7
Jun
4
Jun
– Wow, that is one shitload of contemporary and jazz dancers. By my count there’s one hip-hop dancer (Tony), one pop-and-locker (Philip), two ballroom girls (Asuka and Janette), and one ballroom boy (Maksim – oh, I’m sorry, “Max”). I suppose the ballerina could maybe count as not-a-contemporary dancer if you really want to push it. Be prepared for a season of weak hip-hop, everybody! (Yes. Again.)
– This kind of irks me because it’s an especial flaw of So You Think You Can Dance that hip-hop and other urban styles get a tragic lack of respect. I have lost count of the number of times a contemporary dancer has come out, danced some whiteboy hip-hop and been told they “hit it” when in fact they did no such thing. Hip-hop dancers are routinely judged (or at least handicapped) on their lack of contemporary technique; contemporary dancers are almost never judged on their inability to hit beats as hard as good hip-hop requires.
The bias towards contemporary, especially on the American version of the show, is pretty damn blatant. It’s why Vegas week featured three routines suited primarily to contemporary dancers (Sonya’s jazz routine, Mia’s contemporary and Tasty Oreo’s Broadway). It’s why Napoleon and Tabitha’s lyrical hip-hop gets such a push on this show: it’s hip-hop that contemporary dancers can actually perform without looking lame. (And I like lyrical hip-hop just fine, but compare the hip-hop on this show to anything on, say, America’s Best Dance Crew and you start to see the difference, you know?)
– Mia Michaels spent Vegas week in total bitch mode, apparently. My god, but her comments to Brandon were unwarranted. Lil’ C was a lot more polite about expressing his issues with Brandon’s style – it was basically a repeat of how Mia treated Danny Tidwell in season three except that time Shane Sparks was the one expressing polite unenthusiasm. My mild dislike for Mia Michaels remains entirely justified, I think.
– Should have been Ryan, rather than Evan. Ryan’s just better at pretty much everything.
– Nathalie’s cut was incredibly obvious bullshit. She does the routine with everybody watching twice in a row, nails it the first time and the second time doesn’t do so well so she gets cut? I’m calling that a “casting for the fall season” cut. (Much like Brandon last year was a “casting for season 5” cut.)
– Complaints aside? Even with the flood of contemporary dancers, the season looks strong. But then again, the season almost always ends up being strong.
4
Jun
“We all live as long as we need to.” — Belgarath the Sorcerer
Top comment: He’ll probably have two eulogies. One that is archetypal but with some relatively well-written dialogue, and another immediately after that’s pretty much the same thing, except a few names and places changed around. — Rawrasaur
4
Jun
(Hello to all of John Rogers’ close personal friends and relations. My, but there are quite a lot of you.)
People nowadays look back at Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld and can’t help but wonder what people were thinking. Nowadays the concept of an ongoing fantasy comics series targeting young girls seems like the sort of thing that makes DC editorial go “hsssst!” and then cower in the darkness. “Catering to different demographicsss.. it burns us, precious, it burrrrrns.”
But here’s the rub: Amethyst was actually pretty goddamned good for what it was, namely an all-ages fantasy epic. It had perfectly acceptable writing and gorgeous art by Ernie Colon, and a fully realized world that was imaginative and unlike “our” world to an extent that made it fresh and exciting. Twelve houses based on birthstones? A world where everybody uses magic and where the laws of physics don’t necessarily apply? It was pretty wicked awesome, doing a lot of what the Harry Potter books did, and long before J.K. Rowling was telling people about how she came up with Harry Potter when she was broke in a cafe somewhere.
It begs the question why there hasn’t been a relaunch or reboot. Can you imagine Neil Gaiman getting his hands on this? Admittedly, Amethyst showed up briefly in Infinite Crisis – but that, much like just about everything to do with Infinite Crisis, was something of a bad idea. (Actually pretty much everything to do with DC trying to integrate Gemworld into the DC Universe proper was kind of a bad idea. Turning Gemworld into Zerox, the Sorcerer’s Planet? Bad idea. Making Amethyst a Lord of Order? Bad idea. It’s your classic case of square peg into dork-shaped hole.)
Of course, to have a great fantasy epic you need a great villain, and Amethyst had one – Dark Opal, one of the truly great fantasy comics badasses of all time. (You know he’s evil because he put “Dark” in front of his name. That’s just classy. He advertises his evilness. Dr. Doom would approve.) And… just look at him, will you? That is fucking awesome visual design right there. That is a villain who will fuck your shit up. It is obvious just from that artwork that Dark Opal is not only a magician but knows how to cut you to pieces with a sword (which he does). Plus he has crazy tattoos and blue skin and an amulet that mirrors his facial expressions. That is some awesomely fucked up shit right there.
Dark Opal is like an evil version of Valda. (Who not coincidentally was also drawn by Ernie Colon. Man, Ernie Colon was so great.) Sometimes you just see a character and you know: this guy is just waiting to be wicked cool once again.
(No, I’m not going to write “30 Reasons Why I Should Write Gemworld.”)
Top comment: Man, I love how *stabby* he looks. Bad guys just aren’t stabby-looking enough these days. — Cookie McCool
3
Jun
Recently, the news that Archie will propose to Veronica has been sweeping the nation. Much like how Captain America died or Batman died. Now it is Archie Comics’ turn to temporarily revive the fortunes of a flagging intellectual property through a shamless stunt.
Of course, this particular move, like so many others, has been met with criticism. Mostly because Archie is marrying Veronica. Most comics fans don’t like Veronica, believing her to be a stuck-up mean bitch. And this is true. Veronica is a stuck-up mean bitch. But here are some truths about Veronica most people don’t want to realize:
1.) She is rich. This counts for a lot.
2.) She is unpredictable and fun.
3.) She doesn’t care much what other people think of her.
4.) She is rich, yo.
5.) Most importantly, she is not Betty Cooper.
Some people do not realize that this last is a major plus. Betty, after all, is the “nice” one. She makes Archie cookies and helps him with his homework and does charity-type things and doesn’t gripe about being kind of poor. Plus, let’s face it: she’s smoking hot. Why wouldn’t Archie want to marry Betty?
The answer is simple.
Betty Cooper is motherfucking psycho bugfuck crazy.
Look at this shit. Understand that Archie is a popular kid, sure, but he is not exactly the star of his school. (That’s Reggie. Just because Reggie is an asshole doesn’t mean he’s not super-popular at Riverdale.) Archie is the decent guy everybody likes, who gets okay-to-good grades, plays on a couple of sports teams in a non-star fashion, and dogs lots of chicks. He is pretty fucking unremarkable as teenagers go, and were it not for his line of comics he would be the most boring human on the planet.
Betty Cooper is psycho for Archie Andrews, who tops out at “the most averagest person around.” She has giant blow-up pictures of him. That you know she took herself, with her stalker camera. Look at some of those photos, how awkwardly cropped they are. That’s because they are photos of Archie not knowing he is being photographed.
You know goddamn well the only reason she has pictures of Archie in the shower is jilling-off fodder. That’s not sexy. That’s fucking disturbing. Porn is great. Porn you make yourself – not in the “videotaping yourself doin it” sense but the “take time to produce life-size beat-off photos” sense – is creepy.
She kept an audiotape of him speaking! What. The. Fuck.
You just know that she looped it and edited it so she could have imaginary conversations with Archie. “Archie, do you think I am the prettiest girl at school?” “Heck… yes… Betty. I would… LIKETO… take… YOU… out for… a soda?” In Bettyworld, she is the rich one, and Archie is secretly a prince from the kingdom of Mevonia, come to take her away on his unicorn steed to a idyllic life of sybaritic pleasure.
She is so crazy that when she thinks Archie is near, her sleeves disappear as her psionic powers spontaneously manifest themselves! (Okay, that’s a bit of a dig on the art, but come on, Dan DeCarlo made so few mistakes that when you find a biggie like this one you have to comment. Archie artists today couldn’t hold DeCarlo’s jock if they had a crane.)
Note also how her father holds her back. It is much akin to how one holds a Rottweiler back before you let it rush into a dogfighting ring. “Savage him, Betty! Savage him and leave him bleeding and praying for death!” He knows what happens if you let Betty loose without tranquilizing her first. There was that time in Ohio. That’s why he’s Mr. Cooper now, instead of Mr. Lifschitz, and why Betty is no longer Brenda.
“Imagine if she told him he loved her.” If he did, that would be when she would go get her rifle, climb the clocktower, and start shooting at Lodge Mansion’s windows. “HE LOVES ME!” *BLAM* “HE LOVES ME!” *BLAM* “TAKE THAT, SMITHERS! I CAN KILL BECAUSE ARCHIE LOVES ME AND ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE UNIVERSE!” *BLAM* “ARCHIE WANTS YOU TO BLEED, MR. LODGE!” *BLAM* “ARCHIE’S LOVE MAKES ME IMMORTAL! I AM A GODDESS OF EVERLASTING PEACE AND LOVE!” *BLAM*
Top comments:
Are you guys seriously anylizing a COMIC BOOK? I mean, maybe a book i could see, if it was a realllly old classic, but Archie books? — Tigerthecat
Tigerthecat: Hi. You must be new here. — Lister Sage
2
Jun
2
Jun
Top comment: Flapjacks Fears La Parka — Jim Smith
1
Jun
My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.
1
Jun
31
May
LIKED
– Pixar films, at this point, are either an A+ (Wall-E), an A (Ratatouille) or an A- (Cars). On this scale, Up is a solid A – not quite reaching the peaks of Pixar but definitely not one of their “lesser” efforts (where “lesser” is something just about any other filmmakers would kill for). Ed Asner’s voicework fits his character perfectly (and if you don’t at least sniffle in that first ten minutes, what are you made of?) and the little kid character steals just about every scene without feeling forced. The second great summer film of a thus-mostly-starved 2009.
– Panic Breakout is really only fun the first one or two times, but what a one or two times!
– Finally got around to reading Jennifer 8. Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles and really enjoyed how a treatise on the history of modern Chinese food could serve as commentary on globalism, cultural mutation, immigration, racial attitudes, appropriation and reconcilation. Fascinating, and also brings with it a number of “oh, must try that” food ideas.
DIDN’T LIKE
– Mental is a terrible case of medical-procedural-by-the-numbers, pretending to be daring because it’s dealing with mental illness, but come on – using special effects to make schizophrenia more exciting is both overdone and tasteless. Chris Vance, in the lead, is particularly ill-equipped to handle his role; of course, even if he were a great actor, he’d still have a boring “look I’m kooky and nontraditional for no explicable reason” character to deal with, but he’s not a great actor; half of his work feels like a weak Hugh-Laurie-as-House impersonation minus the balls that makes House so interesting.
– “The Princess and the Dragon” expansion for Carcassonne? Oh my god, is it bad. Mutates one of the best board games of all time into an unrecognizable, not very-fun mess. Avoid. Do not get this expansion.
– Man, what a terrible set of audition episodes for So You Think You Can Dance this year. I went back and speed-rewatched the most recent set of Australian audition episodes for a comparison, and then last year’s Canadian and American auditions, and it’s not just me; this year’s American auditions focused more on jokey bad auditions that were supposedly funny much, much more than average, and the American show is the only one that still even bothers to show many bad auditions at all; in the Aussie and Canuck versions you can literally count the number of joke auditions on one hand, which ironically makes them funnier because they stand out in sharp relief to all the really great dancing. I’m honestly a bit nervous about this season now because I can’t help but wonder: did they not have enough good dancing to showcase?
29
May
I never, ever want to see dancin’ Sex on my television ever again. Hey, remember season two? When you said you didn’t want psycho fame-whores on your dancing show? What happened to that? Why do I now have to watch not only Sex, but also a subpar Dmitri the Lover wannabe jumping up and down?
What happened to the good auditions in Seattle? I mean, you put twenty people through to choreography on day one; surely some of them must have done some small bit of dancing that was worth watching and worth putting on television. This isn’t Idol. Watching people dance badly isn’t fun; it’s just painful. Watching you mug for the camera while you watch the bad dancers isn’t fun either. PS: it’s not fun when you mispronounce people’s names for a laugh either.
(Also: watching Philip Chbeeb and Ariel dance together made me think that he’s desperately in love with her and she thinks they’re really great friends.)
(Also 2: Adam Shankman is awesome, and I forever forgive him for all the terrible movies he’s directed.)
28
May
Flash Comics #1 was an auspicious comic. Of course, it was the very first appearance of Jay Garrick as the Flash, but it was also the first appearance of Hawkman. That’s a heckuva comic right there: the Flash and Hawkman, both appearing for the first time. But wait! On top of that, it was also the first appearance of Johnny Thunder! That’s two major players and a classic second banana, all in one comic!
And then there’s the Whip.
The Whip is a working-class hero. No powers for this guy! Just his facility with a whip. Rodrigo “Rodney” Gaynor (no, really!) was a descendant of the very first Whip, a Mexican superhero of the 19th century who fought for right and protected the poor. Kind of like Zorro! But with a whip instead of a sword. Well, actually Zorro used a whip too sometimes. So basically think Zorro, but no sword.1
Anyway, Rodney used his, I dunno, one-sixteenth Mexican-ness (“just enough beaneater to use their traditional ethnic weapons, but not so much that you can’t take him home to Mother, girls!”) to master the whip and call himself The Whip, as his ancestor did before him. At some point you would think that he would come up with a better name, but no such luck. In a stunning development, he mostly fought… evil Mexicans. The symbolism of a white guy fighting Mexicans was apparently glossed over at the time.
Presumably at some point Rodney joined the All-Star Squadron, as did just about every other vigilante who ever existed. And that is more or less all there is to be said for the Whip. (Except that his granddaughter also became the Whip briefly before dying as one of the Seven Soldiers of Victory.) But that’s okay. Rodney is one of the rank and file. A spear-carrier. A red-shirt. He is there to fill in crowd scenes and show up as a fourth-tier guest star when another superhero visits 1940s Mexico, and that’s all we can expect of him, and that is fine. Not everybody has to be a Flash or a Hawkman.
The Whip did not ask for much from comics, and he mostly got it. And things could be worse. The fifth star of Flash Comics #1 was a guy named Cliff Cornwall. Who the fuck is Cliff Cornwall? Because I sure as hell don’t know.
Although it’s kind of a shame that there are numerous superheroes within the DCU that are more prominent and known for the expertise with the whip (Catwoman and Mr. America, to name two). I mean, he’s called the Whip. You’d think he would be like the Green Arrow of whips, or something.
Top comment: He’s a *millionaire* and he’s using his whip to “protect the poor from exploitation and injustice”?!?! Gosh, it’s a good think he didn’t waste his money on something completely ineffective in that regard, like going to law school. — robin
27
May
When I was seven my mom started sending me to day camp.
Day camp was like the for-cheapies version of summer camp – and my mother, who was a zen master of thrift, loved a good deal. She liked it because you could send one’s kids to day camp on a selected set of weeks, as the day camp – run out of a nearby middle school – offered different “sessions,” each with a theme (pirates, ghosts, cowboys, that sort of thing) and a different Big Fun Trip for the kiddies, and she could stagger around the annual family vacation (two weeks in Maine, a state I would gladly absorb into Canada as a province were I given the opportunity). Be that big fun trip to African Lion Safari (a concept I thought was amazing then and am still impressed by, although I have to wonder where they put the lions in the wintertime) or CentreVille on the Toronto Islands (WARNING: incredibly lame music on site, and also it sucked a lot less when I was a kid) or just a trip to the local Chuck E. Cheese (I always asked for the Chuck E. Cheese session, which never seemed to conflict with our vacation), it was always pretty awesome for a seven-year old.
Of course, from my mom’s perspective, the price of the day camp sessions was probably justified by getting me out from underfoot. But I digress.
The second year I was there, when I was eight, during one of the sessions’ free-time periods, a bunch of us put aside the dodgeballs and discovered that the school in which our day camp was situated had left their music room unlocked. Now, you might think that leaving a large number of musical instruments in the hands of seven-to-nine-year-olds might be a recipe for disaster, but we hardly broke anything. This was mostly because of Felix. Felix had bushy brown hair and a weird sort of combination of cleft lip and overbite, which resulted in him looking something like a chipmunk. His younger brother (whose name I don’t remember) had almost exactly the same features, so it looked like Felix had a younger clone following him around.
But none of that mattered, because Felix was a kid with a dream. Felix saw the musical instruments – recorders and xylophones and tamborines and a ukelele and many others – and turned to the rest of us, busy investigating to see what all these things did when you hit them with a mallet. He had no mallet in his hand. Instead, he had a gleam in his eye. And he said:
“We’re going to start a band.”1
He had plans almost immediately. Every day at noon, the day camp counsellors would explain to us in the school’s gym/auditorium while we ate our bagged lunches what activities we would be doing that afternoon. Felix ignored the “gym” portion of that fact and focused on the “auditorium.” There was a stage. Felix knew he wanted to be on that stage. He went to one of the counsellors and quickly negotiated a performance: our band would appear after announcements that Friday. This gave us four days to practice.
I immediately decided that I was not going to perform badly, so that limited my options, mostly because I already knew that I was not very good at playing the recorder. However, I found a snare drum, and immediately figured out that no matter how much I might suck at playing anything melodic, I sure as shit could hit the drum really well. I immediately declared myself the band’s drummer and “chief percussionist.” I also experimented with playing the drum while using a pair of maracas as drumsticks. Clearly, I was an avant-garde drummer, ahead of my time. Had Buddy Rich ever thought to use maracas as drumsticks? I imagined myself explaining to Buddy Rich, “well, I thought that the drum made sounds and the maraca made sounds, so why not make two sounds with every swing?” And then Buddy Rich would introduce me to the Muppets.
Felix, for his part, had taken up the ukelele. It may have been elemental wisdom on his part – realizing that no matter how shit you are, you can strum a ukelele and nonetheless not sound like total crap. Of course, it might also have been that Felix was powerfully involved with his visions of rocking that auditorium, and even at nine he knew you can’t rock an auditorium without a guitarist. And given that he was, after all, only nine, the ukelele was practically guitar-sized. He practiced his jumping-strums and rocking out on his back, and although I didn’t know it at the time – as I didn’t really start following popular music until my teens – looking back on it I now understand that he was aping Angus Young.
The other band members fell into place quickly. Martin, a kid I knew from school, had three triangles of different sizes and pitches. Another kid named Oscar reserved the xylophone. Two boys whose names I never knew volunteered for recorder duty.2 And Felix’s little brother – well, he was going to do something, that much was clear, but what he would contribute remained unclear. I decided not to worry about it. I was concentrating on my drumming-with-maracas. So firmly was I concentrating that I didn’t notice that more people were joining the band, until we numbered about nine different kids.
The first creative schism arrived soon after that, when we debated the band’s name. I particularly wanted to call the band “The Rock Robots.” It made sense. We would rock, and also I liked robots. However, Felix – who had more experience with popular music than I – declared that to be a “baby name,” and insisted that we call the band Adventure. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean, people like robots.” But Felix would not be swayed. And really, when we were famous and meeting the Muppets, I reasoned, we could always change the band name later, much like how the Beatles had eventually become Wings.3
Unfortunately, that was only the beginning. Felix had gotten his first taste of power and discovered that he liked it greatly. He demanded that the recorder players “blast” on the recorders. “We’re gonna rock!” he would say, over and over again. Privately I started to question his judgement, both because of his clear dislike for robots or because he refused to tell anybody what his little brother’s role in the band would in fact be. “It’s a surprise,” he would say. “But Felix, if we don’t all work together,” I would respond, having watched the episode of Reading Rainbow where Levar Burton taught us about teamwork three times, “we won’t be organized and the band won’t be good.”
He looked at me with disdain. “Just make sure we’re all in sync. [Little brother’s name that I forget] will sing over top of it.” I decided that this wasn’t the time to create drama. (Also, I wasn’t sure what “in sync” meant and I had to ask my mother that night.) But I kept wondering where this band was going. Felix was bringing in more kids from other parts of day camp I barely knew. Martin came up to me the next day and informed me that he was quitting the band because one of the new kids had wanted to play triangles. Felix, I learned, had decreed that the new kid would be our trianglist. He had offered Martin the job of backup singer, which is pretty insulting when you consider that our ostensible lead singer hadn’t informed us yet as to what he would be singing.
But the next day was the last straw. I had been practicing diligently with my maraca-drumming combination, when Felix came up to me, all excited.
“Look what we found!” It was a small Casio keyboard synth, the sort of crappy thing that could only impress a middle-school-aged-kid. Naturally I thought this was the most awesome thing ever. We had a keyboard! We could have cool synth grooves! Like Culture Club!4
“And look at this!” Felix pressed a button, and the keyboard started producing tinny electro-drumbeats. Instantly my self-preservatory instincts kicked in. I expressed guarded enthusiasm, and pointed out that the drumbeats wouldn’t hurt when I was doing my extended maraca solo. Felix looked at me, not quite understanding.
“Don’t you see? Now we don’t need drums. This will be our drums.”
I knew where this was heading, and promptly quit the band before I could be reduced to backup singerdom.
The next day was performance day. I felt grim jealousy as I sat down in the auditorium, eating my peanut-butter sandwich (with crusts, because I was a big kid now and only babies got crusts cut off). I wasn’t in the band any more. It was entirely Felix’ fault that I wasn’t going to get to hang out with Buddy Rich. Martin sat next to me, having had a full extra day to get over losing a shot at stardom and thus being far more relaxed about the whole thing.
The counsellors wrapped up announcements. “And now,” the lead counsellor said with a flourish, “one time only, a very special performance by… Felix and the Adventure!” I’m not sure when Felix got his name put into the band name, but he had managed it somehow. The stage curtain swept open as the kids sitting and eating lunch applauded, because – well, are you going to not clap when you’re eight? Even I clapped, although not for any reason other than to impress Julie, the counsellor on whom I had a crush, with my coolness and grace under fire.
On stage, Felix was already rocking out on his uke, jumping up and down, forgetting to strum it more than a few times. Well, most of them, actually. Oscar stood behind his xylophone, frozen in terror. The recorder kids (now numbering four) were doing an impromptu dance, none of them quite getting the steps in time with each other. The new trianglist, Alex, was dinging his triangle madly – if anybody was going to get blamed for the band tanking, it wasn’t going to be him. (I glanced over at Martin, who looked back at me and nodded as if to say, “well, you have to respect him. That’s triangle.“) There were three other kids there I didn’t even know, one trying to make noise on a trumpet (and failing), one holding the maracas I intended to use as drumsticks but not shaking them with any effort (as a maraca expert, I was not impressed), and the third with a tambourine doing his best Betty Cooper impersonation.
Topping this was Felix’ little brother. He had found a microphone somewhere, but the mike wasn’t plugged into anything. It didn’t matter because, much like his big brother, he was in the zone. He stood at the forefront of the band, posing and stretching and gesturing like a preteen version of Steven Tyler. His eyes were shut, helping him through his performance. He wasn’t singing anything, though. He was just doing the poses and gestures, and occasionally emitting a high-pitched keen.
Nobody was laughing, but that was only because we’d get in trouble if we did. And maybe it was because we all knew that, whatever else, at least Felix had the balls to live out his dream. No, not really, it was the trouble.
A girl I vaguely knew looked over at me and Martin. “Weren’t you a part of this band?”
I instantly knew that this was a time for damage control. “I was originally. But then I saw where they were going with it and got out.”
Martin jumped in with a quick “me too.” The girl lost interest in us as Felix’s little brother jumped from the auditorium down to the gym floor – a whole four feet! – and started doing the whole “point the mike at the audience and get them to sing the parts along with you” shtick. Except, of course, he still wasn’t singing.
I shuffled a little closer to Martin. “I think we got really lucky on this one.” I said it quietly, so nobody would hear us.
“Yeah.” His voice was equally low.
And I never joined a rock band ever again.
Top comment: I imagine this was prompted by MGK drinking a glass of liquor in front of the fireplace in his library full of leather books, dangling a pipe from his other hand and wearing a bathrobe, imagining that Animal would concede he was the better drummer upon meeting the Muppets. — GL
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