I’m not the only one who’s uncomfortable with certain commercials.

I’m pretty much back to full-speed posting.

I really, really miss Barry White.

He was much more than a roly-poly punchline, you know. As anyone who’s really listened to his music can tell you, he truly earned the honorific of The Maestro, just as much as he deserved to be called The Walrus of Love. (God, what a great nickname. I wish I was The Walrus of Love, goo goo gajoob, baby.)

Of course, there’s that voice. It’s not just that it’s low, or sexy–he sings with such conviction and control that you could almost swear (as in “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Baby”) that he’s singing harmony with himself like some sort of sexed-up Tibetan monk. And those spoken-word sections–when he says “Now that I’m a man I’ve put away childish things,” you believe him.

His amazing ear for orchestral ambience helped bring gorgeous, complicated string sections out of the opera house and into the on-the-one funk arena. He had a compatriot in this regard with funk’s other great low-register loverman, Isaac Hayes, but where Ike conveyed turmoil and torment, Barry exuded confidence, warmth, and world-in-your-eyes (or thighs) passion. Funk’s later users of sexy strings, like P-Funk and Rick James, owe Barry a huge debt, as do every DJ and producer who’ve based hip-hop tracks around violins.

Barry also made the most persuasive case for disco I’ve ever heard. I vividly remember reading the liner notes to a friend’s copy of Barry’s greatest hits my sophomore year in college, in which Barry offered an eloquent apologia for the much-maligned dance genre. Disco, he argued, was not about the trendy fashion atrocities we’ve come to associate with it, but about people looking beautiful, feeling beautiful, listening to music that made them feel beautiful. After reading White’s words I felt instantly able to appreciate the genre for the fun-loving (and fun, and loving) music it’s bequeathed us, from K.C. and the Sunshine Band to Giorgio Moroder’s collaborations with Donna Summer to Chic to (I couldn’t believe it myself) the BeeGee’s disco stuff to, of course, Barry’s tunes themselves.

And what tunes they were! The titles alone speak volumes: “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Babe” (with the unforgettable “feels so good” opening), “Love’s Theme” (we used it as the entrance music for the wedding party at our reception), “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me” (featured in a seriously sexy scene in Spike Lee’s compelling, underrated Summer of Sam, it may be my favorite Barry jam). But beyond the greatest hits, there’s the proto-trip-hop epic “Your Love (So Good I Can Taste It)” the 12-minute bedroom-funk equivalent of “Stairway to Heaven” from Barry’s awesome record Is This Whatcha Wont? (Yes, that’s how he spells it–how cool is that?) Folks, words simply cannot describe how good this song is, as it transitions from an anticipatory string-laden opening to a downbeat foreplay-in-music-form spacey relentless groove to a full-throated climax (in every sense of the word). It’s a full-fledged journey deep into the cosmic groove. Please, please go buy this album at Amazon, and discover the joys of White’s art beyond the best-of comps and radio staples.

Man, he was good. In the Missus’s words, the world is a much less sexy place with him gone.

In the “I Love It When Assholes Are Hoist By Their Own Petard” Department, professional bigot Michael Savage has been fired from MSNBC (courtesy of Instapundit–the link, not the firing). The best part of it is that the meltdown for which he was fired was the result of internecine shock-jock warfare: He began shouting viciously homophobic obscenities at a fan of the sub-Opie-and-Anthony “Don & Mike Show.” Now if only we can get a caller to start repeating the word “Bababooey” the next time Ann Coulter is on Hannity & Colmes.

Apologies for the incredibly lame entry title, but the purpose of this post is to encourage you to do two things:

1) Go read this Pulse interview with Phoebe Gloeckner, the amazing writer and cartoonist behind The Diary of a Teenage Girl and an all-around awesome person.

2) Have a happy Fourth of July!

3) Read this elegantly and angrily written overview of the situation in Iraq by Victor Davis Hanson. (I still can’t get over the fact that I link to National Review Online, but Hanson’s a very different animal than, say, John Derbyshire. I also saw him talking about the Battle of Thermopylae (of Frank Miller’s 300 fame) on the Discovery Channel the other night, so that’s neat.)

4) Buy the stunning anthology of Christopher Hitchens’s Slate columns on Iraq, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. He gets into the highest dudgeon I’ve ever seen him get into in the book’s conclusion, aiming a furious j’accuse at Saddam enablers everywhere, from the first Bush administration to the current “peace” movement:

QUOTE: “Those twelve years [between Gulf Wars I & II] were eaten by the locusts. The trunk of the tree of Iraq as allowed to rot, and its branches to wither. And all the time, a huge and voracious maggot lay at the heart of the state. Trade turned into a racket, the market was monopolized by the Mafiosi, the sanctions screwed the poor and fattened the rich, and palaces with gold shit-houses were constructed to mock the slum dwellers and the conscripts. A class of lumpen, uneducated, resentful losers was bred. When the Great Leader wanted to be popular, as on the grand occasion of his last referendum, he declared amnesty of the thieves, rapists and murderers who were his natural constituency. (The political detainees stayed where they were, or are: It will take years for us to find and number all their graves.) To his very last day, the Maggot continued to divide and rule: to pump gangrene and pus into the society, disseminating lies and fear and junky religious propaganda. And there his bastard children were, when the opportunity for hectic destruction and saturnalia presented itself. If it is truly possible to be wise after the event, then I associate myself again with those who believe that the Saddam Hussein regime should have been deposed in 1991. There would have been some severe moments, but Iraq would now be twelve years into the process of nation-building (or rebuilding) and many unlived or blighted lives could have been lived in the risky atmosphere of self-determination.

“I stress the element of risk because it so often seemed to me, before the battle was joined, that many of its critics were demanding the impossible. Assure us of a painless victory, they said, and we might consider lending our support. Assure us, also, of an immaculate conception of the project, unspotted by any previous compromises and betrayals. Assure us above all that oil is an unmentionalbe bodily secretion, unfit for discussion in polite company. I grew impatient with this. As Frederick Douglass once phrased it, those who want liberty without a fight are asking for the beauty of the ocean without the roar of the storm. (It’s been put more terseley more recently: ‘No Justice–No Peace.’)”

This guy hates totalitarianism, and I mean hates it. And he has nothing but contempt for excuses for its perpetuation. Is there really any other way to live?

Happy Fourth, once again!

I was out shopping today and I saw a postcard of that famous picture of the sailor kissing some woman on the street after the end of World War II. I thought for a moment about everything that picture said about the situation those two people found themselves in. Years of indescribable horror, violence, sacrifice, and tragedy, and then, victory. Of course, things weren’t really over–decades of reconstruction and occupation would follow (and the latter bit still continues today)–but the joy these people felt at the successful completion of this horrific but necessary endeavor so moved them that they just started grabbin’ strangers and makin’ out. (Free love, two decades early?)

The sheer scope of atrocity that was World War II kind of helped put the endless stream of awfulness coming out of Iraq in perspective for me. Having been away from the Internet for a while I was getting all my news from the local paper and TV stations here in Colorado, and it’s all talk of “slipping into open revolt” and the like. And of course in the anti-war blogosphere (heck, even in its comics-related subsection–hi, Franklin! hi, Jim!) there’s barely restrained glee, not at the deaths of soldiers and Iraqi civilians, of course, but at the political ramifications of same for the Bush administration. There, it’s “the beginnings of a full-fledged guerilla campaign.”

But war is difficult. Actually, war is horrendously, mind-bogglingly awful. And compared to the horrendous, mind-boggling wars we’ve fought in the past, we’re actually still ahead of the game. The casualty level, both for American troops and Iraqi civilians, remains astonishingly low given the immensity of the action we’ve undertaken. The erosion of civil liberties in Ashcroft’s America (TM) during the So-Called War On “Terror” (c) is troubling, but also trifling compared to that under Presidents Nixon, Johnson, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Lincoln (to say nothing of the old-school from the early 18th century). Americans may be growing aware of the difficulty of the task at hand, but they’re not giving up on it, and neither is the military, and neither is the government–and neither, for that matter, are the majority of Iraqis. It’s not a civil war, it’s not massive daily uncontrollable rioting, it’s not the Tet Offensive–it’s the same kind of pointless vengeful bullshit that history’s losers perpetually engage in on their way down the chute.

What I’m saying is not that in a matter of months we’ll see sailors grabbing girls in front of the TRL studio in Times Square and getting their smooch on. This war is not World War II. But nor, in countless important ways, is it Vietnam. The bad news is still bad, and the deaths are still awful. But they are not in vain.

I’m proud to see U.S. troops deployed to countries that need them, particularly in neglected, impoverished, war-torn Africa (prouder still when I get the impression that the man sending them won’t shit his pants and pull them out after one rough firefight, unlike some presidents I could mention). But I can’t help but feel that the “invitation” extended to the U.S. by the UN to commit troops to Liberia wasn’t an almost solely politically motivated attempt to embarass the administration. Sending a small contingent of troops (too small to be tactically effective in any real way) to help keep the peace in a country that doesn’t have peace to keep and in which the U.S. has no economic, political, or security-based interests isn’t exactly a recipe for an auspicious military action. It looks like Bush is going to give it the OK, which like I said is actually pretty great. But the UN is well aware of its track record in “peace keeping” (please see Rwanda, Korea, and any nation ever discussed by Joe Sacco)–second in ignominy only to France’s–so this reads like a ploy to sucker the States into committing troops in a place where little palpable progress will be made (that is, if it’s the UN and not the U.S. that’s running the show) in order to prevent them from doing things elsewhere, 2,000 troops at a time.

(So naturally, Howard Dean’s all for it!)

Daredevil was a better movie than Spider-Man.

Yeah, I said it!

Since that’s not the kind of thing you can just blurt out in polite company, I’ll be elaborating at some point. Watch this space.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

I’m on vacation! In beautiful Colorado, to be exact, hence the lack of updates. I may be posting sporadically throughout the remainder of the week, though, so stick around.

As a reward for your loyalty, here’s a link to Amanda Collins’s MoCCA recap, and a bit of how she feels about Craig Thompson’s soon-to-be-smash-hit graphic novel Blankets. Enjoy!

Gosh, but Andrew Sullivan sure is good when he tears into the Taliban wing of the GOP. Check out this excoriation of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s deeply creepy comments made in the wake of Canada’s gay-marriage decision and the Supreme Court’s overturning of Texas’s anti-sodomy laws. It really is frightening how huge chunks of a major political party in the United States of America openly advocate the kind of all-pervasive, all-intrusive theocracy against which we currently are waging a massive unconvential war. The more Republicans like Frist and Santorum are allowed to take center stage, the bigger threat an openly social-liberal candidate like Howard Dean will pose to Team Bush in 2004.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love giant squids. Or octopi. Whatever.

Seriously, bigger than the St. Augustine octopus? It’s entirely appropriate to say that this discovery is HUGE.

Best quote from a drunk teacher at The Missus’s end-of-school-year faculty party:

“Loosen up! It’s the month of summer!”

I don’t care how much of a geek this makes me sound like: this is fricking awesome.

Don’t I, Jen Davis? Don’t I?

Haven’t seen it yet. Most people I know who saw it hated it. But NeilAlien liked it, and that’s endorsement enough for me!

Marvel’s nascent Epic imprint, as most comicsy folks know at this point, is purported to be the House of Ideas’ attempt to give newbie and up-and-coming writers and artists a crack at getting their work published by one of the biggest companies in the business. It’s a pretty good deal, but between the company’s fuzziness on what the status of creator-owned books would be, the kerfluffle over recruiting comics journalists as potential writers, the apparently heavier editorial hand being used on the books than was advertised, and general antipathy to the current Marvel regime, the move has generated a surprising amount of animosity in some quarters. The snarkiest among the comics punditosphere have speculated that, what with the volume of pitches an open call for submissions is sure to generate, it’s all some sort of Machiavellian plan to overwhelm rival companies’ editorial and submissions departments with the slightly retooled rejects that are likely to come their way once the rejection notices start getting sent out from Marvel HQ.

Well, once company appears to have quietly headed the stampede off at the pass by creating its own open-call system. While reading the latest issue of Hellboy’s Weird Tales from Dark Horse Comics, I noticed a full page ad featuring DH publisher Mike Richardson in Uncle Sam regalia, informing us all that we’re wanted to write, draw, or otherwise do somethin’ for the Dark Horse army. The ad directs prospective talent to this “new recruits” page, which spells out the submission guidelines for the DH cattle call. Unlike Epic, Dark Horse is asking that submissions have their team essentially completed, i.e. writers and artists must submit in tandem. They’re also looking for more than just a first-issue or “pilot” script, which is what Epic claims is sufficient for full consideration; they want ten finished, consecutive pages of art, the full script from which those pages originated, and tight plotting outlines for the remainder of the storyline. But other than that, DH offers far fewer storytelling caveats than Epic, which essentially encouraged talent to revamp existing Marvel characters in a very specific, origin-oriented, chronologically-told fashion (and to a certain extent discouraged them from trying anything else). No guidelines are given for the type of story the company’s looking for, which could mean a crop of genuinely creator-owned new titles might result from the program.

One of the most enticing aspects of Dark Horse’s program is their guarantee that, provided their instructions are followed to the letter, every single submission will be personally evaluated by head honcho Mike Richardson. Like Bill Jemas at Marvel, Richardson is the buck-stops-here guy at his company, and decisions are ultimately his to make. By bypassing Dark Horse editorial (not to mention DH’s frustrating “next, please” portfolio reviews at conventions), this process can help weed out a lot of contradictory advice to writers and artists and save people on both sides of the equation a lot of wasted time. Of course, the flipside is that Richardson, like Jemas, is a busy man, and may not be able to devote the right level of attention to the stories and art that end up on his desk.

It will be interesting to see what kind of projects stem from this initiative versus those in the Epic camp. It’ll be equally interesting to see how other big companies–particulary DC, home of the now-notorious post-lawsuit “no unsolicited submissions from anyone, period” policy–react.

I mentioned Craig Thompson’s massive autobiographical graphic novel Blankets in my MoCCA recap the other day. The book isn’t even officially out yet and it’s already the subject of much speculation and controversy. Part of this is due to the rapturous reception Thompson’s debut book, Goodbye, Chunky Rice, received. Some people felt it didn’t deserve the ecstatic praise people were heaping on it, so it was the victim of a backlash (one that, even if you agree with its contention that the book wasn’t a masterpiece, was just as excessive as its adherents were saying the praise they were reacting against was). (Whoa, how’s that for syntax?) Another part of the trepidation is due to a general antipathy to teen-angst autobio, which many feel is just as unnecessarily dominant in the alternative-comics sphere as superheroes are in the mainstream comics world. I myself still haven’t read the book, but I admit that certain previews and a few flip-throughs leave me wary.

Not The Missus, however. After seeing it on the kitchen table, she opened to a random spot in the book and was immediately enthralled. She read the whole thing yesterday, before I’d even gotten a chance to read it myself. She happens to relate to its source material quite a bit, having grown up, as Thompson did, in a devoutly evangelical Christian household, and because she had a long-distance letter-writing romance just like Thompson’s (with me, actually). But clearly the book pulled her right in and compelled her to plow through all 600-odd pages, which believe me is a rare thing for a comic to achieve with my wife. This might well be the breakthrough book some people are predicting it’ll be.

I went to The Missus’s end-of-the-year faculty party yesterday, and holy shit, people, teachers effing throw down. Ass-grabbing, crotch-grabbing, vodka shots, married people grinding non-spouses on the dance floor, pouring beer from a story above into a waiting teacher’s open mouth–I was almost waiting for Andrew W.K. to drive a motorcycle out of a twenty-foot cake with three hundred roman candles burning on it. And I can tell you one thing–she ain’t never going to one of these things alone, no siree bob.

Well, I’ve gotten a grumpy email from an underground comix luminary. I’ve arrived!

My blog item about a recent anti-war cartoon in Reason magazine by legendary Hate author Peter Bagge was referenced in this Comics Journal messboard thread, which led Peter to defend his work both there and in a couple of email messages to me.

Taking issue with my comment that he appears to blame the woes of the world on WalMart shoppers, Peter pointed me to this cartoon, where he cops to being a mall shopper himself.

I stand corrected. But then on the message board thread about the strip, Peter said:

QUOTE: “I also don’t know how I can NOT portray average Americans as anything other than dunderheads when most of us believe that Saddam used chemical on our troops, that WMDs WERE found, and that Iraqis took part in 9/11, even though no one in the government or the mainstream media has even SUGGESTED any of the above!…We’ve become such a pathetic and horrible nation of people that it’s gone way BEYOND ‘funny.'”

I certainly share his confusion and disgust about those kinds of poll results (9/11? Huh??), but it just seems like a lapse of emotion over logic to leap from there into general misanthropy about “average Americans.” I may have gotten Peter’s motive for attacking them wrong–he likes WalMart, they like WalMart, it’s all water under the bridge–but I feel I accurately characterized his overall feelings about them.

In a subsequent email, Peter defended the character he depicted in the strip by saying:

QUOTE: “I don’t see how what I wrote applies to any specific economic class, or any specific group of Americans. That’s why I drew a wide variety of people, even if you and others still denigrated all of them as ‘stereotypes.’ I was targeting the majority of the American public who DO believe in all these aspects of the Iraq war that either aren’t true at all or that I find morally reprehensible.”

I definitely got that last part, but I still feel that Peter employed the different “types” he drew as representative of their peer groups. And hey, fine–there’s nothing wrong with stereotype (call it “caricature,” it’s a less loaded term) in satire. I just think it conveyed a sort of anti-middle class/Middle American bias that thwarted the political efficacy of the cartoon, regardless of whether this was the cartoonist’s intent. (While we’re on the subject of political cartooning, Tom Tomorrow” does a pretty good job of skewering the American attitudes he feels deserve skewering without using pictorial stereotypes, due to his effective use of clip-art style generic, uh, “peoploids.”)

Finally, Peter took issue with my rhetoric a bit, saying it was “high school” of me to say his own outlook was “tedious in high school.” To which I can only reply, I know you are, but what am I? In all seriousness, I wasn’t dissing him as immature (he’s obviously a sophisticated guy, but at any rate, what’s so bad about being like a high schooler anyway?), just saying I outgrew way back in the day the outlook he seemed to be espousing. But I think my big rhetorical mistake was saying “YOU can’t help but feel that” Peter was attacking Middle America, not “I can’t help but feel” that way. It’s me writing this thing, after all, and it’s presumptuous and dopey to speak for the general “you.” So I’ll take a hit on that one, no problem.

All that being said, what I take from this is that this Internet thing has its pros and cons. I think Peter thought I was being a much bigger jerk than I really was, but since he doesn’t know me, how could he judge? But on the plus side, I had a one-to-one debate with Peter Freaking Bagge. And I think (cheesy after school special music GO!) we both learned something about the effects of his comic strip. And he was such a cool guy about it that he let me post quotes from his emails on my freaking website. Three cheers for fighting about politics and comics on the World Wide Web!