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The Burning Bush

Big Love, Smallville, and Messianic Fiction

The spring of 2011 marks the finale of two television series that have been keeping me company for several years, each of which I feel a little misty at the thought of letting go of. Beware, traveler: herein lie spoilers for Big Love and Smallville.

The protagonists of the two programs hardly seem similar, at a passing glance. Big Love's Bill Henrickson is a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist, a family man, and an entrepreneur. Smallville's favorite son, Clark Kent, is a monogamist of undetermined Protestant stock, single, and searching for the right career.

  

But scratch the surface a little (with Kryptonite, if you must), and it's easy to see how the two characters have more than a passing resemblance to one another. Even beyond generalities one could draw regarding each program's implicit statements about the American Dream, for example, each continuity's set of thematic elements mirrors the other so well, in fact, you'd think the writing teams were each cribbing from the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index. (And heck, if one subscribes to the Campbellian monomyth theory, as does your humble host, the popular wisdom is that we're all cribbing from it, all the time, simply by being part of our own culture.)

The Secret Identity

Both Bill Henrickson and Clark Kent protect double lives, secret identities. The lies and deception that these two men, each of whom purports to rely on values such as honesty and forthrightness, are born of their iconoclastic and idiosyncratic natures. Bill is forced to hide his family life away from the American and mainstream Mormon publics that will castigate him for his lifestyle choices, while Clark must obfuscate not only his abilities, but his very species, in order to lead a normal life and to facilitate helping others.

"These Guns are Fully Loaded"

If the fever dream scene from last night's episode of Glee had aired in the 1980s...

 

...a spinoff Glee Babies Saturday morning cartoon would be immediately rushed into production.

 

That is all.

Summer Vacation: Getting Animated

This blog post is horribly overdue, I'll admit. The First lady of Inkville had a work conference in Los Angeles back in August, and I tagged along. Besides visiting to Disneyland, eating Brazilian food, and  hitting numerous tiki locales, I flew solo for one day and visited the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where I saw two fantastic museum exhibitions, both of which were ending that very day.

The AMPAS Ray Harryhausen exhibition was an incredible collection of photographs, film clips, and, most excitingly, scale models. Many non-geeks are sadly unaware of Harryhausen and his legacy. The man was a genius of stop motion animation, animating fantasy sequences in films like Mighty Joe Young, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, and, most excitingly for this 7th grade Greek Mythology fanatic, the original Clash of the Titans.

 

Photography wasn't allowed in the galleries, and a dude behind a desk was glowering at me a bit, so I hope you'll forgive these grainy, through-the-lucite iPhone photos, one of the models for Perseus and the Pegasus, the other of the monstrous Kraken. Seeing these models up close reminded me of the amazing level of fear and anticipation Harryhausen inspired in my middle school self with his Medusa sequence, and how the CGI effects of the recent Clash remake fail to deliver in terms of visceral fright... even with the requisite mental adjustment to account for nostalgia.

The second exhibition was even more amazing, and the real reason I mastered aggro Los Angeles traffic to make the commute to AMPAS. The exhibition featured materials and ephemera from the career of Chuck Jones, the amazing director of a number of your favorite Looney Tunes shorts from midcentury ("What's Opera, Doc?," anyone? "One Froggy Evening"?), including animation cells, cartoon scripts, personal correspondence, video clips, and even the man's Oscar statuette.

  

Chuck Jones was a bit (okay, a lot) of a personal hero of mine in the 80s and early 90s. I read the man's autobiography, as well as several other tomes on animation history. I watched Looney Tunes incessantly. I still think that the two-part Elmer Fudd hunting series cartoons Jones directed stand as some of the best-timed and funniest animated films in the medium.

Again, no photos were allowed, so I grabbed these images of the Internet. In fact, security was so tight at this thing, I halfway expected to see Foghorn Leghorn with a baseball bat whacking weasels on the head. When a couple of confused museum-goers confusedly attempted to stray into the AMPAS screening theatre, they were escorted back out again, quite definitively. A far cry from laid-back Oregon.

Amazing exhibitions, amazing trip. That's all, folks!

A Chicken in Every Pot, a Man Cave for Every Man

The digital cable box here in Inkville tends to be squarely pointed at HGTV much of the time, despite my protests. And until such time as I am able to wrest the box away and point it at The Venture Bros. or Treme or hell, anything else, I consider myself an unwilling conscript learning about recessed lighting and SoCal property values.

The program House Hunters offers viewers a ride-along as wealthy families decide amongst three megamansions to waste their money upon. I’ve decided to use the opportunity for a little armchair ethnographic fieldwork. And in the past couple of years, I have noticed a trend. Scratch that, make it a truism: every rich dude expects a Man Cave.

If you’re not familiar with the concept... congrats, you're probably not wasting you life on basic cable, as am I. Snark aside, essentially the Man Cave is a room in the megamansion in which the male half of a heterosexual couple goes to commune with his inner loutish being, a place for neon beer sign collections, framed Red Sox jerseys, and cardboard boxes full of early-70s issues of Playboy. 

I wrote for the Eugene Magazine megamansion beat for over two years, and let me tell you, I have seen my fair share of new construction Man Caves. Since when did this Man Cave idea become a man's inalienable right?

On one level, it seems sort of sad to me. Should a man really need to hide away from his better half? What does it say about a relationship if half the couple needs a space, with formal borders or passwords or whatever, in which to avoid the other? Sorry if I'm a turncoat, fellas, but I actually like my wife. The idea of an oasis is one thing; devoting real estate to it is another.

On another level, I guess I can understand the appeal. My wife shares my sense of design in many ways, but all the same, it might be cool to have a place for my rows of tiki mugs and action figures… rockabilly pouring from the speakers... the walls adorned with comic book art… a special tumbler reserved just for bourbon I pull out of the special cabinet reserved just for the bottle… and most of all, the TV would never linger on HGTV.

Hmm, maybe I can chalk my distaste for the Man Cave idea up to the fact I can’t afford one myself? Perhaps it's all just sour grapes on my part. Any corporate sponsors out there looking to burn through a few clams by financing a blogger's renovation? We can call HGTV to film it, honest...

Sex and the City: Now it can be Told

Special to the Star

My column “Sex and the City” first began appearing here in the New York Star during the heady days of the late nineties, when I was in my late (okay, very late) twenties. I think my weekly reflections on the metropolitan escapades and complicating sexcapades in my own life and those of my girlfriends were shocking to some people, at first.

After all, just a few years earlier, Newt and his cronies had ushered in a renewed focus on “family values,” and “safe sex” was the ubiquitous buzzphrase.

Through it all, you, my readers, helped me answer one overarching question: What happens when an urban journalist opens each column with a rhetorical question based around wish fulfillment of late twentieth century American women?

The answer, of course, is lying. A whole lot of lying.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Things are very different for me since the days the column began, almost as if my life was one large character arc on a half-hour sitcom dramedy.

These days I have a couple books under my (Gucci) belt, and the occasional headline appears in Vogue and other publications just below my byline. So you can imagine how concerned my editors and agent were (not to mention my husband) when I told them I wanted to come back to the Star one last time, for a tell-all goodbye column.

The Starburst "Contradiction" Commerical

As a professional marketer, editor, and writer, I prize specificity. This particular advertisement...

...makes want to throw things at the TV for three distinct reasons:

• As these characters appear to be of Korean descent and living in Scotland, they would in fact be Korean-Scotch (or Korean-Scottish?), rather than "Scotch-Korean."
• Being of Korean descent but living in Scotland is no more an actual contradiction than Alanis Morissette's "ironies" are actually ironic.
• And besides, is it really so far-fetched that folks of Asian descent would live in Scotland? A 2001 demographic study, in fact, lists 0.4% of United Kingdom residents as "Other Asian (non-Chinese)," and that's not even including other line items for "Pakistani" and "Indian."

That's right, baby. Welcome to Inkville: doing the important work of deconstructing candy ads since 2008.

Treme Flow Chart

Continuing what is evidently Inkville's new focus on wall-to-wall Treme coverage... Okay, is two episodes in too early for Treme fan art?

I made this flow chart and submitted it to GraphJam. Thus far, no response. Like other stuff I've done in a humorous (or is that "humorous"?) vein, you kind of have to be in love with the same things I am, to find this funny. And we all know that making arcane references to newly-premiered cable programming is the secret to good comedy, right?

Okay, here's the source material, the opening credits of Treme, featuring John Boutté wailin' on vocals:

Nevah be de' same, eh, cher? How's ya mama and 'em?

The Old Rugged Cross

I had been waiting for last night's premiere of HBO's new series Treme for months. An ongoing program that takes place in perhaps my favorite city in the world, bolstered by the usual deft characterization and commitment to world-building endemic of HBO shows like Deadwood and The Sopranos is too good to pass up.

Watching the series, even just the first episode, felt like coming home. Seeing the dive bars and grimy row homes, and even the Tower Records on North Peters, on television give me that weird little thrill one gets while seeing an accustomed haunt on the local news.

Whether the series is any good remains to be seen. HBO's programming is notoriously slow to start, and Treme's rambling, shambling, 80-minute opening episode is no exception, doling out juuuuust enough characterization for each of the principals to barely keep the viewer engaged. The music was slammin', of course, and the naturalistic writing and acting, de rigeur for HBO, more than make up for the plodding pacing.

It's difficult to watch John Goodman play a character and let the man simply inhabit it; he's always just so John Goodman-y. But I couldn't help grinning and nodding along as Goodman's character lit into a British journalist dismissive (or ignorant?) of New Orleans and what it stands for in the American imagination. Wendell Pierce's performance was reliably droll and understated, and his character's consistent shortchanging of his cabbies was not only duly funny, it was a compelling and simple symbol for the dire straits in which New Orleanians (not to mention musicians in general) found (and find) themselves. And Steve Zahn... well, maybe he'll grow on me.

The true crime behind Treme, the real sadness behind it, is that enough of the city is still in wreckage in real life that the film crew was even able to identify neighborhoods that could pass for the devastation of late 2005. Our trip there in 2008 revealed plenty of ruined homes, three years after their destruction.

Amusingly, with this summer's welcome return of True Blood, HBO will now have two series taking place in Louisiana. And did I mention that 2011's big-budget Green Lantern movie is filming in New Orleans, as well? I just hope the entire state of Louisiana isn't so trendy and gentrified that we're too priced out of it to, well, head down and move into a gentrified neighborhood, provided we someday, hopefully, relocate there.

Until then, I'm trusting Treme to present a nuanced, heartwarming, heartbreaking portrayal of the Big Easy, and to laissez les bons temps (et les mauvais temps) rouler. This opening episode of Treme ends with a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral, but only with the downbeat half that leads to the cemetery, the portion set to a funerary dirge. By forgoing the second, upbeat, from-the-cemetery portion of the jazz funeral, the portion traditionally set to hot jazz, the series indicates its characters are at their nadir, three months after Katrina has ravaged them. The central tension of the series, a tension to which I'm looking forward, will be in watching these characters rebuild themselves, and the city they love.

Ya Gotta Get Hot to Play Real Cool

I've always had a thing for the music of mid-20th century America. In high school I was the guy who was cranking up Rosemary Clooney's "Slow Boat to China" on my Buick Skylark's tape deck while the preppy guy stopped next to me at the light was blasting Blues Traveler. 

So it's no stretch that last week I dragged the too-busy James Stegall, who certainly has other things to do, with me to a screening of Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly, a Grammy-nominated 2001 documentary by Washington State-based filmmaker Beth Harrington at Eugene's Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts.

The film was fantastic, just what the doctor ordered in terms of a pick-me-up in the midst of a soggy northwest winter. And it got me thinking about the roots of my taste in music. Upon reflection, it all really boils down to two major influences:

"Johnny Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet," a short that helps comprise Disney's 1946 poorly-titled theatrical release Make Mine Music, first introduced me to the close harmonies of the transcendent, angelic Andrews Sisters (and by extension the Puppinni Sisters, their 21st century successors). I remember that repeat viewings on the Disney Channel of the 1980s had already transpired before I realized there were multiple voices singing. Beautiful.

And hey, as an added bonus, this cartoon includes the mind-blowing surreality of anthropomorphised chapeaus wriggling around like angry puppies attached to human heads.

Turning the culture clock ahead by a decade, the 1957 Looney Tunes short "The Three Little Bops," directed by the underappreciated Friz Freleng and scored by Shorty Rogers, not only engendered in me an appreciation for Louis Jordan-style jump blues, but the streamlined mid-century googie aesthetic, as well. 

This is one weird cartoon, including, as it does, oblique references to jazz drug culture (the wolf's "red-rimmed eyes") and segregation ("a sign on the door: no wolves allowed"), and achieves its denouement (spoiler alert!) with the lovable loser anti-hero reborn as a horrifying, crimson-hued shade sprung from Hades, forever to haunt his porcine tormentors. Heavy, daddio.

Did any childhood cartoons have a strong influence on your adult tastes in music? Let me know in the ol' Inkville comments corral. And no, getting the Muppet Babies theme song stuck in your head last week doesn't count.

Kneel Before Zod

What’s fluffier and more appealing for a summer weekend than a Top Ten list?  About comic books, no less?  While Batman arguably has the dubious honor of being hounded by the best rogue’s gallery in comics, Superman’s own collection of world beaters, miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, and extraterrestrial bullies ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at.  Listed here are a top ten of Superbaddies, ranked not by their level of villainy or ability to cause the Man of Steel a kryptonite headache, but simply in the order of my preference.  Ten’s a nice, round number, so apologies in advance to also-rans like Toyman, Mongul, and the Cyborg Superman.  But sorry, no love whatsoever for goobers like Terra-Man and the Composite Superman.

That's right: Inkville is runnin' the geekery straight up, no chaser, this time, so, y'know, forewarned is forearmed, for all you civilians out there.

 

#10  Darkseid

Just thinking of the intergalactic, semi-divine tyrant takes me back to mid-1980s Saturday mornings and Challenge of the Superfriends.  More of a general all-around DC Universe bad guy, Darkseid is a relative latecomer to the decades-old mega-storyline that is DC’s shared universe, but so fully imagined in 1970 by his creator Jack Kirby as the final word in alien evil, that Darkseid has suffered through virtually no rebooting or re-imagining, unlike most major comic book characters.  Some geeks have even posited the guy was an inspiration for Darth Vader, and I can certainly see a resemblance in the supervillain family tree.  Darkseid and his anti-pantheon of evil New Gods were used to great effect last year as street-level gangsters in Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis.

 

#9  Doomsday

One of only two characters from the modern era of comics to make it onto my list, Doomsday is the guy who first got me hooked on this stuff, as the titular murderer behind 1992’s “The Death of Superman” storyline.  The character appeared from nowhere, a being of mystery, and dispatched his Super-foe with such apparent finality, that the teenaged Aaron was quite shocked.  Ill-used by various appearances in the 1990s (seriously, a “Joker-ized” Doomsday?), ol’ Doomie has lost some of his luster.  The character has been given a second lease on his rampaging life, and an actor in a poorly-lit rubber suit to boot, in the most recent season of teen action soap Smallville.

 

#8  Silver Banshee

The only other Post-Crisis character to creep onto my list.  She's also the only woman... Who knew the Legion of Doom had a glass ceiling?  Banshee adds a bit of occult noir to a roster of evildoers who usually like to attack the Big Blue Boy Scout head on in the skies over Metropolis in big purple-and-green rockets. Seriously, how can I not like Silver Banshee?  She's a supernatural, Irish femme fatale, for God's sake!  Banshee can only kill people with her ear-splitting, vitality-draining wail if she knows their names.  That's so weird.  I’m such a sucker for weirdly Byzantine superpowers.  And, evidently, for chicks with skull-shaped earrings.