Lost, Season 6, Episode 7: Dr Linus

My blog is up at Smartpop. Total spoilers. Here is a sample. Click the sample to read the whole thing.

And I DO. NOT. CARE. how many times we have done the slow-mo-long-lost-castaways-are-reunited-on-the-beach-to-Michael-Giacchino’s-score thing. They get me every time, and Giacchino won an Academy Award a few days ago FOR A REASON. This one was no exception, and we have a Sun and Jin one on the way to look forward to. (Lost knows everyone liked the tension of Desmond and Penny separated: I think it was kind of cheap to just do it again with Sun and Jin, but whatever. I can get over it.)

I thought it was hilarious that the unique page URL for this week's Smartpop is http://www.smartpopbooks.com/616 -- all this talk about alternate universes, and the number 616 is how we identify this post. (A note to my mother, who now reads by blog now -- "616" is how Marvel Comics identifies their main universe of Spiderman, Iron Man, Captain America and the X-Men, as opposed to other universes where say, all those characters are Zombies because history went different there).

One thing to add here, also for my mother: I forgot to mention what a beautiful moment of Christian forgiveness is shown to Ben in this episode: to not forgive him is not just cruel but puts his soul at hazard (in McCarthy's words), as he will have no choice to side with the Satan figure of The Man in Black (if that is where we are going with this, which is by no means clear, or desirable).

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #259

[Jason Powell continues to look at every issue of Claremont's X-Men run. This one is short, and he worries this will look like his is phoning it in, but I think he is focused, smart, and can usefully rely on all the writing he has in the can -- there is no reason for him to keep making the same points. Especially when the new point he has here is such good one.]

“Dream a Little Dream”

While Claremont’s messing around with Storm’s age and Psylocke’s ethnicity seems like change just for the sake of it, his concluding narrative turns for Colossus and Dazzler are beautifully conceived. Throughout the Outback era, these were the two characters who – within in the world of the story – were never fully at ease with the path on which they found themselves. Peter was raised to be a farmer, and had a passion for art. Alison was groomed to enter law school, but pursued her passion for music. Both originally set to follow in their parents’ footsteps, both with an artistic bent, they nonetheless became “superheroes” – one out of a sense of duty; the other, desperation.

These parallels had existed all along, but only in “Dream a Little Dream” does Claremont juxtapose the two characters so deliberately. They both emerge from the Seige Perilous in Uncanny 259, in scenarios that allow them to pursue their respective passions. Peter becomes a painter; and Dazzler, a movie star. And while each of them will become involved in action-story tropes over the next couple of issues, there is a sense that the greater burdens associated with their X-affiliations have been lifted.

Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

Carl Wilson wrote this great little book a few years back called Let's Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. In it Wilson, a serious indie music critic, subjects himself to Celine Dion music to understand why so many people love it, and investigate where taste comes from. I clipped this passage to show to my students, but there is something about it I don't quite get:

[91] The pleasure of listening to music or playing a sport is obviously real. [Sociologist Pierre Bourdeiu’s] argument is that the kinds of music and sports we choose, and how we talk about them, are socially shaped – that the cultural filters and concepts that guide my interests in and reactions to music, clothes, films or home decoration come out of my class and field. At the worst I am conning myself, but to what I feel is my advantage.

A Serious Man

Total spoilers.

Harold Bloom remarks somewhere that The Torah posits a fullness of meaning for the Jewish people. Because of the Torah everything is meaningful, and everything is meaningful in the Torah, including individual letters, even their shape. The Torah is full of wisdom, as a woman wearing braces from polio points out to the protagonist of A Serious Man, that can help with anything that may arise. Judaism posits a fullness of significance.

Bloom draws a couple of conclusions from this. For one, he says that this is why Jewish poetry is very weak. Because according to Bloom's theory of poetry, poets become great by battling a father figure to determine, among other things, meaning. Wordsworth is great because he is trying to outdo Milton. But Bloom says this is not a Jewish virtue. In Judaism, meaning has already been given in its totality, and surpassing fathers is not the thing to do. (I know a very successful Jewish professional man who outdid his blue collar father; the father refused to visit the son's office.) Bloom also believes that Freud's psychoanalysis, which he did not want to merely be a "Jewish Science," was very Jewish -- just as the Torah contains all the meaning that will ever be needed, so in psychoanalysis your destiny is set at a very very young age for the rest of your life, and just as in Judaism, in psychoanalysis everything -- even slips of the tongue -- have meaning.

The universe of almost all of the Cohen brothers' movies posits the exact opposite - everything is totally EMPTY of meaning, which is why so many of their movies just become complete farce.

Punisher Max issue 6 -- one more thing

[Graham Tedesco-Blair has been looking at Ennis's Punisher Max series. Last week he sent me a revision to one of the paragraphs in his last review, but I forgot to make the change for him. My bad. Here it is. The paragraph that begins "Pittsy and Frank keep smashing the tar out of one another" should look like this:]

Pittsy and Frank keep smashing the tar out of one another, when we get an odd call back to Morrison's Arkham Asylum, of all things. Morrison is about as un-Miller as you can get these days, though he had yet to start his attempted subversion of Millar's Batman, bear in mind. Pittsy stabs Castle through the hand with a shard of broken glass, recalling that famous scene in the aforementioned book, the one than snaps Batman out of his scared and tired trance, and the same thing happens here with Frank, who uses it as an opportunity to chuck Pittsy out of the window, where he's impaled onto the sharp spikes of the fence below. Even then, though, this isn't enough to kill him, so Frank jumps off after him, landing feet first on Pittsy's chest, and driving him further onto the spikes. That old school mafia archetype is hard to put down, after all, but perhaps it can be temporarily distracted by a crazy Scottish magician?

Lost Season 6, Episode 6: Sundown

My spoiler-ho review of the latest episode of LOST is up at smartpop. Here is a sample you can click to read the whole thing.

The Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie for a pretty obvious reason: as the second act of the story, the bad guys are winning. As Dante learned writing the Divine Comedy, it is always more fun to hang out with bad guys than good guys. This far into season 6 of Lost we are clearly in the second act of the final season, and, right on schedule, the bad guys are in glorious form. I can only assume that while I am writing this a series of Youtube clips are being thrown together, scoring the final moment of “Sundown” — The Man in Black’s bad-ass slow-motion walk away from the temple with his crew — to any number of songs, including “Damn it Feels Good to be A Gangster” and “Little Green Bag” from Reservoir Dogs.

Something I did not say over there:

Neil has a theory that the Alt-U is not a different timeline but the result of some time travel mojo that has yet to happen -- that basically we are witnessing how everything will resolve for our characters, the ending engineered for them by Jacob and The Man in Black after the events of the island play out. The fact that a late episode is called "Happily Ever After" supports this, as does the fact that Sayid is in the thrall of The Man in Black, and his Alt U story does not take such a happy turn as the others have. A punishment perhaps, and an appropriately ironic one: the Man in Black said he could see his true love again, and indeed he does -- in the arms of another man.

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #258

[Jason Powell continues his EPIC look at ever issue of Claremont's X-Men, in the process inspiring other people not only to love Claremont MORE, but also to do their own issue by issue projects.]

“Broken Chains”

Why did Claremont turn Psylocke Asian?

The character’s transformation into a ninja is explainable in the context of Claremont’s extended Miller homage. Indeed, the eventual plan was to have the Hand succeed where they fail during the Mandarin trilogy, brainwashing Wolverine into their master assassin – a development that would have lasted a year. (Editorial nixed it, and when the time came Claremont had already quit anyway.)

But the desire to transform Betsy into a different ethnicity seems purposeless. I say “seems” because as I write this, there have just been some fantastic comments made to the blog entry for Uncanny 247, wherein Gary and others helped to beautifully explicate some of my difficulties with that issue’s ending. So while I’m inclined to say that Psylocke’s transformation was arbitrary and ill-considered, I will wait and see if any commentators can shed some light.

(I tend to put Storm’s transformation into a child in the same category. Developments like Ororo’s and Psylocke’s feel very much like the massive narrative chess game that was Claremont’s X-Men ended with “Inferno,” and that everything afterward amounts to him just idly pushing the pieces around on the board.)

Women in Refrigerators 10 Years Later

[Scott takes a discussion from ten years ago and evaluates how it holds up today. He sent me this a while ago but we have had so many regular posters on here, it sat in the pipeline for a while -- Sorry Scott. If it makes you feel better I have one in the pipeline too (expect it Monday).]

For those of you unfamiliar, It was a little over 10 years ago that Gail Simone and a few of her fellow comics creators/fans noticed what they felt to be a disturbing trend in superhero comics, a trend they named ‘Women in Refrigerators’ after the event in 1994’s Green Lantern 54 where Kyle Rayner returns home to discover his girlfriend has been murdered and stuffed into his refrigerator by Major Force (Ron Marz would later defend this scene by explaining that, since the censors would not allow them to show the full picture, many assumed that she had been dismembered when, in fact, she had only been crammed WHOLE into the refrigerator… because that’s SO MUCH better). While often used as a blanket term to refer to any wrong done to a female character, it is more specifically linked with something bad being done to a female character who is close to the hero in some way for the purpose of a plot device, usually one that involves having the hero ‘undergo a baptism of fire’ of sorts or to ‘raise the stakes’ and force the hero to consider and, sometimes, cross a line that they normally wouldn’t cross.

To document this phenomena, they created this website which not only list all the female characters who have had atrocities visited upon them that range from being depowered to being raped or murdered, but also contains responses from various comics professionals (some of whom are the guilty parties in the abuse of these characters) where they will often attempt to apologize or, at least, defend/explain their actions (interestingly, Geoff Johns, who weighs in at one point on this subject is given kudos for his portrayal of the, at the time, newly created Courney Whitmore (Stargirl) whom Simone describes as “ a delightful creation… the kind of young girl character I’ve been hoping for.” So, despite our issues with him here on the blog, maybe there’s some stuff he gets right.).

Punisher MAX Issue 5 and 6

[Graham Tedesco-Blair continues his issue by issue look at the Punisher Max series. There is some very well observed stuff in here about various crime story influences working themselves out in the pages of the book. Smart stuff.]

Opening Remarks

Before I start the analysis, I wanted to address a question left in the comments for the preamble. Steven asked: “In that Boys storyline, I didn't catch where he disses Winick. How did you pick up on that? I didn't see it, but I'd be interested to see how you caught that.”

The story in question, “Get Some,” (The Boys, #7-10) is a murder mystery in which a young gay man is found murdered, tossed off the roof of his apartment, and examines in generous depth the reactions of a somewhat average straight guy to the homosexual community, as well as the sheer folly that comes in trying to label someone as gay or straight without bothering to try and get to know them. Issue 8 starts with Hughie reading a “Swingwing” comic, the titular character being a pastiche of DC's Nightwing. The comic's plot is almost exactly the same as Winick's famous “gay roommate” story arc in Green Lantern, and Hughie's dialog describing it seems directly pointed at the original author:

“An' then later on the kid gets queerbashed, right? An' Swingwing goes after the guys and knocks the fuck outta them... I mean, in what weird fuckin' parallel universe has anything like this ever happened to anyone, would you tell me? ... I just think this is really stupid. I mean gay fellas do get beaten up, there are these fuckers going around doing it – an' here's this shite sayin' not to worry, there's a superhero on the way...”

Lost, Season 6, Episode 5

My post about the latest episode of Lost is up at Smartpop(Total Spoilers). Here is a sample -- click it for more.

One of the things Lost has been about from the beginning is bad parents, especially for “Candidates” (did everyone notice the sign in front of the piano audition said “All Candidates Welcome”): Jack and Claire and their dad, Kate and her mom and dad, Locke and his dad, Sawyer and his parents, Sun and her dad, Walt and his parents, Hurley and his dad, Ben and his dad (and surrogate father figure Jacob), Daniel and his parents (Mrs Hawking and Widmore), Desmond and his would be father in law Widmore, Miles and his dad Chang, Claire as a bad mom, Kate as a bad adoptive mom (with Jack as adoptive dad). Just as the alternate universe gave us a chance to see a place where John Locke could be happy, we also get a world where Jack can break the cycle started by his dad, and be a good dad for his son.

One more thought that I had after the show ended: in the season opener, I felt like Dogen hit so many cliched "Asian" stereotypes: he knows martial arts, and does bonsai, and hates English, and so on. I am not sure how much weight I want to put on it; Lost is after all a genre mixing show, and these are things movie Samurai do. But it is maybe interesting that in the alternate universe Dogen rejects the stereotype Asian dad role -- he says to Jack the child musicians are under too much pressure, when the cliche teaches us to expect him to pour the pressure on. It would not be significant, except for the fact that it is another, minor way, that the alternate universe gives us good dads where the main U has bad ones.

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #257

[Jason Powell takes a look at every issue of Claremont's X-Men. And now we have reached 1990. Be impressed.]

“Lady Mandarin”

Issues 256-258 comprise a self-contained trilogy representing Claremont’s contribution to Marvel’s 1989 company-wide crossover, “Acts of Vengeance.” From what I’ve read, the original concept came from John Byrne, though it quickly morphed into something apart from what he envisioned. The end result was a storyline in which the major Marvel villains teamed up, and began crafting scenarios wherein heroes were forced to fight unfamiliar bad guys.

Claremont’s participation in the game does not seem altogether comfortable. Using Iron Man’s archenemy, the Mandarin, is a clever callback to the Silver Age, back when Roy Thomas had the X-Men fighting Iron Man villains in every other issue – yet the villain doesn’t even appear in this, the middle issue of the trilogy. And at one point, Matsuo Tsurayaba actually derides the Mandarin’s participation in the “Acts of Vengeance” overplot, subtly mocking the entire affair. Claremont’s use of Logan during the proceedings is also strange, given that he could have used any number of people from his large rotating cast; but Wolverine was already fighting an unfamiliar villain in the “Acts” issues of his solo title. To use Logan in Uncanny as well creates a somewhat knotty time paradox.

Kirby's Fourth World Gets Animated

[Andy Bentley caps his look at Jack Kirby's New Gods by looking at how they get picked up in the animated DCU.]

When Bruce Timm and co* approached the Superman Animated Series in 1996, they already had the Emmy award winning Batman: The Animated Series under their belt. The Superman character was nowhere near as relevant as Batman, so they took great lengths to make Superman and his world feel modern. One of the ways they did this was to incorporate the Kirby style into various objects. Timm explains:

When the time came to do Superman, we really didn't know what to do that would make it visually different from Batman but at the same time just as cool. We didn't wanna go back and make it look just like the Fleischer cartoons; I didn't want anybody to put our show up against Fleischer's and say, "Well look, they're doing the Fleischers, just not as well." One of the things we wanted to do with Superman was to kind of "Marvelize" Superman a little bit. That's why the police don't just carry handguns, but these Kirby-like weapons. All of the science-fictional elements in this series-whether it's a tank or something from outer space-has a kind of Kirby feel to it, or at least we try to. Even in the pilot, the origin story, there's this Brainiac satellite floating around Krypton and we tried for the longest time to come up with a design for it, and we didn't come up with anything I really liked. I found this Kirby gizmo in one of the Kirby comics and I turned it upside-down and said, "Hey! That's our satellite." There are things like that all the way through the show where we would just find Kirby-ish elements and turn them into things in the Superman show.

The other issue was that Superman's villains paled in comparison to Batman's rouges gallery. Timm goes on to explain:

Punisher MAX Issue 4

[Graham Tedesco-Blair continues to look at every issue of Garth Ennis's Punisher Max run.]

“No one ever before dared defy THE MAFIA. . . but THE EXECUTIONER not only defies them, he kills, maims, and tries to destroy them piece by piece, with his Vietnam-trained tactics. . . using his knowledge of jungle warfare in his one-man crusade to wipe out the evil web of organized crime in America.” --Jacket copy for Don Pendleton's “The Executioner: War Against the Mafia!”

That sound like anyone we know?

One of the clearest predecessors to The Punisher is Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan, “The Executioner.” The parallels are abundant: a well trained Vietnam soldier who's family is killed takes his war to the mob. There are superficial differences, for example, Bolan lost his parents and sister to mafia loan sharks, and was a Green Beret, while Castle lost his wife and kids, and was part of a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, but the basic idea is clearly the same.

After spending 11 years worth of novels killing his way across the states (and coinciding with Pendleton's sale of the character franchise to Gold Eagle books), Bolan fakes his own death, and emerges as the leader of the top secret government strike force Stony Man, who fight Communists and such all over the world.

Kevin Geeks Out About MONKEYS!

[I will be at this thing. From Kevin Maher --]

Watch the trailer (edited by KGO super-producer Jay Stern) here, and buy tickets in advance, as the show WILL sell-out:

Our top-shelf guests include
Michael Kupperman (Snake & Bacons Cartoon Cabaret) sharing an all-new comic story!
Noah Tarnow (host of Big Quiz Thing) quizzes your primate knowledge
Geoff Klock (author of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why) looks at Gorilla as Super-Villain
Carrie McLaren (editor of Monkeywire.org and producer of Brooklyn’s Adult Ed lecture series) shares the secret history of violent monkey entertainment.
M. Sweeney Lawless (KGO Super-producer) provides a dazzling presentation on Englands greatest King Kong knock-off.

And everyone in attendance will get a monkey-themed snack (not a banana)

Kevin Geeks Out About Monkeys
Friday February 19
8pm
92Y Tribeca
200 Hudson Street
www.ThisKevin.Blogspot.com

Lost Season 6, Episode 4: The Substitute

My review of Lost for Smartpop is up. Here is a sample - click it to read more. Total Spoilers.

John Locke episodes are always the best ones, and this was no exception. This was the episode where I really started to feel like Lost is serious about answering some questions, and this episode featured all the human emotional anchoring I was looking for in LAX. (To be fair, it may have been in LAX, I just did not appreciate it because of the 8 months I had to wait to watch it). And our final story arc was advanced and clarified. I may be overstating it because it JUST ended, but I feel like this may be one of my favorite Lost episodes ever. Not top 5 but top 10.

Extra stuff:
-Because we still don't know the Man in Black's name, that means the name itself must be a spoiler. Interesting.

-Did anyone else think, a spit second before the revealed the wall of names, that Evil Locke was going to reveal some fantastic technology?

-You may know that my wife Sara has a tumblr blog called "Monsters with Sandwiches" which features drawing of exactly what it says. Here is the one she put up today:

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #256

[In a time when people neglect Claremont, in a land where I don't really blog that often, there came a man, a man named JASON POWELL, who looked at every issue of Claremont's X-Men run. And the land was goddamn restored or something.]

“The Key That Breaks the Locke”

Though not the most humble of comic-book personalities, John Byrne has always downplayed both the quality and the significance of his work on Uncanny X-Men in the late 70s. While acknowledging reader reaction to the startling change in visual style between his first issue and Dave Cockrum’s last, Byrne puts it down as much to the inking as to the pencils. Cockrum and Sam Grainger, he notes, both had a softer style, while Byrne combined with Terry Austin made for a look that he likens to “cut glass.” Indeed, however Byrne chooses to contextualize the shift, the effect from going from Uncanny 107 to 108 is powerful, like a leap into the future, and remains so even three decades later.

But, as with so many moments in Uncanny X-Men’s spiraling history, that aesthetic watershed in 1977 was reiterated later … twelve years later, in this case, when the softness of Silvestri and Green in issue 255 (by happenstance the loosest and sloppiest issue of their entire tenure) gave way to the “cut glass” of Jim Lee and Scott Williams in Uncanny X-Men 256. The affect is arresting, and once again feels like a quantum advancement into a new era.