Racial Healing Through Bud Lite? and Other Observations

With the beer summit over and everyone enjoying their teachable moment, questions still remain about what really happened at Prof. Gates' home and why he was arrested in it. Officer Crowley stated there were no apologies from either side during the conversation but the meeting was cordial and constructive. Gates issued a statement thanking God for freedom of speech and for police to protect us. What I want to know is why Gates was arrested once he had established his identity. The charge was disorderly conduct. But what does that mean? Was he causing a danger to anyone or interfering with Crowley's duties? Isn't it a police officer's job to keep a cool head and not arrest someone just for answering back?

It may have been that Gates was arrogant and a little heated, but was he a threat? Crowley may have following procedure, but isn't it at the police officer's discretion to arrest someone and shouldn't he as a professional show restraint?

What a shame that all people falsely arrested can have the President settle the matter with a few brews at the White House.

Other recent observations: Glenn Beck is a lunatic. Surprise! "The president is a racist...but I'm not saying he doesn't like white people."

Lou Dobbs called Rachel Maddow a "teabagging queen." Huh? Does he even know what that means? If he means the political kind of teabagging, she would be the exact opposite since she's a liberal and has a working brain. If he means the sexual kind, it doesn't work because she a lesbian. So Dobbs has exposed himself as utterly clueless.

Scenes from an Amatuer Comic Collector's Life (3)--Theology and the Mighty Thor

I couldn't help myself. I went back to Time Machine on Fri. while I had some time to kill before taking the train to Hudson for the weekend--BTW, we still haven't caught all the woodchucks and there are so many freakin' deer now they cross Route 9 with impunity in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. But back to Time Machine. The owner Roger was getting ready to close up--it was 7PM and he closes at 7:30PM on Fridays. One of his regular customers was standing by the register and asked if I minded if he smoked. I said no and started going through the back issues. Blondie was singing Call Me on the loudspeaker--it was an 80s mix. The Tide Is High is my favorite. The customer was telling Roger about the days when Deborah Harry was a waitress and he was one of her customers. I found several Mighty Thors which were in deplorable shape, but those are usually the only kind of Silver Age mags I buy. There were also some Flashes with exquisite Carmine Infantino covers and a few nice Curt Swan Actions and Supermans.

I also snapped up an fairly good Strange Adventures--No. 181 with the title Man of Two Worlds, also the title of DC editor Julius Schwartz's skimpy autobio which I had just finished--and a Mystery in Space featuring Ultra, the Multi-Alien with a coupon cut out of the last page. It didn't significiantly decrease the value since it did not interfere with the story. Anyway, the Flashes were like $10 each and I was not going to spend more than around $20. The beat-up Mighty Thors came in for $3 each, with the Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures, the total was $23. I decided to forgo the Flashes, Action, and Superman as too expensive.

All the Thors were drawn by Jack Kirby, king of the comics, and the artist whose work I collect the most passionately. All were from 1967-68 when I was eight and nine. I didn't have these particular issues in my collection then, but some around the same date. In one storyline, Thor loses his god-like powers, except his super-strength, and joins a circus as a strongman. Little does he suspect the evil ringmaster plans to hypnotize him into stealing a fabulously priceless and heavy golden bull. I guess it was the circus strongman angle that attracted my burgeoning gay sensibilities.

Thor # 150 had a detached, ragged front and back cover, but a beautifully detailed rendering by Kirby of Hella, the Goddess of Death, looking like a creation of Christian from Project: Runway with a fantastic flowing cape and amazing mask and headpiece, shooting out in all directions, in dark green. The original owner of this Thor #147 had taken a pen and made Thor blackish-blue and drawn lines in the title letters. There was a stamp on the cover--Oct. 23, 1967. It made me wonder who bought it on that date and how did it get to this shop on 14th Street?

I haven't read all of them, but interesting questions are raised by Thor's deity-hood and that of his father Odin. Were Stan Lee and Jack Kirby saying the Norse Gods were the real creators of the universe and our Christain theology was a myth (at least within the parallel comic universe where Thor was real). Odin is often called All-Father and his home Asgard is referred to as the realm eternal. Odin is all powerful and in Thor #145, he rails like the Old Testament deity--"Odin is a vengeful liege...Odin is an angry liege...Odin is now and forever, supreme! And woe to him who strays from righteousness." But Hercules also makes frequent appearances as does his father Zeus. Who would win in a fight Zeus or Odin. Kirby takes up the mythos again in his series for Marvel The Eternals, with comparable figures of an all-father and a rebellious super-powered son. This theological discussion was debated in the letter pages of Marvel comics. I will have to do more study on this. Maybe I should go on that NPR show, Speaking of Faith.

Birther Da Blues or I Don't Know Nothing 'bout No Birthers, Miss Scarlett!

The Birther movement may be dead before I had a chance to mock it--as so many others already have--but I doubt if it will go quietly. (A post on Huffington states that the news director at CNN told Lou Dobbs to kill the story since the proof was conclusive.) This insane conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama has no US birth cerificate and therefore is not legally our head of state has gained credence because seemingly normal conservatives such as Liz Chaney and some in Congress are saying stuff like, "Well, there are some questions here, there's room for doubt. Why can't you liberal media types listen to the other side?" Because there is conclusive proof of Obama's birth in Hawaii--like the birth certificate authenticated by the state's Republican govenor and contemporaneous birth announcements in the Honolulu papers. The fact that the state has produced only the short form rather than a long version has added fuel to the birthers' furor. What they don't see is that the State Dept. of records went paperless in 2001 and discarded all the longer forms of records including --probably--the original long version of Obama's certificate.

Some of these whack jobs have taken the tremendous leap from no original long form of birth certificate to Obama being really born in Kenya as that whacky lady in Delaware suggested. At least I think that's what she was getting at. She's the one who hijacked Rep. Castle's town hall meeting on health care to quiver in rage about her country being stolen from her by this foreign, socialist, Muslim guy. Maybe she meant that because the original long form had been destroyed by the Hawaii people in order to save paper, Obama's birth did not really happen or that he's really a Kenyan because that's his father's country of origin. What? She went on to scream about her father fighting in WWII and Americans sacrifising at Valley Forge only to have a non-American take over. I thought her head was going to explode. (This video is surely on YouTube. I first saw it on the Rachel Maddow Show. I'm too hungry right now to find you lazy people the link. It's pretty scary.) This woman needs help. I hope she is seeing someone for anger management.

Liz Chaney is the most disingenous of all the mainstream, non-whack job Repubs pushing this birther thing. Larry King asked her if she believed Obama was not the rightful president. She didn't answer but instead said the birthers had a right to express their displeasure with a president who was not protecting us from terrorism and palling around with our enemies and leading us down the socialist path to hell. (She later admited to Politico.com that Obama was the rightful President. Look it up yourselves, people, I'm still hungry.) Of course they have a right to state their opinions if they think Obama's the worst thing since mouldy old sliced bread. Go ahead, say he's the devil incarnate and have all the tea parties you want with the Mad Hatter (Rush), the March Hare (Joe the Plumber) and Alice (Sarah Palin) thrown in--hey, that would be a great political cartoon if I could draw. But don't pretend you really believe all this nonsense and expect us to take you seriously. The fact is these people just cannot stand to think an African-American with a broader world view than Dubya is their President so they cook up crazy schemes to explain that he's really not.

Remember when all the talk was about Obama being a Muslim, then he was too close to Rev. Wright, then Bill Ayers, not he's not really an American. Get over it, right wing flakes, you lost. Your image of America as an all-white country club has forever been changed and you'll just have to live with it.

Can Gays and Blacks Jump the Broom?

I think the gay and black communities have more in common than they realize. In a recent CNN.com blog post, LZ Granderson says gay is NOT the new black. He says gays have not suffered in the same ways as African-Americans and we need to show the same patience the black community has, waiting and fighting for centuries for true civil rights. Yes, gays have not suffered to same degree as blacks have. We have not been held in slavery for hundreds of years. But we are like blacks in that we are suffering from discrimination and there is a large segment of American society that sees nothing wrong with that. Just as large swatches of white society--not just southern--had no problem with segretation in the early 1960s, large portions of straight society thinks it's proper and good that us gays stay in the closet and not raise a fuss or try to be treated the same as them.

I'm reading The Hemings of Monticello which examines the relationship of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson and their interracial family. Hemings could not marry Jefferson, the father of her children. Enslaved blacks were not allowed to legally marry, since it would impede the ability of the white master to break up the family if he wished to sell two lovers apart. I know it's not the same or as horrific, but gays are not allowed to marry either. We can live our lives and go to our jobs and not fear being beaten by a master or sold apart from our lovers. But we are being treated badly. We have that in common.

Peggy Noonan, Let 'em Eat Aspirin!

Sometimes I have to bang my ear and say "Did that nutbag really say that?" This morning on Morning Joe, former Reagan speech writer and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan actually stated "When I was growing up, people weren't obsessed with health care. What happened in this country?" And just when I was starting to like her because she called Sarah Palin an unqualified lightweight.

What happened in this country, Peggy, is that costs for drugs and hospitals and operations skyrocketed since you were a kid back in the 1850s when the simple country doc would pull up in his wagon and take his pay in firewood (Actually that was how my grandparents paid the doctor for the birth of my uncle. They were so far up in Maine, he had to be born in Canada.) Didn't you make your debut at the Grover Cleveland inaugural?

People who aren't millionaires or white-glove, country-club Republicans like you, Peggy, are scared to death that if they get sick or have a catastrophic illness they could go bankrupt, even if they have insurance. Didn't you see Sicko? What also surprised me is that none of the other talking heads pointed this out to her, not even Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson. They just blathered on about how medical science has advanced so much since Peggy's girlhood during the War Between the States.

The Power of Words

Several years ago, I saw William F. Buckley being interviewed by Morley Safer on 60 Minutes. The great conservative pundit was saying something denigrating about liberals and compassion. Safer challenged him, asking what was wrong with being compassionate. Buckley replied in that clenched-jaw, Thurston Howell III accent of his, "Compassion is a buzzword." He was trying to control the conversation by controlling the words being used, making the word "compassion" to suit his own meaning--that of a fake sop to the guilty consciences of bleeding hearts.

Ronald Reagan did the same thing when he made the word liberal into a curse word by stating Michael Dukakis would not admit he was one. Yes, he's a L word, the great communicator jovially ranted. He made the word suit his purpose and gave it the meaning of a "tax and spend" demagogue whose head was in the clouds, wasting the hard-earned money of the average, God-fearing American.

Now the GOP is trying to hijack the word empathy in connection with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. President Obama used the term to describe a quality he desired in a Supreme Court judge. The right wingers are twisting it to mean subjectivity and partiality to minorities. They are trying to make empathy into a weakness as Buckley wanted to do with compassion and Reagan did with liberal.

Subway Scenes: Kindled Spirits?

While riding home on the subway this evening I saw two people each reading a Kindle. That's the first time I've seen more than on on the same subway car. So the Amazon.com reading device is becoming more common. I can only see having it if I were going on a long trip and didn't want to carry around a bunch of heavy books. This led me to wonder if someday books would become like vinyl LPs are now, collectors' items only conneisseurs would care about or care to own. Would you only be able to buy them online or in little, out of the way, used bookstores in quaint little villages? Would Harry Potter paperbacks go for $50? It could happen. CD stores are folding because of I Tunes. No more Virgin Records.

But then you wouldn't have the physical book to put on your bookcase and refer back to. You'd probably download it to your Kindle and then erase it once you read it so as not to clutter up the hard drive. If you wanted to read it again, you'd have to pay that $10 again, so keeping the book would be less likely.

This would add to the impermenance of our society. Pictures are no longer printed, they're digitized and stored in your laptop. (I even have fallen victim to this trend, I'm so lazy I haven't bothered to have any pictures printed since my trip to Louisville in April, they're all posted on Facebook, so why bother?) There's less and less of your life you can actually hold in your hands. It's all in the cyber-air.

Will ideas and conversation become as fleeting and transitory? Well, maybe I'm worried over nothing. When television came in, they said it would be the death of the movies. But the art of cinema remains vibrant.

What will life be like in 20 years? Will everyone have a Kindle? Will it become mandatory for school and college? No more heavy book bags to tote around.

As the two men were reading their Kindles across from each other on the subway, I read my edition of Wednesday Comics I had just bought at Midtown Comics. The Superman art by Lee Bermejo is dark and beautiful with incredible details in the folds of the costumes and the creases of the wrinkles of the superheroes' faces. One panel is particularly gorgeous with Superman and Batman's capes flapping in the wind as they discuss Superman's alienation atop a skyscraper in a noir-ish Gotham City. Batman is in both his own strip and Superman's this week.

I wonder what the two guys were reading.

Mass. Culture High and Low

We spent the weekend in Massachusettes, experiencing the heights of culture in music and art as well as the lowest of entertainment--and you know what that means--comics. Friday we drove from Stockport, NY to Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass. and experienced a beautiful Beethoven concerto with soloist Emanuel Ax and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. (Before leaving we had a visit from the animal guy who set the live traps from the woodchucks. We did not have to resort to used kitty litter--see previous post. He had caught the two young ones, but the mother was still at liberty. I asked where the father was. He replied "Oh, he's a runaround" meaning the males gets the females pregnant and leave them to raise the young under people's houses.)

I can still recall a concert with Ax playing a Chopin piece at Avery Fisher many years ago. The delicacy of his playing was beautiful.

The next day was spent in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts viewing their special show on the rivalry between Titian, Tintorento, and Veronese. Separate admission tickets and everything. I liked the Tintorentos best, particularly the Temptation of St. Anthony.

We had time to look around Boston and Cambridge which I like very much. Boston is so orderly they even name the Alleys. Street signs read Public Alley No. 253, etc. The area around the museum--the Back Bay--is charming in a way that no part of New York is any more. Perhaps the Village was at one point, but I fail to see it. Maybe I'm jaded. Here everyone seems rushed and self-involved. They appeared more at ease in Beantown. But it's probably just my own feelings being projected onto others.

I visited Comicopia on Commonwealth Ave. where they have many indie titles and bought False Witness: The Michele Bachmann Story, a wicked satire of the Minnesota congresswoman who's been making such an ass of herself on cable TV news--she's been spouting conspiracy theories about Obama taking over the economy and making us all into socialist zombies. Cambridge's comic book store is called The Million Year Picnic, which is the title of a Ray Bradbury story. The name is cooler than the store. Not many grabby back issues, but I did find a Jimmy Olsen with Curt Swan art from 1968 and a Marvel reprint special with the Fantastic Four teaming up with Sub Mariner, with whom they are normally at odds.

Scenes from an Amatuer Comic Collector's Life (2)--Sunday Funnies

Today is new comic book day, so I go into Forbidden Planet to check out the new goods. DC Comics has come out with an entirely new series I absolutely love which is in the form of a Sunday newspaper comic section like what we used to call the funnies. Remember those? This features epic 14 X 20 inch story pages of Superman, Batman, Kamandi (I have almost all of the Jack Kirby originals), Hawkman, Deadman, Green Lantern, Metamorpho, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Metal Men, Flash, Sgt. Rock, Teen Titans, Adam Strange, and the Demon teamed with Catwoman. Best of all, Metamorpho the Elemental Man is drawn by my absolute favorite artist Mike Allred--who has a cool retro sensibility--he's the guy who does Madman, which will conclude its current series next month from Image Comics. And this Metamorpho strip is written by Neil Gaiman (Geeky enough for yez?)

This will be a weekly series from DC for 12 weeks. Wow! I can collect them all! I remember the funnies used to be my favorite part of the newspaper. Saturday nights my dad used to drive us to this general store-sort of Wawa place to get the Sunday paper. We would go after dinner and get ice cream and pick up the Sunday edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was a weekly ritual, I remember sitting with him in the front seat and my sister in the back. We'd go in the store and pick up this enormous newspaper with the colorful funnies wrapped around the front. Sometimes if I had enough allowance money left--I got 25 cents a week--I would buy the latest Action Comics with Superman AND the Legion of Super-Heroes. So it had to be the early 70s, when the Legion was no longer the only feature in Adventure Comics, but had been relegated to second-class status behind the Man of Steel in Action.

I haven't read all of the comics yet, but I love the Green Lantern which has a real cool early 60s vibe like The New Frontier, a graphic novel series I've been meaning to read.

I also picked up issue 5 of the Marvel adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for my friend Lydia who is a Jane Austen fan.

Piling On Palin

I just had to share this lovely conversation from Fox News via The Huffington Post. I will not sully my laptop with an actual link to Fox. Contributor Liz Trotta (I think she was the genius who used the adjective "terrorist" to describe the Obamas' fist bump) slams Sarah Palin as inarticulate and uneducated. It's obvious the host is trying to get her to agree with him that the liberal media is being unfair to Sarah. But Liz is standing her ground, asking what would William F. Buckley--obviously one of her heroes--think of this nitwit as the standardbearer of the conservative movement? She goes on to commit the heresy of saying Maureen Dowd has an actual case when criticizing the soon-to-be ex-governor. Liz also calls Palin flaky. The host prods Liz to tow the party line by saying these liberal elite types are going too far, calling the gov. crazy and unbalanced. But Liz doesn't budge. Good for her, Trotta is actually being fair and balanced, just like Fixed Noise's all-too-often-ignored motto.

On Countdown earlier in the evening, the guy who wrote the Vanity Fair article commented that she just "wasn't having fun anymore." Hey, my job isn't exactly a barrel of monkeys every minute, should I resign in the middle of a project? He went on to report Palin would get easily bored in staff meetings and when the topic veered from an issue she cared about or the mundane details of actual governing would creep in, her attention would wander. Plus, she was exhausted from all that commuting to Juneau. Poor thing! You're breaking my heart.

Now I'll have to buy that article.

Scenes from Country Life--Not to Be Confused with Turgenev

It's Sunday night of a holiday weekend. These are always the hardest ones on which to go back to the city (Don't I sound like Lloyd and Karen Richards in All About Eve?) For me, one of the best things about weekends up here in Stockport, NY, is finding little used bookstores, garage sales, flea markets, and antique stores. Today, on impulse we drove to this house on route 9 that had a sign reading BOOKS. It was two small shacks outside a huge house. The owner was selling hardbacks for a dollar and paperbacks for 50 cents. Jerry found hundreds of used classical LPs, his passion. I had gone through all of the books in both shacks and found four dollars worth--including short stories by Grace Paley and Madison Bell Smart, film criticism by Penelope Gilliatt, a bio of Warren Beatty, and a VCR tape of Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet--which even Netflix doesn't have--plus a CD of Glenn Miller broadcasting in German during World War II to encourage German soliders to lay down their arms and swing with the Allies, I suppose. Jerry was only through half of the LPs by the time I was done. So I paid my four bucks and started reading the first story by Paley.

Then we stopped and bought sandwiches and gas, came home and I mowed the back of the lawn. Jerry had done the front yesterday. Our friend Lee dropped by on her way home and we had a glass of wine on the porch. While we were sipping our drinks, Deirdre and her child sneaked around the woods at the back. Deirdre is our name for the pesky deer that hang around and eat our flowers--the bastards! Don't get me wrong, I like wildlife as much as the next person, I just don't want it thinking it has a right to hang around my house and potentially spread diseases and take poops wherever it feels like it.

This led to telling Lee about another woodland creature taking up residence ("Hello Acme Pest Control? Well I have a pest I want controlled!"--Elmer Fudd) Yesterday morning Jerry and I saw saw a mama woodchuck and two baby woodchucks scurrying under the stairs leading to the back porch (Cute as hell, but I don't want them living rent free underneath me, making noise and having woodchuck sex while I'm trying to watch Top Chef marathons.) We've had a guy set live traps for previous unwanted tenents but he charges about $60 an animal caught (He releases them unharmed miles away, for any animal lovers out there.)

"Well, there's a way to get them out of your house, but you have to be prepared," Lee told us.

"What is it?"

"You get used cat litter and put it in the hole where they come in and out. They'll stay away. They hate it."

"What do you mean used?" Jerry asked.

"You know, that a cat has done its business in," she explained.

"Where would we get that?" I queried.

"You go to somebody's house that has a cat and get it out of their trash," she proposed.

"Or we could put in an ad," I suggested. "Wanted: cat litter, must be used."

After a few more sips of wine and some laughs, we decided we'll probably call the animal-elimination guy. Such is life in the country.

Palin Poops Out!

Why does this always happen on Friday of a holiday weekend. My partner Jerry and I are up here for the Fourth of July. We were driving back from the Price Chopper listening to NPR and Sarah Palin announces she’s not running for governor for a second term. Okay, fine. Wait a minute, not only is she not running for re-election, but she’s resigning altogether. WTF!! Just two and half years as governor and she steps down? I think she comes across as a quitter and more interested in her own career than what’s best for her state.

She is crazy! To me this dashes her hopes for becoming President in 2012. She may be thinking—hey, I can’t go around the country and give speeches like Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. I gotta hang around this icebox and sign papers. What a waste of taxpayer money! Let somebody do it so I can do something really positive like appear at barbecues with Joe the Plumber.

Interesting that she does this the same week as that damaging Vanity Fair article comes out.

I’m watching her whole insane press conference on MSNBC. She’s making Mark Sanford sound like a model of coherence. (And BTW, why doesn't he resign and have his fling in Argentina which he obviously wanted to do.) Maybe she waited until she knew that Keith Olbermann was on vacation so he wouldn’t lay into her. (I think he’s on vacation.) In any event, I switched to Fox for a few seconds and the conservatives were posturing that she positioning herself

If she cares about Alaksa she would stay in office. It’s obvious she can't take the heat. This makes the GOP like even weaker.

Now there’s a crawl at the bottom stating Palin is out of politics for good according to sources speaking to Andrea Mitchell. Which is it? She seems to have left the door open for future higher office, but this is not the way to do it. She says, it's not politics as usual. It's not politics at all.

What a weird, strange career. Plucked from obscurity, pilloried by the media, the object of tabloid rumors, now she throws it all away--or does she? I think she has a huge enough ego to believe she can still be in the presidential game, but with this misguided decision, all she has left are her hard-core of supporters--right-wing, small-government Walmart shoppers, a shrinking group. She'll probably wind up as a talk-show hostess on Fox. Chuck Todd just said she may be doing it for money. If she's no longer governor, she can give speeches for money.

Random TV Encounters--Porn Again

Earlier this year when I was staying at the Galt Hotel in Louisville during the Humana Festival of New Plays, I was relaxing in my room in between shows. I flipped through the channels which I love to do when I'm in cities I've never been--you get to see all the local news and how low-rent it usually is. I landed on MTV and the program was a reality thing called I'm Addicted to Porn. It was part of a whole series of I'm Addicted to.... They profiled a series of real people whose lives were seriously affected by their involvement with pornography. There was a guy whose wife left him because he couldn't stop watching it on his computer. They went to therapy. The usual story.

But the most interesting segment involved this young porn star. She was in Vegas for a porn convention and she was nominated for the industry equivalent of the Oscar for most promising newcomer or something. The awards were to be presented at the climax--pardon the pun--of the convention. She was shown surrounded by male fans on the convention floor, all clammering for her picture and autograph. She later said to the camera, "Wow, I feel really great, like I'm worth something." Then she received a visit from this group called the Pink Cross whose mission is to get people out of porn. The rescue workers were three women, looked in their 40s, all of whom were very attractive, but you could tell they'd had work done and when they were younger were probably stunning. Each wore an armband with a pink cross. Our girl listened to their spiel and wasn't buying it. They said "You're so smart and pretty, you don't need this. You are worth so much more than this." She thanked them and they left saying "Well, if you ever change your mind, give us a call." The actress turned to camera and said she was happy in her work.

Later just before the awards, she confessed that she wanted to win badly because maybe then her parents wouldn't be ashamed of her. One limo ride later, she loses the big award. Back in her suite with champagne, money, and a life of sex and adoration by horny pathetic guys, she's in tears.

Earlier in the week, I'd seen a play called Slasher about a young girl who gets cast in a sleazy horror film and she's in control and not exploited because she set the terms of the contract. There were eerie echoes of the play in this reality TV show.