Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Crow meets Humble Pie! Imagine a linear accelerator that, instead of highly charged particles, hurtles bowling balls down in its length. And instead of other particles, the fast-moving bowling balls collide with a large mountain of shaving cream. I am here to say that none of the enormous resultant holes in the shaving cream would be one-tenth as large as those in the plot of Spider-Man 2.And yet, that didn't stop me one bit from surprisedly enjoying the sequel to the lackluster big-butt summer hit. In every other way, Spider-Man 2 seems such a superior movie to the first, I actually couldn't wait to get online and eat a big piece of crow. It's not that it's perfect, Spider-Man 2. It's just got a lot of things the first movie really seemed to lack: Like an actual performance from Tobey Maguire. In the first movie, Maguire's baffled stoner boy intonations for Peter Parker gave a one-trick centering to the storyline--luckless kid that really can't believe what's happening to him--that got pretty old pretty fast. In the second movie, Raimi and the scriptwriters so exponentially ramp up the amount of shit dumped on Peter Parker that Maguire's stunned expression moves deftly from bemusement to near-tears to stunned muteness at his own miserable life. And it works like a fuckin' charm. Whether it was because they canned his ass at the beginning of the film and he had to work to get the role back, Maguire actually gives an exceptionally good performance in this role. I'd like to say it will make him a star, but since he already is, I guess a better way of putting it will be: you actually will have a fondness for Tobey Maguire now, something I thought i would never say about that creepy cold control freak. Like actual direction by Sam Raimi. This actually is paced a bit more like a Sam Raimi movie than the first Spider-Man movie which I thought was simply a more hipper Spielberg-wannabe movie than an actual Raimi movie. Here, part of what makes Maguire work so well is he's a straight man for a barrage of constant Sad Sack jokes: at the ritzy reception where he's photographer, he always gets to the drinks and hors d'oevures just behind the person who gets the last item on the tray every god-damned time; he knocks on the door of the shared restroom at his apartment and, while he waits for a reply, the landlord steps ahead of him, newspaper in hand, steps into the restroom, and closes the door. Then opens the door, and asks for the back rent. It's like all the funny little bits in Crimewave...except actually funny. And a sequence where an unlucky surgery team try to remove the arms from Doc Ock becomes a brutally fast horror slapstick sequence right out of Evil Dead 2. And Doc Ock himself ends up being reminiscent of Darkman in regards to his origin, his hideout, etc. It's a lot more enjoyable to watch Raimi rip himself off than rip off the first Batman movie, and he seems to know it. Yeah, I just liked this movie. It's not great, the plot holes are obscenely large, the guy playing "Robbie" Robertson was too fat, the fight scenes all start well and all end hokily (Oh god, the subway sequence), Edi thought Dunst was wooden (while I thought she was much better than in the first movie). But if nothing else, Doc Ock has never been one-tenth as interesting a villain in his entire thirty-plus year career in comics (except, finally, for some of the stuff Bendis has done with him) as he is here. Not only does Molina give a quiet performance with scarcely a bit of ham on it, but Ock is a villain who, given genuine movement and not just the 2-D suggestion of it in comics, works. Every time those limbs of his whipped about, people in the audience ducked. Spider-Man 2? It's not gonna change your life or anything, but as a summer movie and as a Spider-Man movie, it works pretty god-damn well. posted by Jeff Lester | 7:53 AM | Monday, June 28, 2004 The Post: It's like Superman II meets Batman Returns! Thanks to Edi's cool friend, we have preview tix for Spider-Man 2 tonight. This is cool, because (a) I get to leave work an hour early; (b) we get to see a movie for free; and (c) If I end up buying the Spider-Man 2 videogame, I don't have to worry about plot spoilers.You'd think actually seeing the movie Spider-Man 2 would make the little alpha list of coolness, wouldn't you? The first movie didn't thrill me much, to be honest, so I'm being cautiously blase about the second movie. I liked the trailer I saw a month or two back (I really liked it, in fact), and the hype for the thing seems genuinely enthused rather than lacklusterly paid off but that seemed to be the case with the first movie. I also thought Mary Jane was treated creepily and exploitively in the first movie, and not just in the obvious "quick, let's squirt more water on her tank-top and crank the temperature of the set down another fifteen degrees" way. Apart from the given of all superhero movies (that the female lead will be erotically fixated on the costumed hero, despite knowing nothing about him), Mary Jane is crapped on by every other character in the movie except Peter Parker and doesn't seem particularly bothered by it. And Peter's final "I love her, but I killed her boyfriend's dad so she should stay with him" decision more than smacks of "woman as property" subtext--it grills it up right in front of you and tries to serve it up as a delectable morsel. This, more than anything, gives me pause about Spider-Man 2: the film. posted by Jeff Lester | 11:58 AM | Saturday, June 26, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Straight Outta Compton meets Space Invaders! As those of you who've followed my blogging for a while, you remember I can get far too overly optimistic about the potential of certain video games. (The Jan. 29, 2002 entry which was only--hey!--two years ago! I would've sworn it was at least five...) Hell, even I remember, although apparently I can't get the timeframe right.So I'm trepidatious to express any enthusiasm whatsoever about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It's a sucker's bet. And yet, when it was announced that GTA: San Andreas was going to be about gang-bangers and correspond to the early '90s Compton era in roughly the same way that GTA: Vice City did to '80s Miami, I had a moment of hope. I actually thought: "oh my god, this is Rockstar's chance to actually make a socially relevant videogame." Maybe it's just the console videogames that I play but, generally, there are not a lot of African-American protagonists in them (the exceptions I can think of are Def Jam Vendetta, wherein famous rappers punch people out, and sports games, which i don't play, which mainly feature real African-American atheletes as the stars). I was actually giddy when Champions of Norrath made the "erudite wizard" characters black (expect this entry to be filled with lots of humorous p.c.-inspired pratfalls like this one, where I spent three long minutes agonizing on whether to use the term "African-American" since, thanks to the fantasy setting, the characters are neither "African" nor "American."). I mean, not only were they playable characters, they were actually "erudite?" I thought this was pretty great. So GTA: SA is going to be, out of the gate, one of the biggest sellers of the year--the GTA license is a 900 pound gorilla in the world of gaming. The fact that it will have an african-american protagonist has the potential for great good--or great evil. Consider the first bit of flavor text released by Rockstar: Five years ago Carl Johnson escaped from the pressures of life in Los Santos, San Andreas... a city tearing itself apart with gang trouble, drugs and corruption. Where filmstars and millionaires do their best to avoid the dealers and gangbangers. Now, it's the early 90s. Carl's got to go home. His mother has been murdered, his family has fallen apart and his childhood friends are all heading towards disaster. On his return to the neighborhood, a couple of corrupt cops frame him for homicide. CJ is forced on a journey that takes him across the entire state of San Andreas, to save his family and to take control of the streets. Corrupt cops; a hard-knock life; friends heading for disaster. These are the classic elements of an african-american cinema that was both bloodily violent and socially aware. I think it would be cool to have a main character in GTA that could actually grow and change during the course of the game, as the characters in movies like Deep Cover and Belly grew and changed (well, if Belly had been able to do what it was attempting, anyway). Part of my hope for this are the interviews with the Rockstar honchos who talk about how the character has to eat to keep his energy and, if he doesn't exercise, he'll gain weight throughout the game. If the game-makers are smart, they won't make this automatically a minus: I mean, Biggie Smalls was actually a sex symbol in hardcore rap, for Christ's sake. It would be great to have a game where the women coo and call you "Big Daddy" or laugh and holler "Fatty-fatty-fat-fat" depending on your cash and your cred. And so I'm hoping that maybe we'll get a character that can grow and change internally as well based on your decisions in the game. GTA: Vice City, with its opportunities to purchase properties, opened up a kind of RPGish play. GTA:SA could be an RPG that would put a shitload of white people in the shoes of a struggling black kid. It's a pain in the ass when you commit a traffic faux pas in the GTA games in front of a cop and suddenly you're in a high-speed chase--what about when you're not doing anything and the cop wants to pull you over anyway? In GTA: VC you could go into stores and rob them. What about stores where you're just trying to get supplies but security starts fucking with you anyway? It could get preachy pretty quick, I admit, but if done right and done well, GTA: SA could put people right where hip-hop put white guys like me back in the late '80s--one step closer to understanding a situation how different things can be in someone else's shoes. Like I said, I can get too overly optimistic. I mean, this is GTA, for crying out loud: the series that got attention for the allowing the players to not just pay hookers for health-restoring sex, but to beat them to death with a bat when you were through and wanted your money back. GTA3 was the first game I ever played where my roommates seriously told me I was going to hell for playing. It's far more likely that the game makers are figuring out how to push the envelope of game-play--the forums I hang around had far more discussion on whether Rockstar could put the three full cities, as promised in PR material, on one game disc or two, or how the cross-country driving option would work, than whether a game with a black man shooting cops will draw more national controversy than two previous games of white guys shooting cops. (For the record: I think so.) But then what do I know? Maybe the fact that nobody has discussed this yet proves that video game culture exists in a state of post-race consciousness. After all, I never saw anyone else that even commented on the color of Champions of Norrath's erudite wizards. Maybe they just saw, you know, erudite wizards. I wish I knew. posted by Jeff Lester | 6:30 PM | The Pitch: It's like Ennui meets Apathy! Hello. I am here to bore the shit out of you.I haven't written anything in a week, because I haven't wanted to. But since it is very quiet at work, and since you can easily skip over this entry should you so choose, I will now proceed to possibly bore myself. Because I will be writing about, instead of playing, video games. I spent most of my days off playing Psi-Ops, a run-and-gun with very cool psychic powers. Like The Hulk, the super cheap PS2 game I played over the last month, Psi-Ops is all about the ragdoll physics and the serious slapping about of minions in between numbingly annoying boss fights. Unlike the Hulk, though, you keep getting cool powers as you play through the game--by the time I returned the rental, I had only gotten up to mind control which, like mind drain, took the definition of the powers enjoyably past the point of good taste. (I sometimes wonder, by the way, if Pauline Kael, were she starting out today, would make a go at being a video game critic--I think the industry needs someone like her: the recent Salon excerpt from Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me got me thinking about how necessary Kael's distaste of seriousness was for preserving many of the unique charms of American cinema (although ultimately aiding, I think, the art's steady erosion by corporate blockbusterdom). Someone who can appreciate simple pleasures and tawdry aestheticism might be able to steer video games from being more than uninspired b-movies with interactive action scenes. (If nothing else, Kael championed the *inspired* b-movie.) Fortunately, in all the bitching about the lousy story, the reviewers seem more than capable of appreciating its mind-blowing--literally, once you get the proper psi-power activated--charms.) To return to my point: I'm playing too many video games. Before I started playing Psi-Ops, I decided to finish my second play-through of Champions of Norrath just to see if my wood elf ranger was just as overpowered as she seemed. (Yup.) Then, while playing Psi-Ops, I picked up the hideously well-reviewed SSX 3 for under twenty bucks and played it for a bit. Then, I became obsessed with getting The Two Towers game while it was on sale at Target...which led, somehow, to me buying the Space Channel 5 Special Edition for nine bucks. As can be the case with addictions, inappropriate behavior can be rewarded which can result in the reinforcement of that bevhavior. In this case, I ended up with a totally terrific game for only nine bucks, and I only had to spend two and a half hours driving to three Targets to do so. This isn't even underscoring my purchasing of three video games in 36 hours. Succor, such as it is, can be derived from only renting, and not buying, Psi-Ops (a purchase that would have cost more than the three video games I did buy), but this is cold comfort. If Psi-Ops drops to $37.99 or lower on tomorrow's sales, will I then go dashing off to a Target or Circuit City to buy it? I honestly couldn't tell you. Next up (I hope): GTA: San Andreas and why I'm an idiot. posted by Jeff Lester | 2:48 PM | Saturday, June 19, 2004 Inside, and yet outside, too... When it comes to thoughts,You know I'm the man I've got more plots than Death on The Installment Plan. Hey, being a rapper is easy and fun! I just thought that up! All I need is some spliffed out beats to cover up the lack of flow and I'm set! Sorry I haven't updated recently. (I'm sure nobody counts photos, including me, alas.) No lazy bastard, me--this week, at least. Work+overtime+newsletter+comic store (divided by, admittedly, one day of jury duty but multiplied by trojan ware infestation on my laptop)=me being pretty damn overworked. So, remember when I was talking about embracing my inner sheep and activating my gmail account? Well, people keep talking about these things being "hard to get" and "in demand," and apparently Ebay bears this out. Nine bucks for a gmail invitation? I have, like, five invites (one of my super-hip chums advised me to invite myself so that I could have more than one gmail account but I haven't even done that yet....) Does, um, anyone want one? You know, not for Ebaying purposes (cuz I could be making that cheddar myself, yo) but because--I dunno. The cachet? The gig of space... Gmailswap.com? "Because people are nice?" Can Edi and I get a Russian bride out of this, somehow? posted by Jeff Lester | 10:00 AM | Friday, June 18, 2004  If you haven't seen this already, I thought I would pass it along... 
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 Yeah, this sums up jury duty all-too-horribly well, doesn't it?
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Tuesday, June 15, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Point Break meets Chinatown? (Or, Maybe, Hope meets Heartbreak?) So...they're doing a film adapatation of A Scanner Darkly. No, really. One of my three favorite Philip K. Dick books (I actually haven't read very many) is getting made into a film.This is particularly rough as A Scanner Darkly is one of those books I read and knew instantly how to make as a film. I just instantly saw how to make it work, how this heartbreaking and odd book would make a spectacularly off-kilter science fiction film. After all, it's a book about an undercover drug agent who narcs on himself, about a far-flung future that looks and sounds like 1970's Fullerton, about a narrative that, like its protagonist, buckles and breaks under the weight of its internal contradictions. If you've seen Boogie Nights, you've seen the look and the feel of the movie in my head. So I would've been sad no matter who adapted this book, because I have nobody but myself to blame for it not being me making it. And when I read that it was Richard Linklater making the movie, directing from his own script, I had hope. If you've seen Slacker and you've seen Dazed & Confused, you know Linklater gets fuck-ups and he gets the '70s (and I'm sure the reason he's being able to helm this is thanks to all of us loving School of Rock). But the cast...Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., and Woody Harrelson? I can actually handle Downey & Harrelson because I think they're both capable of giving nuanced performances, but Keanu in the lead role of Bob Arctor makes me want to cry. And it's been a long, long time since I've seen Ryder give anything close to a decent performance, honestly. Doesn't anyone remember her and Reeves in Dracula, for God's sakes? Matching shoe trees have more chemistry than the King and Queen of the Frightened-Eyed Dullards. I'm sure this movie wouldn't be made if Keanu hadn't committed to the lead (although I wouldn't be surprised if Linklater wrote the movie with his buddy Ethan Hawke in mind for Arctor's role) because that's the way Hollywood rolls (even a hot director can't jumpstart his own movie, he can just attract enough acting heat to get it made). And I will say, I don't think it's coincidence that this darkly humorous movie about drugs and self-destruction has three actors highly associated with both topics. As someone pointed out in a related AICN talkback, it's like an episode of Inside the Actor's Rehab Clinic. That makes for easy publicity, but it may also make for some truly powerful and incisive performances. But, really, just...damn it. You know? Anyway, those interested in a few more grisly details can look here. posted by Jeff Lester | 8:59 AM | Wednesday, June 09, 2004  Finally, speaking of pals, here's my old chum Mai who dropped in to visit at CE last Friday. Mai's not a big fan of smiling for the camera, but she seemed more or less happy to be chatting with me, honest.
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The Pitch: It's like Bruce Lee meets, well.... Since I'm all about the second hand linky-linky, I thought I'd introduce you to my new pal, the Bruce Lee Kung-Fu Remix Generator. posted by Jeff Lester | 10:21 AM | Yeah, wanted to get around to posting the pix of the candy jar. You may be impressed to find out I didn't have a single M&M all day. Of course, that's probably because I was too full from the Apple Fritter...
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Tuesday, June 08, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Hunger meets Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory! So. For my Friday, they've moved me to a different seat, had two other word processors call in sick, and seated me directly in front of a wide-mouthed jar of plain M&Ms, filled to the lip.I just took photos of them. I'm hoping by catching the souls of the little happy-colored M&Ms, I will have no need to actually consume the perfect little bastards. So, yes, that's the little mental snapshot of the day. Eight hours of work to go, me fixating on a jar of M&Ms. I wonder: if I eat enough to require my stomach being pumped, (a) will it get me out of work early, and (b) can I get workman's comp? posted by Jeff Lester | 10:54 AM | Monday, June 07, 2004 The Pitch: It's like "Time Enough at Last" meets "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street." My buddy Teh Intarweb has failed me. It's (blissfully) quiet at work, and so I've hit the rounds and found--very little. Nancy's lovely post from last week. Tim updated his livejournal with a list of DVDs he purchased (since I was there when he purchased most of them, I wasn't as spellbound as you'd think). And then?My small little habittrail of websites I visit have revealed, by and large, bupkis. No interesting stuff on Quarter to Three messageboards, on Planetcrap forums, on emocrap.com's forums, on Comics Journal messageboards, on Kolchaka's messageboards at americanelf.com. Nothing really frying my burger on diepunyhumans.com, on metafilter.com, on aintitcool.com, on Yahoo! India's most popular movie stories, on Graeme McMillan's comic news blog, on the five or six blogs I follow, on the blogs of the two or three people I consider arch-enemies, or, as far as I can tell, in the 100 or so emails from the Wallace-L mailing list I've got stored on my google account. About the only interesting thing I've gleaned from the Net today is that Creed broke up over the weekend. Reagan died; J.Lo married; Creed broke up--it's three wells of formerly endless news coverage drying up all at once. Unless some site I haven't seen has crafted a brilliant conspiracy fanfic tying all three together--"Scott, no, you can't break up Creed," Nancy sobbed. "I'm sorry, ma'am," Scott said, pensively rubbing his cro-magnonish forehead. "But finding out the only woman I've ever loved is marrying Marc Anthony now that her real husband, the man to whom you pretended to be married, died in psionic combat with The Borg, there's seems no point in crafting power-pop ballads..."--the Internet seems more or less incapable of dealing with such a potentially huge paradigm shift in American media consciousness. I've read dozens of "Fuck Reagan" blog entries on the 'Net today (and several messageboards of terse but heartfelt tributes), half a dozen news stories on J.Lo, and two brief mentions of Creed biting the bullet (both of which were variations on "Oh, Thank God!"). All this, yet I can't find the release date of Elliott Smith's last album. What fucking good is this electronic medium of interwoven human consciousness for, anyway? posted by Jeff Lester | 5:27 PM | The Pitch: It's like The Shawshank Redemption meets Clockwatchers! Back at the job, and the sky outside couldn't be more beautiful. Lunch is over an hour away and although there's nothing particularly excruciating about work ('yet,' intones the Old Jobkeeper with a pop-eyed leer and an evil 'eh-heh-heh-heh-heh' giggle), I just do not want to be here. Vacations are a great way to get rid of the feelings of tedium that creep in to one's job, but they can also, unfortunately, highlight jobs that are nothing but feelings of tedium. I'm hoping I've just got the early summer blues and will get over them soon, because I'm not taking any time off between now and the end of next month.Speaking of time off, yesterday I started my first non-Gravity's Rainbow book, Wild Cards Book I, and am now 90 pages in. I've heard good things about the series and I don't want to diss it, so I'm assuming the problem is with me. I'm a lazy reader of standard fantasy and sci-fi (strike one!), I don't tend to like short fiction (strike two!), and the prose is little more than functional (let's call that one a foul, rather than a strike). I mean, I can see the appeal: alternate world history with recurring characters caught by different authors--plus superpowers! But, for one thing, I feel like I just read that (only by one prodigiously gifted author instead of several mezzo-mezzo types) and, well, I don't know... call it Post-Pynchon Depression, but it just reads like traditional commercial fiction: the writers do their best to sate the reader's appetite for what's being offered, and then do their best to get out of the way of giving it to us. I feel like I'm not reading as much as browsing intently, which is why I'm both kinda shocked and not at all surprised I'm a quarter of the way through it already. I'm obviously pretty messed up in my reading habits, but I have no idea how I'll make it through all seventeen volumes of these things. Ugh, what a whiner I am about a book that someone else loaned me! I suck. As for things that don't suck, I already forwarded this along, but I think it's just too damn good not to share with everyone: http://www.hardnphirm.com/rodeohead.html It's a beautiful bluegrass medley of Radiohead tunes, that is both hilarious, inspiring (and, for me, unexpectedly touching but I doubt that's a standard response). It's one of those classic "this is why the Internet's so great" kind of things, and I hope you like it. posted by Jeff Lester | 11:15 AM | Thursday, June 03, 2004 The Pitch: It's like the Last Day of Summer Vacation! Things I did during my last day of vacation:* Finally, finally, finally finished my re-read of Gravity's Rainbow; * Swore a lot at Blogger, which would not let me log in until I was smart enough to reboot my computer just now; * Swore a lot at the Hulk game, which is cheap in almost all senses of the word; * Went to lunch at Hamano Sushi with my lovely, lovely girlfriend; * Swore a lot at my computer, which included but was not limited to: swearing at Dreamweaver; swearing at Windows ME; swearing at my file organization structure; swearing at Microsoft Word; and swearing at Wordperfect, for it no longer being on my computer. This, sadly, will end up being the sum total of working on the CE website this weekend. As for the Hulk game--one of the best things it's got going for it is the save and quit option so that you can finish a level, save and then quit so you don't play to the point of defenestrating yourself or your game console. As I think I mentioned earlier, I like stealth missions, and think they're a fine and sensible way to incorporate Banner gameplay into the game--and frankly, you just can't have a good Hulk story without a Banner story. Although my young teen self watching the TV show would have been slow to agree (I probably could have convinced him if the show hadn't, like every non-cop/non-doctor/non-PI hour long drama of its time, ripped off the Fugitive for its format), I have an appreciation for the format now. Plus, you get Eric Bana's line readings this way which are right up there with Brian Cox's from Manhunt. (I wonder if there's ever been any kind of award, even just on a newsgroup, for that kind of thing...) But as I said, the Hulk is cheap: the boss villains have a nasty habit of "hulking out" and regenerating all their energy after you've spent twenty minutes battering them down, and there's a squad of a gamma guys with guns who can batter away all your health in one sustained impossible volley. By contrast, as the Hulk, you cannot be injured if you are in the process of picking up and hurtling an enemy. I can't imagine I could have ever gotten this far in the game without a cheap exploit like this, although the walkthroughs in Gamefaqs are littered with references with the "jumping smash combo." Despite all the swearing and head-grabbing, I think the game's an okay time-waster, perfect for the times when I'm tired of swearing and head-grabbing in front of the computer. I can't believe I started Gravity's Rainbow five months ago. There's some strange external/internal schism about the fact. In the world, I'm kind of embarrassed I did such a slow, lax job of re-reading the novel (Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion ended up by the side of the bed after aiding me in the first 350 pages of GR). As mentioned in an earlier post, a lot of the re-read was accomplished while sitting on the can--which I find fitting, not only for the recurrent waste imagery in the book but also because if there's any book that would want to be read while your pants are around your ankles, it's GR. Yes, as opposed to "in the world," in the head (and I take no credit for the pun), I'm glad I took such a long time with the re-read. I didn't just push through sections I had no time or no patience for. The book affected my inner life, and the changing of my inner life affected how I read the book. Toward the end, Slothrop begins unravelling, losing his sense of what he's trying to accomplish or who he is, which is remarkably similar to how a reader in his fourth month of reading the book will see him. What's he looking for again? Why? In fact, as much as I shake my head at my youthful theory about GR from the first time I read it through (Pynchon's novel, which rails against closed systems, eventually becomes aware of the novel as a closed system and deliberately explodes itself), I think there is something to it. Gravity's Rainbow is about, among other things, uncompleted quests, and so the novel makes itself uncompleteable to the reader--there is no closure, even when there is revelation. But, this time around, Gravity's Rainbow strikes me as an incredibly sad novel about the triumph of the elite and the doom of the preterite, with perhaps a deeply encoded emotional autobiography buried inside, mixing personal and public obsessions into an imagistic whole--a literary tarot deck, maybe. Pynchon, like Slothrop, was of the elite and became preterite--more by choice than poor Slothrop, although whether there is actually such a thing as "choice" is a pretty iffy proposition in Pynchon's book--and may now be, like Slothrop, lost among the dopers and the doomed. This time through I was struck by a section I don't remember at all from my first read, tucked away as it is in the brilliant passage describing Weissman's Tarot spread: "He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and with to usurp the palce of, and fail.... So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others will sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willign to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death." (Pgs. 871-72 in the Bantam paperback.) I think Pynchon would be rightly horrified by my inference of this section as Pynchon's explanation for himself and where he ended up, private peripatetic writer, since it's supposed to be, perhaps, a suggestion of Slothrop and many of the other characters' motivations. If nothing else, it's a pretty brilliant summation of male American society, and a more fitting explanation of the failure of the baby boomer generation in particular than the whole of Vineland. And now, on the last day of my vacation, I'm free and wondering where to next. Reading Anna Karenina with the Oprah book club? That hangdog copy of Wild Cards Brian lent two or three months ago? Or back to my tottering cycle of Delillo, McCarthy and Chabon? There's still the hefty Mason & Dixon hanging over my shoulder, in fact--the only Pynchon book I haven't read. And I have to admit, part of me wants to pick up Gravity's Rainbow again, and start right in again, persisting in the illusion that if I do it right this time I can unlock all the doors, understand all the visions. (Kind of like that mention of the antechambers of the throne seen by Isaac the moment before his sacrifice: "For the working mystic, having the vision and passing through the chambers one by one, is terrible and complex. You must have not only the schooling in countersigns and seals, not only the physical readiness through exercise and abstinence, but also a hardon of resolution that will never go limp on you." And you know, now that I read this little section, the more I see that is about reading Gravity's Rainbow--how interesting.) I haven't decided yet. Maybe it's time to go play Hulk some more. posted by Jeff Lester | 4:43 PM | Tuesday, June 01, 2004  The new McSweeneys is so brain-bustingly lovely, I had to post pictures of it.
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 The back.
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The Pitch: It's like Praising with Faint Damnation!  So I had to post the three sides of it here.
Chris Ware designed it, edited it, and contributed extensively to it and comparisons to Art Spiegelman's RAW are not inapt: Spiegelman also edited RAW, contributed to it (I now wonder if 'Maus' would have ever been completed without the pressure to get RAW out putting new wind in Spiegelman's sails), and, with partner Francoise Mouly, designed it. What's interesting, however, are the differences between the projects. Ware's McSweeneys comes off like RAW on steroids: at twenty-six bucks (if you have to pay tax), you get a 264 page book, two minicomix, a four color comic strip broadside by Ware (with an enormous Gary Panter mural on the back with contributor notes) and works by just about everybody who's anybody in North America (at the moment, the only person I can think of who got the shaft was James Kolchaka), to say nothing about the essay by John Updike about cartooning, photos of Charles Schulz's rough drafts and George Herriman's last 'Krazy Kat' strip (or strips, I can't remember). And yet, compared to Spiegelman's RAW (I know, I know. Why compare it to Spiegelman's RAW?), it feels distinctly less impressive. I say that with a guilty defensiveness, having followed a scathing thread on the Comics Journal Messageboards (is there any other kind to be found there?) where Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics announced that any fan of the comics artform who didn't kiss Chris Ware's feet (and the corresponding tootsies of publisher Dave Eggers) was an ungrateful swine. His point was more about the staggering amount of work Ware had done, and the non-existent amount of compensation Ware was getting in return, rather than an attack on any actual criticism, and yet it stuck with me. McSweeneys 13 is a labor of love, make no mistake. I cannot imagine any other publisher in this country publishing this book and I cannot imagine any other editor working so hard upon an anthology. And yet, there is something compulsively OCD-ish about the quality of this love, something so unremittingly pained and labored, I found it at times uncomfortable. In trying to serve as the introduction to alternative comix today, McS 13 has a larger goal than any set by Spiegelman during his time at RAW. Ware proselytizes much more openly than I recall Spiegelman ever doing, and for larger ground: the acceptance of comics as a valid artform--as, perhaps, the most important artform because of its simultaneously base and sophisticated effects. By contrast, Spiegelman did not much bother with the case for comics' acceptance. In fact, much of RAW was a sustained argument for the effectiveness of non-linear comic storytelling, for subversion of traditional melodramatic storytelling, and for the richness of experimentation. To my mind, Spiegelman worked the New York insider angle to RAW perfectly--his case for comics being an artform was made much more persuasively by being a priori from the outset, and going on to stump for more advanced concerns from there. As such, Spiegelman didn't have to include all the great cartoonists in RAW, only the pieces that best argued his claims and there was, consequently, a shock of the new that made RAW such important reading, no matter what level of comics awareness you had. Which explains why, if you follow alt comix closely, you may not have much need for McS 13. Out of the forty-four contributors to the book, at least nineteen by my count are submitting previously published work (these numbers are very messy--several of the contributors are dead and therefore won't be wowing anyone with new work). While this may be a convincing testament to the strength of the current alt comix industry--almost half of the current luminaries are currently engaged in ongoing works!--it also can make such a treasure feel a bit second-hand, rather like if you got one of the world's great chefs to make you a meal of leftovers. Staggering presentation? Undeniably. Old delights seen in new ways? Yes. Beautiful pieces and new tastes overlooked or previously untried? Delightfully so. Yesterday's meatloaf? Well, your mileage may vary, but... It could, and I suspect will, be argued that this volume of McSweeneys is not for the alternative comix fan: it is for the McSweeneys fan, the types who buy every issue, or have a subscription, or use that quarterly as a way of keeping abreast of a certain kind of literature and indulging in a certain kind of object fetishization (there are issues of McSweeneys on my shelf I haven't done anything more extensive with than caress lovingly). And for those people, I recommend it wholeheartedly. But the curse of the introductory anthology is that it must, inevitably, be scrutinized by those with some awareness of the field it covers. And in my case at least, I wish Ware's McSweeneys had been a little more like Spiegelman's RAW in one crucial aspect: that it had been daring enough to be exclusive, rather than inclusive, and point initiate and disciple alike to new directions previously unattended by either. posted by Jeff Lester | 6:41 PM | The Pitch: It's like This Guy Just Won't Shut Up, Will He? I didn't go to Fremont to watch Bollywood films. Instead, half of the commentary on the Dawn of the Dead disc and a refreshingly dreamless nap. I'm waiting on Edi so we can walk down to the 826 Valencia so I can grab the new McSweeneys.In other shopping news, our camera has achieved nigh-omniscience as I swapped out the 64 meg SD card for a 256 meg card: it is now carrying over a half gig of memory which is a thought I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around. That's something like 200,000 UNIVAC 490s in the palm of my hand, all working together to store overexposed blurry shots of my thumb. posted by Jeff Lester | 4:43 PM | The Pitch: It's like Hum Tum meets Lakeer...or is it?  Ahhh, the good old days...this was the Naz 8's old building and, despite the new one being next to a Half-Price Books and a Subway, I still prefer it.
I'm in the mood for an Indian movie or two and am debating going out to the new Naz 8 to catch one. There's some pluses to the idea (those musical numbers!) and some minuses (that drive!). Additionally, the movies I'd plan on catching have gotten pretty stinky reviews. It's not like I'm not swimming in decent movies right here at home, after all. I just finished Bullet for The General and it was fuckin' great. One has to wonder how wildly WWII fucked up Italy, though: out of the non-Leone Spaghetti Westerns I've seen, the most recurrently fetishized image is a blonde man mowing people down with a machine gun. Hmmm. You know, I think I've talked myself out of driving to the Naz 8. Maybe I'll stay in and watch Dawn of the Dead with the commentary on.... posted by Jeff Lester | 1:48 PM | |
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