Monday, August 29, 2005

The Mole: 6

Sunday, August 28, 2005

An 88th Birthday Edition of....


Today would be the 88th birthday of the comic book artist who set and continues to set the standard for all comic book art. Jack Kirby co-created Captain America in 1940, the Fantastic Four in 1961, created the New Gods in 1971, the Eternals in 1975, and a host of other characters and classic stories in the years during and after. Anything comic books aspire to, Jack did it first.

Among those who influenced my own imagination and taste, Jack is right up there with Tolkien, Charles Williams, Alan Dean Foster, Moebius, George Lucas, etc. etc. He is one of the most important popular artists of the 20th century. Michael Chabon's award winning (deservedly so) novel, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, is based in part on Jack; if you've enjoyed the film versions of Fantastic Four, The Hulk, or the X-Men Jack helped create them, too.

Jack Kirby was the Cecil B. DeMille or Steven Spielberg of comic books; always pushing the medium to see where it could go -- always seeing what new ideas and concepts he could incorporate into what the world saw as funnybooks. His stories were grand-scale epics with casts of thousands that swept across millions of years of time and millions of light years of space. He is utterly unique in comics; many have tried to overtake his legacy -- a few have honored it, but none have equalled it. (Do, however, check out my brief article on Tom Scioli and Godland, below).

I would invite you to explore the links (including the new Jack Kirby Museum link) under his name at the right. In honor of his birthday, here are a few examples of the explosive style and restlessly inventive imagination of the King that made me a fan for life 30 years ago: (click on the image for a larger version). Sorry I cant get the images below to line up, but they still work. Peace.

And thanks for the reminder, Ratty.


Above: (L to R): 2001#7; Eternals #1; Fantastic Four #62; Devil Dinosaur #1;OMAC #4; Forever People #3, Mr. Miracle #2, Kamandi #30

Thanks for everything, Jack. I am sure you and Roz are travelling the universe you seemed to know so well. Happy Birthday.

Quote 5


"Ignatius, don't you think maybe you'd be happy if you went and took you a little rest at Charity?"

"Are you referring to the psychiatric ward by any chance?" Ignatius demanded in a rage. "Do you think that I am insane? Do you suppose that some stupid psychiatrist could even attempt to fathom the work­ings of my psyche?"

"You could just rest, honey. You could write some stuff in your little copybooks."

"They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don't you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won't be a robot!"

"But, Ignatius, they help out a lot of people got problems."

"Do you think that I have a problem?" Ignatius bellowed. "The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and sub­divisions."

"Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked."

"Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I've always considered Mr. Becnel one of the martyrs of our age..."

--John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces

Available at www.amazon.com

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Cheap Entertainment 1: Dollar DVD's


Back in college, and I went to kind of a boring college, but that's another blog altogether, my roommate the Party Reptile and I would oft find ourselves without anything to do on a Sunday night, and make our way to a disreputable old dump known as the Village Theater. The Village was saved only by the fact that it did a thriving business in dollar movies -- three screens, two flix each, and very little supervision for the noisy teenagers who populated the aisles.

The Reptile and I played a game: we would drive to the Village, and whatever movie was playing next that neither of us had seen before, we would see it, no matter what. As I recall, we didnt come off too badly: Adventures in Babysitting, House, and several other high-grade B-flicks were ours at just the right price, soured only by Clan of the Cave Bear. Even a lousy movie was good at a buck -- heck, I've paid more to rent lousy movies at blockbuster.

Well, I thought the time of the cheapo flick was gone, but I was wrong. I have discovered a plethora of films, some of them classic, waiting for me in the dollar discount stores of the world. Apparently some companies have gotten ahold of film properties that nobody wants, and have repackaged them in very no-frills editions that contain some classics. Now, of course, you have to want the movies available to you, and the range is limited, but if you are of a particular bent, you can find great fun in these cheap discs.

I have so many of them now I havent been able to watch them all. Here's a few you may find in your local dollar store, with a couple of capsule reviews, and a listing of some others.

Silent Horror Films: A couple of discs from PC Treasures have yielded great fun. One double feature includes the original silent horror classics Nosferatu and Lon Chaney Sr. in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Often these double features include a cartoon, as does this one. One tricky thing with the silent classics is they are, in fact, silent -- not even a backing track of organ music. Nothing. Be prepared to enjoy in silence. Another disc had Hunchback coupled with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a German expressionist horror film that I had heard about since I was a kid but never seen -- much spookier than I had expected.

Non-Silent Horror Films: Probably the best find in this lot is a disc titled "Matinee of Terror" featuring the original George Romero Night of the Living Dead and the Vincent Price movie The Last Man on Earth based on Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend". Again, I had never seen either of these classics and both lived up to my expectations. Night of the Living Dead is one of my favorite movies ever, now.

If you ever want to host "Bad Movie Night" there are many options: the double feature of The Giant Gila Monster, a 50's teen-monster movie, and the incredible-to-behold Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (read it again) is particularly good; another is the truly horrid Snake People / Sabaka double feature, both starring Boris Karloff in his later years. Karloff fares much better in the actually quite good The Terror, also starring a very young Jack Nicholson, available on a doublebill with Bela Lugosi in Scared to Death.

There's lots of other movies and a great deal of old TV available, with, as you can see, some gems scattered among the refuse -- but the refuse can be great fun. Here are some other titles you may be on the lookout for:
  • The House on Haunted Hill (Vincent Price again) / The Bat
  • The Corpse Vanishes / The Invisible Ghost (both with Lugosi)
  • Popeye the Sailor (two hours of cartoons)
  • My Man Godfrey with Carole Lombard
  • The Inspector General with Danny Kaye
  • Nothing Sacred with Carole Lombard
  • Road to Bali (Hope / Crosby / Lamour)
  • Musical Mania featuring Betty Boop
  • The Jackie Robinson Story / The Lou Gehrig Story
  • Dead Men Walk / The Monster Maker

...and we'll see you at the movies!

You Report, We Decide!

So nice to know that some things never change; there is no greater guilty pleasure in the world than the Weekly World News. This recent issue was passed along to The Mole and he could not help but add it -- though I think National Lampoon did something similar with a dog about 30 years ago....
Fair is fair, The Onion ("America's Finest News Source") has also been added to the News Boom Tubes, but WWN edges out the Onion in the hot babe department. Vive la difference!

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Kirby Is God, and Scioli Is His Prophet

Over on Newsarama.com, of which the Mole is a member, there has been something of a debate raging about the art of one Tom Scioli, who has taken it upon himself to continue in the tradition of Jack Kirby, especially the cosmically-powered Jack Kirby of the '70's. I first ran into Tom a couple of years ago on the Yahoo Jack Kirby discussion group, where he was plugging his very-Kirby-influenced and self-published work, The Myth of 8-Opus, which I later was able to read some of. Tom (I write as though I know him - I dont) is unabashedly Kirbyesque in style, which fuels the message board debate: is it homage, is it ripoff, is it something else?

My own argument sez that it is something beyond all that -- more like the work done by the talented painters we see in the Renaissance who toiled in the "Schools of..." whoever. Kirby is, as Twomorrow's Jack Kirby Collector reminds us, a genre unto him / itself, and Tom is the chief purveyor of that genre. My ultimate criteria is that it aint a ripoff because it works.

Case in point: Mr. Scioli has teamed up with writer Joe Casey to produce a new series for Image Comics called Godland, a comic book that, were Mike Royer to ink it, would be almost indistinguishable from the best of Mr. Kirby's Fourth World and Eternals work. It is a breath of fresh air, packing tons of story, color, visuals, dialogue into every issue (two so far) and a real joy to read. There are few comics that provide me with the "Holy Moly!" sense of wonder that Kirby once did, and does, but Godland (and another great independent book, Atomika from Speakeasy Press - see the link) really comes close. I wont bore you with story details, but suffice it to say there is Kirby Krackle, there are cool aliens, there is slam bang action, and there is a lot going on on every page (a couple of which I have taken the liberty of displaying here.) There's even a guy with a disembodied green skull in a tank for a head -- what more do you want out of life???

Godland #3 will be out in September -- the first two issues may be available on the stands yet. For those of use weaned on the Marvel of the '70's, this manages to capture the spirit of those jampacked and funfilled days without being too derivative and even bringing a more modern sensibility to the proceedings.

Insanity Today

Monday, August 22, 2005

So long, Doc -- and Thanks

"[It] ...was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant..."

--Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

(March 11, 1989, First Congregational Church, Portland, Oregon)

Rattle and Hum Memories 3: Three Chords and the Truth


So finally, we all made it -- me, Rob, Vonna, Jennie, Jay, Paul, Jay's roommate, and a white rat named Soren who had somehow come to live in my coat pocket (and would, one day very soon, come to live in my bedroom, but that's another story). These two nights were the conclusion of the Joshua Tree tour, which we had seen one of the first shows of, back in L.A. in March.

We drove across Southern California, into the SOnora Desert, passing fields of high-tech windmills standing like Wells's tripods across the low hills; as we began to approach Tempe the radio stations were totally abuzz with news of these concerts. We learned that people had come from all over the country for these shows - tickets were sold in New York, L.A., Seattle, Phoenix and Tempe, and a few other places. B.B. King, for some reason, would open the show, and they would indeed be full shows, and though the cameramen might get in the way sometimes, we would definitely see a whole show.

Sun Devil stadium was enormous -- I had never been in a sports arena quite that large, and somebody said it sat more than 60,000 people. The place was packed by showtime, and after B.B. King (who was outstanding, by the way -- but superfluous to me and my friends at the time) finished up, somebody from the movie crew came out on the long platform that began at the enormous stage and ran halfway out into the football field. He called out the various cities where tickets had been sold and each section cheered; we all seemed to be seated by locality.

The first night, we were at the back of the upper level, looking straight at the stage but from a footall field away. As they apparently had throughout the tour, the boys opened with the low hum of "Where The Streets Have No Name", and when Bono finally bounded to the front of the stage and bellowed "I wanna run..." Jay leaned over to me and said, "I will never get used to that voice." I knew what he meant--it made my skin break out in goosebumps. Bono Vox, the "good voice", lead singer of the most important rock and roll band in the history of the world (as far as we were concerned).

Next they ripped into "I Will Follow", which apparently was not on the set list and later we learned sent Phil Joanou's crew scrambling to keep up, and we were off. I dont remember every detail of that show, but I remember thinking it blew the L.A. show from months earlier away; Bono sang an a capella version of the Beatles' Help! to lead into some song; he did the skipping dance down the long raised platform with the Irish flag; it was classic '80's U2, and we were happy. He even told us all that the only thing you needed for rock and roll was a guitar, three chords, and the truth. Sounded good to us.



The second night, we were still on the upper deck, but closer to the stage. (That's where the picture with this article was taken -- hmmm, which one might be the Mole?) Instead of millimeters tall, the band seemed centimeters tall. Again, they were excellent; we had a better sense of the filming on stage. When they did "With or Without You" the camera and lighting guys were all on Bono so tight you couldnt see him -- that's the scene in the color section of the movie when Mr. B is standing on the metal grate and the light is shining up at him. Fireworks to kick off "Bullet the Blue Sky" and somewhere in there, I think, Bono held the spotlight on Edge that eventually made the CD cover and movie poster (though that might just be wishful thinking....)

Early in the show, somebody climbed to the top of the low mountain that jutted above the opposite side of the stadium and built an enormous bonfire, straight out of "Under A Blood Red Sky" a few years earlier; it was perfect -- that Unforgettable Fire that all of us had followed like a beacon to Arizona. Bono was triumphant abou the spirit that had removed Evan Meacham from the governor's chair in the state -- the same one Bono had reviled earlier in the year for refusing to honor Martin Luther King's birthday as a Federal holiday.

That night, the final night of the tour, Bono brought one of their stagehands out on stage and announced to 60,000 people that this man had become a father that morning -- nine months to the day after leaving Dublin for the tour. They were done with the juggernaut that had made them superstars, and when they walked off stage -- after a rendition of "Christmas, Baby Please Come Home" as recorded for the first "Very Special Christmas" album, they were gone.

We made our way out into the night, and the next day began the long drive home to the Pacific Northwest, to get home before Christmas ourselves. We made a promise that when the movie finally came out, we would all get back together and see it. That didnt happen - at least for me - but it was not the last time I would see Rob, Vonna, Jay, Paul, or Jennie.

It was the last time -- at least for me, almost 18 years down the line - that I would see U2 live.

Part One: http://motherbox.blogspot.com/2005/08/rattle-and-hum-memories-1-pin-stripe.html
Part Two: http://motherbox.blogspot.com/2005/08/rattle-and-hum-memories-2-this-is-not.html

Next: Mopping Up

Friday, August 19, 2005

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

The Mole: 5

A mole, living in a hole
Digging up my soul
Going down, excavation
I and I in the sky
You make me feel like I can fly
So high, elevation.

--U2

One from the Vaults: Omni Magazine #1, October, 1978


Going through some of the deeper recesses of the hole last night, I happened upon my long-saved copy of the first issue of OMNI magazine, where Bob Guccione tried to do for science and science fiction what he did for...uh...hardcore porn. Unleashed upon the world in 1978, somehow at 12 I managed to score copies of the first couple of issues, blissfully unaware of the connection to Penthouse -- I imagine my parents must have been as well. There would be little on the surface to connect the two, other than one of the image in the pictorial on robots that had a woman who...well, see, there were...well, that's irrelevant at this point (and my Mom may be reading).

So somehow with all the other comic books, magazines, records, and other stuff I have dumped over the years, I managed to retain this copy of Omni. Twenty-seven years later, it remains even with a cursory glance an interesting historical time capsule. Let's leaf through, shall we?

Open the cover: A full page ad from VW touting their new Rabbits that have "seatbelts that put themselves on." A very hip guy in a plaid jacket is closing his door. Volkswagen does it again! An advertisement touting Rockwell International's successful completion of the first Space Shuttle the year before which you can iron-on to a t-shirt to commemorate!

By page 34, we are discussing the creation of artificial environments in space to sustain populations; one breathless caption tells us: "By the year 2000, space settlements...may be home for 10,000 workers." I am so glad that Bob Guccione was able to lay the future out for us so clearly, just like that Donald Fagen guy.

In the arts section, a preview of the upcoming Fall TV season of fantasy wonders: Battle Star Galactica; The Amazing Spiderman; Mork and Mindy! Furthermore, in the wake of the incredible sci-fi splash made by Star Wars and Close Encounters just a year before, the lead off fantasy film for the coming year will be: The Cat From Outer Space! Followed by a re-release of Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts. After these two A-list classics, next on the list is Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings (how else could anyone possibly successfully make those books into a movie???) and finally, somebody is apparently going to try and make a big budget Superman movie. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but are we not now able to see most of these again, redone anew now??? Some Disney exec somewhere is snapping his fingers and going "Heyyyy! Cat from Outer Space! Hillary Duff!" Forward. Lots of ads for high-end turntables. Lots of booze. An ad for Le Car (compared favorably to a Chevette!) Science fiction stories I did not understand then and have no time for now. An article on the Shroud of Turin...and then the robot art, and that woman with the...well, anyway. An Asimov story illustrated by H.R. Giger (pre-Alien, but that thing sure looks like a full-grown one). A taoist analysis of Star Wars ("The Force in Star Wars is only a Hollywood version of the 3000-year-old Chinese Tao.") and an ad proclaiming UFO's May Doom Life On Earth. Finally, an ad for Clarion car stereos that says you can now "choose from a wide variety of ... component systems, including AM/FM stereo cassette or 8-track, exciting new home type 3-way speaker systems."

Sure, there's probably lots of good, interesting science in here, dont get me wrong -- but I didn't read it then, and the to-be-read stack is too high to add a 27-year-old magazine to it right now. But soaring from 30,000 feet over its pages is entertainment enough.

Finally, perhaps the most important part of the magazine: a survey. We hip, drunk, car-stereo-loving young men are asked to predict when certain things in the future will happen, anywhere from "Before 1980" all the way to "2000+" and "Never". Interestingly, and in a couple of cases, thankfully, only a few of these things have yet to happen, and in one case whether the item has taken place yet or not kinda depends on whether you live in a blue state or a red state. I will leave you to decide for yourself, and ruminate on where we have been, and where we might be going....

  • First woman elected President of the USA.
  • Nuclear war breaks out between USA and USSR.
  • US commits troops to Africa to counter communist incursions.
  • Gasoline reaches 25 cents per liter.
  • First terrorist use of nuclear weapons.
  • Return to pre-Sixties standards of morality and end of "permissive society"
  • Manned landing on Mars.
  • First public "paying passengers" on orbital spaceflight.
  • Industrialization of space becomes important source of income.
  • Computer beats world (human) chess champion.
  • World shortage of animal protein makes meat too expensive for average American household to serve.
  • Contact made with extraterrestrial life.
  • A human being is successfully cloned.
  • Extrasensory perception is accepted as fact by a majority of scientists.
  • Average life expectation of life is 100 years or more.
  • Computers have "self-awareness" and intelligence greater than humans.
  • The majority of South American governments become Community or ultra-left.
  • Economic collapse of the west as predicted by Marxist commentators.
  • Revolution in USSR leads to overthrow of existing regime and replacement by liberal "pro-West" government.
  • Marriage as institution virtually disappears in USA with over 75 percent of babies born "out of wedlock."

Quote 4

All we do, our whole lives, is move from one little piece of holy ground to another.

--J.D. Salinger

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

El Motherbox esta en la biblioteca!

Rattle and Hum Memories 2: This Is Not A Rebel Song

(Envelope of the program book for the Joshua Tree Tour, purchased at the L.A. Forum in March, 1987)

A bit of a digression...

I guess it is probably hard for anybody under 25 or so to understand what U2 meant to those of us who have been on the rollercoaster with them for 20-25 years; not that I think that somebody 10 or 15 years old couldn't hear early U2 records and enjoy or even love them -- it has more to do with the environment in which we heard the band, when they were new, like nothing any of us had ever heard before, when they were our band. It is probably something akin to the effect Green Day has had on my son -- it is an almost subliminal effect, an addition to the bloodstream or the nervous system. I love Green Day, dont get me wrong, but I will never know what it means to be 14 years old and feel like the very gods have descended on us in the form of Bille Joe, Tre, and Mike. It becomes part of you, grafted onto your DNA. The people who heard Elvis in 1956 or Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in 1961 or the Sex Pistols in 1977 know what I am talking about: people can always love the music, but they will never know what it meant to have the world changed by it.

I first recall hearing U2 on KGON in Portland; they were playing the primary tracks off of War -- Sunday Bloody Sunday; New Years' Day; Two Hearts Beat As One. I liked them, quite a bit, and the more I heard, the more I liked. I read about them in Rolling Stone and the fact that they were Christians meant a great deal, because their music was good. Most Christian popular music was (and is) crap -- derivative and shallow. The artistic merit is undercut by their desire to shoehorn their music into a predetemined lyrical and musical set -- safe. But U2 was a band first, a rock and roll band, and Christians second (Madeline L'Engle has said much the same thing about herself as writer first, a Christian second.) The only "Christian" band I have heard since then that even tries to emulate this is Switchfoot.

In any event, I found myself liking the band more and more; one Sunday at church several of us got into a discussion of the band and discovered we all liked them; that it was precisely their ability to convey a Christian view of the world that wasn't written like a Hallmark card and played like it was in a church basement as opposed to a garage. U2 soared, they got angry, they yelled, they protested. As the '80's wore on, and we got to see them in Under A Blood Red Sky and at Live Aid and on Amnesty International, they caught all of us in their net who believed in higher realities but didnt want to have to check our brain, our love of rock and roll, and our (self-perceived) coolness at the door.

I have so many memories that revolve around U2. The Rattle and Hum concerts were only the capstone. I remember riding in a pickup truck with my friends in high school, screaming the lyrics to "October" at the top of our lungs. I remember the first time I heard the guitar chords crash into "With or Without You" in my dorm room and felt electricity through my whole body like a lightning strike. I know that every time I put on "The Unforgettable Fire" it will be a religious experience, even though that is generally considered one of the band's worst albums -- for me it is the one where the band utterly threw themselves into the void (and, I suppose, Brian Eno) and embraced the mystery. It may not be a good album, I dont know and I don care -- it is so much the soundtrack of an incredibly special part of my life that I dont think I could seperate the two if I wanted to.

When I met Rob, and Jay, and Paul in Ashland in the Fall of 1986, our friendship began with music, with shared music. Everybody had something of their own religion -- Rob's was the Cure, perhaps; Paul's was anything connected to Phil Collins; Jay's definitely was Springsteen; mine Talking Heads. But the shared faith, the one that pulled all that together, was U2. It was U2 that was enough to get us all together twice more within 1987 to travel at great distance to see each other and commune with the spirits.

And that's how we found ourselves in Tempe.

Monday, August 15, 2005

August 14, 1979

Well, hi, again!

Not much been going on. G & G Kelly will be here tomorrow, G & G Marston here now. I went to Excalibur with Al and Brian. I got:

Invaders #'s 13, 17
Howard the Duck #26
Conan #92
X-Men #122

Not much, oh yeah, I got Howard the Duck magazine #1 (cost me a buck)...pretty good.
And now, today's evidence that...

The Eternals #2, August, 1976

Friday, August 12, 2005

Rattle and Hum Memories 1: Pin Stripe Walks Up To Me...


So when we all met in Ashland at Thanksgiving, just before we left, Jay told us to keep our options open over Christmas break, because he had tickets for us to see U2 again. We had all trekked to L.A. earlier in the year to see one of the ten or so shows they did at the Forum in the initial run of the Joshua Tree tour -- Lone Justice opened -- and now it appeared another quest was on the horizon.

About a week before Christmas, Rob drove down from Seattle with Vonna to pick me up at the house on Division Street. Rob had been my roommate in Ashland, and Vonna was his girlfriend (now his wife and mother of his -- at last count -- four children). I ensconced myself in the shotgun seat and we were off down 95. We were driving straight through to the Frisco area to crash at Vonna's parents for awhile and then head on the next morning to pick up Paul in Santa Barbara and hook up with Jay and Mary Jo in L.A. somewhere.

It was a long trip. I still didn't drive at this point, so Rob did most of the driving. He had heard some of the details of what exactly we were doing from Jay: apparently U2 (our virtual religion at the time) had decided to make a concert film in Arizona to cap off their tour. Jay had scored tickets, and it just so happened Jennie (another alum) lived in Tempe now and we could crash there. Huzzah! That was enough to get us rolling.

We of course listened to loud music; certainly we listened to The Cure's "Disintegration" and Joy Division's "Closer" as these were particularly entrancing to Rob at the time. We moved very quickly, stopping only for food; somewhere in northern California we stopped in a road side diner, other wise deserted except for the creepy proprietor who looked like somebody out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and sat and stared at us while we ate. In the restroom, they had a clawfoot tub with a mannequin in it to freak you out.

It was late December, and cold; very few others were traveling as we were, even with the holidays approaching. The Siskiyous seemed very empty and foreboding. The driving seemed to go on forever.

Finally, sometime early in the morning, we reached Vonna's house near SF and crashed; a few hours later we continued onto Westmont College where Paul was and collected him and his uncanny ability to have fun no matter how chaotic the world around him was; that night we arrived in LA where Jay and Mary Jo were making tie-dyed t-shirts for us to wear and decorate for these concerts. We would sleep there for the night and in the morning drive on to Tempe -- that would be Saturday, December 19.

I was concerned that Jay had laid out hundreds of dollars for these tickets and offered to repay him for mine, but he refused. He finally explained what none of us fully understood: U2 was filming concert sequences for their forthcoming movie, and wanted to have a crowd for the shoot, so they made the tickets five bucks and sold them in five or six specific cities. This show was a pilgrimage from everywhere to worship at the altar of the band/religion. We had tickets for both nights.

There was a catch, however, according to Jay: these would not be full shows. The band would perform maybe five or six songs, stopping between to let the cameras be reset or the sound to be checked. But you would be there for the gig! It would be a memory! And it was only five bucks.

We went to sleep that night with visions of Bono dancing in our heads (despite our best efforts to shut them out) and the next morning awoke to drive into the very country that Anton Corbijn had photographed the band looking very tough, sexy and cool in for the album cover: the Mojave. We might see actual Joshua Trees! Nirvana.

Additionally, we would find out Jay had no idea what he was talking about.

To be continued....

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Elementary, My Dear Watson

"You know, Amway people are all about Amway, and when they didn't -- when they didn't try any conversation further about it, that's when I pretty much thought, well, they're not with Amway."

-- Mike Wager, Ohio Cab Driver, who drove two people claiming to be on their way to an Amway convention who later turned out to be George and Jennifer Hyatte, fugitives after a gun battle in front of a Tennessee court house on Tuesday.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

The Atlas Line of Superstars!

Over the past year or two as my son has become more and more interested in comic books, we have traveled to various comics shows and such and there, largely in the 50 cent bins, I find pretty well preserved issues of comics published by Atlas Comics in the mid-'70's. For those of you who have been paying attention, I wrote an entry awhile back about traveling to 7-11 to buy comic books in the early years of my own collecting frenzy. Well, Atlas was part of that.

To tell the background of Atlas in a nutshell: when Martin Goodman, the original publisher of Marvel Comics, retired in the early '70's, he did so with the belief or understanding that his son Chip would take over. But when this didn't happen -- and eventually Smilin' Stan Lee got the gig -- Martin became angry and decided to start a rival comic book company to get revenge on his old company. He even named it with the same name Marvel had prior to 1961. In 1974 and '75, Goodman aggressively launched a cadre of new titles, almost all of which were direct rip-offs of Marvel titles, and none of which lasted more than four issues. Some of the last published issues have ads for the story in the next - which shows how fast the end must've come. The story of why that happened is told best on the very extensive and well-done website you will find by clicking the Atlas Comics link under "Comics" over in the Boom Tubes.

Some of the best creators in comics history went to work for the doomed company -- Howard Chaykin, Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Pablo Marcos, Ernie Colon, to name a few -- and no comic book company pushed the envelope on sex and violence the way Atlas did, while still managing to stay under the auspices of the then-still-powerful Comics Code Authority. In the end, hubris, poor business decisions, and bad distribution did Atlas in.

Somehow, a handful of Atlas issues made it to the convenience stores of Milwaukie, and I picked them up. Two among them were The Grim Ghost and another was Weird Suspense featuring the Tarantula. The Grim Ghost was a Revolutionary War-era brigand who was killed, went to Hell, and returned to Earth by Satan to gather more evil souls for the pit. The Tarantula was Count Lykos, heir to an ancient legacy that turned male members of his family into blood sucking arachnid people. My parents decided that Atlas Comics were not a good thing for a nine year old boy to be reading, and for one of the few times in my young comic book reading career, forbade me to read them. Its lucky for me Atlas went out of business shortly thereafter, and I didn't have to gaze longingly on that which I could not have....

But the heart does not forget what has been forbidden to it, so now I am becoming an Atlas completist -- a relatively easy thing to do, since only about 50 issues were ever printed, plus, as I said, they're usually in the cheap-o bins at the comics shows -- I even have an issue of the particularly nasty Weird Suspense, with Count Lykos in all his flesh eating glory.

Most of Atlas is, well, not great -- not usually bad, though, either, just so derivative that you feel like you've seen it all before, over at Marvel. A few concepts and characters shine through -- Howard Chaykin's The Scorpion, a '30's noir adventure book, was brilliant, and there's goofy fun to be had in the Conan ripoff Iron Jaw and the Fahrenheit 451/Invasion of the Body Snatchers mash-up Morlock 2001, and art cropping up all over from the aforementioned stalwarts.

I've heard the rumor that Chip Goodman still owns the rights to the Atlas Line of Superstars and will sell them for low-six-figures....if I ever come into big money I might seek him out and become a comics mogul myself! Ah, dreams......

Monday, August 08, 2005

August 6, 1979

Been over a month since camp. Lotsa stuff to catch up on.

Umm, oh yeah, camp! On Thursday we had a big 3 hour cry-in and said goodbye to everyone. I became real good friends with a whole bunch of people that night, friday and Saturday morning. Scott met a girl there who is kind of a fox. He wrote her and got a letter back (He won't even let me read it! OOOOeeee!

Not much happened in July. Grandma and Grandpa are gonna move up to Washougal pretty soon. Neat, huh?

Oh, yeah, there was a bear up around Whitebranch Falls at camp. I didnt see him, but I found fresh tracks. I guess a lot of kids did.

Well, last Sunday, Scott got baptized at church. That was really great, I thought.

Lat Friday, I went and saw The Muppet Movie. It was really great and I'm gonna go see it this friday with the Washougal youth group. It was excellent.

Well, I can't wait till Sunday Because we're going back to Holladay Park Church. I cant wait to see everyone.

Grandma and Grandpa Marston are gonna be here tomorrow. I havent seen them since '76. Oh, well, that's all for today!

Friday, August 05, 2005

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Thanks, Friend

Spong Sponging Sponged


Is there anybody out there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone at home?

Good. Hallo from the Motherbox, where the Mole has just finished a rather lengthy autobio of the liberal former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ, the Rev. Dr. John Shelby Spong. This was a free book, gleaned from the stacks of the Book Thing, please see the link at right. Anywho, yes, the Mole can read, and had heard of Bishop S for many years and been curious about him. For many years I was very afraid of the liberal wing of Christianity for some reason, but this book is giving me a starting point to explore some of the facets.

For those of you who dont know, and at this point if the Motherbox has readers they are likely largely all people who know the Mole, but just in case, the Mole grew up in a Holiness movement church (Protestant, even protesting other protestants - includuding themselves - sometimes) and later spent a decade trying to find his way through the Roman Catholic church, largely (in retrospect) because it didnt require me to think much, and if I thought too hard, it bothered me. Finally, my thoughts won out, and I left the whole RC thing behind.

Mind you, I had not given up on the idea of Christianity, necessarily, just that the things I saw in the church dont seem to jibe much with what I saw in Jesus. Jesus seemed to be a whole lot more intellectual, forgiving, and pastoral than my experiences in most churches. I did not see an obvious correlation between those who perpetuate various churches naming themselves Christian, and the Jesus who appeared in the Gospels.

Furthermore, in all the churches I belonged to, there was a tendency toward an emotional response to the Gospels that required people to believe everything in them at face value, no matter how wacky or outlandish, and intellectual inquiry about such things was punished. This was not the kind of organization the Mole wanted to be a part of, in whatever permutation, or how much I liked JPII.

So, when I happened upon Bishop Spong's book, I thought, well, here you go. Here's at least a starting point for this whole line of inquiry, and it definitely is that, however the book did not have a focus on what I was looking for. Still, I finished it, and found the experience worthwhile.

A couple of caveats, however: the first thing you learn in reading the book is that John Spong thinks John Spong is a really wonderful guy. Frequently he describes his decisions as brilliant or remarkable, and only on a couple of occasions does he (briefly) confess an error in judgement or an out right mistake, and usually it is ultimately the fault of people he characterizes as "adversaries". On a number of occasions he expresses his own belief that he was the standard-bearer for liberal Christianity in America, a real bulwark against the conservative majority. I do not doubt this is true, but he keeps reminding us of it, and how important he is, as if he doesnt think his actions and story alone will prove it.

Still, the guy accomplished a lot, and appears to have been a real standard-bearer for those in the Episcopal Church who felt the church needed reformation. He is very articulate, but also immensely outspoken and judgemental. In a few cases real bitterness toward those who did not agree with him (however warranted) is justified at length. Still, to expect perfection is hardly a Christian ideal, so I did not let it distract me from the meat of the book.

Certainly Spong has put himself, apparently at some personal risk, at the forefront of racial and sexual conflict, on the side of the oppressed. (Again, he often sounds as though he were the only one fighting for such oppressed peoples, but I digress) In the south, he routinely fought against institutionalized racism, defying very entrenched establishments; in the north, he fought for the rights of homosexuals and women and incurred the animosity of fellow bishops all the way up to the Archbishop of Canterbury. By his account he strove (strived? strivonotorisumed?) for integrity in all aspects of his ministry, and tried to live what he preached. And he makes a strong case for a more liberal view of the Gospels, though obviously that is not the main thrust of the book and is mainly sketched.

Here I Stand definitely made me want to read a couple of his other books, primarily Why Christianity Must Change Or Die and his books re-thinking the literal view of scripture, the Virgin Birth, and the resurrection. All in all I would recommend the book, though with the rider that it can be dry and repetitive in parts, and feature entire sections about people that dont seem essential to the story. A good editor could have knocked a hundred pages off this book and made it much, much better. But all in all, a very interesting picture of what it means to believe in Jesus a different way than those who seem to be taking over the country at the moment. It lets in the breath of fresh air that such a Way is possible.

From deep in the bowels of Motherbox Central, I remain --

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

That Al Qaeda is diabolical!!!!

SYDNEY, Australia (Reuters) -- An Australian bus driver who called police after he found a package on his bus which emitted a strange sound when touched was left red-faced when it turned out to be a novelty store cushion.

Just two weeks ago Sydney, Australia's largest city, adopted a New York-style "If you see something, say something" counter-terrorism campaign urging people to report unattended bags or suspicious activity around public transport.

The driver found the package on the rear seat of his bus after completing his route around the Sydney beachside of Coogee on Sunday.

Fearing it could be an explosive device of some kind, he called the police.

"It was an unattended item, emitting a popping sound," a police spokesman said.

"Just as a precautionary measure, police went and investigated. It's a whoopee cushion," he said.

Monday, August 01, 2005

Number One With A Bullet

Let me now praise the punk-pop-rock conglomeration which hath bestowed upon itself the name "Fall Out Boy". All I know about them is that their song, "Sugar We're Goin Down" has one of the oddest videos I have seen in some time, a bizarre Romeo and Juliet tale about a boy with antlers who falls in love with a girl who is not appendaged similarly. Girl's Dad doesnt like it, oh, no, but could Dad be harboring an ugly secret? I'll let you decide for yourself.

I know nothing of the band but this song. But a great song it is, one of those songs that you keep thinking you're going to get tired of but then you dont, and then all of the sudden its the best thing and you cant leave your spot at the curb without cranking the track up on the car stereo, if only to drown out the ominous whizzing noise your car has started to make. But there you are bellowing along with the muttonchopped lead singer with the apparently slight but not distracting speech impediment (nothing wrong with that, just stating the facts, ma'am) and then you get to the chorus (which is repeated like eight times in the course of four minutes) and you're harmonizing along with:

We're going down down in an earlier round
And sugar, we're going down swinging
I'll be your number one with a bullet
A loaded God complex, cock it and pull it (REPEAT)

And always I think of that last line, "What in the hell does he mean? A loaded God complex?" But there's so much to roll around in your mouth with those eleven syllables, and Muttonchops Guy sings it with so much relish and belief and directness, that after the fourteenth time or so It Just Doesnt Matter Anymore, he's going to win this girl, by God, and for him to do it involves the use of a "loaded God complex." It sounds like something very final that Wile E. Coyote might have ordered out of the Acme Catalog to nail the road runner. What the heck.

I am generally amazed at how good the rock and roll on the radio is right now. I also love that very dramatic Alkaline Trio track, "Time To Waste" with one of the most incredibly propulsive choruses I have ever heard, and one of the funniest sets of couplets I've heard in ages:

You had time to waste
And I'm not sorry
Such a basket case
Hide the cutlery

Sure, there are a few out there that I do not for the life of me understand the appeal of -- Kings of Leon comes to mind -- but many of the downloads I've pulled off Itunes lately come straight off that MTV2 Saturday night countdown. Were I you, and interested in such things, I would check it out.

Coming soon: The new Paste Magazine DVD.

The Mole: 4