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April 26, 2006
My Comics Subscriptions
As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm a big comic book fan.
Although I loved superheroes as a little kid, I actually wasn't a comic book geek in high school. (I was a sports stathead instead, which may be even geekier.) And I got back into comics the wrong way around - in college, rather than moving from the mainstream to the indies, I started with R. Crumb and Los Bros Hernandez, got into Neil Gaiman, and gradually worked my way back to the guys in tights. Today, I find the indie scene disappointingly thin (beyond Carla Speed McNeil's amazing, overlooked Finder), but there's lots of superhero genre stuff I love - especially the work of the astonishingly prolific Brian Michael Bendis, who combines the dialogue skills of David Mamet with the mythographic imagination of Alan Moore. There's a superhero comics renaissance going on, as great writers like Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Kurt Busiek, Warren Ellis, Alan Heinberg, Paul Jenkins, Robert Kirkman, David Lapham, Brian Melzer, Mark Millar, Greg Rucka, Kevin Smith, Brian K. Vaughan and Bill Willingham reinvigorate a genre many gave up for dead years - if not decades - ago. Call me old-fashioned, but I still love seeing the classic archetypes put through their paces - and I'm still thrilled when a visionary like Bendis rings some new changes on the old tunes.
For years, I stopped by my local comics shop every Wednesday to pick up new releases. But it closed down a few months ago, leaving the nearest store a little too distant for a regular haul. So, I've started mail-ordering my purchases from an online subscription service, Sci-Fi Genre. It's not the best way to buy comics - I miss the weekly ritual, the browsing, and the overheard debates over whether Picard could take Kirk in a fight - but it's better than waiting a year to get the trade paperbacks on Amazon.
So, here's my current subscription list. It may look like a lot of comics - alright, I admit, it is a lot of comics - but it boils down to about 5-10 issues a week. Since each issue takes about 15-20 minutes to read - more for the talky ones, less for the ones with lots of fights and explosions - that's roughly 2-3 hours of new comic book reading a week, less than the time it takes to watch one baseball or football game. The only problem comes when responsibilities intercede and I start falling behind. Then, catching up can start to seem like work rather than fun, and I end up feeling like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World when he tells Thora Birch, "I hate my interests!"
I'd probably read fewer comics if there were more good SF on TV, or if SF literature weren't currently dominated by the "hard SF" genre, which so often boils down to blowhard scientists with guns. But I'll take my pleasures where I find them.
Ted's Comics Subscription List
Albion
All Star Batman and Robin
American Virgin
Apocalypse Nerd
Astonishing X-Men
Astro City
Battle Pope
Books of Doom
Captain America
Checkmate
Civil War
Colonia
Conan
Daredevil
Dork Tower
Dr. Blink: Superhero Shrink
Eightball
Eternals
Expatriate
Fables
Finder
Girls
Hate Annual
Hawaiian Dick
Invincible
Justice
Love & Rockets
Luba's Comics and Stories
Marvel Team-Up
Nat Turner
New Avengers
Palookaville
Polly and the Pirates
Powers
PvP
Queen & Country
Runaways
Shadowpact
Stray Bullets
Superpatriot
True Story, Swear to God
Ultimate Extinction
Ultimate Fantastic Four
Ultimate Spider-Man
Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk
Ultimate X-Men
Ultimates
Usagi Yojimbo
Walking Dead
Wonder Woman
Y: The Last Man
Young Avengers
Posted by tedf at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2006
"The Future Is Already Here, It's Just Unevenly Distributed"
The above quote comes from William Gibson, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately, since it's turned up in the last two books my grad seminar in new media has read: first Peter Morville's wonderful Ambient Findability, then Joel Garreau's fascinating, overblown Radical Evolution.
Gibson's line is one of those sexy aphorisms that crystalizes a whole theory of the relationship between technology and society, like Stewart Brand's famous dictum, "Information wants to be free." But as with Brand's pontification, it conceals as much as it reveals.
What makes Gibson's phrase so appealing is the idea that we can get a grip on what is to come if we just examine today's cutting edge. To understand the future of mobile technologies, study how the hippest teens in Tokyo use IM. To see what ubiquitous broadband produces, go to Seoul. And to see the future of the human species, check out the research at DARPA's hottest labs (as Garreau did).
But there's something suspiciously self-flattering about a theory of history that so easily boils down to, "We technorati are already living in the future; now it's just up to the rest of the world to catch up."
Granted, this smug, monolithic vision of progress isn't an inevitable corollary of Gibson's aphorism. After all, the phrase doesn't specify who's living in the present, and who's living in the future. Perhaps it's Brazil's present that's the future of the USA: increasing stratification of haves and have-nots. Or maybe in a hundred years everybody will decide it's the Amish who really live the good life. We could simply interpret the line to mean, "To understand the possible shapes the future might take, study the range of ways people live today."
But when I actually see Gibson's phrase invoked, it's almost always being used to justify an author's predictions of inevitable social change to be produced by the inexorable forward march of technology. It implies you can't argue with the author's predictions of the future - after all, it's already here. And that's just a new way to justify old-fashioned technological determinism. Garreau's book claims to offer a range of "scenarios" for how the future might look. But what all of them take for granted, despite his protestations, is that the engine of history is technological change, and that such change is continuously accellerating (thanks to Moore's Law, which predicts that the speed of processing power will continue to double every two years for the foreseeable future). Even Garreau's less deterministic predictions start from the premise that humans will have to take strong action to avoid being pulled along by the tidal force of technology.
But Garreau too quickly takes the grand predictions of technologists - both the optimists like Ray Kurzweil and pessimists like Bill Joy - at face value. The past fifty years have seen many, many pronouncements of the inevitability of certain technological developments - from machine sentience to space tourism to the extension of the human life span. Each has been derailed by the irreducible complexity of the real world - by the mystery of consciousness, by the expense of space travel, by the relentlessness of mortality. Instead, the greatest breakthroughs have been in the development of a parallel universe designed precisely to escape the constraints of the material world: cyberspace. Given that track record, I'm skeptical that the next fifty years will see us finally get back to those flying cars and cancer cures we were promised fify years ago.
Moore's Law creates the illusion that technology is speeding forward at a breakneck, ever-accellerating pace. But a few minutes with Windows XP should be enough to shatter that fantasy. Processor power may double every two years, but that doesn't mean software improves at the same rate - or at all. Bloatware can make a Pentium 4 run more sluggishly than my old 386. That's supposed to be a sign of the progress that's going to transform the human species?
I'm being flip, I know. I'm sure we're in for profound changes over the next few decades, many influenced by the emergence of powerful new technologies. And certainly some awesome technologies - nuclear bombs, for one - have the power to radically and quickly transform our globe. But whenever I hear technologists make grand predictions about the future, I always consider how they may be projecting their own fantasies and fears. This is the process I describe in Electric Dreams as the dialectic of technological determinism: using the rhetoric of inevitability as a cover to authorize utopian (and dystopian) speculation. That's fine - by all means, let's talk about what kinds of futures we want to live in. But let's remember that the choice is always up to us. After all, our machines are just extensions of our selves.
The future may well already be here. But nobody can say for sure where it is, or how we'll know it when we see it.
Posted by tedf at 01:31 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2006
The Definition of a Fetish . . .
My cat Moby usually has plenty of dry food in her bowl. But she'll bang at the bedroom door when I'm asleep because she wants me to get up and pour in some more food. I don't think the issue is that the old food is stale; sometimes, when we're out of fresh food, I'll just pour some of The Dude's old food out of his bowl and into Moby's bowl, and that satisfies Moby just as much as food fresh out of the bag. The important thing is the ritual, and specifically the sound of the dry food hitting the bowl.
It makes me wonder: once Pavlov's dogs were trained to salivate at the sound of the bell, did he find they wouldn't eat without the bell?
Posted by tedf at 02:06 AM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2006
Goodbye, Scott McClellan. Hello, War in Iraq?
Press critic Jay Rosen argues in this astute piece that the painfully inarticulate stonewalling of outgoing Bush press secretary Scott McClellan wasn't just clumsy spin. It was a new kind of presidential press strategy. McClellan wasn't trying to "manage" the press as previous secretaries in the TV age have tried to do. Instead, his job was to delegitimize the press, and indeed the whole idea of the public's right to know. McClellan didn't try to persuade. He just repeated the same points over and over, running out the clock without even bothing with the illusion of engaging reporters' questions.
News organizations could and should have responded by refusing to play McClellan's game, and abandoning the pretense that what McClellan said every day was in any meaningful sense "information," let alone "news." Instead, they played into his hands by continuing to send their reporters out there day after day, legitimizing the administration's delegitimization strategy.
Will Tony Snow or anybody else who comes in to replace McClellan change this approach? Certainly, the administration will want to try to do something to shore up those tanking poll numbers. But they probably won't risk actually attempting to explain and defend their policies, simply because at this late stage, they've become patently inexplicable and indefensible.
More and more, I'm fearing that Karl Rove's grand plan to save congress for the Republicans will involve bombing Iran at the most politically opportune moment - maybe so close to election day that the blowback doesn't even have a chance to start until after the polls close. As Joshua Micah Marshall has been pointing out over at Talking Points Memo, one hallmark of the Bush administration is that every major policy initiative has peaked in popularity on the day of its announcement, then slowly and steadily declined. The important thing for Democrats - or anybody concerned with the security of our nation and the world - to do is to preempt this potential October (or even early November) surprise now, while there's still time. Lay the groundwork so that the idea of bombing Iraq right before the election is widely seen as intolerably craven and reckless, so that polls clearly show that doing so would end up backfiring. That might not be enough to sway the regime-change-aholics in Cheney's office. But it should be good enough for Rove, who may end up the only person on the planet capable of pulling Bush back from the brink.
God help us, we've reached the point where Turd Blossom could be the closest thing to a moderating influence left in the White House . . .
Posted by tedf at 02:21 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2006
Baseball Ennui
For some reason, I just can't get myself to care about baseball at all this season. Part of the problem is time - I've been swamped with administrative work all semester, and haven't even had time yet to launch the fantasy league I organized over the winter. But I think the deeper issue must be the steroid scandals.
I've been surprised by how much this steroid stuff has bummed me out. No baseball fan awake during the home run boom of the last decade can be too surprised that it was largely powered by illicit substances. And thinking historically, this is hardly the first time the game has been widely influenced by cheaters - think of all the spitballers like Gaylord Perry who, at least in retrospect, seem more rakish than vile.
I guess it's the combination of corporate hypocrisy (it seems pretty clear now that the Yankees knew just what they were getting when they signed Giambi), institutional intertia (both MLB and the players' union sat on their hands as long as they possibly could on all this, until Giambi's cancer and the Bonds bust forced them to at least look like they were doing something), and the trashing of cherished records (Bonds chasing Ruth and Aaron).
The latter, in particular, is such a bummer that I feel like not watching any baseball highlights until Bonds retires. I'd been excited over the last few years to have the chance to see the career home run record broken in my lifetime, and now the prospect just fills me with dread.
Again, it's not really that I'm disappointed with Bonds personally - from all I'd read about his failings as a human being, juicing up never seemed out of character. And maybe in 50 years we'll remember him as another cantankerous competitor like Ty Cobb - part of the vast range of characters who makes the game's lore so rich.
But I sure wish somebody had called a halt to all this nonsense before something as central to the game as the career home run record was threatened. Maybe the worst part is how this all seems to cheapen, retrospectively, the accomplishments of Ruth and especially Hank Aaron, who handled racist harassment and even death threats with incredible poise on his way to breaking Ruth's record. Now the record may well end up just another number attached to a juiced-up cheater. Or think of the McGwire/Sosa home run race, so thrilling at the time, which now looks more like corrupt stunt than a historic rivalry.
What burns me the most, I think, is that if baseball really wanted a power explosion in the '90s, they didn't even have to go this route, one with unknowable long-term health consequences for all those scrawny middle infielders who poured god knows what into their bodies and suddenly starting pounding out 30-plus homers a year. The owners could have simply brought in the fences in more parks. Or openly juiced the ball, the way they did in the 1920s when the dead ball era gave way to the modern power game. Or allowed aluminum bats. Or whatever. Instead, major league baseball looked the other way, and in many ways encouraged, a chemical arms race that led to so many players to conclude that they needed to juice up just to stay competitive.
Hell, if MLB and the MLPA had any integrity, they could have begun research years ago on the health implications of long-term steroid use, and developed safe and legal alternatives. If so, fine - that would be just another development in the history of sports training, like the rise of nutritionists, weight trainers, and sports psychologists. But by sliding the whole mess under the table, the owners and the players union conspired to create an unfair system which penalized the players who played by the rules, while endangering the lives of players who made the perfectly rational decision to risk their health in return for the chance of a $100 million payday.
I'll probably get over all this eventually. I'd hate to give up on a pastime which has given me so much pleasure over the last 28 years. (I started following the Yankees at age 9, in 1978 - what a season!) But in the meantime, I'm stoking my thirst for competitive entertainment with reality TV, and gearing up for the basketball playoffs.
Posted by tedf at 03:02 AM | Comments (0)
Finally, A New Kind of First-Person Shooter
This game is just too cool. It's a first-person shooter with no graphics at all - just a blank screen. Instead of visual information, you navigate levels entirely through 3D sound cues. It's like playing Doom as Daredevil.
The game is designed for visual impaired players, but I think everybody ought to give it a try. It's a breath of fresh air in a computer game market full of me-too retreads more interested in polygon counts than in innovative gameplay.
Posted by tedf at 02:07 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2006
(Perhaps) The World's Largest Video Game Collction
More photos and an interview here.
Posted by tedf at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2006
Wrestlemania XXII
I held my second annual Wrestlemania party tonight, and it was again a blast. As was the case last year, the real highlights happened well before the two anticlimactic main events.
For those of you who don't follow wrestling, here's what you need to know: wrestling is scripted entertainment, not a real competition. The winners and losers have all been predetermined by WWE writers - everybody watching knows that - but that takes nothing away from the athleticism and showmanship of a great wrestler's performance. Pro wrestlers are more like stuntmen - or even dancers - than they are like boxers or football players. They're performers, not competitors.
The star of the evening was the great Mick Foley, coming out of retirement to face Edge for twenty crowd-pleasing minutes of barbed wire, baseball bats, barbed-wire-covered baseball bats, a bag of thumbtacks that ended up in Edge's back, and a finale that involved both wrestlers slamming into a flame-covered folding table. There was lots of blood, but as always with Foley (formerly known as Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love), it was all in good fun. If you read only one book about wrestling, check out Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, his hugely entertaining memoir. (If you read only two books about wrestling, follow it up with Thomas Hackett's smart, engaging Slaphappy: Pride Prejudice,and Professional Wrestling. Conflict alert: Hackett is a friend of a friend, interviewed me for the book, and thanked me in the acknowledgements. But I'd like the book anyway.)
Shawn Michaels vs. Vince McMahon was also a lot of fun. For those of you who haven't followed the recent career of McMahon, who has run World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation) for decades, in the last few years he's bulked up and taken to the ring himself, despite pushing 60. Sometimes the results are just testament to McMahon's vanity. But the Michaels match worked up some pretty crazy stuff. First a five-man "cheerleading squad" ambushes Michaels, and he has to take them all down, kung-fu-movie style. Then McMahon's adult son Shaun shows up and tried to force Michaels to literally kiss his boss's ass. But Michaels breaks free, turns the tables, and plants the son's lips on the dad's bare behind. As I told KT, the whole night was homoerotic - that's a given in wrestling - but this was the one moment that got clinically Freudian. KT agreed, but was disappointed that the moment wasn't followed by the son screaming, "my eyes, my eyes," then surreptitiously cutting his forehead (a standard wrestling practice) to bloody his face and make it look like he's been blinded by the horror he's just seen. Maybe the Sophocles reference wouldn't have played with the core WWE teen male demographic, but classics majors everywhere would've been tickled.
In any case, the capper for that match worked fine - Michaels sets up a faux-unconscious McMahon on a folding table, his head and upper body covered by metal garbage can. Michaels climbs up an extra-tall ladder, jumps off, and lands on the can, breaking the table and pinning McMahon. It was a showstopping move from Michaels, one of wrestling's greats.
The rest of the matches were mixed affairs. The women's match, featuring an ongoing lesbian-stalker storyline, was surprisingly fun - it looks like Trish Stratus, a real pro, finally has a worthy opponent in Mickie James. We'll pass over the "pillow fight" between Playboy models without comment, although I was amused to see a mattress (though not the boxspring) used as a weapon.
At least the matchup with The Boogeyman, who eats worms, was good for a laugh. The ladder match was OK, but a disappointment compared to last year's barn-burner. The Undertaker's yearly win (the announcers make a big deal out of him being undefeated on Wrestlemania) was plodding and predictable. And both of the main events were busts.
In the first, a three-way battle, Rey Mysterio, a former Mexican wrestler who still wears his mask, won the belt and dedicated his victory to Ed Guerrero, the WWE star who passed away last year. But the tribute to Guerrero, a victim of steroid abuse, was in extremely poor taste coming on the same card with McMahon, Booker T, Mr. Olympia, and other wrestlers with the telltale body shapes of heavy users. Even Mysterio himself, a lithe guy whose scintillating signature move is to acrobatically swing through the ropes, seemed oddly bulked up. Allegely, the WWE has instituted a new steroid policy following Guerrero's death, but I'm dubious. And it's a big shame, because 'roided-up wresters aren't even fun to watch. They lose the flexibility that makes greats like Michaels so quick and fluid. All they can do is stand in the ring and pretend to slug each other.
That was the final match in a nutshell - the hulking, clumsy Jon Cena fake-boxing the hulking, slightly-less-clumsy Triple H. At least HHH came out in a hilarious Conan-meets-Jesus getup, claiming he was now "The King of Kings." Compared to that, Cena's Eminem-of-wrestling shtick, tired a year ago, hardly registered. In the end, Cena won with a completely unconvincing submission hold. Apparently he sells a lot of t-shirts.
If you haven't had your fill of wrestling commentary, check out this exploration of the hermeneutics of wrestling fandom, along with this classic post by guest-blogger BMN, "Wrestling Lingo Applied to Life and Academia".
Posted by tedf at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
Interview in Gwinnett Daily Post Article on Hollywood and 9/11
It's always weird being quoted in a newspaper article - you ramble on the phone for half an hour on a whole range of topics, then they take one or two random sound bites you may not even remember saying.
But I think this piece by reporter Shelley Mann came out pretty well. I was trying to drive home the argumnt that the claim that "it takes time to develop historical perspective on an event" can become a copout against taking a stand on political issues while they're still controversial and relevant. For all its clumsy didacticism, it took guts for Michael Moore to make and release Fahrenheit 911 in 2004, so soon into the Iraq War. We need to celebrate and reward those artists (Moore, George Clooney, Sean Penn) who have the courage to take stands on the most important issues of our day. They're the ones creating what will become tomorrow's conventional wisdom.
That said, I hadn't seen or read anything about the upcoming Oliver Stone 9/11 movie when the Gwinnett Post reporter called me up, so I hope I'm not completely off base. I'll be really disappointed if it turns out to be as dumb as, well, just about every movie Stone's made since Natural Born Killers. Nixon was just awful, and Any Given Sunday smothered Jamie Foxx's sizzling performance underneath Al Pacino's relentless yelling. Then came that feature-length documentary on Fidel Castro that soft-pedaled Cuba's human rights record. I couldn't bring myself to see Alexander, although I guess it might be worth a rental for camp value. I'd write Stone off, but Platoon, JFK, and especially Salvador remain three of the greatest political films ever made, matching a gonzo filmmaking sensibility to real moral seriousness. In fact, anybody who wants to know how the Bush junta cut their teeth should definitely rent Salvador.
Posted by tedf at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)