Fast And Expensive Comments

Last night, on Person of Interest, John Rees dispatched the perp by driving his car into the guy's SUV & knocking it into him.

On Jeopardy, the two new contestants were named Walkenhorst and Lowmaster. Both females. The blonde woman who had dominated for the last week was toppled from her throne. There wasn't anything offensive about her per se, but I was greatly relieved that she was deposed. She seemed to get cockier every day in her little interviews with Alex, after the first break. She was getting to sort of like being on the television. She was kind of adapting horribly to it. Alex, of course, hates it when the contestants try to outshine him and he jealously, peevishly squashes their repartee when it sprouts. He tries to kill their jokes in the very act of birth. It's in his professional interest for the contestants to be stammering dullards with nothing worth saying. Usually they are. So he was happy to see the blonde go too I think.

Lowmaster won. How her reign shall be remembered by future generations, we cannot say.

On Life After Top Chef Mike Isabella shows up each week even though he is not one of the four featured chefs. I presume he was "put out" that he wasn't invited to be one of the featured chefs, so he furiously contrives to turn up at the filming of every episode as if by happenstance, and perfectly naturally wanders into shot.
This week he happened to turn up at Spike Mendelsohn's place on his moped while the cameras were there. "Oh, are you filming? I'll come back. I can go. You want me to stay? Okay I'll stay."
By the way, the title to this show must be ironic, because the overriding message behind this show is that there is no life after Top Chef. These fuckers are just diddling about while life goes past!
One day they'll be dead!

Idea for TV Show. Colicchio Versus Colameco: Who'd Win.

The pitch: "Who'd win in the crude, ugly slugfest that would obviously ensue when these two eminent chefs met."

On Chef Race: UK Versus US   Johnnie Mountain continues his inevitable apotheosis into Walter White.

Incidentally, did I not make the point several months ago that Mitt Romney looks like Don Draper? "Katty Kay" made the same point, belatedly, on Charlie Rose the other night, after the debate. I wish you could copyright little super-recognitions like that. There must be a way to make money out of super-recognition but I haven't figured it out yet if there is.

Boring Comics. Anything with the Savage Land or the Shi'Ar in it. That is to say, the X-Men. When Sauron (half-man, half-pteranosaur) flies into the shot it is time for us to retire discreetly. When the Starjammers come running dynamically into a room pointing their ray-guns (as they invariably do) it is time to respectfully retire from that same room -- by a different door -- methinks.

I was re-reading some old issues of Uncanny X-Men from about 1990 and you could almost see, as if  in "real time," the collapse and utter demise of Chris Claremont's writing style into incoherence. It's shocking to behold. He developed this sort of be-bopping free-association stream-of-consciousness that was alarming to the sensitive reader. By the end of his run, when I presume he was forcibly removed from the Marvel offices, he was writing sheer gibberish, talking in tongues. Like Pound with the so-called "China Cantos."

I was listening to Bonny Prince Billy's last album the other day, Wolfroy Goes to Town, hearing it meander blandly into little pockets of awfulness, and I remember thinking, "He's another one." Like Emerson to the Sphinx.

Also boring, the Wolverine story, "Weapon X." What actually happens in this story? It's a protracted surgical procedure with, so far as I can tell, bickering staff. I'd as lief watch Grey's Anatomy.

Jor-El: What's Wrong With a Prison?

It's very easy to become bored --- disheartened --- actually depressed -- when you are reading about the planet Krypton before it blew up. It's such dull stuff. And at the crux of this energetic maelstrom of dishwater, the eye of this vortex of dullness, is none other than Jor-El, the father of Superman.

Partially it is because we have read the origin story of Superman so many times that we would as lief eat a pincushion as read it once more. We wish these superficial marionettes conjured up before us like so much trivial vapour would vanish. And this is,  indeed, what generation after generation of writers has been striving -- and failing -- to accomplish, and will do so from now til time immemorial -- until, no doubt, the Earth itself blows up in a manner very like the planet Krypton.

Got to try to re-invest the Superman origin story with intrigue. Doomed to fail miserably.

That said, I was reading with, if not pleasure, then a sort of degree-zero lack of boredom, the DC limited series, World of Krypton (1979). This has some surprisingly nice art by Howard Chaykin -- nothing like his later, more characteristic style. It's unusual for an artist to wane as he develops, but that's what Howard Chaykin seems to have done. Mr. Damian Morgan of Brixton Town, England, tenderly loves Mr. Chaykin and has all his copies of American Flagg preserved in a shoebox decorated with ribbons and rosettes and Mr. Morgan will probably read these words with tears in his eyes. That is to be regretted.

In World of Krypton, anyway, all Jor-El's well-trod scientific endeavours and breakthroughs are explored in "loving detail" - the Phantom Zone, anti-gravity thrusters, etc.  One of his "brainwaves" however is in the field of shall we say criminal rehabilitation. It doesn't make sense to me.

Jor-El recommends that criminals should henceforth be placed in suspended animation and launched in bubbles into orbit in the planet Krypton's immediate atmosphere, where they can float above the planet until they have served out their time.

I fail to see the advantage in this. How exactly does it benefit the polis, sage Socrates? It seems downright eccentric to me -- perverse -- unwholesome. Need I point out what is obvious to the followers of one FRANK CASTLE's many adventures, that the essence of capital punishment is that it is punishing -- even if it is not always capital. If the malfeasant miscreants are in suspended animation (being brainwashed by rehabilitating subliminal mind-control tapes, incidentally -- but I shan't even pursue that rather tedious course of leftist media critique here) then they are not actually awake to appreciate the wrong that they have done. What's the point of time passing if you're asleep? It makes of the prisoners mere Rip Van Winkles. They're put in the bubbles and then they wake up and come out of the bubbles. It's like having your wisdom teeth extracted.

Also, floating about unconscious in solitary bubbles above Krypton's surface they are under no threat whatsoever from grisly prison rape, which is -- I naively thought -- a cornerstone of civilized society's deterrents against breaking the law. The threat of prison rape is, in fact, the single greatest deterrent against wrongdoing. Without it, the world will be in anarchy.

 The reason why Jor-El's crackpot scheme prevails is because of the alternative that is even more outre.  The solution offered by Jor-El's competitor, one "Tron-Et" (his real name, apparently), is the ingenious "Matter-Dissolver". This -- as you might imagine -- succinctly "eliminates the problem of the criminal." If Frank Castle was a denizen of Krypton ( -- idea for a Marvel/DC crossover event -- ) he would be a keen supporter of Tron-Et.

Or not: unfortunately this canny device is discredited in the end when it turns out that "Tron-Et" is a master criminal himself who wanted to kill all the criminal lackeys who worked for him, before they could be put in Jor-El's rehabilitator-capsules. He was frightened -- reasonably enough -- that they would emerge from Jor-El's bubbles older, wiser and rehabilitated, and that on emerging from the bubbles, and after only a rudimentary snack, they would go directly to the criminal courts and tell the judge that Tron-Et was a criminal kingpin.

Hence the "Matter-Dissolver."

Hence the success of Jor-El's prison-capsules.

I see that I have taken up quite enough of your time. And I can see from your faces, having read this far, that you agree with me entirely -- Krypton and Jor-El are very boring.

__________________________________________________________

AFTERTHOUGHT

[This afterthought is really only for you comics twerps. It occurs to me now, as I write this, that the origin story of Superman has some resemblances to the origin story of Galactus. Superman is the last survivor of a dying planet -- for Galactus it is a dying multiverse -- but the "core myth" (pardon the dreadful pun) is the same. It'd be like that story where it was intimated that the Phantom Stranger is actually the son of Superman and Wonder Woman.

As I said, dull dry stuff really which I very much regret having to say, but sometimes -- as an academic -- or as a lapsed academic I should say --  I have to "publish" my findings, dry and loathsome as they are, to add them to that infinitely expanding, pulsing pool of knowledge we call HUMAN CIVILIZATION! This pool of knowledge is, as Jor-El would no doubt agree, our only hope for the endurance of a sensitive society.

That and the vile spectre of the ever-present threat of prison rape.]

Boring Comics: Narratological Point.

It is a commonplace in Marvel comic books, particularly ones of a certain era, to waste several pages of the narrative with empty scenes showing the super heroes' battle abilities and finesse in generic battle scenes. The locus classicus is the Danger Room scene in The X-Men.
The splash page customarily begins with the X-Men seemingly spiritedly fighting one of their most notorious foes. After numerous pages (which we, the comic's humble buyers, have plainly invested and wasted whole cents in) the scene is revealed to be an exercise and an illusion. These were mere phantsasms - robotic simulacra created by the Shiiar technology of the Danger Room. Cut to a panel of Kitty Pryde at the Danger Room controls. Eating a slice of pizza, stuck in the mid-Eighties, talking her usual Mary-Sue jive.

This generic scene purportedly establishes the powers and pecadilloes of the characters for new, first-time readers. A similar scene is the opener of literally millions of comics: Spider-Man webspinning through New York and breezily espying a mugging in a back alley.

Must we ever be made to behold this sight ever again? Spider-Man captureing the muggers, grinding them down with vapid one-liners that everybody (really, everybody) is weary of. He webs them up and further lightly humiliates them, then turns to their victims who recoil from him and call him a "nasty hooligan" or some similar synonym.

Cut to a scene of J. Jonah Jameson droning on about the "web-spinning menace"; or a Daily Bugle front page editorializing against the infamous Spinner of Webs.

Marvel Comics are boring aren't they!!! I certainly wish they had never invented the Danger Room.

Add Danger Room scenes to my list of boring comics.

Also boring: "Pantheon" storylines that deal with characters from classical mythology.

__________________________________________________

Further "English Bands That Americans Like"

The full title should be "English bands that Americans like inordinately," but I think that goes without saying. "English bands that the English ceased to listen to in 1986 but which keep coming round on American turntables."

New additions:

Elvis Costello
Echo and the Bunnymen
Nick Lowe

I thought about adding Sting and Paul McCartney to the list. Does anybody in England listen to these two redundant rascals?

Etymology, Blasphemy and Bowdler

Speaking of the Americans-as-Anglophiles, there is a quite new bar under the Williamsburg Bridge called Gordon Bennett. I was in there with Toby Spinks, sat at the bar, and I was explaining to Toby what "Gordon Bennett" signified in England. "It's an exclamation of awe or surprise." I went further than was necessary, delving as I did into the gnomic realms of etymological conjecture. I said, "It occurs to me now that the phrase may have survived and prevailed chiefly as a bowdlerization of 'God damn it'."

Profane people today are unaware that blasphemy was taken very seriously less than a century ago, at least in certain milieux. There was a New York street gang in the 1850s called The Dead Rabbits. According to the nameless author of the entry on Wikipedia,

The name has a second meaning rooted in Irish American vernacular of NYC in 1857. The word 'Rabbit' is the phonetic corruption of the Irish word ráibéad, meaning 'man to be feared'. 'Dead' was a slang intensifier meaning 'very'. Thus, a 'Dead Ráibéad' means a man to be greatly feared.

This sounds like so much blarney to me, begad and beggorah.
(Blarney? On Wikipedia? It can't be!)

Uncoincidentally, the phrase "dod rabbit" was also abroad at this time-- as a canny, insider, subversive, neutralized way of saying "God damn it". When you said it, anybody astute knew what you really meant, and yet you hadn't strictly offended genteel values by saying the real phrase. The same trick persists today after a fashion in the middle-class use of the oaths "Gosh" and "Golly" ("Cripes" and "Crumbs") ("Begad" and "Begorrah"), which avoid breaking the Third Commandment while pointing ingeniously to the blasphemies. Ambrose Bierce published under the name "Dod Grile" (for "God Riled") in his earliest writings.

I submit that the phonetic similarity between "Dod Rabbit" and "Dead Rabbit" is more convincing than some airy speculation about words from Gaelic. This Gaelic interpretation sounds to me like the wilful excesses of academe at its most academic. And yet it endures. I really should write a paper on this subject for Notes and Queries.

Evenings in the university periodical section blandly leafing through back-numbers of Notes and Queries. This, which sounds pathetic I know, also sounds beautiful to me now. Idly flicking through issues of Artforum on a Norwich night.

Anyway, I merely speculated at the bar that the same may be true of the oath "Gordon Bennett!" While I was explaining all this to Toby, mine host the bartender - a generic Williamsburg collegiate laid-back slacker stubbled t-shirted bardude - had the gall to chime in to "correct" me.

He brazenly leaned across the taps and "explained it away" by means of a fatuous scenario: "If we saw a great sports car right now, while an American would say 'Awesome!,' an English person would say 'Gordon Bennett!'"

How was this different from what I had said? He simply situated it in a rather banal context. He then added, authoritatively, that "Gordon Bennett was also a real guy."

So, of course, was Joe Shmoe a real guy; and what's your point?

I looked at him with wan, noli me tangere disdain. Mine host was a total type, known on college campuses the world over (and Williamsburg is, lest we forget, a college campus sans college). The collegiate American Anglophile dude. He has a close equivalent in Australia in Ryan Webb [see past issues of Curiosa Rubberlineana, ca. 2003-6]. He is expert in smalltalk about exotic sports and is a total bore about "guest beers". He has a preferred English football team and follows them closely. He can talk companionably to anybody, as long as they have a dedicated fondness for utter boredom.

I do not. I am not that man. Nor do I take well to being corrected on points of my own national folklore by outsiders. I said, "Pardon my mistake, Herr Doktor Bardude, I had you for a lowly cocktail shaker! I didn't realize you were the doyen of the philology department. I merely grew up in England."

What I should have said: "Gordon bleeding Bennett!"

What I should have said: "And what is the etymology of the word pillock exactly I wonder, hein?"