A while ago, I asked commenters to list five songs they thought I should listen to / that they would recommend to me, and that I would listen to them and write about my reactions. There were a huge lot of them, so we’re going to do this in stages.

二手玫瑰 － 官封弼马瘟—苏阳: Well, that was weird as hell. Started out as this neat bluesy Chinese song (or possibly Korean or Thai? I’m not sure, I think maybe Korean but non-Japanese kanji all sort of blur together for me, sorry) and then duck quacks start getting used as percussion and then it just gets weirder from there – yes, weirder than “a duck quack song.” Entertaining for a single listen anyway.

ABBA, “When All Is Said And Done“: I mean, it’s ABBA, what can you say? Either you love ABBA or you’re a bad person, basically. This song is actually one of my favorite ABBA songs just because it’s never been one of their top tier, it’s not what anybody thinks of first when they think of ABBA, never will be, but this was my mom’s favorite ABBA song when it was playing on the cassette deck in the car on our drives when we went on summer vacations and that translated down a generation, I guess. already own it

continue reading "The Five Songs Project, Results Post #1: A-B"

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Yesterday, I went into a comic book store and I picked up a comic book set in mainstream Marvel continuity for the first time since…2007? The last thing I really remembered reading was ‘World War Hulk’, which I gave up on because I realized that it had been four years since a major Marvel story had actually involved superheroes fighting bad guys. I may have bought something since then, but if I have it didn’t stick in my memory. Which probably doesn’t argue well for it anyway.

What changed my mind? The new ‘Ms Marvel’. I read about it and decided that a) a superhero who had a different point of view than other superheroes, written by a writer who had a different point of view than other writers at Marvel, might result in something (surprise) interesting and surprising and different. And b) I had, on my own blog, taken Marvel to task for writing something that was designed to appeal to people other than its existing fanbase, only to market it squarely at its existing fanbase because Marvel Does Not Know How To Market Things, and then shrug lazily when it fails and say that all the whitebread fanboys who say that Marvel should stop trying to appeal to anyone other than them must be right after all. And I realized that if I was going to do that, I should really actually buy the comic instead of talking about how it deserved more support and not actually supporting it.

So I went in, and I bought the ‘Marvel Now Point One’ special. And what did I think? Well, first off, it’s almost impossible not to notice the way that Marvel has changed itself to be more like the Marvel Cineverse. It’s not just the obvious stuff, like Coulson making a cameo on the SHIELD helicarrier where he and Loki had a scene together on the prison set from the ‘Avengers’ movie. There are fundamental changes to the basic personalities of the main characters and the dynamics between them. Loki has transformed from a cartoonish supervillain into a complex antihero solely to take advantage of the Tom Hiddleston death cult. (Of which I’m a member as well, don’t get me wrong. I did not expect to walk out of ‘Thor: The Dark World’ thinking I’d want more Loki, but that’s exactly what happened.) The Avengers, as a team, are turning into a partial adjunct of SHIELD, primarily because that’s what makes sense to the new comics fans out there. Black Widow is being given new prominence in the Marvel Universe because to someone just walking in the door from the movie theater, she’s a major player in the superhero world and significantly more famous and important than Captain Marvel. Even the space opera stuff feels like it’s getting ready to tie in to the future ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ movie.

In case it’s unclear, this is not a complaint. This is actually a lot of appreciation for Marvel’s editorial savvy; in a world where comics are a weird, ghettoized marginal medium that’s perpetually five years away from being unviable as a business model, the only possible way to survive is to latch on to whatever freaking trends you can and milk them dry. In the Seventies, Marvel survived by picking up the ‘Star Wars’ license and riding that pony, and in the Nineties, they hung their hat on multiple covers and shock twists. Right now, the movies are making money on a scale ten thousand times what the best-selling comics do; they would be foolish not to adapt. I am proud of them for doing so. And even thought it’s not enough to tip the scales and get me back into buying Marvel comics in general…yet…as someone who has counted himself as more of a “Marvel movie fan” than a “Marvel comics fan” for quite a while now, it was nice to come back into a comic book and feel like I was being made welcome.

Second, it was tremendously amusing to watch Norrin Radd try to grow hair and fail.

And third, I really liked the new Ms Marvel. The character is smart, she’s self-determined and has interesting and accessible character conflicts, she has a good sense of humor and a cool powerset that she uses in fun and visually dynamic ways, and the art really lends itself to the story. (Oh, and I like the costume. It looks homemade in a good way.) It’s only an eight-page preview, but it left me really looking forward to issue #1 and thinking that while Marvel Does Not Know How To Market Things, they picked a great creative team. I’m excited about this.

Although I confess that I still expect it to be canceled by issue #12, and the character to die in a crossover within the next five years when Captain Marvel becomes Ms Marvel again. But I may just be a pessimist at heart.

Dave Lartigue did this a while back and I thought it was a good idea, so I’m stealing it.

I am always looking for new music to add to my iPod playlist, so: recommend five songs to me. Any genre. Whatever you feel like recommending. (WARNING: I am not historically a fan of any metal that can be described as [BLANK]core, and most new-country leaves me cold.) I will listen to them, and then in a subsequent post I will say what I thought of every song that was recommended to me. (Even the metal and new-country.)

Bonus points if you include links to Youtube or Soundcloud or whatever so I can listen to it right away without having to search for it.

EDIT TO ADD: Just as an FYI, my comment moderation software auto-sorts any comment with multiple links into the “pending approval” folder because of spambots, but rest assured I am checking both the pending folder and the spam folder regularly; your comment is not going to disappear into the ether.

SECOND EDIT: Locking comments because jeeeeeeeez that’s a lotta songs

David Uzimeri on Twitter complained thusly:

And I had heard nothing of this, mostly because I tend to ignore nerd news about casting unless people make a fuss about it somewhere I might read it (e.g. not Ain’t It Cool News or one of the myriad websites that wish, for some reason, that they were Ain’t It Cool News). So I Googled “Shailene Woodley not attractive enough to play MJ” and confirmed for myself that, yes, this was a nerd thing. And there are two points I have to make here, and then I’m going to ramble for a bit.

Firstly: by any reasonable standard, Shailene Woodley is really very pretty. Quite lovely. Definitely good-looking. And so forth. The idea that she is not attractive enough to play Mary Jane in a Spider-Man movie is just kind of weird.1

Secondly, though, is the thing that caused this: the ongoing idea that Mary Jane has to be otherworldly levels of hot, which is the root cause of people being stupid and saying that a beautiful young actor is somehow not beautiful enough to play Mary Jane; Mary Jane must be played by someone who is the ne plus ultra of beauty, beauty dialed up to eleven, beauty of the gods. And typically I find this is because people have no idea who Mary Jane is, as a character, besides “she’s super hot” – which explains why, then, that people have to have Mary Jane played by a goddess in human form. If the only quality you assign to Mary Jane is hotness, then a Spider-Man movie where Mary Jane is only very pretty would be like a Batman movie where Batman doesn’t fight crime.2

Of course, this is stupid. Granted, I say that as someone who is a big Mary Jane fan – Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane is one of my favorite comic books ever – but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Mary Jane is best when she’s defined by her toughness, not her hotness. Just after Civil War and just prior to the Mephisto marriage reboot, Matt Fraction wrote a great Amazing Spider-Man annual that was basically the pro-MJ argument summed up: she’s tough and she’s smart and once she picks her side (which is Peter, obviously) she is there. (“He’s my husband. You’re just some guy.” That line is a fucking hammerblow, Thor should be envious of that line.)

Emphasizing MJ’s hotness as being somehow a superpower is also, I think, one of the key reasoning flaws behind why the “Peter/MJ marriage doesn’t work” argument is such bunk; one of the key elements of that argument is that Peter is meant to have a hard life (undeniably true, he’s a fortitude-based character, his hallmark is that he endures hardship on all levels, that’s what it is to be Spider-Man) and that being married to MJ somehow undoes this because she is beautiful. I am not being reductionist in any way when I say that’s the argument: numerous people have said precisely this very thing,, that Spider-Man having a hot wife undoes the character, as if somehow “hot wife” means “everything right in the world” or for that matter that being hot somehow requires a character to have no burdens in life.

Just because MJ has been an actress/supermodel in the past does not mean she has to continue being these things. J. Michael Straczynski gets a lot of crap for his comics work, and some of it deserved, but one thing his era of Spider-Man brought to the table was that MJ could have a failing career and this would not in any way harm the integrity of the character because, surprise surprise, being pretty doesn’t guarantee anything. JMS’ MJ was trapped in a failing Hollywood career and towards the end of his run was considering becoming a drama teacher, which isn’t a bad job but is hardly the ideal of glamorous-as-hell. (As an aside: JMS’ idea that Peter should be a high school science teacher was brilliant, the single best thing he contributed to Spider-Man, and Marvel shouldn’t have walked away from it because having underappreciated overworked Spider-Man be, in civilian life, in the most underappreciated overworked job there is? That’s just perfect.)

True story: the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and I don’t mean “to me personally in a loving kind of way” but rather “objectively, we are talking Botticelli’s Venus times a kajillion,” worked in a video store. I mean, this woman was stunning, literally jaw-droppingly beautiful, and I remember this not just because she was amazing looking but because one time, when I was renting a movie3 this schlub in front of me asked her why she wasn’t a model and she shrugged and said “I tried, but it’s all who you know.” Which isn’t surprising because that is how everything works.4

And there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for MJ as well. Plenty of physically beautiful people fail because that is how life happens; only a small subset of people get to be glamorous and everybody else gets shut out, even if they are a perfect 10. Hell, if the whole Shailene Woodley flap teaches us anything it is that people will discount astounding prettiness for whatever reason they choose.

1. Still not sure what all of this says about Kirsten Dunst. [↩]
2. This sentence was originally going to be “a Superman movie where Superman doesn’t fly” but then I realized that any discussion of Superman movies, by law, now requires people who hated Man of Steel to come out and say that they hated Man of Steel. [↩]
3. FOR THE KIDS: there used to be stores where you would rent movies for money, like, you would go walk to the store and physically borrow a movie from them. [↩]
4. Or maybe she was bullshitting this guy to get him off her back, that’s possible too, because being beautiful doesn’t mean you have to live a life specifically designed for beautiful people. [↩]

My weekly tv column is up at Torontoist.

I read this in IDW’s April solicitation for its Transformers comic: “MEGATRON joins the AUTOBOTS! The perfect jumping-on point for new readers!” This may in fact be the least true statement in comics.

I don’t know, it seems like the whole point of Megatron is that he is irredeemably evil. I guess it’s the cannon. When I was a kid I couldn’t help but notice all the good guy robots had little pistols, and the head bad guy robot had this giant arm-mounted nuclear bazooka and I was like “That’s not faiiiirr!!!” To me that’s the basic appeal of Megatron–he is a machine hardwired to be a dick.

Granted, this is probably a turning point in a larger story, where Megatron’s shifting loyalties are competently explained, and this unlikely alliance will lead to a return to the status quo. But stuff like this is exactly why I could never get into the Transformers comics, even though I love the ’80s cartoon. Once in a while I’ll be watching that hokey old cartoon, and be like “Gosh, I can’t get enough Transformers, I wish there was more of it!” And then I’ll think of the comics and be like “Ennh, actually, this is plenty right here.”

It always seemed more chic to prefer the comics to the cartoon. The comics had Simon Furman and detailed mythology and half-naked cyber-ladies and that one ninja Skeletor guy. The cartoon had Bumblebee and Spike getting a giant can of bug spray to fight the Insecticons. Nevertheless, I feel like the cartoon had a better grasp of the concept, which is–let’s face it–pretty simplistic. Transformers is fundamentally just good toys in an endless war with evil toys.

David Wise, who wrote the cartoon’s finale, once compared the Transformers’ war to Doctor Strangelove–the only major developments turned on some silly new gimmick which was inevitably adopted by both sides. On the surface that theme comes across as a crass marketing tactic, but it also forced the cartoon to set its stories within the “doomsday gap.” Optimus Prime and Megatron can’t dwell on the big picture, or dream up some truly novel way to turn the entire war upside down. Their forces are deadlocked in a war of attrition, and it’s all either of them can do to maintain the stalemate. The drama is in how the characters cope with that–Prime can’t lower his guard and it’s giving him an ulcer, Megatron’s authority is constantly challenged by Starscream, etc. Most of the cartoon’s plots were frankly interchangeable, but all of them provide that sense of getting a snapshot of life in the trenches.

The comics, to me anyway, never seem satisfied with that. Every time I take a look somebody is becoming a robot god, or there are parallel universes, or a somebody decides to create a third force in a definitively dualistic conflict. I suppose the realities of selling a monthly comic force you to employ those kinds of plot devices. But it ends up feeling more gimmicky and cheap, ironically, than the toy line itself.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Voting is now open for the 2013 rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards. You can vote HERE.

Following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into pulldown menus to make voting faster and easier (since the pulldown menus should include most, if not all, of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. The result is a vastly streamlined voting process.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2013.

The deadline for entering votes in is February 14, 2014.

So we are well into 2014, and commenters have had their chance to answer as many questions in the 2013 Not the King William’s College Quiz, and have mostly done fairly well. A few questions I thought were gimmes just got missed, a few I thought were stumpers got answered quickly, that sort of thing. Which means that next year it has to be even harder!

Answers below the cut.

continue reading "The 2013 Not Quite The King William’s College Quiz – ANSWERS"

A lot of kafuffle was raised yesterday about Michael Douglas being cast as Hank Pym in the Ant-Man movie. First off, we’re not sure why there is kafuffle anyway because come on, it’s Ant-Man for crissake, it’s not like we’re recasting Wolverine or anybody important, it’s just Ant-Man, whose superhero name is a punchline and who in comics is so famous for being unable to find a consistently successful identity which fans like that it has, in fact, become the character’s thing to switch names every so often.

But basically the nature of the kafuffle was to say that Michael Douglas in real life is much older than Hank Pym is in the comics. Which: again, it’s Hank Pym. I know there are people out there who care greatly about Hank Pym, but the movies make concessions about character biographies all the time – that’s part and parcel of adaptation. But the question then becomes: what do you really lose by having Hank Pym be older? Because I’m not sure what the answer to that is, exactly.

Can Older Hank Pym still go on superhero adventures? I would suggest that in a world where Christopher Lee can have lightsaber battles then its reasonable for Hank Pym to put on his labcoat and have a bunch of shrink-down weapons in his pockets and be Doctor Pym, or if you want to go for laughs he can even put on a costume. Can Older Hank Pym still have a relationship with Janet Van Dyne? It’d be weird, but sure. (Remember that originally in the comics Hank was twice as old as Janet was until they retconned that away.) Do we particularly lose anything if Scott Lang dates Janet Van Dyne instead of Hank?

Is this about the casting of Douglas specifically, as opposed to a generic older respected actor? Because, as William Goldman pointed out a long time ago, Douglas specializes in playing the modern, flawed American man – and depending on your view of Hank Pym this either makes Douglas perfect for the job or is conceding that Hank Pym is a terrible wifebeater.

And let’s be honest: the domestic abuse aspect of Hank Pym is a third rail, probably the reason that Paul Rudd is playing Scott Lang instead of Pym. Hank Pym fans can talk about mind control and mental illness all they like but the truth about Hank Pym is that the character will always carry that baggage, and even if a Hank Pym movie never had him engaging in domestic abuse people would still wonder when it was coming, just as people wonder if and when the “Tony Stark is an alcoholic” coin will drop in the RDJ movies (answer: who knows if it even will).

I don’t have definitive answers for any of these questions, honestly. But they’re all there, lurking, and the internet kafuffle yesterday serves to remind us of that.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.