Joshua Malbin

Here’s my prediction: Paterson won’t resign over whatever this is about.

This past week, a rumor emerged that the New York Times is working on a huge bombshell with plans to “Spitzerize” New York governor David Paterson.

Several media outlets have reported on these rumors.

Elizabeth Benjamin at The Daily News describes the report as “much worse” than the governor’s previous admission of an affair with a state employee, though she declines to name NYT by name.

We’ve now heard from a single source familiar with the goings on at the Governor’s office that the story will likely drop on Monday, and that the governor’s resignation will follow.

Rumored scandals are always bigger than real scandals.

UPDATE: No scandal reported today? I’m shocked! Oh, well, maybe he’ll resign tomorrow.

Anyway, since, K-sky asked for it, the infamous Whitey tape.

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A friend emailed to ask me to help promote something, so here goes:

Storyboard TV, an online community of scriptwriters, producers, and tv enthusiasts, launched its website this week with a script competition awarding $5,000 to the writer with the best pilot for a television drama. At storyboardtv.com, writers can share scripts for original shows with their potential audience members, while soliciting feedback and gauging enthusiasm for their story. Membership to Storyboard TV is free and open to all, and all members will be able to read, critique, and vote on their favorite pilots.

More about Storyboard TV:
Storyboard TV believes in the power of the television drama to document, enhance, and transform people’s lives for the better. Storyboard TV’s mission is to move show selection and pre-production away from the networks and directly to the web. Established in 2009, Storyboard TV endeavors to cultivate new writers and TV scripts, to nurture the connection between the scriptwriter and the fan, and to shepherd new television drama into production during the Internet age.

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My favorite sentence in a sports story in some time:

Of course, if propriety and taste were required in ice dancing, it would have been tossed from the Olympics years ago.

Hee.

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Dollhouse was the anti-Battlestar Galactica.

Dollhouse couldn’t have been anything good as regular episodic TV, as evidenced by the mostly crappy starts to both of its short seasons, but it turned out pretty great once it began to ignore all of those requirements and focused on building a single, long plot arc culminating in a thoroughly satisfying finale. In fact, looking back from the finale makes me think of the whole show as rather better than it probably was on average. They made me care what happened to Topher. That took some doing.

Battlestar was entirely plotted, a single continuous fabric of narrative that started to unravel as it approached its finale. In fact, its finale was so godawful that it ruined all of what came before it for me.

Part of the difference, I suppose, is that Dollhouse gave up on mystery by its midway point. Epitaph One, the conclusion to season 1, told us exactly what was in store and pretty much what it meant. Season 2 gave us more context and background, but based its climax on its characters. Battlestar, on the other hand, multiplied its mysteries season by season, and then at the end waved them all away with a completely bogus explanation.

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The last issue of the first Kick-Ass story arc just came out, and since the movie release is only three months away, it’s worth looking back over the book’s first two years (yes, only eight issues in almost two years) to try to figure out why this story I loved so much at first went off the rails.

The premise was fantastic: a nerdy kid with no training or special abilities decides to put on a costume and go out and fight crime. In his first real altercation he foils a mugging, taking on three guys at once. He also gets beaten so badly he ends up in the hospital. But someone records the fight on a cell phone, uploads it to YouTube, and Kick-Ass the superhero becomes a national sensation. Of course in his secret-identity life, in which he still goes to high school with his costume on under his clothes, he’s busy pretending to be gay so that girls will deign to talk to him.

I thought this would be a story that took the desire to be special seriously, and let the kid be special in a real way, in a real world. (See, for example, the true story of Master Legend, a guy who lives in Orlando, dresses up in a superhero costume, and goes out to fight crime. He also rustles up donations of supplies for the homeless, launches a campaign to educate them about a staph epidemic, and helps force the state government to relocate endangered gopher tortoises out of the path of a freeway. He is simultaneously ludicrous and, in a deep sense, a hero.)

But instead Mark Millar ended up using his fake superhero as a backdoor into a plot involving real superheroes, a Punisher-type character and his ninja ten-year-old daughter. As soon as they made their entrance the tone shifted and we got several straight issues of slapstick violence, culminating in this issue 8 bloodbath. (There’s an onomatopoetic joke involving shooting a guy’s penis off and then splitting his head with a cleaver, for instance.) Maybe I should have known Millar’s intentions didn’t lie in the direction I wanted from the tag line on the cover of issue 2: “Sickening Violence…Just The Way You Like It!”

From the previews it looks like Kick-Ass the movie follows the comic’s storyline pretty closely. For once I wish the screenwriters who wrote the adaptation had decided to diverge more. I don’t think Mark Millar would have cared—Wanted the movie had only the vaguest of resemblances to Wanted the comic book.

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I’m in the comic-book store today, because Wednesday is new comic day, and this kid of about thirteen or fourteen comes in with his dad. I’ve seen him there a few times before. He has Asperger’s or something: can’t modulate the tone of his voice, is totally obsessed with a specific subject (in this case, comics), seems oblivious to other people’s reactions to him. He strides inside confidently and announces that Batman and Robin is the only good comic out this week, everything else is crap.

He’s carrying a pole about five feet long with some kind of yellow mechanism at the end he’s holding topmost. I see it, assume it’s a piece of merchandising for some movie or comic franchise I don’t know, and don’t remark on it much further than that. The store owner banters with him and his dad a little about comics and whatnot, and finally asks him, “So what’s that you’ve got there?”

“This?” the kid declares, holding his pole aloft. “You might call it a mop handle, but in fact it’s my staff of all cool things that are awesome!”

Top that, Barack.

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Does that work? I have no insight from inside an elected representative’s office, but my impression from watching these campaigns mounted semiregularly by the liberal blogosphere over the past few years is that they don’t accomplish much. There’s one going on now to encourage the House to pass the Senate health care bill, if necessary with amendments passed through budget reconciliation.

Set aside the fact that after you subtract one Republican (Cao) and at least ten anti-choice Stupak amendment fanatics who don’t like Ben Nelson’s still evil compromise language, you’re left considerably short of being able to pass anything. Maybe this is just me getting cynical in my old age, but I can’t think of a single example in the last five years when calls to Congress from Daily Kos readers changed a result.

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Several of the volumes of Rex Mundi now have been careful to point out, on their back covers, that the comic predates The Da Vinci Code. The latest and last, Rex Mundi: Gate of God is no exception. It is true, but they were both beaten hollow by Foucault’s Pendulum a good fifteen years earlier, which made merciless fun of the conspiricizing they both take so seriously.

For those who aren’t familiar with the story so far, it’s far more inventive than Dan Brown’s, which seems to be a pretty straightforward mystery based on other people’s conspiracy theories. (From what I know of it. I haven’t read Dan Brown and don’t plan to.) Rather than setting his conspiracy about the bloodline of Jesus in the modern Catholic Church, Arvid Nelson constructed an entire alternate world in which the Reformation and the French Revolution both failed. The setting is France in the 1930s, still ruled by the monarchy, in a Europe where the Catholic Church (and its Inquisition) are still major political forces. Also, magic works.

It started out highly promising, with political and mystical forces all at work together in a major mystery whose surface the main character, Dr. Julien Sauniere, is only beginning to scratch. I was puzzled by the fact that France devolves into Nazism around book 3 or 4, setting off a war more similar to World War I than II—does Nelson mean to imply that Nazism was historically inevitable, even under vastly different political circumstances? And as the curtain was drawn back further and further on the central mysteries, I found myself disappointed by them.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. It’s always easier to hint at mysteries than reveal them.

Anyway, this last volume is entirely given to a final cataclysmic confrontation between good guy and bad guy, with the help of some pretty silly magic wine and a collapsing castle. It’s satisfying in a formal way. Thematically, it’s supposed to have something to do with Baha’i prophecy, apparently, but I wasn’t really sure what to make of that.

Preview of book 1 here.

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I suppose there are some readers of this blog who haven’t met one or the other Joshes in person. Here’s a little taste of what we look (and of course, sound) like.

I am everyone in this video. (Another reason to choose Yale.) That is, everyone except for the one who is Josh Malbin. He can be seen wearing the Chinese dragon costume in the “8 Cultural Centers” bit.

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I’m hardly the only person to say this today, but Scott Brown would be foolish not to run for president. A state senator who lept to the U.S. Senate. Brown’s opponent did him plenty of favors, but Obama’s opponent was so laughable as to raise reasonable questions about Obama’s ability to survive an actual competitive election. Brown is telegenic, looks good naked, has a national base but can probably (by virtue of living in Massachusetts alone) mitigate fears that he aligns perfectly with that base’s beliefs. The career paths of John Kennedy, Bob Dole, John Kerry, Barack Obama and John McCain all deprecate the value of “experience”, suggesting that candidates quickly grow stale in the Senate. At some level, voters prefer governors with executive records; legislative records pile up for consumption by op researchers; magic and local identity wear off.

Given a wide-open field and two and a half years to the convention, I’ll put up $125 right now that Brown takes the GOP nomination if you’ll give me 4:1 on it. Who wants a piece of that action? Honest Harry holds.

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