Utilitarian Review 8/12/16

favorite superhero

 
News

My next ebook, Your Favorite Superhero Sucks is available for preorder! Out September 19, with an awesome cover by my son.
 
Patreon

Free for all, I wrote about It Follows as a vampire film. (venereal disease horror ftw.)

For $1/mo subscribers, the introduction to Your Favorite Superhero Sucks. Find out why superheroes are bad!
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I wrote about

Nelly Furtado, Timbaland, and the joy of promiscuous R&B.

—Spellbound, Suicide Squad, and fear of a female psychiatrist.

In my first piece for LitHub, I wrote about N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate and why fantasy needs an apocalypse.

At the Reader I reviewed R&B duo Lion Babe.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—the joys of digital self promotion.

—the fact that you can think Trump is a fascist and still oppose him through democratic means.

—Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent and the dream of a politics of individual conscience.

5 thoughts on “Utilitarian Review 8/12/16

  1. Love that cover too. The bold crudeness seems to reference Frank Miller :)
    This will be my first ebook i think. Is there an index of the essays anywhere?

  2. right, “table of contents” is the word i was looking for … anyway i’m curious.
    OK let’s just agree your kid did a genius-level artwork.

  3. It’s a pretty good cover, actually!

    But in my opinion, the Phantom sucks a great deal more than Superman:

    * He look a lot like those old greek statues of naked men. (which the nazies considered very much real art)
    * He has a pet wolf (The SS symbol is borrowed from a wolf trap design, the the nazi plan was called ‘Werwolf’, etc.)
    * He has a white horse (Hitler planed to create a master race of white horses. Yes.)
    * His superiour status will be enhirited by his blond, blue-eyed son.
    * He very much fancy wearing long leather boots.
    * His badie ring features a skull. (SS had their Totenkopf)
    * His good ring looks a like a swastika. (not total ripoff, but close enough)

    Okay, his attitude is more like white mans burden .. but that ain’t helping much.

    But of course, back then, the Phantom actually was quite anti-nazi, so …

  4. to a depth of about seven inches, with a fine powder, pigeon-gray and opalescent, that Joe recognized at once from boyhood excursions as the silty bed of the Moldau . . . . The speculations of those who feared that the Golem, removed from the shores of the river that mothered it, might degrade had been proved correct. After living through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazism and decades of communism, the Czechs are drawn to a character with supernatural powers that will help liberate them from oppression.

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