From Tragedy There Comes Absurdity Part 1

After some time off, Bonbon Confetti Artillery is back and will hopefully be updated at least weekly. More updates on real stuff going on in my life later (including pics from this year's New York Comic Con and a visual tour of my room), but the first post after a long hiatus is a comment on the tragedy that's dominated the news.

Yes, I'm going to talk about the shootings at Virginia Tech.

Heroes and Ideologue Leeches
It's good to know that after a major tragedy we put aside blame and our personal differences in order to come together and... Oh, that entire "put aside our differences" thing didn't happen, did it? No, not at all... Damn.

After the best and highest qualities in humanity were displayed in the sacrifice made by Virginia Tech professor Liviu Librescu--who saved his students by blocking the door of his classroom from gunman Seung-Hui Cho--the pundits and bloviators come from the woodwork to place the blame on other individuals or entities.

It seems like the cynical lesson to be learned from the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting is that there are leeches in the world, opportunists whose commitment to their own narrow ideology trumps common decency. This lack of decency allows them to sop up the still-wet blood from the ground in order to flavor their agendas.

"I think it's all the damn libruls"
First you have several conservatives blaming liberals and liberalism for the shootings at Virginia Tech, which shows you just how mature and reasonable political discourse in this country really is. Michelle Malkin, by inference, suggested in one of her blog posts that liberalism caused none of the students at Virginia Tech to fight back against Cho. From what I understand from a message board I frequent, a guest on Neal Boortz's radio show wondered why students didn't throw desks at Cho or try to tackle him, blaming liberal institutions for (for lack of a better word) the pussification of students.

In most cases I would find this tough-guy posturing quite funny, but second guessing murder victims like this isn't my idea of comedy. These are people who are suddenly being shot at, who are likely unaware if there are multiple gunmen or a single gunman and if the shooter or shooters have other weapons apart from guns. These are people who amid the chaos and intense fear of the situation are unsure if they will survive. Yet there are some who have the temerity to demand them to play action movie star and, by inference, deride them for their failure to be a no-nonsense protagonist from a summer action movie. Surely not all of us harbor an inner John McClane, one that can coolly say "Yippy kay yay, mother fucker" when the time to ice the bad guy is right. It's callous, but I wonder if in a similar situation Malkin would expect her daughters to beat down Alan Rickman's posse of European thugs.

Following the shootings at Columbine, Newt Gingrich said "I accuse [the elite news media, liberal academic elite, and the liberal political elite] in Littleton of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made and being afraid to take the responsibility for the things that you have done, and instead foisting on the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don't have the courage to look at the world you have created." Gingrich has reaffirmed that statement in regards to the Virginia Tech tragedy when he appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

To Gingrich, I state the following: I accuse the simple-minded partisan ideologues in this country of being afraid to talk about the tragedy that has occurred and being afraid to assign responsibility to the person who actually did the shooting, and instead foisting on the rest of us pathetic banalities because the partisan hacks don't have the courage to look at the complexities of the world we live in.

Video Games, Movies, You Know the Drill by Now
The night of the shooting, Dr. Phil was on Larry King Live, a show proven to be an effective sedative and suppository in various peer-reviewed lab studies. Anyways, Dr. Phil (whose credentials are more suspect than Dr. Teeth of The Electric Mayhem Band) opined that video games and violent movies were partly to blame for the Virginia Tech tragedy. Gingrich similarly blamed video games and movies for the coarsening of morality in this country and hence the rise in violence. He also blamed atheism and pimp and ho Halloween costumes for 10-year-olds for the debased morality of the nation. I'll touch on the atheism bit in part 2, particularly in a blog post by dingleberry Dinesh D'Souza. I don't know if I'll touch the pimp and ho costume thing since I'm pretty sure I haven't seem a pimp or ho outfit for pre-adolescents. Apparently I don't shop at the same stores as Gingrich.

Getting back to video games, to quote David Cross, "What was the name of that video game Hitler used to play?"

Blog post has been Godwin'd.

In all seriousness, assigning blame to video games and movies always seemed quite odd to me. I remember hearing in English classes that distraught romantics would sometimes mimic the melancholy suicides of their favorite novel characters, but surely one would blame this act on their inability to distinguish fiction from reality rather than the work of fiction they were imitating. In truth, it makes more sense to blame the mental instability of a person for that person's actions rather than decrying long sessions of Halo and a love of Italian gore films. Heck, even Rush Limbaugh said that people shouldn't blame video games for the Virginia Tech tragedy since there a lot of gamers who aren't going to harm anyone. You know you're way off the mark when you make Rush fucking Limbaugh sound reasonable by comparison.

Perhaps it's easier for us to assign moral culpability to intimate objects rather than a responsible party, though it's funny that some of us are so willing to shirk personal responsibility in order to blame pixels, images, or words.

Shortsighted Gun Bans and Spur-Wearin' Gun Totin'
Then you have proponents of gun control calling for outright bans on the sale of guns thinking that by doing so an event like this would never have happened. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, since banning the sale or ownership of guns will do nothing to stop crazy or immoral people from doing bad things. If guns were illegal and Cho wanted a gun, he would have gotten a gun somehow. Drugs are illegal but, lo and behold, you can still get them pretty easy. A ban on guns would accomplish nothing in this case. Also, I can't help but think about the black market for firearms and how that would expand if all guns were banned.

The contrarian view is that people should be allowed to carry concealed firearms, which again ties into that action movie bravado I just can't fathom. Surely there would be more abuses of this ability to carry concealed weapons than there would be benefits; and surely during school shootings this would lead to more chaos. Think about it: During a school shooting, a bunch of people pull guns and look for the shooter. How is law enforcement supposed to tell the difference between the actual shooter and the guy who just watched Magnum Force the night before? Seriously, people, you are not Chow Yun-Fat and real life is not an action movie or a game of Wild Gunman.

Apart from BB guns, I've never shot or held an actual gun. I'm really in the middle of the issue on guns since I think people should be allowed to own guns within reason (i.e., I don't care if it's your birthday, you aren't getting an assault weapon), but I think there needs to be strict regulation and licensing of guns and their owners. Perhaps a strict psychological screening is in order for potential gun owners. Again, this is might not cut it since if people want guns they have different ways to get them.

Inevitably what this shows, though, is that there are no simple, convenient answers linked to this tragedy.

More on this topic in a day or two, featuring D'Souza, Barak Obama, and the Yale dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg.

String-Diddlying-Ding-Ding String-Ding

I'm really looking forward to the new Andrew Bird album, Armchair Apocrypha. I've listened to "Heretics" and "Plasticities"a bunch of times now and based off those songs and three or four other songs I've heard off the new album, I'm figuring the album will be in my top 20 or top 10 of the year.

For a quick Andrew Bird fix, here he is on a "Jack's Big Music Show" helping puppets fix their dulcimer. If you don't find this charming, you're an ornery polecat who's been kicked by one too many donkeys.

I'm Going to Watch Sweaty Men Squat, Yell, Then Aggressively Hug Each Other

Been low on posts lately since I've been busy getting stuff done. I will say that my "read 10 feet of comics and books" New Year's resolution is going swimmingly. After the first month worth of measuring, it turns out I pretty much read that much junk anyways.

Need pizza and beer before the Super Bowl, and given that all of the Super Bowl commercials have sucked for the last three or four years, it's fitting to end this post with an extended version of the greatest commercial ever made.

Go Fish

From Fishing with John, one of the best TV shows ever, here's Tom Waits and John Lurie fishing in Jamaica.

And After Mouse Guard, Read The Escapists

A brief second recommendation for a comic mini-series released last year is The Escapists, written by Brian K. Vaughn with art by Jason S. Alexander and Steve Rolston. A pseudo-sequel to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, The Escapists covers a couple of modern-day comic book geeks' attempts to create a new comic series featuring The Escapist, the fictional comic book character created by the fictional comic book creators from Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction (whew). Chabon himself made the following appreciation of The Escapists:

"[Vaughan] turned in a script that caused grown men, or at least one grown man, to weep for joy. It is a script that well meets, and perhaps even exceeds, the expectations raised by the shadow of the parent novel . . ."

And indeed, Vaughn has crafted a love letter to comics, to Chabon's novel, and to the city of Cleveland in yet another great yarn, one that establishes him as one of the finest writers in the medium today. And, for those who weren't aware, Vaughn was added to the writing staff of Lost, which hopefully will not affect his future output.

Everyone Should Read Mouse Guard

Mouse Guard, written and illustrated by David Petersen, was one of the biggest surprises to come out of 2006. It's a small press, all-ages comic book about talking mice who are members of the eponymous group of elite medieval warriors who help average mice travel from mouse village to mouse village. While slaying a dreaded snake, however, three members of the Guard learn of a plot to undermine their group and rule over all the mouse territories with an iron fist.

Trust me, it's a lot cooler than that sounds (and if you're one of the few people who reads this blog, that means it probably sounds plenty cool already).

Petersen has created what could just be the best comic released in the last few years, at least by my reckoning. Chris Sims of the always fun Chris' Invincible Super-Blog similarly declared, "Mouse Guard may in fact be the single finest piece of mouse-based entertainment since Steamboat Willie." While I wouldn't go that far -- seems like someone forgot all about Danger Mouse -- I do have to say that Mouse Guard is damn good and definitely better than 90% of what DC or Marvel are producing. Sure, it's about talking mice fighting crabs with sewing needles and wielding rusty miniature swords hidden away in piles of autumn leaves, but Petersen's storytelling is so compelling that Mouse Guard is actually (to steal a line from Terry Gilliam) intelligent enough for children and exciting enough for adults. There's a lot to admire about Petersen's work, but above even his excellent art and knack for visual storytelling, Mouse Guard is pretty charming, a quality lacking in so many comics I pick up today. If he keeps it up, I honestly think Petersen could be in the same league as Jeff Smith and Tony Millionaire.

Even though I have all six issues of the series, I'll be grabbing the hardcover collection of Mouse Guard which is due out in April. Heck, I enjoy the comic so much I don't feel a tinge of embarrassment about buying it as I kinda felt earlier today when picking up Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Given, it was only mild embarrassment, mainly because I really wanted some Scrooge McDuck action by the late great Carl Barks, but they were all out.

A new Mouse Guard series is due out in the summer, which looks like it picks up where this series leaves off. The only other title I'm more excited about is Mike Allred's new Madman series, which, though lacking in the talking-mice department, is a snappy personal favorite.

Mouse Guard is Charming, but as for Charmless Comics...
A little while ago I was given a link to Occasional Super Heroine's "Goodbye to Comics", a blog by former DC comics assistant editor Valerie D'Orazio which recounts her rocky life with comics. Though really, comics books are secondary to a bigger problem in D'Orazio's life, namely her consistently shitty relationships with men. It's a very compelling and harrowing read that's worth checking out even if you aren't into comics. Just start at the bottom and work your way up.

One of the things that D'Orazio covers in the blog is working on Identity Crisis, a mini-series DC put out a few years ago written by novelist Brad Meltzer with art by Rags Morales. In Identity Crisis (which D'Orazio gives a code name) the character Sue Dibny, wife of the stretchy sleuth The Enlongated Man, is brutally murdered. It's also revealed in the comic that Sue was once raped by a supervillain, an event recounted in the second issue that occurs just off-panel. A couple of other people die in the comic, the characters mope around, and it ends with multiple characters' lives thrown into turmoil in an attempt (successful or not) to humanize them.

D'Orazio has her own misgivings about Identity Crisis as recounted in her blog, though my own recounted here are a little different. I think Identity Crisis was an okay though overrated read -- still better than Meltzer's hack writing on Green Arrow or his "superhero-comic-where-nothing-happens" take on the current Justice League of America -- but it's tainted by lots of convenient characterization gloom (i.e. really bad things happening to good characters causing them to question their heroism). This seems to be used by a lot of comic book writers these days as a quick attempt to create depth in a character, usually when they are too lazy or want to sell a few more books.

It's too geky to get into here (even though I just swooned over Mouse Guard above), but it boils down to this question: "Whatever happened to fun comics?" Perhaps I've been reading too many issues of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Superman, and Challengers of the Unknown from the 60s and 70s, but I tend to find those comics more compelling than what passes for compelling comics writing these days. There's something so calculating about characterization in modern comics and modern comics writing. There's no exhiliration in it anymore; the colorful awe is almost entirely replaced with bad attempts at verisimilitude, with grittiness, with characters who do nothing but brood over responsibilities and their own powers. Peter Parker brooded too, but it seems more natural for a lonely adolescent to do it than, say, a quivering, weak-kneed, lachrymose Superman or a Batman who acts like Howard Hughes. There's nothing wrong with dark comics or the shadows of reality spilling onto bright Benday dots, but when it's done simply as a quick way to add supposed depth, it's just another gimmick no better than a holofoil variant cover.

In the end, I suppose this ties back into why Mouse Guard is so much better that a lot of comics currently out on the market: Petersen is trying to tell a good story, not striving for shock; he's creating a reality within his narrative rather than adding violent grit in order for his narrative to mirror the perceived hard edges of reality; but most of all, Petersen is using his imagination, something that the great writers in the medium from Stan Lee to Alan Moore to Grant Morrison have in spades that many other writers in the medium, particularly now, seem to lack.

Today's Bad Joke About a Serious Environmental Issue

From February's issue of Harper's Magazine:

"James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia hypothesis, said that the earth has a fever, and predicted that a warmer planet would be unlikely to support more than 500 million humans."

Lovelock added that the only prescription is more cowbell.

Dignity, Always Dignity 2: The Subway Boogaloo

The fine people at Improv Everywhere have updated their site with more links, photos, and some video for No Pants 2k7. One of their links goes to Downtown Express, a weekly publication in lower Manhattan. The Downtown Express No Pants 2k7 story boasts the following tasteful pictue...


Yes, I can now not get a job in lower Manhattan.

The last time I was in a small newspaper was at age 5 or 6 for an optimistic drawing of the immigrant experience; crayon and color-pencil refugees jumping for joy on a pirate schooner as a crudely rendered land mass lay just yards away. Now, some two decades later, I'm not wearing any pants. Life is funny like that.

Dignity, Always Dignity

Yesterday I participated in the Sixth Annual No-Pants Subway Ride put on by the fine people of Improv Everywhere. More than 200 people (maybe even approaching 300) got together and took off their pants on the uptown 6 train, got off at 125th street, hung out on the platform, and then rode the downtown 6 train back to around city hall. It was a fun time had by all and it gave me an excuse to not wear pants in public, which is always great. There's nothing like reading Ian McEwan without having to worry about one's trousers.

Thank you to Steph Goralnick for providing the pic.

View Steph Goralnick's No Pants Flickr Set

View Chad Nicholson's No Pants Flickr Set

For more photo sets of the no-pants subway ride, just search for "no pants" on Flickr and you should come up with quite a few results... you cheeky monekys.

Expect a link to Improv Everywhere in about a week when they put their account of the pantsless jamboree online.

Yakmallah!

Last year, voters made a crucial decision that would affect the course of human history. It would have a lasting impact on not just the lives of our children but our children's children as well. And I think people also voted for a bunch of Congresspeople or something, but I can't be sure.

The glorious bit of democracy referenced above was Warner Home Video and Amazon.com's DVD Decision 2006, a 30-day vote-a-thon allowing people to decide what films should finally come to DVD. Among the winners were the Ray Bradbury film adaptation The Illustrated Man, Elia Kazan's meditation on disillusionment The Arrangement, and, of course, the Cold War gymnast/kung-fu movie Gymkata.

Yes, quite possibly one of the best bad movies ever made, Gymkata, is coming to DVD and I can't be any happier. There was a time when they would show Gymkata on TBS or TNT every few months, and I'd do my best to catch it. Sadly it faded away, a glorious floor routine consigned to memory until now. If there were any proof that democracy works wonders, this is it; now we can witness the skill of gymnastics and the kill of karate at our own leisure rather than waiting for 1:15am on a Wednesday night/Thursday morning.

Rather than recount the glory and lampoon it myself, I lazily give you this: I-Mockey's take on Gymkata.

Thunderball Fists!
The best bad movie, however, is still the Shaw Brothers sci-fu flick Infra-Man. Well, I shouldn't say it's a bad movie at all since it's actually one of my favorite guilty pleasures and, being one of the first movies I remember watching, Infra-Man had a great deal to do with my growth and development as a person... for better or worse.

Here's a clip of the glory that is Infra-Man.



Incidentally, the other first few movies I remember seeing were Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.