Thursday, May 2, 2002

Time to reveal my hidden contribution to our culture. Check out the WFMU web site. Currently all the slogans below the picture (a different one each time you reload) are mine. Many of the recent polls are from ideas I submitted; if you're bored try to guess which ones.



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Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron 2001) - "And we saw the farmers and poets and children of the earth / Running loose, wildly in circles / With concrete under their feet and the sun at their back and tears in their eyes"



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There's a fascinating "online exchange" with Greil Marcus at http://www.rockcritics.com/gre_marc_online_exchange_march_2002.html. Particularly interesting is his description of teaching recently at Berkeley and Princeton and mentions of what he would add to an updated suggested listening for Stranded (since the actual reissue simply reprinted the original; when I discovered this in 1980 it was a major map).



Worthwhile quotes:



That's what movies are for--for people who think they understand each other to disagree about.



People who trust government agencies to support free and autonomous art are fools.



I think the best songwriters are less afraid of words than poets can afford to be.



No one has an obligation to bother with what I have to say. Name calling usually sounds like the frustration of people who seem to think more people should be listening to them.



He [Bob Dylan] is from somewhere else. He not only speaks in riddles, he lives in them.



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Captain America #1 - Meaning the 2002 issue which is the third Captain America #1 in the past four or five years; Marvel really needs to get its act together about this stuff. Still you probably would be better off with either of the other two since this new one is truly bad: not just inept or dull but completely non-intelligent and anti-human. Like J. Michael Straczynski's Spider-Man #36 this is ostensibly a response to the WTC attack but while it was no surprise that eternal blowhard Straczynski produced a silly issue both insulting and embarassing, this new Captain America might have turned out differently. Writer John Ney Rieber has a solid reputation but any of thousands of nitwits could have produced this issue. Your jaw will drop at a story that would warm the hearts of any propagandist, where racists are immediately converted to warm, caring individuals by the application of American patriotic images, where the reader is constantly told how to feel, where the characters have less depth than anything from Flatland (excepting Nick Fury). A truly atrocious botch.