Richard Cheese vs. Al Capone

I think I’m officially going to wuss out. A friend is co-organizing a comedy revue tonight at 7:30 at Comix, and I may actually pay to go to that instead of going for free to that David Byrne concert in Prospect Park. Sounds crazy, I know — especially what with it being my “Month of Rock!” and all, but I just can’t face the, uh, prospect of thousands and thousands of people packed together without pre-assigned seats. Yes, I’m paying to avoid excitement, a sure sign of aging. Tough.

Of course, in an ideal world, devoid of trade-offs and cost-benefit analysis — the world the government thinks we live in, in other words — a man wouldn’t have to choose between rock and comedy because he’d always be able to experience both at the same time. I managed to achieve that state two months ago by going to a Richard Cheese concert, and I must say, of all the events Helen and I have gone to in the past several months, I would have thought that would be one of the least likely to be written up in the Wall Street Journal, but it was. Good for Mr. Cheese.

If a guy who often sings obscene rap songs in a Sinatra-like lounge style is too gangsta and not enough gangster for you, though, you’ll be pleased to hear that a song by Al Capone about his mother (or his wife or the Virgin Mary) was also discovered around the time of that concert. I’ve heard David Byrne is a lousy tipper, though, so who’s the real criminal?

Ugly Singers, Beautiful Music (and Merely Odd-Looking Byrne and Eno)

Looking back on it all now that she’s come in second and emotionally collapsed, was the reason for all the hubbub over Britain’s Got Talent contestant Susan Boyle mainly that we’d forgotten the ugly can sing? (Meatloaf, anyone?)

I contend that a lot of rockers pre-Britney-or-so were unapologetically heinous, and that everyone in media has gotten so good-looking in the past couple decades we’ve buried the traumatic memories of old. Watch some 80s videos and you’ll be amazed how many already-aging paunchy males with bad hair you see, in particular — but I also contend the female singer from the Waitresses, for instance, just wouldn’t fly today. (The tragically obese but sexy-voiced lead singer of Romeo Void is a separate issue, since even back in the day many of us knew she just wasn’t going to cut it in the MTV era, though we were rooting for her.)

Even some of the singers from the 80s who still seem hot when you watch their videos suffer, of course, from the broader 80s problem of hair and makeup that are ludicrously unsubtle by today’s standards, as though everyone back then was a Lithuanian prostitute who had just recently acquired enough money to experiment with cosmetics — not that I’m faulting anyone for being poor or exploring new territory.

Around the time of the Britney/Latino/Disney/boy band explosion of the late 90s, though, we quickly came to accept that rockers are supposed to look very good (and shortly thereafter that even indie/alternative bands like the Strokes should lean toward Menudo-hood in their prepackagedness — soon we’ll expect them to be genetically-engineered, not that I’m knocking that idea).

•••

On another England note, I have only just learned that one musician who worked with avant-garde modernist composer John Cage when he was young was: John Cale, who was heavily influenced by Cage’s use of “drone” tones, apparently (and went on to co-found Velvet Underground). That makes me feel a bit less guilty about occasionally getting their names mixed up.

The Lou Reed/John Cale partnership is also a reminder that alternative rock was a U.S./UK partnership from the get-go — without which we wouldn’t have things, four and a half decades later, like tomorrow’s free concert in Prospect Park in Brooklyn by David Byrne performing songs he co-created with Brian Eno. I’m sure it will be a mob scene, in a good way. A free Byrne concert in Brooklyn is like Elvis performing for free in Memphis (home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks, needless to say).

Addict, Scientist, Monster, Madman

Some more reminders the music stuff and the nerd stuff sometimes blend:

•It’s not Julie Taymor and U2’s Spider-Man musical, but on the bright side a mere ten bucks gets you into the musical one of my co-workers, Matt Johnston, is directing (which I’ll attend this Sunday at 2pm if anyone wants to join me) about superheroes and supervillains attending a cocaine rehab clinic, fittingly called Superhero Celebrity Rehab: The Musical.

•Here’s Beaker from The Muppet Show performing “Yellow” by Coldplay and doing another number that’s more disturbing. (I notice that in my notes I said Radiohead instead of Coldplay, but that doesn’t surprise me — in contrast to the usual results with my keen ear, the more I listen to those two bands the less I can tell them apart.)

•On a related note, I contend that Cookie Monster doing a Barry White impression ends up bearing a weird resemblance to Roxy Music. (Note: Bryan Ferry once dated the mother of a woman I dated, so I’d kid her about possibly being Ferry’s lovechild…though in truth I sometimes wonder…)

•Finally, how cool would it be to be a comic book writer-artist and have a rock band? As cool as Madman creator Mike Allred, that’s how cool. (Even cooler would be an anarchist comic book writer who performs music, like Alan Moore, but the political gold [standard] medal would have to go to Nexus creator Mike Baron: comic book writer, rock band, libertarian. If he also becomes a scientist, he’s achieved the sacred tetralogy.)

Walk Like an Egyptian -- to the 60s

Here, thanks to tech-savvy Ken Silber, is audio from our debate about Zionism two nights ago.  (Ken notes that the audience vote, which went against Zionism, might have been ever so slightly skewed by a crucial misquoted stat about land ownership in Israel.)

This week has been a big one for Middle East news (and this month is scheduled to see U.S. troops withdraw from Iraqi cities). We have seen President Obama talk like an Egyptian — and if you were around in the summer of 1986, odds are you were trying to “Walk Like an Egyptian,” since the Bangles released that perfect pop song then.

Odder, did you know Matthew Sweet and Bangles lead singer Susanna Hoffs (seen above back in the day doing a sidelong glance and today, looking perfect at fifty) did an album together of 60s covers, including a Fairport Convention song (Fairport Convention being the epic folk-rockers who likely greatly influenced the new Decemberists album), inspired by the Hoffs/Sweet collaboration in an Austin Powers movie? And so mod rears its head on this blog once more this week.

The Twitularity Is Near

It’s not just me. I’ve noticed several of my blogger-type acquaintances worrying that the whole culture, even seemingly quick-and-easy blog entries, is on the verge of being supplanted by Twitter dispatches — a mere 140 characters per thought and thus perhaps the death knell of linear, sustained thought, not to mention solitary contemplation (since Twitter inevitably becomes a sort of hive-mind group activity, often leading to the amorphous formation of a consensus group-opinion about some event while it’s still going on). It’s not quite the “Singularity” — humanity becoming Borg, in essence — that writers like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge have envisioned. More like culture becoming confetti rather than integrated circuitry. A pseudo-singularity, occurring halfway between the releases of Terminator Salvation and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, that may just be the latest step on our seemingly irreversible road to fast-paced stupidity.

I’ll see Tyler Cowen speak to the Junto libertarian discussion group tonight, and his latest book, Create Your Own Economy, is partly aimed at convincing me — as he usually does — that all this is OK and a natural, culturally beneficial outgrowth of market forces. Maybe it’s even something I should be applauding like the decentralized pirate radio broadcasts I blogged about yesterday. Yet I find myself sympathizing with Kyle Smith’s recent column about how ephemeral blogs are and with Daniel Radosh’s recently-expressed qualms about blogging degenerating into Twittering. Combine that with Julian Sanchez’s meta-worries about nobody knowing when to admit “I don’t know” in online debates or opinion journalism (with insightful response from me in the comments thread).

Next, mix in my longstanding worry that civilization is going to end in some sort of ugly uprising involving “flashmobs.” Then consider that I’ve been around the fast-talking twentysomething pals of my lovely girlfriend, Helen Rittelmeyer. Compound all this with my annoyance at talk of an impending Twitter-sponsored reality show about regular people competing to track celebrities and gossip about them (an idea that combines about six different already-annoying components). And I’m left feeling, as James Taranto would put it, that everything is seemingly spinning out of control. Or just that I’m old and about to slip completely out of touch.

•••

Of course, none of this means I sympathize with still-authoritarian and nominally-communist China, which is combating remembrances of Tiananmen Square (and the potential for a more easily-organized repeat of such an event) by trying to shut down Twitter use in China today, as Tiananmen’s twentieth anniversary arrives. That in itself should be enough to get me to see the increasing speed and Twitterization of culture as subversive in a good way (it can also be used to surmount mainstream media bias, obviously — like if you wanted to make sure news of two soldiers being shot in Little Rock by an antiwar Muslim assassin got as much attention as that murder of an abortionist). But it all still makes me nervous.

Speaking of China and things from two decades past, Guns N’ Roses’ recent Chinese Democracy album was nothing so great as to be worth the seventeen-year wait since their last original-material studio album, but it was nice to hear that the title song was not just some randomly-chosen phrase — it really was an audacious warning to the tyrants in Beijing that they can’t hold onto power forever, or so says Axl. Former bandmate Duff McKagan is doing his own part to combat socialism, by the way, writing a column on the basics of economics for Playboy.com (I’m told).

All in all, this would be a sweet time to be someone who’d been in a coma for two decades but wanted to be able to wake up and hit the ground running culturally-speaking: Not only did a new G N’ R album just come out and China threaten Tiananmen-related crackdown measures but the comic book X-Men Forever is literally picking up where Chris Claremont left off writing X-Men in the summer of 1991, as it would have been had he just kept on writing. Add to this the fact that a Terminator sequel just came out and 90210 is on the air, and it’s like a member of the Class of ’91 could just as easily have slept from graduation until now — as I sometimes feel is the case anyway. But perhaps it’s time to leap into the future — time to rock n’ roll. Sigh. I’ll write about the Bangles or something tomorrow.

Boat Will Rock

I’m pleased to see a movie coming out on August 28 called The Boat That Rocked that depicts a heroic battle in 1966 between near-literal pirate radio stations, broadcasting rock from boats in opposition to the British government-licensed radio station’s more staid formats. (If you can’t wait that long to see a good movie, consider seeing the first annual Lighthouse International Film Festival in Long Beach Island, NJ, June 4-7 and organized by Charlie Prince, who just happens to be right-leaning.)

The boat film, it strikes me, is a good test of what sort of conservative one is. Obviously, libertarians (especially Jesse Walker and Brian Doherty — not to mention some libertarian ex-DJs I know, like David “Watts” Whitney and Michael Malice) will tend to side with the pirates in this case, but I would hope virtually all conservatives would applaud their defiance of onerous regulations. Unfortunately, there are those stick-in-the-mud, FCC-loving, authoritarian-type conservatives who still instinctively hate the rebels and love the Man — or will side with the pirates in this case only by suppressing their natural inclinations.

(Note that I’m assuming these broadcasters are “pirates” only in the sense that they’re homesteading unused bandwidth that should not be viewed as “owned” by the government in the first place — this is not the same, morally-speaking, as stealing your neighbor’s cable, and it’s certainly preferable to the kind of anti-globalization vandalism-as-protest that has taken dangerous form here in Manhattan recently, with incidents like that bombing of a Starbucks up in the East 90s, which fortunately have so far harmed no one. If it’s really the antiglob doing it, one has to wonder whether the logic of their anti-cosmopolitan position will eventually lead to a war against airmail, the Internet, and bus trips to Canada.)

Even more frightening than pro-FCC conservatives is that handful of leftists whose aesthetic and cultural allegiances might draw them rockward in the 1966 battle but who side with the government anyway on pro-regulation “principle” — though I’d urge them to recall (and this may be my main message in life) that your aesthetic inclinations should never lead to a knee-jerk fondness for regulations.

•••

You may recall that my ex-girlfriend Dawn Eden was a mod and a rock writer before becoming a religious activist — and in her old form called 1966 the peak of taste in American pop culture, not such an unreasonable position given the way it balanced old-fashioned jacket-and-tie presentability with a touch of bourgeoning psychedelia, achieving that nice but short-lived Batman/Gilligan/Prisoner/Star Trek balance.

But where does my new glam ladyfriend Helen Rittelmeyer stand on this boat vs. establishment question, you ask? I think she’s just pleased to see people passionately fighting for their sect or home team, which often means siding with traditionalists over innovators and reformers but also leads her to a fondness for feisty unions (and even Al Shanker), underdog sports teams, come-from-behind boxers, martyrs, Nietzsche, punks, and thus presumably rebellious broadcasters — not so much the boring bourgeoisie. She’s complex. (Of course, the staid bourgeoisie needs vigorous defending itself, from evil statist predators and common criminals, not to mention Naomi Klein — roughed up by the International Policy Network’s Kendra Okonski here.)

She also sort of enjoys seeing tribes duke it out and thus if she weren’t in DC right now might enjoy tonight’s Debate at Lolita Bar about Zionism and its implications for the Palestinians. Be there. It wasn’t easy setting up an Israelis/Palestinians debate, by the way — my original wording, “Should Israel Give Up Land?” was rejected by the originally-planned pro-Israel debater as too pro-Palestinian and rejected by the pro-Palestinian debater as too pro-Israel. I try.

Eliminating religion might help defuse the conflict, though contradictory land claims are the real problem. Also, my religion-eliminating solution probably wouldn’t go over well with the aforementioned ladyfriend, who already worries (eloquently) about the bourgeois, secular, naively perfectionist, suffering-ameliorating, and thus sometimes blandness-making, virtue-neglecting, and identity-erasing tendencies in the culture. By contrast, my slogan is nearly “Every Man a Cyborg,” my attitude toward pain and suffering (as a utilitarian) is nearly the same as Daffy Duck’s (I don’t like pain — it hurts me), and I think we can achieve excellence and virtue even while enjoying the material bounty of bourgeois, secular society that helped us go see They Might Be Giants and Frank Sinatra Jr. on the same night a few nights ago instead of being trapped on the bayou with a traditional jug band, to make a complex argument brutally short. (Then, too, we secular types can only get away with just so much serious ritualism before we get accused of hollowly mimicking the religious traditionalists — damned if we do, damned if we don’t, as it were.)

•••

But I’m a big-tent, fusionist kind of guy at heart, and I think the civilization’s big enough to embody a lot of these tensions without having to whittle things down to one winning formula. So I’ll save the politicking for next month and for now go back to talking about rock n’ roll — well, after blogging just a tiny bit about Twitter and some related problems tomorrow. If you crave more politics in the interim, contemplate how a certain residual libertarian/federalist streak in Cheney was his rationale for cautiously embracing gay marriage and how that might be a wise attitude toward the whole thing. Also, check out Op-Toons frequently for some sophisticated political humor — you gotta love the joke about Sotomayor being kept off the jury due to her ethnic bias. Oh, and read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, out yesterday in paperback, if you haven’t already.

P.S. One more religion note: My coworkers pointed out to me that the new Bishop of New York traditionally begins his term by knocking on St. Pat’s to be let in — but the doors are so massive he does it with a plain-old hammer in order to be heard, which for a second made one coworker, who was seeing this happen recently with the volume off on his TV, think a new burst of Protestant revolt was occurring or something, a la Martin Luther.

A Spector Is Haunting Rock

The anarchic spirit of rock n’ roll is never far removed from crime, usually metaphorically and occasionally literally. Phil Spector was recently sentenced to nineteen years for shooting a girlfriend. Mary Kay Letourneau, imprisoned for years for having a sexual relationship with one of her young students, is now celebrated with a Van Halen-inspired “Hot for Teacher” night at a Seattle bar where she and her former student, now husband co-host. (If I could easily find the Van Halen video on YouTube instead of just the audio, it would also be a reminder that back in the 80s, which I keep saying were in many ways looser than the 00s, nobody really blinked at images of, for instance, a dominatrix imprisoning schoolboys, whereas that would likely and understandably raise some eyebrows today.)

Frankly, I say good for Mary Kay and hubby. How many couples can boast of overcoming the obstacles they have and sticking together this long? She went to prison, for crying out loud, and they still got back together. And as every male no doubt thinks at some point but none are supposed to say in public: we might fear for young females exploited by predatory male teachers, but in cases where the genders are reversed, unless you’re a feminist of the sort who refuses to admit that switching the genders matters, you must suspect that the exploited young male, if his female teacher was sufficiently hot — see Debra Lafave photo above — was likely getting high fives from his school buddies for the rest of what he will probably quietly remember as “the absolute best year of high school ever.” Not that that necessarily means it should be legal, of course. But again: see photo of Debra Lafave above. I realize we don’t want a law code that lets hot women do things non-hot women cannot — but that’s sometimes a shame, isn’t it? Is anyone in Critical Legal Studies circles working to find a way around this problem?

(Perhaps all that can be a side discussion during tomorrow’s Zionism-themed Debate at Lolita Bar — which is not why the establishment is called that, by the way. It’s from the “Nolita”/“Lolita” geographic distinction on the Lower East Side near Little Italy. Of course, if we ever do some sort of cross-promotion with the nearby Lolita Bra shop, people will have more reasonable grounds to criticize.)

•••

Anyway: anyone interested in reconciling conservative impulses and the spirit of rock n’ roll — such as a guy espousing a form of “conservatism for punks” — would be well advised to admit up front that the two do not naturally jibe (failure to admit that leads to things like that fun but often unconvincing and contrived National Review list of 100 conservative rock songs three years ago). Conservatism is usually construed — at least in the context of social mores and before everyone started obsessing over boisterous radio hosts — to mean something like self-discipline, responsibility, respectability, calm, civility, and so forth. Rock, obviously, is not.

That’s why that photo of Nixon shaking Elvis’s hand seems like it should probably be embarrassing to both parties (even in an ideal world where you replace the phony-conservative president with a real one and the rock star with one who isn’t hypocritically offering to monitor the drug culture for the government).

Anyone espousing some sort of “conservatism for punks” must either have a very idiosyncratic definition of punk or, more likely, an idiosyncratic definition of conservatism. No one is allowed his own private language, but to avoid coyness and pretense, let me come right out and say that of course the Todd Seavey definition of conservatism, while hardly arbitrary or unprecedented, is and has long been one emphasizing the capitalist and individualist elements of the movement, not to trick anyone or to suggest that I get to vaingloriously declare myself a “movement of one,” but simply because they’re most the valuable elements, I think, and the direction I’d like to see the movement go in the future, if it has one.

By contrast, you may recall my beloved witty genius girlfriend, Helen Rittelmeyer (who just happens to be sort of a bad-girl turned teacher, come to think of it), taking the view that conservatism is almost entirely about solidarity and ritual expressions of human excellence (even, or perhaps especially, violent ones), not “do your own thing or whatever makes you happy” — and she admires punks precisely for submitting to a sort of strict collective self-discipline. (She often displays an admirable similar sense of solidarity around some of her comparably — though not, of course, equally! — brilliant and witty close friends.) So we both end up seeing two fusible strands but for what are arguably radically-different reasons, almost like two green anti-capitalists discovering hours into a conversation that one of them’s an idyllically-inclined Tory and the other a Gaia-worshipping left-anarchist (which sounds fun in its own way, of course).

Either way, though, we have to admit rock can be reconciled with conservatism mainly as a result of our unique takes on conservatism rather than as a natural fit. The interesting question is to what extent we may subconsciously, many years ago have redefined conservatism in our minds — before having explicit ideologies — precisely to make it accommodate rock. Rock is a force that cannot be denied at this point in history, after all, and few people are likely to risk giving it up for ideological reasons any more than, well, a professional science-promoting nerd is going to stop watching Lord of the Rings to protest its lack of scientific plausibility.

But a bit more on rock and politics in tomorrow’s entry, when we board The Boat That Rocked.

"Month of Rock!" Begins: Band Names Are Wrong

Nowhere but in horseracing and the naming of musical acts, it seems, do we accept that things should have names that consist of meaningful words yet convey no meaningful information about the thing being named.  I mean, the London Symphony Orchestra tells you quite clearly what you’re getting.  By contrast: Ned’s Atomic Dustbin?  Jesus and Mary Chain?  Pink Floyd?  I know I’m an uptight rationalist and all, but is it really healthy for our brains to so passively accept this sort of nonsense in popular culture without even stopping to think about it?

Free issues of the fluffy music magazine Blender started showing up in my mailbox recently, and they had an article on their choices for “worst” band names, from which I at least learned two that were worth the few seconds it took to glance at the article: Skabba the Hutt (a ska band, of course) and AIDS Wolf.  Whatever.

Anyway, since you’re facing an entire month of observations like this but may well be the sort of intelligent person more accustomed to coming here for political insights, you’d better compensate by attending our Debate at Lolita Bar (between Saif Ammous and Commentary’s Abe Greenwald) this Wednesday, 8pm, on the question “Is Zionism Racism?”  Of course, even there, we shall rock, just you watch.

Monster Finish

Before we take leave of my “Month of the Nerd II” and, tomorrow, begin my “Month of Rock!” let us pause to acknowledge that nerdiness and nerdy topics are not necessarily at odds with the spirit of rock n’ roll — witness songs like “Monster Hospital” by one of the coolest bands of this decade, New Wave-influenced Metric.

Speaking of monsters, comparably awesome, albeit admittedly far less hip, is this montage of cool Godzilla moments set to the tune of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla.” I loved Godzilla even before Star Wars — and dinosaur rock even before New Wave.

Speaking of beloved beasts, late and lamented Seavey family dog Uber sprang to my friend Paul Taylor’s mind recently when he saw a new Pepsi ad that simply says “UberGood” with Pepsi symbols as the o’s. Here’s hoping all the strange monsters in our lives prove as friendly as Uber — and none of them as terrifying as the monster at the end of the book that Grover unconvincingly tried to tell us was only him in that notorious children’s book, after begging us page after page not to turn the next one.

That book remains scarier than anything done to me by all the monster movies I’ve seen and horror stories I’ve read since, something people looking to create powerful new nerd material might want to consider.

One last monstrous-beast note: Be careful what you wish for. Last weekend, mere hours after I posted an entry mentioning my curiosity about what the monster called Swarm — a sentient cloud of bees — would look like in the upcoming Spider-Man stage musical, a game shop near Union Square was reportedly shut down and its workers trapped inside by thousands of swarming bees at its door, not a routine occurrence in Manhattan, and one that required the intervention of the NYPD bee expert, who must not get a lot of calls like that.

Cuddle Party, Sigourney Weaver, and Aliens

It was jarring to hear a line on King of the Hill this past Sunday caused by friends of mine — specifically Reid Mihalko and Marcia Baczynski, inventors, for good or ill, of cuddle parties.  In the sequence, Peggy Hill used Hank’s friends as a test of what things were still hip enough for her to talk about if she wanted to be cool, making a list of those things Hank’s friends hadn’t yet heard of.  Bill had heard of frittatas but not cuddle parties, so cuddle parties made the list.  I’m pretty sure this at least makes me hipper than Peggy Hill, for what it’s worth.

And as a hip guy, it’s nearly time I left this “Month of the Nerd II” behind and moved on to the arguably-cooler “Month of Rock!” for June’s blog entries — so tomorrow, a transitional nerd/rock entry.

I won’t forget nerdy things entirely, of course, even after this month has faded into the past.  For one thing, the rest of 2009 still brings such nerd films as the sixth Harry Potter on July 15, the crime-thriller comic book adaptation Whiteout on Sept. 11, the Wachowski-produced and Straczynski-written Ninja Assassin in November, and best of all (I predict) James Cameron’s 3D extraterrestrial war movie Avatar starring Sigourney Weaver in December.  If when all is said and done, 2009 is remembered more as the year of Avatar than the year of Watchmen, Star Trek, or for that matter G.I. Joe, I won’t be at all surprised.  What would be really impressive is if we come to look upon the Alien movies as mere warm-ups for Avatar.  You have to have hope.

Ursa vs. Motti (plus Evil-Lyn, Cat People, and Blade Runner)

Excellent nerd-film romance note: Sarah Douglas (who played Kryptonian villainess Ursa, the woman who slammed Superman in the gut with a thrown manhole cover after saying “Oh, Superman” in a delightfully taunting fashion in Superman II, possibly turning a lot of young nerds into dominatrix fans in the process and maybe inspiring the career of Laurie Anderson to boot) was briefly married to the actor who played Motti, the arrogant, Force-mocking guy who got briefly choked-from-afar by Vader during that meeting on the Death Star. Pretty S&M all around, really (as is this online Japanese videogame mentioned by Memepool, by the way, in which you get to be Victorian ladies having a slapfight — something reminiscent of the great Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age about it, or maybe China Mieville, given the S&M).

Sidenote: two years ago while being interviewed by Conan O’Brien, George Lucas claimed that that character is now officially named Admiral Conan Antonio Motti. Good for Conan. That’s right up there with being that guy who was supposed to play a stormtrooper in the first movie (along with his brother) but missed the shoot and got digitally inserted twenty years later for the re-releases.

Maybe trying to be an extra in the upcoming live-action TV series would be a productive use of my time. But if so, I want my name to be something like Viceroy Spiddoon. (I also want lightnunchuks. Has anyone had lightnunchuks yet? NOTE: Ah, it appears no one will be wielding lightnunchuks legally in New York state, thanks in part to Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Sonia Sotomayor.)

•••

Douglas was considered, understandably, for the role of Evil-Lyn in the Masters of the Universe movie (which was heavily influenced by Jack Kirby’s New Gods comics), but the role ended up being played by ubiquitous and eerily grey-eyed actress Meg Foster, who’s played everyone from the original Cagney at the outset of Cagney & Lacey to a brain-energy-sucking muse on Deep Space Nine, not to mention Hester Prynne in a 1979 PBS production of The Scarlet Letter that I recall making me think, “Wow, that lady has eerily grey eyes, kind of like a wolf — cool.”

I’ll take that any day over the violet eyes of Elizabeth Taylor — whose appeal I have never fully understood, though women all seem to think she’s astounding. Is it just because Taylor has a very tiny waist? Women just aren’t qualified to appreciate the full complexities and possibilities of the female form, alas. But then, I admit I’m not fully qualified to understand, for example, why Jimmy Smits is such a big deal. (I don’t think it’s just because he played Leia’s dad, important though that obviously is.)

•••

Likewise, I remember all the girls in my English class in high school failing to understand why Nastassja Kinski was so popular with the fellas, whereas I still regard it as something like a miracle that regular broadcast Channel 38 out of Boston used to show Cat People with the nudity intact in the scene where Kinski is strapped to the bed. The 80s was really a lot more permissive in many ways than the 00s.

If I ever claim not to understand why Nastassja Kinski is considered attractive, treat me as if I’ve just failed a Voight-Kampff Test and act appropriately. Even stoics and sociopaths should be able to pass a Voight-Kampff Test, after all. (Come to think of it, aren’t spam filters basically a daily exercise in applied Turing Tests?) Oddly enough, the Voight-Kampff Test, which ought to be a rather cold procedure, supplied us with perhaps the sexiest line in sci-fi history: Sean Young saying “Are these questions testing whether I’m a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?” As neo-noir interrogation scenes go, right up there with the intense psycho-turnabout in Basic Instinct. The real lesson in all this: beware robotic bisexual women with no emotional reaction to roadkill.

P.S. In other nerd-film couple news, the site Newsarama noted that if Scarlett Johansson plays superheroine Black Widow in next year’s Iron Man sequel as planned, she’ll be half a Marvel-assassin household because her husband’s the guy who played Deadpool in Wolverine. That’s cool, and it’ll be even cooler if the Iron Man sequel doesn’t suck.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: Is Zionism Racism?

No, Lolita Bar isn’t becoming the U.N. for a night (that’s up in the East 40s, we’re on the Lower East Side), but next week we are broaching one of the most controversial geopolitical questions, “Is Zionism Racism?”:

Wednesday, June 3 (8pm):

Blogger at SaifHouse Saif Ammous argues yes.

Blogger at Commentary Abe Greenwald argues no.

Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.

Free admission, cash bar.  Basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.

The debate should be made extra-interesting by the participation of Saif and Abe (who, in addition to having debated other topics at Lolita, also used to attend the Manhattan Project social gatherings I host, noted in my right margin).  They are not mere left-vs.-right stereotypes.  Abe’s got too decent a sense of humor for that, and Palestinian-American blogger Saif is a libertarian not so unlike myself — though my vague moderate-conservative impulse has always been to lean Israel-ward on this issue.  Saif notes, though, that one of the most influential libertarians of all, Murray Rothbard, took the anti-Israel position, as he explained in this essay.  (Despite being called a Rothbardian a couple times, I don’t always agree with him, though — and I’ll stay neutral during the debate.)

Meanwhile, in keeping with this blog’s “Month of the Nerd II” theme, I must note that Saif’s pal Richard Spencer (who’ll be one of our July debaters on a different topic, as it happens) compares Star Trek’s Vulcans to the Jews in a new article for TakiMag, of which he’s managing editor.  (I wrote an article contrasting Star Trek’s U.N.-like streak with Star Wars’s more rebellious tone myself in Liberty back in the mid-90s, suggesting as a nice compromise the show Babylon 5 — about a space station that was called humanity’s “last, best hope” in the show’s opening narration.)

Richard might have added that there is an interesting (whether planned or not) generational divide between the self-descriptions of old-Spock and young-Spock in the new Trek movie.  When the Vulcans appear doomed, Nimoy says: I have been a witness to genocide.  Zachary Quinto, playing the young Spock, says: I am a member of an endangered species.  I imagine some folks at our last debate, on animal welfare, would find the latter more alarming, though I think most of us were more moved by Nimoy’s line.

In any case, we will resolve all outstanding conflicts related to these matters to everyone’s satisfaction, bringing about en era of unending peace, next Wednesday, so you have to be there.

Megan Fox

Brian Austin Green (from the late, lamented Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) reportedly wanted to play superhero Green Lantern in the movie due out in mid-2011, and he’s producing the movie Fathom (also based on comics) starring his ex Megan Fox as an aquatic superhero who…well, something involving lots of shots of her in a bikini, anyway. I forget the details.

Fox is also playing the zombie in the Diablo Cody-written Jennifer’s Body movie this year, and I assume she’s in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen next month. (I assume that song by Cody’s fellow ex-stripper Courtney Love inspired the Jennifer’s Body title, and if they use the song in the film, that’s cool. It will bring back memories of seeing Love throw Barbie dolls into the audience when I saw her perform at the Stone Pony in the mid-90s.)

I’m not a big fan of the generic-seeming Fox (or countless other generic hot chicks Hollywood briefly exalts), but here, I admit, is a good argument for having cast her in yet another comics-based movie next year, the cowboy saga Jonah Hex. Much the way people who’ve been involved in politics and TV news (myself included, perhaps) start sounding and looking generic to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum, it’s a movie hot chick’s job to appeal at least a little to all of us, not to be any one fan’s quirky dreamgirl, especially with about $200 million worth of computer-animated giant robots invested in a project. C’est la vie.

Watchmen vs. Bazooka Joe

When Watchmen came out a couple months ago, opinion was divided — some people, like me, loved it, but some people I respect also considered it overly complicated or pretentious, or felt that the classic original comic book was not meant to be adapted to film in the first place, at least not like this.

For anyone who thinks Watchmen was overreaching, though, I have encouraging news. Hollywood is now poised to adapt a comics character who should not present excessive plot or conceptual complexity: Bazooka Joe. That’s right, the guy in the brief but terrible jokes from the gum wrappers. I pity the scriptwriter who has to figure out which “story arc” to use for the film. Perhaps they’ll take a Bazooka Begins approach and explain how Joe acquired his eye patch. Presumably in a bazooka accident, right? Don’t stand behind that thing! “I lost an eye, but now I see the comedy in everyday events…” Etc.

(I should confess I actually have a Bazooka Joe comic magnetized to my freezer door, since it’s the best one I’ve ever seen. Joe loses a bet with his friend Pesty about whether the Earth is round or flat, so Joe’s dad good-naturedly offers to pay the bet for him, asking how much the bet was, to which Joe says: “A million dollars!” That’s as good as Bazooka Joe gets, I’m afraid. To cover weird scratches that were on my freezer, which came with the apartment, I’ve stuck pretty much any old magnetic thing I had or got for free recently up there, with the result being that it’s now somewhat disturbingly festooned with magnets depicting a tyrannosaurus rex, a polar bear, a tiger, the Red Dress Ink “chick lit” logo, Winnie the Pooh, Curious George in a spacesuit, and Arkansas State Rep. Dan Greenberg. Now there’s a fan fiction crossover premise for you.)

The Bazooka Joe idea comes to us thanks to Michael Eisner, the studio exec who, back when he was running ABC a decade ago and I was a cog there, wanted to revitalize that network with retooled shows such as Mod Squad: Hawaii — and not in the kitschy way that Quentin Tarantino and McG might mean that, I fear. (If they had done the show, I hope they would have cast Peggy Lipton from the original 1970s series, still looking good at sixty-two today and seen here six years ago.)

•••

Anyone who thought Watchmen was overreaching is unlikely to be mollified by my observation that the film had a few overt Stanley Kubrick homages (that’d probably just make matters worse): From the distinctly Kubrickesque slow-push-in-with-room-tone on the “3001″ number on the Comedian’s door in the first scene to a similar push-in on Rorschach talking to the psychiatrist, the pan across monitors in the prison, and the Strangelovean war room. If memory serves, I saw the movie four times. No regrets.

And despite it making a bit less money than hoped (not enough to inspire any lunatic exec to demand a sequel, which is for the best), keep in mind it did make about as much as Slumdog Millionaire, the Liam Neeson action hit Taken, Gran Torino, and Fast & Furious, each of those at about $140 million — and again, the fan fiction crossover writes itself.

If Hollywood benefits from having hits that size with budgets far smaller than Watchmen’s you’d think they’d try really hard to get good scripts and lay off the special effects. You’d think. And that’d be fine even with geeks like me. But until then, July brings the sixth Harry Potter movie, which will probably be fine. Here’s hoping it makes guys who kinda look like Draco Malfoy all the rage.

Capt. America, V for Very Authoritarian, and Some Comics Wisdom

It’s Memorial Day, a fine time to remember brave soldiers and some important political lessons, to wit:

•It’s interesting that (at the moment) Steve Rogers, who was Captain America for decades, is dead, while his old World War II sidekick Bucky, believed for sixty years to be the only comic book character to stay dead, is now alive and carrying on the role of Captain America. Let that be inspiration to anyone trying to rebuild a career after being frozen in ice for a half-century.

•A remake of the anti-authoritarian miniseries V, about an alien invasion that offers the Earth’s populace so many goodies that they just keep looking the other way while their liberties erode (even forming enthusiastic youth cadres to celebrate our new alien overlords), comes to ABC in the fall.  Here you can see a teaser clip featuring the lovely Morena Baccarin (from Firefly) in a role similar to that played by the more badass Jane Badler in the original series.  Baccarin turns thirty on June 2, by the way, so consider getting her something nice.  She offers you courtesan services and advanced technology, after all.

•TV and comics writer (and Brown alum) Christos Gage imparts some important, basic political wisdom, I think, in answering an interview question about why the umbrella organization called the Avengers Initiative continues to exist in the Marvel Universe despite widely being known to be corrupt:

What keeps any big, corrupt organization rolling? It’s benefiting the people in charge. I think we’ve all seen that many large agencies, whatever purpose they might have been founded to serve, often come to a point where the real agenda is perpetuating itself so as to benefit those in power. Obviously, someone highly placed — i.e. Norman Osborn — sees a major upside. And think about it–what better way to fleece people than pretending to protect them? If you’re the local crooked sheriff, you can soak a community for all it’s worth if you’re smart about it. Of course, it helps if the locals think you’re helping them, and if they see you take down a burglar or two every now and then. And there’s the rub. How will these, shall we say, “self-interested” individuals react to having to put their lives on the line to save Joe Sixpack from Galactus? (Just to pull out a name–Galactus is not showing up any time soon!)

Healthy anarchist skepticism — and superheroes.  Always a good combo.