a specified mission and a limited period of time. When Obama mentioned Sputnik recently, someone point out that the mission to the government wasn't to get man into space, it was to do it in a short period of time. The only way to get it done in time was to bring in outside interests, private by definition. [This is also where Ike saw the military-industrial complex come into effect, but that's another train of thought.] It's government contracts for the companies, and can get better results for the space program.

[Many have noted the irony of the guy who finally cut funding for America's space program should refer to Sputnik when trying to inspire a nation. Give him a break. The man has spent his whole life rarely voting anything other than 'present' and he's not going to change now. Look at his reaction to North Korean missles and riots in Iran and Egypt.]

Speaking of Egypt, it's looking like the pro-democracy faction has spoken and is ready to finish speaking now. The Muslim Brotherhood, with roots back to the 1920's and were big fans of Hitler, is probably the most prepared organization in the country, except possibly the army.

Nothing's going to happen without the Brotherhood taking a role, or else outright fighting everybody else. I would like to believe that these protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and possibly elsewhere are inspired by western ideals of democratic freedom. And I think a lot of that is present.

But the Brotherhood, big fans of Hitler remember, have a large amount of support as well. I guess topical 90 year old German political theory is just what today's young Muslim male is into. Or maybe it's the jihad [or "struggle", as in "Mein Kampf"] and hatred of Jews.

I would like to think that the outbreaks of violence have been limited to individual thugs on either/any side singling out a specific opponent for short-range or long-range goals. Islam is experiencing a civil war which goes unnoticed because the right is called racist and Fox News-loving and the usual, and the left isn't interested in what *those* people do. Gulags and slaughterhouses in southeast Asia after the US departed Vietnam didn't bother them, and if we lose this war, dead Muslims won't either.

Now the people who want democracy are retreating. Hopefully the Brotherhood and the government thugs will shoot each other and destroy the worst of both sides. Reportedly, and I am not an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood, they actually practice more intellectual diversity in their various cells through the Middle East. If they can be infected with an anti-Shariat Stuxnet virus, we've got 'em. The Egyptian military is strong and effective - it rules the country of course - and reportedly respected by the people as well. They want change. One might even say they hope for it.

The danger is that the Brotherhood has too much popular support and get full license towards their judenhass. Egypt and Jordan are the two countries most immediately troubled by riots, and they're the only ones who've ever been able to make a peace with Israel. It could get real bad real quick.

A few plus sides. After initially supporting the demonstrators, Iran made calls for restraint from violence. Even China is now banning "Egypt" from search terms on China's internet. We may not be looking at an outbreak of Jefferson-style democracy any time soon, but there are encouraging signs. When al-Sadr returned to Iraq after several years in Iran, some of his supporters were noisy. He told them (in English) to shut up. He was only a simple cleric and was ashamed by their behavior. Today Iraqi citizens attacked an Iranian embassy. Most of the Middle East is ruled by despots who might be very willing to leave with their lives and a sizeable amount of loot.

A few down sides. They want shariat law and they hate Jews. In time, the distinctions will return between Arab, Kurd, Persian, black African, Sunni, Shi'ite and more. For the moment, they are as united as the Middle East has ever been since the time of the Prophet. If they do not choose freedom, or fail to choose it strongly enough, or fail to keep it, they will be united in open war.

Iraq and Afghanistan are notable successes we have to argue. Other states in the region which are out of oil also feel similar pressures to liberalize if the rulers want to keep their perks. A dozen years ago, when my parents married in the UAE they had to get government permission to serve wine at the wedding. Now Dubai is a hotspot for Americans in the Middle East to go party when on leave. Things do change.

For a decade now, what do you think Muslims from all over the world have been talking about when they meet on the hajj? Malcom X described meeting blue-eyed blondes and whites in plural when he made the pilgrimage 40 years ago, one doubts that the racial composition has become significantly less white since then.

It's not looking good for that optimistic scenario though. Still, when Obama was melting down and caving in on the tax cuts, he promised that he'd be eager to refight the battle in two years. [A temporary truce, what a... Muslim concept.] Like Nancy Pelosi comfortably expecting to be majority leader again in two years, I think they're using their access to highly classified information to bet on their political futures. They don't know or care how they'll look for doing so as long as it works. And we might be nearing a breakthrough in the war effort.

We're near some flashpoint on the home front as well. Let's hope we can win the future.

To be a Steve Ditko character or not to be a Steve Ditko character. That is the Question.

2011-01-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

Global warming gave us a snow day, so I appreciate that. Weirdest thing, I've turned into a baby about the cold. At first I thought it was because my body was acclimated to where I spent the summer, but over Christmas I spent hours working outside in Nebraska, with only a t-shirt and jacket. No hesitation, no problem. But now that things are back to normal, I might add a hat and sweatshirt when going outside, if I don't already have them on. [not the hat]

Over half of the first draft has been edited. It's time-consuming, but going through line-by-line is working as a slow, steady process. It also takes more mental effort, I think, than most of the original writing. Except on the worst days, it was a lot less depressing to think about adding another three paragraphs than I currently feel when I look at how many remain unedited just on the page I'm looking at now. But most of the expected roadbumps weren't there. I haven't found any places where major surgery was required, and I've almost reached the only real problem, a chapter I had mentally sketched out but wasn't able to complete.

I'm tinkering with the cover design and the overall package, thinking about the technical expertise I'll require to get them precise. I don't know if I'm going to hit my target date for having a finished product.

It's kind of enjoyable not going on endlessly about politics. One of my favorite scenes in Peter Bagge's Hate is when Buddy meets Valerie's parents. Sounds like a sitcom description, and Hate is about the closest thing comics has ever had to an original sitcom. Basically think of The Simpsons when it was at its best, and remove everything that a child could understand other than the cartoony drawing. Anyway, Valerie's father brings Buddy out to have a beer, and saying he likes Buddy more than other guys Val's brought home because one wrong word would set them off and they'd start ranting about politics and he couldn't stand people like that.

As you might guess, it's only a few panels later before he's screaming 'talk about human rights violations, do you know what the interest rates were when Carter left office?' and it's very funny. Bagge, a noted libertarian, is currently doing strips for Reason magazine online [ http://reason.com/people/peter-bagge/articles ] and the collection "Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me" is quite good.

Anyway, I check the news and see if anything's blown up, but don't quite have the urge to bitch about politics for the time being. I've been compulsively re-reading Garth Ennis' The Boys, the superhero series that out-Preacher's Preacher for extreme sex, violence and swearing.

The series is about two-thirds of the way done, and I'm amazed at how much of the background information is still unknown. After The Seven [analogues of the JLA] failed on 9/11 - because having immense superpower doesn't make you automatically better at complicated tasks like terrorists, hostage negotiation or understanding atmospheric pressure and how a plane flies through the air - they encountered The Boys, goverment operatives meant to keep the supes in line. There was a fight at the still-smoldering Brooklyn Bridge - they didn't know how to land either - and current issues are describing what happened.

In his spin-off miniseries also coming out now, it's clear the old guy Wee Hughie is talking to is none other than Colonel Mallory, the mysterious founder of The Boys, who will reveal secrets about Butcher, The Boys' current leader. Hughie is the likeable doofus/reader stand-in and Butcher is, well, a butcher. Ennis' usual themes of violence and male cameraderie show up. I think the secret is that Hughie and Butcher are related. Hughie's an orphan, and I suspect Butcher's problem with the Homelander ["Superman"] a lot further than he was letting on.

It's established that his hatred for the Homelander is personal. He tells a convincing story, but I think it's a cover. I think his origin goes back to infancy, probably as part of the same brainwashing program the government gave the Homelander when they're trying to convince a walking atom bomb to be a likeable pro-American superhero. This will no doubt tie back into the Vought-American superhero-industrial complex that wants superheroes used for national defense so they can clean up.

Issue 50 should be out any time, and we've never gotten a hint of anything about the Man from Vought, even his name. He's just a guy in a business suit who represents the company to The Seven and tells them what to do. They play along because it's easier to live decadent superlives than to run the world, but the Homelander is slowly breaking free of his programming. He has a Pavolovian reflex towards obedience to the Man from Vought, seen at Herogasm, but he's managed to kill more people and get away with it since, and he's had a secret meeting with other superheroes where he presumably said what he'd been unable to before, again at Herogasm.

The Man from Vought has hired Plucky Girl for an assistant, and she's already influencing him, pointing out that some things can't work no matter how much money is thrown at them. Black Noir ["Batman"] has had a subplot all along about learning to fly his Noirplane - he was supposed to fly the plane to safety on 9/11, but whoever was carrying him through the air dropped him early on - and the problems they're currently having are building to a storyline in the near future. Ennis said that one of The Seven would have a major problem, and I think that's what it is.

We also don't know what Noir's problem is in the first place. He violated Hughie in one of the earlier storylines. Queen Maeve ["Wonder Woman"] was the one to bug their own headquarters, which is a surprise. She spends every waking moment drinking and staring out the window to where the Bridge used to be, and it doesn't seem to have stemmed from 9/11 as I'd assumed, because she planted the bugs before then.

A-Train, Jack From Jupiter and The Deep ["Flash", "Martian Manhunter" and "Aquaman"] don't seem to have changed at all or be in the middle of on-going plotlines. A-Train is the major character in these three, and his relationship with Starlight will probably be a part. I swear, this series is chock full of Watchmen-level attention to detail. Ennis must have had it all planned well in advance, and with a much larger canvas to boot.

Except for Starlight. According to a recent interview, Ennis said she'd surprised him. She's the point-of-identification for the reader in the superhero aspect, and gets her goody two-shoes principles hopelessly ravaged right from the start. He'd intended her to be an eventual joke until he found himself writing her second meeting with Hughie and realizing that they were such sweethearts that they could have fun for a while. I mean, leaving aside the romance hook itself, how could such a master of using cliches correctly ignore the whole secret identity part of it?

Hughie knows what she did to join The Seven - exactly what you think - but she still doesn't know anything about what he does. She thinks he's an insurance investigator. But that argument is waiting to happen, because she still wants to know how he saw her "audition". It might even be Maeve who reveals it. In an Ennis book, I'd suspect Annie will lose it and hit Hughie. She's a superhero, but hasn't shown any signs of superstrength. Unbeknownst to her, Hughie was dosed with Compound V, the source of all superpowers designed by Vought-American, when he joined The Boys. Whether or not he hits her back, that will probably propel their relationship arc towards the conclusion.

Of course they're both extremely likeable, and naturally we want them to have a happy ending, with or without each other. Or at least a satisfying conclusion. I'd hate for them to turn out like Featherstone and Hoover - one of the few 'mehs' in the conclusion to "Preacher".

The other members of The Boys haven't gotten much screen time. I think Mother's Milk keeps his mother's decaying corpse locked up, and gets a little more each time he fills up his flask. Butcher's the obvious suspect to have taken the flask - hoping to uncork MM's non-commissioned officer rage - but we don't know that for sure. Frenchie remains the funny foreigner, and looks out for The Female, who fills the psychotic killer role in this team of psychotic killers, (but they're protecting us from the superheroes). These three have their story arcs, but don't receive anywhere near the attention Butcher and Hughie get.

Their government connections are changing, as Monkey is replacing whatsername. I haven't been that interested in those characters, but Monkey's sexual obsession with women in wheelchairs appears to be gaining prominence with advance art showing such a woman who just won a javelin championship (?) and will meet the President of the United States soon.

That's the other major plotline building. Vought-American played all their influence and bought the Vice-Presidency for Vic the Veep (they would have gotten one of the Bush family, but their fortunate son took his head off with a chainsaw). Every other defense contractor who would go out of business if superheroes start being used for national defense managed to get their boy in as President. The President ordered the planes shot down on 9/11, but something happened before the last plane could be destroyed.

It's not clear if Vic the Veep is still the GWB cliche, but either way he's not to be underestimated. When he was told that Dakota Bob would die soon and he would fill out the term before running for election, he responded way too quickly. It's also not clear if he actually did knock the President out and stand down the order to fire on that last plane so that the superheroes could strut their stuff the way they do in the comic books. The Man from Vought stresses that Vic the Veep is not as stupid as he appears. I think we're going to find out what happens when an actual supervillain shows up, who makes no pretenses about heroism or brotherhood, who will reveal himself as Doctor Doom the instant he gets the chance.

All these storylines naturally flow into each other, for the most part. The Boys have worked their way through various analogues of other superteams. Payback [the Avengers], the G-Men [X-titles], Malchemical and Super Duper [Legion of Superheroes, sort of, they're not from the 30th century or anything]. There's been riffs on standard cliches for short interludes. Tek-Knight [the ordinary man who wears an electronic suit], his sidekick ["Batman and Robin"] and the murder of a gay kid by a gay superhero.

There are references to "Red River", which sounds like a rival corporation infiltrating the Secret Service, but we have no details. Intimations of SHIELD vs. HYDRA no doubt. We also don't have any clue why the Russia storyline existed, other than to introduce the comedy relief. He's Russian, 300 lbs and his supername translates to "Love Sausage". No information about the war in Pakistan either. All these characters and all these on-going plotlines, and there's a whole big bad world outside.

This is one of the things that has made comics such a wonderful medium, and a shining example of what they can do in longform. It takes dedication and professionalism in addition to creativity to make this happen, but a reliable series that comes out over many years and utterly rewards the attention. Trying to read the series in order when I got back last fall kinda bored me, but I've been obsessively going through the books at random, and even have most of the issues out that haven't yet been collected. God willing, Ennis, Darrick Robertson and the other artists will have us a work which will be known as 'the longer version of Watchmen'. There are fewer meditations on quantum physics, but more people getting their face ripped off and amazingly the effect is the same. It just takes more pages to explain why the face ripping-off was important.

The Boys is the best-selling regular independent that doesn't star zombies, and even there we have the three superheroes who have been resurrected so far. Nubia ["Storm"] whom we saw in the G-Men storyline. The Lamplighter ["Green Lantern"] who died in the fight with The Boys after 9/11, the one being detailed in current issues, remember? And Blarney Cock, the one Hughie killed on his first case, from the Teen Titans analogue. The corpse gets another shot of Compound V, which can reanimate muscle but not dead brain, the "resurrected" hero does a few press conferences and is never seen again. The Seven didn't bother to do this with Mister Marathon ["Flash", died on 9/11], they just brought in A-Train. They realized that the Lamplighter wouldn't be back, so they brought in Starlight. But there's going to be a lot of people dead before this series is over, and Compound V is expensive. Wheels within narrative wheels.

Ennis says the series will go to roughly issue 72, plus a Butcher miniseries coming up shortly. I don't know if it's a monthly, but that would mean only a few years left to go.

When it's over, The Boys will surely stand among the greatest comic book stories ever told, and it'll almost be a shame to never again be able to read it without knowing how it ends.

Also credit to Darrick Robertson, John McCrea and the rest is due. I don't know or particularly care about the missing deadlines behind the scenes problems there have been. Everyone involved says the timely release of the book is the priority, so they'll all be big boys about how that gets accomplished.

Robinson's art varies in quality - I'm assuming most of it is his but I haven't looked closely. Sometimes it's incredibly gorgeous and sometimes it just looks wrong. The other artists are good, but not all that great. But with very few exceptions, they are doing the most important part of their job well, they are maintaining the consistency of the characters, which is sorely neglected.

There are quite a few Spider-books where I can't tell which one is Peter Parker just by glimpsing at it. If Mary Jane didn't have distinctive hair, she'd be out of luck. Grant Morrison's Batman had a whole subplot with Dick Grayson and Tim Drake, and I couldn't tell them apart. [Or what they were doing in the first place.] There's a reason Archie is such a staple of kid's comics, because you can tell who the characters are. Or you could, now that they're moving away from a Dan DeCarlo style art, which makes no sense. The point is, whoever's drawing a given page of The Boys, there's no mistaking who's who. The art is the most time-consuming part of the job, and that has to be taken into account on a long-term project like this.

This has implications for creator's rights as well. Ennis can write every page of the series more easily than Robertson can draw them. As co-creators, I don't think anything except a 50-50 split is fair. And if other artists are brought in and get a share, that should come out of Robertson's side.

There are alternatives, but as the baseline division, an equal split between the creators of the property is the only fair way to go. Ennis and Robertson could decide that however much a share McCrea or the others get of the complete property, the rest is 50-50 between them. McCrea could get a large percentage of a book he's drawn, or a percentage based on how many pages he's drawn in the overall story.

Now if I think the writer should get half of the property and the artist loses what comes out of his share, I think the artist deserves virtually every penny that comes in immediately. If the writer is paid at all up-front, it's a fraction of what the artist gets. You wrote a comic book page, it's not like you had to stare at it for a day or two. The artist should get the lion's share of the money of the collected edition. Not all of it though. Not that I don't think the artist doesn't deserve it, considering how little money most collections will bring in, but that it wouldn't be fair to the writer. If it's successful enough to warrant a second printing of any kind, it's disrespectful to the writer to not let him get something. If the initial page ratio was 1/100 writer/artist, the first reprinting of the work in any format should be at least 1/10. After that, I think the writer's share should be bumped in future printings until the dollar value each side has received has been equalized, at which point it's a straight 50-50 split, minus the shares that go to contributing artists.

If the writing and the art aren't separate jobs, then it's going to have to be a case-by-case basis, until policies emerge through precedent. If the writer draws out the page and the artist copies the layout, if the artist contributes dialogue and scenes, if the artist has an inker/finisher and is considered an equal partner, if someone else contributes to the writing or it's a collective work from a group, then it becomes an exponentially-increasing problem. In Hollywood, the writer and director guilds have specific percentages for how their jobs are apportioned. The writer on a given movie or tv show may only have contributed 80% of what's shows up on the screen for their job. I don't know the actual percentage, I just made the figure up, but this sort of division could be applied to the writer/artist dichotomy.

The problem is there aren't many precedents, and even fewer successful ones. The majority of collaborations took place in work-for-hire mainstream comics, so these things never came up. Ennis and Robertson took their property away from DC after it had published the first six issues, didn't have to give up anything, and it's been published by Dynamite ever since. Free movement of a property is not unprecedented, but given the blatant rip-offs of DC property, they didn't even say "boo".

Reliable workhorses are where the comics field has made its greatest impact, whether or not there was creative freedom. The Will Eisner sweatshop, EC, the Marvel Bullpen, newspaper strips. The longer-running and more productive writers and artists past and present had more of an impact than those who took years to produce what others could do in months.

The daunting task of trying to fill several years of one's creative abilities is enough to keep anyone from starting, but the few who can make it will be the trailblazers everybody's waiting for. It's not something to give up your day job for.

Well, that was fun. I've also had similar thoughts regarding rock stars. With my ongoing fascination with Guns'n'Roses, I've realized that Axl has lost the game. 13 million dollars, 14 years and only one album to really show for it. There may be two or three more albums worth of material recorded, but if it had any commercial value the record company would have released it by now. Axl must be so far in breach of contract that very few people will talk to him. He refused to promote the album, and a couple of months later, said in an internet chat that there would be a video along "soon", as soon as the drummer from Metallica [?] signed off on a clip because it's going to be in the video.

It's been a couple years now, since he said that. Meanwhile, Slash has recorded an album with a dozen or more high-profile people, and toured it, and gotten them to make a couple videos. [I'm having problems loading "Beautiful Dangerous" with Fergie or I'd link to it, but I like the opening] More touring, and he's getting ready to start the next Velvet Revolver album, probably with a new lead singer. And he's released extra tracks from the solo album (which I, for one, would like to find on amazon or someplace).

Whatever else Axl (or anyone else) might say about Slash, the guy works. Sure, Axl is touring, with a setlist still weighed towards Appetite For Destruction. Half of it is played at every show, with only one from CD with that representation. 4 songs from Use Your Illusions are also played every time. Another three each from Appetite, CD, plus "Patience" are played the majority of the time. Nothing else from the Illusions is played except "Dont Cry" which has made rare appearances recently, especially if Axl can coax Izzy to show up. A couple of songs from Lies are played rarely. One more from Appetite a quarter of the time, one from CD played half, another a third. Filling out the setlists are covers and the remaining CD songs, which are probably few and far between to the Guns fan in the audience.

If there was any more money to be made from Chinese Democracy - like an immediate follow-up such as Axl said he was planning for all these years - it would have come out by now. No record company executive is going to stake their career on the guy who's wasted 13 million dollars and 14 years. And no one's going to let Axl into a recording studio again unless it's coming out of his pocket.

Axl's probably touring because royalties alone won't keep him the lifestyle to which he's accustomed. But unless he can do something - hey, how about recording demos on the road with the band you play with every week - that's just a treadmill towards his eventual burn-out. There's no sign of him being a functioning adult, much less capable of performing like that the rest of his life.

But anyway, I was pondering other rock stars of his ilk and wondering how they rate on the productivity scale, roughly since the 80's, give or take. Let's see if we can do this without Wikipedia.

Paul McCartney, about a half dozen albums of original material since 1990, some of them self-performed, plus a few albums worth of classical, avant-garde or rockabilly covers. Tours for most of these too.

U2, album every few years for as long as I can remember.

Aerosmith, dysfunctional and possibly terminal. They've toured, but no album in years and no album of original material in even longer. Steven Tyler's in his 60s, WTF is he trying to go solo for now??? Joe Perry's released a few solo albums to cover the gap, so he's reasonably productive.

Pete Townshend, kept up a pace of albums every couple of years through the 80s, then only one Who album since around 1993.

Elton John, he keeps announcing he's done his last album and then a couple years later brings out another one. Tours occassionally with Billy Joel, who retired from making pop music in 1993, and only has one album of classical music since.

Sting, I think he regularly releases albums. Nobody cares, but he's still there.

Robert Plant, took a long break but released new work regularly both before and since. Won't go back to Led Zeppelin and (shades of Aerosmith's problem) they can't work without the lead singer.

Van Halen, nothing in over a decade. Sammy Hagar is the workhorse he's always been, pretty much doubling his recorded output since VH got rid of him, while they only have a few new songs with him and Roth, plus the album sung by Gary Cherone to show for it. Eddie Van Halen claims to have dozens of albums worth of material, but we've heard that before. Supposedly the reunion album with Roth will be out this year. Wouldn't surprise me if it happens. With Michael Jackson dead, there are so few entertaining train wrecks left in the rock pantheon.

Paul Simon, releases something once in a while. I think Bruce Springsteen has regular releases. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are prolific. Metallica's albums are about four or five years apart (remember, I'm not checking for sure, just an estimate) which isn't bad compared to the competition.

Pink Floyd, despite an almost-complete absence from the music world, seem to only have increased in public estimation. Songs they did with Syd Barret are popular among teenage kids, not to mention Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. Roger Waters is now flogging the latter on a worldwide tour, having spent years flogging the former. He's even begged David Gilmour to show up at a special performance at some future point. Waters has a few solo albums, Gilmour has one, the band has three albums and a two-disc Best Of to show for everything since 1980.

Anything else? Just one last note about G'n'R. A random check of Amazon's rankings revealed that Chinese Democracy is second to lowest when compared to the rest of the catalogue, Slash's album and Velvet Revolver's two. Even The Spaghetti Incident ranks higher than CD, only Contraband was lower.

Axl's fanboys complain that there was no promotion of the album, but notice they're not saying Axl should have, I dunno, gone on tv or something, even once. 14 years and 13 million dollars. Unbelievable.

I was going to look for a Youtube clip, but never mind. Don't stay up too late now.