There really are quite a few things that I’d like to write about at length for the blog right about now, most notably rebuttals to Johnny Bacardi’s pan of Velvet Goldmine and faint-praise damning of David Bowie’s “Heroes” (which actually compared it unfavorably to, get this, Lodger!) I’m not sure if I have either of these things in me these days, but we’ll see. I’ve got a lot on my professional plate. Ah, the travails of writerdom.
Anyway, yeah, Johnny reviewed “Heroes” in his latest record round-up, which also includes interesting thoughts on post-glam smart-pop duo Sparks, the Rolling Stones’ ill-fated flirtation with psychedelia, the conflict between punk and prog, and more. Johnny–like Bill Sherman, Kevin Parrott and many other pop-obscurist bloggers–is a goddamn great writer, and it’s criminal that there’s no market for this kind of writing in American music magazines. Actually, that’s not entirely true–Maxim’s Blender is actually really good: smart, entertaining and thorough while never resorting to the snarkiness that passes for criticism at Spin or the Joy of Stoopid faux iconoclasm that’s the stock in trade of today’s Rolling Stone (a magazine that placed Jack White at #13 in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time–30 or 40 places ahead of Pete Townshend and Frank Zappa!).
Courtesy of Johnny comes a link to this bizarre take on David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks by communist pop aficianado Antipopper. He’s a good writer, too, but his almost physical aversion to the concept of “good vs. evil” as depicted in Lynch’s series is as good an indicator as any as why I’ve always found the socialist left completely idiotic, even before recent events made me into the bloodthirsty killblogger you know and love. (That, and the fact that they seem to see the hammer-and-sickle as sexy, and not as, you know, the symbol of the deaths of tens of millions of people in gulags and execution chambers. Their hearts were in the right place, I suppose.)
John Jakala joins in the “Get a Blog, Shawn Fumo” chorus. Everybody sing!
John also has some fun at the expense of some goofy upcoming covers from DC. Particularly entertaining is the way he spots Courtney Cox Arquette in Wonder Woman drag (believe me, this is vastly preferrable to the Joanie Laurer version that Adam Huges did for Wizard way back when–accompanied by Meg Ryan as Supergirl, for the love of Jesus!) and points out that there’s a bunch of characters on the cover of an upcoming Superman/Batman who are complete mysteries even to fanboys.
(A propos of this, can someone please kill off the entire Batman family? All right–I understand the need for Jim Gordon and Alfred, probably Robin, maybe Catwoman, maaaaaaybe Nightwing at the outside, but isn’t Batman supposed to be an intense, driven, secretive loaner? Instead he’s got this P. Diddy-sized posse of Alfred, Robin, Catwoman, Nightwing, Oracle, Huntress, Batgirl, Azrael, Spoiler, Thalia, Commissioner Gordon and the entire Gotham City Police Department, Superman, and Harold the mute hunchback car mechanic, plus the forty million villains who’ve figured out his secret identity, like Ra’s al Ghul, Bane, Hugo Strange, and God knows who else. The writer who gathers all these pointless characters on an island somewhere and then has the Joker blow it to non-Mark-Waid Kingdom Come will be doing Batman a bigger favor than anyone since Frank Miller.)
David Fiore finds some gems in old Marvel letterpages, including a view of Dr. Strange as antinomian rebel. NeilAlien, take note!
David also reponds to my question as to why he will never read Fight Club. I see where he’s coming from, but I think Chuck Palahniuk has gotten an incredibly bad rap as the poster boy for Battle of Seattle black-blockers when his work is about a million times smarter and more involving. (Choke, for example, is a masterpiece; and all his books portray the need for familial connections in a completely unexpected and moving way.)
ADD nails DC’s stillborn attempt at doing for Superman what Marvel did for the X-Men, Hulk and Spider-Man, and what DC itself has kinda sorta -it-or-Sienkiewicz-draws-it done for Batman. On the other hand, much to my own surprise, I’ve been buying and enjoying Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman, and I’d imagine Azzarello’s Superbook will be entertaining, too.
Radically shifting gears, Andrew Sullivan demolishes Wesley Clark’s tough-guy commander credentials. I’ve been saying to people for some time now that anyone familiar with how the Kosovo campaign actually went down should know that Clark is pretty much a joke. (To be fair, Clark’s hands were tied in Kosovo by everyone from the Clinton administration to the foot-dragging NATO allies–but this is now the campaign he’s holding up as an example as to how these things are done! Good Lord.)
Shifting back, Bill Sherman offers his take on the now-completed Grant Morrison maxiseries The Filth. I too thought this book had a heart that many of Morrison’s gonzo gross-out underbelly-touring UK compatriots would kill to achieve. The last caption of the series was tremendously moving, even haunting, to me–this despite the fact that I’m still not 100% sure what the hell happened in that last issue. I’m extremely glad that I stuck around through the duration of this series, which was the most radical thing DC has done (and, unsurprisingly, also the best) since The Dark Knight Strikes Again.
Newsarama brings us a look at Mike Ploog’s art for the upcoming fantasy series Abadazad. I guess it’s silly of me to be surprised that it’s so straightforward compared to the only other Ploog stuff I’ve seen, his extravagantly sloppy pseudo-psychedelia for Ghost Rider from the 70s, but surprised I was. It still looks lovely, though the book is seeming more and more like the Clive-Barker’s-Abarat clone I pegged it as a few months back.
Finally, at long last Dirk Deppey snaps and goes absolutely MOAB on the Direct Market. Read this essay–it’s a thing of angry beauty, like Helena Bonham-Carter at the end of Fight Club. Dirk asserts that the Direct Market has proven, through its complete inability to adopt even the most common-sense changes in its business model, that its complete collapse is inevitable. Frankly, I’m pretty sure Dirk is right, which is a big reason why I’ve been humping the book-like manga format as much as I have. Thin though they might be, there’s no room for floppy pamphlets on the bookshelves of Barnes & Noble, and within ten years at the outside that’s where you’re gonna have to go to buy comics….