#600. The Cephalopod Coffehouse August 2013

Via our wonderful host the Armchair Squid, here's to the fourth month of the Cephalopod Coffeehouse!

I was going to include this at the end rather than the beginning, which is what I've done in the previous installments, but I figured why break with tradition, and the long list always seems to impress, and this one's long indeed, so here goes, what I read in August:

• Star Trek Online - The Needs of the Many by Michael A. Martin
• The Best American Comics 2007 edited by Chris Ware
• Absolute Death by Neil Gaiman and various
• CassaStorm by Alex J. Cavanaugh
• Azlander: Second Nature by Gabriel Brunsdon
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack
• Harlan Ellison's 7 Against Chaos by Harlan Ellison and Paul Chadwick
• Doom Patrol: The Painting That Ate Paris by Grant Morrison and various
• Doom Patrol: Down Paradise Way by Grant Morrison and various
• Star Trek: Enterprise - The Good That Men Do by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin
• Bayou Vol. 1 by Jeremy Love
• Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham and various
• The New Avengers Vol. 1 by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Prophecy and Change edited by Marco Palmieri
• Hellblazer: Rare Cuts by various
• Gone to Amerikay by Derek McCulloch
• Batman: No Man's Land Vol. 4 by Greg Rucka and various
• Captain America and Bucky: The Life Story of Bucky Barnes by Ed Brubaker and various
• Manifesto by Anonymous
• Zulu by Caryl Ferey
• Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

 A large reason why the list is so large this month is because the move that is now days away that will affect much more of what hasn't already been affected by my formerly regular routines in recent months.  I had made a Good Reads goal of reading 75 books, and I wanted to hit that by the end of the month (I've eclipsed that, too, after stretching from the starting point of 50 earlier in the year) when I was still sure I could make regular and timely updates there.  Lots of graphic novels, obviously, as with past lists, but also a bunch of pictureless books, including intrepid ninja captain Alex Cavanaugh's forthcoming new book, which I won at said Good Reads.

I've said before that when I hit the Star Trek books, I'd talk about Star Trek books, and so here we are, I've finished that set, and I'm ready to talk.

I've fallen in love.  Not with Star Trek books in general, but Una McCormack.  She saved Star Trek books for me.  Chances are if you know much about Star Trek books at all, you still won't know the name Una McCormack off the top of your head.  She's not one of the marquee names, even though she should be.  She's awesome, she really is.

The Never-Ending Sacrifice begins almost like any other Star Trek book.  But it builds.  And builds.  It becomes unlike any other Star Trek book quickly enough.  It becomes simply a work of great literature.  The story is all about a Cardassian youth seen in a single episode from the second season of Deep Space Nine, appropriately entitled "Cardassians" (the really notable thing about the episode itself is that it's the first time we see the inimitable Garak since his first appearance, although it's not until later in that season that he becomes a true icon, in "The Wire"). 

This youth had become an orphan, and became stuck between worlds when he ended up being adopted by Bajorans.  The nefarious Gul Dukat uses him in a political ploy, sending him back to his Cardassian father, which mirrors a Next Generation episode that features the actor who was once in St. Elsewhere and would later become Dr. Quinn's son.  Anyway, McCormack brushes on the events of this episode, but really enters pretty quickly into her own story.

It's a lot about Cardassian politics at first, but mostly it's about damaged individuals, and being caught in the swoop of big events.  It's a true epic, completely breathtaking by the end.  It's brilliant.

And it ended up finally making clear to me that problem I always had with Star Trek books.  Most Star Trek books are written from a sense that really has nothing to do with Star Trek itself.  Star Trek, in its filmed incarnations, has always been an expansive look at the human condition.  Sure, there are a lot of wacky things that happen, and the term "technobabble" became especially informative at one point, but in the end, it was never about the starships, the gadgets, the aliens, any of that.  It was about trying survive in a universe that often seems to make it as hard as it can.  A world very much familiar to Star Trek viewers.

It was never "just" science fiction and space conflicts.  But that seems to be what most Star Trek books are about.  They try to ape certain aspects of the filmed experience.  Some of the books even read as if they want desperately to be a movie or an episode.  But even those never seem to get the point.  Even the Dominion War wasn't just about having a war for a couple of seasons.  For pete's sake, they played baseball on the holosuite during that arc!

What I mean to say is, McCormack brought an old world perspective to her book.  Star Trek was always a new world's perspective on the old world.  Most Star Trek books are strictly new world.  They lack any real substance (and sometimes are written fairly poorly besides).  They aren't really Star Trek at all, even if all the trappings are there.  In McCormack's hands, you don't even need to know too much about Cardassians or Deep Space Nine to see the outstanding appeal of her prose.

(And by the way, by complete happenstance, Prophecy and Change features her very first professional work.  I didn't plan that or add it in retroactively.)

After Never-Ending Sacrifice, I also got to enjoy Zulu, which was equally delightful.  I wish all books were as good as these, I really do. 

#599. Fall 2013 at the Movies

I probably won't see the majority of these for years to come, but with the help of Entertainment Weekly, here's the slate of new movies that I hope to assimilate into my collective conscious, being released in the next four months:

September

• Riddick (9/6) The third in a trilogy and Vin Diesel's big fat reward for the increasingly successful Fast & Furious franchise.
• Parkland (9/20) Based on the days following the Kennedy assassination (which is marking its fiftieth anniversary this November, and if you can't remember the official date, just scroll through my Cephalopod Coffeehouse entries for the Stephen King book).  Stars, among others, Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton, and James Badge Dale, who was a standout in Flight, and is just waiting for everyone else to notice him.
• Don Jon (9/27) Seems like this Joseph Gordon-Levitt directorial debut has been on the radar all year long, but this is the official release.  Another favorite actor, for sure.

October

• Gravity (10/4) Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.  In this instance, names like these are almost more important than the plot of the movie.  But it features astronauts, and that's always good, too.
• Captain Phillips (10/11) Tom Hanks stars in this film version of the Somali pirate incident from 2009.
•  Machete Kills (10/11) Robert Rodriguez has always been the pulp version of Quentin Tarantino (which was hugely appropriate when they jointly presented Grindhouse).  Here's the second of a theoretical trilogy.
• 12 Years a Slave (10/18) Chiwetal Ejiofor may finally get everyone to notice him with this movie.
• The Counselor (10/25) First original movie script from Cormac McCarthy, whose books have been adapted numerous times by Hollywood (including No Country for Old Men, a personal favorite), and directed by Ridley Scott (also a personal favorite).

November

• Ender's Game (11/1) I've never read the book, but it'd be impossible to not know this movie's being released, what with all the controversy suddenly surrounding Orson Scott Card (who as far as I'm concerned is still perfectly acceptable as the following exclamation: Awesome Scott Card; and less you misunderstand, the acceptable alternative is Awesome Welles). 
•  About Time (11/2) Seems to be Rachel McAdams revisting The Time Traveler's Wife territory.
• Thor: The Dark World (11/8) There's always the chance I'll actually see this.
•  The Wolf of Wall Street (11/15) Topical, and stars Leonardo DiCaprio in his latest collaboration with Martin Scorsese.
• Her (11/20) I'm invested in the career of Joaquin Phoenix.  And it's directed by Spike Jonze, who's a consistently inventive dude.
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (11/22) I'm invested but not hugely interested in these books/movies.  So here's the release of this one.
• Grace of Monaco (11/27) Nicole Kidman playing Grace Kelly/Princess Grace.  A good combination.
• Oldboy (11/27) Stars Josh Brolin (who's once again in ubiquitous mode this fall), and directed by Spike Lee, based on material that's already produced a film I've seen...referenced many times.

December

• Out of the Furnace (12/6) Said to feature a standout performance from Christian Bale, plus Casey Affleck.  Who may yet turn out to be my favorite Affleck.
• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (12/13) In which Peter Jackson reaches Evangeline Lilly and the return of Orlando Bloom.
•  American Hustle (12/13) Great cast (Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams), great director (David O. Russell).  Bad '70s hair.  All things to love.
• The Monuments Men (12/18) George Clooney again, this time trying to retrieve art stolen by Nazis!  (He also directs this one.)
• Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (12/20) I've always been a pretty big fan of Will Ferrell, and this is one of his iconic characters (and apparently his personal favorite), so that's a given.
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (12/25) Glad to see Ben Stiller return as a leading man.  And director.
• Jack Ryan (12/25) Chris Pine assumes another famous identity.
• 47 Ronin (12/25) Keanu Reeves in a movie that he seems like he should definitely be in.
• The Invisible Woman (12/25) What the Dickens!  Why, it's Ralph Fiennes, naturally!
• Labor Day (12/25) Josh Brolin again, this time with Kate Winslet!
•  Grudge Match (12/25) Jake LaMotta versus Rocky!  Otherwise known as Play it to the Bone with more famous actors, aging boxers played by Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro.  Could be fun!
• Lone Survivor (12/27) Based on a book that was based on real events concerning a Navy SEAL who had nothing to do with the death of bin Laden.  But is perhaps even more worthy of a film!

#598. Monk in Maine

In about a month, I'll be living in Maine again.

I've been living in Colorado Springs for six years now, and before that Massachusetts for three, and before that, Maine, where I grew up and spent most of my college years as well.  Every time I move, that means all my stuff moves, too, and for someone who's a collector, that means "my stuff" translates roughly to all the things I've tended to talk about here (and my other mostly aborted blogs).  That means my collections of books, music, movies, and comic books.

We'll start with the last of those.  When I moved to Massachusetts, I initially left my comic books behind, only bringing them over later, comics I'd been collecting for years, although it wasn't until Massachusetts that I started doing so again.  A year back, I sold all those comics.  During the time since I've come up with a smaller collection of those, and yet I will be selling them again.  I've learned that no matter how much of a collector I can sometimes be, comics will always be one of the hardest things to justify keeping around.  If you read a lot of comics, like I've tended to, they begin to be that much harder to go back and reread.  (I'm not a collector who obsesses over future value.)  Instead I've become what I sometimes dreaded in the past, more of a reader of collected editions than individual issues.  Things change.  But that's something that I won't have to worry about moving this time.

Then there's music.  For me, music still exists on CD.  Yes, I am the Monkasaur.  All the hep kids transitioned to digital music back when people still thought it was perfectly okay to steal it (it never was), and then everyone else started to join them when it went mainstream (which is the reason why we now have tiny computer that do a lot of tricks but far less than actual computers).  But I still have my collection.  But it had to be thinned.  So I thinned it, and I was surprised that there were artists I'd devoted myself to collecting that I was okay with thinning, among other cuts.  Shows that I shouldn't have been collecting the way I'd been in the first place.  Unlike comics, I'll admit that about the music.

Same with the movie collection.  Yes, still in physical form, and never in Blu-ray (which the Great Recession exposed for what it really was, merely an expensive variant on its immediate predecessor).  Actually, I still had a good number of VHS editions.  "Had" because I don't have them anymore, even though there were a lot of movies I'd never replaced with DVD editions.  But I had plenty of DVDs.  Plenty.  And so I had to thin through them.  Some of them were movies that I wouldn't have parted with had I not forced myself into thinning the herd.  Some of them were exposed as movies I probably never really had to have in the first place.  Such is life.

Yet the biggest sacrifice was in the books.  I've been amassing books all my life.  I've eliminated selections from this pack in the past.  My pre-college library stuck around Maine for the most part, and I was fine with leaving most of those behind.  And yet I had a very big collection of books.  So many books that several years ago I instituted my Reading List to try and prioritize them.  I always figured I would get around to all of them in time.  And yet with books, this can get a little ridiculous.  I still hadn't read books I'd gotten ten years ago.  And I just kept collecting them.  Actually, as I was shedding books, I even eliminated some from the current Reading List, and even, beyond a few key books, I guess I abandoned even that, at least for the time being.

I quickly learned that selling to used books store is not a great way to make a profit.  These days it's hard to tell how much anyone values books.  In a blogging community like this one you can sometimes have a distorted view of something like that.  Now, I'm not talking about all the independent authors hawking their own books (even me), or the books of their friends.  I value the Cephalopod Coffeehouse these days because it's the rare public acknowledgment that people are really still reading, and not just supporting the latest popular release.  I'm all for bandwagons, don't get me wrong.  Otherwise history never remembers anything.  But I value discoveries of truly great works, too, and I don't think bandwagons always discover those.  I've discovered that a lot in my reading.  It's always possible that the greatness I see now but seems absent from anyone else's radar will be discovered by later generations.  Perhaps it's even likely.  And some future kid will hate reading what I treasure now.

I've discovered time and again that the books I thought would definitely stand out from the pack didn't live up to my expectations.  I think I learned that my discretion wasn't always as filled with discretion as I believed at the time.  That's why it was easy to shed so many of my books, and music, and movies, and even comic books.  (Although in comics, it's never a given that the best work will end up in collected editions, and that's something that still bothers me about some of the stuff I don't have anymore.)

As I prepare to move again, I do sometimes curse that I have anything to move at all.  Humans have a collector's mentality.  Some of us have reacted against this by saying we don't need anything, and that the best way to live is minimally.  But I see the true purpose of living as experiencing the very best there is to experience, and for me the best resides in the arts, in the entertainment that we're able to preserve.  And because few people seem to have the very same tastes, it's sometimes necessary to have personalized collections, and thus my dilemma.

In this streamlining effort, I'm learning more and more about what matters most to me.  I don't curse myself too harshly, because these things take time.  It's a whole process.  There aren't strictly delineated Points A and B, but many points, and if just one of them were missed, everything would be different now, and as far as what I've discovered, I'm pretty happy with what I've experienced so far.  I tell that to myself after every disappointment, by the way, no matter how screwed up my life can sometimes seem.  I think the worst anyone could say is that they can imagine their life as very different from what they already know.  There's a lot that we can't control, but we control more than we think.  If you try, you can find the best of even the worst life can throw at you. 

I've considered moving back to Maine quite a few times over the years.  And yet if it had ever been at any other point, everything would be different, and there's too much that I'd rather keep as it is, no matter how much I'd like to change, to even consider what might have been if I'd moved back at any other point.  I've been reducing what I have, but the accumulated experiences will never leave me.  And that's all that matters.

#597. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse July 2013

Here's my monthly book recap:

• Circuits of the Wind, Volume 1 by Michael Stutz
• Circuits of the Wind, Volume 2 by Michael Stutz
• The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation by Jonathan Hennessey and Aaron McConnell
• JSA, Volume 4: Fair Play by Geoff Johns and various
• Circuits of the Wind, Volume 3 by Michael Stutz
• The New Teen Titans Archives Volume 1 by Marv Wolfman and George Perez
• Astronauts in Trouble by Larry Young, Matt Smith, and Charlie Adlard
• The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan Spence
• Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
• Why I Became a Muslim by Ian Nisbet
• Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations - Watching the Clock by Christopher Bennett

And for the record, I'm currently reading Star Trek Online - The Needs of the Many (so yes, I reached the Star Trek block, though there are three more to follow).

Before going much further, let me give thanks to our Cephalopod founder, the Armchair Squid.  The preceding sentence is not to be construed as suggesting the Squid himself is a cephalopod (or some sort of worship; I don't even particularly like sea food).  He is clearly a lemur.

That's about as jolly as this one's going to get, folks.  This month has not exactly been one for the record books, and that's even before I reached Why I Became a Muslim.  I've referenced before how I formed a Reading List from among the books I've acquired over the years, the priority order as it were.  Sometimes even this List and my selections aren't good enough to keep me reading the best of my own material.  There are several books in the above bullets that weren't even in the List, and although this is always bound to happen, part of the reason why is the Good Reads Curse.

The Good Reads Curse is derived from the giveways the site always has available.  What you get from these giveways is a combination of what you've signed up as a matter of chance for winning, and sometimes, as I've learned, otherwise.  I've ranted before that a lot of books should never have been written, and a lot of writers should seriously reconsider the idea that this is their calling.  This is not a popular sentiment in a blog community filled with writers, not in the sense that bloggers are writers, because they have to be (then again, some of them cede vast tracks of Internet to images), but bloggers who either are already or hope to be published authors of some extraction.

Anyway, what I mean to say is, a lot of what I read this month was writing that should probably have never existed.  Starting with the Circuits of the Wind cycle and certainly including Why I Became a Muslim and also Watching the Clock, this stuff was just not very good reading material.  I quit reading Star Trek books a long time ago expressly because of that, but thought I'd given space and discerning selection enough to have gotten around that.  (Hopefully I can still be proven wrong.)

Circuits is an especially painful effort to lump in this travesty of words, because it was obviously a passion project.  But the writing simply was not good enough to support the passion.  The ambition was not met by skill.  And even one of these three volumes could have been more than enough.  Much the same can be said for Mockingjay, by the way.  I've explained elsewhere why I've read the Hunger Games books at all, but I just don't want to do so again.

The main subject of my wrath should already be obvious.  Why I Became a Muslim is downright insulting.  It's a parody, it really is, of all the prejudices anyone could have against Islam as a whole, written from the perspective of a sincere convert.  One who does such a bad job of expressing himself that he has more or less made it even easier for anyone who doesn't understand the religion in the first place to think it all the more vile.

That's what bad writing can do.  Good writing can accomplish so much, but I don't think that people realize how bad writing can do just as much.  A bad movie, like Plan 9 from Outer Space, can simply be reduced to an object of derision.  Good movies can find the same fate, but there are certainly plenty of movies where it can be universally acknowledged that they are bad.  Bad writing, though, in a book, can have so much more damage.

That's what I mean when I say that books have to be acknowledged as different from other expressive forms of entertainment.  Bennett wrote Watching the Clock, as I've often noticed in the past with bad writing, almost as if he wasn't even writing from the perspective of writing a book so much as trying to copy some other source material (which I assumed was children's cartoons and bad porn, a combination to frighten any good parent).  A writer has a great obligation to do more than just string along sentences and thoughts.  They need to know how to put them together. 

Because if they don't, it shows, and that's what's most striking about Why I Became a Muslim.  This is a explanation of his beliefs more than how he reached them.  Even describing his early years Nisbet can't explain how he reached the conclusion, only to state that he did and then propound the version of what he learned.  It's enough to make anyone scoff at Islam rather than embrace it.

This was far from his intention.  Ostensibly, he began writing it to explain to a son he believed he'd never see again why that was.  He instead presents no discernible consideration for any of the developments that led to that predicament.  It was enough for me to temporarily believe that all Muslims are exactly like that, and that's all anyone needs to know.

Bad writing...!  I came into this post fully believing that I was going to go on a screed against a large segment of the world's population, one that by Nisbet's reckoning has taken its entire stance against everyone by the conviction that it's simply got everything figured out and has for a long time, ever since Islam's founder set down the original record.  And yet even a casual scholar will know that Mohammed struggled for years to establish the beginnings of his new faith (there would be no acknowledgement in Islam's own culture about these early problems otherwise).  It didn't happen overnight.  Yet to hear Nisbet tell it, that's exactly what happened, and because that was the case, Islam is, was, and always will be right about everything. 

If only that were the end of it.  But Why I Became a Muslim is filled with that kind of writing.  I will give Nisbet the benefit of the doubt and assume that it's merely the writing.  There are many Muslims who believe in their faith in exactly that way.  Sadly, they all seem to be suicide terrorists.  And alarmingly, before his conversion Nisbet was in fact learning all sorts of things that might turn out to be useful for just such a cause.  Clearly he doesn't seem to have considered that.  And yet I have.  That's the world we live in today, unfortunately.

I'm not condemning all of Islam.  There's just no point in that.  But I am condemning bad writing.  I hope some day I never have to read it again, or those who perpetuate it will be more willing to see where they've gone wrong.  Because in most cases, bad writers never want to hear that. 

And that's the worst of it.

#596. TNA making an impact

One of the things I've regularly talked about here at Scouring Monk that has never particularly interested my readers is professional wrestling...and really, I'm okay with that.  So here we go again.

Chris Sabin just became the new TNA world champion.  You may not know who Chris Sabin is, or much less what TNA stands for, but this is pretty big for both, trust me.

First off, TNA stands for Total Nonstop Action.  And yes, probably in the beginning it was meant to be a double entendre.  The name of its weekly TV show is Impact Wrestling, and there's been speculation in the past that the promotion could very well adopt that as its name in general.  TNA is the second largest wrestling promotion in North America, behind WWE (and yes, there are others, including ROH - Ring of Honor - which has existed for as long as TNA has, twelve years).  It's like the bastard child of WCW and ECW, but it's become its own beast over the years, despite a steady stream of naysayers who have attempted to point out that it was always doomed to failure.  They said the same thing about the WNBA, and that's still running.

The wrestling market is not anywhere near as strong as it was in the late 90s, or the glory days of the 1980s, when Hulkamania was running wild and Ric Flair styled and profiled.  It's not popular to be a fan of this stuff, partly because it's hard to justify an interest in a sport that was long ago exposed as mostly make-believe, so that all those sweaty giants (and just as many smaller guys, like Chris Sabin) grappling in the ring look like buffoons instead of the athletes and artists they are.  To the outsider, it seems like it can never be any other way.

I mean, by god, TNA is called "TNA."  How much more crass do you have to be?  Of course, sometimes pop culture seems like it's nothing but crass.  And maybe wrestling is really only popular when it's the best crass in town.  Pointedly, WWE went the family-friendly route a few years ago.  And TNA has been leaning all the more heavily toward the best wrestling in town for the last several years now.

That's what Chris Sabin represents.  He's the latest of the new champions, new directions, under the Hulk Hogan regime that began in January 2010.  At the time, TNA had finally anointed A.J. Styles, its very own Shawn Michaels, as a champion it could get behind.  He had the first of the lengthy and unusual championship runs of this new era.  He was replaced by Rob Van Dam, who a decade earlier was the fan and critic's choice as best in the ring, although he had to wait a few more years until WWE decided to give him a run as top dog.  RVD was succeeded by Jeff Hardy, another contender for second coming of the Heart Break Kid.

If there was a hiccup, it was when Hardy succumbed to his demons, demons that haunted him thanks to the daredevil tactics that first got him noticed.  The things he used to do are probably some of the worst moves you can perform for a lengthy career, much less one that doesn't involve a lot of pain.  You don't have to be a wrestler to perform with pain, and you don't have to be in the ring for playing like that to catch up with you.  Here I'm thinking of the brilliant career of ballplayer Albert Pujols, who has lately seemed like a shell of himself.

Hardy collapsed in the spring of 2011, but incredibly had turned his life around by the fall.  He's still doing well, by the way, and was even given another run as TNA champion.  After him was a transition period of more traditional champions, including the veteran icon Sting and Kurt Angle, who is widely considered to be the best wrestler of his generation.  This was also the period where a personal favorite, Ken Anderson, finally had a chance to be champion.  Mr. Anderson is the white version of The Rock.  That would have been a dream match if Anderson's career had developed differently.

Anyway, TNA went back to the approach it'd been using previously when it tapped first Bobby Roode and then Austin Aries as champion, with a little James Storm tossed in for good measure.  These were all talents that had never been considered world champion material before, and would probably have never been thought that way in WWE.  Roode's career has been all over the place, although he's been a TNA staple since the beginning, mostly in tag teams.  Aries is a miniature version of Chris Jericho.  Storm is like a Duck Dynasty version of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.

The point is, TNA began embracing its own legacy.  It's very much comparable to the ROH of its middle years, when Daniel Bryan (then competing as Brian Danielson), CM Punk, Samoa Joe, and Nigel McGuinness ruled the landscape.  These were the titans of ROH.  They were the best and brightest, and somehow most wrestling observers didn't really notice that this was the best the promotion was ever going to get (probably).

What I mean to say is, people take notice.  This is a great time to notice TNA.  Chris Sabin as champion is exactly what TNA should be doing.  He just defeated Bully Ray (who used to be half of the Dudley Boys tag team) for the honor.  In fact, he's just completed a miraculous comeback in general.  He's been sidelined for years.  When that misfortune began, he'd just won his greatest success, with Alex Shelley, in a tag team that finally forced everyone to see just how good he really is.  He's long been a signature element of TNA's X-division (a renamed version of the familiar WCW cruiserweight concept), and like other such competitors (Aries, Styles), he's now graduated to the main stage.

This is why that's such great news:

No matter how long Sabin is champion, he's the latest affirmation that TNA has made a real commitment to integrate its entire wrestling scene.  Styles, as I've mentioned, is the heart and soul of the company, but he's never really been a breakout popular star where wrestling fans in general will know him like they're familiar with the names Hogan, Austin, or The Rock.

For the past year the company has been making a concerted effort to transform Styles from just the best wrestler they've got to an actual personality.  Much of the early focus was on his long-standing rivalry with Christopher Daniels, who like Roode and Aries has lately been a highlight of the tag team division.  The whole company is currently gearing up for its October super-card, Bound for Glory, basically TNA's WrestleMania.  It's been long assumed that Styles will be in the spotlight on that card.

Having Sabin as champion going into this rather than Bully Ray shifts the focus to exactly where it needs to be.  Bully serves as the focal point of one of those big nasty heel factions that traditionally spotlight the traditional main event players. Think the New World Order (or the Four Horsemen).  In fact, for a while it looked like TNA was having Styles repeat the Sting angle from the nWo days.  But recently it shifted him back into an active role, far sooner than Sting did.  And while it's true that Hogan lost the title once before Sting had a chance to take it from him (sort of) in the culmination of that feud, this feels different.

Like I said, it feels like the setup to what TNA has been trying to do for years now: operate under its own terms, and use its best strengths to their fullest potential.  Any number of arguments could be made to the contrary, but that's how I see it.  All these wrestlers, Styles and Roode and Aries and now Sabin, have all been shifted more directly into the spotlight.

All it takes is for Daniels to defeat Sabin and the main event of Bound for Glory has been determined, Styles versus Daniels.  Maybe that's not what WWE would do, but TNA is not WWE, in the same way it isn't WCW or ECW or ROH.

It's just, now we're getting to see that more clearly.  This has been breeding ground for some of the best wrestling you're likely to find, the best wrestlers from every angle to you care to envision.  They've been looking for a catalyst, a way to make it impossible to overlook their strengths.  Regardless of whether or not the pieces fall exactly into the place I now see, I think they've reached that goal.

Chris Sabin can be champion for a week or a month or a year, but he's just proven that the company around him has not let all the lessons of the past go to waste.  And that, as "Diamond" Dallas Page would have said, is a good thing.

#595. Well...

One of the things I've always dreaded as a writer is finding a blank audience, or alienating it.  And I think I continue to do both here at Scouring Monk.  That's part of what led to the dramatic pullback of a little more than a month ago of all my previous blogging activity.

I always expect big things from what I do.  I can't help it.  But the big things don't seem to materialize.  At some point I have to acknowledge that this is my own doing.  As I said at the start, I think I'm best at alienating myself.  Sometimes I'm self-deprecating about that.  A few posts ago I referenced a Green Lantern character, who was famously introduced in an Alan Moore story, the whole point of which was to explain the phrase, "Mogo doesn't socialize."

Thing is, Mogo is an entire planet.  That's why he doesn't socialize.  Throughout my life I've come across stumbling block after stumbling block in my efforts to be social.  I think that plays a big part in my rate of success (such as it is).

But I think I also ask far too much from people.  I keep writing huge chunks of words on this blog.  In fact, the whole A-to-Z fiasco as I grew to interpret it stemmed not as much from the Challenge itself but from the Liebster post.  I've read enough Liebster posts from other bloggers to know that they don't typically drone on for nearly as long as I did.

My wordy diarrhea is an acknowledged need for acceptance, to impress, to seek approval.

And that's why this note will be as brief as I can make it, because at some point we all realize where we make our biggest mistakes.  We all do, we really do.  Most of the time we simply don't see when those around us have experienced it.

I keep approaching this blogging thing the same way.  When I started out in 2002, I was short and pithy.  Not that I was a massive success, mind you (more like mired in obscurity).  But maybe that's what I should do again.  I know that when I come across a blog that has an incredibly long entry, I'm less likely to make the commitment to read it.

Anyway, this is just to say the milk's run out and I've gone to the store to replace it.

#594. I'm No Superman

In conjunction with the title of this post (borrowed from the Scrubs theme), here are links to my Man of Steel thoughts posted at Examiner (y'know, in case you were burning to know):

• Man of Steel review
• Truth, Justice, and the American Way in Man of Steel

I thought the movie was pretty brilliant.  The reason I wrote two pieces on it was because of the big giant controversy surrounding Superman's execution of General Zod at the end.  As far as the reviews I've read go, whether or not you're overly bothered by this affects your whole opinion of the movie.  And since I don't have near the problem (explained in different ways if you read both pieces) most people seem to have had with it, I guess I had that much easier a time enjoying (and still enjoying, because comic book writer Mark Waid has confessed that while watching he kept thinking "Awesome!" right up to that moment, at which point he actually vocally expressed his displeasure in the theater) the whole product.

I have some confessions to make.  I generally like DC products (comics and movies and TV shows) while find those linked to Marvel flawed (there are always exceptions).  This didn't change last summer, when The Avengers became a massive hit that made history all over the place.  I liked that movie, but I certainly wasn't impressed.  I will also briefly note that it wasn't Christopher Nolan alone whose presence swayed my interest in Man of Steel.  In fact, I've debated for years how much I enjoyed Batman Begins dating back to its 2005 release.  I was already a big fan of Nolan thanks to Memento, big enough to add his first film, Following, into my treasured movie experiences.  I loved most of Begins, but the ending left me cold in the same way Steel's has for 2013 audiences (though not really a confusion, I will nonetheless clarify that I have not just referenced the 1997 Shaq movie, though I enjoyed that, too).  The big action finale just felt out of place with the rest of it.  To that point I was enamored of Nolan's skills on a more intimate scale.  The Dark Knight more than ably demonstrated his mastery over other techniques.

Anyway, I didn't originally set out to write about Man of Steel.  My last post was the book club entry, and I enjoyed the lively exchange that went on in the comments that followed, including Cephalopod Coffeehouse founder Armchair Squid.  Owing to my new computer limitations, I wasn't able to respond to his last note, which reads like this:

"But does all of the material serve the story meaningfully? If so, great. If not, I think there's potential for problems."

I say yes.  I say this as someone who made it through Melville's Moby-Dick with great enthusiasm.  Melville famously wrote about things not specifically relating to the plot in the book, including facts about whales and whaling.  I just completed Fanon, the Wideman literary study that didn't focus on the subject so much as the observer's thoughts, which often didn't feature so much as reflect on the subject.  Fanon is no Moby-Dick, but these are two books that easily contradict what Squid is suggesting, that there is some necessary guideline to fiction.

Last Monday I attended a writing group meeting in downtown Colorado Springs.  At some point conversation boiled down to a version of the classic guideposts of storytelling, what every writer must consider as they prepare to put their words into form.  I just don't abide such nonsense.  If you're writing a story at all, anyone can without much effort extrapolate the beats you will have heard in class or workshop.  The question isn't really if they exist so much as how the author used them and if they were successful.  Wideman, for instance, was not as successful as Melville, as I've said, while Dr. Seuss did a much more interesting version of the classic reading primer in The Cat in the Hat (with only 50 words!), but that's exactly what he did, as simple a story as can be.

For the generations that grew up in the wake of the 20th century movie boom, I think a lot of our thoughts and ambitions have been warped.  For instance, I don't believe a story should be written if it can be done better as a film, but if a story is later made into a film, the unique benefits of both mediums can be appreciated better (and with greater critical nuance) than we normally admit.  I despise with the appropriate passive aggression stories and writers who view their task as so much empty air.  If you have a story to tell you'd better well have the voice to tell it, and for the majority of writers that's simply not the case.  Storytelling is an art.  It's not just stringing words along to fit a mold.  A thousand monkeys writing a thousand words every day can easily come up with the right combination to create Shakespeare.  Except that's never happened except in the case of Shakespeare himself.  Know what I mean?

The art of writing a story is to write what inspires you, both in the material you want to read and the material that you've experienced.  Only naive individuals believe that there are new stories to tell.  Civilization has been here for a long time folks.  There are only new ways to tell them.  I'm not talking about experimentation.  In the case of Wideman that can easily turn into a crapshoot, and it's not about limited appeal.  The only appeal any fiction should have is that it has words and that it uses them extraordinarily.  I cannot abide the idea of reading for the sake of reading.  If you can tell me the benefit of that, please amuse me.  If the story does not expand your mind, if it only confirms what you have always believed, if it does not make you think, then it's worthless.

I see every story as the potential to change the world.  Maybe that's where I'm naive.  A thousand strips of Dilbert never caused corporate culture to blink.  A thousand episodes of Law & Order never caused crime to go away.  If storytelling is alone a thought exercise, then even that's okay with me.  A population that thinks is better than one that doesn't.  But we must never forget that it's our responsibility whether civilization succeeds or not.  You think it's just about words.  But words are, after all, mightier than the sword.

If a story leads you to dead ends, if it leads nowhere at all, then the author has led you astray.  If it leads you on labyrinthine journeys of discovery, then surely it will have already proven its worth?  Profit is not in the realm of money.  That's a fool's game.  You benefit by improving your mind.  We're all better off when we identity our limitations, and seek to overcome them.

Getting back to Scrubs, and that theme, it plays over the opening credits.  My sister's an x-ray tech, and the only thing she's ever told me about any of that is that the x-ray Dr. Dorian holds is all wrong.  She says the medical community is never impressed with these medical shows.  Accuracy is fantastic.  I'm all for accuracy.  But my primary concern is the authenticity of the human experience on display.  Scrubs always had that, even though it was one of the goofiest TV series ever.  It always played like an updated M*A*S*H to me, with everyone transformed into the cantankerous "Hawkeye" Pierce.  Maybe no one, even Perry Cox, was perfect in that show, but I never stopped believing that they were making every effort to try.  Yes, even The Todd.

That's a little of what I'd love to see.  Complaints are fine.  You can disagree.  You can call Man of Steel an abomination, or think Moby-Dick was as much a failure as I consider Fanon to be (no matter how fascinating).  We can talk about that.  But me, as much fun as talking is, I've always had better luck with thinking.  That's the form my writing takes.  That's what I think writing is all about.  You can't make a digression in thought, because that's the only way it works.  In stories, you're always headed in the same direction no matter what route you take.

#593. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse June 2013

Okay, before we dig into Armchair Squid's Cephalopod Coffeehouse book talk, let's list the books I read during June 2013:

• 11/22/63 by Stephen King
• Doctor Who - Shada by Douglas Adams by way of Gareth Roberts
• Blockade Billy by Stephen King
• Lunatics by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel
• Cobra: Son of the Snake by Mike Costa and Antonio Fuso
• The World of Flashpoint Featuring Superman by various
• Insane City by Dave Barry
• The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
• Cave of the Dark Wind by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
• Batman and Robin Vol. 2 - Pearl by Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• War of the Green Lanterns  by Geoff Johns and various
• The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi
• Starman Omnibus Vol. 6 by James Robinson and Peter Snejbjerg

and currently:

• Fanon by John Edgar Wideman

Okay, again, before you start to feel like all I do is read, just know that this extensive list is not as impressive as it seems.  Obviously, if the title has superheroes in it you can be assured that it's a graphic novel collection, which doesn't take so much time to read.  There are also several really short books in there, Blockade Billy and Cave of the Dark Wind especially, while I read Good Man Jesus in a single sitting (for whatever reason, which does happen to me but not too often).

But again, a lot of this was easy to read quickly because a lot of it was just very good, and very easy reading.  Crying of Lot 49 was a short read but it took a while, as your better literature (not books in general, but what would typically be called literary fiction) is apt to do.  The writing becomes more involved.  You need to concentrate a little more, with far less nonsense going on that flows from sentence to sentence, page to page, words connecting in such a way that leaves you thinking as you read rather than just knowing that you're being taken for a wild ride.

And that was the way it was with Black Album, and Fanon, as well.  These are reads that even if they take days or a week still feel as if they're taking a month if not longer, not in a bad way, but as if you're living with it and not just watching it pass by.  The books I don't like to read, they're the ones that are a part of the landscape that I'm not particularly interested in.  I'm someone who likes to look at the world around him, but there's always a necessary filter, otherwise you'd go mad noticing everything.

So the month was a combination of the stuff I really love to read, mind-expanding and also simply enjoyable reading.  I even got to read another Douglas Adams!  Sort of!  Adams wrote a little bit of Doctor Who, and a little bit of it got lost along the way, remembered it was falling or something, and recently the kind Mr. Roberts decided to complete it for us.  Since I'm someone who settled the Homer controversy for himself by deciding that it ultimately didn't matter who Homer was or how responsible he was for what we read today of the Trojan War and the journey home for Odysseus, just so long as we acknowledge that he was incredibly important in preserving a long tradition, I don't mind seeing a favorite author become a legacy carried on by someone else.  This isn't to say that I think the creator of anything isn't important, or that we can blithely slap anyone's name on anything (the way some people feel about Shakespeare, although I argue the man was the man, and anyone who says differently has no idea how art really comes about), but that in preserving a name and its legacy, we preserve a part of the culture that's every bit as important as what that person may or may not have contributed.

Confused yet?  You just haven't read enough of me.  By the way, all of these books have lovely, full-sized write-ups at my Good Reads feed.

So if I were to choose only one of these books to write about (again), which would they be?  I'll cheat again and choose the one I'm currently reading, which would be Fanon, naturally.

Fanon is kind of based on the life, or perhaps simply the legacy, of Frantz Fanon, who might be considered the pioneer of the revolutionary '60s.  Author John Wideman has written very much a stream-of-consciousness novel out of the impact Fanon continues to have on his life.  Sometimes it's straight-up metafiction, with Wideman interposing his perspective on the story he's writing, the character he's created and intends to follow.  Sometimes it's really just whatever Wideman feels like writing about.  It's very much the kind of book you will read if you've got patience as a reader, don't just want a straight story but rather are willing to enjoy the journey the author sets you on, no matter the shape it takes.  It's one that begs for some concentration.  That's what I find fascinating about not only reading but writing.

(And for the record, part of what's bothered me about blogging is that I stumbled into a whole community that doesn't seem to understand any of that.  That is another topic, but let me just emphasize: I will never champion something or someone just because I want to champion that someone, but because I believe in the work, in the words themselves.  It's not the story, but rather the way it's told.  Anyone could tell a version of any story, and think they're clever simply for having written something, but writing is more than the art of telling a story, just as reading is more than the art of following a story.  If you don't have an honest-to-god reaction to the story, then the result is a failure.  It's not a matter of support.  It's a matter of preserving a tradition.  No one ever listened to someone tell a story badly.)

So while I ride the wild beast of Wideman's Fanon, I anticipate more books on my Reading List, and even the odd diversions elsewhere.  In July I'll be reading another Good Reads listing I received in the mail, Michael Stutz's Circuits of the Wind trilogy, and then hopefully reach the string of Star Trek books I'll be permitting myself to read after having long since sworn off Star Trek books.  I used to love them.  Practically read nothing but them.  But after a certain point, I stopped trusting them.  I read too many bad ones.  I became so selective that I talked myself out of them entirely.  But a few years ago, I started seeing that there might be some good ones still in that line.  And so I'll be seeing if I was right.  And maybe that'll be the topic for next time.

#592. Monk in Exile

Well, if you haven't realized by now that I've virtually quit blogging, I don't know what to do with you.

There's a lot of reason why this happened, but truthfully, the most honest one was that my laptop's battery finally crapped out on me.  The battery has been an issue for a while.  It stopped holding a good charge a few years ago.  Recently it wouldn't even reliably hold a charge while actually plugged in.  People less technologically pathetic than me probably would have been able to cope with these developments better.  Me, when the battery started becoming an issue, I actually went to the store where I originally bought the computer.  Maybe it's just that their associates suck (which is always possible), but they more or less told me to go away, and so I did, and came to no conclusion.

Like computers users of my kind in general, I've had constant issues with these devices.  I've owned a desktop since 2000, bought right before I started my sophomore year at the University of Maine in Orono (which was actually my first year there; I was a freshman at Mercyhurst in Erie, PA).  I got the laptop in the late fall of 2007, when I originally moved to Colorado Springs, mostly because the desktop (along with everything else I owned) took weeks to catch up with me.  (Seriously, moving companies?  You suck.  Even my brother is facing a lag time with his stuff as he prepares to relocate from Massachusetts to Louisiana.  Then again, maybe it's just moving companies based in Massachusetts.)

The desktop has had its issues, and we've managed to survive them.  My laptop and me have survived numerous crises as well, and it's my hope that we can overcome this one, too.

In the meantime not so much with the blogging.  I started blogging in 2002, coincidentally while attending UMaine.  College for most people is a time for expanding horizons.  I did plenty of that, and part of that was establishing an online presence.  I did a lot of that at a more-or-less-presently-defunct Star Trek message board that was much-beloved in its heyday.  We were a tight community.  I developed most of what has become my writing craft there, both in fiction and otherwise.

I've been here at Monk with very little readership for most of this time.  The most I ever independently provoked actual comments was with the brilliant but short-lived Ted Danson sitcom Help Me Help You.  I spent a lot of time in the years that followed my blogging debut not actually blogging.

And then in 2010, I started expanding.  You can still see all the expansion efforts.  I started blogging a lot.  And I stumbled into a community.

Now, I've never been one to be social.  I'm like the Green Lantern planet, Mogo.  And it always backfires on me.  Persistence equals success?  In your dreams, Dorothy.

The timing with the latest crisis and my decision to consciously back away was something that just sort of worked out for me.  I'd been stressed about blogging since the end of the A-to-Z Challenge.  I was still having fun, but it was becoming a chore, and as I said, persistence doesn't equal success.  I developed a small and loyal following, which I still appreciate, but ego comes to all of us.  We can't deny it.  I'm no Buddhist.  If you think you can live without it, then chances are you're not too keen on living itself.  And that's no way to live.

But this is to say that I haven't totally given up.  On the right is an updated linky for the book club the Armchair Squid started up.  Next Friday is our second meeting.

Join me.  Or not.

#591. JFK blown way what else do I have to say?

Now, just assume for a moment that it's a given that JFK's assassination was a matter of conspiracy, that Lee Harvey Oswald was not after all a lone gunman.

As Brad Meltzer writes in Identity Crisis, who benefits?  This will not be an in-depth discussion, because I don't have the patience for something like that.  Like most of what I write, it'll be a meditation.

I have a peculiar sympathy for men like Oswald, even Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer caught when I was in middle school.  He had such a placid look on his face.  Clearly a fucked up individual.  I don't have sympathy because I want to be them, but because I can identify with them as someone who hasn't had the best luck integrating myself into the rest of society.  Aside from what Dahmer did, what else can you say about him?  I've never subscribed to the belief that monsters are anything else than the casual everyday variety who affect lives more blatantly and subtly than Dahmer or Oswald ever could.  Think whatever you want to about Dahmer, or Oswald.  Oswald had a terrible upbringing, and it stunted his emotional development.  Yeah he probably had a lot to do with the assassination.  But who benefits?

In the 1990s it became increasingly likely that the media would report and feed on the emerging cult of personality, the fifteen minutes of fame at any cost that Andy Warhol told us about, Warhol another eccentric who could just as easily as Chuck Barris have been moonlighting as a CIA assassin.  I mean, if you believe they put a man on the moon, right?  We question everything these days.  I was reading conspiracy theories about the Boston bombings within days of the marathon.

With Kennedy taken out the picture, who benefits?  The whole goddam world, if you'll pardon my language, but mostly two countries full of cold warriors.  Is it really so much of a stretch that two governments exchanged ideas about how to proceed after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis?  So much of what the Soviet Union did was a giant bluff, but in those days, when they were beating Americans in the Space Race, who the hell was going to believe that the nuclear clock wasn't ticking?  Alan Moore wrote a whole comic book at the very end of the cold war, Watchmen, that dealt with the nuclear clock as if it still mattered.  Probably because of all those nuclear reactors that were having all those problems at the time.  But that was it, really, wasn't it?  In Star Trek, the Soviet parallels in the Klingon Empire were revealed to be at the end of their rope, too, in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.  In the end, one half of the whole conflict simply couldn't be sustained.

And so that leaves the guy who was willing to go punch for punch, bravado for bravado, who just so happened to be taken out just before Vietnam, a war that went nowhere and was the only fighting that ever really broke out.  If this were 1812, the English would have been fighting the Americans as well as the French.  But after WWII, that was never going to happen again.  After Hiroshima, never again.  

But the governments wanted to make sure.  It's not so hard to imagine.  We take our hothead off the table, you take yours.  Khrushchev was removed from power not so long after 11/22/63.  I'm not following any specific conspiracy theories, here.  Who benefits?  The whole goddam world.  That's what someone decided, and then agreements would have been met.  Kennedy was one of the best pure politicians anyone ever saw.  His father made sure of it.  He became one because he couldn't help it, like a regular Manchurian candidate.  Clinton repeated this mold, out of sheer force of will, decades later.  Read all about it in Primary Colors.  Everything else he copied from Kennedy, he didn't have the actual ability.  He certainly didn't have Bobby.  Hillary, I know Bobby Kennedy, and you're no Bobby Kennedy.

Kennedy's legacy eventually boiled down to two elements: the assassination and Camelot, which was eventually exposed, and continues to be exposed, by all the affairs he carried on while he was in office.  And yet this is all a smokescreen.  He was the best damn president this country could have ever hoped for.  He pushed for the space program not out of personal conviction, but out of canny necessity.  That's what you need to remember.  He faced down two of the biggest crises of the twentieth century without military incident.  How many other presidents do you know who did that?

And yet everyone feared that he would do the unthinkable and unleash the bomb, just because he might be forced into it, back up his words.

In my experience, it's not the good guys who do that sort of thing.  In my experience, it's the bad guys trying to prevent the good guys from doing it.  It wasn't Roosevelt who dropped the bombs, it was Truman, who considered it a tactical necessity.  Truman was a soldier.  So was Kennedy.  But what do people remember about Kennedy's service?  Oh yeah, going out of his way to save lives, not take them.  What did he do as president?  Go out of his way to save lives.  He was a Berliner, remember?  He talked better than anyone else, but he wasn't just talk, and he wasn't someone who would talk himself into a corner.  He'd talk himself out of it.  Hell would freeze over before John F. Kennedy failed his country, or the world.

Yet there were plenty of people who convinced themselves otherwise.  He simply wasn't as popular as you might sometimes be led to believe.  He was elected against Nixon, and it's said television made the difference.  Not his big ideas or idealism, but his good looks.  Well, bully on that.  Nixon came back a decade later and became president after all, and then won a landslide reelection.  It was Vietnam that was the legacy of the years that followed Kennedy's assassination, and what dogged even Nixon.  No one was safe.  Johnson carried out all of Kennedy's programs, and we reached the moon.

And we stopped talking about the Soviets.  Really, go and look.  In fact, after Vietnam we all started worrying about the Middle East.  I mean, immediately after!  And it was another quagmire, not right away.  Even Vietnam wasn't a quagmire initially.  That was something the French and Eisenhower worried about well before Kennedy.  And yet the quagmire of Vietnam didn't start until after the assassination.

I'm saying the whole world benefited because we were all allowed to forget about the nuclear clock.  We didn't even notice when it stopped being relevant.  In Moore's Watchmen, Nixon is still president.  Nixon became a pariah.  In fact, everything became a pariah after Kennedy's assassination.  If you believe the record, Kennedy himself became a pariah.  Just as he was all along, for some people.

I'm not saying any of this is true, that a conspiracy in fact did exist, two countries deciding to take their troublesome chiefs off the table in whatever form such a move ended up taking (there's just some much monkeying around in the Kennedy affair, that if Oswald didn't have help before his death he certainly did after it, if only to apparently obscure and possibly cover up what perhaps only didn't happen but was considered...see how complicated all of this is?).  What I'm saying is...Kennedy's assassination had one lasting effect, and it was that from that point onward, we started seeing shadows everywhere, and not just saw but created them.  Woodward and Bernstein are still considered heroes for helping take down Nixon, that dastardly plotter (and Watergate was all about...stealing campaign secrets).  Vietnam was a terrible awful thing, but it was also not nearly as bad as the reaction it provoked at home.  Iraq and Afghanistan, the same but thankfully not as bad.  We're still working on the level of our collective idiocy.  (By the way, we put Saddam there.  And then we took him out.  The real problem is and always has been Muslim insecurity.)  Clinton is hailed as a hero despite being a perfectly miserable typical politician.  Gore is hailed as a martyr even though it's plain to see he never wanted to be president in the first place.  (Figure it out.)  And Bush is, well, a pariah.  We use the smokescreen of oil to justify our hatred of him.  And of course everyone who makes that complaint still drives their vehicles each and every day.  Never mind the hypocrisy behind the curtain, Dorothy.

Oswald considered Cuba to be the model of utopia.  He really did.  He thought Castro was a great man.  Me, I'll always side with another fallen hero, Che.  And why not?  Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, and then came back when he realized Marxism and communism were not the same thing.  Today we talk about capitalism and socialists, but it's the same thing, always the same thing.  I tell you, Billy Joel had it right.  We didn't start the fire.  Jefferson was elected president on the grounds that he wasn't John Adams.  And Jackson was elected on the grounds that he wasn't Quincy.  I tell you, these things don't always work out the way we think they will.  Without Jackson, I'm convinced civil war might have been ultimately averted.  Maybe even without Jefferson.  I wonder how much the Louisiana Purchase affected the course toward 1812.  Who's to say how these things work?  Menelaus lost Helen, and Agamemnon declared war on Ilium.  Then again, he might have been preparing to do that anyway.

All I'm really asking is that maybe we let cooler heads prevail every now and again.  Stop discussing events with histrionics.  That's the kind of thought that would actually convince someone that Kennedy was a bad president.  He wasn't.  He was the last of the greats.  And we've all been trying to argue ever since that one party or another has been his successor.  Funny thing is, Lincoln was a Republican.  Kennedy was a Democrat.  And yet they were after the same goals.  The entire Union was scared shitless during the whole Civil War.  If it hadn't won, we'd consider Lincoln a regular Kennedy today.  And yet that's my point.  Kennedy was a regular Lincoln, and Lincoln was a regular Kennedy.  You need to look beyond the rhetoric.  That's what damned Kennedy.  And that's what's been damning us ever since.

#590. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse May 2013

I've got a bunch of books to choose from:

• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco
• The March by E.L. Doctorow
• The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
• how i became stupid by Martin Page
• Rez Salute by Jim Northrup
• Supergods by Grant Morrison
• The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
• Martin Monsterman by Manny Trembley
• Kaboom! Volume 1 by Jeph Loeb & Jeff Matsuda

And the book I'm reading now, 11/22/63 by Stephen King.

None of these were bad.  On Goodreads I rated each of them either four or five stars (out of five) (and King is already looking at five stars), which meant that this month was an uncommonly good one for me as far as reading went (not to mention prolific, though a lot of these were fairly short).  Choosing one book to rule them all (rather than blab on about all of them), I'll go easy and talk about the current one. 

I've talked about 11/22/63 and King in the past.  The book's central location (or at least starting point) is Lisbon Falls, Maine, which is my hometown, and right next door to where King himself grew up.  Al's Diner isn't really, but Frank Anicetti and the Kennebec Fruit Company are.  You may not know either by name, and you may not even know their defining element, Moxie, but trust me, all three are a big deal, not just for me, not just for Lisbon, but for a lot of people.  The Moxie Festival draws thousands to town every year (this year's is being held July 12-14, if you care to stop by).  Moxie is an acquired taste, a soft drink of a bygone era, when soda was used as medicine (no kidding).

The book is King at his best.  It's about the Kennedy assassination, but it's also about people, which contrary to popular opinion is what he does best.  You can't tell a good horror story without knowing about people, and it's something King knows better than anyone.  It's another of the many stories he's been waiting to tell for years.

#589. Pop Fly Wednesday

The Boston Red Sox
(27-19)
2nd in American League East Division
The Sox were five-in-seven for the past week.  Good for them!

The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
(18-27)
4th in American League West Division
Mike Trout made history again.  The Angels were three-in-six, including a couple big wins (a good phrase to use for this hard-luck team).  Trout is batting .293, Mark Trumbo .269, and Albert Pujols .247.

The Oakland Athletics
(25-22)
2nd in American League West Division
The A's were five-in-six.  That's awesome!

The St. Louis Cardinals
(29-16)
1st in National League Central Division
The Cardinals were four-in-seven.  Pretty good!

#588. Fan Tango Tuesday: Hootie and the Blowfish

subject: Hootie and the Blowfish

overview: It's a fact of rock music that it just hasn't been the same since '60s, and really I blame Led Zeppelin.  Rock was the hot new thing that angered '50s parents and gave us outsize personalities like Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.  Then stuff like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Doors happened.  The '70s were a long decade of experimentation that gave us singer-songwriters, disco, and yes, Led Zeppelin.  Then in the '80s everything exploded, broke all the rules.  The '90s were one long effort to recover from the '80s.  Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were a brief effort to do something new, bring it to the next level, but then Cobain died.  The rest of the decade struggled to reconstitute rock identity.

And it all started with Hootie and the Blowfish.  Hootie broke all the rules.  The band was at the vanguard of reviving the '60s rock vibe, scaling back the excesses (which of course the '60s had begun, but surprisingly innocently) that had crept up and splintered interest into a thousand subgenres.  Hootie was Southern rock and soul and pop all rolled into one.  It sounded laid back.  Within a year, though, Hootie was the most popular band of the new generation and then the squarest one around.  This was around the time where everyone started to glom onto the hip hop and dance scenes, leaving rock entirely behind.

These days rock is making a comeback, which began with the garage bands of the early '00s like the White Stripes and continued to the folk acts like Mumford & Sons.  Everyone is still rebelling against the mainstream sounds of U2 and Coldplay, because as mainstream as rock got with Elvis and the Beatles, observers are still convinced that rock is best represented as rebellion like the mumbling Bob Dylan and R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe.

Hootie stood apart because of its lead singer Darius Rucker, a black man surrounded by three white guys: lead guitarist Mark Bryan, bassist Dean Felber, and drummer Jim "Soni" Sonefeld (who's the one responsible for breakout signature song "Hold My Hand").  Rucker was indisputably the face of the band, who was assumed to be the Hootie in name while everyone else represented the Blowfish (these were actually Rucker and Bryan's nicknames for some old college friends).  As much as this common misconception plagued the band, the name itself was so goofy that once people stopped paying attention to the music, they couldn't take the band seriously anymore.

And the glorious reception of the first album was met with dread silence when the second album (led by songs Hootie had dreamed up before its great success) came with much heavier material.  Its name was Fairweather Johnson, giving entirely new meaning to the first one's Cracked Rear View.  The band knew before anyone else that the ride wouldn't last.  In fact, every member of Hootie quickly embraced the dreaded rockstar fate of growing up and starting families, bucking the lifestyle expected of them.  It was the first time the slog of the new road scene had been rejected.  Rock wasn't guarenteed for instant stardom unless you could accompany your songs with snazzy music videos.  Have you ever seen a Hootie music video?

Today the music video aesthetic is built into the whole act since as we all know the music video is already dead.

Yet Hootie endures.  Musical Chairs was all about having fun with the music again, while Scattered Smothered & Covered represented the band's covers era bar scene, and an eponymous album tried to replicate the early success.  Hootie's most recent album together, 2005's Looking For Lucky, is some of its best work, in which the songs reached true Americana like the work of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen.  Yet the stigma remained.  With the radio no longer interested in new Hootie, the band took an extended break.  Rucker announced his intentions to become a country star.  Everyone scoffed.  Then of course it happened.

I've loved every minute of it.  Mark Bryan has created two albums of his own material, while Rucker is releasing his third country album today (his first solo effort was an R&B set).  They've remained a favorite no matter the incarnation since I first heard them.  They're inexplicable to the Led Zeppelin set.  Led Zeppelin happened as a direct answer to the original rock vibe, taking all the music and throwing Doors lyrics in front of them.  Without Jim Morrison, Doors lyrics are beside the point.  It was the jam session, rock as jazz, which the Grateful Dead and the Dave Matthews Band mined to great success, but rock is about the lyrics not just presentation or having a good time, rediscovering the communal messages that go beyond the traditional love message.

That's what Hootie is all about.

highlights:









































(Yes, twenty selections.  I really, really love Hootie.)

#587. Frog Splash Monday: Now I've Seen WrestleMania 29

The thoughts on WrestleMania 29 will follow shortly, but there are a few topics worth addressing first:

1) Curtis Axel
Mr. Perfect's son Joe Hennig made his debut all over again on Raw tonight.  Joe was previously featured in CM Punk's New Nexus circa 2011 as Michael McGillicutty, the name he went under when he competed on NXT (WWE's current breeding ground).  This is pretty big.  Much like Dean Ambrose as part of The Shield, this is someone the fans have been wanting to see get the call-up for a while.  He's the guy who trained with The Rock in his most recent run with the company.  The new name might take some getting used to, but it's a legacy combination just like The Rock's originally was ("Rocky Maivia" coming from Dwayne Johnson's father Rocky and grandfather Peter Maivia).  Mr. Perfect's real name was Curt Hennig, while Joe's grandfather was known as Larry "The Ax" Hennig.  "Curtis Axel" could eventually be boiled down to just Ax or something.  "Ax" was also one half of the '80s tag team Demolition (no, not Larry Hennig), but I'm sure fans would be willing for someone with, ah, more talent to share it, much like "The Rock" was previously a nickname for Don Muraco.  Joe received a strong push out of the gate tonight as the newest member of the Paul Heyman family (which also includes CM Punk and Brock Lesnar).  You might remember Heyman from ECW, the "land of extreme."  Joe battled Triple H, the semi-retired legend who lost to Lesnar last night at Extreme Rules in a steel cage match, in the main event.  Not too bad!  Although of course now fans will be asking all the more loudly to see Richie Steambeat receive similar honors.  This particular prospect is the son of Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat.  If you have to ask who he is, then there's no hope for you.

2) Austin Aries
TNA was on the receiving end of yet another embarrassing episode a few weeks ago when Austin Aries showed a considerable lack of maturity when announcer Christy Hemme misstated his entrance.  Hemme is a legitimate wrestling goddess, winning the original WWE Divas Search, but has nicely transitioned into a role more traditionally associated with men (unless you're Lilian Garcia).  Aries is one of those ROH alumni renowned for his wrestling prowess.  Last year he was given a run as TNA champion, a move that elevated him to the main event, which lately has meant a lot of tag team matches for some of the best wrestlers in the promotion (that's where Bobby Roode, Aries' predecessor as champion and in fact his tag team partner, currently sits, as well as Christopher Daniels, the hottest heel in the company not to be featured in the Aces & Eights faction).  Aries decided it was appropriate to block Hemme into the corner and then climb to the second rope (so, let's be clear, his crotch was in her face) while she made the correction.  That's just not something you do.  TNA as a company has been doing commendable business.  I said "yet another embarrassing episode" at the start of this item because in the spring of 2011, Jeff Hardy showed up to the main event of a TNA intoxicated and unable to compete.  He subsequently cleaned up his act, thank goodness, and is once again a member in good standing of the wrestling community, but I'm sure there are still fans who will only associate both Hardy and TNA with such bad publicity.  Aries has offered an apology, and Hemme accepted, but how could he have possibly thought that was a good idea in the first place?

On to WrestleMania 29!

Sheamus, Randy Orton, & Big Show vs. The Shield
The three names on the left side of this match are all perennial members of the WWE-doesn't-know-what-to-do-with-them-at-WrestleMania club.  To be fair, Orton has had a good amount of success,but Big Show's woes are so well-known that they were the whole subject of his match against Cody Rhodes last year.  Sheamus has twice had matches against Daniel Bryan sabotaged on the card, and his debut at WrestleMania against Triple H is one of those matches I still keep trying to redeem in my own thoughts.  Still, Sheamus had the best showing in this match.  As talented as the members of The Shield are, they were mostly playing off the big names.  Not a bad match, but curiously devoid of any real momentum, possibly because they had to figure out how to help The Shield win again (they're currently undefeated and last night captured a bunch of championships, led as always by Ambrose).

Ryback vs. Mark Henry
It wasn't until I remembered that a lot of this WrestleMania could very easily be defined by the Hall of Fame induction of WWE legend Bruno Sammartino that the significance of this match clicked.  It was all strongman style.  That was Sammartino's gimmick, and who better to sell it at WrestleMania than the new Goldberg and the World's Strongest Man?

Team Hell No (Daniel Bryan & Kane) vs. Dolph Ziggler & Big E Langston
Langston was another obvious attempt at taking a chip off the old Sammartino.  The commentary kept making references at how powerful he is.  Ziggler is the new Mr. Perfect, though a version that can win a world championship in WWE (which he did the night after WrestleMania, though he recently suffered a legitimate concussion and so couldn't make his scheduled title defense last night). He wasn't given much to do in this match, however, which has been typical of his WrestleMania appearances.  That's always puzzled me.  Maybe next year?

Chris Jericho vs. Fandango
I will probably have to watch this match again, but most of it just seemed like it was the consummate professional Jericho at the top of his game, and Fandango merely keeping up.  Jericho is one of those wrestlers who can have a good match with anyone, which was all the more necessary in this one because it was Fandango's first actual match in WWE.  Their feud continued last night, and it seems to be continuing still.  It doesn't hurt that Fandango's sometimes dance partner Summer Rae is turning into an attraction all her own.  Previous Divas like AJ Lee (a breakout sensation last year), Sunny, and Sable have always made the most of it.  Hopefully Summer can do the same.  In the meantime, this match was fun in the same way Jericho's match against Steamboat, Jimmy Snuka, and Roddy Piper was a few years ago.  Jericho can have a good match against anyone and even if he's the only one worth watching (and that's not necessarily the case in either of these matches), by god you'll still enjoy yourself.

Alberto Del Rio vs. Jack Swagger
A contender for best match of the night.  These two had surprisingly good chemistry together.  It's entirely possible that they are in fact each other's ideal opponents in the ring.  Del Rio has been looking for exactly that since he arrived in late 2010.  It was assumed that his match was fellow Mexican superstar Rey Mysterio, but it's Swagger.  The company has been trying to make Swagger a star for years, but with his lisp it's hard to take him seriously when he speaks (I don't personally fixate on that, but I know other fans do).  That's why he has a mouthpiece in Zeb Coulter.  All he has to do is get it done in the ring.  It's always good to have two submission specialists unleashed on each other.

Undertaker vs. CM Punk
For a good portion of Undertaker's famed WrestleMania winning streak (after this match now 21-0), he wasn't know for having the best matches on the card.  But that has become the norm in recent years.  This match was no exception.  Punk had been on a hotstreak since the summer of 2011, and aside the injuries that are currently keeping him out of the ring he's shown no signs of slowing down.  He's an inspired performer.  Every threat to the streak makes big promises about ending it, but few have done it with as much flair as Punk.  The death of William Moody, who portrayed Undertaker's long-term manager Paul Bearer, earlier this year provided particularly fruitful material.  Where such an angle could easily have been in poor taste, in this instance it was the ultimate tribute.  A lot of Undertaker's early WWE matches revolve around his mysterious urn, held like a totem by Bearer at ringside.  Punk and Heyman centered a lot of the drama around the urn once again.  Probably more rewarding than both recent Triple H matches, and even the ones against "Mr. WrestleMania" Shawn Michaels, whom I contend will be facing Triple H at next year's landmark WrestleMania XXX.  It's no coincidence that WWE has been ramping up Shawn's appearances recently.  He's been retired since 2010.  It's time for one last moment of glory, ending his good buddy Triple H's career once and for all.

Brock Lesnar vs. Triple H
Like The Rock, Lesnar made an unexpected comeback, competing on cards sprinkled throughout the year.  His last match before last year's Extreme Rules was at WrestleMania XX against Goldberg.  Though he's a wicked heel now, circa 2002-2003 he was the Next Big Thing, the long-awaited second coming of the legitimate WWE big man, Hulk Hogan style, this time one who could pull off a competitive match (the problem was always finding competition).  Lesnar had a successful stint in UFC, which has informed his current smashmouth style (and the corporate logo-infused attire he uses to wrestle).  Now he's a monster that looks all the more impossible to defeat.  This match with Triple H was a more contemporary version of the Sammartino style.  Notably the commentary never once mentioned the strongman vibe, even though these are two wrestlers who epitomize it.

The Rock vs. John Cena
A reprise of last year's "Once in a Lifetime" main event was a clear echo of that match, much like Star Trek Into Darkness is of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  And it's a better match precisely for it.  If Cena has any real weakness in the ring, it's that he doesn't often seem to realize that a big match should be treated that way.  He's had plenty of big matches, but a lot of those big matches (especially the ones against Rob Van Dam and CM Punk) he lost.  He lost last year's big match against The Rock, too, and that fact made this one more compelling than its predecessor could have hoped to be.  The Rock always benefited from contemporary stars rising to similar levels of success as himself.  Cena has often lacked that, or WWE in its incarnations at the time did everything possible to split its attention, keeping Batista and Randy Orton away from him for too long.  Instead his early WrestleMania opponents were Triple H and Shawn Michaels, stars of previous generations.  Cena in fact had a contemporary with whom he meshed really well, Edge, but their only WrestleMania encounter was a three-way match that also included Big Show (for some reason), and wasn't even the main event of the card.  So it's no surprise that he needed some extra help to get it done with Rock.  And get it done they did this time.

All in all a pretty good WrestleMania.

***

I'll round today out with an acknowledgement of my ongoing obsession over a different subject entirely, actor Colin Farrell, who was on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tonight.  He was pretty awesome, promoting the animated flick Epic by...talking about his line dancing past.  Makes perfect sense!

#586. Life & Theft Sunday: A Grunt

recently i was thinking
about war again

durm und strang
and bang and blame

i think the people
who hate war the most
are the ones who can't
keep their own horrors
out of their eyes

war is a terrible thing
don't get me wrong
but there are a lot of bad things
that happen all around us
all the time and war
has its worst effects in the mind
where most war is pitched
every single day

far from the battlefield

or at least any
that will ever be
commemorated

so what is it
about war and people
getting blown to bits
because that's
what they set out to do?

we find it a horror
because we can't imagine
how anyone could volunteer
for such a fete

yet we've been a volunteer army
for decades now
and the strange thing is
i wish we still had the draft

i wish we still had the draft
because it prevents all the typical bullshit
it prevents assholes from telling you
that you can't fight for your country
because once you go volunteer
you can be rejected
and i know all about that now

when there's a draft
they'll take anyone
and you're all in it for the same reasons

when you volunteer you can be screened away
like it's a good thing to reject the willing
on technicalities while those who slipped in
can be as bad as they want to be
like all the assholes behind a wheel
on the battlefields of the road

volunteers come into a regimented culture
but it's an artificial one that's just as phony
as anywhere else
the drafted were always forced into conformity
because there was no telling where they came from

the drafted could bitch about the horrors with justification
volunteers have no one to blame but themselves
and damned if no one still knows the difference

war in a volunteer state is a tacit approval
and a true dichotomy of the culture
even after all that culture revolution
there are still people who believe in war
and ain't that a bitch?

until the other day i thought the iraq war
was less stupid than the popular opinion suggested
a hangover of the vietnam years that we still cling to
like dependents on the drugs that helped make it possible
you all said bush was an idiot
burning in his own folly
you still claim that it made no sense
and yet it made all the sense in the world
the only problem is that we lost the stomach for resolve
and instead just wanted to believe in absent hope

hope in the middle of climate change
is like a winter that doesn't want to go away
snow in the middle of spring
and spring in the middle of winter
when the levies broke we all saw monsters
a hushpuppy in a bathtub

well maybe it was an obsession
that wasn't so healthy after all
but in a lot of ways it really was inevitable
a mess we had to clean up if we ever wanted
to look at ourselves in the mirror again
and in the 21st century mirrors are no longer miracles
but more of our patented nightmares
they're on the walls and nowhere in the landscape
and there is no fairest of them all
just another warrior attempting to find their grail
in a childrens crusade to a holy land
stuck in a quagmire of conflicting faith
all derived from the same source
but speaking a different language

someone is making the argument
that all of this makes sense
and that the only explanation is that
black is still black and white is still white
but black isn't a color and neither is white
these are absences and they are the abyss
and we are all staring at it
never once realizing that it is indeed
staring back at us

we moonwalk toward Golgotha
and there's not a Cyrenian in sight
and we look upon the grim works of
Ozymandias and tremble because we no longer know
how to look at history with any perspective
perhaps because all those books of Alexander's
were lost and really i was recently reminded
that 97% of human history was left off the annals
so what do we really know except what we tell ourselves?

drafted into this world and volunteered to fight a war
i try to blend all the disparate conflicting impulses
that float around me and the life and the theft of it
are just things that happen before it all ends

so tell me again why i should be outraged
or why i shouldn't be outraged
every single day

i respond with a grunt

#585. Direct Current Friday

Rounding out the week, I'll secretly be participating in the Remakes Blogfest, but not until later in the post.  I've decided that if I do things officially, it just won't work out.  Somewhere along the way I think I either really did alienate everyone or somehow it was construed that I don't want comments.  I love comments.  I loved the dialogue that went into some of the comments recently, and would love to continue that.  Although if I really have alienated everyone, as the title of the obscure Marlon Brando movie suggests, Sayonara.

Today Star Trek Into Darkness opens.  This counts as a holiday for me, although I probably won't be seeing it until tomorrow.  When Star Trek opened four years ago, I used it as an excuse to make repeated trips to the movie theater to see it in an almost exact replica of the instant adoration I had for The Dark Knight a year earlier.  Sadly I have no monies in 2013, so I will not really be able to do that again, but I would beg borrow and steal my way into the auditorium for this.

I'm a Star Trek fan.  Some of us call ourselves Trekkies, and some of us call ourselves Trekkers (because let's face it, "Trekkies" sounds stupid).  I'm not a Star Trek fan in the sense that I regularly attend conventions and have psychotically (but awesomely) retrofitted my living quarters into a replica of a set.  In fact, I've only ever been to one convention, and I had to leave before Robert Picardo made his appearance (yes, one celebrity appearance, so obviously not a big one).  I'm a Star Trek fan in that I've loved Star Trek for a long time.  It's not just one or two of the series or movies that I love.  I have a whole blog committed to the entire franchise.

Ten years ago it was a rotten time to be a Star Trek fan, or at least one the least bit attuned to the rest of the community.  Star Trek Nemesis had bombed in theaters over the winter, and Enterprise was limping its way to a woebegone conclusion two years later.  Fans talked more about what they hated than what they loved.  It was my introduction to Internet culture.  Everyone's too cool for the room, harvesting a cult of personality rather than insightful commentary.  I'm more of an insightful commentary kind of guy.

And so when I talk about Star Trek, it's about the things I love, and I love Star Trek because there are many things I love about it.  I don't spread this love around unconditionally.  It just so happens that Star Trek has a hard time disappointing me.  The last time I was disappointed with it, I pretty much stopped experiencing the offender, which is the pocket universe of the Pocket Books novels.  I used to read those all the time.  I guess the more filmed Star Trek there was, the less tolerance I had for work that I found poorly derivative.  Although that's what the fans who hated the later filmed material said about that, too.

It's all a matter of perspective.  And I'm coming back around on the books, by the way.  I'll be reading a few of them probably later this year.  Anyway, it's not such a bad time to be a fan these days.  Star Trek was more popular than any other film in the series.  It made buckets and buckets of money.  We're only just now getting another one, but that only figures.  I maintain to this day that the main problem a decade ago was franchise fatigue.  The fans went from having a single series that had run for three seasons to a new movie every few years a decade later to another series and more movies to three more series for more than another decade...These fans found plenty of shiny new obsessions, and they had their fun elsewhere.

The reboot was something some of us had dreaded for years.  There was such an interconnectedness to the previous version and all its incarnations, despite minor deviations here and there, it was for those who could follow it exactly like a given author's beloved epic cycle.  But the reboot worked.  It was immediately different from what had come before, but it put a new focus on some of the elements that badly needed attention in the original versions of Kirk and his pals, being a knowing examination of these characters.  Kirk and Spock were already legends.  Now the stories themselves explained why instead of just letting the fans extrapolate.

Some people say the J.J. Abrams version of Star Trek is missing the insightful commentary of its predecessors.  I offer a counterargument that this Star Trek has that, in spades.  It speaks about the human condition, using the main characters, and doesn't do too much to distract from that, other than all the spiffy whizzbang action that won Abrams a seat at the Star Wars table.  Star Trek has always been about the human condition, from Christopher Pike being held captive by the Talosians to "Trip" Tucker deciding to sacrifice himself so his buddy Jonathan Archer could disentangle himself from the mess Shran made.  Every incarnation of Star Trek has interpreted this basic mandate differently.  The new movies are no different.

***

The remake I choose to spotlight in my unofficial participation in the blogfest is The Maltese Falcon.

Wait just a hot dog minute, The Maltese Falcon a remake?!?  The classic starring Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre?!?  Indeed, grasshopper.  It's also based on a book!

Okay, maybe you knew that one.  Dashiell Hammett's book was published in 1930.  Someone in Hollywood figured it would make a great movie.  The Maltese Falcon was duly released in 1931.  And then Satan Met a Lady was released in 1936.  Bogart's Falcon, "the stuff dreams are made of," came out in 1941.  It was an instant classic, a masterpiece of film noir.

And just think, all those people who claim remakes are a terrible thing would have done everything possible to block it from ever being made given half a chance.  What are they, a thug in The Maltese Falcon?  I know, I know, they usually adopt this stance because they hate to see a treasured memory attempt to be replaced.  Obviously most remakes aren't based on actual treasured memories.  Except Harrison Ford's The Fugitive.  Or Judy Garland's The Wizard of Oz.  You get the idea.  "Remakes" are the basis of storytelling itself.  You only think it's about original ideas.  A story is only a version of something that already exists.  It's inspired, no matter how tenuously, on events whether fictional or real.  Every single story ever.

I'd much rather live in a world where Bogart's Maltese Falcon exists, thank you.  I love that Homer helped give us The Iliad, and The Odyssey.  Those poems were composed centuries after the events they evoke.  Stories based on stories.

For the bonus round of music, I'm going unorthodox again.  As I recently stated, I'm a fan of the Beatles.  For a few years, I collected issues of the British music magazine Mojo that included complete covers of Beatles albums, uniting various artists and their particular interpretations of the songs.  My favorite remains Revolver Reloaded, based of course on Revolver, another of their formative masterpieces.  It includes Mark Mulcahy's version of "She Said She Said," which is to my mind the definitive one.  These Mojo albums were probably why I was able to enjoy the movie Across the Universe so much, because it features another collective effort to cover Beatles song.  As far as I'm concerned, you can't go wrong with Beatles songs.

Plus we wouldn't have this without remakes.



And I really wouldn't want to live in a world where that wasn't possible.