Pretty Goes with Pretty

Let's Talk About the Issues

I just came across this article in the Los Angeles Times profiling the candidates pop culture tastes. It's a pretty bullshit article but I like trying to pick apart the honest answers from the campaign staff-penned answers. Here are the highlights, in the order they appear in the article.

[Edit: It should be noted that everything in this post except the "Pretty Goes with Pretty reactions" (obviously) and the final verdict was copied and pasted directly from the LAT article.]

John McCain
Campaign soundtrack: "Gonna Fly Now (Theme From 'Rocky')", ABBA's "Take a Chance on Me" and "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry

Favorite TV show: "Prison Break"

On the iPod: "I have an iPod with Beach Boys, Roy Orbison – I have a varied taste in music between very good music and not-so-good music, but most of my advancement in music appreciation stopped the day I was shot down in October of 1967."

Pretty Goes with Pretty reaction: Fuuuuuuuuuuck. It's hard to fuck with a dude who throws his POW ordeal in your face when you ask him who is favorite band is. Speaking of, it would blow my mind to hear him talk back to his TV during an episode of Prisonbreak.  (Additionally, I like that he likes good music and he also likes not-so-good music--lest he offend people who really love not-so-good music. Ever the politician.)

Hillary Clinton
Campaign soundtrack: Celine Dion's "You and I"

Favorite TV show: "American Idol," "Grey's Anatomy," "Dancing With the Stars," and HGTV makeover shows

On iPod: Clinton told the Associated Press in the spring of 2006 that she received her iPod as a gift from her husband. At that time, songs included Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and “Take it to the Limit” by The Eagles.

Pretty Goes with Pretty reaction: the transparency of her clearly pandering choices for favorite television show are a great example of why I don't want her to win the nomination. I do, however, believe that she likes the Eagles. However, taking her campaign song into account, apparently Clinton and McCain could reach across the aisle in their love of not-so-good music.

Mitt Romney
Campaign soundtrack: Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation"

Favorite TV show: “Lost”

On the iPod: “What I typically download is country music as well as 1960s music. I'm a baby boomer so The Beatles and The Stones and some of the old groups from the '60s are my favorites; I listen to them. And I also listen to country. I have some inspirational music as well, but those are the highlights for me."

Pretty Goes with Pretty reaction: This is the first guy that I think gave honest answers.

Barack Obama
Campaign soundtrack: John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change,” Ben Harper’s “Better Way”

Favorite TV show: HBO’s “The Wire” and Sportscenter

On the iPod: “I won’t let Apple release the new and improved iPod the day after you bought the previous model.” (From "Top Ten Campaign Promises" as read by David Letterman on the "Late Show.")

Pretty Goes with Pretty reaction: Sadly, the LA Times could not find a real answer to the last question. Meanwhile, let's look at his TV choice and compare it to Clinton's: this is where Obama's long-trumpeted good judgement comes in. Do you want someone in the White House who checks the Nielsen ratings before choosing what to watch, or do you want someone who can survey the field and say "goddamn, The Wire is the best show on television. I'm watching that." Further confirmation that Obama is my candidate.

Mike Huckabee
Campaign soundtrack: Anything by the Rolling Stones

Favorite movies: “The Godfather,” “Casablanca,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Citizen Kane “

Favorite TV shows: “The Colbert Report,” “The Sopranos”

Pretty Goes with Pretty reaction: Based on the fact the Times article mentions that Huckabee let Keith Richards off on a parking violation in Arkansas, I will accept answer #1 as true. The rest, if they are true, point to someone who at least consulted the AFI Best Films of All Time list rather than Variety's list of biggest blockbusters.

(The article profiles Ron Paul too but all the answers are lame.)

Final Verdict: Looks like we need to see an Obama/Romney match-up if we want to have any sort of real

dialogue for this election.

 

Radiocatz: All I Need

Whenever I hear the chorus of Radiohead's "All I Need," I can't help but think of lolcatz (or the much-better lolsecretz.) And now, neither will you! Listen to the song and follow along!

Mingering Mike on NPR

I posted once before about Mingering Mike, but now that the book is officially on shelves I thought I'd plug it one more time. NPR's Day to Day did a two-part story on Mike: the first part is an interview with the book's author, Dori Hadar; the second is with Mingering Mike himself. It's really great to hear the story told this way; for one, you get to hear some of the actual songs in the background, plus this is the first time I've heard the story from Mike's mouth.

But of course the best way to get the full story—and to see all the great artwork—is to buy the book. I was the book's editor, so I've read it just shy of 183 times, but I can tell you that the more time you spend with the story and looking at all the details on the album art, the more endearing the whole thing becomes.

Sat in the Hot Tub & Let it Snow

A few years ago my wife and I took a cross-country road trip and along the way stopped at a small town, where we took in some breakfast and then poked our head into a couple of antique stores. (Oh, if only we had a U-Haul; there was gorgeous, rustic furniture selling for a couple hundred bucks that would have fetched a couple thousand in New York).

Instead, I found a diary. It’s really a fascinating thing, mostly because of how minimal and not-introspective it is. You need to see how each day gets its own page though the woman never filled more than three lines to sum up her day. You need to see how light the pencil is on the page. Best, how many blank pages there are—between April and July are countless blank pages, as if she continued to turn a page for every day even though she wrote nothing, The whole thing is a whisper. It begins mundane enough but somehow the entries as a whole really resonate.

Below I’ve transcribed the entire contents of the diary. In the rare event that someone is self-googling, I've removed the (very few) instances in which someone was named by first and last name. There are three main participants—the diarist, who apparently owns a shop probably not unlike the one where I found the diary; her husband John, a construction worker of some sort; and Ed, who appears to be their adult son, based on the fact that he lives on his own yet seems to switch from day to day working for the diarist or for John.

April 13
John worked on Alice’s house in Big Springs.  Wind blew terrible—went to Maundy Thursday Seder supper.  I worked all day at the mall.

April 14
I closed the store at 2pm.  John still working in Big Springs.  Went to Assembly church & sang in the cantata for Easter.  It was very nice.

April 15 (Saturday)
Store open all day.  John & I sat in the Hot Tub for an hour, had dinner & collapsed in bed.  We are both very busy & working a lot.

April 16 (Easter Sunday)
Went to church.  John & I both sang in the choir.  Visited with Ben S----.  Birdie was working.  Had Easter dinner w/ Heidi and Ryan.  Ed came out and all the Fraizers were there & Rosie & Kenny.  Suzie called from Arkansas.

April 17 (Mon.)
Started snowing & raining after spring like weather.  Sat in the Hot Tub & let it snow. 

April 18 (Tues.)
We have 10 in of snow on everything today, no wind—very wet—the trees are heavy laden.  Ed working for me til noon—then he & john going to Big Springs this afternoon.  Damon K---- passed away last night.

April 19
It snowed in the morning.  John & Ed worked on Alice house.  I had the day off.  Just cleaned the house etc.  No choir tonite.  Sat in the Hot Tub while it snowed.

April 20
Got my hair done.  Met Ed & John at Grandma Max for lunch.  Got in the Hot Tub.

April 21
Ed & I worked in the mall.  He got really sick w/ the flu.  He, John & I went to Harold F

That's a Big-ass Dog

This is my new favorite blog. Have a nice weekend.

[via So Much Silence]

No One Ever Talks about the Real Heroes

Maybe you heard about this bizarre story: two dolphins at a theme park in China were choking on some plastic, and vets at the aquarium did not have a way of reaching far enough into their gullets to get the plastic out. So, they called the world's tallest man, because his arms were long enough to reach inside the dolphins and pull the plastic out.

A completely ridiculous story—perhaps, some might say, ridonculous. Yet while the "mainstream press" can only focus on the tall dude, leave it to my brilliant wife to look for the real story.  "What I really want to know," she said,  "is who the troubleshooter at the aquarium was that said, There's nothing we can do. Unless... unless! Sally! Get me the yellow pages... we need to find the tallest man in the world. Because that's the kind out-of-the-box thinking that deserves some props. Someone get that guy a raise."

A Different Kind of Starchitects

The San Fransico Chronicle has an article today looking into why so many movies make their leading men architects. Adam Sandler, Keanu Reeves, and Luke Wilson all played architects this summer, and (thankfully without seeing the movie) I know that Mark Ruffalo played a landscape architect in last year's Just Like Heaven. I hadn't noticed this trend until just a year or two ago, but the Chronicle's Ruthe Stein takes us in the wayback machine to show us just how cliche it is—right up there with the leading women working as journalists. Both careers have the same thing in common—the implication of creativity and the plausability of a high salary, to justify the inevitable to-die-for apartment and pricey wardrobe.

Robert Osborne—of  my one true television addiction, Turner Classic Movies—had this to say (surely walking toward Stein as he was speaking to her):

There are very, very few professions that still have a ring of heroism about them, and architecture is one of the few that does. If an architect is portrayed going off the deep end, it's always because they are so committed to what they're doing and that's an honorable thing. And it's one of the last manly professions—you are building something outdoors.

Of course, if you've ever encountered an architect, you know they're often not the most heroic sorts. [See here, on a daily basis.] Will Peter Cook kill Hollywood's untarnished vision of architects? I guess we'll have to wait for the next cycle of romantic comedies to find out.

[via ArchNewsNow]

Slo-mo Home Depot

This is pretty funny: a few weeks ago, this group of people—

—went to the Home Depot in New York and all shopped in slow motion. They synchronized their watches, then went inside and shopped normally for five minutes. Now interspersed throughout the store, they all simultaneously shopped in slow motion for five minutes. Then normal again, then they froze stock-still for five more minutes, all as employees and other shoppers slowly realized something bizarre was happening.

You can see video of the entire thing here.

It's a Metacritical Hyperconsumerist World; We Just Live in It

Yesterday’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine is yet another trend piece identifying the latest anti/counter/sub-subculture. This time around it happens to be clothing designers (or is “lifestyle designers” more apt?). The article is actually very interesting, but I think the author, Rob Walker, is giving these entrepreneurs too much credit. The Hundreds, aNYthing, et al., are hardly the first DIY businesses to start up as a means of marketing and selling their own subculture (whether independently or in bed with a corporation). Indie record labels, small presses, boutique clothing lines, and ’zines have all existed for decades, and the most prominent and successful ones have often been tied to an express subculture.

But Walker is trying to make the claim that his subjects are unique because they are a sub-consumer-culture, which is somehow antithetical to being part of a “regular” subculture. As if desiring a T-shirt or pair of sneakers is inherently “more mainstream” than wanting to see a show or buy a CD, chapbook, or fanzine. Walker is, I think, not stepping far enough away from his microscope. He writes:

The symbols and references and logos these minibrands create are usually said to “represent” a culture or lifestyle. But I found myself asking, What, exactly, did that culture or lifestyle consist of—aside from buying products that represent it?

Bobby [Kim] did his best to clue me in. “It’s just the idea of trying to be rebellious,” he said. “Or trying to be a little bit anti, questioning government or your parents. Trying to do something different.” Those are familiar answers, and this is hardly the first time that vague rebelliousness has been translated into an aesthetic. The style and iconography of punk, like that of other “spectacular subcultures” (to use the phrase Dick Hebdige coined in “Subculture: The Meaning of Style”), arguably did more than music—let alone ideas—to fulfill one of the crucial functions of any underground: group identity. It just happens that in this instance the symbols, products and brands aren’t an adjunct to the subculture—they are the subculture.

I would argue that this type of subculture has always been here; it’s just been too conflated with other subcultures that were previously attached to a musical genre or art form. Ten or twenty years ago these guys would have been tagged as part of skater culture or graffiti culture, but now that websites, hipster magazines, and, well, New York Times trend pieces parse our culture as never before, people such as A-ron (from aNYthing) or Ben Hundreds are being highlighted for holding fashion and “lifestyle” above music or skating. And a new subculture is born.

Before the rise of globalism and the internet, our powers of cultural perception were less fine-tuned. The internet has served not as a catalyst for new subcultures but as a more powerful microscope into those that have already existed. After all, the quark did not come into existence simply because scientists found a way to see beyond the atom. It was always there.

Going back, for example, to when I was in high school in the early 1990s, the social and cultural cliques were all easily identifiable. There were metal kids, hip hop kids, alternative kids, and “mainstream” (i.e., not identified by their musical taste) kids like jocks and honor students. Yet, as someone who was considered a grunge/alternative kid (full disclosure: only in my senior year; I was totally metal before then), there were friends within my clique that looked the part but actually had very small CD collections and limited musical knowledge beyond the Big Four Seattle bands. Would those same friends be identified by their musical tastes today? It’s certainly not what they’d be discussing on their MySpace blogs. They might just as soon be concerned with flannel,  long johns, and colored sunglasses instead. One girl was a hair dye enthusiast. Similarly there was a devout Mormon nerd in many of my classes who absolutely loved Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. Where would he fit in today’s age? Likely occupying some sub-chat room—whether a hardcore rap thread on a Mormon youth website or a religion & faith thread on a hip hop board, I don’t know.

Simply put, these sub-subcultures are nothing new. Whether now or ten or twenty or thirty years ago, when you ask someone what kind of music they like, the rote response has always been “everything.” It was always a frustrating response because it couldn’t possibly be true, since everyone—except me, right?—is supposed to fall under clearly delineated demographics. But today, now that people’s iTunes playlists can be displayed on their blogs, it turns out to be true—people really do listen to everything! Two effects result: one, the parameters of how one defines his/her tribe by music widens (we like punk, dancehall, and grime, but not emo or metal); or two, something other than music comes into play. T-shirts and sneakers, say. Ultimately these two tribe types overlap like Venn diagrams, creating still more tribes that do or do not fall within certain areas of the diagram. And then someone starts a blog. Soon enough the Times comes a-calling.

It would be silly to say that the internet has not had a profound effect on the culture of the twenty-first century, but my point is that it has actually created less than it often gets credit for. Our current age is an outgrowth of postmodernism— though by now it is also well beyond postmodernism. Much postmodern thought taught us to be suspicious of storytellers, spoke of a polycentric cultural narrative, and depicted all aspects of the world as entropic white noise—chaos, in which we must somehow find sense.

Where this was positively headspinning in the late-twentieth century, the global, internet age has begun to refine it. We are picking out strains within the chaos and finding new labels for them. And as they morph we simultaneously relabel them. The speed and breadth of the internet has created a mutually acting/reacting relationship between critics and creators, to the point where it becomes difficult to tell the difference between the two.

It’s not just music and T-shirts. Look at film: right now John Favreau is interacting with his “friends” on his MySpace blog hyping a film which he has not even cast yet, let alone begun shooting (Iron Man). He is involving his audience before he even creates his art. Meanwhile Kevin Smith, on his own blog, is responding to critics of his recently released Clerks II as soon as their reviews are published, in the case of LA Weekly critic Nikki Finke, or as soon as they leave the theater, in the case of CBS’s Joel Seigel. But is this symptomatic of a new film culture or has the internet only highlighted what previously happened on the street or on the phone, between fewer people in smaller circles? Last week A. O. Scott lamented the diminishing role of the critic in a laughably self-validating article in the New York Times. He’s right to question his professional worth. All of this—Favreau, Smith, and Scott—is emblematic of the internet-as-microscope. After all, the phrase “opinions are like assholes” existed well before the internet. Technology just allowed everyone to take their pants down in public.

The current political situation is also exemplary: the Middle East is embroiled in wars not between states but between amorphous groups that have little use for abstract concepts such as borders or governments. Gone are the days of Hitler’s rallies or FDR’s grand speeches; now Hezbollah and Al Qaeda communicate by videotape and Bush’s policies are filtered to the public not through speeches but via 24-hour news pundits whittling everything down to sound bytes and headlines (or blog posts, for that matter).

What all of these have in common, aside from the speed and brevity with which most of it happens, is something that I think postmodernism did not anticipate, and the thing which truly sets the current age apart as a new paradigm: everything is done in anticipation of criticism.

There is a sense of self-awareness or self-consciousness in art today, as evidenced, for instance, by wink-wink irony in much contemporary literature (spawned by Dave Eggers & McSweeney’s). If Walker’s article is any indication, there is a similar arm’s-length awareness in these lifestyle designers’ business sense. ANYthing has a line of T-shirts that are labels for subsets of Lower East Side hipsters, as identified by A-ron—Cool Guys, Art-Damaged, Parent Haters, etc. This is obviously social parody, yet A-ron is also quick to claim himself as a Cool Guy. So it’s commentary and self-mockery entwined. A-ron’s intent, according to the article, is to brand his own lifestyle (by the way—where’s the shout out to Martha Stewart? Isn’t this her business model?). Should his brand ever come under attack, then so too does his entire lifestyle. To hate aNYthing, the brand, is to hate A-ron, the person—something he must be aware of and prepared for. Thanks to our metacritical, hyperconsumerist era, as shaped and reshaped by the internet—placeless, anonymous, global, amorphous— navigating beyond the critics and shapeshifting from passé T-shirt to au currant short film is as easy as a new domain name and a well-timed head nod.

Rockstar: Supernova—All Pussy Edition

My prediction for the winner of Rockstar: Supernova

Am I the only one hopelessly addicted to the abominable car accident that is Rockstar: Supernova? (It's okay: I expect the answer to be yes.) There is so, so much wrong with it—yet I can’t help but tune in every single week.

Just what is so fantastically wrong with this show? Some might point to the most obvious: just about all of the contestants are no-talent hacks. Every woman (except for the current odds-on favorite, Dilana, and my personal favorite, Zayra) has the same burly biker babe voice—as if since they are women they must make up for that fact by sounding like they have three-pound balls rather than actual personality. It’s so “bar band” it’s maddening. I wonder if any of these women have noticed that there are absolutely no popular or iconic female rock stars that have voices so absent of, well, femininity. Even PJ Harvey or Joan Jett, both of whom are totally ass-kicking tough, are tough without mimicking men. Meanwhile, the men on Rockstar are not much better. They too—all of them, every last one of them—lack any originality whatsoever. I’m actually impressed with the CBS producers for their steadfast dedication in finding the most bland singers in the country.

And of course there are other obvious things wrong with this show, and their names are Brooke Burke and Dave Navarro. Not to mention Tommy Lee, who can’t help but act and look like a bored child forced to be somewhere he doesn’t want to be.

But these are all such easy things to pick on, and they’re not the kind of flaws that make me hate it so much that in fact I love it. The main problem with this show—this show called Rockstar, in which the contestants are supposed to act like rock stars, so they can play in a band with dudes from Metallica, Motley Crüe, and Guns and Fucking Roses—is that this show is full of pussies.

I swear, none of these contestants have a backbone. They get caught on tape whining about their critiques, and when they’re confronted about it, they just clam up and apologize. Likewise the motherfuckers in Supernova bend over backward to point out that they’re just trying to help. They’re not trying to be mean. You know what, Supernova? Fuck you! You guys are from the three baddest-ass bands of the ‘80s and you’re afraid to be mean? You should quit trying to get everyone to come together for a group hug and start injecting yourself with a little attitude. Whatever happened to taking no prisoners, kicking ass, and flipping the bird to authority? God, but I feel like every episode of Rockstar is one big group therapy session. Who is letting these tattooed metalheads get away with all these niceties? What idiot producer at CBS can’t figure out that the whole reason that vanilla showboat American Idol works the way it does is because Simon Cowell is a dick? When the most popular show in America is less afraid to have balls than a show full of dirtheads and hessians, someone needs to get fired. This show should end in a fistfight or riot every single week. Anything less is a failure.

All this nicey-nice happened last year, too, when I was sure INXS was going to throw bouquets of roses at every wannabe they nixed each week. This season’s contestants should take note that last season the only guy that ever rocked the boat and stuck to his guns was the guy that wound up winning. That’s why I’m rooting for Zayra this season, even though I seem to be the only person in the universe that likes her. She is so bizarre, so loony, and she seems to flaunt her inability to sing on key—and hey, there’s little that’s more punk rock than that! But she stands her ground. She practically calls Gilby Clarke an asshole every single week, and I love her for it. She wears blue spandex and dances like a slutty robot Toni Basil, and I love her for it. As long as she stays on the show, Rockstar will remain my #1 guilty pleasure love-to-hate destination each week. As soon as she’s off, the whole sloppy mess of sissy bitches falls off my radar.

It's...Christmas...in...July...with the...Chiiiiip...muuuuunkssss

So simple, but brilliant. The Chipmunks' "Christmastime is Here Again," slowed down so you can hear the natural voices of the singers.

[via Centripetal Notion.]

My Inner Adolescent Yearns to be an Inner Young Adult

This summer has unexpectedly been the summer of my inner adolescent. Between the X-Men and Superman movies and reality metal shows like Supergroup on VH1 and, beginning tonight, Rock Star: Supernova (featuring ex-members of Motley Crüe, Metallica, and Guns n Roses!), pretty much everything that comprised my teenage universe has been neatly repackaged for me. And I’ve been eating it up like a bag of candy—65% enjoyment, 25% guilt, 10% illness.

As regular readers know, I’ve already gone on about X-Men, and I reveled in VH1’s “Metal Month” in May, plus a smattering of Axl Rose and other nerd pursuits here and there. In fact I was tempted to write about the car accident that is Supergroup (and the meta-car accident that is the Supergroup Post-Show—have you seen this? Immediately after the episode airs, the band spends thirty minutes summarizing it for you, in case Sebastian Bach’s desire to go running or Evan Seinfeld’s porny open marriage was too complex for you to understand), but I began to feel that maybe I was reveling in this shit a little too much. That 25% guilt was gaining steam.

With the debut of the second season of CBS’s Rock Star this week (which, to me, looks way more interesting than last year’s, which was a bit of a car accident itself), to extend the candy metaphor, I can’t help but love it but I’m getting really, really nauseous.

Coincidentally, I was chatting with an old high school friend of mine last week and we were reminiscing about the year we finally grew out of metal and, eagerly but clumsily, fell in love with punk and indie rock. Where the new Anthrax album just seemed tired, discovering an oddity like the Jesus Lizard was utter epiphany. Soon enough I was trading in Slayer for Slint. Likewise X-Men grew stale while existentialism grabbed firm hold of me; I  boxed up my comics and devoured Camus instead.

Thirteen or so years later, I’m hovering around thirty and feeding my inner adolescent with all the nostalgia it can gorge itself on. But midway through this summer I feel my inner adolescent growing up, just as it did in the real time of the 1990s. Hopefully pop culture will grow up with me. Next season on Rock Star? Let’s see Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard) on guitar, Doug Scharin (Codeine, Rex) on drums, and Bob Weston (Shellac) on bass. Or better yet, remember the cryptic liner notes on Slint’s Spiderland?

interested female vocalists write
1864 douglas blvd. louisville, ky. 40205

Memo to CBS: you could be responsible for the final and ultimate realization of one of the unfulfilled rock prophesies of our era!

Okay, okay. I know a reformed Slint would not equal millions of viewers... let a boy dream. At the very least I'd like to see these nostalgia shows move into the grunge era. You could get a decent bit of mileage out of mixing up some members of Soundgarden, Faith No More, Smashing Pumpkins and, I don't know, Henry Rollins or Sean Lennon. Whatever. My inner adolescent has grown tired of headbanging and is ready to secede to the Alternative Nation.

But keep the comic book movies coming. I'm still a sucker for those.

Is That a Comic Book on Your Blog or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Warning: most of the links in the post are probably not safe for work.

A couple of weeks ago a female friend of mine was having a bad day and wished that girls could “hulk out," a la Bruce Banner.  Obviously she’d never heard of She-Hulk, so I wanted to send her a picture. But lo and behold, I was way, way, way squicked out upon doing a Google image search to find that there’s a whole mess of She-Hulk porn out there in the cybernoise. I don’t even know how to respond to it; it makes me wretch on about eight different levels.

I had done my best to block the images from my mind but last week a fellow Readervillian [here’s her non-RV blog, fyi] pointed me to the Oddity Collector, who has a great send-up of Frank Miller, in response to his newest cover, which is typically ridiculous in its depiction of the female body (but at least she’s not green!). In response, Ms. OC wondered what our iconic heroes might look like if comic book artists gave equal attention to the boys. Pretty funny, in a homoerotic sort of way. Forgive me if I don’t actually post the images here, but I’m a prude.

Pretty Goes with Pretty Lad... Blogging in Tights!

Last weekend’s edition of This American Life was all about superpowers. Act III of the broadcast was a discussion of the many superheroes and villains that never caught on, such as Bee-Man, All-Prez, or the third-rate rip-off (non-DC or Marvel) Plastic Man and Captain Marvel.

Coincidentally, I stumbled across another forgotten villain-turned-hero [via Design Observer], who if only he caught on would have been the iconic hero of all graphic designers: Typeface! Now see, Gordon Thomas is a frustrated signsmith with PTSD from the Vietnam War. After being laid off from his job—blame Ellen Lupton!—he put on a costume and came up with various typographic weaponry to exact his revenge on desktop publishers, Kinkos, and Spider-Man—until he saw the error of his ways (and an alien invasion of the earth), at which point he teamed up with Spider-Man—but not those damned DIY designers! They can still go to hell.

But then Typeface disappeared. And between that and the many forgotten superheroes and villains enumerated on NPR this weekend, I had to wonder just where these people went? What did they eventually do with themselves? It occurred to me that choosing to become a superhero or villain must have the same allure (and require a similar endurance and tenacity) as blogging.

Think about it. The first thing that a blogger or superperson must possess is either a) a little wit and the ability to write, or b) superpowers. Barring that, then at least they should have a) family and friends that care to read their online diary, or b) a suit with a lot of gadgets.

Assuming the blogger or superperson possesses one of these qualities—and the appropriate need for validation—then it’s pretty simple to get started. A blogger need only sign up at typepad or blogspot or what have you, “custom design” their new site, et voila! The blog is born. Similarly, a superperson just needs to sew a costume. In both cases, the blogger/superperson must spend surely agonizing hours with a pen and paper making a list of potential names that capture that perfect mixture of wit, content, courage, and authority.

Name and look set down, it’s time to go out there and blog! And fight/commit crime! And of course in that first month it’s pretty easy. You have a lot of enthusiasm. You have a lot to say. You have all these bookmarks that make for easy content to begin with. And it doesn't hurt that your first month of typepad is free, so all the more convenient. Similarly, you feel yourself making a nice little splash as you pound a petty thief on the noggin or knock over a hot dog cart (again, depending on your moral character).

But then you start to lag. You’ve run out of stored-up ammo and realize how much effort goes into making new content every day, and you don’t just want to link to other blogs for the hell of it because it feels pretty senseless. Not to mention you have a job with responsibilities, maybe a significant other. Maybe a desire to go be outside now that spring is here. Boy, blogging is hard! And how come the vast interweb hasn’t found you yet? Why, for god’s sake, is Beatrice a popular blog when it is so ugly and just talks about a lot of authors I don’t care about (not to mention I can’t stand seeing Ron Hogan wink at me every time I go to the site)? He must know people I don’t know.

Not to mention you’ve now fought a few criminals that actually landed a punch or two on you, or maybe you ran up against someone who actually had superpowers of their own. Dang it, dressing up and fighting crime on a regular basis is hard work! How does Spidey do it? And how does he get so much darned publicity! He must have an in at the Daily Bugle. He must know people I don’t know.

And so, after a while, it just gets a little boring, doesn’t it? You can imagine all these people who have just given up; watching TV, going to the park or the mall, devoting yourself to your family, all sounds way more worthwhile than putting on tights and starting a fight with a desperate homeless man. So here in my cubicle at work, I decide to stop fighting crime; meanwhile, the yahoo in the cubicle next to mine has just canceled his sixapart autopayment. We’re the same, really, except that I can levitate and shoot “pretty pellets” from my fingertips. Later, we go have a beer together.

Just think about it. Your boss, sitting in his office and secretly reading Gawker, just like you, just might, long ago, have been... Rainbow Boy!

Not Sure Why the Pig Needs to Be Drunk

From here, via here.

Legomania!

Apparently Lego Art is a genre unto itself, of which I was previously unaware. Books, Inq. points us to Lego Brokeback Mountain and Lego Dick Cheney Hunting Accident, while Waxy (scroll to Feb.  21) links to Lego recreations of video games (I’m partial to the Duck Hunt shots).

None of these, however, are as good as the Lego Art I linked to a couple of weeks ago, if you ask me.

Most Likely to Vary Mules

Okay, I've been fairly music-obsessed lately (and there are more music posts in the works); I was actually surfing around trying to find something non-music to bring you for the sake of variety. Well, no luck: I give you Tom Waits's high school yearbook. Apparently his wild years were yet to come. [via Stereogum, via BoingBoing]

Four Takes on the AT-AT

I'm no Star Wars nerd—I haven't even seen the Sith episode—but sometimes you can't deny the zeitgeist.

(via bldgblog)

(via Cinetmatical)

(via Aeropause)