The Factual Opinion

Television Of The Weak: Catching Up With Steve Chlamydia, He's The Same

This week we've got the Venture Brothers, Mad Men, Dollhouse, Law & Order (sort of) and a double shot of Dexter and Sons of Anarchy.

The Venture Brothers: "Handsome Ransom" by Matthew J. Brady

The well for pedophilia jokes is pretty shallow, and Venture Brothers has already probably gone to it more often than is necessary or comfortable (not that awkwardness or dark subject matter is off limits, but I think we can all agree that diddling kids isn't exactly a rich source of comedy), so if they're going to head back to that territory, it should probably be for a good reason, something other than tired gags about superheroes fucking their sidekicks. But no, that's exactly what we get here, with Hank becoming the new Wonder Boy, the ward of one Captain Sunshine, a solar-powered, sunburn-inflicting, hilariously-rainbow-emblazoned doofus who has a mad-on for the Monarch, who killed the last Wonder Boy in a fit of grief after getting dumped by Dr. Girlfriend. So when Monarch holds Hank and Dean for ransom (he's given up on killing Dr. Venture, deciding instead to hit him where it really hurts, his wallet), Sunshine busts in and ends up taking off with Hank, who looks so much like his dead ward (or wards, since a running joke involves other characters asking him "Really? Another one?" after finding out about the new Wonder Boy), and the pedo jokes ensue. And sure, they're mostly misdirection, especially a drawn-out bit involving lube, but again, when the funny part of a joke involves kid-fucking, well, you know how I feel about that.

But! There's a lot of funny shit here, especially stuff involving the bureaucratic negotiations between Dr. Venture and the Monarch, or Sergeant Hatred's pathetic attempts at bodyguarding (he gets one of the best lines of the episode, involving a description of the pliable nature of his testicles when overheated), or henchman 24's (21's? Dammit!) unkempt, hard-edged attitude (or facade thereof) after losing his partner. And in what was probably the funniest scene, Captain Sunshine's local anchorman alter ego freaks out and screams hysterically while running around the newsroom because he thinks Monarch is on his way to murder the new Wonder Boy, although Monarch taunting him while wearing the dead sidekick's costume is also pretty close. The best stuff still probably comes from knowledge of the characters though, like how Monarch and Dr. Mrs. the Monarch constantly mock everybody else while apparently being oblivious to their own ridiculousness, or the way 24 gets pissed at Hank for trying to beat him up, since they've spent enough time together that they're pretty much pals by now. And Dr. Venture's continuing patheticness, with him unable to get much of anything accomplished without calling up White and Billy to bail him out, remains as much of a source of comedy as ever.

Eh, it's kind of a second episode slump, but while it's not among the show's best, there are some solid laughs here. Maybe things will pick up when Brock comes back. Until then, let's just hope for less kiddie-rape comedy.

Dollhouse: "Belonging" by Matthew J. Brady

I think Sierra has always been my favorite character on Dollhouse, possibly because the actress who portrays her is one of the more talented cast member, being incredibly versatile and nailing each of the distinct personalities she's asked to play (as opposed to the nominal star, Eliza Dushku, who has undergone a bizarre change and now does a decent job with her various imprinted personalities but has become extra awful in her increasingly intelligent blank slate persona). So here's her spotlight episode, in which she faces her demons and goes through hell, but still manages to stay safely within the status quo. As we saw last season, she's in the Dollhouse because a rich asshole kidnapped her and forced her into mental slavery after she rejected him, with the intent of repeatedly fucking her to show what a man he was, or something. It was a pretty horrific revelation, and it comes full circle here, as he gets exposed and she nearly gets sent into his clutches permanently, until Topher undergoes his first moral crisis and takes the initiative to do something about this injustice. It's an interesting dilemma, since the show already operates in a moral grey area, with characters having to come up with increasingly convoluted justifications for their actions, so it's nice to see the show confronting this sort of thing head on, rather than ignoring it in favor of some secret agent shit.

It ends up being pretty fucked up, with Topher's actions seeing him taking the first step down the road to the craziness that we saw in the flash-forward episode "Epitaph One", yet still containing some sweet moments between Sierra and Victor (who should probably get a spotlight episode of his own at some point). And Echo's continuing development is intriguing, despite Dushku's woodenness, as we see her trying to lead other Actives, help rectify wrongs, and take the initiative to better herself. It's hard to tell where it's going, but considering what we've seen and the possibilities as to what could happen, it should be fascinating to watch. Hmm, it might be more fun to complain when the show is bad, but I'll take an actual good show any day. Sorry if it means more "Yeah, this was pretty good" columns, but you can blame Joss Whedon because he didn't let me down.

Law & Order - "Reality Bites" and "Dignity" by Tucker Stone

I haven't watched "new" episodes of Law & Order in at least ten years, so I thought I'd give it a try. Anthony Anderson was pretty good when he was killing children on The Shield, so I figured this couldn't be that hard to sit through. And Jeremy Sisto! I've always had warm feelings for Jeremy Sisto, even when he was being really mean to Alicia Silverstone in that shitty horror movie he did. He had a funny line in Law & Order's Octomom episode, where he said "I was having a bad beard day". I bet a lot of old people laughed at that line. Then they started coughing, because they are old.

Oddly enough, I still haven't watched any "new" episodes of Law & Order in at least ten years, because I couldn't finish either one of these. I gave up as soon as they hit the thirty minute mark, right around the time Linus "Batman's Dad" Roache showed up. Nothing against Batman's Dad, but both of these episodes were pretty tough to watch. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't one of the charms of Law & Order that I never had to hear about people's fucking personal lives? I don't give a shit about watching S. Epatha Merkerson wander around getting chemo and talking to her kid about painting kitchens, I'm completely uninterested in listening to Linus Roache and Sam Waterson discuss their personal feelings about late-term abortion--fuck these people. These people aren't real. I don't care. Solve some crimes and yell "objection" at each other. That's your whole shtick. When did Law & Order start thinking it was fucking art? This shit ain't art. It's a warm blanket of nostalgia and time-killing, and it would be okay, maybe, if all of these stupid abortion debates were well-written, but they aren't well-written, they're just a bunch of actors spitting out pamphlet worthy anecdotes and catchphrases. They can't even make the abortion doctor victim complicated and real, he's just a magic doctor doing scary ass late-term abortions in cases where the mother is an incest victim, a rape victim, or a woman with an exploding DNA monster fetus. Go grow some fucking courage. Write about an abortion doctor doing late-terms for women who use abortion as birth control, write something thoughtful and difficult. Write in some pro-lifers who aren't ghostly freaks that mumble dead-eyed sensibilities and extremist evangelical bullshit. If I wanted to get patted on the back for being fucking right about meandering "debates", I'd just go and read more blogs. The closest they come, and it's a Sisto line again, is when Anthony Anderson spits out some ridiculous personal story for why he's pro-life, and when he asks Sisto what he thinks about the fact that he, Anthony Anderson, was almost aborted, Sisto just screws up his face--in that way that let's you see that he knows what he's going to say might hurt feelings, but fuck you for putting him in this position anyway--and says "I think I would've just had another partner." Because, exactly, fuck your personal trump card argument, and fuck what you think, because this isn't how anybody talks, ever, anywhere, about anything.

Oh, and if nobody told you--because why would they, nobody watches Law & Order unless they have the chicken pox and are bored at four in the afternoon--they actually had a bald cancer kid say "i was scared the first time" to S. Epatha Merkerson, and Merkerson responds "I hope I have your courage!" 

Who writes this show anyway? It's gotta be graduate students.

Dexter - "Dex Takes A Holiday" and "Dirty Harry" by Tucker Stone

The best thing that was ever written about not having spoiler warnings was when the Soprano's final season premiere opened with Tony getting shot. Somebody--think it was Salon--wrote about it, and when complaints started rolling in, the writer said something to the effect "If you care that much that you didn't want it spoiled, and you care so much that you've been waiting for months for the final season, and you didn't watch it last night but decided to read a review first, then Fuck. You." 

She was totally right.

Nothing in that first Dexter episode was that exciting, beyond the regular weirdness that comes when Dexter kills a woman. Not sure what it is, but nothing drives home the fact of Dexter's ultimate horrible-ness more than watching him emotionally torment, physically assault, and eventually kill an attractive female. She's a murderer, she "deserves it" in Dexter's code--although it seems a bit unlikely that she was going to do it again--but it's still really fucking creepy, especially when Dexter plays to form and strips her naked. Yes, he does that with everybody--but, fuck. She's a girl, y'know? But then, it came. After watching yet another horrible romance scene, one so heavily ladled with syrup that it became easily mistakable as a stack of flapjacks, somebody fucking shot Deb. And then they shot Lundy. And then they shot Lundy again! And then Lundy died, because he was weak.

And then this show got pretty fucking good again.

All the problems that have existed up until now are the same: Dexter isn't behaving in a way that's very interesting/reliable/the way I like him to behave ive got sand in my peehole and it hurts, all of the other actors are still terrible and there's a whole new shitty romance subplot that's as unbearable as it is uncomfortable to watch due to the out-of-place copious nudity. But now Dexter has. Something. To. Do. Something that takes the show out of the weird procedural drama it falls into whenever the A-plot stalls out, and something that will now put Dexter in the position we've wanted him in since the very beginning--at full on odds with John Lithgow's Trinity Killer.

And what a killer he's turned out to be! He remains a bizarro freak show--hiding in an alley, screaming "faggot" at passers by until he gets the beating he craves, nearly confessing to a hardware store clerk what he needs a framing hammer for--and it turns out, in the other big turn of events, that he's exactly what Dexter is currently failing to be. He's a loving husband and father, with a serial killing hobby on the side. Without a shower, without anything more than a change of clothes, he beats a weeping, terrified man to death, drives home, and kisses his wife. Tousles his son's hair. And while it's so likely that this plotline will become all screwed up and oh so predictable--so likely that, if it doesn't, it'll be a surprise--it doesn't change the fact that these two episodes trumped the entirety of this season so far. Despite what people say about stunt deaths and surprise slaughter, sometimes--usually when it's a story about a serial killer who gets away with it--it fits like a damn glove.

Sons of Anarchy - "Gilead" and "Potlatch" by Tucker Stone

And here's the flipside of the whole "do nasty shit to women" coin, in which the first episode reveals that some guy raped a young girl, the Sons caught the rapist and helped the girl's father stab him to death, and then the Sons kept the knife (with the father's prints on it) as leverage against the father. In the second episode, Ron Perlman gives the father the knife back in this really magnanimous fashion that makes me feel sort of ill, and then another woman gets beaten to death with a baseball bat. 

By Tom Arnold.

Yeah, so that's Sons of Anarchy for you. Sure, you could make the argument that the climax of "Potlatch " was some sort of vindication for ladyhood everywhere, with Katey Segal breaking a giant serving dish to stop all the fussing and mussing amongst the boys. You could, I won't, but hey, I'm not your parent. Do with and take heed, little sister. (Just don't forget the inherent lameness that the only way Katey Segal can grab the floor away from Hellboy versus Charisma Vampire: Round Two is by breaking her own shit and ruining the food she cooked. Or at least made the women from Magnolia cook for her. Women: they got three uses on Sons. Raping, dying and cooking. Classy!)

While I recognize the wheel-spinning in saying "hey, Opie had some nice scenes" every time these responses go up...fuck it, it's true, it's the charm of the goddamn show that there's this one guy roaming around like a scene-stealing roughneck, an actor that seems unaware that the only other actor even trying at this point is the fat dude from Batman Begins. Maybe it's because most of Opie's scenes consist of him working with day players, excepting the moments where he sneers at Jax and says all the shit that the audience is thinking, which is roughly "you're acting like a punk" and "god I hate you" and "seriously, i hate you, and your girlfriend, and I know you're just an actor, but I think I hate you on a personal level" and "i don't want to beat a dead horse but i'm starting to use you as a sort of catharsis figure, in that i'm venting my daily troubles and irritations through a version of visualization therapy where you are my problems and if i take you apart physically in my mind it's like i'm taking apart the parts of myself i find unlikeable, so while i still dislike you in a fashion completely incommensurate with your actual existence as actor-on-television show, i sort of need and love you, the way one would love their boxing coach despite their boxing coach being the immediate reason that the day's workout was a particular difficult one."

...

Okay, okay, the prison fistfight was pretty great, although the lack of testicle attacks seemed unlikely. If you've never hit a guys balls, or never gotten hit in the balls, then guess what everybody knows about you right now? You've never really been in a fight. That shit happens every fucking time.

-Matthew J. Brady & Tucker Stone, 2009

Comics Of The Weak: In The Garden Of The North American Farters

Archie # 602
Written by Michael Uslan
Art by Stan Goldberg, Bob Smith & Jack Morelli
Published by Archie Comics

The picture on the left is the cover solicitation that the Archie people had on their blog. The image on the right is the actual cover. If you ignore the color changes that, among other things, change what might have been jewelry into plastic bracelets, there's no real difference between the two.

Image on the left is the actual cover again. The image on the right is the interior. Now, we see pretty major changes. Veronica's hairstyle is now impossible to recreate with human hair, her breasts are...weird, and she's wearing yellow hot pants. In the background, the guy is no longer dressed like Santa. Biggest change is probably Veronica's face. It's obviously a new drawing, but there's little to indicate why it's such a different interpretation of the same sequence beyond the obvious "the interior art is shitty" response. And no, it's the same artist doing both pieces.

There's nothing worthwhile to be gleaned from the above comparison, but then again, there's nothing worthwhile to be gained from a 2009 Archie comic either. It's just a case of strange and cheap, another indication of the tossed off nature of this whole "Archie marries somebody" story. In this issue, Veronica produces two children, she and Archie name them "Archie and Veronica", there's a panel where Veronica is eating powdered donuts and leaving the residue all over her lips, and at the end, Archie reads his kids the entire Robert Frost poem that this story has used as "inspiration", smirks at his hot-pants wearing wife, and walks the fuck out the front door so that he can get the hell out of the fantasy that he's spent the last three issues living through. Sometime in December, he's going to marry Betty. If things play to form, there will be a bunch of random moments that have nothing to do with the story, existing only so that Archie can dispense odd moral teachings to the reader. In this issue, such moments included Veronica asking Archie if their marriage was only successful because they didn't have to worry about money. Instead of staring at her, hard, and eventually saying "What the fuck kind of weird ass shit is that to say", he just says "All you need is love!" while pointing off to the right. Oh, and immediately after he walks out of the house, away from his children, wife and this storyline, there's a genius moment where he's drawn with a look of utter despair and exhaustion on his face. If there'd been any indication up until now that the people involved in the creation of this comic cared at all about doing something non-horrible, they'd deserve some credit for inserting this moment. It's Archie as actor, Archie as exhausted, broken comic book character, realizing that even now, standing at the end of his story, he's still on the clock. So off you go, you fucking degenerate! It's time to get Betty pregnant.

Brave & The Bold # 28
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Art by Jesus Saiz
Published by DC Comics

This comic is pretty much the end result of a thought experiment about how to make Barry Allen seem less of a stick-in-the-mud by putting him in a situation where he isn't the most boring part of the story. Thanks to people like Hal Jordan and DC Comics (although Stephen Ambrose's hands aren't the cleanest) World War 2 has gone from "the one they made serious movies about" to "more integral to your existence then the time when your dad came inside your mom" status, so it'll fit. Of course, putting the Flash alongside the Greatest Generation immediately runs into a bit of a snag when Those Who Sacrificed All For You Ungrateful Shitheads point out that his red Union suit is, well, lame, and his stance against killing makes him, uh huh, completely useless. Don't want to spoil this one, but here's a bit of a tease: it ends with a guy bowing his head at Arlington National!

DCU Halloween Special 09 # 1
By Don't Care
Published by Really?

DC's Halloween Special was written mostly by editors, Johnny DC people, and inkers. It includes a story where Guy Gardner throws a big Halloween party because Halloween is his favorite holiday. And then, when the party is going down, Guy keeps flashing back to Halloweens of the distant past, and every single one of those Halloween memories involves his father beating him. One year, his dad calls him a pansy. Another year, he grabs Guy's face and shoves it into a bucket of water and apples, and he holds his face in the water. There's a whole lot of these panels--one of them just features Guy's battered face, and the climax is Guy at his dad's funeral. (Which happened on Halloween?) That's all well and good, one imagines that Geoff Johns is off doing something that's sentimental or mature or [big word] with that. Here, it's just strange--Guy prefers Halloween over all other holidays, because Halloween was the special time of year when his father beat the shit out of him? Also, Guy's costume isn't a costume, it's his old football uniform. (Quaint!) Of course, that's not the only story here, and not all of them are as fucking gritty as this one. There's one where a bunch of the Teen Titans pull a joke on Wonder Woman by trying to convince her that the Blair Witch Project is a true story--that part is sort of believable, because Wonder Woman seems like the kind of person who hasn't seen a movie since The Bridge On The River Kwai--but the story's climax consists of Wonder Woman catching the three girls having a splash fight inside the cave where Luke saw himself in the Vader outfit. (Showed that panel to someone who hadn't read the story, and their response was "I'd fuck her, sure." That wasn't the expected response, but at least the story achieved one of its goals.) The only other story point that resonates in a way the reader is unlikely to forget was near the conclusion, where Superman and Lois are taking part in the Daily Planet's haunted house. Superman joyfully uses his heat vision, his freez-y super-breath, and a grim reaper outfit to scare some 30-something punkers. After they run away screaming and crying, Lois joyfully tells Clark that one of them peed their pants, and then they just laugh and laugh and laugh. It's sort of like when Superman used to get bored and decide that it was time to teach Lois a lesson. Now that they're married, she gets to participate.

Superman/Batman # 65
Written by Peter Johnson & Matt Cherniss
Art by Brian Stelfreeze, Brian Haberlin, Kelley Jones, Joe Quinones, Federico Dallocchio, David Baron & Joe Quinones
Published by DC Comics

Superman/Batman will eventually become a part of "continuity", which will probably just mean that it will start containing the umpteeth part of the umpteenth crossover, this will be irritating, somebody will probably write a blog post about it, world, always spinning. It might be worthwhile to remember this particular issue of the title before the keys get struck--continuity may be an obnoxious beast, but is it really that much worse than a comic book where Alfred shoots and kills Bruce Wayne's mother, wife and children while sticking out his tongue? Is the fact that shit like Hunt For Reactron (actual Superman crossover!) will now include a chapter set in Gotham that much more of a nuisance than watching Bruce Wayne shoot his father at point blank range? (The blood and brain matter splats upwards, leaving Daddy Wayne's meat in Bruce's mouth and hair, Chow Yun Fat style.)

Power Girl # 6
Written by Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray
Art by Amanda Conner
Published by DC Comics

Power Girl takes a lot longer to read than most of the stuff that DC publishes, and it has better art than most of the stuff that either of the two super-hero companies publish. But it's still not that fun to read, because it has to struggle with a lead who just isn't interesting in the slightest. Power Girl just...is. She's got powers, and she's a girl. Sometimes she uses her powers, other times she makes faces that look like freeze frame images of the Jim character from NBC's The Office. In this issue, there's a nice drawing of her flying through the subway, a drawing that's able to capture "New York" better than any issue of Spider-Man or Daredevil this year, and there's a funny sight gag where a guy is seen running through the emergency room with a cooler held out in front of him. But the story is just a slog around the country, with Power Girl trying to catch up with some alien celebrities, who are hot, female and, for a little while, naked. It's got a lot of plot in it, and having Amanda Conner's art means the story can be an actual comic (you know, that thing where the pictures actually make the story more involving), so it's an objectively more worthwhile thing than something like Spider-Woman # 2 or Batman # 690, but that's about all you can say about it. (Unless you want to talk about her tits. She has big tits. It might be interesting to see what would happen if you reduced the size of her tits over a period of time, like, would that create an uproar, the way it creates an uproar when they create a new non-white version of a character? Most of the time, the Big Tit defenders just say things like "grow up", which is just odd--after all, it's not like it's an interpretation or a juvenile observation when a non-Justice Society reader says "jesus christ, that character has gigantic tits, it's obviously a comic designed as a masturbation fantasy". Power Girl has big fucking tits. Like--what's that thing that people say? "Can't you get past that?" Of course people can't get past that, you're a fucking moron if you think they will. It's not like only 15 year olds are ripping one off to big tits, that's a love affair that lasts years, even if it eventually just becomes a depressive home movie that plays out behind closed eyelids while an elderly husband humps away at a distant pile of flesh and organs who is considering taking a trip to that Swiss suicide clinic and writing "because this shit never changes" on the reason-we-should-help-you-die line.)

The Incredible Hulk # 603
Written by Greg Pak
Art by Ariel Olivetti, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Cam Smith & Elizabeth Breitweiser
Published by Marvel Comics

Giuseppe Camuncoli was worried that people might think that Dark Wolverine was a good comic that would've been good with or without him, so he left the comic just so you could see that, yes, the only worthwhile thing about it was his art. For some reason, he's paired on this issue of the Hulk with Ariel Olivetti, and the overall result is about as bad an idea as that sounds. If you're looking for an example of two artists who have absolutely nothing in common, you can pretty much stop here and call the game quits. Still, half of a good artist is better than all of a bad one, and Camuncoli once again shows off why it behooves people who want to draw action to actually figure out how a human body would move if it started flipping and bounding around a room--it's worthwhile because it makes for a much better looking comic. It's still a confusing clusterfuck of a story, apparently Bruce Banner and Wolverine want their kids to get better at fighting because they're hoping that their kids will grow up to kill them, something like that. But hey! Bounding!

Batman: Streets of Gotham # 5
Written by Chris Yost
Art by Dustin Nguyen, Derek Fridolfs & John Kalisz
Published by DC Comics

Finally, the definitive answer to the question "What is it that Batman won't do" which is also something that "Oracle can't do"! The answer should have been easy to predict--it's stab the Man-Bat in the deltoid after shooting him in the other deltoid. See, Batman wouldn't do that, because it's a completely ineffectual way to solve Man-Bat related problems, and Oracle can't do that because...not sure, actually. Because she's in a wheelchair? Her hands still work fine, so that can't be it. Maybe because it's stupid? Oracle's usually written as smart, so that's probably it. Huntress can't even be bothered to wear the same costume from appearance to appearance, so we'll leave "stupid bullshit" in her capable hands.

Justice League of America # 38
Written by James Robinson
Art by Mark Bagley
Published by DC Comics

This is basically the wet dream of anybody who has ever wanted hard evidence that super-hero comics were horrible and could only be horrible. It's actually sort of impressive.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Television Of The Weak: The Best Part Of The Future Is The Part Where Everybody Is Dead

This week, we've got The Venture Brothers, Mad Men, Dollhouse, & House. Hey, what do you want? I've been traveling, and Marty's television was stolen by the poor.

The Venture Brothers: "Blood of the Father, Heart of Steel" by Matthew J. Brady

Yeah, I think this fourth season premiere of the best and funniest animated show around (suck it, Family Guy!) deserves a solid "Holy crap!" With each passing season, the creators get more and more confident in their storytelling, while still delivering metric shitloads of hilarity. And this one is a doozy, continuing right where the third season finale left off but then proceeding to jump forward and backward in time, Memento-style, to get us to the new status quo (which may or may not last more than another episode or two; we'll see). Since the second season, the premieres have been opportunities for experimentation, with revamped credit sequences and shifts in perspective, and while this is no exception, it does seem to be pushing toward a more complex future, or at least doing something unexpected for a little while.

So, the story, from what I can piece together, sees Brock injured in the explosion that killed Monarch henchman 21 (or was it 24? I can't keep them straight), then immediately shipped to an OSI facility, where he thinks he's going to be brainwashed. Also, he has HELPER's head embedded in his chest. He makes an escape via plummeting, and then returns to the compound, leaving his signal watch with Hank and Dean, who are being watched over by OSI agents. The surviving henchman hires Dr. Venture to clone his fallen comrade, offering a mint condition Marvel Mystery Comics #1 as payment, but he can't proceed with the cloning because some Nazis also force him to try to clone Hitler, whose blood runs through the veins of a bulldog that Hank immediately adopts, renaming Giant Boy Detective, after the hero of his teen novels, the ending of which was spoiled by an OSI jerkwad. Brock searches out the doctor that did his superior officer Colonel Hunter Gathers' sex change to get HELPER removed. Meanwhile, Sergeant Hatred becomes the boys' new bodyguard, but Hank doesn't respect him, so he convinces Hank to shoot him while lecturing him about the cost of wasted bullets, and Dr. Venture rebuilds HELPER into a giant spider-bot. Brock hangs out with the bionic man and his Bigfoot lover until he's mentally recovered from his betrayal by OSI (yet flabby). Then he searches out Molotov Cocktease and tries to take down her operation, but is defeated by Gathers and taken into captivity by a rogue espionage cell, which turns out to be led by Gathers in the culmination of a ridiculously convoluted undercover scheme. Finally, Hank, Dean, and Hatred team up to take down the Nazis and kill Hitler, although Dean refuses to let his beloved dog be murdered, and Dr. Orpheus unleashes a face-melting spell straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Does any of that make sense? Hell, I barely understand it, and I just watched the damn thing; I can't imagine somebody trying to comprehend it who hasn't seen the last three seasons. But screw 'em, this is becoming an insider show, full of nerdy references and hilarious bits of self-referencing humor. And they even do some fun things with the structure, like tracking the condition and value of the comic, which starts out the episode ruined and worthless and progressively gets more and more valuable, until we finally see the moment that it starts to decline. And Brock's quest gets subtitled with one of the features from the comic itself in each scene, including The Human Torch when he's burning at the beginning, The Sub-Mariner when he's coming up from underwater, and Jungle Terror when he's meeting with the rogue surgeon (in the jungle, natch). And sure, that's all clever and everything, but good god, the scenes and dialogue are as funny as ever, with some of my favorite lines being: "You're getting face all over me! Hot melting face!", "Oh, come on! I should have asked RuPaul to paint my camo face!", "You told me you had to make number one, not number two, kid." "I don't speak your special spy..code...talk!", "Those bullets are like a dollar each! I am taking every missed shot out of your allowance!", "You guys are Nazis!" "Nein, we're not!", "The doggie made a poo poo!" "Great, some fucking master race!"

So, good character bits? check. Cool plot developments? check. Ridiculous, hilarious shit happening near-constantly? check. Excitement at where the plot will go next? check. Over the top violence? Check. Funny-ass scenes and dialogue? Double motherfucking check. Yep, the Ventures are back, and as good as ever. If they make me piss myself next week, all is right with the world.

Mad Men: "The Color Blue" by Sean "No Longer Dying" Witzke

Cindy Brady starts off the episode asking why they don't go to church every sunday. Oh yeah, this is gonna be a fun episode. Don goes over to the hippy teachers house and she's got a star sticker on her face. Don, please destroy this woman emotionally, my anti-hippy senses really make me hate her hippy guts. And she's talking about her kids asking about whether or not colors are the same for everyone. Because cliches aren't SOMETHING TO AVOID WHILE WRITING OR ANYTHING. Teacher: "Do you feel bad about what you do?" Don: "Nobody feels as good about what they do as you do". Don's fucking around on Betty again, at least. Back to the tenets of hateful drinking and philandering that made me love Don Draper. Then there's some crap about a fat bearded communist and Peggy doing crap and I don't caaaare wah wah i had swine flu you fake tv fuckers. Jared Harris gives Don his paycheck, tells Don he's got to give a speech. Fat communist is competing with Peggy or something, the kind of drama that happens on these shows to keep things running when the interesting stuff happens NEXT episode. We meet Jared Harris' wife, who totally hates New York because it's full of fat ladies (not true) and blacks (true, why it's awesome) and "criminals at every level" (sorta true, if you're a liberal whiner). Jared Harris likes it here, because it's not all about class. Ha! Guess he doesn't watch the show. Hippy Teacher and Don are interrupted by Hippy Teacher's epileptic brother. Hippy Teacher defends Don to Epileptic Brother, who judges people harshly. Roger Sterling and Burt Cooper hang out together, hogging up all the old white dudes for the rest of the planet. Sterling talks about discovering Don and Betty at some company upstate. Fat Communist Beardo even drinks like a bad actor. He and Peggy are writing ads for Western Union, and my grandad worked for them for most of his adult life, not too far from Don Draper actually - he grew up on a farm without electricity and ended up working on some of the earliest telecom satellites, had a govt. security clearance and everything. It makes the "outdated" notion they're selling on this episode kind of backwards to me. Uh, yeah telegrams don't matter anymore but they kind of built the infrastructure that the internet exists on, you shitheads. Show some fucking respect. Hippy Teacher catches up to Don on the train, because apparently they don't teach "boundaries" at whatever Montessori school he "inspires" at. Fat communist meets a maintenance guy called Achilles, doesn't listen to him, and then says he gave him an idea, decides to spend the night in the office. He wakes up, realizes he didn't write it down, and goes nuts looking or it. Jared Harris practices his speech to his assistant, the english toady kid who was also on Bones (have you watched Bones? It's charmingly awful). The British calls Harris up, tell him they're looking to sell Sterling Cooper off asap, he doesn't know what to do about it. Betty calls the Governor's Aide (while wearing her best Emma Frost sweater), and he tells her to stop screwing around with him and act like an adult (never gonna happen, there buddy). Harris has to convince Cooper to attend the party, slimy dog that he is. Betty finds the keys to Don's desk drawer, and like the Hayley Mills character she's dressed as, she snoops in his memory shoebox, ignoring the massive wads of cash he's got sitting there. She freaks out at finding the divorce certificate in Don's name. Don offers to drive Epileptic Brother to his job at a hospital somewhere, he doesn't really want to, says "Julius Caesar had epilepsy and he ran Rome" Don: "It didn't work out so well from him". Don tells him to call him if he needs him, according to Don that's the first time he's ever said that. Betty sits at home waiting for Don, and Don isn't coming home. he's going to screw the Hippy Teacher. The problem is that Betty really doesn't know how to react to this, and just kind of mopes around her house. After the commercial, we cut to Don walking in angry to his office, calls his wife asking about his tux. Betty makes the angry face, not understanding how to react to it and Don charms her in a line out of it. The b-plot that pissed me off, with the Beardo and Peggy thinking up ideas for Western Union, settles itself out with the message that "it all works out". Yeah thanks b-plot, great fucking shakes you've achieved tonight filling time between Don Draper scenes. Don Draper on the dais, being presented by a man who hates him to talk to a room full of people who hate him, and we never get to see him speak, just Betty staring at him not knowing who he is. Only three episodes left this season, and hopefully they won't be as chock full of filler like this one.

Fringe: "Dream Logic" by Matthew J. Brady

So, wait, what's the Fringe over-plot again? Is it about groups of scientists committing acts of terrorism in hopes of gaining the attention of some major force or other, or has that gone away, and now it's about war with invaders from another universe? I'm apparently having trouble keeping up, but this episode doesn't really fit into either one, so I guess it doesn't matter. It must be the Fringe equivalent of an X-Files "monster of the week" episode, although who knows if anybody has come up with a term for that yet. I propose "Monthly Mad Scientist Massacre", since these episodes seem to show up more rarely.

So, this week we've got people having waking nightmares, seeing those around them as monsters or something, and going on killing sprees before dying of exhaustion. Also, their hair turns white as they die, which is an odd detail, since even though they paid for the effects, nobody bothers to mention it during the episode. Anyway, turns out they were all recipients of treatment for sleep disorders, undergoing an experimental treatment in which a chip was placed in their brain to control the thalamus, and thus fix the dream issues. Long story short, the chip was wirelessly controlled, so somebody was mainlining their dreams as a drug, which also caused them to go crazy and experience waking nightmares and murderous paranoia for some reason. That doesn't make much sense at all, especially since the point was made that the bad guy was "stealing" their dreams and thus making them die from exhaustion, but they were still somehow seeing nightmares. And that's impressive that only terrible nightmares were induced; nobody dreamed about dancing with fluffy bunnies or fucking supermodels? What a waste.

There was one bit of inspired silliness, made possible by some good guest-casting: the scientist leading the study was so earnest and concerned that nobody could have expected him to be the bad guy. But then Olivia comes up with a bit of trivia about how her alcoholic uncle was like a different person when he was drunk, so boom! Split personality. Ridiculous but entertaining. There was also a subplot about Olivia trying to get over Charlie's death, and Kevin Connelly's treatment is to have her collect business cards from random people, then choose random letters from the people's names and rearrange them to find some secret message. Whatever, that's dumb, but it fits with the dorky Mr. Miyagi type of stuff he does. The funny thing is, whenever she asks people for business cards, they get all befuddled, like it's some bizarre request. I wouldn't think an FBI agent wanting your card was that big a deal, but maybe they're afraid of ending up on a list. Ah well, entertaining enough, I suppose. You gotta take what you can get, beggars can't be choosers, and always look on the bright side of life.

House: "Brave Heart" by Tucker Stone

In the annals of "this is a joke, right" openers, this particular episode of House wins a prize, and that prize is megghlllhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhck. I mean, don't get me wrong: it's nice to see Jon Seda working. I've never actually liked Jon Seda, but I don't wish him ill or anything. He's just "one of those guys", he was on Oz, and I'm pretty sure I saw him in that boxing movie he made with Cuba Gooding Jr. and that assclown from Twin Peaks. So good for Jon Seda, getting to play a patient-of-the-week on House, good for him for jumping off a fucking building for no good reason beyond "see, this guy doesn't care if he lives or dies", even though that doesn't have remotely anything to do with the plot of the episode. But hey, work away. I don't fucking care. I mean, sure--plight of the Latino actor, fucking dude has to work on C.S.I. Miami because hey, he's Puerto Rican, sorta, but at the end of the day, the highway called "America has no decent roles for non-whites" is running parallel to "Jon Seda is so fucking boring". Hey, it bugs the shit out of me that the last time I saw Omar was on a shitty episode of Law & Order, that Marlo Stanfield played a ridiculous voodoo bad guy in Max Goddamn Payne, it really irks the shit out of me that Michael ended up doing that No, Really, God Is A Lie, So's Jesus 90210 is BACK, Melrose is a-coming! Yes, that bugs me. I like those actors. (Not enough to use their real names, apparently!)

Oh, wait. Omar Epps!

Nevermind, House is cool. I'm cool with House. See how Omar screamed when it turned out Jon Seda wasn't dead? That scream was the best scene that Omar's had since those two episodes where he was dying, the one where he stabbed the fuck out of Cameron and said "now you've got it too", and he said it in that way that lets you know he's ending every single line by mentally adding the word "you fucking bitch" before inserting the period. That shit was epic, I had zero problems with those episodes. This one wasn't as good--I like watching Omar scream though. That was a really, really weird scream. It was so weird that I almost thought, shit, is that really the way Omar Epps screams? Because man, I hear people scream all the time--i got weird testicles, deal with it--and I have never heard a scream like that. That shit was Dr. Strange, it was Katzenjammers, it was fucking zoinks in the nose. Wait, what the hell was I talking about?

No more Taub, that's the plan, huh? I'm gonna miss that guy, but I can't complain too hard about an episode that was nice enough not to include one second of Olivia Wylde. I know it's passe and all to hate on Olivia Wylde, and yes, it is sort of weird how the entirety of the universe seems to have risen up and said "we all dislike the pretty white girl", and no, I couldn't tell you exactly why I don't like 13. I could tell you she's got zero chemistry with Omar Epps, or that her suspenders are stupid, or that she's the sort of actor that makes me wonder what it would look like if they replaced her with the dead body of W.C. Fields, or that her hair always looks greasy, or that I'm sick and fucking tired of lipstick lesbians that seem to have been created solely out of dingy all-male writing basements. See, I could tell you all of that. But again: what the hell was I talking about?

Oh, House. So the Puerto Rican Actor had a messed up heart due to a button in his brain, House figured it out while flirting with Cuddy, it turns out that Wilson is even more pathetic than the last time you found out that he did something pathetic, but he still is the best foil that House ever had, or will have, and this show should definitely give the two of them a couple more road trip episodes. At least before he starts fucking Cuddy, which is probably going to happen pretty soon. I used to want it to, but then Lisa "Former Club Kid" Edelstein was rude to a couple of real world friends of mine, and now I sort of think she's trash--bros before fictional characters, that's how we do things. Oh, and because the writers are diabolical, there's going to be a bunch of scenes where Chase and Cameron have arguments about their relationship, and trust, and it's going to be kind of uncomfortable to watch, since the actors playing those parts aren't going to be getting married anytime soon, which means ever, despite the fact that the guy who plays Chase proposed to the lady who plays Cameron on the fucking Eiffel Tower. And look, I don't know who dumped who, and I'm not going to read OK! or HELLO! or PRIVATE SHIT! to find out, but seriously man. It doesn't fucking matter who dumped who. If you propose to somebody on the Eiffel Tower, and then you don't get married--you ever want to see that fucking person again? Of course not.

-Matthew Brady, Sean Witzke & Tucker Stone, 2009

The Virgin Read: "When you get old and think you are sweet, take off your shoes and smell your feet.."

B.P.R.D. 1947 # 4
Written by Mike Mignola & Joshua Dysart
Art by Gabriel Bá, Fábio Moon & Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics

This week I first narrowed down my choice to two books:  BPRD and Hellboy. But when in the store, I was in a bit of a hurry, so I had the man deliver both, so that I might decide between the two at my leisure. When I revisited my choices, I realized that what had most attracted my attention were the two covers, both of which were drawn by Mike Mignola. Now, if you know me, (I realize you don't), you know I'm not usually drawn in by things like red skulls and creepy wings. But something about the overall "package" both those books have is just so attractive to me. I flipped through both books briefly and ended up settling, happily, on the BPRD. Possibly because of the added bonus of 1947...I love that era, I love historical fiction, and I love this FONT!

I will tell you, as I often do, that I don't have much of an art vernacular. Just now, in the previous paragraph, I was reaching for the right words to describe what I liked about the cover and realized I don't even know technical or semi-technical terms. So, forgive me, but I'll just have to gush, Nina-style.  (Yes, you may get phrases like "wack-a-doodle" or "bingy." I am sorry.)

The colorist's (i asked how this was made) used a technique that I have come to love and find in all of my favorite-ish comics. They employed only 3 or 4 major colors per storyline. Not only is this so pleasing to my eye, but it helps me follow the story, a story I haven't read the first three issues of. In this issue, the plot jumps back and forth through time, and that coloring choice was the major thing that helped me to keep it all straight.

On the drawing side, I loved the use of...would it be "perspective"? The way that the panels slowly "zoom-out" over a series of frames. Revealing one cat, and then two, and then ten, and then a frame that shows what seems like hundred of cats on the ground in the trees, etc. That scene, I'm guessing, probably has more meaning or impact to those who read BPRD regularly. But whether that's true or not, it had a definite impact on me.

I have to pause for a moment and just comment on BPRD as a comic. It's so different and interesting. I'd forgotten what the initials stood for and read the comic thinking to myself, "Oh yeah, this book has some science-fiction-y-weird-supernatural stuff in it...but it's so intriguing!" From the ringleted little girl suddenly appearing, to the cats and the strange old...person and his/her (?!?) information, to the vampire sisters and all their craziness, all within a storyline that had me engaged wondering what was going to happen next and how this guy was going to get rescued, rather than all the "weird stuff" sort of taking me out of the story to wonder if things were plausible. This is smart stuff, but most of all, it's fun.

And on that note, back to the art! (Because I need to applaud more of it.) The subtleties! I was reading the story, just along for the ride, trying to figure out what the deal was with these sisters. The frames in which we first see them kill a man and then sort of revel in his blood immediately reminded me of a scene form True Blood. That one when they showed him and his Maker (that chick) in the 20s or 40s and how they took couples to bed and then devoured them and were just luxuriating in all the blood? Remember? I don't know if it was by design...but that was the only way vampires came into my head. At no time were these beings called vampires. But on the full page where the two ladies are in bed with Simon, on his neck, in contrast to the peachy color of skin and green and yellow dresses are 2 small red marks on his neck. VAMPIRES. And again - never called that. Never mentioned. But they did indeed have to stake them through the heart to kill them. I just loved the simplicity of those two little marks on that great big page. 

And then, two pages later? When the team arrives to save Simon, and the sexy, warm room of the previous page is revealed to actually be a decrepit, dark, decaying room with a half-dead Simon surrounded by crazy fanged skeletons? That was an AMAZING contrast. So cool.  

Now, I can't let this whole review go by without mentioning cute little Hellboy! I don't really know the significance of young Hellboy. But he sure is cute. I loved the page where he's reading a comic book eating a huge stack of pancakes. I love how the comic book is drawn to look like, well, old comic books. It's even got the typical WWII content of 1947. (Hell yeah, I read Kavalier & Clay. I know what I'm talkin' 'bout!)

And how about that cinematic last page? Hellboy holding his dog, looking up at the plane, and in the panel below, Trevor, through the window and the reflection of the plane that will hopefully return, Simon in tow. Alive.

This was a good one.

-Nina Stone, 2009

Comics Of The Weak: "Only The Magazine Slut Zone Had The Perspicacity To Notice"

This week's reviews were written by fictional characters created by controversial French writer Michel Houllebecq.

Various Batman Titles

Gotham City has but two types of people-those who wreak violence, and those who have violence wreaked upon them. The first type are all men, for the most part, although the occasional lesbian is permitted participation, as long as she has previously received approval from whomever currently holds the title of most cruel. (Said participation is usually considered an important story point, further cementing the little respect or interest that these stories have for women--there are few other places in fiction where "the bitch can stay" is considered interesting or dynamic.) Batman is their ubermodel, the sturm king who they look to for permissible behavior, be it the anarchic cruelty of a Joker or the crime-towards-system of the grotesque product of inbreeding called Penguin, the City is little more than a repository of bludgeoning, gunshots and death. Men who die are weak, women who are robbed are numbers, all that matters are the muscles that control the clenched fists: nothing can be of more importance than the blood, no skill is given a higher estimation than brute strength. All of the ancillary deaths are pure wish-fulfillment--parents, mostly, although the random spouse falls as well, as that allows for an acceptable frenzied orgy of destruction. (It has been claimed that these stories are not for children, a statement notable for both its pathetic origins in the trivial masturbation known in the West as "therapy" as well as its obvious wrongness--of course these are for children, because it is children who most actively enjoy fantasies about the death of parents. Adult children are already content with the knowledge that they just have to wait for the guilty to reject their withered husks.)

Beyond the nebbishy cries of the nostalgic and the old, this is why the Batman replacement idea cannot work, or does not--a Dick is not a Bruce, because a Dick is weak, a flaccid thing of tears who quibbles and enjoys actual pats-on-back. (Besides the general truth that Bruce would recoil from being "reassured" by another, Bruce's personality would have aborted any such ideas in those near him upon their initial moment of conceptions. Here, Dick not only accepts the grotesque physical touch of friendship, he quite nearly asks for it. Friendship has no place in Gotham City, that fact is the most contemporary portion of the Batman stories--relationships are brutish and mortal, as they are in the real world, where the first action at disagreement is the "block" or the "unfriend"--no longer do we pretend to care for others, we, like Batman, hold all to the one standard: in line, or dead-to-me.) Even worse, Dick lacks the mettle or taste for violence, he recoils from the joy his new Robin finds in the broken bones, the bloodslicked eyesockets, decay...all the worse that, due to his age, this new Robin will abandon violence when his diminished cock begins the biological call to fill its sac, for it is sex that the boy truly craves, and when he realizes that, his taste for gore will abandon him. That is, if he isn't forced into the stunted adolescence that captures his brother Tim, a child who has skipped puberty to become eunuch, with only the final biological slash left for completion. Here, one is given a Batman that is no longer a case and cause of violence, but merely a child in his father's clothing, a case of Home Alone screams at aftershave played out in a decayed memory of Anton Furst's Inferno. (Azrael, the only thing that resembles an adult man, is a tired shadow himself, but here, it is a shadow of a cartoon, a man with multi colored flaming swords and a hood--but with the inability to finish tasks, a lack of stomach for murder. A child's limits placed on man's behavior: repressed, pathetic.)

It is possible, one assumes, for rectification, but only with the most Oedipal (Damian slaughters Tim & Dick, eats their hearts, takes the City as his prize) or base (Bruce returns, kills hundreds and molds the City into Arabian fortress, complete with pedophiliac harem), but, as neither of those help the sales of merchandise and might attract the wholly unwanted attention of America's craven media, they will not take place. Instead, one will be treated to the continued neutering of the one fictional location that formerly most resembled our own: Gotham, the land where you could, and would, be prince--as long as you occasionally offered supplication to the King.

Green Lantern Corps # 41

I cannot be bothered to learn their names, these foolish humanoid beasts, I can only say that they are indistinguishably dull, the lot of them. None capture a moment, excepting the ugliest one, a garguantuan deformity who quotes a pop singer. "Say my name", he cries, and I only recall him now for he reminds me of a Turkish youth who once told me, pride in his breast, that he had made the prostitute I bought for him orgasm. When I asked him why, his stupid mouth opened into confusion--because she said so, he claimed. It can not depress me that they are stupid, I thought, but the feeling of revulsion was so strong! Upon retiring, I knew the simple answer: it was his arrogance! That he would matter to the cheap, revolting whore! I felt the same for this Kilowog--oh that all their names allowed for such easy racial slurs, these weak and simple American stories might have a wisp of danger to them then--that he mattered, that his name did, that his pain did. As if he could not see the globes surrounding him! As if he could not know his singular uselessness! They say the environmental movement got its biggest burst of support when the pictures of our grimy planet were transmitted from the satellites, I know this to be a lie, as all things about the environment are a filthy lie, because the one thing those pictures always inspire is a reminder of our qualities--namely, that we have none. Watching this disgusting elephantine creature punch the undead, screaming for recognition, I thought of it again. We are nothing but husks, sacks of meat to be split and dumped into barrels. I once drained the fluid out of a dog's cracked open ribcage, his body so large that it required two of us tipping him, as the fluid needed measurement, the fiendish ghoul of a doctor hoping for a feature article on retention. As the pus and blood mixed with saline and urine--we had accidently pierced the bladder when removing the beast's shattered ribs--poured out into the plastic buckets, we listened to the grotesque shopkeep cry out the numbers as the level rose. Never have I looked at an animal since and seen anything but that moment. And we are they, the same, sacks of meat, waiting for the depraved to measure us into buckets. This is what the astronauts showed the world, the planet: a land where none of us matter, and all are the same. Say your name if you must, Kilowog. But do not pretend it is makes you any different.

Punisher # 75

I once shook a man's hand immediately after fucking his fiance. My hand was warm, having been pressed between her fleshy ass and the cheap carpet of the rooms he was jobbed with supervising, but he took no notice of it, assuming I to be yet another of those obese cretins whose hands are always coated in a sweat-slickened warmth. He also failed to notice the stink of her sex, which was painted across my mouth and chin, but I've always held to the memory that his eyelashes--he was one of those feminine men with long, cat-like lashes that take on a garish curl--quivered a bit, expressing recognition at the smell his brain must have long since labeled as being one he assumed sole possession over. As I smiled my falsest grin at him, my tongue flecked around the corners of my lips, tasting her sex still, while we forced out the sort of general conversation that was to be expected. The slut waited behind me, and when we sneakily found one another outside--he had another few minimum wage hours left at the desk, and I had not ejaculated yet--she demanded to know why I spoke to him, did I not realize this might arouse suspicion? Sneering at her ridiculous fake concern--if she cared for his feelings, why then had she accosted me a scant hour earlier, demanding that "we fuck right here, while he waits"--I informed her that, while I had no intention of directly informing him of our tryst, she could not expect me to ignore the chance to relish in this, my private drama of power and cruelty.

The Punisher is a character incapable of sexuality, as far as I can imagine, so his only method of exerting that same sort of power is in violence. Devoid of artistic interest or ability, he cannot even revel in creative engagement with this, his only task, so he finds his satisfactions in doing it on a monolithic scale. (The character is a misanthropic lunatic, if the description of his pastimes have not made this clear.) Disappointingly, he only kills "criminals", a ridiculous proposition when considering how impossible it is to find a single human being not deserving of slaughter in the world as it now exists. Born only so that we can die, this "Frank Castle" could work less as vigilante, and more as Platonic argument made flesh--prove your life, or watch it ended. Instead, he's another Good Samaritan, wandering around helping little girls on snowy eves while shooting "bad men" and sneering. However, one story does include the reading of a letter where Frank's daughter reveals her incestual dream to someday "marry her daddy", and that minor twist alone makes it far superior to the predictable "up with normalcy" attitude the rest of this doggerel consists of.

Uncanny X-Men # 516

I am at a loss to understand what is "uncanny" about a father's authority being supplanted by a son, but I will assume that one of the five-hundred previous installments of this serial contains within them the reasoning behind the adjective. However, there is nothing to be found in this particular chapter that cannot be found in any of the generic "action" television products America defecates out of its strangled rectum. While it was somewhat difficult to navigate the hideous drawings that infected every page, I found eventual solace in the belief that the art was the collage project of a diseased adolescent, as the figure drawings most resembled the end result of smearing feces onto pictures culled from mass-mailed catalogs. The story is a simple one, following the decision of a younger man to ignore his surrogate father's warnings and embrace as brother another man the father does not care for, and may in fact fear. Because this plot is not enough by itself to maintain interest, the comic book includes a unforgivable tease of torture sequence involving a professional wrestler who wears mascara. Angry at him because he does not wear form-fitting spandex, the wrestler's captors place him in a plane headed for the psuedo Israel that the X-Men currently live on. It's not very intriguing--like the real Israel, the X-Men are certainly capable of dealing with the incursion of one plane, no matter what its payload consists of--but it does point towards a direction that could be far more worthwhile than the soap operatic of whether or not an old dog is capable of new tricks. One could imagine a delightfully candy-color depiction of the Gaza Strip, with the one-eyed Cyclops eating those who encroach the borderlands, while the women make the final move towards answering the burqa with head-to-toe nudity, a violent explosion of sexuality tangled up in threats of extermination and the death of childbirth. If these characters, these "mutants" really are the last of their kind, it is high time for them to act like it--move past the old rivalries, and celebrate the freedom guaranteed annihilation allows. I.E: they should all be fucking one another. Youthful virility has a timetable. Undergraduate ethics discussions are forever.

Liberty Comics # 2

There are few things as obnoxious as reading what passes for political thought when the speakers are artists, and one of those few things is when the exact same thing happens, but the majority of the speakers are white male American artists. It would probably be tempting for some to claim "for a good cause" while quietly shuffling off to something they actually enjoy, like ultraviolent hobbit smut, but it's undeniably far more attractive to stop for a moment and imagine a world where those who call themselves artists are required to produce evidence that they, at any point in their career, have done something that could honestly be defined as "dangerous". On terms of the examples provided here, a general culling by way of legal attack might not only be necessary, but a more interesting excursion than the work itself. At the very least, one could be assured that the depositions would include at least one moment where the accused broke down into the copious sobs of the charlatan.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Television Of The Weak: My Spine's A Limousine That Drives All Night

This week we've got Dollhouse, a surprise, Bored To Death, Mad Men, Fringe, House, Dexter and Sons of Anarchy.

Dollhouse: "Belle Chose" by Matthew J. Brady

Serial killers! Slutty college girls! Long-distance mind-swapping! Dollhouse's costume department! This episode has it all, or at least some of it. Plus, more Battlestar Galactica spill-over, with Michael "my eye grew back" Hogan showing up as a Dollhouse investor whose nephew is a psycho kidnapper. It's only a small role, but it's a decent one, and maybe he'll show up again at some point. The plot involves Victor being imprinted with the crazy guy's mind so they can interrogate him (he's in a coma from a car accident, and we've gotta find his victims before time runs out! This show will steal every plot it can get its hands on), but he escapes and leads them on a merry chase through LA. At the same time, Echo is off having (pseudo-)pseudo-intellectual discussions with a college professor in hopes of seducing him and raising her grade (she's so dumb she thinks "medieval" is halfway between "beginner's evil" and "advanced evil"! Oh, my sides), because he's too nebbishy to actually fuck a real student. And so, it's a typical thing, with complications and tense scenes and jokes like we've come to expect.

The thing is, there are some interesting moments where--

Sarah (Matt's wife): Hey, what are you doing wasting time talking about this junk?

Matt: Excuse me? What are you--

Sarah: You know what you really want to talk about, the REAL exciting thing we saw last week.

Matt: You mean--?

Sarah: That's right, the So You Think You Can Dance tour! Why bother with your silly shows when you've got that?

Matt: Well, it wasn't really TV--

Sarah: It's from a TV show! Come on, we watch it every week, and you knew all those dancers by name!

Matt: Uh, that's true, but that's just from absorbing the information secondhand.

Sarah: Oh, come off it, you're there next to me on the couch every time, excited to see all the leaps and twirls. You love every sequined, sexy minute of it.

Matt: Maybe not every minute, but I do enjoy the artistry and physicality of the dancing, and it's fascinating to see the impressive results of professional choreography and what has to be a less-than-optimal amount of practice over such a short period of time from week to week.

Sarah: See, I knew this was what you wanted to talk about. So, what did you think of the show?

Matt: It was pretty good. I was impressed how much I was able to see even from our cheap nosebleed seats. The movement of the dances were very clear even from that distance, and it was interesting to be able to see the whole thing, without having the viewing angles chosen by an editor. And man, those dancers are pretty incredible, just amazing to watch how much they're in control of their bodies and how well they can communicate the artistry and emotion of the dances. But what about you? You're the one who really wanted to go.

Sarah: I loved it. It was amazing to see those beautiful dances performed live in front of me. However, I was disappointed that they only had two new routines for the live show, both group dances. Everything else, even the solos, were recycled from the TV show. That made for an interesting new way of seeing some of those routines though. The zombie dance that Jason and Kayla did was amazing this time, but I thought the one that Jeanine and Phillip did suffered from not being able to see the details of their smaller movements. And the dancer that really impressed me was Kayla; she wasn't my favorite on the show, but she was beautiful on stage.

Matt: Yeah, that's for sure. Me, I loved watching Phillip's solo; man, that guy can move. Brandon and Jeanette were pretty awesome together as well; they did four separate routines from the show, all excellent.

Sarah: I wish they had done my favorite dance of theirs, that tango!

Matt: True, true. And some of the group routines were amazing to see when you're watching everybody move around on a stage rather than seeing them on a screen. It was pretty awesome, overall, although I could have used more dancing and less video.

Sarah: I know! They kept showing clips from the show, and were always talking about what the judges said when they introduced the dances. I don't care if Nigel called it "the greatest cha-cha he's ever seen." Less talk and more dance already!

Matt: I guess they gotta keep the branding and the non-dancer personalities prevalent in everyone's mind. So, we're agreed then? It was a great experience?

Sarah: Yes! I want to go next year too!

Matt: We'll see about that. Can I go back to what I was doing now?

Sarah: If you must.

Okay, so, yeah, Dollhouse was good this week. I've forgotten whether I had anything else to say about it, except that the thing they do at the end of episodes, where Echo exhibits some personality trait of whatever she was imprinted with, is kind of tired now that she can basically retrieve memories and personalities at will. Unless they're trying to indicate that the serial killer persona might be fighting for dominance in her mind. That's interesting stuff, kind of a Crazy Jane vibe. I like it. Yeah, this episode was exciting and full of stuff to think about; let's keep this trend going, please.

Bored to Death: "The Case of the Stolen Skateboard" by David Brothers

Bored to Death is, right now, the dictionary definition of a show you tune into because nothing else is on. We're four episodes in and so far, it's just kind of okay. The hook is cool. Jonathan Ames is a novelist whose girlfriend has left him, who is having trouble with his new novel, and who really, really needs to grow a spine. Instead of doing that, he hops on Craigslist and offers his services as an unlicensed PI. It's less illegal that way, apparently.

 

Surprisingly, the show isn't really a Mystery of the Week setup. Instead, Ames brings it up whenever he can, often to perfect strangers. He comes off as fairly desperate for approval, like the kid on the block whose dad works at the toy factory and he can get you some toys if you want them i mean it's no big deal, okay? It feels like he's saying "Hire me!" pretty often. His boss is Ted Danson, here playing a pervert stoner, and when he calls, Ames has to come running. Doesn't matter where he is. It's the kind of relationship that needs either clearer boundaries ("Yeah, Ames, my lady is walking around topless while we talk about business, what's the problem?") or to be cut off completely.

What's entertaining about it, though, is that he's fairly interesting in his weakness. In this episode, he takes a case mainly because the housewife is pretty cute (she's Parker Posey, if you're wondering) and reminds him of his mother. No, really- she babies her son, who is apparently allergic to everything, and Ames shares a lovely story about his mother protecting him as a child. Then they make out on her kitchen floor. I mean, c'mon-- am I the only one making this connection?

The case is retrieving her sickly son's skateboard (why is a kid allergic to air skateboarding, anyway?) from some New York City-Brand Teenaged Thugs. They're just 16, though, no big deal. Except Ames is a skinny guy, pretty much a coward, and rather than just being honest, he tries to use trickery to get the ride. He comes off like a pedophile or someone begging to be robbed. "Hey do you guys know where this other kid hangs out?" he asks, wearing a trenchcoat and flashing money.

Bored to Death is basically about a self-centered guy who is trying to be accepted by others. What's good for us is that he's clueless in a "well off New York resident" way. It's a good show in a flipping through channels, "oh, it's this show, cool," sort of way. I wouldn't rush out to watch it, but if it falls into my lap, I won't complain.

Mad Men - "Wee Small Hours" by Sean Witzke

Hey look the masturbation couch is back!

Connie Hilton calling Don Draper up in the middle of the night, asking Don about the morality of instinct and shit. He wants "Hiltons on the moon, that's where we're headed", and offers Don his international business. Betty compares the baby to Hilton, Don goes into work early, most likely still drunk from the night before. The hippy teacher who's been throwing it at Don is out jogging, both of them pause as MLK speaks on the radio. Don's all fucked up on Connie's words and he's thinking about god and destiny and the teacher's whole tolerance deal isn't helping. Coffee is used as a euphamism for fucking too. That's not new. It's raining in both the city and by Betty's house. Betty writes her boyfriend a letter. Don is disgusted by his underling, notably Peggy. Don drives by the same spot looking for the teacher to no avail. Betty's still an awful mother. Betty maintains a sexually-charged correspondence w/ that guy, which now has the added pleasure of crappy voiceover narration. Salvatore is still not comfortable having sex with a man, which must suck for him. The Lucky Strike commercial subplot is a nice dig at the way things are suddenly about to change, with the son of the head of Lucky Strike being smarter about his commercial than the ad-men are. The two shitheads - fat guy in glasses and fat communist bearded guy - get more play here. I'm still not learning their names, but the Lucky Strikes guy tries to fire Sal through fat guy with glasses. Don and Connie drink prohibiton-era booze and Connie pours his heart out to Don. "It's my purpose in life to bring America to the world, whether they like it or not". Connie believes in Manifest Destiny, but in a culture-war way. It's interesting, because he's so nice about it. It's not a malicious Reagan-era fucking commies logic, it's a guy who actually wants to defeat the communists by being a better man than they are. God is on his side, simply by the logic that the comminists don't believe in God. Betty and that Henry guy escalate fast, and he shows up at her house and they come really damn close to screwing. They've both got it bad, and Bettty's snap at the end of the last episode is going to result in her fucking around on Don instead of doing something about it. We all saw that coming. Lucky Strikes guy shows up, gets Sal fired. Roger Sterling (who is a fucking cocksucker) dumps it on Don, because he's a cocksucker. Don Draper doesn't give a fuck if Sal's gay, really. Not at all, he just doesn't want him fucking with his money. "You people" as a pejorative for maybe the first time ever on this show, and it's Don firing Sal not for being gay, but for turning Lucky Strike guy down. Lesson one of Mad Men is DO NOT fuck with Don Draper's money. Connie Hilton's hat is so ridiculous that it completely takes the seriousness of Don's presentation down a few dozen pegs. Don's conversion of Hilton's earlier speech into the ad campaign is interesting, because Don essentially sells American obsolescence back to itself, instead of the saving-grace speech of Connies, Don's missed the point entirely. The two of them argue about Don promising Connie the Moon, both literally and figuratively. The two of them don't really understand each other and that's going to become more and more important as the series goes on, I think. At Betty's fundraiser we hear rich white people try to be tolerant even as their black maid collects their coats, and a hacky line of "I voted for Kennedy once I think I'll do it again". Hint hint. Hey did you know that Kennedy's gonna die this season? It's not like they haven't hinted at it before or anything. Henry finds out that Betty is fucking crazy, and even as she pushes for an affair, she leaves him hanging. This isn't going to end well. Roger Sterling tells Don "I'm here to put you on notice", Don could clearly care less. MLK dies off-frame, Betty says something hurtful about it to her black maid because she's Betty. Don lies to his wife about Hilton calling, because the only thing that's going to set his life right just now is screwing that hippy teacher, who is giving off almost as many mixed signals as Betty has been. Honestly? This episode was terrible.

House: "Instant Karma" by Nina Stone

What gives you more power, knowledge or money? Or drugs? Or God?

Okay, seriously those are the only four choices. (Fucking is a kind of money.) Now, you know how House feels about God or anything remotely spiritual. He loves to balk at it, and the writers of this show love to dangle the possibilities of the supernatural at work in our lives here and there, now and then.

In this episode, we have the struggles of a father, a billionaire father of a sick son that, of course, no one in the rest of the world can properly diagnose. With all the power of a man who knows he can buy anything, this man demands House as his doctor. And gets him, although House is not in charge, Foreman is. (Pretty much in name only, though.) Long story short, this man is convinced that he is not totally powerless over his sons [at one time in the episode] incurable disease. He believes that he has way too much good fortune in one area of his life, and the balance is off. He seems to think he's being punished by God or "the gods." So, after receiving the news of his son's incurable disease, he signs away all of his money. He bankrupts himself, in order to control the outcome. Weird thing is, that House in a usual end-of-show moment of briliance figures out what's really wrong and the kid doesn't die. The father says, "It worked." House says, "The medicine worked." The father smugly, joyfully smiles and just repeats, "it worked."

I usually like episodes when we get a little taste of some form of spirituality. But in this case, I was not rooting for this guy and his theory. Like, this time, when you ask, "Was it God or was it House?" It was House. All House. God does not get my vote in this one. Often I'm all for those episodes and little instances the writers put in, in the hopes of seeing House believe in something greater than, well, himself. But in this case, I'm rooting for House. The father's arrogance was off putting. And the story didn't really hold my interest. (I'd also seen the actor in a scene from the movie Shaft the night before, and he was really horrible in it. He said "Shaft, you gotta pick a color: black...OR BLUE." It was really stupid.)

There was a lot going on in House under the theme of power - who has it, who doesn't, etc. I thought maybe I was grasping at straws to find a theme and a bigger topic than, well, the actual episode. But my re-watch confirmed my hunch. I mean, just look at all this dialogue that came of at various times:

House discussing Foreman being in charge with Cutty:
H: He loves Power. And I love puzzles.
C: You love power and puzzles.
H: True. But when I had them both....

What? He was a drug addict? Or a not-so-nice person? That was fine with the viewers of America. We loved him like that. And see, at the end of the day, the end of the episode, it's clear that knowledge gives you more power than money. House is smarter than everyone. Even when he's not trying. So, he gets what he wants - whether by manipulating people, or by being able to figure out impossible things. He wins. Money can buy you House. But money can't turn you into House. When the dude is getting ready to sign away his life and everyone's trying to convince him not too, someone says to him, that his son is dying and it has nothing to do with Karma. He says:
Father: No. He's not dying. I'm not going to let him.
House: People don't get what they deserve. They get what they get. There's nothing you can do about it.

Which was interesting to hear, coming from the man who will do anything to get what he wants. ;)

Fringe: "Momentum Deferred" by Matthew J. Brady

"Why are shapeshifting soldiers from another universe stealing frozen heads?" Yes! Good question! But really, it's the answer as to why the hell I watch this show. Ideally, it would be constant bits of ridiculousness like this, with any random moment from the show being enough to freak out somebody who walked into the room. That's good TV right there.

Anyway, this episode gets back onto the "enjoyably stupid" side of the divide, with the revelation/clarification/confirmation that our world (or the Fringe equivalent) has been infiltrated by a bunch of shapeshifter agents, not just the one that took the place of Olivia's partner, and they're just the first wave in an interdimensional war that promises to see one universe completely destroyed. That should make for some good TV-style effects; hopefully they'll figure out a way to work in some Kirby dots. There's also a plot about a girl who Walter experimented on many years ago by dosing her up with lots of LSD who could see into the other universe, so for the hell of it, they look her up and dose her again. It's a pretty pointless thing to do, since it goes nowhere, but we do get the implication that Walter fucked her way back then, totally messing up her life in more ways than one. The show never comes out and confirms that fact, but it seems pretty obvious, given the flirty looks the now-middle-aged lady keeps shooting him, her perfect memory of everything about him, and her willingness to get experimented on at the drop of the hat. The actress who plays her makes it seem like this is the culmination of some life goal, but the fact that a mad scientist fucked up her mind and disappeared into a mental institution for 20 years doesn't bode well for any future relationship.

The real centerpiece of the episode though is the revelation of what happened when Olivia met with Leonard Nimoy (as the other mad scientist of the series, William Bell) in the other universe, and he delivered a bunch of exposition to her about wars between universes and the bad guys' intention to open a door and kill everyone or something (although, since they can already send people back and forth all the time, a door doesn't seem like it would make much difference). But the best part is the way he ends it, by throwing her through a window of his office, which, as you might remember, is on an upper floor of the still-standing World Trade Center. It sort of makes sense in context, but it's still pretty hilarious.

I think I'm just watching this show to see what sort of ridiculous silliness happens next, but when it's a week like this, man is it worth it. More guys drinking mercury and twitching spastically because their shapeshifter bodies are dying, please, or Walter doing a Jason Woodrue and feeding Olivia flatworms (I don't know if they intended that reference, since they had to be really obvious about mentioning Invasion of the Body Snatchers). That's the stuff.

Dexter: "Blinded By The Light " by Tucker Stone

Well, John Lithgow killed somebody again this week. It wasn't as horrifying/well-shot as his previous murder, the one where he stripped naked and then gave some poor lady the worst bath ever, but it was relatively efficient. 

That was, until he said "Mommy" while looking at the body. It went unmentioned last week, but part of the problem with Lithgow's character is that the writers seem to believe that Lithgow is as bad an actor as some of the rest of the Dexter cast. Besides that exposition-only (and basically unworkable) line, a previous episode saw Lithgow stuck making it clear to the viewer that he had grabbed a stray dog as cover when stalking his most recent victim. The thing was, it was obvious that he didn't own the dog--throwing in a "hey, just in case you're a moron" line just made the character seem like a fake imitation of The Ultimate Serial Killer that Agent Lundy keeps painting him as. Which--well, that's understandable. Lithgow's character is an archetypal horror show, a unstoppable, untraceable wisp of a man. He even comes complete with the "lone wolf" description, a background clearly painted to tantalize Dexter, who remains trapped in a domestic prison he's created. But if Lithgow is self-reliant enough to have gotten away with 30 years of cross-country serial killing (so well that his existence is believed in by only a few), then why the hell does he keep standing around in public places verbalizing his own thoughts, tactics and motives?

It's a lot more fun to focus on Lithgow at this point, anyway. This episode also saw Dexter take on Tim O'Neil's description of "terrible vigilante", complete with facemask, just to scare the local neighborhood vandal. There was even a scene where he ran around the neighborhood trying to evade the neighborhood watch, who were all wearing mining headlamps. If you wanted to start talking about jumping the shark--well, you're an asshole, but hey--now would be the time.

Sons of Anarchy - "Falx Cerebri" by Tucker Stone

God, just look at that title. It's not like Sons can get away calling itself "Bikers, NERTZ", but gawd damn man, "Falx Cerebri"? Who are you fucking kidding, television show?

Last week's episode implied, strongly, that this week would include gunplay. And while it did have a shootout, where the excellently cast children of Henry Rollins shot at Jax only to find their little one-on-one shootout turn into a gigantic "seven bikers fire 70 or so rounds blindly towards the bunkbeds of a couple of neo-Nazi children" clusterfuck, no one died in the entire episode. Nobody even got hit by any stray bullets, which outta tell you something. The final showdown--the one that had been pumped up in the "next week on Sons"--consisted of Henry Rollins firing a handgun into a podium to set up the bikers for a good old fashioned police round-up. Meanwhile, Jax found the one actor on the show that's worse than him--the "good" cop--and spent most of the episode playing his faux partner. Thankfully for Jax, all of Katey Segal's scenes were with that horrible woman who plays Girlfriend of Jax, and almost every scene went like this:

Girlfriend: Will it always be like this.

Katey Segal: No. It calms down.

Girlfriend: Down.

Katey Segal: [waits, looks confused]

Girlfriend: What is this. [points to gun]

Katey Segal: What? It's a gun. I have lots of them. It's a gun.

Girlfriend: It is a gun.

Katey Segal: [Confused, looking at cameraman.] what's wrong with her? are you..do you want to cut?

Girlfriend: What is this. [points to cup]

Katey Segal: It's a cup. [to cameraman] no, fuck this. I got shit to do today, you deal with it. [Leaves]

Girlfriend: What is this. [points to gun again]

That's pretty much the entire episode, excepting the part where Opie ran his motorcycle into a car and ended up flying into the back window of the car. Because he's Opie--the only guy on the show that can act and is granted lines that aren't completely fucking stupid--he scrambled onto the ground and got back on his motorcycle. Like a champion. After that, he went back and found out that the lion's share of his biker gang had been arrested in one big group, and the viewer found out that the next episode of Sons of Anarchy is going to consist of all of the non-Opie actors doing their own version of Shawshank.

Which--well. That's one way to go with it.

-Matthew J. Brady, Sarah Brady, David Brothers, Sean Witzke, Nina & Tucker Stone, 2009

Music of the Weak: The 100 Greatest Songs of the Millennium (So Far) - #10-1

PREVIOUSLY: #100-91 - Introductions, yacht rock, epic narratives, Elvis tributes, and one-man Canadian supergroups.

#90-81 – Jazz revisionism, shady fact-checking, Muppetized gangsta rap, and the no pussy blues.

#80-71 – A ragtag assembly of pop stars and other hate-able entities.

#70-61 – More pop music, Australian pop, bedroom pop, Kanye West, and the decade’s greatest use of drum machines.

#60-51 – Sex, suicide, misogyny, and a brief appearance by Amy Winehouse.

#50-41 – 8 songs that deserve your attention, 2 songs that probably already have it.

#40-31 – Dylan covers, guest spots and banging camp.

#30-21 – Electronica and “Rock is Back!” hype cycle relics.

#20-11 – Ravers, perps, gangsta children—basically, everyone named in Christian Falk’s “Dream On”—round out the top 20.

10. LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends” (2007)

The classic myth about The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" goes something like this: Keith Richards woke up one morning in his hotel room and found a tape recorder next to his bed. Belligerently drunk the night before, he'd recorded himself messing around on his guitar. He played back the tape, and discovered the iconic riff that would open the band's most indelible hit.

LCD Soundsystem's “All My Friends” could easily be this decade's “Satisfaction”—a song universally acclaimed, respected and loved, albeit by a much smaller cross-section of the population—except that James Murphy appears to have worked the opposite trick. Murphy dug through his hypothetical tape recorder, and unearthed a shambling, ugly, mistake of a piano riff. Then he built an anthem around it. “All My Friends” operates like a piece of found art; Murphy might as well have sampled a bicycle wheel, the piano he uses is so graceless and mundane. At first, it bangs along like a kid playing a remedial version of “Chopsticks” on his first day of lessons. Then, the piano speeds ahead of the player, and they both stumble over one another. Finally, to save face, the player tries to reconstruct his original rhythm, as if nothing ever happened. As the song unfolds, Murphy paints himself as a hard-partying, jet-setting, age-defying scenester, desperate to simply hang out with the people he feels comfortable around. Looks like someone's got the second album blues. Yet, for all the druggy nostalgia, for all the Pink Floyd references, for as much as James Murphy embodies a generation scrambling to hold onto its youth, “All My Friends” always comes back to that piano riff as the perfect metaphor for the rest of its content—driving forward at an uncertain tempo, while constantly on the brink of collapse.

9. Animal Collective – “Grass” (2005)

As divisive as Animal Collective are, people fixate on the albums so intently that they tend to miss the band’s true genius: as a phenomenal singles band. At album length, Animal Collective frequently misunderstands its own best assets. Allowed indulgence, the band's exquisite timing turns languid; its sense of space and largeness of sound becomes a jammy drone; the worldly percussion experiments morph into wanky drum circles. “Grass,” Animal Collective's most triumphant single, clocks in at 2:59, as if it were campaigning to be a radio hit in some alternate universe. Fittingly, under the constraints of time, every aspect that ever earned the band an ounce of derision locks into place, and begins working to its advantage. The guitar playing is lean, the drumming is thunderous, and the song writing has a pop sensibility about it. "Grass" is still tricked out with plenty of avant-garde touches—most notably, the chorus is a symphonic hurricane of screams and whoops—but everything drives toward the song's cumulative effect. With the short run time keeping the band in check, no aspect is there merely for its own sake. 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion may have been an out-of-the-box commercial hit, debuting at #13 on the Billboard charts, but, in 2005, “Grass” was the point where Animal Collective began bringing their avant-garde sensibilities to the pop table.

8. Broken Social Scene – “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” (2002)

“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” is one of Broken Social Scene’s simplest songs. Over a series of sustained violin chords from Jessica Moss, someone hesitantly plucks a banjo, as if he’s learning how to play it in front of a crowd of people. Emily Haines, her voice slightly distorted, begins a schoolyard chant—one with the ironic distance of a woman looking back on herself as a teenager. Broken Social Scene has never been one for subtlety—they’ll cram a bazillion guitars into a single song, wrap them around some sort of crazy time signature, pack it with hooks (sung by multiple singers), and tack on a horn section for good measure. Like their fellow countrymen Godspeed You Black Emperor, they know how to spin a couple of tiny elements into a beautifully sustained tension. Here, that build is topped by Haines chanting, “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me,” which sounds at once like the frenzy of adolescent lust, and like the adult perception of it. The Canadian squadron typically has its designs on a sound bigger, richer, and more iconic than your textbook indie rock. But with “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” they aim for a different kind of bigness than one simply achieved with a massive quantity of sound—something indelible and malleable and iconic; what you’d call a modern standard.

7. Wu-Tang Clan – “I Can’t Go to Sleep (Feat. Isaac Hayes)” (2000)

If Ghostface and the RZA were actors, “I Can’t Go to Sleep” would be pure Oscar bait. The two work themselves up into back-to-back fits of emotion, and then leave Isaac Hayes to do the Morgan Freeman-style narration. Ghostface describes the ghetto like it’s Darfur (“Someone raped our women/ Murdered our babies”), then gets weepy over “babies with flies on their cheeks,” before pulling the old You’re On Candid Camera bait-and-switch. RZA, whose verse may even top Ghost’s (depending on what mood you’re in) offers no such easy out. He recounts civil rights leaders’ assassinations by empathizing with their witnesses—Jesse Jackson’s presence at MLK’s death; Malcolm X’s kids witnessing his shooting; Jackie Kennedy horrifically picking JFK’s brains out of her hair and trying to put them back in his head. As RZA’s verse winds up, he becomes such a loose cannon that he might just rush out of the studio and beat somebody: “Drunk as a fuck, looking around like, ‘These Devils,’ ready to break this world down.” While Ghostface can’t sleep because the atrocities in his neighborhood have him bleary-eyed, RZA can’t sleep because history has driven him to near-madness. Finally, Hayes, whose version of “Walk On By” from Hot Buttered Soul provides the song’s framework, is sent in to mediate. In a surprise twist, his empathy veers in the opposite direction as Ghost’s and RZA’s, and he ends the song by admonishing them, “Stop all that cryin’, and be a man.” “I Can’t Go to Sleep”: You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fear for your life.

  6. Spoon – “Paper Tiger” (2002)

Spoon has always been minimalist, but with 2002’s Kill the Moonlight the band took its skeletal sound to its greatest extreme. “Paper Tiger” is the leanest track on a lean album, a wonder of precision. Jim Eno clacks his drumsticks against one another to provide the rhythm. A piano plays brief chords, hitting some isolated notes every once in a while, and making only the slightest changes. Against such a spare, confident framework, Britt Daniels’ voice takes on previously unheard resonance—each shift in pitch becomes seismic. In the direct center of “Paper Tiger,” there’s an instrumental break that lasts over a minute—almost one-third the length of the song. Barely anything happens, musically, but it remains utterly captivating. Spoon allows so much space to creep into the rhythm that the song is practically minimal techno. Daniels’ has always had an indie everyman voice, the kind that could become commercial at any moment. The lyrics of “Paper Tiger” would seem comforting, if not for the music’s iciness. Instead they imply an “Every Breath You Take” type of menace. But the “paper tiger” (also used to title a Beck song released on Sea Change, a month after Kill the Moonlight) is lifted from a Chinese phrase describing an animal that looks dangerous, but is truly harmless. So when Daniels sings, “I will be there with you when you turn out the light,” like he’s whispering in your ear, he’s more a boogey man than a predator.

5. Jürgen Paape – “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” (2002)

Translated from German, the lyrics to “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” come off pretty silly—something about flying through space with moonlight in your hair. Sounds pretty implausible. Truthfully, the only translation of Israeli actress Daliah Levi’s sampled lyrics that would even be remotely satisfying would be if we discovered that she was singing the actual phonebook—and not the German one; the American one, translated into German; the one from 2011. That’s how otherworldly “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” is: Assisted by little more than a loping groove, Levi’s vocal is a lost transmission from the future. By now, twisting AM radio gold into chill-out tent fodder is old hat, but Jürgen Paape released this masterstroke a couple of years after helping found the Kompakt record label (long before, say, Bent’s “So Long Without You,” which also appears on this list, was released.) His work on “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” is delicate and subtle—finding the exact buoyancy the song could stand, affixing just the right amount of echo, adding the haunting coda—and, through it, he sets the high water mark for not only Kompakt, but for a decade’s-worth of minimal techno, as well.

4. Cannibal Ox – “The F-Word” (2001)

Of course Vast Aire’s not going to get the girl. On Cannibal Ox’s finest moment, “The F-Word,” dude has preternaturally surgical focus on the object of affection, but he raps with the goofy gallantry of a Sophomore passing folded up wide-ruled notes to a Senior. He upends every cliché he can get his hands on, scrapes barrel bottom for pop culture references, leaves no pun unturned (relationships become “relation-ships;” friends get “fried in the end”). Chalk it up to love drunkenness if you must—or, as wingman Vordul Mega puts it, “Chemical elixirs, caught her like a sickness”—but what results is a song without a single wasted moment. There’s a punch line or two in every stanza, a love of language that parallels hip-hop’s golden age, and a good number of mind-blowing lines. (My personal favorite: “You ask a girl out and the universe extends.”) Producer El-P, who has been chasing down new wormholes within the sound he created on Cannibal Ox’s debut ever since 2001, mines the planetary funk of Dexter Wansel’s “All Night Long” for scrap metal, excising all of its looseness in favor of a jagged, military robot march. The heavy-metal production gives “The F-Word” all the gravitas it needs to launch Vast Aire’s wordplay to the level of pure poetry. He probably still didn’t end up with the girl, but we’re all better off for it.

3. Modest Mouse – “The View” (2004)

Isaac Brock is indie rock’s unofficial poet laureate of disenchantment, king of the deadbeat aphorism, master of the life-affirming double-negative. On Modest Mouse’s “The View,” he’s in rare form. “If it takes shit to make bliss,” he sings on the song’s chorus, “Well, I feel pretty blissfully.” It’s exactly the world view you’d expect from such a sad, sappy sucker—except that the buoyant arrangement that carries Brock’s downtrodden (if wry) lyrics won’t let him get self-involved for even a second. Released in 2004, when it seemed like every single indie band had begun to dabble in dance music, “The View” pushes the funk as hard as it can without tipping over into Red Hot Chilli Peppers territory. Then, they deck it out with a gallery of sounds that would have a hard time playing it cool at any level—whistling, Brock’s gonzo laugh-barking, a freakin’ mellotron. The lyrics may point toward someone resigned to defeat, but, at mercy the supple four-on-the-floor bass line, Modest Mouse twist those aphorisms into affirmations. Brock may look mopey on paper. In practice, he has the unbridled freedom of someone with nothing left to lose.

2. OutKast – “B.O.B.” (2000)

By now OutKast’s “B.O.B.” is an unimpeachable masterpiece, and, when music reaches that status, it usually starts to get taken for granted. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Respect,” “Helter Skelter,” and, yeah, Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” have become part of our lingua franca. When we hear those songs, they tend to wash over us. They have a deeply ingrained greatness, but one that doesn’t ask for close inspection. We tend to focus on, say, Danger Mouse’s production, about as much as we focus on the etymology of words as we say them. “B.O.B.,” on the other hand, will knock you on your ass every time, forcing you to rethink everything you thought you knew about music. It’s a song that’s impossible to mold, or replicate—a staggering example of two geniuses working at the top of their game.

Cranking up the tempo is, of course, a great way to get your attention. Lesser artists would let the BPMs do the work for them. But the joy of “B.O.B” comes from how virtuosic Andre 3000 and Big Boi remain at such breakneck speed. Both MCs rap at hypersonic levels, without ever letting the quickness become the show—you’re still paying attention to the words, not just hearing syllables as they fly by. The choruses turn into an operatic show-stopper, corralling an Eddie Hazel-referencing electric guitar and the Morris Brown College Gospel Choir into a series of calls-and-responses, as if they that anticipated “B.O.B.” would be a major club hit. As ironic as it is that the central image of “B.O.B.”—bombs exploding over Baghdad, as a metaphor for rapping—forecasted the political fixation on the Middle East that dominated the ten years that succeeded it, from OutKast’s point of view, you can easily imagine crowds screaming, “Bob your head, rag top,” as if there’s nothing remotely offensive about it.

1. Dntel – “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan (Feat. Ben Gibbard)” (2001)

Most of us have the well-trained sense to run in the other direction the second someone begins to tell us about a dream they had, but we can't resist telling other people our dreams. We even know all the pitfalls: details that seemed mystical and foreign in the middle of the night become mundane; the symbols that supposedly reveal your subconscious instead reveal that your subconscious is a cliché; things that felt significant at the time get lost in the ether. In the arts, dreams have become a signifier for lazy storytelling—an excuse to be a little hazy on connecting the dots, easy filler, or a way to introduce the deus ex machina. Worse, we've all made an unconscious pact to let this—the ugliest of all artistic transgressions—slide. The Sopranos resolved its second season with a sketchy dream sequence involving a talking plastic fish from WalMart, and people say it's the greatest TV show of all time.

Ben Gibbard’s performance on Dntel’s “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan,” on the other hand, is a small miracle of craftsmanship. The story is a simple one—he and his girl watch a concert—and he never attempts to make it sound anything less than mundane. Instead, he gets wrapped up in the details of dreaming itself—the incomprehensible speech, the vague familiarity of everything that happens, the tickle of eyelashes on this back of his neck. Though the song (and dream) was reportedly about Evan Dando and Chan Marshall, and he was probably talking about Come On Feel the Lemonheads, when Gibbard sings, “He then played every song from 1993,” I always imagine that he’s talking about hearing *every* song from 1993, from “Whoomp (There It Is)” to “Mr. Jones.” With five verses’ worth of commonplace imagery, Gibbard crafts a world with a dreamlike elasticity of time. When a telephone finally disrupts his reverie, he repeatedly sings the word “ringing,” as if his voice were either the ring itself, or another part of the dream, swirling into a new place in his psyche.

As heroically compact as Gibbard's performance is, it's Jimmy Tamborello's production work that makes “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” an unmatched triumph. After “Evan and Chan,” Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello and Gibbard famously formed The Postal Service, but their work on Give Up shows few traces of the groundwork laid here. Their subsequent music relies on synthesizer and drum machine compositions that sound like lost keyboard presets. Here, Tamborello molds swaths of unruly static into palpable bursts of rhythm. He augments the white noise with some drumwork that sounds like The Dismemberment Plan's Joe Easley playing the back half of Squarepusher's "My Red Hot Car." Even without Gibbard's performance, the song would have been stunning. Attaching Gibbard's serene vocals to such an aesthetic beast, Tamborello pulls of something as seemingly impossible as wind wrangling.

The 2001 people imagined decades ago must have sounded like this--the electronic squall, the nearly overwhelming surge of drums, the drifting grasp on reality. In that sense, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” is a nifty bit of wish fulfillment—a dream that Tamborello plucked from the collective unconscious, mistaking it for his own. 8 years on, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” sounds like a future that we still haven't caught up with. Add Gibbard's performance to that, and you've got a memory that never happened laid on top of a prediction that never will; you have an artifact, stuck out of time; a dream; a thing that is exactly what it pretends to be.

-Martin Brown, 2009

The Virgin Read: Sleeping With The King

Each week, the non-comics reading Nina Stone picks out one random comic book based off her own made up criteria, reads it, and then writes about that experience. While she's been doing these columns for awhile, she's only successfully managed to enjoy, remember, and keep up with one series. This week, she picked King City # 2.

King City # 2
By Brandon Graham
Published by Image Comics

Hello, again. This week flew by. It's all a blur. While gathering my thoughts about this entry I was struggling to remember why I chose this particular comic. And then I remembered--I chose it out of pure exhaustion. It's not a statement about the comic, I swear. I'd been up all night due to a mixture of Claritin-D, stuff on my mind, and the goddamned Latin Lounge across the street from my apartment which seems to think the neighborhood rules don't apply to it. Yelling at each other to speak, at 4:30 am, is a usual occurrence outside my apartment and hinders my ability to get a solid-8.

So when I walked into the comic book store at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, I was totally cashed. I could barely form words. King City seemed to stand out amongst the other new comics. And that meant my choice was quick and I could go home. And I did. (And I slept ten hours, hallelujah.)

What ironic is that just the week before, the salesman tried to tempt me with some black and white comic and I said, "no, I don't read those. Black and white makes me fall asleep." (Sleep seems to be an underlying theme with me, huh?) And yet here I am, with King City. Oh, and Achewood's black and white. Maybe I should reassess the things I say to the people at the comic shop.

If you've read King City # 2, you probably know that it's not very linear, and that not much actually happens. But it was certainly entertaining, and it went down smooth and easy. The most notable thing about this comic is that it has "moments." Here are some of my favorites:

1. The very idea that Pete's door has a water lock.

2. That Pete wears a full ski mask hat thing drawn similarly to Dumb Donald from Fat Albert. 

3. The way that Joe sees an old photo and at first we see him and Joe, and then we see the girl - and clearly get that there's a history.

4. The sign on the Do Not Enter doors that says, "Violators will be violated!" (And, "Beat it Horse Lips!")

5. There's a Mermaid. Need I say more? (Yes. Here's more.)

6.  The intro page to Chapter 7 begins with our friends reflection in the water of a toilet bowl, followed by the same toilet bowl without reflection, but with a stream of piss. 

7.  On the chainsaw gun things, there are various plays on famous cosmetic and beauty names: Elizabeth Hard On, Vandal Sasoon and Estee Murder.

8. The depiction of a guy's amputated leg is clear, yet shown in a fashion that keeps from drawing attention to it. Just confirmation of the fact when he straps on his prosthetic leg. Smart!

9. The line, "It's like a minefield of girl products in here. I'll trip and end up with my hair in curlers." So cute.

10.  The Marmoset. That she has one. And then that she holds it up and says, "Marmoset there'd be days like these." (I love a good pun! I'm the only one in the entire state, but I'm the one!)

And just like that, I'm in love with that couple and want to know what happens next.  

All in all, like I said, not much happened. But for me it was like getting a nice introduction to everyone in a completely delightful way. All the little extra, entertaining details make this comic stand out from all others. It could just tell the story it wants to tell, or it can decorate the scenery. This is a comic book that enjoys being a comic book. And I totally enjoyed it.

-Nina Stone, 2009