Fuzzy Elf

And another news brief from the Department of Stupid Ways to Invalidate Stupid Plot Developements in Comic Books:

NightcrawlerNightcrawler never went to the seminary and got ordained as a priest. He only THOUGHT he went to the seminary and got ordained as a priest. It seems as if his mind was being tampered with by some crackpot anti-mutant religious organization. And since it apparently never REALLY came up in conversation ever with anyone, they all just found out and said, “Duh, you were never a priest, blue dude.”

On a similar note, I the only thing I really minded about X2 (which for the most oart I thought was lots of fun, with plenty of nods thrown in to the nerds of us out there who care about whether or not the government is after Franklin Richards) was Nightcrawler. The teleportation effects were great, but the character had nothing of what I always like about Nightcrawler the wiry, wise-cracking swashbuckler with the mischievous smile and furry skin, the one who always seemed curiously sexy. The movie’s nervous, Jesus-freaky version with the goony pants and the brandings instead of the fuzz just left me cold, when not cringing in dismay.

#928

This is my 928th blog entry (more or less there have been a number of guest writers, and I’ve deleted a few irrelevant technical announcements from former sites), having now combined into this one place all the posts ever made from all the blogs I’ve maintained for the last three-and-a-half years.

Phew!

I had to do a quite a bit of manual editing of all the stuff I wrote before I used Greymatter, which turned out to be more of a stroll down Memory Lane than a hassle. It was amazing to see how much has changed in my life over all that time. I started proper blogging a while after the dissolution of my last serious relationship and starting over again in my own place in East Williamsburg a time when I was still depressed, angry, tense, and eager to focus on something other than the difficulty of the previous few months. I wanted to sharpen my writing skills and put something in place that would make it easier for me to add new content to the website I’d been maintaining for a while. I wanted to tinker with some new tools that had just come out.

Since then, my weblogs have collected the records of my adventures, successes, my goofs, my failures, my insights, my cluelessness, and my changing attitudes. Crushes and boyfriends and friends have come and gone, some quite publicly and some with only the most obscure references. I’ve moved a few times, started and quit jobs a few times, gotten depressed and crawled back out of it, and grappled with the same damn insecurities over and over and over again. There have been a number of earth-shattering changes, too.

For all that’s happened and all that I’ve changed, I don’t really think that I’ve grappled with any more or less than anyone else. Whose life doesn’t go topsy-turvy once or twice between the ages of 28 and 32? Or during any other four-yean span, for that matter? It’s just weird to go and sift through all of that, and think about how publicly it all transpired (and also ponder the various gaps in the story, events and people I chose never to expose for one reason or another).

I’ve been thinking about how much energy has gone into all this writing over the years, and it made me stop kicking myself quite so hard for feeling like I never accomplish that much. Granted, it might have been nicer if I’d been paying attention to the effort that was underway so that I could have focused it and written an actual book or something, but I guess all the material is still here in case anyone makes me an offer.

All that stuff was also a good reminder about how my energy and my ability to articulate things ebbs and flows. Lately I’ve felt like I’ve barely been able to string two coherent words together. I’ve been almost completely incapable writing decent, thoughtful posts or e-mails, which has led to an enormous pile-up of overdue letters to people who’ve probably been offended by my silence. (It’s not for any lack of care, I swear, and I’m trying to catch up, just so you know.) I’ll get back in the saddle agian at some point I always seem to eventually. Life is a journey, right?

And thanks to everyone who had read this site, written for this site, or left any of the 2200 or so comments that have been collected (there would be more, but the demise of BlogVoices taught me my lesson about third-party comment services). Y’all are a huge reason this has all been worthwhile, and will hopefully continue to be a big part of life for years to come.

The Basement Blog

So what did your site look like when you first started out?

Unimaginable Hunger

I was getting ready to write all about how deeply engossed I became in Manor House this weekend, and what a fascinating experiment it was and how I think public television’s reality shows are in some ways more sinister than their commercial-televison counterparts and how I can’t shake the sound of Kenny the hall boy saying “She’s a right cracking bird” and stuff like that, but then I got completely distracted by this very funny, nerdy spoof: A Blog for Galactus, the devourer of worlds. Hee hee!

I still wanna write more about Manor House, though, and what a fascinating look it was at class relations that never quite existed the same way here in the United States. The closest equivalent we might have, which would be much more controversial television, would be Plantation House.

Top Ten Treats

I’m a sucker for work that slyly works in the pop culture heritage that I’ve absorbed throughout my life. There’s a lot of heavy-handed, ironic name-dropping of old TV shows and such out there, but that shit’s just weak. What I’m talking about is stuff that has its own story to tell, its own point to make, but shows a certain amount of playful reverence for its direct or indirect source material.

Writer Alan Moore has always been a particular favorite of mine for just this reason. When I first read The Watchmen years ago, it was like a boot to the head to encounter this mature look at the culture of superheroes that drew on the conceits of the genre I knew and examined them in a new light. It was critical and thoughtful and even playful, but most of all it showed a deep love of comics and comic-book culture.

Years later, his series Top Ten gave me another wallop. It wasn’t trying to reinvent the medium in quite the same way, but instead it created another world altogether, one based on the idea of a city where generations of costumed crimefighters lived and bred and thrived and crowded the place. It was a fun idea, and a fun story, and I loved it. It was a slower read than most comics, though, because Moore and the series’ co-creator Gene Ha packed every panel with so much detail of life in the city of Neopolis that every scene had to be analyzed. They populated the place with new characters, generic supertypes, and all matter of characters from decades worth of comics, movies, and TV, often recolored or recombined in any manner of subtle in-jokes for the nerd crowd. Bliss.

I loved it, but I’d forgotten about what a fun read it was until I grabbed the second volume yesterday and found myself giggling uncontrollably as I digested the artwork again. Here are a few blown-up details. How many characters can you identify?

Top Ten #1 Top Ten #2
Top Ten #3 Top Ten #4
Top Ten #5 Top Ten #6

High Anxiety

All week long, I’ve been filing away teeny little reminders of what I should write, but it’s been difficult to summon the will to compose lucid sentences during the little free time I’ve had. Italy was wonderful and rejuvenating and extraordinary (and I guess occasional stories will spill forth from time to time), but being back in the States for just a couple of days nipped all that in the bud. Once I had steady access to the media again, all that tranquility was replaced by dread and anxiety. I’m a little tanner, but it seems that I’ve become a fidgety, lethargic, nervous wreck.

Can you guess why? Yeah, I thought so.

I’m not suffering from some kind of liberal, pacifistic, anti-war reflex, though. I can whip myself into an indignant frenzy when I discuss my views on this situation, but in many respects my reaction is more intellectual than visceral. Though I’m grateful to be able to say this, I’m also not very proud to admit that I don’t really have a true sense of the scale of destruction that has been and will be occurring, one which can stir true empathy. That luxury, I think, is exactly what feeds into the thing that really is twisting me into such knots: the way our republic seems to be disintegrating around us, without much effective opposition.

Every day it’s getting worse, this feeling that we’re on a runaway train. The start of the attacks this week just feels like the part of that nightmare where we come around the bend toward the bridge that’s been washed out. We all knew it was there, but now we see it. I fiercely disagree with how our government has been been behaving. I see a concensus about Saddam Hussein being a thug, but I haven’t seen enough compelling arguments to justify what we’re doing about it. There’s a lot of manipulation, distortion of facts, empty rhetoric, and more hypocrisy than I can shake a stick at, but not enough substantial reasoning to convince me that our nation should be behaving this way. I hear proclamations of our commitment to liberty, to freedom, to compassion, but all I see is a reality that belies those things: censorship in the name of free speech, hostility in the name of peace, persecution in the name of liberty, and self-interest in the name of patriotism. I don’t really think any of this is new to America’s history, but it’s getting absurd. I’ve never felt so strongly that we’ve already lost too much ground to make things right again. Our democracy feels all topsy-turvy: are representatives don’t seem to represent us, our freedoms are selectively doled out and rigorously controlled, our corporations have more rights and privileges than our citizens. How do we keep letting this happen?

What the fuck, ya know? Is anyone ever going to convince us that the emperor has no clothes?

I keep saying “us” and “we” because despite all the disagreement that I know is out there, it still feels like discourse is dead. Everyone talks or shouts but no one ever listens. Even if we disagree how things are done, though, we’re still stuck in the same boat together, and it’s still sinking, even if a bunch of us keep trying to do something about it. We’re not really free because we’re all going down the drain together, whether we like it or not.

Feh. It’s making me crazy.

Unsettled

Things to say, apologies to make to many friends who have been neglected, many difficult things to admit about me treating myself like a precious little glass ornament that can’t withstand any pressure. I can take it I just haven’t wanted to, and I’ve used a vast array of excuses to justify my own laziness, my own unwillingness to juggle even a normal amount of work, social interaction, life in general. The details don’t necessarily matter: as it was pointed out to me (and as I’m forced to admit), I’ve developed an alarming tendency to use writing on the site as a substitute for interaction. That makes me feel shitty, and I hope I can correct my mistakes. I’ve done a poor job of showing a number of extraordinary people how big a piece of me thay really are.

If you’ve noticed, then I’m sorry. Bear with me it seems I still have more self-repair work to do than I’d noticed.

What Was It Like Before?

Trash Addict was reminiscing about his earliest online experiences, when the idea of communicating with strangers outside your usual sphere seemed so new and fascinating. Of course, it’s still quite fascinating, but I bet you take it for granted as much as I do, right? It all seems so matter-of-fact that there are so many ways to draw in words and pictures from the worl outside you, and forge relationships of one kind or another through a medium that offers both the gratification and the threat of immediacy, breadth, and a more malleable identity.

A friend and I were talking just the other day about what office jobs were like before the internet. We could hardly recall how we got through the day without switching to e-mail or news for a few minutes to break up the monotony and reach out past the workplace. I’ve had some kind of access since about 1994 (when I would use a telnet session from my desktop at the B.U. Office of Publications Production to read and write stuff with cryptic, elegant command-line tools like pine and lynx), so my memories are fuzzy, but I recall spans of time where I would just stare blanky ahead when there were no tasks at the moment, since there was nothing better to do with my concentration. Even then, I would wonder back to what it was like to work without a computer in front of me, which could at least provide some kind of distraction for a curious, developing nerdling. (When all else failed, I would fiddle around with the software and try to discover obscure little features to pass the time. Thankfully I was able to do even that, or I’d never have become the employable whiz-kid I’m considered to be today.)

On the flip side, though, I think about how grateful I am to have grown up and gone to school without much computer access, if just because I picked up the skills to make things with my hands, a process that gives me greater joy than any kind of electronic activity. Especially in the world of design, hand-skills and craftsmanship are like luxurious relics. If I hadn’t straddled the ages of physical and electronic production the way I did (My first job was laying out a 180-page book by pasting down type galleys onto mechanical boards and drawing FPO boxes with a ruler and a pen, but now I earn a living writing code that automatically typesets and assembles electronic data into complex books), I’m sure I would be a very different kind of designer today. I also think I’d be far less adept at understanding the relationship between tactile and virtual experiences.

Of course, my fondness for the tactile experience and the process of making things with my hands is part of the reason I loathe doing web design so much (not to mention why I design this site to look like it was made out of paper). I may keep up with it out of curiosity and an appreciation for good communication, but I don’t get the same kind of sensory gratification out of the end product with electronic stuff. My fingertips and my nose and even the more discerning powers of my eyes feel left out of the experience. Booooring. Pretty, maybe, but boring.

There’s something very magical to me about the way I draw on other parts of my mind when I make stuff, and something very magical about the way people hold and view and explore something physical. Even with the parts I prepare electronically, I do so with the end result of the tactile experience in mind. It’s a way of adding other layers to the whole process. In a way, there’s something very luxurious to that extra bit of care, even when the materials are modest. (Or, as my friend Jennifer caught me saying the other day, “It’s all about bein’ cheap and lookin’ fancy.”)

Hmmm, I seem to have wandered off my original point. Oh well more topics are just more bang for your buck.

Subway Cutbacks

Here’s a bit of disturbing news about riding NYC subways that’s being passed on by Stay Free magazine. Apparently, the MTA is planning to close a number of token booths through out the city to cut back on costs, with a long-term goal of eliminating even more and relying Metrocard access in most stations. Frankly, for a number of reasons summed up nicely in that link, that idea is completely crackers. The shadiest things I have ever seen or experienced in my 20 or so years riding the subways have almost alwats taken place around unmanned exits and entrances, especially with those floor-to-ceiling turnstiles that are so troublesome. I shudder at the thought of those kinds of weird, dangerous spaces increasing in number around the city.

There are going to be a number of public hearings addressing the propsed fare hikes, closures, and other cost-saving measures, but it also wouldn’t be such a bad idea to lodge a complaint or two while there’s still time.

Comic Books Fight AIDS

And while we’re on the subject of comics, I was just reading about an event called Comic Books Fight AIDS, being held on Decemeber 1 (World AIDS Day) at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital here in New York Goddamn City. Sounds nifty. It’s being co-produced by the New York City Comic Book Museum, which despite my nerdy background I never even knew about.

So who wants to go with me? I’m mildly curious to see Judd Winick to see if he can finally shed the taint of the Real World in my mind, but I’m very curious to see a documentary they’re showing called Comic Books and AIDS: What’s the Story?,a half-hour piece highlighting the comic book industry’s response to AIDS, and its usefulness as a tool in education, awareness and prevention.

For All the Nerds

Wonder WomanInto comics? Free tonight? There’s a very cool panel discussion at the Center tonight at 7:00 Drawing Closer: Queer Representations and the Comics:

Off Center and the Gay League present what promises to be an exciting, raucous forum on the queering of comics with many of the artists at the epicenter of this growing phenomenon. From Wonder Woman to the Riot Grrls, these bold and brash icons do much more than empower our youth. They forge queer identity and influence our aesthetics well beyond adolescence. You’re invited to this interactive forum with an eclectic group of artists including: cartoonist Jennifer Camper, creator of subGURLZ; Howard Cruse, creator of Stuck Rubbery Baby; Joan Hilty, editor at DC Comics; Phil Jimenez, writer and artist for Wonder Woman; and Ariel Schrag, artist of Potential and Likewise. $5 suggested donation.

Come check it out. It sounds nifty. Off Center is an ongoing series of events that my friend John has been putting together since the summer (“Off Center seeks to provide a forum for a variety of controversial ideas, opinions and experiences exploring what it means to be LBGT today.”), and they’ve been doing all kinds of good stuff like this that would be worth keeping an eye out for. If, you know, you like to think and stuff.