"The Ten-Cent Plague" by David Hajdu

Ever since Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavilier & Clay" mainstream publishers have released a slew of books (see:"Men of Tomorrow") chronicling the rough and tumble world of the nascent New York funny book business. Scrappy Jews like L.E.S. brawler Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman were the (now) marquee names driving the creative side of the biz but behind-the-scenes were crazy bastards like porn publisher turned DC/National head Harry Donnenfeld and M.C. Gaines, the father of Mad magazine's reluctant honcho Bill Gaines. Like the cutthroat competitors of the nearby rag trade, comic book biz was all about ripping off anything and anybody that looked like a winner and doing it cheaper and quicker to boot.

A bit of debunking the standard Bill Gaines' story is the centerpiece. Any comic history fan knows the story of the EC comics empire collapsing (Mad magazine being the sole survivor) under the specious social science of Fredric Wertham's book "Seduction of the Innocent" - and how Gaines famously melted down on live television while trying to defend his gory and gorgeous line of sleazy horror books. You may already know the story but it's seldom visited in the kind of calm detail found here. Wertham was a quack looking to sell a book on the evils of comics while Gaines has always been portrayed as something of a white knight by comic book fans. Hajdu's version spins away from the usual canon. Gaines isn't exactly made out to be a bad guy but Hajdu doesn't buy the martyr stuff either. He acknowledges the artistry of the EC books but seems close to siding with Wertham that Gaines really was something of a sleaze monger. Well, of course he was. But they were some damn fine, sleazy comic books.

Apparently, this book is the impetus behind John Landis' intentions to make a movie out of Gaines' life story (starring Seth Rogen if you believe the digital internets.) This book would be the best primary source for such a tale.

Very cool cover by Charles Burns too.

"Vintage Games" Bill Loguidice & Matt Baron

Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time. By Bill Loguidice & Matt Barton

This authoritative history of video gaming covers a lot of bases (all of your bases?) A detailed overview incorporating orphaned gaming models (like text games1) and old-school platforms without neglecting the modern world of internet-driven orc hordes. "Vintage Games" reads a bit like a textbook in heft and style, yet enough enthusiasm filters through that it manages to be authoritarian without being dry and academic.

The book is organized around roughly chronological examples of what I am now officially designating "meta-games." In the wake of every Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, the floodgates release look-a-likes that share certain strands of DNA with slight variations on the originals. Sometimes you get a Pac-Man rip with little pizzas in a maze. Then again, doesn't every platform jumper owe a bit to Donkey Kong?

The book is apparently an off-shoot of the author's neat website Armchair Arcade dedicated to vintage games. Lots of cool stuff there, including a few chapters that were cut from the book. They also pointed me towards this site which runs 8-bit Nintendo ROMs in your browser. Brilliant idea. (and totally illegal I guess, but what-the-hey...)

(1)Yeah, I know text games are still around. Check out some recent examples at the Interactive Fiction Competition.

"Columbine" by Dave Cullen

"Cafeteria" by Jon Haddock

"Columbine"
By Dave Cullen

Most of the stuff you remember about Columbine is likely bullshit. The endlessly repeated memories and factoids that persist to this day were fished from a shallow river by a bottom-feeding media. Remember the doomed Christian girl, bravely witnessing for Jesus with a gun pointed at her head? That didn't happen. The Trench Coat Mafia tales had little to do with reality. The shooters - Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold - were not gay, Goth outcasts seeking vengeance against cruel jocks. They were relatively popular - good students with ample friends. They came from stable two-parent homes in a prosperous community. Yet Harris was almost certainely a textbook psychopath. Klebold was a fucked-up and suicidal kid along for the ride.

They did frequent Hot Topix, play Doom and listen to Rammstein. But while such lapses in taste may be responsible for pregnant teenage girls with bad tattoos, they can't be blamed for serial killers with axes to grind and arsenals aplenty.

And - as the book makes clear - Columbine was less a successful shooting rampage than a failed bombing mission. It was done by a pair of inept amateurs with delusions of grandeur. Harris and Klebold's original plans were much larger and ambitious. The shoddy, homegrown bombs that were designed to bring the building down were mostly failures. Having access to the "Anarchist's Cookbook" does not make somebody an evil genius.

Cullen describes how a daisy-chain of inaccuracies were fed to the media and gave them exactly what they needed to sell papers with little regard for accuracy or logic. A witness repeats sketchy, third-hand information to the press which is seen by other witnesses who then pass that skewed reality on to other media outlets. There were two-thousand witnesses to the Columbine shooting, it's a textbook worthy example of the unreliability of eyewitness accounts.

"Columbine" treads a cautious line recounting the lives of the shooters. Painting them as larger-than-life monsters - as ersatz Manson heirs - would create martyrs for the creepy death-metal crowd that canonizes John Wayne Gacy. Making them pitiful and sad would piss all over the graves of their victims. Cullen does a good job mixing a sober and journalistic worldview with a novelist's knack for telling a compelling story. This isn't a tabloid "TRUE CRIME" book. "In Cold Blood" or "The Executioner's Song" are more apt comparisons.

The important stuff here might not be the survivor's tales or the confused response from law enforcement. It's how the incident was re-purposed and retold according to who was doing the telling and - more importantly - why they were telling that story.

The closest thing to the "real story" is between the covers of this book.

You Should Not Have a Cow.

"The Simpsons. An Uncensored Unauthorized History"
By John Ortved

I seem to recall vague chatter a few years ago about Matt Groening writing a book chronicling his version of Simpsons history. Maybe the mildly unflattering portrait presented here will get him off the couch. If what I hear is true, the couch is made of thousand-dollar bills woven together with the finest 24-karat gold thread. So it's understandable if a guy gets a little comfortable.

The standards set by contemporary oral histories - say Legs McNeil's "Please Kill Me" or George Plimpton's seminal "Edie"- invite a minimum of first-person incursions by the author. John Ortved injects his own point-of-view way too often and with a fist full of ham. It doesn't help that his insights tend to be a tad bush league and snarky. It's like the Comic-Book-Guys have taken over the asylum. Or maybe it's exactly like the comments section on a Simpsons website. I have never seen an episode of "24" but does it really "endorse" torture like Ortved says? And Homer Simpson mistaking Stephen Hawking for Larry Flynt is pretty goddamn funny but is it the "best single joke they ever came up with?" Was there a voter referendum about that? Maybe I missed it. It's OK if Douglass Rushkoff wants to hold the Simpsons crew responsible for funding the uber-conservative Fox News Network (d'oh!) but subsequently loading the text with others who parrot that overambitious trope is a bit of fair and unbalanced mongering that would make Bill O'Reilly proud.

An array of familiar names from Conan O'Brien to Rupert Murdoch go on record but notably absent are the folks who also take the biggest lumps; Groening, James Brooks and long-departed producer Sam Simon. Predictably no one is exactly rushing in to defend them.

The idea that Groening hogs too much credit (and makes too much money) has been internet fodder for years and it's not entirely fair (even if Matty-boy owns up to it in his "aw-shucks" regular guy way.) The show has obviously grown to be quite a mammoth, collaborative undertaking that no single person can take credit for it. Still, it started with Groening's aesthetic, his quirky voice and his clean, deceptively simple drawings.(1) It's the TV equivalent of an internet start-up. Simon and George Meyer et al may have made the show a powerhouse of yuks but they jumped on the bus a few exits down the turnpike.

And day-to-day music guy(2) Alf Clausen rates a single mention? WTF? Likewise, the various efforts by the voice cast to up their remuneration gets a lot of ink but other than that they are not really part of the story here. It's really about the writers and a truckload of them have contributed through the years. And that is probably the way it should be. The Simpsons might be a cartoon but it's a writer-driven show and this book makes that abundantly clear. The book (expanded from a Vanity Fair piece a few years back) feels rushed. Typos and redundancies appear a bit too often.

I'm still waiting for Groening's take but I'm not holding my breath. Reservations aside, this is a good enough read. I plowed through it in a single evening. Problem is that this book will probably be the final word for a while - a lackluster effort like this is likely to discourage anyone else from attempting to do a "fair and balanced" look at the show. Too bad.

Footnotes:
(1) Saying Groening can't draw - stated more than once in the book - is idiotic and missing the point. It's like saying Charles Schulz can't draw because Charlie Brown was just a circle and a couple squiggly lines or that Walt Disney was a fraud because he didn't actually draw Mickey Mouse.

(2)Danny Elfman is responsible for the wonderful theme song but Alfie is what it's all about when it comes to actually scoring the series episodes...and he contributes much to the various parodies and diegetic music that you hear in each episode.

Goats, Boxes, Staring...

George Clooney stares at goat.

A strange pair of random, head-scratching movies landed in the multiplex this week. "Men Who Stare at Goats" & "The Box" are big studio flicks mining the territory usually reserved for quirky "indie" fare.

"Men Who Stare..." chronicles a strange (and roughly factual) convergence between black-ops military tacticians and the kind of strange pseudo-pscience usually featured on late-night radio shows devoted to psychic spoon benders.

George Clooney is quite a hoot as a shadowy military contractor convinced he possesses psychic powers that allow him to reconfigure clouds while clouding men's minds. Kevin Spacey, Ewen McGregor and Jeff Bridges show up as fellow mystic warriors of varying degrees of sincerity and ability. It's a psychic sausage-fest with nary a significant female speaking role in site (except for a hot-tub montage featuring ample cleavage.)

"Men Who Stare at Goats" is a rather peculiar old-fashioned comedy. It's akin to those 1960s wide-screen extravaganzas peppered with weighty actors in fluffy roles. Lightweight? Perhaps, but it's nice to see a leisurely comedy that doesn't cram jokes down your throat at a million miles an hour. Maybe that makes for a less-than-stellar joke per dollar ratio - compared to any Judd Apatow vehicle of recent vintage, say - but it's still pretty damn funny

"The Box" is the film director Richard Kelly should have made after his cult-fave rabbit from hell opus, "Donnie Darko." Kelly's spasmodic aesthetic would have better served had he followed up with this instead of the entertaining (and over-cooked) "Southland Tales." I liked "Southland..." quite a bit. It's a sprawling, overblown mess of a flick but it's also entertaining, weird and quite funny in places -although sometimes it's hard to tell if bringing the funny was intentional or just a byproduct of so many strange ideas crowded into such a small space.

"The Box" takes a story by Richard Matheson (seen in a vastly different version in the John Landis "Twilight Zone" feature film) and elongates the quirk and weirdness a bit too thin for a full length flick but for at least half the film it works quite well. These folks definitely live in the same world as the Darko family. Hell, it looks like they live on the same block.

Many mysterious folks parade in and out of the story like refugees from "Twin Peaks" but ultimately the more wildly the narrative spins, the less interesting it becomes. Like "Twin Peaks" at its best, "The Box" has its moments. You would be hard pressed to say what exactly is going on at times but when it treads the line between slightly off-kilter suburban banality and full-tilt weirdness, it can be satisfyingly unsettling. Like -dare I say- "The Twilight Zone."

an albatross - Rehearsal footage (2006)

an albatross - "Divine Birthrite (Maiden Voyage of the Grape Ape)"
Behind the scenes with "an albatross" during preparations for their 2006 tour @ Cafe Metropolis, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Shot & chopped by Kevin Dougherty