Anyone who comes around here has probably noticed I haven't done much with the place in quite some time.  Not sure what to say, but I guess we'll find out if I have anything to say. 

For one thing, I've come to describe my relationship with this here social networking tool as a passionate affair.  It burned hot for a short time and then the thrill was gone.  I can't put my finger on exactly why or where the thrill went, but I know that the voyeur culture of MySpace played a big part.  Somewhere in between turning down friend requests from 21 year old girls from ", United States" who had hot pics that MySpace deleted and noticing that only two or three people engaged in actual dialogue around my stuff (and I realize I'm guilty of falling prey to that phenomena as well - and also extremely grateful to those two or three people) - I just began to question the point of it all.  If this is another place where people can just spout of on whatever they think without there being any back & forth...well, I can get that lots of places, and just keep an old fashioned journal.

The other thing is that I can be very anal/perfectionist when it comes to writing.  Most of the posts in this blog took me three+ hours to research, draft, edit, gussy up with my nascent html skills, etc.  The universe & my life haven't aligned to give me that sort of time or energy lately, and on rare occassions where they have, my disillusionment with the notion that this is anything but a new marketing tool removed the motivation to spend the time here.

So, that's that.  I'm not shuttering the place or anything.  Thanks again to my two or three regulars, and to anyone who stumbles by here, click around the main profile page and the friends list.  There are cool people, artists, causes & music to be found, to be sure.  And, who knows?  I could be back with the volume cranked to 11 in the future.

I'll leave you with something that serves as a tribute to my favorite (and one of the wackest & coolest) of Kirby & Lee's creations, and a little embedded html experiment...


"Galactus Needs a Drink"


"Galactus is a Devourer"

That's what I call 'em.  Or rat fuckers.  But I thought the Money Changers thing sounded more metaphor-like and writerly.

Who am I bitching & moaning about now?  If you've read around the blog or browsed through the friends list, you've probably figured out that I hold corporate media in a special kind of contempt.  I'd rank their blend of salesmanship, censorship, sensationalism, distraction and distortion as one of the top five, maybe top three, things plaguing our world today.

Right now, I'm specifically hacked off about the proposed postage rate increases for periodicals.  What postage rate increases?  I'm a little sketchy on the details myself, because I can't seem to find any non-biased reportage on it.  I sure as hell didn't see a trifling 1st Amendment issue getting covered by any major media outlets.  An online search only brings up the progressive organizations who brought it to my attention (Act for Change and Free Press), some Postal Service PR and a smattering of old policy papers.

What I have been able to cobble together is that the Postal Board of Governors (are these Governors who have shown up packing at their State House and killed a bunch of co-workers?) have rejected a rate plan for flat mailings - catalogues and magazines - proposed by the Postal Service in favor of a plan proposed to them by...wait for it...Time fucking Warner.  I wonder who that plan might favor?  One of the details I can't dig up is how much the increase is, but multiple sources indicate that it will be based on shipping volume so that the more you mail the less you pay and vice-versa.  So, just as a for instance, mailings to subscribers of Time will cost less than, say, Mother Jones.  Even if the rate increase were across the board, a rag like People uses subscriptions as a loss leader - they give them away in order to say more people see the ads they sell, which is where they really make their money.  The Nation actually runs their magazine on subscription income.  Another rate increase (flat rate postage was increased 15% in 2000) will probably kill some existing non-big media publications and certainly prohibit many new ones from coming out.

In addition to my old friend the rage, this kicks a few things lose in the grey matter:

Did you know myspace doesn't have a blog category for books?  That tells you something...

Welcome back, ladies & germs.  Sorry for the hiatus.  Life & shit, ya know?  Before we begin, I'd like to announce that this here blog has its first reader that I don't work with (hey JDB3K!).  He specifically mentioned that he liked the political slant but wasn't so much into the pop culture stuff, so here's a post about comic books!  I'm self-destructive like that; it's just how s1rude rolls.  Fear not, I've got two socio-political ones cooking.  They just take more time & research...at least the way I do 'em.

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot lately about the production, publication & distribution of books, specifically of the comic variety.  That's because (shameless plug warning) the comic I'm a sometimes scripter, part-time production tech & all in business manager for has been sent to the printer and my comrades & I are anxiously awaiting our first self-financed shipment of books.  [DB8 Komiks is coming...you are not ready...open cranial doors and clear cortex decks...you have been warned]  In addition to the thought and work involved to get to this stage, I'm having a few issues with the printing company.  I'm not going to bad mouth anyone (yet), but my Irish is up about these kinds of things, and I'm not even Irish (the name fooled ya, dinit?).  So without further adieu, and hopefully less parenthetical asides, here are some mini-reviews of things I've read in the last couple of weeks that have editing issues which piss me off:

The Review:  This is an excellently fun OEL manga.  I'm not familiar with Brandon Graham, but he's got a creative mind, a nice line to his art, a bitchin' design aesthetic and a sense of humor that's right up my alley.  I'd say it has a general Scott Pilgrim-vibe to it, but I actually liked it better than any of the Scooter P volumes, of which I have enjoyed all three.  Maybe it's a generational thing: while Pilgrim is an early-20s rocker living in a video game, Joe, King City's protagonist, comes across as an older soul inhabiting a dystopian world.  Plus he has a Zen connection to a super-intelligent, magical cat.  And he's an ass man.  I can relate, capesh?  All that, with some interesting observations on life and even a small moral or two.  I would endorse this affordable little book for anyone, comics fan or no.
The Beef:  This is the smallest of the quibbles I'll be making in this post, and didn't really effect my enjoyment of the work.  In the fourth chapter, as Joe and his friend Pete are discussing Joe's training to be a "cat master", their dialogue balloons are reversed.  It's distracting, and is made worse by virtue of the fact that it comes during such an important piece of conversational exposition.  I guess I just know that if this was my story, one that was getting a major push from a big publishing concern like TokyoPop, I'd freak the fuck out if there was a screw-up like that.  Who knows, maybe Graham made the mistake himself.  I'd probably want to kick my own ass if it was me and that was the case.  Just proof-read, baby.

The Review:  Jay Faerber's Noble Causes is something I would only recommend to people who really like superheroes.  It doesn't just embrace its superhero roots, it gets down in the mud & rolls around with them, stopping only to clean out its trunks before it grabs you and drags you into the pit with it.  It, like Faerber's excellent Dynamo 5, is one of those ideas that seems so obvious you can't believe nobody came up with it before.  But nobody did, so you just have to enjoy the ride in Jay's wake.  The Nobles are like the Kennedys or the British royals, if they could shoot lasers out of their nipples or run faster than the speed of sound and shit.  And if you could watch their in-fighting on C-Span, instead of just having to catch gossip on tabloid shows.  If any of that sounds good to you, it's also really well executed by Faerber & his collaborators and you should check it out starting with Volume 1.
The Beef:  If you didn't get it from my bullshit above, this comic has twists and surprises galore.  These are a LARGE part of its charm.  Well, the introduction to Volume 2 is by some Hollywood producer cat named Rick Alexander.  And Alexander totally blows one of the book's big reveals!  In his intro!  Like before it happens!  This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but I loves me some introductions.  Prefaces, forewords...whatever you want to call it, I am there, dude.  So I was hacked off to have what would have been the story's best "ohnohedinit" moment given away by some muckety-muck I've never heard of.  Somebody tell Mr. Alexander not to do it again, or to stick to afterwords.  And for whoever let this volume go to press with the party-pooper intro?  Ten demerits.  And you have to wear this hat:

The Review:  I have always been a big fan of the X-Men character Rogue.  I'm talking well before Anna Paquin & Bryan Singer redefined her in the first film.  Truth be told, I had a little crush on her when I was just a wee nerdling - the Southern accent, that streak in her hair - ahem.  I was a weird kid.  Moving on then, I sought this out for a few reasons:  (1) the mildly embarrassing one I just mentioned, (2) I've always enjoyed the work of the team that's credited on the outside of this tome, writer Tony Bedard & penciller/artist Karl Moline and (3) I'm currently really enjoying Mike Carey's X-Men which features a team led by Rogue - and she has new powers, so geek-boy here has gots to know, "how did Rogue get them new powers?".  How did it work out for me?  Meh.  Bedard's story is completely serviceable and I think he could have really run with the character and interesting new background he establishes for her here, had the title not been canceled with the issue that wraps this volume.  There's a key plot point that hinges on a piece of X-minutia that I've always disliked: Rogue & Gambit, ill-fated lovers.  Hell, I've always hated Gambit, period.  I'd like to shove a kinetically charged Ace of Spades right up his cajun cornhole (I'm embarrassing myself again, aren't I?  And within parentheses, too.  Damnit!).  And if, like me, you're thinking, "Kewl!  Art by the guy who did Fray!", hold your horses.  It's predictably awesome in the spots where he inks himself, but the inker they  pair him with elsewhere does not mesh with his style at all, in my opinion.  And he doesn't even pencil the whole arc!  I'm slipping into my beef early, so I'll just wrap up by saying...it's okay.  Unless you're as big a Rogue fan as I am, you can probably pass.
The Beef:  Aside from the misleading advertising on the creative team, there's a page missing from the climactic scene in the final issue.  And it then mysteriously appears three pages later.  It isn't just flipped, or out of order, it's random.  I had to read the sequence twice to put everything in order and then a third time to make sure I understood what I'd read once I knew how it was supposed to flow!  That's too much effort for a straight superheroin' tale!  I also don't like the trend toward removing the single issue credits in collections, especially ones with multiple artists.  I'd like to know for sure when art teams change.  Eh, everyone involved in editing and designing this baby gets the gas face.

The following isn't mine. It comes from the folks at Progressive Democrats of America. But they did ask for it to be shared...

While considering myself progressive (how can you not want that classification?  We should start calling conservatives 'regressives'), I'm not a Democrat.  I have, on occasion, been a Clinton apologist, but that's a story for another time.  Wait - lost my train of thought.  Oh yeah.  I would like to side with the ha ha on these tidbits, and if they were delivered by Jon Stewart, I probably would.  But seeing the hypocrisy in black & white, and knowing what I do of the consequences, it's just...sad.  These people's assault on civil & human rights, on human lives, have set us back 50 years, at least.  Plus, I'm fucking tired of needing 30-40 bones to fill up my tank.

Anybody have a kleenex?

I found these stories on the front page of the online edition of my local paper this morning:

ITEM! A top financial aid administrator at the Johns Hopkins University was put on paid leave yesterday while the university investigates her ties to a student loan company that is at the center of a national probe by New York's attorney general, Hopkins officials said. Excuse my lack of surprise. Further excuse my general apathy. This news only serves as a reminder that the only thing that greases the wheels of higher education in this country is $$$. There are good people, people who care, at almost every college, university and trade school. But the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. And that its JHU, Columbia, USC and UT marginalizes it even more for me - these aren't schools that are realistic options for the majority of the kids I work with. In other words, poor minorities in public schools. The New America Foundation report offers some good suggestions for financial aid reform, but until we improve the quality of pre-college public education, nothing is going to help the hopeless.

ITEM! A state takeover and a freeze on city funds were among the sanctions proposed yesterday as elected officials at City Hall and the State House reacted to the disclosure that the Baltimore school system's $1.2 billion budget is riddled with errors. Lookee here. It's the proverbial cart that's before the above horse. I have nothing but ire for all involved in this story. The school system that can't do maths. The politicians who posture when something negative hits the news and then shift focus away from the city and back to whomever is offering the finest pocket lining once the storm has blown over. And the media, in this case the only daily paper in Mobtown not funded by a conservative zealot, for only reporting the bad news. The System tries to deflect attention by blaming the paper for subjective reporting, but come on. Even if the media reported anything positive, 95% of it would be driven by students and/or forces outside their offices. And the dirt on them could fill a paper or newscast by itself for weeks. In an Op-Ed piece in an earlier edition, the Greater Baltimore Council's President recalls that the School System has a "culture of complacency". Ding, ding, ding - show him what he's won! Every organization has its fair share of employees whose main job is preserving their job, but public ed has to rank up there with the IRS and DMV in being guilty of this sin. I can't even pretend I have an answer, or that there is a single one, but there is food for thought in our final...

ITEM! This afternoon, when the minister of education addresses an assemblage in Cape Town, her speech will air live to the nation. There's a lot more to this series of articles, but that sentence blew me the fuck away. Can you imagine a live address from the U.S. Secretary of Education airing on anything but C-Span Ocho? Can you name the U.S. Secretary of Education? Turns out I could, but only her last name, and I allegedly work in the field. (It's Margaret Spellings. Searching that also told me that, no matter how they spin it, she has no ed-related experience. She's one of Dubya's general policy makers. The rage is coming on strong again.) The South African minister of ed's address will deal with the results of the country-wide Matric exams, given to high school seniors to determine university eligibility, among other things. I loathe standardized tests from the SAT on down to our own free state MSAs, so I can't get behind that aspect of South African public education. And it certainly sounds as if they have their own school equity issues along income and race lines (sound familiar?). But I want to do some more research into their system, because there is a cultural value being placed on education there that we need to aspire to here. If I come up with anything, you'll read it here.

Until then: fight on, Fighters.

Used that new-fangled DVD technology to watch Babel tonight.  If you haven't seen it, check it out.  Not a perfect film, but I found it to be a pretty amazing piece of art.

It's the latest from the director-writer team of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu & Gulliermo Arriaga; their follow-up to amores perros and 21 Grams.  I was in no rush to see it (and probably wouldn't have watched it if not for a friend getting it from NetFlix) - while I loved the former, I found the latter to be overwrought and unintentionally silly.  As Babel was marketed in the "big Hollywood surefire award winner" way that 21 Grams was, as opposed to the grassroots indy buzz of amores perros, I figured I could take or leave it.  Wrong-o, movie boy.

If you've seen Grams or perros, or read much Raymond Carver, you're familiar with the narrative structure: seemingly disparate stories that all tie together in some way.  Cast-wise, it's all good.  Cate Blanchett is her usual amazing self, and Brad Pitt acquits himself well in one of his quieter performances.  The real standouts are the mostly unknown non-English speakers, especially Adriana Barraza as "illegal" nannie Amelia and Rinko Kikuchi as the deaf-mute Chieko.  The film is made by the writer & director, though.  You can tell they share the same vision; every theme explored in the screenplay is supported by the visuals and vice-versa.  And the themes, oh, the themes.  I will be thinking about this movie for weeks.  For the crickets out there in the audience (they're this blog's biggest fans, you know), I will probably expound on things this film has stirred in my brainspace later, so stay tuned.  Here's just a sampling from my first go-round:

How difficult it is to communicate with the people closest to you about the really important things.

How insane it is that we have borders in this world, given all the technology we have that renders them obsolete.  And the lunacy that comes in the wake of our "government's" attempts to enforce them.

The unbelievable amount of damage that can be done to human beings by just one of those stupid fucking guns.

How impossible it would be to feel connected to others if you're unable to experience the world as the majority of us do.

That, in a world where we do massive amounts of mental & physical violence to one another, we still find time to judge people when they act as the sexual beings we all are.

Really, watch it.  I'd love to hear what others think about the movie, what kind of things it shakes loose in them or if you think I'm batshit crazy and disagree with any/all of the above.

Movie boy out.

I come from a long line of crazy people.

That is all.

If you live where I live, you may have heard about a 17 year old, alternative public high school student named Kenny who died last week in an accident in remote West Virginia while on a school field trip.

I didn't know Kenny. I had seen him; I worked with juniors and seniors at the school occasionally in my job with the Baltimore Urban Debate League. But I didn't know him. Those unfamiliar with Baltimore Shitty and our public school system may at this point be asking, "Sean, he was 17. Wasn't he a junior or senior?"

No, Kenny was a sophomore. He was a kid whose 17 years were inundated with shit a lot of us don't have to deal with in 30. Placed in educational institutions whose primary purpose was not to nourish his soul or cultivate his mind, but to get him to score at a certain level on standardized tests, he was punished for failing to be motivated by such a lofty goal. I'm probably generalizing; as I said, I didn't know him. I don't know the details of what he was like to deal with in an overcrowded classroom, if he was affected by diagnosed or undiagnosed mental issues, or any of the myriad of hurdles that are all too common for the criminally underserved children in this country's so-called education system.

But what I do know is that he was cared about by the family that is Independence High School. Independence is an amazing thing - a true educational community. They take on students who have struggled in and usually been asked to leave traditional high schools. Eschewing a pre-set curriculum while still providing applicable experience in all subject areas, Independence is a place where students have a stake in their education and an opportunity to guide it, dissect it and live it. By all accounts, in this environment where he was valued, he was making progress, beginning to make decisions about the man he might have become.

Due to an accident, the kind of accident that will happen to kids, he's gone now. Thinking you're invincible (and given what Kenny had seen, he could probably make a pretty convincing argument), you test waters you shouldn't, act in possibly dangerous ways to get laughs from or appear tougher than your friends. The presence of adults, the cries of girls telling you to stop - they don't matter when you're 17. You're getting a reaction, and you never for a moment consider that tragedy might strike when you're surrounded by loved ones.

Sorry for the long-winded, no doubt overly prosaic narrative, but it came honestly and the backstory is necessary prelude to my point. See, what's being presented by the media, what's being discussed by politicians and civic leaders isn't the hope represented by Kenny's time at Independence, or what the only blood relative who cared enough to house him thought about his experience there. No, it's all incriminations, investigations and inquests. Something bad happened, and it has to be put out there in a way that can be easily processed by the masses who didn't pay one second of attention to Kenny's life and never knew about Independence until it became a convenient scapegoat and political lever. Kenny or any of his Independence family never made the front page of the Baltimore Sun or were ever on the 11 o'clock news until they fit their formula of tragedy & blame. And now a school that made its own way, tried the radical notion of asking its students what they wanted and put thought into how they learned, faces scrutiny & probably action of the kind that doesn't help them further their ideas. And that pisses me off.

So find out more about what really happened. You can read some thoughts put down by a co-worker of mine who spent a lot more time at the school (and who happens to be a forkliftologist - join the nation...) here, and see what some of our students think by browsing around here. Don't believe what corporate media tries to sell you. Find the good news, ask if you can help and spread the word. We mourn Kenny, but we act to make sure opportunistic, lazy and low people don't damage or dismantle something he loved. And for all the kids who don't have a community like Independence to call home at least part of the time.

That's what I do. Starting again tomorrow morning, after I partake of a little of the ole' escapist fiction. Getting pissed off about injustice tires my brain.

...and felt like doing a little of the typey-typing about them.

As they admit in the DVD extras on this set, the creatives behind Justice League Unlimited (and, in several cases, the animated DC Universe going back to Batman: The Animated Series) really didn't expect JLU Season 2 to exist. It shows a little - how do you top "Star-Crossed" (the finale of the Justice League series) and the Cadmus arc (JLU Season 1 and the creator's intended finale for the whole shebang)? The answer is that you don't, but that doesn't mean that this set isn't a whole lot of fun with some moments of genius.

The animation has grown in leaps & bounds (pun intended) since Batman, and the CGI that began to show up in JL: Season 2 is more seemlessly integrated than ever. The voice cast is astounding, even for the already impressive roster that has worked on Batman, Superman, Batman Beyond and earlier seasons of this show. Clancy Brown really steals the show as Luthor, though, especially with his laugh-out-loud performance in "The Great Brain Robbery". The writing is up to snuff, especially considering that they weren't shooting for the gravitas of the two previously mentioned Justice League finales. In addition to Brain Robbery, there is a lot of fun to be had in eps like "Flash & Substance", "Grudge Match" and the villain showcase "Alive!". And the two Hawkman shows, "Dead Reckoning", "Far From Home" and personal favorite "To Another Shore" excellently inject some pathos, develop characters and tie up some plot threads from the overall continuity of the universe.

The extras are slight but informative (which has become the norm for these WB releases), and worth it just to watch Mark Hammill geek out discussing Cadmus, a season he wasn't really involved in. Basically, if you've ever enjoyed any of the cartoons that lead up to this set, you'll enjoy this. The second best season of JLU is better than most animation out there.

This review is also on Amazon here, if you, you know, wanted to go and say how helpful it was to you. You can, of course, also purchase this fine product there.