Spotted this over on The Daily Dish, where Andrew Sullivan finds them a bit scary. Me, I find them magical and impressive:
Practical Magic
More Stuff Myself and Three Other People Care About
Well, I really should do something beside read, apply for jobs I’ll never get, play Chrono Trigger (thank you, Santa Wifey) and try to get interested in watching a movie for review. I know, I’ll write in that blog I started once upon a time, knowing that it was a mistake then.
Reading, of course, should never be considered a waste of time. Though what I’ve been reading would likely cause some to turn their noses up, say something disparaging, and then the pig will get up and slowly walk away. The only thing that can be legitimately called a book I’ve read during my unemployment is Jonathan Barnes’ The Somnambulist, which reads rather too much like a self-conscious attempt to make a cult classic movie. No, I’ve been re-reading that collection of graphic novels – for which read funny books collected into book form – which I’ve accumulated over the years.
This mania started when a friend mentioned he had finally read Watchmen, doubtless in preparation for the movie. It had been several years since my last reading, so I settled down in my new reading chair – well, new to me, it was cast off by neighbors to my wife’s school who had abandoned it – and got impressed all over again. Much of what Alan Moore did in that series has been ripped off so much in the intervening years (for instance, the first season of the TV series Heroes) that it has entered the realm of the cliche… but when it was coming out one issue at a time, it was electric.
After a brief detour to Watchmen‘s contemporary, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, I went back to Moore for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: volume one, good, volume two, near perfection, volume three… intensely problematic. Then on to the complete run of Neal Gaimen’s The Sandman.
Then, a deep breath before diving once more into Alan Moore’s exhaustively researched From Hell. Harkened back to other limited series from the dawn of creator-owned comics, like Rick Veitch’s The One, or experiments from the Big Two like the maxi-series Camelot 3000.
In and about all these, I started digging through those Marvel Essentials I had picked up when I had disposable income. These are phone booked-sized black and white reprints of Marvel comics from back in the day, and I had resisted them for years because of the lack of color. Then I bought one at Half Price Books, found that color was the least of the charms of these stories, and set to picking them up against future boredom.
I positively devoured The Fantastic Four, which is arguably where you see the blueprint laid for what would come to be known as The Marvel Universe. A universe which is, in my not-so-humble opinion, currently in a shambled, smoking ruin… but that’s a fanboy talking, innit?
Finally, after multiple volumes of Fantastic Four, Avengers, Defenders (Steve Gerber, how he is missed), Dr. Strange, Iron Man, X-Men and Luke Cage – Power Man (Sweet sister!), I feel a bit Marvelled out. I feel more comfortable in the overbearing soap opera of the early Marvel than I do in the stories of the contemporaneous DC Showcase Presents reprints. Even though Mr. Fantastic’s barking to Sue Storm of “Don’t go all female on me now!” may grate, it’s an individual voice. The DC Heroes all seem to speak with the same voice, which becomes bothersome when they all get together in The Justice League of America. When Wonder Woman sounds the same as Batman, it’s hard to get involved on any level but the scholarly, or even archeological.
The older DC stuff – which let’s face it, was skewed to a much younger crowd than a 51-year-old fanboy, or the collegiate crowd Marvel hoped for – is also intensely formulaic. This house-mandated “this is the way comics ought to be” chased comics mainstay (perhaps even god) Jack Kirby into the arms of Marvel in the late 50s, according to Mark Evanier’s biography Kirby, King of Comics (okay, maybe I read two books), whereby hangs a history. There are far fewer Showcase books on my shelf than Essentials.
So, Marvelled out for the moment, what remains on my shelf, in terms of Grand Sweeps of History (comic)? Alas, I have already used the word problematic in this post, for what awaits me is a near-complete run of Dave Sim’s Cerebus.
Apparently, the name Dave Sim is supposed to be fronted by the adjective “controversial” whenever he is mentioned, the reason for which – it seems – won’t even be apparent until, like, Volume 9 or so. Something about gender politics. I guess I’ll find out when I get there.
You see, likely the reason I even busted out this blog post, was the serendipitous discovery of another blog as I prepared to dive into the Simiverse: Cerebus: A Diablog, in which writers Leigh Walton and Laura Hudson intend to examine the comic on an arc-by-arc if not issue-by-issue basis.
Now, this might have gotten off to a rockier start with me had I just weighed in on Laura’s initial post, which begins:
Ah, winter 1977. Sadly, neither of us Cerebloggers had yet been born, and so we cannot nostalgically recall what it was like when Cerebus first came out, only that it was a long, long time ago. I say this not to make anybody feel old, but to emphasize the scope of Sim’s accomplishment: Cerebus would subsequently go on to run for 26 years, a marathon that Sim refers to as “the longest sustained narrative in human history.”
Well, a little too damn late for the old part, as I do remember seeing that first issue in the wild. I was going through the wire rack at Roy’s Memory Shop on Westheimer, during one of my road trips to Houston from my college digs in Huntsville, looking for new issues of underground and “ground level” comics like Star Reach. I saw this first issue, and dismissed it another @#$%! funny animal comic. You see – if you are one of the uninitiated – Cerebus is an aardvark in an otherwise human-populated Conan universe.
This was the time of Howard the Duck (and have I mentioned how missed is Steve Gerber?). There were funny animal comics everywhere… hell, there was even a ground-level comic called No Ducks!… and I wasn’t in the market for another “trapped in a world he never made!” series. Many months later, my brother would show me an issue which featured Lord Julius, in whom Sim managed to flawlessly insert Groucho Marx into this world, and I got hooked.
Sim made it known that the saga of Cerebus the Aardvark would cover 300 issues. The amazing thing is, it actually does. He did it. All 300 issues. Yep, took him 26 years, just like Laura said. I also begin to wonder how many people who started out, like me, back in the late 70s actually stuck with him all through that. I know I didn’t.
Now, Cerebus, I hasten to add, is one of the things that got me through some very difficult times in the 80s, when I was just feeling my way through young adulthood and getting my nose rubbed in all manner of unpleasant realities. There were, generally speaking, maybe three continuing comic series that I looked forward to each month with anticipation, and one for a great length of time was Cerebus.
Sim started putting his work out in bound volumes which were very much the predecessors to the Essentials and Showcases – big, square phonebooks of comics goodness. The first four volumes – Cerebus, High Society, Church and State I & II – cover the years of my extreme fanboy-itude. They contain some of the keenest social satire I had seen since Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and is stuff I wholeheartedly recommend.
Ah, but it’s Volume 5 – Jaka’s Story – and beyond where things get, shall we say, interesting. Yes. Interesting it is. Sim stepped away from the political satire for a while to concentrate on story-telling, and the Earth Pig Born fell to supporting character status for a long, long stretch. About this time I decided it would be far better to invest in the collections than the comic, since I would lose the narrative thread in the time between issues. Of course, it also made it easier to just put these books on a shelf and ignore them, since – like, I suspect, a lot of readers, I longed for a return to the days of Lord Julius, Red Sophia and Elrod of Melnibone, the last member of a race of albino sorcerer kings, who talked, I say, who always talked like Foghorn Leghorn, son.
Or maybe I was simply young and callow. I shall likely find out in the weeks ahead, and it will be nice to have Hudson and Walton weighing on these matters in a much more scholarly, incisive manner than I myself can muster. Turns out I stopped buying the Cerebus phonebooks just four books shy of the complete set. Hopefully, by the time I reach that point, I will not only be able to afford those last four books, but will actually want to buy them.
The Long and Dark of It
Well, that was a long, dark week. A week of ignoring practically everything else in order to be at the disposal of contractors (themselves all overworked and behind schedule) so I could get repair estimates to submit to my insurance company. That includes my search for a job, to which I could only devote a minimum of time.
Well, I now have all the estimates I need, I have an interview this Friday (pray for me to your heathen gods, if you would), and I borrowed the money to get the destroyed tree out of my backyard and off my neighbor’s house.
I need to get a picture of the pile of organic debris currently in my front yard – it’s pretty impressive. The best news associated with this is that, once the damaged parts were removed, the rest of the tree was pretty healthy. I was worried that I was going to totally lose the tree, and dammit, I love trees.
Speaking of tree hugging – and that is my clumsy segue for the day – I am entering radio silence for the next month. By which I mean I won’t be listening to the radio or watching TV until after the election. I made my decision quite some time ago, and it sure as hell is not about to be swayed by the sewer water spray that has become The Campaign.
On the other hand, via my ol’ homie, Roy Bragg (who was known as “B-Pad” back in our dayz on da street), and his blog At Large, comes this sublime piece of Comedy Central:
(Present me must weigh in here and admit, with eyes averted, that Viacom took the clip off YouTube, or something equally shabby. Too bad. It was funny. Even if I don’t remember exactly what it was)
Peace out, D.
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Now playing: Apollo 440 – Crazee Horse
via FoxyTunes
Bah, etc.
The last time a hurricane came through, I rented. Now that I’m a homeowner, a whole new universe of tedium and anger has opened up for me. Though we were told an insurance adjuster would be in contact with us within 24 hours, it was actually more like a week. A week later, I attempted to get an estimate from him to see how it matches up with the figures I’m getting from contractors, and was told that it would not be ready for another week. I still have a tree down in my back yard, resting on my neighbor’s roof, and have resorted to trying to raise the money on my own to get it removed – not an easy thing when you’re unemployed.
As a somewhat un-hurricane related aside: I really hate that I only seem to write here when I have something to complain about – but when things are going alright in my life, good God, am I boring.
I also feel compelled to mention that yes, I am lucky. My house still stands. I got power back relatively early. My discomfiture stems from the fact that the pressure that I am experiencing is not being felt by the people in charge of alleviating that pressure.
I recognize they are busy. I am not the only one with problems in this area. That still does not help – it only makes me feel more petty.
Yet another contractor arrives within the hour. I will attempt to restrain my enthusiasm.
The Aftermath (and I flunked math)
This is going to come as absolutely no news to anyone, but man… that was the antithesis of fun.
We should start with us losing power at about 7:00pm, long before any wind or rain showed up. Now, I must admit: the power came back, and stayed until the time I predicted it would vanish, at about midnight, just as the first official winds were starting to batter Galveston Island.
As I think I mentioned, this was my first hurricane since Alicia, back in ’83, and I could easily go another 25 years without another one. In ’83, I didn’t have a family, and trying to be a calm, strong influence in the noisy dark is… a little wearing. I’m not sure if I’m good at that, but I tried.
My new battery-powered radio worked like a champ. I had used the time with power to tune in a TV simulcast for Channel 11, which had gone into DOOOOM overdrive several days before (My wife and her best pal Ronnie the Crazy Cat Lady are still pissed at Big Brother being pre-empted Thursday night). This was the only to track the storm’s progress, and I was glad to have it, and all schadenfreude was put on hold whenever KHOU or the radio station took a hit to their power, and I had to find another station.
About 2am we had the first of the Noises, with a capital N. That was the siding being ripped off the side of my house and tumbling over the roof.
The storm had shifted enough to the east that we never saw the eye, and we were on what is euphemistically referred to as the “clean” side of the hurricane. The only clue we had that the eye was passing to our east was the change of direction in the wind.
At about 4:30, we had the second noise. We didn’t know it at the time, but that was a giant hand reaching down from the heavens and applying a purple nurple to the large chinaberry tree in our back yard. The poor thing shattered, and missed our house by literal inches. In fact, leaves from one of the upper boughs were pressed against one of our windows.
Our neighbors didn’t do so well. The tree took out their satellite dish, and the offending branch is still on their roof. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As the sun came out, Ike was winding down in my part of the world. Ronnie – who is our neighbor – came over to check on us. I looked out our back window and went Damn…. And I eventually crawled into bed at almost 8am and drifted into exhausted sleep in our stifling bedroom.
That was interrupted – as it would be interrupted several times throughout the day – by people banging on the door to check on us and oooh and aaah at our shattered tree. We had the dubious honor of having the most damaged tree in our neighborhood.
Lisa went to check on the private school she runs and, miracle of miracles, it had power. We moved in, with Ronnie in tow, and microwaved some thawing TV dinners and watched a couple of movies that had nothing to do with hurricanes. I got a few hours of sleep… but was awake when another rainstorm came through at about 4:30am, killing the power there, too, and confirming my suspicions that God hates me. No, that confirmation actually came through at 4:45, when I was in the bathroom and my Mini-Mag-Lite’s bulb gave up the ghost.
After the rain let up, about 10:00am, we went back to our houses and started to clean up. It was the first time I had a chance to actually contemplate the fallen tree.
Here’s the same picture with my bulk added for scale:
After three hours with my cutters, bow saw and a borrowed chainsaw that gave up the ghost rather than deal with anymore of this, I was forced to give up. This was way above my abilities, even if I were a younger man with an uninjured back and legs and no health problems.
That was a hell of a blow to an already bruised ego. But I have to be rational about this: I could keep on whacking at it, but it wouldn’t be safe. This is no time for enthusiastic amateurs.
So we took showers – thankfully, the water pressure remained constant here in the hinterlands – and returned to the school, where the industrial-grade insulation stood a better chance of retaining some cool from the previous evening’s air conditioning. There was some recovery evident: about half the traffic lights were working, and some businesses on the main drag had power. Anything with food prep abilities were doing great business, including my beloved Tornado Burger. I didn’t even order the Spicy Burger, I was so happy. After 36 hours of Pop Tarts and Doritos, this was, and I do not exaggerate, heavenly.
As we sat out front of the school, enjoying the cool front that had pushed that early morning rain ahead of it (a small mercy shown to a city without power)… the power suddenly came back. Max was overjoyed to discover that cable and Internet had returned, too. (I may have to reconsider this whole grudge-holding Deity thing) The school uses Comcast for such things, and their phones, too, which was a blessing, as regular phone service and cell service had been nonexistent for some time. I had managed to send out some text messages, but it’s not the same as hearing voices.
I didn’t have much choice, I actually managed to sleep six hours, almost straight through – a near record for me, lately. Power was restored back at the house at about Noon on Monday, and we moved back, and started cleaning out the spoiled food in the refrigerator. Some of the meat in the freezer was actually still half-frozen and we went into an orgy of cooking.
About this time, I started shaking uncontrollably; the last few days had finally caught up with me. We checked my sugars, and they were normal, but the blood pressure… ah, jeez. I was riding for a stroke. I was ordered to bed, and I wasn’t about to argue. Stitches were creeping up my side, and I recognized the early signs of bronchitis. Just what we needed.
So here I sit, on Tuesday morning. I feel somewhat better. We await the call from our insurance adjuster, I have actually taken the plunge and gotten a Facebook account, since it’s very hard for me to reconcile my geek cred with a most un-geeklike wife who has a Facebook page and a Crackberry, while I just have a Bluetooth headset and a Nintendo DS. The world is totally out of whack, and I expect to see Rod Serling smoking a cigarette in the corner at any moment.
Well, that was my weekend. How are things in your town?
Look! In the Trees! It’s Coming!
So my usual four hours of sleep got chopped down to three. Man, you’d think I was worried about something.
The sun is rising. Amazingly, the city trash pickup just happened, and I’m glad I was optimist/dick enough to put out the garbage. According to HurricaneTrack.com, there is already some wave and water rising action in Galveston.
Ike strengthened a little overnight, but is still a Category 2 hurricane.
Last night, I watched 102 Minutes that Changed America on the History Channel, which edited together 9/11 footage from a variety of video sources. I only intended to watch a bit of it, but wound up getting sucked in for the whole ride.
The really awful thing is I kept thinking “Yeah, Cloverfield got that right.”
Things still to do: Patch that loose siding. Gather up all potential projectiles and lock them away. Fill up some more water containers. Take some photos. And get some damned sleep.
Batten Down the Hatches, Ar.
Man, that’s a big storm.
As I write this, what are referred to as the A and B Zones in the Gulf Coast region are evacuating in advance of Hurricane Ike making landfall late Friday, early Saturday. Seems that while I got usual four hours of fitful sleep last night, Ike shifted its path northward yet again, and unless it does so some more, I’m going to be getting some eye action this weekend.
Spent the early morning trimming off some branches (a project I started Labor Day weekend, but abandoned when my @#$%! cheapass bypass trimmer snapped), filled some containers with water. Most of my other shopping was done weeks ago. A new radio, batteries and even one of those shake-it-up-and-down-powered flashlights sit by my desk.
This will be my fifth hurricane to ride out; considering the nearly five decades spent living near the Gulf Coast, that’s not too bad. In two of those, I didn’t even lose power, but 50% ain’t great odds. So I’m likely going to be losing my ability to watch crappy movies, cheat at video games, and grouse on the Internets.
I guess the local media is breathing a sigh of relief; at least this time they can’t be accused of fearmongering, nor will some poor correspondent, sweating in their rain gear, be filmed desperately stating that they heard about some flooding maybe five or six streets over, though there’s not any rain where they are… at the moment. Back to you, Bob.
See you on the other side.
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Now playing: Holy Fuck – Echo Sam
via FoxyTunes
Gobsmacked
Still looking for a job. But you know the guy I used to work for? I just found out last week that he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Completely unsure how to feel at this time. I’m glad I’m deriving no satisfaction from the news, and that’s about it.
Old, old, old
While doing research for 50 Foot DVD, on the long-gone vistas of 1967, I started thinking about a few things that had some impact on the then ten-year-old me. Of course, YouTube has it:
Yes, I owned a toy sniper rifle in its own case. There was a lot of incredibly un-fun crap going on in the late 60’s, but goddamn how I miss them sometimes.
Somehow made more poignant by last night, when my ten-year-old finally prevailed upon me to watch Alien vs Predator: Requiem, a viewing which was fraught with multiple pronouncements of “Awesome!” from him.
Here, let me spare you the incredibly spastic nature of the YouTube comments by embedding this here:
It wasn’t as awful as I’d been led to believe, but then few things are. It was pretty much standard action movie mediocrity wrapped in a fairly large budget, and continued the first AvP movie’s pattern of a large cast of undeveloped characters about whom the viewer could not be bothered to care. The more I think about this movie, the more I think this course of affairs deserves closer examination in that old, venerable project of mine, The Bad Movie Report… but that would also mean watching this, the first one, and Alien 3 and 4 again, and that could get ooky.
I have joked that since my son professes the original Alien vs Predator to be his favorite movie (it edged out The Empire Strikes Back), I may have to disinherit him… but then, he’s ten. And I have to ponder how my parents felt, forty years back, when yours truly watched that psychedelic Levis commercial raptly, over and over again… on a black and white set.
Was there a point?
That last post got very scattered, yes, I know. There was a point I had intended to make in there when I started writing, and it all got buried. That point was – while I was talking about the quality of the speakers in the Nintendo DS – I was struck by one instance in particular.
I’m still playing Etrian Odyssey II – Heroes of Lagaard. As you know, I’ve typified it as an old school dungeon crawl (which I lurvs), where the lower screen is used to map the dungeon as you travel through it. In this particular labyrinth, you start at the bottom and work your way up, and it has become so overgrown that it is a forest into and of itself – no stone walls or caverns. Seasons seem to change with every five levels or so, and when I got to the third stratum, where it is perpetual winter, there it was, captured with perfect fidelity, one of my favorite sounds in the world: the sound of boots crunching in snow.
Yeah, yeah, I know, you folks in the more Northern climes, like my pal Ken Begg in Chicago, are doubtless sick to freakin’ death of the sound, but as a lifelong Texan, it remains quite exotic to me. I seem to make it to Chicago every two years or so to visit snow (and Ken and B-Fest), and on the rare occasion that snow does not coat the ground… man, I miss that sound.
And since we are speaking of Etrian Odyssey II and my time-wasting activities: I finally got past the twin bosses that were giving me so much grief and continued to advance into the game. At this point, I am starting to mess with the makeup of my party, so here comes some gaming geek stuff. If you’re not interested, well, there’s some links over to the right. See ya later.
Lagaard allows a party of up to five characters, and by and large I’ve been pretty traditional in the makeup. There’s a jack-of-all trades warrior (called a “Landsknecht” here), a tank – high hit points, high defense, decent damage (called a Protector), a “War Magus”, so-so damage but some great healing and buffing magic, a dedicated healer called a Medic (fancy that) and a Gunner. Yes, a character with a gun in a fantasy game. It happens all the time. And once you start leveling a Gunner’s attacks, that character starts kicking ass without bothering to take names.
I’ve been using the War Magus as a backup healer, but that’s really only utilizing half his potential, as many of his special attacks do extra damage to targets that another character has placed a status effect upon – a monster that has been stunned, or had Sleep or Fear cast upon it.
What this means is I should be leveling up a Hexer… a character whose sole function is to cast Curses upon opponents. Yet, so far, I am not. (Though if the Hexers attacked with canes, and were called Curmudgeons, nothing would stop me from fielding a party of five of them)
Minor digression: Lagaard has some attacks, both on the player and opponent side, that “bind” various portions of the target’s body. A Bind on the head lessens accuracy and damage. A bind on the arms prevents the fancier, higher-damage-dealing attacks and magic. Bind the legs, there is no escaping (and that’s card I’ve had to play several times).
Minor digression 2: After a certain number of battles, each character is able to perform a Force Skill. If you’ve played Final Fantasy, you’ll recognize it as a Limit Break. A devastating attack that costs no points to perform. For the Gunner, it’s a Riot Gun, for the Landsknecht it’s All Out, which deals heavy damage to every target onscreen.
Now that you have that information, I can try to tell you about what is distracting me from that Hexer I seem to think I need. Cuz I’m leveling a Dark Hunter.
From the website:
“The Dark Hunters of High Lagaard are similar to those found in Etria; they can still work with either whip or sword to focus on bindings or status ailments, respectively. The key difference comes in their ability to set potentially deadly traps: in High Legaard, Dark Hunters can react to either physical or magical attacks, no matter what weapon they use.”
But wait, there’s more.
“Force Skill: Bondage
Using every binding technique at its disposal, the Dark Hunter will bind an enemy’s head, arms and legs, rendering it completely incapable of acting in battle.”
Attacks that bind the opponents legs, arm and head, individually? They are called Shackles, Cuffs, and Gag. Higher attacks in the tier are named Climax and Ecstasy.
I’m leveling up a dominatrix.
The game supplies four possible portraits for each character, but I think this one says it all.
Did I mention this game is rated E – 10+ ?
I guess this may be the “Suggestive themes” alluded to in the ratings box….
God, I love Atlus Games!
EDIT: Now that I’ve gotten a chance to use it, the Dark Hunter’s Force Skill in-game is called “Dominate”, not “Bondage”, as it says on the site. I’m not sure if that’s more or less explicit…
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Now playing: Haggard – Larghetto / Epilogo Adagio
via FoxyTunes
