* I expect to get my computer back from the shop this evening, so that’s good news.

* My pal Kiel Phegley has a bunch of stuff up right now that’s worth your time: a two-part Ed Brubaker interview on Captain America and a collection of the best quotes from his year-long Q&A series at Marvel.com.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Hellen Jo’s fun Jin & Jam #1.

* “Now in Stock: Luba by Gilbert Hernandez.” The seven most beautiful words in the English language?

* Robert Rodriguez is “officially” making a new Predator movie called Predators, and now I can’t find the link but supposedly he’s also “officially” making a feature-length version of his Machete trailer from Sin City 2. Given Rodriguez’s recent track record (Sin City 2, Barbarella, Red Sonja, the long-gestating Machete) I’ll believe all of this when I see it.

* Yucky Tuna is a tumblr that’s a fun NSFW way to spend some spare time.

My favorite song ever?

Normally I don’t like to be disarmed by musicians but she’s pretty damn disarming in this song, which she uses to her advantage to say some weird things and sing them weirdly.

I’m really happy for Elbow’s success and don’t begrudge them for it one bit, especially since they’re really awfully good at the uplift for which they have rightly won renown, but I do wish they’d kept sinister in their repertoire. They were really awfully good at that too.

I’ve never understood why we were to believe the audience would stand stock-still for this song.

Something about the way the groove, the lyrics, and Zombie’s voice interact in this particular song has always hooked me. It’s confident, sexy, and a bit unpleasant at the same time. The way he says “living dead girl” is halfway between sneering condescension and mortal terror.

* I interviewed The Stand: American Nightmares artist Mike Perkins about the Stephen King adaptation’s upcoming all-Larry-in-the-Lincoln-Tunnel issue for Marvel.com. This is maybe my favorite Stand thing I’ve done, as it presented me with the opportunity to talk to Perkins about various horror-comic issues I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I hope you enjoy it.

* It had been a while since I read Cameron Crowe’s 1976 Playboy interview with Thin White Duke-era David Bowie, and I’d kind of glossed over just how amazing and hilarious it is. Seriously, it may be the best interview ever given by anyone ever. From homosexuality to Hitler, Mick Jagger to Elton John, the whole thing is one giant pullquote. It makes Grant Morrison sound like Billy Bob Thornton. I beg you to read it. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Speaking of Bowie, Matthew Perpetua did a great little piece for New York on why it’s tough to love Lady Gaga. Unsurprisingly, I’ve given a lot of thought to Lady Gaga, and my take is basically the same as Matthew’s: She’s admirable, but the music’s not there. In many ways she’s comparable to Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, sans Bowie’s already extensive artistic past at that point (but complete with affinity for lightning-bolt face paint): a self-consciously arty weirdo trying to be subversive but also, equally importantly, determined to make giant hit records for the kids. Which is great! But the difference is, if you played “Hang On to Yourself” or “Moonage Daydream” to a theoretical me who didn’t know who recorded them and told me it was the Bay City Rollers, I’d still be interested, whereas if you took a Lady Gaga song and told me it was by Britney Spears, i’d get about halfway through and then be like “Okay, that’s enough.” I mean, they’re fine, but it’s her that makes them interesting, not the music itself.

* David Cronenberg on horror at MTV News. Covered: remaking his own movies, torture porn, Blair Witch, Scream. Via Jason Adams, who reposts some highlights.

* Here’s a semi-interesting interview with Lost masterminds Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, tackling 10 popular questions from the readers of Variety. Nothing you haven’t heard before, for the most part; what stuck out most for me is their continuing regret that they couldn’t do more with Mr. Eko due to the actor’s desire to leave the show after one season. (Via The House Next Door.)

* ADDTF blogfather Bill Sherman reviews The Monster Squad. They don’t make ’em like that anymore, man.

* So maybe Sin City 2 isn’t sticking with the Weinsteins? Who the fuck knows. I can’t imagine years of will they or won’t they regarding the making of the sequel augur well for its future regardless. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Letterer Todd Klein’s posts on designing the Amalgam Comics logos strike me as pornography for a certain subset of my friends. There are more posts to come in the series, too! (Via Robot 6.)

* For a connection so obvious, this is underused, so I’m glad someone else made it, and even gladder they made it on a badass T-shirt. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Carnival of Horrifying Torture Revelations: Between the release of the CIA/OLC memos and the Senate Armed Service Committe’s report (conclusions here), we’ve learned that Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney and other all-the-way-to-the-top Bush Administration officials personally approved torture. We’ve learned that the United States implemented, as policy, torture techniques reverse-engineered from the program used by the military to train soldiers how to handle being tortured, techniques that were in turn derived from the torture techniques used by the Communist Chinese on American prisoners during the Korean War for the express purpose of eliciting false confessions. With that in mind, perhaps, we learned that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged torture specifically to produce “evidence” of links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. We learned that spiders were another phobia American torturers were encouraged to exploit Room 101-style. We learned that a galaxy of conservative stars openly applaud the use of torture and/or deny its existence, sometimes simultaneously and/or accidentally. I would like to apologize, once again, to everyone who read this blog from 2001-2004.

* Finally, let’s end on an up note: gorgeousness

and

gorgeosity.

From I guess Music for the Masses onward, the message of Depeche Mode’s music is that sex is the only thing cool enough to temporarily disrupt depression. That’s kind of an adolescent approach to these subjects, but also a mightily entertaining one.

* In this single episode alone, Serena got together with a guy, broke up with him, pretended to go out with another guy, “broke up” with him, got back together with the first guy, and got betrayed by him. In one episode! Similarly, Blair agreed to try to dupe Nate, decided against it, got snitched on, got dumped, and got back together with him. I don’t think Lost‘s entire five-season Jack-Kate-Juliet love triangle was this eventful.

* Speaking of Lost, the whole unnecessary-secret-keeping thing was taken to ridiculous new heights during that seder scene. I definitely felt Wallace Shawn’s frustration. Dan lied to his dad about working as a seder cater waiter (LOL), Lily lied to Rufus about why she brought him along, Serena lied to her mom about getting married, Serena lied to whatsisname about Dan being her boyfriend, Serena lied to Blair’s mom about why she was there…did I miss anything? And other than Serena not wanting to tell her mom about getting married, did any of it make sense? Less of that kind of ridiculousness, please.

* Wow, I did not expect them to address Chuck’s sexual assault on Jenny ever again. I really did believe it was akin to Batman shooting criminals to death in his early adventures, something that happened before the writers really had a handle on the character, which they’d chalk up to experience and simply move past. (Following that little righting-the-scales gag in season one where Jenny stranded Chuck on the roof in his underwear. Well, that takes care of that!) Bringing it up again is a very tricky thing. Obviously they still have to gloss over the severity of what occurred, and just how upset one would expect Jenny and her friends and family to rightfully still be, or the show wouldn’t work anymore. But nor can they make it some horrifying Rihanna/Chris Brown situation. What they seem to be doing is using it to help establish just how emotionally isolated Chuck is under his billionaire playboy exterior, which actually is kind of an interesting thing to do with a post-Blair Chuck, certainly more interesting than the My First Eyes Wide Shut storyline was. Now, is it just me, or did I detect some groundwork being laid for a Chuck/Jenny romance, though? Is that possible? Is Gossip Girl on some Comedian/Silk Spectre shit?

* I still feel like the show is pretty clumsy at introducing new viable non-Wallace Shawn characters. This clown Serena banged in Spain doesn’t seem to have much to offer personality-wise, and no, making him some kind of double-agent for Poppy, who is also underdeveloped, doesn’t help. Meanwhile Nate’s cousin still seems destined to disappear. I guess maybe they’ll try to do something with Jenny’s Monopoly buddy and his sister? I don’t understand why they don’t just make Eric a full-fledged cast member and build some more stories around him for crying out loud. (Admittedly I want to see some all-male make-outs on this show.)

* And hey, I didn’t realize until I wrote that last paragraph that Vanessa wasn’t even in this episode. She wasn’t missed!

* This was actually an oddly heartwarming episode of Gossip Girl, when you think about it. Serena made up with her mom. Serena made up with Gideon(?) (even if he’s a fink and a phony). Blair rejected Nate’s grandfather’s scheme. Nate seemed to have made up with his grandfather, at least a little. Blair made up with Nate. Nate made up with Chuck. (If only Nate made out with Chuck.) Blair and Serena snuggled. (See previous note.) Chuck apologized to Jenny. Rufus ended up in a pretty good place. Dorota is apparently in love (and royalty). Not even a bible-thumping Michelle Trachtenberg can take this moment away from us, friends.

I would like Adam Lambert to perform Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” during this year’s American Idol finals.

Press Release from Buenaventura Press:

The Comics Revival!

Despite the ‘industry trend’ of cancelling comic books to focus on graphic novels, Buenaventura Press boldly plans to release half a dozen actual comics over the coming year. We love the serial format that gave us masterpieces such as Eightball, Frank, Acme Novelty Library, Optic Nerve, Yummy Fur, Zap, Dirty Plotte, Palookaville, and Love & Rockets–and we want to keep alive the stapled marvel that is the comic book.

As part of this mission, Buenaventura Press is excited to announce the first in a new series: The BP Comics Revival Economic Stimulus 3-Pak! This Diamond exclusive is a throw-back to the ol’ drugstore shrink-wrapped 3-packs, but with all new comics. Offered in the June 2009 Previews at $11.95, the first Pak includes two new series–Aviatrix #1 by Eric Haven and I Want You #1 by Lisa Hanawalt–plus the return of Ted May’s Injury, with the brand new issue #3.

Working with Diamond’s Jenny Christopher, a staunch supporter of independent comics and new cartoonists, we are offering the Economic Stimulus 3-Pak at a discount price. Diamond’s distribution system allows us to maintain significant print runs that keep the price affordable. The comics will also be available individually at the BP webshop, Last Gasp, and select retailers. Issues will be priced at $4.95 each, making the 3-Pak a 3 dollar savings!

Stay tuned to Buenaventurapress.com for information on forthcoming comics, such as Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club #3, and more news from The Comics Revival!

* Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken, who I like to think is the Topless Robot, notes two momentous releases today. First up is the DVD premiere of Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel pilot/movie. I’m obviously going to watch this and am looking forward to doing so, though I may hold off on purchasing it until they release a complete first season DVD set, given how they previously duped me into double-dipping on the original BSG miniseries and Razor and will likely attempt to do so again with The Plan.

* Next up is the RiffTrax for Twilight, the latest film to be mocked by the MST3K crew of Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett. The Missus is a major, though self-aware, Twilight fan–I believe the preferred term for such people is “Twatlighter,” to give you some idea of how they view themselves. And she’s also a big big fan of RiffTrax–we listened to the Road House RiffTrax for like the fourth time this weekend and did The Two Towers the weekend before that. So we’ve been looking forward to this from the moment the DVD was announced and we realized a RiffTrax was virtually guaranteed. It should be a hoot.

* Also from Topless Robot, The 12 Coolest Masters of the Universe Action Features. Holy smokes I remember these all so vividly. What’s great about the list is that it doesn’t just stop at “Hey, remember Ram-Man? He was awesome, right?”–it actually unpacks each feature it discusses in terms of how and why it clicked with kids.

* Frank Miller’s The Spirit: the movie so nice Jog reviewed it twice! Also, Mike Sterling liked it, and given Jog’s distaste for the likes of 300, Sin City, and Watchmen, all of which I enjoyed a great deal and to all of which he favorably compares The Spirit even if he can’t quite bring himself to say the latter is actually good, this is very much starting to sound like the sort of thing I’ll like a lot. And every time I catch myself kicking myself for buying the hype and not making a point of seeing this in the theater, I remind myself that I didn’t buy the hype and did make a point of seeing it in the theater, but the projection was so shitty that I left and demanded a refund, and by the time my next chance to see it rolled around the movie had disappeared.

* Tom Spurgeon on superhero-sexism cheesecake kerfuffles:

I can’t get too worked up about it, because these kinds of efforts from these kinds of companies don’t really mean as much as people who have burrowed into that world tend to think.

Brian K. Vaughan had a great line about doing Y: The Last Man because he thought there was a more productive way to address feminism in comics than debating the size of Catwoman’s tits.

* Also via Spurge, the sad life and lovely art of Anne Cleveland.

* Over at the Partyka site, Matt Wiegle is drawing Ghostbusters, while special guest star Joey Weiser is drawing kaiju, and lots of ’em. That’s Mothra (as Snoopy) below–click the link for Godzilla, Ghidorah, Gamera, King Kong and more.

* Jaime Hernandez promo art for Wendy & Lisa? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Monster Brains highlights models and art from a deleted stop-motion animation sequence in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. Much more at Revelations. Sigh. What that movie could have been! Still pretty great as-is, though.

* Finally, my friend Matthew Perpetua, The Man Who Murdered the Music Industry, is offering T-shirts for sale to fund Fluxblog and his various other enterprises, and as a veteran T-shirt buyer I can tell you they’re priced to sell. Won’t you please purchase one?

I’d been thinking a bit about Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation (original review here) over the past week in a very particular way, and a chance to see the movie again last night with a friend who hadn’t seen it at all yet sort of reinforced what I was thinking.

Basically, take The Godfather–not as an adaptation, because I don’t think Mario Puzo’s novel was nearly as highly regarded in its field as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen was in comics, but as a gangster movie. My understanding from reading about Francis Ford Coppola’s film (and the last time I did that was years ago, so my memory could be fuzzy) is that prior to its release, gangster pictures were considered strictly b-movie territory. But nowadays, you’d be very, very hard pressed to find someone who’d say something like “Well, The Godfather Part II was pretty good for a gangster movie” or “as far as mafia stuff goes, The Sopranos was great.” Thanks to the first Godfather film, great art about mobsters–from Coppola, Scorsese, Chase, whoever–kind of gets considered as “great art” first and “about mobsters” second.

Longtime readers of this blog know what a skeptic I am regarding the notion of “transcending the genre,” but in this kind of case I can understand the utility of the term. The idea isn’t that The Godfather transcended the limitations of the the gangster genre–it’s obviously just as much of a gangster picture as anything, and it doesn’t make sense to claim the genre is limited if a movie like this can be constructed out of its component parts, since then you’re pretty much saying a genre movie can’t be a great movie without no longer being a genre movie. The idea is that The Godfather transcended the appeal of the gangster genre, for want of a better word. You don’t need to be someone who just loves him some tommy-gun-toting greaseball action to really get a whole hell of a lot out of The Godfather; if you’re a critic, the presence of tommy-gun-toting greaseballs won’t put you off the film, most likely.*

In that light, it seems safe to say that Moore & Gibbons’s Watchmen was the Godfather of superhero comics. It also seem safe to say that Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was NOT the Godfather of superhero movies. I think many fans and critics expected or hoped it would be, I think Zack Snyder may have thought it was, but it wasn’t. It was more like, I don’t know, The Warriors, or maybe Tim Burton’s Batman–a zesty, creative, exciting, violent, funny, sometimes lovely, and deeply, deeply weird genre movie. Its pleasures are really firmly rooted in the pleasures of genre movies. As much as it monkeyed with the usual superhero-movie tropes, as much as I think it put a lot of things on screen that no one had seen in a superhero movie before, I don’t think it transcended the traditional appeal of the superhero movie so much as it pushed the existing appeal of superhero movies in a bizarre direction that people who appreciate the bizarre could appreciate.

Now, I really enjoy stuff like The Warriors and Batman. Off-kilter genre pictures are my bread and butter. That’s why when I watch and think about the movie I don’t dwell on Snyder’s overall stylistic and tonal differences from the comic–as Tom Spurgeon has said, Peter Jackson made the boy’s-adventure version of The Lord of the Rings, and Zack Snyder made the weirdo-edgy-action version of Watchmen, and that’s fine with me. Instead, what bugs me are the “unforced errors,” simple changes that add nothing and detract from what could have been (and often what was, in the comic). Stuff like turning Ozymandias from a chiseled, beatific all-American captain of industry into a hawk-faced, preening gay Nazi; having Dan and Laurie do so much lethal damage to their would-be muggers that Rorschach’s sui generis status as the ultraviolent vigilante is lost in the shuffle; cutting the flashback where Laurie angrily confronts the Comedian after reading Hollis Mason’s book, so that her devastation upon realizing he’s her father would have more impact; not having a reaction shot of Doctor Manhattan’s face when he has his eureka moment regarding the miracle of human life; not casting better actors for Laurie or the child killer who Rorschach murders; cutting some of my favorite lines (“Somebody EXPLAIN it to me”); and so on. Of course, a lot of movies I like a lot are lousy with flubs of that magnitude, and that doesn’t stop me from liking them a lot any more than I like this one a lot. As I said, I’m pretty much fine and dandy dandy and fine with a Watchmen movie that’s more like, uh, Aliens than 2001, even if the source material could have brought you in a 2001 direction had the filmmakers so chosen and been so able.

As I’ve mused before, would it have been interesting to see Watchmen in the hands of a realist rather than a stylist, someone who could have muted the material’s more outre aspects instead of heightening them, someone who could have crafted the Godfather of superhero movies? Absolutely, though I think in that case it would work better as a 12-part HBO miniseries, say, than a feature film. A lot of the lurid melodrama, groany puns, and other stuff that people decried in the movie is right there in the comic, and I think that if you’re going to diffuse that you need time to let dialogue and performance breathe in lieu of that overheated directness, more time than even a really long feature would give you. I think we can all fantasize about David Simon’s Watchmen, just like I know Tolkien fans who fantasize about a lengthy, serious BBC adaptation of The Lord of the Rings regardless of whether or not they liked Peter Jackson’s blockbuster version. (Which, now that I think about it, straddled that line between transcending its genre label so that people who’d never give elves the time of day get a lot out of it and making a just-plain bugfuck adventure/horror/war genre movie with trolls and ents and whatnot about as well as anything has done.) But I’m perfectly happy with what we got.

* To use a more recent and perhaps even more directly applicable example in terms of its place under the fantastic-fiction umbrella, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the Godfather of post-apocalyptic fiction. Maybe Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is the Godfather of horror films, or perhaps it’s something by David Lynch. You get the picture.

* Huge nerd news #1: The Hobbit and its nebulous sequel are now officially going to be The Hobbit divided into two parts, according to Guillermo Del Toro. That’s as opposed to a done-in-one Hobbit followed by a possibly Gandalf-and-Aragorn-centric “bridge” film filling in the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The movies will incorporate the off-camera stuff from the books about Gandalf infiltrating Dol Guldur and rallying the White Council against the Necromancer. Here’s hoping for a Tarantino-style slow-motion walking scene involving Ian McKellen, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and a Radagast to be named later. (Via Kristin Thompson.)

* Huge nerd news #2: Official specs and release date–July 14th–for The State: The Complete Series. I’m seeing it…

…but I won’t believe it until I can physically dip my balls in it. (Via Shaggy.)

* The House Next Door has a review of the Caprica pilot/movie up that I’m not going to read, but you’re welcome to do so.

* I love Fantagraphics. Specifically I love Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box. If I fail to get this into Maxim I will look at it as a personal defeat.

* If I were in Chicago, I’d go to this: Anders Nilsen’s art show at Home. (Via Peggy Burns.) I’d forgotten all about this Captain America piece.

* My Bloody Valentine 3D director Patrick Lussier says Lionsgate has no interest in an MBV3D sequel. This is pretty lulzy news given how comically sequel-ready he made the end of the movie.

* This comic about Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Mairead Case and David Lasky is both beautiful and informative. (Via Tom Spurgeon.) Because I am an ignoramus, it wasn’t until the album’s recent rerelease (which the comic was created to promote) that I discovered in “Melody” and “Cargo Culte” the origin of the astonishing bassline from the “Portishead Experience” remix of Massive Attack’s “Karmacoma,” maybe the funkiest single track to come out of the entire trip-hop movement.

* The Midnight Meat Train: closeted text? This is Clive Barker we’re talking about, so it seems like a safe bet.

* Power Rangers magnate Haim Saban: Israeli agent? That is funny in any number of ways.

* Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in the month of March 2003 alone; Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in the month of August 2002 alone. “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

* Also (via Andrew Sullivan) a reminder that “at least 108 people have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently”…as of March 2005.

* Finally, rest in pieces, J.G. Ballard.

(art from The Atrocity Exhibition by Phoebe Gloeckner)

Due to computer problems, my posting schedule is apt to be erratic for the foreseeable future. Thanks in advance for sticking around…

You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him. You would, however, place a harmless insect in the box. You have orally informed us that you would in fact place a harmless insect such as a caterpillar in the box with him. [content redacted] […] In addition to using the confinement boxes alone, you also would like to introduce an insect into one of the boxes with Zubaydah. As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, then, in order not to commit a predicate act, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death. [content redacted] so long as you take either of the approaches we have described, the insect’s placement in the box would not constitute a threat of severe physical pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his positioin. An individual placed in a box, even an individual with a fear of insects, would not reasonably feel threatened with severe physical pain or suffering if a caterpillar was placed in the box.

—Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, August 1, 2002.

At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by O’Brien was high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as deep down as it was possible to go.

It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him.

For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O’Brien came in.

‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.

‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.

‘You can’t do that!’ he cried out in a high cracked voice. ‘You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.’

‘Do you remember,’ said O’Brien, ‘the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.’

‘O’Brien!’ said Winston, making an effort to control his voice. ‘You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?’

O’Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston’s back.

‘By itself,’ he said, ‘pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable – something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.’

–George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

* Snake’N’Bacon, Adult Swim, May 10th, 12:45am.

* George A. Romero is planning to publish (not sure if that means “write” or “put his name on”) two Dead novels. This is harder to get excited about after Diary of the Dead and his previous foray into print zombie fiction, the comic book series Toe Tags, but hey, who knows.

* Ben Morse reviews Daniel Clowes’s Eightball #23: The Death Ray and ponders how preexisting moods can impact the impact of art.

* Go, look: Willow concept art by Moebius and others, featuring the below ideas for #1 STC crush warrior woman Sorsha. (Via Monster Brains.

* This T-shirt would be awesome enough as is even if my cat Felix wasn’t built JUST like an AT-AT so that seeing an AT-AT’s skeleton is like x-raying Felix. (Via Topless Robot.)

SPOILER WARNING

* First of all, the Ewoks do not suck. “The Ewoks suck” is the kind of thing Star Wars nerds who are insecure about being Star Wars nerds and feel like they have to be tough guys about it–the worst, most insufferable kind of Star Wars nerds–say in lieu of whipping their dicks out and measuring them and yelling “see?!?!” The Ewoks are awesome. They look like teddy bears and fight like the Viet Cong. If given the choice between living among humans for the rest of my life and living among Ewoks, the choice would be it’s not even a choice. Ewoks every time. What I’m saying is that the Ewoks are better than you.

* Second of all, fun episode. I like Miles–he brings a different tone to the show in terms of how his character works, something a little harder to get a handle on thanks to both how he’s written and how Ken Leung performs him. For example, like every single other character on the entire show and approximately 90% of all the characters in nerd-centric fiction, he has daddy issues, but he doesn’t play them in the hard-exterior-surrounds-wounded-puppy manner everyone else does, not even after an entire episode dedicated to pushing him into that place. My read on him is that the combination of not having a father/being told his father rejected him and his mother with being able to hear the thoughts of dead people makes him has just made him think life is all some big cosmic joke, so why bother? Leung plays this like he honestly could say “fuck this” and walk right off the show at any moment. It’s intriguing.

* I think his best moment in this episode was when he returned his money to the grieving father, not to do the right thing by the guy, but to lay down the hard truth on him. He didn’t seem to derive any schadenfreude or pleasure from it, which is what saved it from being too on the nose–he just sort of spat it out and split, like his own internal hardness forced him to do it but he couldn’t contemplate deriving any kind of satisfaction from it (either out of cruelty or out of being a better person and returning the stolen cash). I didn’t anticipate the scene working out that way, and it was a pleasure.

* In his Lost recap this week, Todd Van Der Werff points out that this episode felt like it came from an earlier season. We have a first-time flashbacker for the first time in a while, and the forward movement on any of the show’s mysteries is pretty minimal. Back in Season Two or so, having an episode where one of the biggest revelations is that some redshirt got killed by electromagnetism would be par for the course, but nowadays everything’s jam-packed. I kind of liked that throwback feel.

* The other revelation this episode, besides the kinda non-revelation that Daniel was in Michigan, is that one of the dudes from the new set of plane-crash castaways is somehow in on the mysteries and working against Widmore and his forces, and is also using the “what lies in the shadow of the statue” catchphrase. I assumed this means he’s working for Ben, but a lot of my friends (and a lot of Internet speculation) argue that there’s a third party at work here. I’m not sure why that conclusion’s being drawn–but during the show I complained that whoever that guy was, him and his cronies should have just killed Miles if they wanted to make sure he didn’t go to work for Widmore, and now that the third-party theory has been suggested to me I think that’s the best available evidence that he isn’t working with Ben. Ben’s dudes would have shot Miles from across the street.

* Also, Ilyana is another “shadow of the statue” catch-phraser, and she claims to be working for the family of one of Sayid’s victims, and what do we really know about them that we didn’t learn from Ben? So maybe the third-party theory is correct. On the other hand, remember the blonde German lady Sayid dated for a while before they mutually betrayed and shot each other? I’m pretty sure she really was working for Widmore, no?

* I think the Kate/Roger sequence of events was surprisingly rich. On the one hand, Roger is right–Kate was involved with everything that’s happened to poor little Ben. But on the other hand, he’s kind of accidentally right–that is the kind of thing that only a paranoid drunk who believes the worst of everyone (including his own kid, when he hasn’t been shot and kidnapped) would think about a lady who gave blood to save his son’s life then tried to comfort the dad when the kid went missing. And on a third hand that I’ve grown for the purposes of this paragraph, it’s another instance of Sawyer’s caution and Juliet’s pessimism proving out over Kate’s “we’ve got to DO SOMETHING”ism–she could have simply kept her head down and let Sawyer run the show as he saw fit, but instead she’s pretty much fucked them without even trying. It’s downright Jackish, is what it is.

* Oh yeah, Dr. Marvin Candle/Pierre Chang is Miles’s father, duh. At least they made the reveal funny: “That douche is my dad” takes away a bit of the anti-climax sting.

* Is it just me or is Hurley becoming less of the common-sense audience stand-in and more of the “I’m too slow to follow this show” audience stand-in?

* Clip show? Boo!