Category Archives: Blog

Great first sentences

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The Providence Journal flags its corner of the ongoing story that is Sarah Palin. (I broke off the second sentence and stuck in “etc.”)

update, Last I heard, the Senate Finance Committee was not going to allow the death-counseling clause to stay in the bill, reason being the scare about “death panels,” which, as I understand it, was started by Sarah Palin with a Facebook post. Taken all in all, I believe this could be called driving the debate. Not bad for somebody I say is a wash-up.

On the other hand … this health care debate is so off-balance it seems like anyone can land a punch against the Democrats. Which isn’t good news either.

update 2, When the conventional wisdom sucker-punches you.  Joe Klein slips in this by-the-way toward the end of his new column: “it was government action — by both Obama and, yes, George W. Bush — that prevented a reprise of the Great Depression.”

So we’re agreed that the fall ’08 situation really was that bad — that, pre-TARP, the economy was heading for cardiac arrest? Don’t want to challenge Klein, just checking. It’s kind of a scary thing to face up to, even in retrospect. How glad I am to be invested in a mutual fund.

update 3, Arthur Frommer is the nervous type. He sums up the Arizona situation: “According to the Phoenix, Arizona, police, people with guns including assault rifles do not need permits in Arizona, but can simply carry such weapons with them, openly and brazenly, when they gather to protest a speaker at a public event.” It just reels the fucking mind. (Sorry, Uland, but this is a preoccupation I have.) update 4, Talk about wedge issues. Open-carry-for-Obama may be up there with NAMBLA as an “I get off the bus now” moment for the general population. There are some things that no idea can justify.

update 5, My senator is five years younger than me.


Peter Cook line

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He fell apart in his mid-40s and stayed that way for about 10 years. Most days he just stayed home and drank. But a decade is a long time, so every now and then he wound up on a talk show. When this happened he managed to be very funny, or that’s what I’ve read.
For instance, a tv interviewer asked him what he’d been doing. Cook said he had taken up a form of yoga so subtle and arcane that to the uninitiated it would look exactly like a middle-aged Englishman staying in bed until 1 o’clock every single afternoon.
I have to admit that’s one of my favorite lines. He was such a wreck by then but he could strike a glimmer, which is good to know.

Overheard

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My neighbor Henri, while watching the scene in Godfather where Don Corleone views his son’s body: “When you’re dead, they don’t take care of you, they get rid of you.”
He expands on the theme a while. “When a cow is dead, you say get rid of that fucker. You do not keep it around, no.” The whole speech is typical of him, because he’s pretending you treat a dead person the way you treat a dead animal. Henri wouldn’t visit his stepfather at the hospital when the old man was dying, and as a result Henri’s daughter wouldn’t talk to him for two years. It’s just a month or so that she started again.
Henri is talking to the guy from Apartment 3 while I do my qi gong. The Godfather that’s playing is from Henri’s collection of old video tapes and the colors have gone blurry, like the print was made of toilet paper.

Synthetic Sugar Rush

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This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.
______________

SCUD The Disposable Assassin: The Whole Shebang
Rob Schrab
Image Comics
paperback
black and white/$29.99
978-1-58240-685-5

SCUD is a pulpy cyberpunk romp. The main character, SCUD, is a robot assassin who comes out of a vending machine; put a coin in, tell him who the target is, set his contempt level to determine how much extreme prejudice he employs, and let him rip. Scud’s supposed to self-destruct after completing his assignment, but a loophole allows him to prolong his life and his career of mayhem. Over the course of 24 issues he fights a monster with a plug on its head, a squid on its face, and mouths on its knees; a werewolf who switches arms with him and then turns into a black hole; a bull with chainsaws for horns; and the severed head of Jayne Mansfield. Allies, on the other hand, include British astronauts who all have backgrounds on the Shakespearean stage; a cute child made out of drywall, zippers, and interdimensional portals; and a sexy bounty-hunter with a kink for robot sex named, of all things, Sussudio.

Action, gore, and outlandish character designs abound. Rob Schrab’s visual imagination is both voracious and unstoppable. His pages are a mess of panels spilling into and over one another, sound effects, motion lines, and outlandish details. He work reminds me of a cartoonier Pushead, or of some of Keith Giffen’s loonier moments as an artist. Inevitably, in all the chaos, the narrative becomes at times incomprehensible — but so what? You’re not here to watch the hero foil evil and get the girl. You’re here to watch the three-way fight between an imitation shogun warrior, zombie dinosaurs, and the mob.

Unfortunately, as the series goes along, Schrab and his co-writer Don Harmon start to move away from violent nuttiness for its own sake, and begin to try to Say Something Meaningful. Bad move.

Many creators do, of course, imbue their punky future dystopias with bite — Tank Girl comes to mind, as, to some extent, does Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair. Alas, SCUD’s bad attitude is as prefabricated as its hero. Schrab makes fun of God and angels and casually has Ben Franklin murder a nun. But it’s all in the name of jovial fratboy crassness, not out of actual misanthropy or bile. I wasn’t surprised to see in the author blurb at the back that Schrab had done time as a stand-up comic.

When he tries to give the narrative a point, therefore, Schrab goes, not for satire, but for melodrama. The end of the story devolves into tragic backstories, doomed heroes whining, and a saccharine and unmotivated quest for true love. The series officially jumps the shark when it is suggested that Sussudio has a robot kink not for the goofy reasons originally propounded (something to do with a malprogrammed robot maid), but instead because her parents didn’t pay enough attention to her. The initial joke was rather funny; the attempt to make us take it seriously, however, starts to border on tasteless. Vending machines are great for a callow rush of sugar. But when they try to sell real food — say, an egg-salad sandwich— the results are invariably repulsive.

Update: Fixed embarrassing error. Sigh.

Photobucket Is Holding Me Hostage

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If you look around the site you may notice that some of my pictures are not visible. I apparently exceeded my bandwidth. I then paid to upgrade because I care about you, my blog user…but, of course, the pictures still aren’t showing. I contacted photoshop to see what the deal was…so hopefully some day they will fix it. We’ll see….