I did not post last night as I was doing other things.
Below is an image of Miss Louise Brooks in the 1930s after she'd returned from Europe. She's burned bridges before departing, and in coming home found her star had faded in the US. And, of course, the bob she'd made so famous had gone out of style.
I know it was not in her mind when the photo was taken, but I like the resolute stubbornness I read in the expression. She's back, and she's still not going to take any guff from these swine.
I don't really know when they quit showing Popeye cartoons on TV, but I really don't remember seeing them on after I started college. Its not like Popeye was all that popular even when we were kids in the late 70's and 80's. Heck, one night I spent an hour explaining to Jamie what the hell a Jeep and a Sweet Pea were.
I just finished listening to the audiobook of Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon (also read by Chabon, who did a great job, I might add). The book covers a lot of territory, considers adulthood, childhood, his fatherhood, how he relates to his kids, how he related to his parents... He's got 10-12 years on me, and so is a product of the 1970's, a period I see in my mind's eye with a weird aura of gold and washed out color thanks to the film stock and production values in vogue at the time.
He talks a bit about how we mourns the content his kids have to consume, the formulaic closed-endedness of a cute but structurally dead-ended bit of Dreamworks entertainment. He admits that between what the 90's called helicopter parenting, and this closed-off world of entertainment, he doesn't think his own kids really understand what it means to have an "adventure". After all, if you're not letting your kids go beyond the end of the driveway, or out into the yard without supervision, how can you ever experience the unknown? And its reflected in a lot of juvenile lit and entertainment.
He also discusses how he relates to his kids through media, how he's raising them on a steady geek-diet of Marvel comics, Dr. Who and other bits... things that he enjoyed alone once, but that is creating bonds within his own family.
I've got no kids. I don't often think much about passing on my passions to anyone else (Scout, simply, does not care about Superman. She's sort of an X-Men fan, and I assume she'll grow out of that).
editor's note: If you have not yet read about my Charity Walk For Kidneys, please click here.
This weekend was pretty ideal.
Friday I went out to see my brother's band, The Mono Ensemble, play at Austin institution (of sorts), The Carousel Lounge. Jamie could not come out, but I met Jason's friends from work and hung out with Reed's sister, Heather, whom I've known since middle school.
Here's me dancing to the sounds of The Mono E with the lead singer's wife, Stephanie, and Anna, a band-buddy.
Yes, that is me in the "John Carter of Mars" t-shirt biting my lip as I get down on the dancefloor.
I am exactly as cool at age 37 as I was at age 13.
Saturday we threw open the doors here at League HQ and had a steady stream of folks from 2:00 PM until midnight. Burgers were grilled, sausage was charred, old friends met new friends, parents came by, employees came by, Vespers were made and MikeR consumed the bottle of Ghostface Killah Ale which I had purchased for him.
Also, Jamie made an amazing raspberry chocolate cake, which is probably my favorite kind of cake (with only German Chocolate and Carrot Cake in any other kind of contention).
Today I rose late, watched too much River Monsters on Animal Planet, and then The Admiral came by and we solved a problem which had long plagued us. About 4-5 years ago the lights in both closets in our bedroom went out. I figured it was an electrical issue and as you could basically see into the closets, was not compelled to fix the problem because: money.
The Admiral and I looked into it, and... no. Both fixtures were LED fixtures with transformers that had died. We removed them and replaced them with incadescents, and... lights.
This evening we had pizza and watched Mad Men with Matt and Nicole. It was a particularly good episode, I thought.
And nothing obvious went wrong all weekend long. Not a bad deal for my birthday weekend.
Longtime readers may know that Jamie, the better-half and brains of the outfit here at Signal Watch, has some serious kidney dysfunction. She has a disease called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis. It is not as much fun as it sounds, and its pretty serious stuff. Even Wikipedia says so (she fell under "none" under that treatment tab).
To raise money, I will walk side-by-side with an army of dialysis patients around a lovely man-made lake somewhere in Pflugerville. One assumes the walk isn't very far because, you know... dialysis patients.*
Somehow kidney disease does not have the prestige and glamour of other diseases. Awesome people who are not Jamie have kidney disease, too, but you rarely hear about it. Sean Elliot of the San Antonio Spurs has FSGS, as does Alonzo Mourning. Curiously, Jamie never played NBA basketball, but she also contracted the disease. We're still looking into why she never got a contract with the Denver Nuggets.
Anyhow, if you can, please give just a few bucks. We'd certainly appreciate it, and you'd be helping what I assure you is a very very good cause. Kidneys.**
*What are you, some kind of monster wanting to see how far you can make those people walk? They're ill! What is wrong with you?
**you have them, too, and frankly, we're worried about how much sugar you've been eating
Captain America: "Big man with a suit of armor. Take that away, what are you?"
Iron Man: "Genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist..."
cut to: (in trailer 1): Thor laughing knowingly at the humiliated Cap
cut to: (in new TV trailer): shrug from the sexy girl agreeing with Iron Man
implied: the sad trombone
Marvel may not know it, but it seems they're setting up their Cap to become the insta-square that DC accidentally made of Superman back in 1986 and which, 26 years later, they've never recovered from. By setting up our pal Cap as The Bad Guy In the Dorky Outfit picking on The Guy We All Related To a Few Summers Back, its more than possible they're sinking one of their own flagship guys, all before the movie is released.
Sure, the exchange is intended to sell us on the crazy dynamics of the characters that we'll see if we give our local cinema $10, but the whole exchange feels out of character for Cap, including the Cap from last summer's movie (the whole point of which was - he's generally better than that). Yes, we need a "clashing team", but... you're losing me a little here, Marvel/ Studio/ Joss. That exchange is supposed to be the response the drunk on power/ charming Stark gives to the stuffed suit SHIELD Agent, not the guy who just got unthawed after saving the Free World.
Just do it right
Make it perfect and real
Because it's everything
No everything was never the deal
So grab your things and stumble into the night
So we can shut the door
Oh, shut the door on terrible times
Yeah, do it right
And head again into space
So you can carry on
And carry on, and fall all over the place
This is the trick, forget a terrible year
That we can break the laws
Until it gets weird
And this is what you waited for
But under lights, we're all unsure
So tell me
What would make you feel better?
As night has such a local ring
And love and rock are pick-up things
And you know it
Yeah, you know it
Yeah, you know
Take
Forget your past
This is your last chance now
And we can break the rules
Like nothing will last
You might forget
Forget the sound of a voice
Still you should not forget
Yeah, don't forget
The things that we laughed about
And after rolling on the floor
And thankfully, a few make sure that you get home
And you stay home
And you better
'Cause you're afraid of what you need
Yeah, you're afraid of what you need
If you weren't, yeah you weren't
Then I don't know what we'd talk about
Yeah no one ever knows what you're talking about
So i guess you're already there
No one opens up when you scream and shout
But it's time to make a couple things clear
If you're afraid of what you need
If you're afraid of what you need
Look around you, you're surrounded
It won't get any better
I like the UT Southwestern Med Center campus. As with so much in Dallas, its very Logan's Run. Its also crawling with young soon-to-be-doctors in scrubs and white coats all looking very stressed.
Reading
A long, long time ago AmyD suggested I read Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs, and I am now listening to the audiobook.
I am, obviously, not a father (at least not to anyone I'm telling Jamie about), but I'd recommend friends who have taken the bold step to bring human life onto this miserable rock (either male or female) to give it a whirl. Mr. Chabon's essays and observations are not all exactly something I agree with, but they're interesting, and I think they do an excellent job of exploring the headspace of us products of a generation raised on TV but who did not have the interets, play-dates and Pixar movies its now common practice for middle-class folk to foist upon their children.
Chabon's geek-media-fueled POV is of particular interest to me, even if many of his choices don't reflect my own. But anyone who writes a paean to Big Barda gets my respect.
I am also finally reading The Jugger by Richard Stark (aka: Donald Westlake). Its more Parker. And its very, very Parker. Nice to get back to Stark's punchy, brisk style.
Grillmaster 2012
For my birthday/ in order to engage in better living, I have finally moved from the charcoal grill to propane, something the me of 7 years ago would have found horrifying. But the me of both Sunday and Wednesday evenings found absolutely fantastic.
Cooking meat inside your home is for chumps. As is doing anything to vegetables but grilling them. Especially when Matt T. Mangum pushes you aside on the maiden voyage of said grill and insists this is his show, and on Wednesday when Jamie wants to do this herself, so maybe you don't get to use that grill you bought, but you do get to just sit in a porch chair, watch the sun lower in the west and then enjoy a lovely dinner.
Writing
I'm at a very strange point in working on the thing I'm working on.
1) To some extent, I'm now playing connect-the-dots with plot points I've always known were there, so I feel like I'm straying from character development, world-building, development of themes, etc... in favor of "let's get this told", which is a huge departure from where I spent several chapters/ years hacking away.
2) Some items that popped up in the news were scheduled to happen within three chapters of where I'm at. Its both disarming and useful to see what actually happens in real life so I can see how close I was, and what the parties involved actually do.
3) Writers, can you be kind to your protagonists? It seems counter productive to raising the stakes or maintaining a certain goal or theme.
I'm in Dallas for work related reasons, staying a bit down the road from Medieval Times. I've not been to Medieval Times since the 1980's, and, because I like doing things that take a lot of explaining later to Jamie, I was going to take myself there for dinner tonight. But its closed until Thursday. Its also $70. That seems a bit steep for a staged fight and a bad chicken dinner.
J.R. is a tremendous fan of The Red Knight
Alas, it was not meant to be.
I have a book to read and other stuff to do. I'm taking the evening off.
Not all shops participate in the event, and if they don't... that's probably not much of a comic shop. So call ahead in the coming weeks to see what your local comic shop is doing. I know at Austin Books and Comics, its always a big to-do, and gets Brandon all crazy-eyed, but in a good way (it gets crazy-busy).
The comics this year look really good. Atomic Robo, Donald Duck, Avengers and other recognizable names like Buffy and many, many all-ages options.
The name Jeff Jensen didn't immediately ring any bells as a comics writer when I looked at who penned this book, but as a writer for Entertainment Weekly I know the name, indeed, thanks to the fact that I cannot remember a time when Jamie wasn't a subscriber to Entertainment Weekly.
Jensen's own father, Tom Jensen, was a detective in the King County Sheriff's Department who was on the Green River Task Force from the early 1980's until the unit was dissolved in 1990. He continued work on the case right up through the Green River Killer's conviction around 2003.
Like a lot of morbid kids seeking a cheap thrill, back in high school I checked out books on serial killers from the local library. In addition to names like Son of Sam and Zodiac, The Green River Killer was always named as one of the greatest hits of serial killers. He was called out in part thanks to the sheer number of those he was suspected to have killed and in part because he'd never been caught. Of course doing a little reading quickly dismisses the whole "brilliant mastermind" scenario of the Hannibal Lecter books. The reality is that it's hard to catch people who kill mostly strangers and with motives that don't stem from personal grudges, and the stories of both victims and killers are often bleak and tragic.
