Superman Puts the Zod On Batman

There is a bit of wondering going on about the role Kryptonite (the fictional substance that is Superman's weakness) will play in the Man of Steel sequel, tentatively titled Superman v. Batman. The thinking seems to be that the two characters will eventually duke it out, with Batman employing the special K as an equalizer in face of Superman's obvious physical advantage. I'd prefer it if the filmmakers found another angle to bring these two men together. I share the opinion that Superman defeats Batman, period, no explanations, no conditions, no excuses. 

The "Batman v Superman" name is a working title only, and there is NO NEED to have these two characters fight. We can leave the Frank Miller tale where it belongs, in DC's "Elseworlds" sagas and let these two men meet under more realistic circumstances. In any event, even with kryptonite, Superman would likely win in a heartbeat. His skill set, ie, powers, are too many and overwhelmingly superior to Batman's skills and expertise. It would just strain credulity and lessen the reinvigorated Superman brand. More interesting, intriguing and with greater plot potential and character development would be to have the two heroes circle each other with suspicion, each considering the other as an abomination and contrary to everything each of them stands for. And, as the plot's crisis mount, the two find themselves in common cause and discovers that each has abilities and skills that come in handy in the fight against evil. This way we can have Batman's using his skills in detection and strategy with more purpose, and we get to see Superman be super against a foe, we assume, who can give him a fight worthy of his strength.

On the matter of Kryptonite, let me add that that the filmmakers would be wise to just get rid of. I always resented the fact that the most powerful being in the universe could be rendered weak and eventually killed with a mere radioactive rock. It doesn't do any good to hypothesize alternative theories around this; Superman is a character who is able to withstand immeasurably destructive cosmic forces and it is irrational for a hero of such heroic resilience to quite suddenly lose his strength and commence to perish because of a rock emitting a particular kind of radiation. It has never, never been plausible, even considering how insanely implausible (albeit entertaining) his comic book world is.

Kryptonite is, and always has been, a fast exit for writers who hadn't the imagination to create better, more demanding perils for Superman to face. It had gotten to the point that seemingly every two-bit punk and shoplifter had a chunk of the green stuff in reserve in case Super tried to interfere with their acquisition of ill-gotten goodies. We have to consider as well two other inconsistencies with the fictional rock; (1). If a rock emits radiation powerful enough to weaken and eventually kill the otherwise invulnerable Man of Steel, why have humans, in most of Superman's 75 years, been able to handle the substance without harm. This was a glaring inconsistency, an issue unresolved because the writers wanted human villains, be they punks, technologized billionaires, or mega-powered bad guy, to be able to handle the material to foil Superman and then move on with their agenda. It's a cheat in the narrative art. 

By rights, humans should burst into flames and scream something horrible before there is nothing but a black scorch mark on the ground where they once stood. Kryptonite should have been killing humans all along. 

(2). Why has it seemed that every single chunk of Kryptonite landed on Earth? Over the many decades that I've read Superman, it has always seemed that the kryptonite was much, much too plentiful. Even in the comics, the universe is a very big place and it would seem only the smallest, nearly unmeasurable amount of K would crash to earth. What I am basically arguing is that Superman's only weakness should be someone with superior strength, skills, intelligence. The Kryptonite trump card has got to end. And DC should run another Dark Knight novel with an alternative ending--Batman picks a fight with Superman and Big Blue, annoyed, goes Full Zod on him. If you want some of Superman, you're gonna get some of Superman. As they say, you mess with the bull, you get the horn.

Sound, fury, cliché! Lazy pundits “double down” on “game-changing” “narratives” - Salon.com

Sound, fury, cliché! Lazy pundits “double down” on “game-changing” “narratives” - Salon.com:

'Thomas Frank, writing in Salon, does a neat job of collecting and arguing the uselessness of cliches and other forms of verbal filler when it comes to the discussion under way on cable tv's political talk shows. 

I remember a night watching the old Keith Olbermann show on MSNBC where I heard he, author Richard Wolf and Washington Post columnist Gene Washington have a wonderful time saying "double down" to one another , in rapid succession. Conversations, even ones stressed by tv segment time constraints, are based on rhythm and cogent phrasing to be understood at first listen; the relentless repetition of the odious "double down" rendered the topic of the discussion all but incoherent to my ears, not an easy thing to do since I am someone who listens to what others are saying. 

Gone was the showy outrage over whatever the latest GOP happened to be at the time; what replaced it was a verbal circle jerk that sounded like it involved the odious Kentucky Chicken offering, also named the Double Down. The sandwich was two thick,greasy chicken breasts and lots and lots and lots of cheese, bacon and assorted other bringers of cardiac complication. The panel on Olbermann's show sounded like they were slipping into a Food Coma, murmuring for more Double Downs before the Lights Went Out.

Hope for the Quentin guy?

On the subject of" the film Pulp Fiction", I will say again that I think that film is a masterpiece, sheer inspiration in ways of writing, editing, acting. Everything that Tarantino does in the film is      fresh and alive, a lively recasting of venerable Hollywood genre. The essential problem is that he uses the same tact over and over; directors are allowed to repeat certain things they do, since that is the essence of having a style. But the point of having an identifiable  style is being able to do different and unexpected things within the recognizable framework.

Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and  auteurs too numerous to mention made movies which are praised for being individually stylish and avoiding being declining versions of earlier work. What attraction is how a director or an author's style is adapted toward the story at hand and the genre specifications that frame the narrative; if everything is working the way it ought to, a viewer or reader loses track of stylistics and suspends their proverbial disbelief.

A competently managed style eases the audience through the "fourth wall" and engages them in the story. Tarantino has it reversed, a condition not unlike what plagues a two generation of  able fingered rock guitarist, where the  structure is meant to serve the flashy pyrotechnics.   What Tarantino repeats himself, in a succession of films, that threaten to downgrade his method from "style" to mere shtick. Audaciousness quickly becomes an indulgent rut an artist can't climb out of.

 I would argue that virtually all of Tarantino's movies are reboots, in his case , the rebooting of a genre, be they crime stories, samurai tales, a war film, a western. Doubtless he'll resurrect the Hollywood musical, do a spy film and present us with super hero movie.  Those genre revivals, though, needn't be the over packed, eager to please student projects his last three films have been. As he did with his wonderful adaptation of Elmore Leonard's crime novel "Rum Punch" in the form of "Jackie Brown", Tarantino has the ability to let the tale advance without the worrying , hovering , obvious obsession to make the scene more clever than it needs to be. Many were disappointed when"JB " came out because it wasn't another "Reservoir Dogs" or  "Pulp Fiction"; I liked the way he scaled back his style, letting Leonard's plot unwind, allow the characters to have breathing room in the film space they inhabited,  letting the conversation ring stylish, idiomatic and true.

 What would be interesting is if Tarantino became bored with his established approach and challenged himself.  None of this means that QT needs to stop being the QT we were first attracted too--genre jumper, dark humorist, writer of quotable dialogue. What it means is that there is a wish that he soon acquires the most important trait any artist with serious ability can apply to a project he or she is working on, the sense of knowing when to stop, of knowing when enough is enough.

Teen Age Waste Land

I was a guitar obsessive for years over a slew of players--Larry Coryell, Leslie West, Ritchie Blackmore -- and there were parents, friends and the less friendly alike who thought that I would be better off with a more purposeful hobby. Building ships in bottles,say, or collecting bottle caps with cork linings.But I was in my teens and early twenties, after all, and matters of family, work, sobering up , and career change would eventually consume the time I would otherwise have spent waxing on , 24/7, about my favorite guitarists.

 In the meantime, I gloried in the fretwork of the string bending maniacs I called heroes, I read all their interviews, I bought whatever biographies were published, I owned each album these guitarists released in bands or as soloists, and my various apartments , through the years, were filled with the galvanic crash of frantic guitar music. Notes swarmed like bees over the lights. I was a fan, again, an obsessive, caught in the grip of having to have it all. I was also growing up and becoming slowly, faintly, conspicuously bored with my efforts to be definitive in my peculiar music world. I wanted something more. A life, perhaps. Some are not as lucky.

The sad part of the story is that I know some fellows, from a variety of circumstances, who are my age, late forties, and rattle on about their musical agendas at the drop of a beret. I did an interview with Ozzie Osborn in the early eighties for a weekly when Black Sabbath were coming through town, and an acquaintance named Roy couldn't get over the fact that I was the undeserving son-of-bitch among his associates who'd received an audience with his Ozziness.Roy complimented on this fact, saying that I must be something special to get the interview --"You met Ozzie, Man, that's doesnt jus happen, bro, you met Ozzie, I mean , The Oz, the god-damned Oz shook your hand , bro..."-- and then would kneel , valet style. Of course, being a young asshole myself, I got a kick out of that, but he kept it up for weeks, months, months turned into years, a decade passed, friends got married, had kids, other friends died of many different things, life became full and complicated, and close to twenty years later, around the time I turned forty, I was in the local market when Roy turns up in the aisle pushing a cart, thick around the middle, hair long, grey and thinning.

"Hey, how's the Oz man" was the first thing he said. I said I was okay, and after the expected pleasantries, he asked me what I thought of Randy Rhodes, Osborne's guitarist who was killed in a plane wreck. Not much, I said, I liked Van Halen better.

"But Randy played with Ozzy, man" he said," and you met Ozzy. Where's that at? Randy Roades played behind Oz and he could..."

Scary.

YES, ANOTHER SLAM ON THE GRIM GUS JONATHAN FRANZEN, WHO CANNOT STOP WRINGING HIS HANDS

 The Guardian continues to give Jonathan Franzen novelist room to vent; this week he opines at length that modern life is horrible, awful, far, far inferior to the good old days when he was young and the internet was only a dream fools had after a  tequila binge.

I was born in 1952, and 'though being somewhat older than Franzen, I think he's become a tiresome, humorless prig who views modern life through a filter that renders repetitive results. It's a natural instinct to resent and resist change, but truly smart and creative people cease with a protest that will not be heeded and adopt to the changes times and technology have brought us. 

Often enough, the writers, poets and playwrights and publishers and book retailers who embrace the means available to them find themselves doing more interesting work; it means that they are engaged with the world that swirls about them and are fearless enough to interrogate shifting assumptions and remain relevant to readers who, I think, like to read writers with stylish prose styles wax poetic on the doings of human contradiction and convulsion. 

Me, I love the internet, and I haven't had to give up the things I love, ie, literature, movies, poetry, jazz and blues, writing. The social sphere has been changing for the last 30 years, and I prefer being in on the conversation. Franzen continues to mumble about his fabled good old days, he continues to rue the dawning of the 60s and all the decades since. What a pathetic sight, a premature elder alone in a room with the shades drawn, the floor littered with crushed party hats and shriveled balloon skins. It was a great party, Jonathan, but it's over. Much fun and sadness has transpired since then. Did you miss all that.?

Holy Fucking Shit

 If you've been thinking that the satirical web site The Onion has been more strident and less funny in their lampooning of American mores, you're not alone.  Slate's Farhad Manjoo describes their busier, faster, louder, more extreme version in an article in Slate.  It's a good dissection of a funny magazine in the process of losing what makes it funny. For me, the Onion peaked shortly after the 9-11 attack, when the web site called their mock-coverage of the catastrophe "HOLY FUCKING SHIT!" It was a brilliant and angry poke in the eye at the media that tries to give a dramatic reading to events however inane or tragic they happen to be; there was no convenient narrative axiom like "America Under Attack" with which to make unfolding events barely comprehensible in an entirely false light. I pulled up the Onion , wondering how a site dedicated to the idea that there is nothing too cruel or horrible in human cruelty that cannot be made fun of, would react to what seemed like the end of the world. React they did, and I laughed, a hard, extended laugh, an hysterical series of gulping guffaws and belches that left me breathless, near tears. The Onion cut away a veneer and and gave us a headline that was hysterical , stupified and terrified with the revealed truth that suddenly, brutally, absolutely we thought we knew for certain mattered. The Onion took the whole shooting match.

Pushing the envelope

Absent Lovers --King Crimson

Absent Lovers-- King Crimson

Double cd set of a 1984 concert in Montreal, during their Beat, Discipline, & Three of a Perfect Pair trilogy of releases. This grouping is one of Fripp's best lineups, with Adrian Belew, Tony Levin on bass and stick, and Bill Bruford on drums, and what we have is something sounding no less than a more muscular Talking Heads (check out "Man with an Open Heart"). One needn't choke on that if Heads aren't their idea of heaven, because the abrasive textures, the angular riffing, gamelan rhythms, and swarming-bees improvisations abound aplenty here. Tasty. Crankier, spookier, harder, this is the goth side of Crimson, though there is little in the alternately playful/deadpan visage of the band's characters that gives you any hint of just how serious you need to take them. Hint: just seriously enough. Below is one of the great rock guitarists, for sheer whammy bar genius-- no one does six-string torture bends like him, save the sainted and departed Jimi-and I admit, I'm a sucker for his Kerouacian lyrics. Kerouac has not been my idea of anything brilliant--in fact, I think he's an absolutely horrible novelist-- but Belew is someone who picked up on what was trying to be done and made art out of it. 

If a failed novelist who would rhapsodize in huge portions of his best-known fictions with a careless application of jacked up modifiers and agitated adjectives in conspicuous attempts to intensify the experience for the readers, Kerouac, all the same, had a talent for loose, open -form free verse poetry; although not as sharp as some of his contemporaries--Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure--Kerouac 's verse had a snap and rhythmic sizzle that was as jazzy as he tried to make his prose. Belew picks up on this vibe and writes in a way where the words bounce, race, and arrive on, after and before the morphing rhythms that Bruford and Levin put across. 

Choppy rhythms and jerky pops and beeps; truly a band of great surprise. Fripp is the great Bringer of Chaos, and what's impressive is that he's been able to provide an art-context for his unique music and idiosyncratic aesthetics apart of the usual lockstep spheres and institutions that crush true innovation with the same avant gard template. Note: this is a 1998 release that Fripp and his DMG company have been sitting on for years. Somethings are worth waiting for.  Another note: disc one is a cd-rom that is clunky and hard to navigate. There is a video, apparently, that comes among its features, but I've skipped it after trying too long to access it, and landed straight on the audio portion of the show, which, I hope I've made clear, is wonderful and wild.

The Rooster King

Jay  Hopler's poem The Rooster King seems at first like a paean to the good sport of chicken righting, but one detects an increasing exaggeration of the terms until a certain falseness of claim is exposed. In the early lines, one is attracted to the cocksure bravado of Hopler's language and quickly appreciates the parody of athletic boasting and promotion that has long made professional sports just a much a matter of running one's mouth as it is with the combined assets of agility, speed, instinct, and determination. One might imagine this as an old forties Warner Brothers barnyard cartoon featuring a caricature of Muhammad Ali strutting around in the background amid the rain barrels and the hens while a Don King lookalike flaps his wings (if not his gums) about the legend and good graces of his man rooster, The Rooster King.Hopler seems to have absorbed his Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, as well as the more recent waxing about boxers by the late Norman Mailer and Joyce Carole Oates, as his writing has a high, cultivated lift to it's boasting, the myth-making that wants to convert something that is merely a few suppressed coughs from being mere thuggery and criminal enterprise into a tale of heroism, reaching the implied conclusion that some poor, hapless soul--or rooster--has had their character in the fires of tribulation and has made their brute aggression and ability to ignore pain into an art.

Like a cut throat and doesn't

………………………………….............Bleed. And when he bleeds,

He bleeds whiskey—Fighting Cock: 103-proof Kentucky Straight

Bourbon—the light of the world.

The light of the world:

Ruined. Magnificent; ferocious, gorgeous—

So what? You think he's afraid of fire? He wasn't born; he was forged.

He's the napalm love letter, the sweetheart

Carpet bomb, the 1967 Pontiac

With a straight-6, single-barrel

Boot in the face. No ram unto

The shackle, this bantam assassin, his death-red hackles flaring like a funeral pyre.

He's the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Wound 'round with barbed wire, the crucified

Christ tattooed on the back of a contract killer.

It's argued that the poem is a play on the sufferings of Jesus, but Hopler's intentions are grittier, I think. The pain and suffering of Christ on the cross is a plausible scenario, but Hopler intended a narrower reference, I think. The gospel accounts of his death are not all that reliable as an accurate historical record, with the elaborations of his story purposefully elevating the tale to sanctified mythology that demands that we regard Christ as a man of destiny fated with enacting an absurdly convoluted Plan to make humankind worthy of God's love. All things considered, I suspect the actual Jesus had as much choice as anyone else had when confronted with a situation as to flee from danger or face his accusers. The boxing analogy is apter, I think, and even a gladiator comparison is a closer fit to the level of metaphor Hopler is successfully attempting. Roosters, being animals with only instinct to push their actions, have no choice but to battle; boxers, the poor men who try to make a living with their fists in some vague hope of achieving, have no choice but to battle because brawn was their only resource. What I read Hopler as doing is deconstructing the layers of heroic mythic association on the idea of brutal spectacle being somehow honorable and necessary for the social and political cohesion of the populace by applying the meme to an absurd example, a battling rooster. For all the fanfare the pitchman can muster, it never eludes us, not for a second, that what he's extolling is a bloody, awful event. The attempt to graft a grand narrative to the cockfighting exposes the lie of battling skill and that more often than not the results are determined not with skill or guile or flashes of pugnacious brilliance, but rather with raw, unforgiving, unyielding. He who is bigger, stronger, faster wins the fracas.

Hopler does a sweet balancing act here between heaping on the hyperbole and maintaining a straight face as he ramps the praise and the qualifications meant to soften the audience's perception of the frenzied, gouging agony before them. Each stab, peck, talon rip and snap is valorized, connected by association to great battles, hero's funerals, the spirit of invention that forges raw steel into classic automobiles; the declarations become precarious and unsustainable if questioned an iota. One only turns up the volume of the pitchman's incantation and seeks to enter into the illusion that the banal bit of fatal sport betting is a History in the Making. Hopler understands it seems, the vanity the pitchman is speaking to. The rhetoric, though, isn't for the nominally honored Rooster King, nor does it have anything to do with the skills or extraordinary qualities the toastmaster makes claim for; rather, the tale-telling and accumulating myth-making are for the audience's sake, a sales pitch voiced in such a way that it dually obscures the meanness of the activity and creates the illusion that the creature is there, prepared for combat, by some manner of free choice. It's a rhetorical zone that is impermeable to logic, and it is banter that is kept up without pause, to concoct a dramatic narrative over the bare facts of the situation--that these birds, and the analogous boxers they're standing in for, have no choice in whether they fight or not. Whether through the repetitive causation of murderous behavior modification, or the grim forces of economic survival, the fighting, the killing has nothing to do with glory, legend or principles: the goal is for one of the combatants to not ring the arena alive.

The sky is falling again!

Mary Beth Williams of Salon is fretting about fashions based on gangsta rap imagery are being marketed to white people. People at Salon like to  sweat the chump change that comes our way.

At this late date I doubt that it's required that a soft-boiled culture critic inform white people that they are not "straight outta Compton." It seems that the issue of wiggerism , the appropriation  of hip hop style by white teens in an effort to gather unto themselves a vestige of an elusive and ephemeral "hipness" and unearned street cred has been made discussed and mocked incessantly; it is a dead issue, I think.

There is a long, long, long history of  white America stealing the art and culture of black America, a problematic dynamic that reveals the underlying disorder of racism that the diminishing ruling class cannot let go of , but as well has energized and continues to energize popular culture to the degree that a certain kind of bi-cultural transcendence happens, in the art that results if not in the righteous reconciliation of the races. 

This issue, though, has less to do with racism than it does with the exploitation of a marketable style;  surely no one who has witnessed hip hop/rap/rhythm and blues venture from the margins of alternative culture, the street level experimentalist of urban life and enter the mainstream in full embrace of the corporations and consumes cannot b be shocked or offended, really, by the fact that the symbols of black  art wind up on fashion designs aimed for a privileged white audience, a demographic with money to spend on the latest pricy artifact of what used to be provocative.

 It's not about race or racism , it's about buying into an image that is manufactured and arranged to attract the naive, the gullible, the young, the willfully stupid. It's about getting paid. That's all.

Proud of being a hipster: One bearded, indie-rock-loving, contrarian-article-writing man’s story.

Proud of being a hipster: One bearded, indie-rock-loving, contrarian-article-writing man’s story.:

Writer Luke O'Neill  has authored a thoroughly pointless patch of self-regard for Slate declaring himself a hipster and defending the word and the stance against the general derision it gets from a mass-culture that has reached the saturation point with all things hip, whether  people, places or things. Norman Mailer's essay on Hip. "The White Negro", had the benefit of being stylishly lugubrious ; it was an essay written enough that intellectuals and pop-culture junkies are still debating , in some fashion, ideas that would have been dismissed in  heartbeat had they been presented by a lesser talent.

 Mailer brought gravitas to the concept of hip,  linked it to existentialism and zen, defined the zeitgeist which gave birth to it, started a conversation that remains vital. Mailer might have been a jerk and wrong headed, but he could argue his foolishness brilliantly. O'Neill , in effect, is defending his right to be a consumer, a customer at what is left of the Counter Culture, and he defends his right to take on the attitude his material preferences suggest they have. While I do believe there are genuinely hip folks in the world--the reader is left to define what they're idea of Hip needs to be, and what set of habits are  required to be a hipster--those I regard in that vague category seem unaware that they , in fact, the embodiment of something genuine , whether it's talent or personality. O'Neill's selling point attempts to make an irritating manner into a presence that suggests authority, a perverse sense of being superior:

" The single most defining trait of hipsters is our allegiance to irony, we're told. And it's true, because I don't even know if I believe any of the stuff I just wrote. It seemed like it might sound cool at the time and I thought by sharing it people would notice me and I'd end up feeling, albeit briefly, less lonely. If that's not hipster, then I don't know what is."

This underscores my contempt for the faux-hip running amuck and aimless , without purpose or intent in the culture, no intent other than to consume and indulge.  The "allegiance to irony"  is a further debasement of a venerable modernist literary device and is usurped to justify a  generation's inability to commit to solid principles and ethical conduct, or even create coherent values by which their doings do more for the community than earn a profit for the corporations  and they banks  earning  interest plus on purchases consumer hipsters make so they may  decorate their flimsy, contrived alternative.  O'Neill is not yet aware of the chain that shackles to the wall of the cave he lives in.