Another winter storm, another day at CCS...

First day of a real drawing session at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and I'm psyched. I'll finally be seeing what the students do; a few have kept me supplied with copies of their work from last semester with other classes, but given the lecture-oriented nature of last semester's comics history sessions I was responsible for, I really didn't have much access to engaging with their work, which is after all the reason we're all at CCS.

However, I'll be driving to and from in another Tuesday winter storm -- my wife is already on her way to work (a daily commute, and a long one) through this sleet/snow mix. Wish us luck.
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Since Mark Martin is on vacation, I'll ease off the Condi remarks after this morn. A portion of yesterday's post was indeed inspired by Mark's blog posting:

"About halfway through this Santo review you can see where a liberal has yet again portrayed Condi as an aggressive dominatrix. One appearance in knee-high fuck-me boots (which were specifically worn to convey strength to a bunch of mysoginistic [sic] neanderthal foreigners) and she is pegged as a man-eater for life.... it amazes me how these so-called "progressives" are intimidated and driven to insane fantasies by the reality of a strong woman."

Well, no, it's amazing how male friends will continue to bait male friends in this wacky American culture we've grown up in. If it weren't for Mark's professed affection for Rice, I'd focus elsewhere; I'm neither intimidated nor impressed by Rice. I haven't any fantasies about Rice or cyborg Cheney or anyone else in this Administration; I'm just tired of seeing a single one of them elevated as being in any way honorable, much less admirable, as they continue to lie, lie, lie and fuck about with all our lives, all in the name of professed ideologies about "freedom" and "downsizing government" and "tax breaks" (which have only increased localized tax burdens in all arenas to make up for unfunded federal rules and mandates; it's all a shell game).

The central aspect of "...the reality of a strong woman" regarding all women in Bush's circle, from his mom to Rice to failed Supreme Court Justice nominees Myers, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Bush partriarchy, another of its implicit hypocrisies: even as the Administration actively erodes women's rights as a matter of principle and policy, Bush is utterly dependent on his circle of powerful women, with their undying fealty and devotion to him and only him. It's sick and compelling and quite a case study -- if only it weren't so central to how completely diseased our country has become. It's not a "strong woman" per se that's so perversely compelling; it's her/their interaction with straw patriarch, the "Mission Accomplished" man-in-the-flight-jacket, will-only-speak-to-hand-picked-'safe'-crowds Bush that invites derision.

So, OK, Mark, I'll quit kidding around about Rice. There's nothing I could possibly write here that would approach the ongoing reality of her true antics, anyway.
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What is infuriating about life as an American today is seeing years of this sociopathic behavior rewarded time and time again, and seeing people I love, respect and admire look up to such behavior as not just proper, but somehow worthy of my respect, too.

Fuck that.

America the Plutocracy has become such a predatory culture, feeding on its own with such alarming ferocity and rapidity, that the ongoing pretence that there is some shred of an American "ideal" left is a nauseating conceit. We are eating our young while claiming otherwise (really: infant mortality rates in the US are increasing annually, in impoverished populations, natch), and our elected leaders actively and blatantly conspire with dangerously out-of-control deregulated business interests. The Federal government is now quite transparently an active broker for such interests, from Halliburton to multiple pharmaceutical and insurance interests; 'outsourcing' has become so prevalent, we now 'outsource' torture and foreign policies (as Rice so visibly spent the weekend and yesterday 'outsourcing' US policies regarding Palestine).

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina laid bare the internal collapse of our once-mighty, once-production-driven "empire" for all the world to see -- it's just the majority of Americans who refuse to see it. We're a weak, imploding consumer culture lionizing the very forces that are bleeding us dry, and we not only can no longer "take care of our own" as we once could (as evidenced by the speedy coordinated federal and state government responses to the major natural calamities of the late 1930s-'60s), we now espouse and/or embrace self-serving ideologues who pretend we can while they, like a termite infestation, aggressively excavate and hollow out what little is left of prior generations's hard work.

I've heard and read this morning that "health care" is paramount in tonight's Bush "State of the Nation" speech (heard & read from multiple sources, from the local station we listen to for weather, WTSA in Brattleboro, to the three public radio stations we pick up -- yes, HB3, I do listen to lots of public radio, in part because we live between three NPR stations that add up to a picture of the weather Marj and I drive through, but that aside, my alternatives in southern VT are pretty dire otherwise: it's now entirely corporate-programmed radio with almost no local content). This would be amusing if it weren't so fucking perverse: this Administration has done more to unravel health care than any in memory, reducing government to being a broker and muscle for pharmaceutical corporations and interests, with this past month's Medicare disaster (which again the states have been left to deal with, including massive emergency funding) the most recent and most visible result. This president and administration's steadfast devotion to inflating corporate profits on the backs of the American consum-- oh, excuse me, citizens (including that announced this weekend, very quietly, by Exxon Mobile, the highest record profits in corporate history anywhere at anytime -- out of our pockets!!!) is nowhere more evident than the government policies in place that don't even allow the federal government to negotiate for better pharmaceutical pricing. "The American way of life is not for sale!" Poppa Bush, when President himself, declared; but it is and has been and Poppa and Son Bush have been the most transparent about selling it to the highest corporate bidder/lobbyists, under the lie of "free market" strategies and "ownership society" where only the wealthy will be left standing.

Heaven help us if the dreaded pandemics -- any pandemic! -- indeed arrives. The scenario of, say, Los Angeles's monolithic homeless community being ravaged by any infection inevitably spilling into the rest of the community, however affluent, just doesn't seem to carry any weight. If the wealthy think class divisions will be respected by virulent disease outbreaks, welcome to the bubble Bush and his cronies live in.

I say, who needs pandemics? I've seen with my own eyes how lack of affordable health care impacted daily on coworkers at First Run Video and impacts daily on my own now-adult kids and their circles of friends. Scraping by on low-paying local jobs, when available, and unable to afford any form of dental or health care (except that my ex-wife and I can spring for, in the case of our kids), this upcoming generation don't have any concept of preemptive or prevention health care. They can't afford it, it isn't available to them, and any safety net they had until age 19 is yanked away so quickly it leaves them utterly vulnerable and seeing no alternatives. They're afraid to visit the doctor when they have a genuine emergency, and even then they're postponing any care until they're on the floor and the ambulences are on the way. Seeing states like Massachusetts proposing mandatory health care policies -- with punitive consequences for those who don't buy in -- misses the point entirely: these kids can't fucking afford health care in a system where costs have doubled and tripled and health insurance premiums escalate as services dissolve. If states legally exact health insurance, however meager, from the pathetic weekly paychecks even the hardest-working young adults and working poor struggle to bring home (some juggling two or more jobs and still unable to make ends meet) amid the climbing rents and heating costs, disaster (personal and societal) must follow. At that point, too, we have the ultimate merger of corporate insurance and government, with the government acting as enforcement for collections: the corporate rule almost complete.

Black market economies already thrive in the good ol' U.S. of A., and I'm not talking about meth labs. Among the dirtiest secrets of the current Administration that peeks its head into light of day whenever Bush feebly addresses the immigration issue is how increasingly dependent the New Gilded Age Rich are upon migrant labor to tend to their needs, how firmly portions of the corporate agricultural market depends on migrant work populations living in slave-like conditions -- it keeps strawberries affordable, for instance. As real estate, home prices and rentals spiral into the stratosphere, affordable housing isn't just an issue for the poor: how do the rich keep their maids, gardeners, servants in reach, with the lowest-pay possible (as bussing from greater and greater distances becomes not only more expensive, but less possible as once-subsidized trains and bus routes are discontinued)? These are "the jobs working Americans don't want to fill," the soft-shoe done around the reality of jobs that pay so little they're below the radar. Ah, the perils of the New Gilded Age.

As this continues, once-reliable economic barometers cease to function. "Median income" and "job creation" figures succumbed during this Administration's watch to meaninglessness: when CEOs are yielding (I can't use the word "earning" here) 400 times what their average laborer earns, and minimum wage (federal and state) is so far below any livable standard that it ceases to mean anything but 'indentured servitude' and guaranteed poverty, "median wage" is meaningless. Averaging minimum wage jobs with what CEOs bring home (not counting, of course, their obscene packages: benefits, stock, parachutes, etc.) tells us nothing about the American economy -- nor do unemployment figures now that millions have fallen off the other end of the unemployment process and are no longer counted at all.

We now have a "Hunger Belt" in America -- with almost all families in that belt with one or more adults in the family working full-time. We now have a working class that cannot afford housing: mobile home gypsies who live in camping areas seasonally and work full-time in those areas they settle in (depending, usually, on employment). We now have more uninsured working families than any time since the Depression, and insurance is only becoming less affordable, as is health care. We now have a cataclysm-scattered population that once lived in the Gulf region left to their own devices, and another hurricane season soon upon us -- even as the present Administration continues to stifle as best they can the science relevent to the escalating weather patterns precipitating such disasters, servicing "the special interests that have obfuscated the topic" (as stated this weekend by James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, on ongoing government attempts to silence his public conversation about global warming).

By mobilizing attention to 'moral' issues, feeding on & fomenting homophobia, hot-button emotional issues like abortion and 'Intelligent Design,' illusory 'assaults on Christian/family values,' and (heaven help us) "The War on Terror" (an undeclared war on nonexistent enemy states -- in fact, a nonsensical 'war' on a tactic, that's not even mobilized against the factions involved in 9/11), the ruling class and corporate culture has neatly kept what passes for a national attention-span on anything but the realities of the imploding empire.

It wouldn't be so completely nauseating if the Bushes and Rices of the world had some facet of imagination at work, but they don't. I mean, c'mon -- both claim surprise at the outcome of the Palestinian elections, that they didn't see it coming that Hamas would displace the long-reigning Fatah movement in the PLO. They still think "bringing democracy" to the Middle East will somehow serve US interests? The Middle East is sick to fucking death of US interests, and this Administration has done more than any before to escalate that (to put it nicely) disenchantment. Even Texan President Lyndon Johnson had the empathic ability to grasp that repressed populaces, once 'liberated,' can hardly be expected to be thankful to their "liberators" when the "liberators" were the oppressors (as Johnson said in so many words to Governor George Wallace amid the civil-rights violence of the '60s, making it clear to Wallace the times were a'changin' and Wallace had better adjust accordingly, one southern politician to another); Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice et al have been idiots in every step of their radical Messianic determination to "reshape" the Middle East, to the collective peril of all.

Only an utter lack of fundamental imagination and empathy can rationalize their ongoing rhetoric and policies, and that promises only three more years of dire consequences for the globe and all Americans.

So, if you're wealthy and rooting for the Bushes and Rices of the world, hey, I can see exactly where you're coming from. More power to you, though you don't need it.

If you're not in that top 5% bracket, assume the position.

We can see you're already somehow enjoying it.

Just don't ask me to join in.
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OK, off to draw, a great relief, no doubt, to all.

I'll stick to lighter and more entertaining fare the rest of the week, or at least try to. But, oh, wait, the Enron case begins...

You'll Thank Me Until January of 2011...

OK, first things first:

This is not a hoax. Time to immediately register your phone numbers (you can register up to three) with the Do Not Call Registry, which will keep your phone(s) off the call list of telemarketers in the US.

This isn't a scam; our home number was registered years ago, and it really does work. Telemarketing calls stopped, period. Thanks to the heads up from amigo John Rovnak, I renewed our placement on the "Do Not Call" list by re-registering our phone number(s) last week, including the two cell numbers (Marge's and my son Dan's) acquired since the old registration in the late 1990s. So I can personally recommend this service, which really does work, and it's easy pie. I recommend the online option: go to www.donotcall.gov (link is provided below), register your number(s); you will then receive one email confirmation per number registered, and once you click on the confirmation link, you're set -- and off telemarketer lists until 2011.

There's a certain urgency to your acting on this today. Starting February 1st, all cell phone numbers will be released to telemarketing companies and you will begin receiving sale calls -- that you will then have to pay for.

This is a new wrinkle from the old telemarketing routine, which was merely intrusive. This could be intrusive and expensive, elevating telemarketing to a new circle of hell.

So, what are you waiting for? To keep telemarketers in their place -- away from you --

register here & now.

If you prefer, you can also just call the National Do Not Call List from your cell phone and/or the numbers you wish to protect; that number is 888-382-1222.
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The last time someone in comics casually tagged me 'liberal' as a pejorative was Gary Groth with a stealth-editorial phone call out of the blue back in the early 1990s; Gary called and the first words out of his mouth after "hello" were, "So, Steve, would you consider yourself a liberal?" Gary pretty much ignored the conversation that followed, since the sole purpose of the call was to snag a sound byte or two to justify Gary's forthcoming Comics Journal editorial in which he villified yours truly and my devotion to horror (read, in Gary-speak: endorsement of violence) as a means of 'elevating' the Fantagraphics Eros line by arguing that the only detrimental effects possibly attributable to sexually-explicit comics might be excessive masturbation.

Well, now, rather than referring to me by name to lovingly jackboot my satiric Santo post of yesterday, the great cartoonist and grand fellow Mark Martin has on his own site instead obliquely referred to/linked to yesterday's "Myrant" post as a "liberal Santo review," all to further service his own devotion to Condi Rice (who is presently dashing around Europe rallying for economic boycotts against Hamas and Palestine because, uh, democracy did not yield the government our "democracy" prefers, which pretty soundly deflates the latest bullshit reason given for our pre-emptive war against Iraq, "to promoted democracy and the march of freedom in the Middle East" -- so, if democracies don't yield the results "we" wish, those democracies are to be undermined with all due speed; same as it ever was). Touche.

But let's get beyond the ongoing fashionable wielding of the "L" word whenever one wishes to caricature an oppositional political view -- or at least apply the correct "L" word.

I consider myself a libertarian by nature, and not Libertarian in party terms. Live and let live; don't foist your will upon me, I shan't foist mine upon you; freedom of expression, in word and deed, is an absolute, until/unless it causes genuine harm to another (thus depriving that person of their liberties).

Webster's New World Dictionary definition:

lib-er-tar-i/an...n. 1 a person who believes in the doctrine of the freedom of the will 2 a person who believes in full individual freedom of thought, expression, and action -- adj of or upholding either of these principles

Ya, that sums it up. You got a problem with that, fine, let's talk.

I might add, however, that I do not consider the legal definition of corporations as individuals anything more than the legal sleight-of-hand it is, a core issue in all that's detoured America from a true democracy to a plutocracy. Corporations are abstractions, business entities that are neither persons nor individuals, nor even collectives of individuals; they are something else, amoeba-like business organisms that shouldn't have the Constitutional protections extended to true citizens (particularly in the current global corporate environment). But that we can get into another time.

The caustic redefinition of "liberal" as a perjorative has become the most knee-jerk abuse of the English language to gain political and moral capital in my lifetime. That this is most often venom fomented by those who claim to be conservatives further confuses the issues into incoherence, as neither word seems to mean any longer what they once meant -- or still, according to all English language dictionaries, still mean. It behooves those who so freely indulge in such slagging to take a hard look at the actual meanings of words. "Liberal" and "Conservative" bely the political realities at work, as do such opportunistic revamps of "Free Market" (particularly given the very real oligarchies these "free markets" function in, our own included) and the like. The careful skirting of loaded terminology of prior generations -- like 'radical,' the term most applicable to the current Administration in all its permutations -- has been a calculated factor, as precise in its way as the euphanisms applied to the concepts and acts that would be abhorred by the masses if they weren't so lovingly redefined as something other than what they are. Thus, 'downsizing,' torture referred to anything but torture (under the current definition the Administration has defended, nothing short of death-inducing agony is "accepted" as being in fact 'torture' -- and even those deaths are being sidestepped), etc.

That much of this has been done under the faux-umbrella of a corporate-sanctioned theocracy -- claiming a devotion to Christian faith clearly at odds with any form of known Christianity -- overtly repositioning 'conservative' as a synonym to 'Christian' and thus demonizing 'liberal' as, by proxy, that which opposes conservatism and Christianity, and you've got as neat a feat of wolves pulling the wool over the sheep-populace for ongoing fleecing as one can imagine.

We now live in an Orwellian realm where political and corporate reinvention of the English language has further eroded meaningful discussion of anything of substance in available (corporate-owned) public arenas.

Which is, of course, why I brought the clear, clean, sanctifying persona of Santo into the fray, handily demonizing Condi Rice with sadistic glee.

This serves the current environment in its way, too, trivializing completely everything I've just said above.

Thus, I have done my duty as a servant of the ruling oligarchs and as a devotee of Santo!

Note on comments: The 'word identifier' has been activated...

Due to blogspam hitting the fan, I've had to activate the 'word identifier' for comment posts. Anyone/anything still goes, as long as you're a human being; anonymous comments, no need to 'join up', etc. is still the law of the land. Just trying to keep the blogspam out. Thanks!

Blessed Incoherence

Santo for President! This from a recent screening of one of the early Santo pix, Santo el Enmascarado de Plata vs. la Invasion de los Marcianos (1966):

"...the Martians, who claim to come from a world much more civilized than our own and whose scientific advancements far surpass the Earth by more than 500 years, nonetheless make the same fatal error of which they accuse us, attempting to impose brotherhood through fear and force, forgetting that violence only promotes destruction and hate."

Why can't we get that writer into a key position of power in place of Alberto Gonzalez, Rumsfeld, or Condi Rice? Huh? Why can't we?

I've been watching so many Mexican monster vs. wrestler movies that I actually dreamed one the other night.

In what I can recall, a Santo surrogate named Pecador ("sinner") was trying to keep an outsized nine-legged spider from removing his mask (the removal of the mask has castration-like importance in the Santo films), turning the tables by pulling off six of the spider's nine legs before answering a call on his Pecador phone (which he pulled out of a handy wall-mounted fake stone cabinet) and telling me to pluck off the other three arachnid legs while he went and picked up our lunch. As I tried to remove the first leg, bracing my foot against the squirming (fake) spider torso, a TV set popped on with a news story about Pecador removing the dry cask nuclear waste storage units from Yankee (our local nuke power plant in Vernon, VT) and defeating a villain named Momia Blanco (The White Mummy), at which point Pecador returned with lunch. I decided not to eat mine, certain that it was now irradiated, while the movie director, actors and technicians broke for their lunch and Pecador struggled with eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich through his facemask. I pulled off the other three legs on the giant spider and went to work at my drawing board, working on a new comic featuring N-Man. Pecador acted like he was envious of this, and harrassed me. Every time I lettered the word balloons, Pecador would call Alan Moore and Rick Veitch and laugh. I went to work instead on something called "Lanesborough Briefs", drawing with the dismembered spider's blood, which smelled like almonds, and Pecador left me alone. On the TV in the background, I heard Jack Abramoff committing suicide like the Pennsylvania government official who blew his brains out on-camera: I turned around to look, but there was a commercial on by then in which a young Dan Rather was interviewing Natalie Portman about the color of her mouthwash. After the commercial, the Pecador movie we had been making earlier was playing, and I was pissed off because it was edited for television, cutting a key brain-surgery scene, so I went back to work on my comic, which was now a sort of Latino variation on my childhood in Duxbury with explicit sex scenes that never happened in real life. The 'host' of the story was a happy caterpiller I enjoyed drawing who apparently ran a haberdashery, though I wasn't sure about that detail and thought I might have to change the background art in two panels. My hands became brittle, like pastry flake-dough, but it was still fun to draw, so I kept at it. Pecador was still laughing on the phone, but I didn't care; in fact, it made me happy.

Since then, I've reluctantly taken a siesta from Santo, but confess to toying with titles like Santo contra Condi y las Mujeres Vampiro (Santo vs. Condi and the Vampire Women), which I think could both realign the scales of justice in America and the world today and make "not a race car driver" Mark Martin cream his briefs. Picture Condi with fetching boots, those extra-long Mexican monster movie fangs framing that famous gap-toothed smile, and her binding Santo down to taunt him incessantly until the dawn sun shines, blowing her schemes for world domination, and, well, you've definitely got a winner.
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Lest you think this appetite for Santo and Mexican monster movies is a sign of brain-addling atrophy taking place hereabouts, let me tell you, even the lamest of the Mexican monster flicks I've seen are models of coherence next to Underworld 2, which my pal James and I caught on the big screen this week. Luckily, it was entertaining from stem to stern, but man oh man, narratively it was a real shambles.

The film itself was a strangely giddy-making affair, yielding quite precisely that weird mix of satisfaction and utter dissatisfaction I got and still get from most post-1968 Marvel Comics: it looks cool as hell, the performances are dead-earnest and dialogue thick with the bombastic sound of importance and coherence, the emotions the characters express seem genuine and the action is intoxicating and relentless, but it makes no sense whatsoever. It felt, in fact, exactly like the 1970s and '80s Marvel Comics I would pick up based on the passionate recommendation of a friend, read, and then wonder, "Hmmm, I must be missing something. Let me go back and find a few backissues and see if I can make sense of this." Borrowing or buying the back issues, I would then read them in order -- and find that the entirity was incoherent, but the loosely-knit tapestry of nonsense cohered into some semblence of logic that created an elusive illusion of some core logic at work, though it seemed impossible to define or synopsize. The few times I really made the effort to trace these distinctly Marvel lunacies from beginning to end (with War of the Worlds: Killraven series and most memorably the Chris Claremont X-Men passage featuring the Alien knockoffs the Brood), I found myself grinding my teeth over wondering who was doing what to whom and why, speedbumps in narrative illogic too blatant to ignore, contradictory and irreconcilable story detours, writers writing themselves (and the reader) into multiple corners that required 'rabbit-out-of-the-hat' non-resolutions (illusions of resolution that in fact set up more dangling plot threads to be picked up later, if at all), and so on. But, hey, most of 'em looked nice, with the likes of P. Craig Russell, Dave Cockrum and John Byrne slinging the graphite with cool precision and confidence.

Underworld: Evolution is like that, to a 't'. Taken as such, it was perversely engaging and quite a bit of fun to watch. I can savor werewolves pulling each other's skulls in half for days, and it's fun to see the latest post-Jeepers Creepers brand of bat-winged boogeymen multi-task their wings: as daggers, pinions, peelers, slicers, dicers, and pole-vaulting aides. Tres cool.

That much of this involves savoring glistening, wet-hair-hanging-in-her-face closeups of writer/director Len Wiseman's wife Kate Beckinsale wearing wild contact lenses as the almost-always-on-screen heroine Selene makes it all easy on the eyes. This considerably aides the brain-disconnect essential to just going along for the ride despite such irrevocably stupid storypoints as how the entirity of vampire vs. lycanthrope feuding goes back to two brothers, one bitten by a bat, the other by a wolf (uh, what kind of bat and wolf, exactly?), whose dad is still alive (Derek Jacoby, a long way from I, Claudius), and whose 'ancient knowledge' of how to at last defeat his warring offspring somehow leads to having a 21st Century military black-op coptor drop nose-first then snagging impossibly in mid-air at a convenient height with both blades spinning, all while your apparently immortal hybrid boyfriend gets a Kong-like grip on both jaws of the primal-uberdad-of-all-lycanthropes and the leverage to play wish-bone with said uber-canine's skull. Now, there's arcane secret centuries-old knowledge for you.

It's one of those movies where not only can flying vampiric monsters majestically suspend themselves "mid-wing-flap" in the air in front the windshield of a truck hurtling along mountainous European roads at at least 55 miles per hour while still moving ahead of the truck, but said resurrected medieval bat-like vampire also awakens from centuries of incarceration to messily drink blood (thus acquiring 'blood knowledge' instantaneously, the film's niftiest instant-omniscient shorthand conceit) and then, confronted with high-tech top-line post-Millennium computerized security keyboards and monitors, said ancient vampire grins, flexes fingers, and pecks at three keys (a number with iconic Ernie Bushmiller urgency, for you diehard Nancy fans out there) to arrive at "ah, there he is" revelations of where a sought-after target foe (Scott Speedman's blonde hybrid hero) is hiding out. A sloppy sip of blood, three keyboard pecks, and viola, instant knowledge. Despite his Medieval origins, this only takes about half-a-minute, tops: our monstrous vampire villain (Tony Curran as Marcus) does this with nary a nano-second of hesitation, wondering not a whit about what this damned technology might be or how it might operate -- just three key-pecks with his scorpion-stinger like fingertips and he's in like Flint. (Later, we meet another exiled ancient vampire who not only has state-of-the-art computers at hand -- apparently keeping up with the necessary upgrades -- but also a pair of nude sex-slaves and a quartet of Cerberus-like Lycan guard dogs; some exile, huh?)

So, see, there are these feuding factions of vampires (Death Dealers) and werewolves (Lycans), and Death Dealer Selene has discovered her side is corrupt and she's been lied to for, like, centuries, and she also has the hots for this hybrid named Michael (Speedman) everyone is out to kill. Selene and Michael fight back. That was Underworld in a nutshell, and I liked that movie quite a bit: it was stylishly done, had some great monsters and monster-fights and enough sexenergy to satisfy the 5-year-old and 50-year-old in me, and proved to be a surprise hit ($100 mil+ boxoffice, plus DVD).

So, Len Wiseman and Danny McBride pick up the sequel with (a) a flashback to the split between Death Dealer and Lycan brothers orchestrated by nasty ol' vampire chief Viktor (Bill Nighy, omnipresent and excellent Brit actor in everything from The Constant Gardner to Shaun of the Dead these days) and (b) the contemporary narrative beginning about ten minutes after the end of the first movie, with the Death Dealers' successful resurrection of primal vampire Marcus (Curran) instantaneously kicking the shit out of their centuries of scheming. It's all breathless intergenerational venom and bile punctuated with rousing blood-geysering, marrow-splintering, skull-shearing fight scenes thereafter, all in-your-face visceral gristle-and-grue with fangs and various snout-lengths (depending, apparently, on where in the faux evolutionary ladder of Lycans one lucklessly falls), with one eye-candy breather for Kate and Scott to bond and savor a quick fuck in a candle-lit locker of some sort, then it's back to the bone-crushing mayhem to the bitter end, false climaxes (about three of them), narrative cheats (think E.T. for hybrids) and all. What's not to like?

It looks fantastic and keeps up a steady head of steam but is utterly senseless. In short, Underworld: Evolution is the movie Van Helsing wanted and tried to be, and that's the closest thing to a recommendation you're getting from me.

The end result:

Fuck it, I'm back to Santo, man!

Santo for Presidente!

Hangin' With Frank...

The fusion of Jim Woodring and the anime maestros working with Presspop Music has yielded a grand new DVD, Visions of Frank: Short Films by Japan's Most Audacious Animators Based on the Comics by Jim Woodring (Presspop, 2005). Thanks to my amigo John Rovnak, the disc landed in my hungry hands this week, and I've been savoring the occasional trip to Woodring's uncanny dreamscapes all week off and on. It's catnip for Woodring addicts; all others beware! (My friend and artist extraordinaire Michael Zulli used to physically flinch when confronted by any Woodring art: it plucked too deep a nerve by nature for Michael's comfort level.)

Visions of Frank is the brainchild of Trancepop director Yuki Yamada, co-producing this gem of a project with Presspop Inc. media guru Yasutaka Minegishi -- and, of course, Jim himself, who is represented here with his own animated effort. Presspop and Jim have already forged their relations with some pretty cool-looking Frank 'action figures,' which I've only seen online and via ads; these look pretty remarkable, particularly those for Pupshaw & Pushpaw, my personal fave of all Rin-Tin-Tin, Lassie and The Littlest Hobo successors in pop history. If I'm not mistaken (correct please if I am, someone), Jim & Presspop also collaborated on a line of amazing little bubble-egg plastic toys a couple years back, the kind coin machines in the US usually grace with trinkets, trolls and the like -- only these contained soft vinyl Woodring creations, including some of the demons and deities that grace his comics.

The DVD is neatly packaged in a colorful boxboard folder with full-color Woodring art covers and a nifty black-and-white Woodring 'semidiorama' interior picturing Frank and Pupshaw going for a walk; the disc and nifty 16-pg. booklet tuck behind the foreground flaps. The booklet sports two new Woodring "Frank" strips -- a black-and-white single pager, and a 3-pg. color story, both playing off the Manhog's disposability -- and biographical info on all animators and musicians involved, including Seattle composer and Woodring associate Bill Frisell. There are 9 animated shorts in all, 8 of which offer bonus musical scores (including one by musician and Meatcake cartoonist Dame Darcy), expanding the 48 minute program to almost 90 minutes if you watch each animation with both music tracks.

The animations are pretty alluring and a couple of them are simply exquisite, though I confess the net effect has been to send me scurrying back to the Woodring originals (which isn't anything to complain about, mind you). In his text introduction, Jim evocatively invites the animators (and by proxy the viewer) to explore facets of Frank's universe he himself has been nervous to explore: "Sometimes I want to go to the Unifactor and sometimes I am afraid I must go there. I really, really do not want to see the two-mouthed fear cow. I do not want to be glory-poisoned, or brain-looted, or lathed. But I do want to see the field of jivas and the eyepool, and that walled city.... There is so much I haven't seen; nearly all of it. So show me, please. Interpret those elusive textures, capture that waning light, bring us to those distant temples. Show me how those things move, let me hear what sounds they make. I want to see what you see."

Do they manage this feat? Well, I'm happy to report that a couple of them do, and with intoxicating fidelity to the Woodring universe as it has cohered in my own reader's mindframe after years of drinking Jim's comics wine. It's gratifying to see so many 'straight' adaptations of Jim's comics -- including the two seminal tales relating how Frank 'acquires' (misspelled in the credits, typical of Japanese-to-English translations) both Pupshaw and Pushpaw, lending the collection as a whole a measure of authenticity and initiation. The omnipresent spindly satanic figure and his egg-beater-like reality-altering/shapeshifter device perhaps capitalize a bit too much screentime and ideaspace, but that's a matter of personal taste, I reckon: all in all, this beats the shit out of the interminable "Spike & Mike" festivals of the past ten years as an animation collective, and profers the most cohesive 'adapted' universe (even given the multiple hands and sensibilities involved) of any living cartoonist.

Frank, Pupshaw, and the devil & his reality-mixer inhabit Woodring's own introductory animated short (a mere 1m 22seconds, but a treat); no surprise that it perfectly carries Jim's distinctive drawing style to its CGI animated stylings, but it is initially surprising how beautifully Woodring's semi-anecdotal narrative drive transmutes to this form. The tension between apparently concrete forms (from the lived-in architectural structures to the organic geometries of beings like Pupshaw) and alarmingly mercurial transformative eruptions that is so central to Woodring's comics is an ideal fit with the medium of animation in all its forms. That said, Frank as a character almost resists full animation: though he is consistently 'himself' in all the diverse animation forms showcased herein, Frank anatomically challenges every animator in strikingly different ways, and only a couple of them 'get' Frank "right."

Two of the subsequent shorts follow suit in their essential fidelity to the 'look' of Woodring's comics, while maintaining their own respective orientation to the wellspring. Coincidentally, these are also the two shorts introducing Pupshaw and Pushpaw, Frank's 'pets': Kyota-based "art unit COCOA" offers Pupshaw's "origin," or more specifically the tale of how Frank picks up Pupshaw as a "Free to Go Home" yard sale adoption (in short #3 on the DVD; 2003, 4m 7s), and Taruto Fuyama animates the marvelous story of Pushpaw's entry into Frank and Pupshaw's household (as an unexpected savior when Frank's plowing excavates an active, all-devouring serpentine manifestation) with considerable imagination (in short #1; 2003, 5m 38s). With the sole caveat that Fuyama doesn't quite capture Frank as a character (something about his adaptation of Frank's facial features to three-dimensional space doesn't jive for me), Fuyama's short is in the top three for me here: the synthesis of story and spot-on (pun intended) characterizations of Pupshaw and Pushpaw and their chemistry cooks. COCOA's "Frank Acquires Pupshaw" short takes place in part under the cover of night, and the strong blacks of Jim's comics are supplanted with a photocopy-like gray (blotchy with patches of photocopy bleaching or 'burn', if you know what I mean) that lends a distinctive aura to the entire short; it also boasts one of the most strangely ingratiating musical tracks (by the prolific Rubyorla; the bonus alternative track by techno musician Yabemilk is cool, too, but Rubyorla's is actually catchy and I got a warm feeling when I viewed the short the second time, like, "oh, ya, this music"). Thus, I'd have to elevate COCOA's first short herein into a favorites position; his second Frank animation (#6, 2004, 3m 41s) embraces a crazy-quilt color-and-texture scheme similar to that of animator Eri Yoshimura (#2, 2003, 3m 55s), which is personally my least favorite of all.

In both cases, the attempt to transmute Woodring's distinctive beings and universe into their patchwork collage tapestries of bright fabric-like patterns, colors, and swatches grates on the eyes: I can't engage with the forms as cohesive characters or even a cohesive synthesis of an environment. Part of the allure of the Woodring universe is its tactile illusory 'reality': one falls into it effortlessly, and finds oneself engaged all too easily in enigmatic events and mutations that resist rational analysis. The 'crazy quilt' approach of COCOA's second short and Yoshimura's one and only make these confections all too easy to resist: they become eye candy instead of mind candy, though the strength of Jim's source narrative for the COCOA fabric-texture short lends it some impact, if only as an effective sight-gag (Frank tries to catch an insect-like creature in a jar, prompting the creature to inflate its form to 'scare' Frank; Frank gets progressively larger containers, until the insect inflates so traumatically that Frank tips the largest vessel onto himself).

The third short to display a beguiling fidelity to Jim's comics -- specifically his color comics -- is the one by TAMAPRO/DROP (#4, 2003, 2m 40s; 'original track' by now-defunct band The Double), which is a charmer. Here again is that spindly ol' Woodring debbil, this time anally (technically entering Frank's tail, not his ass) infecting Frank and prompting Pupshaw to save the day yet again by tearing into Frank mid-shape-shift and shaking the spring-tailed wormlike infecting organism loose. TAMAPRO/DROP brings the fullest animation on view here to bear, if anything expanding upon Jim's panelogical transformations to make them even more effective, and the bold color schemes (again, perfectly adapted from/attuned to Woodring's own palettes) work wonders. This is a great short!

Masaki Naito's stop-motion dimensional model-animated adaptation (#5, 2004, 5m 35s) and Naomi Nagata's wonderfully textured 'flat' animated effort (#8, 2005, 8m 15s) are in their own way quite wonderful, too, though they are less concerned with capturing the 'look' of Woodring as they are with the dream-into-nightmare ambience, events and atmospheres of his comics. Both shorts involve Frank losing his cohesion and transforming into altered variations of himself: in the former, it's the 'devil' and his damned egg-beater shapeshifting device that's the agent of change; in the latter, Frank dives into a subterranean eye-ringed pool that alters him, prompting Pupshaw to wake the Woodring 'devil' and wield the same egg-beater-like contraption to change Frank back to his familiar self, much to Pupshaw's delight. Both have their charms, though the inherent instability/malleability of Frank in both undercuts his registering as a character (once again, Pupshaw shines with more affectionate clarity), and arguably makes these less effective experiences unless one is already indoctrinated into the Woodring reality. Of course, that very aspect of both is integral to the Woodring universe (after all, Jim has been no less mutable a character in his own work!), but I'd recommend viewing both Naito and Nagata's shorts last; appropriately enough, Presspop has placed both in the latter portion of the disc's play order. Good call. Naito's begins with a foot clearly in the realm of, say, the Brothers Quay, with its organic/mechanical constructs and spaces, but eases in short order into the appropo Woodring world; Nagata’s is animated in what appears to be some sort of dust, sand, or chalk-based medium that asserts its own enchanting and curiously urgent reality.

Last but not least, the penultimate short in the disc's menu is Kanako Kawaguchi's lengthy stop-motion animation effort, the package's most expansive in terms of running time (#7, 2005, 9m 58s). Kawaguchi's approach to animating and 'dimensionalizing' Woodring's work is immediately compelling: combining intricate modelwork (including exquisitely detailed pieces of furniture and room interiors and convincingly naturalistic miniature exteriors) with construct 'cut-outs' models of Frank (composed of layered bits of Jim's art), Kawaguchi allows himself (as filmmaker) and ourselves (as viewers, participants in the dream) to inhabit Frank's environments as never before. Like Karel Zeman's brilliant adaptations of period-Jules Verne illustrations for his seminal 1960s feature films (The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, On the Comet, etc.), Kawaguchi carefully renders his dimensional 'live action' sets with Woodring's distinctive linework in certain environments (Frank's dwelling, the interior of the neighbor's house he visits, expecting a party but finding only silence and a jug of skeletal remains as a barely-seen lurker malingers behind an open doorway). Others, like select exteriors and especially the outside of the neighbor's dwelling (its outside walls somehow swollen, blistering paint into unusual textures consistent with Woodring's work), eschew the direct association with Jim's recognizable rendering style, breathing fresh life into the familiar Frank universe. In this, the short evokes stop-motion universes of yore: the works of Ladislas Starevich, Jiri Trnka, Jan Svankmajer, etc. With its pitted roads, windblown grass stalks, scrub and brush composed of bleached lichens, this approach brings bracing life to the Woodring landscapes I'd grown somehow so accustomed to, making the familiar unfamiliar, without losing its palpable fidelity to Jim/Frank's universe: quite a feat, really!

But Kawaguchi brings two other elements to bear -- sound and time -- in a manner none of the other animators do. As the alternative music tracks evidences, almost all the shorts rely in a primary way on unusual scores to enhance/create their synthesis/derivations of the Woodring comics universe. Kawaguchi eschews that music-video approach to anchor his Frank film in a more primal context: a naturalistic audioverse, in which the rustling and clinking of domesticity, the crunch of gravel and relentless howl of wind compose the soundtrack, lending a strong sense of gravity, scale, and of chronology to his film. This is the short with the Dame Darcy "bonus track," which is engaging in and of itself, but I quite prefer the naturalistic "original track," in which sound and space takes on an almost Sergio Leone impact and import. Imagine Frank in the opening sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West (not as much of a stretch as you might think, really), steeped in its disorienting blend of the banal and the mythic, and you'll have some idea of how Kawaguchi's lovingly detailed evocation of Frank's world works (despite my reaching for Leone as a benchmark, I hasten to add this use of naturalistic sound to anchor stop-motion realms has a venerable history as old as the fusion of motion pictures and sound). Thus, savoring the sounds as well as the sights of Woodring's universe, Kawaguchi conflates the other naturalistic touches -- the warm light coming in through Frank's window, the sharp 'clink' of porcelin cups (oddly embellishing the 'reality' of the details of Frank's kitchen: knifes sheathed in a wall-mounted rack, etc.), the wood interior of the draw Frank opens in his circular reading table, the cool light illuminating the interior of Frank's home in the final shot of the film -- and extends the sense of time moving to lend enormous, appropriately ominous weight to the enigmatic events as they unfold. By the time Frank is musing a bit too long over the skull and skeletal remains in the huge jug in his empty neighbor's home, the dreamy suspension and suspense really gets under one's skin in a way none of the other short films do -- and this, too, is essential to Woodring's best work. It works completely as a film and as an adaptation of Jim's comics, and that's a solid recommendation from this viewer.

All in all, Visions of Frank is a great disc, well worth seeking out and immersing oneself in ASAP. It's undoubtably available from many online sources, but check out

Presspop

-- a good starting point, if only to check out the superficials (scroll to the right and click on the ‘English’ option; all things Frank will emerge). Highly recommended, and the year's first DVD sleeper!

Thank God, Bush Has Help for the Red ("It's Kind of Muddled")

See my earlier daily rant (below), and tell me how this fucking bozo is going to help us do anything to help anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Here's how President Bush explained changes in the social security plan to a dazed audience on February 4, 2005:

Woman in audience: "I don't really understand. How is the new plan going to fix the problem?"

President Bush (his verbatim response): "Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to that has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate uh, -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, supposed, uh, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."

The impending Judge Samuel Alito vote is likely to pass, pleasing Ann Coulter to no end. It'll pass, given the illegally-stacked (or haven't you been paying attention to the DeLay/Abramoff/etc. debacles?) Republican stronghold in Washington. The fucking Democrats can't find their balls with roadmap in hand, though it's a moot point given how the Supreme Court's unprecedented interference with the fateful Presidential election that put the current hyena pack into power demonstrated the bankruptcy of the Court as a judicial body and/or moral institution.

Alito is the kind of devout patriarchal selective "Constitutionalist" we've come to recognize: like "Christians" righteously supporting war, capital punishment & corporate crimes while decrying abortion, Alito passionately argues his obsessive fixation on the Constitution while opportunistically skirting those portions of the Constitution and Bill of Rights contrary to his blinkered affiliations (the founding fathers so reviled the potential power of corporations that they established clear laws to regulate and contain any corporate entities growing into challenges against the people and government; the railroads actively began dismantling those restrictions in the late 1800s, and since the corporations mobilized their forces in the 1970s and Reagan embraced deregulation, it's been all downhill for the individual in the U.S. of A.). The perverse irony that those who sought so vehemently to cripple/discredit/impeach Clinton within the past decade increasingly espouse the Unitary political philosophy (which Alito is linked with, though he dodged explicit attempts to probe that aspect of his views during his hearings) that concentrates unprecedented Presidential power into the hands of the current President and Administration snowballs with the clear presumption that they will remain in power: the power brokers the Republicans have become presume ownership of our nation in perpetuity.

Karl Rove has scurried back into the spotlight, claiming only the Republicans are actively embracing the necessary "post-9/11 world," once again linking the Bush Administration's actions and 9/11 as somehow justification for whatever they do (on January 20th, Rove attacked Democratic critics of the Administration during a Republican National Committee meeting, saying, "That doesn't make them unpatriotic -- not at all. But it does make them wrong -- deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong"; see The Washington Post, Jan. 21, 2006.) Now that he feels bold enough and suitably out-of-scrutiny for the Valerie Plame outing (a blatantly treasonous act, whoever is responsible, and Rove is still highly suspect), Rove's canny manipulation of public & politics skillfully manifests: of course, as soon as public outrage against Bush's arrogant claims to have the inherent power to supercede law begins to reach critical mass, we conveniently are provided with Osama bin-Laden's resurfacing on Jan. 19 in a new audiotape sent to al-Jazeera TV, ending more than a year of silence. Tuesday night, Bush will no doubt cite this new threat from al-Qaeda as well as the bloody conflict in Iraq as justifications for continuing to consolidate his powers as the "unitary executive." Give me a break. "Oh, puh-leez, President Bush, save us!" Ya, right -- the man who boasted during his heart-sickening press conference yesterday morning how he and his Administration is reserving the right to ignore those laws it does not like is going to save us.

Rove clearly plans to ride the War on Terror into another election season, having orchestrated an Orwellian obfuscation and confusion of rhetoric so impeccably that any attack on the US will now be seen as evidence of the validity and necessity of the Bush Administration rule rather than horrific proof of its abject failure.

Are we such sheep, such saps?

I'm sick to death of the travesty my country has become. The active dismantling of all existing protection of citizens from monolithic corporate power is yielding weekly devastation in increasingly personalized and intimate arenas (coal mine disasters, anyone? Orchestrated implosion of Medicare?). Our senators are complicit in all this: amid the "protecting the little guy" rhetoric of the Alito hearings, why didn't even one Senator get to the core of the issue and query the Judge's views on the court's gradual acceptance (there was never a ruling or judgement) of corporations as entities recognized as having the rights of individuals, protected by the Constitution? (Well, of course, our Senate is in the same corporate pockets -- we'll never hear that particular issue raised, much less debated.)

Another election season is brewing.

Time to play hardball, if anyone has 'em to play with: I mean, we should be seeing billboards with Jack Abramoff in his duds representing the Republican K-Street faction that has sold us all down the river. We should be seeing explicit links between the current Medicare disaster and the coalition of government and pharmaceutical & insurance interests that forged this nightmare (the key elected officials involved stepped out of the Capital into cushy jobs with insurance and pharmaceutical firms). We should be seeing vast roadside side-by-side images of the burning Twin Towers and Bush walking hand-in-hand with his Saudi guest and the moniker, "BROKEBACK NATION."

It was Saudi terrorists with (real) boxcutters, not Iraqis with (imaginary) weapons of mass destruction, who brought 9/11 raining down around our ears. The Iraq War is a sham and a crime, and all that has led to it and all that has followed is among our darkest moments in history. The sham 9/11 link is the magic button they continue to push to induce sheep-like complicity. Bush's upcoming "State of the Nation" address will no doubt hammer that link anew, now justifying his blatant disregard for the law (most recently and prominently regarding illegal wiretapping of Americans in the name of 'national security').

There are no links between 9/11 and what we've become mired in as a nation. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud -- the wealthiest businessman in the Muslim arena -- himself said, "September 11 was a deep wound. These kinds of wounds take many years to heal, not just three or four. Yes, the terrorists were Saudis, but most Saudis do not agree with them. I hope things like King Abdullah visiting Texas will help bring us together" (Fortune, October 3, 2005, pg. 32).

No worries, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud: we are such a pig-ignorant "These Colors Don't Run" shithead jingo-patriot nation, Bush and his cronies have successfully diverted the populace rage to uninvolved parties, against whom we wage all-consuming undeclared war. The long-standing US-Saudi relationship is the only aspect of the FDR legacy Bush and the neo-cons aren't intent on dismantling: it was indeed FDR who forged the post-WW2 "US protection for Saudi oil" pact every President after has honored (the Bush clan of course also profits enormously from said pact.)

By the way, FOX News lovers, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, richest man in the Muslim world, among the largest and most successful of all foreign investors in the U.S., increased his holdings in Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp (corporate proprietor of FOX News, among countless other media venues heavily pro-Bush and his cronies and aggressively burying any news or discussion of their fuckups, faux pas, and crimes) "to 5.46% of the voting shares and reaffirmed his support for chairman Rupert Murdoch..." Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud says, "We approve of his [Murdoch's] strategy and approach.". He is in fact pushing for Murdoch to expand his media empire into the Middle East.

I'm sure Hamas is all for that; don't you think Bill O'Reilly will fit right in?

This week's Palestinian election results demonstrates we are reaping what we sow in spades -- we have further radicalized and polarized the region, and the extremists are looking mighty good to oppressed populations. The lunacy of the argument that one of the threadbare justifications for the Iraq War is "keeping the war over there" is bearing unexpected fruit.

It may not be the orchard we as a nation thought we were planting, but the harvest is upon us.

More on Hoop-Hoop-a-Doop

Not only was yesterday Tobe Hooper's birthday, it was also Robert Burns's birthday. Much as I revere Burns, thanks in part to Eddie Campbell provoking my finally reading Burns's poetry after he and I jammed on a Bacchus comics adaptation of the Burns poem ("Tam O'Shanter," I think, off the top of me head), it's Hooper's films that had the greater impact on my existence -- life and work -- creature of the 1970s that I am.

Fond memories I harbor of my amigo Mark 'Sparky' Whitcomb and I up and bolting from our lowly (and I do mean lowly: I was in a sub-level dorm room at Johnson State College) digs at JSC to make the drive to the nearest theater, the Bijou in Morrisville, VT, where an unknown quantity entitled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was opening. All we knew about the film was that it had opened in NYC, and I'd clipped out the tiny ad from The New York Times and had it posted on my wall; the title alone had us both hoping against hope it might play close enough to Johnson to catch a peek. Sparky being from Texas (though he and his family had since moved to Chester, VT, hence his being at JSC), he had a real jones to see the film; I was just psyched at the title, one of the most blatantly exploitative in all horror film history. We were stunned at the news of its opening two towns away (one of its few VT playdates, it turned out), and we were there as quick as we could scam a car.

At that time -- 1974, natch -- the Bijou was still an old-fashioned one-screen small-town theater, a relic and a beaut, kept in pretty good condition by the family management. It was a weird time for such 'nabes' (industry term for neighborhood theaters): most were closing for good in the '70s, or hanging on by their thumbnails, surviving by succumbing to the wave of post-Deep Throat XXX fare or a mix of porn, exploitation, and the occasional third-run pickup. The Bijou never booked XXX fare to my knowledge; whoever was booking the theater actually did a remarkable job of mixing it up between exploitation and major studio curios (we saw Mean Streets, Badlands, The Devil's Rain, and the heady double-bill of The Giant Spider Invasion co-featured with Godzilla vs. Megalon there, too, among others). That The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- distributed by Bryanston, a Mafia-family owned and managed distributor responsible for circulating a plethora of key '70s fringe wonders, including the X-rated Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey one-two punch Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (in 3-D!) and Andy Warhol's Dracula -- had come to roost at the Bijou was a surprise, but not inconsistent with Bijou's eclectic pantheon of first-and-second run titles. Though the theater was clean, the floor none too sticky with spilled and calcified soft drinks, and the popcorn always fresh and hot, the seats were classically narrow and claustrophic, the pitch of the theater floor only increasing the need to fold one's knees into arcane contortions guaranteed to cut off blood flow in less than 20 minutes.

Sparky and I proudly bought our tickets from the kindly matron in the ticket booth (whom I once provoked into spitting her false teeth out laughing when stony Bissette walked full-faced into the crystal-clean glass doors before the booth), stocked up on popcorn, and took our seats. I recall Sparky buying a huge bag of popcorn -- the quantity of which, and bag-packaging of which (this was before nabes had 'tubs' of popcorn for sale), is critical to our evening festivities, as you will soon see. Now, remember, I was as I am now a die-hard horror movie buff; Sparky was a kindred soul, steeped in years of honorable Texan drive-in attendence. We'd both seen and wallowed in our share of outrageous exploitation, the bloodier the better to our 20-to-21 year old brainpans. Still, we weren't prepared at all for where ol' Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel took us: from the opening shots of barely-glimpsed rotting human extremities lit by flare-and-fade flashbulbs to the revelatory pull-back from the corpse-sculpture skewered onto a gravestone, we were stunned into silence (as if the sunflares erupting behind the credits as an ominous, cacophanous, Sun Ra-cosmic-jazz-gone-south score exploded in our ears hadn't already done us in). The first shot of armadillo roadkill relaxed Sparky a bit -- downhome stuff for a Texan -- but that comfort level was methodically peeled away as the narrative got underway and TCSM worked its black magic. After the hitchhiker's classic setpiece aboard the van, all bets were off, and we knew it.

Now, we weren't alone in the theater, but it was a small crowd that night: first show and all of a flick with little family appeal and no pre-sell beyond the baldfaced mania of its title. The audience was dead quiet for most of the unreeling, suffocating amid the audio horrors filling the auditorium, but things got real quiet after Leatherface made his appearance, concluded by the slamming of that fucking steel door after downing his first victim with sledgehammer force. By now Sparky was hunkered waaaaaaaay down in his seat, clutching his no-longer-munched popcorn like a prairie dog with a prize. I'd given up on my popcorn, too, but had the wherewithall to plunk it down into the seat next to me with my coat and hat.

As Hooper & Henkel tightened the thumbscrews, setting Sally into the woods pushing flashlight-wielding Franklin in his wheelchair in the pitch-dark night, we were holding our collective breath.

Then, it happened --

-- the roaring of a chainsaw --

-- the eruption of Leatherface from the darkness, his horrific face caught in Franklin's flashlight beam --

-- and it was suddenly snowing in the theater.

I can't adequately communicate how disorienting the moment was:

-- the horror of what was happening onscreen (barely visible, the art of Hooper & Henkel's conceit being the relative gorelessness of the film) conflated by the tactile feeling and seeing of, well, snow in the theater. It was just suddenly there, big fat kernels of --

-- popcorn.

Sparky had hammerlocked his bag of popcorn, and it was in the air the second Leatherface was into Franklin with the saw.

We stole a look at one another and let loose with something half-scream, half-donkey-braying laughter, and we were forever drunk on TCSM thereafter.

But first we had to make it through the rest of the movie, which wasn't much of a laugh-provoker. Oh, we cracked up at the now-classic, then-surprising flourishes of pitch-black comedy ("Look what your brother did to the door!"), but Hooper & Henkel had sunk their meathooks deep into our cortex, and we were physically exhausted -- an exhaustion that felt all the more overwhelming with the abrupt, end-of-nightmare brevity of the final shot: the mad dance in the sun-blasted road, the racing chainsaw sound, the blinding cut, and we were back to those fucking cosmic views of sunflares bursting from the surface of the sun, the final credits crawl as the score reasserted its percussive mania. It was only when the lights came up and we saw the enormity of the popcorn-spew circle Sparky had wrought with his bag-bursting reaction to Leatherface's attack that we recovered a bit of equilibrium and staggered to our feet, tottering up the aisle and groggy in the ropes.

As we teetered into the lobby, meaning to apologize to the management for the mess and offer to help clean up, we were caught offguard by a new and even more unexpected spectacle:

A schoolbus was visibly parked on the curb in front of the glass doors and ticket booth, and a line of uniform-jersey-wearing high school students were lined up, paying their dough to see the next show. Their spirits were high and voices loud -- reckon they'd won the game, eh? -- and we looked at one another and cracked up.

As the first players in line passed us en route to the snack bar, one of 'em said to Sparky, "Hey, how was it?"

Bet it was a lively theater that night.

A year later, I would be showing TCSM as part of an "Audience Assault" double-feature at Johnson State College. Someone started a chainsaw up in the theater during the show, and -- well, that's another story (as is the lively evening John Totleben and I enjoyed at a Newark, NJ theater seeing Hooper's followup Eaten Alive)...
_________

Among my fave bits of TCSM trivia is the fact that the film was sneak-previewed in a San Francisco theater as a 'surprise' unannounced second feature for underrated studio director Joseph Sargeant's suspense gem The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (wherein Robert Shaw shone bright as lead villain "Mr. Blue" -- source for the color-coded names of Quentin Tarantino's celebrated Reservoir Dogs). Just as the subway passengers of Pelham 123 rallied against their murderous oppressors, the audience reportedly stormed the theater management in a rage as TCSM played, provoking more ire than terror as unsuspecting patrons assaulted by the Hooper & Henkel cinematic crime demanded their money back and still couldn't believe they'd been guinea-pigged with such an offensive exercise.

Lest you think such distributor and studio faux pas are a thing of the past, consider the November 2005 'sneak preview' booked in the Manhattan AMC Empire 25 -- where parents and chicks attending Disney CGI feature Chicken Little were greeted with the opening minutes of the new Spanish feature Andrea, in which a young man hangs himself from a tree. All the traumatized tots and furious parental units got were refunds or a coupon for a future free movie.

Back in '78, Kubert School pal Marc Vargas and I once rushed to a Manhattan theater matinee of Allegro Non Troppo, second-billed with Ralph Bakshi's maladroit Lord of the Rings animated feature. We arrived early for Allegro and resigned ourselves to sitting through the final minutes of of Bakshi's film, which we'd seen before, plunking down into the quickest two seats we could find, sitting behind a wiry black guy in an audience packed-to-the-max with parents and kids. Suddenly, amid the climactic battle, the rotoscoped Alexander Nevsky Bakshi imagery was supplanted by the most clinical balls-slapping cock-ramming-into-cunt XXX footage imaginable, washed-out morgue-flesh color and all. The footage erupted, slammed, and was gone in seconds -- and we were back into Bakshi faux-Tolkien animation in a heartbeat, but the theater went nuts. "Momma, whatwassatwhatWASSATWHATWASSAT???" screamed a kid behind us to his panicked mom as the screen suddenly went black and the lights came up and panic ensued. Vargas and I were crying with laughter -- we couldn't believe it! -- and the noise from the outraged rush to the lobby was deafening. It took some time for the hubbub to subside, but Vargas and I were helpless with laughter; every time we caught our breath, we'd look at each other and crack up anew. We finally calmed down, at which point the guy sitting in front of us -- whose face was streaming with tears, too -- stole a glance back at us, and all three of us collapsed laughing again.

Shit, was Chuck Palahniuk or "Tyler Durden" in the audience -- or in the projection booth? When I saw that sequence in Fight Club, I couldn't help but wonder.

(Yes, we did get to see the end of Lord of the Rings without further incident, and Allegro Non Troppo was a treat.)

__________

Starving Gay Marriage While Feeding the Bears

While Massachusetts clergyman Tom Crouse persists in staging events fomenting rage against homosexual marriage under the guise of supporting 'maleness' and hetero marriage (go to

Out of the Inkwell,

check Mike's January 25th post for details), I'm relieved to report that Leonardo DiCaprio is aggressively supporting -- well, read on.

I got an email from "Leonardo DiCaprio, NRDC Trustee" with the subject line, "A message from Leonardo DiCaprio about protecting bears." Now, Leo's dad is one of my dear friend Chas Balun's old cronies -- they did mini-comics together in their happy hippie arteest days -- and yes, Leo is appealing on behalf of bears to "stop the Bush administration from implementing a disastrous plan to revoke the bears' protection under the Endangered Species Act" ("...That's why it's so important for Americans all across the country to tell the government that we oppose this risky plan. To take action, go to the Natural Resources Defense Council's BioGems website at

Save the Bears,

..." etc.).

But the email arrived shortly after an exchange with local filmmaker John Scagliotti about an upcoming pair of "Bear Film Festivals" here in southern VT -- and we do mean bears, but not the bears Leo is talking about. John mentioned the great success of last summer's Guilford, VT Bear Film Festival, composed of "films that attract the gay Bear movement -- believe it, its a big group and they arrive in hordes!" The festival ("mostly shorts and one feature," check out last summer's event

here

-- no 'organ barn' jokes, please) may become an annual event, as the first was, according to John, "really a lot of fun and a little inspirational at times."

These bears are clearly not an endangered species, however much clergymen like Crouse might carry on.

Hmmmm, maybe we should get some bears to crash the Crouse pro-male event? Whether it's Leo's bears or the VT Bear Film Fest bears matters not a whit.

Happy Birthday, Tobe Hooper...

Yep, this day in 1943, Tobe Hooper popped (or was cut) into the world. Whodathunk, way back in '43, with WW2 still raging and Moonlight in Vermont playing in local theaters, that Tobe would be helming one of the seminal horror movies of the '70s in a fetid hothouse hellhole that had cast and crew vomiting out the windows between takes? That would be The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, natch, and Tobe never made a better movie (nor did co-conspirator/writer Kim Henkel, though both went on to make flicks I love).

What's more astounding to me is I heard this birthday notice this morning from Garrison Keillor (sp?) on the Writer's Almanac on my local public radio station. I almost shit when I heard it -- I mean, hearing Garrison's dulcimer tones say "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," smooth and neat as can be, is a real sign of the times. Coming as this does on the heels of Mike Dobbs showing us a holiday season ad for a miniature licensed 'horror village' composed of corporate franchises like Friday the 13th, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm St. and Leatherface's beloved charnelhouse, the mind reels.

What a world, what a world.
__

Speaking of worlds:

Big Thanks to cartoonist extraordinaire Dan Lapham for the gift copy of The World of Kong, a gorgeous illustrated book on the 'backstory' of Skull Island and all the environment and creature designs that were poured into Peter Jackson and WETA's latest opus (in fact, the WETA Workshop is credited as author). My son Dan loved the book, too, pouring over it the second he could get his hands on it.

Thanks, too, to amigo John Rovnak, my comics source for almost 15 years, for the copy of the new Jim Woodring animation DVD sporting over 45 minutes of animation from Japan adapted from the Woodring comics and universe. Check it out -- Visions of Frank: Short Films by Japan's Most Audacious Animators from Presspop Music on all-region DVD. The showcase of nine animated shorts opens with a 1m 22s animation by Jim himself, followed by a beaut by Taruto Fuyama and a curious collage-animation adaptation by Eri Yoshimura, and -- well, more on the rest later. Full write-up this week!

(PS: John will be launching expanding his comics service to a full online venue later in 2006; will post the news here once John's got it up and running.)
___

Back to the CCS!

Yes -- first day of the new semester at the Center for Cartoon Studies! I'm off, so not much to write this morn --

I've prepped a sort of 'intro' session, though whether it goes down this week or next is also up to the timing of the student presentations spilling over from last semester. Will let you know how it goes -- then it's pizza, cartoons, lurid preview trailers and a movie for one and all!

Five Inches and Falling...

It's snowing today hereabouts (we're already over the 5-inch mark) and Marj is home (no school!). So, puttering around and chipping away at studio work, writing and drawing.

I'm prepping for tomorrow's first new semester session at the Center for Cartoon Studies and just wrapped up proofing the first volume of a new book series, S.R. Bissette's Blur (Complete Editions) Volume 1. It's the first of four volumes collecting all my video review columns from 1999-2001; I pulled all this material together last August in a flurry of frustration-spawned activity, hoping to get out the first two volumes before the end of 2005, but have only just now managed to gather a complete enough set of VMag from my archives to double-check that scattering of published work, incorporating all of it into the finished book (and footnoting sources, as necessary).

I'm also scrambling to finish the cover today and get it scanned so I can ship book and cover off to Jean-Marc Lofficier in France and get this first volume to bed and into print. Actually, I'm doing all four covers in one swing, if only to ensure Jean-Marc can post everything on the Black Coat Press site in short order, and we can pull all four volumes together before the end of winter. Then there's the wrap-up work (long overdue) on All That Lovecraft Loathes (a short story anthology of my short fiction and stories and poems by fellow Vermonter Roderick Bates), Gooseflesh Volume 1, and the comics essay collection (including the expanded version of "Mr. Moore and Me," the original version of which is already in print in more languages than anything I've done outside of Swamp Thing).

The goal is to clear the decks as I get projects done, with the ongoing work on the revisions for my cannibal movie history We Are Going To Eat You! constantly gaining steam. I'm hoping to make 2006-2007 a major year of output, including volumes collecting my past works -- articles on horror movies, comics, and hopefully at least one volume collecting my comics works. This will also clear shelves in the studio and library of books and materials I've held on to for years (decades, even) for publication. As that happens, the ongoing organizing of the existing library (with a prejudice toward all that's of use in my CCS classes) is underway, too. Multi-tasking in spades, you might say.

OK, back to work --

Hey, one and all.

Sorry for the hiatus; my sleeping was completely skewed by too much time on the computer, which brought on this recent bout with the flu, so I steered clear of this time-eater (the computer, not just the blog) for most of the week. Back to sleeping like a pre-Millennial being, and determined to keep it that way.

With so much time of late happily going into my writing, teaching (the Center for Cartoon Studies second semester starts this week -- exciting!), and my return to the drawing board, it’s become more of a chore to even want to sit at the computer for anything involving email or the internet.

I’m now determined to find some means of high-speed access. The pisser is it isn’t available to anyone here in Marlboro -- even though the fucking line serving Wilmington and Brattleboro (the two towns on either side of Marlboro) runs right outside my house! Email is out of control, in part because it’s just so time consuming to creep through every day, and any online adventure takes far too much time with slo-mo dial-up. It’s crazy how long it takes to circumvent crap I don’t even want to deal with.

So, please bear with my occasional days away until this problem is solved. Among the upcoming 2006 blog events I’m working on are interviews (currently underway!), a story-marathon, at last posting art here (part and parcel of the server/high-speed access dilemma), and much more, including the usual rants and rambles.

Catching up a bit:

* A little blast of Bissette art and a writeup of one of my personal favorite books of all time awaits you if you click on

The Late Great Creature.

What brings this to mind this week is my current work-in-progress that involves some made-up movies, inspired in part by Brock Brower’s sadly forgotten (it was barely noticed when it was published) novel. Dig:

"THE LATE GREAT CREATURE by Brock Brower (1971, Atheneum) was Simon Moro, notorious horror movie star of the 1930s and 40s who could (in the words of the men's magazine reporter who relates the novel's first third) "indicate corruption with just the back of his neck" onscreen. Brower's invented filmography for Moro is utterly convincing and compelling: hints of the actor in silent German films; his rise to fame as a mad pedophile in Fritz Lang's ZEPPELIN (1930); his American debut as THE MOTH, a tatty low-budget horror co-starring Fay Wray; his butchered masterpiece GHOULGANTUA (1937), a reworking of FRANKENSTEIN; his subsequent decline playing Nazis in ersatz World War 2 propoganda and a poverty-row GILA MAN series; a mysterious, incomplete feature Moro starred in and directed in post-War Germany set in the concentration camps; on to the centerpiece of the novel, a Cormanesque remake of THE RAVEN for the drive-in circuit.”

I ache to see these nonexistent films the same way most Lovecraft fans hanker to hold the Necronomicon in their mitts. I don’t think my spin on nonexistent drive-in movies will prompt the same hunger, but one never knows...

* Does anyone out there have any info on the “i” network? Last night Marj and I watched most of a locally-produced and filmed ‘natural disaster’ movie (Edgewood Studios’s all-hail opus Frozen Impact), which was produced by the Rutland-based studio for Porchlight, who also provide content for Pax. The “i” network’s commercials and content clearly was along the lines of Pax: lots of Christian and family oriented ads, geriatric pharmaceutical commercials, etc. Just curious; any info or links would be appreciated.

* There’s a new post from Al Nickerson at the Remembering The Creators Bill of Rights website: Dave Sim's succinct letter to Mark Martin is

here

-- and there's a photo from the historic summit, too. Check ‘em out!

* Speaking of Al, he also recently sent me a link to

this publisher forum for Johnny Raygun

about Diamond Dist.’s new policy “that makes it difficult for small
publishers to produce a Free Comic Book Day issue this year.” Johnny Raygun is among Al’s current faves being effected -- there are, no doubt, many others.

Publisher Ralph DiBernardo kicks off the thread with the sobering news that he "can't get a straight answer from anyone at Diamond but the bottom line is that we were not invited to participate. For whatever reason, we did not meet the criteria for it, even though we sold about 15,000 copies 2 years ago and 20,000 last year. Between that and Diamonds new policy for small press it makes it hard to imagine this industry ever moving forward again."

So, 2006 is the year Diamond laid down the law and instituted new restrictions: more of the same. It can only get worse. I’ve no doubt that Free Comic Book Day is one of the few entry-level events left for small press and self-publishers who have already been crowded off shelves and barely have a hand-hold in the pre-order system that dominates consumer-end buying in what’s left of the direct sales market. The marginalization of the independents continues unabated.

* The news has been so fucking infuriating of late. President Bush keeps blathering about “freedom” while blithely tredding on one and all, ourselves included.

Just narrowing the field to the Middle East: Want to ‘export’ some democracy, some freedom? How about freedom from us?

You’d think a nation built on refuting a colonizing empire would have that one down.

Caveman Steve Like Cave Paintings

I've been wrestling since 7 AM with trying to send two pieces of art to a publisher in Italy. It simply isn't working for a variety of reasons -- including the lack of DSL or any affordable higher-speed alternative to our snail-telephone-line online access -- and I'm ready to toss all this computer equipment off the cliff in the back yard.

Thankfully, my good friends in Italy are patiently working with me, and I am now seeking outside assistance. No, don't write me with suggestions: it's all Greek to me. Simple steps for computer-literate folks ("upload to my ftp link") are gibberish to Luddite Bissette, and I'll need some hands-on, person-in-the-room assist with all this.

It seems like our slow-speed access may be the biggest hurdle, and for that there's no affordable solution in reach as yet. "What's green and goes backward?" (an old VT riddle, with two answers if you've got a cold like I have)

TWO additions to my faves of the year that came to mind after my last 'fave' post:

* THE CORPSE BRIDE: Loved this stop-motion feature as much as I loved Wallace & Gromit's latest outing, and particularly enjoyed the overt nod to the old Rankin-Bass theatrical feature Mad Monster Party? via the Peter Lorre maggot living in the bride's eye socket.

* DOMINO: Already wrote this up, but Tony Scott's latest multi-textural overload opus was a splendidly misanthropic road movie, a sister of sorts to Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects and the better of the two psycho-siblings at that.

OK, off to find some help sending this art off to the land of Fellini, Pasolini, Bava, Leone, Diabolik, Argento, Soavi and Fulci...

Don't Fulci Yourself!

I'm reeling with a flu-like cold and just wasn't up for writing here today. But I did put the finishing touches on my illustration for an Italian publisher's new book on Lucio Fulci, the director of late-'70s and early '80s gems like Don't Torture the Duckling, Schizo aka Woman in a Lizard's Skin, Gates of Hell, Zombie, House by the Cemetary, The Beyond and lots more (I've already written an article for the book -- on my initial drive-in and grindhouse experiences with all things Fulci -- which is being translated into Italian).

I then made the pilgrimage down the hill to Brattleboro to pick up my son Dan's drawing for the same project. Great to see Dan and my daughter/his sis Maia Rose, though I was by then suffering from the waning of my cold med and slipping into a mucous-dribbling rough beast slouching, so home agin home agin jiggedy jig I did go.

I've now got some scanning and touchup to do, then off it goes to the Smoky Man!

For some reason, I channeled Fulci via Charles Schulz and found the result amusing. It must be the cold meds.

Sniff --

More Faves of 2005, Part, uh, Four?

Time to wrap up my faves of 2005, as if anyone cares any longer.

First off, four films that would have made my faves of 2005, if I'd actually seen 'em in 2005:

* The Squid and the Whale
* Brokeback Mountain
* Oldboy
* In the Realms of the Unreal

...but I didn't, I just caught up with them, so I'll save writeups of those until later in the week (along with Syriana and Hostel, which I also caught on the big screen this week).

OK, to the point, the rest of my fave theatrical movies from 2005:

* A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE: A harrowing and deeply effecting drama from David Cronenberg that fulfills its promised meditation on violence (it is a contagion here, as it was in Michael Reeves's still-potent The Conqueror Worm) and the American psyche with haunting gravity and devastating clarity. Adapted from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vincent Locke (using only its premise and first act, choosing a different and much more introspective path for its narrative), this is a bookend of sorts to Jarhead and metaphorically the only film to date to begin to deal with the consequences of the trauma of the Iraq War on the home front. The wordless final setpiece is among the most quietly potent sequences of the decade; I cannot shake it.

* THE JACKET: The theatrical feature that most looked like an episode of Twilight Zone was George Clooney's excellent Good Night and Good Luck, but the most remarkable evocation of Rod Serling in many a year was The Jacket, which also offered the most potent meditation on the American zeitgeist that fueled Abu Ghraib. Though dismissed by most critics and folks I've talked to who saw it, I thought this was a beautifully executed weird tale, fusing Serling's wistful wish-fulfillment time-travel fantasies with his most sobering political indictments of human nature; an unsung jewel, chilling and moving.

* LORD OF WAR: Terrific, electric piece of work and among the best black comedies of the year, a driven narrative tracing the rise and rise of Nicholas Cage as arms dealer from the mean streets to the global marketplace. Exchanging only its subtext -- arms instead of oil -- this was the movie Syriana was purported to be.

* LORDS OF DOGTOWN: Among the best sleepers of the year was this sly and insightful biopic fictionalization of Dogtown and the Z-Boys (2001) produced and scripted by one of the Z-boys-who-made-good (Stacy Peralta) and directed by the woman who helmed Thirteen, Catherine Hardwicke. Standout cast, led by laid-back Elephant toehead John Robinson as Peralta and a top-notch turn from Emile Hirsch (The Mudge Boy, The Emperors Club, etc.) as Jay, but to my mind this was Heath Ledger's breakthrough flick. As Skip, the garage surfboard/skateboard manufacturer who recognizes and nurtures the Z-boys into transforming skateboarding as a sport only to see his potential fortune slip away as they each come into their own and the bigger mercantile sharks swim into the scene, Ledger strips his star persona to inhabit the role; as Skip and Jay veer into parallel paths, you can taste their sorrow. Great little film and a potent parable, not to be missed.

* MILLION DOLLAR BABY: Didn't see this until January of 2005, so it's on my year's fave list -- I've been a huge fan of Clint Eastwood as a filmmaker since his 1971 directing debut (with the 'jumper' rescue scene in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry and his official directorial maiden voyage with the fine suspenser Play Misty for Me), and the man just keeps making better and better movies while remaining one of the finest American storytellers working in the studio system. This one is among Eastwood's best, with his usual deft narrative touches (his character's ongoing non-debate with his church's pastor) and one of the year's most remarkable ensemble performances led by Morgan Freeman, Hilary Swank, and Clint.

* REDEYE: Jodie Foster might have boasted the higher profile airplane suspense flick (an evaporative remake of Alfred Hitchcock's venerable charmer The Lady Vanishes), but Wes Craven helmed the better movie in this effective thriller. Anchored by Cillian Murphy's galvanizing central performance as a beguiling boyish sociopath, this was made all the more engaging thanks to the target audience of teen girls I saw this with, who were reacting like a 42nd St. audience of yore (talking to the screen, shouting in terror, and at one point on their collective feet). It's on DVD and still quite engaging, but it was a real treat in the theater!

* WILD AND WOOLLY (1917): In a week when Marge and I caught a movie a night while vacationing in Maine, seeing all the new Hollywood summer movies, we both agreed we had our best night out at the movies on vaca when we made the pilgrimage to the Alamo Theater in Bucksport to catch this summer silent film festival showing of one of Douglas Fairbanks's rarest features. A whirlwind entertainment starring Fairbanks at his reckless daredevil best as a Eastern richboy in love with his fantasies of the wild west who is assigned to tend to his father's mining concerns in the real west circa 1917; wise to his fantasies, the locals dress up the town and play their roles to the hilt, but the inevitable clash of fantasy and reality -- even as Fairbanks saves the day -- lend this brisk comedy enough weight to work wonders. Grand fun, a timely snapshot of the 1917 west already in conflict with the pulp-and-movie fantasy west (anticipating some of the westerns of the '60s and '70s), and heads and tails above most 2005 movies!

* THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL: In a year of outstanding documentaries, this loving portrait of an amiable loner & amateur naturalist and his bond with a flock of tropical parrots that have settled in San Francisco was among the sweetest surprises. Just do yourself a favor and see it.

* Fave Remake of a 1970s Flick: I don't care what was written or said by most, for my dough the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 was the best of many unnecessary remakes, retaining enough fidelity to the John Carpenter original in atmosphere and suspense but inventive enough with its revamp, characterizations and setpieces that I savored the ride end-to-end. It also beat the living shit out of the luckluster The Fog, a by-the-numbers reboot which scuttled the best elements of the original Carpenter gem and failed to supplant those with anything of substance (or ectoplasm).

* Fave Sequence in an Unnecessary Remake:The final fifteen minutes of House of Wax, which transcended the fun I had with this film's enjoyably twisted revamp (not of Andre de Toth's House of Wax, but of a personal favorite 1970s gem Tourist Trap) to enter true nightmare turf as the 1950s-'60s traditional genre fiery finale was conflated to surreal extremes. No shit, I have had countless dreams/nightmares like this, with walls/stairs/floors and even human beings melting away underfoot and overhead; thus, for me, this uncanny climax plucked a primal and personal nerve that lifted the entire film to a level few theatrical films approach.

* Least Fave of 2005: Good God, Alone in the Dark was the suck! Who gives Uwe Bowel (oh, sorry, I meant, Boll) the money for these video-game travesties? From the interminable pre-credits narrative crawl to the numbingly braindead climax, I literally could not believe I was seeing this on a theatrical screen; it was worse than any Sci-Fi Channel opus I've ever seen, and there's been some real stinkers. In one way, this flick was sublime in its incessant stupidity and ground-zero devotion to the lowest common denominator; the lamest travesty with star power (I mean, Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff -- what the fuck??) since Species II, and incredibly even more offensively insipid. Next from Boll: Bloodrayne, already playing in some venues. I may have to go, just to savor the yawning abyss.

I may have missed something, but fuck it. It's 2006, and a New Year is well underway.

Followup conversation to my lengthy KING KONG analysis...

Bringing a conversation on a December comment thread to the fore:

An anonymous commenter responding to Tuesday, December 20, 2005's post "Off to Skull Island... (Part the Second)" just posted the following comment:

"I don't know what you're trying to say here, but I think I disagree. For one thing, much like Andy Serkis was Gollum, Ang Lee donned the mocap suit and provided a substantial portion of reference for the Hulk. The idea that CG is somehow so much more complex than 2d or stop-motion that an individual animator cannot be assigned to a character is also a false notion. In 2d features, any animator credited with with a particular character is in reality usually taking the lead on that character, and supervising a team who follow up in assisting, and animating other scenes. It is perfectly possible to have lead animators assigned to cg characters as well.

I agree with the general thrust, that it is probably better for one individual to take the lead in defining the character. A lot of the rest here seems to be the same slobbering reverential treatment that is so often thoughlessly given to Harryhausen and O'Brien. As if O'Brien and Harryhausen had some secret knowledge that has eluded the CG artists. And as if Jackson is somehow privy to this, being the Kong/stop-motion fan that he is.

It comes across as an attitude that might develop as a result of knowing the animators behind the stop-motion and cartoon films, but not knowing the artists behind the CG. Some of the key guys behind Kong had stellar stop-motion backgrounds, but that also is not neccesarily the key to why one performance worked, and another performance failed. Part of it is that these artists come from an artform that has matured, and while cg was in it's infancy, artists from stop-motion and traditional animation backgrounds have a century of work to build upon.

The reason the Hulks's performance was a failure is mostly down to the eyes. There were a few bizarre scenes that defied the law of gravity, but mostly it comes down to a lack of expressiveness in the eyes and face. You will see much the same thing in the mocapped film "The Polar Express". There is a glassy, detatched look that fails to engage with an audience. That's the main thing. Acting is done through the whole body, and limp gesturing doesn't help either, but it is mostly the eyes that let down these performances. Compare this to the expressiveness seen in films like the Incredibles."

[posted 1/12/2006]

Anonymous said...
additionaly, I believe the Hulk was almost handled entirely at ILM.

[posted 1/12/2006]

To which I've just replied -- and now bring up here, so everyone can read it and re-engage, if you wish --


SRBissette said...

"Hello, anonymous, and thanks for reading [my blog] and posting your comments.

My broad point is one I believe is true: whatever the medium (and in terms of stop-motion animation and CGI, I am not arguing anything is inherently "for" one or "against" another), the viewer responds unconsciously to the infusion of an artist's personality in a work. The viewer also 'feels' it when there's a vacuum there -- no infusion of personality -- or when piecemeal work doesn't add up to a coherent infusion of personality: a character.

Even in the context of a lengthy, five-part writeup (a far broader canvas than any publisher would ever offer me), I have had to rely on a certain amount of shorthand. I chose to reference Harryhausen and O'Brien not to lionize them per se or argue stop-motion as inherently superior (it isn't; we could cite many sloppy and characterless stop-motion-driven films of yore: THE LOST CONTINENT, DINOSAURUS!, THE GIANT BEHEMOTH, etc.), but to make the point that when there's a strong guiding hand (in the case of O'Brien) or clearly individualized puppeteer/animator (Harryhausen, Tytla), the results usually engage viewers on a more compelling level.

Given the one-two punch of Gollum and Kong with Jackson and Serkis's collaborative efforts with the WETA team, it seems obvious to me they've forged the first compelling means of coherent characterization via CGI in the context of live-action/CGI fantasy (clearly, PIXAR and others have amply demonstrated strong characterization in all-CGI features and shorts). This is the first coherent expression of a new principle in such films, and as such worth noting and discussing.

I chose THE HULK as a handy reference point; your noting the lack of life in the eyes of the character is accurate and I agree, but you're missing my point. THE HULK failed in part because the effects-created character didn't have an identifiable personality; as the CINEFX article detailed (the most intensive in-print analysis of the film's production I know of), yes, ILM handled the effects by and large, but it was still a fragmented affair -- typical of today's productions -- and there was no coherent expression of a potent and individualized enough personality in the Hulk. The fact that the Hulk, as a character, also bore no relation to Eric Bama's performance (as alter-ego Bruce Banner) was an even graver flaw (though as the TV series proved, the separation of performances -- Banner and Hulk embodied by different performers or, in the case of the film, methods of performance -- still could have worked, had the Hulk been a identifiable personality in and of himself). That the HULK was "almost handled entirely at ILM" misses the point: to my mind, much of what ILM has produced is technically accomplished but devoid of character or soul, and that's another discussion altogether.

As masters of the form like Phil Tippett (to cite the man whose career spans both stop-motion animation and CGI) have noted time and time again, this is character creation & animation, not just special effects. This is clearly central to the success or failure of a given film when the titular centerpiece of a given film -- KING KONG, THE HULK -- is a single character. In terms of characterization alone, the striking contrast between the failure of Ang Lee/ILM's THE HULK and the success of Jackson, Serkis, WETA's KING KONG is obvious, and worth analysis.

As the excellent two-part CINEFX group interview of top-drawer effects/CGI celebrities and experts hammered home, almost all contemporary Hollywood films are dependent upon collapsing postproduction pressures that demand "more and more" (quantitatively and in terms of superficial quality) effects in less and less time, forcing increasing piecemeal farming-out of specific setpieces and effects while cutting off artists from active involvement in films in their seminal creative phases. Thus, the organic involvement on a pre-production level that was characteristic of the best work of O'Brien and Harryhausen is increasingly remote -- in fact, if you want to get into it, O'Brien's post-MIGHTY JOE YOUNG career anticipated the norm of how such fantasy films are produced today, with O'Brien and Pete Peterson reduced to 'hired hands' rushing their best efforts through compressed post-production windows, their final efforts mismatched with sequences by other effects houses (see THE GIANT BEHEMOTH, the complete version, that includes the laughable ferry boat sequence O'Brien & Peterson had nothing to do with) or compromised by cheapjack producer shorthand (see THE BLACK SCORPION, where it was decided the black matte was sufficient for the climax, though the animation was completed). Harryhausen saw this and correctly diagnosed what was happening to his beloved mentor; thus, Harryhausen forged his relationship with a producer (Charles Schneer) and maintained a strong enough hand as co-producer in that relationship to remain integrally involved with all facets of production. As Paul M. Jensen has accurately noted (in his remarkable career-spanning analysis of Harrhausen's films), this was as much of a detriment as a strength: for Harryhausen and his methods, directors were interchangable functionaries, and many of the films suffer for that.

It seems obvious to me that, despite enormous odds, Peter Jackson and WETA have developed a comparable model for the new era of filmmaking we're all enjoying. This has been facilitated in part by their geographic specificity of production (New Zealand), which has granted both an autonomy almost impossible in Hollywood today; but there's also no denying the track record they've racked up with the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy and now KONG also is critical to their autonomy. Across the board, as a team, they've infused everything they've done with tremendous personality and power, in stark contrast to the sterile soullessness of Lucas's empire (and, by extension, some of ILM's efforts, though there are lovely exceptions to that assessment). Thus, Jackson, Serkis, and WETA present a new template -- related to the old (of O'Brien in his prime, and Harryhausen throughout his career), and most importantly artist-driven from top to bottom rather than commerce-driven.

Your observations and assessment of POLAR EXPRESS are also on the money; in one draft of my writeup, I began to address that film, too, but chose to cut back and maintain my focus on live-action/CGI fusion fantasy. That it led to a rather extensive diversion (in which I wondered aloud if Robert Zemeckis was the 'problem,' citing Jackson's THE FRIGHTENERS as the obvious bridge between the two filmmakers -- Zemeckis produced the film -- and the least personable of Jackson's films as well) also prompted me to cut that digression, which is neither here nor there.

Thanks for pushing for further discussion -- happy to engage further!"

I'll add a few points here:

* Yes, I know Willis O'Brien and Pete Peterson worked on THE GIANT BEHEMOTH (1959), one of the films I cite as a 'bad' stop-motion example. Note my contextualization of this later in my reply; like all of O'Brien's post-1949 projects, O'Brien and Pete Peterson were relegated to freelancers contributing effects as outside contractors, far from the heyday of O'Brien's studio-subsidized work under the umbrella producer Merian C. Cooper offered at RKO.

* Yes, I know Phil Tippett was among ILM's effects team. That's no longer the case, nor has it been for some time, hence my reference to Tippett and ILM as separate entities.

* If anyone wishes, I'm happy to dip into the ol' SpiderBaby library and cite book titles, magazine titles/dates, etc. regarding my references in the reply. In the context of the comment thread, though, I was writing off the top of my head and what was in easy reach.

Carry on!

Sample contract: The Bold New Era of Electronic Media

Back in July of 2005, I replied at length to one of Dave Sim's letters (the back and forth is posted at the Creator Bill of Rights site forever accessible from the menu at your right). Relevent to the discussion underway here, I've decided to open up discussion of actual contracts and legal documents that have crossed my desk since the late 1990s by citing the particulars of the most recently rejected contract.

Before we get into this, let me remind everyone I am not an attorney or in any way practiced in law. My insights and discussion is founded upon three decades of freelancing, and my considerable experience with contracts as a freelancer.

Here we go:

I can’t address contemporary indy comics contracts with any particular insight, as the only ones I’ve been privy to aren’t mine to discuss, but it is interesting to note that yours [Dave Sim's] statement “...when creators essentially started getting absolute rights and leaving the publishers with no rights or few rights and certainly few venues by which to profit from being publishers” is already being aggressively addressed in other markets.

Note, for instance, that your suggestion for some sort of industry standard for terms by which a publisher might be rewarded long-term for offering beneficial advice is already precluded by existing agreements that must be signed before submissions are even considered, in which the freelancer acknowledges other work just like it might already be under consideration -- effectively signing away any proprietary rights to one’s work just to have it considered for publication. In the vernacular of the Roy Rogers westerns, “Cut ‘em off at the pass!”

[Note: I will find a copy of this type of pre-submission document and post it here in the near future. Continuing:]

Intellectual property is the coin of the 21st Century, and we’re seeing how this is playing out in multiple fields. It’s been interesting to see how some of the recent contracts I’ve been offered address this situation. In all venues -- comics, magazines, newspapers -- the coin of the realm is clearly that which can be translated to other media. In many such agreements, language providing the illusion of creator ownership (and illusion of negotiation, when they are almost always take-it-or-leave-it fait accompli agreements) while assuring the publisher gets the real goods has become as tortured as the U.S. Attorney General’s justification for the current administration’s treatment of detainees (how’s that for hyperbole?).

The most inventive of these basically spell out all the rights the publisher is acquiring (often for a song), while acknowledging somewhere along the line something called copyright stills belongs to the author/creator -- after the contract has effectively stripped away anything of value from such ownership.

Case in point: after completing a trio of articles for a local newspaper for which I’ve written off and on since 1998 (including over a year as a regular weekly columnist), and which is now owned by a larger media corporation, my standard pay invoice procedure was interrupted by an apologetic letter from the editor and the following contract.

This is not the first time I’ve seen this kind of retroactive “your pay for THIS job now grants us THESE rights going back to 19--” contracts; the first time I saw it was, of course, Marvel’s “blanket work-for-hire” contract in 1978, the first and last time I ever signed this kind of reprehensible document; the first time I saw it in the magazine market was Starlog Communications’ retroactive work-for-hire contract in the early 1990s, after I’d caught them reprinting my copyrighted Gorezone column “With My Eyes Peeled” in their Italian editions without negotiation, permission, or payment. It’s too bad, as it means one simply refuses payment, refuses to sign, and loses another venue for work -- but they lose another creator/author in turn. All of this cumulatively marginalizes all but those freelancers with either the clout to insist upon genuine negotiations and mutually beneficial contracts, or those willing to sign anything for any level of work for any level of payment.

I am presenting the contract as it was received, mere days ago, and offer it as a current legal document circulating in the journalism and newspaper field, with parenthetical numbers to footnote my comments, which follow.
___

Dear Contributor to [the Publisher],

This letter is an agreement between you and [the Publisher] concerning materials you submit for publication (“Materials”). You will be paid fees for these Materials as negotiated between us on a per-piece basis (1). You agree that any such Materials will be your own work in which [the Publisher] will enjoy non-exclusive “publication rights.” (2) [the Publisher]’s “publication rights” shall include the right to publish and republish the Materials; the right not to publish the work, despite having paid for publication; to create derivative works; to use, adapt, modify, perform, transmit or reproduce such Materials and derivatives therefrom in any form or medium, whether now or hereafter, throughout the world, including, without limitation, compilation, microfilm, electronic or other databases, and any digital format in any medium, and to transfer or sublicense any of the publication rights to any entity controlled by or acting for the benefit of [the Publisher] or with whom [the Publisher] contracts.

Notwithstanding this grant of right, three days after first publication of your work in [the Publisher’s venue], you may republish the Materials in any form or medium without geographical restrictions. (3)

You agree that you will be the sole author of the material, which will be original work by you, free of plagiarism, that all facts and statements in the Materials are true and that the Materials do not infringe upon any copyright, right of privacy, proprietary right, right of publicity or any other right of a third party.

You agree that [the Publisher] has the right to edit the Materials as it deems appropriate for publication, and that you will cooperate with [the Publisher] in editing and otherwise reviewing the material prior to publication. You will cooperate with [the Publisher] if any complaints, claims or litigation should arise against [the Publisher] regarding your Materials, and if you comply with the terms of this agreement, you will be entitled to any applicable coverage arising from any applicable [Publisher] policies respecting your Materials. You agree that the Materials include any works by you published by [the Publisher] since September 1, 1995 (4). You retain copyright to all Materials covered by this contract (5).

You are responsible for the payment of all federal, state and/or local taxes with respect to the services you perform for [the Publisher] (6) as an independent contractor. [The Publisher] will not treat you as an employee for any purpose (7).

The submission of Materials by you as a freelancer, as well as the receipt of payment for such Materials is a binding acknowledgement of the grant of these rights to [the Publisher], which will be relied upon by [the Publisher] and other entities with which [the Publisher] may contract (8). In addition, your endorsement of any check issued to you shall constitute your confirmation of the continued existence of this agreement (9). If this is acceptable, please sign and date the enclosed copy of this letter, provide your Social Security number, and return the signed copy to me.

We look forward to working with you (10).
__

(1) Note: Nothing was negotiated -- this contract was for work already published last month, which was invoiced per usual sans any such document or signing required. Negotiation has been actively discouraged, leaving me in the position to explicitly state what they cannot do with my work, insist upon payment or be willing to lose that earned income, and go. I have, in fact, been until now paid by this Publisher the same per-piece rate I was first paid in 1998, with the understanding per verbal agreement in 1999 that they are purchasing one-time, first-time rights only with no electronic media or online publication rights. Whenever a per-piece rate increase has been inquired about, it has resulted in nothing being renegotiated -- and, in the case of my weekly column, mutual termination of relations -- hence the increasing infrequency of my writing for this publisher.

(2) These are their quotations marks, not mine.

(3) However, one’s rights to said material are so compromised by this contract that one could not, for instance, do so via an agreement with a subsequent publisher or venue that required the very next paragraph of this contract be observed: that one’s rights to the Material does “...not infringe upon any copyright... proprietary right... or any right of a third party,” in which case this Publisher would be an infringed-upon third party. This is the Catch-22 of the contract, implying the author has rights left to sell or traffic after signing this document. The author does not.

(4) Ah, the zinger, neatly buried in paragraph four. For all intents and purposes, this means if I accept the $75 due me for the three articles being invoiced -- a pittance -- I have retroactively revised my prior agreement with the Publisher, and signed away all rights to almost two years worth of weekly columns I am about to anthologize in book form, and all other articles, some of which I have already resold to other publishers over the past seven years.

(5) Another beaut, buried at the end of paragraph four -- after, of course, having stripped away all rights relevant to one’s ownership of copyright. Beware this kind of language in all contracts; I have seen this sort of language and placement rendering copyright ownership moot in two comics publishers contracts since 1997.

(6) Note the shift from Materials -- a finite, defined quantity -- to “services.” I am not a lawyer, and cannot articulate what this means.

(7) This is standard work-for-hire language, BTW. Signing this agreement gives one none of the benefits of an employee, none of the benefits of a freelancer, as far as I can see.

(8) Note that, with signing, the author has already implicitly agreed to multiple contracts with entities other than the Publisher. This statement here means one has done more than explicitly agreed to the Materials as a transferable property, but indeed has agreed to unknown/undefined contracts with unknown/unspecified entities.

(9) The 2005 corporate media variant on the old Marvel ‘back of check’ agreement: “endorsement of ANY check issued to you” (my emphasis) explicitly extending the terms and “continued existence of this agreement” -- hence, it is both retroactive, per the penultimate sentence in paragraph four, but also covers all future Materials once checks are endorsed.

(10) Not bloody likely in what’s left of this lifetime.
______

Having now offered you the complete contents of a contract submitted to this freelance writer as recently as June of 2005, may I humbly suggest we all agree the Creator Bill of Rights is still relevant, and to more media than just comics?

[End of July CBR site letter excerpt.]

By the way, that issue was never 'resolved' -- that is, despite my calls to the paper's relevent editor, and the suggestion from said editor "we get together on this next week," I never signed, the newspaper never paid me, and my attempts to pursue the matter were simply ignored. In my experience, this is how these matters are 'resolved' by many publishers, and how freelancers 'lose' an account -- when the terms of employment are suddenly supplanted with a revisionist, almost always retroactive Draconian "new agreement" (which no one has agreed to). If one asks for negotiation or demurs, end of story. End of account.

[To be continued as time permits...]

Interlude: A day of CCS is like a day of...

As I'm bundling off to the north country for the day, here's a brief break from the comics-industry-related posts.

Today the online University of Vermont class that I've been teaching with filmmaker Walter Ungerer comes to an end. I've just posted the new day's (and final) online material, and save for the discussion board exchange to come, that's that for the active engagement. Final projects and journal assessment, and then grading, follow next week.

It's been a two-week one-credit class built around a diverse selection of Walter's films -- which they access via a three-DVD set purchased with the class workbook, viewing one short film per night and a feature and two shorts during the two weekends -- and a lively ride. This is the second year Walter and I have done this, and if all goes well we'll be doing it again. I'll keep you posted.

For me, there are longterm implications. Having learned some of the ins and outs of this particular online teaching technology and venue, I can see where this is an ideal medium for teaching comics -- and hope that may be realized one day (perhaps in conjunction with the Center for Cartoon Studies and Henderson State University, or mayhaps they and The Joe Kubert School? I can dream, can't I?). If so, count me in as an instructor.

It's been an intensive educator-oriented couple of weeks for me, between CCS preparations, seeing to/co-teaching the UVM online class daily, and popping in at Bennington VT's Mt. Anthony High School last week to deliver three lectures on comics, graphic novels, and my work in a row to a mixed group of high school students. The zinger for all three groups were my panel-by-panel presentations of some of my own comics works, including complete stories; the popular fave (coaxing gasps and chatter from the crowd as the last panel appeared and I read the final caption) was "Sleeper", a four-page horror tale originally published in Shriek (FantaCo Enterprises), and two of the groups also enjoyed a reading/showing of "Seeker", which originally saw print in Secrets of Haunted House (DC Comics). So, two ghost stories and a lot of comics, graphic novel, and personal history from yours truly, heavily illustrated (thanks to the power of laptop computer slide show technology), all in 45-50 minute timeslots. Whew -- still, all have gone well. I'll be doing it all over again in Danville in February, and elsewhere, no doubt, before the winter is over.

I've also been cranking on two scripts, which may account for tonight's sleepless night. Between too much time at the keyboard/computer and too much whirling in my head (it's been great fun to reconnect with the medium comics via these scripts, which I won't be drawing -- no, I'm not telling!), I found myself just laying in the dark for two-three hours while Marge snoozed beside me, so I tottered downstairs to type this post as today's entry. Afterwards, back to bed, and hopefully some sound sleep!

I'm visiting my filmmaking friend Nora Jacobson this afternoon (the director of the excellent My Mother's Early Lovers and Nothing Like Dreaming) before popping in to the Center for Cartoon Studies to powwow with James Sturm and Michelle Ollie over some end-of-semester stuff from last month and some before-next-semester stuff in anticipation of the new semester starting on the 23rd of this month.

Then it's time to hunker down with the students stranded in White River Junction during break over a pizza and some beverage and brighten their night with a private screening of my favorite Mexi-Monster movie El Baron del Terror aka The Brainiac, in which Abel Salazar slyly silver-spoons brain bon mots between bouts of Liberace-like suave and transformations into his head-inflating, tubular-double-digit-twitching madness as -- the Brainiac! Per usual, I'm also icing the program with some weird & wild short subjects, adding up to two hours of big fun before I slip & slide the 90 minute ride home.

No, sorry, you can't come with.

But, thanks to Al Nickerson (thanks, Al!), who brought the following link to my attention yesterday, you can vicariously visit the CCS online right now right

here!

(Oddly enough, the moniker for Tim, the man behind the CCS online tour, is "Tundraboy" -- man, can't we ever get away from Tundra?? BTW, neither CCS nor I have anything to do with the site Tim sponsors or his post, so enjoy the non-commercial peek at CCS.)

So, like, we'll sorta like see you there, but -- well, not.

Ketchup Kontinued: Creator Bill of Rights Discussion Redux, Part Two (for Tuesday/Wednesday)

[Please see today's first post for the beginning of this piece.]

The problem lies, in part, in the fact that in the 1980s, when I first met Dave, most creators in my neophyte shoes were still dealing with -- and on the losing end of -- what is called in economist circles information asymmetry. That is, a situation in which one party involved in a given transaction has "better information" than another party. Dave was the first person I crossed paths with who not only knew this, but who was already dedicated to discussing that gross imbalance and addressing the information asymmetry by trying to arm the uninformed party -- creators -- with some measure of information from the other party's side (the publishers) in hopes of redressing the balance.

There was nothing in this for Dave, mind you, save for the possible search for true peers in a community wherein he had few, if any, peers, and the hope of enlightening a portion of that community. Some (primarily Fantagraphics pundits) have passionately argued this was Dave's campaign to solicit and swell the ranks of self-publishers, as if there were some inherent stake in that for Dave. In cold pragmatic light of day, that argument holds little water: the urge to breed competitors where there are few makes little sense in capitalist terms, and there's never been a demonstratable market clout inherent in the formation of any such block, due in large part to the fact that truly independent market forces (which self-publishers are, by definition) are unable to pull together effectively in economic terms. Hell, even small independent self-publishers have failed at that effort, as some of us saw in the late 1980s when the impossibility of competing direct sales comicbook publishers/volatile personalities arriving at common goals, much less common action, was amply demonstrated.

My personal experience with Dave was that waking some of us the fuck up seemed to be the be-all and end-all of his effort. Dave gave a great deal to John Totleben and I to realize Taboo; Dave gave a great deal of time, knowledge and conversation to me over the years. There was nothing in it for him; in fact, all of this must have been quite draining and depleting.

In the matter of standard comicbook industry terms circa 1983-86, there can be no doubt that information asymmetry was the status quo. Publishers -- and I'm not just talking about DC and Marvel here, but even 'creator friendly' publishers like Eclipse, First Comics, and Dark Horse -- did their best to maintain a "healthy" information asymmetry that served their needs while habitually pulling the wool over the eyes of a majority of the creative freelance community. At that time, remember, publishers not only discouraged the involvement of agents and attornies as representatives for creators: by my own experience (and events I witnessed), they would cut off negotiations at the first hint of such representation, with the noteworthy exception of Mike Friedrich, who was an 'accepted' enough member of the comics community with a defined-enough talent pool to be tolerated. I can attest from personal experience, circa 1977-1987, that not only was active discussion of creator rights issues discouraged in most social gatherings beyond personal kitchen or convention hotel room conversations, it was considered ill manners to even go there.

This may make some sense of the uproar over Marvel's refusal to return Jack Kirby's artwork, and the vehemence with which the creator community expressed their outrage, but also the venom with which publishers (with the significant exception of a few: Fantagraphics, who actively 'led' the charge by providing coverage and activist involvement, was the notable exception) retaliated. The latter aspect of the furor is forgotten today, but I remember well the retribution exacted against a select few, and the pathetic nature of the comics community's reaction to that (again, with the notable exception of the Comics Journal). Tacked up on my studio wall for a time was the cover of an issue of The Comics Buyers' Guide from that fateful few months, which featured the headline "Captain America Fired!" as the prominent feature, and tucked into the lower left corner of the same cover, the tiny byline "Marv Wolfman Fired" -- that summed it up in a nutshell for me. Fantasy comics character fired: BIG news. Real-life creator fired (in part over Marv having signed the TCJ petition supporting Kirby): who cares?

I'm afraid the same goes in the contemporary environment, with a few twists and turns. Just as publishers like First Comics, Eclipse Comics, Continuity, WaRP, etc. presented a facade of "creator ownership" to obfuscate their true dealings with way-too-many of the freelancers they dealt with, especially as the lucrative allure of licensing (from both ends: publishing licensed properties, and licensing published work to outside media) asserted itself, we have arrived since the mid-1990s at a similar "it's all OK here" facade for prominent publishers and imprints pretending to be something other than what they are. Dark Horse, Vertigo, Image, et al profer one face within the community, and another in their contracts and actual dealings: the former, public, the latter, behind closed-door and sealed in binding non-disclosure agreements.

Not that the legal clauses are necessary (and never binding until one signs on the dotted line). As in the 1980s, those who dare to publicly address this information asymmetry are most efficiently dealt with via ostracization, passive and aggressive.

I'm quite used to it, after 20 something years of it. Whether it's the distance one-time friends maintained and defended in the late 1990s, or the dismissal from Warren Ellis on his forum (caricaturing those willing to engage in such discussion -- read, Dave and I -- as mentally suspect), it's a fact of life I accepted long ago. Whether one is a pro unwilling to get into the real ethics inherent in ongoing transactions with the compromised environment, or an entry-level or aspiring pro adverse to being lumped in with the mental deficients engaged in such conversation over creator rights, ethics, etc. matters not at all to me: it's all the same. An unwillingness to engage for the greater good; an "I got mine" or "God, I'll never get mine if I speak up" atmosphere of repression and dread.

The few left standing in the direct sales comic market professional community are either pros dependent on existing venues or publishers providing those venues, and the information asymmetry necessary to maintaining that delicate balance among so few players musn't be upset. I'm given, privately in conversation or via email, occasional industry updates and assessments I'm told not to share; after my retirement from comics in 1999, it became much easier to honestly say, "Look, I'm not going to say a thing, I really don't care," and mean it.

Dave neatly sums up the current dirth of discussion of the key issues in his opening paragraph:

"I think we should have expected things to slow down--it's pretty discouraging stuff for guys who are trying to stay optimistic and I don't think the fact that the comic-book field once again resolves pretty much exclusively around Marvel and DC's super-heroes can be underrated as a factor. If you can get a hold of a copy of Comics & Games Retailer and read the Market Report that's in every issue where retailers chart the hits and misses in their stores there is only the very, very, very rare mention of any title that isn't a Marvel or DC super-hero title. Marvel and DC have a very specific relationship with Creator's Rights that definitely puts those rights a distant second to their preferred method of owning things outright. So if your interest is to make a splash in the field, Marvel and DC are the doorway and that doorway tends to lead in one direction. I'm sure for most creators reading these discussions it must be like finding out the roulette wheel is rigged. What do you want to stick around for? You're really down to the compulsive gamblers at that point (in this case the creators who have grown up in an environment where Marvel and DC are the defining environments and who consequently have to, one way or the other--either by lying to themselves or lying to others--adjust their thinking to believing that the Marvel and DC way of doing things is the best way of doing things). “Hey, it's the only game in town.” Which is not to say that it's completely rigged. I'm sure Neil Gaiman would be the first to tell you that Paul Levitz does carve you out a fairer deal if you start charting Gaiman-sized numbers and that definitely needs to be acknowledged as a step up from Siegel and Shuster's treatment. But it's a long way from the comic-book Nirvana that everyone seems to have a compulsive need to see every step along the way. “Everything's fine now.” Obviously these discussions tend to view it as “Some things have improved but everything is far from fine.” If you don't want to see that--and I would maintain that probably 98% of creators really don't want to see that--you're not going to stick around and read about or contribute to a discussion of creator's rights. Hence the sound of crickets chirping."

Indeed, it's finally time to begin posting legal documents and airing the core issues -- with the goal of not only shining light into some deliberately darkened nooks and crannies, but to propose some viable alternatives.

[to be continued...]
______

Before I continue with this line of discussion, I hasten to point out that Mark Martin is joining the conversation, and he's already opened up a fresh vein of discussion: What were the expectations of those who participated in the historic summit that yielded the Creator Bill of Rights?

This is something Dave Sim has addressed from his point of view, as has Scott McCloud, Rick Veitch, and yours truly in our initial posts to Al Nickerson's site. Until now, though, participants like Mark haven't gone on the public record, and this is important. Check it out from the get-go on Mark's site

Jabberous: New CBR/Summit Insights --

-- which begins with Mark's January 10th post. Be sure to check out the stream of comments on that (those) threads, too, and the conversation continues there.

Ketchup Kontinued -- Part One for Tuesday/Wednesday

OK, I'm reconstructing the lost post of Monday AM -- now more relevent than ever, given Mark Martin's engaging with the discussion, thanks to his exchanges with Al Nickerson. Links to follow; I'll be chipping away at this through the day, posting as I go, so please bear with me.

Dave Sim's latest letter on Al's site touches upon some of my posts on this very blog, and prompts a reply. Mind you, I'll be addressing the broader issues in a longer letter intended for Al's site -- hosting the ongoing discussion of Creator Rights -- but this seems as good a time as any to get into a few issue-specific points.

Here's an excerpt from Dave's letter, specific to my prior posts on this blog:

"Yeah, I think this might have done it. Driving away what limited participation we had from the creative community. The mythology that the major company contracts have just been getting better and better (“EVERYthing's fine now.”) takes a direct hit in finding out that seven years earlier Bissette got the same one I got. Plus, for a lot of guys with stars in their eyes the fact that Steve Bissette can't get a foot in the door at Vertigo is like finding out that Paul McCartney can't book recording time at Abbey Road studios. I mean it doesn't surprise me.  There's the “ins” and the “outs” at the companies--'twas ever thus--and the Neil Gaimans are the rare exceptions and not the rule. But it is very hard on the perception that runs very deep in the comic-book soul that all your hard work for DC and Marvel is like money in the bank not only while you're banging out your pages but that there's a Long Term Good Will Jackpot once you've served up a hit for them. “What have you done for us lately?” unfortunately is always more the company attitude. After all, this is the generation (or the generation right after the one: generations come and go so fast these days) that was weaned on Moore, Bissette and Totelben's Swamp Thing and would be starting from the baseline assumption that Bissette is the problem. If he would just get over his crankiness and his belligerence and let bygones be bygones and go and visit Karen Berger and his long-lost Vertigo family he'd be welcomed back with group hugs all around and given carte blanche to do whatever he wanted and a nice fat happy Neil Gaiman contract to boot. I'm not really being facetious, I don't think. The fact that Steve was given the same “take it or leave it” boilerplate contract for his proposed projects that I--as a marginal presence and first time potential participant--was given for the proposed Fables short-short speaks volumes about the non-Neil Gaiman end of Vertigo and of DC and of mainstream comic books in general. And those are volumes that creators don't want to read, unfortunately. I mean, heck, Steve Bissette is the absolute toppermost of the poppermost cutting-edge guy when it comes to comic-book horror--still!--just on the basis of what he did with Swamp Thing and Taboo and he can't get a project green-lighted at Vertigo even under their crap work-made-for-hire terms? That's just too sad. But look at the reaction of the comic-book field: given the choice between thinking badly of Steve Bissette or thinking badly of Vertigo, it's a no-brainer. If Steve Bissette is right (which he obviously is) then the average creator following in his career footsteps is walking into a potential death trap where they could end up as he did--producing hundreds of pages of top-flight well-thought-of work and ending up like Jerry Seigel. Except nobody offered to buy Bissette an overcoat after they kicked him out the door. Maybe if he got a job as a messenger in Manhattan?"

True enough, Dave. As Dave knows from personal experience, it's no fun being a pariah, but so it goes. With few exceptions, the pro realm of comics was just as glad to see me go. For my own part, I uprooted, I got on with it, found other ways to get by in the world, and have been much happier since. Since being a messenger for DC isn't on my future job agenda (nor is returning to mainstream comics), I'll get by just fine without comics.

As far as DC goes, from the time I departed from Swamp Thing as penciller, the only door that occasionally opened was as a 'guest writer' for that title in the fairly immediate wake of that departure. I followed that through to the work Keith Giffen and I did on a proposed Eclipso project, which actually got all the way to a contract negotiation -- deep-sixed by a low script rate and DC's negotiation "tactics" of the time (their way or the highway). I persevered nonetheless throughout the late '80s and 1990s; I didn't write off DC. My files harbor a fair number of project proposals I prepared or was involved with (including fairly polished and extensive proposals -- including scripts, full issue breakdowns and completed covers -- prepped with folks like Tom Veitch, Rick Hautala, Michael Zulli, Jack Butterworth, etc.) that were offered to DC and Vertigo, all for naught. Oh, well; no worries. I kept working on other things, up to and including Tyrant, and remained productive until deciding to step away from comics altogether at the end of '99.

Corporations do hold grudges as well or better than many frail mortals, and aside from the legal redirecting of creator ownership (relevent to the character of John Constantine) that emerged during my DC years, I've never directly benefitted from the hard-fought 'rights' battles fought with DC during the 1980s. As I've said here and elsewhere, I believe my role in those battles is part-and-parcel of the reasons I'll never benefit from the "new DC" era; it's been made quite clear to me there's no open doors there, even when the doors were tentatively teased opened (last in 1997-98). No love lost, but the belief, as Dave so neatly puts it, that if I would just "let bygones be bygones and go and visit Karen Berger and his long-lost Vertigo family [I'd] be welcomed back with group hugs all around and given carte blanche to do whatever [I] wanted and a nice fat happy Neil Gaiman contract to boot" is a tenacious one in comics fandom. It malingers to this day -- I just got an email from a fan to that effect on New Year's Day! -- and my stating otherwise is seen as just further evidence of my crabby disposition, ironically reinforcing the illusion that this is a situation I fomented and somehow cling to.

But that doesn't change the fundamental issues, nor the comics environment. Though I've been out of the old circles now for over six years, all evidence is that the old status quo holds. The fact that the Vertigo contract I was given a peek at in 1997-98 was something I wouldn't have agreed to on my own pet projects (but would have on the Swamp Thing-related projects I was invited to propose and did propose, including a Nukeface miniseries and an original Swamp Thing miniseries) is relevent, but that wasn't the insurmountable obstacle at that juncture: something "else" was going on, as Neil himself found out when he proposed the one-shot ten-page story we (Neil, John Totleben, and I) eventually completed for Neil's anthology Midnight Days.

Still, that Vertigo contract is a telling document. With the notable exception of the very different realm of mainstream book publishing, where the newer generations of comics creators are thankfully yielding some measure of acceptance along with venues and benefits denied all prior generations of comic book creators (note, I am citing "comic book", not comic strip) -- a realm closed to most of my generation of creators, and that's just how it is -- the Vertigo contract Dave posted is a pretty eye-opening dose of reality for many.

Until or unless other Vertigo folks step into the conversation, the contract Dave posted on the Creator Bill of Rights site stands as representative of "the deal," and as previously noted on this blog, that agreement is identical to the sample contract I was mailed in 1997-98.

[to be continued later today & tomorrow...]

Awwwwwww...

I had a brilliant blog ready for today, then the power bipped out, and it was gone, just like that.

So, sorry, it'll wait until tomorrow.

Oddly enough, my son Dan and I were joking about the virtues of analog vs. digital just this morning. Huh. I shoulda listened.

Sunday, Ketchup Sunday...

Ketchup time!

* Though I'm hardly the world's greatest Barry Windsor Smith fan, I do love his work, and happily jumped at acknowledging one of my fave Smith comics delights when Alan David Doane invited me to offer something to his current preview of

BWS's new project.

Make the leap over there; see what I had to say, and savor the BWS art preview!

* Al Nickerson, bless him, is continuing to post the exchange of letters concerning the Creator Bill of Rights, and Dave Sim's latest neatly summarizes a few of the key issues and brings the 2005 conversation to a neat juncture. It's waiting for you at

The Great Creator Bill of Rights Debate.

Dave comments on my own blog posts right here, as well as on issues and letters relevent to (or from) Tundra, Neal Adams, Alan Moore, and Gary Reed, and it's worth a read.

Al also accelerates the process by posting

A Proposed Contract for Creators who wish to work with Other Creators.

This particular document is, according to Al, a verbatim post of the "Kenmore and Nihilist-Man team-up contract," reflecting his own efforts to apply the principles of the Creator Bill of Rights to his own non-work-for-hire collaborative efforts.

The intent now, for 2006, is for this exchange to yield a number of 'boilerplate contracts' that Dave, Al and others are proposing as viable templates and/or alternatives to the 21st Century status quo the environment currently seems to be settled into. For this process to yield anything of value, the active participation of more than the few thus far involved would be invaluable, if members of the standing comics community have the werewithal to do so.

More on this later today and tomorrow...

“Watch out, Steve, I’m a conservative!” was said to me a day or two ago by someone I quite like and respect.

Maybe so, but last time I looked up the word (for a post on this blog), the word “conservative” in no way embraced the kind of radical ideological extremism and impatient, bullying arrogant pig-ignorance this President and Administration have inflicted on the planet.

Let me be blunt:

George W. Bush and the present “conservatives” in power are not conservative by any stretch of that word’s definition. If you can demonstrate to me otherwise, I am listening -- but first, please, look up the word “conservative,” and let’s agree to adhere to that word’s common English language definition as our starting point.

From the time it was evident -- truthfully, the first time I heard him speak -- that George W. Bush had delusions of adequacy, it has been an offense to even imagine the man as our President.

He has proven that first impression correct every single day since.

This is not prejudicial, nor is it some sort of partisan fealty to some opposing party (it isn’t, I’m independent, and that don’t mean “Independent,” thanks). This is just keeping my eyes & ears open, seeing and hearing what we all see and hear, and remaining honest with myself.

I am tired of having used toilet paper (excuse me, is that our Constitution and Bill of Rights?) crammed in my mouth daily by blinkered tools insisting that if I don’t like the taste of fresh ass-wipe, I am by definition “unpatriotic.” We having all been force fed shit for over five years (not counting the Reagan and prior Bush presidencies, of course), and all we know today better than we knew five years ago is that (a) shit tastes like shit and (b) Bush is not a conservative. If you fail to recognize either (a) or (b) as valid, by all means, go & enjoy enjoy your daily diet of dung, but don’t tell me it’s “good,” or “American,” and fuck you if you think me unpatriotic.

Just thought I’d get all that right out in the open, in case I had been in the least bit vague at any point.

Have a great weekend!

"Mr. President, Have Pity on the Working Man..."

(That's a Randy Newman song, y'all. Check it out.)

The news this morning reports that President Bush is pushing a new “critical languages” education program, and setting up funding for it, too. Whew. Apparently, military academy and university students will all soon be learning Chinese, various Middle East languages (Farci, Pashtu, etc. -- about time, y'think?), etc. -- but what I wanna know is, when are we going to see funding of a program to teach us all Bushese?

That’s perhaps the most “critical language” of all.

After over five years, you'd think we'd have it down. But no, with every speech, there are more questions -- I mean, I read English. President Bush seems to be speaking some variant of the language. Maybe that’s why the White House has to keep issuing “corrections” after every speech?

So, I'm going to provide a long-overdue public service. I am going to teach you all a bit of Bushese.

To do so, I have sought out the least controversial speech I could find. My purpose is not to foment ire or articulate my views as I usually do here, but to illuminate our President's unique vocabulary and language.

I decided to go back in time, before the Iraq War, when (one would think) President Bush hadn't yet entered the full blossom of his current tongue. Back when Jack Abramoff was an unknown name to all but those reaping the benefits of knowing ol’ Jack in the Washington D.C. and Texan fund-raising arenas, before Valerie Plame had leaked all over the place, when Tom DeLay was still lording over his righteous feifdom and Karl Rove and "Scooter" Libby were free to work as they were meant to be working, behind the scenes and away from scrutiny. Hell, Vice President Cheney hadn't even lied about "never meeting" Senator Edwards yet, nor had he told Senator Leahy to "go f --" well, you know, do that.

Maybe the secret of Bushese as a language can be found in his halycon years, that lovely glow (Yellow Alert? Orange?) we as a people basked in between 9/11 and March 2003 and the launch of the Iraq War.

I even went for something relatively non-controversial, then or now. You’d think.

The following is entitled "Remarks by the President on Homeownership," which sounds straightforward enough, and it's posted in its entirity

here,

just in case you want to check anything I’m quoting as accurate and as it was said.

The speech appears here, complete, unexpurgated and unaltered.

I have only provided a translation -- subtitles, if you will, for the daily “foreign film” that is our President.
_______

President George W. Bush speaks to HUD employees on National Homeownership Month
Tuesday, June 18, 2002

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON HOMEOWNERSHIP
at the Department of Housing and Urban Development
Washington, D.C.
June 18, 2002, 10:30 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you all very much for that kind welcome. I'm here for a couple of reasons. First, I want to thank you all for your service to the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. (Applause.)

[Read: America.]

I'm here to celebrate National Homeownership Month,

[Read: "No I’m not, really. I’m going to talk about terrorism."]

because I believe owning a home is an essential part of economic security. And I'm concerned about the security of America. (Applause.)

[Read: Tentative link between agreed-upon agenda for this speech, and President Bush’s agenda for this speech.]

I had the pleasure on June the 12th of speaking to the last President who visited HUD.

[Read: "I don’t want to say his name. I may not know it."]


I wish number 41 a happy birthday. (Applause.)

[Read: "Ha, see, I did know who it was. Do you?"]

And I'm glad you've invited me here today, I really am. I first am really proud of Mel Martinez and Alphonso Jackson. I've known Mel for a while, I've known Alphonso for a long time. There was no question in my mind that these two fine Americans would do a great job in leading this important agency. (Applause.)

[Read: Cronies.]

I want to thank all those who have assumed leadership roles, who have left your states and your friends to come and serve America. And that's important. Service to our country is an incredibly important part of being an American.

[Read: "Like me. I’m the most important American."]

I want to thank all those who have worked here for a short time and long time,

[Read: All time, of all lengths.]

who will be here after we leave.

[Read: After we die, they will live on: evocation of religion.]

I want to thank a man named Larry Thompson, who has worked here for -- where's Larry? (Applause.)

[Read: "I have forgotten what Larry does, if ever I knew."]

Larry's been here for 30 years. And I want to -- appreciate your service,

[Read: “I want to, but I can’t. But I will.”]

Larry, and thank you for setting such a fine example for many others inside this building who serve the country.

[Read: The waiters working for the caterers, most likely immigrants working in jobs “real” Americans don’t want to fill.]

Let me first talk about how to make sure America is secure from a group of killers,

[Read: Definitive & irrevocable transition from HUD speech agenda to President Bush’s agenda.]

people who hate -- you know what they hate? They hate the idea that somebody can go buy a home.

[Read: Blunt alignment of the seemingly unrelated HUD and President Bush speech agendas, all in one succinct turn of phrase.]

They hate freedom; that's what they hate.

[Read: Even blunter full-bore return to President Bush’s speech agenda.]

They hate the fact that we worship freely. They don't like the thought of Christian, Jew and Muslim living side by side in peace. They don't like that at all. And therefore, they -- since they resent our freedoms, they feel like they should take out their resentment by destroying innocent lives.

[Read: "They what? Oops, almost wandered astray": quickly regained footing with President Bush’s speech agenda. Whew.]

And this country will do everything we can possibly do to protect America. (Applause.)

[Read: Everything=Anything.]

And that's going to mean making sure our homeland is secure, and I appreciate the progress we're making on setting up a Department of Homeland Security. I know it's going to be hard for some in Congress to give up a little power here and there,

[Read: “I am in power, and they have no idea how much power I am already wielding, with or without their consent.”]

but I think it's going to happen because people realize we're here to serve the American people, not here to serve a political party or turf in the United States Congress. (Applause.)

[Read: “I am the power.” Evocation of the Divine Right of Kings.]

But the best way to secure the homeland is to hunt them down one by one. And I mean hunt them down one by one

[Read: Hunt them down one by one. One. By. One. One. One.]

and bring them to justice, which is precisely what America will do. (Applause.)

[Read: “If I have my way, we’ll be in Iraq by this time next year.”]

I want to thank the choir for coming, the youngsters for being here.

[Read: Disorienting return to cozy populist homey warm fuzzy talk of children, children who sing; everyone loves singing children.]

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.

[Read: War=Peace.]

We want there to be peace.

[Read: We want there to be war.]

We want people to live in peace all around the world. I mean, our vision for peace extends beyond America.

[Read: “We will fight a war on any foreign soil I choose. Like, soon.”]

We believe in peace in South Asia. We believe in peace in the Middle East.

[Read: War in South Asia; War in the Middle East. “Wait, didn’t we already fight a war in South Asia? Oh, well, then, we’ll believe in war in the Middle East.”]

We're going to be steadfast toward a vision that rejects terror and killing, and honors peace and hope.

[Read: Honor terror and killing against those who reject peace and hope.]

I also want the young to know that this country, we don't conquer people, we liberate people -- because we hold true to our values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

[Read: “Get your helmets and rifles, kids. Time to liberate some towel-heads.”]

The security of our homeland, the need to make sure that America is safe and secure while we chase peace is my number one priority for the country.

[Read: “We will be cozy over here while we chase war elsewhere.”]

But I've got another priority, as well.

[Read: Clumsy segue to HUD speech agenda.]

I not only want America to be safer and stronger, I want America to be better. (Applause.) I want America to be a better place. I worry about our economy, because there are people who can't find work who want to work.

[Read: Check out the cater waiters.]

In this town, people look at numbers all the time -- you know, such and such a number dropped, or this number increased.

[Read: Fuzzy math.]

What I worry about are hearts and souls.

[Read: “Who needs fuzzy math when you’ve got Jesus?”]

That's what I worry about.

[Read: “I am not Alfred E. Neuman, whatever the expression on my face at this moment.”]

And if somebody is trying to find work who can't find work, we need to continue to expand our job base. (Applause.).

[Read: Check out the cater waiters.]

We also have got to understand, in this land of plenty, there are pockets of hopelessness and despair. You know, I mentioned the word American Dream

[Read: Two words=one word. Fuzzy math=reality.]

in Atlanta. I also recognize that some people aren't sure that dream extends to them. Some people don't even know what the dream means.

[Read: Dream=home ownership. Further transition into HUD speech agenda.]

And our job -- our jobs, our collective jobs,

[Read: Our collective job.]

is

[Read: are.]

to make sure that notion

[Read: “my notion”]

of the American Dream extends into every single neighborhood around this country. (Applause.).

[Read: Dream=home ownership, homes=neighborhood, hey, we’re finally in HUD territory.]

I know this isn't the right department when I talk about education,

[Read: “Fuck HUD, I isn’t done yet.”]

but education, making sure every child is educated and no child is left behind, is part of making sure the American Dream extends to every single neighborhood in America. (Applause.)

[Read: Dream=home ownership, homes=neighborhood, neighborhood=kids, kids=education, education=“No Child Left Behind” policy.]

And we're making progress in a practical way when it comes to educating children, because, you know what,

[Read: Further clumsy segue, appropriately using playground rhetoric.]

for the first time the federal government says, if you receive money,

[Read: “even if you don’t”]

you need to let us know whether the children are learning to read and write and add and subtract.

[Read: But not multiply: no sex in schools.]

And if they are, we'll praise the teachers and praise the parents and praise the administrators.

[Read: Carrott.]

But if not, if our children can't read and write and add and subtract,

[Read: “like me.” More fuzzy math.]

instead of just hoping something changes, we're going to use the accountability system to insist upon change,

[Read: Stick.]

so every child has a chance to realize the dream in America. (Applause.)

[Read: Educated children=homeowners; back on the HUD speech agenda.]

But I believe owning something is a part of the American Dream, as well. I believe when somebody owns their own home, they're realizing the American Dream. They can say it's my home, it's nobody else's home. (Applause.) And we saw that yesterday in Atlanta, when we went to the new homes of the new homeowners. And I saw with pride firsthand, the man say, welcome to my home. He didn't say, welcome to government's home; he didn't say, welcome to my neighbor's home; he said, welcome to my home. I own the home, and you're welcome to come in the home, and I appreciate it. (Applause.) He was a proud man. He was proud that he owns the property. And I was proud for him. And I want that pride to extend all throughout our country.

[Read: Except in Connecticut.]

One of the things that we've got to do is to address problems straight on

[Read: “Pay no attention to the war behind the curtain.”]

and deal with them in a way that helps us meet goals. And so I want to talk about a couple of goals and -- one goal and a problem.

[Read: Goal=problem.]

The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so. The problem is we have what we call a homeownership gap in America.

[Read: Not everyone who wants to own a home has a shot. “See, I’m talking about HUD.”]

Three-quarters of Anglos own their homes, and yet less than 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanics own homes. That ownership gap signals that something might be wrong in the land of plenty. And we need to do something about it.

We are here in Washington, D.C. to address problems. So I've set this goal for the country.

[Read: After waging war, that is.]

We want 5.5 million more homeowners by 2010 -- million more minority homeowners by 2010.

[Read: Fuzzy math. Repeat.]

(Applause.) Five-and-a-half million families by 2010 will own a home.

[Read: Repeat. No fuzzy math.]

That is our goal. It is a realistic goal. But it's going to mean we're

[Read: “you’re”]

going to have to work hard to achieve the goal, all of us.

[Read: “We’ve got ours. Get to work.”]

And by all of us, I mean not only the federal government, but the private sector, as well.

[Read: “Fuck this, you do it.”]

And so I want to, one, encourage you to do everything you can to work in a realistic, smart way to get this done. I repeat, we're here for a reason.

[Read: There is no ‘two.’]

And part of the reason is to make this dream extend everywhere.

[Read: Everywhere=America.]

I'm going to do my part by setting the goal,

[Read: “There, I’ve done my job!”]

by reminding people of the goal,

[Read: “There, I’ve done my job again!”]

by heralding the goal,

[Read: "Man, I've told you this is hard work! Now you get to work! I've set, I've reminded, and I've heralded!"]

and by calling people into action,

[Read: "By God, and I called, too! I'm tellin' ya, this is hard work!"]

both the federal level, state level, local level, and in the private sector.

[Read: Both=Four.]

(Applause.)

[Read: “Did my part -- get to work, the rest of you!”]

And so what are the barriers

[Read: Race+Poverty=barriers]

that we can deal with here in Washington?

[Read: Race+Poverty=Not our problem.]

Well, probably the single barrier to first-time homeownership is high down payments. People take a look at the down payment, they say that's too high, I'm not buying. They may have the desire to buy, but they don't have the wherewithal to handle the down payment.

[Read: Poverty=problem.]

We can deal with that. And so I've asked Congress to fully fund an American Dream down payment fund which will help a low-income family to qualify to buy, to buy. (Applause.)

[Read: Buy (said twice)=no problem.]

We believe

[Read: Believe=do=no problem]

when this fund is fully funded and properly administered,

[Read: “Put one of my cronies in charge, wouldja?”]

which it will be under the Bush administration,

[Read: “Put one of my cronies in charge, wouldja?”]

that over 40,000 families a year -- 40,000 families a year --

[Read: Repeat=no fuzzy math=reality]

will be able to realize the dream we want them to be able to realize, and that's owning their own home. (Applause.)

[Read: Realize+dream+realize (repeat)=reality=no problem=no poverty. Repeat.]

The second barrier

[Read: Oops, “Not single.” There is ‘two,’ e.g., “a second.”]

to ownership is the lack of affordable housing. There are neighborhoods in America where you

[Read: you=Not ‘me’=Not ‘my’ problem.]

just can't find a house that's affordable to purchase, and we

[Read: you.]

need to deal with that problem. The best way to do so, I think, is to set up a single family affordable housing tax credit to the tune of $2.4 billion over the next five years

[Read: Fuzzy math.]

to encourage affordable single family housing in inner-city America. (Applause.)

The third problem is the fact that the rules are too complex. People get discouraged by the fine print on the contracts.

[Read: Fuzzy words.]

They take a look and say, well, I'm not so sure I want to sign this. There's too many words. (Laughter.)

[Read: “I can’t read. I don’t like to read. No one likes to read. Why should I have to read this?”]

There's too many pitfalls.

[Read: Words=pitfalls.]

So one of the things that the Secretary is going to do is he's going to simplify the closing documents and all the documents that have to deal with homeownership.

[Read: “You won’t have to read as much”=no pitfalls.]

It is essential that we make it easier for people to buy a home, not harder. And in order to do so, we've got to educate folks.

[Read: Clumsy but quick return to education agenda portion of speech.]

Some of us take homeownership for granted, but there are people -- obviously,

[Read: “Whoops, almost started talking about people.” Regain footing.]

the home purchase is a significant, significant

[Read: Repeat=important=significant, significant.]

decision by our fellow Americans. We've got people who have newly arrived to our country, don't know the customs.

[Read: No contact with customs=Illegal immigrants=workers filling jobs Americans don’t want to fill; don’t go there.]

We've got people in certain neighborhoods that just aren't really sure what it means to buy a home. And it seems like to us that it makes sense to have a outreach program, an education program that explains the whys and wherefores of buying a house, to make it easier for people to not only understand the legal implications and ramifications, but to make it easier to understand how to get a good loan.

[Read: Credit=solution=no problem.]

There's some people out there that can fall prey to unscrupulous lenders, and we have an obligation to educate and to use our resource base to help people understand how to purchase a home and what -- where the good opportunities might exist for home purchasing.

[Read: What=where.]

Finally, we want to make sure the Section 8 homeownership program is fully implemented. This is a program that provides vouchers for first-time home buyers which they can use for down payments and/or mortgage payments. (Applause.)

[Read: Vouchers+education=good, because it’s like, like, our other thing there.]

So this is an ambitious start here at the federal level. And, again, I repeat, you all need to help us every way you can.

[Read: “You do it.” Ambitious start=another unfunded Federal program.]

But the private sector needs to help, too.

[Read: Help=do. Read: “You do it.”]

They need to help, too.

[Read: Help=do. Repeat: “You do it.”]

Of course, it's in their interest.

[Read: Repeat: “You do it.”]

If you're a realtor, it's in your interest that somebody be interested in buying a home. If you're a homebuilder, it's in your interest that somebody be interested in buying a home.

[Read: Repeat, repeat, repeat: “You do it.”]

And so, therefore, I've called -- yesterday, I called upon the private sector to help us and help the home buyers.

[Read: Repeat: Repeat: “You do it.”]

We need more capital in the private markets for first-time, low-income buyers. And I'm proud to report that Fannie Mae has heard the call and, as I understand, it's about $440 billion over a period of time.

[Read: Fuzzy math+Fannie Mae=no problem.]

They've used their influence to create that much capital available for the type of home buyer we're talking about here. It's in their charter; it now needs to be implemented.

[Read: “Fannie Mae will do it.”]

Freddie Mac is interested in helping. I appreciate both of those agencies providing the underpinnings of good capital.

[Read: Fannie Mae+Freddie Mac=MaeMac=no problem=they do it.]

There's a lot of faith-based programs that want to be involved with educating people about how to buy a home.

[Read: Jesus=education=buy a home. “The Virgin Mary Built My Shed.”]

And we're going to have an active outreach from HUD. (Applause.)

[Read: “Oh ya, HUD.”]

And so this ambitious goal is going to be met.

[Read: “They’ll do it”=“There, I solved that”=problem solved.]

I believe it will be,

[Read: believe=reality=“They’ll do it”=problem solved.]

just so long as we keep focused, and remember that security at home is -- economic security at home is just an important part of -- as homeland security.

[Read: Clumsy return to President Bush’s speech agenda: Home=war.]

And owning a home is part of that economic security. It's also a part of making sure that this country fulfills its great hope and vision.

[Read: Fuzzy math: Ownership=security, hope+vision=war, thus: security=war.]

See, I tell people -- and I believe this --

[Read: “I tell”+“I believe”=reality.]

that out of the evil done to America will come some incredible good. (Applause.) You know, they thought they were attacking a country so weak and so feeble that we might file a lawsuit or two, and that's all we'd do. (Laughter.)

[Read: Evil=good, 9/11=lawyer joke.]


That's what they thought. We're showing them the different face of America.

[Read: These Colors Don’t Sue.]

We're showing them that we're plenty tough.

[Read: These Colors Don’t Run. Repeat:]

When it comes to taking somebody trying to take away our freedoms, we're tough, and we're going to remain tough and steadfast. (Applause.)

[Read: 3 x ‘tough’=applause. Repeat as necessary, forever.]

But I also want people to see the deep compassion of America, as well.

[Read: Compassion=war.]

I want the world to see the other side of our character, which is the soft side, the decent side, the loving side.

[Read: Soft=hard, decent=kill, thus: ‘Soft’+‘decent’+‘love’=tough love=war. Fuzzy/hard math.]

I want people to know that when we talk about dreams, we mean big dreams.

[Read: Texan talk.]

And when we talk about a free society, we want a society in which every citizen has the chance to advance, not just a few.

[Read: free=buy, advance=buy, every+advance=few. More fuzzy math.]

And part of the cornerstone of America is the ability for somebody, regardless of where they're from, regardless of where they were born, to say, this is my home; I own this home, it is my piece of property, it is my part of the American experience. It is essential that we stay focused on the goal, and work hard to achieve that goal. And when it's all said and done, we can look back and say, because of my work, because of our collective work, America is a better place. Out of evil came incredible good.

[Read: My home=your home, property=experience, goal=war, my=our, evil=good, inchoate string of cliches=conclusion, confusion=comfort, gibberish=coherent speech. No problem.]

Thank you all for coming by.

[Read: Thank you all for not questioning anything I’ve said; you wouldn’t be here if you were going to.]

END.

[Read: Not by a long shot.]

© 2006 Stephen R. Bissette, scribed atop the Mountains of Madness 1/5/05; don't tread on me!

More Faves of 2005: Theatrical (continued)

Ohhh, Abramoff. Uhhhhhh, Bush; it's going to be a landmark 'lame duck' experience, in't it?

A real heartbreaker, though, the fate of those unfortunate miners, and the latest deaths in the Middle East -- what a way to start a New Year.

Thus, the timing is miserable, but forgive me as I drift back to another installment on my theatrical cinema faves of 2005. May this reading lighten your day a bit, or at least provide some diversion. In no particular order (though I've once again alphabetized this selection, too):

* CRASH: Along with Eastwood's MILLION DOLLAR BABY and Romero's LAND OF THE DEAD, the most satisfying cinematic storytelling experience of 2005. Emulating the character-driven tapestry narrative weave of everything from Robert Altman's best films to Boogie Nights and Magnolia, CRASH slithers between the lives of apparently unrelated Los Angeles denizens -- from an adrift immigrant store owner and his daughter to a locksmith and his daughter; from cops on all ends of the spectrum to the citizens they fatefully cross paths with; recently-robbed rich & unhappy spouses to two black compadres on a car-jacking spree; etc. -- and traces the tentative umbilical cords between them all. In hindsight, the arguably schematic script shouldn't perculate as urgently as it does, but the damned movie worked in spades during both viewings. At one point, it literally took my breath away -- and that's more than one expects of any movie. Great cast, stunning performances (particularly from Don Cheadle and Terrence Howard), well worth seeking out.

* GRIZZLY MAN: Another 'found footage' gem from Werner Herzog, the necessary antidote to March of the Penguins anthropomorphized 'feel good' brand of documentary. Egocentric amateur naturalist Tim Treadwell fancied himself the ally and 'friend' of the Alaskan grizzly bears he passionately cohabitated with every year, and Herzog explores and dissects his 'back to nature' fantasy gone wrong. This compression of Treadwell's own self-narrated 'home videos' charts the arc of his curious breed of misanthropy and misplaced devotion, culminating in tragedy (sparked, it turns out, by an altercation with an airline employee that drove Treadwell and his unfortunate female partner back to the 'Grizzly Maze' fatally past its 'safety date'). Echoing his rant about the nature of the jungle in Burden of Dreams, Herzog's articulation of the true face of nature as Treadwell's camera malingers on the bear that most likely killed him is among the most pointed moments in Herzog's works. A brilliant film, necessary viewing. (BTW, this was another experience elevated by the active, in-person participation of Herzog himself, another rarified father-son sojourn savored by Dan and I in 2005.)

* INSIDE DEEP THROAT: Intricate, insightful, and seemingly effortlessly entertaining overview of the life & times of the breakthrough porn opus Deep Throat manages to cover not only the fortunes and misfortunes of the film and its participants, but of that entire period of early 1970s America. As such, the coolest time-capsule in ages, and I can attest as one who lived then that everything herein rings truer than any other film on the period. Be sure to see the unrated or 'NC-17' version: whether you've seen Deep Throat before or not, it's necessary to see the setpiece that set so many cultural wars ablaze in '72-'77 -- and it's still a jaw-dropper (pun intended).

* KING KONG: What, you need more from me on this? If you didn't enjoy it, ah well, c'est la vie. I loved it, I've been to see it three times, I can't wait to see it again.

* SIN CITY: I don't toke up before going to movies anymore (hell, I don't toke at all anymore). Thus, when a movie sparks a cinematic contact high, I am pleasantly surprised. Sin City got me flying from its opening scene, and the high only got better as the film unreeled; I loved every second of it, its most extreme images are indelibly burned into my mind. Energized, high-octane, relentlessly drunk on its own characters, and in love with its alternative universe, Sin City rocked, particularly on the big screen (nice having the DVD, but it's like a souvenir of the real McCoy). Kudos to Frank Miller for seeing his art & stories through to the big screen with style -- one of the few American cartoonists in history to ever savor that high -- and kudos to Robert Rodriguez for seducing Frank down that path, bucking the Director's Guild for seeing to it Frank maintained his co-director credit, and for making this flick a reality. This put me so much in the head of the drive-in movie heyday of the 1970s (particularly evocative, in its way, of my fave Mario Bava films) that I immediately jumped at the opportunity to see Sin City again when it opened at the local drive-in: at last, the perfect 21st Century drive-in movie! It was nirvana.

More tomorrow!

BTW, quick, nip and bip over to Tim Lucas's

Video Watchblog

pronto for Tim's marvelous post on the brand-new revised edition of John Canemaker's essential WINSOR McCAY - HIS LIFE AND ART, which I've been meaning to write up myself for some weeks now. Tim's views (in his second of two January 2nd posts) are detailed (as you'd expect) and precisely mirror my own on this matter, as I also had compared the two editions. In any case, check out Tim's review, and I'll add that Canemaker's book is an essential addition to any and all comics, art or animation libraries. Highest recommendation!

(While you're there, also scan down to Tim's thourough analysis of the KING KONG PRODUCTION DIARIES DVD set, with which I'm also in absolute accord with his views.)

Ok, as I say, more tomorrow...

More Faves of 2005...

Hey, it's been a lively day here, with a heady online class day (the UVM online class I'm co-teaching with filmmaker Walter Ungerer), lots of class prep for my upcoming Center for Cartoon Studies class and this Friday's lecture on behalf of the CCS at nearby Mount Anthony's High School in Bennington, VT, and more.

I've also been following the breaking news about lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleading guilty (sidestepping a trial and potential thirty-year sentence in exchange for ten years and going State's Witness); coming on the heels of Enron's former Chief Accountant doing the same a couple weeks ago, this promises a real shitstorm in 2006 for the likes of Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed, the Christian Right, many Republicans and Democrats (but primarily Republicans, as Abramoff was deeply involved in multiple fund-raising and election-financing schemes that boosted the present regime), and who-knows-who-else. We've also had further revelations about the President's covert wiretapping activities, none of which looks good for either us or Bush and his cronies. Sigh.

President Bush's handling of the wire-tap controversy is only getting worse -- he's his own worst enemy right now, and the more he betrays his testiness, impatience, and bullying nature, the more transparent his true nature becomes.

Amazing, amazing times -- what a year this is gonna be!

Well, anyhoot, instead of all that, I'll divert attention to yet another "Faves of 2005" litany. Enjoy -- sorry the writing is so scant today, but it's a busy day, and busier ahead.

Fave Movies of 2005: Theatrical Part One (in no particular order, though this entry & next entry are alphabetized per installment:)

* ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM: In a year of exceptional documentaries, this one sticks to the memory like no other. A galvanizing, hypnotic cartography of economic horrors that are almost unimaginably audacious, outrageous, and far-reaching in their reach and impact. The sequence in which we hear excerpts from the phone calls from snickering Enron employees calling for the California blackouts being rolled out, and see the consequences in familiar imagery suddenly rendered cataclysmic in urgency and effect is indelible and among the most chilling sequence in recent memory. Required viewing, period, especially given the trials to come -- this touches all our lives in the US.

* GOJIRA: Seeing the original Japanese version of Inoshiro Honda's 1954 classic -- known here all my life only via its cut-revised-dubbed Godzilla, King of the Monsters incarnation, save for home-video dubs of the original version -- was a highlight of the year. Seeing this on the big screen (at Dartmouth College) was a revelation and something I never dreamed possible in this lifetime. This is a great, grand film of tremendous gravity and impact, however dated Eiji Tsuburaya's atmospheric man-in-suit and miniature effects seem to contemporary audiences.

* HIGH TENSION: Even slightly trimmed, this was the best of the theatrical horrors of the year, courtesy of Lion's Gate (the only studio consciously forging a 21st Century genre output) and the fresh French Wave of genre and borderline-genre fare, the most inventive and disturbing since Fat Girl and Irreversible, though a bit less gut-wrenching than either of those. There's still life in the tried-and-true slasher opus yet, when it's as insidiously imagined and maliciously orchestrated as this agonizing roller-coaster ride. I was groggy in the ropes by the end, and the sting-in-the-tail twist wasn't a cheat, once you replay the film in your head blow-by-blow -- or brave a second viewing (if Rob Zombie could muster & mesh half of this kind of reptilian intensity and cold-blooded ingenuity, he'd be living up to his promise and better utilizing the resources at his disposal).

* HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE: A fresh Hayao Miyazaki masterwork, the first adapted from another source, though it's easy to see why Miyazaki embraced the novel: its heroine perfectly embodies the female archetypes all Miyazaki's prior works embraced and explored -- the innocent child daring to find her way in the world, the elder woman who acts as mentor -- ingeniously combined in its age-shifting protagonist. Her mercurial nature, mystically changing from youth to old age (sometimes in mid-sentence), is beautifully realized, visually and via its vocal performances -- including, for a change, its English-dubbed version. Dazzling, engaging, moving, and a wellspring of pleasurable images, concepts, and wonders. No, it's not Miyazaki's greatest work, but lesser Miyazaki is still magnificent, eye/mind/heart-opening, and light years beyond what passes for fantasy in American films.

* JARHEAD: Did any critic writing about this film see the same movie I did? A gripping, timely testimonial to the utter inconsequence of the individual 'grunt' in the contemporary military reality, and the indifference of command to that reality. The deceptively loose narrative brilliantly culminates in the anticipated mobilization of our hero(Jake Gyllenhall)'s refined sharp-shooter skills -- only to be usurped by eleventh-hour "superior firepower" in an emblematic flaunting of the new style of warfare initiated by the Gulf War. The waste & sorrow is palpable; the consequences for those who survive such monumental mismanagement and waste strongly communicated and felt. The primary fictional narrative American war film in this period of national transition, and an ideal companion to documentaries GUNNER PALACE (which I saw on DVD, not in the theater, hence it not being on this list) and Jay Craven's excellent AFTER THE FOG, which almost made this list.

* LAND OF THE DEAD: For my money, George Romero's latest was the most completely satisfying feat of genre storytelling of the year -- tightly scripted and executed, succinct in content/intent/effect, deft, barbed, sharp, attuned (with startlingly prescient imagery, tapping Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls while anticipating the grim realities of Hurricane Katrina), and worthy of all-that-came-before. Walking the studio tightrope (higher-profile cast than any prior Romero 'dead' entry, but working to an 'R' rating and under tight budget and scheduling constraints) and adhering to the aesthetic of similarly unpretentious fringe-studio filmmaking traditions (think Don Siegel, Phil Karlson, Sam Fuller, et al), Romero delivered the goods on all levels (also, this was the second-best father-son outing of the year, too, as far as movies go; Godzilla: Final War was more fun, but couldn't hold a candle, as a movie, to Romero's glorious accomplishment).

* MYSTERIOUS SKIN: Gregg Araki's masterpiece, by far his best film and among the best of the year. Tracing the intertwined lives of two small-town teen kids -- one a confused but earnest lad convinced he was abducted by aliens as a child, the other a callous embittered gay hustler cynical about all relationships & seemingly intent on selling his body at greater endangerment as if that will lead to something of consequence -- Araki forges a brave, disturbing, introspective, moving and ultimately transcendent film. Third from the Sun's pre-teen star Joseph Gordon-Levitt delivers a devastating performance, proving his role in the lesser (but nonetheless compelling) film Manic (2001) was no fluke.

* WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT: What can I say that hasn't been said? Funny, inventive, brilliantly conceived and executed, perfectly timed, utterly delightful. God bless Nick Parks and all his collaborative partners; Aardman and Pixar are making not only some of the best animated films of our lifetime, but some of the best films ever, period. Grand & giddy fun, stem to stern.

* THE WILD BLUE YONDER: A stunning feat of directorial conceit and slight-of-hand from Werner Herzog, his latest bizarre fusion of documentary found-footage (fusing NASA archival footage of a Space Shuttle flight with under-the-Arctic-ice exploratory footage) and science-fiction (articulated by Brad Dourif as a visiting alien, ranting at the audience from a remote, desolate abandoned Californian location littered with crumbling buildings and junked technology). It adds up to a strangely mesmerizing, intoxicating voyage to an imaginary world, and somehow it works, despite the blatant absurdity of Herzog's concept; bravo! That Marge and I saw this with Herzog in person, introducing and then grilling the audience for input, during a special impromptu showing only sweetened the experience beyond words.

[Continued tomorrow or the day after -- ]

Keep Talking, President Bush...

Bush speaks, the White House "corrects."

His bullish defense of recently disclosed wiretaps as "legal" is forcing Congress's hand, as it must.

Keep talking, oh my President.

These actions Bush has owned up to and vigorously defended are clearly contrary to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978; those guidelines, erected and revised in the wake of President Nixon's claim to similar Presidential power, clearly provide Bush with the necessary means to implement what he has pursued. But Bush chose to sidestep and thus subvert & ignore those guidelines. We've already seen one judge (Robertson) resign from the judicial panel that serves the FISA process, explicitly doing so in protest of Bush's actions.

On the public record over the past week or so, President Bush has made it clear he chose to do so, he has admitted to doing so, he has asserted his power to do so.

Bush is also aggressively evoking Presidential power that President Harry Truman evoked during the Korean War; the Supreme Court explicitly ruled against case relevent to Truman's assertions, ruling that the Presidential powers Truman (and now Bush) asserted as his to wield are effective for only 15 days after an event like the 9/11 tragedy.

Of course, true to form, the White House's energy is already directed toward dealing with the messenger rather than the reality of the message. President Bush immediately characterized the disclosure as "a shameful act," arguably hinting at treason. Who told on the Prez? In the eyes of this President and Administration, public disclosure of the policy is "harmful," not the policy, which Bush defends as "legal" and, now, "limited."

Keep talking, oh my President.

The perversity of the same Justice Department that has yet to fully deal with the leak of Valerie Plame's identity -- which has already led to the resignation of "Scooter" Libby, placing the source close enough to the heart of the present Administration to prompt suspicion even among the devout supporters of this President and Administration -- now being intent on finding "who leaked" (hmmmm, no clothing stains?) is comical.

I mean, what's President Bush going to do -- fire them? He's wussed out of that bold talk regarding the Plame affair as the taint of that scandle seeps deeper in his and his circle.

Our President is currently trying to coalesce power and divert attention from the mounting scandal by mobilizing further pressure to force the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act into permanent status and rallying further aggressive promotion of "The War on Terror." This remains as dubious a "war" as any in U.S. history, declared as it is not against a definable nation or enemy, but a tactic; dubious above all given this President and Administration's gross mishandling of said "war," diverting the initial mobilization of US forces in Afghanistan to strike at those identified being responsible for the 9/11 attack to instead wage "pre-emptive war" against Iraq without justification, based on intelligence even Bush has publicly acknowledged was "faulty." (Does this prompt the logical response -- rethinking the entire concept of "pre-emptive war," in its first outing demonstratably based upon "faulty" intelligence? No, of course not. We've got a war to fight, son!)

The mad, circular illogic of this Administration is reaching critical mass. President Bush's actions and statements are at last necessarily called on the carpet -- by his own words and deeds.

Where might all this lead?

The further Bush defends his abuses of power, the deeper the conceptual "spider hole" he'll be digging. At last, he will have to own up to his actions and words.

Keep on talking, oh my President.

Journalist Jonathan Schell writes:

"As justification, [President Bush] offered two arguments, one derisory, the other deeply alarming. The derisory one was that Congress, by authorizing him to use force after September 11, had authorized him to suspend FISA, although that law is unmentioned in the resolution. Thus has Bush informed the members of a supposedly co-equal ranch of government of what, unbeknownst to themselves, they were thinking when they cast their vote. The alarming argument is that as Commander in Chief he possesses "inherent" authority to suspend laws in wartime. But if he can suspend FISA at his whim and in secret, then what law can he not suspend? What need is there, for example, to pass or not pass the Patriot Act if any or all of its provisions can be secretly exceeded by the President?

With Bush's defense of his wiretapping, the hidden state has stepped into the open. The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form. He is now in effect saying, "Yes, I am above the law -- I am the law, which is nothing more than what I and my hired lawyers say it is -- and if you don't like it, I dare you to do something about it."

Members of Congress have no choice but to accept the challenge. They did so once before, when Richard Nixon, who said, "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal," posed a similar threat to the Constitution. The only possible answer is to inform Bush forthwith that if he continues in his defiance, he will be impeached.

If Congress accepts his usurpation of its legislative power, they will be no Congress and might as well stop meeting. Either the President must uphold the laws of the United States, which are Congress's laws, or he must leave office."

(Jonathan Schell, "The Hidden State Steps Forward," The Nation, January 9, 2006 issue)

However much Bush and his circle argue the "War on Terror" and "security" issues as reasons for any and all abuses of power, and evoke "the enemy" as justifying any and all abuses of power, the blatant truth of all the world saw in the wake of Hurricane Katrina -- that we are not only not "more prepared" than we were in 2001 to deal as a nation with a cataclysmic attack, we are less prepared, due to Bush's own insular brand of cronyism and incompetence -- will necessarily assert its reality.

We can all see that the train stations, the subway stations, the bus stations, and our local legal authorities are hardly "more secure." We all see our national ability to deal with short-term or long-term crisis situations has been so co-opted by the calculated erosion of safety nets, infrastructures, and any effective organized response that we are indeed "on our own" when the worst happens. As further national resources are poured in unimaginable quantities on a daily basis into Iraq, those who fomented and mobilized this war have only further eroded "our" ability to do much of anything as they vote -- by a single decisive/divisive Vice-Presidential vote -- their budget-slashing bills into law. Bills that will, must only further concentrate wealth into the hands of the rich while impoverishing, depleting, and crippling our tentative ability to cope with any natural health care crisis -- much less an orchestrated future terrorist attack. Hell, all they now have to do is wait -- for the next hurricane season, which inevitably must come.

Who needs to wait for another 9/11 attack? We have global warming and the extremity of weather conditions that the scientific community warned us about (and which this President and Administration have brazenly ignored and refuted).

[An aside: During our visit two weeks ago to Florida, Marge and I saw with our own eyes significant sections of communities like Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda that remain as they were in the wake of Hurricane Andrew, circa 2004: low-income houses and housing still empty, homes and businesses still literally wrapped-in-plastic -- blue tarps installed in 2004 -- the only major reconstruction that of businesses and corporate chains. It doesn't take much imagination to speculate the cumulative impact of such mounting natural destruction, forced dislocation, capitalism-driven reconstruction, and lack of societal investment in any meaningful support infrastructures gains momentum as the natural disasters seasonally return.]

In the meantime, at least President Bush has changed his five years worth of diversionary tactics into talking about "taking responsibility."

Shall we take him at his word?

As Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich said on December 14, 2005 after President Bush's December speech on Iraq to the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC:

"The President, who has given a series of reasons for the war, in his latest in a series of speeches promoting the war, now says one thousand days after the invasion, it was about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Not about WMD's, because there were none. Not about Iraq obtaining uranium from Niger. It did not. Not about Iraq's connection to 9/11, because there was none. Not about Iraq's connection to Al-Qeada and 9/11, because there was none.

The President now says he is responsible for the war in Iraq. I agree with the President. He is responsible. He is responsible for attacking a nation that did not attack us. He is responsible for the 2,151 American troops killed in Iraq. He is responsible for the 15,881 US troops injured in the war. He is responsible for at least 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed since the start of the war. He is responsible for draining $250 billion from US taxpayers to pay for the war. And he is responsible for the failed reconstruction and for the continued occupation."

Do we feel more secure yet?

Keep on talking, oh my President.

Top o' 2005 to you! Here comes 2006!

With no rhyme or reason, here's just a few of my faves of '05. More to come tomorrow, promise:

* Fave Graphic Novel Reading Experience: Charles Burns's Black Hole -- a hole-in-one at last, after over a decade of single installments (and at least two publishers), adding up to the most delicious, delirious comic-reading experience of all for me this year of pretty-damned-good comic reading.
Second Place: All the great comics the Center for Cartoon Studies students gifted me with this past semester -- their comics, mind you! Some very imaginative work and some very lovely packages, too. I can't wait to see/read more, and it'll be a hoot to be working with them drawing at last.

* Fave "I've Always Wanted to Read This!" Collection of Archival Material: The grand, glorious, over-sized (actually, 'actual size' of the original Sunday newspaper comics pages) Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!. Lovingly compiled, edited, and packaged by Peter Maresca and his imprint Sunday Press, the book of the year in a great year of books. Hey, I got 'Sunday' in here four times on a Sunday -- wait, that's five!
Second Place: At last! The rare 1969 French comic series Wampus by Franco Frescura and artist Luciano Bernasconi has been collected under one cover (cover by yours truly, I might add) and available in English, thanks to Jean-Marc Lofficier and Hexagon Press. I ate it up when my copy arrived and have already reread it, it's such grand fun; a heady stew of bogus sf/alien/espionage/terrorism circa the '60s, working up to staggering global political/social collapse (orchestrated by the translucent noodle-bodied badboy Wampus) that builds upon the anarchistic spirit of none other than Diabolik -- hence, a missing link of sorts in European comics history, between the archetype of Fantomas and the coming wave of underground comix radicalism. Love, love, love it, highly recommended! (More on Wampus on this blog this week.)

* Fave "I-Can't-Believe-This-is-THIS-Bad!" Theatrical Movie Experience: Hands down, George Lucas's glittering abomination Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, which proves at last you can polish a turd -- though it's still, like, a very shiny turd. Within the first five minutes, Marge and I were glancing at each other in disbelief, dumbstruck at how unbelievably insipid the dialogue was -- and it was all downhill from there. The much anticipated climax, 28 years in the coming, of Darth Vader in full gear reborn and resurrected had many in the theater (ourselves included) laughing uncontrollably, recalling as it did Peter Boyle's monster in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein more than anything else. I went back again within the week to wallow in it all over again -- and to make sure it really was as dreadful as it had seemed. It was (sigh) worse. For shame, George, for shame, but thanks for the hearty laughs!

* Fave Fun-In-A-Movie-Theater: Seeing Godzilla: Final War at FantAsia fest in Montreal with my son Dan in a jam-packed, not-an-empty-seat-left-in-the-house big-screen theater brimming with nothing but fellow devoted Gojira geeks of all ages (literally from 6 to 60!) revelling in the spectacle. 19-year-old Dan was completely disoriented at first, looking around dazed as the crowd screamed with glee every time another beloved old Toho kaiju eiga monster debuted on the screen, until his male teen ultra-cool dissolved and he fell into the party atmosphere wholeheartedly. We had a grand fucking time! It was thoroughly intoxicating fun, and the closest he's ever come to experiencing what something like Rocky Horror Picture Show was like with a dedicated midnight movie audience circa 1977-78, and big fun for this Dad. God bless you, everyone at FantAsia, for making it possible.
Second Place: Even tie between Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Peter Jackson's King Kong, both savored with Marjory, the former thrice (including a Cape Cod showing with dear amigos Mike Dobbs, Mary Cassidy, and Mark & Jeannie Martin).

* Fave TV Watched While My Wife was Out of the Room: Bill O'Reilly on FOX ranting about Christmas -- for fucking weeks on end! Amazing, hilarious television. We've come a long way from Morton Downey, Jr. and haven't far to go to arrive at the Third Reich's locking up the Jewish population so as to not blemish our sacred holidaze. O'Reilly is fucking insane, and FOX is the most shameless network on US TV, and man, that's saying something.
Second Place: Nip/Tuck. Marge can't stomach the gore; I'll have to wallow in the DVD collections at some point.

* Fave TV for the Couple that Barely Watches TV: The faux-Karl Rove (played by the great Robert Picardo) getting a ballpoint pen jammed clip-deep into his eye socket seconds before having his fucking skull methodically bashed to bloody oatmeal by an undead soldier who faux-Rove tried to force into complying with the party line by incarcerating the G.I.'s mother and putting the poor woman on the phone with her (un)dead son, in Joe Dante & Sam Hamm's "Homecoming" for Showtime's Masters of Horror. We laughed our asses off, and then wished it could be so. If television was like this more often, we'd watch it on occasion. (Special thanks to Tim Lucas for providing this Showtimeless household with one of the highlights of this or any year.)
Second place: Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens so pissed he could barely contain himself (on C-Span), after the cynical attempt to graft his drilling-in-Alaska-national-forest bid onto the latest defense-spending bill went down in flames. We lucked into the raw feed footage as his rant happened, and it was almost as good as the faux-Rove demise.

* Fave True-Colors Commemorative Alexander Haig "I'm In Charge Now" Moment: President Bush claiming the right to illegally circumvent standing process and laws to wiretap American citizens; the Divine Right of Kings, Mein Fuehrer?
Second Place: Vice-Prez Dick Cheney flying in from his diplomatic (chuckle) overseas tour to cast the eleventh-hour deciding vote on a budget-slashing bill that further depletes the very social support systems we saw tattered beyond repair when Hurricane Katrina hit. Right up there with Cheney's "Go fuck yourself" to our own beloved Senator Patrick Leahy: we hear ya loud & clear, Dickie boy.

* Fave ReBiblican I Know and Love: Mark Martin. Love ya, baby-blue.

More later!