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 a week goes by and I have failed to add you to the blog roll TELL ME TO DO IT AGAIN, and KEEP TELLING ME UNTIL IT GETS DONE. I can be lazy about updating the non-post parts of this site.

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 (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.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 you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is availible on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.

Russell Edson’s “The Parental Decision”

One of Blake’s best poems is “The Mental Traveller.” A close reading of the thing here is beyond our scope, but essentially it is a terrifying, hallucinogenic vision of the cycle of history in the fallen natural world – a cycle we must escape if we are truly to be free. It only has a few archetypical characters that morph in a cycle. Here are some representative lines.


And if the babe is born a Boy
He’s given to a Woman Old
Who nails him down upon a rock
Catches his Shrieks in Cups of gold


She binds iron thorns around his head
She pierces both his hands & feet
She cuts his heart out at his side
To make him feel both cold & heat

Her fingers number every Nerve
Just as a Miser counts his gold
She lives upon his shrieks & cries
And She grows young as he grows old


Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a virgin bright…

[In the end, the poem cycles back to the beginning –]

Till he becomes a wayward Babe
And she a weeping Woman Old
She nails him down upon the Rock
And all is done as I have told

Russell Edson’s weird little poem “The Parental Decision” takes Blake’s visionary allegory of world history and wrecks it by translating it into the mundane day-to-day world of household decisions. Here is the whole poem.

A man splits into two who are an old woman and an old man.
They must be his parents. But where is the man? Perhaps he gave his life for them …
I ask the old couple if they’ve seen their son.
The old woman says, we’ve decided not to have any children.

If modern poems seem weird and impossible to understand, it is often the case that you are just missing another text that the poem you are reading is thinking of.

Comics Out October 31, 2007

Batman 670. Morrison’s dully retro 70 Batman thing continues. The three girls, who are probably old comic book characters I do not know are boring, and the Silken Spider looks ridiculous doing her “sexy” wavy-arm squat dance. The art is pretty good, but also very Neal Adams in places, which is what is wanted, but not exactly keeping me on my toes. Making Bat-Gas standard issue may please retro-folks who just think the idea is great, but I am not one of those people. Ra’s al Ghul, again, is not impressing me for the same reason – I read this already in reprints. The issue almost kicked into gear with Damian – I was surprisingly pleased to see him back, and I love that he is still in the Robin uniform and cloak. That speaks volumes, and is the only thing in the issue worth keeping. Damian is the only character in the book to have any life to him. His family romance is the only conflict that feels like something original.

X-Men Messiah Complex. Flat, like no man’s business flat. Starts with the X-Jet and a view of five characters inside. Each is introduced with a name plate thing, and each gets a line of dialogue. Here they are.

“You picking up anything? We should be close by now.” “Nothing … which is a bit troubling.” “What do you mean?” “It’s a whole town fulla people, and xxx ain’t hearin’ any of their thoughts.” “It’s a trap.”

Look at E for Extinction if you want an example of how to reintroduce your cast for a big X-Event, cause this is a mess. Most of these lines could be assigned to other characters – they are not particular to character and just dully advance the plot in the least interesting way. Plus the second to last line is Wolverine’s and the last line is Angel’s, spoken with his hand on Wolverine’s shoulder, sympathetically. Why? I have no idea. He is basically just making something Wolverine said explicit. Dumb. The whole issue is like that.

Silvestri does a good Emma in spots (and several other characters as well), but does she have to look like she is posing for Maxim for a nothing scene like when she says to Scott “no orders for me?” Is that I joke? The context would suggest it is not, but there it is. And I think Silvestri accidentally made Xavier look evil, which is just distracting, as was the too-small caption telling us “A few hours earlier” (that confused the heck out of me). Also Silvestri has Nightcrawler looking down from the plane on the town but I do not see how he could see down out of that window unless the plane was at a major angle, an angle not implied by the art elsewhere. The thing ends with a creature, whose purpose in this issue is to establish, I think, that the baby is alive (other he would not be hunting it) – but for God’s sake, that is the most boring creature design I have seen since playing Metroid: Whatever for the Game Cube.

There is a trailer for the Wanted movie on the web, but I have not seen it yet. Wizard magazine had the words “Grant Morrison vs Neal Adams” on the cover but I have no idea what that is about.

Review, discuss, and recommend this week’s comics and comics news.

Mitch Reviews Radiohead's In Rainbows

[Guest blogger Mitch, with his second official review for this site].

How much is Radiohead worth to you?

When Kurt Vonnegut died, PBS replayed an older interview with Charlie Rose where Vonnegut mockingly admitted that the book he was supposed to be promoting was probably deserved a “C” rating relative to Slaughterhouse Five. It was a funny thing to hear coming from an artist, because one of the most natural acts in actively consuming any form of media is the assigning of value. Radiohead’s seventh album seems to be playing a capitalistic joke on this idea of determining worth. The monetary cost of In Rainbows —much like any rating of the music’s artistic value— is entirely up to you.

My enjoyment of Radiohead puzzles me. Their music nestled its way into my life by way of an ex-girlfriend with unimpeachable taste. Since our relationship took place at a time when Radiohead was firing on all cylinders (Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief all came out while we were together), our enjoyment of Radiohead developed into something significant in the fabric of the relationship. When the relationship ended, here I was with all of these CD’s that had become unbearable artifacts of a now finished period in my life. It’s been years now and thanks to this new album, it seems at last that my personal enjoyment of Radiohead can exist independently of the relationship.

The new album, In Rainbows, is refreshing in its exemplification of everything Radiohead stands for. Like Kid A and Amnesiac, ambiguously romantic and philosophical lyrics peak out from behind drum-machine beats that seem to be played through constantly peaking speakers. Meanwhile, there is also a strong presence of Pablo Honey and The Bends-era guitar work in the album's ten tracks. Imagine that Radiohead's two periods (Brit Rock and Trippy Electronics) are two nations looking at each other across a great ravine. For years, the album OK Computer served as an sensible and obvious bridge to unite those two countries of sound. Now imagine that there is a horrible storm that blows the OK Computer bridge away—gone forever. As the people of Radiohead-land begin the rebuilding process, they decide to use the latest technology to build a new bridge between the two countries. That new bridge is In Rainbows. It might not have the magic newness of its predecessor, but it sounds like they were a whole lot happier while they were making it.

This is the thing that nails me every time I listen to In Rainbows. Radiohead have always been the masters of mellow melancholy. But this album is a new kind mellow for the group. It's a contented mellow. There are these unapologetically sunny snatches of guitar in every song, coupled with such appreciative lyrics like "you're all I need" or "I'm in the middle of your picture"—as if this person's picture is SO striking, that you can take a break from evaluating its aesthetic qualities and finish doing so at a later sitting. This newfound optimism even manifests itself in the line "No matter what happens now I won't be afraid, because I know today has been, the most perfect day I've ever seen," a jarringly unflappable end to the most somber track on the album, "Videotape".

So there is the unbridled optimism and there are the two music styles, but there are also the usual inspired quirks that turn each song into a half-story: the joyful surrender in a song about zombies, the sensation of drifting in a song about bizarre marine life and a song where the dead protagonist is confronted by videotapes from his life. The band has to be careful here, because if you make a commitment to being charismatically “weird” on every album, each album must contain “new weird”. Unfortunately, some of this weird is “old weird.” As I understand, Radiohead has been touring with a number of these songs for years now, so it isn't surprising that sometimes the tone is a little out of sync. Ultimately, Radiohead knows from out of sync and I’ll trust them to take me there anytime. I keep buying their albums as long as they keep recording songs like "The Reckoner," the tempo and fluid texture of which largely make me feel like the Silver fucking Surfer—shiny, invincible and moving at light speed.

This album has been a great tool for reacquainting myself with Radiohead. Maybe for some of you, it'll just be "more of the same old weird" or a "C" effort relative to OK Computer, but to me it's worth a lot.

Slavoj Zizek's Titles (Commonplace Book)

Hegelian-Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek is a genius with titles, especially in a field where people come up with such awful ones, that start with a vague phrase, then have a colon, then try to do some weird pun using slashes, bits of words in parenthesis, and intentional misspellings.

Actually, if anyone has any great examples of horrible academic titles, put them in the comments of this post.

Here are Zizek’s better ones:

Zizek!
Interrogating the Real
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
The Metastases of Enjoyment
The Universal Exception
Enjoy Your Symptom!
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime
Opera’s Second Death
The Plague of Fantasies

And my favorite:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)

I wish I had called my first book Everything You Wanted to Know about Superhero Comics (But Were Afraid to Ask Harold Bloom).