Philosophy Is Like Sawing the Limb You Sit On (and "The Collector" Is Like "Saw")

No sooner had I asked Helen (who likes boxing, monster movies, and other violent manifestations of culture) whether she likes the Saw movies and been reassured to find that she doesn’t…than I learned that a friend of mine, Courtney Balaker (who herself portrayed a vampire in the film Sleepless Nights), helped produce the horror movie The Collector, out today, which began life as a proposed Saw prequel (about a burglar entering a home only to find that a madman is already holding the family inside hostage).

Her husband Ted Balaker’s works, such as these libertarian shorts about iPods-vs.-protectionism and P.J. O’Rourke, are probably better suited to keeping me happy, but you sort of have to see your friend’s horror movie, no matter how sadistic, don’t you? (Heck, I even said in a comments thread on my entry from two days ago that I’d read a comic book if the author gave me a copy and asked me to.) And a movie about hostage-taking and home invasion is in some sense a movie celebrating freedom and property anyway, isn’t it?

Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m not worried one bit about the quality of the The Collector (which I gather has already gotten positive reviews — and should not be confused with the somewhat similarly-premised 60s novel/movie of the same title about a lovelorn kidnapper). I’m flat-out admitting I’m afraid of The Collector. And I don’t mean I’ll leap or weep there in the theatre. I mean I’m worried about the long-term effect on my psyche. I’ve never seen any of the Saw movies, but I fear I will nonetheless take to the grave my memory of just hearing a flesh-rending scene described by my friend Diana Fleischman (ironically, a vegan who I believe was involved romantically with a vivisectionist at some point and has a family name with “meat” in it, so she sort of sounds like a horror movie waiting to happen — but more about her tomorrow).

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Well, if I do see The Collector, I guess August will be one terrifying month, since this coming Wednesday (8pm), of course, will be our Debate at Lolita Bar between Lillian Waters and Jen Dziura on the eerie question “Have We Ever Been Visited by Extraterrestrials?”

And by the way, if neither The Collector nor UFOs scare you, maybe you’re ready to face Jen Dziura’s alarming one-woman comedy show on August 7 (one week from tonight at 9:30pm) about What Philosophy Majors Do After College (a topic clearly meant to strike terror into the hearts of people like me, Dan Greenberg, Koli Mitra, Ken Dornstein, Holly Caldwell, and a few others who spring to mind — Holly even getting laughed at once by a job-placement expert when she revealed her major, but that was before she became a patent attorney).

Note that by buying tickets to the show through the green ticket service linked above you are supposedly able to choose which of multiple good causes right in your own area to donate part of the proceeds to — and I decided to think of the children, since I don’t notice much in the way of animals needing rescue on the Upper East Side.

Corpse-Eating, Lawn-Mowing Robots

Given humanity’s boundless capacity to blame the other guy when things go wrong, I wouldn’t be too shocked if I lived to see humanity exterminated by out-of-control robots and the last living pundits fighting over whether nerds should be thanked for warning of this possibility (in sci-fi) or condemned for building the robots.

(Certainly, such a scenario would settle the “monkey butler vs. robot butler” controversy, on opposite sides of which Helen and I sometimes find ourselves — and she’s not that crazy about dogs, so I find it hard to believe she’d be comfortable around an actual monkey butler, primates being far more dangerous — but more about primates in two days.)

There’s already a fight over who to blame in the recent attack on a factory worker by a robot.

Much as I love seeing (real) headlines like this: “Hate to cut your grass? Check out the best robotic lawn mowers,” I can’t help worrying that the lawn-mowing robots’ programming will at some point inevitably be mixed up with that of the corpse-eating, steam-powered robots the military is supposedly designing (if that rather ludicrous and steampunk-sounding idea isn’t just some psych-warfare tactic meant to gull Middle Easterners). As my friend Chris says, you’d sometimes think the military has seen no cautionary horror movies at all.

(If the lawn-mowing robots become commonplace, though, perhaps they can be used to mow artificial lawns.)

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Would we be able to stop a robot uprising, perhaps caused by some out-of-control a.i. predator drone interpreting its “kill the enemy” mandate too broadly? Beats me, but this Wikipedia paragraph — concerning just two of the forty or so movie Transformers we’ve seen so far (specifically, the bad helicopter and the burrowing scorpion-thing that attaches to him) — is a reminder how hard it is just making a movie about robots:

Frank Welker provided vocal effects for Blackout, who transforms into a MH-53J Pave Low III helicopter, with his minion Scorponok attaching to him. Soundwave had been considered for this role, with Ravage as his minion, but Hasbro insisted Soundwave have a music-based role. Scorponok was chosen after the writers discovered him in the pages of The Ultimate Guide and felt he was appropriate to the setting. A model of his head and tail was built, while primacord explosives were used for his ripple movements in the sand. This was potentially dangerous to cast members, generating genuine terror in the actors’ performances. During production, Blackout was preliminary named Incinerator, Grimlock, Devastator, and Vortex, being referred to by Ben Procter as the Transformer with “the most name changes during development.”

On a less ominous movies-come-true note, Jacob Levy points out to me a story about Star Trek IV’s beautiful dream of transparent aluminum becoming reality (though Chuck Blake reminds me that this superheated material is of little use in the low-energy everyday world).

And as for whether we really stand on the brink of forming a galactic federation, being invaded, or simply continuing to cope with messes of our own creation, remember to help us settle that question next week at Lolita Bar when Lillian Waters and Jen Dziura debate the meaning of the UFO phenomenon.

Fables of Liberty

Walking last night to an event hosted by an anarcho-capitalist I know, I heard my name called out and realized I’d been spotted on the street for the second time by a guy I know as he attended an anti-government-spending protest, and unlike last time (when I was doing a quick pass through the Times Square Tea Party protest), I didn’t even know there was a protest going on this time until I stumbled by it (specifically, by the midtown office of Sen. Chuck Schumer).  They were protesting socialized medicine this time, and I wished them luck.

Speaking of libertarians, you may recall that I decided to use my remaining comic book store credit (just before reading my final comic book last week) on a Pete Bagge anthology of comics from Reason.  It was sold out, though — which is good for society, if not for me personally — so I instead got the first volume of DC’s comic Fables, Bill Willingham’s noir-like saga of familiar fairy tale characters living underground in modern New York City.  (On another retro-hip New York-meets-old-timeyness note, you might check out Molly Crabapple’s new graphic novel, Scarlett Takes Manhattan.)

And I swear I’d genuinely forgotten, in my quest for something hip yet classic, that Willingham is a libertarian/conservative who has even written for the conservative site BigHollywood.  Indeed, Snow White’s opening speech is about how the “mundanes” (normal humans) look to government to solve their problems, but fables-beings solve their own problems, and their Snow White-run “government” explicitly lacks even the power to tax, relying on donations.  That’s hardcore anarcho-capitalism, my friends — or should I simply say, that’s liberty.  (It’s also perfect fodder for a movie or TV show, and I think there’s something in the works.)

•••

On another libertarian-yet-traditionalist note, Willingham joked at the recent San Diego Comic Convention that he’s 97% sure he won’t turn a gay character from the Justice Society of America, which he’s just begun writing, straight, but he leaves the 3% chance “because I’m a Republican.”  The highlight of San Diego, though, was no doubt this rousing speech by my friend Ali Kokmen, who sells manga for Random House.

Ali, one of the nicest people on the planet, has also recently been encouraging people to donate to pay the medical bills of ill and cash-strapped comics writer John Ostrander, if you’re interested in looking him up and helping out.  We wouldn’t want him becoming the new host-body for the Spectre, after all.

Speaking of ghostly figures:

(a) That apparition in the photo above is the marvelously-named Elva Beene, one of Indiana’s most-wanted criminals and a woman who strikes me as looking rather like she could be the sister of Elric of Melnibone, the albino swordsman from Michael Moorcock’s stories (whose look was imitated for the evil prince in Hellboy 2).

(b) Remember to attend our August 5 (8pm) Debate at Lolita Bar one week from tonight between Lillian Waters and Jen Dziura (herself a friend of the aforementioned Crabapple) to find out the answer to the question “Have We Ever Been Visited by Extraterrestrials?” — and find out whether your dreams about ghostly figures probing you are more than imagination.

(c) And for anyone out there who is still buying comics, you might consider Marvel’s Marvels Project, depicting with realistic painted art the rise of the first wave of their hero characters seventy years ago, in 1939, starting, according to a teaser sequence seen online, with a clever bit in which an elderly man dying in a hospital foretells the coming age of heroes — because, it is revealed, he is the cowboy-era hero Two-Gun Kid, whose adventures have included time-traveling to our era to meet the Avengers.  It’s all connected by coincidence and causality, as in real life.

World Peace Through Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and the Coolatta

The comments thread under my Saturday blog entry, about Henry Louis Gates’ overreaction to the police, contained a couple jokes about Starbucks as a place of ethnic blending — and that’s fitting, of course, since even in other parts of the world, American-style franchise restaurants (much as the cultural-protectionists of both left and right, not to mention that recent Starbucks bomber near me, may hate to hear this) often become a sort of calming, neutral safe haven for people needing a little escape from all the local culture. (Or as a friend of mine from a rural background once put it: sure, small towns have rich local cultures — that’s why so many people want to get away from them.)

Almost as interesting as seeing commercial space become ethnically-neutral and thus liberating space is seeing commercial brands that have fought so hard for individual recognition sharing space. The brand-watching modern mind reels in much the same way hardcore racists of old must have recoiled at mixed-race individuals: How can a Baskin-Robbins and a Dunkin’ Donuts exist in the same space at the same time?! That strangeness is celebrated to hilarious effect in a hiphop song (pointed out to me by Helen, who is obviously more street than I) called “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.”

I am reminded of Kramer’s bafflement on Seinfeld in the implausible episode revealing he’d never been downtown, climaxing with his panic upon reaching the intersection of First Avenue and 1st St. and thinking he “must be at the nexus of the universe!” (That was clearly one of the most sci-fi-influenced jokes in sitcom history, with perhaps the most out-and-out nerdy being the moment on Seinfeld when the “Bizarro Jerry,” with essentially no background explanation for the uninitiated, ended the episode by declaring “Me am so happy!”)

•••

Turnabout being fair play, I notice that in New York City at least, Indians appear overwhelmingly to staff the Dunkin’ Donuts shops — one of those relatively random and probably in no way sinister ethno-commercial flukes that renders the equal-representation-everywhere expectations of affirmative action and EEOC defenders ridiculous. (Does anyone really think the Indian hegemony in the U.S. oppressed all the white applicants to Dunkin’ Donuts? More likely, word of mouth and path-of-least-resistance social ties contributed to friends and relatives of the first workers there attracting the next, etc., no more mysteriously than a Chinese man who opens a restaurant thinking, “Where will we find chefs? I know — call my cousins!”)

This is important to me for two reasons: 1. my apparent affinity for India and 2. my need for the occasional Coolatta.

1. It seems as though there have almost always been a few prominent people in my life with ties, ancestral or otherwise, to India, it occurs to me — my naturally-surrealist friend Prasad Kantharaj in elementary school (influencing my sense of humor forevermore by being prone to say things that made no sense in any cultural context, such as a whispered “This sheep is Julius Caesar” during class, often punctuated with “arooga” noises and other manmade sound effects), college acquaintances Viraj and Munia, Kaplan co-worker turned purported “quantum healer” Sangeeta Sahi, a couple writer acquaintances, and of course ex-girlfriends Indrani and Koli (and I’m not even counting possibly-related phenomena like my friend Diana now moving to India or the time I kissed a Pakistani woman named Teniyah I met on the bus while we were still on the bus, only to have her bid me a sad farewell and reveal her engagement ring — which I swear I hadn’t noticed — when we exited after this very brief affair, which, given her very anti-Bush and somewhat anti-U.S. sentiments, my friend Ted Balaker may have been correct to declare a shameful triumph of gonads over principle).

Indeed, Helen thinks I have two main “types”: Indians and “theologically-troubled blondes” (two members of the latter category having announced their weddings in the past month or so, as it happens). If these two types are actually important parts of my psyche and not simply side effects of me seeking out intelligence (don’t forget the Jewish exes, after all), then there’s probably an ashram near Deli [CORRECTION: make that Delhi -- Foodian slip] that would be a paradise for me, as long as none of the residents are mystics or hippies, but that seems unlikely, by definition.

2. Also, the ashram would have to be within walking distance of a Coolatta machine.

The coffee Coolatta is, of course, the wondrous frozen beverage from Dunkin’ Donuts that tastes for all the world like a sub-zero thermos full of coffee mixed with a sugar packet as big as the entire beverage. Since discovering it, I have been attempting to wean myself off the more acidic and less fun Starbucks mocha frappuccino — and often trying in vain to find places with working Coolatta machines, since my impression is that they’re frequently out of order (perhaps suggesting a market opportunity for Coolatta-machine engineers — or rival beverage-makers — out there).

Admittedly, a few times after discovering them, I was stymied by mistakenly asking for one in a Baskin-Robbins. You see, the first one I consumed was from, yes, a combination Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin’ Donuts, and (demonstrating the danger of mixed branding) I misunderstood which chain was responsible for the divine drink. Now I know — and there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts one block from my apartment (where I am now, taking the week off) but none at all near the ACSH offices on the Upper West Side for some reason, so perhaps I should stroll over now while this unusual mid-day opportunity presents itself.

Dismal Science, Private Prisons

While I was in DC Saturday, Helen and I stopped in the Cop Shop, the giftshop portion of a crime and police museum, and we were pleased to see they had copies of a book by libertarian Alex Tabarrok on private prisons. Coincidentally, earlier this month I’d seen Donald Boudreaux’s announcement that Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen have co-written new textbooks on the basics of economics, which society sorely needs, lest it keep voting for Obama or having socialist revolutions in Latin America. The microeconomics portion can be found here.

I’m sure they’ll do a fine, free-market job even on the macro volume, but I almost wish our society had never devised macroeconomics, with its vast, oversimplified, statistics-derived abstractions warring against and inflating and deflating each other and leading to all manner of false causal inferences — such as, say, the belief that if prosperity tends to be associated with spending, we can create prosperity via government-induced spending. Likewise, to use an example I’m certain I’m stealing from someone else, if straight A students get cars as gifts when they graduate, all we have to do to make everyone as smart as straight A students is give them cars when they graduate. QED (and the D is for Democrat). You can believe things like that and still get a Nobel in econ these days.

I don’t know whether the Tabarrok book on private prisons goes into the slightly tangential issue — which to me seems even more fascinating and important — of experiments in prison reform that encourage market-based thinking among inmates (as opposed to theft-based or welfare-based thinking, to be redundant). There was a prison experiment in Maine, I believe, where prisoners earned more privileges as they became more economically productive while imprisoned, so that, in theory, by the time they got out, they were already accustomed to a fair amount of freedom, accustomed to earning a living, and able to make restitution to their victims, which the current criminal (as opposed to civil) justice system doesn’t do.

I tend to think of the small leftist movement that favors abolishing prisons completely as loons, but this gradualist and market-based approach to phasing each individual prisoner out of prison life and back into society (as opposed to suddenly thrusting him from a world of violence and inactivity into the rough and tumble of the market) might be the next best thing (in fact, better, obviously). The usual prison reform advocates would probably decide the whole thing smacks of exploitation and chain gangs and shut such efforts down, which is a shame, not just for us but for prisoners who might’ve been reintegrated successfully.

Oops: NY Giving Back Half a Billion Medicaid Dollars

More evidence we probably wouldn’t be better off with government controlling all of healthcare (instead of just the half it does now): the half-billion dollars in Medicaid fraud New York State was found to have committed that just led to my already cash-strapped state having to give the money back to the federal government.  Yes, let’s put government in charge of using resources more efficiently — and ethically — than we could do ourselves through diverse, competing, private mechanisms.

Reagan once joked that he liked to go to DC — to visit his money.  I’m in DC today, and this Medicaid incident — especially coming amidst the current healthcare wrangling (which in turn comes amidst unprecedented and economically insane government “stimulus” spending) — makes me feel more than ever like I’m visiting the prison where part of me is enslaved.

Or to put it in simpler terms: If you’re pro-government, you’re wrong.  You may have arrived at that position for what seemed the noblest reasons, whether hippie-derived, neocon-inspired, tree-loving, equality-seeking, drug-hating, or community-seeking.  But you’re wrong.  Stop it.  Now.

Henry Louis Gates vs. the Cops -- and Me in the Same Situation

I’m in DC today and thus once more in a position to give advice to Obama, if he’s reading the blog (my apologies to him and others for still tending to do one long entry per day instead of the multiple short ones per day, which is the rhythm I’m still moving toward). My advice this week would be to apologize to the Boston-area cops who arrested Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates.

I suspected from the get-go that Gates had brought the whole thing on himself by overreacting — if a cop had simply walked away without doing any questioning after getting a call about an intruder, then we’d all say the cops were stupid. But it wasn’t so much the details of the procedure that made me suspect Gates was in the wrong — cops can be very stupid and corrupt, after all — nor, despite what Jesse Jackson and other opportunists would likely think, was it simply that I distrust the black guy in any dispute. Rather, I distrust Ivy League professors steeped in poststructuralist theory. Those guys thought I was an oppressor, from what they said in their lectures, back when I was at Brown. Of course they’re going to freak out and think they’re being oppressed when an actual cop comes in the door.

And let it not be said that I am simply too far removed from crime to appreciate the whole situation. True, I’m living in America’s safest large city (that Starbucks bombing notwithstanding), but I was here back in the early 1990s before Giuliani worked his magic as well, and I remember moments such as the time I was at my apartment front door, returning, just like Gates, exhausted after a long trip, and had to desperately pry at a big, fat column of accumulated mail in my mailbox, making it look for all the world as if I was using some big crowbar on the front door — while wearing black, I might add. Sure enough, a cop car shined a powerful spotlight on me, and unlike Gates, who may well think cops’ brains are wholly unlike his own, I immediately imagined the situation from the cops’ perspective, realized how bad it must look…

…and employed my acting skills to look as innocent and baffled and unconcealed as possible, staring straight into the light even though it was blinding, tilting my head around like “Huh?” and letting a whole bunch of mail slide out of my mailbox before turning back with a sigh to sift through it unhurriedly. Luckily, I was not shot. I will leave it to the deconstructionists to decide whether I partook of the white hegemony-thing.

Three Hip Women (One with a Three-Leg Dog)

I saw a huge poster of model Agyness Deyn in a clothing store this week — and that’s hardly unusual, but her British-raised New Wave tendencies are somewhat unusual at this late juncture in history (though growing less so in the past couple years, which is nice). A few months ago, I praised a super-cool perfume ad she was in as something that’s sort of an example (like much New Wave) of “conservatism for punks” in at least the shallow aesthetic sense, combining traditional notions of class and beauty with an obvious punk influence, like many of the good things in life.

And as if she weren’t cool enough already (not that I’m endorsing her interest in numerology or anorexia), on July 9, NYT said Deyn might appear on Doctor Who (with the entire series unhelpfully identified by NYT as “a BBC Christmas special,” as if the other four decades of the world’s longest-running sci-fi series didn’t exist).

I guess everybody’s meeting aliens these days — but learn more about whether that’s true at our August 5 Debate at Lolita Bar between Lillian Waters and Jen Dziura, of course.

Another hip lady on my radar this week is Laura Lovelace, who played the waitress in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction and, more important, picked the soundtrack music for that highly influential film. She’s apparently posted a couple comments below a recent blog entry of mine, in effect rewarding me for getting her name wrong. I don’t deserve the resultant increased hipness points of my blog but will accept them nonetheless.

This weekend, though, I’ll be in DC visiting the hippest retro-yet-punk lady of all, Helen Rittelmeyer (who like a lot of people could use a writing/editing job of some sort preferably in NYC but unlike a lot of people is a witty, hyperlexic genius, if you have use for that), so I think a couple actual political entries are in order to keep you amused for the next two days while I’m gone.

The A-Team: Anarcho-Capitalists and Aristotle

Three years ago, this article made the case that the A-Team would make good representatives of anarcho-capitalism. The point is every bit as relevant — and important — today as it was then.

Oddly enough, in the past few weeks I’ve also seen a blogger at First Things’ site refer to Aristotelians as the A-Team and to Tocqueville as Mr. T. Like Peter Griffin and friends in that episode of Family Guy, everyone wants to claim the moral and political mantle of the A-Team. And naturally, there’s a movie remake in the works now, too.

I’m pretty burned out on remakes at this point — and franchise-type films in general — though as noted before, I’ll still see the Narnia, Hobbit, Potter, and Avengers (Iron Man et al, mentioned in my entry yesterday) series through to their respective bitter ends — starting with gathering at 9 tonight in the top-floor IMAX 3D theatre at 68th and Broadway to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, if anyone wants to join my nerd posse.

All those franchises should be completed (essentially) by late 2012 if all goes according to plan, just as Obama’s preparing to leave office. Then the economy can be rebuilt, hopefully in a slightly more anarcho-capitalist — and maybe even Aristotelian and Tocquevillian — fashion, unless the dread skygod Quetzalcoatl appears to destroy us all, in keeping with the prophecy. I’m sure something interesting will happen, anyway.

Final Comic: Leisure of 3 Decades

So. Today I purchase my final comic book, the fifth and final issue of the miniseries Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, written by Geoff Johns (who’s now writer/producer on the Flash movie, apparently) and drawn by George Perez. This comic nicely encapsulates comics history and my own history of comics-reading, long an important element of how my brain works. Observe:

Superman was the first comic book superhero, debuting in 1938. Twenty years later, publisher DC Comics began depicting what is now technically regarded as another Superman, dwelling in a hipper, more modern universe, where he interacted with characters such as the Legion of Super-Heroes, time-traveling crime-fighters from a thousand years in the future.

That conceit of multiple universes was imitated by Marvel Comics in the first superhero comic I recall ever reading, Avengers #149, drawn by George Perez — who, with the editor of that issue, Marv Wolfman, went on to do the ultimate multiple-universe story for DC, the aptly-titled 1985 miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths, by which time George Perez had become my favorite comics artist and I’d started buying the futuristic Legion comics as well, seeing in them something akin to sci-fi movies (such as the then-current original Star Wars trilogy). In Crisis on Infinite Earths, which drew me away from Marvel and more fully toward DC, DC Comics’ entire fictional reality was nearly destroyed, and the original 1938 Superman was sent into extra-dimensional exile, along with a younger version of him from the “real” world, Earth-Prime.

Long story short, that Earth-Prime denizen went homicidally insane while in exile (in a slightly metafictional way that makes him unable to regard the other characters as “real”), killed the original Superman (who now exists only as a zombie, per the current horror miniseries Blackest Night), and later traveled a thousand years into the future, where he has summoned an army of supervillains and now threatens to kill not one but three different versions (from alternate universes, as depicted over the years) of the Legion of Super-Heroes (hence the title of the comic I’m buying today), while the main, current Superman goes to the end of time to confront my favorite Legion villain, the history-manipulating Time Trapper (who I was for Halloween once, as Jill Pope, Mike Carlin, Scott Nybakken, and others may recall).

Indeed, the tale technically pits four versions of Clark Kent against each other and promises to resolve years’ worth of plot threads — perhaps even revealing that one of the Legions hails from the aforementioned Earth-Prime, since their universe’s Kryptonite seems to work on the evil/insane Clark.

The time-hopping story also binds together my childhood, Superman’s childhood, our time, a sci-fi future a thousand years away, and the literal end of time, all wrapped in a universes-crossing temporal Crisis. It literally all ends here. You can’t blame me for using up the last of my store credit on it — and just a tiny bit more of my precious time.

Zoltar, Zolar, Zordar, Zoltan

Our celebration of space continues today with a reminder that the Japanese animated series Gatchaman, known in the U.S. as Battle of the Planets, had an odd lead villain called Zoltar who, like a lot of Japanese animated villains — but almost no American animated villains — was a hermaphrodite. Interestingly, the inevitable interpretation of the character’s mixed gender cues (deep male voice, big red feminine lips, high heels, no discernible breasts, concealed long blonde hair, occasional skipping while going “tra la la!”) in Japan would be that Zoltar is some sort of she-male, whereas the almost-certain interpretation in the U.S. would be simply “Zoltar is a woman, disguised as a man” — which is less disturbing and destabilizing for the kiddies, though perhaps something that some Gen Xers are still talking about in therapy.

(Next year we can see how they handle it in the computer-animated movie version, not to be confused with this year’s guinea pig adventure G-Force, despite the Gatchaman team of science-ninjas also using that team name.)

Zoltar is not to be confused with the strange space-themed (and fake-language-speaking) rock band Zolar X, nor with the title character in the film Zoltan, Hound of Dracula, a perfect example of one of those trashy movies that has enriched all our lives simply by existing and having a title, without us needing to watch it. (Though with vampires becoming increasingly chic, maybe it’s time for a remake.)

Zoltar also should not be confused with Zordar, the villainous leader of the Comet Empire from the second season of the great Japanese animated series Starblazers about the flying battleship Yamato/Argo. Zordar, as this awesome and solidarity-inspiring second-season opening song reminds us, could “destroy the universe.” However, it’s the season one song that I have memorized from childhood to this day, so listen to that version if you want to sing along with me. It’s almost as moving a love letter to militarism as the Transformers movies. And I’m not sure I can think of another song that works so well while giving such complex plot exposition, with the possible exception of the Gilligan’s Island theme. Beats the crap out of the strangely surreal Gumby theme song, which was clearly meant for hippies and dope fiends (as was that real episode about Gumby and others having fun by crawling into an oven and discovering a magical land inside, something that I don’t think would get past the network brass today).

If I seem to be waxing strangely nostalgic, or just waxing nostalgic strangely, chalk it up to the fact that I will read my final comic book — itself time-travel-themed — tomorrow. But more about that then. (It concerns Superman, which at the moment reminds me that for all the cool animation mentioned above, you sometimes have to wonder whether animation’s ever gotten any better than the Fleischer Brothers’ Superman cartoons of seventy years ago. Where is progress? Likewise, one could argue comic strips have been all downhill since the ornate and surreal Little Nemo in Slumberland a century ago.)

On a similarly mournful note, let us end with the one moment of Starblazers that struck me most as a kid: the moment the long-feared Leader Desslok suddenly becomes a sympathetic character — because his mind cracks as he realizes that duping the Starblazers team into coming to his planet has doomed his world to destruction after a year of struggle against Earth. That’s gotta hurt a guy. I hope our August 5 Debate at Lolita Bar about extraterrestrials proves as moving.

Punk Gang Leader Arrested, and Fight Club-Loving Teen

I was delighted to hear about the arrest of Kyle Shaw, the teen and ardent Fight Club fan accused of bombing a Starbucks not too far from me on the Upper East Side. As Fight Club teaches us, nothing’s more inspiring and noble than pointless destruction and physical punishment, without which we would have no choice but live as civilized, happy, prosperous beings — with coffee. Like a lot of people, I watched Fight Club as a trip into a Nietzschean Bizarro-land no decent person would want to inhabit, but when I saw the massive and boisterous and overwhelmingly young-male crowd that turned up at a Chuck Palahniuk reading at the Union Square Barnes & Noble first began to fear that some viewers simply saw in it the timeless allure of acting like violent complete assholes while pretending to have some sort of vague “cause.”

On a similar note, it sounds like the violent gang whose leader’s arrest is described in this article (pointed out to me by my fellow punk sympathizer Christine Caldwell Ames) and who sought to control Chicago-area punk venues probably imagined themselves to be on a crusade against “Nazis.” Once the tribal bloodletting begins, it usually becomes easy for everyone to stop reasoning and convince himself on a gut level that the other guys deserve more pummeling. With this guy and our UES bomber apparently out of commission, a troubled world gets just a bit better and the people in it able to live just a bit more like human beings, less like savage animals.

Space: $1999 Billion

I dread the inevitable David Brooks column cheering talk of a new manned mission to the Moon (forty years after Apollo 11), calling it national greatness to waste even more money we don’t have on grandiose projects (whether it’s Obama visiting Earth’s satellite or Bush going to Mars — though I suspect NASA largely stumbles along doing its own thing, simply leaving to presidents the dubious honor of announcing the next step — which used to be how the left suspected the military also works, except now they suspect that was actually run by Cheney). I often think NYT is dumb, but you gotta hand it to them leftist-ideological-maintenance-wise, hiring the only “conservative” columnist in America who hails Obama’s “bold” leadership for doing things like spending (other people’s) money on community colleges.

In a reminder that people find it hard to prioritize rationally about big numbers (necessitating the organization I work for), NASA periodically loses billions of our dollars in space in the form of malfunctioning equipment without voters revolting, but people go berserk if the DMV line takes an extra five minutes. The closest thing we’ve had to an anti-NASA revolt might be the conspiracy theories suggesting we never really landed on the Moon. I have some sad author’s book proposal making that argument sitting permanently on my shelf, a gift from a friend in book publishing who couldn’t believe someone was peddling the idea (and with NASA losing some Moon original landing footage this year and Hollywood cleaning up and remastering a copy, I’m sure the conspiracy theorists will be extra-crazy this week).

But with our Lolita debate on extraterrestrials — the first in a trilogy of conspiracy-related debates for us — two and a half weeks away, let’s take at least a few days to consider some more entertaining and positive space-things, starting with a mention of the approaching tenth anniversary of the day the Moon blew out of orbit. You didn’t hear about that happening on Sept. 13, 1999 (and even being celebrated with a party thrown by Liz Braswell — inspiring me to join in and abandon the completely separate nerd party that I, too, had been planning for that date)? I speak, of course, of Space: 1999, which I still contend has one of the very coolest title sequences in the history of television — and almost disco-funky enough to be worthy of, well, Prince. Apparently, it was an influence on the opening of the Battlestar: Galactica remake series (and was created by the producer responsible for my all-time favorite TV open, the ominous five-vehicles countdown from Thunderbirds).

It’s impressive we even had a Moonbase in 1999 given that civilization was destroyed in 1994, not by the election of a Republican Congress as some would contend but by “a runaway planet” hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, as seen in the opening of the 80s sci-fi cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian.

Getting back to funk for a moment, though, consider two TV opens almost as good as the Fat Albert theme: I think it’s worth watching the Wonder Woman open with twenty-first-century eyes — and listening to those godawful lyrics about satin tights and making the Axis fold — then checking out the vastly classier S.W.A.T. open and wondering how much the Beastie Boys (or the director of the “Sabotage” video) must have loved it (and if you in turn loved the “Sabotage” video, including the credit “and Nathan Wind as Cochese,” which had a hyper-ethnic ring to it reminiscent of the Hawaiian guy in the Hawaii 5-0 open, you’ll be delighted that some creative person has refashioned a horned troll-or-something action figure to look like Cochese).

I for one was inspired by S.W.A.T. as a small child to run around with a black plastic M16 rifle, blue clothing, a blue baseball cap, and a brown vest representing bulletproof material, using my first two initials, T.J., like the blonde guy in the series by that name. Ever since then, my ongoing fight against evil just seems to come naturally.

Comics For and Against Government

John Farley of the Phillips Foundation pointed out to me a recent article by Jonathan Last (who I first met because he wrote a Weekly Standard article about Star Wars and was briefly worried that an e-mail I sent him about blowing up the Death Star might have been part of a series of threatening messages the magazine had been receiving) chronicling the chronic adulation of Obama in comic books (a phenomenon making it easier to quit the comics habit next week and to laugh loudly the next time I encounter a leftist — such as Kyle Baker — who tells me the media are conservative).

On the bright side, I’m told that the animated series Justice League Unlimited did a neat job of depicting the hero called the Question as a sort of hybrid of the Question, another (more overtly Objectivist) character created by Steve Ditko called Mr. A, and Rorschach, at one point even having him yell the Randian slogan “A = A!” while being tortured by the government. And here’s a comedy piece from Op-Toons reminding us that government, like the supervillain Bizarro, does not think A =A. And with that, I’m off to see Rorschach on the big screen one last time at the Landmark Sunshine 2:30 show.

Book Selection of the Month: "The Devil's Piper" by Susan Price

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (July 2009): The Devil’s Piper by Susan Price

With the world excited over the release of the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie this week, it’s worth taking a few minutes to laud a fantastical — and far creepier — children’s story by another British author, Susan Price.

I was about ten when I happened across the disturbingly, surprisingly effective children’s horror story The Devil’s Piper in the school library — and unbeknownst to me, the author was herself only a teenager when she wrote it several years earlier.  This may help explain its effectiveness: Grown-ups (aside from a few weirdoes like Clive Barker) have a natural aversion to scaring the bejeezus out of little kids, but kids themselves don’t.

I remembered the book for decades after first reading it, uncertain it was as good as I thought I recalled — and ignorant of the author’s subsequent career, if any.  Finally, I learned recently that my youthful judgment (as usual) was on-target, and that Price went on to a long and successful career, authoring over forty books, often horror, for both kids and adults and winning critical acclaim along the way.  I ordered and re-read the book.

The simple but highly eerie premise (which would make a good film, hint hint) makes me suspect Price had some youthful contact with unsavory older kids or adults: A few ordinary present-day British teens encounter a scruffy, barefoot, odd-seeming man who casually — and increasingly convincingly — claims to be a leprechaun, not wholly evil but amoral, mischievous, hypnotic, and selfish.  And he slowly but surely leads the kids away from town and their parents, deeper and deeper into the nearby woods, which grow larger and wilder due to his very presence, the kids slowly forgetting their normal lives.

Best of all, creepiness-wise — and again, this is something few adults would think to put in a book aimed at kids, perhaps with good reason — when some adults, alerted to the increasingly weird things happening in town, finally intervene, their solution is to go over the leprechaun’s head, as it were, by visiting Hell and complaining to the leprechaun’s boss.  The depiction of Hell is just unconventional but deceptively safe-seeming enough to make your skin crawl, in a sort of proto-Neil-Gaiman, crypto-pagan, “let’s just talk about ultimate darkness over drinks like civilized people” way that perhaps comes naturally to British writers who came of age in the wake of the New Agey hippie era.

If there’s a smart fifteen year-old you’ve been looking to turn into an occult-obsessed goth, this might be a nice, low-key starting place — not that I’m recommending that.

(Of course, as a skeptic, I don’t think there’s much danger you’ll summon demons by reading this book — but perhaps the real question, in advance of our August 5 Debate at Lolita Bar, is whether you’re in any danger of encountering extraterrestrials.  To my surprise, at least one usually-skeptical person I know leans toward saying yes.  As host, I should remain neutral until next month’s debate — and for dramatic effect, of course.  In the meantime, contemplate this footage and consider the irony that even if we did get footage of aliens at this juncture in history, it’s hard to see how we’d ever know it was real given all the special effects available.  They’ll just have to make a really big splash, I guess.)