Gus Gus – David

It always blew my mind a bit that Gus Gus, the Icelandic film and music collective responsible for perhaps my favorite record from my imaginary “Straight ’98” electronic music genre, Polydistortion, so quickly abandoned the sweeping, glacial tone of that album for earthy, sexy bangers like this one. It hails from their third bonafide album, Attention, a 2002 release that featured only four bandmembers instead of the previous (I believe) nine, and a brand new singer named, appropriately enough, Earth. It’s a much more techno-centric record than its two predecessors, Polydistortion and This Is Normal; I saw at least one of its songs on an electroclash compilation. So yeah, it’s fairly far removed in several different ways from the Gus Gus that made its first impression on me.

But it’s also a fabulous song. Early Gus Gus certainly did “celebratory”–cf. “Barry,” “Purple”–but never in such a directly sexy way. Obviously the killer element to this song, even more so than the buoyant beat or the big hands-in-the-air keyboard riff that functions as the chorus, is the lyric: “I still have last night in my body. I wish you were with me.” I think the sign of a great lyric is tackling a familiar concept from an unexpected direction–like a Looney Tunes character who sidesteps an oncoming freight train only to get hit by a falling anvil–and that opening line does exactly that. We’ve all thought “man, I had a great time last night!”, but phrasing it as “I still have last night in my body” makes that connection not just mental but physical, not just a leisurely reminiscence but an immediate, palpable link, indeed one that’s not quite within our control to sever. Better still, she could be using the phrase purely metaphorically, but the literal interpretation–involving any number of substances imbibed through any number of orifices, bless her heart–is just as plausible and far more tantalizing.

Now, a couple paragraphs ago I mentioned that Gus Gus’s shift to sexy was a rapid one. “David” came out five years and several major cultural and musical shifts after Polydistortion, so it doesn’t exactly make my case for me. “Starlovers,” from 1999’s This Is Normal, on the other hand…

Gus Gus – Starlovers

This right here is straight-up Straight ’98, and sexy as hell. In the album’s context, the song follows an even more explicitly raunchy number called “Teenage Sensation,” which is about exactly what you think it’s about. So here, when Daniel August sings “Love, God, and affection–you know exactly what it means, still you’re only in your teens,” we know exactly what it means too. The notion of sex as revival-tent spiritual revelation, a gateway to an eroticized relationship with creation itself–“You are in love with God, you are in love with stars, you are in love with something that will tell you who you are”–well, this is a wonderful, wonderful idea to explore when you’re 20 years old! Yet Gus Gus cleverly include a bit of old-time religion in their message: “They need love, they need God, they need guidance from above.” You may know exactly what it means, but someone has to teach you a bit about it. And that, too, is sexy, in a hot-for-teacher (Rabbi?) kinda way, and in an implicit youth-gone-wild way as well. Nowadays it makes me think of Gossip Girl.

Why bring all this up? Well, coincidentally, even as I’ve been revisiting music from this period over the past few days, I’ve also been talking and thinking a lot about Grant Morrison comics, and different critical approaches to them–positive ones, this time, rather than negative–and different critical approaches to art in general. One such approach seemingly shared by both many Morrison defenders and Morrison himself is a poptimism-inflected belief in the future as a locus of potentially unlimited positivity, and the consequent importance of valuing art to the degree that it supports that belief. As Morrison put it:

For me, Final Crisis is about the type of guilt-ridden, self-loathing stories we insist on telling ourselves and, especially, our children–about the damage those stories do and about the good they could do if we took more responsibility for the power and influence of our words….

People like superheroes, particularly in stressful times, because there are very few fictions left which offer up a utopian view of human nature and future possibility. I suspect that’s some part of the appeal. The superhero is a crude attempt to imagine what we all might become if we allowed our better natures to overcome our base instincts. If we are not a race of predatory monsters intent on murdering ourselves with toxins and famine and war, then the superhero is the last, best shot at imagining where we might be headed as a species. The superhero occupies a space in our imaginations where goodness and hope cannot be conquered and as such, seems to fill what I can only describe as a spiritual hole in secular times.

As I was reading things like this, I was listening to a kind of music that even at the time I thought of as “the music of the future,” the music that near-future science fiction of the late 20th century said we’d be listening to, digital music, soundscape music.

Suddenly, I realized that the time in my life during which this music emerged and took precedence for me was the time in my life that most closely resembled a Grant Morrison comic.

I attended Yale University from 1996-2000, after emerging from an all-boys Catholic high school. I was suddenly surrounded by many of the smartest, richest, best-looking people I’d ever met. My only responsibility was to find out what I was really interested in and learn as much about it as I could. At varying times my homework assignments included reading The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, analyzing the use of Tarot symbolism in Vertigo, watching Cries and Whispers, and creating a performance piece based on the duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader in Star Wars. My sex life was intense, even creative. I would get very, very stoned and watch Barton Fink or Little Big Man or listen to Sex Style or The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions. I used Yahoo! Search and Persian Kitty. I hosted a radio show, wrote a screenplay, performed sketch comedy at midnight to a packed house of inebriates. One night I watched David Cronenberg’s The Fly and David Lynch’s Eraserhead for the first time, back to back, starting at 2am; another night I listened to Pulp’s “Seductive Barry” on my discman while walking to a naked party. I was in love. Intellectualized glamour soundtracked by Massive Attack remixes permeated my every waking moment. It was a wonderful time.

But of course it was also an awful time, rife with emotional turmoil that rose almost to the point of abuse, of which I was both on the giving and receiving end. I drank Bud Light out of kegs and grain’n’grape out of pilfered punch dispensers. I thought and wrote some truly embarrassing things. (This has not changed.) I encountered/experienced/perpetrated snobbery, pretension, classism, intellectual coasting, moral turpitude, and soul-crushing loneliness. My house was so filthy that there’s a decent chance I literally caught a disease from it. (The doctors were never quite sure.) I realized that maybe I’d always feel unbelievably miserable and angry from time to time with no innate ability to stop myself from feeling that way, maybe that wasn’t just something that happened when you’re in ninth grade listening to Alice in Chains. And you know how I’m always talking about my fear of making mistakes that can never be fixed, of hurting people in ways you can never make up to them? Where do you think I got that fear, middle school?

My point, besides the fact that I am a beautiful and unique snowflake and no college student has ever loved and lost like I have, is that for four years I lived in the future, and it was both awesome and awful–just like the past, just like the present. That’s fine. That’s as it should be. Well, no it’s not, but it’s definitely as it is. And to me, that’s the most beautiful about Straight ’98 music. You have your “David”s, yeah. But you also have your “Is Jesus Your Pal?”s.

* The new Diamond minimum order cutoffs claim their second major artcomics casualty: Sammy Harkham has announced the cancellation of his short-lived series Crickets. If no other title but this and Or Else disappears, it’s still a grievous loss. My guess at this point? The alternative comic book is dead.

* Tom Neeley announces his next project, a book/album collaboration with Aaron Turner called The Wolf. So far, so scary:

* John Landis is suing Michael Jackson over profits from the “Thriller” video. My second Thriller news story of the week? How did that happen? (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Fun with close reading: Using a chase sequence from Jeff Smith’s Bone, Josiah Leighton dives deep into framing images, and how framing affects pacing.

* And then he picks apart that crazy Pat McEown quadruple-page spread from Dave Cooper’s Weasel #1. Oh, Dave Cooper’s Weasel. MISS U

* Slate’s James Parker reviews/explains Jaime Lowe’s Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB through the lens of spiritual autobiography–in the Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s case this means his relationship to the teachings of the Five Percent Nation/Nation of Gods and Earths, which is sort of like the Nation of Islam Meets Illuminatus! In so doing he looks at the Wu Tang Clan as worldbuilding project:

Dirty’s home in hip-hop was the Wu-Tang Clan, where–commercially speaking–NGE doctrine was part of the package, part of the plan. His cousin and fellow Five Percenter the RZA masterminded it on brooding solo walks around Staten Island, N.Y.: In order to conquer the world, Wu-Tang would have to be a world. Nine killer MCs pickled in late-night kung fu flicks, chess lore, Marvel comics, street life, weed cabbalism, and NGE slang eschatology–a hip-hop Middle Earth, with its own legends and grades of being. No other crew could match the sorcerous allure, the smoky Dungeons & Dragons vibe curling off those minimal Wu-Tang beats. “I lived in at least ten different projects,” wrote RZA in The Wu-Tang Manual, “and I got to see that the projects are a science project, in the same way that a prison is a science project. … And in comics, when a science project goes wrong, it produces monsters. Or superheroes.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates responds and elaborates:

Wu-Tang, to me, was what I always understood black geekdom to be. Karate flicks, Comic Books (but what about the Wonder Woman bracelet), cartoons (form like Voltron), wrestling (My style broke muthafuckin backs like Ken Patera) etc. They took all of that and then filtered through New York, and through the lense of urban black America, at large. It was a great time.

Indeed it was! Speaking as a white Ivy League suburbanite, I think the geek element, and the emphasis on worldbuilding even beyond the geek stuff, is why I maintain a connection with the Wu above and beyond any other hip hop acts. It really, really feels like a shared intellectual experience to me. (The closest anything else comes is Public Enemy growing up on Long Island.) But it’s also a really fun and enjoyable art project–the only other artists I can think of who fire up my imagination through sheer totality of vision and expanse of imagination the way the Wu Tang Clan does are the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, who were just as interested in worldbuilding via psychedelia + utter mastery of myriad songwriting traditions/mysticism + exploration and admixture of worldwide roots music respectively.

* Did that make any sense?

* Kiel Phegley lists his 10 Favorite Comics of 2008 that he read. I tell you, this year was the first where I even came close to feeling comfortable leaving off the “that I read” caveat, given that I read so many comics this year. (But there were a few that slipped through the cracks. so don’t feel bad if you drew one of them.)

* Dustin Harbin gives the business to The Prestige, which though not quite as stupid as director Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was indeed pretty stupid. Pretty, but pretty stupid.

* David Allison runs down his master plan for killing off his blog by beating it to death with posts about Grant Morrison and Jack Kirby comics. Or something.

* Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog has a preview of the Internet’s upcoming run writing Batman.

* Your horrifying news story of the day:

Traditional healers in Tanzania are defying a government ban announced on Friday, intended to stop the killings of people with albinism for ritual medicine.

A BBC correspondent has seen at least 10 healers working openly.

It comes days after the latest murder of an albino man in Tanzania brought the national death toll to at least 40 since mid-2007.

The killers reportedly sell albino body parts – including limbs, hair, skin and genitals – to witchdoctors.

–Via Bryan Alexander. I don’t know why, but this story reminds me of how I’ve long wondered why human breastmilk and semen aren’t treated as delicacies in highfalutin’ restaurants someplace. Maybe they are, I don’t know. The most dangerous cuisine, that sort of thing.

* If you are familiar with the horror film The Broken, chances are it’s for one of two reasons: 1) Sessy sessy star Lena Headey; 2) Awesome awesome poster featuring the bifurcated head of same. Naturally, the two new American posters for the film lose the powerful imagery and add in the fucking Horror Movie Font. Goddammit. (Good call, Jason Adams.)

* Becky Cloonan can sure draw a triceratops.

* Make sure to click over to Ryan Catbird’s site to see this gallery of Yes Studio album art for the band Maxïmo Park at full size. It’s really lovely.

* Lego Twin Peaks!

This is much, much funnier when it relies on accuracy for laffs than it does when it starts riffing, so you end up wishing it had stuck to the script the whole time. It also more or less ignores the Hornes and related characters and events. But still, in the words of Sheriff Harry S Truman, “Yeah.” (Via Matt Maxwell.)

This song is really a perfect example of a vaguely defined genre of music I mentally refer to as “Straight ’98.” Burbly, ice-blue but warm British dance music, trip-hop, moody actual hip-hop from the States–this is the stuff that soundtracked my life during college. The funny thing about this particular example is that even though the feelings engendered in me by listening to this music today are so tied to nostalgia (that’s not all it is, not by a longshot, but that’s a big part of it), the song itself is resolutely anti-nostalgic: “You say, ‘Think of the old days–we could have them back again.’ Well, I thought about the old days–they’d go bad like they did then.”

And yet the song is equally chilly on the prospects of the future: “The future of the future will still repeat today. Time goes fast and fades away…I’m not going home again. Tomorrow will never come.” This in particular is interesting to me because the promise of “the future” always seemed to me to be implicit in the technological wizardry of this kind of music.

So what’s left? The present. “It’s so bright tonight!” I think this could be seen as a message of live-for-the-moment clubland hedonism, but I rarely saw this kind of thing that way before and I definitely don’t see it that way now. To me, it’s resigned celebration of, or maybe celebratory resignation to, the idea that right now is all we really have, so we must take what pleasure comfort from it we can. “Do you see those cars, those lights? Do you see those roads, these skies?” We’re traveling, our points of departure and destination are perpetually out of reach, and all we can do is admire what’s outside our window right this moment. “Whatcha gonna do about me now?”

The video is gorgeous, too.

* Your must-read post of the day: The Groovy Age of Horror’s Curt Purcell close-reads the holy hell out of Josh Simmons’s wordless horror graphic novel House.

* Kevin Huizenga talks to Tom Spurgeon about his decision to cancel Or Else–the Diamond minimum order level change did play a part, sorta–and elaborates on his plans for the future.

* He never comes right out and says it, but Tor.com’s Lou Anders seems to have come up with one of the most unusual interpretations of Paul Pope’s Batman Year 100 I’ve come across yet.

* Wow, these Matt Kindt pages sure are pretty. (Via JK Parkin.)

(The actual song, by which I mean the two-minute ambient intro to the song, starts around the 45 second mark.)

If I were the Mayor of Music, all music would sound like this.

* I’ve read a lot of depressing comics-industry economic news stories lately, but I don’t think any of them even come close to touching this one.

* In much less depressing news, Michael Kupperman’s starting a blog, maybe? (Via Paul Hornschemeier.)

* More silver linings to possible comics-economics dark clouds: Kevin Huizenga has announced a new minicomic containing a story originally intended for his now-cancelled series Or Else.

* Ken Parille takes a close look at Chris Ware’s use of the red-circle leitmotif in Acme Novelty Library #19, my favorite comic of 2008. I did something similar in my own review.

* David Uzumeri does his level best to explain the cosmology of the DC Universe as revealed (“revealed”?) in Grant Morrison and Doug Mahnke’s Superman Beyond. I’m still a little unclear as to how this all jibes with the revived Anti-Monitor as seen in The Sinestro Corps War and kinda-sorta in the upcoming Blackest Night, part of the Geoff Johns Green Lantern run for which Morrison has expressed much admiration (so you know he probably does want them to jibe). (Via Douglas Wolk.)

* Christ Almighty, did Dr. Josef Mengele create a town full of Aryan twins in Brazil? (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* A Broadway musical based on Thriller? Sure, I’ll…well, actually, I’m not sure if I will eat it or not. If it’s just another one of those “here’s a greatest-hits package from a pop-rock artist with some feints in the direction of musical theater thrown in” deals, I’m not that interested. But I am on record as a huge proponent of the original John Landis “Thriller” videos effectiveness and importance as horror, so if they take things in that direction, you can sign me up. (Via Dread Central.)

* A Star Wars horror novel? Sure, I’ll…no, you know what? Pretty doubtful I’ll eat this one. I suppose this marks the emergence of the Star Wars Universe into full post-Silver Age maturity, where now you can do “Star Wars plus crime / horror / whatever” genre mixings a la Nu-Marvel, but I look at that cover and think “No way can this be good.” Prove me wrong? (Via Topless Robot.)

* I debated whether or not to blog about the horrible case of Kim De Gelder, a 20-year-old Belgian who entered a nursery and stabbed two babies and a caretaker to death. Now authorities are examining possible (though to my eyes dubious, at least given the evidence cited) links to the death of Heath Ledger, his performance as the Joker, and possibly The Crow as well, so it’s truly become my kind of story, God help me. God help us all, actually.

* I’m going to try not to end these things on down notes like that, at least not all the time, so here’s something that actually might cheer you up: 27 Comics Ben Morse Loves.

* Kevin Huizenga is calling it quits with his series Or Else, which is a bummer (even if I haven’t liked recent issues as much as I’ve liked older issues). It’s not clear if the decision is a personal/artistic one or a business/logistical one, but fortunately he says he’ll continue to put out comics (though he doesn’t reveal the details as to where exactly material intended for OE will wind up, if anyplace).

* This week’s House Next Door Battlestar Galactica review by Todd VanDerWerff really gets at everything I liked so much about the episode, from Ron Moore’s occasionally almost abstract shot choices to the emphasis on societal and psychological breakdown rather than plot movement.

* Meet Santiago Meza “The Stewmaker” Lopez, a Mexican man arrested for dissolving the bodies of 300 victims of a Tijuana druglord in acid.

* Fantagraphics’ Mike Baehr lists some of his favorite comics of 2008.

* Curt Purcell tips his hat to fellow horrorbloggers John Cozzoli and CRwM for their contributions to the horror blogosphere.

* Jog examines Let the Right One In and Synecdoche, New York.

* David Allison plunges deep into Gilbert Hernandez’s hardcore-porn Love & Rockets spinoff Birdland.

* Bill Sherman gives some thought to the morality of The Dark Knight.

* Wow, look how pretty old-school Adam Hughes art used to be!

* Here’s a lovely photo gallery of David Bowie from 1973 to 1976, during the tail end of which he was the best-looking man I’ve ever seen. (Via Sean B.)

This week I finished reading The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, a very fine collection of Robert E. Howard’s first 13 Conan stories presented unedited and in order of publication. Aside from some pretty inaccurate-to-the-actual-writing illustrations here and there, it was a wonderful way to be introduced to Howard’s writing and Conan’s world.

I’d imagine the criticisms I have of the stuff have been echoed by countless readers and critics across time. The stories can be repetitive, not only in terms of the basic “Conan shows up some place and kicks some ass” formula but also in terms of details. Here’s a great little summary of that sort of thing from Will Duquette:

And some of the plot elements are distressingly repetitive. In at least four different stories (and it might be five) Conan comes to an island on which he finds ruins made of a strange green stone which were built by some cosmically evil non-human elder race who worshipped a horrible demon who will return to cause Conan grave difficulty but over whom Conan will ultimately triumph. Sometimes the remnants of the cosmically evil non-human elder race still live among the ruins.

Now, if this were one single cosmically evil non-human elder race which left its markings scattered hither and yon across the globe, that would be one thing. But it’s quite clear that each story concerns a different cosmically evil non-human elder race, and that each went from extreme majesty and power to the control of this one single island, and then dwindled almost to nothing, only to be forgotten by time. I mean, really–how many cosmically evil elder races can one planet accommodate?

Also, while Howard takes a very dim view of the morality of pretty much everyone, including and often especially civilized white men, I think the African, Arab, and Jewish analogues come off looking particularly bad, as one sadly expects from American pulp writing of the time. And needless to say his take on gender relations is pretty benighted.

My biggest problem with the work, though, is the total lack of story-to-story continuity in terms of characters other than Conan. Though Howard’s Hyborian Age backdrop is vivid and engaging, the lack of meaningful, repeated interaction between Conan and other people makes it more or less impossible for us to gauge his growth or feel attached to him for any reason other than his awesomeness. Reading these stories reminded me of this long-ago Jon Hastings post comparing J.R.R. Tolkien unfavorably to Howard (read it, it’s fun), which focuses on Tolkien’s use of world-building and continuity as a weakness. I think that’s wrong for a lot of reasons that Jon dismisses, but this particular issue of making it harder to get to know and care about Conan as a person instead of just an avatar of coolness is probably where it’s wrongest.

All that being said, man, these stories are great! Vivid, crazily imaginative (“The Scarlet Citadel” is basically one amazing idea after another), and faster paced than I imagined writing of the era could be. The lack of continuity from story to story gives Howard license to stick Conan in any situation he pleases. In one story, he’s in the jungle with a leopard-skin loincloth. In another, he’s fighting Vikings in the land of the ice and snow. In another, he’s a pirate king. In another, he’s a thief. In another, he’s King of Hyborean-Age France. Basically, if it’s awesome, Howard can make Conan do it.

Moreover, Howard’s defenders often point out that Conan isn’t nearly the one-dimensional killing machine that later interpretations of the character in literature, comics, and film made him out to be, and that’s true: While he is certainly enthusiastic about fighting, fucking, and feeding, he frequently makes reference to how this is what he does in lieu of contemplating human life’s nature as fleeting and futile. He cracks gallows-humor jokes and drops decades-ahead-of-their-time action-movie one-liners (“Who dies next?” is my favorite), but he also reacts with genuine terror to many of the supernatural threats he faces, which is humanizing and endearing. (It often may not stop him from attacking these supernatural threats, but it’s clear that that’s because he simply doesn’t know what else to do.) It’s addictive, but it’s surprisingly satisfying, too.

SPOILER WARNING – LOOK OUT

* With the mythology-based guessing game finally out of the way, we have an episode that focuses entirely on the breakdown of both the body politic and people’s psyches in the face of calamity, which is exactly what I come to this show for. I thought it was a pretty magnificent episode.

* I gave some thought to how Felix’s sudden transformation into anti-Cylon extremist would play for people who didn’t watch the webisodes (which I won’t spoil for you if you haven’t seen them yet, but suffice it to say that they bear directly on this point and see them you should) and decided that it probably works fine thanks to Anders shooting his leg off last half-season. The show made sure to pay a lot of attention to that bone of contention (pun intended) during the episode, too.

* I’ve been waiting for an officer to lead a coup for a couple seasons now–I had myself convinced it was going to happen in the Season Three finale–so I’m pretty excited about this. I also love Tom Zarek as a character, so I’m excited about him playing a major role again–and also being crooked, which I think fits. He’s a natural revolutionary, not a natural politician. And hey, nice callback with the first big mutiny taking place on the Tylium ship, or as I like to call it, Harlan County, Colonial Fleet.

* Baltar was doing his best Jim Jones, huh? Having watched an MSNBC documentary on Jonestown during its anniversary a couple months back, that’s really all I could think of during that sequence. I hope the “cult of Gaius” storyline is headed somewhere at least that bleak. It always seemed a bit of a random development to me, to be honest, but in this episode I finally bought that Baltar has basically lost it and this is the result. Maybe the next Baltar-centric episode will reveal that he’s still the craven opportunist he’s always been and barely believes any of this stuff, I dunno. I wonder how his personal Six will feel about him giving the One True God the middle finger?

* Throw in plot points that necessitate envisioning both Nikki Clyne and Mary McDonnell having sex and you’ve got a winner!

* I’m not a big user of The Lost Internet since I don’t go in for hardcore theorizing, but I do enjoy Whitney Matheson’s “Best of the Comments” round-ups, which usually includes a few connections and callbacks I missed or theories I wish I’d come up with; I thought this week’s was a strong batch.

* I also really enjoy The House Next Door’s weekly recap/reviews, this season being handled by Todd VanDerWerff, who’s been ably tackling Battlestar Galactica as well. Again, I thought this week’s was a strong write-up.

* Speaking of BSG SciFi Wire talks to creator Ronald D. Moore about tonight’s episode–his directorial debut–and about the BSG prequel series Caprica and prequel TV movie Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. Interestingly, Moore says that he and his fellow writers are handling all the Cylon mysteries in BSG and won’t carry any of that into Caprica, which given both recent revelations and Caprica‘s storyline, “How did they create the Cylons?”, is rather curious.

* The Supreme Court has shot down the Child Online Protection Act, which if fully enforced would probably have had the effect of “protecting” a lot of consenting adults from “objectionable” content. It’s the kind of law that brings out the “sneer quotes” in everyone. I can’t decide if the last time I was this delighted by the demise of something inimical to free speech was when the Gordon Lee case was dropped or when Jesse Helms died. (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Spencer Ackerman runs down three areas where he’d like to see follow-up in terms of the Obama Administration’s crackdown on torture and other illegal and immoral practices regarding captives: Interrogation techniques that will remain classified and/or are a part of the problematic Appendix M of the Army field manual; how to determine whether or not countries we use for rendition torture or not; and how long the CIA is allowed to hold prisoners. To his list, per Rachel Maddow last night, I would add the question of the prison at Bagram, which has history of prisoner abuse similar to the more infamous Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay facilities.

* Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog tackles Grant Morrison and Doug Mahnke’s Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #2, and in so doing nails maybe the thing I like about Grant Morrison: “[Morrison] treats us like we’re grown-ups who know how lowercase-f fiction works.” I’ve never read a Grant Morrison comic that made me feel like he thought I was probably a little slow, or spent a lot of time apologizing for itself and laying out ground rules we can all follow. Morrison assumes we all came to play, as it were.

* As every nerd site on the Internet noted today, Monty Python DVD sales are supposedly up 23,000% thanks to Python’s new-ish YouTube channel . This is not an issue I’ve spent a ton of time thinking about because my own habits w/r/t DLing stuff for free and subsequently purchasing it are probably outside the norm, but personally I don’t think this actually says anything more about the overall viability of using free content as a booster for pay content than did comparable initiatives by Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails, because my hunch is that in all three cases the groups in question a) have insanely devoted self-reproducing fanbases that can be counted on to purchase things from them provided they know they exist; b) are really fucking good and create things worth paying for. Mainly I’m just happy people are buying Monty Python DVDs. (Via Topless Robot, my nerd site of choice.)

* Anders Nilsen and sea monsters: Two great tastes that taste great together.

* This is the only ticking time bomb scenario I believe in.

* Finally, Happy 3rd Birthday, Monster Brains!

In “Sean on dead tree” news, the latest issue of Maxim–boasting two different covers featuring swimsuit models Jamie Gunns and Sarah Mutch, and I swear I didn’t make those names up–features a piece I did on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. It explains the basic premise and plugs mainly the upcoming fifth volume Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe but also the currently-gathering-steam Edgar Wright film adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I hope you like it.

Meanwhile, issues of Marvel’s comic-book adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand continue to feature the pieces I’ve done on the book for Marvel.com, so be on the lookout for those, too.

Also, I’m a constant contributor to ToyFare magazine’s long-running, Robot Chicken-inspiring action-figure parody strip Twisted ToyFare Theater, as well as the occasional random gag or cool-thing plug. I have the vague impression that TTT has a reputation for just being “toys with word balloons spouting dick jokes”–heck, that’s what I myself believed. Then I read it and it turned out to be very, very sharp and funny, which I thought long before I had anything to do with it. I’ll be on a panel discussing the strip on the Saturday schedule for New York Comic Con–hope to see you there.

Finally, I still don’t have a copy of The Comics Journal #295, featuring my cover-story career-spanning interview with Brian K. Vaughan, but I’m told by reliable sources that it’s out there in a lot of places. Let me know what you think!

Before

After

* Good news on the torture front from the new administration…

President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

The orders, which would be the first steps in undoing detention policies of former President George W. Bush, would rewrite American rules for the detention of terrorism suspects. They would require an immediate review of the 245 detainees still held at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to determine if they should be transferred, released or prosecuted.

And the orders would bring to an end a Central Intelligence Agency program that kept terrorism suspects in secret custody for months or years, a practice that has brought fierce criticism from foreign governments and human rights activists. They will also prohibit the C.I.A. from using coercive interrogation methods, requiring the agency to follow the same rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects, government officials said.

…and from the majority of the American people:

A majority of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll oppose the use of torture in terrorism investigations, backing Barack Obama’s pledge that “under my administration, the United States does not torture.” But there’s an even split on whether he should investigate whether laws were broken in the way suspects were treated under the Bush administration. [It’s actually 50-47 in favor -STC]

Overall, 58 percent support the prohibition Obama declared before taking office, but there’s a wide gap across party lines: 71 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of independents in the poll said torture should never be used, but most Republicans, 55 percent, said there are cases in which the U.S. should consider using torture against terrorism suspects.

Note that last bit, because it perhaps explains the behavior of some GOP senators in the confirmation hearings for Attorney General-designate Eric Holder: They’re playing to their torture-enthusiast base.

* I oppose torture but not the Darwin Awards, so it’s a shame that this story about al-Qaeda operatives dying en masse of their own bubonic-plague experiments is most likely bullroar, since otherwise it would manage to be both horrifying and hilarious in one fell swoop. Either way, no word as to the presence of the Walkin’ Dude at or near the training camp. (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.)

* Bryan Alexander tracks the Onion’s pretty shockingly horrific Bush Administration send-off pieces from the past few months.

* Curt Purcell catches that that much-discussed piece by former Starbuck Dirk Benedict on the supposed awfulness of the current Battlestar Galactica actually dates back to May 2004, before all but the initial miniseries had aired. Benedict says a lot of things in the piece that are stupid and loathsome regardless of when he said them, but this does at least excuse some of his egregious misreadings and mischaracterizations of the show and its characters. It also makes the whole kerfuffle make more sense to me, since I recalled seeing Benedict happily chatting and smoking stogies with Katee “Stardoe” Sackhoff in a behind-the-scenes featurette on one of the BSG DVD sets. On the other hand, it speaks pretty poorly of either Benedict or the right-wing entertainment-ressentiment site Big Hollywood or both that they thought it appropriate to dredge the piece up and post it again.

* Legislators in the UK are moving to increase restrictions on drawn and computer-generated representations of children engaged in sexual conduct. This is a bad idea for reasons I’ve gone into before; it’s of a piece with Europe’s illiberal attitude and legal climate regarding unpleasant or controversial speech generally, but that doesn’t mean it can’t and doesn’t happen here, as the Christopher Handley case (going to trial February 2nd) demonstrates. The people and art and speech involved in all these cases may or may not be distasteful or even outrageous, but they are people and art and speech deserving of protection. Bad law is bad law. (Links via Tom Spurgeon, Kevin Melrose.)

* Newsarama’s Michael C. Lorah talks to David B. (in French AND English) about his dream-comic collection Nocturnal Conspiracies, one of my favorite books of 2008. (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Kurt Busiek politely explains the uses and abuses of shared-universe, continuity-based superhero storytelling to a largely skeptical audience of Noah Berlatsky. I really liked what he has to say here, which I don’t think will surprise those of you who’ve followed my recent explanations of my own approach to such comics. (Also via Dirk Deppey.)

* Shelf porn from my pal Ryan Penagos of Marvel.com! I’ve seen this in person, and it’s freaking impressive.

* Which is the most awesome part of this Hammer horror poster: the image, the title, or the tagline? U DECIDE!

* Finally, here’s rising altcomix star Jon Vermilyea’s video for Animal Collective’s “My Girls.”

SPOILER WARNING

* A lot to swallow. Maybe too much? Maybe they should have just done an hour? Not that I’m complaining, really, but it was a little hard to get a handle on any kind of “story unit” flow because it was two separate episodes crammed together rather than a two-hour premiere. The breakneck pace established now that we’ve done away with flashbacks and flashforwards and are doing all-plot episodes contributes to the feeling that we’re just seeing a lot of stuff happening.

* Last night I told a friend that I thought a lot fewer people were going to complain about the show dividing the cast this time than they did during the beginning of season three, because this time both halves of the story were so crazy and action-packed. But sure enough, there’s someone on my Tori Amos board complaining about how boring the Sayid and Hurley stuff is. You really can’t please everybody!

* My one beef/quibble/beefquibble with the time-travel storyline is that it would have been nice if, like, back in season two or something, we’d had maybe one random encounter between a character and a time-anomaly version of someone. Heck, even that same character, perhaps. I mean, maybe we HAVE, but it wasn’t anything obvious. I’m mentally comparing it to a scene from Savage Dragon where the Dragon suddenly flashes forward into a post-apocalyptic future, and his as-yet-unborn son wearing a space suit appears to him and says “Dad?”, and it wasn’t followed up on for literally YEARS. I’d like for something like that to have happened relating to the time-travel storyline much earlier in the show–something that really stuck out, like Libby showing up in Hurley’s asylum, but then they don’t explain it for season after season. Trying to shoehorn it in after the fact–as with Faraday’s meeting with Desmond, which Desmond had never been shown to remember until last night–doesn’t cut it.

* Now that I think about it, it seems reasonable to assume that the mysterious eye that peers out of Jacob’s cabin’s window the second time Locke goes to visit it is in fact Locke himself. So maybe I’ve got nothing to complain about. But that’s something we’ve all filed away in the “Jacob’s cabin is crazy” file, not the “time travel paradox” file. Also, I’m hearing people say that maybe the whispers are the sound of people elsewhere in the time stream, and that when Locke initially discovered the crashed plane he had a flash-vision of the actual crash and then inexplicable leg pain, which would seem to connect to his Billy Pilgrim routine last night, so there’s that stuff too, I suppose.

* It’s good to see Sun becoming a cold-hearted bastard because she’s always been a bit annoying and she’s always had that side to her personality. And I was pleasantly surprised to see her stick the knife in Kate over her “I’ll go get Jin” move on the freighter, which I had totally forgotten about but at the time was like “Way to go get Jin there, Freckles.”

* I liked seeing Ana Lucia, and I liked the shout-out to Libby and the unspoken remembrance of Eko and his brother with the plane crash (even though Locke’s mental associations with it would most likely be the death of Boone and Charlie’s heroin addiction, at least WE can remember Eko and his brother). I like it when the show acknowledges the existence of the non-Bernard Tailies and acts as though that whole storyline actually made a difference even though it really didn’t. I hate when external factors like negotiations with actors and scheduling conflicts and so on force changes on the storyline–the actor who played Eko not wanting to live in Hawaii anymore, for example, or the rumor that Libby and Ana Lucia’s DWIs hastened their departure. And I always assume that otherwise unexplained gaps in the story in terms of actors playing a part and then disappearing are related to such external concerns–the stewardess who joined the Others, the tribunal Other woman who the creators now claim died during the Others’ ill-fated attack on the beach camp even though we never saw her, why they’ve taken so long to follow up on Libby’s story, why Michelle Rodriguez didn’t show up again until now, why Eko hasn’t made any more cameos, whether Matthew Abbadon is now stuck in Fringe purgatory and won’t be coming back–and it drives me fucking nuts. So yeah, happy for all the Tail Section-related stuff last night.

* Always happy to see Rose and Bernard, too.

* Now that we’ve firmly established time travel as a phenomenon, who do we think are the Adam & Eve skeletons with the white and black stones that Jack and Kate discovered in the caves way back when? A friend of mine assumed it was whoever discovered them, since that would be the most poetically fitting thing. But the fact that it was Jack and Kate who discovered them makes that seem unlikely to me because a) I think the Sawyer/Kate couple will end up prevailing, not Jack/Kate; b) I’m not convinced that they’re gonna let their main characters die on the Island, whether through foul play or because they stay there voluntarily and die of old age or whatever. So who is it? Jack and Kate? Sawyer and Kate? Jack and Juliet? Desmond and Penny? Ben and his mysterious disappearing childhood girlfriend? Daniel and Redhead Woman whose name I can’t remember ever? Rose and Bernard?

* Do you think there are any mysteries they’re just not gonna get around to explaining by the end of the show? Like how they consigned the Numbers to that stupid ARG and are now just kind of pretending that was never a big deal?

* New Battlestar Galactica on Friday, new President Barack Obama on Tuesday, new Lost tonight…not a bad week, huh?

* Just how bad will Diamond’s new minimum order thresholds hurt the alternative comic book? Pretty bad, if you ask AdHouse’s Chris Pitzer; he elaborates here. The Beguiling’s Chris Butcher is even more pessimistic.

* My pal David Paggi lists his best comics of 2008 at Wizard’s Indie Jones blog. My list is here if you missed it in all the hubbub yesterday.

* Chris Mautner adds the very powerful, very well executed, very hard to read I Live Here to his list of the year’s most criminally ignored books.

* I think many potentially interesting questions in this two-part interview with writer Grant Morrison are phrased in such a way as to leech out any potential drama and disagreement, which is a shame, but still, it’s a two-part interview with Grant Morrison:

In recent years, we’ve seen the superhero as celebrity and as super-soldier, tool of the Military Industrial Complex. The coming wave is more escapist, more psychedelic in tone. The Hero home from the War. The superhero always mirrors the emotional needs of his audience, and comic book creators adapt—sometimes quite unconsciously—to provide the kind of protector and role model each age demands.

Does the zeitgeisty success of the new Animal Collective album (officially released on Inauguration Day, no less; listen to it at the link) vindicate this theory of the New Psychedelic Age? U DECIDE!

* Morrison also mentions upcoming Vertigo collaborations with Cameron Stewart (see below), Sean Murphy, and Camilla D’Errico.

* In the battle of the Battlestar stars, I’ll take Richard Hatch’s thoughtfulness over Dirk Benedict’s grotesque, ignorant, sexist, poorly observed and argued ressentiment anytime. Faceman, we hardly knew ye.

* I’m not easily offended, but see if you can figure out how this poster for some horror movie called Babysitter Wanted isn’t just about the most misogynistic thing you’ve seen since Dave Sim’s last letter column. It’s lazy and derivative, too! All in all, a pretty tremendous illustration of how the tools of the extreme really only work in very, very skilled hands.

* How about some sexy Bryan Lee O’Malley Kim & Ramona art to cleanse the palate?

* And do you wanna see BLO’M draw Kitty Pryde? Yeah you do.

* And what about Wonder Woman Covered by Robert Goodin? I thought so.

* And hey, I bet you a nice preview website for Hans Rickheit’s forthcoming Fantagraphics graphic novel The Squirrel Machine would hit the spot too, huh? (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Or perhaps you’d prefer some preview art for David Mazzuchelli’s forthcoming Pantheon graphic novel Asterios Polyp? (Looks like Dash Shaw, no?)

* Or maybe the cover and Previews solicit for Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s long-awaited Seaguy sequel is more to your taste? (Will there be a rainbow of Seaguy Corps?)

* Regardless, surely you can’t resist the “many faces of Rorschach” Watchmen T-shirt by Warren Hart! (Via Sean B.)

* And you can wash it all down with a mildly NSFW video for the new Antony & the Johnsons song “Epilepsy Is Dancing,” directed by the freaking Wachowski Brothers!

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more. Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. We are the keepers of this legacy.

–President Barack Obama