Wow, That Was Insanely Easy

So I decided to back up all my Blogger entries on a WordPress blog that I made special for the purpose…

And wow, it just happened, it just went there, and I’m totally thrilled.  Two clicks, and it was done.

Easy.

So, just to say…I’m very happy with my WordPress service.

Never leaving you, Wordie.  Mwah mwah mwah.  Let’s stay together forever.

Used To Be Glorious Black And White

You know, I still have that post about the Moench/Sienkiewicz Fantastic Four hanging…

But screw it.  At least for now.

I want to write about Moon Knight.

Although Jonathan Burns would do this far better than I can:  this business of the Return Of The Pulps.  I suppose people look at Moon Knight today and just see Batman…do they just see Batman?  But he’s only partly Batman;  and he’s only about as much Batman as he’s also Dr. Fate.  And much more importantly he’s also the Phantom, the Shadow, Doc Savage…really, this disquisition’s gonna be a bit disorganized, but I may not be able to pull myself more than three steps away from Moon Knight’s assault on pulp at any point in any case, so stirring and sensible is the way Moench and Sienkiewicz show off the knowledge of there inheritance of the pulps, their membership in those old ways of telling a particular sort of story.

But it’s hard to know just where to start, with all that. Going over the art alone could take a while: because we won’t get the Sienkiewicz we know today ’til almost two years of Moon Knight have passed. Mind you, when we do it will FREAK YOU OUT, SONNY…but it’ll take a while, is what I’m saying. You expect to open page one of issue #1 and see the peer of Ploog, Rogers, Miller and all, but you don’t, or at any rate you don’t think you do: instead you see their student. Mind you a lot of the latter-day Sienkiewicz’s craft is right there in front of your eyes anyway, breaking up pages into lean strips and little stamps, populated by distorted figures and scratchy lines — and I’m not enough of a comics scholar to explain it, it does seem fairly squeezed until about the sixth or seventh issue, and it’s about another six or seven (or eight if we’re heading for my favourite, issue #15 — also the first direct-market issue, perhaps not coincidentally) before it really starts to breathe whole breaths, but there is something pulpy about that, too…so I’m not sure how to discount it, or even if it ought to be discounted at all. What we have here, on occasion, is something that verges on a Lee Falk style, something raw and speedy made to get the job done…and yet what we also have is a style in which different angles and perspectives are slammed together quite artfully in order to propel the eye across the page, and in which the compositional space does a lot of extremely fancy things in order to get you from one word-balloon to the next on time and in good order. And in this particularly — at least, so far as my untutored eye can tell — the Moench and Sienkiewicz team are creating something unusual: a largely effortless read, but also one that’s slyly reflective of a slightly less obvious purpose. It probably goes without saying that Doug Moench hardly ever gets the credit he deserves as a writer, much less as an innovator; though his credentials are as solid as any of the Seventies Marvel “superstar” writers who made their fame on style, that he seems to prefer clarity of intention over style has (I think) given him the status of a utility player in most readers’ eyes.  Because he can do the florid, cheaply programmatic “symphonic” emotional Eighties Marvel prose as easily as he can the more “psychological” stuff it developed from, the stuff more rooted in Raymond Chandler knock-offs than in Tolkien knock-offs  — and why not, since in superhero comics the latter style flows out of the former anyway? — and indeed in the Eighties mode (as we’ll see in the Fantastic Four post) he can be as guilty of sententious overreach as any Chris Claremont…but as you read him through you can see a certain kind of studious deliberation behind the styles, an interest in other things past and above “narrative voice”.  Sometimes the captioning is relatively terse, relatively tough-nosed and poetic; other times it’s relatively flowery, or it’s pushy, or it seems unnecessary. But no matter how ornamental the captioning seems at its most extreme, it evidences a certain sort of restraint, that flows from purpose — one senses that Moench could go any old way with this stuff, if he wanted to, so just because he’s going this particular way it doesn’t mean he’s willing to abandon his objectives for the objectives of the tools he’s using.  You wouldn’t really call it spare in most places, and you wouldn’t call it lean in most others, but with one notably teeth-grinding exception I think a reasonable person would have to call it impressively self-aware.

Which is what the placement of the word-balloons helps to suggest: because, is Moench genuinely aping the going Marvel style, here?  After a time, and mostly because of the resolutely intentional character of the dialogue, the weird lucidity that pokes its head up even through the most turgid bits of seeming duckspeak and filler — in fact, hardly a soul opens their mouths without rendering valuable practical information to the reader! — it starts to look a lot more likely that what he’s playing with is the old language of pulpiness that both the Seventies and Eighties Marvel styles drew their power from:  looks a lot more likely that he’s trying to get back to the ruthlessly pragmatic roots of style that he always loved the best, and not only that but trying to tap them more directly than his colleagues.  And when you look at what he doesn’t do, the picture comes even clearer:  because he doesn’t wink at us while he’s doing it.

Despite the constant captions, he really just lets the story tell itself.  Look at everything that’s packed into Moon Knight, all unselfconsciously, without any nervous ankle-scratching:  the callback to Forties movies like Casablanca and Rope Of Sand, the callback to Golden Age origins based on animal-spirits and Egyptian tombs;  Batman’s playboy mansion, the Phantom’s “living ghost” shtick, the Shadow’s and Doc Savage’s crew of helpers…well, Moon Knight is his own crew of helpers, he’s even his own faithful chauffeur at times, and as for the superhero stuff about “you’d have to be crazy to dress up like a bat and fight crime”…well, he is crazy, at least in part.  The resurrection to a new life before the god of the moon…that might not have actually happened.  “Bruce Wayne” being a disguise for Batman in the metaphorical sense…well, Steven Grant is a disguise for Moon Knight, and there’s nothing metaphorical about it!

And yet there’s hardly a time when the complex interleaving of all that stuff is thrust in your face, and you never have to think about it if you don’t want to, even though it all mounts up and up:  because it isn’t the main point, even though it’s by far the cleverest point.  If it were me, I can tell you I would’ve made a great big deal about it in every issue…but Moench makes a far bigger deal of reminding us that Moon Knight has a microphone concealed in his cowl that enables him to talk to his helicopter pilot, and a far bigger deal of reminding us that the copter is silent, the crescent-darts are really throwing stars, and that each phase (each phase…now what could be kinder, than never hammering that point home to the reader?  What could be less necessary than to harp on it?) of Moon Knight’s personality has its own crew of friendly helpers it can call on.  Well, these are the things that should be the biggest deal, since these are the things that allow us to parse the story — that Moon Knight checks to see that the cowl-mike is working properly is maybe something that you could, in fact, call a little bit spare and lean, since it at once gives us the opportunity to cut to Frenchie in the copter (and being able to cut away to Frenchie in the copter is actually very important in terms of the book’s fusion of styles, even when all he says is “oui, Marc“!), and less importantly it eliminates the need for big thought-balloons needlessly explaining who the hell Frenchie is.  And, maybe it does something else, too, in that it accentuates the idea that Moon Knight isn’t quite that crazy after all:  I mean, look, he makes sure shit is working correctly before he swoops down on the criminal element.  You never see Batman doing that.  Batman, especially today’s Batman, just has an assload of incomprehensibly high-tech stuff that all works perfectly all the time, when he wants to talk to Alfred there is never any doubt he can do it, it all just happens and it makes him look a bit insane all by itself.  Modern Batman has so many technological dependencies that never betray him that he’s basically godlike, so totally sane in every way that even his equipment is totally sane, and never has a doubt about itself.  Moon Knight’s a lot more chaotic:  a handful of fancy shuriken, a stick, and a rope ladder hanging from a helicopter is just about all he can handle.  Throw in a cape and a cowl-mike and a dark past and he’s full to capacity.

For some bizarre reason, it’s almost believable.  And you know what it all reminds me of?  Jack Staff.

But more on that in a minute, I guess.  Let’s get back to the pulps, first, and their remarkable “updating” in the Moon Knight mag.  You know what, it actually turns out to be not that hard to pull off! To the Golden Age motivations you simply add the existence of an interior state for your main character — just its existence is enough, about six small thought-balloons an issue is all you need! — and then you drop the other characters a thought-bubble or two, usually just something like “I hope he knows what he’s doing”, and away you go. Some ultraviolet prose in the captions, and it’s superficially indistinguishable from any Very Special Episode Of The Uncanny X-Men you’d care to pick up…but it feels different. The story, whatever story it happens to be, pushes forward in a simple way, “refreshingly psychotic” as Moon Knight says of his third-issue art-thief villain: the captioning seems to nod to the typical moral message one finds in any standard superhero book that deals with anything like the seamy, the social, the evil, the racist, the crazy — always something cloying about making things better one day at a time, taking your solace where you can find it and all that crap, darkest before the dawn, there but for the grace of God, etc. — but whatever sincerity’s to be found in this stuff only comes out of the juxtaposition with action, which is its payoff. I mean the poetry is nice, but on its own it doesn’t mean a thing, does it? It doesn’t really mean a goddamn thing. It’s just texture. As the soul-searching, the navel-gazing, the ruminations are all texture — and we know they are, because they are always cut off by action before they even get to the posing of the Big Philosophical Questions! You read it all through and you start to love Moench for that, love him for not just beating on you with Moon Knight’s interior monologue. Instead he just sort of of gestures airily to the part of the house where the big questions are located, “bathroom’s down the hall to the left”, and leaves it to your imagination. Consequently the pages of Moon Knight continue to be all about the action, and there are few ameliorating complexities at issue:  the crazy people are fucking crazy, even if the story has an earnest line of patter about them…the evil people are evil as shit, even if they’re just cardboard cut-outs we see for three panels, even if they’re nine-tenths cliche in the first place. As early as issue #5, the book starts to externalize Moon Knight’s ongoing identity crisis in the tried-and-true formula of the superhero comic, but only by doing something rather more adventurous and pure than we’re used to even in a superhero horror comic: which is, the horror starts to get funny. Well, okay, maybe not “funny”, exactly…”humourous”, maybe?

Ludicrous, perhaps. And as time goes on, what’s funny and what’s chilling, what’s cute and what’s ugly, starts to get all mixed up. By the time we reach #15, “Ruling The World From His Basement”, we’ll get used to encountering just the damnedest things as equal moments of humour and horror, delight and disgust, in something like the principle of the uncanny — where things that aren’t alive behave as though they were, and things that live practice being inanimate when they shouldn’t. “Refreshingly psychotic”?  Hey, a lot of Moon Knight’s stories are kind of derivative in that old “topical comics” way, but that’s not the point:  you see everything coming anyway, and the characters mostly see them coming too, and there are no shocks or twists, not really…but there is drama, and there is activity, and there’s a certain amount of character development and study, and mood to spare as Moench makes contact with his men’s magazine background, and Sienkiewicz cranks up the speed.  Why Moon Knight does what he does isn’t even a question;  the way things are arranged, he just finds out he has to go from A to B, and then he quite logically proceeds to go there.  Purposes bubble up from wherever they need to.  You love to ponder the backstory in your idle moments, but you come for the action and you stay for the art.

And, oh, “who is Moon Knight”?

Excellent question, but hold on for a minute:  gotta check this cowl-mike is working properly.  Okay, now Sienkiewicz is drawing that Mardi Gras parade, but hold that thought…it’s a good thought, but just hold it for a minute…

Really a lot of the stuff we’re given to know in today’s comics, isn’t stuff we really need to know.  The stuff that gets resolved, a lot of it doesn’t really need to get resolved.  Just find out where you’re starting from, figure out where you’re going, and the question isn’t how soon you can get it all broken down, but how far you can take it.  And there’s no reason not to just keep taking it further, is there, when it isn’t dark secrets but only dark pasts that people have in this book. Which is an important distinction, in that it shows how the one thing gives you something to spoil, and the other one doesn’t.  Years from now, when William Messner-Loebs is writing Flash, again possibly when James Robinson is writing Starman, we’ll see how the Moon Knight Method can rehabilitate even an ordinary superhero-type character completely: why keep doing the same old thing, why keep trying to breed this mutant strain of the Silver Age true? When it’s so easy to get back to the original influences, and mutate them some other way. After all sometimes shit just happens, and that’s a good thing:  you should let it happen. This ain’t Dostoeyevsky, you know.  Nothing’s at stake here, we are not reaching for the timeless themes of respectable literature;  this is the pulps, man.  This is the pulps.  And you thought they were kind of stupid, well they’re not…or at any rate, they don’t have to be.  And don’t you want to see something you haven’t seen before?  Don’t you believe that the old can be made new?

You have to do it the right way, though.

Let’s have a short digression about Jack Staff, I think the first new character of this type since Moon Knight.  Who is he?  What’s his deal?  Well, it’s simple, really;  the last thing any of it is, is secret.  For secret you should go to Harold Pinter or Tennessee Williams, maybe — they can set you up, they’re not serial entertainment, they can afford to give you one big revelation that pays off everything, changes everything, and even ruins everything.  These adventure stories of ours, though…they’re not really set up very well for that sort of thing, it takes an enormous talent to make them traffic profitably in such secrets, and to make them capable of continuing afterwards is even tougher.  Jack Staff is all about the dark past, however, so it doesn’t look (from my cursory survey of it, and God I hope I’m right) much like it can really run out of things to be about.  And when’s the last time we saw that, in our superheroey fiction?  Of course you like Jack Staff:  he gets on with it.  So what’s not to like?

After all, you get on with it too, don’t you?

Ahh, men’s magazines.  I’ve got a copy of the cover of one stuck on my fridge, about the size of a magnet.  “I Battled A Giant Otter!” reads the title of the main story to be found inside, with the illustration of a man in a tent thrashing a big Amazonian furry creature with his lantern, its teeth buried in his forearm…as his square-jawed buddy pokes his head in with a gun.  Moon Knight’s just like that, only with an intense identity crisis;  Jack Staff’s like that, only with humourous world-weariness. One’s punchy, one’s languid, but they’re both drawn to say “hey, look, over here!”

Here’s something that’s not boring to read, even though you’ve basically seen it before. Action, again: to read it is not boring, it is not boring to read.

That, too, is an important distinction.

Of course now that I’ve made it, I don’t know if I can think of much more to say.  I used to say, parroting what they all said in the letters pages at the time, that Moon Knight was like the perfect superhero for the Eighties, the perfect Eighties superhero.  And I guess that wasn’t exactly the right way to put it, but it was true enough for my purposes at the time…maybe even true enough for my purposes today.  Frickin’ Moon Knight, man.  It was so cool.

Although reading these issues again, they’re full of those ads for the Roger Stern/Frank Miller Dr. Strange, and I have to tell you that as much as I loved the Stern/Rogers Doc, I am still waiting for the Miller book to come out…somewhere deep down in the feverish fourteen-year-old core of my comics-lovin’ brain.

…And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been saving the re-reading of Moon Knight #25 as a special treat for myself, for when I finally finished this tangled mess.  It’s got a little essay by Sienkiewicz in it, it’s got three pages of letter column, it’s a Special Double-Sized Issue!!!

And the art’s completely insane.  Moon Knight.  Moon Knight, Moon Knight, Moon Knight.  MOON KNIGHT.

You should probably read it, if you haven’t already.

And I should probably go get some more Jack Staff.

Just to keep up with the times, you know!

Last Homely House Before The Mountains

String Theory

Magic Mirror II

Magic Mirror I

Vancouver When It Stumbles

Topics In Fantasy: Terminal, Discotheque, Apocalypse

Welcome folks; this way in, okay?

It’s something I keep saying (and why I keep linking to the most incoherent and longwinded shit I ever wrote is beyond me, honestly, but there it is once again) about the SF staple we call “the post-apocalyptic world”, because it’s both obvious and overlooked: that after the Apocalypse, we survivors are living in its world, and not our own. Though naturally it used to be ours.

And all science fiction is about the present, not the future, but…

…But you know, I think it’s possible we say that a little too much. Say it too much, and as a result we think too little about what it means. “Science fiction’s about the present, not the future”, so okay…

What’s it saying, then?

Here’s a thing I noticed recently, in the dark days of the Exploded Computer that saw me write half-a-dozen posts I may never get to, before finally posting one that probably was never going to be much more than half-baked at best…although, you know, now the deed’s been done I feel I ought to try to find the method in my own madness…

…Which is — uh, the thing I noticed, I mean — that I noticed that there was a new bar down the street. Or rather, an old bar under new ownership, now trumpeting its “New Pub Concept”. This, for those of you who may not be familiar with the syndrome, is basically a combination of fancier food, a more impressive arsenal of liquors at the high edge of possible spending, some distressed “old-timey” accoutrements lying around, “modern” music, and most importantly FLATSCREENS EVERYWHERE. Man, I’ve just never seen such a high flatscreen-to-square-footage ratio, you know. They had a Cray in the basement of the place running them all, a clean room with retina scans and chin-tilt biometrics accurate to within a picometer, webs of blue light everywhere. The very highest of high, high New Pub Concept technology.

And over the bar, a red LED news-scroller announcing “New Pub Concept! We Want To Be Your New Neighbourhood Watering-Hole, A Place To Chill Out And Relax!” While the modern music blasted, the UFC matches filled the air with blazing light, and the repros of old newspapers nodded knowingly from the walls. Ab-so-lutely schiztastic!

But it was that LED scroller that was the damnedest thing of all.

It didn’t say anything as interesting as I’ve given it to say here, actually; truth be told, it was not much of a conversational entre that it was scrolling out. I can’t really even remember what it said. The name of the place, sure; maybe something faintly non-sequitur-ish about the burgers and the beer, or the music. In my memory the approximate content was a lot like:

…New Pub Concept…What’s Happening!…New Pub Concept…What’s Happening!…

Yeah, that’s a lot closer.

Anyway…

It’s a funny thing about that LED scroller. Given the colossal amounts of cash and semiconductors thrown at every other aspect of the place, I had to wonder what it was doing there. Was it really an old-fashioned LED scroller, or was it just made to look like one? It did seem slightly technologically incompatible with the rest of the place, like everything else was James Cameron and it was Ralph Bakshi…but then, if it was just a simulation, then what on Earth was it simulating? And if it was real, then why was it real?

Why was it this real thing, instead of some other real thing?

I think this history of it’s all pretty straightforward. As we all know, once upon a time the LED scroller was the very reeking essence of What Is High Tech, or what looks like the Future…this was a time just after that cool old “computer font” disappeared, that thing that sort of looked like the kind of graffiti Mr. Spock might have left on the walls of Vulcan’s subway system, probably a thing worth investigating in its own right in the history of pop typography…and is there any other kind of typography, really…?

But it was part of a different design era, I think. This kind of iconography was just “finding” itself in the real world, finding itself in the hands of people who made real devices and real places for real people, rather than suggestive sigils for science-fictional scenarios that were based on real devices, that were extrapolated from real human uses, and so the aims of things like the LED scroller were a bit different from the aims of all the crap Rudy Wells had in his lab. By the late Seventies even the more nouveau TV computers, all slanted banks of skittering lights rather than boxy tape-containers with big fat bulbs on ‘em, were starting to look more like kitsch than conjecture…because as electronic gear moved more steadily into the hands of real people, the look of their fictional counterparts started to become more irrelevant. Something perhaps a bit similar can be gleaned from looking at past design era’s conceptions of what space-suits “of the future” might look like; many of them still look charming today, but hardly cutting-edge. In fact we can barely remember a time when technology was quite so neutral as to produce future-visions such as those simple, voiceless, soulless “suits”. In the Eighties things took a sharp turn toward the interactive, the interfunctional and interpenetrated, the “hi-touch”, and it wasn’t by accident then any more than it’s by accident now — because it was always the world we inhabited, that shaped the design of the futures we imagined. So, that LED scroller…the thing about it was, it was supposed to be friendly. Obedient, inviting, comforting.

But…

The real question, again, is why. What was it about that device’s use that made it important to be seen as possessing such qualities? I mean…was it just random typography, or what?

Well, clearly it was not. Here’s where I first saw the stuff, and you can tell me if this is where you saw it too: large public buildings.

Large public buildings.

This doesn’t really crack the nut yet, either. Are there just things called “large public buildings”? No; there are always reasons for each one of them, and the reasons usually have to do with governments. Bridges and tunnels and ferries and airports and train stations: the large public buildings are always signs of large public expenditures on large public projects. People-moving, mostly; as one of government’s biggest jobs is finding ways to move larger and larger of numbers of people around from place to place. From home to work, from work to school, on time and on schedule and above all on-message. Taxpayer dollars and public relations, megaprojects and elections: at a certain very base level it’s about pure mechanical efficiency. You build a large industrial environment out of concrete and steel, put a funnel at one end and a spout at the other. But you don’t just do that; to do that and no more would be suicide. You need a few potted plants in there, too. You need some nice chrome for people to see their reflections in, like you need some soft corners and dark carpets here and there to blunt echoes too. They used to do it with brass and marble and stained-glass windows, but as time moves on so does efficiency, of course — and you find ways and ways to make the bearability of the big industrial intake valves easier to clean, maintain, replace. Sometimes efficiency means hiding a lot of things in plain sight, hanging lanterns and drawing shades. We people are always all in this together, after all; and steps must be taken to ensure that where we meet, and get moved, our moods can be managed.

None of this is exactly conspiracy-theory stuff, you understand. It’s just a matter of learning the lessons of history. Or rather, of architecture.

Or rather, of literature.

The anxieties that modernity brings are hardly new, hardly obscure. The cautionary tales of science fiction in particular have given us a nice hundred-year-deep examination of those problems and pressures, and not only that but they’ve indicated ways to alleviate modernity’s stress, precisely by sketching out exactly what it is and exactly how it works. Oh, you’ll find it in Angel Pavement too, but not as clearly schematized as it is in The Machine Stops; and you’ll certainly be conscious of its presence in The Grapes Of Wrath, but if you’re looking for a prescription rather than a mere diagnosis, then you’ll probably be a bit more interested in 1984. Possibly Brave New World on the side, just to round things out. Lord Of The Flies? Oh, absolutely; but don’t neglect the somewhat less Nobel-worthy charms of Foundation while you’re browsing around…

The point being: that we do, actually, know how to do all this. How to warm the textures and cool the exhausts. It is, of course, not at all an easy job: who among us can look on rush hour in a major city and think “nope, no lemmings here!” But people are good at adapting, too, if you just give them something to rally around inside their heads. Often it doesn’t take much. For goodness’ sake, potted plants at the ferry terminal! It’s next door to totally stupid, but it does work if you just let it.

And by now you’re probably wondering where I’m going with all this. Okay, fair enough.

Those LED scrollers…they were for telling you when your boat, train, plane, whatever was coming in. So you could go home, you know? A welcome announcement, a mass relief…if you look at them carefully, and consider what they might have been, you’ll see the letters that spell out the happy news are surprisingly polite and reassuring. Somewhere along the line, it went from angular bars spelling out least-energy impossible-to-read digits on your wrist, to domesticated dots marching in order to form smooth-ish curves, legible fonts…fantastically expensive, surely! And yet there it is, our ultra-modern system: working properly. Serving our needs, with no expense spared. Oh, except it is spared, but never mind that right now, the illusion’s more important than the reality anyway. Isn’t it? Buckets of gigabytes at our disposal, I like to swim in them, dive into them, throw them up into the air and let them hit me on the head…! It’s sort of the same thing that happens when Regis Philbin addresses the empty air on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, saying:

“Computer, please take away two of the wrong answers.”

There’s a certain reassuring level of performance on display, there. A certain reassuring display of wealth, that’s big enough to free us from reality’s pesky details. “Say, computer, hand me the sports section, wouldja pal?” How polite Regis is, to his obviously non-existent friend the computer! His perfect servant/master, his all-seeing Jeeves or Spock: thus the modernistic dichotomy becomes the modernistic harmony, easy as that….at least, in our minds it becomes that, whether or not it happens to be true.

You may think I’m reaching a little. But believe me, you don’t know from reaching…

…And anyway, yeah. Because the fact remains: this is what I’m saying the LED scroller is at the airport, the bank, the ferry terminal.

But what the hell is it at the New Pub Concept?

Maybe I’ve dragged this out a little too much, because I’m sure you can clearly see: the LED scroller didn’t stay in the big industrial spaces. It didn’t just sit there kind of “humanizing them somewhat”. But as time passed, it got picked up and turned around, and also used for other purposes. Subversive purposes.

Consider the club, more precisely the discotheque: where before long you found the wilder people of the culture inhabiting, once again, a giant population intake valve. Only this time, it need not have been that, but it was chosen to be that — to look like that and to feel like that. Insouciant post-punk nihilism, narcissism, whatever you want to call it if there’s even any difference: obviously I am not speaking against it, but it’s the Berlin-style club, the “New York-style” club as they used to call it here in my backwards, soggy little home town, and it is an identifiable thing. Well, people will whoop it up anywhere, in any surroundings, but a party can also be a statement, and since the problems of modernity never can get fixed…

…Because like bone, our culture’s macroscopic resilience is based on the flex and snap of a million invisible microfractures…

…But only addressed, is it really surprising that it was really easy for a while there to find demimondean environments of consumption and abandon that embraced the identity of the Big Industrial Throughput Engine? Through which tides of people ebb and flow, ebb and flow, anonymously: the very picture of modernity’s big bugaboo. But, fuck it, say the young: we’ll just take this off your hands, you’re so damn scared of it. And just then, just there, look up to the DJ booth:

Hey, there it is!

Our old friend the LED scroller. Now Playing…Some Band…Now Playing…Some Band…

No, we haven’t reached the New Pub Concept yet, but we’re getting closer. And this is interesting too: the club is a station, the club is a vessel, the club is essntially nowhere and noplace, caught-between. Marvellous stuff, eh? There you are, stuck halfway between Denmark and Finland, when suddenly Eliot’s old air-raid siren goes off. So what better time to drop everything and dance, and drink, and screw? ‘Cause there’s nothing left to do, natch.

Ah, you have to love a rebellious spirit.

But note that as what was once the softener of alienation becomes the marker of it, suddenly it takes on a vast new life in the sea of associations. The post-apocalyptic world is where we survivors live, but it isn’t ours — it belongs to what was destroyed, it belongs to what destroyed it. All those great big public structures, the agents of alienation, we’re alienated from them again, alienated twice over: Grand Central Station goes back to the birds and the foxes, but not to us, even though we live there…’cause there’s nothing left to do…and the LED scroller outside the stock market chimes out our solitude and essential foreignness to ourselves, in abbreviations and fractions we can no longer decipher as anything but funereal runes, leftover readouts on the reactor long since gone supercritical. Science fiction, I tellya: it’s great, isn’t it? The toppled buildings and empty freeways. No wonder we keep going back to that shit. It is not predicting anything; because it is not predicting anything. The conversation is not new, and it isn’t particularly obscure either. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be about collapse. Or, you know…at least not exactly about collapse…

Microfractures, remember?

We have American Flagg, a series that often seemed almost to be based around the lettering, based around the reassuring/ironic/sinister texture of mood-managing surfaces, a neat and rather prescient screencap of what the idea of a post-apocalyptic world would eventually turn into. Well, sure! With the world decentred, all the announcements, all the lettering, all the textural softening is ludicrously, satirically untrustworthy; and the airports and train stations really are abandoned, as the Plex stops people-moving — wants no more to do with people-moving! — outside the corrupt and chaos-making media channels, which don’t push anyone from place to place, so much as they simply push them around. Because the lettering’s all that’s left. However, it’s a dystopia with a difference, because it’s so very up-to-date: and as a result this post-apocalytic landscape fails to alienate anything except what came before it, what destroyed it, what all its world supposedly belongs to. All that stuff instead getting disenfranchised itself, as the mood of the people waiting for the subway changes. Sours: as vitality fruits in the blasted plazas and the mixed messages, and once again the world’s copyright is returned to the survivors.

And we will get right into this pretty darn soon, as soon as Paul Verhoeven starts to make movies…“Would You Like To Know More?”…but we should also remember this stuff isn’t even original to Flagg, as fantastic as Flagg is at carrying it forward. The corrupt, dying society with absent and decentred authority sources, mysterious directives from space or who-knows-where that are no longer interested in control for anything but control’s own sake…a world of lies, unsustainable: there are so many places to find it. Certainly it was chief among the interests of SF writers of the Sixties, as a generational elaboration on, and reaction to, the warnings of 1984 and Brave New World…but now it gets more personal, as the post-apocalyptic landscape gets bigger and woolier, and the need for cosmic vengeance, scale-balancing, gets more and more urgent. The individual, always important for understanding the post-apocalyptic times in which we live, now becomes an instrument of Fate as well: agent of a new world, a neo-post-apocalypse if you will. And you could trace that stuff a LONG way back if you wanted to, as far as the Elder Edda and farther, but since in this essay we are focussing on the meaning of the present, we might as well concentrate on what happens to that old stuff in the present’s own Era. In movies, I guess I first became aware of it when I saw Logan’s Run, but soon there were movies that brought a lot more of it to the surface, made it all more immediate and visceral. The Warriors, and then Escape From New York: this is where the rebellious spirit grows teeth. Screw your vast impersonal industrial throughput spaces; we’re taking ‘em back from you. It’s just what’s going on in the clubs, in the music, in the books and the comics.

But…

Wait, I think I may have gotten a little off-topic, somewhere around here…

Oh, yeah. The lettering. The scrolling.

Hey…now that I think of it, just what is that damn LED scroller doing in the New Pub Concept place?

What I think it’s doing is this: trying to exploit its own associations.  But unfortunately for it, the river of association only flows one way:  and the only way to exploit associations is to try to create distance between them, that makes them weaker.

Let’s look at The Matrix for a minute: ostensibly just the same sort of business as all that fluff above, and indeed very much classically in line with the general discussion. Well turned-out, to say the least…and yet there’s something a little too pat about it. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Matrix too! “There Is No Spoon” and so forth…the guns and the violence, the technology and the environments, the temptation and the escape…but it’s no Diamond Dogs or Heroes, exactly. Is it? No, not exactly; the mood’s changed. To fight the machines, after all…that trick was looking a bit shopworn back when Steve Austin had his red tracksuit on. Not to mention, something the casual reader of even 1984 might be persuaded to find a little dishonest. Because, after all, who are the machines? What are the machines? Science fiction isn’t about the future, but the present, so the machines are always just figures, or when mishandled just excuses, because the technology and the people are inseperable: in fact, they stand for exactly what they are, and no more. The spectre of the machines “taking over” is practically Victorian, well out of date as a speculative nightmare by the time a concept of “neutral” technology is so dead it can’t even sponsor a believable spacesuit, fuck where are the scrolling letters at least, for heaven’s sake, you know?…and so it’s rather too pat, even if to the Wachowski’s credit the mysterious promise of the Oracle in the first movie is soon made good on, as it turns out there are all kinds of machines, just as there are all kinds of people. “Love is an emotion.” “No; love is a word.” There’s the only philosophy the Matrix movies contain, and it’s more than most movies ever contain, so you really do have to give them a little credit for that…however at the same time it’s hard to argue this philosophical point doesn’t get a little bit lost after a while, if only through being abandoned: as at least on the surface, the Matrix movies continue to separate out human agency from human machinery.

Which is not very “hi-touch” of them!

And so it’s a bit out of step with the times. One might even say: oddly so, given the great successes of SF movies that incorporate the interpenetrating, interfunctional nature of our own real-life relationship with technology into their decentred, surreally-fragmented futurescapes. We could start with Blade Runner and move up even to Minority Report: your Sixties fascinations, post-apocalyptic landscapes as psychological as they are technical — living simulacra, self-aware landscapes; dead and plastic people, touchable lies. And nowadays, of course, even that can’t help but look just the tiniest bit worn-out: because it isn’t American Flagg we’re dealing with anymore, it’s The Intimates. Even the unspeakably hideous modern captions in crap Marvel comics practically scream it out — an awareness of how to handle the reader, how to manage the reader as they stream them through these huge and empty rooms, although in the case of The Intimates it’s to direct your attention to something, and in the case of New Avengers it’s to direct it away. But in any case the typography’s more important than ever, because it’s more pop than ever: of all the things you might see in a comic book, pencils, inks, and colours — even paper quality — it’s the one that most clearly announces to you where and when you are, how you are interacting with your mass media and why. Well, McLuhan I ain’t, but even I can make it out at this kind of distance: every era gets its own flavour of meltdown, as the medium messages you its massage. And this time around it’s all about selling you the same thing twice, that you already own.

That you already lived through, and survived.

So in the New Pub Concept, things are all wrong because they’re just the same as they always were, only upside-down and distorted: the dancefloor’s on the walls, making the room’s floor and ceilings alarmingly small and close, but the “old-timey” typography comforts and reassures you, leaving room for the LED scroller…

…To get you excited, is the idea I think. But of course here again is the big why of it all: why is that its function, and not something else’s?

Finally we come around to it: it’s control, again. Management and massage. Well, naturally it is, eh? I mean, don’t we all know that large corporate entities never balk at recycling the recycled? “Oh, you took that thing we used to bullshit you with, and repurposed it to indicate our bullshitty nature…wow, thanks for giving us a new way to sell you your own bullshit!” Not that I’m saying we’re stupid, after all it isn’t our fault that modernity’s essence is economic…!

Hey, I think the Enlightenment went thataway, Sheriff…!

But in the era of the present, this kind of winking-at-you-winking-at-me thing gets less useful, and more Steve Austin, all the time. “Hey,” says the LED-scroller. “Hey buddy. Hey, buddy.”

Yeah?

“Hey, we’re really going somewhere now, eh? I guess we made it. Together.”

Yeah, well…I guess we kind of did…

…Whoever you are.

Thus it is revealed, that those who do not learn the lessons of pop iconography, will be forced to repeat the class.

...This way out, Bloggers…Do Come Again…

“Nature Is Orderly, Regular, And Has Patternedness”

Wow.

Dear Internet Search Person:

Thank you for visiting my blog.  It is not a very good one as far as discussing these deep questions goes — at least, its proprietor is not particularly qualified for such discussions.

However.

I do believe that Nature is patterned;  the question is, can its patternedness survive for long in our minds if crammed into a conception of order and regularity?  I would guess not;  and I think that to be alive to the patterned nature of our existence is far more important than establishing an ordered regularity to our thoughts about Nature.  We are always learning things that put our previous physical, cosmological, even chemical certainties into a precarious position…order is something we impose on the world through theorizing, and that order is useful to us just until it ceases to be useful.  But “regularity” kills every theory deader than a doornail with some speed, I think.  I believe we’re entering into a time when, merely due to our increasing observational acuity, we can have no theories about the world that don’t incorporate a bit of “wiggle room”…room for atypical observations.  We used to argue about epicycles.

Now, it’s all epicycles anyway.

The only question is:  are they the right epicycles?

I thank you, and Thomas Kuhn thanks you, for your interest.  We all have some catching-up to do.  Some jumping-on to do, I think.

Our telescopes won’t wait for us, to show what’s been captured in their lenses.

That, anyway, is my preliminary answer to your implied question.

I may have more later, when I know more later.

Im In Ur Wheelhouse, Reding Ur Seaguy

Okay, for some reason I can’t leave that big comment on Sean’s great Seaguy 2 article — and I don’t even know why I’m linking to it, since anyone who reads this has probably read that already [EDIT: and it was such a hell of a long time ago too]– so okay, I guess today’s a posting day instead of a travelling day.

Here’s Devo, the Venture Bros., Seaguy 2, and Grant Morrison’s weird desire to go back to the land of mainstream corporate superhero crossovers…where as Sean notes, he just cannot seem to get any sat-is-fac-tion. So let’s start with that, and do a typical thing on it too: the Alan Moore connection.

So here’s Alan Moore, and if there’s one thing he’s all about it’s really getting into the best possible state of collaboration with his artists. Forget everything else: we may have all heard horror stories about the density or sprawl of his scripts, or we may admire his ambitions or shake our heads at ‘em, but for me what makes an Alan Moore book worth buying is that I know when I do, I’ve got a VERY good chance of seeing a truly spectacular collision of a writer and an artist. (Well, obviously a writer and artists, but I don’t want to make this post bigger than it has to be, so like Newton I will approximate the centre of gravity…)

How does he do it? How do they do it? I don’t know, but it certainly gets done, and it must be quite something to see, if we ever were able to see it. So this is part of what it means to have a gift, one supposes: being able to settle, somehow, right into the specific requirements of the work you’re doing. Collaborations are exceedingly tricky things, they’re all process, and the process can very easily founder for some reason you never become aware of…but when it works, it bloody well IS magic, even if what it produces should happen to be unsatisfying to some ultimate enjoyer down the road. That clicking, that chemistry…it isn’t something that at the present moment we have the skills to investigate. Heck, we haven’t even figured out how to tackle questions like “what is music?”…and surely collaboration is a music of a kind? Just the other day there was a big pop-science program on PBS that was all about that question — what is music? — and even though it contained a lot of information that had me saying out loud to the living room “why, I don’t believe it, but…that’s actually true!“, it also was encumbered with a certain lack of direction, an experimental bias gone weak and rotten and subliminal…it was real “yesterday’s-paradigm” stuff, a lot of it, posing poor questions and therefore arriving at pointless crossroad-answers, much like an old “In Search Of” episode.

“Could these randomly-scattered stones once have been a landing strip for aliens who were mistaken for gods by the children of the survivors of the lost city of Atlantis?”

In many ways, that’s actually a better question than “what is music?”, if only because it’s more upfront about the basic flaw both those questions share. Because, we are not trying to set out on a re-enactment of The Blind Men And The Elephant here, are we? And yet just tossing neuroscientists, physicists, musicians, and child development psychologists into a room together is the very best way to do that. What is music? Well, one thing it is, is a question you’re not going to answer by surveying only ten, or twenty, or a hundred researchers from different fields. Because it’s a big mystery, is what it is — the kind that gets into everything.

So you can’t just “solve” it, or “find it out”; that’s a pipe dream. It’s not going to answer the bell of any one theoretical approach, not even any one set of theoretical approaches. Because it isn’t a matter of hitting on the right theoretical approach…!

…But rather it’s a bit more useful for testing whether any given theoretical approach is being both consistent, and honest. Like: if you hear someone say music is “hardwired” into human beings, better you should flick the channel on over to Jerry Springer — if honest investigation is what you’re looking for. Because that’s a metaphor, that “hardwired”, and it’s a pretty old and rusty one too; that’s an unexamined bias right there. That’s the computer model of cognition, and it’s no good for most things, in fact I do believe by the late Nineties it was wandering around with a tin can begging for gas. And you won’t get to music through that. Because music actually exists. Hey, I’m just here to let you know about it, so don’t shoot the messenger! As I said, there were many interesting things going on in that program; it was just that they didn’t add up to anything…

…Because obviously, they weren’t supposed to. What the world of science has to say about music just goes on and on and on, you see: it really does. You’d be surprised. So, are we going to get a show on the Discovery Channel or whatever that aspires to anything even so great as repeating the most interesting things science has to say about music? If we hit ten or twenty percent in that regard, we’ll be lucky…because these programs pull double-duty most of the time, in that they are made not just to examine their main topic, but also to provide the viewer with a primer for the various disciplines they sample. Which is why a lot of them are just flat-out shitty; which is why you should beware shows about Quantum Field Theory or string theory, or indeed anything with Stephen Hawking in it. I mean, Stephen Hawking, he’s a great physicist, but PBS isn’t where he does his work, you know? It’s just where he exercises his influence. Which is not a bad thing, necessarily; but it is a particular thing, and it’s good to bear that in mind. Because physicists are like comics fans, you see, they’ve always got some enthusiasm of their own that they’re trying to sell you…

…So if the buyer has to beware of such simplistic material as quantum mechanics’ mutant offspring, how much more should he beware when it comes to such stern stuff as music? And if music’s hard to explain (as hard as humour, we must think!), what happens between inspired artistic collaborators must be harder still, so, no…I don’t know how they do it.

But they do it; and in the fact of the doing are probably some things we can recognize about their strengths and weaknesses, even if we don’t know the how of it. For example: Moore’s best ideas, I’ll hazard the guess, are the ones he gives to his artistic partners to improve upon…so good at the flourish that empties the rabbit from the hat, nevertheless he needs a rabbit and a hat to get him there, and a stage, and a wand, and a tuxedo, and a theatre…so he sketches out what he figures they’d all have to look like, and he passes it over. And:

“What is all this, Alan? Where are you going with it?”

“Oh, it’s gonna be great…! See, it goes like this and this, draws on this, mentions that, then out of nowhere BANG! It all comes together in a great big understanding…!“

The artist thinks for a minute, hand on chin; sees that Moore has concocted the most wonderful version of a Campbell’s Soup recipe imaginable, with the freshest and most exotic ingredients — meat from the flesh of the horses that pull the chariot of the Sun, stewed with the stalks that stood mute when Horus was got on Isis by her dead husband; seasoned with peppers harvested from the Underworld, from under the very noses of the dead, DON’T LOOK BACK! — but that it’s still, basically, when you get right down to it, just Campbell’s Soup. And therefore it won’t work: it isn’t going to be as good as it needs to be. So all the fine ingredients, and the trouble it took to get them and slice them and dice them, will have been wasted…

Unless…

The artist retires to his studio, searching for what isn’t there, but what must be there. Pounds away at aether with the mortar and the pestle for a time, and then triumphantly delivers what is probably the ONLY way it can all work, in the only dish it can be served in…and then it’s Moore’s turn to pause, and put his hand on his chin: “All right, that’s brilliant,” he rumbles finally, head all a-nodding. “So, new plan…

“…The hat comes out of the rabbit.“

And then they’re off to the races, somehow, bags of mixed metaphors in hand!

Rushing towards the finish line!

Don’t ask me how. But Alan Moore is an exceptionally playful writer, so I don’t think it’d be too crazy to suggest he needs someone to play with, in order to get a real game going…so, I humbly theorize, he makes it the most interesting game for them that he can.

But, it’s a particular kind of game. Grant Morrison’s playful too, but his kind of game’s a bit different. And here’s where the Devo comes in: because Grant’s not really that interested in what you, the average comic-book reader, are interested in. Alan Moore is interested in what you’re interested in, as it happens! But Alan’s pre-punk and Grant’s post-punk: Alan’s great at hitting the beats, even Gene Krupa-style, but Grant wants to mix ‘em all up on the turntable. It’s sort of similar to Devo, maybe…they were just not interested in doing the things everybody else was doing, so if you wanted to like Devo you had to go along with Devo, you had to catch them on the hop. You had to be into it. This is (obviously) a bit of Venture Bros. too, or even Farscape: what you want to see is not what you’re going to see, because the episode stops once the stuff that matters gets done with. And yet it isn’t just a joke, it’s serious stuff too: it isn’t only funny, and although it doesn’t stoop to anything like continuity it’s got plenty of, ah, subsequence to it. Dean and Hank die all the time, and there’s how this thing all goes down in a nutshell: subsequence is only important for what it gets used for, and it’s all very decently controlled, sublimated to what matters, like a clock designed for the primary purpose of stopping on time. Watch Arrested Development, and you’ll see much the same principle in play: it doesn’t really care about the stuff it’s supposed to care about. It’s over that already: “next time on Arrested Development” never comes, nor does it need to — because even though it still does matter, that stop-and-start and never-seen business also cuts another way, by telling you what kind of show you’re watching…

Which is great!

Provided, that is, that you’re into it.

And just about everything Grant Morrison writes is just like this: you get whiplash from the scene-changing, the beats are buried beneath the bass, it’s all interested in different stuff, and as Grant says there are lots of gaps left for the reader to tumble into and fill. Moore doesn’t operate this way: he controls everything with astounding precision, and you never fall into a hole he hasn’t carefully pre-dug for you. In fact mostly you don’t even know you’re falling ’til you’ve landed, so carefully does he load each panel, each page, each line of dialogue with meaning fated not to become apparent ’til the whole thing crashes together, in perfect ass-tumbling choreography. But Morrison’s much happier to let his freak flag fly, and let almighty Chaos reign over all, improvisationally; in Morrison’s books, you’re always falling, and you know it the whole time…except you’re really not, and never really did know. In Moore’s oeuvre, simple things are always more complex than they seem at first glance: so when you finally realize what’s really going on, you’re stunned. But with Morrison, the complexities are just what he uses as building blocks for the familiar. See? he says. You can make this stuff out of anything, anything at all, and it still works! Moore shows you what can really be done with this wonderful toolbox in terms of construction, if you’re really working it as hard as you can. You can build cathedrals with it. But Morrison demonstrates precisely the reverse: that you can use any old toolbox, or a combination of a whole bunch of different toolboxes, to build what anyone would call a house.

You can use bazookas to build it.

Or even cans of Campbell’s soup.

Well, but having said all that…it’s really much the same thing they’re doing, so these grand pronouncements of mine are a little bit fatuous, inevitably. These two gentlemen write comics, that’s all, and comics is a big tent. None of that is really my point, because my point’s about the nature of collaboration. Morrison, the chaoticist, needs different things from his collaborators than Moore needs from his, to the extent that his methods are different. Lots of holes! Holes everywhere! Gaps between instigation and conclusion! This is pretty much key, as Morrison pursues a level of allusiveness comparable to Moore’s, but the allusions are all pitched outward into new conclusions, rather than focussed to the centre of the matter of meaning as they are in Moore’s marvellously revelatory dissections. And, is it useful to suppose this, for the sake of the argument? Hmm, maybe…of course we’re leaving every other comics writer out of this discussion, and that doesn’t make much sense. After all, everybody has aims and concentrations! Everyone collaborates!

But Morrison’s collaborations seem rather erratic, don’t they?

When they work, boy do they work. Morrison and Quitely, as everyone knows, are practically mirrors for one another — one is tempted to say that they share a common methodology, that’s how crazy the pairing is. Quitely embeds much and explains little in the same way Morrison does, leaving lots of room for the reader to muck about with re-readings and find unexpected keys. Of course Morrison also leaves room for Quitely, and that’s important too…

But Quitely didn’t draw Seaguy, so why are we talking about him?

Oh yes…

…Because we’re on our way to Cameron Stewart. Start with Quitely’s remarkable simpatico with Morrison: I don’t think anyone would deny its existence, even if science can’t explain what makes good artistic collaborations. But even among artistic collaborations, it seems like a one-off lightning-flash…

…Until you get to Cameron Stewart.

Morrison’s actually been easily as lucky as Moore in his most impressive collaborations — and there have been a lot of enormously impressive ones! — but unlike Moore there seems to be something in his collaborations, some thread of collapse, that sometimes makes them go wrong. I don’t know what it is, and I bet he doesn’t even know what it is. Maybe Moore knows. Maybe the answer is to get out of the superhero rat race, even though that’s where a lot of awfully good artists are working.

But here’s my theory.

Grant Morrison was born to be a subversive comics writer, in the style of all the old guys who did this for no money back in the old days, and grew up irrepressible. Well, this is what superhero comics are supposed to be: slightly subversive, lessons from kids who haven’t grown up, to kids who are yet to grow up. Anarchic fun, a feeling of “you could do this”: somewhere out there is a kid tracing Seaguy’s expression looking into the aquarium, somewhere out there is a kid tracing (the fucking hilarious!) “Maxim tie-rack” El Monstro — God how I laughed when I turned that page, and God how I’d like to send the kid money for proper pencils, who’s tracing it now! But the point is: every time there’s a Grant Morrison comic, it’s sending that EC message to kids somewhere…

And yet…

…To make it all work, it’s got to be fabulously modern, as modern as Kirby and Sinnott.  Well after all that’s the point:  because Morrisson’s work is a work of its time, and it has to look like its time.  And that’s what makes it so incredibly delicate;  that’s what makes it so special.

He’s been lucky.  Even Howard Porter made Kyle Rayner look like a guilty, sweating kid — you knew hw whipped up ring-replicas of Wonder Woman and Power Girl in his spare time, that just teased the edge of what could be printed in a mianstream comic.  Hell, well God knows what would’ve happened if they gave the ring to R. Crumb, eh?  BAD SHIT…

…But I digress.

Or…

Actually they should’ve given it to Crumb.  Can you imagine a Vimanarama drawn by Crumb?

Or Shelton?

But then that was the point:  you don’t honestly think Philip Bond wasn’t influenced by Crumb, do you?

And neither was our good friend Mr. Stewart uninfluenced by our other good friend Mr. Quitely. is all I’m saying.

I mean, for heaven’s sake…just look at those Disneyesque paving-stones in Seaguy 2 #1, eh?  It means as much as anything seen in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude…it’s every bit as solid and awful.  Detail, people.  It’s all about the detail.  And lack thereof:  our pal Cam leaves every bit as much to the imagination as Quite Frankly does, and maybe even more:  the fish float in Seaguy’s aquarium.  His wife’s belly swells and bursts in the land out of which Arthur once brought the Cauldron of the Underworld, the land where the Neutral Angels once deposited the soiled Grail.

Let’s think seriously, folks, about what Grant Morrison’s scripts involve.

He isn’t Alan Moore.

But maybe he has a lot in common with him.  Moore’s scrripts get tossed by his collaborators.  Maybe Morrison’s do too?

Except he plans for them to get tossed.  Morrison’s scripts aren’t two hundred pages describing the Atom’s face;  they’re probably two lines describing it.  “The Atom looks down on the microsphere he’s approaching — an unnameable expression comes over his face.”  HTT.  The artist doesn’t know any more than we do, I bet.

Both Moore and Morrison get the best out of their artists.

It’s just that Morrison’s more meta about it.

Moore locks his artists down.

Morrison lets them swirl around.

And if you ask me:  outside The Invisibles, when he does, his work suffers for it.

But do we blame him for it?

Hey:  to date…only on The Invisibles do we blame him for it.

But whenever somebody like Cam Stewart’s on his side, there’s nothing whatever to blame.

Holy Christ, did you see his work on Seaguy 2?

Guy’s a genius.

And I can’t remember where I was going with this all.  Can’t remember what my complaint was.

Bloggers, help me fill it in.  ‘Cause I can’t get me no.