Month: September 2003

Categories
Comics

Comics as Opera

An interesting set of thoughts on Superhero comics as Opera, starting here:

Further distorting most of the critical takes on super-heroes is the fact that writing about all comics tends to focus more on the writin’ than the drawin’, and while this isn’t a fatal flaw when the subject is Harold Gray or Harvey Pekar or E.C. Segar or Harvey Kurtzman, ever since Joe Shuster drew a picture of a dude in tights lifting a car above his head, the appeal of the super-hero comic has been primarily visual. I’ll have to save my post on Alan Moore and the folly of the through-written super-hero story for a later date, but 15 years after Watchmen I’m convinced more than ever that Stan Lee’s approach to super-heroes is the best. We don’t go to see a Verdi opera for the story, but to hear the music. We don’t read a Kirby comic for the words, but to look at the pictures. Working with Kirby and Steve Ditko, Stan Lee proved himself the finest super-hero librettist the comics world has produced. Fans who find humanistic depth in the stories in The Fantastic Four are as wrong-headed as critics who attack what seems to them to be these stories’ superficiality and simplemindedness.

Follow-ups here and here, in response to comments on other blogs.

Categories
Software and Programming

Geeks bearing Gifts

Yep. it’s back to boring geek stuff again.

This guy has incorporated an impressive HTML Rich edit box (HTMLArea, coded by Mihai Bazon) into his Blosxom set-up. I’ve tried to do something similar with my comments page, but I’ve run into problems with Movable Type sanitizing the HTML in comments (a security feature).

Elsewhere on his site, Bazon has a rant about free software and being a starving developer, echoing a similar sentiment from Garrett Smith of the excellent DHTMLKitchen. His good point is that nothing is really free – and the developer shouldn’t be the one paying for his own work when everyone else just copy-pastes it.

Categories
Blather

Jazz and the Gods

Back from nearly a week in Eilat, during which we tried to take in the whole of the Jazz festival. Pretty exhausting. Although we left early on the first night, didn’t really get to see the Mingus band, and missed a few of the Israeli acts, I think we saw most of the shows. Hmm.

I guess I’m not that keen on Jazz, and some of the stuff was, well, boring: there’s only so much improvization and free Jazz you can hear in a week, I guess (Suzie would have liked more standards – stuff you can identify). Overall, I enjoyed the vocalists (Tina May and the Swingle Singers) more than the Saxophonists and Pianists, and some of the Israeli acts we good (we both found Dori Ben Zeev a lot of fun, and I liked Piamenta’s Mystic Flute compositions).

The undisputable highlight, for us, was Ute Lemper. People complained (as is their want) that she was not really Jazz – she can do Jazz like nobody’s business, but by genre, she’s a Diva (not a cabaret singer, really), or that she was too political (she sang in German, English, French, Hebrew, Arabic – “Arab”, she called it – Russian and Hungarian…), or that her renditions were too sweet or too something other. They are fuckinw philistines: the woman is a goddess.

I read American Gods in Eilat: it goes down very smooth and nice, but the plot seems to get bogged down somewhere in the middle, and I finished it with a keen sense of anti-climax and loss. Perhaps because the hero, Shadow, is such a damn non-entity, as his dead(-yet-still-active) wife – a classic Linda Fiorentino casting if ever I saw one – points out. Or perhaps I miss Odin: Gaiman calls him Wedensday, and his version is both much more chilling and more human than Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s take – a gallows god in the form of a Jack Daniels-drinking grifter (One of the gags is that Wedensday hates Mead, which’s taste he describes as like the piss of a diabetic alcoholic). Despite Shadow’s adventures and heroic acts (including a somewhat pointless IMO journey into the underworld), he basically plays straight man to the more engaging characters, like Wedensday and the dead wife. And in the end, he leaves the book with little more than what he started it with. I think.