Black Lanterns and Overkill

My pen name in Overkill was Charles Victor Szasz. It's nuts to type it this many times in an article. Anyway. I submitted this elsewhere and apparently, it didn't take. Here's something about the Question #37.

Go Saints!

I got excited from the first five words: Charles Victor Szasz of Earth.

During a DC Universe-wide event (Something big happens in the fictional universe, to which the monthly series respond and draw upon) Blackest Night, the main artist took some time off and in the place of the main story, 10 cancelled series were brought back for a one-off issue tying into the event.

One of those was the Question, a little known monthly series active in the 80s, starring a C-list hero called the Question. It ran for 36 issues and ended there, influencing most of today's top writers and hadn't been touched since. (The characters were used elsewhere, but not in their own ongoing monthly series.) The series itself was a mix of Mike Royko and Batman, a 200-level philosophy final and Zen Bhudduism that congealed around Charles Victor Szasz, a TV news anchor who went out crusading as the vigilante without a face, the Question, at night.

It ended with him leaving the city because he was too attached to the city and to his lover there to be the Question without emotional pain.

The big event in universe to thank for the one-shot, Blackest Night, is about zombies. Evil zombies feeding off of the emotions for the person, if I had to be specific. In universe, Szasz is dead from lung cancer and his protege, Renee Montoya, is the current Question.

The issue's storyline goes like this: By an incredibly loose definition of a comic book reanimation, Szasz is back as a Black Lantern and it's up to Aristotle Rodor (mentor), Renee and Lady Shiva (kung-fu master, hyper violent) to beat Black Lantern Szasz.

Trouble is, they can't.

Past this point are spoilers, by the way.

The way this is dealt with is what sells me on the book. They don't defeat Black Lantern Szasz in combat. The vision of the Black Lanterns only extends to beings with emotions they can feel. A person who has no emotions will disappear and that's what the group does. They let go of their feelings towards Szasz and Black Lantern Szasz can't see them, so he walks out into the rain.

In short: Szasz had to let go to truly become the Question and his friends had to let go of their feelings for Szasz to survive. If you're aware of the history, it's a callback and if not, it's a unique piece of the larger Blackest Night mystery revealed. This issue, #37, has many different weights on it and shoulders them all. It's one part resolution for the lingering memories of Szasz and one part Blackest Night puzzle piece, set up and done in a way that is reminiscent of the series from years ago.

The issue was done the right way, with the original artist and writer coming back, even titling the issue One More Question. Shame that there's only the one.

Taking Aim at the Fatosphere. WHICH IS TOTALLY EASY BECAUSE IT CAN'T RUN FAST.

The New York Times has this giant article on how fatty bloggers are all, I dunno, blogging. Which is great. For them, I mean. It is slowly dawning on me (because I am very, very stupid) that there are blogs to satisfy almost any sort of predilection a person can have. Whether you fancy cats or like anorexia or are fond of music or whatever, there is someone out there pontificating endlessly about it.

This does not mean I have to approve of what is being said. I do not take the fatty bloggers seriously, any more than I take the anorexia bloggers seriously. Partially because my recent BMI measurements placed me around the upper end of "Normal Weight". WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, INTERNET? But also because it illustrates the one thing that I hate most in life: people who are satisfied with who they are and what they are doing. Blogs are supposed to be tawdry or witty or riddled with neurosis (self-referential pause inserted here), not life-affirming details of what some sassy overweight teen is eating and how she doesn't care who knows it.

That's great. I get it that when you are in certain states of life, you want to commune with other people. But this cannot be healthy. I mean, not just that it's reaffirming (what I interpret to be!) an unhealthy lifestyle (that is, the lifestyle where you are happy and you communicate with others - WE HATEFUL TROLLS DEMAND THAT YOU SUFFER), but that you're doing it and expecting praise. How brave of you to accept yourself! Aren't you novel, aren't you grand! I totally wish I could drown myself in the crushing mundanity of my own life in front of an audience! GRR.

There's no sense of self-reliance in so much of the online community. The self-acceptance that's so often preached online is nothing more than dependency wrapped up in the comfort of anonymity, that having attention paid to you is good, so long as people are stuck watching. It's worse, in my opinion, than a rich/poor division, because the watched/watcher division is invariably skewed towards the lowest common denominator. Television studios don't make shows that are too highbrow because then people would form dreadful individual opinions about things - including the possible opinion that the watchers of the show aren't smart enough to understand it. Wal Mart has pulled magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and the New Yorker and others. Do you know what this leaves behind? The magazine rack at the most popular store in America is pretty much just Nascar magazines now. The notion of challenging a reader has gone out the window, along with flowery prose and the effing Dodo Bird. As Kurt Vonnegut (speaking of things that are extinct) said, eloquence is just a matter of waste nowadays.

The notion of self-satisfaction (was going to say "satis-fat-tion" but realized that is an incredibly stupid thing to say - but I just said it! Yay me!) coupled with a desire for approval does not, to me, display any shade of good thinking. If anything, it reveals a crippling inability to achieve the kind of satis-fat-tion that makes an interesting individual, substituting trifles for actual content. This profligate blogging is no real solution, but a placebo to achieving a healthy balance between the personal and the private. It's no forward progress, but rather, simply justifying the old idiom that misery loves company. We may be perplexed by a single problem in life, but hey, at least we're all stalled at the same point.

Which is partially the purpose of my participation (what is it with all these multisyllabic P-words? My professors would've demanded my head on a platter by now) in the blog-o-rama. I do it because I am a neurotic, self-hating individual, but also because I've been told that I do my best writing when I feel strongly about an issue, and also because I can only hope to get a chuckle or two out of the reader. Hey, I'm a third child - getting attention is something that I'm good at. It may be that I think I can help the world (snrk) by blogging about blogs, in some kind of snake-biting-its-own-tail sort of way. It may be (read: is) the real fuel for my bilious temper is just simple jealousy, that there are people out there who I feel are undeserving of the attention paid to them (the hidden truth: SIMMERING ALCOHOLISM).

But at least I'm self-aware enough to admit it. I may not practice what I preach ( and who does these days? ) but I at least have the good sense to present myself as a trifling hypocrite, and not as someone who should be taken seriously.

Hateful Screed; Politics Edition!

Benazir Bhutto has been killed. It is a sad day. The primary impact is always one of loss - here was a person who let us understand the movement she represented, who was willing to die for it. That kind of political devotion is unheard of in America, which brings me to point two of why the day is sad - our own political race, and how the candidates are going to try to use the death of this noble person in order to further their own careers. If they mention it at all, that is. I understand most of the republicans have something against People Who Are Not White, and want to hide them all behind fences.

I once recall hearing that although you are white and American, it does not mean you don't suffer - just that your suffering pales in comparison with what other people have to go through. Which is true. There's been a push with recent American policy to appeal to use what sounds like the logic of the suburbs internationally - the fence metaphor returns. If you don't like your neighbors, block them off. Don't do anything to upset your important neighbors, too - the US can't come down too hard on president Musharef, because if they did, where would the US stage it's forays into the middle east? How many people even know or care about what's happening?

Before I am swept away by the tidal pull of despair, I must try to come clean about some things. I am cynical because deep down, I feel that I'm helpless in the situation. I'm not even sure that if I knew how I could help that I would. At my core, I hate politics, and all that they stand for. I think that they're nothing but an outlet for the most vile, bullying, putrescent pieces of semi-sentient human waste to achieve something resembling, in it's most exterior aspects, a respectable life. I even hate the candidates I like. There's nothing admirable about public office. It's a circus of balding old men and their sycophants, mistresses, and saducees.

And the worst part seems to be that, like a disease, it's spreading. Ted Haggart, Larry E. Craig, Rush Limbaugh. People who abuse the faith that the public has in them, who lead tiny, pathetic shadow-lives behind the public image that constitutes all that they really are. Say what you like about Marion Barry, at least DC knew what it was getting when they re-elected him.

Why do these drug addicted whoremongers get to continue with their unusually wide-stanced ways, whenever someone so generally admirable as Benazir Bhutto gets blown up? The American Political/Fame system seems to be irreversibly corrupt, where one achieves power through falsehood, lowest-common-denominator appeals, and apparently, the guiding hand of Satan himself. The person who stands up is the person who gets cut down. I hate to sound like them, I hate the thought that this post even echoes something that they might suggest, but perhaps ignoring the problem will no longer make it go away. The American Way, anymore, is about access, and as long as you have an iPod, radio, satellite radio, TiVo, elaborate smoke message system, or effing telegraph, these people are going to be worming their way into your life. We're like Whatsisbucket in A Clockwork Orange, tied to a chair, and forced to witness not atrocities and horrors, but rather, the overwhelming cowardice, lies, and pabulum of the modern age. Is it any surprise, then, when America produces not monsters, but yawning, gawking sociopaths, unable to feel anything other than greed?

I, too, am a victim. I strive for something resembling legitimacy, morality, respectability. Would I even be able to recognize it, if it would present itself? Probably not. I am one of the yawners, the gawkers, the ones who casually shrug off increasingly depressing systems of jurisprudence in favor of talking about who should have "won" Tila Tequila's show. I may be suffering, but it does not mean that I have any idea to what degree others are in pain. I can only hope to take some lesson away from the assassination, some aspect of Benazir Bhutto's work, that maybe there are worse things that can happen to you besides death - you can live a life of complete mundanity, dulling your senses from a universe full of wonders.

The Alchemy of Madness

I was going to make a post here.

A post about dreams, aspirations. New apartments and friend's cats. A new computer! A child born into this world, full of potential - 200 gigs to be filled up with my videogames and art and music.

BUT NO.

That child was born, yes, and I type onto it right now. Except that it is infected with a terrible virus called Windows Vista.

IMAGINE IF YOU WILL that you are a person. Your name is windows! You have to go down a flight of stairs. The first time your head collides with the stairs below you, producing a meaty thump, you become Windows 3.1. Your body has too much momentum! Your own weight, your own stupid inertia, push your face along the step, shredding your face. Next step! Windows 95! Blood and beaten, you bring your hands about, trying to slow your descent, succeeding not in slowing your momentum, but in ripping the flesh from your hands and forearms. Windows XP! You're still okay! But then your arms collapse from the searing pain of being ripped apart, collapsing beneath your helpless, gamine form, and propelling you, face forward into the next step. Another meaty thunk. The descent continues, unabated, but you are deeply concussed and bleeding.

WELCOME TO WINDOWS VISTA.

Another apt metaphor - you are debating with some kind of functioning-handicapped autistic jester in the dark ages for the keys to the cell in which you are trapped. You say something clever, something any rational person would acknowledge, but all that they do is shake their foolscap and recite a limerick. THIS CONTINUES FOR THREE DAYS UNTIL YOU DIE. And then they chant riddles at your corpse.

I don't need this! I had a dream! There were airships and whores and trains! And a floating island kingdom, of which I was prince! But now, all of that is bitter ash!

Now, it may just be because Dark Side of the Moon is playing at the behest of some verbose Baristas in the coffee shawp where I EVEN NOW slurp my Red Rose Tea, but Linux seems like a good idea. Does this make any sense? Only hippies and those weird kids who get bar codes tattoo'd on the backs of their necks use Linux!

Whatever.

I'm looking for apartments on the Pittsburgh Craigslist postings, and they are daily, almost hourly spammed by some company who posts in all capital letters. At first it was annoying, and then I just ignored it. But now it seems like a good idea! I see these advertisements, and I'm like, WOW THAT IS THE BEST DEAL I'D BETTER HURRY!!!!

I distinctly remember having a life before the internet. I think I filled it with cartoons.