The mightiest mental machines
Indoor electric illumination is often referred to as "artificial light". How can it be artificial? The way I look at it is this: If I can read by it, see myself in the mirror and recognize my friends, it's probably as real as I'm ever going to need it to be.
I read George Carlin's book "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?"
George must be getting old, since the book was not that much of Denis
Leary -style "I drink and smoke what I want and you shut up about it,
puritan fucker, I hate everybody" bad boy angst as I expected. The book
was actually quite mellow and more in style of the other, more
mainstream comedians. Several pages of the book discuss the way that
properly good words have been replaced by euphemistic equivalents, for
example saying "career apparel" or "team wear" when you simply mean a
uniform.
The collection "Twentieth Century Eightball" by the comic book artist Daniel Clowes
(who is best known for "Ghost World") offers somewhat different kind of
humor. The collection reprints a variety of one- and two-page strips
that are delightful in their intelligence, almost as if they were made
for a reader who wants to look intelligent and hip by reading these
comics instead of the Marvel comics. Let's practice: "I don't like his
work as much now after he sold out to Hollywood." All joking aside,
Clowes's writing and drawing styles simultaneously reminded me of Los Bros Hernandez, Tom the Dancing Bug
and a whole bunch of other alternative comics that I can't remember
right now. I couldn't tell who came first and who was inspired by whom,
though. But that would be corpoistic thinking that belongs to the era
of scarcity anyways.
I also read the first three collections of "The Walking Dead".
The book is your basic zombie story so that a small band of survivors
tries to stay alive and find food and shelter in a postapocalyptic
world swarming with the mindless undead. Along the way, these people
grow as persons and learn to value what is really important, but nobody
of the cast is really safe as the group loses members and finds new
friends. The art somehow reminds me of John Byrne, but is actually
better in creating the overall feeling of the dead world.
Brian K. Vaughan is best known for his series "Y: The Last Man", a feminist dystopia that seems to be popular in certain circles, and "Runaways", a story about a group of LA teens who realize their parents are supervillains, but I see that he has also created "Ex Machina",
a rather strange superhero comic about an engineer superhero who can
control all machines and becomes the mayor of New York after preventing
the second tower being hit at 9/11. The storyline takes place outside
the other superhero continuums, so there are no other superheroes in
this world. There seem to be lots of cursing, social problems and
idealistic young progressives who can't comprehend why the rest of the
world just doesn't seem to want to obey them and this way make the
world a better place, though. But no problemo, as the story is solid
and the artwork is nice. The panels are drawn by first having real
people pose for photos that then work as the basis for the art. But
this is not distractingly obvious, so that I din't even realize this
until seeing the few example shots shown at the end of the book.
Carlin has been irrelevant to comedy for over 20 years. Now he is in the last stages of Bob Hope syndrome. "Team wear"? Who says that? No one, but Carlin doesn't have a joke without this made-up claim.
Posted by Udolpho | 1:05 PM
Artificial light is vastly inferior to sunlight if you want to take photos, grow plants or work on your tan, among other things. See "wavelength".
Posted by Anonymous | 3:18 PM