Waiting for Godot, the Classic Comic edition
click for readable view.
I have no idea who created this. I found it here, with no explanation.
I post this primarily for the edification of
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, who studies comic adaptations of classics (and who’s probably already seen it). The weird thing is, based on the Classics Illustrated comics R has shown me, this doesn’t even seem like too far a stretch, more like a loving tribute.
Bartholomew and the Oobleck
click for larger view
Bartholomew and the Oobleck, for the uninitiated, is about a king who gets bored with the weather and commands his creepy magicians to make something new come down from the sky. As I read the first part of this story to my kids tonight, my son Sam (6) interrupted me to ask “Is that really a good idea?”
Oobleck was published in 1949, a time when it seemed that the kings of the world did indeed seem to be bored with the weather of the world and, aided by creepy magicians like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, deemed it necessary, for reasons having to do with hubris and pride, to have something new fall from the sky.
The narrative tension of Oobleck is palpable as Bartholomew, the lowly page boy, tries first warn the king against his foolish whim, then waits with nameless dread for the coming apocalypse, then desperately races to warn the kingdom of the king’s disastrous mistake.
It’s hard to read this story without feeling a lot like Bartholomew. We all knew our current king’s folly was a bad idea, everyone tried to tell him so, but kings will be kings and so the creepy magicians (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Halliburton, the Carlyle group, PNAC, etc etc etc) created an apocalypse for the boy tyrant.
(With plenty of little army men for him to throw around the floor of his throne room while he made exploding noises, but don’t let me mix my metaphors.)
The effects of oobleck, it turns out, can be reversed with a simple act of humility on the part of the king. Our boy king, of course, we have learned is incapable of an act of humility, and even if he were, this particular oobleck is, alas, here to stay. Our boy king’s plan, his stated plan, is to keep the war in Iraq going long enough to become someone else’s problem, and, theoretically, never end at all.
(A canny commentator remarked recently that Bush is not, and never was, interested in being president. What he was interested in was winning the election. We’ve seen, indeed, over and over, that Bush’s main objective has always been to win, no matter what he has to do, what laws he has to break or who he has to kill to do so. We’ve also seen that he does, in fact, have no interest in leading, making decisions or doing anything remotely presidential, like treating other leaders, or anyone really, even his own mindless supporters, with anything like dignity or respect.)
Just to be clear —
“Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq”, translated, means “Bush Will Say Anything He Has To To Keep the War in Iraq Going On Forever.”
But don’t take my word for it. Watch Mr. Olbermann’s commentary instead.
(I don’t know how Keith Olbermann manages to keep up his outrage every day, but I’m glad somebody in the media is doing so.)
Please please please let this be so.
UPDATE: Apparently, in addition to being a closet case who likes anonymous sex in public restrooms, Larry Craig is bad at dialing the phone. Here is a voicemail he left at the wrong phone number.
What I did on my summer vacation
click on images for larger view.
The first three pages of my long-in-development graphic novel are done, and the reviews are ecstatic!
“Those look — pretty good — ” — Robbie Busch
“They do look good, and I can definitely tell what’s going on.” — R. Sikoryak
“Great work! I don’t know how you learned to draw so quickly.” — Tony Millionaire
“Those pages look great. Good on you!” — Jackson Publick
“I mean, I don’t know anything about comics, but they look great to me.” — James Urbaniak
With ringing endorsements like this, I am hugely encouraged to continue. Messers Busch and Millionaire both detect a Kirby influence in the “big hand,” which is weird because I’ve never particularly looked at Kirby, and Mr. Busch, in a moment of extreme generosity, compared these pages to the work of Jim Sterenko. I said that these pages look like Sterenko — if Sterenko drew with a meat cleaver instead of a pen.
For the non-comics creators in my readership, please keep in mind that there will eventually be speech balloons taking up all the blank space you see here and sound effects added to make it all more dramatic.
I post these partly to promote my work and partly to comfort Senator Larry Craig, to remind him that a bathroom encounter with a strange man could end a whole lot worse.
Movie Night With Urbaniak: Pickup on South Street
Neither
nor I have ever seen Pickup on South Street, but after The Naked Kiss I’m curious to hear his take on Samuel Fuller’s, erm, unique approach to screen acting. So he comes over and we watch the movie.
“A maddening director,” says Urbaniak. And “maddening” is certainly an apt description. You’re watching a Sam Fuller movie and you’rethinking, “this guy is so bad, he doesn’t understand the first thing about what film is,” and then out of nowhere he’ll produce some effect so daring, so creative and so sophisticated that it’ll make your head spin. And he’ll do this, mmm, about sixty times in the course of a 90-minute feature.
In Pickup there’s an actor named Murvyn Vye playing “Detective Tiger,” and there isn’t a single spontaneous, heartfelt or natural line reading, gesture or movement in his entire performance. I mean, this is a guy who looks out a window and says “He’s here,” and not only do you not believe he’s seeing anyone, you don’t believe he’s ever looked out a window before. And you despair because you’re watching a lame police drama. Then, out of nowhere, ace pro Thelma Ritter walks in, acting as though she’s in a completely different movie, and just mops up the floor with the guy. Just takes the mop handle out of the closet, screws it into the guy’s navel, and literally mops the floor with him. And just as you’re about done marveling at the great Thelma Ritter’s performance, you realize that the scene you’ve been watching has been an eight-minute long extended take, full of dollies and zooms and tracking movements, and you remember that you’re watching a movie by one of the true mad geniuses of American film.
Similarly, there’s Jean Peters as The Girl. The Girl is supposed to be a hard-nose, hard-luck dame who’s been around the block a few times, and she honestly looks like a perfectly nice young lady who’s watched a few movies. You can’t believe she’s the lead, she’s fake and flat and all surface. Then, she goes to see co-lead Richard Widmark and a weird thing happens. He picked her purse, she needs the maguffin back or its her head, and next thing you know, Widmark is putting the moves on her and she’s totally falling for him. The scene shouldn’t work on about ten different levels, but it does because Peters suddenly explodes with passion, vulnerability and deep sensuality. And suddenly a movie you could barely believe got released becomes something so intense and deeply personal that you can’t believe you’re watching it. And you realize, “that’s the audition scene,” that’s the scene that got her the part,” Fuller cast her because he knew she’d be able to sell the weirdest-ass scenes in the movie, the ones the narrative won’t work without. To give you an idea of how weird her scenes with Widmark are, imagine the famous encounter between Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe in Wild at Heart, but instead of Willem ending up with his head blown off outside a bank, Laura Dern runs off with him and it turns out he’s really a really sweet guy and a patriot to boot.
Fuller the filmmaker is no less idiosyncratic. He’ll mark time through any number of ho-hum procedural scenes, then uncork a fight scene as intense, frightening and real as anything in Raging Bull, or, conversely, he’ll ruin a beautiful death-bed monologue with an utterly unnecessary reaction shot, or spoil a love scene with a shot out of focus. It’s almost like he’s playing with you, lulling you into a false set of expectations, waiting for the next opportunity to blow your mind.
to make you cry
I’m reading Lynn Hirschberg’s long profile of music producer Rick Rubin. I like Rick Rubin — who doesn’t like Rick Rubin? — and I am surprised to learn that he’s crossing to the other side of the desk and becoming a record-company executive. No, not a record-company executive, the record-company executive, co-president of Columbia Records. Columbia Records! Jiminy!
Anyway, the article is a great read and a fascinating glimpse into the mind, or the acts anyway, of a true weird genius. Rubin going from LL Cool J to Def Jam to the Geto Boys to Johnny Cash and on and on is a pretty staggering story, and I’m always interested to know what he’s going to do next. Him getting a boat as big as Columbia Records to steer is a big story indeed.
And he says one of the first acts he will sign is this guy he saw on the UK’s version of American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent! (which is a wonderful, self-conscious, defensive title if I ever heard one). The guy’s name is Paul Potts, and Rubin says his appearance on Britian’s Got Talent! makes him cry every time he watches it.
Well, I think, Rubin’s a sensitive soul, isn’t he? But I’m curious, so I bop on over to YouTube and check the guy out.
Oh. My. God.
After recovering my wits, I show this to my wife, to see if I’ve been genuinely moved or have merely been set up for a sucker-punch. She tries to remain calm, says that she doesn’t know anything about opera, has no idea if the guy’s “any good” or not, doesn’t know if she’s reacting to the quality of the guy’s voice or the situation he’s been placed into. But yeah, she’s floored too.
Me, I say it’s only partly his voice and it’s only partly the situation. For me it’s his face. Look at his face before he goes on, and as he stands there before his judges. “Judges” being a loaded word here — he looks like he’s facing his executioners. He looks like a beaten man. He looks like a man who’s had every ounce of hope beaten out of his soul by life, by Britain, by whatever dead-end grind he’s required to endure in order to make ends meet. He looks like he doesn’t even want to be there. Hell, if I had music like that going around in my head, Britain’s Got Talent! is probably the last place I’d want to be. Who with music like that going around in his head would choose to seek the approval of Simon Cowell? And yet here he is.
Then he starts singing, and his face completely changes. First it gains a sense of power, something he controls. My guess (projecting here, obviously) is that he feels very little control over anything in his life, but God Damn It, he knows how to singthis goddamn aria. Then, as the tune builds to its climax, something else comes into his features. It’s not just power, or control, or happiness — it’s defiance. Paul Potts has looked at the dawn of the 21st century and said “You know what? Not everything has to be crappy and ugly and shiny and cheap and brutal. People don’t know that beauty and truth are still possible in this world, and damn it all, I’m going to do something about it.
When he takes the stage he looks like the cell-phone salesman I would cross the store to avoid, but the look on his face as he sings the climax of this aria is one of a general leading his troops into battle. This is madness? THIS! IS! OP-ERA!! Then he finishes and becomes that shy young man again. Incredible.
The fact that he chose a venue like Britain’s Got Talent!, a show dedicated to the idea that art is a competition to be “won” or “lost,” to launch his tiny cultural offensive, makes him a kind of cultural suicide-bomber. Into the temple of the cheap and shiny he has smuggled his brave message of defiance and hope.
Wow!
The ever-indispensable Occasional Superheroine directs us to Crypto Kids, the NSA’s “kid page,” luring a generation of pre-teens to a life of spying. It must be seen to be believed.
