Joshua Malbin

I’m still getting caught up on Glee. Episode 7, while entertaining enough, has a number of flaws that highlight what the show does so well.

1: You can have too much of a good thing. Jane Lynch is one of the best things about the show. But her over-the-top villainy plays better as a force of nature than in sustained interactions with other characters. An episode like Preggers, where the Glee club’s success threatens Sue’s television perch, uses her centrally without overdoing it, but Throwdown puts her and Mr. Shuster in continuous battle, which taxes the necessary suspension of disbelief. In general, the adult world outside of Will Shuster is so absurd that it needs to be secondary to the fortunes of the Glee club, and the show works best when it uses the adult world as the B plot or makes Will overwhelmingly central.

2. Narrow your focus. Sue’s exploitation of the minority students’ alienation was tonally inconsistent. The satire of “minority status” was too absurd in its broadness to be pointed, and came off as mushy and hesitant. Glee hasn’t entirely found its voice with regards to satire; this is most clearly found in the attempts to soften Terri even as she moves forward her fabricated pregnancy and baby-switching plot. With Terri, I’m glad to see that the show doesn’t want to treat her as an outright villain, unsympathetically desperate in her baby-madness; with a one-episode theme, however, it’s better to stake out your target more clearly.

2. Glee it up. Too many of the songs in this episode were solo numbers with only incidental choral touches. Consider “Hate On Me”:

There’s no doubt that Amber Riley’s Mercedes can deliver the goods, but solo performances weaken the show. We’ve already seen her do “Bust Your Windows” on her own. The show does a good job of pairing pop songs with the characters’ emotional states, but it only soars when they get their peers to join them in their heightened, musical state. To me, that’s the central proposition of Glee, the truth of which Rachel tries to persuade Quinn in this episode: we all know how much it hurts; you’re not alone.

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1. Rex Mundi

2. Air

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I liked Preacher. I’ve liked several of the tales in War Stories. I really liked his run in Hellblazer. And up until this point I’d liked The Boys. But as I believe I’ve mentioned in passing before, Garth Ennis has always had a problem with using violence as a punch line. Sometimes this works, as in some of the sickest moments in Preacher, but sometimes it really doesn’t.

Herogasm is one case where it doesn’t. One of the main characters gets raped and spends the rest of the book stumbling around, clutching his stomach and looking upset. I just don’t think rape jokes are funny. Not cool, Garth.

The art is also lame, totally static and plastic.

Preview at the link above.

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I saw yet another guy on the subway collecting change for the United Homeless Organization and for the umpteenth time wondered if it was all a scam. This time, though, I Googled it when I came home, and what do you know, news!

[A]n investigation by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo appears to have confirmed what many New Yorkers secretly (if somewhat guiltily) suspected all along: The United Homeless Organization, supposedly a nonprofit group set up to help feed and house the homeless, was actually an elaborate fraud.

According to a complaint filed by Mr. Cuomo on Tuesday morning, U.H.O. does not operate a single shelter, soup kitchen or food pantry. It does not provide food or clothing to the homeless. It does not even donate money to other charities that do.

Most of those coins and bills, Mr. Cuomo contended, end up in the pockets of those working the donation tables, who pay a daily fee to the group’s founder and president, Stephen Riley, and its director, Myra Walker, for the right to use the U.H.O. tables, jugs and aprons. The rest of the money, Mr. Cuomo charged, is kept by Mr. Riley and Ms. Walker, and has been used for a variety of expenses not related to U.H.O. business, including expenditures at Weightwatchers.com, Toys “R” Us, P. C. Richard, Bed, Bath & Beyond, and premium cable and electricity bills at their homes.

In case you ever wondered.

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Cat Burglar Black is a perfectly fun little story, but I guess at this point I just wish Richard Sala would stretch himself a little. It’s not significantly different in style or tone from The Chuckling Whatsit, Peculia, or Mad Night. I realize, as mentioned before, that commercial success comes in part from giving people the same thing over an over, but I think Sala is carrying this a bit too far.

Preview here.

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I hate him more than any other politician I know. I hate him more than George W. Bush, who was merely smarmy, self-righteous, and stupid. I hate him more than Dick Cheney, a principled champion of evil. I hate him more than the Joe Lieberman, Exhibit A for narcissistic personality disorder.

See, most other politicians do bad things because they come to view people as abstractions. Rudy Giuliani does bad things because politics, to him, is an endless series of personal blood feuds, and he is out to screw everybody he believes ever screwed him. And he will use all the power of his office to do it.

Here, then, is a brief review of Rudy Giuliani’s loathsome history.

1. Patrick Dorismond. Explained by The Nation:

[I]n March 2000… the unarmed Patrick Dorismond was shot and killed by undercover narcotics police in midtown Manhattan. Dorismond, 26 and black, an off-duty security guard, was standing outside a bar when a plainclothes cop, part of a narcotics detail patrolling the area, tried to buy crack from him. “What are you doing asking me for that shit?” Dorismond asked.

A fight developed, and one of the cops killed him. The shooting came just three weeks after a jury had acquitted four white police officers in the death of another unarmed black man–Amadou Diallo–who was shot forty-one times on his Bronx doorstep. The cops claimed they had mistaken his wallet for a gun. So Dorismond’s shooting occurred in an atmosphere of tinderbox racial tension.

At first Giuliani called for calm, asking the city to withhold judgment until all the facts were established. But the next morning he ignored his own counsel and started demonizing the dead man. Instead of trying to be fair-minded and reassuring, Giuliani made a series of prejudicial and venomous remarks about Dorismond–even before his funeral. The Mayor seemed unable to express any human sympathy for the dead man’s mother, or to grasp the fact that this was a citizen of his city who was killed–by police–for saying no to drugs.

Giuliani authorized the release of Dorismond’s sealed juvenile arrest record, which contained nothing more serious than a violation punishable by a summons, to discredit him. Juvenile arrest records are supposed to be kept confidential, and Giuliani violated legal ethics by breaking the seal without getting a court order. Dorismond was 13 at the time his arrest was entered into a police computer. At a press conference Giuliani argued that the dead man’s conduct at age 13 was “highly relevant.” Dorismond, he sneered, was “no altar boy.” But Dorismond had actually been an altar boy. He had even attended the same elite Catholic high school as the Mayor–Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn.

Patrick Dorismond, who’d done nothing wrong, had, by his death, become a political threat to Rudy Giuliani. Therefore he had to be destroyed and discredited, even after death.

2. Homeless shelters as political bludgeons:

When the City Council overrode his veto of a bill to change the operations of homeless shelters in December 1998, Giuliani sought to evict five community service programs, including one that served 500 mentally ill people, in the district of the bill’s chief sponsor, and to replace them with a homeless shelter.

What’s more, he released a list of sites for other shelters that would be housed in the districts of council members who voted in favor of the override. (He backed down two months later, after much public outrage.)

3. Say what you like about William Bratton, but he was generally credited with the drop in crime under Giuliani’s mayoralty. And since he got most of the credit, he had to go.

[A]n administration that prized unwavering loyalty to the mayor could not stomach Mr. Bratton’s celebrity. Mr. Bratton dined with celebrities and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He tried to organize a parade for the Police Department’s 150th anniversary, prominently featuring himself, but Mr. Giuliani killed that plan.

Mr. Bratton left the job after just two years — it was generally acknowledged that he was forced out — and publicly toyed with the idea of running against Mr. Giuliani.

4. All the petty little things that won him the Lifetime Muzzle Award from The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

5. Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum. Having never seen it, Giuliani declared it sacrilegious. And therefore…

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani stepped up his attack on the Brooklyn Museum of Art Thursday, threatening to terminate its lease with the city and possibly even seize control of the museum unless it cancels a British exhibition that features a portrait of the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung.

Giuliani said that the exhibition, which is to open next week, would violate the terms of the lease, because the museum does not intend to allow children under 17 to view it unless they are accompanied by an adult. His remarks came a day after he vowed to cut off all city subsidies to the museum if it proceeded with the exhibition, which he described as “sick stuff.”

(By the way, that “stained” is tendentious in the extreme. The painting incorporated elephant dung shaped into small mounds, shellacked, and brightly painted. It was supposed to be an African appropriation and celebration of the Madonna, not in any way a defilement.)

6. The divorce. Now, I don’t usually care what politicians do in their private lives…except when they use their public position to humiliate their families. Take it away, Steve Gilliard (RIP):

By the spring of 2000, there was a new woman in Rudy’s life, Judith Nathan. She had been camoflauged in the mayor’s entourage from the fall of 1999 on. No one knew who she was, at least not obviously. But, as Giulani’s bout with cancer became news, Nathan, who was trained as a nurse, was seen to have been accompanying him to doctor’s meetings. …

Finally, on a rainy late spring day, as the Giuliani senate campaign gained steam, he annouced he was leaving his wife. Well, a couple of hours later, Hanover, now seen on the Travel Channel, announced her reaction … Seems he forgot to tell he wanted a seperation and she found out when we did.
…
Within a week or so of the breakup, Mother’s Day weekend came. So how did the then mayor celebrate? While his wife was home in LA visiting her family, he took a stroll along 2nd Avenue with the press in tow. The pictures of the mayor and his paramour greeted his now estranged wife as a Mother’s Day gift.

Things only got uglier, of course. New York is not a no-fault state. You need grounds. And only Hanover had them.

Now, this is why this story becomes evil.

Over the next year, they fought like pit bulls over control of Gracie Mansion. Giuliani reduced his wife’s security, fired her press aide. She banned Nathan from the parts of Gracie Mansion. For the next year, they fought over control of the building like the Red Guards and German 6th Army fought over the Tractor Works in Stalingrad. No advantage was too slight to gain. Giuliani’s lawyer, showboat Raoul Felder, once called Hanover a greedy pig after a contentious court session.

At one point, Giuliani banned Hanover’s parents from staying in the city-owned building. While Giuliani’s own father was a convicted felon who avoided military service in WWII, Hanover’s father had survived the kamikaze attack on the USS Intrepid in 1945, and was attending a reunion of the ship’s surviving crew.

In the nadir of his behavior towards the mother of his children, mayoral aides forcibly ejected Hanover, who rushed to see her children’s grandmother after she had been taken ill and rushed to the hospital. The shouting match was heard throughout the ER as Hanover was forced to leave.

7. The ferret rant.

I could go on. There were the random, illegal searches. There was the crusade against squeegee men. There’s Bernie Kerik. There was the grandiose, pigheaded gesture of housing New York’s crisis response center in the World Trade Center, the one place in the city already attacked by terrorists. Feel free to add your own.

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I think this is a brilliant idea.

ParkingAroundMe is a free service that lets fellow drivers tell each other about available street parking through text messaging or Twitter. We’re starting in Park Slope Brooklyn (focused on the area around New York Methodist Hospital) and plan to cover the rest of NYC very soon.

No idea how they plan to make money.

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He just won’t die.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has decided not to run for governor next year – but will run for U.S. Senate instead, sources told the Daily News.

Let’s be clear: I don’t care what the polls currently say about his chances against Gillibrand. A lot of New Yorkers still don’t know who Gillibrand is, and Giuliani still has the Kerik albatross. I don’t believe he’s going to win. But I’m not looking forward to seeing his smug, hateful face on the news for another year and worrying about it.

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Ministry of Space was originally published in three installments from 2001 to 2004, really far too extended a schedule for a limited series. It’s just been collected and reissued as a trade paperback by Image Comics. I’m not sure why now except maybe Warren Ellis has gotten so popular that some people will buy any old thing with his name on it. Including me.

The comic lays out an alternate history in which it was the British rather than the Americans who spirited home Germany’s rocket scientists at the end of World War II, giving England an edge in space exploration and leading to a glorious new British Empire in space.

There are two main problems with it. First, speculative history and sci-fi are usually used to make some comment on actual politics, history, or human nature in the world as we know it. I don’t see Ellis even trying to do any of these. It’s a thought experiment without a result.

Second, there’s a supposed big mystery all the way through surrounding the secret origin of the funds used to launch the Ministry. Except that anyone with any knowledge of the Holocaust will guess the answer as soon as the question is raised, making the big reveal at the end no revelation at all.

I love Warren Ellis, but this was not his best work.

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It’s approximately the last third of Kevin Baker’s Luna Park that interests me, since it’s there that the graphic novel stages an experiment with narrative form that I haven’t seen before.

Up to about the hundred-page mark Luna Park is a competently written crime novel with beautiful drawings by Danijel Zezelj. Alik Strelnikov is a low-level Russian mob enforcer in Coney Island who shoots heroin with his girlfriend Marina so he won’t have to remember the death of a previous lover, Mariam, during his Army days in Chechnya.  A rival to his boss owns Marina and is planning to wipe out his competition, including Alik. In Alik’s mind this confrontation repeats the one that killed Mariam, and he is determined this time to save Marina.

So far, pretty conventional. But what I didn’t notice until rereading was how Zezelj sets us up all through even this conventional portion of the story. He separates elements by color: almost everything in Coney Island is a shade of blue-gray, the flashbacks to Chechnya are in reddish brown, and other stories of the past are in pale yellow with brick-red figures. These stories include Genghis Khan’s invasion of Russia, the legend of a queen who killed hundreds of suitors, and a story Alik’s grandfather once told about fighting Americans during the Russian civil war of 1919.

These color schemes make it very easy for the reader to track where a panel belongs, flashback or current narrative. In and of itself, that’s a pretty common comic book device.  What’s uncommon is what happens after the betrayal and bloodbath Alik has been awaiting and fearing: as they flee, Marina leads him into a funhouse near the boardwalk. Alik steps behind a curtain—and we are in a world of yellows.  Without needing to be told we know we are in the past, and it soon becomes clear that Alik is now living out his grandfather’s story, only he is one of the American soldiers, a naturalized Russian. It is the same tale once again, this time with a woman named Mariya, the same desperate attempt at rescue and the same betrayal. We can gather all this visually, without exposition to explain it, and that’s a very neat trick. We only get exposition almost at the end, when Marina/Mariya shows Alik echoes of the same story over and over through Russian history: betrayals and violence.

Unfortunately Kevin Baker provides one last twist and next puts Alik in the shoes of Lee Harvey Oswald on the day before the Kennedy assassination. That’s a deeply silly decision. Maybe he thought a resolution about Russian history wouldn’t resonate with Americans. And, to be honest, that version of the resolution doesn’t ultimately hang together either, though it’s better than an Oswald ending. I am nevertheless impressed at the original method of turning from realism to something else. It’s rare to see the art in a comic do that much narrative work, and I certainly can’t think of another example where it does work of quite this kind.

Preview here.

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