| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Tuesday, September 07, 2004 ( 9/07/2004 11:06:00 AM ) Bill S. "JUST CALL ME FALLEN ANGEL OF THE MORNING. . ." – My absence last week has me behind on noting hot blog action like Johanna Draper Carlson's Fallen Angel Contest, which attempts to drum up interest in this unfortunately underselling DC title. I've been following Peter David's dark series from the get-go, and while I'm still rather murky on its underpinnings, there's enough solid creepiness and noiry angst in the book to keep me reading it. So consider this a plug for both book and contest. Contest deadline's tomorrow, so don't dilly-dally if you're interested. . . # | ( 9/07/2004 09:12:00 AM ) Bill S. POINTS FOR INCLUDING FRED SCHNEIDER'S "RAWWWWK LOBSTER"! – Thanx to Johnny Bacardi, here's a link to retroCRUSH's Fifty Coolest Song Parts. Unfortunately missing from this list (though the band gets two other slots): the guitar barROOM from the Who's "I Can See for Miles," a sonic flourish that still gives me chills decades after first hearing it. . . # | Monday, September 06, 2004 ( 9/06/2004 11:46:00 AM ) Bill S.  LUNCH AT DENNY'S AND STUPEFYIN' LADIES – Mark Evanier's newest collection of essays and reminiscences, Superheroes in My Pants (the Sergio Aragones cover does a swell job illustrating this title) is both dedicated to and packed with front and back recollections of Julius Schwartz. With good reason: the DC editor was arguably the foremost initiator of the superhero comics revival through his shepherding of the Silver Age Flash, Green Lantern and Justice League revamps (t'was the latter which sparked the Marvel Comics line of costumed characters). Without Schwartz, Evanier's pants would doubtless be much less crowded.Evanier's initial take – which originally spanned five entries of his PoV column (first published in The Comics Buyer's Guide, before the paper foolishly haggled its star columnist off its pages in 2002) – follows his usual approach: a historical overview of the subject's career laced with pithy anecdotes both from the writer’s own career in comics and the memories of his peers. With Pants, the third collection of columns following Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life and Wertham Was Right! (all from TwoMorrows Publishing), Evanier maintains his title as comic fandom's foremost raconteur. Among the other topics tackled in this outing: comic book conventions and the foibles of fans (a funny piece on dining at conventions which will be familiar to anyone who's ever been in a con group attempting to gather for lunch), appreciations of artists ranging from Superman main man Curt Swan to Gary Trudeau, several considerations – positive and negative – of the Magic Kingdom, columns co-starring his regular collaborator Aragones, plus a common-sense reflection on why most of today's superhero comics don't work for him. He also includes a three-part warning piece on Unfinanced Entrepreneurs, those figures on the fringe of most creative communities who have a knack for pulling both writers and artists into fiscally dubious projects, that I half wish my alter ego Wilson Barbers had read before getting talked into crafting a still un-optioned movie script. But if he had, he probably wouldn't have heeded Evanier's advice, anyway. If this third volume falls down, it's in the relative paucity of stories from the writer's comic club youth that made Necessities such a treat. (He has a canny knack for recreating boy behavior, though perhaps you could argue that he continues that tradition by describing older fanboys in action – but it's not quite the same.) Too, a report from the 1996 San Diego Con comes across as slighter than the rest of the book because it's not much different from con reports any number of Internet reporters could have produced today (though he does include a sharp appreciation of Mad caricaturist Mort Drucker in the middle of the piece). But these are minor grumbles. Superheroes in My Pants remains an addictive read: a clear-eyed look at the comics industry and fandom from Both Sides Now – with an occasional side glance at such pertinent pop culture topics as the force of nature that is Julie Newmar. Don't know how many more books Mark'll be able to get out of his finite run of newsprint columns, but I know I'll buy 'em all. # | Sunday, September 05, 2004 ( 9/05/2004 12:36:00 PM ) Bill S. "HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A LOADED GUN?" – Lotsa stuff to catch up on from the past week, so let's do a round of bullet-points to target a few. . .
(Background Music for this Round o' Pointing: Jellyfish, Spilt Milk.) # | ( 9/05/2004 06:49:00 AM ) Bill S. FRESH-GROUND COFFEE, LAW & ORDER RERUNS – (Note: The following piece will most likely be of little interest to those who’ve come here looking for pop culture bloggery.) Early this week, on the penultimate day of August, as my wife and I did the five-minute drive from our home to Bro/Menn Hospital in Normal, IL, Becky's mother Coralie Fox died in Intensive Care. As we were riding over, the Zombies' Odyssey & Oracle playing in the car, the ICU nurse futilely attempted to phone us at home. We arrived at the hospital with a bag of cassette tapes (Pavarotti, Jose Carreras, Dvorak's "New World Symphony," a few more) and a Walkman. Becky had seen a show on Discovery Science that described several studies on how music can help in the healing process, so we'd brought a selection of sounds that we knew her mother loved. When we got to ICU, the room was curtained shut, and it was clear that the musical selection we'd taken pride in collecting was un-needed. The death was not a surprise, just the timing. Mom Fox had moved in with us twenty months before, and from the beginning, it was obvious her time was limited. She'd come out of her own elder care apartment after a series of repeated hospitalizations made it clear she could no longer live by herself. She'd been a widow for over thirty years, had largely made it on her own as a maid and housecleaner for some of the moneyed folk in Peoria, but now she needed help from her family. A lifetime of smoking had left her with emphysema and a congested heart. The latter was working at 20 per cent capacity on good days; she spent her days and nights hooked to either a breathing machine or a portable canister of air. At least four times a day, she had to use a nebulizer to get her breathing back under control. Medical science was prolonging her life, and she wasn't always happy about it. For one thing, she had bad hips, which pained her most of her waking hours. Doctors were reluctant to do any replacement surgery because her heart was so frail, though she wouldn't stop trying to cajole one into doing the procedure. At 82, she was on an elaborate regimen of medications, and I was impressed by her ability to keep them straight. When she first came to live with us, I did a chart of her meds for her, and it was something like twelve different prescriptions. Lasix, zestrel, trazadone, theodur – a catalog of names that sounded like a Professor Irwin Corey spate of doubletalk. Yet she diligently sorted and kept up with them all. She moved in upstairs, into a guest bedroom that took up two-thirds of the floor (the rest was attic plus a spacious bathroom). I shared closet space with her: our old Sears craft house does not have a lot of downstairs storage room, so I’d always used the capacious built-in upstairs closet. Every morning, I'd trudge upstairs with the first of two cups of fresh-ground coffee: it became part of our daily ritual. Those mornings she still was in bed, I'd watch for signs of life – a deep breath, a shifting of the body, a sound. It often took a long time for me to catch one. The first months of her stay, she used to come down from her "apartment" regularly to talk, eat dinner and watch television – thirty-plus feet of clear plastic tubing trailing behind her – but either through emotional disinclination or growing physical debility, these treks grew less frequent over time. Leaving the house for doctor or psychiatrist appointments was a major excursion, taking up to an hour to get from bedroom to car, with even longer to return upstairs. The family worked to have a chair lift installed to make these trips easier, a process that took months of badgering once we'd acquired a used lift. But by the time we finally got an elevator company to actually anchor it, she was in the hospital for the last time. Before she became a part of our household, I'd primarily known Coralie Fox as the woman who'd driven my wife to distraction. Becky's mother was mentally ill and had been so through most of her adult life; she was institutionalized several times during Becky's childhood. I've seen several diagnoses given for her illness – schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder – and while the symptoms had been largely managed with medication for years, at times you saw them coming out in the form of fits of prolonged hopelessness and irrationally hurtful diatribes that she'd aim at her daughter. Becky, who'd lived through these spells since childhood and had taken them to heart for years, was finally able to see them as symptoms of her mother's illness and not something really connected to her. Afterwards, Mom Fox would never remember what she'd said to her only daughter. Getting to know her more fully over her stay with us, I found her to be more than just the maddening mother-in-law. Coralie Fox was a quirky and sensitive woman who'd not been given an easy life: a frail woman in her eighties, with paper-thin skin and a haunted look about the eyes. She could be stubbornly provincial in some of her beliefs, yet totally openhearted in others. A lifetime of struggling to hold her life in control kept her heavily focused on routine and neatness (which doubtless made her an exemplary housekeeper), and she often chafed against our hippie-esque attitude toward household maintenance. Fortunately for all concerned, we were able to secure a companion from the YWCA to come in to help Mom Fox keep her place up to her own specifications and be a companion during those times I was at work and Becky unable to make it upstairs herself. Occasionally, I'll read an essay – by some pundit eager to score points through simplistic overgeneralization – about the selfishness of the Baby Boom Generation. Looking at my wife, I just can't see it. During her mother's stay, she didn't work so she could remain at home. This turned out to be a round-the-clock commitment, and while having Mom Fox around could be a delightful experience, the first time we were able to actually get some time away we spent three months setting up arrangements with other family members – only to have the old woman hospitalized in Peoria three days into our vacation. Despite years of rocky memories from growing up under a mentally ill parent plus her own medical issues with arthritis and fibromyalgia, she opened our home to her mother. I'm in awe at her willingness to do this. It wasn't all duty and responsibility, of course: Mom Fox could be a charming person. She had an inexhaustible memory of friends and family history, plus an appreciation of small pleasures. She enjoyed a good homemade meal and the feeder we hung from a flagpole off the back porch so she could see the birds from her window. She was addicted to Law and Order reruns plus professional poker tourneys on television; she had a good-sized VHS collection that ran from Disney to concert tapes of the Three Tenors. She was a sucker for charities and a long-standing friend to those she met along the way. Though at times, she'd get stressed, close up and shut those same friends out, she always came back. At least she always came back until now. . . We'll miss you, Mom Fox. # | |
|
|
