Just came across this (via Fluxblog), and all I have to say is: Wow.

This is the GLFC's Mix Tape Central taken to the nth degree. Genius.
posted by Gardner at 4:47 PM

Interesting.

Obviously you shouldn't let an Internet quiz tell you how to vote, but this may help clear up some confusion and/or indecision. (Particularly when said Internet quiz seems to be weighted strongly in favor of Dennis Kucinich, to the point where I have to wonder if he paid for the damn thing.) It told me my top two candidates were Kucinich and Sharpton, but I think we can discard them since (sorry, guys) they don't have a shot in hell of winning. That leaves John Kerry at the top of my list, followed closely by Howard Dean. Taken with the requisite grains of salt, this is, like I said, interesting. And it did get one thing right: Bush and I stand opposed on nearly every issue that matters to me. Looking at his profile is like looking at Bizarro-Gardner.
posted by Gardner at 3:29 PM

Gardner's Early-2004 Culture Roundup Part 3

Comic Book (monthly): New X-Men by Grant Morrison & Marc Silvestri

Since taking over Marvel's moribund X-Men title in 2001 and remaking it in his own image as New X-Men, mad Scotsman Grant Morrison (creator of the Matrix-influencing series The Invisibles) has turned the adventures of Xavier, Cyclops, Wolverine et al into the sharpest, funniest, most exciting and subversive pop literature going. His formula has been simple but incredibly effective: combine the classic X-Men elements created by writer Chris Claremont in the seventies and eighties (not coincidentally the era when Morrison was an X-Men-reading teenager) with the wit and style of Bryan Singer's X-Men films (the new uniforms, designed by artist Frank Quitely, Morrison's most sympathetic collaborator, are actually much cooler than the movie costumes) and Morrison's own bleeding-edge scientific(nano-Sentinels and mutant gene grafts) and metafictional interests (referring to said new uniforms, Wolverine says "Suddenly I don't have to look like an idiot in broad daylight"). The characters, mired for years in mind-numbingly stupid crossover plots and mysteries with no resolution, are fun again; Wolverine's stopped caring about his mysterious past and started caring about being as big an Eastwood-esque badass as possible, the simian Beast has turned into a big blue lion and started pretending to be gay, and the normally uptight Cyclops is having a telepathic affair with Emma Frost (Morrison's most successful revamp--kind of like Marie Antoinette as played by Heather Locklear with a British accent and diamond-hard skin). And Morrison has turned the Xavier Institute into an actual school, with hilarious new students like the scrawny chicken-boy Beak and his baby-mama Angel, who seems to have been an attempt by Morrison to make the term "fly-girl" literal.

After nearly three years on the series, Morrison has begun "Here Comes Tomorrow," his final story arc. He just wrapped up the fantastic "Planet X" story arc, in which he brought Magneto back to life (one of the few comics resurrections that has ever made sense), destroyed Xavier's school and New York City, and killed two major characters. Now, without even pausing for breath, we're flung 150 years into the future to a time when humans are nearly extinct, the world is a wasteland ruled by competing factions of super-mutants, and the Beast is trying to bring about some sort of genetic apocalypse. Like all of Morrison's New X-Men stories, "Here Comes Tomorrow" is a riff on a Claremont plot--this time it's "Days of Future Past," which found the X-Men fighting for survival in a dystopian future. Two issues in, it's a gas; Morrison's ability to create whole new cultures and mythologies in just a few well-placed words and images is fascinating. Also, in the future, everyone is inplausibly pretty, thanks to artist Marc Silvestri, making his return to the X-Men after about fifteen years. Silvestri isn't a great artist (he can't touch Quitely or Phil Jimenez, the best artists to work with Morrison on New X-Men), but his super-slick style has a strong nostalgic hold on me, and not because he first rose to prominence on X-Men comics in the eighties. In 1992, Silvestri and six other Marvel superstar artists quit to found their own company, Image Comics, where they published poorly-written comics starring their own creations, usually thinly-veiled analogues of the Marvel characters that made them famous. Silvestri's contribution was CyberForce, laughably bad drivel about a group of cyborg mutants that nonetheless greatly appealed to the 13-year-old Gardner. (C'mon, it had a guy named Stryker with three cybernetic right arms. How can you resist that?). Seeing his art on New X-Men, complete with the heavy purples and blues of his own personal coloring team, instantly turns me into that 13-year-old fanboy, meticulously copying the strained poses and grimaces of CyberForce members Ripclaw (a Wolverine rip-off) and Heatwave (ditto Cyclops) for my own characters (which were, by then, third-generation copies). And unlike fellow Image founder Jim Lee's recent stint on Batman, Silvestri has a decent script to draw from, so his ridiculously pulchritudinous people at least have clever things to say.

Silvestri's art is to me what Claremont's writing is to Morrison: the first, best hit. Just as everyone thinks the music they were listening to at 15 is the best music ever, comics readers have an affection bordering on obsession for the characters/stories/creators they were reading when they first discovered comics. For me, it's the first few years of Image Comics (particularly the books under Jim Lee's Wildstorm umbrella--but that's a topic for an essay of its own); for others, it's Marv Wolfman's Teen Titans or Jim Shooter's Avengers or WombatMan #35-69, but not #47, because that was a fill-in issue...you get the picture (if you don't, refer to the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons). For many readers, this becomes "WombatMan should only be like he was in issues 35 through 69." These readers bitch endlessly about how bad WombatMan is now, and it's not a matter of quality--it's that today's WombatMan isn't what they grew up reading. A small but significant number of these readers become comics writers themselves, and then they take WombatMan "back to his roots"--i.e., back to what he was when they were fifteen.

Comics have found themselves in the middle of a strange paradox. Because the audience for comics is so small--the highest-selling comic right now sells between 150,000 and 200,00 copies a month, a fraction of the number of people who watch the lowest-rated weekly TV show--they fly under the cultural radar, meaning that writers and artists can get away with experiments and subversive ideas that would get chopped to death by the suits if they appeared in a script for a Hollywood movie or TV show. But comics are so mired in the past that the only way to reach a large audience (again, a relative term) is to write about characters that have been around for forty years or more. Or that had a popular cartoon in the eighties. (Transformers and G.I. Joe comics are hot stuff these days.) Very few writers are able to create something truly new and exciting while servicing the past enough to keep the fanboys happy. Grant Morrison is one of them. Though his X-Men stories have their roots in the 20-year-old concepts he loved as a kid, his treatment of them has been completely his own. It's going to be interesting to see what happens to New X-Men after he leaves--whether the series continues to change and evolve (the way you'd think a book about mutants would) or reverts to the unreadable mess it was before Morrison took over. There's a persistent rumor that Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon is taking over, which would be interesting, since Buffy was essentially Claremont's X-Men with better dialogue. But it's a safe bet that nothing Whedon comes up with will top the pinnacle of Morrison's run: in #122, the Imperial Superguardian Smasher crashes to Earth to warn the X-Men that Xavier's evil twin sister Cassandra Nova is still alive and is coming to Earth to kill all the mutants, the brainwashed Shi'ar Empire legions right behind her. Smasher crawls up from his smoldering crater, raises his head with a final effort, and gives his onlookers his message: "Tell your people! Protect the earth...She has come. She has come." Then, in a gorgeous double-page spread by Frank Quitely, the recipient of Smasher's warning offers her reply:

"Moo."
posted by Gardner at 12:43 AM

A grammar question that's been bugging me for way longer than it should: if a word that is usually not capitalized in a title (like "the," "of," "in," etc.) is purposely misspelled in, say, a song title (like "In Da Club"), do you capitalize it? Is it "In da Club" or "In Da Club?" Am I the only one who worries about this? It literally consumes about 35% of my waking thoughts.
posted by Gardner at 12:32 PM

Gardner's Early-2004 Culture Roundup Part 2

Books: The Dark Tower series by Stephen King
I was a huge Stephen King fan in middle and high school. I think The Dead Zone was the first King I read, and after that, I devoured his works. For a few years, he was pretty much the only author I read. In those years, everything I wrote was an attempt to write like King. I grew out of this phase as quickly as I had entered it; Desperation was the last King novel I read, on my breaks at my job making donuts at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter on the night shift after graduating from high school. I imagine there are a lot of people who went through a similar King phase. King is everywhere, and he's been everywhere for three decades now, and though occasionally his writing can be formulaic and hacky, his best books (The Shiningand The Stand) approach greatness.

My roommate James is a big King fan, and his excitement at the publication of Wolves of the Calla, the long-awaited fifth book in King's Dark Tower series, got me interested in reading the Dark Tower books. (He loaned me the King; in return, I loaned him Philip Pullman's masterful His Dark Materials series.) The first book, The Gunslinger, is made up of a series of short stories that were originally published in a sci-fi magazine; as such, it is fast-moving and crammed with events, the publishing format demanding action, climax, resolution, and cliffhanger in each chapter. This, as anyone who has read King will know, is in direct contrast to his usual M.O. of stretching the smallest events over pages and pages of conversational narration (which is exactly what we get in the subsequent Dark Tower books). But something else about The Gunslinger struck me as well: in removing himself from his usual milieu of urban (or suburban) horror, King issued himself a whole new set of challenges. He couldn't rely on his usual streetwise dialogue or his canny pop-culture references or his familiarity with his favored Maine settings. He had to create a new world, a new culture, and new ways of speaking and writing, resulting in some of his strongest writing, spare and poetic in a way that his other books (including the other Dark Tower books) are not.

There are references to contemporary culture in The Gunslinger, most notably the ghostly echoes of pop songs like "Hey Jude" and the general atmosphere, which is taken directly from a spaghetti Western. Roland Deschain, the titular gunslinger, brings to mind every taciturn, stubbly shooter Clint Eastwood ever played. This is intentional, of course. King has written that The Dark Tower is his attempt to write a Tokien-esque epic fantasy about things that mattered to him, instead of the standard fantasy trappings that Tokien introduced. So, instead of dragons, wizards and trolls, we get Arthurian legend filtered through cowboy movies, rock 'n roll, The Wizard of Oz and nuclear paranoia. In the later books in the series, King introduces characters from "our" world, allowing him to return to familiar ground. The best parts of the series are still when King immerses us in Roland's ruined Mid-World, such as the extended flashback that makes up the bulk of Wizard and Glass, or the beginning of Wolves of the Calla. It's in those moments that King is really pushing himself as a writer, and the rewards are great.

As the series has progressed (five books published so far; the remaining two are to be published this year), it's become clear that the story is bigger than just the novels labeled The Dark Tower. A triple handful of King's books are connected to the Tower in some way. For instance, in Wizard and Glass, Roland's band of travelers find themselves in the plague-ravaged Kansas of The Stand. I remember when I first read Faulkner and discovered Yoknapatawpha County; I thought "Stephen King does this too." He had already staked out the landscape of Maine, particularly the fictional town of Derry, in his other novels, but now he is staking out whole worlds. Even when the story falters and the familiar King-isms rankle, King's fascinating integralist approach to his work keeps me reading.
posted by Gardner at 11:12 PM

gardner is god
gardner is a shape
gardner is on the mend and plans to wrestle this fall
gardner is brought down
gardner is very close to many towns
gardner is guy you can like
gardner is recognized
gardner is back
gardner is a member of the board of directors of the pennsylvania school librairans assocation
gardner is appointed to gardner
gardner is an assistant professor of turfgrass science at the ohio state university
gardner is returning to the mat despite losing a toe to frostbite last winter
gardner is a historical demographer who trained at the university of minnesota with steven ruggles
gardner is always looking to make gardening and lawn care easier and more enjoyable
gardner is focus of 'intimate portrait'
gardner is endorsed as candidate for moderator
gardner is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences
gardner is at the forefront of musicians devoted to the composition of music for healing
gardner is only the fifth wildcat in the last 10 years to leave school early for the nba draft
gardner is presidential attaché to the european council of princes and the appointed jacobite historiographer royal
gardner is also highly recognized in relation to his work with artistic development
gardner is out of the office
gardner is approximately 8
gardner is going to be testifying january 31 or february 2 in front of the committee on economic and educational opportunities
gardner is today beginning to reach for the future with an occasional glance over its shoulder to see where it has been
gardner is trying to develop tomatoes that are resistant to spotted wilt virus
gardner is the sort of person who is so supremely confident of his opinions and his oratorical skill at expressing them that he intentionally raises his voice
gardner is a lecturer in bassoon at california state university
gardner is not as elegant a writer as leguin
gardner is a doctor of naturopathic medicine
gardner is recognized as a "champion for children"
gardner is the founder and president of the strategic edge
gardner is even better than trotter in certain areas
gardner is home to approximately 10
gardner is a community that feels more like a small town than a city of approximately 20
gardner is a well
gardner is an aim manager with a number of strategies to note
gardner is one of the most popular child psychiatrists in the country
gardner is committed to providing you with quality products and services
gardner is up for sale
gardner is a religious individual who believes in immortality
gardner is responsible for the day
gardner is the author of more than seventy books on a vast range of topics
gardner is one of the fastest
gardner is our pick for the 42nd district senate seat because she has a clear vision of the job

posted by Gardner at 10:40 PM

I have a job and the Pixies are playing Coachella. Things could be worse. And now...

Gardner's Early-2004 Culture Roundup

or: What's taken my mind off real life in the past month.

Album: Gallowsbird's Bark by The Fiery Furnaces
I first heard about the Furnaces at the excellent pop blog Fluxblog, which prompted me to pick up this incredible album. Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger are a brother-sister duo (kind of like The White Stripes, if they were for reals and if one of them could play drums) playing sorta-bluesy, sorta-jazzy, sorta-poppy music--like Pavement getting drunk and covering The Velvet Underground. With xylophones. And endlessly fascinating lyrics that are as much about the way the words sound as anything this side of Eminem: "In the Cracker Barrel dumpster I found a bag / Red-white striped, I opened it--gag: / Mummy day Pizarro dressed in a Inca rag." (Okay, that was unfair to Meg White: I just checked the liner notes, and somebody named Ryan Sawyer played drums, not one of the Friedbergers. Sorry, Meg!)

Song: "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" by Jet
Yeah, this song kind of sucks; it sounds like some third-rate bar band covering a White Stripes song that never existed because Jack White would never write anything this obvious (it's the Reader's Digest version of "Fell in Love with a Girl," basically). But it's so damn propulsive, so damn catchy, so damn laboratory-tested to make you want to dance and sing along, you just can't help it. I mean, even the singer's throat-clearing at the beginning sounds calculated, but it's all a part of the faux-garagey thing they've got going on, and in that context it's absolutely necessary.

TV: Alias (ABC, Sunday, 9:00 p.m.)
For someone who makes his living working in TV, I watch precious little of it: just my Sunday-night fix of The Simpsons and Alias. But that's really all I need: Homer and Bart bring the funny, while Sydney and Jack Bristow and Co. bring everything else. What I like best about Alias is that, in its third season, creator J.J. Abrams aand his team have completely abandoned anything resembling a status quo. Since the climactic post-Super Bowl episode halfway through Season Two, nearly every episode has Changed Everything Forever. This show moves so fast; the most recent episode wrapped up the mystery of what happened to Sydney between Seasons 2 and 3, a mystery that I was sure would last at least until the end of this season. Nope. Mystery solved, sending Sydney and her C.I.A. pals off into even more mysteries. And let's not forget the acting, which is some of the best on TV. (It has to be--a good bit of Alias is admittedly ridiculous, so it takes some fine actors to make it all plausible.) Jennifer Garner as Sydney is completely open and empathetic, traits which have worked against Sydney to great effect this season. Greg Grunberg and Kevin Weisman, as C.I.A. Agent Weiss and ubernerd Marshall Flinkman, make the most of their limited screen time by providing comic relief that's funnier than 99% of the sitcoms on TV. But the real star of the show is Victor Garber as Sydney's father Jack--the only other character on TV who's as ruthless, deadly and devoted as Jack is Keifer Sutherland's Jack Bauer on 24. (I would pay cash money if the next James Bond movie was just two hours of Garber and Sutherland, playing thinly-veiled versions of their TV characters, torturing Pierce Brosnan for information.) I've become convinced that Jack, and not Ron Rifkin's Arvin Sloane, is the real driving force behind everything that happens on the show. There is nothing he won't do to get what he wants.

Movie: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Um, what did you expect? You already know where you stand on this by now, but I'd just like to refer you to the scene, maybe an hour into the movie, in which Faramir, trying to please his father Denethor, leads a regiment of Gondorian soldiers on a suicide mission back into Osigiliath while Pippin sings a heartbreaking song for the amusement of Denethor. The sounds of breaking chicken bones have never been so chilling.
posted by Gardner at 7:19 PM