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Saturday, January 10, 2004 ( 1/10/2004 11:34:00 AM ) Bill S. WAITIN’ FOR WEDNESDAY – In the wake of the revitalized Four Color Hell, a second comics community blog, The Comics Waiting Room made its debut this week – and it looks darn promising. Especially recommended reading: "The Comic Book Reader’s Bill of Rights." # | ( 1/10/2004 11:20:00 AM ) Bill S. COULD A SIZE TWELVE BE IN YOUR FUTURE? – It's Diet Season, when the big companies trot out their newest campaigns (Whoopi Goldberg is a Big Loser! [Insert you own failed sitcom joke here]), attempting to cash in on all those soon-to-be-dead New Year's resolutions. The Atkins Diet appears to have so ingratiated its way back into the mainstream that places like Subway have begun reassuring patrons that, yes, they have low-carb fare, and though ephedra's been banned by the FDA, ads for its "all-natural" replacements are already swarming the basic cable channels – and appearing in my emailbox. Meanwhile, over at Fox, ads for its latest reality assault, My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé, treat us to the sight of a fat man in his underwear dancing about the room. Care to wager if there are any ads for Weight Watchers during that series premiere? What's irritating about all this (aside the implicit presumption that "fat" and "obnoxious" are confluent words) is the consistent emphasis on reduction of size over healthy eating and exercise. This Diet Culture given – that smaller size is the primary measure of a healthy body – leads to trends like ephedra misuse. We'd known for years before it became a natural food fad that ephedra was risky, for instance, yet that didn't stop dozens of dubious companies from manufacturing their own version of it and selling it to General Nutrition Center. Dropping poundage is The Big Goal: anything else is superfluous. I should probably add here that I don't mean this post as a slam against anyone who undertakes weight loss (at least two bloggers who I regularly read have documented their own personal efforts in this arena). My wife Becky suffers from fibromyalgia and arthritis, and a couple of years ago she decided to stop drinking soda (before that, Cherry Coke was her primary caffeine source) and monitor her portions better in order to drop weight that was putting a strain on her knees. This limited measure successfully resulted in the loss of weight she'd gained during a period she was laid up and receiving steroid shots for a back injury – and while it hasn't totally eliminated arthritic pain in her knee joints, it has significantly helped her get through the day. There are plenty of good, practical reasons to attempt a healthy weight loss program. But Diet Culture isn't about healthy and practical: it's about selling insecurity and making false promises, about reinforcing the message that Fat Is Icky and hyping faddish diet regimens that 90-95% of your customers won't maintain in the long run, anyway. Welcome to the Winter Doldrums, you too-fat Americans. . . UPDATE: Jim Henley has a take on the Tech Central Station exercise article that I linked to in the above post. # | Friday, January 09, 2004 ( 1/09/2004 01:10:00 PM ) Bill S. ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE – Hola! to Johnny Bacardi for entering one of the circles of Four Color Hell with a series of reprinted JB Show comics-related postings. The first few days after Michelle indicated that her comics blog community site was not extinct after all, I still was a bit worried – the contributions weren't exactly flooding in – but Hell happily appears to be regaining its momentum. JB's weekly comic reviews'll make a great addition to the site. I have noticed the spamsters are continuing to latch onto the site's Movable Type Comments boxes, though. For some reason, they seized one of my mirrored pieces – a review of Dicks and Deedees – and have continued to send fake comments whose primary intent is to advertise on-line casinos. Both Four Color Hell and Blogcritics automatically send emails alerting contributors whenever their posts have inspired outside comments. Pretty irritating to receive an email indicating you’ve received a comment, only to discover it's a piece-o'-crap ad. Rather like the scene in A Christmas Story when Ralphie finally discovered what those "Little Orphan Annie" secret decoder messages actually said. # | ( 1/09/2004 11:59:00 AM ) Bill S. "YOUR FATHER WAS NEVER ONE FOR TOEING THE PARTY LINE" – Picked up the latest volume of Battle Royale Wednesday afternoon – and raced through it that night. As I understand it, the serialized manga series has just about reached where the first movie BR ends. (Trying to parse this stuff out on sites devoted to this material is not, I've discovered, an easy task.) There's a movie sequel that has only fairly recently become available on DVD to English speaking viewers, which presumably carries on the rest of the story from the original source novel. I've avoided the DVD release to date (my local shop, Acme Comics, has copies for sale, but I've resisted purchasing it) because I'm enjoying the plot as it unfolds in the comic and don't want things spoiled. (Query for Sean Collins: have you still been following the manga after viewing the movie version?) I can understand those who've taken issue with Keith Giffen's Americanized adaptation – at times you can definitely feel him exerting his hand on the material – but occasionally he and original manga creators Takami & Taguchi really surprise me. In Volume Five, it's with the appended tale, "Man of Justice," the second such side story to appear in the series to date but the first to actually add welcome character information. (The first, "Fallen Angel," which appeared in Volume Three, primarily served to reinforce what we already knew about series bad girl Mitsuko Soumo.) "Justice" focuses on the childhood of orphaned good guy Shuuya Nanahara, and it illuminates some of the factors that have led to him becoming the closest thing to a moral spokesman that this determinedly hardhearted series possesses. One of the striking things about Battle Royale is the way its creators juggle ruthless exploitation (Look, the drag queen's head blowed off!) with empathy for its adolescent cast. And while I wouldn't have necessarily expected it from him, Giffen so far seems up to the task of holding to Takami & Taguchi's storytelling intentions. UPDATE: ADD (who must have watched the DVD – hopefully without the kids in the room) tells me that the series is about three quarters of the way through the movie. Which means we’ve got at least two volumes to go before we get to the end of the first flick’s story. # | ( 1/09/2004 08:33:00 AM ) Bill S. YOUR FIRST SPORADIC POLI-POST FOR 2004 – Here's a Salon opinion piece that's more right than wrong, I think. Among the big ideas, this paragraph: Toppling Saddam was a worthy deed, and much good could still come from the U.S. presence there. But this administration is particularly ill-suited to convince the rest of the world and the Iraqis themselves of its good intentions. The Bush team is fighting this war of ideas almost exclusively with military tools and displays of power politics, both abroad and at home.The piece goes on to criticize those anti-war leftists who remain willfully blind to the excesses of the Middle Eastern political world (something blogger Sean Collins has decried more than once) just as strongly as it condemns smugly provincial Ashcroft-ians. In author Ferry Biedermann's view, for example, conferring the rubric War on Terror against strategies that predate Al-Qaeda elevates the perpetrators in ways that do us little good. (Biedermann is as much concerned with the War of Ideas as he is the military one.) Click through the opening ad to check it out and see if you agree. # | Thursday, January 08, 2004 ( 1/08/2004 12:54:00 PM ) Bill S. "IT'S LIKE A HORROR FILM!" – Johanna Draper Carlson alerts us to a "Funky Winkerbean" sequence about a comic shop's last gasps. The shop, Komix Korner, appears to be a totally superhero focused enterprise (the prototypically pudgy and bespectacled store owner is shown wearing a purple tee-shirt with an "S" logo), while the only comics we can actually identify in the store appear to be X-titles. Our depressed shopkeep, who speaks in Superman metaphors, blames a sluggish economy on his financial woes. But, c'mon, if the only superhero you can think to bring up in conversation is Superman, fergawdsakes, then I've gotta wonder if you haven't deservedly micro-niched yourself out of bizness. . . UPDATE: New blogger Tony Collett takes issue in the comments below with my somewhat facetious categorization of the strip's shopkeep – and gently chides me on his blog for my overuse of Ben Grimmly spelling in the abovewritten paragraph. Welcome to the blogosphere, Tony! # | Wednesday, January 07, 2004 ( 1/07/2004 08:33:00 PM ) Bill S. LINCOLN, LINCOLN, I’VE BEEN THINKIN' – From The Department of Teevee Scenes That Look Good But Don't Make A Lick O' Sense comes this moment from tonight's 100th ep of The West Wing. President Bartlett, returning from the funeral of a former, more conservative president, is following the last advice from the dead prez by going to the Lincoln Memorial and "listening." The show ends with Bartlett climbing the stairs to the looming Lincoln statue, standing there and humbly, I guess, looking up at it. Then the camera pans back, leaving him in the shadow of the memorial, backing down the steps and along the walkway – and we don't see any secret service agents anywhere in the vicinity! Thank God they brought in new writers (hey, didn't this William Sacret Young guy write China Beach?) to save this show from Aaron Sorkin's nonsense. . . # | ( 1/07/2004 11:10:00 AM ) Bill S.  "AN INTENSE NIGHT OF FAKE SLEEPING" – The beginning of January can be a tenuous time for those of us who habitually follow pop culture. With the previous year already neatly stamped and cataloged – and the pickings for new releases spare – it's a period when many of us work to catch up on stuff we missed, usually by perusing the best-of lists of other pop junkies. It's a bittersweet practice for many of us. While it’s always a joy to come upon unfamiliar pop that speaks to you, there's also a sense of "Why didn't I discover this for myself?" tingeing it.So it was for me with Yours, Mine & Ours (Ashmont Records), the 2003 disc by New England's Pernice Brothers, a release I was alerted to via Thomas Bartlett's year end summary piece on Salon (you may need to sit thru an ad to read it - so enter at your own risk!) I was unfamiliar with these guys, and if you'd asked me to categorize their sound based on name alone, I'd have guessed they were one of those bluegrass groups beloved by cultish country aficionados and nobody else. I'd have totally missed the mark. Turns out the bros. (singer/songwriter Joe and brother Bob) are power poppers: guitar-friendly melders of the Beach Boys and Smiths, capable of matching either at their melodic peak. YM&O is the group's third outing: don't know if the early entries sound anything like this, but after playing this 'un feverishly for days, I intend to find out. Simply put, it's a gorgeous pop-rock album: harmonic and musically uplifting, even as the lyrics often plunge into depresso-ville. (Pernice's idea of being reassuring to his lover is to imagine himself as King Solomon and telling her to "Cut the baby in two.") We need good moving melancholy pop like this: it's everything that Brian Wilson's Imagination tried to be and heartbreakingly fell short of achieving; it's how you imagined the Smiths sounded when you first read about 'em – until you actually heard Morrissey's one-note gloombox voice. And in this case, at least, the bittersweet sense of picking up another pop-nerd's leavings only adds to the experience. The perfect pop experience for an ultra-chilly January. . . # | Tuesday, January 06, 2004 ( 1/06/2004 02:21:00 PM ) Bill S. EGO-TRIPPIN' (A WHOLLY INEXCUSABLE EXERCISE) – Rambling through The Comics Journal's messboards this afternoon, I came across reference to the Michigan State University Comic Art Collection Reading Room Index. The index includes TCJ, so out of pure self-indulgence, I decided to see if I was in it. Found a page that listed fifty-plus articles I'd written for the Journal from 1977-87 – and also referred to a dopey fannish letter I wrote to the EC fanzine Spa Fon back in 1969. The list ends with a November '99 letter to TCJ that must've been written by another Bill Sherman because I wasn't reading the mag (or indeed many comics) that year. I'd love to read that letter, though. The title, "You & Your Silly Research," cracks me up! Okay, so I'm not completely over my head cold. . . # | ( 1/06/2004 11:43:00 AM ) Bill S. TALES FROM BLOGOSCOPIC OCEANS – Still feelin' pretty muzzy-headed from this cold, but I had to celebrate the re-emergence of Steve Wintle's Flat Earth blog: which re-opens with a commentary on the state of comics plus a wonderful piece on an Archie dential hygiene(!) comic. Welcome back, Steve! And in other blognews, Big Sunny D has apparently changed the title of his web log from a music reference that I recognized to one that I don't. The blogroll's been adjusted accordingly. UPDATE: Scott McAllister links to BSD's explanation (makes sense that he'd get his new blog title from a Grant Morrison book!) in the Comments section below. # | Monday, January 05, 2004 ( 1/05/2004 09:49:00 AM ) Bill S. WHERE I AM TODAY – Major head cold . . . goin' to try to sleep it off . . . so, if you haven't already, why not head to Sean Collins' most excellent interview with Phoebe Glockner? Lots of good info and insights offered on this underappreciated graphic artist. # | Sunday, January 04, 2004 ( 1/04/2004 08:50:00 AM ) Bill S. BRING ON THE HORSES – Caught Gore Verbinski's Americanized The Ring last night on HBO – so, of course, I'm tempted to do a quick comparison between it and Hideo Nakata's Ringu. Some of the remake's shots, particularly in the opening sequence (Oh no, they're gonna kill Joan Girardi!), ape the original fairly closely. But the film soon finds its own way with the material. Considered side by side, both versions have their strengths (a scene in The Ring featuring a freaked-out horse on a Pacific Northwest ferry was an especially strong addition). But the climactic appearances of the movie's central evil were a bit cheapened, I thought, by the obvious CGI overlay. (The bit where we watch a body decay in our heroine's arms could've come out of Pirates of the Caribbean.) Perhaps if I'd caught the American remake first, I'd have accepted these scenes more readily. As it stands, the original flick's unadorned crawling ghost was just plain creepier. . . # | |
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