The End of the Beginning: Iraq 

Iraq: Shit Meets Fan

It just gets better and better. Recent events, particularly the destruction of an important Shiite shrine in Baghdad, have brought the country closer to civil war than ever.

The U.S., according to unnamed military professionals, faces a "humiliating defeat."

Baghdad has now been completely sealed off to curtail further violence. Not an encouraging sign, especially since the lockdown is in effect during daylight hours. And this is how things are kept under control by the U.S.? Let's face it: we've failed.

To get a more personalized perspective on how fucked up the situation is over there, read this compelling and heartbreaking blog from an Iraqi resident.

And how are the architects of this disaster dealing with life? Evidently, according to Secret Service agents, by getting drunk off their ass and shooting each other in the face.

Little wonder, then, that an increasing number of voices are calling for the impeachment of the President. The cover story on the March issue of Harper's (not posted online) explains "why we can no longer afford George W. Bush." It's not merely a left-wing rant. It's an important and chilling essay.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's over. Now it's just a matter of when the Bush administration realizes it and cuts our losses. Meanwhile, the body count continues to rise and, I fear, we can anticipate a long season of revenge strikes in Iraq and at home. Welcome to the occupation.

Another Reminder

A roadside memorial to an 18-year old soldier killed in Iraq was removed from its location outside a Florida Air Force Base days before a visit from George W.

This is the mindset of our times, apparently; let's not risk offending the President by making him confront the consequences of his actions or his lies.

Current total of American military casualties in Iraq since the "war" began: 2286

Here is a web profile of the dead soldier that someone feared Bush would notice. His name is Andrew Julian Aviles. He was a Lance Corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps. He died in Iraq on April 7, 2003. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

100 Things I Love About Comics

I'm not the first to do this. I suspect I won't be the last.

1. "I'm the goddamn Batman."
2. Mutts
3. Chris Ware
4. The one-volume edition of Bone
5. Lone Wolf & Cub
6. J. Scott Campbell's women
7. Ghost World (the movie and the comic)
8. George Perez drawing superhero teams
9. Preacher
10. The Fantastic Four (not the movie!)
11. Get Fuzzy
12. The Sandman
13. Ray & Maggie down at Leo's
14. Omnibus reprints of classic comics
15. Jack Cole's Plastic Man
16. Joe Sacco
17. Harvey Pekar
18. Charles Schulz
19. The Silver Surfer
20. Robert Crumb's women
21. Alex Ross
22. The Comics Journal
23. "The Comedian is dead."
24. Calvin & Hobbes
25. Jeffrey Brown
26. "With great power comes great responsibility."
27. The continual death and rebirth of superheroes and their enemies.
28. The Flaming Carrot
29. "Listen. Kid. Cerebus is in love with your wife."
30. Alan Moore
31. The trailer for Superman Returns
32. "To me, my X-Men."
33. Zot!
34. "Human? Why should I want to be human?"
35. Jack Kirby
36. "Me so happy."
37. Two-page splashes
38. Superman: Red Son
39. Action figures
40. The Galactus trilogy
41. Art Adams
42. Beta-Ray Bill
43. Kandor
44. "You die alone. Unmourned. And unloved."
45. Superman: The Movie
46. "Here's to crime."
47. Charles Burns
48. Uncle Scrooge
49. Paul Chadwick's Concrete
50. "He is this lightning, he is this madness."
51. Frank Miller's Daredevil
52. Bill Sienkiewicz
53. Fables
54. Michael Allred's adaptation of the Book of Mormon
55. Dave Gibbons
56. The lobotomization of Doctor Light
57. Milk & Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad!
58. Steve Rude
59. The Mysterymen
60. Adrian Tomine
61. Planetary
62. The Creator's Bill of Rights
63. Sin City (the movie and the comic)
64. Curt Swan
65. "This is an imaginary story. . . Aren't they all?"
66. The re-imagining of Swamp Thing
67. Thor: Vikings
68. Chester Brown's adaptation of the Gospel
69. Collecting a complete run of one title
70. Todd MacFarlane's Spider-Man
71. The Jewish heritage of Benjamin J. Grimm
72. The Tomb of Dracula
73. Young Miracleman's rampage in London
74. "Oof-da!"
75. Akira (the movie and the manga)
76. Hugh Jackman's Wolverine
77. Nexus
78. Hal Jordan goes insane
79. "We should form a club or a league or something."
80. Adam Hughes' Wonder Woman
81. Tintin

Music Picks of the Week

Based on the frequency of my postings on this topic, it'd probably be more honest to say these were my music picks of the month, but I want you to maintain the illusion that I listen to scads more music than you would ever dream feasible.

System of a Down: "Vicinity of Obscenity"
I totally missed the boat on these dudes, assigning them to the broad category of "loud music that I might like listening to under certain circumstances but otherwise don't pay much attention to" bands. Which, in a way, is what I'm sure most people do with music in general. Anyway, what finally got to me was the Zappa-like repetition of the refrain in this song: "Banana terracotta terracotta pie." How can you not fucking love that? With this, System of a Down have entered the exalted ranks of bands that rock so hard you don't give a fuck what they're talking about, and song lyrics whose main purpose is to cleverly disguise obscene sex jokes (see also "Louie, Louie" and "Wooly Bully"). I don't even care that my last sentence doesn't read. Such is the awesomeness of this band.

Sun Kil Moon: "Ocean Breathes Salty"
This is a cover of the Modest Mouse tune, and comes from an album of covers of the same band. They all pretty much sound like this song, and I can't imagine listening to the entire album. However, these songs work perfectly as individual selections. You are initially intrigued by the soft acoustic strumming, not dissimilar to a warm tune from Iron and Wine. Then you realize that you already know the lyrics, but you can't quite place where you've heard them before. Then you finish your coffee and go about your day, but the lyrics follow you, haunting your thought and motion and you become completely disoriented by the memory of this song.

Rumour has it that Sun Kil Moon has also recorded an entire album of AC/DC covers. I gots to get my hands on that shit.

The Crimea: "Baby Boom"
This is yet another band that has been forced to re-record one of their albums by order of their record company (see also Nellie Mackay, Fiona Apple), but in this case, you won't mind. The upgrade in production values and sonic range makes this playful number resonate even more powerfully, and you will ache to hear it come over the car radio someday. The references to Fred Flintstone and Captain Caveman don't detract from the gentle tone, or even seem as obnoxious as they might be in the hands of a band less attuned to their ultimate triviality. On the contrary, the Crimea make everything sound gorgeous.

Defunkt: "Thermonuclear Sweat"
It would be disingenuous to say that this band ever had a "heyday," but it should have occured when they were recording their unique blend of jazz punk funk in the early 1980s. Someone in the future lineup of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (probably Flea) had to have been listening to records like this, in between heroin runs. If there is a downside to radioactive fallout, you won't care after hearing this.

Always the fault of the shooter. Always 

Responsibility

Holy shit, it's windy today. Cedar City is getting wind gusts of up to 35 MPH. Not much by Ohio standards, perhaps, but enough to knock over the neighbor's basketball hoop and rattle the swamp cooler. It makes me nervous and agitated, but then, so do most things.

Wind's rising all over the Empire, apparently. Couldn't let the Cheney shooting go by without some links:

Why some hunters are questioning the details we've heard so far about Whittington's injuries and how they were caused, along with this reminder--A shooting accident is always the fault of the shooter. Always. I would love to hear from my gun-owning friends on this one.

Via Billville, the transcript of yesterday's White House press briefing by SpinMaster McClellan. Unbeknownst to the reporters in attendance, at this point McClellan had already learned of Whittington's heart attack. Suddenly, things didn't seem so funny anymore, as Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reports.

Why should you care about all this? As David Ignatius points out in his editorial for the Post, the Cheney shooting "illustrates how wealthy, powerful people can behave as if they are above the law" and serves as yet another reminder of the Bush administration's disregard for truth and reponsibility. What I wouldn't give for another blow job scandal.

I've never fired a weapon. I don't know the first thing about how to handle, load, or discharge a gun. I do know that shooting birds from a car is lazy and dishonorable, and hardly the sport of men. I do know that Cheney is a lying scumbug with little regard for the press or the public he so diligently claims to protect. And I wish someone in this administration would take some fucking responsibility for the pain they've inflicted on the people of this nation.

This is why I don't write about politics much. It just persuades my doctors to increase my dosage. Soon I'll have my own medical entourage, no doubt.

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Today's post, as vitriolic as it is, was inspired by the news that JonLee reads Chazzbot daily. I have not served him well over the last few days, so I will strive to put something up on a more regular basis for his amusement, and in the hope that he will let me oil his chest in return.

Here's a great post idea that I'm totally going to steal. Or meme. Whateva. Stay tuned, and I might actually follow up on these post teases.

When Robots Lock the Pod Bay Doors

There's a great sequence in the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that is one long in-joke for fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As I recall, Dina and I were the only ones in the theatre laughing. Just goes to show that modern filmgoers have no concept of cinematic history. Or that Kubrick in-jokes aren't that funny.

Anyway, here's the story behind this startling image. Just don't leave Hal with the keys to the pod if you go out.

Blue Harvest

LUKE: I think those new droids are going to work out fine. In fact, I, uh, was also thinking about our agreement, about me staying on another season. And if these new droids do work out, I want to transmit my application to the Academy this year.

Owen's face becomes a scowl, although he tries to suppress it.

OWEN: You mean the next semester before harvest?

LUKE: Sure. There's more than enough droids.

OWEN: Harvest is when I need you the most. It's only one season more. This year we'll make enough on the harvest that I'll be able to hire some more hands. And then you can go to the Academy next year. You must understand I need you here, Luke.

LUKE: But it's a whole 'nother year.

OWEN: Look, it's only one more season.

Luke pushes his half-eaten plate of food and stands.

LUKE: Yeah, that's what you said last year when Biggs and Tank left.

AUNT BERU: Where are you going?

LUKE: It looks like I'm going nowhere. I have to go finish cleaning those droids.

Resigned to his fate, Luke paddles out of the room.

AUNT BERU: Owen, he can't stay here forever. Most of his friends have gone. It means so much to him.

OWEN: I'll make it up to him next year. I promise.

AUNT BERU: Luke's just not a farmer, Owen. He has too much of his father in him.

OWEN: That's what I'm afraid of.

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Here's hoping actor Phil Brown has gone to where he can waste time with his idle friends before his chores are done.

April 30, 1916--February 9, 2006

Sentences of the Year

My favorite magazine, The Believer, has a feature this month on the "ten lines from 2005 that stopped one reader in his tracks." The reader is writer and editor Stephen Schenkenberg, and you can read sentences ten through six here. Here are the rest:

5. "Broken windows lie like a tattered dress over the evacuated city, hemorrhaging what remains of its long life of sounds: a radio denying the imminent arrival of Russian troops, the echoing report of a suicide, a phonograph whispering the illegal syncopations of American jazz."

Forgetfulness, Michael Mejia

4. "I embraced my solitude without Jane, or my solitude in the exclusive company of her absence, as eagerly as I had embraced all day so many men and women."

The Best Day, the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall

3. "Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

2. "Yes, sir, boss, I will be what you want me to be, and when you climb into your automobile at five o'clock in the morning with Miss Ann on your arm, and a gentle buzzing in your veins, the lights will be turned off, and the shoes will be eased from my burning feet, and the spit shaken out of my instrument, and the tie loosened from my fat neck, and we men will appear where previously only shades lived, and we men will speak to one another in grave low tones, cutting fatigue with relief and anticipating short bouts of loving before the chain of streetlights blink out one after the other and the sun clears the horizon and sleep finally reaches down and smoothes our furrowed American brows, bringing us some kind of peace until the afternoon is new and strong and full again."

Dancing in the Dark, Caryl Phillips

1. "Enough for me to keep our Goose and in myself the truth of him and the dogs grow fat and eat of him and by the silken sweet of glue we spread across our palms to peel the skin I feel him with me and feel of the seeds that split in me and of the living harvest, shell and hide and cloven tongue and of the fruit and fowl we strew the yolky eyes the deer we cull the great whales flensed for blubber."

What Begins with Bird, Noy Holland

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The same issue of The Believer also features a fascinating essay on the "psychological craftmanship" of Eminem by Robert Christgau, a critic who continually frustrates and amazes me with his writings on music and popular culture.

Elsewhere, Christopher Hitchens chimes in on the growing controversy over those Danish editorial cartoons depicting Muhammad. Hitchens almost always makes me feel uncomfortable, either because he is being a complete asshole or because he can write so well while being one. Usually, it's both, but this essay had me raising a fist in solidarity.

Amid the hubbub over those cartoons, I was reminded of the stink following Sinead O'Connor after she ripped up a picture of the Pope on SNL. Some commentators on the Muhammad cartoons have pointed to the Muslim reaction as unnecessarily extreme, but it's interesting to note that NBC has banned any use of the O'Connor footage for any purpose. The incident effectively ended her popular career and has become a legendary example of the artist's intolerance and instability. My nation for a kettle.

While we're on the subject of earth-shaking demonstrations and cultural collisions, here is an interesting report on new findings regarding the origin of the Man in the Moon.

Stay tuned for a post on the film series I've initiated at Dixie State.

I'm Bored--Here's a Post

Dina's off at some Ambassadorial Weekend event at the university, so I'm off my usual Saturday routine (reading in bed) and looking for something to do. I amused myself for a little while watching the obese man across the street load up his family's collection of ATVs on the extended trailer for what I presume will be a long day of environmental destruction. Every member of the family, as far as I can tell, is grossly obese, including the two children. They drive an extended cab pickup and a slightly smaller pickup and eat a lot of fast food. About a week ago, the obese daughter was learning to ride her bike, but she seems to have abandoned that effort for the much simpler gratification of riding up and down the street on her new ATV.

One of the problems with living in a suburb built on converted farmland is that most of the people who live here seem to feel licensed to drive their off-road vehicles on the streets, regardless of the large number of roaming children and unleashed pets also on the streets. Then there are the wannabe ranchers who have purchased the lots next to their homes and set up tiny horse corrals. I feel bad for the horsies, confined in narrow pens that don't allow them to do much but stand around.

I can't help feeling that I don't really belong here, but there are few places that I really felt I did belong. I guess the last place I lived where I felt really comfortable was Logan, probably by virtue of having stayed there so long.

Went to see Capote last night. Even knowing the story, I was struck by the great sense of emptiness to the lives of Truman Capote and the subjects of his book at the end of the film. Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote, however, was one of the most impressive transformations of an actor I've seen. His Capote was both familiar and unnerving, in the sense that the scenes in which we see him entertaining a small group of devoted followers (It's hard to imagine that Capote had many true friends, although, as he says in the film, "I know a lot of people.") made me laugh out loud, while at the same time recognizing the same diversions I sometimes use in my own conversations to avoid anything like an honest emotion. The scene that takes place after Capote's first reading of what will become In Cold Blood was especially insightful. Capote is visibly moved by the audience's reaction, but backstage, as he's relating some bawdy tale of his pants ripping, a man comes to shyly congratulate Capote on the depth of his characterizations. Capote offers a polite thanks, but when the man leaves, he turns the whole incident into a kind of publicity joke for his backstage groupies, saying, "Have any of you met my father?"

A film that manages to deconstruct the writing process, provide an unblinking look at the almost vampiric nature of Capote's craft, reflect back on the viewer's own shortcomings, and allow a favorite actor to bust out of his usual roles is a film worth recommending to you.

I'm holding off on my Oscar picks until I see Brokeback Mountain, but since I'm sure you won't sleep well until you know my preferences, I will go see it as soon as possible.

Here are some possibilities for the rest of my day:

• Listen to the 45s I liberated from the campus radio station
• Grade student papers
• Download music
• Catch up on the DVR backlog
• Send out publicity info on the next screening in my film series
• Blog about the first night of my film series

While you're thinking about what you're gonna do today, check out yet another indication of why this nation is rapidly becoming a bastion for religious fundamentalists.

Finally, I've been meaning to do this for weeks, but I'm adding Kottke.org and Chronicle West to my list of blog links. They are two of my favorite sources for internet reading, and I have enjoyed drinking beer with at least one of the authors.

All About Me Meme

The celebration continues! More pointless questions so you can pretend you know me! Via Billville, yo!

Four jobs I've had in my life:
Meatpacker
Internal Revenue Service clerk
Lawnmower (among my clients, a Baptist church)
Prep cook for Mexican restaurant (mmm . . . lard)

Four movies I can watch over and over:
The Empire Strikes Back
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Royal Tenenbaums
This Is Spinal Tap

Four TV shows I love to watch:
The Shield
The Daily Show
The Simpsons
Smallville

Four places I have visited:
Mt. St. Helens, Washington
Rappalano, Italy
Canterbury, England
Kennedy Space Center, Florida

Four websites I visit daily:
The Morning News
Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin
Billville
Kottke.org

Four places I would rather be:
The deck of the White Owl, Logan, Utah
Crescent City beach, California
The International Space Station
High on a hill in Eldorado

Four albums I can listen to over and over (thanks, Schrand!):
Radiohead: OK Computer
The Beatles (white album)
R.E.M.: Lifes Rich Pageant
Electric Light Orchestra: A New World Record

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Off the subject, but here's a cool movie of the Stardust re-entry taken from a DC-8.

And Mars has salt.

Coming soon: Oscar picks!