* It was indeed a technical error caused by a sole employee that de-listed some 57,310 books from Amazon’s sales rankings over the weekend, rather than a sinister Rod Dreher-orchestrated plot that required account cancellations to rectify or something.

* Supposedly terrible comic book movie update: Tom Spurgeon is a Punisher War Zone skeptic, while Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken is a The Spirit believer. I think I’m going to have to see them both and make up my own mind. While loaded.

* Trent Reznor is interviewed by Digg founder Kevin Rose using the top 10 reader-submitted questions as voted for by Digg’s users. Lots of interesting stuff in there about navigating competing and emerging business models as an artist in a time of uncertainty and technological transition; I think the insights are useful whether you’re in Nine Inch Nails or doing comics.

* Tom Spurgeon spots a new John Hankiewicz mincomic in collaboration with Jeremy Onsmith, Fine Tooth Comics.

* The House Next Door’s Melissa Tuckman interviews documentarian Ondi Timonder, the director of the splendid Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown Massacre documentary Dig!

* Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.

* Finally, the Best of Bowie Loves Beyonce!

Remember: The prettiest stars are always in your Bowie Loves Beyonce tumblelog.

* This is so delightful to me: Curt Purcell interviews Josh Simmons. If you’ve been reading my recent reviews of Josh’s minis, I think you can imagine that there’s a lot to talk about.

* Yesterday it was discovered by the Internet at large that Amazon had somehow and for some reason tagged pretty much any book touching on homosexuality in any way as “adult” and therefore removed it from all-important sales rankings, a blow in terms of both searchability and marketability, not to mention common decency. Instantly I saw people posting about how they were canceling their Amazon accounts and stripping links from their sites, but it seemed to me so clearly a case of either a technical or personnel fuck-up rather than a conscious decision to smear the queer at a company level that I figured publicizing its ridiculousness was all it was appropriate to do. (The initial reports of customer service reps more or less defending the move struck me as the actions of employees who didn’t really know what was up and offered an explanation based on what they assumed must have been happening as though it were a conscious decision on a company level.) Sure enough, today we’ve seen Amazon begin relisting a lot of the books, and various conflicting but convincing explanations emerge regarding how coding glitches, hackers, “let’s you and him fight” meta-trolls, and/or bureaucracy are more likely culprits for the move than Jeff Bezos catching a bad case of the Maggie Gallaghers. Gawker has one theory, while Patrick Nielsen Hayden and his collection of relevant links have more.

* Fantagraphics offers a sneak peak of some of its upcoming projects, including an odds’n’sods collection from Paul Hornschemeier and a Steve Ditko collection.

* Did I already know that Dan Nadel is working on Art Out of Time 2 and forget it, or is that news? Very, very welcome news? That really is the book that launched a thousand other books and opened a couple thousand eyes, although Craig Yoe will pop up in your comment thread and make cryptic statements to the contrary if you say so, bless him.

* It’s come at last. At last it’s come. The day I knew would come at last has come at last: Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken reviews Dragonball: Evolution. His subsequent shame spiral into alcohol-induced unconsciousness is mercifully left to your imagination.

* Bryan Lee O’Malley talks about Scott Pilgrim and the classic video games that influenced it to Kiel Phegley.

* Tim O’Neil reviews Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, and John Paul Leon’s Earth X, noting what the book’s differences from Ross and Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come say about the differences between the Marvel and DC Universes. Hint: the central figure of Marvel is a soldier, while the central figure of DC is a savior.

* Chris Butcher explains what’s up with those (to my eyes) obviously cockamamie New York Times bestseller charts for graphic novels. The problem, he says, has to do with the fact that the “final sale” in the bookstore market is from store to customer, while the “final sale” in the direct market is from Diamond to store, and how that discrepancy creates glitches in the way the chart is tabulated.

* Monster Brains notes the upcoming release of Knowing Darkness, a book containing Stephen King-based art by the likes of Bernie Wrightson, Lord of the Rings creature designer Gino Acevedo, and Monster Brains mastermind Aeron Alfrey himself.

* Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman call out the Obama Administration’s attempts to preserve, if not expand, certain Bush Administration policies regarding such issues as state secrets and indefinite detention, particularly at the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan. One of the theories that Greenwald notes–that in order to preserve some vestige of inter-partisan comity the new administration is doing whatever it can to prevent investigations and prosecutions of the past administration even if that means giving its active and ongoing imprimatur to that administration’s practices–is to me a) the best explanation and b) a terrible excuse.

* Renee French: still creepy.

* Attention Marvel: Please let Jon Vermilyea draw Venom.

* I deeply want someone who was around back then to tell me that this shot of Howard Chaykin and his amazing friends circa the early ’70s is what all gatherings of comics culture looked like back then.

* Shaggy has my favorite take on James Dobson’s admission of defeat in the culture wars.

Very bad person James Dobson admits defeat in the culture war. I can’t even BEGIN to tell you how much this made my day.

KEEP AMERICA EVIL!

* David Mazzuchelli, Seth, Jerry Moriarty, and Tom Gauld are going to be at MoCCA this year. My Bowie sketchbook just had a mild heart attack.

* Thomas Lennon says The State DVD box set is finally coming out on July 14th. Again, I’ll believe it when I see it. And I’m still disappointed by the music clearance situation–as good as Craig Wedren is as spoofing music, it was the use of the real thing to which the original series owed so much of its satirical power. But still, it’s The State DVD box set.

* Chris Mautner talks to Drawn & Quarterly’s Peggy Burns about the new Diamond minimums and how they’ve affected the company’s titles like Or Else and Crickets. I think this is the first time I’ve heard that Gabrielle Bell’s Lucky has also been canceled. I also think it’s the first time I’ve heard an unimpeachable alternative-comics big like Peggy push back quite this forcefully against the notion that there’s something uniquely terrible about the death of the alternative comic book given the inevitable print-publishing apocalypse generally.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Jeffrey Brown’s Funny Misshapen Body, a sentence which will sound funny each and every time I write or read a variation on it. I got this book in the mail yesterday and put it down on the couch, and the next thing I knew the Missus was three quarters of the way through it. She said it’s very, very personal, even for Jeff, which is saying something.

* I enjoyed Curt Purcell’s post on how genre fans come to appreciate even the crappy parts of their favorite genres because they associate them with the good parts, as well as CRwM’s down-comment response that the problem is subsequent artists appropriating good and crappy parts indiscriminately as fanservice.

* Sin City 2 is still with the Weinstein Company. ADDTF sincerely regrets the bullshit rumor. (Via Arrow in the Head.)

* Tales Designed to Thrizzle #5 now in stock!

* Bart Beaty reviews Laurent Cilluffo’s New Wanted. It looks very good.

* Josh Simmons does creepy paintings, too.

* Apparently when Au Revoir Simone’s Heather D’Angelo isn’t playing keyboards and pursuing an astrophysics degree at Columbia (for real), she’s drawing the bejesus out of David and Goliath.

* Anders Nilsen Sure Can Draw update: Anders Nilsen sure can draw.

* Sexy Velma? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

SPOILER ALERT

* I feel bad for last night’s episode because I’d allowed my expectations to be super super super high. It was gonna be a Ben episode, indeed a Ben and Locke episode. It was co-written by Brian K. Vaughan and Deadwood vet Elizabeth Sarnoff. The Monster was gonna be involved somehow. We were gonna get some flashbacks to Ben’s past on the Island. Probably a lot of mythology stuff would be revealed, probably something involving the Temple. The two best actors on the show were going to get a showcase. You’d get payoff for Ben’s murder of Locke. And on and on and on. In the words of Todd Van Der Werff last week, “If that is not the greatest episode in the history of television, it will be a letdown.”

* And so, contra Todd this week, I think it was a letdown. Not a huge one or anything–it just wasn’t THE BEST EPISODE EVAR, nor even the best episode of the season, nor in my view even one of the best episodes of the season. It was just good, very good at times but not at all times.

* The big problem, for me, is Ben. Listen, I think Ben is one of the all-time great television characters, and I think Michael Emerson is serving up one of the all-time great television performances. As I’ve said in the past, compare and contrast the mid-season-two emergence of Emerson’s Ben as the show’s Big Bad with that of Kenneth Welsh’s Windom Earle in Twin Peaks and you can see how the former show basically became what it was to become with the character/actor/antagonist’s introduction while the latter gave up the ghost.

But I think you run into difficult, dangerous territory as storytellers when one of your main characters lies about everything all the time.

It’s not just that Ben takes “unreliable narrator” to soaring new heights when it comes to doling out information about the Island/Others mythology, both because he’s the show’s primary source on that score and because he just lies his ass off constantly. It actually starts to become an impediment just in basic character-based drama terms. In his post this week, Van Der Werff points out how difficult a task Emerson has in that he himself likely has no clue whether or not he’s telling the truth at any given time, because the writers often haven’t decided yet, so he therefore has to say everything as though he could be full of shit or perfectly sincere. That’s rough enough on our ability to process a narrative when it’s just a question of whether or not, I dunno, the Temple is half mile inside the walls, but it really plays havoc on our ability to get a handle on the emotional center of the character, and by extension, sometimes that of the story.

In this particular episode we saw that take place in Ben’s separate conversations regarding Locke’s death and resurrection. To Locke, he says that he believed Locke would rise again–he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t be until he saw it happen (like Doubting Thomas–callback!), but he had faith that it would happen and he was glad that it did. To Sun, he says he had no idea Locke would come back from the dead–he’d never seen anything like that happen, and the fact that it had scared the shit out of him. Naturally, given the nature of Ben and the nature of the writing done for Ben per Van Der Werff’s observation, he says both these contradictory things with his trademark blend of utter sincerity and unctuous weaseliness. Which one is true? Who the fuck knows? That’s undoubtedly part of the pleasure of Ben, but without enough context clues for us to figure out which is real and which is bull, it becomes extremely difficult for us to figure out how Ben is feeling when various things happen to him later on.

Case in point: Ben’s final scene with the Smoke Monster and “Alex.” It seems to me that we’re probably supposed to feel like Ben really does feel terrible about his role in his daughter’s death, particularly his Peter-style denying of her. Certainly that’s what the flashback material involving his kidnapping of Alex from Rousseau years ago would imply. Therefore it’s reasonable to believe that he’s genuinely traumatized when the Alex simulacrum shows up, slams him around, and tells him to tuck his tail between his legs and jump whenever Locke says “frog”–it’s not just that he resents no longer being King Shit of Turd Island, it’s that having the message delivered in the form of the daughter he failed and betrayed really did devastate him.

However, we’re so accustomed to seeing Ben pretend to care about someone, only to immediately turn around and choke them to death or whatever, that I spent the whole sequence feeling like 90% of his reaction was a put-on. Obviously inside the smoke monster he’s got no audience to play to, and it’s reasonable to assume that some part of him really does feel bad that he got his daughter killed. But before he falls into Smokey’s chamber and he’s telling Locke that he’s here to be judged for his role in Alex’s death, and after his “this is your life” routine inside Smokey ends and “Alex” shows up and he’s all walking toward her crying and apologizing like Norman Osborn taking off his Green Goblin mask and thanking God for Peter Parker’s intervention in that weird scene at the end of the first Spider-Man movie–it felt like he was bullshitting. And if he wasn’t, that’s a problem for the creators of the show, because it’s precisely at moments like these that the audience really does require some kind of certainty, some kind of true north, in order for the emotional impact of such scenes to really come through.

I mean, what was the point of Ben telling Caesar that Locke was forcing him to go on the boat ride if he was just going to turn around and kill the guy the second he tried to stop them from leaving, which is precisely what the lie about Locke coercing Ben would lead him to do? Unless Ben was deliberately trying to provoke a confrontation and give himself an excuse to plug another potential alpha male, which I admit is well within the realm of possibility, it was just lying for lying’s sake. And I can’t be the only person who had this sort of exchange in mind later on in the episode when trying to figure out whether or not I should feel bad for Ben’s heartbreak when his dead daughter smacks him around.

My point (and taking this long to get to it is going to be kind of ironic to you when you see what it is) is that in narrative terms, Ben’s dialogue is a waste of time. We can’t trust a word he says, so it’s useless to us in terms of both the emotional and plot-based information it conveys. Sure, it establishes that Ben is a manipulative liar who can’t be trusted, but, uh, duh. At a certain point it becomes a character-sized version of the liar paradox: Ben Linus is false. Where can we go from there?

* That said, this episode still had much to recommend it. I particularly enjoyed Locke’s newfound devil-may-care confidence, something he gets to display maybe every other season or so–my hope is that he won’t get fooled again and this smiling, cocksure Resurrected Locke has learned his lessons and finally knows he’s the real deal. Kind of like Gandalf the White versus Gandalf the Grey, if you will.

* There were also some lovely images, as almost always. I was rather smitten with that long shot of Ben and Locke walking on the main Island’s dock. Again, it’s not the kind of shot the show usually goes for.

* The editing during Ben’s confrontation with Desmond and Penny was genuinely thrilling, wasn’t it? The urgency of it all made Ben’s reasoning sound all the more childish and absurd: He just matter-of-factly plugged a guy carrying groceries and is about to execute an innocent woman who has nothing to do with his actual enemy because “your father is a terrible human being”? It seemed to me that the brutal beating Desmond inflicted on him was just a physical embodiment of Ben’s own realization that he was behaving in a completely unsupportable and terrible fashion. Plus, it was a satisfying twist on our expectations for Ben not to have killed Penny, which I think everyone assumed happen and moreover everyone assumed to be the reason for what everyone assumed would be Desmond’s return to the Island. On the other hand, of all the things Ben could have chosen to tell Sun to apologize for on his behalf, I feel like not actually killing someone would have been pretty low on the totem pole.

* So (if Ben can be believed, which, see above) he really didn’t remember the presence of the castaways back in the ’70s. This raises a question about Richard, who has no such Temple-healing-based memory loss, doesn’t it? It seems like he’s the power behind the throne no matter who’s nominally in charge, maneuvering Ben to dethrone Widmore and doing the same thing with Locke and Ben years later. So will the “you knew all along???” confrontation I once expected to take place between the castaways and Ben now happen between Ben and Richard?

* I’m kicking myself for giving so much mental and blog airtime to the “we’re in an alternate timeline because there’s still Dharma stuff hanging up in New Otherton” theorizing. It’s not something I ever would have given any thought to if I hadn’t read it on the Internet, and if I’m being honest I think I did remember still seeing plenty of Dharma logos amid all the Others’ buildings in the past, so hunting for a zebra based on those hoofprints has me feeling the fool. Oh well, you win some, you lose some, and some get disrupted by the smoke monster.

* Was it me or did Ben recognize Christian’s name, and presumably the import of that name?

* I liked how in the brief time Lapidus spent away from the new castaways, some new kind of crazy alliance with its own inscrutable catchphrases popped up. That shit happens all the time around here!

* I also really liked that Caesar has already gone the way of the dodo. I don’t care how many times Lost introduces major characters only to kill them off–I fall for it every time!

* So do you think the last shot of the season is going to be “meet Jacob” or what?

I was in the Kmart in Penn Station trying to buy batteries but all the registers went down, so tensions were running high in the line. This big burly middle aged Noo Yawkuh guy started getting into it with this youngish kid in his 20s and the girl he was with, I guess maybe because they both tried to get on line at once. Clearly the older guy was being an unnecessarily belligerent dick, trying to intimidate them. Eventually the older guy yelled “faggot” at the kid. I look at him and say “classy.” He goes “what, are you one too?” Suddenly I hear “I absolutely am, sir” coming out of my mouth. He says “Sorry,” kind of shocked-like, and he repeats it a couple other times as I turn away–it sounded like he wanted it to come out sarcastic but that he was also kind of sorry that he called someone a faggot in front of an actual faggot. Eventually he manages to add “Kiss him and make it better, I don’t know what to tell ya,” to which I just reply “awesome” and roll my eyes. Then he threatened to hit the other kid, and there were all these cashiers and managers circulating–I thought they were going to get security but they might have just been trying to figure out what to do about all the busted registers. Finally I gave up on trying to buy the batteries and left.

What I WISH I had said to him instead of my awesome final reply of “awesome” was “Your revolution’s over, sir. Condolences! The bums lost!” As gross and ugly as it was to have this dickhead call someone a faggot and then continue to crack wise about it even after I “came out,” I just felt so, so good and so sure that his time is coming to an end, and it’s just a matter of time.

* The new issue of ToyFare Magazine is out, and with it a new Twisted ToyFare Theater containing the debut of maybe my favorite TTT character ever, Golden Age Spider-Man. I think this was the most fun I’ve ever had writing a TTT.

* When I posted about the Eisners yesterday I neglected to congratulate The Comics Reporter, The Comics Journal, Comic Book Resources, and Comics Comics for their nominations in the journalism category. The former three publications have all paid me to write for them at one point or another, and Comics Comics is pretty good despite their woeful neglect in that department. I enjoy them all.

* This video interview with Paul Pope encapsulates a lot of the things I love about Paul, most of which have to do with the fact that he’s stylish (which is to say he cares about style) in a way that isn’t very stylish in altcircles these days.

* Matt Furie has posted a heaping helping of recent work. Go check it out. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Apparently Sin City 2 is no longer with the Weinsteins, maybe, possibly? Expect much rejoicing among genre-film fans given Los Bros Weinstein’s handling of such pix in the past. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Tom Kaczynski draws a Morrissey concert.

* Scott Horton reports that Senate Republicans are threatening to block various Obama Administration nominees unless Obama quashes the release of Bush Administration memos authorizing torture. (Via Eve Tushnet.) Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald notes that he, Keith Olbermann, and various high-profile Daily Kos posts are attacking Obama from the left on privacy and secrecy issues, abuses of which obviously go hand in hand with the authorization and implementation of torture.

* Wolverine co-creator Len Wein, who basically invented the X-Men franchise as we know it and also edited Watchmen, has suffered a catastrophic house fire that destroyed many of his possessions and took the life of one of his dogs. This is just awful. The long and the short is that there’s nothing for fans of Wein’s work to do about it just yet. Robot 6 and Tom Spurgeon have comprehensive link round-ups.

* The Eisner Award nominees have been announced. It’s nice to see them get rid of a bunch of categories, like the “Best Single Issue” one that enables Brad Meltzer to be referred to as an Eisner Award-winning writer, but then again this forces all the nominations for Acme Novelty Library #19 to be shunted into categories for Chris Ware specifically rather than for the book itself, and a world where Acme #19 can’t win an Eisner as Best Something isn’t so hot a world, although hey, that’s a lot of nominations for Chris Ware, which is terrific. Anyway, I look forward to Sammy Harkham’s concession speech when Dark Horse MySpace Presents wins Best Anthology.

* I’m going to jump on the bandwagon with Jog and Spurge by saying that Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings is a rigorously observed, beautifully drawn, painfully angry book that you should buy now that it’s coming out in softcover tomorrow.

* Here’s a fun interview with Garbage Pail Kids artist John Pound, the man behind the immortal Shrunken Ed. (Via Jason Adams.)

* CRwM says “it’s high time for a little elitist disdain” when it comes to horror movies:

Imagine how different the genre would be if fans told filmmakers that every time they were going to kill a bunch of people, they should have a dramatically and intellectually convincing reason to do so.

* Helena Bonham Carter is apparently in the upcoming Terminator sequel. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, but I loved HBC back before this serial homewrecker became the muse of Tim “phoning in the goth nonsense” Burton and she looks not unlike the Missus, so I thought Arrow in the Headl’s choice of photo to illustrate their latest story on this was equal parts hilarious and delightful.

* Beck Cloonan Sure Can Draw update: Becky Cloonan sure can draw.

* I liked this interview with Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan about her personal style. (Via Largehearted Boy.)

* Ta-Nehisi Coates wonders if the dividing line between honest lust and demeaning misogyny in hip-hop and rock lyrics lies between “I want to” and “I’m going to.” This strikes me as quite insightful.

* This isn’t the sort of thing I get to say every day, but in the past 24 hours I’ve come across three very funny examinations of murder. First up: A recent episode of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, which worked some pretty rough chuckles in an episode-long chronicle of the fall of the Cinco Brothers, the snake-oil salesmen/inventors responsible for all of the horrible products featured in the show’s spoof ads. A lot of it is the usual ridiculous Tim & Eric lo-fi/surreal nonsense, but there are also some pretty spot-on send-ups of post-Scorsese/Tarantino tough-guy rise-and-fall crime movies, and some vicious jabs at the unthinking, violence-tinged misogyny of the media. Hiring shock-jock Tom Leykis to play and/or parody himself in an episode centered around the murders of a trophy wife and a prostitute was particularly inspired.

* Next: “Don’t Murder Your Friends,” a routine from comedian Jen Kirkman in which she muses on how the difference between murderers and normal people is that they a) don’t check the impulse to kill when it occurs to them and b) if they’re lucky, they don’t come to regret it either. From there she segues into a pretty horrifying urban legend that isn’t any less creepy for the fact that she’s picking apart how unrealistic it really is. (Via Said the Gramophone.)

* Finally, and you’ve probably seen this already: The Onion News Network (now featuring actual former CNN anchorwoman Bobbi Batista!) takes a look at Close Range, the hot new first-person-shooter video game that consists solely of shooting people in the face at point-blank range. There’s so much to unpack here I hardly know where to begin, but here are two potential points of departure:

1) I would happily play this game–and guess what, I can!;

2) the piece slowly ratchets up the horror from pistols that blow a comparatively neat hole in the target’s face to shotgun blasts that split their skulls in two like smashing a watermelon, but it’s not until they present an interlude where animals are the targets that the gruesome hilarity of it all becomes almost unbearable. If the sight of a realistic, adorable horse’s face being blown in half doesn’t get you, the way the ostrich’s tubular neck sways and swivels like a firehose as blood spurts out after it’s decapitated by a close-range blast will.

To be honest, I’ve been a little bit soured on the Onion since I spent a little time working for them and saw how the sausage gets made–comics fans, if you think your average Marvel or DC deal is unfavorable, you ain’t seen nothing yet–but I think this bit is not just funny, but profound.

* And here’s a good reason why. The state of the beast: The Army uses live pigs to test anti-explosive armor. (Via Pterodactyls.)

* I’m late on this, but I’m sure you’re already aware that there was a horrible spree of mass shootings over the past few days. Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Wong, frustrated by the loss of his job and feeling like a fish out of water, killed 13 people in Binghamton, NY before killing himself. Richard Poplawski, motivated by racist, anti-Semitic, and (for lack of a better term) “gun-nut” far-right conspiracy theories regarding the Obama Administration and the government in general, killed three police officers in Pittsburgh, PA before surrendering. And James Harrison, distraught after discovering his wife with another man for whom she announced she was leaving him, killed his five children (aged 7 to 16) and himself in Graham, WA.

* The International Committee of the Red Cross’s report on doctors and medical officers who participated in the systemic torture of inmates throughout the CIA’s secret prison system has been leaked.

Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said.

Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had “condoned and participated in ill treatment.”

The New York Review of Books’ Mark Danner broke the story; you can download the full report here.

* Dave Kajganich, who’s writing the screenplay for the upcoming theatrical adaptation of Stephen King’s It, briefly talks to Dread Central. The gist is that the flashback/flashforward set-up will be ’80s/’00s (or ’10s, I guess) rather than ’50s/’80s, but beyond that it’ll be rated R, “we can really honor the book,” the usual Zack Snyder litany. I wish him well, but it’s a mightily ambitious book in scope and in envelope-pushing–I think we can all think of at least once scene that doesn’t stand a chance of making it into an R-rated theatrical release–and will likely prove tough to pull off even before you consider King’s mostly woeful track record with such things.

* Remember that bitchy email from the studio behind Let the Right One In regarding the iffy subtitles for the film’s DVD release? Turns out it wasn’t an internal communication, but an actual email to a concerned citizen! That makes it even weirder and more annoying. (Via The House Next Door.)

* Jeffrey Brown has been talking process a lot at his blog; his latest post offers a peak at how he scripts.

* My pal TJ Dietsch is saying all the right things about Punisher: War Zone.

* Tom Spurgeon’s gigantic Sunday posts are virutally always worth your time. This week’s installment spotlights ten different kinds of out-of-print works you can find and puchase cheaply online. I think Tom intended the post to be seen as an eye-opener in terms of the economics involved, but for me, the avenues he advocates–involving strips, gag cartoons, editorial cartoons, children’s books, art books, “cartooning,” and other non-“comic book/graphic novel” areas–is inspiring and intriguing more in terms of the content than the cost. I’ve been a story-focused comics reader for as long as I’ve been reading comics, and investing time and energy (money notwithstanding) in nice fat cheap old collections of, say, a New Yorker guy exercises a very different part of my comics-reading brain than does an altcomix graphic novel or a superhero serial. I’m starting to feel like enough of a grown-up that I wouldn’t feel like I was wasting money by grabbing a few books just to look at the pretty pictures and marvel at the execution rather than get a rewarding beginning/middle/end read out of them.

* As a bonus, there’s an undeniable pleasure to be had in tracking down images that pressed themselves on your brain as a child long before you had the ability to contextualize them, and then looking at them again knowing what you know now. The closest experience I’ve had to a lot of what Tom talks about is when I bought the Scary Stories Omnibus at Borders for $10 a few years ago. Those watery Stephen Gammell illustrations are still among the scariest visuals I’ve ever seen, and the frisson of experiencing them all over again, of being able to pick up that hardcover off the bookshelf in my own home and flip through it at my leisure, was delightful.

Part I

Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love / Banstyle/Sappys Curry / Two Months Off / Crocodile / Beautiful Burnout / Will and Amira [with Gabriel Yared] / Pearl’s Girl / Doot Doot [as Freur]

Part II

Jumbo / Mmm Skyscraper I Love You / Boy, Boy, Boy / Dirty Epic / Cowgirl / Small Conker and a Twix/You Do Scribble / Most ‘ospitable / Born Slippy.NUXX / Please Help Me

DOWNLOAD BOTH PARTS HERE

Underworld is my favorite band.

* After spending the ’80s in struggling new wave bands called Freur and Underworld (the group’s original, more traditional iteration), then taking time off to work with the art and design collective Tomato with whom they are still affiliated, musicians Karl Hyde and Rick Smith hooked up with a much younger DJ named Darren Emerson. Together they created some dance singles under the names Lemon Interrput and Steppin’ Razor, selling them out of the back of a van at gigs. By 1993 they were releasing singles as Underworld again, leading up to their re-debut, 1994’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman.

* Emerson eventually left the band, leaving Hyde and Smith to continue as a duo beginning with 2002’s A Hundred Days Off. After the completion of their most recent album, Oblivion with Bells, DJ and frequent Underworld remixer Darren Price joined the group for their live performances, which are heavily improvisatory. I guess they like Darrens.

* Hyde, the band’s singer, assembles his lyrics in large part from snippets of overheard conversations.

* Perhaps in part because of the prominence of the songs “Born Slippy.NUXX” and “Dark Train” in the film Trainspotting, “cinematic” is an adjective frequently used to describe Underworld’s fairly epic form of dance music.

* “Pink Floyd with beats” is a phrase I’ll use to describe them in a pinch.

* Underworld’s music is very, very good as an accompaniment for travel by train or car. I interviewed them once and they told me everyone tells them this. Maybe it’s because of the warmly propulsive beats, maybe it’s because Hyde’s lyrics themselves are often recorded during travel.

* Their music feels blue to me, whatever that means.

* They’re the best live act I’ve ever seen by a comfortable margin.

* “Born Slippy” is that “shouting lager, lager, lager” song.

I got to know Underworld during my first semester of college, thanks to the Trainspotting soundtrack and the “electronica” boomlet. I think they are my first post-adolescent band in that regard. I’ve listened to them more or less constantly since then. Normally this is where the whole “soundtrack of my life” tag would go, and not without good reason, but I think referring to Underworld’s music as “cinematic” gets it all wrong. While it is indeed dramatic, frequently anthemic, it doesn’t help craft your life into a story of some kind, a narrative with beginning, middle, and end, playing out on the screen of your mind–it emphasizes and heightens the emotional content of this moment, whether you’re dancing to it at a concert or listening to it while staring out the window of a train or playing it behind the closed door of your bedroom, with someone or without someone. Underworld is an utterly immediate band.

This two-part mix is pretty simply a collection of many of my favorite songs of theirs, with one or two additions or subtractions for cohesiveness’ sake. If you’d like more, two excellent, wide-ranging collections are already out there: Everything, Everything, a live album from the final tour of the Hyde/Smith/Emerson era, and Underworld 1992-2002, a two-disc greatest-hits-type compilation of all the singles from that decade. I’d also recommend their latest album, Oblivion with Bells–if you liked Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and thought “I want more of this,” that’s a record for you.

I hope you enjoy the mix!

* New Love & Rockets Free Comic Book Day comic featuring the following cover and a story from Gilbert Hernandez called “Chest Fever,” the title of the Band’s best song? Shit yeah.

* Triptych cover for Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps #1-3? Oh, indeed. My God the rainbow of Lanterns is a wonderful idea. I do apologize on behalf of Ed Benes, however. Star Sapphire LOL

* Josh Cotter announcing the completion of Driven by Lemons and March Hare? Good golly. Here’s the cover for Lemons.

It also looks like I’ll be interviewing Josh for The Comics Journal, so look out for that.

* A new Abstract Comics blog in preparation for the Andrei Molotiu-edited anthology coming soon from Fantagraphics? This one literally made me pump my fists in the air with glee. This is like pure pleasure for me.

* Torture part one: Here’s an update on the ACLU’s efforts to get the Obama Justice Department to release the Bush Justice Department’s memos giving torture the green light.

* Torture part two: Here’s a video of and an article about a woman being flogged in public by the Pakistani Taliban for the crime of coming out of a guy’s house.

“Please stop it,” she begs, alternately whimpering or screaming in pain with each blow to the backside. “Either kill me or stop it now.”

A crowd of men stands by, watching silently. Off camera a voice issues instructions. “Hold her legs tightly,” he says as she squirms and yelps.

[…]

The woman’s brother is among the men pinning her down…

(Both links via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Boy, recent events sure have exposed the lurid eschatological delusions of significant segments of the political and opinion establishment, huh? And only two months into the new administration! It’s not a good look. I’ve seen enough comparisons to the Joker and references to the mustachioed dictator hall of fame that I’m left wondering where they’ll go when he tries to pass climate change legislation or institute universal healthcare. Darkseid and Elizabeth Bathory? I’ve learned from bitter, bitter experience that politics are not the place to apply the lessons you think you’ve been taught by heroic fantasy, or by the aspects of history that most closely resemble heroic fantasy.

* Will Wilkinson:

Marijuana is neither evil nor dangerous. Scientists have proven its medical uses. It has spared millions from anguish. But the casual pleasure marijuana has delivered is orders of magnitude greater than the pain it has assuaged, and pleasure matters too. That’s probably why Barack Obama smoked up the second and third times: because he liked it. That’s why tens of millions of Americans regularly take a puff, despite the misconceived laws meant to save us from our own wickedness.

* Ezra Klein:

As a policy wonk, I think marijuana should be legal, but should be regulated, heavily taxed, and subjected to various restrictions on advertising, age, etc. That said, I think it’s important to say that it shouldn’t just be legal for reasons of profit but for reasons of pleasure. It’s a public good for people to derive enjoyment and relaxation from a harmless and private pursuit.

* Jim Henley:

In my case, Will stands in for the numerous friends we all have who either were or are recreational drug users – mostly marijuana smokers but also dabblers in other drugs – who, today, lead perfectly “productive” lives, as conventional society measures productive. It’s a great evil to waste untold billions of dollars and ruin millions of lives, and end numberless thousands of others around the globe, in the name of a futile war based on lies.

I’ve learned that last part from bitter, bitter experience too.

This song is over 40 years old.

* Heading to the printers this month: Jordan Crane’s Uptight #3! YESSSSSSSSS

* Here’s quite an array of artcomix badassery: Frank Santoro, Lauren Weinstein, Dan Nadel, CF, Yuichi Yokoyama. (Via Comics Comics.)

* A leaked email from Magnolia Pictures reveals the studio’s sentiment regarding the blog-generated kerfuffle over the subtitles for Let the Right One In: STFU. Look, it’s entirely possible that this is much ado about nothing, all the from the side-by-sides I’ve seen the theatrical subtitles seem demonstrably superior. (The email claims the DVD subs are more literal translations; who knows?) But the blogs this email bashes are the same blogs that told all and sundry that Let the Right One In was the best horror movie of the year, if not the best movie period. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Speaking of Jason, he agreed with me about last night’s Lost episode in two particulars: It’s nice for Kate to have a raison d’etre beyond her feelings about someone else, and Kate looks hot in supermarkets. He adds an observation about Jack’s waxed chest, though, which difference is what makes him him and me me.

* And speaking of last night’s Lost, Todd Van Der Werff sums up how I felt about it:

All of this is a lot of rambling preamble to say that “Whatever Happened, Happened,” written by series masterminds Damon Lindelof and Carleton Cuse and directed by Bobby Roth, was another solid hour in what’s shaping up to be a very well-done middle run of episodes for this show’s fifth season. It’s rare to have a show have a creative renaissance this late in its life, but Lost, most likely reinvigorated by knowing where it’s ending and roughly where it’s going, is crackling along like it never has before. Here’s a measure of just how much fun I had with “Whatever Happened, Happened”: Basically nothing HAPPENED in the episode, but I still was completely engaged throughout. And, after all of my complaining about how boring and useless such episodes were earlier this season, this was a KATE (Evangeline Lilly) episode that not only managed to tell a compelling story but also utilized flashbacks to Kate’s off-Island life about as well as they can be used. I haven’t looked into it all that thoroughly, but I daresay this was the best Kate episode of them all. Granted, it’s kind of a low bar, but the show took an awfully big step over that bar.

Okay, this is actually getting a little weird by now: I’ve been listening to King Crimson more or less nonstop since I put that mix together a couple of weekends ago. This is putting me in a bizarre, intense headspace. So many of Crimso’s songs rely on mechanistic repetition and build that listening to them almost demands repetition itself–I can’t count how many times I’ve listened to “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part II” over the past couple of days, for example–and the overall effect is similar to standing with your face a few inches away from some horrible giant industrial machine that could fly apart at any moment.

I’ve been tapping into YouTube to dig up what live versions I can find, and unfortunately a pretty tremendous Fripp/Belew/Levin/Bruford-era version of “Larks’…Part II” I’d planned on posting got disappeared due to copyright infringement in the time it took me to get home from work last night. However, this gives me an excuse to post this cover version by students from Utah’s Paul Green School of Rock. While the Belew-centric version by KC themselves pushed the song into the crystalline post-punk sound of the band in that time, these kids just go metal on its ass, bringing out the proto-Alice in Chains skronk from the original. What it must be like to be a proud parent in the audience!

SPOILER ALERT

* I really enjoyed this episode. It threaded a ton of needles with a slew of loose ends, all rather effortlessly I thought. On the Kate side, you found out what Sawyer whispered and got some movement regarding his ex and his daughter. You found out how and why Kate gave up Aaron. You got some resolution for Claire’s poor grandma/Christian’s poor babymama. And best of all you found out why Kate returned: to find Claire!

* This last part really made me happy because I just tend to like it when shows find a way to make a big deal out of smaller characters. Now one of our core players is on a quest to track down Ms. Stay Away From Me and the Bay-bee Chah-lie. Hopefully this will keep Kate busy enough not to fuck up Sawyer and Juliet and not get dragged into another thing with Jack. It also suggests that Claire’s status is going to become more central to the plot, which I appreciate. I do wonder whether this mean’s Aaron’s all that special after all, whether he’ll be back on the Island at some point or whether he’s just going to stay with Grandma, but hey.

* Meanwhile, on the Dharma/Others/Island end of things, you obviously see how and why Ben survives Sayid’s assassination attempt. You get another callback to the Temple and whatever the hell goes on in there, presumably some supernatural brainwashing process like what Rousseau believed the monster did to her crew. You find out that not only did Ben not remember Sayid, but you also find out why that’s the case–I assumed that he did remember but just hid it.

* And finally, of course, you get the big payoff moment between Ben and Locke. The look of panic on Ben’s face was almost as priceless as the look of confidence on Locke’s. Payback’s a bitch, I hope!

* When you think of the sheer number of balls this episode kept in the air, the sheer number of other episodes it referred back to, it’s really flabbergasting. Sawyer’s whisper, Sawyer’s conned ex-girlfriend, the surgery storyline from the part of Season Three that everyone but me hated, Ben’s first meeting with Richard, his mother’s death in childbirth, the oft-seen scene where Ben tells them they all need to go back, the Christian/Claire/Aaron lineage, the red herring with Mrs. Littleton and Ben’s lawyer, presumably Juliet’s history with Ben and that “you look just like her” line from the woman whose husband Juliet was schtupping, all the time-travel meta-discussion between Hurley and Miles, some mentions of Ellie and Charles running the show for the Others, Claire giving birth to Aaron, Claire disappearing, the big lie about 815, the fame of the Oceanic Six–if they’d somehow worked in Boone and Shannon, or Eko and Yemi, or the Adam & Eve skeletons and their black and white stones, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

* Heck, they even gave us a visual reference to that episode where Kate was married to the Joss Whedon guy by putting her back in a supermarket. Between those two episodes, I don’t know what it is about the lighting in grocery stores, but hubba hubba, Kate should go shopping more often.

* They’re also answering questions a lot faster than they used to, now that they know that they can. So we find out what happened to Kate and Aaron just a handful of episodes after that first became an issue, just like we learned how Sayid got arrested by big-haired lady, just like I presume we’ll find out how Hurley ended up on the plane before the season’s out too. But where I felt this the most was when they showed Richard walking into the Temple with Ben, where a couple of seasons ago he’d have just walked off and we’d be left wondering where he took him and what he did with him. I’ve always enjoyed the show no matter how long they left various mysteries out there, but this new economy of storytelling is pretty satisfying.

* Given the amount of superhero comics I read, this business about whether or not it’s right to kill Young Ben/let Young Ben die is the kind of thing I’ve thought about and talked about more than is perhaps healthy. Yet the show doesn’t dwell on it all that much–we’re clearly supposed to feel Jack is a dick for washing his hands of the affair, and we’re clearly supposed to think Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate are doing the right thing by trying to save his life, even if that means he’s going to make their lives a living hell 30 years later and murder dozens of people some time before that. The thing that’s tricky about this sort of story is that while the normal, real-world concept of preemptive strikes involves a degree of uncertainty, time-travelers or clairvoyants or whatever actually know what will happen if they don’t make their move. Sure, it’s cold-blooded to shoot a 12-year-old or leave him to die on an operating table, but it’s also cold-blooded to condemn a bunch of hippie scientists in jumpsuits to an agonizing death by chemical weapons–not to mention Ana-Lucia, Libby, the redshirts, everyone on the freighter, etc. When I hear commercials for that Wanted movie say “Kill one, save one thousand” I want to kill myself, but here it’s a more ethically dicey situation.

* Do you think we’ll ever see that stewardess who joined the Others again? Or the kids? That was kind of a big deal, wasn’t it? That image of the Others dragging the teddy bear along?

* I liked it when they cut to commercial on the tableau of everyone in the house after Jack refused to help Young Ben the same way I liked it when they cut to commercial on Sawyer’s smiling face after Juliet helped Amy give birth to Aaron: It was something different in terms of what they cut to commercial on. Usually you get a close-up on someone who just said or did (usually said) something shocking, or a close-up on the shocked face of someone who just heard or saw (usually heard) the other person say or do (usually say) something shocking. In the case of the Sawyer Smiles cut, he was reacting to good news, which almost no one ever gets on this show. In the case of this tableau, it was a group reacting, in long shot, to the shocking statement. It just makes me happy when you get a little difference like that–it shows that the people who make the show are still alert and kicking.