I have a few more relevant things to write about that I haven’t yet. The once-promised “I’m Done With Presidents.” That’ll probably be next week. A few others I won’t mention in case I never do them. In the meantime, here’s yet another look at some more obscure Batman villains I think deserve some more shine.
READ MORE »
Well it’s October again. Which means, like every year, that it’s time for BREAST CANCER AWARENESS FEVER! Pinktober, y’all! Buy special pink versions of household products and GIVE TO THE CURE. And, it’s October again, so it’s time again for me to be the lone voice from the wilderness reminding everyone that other cancers exist, and it’s a little ridiculous how much hype breast cancer gets. It’s not the most deadly. It’s not the most common. It’s not the hardest to treat. It’s not even the only one with a special “awareness month.” And yet, Breast Cancer Awareness Month (which for retailers seems to run between September and November, if not just year-round) just keeps getting bigger and bigger every year.
READ MORE »
It’s a tough call, but Mysterio might be Spider-Man’s lamest well-known villain. I specify “well-known” because a decades-old hero like Spider-Man has accumulated SO MANY lame villains over the years that you could argue over who’s the lamest and come up with dozens if not hundreds of names and still not get anywhere near Mysterio. But of all the “classic” Spidey foes, the ones that got established in the first year or so of Amazing Spider-Man and a few of the more recent ones (like Venom, mostly) who have earned that status since then, Mysterio’s got to be the lamest. There’s nothing to the guy, except a faintly ridiculous outfit punctuated by a goddamn fishbowl.
READ MORE »
May 2007:
I was angry when I realized that mice were getting into my snack drawer from under my bed. So duct-taping a cardboard cover over the open back, cutting off their access, wasn’t enough for me. I set a mousetrap. READ MORE »
(I Don’t Belong Here, The Lost Month concludes with this review I wrote of The Matrix Reloaded, basically right upon leaving the theater, May 15, 2003. Remember The Matrix? Me neither.)
Let’s be honest. The first Matrix was a smart movie for dumb people. While it deserves kudos for its groundbreaking special effects (copied in every action movie since 1999) and its attempt to marry existential philosophy, cyberpunk aesthetics and kung fu, let’s not blow things out of proportion. It raised many interesting questions about the nature of reality, provided that you’ve never taken a PHI 101 course, and then managed to ignore or insufficiently deal with all of them. It had great fight scenes, but murdered itself in the third act with the hokiest declaration of love since, well, basically since ever. I like to say that The Matrix was a metaphor for itself— while it can dazzle the eye and confound the senses, right below the surface the machinery of age-old plot devices and clichés grinds away.
READ MORE »
(The Lost Month continues with this angry essay I wrote in January of 1999, within hours of paying money to see the festering bull-turd called Patch Adams.)
Friends and family members, people whose opinions I value, told me I should see the movie “Patch Adams,” the true story of one man’s unconventional battle to return humanity to the medical industry. And, after returning from this movie, I am convinced of one thing: these friends and family members are part of a COMMUNIST PLOT TO SEPARATE ME FROM MY EIGHT BUCKS. Why else would these intelligent, reasonable people with good taste, all of whom have a pretty good idea of my tastes as well, recommend this turkey to me?
I mean, what can you say about a movie so shamelessly emotionally exploitative, it makes “Titanic” seem subtle and restrained in comparison? A movie so determined to stack the cinematic deck in favor of Adams’ theories of medicine that it makes “JFK” look unbiased and balanced? What can you say about a movie that was sad when it tried to be funny, and funny when it tried to be sad? Well, I can say a lot, I guess.
READ MORE »
(This week’s I Don’t Belong Here was written 11 years ago on September 14th, 2001. It is not necessarily to be taken as the author’s current opinion on the attacks of 9-11-01. That can be found here.)
September 11, 2001. It’s noon, I’m sleeping late again. Someone is knocking, pounding, on my front door, pausing only to frantically ring the doorbell. “Please don’t let it be our landlord,” I mumble as I get dressed, find my glasses and stumble downstairs. (It’s a well-kept secret from my super-clean landlords that my house is a total pigsty, the unpacking still incomplete six months into my lease.) Instead, it’s Tom, my brother-in-law, neighbor, and former employer, not necessarily in that order.
“Don’t you ever answer your phone?” He asks, in that what-fools-these-mortals-be tone he adopts only most of the time.
“I was sleeping. Didn’t hear it.” Half-truth. I heard it a few times during the morning, opting each time to go back to sleep. Usually it’s a telemarketer, or worse, the Baltimore Sun.
“Terrorists crashed jet airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The World Trade Center is totally destroyed.”
READ MORE »
Here’s a view you don’t hear often. The slow, useless, incompetent people that are seemingly everywhere these days — and by “these days” I mean probably “always” but I can only speak for the time I’ve personally seen — they steal your time, my time, and we’re not getting it back. And it’s not right. Society isn’t structured with the view that time is a commodity with value, which is crazy because time is the only thing that there is a natural limit to. Benjamin Franklin said the only sure things were death and taxes. Except taxes are a human innovation, while death is an integral part of life. You can skip out on your taxes if you’re clever or really rich. You can’t skip out on death. Not yet. Maybe never. You’ve got a finite amount of time. You don’t get it back. It’s not like taxes. When I die, I don’t get some time refund check in the mail. It’s not like there’s St. Peter up in the Pearly Gates with an adding machine.
READ MORE »
Bear with me. I know this seems like another one about Batman but it’s deeper. I’m trying to say something important. A carpenter views everything in terms of nails, so… Batman.
(This is like maybe nine years old. I could check the date if I did the research into my files but fuck it, it’s late and that’s not the point. Original content to resume, eventually.)
“Those who come together for no good reason will part for the same.”
— Chuang Tzu
This is it. No Great American Novel, no scribbled sheet of pseudonyms, no hope to get the point across. Just this. Cheap catharsis and a prayer for closure. None of this story is true. READ MORE »
So a while back I wrote about Batman villains I’d like to see more of. And while that list was pretty definitive and special — I’m especially proud of my discovery of Adam Lamb AKA Wolf The Crime Master, who is easily the most obscure Batman villain deserving of another appearance — but the thing about that path is once you are on it, it never ends.
It never ends because Batman’s rogues’ gallery is so immense, with so many bizarre and colorful additions over the years that by the time you finished exploring them all, a whole new generation of writers and artists will have created brand new ones to occupy your mind with. Here’s some more lesser known Batman villains that I for one would like to see used in the sandbox a little more. READ MORE »
Shhh. Don’t tell anyone. I’m writing this in the future. See, what happened was, I caught a bad case of the couldn’t-fucking-be-bothereds for basically this entire month, and I stopped even bothering to half-heartedly phone in these pieces. My five devoted followers were disappointed. I was too, but mostly I couldn’t fucking be bothered. So now it’s the future of August 27th and I am sneakily adding the I Don’t Belong Heres that I missed. I am going to backdate this post to the past, to the far-gone era of August 10th, where I hope it can reach people in time to prevent the apocalypse from happening. Just kidding. I actually would like to see the apocalypse at this point. I was inspired to do this retconning of my creative slump by a recent law passed in Arizona that declares pregnancy to begin before conception. And I thought I was born premature… at least my conception didn’t warp space-time! So I thought maybe I would go back in time and write about how fucking mad this country has become. But you’ve heard that before, and if not, I’ve definitely spent time writing it. So instead, since this is actually the 54th I Don’t Belong Here and I missed the anniversary by writing about Batman instead, here is a collection of all my I Don’t Belong Heres, for people too lazy to scroll through the damn feed. READ MORE »
