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Saturday, July 03, 2004 ( 7/03/2004 10:20:00 AM ) Bill S. "HE HIDES LIKE A CHILD/KEEPS HIS FINGER ON THE TRIGGER" – Been a while since we did some bullet pointing, so why not start the holiday weekend with it?
(Background Music for This Round: Richard & Linda Thompson, Shoot Out the Lights.) # | Friday, July 02, 2004 ( 7/02/2004 01:30:00 PM ) Bill S. "THIS TIME FOR SURE!" – So "venom-spitting technocrat" Heidi MacDonald now has a news blog version of her comics column, "The Beat." Dare I post a link to it? # | ( 7/02/2004 01:19:00 PM ) Bill S. "KNOW WHO HE LOOKS LIKE?" – The other night, we were checking the menu for the movie channels and came upon a film we hadn't seen in a while: Andrew Bergman's wry comedy, The Freshman. The flick stars Matthew Broderick at his most boyish and Marlon Brando, playing a character who not only resembles Don Corleone, he uses this resemblance to pull off an elaborate con. As movie comedies go, The Freshman is only fitfully laffworthy, but every scene with Brando and Broderick together is a joy to watch. I've enjoyed Brando from all stages of his career, but, to be honest, the movies I most love are the ones featuring him as a canny old fart: the original Godfather, of course, but also minor fare like Don Juan DeMarco (where you believe this fat ol' guy could really romance wife Fay Dunnaway) or Freshman. As an actor, Brando could maddeningly quirky (from Mutiny on the Bounty to Island of Doctor Moreau, the annals of filmdom are littered with flamboyantly eccentric Brando performances), but there's no arguing his talent and movie-made watchability. Reading of his death yesterday at the age of 80, I couldn't help wishing there'd been time for at least one more good movie role out of the man. . . # | ( 7/02/2004 12:03:00 PM ) Bill S.  "WHO EXACTLY DECIDED THAT WONDERFUL WAS SHAPED LIKE YOU INSTEAD OF US?" – As a science-fiction writer and feminist satirist, Kit Reed has long made fatness one of her regular themes. Back in the mid-seventies, she even edited a collection of poems and stories on the topic, while her s-f short story, "The Food Farm," is a classically nasty take on both fat farms and youth culture. Thinner Than Thou (Tor) has got to be Reed's most complete word on the subject, though: a dystopian novel set in a near future where pursuit of the perfect body has become the nation’s religion.At the center of all this is the Reverend Earl Sharpnack, a charismatic huckster with his fingers fondling all aspects of body focused culture. In addition to running Sylphania, a weight loss spa where upper middle-class saps sign away their lives in the pursuit of thinness, he's also behind the Dedicated Sisters (a religious order purportedly devoted to working with eating disordered youth), a chain of gyms called the Crossed Triceps and a group of fast food restaurants – plus more sordid quasi-underground businesses like the Jumbo Jigglers, a series of sex clubs featuring super-sized strippers. In the world of Reverend Earl, the heightened obsession with avoiding the Sin of Gluttony feeds (the verb is inevitable) a blend of religio-capitalism whose stated goal is helping each member achieve the state of Afterfat but is primarily designed to sustain mass self-loathing and fund the Reverend's own dark fetishes. Reed shows us this world through several characters who fall under the Reverend's control: Annie Abercrombie, a teen-aged anorexic who is signed over to the Dedicated Sisters's underground convent by her parents; Jeremy Devlin, a fat businessman who enlists for a stint at the Sylphania spa in Arizona, only to discover the place is more prison compound than weight loss camp; and Kelly, another captive of the Dedicated Sisters, who is so large that she's able to fool her captors into thinking she can't walk. Traveling across the country in search of Annie are her younger twin brother and sister, Annie's ex-boyfriend plus their guilt-ridden mother Marg. They show us the world outside the hermetic camps, where mainstream religions have been driven underground and unregulated eating contests are held in restaurants for the edification of an audience of fascinated/horrified diners. Reed is particularly deft at revealing the ambivalence most of us have toward our own bodies, and where Thinner Than Thou especially shines is in her characters' inner monologues. In the writer's view, our cultural obsession with thinness is symptomatic of a darker neurosis: fear of aging and dying (in this, Reed's work is a spiritual kin to fx's Nip/Tuck teleseries). "In the gospel according to the Reverend Earl," one character reflects, "Americans deal with things they believe they can fix. Important things, like hair color and fitness and body weight and those nasty wrinkles under the chin and around the eyes." Both of Reed's middle-aged protagonists, Marg Abercrombie and camp inmate Jeremy, express this ambivalence in spades. Even when Jeremy recognizes that Sylphania is a scam, he can't help feeling jealous when one of the other camp patrons becomes one of the favored few to actually lose weight. He romances a fellow campmate, the zaftig Zoe, indulging in forbidden late-night binges as an act of guilt-riddled rebellion. Annie and Kelly represent another end of the continuum. Where the middle-aged Marg and Jeremy have initially brought into the Gospel According to Reverend Earl, the two young girls attempt to assert their freedom by diverging from the body ideal as far as possible. The catch, of course, lies in the fact that both girls, if they continue unchecked, will ultimately kill themselves. While we root for them both to escape the decidedly unfriendly clutches of the sanctimonious Sisters, we also recognize the self-destructive impulses within them. As a satirist, Reed refuses to indulge in easy dichotomies – which is apt when considering the barrage of mixed messages within dietland. Much of the plot of Thinner Than Thou concerns itself with Annie and Kelly's attempts to flee the Dedicated Sisters' convent/compound – along with Marg and the Abercrombie siblings' quest to find and rescue the imprisoned anorexic. Some of the plot mechanics designed to bring the full cast together are a bit rickety, but they also yield some marvelous moments. A scene where an army of disgruntled fat people marches on Sylphania, for instance, is wonderfully described (even as it conjures images from an old Judge Dredd comic), culminating in an angrily elegant declaration of the right to be fat. When the Reverend Earl turns out to be nursing a secret that runs counter to his public persona, it's no surprise to the reader, but it's consistent with Reed's view of the way consumer culture sells fatness and thinness to the exact same clients. Just this week on television, I couldn't help noticing the new summer ad blitz for Taco Bell: a series of commercials featuring inexplicably thin couples happily shouting, "I'm full!" to their beaming friends and family. The Bell is attempting to fill the space that's been left now that MacDonald's has yielded to recent public pressure and ceased offering Full Meal Deals to the public, I realized. Consumer culture abhors a vacuum. And in the too-close-for-comfort world of Thinner Than Thou, you just know Earl Sharpnack would own controlling stock in both companies. . . # | Thursday, July 01, 2004 ( 7/01/2004 08:59:00 AM ) Bill S. "NO MORE???!!!" – Haven't braved the crowds yet to see Spider-Man 2, but I'll admit the promos have me hooked – if only for the quick flash of that quintessential Lee & Ditko cover moment: the shot of a downcast Peter Parker walking away from his discarded Spider costume as it pokes out of a city garbage can. Spider-Man No More! UPDATE: Mark Evanier corrects the boneheaded error (my misattribution to the cover of AS-M #50) embedded above in the Comments section! UPDATE II: Captain Spaulding correctly points out that the image director Sam Raimi appropriates in Spider-Man 2 is even closer to the splash page in AS-M #50. # | Wednesday, June 30, 2004 ( 6/30/2004 11:14:00 AM ) Bill S.  "FEELING 22, ACTING 17" – If Katie Melua's Call off the Search (Dramatico) had been released in the early sixties (not that far a hypothetical stretch), chances are she would've appeared on the cover dressed in a revealing cocktail dress instead of the shadowy introspective singer/songwriter garb she affects on her album debut. Not a bad pose for the teen-aged Miz M. (it sure beats the "I want That Girl!" image that Nellie McKay affected on her debut disc), but I bet she'd sell more discs if she'd gone for the Julie London look instead.The Julie comparison is not meant too snarkily because I hear elements of the former Missus Jack Webb in some of Melua's softer chanteuse moments. London, plus Waitress in A Donut Shop Maria Muldaur (who Melua most vocally resembles), orchestrated Judy Collins (even does a version of Randy Newman's "I Think It’s Going to Rain Today," a song that Collins nailed on her In My Life album) – not to mention Ray Charles in the more spritely rhythm-&-blues tracks – are all over this album. Whether you'll enjoy it or not probably depends on your personal tolerance for music that at one time would've been marketed as Easy Listening and these days is just called Pop. Me, I find myself interested in Search about half the time. Doing John Mayall's "Crawling Up A Hill" as a Charles Brown-styled blues number is a snappy touch (is that Chris Spedding on the guitar break?), while her cooing come-on song, "My Aphrodisiac Is You" strikes all the right mildly risqué notes. Title song "Call off the Search" is a smoothed down bit of smoky supper club jazz, which of course pulls up the Julie London comparisons big time. And though conductor & primary songwriter Mike Batt's over-reliance on The Irish Film Orchestra can be an irritant (just coz Randy Newman had too much Van Dyke Parks filigree on his version of "Rain" is no reason to go the same way), it works on "Blame It on the Moon," which sounds like something Martha Davis might've recorded at her most broken-hearted. As a singer, Melua has a distinct instrument, though at times her callowness is a little too evident: when she sings about "feeling 22, acting 17" in "The Closest Thing to Crazy," us geezers in the audience might be forgiven for asking "there’s a difference?" since her voice neither communicates maturity nor impulsiveness. She's much more effective playing the provoca-tease, a familiar role in this brand of jazz-pop. If Jessica Rabbit had a kid sister, Melua could do the singin' voice in the nightclub scenes. On the basis of her debut, I'm hoping that the girl hooks up with someone with a trace more grit than Batt for her next release, digs a bit deeper into the bluesy torchiness – and maybe rethinks her wardrobe, too? (Just kiddin' on that last 'un, Katie. . . honestly!) In the meantime, Search provides a soothing slice of late-nite listening. May not replace your copy of Cry Me A River, if you have it, but, hey, the kid's still young. . . (NOTE: The preceding was written as part of a series of Blogcritics blogtakes on this new disc.) # | Tuesday, June 29, 2004 ( 6/29/2004 07:55:00 AM ) Bill S. WE CAN BE CARTOONISHLY EVIL ALL BY OURSELVES, THANK YOU – Funny how a few months of real world news can ruin a perfectly acceptable hour of mediocre television: last night's C.S.I.: Miami revolved around a pair of stereotypical South American scumwads who thumbed their noses at Horatio Cane and his noble band of forensic scientists because they had diplomatic immunity. Reason for this murdering duo attaining said status? Dad was a bigwig back in the mythical country of Baraccus (named after Mister T.'s character on The A-Team, perhaps?) who was using his police authority to torture and interrogate suspected terrorists on behalf of the U.S. Per the storyline, the U.S. govt. was relying on this tin pot tyrant to do what it was reluctant to do. But from the events at Abu Ghraib and subsequently released memos discussing the validity of the Geneva Convention and the bounds of interrogation, it's pretty clear we don't need some mythical dictator to do our dirty work for us. # | ( 6/29/2004 07:09:00 AM ) Bill S. ALL FOR THE WANT OF ONE SMALL CARD – Spent the a.m. yesterday at the Champaign County Courthouse, offering moral support for my wife Becky, who had her license taken away last month on our way back from Savannah, GA. She lost it for something that could easily have happened to me: driving our new car without current proof of insurance. (She was initially pulled over for going seven miles over the speed limit, but since it was her first offense, the officer gave her a warning on that 'un.) We'd bought our PT Cruiser in late April and contacted our insurance company on the day we'd switched from our old Buick to our spiffy new compact. But by the time we were ready to leave on our trip in May we still didn't have a card attesting to the fact, so we drove our whole vacation with our old insurance card in the glove box. Illinois is a big insurance state – State Farm and Country Companies have their headquarters in our little town, in fact – so they don't take being uninsured lightly in these yere parts. . . We'd hoped getting Becky's license back would be a relatively hassle-free procedure: just show our new insurance card at the Champaign County Courthouse and, bingo, no messy court appearances. Didn't turn out that easy, of course: our new insurance card was waiting for us in the mail when we returned from Savannah, but the starting date on it was the middle of July. I phoned the insurance company's 800 number, asking for documentation that we'd actually switched car insurance in April, but when they sent a letter confirming the change, they still got the dates wrong. So I contacted our agent and had a copy of the new policy mailed to me: it indicated a starting date of April 23, two days after we'd gotten our new vehicle but good enough since it covered the dates of our Savannah trip. Champaign County Courthouse is an hour from where we live, but ten minutes from where I work, so I took this copy of the new policy over to the County Clerk during lunch one day. The clerk, however, would not accept it: "We need a copy of the actual insurance card," she told me, so I phoned our agent again and asked it he could mail the corrected card to the courthouse. He agreed, and when I phoned the clerk a few days later to verify that it'd arrived, this time she told me, "Oh, we can't accept it in the mail!" So I called our agent a third time; he in turn phoned the courthouse to ask for their fax number. When I reached the clerk one last time, I was now told that they didn't accept faxes. The reason this time, swear to God, was: "We need a copy for the file, and faxes are often difficult to copy." (But, um, isn't the fax a copy? It's not as if I'm expecting the court to give it back to me.) Bottom line: after weeks of phone calls and failed attempts, we wound up taking a day trip to Traffic Court, anyway. Once we got into the courtroom – an operation that took over an hour between the security x-ray check at the courthouse entrance and our waiting for the bailiff to call Becky’s name – it didn't take long. Becky was called early. All she had to do was show the prosecutor that copy of the insurance policy and a letter from our agent verifying that the policy had begun on April. The prosecutor dropped the charge, and the judge handed back her license. They didn't even ask for a copy of the card or policy for their files, though we'd made 'em, anyway. Ah, the mysterious ways of county bureaucracy. . . # | Monday, June 28, 2004 ( 6/28/2004 03:27:00 PM ) Bill S. "ARE YOU SAYING MY COSTUME LOOKS STUPID?" – Johanna Draper Carlson ponders the dour doings in Geoff Johns' Flash, looking at issue #211 (which is actually rather low-key compared to some of Johns' other outings in this series) and laments over what she considers an excessive misdirection for modern superhero comics. As someone with fond memories for the lighthearted Silver Age Flash stories, I can definitely see her point. Do we really need a character like Murmur – a serial killer who's been known to cut out the tongues of his victims because he doesn’t want to hear their noise – in a comic book series about the Fastest Guy Alive? It isn't a question as to whether we need "dark" or "hard-hitting" superhero books, more my wondering whether a character like the Flash is the proper vehicle for this story. He's the Flash. He runs real fast and basically has to use his wits to make this limited power work for him. Reading Mark Millar's current on the Marvel Knights' edition of Spider-Man, I had some of these same thoughts. On the basis of his first three issues with the character, Millar is attempting to do with Spider-Man what Johns has done with the Wally West Flash: ratchet up the level of supervillain menace and physical duress experienced by the title hero (I blame Mel Gibson and the Die Hard movies for the latter), plus slap the secondary characters beyond what used to the bounds of mainstream comic book peril (cf. Linda West's miscarriage at the hands of anti-Flash Zoom). I'm not sure the approach works for Spider-Man either. We're talking superhero tone here, and, to a certain extent, both leads share the same elements: bright red costumes and a twenty-something adolescence, costumed villains who at heart are kinda goofy. Spider-Man may have the lock on doubt and hero guilt, but part of the character's appeal still rests in the way he uses his smarts to get out of scrapes (much like the Silver Age Flash utilized science, however dubious, to win the day). Reading Johns & Millar's versions of their respective heroes, you're amazed that either one has survived a single simple day in the city, let alone a fight to the death with some costumed baddie. # | |
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