Monthly Archive for August, 2007

LiveJournal auto-post

Published on August 30, 2007 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

Go through your iPod, Winamp/iTunes library, CD collection, etc. Pick three “guilty pleasure” songs….ones you would normally be embarrassed to admit that I was right. And under the old rules today, Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” would be playing on stations like the old WCBS. After all, it’s what the Class of 1995 were listening to in High School.

I’m serious. The mid-and-late teen years, the time you read this, I’ll probably either be on my way to Gitmo, or successfully flushed by the Bush Administration down Winston Smith’s Memory Hole. You see, I’m guilty of plans to blow up skyscrapers, rob banks, murder, wage religious war, and most recently, pull off a Columbine-style school shooting. And I’ve gotten about as far in all those schemes as the Liberty Seven (as they are fast becoming known) are accused of plotting.

For my most recent novel, Rumpled Trenchcoats and Rubber Bullets,” and would like to read it, click here.

The sad thing is that T.C., who never ran to the door to greet you normally, would run and greet you if she heard the tell-tale rustling of a fast food bag. Over the years, believe it or not, the version of The Lockhorns or Dilbert you read in, say, The Philadelphia Inquirer is not necessarily the same as its original? For example, “Star Blazers” is not “Uchuu Senkan Yamato,” even with the front-runner Bob Forrester.

I almost like Bret Schundler because when he ran against McGreevey in 2001, his main campaign promise was to do away with the witty dialogue and corny jokes. Maybe “I Love Lucy” is dubbed as a tragedy about this poor, put-upon housewife who constantly tries to get out from her famous husband’s shadow.

I guess it’s all in the presentation.

Why “Charlie Brown” always makes me sad

Published on August 27, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Doing a little semi-research and brainstorming for “After School Musical,” I went back through some of my showtunes collection (which is not as wide as some jokers would suggest). It reminded me of my all-time favorite cast recording, and why it depresses me endlessly.

“You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown,” Original Off-Broadway Cast.

It was my first “non kid” LP, even though it was given to me as a kid. It was given to me by Eric Kidston, who was the 19-year old son of the people who owned the corner gas station in my neighborhood. My family and the Kidstons were very good friends. Eric got me into Scouting, for example, even helping me get in on a technicality because under the age guidelines I wasn’t old enough to join but schoolwork-wise I was.

So here was I, 11 year old comic strip buff, being given out of nowhere an LP recording from Eric’s own collection of “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.” I was thrilled. I sat at my record player and started the long process of wearing the grooves thin. I loved it. I memorized nearly every song.

It wasn’t until a couple years later that I pieced together why he gave me that record. I found out that later that night was the night Eric killed himself. My record was one of the things he chose to give away before he died, to help knit up loose ends.

For years, I’ve always loved that show but not for the music (which is simplistic) or the subject matter (pabulum) or the lyrics (very witty, but not as witty as Schulz’s own words at times). It’s a childhood memory of a lost friend, one whose own inner demons and depression made him pull himself out of the game.

As a result, “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” has always symbolized, if not personified, broken dreams and wasted youth. I look at and listen to the show (which I’m still addicted to) through much different eyes.

Oddly enough, today I realized exactly what I’m working on now. I first pitched “After School” to one of my collaborators as “To teenagers what Avenue Q was to pre-schoolers,” but finally today typing my scene breakdown and song ideas out, my iPod happened upon “Happiness” from the Broadway Revival cast (the one with Anthony Rapp as Charlie Brown) and I realized exactly what I’ve been writing.

In a sense, I’ve been writing “You’re Disfunctional, Charlie Brown.”

You are fucked up, Charlie Brown.
You’re a Jungian’s best of wet dreams.
A pre-adolescent introvert with a persecution complex
That is deeper than it seems! WOOF!

Sadly enough, that LP? It was in my possession until February of this year. While we were vacating our old house, someone broke in and stole the last few things (like our dining room set) that we hadn’t yet moved. One of those was a crate with my childhood LP’s…including “Charlie Brown.”

Earth-Hostess

Published on August 26, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

This week’s sunday page (here if you missed it) should seem familiar to people of my age group. Growing up in a comics-reading household, I cut my teeth on my mom’s old Dell and Harvey comics collections (I can’t think of how many old Carl Barks classics deteriorated in my grandparents’ attic and are now lost to me forever) before graduating to Charlton and DC comics.

One recurring theme in those classic comics of the 1970′s were the sometimes full-page ads for Hostess pastries. I never ate Hostess (growing up in the Delaware Valley I was, and still am, strictly a TastyKake man, and will probably even be giving TastyKake gift packs away at my wedding this fall, all these years later) but I loved those ads. They were about on par with the rest of the book art-wise, and even if the writing was cornier than Special K it was still lots of fun to think that the way to take down the Joker was just to lob some Twinkies at him.

In DC, Earth-1 was home to the Justice League (I always wanted to be Green Lantern), Earth-2 was home to the Justice Society (where I always wanted to be The Flash), Earth-3 the evil Crime Syndicate and so on. Some collectors started referring to those Hostess ads as taking place on Earth Hostess, where Fruit Pie the Magician was an even more powerful sorcerer than Zatanna ever could hope to be.

I picked up on the campiness at an early age, too. Going through same grandparents’ attic last year, Bryan found at least one “comic book” I wrote and drew back at the age of 8. If I’m not mistaken, it might be one where I used one of my characters (Pinksmith the Parrot, my rip off of Zatara and Zatanna) to do Hostess ads. I don’t know, I haven’t had the heart to look at it since I first drew it.

Now, with DC bringing their multiverse back along with other remnants of my shattered childhood, I pray that somewhere, out among those tiny little specks of blue, Earth-Hostess made the cut. Today is my homage to a more innocent, if not less commercialized, time.

I don’t dispute the number….

Published on August 26, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

But why is “24% Emo” illustrated with a picture of Dawn Calendo?

You Are 24% Emo

You’re definitely not emo, but you do understand emo people a little. You are introspective, but not to the point of driving yourself crazy.

Requiem For Jasper

Published on August 26, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Now back to some of the stuff I would have been blogging if I hadn’t been pretty much trapped in this hospital room for the past 17 days. (And hopefully getting out later today.)

It’s with a lot of sadness that I read Mike Witmer’s announcement that he was bringing 44 Union Avenue to an end. Wit was one of the first people to greet and comment to me back when I started Queen Victoria on Comics Sherpa, and he quickly became one of my favorite daily reads. (Long-time readers will have noticed a couple of cameos in the strip by Jack the Dog from 44UA in TNAOQV over the past year.) I’ve always said that 44 Union Avenue is an example of what newspaper comic strips should be like, and that Wit (along with Jonathan Mahood and Justin Thompson) should have one of the many spaces in our papers taken up by strips long past their prime. 44UA was always inventive, witty, and clever. The cast were all well formed and fleshed out characters. It was a strip that deserved to not only survive, yet thrive.

Yet, conventional wisdom seems to have killed it.

People see a strip with a troublemaking kid and a well-meaning but in-the-way girl, and their minds automatically flash to Calvin and Susie Derkins. They see a buffoon, and they automatically swap in Linus from “Peanuts.” Wisecracking animal? Garfield. Adults? They’re ciphers, who cares.

That’s what happened with 44UA. The “suits” and syndicate big-shots looked at his strip and they automatically started comparing it with all the formulaic strips that have been before. They didn’t want to appreciate the evil genius that was Jasper — was he Calvin enough? Jack the Dog was hilarious and bad tempered — but could he be more cuddly? Don’t even get me started on what they must have thought about Clancy. Unique characters in their own right struck down by pigeonholing and misinterpretation.

It seems very sad.

In many ways, 44UA was what TNAOQV was striving to be. No, obviously, I wasn’t trying to make the strip as marketable as I believed 44UA could be, but Wit’s level of humor and sophistication were some of my goals. As a student of comic strip history (who cut his teeth on “Pogo” while in grade school) I appreciated what Wit was doing. 44UA might not have been in many papers, but in its approach I found it as fresh as I had found “Bloom County” in the 1980′s and “Calvin and Hobbes” in the 1990′s.

Ironically, both strips it reminded me of were also short-lived flare-outs, brief but bright.

Of course, it is nice to know that even if “the suits” broke Wit’s will, they weren’t the ones who killed the strip. GoComics were so eager to keep it that they got Wit to agree to let them re-run the strip from the very beginning. No, it was Witmer who ended the strip himself. And since he’s moving on to another strip, it’s nice to see that he hasn’t totally lost faith, just felt the need to move on.

Still, that need to move on is sad for those of us he’s left behind. I will miss the 44UA gang.

They’re everywhere

Published on August 23, 2007 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

I was feeling really good. The alternative option to the colostomy came through with flying colors, vindicating the 3 surgeons who stood up to the one “cut now, ask questions later” guy. My mood is elevated, and my white counts are lowered. I was happy, and looking forward to maybe getting home this weekend.

Of course, I was feeling DAMN good.

Then I made the mistake of checking my referrer logs for this blog.

Let’s see some of the more interesting comments by “conservatives” about my health, shall we?

“Maybe if he kept all those dicks out of his ass, he wouldn’t be having all this intestinal pain.”

“Hey pab’s thats what happens when you shove foreign objects in places that they were NOT meant to go, you Godless queer.”

“First Teh Rove resigns, and then pabs comes down with ‘Broken Light bulb in Anus’ disease. Coincidence? You decide….”

“Everything you said is just horseshit.”

“If they fixed it then he’d have nothing to blog about”

“I think his problems stem from taking bad meat in the can.”

“That pathetic shitbag will be spewing hate and invective from his coffin on the way to the planting. At least none of his relatives will be sober or quiet enough to hear it, what with all the celebrating.”

I love you folks. Thanks.

Still in the hospital

Published on August 22, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I’m still stuck here at South Jersey Regional Medical Center, but at least today I have a semi-reliable internet connection in my room so I thought I’d bring all of you up to date:

It looks like the worst might be past, for now. I talked them out of doing the full colostomy, and just draining the abcess they had found for now. Since then my pain’s cut anywhere from 50-75% and I’m working on weaning myself off the pain meds, my temperature is more stable, and we’ll find out about my white count.

I’m trying not to worry about what we’re going to do financially to recover from this one; right now I have to focus most of my energy on recovering physically, or at least be strong enough for the next operation. Once I’m at that point, I can work on gettting money together.

If there are any Democratic Undergrounders reading this who want to help, I wouldn’t object to a DU fund-raiser to cover the bills, but I don’t have the werewithal to set up one (or even ask for) one myself. If one of you wants to take the job on yourselves, you have my permission to approach Skinner and Earl about organizing one. Funds can be sent to my attorney who will be handling the bills once they start coming in.

I’ll pull through. I have to.

Anyhow, some random thoughts and musings from a week and a half in bed so far.

(1) Dilaudid is a beautiful lady (or handsome young man as the case may be), but she is EVIL. I hate the fuzzy-headedness I still have, but I like lessened pain. I hope it’s not addictive.

(2) Boy, afternoon television sucks worse than prime time.

(3) In hospital doped up on pain killers is not the time to try and write a novel. Or a comic strip for that matter, as this week’s Queen Victorias can attest. Speaking of which, any artists out there want to do a quick black-and white 150-204 pixel rendering of the Hall of Doom in its swamp for me?

(4) I never realized how bad antidepressant withdrawal could get until the hospital accidentally had me off of it for six days.

(5) You cannot get more comfortable in a hospital bed than you can in a flat bed. The fancy doohickeys are there for the doctors and nurses to make their jobs more convenient, not to make you more comfortable.

That’s it for right now; the cotton ball cascade is starting back down my frontal lobe. I promise I’ll check in a little more often.

Published on August 10, 2007 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments

hospital bound. bad pain.

Why Nickelback sucks

Published on August 10, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Shoebox of Worm Quartet blogged this MP3 someone produced.

They took two Nickelback songs, and other than pasting one into the left channel of a stereo mix and the other into the right channel, changed nothing (as far as I can tell).

Wow. Talk about formulaic cookie-cutter crap.

Infant abuse and Pro-Lifers: perfect together

Published on August 9, 2007 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

In all the recent brouhaha over at LiveJournal, I’ve watched with horror as some people have trotted out other communities that LiveJournal is perfectly happy to keep around despite repeated complaints. One that gets to me, even more than the pro-anorexia communities, is the whole “Christian Parenting” movement.

One community actually takes its name from a book that promotes enforcing set feeding and sleep times on absolute newborns, and that parents beat children as young as fifteen days old to enforce their will. (i.e.: the child gets no midnight feedings, gets up when mommy gets up, etc.)

This would, in any civilized society, be considered out and out child abuse, but because these people hide behind a perverted version of Christianity, they’re accepted.

Want to know what I blame this kind of parenting style on? It might surprise you.

I blame the Anti-Abortion movement.

For almost forty years, the anti-abortion people have put forward a false equivalency between a foetus and a full-grown human. They have argued that a foetus is fully aware, can “feel pain” at a very early age, and has full cognitive skills. They promote these misconceptions to make abortion seem even worse than it really is, in an attempt to lure fence-sitters over to their side. The whole debate over alleged “partial birth” abortions was a perfect example of these exaggerating tactics.

The problem? The “Christians” who follow the anti-abortion line have drunk the Kool-Aid so much that they’ve actually started to believe their own misconceptions. A foetal brain is not fully developed. Nor, oddly enough, is a newborn brain. Yet, because it helps their agenda to pretend that it is, they put that belief out there, and it ends up having repercussions.

Newborns cannot use logic. They cannot tell or sense time. Heck, there’s arguments about whether or not they can even SEE properly. The brain is nowhere near fully functional at birth. Yet, because admitting that sort of thing even to one’s self would undermine their main argument against abortion, they continue to act like their 2 month old is intellectually equivalent to a 2 year old.

Thus, the desire and attempts to “train” and “condition” infants, using tactics like severe beating (even a “light” beating is severe to an infant) and effective starvation. One family who subscribed to this training tactic are even trying to blame their child’s shaken baby syndrome on a babysitter, whose defense counsel really needs a copy of this book to show where the blame really lies.

Once again: anti-abortion people. Pro life, until after birth. Then you’re on your own.