Archive for June, 2010
Cleaning Out the Closet II
by Joshua Malbin on Jun.30, 2010, under Uncategorized
For all my class of ’94 peeps, below the fold: The DS “Tape” – 95 (LICK).
I feel like the 94 tape is clearly the best of the three, but judge for yourselves.
Cleaning Out the Closet I
by Joshua Malbin on Jun.28, 2010, under Uncategorized
My parents are cleaning out their house to put it on the market, so I had to go and sort through all my old things. Among them were the Deep Springs mixtapes of 1994 and 1995. I realize that this is of limited interest, but ladies and gentlemen, below the fold I give you the Deep Springs Mixtape 1994 Playlist (with contributors in parens):
Well, There Is That Dark Side to the Nose Ring [furrows brow. steeples forefingers.]
by Joshua Malbin on Jun.28, 2010, under Uncategorized
I realize that even asking this question marks me as being 120 years old in kid years, but what’s the deal with cheek piercings? Who started the trend? Are they supposed to be reminiscent of dimples? Why do so many kids have them now instead of, you know, tongue studs or eyebrow rings?
Criminal: The Sinners TPB
by Joshua Malbin on Jun.22, 2010, under Comics
The latest volume of the Criminal series, The Sinners, sees Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips return to a set of characters for the first time. We first met Tracy Lawless in the second trade paperback, Lawless, when he returned home from Iraq, a deserter, trying to find out who killed his little brother. He found out, but then to save a woman had to agree to work as a hitman for the gang boss his brother owed money to.
This book starts a year later, as Tracy is handed an assignment: find out who’s killing mob-connected crime bosses all over town. We also soon learn, though Tracy doesn’t right way, that an Army investigator has tracked him to the city and is looking to bring him in.
That change—from a third-person voice strictly limited to Tracy’s perspective to one that bounces among at least three characters and shows us things unknown to any of them—dilutes the book’s emotional impact some. Neither of the books has an astoundingly original plot. They’re both pretty straight-ahead noir crime fiction. But Lawless featured less action and spent more time inside Tracy’s head, and felt richer for it. The Sinners does less of that, perhaps because we’ve already explored Tracy’s character, but the glimpses we get into other people’s heads don’t make up the loss.
They do, however, give away the answer to the puzzle Tracy is trying to solve long before he solves it, which throws the weight of the book back onto character, even as character is also weakened.
I don’t want to get on Brubaker and Phillips too much. The characters are still better here than in other recent crime comics I’ve read, and the story is told with neat competence. There are a lot of moving pieces and yet I was never confused about how any of them fit together. That’s easier said than done.
In the end, though, I guess I think the decision to center this story around Tracy Lawless was itself the book’s biggest mistake. I would have preferred to spend the story in the brain of the chief villain, with Tracy on his tail.
Preview below the fold.
Zip Up Your Skirt and Get In The Ring
by Josh K-sky on Jun.19, 2010, under Politics
Dahlia Lithwick is a little too subtle when she asks the question “What happens to our civic life when we’re all too scared to participate?”
In the wake of Prop 8′s passage, activists publicized the names of individual donors to Yes on 8 and encouraged boycotts. To find tactics she calls “inexcusable and genuinely threatening”, Lithwick links to an editorial by the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor, who writes:
Protesters have shouted insults at people headed to worship; temples and churches have been defaced. “Blacklists” of donors who contributed to Yes on 8 are circulating on the Internet, and even small-time donors are being confronted. A Palo Alto dentist lost two patients as a result of his $1,000 donation. The artistic director of the California Musical Theatre resigned to spare the organization from a fast-developing boycott. Scott Eckern, the artistic director of the Sacramento theater group and a Mormon, had given $1,000 to Yes on 8.
Not quite Mississippi Burning. Let’s break it down: “People headed to worship” presumably means in the Mormon church, which raised $40 million to pass Prop 8. It makes me happy to know that people are shouting insults at them. Existing laws prohibit defacing temples and churches; I bravely submit that they should be enforced. If I found out that the money I was spending on my dentist was going to defeat marriage rights, I would find a new dentist and I would thank the person who told me.
I personally feel ambivalent about using a boycott of an organization to drive an individual with repellent views from his job. I might question it as a tactic. But there’s no question that people have the right to not direct their funds where they will be used to hurt them politically. I think the Prop 8 donors who cry scared are genuinely surprised that they don’t have a right to be liked. I think they’re surprised that people take it personally when they prevent them from marrying.
I think they’re scared in part by their own empathy — the yawp of rage that sounded after Prop 8 won made them feel, for the first time, just how bad gay people felt at being told they couldn’t marry. Knowing for a moment that anger, it scared them to know that someone else had it towards them.
Justice Scalia, mirabile dictu, gets it right. Lithwick:
While he acknowledged that threats of violence and hate mail can be scary and should be addressed by other legal means, Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed Bopp’s concern that one’s political opponents are just a mouse-click away from hunting you down as “touchy-feely, oh-so-sensitive.” An exasperated Scalia warned at oral argument that “you can’t run a democracy this way, with everybody being afraid of having his political positions known.”
The United States has a robust avenue for anonymous political participation. Besides your blog. I speak of the vaunted secret ballot. If you want to anonymously support a cause, do so on election day. Otherwise, if you put your money where your mouth is, be prepared that others may do so as well.
Buzzard #1
by Joshua Malbin on Jun.17, 2010, under Comics
Somewhere along the line Eric Powell clearly got bored. The Goon in its original form was a bizarrely funny mix of over-the-top elements borrowed from 1930s and 1940s gangster films and 1950s and 1960s low-budget, sci-fi B movies.
That energy began to flag about a dozen and a half issues in, though, and Powell’s tone grew more serious. Ponderous, even. Without the jokes, Powell’s tales of battles against zombies and witches have dragged. His drawing style has continued to mature, so that the pages of more recent books are now beautifully painted color illustrations, rather than the simpler (but still very well done) scenes with which he began, but that has only lent to the comic’s sense of gravity.
His new limited series Buzzard, focusing on the Goon character who eats men and zombies, is half a continuation of that trend and half a return to his antic roots. The half that’s a continuation is the Buzzard half, since Buzzard has always been The Goon‘s closest thing to a tragic figure. It’s lovely but almost entirely told in a deliberately stilted narration, far, far from the goofy dialogue-and-action-driven stories of the early days.
The half that’s a refreshing return to earlier form is titled “Billy the Kid’s Old-Timey Oddities and the Pit of Horrors.” Perhaps Powell was able to recharge his inspiration with a new set of genres: instead of gangsters and B-movie sci-fi, how about Westerns and B-movie horror? The sensibility edges back in the right direction, with Billy’s little-person sidekick insisting in panel three that “Them British is a bunch of intellectualized, pinky raisin’, tea sippers!” That may not have the manic genius of “This head ain’t talking. Maybe I should poke it with the stick again,” or “THIS BIT AIN’T ABOUT LABRAZIO! IT’S ABOUT THE GOON BEIN’ MEAN TA FISH, SO BUGGER OFF!” (both scraps of dialogue from page one of The Goon issue #1), but I guess I’ll take it.
Preview below the fold.
I Know That Taxi Stand!
by Joshua Malbin on Jun.15, 2010, under New York
Saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, of all places. One of his emailers gets all goopy about how great this means New York is, but the important thing is that this is a glimpse inside my favorite taxi stand! Usually a spot for Sikh taxi drivers to buy tea, on weekend nights it fills up with drunk twentysomethings looking for late-night munchies. I used to be one of those. Now I try to stay out of the East Village on weekend nights. But I still love me some Punjabi taxi stand.
Bhangra in the East Village from Derek Beres on Vimeo.
Meta 4 #1
by Joshua Malbin on Jun.15, 2010, under Comics
In Ted McKeever’s Meta 4 #1, a man in a spacesuit wanders the boardwalk of Coney Island. He can’t remember who he is nor why he’s in a spacesuit. He’s harassed by a junkie in a bathroom, gets assaulted by her boyfriend, and is saved by a giant bald woman in a Santa costume who bears a close resemblance to previous McKeever Amazon androgynes. Interspersed are transcripts of two conversations between “Dispatcher” and “Police” concerning the same hostage situation, or maybe different ones. The first is superimposed on an image of abandoned gas station outside the Nevada Test Site, the second over a series of three views of Coney Island, culminating in a woman’s face in an aviator helmet.
Do I have the slightest idea what’s going on? I do not. Do I trust that a comic entitled Meta 4: A 5-Issue Allegorical Series in Black & White is ultimately going to make sense of everything? Not really. So would I put up with this vagueness if the author weren’t McKeever?
Maybe. Probably not. I don’t know. The fact is, by reissuing his three classic graphic novels from the late 1980s and early 1990s—Transit, Eddy Current, and Metropol—McKeever has earned himself a new generation of fans who were, like me, too young to buy the books the first time around. And while those comics weren’t quite as obscure as this one seems to be so far, they were pretty off the wall. So okay, Ted, I’ll give you five issues’ worth of rope. Try not to hang yourself.
Preview here.
Alvin Greene
by Josh K-sky on Jun.13, 2010, under Politics
Here’s my Alvin Greene hypothesis. I think his candidacy is cooked-up and crooked. I think his vote margin is a Dieblod artifact. I think he’s also supposed to get caught.
No one in the South Carolina GOP ever lost a minute of sleep over Jim DeMint losing his seat. Someone saw an opportunity. The stakes are low — let’s see how effectively we can sabotage a Democratic primary, let’s see what people use to figure it out (statistical analysis! recount challenges! investigative reporting!) and then when it counts, we’ll know how to do it even better.