WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Real and Replica: Independence Day, 2013

This year, I saw two Independence Day-themed exhibits, of which it would be easy to categorize one as real and one as not, except that, technically, both are “real.” Or maybe one is just as much a figment of meaning-projection as the other. I can’t decide.

The first display was at the New York Public Library, which was showing an original draft of the Declaration of Independence, as written by Thomas Jefferson, along with one of the original 14 copies of the proposed Bill of Rights. Both these documents are extremely rare, and the Library has never exhibited them together before. Because they're so fragile, they were on display for only three days, July 1–3.

I went to see them after work on Tuesday, when the library was open late, and stood in line for 45 minutes, which was totally worth it. It’s hard to write about the experience without sounding like a Frank Capra film. The crowd was large and diverse, and noticeably respectful. Even standing in line, everybody was polite and patient, which is something I don’t recall ever experiencing in an NYC queue before. The crowd fanned out once we were admitted to the room where the documents were in three displays: Jefferson's two-sheet (front and back) Declaration, sandwiched in glass inside two separate vitrines, so you could read all four pages; and the large, printed Bill of Rights (one of only 14 original copies known to exist) laid on a slanted backing inside another, much larger display case. Even though people were allowed to crowd around the displays at will, there was no bad behavior that I saw: Everyone waited patiently for their turn and looked as long as they liked.

Summer Reading: Picture Books

Since I gave up buying books, it seems like I have more books than ever. For years, my little hoarding problem expressed itself as a compulsion to collect all kinds of paper: books, magazines (remember those?), clippings from newspapers (ditto), random health pamphlets from the dermatologist’s office, Jack Chick comics, 10-year-old bank statements…  . And by “collect,” I mean stuff into boxes and bags and make a big pile in every room in the house. But when I saw a documentary about the people who are paid to go in and clean out hoarders’ homes, I got scared straight and I have been slowly dealing with the mess.

Although I’ve stopped buying books (sort of), I haven’t stopped reading. I do go to the library, which not only is free but they make me give the books back after a few weeks, so I figure it doesn’t do any harm. A senior boss at my dayjob gave me her old Kindle, which had about a hundred books on it (many of which I deleted because I really do not need to read dozens of novels about the modern-day grandchildren of World War II survivors); I really like the Kindle, because it takes up a lot less space than seven boxes of books in the middle of the dining room. But there are still a lot of actual, physical books coming into the house, because my good friend A. sends me boxes of discarded review copies from her job.

Friend A. has a good idea of my taste in reading material, so she sends me lots of nonfiction science-y books, and books about food and cooking, and photo and art books. It’s fun to open the packages from her, because I never know what’s going to be inside and sometimes there’s something pretty amazing. The last box was the most amazing of all, because it contained both Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits, by Matthew Rolston, and Dulce Pinzon’s The Real Story of The Superheroes.

 

Sticking to Music

You know how whenever anyone brings up the topic of US sonic weapons and music torture, someone always says, “What do they do, just turn on WFMU? Hahahahaha.” No? Maybe you hang out with smarter people than I do. On the other hand, WFMU has always been a leader in the irritainment industry; some of my favorite DJs, people I’ve been listening to for decades, do shows I’ve never been able to listen to all the way through. So I got to wondering—what is on the playlist when our government wants to break the will of its enemies? (“Enemies” being defined in the broadest sense, of course, in that the term has included US citizens minding their own business in their own homes.)

Manuel Noriega vs. Van Halen: Noriega was Military Governor of Panama from 1984-89, when elections were held with results he didn’t like. Also, he refused to help Oliver North with the whole Nicaraguan Contra thing. (Noriega had been working with the CIA since the 1950s.) Meanwhile, US troops stationed around the Panama Canal were conducting a series of ludicrously named “operations,” and then a Marine Lieutenant got killed, and then the US invaded, which was condemned as a flagrant violation of international law by the UN. Noriega fled to the Vatican embassy in Panama City, where US troops laid siege in Operation Nifty Package. (I am not kidding about that name.) They stood around outside playing high-volume rock music, specifically the Van Halen song “Panama.” A week later, Noriega surrendered.

Don't Free Pussy Riot

Last night I saw Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, and now I’m convinced that Pussy Riot should be in jail, which I think was not the filmmakers’ intent.

The video shows three strong feminist women and their history of activism, culminating in their action in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The three who were arrested—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich— are not the only members of their political collective, although you wouldn’t know that from the film. They also are not “girls,” they are young women in their mid-20s and early 30s, they are wives and mothers, they are educated and intelligent enough to have devised an ideological basis for their political protest. Yet since their arrests, they’ve been portrayed as “girls” who “didn’t realize” that defiling a revered place of worship would offend anyone, which is complete bullshit: The whole point of the action was to offend as many people as possible. If people weren’t offended, they wouldn’t pay attention. Well, they’re paying attention now; they’re paying attention all over the world.

The women of Pussy Riot must have realized there were likely consequences for their actions. Just as Edward Snowden was prepared to accept the loss of his well-paid job, the end of his comfy life, and his possible extradition to the US to face treason charges, so Pussy Riot should have been prepared for arrest, trial, and conviction. They say they are feminists: Let them act like feminists. Their prison sentences are the proof of everything they’ve said about Russian repression. Let them take the consequence of their actions like strong feminist women, not disingenuous, apologetic little girls. In the words of Sammy Davis Jr. “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

Be punk, Pussy Riot: Be strong.

UPDATE 6/18: So what I was trying to say was unclear, and that is the fault of my writing. Mostly I was objecting to the documentary's portrayal of "girls," but also there's the rather alarming footage of the three prisoners apologizing and saying they "didn't mean to offend anyone." This is contrary to their otherwise strong statements--contrary, in fact, to their actions. The obvious injustice of two years in prison for their protest is what has called international attention to the very repression they were protesting. I have friends who participated in ACT UP's protest inside St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1989; no one went to prison, but it brought international attention to the AIDS crisis and forced the government to begin dealing with it. I hope Pussy Riot's Punk Prayer will turn out to be as influential. Also, one week on, Edward Snowden looks less like a hero. -B.

 

 

Numismaticism Update: 2013 Marathon Fundraising Edition

Congressional Republican economy terrorists have been holding the country hostage for a while now—Sequester! Fiscal Cliff! Debt Ceiling! Meet All Our Crazypants Demands or We’ll Blame Obama!—and people who don’t enjoy negotiating with terrorists have been looking for a way around dealing with them. How can we keep paying our bills if there’s no money in the bank? Well, one obvious way would be to print some more money.

Technically, the Government can’t print more money, but the Federal Reserve can. (They are not the same thing and if you don’t know this, that is because you are not a nutbucket conspiracy theorist like me. Most normal people do not know how the Fed works.) BUT: Back in 2011, a Constitutional law professor at Yale started talking about an idea to take advantage of the one way in which the Government can mint more money: commemorative coins! The Secretary of the Treasury is allowed (31 USC § 5112!) to strike platinum coins in any denomination. So all the Secretary of the Treasury has to do is to mint two one-trillion-dollar platinum coins, deposit them with the Federal Reserve, and hey presto! It’s all good. (And go to hell, Repubican economy terrorists.)

The trillion-dollar-coin idea started being talked up again a couple months ago, as the Sequester approached, and it was even endorsed by some Celebrity Economists, but in the end Jacob Lew was confirmed as the new Secretary of the Treasury and even if he tried to issue The Coin, no one can read his handwriting and the Treasury would probably just issue a couple of platinum Slinkys instead.

Still, I do believe we could apply the trillion-dollar-coin principle to raising money to support WFMU.  When Former Cohost Jay and I decided to produce our own Thunk Tank currency (the Bieb, the official currency of Iceland!) we discovered that it is illegal for anyone but the Government to issue specie (coins), but anyone can issue paper money. (So we did.) Why should we continue with the annual Marathon and the Record Fair and the Secret Off-Air October fundraiser and the Superstorm Sandy Wrecked the Station Special Appeal and Station Manager Ken in a Lawn Chair Attached to Weather Balloons, going back to the Listeners for their support again and again, just because we’re a Listener-Supported station? (And God bless the Listeners, they have been fantastic!)

All Station Manager Ken has to do is issue a 1-milion Bieb note (which trades at a rate of 1 Bieb to 1 US dollar), deposit the note in the WFMU bank account, and then pay all our bills! (Or just deposit 10,000 100-Bieb notes, because I think there are plenty of them lying around the station from Thunk Tank’s overproduced Marathon premiums.) Assuming the bank that has the WFMU bank account will accept it for deposit, which maybe they will not.

Alas, the one- trillion-dollar coin is not to be. The main problem seems to have been that it would have called attention to the fact that our entire economy is based on the fiction of fiat currency and debt. So I will never be able to add the Biden Commemorative $1 trillion dubloon to my collection, and I also still have never got a Guam quarter, either, so what’s up with that? You can still use your Federal Reserve-issued currency to support WFMU, though, so go to wfmu.org and make your pledge now.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and thanks for supporting WFMU.

 

 

Smells Like Columbus Circle

Last Wednesday was Art Day, so Sluggo and I went to see Discovering Columbus, which was supposed to end on November 19 but has been extended through December 2. The friend who gave us the heads-up about the extension said it was because so many people missed seeing it on account of the Superstorm; I haven’t been able to confirm that, but as soon as she told us it was still on, I jumped online and got tickets for Wednesday morning. 

The piece is easy to describe, but its effect is not simple. Tatzu Nishi has built a living room up in the air around the statue of Columbus in Columbus Circle. You climb up seven flights of stairs, and enter a hallway, and then turn into some rich guy’s living room where the 13-foot–tall statue is a knickknack on the coffee table. It’s delightful. A little girl who followed us inside dissolved in a fit of giggles when she saw it, the kind of little-kid giggles where you finally have to tip over onto a chair and kick your legs like a bug. Then her dad started trying to teach her to say “recontextualize.”

It’s cool to get to see the statue close up; it’s cool to see it in that context, which brings up thoughts of the 1% and private art and public art. The furniture is mostly from Bloomingdales, but the wallpaper was designed by Nishi himself, and features images of things he knew about America when he was growing up in Japan: Elvis, Marilyn, Michael Jackson, Coca-Cola, Malcolm X, Mickey Mouse. It made me think about how Columbus didn’t even know he was in America, he thought he was somewhere else. Everybody’s always discovering America, and nobody ever knows what it is. The big, flat-screen TV in the room is always on, set permanently to Fox News.

After we discovered Columbus, I went across the street to the Museum of Arts and Design for “The Art of Scent,” which had opened the day before. It is the best museum show I have ever smelled. 

I was lucky to get there the day after the show opened—it really was delayed by the storm—before everything starts malfunctioning and they run out of the perfumes. When I was there, the only thing that wasn’t working was the player for the video interviews with some of the artists—no big deal. Also, I was there at 11:00, right when the museum opened, and when I walked into the main gallery, it was empty: empty of people, and empty of things. It looked like a big, white, empty room, until I noticed some faint depressions in the wall, about the size and shape of a row of urinals. This was the exhibit: 12 scents, arranged in chronological order, from Jicky (1889)—Jicky!—to Untitled (2010). You stick your head into one of the urinal-like devices, and a puff of scent envelopes your face. The sort of info that’s usually on a wall label is projected onto the wall next to where you’re standing, then disappears. The exhibits lead you through a sketch of developments in the art of fragrance—the introduction of synthetics and new molecules and new ways to construct olfactory compositions. Although all these scents were developed to be sold commercially, they are not treated as commercial products, they are presented as works of art.

In a smaller room off the main gallery, there’s a long table with bowls full of the 12 scents featured in the main exhibit. You’re invited to dip a scent strip in each one and then use a tablet to enter two words you think describe each. The words “hostile” and “unwearable” weren’t included, so I wasn’t able to say anything about “Untitled,” but I took a scent strip from each sample anyway. There were five slits along one wall, where cards were dispensed to show four mods in the development of Tresor, along with the final composition, and it was interesting to see how that happened and at what point I thought they should’ve quit while they were ahead.

I’m probably not the average perfume-wearing DJ, in that I would rather smell like the air from a bicycle tire (Bvlgari Black) or a stack of wet cardboard (Dzing!) than a flower. Even so, I think you should go to MAD for “The Art of Scent,” just because there’s never been anything like it. And because you’ll get to smell Jicky.

 

The Storm Next Time

The night before Superstorm Sandy was supposed to hit, I called my friend A to see what she was doing to prepare. She lives in a fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village, and had spent a few minutes talking with a neighbor about which local restaurants would be most likely to deliver in a hurricane—that was it; that was the extent of her preparation. Since then, I’ve heard her stories of going for days without electricity, heat, and water. Our friend V told us about walking down 17 stories with a couple of empty water bottles, filling them at an open fire hydrant, and walking back up, over and over, again and again. K ran out of money when the ATMs ran out of power. And so on.

As far as I know, none of my friends’ homes were destroyed, nobody truly suffered, but I was surprised at the things they didn’t think to think about, the simple steps they didn’t take to make it easier on themselves. The following list is for people who live in the city and need just the most basic reminders of what to do when a natural disaster is looming. I know there are plenty of serious urban preppers who take things a lot further—if you are one, this list is not for you. These are clues for the clueless: It’s for A and V and K and anyone else who has never, ever sat down to think about what happens when the lights go out.

1. Fill your prescriptions. You do not want to be going cold-turkey from antidepressants when the world really is dark and cold.

Sportsy Talk: Gay Techno Glowstick Music

Thanks to WFMU’s Internets dominance, we have now reached the furthest niche of nicheyness in Listeners, which is fans of the South Carolina Gamecocks. (Hi, Deep South!) The Gamecocks, the #3 #7 college football team in the country, are the subject of an extremely fine and hitherto unheard-of conspiracy theory, launched by fans of Georgia (another state somewhere outside the WFMU broadcast area) after the Bulldogs were humiliated by South Carolina in a game a couple of weeks ago. Georgia fans speculate that their distressing loss was due not to the Gamecock defense holding Georgia to just 115 yards rushing, but was caused by the Gamecock’s HYPNOTIZING GAY TECHNO GLOWSTICK MUSIC. That is, the music that was played in Williams-Brice Stadium to rile up the fans before the game. See for yourself:

  

(Thanks to Deadspin, my favorite sports site, for this.)

There’s not much to say except, as one Deadspin commenter pointed out, it’s more like Hypnotizing Gay HOUSE Glowstick Music. Also, I thought that bird (an actual Gamecock?) was totally fake until it slowly deflated at about 0:43.  And, also, there appears to be a guy whose entire job is to fan the bird. Our friend Nate says if he were in charge of music for the Georgia Bulldogs, he would have them play one of those super low-frequency things that would cause all the Gamecocks to evacuate their bowels, except that it would cause the Bulldogs to do the same, and also all the fans. And probably the bird, too.

Putin Summer Retrospective

As befits the future Savior of Humanity (or at least the Savior of Blonde Russian Gymnasts in the Duma), Vladimir Putin has been extremely busy this past summer. One of his major tasks has involved recruiting new members of the Putin Pals, his protective managerie of super-powered animal agents. Thunk Tank Cohost Jay and I often wondered why it was that the Putin Pals did not have any bird members, when their primary mission will be to defeat the insect forces of MANTIS. How is it that Putin would recruit a Were-Whale before he’d got even one bird? (Anuka, the Flying Donkey, does not count as a bird, because: Legs. Hooves. Hair. Mammal.) Naturally, the Leader was just waiting until the time was ripe, and this summer he finally judged time to be squooshy and soft enough to unveil his Craneforce. Dressing in the uniform of a Crane Obergruppenfuhrer—sort of a white hazmat jumpsuit with weird black goggles—Putin jumped aboard Craneforce One and led the baby cranes on skywriting maneuvers high in the sky above Moscow, where they wrote “Surrender, Pussy Riot!” in smoke, and also in Russian, not English. And Cyrillic. Cyrillic letters are really hard to make in smoke, but of course Putin enjoys the challenge.

The Dog Day of Summer: August 26

Sunday was National Dog Day, which apparently is celebrated on August 26 each year by anyone who happens to know about it. Even though most people do not know about National Dog Day, everyone knows that dogs are awesome, especially Boston Terriers, which are the best dog ever for all sorts of reasons, the main one being that purebred dog people are always going on and on about how their dogs are still suitable for the task for which they were bred, e.g., they do not actually take their Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever down to the pond to lure ducks with his attractive white markings, but they could if they wanted to. The Boston Terrier, however, was originally bred to be a little super-deformo pit bull fighting dog, yet there never was a BT in the world who would fight, they just want to play and be happy and lick your hand and eat delicious treats. In other words, the breed was always a total failure at the task for which it was bred, and that is why it is still awesome even today.

How Not to Die in the Woods

Yesterday I got back from Squad School; today I’m a lot cleaner and covered in calamine lotion. Tomorrow I go back to work. I think Squad School was transformative, but I haven’t quite figured out how. I just know that I see things differently now.

I thought a lot about death while I was out in the woods last week, but then I always think a lot about death. (I wrote a book about it, so …) Of course, the human body is what it is, so the underlying causes of death are the same wherever you are, in the city or in the middle of the woods in a lightning storm huddling under a pile of sticks with a couple of strangers. Some of the main things that can kill you are trauma, wounds, heat, cold, dehydration, starvation, or disease, and those are basically the same wherever you are. But when you’re out in the woods, there’s another possible cause of your death, and that’s bewilderment.

 Bewilder, meaning to wilder; wilder, an old word meaning to take someone out in the woods and get them thoroughly lost. Why? Because when you’re lost, and the world is strange, and it stops coinciding with the world you know and the reality you’ve constructed in your head to get through your day-to-day existence, then you see things differently. Literally. Being wildered can cause hallucinations, to the point where some cultures use it ceremonially: You’re taken out of your reality, and you come back different, you’re reborn.

Sportsy Talk: Olympics Update!

Mitt Romney, former head of bribery-ridden Salt Lake City Olympics 2002, started off his Big World Diplomacy Tour (Three Whole Other Countries!) by pissing off his first hosts so much that the Prime Minister of England dissed him in public. Score!

Just because the London Games have involved social cleansing, Brand Police,  a ban on fish and chips without the fish, strikes, threatened strikes, security failures, rooftop rocket launchers, a battleship in the Thames, official mascots with security camera eyes that “record everything,"  a logo that looks like a sex act, the worst font ever of the 21st Century, empty seats, insulting flags, inappropriate remarks about beach volleyball, and badminton scandals, it doesn’t mean they’re not, you know, well-organized.

Then there was the Opening Ceremony. You’d think Mittens would have liked that Opening Ceremony, with its salute to the Poors Who Knew Their Place back in the England of the Industrial Revolution. The part he probably would not have liked was the part we didn’t get to see here in the US—the tribute to the victims of the 7/7 attacks. London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics on July 6, 2005, and on the next day terrorists detonated four bombs on London subways and a bus, killing 52 non-terrorists and wounding 700. The two events are linked in people’s minds, and the ceremony featured a moving version of the hymn “Abide with Me” sung by Emeli Sande, and a dance choreographed by Akram Khan. I couldn’t figure out why NBC cut this part of the program to run some stupid interview with Ryan Seacrest and Michael Phelps—which they reran the other night!— because I thought the point of American news media was to keep us in a constant state of fear about terrorism, and wouldn’t a tribute to terror victims help with that? But then the next day NBC said they cut the tribute because it “wasn’t tailored for the US audience.” So now I know that the main goal of American media isn’t to keep us frightened, it’s to keep us ignorant.

Here's the censored part of the ceremony:

 

Print Isn't Dead!

In connection with my little hoarding problem, I also have a bookstore problem. My New Year’s Resolution this year was to stay out of bookstores, and I have done so, unless you count Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal that I have pretty much stayed out of, except for drifting in … oh, not very many times at all. Hardly ever! And also, I haven’t bought any books there, except for a couple. But not really! Mostly, I just go in to look at the latest issue of The Believer to see whether there are any more articles by WFMU DJ Dave Mandl about WFMU DJ Kenny G., and so far there have not been. 

Posman Books does not have a terribly large selection of magazines anyway, not as large as any of the actual newsstands in Grand Central, so I’ve sort of lost track of What’s Going On In Magazines Today. Having been a magazine editor for a number of years, I still have a sad, schadenfreudish interest in the genre. So that’s why, when I got caught in the rain last Thursday down by Battery Park, I felt that it was all right for me to go into the big Barnes & Noble there to, you know, get a cup of coffee and look at some magazines; it was purely for research purposes, it wasn’t about buying books. Not at all.

Once inside, I got the very worst iced caffe latte I’ve ever had anywhere and began my investigation. Barnes & Noble has several shelves of magazines: How can there still be so many titles? Niche marketing, apparently. For instance, Glutes. Yes, Glutes, a “women’s fitness magazine” about making your butt look good. It turns out it’s not even a new magazine; Glutes has been around for years, apparently with the same headline on every cover, just changing the punctuation: “Your Best Butt Ever!” vs. “Your Best Butt … Ever.” Your best butt? Whatever. Check out Pole2Pole.

 

Okay, a magazine called Pole2Pole is about, what? Amundson, Scott, Shackleton …? No, it is a magazine about “the sport of pole fitness.” Pole fitness. Back in my day, it was just a sleazy way to supplement my college scholarship, but now it’s a sport. In fact, it is so very sportsy that there are several other magazines also devoted to pole fitness, such as Pole Spin and—my favorite—Vertical. And those are just the actual print periodicals; there are several other titles online.

A few years ago, I got a promotional copy of Garden and Gun, which I thought was pretty awesome: It’s like Martha Stewart with a Mossberg. It’s won a number of magazine-industry awards, and sells tons of advertising, but now I realize it is just the older, more aspirational cousin of Gun Girl and a slew of magazines featuring photos of women in bikinis holding assault rifles.

So the good news is, Print isn’t dead! It’s just turning into a Hooters franchise.

The Love Song of Kim Jong Un (UPDATE!)

Kim Jong Un has a girlfriend! Or maybe a wife! Or maybe a girlfriend who is somebody else’s wife! No one at Thunk Tank Central (or anywhere else) is really sure. But last weekend he was seen in public with a young woman. Who was she?

Korea Joongang Daily says that South Korean intelligence has identified her as Hyon Song-wol, former lead singer for the Bochonbo Electronic Music Band. Hot gossip: KJU might have had an affair with her when he returned home from his Swiss boarding school. His father, Kim Jong Il, may have objected to the (still unconfirmed that it ever happened) relationship and separated the two. Song-wol might have married an army officer! She might have had a baby! But whose baby was it?

 If, you know, there even was a baby. Or if the woman in the photos with Kim Jong Un isn’t just his sister, which it might be. Whatever! Here’s the video for Hyon Song-wol’s #1 super hit from 2005, Excellent Horse-Like Woman!

 

 

Minicomics vs. Rob Liefeld

Comics are the greatest story-telling medium ever, combining words and art to build a narrative. But minicomics are like haiku: They set a mood, make a point, surprise the reader— communicate—in a spare, evocative way. Being small makes them seem more intimate; the fact that they are often produced by hand by the artist/writer makes them very personal. Minicomics may be twee, but they are rarely pretentious.

I have a small (obviously) collection, tiny booklets I’ve picked up here and there. One of my favorites is “Things I Saw and Did, Pt. 1” by dom the deer, who made a little pamphlet of her 2010 vacation in Paris and London, not because she had some heavy realization to impart but just because she had an impulse to share the fun. It’s very sweet.

Meanwhile, in Europe, where comix art is more generally appreciated, the folks at B.ü.L.B. in Geneva had the idea of issuing minis in box sets. They’ve been publishing sequential art since 1997, and apparently making a living at it—something that is unlikely ever to happen here in the US. I assumed their government was supporting them, because that’s the sort of thing governments do over there, but they claim to be unsubsidized, and their “manifesto” gives a shout-out to the D.I.Y. ethos of mid-80s hardcore, especially straightedge. (I’m reading a Google translation from French, though, so who knows?) In the past, I’ve picked up a couple of B.ü.L.B boxes at MoCCA and enjoyed them very much.

Each boxed set has five 1¼” x 2¾” 22-page accordions “bound” with a rubber band, each by a different artist, some well-known here (Chris Ware, Jad Fair, Ivan Brunetti), others not so much. Recently, B.ü.L.B sent me a copy of Box 2W Set Y (Charles Burns, etc.), which is how I discovered the work of the Swiss/German collaborative duo It’s Raining Elephants. Their mini, “Sunrise,” was my favorite of the set.

Thanks to the Interwebs, you can find and buy minicomics without having to hang around the fringes of some distressing comic convention. If you want to buy American mass-market comics, though—well, actually, why would you want to? I’ve found that most people have a dim idea that there’s still a spinner rack full of Richie-Rich and Superman and Caspar and Fantastic Four … somewhere … maybe at the grocery store? Isn’t that where they used to have them? If the latest news coverage of a superhero who’s “died” or come out as gay or whatever does cause you to want to go buy a comic, you pretty much have to call a special phone number to locate a comic-book retailer, and then drive to a special store in a sad little strip mall, and then deal with the pimply-faced 17-year-old loser who, no matter how many Eisner awards you have, will call you “Ma’am” as if it were an insult. Well, maybe not that last part, that might just be me, but the rest of it, absolutely. And then, when you actually find a comic book, you see: Rob Liefeld.

Bill Hanstock and Brandon Stroud have written a couple of brilliant articles reviewing the worst of Rob Liefeld’s "art," which must have been extremely difficult since it’s all so horrendous, plus they actually had to look at so much of it that it’s a wonder they haven’t both gone blind in self-defense. Here’s Part I, and here’s Part II. In Part II they say, “In the years between 1986 and 2011, not once did an editor crack open a FedEx package containing Liefeld's art, slide out the inked pages, and say, "What the shit am I looking at?" For 25 years, just "Beautiful! Send this to the letterer! Wouldn't change a thing!" So I guess what I'm saying is ... maybe Rob Liefeld isn't history's greatest monster?”

That is correct. Yes, that’s exactly what happens. Mainstream comic book editors are wonderful examples of what Erroll Morris refers to as the Anosognosic’s Dilemma: They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know that they don’t know anything about art, because they don’t know that there’s anything to know. Same with writing. Same with editing. Same with any kind of business management. To know these things is not a requirement for the job. What comic book editors know is, for example, who inked issue 28 of Secret Origins in 1988.

It was Bob Lewis, inking over Rob Liefeld.

 

Update: No Airplane for You

From the land that brought you St. Olav and Hornorkesteret came the oxymoronic competition to place the images of Famous Norwegians on the tails of airplanes belonging to the national airline. When I last wrote about this contest, Euronymous (aka Øystein Aarsteth) of Mayhem was wa-a-ay out in front in the voting, so I was astonished when I checked the final results and discovered that the winner was Ludvig Karlsen, a “beloved Norwegian Gypsy Christian Evangelist.”

Whu? The only info I could find out about him was in Norwegian, except for one English-language website of Famous Gypsies which lists Elvis Presley as a Famous Gypsy, so I don’t know what to say about Mr. Karlsen. But apparently Euronymous didn’t win the poll because his family asked that his name be withdrawn.

If this had happened in the US, it would be because the Authorities and Officials would have “asked” the family to withdraw his name to avoid the embarrassment of having a Black Metal guy in corpse paint on the tail of their plane. But Norwegians are actually proud of their black metal and the global influence it’s had on popular music, so I think maybe the story about the family is legit.

For a taste of what Norwegian music is up to now, here’s a bit of Hornorkesteret performing their soundtrack for the great silent film, Nanook of the North.

 

For black metal, and all kinds of other dark doings, check out the archives of Wm. Berger’s great WFMU show, My Castle of Quiet.

P.S. about the corpse paint: It kinda makes them look like Boston Terriers or pandas, doesn’t it? So scary!

Numismaticism Update UPDATE: OMG, Canada!

No wonder Canada isn’t making pennies anymore—they’re using the copper for their new quarters! While the US goes on churning out those sad commemorative quarters that no one even knows about (Chicasaw?), Canada is creating the Greatest Quarters Ever, oversized cupronickel disks featuring bas-relief full-color dinosaurs—four of ‘em, starting with our old friend  Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, and they are photo-luminescent so when you look at it in the dark, you see the glow-in-the-dark Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai skeleton!

And the obverse has the head of Queen Elizabeth, as per usual, but when you look at that side in the dark, you see the glow-in-the-dark depiction of her actual reptilian form!

Canadian money is so bad-ass! Next to the Thunk Tank Bieb (now the official currency of Iceland), it is the most bad-ass money in the world.

Numismaticism Update: Oh, Canada!

When was the last time you looked at a penny? I did when I noticed they’d suddenly begun looking like arcade tokens. which apparently started two whole years ago. But I didn’t even notice when they just went random with Scenes from the Life o’ Lincoln, which I guess was in 2009, although I’ve never even seen one of those. Where are all these weird pennies that are supposedly in circulation? Are people snapping up all the pennies and putting them in bottles on the dresser, like with those state quarters? (I still do not have my Guam quarter!) It’s not like they’re melting them down for the copper (currently trading at US$8,526 per tonne on the London Metal Exchange), since pennies aren’t made of pure copper anymore, they’re made of zinc drenched in creamy milk chocolate and covered with a thin candy shell. Right now the U.S. Mint could be putting anything on the backs of pennies, how would I know? I actually don’t know. What does a 2012 penny even look like?

Remember when all the paper money started going strange? The government said it was because they needed to make it harder for counterfeiters to make fake bills. But now every $20 bill I see looks totally different from every other $20 bill. I don’t even know what they’re supposed to look like anymore, which seems to me would make it easier for counterfeiters. Just hand me a green piece of paper with the number 20 and an engraving of Andrew Jackson’s face, that you can fold to see the burning Pentagon, and I will accept it in exchange for my goods and services.

This week in International Numismaticism, the Canadian Government Inc. (Stephen J. Harper, prop.) announced that it would no longer mint pennies—meaning Canadian pennies, which are copper-plated steel and nickel. It costs the Canadian government 1.5 Canadian Cents to make one Canadian Cent, so that just isn’t working out for them. BUT: It costs the U.S. Government 1.7 US Cents to make a US Penny. Does the US continue making pennies just to have somewhere to put their Picture History of the Deads? Here’s my idea: Canada can just start using US pennies.  Let the US absorb the cost, and get your currency made for free. There’s no reason one country can’t use another country’s currency as their own legal tender; it's happened before. For instance, Panama and El Salvador both accept printed paper US dollars (including the $20!) as legal tender. And it’s been about 16 months since Iceland—which has never had a penny at all!—adopted the ThunkTank Bieb, and everything’s going great over there.

From the Country that Brought You Lutefisk and Vidkun Quisling

I’ve written before (somewhat incoherently) about the Norwegian black metal scene—Until the Light Takes Us, Lords of Chaos, the murder of Mayhem’s Euronymous—but it’s thanks to WFMU’s Music Director Brian Turner that I know how to vote to get Euronymous’ picture painted on the tail of an airplane of the Norwegian National Airline.

Apparently, they’re having a contest—in Norwegian!—to vote for the dead famous Norwegian who most deserves to have his or her portrait painted on a plane. There are so many dead famous Norwegians (“The only famous Norwegian is a dead Norwegian”) that they have to have four separate contests! Euronymous is currently in FIRST PLACE in the voting to have his portrait on a plane that flies in and out of Oslo,  beating out the likes of Grete Waitz and King Olav V.

You should totally vote for Euronymous! Just remember, his real name was Øystein Aarsteth. You just go to the Oslo page of the website, find Øystein’s name, and click on the heart to the right of it. Yes, it’s in Norwegian, but it’s really not that hard. And also, don’t be trying to vote more than once; the Norwegians play fair and square, and they know if Du har allerede stemt.

And in case you need a reminder, here’s why Euronymous deserves to be painted on an airplane.

SEE YOU IN HEALTH: The Thunk Tank guide to the 5 most likely things that will kill you to death

Half of Thunk Tank almost died last week, which made us realize that we owe it to you, the WFMU Listener, to alert you to the Five Most Likely Things That Will Kill You (this week). Consider it a public service. (You’re welcome.)

1. All-Drug-Resistant TB. Okay, it’s not bad enough that you keep taking antibiotics for your headcold (Das viral!) and using antibiotic soap to wash your crusty dishes, which caused multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis even in a young female ginger who is also a lawyer and lives in London (much to the surprise of the BBC). No, now your stupid antibiotic lip gloss has caused ALL-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, which is just in India now, but will be killing you sometime next month.