Fabian took acting lessons from Leonard Nimoy. This was a few years before Nimoy was cast as Mr. Spock. Fabian was getting ready for a guest spot on Ben Casey.
From I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy
Monthly Archives: January 2009
Rough Beast Slouching Towards Apocalypse to be Censored
I review Beasts, Lynda Barry’s Best American Comics, and a big art book called “Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture” in this week’s Chicago Reader. The first line of the review was supposed to be:
“For the latest Best American Comics anthology, guest editor Lynda Barry has selected works that are richly literary, deeply felt, and fucking boring.”
Something got lost in the editing process, alas. It’s still pretty mean, though, so I guess I can’t complain.
On the other hand, I liked Beasts a lot.
Culture 11 No More
Culture 11, for whom I have been doing a lot of writing over the last five months or so, very suddenly went out of business yesterday.
This really makes me sad for a number of reasons. First and most selfishly, the site had quickly become my favorite place to write for. My editor, Peter Suderman, was a joy to work for, and I got to write about a whole crazy range of things, from C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, to gospel music, to bluegrass, to the Indian Cinderella. I was looking forward to publishing an essay on the Friday the 13th series (which should appear somewhere else, I hope) and an essay on the just-released Bob Wills boxset (which will probably never get written) and one on Barack Obama slash fiction (which really, really will probably never get written.)
Second reason this sucks is that the editors at Culture 11 are all out of jobs. They were a smart, thoughtful bunch of people, and I enjoyed working with them and (occasionally) debating them. I wish them all luck.
Finally, I think Culture 11 was just a great site. It was basically a center-right conservative website, but one which was willing to print and engage in conversation with a socialist-pomo-whacko like myself. I really appreciated that. Conservatism in general seems to have been hijacked in this country by a lot of insular hacks (to an even greater extent than is usual in politics.) Having a place dedicated to using conservative ideas to challenge and interact rather than to hunker down and fulminate was, to me, extremely heartening. I was honored to be a part of it.
Sour, Bitter
I’m watching the final round of The Sopranos. The series became more and more sour as it went on, which isn’t a bad thing. But I’m surprised the public loves such an unpleasant work. Maybe I’m not as out of step as I thought.
A side point. People keep misusing words, but everyone seems to understand the difference between “sour” and “bitter.” I just checked Mac’s Oxford American Dictionaries and they back me up (or it backs me up). Sourness does not necessarily involve self-pity; bitterness does. The definitions:
sour — feeling or expressing resentment, disappointment, or anger
bitter — angry, hurt, or resentful because of one’s bad experiences or a sense of unjust treatment
Offhand, I can’t recall seeing someone described as bitter without the implication of self-pity; nor have I seen anyone described as sour when his/her resentment over personal mistreatment was being discussed. “Soured on,” yes, but that’s different. People understand right off when to use one word and not the other. Which strikes me as remarkable when you think of all the traps people fall into with word use.
That Fucking Shatner
From Star Trek Memories:
“The Devil in the Dark” … We shot this particular episode, our twenty-sixth, during the first half of March 1967.
Problem: Star Trek did its shooting from May of one year to January of the next. Never in the early spring. “Devil in the Dark” was broadcast on March 9, 1967.
What’s remarkable: Shatner says that on the second day of shooting he had to take off because his father died. “My beloved father.” But he got the month wrong.
All right, maybe Chris Kreski gets the blame. He’s the “with” guy under Shatner’s name in the byline. Shatner talked into a microphone, Chris Kreski did a lot of typing and organizing, looked up some dates, and got the shooting month mixed up with the broadcast month. These books about Star Trek people are such murky soup.
But we experience this amazing simulated effect: A man talks about his father’s death, “the tears and the anguish,” and he thinks the death happened months after it actually did.
Oh, that fucking Shatner.
No School for Piper
Mom’s got plans, big plans.
Mangafication I
Before the manga roundtable, our Tom Crippen asked why manga adaptations sucked. No helpers appeared with either generosity or bile, just me.
And this is my response, half-answer, half-question. Purely from the stance of what’s pleasing, not what’s good business, since Japanese cross-marketing is pretty ridiculous. I mean, cow catchers.
First, classic-to-manga. (I’m saving manga-to-movie for another day.)
Like Tezuka’s Disnefications of Crime and Punishment and Faust. Both kids’ works from the early 50s, they’re strange marriages, like the Otto Preminger-Jackie Gleason acid-trip movie Skidoo. Once Groucho Marx shows up as God, you can’t stop wondering how such a thing ever happened. There’s Faust, cute as a button! There’s the devil, a nice doggie!
Worse yet:
Yes, that’s him. Thank East Press.
They publish a few books you might know, like Travel and Disappearance Diary. They also do Comic CUE, the flashy, infrequent cousin of the alt-manga anthology Ax everyone’s talking about lately.
They been mangafying the classics. Rashomon, War and Peace, freaking Marx, Machiavelli, Hitler. With twice as many books as the last time I looked. They’re shameless: the series is entitled, more or less, “Finish reading them with manga!” Since no-one would ever read all those words, certainly not illiterate youths. Cliff’s Notes and all that.
I’ve only read their version of Sakaguchi Ango‘s essay ??? (“On Decadence”) and story “The Idiot.” He’s a writer I treasure, whip-smart and wry, the first to read Japan’s utter failure in the war as a gift. I particularly love his ?????? (“My View of Japanese Culture”), in which he decimates German architect Bruno Taut for finding “the Essence of Japan” in temples and palaces rather than a piss-stained toilet in the back of a nightclub. (His point’s far more nuanced, but you get the idea.)
So his outrage and sense of the absurd might fit in manga. I paid my money and I took my chance.
Ouch. I was going to post about manga’s tilt to melodrama, and how Manga-Ango running around screaming would fit better in issue #53 of the Sub-Mariner rather than a version of a classic. About how just drawing a writer this mercurial as a cartoon character, fit for a model kit, betrays his technique. Then I started rereading the source works and wondered if I should write a column about this.
At least the manga has modern-day Shibuya crossing in flames.
So as I see it, the question isn’t whether manga/comics/macrame can or can’t do nuance. They all can when the artist isn’t “Variety Art Works,” who takes all blame for the East Press books. The question is, in an ideal world, what do you get from mangafication? More than just quick & easy consumption? Are some things (stats books, LotR, weddings) better-suited to manga than others (wakes, House of Leaves, Georges Bataille)? What in your life should be mangafied, and why?