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Now Playing on HT's iPod
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- "Rise and Fall" by Craig David and Sting
- "Unhappy Birthday" by Morrissey
- "Where We Stand" by Faith Evans
- "Ode to my Family" by the Cranberries
- "Superstar Part Zero" by K-os
- "I Like You" by Morrissey
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1/25/05 11:02 PM: "You can't stop modern science. Can't stop it, you can't stop it. Can't stop science. Can't be stopped, no way, no how." -- George Costanza
SET IT OFF:
So one way or another, I'll be getting The Crown: Books One and Two published in March or early April. I originally was gonna have my only avowed "fan," this early-twenties brother named Chinedum from Boston, write the foreword, but he disappeared mysteriously a little before I bought my new iBook (more on that in a bit). So I'm gonna write the damned foreword myself, quoting Spider Jerusalem as I go.
UPDATED: As I was writing, Chinedum emailed me, telling me he was the victim of a car accident. I'm just glad the zany little Nigerian didn't die or something. More as it develops.
As well, I wanted my old co-worker Jenna to edit the whole thing, but I couldn't scrape up the money, so my dear friend Dana stepped in with the assist. I ran it through a fairly brutal spell check in Quark XPress, but spirit only knows what I missed. So if you haven't read it online, you'd better hurry up because after publication, I'm pulling off everything but the first three chapters of each volume and calling it a day.
Funny side note about Roman numerals ... I'll tell you in a second, down when we talk iBook.
ILL CRIMES UNIT: I've made an agreement with Jamar Nicholas to do a twelve-page one-shot ashcan comic for this summer's convention circuit. This serves several purposes: one, it shows people I can actually produce something on my own. Two, it gives Jamar a new platform to show off his artwork, which is cool. Three, it gives us a chance to work together, which is cool since we've liked each other ever since we met two years ago at San Diego Comicon. Four, it's two Black men coming together, setting aside drama and wherewithal to just do some work, which is great. So I'm happy, finally putting my mouth where my money is, or something like that. I've gotta get him the script by February 1st, and sadly we haven't even come up with a name for it yet. More news as it develops ...
 GOODNIGHT, JOHNNY:
Johnny Carson died Sunday morning of emphysema at age 79. Now, you know its exceptionally rare for white people (and not drawings of them) to ever be on this page, but this was different, and I wanted to say some things.
Over the last couple of years, they've started selling DVD collections of The Tonight Show from Carson's run, and they show clips on these commercials that often run late at night (when I'm up and watching TV randomly). In watching 'em, even in those brief moments, I was always struck by how effortless and perfect his comic timing was. A pause, a slow consideration before looking into the camera ... it was scary how good he was. Nobody is even close these days, not even his desired heir apparent, Dave Letterman (who is a different kind of genius, and a less marketable one as he well knows). He was a master performer from a day and age where these types of entertainers were forged over decades and made glorious. That kind of time and application to craft, especially in the thankless job of talk show hosting, is apparently an extinct specie, like the lover you can trust or the dodo bird. That deserves mentioning.
Then there's the privacy thing. In 1992, he walked away from everything, leaving The Tonight Show to retire in virtual anonymity. It's believed that his solitary public appearance after the retirement was as a voice on The Simpsons. Who does that? Who can pass up the cult of celebrity? On Good Morning America, (I was up late working ... or is it early?) Joan Rivers talked about how she can't go anywhere without a retinue of servants and support staff, and how she was amazed at Johnny, simply showing up, by himself, and doing the work, in every professional arena she saw him in. You didn't see a lot of "Johnny Groped Me" stories. No scandals. No drama. He kept his personal life very, very separate from his public and professional life. As a wildly anti-social person (the polite word is "shy," but I know misanthropy is more at the root than fear these days) that kind of decorum is very powerful to me.
Carson fought a nicotine addiction for a long, long time. That addiction killed both my great aunt and uncle, who raised me as if I was their own. It's a relentless evil that even I cannot condone, hanging over the global consciousness like a vengeful storm cloud. So that it killed this man that, near as I can tell, nobody, anywhere didn't like ... well, that's even more of a case against it.
Not a lot of people get this, but anedge hirak Johnny Carson, and here's hoping the chairs are as comfy where you are.
NEW BUSINESS: So I've been doing press relations for Speakeasy Comics and helping get the word out about the first three comics out from the in-house content creation arm, Hawke Studios. This meant setting up Sebastien Caisse exclusively at Comicon's Pulse for a new comic called The Grimoire and Brian Augustyn exclusively at Comic Book Resources (where I happen to work as well) for a comic called (IIRC) Beowulf: Gods and Monsters. I'm still working on setting up Daniel Mishkin at Newsarama for his comic book The Spell Game, which has been the hardest one to get going for some reason. As long as I'm doing it from my keyboard, this is fine -- no phones, no handshakes, sometimes not even any pants. It's going pretty well, and I'm finding out that the second wave of comics (led off by my own comic book Seraph) will happen in September (and paving a way for that is why I'm pimping the other books so hard). That's all turning out pretty spiffy, but I still wanna talk to some retailers about how they're gonna order the projects.
 RULING THE WORLD:
For the record, yes, I want a picture of me in just this same pose as Cobra Commander, with all the madness and glory therein. I make no apologies for it.
So I'm hearing rumors that the G.I. Joe line of licensed comics is imploding over at Devil's Due, with the G.I. Joe Extreme-esque G.I. Joe Reloaded unable to shake its somewhat trendy adjective and pull down the sales, even with Chuck Dixon climbing on board (remember when Chuck Dixon used to write, like, seventy comics a month?). The main title, listing like a drunken Scotsman from even before Devil's Due head honcho Josh Blaylock handed the reins over to the less consistent Brandon Jerwa, is also gonna call it quits. Allegedly (and these are all half-remembered website notes, some of it may not be true, but even rumors of demise say a lot) there's gonna be one, new unified title with more of a real world approach.
This is completely the wrong way to go.
I'm the target demographic for G.I. Joe comics and I ain't buying them. The reasons are largely content based -- the stories lack zip. When Larry Hama was on the Marvel run (of which I bought every single issue as it came out), he was always balancing his desire to tell larger, more emotional stories with the toy company telling him to use the idiot in the bird suit or the moron with the dog or the crocodiles. That tension made for fascinating reading, as he used all of his talent to make it work. Either there's less talent at Devil's Due or it's less focused, I don't freakin' know. But the stories -- and there were some good ideas, the Serpentor return looked really good, but kept stopping and starting -- aren't up to snuff.
What would I do differently? First of all, I'd have to acknowledge some of the ridiculous nature of the beast. For the love of god, Quick Kick never had on a shirt or a pair of shoes the entire time he was on the team. The Crimson Guard were an army of gun toting accountants, deep cover in suburbia, led by psychically-linked, fey, twin corporate raiders. Both Walter Perry and Sgt. Slaughter suited up for the good guys. The Dreadnoks, a biker gang, counted amongst their members a split personality case who quoted Shakespeare while holding a stick with a cinder block on the end of it, a pirate and a family of shapeshifters. You don't run from this sort of thing. You embrace it, laughing at it all the way and still remembering, oh, yeah, we're a team of professional killers. Whimsical professional killers, admittedly, but professional killers nonetheless. G.I. Joe should be a book people have to pick up every month, because the sheer lunacy of it should mean absolutely anything can happen, and you might miss something really crazy.
The other thing that such an approach would allow is a means to deal with the problems of being an American Hero in this day and age. People around the world hate people from the United States. They cheered 9/11. They see each and every one of us as complicit in the torture, murder and oppression of literally billions of people around the globe. Worst of all, they're not far from being right -- every cent of sales tax we pay could put another bullet into a prone man in a place of worship. That's a fact. So how much more complicit are the very instruments of policy that are flown around the map to liquidate problems and secure strategic assets? I swear, take this tactic and give the book to John Layman, or Christopher Priest, or me. Them's good readin's!
HARMONY: I've started to find more joy in singing duets at karaoke shows. Jon the Cowboy and I now sing "Rise and Fall" by Craig David and Sting, and we're getting pretty good at it. I tried "Broken" by Seether and Amy Lee with Dana, and we're still working on that (I can't hear the harmony right, for some reason), and we had a blast doing "Vision of Love" at my "birthday party." I've been feeling very isolated, and I'm seemingly more comfortable reaching out with a microphone in my hand and a backing track than just talking to people. That's just something that's happening.
ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL?
In the world of football, everything is proceeding as I have foreseen. Riding a wave of smart trades, Chunk soup commercials and relentless momentum the Philadelphia Eagles stand poised to enter their first Super Bowl since the Reagan administration. On the other side, led by the luckiest man in professional sports, a team of seasoned, thoughful professionals stand poised to re-introduce the word "dynasty" to football and make this possibly the greatest twelve months any Boston sports fan has ever had.
Growing up, the power and grace of Joe Greene, Franco Harris, Lynn Swann and the rest of those legends made me a Steelers fan for life. Their hard working, black-uniformed, nose-to-the-grindstone image in relentless pursuit of victory endeared them to my heart, and even now that my "home" state of Tennesee has the Titans, my loyalty remains divided, partially in a city I've never even visited. Add the rookie sensation of Ben Rothlisberger, enjoying the finest rookie season a QB has ever had in the history of spacetime, and I was ecstatic.
Then there's Michael Vick, the NFL's answer to Lebron James, a physical phenomenon that surpasses normal humans. Everybody would love to be him, even if for just one play.
Yet, had I had money on it -- and I said as much in the weeks that preceded this -- I'd have bet on Philly and New England, with the Pats to take it all. Vick and Big Ben have the same issue -- it's not their time yet. They're still too raw, the systems around them still too suspect and incomplete. For the same reason, the Eagles will more than likely fall to the Patriots. There simply are too few flaws on New England's face, their system is too wonderfully tuned. Tom Brady combines being a really good quarterback with having the sort of luck that would make Longshot blanch. Combined with a coach referred to by many as a "genius," and time to (as Brady did with Pittsburgh) watch every single game their opponents played this year ... Patriots all the way. Which is hard for me to say, because I went to high school with their safety Lawyer Milloy, a man I actively loathed for years and still don't have any warmth for. But he's amazingly good at what he does, just like the rest of his team, so that's that.
Saturday at my "birthday party," a barfly named Mike almost bet me and Cowboy Jon $50 each that the Steelers would win. We couldn't talk him into it. Now, remember, I'm a Steelers fan, I have a customized Steelers jersey and everything. But I'm also a businessman, and fandom takes a back seat to profit.
 Fun side note: my business associate/damned-near-best-friend Dana is from Philly. For Kwanzaa, I got her matching Eagles license plate covers. She has a McNabb home jersey and is very fanatical. She even knows New England will win. It would almost take an act of God to change that.
SUPERIOR FIREPOWER: On December 27th, I bought an iBook G4 1.2 GHz machine with a 12" screen. Mercy it's fast -- more than twice as fast as my old 550 MHz PowerBook. Its plastic shell seems a lot more resistant to everyday life than the surprisingly tender Titanium casing. But its screen is too small, I know -- I often have to move browser windows to get to aliases (aliasi?) on the desktop, and new windows block the old ones. Still, for the money (with a discount, I walked out with it for $973), it can't be beaten. I'm ecstatic, and it's also lighter, so that's a worthwhile trade for the screen space. I'm not the graphic designer I once was, so whatever.
PLAYER:
But whither my venerated G4 PowerBook? I realized, as I was setting the iBook up, that my last four laptops (all named "Eclipse" numbered one through four) had Roman numerals in their names.
My namesake, Hannibal Barca, swore undying hatred for the Romans, and here I was, using their numerals! Argh!
So that had to go, and I've since renamed everything with words (even as far as my sci fi stories ... oh what I wish I could tell you). But this is all a digression ... the original point is that my theory of using the PowerBook as a digital jukebox hit a snag when the thing heated up, with the sound of the fan overpowering the soft strains of slow jams. That's no good. So I've gone back to the iPod running off the cradle into the stereo. I wanna get a NaviPod from Ten Technologies to run it remotely, but I can't spare the $50 now. So the PowerBook just gets used for transferring music. Developing ...
Plus everybody has more impressive car interfaces for their iPods in cars than my RF modulator. Even my barber Jovan. On the other hand, my car is like "whatever" most of the time. But the iPod is playing, all the time, everywhere I go. I sure wish Dana wouldn't have accidentally screwed up my backup. Oh well.
 DESPERATION:
So the whole world is going nuts for Desperate Housewives. I've been watching from the start, and most of my reason for that was Eva Longoria (who I would punch nuns to sleep with). But I've found other reasons to watch.
When I first saw the overly fetishized Edie Britt, played by Nicolette Sheridan (seen at the left here), I hated her. A tall, leggy blonde white woman with a lot of money and very little to do with her free time. Ick. Add that to the fact she was relentlessly promiscuous (which is like waving a gun at a Black guy from the south), and cashed in on a big divorce so she could drive around in a luxury convertible ... I wanted her dead. Then, in recent episodes where she had to play directly off of Teri Hatcher, she showed something I could relate to. "You used to be a cheerleader, didn't you?' she asked Teri Hatcher's character, before revealing that before Edie Britt became the telegenic white icon, her character was a wallflower, a frump, a nobody. Then, one day, she got "hot."
Just like I did.
Suddenly all of her behaviors -- dousing herself in water while washing a car to get a guy's attention, and so on -- got cast in a different light. So I started, against my better wishes, liking her character. The TO/MNF flap made her seem even more of this late bloomer, raging against the machine. So now she's cool with me, getting a pass like Felicity Huffman did (and that's just from her work on Sports Night).
On the other hand, Marcia Cross' Bree Van der Camp is the most terrifying figure in my recent memory, so much so that I didn't even wanna deal with a photo of her. She's considered so hot by so many around her, including her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Rex (who, by the way, she's almost killed). She's a Stepford Wife on speed, a horrifying amalgam of June Cleaver and the wife from American Beauty. The idea of real emotional connection, outside of her idealized Martha Stewart household, is an alien concept to her. If my ex-wife was taller, and white, and had kids, she'd be Bree. I watch her with morbid fascination and mounting dread, her every moment on-screen a nail-biter.
So, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "The stars of TV hit 'Desperate Housewives' have reportedly threatened a revolt over their small salaries. Marcia Cross, Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Eva Longoria and Nicolette Sheridan are all demanding bigger paychecks to cash in on the success of the ABC series that won two Golden Globes last week." In an interview with People magazine last month, Sheridan complained, "I'm the poorest actress on television. I heard [the cast of] 'Friends' got cars when they had such amazing ratings. But I got flowers. I'm still waiting for the Porsche."
Forget the fact that none of these heifers even had a job nine months ago. How could I not hate people?
AWKWARD SILENCES:
The following is from an email to my good brother Inpu:
Last Friday, I was up all night working on my comics reviews, a day late due to ... hell, I don't even remember why. I decided to stay up and get my hair cut as soon as my barber got in. Well, time got away from me, and I ended up in the chair at 12:30, leaving the shop around 2ish.
Hungry and near delirious with sleep-deprivation, I drove to Simply Wholesome, my fresh-shaven pate gleaming and my sunglasses hiding how whacked out I was. As I walked up, I saw a smartly dressed brother in a suit, speaking expressively to a short sister with shoulder length (I thought) braids. As I got closer, I said, "Hey, that's Inpu! That's funny, to see him in this neck of the woods ... aw crap, he must be talking to Renae, that poor bastard. Argh. I'll just wave as I come out." A part of me considered walking over and saying hi, but I have no real reason to be friendly to Renae so I decided against that.
So I walked over in line to get some chicken patties and maybe a bean pie or two. With nothing else to do, I kept watching you, sunglasses perched on your head, gesticulating forcefully with your right hand. I then watched the sister who I thought was Renae, listening surprisingly attentively.
"Hang on, those are dreads," I realized. "Renae doesn't have dreads, that's too much for her ... hang on. That's not Inpu's ex-wife. It's my ex-wife! Gah!"
I glanced around -- apparently neither of you had noticed me. I decided that I didn't want to have any un-necessary weirdness in my already weird day, with me working on zero sleep in thirty hours. So I ducked out of line and headed out the grocery store exit, got into my car (not noticing either of your cars, which was probably sleepiness again) and hightailing it back over the hill.
At first I wondered if I punked out, but in the end, I decided it was the smart play for me, and ultimately everybody involved. I realized that seeing her still bothers me because I chose someone who was clearly, violently, dangerously wrong for me and being reminded of that is like punching myself in the face. I don't make mistakes like that, or so I thought.
So if you felt anything weird that day, that was it.
FAMILY TIES: My mother sent me $200 for Kwanzaa and $150 for my birthday. This is, in a clump, more cash than she's given me in probably my whole life, and I turned 32 on Thursday. I have a vague suspicion that she's trying to get on my good side so I won't put her in a home or something in a few years.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
PRESENT TENSE:
So from Kwanzaa and my birthday, I did okay. I got a mountain of DVDs (the first and last Lord of the Rings flicks from Dana, and from Bernadette I got School Daze, Lost in Translation and Brown Sugar), plus the $350 from my mom. Some cards, some good wishes. No car-that-turns-into-a-boat, but oh well.
I will be doling out iPod shuffles as gifts for the precious few people I need to give gifts to. I found out today at the Apple Store that I can't set the things up on my machine, so that's some drama. But oh well -- I can take people's music, burn it on to a data disc, and dump the original files, and have 'em use the discs to drag and drop for their iPods. I've been learning that some businesses are doing this, calling it iPod loading. So there's that.
MONETARY: I'm recovering from the brutal December, scrounging for the new laptop. new iBook. I'm getting back on track with those past due bills, socking some cash away. It was troubling, but I made it. I'm already doing better.
FOR ONE, SHINING MOMENT: Part of that "doing better" is cutting loose some extraneous things. Since the mid-90s, I've had my email routed through a company called Camalott Communications. I started with them as a UNIX account I could telnet into for my MUD client (Google it, I'm too lazy to explain), which used to be something so important to me, but kind of dropped off the map. They had some serious problems with denial of service attacks and I almost didn't get my email on work nights. That's no good. When I asked for assurances, they were silent. So, I go to look after another outage, and they've been swallowed by a larger company. I worked at Earthlink when they ate smaller companies, and it never went well. So, after almost ten years, I got out, cancelled my account and found alternate rerouting. The end of an era.
THE SIMPLE LIFE:
Today I went to the aforementioned Apple Store to ask some questions and kil time while my oil got changed. As I sat in the lounge area, surfing on my iBook, Brent Spiner walked up and started watching the iMovie presentation with great fascination, looking much like Dr. Arik Soong from Enterprise.
Brother J from X Clan rolled into Norm's in Lomita last Friday night with some friends of his.
When I was at Simply Wholesome, I saw Huey Newton Story creator Roger Guenveur Smith was sitting and having lunch.
Celebrities are so boring after you live here.
SCIENCE: I'm a lot more on the ball since last month. I'm not missing many things, hitting all my marks and getting things done. That's a good thing.
And yes, you'll probably not see this many white people on one page for the rest of the year. *shrug*
"No other road. No other way. No day but today." -- Mimi from Rent
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