Back in the Saddle

Hey, gang...yeah, it's been a while, and yeah, I've got my pants on. Anyway, if you want to know how I spent at least 45 minutes of my summer vacation, click here.

More later. Got stuff to say.

Out of the Office: Update

I put on pants today.

For those of you taking part in the pool...

Out of the Office

Hey, gang. Sorry it's been a little scarce as of late. I'm on vay-fucking-cation. Yeah, baby...off for the whole week. Not doing a goddamned thing with it, either. Some days, the sum total of my ambition is pants.

Oh, and introducing the wife to Battlestar Galactica. Which has been fraktastic. That's what summer is for, at least for guys like me, who don't give two shits about the beach and read enough for my job that doing it on vacation isn't a "treat." No, summer is for boxed sets...novels for the lazy who don't want sand in their cracks.

So, y'all be good, and I'll check in on yous later.

Report from the Metro Beat

So, I saw this movie the other day. I liked it, but didn't love it. It has moments of real grandeur and sweep and emotion, even though it plods a bit in places and ends 30 minutes before the last reel is up. And it's very, some would say slavishly, beholden to the movies that came before it—sometimes that's cool and nostalgic, and sometimes that smacks of a lack of inspiration.

But the thing that was rolling through my mind as I left the theater was, "Margot Kidder really was something special."

I Wish I Was Taller

Not by a lot, mind you...but a few inches wouldn't be bad. Then again, I'm sure everyone who isn't tall enough to play pro ball wouldn't mind a little boost. But I've got no control over that. Isn't in the cards--though I will never forget my grandmother telling be to just go over to the jungle gym and hang from a high bar for a bit. This was the same grandmother who tried to tie one end of a string to my loose tooth and the other end to a door...and then slam that door. Not much for letting things take their own course, my grandma.

As for things I do have control over...I wish I could draw. Always have. When I was a kid, I thought I could. I'd draw dinosaurs and lightsabers and birds of prey and the Flying Pheonix from G-Force (or Battle of the Planets, depending on what shitty local TV station it was on). When I got older, I would take my favorite comic panels and blow them up to fill a huge piece of oaktag paper and make my own Wolverine posters. And I thought I was halfway decent at it, until I met people who really knew what they were doing, like my friend Roger.

Roger could just draw, in a way that I couldn't. He went to the School of Visual Arts in NYC for advertising design. He hated it. He wanted to be a screenwriter, and put his ad portfolio away, even though he could've made a perfectly plummy life for himself as an art director. I always respected him for that, but at the same time I always envied the fact that he could sit down with a pencil and paper and make something cool.

But I've never wanted to be able to draw as much as I do now that I'm "working" in comics. Because for as much as we're in an writer-ascendant phase in comics, it's still a writer-artist's medium. Comics can be a collaborative medium...but it doesn't have to be. In no other form of visual mass media can a piece of work be the product of one person and not suffer for it. (Hell, books are the only mass media period you can do by yourself. Guitar- or piano-based singer-songwriters need not apply. Everything sounds better with drums.)

The potential for one-man-bandness in comics is somewhat unique...and while I'm completely digging seeing the wonders that a good artist can do with our words, I can't help but think that it wasn't quite meant to be this way. One man (or woman) with an idea and the skill to realize that idea: there's something primal about that and some of the great artists--in the larger, artiste sense--did it that way. Eisner, Miller, Crumb, Otomo. (Of course, the list of ground-quaking writers or artists is just as long, but you get my point.)

So, I wish I could draw...just to know what it's like not to have to fear nuance getting lost in translation, or power drained by signal degradation. Plus, artists get the chicks.

Mea Culpa

Sorry for the lack of real posts, but it's gotten a little crazy ovah heah. Many of the things that had been in the hopper are hopping right out and turning into real honest-to-goodness opportunities. The manager has asked me to take another look at Hero Unlimited, with an eye towards two things: 1) Freshening it up for, perhaps, another go on the spec circuit and 2) maybe turning it into a TV pilot—which can be done, but would require telling a totally different story (luckily, I already know what it is) with the same characters.

Bad Medicine, the other TV pilot that Adam and I finished last month, has hooked both his agent and my manager, and things may heat up on that front later in the summer.

Then the comic book stuff: Wildstorm wants to move forward on a 5-issue limited series that we pitched them in February and there may be a kernel of interest on some Batman ideas.

I'm thinking about a children's book—either a graphic novel or an honest-to-goodness illustrations-and-text picture book. A story I've been kicking around in my head about autism.

And then, finally, the screenplay that Adam and I have been intermittently working on for the last eight months, which, sadly, ends up taking the back seat to whatever is the most time-urgent. (For most of last year, that was Monster Attack Network, then it was regular old day-job stuff, then Bad Medicine, all on top of our respective parental/husbandly duties.)

Oh, and suddenly there's an animation window opening up that we need to figure out how to take advantage of.

And the Vertigo pitches we need to work up...

And, eventually, sleep.

Poor King of the Sea

How does one actually learn that their superpower is talking to fish? Seriously, like, how far down the list do you have to go before you get to that? Flying, I get. X-ray vision, sure, people are horny and that one dude suddenly gets a nice little surprise. Super-speed, yeah, you'll stumble upon that pretty easily trying to catch a morning train.

But at what point do you get to the talking at shit and seeing if it'll talk back? And, even if you somehow arrive to that sad superhero place where you are trying to strike up random conversations with animals, how do you settle on fish? They certainly wouldn't be the first species you tried--dogs, cats, lions, horses, parakeets, roaches, spiders all would've been higher on my list. Whoever keeps going all the way into phylum's basement is one persistent sumbitch...or, retarded.

I'm just saying, is all. Kinda sad.

Spoon!

All I can say is about friggin' time. Finally, 10 years after it premiered on Fox, Ben Edlund's crazy-brilliant animated show is coming out on DVD. I can, at long last, destroy those shitty bootlegs I bought at San Diego two years back. Ben Edlund goes on the list of people who are too scary-smart to exist in the same world as the rest of us hacks.

(I recall someone saying, when John Rogers posted on his blog that Ben was set to write an episode of Global Frequency, "You were gonna be Ben Edlund's boss!" John replied, and I quote, "I will be blunt—in no way shape or form would I have been Ben Edlund's boss. I would have been the guy who ran the show Ben was working on. The very second he finished his first story pitch, I thought 'Shit, now I'm going to have to spend a year pretending I don't secretly know he's a much better writer than I am.' ")

So, I rejoice.

Mr. 3000...

...was a bad movie, I know, but in looking for titles with the number "3000" in it, it was the Bernie Mac fiasco or 3000 Miles to Graceland, which the simple typing of has made me throw up in my mouth a little.

No, sometime in the last couple of days, this l'il blog has tallied up more than 3000 hits. Now, some of those are mine, but not all that many. So thank you all for continuing to stop by and for finding something here worth coming back for.

Now I just have to keep it going...stupid pressure.

OneWord

There's a site called OneWord that offers a very simple writing challenge. (I found it while visiting the AiT/Planetlar site, and seeing Larry's take on "cult.") You are presented with a word, seemingly plucked out of the ether, and given 60 seconds to write something about that word. Whatever comes to mind.

As writers, we see it as our mandate to think about what we write. Hell, I know I've spent years mentalizing my way through stories, waiting for them to click in a way that makes sense. But this little exercise doesn't give you time to think, or even to revise. This is the very definition of writing from the gut.

You're on the clock. One minute for one word. There's nothing to it but to do it.

10 Things I Hate About Commandments

Not to be a YouTube whore...but it's so damned easy.

Chappelle Knows All

In case you were wondering why the Aquaman show didn't get picked up by The CW...

Outlets #2

That Shit is Real, Yo

Unlike my man Bill, who seems to have it in for the Mission: Impossible flicks (and, if you check out his blog, he's got some good reasons), I kinda liked this latest installment. It holds together a damned sight better than M:I-2—which, when watching today, is a structural mess. There's no reason for an action/spy thriller to be completely devoid of action for the entire first hour. And even the John Woo-ness, which I loved when I first saw it, hasn't aged very well. Totally untethered to reality, that movie is.

But there's a moment in M:I-3 that really resonated with me. Ethan Hunt has just escaped from the Big Bad's clutches and learns that his wife is being held in a building almost a mile from his current location. So, easily-GPS-trackable cell phone in hand, Ethan takes off down a riverside road in Shanghai, in full sprint, and the camera tracks him almost the entire way. In one shot. And, say what you will about Tom Cruise, that fucker can run.

It reminded me of what I love about old Jackie Chan movies: That those incredible stunts were actually being done by Jackie himself. He was willing to sacrifice his body—and sanity, more often than not—for my ten bucks. There's an incredible verisimilitude to seeing reality on screen, and never more so than during a moment when you usually don't.

I recently went to go see Lawrence of Arabia at the Ziegfeld theater in Manhattan. (If you've never been, I highly recommend it. One of my favorite NYC activities is sneaking out of work early and catching a matinee at the Ziegfeld, preferably of a film late in its run. There is nothing like sitting in that glorious, red-velvet, single-screen movie palace BY YOURSELF. For those two hours, I have the greatest private screening room in the world.)

Anyway, Lawrence. I'd never seen it on a big screen before, so it was something of a new experience. Besides being blown away, once more, by the strength of that cast (can you imagine being the casting director who got to say to Lean, "I found this kid named Peter; he's a little slight, but he might be good for the lead"?), you just gasp at the magnitude of that production. The scene where Auda's (Anthony Quinn, who inhabits the screen with a bigness that's extinct in today's Hollywood) cavalry storms the fort at Aqaba is, for the most part, a long, sweeping single shot with hundreds of horsemen decending on, and laying waste to, a desert installation.

And it was all done...for real. No CGI. No fake horses. No camera tricks. What you see is what they had. And there's a weight to that scene, to every scene in Lawrence, that can't be replicated.

It makes every film made today look like it's cheating.

Outlets #1

Something I'm trying, spurred on by a thread at The Engine. Essentially, someone--Colleen Doran, I think--said that you can tell a perfectly good story with stick figures, and that more writers should try. Now, because my drawing skills have atrophied to the point of non-existence, I've gone a slightly different route.

Lemme know what you think.

Let 'em eat Chuck

This is the greatest thing on TV right now. And by "greatest," I mean "most awesome." And by "most awesome," I mean "something completely worth TiVo-ing (because it's on Cartoon Network at 5:30 am) and watching over and over so you can bathe in its Cheez-Whizzy-ness."

I bring you Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos. (And, despite being only one "K" away from out and out racist, the portrayal of Asians probably gets you the rest of the way.)

Ante Up and Kick In Like Men

I have very little patience for modern rock and roll. To be more accurate, I have very little patience for the artists who create modern rock and roll. The music isn't bad—I have banged my head to My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Green Day—but to look at them, they're children. Post-teenagers if we give them the benefit of the doubt.

What happened to the men who used to make rock and roll? Even when they were young, the boys from AC/DC, Van Halen, Cream, Traffic, Black Sabbath, etc. looked like men who had lives before rock and brought some of that to bear on their music. I remember hearing stories of how the other members of The Who wanted to kick out Roger Daltrey...but they were afraid of him. He grew up on the wrong side of a coal-mining town (or something) in the bad part of the U.K. and had something of a violent streak. Can you imagine being afraid of Billie Joe from Green Day, who's so "hardcore" he thanked his manager and agents first in his Grammy acceptance speech?

Jimi Hendrix had already been in and out of the Army by the time he was touring with Little Richard's band. He was in his early 20s when he landed in London, blowing the doors off the city by opening a set with "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"—with McCartney in the damned audience. And Robert Plant may have looked like a female elf, but that thing he kept trying to suffocate in his trousers was clearly not safe for Catholic school girls.

Rock stars used to be dangerous, now they look like art-school kids with chips on their shoulders.

And that's a big reason why I think hip-hop has taken off the way it has in the last 15 years. Because, say what you will about the music itself (my love for it ebbs and flows, but I've always respected it), the artists are MEN. Whether they can back up their claims to thug-life credibility or not, or if they go the proficient loverman route, it doesn't matter. I think their perceived manliness is what sells a lot of records. (But black music has long been made by artists who were men first. The R&B acts that dominated the pre-disco charts were made up of some hard-working brothers: James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, the Temptations, the Four Tops.)

Look at it this way: the people buying records (and I will still refer to them as such) are, for the most part, teenaged girls. The TRL demographic. Always has been, always will be. And so the desire for the music, and the musicians that make it is, both consciously and subconsciously, a sexual one. (And that is why, back in the '50s, Elvis was such a hit: He was giving black music a face that was somewhat tolerable to white parents—he was the other other white meat.)

I don't find it surprising at all that young women are choosing, with their wallets at least, Prince Charming as their romantic ideal...not Prince Charming's intern. I just wonder when rock and roll will remember that.

Casino Royale

I've got no problem with this whatsoever, aside from all the French:

So, I'm Back

Finished the Summer Movie Preview. It was a long road, but there is a sense of satisfaction one gets having the final product in your hands...or, in my case, on my desk, with Tom Hanks' face glaring at me.

But the strangest thing about it all — and this almost slipped by me — is that this issue marks my 10-year anniversary at the weekly entertainment magazine.

Aside from breathing, I've never done anything for 10 straight years. School was always broken up in chunks, never dated anyone for that long (though I've been with my wife for almost 12, but that shifted from dating, to being engaged, to being married: all different dynamics)....

An old friend of mine, let's call him Brad (because that's his name), was a drummer. Since he was, like, six years old. By the time he and I were in a band together, in high-school, he'd been playing the drums for longer than he had not been playing the drums. And he was really good. Astonishingly good. The kind of percussionist who warmed up with Buddy Rich solos. The kind of musician that, frankly, could've done far better than our shitty band. And I was always a little jealous that he had this thing that he did, and knew how to do well, and would always be doing because he loved it.

Not that being a magazine editor is my end-all- be-all (though, let me be clear, I do enjoy it and think that I'm half-way decent at it), but I'm starting to understand what it's like to have invested time in an endeavor and be able to take pride in that investment. Not bad at all.

The Home Stretch

The light at the end of the tunnel is beckoning to me, like a $12 Atlantic City whore. Almost done with my white whale of an issue. But I came across this, while giving my eyes a rest from editing copy that features the phrase "Garfield's A Tale of Two Kitties":

This pensive post on Javier Grillo-Marxuach's journal (which you should read, because he's a good writer—they don't let just anyone be a supervising producer on Lost, you know), all about the varied and sundry Supermen, Batmen, and James Bonds, ends with one of the more provocative pop-culture statements I've ever heard:

"Ponder this...within our lifetime, someone other than William Shatner will play the role of captain James T. Kirk."

Hot damn. And he's right. Captain Kirk is a one of the few genuinely American characters—that didn't come from a comic book—that can lay claim to a mythic, almost Shakespearean heft. There will, undoubtedly, come a time when someone will want to tell new adventures of the original Starship Enterprise, and realize that they were never as good as when Kirk, Bones, and Spock were at the helm.

And we will all hate the 22-year-old chump they cast, but it won't matter...because the 13-year-old kids who tune in (or download) will think he's the shit, and they will buy all the DVDs and the videogames and the cell phones that look exactly like the communicators. (Seriously, why hasn't anyone ever done that? It wouldn't be hard, and I'd buy one.) From that point on, Jake Bronson (or whatever the hell his name is gonna be) will be James T. Kirk.

As much as it'll pain those of us who hold the image of the young, almost Elvis-pretty Shatner close to our hearts, it will be necessary. Because the only way a character achieves immortality is if he or she can be reinterpreted for each subsequent generation. That is how new life gets breathed into old heroes, and that is why Bond and Othello and Falstaff and Willy Loman and Mr. Darcy live on, instead of becoming relics, like John Rambo or Steve Austin or, yes, Atticus Finch.

Hell, if we can tolerate three different Indiana Joneses, we can handle another Cap'n Kirk.

EDIT: In case you hadn't heard, Lost-boy J.J. Abrams will follow Mission: Impossible 3 with the next Star Trek film...featuring a young Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy. My powers are beyond even my understanding.