* What’s the most depressing thing about my most likely not being able to make this weekend’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival? Mat Fucking Brinkman’s gonna be there, that’s what. And thus the Brinkman Bowie is lost to the ages.
* Today on Robot 6: When faced with a Reed/Lucasfilm alliance, Gareb Shamus turns the ship around; and I had a little convo with my pal Jim Gibbons, Dark Horse’s new PR guy.
* I feel like I’ve linked to these before, but really, is there ever a bad time to direct my readers to Aeron Alfrey’s drawings of creatures from Stephen King’s The Mist?
* I greatly enjoyed Rob Humanick’s heavily illustrated Best Films of the Decade list. That’s a gutsy Top 10 right there, man.
* As the years pass it’s difficult to remember just how noxious Britney Spears first seemed to music fans like me. Well, that’s not quite true–from the very first time I heard and saw the video for “Baby One More Time” I knew there was no arguing with its monstrous greatness. But as the Jesus Christ to the Spice Girls’ John the Baptist she represented the triumph of pop over all the music I really cared about, and it stunk. But today I can read something like Rich Juzwiak’s review of all her singles and B-sides and think “hey, that’s a pretty respectable body of work.” I mean, plenty of junk, but plenty of songs I enjoy hearing too. I never thought I’d comfortably say that but a lot has changed since 1998.
* GOD how I loved MUSCLE figures. Thank you, Topless Robot, for reminding me.
* Here are some truly, deeply horrifying stats on Americans’ support for torture, which is now at levels unheard of even in places like Iran. This is true: When your country has two major political parties and one of them has adopted support for torture as a plank, bad things happen.
* If you spend much time on the industry side of comics, you can probably understand the applicability of the Tiger Woods story–the real story, which is that Tiger’s real story was apparently known to but not covered by the sports journalism world for years. Which in some ways is as it should be, because I don’t think we need to go around panty-sniffing. But on the other hand, when a public figure who is also a major industry presents himself as one thing and the people whose job it is to cover that person know him to be something different…well, you wonder who else knows what else and isn’t telling. (Via Atrios.)
It was nice to see Mulholland Dr. rather high up on that list. It was not nice to see Miami Vice even higher.
That is a pretty gutsy list. Lots to chew on – like he said, though, it’s a list of the movies he can’t live without; no argument is made that it’s objective in any way.
That said, I’m glad to see A.I. getting some love on these lists going around – that movie moved me to tears a couple of times, but I remember there be such downright contempt for it on its release.
No way I can get behind Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull though. That movie raked me in the face with its fingernails of boring.
Re: Tiger – that happens with politicians, too, where it’s worse because the threat of a known story “going public” is bound to affect backroom dealmaking in all sorts of ways.