Favorite phrase: “il tient à cœur.” It means “it holds to the heart” but what it really means is “it sticks to the ribs.”
Archive for ‘fief’
Here are the main fixable problems with American life that I can see:
1. We take the single most genetically diverse human population on the planet and label them “black.”
2. We really, really want to believe in doctors.
3. We accept casual brutality for our own convenience.
And don’t get me started on people who think “all politicians are the same.” There are three types of people who say that; those who are so specialized and informed that they have lost track of regular life, the insane, and the terminally naive. “All politicians are the same” usually translates as, “I’m uninformed and angry.”
And how does the summer find you? Hazy, crazy days. Hopefully you can find some time to be lazy too.
The largest single demographic group in America is “people who try too hard.” It’s that damnable Puritan legacy. It is our largest single identifiable curse.
I’m really figuring this guy out. Read thirty books on something and you’ll be surprised how it pops into focus.
First thing; finding out that Kansas John Brown had invaded your town in 1859 would be a little bit like waking up one morning to find that Kony has invaded your town’s City Hall, kidnapped the mayor, and was now holed up downtown in a desperate gun battle with the police.
And I had to search for that metaphor, because there just aren’t that many famous outlaws these days. Another big change between then and today.
Also learning about my own research method and how they are flawed. For example; it is only now, thirty books in, that it has occurred to me that John Brown wrote a provisional Constitution for his freedom raiders…and maybe I should read it. It’s good. It’s not as good as the real Constitution, but that’s okay. Writing a political constitution is not, and should not be, a solo project.
Fact: Brown was NOT crazy. Definitely put that to rest. In fact, one of the harder parts of writing about him is preserving neutrality, which is necessary for the story to work. From the modern perspective, he’s almost perfectly heroic. In fact, the only way in which he wouldn’t fit into the modern world would be his overt reliance on the Bible. But in most ways, he was just a solid and sterling citizen who waited impatiently his whole life for a chance to do something important and when it arrived he took it. And it worked. He sparked the Civil War. At the cost of the lives of some of his children, but if there is one guy who did more to free the slaves than anybody it was Brown.
I can no longer accept the argument that the slaves were going to be freed eventually, unless you mean that things were so bad that a revolution was inevitable. From the slaves’ point of view, things had gotten steadily worse for thirty years and even before the Dred Scott decision they were about as bad as could be. What Dred Scott did was take everybody who had escaped from slavery and tossed them right back in the pot, which got the North involved, but it didn’t make things any worse in the South because how could it? The only thing left to do was to start chopping off hands, that’s about it.
I am frankly quite relieved that the 1860 crop of Americans decided to kill each other. As crappy as people can be today, imagine how crappy they were then. Wars have an interesting habit of killing a slightly larger percentage of the vicious and depraved than the innocent and ignorant, or at least I hope they do, and civil wars all the more so.
It certainly turns out that the people Brown executed in Kansas had it coming. Our species is probably better off without that sort of offspring.
The cultural consequences of Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes have been immense.
I don’t know if these consequences are good or bad, unless you’re Bill Watterson, then they’re definitely good. The rest of us have had to/gotten to see Calvin and Hobbes slowly retire from the scene, to become a dimly remembered childhood memory like Bambi.
And I’m not saying that’s bad.
OK, I am saying that’s bad. At the very least it’s not good.
At the end of the day, artists do not own the things they create. These things come from all of us, go to all of us. It’s okay if a businessman doesn’t know this, but an artist should.
And I’m sure that Watterson thought that waiting until the end of his life is soon enough. Culturally speaking, they can wait another fifty years or less before the only person stopping the licensing gets done and moves on, and then we can begin to interact with the symbols directly and personally again. Maybe it’s even good to have a myth/product that has a break in it.
It just so happens that we live in the lee of that break, the one moment between the 1980s and the end of time in which there is no Calvin & Hobbes.
So right now the full force of Western law and jurisprudence is bent to the impossible task of making sure no Calvin & Hobbes merch slips through. But that can’t be done, and merch has broken through at the weakest point of its particular myth.
These things could not be stopped. The symbol of defiance that resides in Calvin demanded a cultural expression, and because of societal pressures it occured within another, separate symbol of defiance.
Peeing; marking territory, yes. Also a symbol of harmless fun, of pranks, of the irrepressible nature of little boys. And this is not new. There have been statues and pictures of little boys mischievously peeing for millennia.
What’s it mean? It means that Calvin is related to mischievous peeing statues in the subconscious zeitgeist, that’s what it means. What’s that mean? I dunno.
I dig this fella:
He wrote some pissed-off treatises back in 1829 that sort of sounded a barbaric yawp against the racist excesses of Andrew Jackson’s era and then managed to die suddenly and mysteriously. Some say it was poison, some say it was tuberculosis, all I know for sure it was a heck of a coincidence.
As I read and read and read about the run-up to the Civil War I keep asking myself, what’s our slavery? What’s our modern crime that’s too big to be acknowledged? What’s the mistake that could tear our society apart? Because slavery isn’t the greatest evil in human history — human sacrifice, cannibalism, and incest are all even bigger taboos, so I assume they are things that societies tried and found to be even worse ideas than slavery, which makes slavery the fourth worst thing — but it was the greatest evil in that society, and they all knew it, and their failure to address it took about a hundred years to cause the single greatest die-off in American history. It wasn’t the only evil in that society — sexism, homophobia, and the rich preying on the poor were all quite present. But a society will split along its weakest point.
So what’s our weakest point?
I think it’s probably the willingness of the rich to murder the poor. That’s the problem that everybody knows is a problem but we’re not sure anything has to be done, it’s been going on like this for so long, and so what if it’s getting worse because it’s always been bad.
That’s exactly the reasoning used by people who stood by and did nothing for abolition, by the way.
We’re seeing this pop out everywhere in the last couple years. Most hopefully with Occupy, sure, but let’s just take the last few months.
Elliot Rodgers is emblematic of the rich person’s disdain for the poor, though his particular personality broke across his weakest point, which was misogyny. Remember that Rodgers was considered odd by his peers, not because of his murderous tendencies, but because of their specific expression. Read his manifesto; he knew plenty of Southern California psychopaths. But they didn’t like him, because he was misogynistic and odd.
Meanwhile, down in Brazil, they murdered poor people by the hundreds for the fucking World Cup. For a kid’s game. They gunned down innocent people because they were in the way of the rich people who wanted a nice place to play a kid’s game. And this is fairly normal.
If there’s a problem that we all know is a problem and keep hoping it will go away in spite of the fact that it’s getting worse and worse, it’s the rich versus the poor.
Poverty would actually not be so bad if it wasn’t for rich people fuckin’ with ya.
When you consider that “the environment” is where we ALL live and rich people are fucking up the environment far, far faster than the rest of us it becomes even more desperate. Global climate change is an assault by people with private planes and SUVs on every of us. 10% of the population is using 90% of the resources.
It’s always been that way, but it’s become the single biggest problem in the world. Before modern technology it didn’t matter as much to the global environment; who cares in Japan if Henry III King of England gets to eat a bigger drumstick? But with fracking and air pollution and global warming, excessive petrochemical consumption is going to kill us all, right now, and people are starting to notice.
I don’t want to call it class warfare, because that’s too close to the truth. Just because people are starting to figure it out doesn’t make it any safer.
I feel like I’ve gotten a little better at the internet lately. About got the hang of getting a thousand people to read something I write and post on this blog. That may not seem like much to some, like an impossibly huge number to others. In reality it’s on the very low end of Internet Anything, but it’s still sort of neat.
It’s hard to say stuff like this and be interesting, but I also know that we are all most interested in what we want to do ourselves (I know I am), so I know that at least some of the people reading this want to know “How do I build a barely successful blog?”
Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that entries like this have practically nothing to do with it. The writing that I do for each comic is more like practice than anything. It’s a text sketchbook.
Practically all my consistent readership seems to come from advertising (Project Wonderful is pretty great yo), internet friends that I’ve made over the years (I’m looking at you Facebook and Livejournal), and writing about True Detective. If you treat your blog something like a dinky newspaper, where you find things that people are interested in and sort of try to get there first, you will be rewarded with an extra significant digit worth of readers. I got lucky with True Detective because HBO bothered to make a show worth watching and it got popular enough that people besides me were interested. Believe me, most of the movies I want to write 25,000 words about are not exactly popular. No matter how many people would read about the Sopranos now, it’s nothing to how many would have in 2004. Lesson learned.
Sorry if all this is obvious. It was obvious to me, too. I just didn’t do anything about it. For years.
So on the principle that I should keep doing something because it worked and I liked doing it, I’ve substantially expanded my film-and-TV (they are the same thing to me) criticism. Write something interesting about TV, post it on reddit, enjoy the thousand extra readers; that’s how it’s done.
I’ve been lucky enough to find a secondary posting site — The TV Dudes. It’s a good site run by some friends of mine who have had some success on the web before, and I’m hoping that it will become a sort of global resource for serious TV criticism and also ludicrous TV criticism, which are my two favorite types. Since they’re doing me the favor of reprinting my articles and I sure do enjoy the secondary wave of hits that I get from them, I’m going to keep posting things here first and then sending them over to them for reposting. Maybe we can make a place that publishes the sort of articles that I want to read…
So, anyway, I’m all in on this thing. I’m going to keep watching good TV and trying to think of truly interesting things to say about it and publishing them here and there and we’ll see where this goes.
Dominic Postiglione aka Nick Post died. That’s pretty sad news. I barely knew him, but it was obvious that he was a monumentally important person to his friends and community.
He was the primary mover and shaker behind MCBA, a fantastic show in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and the proprietor of a wonderful store in St. Paul called The Source. The man did a lot for comics and comics artists.
I guess that includes me. Although I didn’t know him well, I liked him a lot and truly enjoyed our conversations. He was one of the most genuinely friendly and personable people I’ve met in comics, and there was nothing fake about him at all. He had a real knack for making people feel welcome and at home. It’s a big world in comics, for such a small world, and it’s easy to feel like you’re in the wrong place, pretending to be something you can never be. I never got that from him. He always made me feel like I belonged.
He wasn’t fake. He was a big, loud, opinionated, warm-hearted open-souled intelligent man who was as alive as anybody could be. And his health was obviously terrible. And he kept smoking cigarettes. And every time I saw him I thought, wow, there is not a healthy guy. But I was always glad to see him.
He will be sincerely missed.
I am a serious night owl. I stay up about thirty-six hours in a row on average every third day. Whether this is good or bad for me I cannot possibly say. I get some things done, some other things not done.
What this means to my long-term health I don’t know either. I feel extraordinarily healthy, but that’s probably because my diet has been extraordinarily good lately. I’ve become a believer in the power of proper diet, especially when combined with actual exercise. So I feel great!
Maybe I’ve stumbled onto/earned some sort of amazing proto-sleep schedule, where a random assortment of power naps and ten-hour-long comas allows me to maximize mental productivity while at the same time being available for any important event in my life. If you need somebody to pick you up from the airport at midnight or drop you off at four, I’m the guy and I can do it. I’ll either go to bed early to be up on time or I’ll just stay up later, either way is fine.
All in all, I like being the guy with the 24 + 1d20 hour sleep schedule.
A dialysis clinic is the grimmest vision of hell that I’ve ever seen. There is no more hopeless place that I have ever walked into. Even the intensive care unit has some hope that someday they will leave. Senior centers are not really that bad; they’re full of old people, hangin’ out with old people. But dialysis clinics are pure misery. These people have to go and sit in a cold room and suffer every other day for all the good times that they used to have. All the beers, all the sodas, all the parties. They all ended up there, with a needle in your arm and a sour stomach that never quite goes away.
And it can last for years. And they know it.
Treasure your kidneys, folks. You don’t want to know what it’s like to live without them.