| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Wednesday, July 07, 2004 ( 7/07/2004 02:44:00 PM ) Bill S. "IT'S SCARING ME RIGHT OUT OF MY MIND" – The week's packed with projects & commitments – work-related, plus writing outside the blogosphere – so it looks like posting'll be light in these parts. I did want to briefly note, though, that Bob Christgau is an old poop for relegating Brian Wilson's first solo album in years (Getting' In Over My Head) to the Duds bin of his last "Consumer Guide." I'm playing the CD as I type this, and I find it an enjoyably old-fashioned, totally summery musical experience: more poppishly listenable than Wilson's last solo effort, Imagination, or his collaborative effort with Van Dyke Parks. Am I making allowances for poor ol' ravaged Bri after all these years? Most likely. Does the disc compare to the Beach Boys at their best? Of course not. But it's near close to the Next Best Thing. . . Will definitely have more to say about Head after I've played it a dozen more times. # | Tuesday, July 06, 2004 ( 7/06/2004 05:32:00 AM ) Bill S. SEBASTIAN – Spent late afternoon yesterday digging a space in the backyard for one of our cats, a sixteen-year-old Siamese named Sebastian. We had Sebastian put to sleep after he was diagnosed with Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) and began failing (severe weight loss that we were not able to stop through hand feeding, difficulty swallowing, dehydration, yellowing skin and progressive weakness). It's never an easy decision to make, but we feel it was the right one: per our vet, he was also showing signs of liver failure and was mainly looking to three to four weeks of basically starving to death. We are a major animal house – four cats, three ferrets and two dogs – and, with the exception of Sebastian, every one of the creatures has been a rescued pet. Sebastian was part of a litter that we bred sixteen years ago with his mother, a mixed Siamese, and a pure-bred Siamese studboy named Don Juan (for obvious reasons). He did not show the stereotypical behaviors associated with the breed: he was not stand-offish and, indeed, was one of those cats who loved doing lap duty. Back when my wife Becky worked at an animal hospital, he was diagnosed with a heart murmur, but we never could get a confirming second opinion: whenever we took him to the vet's, his purr was so loud, the docs couldn't hear his heartbeat. The diagnosis of FIP is worrisome, since it's a carcinovirus that can be easily transmitted from cat to cat through their saliva. (Other animals don’t seem to get it.) Two years ago, we adopted a trio of young cats from a group called Sterile Feral (they specialize in rescuing wild felines), and we lost one of these three within a few short months to FIP, so it's likely that the virus came from that poor doomed cat and remained dormant in Sebastian until he grew too old to fight it off. Reading up on the disease, I see that while it can be easily passed around, a significant percentage of cats who come into contact with it never get the disease (one study of catteries that were exposed to FIP noted that 10 – 20% of the other cats tested positive for the disease), though it's unclear from the material that I've read whether these were short-term or long-term exposures. There is a nasal vaccine for the disease, but the jury's still out on its effectiveness. We're getting the rest of our menagerie tested, but since the virus also can remain dormant, we don't plan on bringing any more cats into the current mix. With so many animals in the house, it's probably inevitable you have favorites: of all our cats, Sebastian was the one I most enjoyed because his friendliness was almost doglike. (I'm the dog person in the home; Becky's the cat.) He had a nice, long life in our home, but, as usual, it's never long enough. . . # | Sunday, July 04, 2004 ( 7/04/2004 08:13:00 PM ) Bill S. A GOLDEN OLDIE – Gearing up for Spider-Man 2, I immersed myself in one of the Marvel Masterworks collections this weekend. And while reading the Green Goblin story from AS-M #40, I revisited a moment I'd forgotten: in the story, Peter's estranged first love Betty Brant is standing in a Chicago train station, preparing to return to New York. In the background, a radio is broadcasting deejay Art Roberts on WLS, who wonders why "nothing has been heard of Spider-Man these past few days." Living in the Chicago 'burbs at the time this story was originally published (1966), I was familiar with both the station and disc jockey. WLS (the call letters stand for what used to be the "World's Largest Store") at the time was one of two Top 40 AM stations in the Windy City (the second being WCFL – no, I don't know if the call letters stood for anything). The station devolved into an all-talk radio format ages ago, but when I was a teenager, it was a glorious purveyor of sixties pop 'n' roll. How'd Art Roberts, the station's night deejay, wind up making a faceless cameo in a Marvel Comic? Can't say for certain. (Makes you wish that they reprinted the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins from those old issues, so you can track some of this minutia down.) Perhaps Roberts did an on-air interview with Stan the Man? Whatever the answer to this profoundly trivial question, it sure was a kick happening on his name. . . UPDATE: Greg Gatlin (of Raw Feed) alerted me in the Comments section below to a webpage devoted to reprinting all of the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins – and in the June 1966 page, I see Art Roberts is included in a list of radio d.j.s who are members of the Merry Marvel Marching Society, the company’s fan club. Mystery solved. . . # | 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. # | |
|
|
