"Hoarders Are Weird."

My wife was telling me a story about somebody who was a chronic hoarder, as I was going through a pile of comics bags and boards separating them into two piles. All the while she was talking about hoarding, I was coolly making these two piles. One pile was of bags and boards where the bags were wide enough that you could fit an average-sized trade paperback inside it. The other pile was for bags and boards that were too narrow to hold a trade paperback and could only hold a single issue of a comicbook (or as the fanboys now term them, a "pamphlet"). When I had finished I put the first pile into a cardboard box so they would be neat and easily available. The other pile, for which I had less time and esteem, I thought I didn't want to waste a box on so I decided in a flash of artistic inspiration to put these bags and boards inside a Trader Joe paper bag. I was influenced in this not so much by the art world as by the Chinese shoe repair people down the street who keep all the shoes they are fixing in brown bags. They can never find your shoes. It's a sort of trademark they have. We will almost certainly lose your shoes. This our personal promise to you.

When my wife had finished her interesting story I took a pause from my industry, as I said putting these bags and boards into two piles according to size, prelude to placing the piles in respectively a box and a paper bag, and as I said I paused from my work to remark:

"Yes. Hoarders are peculiar."

"Boring Comics Are Here Again."

Boring Comics. Anything with the Savage Land or the Shi'Ar in it. That is to say, the X-Men. When Sauron (half-man, half-pteranosaur) flies into the shot it is time for us to retire discreetly to our separate rooms. When the Starjammers come running dynamically into a room pointing their ray-guns (as they invariably do) it is time to respectfully retire from that same room –– by a different door –– methinks.

I was re-reading some old issues of Uncanny X-Men from about 1990 and you could almost see, as if  in "real time," the collapse and utter demise of Chris Claremont's writing style into incoherence. It's shocking to behold. He developed this sort of be-bopping free-association stream-of-consciousness that was alarming to the sensitive reader. By the end of his run, when I presume he was forcibly removed from the Marvel offices, he was writing sheer gibberish, talking in tongues. Like Pound with the so-called "China Cantos."

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Also boring, the Wolverine story, "Weapon X." What actually happens in this story? It's a protracted surgical procedure with, so far as I can tell, bickering staff. I'd as lief watch Grey's Anatomy.

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Last night, on Person of Interest, John Rees dispatched the perp by driving his car into the guy's SUV and knocking it into him.

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On Jeopardy, the two new contestants were named Walkenhorst and Lowmaster. Both females. The blonde woman who had dominated for the last week was toppled from her throne without dignity. There wasn't anything offensive about her per se, but I was greatly relieved when she was deposed. She seemed to get cockier every day in her little interviews with Alex, after the first break. She was getting to sort of like being on the television. She was kind of adapting horribly to it. She was clucking with her tongue. Alex, of course, hates it when the contestants try to outshine him and he jealously, peevishly squashes their repartee when it sprouts. He tries to kill their jokes in the very act of birth. It's in his professional interest for the contestants to be stammering dullards with nothing worth saying. Usually they are. So he was happy to see the blonde go too I think.

Lowmaster won. How her reign shall be remembered by future generations, we cannot say.

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On Life After Top Chef Mike Isabella shows up each week even though he is not one of the four featured chefs. Even though he is not even invited by the show's producers. I presume he was "put out" that he wasn't invited to be one of the featured chefs, so he furiously contrives to turn up at the filming of every episode as if by happenstance, and "naturally" wanders into shot.

This week he happened to turn up at Spike Mendelsohn's place on his moped while the cameras were there. 

"Oh, are you filming?" he says, all innocent. "I'll come back. I can go. You want me to stay? Okay I'll stay."

By the way, the title to this show must be ironic, because the overriding message behind this show is that there is no life after Top Chef. These glorified cooks are just diddling about while life goes past!

One day they'll be dead!

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Idea for TV Show. Colicchio Versus Colameco: Who Wudd Win.

The pitch: "Who'd win in the crude, ugly slugfest that would obviously ensue when these two eminent chefs met."

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Incidentally, did I not make the point several months ago that Mitt Romney looks like Don Draper? "Katty Kay" made the same point, belatedly, on Charlie Rose the other night, after the debate. I wish you could copyright little super–facial–recognitions like that. There must be a way to make money out of super–recognition but I haven't figured it out yet if there is.

“Jor–El: What’s Wrong With a Prison?”

   It’s very easy to become bored –– disheartened –– actually depressed –– when you are reading about the planet Krypton before it blew up. It’s such dull stuff. And at the crux of this energetic maelstrom of dishwater, the eye of this vortex of banality, is none other than Jor–El, the father of Superman.

     Partially it is because we have read the origin story of Superman so many times that we would as lief eat a pincushion as read it once more. We wish these superficial marionettes conjured up before us like so much trivial vapour would vanish. And this is, indeed, what generation after generation of writers has been striving – and failing – to accomplish, and will continue to do so from now ’til time immemorial – until, no doubt, the Earth itself blows up in a manner very like the  one that did for planet Krypton. In World of Krypton all of Jor–El’s many well-trod scientific endeavours and breakthroughs are explored in tedious detail – the Phantom Zone, anti-gravity thrusters, etc.  Nothing too dull or trivial it seems. 

     One of his more eccentric “brainwaves” is in the field of, shall we say, criminal rehabilitation. It doesn’t make sense to me. Jor–El recommends that criminals should henceforth be placed in suspended animation and launched in bubbles into orbit in the planet Krypton’s immediate atmosphere. There they can float above the planet until they have served out their sentences.

     I fail to see the advantage in this. How exactly does it profit the polis, sage Socrates? It seems downright perverse to me – contrary – unwholesome. Need I point out what is obvious to the followers of one FRANK CASTLE’s many adventures, that the essence of capital punishment is that it is punishing – even if it is not always capital. If the malfeasant miscreants are in suspended animation (being brainwashed by rehabilitating subliminal mind-control tapes, incidentally – but I shan’t even pursue that rather boring course of leftist critique here) then they are not actually awake to appreciate the wrong that they have done. What's the significance of time passing if you're asleep? It makes of the prisoners mere Rip Van Winkles. They’re put in the bubbles and then they wake up and come out of the bubbles. It’s like having your wisdom teeth extracted.

    Also, floating about unconscious in solitary bubbles above Krypton’s surface they are under no threat whatsoever from grisly prison rape, which is –– I naively thought –– the cornerstone of Western civilization’s deterrents against lawbreaking. The threat of prison rape is, in fact, the single greatest deterrent against wrongdoing in existence. Without it, the world  would be in inchoate, antediluvian anarchy. 

    The reason why Jor–El's crackpot scheme prevails is because of the alternative that is even more outre.  The solution offered by Jor–El's competitor, one “Tron–Et” (his real name apparently), is the ingenious “Matter-Dissolver”. This –– as you might imagine –– succinctly “eliminates the problem of the criminal.” If Frank Castle was a denizen of Krypton (– idea for a Marvel/DC crossover event ––) he would surely be a keen subscriber to Tron–Et’s peculiar philosophical tenets.

  Or not: unfortunately this canny device is discredited in the end when it turns out that “Tron–Et” is himself a master criminal who wants to annihilate all the criminal lackeys who worked for him before they can be put in Jor–El’s rehabilitator-capsules. 

     Tron–Et is frightened – “reasonably” enough – that these erstwhile henchmen might emerge from Jor–El’s bubbles older, wiser and reformed. His “sensible” fear is that on clambering, like newborns a-birthing, from the bubbles and after only a rudimentary snack, the former lackeys would go directly to the criminal courts and tell the judge that Tron–Et was a criminal kingpin.

     You can see how a thing like that might happen.

     Hence the “Matter-Dissolver.”

     Hence the success of Jor–El’s prison-capsules.

   I see that I have taken up quite enough of your time. And I can see from your faces, having read this far, that you agree with me entirely – Krypton and Jor–El are very boring.

AFTERTHOUGHT

     [This afterthought is really only for you comics jagoffs out there in the wide, disappointing world. It occurs to me now, as I write this, that the origin story of Superman has some resemblances to the origin story of Galactus. Superman is the last survivor of a dying planet –– for Galactus it is a dying multiverse –– but the “core myth” (and pardon the dreadful pun) is the same. It’d be like that story where it was intimated that the Phantom Stranger is actually the future son of Superman and Wonder Woman cast back through time.

     As I said, dull stuff in the dry diggings, which I very much regret having to say, but sometimes – as an academic – or as a lapsed academic I should say! – I have to “publish” my findings, desiccated and loathsome as they are, to add them to that infinitely expanding, pulsing pool of knowledge we call HUMAN CIVILIZATION. This pool of knowledge is, as Jor-El would no doubt attest, our only hope for the endurance of a sensitive society.

     That and the vile spectre of the ever-present threat of prison rape.]