The past few months…

…have been a bitch and a half. This semester isn’t going as well as I had hoped. The sheer amount of work (reading, writing–fortunately, no arithmetic), coupled with things going on at work and at home, have made blogging fall way down on the list of priorities.

So, updates:

• I will try to blog more (for reals this time!). I even have a 75% compeleted post that has nothing to do with comics.

• I adopted another dog. He had been thrown off the back of a truck in rural Virginia, and they were scheduled to put him down because he had mange and a secondary skin infection. So, I drove home with this:

And now have this:

• Classic movie fans: A relatively hard-to-come-by film is airing on Turner Classic Movies Thursday, November 15th at 10PM on the East Coast: Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Just a friendly FYI.

• Comics! I haven’t been reading much–hell, most of my MoCCA pile is still untouched, and I stopped by the comics shop and picked up four issues of The Comics Journal that I had missed. I don’t expect to be talking about them much in the next few weeks, because…

• I signed up for National Novel Writing Month. I know, I know–I don’t have time to blog, so why would I have time to do this? The answer is–I don’t. And that’s kind of why I am doing it–it’s going to free me up from my “internal editor,” knowing that I have to get through 50,000 words in 30 days on top of everything else going on in my life. It officially kicked off today, and I started what I’m currently calling “The Critical Approach” on my lunchbreak. I didn’t meet my target wordcount for the day yet, but about 500 words in a half-hour (hey, I had to eat first) isn’t a bad start, I suppose.

If anyone’s curious, here’s what I tossed out:

Vijay Patel’s bodega hummed with the vibrations of coolers filled with soda, milk, and energy drinks. The tiny television behind the counter buzzed in a slightly higher tone–the poorly remanufactured off-brand set’s inner workings were audible even over the Sale of the Century remake WWOR was airing in the afternoons. The few other post-lunch customers weren’t talking either–not to themselves, and not to the other customers, either. And no one was speaking to the crazy brother with the gun; if they did that, he might stop pointing the gun at the back of my head and start pointing it at one of them.

Vijay loved shitty syndicated daytime game shows, which is why I swung by at 1PM instead of 2PM–I knew I’d get the regular discount if I didn’t interrupt Family Feud. Something about how it reminded him of the gambles he played, he told me once–moving to America, starting his first store, opening his new store outside of the Indian storefronts of what gets referred to in Jersey City as “Patel Street.” At least, that’s what I think he was saying–even though we’d shoot the shit as I drank his coffee and buy my Camel Lights, I usually only picked up about two-thirds of what he was saying. If his accent didn’t trip me up, whatever bit of candy he was gnawing at did. Still, I got the gist of it–any new venture, planned or not, is a gamble.

Vijay learned from his gambles, though. A few robberies left him shaken, and scared him enough to install one of those silent alarm systems that runs through the phone line and alerts the authorities. “Next time,” he told me, “none of those fucks are going to be getting off with any of my money again.” At least, that’s what I thought he had said–something like that, at least. The point was, he had a new system and he was dying to use it at the right time.

Vijay had been on the business end of a gun a few times, but not enough times, and definitely not enough times to know that this wasn’t the right time. This was the wrong time–the worst time. The brother was twitchy. Twitchy, big, and young—drugs, probably. And if he was big twitchy, and not scrawny little shit twitchy, it meant he wasn’t used to working on hype or dust or whatever the fuck he took before he walked in and pulled his piece out. It meant that he had narcotic-fueled anxiety on top of all the other anxieties that come when a stick up kid pulls a job.

It meant Vijay should not have given me that look, that cocky look someone gets when he pulls a straight flush on the river or the chance to land “quixotic” in Scrabble on the triple-word score. That “Don’t worry, Harris, my secret will save us all” look.

It meant Vijay should not have pushed that fucking button.

**************************************

Hopefully, this will give me reason to blog some more, despite not having time for comics, movies, or anything else, really.

It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you without a dope post to step to.

Thanks, Palette, for reminding me I’ve neglected this blog.

 For once, it’s not just laziness. I’ve had a rough month taking care of a sick old dog.  I think I have him to the point where he can be maintained, but it’s kind of gut-wrenching to know that, at best, I’ve got a year or two with him.

 So, I’m going to rectify that. 

 You know what I miss? INTERNERD DRAMA. Internerd drama is awesome. That’s maybe the thing I miss most about doing The Low Road. I was never Graeme McMillan, or anything, but I loved pointing out and mocking some of the crazy histrionics of the internerd in my own, special way. 

 I thought I grew out of it, actually.   I mean, blogging lightly about comics and classic film? Doesn’t lend itself to the real investment in the happenings of the blogosphere or the forum world or anything like that.  Plus, we’ve got Dick doing it awesomely.

Still, sometimes the drama touches on things I wanted to write about anyway.  This time, it’s turf warfare, a concept as old as, well, turf.  I found a thread on the Classics Forum at Comic Book Resources (arguably the least drama-filled comics subforum on the internerd, those classics cats).  In it, a poster points out an interesting comics-related web site  from Mr. Kitty he stumbled across: 

This website features some fascinating and hilarious material, assembled by one or more people who are both funny and highly knowledgeable about comics. Check it out today! 

However, Stupid Comics rubbed Scott Shaw! (of Oddball Comics) the wrong way:

Gosh, what a unique website. And jeepers, such a clever name, too. I wonder where these geniuses came up with the idea for “Stupid Comics” anyway?

Seriously, ODDBALL COMICS has already covered a lot of this material, and with much more depth, information and humor. (”Stupid Comics” numerous “fucks” and “Goddamns” don’t particularly enhance the commentary material either, in my opinion.) I’ve been doing my Oddball Comics slideshow since around 1975 or so, probably long before the people behind “Stupid Comics” were even born or able to read. Sites like this and “Superdickery” strike me as being amateurish and generally scornful of comics.

So please consider me overwhelmingly underwhelmed.

You know, people express their passions in weird ways.  Some of us good-naturedly mock ourselves and the things we love.  And some of us become very proprietary about ideas we hold dear, evidently.  I’m in the former category–recovering Irish Catholic upbringing, and all of that–and Shaw! appears to be in the latter.  His latter comments in that thread demonstrate some very weird rhetorical tricks designed to make him appear to have the high ground, but fall flat.

 The big one that sticks with me is this:

Speaking of being on “the right track”…

– At SDCCI ‘07, I recently did my ODDBALL COMICS show to a SRO audience of over 1,000 people who were kept laughing throughout the performance.

– I’ve been doing variations on my ODDBALL COMICS show at conventions all over the country, spanning four decades.

– I’ve been writing my ODDBALL COMICS column for the Internet for over seven years, first here at Comic Book Resources (where it won a “Corey Award” for “Best Column”) and now on its own website.

– Kitchen Sink published a boxed set of my ODDBALL COMICS trading cards, which was one of the finalists for an Eisner Award for “Best Comics-Related Product”.

– Avalanche Press published my ODDBALL COMICS calendar.

– Last year, my live ODDBALL COMICS show had a very successful eight-week run at Hollywood’s ACME Comedy Theater.

“Pedantic and tiresome”? Looks like a lot of people would disagree with you, Dave.

On the other hand, as someone who has worked with a number of top Canadian entertainers (I produced and directed two animated SatAM TV series “starring” Martin Short and John Candy, THE COMPLETELY MENTAL MISADENTURES OF ED GRIMLEY and CAMP CANDY, as well as storyboarding a MacKENZIE BROTHERS Internet cartoon, all of which also featured voiceover performances of most of the legendary cast of SCTV), I think that I’m somewhat qualified to congratulate “Stupid Comics” for disproving that often-held theory that Canada’s chief export is comedic talent.

Where to start, where to start…

• Those 1,000 people? Likely older, reverential comics fans.  Let’s face it–humor falls along demographic lines more often than not. 
• The appeal to longevity doesn’t really work if the counterargument is that the method is tired and, therefore, not as funny or valuable as it once was.
• That “other people disagree” with the value of Oddball Comics rings hollow when people are disagreeing with Shaw! regarding the value of Stupid Comics.
• The closing back-handed compliment just, well, isn’t the way to go if the whole point of condemning the cats at Stupid Comics for being too snarky, is it?  It strikes me as kind of like saying to someone “Hey, your antisemitism offends me! Those kikes have feelings too!”

What really bothers me, though, is the claiming of turf.  An idea isn’t something one can really hold onto.  Hell, as I’ve written before, an idea in and of itself is not of any value until it’s executed well.  Here, we have two different sites, both taking inspiration from similar material, and executing it in different ways.  Oddball Comics isn’t my cup of tea.  Maybe it’s yours.  Enjoy your tea, or something, but I’m going to stick with this new flavor of coffee I just found at Stupid Comics.

EDIT: If you want to track the other side of the discussion, you can also view the thread at Shaw!’s forum.

…

Typing that exclamatian point hurts the inner prescriptivist grammarian I thought I had completely eradicated.

*************

 Unrelated: my friend James sent me this web-comic, and I just had to share it with everyone else.  It’s always nice to see people mocking the white heteronormativity that happens within American superhero comics–not because it’s something that needs saying, as I think most people recognize it, but because it’s fun to watch the people who vehemently disagree with it get all hot-and-bothered about it.

Someday, I will post actual content.

Today is not that day.

 • In today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, there’s an article about graphic novels created by Kaplan Inc. to help students with their SAT and ACT exams.

• I would probably be blogging more if my life wasn’t utter chaos and if I hadn’t reconnected with my Playstation 2 and, in particular, Def Jam: Vendetta and Def Jam: Fight for New York.  And I made a new friend:

It’s made out of Nerf.  I can throw it at things.  I think I’m in love.

…

Clearly, I’m not having the productive summer that I thought I would have.  I am hoping to finish this big long classic film post soonish, and to get some post-MoCCA reviews up.

• The new Savage Critic and you should, like, totally check it out and stuff.

• The other night, I got an e-mail saying I got into a class for the fall that was previously closed–lazy as always, I registered late.  It isn’t a particularly exciting class, but it is one that I need to graduate with my MA.  However, as I still work full time, I can really only spare the time to give two courses the attention they deserve, which leaves me with a bit of a quandry.

 So, here are the choices.  Two graduate courses enter.  One leaves.

 Topics in Literature as Genre: Modernism and Gender

This course will focus on modernism and gender in film and literature of the 1910s and ’20s. Secondary sources will include Cinema and Modernism by David Trotter (Blackwell, 2007) and The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, by Liz Conor (Indiana, 2004). Sections of the course will focus on the films of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, the literature of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, and women in relation to various aspects of popular and consumer culture during the decade. Besides these sources, we will utilize selected primary writings and additional web sites and resources. The expected visit of London filmmaker Georgina Starr and showing of her film Theda based on the career of screen vamp Theda Bara will fit right into our work. Students will write individual short essays, produce a class presentation, and write a major research paper. There will be a great variety of topics to chose from.

Topics in Postmodern Literature: New Media Literature

Literature has been directly engaged with technological change and its mediation of language for at least the duration of the modernist period-from telegraph, radio, magazine, newspaper and book typesetting, to the fax, T.V., personal computer, desktop publishing, networking, and digital multi-media production. In this course, I will be interested for us to consider the poetics of electronic literature (i.e. the text-oriented subset of new media) from experiential, aesthetic, theoretical, and historical perspectives. Some initial questions that may inform our study are:

• How do art makers integrate technological concepts and their social implications into art? (database, interactivity, algorhythm, open source, modularity)
• How does the saturation of the social world and the terms of specific media devices (cable T.V., video-game, mobile phone) inform literature?
• What are the important concepts, genre conventions, and “APIs” organizing the varied kinds of work within electronic literature: hypertext, net.art, e-poetry, vispo, blogs, wikis, podcasts?
• What reconfigurations to prior genre conventions and understanding of text objects can we observe? How does the “remediation” of classic genres transpire? Do multi-, hybrid- and inter- media overwhelm genre thinking?
• How can the tools of literary study be adapted to their reading? Where do new media leave the material book?
• Does the advent of “new media” constitute a paradigm shift, a fresh chapter, or only the illusion of literary change? To what degree is new technology enabling, determining, or limiting?
• What do we gain by considering new media from the perspective of electronic literature, rather than such disciplinary categories as performance, experimental music, or computer science?
• How is the writer and the activity of writing reconceptualized? (FLARF, singular genius vs. collaborative writing) How is the reader and the activity of reading/consuming reconceptualized? (navigate, launch, operate)

The semester will be choreographed to acquaint you with current digital practices, leading you toward becoming a fluent reader/viewer/user, while buttressing these engagements with research into the development of new media as a textual art, and the history of human/computer interaction. Our study themes will oscillate between close encounters with new media artifacts and more distanced reflections on theoretical and historical issues–supported by assigned critical readings, student-led panel presentations, collaborative online work, and student-curated exhibitions. We will communally work through a number of emerging new media “classics” and “foundational” critical texts with the aim of enabling students to develop a conceptual framework for producing review-quality critical writing about new media and introducing it into their teaching. In addition to electronic exhibits and reserve texts, we will work with such titles as: The New Media Reader (eds. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort), New Media Poetics (Morris and Swiss), and The Language of New Media (Manovich).

I’m torn.  On the one hand, the first course?  Right up my alley in terms of time period, content, and media.  On the other, the second course is an interesting field, one I think may be highly relevant in the future of humanities academia.

“Tastes bad!” “More filling!”

That long-ass entry?  Still in the drafts folder.  This entry isn’t.  It’s also probably skippable.

• Ed Piskor has just completed a new graphic novel with Harvey Pekar on the Beat Generation, and it looks awesome.  And people say MySpace is exclusively the domain of shitty bands and pedophiles.  Just today, MySpace helped me learn about Deep6 Studios, Ryan Dunlavy’s new website, and, um, that a girl my college roommate dated has seen 82 out of 245 movies on some list.

• Speaking of movies, Johanna steals my thunder.  If you haven’t seen Casablanca or The Philadelphia Story, this would be a good week to do it.  I’ll be watching Dark Passage for the first time, so I’m looking forward to that.  Also of note: The Awful Truth and Rashomon.

• More movie stuff: Matt at Better Late has posted his first review, covering Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.